Frederick the Great, discussion post 5: or: Yuletide requests are out!

[cahn]

All Yuletide requests are out!

Yuletide related:
-it is sad that I can't watch opera quickly enough these days to have offered any of them, these requests are delightful!

-That is... sure a lot of prompts for MCS/Jingyan. But happily some that are not :D (I like MCS/Jingyan! But there are So Many Other characters!)

Frederician-specific:
-I am so excited someone requested Fritz/Voltaire, please someone write it!!

-I also really want someone to write that request for Poniatowski, although that is... definitely a niche request, even for this niche fandom. But he has memoirs?? apparently they are translated from Polish into French

-But while we are waiting/writing/etc., check out this crack commentfic where Heinrich and Franz Stefan are drinking together while Maria Theresia and Frederick the Great have their secret summit, which turns into a plot to marry the future Emperor Joseph to Fritz...

Master link to Frederick the Great posts and associated online links

Comments

Re: Fritz chronological maps, or a labor of love

[mildred_of_midgard]

Look, I did it! I wrangled all the data for his personal correspondence and turned it into gifs. \o/ *happy dance*

- 1740-1745
- 1745-1756
- 1756-1763
- 1763-1786
- And the granddaddy of all gifs: 1740-1786

It was easier than I thought, and apparently researching coordinates for 18th century place names is a suitably mindless and time-consuming pastime on 3 hours of sleep and insomnia.

I got two surprises out of the finished product, one cool and one sad.

Cool: I keep reading about the autumn military maneuvers Fritz held in Silesia, and you can watch them happen on this map! What you can't see on the map is that he kept going every year until his death, because in 1785 he famously insisted on sitting on his horse in the pouring rain for 6 hours reviewing the troops, and then got so sick he couldn't get out of bed the next day. That was the beginning of the one-year decline toward August 17, 1786.

Sad: The 1780s autumn maneuvers, aka Sir-Not-Appearing-In-This-Map. That's because the map turned out to be an inadvertently very poignant illustration of his emotional isolation. You may notice the itinerary gets less and less granular at the end, as his correspondents die off one by one. There's a sharp drop-off in volume after Voltaire goes in 1778 and Maria Antonia in 1780. :(

Which, of course, makes me even more annoyed that the transcription of his political correspondence cuts off in March 1782. I'm just not going to be able to put together a decent map after that date. Ditto before 1740, the data's just too sparse.

But what I've got so far is still cool! As approximations go, I'm pretty stoked about what I've put together. And proud, I have to admit. Do you think Old Fritz would be proud?

For my next trick, I'm planning to see how much work would be involved in wrangling the more granular data from his political correspondence, and then making a decision whether to proceed. :D

Re: Fritz chronological maps, or a labor of love

[cahn]

This is super cool, wow!! Though I am probably not appreciating the military maneuvers at all, lol. It would probably be really interesting to watch along with reading about the maneuvers or even his correspondence.

I wouldn't have noticed had you not mentioned it, but because you did mention it I could see how much faster the dates advanced as they got later in his life :(

Re: Fritz chronological maps, or a labor of love

[mildred_of_midgard]

What I meant by that is just that after the Seven Years' War, he spends almost all his time in Berlin/Potsdam, except every so often, you see the dot jump southeast to Silesia for a bit, before coming back to Berlin. When I saw the dates on those Silesia appearances, I realized they were in August/September every year, and I went, "Oh, I know why he was there! It was for the military maneuvers I keep hearing took place in the autumn!" I didn't, in case it wasn't clear, mean anything about his specific locations within Silesia. Just that it's showing him there autumn after autumn, and I know why!

Yeah, the later years are :(

Re: Fritz chronological maps, or a labor of love

[cahn]

Ohhhh! I noticed the jumps and I didn't realize that they were every autumn! That's super cool.

I feel like you should publish this somewhere :P

Re: Fritz chronological maps, or a labor of love

[mildred_of_midgard]

It is super cool if you know what you're looking at!

Me too! But I have no idea where.

Anyway, let's wait and see if I sustain my momentum long enough to get through the political correspondence, and what the resulting product looks like.

Re: Fritz chronological maps, or a labor of love

[mildred_of_midgard]

Almost there! Just need to see if I can figure out the last dozen or so tricky place names that I couldn't figure out the first time through, then start preparing the data for image generation, run through the images in chronological order as a sanity check to make sure he isn't doing anything crazy, like jumping hundreds of miles overnight and then back again, and finally see if I can generate a gif out of this many images without either crashing my computer or needing 50 years for the command to run (it was an interesting exercise not crashing my computer just on the smaller data set).