You must be from Hollandtown. 
The wooder in the zinc? 
And this, prospective writing students, is why you should try to refrain from writing in vernacular.
[slam dunks 200 pages of hand-written manuscript into dumpster]
There goes my All-Mi’waukee Dialect novel:
So, Goin’ Down By Da Brathouse, Meetcha By Da Bubbler Onna Corner Dere, Hey?
I saw the new Elvis movie this weekend…I’m not even a huge Elvis fan, but even I noticed a bunch of stuff there that was glaringly inaccurate, but was obviously added for dramatic effect. I disliked the movie generally, and the fictionalizations contributed to that opinion. The movie devotes twenty minutes or more to the filming of the '68 Comeback Special, and a big plot point is RFK’s assassination in the middle of filming. IRL he was shot a few weeks before filming began. The movie also goes straight from a concert riot and the embarrassing Steve Allan Show performance right into the army, skipping over the Ed Sullivan appearances, which are arguably much more important. I think they also fudged the facts about his Army time as well: IIRC, though Elvis was drafted, the Army was willing to let him take part in the Special Services, but Tom Parker insisted on Presley going in with regular troops. In the movie, it’s portrayed as Elvis enlisting in a desperate image rehabilitation attempt. It goes on and on.
For me, it’s the portrayal of spaceflight, particularly spaceflight as we currently know it, which is limited pretty much to low-Earth orbit.
So many movies, which should know better, especially if they claim that they had a NASA advisor participating in the show’s production, give the audience the impression that rockets labor so much in simply going up, like a toy rocket. Then, having safely arrived, they simply turn off their engines and float. As in, at a height close to Earth, gravity magically turns off. The movie “The Astronaut Farmer” did this, and so many other movies and TV shows that I’ve lost count.
XKCD did a great job of explaining this fallacy, far better than I can.
I’m not sure how you distinguish, in a typical movie rocket launch scene, between a spaceship laboring mightily in going up, and a spaceship laboring mightily in achieving orbital velocity. You start with exterior shots of flames coming out the back of the rocket and interior shots of the astronauts pushed into their seats with rumbling background noise, and transition to exterior shots of the flames stopping and interior shots of the astronauts floating quietly. I guess if the Earth is in the background, then you can tell whether the rocket is pointing up or sideways?
What bugs me is space flight as we don’t know it – space flight in Star Trek or Star Wars universes. For the most part, ships are shown making swooping curves, angling and making graceful curves.
Yeah. That’s not how spaceflight works. We obey Newton’s laws of motion (as modified by relativity, where needed) in this universe. Ships move in straight lines until a force acts on them. Things rotate about the center of mass at a constant rate until some torque acts on them. Watch some old film clips of space missions and you’ll see this. A handful of movies sometimes get this right.
I know why they don’t do it in the movies – it doesn’t look right. we’re used to airplanes and frisbees and gliders being directed by interaction with the atmosphere, and gravity. So the Milennium Falcon swoops and glides even in space. It makes that big unnecessary loop the loop into the cave on the asteroid (that turns out to be a space worm burrow) that looks cool but wouldn’t work in reality (It doesn’t bother me when they do a loop over the cloud at the end when they turn back to get Luke – they’re in the atmosphere then)
Yeah, you can handwave it away – say that they’re going so fast that even sparse interstellar molecules act like atmosphere – but it’s not convincing.
Interestingly enough, in the recent animated move Lightyear they did address how essentially in space you keep going. It is a small part of the plot filled with other vaguely spaceflight and interstellar things, but it at least they did mention it and it was important to the action.
//i\\
That’s one of the things I liked about Babylon 5. They took some pains to show the Starfury maneuvering thrusters and how they would work.
So I found an inaccuracy that bothers me! I’m reading one of the books in The Expanse series, which is often noted for its general level of scientific accuracy.
So it’s kind of glaring when they mention (in several places) Luna having a surface gravity of one-tenth G, when it’s well known to be one-sixth G. It would have been trivially easy to fix that, had they noticed.
The Expanse does a good job with this as well. They show ships with maneuvering thrusters that look like realistic space ships. And when a ship generates artificial gravity (a plot point in one episode), they show it being done with a big spinning cylinder, not some hand wavey way like in the Star Trek universe.
Blanks being used in movie guns bothers me the least, it’s almost always seen when anyone uses a belt fed machine gun and as it’s firing you can see the bullets on the belt are the squished-nose blanks. As long as you actually see the muzzle flash it doesn’t bother me. Now if they’re using blanks to reload a gun that won’t actually fire that’s when I noticed more.
IIRC the original Star Wars novelization mentioned some sort of a space drive (powered by gravity!) which made this possible. I’ve never yet seen a plausible explanation for a space drive, but it isn’t quite the same as having an Apollo capsule do it.
One of the things I liked about “The Mote in God’s Eye” was that Niven and Pournelle avoided this kind of nonsense.
Yeah, Start Wars and Star Trek, and most of those kinds of “space fantasy” series have some kind of explict control over gravity. Once you’ve got that, everything we’re used to about actual space travel goes out the window.
For example, why does the Enterprise always start falling out of orbit as soon as they lose power? Well, it’s because they’re not actually in a stable ballistic orbit like the space shuttle used. They’re using their anti-grav engines to maintain a lower orbit at a lower-than-orbital-speed velocity, so that they can maintain a geosynchronous position, but much closer to the surface. As soon as they lose power, they don’t have the velocity needed to maintain that orbit, so they start to fall.
Yet they’ve never bothered to explore what that actually means. Gravitational control gives you a plethora of choices, weapons-wise.
Some stories, like the Honor Harrington universe, have gravity control, but it’s so slow to build up that it’s not often useful directly as a weapon. It all really comes down to the rules you decide to use, since the whole field is just made up anyways!
It’s kind of like Larry Niven’s essay, “Exercise in Speculation: The Theory and Practice of Teleportation.” The rules you use determine what kind of stories you can tell.
My BiL is from Maine, so I’d have noticed that and cringed (I’m in SoCal). I can still remember the first time I (mis)pronounced Orono and his merciless ragging on me.
From your 2nd cite:
A walk through the historic districts of many older American cities will reveal a rustic and romantic street standard of the past: cobblestones.
The first link doesn’t work for me.
Yeah, one of my buddies says “warsh” and he is California born and lived here all his 55 years.
Mark Twain wishes to differ.
So does Dante Alighieri.