Things have been a bit silent here. The best intentions to share the interesting bits tend to get bundles in with the low priority tasks and subsequently forgotten about. And I should probably add to that various levels of apathy, secrecy, and not having web access during the 1860s may have hindered my blogging.

So I've kind of joined the army, the 19th Indiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment to be precise, at which point shrewd observers will note that I've never set foot in Indiana, and the photos floating round this site of people in uniform appear a little outdated. The kind of in question is in fact re-enacting. I've done a busy season of events now and it's been hugely eye-opening, beyond treating as much of the experience as a LARP as I can get away with (some of us play the game, some don't), I've really taken to camp cooking. My particular brand of bloody mindedness makes for coffee ground with musket-butt and finding ways to make hardtack edible. Expect me to start posting recipes. Pumpkin pie is imminent.

Re-enactors get better toys than LARPers. I played with this rampart gun at Spetchley park (not me in video), but our tools are a little more manageable, replica percussion muskets supplied as smoothbores, despite the originals being rifled, for convenience reasons. This makes it possible (both physically and legally) to load them with birdshot and fibre wadding and go clay pigeon shooting. Messy, smelly and very slow but reasonably effective and remarkably satisfying.

And the music. Yes, I'm doing musical stuffs. We're very close to having a set together, along with demonstrable and eventually publishable material. Just one hurdle remains: working out how the hell to market the entirely eclectic mix of what we do. Some of it might sound a bit like power metal. Some of it might be describable as synthpop. Somehow it all fits together, but it's most definately not the punk/thrash, nu-metal, grunge or other easily labelled stuff some of my previous projects have been.