DE: Looking it up

[bjornwilde]

 Quoth the runningred :
A bit meta but what's the weirdest thing you've found yourself researching for an in character interaction?

Prompted by the fact I went from the history of Turkish Delight for Olivier to non Newtonian fluid in body armour for Jay.

Comments

[bjornwilde]

I'm not sure about the weirdest, but I did just have to decide if the humans in the London of 1666 knew what a vampire was. I decided to not really care for fact and just assumed there was some sort of vampire legend.

I also need to figure out how old Champagne is and whether Rand would know of it.

ETA: And wiki to the rescue. Yes, he would know what sparkling wines are as the first was made in 1531.

[street_sparrow]

That seems to be a bit complicated. They've been making wine in that region since at least the fifth century, but it wasn't until the 19th that they really learned to mass-produce champagne as we know it.

[bjornwilde]

Very true but the first sparking wines, vs other types of wines, were produced there around his current time and English glass makers were the ones who were able to make strong enough bottles for the fermentation process. Close enough for me to think he would know if it, though he may not have tasted it.

Of course, if a bottle or so got lost, there is a good chance they would show up in the Court of Cats.

[a1enzo]

In recent memory? Probably whether or not the sex of a nautilus can be readily determined by a layperson.

[camwyn]

For Medic, it was the date of the invention of ibuprofen.

For Stacker, it was whether or not anything even remotely approaching the clearly American novelization writer's conception of a military school existed in England (answer: not really, but there were compromises), tied with searching census records for the UK to find which city/county/whatever would actually have a snowball's chance in hell of having a family with the surname Pentecost.

For Santo... mnh, I haven't had to research anything all that weird for his background or his interactions, since mostly the research has been 'read up on lucha libre in general'. I suppose maybe having to dig up information on desserts and foods from the area of Puebla, since he got a request from Bar to serve a tending shift on Cinco de Mayo and didn't entirely understand why the Bar was celebrating the anniversary of the Battle of Puebla but figured he ought to provide regional food to mark the occasion.

For Edward, the history of the Pirates' Republic and the Madagascar anarchist colony of Liberalia/Libertatia.

For Varric, probably the history of real-world repeating crossbows.

For Gordon, a tie between downhill mountain bike racing (I put it into his background to give a seriously nerdy physicist a reason for balancing very very well in very very narrow conditions) and cheap-ass Chinese restaurants in the MIT area with recognizable specialty dishes so he could have a college favorite. I don't count things like Black Mesa Golf Course, Espanola, NM and White Forest Zen Monastery, Sullivan County, NY. I just used those as a means of placing the fictional locations from the games in a real world context.

For Shephard... 'is it possible to kill very large wild pigs with knives' (answer: yes, but good luck), 'any information whatsoever on icebreakers on par with what we've seen of Borealis' (result: a combination of specs from the US Coast Guard vessel Polar Star and several Arktika-class Russian nuclear icebreakers), 'have any Marines ever commanded a US Navy ship' (yes, one, and it was the War of 1812). I don't consider the archery and primitive survival skill stuff research for Shephard; I do that for myself and it just shows up on his account from time to time.

For Ellen, oh God. Um. Wow. There's so many... I'm just gonna go with research on people who've successfully broken cattle to the saddle, including the once-every-four-years ox racing championships in Muensing, Germany.

[minkhollow]

Not for this game unless we decide to do a thing (also, hi everyone!), but the winner of late is abortion laws in Japan. Apparently they never took the 1907 law making abortion illegal off the books, but they expanded a later 'life of the mother'-type exception to basically say 'if the lady says she wants an abortion, do the thing.'

Relatedly, oral contraception only became widely available in Japan a few years ago, and most people still rely solely on condoms.

[death_gone_mad]

Anatomy of a beetle? Historic water delivery infrastructure, climate control, and ice making techniques in ancient Persia? When is the best time of year to plant cocoa trees?

[ceitfianna]

One of the earliest things I researched for Will was about certain spices, I don't remember which one it was, but that's up there for me.

I know I've done a lot of these but now I'm completely blanking. I'll poke my brain and see if I can remember any others.

History of dime novels for William.

[yakalskovich]

Currently: recipes to cook dog. Both Hannibal and I are rather meh about it; but we have a reputation to defend.-

[tire_moi_mes_bottes]

...and I'm vegetarian. We, uh, we don't actually have to do it. BUT I'M GAME IF YOU WANT.

[yakalskovich]

I want! Because our charries are a cannibal and a werewolf. Hannibal will quietly tell himself, from time to time, that it's not a dog but a mythical Set animal...

[tire_moi_mes_bottes]

Awesome. Also it involves Hannibal Lecter and a werewolf setting fires in Milliways, so surely nothing can go wrong with this plan.

Gredya has no sentiments whatsoever about eating canines.

[yakalskovich]

Hannibal likes Will's dogs, and in book canon, he bribes and charms somebody's dog whom anybody else would kill in that context.

So yes, definitely sentiments about canines. On the other thing, the Set animal is already dead.

Nothing can possibly go wrong, nope.-

[gredya]

>_>

I used to RP Set. I should feel worse about this than I do.

[yakalskovich]

Oh -- I used to RP Ma'at!

[tire_moi_mes_bottes]

Oh, Ma'at is difficult! I used to to RP Djehuty. Happy days. :3

[yakalskovich]

Where did you do that?

[tire_moi_mes_bottes]

Oh, jeez, back on LJ, on a couple of the multiverse comms, and then privately with a friend for the most part. Talk about weird research, I have a whole shelf of really neat books on Ancient Egypt.

[yakalskovich]

I got to review a rather dry book on Ma'at once, which is how I started liking her enough to want to RP her.-

[camwyn]

If you can find a copy over there, may I suggest picking up Unmentionable Cuisine, by Calvin W. Schwabe of the University of Virginia? It was a book I used as one of my two major sources for a term paper on food taboos back in psychological anthropology class. Starts off with 'parts of the cow that Americans and sometimes other Westerners are uncomfortable with' and works its way up through the other meat-bearing farm animals, rodents, dogs and cats, reptiles, and so on; I think the last chapter is on insects. Each chapter starts with a discussion of the taboos surrounding the subject matter, then goes on to recipes from various cultures where whatever it is actually gets eaten. Good reference material for future, plus several of the rodent recipes can be adapted to chicken without a big problem.

[yakalskovich]

That sounds like a fascinating book! Thanks.-

[guppy_sandhu]

Heh well weird stuff I tend to get on request e.g. Where can my pup get stabbed and not die. My med school lecturers had a number of very odd questions over the years.

I've done an enormous amount of research in general for Fry (which I still don't always get right) on ASDs and kids with high IQs. Also I did my elective on premmies for totally not RP reasons. There is a degree of fictional licence in my ooms though and reflection of the drama of the canon.

Recently for older Brooke I researched womens' ice hockey.

And for Shufti I revised various things about pregnancy since I first played her, most recently MoMo twins.

[tire_moi_mes_bottes]

Oh god, I'm looking stuff up all the time for Bossuet, so I can't even recall anything that particularly sticks out right now. History of ballooning was a recent one--turns out people were using hydrogen for balloon flights way earlier than I thought!

...Definitely the most distressing thing I've looked up for Gredya was what kind of firearms would make sense for killing wolves. ;_;

[alas_a_llama]

For Yugo, yakuza structure, mostly, and the language of flowers.

For Sherral, the military practices of the British Army (and especially the Black Watch) 1850-1950; the military practices of the Romans, especially training (crazy brutal) and recruitment ages (shockingly arbitrary, there are records of eleven year olds being recruited in some places even though that went wildly against standard practice and common sense).

[student_of_impossibility]

I almost wasn't sure how to answer this. Now I can.

Greenhouses.

[halfemptyglasses]

Mirai's stuff isn't really that weird. The most out there thing I've had to look up for her is symptoms of anemia.

I watched the entirety of Wagner's Lohengrin for the sake of my interpretation of the Knight. I do not regret this, but wow was it long.

Not only have I researched just how PSI works in the Mother/Earthbound universe, I've written a 3-page essay on the history and nature of the subject. Not bad for the limited information we get about how it works in universe as oppose to Mr. Itoi's symbolism.

And I can't quite remember the weirdest thing I've looked up for Mia. I've kind of accidentally become this walking strategy guide on Lunar, so if it has to do with her world, I probably know it. But I will tell you guys a fun fact: Every eye on Lunar's gorgons doubles as a mouth.

[lazy_but_loyal]

Nothing really weird for Pam, but I do enjoy going to high-end designer brand websites to look up outfits and shoes for her. I guess the most baffling thing is why anyone would want to spend $900 for a pair of pumps... O_o

[isawit]

Just had to share a moment, I just realized the actress who plays Pam also played Maleficent on Once Upon A Time. = D

(I will be getting back to our thread here in a sec.)

[lazy_but_loyal]

Yes, she is! I haven't been keeping up with it, but I do remember her first appearance in the first season.

And Pam and Cat are getting along better than I expected. I think Pam might have a soft spot for wayward girls because of who she was when she was human, but don't tell her that. *cough*

[onceaviking]

Eric approves of Pam getting along with girls.

... Eric might be a little hazy on adulthood and age of consent. Ehm.

[lazy_but_loyal]

Eric. :|

[onceaviking]

Comes with being considered a man at twelve, I think.

[misslucyjane]

Drinks available in the middle ages, so Merlin could serve something sort-of-true to his time period (she says with a laugh, since Merlin the Series was anachronism stew like whoa) one time when he bartended.

Apparently they had almond milk. Who knew?

[chanter1944]

For Sariel: It's sharding difficult to find vocabulary and slang specific to Lucian kweyol, just sayin'.

[filemyclaim]

An innumerable amount of nasty things for BN Rp, and medieval courtship and cooking customs for my Evil Dead RP.