Thinking About Sophie’s Dramatic Death In The “San Lorenzo Job” Today And How Many Leverage Altered

yes, and! the villain of every graceling book is an evil, powerful man who is able to manipulate others into believing lies (and inspired by the catholic church) except in winterkeep where the villain is the evil partisan government (inspired by… well.)

I love how the villian of every graceling book is leck (as a child, as a king, even when he's dead) except in winterkeep where the villian is the evil partisan government

Throughout leverage we see multiple different people driving the team/groups. Parker with the "I was taught to run from the cops", Sophie with the "taxi driver in Istanbul (citation needed)", Eliot with "I am getting us there in 5 minutes or less"... So what is your headcanon for how they decide who drives? Does Nate have a specific set of criteria where he picks who drives? Do they argue about who drives?

well, a lot of places they go, they need minimum two vehicles: hardison's van for tech (i think its only got two actual seats, though im sure people have had to sit in the back & get thrown around lol) and at least one car for other people/general driving. hardison tends to drive lucille so thats one down. if eliot's around to drive, he's probably driving the second car. if not, then nate, then sophie, then parker*. when hardison isn't driving lucille, he's probably as likely to drive as nate or sophie. and when tara's there, i doubt she has driving privileges lol.

in s1, i doubt they're carpooling much. like, they'd drive from their homes to the hq to the job themselves, and only go in the same car to do some quick task. later, they treat nate's apartment as home base and are frequently there for very little reason lmao, so thats when they actually have to plan more about who drives. obviously it heavily depends on how many cars are required and who's doing what. but. it seems like it's often nate driving with sophie as passenger, eliot driving himself or with parker as passenger, and hardison driving himself or with parker as passenger.

*detailed explanation of their individual driving under the cut:

parker is a genuinely great getaway driver, so her skills are useful in that type of situation... but i think 99% of the time, when they're not requiring a quick getaway, she is BANNED from driving. sophie even said so somewhere in s3, i dont remember exactly. canonically she can drive perfectly normally too (eg her driving with tara in the s2 finale) to be fair. she just doesnt want to lol. the stuff she has in her own car (both useful items and "decoration") is somewhat disturbing and very confusing. a lot of it is sharp. or a chemical hazard.

sophie drives sometimes but her driving can be... questionable, occasionally (ie big bang job). the (alleged) fact she learnt to drive from a taxi driver in istanbul seems to imply she didn't learnt to drive later than most, when she was traveling a lot? her attitude of "if i'm doing my job right, the mark just turns off the alarm for me" makes me think she'd apply the same logic here and would've done more hitchhiking & public transport than driving when she was first starting out, but over time got herself a car and learnt to drive because its kinda a safety thing in her line of work (need a getaway). all this to say, she can drive and she might have a nice car but its not her priority, you know?

nate drives sophie, some mix of her thinking its chivalrous and him having some ingrained ideas about male gender roles, but also just personal preferences. and a little bit because hes seen some of her questionable driving choices. once they're together, this changes to a more even split. also nate is def a backseat driver (like, regardless of who's driving/their skill level) and has been kicked out of a car at least once.

hardison is also mostly fine to drive or not drive like sophie. he'll bicker with eliot about who drives but mostly that's just an extension of their ongoing bickering saga. every time one of his lucilles gets exploded or whatever, he has a period of mourning and takes a couple weeks before he'll let other people drive the next incarnation of lucille - and to be fair thats usually because one of them was responsible for killing lucille.

eliot doesn't let other people drive his car (unless its absolutely necessary for a con - see: the boost job). he only begrudgingly lets people IN his car because SOMEONE spilled slushie all over it one time and yes he will continue to bring that up a decade later, hardison. i think being around the team has made him become one of those people who has strict rules for being in his car lol - no food/drink, no leaving anything in the car that doesnt have to be there. obviously the team break these rules all the time.

and the definition of what is a "necessity" and can therefore stay in the car is a BIG ongoing debate. some items of interest on the "necessity" list: gift wrapping paper, one (1) shiny thing, a gaming console, chloroform, a neatly packed bag of spare clothes, at least one dress hanging up with a dust cover, 3-5 CDs (which must be individually approved before being added to the car and only one of which can be christmas-related), spare reading glasses, cables that eliot annoyingly can't veto because he doesn't understand that stuff enough to argue, aluminium foil, and a pack of hair ties.

some things that have been BANNED: food & drink, glitter (there was an incident), nail polish (there was more than one incident), most tech stuff ("that's why you have lucille!"), secret money stashes, anything considered priceless by art experts, "surprises", and live animals.

i would love a road trip episode where most/all of them are taking turns driving and are stuck together in a vehicle for ages. also i now have the urge to go through the series and actually chart who drives.

lol thank you very much for the ask and ik the length is crazy but i hope this is a good answer haha.

The Motherfucking Lizard King

No one at work trusts my boss. 

He's smart. He works hard. He's not trustworthy. He hasn't actually fucked anyone at work over, but he's ruined his last two marriages with affairs, and got dumped by his third fiance when he wouldn't sign a prenup. The fact that we all know this is just a hazard of working in a small town. 

Anyway: The thought process of the people in the lab is that if he screwed over his first wife, and his second wife, and was probably planning on screwing over his third wife, it would be insane for him not to screw us over. After all, what kind of idiot treats their employees better than their spouse? 

I dunno. His kind, I guess? He's had a few chances to fuck us over, and he hasn't taken them. Opposite really. When our parent company was doing furloughs, he stayed in the office almost a hundred hours, talking and talking and talking his way up the corporate ladder. And in the end, no one at our site got furloughed. 

He's pulled strings like that before. And it baffles me, right? Because it really does make zero sense. He'll move the heavens and the earth for us, but his wife and kids are afterthoughts. It feels like any moment, he's going to look into the mirror and realize how stupid that is. It feels like I'm betting on him making the same stupid mistake again, and again, and again - like it would be less cynical to believe he was, eventually, going to stab me in the back. But he hasn't yet, and as far as I can tell he's been making that mistake for close to fifteen years, and it's already cost him everything it can. If he was going to learn, he would have by now. 

So my position on him is that if he wanted to date someone I cared about, I'd warn them off. I don't trust him there. But I tentatively trust him to be my boss. Maybe one day he'll stick the knife in and twist, and everyone will say Ah, Babs, we warned you, but for now, I accept that he's doing a very predictable, very irrational thing, and I've made my peace with it. 

---

My job has glue traps. 

No one likes the glue traps, but we don't have a lot of options. Poison's banned by state law, spring traps are banned by company safety, and several non-lethal options tried in the past failed to work. The mouse problem can get pretty bad if it's ignored, and there's some real health hazards in that. Our site has never had a positive hantavirus test, thank God, but the big base about a half hour away has. That guy's gonna be on oxygen the rest of his life. 

If a mouse gets caught, we just euthanize it. But more than mice get stuck. Lizards can wander into those traps too, and the people working there have different feelings about the lizards. They don't pose nearly the same kind of risk mice do. They're chill little guys, and they keep the moths away, and they're just 

You know. They're friendly. There's something to be said about walking into a room, and hitting the light switch, and seeing two little guys on the wall start to do pushups as soon as they see you. 

People used to just euthanize the lizards too, but I had pet leopard geckos as a kid and I couldn't take that so I wound up googling how to free animals from glue traps. Now, when a lizard gets stuck in a trap - which happens once or twice a week - I get some vegetable oil from the breakroom, and a little plastic fork, and I'll spend fifteen to twenty minutes just kind of gently prying the little guys out. 

I have a team of technicians that help me operate one of the larger machines. They're real blue collar guys, ex-airforce, and they make me look like a little kid. Being an engineer means they'll look to me as a leader sometimes, which is a wild experience. And I started helping the lizards for my own conscience, but one of the crazier consequences of it has been that it seriously boosted my leadership cred. Because those guys see me, and they go: Hey. If he's willing to fight for a lizard, he's gotta be willing to fight for me. 

I cannot overstate how nice that is. Most engineers that want to make a change to a maintenance practice, or try an upgrade, they have to work their asses off to get the techs to buy in. But I can just ask. They already trust me to do good. They know I'm new, and they know I'm not the smartest engineer in the building, but they also know I'm the one who gets lizards out of the glue traps. 

And just because of that, they're willing to follow me. 

---

My boss has a meeting every month or two. It's typically basic house cleaning stuff - reminders about routines we've gotten lazy on, and updates on future projects. Maybe some warnings about problems coming from higher up in the company.

People are, in my opinion, a bit too cynical about the meetings. It stems from people not trusting our boss, which again, I understand, because it would make so much more sense if he wasn't trustworthy. It's a testament to the man's incredibly unhealthy priorities that he is. But as we made it to the end of the meeting, one of bullet points was: 

Do NOT mess with animals in the building. 

So I looked at my techs, and they looked at me, and when he got to the point, he was so scathing I actually just wanted to crawl under a rock and die. He said basically that he'd heard some reports about someone in the building handling animals that found their way in and got stuck, and that he just wanted to emphasize how insanely inappropriate that was, not to mention dangerous, and that if he needed to speak to anyone about it again, there would be severe consequences. 

I was willing to just take the shame and move on. I was. But one of my techs is old. Old enough he could've retired two years ago. And his actual literal goal is to one day get angry, yell at someone, and storm out. That's how he wants to retire. So instead of biting his tongue like everyone else, he stood up and said: I hate the glue traps. You hate the glue traps. We all hate glue traps. But we've all sat here for years, ignoring the little things that get stuck in them, watching them die, and then Bab's comes in, and he is the first person in decades to give enough of a shit to start pulling the lizards out. And I don't want him to stop. 

Get humane traps or shut up but we are not going back to the old way of just letting things starve. 

And my boss actually froze up. He got all wide eyed and stared at Marc, and then the other techs jumped in, and there was a very small but intense rebellion in the meeting and my boss kept trying to interrupt while getting absolutely bowled over by this gang of angry middle aged air force vets, and eventually he just went 

I will speak with Babylon about this afterwards! After! And then he will speak with everyone else, but I have more points to cover. 

So they went silent, and my boss rushed through the last five minutes, and we all adjounred. The techs really didn't like that I was going in alone - they thought our boss was going to try and shout me into compliance. Marc in particular was like, Look, if he tries bullying you, stand your ground, and if he threatens anything, just come get us, and we'll give him hell. 

So armed with that, I went to my boss's office. I sat in the chair across from him, and he kept his composure for maybe five seconds before just flopping back into his chair. 

I had no idea you were saving lizards, he said, but I'm glad you are. I always hated seeing them die in the glue.  

I wasn't expecting that. I was about to ask him what the comment from the meeting was about then, but he answered that before I even got the chance.

A snake got into the building last week, and - someone picked it up and chased a coworker around. Turns out that coworker was severely afraid of snakes, and now it's a shitshow. We're a small site, and now I can't ask those two to work together anymore, to say nothing about how the snake fared after all that. Being upset about that is a reasonable thing, right? 

And he gave me a look like he actually wanted an answer, so I said Yeah, totally, chasing a coworker around with a snake is a dick move. Especially if that coworker is already afraid of snakes. 

And he said Exactly! and then we sat there a few moments longer. He looked so incredibly tired that I did, actually, feel kind of bad for him. And then he somehow managed to sink even further into his chair, and said

Look, I know I'm not a good guy. But I'm not evil. I'm not some sort of crazy asshole that's going to demand that everyone watch lizards starve to death. When you go back downstairs, could you try to pass that on? That I'm not evil? 

I said Sure because it wasn't a hard request, and he looked relieved. I actually made it halfway out before I realized I had a question. 

Who grabbed the snake? I asked. 

Not supposed to talk about it, he said. But whoever comes to mind first is probably right. 

ThatGuy? I asked. And he looked me in the face, nodded his head yes, and said No. 

---

The techs seemed a little disappointed that they didn't get to storm the boss's office, but were otherwise in good spirits. They were actually a little bit embarrassed to hear about the snake story - apparently, it wasn't much of a secret. It'd just slipped their minds because it happened three weeks ago. 

We did maintenance after that, the same basic repairs we did every week. The meeting had been stressful and it was a relief to work with my hands. When the parts were reinstalled, everything cleaned and smooth and ready to go, Marc found me again. 

You know what the lesson of today is? he asked. And there were quite a few answers to that that I could have taken - from don't assume the worst of people to be careful with how you spend your trust - we all need it more than we think. 

But instead I said what? because I wanted to hear what his answer was going to be. 

That I got your back, he said. Then he clapped one very, very large hand on my shoulder, gave it a good squeeze, and walked back to dosimetry lab.

---

The next day, Marc gave me a package and told me to open it in my office. I was suspicious, but I followed the request.

Cardboard gave way to a small baggie, obviously full of fabric, which opened to reveal a t-shirt that read

"I Am the Motherfucking Lizard King."

I looked at it, I loved it, and then I got an idea. I went to my boss's office and knocked on the door. When he opened it, I asked him if he would be willing to allow something very unprofessional to happen for morale building purposes.

How unprofessional? he asked. I held the shirt up in answer. He gave the shirt a short look over and snorted.

You can wear it on weeks without customers, he said. Which just so happened to include that week.

I'll pass on that it came with your blessing, I replied, and he looked oddly relieved.

Thanks, he said. And then I went downstairs.

---

The techs were very, very happy to see the shirt. And while my boss's reputation remains in tatters, and probably will be until he moves (or dies), the next time there was a meeting, there was quite a bit less complaining about how mere presence. Which is, I guess, a start.

We'll see if he squanders it.

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.

I love Eliot’s hair so much, because it’s so unpractical for his line of work. A buzz cut would be so much better, no hair in your face, nothing for an opponent to grab onto. I strongly believe that Moreau had rules around hair, much like the military and that it was one of the first choices Eliot made after breaking free. That it means a lot to him. Like the first time his hair has grown too long after he leaves, he goes to cut it again and he’s standing in front of the mirror and he suddenly realizes he doesn’t want to, then that he doesn’t have to. Maybe standing in front of that mirror happens earlier and makes him realize he doesn’t want to do any of this anymore.

99% of all murders committed by women in ancient greek plays are completely justified

update wtf guys

i need the ao3 tag wranglers to tag wrangle so it's easier to find the united healthcare shooter fic (there are 23 fics about him currently) (i did manually count) (i don't know what to tell you the internet is a bizarre and hilarious place sometimes)

Headcanon: Eliot can ballroom dance as well as any professional. Better, in some instances. And no one knows this until they have to work a con at a dance studio that's a front for trafficking. He has to compete, which adds another pseudo-celebrity persona to his identities.

Of course this naturally also results in him acquiring a ton more fangirls - and fanboys! - because a) hyper competent dancing is HAWT and b) he's going to be in a male ballroom dance competition outfit which... well, I'll leave y'all to try Googling that and picture Eliot in something like it. #AHEM

So poor Hardison is on full time social media/attempting to control the hype duty while also trying to do the digital stuff for the actual job AND making sure to needle/mock/jab at Eliot at every possible opportunity... until the team actually sees their hitter, their punchy grump-up artist, dancing in one of the competitions and. Well. It's basically a Scheherazade moment that nearly blows the con because hey, this grade of dance is supposed to be emotive, right, and they're all gawking so hard they nearly miss their marks.

The fact Eliot refuses to actually acknowledge how good he is, just growling and stomping off when someone tries to actually compliment him, only adds to the effect.

Nate meanwhile is in Actual Hell because let's set this theoretical episode in early to mid S5 as, of course, Sophie just LOVES the idea of "going dancing" and is thoroughly miffed that her newly sort-of s/o can barely do a basic waltz. Bonus points if she suggests, in either or both of their hearing, that Eliot could maybe teach Nate some moves to help.

Only later it turns out the only person who Elio has actually volunteered to teach some steps to is Parker, firstly because she's competent enough to actually follow along, and secondly because that way she can take Hardison dancing on one of their date nights, which of course leaves Alec melted into an absolute puddle because he's essentially just an enormous ball of squish in the shape of a boy.

And we fade out the episode as Parker and Hardison head for their night out while Sophie is trying to teach a purposefully-failing Nate some basic steps, seeing Eliot in the kitchen of the brew pub humming to himself and, secure in the moment of being entirely unobserved, execute an absolutely perfect reverse fleckerl with a bowl and whisk as his only partner.

Extremely messy doodle (even for me) but this fic about Circe (I don’t think the author’s on Tumblr so I can’t tag them!) is currently rent-free in my head, and the bit about one of the nymphs getting stuck on the roof was such a funny image that I had to draw it. Poor thing was probably there for hours before Circe found her — so, you know, she’s probably learned a valuable lesson about not climbing on roofs.

Anyway, go read maybe showing one act of kindness leads to kinder souls down the road, it’s such a brilliant exploration of Circe’s character.

Your WHAT that Gilgamesh touched to please his heart, Enkidu?