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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  3d ago (text post)   201 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for August 5, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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A week ago I said that I'd finished cutting stuff out of the first draft of my NaNoWriMo project and was ready to start adding new things in. On reflection I decided I hadn't killed quite enough darlings yet, so I'm halfway through a second pass. It's now down to 109k words, with the goal of the second draft being no more than 85% of the first draft i.e. 113k words.

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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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