Interesting Research

What's the strangest/funniest/most interesting topic you've researched for your writing?

Probably the most notable example for me would be when I was attempting NaNoWriMo last year. My story was all about this woman who found herself thrust into Witness Protection. Obviously, I wanted to learn everything I could, and I started reading everything I could online about the program and ended up checking out a book from the library written by the founder of WITSEC. My mom ended up seeing me carrying the book around the house one day. She looked at me and said "Is there something we need to talk about?" in a very serious/worried voice. It was priceless. XD

I'm sure it didn't help that not long after that I was watching a lot of videos on throwing knives for a completely different character.

Any funny stories to share, or awesome things you learned?

Not so much any one thing, but the looks on peoples faces when I know how to do something like pick a lock, or know some obscure fact like Lincoln considered shipping all the blacks to their own state after the war...

One job application said have you ever considered committing a crime? And I wrote yes, dozens, but I'm a writer. They hired me :D

I've reasearched a whole bunch of things that were funny and strange. Unfortunately, right now they fail to enter my mind. For my own current stories: I've researched incest, there was also paedophilia, rape, and Satanism - which I took extra care to hide from my mother. And, well... I don't know if I should be saying this but 'pegging'. Erm, yes... I think most people thought I was 'weird' for researching the last, I've gotten most Hell for that one. I know all of you must be thinking, "What sort of stories is he writing now??" I assure you, I write "Children stories" xP

Many of the things I research causes people to go WTF or "why would you look that up on your freetime?". I remember my brother was once laughing for ages because I randomly was telling him stuff about dwarfism and to him it was completely random and unexpected. At least, I think it was dwarfism.

I remember one time I was re-researching leprosy (I've seen people suffering from it in real life and I've read about it long ago) but I learned much more about the disease than I had known primarily, so that was a very interesting moment for me - at least... I think so. I've learned about multiverses, physics, and outer space (literally screaming whenever a picture or stimulated video of black hole pops up).

I've learned a great many things though! Odd or not! I've cherished every moment but I wish I could remember funny things I've stumbled upon.

I openly admit to making @Alandree research gonorrhoea (because I'm a complete baby) for our role-playing thread.

But I read a book about how venereal diseases were treated in the 19th century. It was not for writing or role-play though, it was actually done on my free-time for fun (god, I sound like such a nerd). But I do intend on using what I learned for the thread mentioned above. :-D

Edit: the brave lad looked at images.

AIDs is the strangest thing I've had to look up for a roleplay.

I do lots of wiki'ing, like mideval torture methods, but that wasn't what you asked. = P

@Xerxes I think wiki'ing stuff counts as research. Perhaps not in the terms of what is acceptable for coursework, but roleplay =/= coursework so who cares?

Exxxxactly.

I know a ton about the circus (both modern and historically, particularly in America). :]] It's something I've actually had a passing interest in for a long time, and when I finally decided to make a character for our site who ran her own show I was like OH HUH EXCUSE TO DO SOME HEAVY READING ON THE SUBJECT.

So now in conversations randomly I can bring up things like "Oh, did you know where the term Jumbo came from? A circus elephant. :] Yep."

It's actually really fascinating and I got to read books and listen to podcasts and watch some PBS documentaries. There came a point where I'd obviously moved past researching for the character and just found myself kind of sucked into learning about the stuff.

Just yesterday I researched types of pirate hats, which surprisingly enough, I found a link describing -exactly- what I was looking for, which was delightful and strange at the same time.

I can tell you all about chickens! They're pretty dumb, have a pecking hierarchy, don't mind pooping on you, make a big racket when they lay an egg, can and will peck your fingers and toes to death, might possibly drown themselves by staring at rain, and will eat everything green in sight.

My family once placed colored dots on the hens to remember which was which with magic markers, and the chickens nearly pecked each dot to death. "Is it a bug?" five seconds later "Bug?" three days later "Oh look it's a bug"

Also, hand-raised chicken eggs taste sulphuric, especially compared to store-bought eggs.

Just yesterday I was researching about swollen testes for a thread... that eventually lead to how splinters were a common threat during sea battles when they fired the cannons, etc,... and these splinters sometimes became embedded into the scrota of men.

Then it went on to how one man in particular got splinters and then a musket ball in his scrotum and the article was like, "he healed fairly quickly, within 64 days in bed."

It appears bad on my part, but it's good to know these things.

From pregnancy symptoms, to battle strategies in the Age of Sail and in the Viking times, fencing, period accurate dances and festivals, Aztec gods and customs, all kind of diseases, palm reading, zombies and voodoo, name it and I've researched it!

Fencing! Gosh I love fencing. Reading this thread is just making me want to go and research more things, even though I might never use them for my characters. XD

I have a character with bee-themed powers at Metro City, among them being that she can shift her visible spectrum up a bit to include ultraviolet light. There are real people who can see into the UV spectrum (mostly due to inadequate UV protection in their lens and stuff), but there isn't a whole lot out there about what it would be like as a human to see colors upshifted like that. It's probably the most utterly inhuman thing I have had to write, in the sense that there are not even really ways for me as a human to describe that experience to myself and my readers.

Thankfully she doesn't see things like that all the time, so I am usually spared the task of writing a normal street with the reds gone and a whole new kind of color on the upper end of the spectrum that we don't even have a word for in English.

Coming back to this thread again like a bad cold...

For RP, I had to help @Hippie Sister with her character on my site and I was giving her suggestions so I looked up, literally on Google: 'Tolkien Elves rape' - which isn't funny, of course, but anyone walking by would question wtf I'm looking at. She found a whole article about 'rape in Tolkien's stories' or something. For my site and future reasons, I'm literally going to re-read The Silmarillion, I have to look up a lot of Tolkien and Middle-Earth-related things so yeah 8D who's a happy child?

As for story-writing, since I suppose this might also be for story-writing too... recently it was the angels from The Bible - don't ask, rofl, at least it isn't the stuff from my last post?

Currently researching PTSD ... For an old PnP Dwarven character I'm resuscitating for a ... ahem ... LOTR site.

Researching....
cults
human trafficking
animal husbandry
Drug cartels
military coups
the Global Village Construction Set
Sustainability
How to build random things like dehydrators