Stupidly wrong but persistent tropes in books, plays, comics, movies and TV

[LDoBe]

Shooting from the hip is a waste of bullets. And running and gunning is the easiest way to miss your target every single time.

[Skeptic]

@LDoBe

Knockout gas. All those Hardy Boys books full of knockout gas. Which just doesn’t exist. And when they try to fudge some up IRL they end up killing a whole theater full of people.

And not just gas, all anesthesia is dose sensitive. Including tranq darts and “knockout drops”.

Wrestling midgets killed by fake hookers

[anon33466019]

@popobawa4u

Not unlike people composing music in even meters and twelve-tone scales, it is so predictable and limiting, so why does nearly everyone do it?

Three serious points:

First, we don’t.

Second, scales are approximations for natural phenomena, I.e. overtones.

Third, the ratio between seconds, thirds, fourth, etc. are largely the same in the most widely used diatonic and pentatonic scales, reinforcing the notion that natural ratios are generally more accessible than arbitrary microtones.

[LDoBe]

It’s everything I can do not to start in with size-based jokes.

[Skeptic]

@LDoBe

Shooting from the hip is a waste of bullets.

Well, gonna slightly disagree there. Generally true, and I really tire of seeing long guns shot from the waist in movies, but with training and at short range it is possible to be lethal shooting from the waist thanks to proprioception.

[LDoBe]

It’s still a terrible idea. You should always know exactly where you gun is pointing because it should only point at stuff you’re okay killing/destroying.

[popobawa4u]

@Skeptic

fake prostitutes

Sincerity will cost you extra!

[Wanderfound]

@William_George

u can arrow/ shield/ repulsor/ Hulk punch/ Mjolnir someone into a prison sentence. This is why no one wants to play superh

…which is why the only semi-realistic auperhero show of the modern era is Dexter.

[MikeTheBard]

Try Indian music. Western music has 12 notes, they have 24- And where we have 7 modes, they have roughly 30.

[renke]

@nimelennar

Bad villains.

And it’s counterpart, the Always Good Guy. Characters with only one trait are often shallow and not very interesting.

High point of this are Good vs Evil storylines, with an unquestionable and crystal clear gap between the two (only) sides.

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unrelated:

@Skeptic

metalalurgy

I love this typo. This word needs to be added to the dictionary, we only need a meaning.

[crashproof]

I don’t read superhero comics much, but it always amused me in games like City of Heroes and Champions Online that I was “apprehending” criminals with fire, machine guns, lasers, swords, poison gas etc.

I’ve been watching Yamato 2199 and am about halfway through, and there isn’t an episode where I don’t think “spaceships/lasers/physics/etc. don’t work that way.”

[nimelennar]

@gellfex

Some Space Opera shows gave lip service to “translator medallions” or such, but most simply have everyone in the galaxy speaking perfect english. SG-1 gave lip service to the language problem at first, then said fuckit, everyone speaks english, but all the written stuff is in them foreign tongues that the good Dr Jackson has to translate.

I don’t mind that so much, for narrative convenience, but when they acknowledge that they’re not speaking English, and then make puns that would only work in English.

For instance, let’s go back to Artemis Fowl.

The first few chapters of the first few books is Artemis teaching himself to read and speak Gnommish. Then they introduce the main character from the Fairy side, and she’s a member of the Lower Elements Police (LEP) Recon team.

Leaving aside the sheer impossibility of the words in Gnommish being pronounced so similar to English that the pun works (or even that the three words in Gnommish starting with the right letter that just the acronym part of the pun works), it completely discards the history and tradition of the Irish Gaelic word leipreachán. Not only is it saying that English dominates over the fairies, but it’s saying that the rest of the current and historically spoken languages on Earth are unimportant.

Gah.

[andy_hilmer]

Root word: lalurge. Still needs a meaning.

[nimelennar]

@andy_hilmer

Root word: lalurge. Still needs a meaning.

[Snowlark]

CPR.

• Ineffective in ~80% of cases
• If you’re doing it right, you’ll likely fracture the person’s rib cage. If the person is 60 or older, you will definitely fracture their rib cage.
• Recovery time from successful CPR resuscitation is (roughly speaking) logarithmic to elapsed time since flatlining (read: permanent brain injury begins to occur after 1-2 minutes of insufficient oxygen to the brain; by four minutes anyone surviving a Code Blue will likely be facing a lifetime of severe cognitive impairment)
• tl;dr — all those movie scenes showing a resuscitated person recovering quickly afterwards are bullshit.

[nimelennar]

Related: Defibrillation
To know what a defibrillator does, you first have to know what fibrillation is.
So, a heart working properly sucks the blood into the atria, the atria shoves that blood into the ventricles (lub), and then the ventricles send that blood out to the rest of the body (dub). So, a normal heartbeat is lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub, etc.
A fibrillating heartbeat is when that sequence is disturbed - the heart is still beating, but the timing is off: dub-lub or lduubb or lub-lub-dub. So everything still works, but because it’s not timed correctly, the blood isn’t being pumped where it needs to go.
A tachycardic heartbeat is when the heart is beating so fast that it can’t refill: lbdb-lbdb-lbdb-lbdb. So, again, the heart is still beating, but not properly.

Most people thing that what a defibrillator does is like jump-starting a car battery: there’s not enough power for the heart to beat, so you’re giving it a jolt. This couldn’t be farther from the truth.

A better analogy would be a computer where the CPU is caught in an infinite loop and can’t actually process anything important. Like pressing the reset button, the shock from a defibrillator is a power down — it stops the heart. The autonomic nervous system then realizes “Hey, the heart is stopped” and sends a signal to get it going again, and hopefully… lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub… a normal rhythm is re-established.

An asystole or flatline is what you see in the movies or TV shows (beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep), and that means that the heart has stopped. A defibrillator can’t do shit for that. Its job is to stop an abnormal rhythm so that the heart can be restarted with a normal rhythm; if the heart is already stopped, there’s not much it can do.

That’s not to say that there’s nothing that can be done if the heart is stopped: as @Snowlark says, CPR can be (but isn’t always) effective, and if you get to a hospital quickly enough (before brain death), they have techniques that can start a stopped heart.

But all of those scenes that you see: beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep “Clear!” *zzsst* beep, beep, beep… so much BS.

[anon33466019]

I apologize, I am feeling… Argumentative.

C flat is not the same as B. G# is not the same in a C augmented chord as compared to a G# in an E major chord. And because of the peculiarities of our ears, A55 and A1760 don’t sound in tune with each other even though they mathematically should be.

So back to my very first bullet point, western music doesn’t use a strict chromatic scale by any stretch of the imagination.

[anon26304152]

So I was watching Agents of Shield on NetFlix this last weekend, and Big Evil Guy demands that the Immoral mad scientist he’d enlisted fix the over-ride on the missile the good guys had managed to pull off.

And he was all stammering that he was a doctor not a computer genius but when threatened with death relented to doing what he could…

So he started to Read The Manual. Still couldn’t fix it, but it was nice to see at least one “Supra-Genius” admit they couldn’t fix something and then do something that a reasonably intelligent person out of their element would do. Look it up.

[howaboutthis]

Think about all '70s TV shows where the good guy was hit, at least once, on the back of the head with a pistol.

In the real world, Mannix and Jim Rockford would have had permanent brain damage, if they survived at all.

[howaboutthis]

Or poison gas that is always visible, or hisses as it comes out of the vent.

I knew The Phantom Menace was going to be a turkey as soon as I saw the poison gas.