Ok, I'm working on flavour-text for the Regency vs Aliens larp I'm writing & running. Think Austen, Shelley, Radcliffe, Temeraire, Strange & Norrell, Hornblower, Sharpe, Aubrey & Maturin, Blackadder the Third and so on, being attacked by big xenomorphs.

What I need is quotes and snippets from stories. Preferably 3 sentences at most per quote, and taken from any of the stuff above, or from historical people around at that time, or from other works that you feel describe the Regency attitude on the subjects in question well. Victorian or Georgian stuff will also do, at a pinch. Fiction rather than history books, preferably.

I'm particularly looking for people who have Sharpe/Hornblower/Aubrey/Flashman or any similar fighty-fighty books. I have Austen, Strange & Norrell and Temeraire with me; the fighting is the stuff that's particularly bothering me.

Anyway. Below are the subjects I need quotes on, together with the quotes I already have. Any help gladly received!

Gods I'm tired!

It's been a great couple of weeks, but they've been quite knackering.

Two weekends ago was my Viking event. It went well! Got a good turn out, managed it within budget, and none of the food was disgusting! The onion soup was perfect, the lamb stew was a bit too watery & veggie-heavy but still very nice, the apple crumble was a bit too dry but mmmmm tasty. And the fighting was fun, and the feast had lots of singing and quaffing and (somewhat bizarrely) a tombola. All good stuff!
And luckily I had a team of willing helpers chopping onions and cleaning up and setting up and stuff for me, so the whole experience was a lot easier than it could have been.

Then last weekend was the Oxford Uni Historical Re-enactment Society ("Wychwood Warriors")'s 20th anniversary feast. Another big Viking banquet- this time with 8 courses! Pea soup, cold meats & cheese, roast, cakes, bacon & mushrooms, fish pie, meat stew, cakes. Blimey. My girlfriend's the president of the society, so I did lots of driving her around and helping her make things. And the meal was a big success.
We both got a bit stressed, but it was lovely on Sunday when it was all over.


Right, onto my next project. Which is organising a Regency romance/politics/horror LARP weekend, entitled "Aliens & Alienation". Expect swooning young girls, dashing officers, fiercely intelligent ladies, arrogant gentlemen, mysterious magicians, sinister Cthuluesque plots and horrific slavering xenomorphs. Oh yes. It's Jane Austin's Aliens, with a side order of Temeraire/Sharpe/Strange&Norrell. Coming April 2009, hopefully. Once I find a site. And make a bunch of Aliens outfits. Oh gods.

I aten't dead, yet. 

National Trust life continues well- working at Kedleston Hall outside Derby. Much older books than Ickworth, very fun. Oldest I've looked at here was 1486; also worked on several sixteenth-century books. Which is nice. In a similar vein, enjoyed Stephen Fry's documentary about the Gutenberg press. If you didn't see it, go download it from the BBC website. It's like my degree in brief!

I have a girlie in Oxford. Weekdays (and weeknights...) many miles from her are difficult, but weekends in Oxford with her are lots of fun and make me very happy.

I am still doing lots of re-enactment and larping and stuff. It's all good. Lots of fun hanging-out-with-mates-in-silly-costumes (and sometimes in the snow- Easter at York was amazing!) Plus planning to do a couple of big events this summer, including Maelstrom (a larp weekend festival with over 1000 people) in June, and a re-enactment trip to a Swedish lake with a longship in July. Excited!


Just found out that Edward Lorenz died a few days ago. This was the fellow who first discovered and expressed the Butterfly Effect- that even purely deterministic action-reactions can give rise to hugely complex systems, and that the tiniest change in starting conditions can lead to huge differences down the line. 
Without him, there would be no Chaos Theory and my undergrad degree would have been much more boring.
Still, he got to 90. A good innings, and he lived to see his discovery have huge effects.
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/obit-lorenz-0416.html

I've got a problem, folks. I could be rich, or moral. Which should I choose?

So, some background.
I work for the National Trust, cataloguing books and researching their libraries. I'm currently working at Ickworth House, in Suffolk.
Ickworth was home to the Hervey family, who were made famous by the phrase "When God created the human race, he made men, women and Herveys". They have been famous eccentrics for centuries.
However the maddest fellow at Ickworth was the 4th Earl of Bristol. The youngest of three brothers, he was bundled off to the clergy. And, possibly due to his elder brother being Lord Lieutenent of Ireland, he got given the marvellously well-paid post of Bishop of Derry. When both his brothers died with issue, he became the Earl-Bishop (the first person in England to have such a high-ranking post in both Church and State since Odo in the Norman Conquest), and absolutely filthy rich.
He was a collector, and a genius. He toured Europe collecting paintings, books, sculpture, etc. He had an ambition to make Ickworth basically into the ultimate History of Art Museum- as you went round, you would travel through artistic styles. Wonderful plans. Sadly, most of his art was stolen by Napoleon. 
In fact, people assume *all* of his art and books were taken. This is not the case...

I've found one of his books. It's on classical architecture, and filled with annotations. The tholus at Delphi is a particularly heavily marked section- clearly due to his round building obsession (he built Ickworth as a round house, and two other houses in Ireland). But there are other annotations.
I've been studying these today. And I noticed lots of comments about hiding places and concealed rooms. Checking these with his original plans of the house, it became clear some of these places must have survived. The thing about round houses is that they lend themselves to this sort of thing. Fitting square rooms inside circular walls always leaves spaces and cavities.
The cavity I've found was only accessibly from the attics, in a distant corner where the eaves met the floor. Difficult to get to. But rewarding. Because, after descending on the very unsafe ladder inside it, I discovered that not all his paintings were stolen by Napoleon. There's a bunch of them still there, lying undisturbed under the house.
But who do they belong to? The Hervey Family, those stupid posh blonds from the Playboy Channel? Or the National Trust, owners of the house they're hidden in? Or... me?

Details here. Short notice, sorry about crapness.

So. Another author I've been reading recently, as well as good old George MacDonald Fraser, is Philip K. Dick. There's a bit of a difference!

A few years back, I was a bit skint but wanted to read PKD novels. I reached the ideal solution. Mother and the family always want to know what to buy me for Christmas and Birthday presents. I told them I wanted all the PKD novels, and promised not to buy any myself. So they've got a master list, and have been working their way through it... I like this situation, as it creates artificial big gaps between reading the books, which gives me enough time to forget how brilliant PKD is so that I rediscover him twice a year.

So... I'm in love with PKD, again. His mind just functions in such strange ways, and he's excellent at pushing you into the same mental states. So far this year I've read A Scanner Darkly (made into a strangely animated movie recently) and Time Out Of Joint. Both of these (indeed, a lot of PKD books) raise similar questions: what is "reality"? Is there an objective reality, and if so how do we know our perceived reality is the correct one? Is our idios kosmos the same as the koinos kosmos?

Scanner Darkly is about someone going mad, loosing connection to the real world through a seperation of the personality into two competing halves (so an idios kosmos that starts identical to the koinos kosmos, but then drifts apart).
Time Out Of Joint is a story more like The Truman Show, The Village or The Matrix: a person realising their world is not real, and seeking to discover the reality beneath (trying to re-align their idios kosmos and the koinos kosmos). Apparently when he submitted the story originally, he was told to make the discovery shorter and the war underneath longer (i.e., to make the Matrix). But that's not what PKD does. He doesn't really care what the final revelation is: he's interested in the discovery process and the mental states it creates.

The fact that PKD didn't write the Matrix is the whole beauty of his books. Even when involving God and huge cosmic wars, they are never told on an epic scope. Two planets are at war? Brilliant! Just the opportunity to tell a story about some toy wholesalers, or a really good engineer, or someone lucky in newspaper guessing games. PKD doesn't write about sci-fi, the sci-fi is just there as a backdrop for the bizarre mental states of his initially everyman characters. He's not interested in interplanetary warfare, he's not even particularly interested in interpersonal warfare, he wants to see intrapersonal warfare. PKD is all about the Little Man, going maaaaaaaaaad (or, possibly, saaaaaaaaaane...)

And I love him.

"Maybe all systems- that is, any theoretical, verbal, symbolic, semantic, etc. formulation that attempts to act as an all-encompassing, all-explaining hypothesis of what the universe is about- are the manifestations of paranoia. We should be content with the mysterious, the meaningless, the contradictory, the hostile, and most of all the unexplainably warm and giving..." PKD, Vancouver, 1972

Screw you, modernists. I'm a post-modernist and proud confused.