It’s deeply unfair but my reality that I have much longer recovery after activity that is getting worse not better. It’s also deeply unfair that makers of the technology I used, hardware and software, have failure rates that are unacceptable in any other field. Last night I had cause to look at the saved files on my laptop- and the number of corrupted files suggests there is either yet another drive failure (the laptop) or I backed up my corrupted files.
What’s really unfair is when this impacts on other people. I really didn’t expect to still be in as much pain and as fatigue as I am today. But that means I also wasn’t prepared to be time displaced this whole week. I haven’t really found a solid solution for this. Not as a physical diary. Not as alarms/alerts on my phone (none that aren’t a massive privacy risk and not just for me (a lot of apps want access to your contacts.)
I’m used to how unfair this is on me, but not for other people.
Or rather I’m used to being disappointed and accepting some limitations. But when it goes beyond me? The guilt doesn’t matter, solutions do. I’m going to test drive a physical option. Not a whole diary that would be a waste. An A5 bullet journal might work though. And I do have options there.
I don’t want sympathy, but I do want reach out to other people like me and maybe our pooled experience and solutions can be picked through for what we each need.
Well not me, though I did dye my eyebrows and hair yesterday making the title fit. No, I mean this website, but in a way it’s to make it clear my two sites are connected but not to the point people mistake one for the other. Meanwhile guess who has had another drive fail?
I worked so very hard to avoid this. The due diligence I put in to research was still worthwhile, but the kind of problems with both these drives are not revealed until a year into use.
I’m very lucky though that aside from costume research from October last year everything on the drive is a copy anyway and I had already backed everything up on my itty bitty external and my OS drive.
I’m also lucky that despite being the same problem of bad sectors they are all in the MFT. Which is what’s used to keep track on where the files are located. If that sounds familiar from anything I’ve written it probably is.
You see the itty bitty drive was formatted in MFAT. Which doesn’t use journaling. The drive is meant to be used to make a full copy of the image of a drive to be copied from. Then you wipe the drive and start again. Luckily it still does work in NTFS.
But that experience is what helped me identify what is wrong with this last drive. I saw a file leave behind its thumbnail. Then a different file opened in the associated program but was a different file type and name.
So it was pretty clear this was an issue with journaling.
So then I checked my logs and yes I’m very lucky indeed. Under both disk and ntfs there were only three days were these occurred. And within that just one file had errors outside the MFT.
But for every single error I found and searched for? I wound up finding the same make and series of this drive pop up. And I did not include my drive. In fact when I looked for the particular model I had less useful results.
But one site seemed to point to a flaw in default drive settings. So I’m hoping I can just put the drive aside in a stable state and use the drive that arrived yesterday. So far one folder indicates different contents to the drive. So yes, I think the contents are safe. I at the very least can use the new drive and leave the other one alone until I find the very best least destructive way to close it properly. Oh like the bad SSD.
Meanwhile I’m reinvigored to finish my Bruyn Anne of Cleves gown. Though also to get my teal gown made over. SIX has started their tour and I’ve got my ticket and it all fits very neatly within my obligations for ICMS including recovery time.
Okay, I can still be a bit productive today with my hauben but I’ve had yet another drive start to fail. Obviously I started to worry this was me but well… Do you know what the fail rate of shipped drives in the first year actually is? Between 1-5% Yes between one in every 20 and one in every 100. I can’t think of any industry where that’s close to acceptable. The problem can be physical or firmware.
Oh and this is even worse, if possible, for people who use RAID. This is where you have several harddives acting as one- so data is spread rather than discretely per drive. And obviously the more drives you have the greater the odds of buying one that’s already bad.
I’ve experienced the firmware issue. And as the firmware update was quietly rolled out and never really admitted to, even when I did get the update the damage was done. I’ve stabilised the drive but there is still an unknown in regards to whether it actually is stable.
So I’ve got a really similar issue, but it seems all the bad sectors are in the MFT. Which was “repaired” but only to make it stable, the errors in terms of location of files remains. And for each error/warning I found in my logs? The same brand and series were in the top results. Oh and there is no firmware update. And the drive tools from the same generation don’t work. The depreciated one did.
So I’ve got another drive on the way.
To say I’m fatigued is to say the least. And worried? Yep. My entire folder of photos organised year by year (already backed up) seemed to have disappeared but I think it’s been moved. In theory I can copy the image of the drive and even if the file locations are wrong the error free drive will allow me to move them. And they should look like they are in the right place- thumbnails on folders show incorrect contents too.
I really needed that money for my ICMS registration. Or skincare. Or physio. Or glasses. And that failure rate will still apply to this drive. So the first thing I’ll need to do is search for the serial number and any issues so I can RMA it. I can’t do that with my current drives as they are full of data.
Bras are awful. If you’ve ever thought us less endowed individuals have it easier- no, we don’t. Prettier? In terms of fabric appearance, yes. In terms of fitting? No. Still stuck with whatever shape is in fashion and this tends to be for years. But also most bras overly rely on the heavy duty but very narrow elastic that make the straps but also across the back at the edges of the band. All that happens as you go down sizes is the elastic also gets narrower. They remain as rigid and dig in as badly.
Bras could be built the way I wind up customising them. I buy bras for the cup size. I then completely remove the band and make a pattern from it and cut out the same shape in two layers of matching spandex/lycra and overlock/serge them together and reinstall. So far I haven’t had to replace the straps as they tend to have much more room to be made looser.
You can use a firmer fabric and just extend the middle a bit if you have a greater need for support but it’s so much easier to wear.
I wish cups were taller at the sides as that would also allow the band to be wider and so be more supportive without relying on those inappropriate elastics.
One of the things people get surprised about in historic costuming is how tall the sides of bodices go, right up to the armpit. But it’s the same principle. We lost the ability of bodices to be self supporting as we cut into the fabric that does the supporting.
I’ve been meaning to post about this for years. Wanting to get a better range of options. But it really does some down to those two issues. An over reliance on terrible narrow and inflexible elastic and cups that are cut down too far at the sides limiting the ability to make the band wider. The wide the band the more the pressure is eased away.
So I finally managed to get through and translate 60 pages of a really important work. It’s mandatory reading for my paper. No, it’s not that I hadn’t already gone through it- I can read technical works pretty well in a few languages, but this was a full day of just this one book, and super carefully going though it all because yay for a lack of white space aka returns in the body of the text.
Luckily the writer did write out how many assumptions were used at the time, rather than make outright claims of “it is known.” It just makes it so much nicer to write a follow up and keep it positive. It should be exciting to be able to add to a body of research, and this makes it easier to retain that excitement. It isn’t pulling down.
So now that I’ve got that done, and annotated, I started to really go through the GNM catalogue of their hat exhibition. Much as I’d love it to be three times the size with bigger photos the reality is I already have folders of each of the pieces I’m interested in. So a single book with all the context of why the pieces are together makes it a much better fit in my library.
Meanwhile my site looks a little different. I’m changing things to make everything simpler but to do so I need to first remove what complicates things. So there is a lot of manual cross posting for a while. Extra work but until I can set up an uncomplicated way to get sharing buttons back in that’s where we are.
Okay. It’s been a couple of days of noisy metal cutting by neighbours so my fibro is screaming at me, time to shut down the post and do that manual crossposting if I can.
Under Pressure more relevant than ever, but I’m resolving some very stressful issues that have severely drained my physical and mental resources. Today however has been the first day in over a month where I’ve been able to get back into the books I haven’t managed to fully fold into my research for my paper revisions. But I am, and it’s not as overwhelming as I thought. I can skim technical information in several languages, but when I’m as tired as I have been it does all turn into garbled nonsense. To be honest English does as well. So I have to structure my day around the most pressing matters first.
I did manage to find my missing patterns- as in my own. I was about to post that here but everything went splat.
So here I am. Let’s see if I can put some of those images in here.
Is this a revolutionary pattern for the Mara Jade cowl? No. But the curved edge is for the back which is how you get the cowl to stay framed around your face while the curve allows the back to drape nicely and to reduce bulk at the front.
This needs a bit of an explanation. This is based on a book that describes the “French system” of pattern drafting though most books that refer to it still use a decidedly “American system.” I’ve got well over 300 pattern books from various online archives and most do not do anything this interesting to the classic double dart Victorian bodice. But it’s incredible. By rotating the section between the darts to the true bias you get an incredibly smooth fit. This was the base of one of my Mina bodices, which I set aside because I actually need to make it from a fabric with absolutely no give because the silk has no give even when on the bias.
For something completely different, I’m also going through my 3D files as the way I build my props is to make use of the technology. Yes, my Ahsoka hilts are sliced in so any sections so that print lines are much easier to remove. The pieces are hollow and interlock at each piece as I like to print in ABS. It just takes a bit of acetone to weld the layers as well as parts. It means you can also finish the pieces to be really glossy also through use of acetone.
But I need to write up instructions before putting them on thingiverse. I’ve got my Ventress hilts to add as well. Both sets are curved and flattened which is just another link between the two characters and their story arcs.
So, now that I’ve tired myself out again, I will close this window, and share in the usual places.
Love the clickbait title? But it’s true. If I read “it is assumed” and there is not even one footnote? I immediately don’t trust a writer. I don’t. It’s not that difficult to cite a textbook if it’s a foundation textbook.
It was when I was editing my own work and wanted to add my footnotes to cite where it was written/known/assumed and I realised: the writers I was footnoting? Didn’t footnote either.
So. I needed to work through their entire bibliography to try to work out where the when, how, who, how many knew/assumed this.
And even then I know for a fact writers don’t include all their sources. Because I’ve been edited out of my own research. Whoever uploaded all my edited images to commons did cite me, each image is credited. But my understanding of a manuscript is unique. And that was taken without credit.
So whoever reads the wiki entry has no idea why I came to my conclusions. And that’s the important part. So it’s presented as if “it is known” or “it is assumed” then no one landing on that page can criticise that, or add context to that, or say yes that’s right precisely because I’m not cited.
The point of research is to share, to add to our understanding. You can’t do that if you can’t even cite your sources. It erases the shoulders you are standing on.
So yes, that’s why I’ve pulled my essays because I’m standing on a network of shoulders of scholars. Even when I’ve only used their sources I’m including them either in a series of citations in the body of my text, or in further reading. I’m making sure that as I cite chain I don’t misrepresent writers, nor chop out context.
It’s the most time consuming part. Claims of new information either circle back to 19thC transcriptions or other secondary sources that are paywalled and/or geolocked. Which again strips the context and asks us to just trust an interpretation. And that does a massive disservice and is how assumptions hurt “u” and “me.”
It is, it’s just… well… batch processing images so I don’t destroy the original files still feels like it’s playing catch up. But the very sad state of my website isn’t going to get better until I have photos that are a good size for viewing, and that is about 1M which is about as much as this CMS can handle per image. I’m in the 10s of thousands of images of my own work at this point, not counting all my PS files nor pdfs nor 3D models I’ve created. Nor does it count all the reference images I’ve had to strip out of those folders until this process is finished.
But it’s so much time and so much work. I’d love to start over and go back to html, but at this point I have so many posts that are already pinned or shared or otherwise just quite highly ranked and that’s a lot of people looking for information to turn away and say ‘you don’t matter, you need to do the work to navigate my site.”
I have looked at how to convert those posts to static html, it’s not that difficult, so I can keep the slugs. It just is quite limiting going forward in terms of making over appearance to keep up with changing device use.
Okay, I was going to just batch process my early historic today, but I’ve worked my way up to sci-fi.
I’ve been able to finally Make rather than Find files so my pattern book is getting the massive edit it desperately needs. But I had to uninstall the latest Inkscape to go back to what I used before all heck broke loose with my hard drives. The UI is just so different. The old UI though means I’m able to use muscle memory to refamiliarise myself with it all to simplify my shapes to make it even easier to use the newer version.
I had added seam allowances to each bodice shape but I’m going to remove all them all again. One of the biggest problems with including them is that they really need to be approached as fulfilling different roles at different times. I’m not even a fan of including notches for corners, because I only cut these after I’ve got the bodice fitted. I’d rather have an annoying bunch of fabric than have to cut it all over again.
That really is how I cut around my base pattern, apart from the notches and cut off points. I use grain so much for support, yes there is a diagram for that scanned but not yet redrawn as a vector. Quite often I’ll find it easier to fit by pinching/letting out evenly over the seam but then will want to move the seam to the back a little. So this extra fabric lets me do that.
Even with a dress form I find I want this extra fabric. It’s partly why all my patterns that I traced over to make my book line up so well. I do want to keep the allowances for my pages on how to draft, fit, and finish the pattern though, so it’s not a total waste. But
As far as the work involved. I’m removing all the path effects (dotted lines or sweeping lines like a pen would leave) which is time consuming, but absolutely will make it easier for people to use. And I’ll be able to connect paths I had to separate for those path effects too. Making it all easier for me going forward. From what I can tell this work flow is still in use with the new UI, so I’ll just keep going getting the paths all tidy. I’ve got the new version on my flip book so I can use that to learn the layout and possibly new tools.
I’ve been awake for three hours and I’m shattered already. But it’s getting easier to use the controls again. ctl+scroll for zoom, just ctl+z to undo (making it easier than PS) shift+click to select multiple paths. I’m even appreciating the infinite scroll as I’m able to bring paths right next to the side to speed up remong path effects from each path. That would be handy going forward- the ability to remove/add path effects to multiple paths like you can stroke/fill/change width.
I’ve also installed like 300 fonts and I’m really only happy with one. It’s so bad! But I want to pull a Quentel. At least one reference I found suggested the French edition was in house rather than printers in France copying or being given permission to do so. And there are even editions out there with no text put in the box of the title page as well. So this is what I’m trying to do. Make a “plate” for the title page to be in different fonts associated with different cities so people can grab which ever one they prefer.
I really want to redraw all my figures. There are regional differences in proportions too like typefaces. It’s proving difficult to find much in the way of local artists depicting real people but what I have found suggests a richer connection to Augsburg than I thought. It might be the size of the books. I collect all the (digitised) prints of dancing couples and there is quite the difference when you compare large and small sets. I mean it’s obvious really. But I might be putting my own ideas of a large and small rather than going by the actual dimensions.
I’m still going to webify the book because that lets people zoom the entire page or text only or even translate it all. Working out alt text for the pattern shapes is really difficult. It’s not just me. It’s a problem with all the extant books I have as well. Ditto instructions in magazines. There is an interesting phenomenon of where different costs merge. Number of pages, verses amount of ink, versus slugs and cost of illustrations (artist, woodcut/etching) all affect cost.
So by the time of the late 19thC magazines have the tiniest font you can get away with but filled to the last word. So there is a lot of flowery language.
Okay, it’s very humid so I’m off to have a shower. And let what I’ve done settle in my memory.
My beloved first truly North Rhine frock seemed beyond repair, but I trimmed the under-linings just enough to not need to piece the skirt more than I had originally. So that was about 30cm from the waist and maybe forty from the hem. These were my “if I can scrape through I’ll keep them” allowances but I don’t need them.
I also checked my proportions through cunning use of zoom of the images to make hands the same size as mine. So the liste is a lovely 50cm tall. This pushes my red panel up just high enough that the original width is very nearly retained. I wish this shade of velveteen was still available, but Spotlight stopped stocking it years ago. Now we only have fairly muted but deep tones. But I might even be able to just really deep dye some to make it easier to make a strip that will edge the entire skirt.
