After thinking more about this article after I first read the draft, I think I've arrived at a novote. While the development is interesting, ultimately, I'm left with just too many questions and a nonspecific threat at the ending for the impact. While it was well-written, that's just not enough to convince me to upvote.
SCP-2423 / Discussion
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This is the discussion related to the wiki page SCP-2423.
Very cool, +1. One little quibble: Santa Clara, California is not touristy at all, and not especially near the beach—it's in Silicon Valley. What the interviewee describes sounds more like Santa Cruz.
This feels like a grab bag of disparate, vaguely radio-themed elements thrown together and half-baked. The stuff like the number of staff being squares of whole numbers, the instances causing irritation or whatever, the weird floating book what can't be moved, all of this feels like a collection of weird-for-the-sake-of-weird ideas mashed into a narrative that's not really understandable on any thematic level. As a result, I feel completely unmoved by this.
I'll also second the sentiment that what you're describing is not Santa Clara.
I'd definitely swap out Santa Clara with Santa Cruz if you're looking to maintain real-world verisimilitude. Santa Cruz was the basis for Santa Carla in The Lost Boys, anyway.
The level of mystery remains high in this piece. Why are people angered by the 2423-1? What are the radios talking about? Is 2423 from here, from elsewhere, or spontaneously generated, or other?
However, I still feel like this works. We don't know the how or why for 2423, but we do know what to do about it. I think that's why it's okay to let the mystery remain.
This is the fourth article depicting a fake foundation site that I can remember, and it's ultimately not doing anything for me and not covering any new ground. Echoing the "conceptual grab-bag" comments.
Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!
Is there something tying all this together that I'm missing? What the heck is Nina Kärde anyway?
This is either a "grab-bag" as Roget put it, or a very awesome mystery that fits together in a way that I can't seem to figure out.
I'll go +1 just because I think there may be more here than anyone is seeing.
I'll go +1 just because I think there may be more here than anyone is seeing.
I don't often take exception to another user's criticism of a piece within a discussion thread, but I think this is a general enough issue that it needs to be addressed, here or elsewhere.
If everyone who reads this is failing to pick up on whatever is going on here, then that represents a failure on the part of the writer. If indeed there is anything going on here. This community, for as much as I tend to disagree with it on the whole, is discerning enough to pick up on contextual clues and subtle themes that my baseline assumption is never "wow, the writer must just be too clever for us." I might miss something and not get a piece. You might miss something. But all of us? Call it the Abe Lincoln Principle.
You're free to upvote for whatever reason you like, of course. But the burden of proof, in my mind, is on the writer to effectively communicate the story they are trying to tell. I do not believe that burden to be on the reader to invest meaning in something where it might not even be there.
But all of us? Call it the Abe Lincoln Principle.
I feel like I'm missing a reference, because this is a cool name.
"You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time." A quote attributed (apocryphally, according to some) to Abraham Lincoln.
And the people who believe it's apocryphal believe that it's apocryphal all the time.
Agree with this sentiment. When a reader or critic fails to pick up some nuance I had in the document, then I consider that my fault. I'm the author, it's my job to convey meaning to the reader.
In this case (I am not the author here), there is clearly not enough information to piece the mystery together. I can fit the pieces together in multiple internally consistent narratives. The question to me is, does this make the piece poorer, in my opinion? Not for me. I accept the ambiguity.
This is really neat. I think there is some room for expansion, but I'm +1ing right now. There are a couple spots where tone felt a little wonky, and things like giving the interviewees random extra-#'s to show that we've catalogued them all would help. Also, how is "Nina Kärde" pronounced? That's a very specific spelling to have picked up from an audio recording.
incidents of SCP-2423-1
I think you mean "instances".
I miss things like that all the time. Thanks for pointing it out.
Edit: Also, it's Nee-na Kare-deh. It's based on words for "tongue" and "rock". I believe them to be Mingrelian, but don't quote me on that.
I like it! It's weird, but feels like there's some underlying logic just tantalizingly out of reach. This one feels challenging but solvable (and doesn't even ever need be solved to keep working at this level).
Upvoted hard at Incident 2423-A.
I love these open mystery ones. A story that answers all of its own questions is a dead story; it leaves nothing more to be told, nothing that keeps you thinking about it, nothing that creates more story beyond its own words. The best type of worldbuilding you can have is a story that answers questions with more questions- each of which is potentially a story of its own.
I was gonna upvote because of the whole "logic tantalisingly out of reach" thing, but I eventually arrived at novote because of some parts of the article, namely: several instances of "it is believed that " or "it appears to be " when the "it" in question clearly is what it is; second interview log is a bit over the top, but slightly excusable given that the anomalous personnel instill some sort of sense of unease; the child speaking through the radio sounds like a cartoon villain.
several instances of "it is believed that " or "it appears to be " when the "it" in question clearly is what it is
One can never be certain with this sort of anomaly. SCP-2423-2 is an object locked in unbreakable geosynchronous orbit 2 meters above the floor in a facility that spontaneously materialized out of nowhere. No matter how much it may look and feel like a book, its a good idea to maintain a healthy sense of skepticism about these things. For comparison, SCP-2540 appears to be a lime. It is entirely reasonable to suspect that SCP-2540 may not, in fact, be a lime.
/forum/t-1287246/scp-2423#post-
page revision: 1, last edited: 25 Feb 2021 03:57
