DE: Be sure to cite your sources.

[bjornwilde]

A follow up to last Saturday's DE, what is some of the research you've done for pups? Anything really unusual or odd combinations?

For example, I have one pup I'm still contemplating, for whom I really should study up on both the Prose and Poetic Edda, as well as dementia.

[Also, as ever, we love topic suggestions. Leave them here and the topic faeries will bless you.]

Comments

[damncompass]

Currently I have a few Wikipedia pages bookmarked: Large Hadron Collider, CERN, HG Wells, HG Wells Bibliography. (Also, my theoretical physics understanding is TERRIBLE.)

I don't know what the oddest thing I've ever had to look up was (Things I have researched: miscarriage/stillbirth, progression and transmission of AIDS, concussions and their effects), but I am realizing lately that my 19th century history is absolutely terrible. (between Fantine and Helena.) I need to app someone from the 18th century. I'm much more solid on that.

[sdelmonte]

Wondering where your 19th century history gaps are. I am pretty good with some of it. Though mainly on the US side of the sea.

Also, BTW, I have discovered that the real HG Wells died on August 13, 1946. Or about three weeks from now for Howard. I think Howard HAS to read an obit and bring it to the bar.

[timelessinventor]

Oh, and how could I forget: South Dakota.

[saphyria]

Oh god. The development timeline of kittens. The thermal resistance of various metals in cookware. History of cheesemaking. SO MANY RECIPES. Archaic names for modern countries. Little known or region-specific fairy tales and legends. Obscure cryptids or mythic creatures. Symptoms and effects of significant injuries. The language of flowers.

And those are just recent examples.

[sdelmonte]

Kirk requires vast amounts of Trek canon knowledge, which is practically a specialized subject.

I have been familiarizing myself with 1940s airplanes for Howard Stark, and before that with actual pirate history for Gibbs. I haven't done this yet - Gibbs is sort of on hold - but I even chose a few real sunken ships to be in the collection that he and Capt. Jack took possession of at the end of the last PotC film.

[camwyn]

Downhill mountain bike racing
The geography of New Mexico
The immediate geographical vicinity of Espanola, New Mexico incl. Black Mesa Golf Club
The geography of Sullivan County, NY incl. White Forest Zen Buddhist Monastery (Bak Lim Sa)
The Seattle-King County court system
The geography of the Preston County, WV area incl. the vicinity of Rowlesburg, Terra Alta, Mannheim, etc.
The 1985 Cheat River floods
USMC sniper scout training
USMC ranks
USMC saluting protocols
Dutch profanity
Quebecois profanity
Russian profanity
Flint knapping techniques
Appropriate wood to use for the creation of selfbows
Bowstring making techniques
Beekeeping
Cutaneous radiation syndrome
World record holder for most radiation absorbed and still survived
The 'demon core'
Progression of symptoms in acute radiation poisonings and deaths of Louis Slotin and Harry Daghlian
US Army Physical Fitness Test standards
US Army military police units of the 20th century and their emblems
Radio astronomy
Earth-Moon-Earth radio transmission and reception
Project Diana
The geography of the Pittsburgh area
The Western State Penitentiary
Lucha libre
El Santo's history
Foods of the Puebla region of Mexico
Popular mid-century Mexican beverages
Quite a lot of paranormal material
Transplantation surgery in general
First successful kidney transplant
First successful heart transplant
The discovery of ibuprofen
Swabian dialect
Traditional foods of the Stuttgart region

.... I could go on for a while.

[bjornwilde]

I knew before this DE that you were a research pro but dang...

[minkhollow]

And Cata was on the receiving end of that ibuprofen research! I still remember reading that tag and going 'brand new and super secret? damn.'

[genarti]

I think Enjolras is the first character for whom I've done a lot of real, sustained research on something outside of the character's own canon. (For him: the French Revolution; the Napoleonic Era and the Bourbon Restoration and the early days of the July Monarchy; Paris café culture; cholera; humors and miasma theory; 1830s fashion; more about the French Revolution; Paris geography pre-Haussmann; the theater and new media of the 1830s; more about the French Revolution; lots of minor related stuff like fanmaking and moths and Romantic writers. This is an ongoing process, because oh god Enjolras has extremely detailed knowledge of a period I knew very little about before I started this. Also, for the record, some of this research has been in a detailed reading-of-scholarly-books way, but some of it has just been reading informational posts in the fandom by people who've been at this a lot longer than I have or have other character focuses. I am 100% certain that once he's in the bar, I'm still going to run up against things I have to hastily research or desperately fudge.)

For the others, I've done a lot of spot research, both before playing and with hasty googling mid-thread, but nothing really sustained or in-depth.

For Lan, swords and sword form traditions. For Thor, a little bit of Norse mythology, although I didn't want to go too far into great detail about that lest I get sidetracked by actual historical Norse culture and lose sight of the wild inaccuracy that is Marvel canon. For River, dance and weapons research and quantum physics (enough for Riveresque technobabble, not enough for understanding anything properly) and foods of various cultures and a lot of minor things I'm forgetting at the moment. For Trowa, lions and how circuses function and Lagrange Points and street kids. (I have a book on child soldiers which I bought partly out of general interest and partly with an eye on Trowa, but I haven't read it yet.) Clare hasn't led to a lot of research, except re-checking her own canon, because so much of it just doesn't work the way anything on our Earth does.

Edit: oh, no, I did a fair amount of research on Russia for Piotr, too. (Although I did also reassure myself every time I got insecure with the fact that even half of that research was way more than most of the Marvel folk who wrote his canonical scenes. I had to do a certain amount of fanwanking on some things -- like, uh, the fact that Piotr and his baby sister call each other by firstname + patronymic. *facepalming*) In that case, I guess the pattern is that I do the most concentrated research about the cultural/historical/political context for characters from modern or historical Earth settings. For secondary world characters, I mostly take their canon as the world context, and do much more minor research about their specialties etc to flesh it out. I don't do the kind of research one needs for a detailed plausibility-fanwank of a canon setting from the ground up, though.

[jothra]

Fucking Lagrange points, how do they work, I say.

[bjornwilde]

Most of my research has been what I can find online. I am inherently lazy and am a slow reader, so reading an entire book to find out one bit of info is unlikely. That said, things i have figured out in the past:

Which Air Force base Ben likely was stationed while he was a test pilot?
What minimum rank he would have to hold in order to be a military test pilot?
Did Guinness exist in the 1870s and if so was it likely to have been imported to San Francisco?
Did bottled beer exist in the 1870s?
What hotels/bars/taverns/restaurants might have existed in San Francisco in the 1870s?

Google and Wikipedia are my friends.

[not_my_sandbox]

Hmmm...

Beetle anatomy
chicken breeds
flail combat
combat forms developed in Medieval Europe in general
Iranian Persian Kung Fu (It isn't actually called that but its a thing)

[death_gone_mad]

Also, Chen style Taijiquan which is the more combative side/origin of Tai Chi, because I wanted to balance the OFFENSE OFFENCE OFFENSE style of fighting I had in mind for Amascut with a bit of defense so she can put some distance between herself and an opponent and go on the attack again.

It looks reasonably badass when used against other styles but a fight between two Taijiquan masters looks rather like a ridiculously slow dance.

[kitchen_maid]

I research a lot for all of mine, honestly, on all sorts of things.

The best combination of research topics happened years ago, when I was researching pregnancy (for Amy) and how to get married in Vegas (for Trina Echolls) and hoping no one in my family saw my browser history.

[misslucyjane]

For Merlin, I've looked up things like medieval food and the earliest universities.

For Steve, I've done research about the 1930s and '40s, particularly the European theater of WWII.

For Lydia, I've looked up things about higher math. And then flailed a lot, because I don't even know where to start. I've also looked up Latin, especially insults. The Romans had some great ones.

For Bilbo, I just keep the appendices of LOTR nearby. For the Ice King, it's the Adventure Time wikipedia. For Jack, I haven't had to look up much yet outside of canon, but I did reread all the parts about Jonathan in the Bible before I apped him to get an idea of where I want to take him.

[nocarename]

...What parts caused flailing? (Four and a half years of calculus plus a dip into some geometry odds and sods have to be worth something. Even if I do need to refresh some of those parts thoroughly.)

[gavin62truck]

Firefighting. Lots of technical jargon, terminology, standard operating procedures, slang, anecdotes from firefighters -- pranks, unusual calls, funny stories, etc. Basically anything that would be useful in order for me to not sound like a complete idiot when writing OOMs or explaining things to non-firefighter characters. I like to think I won't ever die in a fire now.

[jjprobert]

Egyptian Hieroglyphics and their development
The Pyramids at Giza, their development as a set of structure
More Specifically, The Great Pyramid of Cheops
Various other bit about the seven wonders of the ancient world (I need to do more on this)
Australian Army uniforms
Australian Army bases
Australian Army structure
SASR selection procedure
SAS selection procedure
Engagements the SAS were involved in in the 1950s/60s
Trinity College undergraduate courses
Various things about Dublin as a city

And I've read bits of a Vauban translation for Bean, irrelevant though it is as yet.

I suspect that's not everything.

[minkhollow]

Some of these are for sandboxing or fic-writing.

schools in Sioux Falls, South Dakota
the Interstate system
lists of events in various years in the '50s
which led me to: Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella
John Brown
the Defenestration of Prague (Turns out there are two officially recognised Defenestrations of Prague, and a couple unofficial ones. Who knew the Czech had a thing for throwing people out of windows?)
"Frosty the Snowman"
travel time from Rapid City to various points (Quinn looked up air-travel times/prices once, for a fic, and decided Joshua would probably rather drive.)
Jack the Ripper

[damncompass]

Oh god, the times and prices from Rapid City. *faaaace*

[nocarename]

Podcasts!
No really, they're great. I can put them on and do something else at the same time.

So Ako has me subscribed to, oh three or four different medical ones. (Surgery 101; White Coat, Black Art; Pre-Hospital Trauma Life Support...)I have another three or four weird science/news ones that fill in for Artemis, Robo and Tyler. Tyler had an advertising one as a sort of general interest, but that one is on hiatus at the moment.

Feel free to suggest more to me. I use them to let me know that there is something that I need to research more should RP or other things drift that way.

[Help please. I'm buried at work and the future looks much the same into October-ish. *weeps*]

[bjornwilde]

I am very curious about your weird science podcasts. Titles?

[herr_bookman]

Autor's grenades work.

[seat_five_girl]

You mean that every school doesn't teach basics of explosives?
Shame Autor, shame. You should transfer.

[ceitfianna]

A lot of my research centers around would a pup from this era know of a certain thing.

Lots of history, and due to Charles and Sameth, I'm reading more science and engineering books and articles.

I know there's more since one thing I love about historical pups is the excuse to research, I'm just blanking at the moment.

[1nv1nc1ble]

For Invincible, it's been mostly reading summaries of the other Imageverse comics that I haven't read previously (Trivia: Did you know that everyone's favorite turtles were, at one time, part of the Image canon? I'm tagging that as urban legends of that universe's NYC.) Also, there's been timeline research, to see what is going on in 2004 that would be relevant.

Nothing truly weird has come up in the research, but who knows? We're only about a year into the series.

[mnt_raph]

TMNT Mirage Timeline (Long Live Spengler)
Avatar Wiki
Anatomy of various Japanese weapons
Lactose (in)tolerance of various cultures and regions
IMDB. Always IMDB.
Deviant Art

[alexiscartwheel]

Some fun ones that I remember...

US Air Force bases with test pilot squadrons
Edwardian breakfast foods
Degrees offered by CSU and UC campuses in Northern California
Common birds in the Sacramento Valley
California police radio codes
1912 news stories on the sinking of the Titanic (The librarian in me would like to point out that the paper Lord Grantham reads at the breakfast table in first episode is historically inaccurate. The Times didn't feature front page photos then. And yeah, I went and dug out scans of the originals.)

And of course constant checking of various wikis, LJ, and Tumblr posts for canon timelines or details

[bjornwilde]

I didn't notice the flower wreathed Carol in your icon yesterday. Love it!

[muji]

...Who are you considering, that you need the Eddas?

[bjornwilde]

Just a sweet little old lady who goes by the name of Nidhogg. Her canon is an urban fantasy series, not the Eddas themselves, but a little extra research can't hurt right?

I don't know how strongly I am considering her but she could be lots of fun.