Community Profile

Important notice: Please read the rules before participating.

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!

---

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.

---

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.

---

Anonymous Posting

If for some reason you want to ask your question anonymously, you can post it as a comment here. kutsuwamushi will post it to the community for you.

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!