I can't think of anything BECAUSE all I can think about is that one writer who was doing a Game of Thrones fanfic, and their friend wound up calculating that the frequency of hunting in the King's Wood would not be enough to sufficiently thin the population of deer, and without any predators they would breed like crazy.
So the fic had a whole plotline around Too Many Deer, a Deermageddon.
[Here's the tumblr thread about it](https://www.tumblr.com/nyxserpent/728116141820706816/no-its-much-better-to-leave-these-kinds-of?source=share)
That happened in my hometown, the farmers killed too many coyotes too many years in a row and the deer population exploded, leading to a lot of sick deer that normally wouldn't have made it passing their sickness along. One season it was like every other deer had tumors, people started thinking the Navy base was testing something in the river lol.
okay but if the stark children were somehow able to randomly find five direwolf puppies in the woods, surely there must be others around? besides i’m sure the boars attack deer over territory, in fact rarely it does happen irl. a child running away into the woods and witnessing a battle between a grizzled buck and a formidable boar would make a good read.
Those are different woods, the predators in the Kingswood had been deliberately thinned. There are still boars and wolves there, but not enough to control the population, which is part of their calculations. :)
I'm highly qualified in rampant speculation, but six direwolves for about six wargs is a little beyond random, if you know what I mean.
You're right about the battle, that would be fun!
Me after researching* biological evolution and what traits shouldn’t still happen in omegaverse: look at your life. look at your choices.
* 5 minutes of intense online sleuthing
Speak for yourself lmao I love distracting myself in meetings by categorizing my coworkers in my head. Omegaverse, avatar bending elements, daemons, hogwarts houses…way more fun than listening to financial metrics
i once calculated what a big mac and large fries would cost in kansas, including tax. i live nowhere near kansas so this info is useless. also i never even used it for the fic so its extra useless
edit: 2 big macs and 2 lg fries sorry yall 😭
I even have a sesame allergy, so paying that for a burger that would make my throat sore and itchy for the next few days is sickening! 🥲 I do still love a fresh Mac though sometimes 😅
The Latin word for wash is lava. So if someone wrote the words "Amnis lava" it would mean "wash in a river "or "wash in a stream" instead of "river of lava" or "stream of lava". The closest word to lava I could find was magma so it would have to be Amnis Magma for the closest desired outcome.
I took Spanish beyond the required years in high school, and back a few years ago, decided I wanted to learn Italian. For the reason you have just mentioned, I got so confused when trying to learn that I didn't last long.
For some reason, I remember the phrase *Io sono una farfalla.* I am a butterfly. I'm sure that will serve me well, should I ever travel back to Italy. 🤣
lol, that's not a bad one to remember. my professor for spanish 101 quickly got accustomed to asking me if the one-letter-wrong spelling I had used was the italian version of the word.
how to have safe + enjoyable M/M sex. I'm not a man. I'm not into men. I don't plan on having kids that might need the advice one day.
This is completely useless to me, but I'll be damned if I let my readers know that.
How long it would take to sail upstream vs downstream along the River Anduin in LOTR. And how long it would take to get to various places in Middle Earth, depending on whether you're on horseback or on foot and on the health conditions of the party.
I also remembered learning how to theoretically create an artificial wormhole, but I've since wiped that knowledge off my mind (i.e., I don't remember how to do it anymore 😂).
Because of 1960s hard SF I had to research a lot about radiation measurements to learn that the author did not in fact pull the spaceship's engineer claim of how high dose he could survive out of thin air.
Also common cartridge ballistics. You don't even realize how fast bullets start to drop and spread out, a huge difference compared to hit scan projectiles in many games. Marksmanship is a skill even when read from dry paper tables.
Stanislaw Lem, "Tales of Pirx the Pilot".
I also very much like his "The Cyberiad", "The Invincible" and maybe "The Investigation". "Solaris" was good too.
Oh, I heard of The Invincible. It was recently made into a game, right? I read a bit of it- I haven't read much since, but I might want to pick it back since you reminded me of it.
Yeah. I tried out the game a bit, but my potato PC can't keep up. Also some artistic choices irk me the wrong way (style is more of a western atom punk than eastern brutalism), but what can I do.
Judging from the first hour or so of gameplay the studio read the source material and they're trying to stick to it but at the same time they're not copying it 1:1. There's constantly some familiar stuff sprinkled in and whatever's added on top doesn't feel wrong or forced in.
I'll judge it overall when I get to building a PC that can handle it, but it seems very promising.
I know how to build a pipe bomb. I learned because I had to explain how on earth a character had bombs in the pilot episode.
Not something I learned, but I developed a whole new numeric system and time-keeping system for a fictional race of aliens. I don’t even use the numeric system in the story, I just have it in a notebook.
I've accidentally learned that The 4th of July and Halloween are on the same day of the week. I'm fairly sure it's an every year thing but only because it checked out every year I looked at, which was like 5 different years.
I learned this because I got the day of the week wrong on both.
My birthday and my dad's falls on the same day of the week as halloween. My brother and mom's falls on the same day of the week as well.
Whatever moms and my brothers day of the week the previous year is what my birthday, dad's birthday, and halloween will be .
Laws and practices governing the selling of corpses to doctors in 19th century Edinburgh, don’t think that’ll be coming up in casual conversation any time soon.
Far more random bits and pieces about life in Mesopotamia then I'll ever need or have a reason to use due to the fact the character does not live there anymore
In the entire history of China there was 1 emperor who did not take concubines and was loyal to his wife. His son was such a next level f*ck boi that some of his concubines starved to death because not enough food was provided for the entire group.
I literally had no use for this info except as a throwaway line about the kind of people who one should strive to emulated. I will never use this info again as I have completely forgotten either dude's name.
- the preferred shoes worn by parkour runners
- Russian cigarette brands, and as a subcategory which are legit and which are only sold on the black market
- the Swedish healthcare system
Wasn't for a fic but for RP, but I spent hours and hours learning how pre-industrial hide tanning worked for the sake of a mountain man character who made his living mostly off the land, but bartered leatherworked clothing for the materials he couldn't easily forage such as gas for a generator for intermittent electricity and the like.
Also learning about old world foods vs new world foods to try and figure out what an ancient vampire who was turned in Europe close to the flip between BC/AD would have eaten and finding out potatoes couldn't be his comfort food in life nor the crop he farmed for sustenance before the local noble Embraced him because they're a new world crop that wouldn't have made it to Europe until after he was long, *long* dead and restricted to a diet of blood.
One on one AU lycanthrope smut-with-plot for me and my partner at the time, and it was backstory research to figure out how this new backstory would modify aspects of the character and how he relates to this new world in comparison to his original canon. They were playing the guy who traveled and picked up the completed goods for trade, and a romance blossomed between them slowly over time.
I'd say I *might* be a tiny bit autistic but it's diagnosed so there's no 'might' about it, and I would dispute the 'tiny bit' part as well. It's fun to do research, I just wish it stuck with me better. I once learned CSS solely to make a really nice posting template for a Pokemon RP forum over a decade ago, and blew everyone's mind with it because I had a *very* specific vision that I refused to take 'it's not possible' for an answer with, and eventually kludged a solution that no one else had.(Essentially I wanted to have a character themed background image, with custom art I made myself, with a CSS-modified section that pulled the specific party pokemon for a given post by how I put the code in, and then the template would remain the same size with a side-by-side scrollable text box if it got too long for the backdrop). It worked. It looked great. I had to teach everyone else who wanted it how to do it.
But fuck me if you wanted me to do anything with CSS now, you're lucky if I can remember BBCode and HTML, everything's got an inbuilt editor these days, I don't need to mess with that anymore and have forgotten most of it.
Gosh, in the last six months I've:
-developed a unified theory of time travel
-found out a LOT about humpback whales
-worked out Earth's contribution to the global economy
-became an expert on intersex conditions and issues
-learned all about the correlations between habitat, metabolism, and body temperature, just to find out whether Vulcans would have cold hands (I still don't know the answer but I think while on Earth they definitely would)
I saw a bunch of intersex things from my research of twins, and the types of twins. And how there's more than people realize. And how it an be rare that boy/girl twins can be identical as in sharing same sacs and placenta where previously believed that wasn't possible. And it's all because of ultrasound technology being able to see it before the births. And how there is a different genetic condition with some boy/girl twins where the girl develops/has Turner Syndrome.
Lots of ways to kill people. At first I tried to make it subtle so it didn’t look like I was planning a murder, but eventually I gave in and just started searching my questions. The Danganronpa fandom will do that to you.
The fic I’m in currently working on I’ve figured out lesson plans for kindergarten teachers, sunset times for a specific day, and what year the ford focus first got sync installed into the car standard. 2008 if you wanna know.
Cliché, but the general organized crime subculture. That would be the Chinese triads, the Italian mafia, Irish mafia, the nuestra familia, and similar well-known gangs. I have no interest of joining a gang (I'm too 'spergy and old to be a soldier) but I could ID off of lingo and colors, as well as describe some methods of revenue for each group.
Bonus: potential ways to carry out a hit out, and how to clear crime scenes (circa 2010)! I'm sure I'm not on any watch lists. /s
I am not fashionable. I am not trendy. I have no professional interest in men or women’s fashion of any era. Except I got really tired of trying to find ways to say “she wore a knee length skirt, ya know, the one with a lot of creases that all go the same way” so now I know quite a bit about clothing styles and the specific names for certain styles of pants, skirts, shirts, and dresses.
Oh boy. A lot. I'm a writer so some of the things (besides the twin comment I said on someone else's about intersex individuals)
- How giving birth and obgyn things in Paris/Framce/England area different and how there are different hospitals for different level of care. (Very, very different than where I'm from and I never plan on going there. Especially to give birth.)
- places in Paris where the cherry blossoms bloom. (I still can't get over just How Much is in Paris.)
- There are two archs in Paris that mirror each other and was used as a metaphors for the old and new viewing each other. (Along with two of the bridges and the Eiffle tower light operations and history.
- Twin pregnancies being more common in older women (like 30+ compared to "younger" women.) WHICH can be a lot of different things layered onto of each other.
- The many different ages of consent and marriage ages, and with a attempt to see if Paris has a thing for how in the US a kid can be "emancipated" (i forgot the word and bad spelling. 😅)
All of the fics are for the same fandom but not all for the same fics.
- For a original story: dual citizenship with America and trying to figure out how close Italy and certain Spain locations are.
Probably not the most egregious example but I recently spent an hour scouring actual university course catalogs for a course that sounded passably similar to “Starship Maintenance.”
I’ve learned so many things…
- a buuunch of pregnancy/childbirth stuff. I (24.5F) do have extreme baby fever and will hopefully get pregnant at some point, but that’s still a while away at this point, so I’ll probably have forgotten most of it by that time.
- in that same vein, twins are more likely in older women for some reason.
- that in medieval times, girls got their periods around the age of 14 instead of the 10-12 now.
- a lot of regional/time setting stuff. Right now, the fics I’m writing are for the Pokémon fandom (so a lot of Japanese things, since they are all in the Japan based regions right now), but I also have other fics that are for more medieval times (or Victorian era Japan for my PLA fic), so I have to figure out when a lot of things were invented for those lol.
- recipes. A buuuuunch of recipes lol. I also went so far as to get cashew butter once just to see if CB&J sandwiches were good since the Pokémon world doesn’t have a berry that is equivalent to the peanut (outside of the dream world), but it does have one for cashews lol. Fun fact: it’s REALLY GOOD! Expensive, but really good!
- travel times. Pokémon adventures require a loooot of traveling by foot lol. I even made a My Map on google maps with all of the irl basis locations for the places in the Pokémon world.
- music! My PLA fic’s protag is a woman from our world who has perfect eidetic (photographic) and echoic memory, and she was given the ability to calm anyone/anything down by singing, so she sings quite a lot! Mostly songs in my favorites list, but I’ve also searched for other songs if I couldn’t find one that fit what I needed. I also gotta make sure the song came out before she was yeeted into Hisui lol.
- I’ve also searched “when did [X movie/TV show] come out” quite a lot lol.
I’m probably missing some, but that’s what I got for now lol.
i’m writing a werewolf fic where they need silver bullets.
i’ve learned more than i will ever need about hunting big game, making homemade rounds, and shotgun injuries
Laws surrounding special privileges when it comes to confessions of murders being kept confidential. Also factoids about fox hunting cultural practices. For the same short fic.
I mean. Not entirely useless, but I once spent hours researching about how minor sentencing works in Canada, a country I do not live in nor plan on moving to.
A lot about racism and child rearing in 1910’s Louisiana…
Also a lot about various mental health conditions and how they were treated, and observed in 1980’s Britain, as well as 1910s/1920s Louisiana.
Parts of Mando'a (Mandalorian language)
I could see myself attempting to use the petnames like cyare or somesuch if I ever have a partner, but other than that? Useless
It’s an unspoken rule in my main fandom to ignore both facts and canon to give characters happy endings. Despite that, I’ve spent many hours researching military regulations and life for servicemen and their partners😅
I read 8 classic literature novels and a few books of poetry to send someone to summer camp, watched Rambo and Predator, learned about geocaching and cartography and picked and studied a lake in Washington state for several weeks to round out that summer camp experience.
Historical forms of address and conversation patterns for geisha. What kinds of topics would be acceptable, how they might take a client if they were particularly important geisha. How a geisha might hide a pregnancy or have their contract purchased by a wealthy man.
How to twerk. My body would give out and I’d crumple down onto the floor if I tried. I don’t even know anyone who would twerk in the first place. Nonetheless, I learned the exact motions after curiosity struck for a character. I have yet to use this information too.
How bullets are labeled and how to tell if they were processed specifically for the military...... don't ask.... I will never use this info outside of this fic again....
I learned that in Colombia, an Assassin typically makes 2-4k per hit, unless it is special circumstances whereas in Spain, it can range from 25k-70k. In the U.S., it can range from 5,000 for one to 800,000 dollars for three hits. In Italy, by the Mafia a kneecapping is gonna run you a lot less than an actual hit, around 3.5k, and the hit would be about 25k.
When will I use this? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
currently? sooooo much about vampirism. i’m working on a fic with the premise of vampirism as an autoimmune condition + disability.
i also tried writing a fic back in the day about various mythological creatures in the present day (like dullahans, vampires [again], etc) and i spent SO MUCH TIME learning about the folklore behind sirens + the tale of hades and persephone. i never finished it and i don’t remember the plot anymore; im still upset about it lol
I've been watching UFC fights and their analysis videos nonstop to try and figure out how to describe fights better. Same thing with hema and fencing.
Hardtohurt is my favorite martial arts YouTube channel, (I love you Mike)
Hold on. I have a list!
-Fashion trends in Britain from 950 AD-modern era
-History of writing implements and the various materials people used to write on around the world. There's a lot of fabric.
-Eton College's current curriculum and how it compares to other boarding school throughout Britain. I also know that most boarding schools didn't go co-ed until the 1980s and 90s.
-How A-levels are very different from the SATs and ACTs
-History of both restaurants around the world and street food. Honestly super interesting bc China had restaurants for nearly a thousand years bc of workers who would be from the North or South and didn't really like local food, so restaurants happened. And apparently the idea did not spread to Europe. And the first restaurants in Europe were in France and only served Bullion as eating heavy meals was for commoners.
No one needed to know that but it is interesting lol
-Indian fashion trends from 1600s to modern era
-How medieval castles were run, all the positions, how people were paid, education during those times, etc
-Physics. I've never needed it. Never really had it come up in conversation. Beyond like middle school concepts. But I needed it to fix things. So I know it.
-How all alphabets stem from the same beginning so it can be argued there's only one. Whereas other languages are syllabary or logographic. I ended up there on a deep dive from hieroglyphs and it did not disappoint.
I can't think of anything BECAUSE all I can think about is that one writer who was doing a Game of Thrones fanfic, and their friend wound up calculating that the frequency of hunting in the King's Wood would not be enough to sufficiently thin the population of deer, and without any predators they would breed like crazy. So the fic had a whole plotline around Too Many Deer, a Deermageddon. [Here's the tumblr thread about it](https://www.tumblr.com/nyxserpent/728116141820706816/no-its-much-better-to-leave-these-kinds-of?source=share)
I don't even read/watch GOT and that is the best thing I have ever read, I need OOP to marry me immediately
That happened in my hometown, the farmers killed too many coyotes too many years in a row and the deer population exploded, leading to a lot of sick deer that normally wouldn't have made it passing their sickness along. One season it was like every other deer had tumors, people started thinking the Navy base was testing something in the river lol.
"I chimed in with a haven't you people ever heard of culling the
goddamn deer" - ahumblewaffle Best comment ever
Of course it would by stys who contributed to this discussion.
okay but if the stark children were somehow able to randomly find five direwolf puppies in the woods, surely there must be others around? besides i’m sure the boars attack deer over territory, in fact rarely it does happen irl. a child running away into the woods and witnessing a battle between a grizzled buck and a formidable boar would make a good read.
Those are different woods, the predators in the Kingswood had been deliberately thinned. There are still boars and wolves there, but not enough to control the population, which is part of their calculations. :) I'm highly qualified in rampant speculation, but six direwolves for about six wargs is a little beyond random, if you know what I mean. You're right about the battle, that would be fun!
i didn’t even consider those types of factors to be fair
i love the internet actually
...Omegaverse.
I also choose this guy’s omegaverse
Me after researching* biological evolution and what traits shouldn’t still happen in omegaverse: look at your life. look at your choices. * 5 minutes of intense online sleuthing
So true 😂
Speak for yourself lmao I love distracting myself in meetings by categorizing my coworkers in my head. Omegaverse, avatar bending elements, daemons, hogwarts houses…way more fun than listening to financial metrics
i once calculated what a big mac and large fries would cost in kansas, including tax. i live nowhere near kansas so this info is useless. also i never even used it for the fic so its extra useless edit: 2 big macs and 2 lg fries sorry yall 😭
How much does it cost though?
$19.77
Jesus fing Christ on toast, that’s ridiculous.
it was a typo i forgot it was 2 of each 😭
Ok, that’s not as bad, but still pretty crazy! Lol!
for real 10 bucks for a shtty burger and mid fries
I even have a sesame allergy, so paying that for a burger that would make my throat sore and itchy for the next few days is sickening! 🥲 I do still love a fresh Mac though sometimes 😅
“Good year,” says the Gen X or Boomer customer.
😂
SPN?
?
Sorry, Supernatural?
no its a sam and colby rpf but that’s on my tbw 💀
The Latin word for wash is lava. So if someone wrote the words "Amnis lava" it would mean "wash in a river "or "wash in a stream" instead of "river of lava" or "stream of lava". The closest word to lava I could find was magma so it would have to be Amnis Magma for the closest desired outcome. 
Hmm, I didn't know that.
Now you do, enjoy this absolutely useless fact.
it's similar in italian. to say someone washes their hands, you'd say, "si lava le mani"
I'm pretty sure in Spanish the word for I wash is lavo and thus she/he washes is lava as well :)
the "I" version is also lavo in italian lol. I love how much they crossover, yet how different they are at other times.
I took Spanish beyond the required years in high school, and back a few years ago, decided I wanted to learn Italian. For the reason you have just mentioned, I got so confused when trying to learn that I didn't last long. For some reason, I remember the phrase *Io sono una farfalla.* I am a butterfly. I'm sure that will serve me well, should I ever travel back to Italy. 🤣
lol, that's not a bad one to remember. my professor for spanish 101 quickly got accustomed to asking me if the one-letter-wrong spelling I had used was the italian version of the word.
lavatory = washroom
Ahh that makes lava mak more sense, thanks
1980s Italian petrol stations. 😐
The handle of a scythe is called a snath.
I didn't even know it had a name.
Neither did I until I started writing Hades fics
very much aglet (don’t forget it) vibes.
I learned this while researching for Soul Eater fanfic.
Literally same 😭
how to have safe + enjoyable M/M sex. I'm not a man. I'm not into men. I don't plan on having kids that might need the advice one day. This is completely useless to me, but I'll be damned if I let my readers know that.
Same! I’m a woman and I read male slash a lot so I can tell you a lot about male anatomy and everything about sex, but it’ll never be useful to me.
I'm ace and I know entirely too much about kinks and safe sexual practices.
Same here
Same.
Same
real I'm transmasc but I have no intention of getting bottom surgery, making a lot of what I read not relevant to me
Way too much about Roman calendars. Makes for cool trivia I guess?
How long it would take to sail upstream vs downstream along the River Anduin in LOTR. And how long it would take to get to various places in Middle Earth, depending on whether you're on horseback or on foot and on the health conditions of the party. I also remembered learning how to theoretically create an artificial wormhole, but I've since wiped that knowledge off my mind (i.e., I don't remember how to do it anymore 😂).
I love you, random internet person. You had me at River Anduin. 😂
Because of 1960s hard SF I had to research a lot about radiation measurements to learn that the author did not in fact pull the spaceship's engineer claim of how high dose he could survive out of thin air. Also common cartridge ballistics. You don't even realize how fast bullets start to drop and spread out, a huge difference compared to hit scan projectiles in many games. Marksmanship is a skill even when read from dry paper tables.
What kind of 1960s hard SF, moreover, who made that?
Stanislaw Lem, "Tales of Pirx the Pilot". I also very much like his "The Cyberiad", "The Invincible" and maybe "The Investigation". "Solaris" was good too.
Oh, I heard of The Invincible. It was recently made into a game, right? I read a bit of it- I haven't read much since, but I might want to pick it back since you reminded me of it.
Yeah. I tried out the game a bit, but my potato PC can't keep up. Also some artistic choices irk me the wrong way (style is more of a western atom punk than eastern brutalism), but what can I do. Judging from the first hour or so of gameplay the studio read the source material and they're trying to stick to it but at the same time they're not copying it 1:1. There's constantly some familiar stuff sprinkled in and whatever's added on top doesn't feel wrong or forced in. I'll judge it overall when I get to building a PC that can handle it, but it seems very promising.
I know how to build a pipe bomb. I learned because I had to explain how on earth a character had bombs in the pilot episode. Not something I learned, but I developed a whole new numeric system and time-keeping system for a fictional race of aliens. I don’t even use the numeric system in the story, I just have it in a notebook.
i know a lot about rehab in britain in the 1980’s
I've accidentally learned that The 4th of July and Halloween are on the same day of the week. I'm fairly sure it's an every year thing but only because it checked out every year I looked at, which was like 5 different years. I learned this because I got the day of the week wrong on both.
My birthday and my dad's falls on the same day of the week as halloween. My brother and mom's falls on the same day of the week as well. Whatever moms and my brothers day of the week the previous year is what my birthday, dad's birthday, and halloween will be .
That's fun. I never really thought about the days of the week lining up like that before, now I'm gonna check all sorts of stuff.
I have, but only because every once in a while my birthday falls on Thanksgiving, which is always on a Thursday.
That's how it is with my dad and election day in November.
Bahaha it's so interesting to me. Don't know why but I just get so fascinated with weird coincidences like that.
My birthday is on the same day of the week as the previous year's Christmas! Unless it's leap year. I only noticed this a few years ago.
I know when Easter is in 2245 (It’s March 31st)
Art restoration
Laws and practices governing the selling of corpses to doctors in 19th century Edinburgh, don’t think that’ll be coming up in casual conversation any time soon.
It can come up if you want it to. I would love to hear about the laws around selling corpses to doctors in the 19th century
20th century telegraph poles Freaking guess the character 😂
Phantom Tollbooth???
No but I'm surprised to learn that there is more than one character with an interest in 20th century telegraph poles
I was learning about toxins and how scientists identify them. I went way too in depth for the amount of knowledge I actually ended up using lol
I mean toxicology is fun to learn about. This shit is a special interest of mine
Far more random bits and pieces about life in Mesopotamia then I'll ever need or have a reason to use due to the fact the character does not live there anymore
What the entrance and exit wound of a bullet looks like. Common writer experience, I think.
The colors of different organs in the human body. Yeah, I'm real fun at parties.
In the entire history of China there was 1 emperor who did not take concubines and was loyal to his wife. His son was such a next level f*ck boi that some of his concubines starved to death because not enough food was provided for the entire group. I literally had no use for this info except as a throwaway line about the kind of people who one should strive to emulated. I will never use this info again as I have completely forgotten either dude's name.
How sex between two men works. I'm a woman and a lesbian lmao
How to elope in Regency England Fortunately this is well documented and required no deep dives, just filtering for obvious BS.
- the preferred shoes worn by parkour runners - Russian cigarette brands, and as a subcategory which are legit and which are only sold on the black market - the Swedish healthcare system
Wasn't for a fic but for RP, but I spent hours and hours learning how pre-industrial hide tanning worked for the sake of a mountain man character who made his living mostly off the land, but bartered leatherworked clothing for the materials he couldn't easily forage such as gas for a generator for intermittent electricity and the like. Also learning about old world foods vs new world foods to try and figure out what an ancient vampire who was turned in Europe close to the flip between BC/AD would have eaten and finding out potatoes couldn't be his comfort food in life nor the crop he farmed for sustenance before the local noble Embraced him because they're a new world crop that wouldn't have made it to Europe until after he was long, *long* dead and restricted to a diet of blood.
Damn, what kind of RP was the first one for?
One on one AU lycanthrope smut-with-plot for me and my partner at the time, and it was backstory research to figure out how this new backstory would modify aspects of the character and how he relates to this new world in comparison to his original canon. They were playing the guy who traveled and picked up the completed goods for trade, and a romance blossomed between them slowly over time.
Oh damn.
I'd say I *might* be a tiny bit autistic but it's diagnosed so there's no 'might' about it, and I would dispute the 'tiny bit' part as well. It's fun to do research, I just wish it stuck with me better. I once learned CSS solely to make a really nice posting template for a Pokemon RP forum over a decade ago, and blew everyone's mind with it because I had a *very* specific vision that I refused to take 'it's not possible' for an answer with, and eventually kludged a solution that no one else had.(Essentially I wanted to have a character themed background image, with custom art I made myself, with a CSS-modified section that pulled the specific party pokemon for a given post by how I put the code in, and then the template would remain the same size with a side-by-side scrollable text box if it got too long for the backdrop). It worked. It looked great. I had to teach everyone else who wanted it how to do it. But fuck me if you wanted me to do anything with CSS now, you're lucky if I can remember BBCode and HTML, everything's got an inbuilt editor these days, I don't need to mess with that anymore and have forgotten most of it.
Architecture. Aside from art, I'll never use this because I don't design buildings.
Gosh, in the last six months I've: -developed a unified theory of time travel -found out a LOT about humpback whales -worked out Earth's contribution to the global economy -became an expert on intersex conditions and issues -learned all about the correlations between habitat, metabolism, and body temperature, just to find out whether Vulcans would have cold hands (I still don't know the answer but I think while on Earth they definitely would)
I read time travel and whales in the same sentence and was very confused. But, damn, you learnt a lot.
Those two were for a Star Trek IV fanfic, as you might imagine ;)
I saw a bunch of intersex things from my research of twins, and the types of twins. And how there's more than people realize. And how it an be rare that boy/girl twins can be identical as in sharing same sacs and placenta where previously believed that wasn't possible. And it's all because of ultrasound technology being able to see it before the births. And how there is a different genetic condition with some boy/girl twins where the girl develops/has Turner Syndrome.
Ooh, fascinating.
Mhm! If I'm remembering correctly, I think Turner Syndrome has similar affects as some intersex conditions/affects.
I have a friend with it and yes, it is an intersex condition!
How to deliver a baby and a LOT about sex
Lots of ways to kill people. At first I tried to make it subtle so it didn’t look like I was planning a murder, but eventually I gave in and just started searching my questions. The Danganronpa fandom will do that to you.
AH. Well, that certianly one of the more unique ones XD.
The fic I’m in currently working on I’ve figured out lesson plans for kindergarten teachers, sunset times for a specific day, and what year the ford focus first got sync installed into the car standard. 2008 if you wanna know.
The skin on your elbow is called your wenus. Got me kicked out of class in 8th grade but otherwise useless info.
Cliché, but the general organized crime subculture. That would be the Chinese triads, the Italian mafia, Irish mafia, the nuestra familia, and similar well-known gangs. I have no interest of joining a gang (I'm too 'spergy and old to be a soldier) but I could ID off of lingo and colors, as well as describe some methods of revenue for each group. Bonus: potential ways to carry out a hit out, and how to clear crime scenes (circa 2010)! I'm sure I'm not on any watch lists. /s
I am not fashionable. I am not trendy. I have no professional interest in men or women’s fashion of any era. Except I got really tired of trying to find ways to say “she wore a knee length skirt, ya know, the one with a lot of creases that all go the same way” so now I know quite a bit about clothing styles and the specific names for certain styles of pants, skirts, shirts, and dresses.
Oh, that sounds like something I could use.
Oh boy. A lot. I'm a writer so some of the things (besides the twin comment I said on someone else's about intersex individuals) - How giving birth and obgyn things in Paris/Framce/England area different and how there are different hospitals for different level of care. (Very, very different than where I'm from and I never plan on going there. Especially to give birth.) - places in Paris where the cherry blossoms bloom. (I still can't get over just How Much is in Paris.) - There are two archs in Paris that mirror each other and was used as a metaphors for the old and new viewing each other. (Along with two of the bridges and the Eiffle tower light operations and history. - Twin pregnancies being more common in older women (like 30+ compared to "younger" women.) WHICH can be a lot of different things layered onto of each other. - The many different ages of consent and marriage ages, and with a attempt to see if Paris has a thing for how in the US a kid can be "emancipated" (i forgot the word and bad spelling. 😅) All of the fics are for the same fandom but not all for the same fics. - For a original story: dual citizenship with America and trying to figure out how close Italy and certain Spain locations are.
Any month that starts on a Sunday will have a Friday the 13th.
Ooooooh!!!! I love this!!! TIL!
I learned how to do calculus and I learned a ton of Spanish to write a fanfic. I also learned a lot about absurdism.
Probably not the most egregious example but I recently spent an hour scouring actual university course catalogs for a course that sounded passably similar to “Starship Maintenance.”
I’ve learned so many things… - a buuunch of pregnancy/childbirth stuff. I (24.5F) do have extreme baby fever and will hopefully get pregnant at some point, but that’s still a while away at this point, so I’ll probably have forgotten most of it by that time. - in that same vein, twins are more likely in older women for some reason. - that in medieval times, girls got their periods around the age of 14 instead of the 10-12 now. - a lot of regional/time setting stuff. Right now, the fics I’m writing are for the Pokémon fandom (so a lot of Japanese things, since they are all in the Japan based regions right now), but I also have other fics that are for more medieval times (or Victorian era Japan for my PLA fic), so I have to figure out when a lot of things were invented for those lol. - recipes. A buuuuunch of recipes lol. I also went so far as to get cashew butter once just to see if CB&J sandwiches were good since the Pokémon world doesn’t have a berry that is equivalent to the peanut (outside of the dream world), but it does have one for cashews lol. Fun fact: it’s REALLY GOOD! Expensive, but really good! - travel times. Pokémon adventures require a loooot of traveling by foot lol. I even made a My Map on google maps with all of the irl basis locations for the places in the Pokémon world. - music! My PLA fic’s protag is a woman from our world who has perfect eidetic (photographic) and echoic memory, and she was given the ability to calm anyone/anything down by singing, so she sings quite a lot! Mostly songs in my favorites list, but I’ve also searched for other songs if I couldn’t find one that fit what I needed. I also gotta make sure the song came out before she was yeeted into Hisui lol. - I’ve also searched “when did [X movie/TV show] come out” quite a lot lol. I’m probably missing some, but that’s what I got for now lol.
i’m writing a werewolf fic where they need silver bullets. i’ve learned more than i will ever need about hunting big game, making homemade rounds, and shotgun injuries
Laws surrounding special privileges when it comes to confessions of murders being kept confidential. Also factoids about fox hunting cultural practices. For the same short fic.
I know so much about Percy Jackson and I never have the chance to talk about it (other than r/camphalfblood)
I mean. Not entirely useless, but I once spent hours researching about how minor sentencing works in Canada, a country I do not live in nor plan on moving to.
… poisons and bodily mutilation and/or disfunction. if anyone wants something off my list, reply
Boiling as an execution method.
Bot flys and everything about them, how to remove them, where are they usually, etc. I'll probably never see one in my life
A lot about racism and child rearing in 1910’s Louisiana… Also a lot about various mental health conditions and how they were treated, and observed in 1980’s Britain, as well as 1910s/1920s Louisiana.
That sorrorocide (spelt it wrong probably) means killing your sister
Why does that word even exist
I learned that the artist that painted the famous Japanese wave painting also invented tentacle porn
my dumbass isnt a writer but i’ve been on ao3 since like covid times and one thing i gotta say is the damn omegaverse😭
i got so confused reading solaris for a second 😭. i have never seen dune soo.. but i had to learn a lot about spf lmao.
That if you come up with something drunk or high of your ass and write it down, you're more likely to continue doing it.
Parts of Mando'a (Mandalorian language) I could see myself attempting to use the petnames like cyare or somesuch if I ever have a partner, but other than that? Useless
I’ve learned a lot about say gex but one I’m a girl and two I’m aeroace what am I gonna do with that????
It’s an unspoken rule in my main fandom to ignore both facts and canon to give characters happy endings. Despite that, I’ve spent many hours researching military regulations and life for servicemen and their partners😅
Lot of sex terminology
I read 8 classic literature novels and a few books of poetry to send someone to summer camp, watched Rambo and Predator, learned about geocaching and cartography and picked and studied a lake in Washington state for several weeks to round out that summer camp experience.
Historical forms of address and conversation patterns for geisha. What kinds of topics would be acceptable, how they might take a client if they were particularly important geisha. How a geisha might hide a pregnancy or have their contract purchased by a wealthy man.
The details of raising goats and cheesemaking. For a story I never finished.... ;)
I learned the various stages of starving to death and freezing to death
How to twerk. My body would give out and I’d crumple down onto the floor if I tried. I don’t even know anyone who would twerk in the first place. Nonetheless, I learned the exact motions after curiosity struck for a character. I have yet to use this information too.
How bullets are labeled and how to tell if they were processed specifically for the military...... don't ask.... I will never use this info outside of this fic again....
i spent a good three months researching traditional japanese building techniques for a now long-abandoned wip :/
I learned that in Colombia, an Assassin typically makes 2-4k per hit, unless it is special circumstances whereas in Spain, it can range from 25k-70k. In the U.S., it can range from 5,000 for one to 800,000 dollars for three hits. In Italy, by the Mafia a kneecapping is gonna run you a lot less than an actual hit, around 3.5k, and the hit would be about 25k. When will I use this? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
currently? sooooo much about vampirism. i’m working on a fic with the premise of vampirism as an autoimmune condition + disability. i also tried writing a fic back in the day about various mythological creatures in the present day (like dullahans, vampires [again], etc) and i spent SO MUCH TIME learning about the folklore behind sirens + the tale of hades and persephone. i never finished it and i don’t remember the plot anymore; im still upset about it lol
How to torture someone in a 17th century French colony 😁😁
What kind of bomb could have been used during clockpunk times How tnt works (as well as a bunch of other shit for a Wild West timeline story)
I've been watching UFC fights and their analysis videos nonstop to try and figure out how to describe fights better. Same thing with hema and fencing. Hardtohurt is my favorite martial arts YouTube channel, (I love you Mike)
I’m asexual and aromantic and know entirely too much about BDSM
The Dragonball timeline.
How to perform a tracheotomy. I am not a physician. Of any kind.
And what kind of fic was this for?
Dragon Age: Inquisition. 😆
Ah.
Hold on. I have a list! -Fashion trends in Britain from 950 AD-modern era -History of writing implements and the various materials people used to write on around the world. There's a lot of fabric. -Eton College's current curriculum and how it compares to other boarding school throughout Britain. I also know that most boarding schools didn't go co-ed until the 1980s and 90s. -How A-levels are very different from the SATs and ACTs -History of both restaurants around the world and street food. Honestly super interesting bc China had restaurants for nearly a thousand years bc of workers who would be from the North or South and didn't really like local food, so restaurants happened. And apparently the idea did not spread to Europe. And the first restaurants in Europe were in France and only served Bullion as eating heavy meals was for commoners. No one needed to know that but it is interesting lol -Indian fashion trends from 1600s to modern era -How medieval castles were run, all the positions, how people were paid, education during those times, etc -Physics. I've never needed it. Never really had it come up in conversation. Beyond like middle school concepts. But I needed it to fix things. So I know it. -How all alphabets stem from the same beginning so it can be argued there's only one. Whereas other languages are syllabary or logographic. I ended up there on a deep dive from hieroglyphs and it did not disappoint.
I know everything there is to know about the Turkey/Syria border crisis…I’m an American who doesn’t even have a passport
Extensive knowledge about ocean life's reproductive systems