#random research

My conclusion is that I don’t have any friends that wants to give me a shit

And from this on they’re about the five nordic countries separately

*additional information—for us people in the eastern hemisphere, all we know about Finland are Santa Claus, Aurora and moomins. Most of them won’t even have “death metal” or “rock” crossed in their minds, unless they’re hardcore fans. (I’m actually quite impressed by that one friend who answered music shows)

*additional information—there are quite a lot of IKEA branches here so Sweden is actually quite well-known, also considering Sweden is the most iconic nordic nowadays (lmao sorry Denmark), the results are quite legit.

*my own comment—actually I didn’t know Denmark is a part of nordics at first, I thought it was next to the Netherlands. I expected at least some of them will answer Anderson(or the little mermaid), but apparently they don’t even know that Anderson is danish💁‍♀️ Also that cookie brand was extremely popular in my place, I don’t even know why

Another country I thought it was next to the Netherlands. I’m a bit disappointed that no one answered Norwegian forest cats, that’s the first thing I’ve ever heard about Norway!

SO, I found these pics, and they are almost exactly like I pictured the world in my story. They are from a game, as far as I understand - Lost Order, but I think it’s only in Japanese so far. Obviously, these pictures do NOT belong to me, but they are soooo pretty <3

I thought I’d share these and distract you with a little piece of worldbuilding and a little science.  Nerding under the cut:

(Before I get into this I feel I should note that I do NOT speak/read Japanese so this has the potential to be hilariously wrong bc my main source is google translate)

So I was re-watching Magic Kaito and in Hakuba’s intro episode he solved a case and finished with a catchphrase and my brain went: !!! The Holmes detectives both have catchphrase puns!

Except the subtitle of his catchphrase didn’t really match what I could parse from the Japanese voiced phrase...thus the rabbit-hole.

So the English subtitles give Hakuba’s catchphrase as ‘the truth will always come to light’

When what I hear is: subete wa hakujitsu no moto ni

This was confusing to me because I have heard Shinichi’s ‘shinjitsu wa itsumo hitotsu!’ catchphrase so much and ‘shinjitsu’ is the only word for truth my brain knows.

So I put Hakuba’s catchphrase into google translate, and...well...it didn’t translate very well. I have gotten a different result every time I typed the entire phrase into the translate function.

The first problem was that google refused to translate ‘hakujitsu’. My not-Japanese-fluent brain decided that maybe I misheard the word because I wanted there to be a pun, and tried again after deciding that maybe the word had actually been ‘kakujitsu’.

The first hilariously wrong result read in English as ‘everything is based on the lottery’ at which I stared in confused disbelief.

My anime-loving brain has managed to absorb that ‘subete’ actually does translate to ‘everything’, and decided that the problem was that word ‘kakujitsu’

So I typed in ‘kakujitsu’ by itself, which google translated as ‘sure’ or, alternatively, ‘certainty’. Which makes a whole lot more sense than whatever strangeness gave me Kogoro’s catchphrase about a lottery instead of Hakuba’s.

I proceeded to fight with google translate for a while in an attempt to make it give me a somewhat grammatical translation that did not include lotteries. The closest I got (from making google translate individual bits of the phrase) was something like ‘everything is(was?) certainty from the beginning’ which sounds plausible as a cocky detective catchphrase.

On a whim, I went back and typed in ‘hakujitsu’, just by itself. Amazingly, google now recognized it as a word! It translated to ‘white sun’ or possibly ‘broad daylight’.

I then went through the process of copying the Japanese characters themselves in the individual bits that google could apparently recognize from my romaji only when they were separated and pasting them all together in the correct order.

So now I have the translation to English reading ‘everything under the white sun’

But an alternate translation of ‘hakujitsu’ which google sets as ‘white sun’ is broad daylight

So you have: ‘everything is(will be?) under broad daylight’

I’m gonna take a slight leap here and assume that the metaphoric interpretation of that is similar to how it is in English: that is, that things are revealed in broad daylight. That’s pretty close to the subtitled phrase ‘come to light’ which also refers to things being revealed.

So technically the english phrasing of Hakuba’s catchphrase should be ‘everything will come to light’ he doesn’t actually mention anything about truth.

However, to my excitement, it actually does have a pun on his name! (Hakuba is written with the characters for white horse if I remember correctly).

1. Powder within the palm 2. Powder that is “to hand” 3. Rifle equipment 4. Sleeping powder 5. Keeping-sleep-at-bay ointment - “Myoganko, an ointment used to stay awake.”

6. One-cho hiding powder

7. [Charcoal of the] kiri [tree] - “The powder obscures the human form at night when it is thrown in front of the shinobi.”

8. Goblin Powder -“tengu as “goblin,” though the rich lore around this type of creature makes that a rather simplistic translation. The literal full translation for this powder is “tengu that catches an arrow” or “catching an arrow shot by a tengu.” The meaning of this is unknown.”

9. Total concealment powder ”

“...they amused themselves by dining on three biscuits, two glasses of port and a bunch of violets.”

So, I’m like: were they just munching on some flowers? what’s up with that?

So, I did a ton of random, goose chasing research, and found out what that most likely meant.

This is from a document I found that explains it:

“The above process created what were known as smooth, pearl, or plain round comfits. If the syrup was boiled to what Platt called a higher decoction, the comfits were rough in texture and were known as ragged, or crisp comfits. Although sugar coated caraway, coriander, anise and fennel seeds were the most popular, many other items were made into comfits. Small slivers of cinnamon and candied orange were made into “long comfits” to adorn marchpanes and printed marmalades. In a still life painting by Clara Peeters (Charles Roelofsz Gallery, Amsterdam) small coloured seed comfits adorn a marchpane on a silver charger, while some long comfits spill from a platter of biscuits and wafers.(see plate ) Almond comfits, identical to modern sugared almonds (still known in Italy as confetti), were coated in the balancing pan, as were tiny biscuits and pellets of spiced breadcrumbs.30 Muskadines, or kissing comfits for sweetening the breath were made in the 16th and 17th century by scenting sugar paste with musk, rosewater and orris powder and cutting them into diamond shaped tablets with a pastry jagger. Although these were not made in the balancing pan and were really a type of lozenge, or floral cachou, the early 19th century confectioner Jarrin describes very similar gum-paste comfits which were flavoured with “coffee, chocolate, bergamotte, vanilla, &c ... cut with tools of different forms, as lozenges, hearts, clubs, &c and are only to be put into the balance pan to be finished smooth” with three coatings of syrup to create a smooth glazed finish.31″

http://www.historicfood.com/The%20Art%20of%20Confectionery.pdf

So, basically, confectioners of the time were doing a ton of experimenting and a newly popular thing was to basically caramelize nuts and other things inside a sugary, syrup, kind of thing that would often have stuff like rosewater added to make it make your breath smell nice. This included violets. The nuts or whatever would be coated in the syrup, dried, coated, dried, etc, until they were basically candies that smelled good. They were created through a process kind of like pearls do, layer over layer. 

I am so obsessively nerdy about this. I think this is the most interesting thing I have researched in the past month. I absolutely love learning random things that will have no purpose in my life from this point on. 

“Soak ‘em for Crutchie!”  In this context, soak means “beat up really bad.”