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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  1d ago (text post)   131 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for August 19, 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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On Friday I printed the second draft of my NaNoWriMo project for the missus to read. She's about halfway through it, and so far the feedback has been guardedly positive. She's consistently said that it is neither boring nor cringe (my primary and secondary worries about it, respectively) and that the prose is, for the most part, very readable.

Side note: I was unsure of what NaNoWriMo was, and after googling found myself tumbling down a rabbit hole of juicy controversy. What a ride!

I'm now coining FtttG's Law: the longer an online organisation goes on, the probability of it becoming embroiled in a child grooming scandal approaches 1.

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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."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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