Random Questions Thread

Sorry never mind.

edited 26th May '13 6:53:00 AM by PsychoFreaX

My work is set in a private college featuring characters from different social classes; specifically upper class tuition-paying students and lower class scholarship students. My brain tells me one way to emphasise this divide would be in how they dress.

So, my question is... without going into "chavvy" stereotypes (i.e. sweatpants/tracksuits, white trainers/gym shoes, etc), what would be the expected dress sense for a working class teen from London? At the moment, I'm envisioning my (female) main character in simple tees, jeans and army jackets. Would that make sense or come across as too "American"?

edited 26th May '13 7:29:33 AM by peasant

You wouldn't really see someone in an army jacket unless it was a hipstery fashion statement. She'd be much more likely to wear a hoodie.

I have a question relating to.. electricity.. science.. thing. Related to a character. May or may not be the right place but I'll try anyway.

Basically, there are some fish that can detect things around them with an electric field. Rocks don't conduct electricity so the field goes around them, other fish do so the field bunches up and goes through them. So the fish can locate things around them by detecting areas where the field is bunched up or whatever.

My question is: does this work on dry land? Say you had a superhero with this exact sensory trait. Does this work through air similarly to how it works through water?

I see. Didn't think of that - the army jacket and hipster association. I was mostly thinking of and channeling Lindsay Weir from Freaks And Geeks with the army jacket look.

Plus, a number of other characters are already known to favour hoodies and I was hoping to make my main character distinctive from them. Again, hence the army jacket. As such, would it be fair to say that a rationale would be expected to explain why my character wears an army jacket?

It wouldn't be massively weird for her to wear one and people don't tend to have some kind of rationale behind their clothing beyond 'I like this'. I got the impression that you were looking for the most blandly normal outfit that your average London working-class teenager would be wearing, and you don't often see people in army jackets, but if you were thinking more about your character's individual taste I think it's fine and you don't need to go to great lengths to explain it.

I was fact checking; to see how well my ideas lined up with reality and if off, to help figure out what adjustments to make; i.e. to add explanation and/or change the outfit descriptions.

The problem is that youth fashions, and the interaction with social class, chage so frequently that by the time you get your work into mass publications, whatever you used may already be out of date. There are better, more stable ways to indicated social class, like speech patterns.

@ et....

I think it probably COULD work. The issue is that water is an excellent conductor of electricity, allowing it to flow about as needed for what the fish needs. The air is much less conductive, so either emitting a field or sensing any type of field from your surroundings is going to be much tougher. Not impossible, but it would be a lot harder.

If I were reading it, I would probably let it slide, but then, I tend to have a large suspension of disbelief for anything involving superheroes.

@ etatau: Nearly all electroreceptive organisms are aquatic or amphibious, for the reason Nightmare mentioned. (Besides the gymnotids - electric 'eels' - other groups with this sense include lampreys, lungfish, coelacanths, and cartilaginous fish.)

Monotremes have electroreceptors, though, including echidnas, which are purely terrestrial. So it isn't impossible, but it is likely to be fairly weak on land.

Maybe give them cybernetic enhancements of some sort a la Spider-Man's web shooters? Real-life radar systems need fairly powerful antennae to do their job properly, but I think that just a bit of Techno Babble would suffice for most superhero fiction - depends on your preference, of course.

Electroreceptors are entirely different things than radar—that's basically just ordinary reflective detection of EM, except with radio waves. You probably can't have a living thing do radar in the conventional sense, since it requires large metal antennas, but the eye naturally does "radar" with visible light, and it works just fine.

Do you necessarily have to explain a part of your backstory?

Depends on what that thing is and what you plan on doing with it, if anything.

If I remember correctly, water is actually a horrible conductor for electricity. It's just that it's a terrific solvent, and the ionic solutes react to charge differences by following suit, creating a path for the current to pass through.

It's a "why the future world is the way it is" explanation.

edited 29th May '13 3:20:43 AM by MorwenEdhelwen

My explanation still stands. We can't give a hard and fast answer that will apply to everything that you could potentially have to explain. Make sure that everything is explained and dissected in your notes, but think long and hard about what you plan to do with whatever and its relevance to the plot at hand.

Thanks.

True, strictly speaking, but distilled water doesn't really occur naturally, and it doesn't stay that way long if it has organisms living in it. So for all intents and purposes, natural water sources are good conductors. :P

If our laboratory budget is any indication, not only distilled water doesn't occur naturally, but double-distilled water is really goddamn expensive.

Can anyone think of some magical symbols that would work well as glowing tattoos? Do you have pictures?

some possibilities I've already found include

• Symbol of the outsider◊ from Dishonored. This has the advantage of already being a glowing tattoo.

• Symbol of Chaos used in the heretic series in red and green.

• The hand symbol from Populous: The Beginning

I know we have Power Tattoo but there aren't many images.

edited 29th May '13 10:08:36 AM by MCE

I would use a pentagram.

Unicursal hexagram or some other type of 7₄ knot/endless knot?
Valknut?

edited 29th May '13 10:16:13 AM by m8e

Is it necessarily Unfortunate Implications for a story's main character to be white?

Depends upon the story's ethnic background.