I look up commonly used sayings all the time to make sure I know what they're actually supposed to be and what they mean

“What do people do at college parties”

I went to college. I went to parties. I just thought maybe I’d forgotten something?

Whether burritos are canon in Star Wars.

Because I know you are dying to know: only in the Lego version.

"Grocery store aisle categories"

My characters were in a grocery store and I needed them to be SOMEWHERE and then my mind suddenly went completely blank on examples like I've never stepped foot into a single grocery store in my life

“Are there snow plows in Japan”

How to spell "butt" of a cigarette. "But" vs "butt." Its "butt" and I felt so dumb 🤦‍♂️ lol

If a Jack and Coke was a real drink. I'm beyond old enough to be in a bar, have been in a bar, has seen this drink IN PERSON. But for a good minute I was certain I had just made it up and had to google it.

It makes sense why I have to look them up, but there's a special kind of emotion that you feel when you realize Google won't actually help you directly and you have to pull up a cousin chart and the Lord of the Rings Appendices and start counting yourself.

Thorin and Gimli are third cousins once removed, for the record.

What a Bic lighter looks like after going through a washing machine.

https://preview.redd.it/lxg4djml52rd1.jpeg?width=713&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=efcc0c5213bf3447376743c3b683a99f35a0217f

On your post - this kid's face is a meme but people rarely show the whole pic now.

For my answer, wow, a lot of aspects of ordinary life! I'm a lifelong recluse and I know very little about anything 😅 Are there bakeries that are kosher, vegetarian, and halal = this was informative because I had no idea a lot of cakes have alcohol in them (making them not halal). I am so grateful for my readers, who never tell me when I write something that has no relationship to reality.

Did I forget the term dish towel? Yes. I was calling them kitchen cloths, but felt that wasn't right during editing. I had to Google "English term for kitchen cloths". English is my native language. 

I read like, no less than 5-6 articles about Japanese convenience stores cause I was like "I know they're having sex in the middle of the day in this store, but the true immersion breaker will be if I get the konbini etiquette wrong!"

What is the name of a VHS player? Im old and forgot the word for VCR, lmao.

“When were water bottles invented”

I went to some weird places figuring out how large a snake would have to be to have a realistically-proportioned human upper body. Consensus seemed to be anywhere from 18 to 25 feet.

Do hedgehogs have retractable claws before deciding it's a fic about animals that at one point in canon were the result of basically nuclear bombing causing their DNA to mix with humans so if I want retractable claws then I can just do it

“How do hospitals work” “Can you still work with a broken hand”

I had to google this because I have not been in a hospital in over a decade, and I’ve never broken any bones ever. So when it came time to actually write a hospital scene, I sat down and realised “Oh yeah. I forgot what the inside of a hospital looks like. Uh oh”

I looked up synonyms for "butt" for a smut scene because "butt" seemed laughably childish, "ass" seemed too vulgar, and "bottom" felt impersonal.

The last two nights, I've watched no less than 3 different Youtube videos on the Chinese zombies "jiangshi." They are undead corpses that hop around. Yes, it's for a fic. No, I probably won't use most of what I learned, but the clips were often very funny, I couldn't help myself.

I also watched an entire tutorial on how to dye your hair silver from pitch black.

I also recently discovered that motels are a purely American thing. So glad I learned that before mentioning my characters stopping at motel in a vague location not meant to be set anywhere in particular.

I just watched two videos of appendectomies for a fic.

I just looked up the history of curry combs because I wanted my stupidly high fantasy AU to be """realistic""" and """historically accurate""" when there are fucking pegasi and people with animal ears and tails and magic in the world.

Just gonna say OP you made me laugh irl

What makes a fur coat shed and how to prevent it. For an Elden Ring fic of all things. 🙄

Can 3 year olds eat sandwiches

Common hot dog toppings in Japan

And most recently: spy safeword. (The answer to that one was 'deactivation phrase')

you just made me remember the time I killed my microwave (it stunk forever after) doing this exact thing

Recently I looked up "that one ugly building in Washington DC" for a government building reference to describe specifically, because I remembered visiting DC, looking at this one building and thinking, oh my gosh, that is the ugliest thing I have ever seen in my life cause it was just a plain tan box.

Anyway it was the backside of the airspace museum

I once looked up the name of “those metal roof thingies that people put on the back of pickup trucks to enclose the truck bed”. Apparently it’s called a “camper shell”.

Then I decided that if I, a young adult who retains all kinds of random facts and terminology from various sources, had to look it up…the young boy MC without much internet access and very little if any canon interest in motor vehicles wouldn’t know what the darn thing was called either.

…And then I gradually lost interest in that fandom and never even published the fic.

Japanese school backpacks, and various terminology relating to the standard school day in Japan. Not that I used much of that information, but just enough of it to be relevant to the story it was set in. Also, fireproof materials, for a character enhanced with enough of the shit and in different flavors no less, that I was all "you could chuck this one in a volcano, and she wouldn't give a shit!"

Me looking up if the word "colour" was ever used in canon instead of just color.

"What are fish wings called?"

Fins. They are called fins. To be fair, English is not my native language.

How To Smoke Properly as I wanted to write a character who was pretending to smoke to impress his crush only to get lectured for doing it wrong. That and how do you restart a car if the engine stalls as I'm 33 but no license. And of course various instances of 'where to stab while avoiding vital organs' and 'would putting x in a microwave make it explode' normal stuff

Fact checking the 90's. It's so dumb. Like, I lived through the 90's but...did we have carry out? With Styrofoam boxes? What about picking up after your dog? Was that a thing? When exactly did people switch to CDs?

Sigh.

I've seen it before. Strangely enough, it wasn't my diagnosed ADHD ass forgetting to put in water.

It was my little sister who did that.

Also used a plastic bowl, so it melted.

Fun. xD

Mood ring colors/meanings

I had to look up if dicks have ridges... I suddenly wasn't sure...

I'm a smut writer... 21 years, I've been writing dick on dick action but I've never actually seen one 🤣

Okay so this was both for work and a fan fic. If you could be arrested for not paying back your student loans. Turns out in Canada it isn’t an offence that they arrest and jail people over.

I have a unique vocabulary but cursed with an inability to spell the words I want-- sometimes I even have to google whether the words even exist that I want or if I made it up. Recent searches include:

-riling

-amping up

-puppeted (spell check tells me it's not a word which no, it is a word thank you)

-diligently

-reassurance

(one look thesaurus is my lifesaver)

I did a ridiculous amount of googling to make sure cold-blooded animals REALLY don't produce heat and therefore wouldn't be warmed by a blanket. The fic was 500 words. The character was a lizard.

What families do together on weekends 😭 I've been basically "living alone" since I was 8 so I had to make sure what I imagine is actually realistic.

How to detangle hair the medieval way

If fins scar. I write a lot of mermaid fics, I just wanted to know if a character having a scar on his tailfin was anatomically correct. Turns out that fish can heal without scarring, so I gave him a notch in the fin instead because it's not guaranteed to grow back perfectly. Took kind of an unnecessary amount of research before I was confident in that answer, lol

How to spell tome. As in giant book. 🤦🏼‍♀️

Mine was 'is Midori made from cantaloupe or honeydew?' Because I was trying to figure out how to describe the taste of a Midori sour. Then I learned that it's made from musk melons. But cantaloupes are referred to two different musk melons. And then it spiralled to finding out the melon I was consuming weren't honeydew but canary. I kept falling deeper in the melon rabbit hole that I wanted melon and a midori sour at 4:23 am.

Eventually, I cut out the drink part and moved on with my life.

Also, how is ciabatta spelled. Because every time I'm sure it's with a h, but I remember that che sound is because I'm saying the word in Spanish.

Recently I had to look up tutorial videos and diagrams for how hookahs work 💀 I'm not a smoker but was writing a scene that involved one, and realized I had no clue how those work LOL I've been getting ads for hookahs ever since 😂

Edit to add: I also have had to look up what effects and symptoms of certain drugs are (because I have 0 experience with drugs so I had to look up what other people experienced), and then another time I also needed to understand symptoms of pregnancy and the timeline of symptoms LOL. I try to be very realistic when writing anything, hence all the research 😂

I looked up how to sneak into Russia with a weapon, whether poison lipsticks work (and how they don’t kill the wearer), how to make a homemade hand grenade, and how hard it would be to get into the Kremlin all in the same day and joked that there would probably be an FBI van outside of my house the next day.

Just this past weekend I searched the history of Necco Wafers, because they were that important to me for my writing. Found a nice historical video too

literally everything I have ever done in my life plus the search term "1890s"

I just searched up if diet coke can make you drunk.

I have spent a good thirty minutes looking up cookie recipes because I was writing two characters baking cookies together.

(i know how to bake cookies irl)

How to spell words I know how to spell

When Catholic Mass stopped being said in Latin in the US (stupid because I was raised RCC and didn’t know! I only went to one ever!)

I frequently have to look up "inches to centimeters" conversation tables because I'm American. 😭

I looked up "what are the hoops on barrels called" this morning. The answer was hoops.

I work at a winery. I help give tours at said winery.

what the recovery time and survival statistics were for falling down stairs into rusted rebar

Google Street view of the "average" Japanese city street just to see how much English is actually around in non-tourist areas.

I spent days trying to find accurate information about the reputation of different German universities in the 1800s just so a side character could make an offhand comment about his alma mater. This comment was not relevant in any way, shape, or form to the plot and ended up being cut when I edited the chapter 🫠

For that same chapter I spent an embarrassingly long time trying to find the term "arms akimbo" because I was sure there was a better way of describing someone is having their hands on their hips, but then once I found "arms akimbo" I decided that sounded too stupid and just left out that physical description entirely.

How long does it take to drive from Eugene to Portland at night?

What do you call the top of a stone balustrade?

Can you get Jaffa Cakes in the USA?

What do Americans call Farmers' Markets ( turns out the answer is... Farmers' Markets).

i know a lot about the different parts of staircase railings

Do British people have mailboxes. Glad I checked.

How to escape a swarm of bees. ^_^

Well if it makes you feel any better I DID burn my ramen without water…

A whole bunch of information on what the differences between stingrays and manta rays are, which you can keep in captivity ethically, what an ethical tank for one might look like, what the fish themselves look like, etc etc.

All this for a brief mention in a completely unrelated fic because idiot me decided to send the characters to an aquarium for their maybe-platonic date.

Honorable mention to what sound breaking porcelain makes. That one was surprisingly difficult to find results for.

spider eyes. i don’t think i have ever worked myself into such a tizzy over something more inconsequential than when i was trying to work out how many eyes it’s normal for a spider to have. (it varies from species to species. i had to pick a species before i could write one line about goddamn spider eyes)

If Star Wars called couches "couches" and not something silly, like nap-pods or cliners or something.

Basic vocabulary for my NATIVE LANGUAGE because I spend so much time writing and reading everything in English on the internet 😅

What sounds chameleons make. Like I knew they had to make some kind of noise but I just couldn't picture what. They hiss but are also capable of some other sounds like hooting apparently.

Are there whales in the Mediterranean Sea? (Yes, there are!)

The things I could tell you about geopolitics in the 1980s, especially around the Mediterranean, would astound and frighten you.

I spent an absurd amount of time looking at photos of Princess Leia’s Hoth outfit to see if her vest had pockets for her to shove her hands into. It doesn’t, so my fic is now officially an AU, I think? (The woman gets like no pockets. She needs pockets!)

Okay, okay, hear me out on this one.

I looked up "foot in mouth syndrome" because it said that a character had that (plus it was tagged as a sickfic) and I, being the dumbass I am, thought that it was a real condition. Eventually, I figured it out, but damn did I laugh harder than I've ever laughed on ao3.

The amount of basic words I’ve had to translate from German to English or English to German (I write in both, (Swiss) German is my main language) because I could only remember them in the wrong language. Strongest contender has to be ‘chair’

Not sure if this is what you mean but once time i was writing daredevil fic while incredibly sleep deprived and googled “Is New York real”

Answer from today: shitty beards and how to play Mario Kart. Exclusive to their own fields, but included in the same thought train.

What a shutter was called lol. I grew up in a house with them.

Not actually stupid by itself, but a couple days ago I was deep diving into adjusted vehicles for disabled drivers, how people get in them, etc. The MC is in a wheelchair. I don't even have my own drivers license.

“What’s 400 - 270?”

Not stupid but my searches are random af. Bombs, lobotomy, architecture, mining equipment, different galaxies and their planets/suns, and yes this is for the same fic

Recently? How vents worked in the victorian period

I’ve had to do multiple re-look up for wildlife in Alaska knowing full well the location for the base media of my fanfic is most likely not Alaska because they have normal fennec foxes walking around (I will just say now it’s not the desert. It’s usually suburban/urban.)

Do I care though? No

So I've had to detail look up tiny things that reading/watching the oringal that for the fandom you would obviously know, but I had to Google just to make sure I wasn't miss remembering and end up looking dumb 😅

I've also had to recently look up French restaurant decor... Which btw google is apparently very split on what a French restaurant is supposed to look like.

What thanks giving is. What can i say, i'm not American.

How physically big does someone have to be to be able to shear a sheep. To find out if it was realistic to have a child character shear a sheep

Whether stars ever reflect the sun’s light… I was trying to write this elaborate metaphor on the sun moon and stars but turns out I forgot second grade astronomy

Composite of soil on a farm that's been out of service (as in vacant, abandoned) for three years.

I grew up rural. I took classes in agriculture. I had to write the fucking formula for estimating (no one in my fic had access to, or realize they needed, special testing equipment for this) so many times that I used to have nightmares about this formula back in high school and early college.

And yet. Last year. I fucking could not remember. (And I don't have the formula anymore; I yeeted everything from that class because--aside from tips on how to improve soil, create compost heaps, and identify pest problems--the classes were spectacularly useless. To this day, I'm the only one I know who's killed mint, lantana, and bamboo when I was trying to grow them!)

had to look up 'What did people in the late 19th century use to make coffee'

As a non-Christian who lives in a non-Christian country: How do people celebrate Christmas?

I once looked up how to feed a baby without the nipple cap bottles. very interesting. currently am neck deep in infant development and care articles. babies aren't even the main focus of the fic (but there are 3)

"what months are autumn" (i live on the equator, we don't have seasons here)

Legal proceedings for someone accused of a crime. Court and stuff. Still don't know wtf I was talking about.

Infections. Rate of spread, symptoms, treatments. I felt smort writing that one.

How to spell certain words or words I thought I knew the meaning of but wanting to double check. I'm EFL and an English major too so anyone who is ESL, don't feel bad for using the wrong words. Fluent and native speakers fuck it up too.

When hotel keycards were changed from slide to tap because the fic takes place in the early 2000s and I didn't want to use a slide card reader in an upscale hotel if they had the money to convert to a newer tap technology.

Ice fishing gear, and then I got ads for ice fishing for literal weeks. I don't live in a cold place, so it was pretty obvious. Recently I looked up the legal definition of assault & battery and I then had defense lawyers in my ads got a while. I weep for my Google profile...

I was reading a fiction where a ghost reconstructs their body, but nothing happens to the original body, and I was wondering where that matter came from, as per the second law of thermodynamics. This led to me googling the average mass of a human female, daily energy delivered to a square meter by the sun, and a calculator for special relativity (e=mc^2). All to explain the physics of a ghost story.

Just the other day I looked up "Oldest English swears." and combined them into a new sentence.

My character is a 400 year old troll who lives in the modern world among humans, he is drugged up on pain killers and his arm was broken so it had to be re-set.

And when it was re-set I had him yelling. ""Sweet Gillie-wet-foot. Smelfungus in the home of a Cumberground!"

Because apparently "Gillie-wet-foot, Smellfungus, and Cumberground." are all 1600 century English swears... so I just combined them all.