As most of you probably know, the Internet is amazingly useful for research, and amazingly, arbitrarily frustrating.
Working on Southern Discomforts, for example, I’ve found all kinds of useful information about Georgia farming, Georgia state police and other stuff that will help me keep the mundane details accurate. Working on my time travel book I’ve found several lists of time-travel films online, plus Netflix constantly informs me about obscure time-travel films I don’t see anywhere else, such as The Caller or The Ride (surfer catches a big wave and gets thrown back a century).
On the other hand, when I Google a movie to see if it really involves time travel, frequently I won’t turn up anything more detailed than an IMDB synopsis. That’s not much use. Likewise, when I look for background data on various TV or anime series, sometimes I get a copious flood, sometimes nothing.
Occasionally the Internet synopsis or details are just wrong.
Which is why the Internet doesn’t supplant reference books or (of course) actually watching the material. It’s an added resource but it isn’t the final authority. Which is good, because otherwise why would anyone need my reference books?
The world of Internet research (#SFWApro)
Filed under Movies, Now and Then We Time Travel, Southern Discomfort, TV, Writing
