#fuck your text image posts noobs

[roguetelemetry]

#fuck your text image posts noobs #cyberfunk #so many weapons to hide #stronk

[abra-ka-dammit]

Pillowfort Is Coming!!

hey yall PF is opening up to the public soon (was gonna be the 15th, they just announced theyre pushing it to the 25th) and I REALLY want people to follow me away to there instead of everyone exhausted by twitter just coming back to this.... place

I have 3 weekly invite links if anyone wants to get in pre-open to get their blog set up to be ready for the incoming noobs to follow!

WHAT IS IT THO?

oh, right, so pillowfort.social is a blogging platform much like tumblr. while its not yet at the slick polished stage of tumblr (tumblr has a several year advantage), it is already offering its users several things tumblr does not, such as:

NSFW/18+ content OK (within law, so no fuckin CP allowed ya creeps)

Blogs toggleable as NSFW, as well as INDIVIDUAL POST NSFW toggling

edits to the original post changes all reblogs of the post across the site--so no “fuck they reblogged my drawing already but i just noticed i fucked up and need to fix smth”

toggle reblog-ability and comment-ability per post

if u make smth unrebloggable after its already been reblogged, u can either let the old reblogs stay but be unreblogable any further, or delete all reblogs!)

choose who can view each post if u dont want it just public (only me, only mutuals, only followers, only logged in users)

toggle whether non-logged-in folks can see ur NSFW content (bless)

if multiple people/communities you follow reblog the same thing it compiles it into one post on ur dash so u dont scroll past the same thing 6 times

“communities”, which are basically like, uh, a group? so it has its own little discussion area and its own feed (that also shows up on ur dash ofc) but any group member can contribute, theyre themed on certain things...

for example, i made one for WoW Goblins specifically! :^)

there’s art communities for showing off your stuff to people who arent even following you, great way for artists to attract attention, theres LGBT+ communities, fandom communities, all sorts of stuff so u can find a nice user-made compilation of the kind of content you wanna see

tells u how many mutuals u have, and u can click to see a list of only ur mutual followers

replies on posts can be replied back to, encouraging conversations instead of just random comments (and letting artists thank ppl for saying nice things <3)

replies can also be “like”d!

filter the posts on a blog ur viewing to show only original posts or only reblogs

can put more than 10 images in a post (idk the limit, I have a post w 12 at least tho)

easy access toggle to if u wanna see nsfw on ur dash or not, so u can Safe It while ppl can see ur screen and switch back real quick later

u can put images in ur blog sidebar lol

only show notifs for replies, if u want that i guess

AND SO MUCH MORE I CANT REMEMBER OR MAYBE EVEN DONT KNOW ABOUT!

It also has stuff we like from tumblr, such as:

searchable tagging system

direct messaging (via inbox, not like the chatboxy tumblr IMs) that you can disallow based on follower/mutual status or disable entirely

blessed validating notes

images in text posts

Things they’re working on adding in the near future:

Sideblogs

More blog customization (atm it’s pretty minimal)

Queues & drafts

Whatever people ask for, pmuch*

*They listen to community feedback & recommendations for features, etc, adding things people WANT instead of random bullshit, and are much more responsive to users concerns than the cold corpo feel of tumblo

#stupid shit #long post #not tryina be a salesperson im just very enthusiastic #and think pillowfort despite its goofyass name can be the Better Tumblr we all dream of

[ghostradiostoryhour]

The Fig

I walked up to the bar where Lucas had said to meet him, double-checking the location on my phone. This place looked beat to hell, run down—hardly the luxe cocktail bar my editor had mentioned in our meeting earlier that day. Maybe the team was hazing me? I was still pretty new on the bar beat, and I wouldn’t put it past them—my company’s culture could get a little frat-like at times, and I was the first woman on their team of six reporters. 

Maybe some of them were jealous of my “acceleration,” the somewhat inscrutable metric for success that our CEO had put into place last quarter. Whatever the magic formula was, though, I had cracked it with my first exclusive. My coverage of a new SoHo queer bar’s take on a Corpse Reviver #2 that was in its own right revolutionary—the secret ingredient was reduced rhum cotton candy stacked high atop the tiki mug the drink was served in—had gone viral only three hours after the piece had posted to the site. Lucky for me, I was dating the owner, a semi-famous mixologist renowned for her innovative drink presentation—Sasha had been kind enough to let me write about her. 

We hadn’t been dating long, only about a week or so, but her pull was strong on me. Every moment spent gone from her was a dull ache in my chest, a burning, lower. So being here, at this bar, where I was certain I was about to get punked by my male coworkers—on a Monday, no less, the only day that Sasha’s bar was closed . . . I felt like a sucker. But, as I looked at the bar’s faded sign again—it was called The Fig—something crawled through me. Danger? No, it couldn’t be. I was a bad bitch. Tall, thick. Anybody with the idea that I might be easy pickin’s was quickly dispatched with a scowl and a straightening of my shoulders. 

Whatever these boys had in store for me wasn’t enough to scare me. So then, what was this feeling? Interest? The place, as dilapidated as it seemed on first glance, was alluring in its way. It was situated at the crux of a weird intersection, bounded on either side by small streets that ran alongside three bigger, much busier thoroughfares, to create a chaotic clump of five streets. Music poured down from a small, empty rooftop that was overgrown with lush plants and flowers. Along one of these streets, the bar had no windows, just a solid concrete wall that had been decorated with a huge mural of some strange bug. It looked like a bee or a beetle, but with a thin, long head and translucent wings shaped like those of a butterfly. A thin, whip-like appendage that was almost twice the length of the bug itself extruded from its abdomen, right in the place where a stinger might be. The front of the bar looked out onto the corner of the intersection, at the meeting point of the two roads. The one window in the front of the bar held a single neon sign that read PSYCHIC in cursive yellow and red. Patterned lace curtains were draped behind it, making it hard to see into the bar.

I stepped up to the door, and the same strange feeling coursed through me again. Like when I had touched the bare outlet in my aunt’s guest bathroom as a child. Involuntarily, I stopped dead. Weird. 

I had to push myself forward on the bar’s threshold. Lifting my hand to the door knob felt like moving my arm through thick molasses. My phone dinged. Sasha.

6:55 PM

bb have fun at the bar. hurry back to me. im waiting ;)

I smiled at the text, then shook my head. What was I doing? I just needed to get this over with so I could get over to Sasha’s. 

Ignoring the feeling of wrongness prickling my skin, I put my hand on the doorknob, turned it, and stepped into the bar. 

Inside, it was a garish, dingy pink, like the inside of a mouth, some mucous membrane. Baroque decor—a limp looking beige silk sofa sagged in one corner, in another a set of mismatched embroidered armchairs gathered around a spindly iron coffee table painted white and flaking. A long unused fireplace carved from gray marble and festooned with cherubs and angel faces displayed an iron rack full of half-lit, melted pillar candles. 

It was an oddly feminine place for Lucas’s crew to choose for a drink with the bros. He and the rest of his cohort had already arrived. They were sitting at the bar, hunched over drinks, their black-suited backs to me. Even the bar itself was overly frilly, draped in beads and lace and glowing a pale peach, thanks to some recessed lighting within the bar itself. The color was nearly the same shade as the glittery highlighter Sasha brushed across her high cheekbones every morning. No doubt choosing this place in particular was meant as some joke about my gender.

I rolled my eyes and strode up to the bar, clapped Lucas on the back. He was easily distinguished by the premature gray in his dark undercut. 

He spun around. “You made it!” He grinned stupidly. Looked like the group had cut out a bit early to make it here with enough time to fully cash in on the happy hour specials, which ran until 8. 

“Yep,” I said. “How’s things? You wanted to meet?”

One of the others, Brad or something—we hadn’t really met yet, laughed aloud at a joke the bartender had made. The rest of the guys leered at me, in various states of drunk. 

“Siddown!” Lucas crooned, and I took a seat at the empty stool next to him. 

The unsettling feeling from before hadn’t faded, and I had already assessed the room—exits to the back right and the way I’d come a decrepit set of iron stairs that twirled up to the rooftop deck I’d seen from the street. Club mixes of 80s pop lilted from the speakers in the other corners. There were a few other patrons in the bar that I could see, coupled off by the front window, in a small clump by the sofa. The air smelled sickly, hung thick beneath the gaudy chandelier lighting. It tasted like fermented peaches—like farmhouse cider, or a funky saison. Sasha and I were both into craft beer and small batch brewing. 

Before I could say anything, Lucas had motioned to the bartender, who was presenting me with an acid green up cocktail. 

“Uh, thanks,” I said, immediately wary, but trying to be cool. Everyone was acting a little strange—I had been sure they’d have jumped on me right away, roasted me for my masculine look, or my success, or my general otherness, but they were all acting pretty chill, if a bit loopy. Maybe the invitation had been genuine after all, and this was just how they partied. 

Lucas smiled, his features a little droopy—how long had they been here?—and patted me on the shoulder. 

“Not always that we get a noob with acceleration!” he said loudly, and at this, the other guys turned and started to pay attention. 

“Oh. Yeah,” I said, not wanting to play it down—though if I were with my girl friends, I would have. I straightened up. “Well, I know what I’m doing, so.”

The oldest guy in the group besides Lucas snorted. His name was Todd, and he’d been with the company for three years now—long for this business. Everyone knew that he was struggling with acceleration. 

“You don’t know shit,” he said. His words were rude, but his tone was good-natured enough. “None of us do. Even the CEO, Roderick. No idea what the public wants. It’s all this PC culture, ruining everything. Can’t even have an opinion on something anymore.”

I frowned. Of course he was one of those. Todd downed his drink, signalled for another.

Arun shook his head. “Shut up, man. Don’t you realize that makes you sound like an asshole?” He looked at me, and I blinked. His face seemed blurry, or—no. It seemed to be sagging. I smiled, trying to not to stare. He kept talking. “The girl clearly knows what she’s doing,” he said. His lip somehow curling as the rest of his face wilted. “I mean, sleeping with your sources is bound to help you get deep inside of the story.” 

Brad laughed again, a guffaw that sounded almost cartoonish. “Have you seen her girl?” he slurred. “Not really the marrying type, but damn she is fun to look at.”

Lucas waggled his eyebrows at me. “Yeah, thanks for the pictures, too.”

Damn Chai’s photography skills, I thought. Our publication was known for its amazing photos. Chai, our lead photographer, was truly gifted, which meant that she’d captured Sasha behind the bar at just the right moment—her cheeks flushed with heat, her golden eyes focused, perfectly lit, as she seared an orange rind with a newly struck match. Tiny beads of sweat like dew at her brow and collarbone. I guess for these guys it helped that she liked to wear low cut dresses while she worked. In the feature image for my piece, Sasha had looked like fucking Tessa Thompson. The thought of Sasha, of that picture, sent me back to the text she had sent not ten minutes ago—

hurry back to me. im waiting ;)

The guys were cheering and high fiving each other, practically drooling. This was nonsense. I took a sip of my drink and winced—the lime green cocktail tasted bitter and reeked of ethanol. 

“What’s in this?” I asked the bartender, but they had their back to me and didn’t respond. I could barely make out their features in the mercury-stained mirror that hung above the dusty bottles of liquor behind the bar. 

“Hey,” Lucas practically shouted into my ear. “How’d you end up with a babe like that, anyway? You’re just a dyke.”

I whipped around, ready to slap him, but then I saw his face. 

His features were totally distorted, almost as though his flesh were melting, like the wax of the candles in the fireplace, like Arun’s face, but worse, far worse. The pink sockets of his eyes grew as his bottom eyelids sagged, his eyeballs, horrifyingly spherical, jostling as the space they occupied shifted. 

I gasped and jumped back, toppled over. I thought I was going to fall off of the barstool, but it came with me, adhered to me by some beige, creeping slime. I yelped and pulled myself from the chair, slapped at the gunk on my pant seat. A faint hissing noise came from the caustic goop. 

The guys were jeering, making fun of my start and cackling to themselves about the fall. I couldn’t bear to look closely at them. I couldn’t bear to see Lucas’s face again, not like that—all dripping and disfigured. He was a dick, but he was still a person. At least I hoped so. 

I took my phone from my pocket, checked the time. 

11:55 PM.

How could it be so late? I dimmed the screen, pushed the button to illuminate it again, and the time was the same, but now there was a series of messages from Sasha as well. 

8:01 PM

how’s it going?

9:10 PM

bb

9:10 PM

do you think you’ll come over tonight?

9:15 PM

i hope they’re being nice to you

10:45 PM

Ro, are you okay? starting to worry…

11:32 PM

Ro seriously this isn’t funny

Fuck. How had so much time passed? Did Lucas fucking roofie me? No, I thought. No, I had been drugged at a club before. This wasn’t how it felt. 

A moaning sound from the bar and I snapped my head up, looked dead on as the bartender, who had no discernable face, I could see now—just a blank oval of skin tone painted on like nail polish. I watched in horror as the face color melted away to reveal a perfectly polished, nearly opaline skull. Only the skull was no longer a skull at all, not really, but instead a shined white sphere, growing ever smaller as the flesh color drained from its surface. Beneath, the body writhed and jerked as the last spasms of life left the bartender and great hunks of muscle flopped down from their arms onto the floor, which, I noticed then, was crawling with the same slime that had stuck me to the chair. I wanted to run, but I was frozen in place by the spectacle before me. 

The bartender had become more of a skeleton than anything, but a strange scream erupted from the body as its shined white limbs began to shorten and curl. I looked around at the other patrons of the bar, then—Lucas and his crew were all melting in a similar fashion—had they given me acid? But no, I could hear them all screaming, set to the overly positive backbeat of Tiffany and the B-52s. The bartender had become a kind of grotesque, ultra foo foo coat rack made of bone, and Lucas, Todd, Brad, and Arun seemed to be melding together, their flesh melting onto the barstools where they sat in such a way that they began to resemble an ornate, blood-red chaise lounge. They wailed together, and Lucas reached out to me. I screamed, and remembered myself. 

I looked down. My legs were throbbing with the beige slime, which stretched almost all the way over my knees. “Fuck!” I yelled. 

No way in hell I was going to become part of some shitty Williamsburg dive bar. Fuck that.

I ran, or tried to run, for the door. I was moving, that was good, but the most I could manage was a determined kind of lurch. I trudged forward, my heart beating hard in my ears, as I focused on the George Michael lyrics pouring from the bar’s speakers. I willed myself to move, to keep moving, to never stop, even as I neared the door. 

My phone rang in my hand. Sasha. But I couldn’t answer. I had to focus. 

The couple at the table near the window was melting also, their shared skin flowing together like spilled shades of paint over the wire table and white wicker chairs. I looked away. 

The floor of the bar bucked, then, as if it knew I was trying to escape, and I crumpled to the ground. The slime overtook me, moving much faster than it had before. With a yell, I pushed myself up to my feet and ripped my torso away from the hungry slime.

In the corner of my eye, the couple at the table—or the chrysalis-like shape they had morphed into—bubbled up once. I stared, transfixed, even as I worked toward the door. The chrysalis throbbed again, then shook violently. Then it cracked open with a sick noise of breaking bone. 

But what emerged from the chrysalis was almost too monstrous to describe. 

It was a giant wasp, or something like a wasp, black and shined and buzzing, still new and dripping with whatever amniotic fluid it had emerged from. Was it the couple’s blood? I gagged, but still I pushed toward the door. 

It didn’t seem like it could fly yet, because it crawled on almost human arms up the wall of the bar, and onto the cieiling, hanging upside-down between me and the way out. I could barely make out the couple’s faces, stretched and distorted, in the wasp’s wings, mouths still working in distress even as they melded slowly into the wasp. A long, black, whip-like stinger grew out of its abdomen, a near-perfect echo of the mural I had seen earlier, outside. 

I screamed again, this time more out of desperation than anything. I had more to do before I died. I had more stories to tell. I had Sasha, sure, but I wasn’t certain that we were meant to be anything real yet. I wasn’t done loving her and I wasn’t done meeting people. I had worked harder than this, dammit! I deserved better than to be yet another woman who had gone out for drinks with male colleagues and had never come back. 

The wasp crawled closer to the door, and the beige slime crept over my arms and shoulders, nearing the tips of my fingers. I felt the structure of my face start to shift as I lunged for the door. My hand closed around the doorknob just as the wasp descended. 

I closed my eyes and threw my whole weight forward into the door. A terrible buzzing filled my head, and I hit pavement. 

The door slammed closed behind me. 

For a moment, I thought I was dead, surely eaten by the bar, by the wasp, gone forever, just another queer casualty everyone would cry out for on Twitter and then promptly forget about. But I was still alive and whole, despite the state of my outfit, which was pocked with holes all over, as though I’d been living in a closet full of moths for the last five years. But the slime was gone. My phone was in my hand. 

Breathing hard, I checked the time. 5:20 AM. 

I laughed aloud at my luck, at my existence, and the few drunk stragglers on the street jumped, looked at me funny. I turned back to look at the bar. All of the lights were off, save for the neon PSYCHIC sign glinting yellow and red in the front window. The sky had started to lighten, and as I stared into the window, wondering if what I’d been through, if what had happened to Lucas and everyone else in the bar had been real, I saw the dark shape of a giant insect crawl across the window. 

It paused there, as if regarding me, and then crawled back into the shadows of The Fig. 

A shiver ran through me. I felt drunk and wobbly. I let out a huge breath, and then I took out my phone to text Sasha. She was never going to believe me. 

As I typed, I noticed something strange. My thumb was changing. Little bumps appeared and then they grew into small, sharp points. It wasn’t painful, not really, but it was startling, and I pocketed my phone, looked closer at my hands. The bumps were all over my hands and forearms, bubbling up and then hardening into hair-thin points. If I didn’t look too closely, I could almost imagine that they were hair. 

And then the growing stopped. I touched one of the prickles gingerly and pulled back. They were sharp, alright, and they covered my arms from the elbow to the backs of my knuckles and thumbs. 

The door to the bar swung open, then, and a gust of the rank-smelling rotten air whooshed out toward me. I covered my face with my arms and closed my eyes. When I heard the door slam and the wind stopped, I looked up. The bar was closed. Nothing had changed. 

But then I looked down at my arms. A fine beige dust coated the new spines on my forearms. I tried brushing it off, once, twice, and then frantically, but it didn’t budge. I looked at The Fig, at the wasp mural on the wall, and then I remembered something I’d learned back in elementary school science class. Mutualism. How some species depended on each other in particular ways. I hadn’t made it out, not really. I had, but not of my own volition. 

This was how it spread. I wasn’t a survivor. I was a pollinator.