is filling out tax forms for fanfic characters, to make sure you didn’t accidentally write them living beyond their means, too obsessive?

anais-ninja-bitch:

welcomedmachine:

blackkatmagic:

cameoappearance:

rainbowbarnacle:

lizardlicks:

universe-c:

edenfalling:

thatgirlnevershutsup:

liesmyth:

liesmyth:

I mean last week I browsed google scholar trying to find details about the composition of ancient Byzantine shampoo and ended up google translating an article written in Hungarian, so. You’re probably fine, nonnie. We’re all quirky here.

Friends, please reblog and tell me what is the most obsessive detail you’ve researched at length for fic writing purposes!

It’s a tossup between research on transatlantic travel in the latter part of the 19th century, and research on orcas in Sea World.

Probably sluice gate construction and installation methods, for field drainage in Tudor England… and/or the life stages of various bloodborne parasites and their attendant bacteria plus the comparative structures of avian and mamalian lungs, so I could design a superficially plausible xenobiological plague vector.

I once spent 3+ hours researching bird species of the Himalayas to come up with the phrase “the little brown bird.”

I know so god damned much about sailing.

I’ve read a ton of dusty Victorian medical guides, so I could tell you a lot about the hilariously bad snake oil cure-alls that got advertised back then, or various home cures for stuff like snake bites or burns, or phrenology, or how masturbation causes the “brain softening”.

I now know a moderate amount about alcohol-based fuel cells – I spent several hours on a Wikipedia binge – because I needed to come up with a power source for robots that would be shelf-stable enough to still work after being left out in the woods for 12 years. (This one was technically for RP, and it hasn’t even come up so far.)

I technically know how to build a sloop from the 1800s, from raw timber. And I once spent six hours researching how an arc reactor would hypothetically work in real life so I could write one sentence of technobabble and make it sound legit.

At this point, I’m going to go with things from this decade, because I honestly can’t pick just one:

it’s a toss-up between what years in the next 150 have Rosh Hashanah falling on a Monday, whether or not Arizona desert locusts could feasibly be kosher (the answer is “almost certainly no”, btw), whether or not a specific episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer had aired before August 11th, 1999, and the exact brake and throttle arrangement on a car that could plausibly be stolen in Pisa, Italy, in 1917.

HOW DO YOU MAKE ANCIENT BYZANTINE SHAMPOO???

I looked up what was on during the 2011-2012 season of the Stuttgart Opera to figure out what opera Loki could plausibly have attended before taking a guy’s eye out at a gala in April 2012.