December Days 2020 #07: Memery Maybe Interesting

[silveradept]

[O hai. It's December Days time, and this year, I'm taking requests, since it's been a while and I have new people on the list and it's 2020, the year where everyone is both closer to and more distant from their friends and family. So if you have a thought you'd like me to talk about on one of these days, let me know and I'll work it into the schedule. That includes things like further asks about anything in a previous December Days tag, if you have any questions on that regard.]

There was one of those "comment and I'll pick some interest of yours" things going about, and bladespark asked me to talk about three things:

Discordianism, 1000 Blank White Cards, and pot pies

Two of these things are related to each other, so I'm going to start at the bottom and work my way around from there.

1. Pot pies!
   
   Filled with cubes of meat and veg all put together with a savory broth, and with a crust all around. The usual form of them that I get at the market have them in paper bowls, which makes them microwavable, as opposed to the foil containers that they used to be in, which made them conventional-oven only. You're still not supposed to microwave them, as there are no directions for such on most of the pot pie manufacturers that I know of.
   
   A more handheld version of these are sometimes known as Aussie pies, or meat pies, or if you're somewhere near the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, you can get something like a pot pie in handheld form by asking for a pasty. (That's pronounced /ˈpæsti/, and apparently, it's not just Yoopers and their close-by friends who have eaten them for a long time.)
   
   These work really well for relatively inexpensive and complete-type foods. I tend to eat the less fancy, less expensive ones with the meat and vegetable cubes because I like their broth more than the kind that shows up in the Marie Calendar tier of pot pie that uses chunks and rounded cuts of vegetable. Most pot pie recipes that I know of tend to try and recreate the type of white broth / gravy when they make it in a glass dish, rather than the other form, and so I don't do a whole lot of making pot pie myself. Although, in creating some other dish with a broth for braised chicken, I believe, I think I might have found the correct kind of broth for making a pot pie in the oven dish manner, but I haven't had the gumption to put two and three together and make the dish, mostly because I lack the recipe for creating the shell around the vegetables while they are in the dish / the Bisquick that's supposed to go on top and get baked so as to provide the bread part. Two of the store-bought pot pies, by themselves, microwaved, makes for a decent lunch in a relatively quick manner.
   
   I always feel a little like pot pies are looked down upon as lower-class food, although I'm not sure why that's the case, or whether I'm misremembering the Ex Who Is Not Named looking down on my preferred brand of pot pie as being trashy or low-class and instead purchasing the higher tier ones that had "real" ingredients, in her words, and extrapolating that out to a bigger cultural disapproval.


2. Discordianism
   
   The only religion that can honestly claim to see the fnords, and possibly pine for them as well, Discordianism started as, well, as best I can tell, it started as a parody, a tradition that things like the Invisible Pink Unicorn and the Flying Spaghetti Monster would uphold and expand, although those two are more squarely in the mold of parodying aspects of Abrhamic religions. Discordianism makes fun of a lot of entities without specific regard to who gets punched at more than others. There's a sacred text, for as much as anything can be considered sacred to a Discordian, and it's freely available and digitized. The Principia Discordia is generally the thing that people are referring to when they talk about Discordian topics, memes, fnords, the Sacred Chao (Mu), the Pineal Gland, the firm belief that it is a mistake to hold firm beliefs, eating hot dogs without buns on Fridays, and many other things related. While it talks about the worship of the Greek Goddess Eris (Roman name Discordia), there's very little in there that wants to have anthing to do with history or reconstructionist religion and a lot more to do with saying whatever happens to come to mind and pretending like it was a revelation. As parodies go, it casts a wide net, having forgetten that it needed to mend the holes in it. (There's also a version of the Principia with the graphics and layouts that the plain text version doesn't have.)
   
   There's plenty of additional Discordian material out and about, much of it on the World Wide Web, which each Discordian Pope, Mome, or curious seeker is free to take as revelatory, add to their own practice, declare it a schism, call it unorthodox and excommunicate, de-excommunicate, re-excommunicate (no backsies) any other Discordian Pope, Mome, or curious seeker. To put it mildly, the only rules about Discordianism are the ones you decide apply. Similarly for the parts of the myth that you want to take on and the ones that you want to discard. In that sense, Discordianism pokes fun at both more organized churches and religions and at mystic and aescetic traditions and practices that emphasise individual practice toward enlightenment or self-attainment. It revels in the chaos and the discord, even as it claims to offer a way of seeing past all of it to the heart of it in a Zen-like fashion. Or at least offers a way of making sure the chaos that you create in your life is particularly funny to everyone who is in on the joke, even if it's not as funny to the people who are on the sharp end of the joke. Really, it's whatever you make of it, and if you've been blessed to be the chew-toy of the goddess of chaos herself, sometimes it helps to have some sort of text to refer back to, even if it's mostly useless at answering the questions you might have about such a thing.
   
   Which brings us to the last of the three items in question.


3. 1000 Blank White Cards
   
   Which is not actually a game with official ties to Discordianism (for obvious reasons), but is a game that I believe is one of the ways to understand Discordianism and practice it on a conscous level. Or perhaps I was introduced to it by people who were knowledgeable Discordians and I made the association myself. Regardless of how I came to making the connection, it's definitely there.
   
   The game itself is fairly simple, in that one has a deck of index cards or other such blanks, and that the cards that are going to be played need to be generated first. Any blank card can be transformed into a playable card through the application of art and writing to it. Generally speaking, a valid card has a title, some form of art upon it, and the thing that the card does. The art can be as simple or complex as the maker desires, as can the thing that the card does. It's generally not cricket to create cards that say "I win" or that otherwise confer clearly unfair advantages. Mostly because someone else will likely create and play a card that takes those advantages away. Did I mention the part where there isn't necessarily a set goal to achieve beforehand, and so cards that are things like "The bearer gets 1 million points" may turn out to be fundamentally useless if someone else's card says that the goal is to get to 100,000 zorkmids instead? Unlike Fluxx, which has a defined set of cards with which to shift goals, rules, and actions, and games like Mornington Crescent or Numberwang, where the point is that there isn't any sort of coherent ruleset, 1kBWC is much more like a tabetop card form of Calvinball, but it's not a rule that you can't play it the same way twice, but the process of the game and the addition of more blank white cards in each round makes it highly unlikely that you will play it the same way twice. Instead, the real goal, as it were, is instead of winning the game, is to create a game space where people are having fun and exercising their brains to try and come up with cards that will be accepted and laughed with and otherwise used as a way of having creative fun and generating their own fair share of humorous or silly discord along the way. At the end of any given session, some amount of the cards created are selected to seed the next game's deck, although there will still be plenty of blank cards to create with. It's very much a game that's less about winning and more about enjoying the ride, because anybody can create a card at any time that declares victory, whether for themselves or anybody else. It's a game that works best with people who are willing to go along with it as a game that's fundamentally about creation together and not about winning or being competitive about the points (because they're likely not going to matter at all very shortly). In the wrong grouping, it dissolves into angry chaos. In the right one, it becomes amiable and friendly chaos, and works quite well as a proper form of Discordian worship.

So there you have it, three things off the interest list. If there are others that you might be interested in hearing, feel free to ask about them. There's still plenty of space left to talk about things, and if you don't supply the questions and content prompts, that leaves me to my own devices to talk about things, and that may or may not be what you want to hear about.

Comments

[vass]

That's pronounced /ˈpæsti

Hmm. *quick Wiktionary dive* Aha.

Etymology 2
From Middle English paste, from Anglo-Norman paste and Old French pasté. Doublet of patty.
Alternative forms: pastie
Pronunciation:
(UK) enPR: păst'i, IPA(key): /ˈpæsti/, Rhymes: -æsti
(General Australian) enPR: päst'i, IPA(key): /ˈpɑːsti/, Rhymes: -ɑːsti

Noun
pasty (plural pasties)
A type of seasoned meat and vegetable hand pie, usually of a semicircular shape.

Usage notes
The spelling pasty is preferred in the United Kingdom, but in Australia pastie is more common.

*is vindicated*

[silveradept]

Well, the Yooper version was always pæsti, so I never learned any other way of it.