Unsolicited Advice

I finished a 1960s pencil skirt the other day. It's very authentic. So authentic I had to give it a satin lining or I wouldn't be able to wiggle it on. If it were any more authentic, I don't think I could sit down. Pencil skirts are structured garments and this one was meant to be tightly tailored, so I thought I ought to take a shot at following the design process properly for once. Looking up 'how to draft a pencil skirt' led me to The Closet Historian , always a fantastic resource for post-war/mid-century garments. She went to fashion school in at least two different countries, and if you want directions on how to derive standardized patterns from a series of measurements, she's your best bet. After twenty minutes of her doing math on camera, she showed the pattern pieces, and I knew immediately that they would not fit. Her method results in front and back panels with the same rise (the distance between the low full hip line, or the crotch seam for pants, to ...

It's been a rough couple of weeks. Discount Cheeto Hitler is refusing to admit he lost the election, which he did, by a fairly wide margin. The response of the Biden campaign to Trump's refusal to concede is -- and I am quoting directly here -- "[T]he United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House". On the personal side of things, one of my housemates is having (non-virus-related) breathing problems off and on, and at the time of this writing is in the ICU again. We're waiting to be COVID-evicted on the first of January, because none of us can get enough work to pay for anything. I have started feeding the rats entire sandwich cookies for brekfiss, because it makes me feel better. So you will all forgive me for thinking way too hard about Star Trek . I've seen conflicting reports on whether the novelization of The Motion Picture  is canon or not. Roddenberry seems to have thought it was, inasmuch as he wrote it an...