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 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 of newer games.

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 up. 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

NCIS scenes?

When the computer hacker character clicks 8 keystrokes and says, “I’m in!”

Quiet conversations on airplanes and dance floors as if there’s no background noise.

Two people draw guns in each other’s faces point blank but nobody fires. Instead they have a tense conversation.

Talkin’ to you, Malcolm Reynolds and Saffron (or Yolanda or Bridget or whatever).

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.

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.

The horror movie character who searches a scary room by walking in and immediately looking intently up at the ceiling, while slowly turning around until he ends up backing into the dangerous thing he somehow didn’t notice.

Enhance!