It wasn’t. May as well have been for the endless loop of “your harddrive is failing and it’s all your fault” advice online. Ditto advice that you just store data on drives not use them, which is… something. Ditto the goal shift from having a back up in the cloud and physical to now something like five redundancies- way to embrace inbuilt obsolescence. Nope. It was just the last connector in my power cable to it. The second to last one is fine. Silence. Speedy. Luckily the manufacturer builds in a beep that power has been lost but it sure does sound like a failure. It didn’t seem to cause any errors, it just meant each time there was a waver in the supply it had to retry.

So that’s brilliant. I did though learn all the ways both the OS, and browsers alike keep accessing it. Oh yes. The latter is ostensibly to check for software conflicts, but that’s pretty invasive. I caught it live only because of the noise- and the noise is due to multiple attempts to read/write. I doubt it would be easy to spot it otherwise. So that’s good. I was worried my PC was on her last legs, I even have an entirely new set of power cables.

But I’m just so physically shattered by the stress. As in biological stress. Sure other stress, but think about how you physically tense core muscles when you’re trying to focus and trying to be alert. There are superficial and deep muscles alike and for me these are the muscles that make my fibro start yelling at me. Very loudly. Well maybe not the muscles themselves but all that fascia around and between and particularly just under the skin do. Yes, it was assumed the fascia only transfers pain signals, doesn’t actually generate them. Turns out it very much does. And that matches my experience better than if fibro was in muscles.

That or yes, it’s heavily in the smooth muscle fibres in skin. These are the ones that you can feel when you get goosepimples. When I get them now? It hurts. I can feel them slowly contract. It’s very creepy. But it’s probably also why even before I get to that point that a warm shower hurts. It feels like having a warm shower after being sunburned. So when people talk about the pain of fibro, yes, it includes actual burning sensations, not the burning of inflammation- though I get that too and prednisone can quite often knock that back. It’s not supposed to. But it does for me. Maybe because my RA is active enough that knocking that back is upstream of the pain of fibro.

And while I know I’m not actually burned, it doesn’t actually stop the pain. And a hot shower is really beneficial for my RA and fibro for the same reason it’s beneficial for anyone. It soothes sore muscles.

So here I am. With the source of stress gone. But now left trying to recover from it.

Still. We are here and it is now. A quick fly by post, now off to have that shower I’ve put off. Hah!

But if I can get my body to stop yelling at me I can actually work on those embroidery projects I keep having to put off. Pink Diamonds, Elissa, Elsa, my pearl work.

Yes, still recovering, prednisone taper continues. But I’m also able to appreciate what I did achieve over the last year. It’s huge. After repeated harddrive failures, I really do have a good one, it’s stable and so my catalogue of portraits of women of the North Rhine is back under control. I’ve added some categories for broad date ranges, I’ve removed the stained glass window and print depictions (just from the categories) as the art forms have distinctly different aims and so need to be handled separately. It’s excessively difficult in the UI of media to handle these changes so it’s a bit incomplete too. Had my site not been picked up by google for high rankings I’d have totally changed all of it. But we are hear and it is now.

And alongside this of course I have individual inventories as well as research of those who have gone before me.

So what about my paper? I’m trying to work that one out. But I let go some of the stress because while working my way through I translated a nifty two page article that was the first of a two part series except I can’t find the second half. And it was written in the 1950s.

He said what volume it would appear in, but I couldn’t find it.

I don’t think I need that second half, I got the answers I needed, but I’m feeling less stressed about leaving unfinished works up on my sites because I’m far from the first to be heavily invested in the art of this time and place and where my output may not keep up with intent.

I’ve also got multiple sources about the language of 16thC Cologne and as I worked my way through that I was also able to let go of some more stress: even people who study that sum it up as it’s complicated. And it is. I know it is when I hear contemporary spoken word now, but what’s interesting to me is that I found myself almost with the same accent when I started just trying to get different spelling variations to make sense.

I also really pushed my theory. Really hard. That’s what you do of course. You defend it, and the only way you can do that is to follow up every piece of evidence that contradicts you. There is a repeated claim that I only just was able to trace back. This is in part due to the very low quality scans of books that are foundational. Sometimes a bad OCR layer is worse than none.

The claim is important, I’m frustrated I didn’t spot it myself, but it doesn’t change my theory. It just means there were connections lost and gained right up to my focal time. And it means I can happily quote everyone who shared it. And I can do so by starting with the transcription of the founding document, and what each writer has interpreted it to mean, and what it means for my work.

I’m still shattered. Refractive disease means resistant to treatment. All treatment, including diet etc. You still do what you need to do, obviously, it’s just hard to keep going and not just cry.

I’ll write about hat in a separate post. Because I haven’t cried, I’m staying positive, just a bit impatient.

I’ve been quiet because I’m trying to recover from triggering a relapse of my RA. The petechiae in my feet and my Achilles tendons injuries are at this point clearly connected as they calm down with high doses of steroids. So does my fibro and pain where I have a little narrowing in my spine- so they all were ringing alarm bells that just turned into a cacophony.

The problem was I had a pulse not even three months ago and wasn’t on alert to notice the gathering warning signs that another flare was on the way. I did have to use heat and darkness for longer than usual but it was gradual until it was half my day. But then it pretty much fell apart and now I’ll need to recover from the steroids too because they do suppress your own cortisol production.

RA treatments do so much but immune cells are particularly good at by passing interference- just consider how much bone marrow we have, not even total body irradiation and Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation is long lasting. That’s how powerful it is. It was fascinating and horrifying to study at uni, so you can imagine what it’s like to now be part of the subject.

So you keep running interference, you keep tools in your toolkit, and you remember to be as forgiving of yourself as so many people you know you’ve disappointed have and who continue to be forgiving. First out of respect for that grace, second because it’s how you recover because stress makes it take longer, third so you remember to keep offering that grace in kind. And fourth so you do keep trying.

It’s a matter now of making sure I don’t push recovery nor get disheartened by how long it takes, because that’s truly the most difficult to manage.

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.