Mexican maids

French .

Happy endings in Christmas films.

That Hitchcock thing. Which oh so many directors seem to insist on doing.

Sad thing is none of them do a good job on the Hitchcock thing

Villains with English accents.

I mean they're not all evil, once you get to know them.

but before you know them... Sweet Jesus!

Yeah, love it how the entire economy and fauna changes over 24 hours. Wolf forest? Oh, we stopped calling it that last knight, there are no wolves there anymore. There's now some 50 minotaurs running around the city. And that guy asking you to hand him 20 gold, and he's in full glass armor. Love that.

There's also the edge of the map thing in non-leveled RPGs, where everyone in the middle of the map are wimps, and every kitty near the edge of the map launches nuclear warheads from it's pooper.

Or when you can see the exit from the level but have to take a much longer detour because the hall is blocked by 2 lazily placed rocks, and 3 planks, which are impossible to put aside, even if your character has, I dunno, a rocket launcher on his back. I love "locket" doors even more, especially when you can conveniently break some other locked doors if the game needs it.

I also hate the deus ex machina saves (hint hint, a dragon kills a bunch of people that were JUST about to cut off the protagonist's head off). Speaking of which, I wonder if it ever occurred to Bethesda's writers that Alduin basically killed himself, the fool. The impatient idiot just had to fly in some 10 seconds later. Ooooh, says Bethesda fan boy, but that's not the exact moment Akatosh chose the dragonborn, if that person died, Akatosh would just choose another person. Cool, another chosen one + deus ex machina package.

Also love it when the world is saved by a group of most unlikely people of all. An ancient being came to bring chaos and destruction upon the world. Of course, all the nuclear power and armies of trained soldiers from all over the world couldn't hurt it one bit. But you bet you know who can! A whiny emo kid, kinky chick that usually has her eye colours messed up in some way, an annoying middle-aged man who throws 5 years old level jokes, a person with a hairstyle worthy of a death penalty, and a silent domina. And none of the use guns. I mean, why not choose something like a beach ball, that makes sense. Oh, and that non-human thing whose father probably banged some unearthly animal that gave birth to it. Actually, usually turns out to be the best character.

While I'm at jrpgs and FFs, said last boss can't be hurt by massive energy weapons and hordes of master wizards, but earlier mentioned kinky girl tears his soul apart and annihilates the memories of it's family tree from history of the setting, with a cute cat claw attack, possibly even yelling "yaaaay" while doing it. Cause you know, girls just wanna have fun.

Lv1 enemies are humongous rats.

I can't pull that lewer because it's handle is missing. I think someone ripped it off and placed it in a random vase just to [censored] with me.

"I know money is hard to come by..." *keeps 10 golden pieces, along with some old cloth and rotten vegetables in a barrel he threw out in the street*

Magical swords of great power found in sewers.

Bosses who have ONE weakness. Of course, that one weakness also happens to be completely uncovered, because those bosses secretly have sixual attraction to pain or something.

That one item that dooms the world. So people decide to break it apart and split it's pieces, and send them to the 4 sides of the world, like a temple or something. Instead of grinding it to dust and tossing the dust into the sea, but then, that wouldn't be convenient for the protagonist and the antagonist to find.

I could go on all day. Don't mistake this for hatred. I love both Final Fantasy and Elder Scrolls, which are games I made fun of the most. You gotta know something well to mock it.

Ninja'd by several days.

"Computer hacking" involves frantically mashing keys on a keyboard with a determined expression on the hacker's face. All computers constantly make the same bizarre pvssyring and beeping sounds that movie computers have made since the 1970s...because otherwise the audience doesn't know that the computer is "doing something," I guess.

Don't forget the user interface..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFUlAQZB9Ng

Oh, this really gets on my nerves. And it's not just hacking either. Anytime an actor does anything with a computer it has to involve lots of loud, furious typing. I don't recall seeing any actor ever use a mouse. It's as though Hollywood believes we are all still using late-70's computer technology.

Oh man, this one a thousand times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn_(file_manager)#/media/File:Fsn.png! Probably the most frightening part of that movie.

I actually had one of those for a while (I mean an Indy, the cheap ones!) Then I loaned it to a friend and she never returned it.

That one's hilarious, although the mouse thing is totally on the spot. Two friends of mine who do coding are 10 times faster than me at navigating through google chrome, and they barely touch the mouse at all, it's all keyboard shortcuts.

I remember a regular online acquaintance used to rant about "the user interface device from hell" whenever provoked, provocation being any mention at all of the mouse. She is an old PDP-10 kernel developer, though.

Personally, my main use of windowing systems is to just have lots of terminals open: my concession to modernity is that I finally use full-screen applications, but I find that vi edits much more quickly and easily than any fancy graphical editor and Alpine is still a better email system than any newfangled GUI thing I've seen to date.

The dead/absent spouse, father, mother thing. Examples: The Partridge Family, Fallout 3, The Ghost and Mrs Muir, ET,The Harry Potter franchise, Star Trek, Mad Men,(There are at least four fathers and a couple of mothers.) A surprising number of 1960's Disney films and there are many more.

Why?

Was it away of saving production costs? Was it propaganda? Was it away of allowing an actress to carry a film or series in less

liberated times?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msX4oAXpvUE

"Keep 'em on the line for at least three minutes and we'll be able to run a trace on them"

So. Much. Stupid.

I'm sure that's true. But I'm not talking about characters who are professional software programmers. Anybody, anywhere, at any time, who ever uses a computer in a movie uses only the keyboard. Teenagers surfing the web on a laptop in a bedroom, parents sending baby photos to grandparents, a rural sheriff checking a criminal database...all use the keyboard. That is what I'm talking about.

A quick and easy way of getting people emotionally invested in the characters and story by engaging their sympathies perhaps?

I'm a character that's a professional software programmer, and I use the mouse. Granted, I do use a lot of hotkeys as well, and I automate a lot of things with scripts run from a command-line, but almost never touching a mouse is pretty unrealistic. Heck, it's even inefficient depending on what one is doing at the time.

Well, laptops have touchpads. But you're right, basically everyone, even if slowly, only hit the keys, and everything is magically found in mere seconds. I only recently started seeing people using mouses in movies.

It's a quick way of adding a meaningful agenda to the main character, if he'd kill a random mobster that would be insane and senseless..If that mobster killed his mom he then has a good reason for murdering him.

This is borderline cancer causing. Actually, scrap the borderline part. Then again, CSI/NCSI/other ciminalistic shows called after abbreviations were always in-your-face unrealistic when it comes to how technology, law, and medicine work.

Well, laptops have touchpads. But you're right, basically everyone, even if slowly, only hit the keys, and everything is magically found in mere seconds. I only recently started seeing people using mouses in movies.

One of the cheap ones. What, was it only 10 grand? I used to lust for SGIs and was really excited when they released the cheap workstations, but they were still out of my price range.

Emacs, vi, and similar are far superior once you've learned them, but require too much effort to learn for the average person. And I wholly agree on the email thing, too. I stuck with pine/tin or one of the more modern variants for years, but was eventually forced into the world of Exchange and Outlook at work and switched to gmail for personal use. Not really a step forward, and I think dealing with mail was faster from the older tools.

The OS makes a difference, too, for CLI stuff. There's something about being in a *NIX that makes command line usage comfortable. I've tried using vi and x emacs on windows and I always end up uninstalling them (or just opening multiple shells on another system via putty). There's something off with a command line workflow in windows.

You must be familiar with Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Command Line", right?

We had a bunch of them at work that they decided to scrap, so I offered to scrap mine by taking it home with me. Which was entertaining on public transport from central London with that big fat monitor.


I must admit the learning curve of vi in particular caused a certain amount of impolite grumbling to emanate from my general direction, and I never did get the hang of emacs: I think my fingers just couldn't handle the escape-meta-alt-control-shift key combinations. And Unix's assorted CLIs took me a while to warm to since I was more fangirly about VMS at the time, but there's no going back now. Cygwin in Windows suffices to make it tolerable.

I'm not familiar with Stephenson's thing, but now you've mentioned it I guess I should do something about that!

Its quiet out there..........................................

Too quiet........................