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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   2560 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 17, 2025

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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Do you have any strong flashbulb memories from a fictional media experience? A video game, a book, a movie?

Flashbulb memories are memories for the circumstances in which one first learned of a surprising and consequential (or emotionally arousing) event. Hearing the news that President Kennedy had been shot is used as the prototype case. Almost everyone can remember, with almost perceptual clarity, where he was when he heard, what he was doing, who told him, what was the immediate aftermath, how he felt about it, and one or more idiosyncratic and often trivial concomitants

Some major realizations about culture when I was a teen reading The Diamond Age on lunch at the job I had then. Just looking at the cover takes me right back even though I've read that book at least ten times now.

Follow-up small scale question: what is the motivation for you (or indeed anyone) to read a book more than once?

I am a fairly voracious reader-for-pleasure but I have never had any desire to re-read any book ever in my life. It seems not just pointless but actively opportunity-costly because you could be reading a new book?

There have been a few books that were especially well written that I read twice. The first time I'm too consumed with finding out what happens, plot progression, resolution of tensions etc. I overwhelmingly am interested in how the story ends, which distracts from some of the finer points of the writing, sub plots and characters that weren't critical to the main storyline etc. During a second read I already know how these things are going to resolve and can more enjoy the total quality of the writing. Most books aren't actually good enough to warrant this though. I can usually tell when I'm going to reread a series pretty soon after I start it too. Steven Erikson's books are a first example I can think of.

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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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