New Year's Eve in The Grand Duchy. . .

One of just a few more seasonal illustrations his morning. Nothing quite so striking as Cardinals against a snowy backdrop.

Still quite cold. Snowy. Swimming lessons for the Young Master and a family ski tour later this afternoon before the Grand Duchess whips up a New Year's Eve dinner of pork tenderloin with fennel and onion relish, roasted vegetables, roasted brussel sprouts, and a few other items including the last of a cranberry and orange relish that I make us each year.

Which reminds me. I need to put together a cherry pie for dessert. Otherwise a lazy day ahead nibbling on the remaining Christmas treats and listening to some Christmas jazz one last time before we put things away for another year on Tuesday and settle into that post-holiday quiet, which is just as intoxicating in its own way as is Advent and the eventual celebration of Christmas itself.

Sadly, the start of school again on January 8th looms for all three of us, but we have one more week of relatively idle time.

And yes. It looks like my planned Christmas Week game is slated to become a New Year's game. Ah, well. The journey is always at least half the fun.

-- Stokes

Comments

Peter Douglas said…

Dinner sounds excellent! Best of the New Year to you and the family Stokes!
Peter

11:25 AM

Rob Young said…

Sadly, I start back on the 3rd, my wife on the 2nd... short holiday this year. Happy New Year in a bit over 6 hours.

11:46 AM

Fitz-Badger said…

Happy New Year!

Sounds like you have a pleasant New Year's Eve going!

1:54 PM

Martin said…

Savor every second before you have to go back to the grind! Happy New Year to you and yours!

Martin

4:04 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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