There's a New Blog in Town. . .

Berliner Landmiliz, 1760. You can see where my mind is headed, can't you?

Breaking News! Phil's War Cabinet is back! Noted wargamer Phil Olley has been hard at work behind the scenes, and it looks like his new blog is going to be an amazing ride chocked full of visual goodies and inspiring copy. Do yourselves a favor and toodle on over to Phil's War Cabinet right now. Have a look around and either bookmark or, better yet, click on 'follow'. This is destined to become one of the greats I'm certain.

In other news, the Battle of the Elbow River has obviously taken a brief hiatus. The Grand Duchess and Young Master returned last week, which has eaten into my available freetime considerably, much as I love and missed them. And then, in a double whammy worthy of a WWF tag-team move, I looked at the calendar and noticed, almost as an afterthought, that it was the final week of summer vacation. Which meant that it was time for. . . the dreaded annual revision of course syllabi. And it's gets better, since I have also had to plan and write a new course syllabus, in addition, from the ground up! A tedious temporal sinkhole at best, let me assure you. Classes for Fall 2013 start tomorrow, Wednesday, August 21st. Need I say more?

Hopefully, life permitting, I can wrap up the game during the approaching weekend and see how things pan out between generals de Latte and von Tschtschke before launching headlong into another three-month painting challenge on August 30th. Or was it September 1st? No matter. Time to get moving on all fronts. Time and unpainted miniatures wait for no man.

Comments

Phil said…

Thanks for the "plug" for the new blog, Stokes.
Phil

1:00 AM

CelticCurmudgeon said…

My Dear Heinz-Ulrich,

I can commiserate with your plight. Many were the lost weeks in August as curricula were prepared and lessons designed. Now that the Church Fathers have consented to my retirement, these thoughts fade into the warm glow of memory. Have a wonderful semester!
Your Friend,
Gerardus Magnus
Retired Archbishop and University Lecturer

10:39 AM

Scheck said…

I also put already a link into my blog to Phil´s Wargaming blog. Thanks for this news.
_Peter

3:11 AM

And We're Off!!!

Arrrgh! Gotta go back into camera settings on my iPhone to bring all of the frame into focus. Blast! Painting is underway on the 60 or so Minden Austrians, which are slated to become my version of the Anhalt-Zerbst Regiment of AWI renown. More or less indistinguishable from Austrians of the era really, right down to the red facings and turnbacks, but the eventual flags (already in my files) will set them apart. I went ahead and based-coated all of them over a couple of days lthe last week of August, using a mix of light gray and white acrylic gesso, before next applying my usual basic alkyd oil flesh tone to the faces and hands. In a day or two, I'll hit that with Army Painter Flesh Wash to tone things down a bit and bring some definition to the faces and hands. As usual, the plan is to focus on about 20 figures at a time, splitting the regiment roughly into thirds along with the color party and regimental staff. Depending on ...

Sunday Morning Coffee with AI. . .

A rmed with a second cup of fresh, strong coffee, I messed around a bit this morning with artlist.io using its image to image function in an attempt to convert my hand-drawn map from September 2006 to something that more resembles an old map from the mid-18th century. And just like my experiments with Ninja AI in June, the results are mixed. The above map is pretty good, but Artlist keeps fouling up the place names and has trouble putting a faint overlay of hexes across the entire area. Hexes, admittedly, are not likely to be found on any genuine maps from the era in question, but there we are. Frankly, I prefer the appearance of the Ninja map, but there were problems getting it to correct its errors. Grrrr. As is the case with so much having to do with the various AI's out there now, the output generated is a direct result of the prompts entered. For text alone, and when you develop a lengthy, highly detailed prompt, it is...

Continued Regional Map Revisions. . .

F ooled around a bit more with the revised map just before and after dinner this evening, using the Fotor app to reinsert missing text . I also removed a few other things using the 'Magic Eraser' function, which works surprisingly well. Now, we're getting somewhere. I just have to figure out how to ensure that the text is all a uniform font style and maybe figure out a way to add a few bunches of trees to suggest forested areas, Ninja AI is not always entirely cooperative to the tune of "I'm sorry Dave. I can't do that." -- Stokes

The Grand Duchy of Stollen

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