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Comment by LaserDiscMan | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly why I miss IMDB's "I need to know" board. You could post a partially correct memory snippet from decades ago and someone would chime in with the answer. I had memories of movies I'd watched on TV as a young child. I had no name or context, but simply little moments stuck in my brain, and someone was able to resolve those to a title.

The closing of the IMDB message boards was a terrible loss IMO. You could visit an obscure actors message board, and you might run into someone who knew them. You could discuss a movie's intricacies with someone, and share theories, etc, on the specific board for that movie. It was a goldmine for movie fans, and I still miss it.

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I wish there was something like that for books.

I remember reading a book in my youth about a kid that lived in a shielded city with an AI controlling it with the assignment to keep everyone ‘happy’ (= docile). He/she breaks protocol and gets ejected through a trash chute. Meets an old man. Crossed a wasteland and finds old ruins, learns something and then blows up the shielding of the city to make it free again.

In the Dutch translation either the old man or the main character was called ‘gull’ or ‘sea gull’. I’ve posted on a few subreddits and forums with people pretty much ignoring, and I have scoured Google without much results neither.

Try https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/story-ident... - they solve this kind of thing all the time.

Here's the one for books:

https://www.reddit.com/r/whatsthatbook/

Maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Fall_of_Night or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_and_the_Stars ? Also sounds similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run but doesn't quite match.

Logan's run was the first thing I thought of as well. Maybe a dutch adaptation of the movie that took some liberties?

The last two sound familiar. Further research is required. At any rate, I thank you!

Goodreads has the What's the Name of That Book?[0] group for identifying books based on a description.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/185-what-s-the-name-of-...

Haha, I have a memory of a movie I saw in the 1960s where there's a dream sequence with the guy in a stylized prison cell with pink mist and giant keys dangling in the air. I've never been able to figure out what this was.

You might want to try https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/

Many answers are low quality. Some participants will just Google and post their answers, something you've likely done before asking.

Now r/WhatIsThisThing, that actually feels like crowdsourcing.

There's also the NFSW version /r/tipofmyp** (I'll let you guess the last word)

And I also found out /r/tipofmyjoystick for games.

Ye it is impressive how good those type of forums work. Pointing out a movie from details.

I wrote in a similair local forum about a movie I was not allowed to watch as a kid, where people at a plane disappeared and their fake teeth was still there (only thing I remember) and someone could immediately point me to the correct kinda crappy Stephen King movie ...

The Langoliers

I've had the same with some music and even from pretty vague descriptions about tempo and content some people were able to find a couple of pieces that I thought I'd never hear again.

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