My search history is a legal liability and the algorithm thinks I am a monster
I took a look at my browser history after a six hour deep dive into my industrial-era fantasy setting and I am fairly certain I have triggered every automated red flag at the NSA. It is the same old worldbuilding sickness where you start with something innocent like "aesthetic canal cities" and somehow end up three hours later reading a 19th-century manual on the specific chemistry of tanning hides using animal brains. My recent searches are a frantic mess of how many kilograms of grain a peasant family needs to survive a harsh winter vs how long a body takes to bloat in brackish water. If my computer gets seized for any reason there is zero chance a jury believes this was all for a hobby project about sky-pirates and economic collapse.
The worst part is that none of this even makes it into the actual lore doc in a way that people notice but I cannot stop myself from checking the math. I spent an entire evening researching the structural integrity of limestone arches because I wanted to know if a specific bridge in the capital would realistically collapse under the weight of an armored carriage. I do not even have a carriage scene written yet but the possibility of a physics error in my head was enough to stall the entire writing process. The algorithm now thinks I am an architect with a dark obsession with medieval sieges and public sanitation failures. My YouTube recommendations are just videos of guys in sheds forging rusted nails and hour long lectures on the history of the salt tax in pre-revolutionary France .
It is a weird form of mental gymnastics where you have to be an expert in the most boring and morbid parts of reality just to justify the existence of a floating island. I was looking up the legal definitions of maritime salvage rights yesterday because my protagonists found a shipwreck and I ended up reading about how long a human can go without fresh water while suffering from stage two scurvy. It is disgusting and my targeted ads are trying to sell me industrial grade water pumps and antique bayonets. My brain is basically a storage unit for useless and mildly traumatic information that will only ever appear as a single throwaway sentence in a draft that I will probably delete next month anyway.
There is no way to explain this to normal people without sounding like a total creep or a weirdo who forgot to take his meds. I tried to tell my girlfriend why I was looking at photos of gangrene progression and she just stared at me until I mentioned it was for the "plague sector" of the city. That did not make it better. Now I am just sitting here wondering if I should clear my cache or just lean into it and start researching the most efficient way to tax a population that lives entirely on giant mushrooms. I think I will go with the mushrooms because the alternative is actually finishing the first chapter.