meowmeowbilly

[meowmeowbilly]

I hate to go through this all over again. On July 23rd, Itch.io, one of the most popular platforms for hosting queer and adult independent media, went through a large-scale crackdown on adult content.

This was primarily aimed at games, but novels and comics were hit in the process. Most adult content has been de-listed from the site's search, and some creators were banned without warning. Any funds banned creators have not been paid are currently being withheld by Itch.io.

This crackdown was done, as it always is, because of payment processors like Mastercard and Visa threatening to pull their services.

The payment processors caved to an influence campaign by Australian extremist anti-pornography group Collective Shout, who have been inundating Visa and Mastercard with calls to force video game platforms to stop hosting adult content - which, of course, includes anything queer.

Collective Shout claim to have sent in 1000 emails to get this result, but there are a WAY more than a thousand of us. We need as many people as possible to make as much noise as we can!

Below the cut are numbers and scripts, all you need to do is follow the step by step guide.

Graphic, contact info, alt text, and script by voiddebris on Bluesky, also available collected in a handy document:

Paypal:

Phone (US): 1-888-221-1161

Phone (outside US): 1-402-935-2050

Hours: 6am - 6pm PT

Online (for non-users or logged out - UK bc US site ONLY allows logged in users)

Mastercard:

Phone (US): 1-800-627-8372

Phone (outside US): 1-636-722-7111

Online form

Visa:

Phone (US): 1-800-847-2911

Non-US numbers

Online form

Script:

Customer Complaint Dept, This message is to lodge an official complaint about the ongoing rampant restrictions your company has placed on legal sales made by legitimate businesses. These restrictions are not only counter to the concept of freedom of speech and expression, but they harm consumers, businesses, and they harm your company’s bottom line. The following actions are absolutely necessary to protect the freedoms of your client base and the sustainability of legitimate business practices: 1. Remove from your Terms of Service any mention barring the use of your service for sale and purchase of legal products. 2. Contact Steam (Valve), Itch.io, and any other company you have previously put pressure on to retract your content restrictions. Put in place protections to prevent such restrictions from being put in place in the future without ample warning and time to contest them. If these changes aren't made then I, along with many others will be forced to seek other options for processing payments. Sincerely, A Concerned Customer

***

OTHER THINGS YOU CAN DO

Sign this petition from the ACLU:

Americans - contact your representatives about payment processors acting as censors! You can find your reps’ contact information on 5calls.org.

Script, from here:

Hello Representative/Senator [LAST NAME], -or- Hello office of Representative/Senator [LAST NAME], My name is [YOUR FIRST NAME/SCREEN NAME] and I am one of your constituents. I am calling today to express my concerns with technological censorship. Legal and legitimate adult entertainment is being banned in this country. These bans are not by legislators, but by payment processors like Mastercard and Visa. Mastercard and Visa are improperly creating legislation online through their user and merchant policies. They are banning creator and user access to content that is legal and legitimate. They are inciting fear and panic to encourage censorship. Please take a stand against this impermissible censorship. This is a direct attack on an adult's right to legal content. No one but the legislative branch should be allowed to create legislation. Please support the Federal Trade Commission in their stand against technological censorship to protect the first amendment. Thank you for taking the time to listen today.

[meowmeowbilly]

jetpens just started stocking a product that will be an ergonomic game-changer for a lot of folks!

this is the kutsuwa punyu spiral pencil grip. unlike most pencil grips that are solid tubes and have a fixed maximum diameter they can wrap around,

the punyu is a spiral! it wraps like spaghetti.

this means that, unlike almost every other grip on the market, this grip can be added to almost every pen or pencil! and that includes fountain pens and gel pens. you can see it here being used on a pilot metropolitan fountain pen and a sakura gelly roll gel pen.

(not an affiliate link, not sponsored, you can buy from wherever you want if interested, jetpens has a lot of specs of their products that I appreciate)

a jetpens review even mentions someone using these on the lamy safari line of fountain pens. the ones with a really sharp triangle grip. these grips seem really really versatile, especially if you are about to sit down and take notes for hours on end!

if you do use this with a fountain pen, I recommend making sure the fountain pen is not prone to hard starts or drying out, has a good flow (whether that flow is from a wet nib or a wet feed or both), and/or that you use a relatively wet ink. because the goal is to have the fountain pen continue to write even if you put it down for a few minutes, so you do not have to keep removing the grip, capping the pen, uncapping the pen, or reapplying the spiral grip!

over the years some folks have asked me if I know of anything like this, and well, now we both do! if you get this let me know what kinds of pens and pencils you use it with and how well it works! this is a really exciting pencil grip!

[meowmeowbilly]

Happy Dot in the I Day to all who celebrate

Today is Tuesday and also July

But sometimes never

[meowmeowbilly]

the note | wally clark x gn!reader

a/n — this was gonna be more smutty but I didn't feel like it should go down that path, so a gender neutral wally fic it is! Christmas themed because Christmas is year-round, and also I love that little Christmas scene in the new episode

warnings — started out as smut but abandoned the smut part, so there's a few comments about hot and sexy you are. is cringe a warning? not proofread

words — 2.1k (surprisingly short for me omg)

summary — Wally writes you a note in a Christmas card about how he really feels.

~~~

“The things I dream about doing to you…”

Wally sighed, placing the Christmas card down on his desk after penciling those words into the top left corner of its inner blank space. His leg bounced, and he looked off to his left to stare out the window, a mix of snow and green covering the expanse of the field outside. Anything to clear his head and focus, but maybe he shouldn’t have taken a seat in a class that you were currently in, painfully unaware of his existence. Telling you would be so much easier. Showing you, even. He wished a long time ago that he could affect the living world; he wished that he could tell someone who he didn’t already overly annoy that he exists and that he’s not gone. He wished for a lot of things, but he was waiting for a miracle on this one.

Mr. Martin suggested this, a way to cope with the uncontrollable: write a note inside of a Christmas card to someone at the school and send it to them. He said it would be the key to accepting that the only lifeline—from the fun they could have to the ways they could express their feelings of grief about their own feelings to even Wally���s favorite pastime, exercising—could only exist within the walls of this school. Wally was the first to accept this challenge, but that was only because he could think easily of writing it about one of the many living people he found hot. The only thing is that it wasn’t going to be that easy.

He used to be so blunt—and still was—but there used to only be one person that could push him to do the opposite of what he wanted. And he was doing this so that he wouldn’t have to think about her, and yet, this Christmas card was taunting him all the regardless of its stupidly thin presence. 

Why did he even bother writing words down when they would just disappear? When the generically empty cards they teachers swiped these off of returned back to one of the drawers in their desk? How long could he keep pretending that this was more than a glorified way of lessening Mr. Martin’s workload?

He picked it up again and started writing, letting his mind flow.

“The things I dream about doing to you, well, if I could dream. If I could dream, it would be all about you, obviously. You would hear me talking in my sleep like that stupid song by The Romantics, and I’d have the biggest boner because you’re so damn sexy.”

Wally paused, thinking about whether or not he should hold himself back. The card wanted that, to keep its crisp, pure inner-white pages free from the filth he scribbled over it. But he was supposed to be raw, real, and he wanted you in a way that could only best be summed up by coming straight from his mind. No filter. 

He continued writing, 

“I think I’m taking this too fast. Obviously, I would say ‘hi’ to you and I would tell you my name instead of keeping it from you until the end of this. I think I’m already saying obviously too much. Obviously, Wally. Right. Let’s get to the totally rad intro where I introduce myself and break your heart when I tell you that I’m a ghost. Hi, I’m Wally Clark. And I’m haunting the halls of this place like Poltergeist but not really because I’m only freaky like that movie in the parts where it matters. The ghost part is true, and the not seeing me part. Could they see the ghosts in Poltergeist? I don’t actually remember. If you could write me back, I’d love to know what you think about it. Don’t tell me everything, though. I don’t want to think about that weird man-eating tree. It was grody. Maybe you’ll like it. I barfed out halfway through.”

Wally cursed at himself for rambling so much, but if you could read this letter, he would want you to know how the whole ghost-thing worked.

“If you could watch it, all you do is have to speak out loud and I would hear you. It sounds creepy, but I would know at least. And hey! I’m telling you what I would do if I dream about you, and now I’m realizing how much space I wasted writing about some dumb movie you’ll never see. We could watch it together? Date night—you and me? Eight p.m., in the gym?”

This wasn’t like passing notes in the 80s, because you would never feel the card between your fingers. You would never crease it with your hands while you hold on tight to it as you cling to every word—Wally hoped you would do that when he got to the stuff that he felt would rock your world, anyway. 

“I guess I should get into it. We do movie nights here, and I always choose the best ones to watch, and I save the couch for us. I think about putting my letterman over you while we watch the movie so you’re sandwiched by me from the back and the front when I pull you onto me, and you lay on me, and sometimes I wish you could take things from the ghost world like we can from your world. Just so you can have it. I think about you fitting into every spot at this school. I think about doing it in every spot of this school. Every time you wear a new outfit, it makes me go feral. When you wear something I’ve seen, I still love it. You’re the hottest when you wear those clothes that reveal skin all over your body, and you play dumb to the teacher that dresses you because you wanted to feel hot that day. You’re hot. You’ve got my desired approval. I think about walking next to you in the hall—I do, you just can’t see it—and holding your hand as you have your five minutes of fame. Strut down the hall, make everyone’s head turn. You deserve to feel that way, and you deserve the punishment I’d give you for being such a skank. For letting everyone see your rocking bod.”

Wally took a beat to breathe and look over at you. You were wearing clothes that made heat travel to his pants—if blood could flow down to there. He envied the way you looked to the teacher and gave him those eyes he wished you were giving him. The eyes you’re currently giving a forty-year-old balding has-been who doesn’t know the privilege he has to see you every day in his class to just ask him to use the bathroom. He watched your backside as he permitted you to use the restroom, and you stood up and left the room. Thank god, Wally would have left the room to slip this card in your locked locker with a pair of wet sweatpants, or left his desk a mess of sticky white. He returned to the card and noticed that the underside of his hand was smeared with grey lead. The whole card had smudges on his already messy writing, but he continued on,

“Okay, fuck. You’re really going to make me say it? I want you, and I can’t have you, and I hate this power you have over me. Not even my own death holds that much weight, and it’s the thing keeping me from you…”

Wally finished off the letter with a few more blunt thoughts. Anything and everything heedless and stupid was carefully spelled out with the last bit of lead in his pencil. He would get up to sharpen it, but the fear of losing these words until he was ready to let him go took ahold of him. These were words he needed to say, even if you could never read them.

He concluded his thoughts with an aggressive signature at the bottom. He wanted to shut the card and imagine like the words had already reset, melted away from the paper like a bad storm had turned the thick stock into indiscernible mush. His heart was on this paper in a string of words that would only ever make sense to him, but Mr. Martin insisted on the next step he was about to take.

Wally left the room with a couple of minutes to spare, yelling a dramatic Goodbye! to you on the way out. He knew the schedule of the bells so well that he didn’t even need to think about it when he left. He had one destination in mind, and the bell had rung by the time he got there. On the first floor of the school, down the hall with all the English classes, was your locker, right near your homeroom. The lockers had a few slats near the top of each of them, and the card was the perfect width to fit and slide right through. Wally held it in his hands for a second, creasing it with his fingers and thinking of all the things that could happen if you just got to see it. Communication, even this bizarre, would be perfect for him. A place to overshare his actual feelings and not the constantly happy, empty-headed jock he always pretended to be. He had real feelings, and only a fraction of them were captured with stationary. It was more than something for you to read; it was the first step on processing his own feelings, to distract himself from thinking of missing his family’s holiday traditions. You helped him with that, unknowingly. And this was something to pay you back with, for being the unwanted object of his attraction.

Wally lifted the card to the horizontal grooves in the locker, pushing it inside. He heard it scrape against the metal and land on the stuff in your locker. There wasn’t much else he could do besides walk away. The note and all of his raw emotion were gone. Knowing the path you usually took, he expected that you would open your locker and find nothing. So, with the new weight off his chest, Wally moved through the hall, filling with students moving to their next class to throw hoops in the gym or convince the other ghosts to make holiday treats with him.

He went down towards the opposite end of the hall from where you would be coming in, putting an unknown distance between you and him as you walked to your locker. Standing exactly where he had been, you started twisting the lock embedded in the blue metal door to get it open. When you did, a Christmas card fell out and landed on the shiny linoleum.

You reached for it, picking it up and opening the card. The words were a bit faded and smudged, looking too messy to be some joke, so you assumed it was written with pure intentions. It looked to fill up the whole card, the letter written inside even going around the “Happy Holidays” wish written in red and green lettering on the right side of the card. Though, you started to question the legitimacy of it as you read further into it. The stuff about your appearance, and how they admired you from afar made you feel seen in a way that other guys at school were too dumb to see express on their faces or with their words. But ghosts? That part had you questioning what was actually real about this letter, and who was using a dead kid as a sick punchline to this joke of a letter. But the end of it what really got you, it being somehow both too cheesy to take seriously but also too specific to not be straight from the heart.

“It’s so hard to watch someone that you can only have in your fantasy. Every day I think about you and do things that would get me in so much trouble if anyone could see it. I think about you in ways that tell me I really love adore you.” The sentence originally used the word ‘love,’ but it had been scribbled out to become almost unreadable and replaced with the word ‘adore.’

Your eyes scanned over the final few sentences, which really stuck out to you. Unbeknownst to you, it was the first time Wally was at a loss for words. He could always offer support, even if he was bad at it. But this was the hardest thing he found himself trying to say.

“I don’t usually notice the living. They’re boring and lame, but you’re different. I dream about us doing the—“ The sentence ended there and picked up again at the start of a new one. “Well, I can’t describe it. The best way to put it would be doing the most. Everything. Anything. My world tilted off its axis, and it was already upside down. I love you.”

At the bottom of the note, it was signed,

“Worlds apart, 

Wally Clark

Class of ’84”

[meowmeowbilly]

[meowmeowbilly]

[meowmeowbilly]

so itchio has shadowbanned any games tagged with 'nsfw', 'adult', or 'erotic' so they don't show up in searches, and several devs have reported that their r18 games have been removed from the site with no warning

you know, maybe the internet shouldn’t be controlled by payment processors and terf lobbyists. and maybe people should be more concerned about this rise of censorship on queer media.

[meowmeowbilly]

Girl.... WHAT?

[meowmeowbilly]

If I said Billy playing D&D with the party because Max tricks him, thinking it will be funny. After hearing the rules he insists on being a cleric, and everyone's like ??? But lets him because he's got scary dog privileges.

But then everyone notices he seems to be able to anticipate conflict just from the tone of Eddie's voice. He's quick with the healing spells to his own detriment and will put himself in harm's way to help his party.

Now the party has a new mystery to solve. Why the fuck Billy's like that.

[meowmeowbilly]

The filter relies on manually curated open-source blocklists, including the ‘nuclear’ list, provided by uBlockOrigin and uBlacklist Huge AI Blocklist,” DuckDuckGo said in a post on X. “While it won’t catch 100% of AI-generated results, it will greatly reduce the number of AI-generated images you see.

Left: AI filter is off Right: AI filter is on

[meowmeowbilly]

[meowmeowbilly]

[meowmeowbilly]

Just to clarify, there's a bill that would STOP credit card companies from controlling who's allowed to spend money on porn or "risque" (read: queer) content. If you don't think big business should be able to tell you what to spend your own damn money on, call your senators and reps to let them know! It's the Fair Access to Banking Act, H.R.987 in the House, S.410 in the Senate.

[meowmeowbilly]

Hey guys something fucking bad happened

KOSA/the kids online safety act has been reintroduced into legislature after it passed Senate last year and then got snubbed. It is not unlike the bill that just passed in the UK a few weeks ago. If you don't want what happened in the UK to happen here, now would be a good time to vocally oppose it.

Here is a petition that can be signed by Americans. Attached to the petition is an easy tool that allows you to call and leave messages for your representatives. I have already done so. You can also email your representatives by searching for their name, most have message submission boards as well. This thing died once, it can die again.

Please sign/share the petition and contact your representatives.

[meowmeowbilly]

Billy Hargrove holding his cigarette up to Steve Harrington’s trembling lips after the Halloween Party sees them tearing into each other in Billy’s backseat. The streetlamp illuminates their sweaty skin and Steve’s chest heaves. Canon. To me.

[meowmeowbilly]

[meowmeowbilly]