memes

Basically any time someone playing a chef or cook on TV picks up a knife I fly into a rage.

In episode 2F09, when Itchy plays Scratchy's skeleton like a xylophone, he strikes that same rib twice in succession yet he produces two clearly different tones. I mean, what are we, to believe that this is some sort of a, a magic xylophone or something? Boy, I really hope somebody got fired for that blunder.

People driving straight on the highway need to move the wheel around at all times to stay straight. Also, the drivers can look away from the road for like 10 seconds without it being a huge issue that would otherwise be scary and dangerous.

That water pollution is neon green goo, air pollution is thick black smoke, or radioactive waste is only in drums.

Most of it is invisible and you don't know about it until it's too late.

One of the GIJoe movies ends with an underwater arctic base being crushed by ice that is dislodged from a bomb blast on the ice shelf above. Neat except ice doesn't sink. I'm sure there are all manner of inaccuracy in those movies but that one really stuck with me.

When someone’s falling hundreds of feet and when they’re inches from the ground a super hero swoops in from the side to grab them.

Sure, they didn’t hit the ground but not only did you catching them slow down their vertical velocity just as fast as the ground would have, now you’ve accelerated them horizontally so fast that they’re now twice as dead as they would’ve been otherwise

All of this stuff makes me wonder how hard it would be to make a fully pedantic story.

I've seen books where the hero was on the verge of winning but gets randomly concussed by a piece of shrapnel. Disoriented, hospital.

Another where the hero had hearing loss issues from solo pistol badassing too much, sans ear protection. (Forgot the titles of these stories).

But what would it take to meet everything? Imagine Superman. Now he has to mind his acceleration to save people. He also has to mind distribution of force, since he can't lift a plane without puncturing it. (Maybe he can make a little energy net under the plane somehow to distribute pressure?) And then he has to mind the Law of Conservation of Energy unless he splits apart matter somehow. And then this and that...

Will adherently realistic changes downrank most stories? I for one laugh my ass off when The Rock flexes his broken arm cast off in F&F.

If a girl doesn’t like you, but you just keep pursuing her, everything will eventually work out and you’ll be happy together.

In action films, serious injuries heal with just a few hours’ sleep, no recovery needed.

The Dark Knight trilogy really wanted to be a realistic, grounded take on the Batman mythos, so they dropped the more fantastical elements of some characters' backstories. Ra's Al Ghul was no longer immortal, Bane didn't have super steroids, the Joker wasn't permanently bleached by chemicals...then there's Two-Face.

I guess they thought acid burns were too unrealistic, so they gave him regular burns...apparently without knowing that burns that severe would be so painful that he wouldn't even be able to remain conscious, much less run around the city on a killing spree. I mean, you can see exposed muscle in some places. There's a line where Gordon says he's rejecting skin grafts, and I remember thinking, "WTF are you talking about? He should be in a medically induced coma, not making healthcare decisions." Half of his body was an open wound; I'm amazed he didn't die of infection 15 minutes after he left the hospital.

Almost any depiction of how consent works.

I just fired a gun right next to your head, neither of us was wearing ear protection, and now we're having a conversation at normal volume and we can understand each other just fine.

Bonus points for grenades going off indoors, and nobody having a concussion after.

First time I saw the Jurassic park I thought no way would intelligent people just run around a huge and therefore dangerous Brachiosaurus or jump out of the car and run right to the ill Triceratops. That would be Darwin's award kind of madness.

Then I studied biology, got to know some zoologists and paleontologists, and yeah, this is exactly what would happen.

or when someone runs through airport security in seconds to catch a flight. In real life, security lines, tickets, and checkpoints would definitely slow that down

A more mundane one, but people on reasonably normal incomes living in a house that's at least one order of magnitude more expensive than they could ever afford even if they purchased it twenty or thirty years ago. Its particularly bad in things set in expensive areas like London or New York or Tokyo. Like being able to afford a house in central London rather than renting a flat with three other people takes substantial money, you aren't going to be afford that if you work in a supermarket.

I love scenes where a character hotwires a car by:

• reaching under the steering wheel and pulling a panel off. It isn't held on by fasteners or anything, it's just like wedged in place.

• A bunch of loosely coiled wires tumbles out. In front are two thicker wires that are cut, stripped and tinned.

• The character strikes these two wires against each other like attempting to strike a match, mostly to make sparks.

• The sound of a car engine turning over plays.

• Climb in, shut the door, put it in gear and drive off.

Holy moly this thread got a lot of comments! Is Lemmy growing up? Are we big now?

In the dark knight the police convoy encounters a roadblock (burning fire truck) and goes onto the lower road into an obvious ambush, rather than just... Go onto the incoming lane and around the truck

When the computer hacker character clicks 8 keystrokes and says, "I'm in!"

When something or somebody is injected into space, they always freeze in seconds. The logic is that "space is cold" but space is mostly a vacuum and vacuums don't have temperature. Vacuums insulate against conduction, so you're not going to freeze anytime soon. (You'll lose heat via radiation but that will take a while).

Not to mention the effect that zero pressure has on freezing/boiling points. If anything you'd be steaming as all the water on you evaporates!

This happens with fire sprinklers a lot, one sprinkler goes off, and triggers the rest of the floor, or sometimes even building.

That's not how it works. Each sprinkler has it's own trigger mechanism, the glass bulb, and cannot trigger another sprinkler.

There are systems where this happens, but the sprinkler heads look very different, and you won't find them in an office building.

Hacking.

There is no way that you keyboard danced for 12 seconds and completed a nmap scan, identified an unpatched target with a remote code execution bug, delivered the payload, pivoted to an account with the permissions you needed, and found the server running the internal application you are looking for.

I hate to say it because so much of this show was actually really excellent and accurate but in the Chernobyl miniseries they totally did the "radiation is contagious" thing and it is just not true.

Things and people that are irradiated/hit by radiation in a situation like a reactor failure or contact with radioactive waste do not become radioactive. They can have radioactive particles on their clothing/skin or inside their body if they have ingested/inhaled radioactive material, but they are not emitting radiation themselves. Furthermore, a thin sheet of paper or cloth will stop the kind of radioactivity that would be emitted by such material, if it is on the outside of a person's body.

Anyways the point is that the woman whose husband was dying of radiation poisoning and then she went in and spent time with him did not lose her baby because she spent time with him. That's just not how it works.

Lots of environmental contamination-related stuff in movies is inaccurate but that one is the most recent I can think of.

Sprinklers react to heat, not smoke and they don't all go off at once. Also the water that comes out is brown from rust, not clear.

War bows are so heavy that you can barely hold it for the moment it takes to aim. There's no way you're holding it for minutes before told to release.

Recently, I've been mindful of how long fights are in movies.

Sword fight? Fanning at each other, crossing and smacking swords. Maybe even walking around each other. I don't think that's how a real sword fight would look.

Fights where it's mostly talking. Talking and talking. Nobody would fight like that.

Fist fights without a smack and dead. It's fancy movement - only because of the shaky camera and cuts of course. Give me back Jackie Chan or smack them once and they fall over.

I also dislike noticing the wire-guided movements. Fast acceleration and you can see them balancing in the air lifted by wires. Wires removed after-the-fact, but it's such unnatural movement.

And of course, the classic gunfight where nobody hits anything.

Or any monster chase or fight. If a giant monster chases you it's faster and instant-kills you. But not in movies.

It's certainly prevalent.

Any kind of severe allergic reaction is going to ruin your week. If you're in anaphylactic shock, you don't just pop some antihistamines or an epi-pen and carry on with your day. And you certainly should not be moving around.

This happens in many shows. At least My Girl was more accurate.

People talking over each other. Other than IASIP, I can't think where they get this right.

Space Flight.

I walked in on my roommate watching "Don't Look Up" right during the space shuttle launch scene. Literally every single thing was wrong. The trajectory the shuttle took off the launch pad. It flying RIGHT SIDE UP as it did the gravity turn like a fucking airplane. The fact 50 other rockets were in formation with it despite that being stupidly dangerous, them all having different TWR ratios, there not being nearly enough launchpads anywhere in the world to do that, etc. Just everything.

We have existing video footage of shuttle launches. It's not some crazy mystery. This isn't Gravity where they add a window that doesn't exist on the ISS for dramatic tension. It's not Star Wars where the X-Wings behave more like airplanes than spacecraft for visual appeal. This was deliberate negligence.

A very common one is spacecraft seem to always launch in a direct line away from the planet. They just go straight up. That's the least efficient way to get into space. But I usually let it slide because explaining orbital mechanics and Hoffman transfers isn't necessary for good story telling.

There’s a trillion ones around unrealism, so I may as well pick something that would be more enjoyable if fixed.

Professional chatter. Let’s say a team of 30 scientists have been trying to communicate with a dimensional portal for 5 years. They wouldn’t be using speech like “Identity verified. Doctor Faris, you are clear to approach the anomaly.” Often, they’d have extremely abbreviated lingo for everything they need to express that happens on a daily basis, and otherwise are chatting about other stuff.

“Ok, approach endorsed. Bob wasn’t so chatty yesterday from what I heard, we’ll just aim for 2 logic points for this cycle.”
“Ryan was suggesting we spread the cycles. Bob has to sleep sometime.”
“Yeah, 90% of us would rather listen to Ryan than Mick, but Mick signs the checks.”

So the only actual order comes from some obscure phrase like “Approach endorsed”, which they may only say verbatim for safety reasons. The rest is just workplace banter about how best to accomplish their task, none of it being essential. EDIT: And, to make clear, in the above quote, Bob is the portal/anomaly.

When a character wakes up in the hospital.
They've been out for three days. They're obviously in real bad shape, every time they move they grunt.

Then they just rip out the IV and pulse monitor. But not any of the ekg wires. And then just leave.

Good luck getting down the hallway in that shape.

"We got their hard drive!" *Holds up a power supply.

And even if it was a hard drive, what were you going to do with it? You went in there guns blazing with no warrant after you knocked on the wrong door. The evidentiary chain is well and truly broken at this point. Nothing from that scene would be able to be entered into evidence.

Stepping on a landmine doesn't make it explode instead it arms the mine with a noticible click sound then lifting up your foot is the thing that makes it explode.

As a counterpoint to the excellent examples posted here, I will cite an example of the opposite that I appreciate: In the Big Lebowski when the Dude goes to retrieve his stolen car and he asks the cop if they have any leads. The cop's reaction is both realistic and absolutely hilarious.

Electrical shocks applied to asystolic hearts to restart them is a classic.

The shock serves to stop fibrillation and to induce a rhythmic firing of the neves, that's why it's called defibrillation. Fibrillation is random firing of the nerves, asystole is no firing.

If I recall correctly my father told me you use an injection of adrenaline for asystolic hearts. Kind of like in Pulp Fiction. Though I think injecting directly into the heart isn't the preferred method anymore.

In movies when there's a huge explosion in space, there's always this ring that comes out from the explosion. No!

In space the blast wave would be spherical: it only looks like a 2d ring when observed from a telescope many many light years away, since the telescope can only pick up the outside edge of the blast.

Edit: fixed auto-incorrect