… computers can’t do that.
i’m not an idiot. i have a pretty good idea about how computers work.
computers use mice. computers require you to double click on things. computers have windows and menus. computers use internet browsers.
why can’t your movie computers stop assuming i’ve never used a computer before, and just show one that works normally, for god’s sake?
when actor “a” needs to show actor “b” a video of a rotating 3d shark tooth to illustrate the severity of the situation they are currently in, why can’t actor “a” just minimize his or her current window and double click on a .mov file and watch the tooth spin around in a quicktime window? why do you have to have actor “a” ignore his or her mouse, and instead type about 200 seemingly random characters, magically resulting in the entire screen filling up with with the movie, which may or may not be interactive through more typing?
also, movies, i’m pretty sure it’s harder to “hack” into things than that.
ugh, it boils my blood.
when i get to thinking about the preposterous things that computers do in movies, a few examples pop into my head right away.
jurassic park: when the girl that had previously been shot with the brachiosaurus snot-cannon needs to lock the electronically controlled doors, for some god-awful reason she has to navigate choppily through some sorta lame 3d-ish landscape dotted with rectangles that i think were supposed to represent different programs or something. i can’t remember right now if she was “hacking” the computer or merely “using” it, but i can remember for sure that, even as a wee tyke, i thought it was absurd that she couldn’t just be using something that resembled a normal computer program…
running man: remember when they were all trying to escape from the prison camp in the beginning, and the nerd of the group had to use a computer to disable the invisible fence that made people’s heads explode if they crossed it? i sure do. it was a great scene, with one exception. as i recall, all the nerd needed to do was enter a password that they had spied earlier, but for some reason when he tried, it just made the text keep switching back and forth between green and red, and it took minutes of furious typing - and one head explosion – before the text stayed green and they were all free to run away.
hackers: the whole movie. every bit of it. i don’t think that movie ever goes 5 minutes without showing a computer acting in a way computers don’t act. there’s the obvious bogus stuff, like the hackers using all of their best viruses at a subway station to make cookie monster heads show up on their enemies’ screens and start eating program code, and the fact that the hackers are attractive, but there’s also a lot of subtle computer related nonsense too. at one point, when they’re at school, i remember somebody typing a bunch of stuff and it resulting in his or her computer displaying two skeletons humping and making out.
movies, you can not just type something to make a computer show two skeletons humping and making out. you need to go to websites for that.
i long to see some sort of blockbuster movie come out in which the main character gets momentarily frustrated when firefox’s auto-complete accidentally leads to the wrong website, and then he or she has to hit the ’stop’ button a bunch of times while the page loads anyway. i want that film to show somebody who has to wait for a microsoft update before they can show a video of a 3d shark tooth in the latest windows media player. i want to hear somebody ask “can’t you just hack in and change it?” and then hear the reply, “no. of course not. i don’t think that’s the sort of thing anybody can do, really. i mean, can you ‘just hack in?’ i didn’t think so.” i want somebody to double-click something. anything. that’s how you make things happen on computers; you double-click!
sadly, i don’t think that movie will ever come… i have a hunch that i’m destined to keep watching attractive and fit computer people hack things without using their mice while videos of shark teeth and skeletons humping pop up with a simple keystroke…
sigh.
love,
the tiniest sprinter
hahahahahahaHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHhahahahAHA
I typed the above with my brain. No mouse OR keyboard. Just FYI.
You should watch medical shows on TV. They’re refreshingly accurate.
accurate in a computer sort of way, or accurate in a sewing up people’s guts sort of way? both?
probably accurate in a “man, that’s exactly how handsome uncle jessie should look as a doctor” sort of way.
You must be confused. Everything in every Jurassic Park movie is realistic and also flawless.