It’s getting closer to ICMS and wouldn’t you know. My instinct remains really pretty good. But that doesn’t mean I always trust it. So I’m going back over my entire collection of archives and… sigh… I was so caught up in what the variations in different terms reveals about how they were spoken and backtracking a few specific terms and … well. My paper stands ups even better. I’m very tired and sore and might have a low grade fever making everything much more difficult, but this does help a lot even if it’s a full on smh realisation.

But I’m also a bit tired and annoyed because I keep finding assumptions and having to chase down where they come from. And of course, I’m going to do this over this one term rather than just say “yay, they agree with me therefore it’s correct.” I need to know why there is this agreement given the very real limitations I’ve got in accessing information from the bottom of the Pacific.

And then there are the archives and their different digital and physical homes, the different identifying numbers, so that I also have to track down every single one again. And not just to check if there are new scans. No. To also check which still have scans. A heck of a lot have been taken down.

But I thought I’d just sign off with the two women who started this journey for me, to understand what connects them, and what separates them.

I’m finally working through a heck of a stack of books and essays and theses about Anne and there still isn’t anything new. It’s quite frustrating as I was hoping for hints of records I don’t have accn numbers for, so I’ve saved and will fold them in at a later date.

Meanwhile CMS update has gone better than expected. Thank goodness, these are always fraught.

So now I need a break as this weekend is dedicated to finding specific, but wildly differently spelt, items for my paper. But I’m so exhausted because the tech stuff just doesn’t relent. I think I know the issue. But knowing the issue and solving it are very different things.

So much technical fail, none of my doing, but as an end user of course it is as far as help is concerned. Tropical Cyclone Tam is about to hit us in the next few hours, so that’s one. My websites need work, I’ve got the dreaded squeal/squeak of yet another failing drive (or it could be c or p state, or my mobo, or the CMOS battery.) I’m hoping it’s the ssd my OS is on- I’ve been running on as few apps as possible, but I’ve taken my HDD out because it just sounds like that particular issue.

The squeak sounds like when a firealarm battery is *just* starting to fail. Like a very weedy attempt to make an actual beep.

I have found a couple of videos with a similar sound that are for when HDDs start to fail. Something something ceramic coating heating up…. That would fit the first time I heard it, and promptly ejected it and it was warm from use.

But yesterday it wasn’t in use, and I had OS hang trying to open/close apps. Suggesting a P or C state issue.

And my processor and gpu are not longer supported so that winds up trickier to work out.

Especially with the cycle about to bring 20km gusts and we need to do some things like get this pc a bit further away from windows.

I will try and get as much in the cloud as I can before that. Find what drive I’d already started to make room on for the rest. And cry.

There is more.

Probably best kept to myself for now.

That would be the sped up version of the chorus of “The Shangri- Las – Remember” it’s brilliant, and perfect as a reaction. Today as I was typing up my shortened notes for my paper Weaving In Fields of Gold (why yes a music reference, also a full on Nausicaa reference) I was trying to track down any further record of an extant fragment of a textile, I couldn’t find anything, but I did grab some barely better screenshots so, okay. But I now owe an even greater debt to a scholar I will be referencing heavily because I now have the link I need between old and new skills. I’m a bit confused why it doesn’t seem to have been recognised so far, but so far I’ve been looking only at the original use. So having exhausted every avenue I’m now looking to see if anyone has made the connection before so I can include them.

As a creator myself I often use tools and materials outside the original use. I blend techniques to suit my environment and limits, and I know I’m far from unique in that regard.

I also know what it’s like to reverse engineer an existing piece and, again, I’m not the first. There is a long history of doing this. And a long history of legal action to prevent this. As I’m dealing with a series of legal proceedings that is basically FAFO I want to work out if my suspicion could be supported. It does mean I’ve stopped transcribing my notes as it does need to be brought in. It strengthens my argument so I need to decide where to put it.

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.

See also https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q1-2023/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive_failure#Metrics_of_failures

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.