#Self-Referential

[fringillidae2]

had to draw women instead of anime girls because of woke

[the-leftfield-files]

[TW - Bugs & Self-harm]

>FILE ACCESSED - DATE 12/2/22, TIME 1:03 AM.

>FILE STATUS - CLASSIFIED

Officially, I don't exist anymore. I'm dead, been that way for a long time now. That's not true for everyone who works in my field, some of them get to keep their lives intact. Not me, I dove in head first when I found out what we did and almost didn't live to regret it. My thoughts on that have changed since then. What we do should be public knowledge - the things that hurt people shouldn't be kept secret for a bullshit reason like "The public is too chaotic" or whatever they say nowadays to the new guys. I may get caught, I may not, I hope by spreading this on a site like this there will be a significant delay between my whistleblowing and my death, but we'll just have to see. Continue reading at your own discretion.

It was November 28th, 1965. I was being dispatched to a possible sighting of what we called "Watchers". I think these days people like to call them "Hide Behinds”, which is a much less succinct name but I digress. I was driving from D.C. to Utah, and this was back before they decided to start sticking us with partners. That was after ‘66, I don’t really know what drove the change but I’d be dead many times over if not for my old partner. Damn, thinking back I really wish I had one when this went down, but all I had to accompany me on my drive was the radio. Not exactly the top tier conversationalist unless you’re half insane.

Like I said though, D.C. to Utah. I was getting used to the feeling of being out of my depth, but somewhere in the middle of nowhere Kansas something started prickling my sixth sense. One thing that one of the other guys told me when I started working was to never ignore that feeling. It’s not an end all be all. It doesn’t always help, and it’s just pretty vague in general, but better to react to it when its nothing than ignore the cause of your death.

It was near 10 P.M. at the time, already far too late into the night for me to have been driving but I… well I was still trying to be a human being I guess. Wanted to get to Utah before the damn thing had a chance to kill again. The cornfields around me were impossible to see through, but I looked anyway. I didn't dare slow down my car in case whatever it was attempted to attack me, but as the feeling kept getting more and more powerful I could feel the terror creeping in. What was it? What was out here in the fields that could keep up with a car?

I almost hit it before I realized the other possibility. Something that looked like it had once been a man was standing on the side of the road. I slammed on my breaks and swerved to avoid hitting it, my car spinning out in a half circle and ending up facing it. As I calmed down, I got a better look at it. It's head was at an odd angle, and I could tell from the light my car was cascading upon it that the left leg had been stripped of flesh down to the bone. So, I of course, did the smartest thing possible, and slowly stepped out into the cold night air. It continued shuffling down the road, and even from the distance that I was at I could hear the odd clack of bone hitting the cement.

An important thing to note is that most of these fuckers are flesh and blood. They exist in the material world and can be stopped; or at the very least significantly injured by material things. I drew my service weapon and felt significantly calmer with the cool steel in my hand. As I heard the safety click, the thing stopped but didn’t turn around towards the sound. I thought something along the lines of 'Zombie, okay, first I've heard of them but I'm sure I just missed something.', and in my defense there was a lot of information I was told to comb through in only about a week, so it wasn't too small of a possibility for me to have missed something. Another important thing is that some of these creatures are pretty damn intelligent, around as smart as humans or smarter, so I thought I'd give it a chance to talk before I did anything.

"My name is Agent Fletcher, part of the Leftfield program. Who are you?" I yelled, my voice more jittery than I would have liked.

The smarter guys would know what we were, and those that didn’t, well… the creature twitched, and then slowly began to turn towards me. I watched in horrible fascination as it turned and I got a look at its face. The flesh around his skull was fully eaten away, revealing a writhing mass of insects underneath. They were everywhere in him, now that I was looking I could see them crawling out of the corpse from every opening. They escaped through his ears, his leg, even burrowing out of the rotting flesh in a mad scramble. It was almost too late before I realized what they were scrambling for. They were coming out of the ground as I was frozen in fear, staring into the empty sockets of the man. Oddly enough, a single centipede, much larger than the rest, was staring back at me. I could barely see its black beady eyes, however there was a deep hatred in them that kept me frozen. As the first of the bastards tore through my leg the pain brought me to action.

I began squashing them left and right and started running to my car. Every step must have crushed hundreds of tiny insects all trying to rip into my flesh. They were at least as far as my calf by the time I managed to get into my car, and as I slammed the door, I definitely heard an audible crunch. I fumbled in terror for a moment as the bugs filled all windows of my car, surrounding me in darkness and burying me beneath a squirming mass. I hit the gas not caring if I hit the fields. As my car accelerated past 75 mph the things started to fly off of the windows by themselves, and I could hear the sound of bugs being crushed by my shitty windshield wipers. I knew, however, that I wasn’t safe. I could hear them in the car, crawling all around me but just out of eye sight. I knew I couldn’t stop at least for another couple of minutes before I was far enough away from whatever the hell the thing was.

Every few moments, I saw something poke out of the different parts of my car. I could see them worming their way into the different instruments on my dash, trying to find their way to me. It wasn’t long before they found their way to the air vents, and I quickly grabbed my knife from the glovebox and began stabbing them. I heard their hissing comming from all around me not long after, and another terror began to encroach on me as I felt some make their way from the seat into my leg, and I slammed on the breaks and ran from my car.

The pain was sharp, piercing. I felt hundreds of tiny needles stabbing into me, consuming me from the inside out. I didn't know what to do at first, in shock from the pain, but as they began moving upwards, I quickly thought of a solution. I had my knife. I had a lighter in my pocket. I had some number of bugs trying to burrow up through my skin towards my head. I got the first ones relatively easily, ignoring the smell of burning flesh and the searing pain. After that, the bugs quickly learned and started burrowing deeper than any wound has ever gotten, and I was forced to follow.

It took me four minutes. Four minutes of hell, scarring myself and waiting for one of the fuckers to slip up and move close enough to the surface for me to get it with the knife. Self preservation opens the window to absurdity.

Luckily it was dark enough that I could barely see the damage. I had solved the first issue, and I dared a trip back to my car to grab my medical supplies, managing to retrieve enough of them to stem the worst of the bleeding, so I was in no immediate danger of death anymore. I sat there, in the darkness, for a few minutes, with every itch and tingle driving me insane.

How would I know if I had gotten all of them? How would I know that there wasn't one who could mask itself better and was about to reach my brain? Was that lump always there on my skin? What part of the pain that I was experiencing was the damage I had done to myself? Was it actually the pain of something moving under my flesh, one that I had missed? Suddenly, a bright light illuimated me and I turned towards the culprit. A car was driving down the road, and as it reached me, it began to slow. I limped over as he fully stopped, seeing a middle aged man. After a quick lie about a car accident, he agreed to take me to the nearest town.

I spent the rest of the evening in the hospital. I didn’t sleep, something in me was sure that if I did the bugs would start crawling out of the sink, out of the different cracks in the ground, ready to finish the job. I convinced the nurse at the ER that I needed to be off, only really managing to do so because of my badge. Around 3 A.M. or so, I found myself in a motel, devising a plan to take the thing down. Fire, certainly, was my best bet. I tried my best to sleep after that, but it was mostly fruitless. I woke to every ache that my body felt, and every tingle that could be the signal that something else was taking control. The next morning, I went into a gas station, buying a six pack, a liter of gasoline, and some rags. The man at the counter gave me an odd look, but nobody really questions you if you look like a ‘G-man’. I got a ride back to my car from someone else, and after inspecting everything to make sure something else wasn’t hiding in it, all I could do was sit around and wait.

I spent two more days in that town, some of the longest in my life. The anxiety, the pain, my nerves were shot to hell too. Three people disappeared from the nearby farms during that time. Three people I didn't save because I couldn't think fast enough to create a solution when I first saw the bastard. I’ve gotten better since then, but I’m not perfect. I know some of the guys on the force let it ruin them, and I refuse to let that happen. Can’t be much help if I’m too busy fighting my own demons, now can I?

When it finally decided to show itself again, I was ready to leave, half convinced that I needed to just head off to the main purpose of my trip. I was looping around the town on the back roads when I saw it. The thing had taken a different body by then, the new guy was much fatter and as I approached, I could already see the signs of decay and consumption that the swarm had left on its new victim. As I calmly stepped out of my car, it didn’t stop moving and kept its slow pace forward. I grabbed a molotov, and only then did it stop as the few bottles I had clinked against each other. After the first bottle started burning, I could see the bugs beginning to climb out of the ground, but I was ready this time. Three bottles in I could hear the things inside of their terrible rotting abode screaming and popping in the heat. I used another two to burn the excess bugs that were attempting to attack me, or maybe they were trying to escape at that point. The last one I used on the corpse after it had started to calm down, burning it even longer. Afterwards, I managed to find a bit of the original centipede which had stared at me, and placed it inside of a small metal tube for further examination.

I only gave myself another day of rest before I continued on my journey. In Colorado I connected with another agent from the program. He had been informed that I would be passing through and we were to check in with each other. I’d learned that this practice was pretty typical, if someone failed to show up, the other agent would be tasked with going to solve their last known case in the possibility that they had died on the way or had died in the line of duty. I barely made it to the rendezvous, the other agent was about to leave before I managed to catch him in a coffee shop.

It was a small, rundown place. Honestly, the only reason I noticed it was because of his vehicle parked outside of it. The inside was no better, but we met eyes and the man nodded his head in what seemed like a mixture of relief and greetings. After I told my story to him I finally learned the bastard’s name.

“I’ve always called them ‘Hosts’, but I think some of the guys in the science division have a more technical name for them.” He informed me, rubbing the back of his neck and ordered me a drink. “Fire… that’s the best you’ll get. I think we lost a guy a few years ago 'cause he had the brilliant idea to try and shoot the damn things."

We paused for a moment as the barista brought me my coffee, and after I took a sip I replied "Yeah, I didn't really know anything else to attack them with. Pesticides maybe?"

We both laughed at that one before he gave me a serious look "You sure you got all of them Fletcher?"

"Y-yeah. I'm sure I would have felt it crawling in me if I hadn't, right?"

He just nodded and mumbled something into his coffee as he took another sip. As we sat there in silence, I couldn’t ignore the sudden feeling of an itch on my leg, but I tried my best to ignore it. Suddenly, he stood and paid for both of the drinks, beginning to head out.

"Well, I'll be off then. You're behind schedule as is, best you get going too."

"No rest for the wicked, right?"

I've never forgotten his smile as he walked out of the cafe. It was a mix of pity and knowing, a smile that haunted me with its secrets. I suspect my own looks similar these days, coupled with its own stories behind it. My leg always begins to ache slightly when I think about that job. I still humor the possibility that I'm being driven by a bug from time to time, but regardless of the odd tingles that I get, I try not to dwell on it anymore.

So, monsters are real - the things that kids whine about in the night, the things that kill or impersonate hikers in the wilds, and even things that fry the mind by trying to properly comprehend. They're real. Not all of them mind you, Steven King is just fiction, but some people have had a connection to something paranormal. I genuinely believe Lovecraft tapped into something like what I'm talking about, Cthulhu isn't real but there's definitely something like it - you get the point.

The official program, titled "Project Leftfield", gets its money from the U.S. military's budget. There's so much money moving in and out of there that no one is going to miss the funding for a few hundred guys. We had a close call back in '66 with the FOI act, really had to go blackout then, wiped all internal actions with the FBI. Turned out to be the best damn thing that happened to the program. The director was essentially his own boss, had to occasionally give a report to some anonymous congressmen, say something about how our actions were "keeping the peace, and making excellent progress" or something like that and he got a million dollars pushed his way. They didn’t care anyways. In those days, they were much more likely to skim some into their own pockets rather than look at us twice.

Don’t ask me who founded the program, I don’t know. Our current director, [REDACTED], is always vague when I ask him any questions that don’t directly pertain to the line of duty. All I know is that he’s not the first one, and that according to some coworkers, he’s “significantly better than the last.” so I’ll be avoiding the question until I need to ask it. Occasionally you’d get someone going on a power trip as we were still figuring things out, but that mostly settled down as the years went on.

To any god that cares, my name is Agent Fletcher and I hope to continue sharing these stories.

>ADDITIONAL NOTES -

Wish you the best wherever you ended up, Fletcher.

[thisisprettybroken]

The weirdest consequence of making the "Tummy Better" Dark Souls meme, and not turning off notifications on it, is that I know how this website's collective tummies are doing at any given time.

I notice a spike in meme magic posts around July 5th and the Holidays. As your doctor, I suggest bringing your tummy better meds to the eating holdays. Don't be a statistic.

[batgovernor]

Using form: Sonnet: Max Gutmann, 'How to Inspire a Sonnet - advice from the pros'

Inspire amore first, but molto forteIf in sonetti dolci you’d be sung.Then see that you stay bella. You’ll support aPassione deep and long by dying young.— LauraIf thou upon his stage the Muse’s partWouldst play, each act thou study’st must prolongThy Poet’s pain. ‘Tis pain shall prompt great Art.Then con thy lines with style, and do him wrong.— The Dark LadyStay always by her. Never for a dayBe…

[turiyatitta]

The Enigma of Nine

A Metaphysical Exploration into the Significance of a Singular Number In the vast expanse of numbers and their mathematical precision, there lies a mystical depth, a metaphysical dimension that transcends their apparent functionality and dives into realms of deeper significance. During our conversation with Steve James on Guru Viking, I ventured into the enigmatic world of the number nine,…

[silentsamemu]

[halcyoncatastrophe]

New word: recursive irony

Irony, but uncomfortably self-referential. For example:

Three people are playing Scrabble- Anastasia, Bartholomew, and Cheyenne. At the start of the game, Anastasia suggests that everyone play quickly to reduce the amount of time between turns.

A little ways into the game, Anastasia thinks she sees an opportunity and spends several minutes deliberating over it. During this time, Bartholomew comments on how it's ironic she said to play quickly, but is now taking a long time to play.

Anastasia plays a decent word and Bartholomew begins his turn. He spends ten minutes trying to choose between the word QI for eleven points or the word QUIT on a double word score but opening up an opportunity for a triple. Finally, he plays QI.

Cheyenne begins their turn with a snarky comment on how Bartholomew looks quite the fool- having just reprimanded Anastasia on her long turn, but then taking so long to play an eleven-point word. They then take half an hour chasing an opportunity to play the word REVILED and the cycle of self-referential irony/stupidity is complete.

[crustaceousfaggot]

Hawkeye you can't just say that

[renjirukia]

Who are you supposed to be?! A villain. BLEACH | Episode 15 BLEACH: THOUSAND-YEAR BLOOD WAR | Episode 18

[professorcalculusstanaccount]

boy reporter does some major self reflection and begins his most difficult journey yet - a journey of self acceptance, through turning empathy he usually has for others onto himself

Also look! Ramo Nash is here!

a continuation of this , at this point there’s so much context to cover I’m just gonna drop a link to my pinned post here lol (Call of the Songbird and the Beast of Loch Broom)

[swamp-chicken]

call and response

[felassan]

Taash is blunt and straightforward, but is she also free on Tuesday night when we are free?

"deeply knowledgeable about many topics" - I can't wait for Taash to info-dump to us about all the things!! ✨ please tell us lots of cool facts and about lots of lore topics.

"While her interests include sparkling treasures and hitting things with an axe,"

and this fragment just took me out. whoever wrote this, it's really funny hhh :')

[luthordamnvers]

“Kara is idealistic, yes. You are realistic. That doesn’t mean you are different.” Kelly paused, then, “I have not seen anyone as connected as you two.” “That’s not true,” Lena disrupted her speech. “She’s like the sun, and I’m m–" “If you say moon, I’m going to smack you so hard sparks are going to explode everywhere.” Kelly threatened in jest. 

(x)

For @itsalliebitheway as a belated present, for our mutual love for blondie's lyrics and supercorp.

[whitmore]

immensely adore how much qsmp opens old wounds i love you oi queridinho i love you ‘i’m used to joining in the middle of wars’ i love you purgatory elytra i love you eggpire references i love you obsidian sleeping box i love you ‘i feel like in a past life we would have been enemies’ i love you

[movie-robotnik-positivity]

Funny how fans are learning that "Knuckles" is meant to be a love letter to 90s sports comedies like "The Big Lebowski" and getting angry because "THAT'S NOT SONIC STUFF!"

I think having Sonic stories written by people who have influences beyond other Sonic media is a great thing, actually.

[mizzyislost]

dreamin of the good ol days