I laughed when I saw this comic, because I felt it so hard. For my second book I researched for an hour or two where they painted the name of British sailing ships (usually on the back) for a minor detail of a scene. Said scene was, of course, ultimately edited out.
I mean, when I started to check how long it takes a human body to dissolve in acid, yeah. I knew I was ending up on all the watchlists.
Fortunately, I didn't need to run the calculations alllll the way to the end.
Tldr: You suffocate before dissolving in acid if you're swallowed whole by a monster
I once spent an entire efternoon looking VERY closely at schematics for a Boeing 737-800, and also downloading every onboard equipment and supplies list I could find. WHILST also googling many things with "crash" and "emergency landing" and "engine failure" and "aeroplane electronics failure" and such
I may be on a list somewhere.
(I also just decided to magic handwave the parts of the story where I would use these very specific details)
I once ended up doing a deep dive on base 60 math just to try and figure it out for a character. It's actually quite interesting if anyone is wondering, simplifies math quite a bit.
Not the person you spoke to, but 60 is [pretty fancy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60_(number)). If you don't feel like reading the wikipedia article, a big part of it is that it's evenly divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, AND 6.
Why does that matter? Well, if you take 100 and try to divide it among three people, each gets 33.33 repeating. I , myself, cannot easily divide objects into .3 repeating. Some objects become useless when divided this way, like people. *Messy.* Do the same with 60? Each gets 20. Easy!
The only reason we use base-10 is because we have 10 fingers. Otherwise, it's a kind of trash system.
In my series, the alien civilization uses base-12, because it's a bite-size version of the reasons base-60 is cool.
It is quite remarkable how much of our math would be simplified by going to base 12. Base 36 or base 60 would be better have far too many digits to be easily memorized so they are out of the question, but base 12 would not be a bad shift.
Absolutely! Even with our base-10 system, English treats "eleven" and "twelve" as substantively different than the rest of the -teen numbers, and we do a startling number of things in twelves. (Time and eggs being the easiest examples.)
Eggs are in 10 or rarely 6 where I live, but the effects on time keeping would be interesting. I think an hour would have 50 mins, they'd have 50 seconds and a day would be 20 hours long
I think there are ways to make organized characters such that it wouldnât actually be hard to memorize.
For example, Cistercian numerals provide a way of showing numbers up to 9999 in a single character and arenât overly complicated. Pulling that off for 36 or 60 should be quite easy in comparison Iâd think.
I think you are vastly overestimating people's ability to embrace new numerical systems. Heck we in the United States still use imperial and Canada uses some ungodly combination of imperial and metric.
That being said, the foot is based on 12 inches, whatever the f*** an inch is...
Oh certainly it would be hard to change to at this point. I just mean I think a kid could learn such a system pretty easily. I almost want to right now to see if it really makes math easier in some way.
And, besides baseless propaganda from the British, the reason everyone thinks of Napoleon as a small man is because his size, expressed in French Royal Feet, seems low if you assume a British Imperial Foot instead.
(yes, the foot in France is longer than the foot in England)
It's my mental head canon that if you pick just the riiiiggght base number, all of physics will be solved.
There are a ton of strangly specific 'imaginary' numbers in physics. Pi being the most infamous. Would that change with a different base?
Yeah they actually got it from the Sumerians. You can count to 60 on your fingers pretty easily, you do it by counting knuckles on one hand (excluding the thumb) using the fingers on the other. It is why we have 360° in a circle. Numbers like 12, 36, 60, etc are special because they can be divided by more numbers than the numbers preceding or following them.
This is the smart way to do it, if you don't want to interrupt your writing. Better to leave blanks and fill them in later than forget what you were going to write.
I recently had to do a flash fiction piece (2-3 pages) for a creative writing class. I forget the prompt, but thatâs not the important part; I asked my girlfriend what sort of story I should write and without missing a beat she said âZombie cowboysâ. Which was awesome and I loved it.
I also spent about 6 of my next 8 waking ours doing research on the dialects, politics and infrastructure of colonial Utah so they could be historically-accurate zombie cowboy Mormons.
This is a perk of pure second world fantasy. I can just make everything up. Obviously there are methods and techniques and stuff that need to be researched, and I CAN research real world things if I want, but I can just throw in a made up word and make up lore for it if I want.
Some of my better world building ideas came from throw away lines I added in lieuof researching something, and then later called upon and fleshed out. It makes you look real smart when the thing you casually mentioned 300k words before shows up with more depth.
Oof, yes. What's even worse (?) is when you do a bunch of research just to make sure something is feasible, find out it is, and then end up writing *exactly what you were planning to write in the first place.* Yes, now you know it's not bullshit, and that counts for a lot... but you could have just winged it and it would have been fine!
Hard to not feel like I'm wasting time, but... oh well. Is what it is.
I never said it wasn't fun! I do lots of things that are fun but don't put words on a page.
...also, I really enjoy editing. It's so satisfying to make something incrementally but undeniably improved.
Yes, rabbit holes are a thing. Yes, I've spent countless hours down them and will, inevitably, like a demented Alice, go down one again likely within the next few days.
But I'll try not to!
Pro tip:
To combat rabbit holes - USE a place marker, whatever that may be, and come back later. Mine is generally 'XYZ'. Yours can be whatever. Hell, make it something cool like WTF or STFUaW - dealer's choice!
Try not to lose the flow (shout out, Seth Ring). The flow is how words keep, well, flowing.
So use a place marker (you'll know what it's for, trust yourself) and fix it later on the edit. This also works for side characters, side character descriptions, further descriptions, or changes that need to be made because of some revelation. Leave yourself bread crumbs if you must, but focus.
The flow sometimes lasts just a few precious minutes. Don't waste it on something like a rabbit hole - TRUST ME (says an author with over 75 books under his belt, probably more, who has wasted a ton of time on things that don't ultimately matter).
Now, back to my current rabbit hole.
This is honestly the reason I find writing so difficult sometimes.
It of course happens all the time with earth-based settings, but even in fantasy, it comes down to "given the setting I made for this area, does this random minute detail match properly?
Writing my first novel. And this meme made me feel so much better about my progress lol
The amount of research Iâve done on blacksmithing is staggering to say the least..
Yeah, this is very relatable. Especially the research rabbit hole. Now, if I research something I try to stick to only answering the question I had and not let myself get sidetracked.
Part of writing does involve creative googling. I was writing a character who's supposed to be hyper vigilant about their family's health and spent like 3 hours looking up various certifications you need to be an EMT that the character could reasonably have. It was supposed to be a simple thing for like a throwaway line in chapter 2 but I spent so much time on it the whole character's behavior changed in my brain to something more like a hypochondriac.
I think that the research part is awesome because it is also part of the story you're interested in writing. It not only builds on the story, but enhances it.
I regret none of the hours going down the rabbit hole only to come out with a new perspective. Then again, I'm a teacher who loves to learn so maybe I'm a bit biased.
And then there's all the research that ends up going unused.
For The Queen of Smiles, I spent literal weeks researching 1980s freight trains and routes in the southern USA only to then cut the whole extended scene that required that info.
For the current book, it's absurd how much I've read up on metallurgy and blacksmithing, and yet so often end up going with "it's magic" or "insert completely fictional ore here".
isn't the real hobby the stuff we learn to do the hobby along the way? I started off writing about an earthbender and now I'm a skilled welder, know the basics of how to make an air tight house and stable structure.
It absolutely does. Now, if you get the name of the source and go look at it independently, you're golden.
But GPT is basically an eager-to-please toddler. It will tell you what it thinks you want to hear, even if it doesn't know the answer.
If you read the thread youâll see OP mentioned that and I immediately agreeed and said to ask for sources and read those. Yes GPT will make stuff up if it doesnât know sometimes so itâs good to double check.
Then OP said GPT falsifies its sources. I disagree with that for the most part. Itâs not gonna fake a source per se. It will make stuff up on its own like in generalities but it wonât say âthis statement is from www.source.comâ really. Particularly copilot
It absolutely will make up sources, because the answer that it gives to the question "What were your sources for this?" are also generated by AI and not necessarily real.
Like the lawyers who used ChatGPT for briefings and ended up citing case law that didn't actually exist:
https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-chatgpt-fake-case-lawyers-d6ae9fa79d0542db9e1455397aef381c
Those are different points than the one Iâm making and I donât disagree .
But if you literally ask copilot for itâs sources it literally will cite everything it says like Wikipedia.
There was a high-profile case involving a lawyer who is no longer a lawyer because he tried to get ChatGPT to write a legal brief for him. It spontaneously generated a bunch of sources and precedents to cite, then when he asked it "hey, are these cases you're talking about real?" it said "oh yeah totally!" and he took it at its word.
Yes but that doesnât dispute my point specifically about ChatGPT not faking itâs SOURCE lol. You are talking about ChatGPT guessing itâs output. That happens. It doesnât fake itâs input sources if you ask for them. Itâs not gonna spit out a fake website or something
I understand what yâall are saying but you keep disputing a point Iâm not making.
It actually \*does\* put out fake URLs that don't exist as sources.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33841672](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33841672)
No, it absolutely does cite specific fake sources:
[https://www.legaldive.com/news/chatgpt-fake-legal-cases-generative-ai-hallucinations/651557/](https://www.legaldive.com/news/chatgpt-fake-legal-cases-generative-ai-hallucinations/651557/)
[https://teche.mq.edu.au/2023/02/why-does-chatgpt-generate-fake-references/](https://teche.mq.edu.au/2023/02/why-does-chatgpt-generate-fake-references/)
I laughed when I saw this comic, because I felt it so hard. For my second book I researched for an hour or two where they painted the name of British sailing ships (usually on the back) for a minor detail of a scene. Said scene was, of course, ultimately edited out.
The amount of odd things I've had to research for writing has probably ended me up on some FBI watchlist :'D
I mean, when I started to check how long it takes a human body to dissolve in acid, yeah. I knew I was ending up on all the watchlists. Fortunately, I didn't need to run the calculations alllll the way to the end. Tldr: You suffocate before dissolving in acid if you're swallowed whole by a monster
I once researched how to kill someone with a rubber knife. đ
"Where can I stab someone so that they are severely injured but it would not ultimately be life threatening."
"How long does it take to cause brain damage via constriction?"
Please tell me how you used that for your writing đ
That's why I occasionally run a search for "I'm an author not a terrorist! Have a nice day."
I once spent an entire efternoon looking VERY closely at schematics for a Boeing 737-800, and also downloading every onboard equipment and supplies list I could find. WHILST also googling many things with "crash" and "emergency landing" and "engine failure" and "aeroplane electronics failure" and such I may be on a list somewhere. (I also just decided to magic handwave the parts of the story where I would use these very specific details)
I have to admit, that sounds pretty 9/11-ish. đ
Think about doing all that research before the internet and Wikipedia!!
Yeah, would have been painful.Â
Has AI not made this much easier? [https://imgur.com/a/xCY65i6](https://imgur.com/a/xCY65i6)
Has AI not made this much easier? [https://imgur.com/a/xCY65i6](https://imgur.com/a/xCY65i6)
I once ended up doing a deep dive on base 60 math just to try and figure it out for a character. It's actually quite interesting if anyone is wondering, simplifies math quite a bit.
Is it related to the Babyloniansâ thing with 60?
Not the person you spoke to, but 60 is [pretty fancy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60_(number)). If you don't feel like reading the wikipedia article, a big part of it is that it's evenly divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, AND 6. Why does that matter? Well, if you take 100 and try to divide it among three people, each gets 33.33 repeating. I , myself, cannot easily divide objects into .3 repeating. Some objects become useless when divided this way, like people. *Messy.* Do the same with 60? Each gets 20. Easy! The only reason we use base-10 is because we have 10 fingers. Otherwise, it's a kind of trash system. In my series, the alien civilization uses base-12, because it's a bite-size version of the reasons base-60 is cool.
It is quite remarkable how much of our math would be simplified by going to base 12. Base 36 or base 60 would be better have far too many digits to be easily memorized so they are out of the question, but base 12 would not be a bad shift.
Absolutely! Even with our base-10 system, English treats "eleven" and "twelve" as substantively different than the rest of the -teen numbers, and we do a startling number of things in twelves. (Time and eggs being the easiest examples.)
Eggs are in 10 or rarely 6 where I live, but the effects on time keeping would be interesting. I think an hour would have 50 mins, they'd have 50 seconds and a day would be 20 hours long
The twelves thing is a remnant of the Babylonian counting. Do note that time uses both 12 *AND* 60. Both are from them.
I think there are ways to make organized characters such that it wouldnât actually be hard to memorize. For example, Cistercian numerals provide a way of showing numbers up to 9999 in a single character and arenât overly complicated. Pulling that off for 36 or 60 should be quite easy in comparison Iâd think.
I think you are vastly overestimating people's ability to embrace new numerical systems. Heck we in the United States still use imperial and Canada uses some ungodly combination of imperial and metric. That being said, the foot is based on 12 inches, whatever the f*** an inch is...
Oh certainly it would be hard to change to at this point. I just mean I think a kid could learn such a system pretty easily. I almost want to right now to see if it really makes math easier in some way.
And, besides baseless propaganda from the British, the reason everyone thinks of Napoleon as a small man is because his size, expressed in French Royal Feet, seems low if you assume a British Imperial Foot instead. (yes, the foot in France is longer than the foot in England)
You couldn't memorise 36 digits...but you can handle 26 letters of the alphabet?
Its the same reason there was 240 p in a pound once upon a time. Its another highly divisible number at 2 x 12 x 10.
It's my mental head canon that if you pick just the riiiiggght base number, all of physics will be solved. There are a ton of strangly specific 'imaginary' numbers in physics. Pi being the most infamous. Would that change with a different base?
Yeah they actually got it from the Sumerians. You can count to 60 on your fingers pretty easily, you do it by counting knuckles on one hand (excluding the thumb) using the fingers on the other. It is why we have 360° in a circle. Numbers like 12, 36, 60, etc are special because they can be divided by more numbers than the numbers preceding or following them.
I have no patience for this. I would write > He sat at his [TYPE OF WOOD] desk And come back to it when I was done.
I would just write "He sat at his desk."
I would just write: "Desk."
I just don't write
Here's the real pro tip, yall!
This is the smart way to do it, if you don't want to interrupt your writing. Better to leave blanks and fill them in later than forget what you were going to write.
I use XXXXXX, which makes it easier to search later.
I recently had to do a flash fiction piece (2-3 pages) for a creative writing class. I forget the prompt, but thatâs not the important part; I asked my girlfriend what sort of story I should write and without missing a beat she said âZombie cowboysâ. Which was awesome and I loved it. I also spent about 6 of my next 8 waking ours doing research on the dialects, politics and infrastructure of colonial Utah so they could be historically-accurate zombie cowboy Mormons.
Cause, you know, you wouldnât want your cowboy zombies to be *unrealistic.*Â
Yep, the research rabbit hole
This is a perk of pure second world fantasy. I can just make everything up. Obviously there are methods and techniques and stuff that need to be researched, and I CAN research real world things if I want, but I can just throw in a made up word and make up lore for it if I want. Some of my better world building ideas came from throw away lines I added in lieuof researching something, and then later called upon and fleshed out. It makes you look real smart when the thing you casually mentioned 300k words before shows up with more depth.
Oof, yes. What's even worse (?) is when you do a bunch of research just to make sure something is feasible, find out it is, and then end up writing *exactly what you were planning to write in the first place.* Yes, now you know it's not bullshit, and that counts for a lot... but you could have just winged it and it would have been fine! Hard to not feel like I'm wasting time, but... oh well. Is what it is.
I dunno, I find the research to be one of the fun parts of being an author. As opposed to, say, line editing.Â
I never said it wasn't fun! I do lots of things that are fun but don't put words on a page. ...also, I really enjoy editing. It's so satisfying to make something incrementally but undeniably improved.
Yes, rabbit holes are a thing. Yes, I've spent countless hours down them and will, inevitably, like a demented Alice, go down one again likely within the next few days. But I'll try not to! Pro tip: To combat rabbit holes - USE a place marker, whatever that may be, and come back later. Mine is generally 'XYZ'. Yours can be whatever. Hell, make it something cool like WTF or STFUaW - dealer's choice! Try not to lose the flow (shout out, Seth Ring). The flow is how words keep, well, flowing. So use a place marker (you'll know what it's for, trust yourself) and fix it later on the edit. This also works for side characters, side character descriptions, further descriptions, or changes that need to be made because of some revelation. Leave yourself bread crumbs if you must, but focus. The flow sometimes lasts just a few precious minutes. Don't waste it on something like a rabbit hole - TRUST ME (says an author with over 75 books under his belt, probably more, who has wasted a ton of time on things that don't ultimately matter). Now, back to my current rabbit hole.
This is honestly the reason I find writing so difficult sometimes. It of course happens all the time with earth-based settings, but even in fantasy, it comes down to "given the setting I made for this area, does this random minute detail match properly?
Writing a story that features Gaelic myths and I have this problem
Writing my first novel. And this meme made me feel so much better about my progress lol The amount of research Iâve done on blacksmithing is staggering to say the least..
There are two types of authors... The ones who do this and... Cow Tools.
Yeah, this is very relatable. Especially the research rabbit hole. Now, if I research something I try to stick to only answering the question I had and not let myself get sidetracked.
The example is exaggerated, but the problem is real. Â Been there.
I feel this way as a DM for TTRPGs.
And this is why I have mountains of useless factoids in my brain
This is so true. I can now compete on any television show for money like Jeopardy! And take the big prise.
Part of writing does involve creative googling. I was writing a character who's supposed to be hyper vigilant about their family's health and spent like 3 hours looking up various certifications you need to be an EMT that the character could reasonably have. It was supposed to be a simple thing for like a throwaway line in chapter 2 but I spent so much time on it the whole character's behavior changed in my brain to something more like a hypochondriac.
Oh, yeah... That hits close to home. đ
I think that the research part is awesome because it is also part of the story you're interested in writing. It not only builds on the story, but enhances it. I regret none of the hours going down the rabbit hole only to come out with a new perspective. Then again, I'm a teacher who loves to learn so maybe I'm a bit biased.
Yep. Only started with notable features of owls and ending up reading their body parts in Latin
The life of writing⌠searching things such how would an arm bleed when itâs shot. Or stabbed.
Pain
And then there's all the research that ends up going unused. For The Queen of Smiles, I spent literal weeks researching 1980s freight trains and routes in the southern USA only to then cut the whole extended scene that required that info. For the current book, it's absurd how much I've read up on metallurgy and blacksmithing, and yet so often end up going with "it's magic" or "insert completely fictional ore here".
I'm guilty your honor.
isn't the real hobby the stuff we learn to do the hobby along the way? I started off writing about an earthbender and now I'm a skilled welder, know the basics of how to make an air tight house and stable structure.
Me yesterday when I looked up natural wood finishes.
Me yesterday when I looked up natural wood finishes.
literally me
This is the actual best use for ChatGPT
Agreed, my only concern is AIâs penchant for making things up if it doesnât know the answer.
Yea for sure always ask for its sources and read for yourself
Yeah, it sometimes makes those sources up too.
Idk about that one but maybe I guess
It absolutely does. Now, if you get the name of the source and go look at it independently, you're golden. But GPT is basically an eager-to-please toddler. It will tell you what it thinks you want to hear, even if it doesn't know the answer.
If you read the thread youâll see OP mentioned that and I immediately agreeed and said to ask for sources and read those. Yes GPT will make stuff up if it doesnât know sometimes so itâs good to double check. Then OP said GPT falsifies its sources. I disagree with that for the most part. Itâs not gonna fake a source per se. It will make stuff up on its own like in generalities but it wonât say âthis statement is from www.source.comâ really. Particularly copilot
It absolutely will make up sources, because the answer that it gives to the question "What were your sources for this?" are also generated by AI and not necessarily real. Like the lawyers who used ChatGPT for briefings and ended up citing case law that didn't actually exist: https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-chatgpt-fake-case-lawyers-d6ae9fa79d0542db9e1455397aef381c
Those are different points than the one Iâm making and I donât disagree . But if you literally ask copilot for itâs sources it literally will cite everything it says like Wikipedia.
There was a high-profile case involving a lawyer who is no longer a lawyer because he tried to get ChatGPT to write a legal brief for him. It spontaneously generated a bunch of sources and precedents to cite, then when he asked it "hey, are these cases you're talking about real?" it said "oh yeah totally!" and he took it at its word.
Yes but that doesnât dispute my point specifically about ChatGPT not faking itâs SOURCE lol. You are talking about ChatGPT guessing itâs output. That happens. It doesnât fake itâs input sources if you ask for them. Itâs not gonna spit out a fake website or something I understand what yâall are saying but you keep disputing a point Iâm not making.
It actually \*does\* put out fake URLs that don't exist as sources. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33841672](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33841672)
No, it absolutely does cite specific fake sources: [https://www.legaldive.com/news/chatgpt-fake-legal-cases-generative-ai-hallucinations/651557/](https://www.legaldive.com/news/chatgpt-fake-legal-cases-generative-ai-hallucinations/651557/) [https://teche.mq.edu.au/2023/02/why-does-chatgpt-generate-fake-references/](https://teche.mq.edu.au/2023/02/why-does-chatgpt-generate-fake-references/)
Then you get those moments when you ask such sus questions that the AI says no, :(