1. "There are virtually never surprises in court, and 98% of the work is done before you ever get in front of a judge. Most court events other than trials are minutes long. Shout out to my homies who drive an hour or more to attend a five-minute status conference."
2. "Chloroform takes ages to have an effect. You wouldn’t just touch a rag doused in it to their face and then they’re out … you’d be there a good 10 minutes."
3. "Rifle bullets go through the trunk, the backseat, the driver's seat, the driver/passenger, and out the front of the car (if they don’t hit something particularly chunky in the engine bay, like the engine block). So when the good guys are in a car chase and their trunk has 700 bullet holes in it, the occupants of the vehicle are dead."
4. "Train brakes apply when there is an air hose separation. So if our hero cuts a train car full of bad guys from the train, as soon as the air hose separates, the train will have air brake trouble and the brakes will apply — or the train will have issues at the very least. Locomotives also have an updated dead man's switch, so if there’s no one behind the controls, the train will apply its brakes once it’s tripped."
5. "Gasoline has a shelf life. If the apocalypse was a few years ago, the gas that is left isn't going to work so great anymore."
6. "'The reactor is going critical!' A reactor loves being critical. It's running perfectly fine when it is critical and is probably the safest state it can be. Most of its safety features are designed around it being critical."
7. "A firewall cannot be '87% down'."
8. "You’ll regularly see someone who needs to hide push aside a ceiling panel and climb up, then have a well framed shot of their face up above while they slide the panel back over covering their escape. You can’t do that. Those panels are fragile enough that you can break them with one hand. The cheap ones are literally fiberglass insulation with a sheet of paper glued to the face. The scene from The Office with Angela’s cat is what would actually happen."
9. "The fire alarm is a good one. The male lead pulls the alarm, and his lady love kisses him while the water romantically showers them both. As an electrician who has been there while they change the system, that water stinks and is black and disgusting. Chances are, especially in old school buildings, that water has been sitting in those pipes for possibly years. Whole generations of bacteria have lived their lives in those pipes. That sh*t is the worst smell, it stinks up whole rooms when they drain it. And it’s nasty brown and black. I don’t think I could kiss someone who just took a shower in it."
10. "My sister is an architect and absolutely hates the spy trope of maneuvering through the air vents. Air vents are designed to hold air, not people. They’d certainly collapse under the weight of fully grown, muscular man."
11. "It's not 'over and out.' It's 'over' [I'm done transmitting, waiting for a response], or 'out' [I'm done transmitting and signing off]. Saying both is like saying 'No no keep talking, I can't wait' then hanging up."
12. "Gun silencers don't magically make bullets completely quiet."
13. "Typically, a cigarette thrown into a puddle of gasoline will simply go out rather than igniting the gasoline."
14. "Private investigators don't exist in some legal grey area where they’re willing to risk their lives/do highly illegal sh*t for clients. I make good money as a PI, I’m not about to risk my license to do anything illegal for a client, and I’m certainly not going to get in a fistfight on the roof of a high-rise building."
15. "Babies are born with an umbilical cord attached. And healthy babies look purple for a few seconds."
16. "If you are close enough to an explosion for it to physically move you, your insides are liquefied, you don't get up from that."
17. "Swords do not cut through armour like butter. There's a reason why people wore armour. Even arrows designed to penetrate armour are more likely to bounce off or get stuck in armor. It still hits like a strong punch or fist and can wear you down if a hundred arrows nail your ass. But heroes do not carve their way through armoured warriors."
18. "Tying a rope around your waist will not save you from a fall. Climbing harnesses go around your pelvic bone and hips. They are designed to stretch to cushion your fall and place all your body weight on your ass, which can take it. Tying a random rope around your waist will crush your internal organs and break your spine."
19. "I hate the 'computer geek breaks into super protected mainframe' trope. Hacking is social/psychological skill these days. A nerdy guy in his mum's basement can't 'hack' into NASA's mainframe. I would say that 95% of 'hacking' is ordinary phishing."
