Gotta Include These Tags:

Gotta include these tags:

#accurate af#and hardison is everyone's big brother#and occasionally grandmother#XD#leverage

Hardison is everyone’s big brother and occasional grandmother, I love that description.

I feel like it’s really easy to lean towards categorising Sophie as the mom friend but like, no. no Sophie is the Cool aunt who’s always slightly tipsy and whisks you away for impromptu shopping trips and lets you drink but Eliot, Eliot is the mom friend.

We've mentioned before, but every con we do could in theory be used to pull apart the real-world equivalent of the mark. This is one of the reason we have consultants like Apollo Robbins, or sometimes talk to high-level campaign finance experts or US Attorneys. Fiction, where you can bend and twist the rules, is made enormously easier when you force yourself to play by the rules as you break the story. This is a personal issue I have with some con and heist shows. Two lifts and a fake name don't make a con show, they make a particularly aggressive Rockford Files. Of course, this is probably more about my obsession with systems than it is about the bare minimum requirement for audience entertainment.

There was one truly odd moment, after three days of trying to break this thing, where I said: "Jesus, we've pulled corrupt money-laundering apart, international cyber-cons, kleptocratic hustles -- and we cannot break this fucking cheerleading scam. The real version of it is just too ironclad."

Downey: "This web of companies looks like a mob breakdown on The Sopranos."

Me: "Okay, so how do you bring down the mob?"

Downey (who, you will remember, is a former white collar defense attorney): "RICO Act. It's ridiculously broad."

That's how a cut-down version of the RICO Act wound up on the writer's room wall. The key, of course, being that you need to commit TWO acts of racketeering activity. So while half the room banged various combos of offenses off the walls ("Kidnapping and criminal copyright infringement?"), we tackled the other big problem --

-- we can't write a cheerleading episode.

By which I mean, it obeys none of the structural parameters which allow us to make Leverage on a weekly basis. There aren't really enough "hats" for the characters in cheerleading. Coach, cheerleader, maybe judge ... there's no inherent threat of violence or prosecution or meddling law enforcement. What's the real-time (used to be fourth) fifth Act sequence as we tempo up heading into the back of the show?

Again, back to the research. Jeremy had talked to several groups who were trying to change the cheerleading rules, primarily by trying to get it declared as a sport, where Title IX safety rules would kick in. These groups' primary frustration was in the politics of the situation -- which for once fell on both sides of the aisle. Generalizing roughly, Conservatives didn't want to establish that sort of excess regulation, Liberals didn't want Title IX money being diverted to cheerleading from other women's sports. Few friends on either side.

Well, there you go. Despite assumptions by some of our viewers, we try to stay very even-handed on the political spectrum on the few times we venture into politics. My policy is alway that the primary split in politics is along the money/power axis, and there are plenty of R's and D's chasing both. We'd never done a Congressional episode, and Congress is a lovely, complicated, antiquated ramshackle system all based in a one big, swinging doors-French farce worthy building. Aces. We came up with some prototypical Congresspeople, assigned unlikely humans to deal with them, and turned loose the Fun Train.

LEVERAGE #505 "The 'Gimme a K' Street Job" Post-Game

LOL!  Oh I love this.  Poor Stephen. ‘Just because I’m short doesn’t make me a magical girl!”  Crane would take far too much enjoyment of Stephen dressed as a magical girl. 

Now I’m imagining a Magpie Lord/Card Captor Sakura crossover.  Crane and Tomoyo would bond over a shared love of clothes and forcibly dressing people up ... the more I think on this the more I’m convinced that Lord Crane and Tomoyo meeting would be fantastic (for the readers) and terrifying for everyone else. 

Sometimes, these absurd ideas just pop into my head. I’m sorry. Only not really.

Completed February 2021

Part 1 of my insane quest to draw the entire (book/story appearing) Healy-Price family from the fabulous Incryptid series by @seananmcguire! This section of the family tree takes us from roughly 1906ish to 1952ish!

I’m not sure how I’ve going to eventually present these when they are all finished but some people on Twitter did ask about making coloring pages out of the lineart, so that might also be a thing! Stay tuned!

She’d kill you, and you’d thank her.

On Redbubble.

Poem about the moon

Lucien Vaudrey, high on life after getting a curse removed, waxing poetic about the moon. A Charm of Magpies is probably my favourite series, and listening to the audiobooks again put me in the mood for art ^_^

So, my Chinese (Mandarin) is pretty basic (apologies for the poor handwriting!). Certainly not good enough to be composing poetry. So I have Crane reciting the first two lines of the famous Tang Dynasty poem Looking At The Moon And Thinking Of One Far Away (望月怀远 ) by Zhang Jiuling (张九龄).

Completed November 2020