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My wife is a physician and it drives her crazy. It often manifests as a scene like: Doctor 1: This patient has severe hepatitis, we need to get them into s

My wife is a physician and it drives her crazy. It often manifests as a scene like: Doctor 1: This patient has severe hepatitis, we need to get them into surgery stat! Doctor 2: You mean they have an inflammation of their liver? Which is truly the dumbest possible way for a doctor to respond in the real world, though obviously can be necessary for exposition to the viewer. As a programmer, "Live Free or Die Hard", "Independence Day", and "Swordfish" are memorable examples of this sort of cinematic stupidity

123pie123 3y ago
arrgh - swordfish really got to me
- anotherevan 3y ago
  The thing that bugged me the absolute most and destroyed by suspension of disbelief completely was Hugh Jackman couldn't type a coherent sentence on a keyboard if his life depended on it (and it did in several scenes). It looked at times like he was just bouncing all ten fingers up and down on the keyboard like a kid just going bang, bang, bang on a piano. Aside: Watched that movie twenty-two years ago and am still obviously triggered by it!
eternityforest 3y ago
Bad tech realism in scifi doesn't bother me, because a lot of it is showing the way tech could be, with a few liberties taken. Generally they show extreme capabilities, similar to what machine learning can do now(Except it's implied that a lone genius coded it, rather that it being a trained model), in a world of highly flexible IoT type devices that can be repurposed to do anything via a pretty easy GUI. I take it as a challenge. Using an app I wrote should feel like being on SeaQuest DSV. If there's a broken connector, can I make a software workaround? If I'm buying a product, what's the state of the art for that area? Except hacking. Hacking scenes are just comedy.
tiffanyg 3y ago
Or, she could just note the exposition as part of the fiction and its presentation. Years ago, I used to be critical when it came to that sort of thing, then I realized that I was being critical of something with a clear purpose that's useful. And, that this was just a distraction from the often much more appalling flaws in mass media that can actually have real-world harms. I.e., flaws that give people the wrong idea about how things actually work in ways that can negatively impact their behavior. "Independence Day" provides some exemplars of that, certainly. It is completely outclassed, however, by: https://www.salon.com/2023/02/05/the-core-science-entertainment-exchange/ https://www.salon.com/2023/02/05/the-core-science-entertainm... These days, I see something like two axes, when it comes to flaws in movies (/ productions of any kind). One axis relates to "style" / "taste". For example, some people dislike works of the author Charles Dickens because he tends to spend a lot of time describing settings, preferring the works of someone like Shakespeare, who's typically much more "action-oriented". The other axis relates to factual / logical / structural issues, the worst in my estimation these days being in the "factual" part of this sort of "dimensionally reduced" axis (i.e., you could of course have 3 or more independent axes for what I've written). I may not have much interest in something that has a style I'm not a fan of, but I only have a more realized reaction (something like negative, and I care to some degree) when the flaws are on that second axis. She should try it - heh, save the annoyance for something "truly worthy" of it. :)
lostlogin 3y ago
Medical stuff is often worth avoiding if you have even a passing knowledge. I’m a radiographer, and pretty much useless at anything except driving a magnet, but it still bugs me. Medical shows have ventilators set up wrong, chest x-rays hung up backwards (L on R) and piss poor representations of CPR chest compressions. The main actor can often operate all sorts of specialist equipment, perform surgery and analyse results of complex tests. It’s almost universal.
- EdwardDiego 3y ago
  And of course the classic "oh no they flatlined, use a defib to restart their heart " when they're not in V-fib or V-tach.
- hgomersall 3y ago
  I'd always given them a pass on the chest compressions on the basis that doing it properly would cause serious injury to their fellow actor.
squeaky-clean 3y ago
The youtube genre of "Expert at XYZ reacts to XYZ scenes in TV/Movies" is a guilty pleasure of mine. Especially the medical ones.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  I'm annoyed at them because they are often not as expert as they claim to be. Like "singing teacher reacts to <someone better at singing than they or any of their students will ever be>" kinda thing.
  - squeaky-clean 3y ago
    Oh, I usually watch the ones where there's someone in the show doing chest compressions on a person's neck at 30bpm. Or where Dr. House makes some ridiculous prediction based on evidence that would be inaccurate in the real world. Wired and Vanity have some good videos in the vein of "Forensic scientist reacts to CSI" and etc. GameSpot has a good one reacting to firearms in various video games. There's too many medical ones to mention. I don't think I've found any entertaining coding related ones yet.
  - olddustytrail 3y ago
    You mean like these football coaches who aren't as good at the game as the players they're coaching? The job of a voice coach is to teach you to be a better singer, not to be better than you at singing.

123pie123 3y ago

arrgh - swordfish really got to me

anotherevan 3y ago
The thing that bugged me the absolute most and destroyed by suspension of disbelief completely was Hugh Jackman couldn't type a coherent sentence on a keyboard if his life depended on it (and it did in several scenes). It looked at times like he was just bouncing all ten fingers up and down on the keyboard like a kid just going bang, bang, bang on a piano. Aside: Watched that movie twenty-two years ago and am still obviously triggered by it!

eternityforest 3y ago

Bad tech realism in scifi doesn't bother me, because a lot of it is showing the way tech could be, with a few liberties taken. Generally they show extreme capabilities, similar to what machine learning can do now(Except it's implied that a lone genius coded it, rather that it being a trained model), in a world of highly flexible IoT type devices that can be repurposed to do anything via a pretty easy GUI. I take it as a challenge. Using an app I wrote should feel like being on SeaQuest DSV. If there's a broken connector, can I make a software workaround? If I'm buying a product, what's the state of the art for that area? Except hacking. Hacking scenes are just comedy.

tiffanyg 3y ago

Or, she could just note the exposition as part of the fiction and its presentation. Years ago, I used to be critical when it came to that sort of thing, then I realized that I was being critical of something with a clear purpose that's useful. And, that this was just a distraction from the often much more appalling flaws in mass media that can actually have real-world harms. I.e., flaws that give people the wrong idea about how things actually work in ways that can negatively impact their behavior. "Independence Day" provides some exemplars of that, certainly. It is completely outclassed, however, by: https://www.salon.com/2023/02/05/the-core-science-entertainment-exchange/ https://www.salon.com/2023/02/05/the-core-science-entertainm... These days, I see something like two axes, when it comes to flaws in movies (/ productions of any kind). One axis relates to "style" / "taste". For example, some people dislike works of the author Charles Dickens because he tends to spend a lot of time describing settings, preferring the works of someone like Shakespeare, who's typically much more "action-oriented". The other axis relates to factual / logical / structural issues, the worst in my estimation these days being in the "factual" part of this sort of "dimensionally reduced" axis (i.e., you could of course have 3 or more independent axes for what I've written). I may not have much interest in something that has a style I'm not a fan of, but I only have a more realized reaction (something like negative, and I care to some degree) when the flaws are on that second axis. She should try it - heh, save the annoyance for something "truly worthy" of it. :)

lostlogin 3y ago

Medical stuff is often worth avoiding if you have even a passing knowledge. I’m a radiographer, and pretty much useless at anything except driving a magnet, but it still bugs me. Medical shows have ventilators set up wrong, chest x-rays hung up backwards (L on R) and piss poor representations of CPR chest compressions. The main actor can often operate all sorts of specialist equipment, perform surgery and analyse results of complex tests. It’s almost universal.

EdwardDiego 3y ago
And of course the classic "oh no they flatlined, use a defib to restart their heart " when they're not in V-fib or V-tach.
hgomersall 3y ago
I'd always given them a pass on the chest compressions on the basis that doing it properly would cause serious injury to their fellow actor.

squeaky-clean 3y ago

The youtube genre of "Expert at XYZ reacts to XYZ scenes in TV/Movies" is a guilty pleasure of mine. Especially the medical ones.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
I'm annoyed at them because they are often not as expert as they claim to be. Like "singing teacher reacts to <someone better at singing than they or any of their students will ever be>" kinda thing.
- squeaky-clean 3y ago
  Oh, I usually watch the ones where there's someone in the show doing chest compressions on a person's neck at 30bpm. Or where Dr. House makes some ridiculous prediction based on evidence that would be inaccurate in the real world. Wired and Vanity have some good videos in the vein of "Forensic scientist reacts to CSI" and etc. GameSpot has a good one reacting to firearms in various video games. There's too many medical ones to mention. I don't think I've found any entertaining coding related ones yet.
- olddustytrail 3y ago
  You mean like these football coaches who aren't as good at the game as the players they're coaching? The job of a voice coach is to teach you to be a better singer, not to be better than you at singing.