i check the leverage tag often and an emerging reason is to tell folks just starting the show to watch season one in the intended not broadcast order. and [prospector voice] its never-ending work, but gosh darn if it ain’t the gold work.
anyway here’s the list if you didn’t know! the most important parts for me is keeping the two-horse job (showing eliot opening up) and the bank shot job (the team is now officially ride or die) later, after episodes that show them still getting used to each other (esp the wedding job and the mile high job)
[ID: A screenshot of a numbered list of Leverage season 1 episodes that reads
Randland World Leaders - Do they know the price of a banana apple?
Morgase Trakand - No, but she could get it in the right neighborhood if asked. Understands the economic influences that affect prices and knows roughly where Andor’s sit at any given time.
Elayne Trakand - Pre world travels? Not with a gun to her head. She wouldn’t give a false guess though, just avoid the question rather then admit ignorance. Post world travels she knows the prices of most common food stuffs for Andor and all of it’s immediate neighbors with scary accuracy.
Rand al'Thor - Yes. One of the first things Rand does after taking over Tear is familiarize himself with tax policies and food production and grain trade. He is a farm boy at heart and has Powerful Opinions on cost of living.
Perrin Abyara - Nope. He thinks he does, but in reality he names the price of apples he paid aka, pre adventure. He knows that prices in general have gone up but if you tried to sell him an apple he would get offended when you wouldn’t take the same price he paid prior to half a dozen kingdoms going to war, and the endless summer choking out trade. He wouldn’t say anything though and just assume you where trying to squeeze a few coins out of him because he’s dressed like some ‘idiot lord’.
Faile- Yes. She knows exactly the price of apples grown in the Two Rivers and knows that it’s out competing the neighboring provinces apples by a good margin. Does this have something to do with her threatening local officials to ensure they don’t try to hard to compete with Two Rivers food prices? Maybe, but it’s nothing Perrin can prove she did. HE dosen’t know the price of apples.
Siuan Sanche - Apples? No. Fish? Yes. Siuan could tell you the price of every fish in the market at Tar Valon and what will be cheaper next month based on yields out of the south. This is not for economic reasons, it’s because she still eats fish for 3 meals out of 4.
Berelain - Nope. She has economic advisers who she pays to know that. Her skill and perk points all went into Foreign Policy and Espionage, not Economics.
Alliandre - The price of apples keeps Alliandre up at night staring at her bedroom ceiling, fearing for her life. It turns out having a religious tyrant running rampart around your kingdom burning down farms and causing skyrocketing inflation by assaulting trade routes and exacting inconsistent 'tithes’ on merchants will make you VERY familiar with the economic conditions of the common man. Every time the price of apples goes up a silver mark, Alliandre makes her food taster check her meals an extra time.
Tuon - Yes. Always good to know the price of local cyanide containing fruits, just in case.
Elaida - “It’s an apple Alviarin? How much can it cost? 10 gold marks?”
Mat - Mat can price anything. (It’s just not interesting to price apples rather than gemstones, unless he’s hungry or it’s a supply chain issue.)
Aviendha - Applies the usual Aiel exchange rate of loot to rare imported foodstuffs. Is correct in the Waste, vastly overpays everywhere else until Elayne learns what an apple is worth in the wetlands & tactfully communicates it.
Valan Luca - Surely you have a bulk discount?
Nynaeve - Has a general idea of what the price of apples is, but is still going to raise a ruckus about how cheap apples were when she was Wisdom. Lan tries to keep her away from the apple sellers. One day though, he gets called away to perform some Malkier tradition. When he comes back 2 hours later, Nynaeve has organized a fruit sellers’ union.
Darlin Sisnera - not for any amount smaller than “a bargeload” (until Caraline Damodred explains to him the value of understanding the price of basic staples in the units ordinary people actually buy them at)
Harine din Togara Two Winds - apples are not part of the traditional Sea Folk diet and not usually worth transporting long distances via ship, and even if they were, that’s the Master of the Blades’ job to know.
Amathera - not WHILE she was a world leader, but she absolutely does now (and furthermore has a lot of opinions about it).
Rodel Ituralde - only in the sense that he knows how valuable it is to burn and/or steal your enemy’s apples.
Hey btw I don’t know who needs to hear this, but those adults telling you that your teen years are the best years of your life? Yeah I don’t know what the hell they’re smoking, either. I’m 29 and every once in a while I just sit here and think “man, it sure sucked to be 14. Glad I never have to do that again.”
Some of my coworkers work on tree ring data. We use a terrific piece of software called CooRecorder, which takes scanned images of tree cores and let’s you create a position file that maps out where each ring is. This is opposed to the traditional method of measuring tree cores, where you put the core on a little rolling platform, look at it under a microscope and had a device that measured how much you moved the platform between marking rings. (Total nightmare, extremely difficult to realize where you’d made a mistake.) It’s a great, user friendly piece of software that only costs $68. By comparison, the main competitor costs close to $10k.
When I was buying new licenses a couple years ago, I looked into the story of this software. Apparently this couple bought an old house in southern Sweden in the 1980s, and wanted to date the house using ring widths from its timber beams. Straightforward! But at the time, all the dendrochronology labs refused to share their methods for measuring tree ring widths or any data to cross-correlate their records. So they decided, you know what, we can build software–we’ll just do it ourselves. And they created CooRecorder, as well as their own library of ring widths. That’s why it’s such a good price, it’s meant to be accessible. Now tree ring width data is widely shared, and it’s easy to create a reference.
Here’s the turn for the hilarious and bizarre: there is a well known area of poor correspondence in European oaks from antiquity (Roman era, ~ 518 BC to 314 AD) and modern day (AD ~381 - today). It’s believed the Romans cut down too many trees and the weather was bad, leading to many years with missing or hard to measure rings. People have been working on creating better references that span that ‘Roman gap’; it’s a known issue. However, our Swedish Ring Width Robin Hood couple has decided they have solved the problem once and for all: that misalignment is actually because EVERY SINGLE RECORD OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION IS WRONG BY OVER TWO HUNDRED WHOLE YEARS. Everybody–the Byzantine empire, the Roman Empire–just colluded and wholesale made up 232 years of history. I am actually writing this to you in the Year of Our Lord 1791. Their self-published papers get deep into aligning records of Roman comets, eclipses, etc, with other known astrological phenomena to get the 'correct’ dates (they note that this is difficult and the astrologers who 'faked’ the records in the Christian era did a very good job), and now they’ve moved on to re-dating everything in ancient Egypt. It gets very red-string-Pepe-Silva.jpg very quickly, which would be fun except that the papers are completely unreadable and clearly no historian has ever been consulted.
Overall, a great example of how you can make a terrific contribution to science in one area and have no idea what you are talking about in other areas. Stay safe out there folks.
The baffling thing about this one–besides all of it–is that they admit it would take enormous, painstaking effort to fabricate these records and hide the truth, and the nefarious motive offered up for all this is…..nothing. Bupkis. Apparently the early Roman Church thought “hey this’ll really fuck up those dendrochronologists a couple millennia from now” and put all their crack scholars on the case
Using this piece of software again, decided to check up on my favorite dendrochronologists! They are continuing to reconcile their chronology with Egyptian records but they have a new hypothesis: the Coptic Christians wanted Christ to be conceived in the Alexandrian year 5500, and dated their calendar from that. Does that account for the difference they are proposing, not even close. Is there any biblical/cultural/numerological reason to falsify records for this, no. Did anyone else ever use that calendar, absolutely not. Still! It’s a start!!
“Fiction is not a 1:1 reflection of reality” and “the U.S. military doesn’t support and finance American action movies and video games for fun” are concepts that can and should coexist
one of the reasons i love the murderbot diaries is how it doesnt flinch in trying to grapple with some of the Big Questions, such as “why is it that Humanity™ is the goal to strive towards for artificial intelligence if it wants to be acknowledged as a person?” and “What does it look like when someone is both undeniably a person but also unapologetically nonhuman?” and “what if the magic school bus had a gun”
Queer lady Pākehā scientist, in fandom since ages ago. He tangata tiriti ahau. I'm on Twitter @sixthlight and my fanfic can be found
on AO3. Blogging and reblogging about fandom, science, history, feminism, queer issues, and other things that catch my fancy.
