Yoikes and Away!

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Here is a free pdf to tashas cauldron of everything

Here is a free pdf to dungeon master’s guide

Here is a free pdf to volo’s guide to monsters

Here is a free pdf of mordenkainen’s tomb of foes

And everything else is a type of distraction that Lestat WANTS us to be distracted by.

In previous seasons, Danny Molloy talks about how Louis uses third person "him" or "one" when he's trying to distance himself from his actions. Danny is good at catching this stuff!

Lestat is a master of DISTRACTION. Look at the visual difference in the third season (a naked woman showering in the background of a shot, switching from documentary style to colour, time skips, so much modern slang it's almost hard to understand).

Danny repeatedly throughout the episode asks Lestat if he was a stutterer as a kid. (the repetition also kind of mimicking the act of stuttering). He's hammering him. Don't get distracted! Stay on point (both Danny and us, the viewer)!

And what happens at the end of the episode? Lestat stutters as he sees his mother; and it looks like we're going to start delving into his childhood. That's where the pain is. That's where the story is.

like it is supposed to feel jarring and insane. it is supposed to feel like lestat has been violently submerged in modern young people trends and culture and is now repeating all the new words he learned like a beautiful fresh baby. but because the book is from 1985, all I think is oh interesting huh I didn’t know that slang term even originated in the 80s how vintage how retro how lestat wow he’s so embarrassing aw aw so cute.

He's puzzling out his own identity via trial and error. He's very, very observant and using every little thing as a clue. He thinks in miles, the tape measure is metric. He took the time to figure out stopwatch controls before an experiment, in the midst of an identity crisis. He knows how to improvise an experiment from really basic supplies.

They've been immortalised as heroes but its been so long they've fallen into legend. They're the King Arthur of this planet, said to return when they are needed most.

The sg1 characters have been bastardised beyond belief. Jack is an Odin figure. A wise leader but also a trickster. Sam is said to contain the knowledge of the universe. Teal'c is said to be able to lift mountains and, perhaps if his age came up originally, be as old as the universe. Daniel is said to be a kind a generous soul who can speak to all things, people, animals, rocks, everything.

Idk where I'm going with this but I just couldn't get the idea of SG1 becoming immortalised in myth and legend, their adventures told to children as bedtime stories.

1. Archer (does not feel bad)

2. Burnham (feels a Little Bad)

3. Janeway (we personally witnessed the devastation in them big ol I Had to Kill Somebody eyes, but she recovers quickly due to personal love of Tuvok and Neelix)

4. Sisko (spends awhile confirming every single possible alternative, does Not Feel Bad except when Tuvix directly calls him murderer)

5. Kirk (tries to Kobayashi Maru it. Dealer’s choice on if this results in a Tuvix AND Neelix and Tuvok live, or if it becomes one of those things that he carries foreverrr)

6. Picard (this could be a two parter episode with how much he would need to soliloquize on identity and the rights of the individual and the authority limits of a captain. But yeah, he’s killing Tuvix).

Picard is the Captain of No Compromise. His morals are his compass, and every time his duty to Starfleet clashes with them, it chafes him, and he refuses to back down until he finds a path that serves both. He will not spend what he is to get what he wants.

Sisko is the 'I can live with it' Captain. We see it most clearly during In the Pale Moonlight, but he is that man from the very beginning; the circumstances of his command just strip away every layer until nothing is left but that core truth. And the hard thing about that moment, that speech, is that he knows. He isn't rationalizing. He walks through every ugly step like he's reading his own indictment, and at the end he doesn't grant himself absolution. He just decides he can carry it. And means it.

Picard could never have been the Deep Space Nine captain. The compromises would hollow him out.

But flip it around and Sisko could never have been the Flagship captain either. Not because he lacks the greatness, but because his greatness is the wrong shape for it. Hugh is a perfect example. Hugh gets to become Hugh because in the end, against his trauma and instincts, Picard refuses to treat him as a weapon, and that refusal only lands with the weight it does because he has never once quietly spent his principles for convenience. He is the ideals. They aren't aspirational when he says them. They're real.

Sisko couldn't hold that position. His strength lives in the grey, and you can't be the beacon and be in the mud at the same time. "It's easy to be a saint in paradise."

Sisko is who you need when the war is real and the cost is brutal and someone has to make the call no one else will make. Picard is who you need when someone has to prove the dream is still worth having.

We need them both. That's the whole point.

She was trying to the best for her kids and just didn’t know how to interpret the validity of information or its sources, an actual skill that can be actually difficult and that is under-taught and a necessary first step to being able to trust vaccination research, so chose no action over taking an action she wasn’t sure of. She kept looking into it with family and friends and even eventually came to the right conclusion before her kids became sick, but it was still too late.

Honestly it was pretty brave of her to publicly admit she was wrong. She could have just quietly vaccinated her kids and not become a national news story, but instead she spoke out, even saying “I’m writing this from quarantine, the irony of which isn’t lost on me.” and also “I am not looking forward to any gloating or shame as this ‘defection’ from the antivaxx camp goes public, but, this isn’t a popularity contest.  Right now my family is living the consequences of misinformation and fear.  I understand that families in our community may be mad at us for putting their kids at risk.”

The movement is pushed by women, especially suburban moms, because they know damn well you cannot trust doctors. You cannot trust the medical industry, the billion-dollar corporate zone of “you should lose some weight and maybe the pain will stop.” Cannot trust the ones who keep changing diet advice - is it no sugar? No carbs? No fats? Is it dangerous to let kids eat things in wild colors? Food pyramid: good or bad? They cannot trust the BMI chart that says they should lose 75 lbs to be “healthy.” (Whether or not they “should” lose 75 lbs, they know damn well that “healthy” does not describe any part of the journey to getting there.) Cannot trust the ones who keep giving them incomplete and sometimes incorrect information about contraception. The ones who said “that’s false labor; you have two weeks more” 12 hours before they gave birth. And so on.

So they have their kids, and they want so much for their kids to be safe, and the doctors and nurses say: Get them vaccinated.

So they ask: What about if there’s complications? An allergic reaction? Side effects?

And the doctors and nurses say: Get them vaccinated.

This is… not reassuring.

And they ask, My sister-in-law’s cousin had a really bad reaction to the MMR shot and I want to know how I can tell it’s safe for my kids.

And the doctors and nurses say: Get them vaccinated.

Throw in the right-wing/libertarian faction yelling YOU CAN’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO and the insurance companies saying “hey um you need a specific type of coverage for that; we probably cover those vaccinations but you’ll need this special paperwork to be sure” - and then you have the actual anti-vax propagandists yelling some combination of cherry-picked statistics and outright lies, and you get a whole lot of moms willing to say BUGGRE ALL THIS FOR A LARKE.

There is no amount of facts that can fix this. They’re swamped with facts from 300 directions. What they need to fix this is empathy and the kind of connections that lead to trust.

Kindness doesn’t just matter because it’s more ethical - it'salso a more effective strategy.