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Gothica Studded and Ada Lovelace
Mar. 6th, 2019 08:53 amKat Von D stopped making Gothica Studded.
My heart is broken: It was the only lipstick I ever loved, a magical, bronzy, shimmery shade that didn’t clash with my skin. (Centuries and centuries of immersion in olive oil bequeathed my genome distinctly greenish skin tones.)
My hair is very long right now, so my most practical coiffure is a modified Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez chignon, which calls for bright red lipstick. Alas! When I wear bright red lipstick, I look like John Wayne Gacy in full Evil Clown regalia.
Fortunately, I have finally found a short hairstyle I like, and will be getting sheared today (if I can bear to leave the house) or tomorrow. This will expand my palette of lipstick choices greatly.
This is the only extant photograph of Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace. Depending upon whether you are left-brained or right-brained, she was either the inventor of modern computer science or Lord Byron’s only legitimate daughter.
In between pounding away at various exceedingly tedious revenue-generating projects, I have been dipping into Miranda Seymour’s delightful In Byron’s Wake, which is a biography of Annabella Milbanke, Byron’s wife, and Ada Lovelace, his daughter.
In most Byron biographies, Annabella is presented as an exceedingly stuffy young woman, very pious, whom Byron married for her money.
Delving into Annabella’s diaries and letters, Seymour paints a rather different portrait.
Annabella was spirited if cosseted, and had many suitors besides Byron. As a young girl, she was kind of fluffy, comical, and self-involved. Alas! Only that self-involvement survived into her dowager years. Annabella’s fatal flaw was a passion for reformation—a rather modern flaw: Don’t we all want to straighten out Bad Boys?
Ada was the product of some spectacularly bad marital relations. In consequence, Annabella didn’t really like her daughter very much and tortured her to make up for her inability to torture Byron.
Ada was schooled in mathematics from an early age, in hopes that logical rigor would prevent her from developing regrettable poetical tendencies. The strategy only half-worked: She approached mathematics from a distinctly metaphysical perspective. Ada also became a compulsive gambler and used her mathematical talents to create a model for large roulette bets. She formed a syndicate with male pals to test her model; they lost a lot of money. When Ada’s husband found about the syndicate, he renounced her.
(One could write a very interesting fantasy story that starts with discovering Ada Lovelace's roulette model in some shabby reading room at the British Museum!)
Ada was an altogether fascinating woman who lived what sounds like a very sad life.
Of course, until relatively recently, what woman didn’t live a very sad life?
Woman, as Yoko Ono reminds us, is the N-word-redacted of the world.
My heart is broken: It was the only lipstick I ever loved, a magical, bronzy, shimmery shade that didn’t clash with my skin. (Centuries and centuries of immersion in olive oil bequeathed my genome distinctly greenish skin tones.)
My hair is very long right now, so my most practical coiffure is a modified Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez chignon, which calls for bright red lipstick. Alas! When I wear bright red lipstick, I look like John Wayne Gacy in full Evil Clown regalia.
Fortunately, I have finally found a short hairstyle I like, and will be getting sheared today (if I can bear to leave the house) or tomorrow. This will expand my palette of lipstick choices greatly.
This is the only extant photograph of Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace. Depending upon whether you are left-brained or right-brained, she was either the inventor of modern computer science or Lord Byron’s only legitimate daughter.
In between pounding away at various exceedingly tedious revenue-generating projects, I have been dipping into Miranda Seymour’s delightful In Byron’s Wake, which is a biography of Annabella Milbanke, Byron’s wife, and Ada Lovelace, his daughter.
In most Byron biographies, Annabella is presented as an exceedingly stuffy young woman, very pious, whom Byron married for her money.
Delving into Annabella’s diaries and letters, Seymour paints a rather different portrait.
Annabella was spirited if cosseted, and had many suitors besides Byron. As a young girl, she was kind of fluffy, comical, and self-involved. Alas! Only that self-involvement survived into her dowager years. Annabella’s fatal flaw was a passion for reformation—a rather modern flaw: Don’t we all want to straighten out Bad Boys?
Ada was the product of some spectacularly bad marital relations. In consequence, Annabella didn’t really like her daughter very much and tortured her to make up for her inability to torture Byron.
Ada was schooled in mathematics from an early age, in hopes that logical rigor would prevent her from developing regrettable poetical tendencies. The strategy only half-worked: She approached mathematics from a distinctly metaphysical perspective. Ada also became a compulsive gambler and used her mathematical talents to create a model for large roulette bets. She formed a syndicate with male pals to test her model; they lost a lot of money. When Ada’s husband found about the syndicate, he renounced her.
(One could write a very interesting fantasy story that starts with discovering Ada Lovelace's roulette model in some shabby reading room at the British Museum!)
Ada was an altogether fascinating woman who lived what sounds like a very sad life.
Of course, until relatively recently, what woman didn’t live a very sad life?
Woman, as Yoko Ono reminds us, is the N-word-redacted of the world.
