memes

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

GI Joe movie where they blow up a sheet of ice on the ocean to make it sink down and destroy the base below.

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

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.

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!

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.

Gotta be the "high noon duel" in western movies. That didn't happen much in the real wild west.

Citizens shooting at gangs during bank robberies? Yup.
Shootout at The OK Corral? Yup.
Lynching of accused criminals before a judge could come to town? Oh hell yes.

But that trope of lawman/outlaw facing off in the middle of the street for a prearranged gun duel just didn't really happen.

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.

L shaped blankets.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ModestyBedsheet

Person gets shot and they have to dig the bullet out to save them.

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.

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.

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.

So many.

Normal people get slammed into a wall by monster, explosion or whatever, stand up and walk away. Buddy, you don't walk that off. People die or need months of recovery from less.

Don't get me started on the speed force. You do some napkin math and see the Flash is taking on a 1000G running in circles close to mach 2 without blinking and then gets knocked unconscious with a single punch in the next scene. Flash is not the only one of course.

And the lone inventor developing a fully conscious AI in some mountain cabin on an old laptop. It was clear that would never work and reality now shown us AI companies looking into nuclear powered data centers to speed up things.

The ones that really get me are the way they show execs at companies. The "look, this character is so bad ass at being an exec!". They always come off as so unrealistic and cringy.

I've swam in that ocean, and that's not how that shit works. Engineering too. In reality, it's always a team of engineers that get something done... It is NEVER some rich smart guy inventing stuff on his or her own in their super fancy workshop.

The first time I remember absolutely losing my suspension of disbelief was at the end of the first Mission Impossible reboot where Tom Cruise puts an explosive on a helicopter he's hanging on the outside of that's flying behind a train through a tunnel, and the explosion completely destroys the helicopter and flings him onto the back of the train. Yeah, that helicopter (which probably couldn't be flying through a train tunnel to begin with) was made of far tougher material than Tom Cruise. Any explosion that destroyed it, would have turned him into a stain on the wall of the tunnel.

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.

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.

I always think its funny how bullets never seem to penetrate anything in movies. Like, guy hiding behind a barrel? Nope, cant penetrate, even with a rifle. The newest Batman movie had me shaking my head as he shrugged off multiple rifle rounds to his armor.

Bullets are insanely dangerous and powerful. A .223 round can penetrate a solid brick wall pretty easily, and can destroy a cinderblock wall with some effort. Even if it doesnt penetrate, the amount of force applied is incredible. Plates designed to stop bullets have to be made in specific ways to make sure a bullet doesn't penetrate, but even with that plate, the sheer force of an impact can break bones.

How night and day work above the Arctic Circle.

Movies and TV and stories talk about how there's 6 months of daylight and 6 months of darkness. That does not fucking happen. This is still part of storytelling to this day (I'm looking at you, Sweet Tooth season 3).

Days get stupidly long in the summer, and there's a while where the sun really doesn't go down. in the Winter days get stupidly short, and there's a while where it doesn't really come up all that much. But it's not 6 months of one and 6 months of the other.

(edited for clarity)

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

Hacking. Each and every time it is part of a movie or TV series.

Kingsman

Training scene where they shove a shower hose down a toilet and use it to breathe...

There would be no air (or even sewer gas) to breath in that case. Toilets work by raising the water level in the bowl above the water level in the S-bend/siphon. Since the room was full of water, those toilets would have been flushing constantly, and the whole pipe would be full of water.

Better(ish) solution. Use the body bags that they each had to fill out and place in their trunk/locker to capture an air bubble. That would at least give you some time to attack the door, or figure out how to drain the room.

The film Under Siege II has some of the best hacking scenes and dialog.

Even at a young age, the line "This is the guy that hacked into the Pentagon with a laptop" made me WTF because unless you're brute forcing encryption, the kind of computer you use to backdoor a system is irrelevant.

Pouring gas over everything and lighting it by tossing a lit cigarette into the puddle. It does not work that way.

"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.

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

There’s a scene in Spider-Man: No Way Home where Tom Holland is fighting the Green Goblin. Goblin grabs Spidey, jumps with him, and then they both smash through the 23rd or so floor of the apartment building they’re in and they land on the floor below.

Sure, they’re both super strong but neither of them used their strength to push through the floor. They just jumped and reached no more than like a foot off the floor, implying that gravity pulled them both through the floor. Okay, so the floor was built poorly, but then why did falling 10+ feet from the 23rd floor to the 22nd floor not make them smash through the 22nd floor?

That movie’s a lot of a fun but that scene makes me upset lol

Hacker shit. Some lone genius passing through systems intended to be secure for militaries and governments. It's not about details being stupid, that's to be expected. It's about the very fact of power imbalance.

Random characters challenging militaries and governments and just "quickly finding" some qualified assistance in doing that. And winning. You don't. You are an amateur and they are professionals. And if you want to do that, you are likely already under personalized surveillance.

That last thing is a trope from a free society where some people on the top are bad. And fighting them you can find help and learn, because in some sense you are protected, and guaranteed privacy and safety. There are no such free societies on our planet right now. The closest you can get is probably to join Hezbollah or some mafia, that is, well-established powerful organizations.

On the contrary, Luke Skywalker taking a lucky shot at a vulnerability that a team of engineers and military men, all of which were high-level Imperial defectors, with support from many planets of what is the Star Wars alternative of Western Europe and North America, had found by analyzing space station's stolen blueprints, using computers and what not, is realistic. Similarly to the Empire (at that moment with kinda democratic Senate and all) being fine with anyone on the way being murdered trying to contain such high-value corpus of information.

Again, I love Star Wars so much. A lot of the materials written in AotC and RotS time describe very well, in my modest opinion, how the real world oppression really works and how you can't really escape evil or defeat it. The best you can do is survive till that evil dies on its own, but the realistic best is planting the seeds for that time.

In general everything showing fighting your enemy as something easy, impressing upon audience that if it didn't work out in a month, then you just give up and do something more pleasant, deceiving yourself.

At the same time the sheer extent to which personal brilliance and hard work and persistence can change the world is often downplayed in movies. Drastic changes made by characters are attributed to magic or being in some unlikely situation. But the whole reason for previously described power imbalance is that professionals perpetuate their knowledge and understanding every day, and if one's persistent, one can beat them.

Yes, I like fiction about justice and fighting evil.