Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
- 77
- 2
What is this place?
This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a
court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to
optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.
The weekly Culture War threads host the most
controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are
appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy;
if in doubt, post!
Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts.
You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.
Why are you called The Motte?
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.
New post guidelines
If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it.
A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts
such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a
submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).
Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or
significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.
If in doubt, please post it!
Rules
- Courtesy
- Content
- Engagement
- When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
- Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.
- Accept temporary bans as a time-out, and don't attempt to rejoin the conversation until it's lifted.
- Don't attempt to build consensus or enforce ideological conformity.
- Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
- The Wildcard Rule
- The Metarule

Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I'm working on a rather ambitious mod for Rimworld. By which I mean I've told Opus 5.5 to do all the hard work while I play Helldivers 2 in the background (as somewhat expected, modders have gotten around the anti-cheat) and then nip away for brunch.
TLDR: One of the DLCs, Royalty, adds an ll faction with imperial hierarchy with access to permits that function as supplies, resources and manpower on a cooldown. Like everything else in vanilla Rimworld, the implementation is underwhelming.
There's a mod that expands the system drastically, from the Vanilla Expanded team. But it's still not what I want. I wanted more diversity in content, lower cooldowns, a lot of other missed opportunities addressed.
I had Claude implement a few ideas, then a few more ideas. It's being a champ, autonomously loading and running tests and debugging everything. I then got drunk with power, and asked it to look at my modlist of 521 mods, and think of more. Why not overhaul the whole permit UI while we're at it? Opus 5.5 on even a 5x Max plan is more than I can eat.
I then took the unprecedented step of enabling full access to my c drive, while telling it not to do anything regrettable. I would not have used that feature any earlier than 6 months ago.
Well. I'll come back and let everyone know how well this works.
Reminder to backup any critical data before giving an AI full access in the future. In fact, make multiple backups.
More options
Context Copy link
I've been working on a slower approach to timerborn mod. The plan is to make an immortal beavers faction, that starts a little weak but gains power as their beavers cultivate. Culminating in huge individual bonuses.
My approach is slower because im working on basically a ~$10 a month plan with a "lesser" AI (grok). I've had chatgpt coordinating some of the plans. I briefly tried astra but i burned through tokens so fast that I didn't get any sense of whether an upgraded plan would even be useful.
To conserve tokens I've basically become a project manager. Creating specifically defined tasks that keep the agent strictly on task and implementing things in as small of chunks as possible.
I've made good progress. A unique faction up and running. Mortal->qi condensation complete. A 5 element cultivation system planned out (water, earth, wood, wind, corruption). The elemental cultivation begins in the qi condensation stage and there are different buildings needed once cultivators have broken through the foundation realm.
End plan is to release the mod publicly, but also share the repo and code i used to make it. So that others can continue to add on to it, or use the knowledge repository I've been building within it to make other interesting mods.
More options
Context Copy link
(Never heard from again)
I was busy with Halloween, and for the record I actually went out in proper clown makeup and a very loud sequined jacket.
Well, the actual mod seemed to be working reasonably well. The improved UI worked, I'd made several existing permit mods redundant, and there was good progress on adding additional themed sets. I also had it fix the UI for using permits in-game, which was previously a simple list that got unwieldy when you had more than a handful.
The end experience was significantly better than I would have been content with. And Claude Code with Opus 5.5 is a much better experience than Codex with Sol or Astra, everything is simply a lot faster, and Opus has good taste and needs very little hand holding.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link