About Little Details

[kutsuwamushi]

Little Details is a community that helps writers with their research and fact-checking. We're here to answer questions such as:

• If I drop a brick on someone's head from twenty stories high, what will happen?
  
• How big does an asteroid need to be to destroy the Earth?
  
• How do I say "it's not you, it's me" in French?
  
• Can people have freckles on their penises?

All types of fiction writers (professional, amateur, fanfiction, original, dungeon masters) are welcome to post questions. Our focus is factual accuracy rather than general writing advice.

This is the new home of the (now defunct) Little Details community on LiveJournal. Welcome back, everybody!

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General Community Rules

1. All posts should be questions to which there is a factual answer (theoretically at least).

2. Obey common posting etiquette, such as not altering your font, putting large images or extremely long posts behind a cut, not deleting others' comments, and so on. Note: incivility and bigotry are also prohibited by this rule.

3. Report issues with the community or other members to kutsuwamushi instead of escalating. If it's urgent that something be taken down, screen it before reporting.

Rules for Posting Questions

We don't have a specific format that you're required to use, but we do have some general rules and guidelines for posting. If your post doesn't follow them, it might be deleted with an invitation for you to repost.

1. Give your post a short subject line that describes your question.

2. Include the background information we need to answer your question. Often this means things like the setting or what you're trying to accomplish.

3. Don't use us as a substitute for doing basic research that you could have done yourself.

4. There are no topics that are off limits, but keep commonly triggering and NSFW topics behind a cut and give an appropriate warning.

5. Especially sensitive content, such as information about criminal acts or self-harm, should locked so it's only visible to community members. We don't want this appearing on search engines and bringing in people who aren't here for fictional research.

Rules for Answering Questions

1. Don't be careless about the accuracy of your answers. If you're not sure whether your answer is correct, try to verify it; if you can't verify it, either don't post it at all or warn the poster that the information is unreliable.

2. Write your own answers. Quoting a source that you credit is fine, but don't copy-and-paste answers from elsewhere on the internet, don't post answers generated by ChatGPT or other AI text generators, and don't use machine translation for translation questions.

3. Do your best to answer the question as it was asked unless doing so would be misleading (for example, if the question has false premises). Our goal is to give authors an accurate understanding of how things work(ed) in reality. It's up to them to decide how to incorporate that into their story.

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Using the Tags

Currently, only administrators can add tags to post. This is because of the limitations of the tagging system. Past posts can be browsed by tag here.

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Posting Anonymously or Without a Dreamwidth Account

If you want to post anonymously or if you don't have a Dreamwidth account, you can submit your question as a comment here. kutsuwamushi will post it to the community for you. Since you won't receive any notifications from an anonymous comment, you'll have to check the community for your question.

All comments on that post are screened, but have to be unscreened if kutsuwamushi needs to reply to ask a follow-up question or request an edit. If you don't want your identity to be revealed, comment anonymously and don't include identifying details!

Comments

[makamu]

I am really glad to see that the idea behind this community has not died. I don't have a huge reach, but would you mind if I mention the revival in my next linkspam?

[kutsuwamushi]

It would be GREAT if you mention this in your next linkspam! And welcome!

[makamu]

The linkspam won't happen until the next weekend, but your wish is my command!

[dewline]

Deeply appreciating this revival!

[nonplussed]

Love the idea of this community, but I'm personally not often on DW... Just wondering if it might be a good idea to have a mirror of this site on another platform like discord or something so more people might see the questions? Just a suggestion, thanks for setting this up!

[kutsuwamushi]

There aren't currently any plans for that. One of the inspirations for opening this up was recent experience with how toxic large corporate platforms are toward their users, and tbh, Discord's not exempt. I'm on it, but I don't want to put any work into building communities there, and splitting membership between platforms is a good way to make communities peter out. Also the Discord format's really bad for this type of community.

Depending on traffic, I might consider a daily/weekly digest on Mastodon, where it seems this has garnered some interest. Anonymous comments are currently allowed so you don't need a an account to ask/answer questions (though you'll have to follow the anonymous posting method to post).

You could set up your DW tracking options to send you an email when a question is posted here, or subscribe to the RSS/Atom feed, too:

https://little-details.dreamwidth.org/data/rss
https://little-details.dreamwidth.org/data/atom

[caviling]

I was a big fan of the community back in the LiveJournal days and am delighted to see it reborn on Dreamwidth—thank you for making this space.

[pallas_rose]

Hooray! I've been DYING to have a place to answer injury/trauma questions for writers other than my friends [though I love doing so for friends]. Thank you for making this!!

[kutsuwamushi]

If the old little_details is anything to go by, writers do love injuring their characters! Hopefully we will take off and you'll get plenty of opportunity.

[doranwen]

Yay, glad to see this move over here! Will you be promoting it on any comms? dw_community_promo and fictional_fans come to mind as good places…

[kutsuwamushi]

I will be! I just wanted there to be a couple of questions first so people could see something in the community other than my admin posts!

[chemicalcain]

I love this concept and I am fully on board. I am also happy to report that I work professionally with a dermatologist. Yes, people can and do have freckles and moles on the penis-- it's even possible to get skin cancer there. If a skin lesion is painful, is asymmetrical, has irregular/jagged borders, is multicolored, is bigger in diameter than a pencil eraser, or evolves/changes over time, you should get it checked out ASAP even if it's in a sensitive area.

[kutsuwamushi]

Yes, people can and do have freckles and moles on the penis

Haha, the original community had a footnote saying that the answer was yes. I cut it to try to shorten the profile a bit.

[dr_zook]

What a brilliant premise for a comm! Didn't know it during LJ days, and I'm delighted it gets a revival. :D

[mx_morden]

Just jumping in to say that I'm unbelievably glad to see this community on dreamwidth. I have many positive memories of its livejournal version, and I really hope to see this version flourish!

[doodlemancy]

Can I just say... today was my first time posting in a community on Dreamwidth (I made an account ages ago during the 2018 tumblr exodus but kinda got caught up in other stuff) and I'm delighted that this is here and active. It's exactly the sort of community I have many times wished I could find. I hope I can be a useful contributor at some point!!

[cuddyclothes]

I am beyond happy to see this community revived!! I will post links to it in several communities and in my blog!! I sent the link to someone who I think is not on Dreamwidth but who was interested.

Please help my hacker make sense

[brimstonegarden]

We're in a slightly scifi dystopian setting so a little finagling is fine but I try to keep things realistically based. My poor boy has been blackmailed into helping another character locate the head of the company. The target is rich and paranoid, but he does make video calls and public broadcasts which our boy has access to.
Now naturally, our target is presumably using some sort of VPN so we need a backdoor method.

I've heard of locations being given away by metadata in photos. What information would that include? Would there be anything that would identify the specific camera?

I also like the idea of sort of backtracking the signal through microsecond delays in public broadcasts. In theory it's going to get to places that are closer to the origin before those that are further. Does that make sense?

Is there a tracking method that would make more sense?

I am very not tech savvy. He doesn't really need to be able to explain how it works fully, just what he did. Though more info would be useful.

[rdivo]

great! looking forward to the technology discussions 🤖🔩⚙️🧰🛠💻📺

[lizvogel]

Late to the party as usual, but so glad to see this comm here! I was a big fan of the old LJ version, and always hoped it would make the jump to DW. Belated thanks for making it happen!