I watched the pilot of the new show Scorpion today. It reminded me a lot of Die Hard 2, and many other TV shows and movies to be honest. You see, I know a lot about how aircraft work. I know a hell of a lot about the operational technical and physical side of aviation, and it is sad that I cannot watch a TV show that surrounds this industry without a hole big enough to fly an A380 through.

The fact is that almost ever 5 minutes (that is me being generous, it was actually every time aircraft or anything aviation-related was mentioned which, considering that the show surrounded an impending aviation disaster, was very, very often) I would cringe at the impossibility of the situation they are in, and get annoyed at the incredibly simple solutions that are obvious to an idiot, even were the event not already covered in standard aviation law and training (in this case, standard loss of comms procedures would have nullified the threat, rather than what the show suggested: that the pilots would just fly around in a circle until the 56 planes ran out of fuel... and even if it weren't there were many methods of contacting the planes and, at one point, they drove along an obviously hugely long runway underneath a plane to download info from it in some sort of nonsense scene, instead of just landing the plan at said runway).

Urgh, Die Hard 2 was just as bad. So are most movies and shows about planes and aviation. I cannot watch them and enjoy them. It's the same with news reporters... I remember reading an article not long ago about the terrifying ordeal of an aircraft plummeting out of the sky at an horrific 500ft per minute... awful reporting... just awful. Reading it made me embarrassed for the author of it.

Is there anything that you just know too much about, so that now you cannot watch fiction about it without picking up every flaw in the premise and losing enjoyment because of it, and that reading news reports or hearing lamen discussing it just makes you cringe?

I try to stay away from spoilers as much as possible. I've read a few GoT spoilers, but they aren't too bad. I did read a pretty bad The Walking Dead spoiler from the comics though.

I'm not at a point with anything yet though that I can't enjoy it.

That's pretty much me and anything to do with the military and or military history. Whether it be a television show or a film I can always find some inconsistency in it, I find this entertaining at times but mostly annoying as you can tell in some parts that they did no research at all before they made it. So I tend to stay away from shows like that because I spend more time picking it apart then I do enjoying it. My fiance used to hate watching anything with me because I would pick it apart all the time and she would be like "What? You can't just chalk it off as being a film?" and I would always reply with "A film sure, a documentary hell no!"

I generally don't pay too much attention to stuff like that, but whenever I watch csi style shows or medicine related shows... the amount of bs they say when they get medical is incredible. And criminal shows that pull out an exact location of a place using some impossible 3D projectioning on a barely visible silhouette on the bottom of the window, or when some hot, buxom, barely 20 years old girl licks some crap and knows all 200 substances that mentioned crap contains. It's also kinda funny how they send 2 casually dressed people with eagle visions to a crime scene instead of an actual forensic team.

Thought this is not something that I "know too much about", it's something that I assume majority of people cringe over.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention. Ever since I started modding stuff games kinda lost a bit of magic for me. Now I don't imagine "what could be behind that wall" or "who knows what's in the rest of that castle". Now I've been in the void beyond. I also notice mesh and texture problems much easier now.

When three men manage to get 15 shots off in 20 seconds when armed with 18th century flintlocks...

And when Bethesda horribly underestimates the size of sails needed to move those enormous ships of theirs in Skyrim. The little knarrs are pushing it, and those huge Noah's ark things and the emperor's ship are way too wide and have insufficient sails to move them.

Yeah, I think they're called mess ups in the movie that people catch. I don't think you're the only one who see's these things though. There are a lot of bad movies and tv in general that I stay away from.

Oh yeah, I know that feeling.

I have an incredible suspense of knowledge, or whatever one might call it. I just refuse to acknowledge my knowledge, as it were, to enjoy to film (games, series).

But it is pretty astounding that I as a average joe seems to know more about just everything than these professionals put out. They got historical advisers they plainly ignore. Technical advisers they override and military know how they just fling out the window.

Okay, I might not be average as I have a broad interest in technical and historical stuff. Most of what I know, I would say, was learned outside of university. University studies might have helped hone the critical thinking a bit but overall it is my interest in things that have taught me the most.

Anyway, I can enjoy stuff even though it is extremely silly but I do wish the producers and writers would at least try to research stuff a bit more.

Yep.

I can't watch Star Trek and similar without grumbling about the physics. (I'm not a physicist, but I read a lot about the conceptual side of things a while ago, so I know that Star Trek Voyager's neutrino bubble would a. Not make a wormhole and b. Not do anything to the antimatter).

Pretty much this.

-especially when they amp up firearm reports or turn silencer shots into whispers. also, no one ever swaps out their mags of normal ammo for sub-sonics when they attach a silencer. Then there's hand grenade explosions where I just sit back and think 'Wow.. I sure could've used a few of those mininukes back in the day...'

Technology. It's extremely rare for a film or TV show to portray technology (computing, in particular) in a way that is even remotely close to reality. It happens every once in a while (and I appreciate it), but for the most part the writers are just pulling nonsense out of their butts.

It doesn't bother me too much, but I have to work to suspend disbelief. One aspect that I actually enjoy is the wacky sound effects that computers make in TV shows and movies. Do any real-life computers or computing devices actually make all those bleeps and blorps while you're using them? No, never, but they sure are funny. It's like every sound engineer is using the same 8-track tape of stock "Computer Noises" that the studio has had sitting around since the '70s.

I'm a big Tolkein fan, so I can't watch the new Hobbit movies without cringing every time they either bugger up the story or shove in Orlando Bloom's stupid overly-CGI face. I saw the original LOTR films before reading the books, so I weirdly dont have the same issue there, but the Hobbit....yeesh.

Also as a History teacher I have trouble enjoying shows like Spartacus that are historically-based but go so far off the actual history they may as well be set in Azeroth.

In science fiction, you've got "hard science" and "soft science" stories - I think those terms could apply to other genres as well, really. Basically, there's different standards of realism depending on the story you're trying to tell. As "soft" science fiction, it doesn't matter in Firefly what a compression coil is or how the spaceships work. Those are just set pieces that are going to be used as needed to tell the story. But if you're reading an Arthur C. Clarke story and a spaceship breaks down, he's probably written the narrative around figuring out what would happen when a specific type of ship broke down and what you would need to do to fix it.

As an example, last season in Castle they introduced a new character on the NYPD that's a computer expert. Sometimes when they need a photo enlarged or enhanced they go to her, and sometimes they don't. But every time she opens a new window or does anything, it sounds like she has to manually write the program to do that. In reality if you're making a picture bigger and enhancing someone's face chances are you're using a mouse to move a bunch of sliders around. And you don't need to hit 20 different keys to basically alt-tab.

I know that's not how it works in reality. The producers know that's not how it works in reality even if they don't know what the real process would be exactly.

But it's a more active action to type than to scroll around with a mouse. And there's more characterization involved with someone typing a bunch of stuff on a keyboard really quickly ("wow, they must really be good at computers to type that quick") than watching someone use a mouse. We all know the actress is really just hitting random keys really quickly and they're even adding the sound effects later anyway. But it's a detail that's been changed and dramatized to convey more meaning and information.

But the show isn't about the process of enlarging photos to solve crimes or the complications that might arise from that. It's about a crime novelist helping the homicide team solve murders. So long as that aspect is internally consistent then everything else is ancillary details, and I feel fall into a different standard of "realism."

If they made a show called "enhancing photos with that girl who stands at her computer terminal" then I'd expect a different degree of realism and detail with those aspects. As it is in the show now, she's mostly there to review and collate the plot so far for the audience's benefit ("hey guys, we're moving onto act 2 - here's the section of the mystery we're going to solve now,") and say things like "metadata" every once in a while.

Ah this is an interesting topic.

There's several things like that where it makes certain things difficult to watch, but I seriously can't think of them right now and it's kind of annoying me.

The one I can think of is in movies, or shows especially, where people are firing handguns or pistols from a far distance and their getting head shots. I've seen this a lot in zombie movies and shows, Walking Dead certainly being one of them. Handguns are so much more inaccurate than they're portrayed.

Yes! I definitely agree with you on historically based films. I can't remember the name of the movie but it was one based around the crusades and a friend of mine asked me if that's how it all happened. I was just thinking wow, people are leaving this movie assuming it's an entirely correct depiction after seeing "based on true events" at the beginning.

When an actor goes completely ape-[poop] on a controller because they are srs gaemurs.

Or hackers typing at lightning speed like a five year old high on pixie sticks.

Dare I mention "The Eagle" and "Centurion" both of which are fairly new military action films based around the 9th Roman Legion in Britain. I wouldn't even call them "historical" it shames me that people left the theatres going "Wow thats really how that went down." I contradicted those films from start to finish, but they were good action romps.