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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.
The Government knows everything about you and any employee can pull up any info on anyone in seconds
DOGE is working on that
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?
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.
They think programmers are super smart and great at maths.
Programming.
It’s long and actually even longer.
And involves a lot of sobbing
I work in IT so basically everything
So two people typing in one keyboard doesn’t make the hack faster?
I loved that entire scene for all the wrong reasons
Hobby: Video gaming.
Try to determine what kind of video game a movie character is playing by what they’re doing to the controller.
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”
To be fair there are a few Unify router setups in even big corporate settings that use the default passwords, and if you can get into the control panel, you pretty much could disable basically anything in a few keystrokes
I have changed annoying PA music in public venues from my phone, for example
But yeah, movies almost never get IT or secops correct
Of you don’t mind explaining, how? I can only code for maths purposes, but this sounds cool
So out of the box a lot of equipment has a set of standard default passwords, you can usually get them from the company’s own manuals or websites
A lot of people also never bother setting up their own passwords, so a lot of these devices are insecure.
If you are walking around a place, and see they offer free wifi, you can connect and the landing page usually gives you an idea of the manufacturer of their equipment. You look up the manuals and it will tell you the default IP address and login passwords for the management console. Try them. If they work, congrats you are a hacker and technically a criminal (so don’t do this at all ever even in minecraft)
If the site is REALLY STUPID none of these have changed, and from any web browser you can do anything you want to the network. You’ll need to learn how those kinds of devices work because the UIs aren’t designed for ease but you can still navigate them from a phone.
Unify is the most common midgrade equipment used by small to medium sites, and even as part of larger networks for campus style mesh networks but it’s unlikely a team with the skill to set that up would leave default passwords on
Is your job/hobby bank robbing?
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.
Silo also has several falls that should absolutely kill people. One that’s like dozens of feet into the pile that they throw all sorts of sharp metal objects on? Dead.
Free falling off a bridge with just a rope tied around your waist that stops you? At the very least your back is fully broken, but that fall looked long enough that you should just be dead. Full Gwen Stacy.
You act that way because you work in a career that can dismember you if you are careless, so you’ve trained yourself in ways that almost no actor could ever capture, and certainly no screenwriter would ever consider
Or it would be boring to watch them sit around and wait for the thing to cool off
I said it loud too while watching it: “that shit’s over 100°C… and they’re going right in?”
If there is a god to bless people, then people like you deserve it the most.
If you broaden it a little from job/hobby to living in the real setting of a movie, you’ll notice characters going places that make no sense at all. Like if it’s Seattle they might start a boating scene on Lake Union and ends up at Mercer Island, swinging by Alki beach on the way.
I’ve seen Americans start explaining how the geography in Spaghetti Westerns doesn’t make sense, so we in Europe have to go “oh, but you see, the film doesn’t take place in real America, it takes place in America of myth and legend.”
As a kid watching Miami Vice, except for a few external shots I was like “Umm… that’s not miami…”
And the few shots that were kind of just had Sonny and Rico walk-talking past buildings that were like eight blocks apart from each other in the same conversation
I have not unlocked a single chasity belt, it doesnt even come up as a service they might need.
About anything to do with computers. Anything.
Even worse the Hollywood Effect makes the stuff that I do that’s ACTUALLY impressive look like routine.
Fuckers will literally clap if I unjam their printer but manually recalculate a CRC header for a mission critical live database without a second of downtime and they’re like ‘Ok but isn’t that your job?’
BITCH LESS THAN 5 PEOPLE IN THE STATE CAN DO THIS
But you just typed in some numbers
BITCH I CANNOT EXPLAIN IN UNDER FOUR HOURS HOW TO FIGURE OUT THE RIGHT NUMBERS TO USE
The more complex the task, the less fucking impressed the proles are.
It angers me even more than normal that this is so fucking true
import crc
import crc
Ok, so how do you calculate the correct value when the database keeps dumping new arbitrary length records at roughly 10 per second? And figure it out quick because once that record hits finalization in roughly four minutes, it’s going to puke out a record dump that contains every test done since the database was stood up a decade ago and there isn’t enough HD space in the cluster for even half of it.
Three minutes now, do you have that number? Two minutes fifty seconds…
Nods and waves arms widely - the computers.
Which ones? All of them.
If any of the detectives from Law and Order come in to my bar I absolutely will not remember that random patron from five days ago.
I have facial blindness so I’d be a cops worst nightmare as a witness. Yeah I know the guy left literally 3 minutes ago but I could not pick him out of a lineup.
Retail workers spending the day doing shenanigans while barely doing any work, I’d kill for time to do some stupid time wasting shit.
Sorry I can’t join your impromptu wedding for two workers whose name I forgot.
LOL or for that matter fictional characters doing ANY job. It’s like they just screw around all day having wacky misadventures and somehow the company stays in business.
Right? I dunno how it was back in the old days but Clerks is maybe the worst representation of modern service workers I’ve ever seen. I’ve got a “hard labor” job and work about 1/4th as hard doing that than I ever did in service when I was younger
Superstore is the worst representation of retail work, I think they did about a week’s worth of work max during the entire series.
One of the better ones is a British show called Trolled, they at least show them doing some form of actual retail work, still shenanigans, but they never leave the store to do them besides one or 2 episodes, plus it’s a damn good comedy.
TL:DR: Everything? Like, literally everything.
If it’s about driving? They’re looking everywhere except the road in front of them
Computers? It’s cringe, all I will say
Flying? Not even close
Brushing teeth? Put some tooth paste FFS!
Sex, perhaps? As bad as porn videos are at showing realistic sex situations, movies and especially TV shows are typically way worse with all the requirements to not accidentally show a nipple, omg!
Martial arts and fighting? The worst offenders. After twenty punches to the chest that will have broken half of the ribs, the protagonists now suddenly finds the strength in thinking about keeping his little girl safe and now he beats up 20 guys with those broken ribs
Being punched unconscious or getting some chloroform and they wake up the next day? Lolololollll. Humans are notoriously hard to keep them “out” without killing them, it’s why anesthetists are paid so well, it’s a very complicated job. When you’re out from an impact to the head, you need medical attention, you likely have a minor amount of brain damage. If you’re out for more than ten seconds, it’s brain damage for sure. If you’re out for over a minute, you’re likely not waking up with full abilities, you’re likely going to be a vegetable at best
Okay, doctors then? Saving a patient’s life with the buzzer? Yeah no. When the heart stops, that defibrillator won’t make it “go” again, the defib actually stops it in case of heart rithm problems. Also, CPR outside a hospital will result in death for about 90% of the cases, give or take, and Har % goes up by another 2 after 3 weeks later. The tiny % that does survive likely will have issues ranging from benign to being a benign vegetable.
Hollywood is a facsimile of reality that now we are being punished for not conforming to, despite it being illusion
Modern western culture worships image over substance, and Hollywood is 100% image
+ All of physics. Especially anything involving characters falling, lasers, explosions, firearms, and any physics in space (sound, motion, temperature, black holes).
Not that it’s known physics, but time travel falls into this category too. Not the time travel itself, that’s just suspension of disbelief, but having time travel mechanics be internally consistent. It’s difficult to do well.
It took me getting obsessed with Kerbal Space Program to figure out my understanding of orbital physics was absolutely ridiculously bad
“What do you mean you have to go sideways to go up?!”
Have you watched The Expanse? I’ve seen some physicists talk it up for realism. At least as real as a show like that can be.
Yeah, I love that show. They do a really good job staying grounded in real physics when they’re not in the fiction side of sci-fi. IMO, their space mechanics are unmatched in sci-fi.
I love lots of franchises that also do it poorly, but I’m always pleased when they go the extra mile.
I think you really nailed it to the wall for all to see!
