bog unicorn, inc.

BUT. This is Lestat's story. How much of that was what really happened? Did Louis recite those pages from Claudia's diaries to Lestat? Were those even really her words? I think finding out more about Louis's relationship with Lemuel will actually hugely affect my reading of this scene, because that phone call at the end could so easily be Lestat projecting the same insecurities he always has about Louis partners (and I think black men, especially), and if so, that may be a cue to remember that this is Lestat's story. We also see Louis fly, which Louis himself says he can't do, and which we never saw him do in the objective reality scenes we got in IwTV.

Lestat was the one who first opened Claudia's diary, not Louis. Louis went with it, and he did plenty later, but Lestat started it. He chose to violate her privacy because of how she acted after he hurt her in a way that echoed his own trauma.

Louis reading that entry is intercut with Lestat's flashback. The show is making a connection for us. But Lestat is telling this story, right after spending an episode trying to convince himself his relationship with his mother is okay by trying to convince us, so how much of this is him making a connection for himself? His hallucination of Magnus mentions to Claudia by name in Lestat's side of this scene. No one else gets a name.

This is the same episode where he talks about Nicki; both watching Nicki lose his grip on reality and spin out into self harm, and literally watching Armand burning him, and the parallels between that and Lestat burning Claudia's dead lover are so strong, as are the ones between Lestat letting Nicki convince him to make him a vampire and him letting Louis pressure him into making Claudia a vampire. No doubt the memory of what happened with Nicki made him reluctant to get too close to Claudia, and I think his response to her behavior after the burning of her lover was probably deeply influenced by that. Louis's and Claudia's accounts of him during that time are so different from the person we see in his own memories leading up to Nicki's death, and I don't think that's solely a matter of who's telling the story.

Lestat is so defensive about what happened on that train, telling sideways truths that don't answer for what he was really accused of. "Did I threaten Claudia with rape on a train?"—maybe not, but unless for some reason it was changed in the book, that wasn't really the question.

The first callout of a transfemme I didn’t see until years later and it was directed at monetizeyourcat for financially abusing and pressuring young trans women into sex.

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

unauthorized fucking thing!!!!!!

(warning: loud chirping throughout)

the first osprey is the father, the one that comes later is the mother.

ospreys are not eagles, they're ospreys

ospreys only eat fish, that's why they don't register this starling as possible food

the starling got home safely

the starling was not trying to eat the eggs, it was mostly curious and you can see it trying to hop under the osprey every time the osprey tries to sit down again--this is because the starling is still a baby and has the instinct to get under an adult for warmth, even though it mostly has its feathers. this scares the osprey because that is a Foreign Creature near its eggs.

at the end of the video you can see the ospreys starting to turn the eggs. birds do this so the yolk and/or embryo don't stick to the shell of the egg, which is bad for the egg's health.

I was like, "This will either be amazing, or I'll turn it off in 30 seconds."

Gargoyle character studies I had on my Patreon for a while now, featuring Brooklyn, Broadway, Lexington, and Angela! :)

These were largely a bid in trying to capture the likeness of the characters while translating them into my style. As seen with Angela's sheet: what I did was take the official character model sheet and trace it to get a feel of their base character shapes, then did a second pass over the trace to add the features I wanted to incorporate into my headcanon design.

The final iteration (the big colored ones) is entirely freehanded and drawn using my passes as reference. I like how they all came out! :>

I'll eventually do the same with other characters (Elisa, Demona, Goliath, and Hudson are next on my list), then do fullbody redesigns to act as refs for any future drawings and headcanons I make for Gargoyles.