The Plumber Problem

Like, what else about a person is of any use to machines with that kind of power?

> In Speed 2, a plot point involves a laden oil tanker about to collide explosively. My wife, native to a major oil port city, couldn’t follow the plot because she could tell the tanker was empty just by looking at it, so she didn’t understand why everyone was saying it would explode.

Wait a minute. Full oil tanks don't explode, but empty oil tanks full of hydrocarbon vapor do.

Pretty much anything to do with physics, especially in sci-fi/space stories. Now I see everything as a typical human emotional drama with a science/space backdrop. Actual sci-fi where the plot directly ties into it is rare, and good ones rarer. It was actually better when sci-fi was niche and what there was, was trying to be good.

Even worse for me these days than this plumbers effect is bad acting. Once my mind gets into the reality of actors doing a job, getting this filmed, and played for me, it's hard to get back into the storyline even if it might be great, like trying to return to a dream when fully woken.

Years ago, I used to be critical when it came to that sort of thing, then I realized that I was being critical of something with a clear purpose that's useful. And, that this was just a distraction from the often much more appalling flaws in mass media that can actually have real-world harms. I.e., flaws that give people the wrong idea about how things actually work in ways that can negatively impact their behavior.

"Independence Day" provides some exemplars of that, certainly. It is completely outclassed, however, by: https://www.salon.com/2023/02/05/the-core-science-entertainm...

These days, I see something like two axes, when it comes to flaws in movies (/ productions of any kind). One axis relates to "style" / "taste". For example, some people dislike works of the author Charles Dickens because he tends to spend a lot of time describing settings, preferring the works of someone like Shakespeare, who's typically much more "action-oriented". The other axis relates to factual / logical / structural issues, the worst in my estimation these days being in the "factual" part of this sort of "dimensionally reduced" axis (i.e., you could of course have 3 or more independent axes for what I've written).

I may not have much interest in something that has a style I'm not a fan of, but I only have a more realized reaction (something like negative, and I care to some degree) when the flaws are on that second axis.

She should try it - heh, save the annoyance for something "truly worthy" of it. :)

The show isn't aimed at people they're caricaturing. And it was apparently tremendously successful, so whatever they're doing, they're doing it right.