memes

The part in Drop Dead Fred where Elizabeth's best friend's house boat sinks and she gets rich off the insurance payout. That's not how that works unfortunately.

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.

The law, in basically everything.

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

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.

I didn't watch it, but I saw the trailer for Moonfall and I had a lot of WTF moments just watching that. A lot of 'there's no way that's how it would actually work.'

One that annoys me is "Oh, you can't pay for your food, you work for the restaurant now till you're paid off!"

Getting past the absurd number of Labor Laws and Sanitation Regulations we're violating with that set-up, in addition to how badly this is pissing off of the union if the restaurant happens to be unionized...

Most modern restaurants have dish washing machines minimizing the need for bus boys.

Additionally, there's a little thing called job training that typically has to be done. You don't just throw a mop at a guy and tell them to get to work, even if they're experienced each place has their own way of doing things. It's why it's actually really hard to get fired in real life, laid off sure, but actually fired? Unless you're just THAT incompetent... Cause these things take time and money.

And because you didn't do any training, all your deadbeat patron has to do is cut his hand trying to dry off a knife and he's not only paid off, but he's gonna own the fucking joint when his lawyer hears about this shit.

So what DOES the establishment do? Well it depends, but the most common scenario I've heard is that they take some form of collateral until you come back another day to pay them, and that's usually for a fancy restaurant. For most places though you'd pay before you even got your food making this a non-issue.

That's the most common one, there are some that are less common but still get on my nerves.

It could make sense if it's a long time ago when the population is much lower, there aren't as many labor laws, but I think even by the 60's this scenario would be bizarre if it actually happened. I could see it happening in modern day, but it'd have to be a very specific set of circumstances

1. Easy Sex Change - Now the name for this might be somewhat dated because no one refers to it as a "Sex Change Operation" anymore, but I can't think of a better name for it. Basically there's this idea in fiction that you can just go into any hospital looking like Fred Flintstone, and come out the same day looking like Pamela Anderson in her prime.

Medical Science does not work that way

The Transgender Healthcare standards wouldn't let it happen that quickly as you need doctor's notes (Hell I'm Post-Op for the better half of a decade and I'm still trying to get a note for a purely cosmetic boob job)

Doctors actually trained to do Genital Reconstruction Surgery are extremely rare, nearest one to me is three states away, and I'm not even sure he's still alive because that was 8 years ago and he was older than dirt.

Genital Reconstruction only changes what you've got going on down there, and until very recently wasn't covered by most insurance. All the other changes? You have to do estrogen for years and hope for the best.

The body can't recover that quickly (I literally had to spend the better part of a morning learning how to walk again after being bedridden for two to three after that... till then my body was still healing and I was basically immobilized.. also having to learn to pee was weird. Trust me you don't wanna be in a situation where you really have to pee but literally don't know how because the functionality of your genitals has been reversed.)

Admittedly I'm seeing it less and less as the idea of transpeople existing is mainstream now, but from the perspective of a transwoman like myself it's the trans equivalent of someone asking a homosexual male how they know which man's penis will open up to accept the other's.

2. Ordering food at a doctor's office - I've not seen this too often, but I have seen it more than once, which is enough to baffle me.

3. The Death Card - I just want a script writer to do a scene where someone draws Death, gets super scared, has it explained to them that the card isn't that bad. As it refers to death in a spiritual sense, meaning not the cessation of existence, but rather the continuous cycle of rebirth.... So it's actually referring to change.... And then immediately they draw the Inverted Tower (Which actually does mean that you're in for a bad time). I'm just surprised I haven't seen this joke done before...

Wait a second...

Simpsons did it - https://youtu.be/M-dButYcv14

Though to be fair, I think this is one everyone who isn't in Hollywood knows at this point. But as someone who actually practices Tarot it is annoyed.

4. The movie Clerks 2 - Look I love Kevin Smith, I think he does great work, I'm even one of the only people who love Clerks 3.... but... I can't just point to one thing in this film. Pretty much everything about Clerks 2 requires a lot of suspension of disbelief as it's obvious that Kevin Smith is too rich in 2006 to know how fast food joints work at the time.

The part where they close up to a Donkey Show definitely stands out, as chain franchised Fast Food restaurants are not only too busy for that to be plausible unlike a random gas station in the boonies (like in the first movie), but it's 2006, while it's not as common of a practice now, most McDonald's/Taco Bells/Wendy's of this era would have been 24 hours.

5. Video Games in general - If movies are to be believed, video games now are basically the same as they were in the 70's. Atari sound effects, high scores, limited lives, games having "levels".... When in reality games have moved on, most games don't really test the player's skill so much as tell you a story through in an interactive medium. So your progress isn't really based in how many points you're getting, but rather how far in the story you've gotten. Lives aren't really a thing anymore for the simple fact that if your streaming platform gave you an overly tough quiz half-way through the movie about things you saw in previous scenes, and punished you by making you re-watch the whole thing up until you got to the quiz again. No one would watch movies ever again.

Actually it's become a bit of a problem for the market as too many gamers are becoming annoyed that games are too much like movies funnily enough...

Now Mobile games play more like classic arcade games, sure.. but in movies they're clearly playing consoles. Heck even re-releases of games that did have limited lives and a scoring system (Sonic Origins for example) took them out to modernize the experience. Which is kind of a good thing because older games were artificially difficult to prevent you from beating the game over the weekend as a method to discourage rental services.

In the early 2000's, sure I guess I can buy that. Gaming was a niche hobby, good to dumb it down I guess. But nowdays it's considered weirder to not play games than to play them, so I don't know how this mistake keeps getting made.

I wouldn't be surprised if my grandmother had a fucking Steam account to play TF2 Themed Solitaire on. Because the oldest guy in my writing group has one to play Civilization and he's fucking 80.

6. Ditching a cop - In movies if you get in trouble and police are after you, just run away! You'll ditch them and whatever you did will be forgotten about. In reality: Warrants for arrest exist, the charge for resisting arrest exists, and so do body cams... So, no, not really.

My final one is

The Monitor is the computer! The tower is just decoration! - But, this cliche has vanished thanks to computer use becoming more common.