art theft isnt what it used to be. now you can just right click save. you used to have to break into a museum. there were lasers and stuff. you don't even have to have a grappling hook anymore.
My favorite thing about the Redemption episode, is that Parker does end his life.
She doesn't just damage his professional reputation or take all of his money. She ends his previous identity and locks him on a completely new path with no real possibility for return.
It's one of the most extreme solutions we've ever seen from the Leverage crew, and absolutely only a solution that Parker would have felt comfortable executing. She truly did things her way.
Bless Eliot for seeing her and allowing her to be comfortable with her own viciousness.
We had a period piece romance between Hardison and Parker ("The Van Gogh Job"), and a period piece romance between Eliot and Parker ("The DB Cooper Job"), so now we need a period piece romance between Hardison and Eliot where they play secret lovers (my pitch title "The Confirmed Bachelor Job").
Come on now, you can't just drop the title and not the rest of the pitch! Tell!
Yeah, okay. This isn't fully fleshed out, and I'm sorry but it DOES take place in Redemption.
Athens. Modern day. An older black man named Lucas is tending to a rooftop garden when three Colombian gangsters (2 younger, one around the same age as Lucas) knock on his door. Lucas opens the door and the older gangster greets him by name.
New Orleans. Breanna and Harry are playing Magic: The Gathering and she is dogging him on how old his deck is. Eliot comes in and calls for Hardison, telling him that someone in Greece needs their help.
"There's an older American man in Athens trying to hire mercenaries. Some of my contacts in the area caught wind and sent me his info."
Parker and Sophie are excited to go to Greece.
"The culture, the art..." Sophie begins.
"The baklava!" Parker interrupts.
"I've always wanted to go to Greece," Harry says. "Ever since I saw Mamma Mia."
Breanna laughs at him and says she'd like to visit her homeland. They all look at this white-black biracial girl and she says, "Lesbos?"
"Ohh, okay."
While they've all been padding out the run time of the episode, Hardison has booked them flights for the same day. Transition panels of planes taking off and landing, and our team is in Greece.
Hardison and Eliot meet with Lucas, and he tells them someone has kidnapped his husband, then he begins to tell them why.
Miami. 1984. Lucas (Hardison) runs a gay club called The Confirmed Bachelor. Colombian gangsters fronted Lucas the money to get his club started, and in exchange, they use the club to run drugs and launder money. Lucas gets involved with one of their closeted American employees, James (Eliot), and the two's love quickly blossoms.
Things are good for a while. Lucas loves running his club, James loves Lucas, and the two share tender moments in their off hours. But one day James is forced to rough up one of the patrons for making a pass at one of the gangsters in the club (through some distinguishing feature, we recognize this is the old man that came to Lucas in the opening scene). It causes a small rift between them.
Upset at what he had to, angry that his actions upset Lucas, and fearing what the gangsters would do to him if he ever came out, James conspires with Lucas to steal $200k from the gangsters and run away to Greece.
Lucas tips off the police to the gang's activities in the club, and in the panic of running away, James manages to snag a duffel bag full of cash, and the lovers leave Miami.
It turned out the bag actually had over $2 million in it. The $200k could have been explained by corrupt cops skimming a few stacks during the arrest, but $2 mill was obviously theft. The gangster was sent up for 40 years and when he got out, he used his remaining influence to find the lovers.
During the story's telling, Eliot leaves to track down where the trio might have taken James. A physical search would be almost impossible. Breanna, who has at this point networked with an all-female group of Lesbosian hackers, is able to do some sort of computer magic to figure out they're keeping James on Psyttaleia, an island west of Athens that's uninhabited (it is a sewage treatment plant, which is convenient for the set designers).
Sophie manages to convince a harbormaster that Harry is a barge captain, and when they're on board, they make their way to the island.
James and Lucas are reunited. The lovers share a passionate embrace, and the camera rack focuses from them to Hardison and Eliot.
They find James, Eliots unleashes 10 kinds of hell on the gangsters while Hardison frees him, but the bad guys manage to get away. We see in a flashback that while Sophie was getting them a boat, Parker was stealing logs, manifests, someone's lunch, and a truly staggering amount of wine. While Eliot and Hardison were figuratively fighting for their love, the rest of the crew were loading that stuff onto the Colombians' boat.
Cut back to present and they are picked up by whatever Greece has that's the equivalent to the Coast Guard.
"You think they'll be safe?"
"I offered to make 'em new IDs, get 'em set up somewhere else, but they wanted to stay here. Keep what they built."
"Hmm. No shame in that."
The couple thank the team, then Lucas tells Hardison to hold on to what he loves. (The obvious implication being Eliot.) They leave.
"No sir."
The subtlety. 🤌🤌
Cue Leverage end scene music. Parker has a plate full of baklava and Harry takes one. He says, "My my, how can I resist ya?" And everyone hates it.
In the Miami scenes, everyone is seen inside The Confirmed Bachelor. Sophie and Parker are bartenders. Breanna is a waitress. Harry is one of the patrons (mostly because I wanna see Noah Wyle be gay ((it's a personal thing, don't @ me))).
Dream casting for older James and Lucas
Lucas - Lee Daniels, hands down.
James - ideally Anthony Stewart Head, or if we wanna be on theme and have a gay actor play him, I like Rupert Everett. Either way we're getting an Englishman to do an American accent, and that's fun for me.
I need people to understand that all of the "vegan leathers" are plastic. Yes, really all of them. Yes, even that vegan leather that you saw online that prominently claims that it's made of plant waste and is therefore super sustainable.
Cactus leather is "cactus fiber, mixed with various compounds to form a bioresin, which is then poured over a polyester carrier," or, in other words, it's plastic + some cactus material, being deceptively marketed as though it is made entirely from cactus.
Apple leather is "dehydrated apple waste combined with polyurethane," or, in other words, it's plastic + some apple material, being deceptively marketed as though it is made entirely from apples.
Cork leather is "thin sheets of cork which are bonded onto a fabric backing, usually made of polyester, using a polyurethane adhesive" or, in other words, it's plastic + some cork material, being deceptively marketed as though it is made entirely from cork.
Pineapple leather is "pineapple fiber based felt combined with polyurethane," or, in other words, it's plastic + some pineapple material, being deceptively marketed as though it is made entirely from pineapple.
The closest I was able to find to a non-plastic "vegan leather" is mushroom leather, which is made from compressed mushroom mycelium. That compressed mycelium is biodegradable, which is more than you can say about basically anything else on this list, except it's also extremely fragile and falls apart in pretty much any context you'd want to use leather, and so to increase its durability it's usually – you guessed it – combined with polyurethane, which means that while you can make a biodegradable leather-feeling material completely out of mushrooms, almost all of the mushroom leather that you can actually buy is really plastic + some mushroom material, being deceptively marketed as though it is made entirely from mushrooms.
IT'S PLASTIC, FOLKS
IT'S GREENWASHED PLASTIC AND WE ALL NEED TO STOP FALLING FOR IT
I don't think people realize how absolutely wild Linux is.
Here we have an Operating system that now has 100 different varieties, all of them with their own little features and markets that are also so customizable that you can literally choose what desktop environment you want. Alongside that it is the OS of choice for Supercomputers, most Web servers, and even tiny little toy computers that hackers and gadget makers use. It is the Operating System running on most of the world's smartphones. That's right. Android is a version of Linux.
It can run on literally anything up to and including a potato, and as of now desktop Linux Distros like Ubuntu and Mint are so easily to use and user friendly that technological novices can use them. This Operating system has had App stores since the 90s.
Oh, and what's more, this operating system was fuckin' built by volunteers and users alongside businesses and universities because they needed an all purpose operating system so they built one themselves and released it for free. If you know how to, you can add to this.
Oh, and it's founder wasn't some corporate hotshot. It's an introverted Swedish-speaking Finn who, while he was a student, started making his own Operating system after playing around with someone else's OS. He was going to call it Freax but the guy he got server space from named the folder of his project "Linux" (Linus Unix) and the name stuck. He operates this project from his Home office which is painted in a colour used in asylums. Man's so fucking introverted he developed the world's biggest code repo, Git, so he didn't have to deal with drama and email.
Steam adopted it meaning a LOT of games now natively run in Linux and what cannot be run natively can be adapted to run. It's now the OS used on their consoles (Steam Deck) and to this, a lot of people have found games run better on Linux than on Windows. More computers run Steam on Linux than MacOS.
On top of that the Arctic World Archive (basically the Svalbard Seed bank, but for Data) have this OS saved in their databanks so if the world ends the survivors are going to be using it.
On top of this? It's Free! No "Freemium" bullshit, no "pay to unlock" shit, no licenses, no tracking or data harvesting. If you have an old laptop that still works and a 16GB USB drive, you can go get it and install it and have a functioning computer because it uses less fucking resources than Windows. Got a shit PC? Linux Mint XFCE or Xubuntu is lightweight af. This shit is stopping eWaste.
What's more, it doesn't even scrimp on style. KDE, XFCE, Gnome, Cinnamon, all look pretty and are functional and there's even a load of people who try make their installs look pretty AF as a hobby called "ricing" with a subreddit (/r/unixporn) dedicated to it.
i've been using linux mint (cinnamon) for years now, since i gave up on windows. it runs so well, so stable, and looks just like win7 (which was the last win os i ran). even games now, as the op noted, are all over for it. i luff it with great luff.
No, but that’s exactly something that should be put in a museum.
Imagine seeing this two, three, eight hundred years after the fact. Imagine this little girl through centuries of time holding up her hand to show you her most precious rock. It’s potent enough now, this intimate knowledge of a complete stranger, this tiny insight into what was explained to her and what she thought was important and who listened to her long enough to let you see it, but imagine centuries in the future. Imagine this little bit of rock that looks like every other bit of rock, with no context and no explanation to it. And then imagine finding/seeing this little sign, and realising that it was Bethan’s rock. That it was a rock that a little girl loved the look of , and picked up, and carried around with her, and when it was explained to her that museums were places where precious things were shown so that other people could see and enjoy them, the precious thing she wanted them to show, that she wanted to show you, was this rock.
This is what material history is. These windows through time into a person’s life and beliefs and mundane treasures, these bridges across centuries where a child a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand years ago can show you her favourite rock.
That is, in so many ways, what museums are for. And well done them for following through.
gummygunk
prguitarman
annaxmalina
kaledo-art
stormborns
