it's something!

It's rude. You're making someone take their time to read something you couldn't bother to write. You're telling them they were so unimportant you couldn't be bothered to actually take the time to say something yourself. And frankly, you're lying about it while you're at it.

This may seem like an exaggeration, the idea that one can learn how to properly think like a criminal by learning how crime stories work. On a personal note, let me tell a story from the Leverage writer’s room.

Apollo Robbins (http://www.istealstuff.com/) runs a crew of professional thieves who consult for law enforcement. He was also our criminal consultant on Leverage. Every few weeks he would visit the writer’s room to advise on the scripts and keep us up to date about new cons and the latest in criminal technology.

One day during the third season he sat in with the writers while we broke a story. We posted the details of a real-life white collar criminal up on the room’s whiteboard, using him as the basis for our Mark. We looked at his weaknesses, how he moved his money, what his hobbies were. Once we were happy with that element of the story we added a Vault to the mix, one that used an interesting new alarm technology we’d researched. We then spent about an hour figuring out how to circumvent that alarm. We even sketched out a map of the imaginary building so we could keep track of our Crew’s movements during the Job.

“Well, I’m done here,” Apollo muttered. Noting our confusion, he pointed at the board and index cards cluttering the wall. “This is exactly how real Crews plan these things. This writer’s room is now a fully functioning criminal gang. You could be thieves.”

Of course writing television pays better than crime (usually), with far less chance of being arrested (usually), so we all managed to resist the temptation. But aside from the day a US Attorney asked us to change a plot because we’d created a scam that was a little too foolproof, or when a Homeland Security Agent admitted they were spooked by a security hole we’d exploited in our season finale, it was certainly one of the proudest moments I had on the show.

WONDERFUL news bestie

My stepmother did NOT like the way her Libertarian Viking Neighbor framed pregnancy as the fetus "attacking the woman". She incredulously told him this was extremely disrespectful to expectant mothers to portray pregnancy as so violent and negative.

Libertarian Viking Neighbor's response was that people consensually hurt each other all the time, and "there's like a whole community about that, with the acronym the one that starts with a B" And his reasoning was that if the mother was consenting to bring attacked by the baby, it in fact wasn't violent and negative because there was consent.