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WHO, ME? Is showing up for work every Monday a mistake? While you ponder that question, dive into a new installment of Who, Me? – The Register's weekly column that shares readers' stories of escaping their errors. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Evan," who wrote to us from the side of a pool while his kids had a swimming lesson! "I work in test automation as a consultant and for one client I had to record test evidence as video," he explained, adding that the client's test management tool stored the vids. The resulting files weren't individually large, but by the time Evan had recorded 600 of them, managing all those files was starting to get a bit cumbersome. "Removing them manually was far too slow and wasn't feasible," he wrote. So he wrote a script to clean things up all at once. "Obviously this data was important, and I'm not reckless," Evan wrote. He therefore carefully debugged the script using breakpoints. "I stepped through every line, I checked all values, and I could see everything was right. Then I let the code try to delete the one file I was watching." The script deleted that file. And everything else in the container that the test tool used to store videos and plenty of other data. Did we mention this happened in the middle of a project, meaning Evan's action was profoundly unwelcome? Evan reckoned he was probably at fault, but decided not to confess to his client and instead informed them about the data loss and logged a support ticket. The client therefore assumed this incident was an accident and was cool about it. After a week of back-and-forth with support, Evan got good news. His client's support team was able to restore the data from a backup and could not find a reason for the incident. And then came even better news. "They took all ownership of the fault," Evan admitted. "They were very apologetic and said one of their SaaS scripts had gone haywire and deleted the content." Evan therefore escaped blame and carried on consulting – and is clearly doing well enough to pay for multiple kids to have swimming lessons! Have you successfully escaped blame for an error? If so, click here to send an email to Who, Me? It would be a mistake not to share your story so we can present it to your fellow readers. ®

⚡ Quick Take

• The very first scene of The Vampire Lestat is quite cryptic, but based on Anne Rice’s later novels, we have some idea what is going on.

In the opening scene of episode one of The Vampire Lestat, we see a rather exclusive auction, one held for only the richest and most elite individuals on Earth. We presume this auction is being held by the Talamasca, the secret order of supernatural scholars. It’s held at an airport, and we see that even elements from the Vatican are bidding on this auction. They are auctioning off several recordings of The Vampire Lestat, not just his music, but also his spoken word confessions, labeled as “The Failures.” The auction is taking place in 2026, after a series of events the year prior have shattered the world, and (presumably) left Lestat dead. Or is he? Here’s what we gleaned for the future of this series based on just this opening scene.

Could Raglan James Really Be Lestat in The Vampire Lestat’s First Scene? Body Swapping Exists in The Vampire ChroniclesAMC Networks

The character of Talamasca operative Raglan James first appeared in season one of Interview with the Vampire. But in Anne Rice’s novels, he doesn’t show up until book four, The Tale of the Body Thief. And Mr. James is the Body Thief in question. James is a psychic of considerable power who perfected a technique of “body swapping.” He exchanges bodies with Lestat in this novel, and then literally steals it, while Lestat rots away in a dying mortal form. The way Raglan James at the auction is giving meaningful glances to Louis in that scene makes us wonder if that’s now Lestat, now somehow in James’ body. And the (supposedly) dearly departed Brat Prince? Possibly not so dearly departed after all.

Armand Has Lost an Eye; Here’s Where Else We See Eyes Lost in Anne Rice’s Books

We see in the auction scene that Armand (Assad Zaman) is missing an eye, and wearing an eye patch. In Anne Rice’s canon, Lestat famously lost his eye once too. In the fifth Vampire Chronicles novel, Memnoch the Devil, the fallen angel takes Lestat on a harrowing journey through the realms of Heaven and Hell. When Lestat refuses Memnoch’s offer to be his right hand in Hell, he escapes back to our earthly reality.

AMC Networks

As Lestat attempts to escape, Memnoch plucks out Lestat’s left eye to prevent him from taking the Biblical Veil of Veronica, which he acquired during a time-traveling visit to Christ’s crucifixion. Memnoch eventually returned his eye to him. We’re not saying Armand had the same experience, but it’s not impossible.

Louis Is Missing His Leg. What Could That Point To?

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Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson) is also there in the same auction, but with a missing leg. There’s no instance in the books where Louis loses a limb like this, but he may lose it when the vampires of the world descend on Lestat’s final performance, hoping to eliminate the rule-breaking Brat Prince for good. Louis stands by his man during this battle, and he may lose a leg at this point. Having said that, vampires can easily replace their limbs with those from other vampires. So we’re not sure why Louis doesn’t do just that. Then again, with Louis, he probably thinks he deserves to suffer.

“The Consequential Global Catastrophes”: What You Should KnowAMC Networks

The vampire community labels Lestat a heretic for revealing the true nature of their species to the world. They attack his final concert, packed with thousands of mortals. But before they can kill the Brat Prince, Queen Akasha awakens and sets them all on fire with her mind, not just at the concert, but all across the globe. These fires spread, destroying property and taking mortal lives everywhere around the world.

“The Attempted Extinction of the Y Chromosomes”: What Does That Mean?

This refers to Akasha’s “Grand Plan” in Queen of the Damned. While the Mother of all Vampires sat still like a statue for millennia, she was not truly catatonic. Her consciousness traveled from mortal body to body for thousands of years, witnessing humanity’s bloody history through the eyes of others. Akasha concluded that the culprit behind all wars and violence was the male sex. From the Crusades to the Holocaust, a man can claim blame. So when she rises again, she uses her Mind Gift to kill hundreds (if not thousands) of men. She plans to wipe out 95% of the males of the species, keeping just enough to keep humanity going. Akasha believes that if women rule the world, with herself as Queen of Heaven, world peace can be achieved. She doesn’t get far with this plot, but she kills hundreds around the world before she’s finally stopped.

The Vampire Lestat (or season three of Interview with the Vampire) is currently running on AMC and AMC+.

The post What Is Happening in the First Scene of THE VAMPIRE LESTAT appeared first on Nerdist.

⚡ Quick Take

• On AMC’s The Vampire Lestat, the Brat Prince’s backstory is told out of sequence, but we present to you Lestat’s history chronologically to help you make sense of this season of the show.

The Vampire Lestat has premiered its first episode on AMC, adapting Anne Rice’s second novel in her Vampire Chronicles series. This 1985 book truly made Lestat a star, elevating his undead status next to the likes of Dracula. Sam Reid reprises his role from Interview with the Vampire, with his backstory from the novel told largely in a non-linear fashion. So to help guide you through these tangled narrative vines, we present the undead rock star Lestat’s canonical history, as told by Anne Rice in The Vampire Lestat. We start with his birth in the 18th century and follow him until he meets Louis de Pointe du Lac in New Orleans.

Alfred A. Knopf/Ballantine BooksThe Mortal Life of Lestat de Lioncourt in 18th Century France

The mortal Lestat de Lioncourt was born on November 7, 1760. That’s the same birthday as Anne Rice’s husband Stan, who the character of Lestat is physically based on. (Louis shares Anne’s birthday of October 4.)  He was born the son of an aristocratic lord in the French countryside, in a place called the Auvergne. His family long ago had spent all their wealth. Lestat’s father was a cruel tyrant who married a much younger heiress from Italy named Gabrielle. She gave birth to several sons for him, many of whom died in childbirth. The youngest, and the only one who took after her (and not his father), was Lestat.

AMC Networks

Lestat aspired to be an artist and actor, completely different from his boorish brothers. Thus, he maintained a close relationship with his mother. When he grew to adulthood, he became the family hunter, protecting their ancestral lands. One day, when he was 21 years old (29 in the TV series), he saved the nearby village from a pack of eight wolves, who very nearly killed him. It was after this incident that Lestat discovered his mother was dying of consumption. As her last wish, she bequeathed all her jewels to Lestat, so he could run away to Paris and fulfill his dream of being an actor on stage.

AMC Networks Lestat’s Vampire Life Begins in Paris

Lestat and his childhood friend Nicolas de Lenfent, a cynical violinist who was now his lover, fled to the big city together. They both got work in a shabby theater in the heart of the city, where Lestat quickly became a rising star. Nicolas, meanwhile, sank further into depression as Lestat’s on-stage fame grew. One night, Lestat noticed a face in the audience stalking him, whispering the words “Wolfkiller” into his mind. One night, this being, who turned out to be a vampire, captured Lestat from his home and dragged him to his tower outside Paris. There, he forced him to become an undead being against his will. The Vampire Lestat was born.

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Lestat’s vampire maker, Magnus, was about 300 years old, and an outcast from vampiric society. He had grown tired of eternal life, and chose Lestat as his heir. In part because of his beautiful looks, but also for his bravery in killing the wolves. Once Lestat became a vampire, Magnus flung himself into the fire, ending his existence. Thus, leaving Lestat without a teacher. Lestat took to his vampire existence like a duck to water, killing the many thieves and scoundrels of Paris. He bought the theater he worked at, giving his fellow actors continued employment. But he kept his new vampiric nature a secret from his lover, Nicolas, and kept his distance.

AMC NetworksLestat Turns His Dying Mother into a Vampire

Eventually, Lestat’s mother, Gabrielle, came to Paris to see her son one last time and to spend her final nights there. On her deathbed, Lestat revealed his true nature to her, and turned her into a vampire. Gabrielle became his first fledgling and companion in immortality. The two made Paris their hunting ground, although they’d often hear the telepathic voices of other vampires in the city calling them outcasts and blasphemers. Eventually, these Parisian vampires attacked them directly.

AMC Networks Meeting Armand and the Children of Darkness

These vampires were cultists, who lived in the nearby cemetery of Les Innocents. They believed what their mentor, the ancient vampire Armand, had taught them. They considered themselves the Children of Satan, and they had to live among the dead, stay away from mortals (except to feed), and run from crucifixes, as Satan commanded. But Lestat didn’t obey any of those rules. And because of his and Gabrielle’s presence, they knew the “rules” Armand had been feeding them for centuries were all lies and superstitions. Lies Armand told them to keep the coven under his thumb.

With his hold of the coven shattered by Lestat, and its members fleeing, Armand tried to become the new companion of Lestat. He told Lestat how an ancient Roman vampire named Marius had transformed him when he was a slave boy in Renaissance Venice. The Satanic vampires of Italy set Marius on fire for living against their dogmatic rules, leaving him for dead, and they kidnapped the young Armand. They brainwashed him into believing in their religion, and Armand became a leader among the Children of Darkness. He never truly believed in their ways, but used their dogma to control his Satanic coven in Paris.

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The Weird History of Anne Rice’s Vampires in Comic BooksLestat Helps Create the Thétre des Vampires

Ultimately, Lestat rejected Armand, and transformed his lover, Nicolas, into a vampire. He did this despite Armand and Gabrielle warning him against it. Nicolas almost instantly went mad from the vampiric blood, and told Lestat that he resented and hated him for ever keeping it from him. Lestat and Gabrielle decided to leave Paris, but they left the theater he had bought to Armand and what remained of his coven. They transformed it into the Thétre des Vampires, where they acted out vampiric plays for Parisian mortal audiences who believed it all to be fake.

AMC Networks

Nicolas remained at the Thétre des Vampires, in Armand’s care, while Lestat and Gabrielle searched for Marius, Armand’s maker. Even though Armand told them he was killed by the Children of Darkness centuries earlier, they didn’t believe a vampire that ancient could be destroyed so easily. They searched together for years, and found no sign of Marius de Romanus anywhere on Earth. After Nicolas finally threw himself into the flames, and Gabrielle decided to leave her son to be a lone wolf, a despondent Lestat buried himself in the Earth, where he remained for years.

Warner Bros. Lestat Meets the Vampire Marius, Keeper of Akasha, Queen of the Damned

Eventually, Marius chose to reveal himself to Lestat, and pulled him out of the ground. He fed him his powerful blood and nurtured him back to health. He revealed himself as the keeper of “Those Who Must Be Kept,” also known as Queen Akasha and King Enkil of Egypt. Nearly 2,000 years prior, the scholar Marius was transformed into a vampire in ancient Rome. But only to become the new caretaker of Those Who Must Be Kept. This 6,000-year-old royal pair were the ancient progenitors of the vampire species, and all vampire bloodlines came from them. They no longer drank blood, or spoke, or moved, frozen like statues.

Lestat Arrives in New Orleans, Creates Louis and ClaudiaAMC Networks

Since their destruction meant the entire species would be destroyed, they needed to be kept secret and safe. Marius had been their keeper for millennia and entrusted Lestat with this knowledge. But he made him swear to never tell a living soul. When Lestat played Nicolas’ violin for Akasha, she awoke momentarily and let Lestat drink her powerful and ancient blood. This made the young Lestat one of the most powerful vampires on Earth, despite being so young. Marius then told Lestat to flee to the New World, someplace where barely any vampires existed. Someplace that even Akasha could not find him. And that’s when Lestat wound up in New Orleans, and met his fledgling Louis, and the events of Interview with the Vampire began.

If you’ve seen seasons one and two of Interview with the Vampire, or the 1994 film adaptation, you probably know what became of Lestat next. Of course, many things happen to Lestat after the events of book two, but we’ll have to wait and see if AMC plans to adapt those books as well.

The Vampire Lestat airs at 9 pm ET/PT on AMC and AMC+. You can also read The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice today as you wait for the next episode of the series to air.

Eric Diaz is a staff writer at Nerdist and a life-long Anne Rice fan. Yes, he is a member of the OG fan club.

This post has affiliate links, which means we may earn advertising money if you buy something. This doesn’t cost you anything extra, we just have to give you the heads up for legal reasons. Click away!

The post THE VAMPIRE LESTAT’S Backstory, Explained in Linear Fashion appeared first on Nerdist.

⚡ Quick Take

• In AMC’s The Vampire Lestat, vampires have to pee. But do the undead have to go to the bathroom in the actual Anne Rice lore?

One thing that befuddled Interview with the Vampire fans from the trailer to The Vampire Lestat was the moment where we see Lestat peeing blood in a public urinal. Was this from a dream sequence? Since when do vampires need to urinate? Well, after the first episode of The Vampire Lestat, we’ve learned that yes, in the world of AMC’s Anne Rice Immortal Universe, the undead do have to take a leak sometimes.

Vampires Do Indeed Have to Pee in AMC’s The Vampire Lestat

Lestat does so in this episode, and he’s even accosted by two angry vampires peeing next to him. Lestat explains, via voice-over narration, that yes, vampires do indeed have to pee, just not as frequently as humans. Also, it’s hard to get blood out of eco-friendly urinals. Who knew?

AMC NetworksDo Vampires Urinate in Anne Rice’s Books?

So, is this an invention of the series, or do vampires pee in Anne Rice lore? The short answer is, in Rice’s books, they do not pee. But the TV series vampires deviate wildly from Rice’s take on vampire physiology already. For starters, Rice’s vampires have almost translucent skin, which exposes their veins, except for in the hours after they feed. They don’t eat, drink any fluids other than blood, or have to go to the bathroom for number one or number two. Rice vampires do cry, but only blood tears. They also sweat blood, but only under extreme duress. Most markedly different from Rice’s novels is that her vampires don’t have human sex. And on the show, they absolutely do. Although they admit that it’s way behind in terms of pleasure in comparison to blood consumption.

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Essentially, in Rice’s novels, vampires describe the act of taking blood as being a bit orgasmic, like sex (but not exactly), a bit like getting high off drugs, with accompanying hallucinations, and of course, it’s their food. But it’s all of those things, and yet also none of those things. Both Louis and Lestat have said it’s a state that they simply can’t explain to humans.

Do Anne Rice Vamps Have to Go to the Bathroom in the Movie Versions?

In the 1994 movie adaptation, Louis says of the transformation, “Might as well ask Heaven what it sees. No human can truly know.” The movie is more in keeping with Rice’s original take. We know they dont eat and drink. And we never see them needing a bathroom break. But the AMC series brings its vampires a bit more down to Earth. Although they do retain a lot of Rice’s supernatural powers, like telepathy, flight (among some of them), and the ability to start fires.

In the Anne Rice novel The Tale of the Body Thief, the Vampire Lestat becomes stuck in a human body for a prolonged time. He wanted to feel what it felt like to be human again after 200 years and change. Turns out, he romanticized being human and found that he actually hated it. He loathed getting sick, having no real strength, and how quickly sex acts were over. Oh, and the disgusting nature of having to poop and pee all the time. He really disliked that. He was glad to get back to his immortal body as soon as possible. But in the AMC series, if he ever goes through similar events in future seasons, he’ll at least have been used to peeing.

The Vampire Lestat airs at 9 pm ET/PT on AMC and AMC+.

Eric Diaz is a staff writer at Nerdist and a life-long Anne Rice fan. Yes, he is a member of the OG fan club.

The post Vamps Pee in THE VAMPIRE LESTAT, But Is It Anne Rice Canon? appeared first on Nerdist.

We’ve all been waiting with bated breath for The Vampire Lestat to arrive and continue the incredible world of AMC’s Immortal Universe. We knew this season would belong to Sam Reid, who captivates as Lestat in all his glory. Playing Lestat alone requires a chameleon of an actor, of course. The vampire has so many moods, modes, layers, and emotions, and they all move through him at the drop of the hat, often several at once. But if that weren’t enough, Sam Reid actually plays TWO roles in The Vampire Lestat. Yes, in addition to Lestat, Sam Reid also plays a mortal called Jarda in the series. But just who is The Vampire Lestat‘s Jarda? Why do we need him? And why do we love him? Let’s break down this Czechian karoke fanatic.

⚡ Quick Take

• Sam Reid actually plays two characters in The Vampire Lestat: Lestat and Jarda. But who is Jarda in The Vampire Lestat? We explain.

Who Is Sam Reid’s Second The Vampire Lestat Character, Jarda?

In short, Jarda is Lestat’s body double in The Vampire Lestat, so it only makes sense that Sam Reid plays him as well. But as far as everything else about Jarda goes, he could not be more different than Lestat. Jarda, in a word, is kind of a loser. Most of the time, he’s drunk and singing off-key to himself as he gets bossed around by Lestat’s right-hand woman, the tough-as-nails lawyer Christine Claire.

AMC

Lestat describes Jarda as a “brick-laying, karaoke fanatic from Oztrova.” And reveals that Christine found him working construction in the Czech Republic. He also makes sure we know that Jarda is three inches shorter than he is, and needs blue-eyed contacts (which he’s always forgetting to put in) and a wig to truly become Lestat. Or, in short, he’s “Neanderthal Lestat.”

Why Does Lestat Need Jarda in The Vampire Lestat?

It turns out that becoming a nice celebrity with a cult following is a bit of an issue when you’re a vampire. Suddenly, eyes are on you everywhere you go. And that makes hunting and killing people, or at least drinking their blood, a bit hard. That’s where Jarda comes in. If Lestat makes a mess, Christine sends Jarda to Applebee’s to order a tuna melt and take some selfies with fans, while Lestat hunts in the other direction. It’s a pretty good system for keeping suspicious eyes off our favorite diva vampire.

But What Is the True Purpose of Jarda in The Vampire Lestat?AMC

But, most importantly, The Vampire Lestat‘s Jarda is there to be very, very mortal. His chief job, beyond protecting Lestat from minor mishaps, is to be so painfully human that other mortals cease to question whether Lestat is a real vampire. Jarda is there to obscure Lestat’s true vampire nature and have the world come to believe that he is only a farce… A tribute to a figment of imagination born from Daniel Molloy’s mind. For the most part, Lestat notes that this works pretty well, as humans aren’t really that prone to doing much more than “huh-ing” at anything interesting before returning to their phones and algorithms. But, of course, some persist who won’t be swayed. Still, when Jarda is openly posing as Lestat in the open, it does make it kind of hard to believe vampires are real.

We Love Sam Reid as Jarda

In a season where Sam Reid is already doing so much, we didn’t really expect him to do even more. But we are obsessed with Sam Reid’s second role as Jarda in The Vampire Lestat. It really goes to show you HOW talented an actor Reid really is. Lestat, although quite changeable, NEVER approaches anything as bumbling and comedic as Jarda. And seeing Reid flex this muscle of his acting chops is absolutely a delight. Although Reid is literally playing Jarda AND Lestat, the two characters barely resemble one another. They literally feel like they are played by different people. And is that not the wonder of acting?

The Vampire Lestat is now releasing weekly on Sundays at 9p ET/PT on AMC and AMC+.

Rotem Rusak is Editor-in-Chief of Nerdist and a huge fan of The Vampire Lestat. She can’t wait for everyone to watch this season.

The post Sam Reid Plays TWO Roles in The Vampire Lestat appeared first on Nerdist.

The Vampire Lestat has returned to us, and with it a fresh batch of tangled vampiric relationships. Throughout the first episode of the series, we see Lestat texting a mysterious person simply labeled as “Toi” on his phone. These texts take on an increasingly intense urgency, which corresponds to Lestat’s levels of loneliness and distress. Of course, for much of the episode, fans might imagine the person Lestat is texting is his longtime companion and lover, Louis. I was lucky enough to watch the first episode of The Vampire Lestat with 2,000 or so other fans at The Vampire Lestat Concert, and judging by the “awwwwws” that came after some of the texts were shown on screen, Louis was a much-hoped-for “Toi” contender. But in the end, who was the person Lestat was texting throughout the first episode of The Vampire Lestat? Here’s the identity of Lestat’s Toi and the ending of The Vampire Lestat episode one, explained.

⚡ Quick Take

• In the ending of The Vampire Lestat episode one, the mysterious person that Lestat is texting is revealed to be his mother/fledgling Gabriella.
• Gabriella and Lestat exchange a series of texts under the names “Moi” and “Toi,” which we have transcribed below.
• Ultimately, these texts reveal that Gabriella doesn’t necessarily have Lestat’s best interests at heart and that she allows him to break down and spiral for some time before finally coming to him.

The Ending of The Vampire Lestat 1 Reveals the Identity of “Toi”

Moi and Toi, me and you, in French. Moi, of course, is Lestat, and Toi, the end of The Vampire Lestat episode reveals, is the Vampire Gabriella. Alas, not Louis.

AMC

Throughout episode one of The Vampire Lestat, Lestat reaches out to Toi/Gabriella by text, asking for her company. At first, when he is merely bored and annoyed (though obviously lonely) on his tour, his texts are idle and more removed. But throughout the first episode of the series, Lestat’s emotional state deteriorates, culminating in something of a breakdown on stage, followed by a rough aftermath. The sound of his own music moves through him, unleashing all the “muses” of his past to swirl through his thoughts, taunting and haunting him. On top of that, Lestat manages to bite his fan Baby Jenks, who is HIGH on “candy.” And if a vampire drinks the blood of a drugged mortal, they’ll overdose as well. Lestat sees visions of Baby Jenks’ soul floating on the ceiling, has a lot of spirited sex, and ends up getting in a spat with the local Detroit coven, the Tooth Team, excuse us, the Fang Gang. After that, he accidentally outs himself as a vampire to his band and flies out the window in a tizzy to throw up blood in a run-down motel.

And then, at Lestat’s lowest, most desperate point, THAT’s when the vampire Gabriella, or Toi, as we know her from Lestat’s texts, decides to finally make her appearance. The Vampire Lestat episode one ends with Gabriella arriving in the hotel room and a very performative Lestat telling her, “I got myself into something I can’t get out of. Music’s opened up the dutch oven, and I’m not sure if I can close it again. I’m not really at my best, but it’s very nice to see you again. I like what you’ve done with your hair, my Gabriella.” Gabriella heals a cut on Lestat’s face and then draws him into an eager makeout. The voiceover from Lestat supplies for us that Gabriella is his “Fledgling, lover, mother.” Welcome to the Vampire Chronicles, new Fledglings.

What Do Lestat’s Texts to Gabriella Say?AMC

Before we get into the full identity of the Vampire Gabriella in The Vampire Lestat and what episode one’s ending means for the show, we thought you might want to read all the texts that she and Lestat pass between one another as Moi and Toi without squinting at your screens. Buckle down, it’s a painful read.

Text 1:

• Toi: Saw a video of your show last night
• Moi: And?
• Toi: Helped my insomnia.
• Moi: Who is this again?
• Toi: At least I’m thinking about you.
• Moi: Ready to drain my fucking lead guitarist.
• Toi: And where are you tonight?
• Moi: Right of Rome, Wisconsin
• Moi: Left of London, Ontario
• Toi: Stuck in the mud again.

Text 2:

• Moi: The Rapture has descended upon Detroit!
• Moi: I’m staying in a hotel called Dracula’s Daughter.
• Moi: The minibar has vodka and feminine products called Vampons.
• Moi: I miss you. Come to me.
• Moi: Typed and erased: It’s been too long… I need you. I’m struggling.
• MoI: It’s been too long.

Text 3:

• Toi: I’ve found myself in Chicago.
• Moi: Still in Detroit. Meert innkallamazzo? 🙂

Text 4:

• Toi: Expectations.
• Moi: None. Nothing. Just sit with me.
• Moi: Please!
• Moi: Please I need you
• Moi: Please
• Moi: Please find me!
• Moi: Starfight Inn, room 12,3664 12 Sandwich St. Windsor. Starlight Inn. I’m not well.
• Moi: I.
• Moi: Love.
• Moi: You.
• Moi: Forget it. I’m fine. Hell with you.

Text 5:

• Toi: I’m here.
• Moi: Where?”

Who Is The Vampire Gabriella?

As Lestat informs us, Gabriella is “Fledgling, lover, and mother” to Lestat. Yes, the vampire Gabriella is literally Lestat’s mother. Technically, though, he’s her Vampiric Maker and she his first fledgling, so their relationship is quite tangled in many different ways. In the Vampire Chronicle books, lover, as we understand it through a mortal lens, wasn’t specifically part of the relationship between Lestat and Gabriella (known as Gabrielle in Anne Rice’s writings). But that’s because Anne Rice’s vampires didn’t have actual sex with one another. But in The Vampire Lestat, they certainly do, and they take great pleasure in it. And that puts lover firmly on the table for Lestat and Gabriella as the end of episode one of The Vampire Lestat implies.

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IWTV: Lestat’s Complex (Icky?) Bond with Mother Gabrielle, Explained

Gabriella’s story in this adaptation will be told throughout this season of The Vampire Lestat. But if you’d like to know more about Gabriella from Anne Rice’s books, you can check out our full explainer here.

What Does The Ending of The Vampire Lestat Reveal to Us About Gabriella?

There’s still much we can glean about Gabriella in The Vampire Lestat from the ending of episode one and the texts she and Lestat exchange throughout it. Namely, that Lestat’s well-being is not her first priority. Despite Lestat’s many and increasingly alarming texts, Gabriella does not come to him when he asks until he is literally at his lowest point. And when she does arrive, it is not with compassion and fear, but with a sort of delight. That doesn’t seem very good from the perspective of a mother or a lover.

And even though he so ardently seems to long for her and calls what’s between them “love,” the uncanny way Lestat changes without warning when Gabriella arrives in episode one is truly unsettling. His face, voice, and body language alter with an alarming speed. Disturbingly, from the depths of despair, Lestat takes on an immediate, coy, simpering flirtation which has all the red flags waving. Our hats are totally off to Sam Reid for this abrupt heel turn, which is SO visceral.

AMC

In sum, although Lestat wants Gabriella by his side so much, it feels like she’s not very good for him, and she doesn’t really care if that’s true. And with Lestat and Louis broken up again, and Lestat feeling the weight of his past scars more intensely than ever, that can’t be very good news.

Of additional interest, in the voice-over at the end of The Vampire Lestat episode one, before Lestat reveals that Gabriella is his mother and lover, he says, “It’s not much of a reveal, I guess. I know it’s common gossip now, the first thing one thinks about when my name comes up.” That makes it sound like somehow, the rock star Lestat’s mother/lover relationship with Gabriella becomes public knowledge in the world of The Vampire Lestat. We suppose it is the kind of thing the internet might have a field day with.

Sam Reid on His Relationship with Gabriella and Louis

In an interview about The Vampire Lestat, Sam Reid told us the following about Lestat’s relationship with Gabriella and with Louis. His words are critical to keep in mind as we rewatch episode one’s ending and prepare for the rest of this season of The Vampire Lestat. Reid shares:

How does Lestat’s relationship with Louis and Gabriella define him and bring out different parts of him… I mean, yeah, it’s very different, but I think you get the sense that the relationship with Louis is actually … They’re on a level ground. They accept each other for who they are. They go through hell and fight each other, but they come back to each other. They keep recircling each other, and a lot of the performative nature, particularly of Lestat is kind of stripped away with Louis because he can’t really hold it up. Whereas Gabriella, it’s different. She’s been there in very formative years, and so she has helped build him and kind of build the foundations and the structure that is Lestat. And Lestat has spent his entire life performing and building these characters and these archetypes that are built around the situations that he finds himself in.

And sometimes the suit that Gabriela puts him in, he sort of outgrows and doesn’t really fit anymore and he keeps returning to it because that is unfortunately a very safe space for him because he’s looking for that maternal acceptance and love. So actually the actor, the rockstar, the Brat Prince, the leader, all of these things, that is the kind of vicarious life that Gabriella’s built for him so she can kind of use that as a conduit to experience it himself. Whereas Louis is different.

They call each other out on their bullshit more often than not and also really hurt each other and the hurt is reciprocated. I think Lestat finds it very hard to hurt Gabriella. He wants to hurt her and also he wants to hate her and she won’t let him. She won’t let him go whereas Louis will let him go and Lestat will let Louis go and they’ll have years where they’re not together and they’ll be like, “Whoa, I lost that one.” And then they come back, he’s like, “No, okay, you grew a little bit. I grew a little bit. Who are we now? We’re still the same people. ” Whereas Gabriella won’t ever let Lestat out of her orbit. And just when he thinks, “Okay, I’ve got some time,” She comes right back in. She knows. She’s very clever, but that’s how he learns the great art of manipulation.

We’ll See More of the Vampire Gabriella in The Vampire Lestat

Whatever all of this brings for Lestat in the coming episodes, for now, it feels like the Vampire Gabriella is here for a spell. Of course, we never know when she might ghost again.

The Vampire Lestat airs at 9 pm ET/PT on AMC and AMC+.

Rotem Rusak is Editor-in-Chief of Nerdist and a huge fan of The Vampire Lestat. She can’t wait for everyone to watch this season.

This post has affiliate links, which means we may earn advertising money if you buy something. This doesn’t cost you anything extra, we just have to give you the heads up for legal reasons. Click away!

The post Who Is Lestat Texting in THE VAMPIRE LESTAT? Episode 1 Ending Explained appeared first on Nerdist.

Survey Says is a weekly series rounding up the most important polling trends or data points you need to know about, plus a vibe check on a trend that’s driving politics or culture. This year has started as the hottest on record. In the United States, the average temperature for the first four months of 2026 was 44.8 degrees, a height unmatched in data that goes back to 1895.

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KETTLE El Reg's systems editor Tobias Mann has been in Taipei for the past week getting the skinny on the hottest new chips, and what he's heard has been less about actual hardware announcements and more about how chipmakers are rushing to meet the demands of AI, other customers be damned. Tobias joins host Brandon Vigliarolo to discuss what he noticed at Computex 2026, how AI has taken over yet another industry event, and whether the world is going to have to adjust to new, more expensive hardware that only the biggest datacenter operators and wealthiest consumers are going to be able to afford. Will things stabilize? Will prices return to normal? We're not so sure, to be honest. You can listen to The Kettle here, as well as on Spotify and Apple Music, or read the transcript of the latest episode below. It's been lightly edited for clarity. Brandon (00:01) Fire up the hob, it's time for another episode of The Register’s Kettle Podcast. And we're even more international than usual this week, as our systems editor Tobias Mann has been in Taiwan scoping out this year's Computex conference. If you're curious about what's coming from chip market leaders this year, you've come to the right place. Tobias, it's really good to see you from the other side of the globe. Tobias Mann (00:21) Yeah, a whole twelve hours ahead, right? If I don't have it confused in my head. But it yeah, it's good to be here. Brandon (00:29) Yeah, it's kind of late for you, so we'll try to we'll try to keep this concise so we don't keep you from from some sleep. So I think you filed a number of stories this week about Computex, like quite a few. so talk us through some of the biggest announcements or or news items that have come out of this year's show. Tobias Mann (00:46) Yeah, yeah. It's been a it's been a wild week here in Taiwan and and at least for the first half of it it was sunny and warm rather than the last half, which has been rainy and warm. Brandon (01:00) Well, hopefully that means you've been focusing more on the conference for the second half, right? Tobias Mann (01:05) Well, at least the air conditioning works in the conference center, that's certainly true. We had some we had some interesting announcements, some of which we we we definitely hadn't anticipated. I think the one that everybody had long hoped to see was Nvidia's N1X. This is their kind of Apple silicon competitor, high-end notebook SOC. They're they're finally rolling that out on a Windows platform. And you know, this is something that Nvidia had been rumored to have been working on for for years, but we only started to see inklings of what it could look like last year in some very niche products, and now that silicon is gonna be coming to to notebooks. I think that's the big PC news from Computex. As sad as that might sound, of all the chipmaking stuff we got, that's probably the biggest. Intel had some Brandon (02:01) And that's more like mainly I'm assuming consumer kind of, or are they talking about business notebooks and stuff too? Tobias Mann (02:04) They're spinning it both ways. This is a 20-core CPU with like a 5070 class GPU strapped on to it, with up to 128 gigabytes of unified memory. So this is a very, very high-end chip and it's expected to retail in notebooks that start around three thousand dollars. Brandon (02:18) So we're talking about yeah, high end hardware here. Like you said, it's kind of a Mac an Apple Silicon competitor, so to speak. Tobias Mann (02:33) High end hardware. Right. The funny thing is the chip's not new. So even Nvidia is having to recycle parts to to have something to talk about in the PC sphere. This is a part they announced back at CES in 2025. It was called the GB10, at that time, Grace Blackwell miniaturized super chip. Brandon (02:41) So this is a Blackwell derivative here. Tobias Mann (03:05) Yeah, it initially launched as part of what was originally called Project Digits, and later actually launched to the market as the DGX Spark. This was like an AI development mini PC that we reviewed back in October. Brandon (03:18) I remember when that came out. Tobias Mann (03:22) And so really the silicon is being recycled and what's new is the partnership Nvidia embarked [on] with Microsoft in order to kind of extend Windows support to this platform, and they're working on a bunch of agentic AI integrations into Windows, so maybe Copilot might be worth a damn. It's hard to say. Brandon (03:39) Of of course they are. Yeah. So now is this gonna be, I mean, are these gonna be Microsoft branded machines then? Or is this gonna be something that's available to the to the wider OEM market for PCs? Tobias Mann (03:52) So essentially every major OEM is gonna have some version of this. Whether under the RTX Spark branding. Microsoft will have hardware, they have a Surface product that they're also bringing out with it. But I think that the partnership with Microsoft and Nvidia is largely focused on kind of doing something actually interesting and useful to end users with AI versus, you know, another chatbot, which unfortunately is what most people kind of associate it with with this technology at this point and kind of roll their eyes. Or at least I do anyway. Brandon (04:24) So Microsoft had their – was it Ignite this week? Tobias Mann (04:36) Ignite is later in the year, I think. Build was this week. Brandon (04:42) Right. So at Build this week they announced new autopilots, right? So they're trying to do something useful with that AI, right? Turn it into something that's completely autonomous and always watching everything you do. But that's not what we're here to talk about. I'm sure we could go on about Microsoft and agentic AI being stuffed in everyone's faces for for a while. Tobias Mann (05:02) Right. We we we also got a couple othe announcements this week from Intel that are worth mentioning, at least on the PC side. They had some they had some handheld gaming processors which didn't get a ton of attention, mostly because everything has gotten so much more expensive that it's just kind of like, great, a new thing I can't afford. Brandon (05:25) Right. Yeah, yeah. I mean we'll get to some of the pricing issues a bit a bit later on in the podcast, but that also ties back to, right, the big factor in every trade show right now, and it seems like Computex, based on what I'm reading from what you reported and elsewhere, it was an AI show again this year, right? I mean that's kinda what it seemed like. Everything was being turned toward feeding the great large language model beast. Tobias Mann (05:52) Every conference is an AI conference now. And that includes Computex. Even Nvidia's PC hardware launch was steeped in AI. You just can't escape it. It was, every keynote was AI, AI, AI, whether it was Jensen getting on stage at GTC Taipei because they've gotten too big for Computex, so they have to hold their own conference on the sidelines as well. But everything just came down to artificial intelligence and how it's going to revolutionize the world, and also maybe turn the entire world into a surveillance state if Cristiano Amon has his way. Brandon (06:23) Yeah, what did he say? He was talking about AI agents are going to be inescapable, according to what he said in the story you covered. You were at that keynote, I assume. Tobias Mann (06:55) Yes. That was probably the most dystopian of the keynotes that I caught. And I get the message he's trying to say. He's trying to make the argument that doing AI compute inference in the cloud is just not economically viable. It needs to move down the stack, and that means it needs to move down onto our personal devices, whether that's notebooks and smartphones and, he seems to think we're gonna have AI inference happening in earbuds even. Brandon (07:27) Yeah, I saw that. Glasses, obviously, so that it can watch everything you do. Tobias Mann (07:31) And so I think the creepiest moment in all of it was when he said, basically on the topic of the economics of it all, he said "resistance is futile." It's like this is happening whether you want it or not. But in that same breath starts going on about 6G, because of course this is a you know a big connectivity chipmaker. And how 6G is gonna turn all of us into walking cameras and 6G towers are going to function like radars that let us track everything from bicycles to cars to drones in the sky and…[laughs] Brandon (08:09) Tech leaders always try to spin that as like this thing that's great for data and great for, you know, we're gonna be able to maximize every little thing we do, right? With with for the most efficient XYZ. But it right, they always kind of seem to neglect the fact that I don't think the average person really wants to be tracked by their cell phone towers, even if they don't have a phone. You know, it's it's a little intrusive to put it lightly. Tobias Mann (08:36) I certainly don't want to be tracked. You would think somebody, maybe even Copilot, could have checked over his keynote speech to see if this is it what what is the vibe here? Is it creepy? Yeah, it's kinda creepy. Brandon (08:48) Maybe you should cut this out or rephrase it a little bit. Tobias Mann (08:54) "Resistance is futile." Maybe maybe don't say that part out loud. Brandon (08:57) Yeah, drop the Borg reference, you know? 'Cause I that's a thing, right? Like anyone in this space probably is a Star Trek fan. I know I am. And I mean when you hear "resistance is futile", you immediately think, right, yeah, the the the Star Trek, the Borg, the the thing that assimilates everything and sucks it into the big collective aka big large language model. Tobias Mann (09:14) If you're gonna make a pop culture reference appealing to nerds, don't make it a creepy one. Brandon (09:20) Seriously. And I guess Marvell was also talking about, kind of on the AI front too, ditching copper finally in favor of optical connections. I know they're not the first company to take this up, but Jensen seemed dead sure that this was gonna turn them into a trillion-dollar company. Tobias Mann (09:36) This is one of the more interesting chats, mostly because of the dialogue between Jensen and Matt Murphy, the CEO of Marvell. Marvell is a company that most people probably never heard of before today, or before this week, when Jensen sends its stock prices through the roof, with the next trillion-dollar company claim. but they are a chip development company and IP house that has collected a lot of intellectual property around networking and photonics. A Brandon (10:13) They're fabless, is that correct? Tobias Mann (10:18) Yes. They design and then license out, kind of shake and bake pieces of a larger design. So you might go to them to license a piece of the chip that you don't want to spend resources on, and you just need it to work, so you're gonna spend money on engineers to do the core part that you're interested in, then buy the rest from Marvell. Broadcom also operates in this space. But we're in an interesting place where the speeds that these networks need to operate for the the AI infrastructure to work efficiently keep doubling, and doubling really quickly. And the problem with going faster is every time you double the speed, you half the reach on copper. Brandon (11:10) So I think you mentioned in your story a 400 gigabit interconnect that only moved to I think two and a half meters. Was that right in terms of length? Tobias Mann (11:18) Right, yeah. We're at the point where at 200 gig it's about two and a half meters and it's gonna get halved as you go to four hundred gig. These are lanes. So, you think about ports on a network switch today and you might see 400 gig or 800 gig or 1.6 T. But those are assembled from four to eight lanes at these speeds. It's not the port speed, it's the link speed. At four hundred gigabit you're down to like 1.25 meters, you're at the limit of a rack….We are putting the switches in the middle of the rack for these systems for a reason, because that's the where you can get the best reach to all the stuff you get a plug in. Once we go to 800, you're gonna be supremely limited. And so you have to start talk thinking about optics at some level. There's a lot of ways to do this, but Matt Murphy is convinced that within 10 years, copper is basically going to go away. And there's a lot of companies that have been working towards this. Today the way we connect to optics is really complicated. You have a chip that communicates over copper through PCB out to a front end, some PCI interface or something like that. That has to go up to a network interface, and then you're gonna plug a pluggable optic in. And then you can go out over the fiber, and then you have to have basically the same thing on the other end, or there might be a switch in the middle, with more pluggable optics. Those pluggable optics are one of the reasons that we haven'tdone this yet. Why, if we're heading in this direction, just not move to optics now? And the reason is pluggables are really power hungry, especially at the speeds we're talking about. You need lots of them. Like 72 pluggables for one GPU potentially. And each pluggable pulls like fifteen watts. So you start doing the math – or not 72, but 18, so sorry, or 36. It's a lot of power. It adds up really, really quickly. The numbers get really confusing very quickly, but the point is you just need an absurd amount of pluggables. And to use really simple numbers, Nvidia faced this problem two years ago. They said why not just do optics? We're gonna have to go there eventually. And they did the math and it was going to add 20 kilowatts of power to a rack that was already pulling 120. And as you go faster, you need faster pluggables. Eventually we'll get to the point where the fibers go straight to the chip. You've cut out all of those copper interconnects all the way out, and the fibers just go to the chip, and you might have a little connector that goes from fiber to fiber in between. Brandon (14:39) So that's that's coming. Tobias Mann (14:41) That's coming. Matt Murphy thinks it's probably ten years out, that we're gonna get to a point where most most of the copper is gone. You'll still use it for power, but you're not gonna be using it for data communications. Brandon (14:56) Well it'd be great if that would kind of resolve our issue with with the copper shortage. Tobias Mann (15:00) It would help with copper shortage, but it would also help with memory. So today the reason everything has to go in one box. You have a CPU, a GPU, you have a bunch of memory. All of it has to go in one box and it has to be in a relatively fixed ratio of of these things. You know, one CPU to two GPUs to X amount of memory. And regardless of whether your application, your workload actually needs that ratio or not, that's what you're stuck with. When everything is optically interconnected, Murphy is contending that you could just have a box full of GPUs in one corner of your data center. You could have memory over in the other corner, and CPUs in another corner. Brandon (15:43) Basically it'd be fast enough to have a distributed system essentially. Tobias Mann (15:48) Right, and then you can then reallocate it. And there's there are protocols, Compute Express Link, this is a technology that's been under development for a long time. It allows for memory sharing on compatible components. And memory sharing is interesting because you can have two different systems doing almost exactly the same thing, and it's basically deduplicating. So they're only using the memory of like one and a quarter versus two machines. And so we can dramatically potentially reduce the memory consumption of these systems by sharing the memory like it's network attached storage device almost. Brandon (16:36) Yeah. So Marvell is putting this forward as their strategy and causing Jensen to basically cause their stock to just skyrocket, right? That to me sounds like they're getting their share of the bubble. Right? A lot of what I wonder is, what's going on there this week, do you think it's more it's more bubble inflation? Or do you think these are, you know, practical, realistic things they're saying in an attempt to move an industry forward regardless of the potential collapse. Tobias Mann (17:12) Well, I think there's a lot of industry building going on, certainly. But I think to your point, hype is something that, if you if you can't launch a product, then you can hype up your product or hype up somebody else's. Nvidia invested two billion dollars in Marvell not that long ago. So I'm sure Jensen is eager to get his money's worth out of that investment and jacking up the stock price with predictions is probably a pretty decent way of getting things going. But the reality is that for any of the things that you know Matt Murphy is talking about, for Jensen's prediction to come true, there's a lot of the industry that needs to start ramping up now in preparation of this, and if you want to keep the bubble from popping, a good way to do that is to make sure that you don't run into roadblocks too early. So if you've got capital to burn in getting…in kind of building the track further out in front of the train, I'm mixing a lot of metaphors here because it's late, but this seems to be what Nvidia is doing here. And it feels like we're seeing a lot more of this. This is not the first time Nvidia has thrown money at optics in the last couple of months. They've invested heavily in photonics companies and Marvell is just the latest example. Brandon (18:50) We've seen memory prices just skyrocket recently, right? Memory and storage prices are going through the roof. There's no reason to guess on that. It's been AI and people have been fingering AI chip needs as as the cause for a while now. What was the sense like there, right? D customers, do speakers, did the air seem to be kind of thick with concern over an an affordability, you know, or what? Like what's the finger on the pulse there? Are people concerned about pricing? Tobias Mann (19:27) Yeah, I think people are concerned about pricing, but less so on the components that we used to get excited about and more so on things that touch memory. Memory has basically eaten everybody's lunch. It doesn't matter whether you're building AI servers or you're just trying to buy a new laptop. The share of the price on either of those things as associated with memory has just become the dominant force and what's driving up memory. I was talking to AMD this week about some products that they're they have in the works, trying to build up their developer onramp for around their products, something they have kind of a deficit and they're trying to catch up with Nvidia on. And you know, the device that they're gonna do this with is $4,000. And they said 75 percent of that is now memory and storage. And you know what's crazy is the hardware in it's not new. And so a year ago, that $4,000 box could be had for under $2,000. Brandon (20:45) Yeah, it's the same with the Steam Deck, right? It skyrocketed in price as a consumer device example, right? We talked about this in last week's episode. It's gone through the roof and it's not new hardware. It's the same thing. It's just that in order to make it, Valve's markups are now gonna be have to be so much higher because of the price of the memory and the storage in the thing. It's ludicrous. Tobias Mann (21:05) Right. I was walking around some of the consumer memory vendors. They don't make the memory but they package it and they're how consumers buy it. And they were all advertising that their new SSDs with capacities up to eight terabytes and and new memory with up to a 128 gigabytes per DIMM. And I'm looking at this going, uh-huh. And so we have a $8,000 SSD that I can't afford and a memory kit that God knows how expensive that's going to be, but it's going to be probably two, three thousand dollars for that. The addressable market for these products is shrinking because you know the market can't, the consumer market simply can't bear it. And there's a lot of excitement that's lost on that. Brandon (21:36) Yeah, totally. I mean when you when you say, hey, here's the newest graphics card or the newest blah blah blah blah blah, it's faster, it's greater, it's gonna make your PC run, more efficiently, but it costs, more than three times more than the computer you bought, it's like, well I that why should I get excited about that? Tobias Mann (22:21) We used to get excited when there was a thirty percent improvement and whatever performance market generation on generation, but that was predicated on the price staying relatively…increasing by less than the performance increased. Why upgrade? Sure the performance is thirty percent better, but the price doubled. That's not a compelling sale. Brandon (22:28) So this this old machine's gonna have to work for a little longer, you know? It really makes me wonder, I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Apple's got the new MacBook Neo or whatever it's called, the the the cheap one, right? I think I just read somewhere that they've had a double production because it's been so popular, right? Cheap hardware, people want it, right? And it makes me wonder if given the cost of, you know, high performance components, getting to the point where they're going to be untenable for anyone but, hyperscalers and colo facilities that are running, all this this stuff. I mean, are we looking at kind of a new normal in computing? Are these prices going to come back down or are we are we getting to a point where this is going to be the sort of thing where companies are going to use this as an excuse to say, here's a cheap machine that you need all our services for? Are we moving that direction? Tobias Mann (23:38) It's an interesting question. There's a lot of there's a lot of shifting market dynamics around this kind of thing. New markets are oftentimes born out of necessity. I would say that the MacBook at Neo is an interesting example of this. It's like this is this is not a market that Apple has traditionally played in. But they had excess capacity of, I think it's the A19 that it's based on. And they were able to leverage that and to bring into bringing a lower cost but still premium device to to market. In that there's some relief and there's an ecosystem play. They can capture a market that has previously been inaccessible to them on and kind of that low end Mac marketing. So I do think that there's some opportunity for Microsoft to capitalize on this if they're if they're smart. But I would also say that Windows has become increasingly hostile to users and I think that they might be better served by focusing on fixing the software first. Back in April, Intel did bring some new chips to market that look like they're going to provide similar performance to a MacBook Neo at low enough prices that we should start to see notebook vendors being able to compete on kind of the premium device with just enough performance to be interesting. Brandon (25:15) So you don't necessarily think we're looking at a period where we're gonna all be sold Chromebooks and toll or something to that effect, right? Like cheap machines that are basically gonna be like, necessitating connected services that we can eventually either be handing over data or money for. Tobias Mann (25:30) Right. You know, anytime you hit a kind of you stall out on the technological, the hardware side of things, software typically is where you see the most optimization and improvement. But I do think that if this idea of local AI is going to take over as kind of an economic driver, as Amon was kind of pushing, we're gonna need memory. Like these models are not small and it needs to be fast memory. And so, right now those devices cost three or four thousand dollars for to even to get into the entry level of of of that. It's kind of two forces working against each other. And the reality is the problem that all of this comes back to is that we can't control the memory markets. And at least from talking to folks at Tech Insights not that long ago, it looks like we're in this for the next year and a half at least. And even then prices are going to settle rather than continuing to rise. It's not going to be the course correction that we've historically seen. Memory markets are historically very cyclical. You have booms and busts, prices go high, memory vendors raise enough money to ramp production again, they stop production, and when inventory gets high, prices drop because people are willing to pay less for it. That we're just not seeing that. The demand is so high that every memory module just gets eaten. Brandon (27:18) Yeah. I it's gonna be an interesting it's gonna be interesting couple of years here in the tech space as we kind of hopefully find some new balance. We'll see what comes of it. And chances are we will be right here at The Kettle to talk about it after writing plenty of stories about it. So thanks again Tobias for joining me this week and hopefully have a safe flight home. And to everyone listening, we'll see you soon. ®

A cartoon by Mike Luckovich. Related | Fired CBS reporter reveals MAGA bosses pressured him to skew news…

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Thousands of people lined Pacific Avenue late Sunday morning, many dressed in rainbow colors and waving flags, as they watched the annual Pride Parade.

Santa Cruz Pride is the largest LGBTQ+ event on the Central Coast and the third-oldest annual Pride festival in California.

Marching in the parade was a mix of nonprofits, social groups, individuals and performers such as dancers and cheerleaders.

This included Santa Cruz Gay Beach Volleyball, which meets on Wednesdays from 5:30pm to sunset at Main Beach in Santa Cruz.

The group set up a mobile volleyball net bedazzled with an estimated 18,000 tiny beads in rainbow colors and flanked by two tile-mosaic planters filled with colorful flowers.

“Visibility, visibility,” group member Joe Cosentino said of the group’s reason for being there. “We’re not going away, ever.”

Pride, Cosentino said, is a “family reunion.”

“People showing up for the first time, not knowing where they are in this community, they find us and they find family,” he said.

Nearby, members of the Book Truck Precision Drill Team stood ready with their book carts painted in various rainbow shades.

“We have a long history of doing this,” Santa Cruz Public Libraries Director Christopher Platt said. “We celebrate everyone in our community, and this is a great way to do it. Libraries welcome everyone. No matter who you are, all the time.”

In another staging area, the Nor Cal Pride Band waited, most members wearing rainbow-inspired clothing and practicing with their instruments.

Santa Cruz Pride Band makes its way along Pacific Avenue.

The group is an amalgamation of about 85 young musicians from schools around Northern California, most of them from Santa Cruz County.

Instructor Keegan McCoy said the group was excited to participate.

“We’re just here to be in the community and support love and support acceptance and just people loving each other,” he said. “And we’re here to spread happiness and positivity.”

Percussionist Jayden Ross, 11, who attends Mission Hill Middle School in Santa Cruz, said performing in the parade was an exciting opportunity.

“Everybody’s here today to celebrate pride,” he said. “Because some people come from families and roots that don’t really let them be themselves. So it’s kind of, like, a chance to celebrate people being free and being themselves.”

San Francisco Cheer performs for the crowd.

Emi Akioshi, who volunteers with Teen Kitchen Project, said she came with the organization to show her support for the queer community.

The spirit of the parade, she said, matches the mission of Teen Kitchen Project, which teaches young people to cook nutritious meals that are delivered to people with serious illnesses.

“It feels good to be here. I mean, I’m part of the community myself,” she said.

Margaret Murillo of Peace of Mind Dog Rescue shows off two of her charges.

Rachel Williams, who chairs the Santa Cruz County Board of Education, said she was there to support all of the county’s students.

“We really feel like there’s a place for every student with academics, but we want to make sure that we create a safe space for all students to learn, to thrive, to grow and to advance,” Williams said. “We want to be here in support of them and our entire community of individuals.”

Newly re-elected California Assemblywoman Gail Pellerin was the parade’s grand marshal.

Elaine Johnson, president of the Santa Cruz NAACP and CEO of Housing Santa Cruz County, said the celebration is important in the current political climate.

“I’m just so happy that we’re here today celebrating who we are, who we truly are,” she said. “And I get to do it with people that I love and respect. And my thing is that it doesn’t stop when the sun sets tonight. We keep on celebrating life.”

Members of Sacramento Cheer show off their moves.

Cabrillo College Trustee Adam Spickler agreed.

“We spend, as the LGBTQIA2S-plus community, most of our time since President Donald Trump’s inauguration living in shadows, fearful of the ways they’re going to take back our rights,” he said. “That we’re going to lose our access to health care, you know, all this stuff. And we get to show up visibly in our community today and put all of that aside and celebrate and unite with each other in a way that really allows us to remember what we fight for in the first place.”

Participants walk along the parade route. A man who attends the parade every year dressed in an elaborate costume poses for the camera.

After Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth cut nine Navy officers, including all the women, from a promotion list, several female officers say they see the unusual intervention as a sign that their careers now have a ceiling and worry for the future generation of female military leaders. The Navy had selected 31 sailors to promote from the rank of captain to one-star admiral…

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Early Saturday morning, a woman whose husband is detained at ICE’s Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, drove nearly two hours to visit him. She was turned away at the gate. 

GEO Group—the multibillion-dollar ICE contractor that runs Delaney Hall—had cancelled family visitation for the day. She sat on a curb, cried, and drove home. Throughout the morning, I saw half-a-dozen women and children arrive: all were told they would not be seeing their loved ones that day.

More than two weeks since detainees began a hunger and labor strike inside Delaney Hall—and their allies outside answered with near-daily protests—it’s still incredibly difficult to find out what’s going on inside the facility. Often, family members find their visits rescheduled or canceled, and journalists have not made it in, either. 

Members of Congress are allowed by law to conduct unannounced oversight visits to ICE facilities like Delaney. But politicians have been turned away, too. New Jersey congresswoman LaMonica McIver is facing assault charges after she was arrested alongside Newark mayor Ras Baraka trying to conduct an oversight visit last year. New Jersey governor Mikie Sherrill tried to visit the jail in late May, and was denied.

NEW: this morning, Sen. Andy Kim entered ICE’s Delaney Hall for an oversight visit. He saw people in visible medical distress—but GEO Group guards refused to let him speak to anyone detained there. pic.twitter.com/L2Tmqn8zIV

— Sophie Hurwitz (@sophiehurwitz) June 6, 2026

New Jersey Senator Andy Kim was pepper-sprayed when he tried to enter Delaney Hall last month, and as my colleague Alex Nguyen reported, he was forced to directly call Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin for admittance. Kim returned Saturday morning to try again—and this time, he made it inside.

But even Kim wasn’t able to find out much about the conditions there: “They refused to let me talk to any detainees,” he told me as he exited Delaney Hall. 

“They told me that if I were to speak to any detainees, the oversight tour would immediately be cut off and stopped. This is impeding my ability to lawfully do the oversight that I’m legally allowed to do, and I told them I thought this was a deep breach of my responsibilities and what the American people are demanding.” 

What he was able to see was disturbing. 

As Kim walked past the women’s unit, he said, he saw a group of women frantically waving their arms and pointing at someone curled up on a bed in pain. “They’re just frantic and waving and pointing, and I saw the woman curled up on the bed. I asked, ‘What is happening here?’” The guards, Kim said, didn’t answer. (GEO Group and ICE did not respond to requests for comment.)

“They continue to have only one full-time doctor here for hundreds of detainees, many of whom have significant medical concerns,” Kim said. At this point, there are about 600 people jailed in Delaney Hall, a thousand-bed facility which has faced accusations of inadequate medical care, wormy food and abusive guards. 

On his oversight visit, Kim asked the guards why detainees’ video calls are being restricted. “’We’ll get back to you,’” he said the guards replied. He asked after specific detained people, whose families had asked him for help. Again, he said, the guards responded, “’We’ll get back to you.’” 

He asked about one detained woman who has been hospitalized for several weeks. “They aren’t telling her family where she is, which hospital she’s in. They’re saying it’s a security problem,” Kim said. Guards told the family to file a Freedom of Information Act request to find out where she is, he said. “Can you imagine if your loved one was in a hospital and you don’t know what hospital they’re in, and then you’re told to just file some bureaucratic papers, and cross your fingers that they’re going to get back to you?” 

“That’s the stuff that just pisses me off about this.  I was here to get answers for these family members that I talked with earlier today, and I didn’t get them.” 

For over a year, a group of volunteers has operated a “radical hospitality” tent outside Delaney Hall—the same tent where medics cared for Kim after he was pepper-sprayed. 

On most weekends, when hundreds of family members might come to visit their loved ones, it’s bustling: volunteers distribute water and grocery gift cards, and children play on the rocking horse inside the tent to get some respite from the sun. Diapers, a volunteer told me, are often the most asked-for item. 

This Saturday, though, the tent—painstakingly rebuilt after ICE agents reportedly ransacked it days earlier—was nearly empty after visits were cancelled for the day. A few individuals, turned away at Delaney Hall’s gate, stopped for bottled water and directions to the nearest bus stop.

“This is our money going to detain these people, and we’re not getting any answers,” Kim said. “I’m not getting answers on behalf of you, on behalf of other Americans, on behalf of the families of those that are detained. They deserve to have answers, they deserve to have their rights.”

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Scott Pelley spent 37 years at CBS News, only to be fired last week after coming into conflict with Free Press founder Bari Weiss, who took control of the network last October. In a New York Times sit-down interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro published Sunday, Pelley said Weiss personally interfered with the network’s coverage of the ICE officer who killed Renée Good in Minneapolis.

Pelley told Garcia-Navarro that, hours before an episode of 60 Minutes on the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti was set to air, Weiss sent an email to his boss asking for changes to the episode. “Two of the things in the email include, can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me. And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.”

On June 3, Pelley posted on Instagram that “New management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story.” Now, it’s clear that story was about the ICE agent who killed Renée Good: video of Good’s final moments posted by CBS Evening News does not in fact show her driving toward an officer.

A CBS spokesperson told the New York Times that Weiss’ comments “had no political motivation and were proposed solely to make the piece as strong, fair, and accurate as possible.”

“My impression at the time was that she was putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration.”

“My impression at the time was that she was putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration,” Pelley said. “Constantly looking out for the views of the president.” But that, to him, wasn’t the worst part. “The bigger problem, Lulu, frankly, is not any kind of political influence,” he told Garcia-Navarro. “The problem was the incompetence. You don’t break a deadline. That episode came within 19 minutes of not making it to air.”

CBS has previously pulled 60 Minutes segments, including one in December reporting on the Trump administration deporting people to a maximum security prison in El Salvador.

Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison—a key ally of President Donald Trump—installed Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS shortly after buying her website, The Free Press, for a reported $150 million.