Happy Feast of Stephen!

An unusual old Christmas image that I cam across in my annual image search earlier this month.

Happy second day of Christmas everyone. Or Happy Day After as my late maternal grandfather used to say. We are planning a relaxed day with some light skiing in another nearby park which has trails. Again, just about five minute from the house and later more Christmas goose and all of the fixings. The Young Master seems to enjoy goose and even suggested yesterday evening during dinner that we have it for Christmas every year, so I guess that is that. Otherwise, some time down here in Zum Stollenkeller today, so I can finish tightening up an article to get off to Greg well in advance of the New Year. The online Christmas jazz should help spur me along nicely.

-- Stokes

The Young Master and Dad, Christmas Day 2017.

Comments

MSFoy said…

Ignoramus that I am, I have to confess that I knew St Stephen's Day was sometime around Christmas, but I never realised that it was the 26th. These blog things are educational, no doubt.

When I was a nipper in Liverpool, there was an alternative schoolkids' version of the famous carol. I hope it is not unacceptably sacrilegious:

Good King Wenceslas looked out, on the Feast of Stephen,
When a snowball hit him in the eye and made his face uneven.
Brightly shone the stars he saw, though the blow was cruel,
Then a poor man came in sight, riding on a bandy-legged mu-u-el.

We're probably on relatively safe ground here, since the carol makes no reference to the Nativity, nor anything holier than a good deed.

Today is our day for tidying up and putting away the Premier Cutlery. All part of some ancient ritual...

2:00 PM

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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