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What interesting research have you carried out relating to recent stories you have written, or are writing?

StillStunned said:
In my experience the Guerande salt doesn't really add anything that plain sea salt doesn't. But I've had salt from the Camargue that had a delightful peaty flavour.

Smoked salt is good, and volcano salt has a hint of sweetness (the one I had was from Iceland). You can also get various herbed salts in Iceland, for example seaweed salt. Balsamic salt is fantastic for preparing meat. And I have a chocolate salt from Salzburg that I haven't tried yet.

One that I've thought would be nice but I've never seen for sale anywhere would be paprika salt - either smoked paprika or sweet paprika.
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I have nothing to add to the salt discussion, but I am hanging around waiting for an opportunity to say that some variety tastes "too jismy."
 
In doing research for the Jasmine Tea event I found some interesting things in the middle Joseon Kingdom (Korea before it was modern Korea):
  • extremely educated sex slaves who preserved Korean art, music, literature, and culture for 1000 years
  • A set of 1,893 books that detailed every aspect of every King's actions over the course of 500 years, with entries added every day (I found entries in there describing one King's poop, and my personal fave is the one where a King says something and then says "don't write that down" and it's all written down and preserved)
  • a concubine who manipulated the King by playing to his mommy issues, and was the real power behind the throne
  • a mad King who would ride around the kingdom abducting women (regardless of age or martial status or whether they were mothers) and took them to his sex training palace, which by the way was the 600 year old National University of Joseon until a few months earlier
  • a poetry form so obscure ("sijo") our Lit thread about it is, like, probably the 3rd most extensive English language resource available online at this point
  • oh, the King banned the alphabet on penalty of death (that's right, if you were literate, you could be killed for that) because someone wrote an article he didn't like
  • the mad King's mom wasn't who he thought she was, she was a deposed and disgraced former Queen. When he found out, he went insane and killed thousands of his advisors (this was his second violent purge of advisors, btw)
  • two warring factions of Confucian scholars who plotted to murder each other
  • an art called "sword dancing"

That's only the year 1504. Things go downhill from there for two more years.

Once my stories for this event are complete, if there's time I'm thinking of compiling a lot of my research and publishing that as an essay for anyone interested because it's just THAT f**ked up.

I swear on the King's poop that I did not make any of this stuff up. Don't write that down.
 
Kelliezgirl said:
Not as interesting as some, but I've learned quite a bit about the range and speed of helicopters in VIP configurations.
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As a former US Coast Guard helicopter crewman (Sikorsky HH-52 as seen on the original Magnum P.I., and HH-65A, then fresh off the Aerospatiale assembly line), I approve.

And how can you say not as interesting as some? It's amazing how sensitive helicopters can be to configuration changes.
 
Kelliezgirl said:
We need a Lit Cookbook. So many of us write food into our work there would be plenty of recipes to use.
The recipe for something that featured in one of your stories along with a brief excerpt from the story.
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I'm in.
Dead serious, if you want to do a collaborative Lit Cookbook, I want to play.
Good food is as hedonistic as good sex.

Real hot chocolate, Italian hot chocolate was a key point in a demon's seduction of a nun.
 
EdwardsOtherSide said:
As a former US Coast Guard helicopter crewman (Sikorsky HH-52 as seen on the original Magnum P.I., and HH-65A, then fresh off the Aerospatiale assembly line), I approve.

And how can you say not as interesting as some? It's amazing how sensitive helicopters can be to configuration changes.
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Thank you for your service!

It started off as something really simple... just wanted to see how long it would take for my characters to get from Miami to a particular island in the Bahamas.
Then I was off to the races.

That little helicopter from Magnum always looked super cool.
 
TheRedLantern said:
  • a poetry form so obscure ("sijo") our Lit thread about it is, like, probably the 3rd most extensive English language resource available online at this point
Voboy said:
This, I love.
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That Lit is (or should be) a significant academic resource makes me happy in ways I cannot put words around.
 
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Kelliezgirl said:
Thank you for your service!

It started off as something really simple... just wanted to see how long it would take for my characters to get from Miami to a particular island in the Bahamas.
Then I was off to the races.

That little helicopter from Magnum always looked super cool.
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There were at least two helicopters in Magnum, USCG HH-52s, and that little Loach/surplus OH-6/Hughes 500.

And thank you. Today I learned that there is an internet movie plane database.
 
J
EdwardsOtherSide said:
I'm in.
Dead serious, if you want to do a collaborative Lit Cookbook, I want to play.
Good food is as hedonistic as good sex.

Real hot chocolate, Italian hot chocolate was a key point in a demon's seduction of a nun.
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Oooh thank you for the link! I will have to make that. I can't do any mixes or café hot chocolate because of the milk, but I bet that recipe works amazingly with coconut cream.


I may put it in my current story about the chef.
 
ColtonWrites said:
J

Oooh thank you for the link! I will have to make that. I can't do any mixes or café hot chocolate because of the milk, but I bet that recipe works amazingly with coconut cream.


I may put it in my current story about the chef.
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I had the demon buying it for the nun at Max Brenner's Union Square location, but have made it at home.

Yes, it is good enough to corrupt a nun.
 
I claim no credit, but @PennyThompson did some awesome research on lockpicking for a story that she's beta reading for me, and wrote a beautiful paragraph to insert into the story, thereby winning the beta-of-the-month award. And then co-muse @Nynah contributed some research that she'd already done relating to another topic, and that raised the bar again...
 
I've been refreshing my knowledge on color psychology because I never left my surrealist stage, and my universe has its own color language where I bastardized the meanings of colors according to color psychology. Nevertheless, I limited myself to the few colors neon lights are available on...

Thanks to this, I've been commenting the noble gases with my firefighter friend as I've deepened myself into the world of neon lights for the longest this year. All I can say to this is that LEDs suck! They are not as awesome as the way neon lights work, with how each gas reacts to electricity, and how colors are created. Mercury is not a gas, but it's what makes blue neon. The Nicolas Winding Refn movies became better after knowing this.

Am I seriously the only one who actually loved Chemistry in high school?
 
KittyOfSteele said:
Am I seriously the only one who actually loved Chemistry in high school?
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I barely passed. I liked making explosions, but balancing equations and calculating moles vanquished me.

I'm still working on the intricacies of LoN mandates during the interwar period, with specific reference to the rights of German nationals after 1926.
 
I spent a lot longer than I should have trying to find out which episode of Magnum PI was airing on a specific date in 1983 so I could have it playing in the background on the TV during a scene in a recent chapter.

I get caught up in some seriously weird rabbit hole google searches when I'm trying to make sure I get details correct that only I will ever notice or care about, lol.
 
SinclairGroupLLP said:
trying to make sure I get details correct that only I will ever notice or care about
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Probably true, but...

@Actingup and my winter story was set in Grand Rapids MI, and included a little vignette about going to see Oasis playing at the Orbit Room music venue in 1995, and we both pulled together unnecessarily detailed research that we figured nobody would care about...

Until a commenter said that he lived near Grand Rapids his whole life, and had gone to see shows at the Orbit Room many times in the 90s, and appreciated the reference 😍

So you never know what people will resonate with, you might get a reader who still has that episode taped from broadcast on VHS in their library 🤣
 
SinclairGroupLLP said:
I spent a lot longer than I should have trying to find out which episode of Magnum PI was airing on a specific date in 1983 so I could have it playing in the background on the TV during a scene in a recent chapter.

I get caught up in some seriously weird rabbit hole google searches when I'm trying to make sure I get details correct that only I will ever notice or care about, lol.
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Tell me about it. I just spent an hour looking at the differences between RAF training under the Arnold Scheme, RAF training through US-based British Flight Training Schools, and RAF training under the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. Arnold Scheme training covered 29 weeks with roughly 260 flight hours across four aircraft. BFTS training took 28 weeks, with 260 hours across two training aircraft. British pilots got an extra eight weeks and fifty hours of flight time in single-engine planes, and more for multi-engine aircraft, compared to American pilots, but Americans were sent to air units in the US for active-duty training rotations, so it's sort of apples-to-oranges.

The BCATP program varied a lot. By 1944, it might have been the most comprehensive air maneuvers training program in the world, especially for Canadian pilots, who received additional conversion and acclimatisation training, but I couldn't find a lot of information about this. In 1940, though, the program was something like 17 weeks long, can you get up, get down and not die, and then you were off to Merry Old England.

Anyway this is all for the purposes of like one conversation that I had to design my own flight training program for. No British people, Americans, World Wars Two or Canadas are involved. Wrote some of the conversation -- about 400 words. Then I decided it was in the wrong place and deleted the whole thing. 🤡
 
I have a lot more information about Rapa Nui (Easter Island to most of you) in my head than I ever thought I would retain considering the story we wrote taking place there was published twenty years ago. Perhaps it's because the desire for information about a place or subject seems to live on within me even after the need for it has passed. I always perk up when I see new information or a musing on a new theory about the how, when and why of the native population of the island.
 
PennyThompson said:
Probably true, but...

@Actingup and my winter story was set in Grand Rapids MI, and included a little vignette about going to see Oasis playing at the Orbit Room music venue in 1995, and we both pulled together unnecessarily detailed research that we figured nobody would care about...

Until a commenter said that he lived near Grand Rapids his whole life, and had gone to see shows at the Orbit Room many times in the 90s, and appreciated the reference 😍

So you never know what people will resonate with, you might get a reader who still has that episode taped from broadcast on VHS in their library 🤣
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I agree with that, but I'd go further. Let's say your story gets 10000 readers. If you treated them as a random sample of Literotica readers, the odds would be good that there would be somebody who cares about the details. But it's not a random sample. Those readers are attracted to your story which means that they may be resonating with your themes, your places, or your language, and that significantly increases the chance of them caring about the detail. Our readers are experts. This particularly applies to shared memories, and it's remarkable how some of those have stuck with readers.

Some illustrations to add to Penny's:

On a story about Japanese onsen culture in Kyushu,
"I have been to all the places you mention on Kyushu. I particularly recall two things in Beppu. First the large steam vents in the streets. And, second, the extremely hot water in the Onsen I visited. Thanks for stirring these recollections."
"I’ve lived in Japan for more than 25 years and have experienced many of the things you’ve mentioned, although I also speak Japanese. I think you reported this well and true to life, even if you didn’t experience each part personally. I can even imagine the 101 year old obaachan leading the way to the rotenburo. I hope that konyoku bathing regains popularity."

On a story about growing up on the Mornington Peninsula in Australia, where I went to the trouble of checking the weather details on particular dates:
"I remember the 1983 cold boxing day, the South Africans were playing at the G for tge first time since tge apartheid bans and I got 3 tickets,one for dad, one for my sister and one for me. It rainedcatt day and we saw no cricket but had a great day. Our seats were undercover and we talked like we never had. My wife had the heater going when we got home."

On a story about the recovery from the trauma of Cyclone Tracy, 50 years ago in 1974:
"Cyclone Tracy is a strong memory for me, I was 18 years old at the time and helped evacuated survivors arriving in Adelaide."
"Visited Darwin recently so all the locations in this stunningly good story were vivid in my mind."
"Christmas day this last one. Had lunch at a friends house. Perchance sat at a table with 2 older ladies. Both had been in Darwin 50 years ago to the day. Independently with different experiences and outcomes."
"As a Kiwi Cyclone Tracey was big news for several days. The record passenger load in a Qantas 747 comes to mind."
 
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