Whatcha Been Stamping?

Hi Dan,

Sorry, next time I'll post about it a few weeks before.

Coming up in August is the Annual BNAPS event which is being held in Kingston this year at St. Lawrence College. There is also a Paper and Postcard event in Brockville in September ... sponsored by the Eastern Ontario Postcard Club. And, they'll be another Kingston Stamp Club sale in the Fall.

I've been buying used Iceland & Norway stamps from Stamporama. Yesterday, at Plaça Reial stamp market I found 6 nicely used Norway Olympic (1988/93) and a 1999 Millenium mini-sheets for a decent price (30% of the catalog price) which I couldn't resist. So, I bought all of them. A nice addition to my modern (up to 2005) Norway collection. I'm afraid, that I'll soon reach the "too-expenssive" point...

Continuing to sort items for sale and giveaway here and elsewhere. Finland, France and Delandre will be coming very soon ! 

Also, tomorrow or Sunday, I will be meeting a JNF collector who is disposing of his collection. Hopefully I will find something for mine !!!

Does anyone collect modern Israel ? I have a bunch of MNH items for 50% of face value, including some booklets.

Londonbus1

I have been happily scanning millésime gutter pairs of France Semeuse cameé #137 and 138 for color shades study and paper (backlit scans), over 500 scans in all. (whew!)

Now to start looking at the data and comparing, The color varieties is a bit mre straightforward, except perhaps when does red become dark red? and as usual, not 100% agreement between the various references.  The paper does seem to give clues and the millésime  is extremely helpful as in some years only 1 or maybe 2 types of paper were uses, most years just one.

Keep on stamping!

Back Home in So Cal
Time to Work on the Newsletter

Greetings, stampers everywhere!  I hope this message finds all of you as happy and healthy as possible.  I had some nice days this past week in Northern California visiting old friends near where we used to live and getting to meet Stan (stainlessb ) in Sacramento, which was the highlight!  On the list of activities for this weekend are:

• TSF Newsletter, V8.4: Finish reading submissions and begin layout
• Remove stamps from press-flattening, which were soaked about 10 days ago
• Finish sorting previously soaked-and-flattened material, shown in the photo below
• Organize recent eBay purchases that have arrived in the past couple of weeks

I have been enjoying reading others' posts on TSF this past week, too. Interesting stuff! Anyway, I had better get cracking on the Newsletter, so I think it will be my next order of business to spend a few hours on that and see if I can make a good start.

Stay stampy, all!

---

Edit: Forgot to mention that most of the Canada material shown below came to me from firstfrog2013 as part of a huge TSF auction lot of classic Canada that I won back in 2017, my first full year in the Forum.  It is such a tremendous lot, that I am still sorting through it seven years later!  Thanks again, Frog.  You are a good and generous friend, and I wish you all the best, even during the tough times.

Oh boy - one step forward and two steps back - isn’t that the old saying? Ok imagine me with one missing gyroscope (the inner ear) having the OTHER ear get plugged up. Oh yeah - we’re talking big time dizzy and can’t hear. Ugh. I managed to get most stamp things shipped today though - just kept going and trying my best to muddle through. As long as I don’t turn my head too much it’s not too bad.

When I’m feeling at my best I putter on my Canada, rearranging and culling all the duplicates. All of you folks who expressed interest in Canadian material spurred me to dust off my long neglected albums. I haven’t actively bought very many Canadian. Actually, much of what I’ve accumulated has been through close ties with Canadian family sending me stamps and even their nascent collections. Somehow it has grown into several binders full! Looks like I need to do some tagging - I kept stuffing stamps onto stock pages with a reminder to check them but I never seemed to get them identified. No time like the present! Just need to wait until dark - too much ambient light during the day.

Ok - back to the Great White North. Oh - I’ll do the mystery game in a day or two. Promise. Happy stamping!

This morning, scrolling through the nearly 3100 Cape of Good Hope listings on Delcampe, I was really surprised at the large number of triangular forgeries listed as authentic. Also one authentic listed as a forgery. But I did find two triangulars worth going after.

Why not contact them and ask if they'll take a bank transfer?

I have two penguin maxicards in the collection, but the third one envisioned, existed only in my mind...


Have fun and happy collecting!

It seems the auction house where I bid , is merely a platform for sellers, so I have to deal with the seller direct , not the firm who took my bids. The Auction platform has replied telling me to deal with the seller. What a round about way to do things. I still don’t know how the seller wants payment ……not yet replied to my email.
It sure doesn’t inspire confidence.

Outside of Colnect stuff (which is a good 1-2 hours of managing a day, more if working on new issue updates) my stamping has been near nil, in part because I've started going down the modding rabbit hole for my favorite video game (Victoria 3 by Paradox Interactive - a historical grand strategy game set in the Victorian Era, modelling industrialization, imperialism and democratization). Being a historian by academic training I love the games produced by Paradox Interactive (they have several different games set in different time periods, from the Ancient Mediterranean to World War II era) and the company makes their games very open to modding/customization by players who feel content could be changed/improved to their own personal gaming tastes. I've been collaborating with a couple other people to overhaul the game map for the start of the game in 1836 to better reflect de facto control over lands, so adding in a lot of indigenous nations in the Americas, Africa and Australasia that the base game elides over.

Here are some samples of the reworked maps my partners and I have developed.











Today however, Paradox released a brand new patch and DLC (Digital Limited Content - new playable content for the game) that makes significant changes to the base game map, which we will now need to adapt our modded map so as to make it compatible. 

Today I spent much of my day looking at 3D graph plotting open-source software. SciDavis seems the most useable, though it has its quirks and some limitations, but it's more user friendly than some of the others.... and some  had  ways of showing 3 D (x, y, and z plots) that weren't all that helpful.

I am using to plot out color values from a recent marathon of scans I took.

It's amazing how all of sudden the day  has just gone by....

those Boer War and Boxer Uprising items do indeed sound tempting  -  do you have the stereoscope gizmo to view the cards?   Also some v. interesting book titles there too. 

oh my - we are high brow today Hugh;-);-) Books have been my downfall, frequently, though I can't read Latin and v. little French - wrong upbringing you understand;-). My other hobby is bookbinding - the quantity of books I have that I intend to rebind grows by the month - just finishing an 1838 copy of 'The Lady's Magazine - hand coloured pix to die for. You've no doubt heard of the location known as Tilbury - east of the city of London (in U.K.), on the river Thames - the inhabitants are known for saying, often, "we have fairies at the bottom of the garden".