We almost never uncover accursed tomes or massive government conspiracies.
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this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
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Aside from Mr. Robot, almost every show that features software or computers completely butchers the details. My favorite offender? Mythic Quest. The main cast supposedly runs a massive MMORPG, yet their day-to-day activities have almost nothing to do with how game development or even basic software work actually functions.
It is like if ER was about hospital staff moving random boxes labeled "coils" back and forth while claiming to perform life-saving surgery. That is how far off it feels.
What really gets me is that Mr. Robot proved it is possible to do it right. If you treat the subject matter with respect, you can absolutely make something compelling and realistic. But since it is all just "nerd stuff" to most writers, and none of them are C++ goblins, we get tech scenes written by people who probably think JSON is a fitness drink.
Ever see the famous NCIS episode where two of them share one keyboard to fend off a super hacker?
No, that one was actually pretty spot on. My uncle works at Nintendo and he told me it's pretty similar there.
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Hobby: Telescopes upside-down or back-to-front, pointed through windows, with aperture caps on, without eyepieces, under heavy light pollution and glare, magically show Hubble-level images of something only visible from the opposite hemisphere.
Job: The Government knows everything about you and any employee can pull up any info on anyone in seconds. Ffs we can't even get two departments to cooperate on a common database format.
Also the images they show are only possible with a camera and a slow shutter and image processing; what you see through the eyepiece is completely different and usually just a bluish smudge.
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I used to work in organ transplants, and like literally everything related to organ transplants in film or tv is entirely wrong. Every medical drama, even the ones that pride themselves on realism, always try to make transplants and donation more dramatic, which is absurd when you consider how dramatic the reality actually is.
Oooh. I love medical dramas, I seem to love to ruin them for myself by finding out what's real and what's not. That said I desperately want to know the details behind a real organ transplant, now that you've mentioned it in that way. Are you able to elaborate?
Sure, I can share non-confidential stuff of course.
Like one thing tv and movies always get wrong is how much information is shared about who gets what. Donor families wait years to send or receive anonymous communications through the org, because both parties need to approve even the anonymous letters. If both sides are interested after a few more years, they might be able to eventually meet. I don't remember the recommended waiting periods off the top of my head, but it was exceptionally rare for donor families to ever meet a recipient.
Another thing everyone gets wrong is who is in charge of care and when. You'd never have the same doctor treating the patient, declaring them brain dead, and then recovering and transplanting the organs. I understand tv shows can't have hundreds of actors, but any hospital will have a team of dedicated transplant surgeons, and there will be dozens of transplant hospitals involved in the organ allocation. Having one small group of people involved in both the care and the transplant is like having the farmer who grows corn also be the grocer who sells it, the chef who cooks it, and the busser who takes away your dishes. Those people barely communicate if they even know each other at all. They certainly aren't getting involved in each of the others' jobs.
Unfortunately that one spills into the real world. People will say "don't put Organ Donor on your license, or they won't try to save you." If you just think about that for even a moment, you realize how absurd it is.
There's plenty more, but those are the ones that tend to pop up every time.
From the emergency medicine perspective on that last bit....we don't care if you have a DNR somewhere on file. If you show up in cardiac arrest and someone isn't shoving an official POLST into our hands, we're running the code. We'd rather someone try (and fail) to sue for malpractice for saving them than accidentally let someone die that didn't want to.
Exactly, and that's your job. Like, people who think that doctors will murder them for organs also work at a job where they won't hold the elevator for anyone pushing a mail cart. How long would you keep a job where you intentionally suck at it to help someone else do their job?
I work at a bank. Every bank heist scene makes me fucking cringe lmao. Why would only one person know the code to something??? Why are safety deposit boxes treated as some super special thing? Daredevil just pissed me off with this so much lol
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Hobby 1: Ballroom dancing
It is surprisingly difficult to get into a good dance position, especially for the standard (waltz, tango, foxtrot, quickstep, Viennese waltz) dances. Two actors walk up to each other and it's apparent even before they touch that they have no idea WTF they are doing: they aren't even standing up correctly.
Hobby 2: Chess
Smart guy walks over and absolutely beats the pants off of anyone else playing like 30 seconds after they get taught the rules or from glancing over the shoulder of someone else playing the game. It's all "aha! Mate in 4!".
No way dude. It is way, way not that easy. There's "good at chess" and there's "GOOD at chess". Unless you are part of a very large club or are taking lessons from someone at or above the master level, you probably don't know anybody in the second category. Dr. House is not going to blindfold beat anyone like that.
My favorite version of the chess one is from the Simpsons when the teachers at the school go on strike. Bart now has a ton of time on his hands and ends up playing chess against 3 people at the same time in the park. A bystander comments on how smart he must be right before all 3 opponents checkmate him. https://youtu.be/zLcAu1VuP0w
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it's neither a hobby or a job But the trope that a very complicated, very dangerous situation can be solved by just one person and a gun.
It's unfortunately so ingrained into the Hollywood story lines that people, especially in the US, think that that's reality.
The idea of the rugged individual has destroyed the idea of societal support to the point that some people are actually terrified to ask for help in anyway.
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Click click clickety-click... I'm in! Click click click... okay, I've hacked the corporate security system and unlocked all the doors, click click... here's the floor plan.
Can you disable the cameras?
Hang on... click click... okay you're good.
The floor plan thing, in particular. Every time I change jobs, I search the company intranet for a layout so I can find my way around. The amount of hours I've wasted, to no avail...
And somehow those plans always open up in some 3D render that shows everything like the HVAC pathways.
Imagine the character saying, hang on I gotta spend the next 3 hours trying to convert this into a modern format, post all my research to reddit begging for help, ultimately give up, manually replot everything and in 19 months finally get a reddit reply that says "solved it"
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there's a scene in "Silo" where a character needs to repair a massive steam-powered turbine that is off-balance, scraping at the housing, and heading towards collapse. all fine and we'll, it's sci-fi, so whatever, they can make magic quick fixes to move the plot along.
what really bugged me, for some reason, is how characters started touching the internal components immediately after it powers down - I have to wait for significantly smaller motors to cool off before handling them, especially if they're rotating poorly with a bad bearing, and burning from friction.
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