And it was the best squid ever

Stripes' Surprisingly Successful Squid Stir-Fry (serves 2)

Ingredients:

200g fresh squid
100g prawns, shelled
flour, eggs and breadcrumbs (for coating)
10g coriander
1/2 thumb ginger
Vegetable oil
100g rice
1 large carrot
1 bell pepper
2 spring onions
150g tinned pineapples in juice
50g frozen peas
1/2 tbsp Chinese five-spice
2 tbsp white wine vinegar
1 1/2 tbsp light soy sauce
Chilli powder/flakes/etc. to taste

Seafood
1. Take the fresh squid and cut it up into rings and tentacles.
2. Roll each piece and each prawn in flour, then dip in egg, then coat in breadcrumbs.
3. Chop the coriander into bits.
4. Grate the ginger.
5. Put the coriander and the ginger into a wok with oil; heat slowly, to let the flavours go into the oil.
6. Fry seafood, turning every so often.
7. When fried, lay out on kitchen roll to soak up excess oil.
8. You'll probably need to add more oil when you swap items. That's okay.

Veg
1. Put the rice on.
2. Chop carrots, pepper and spring onions.
3. Fry these in the oil.
4. Add five-spice, white-wine vinegar and soy sauce, and dash some chilli about .
5. Add pineapple and some of its juice for a couple of minutes.
6. Thoroughly mix in the rice once it's done and cook for a couple more minutes just to let the rice settle down a bit.

To Serve

That's... pretty much it. A lot of this great success was the incredibly fresh and delicious squid from the Arndale Market fishmongers, who have hereby redeemed themselves for the Great Mussel Disaster of a month or so ago - but also, it was the skill and ingenuity of the chef in modifying and, dare I say it, improving on the works of Jamie Oliver that did it.

Skill, ingenuity and modesty.

The most important traits of the utterly perfect.

Sad Robot Stories

My latest review project, Sad Robot Stories by Mason Johnson, was an emotional ride through love, loss and the apocalypse, told by a nameless protagonist whose fool's journey from lost loner to unknowing messiah takes him through questions of gender and species identity, faith and religion, suicide, death and grieving. I absolutely loved it, and if you think you'd like a short, thoughtful sci-fi piece in your life right now, then follow the link above and download the novella there.

Terry Gilliam Raspberry Your Heart Out

I've just come across this video, a compilation of Terry Gilliam-style animations from the Elegant Gentleman's Guide To Knife-Fighting. They've got a very Pythonesque feel about their style, and a similarly Pythonesque disrespect for the source material.

I love the way these short-run sketch shows, like Jam and Monkey Dust, manage to get away with murder for a while. Of course, then they get cancelled, so they don't really get away with it at all... but it's nice while it lasts.

Which does beg the question - how exactly did the Pythons actually get away with it for so long?

Cultural Appropriation: A Proposal

If you read this, you almost certainly know I'm a LARPer. Ridiculous hobby, yes, but heavy on the creativity, and that's my drug. Also heavy on the cultural appropriation - and for better or for worse, it's pretty much necessary.

The British LARP scene, like any social network of sufficient size, has parts which care about this issue and parts which don't. Me, I've had a lot of cause to think about it recently, and how to build cultures from scratch. And the problem for the respectful citizen of the world trying to do so in the 21st Century is that assuming you're using humans, or beings which relevantly resemble humans, whatever idea you have, it's been done already.

Think about dress. There's only so many ways it's possible to dress a human. You can define your culture's clothing by whatever criterion you like, prioritising warmth, comfort, ostentation, beauty, intimidation, alienation: whatever you do, you'll be replicating something someone's done before. Likewise, the materials you use. Likewise, the relevant social conventions.

Think about faith. There's only so many ways it's possible to admire the divine, and if it's going to make sense, it'll be underpinned by one of only a tiny handful of philosophical foundation-structures. Worse yet: if you don't use one of those, but have a religion which doesn't particularly care for its underlying philosophy or metaphysics, you're basically encouraging your players to treat it as a one-dimensional obsession rather than a faith - and even that's been done to death in history.

Think about social structure. There's only so many ways it's possible to organise a society of humans, and every one of them's been tried. This isn't the place to go into them all, but particularly with the accelerated timelines of LARP games (driven by the very short lives of many PCs), most of them end up as thin veneers over "Survival of the Most Competent" anyway.

An ideal solution might seem to be what I'll term the Element By Element solution: take the clothing style of one culture, adapt it for a different environment, then adapt it again for a different religion. Do the same for your religion, if any; do the same for your social structure and rituals, your magic, your relationship attitudes, anything. Sounds like you should have something new, right? Wrong. Whatever you come up with, if it works, someone has done it already. That's just humans. We like to think up new ways to solve old problems. This is the first problem: that there is nothing original in the world.

The second problem is that whatever you do take and however respectfully you take it - wait for it - it's already been taken, and by people less respectful than you. Oh shit. Mind = blown. If you're from a privileged culture, like I am, then it's already been appropriated by members of your own culture, and now not only are you disrespecting someone else's heritage and historical-culture, but you may even be exploiting your people's history of abusing their people to do it.

This quickly grows too complex to discuss successfully without specific examples to hand, so I'm not going to go into it at length here. However, I'd like to know about examples you may have come across.

I'd actually quite like there to be more of a debate on this - not on the respectfulness issue, as we all already know that being disrespectful of other people's cultures is stupid and douchey, and don't bloody do it - but on designing a schema to help media creators understand the difference between acceptable and unacceptable cultural appropriation. "Be respectful" isn't enough. It's problematically nonspecific and ideas of respect vary too widely. I'd like to design a questionnaire or scoring system by which content creators - authors, artists, designers, directors, etc. - can see how their meme-borrowing might cause offence. In essence, I'd like to take the discussion about stereotypes and storytelling seen in this excellent blogpost and try to quantify its conclusions. Because Stargate is less offensive to its borrowed culture than, say, Avatar, and it'd be really helpful if we could say why more clearly than we can right now.

On the Poppy

So this Remembrance thing's come up again, as it does precisely once a year. That'll change next year, and I think it's the 2014 centenary of the beginning of the First World War that's got some people particularly worried about the meaning of the poppy and of remembrance in general. But for now, it's November, it's coming up on the 95th anniversary of the 1918 Armistice, and the famous poppy is under fire.

As with all wordless symbols, the poppy's meaning is open to considerable interpretation. This year, Robert Fisk, writing for the Independent, has decided that it's time to take a stand against what he sees as the glorification of the war. Poppy-wearers "mock the war dead", he claims, in the screaming header of an article which combines legitimate personal remembrance with slew of trivial protests in the finest Grumpy Old Man cast - that the poppy's manufacture has changed, that its design is different, that members of the BBC now wear it.

He focuses, with palpable holier-than-thou disdain, on his own contempt for the symbol itself. He admits to taking part in Remembrance services, so it's not like his protest is against war memorials in general - he just refuses to partake in any symbolic gestures involving poppies. He calls the poppy a "fashion appendage", and laments the poem that started it all, despite its gut-punching power. In that respect, if he wants to change attitudes towards remembering the dead, he's selected exactly the wrong target.

The argument brings to mind The History Boys, in which a character describes "lest we remember": the idea that institutionalised remembrance is a device to emotionally distance ourselves from the reality of war, and in doing so, to forget how it felt to be in it. Fisk really wants our remembrance of World War I to be emotional, and seems to think that the poppy detracts from that.

But it is a fundamental fact of human nature that children don't appreciate their parents' sacrifices, even when they're grown-up themselves. After half a century of relative peace for the United Kingdom, it's not surprising that our society is slowly losing its memory of the horror of war. This is not a difficult idea. There's no ceremony for the dead of the Crimea. There's no remembrance for the Boer Wars. The War of 1812 is a historical footnote, and the less said about the Americans' attitude towards their own continental wars, the better. The list of British wars is longer than you realise. Much, much longer.

I'm sure there are people who wear the poppy as a fashion article. They haven't thought about its meaning, in the same way that people don't put much thought into the history and meanings of lots of simple annual rituals. But people need to put their faith, their trust and their attention into symbols, because all too often they don't have the time or the creative impulse to come up with their own personal ways of remembering historical events. Especially those which relate to emotionally exhausting subjects like war and death.

The very act of remembrance itself is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, ritualising the sorrow we feel for the war dead allows society to agree on how best to remember, and helps the truly stricken to compartmentalise their sorrow and get on with their lives. On the other hand, it encourages people to get on with their lives. And the longer they can do that, the more distant the war becomes.

I'm not sure that what's happening with the poppy - if anything's really changed about its meaning and significance at all in the 20 years since Fisk's late father died, which I'm not sure about - is anything more than the passage of time. And bitching about the symbol isn't going to help people remember. If anything, it's going to bury the significance of the date and the ceremony beneath a weight of - largely pointless - debate. Debate which won't reach those who wear the symbol as a "fashion article", because they're precisely the people who aren't paying attention. That's the point.

One day, I don't know how far away, people will stop wearing the poppy. And that won't be because everyone's too busy remembering the dead in their own personal way. It'll just be because they've forgotten entirely.