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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3273 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 11, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So what's the story behind everyone's usernames?

I'll start, mine is derived from crow-stepped gables, a common feature of the architecture in my city.

One of the earliest programs I wrote was a random name generator for the ABC 800, a Swedish Z80 computer from the 80s; grossly obsolete by the time I got it but could run BASIC* well enough.

My current handle was generated from that, initially for some elf character I made for a MUD that i kept reusing everywhere.

* From what I can remember it was some cursed de-Americanized version of BASIC that e.g. modified the keywords and replaced the standard "$" string symbol with the international currency symbol "¤" to counter American cultural encroachment. As a fun aside, when the Swedish keyboard was standardized it got prominently featured as shift-4 due to this, though very few people since have ever used it.

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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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