radiantmephit

For anyone who still lets me languish in their feed readers. A lovely little video! 

This article about a newly developed computational model that can detect photographic airbrushing makes me happy:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/11/photo-alteration-analysis/

Here's a sample of some of the photos that were used to build the tool (the top row is un-retouched; the bottom row is retouched):


Image Source: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/11/photo-alteration-analysis/

It's really exciting stuff!
Emily K.

I am planning to make my first corset. The one I currently wear, made for me by the incredible nataliesee, looks like this (I'm on the far left of the photo).



It is gorgeous, but corsets are almost more exciting to collect than tattoos! So, it's time to start learning how to make my own. This is absurd because my sewing skill is at beginner-intermediate.

On the other hand, the last time I posted about my goals, I reached all of them. Defended Master's Thesis, lost the remainder of the baby weight, yada yada.

I have also made a little bit of progress: I bought the fabric for the corset and I bought the Laughing Moon Dore corset kit. Also, I have my machine. And I've been reading through and bookmarking posts in the corsetmakers group so that I will know what I want mine to look like. One of the nice things many people say about the Laughing Moon pattern is that it's customizable. 

I still need: thread, canvas or coutil, bias tape, and TO DO ALL THE WORK.

But, sewing tends to be something technical that I can do with my hands, and is therefore a nice balance to all the time I spend in my head working on the PhD. 

To corsets!
e

In the spirit of ventilating my house, this is what I've been doing for the past four months:



This is my four month old son Colin, on my lap. I adore him. 

As for the rest of my life, I started three things at the end of March:

- I went back to work after maternity leave
- I began the slow-carb diet
- I started working on Version 11 of my Master's thesis

Progress so far?

- Work is going pretty well. I planned an event that didn't suck. I've edited some things, and been to meetings that haven't sucked. I am getting projects done and able to make it home for most of baby's feedings, so that's good.
- I've lost eight pounds. That's pretty cool, but I have ten more to go. I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the ice cream and cookies I'm not eating.
- The thesis is ARGH. I have 15 of 28 edits complete, but the last 13 might kill me. I am presenting my research at a seminar tomorrow, and I feel ready. I would like to defend before my committee all goes on summer vacation, but that means I NEED to FINISH this revision. ARGH.

Also, we've been interviewing daycares and landscapers. Promising possibilities on both fronts.

That's what I'm up to. How's your April going?

One of my favorite things I've seen come out of the It Gets Better movement.

I'm calling it a movement.

I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't get back to sleep because I was upset about work. Isn't that odd? The one problem with when everything is connected is that you can't ever disengage.

I mean, when I was a kid, if I woke up upset I think I would just find a book and get lost in the make-believe. But in my life now, I can't just read fiction. Time spent reading fiction is time not spent reading Bourdieu. Or Butler.

So I got up and started reading Butler. And this is what that means:

"The radical constructivist position has tended to produce the premise that both refutes and confirms its own enterprise. If such a theory cannot take account of sex as the site or surface on which it acts, then it ends up presuming sex as the unconstructed and so concedes the limits of linguistic constructivism, inadvertently circumscribing that which remains unaccountable within the terms of construction."

OK, and that is just one sentence. Imagine approximately 500 more sentences like that, and you've got what I turn to in the middle of the night instead of a good fiction book. Which may explain why I'm still awake. Because the time it takes to make sense of something like that means that I probably ought to just be content with five hours of sleep, since I'm going to need 18 waking hours a day to keep up.

He he! That's my news! I've got a bun in the oven. You want to see? I present Week 16:



So yeah. This complicates things a wee bit. My Master's thesis is due in the Spring, and the baby is due 1/11/11. There may be a conflict there!

However, I'm keeping my head down and getting as much work done in the the next five months as possible. This includes conducting many interviews, completing transcription on all my interview data, drafting the thesis, completing three grad classes, and working full time. Did I say complicated?

Did I mention that my man and I are season ticket holders for KC Wizards games? Would that be a nice bit of relaxation if I wasn't also going to perform at the KC Renaissance Festival this year?  And keep the DnD game going? HE HE HE!!!

I guess I like it busy. Or something like that. No, but seriously, I have a really hard time saying no to things in the late Summer, early Fall. This is always a super joyous time of year for me and it's like syrup and waffles. I just keep pouring it on.

Wooo hooo hooo!!!!

I'm done with the spring semester!

For once I feel as though I totally don't care what grades I got. It's just super lovely to be free. Even if I am going to have a summer full of research. Free for until then!!!

I really want to get my sew on. Look at these cool projects:

Dress With Pockets via AcademicChic

Elastic Waist Skirt via Freshly Picked

Both so on trend, no?

Oh, and don't you want some sparkly shoes?? Annie's a genius!

Glitter Brogues via Annie Spandex
(Seems like you could do this with cheap-o canvas tennis shoes as well. Like an old pair of Keds or something. So bling!)

em

How is it possible that, when I have a final paper due this coming Monday I host a dinner on Friday, and I head to Kansas City for another event on Saturday? It's just so beautiful right now. Spring has sprung, and though it's still chilly, I want to do stuff! Bejeezus help me to get through my last two assignments and avoid failure this semester.

Discussion last night resulted in an increased awareness that I need new userpics. I love that idea! Just need to find them. Your LJ presence sucks. Discuss!

Back on the paper that I really ought to finish: it still feels strange that my thesis will be on personal style blogs. I'm fortunate because my cohort (the people who were accepted for grad study in Sociology the same semester that I was) are very supportive of my project. Two of them even asked me if I keep a personal style blog. Um, when would I do that exactly? Studying the PSB community, I feel like an anthropologist. I'm present in the middle of their culture; observing and interacting, but not belonging. Being an outsider to the PSBs, in a way pushes me towards wanting to feel like an insider amongst the academics. Outsider/observer status is strange like that. I should make more friends with anthropologists and see how they deal. I guess, now that I think of it, I am one of only two in my six person cohort that is doing in-depth participant observation or ethnography. Three others are doing content analysis (which is alot of reading and watching, but not interacting), and one is doing a big survey project, which doesn't involve much interaction with the community of study either. Well, hmmm. If it results in a publication, it is all good.

This is old news like 2006, but my sweetie and I have been enjoying Simon Schama's Power of Art dvds recently. So far we have only seen Caravaggio and Bernini. Italian artists in the 1600's? HAWT. Super salacious deliciousness.

In new news, this past weekend my brother-in-law got married in KC. It was a fun party. I love it when people wait to get married (they were both 37, I think). You have this feeling that you're watching two intelligent and wise human beings make a considered commitment. Here are a couple of pictures of me and my darlin' at the wedding:





Flutter sleeves for the win. And his suit is all kinds of awesome-ness like wow.