Funny story about writing research...

So a few years ago I was writing a book about stoners who save the world, but I ran into a technical problem: my heroes needed to be able to farm indoors (nuclear winter scenario).

Not only that, but they had to grow ten or twenty acres of food...indoors. So once they used up their limited supply of UFO lamps and grow bulbs, how would they manufacture or acquire more? They lacked the industry to make new ones, and ordinary light bulbs lack red & blue spectrum light (so the plants never mature properly.)

So I went to the prepper & survivalist forums, but they didn't have a clue.
Then I went to the science forums, and they were also clueless.
So finally I went to the stoner forums...and they knew the answer right away. Hell, they even had links and documents on how to do it.

So never let anyone tell you stoners are dumb. The answer was actually pretty amazing, and had been right in front of my face the whole time.

 

I spent a month trying to find an answer to that problem.
But in the grower forums, it was old-hat. One guy even had pictures and diagrams.
Soooo cool.