Just Once, I'd Love For Someone From Hardison's Past To Show Up And Attempt To Throw A Wrench In Things

Okay, I'm thinking about the Murderbot TV show again, and how I would adapt it, and we're going to be robbed if we get anything less than a cold open to a scene of some obviously cheezy space drama, maybe an Overdramatic Human Woman In Green Facepaint overdramatically sobbing as she confronts a Generic Action Hero like "It's...it's your baby!!!" *cue three different angles of Generic Action Hero's shocked and surprised face* Generic Action Hero opens her mouth to respond, but we don't hear her voice, because her words are drowned out by a sudden roaring sound coming from offscreen. The audience gets jump scared by lashing tentacles that seem to whip across the screen, in front of the window where we were watching the space drama, and the camera zooms out until you see that the window was floating in front of MB's face, as MB stands on the edge of a crater and the survey team pokes around down below. A giant, tentacled space monster is emerging down below, the survey team is screaming, Overse is getting picked up and tossed into the air, on a trajectory heading straight for the monster's gaping jaws...

Everything slows down. The sound mutes. MB swears and launches itself towards the monster. The camera shakes and warnings blare and flash across the screen, but we don't see much of the action, because the camera swings in to focus on the floating window where the space drama (Sanctuary Moon. It's Sanctuary Moon) keeps playing, on mute, while Murderbot's voiceover delivers the line: "I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites..."

I made another incorrect EPIC quotes comic! The general script idea came from reddit user Creative_Army1776

theories about why sophie claims she can’t play pool in leverage redemption:

she doesn’t really like being the pool player in cons so she just pretends she can’t play. i have the same theory about how she canonically went to pastry school and yet we’ve never once seen her help eliot in the kitchen: why would she let him know all that when she could keep getting eliot’s homemade meals without doing any work?

Sophie Devereaux (the alias) can’t play pool. but sophie (the person) can.

rashomon job part two: they all once ran into each other pre-leverage on a pool-related con, sophie is the only one who realises this, and she’s decided to avoid jogging anyone’s memory. she remembers how much they butchered her accent last time, she’s NOT giving them another opportunity.

the story of how she learnt to play pool that good can Never Be Told.

if the team knew she could play really well, they’d want to compete with her every time they went to a bar with a pool table. but when sophie’s at a bar, she just wants to have a drink and relax. this would have especially been a problem back in og leverage when nate’s condo/their HQ was literally on top of a bar with a pool room. so she just "can’t play". oh nooo, too bad, oh well, time for a glass of wine :)

making stuff up randomly = grifting practice session. she can’t let her skills get rusty!

in the job we saw in those flashbacks of her pool failures, she decided that her grift persona for the job should be incompetent at pool, despite that being very inconvenient. much in the same way she decided that the ridiculously valuable emerald necklace was something her persona in this episode would wear. she committed to the bit way too much and everyone got pissed at her so she had to pretend that she really is that bad at pool and it wasn’t just an acting choice (no one understands her artistic vision 😔 *dramatic sigh*).

it’s the reverse of her acting skills: she can only play pool when she’s playing for real, as opposed to how she can only act when it’s for a grift.

she will eventually make a bet with someone on the team about something, and whoever wins a game of pool wins the bet. it’s an extremely, unnecessarily long con she’s pulling, almost certainly for a petty reason. maybe she’s gonna ask parker to give her the stanley cup back lol.

lying is simply her hobby. god forbid women do anything.

Leverage 1x8 - "The Bank Shot Job"

Leverage 3x16 - "The San Lorenzo Job"

Leverage: Redemption 1x2 - "The Panamanian Monkeys Job"

Leverage: Redemption 3x7 - "The Shakedown in Clone-Town Job"

Today in Leverage headcanons no one asked for: do they have tattoos and if so, of what

Nate: has Sam's name tattooed over his heart in an awful cursive font. Definitely got it when he was drunk.

Sophie: no tattoos for obvious reasons (she changes identities too often to have anything permanent on her body)

Parker and Hardison: matching lock and key tattoos <3

Eliot: got an American flag on his shoulder when he was eighteen, right out of boot camp. He covered it up on a whim with a wolf or a skull or something suitably fierce when he started to grow disillusioned. Didn't get another tattoo for years, until he went with Parker and Hardison to get a little matching pick.

Harry: too uptight for tattoos

Breanna: has been slowly amassing a collection of cute small tattoos. They're all in places she can hide them easily, because she's not about to jeopardize her chances of being involved in cons, but she also couldn't resist the urge when all her friends were getting cute tattoos. They're not, like, overtly gay tattoos, but they also kind of are.

so, there's this leverage fic, what we owe each other by @trivalentlinks. (it's one of my favorites. eliot/quinn with a solid dash of moreau. highly recommend. but i digress.) and in this fic, there's a running thing about these tunnels under paris. quinn introduces eliot to them and makes him promise not to use them for crime, and then moreau happens, and, well, it's a whole thing.

and then in the first episode of redemption s3, what do we get? the paris catacombs. and I know that the catacombs are not quite the same as the tunnels from the fic, but I still can't help but wonder what it would be like for that eliot to end up in the tunnels again in the context of l:r 20+ years later. there's just. so much potential there. these ponderings are built firmly on the foundations of a 60k au fic and as such will not go anywhere but i'm just hoping someone else may have read this fic too and understand where my mind went.

Okay but like whenever europe and USA are compared in terms of ruins and artifacts it makes me think "oh but what about Native American artifacts and ruins" and it reminded me of another post I meant to make ages ago but forgot

A while back I went thru the library looking at all the books I could find on the history of Kentucky.

My textbooks and most "reliable" sources when I was a kid said that Kentucky was never actually home to Native Americans, it was just a "hunting ground." This is total bullshit, the living Shawnee whose ancestors lived here know it was bullshit, but how did we get there

A lot of the more recent books I found (from like the 1990's) repeated the "it was only just hunting grounds" thing

But heres the weird thing

When you go back further

The narrative is completely different

so here's the first page of a book published 1872, it's "History of Lexington Kentucky: Its Early Annals and Recent Progress" by George W. Ranck

Let the shock of this first paragraph settle in. Like, damn, this is a whole different picture being painted

now, this Rafinesque fellow he refers to, has been widely referred to as the originator of many claims about Kentucky, and an exaggerator and liar, outright dismissed and scorned by many historians.

Rafinesque is considered to be the source of many claims found in this chapter, and the pompous, flowery language used to state them makes them seem a bit unbelievable. But the claims themselves are not highly unrealistic. These are several of the claims found on pages 2-12 of the book

An artificially built stone well was found by settlers

Earliest settlers plowed up pottery fragments

Settlers dug into an old abandoned lead mine

"Stone sepulchers" were found containing human bones

A large earthen mound 6 feet high was found with pottery and burned wood

A stone mound was found containing human bones

An extensive cave used as a cemetery was found under Lexington, containing embalmed bodies

Flint arrowheads were found

Polished and worked fragments of iron ore were found

Sandstone and limestone tools perforated with holes were found

Rough ingots of copper were found

Stone walls were built defended by entrenchments

It is very important to note that this chapter is insistent that the inhabitants that built these ruins and left these artifacts were NOT Native Americans. Why? Because Native Americans didn't build stuff so advanced! Very circular reasoning.

It was a very common myth that there was some kind of "pre-native-american" race of people that existed in Kentucky. Sometimes this was a way of justifying colonization by saying that well, the Native Americans were just taking over land that wasn't theirs too, so it's okay for us to do it.

It seems to me that when it became clear that Native Americans were the first and only pre-European inhabitants, the stuff about an ancient city under Lexington and all that became dismissed as lies. But are they lies?

I tried to find out, and we know for certain that central Kentucky had many, many burial mounds (some of which I had seen the site of without knowing what I was seeing) and quite a few stone ruins. The builders of the stone ruins are referred to as the "Fort Ancient" people because the earliest settlers incorrectly assumed the stone structures they saw were forts for some defensive or military purpose.

The tools and artifacts being referenced are all known to exist, except I think there aren't any confirmed extant examples of pottery.

The most widely criticized claim in the chapter is the underground cave used as a tomb, but I don't see why—central Kentucky is a limestone karst region and EVERYWHERE has a cave under it. The embalming or mummifying of bodies could have been a flourish or rumor, but the essence of the claim is totally reasonable. Then again, it might not have been, since the area had access to sources of salt. The supposed "lead mine" probably wasn't that specifically, but it's known that Native Americans went inside, explored and used caves.

It was really interesting to me how so many later sources dismissed these claims despite most of them being plausible or just true, and how many of those sources repeated the idea of Native Americans using the land for hunting but not "inhabiting" it. It is two different ways of denying Native Americans were here.

It's so over (got stranded on Mars) we're so back (I can grow food here) it's so over (we left a guy on Mars) we're so back (we've established communication) it's so over (the airlock exploded and the crops froze) we're so back (we've cut down the launch window for a resupply) it's so over (the probe exploded) we're so back (the space program in China has been working on their own probe that can launch in the correct window to get him supplies) it's so over (we didn't tell the hermes crew about a separate possible mission) we're so back (the hermes crew committed mutiny and are now on the way to save Watney) it's so over (we have to remove the front of his spacecraft to get him into space) we're so back (we can cover the hole with a tarp) it's so over (the tarp ripped off during launch and the distance between the hermes and the mav is too wide) we're so back (we can use remaining thruster fuel to course correct) it's so over (if we do this we'll be going too fast) we're so back (we can build a bomb and blow up part of the station to slow us down) it's so over (there's still too much distance between the Hermes and Watney) we're so back (he poked a hole in his suit and flew to us like iron man)

so the ithaca saga, huh

my jaw was dropped for twenty two minutes and thirty five seconds straight