SCP-3947 summarily deleted for being an incomplete draft.
Accelerando witnessing.
SCP-3507 summarily deleted following an unsuccessful author self-delete.
DrBleep witnessing.
SCP-3439 is a RJ45 standard ethernet wall port attached to a 2x4 inch wall plate which is in turn firmly fused into a rock face at ██.████° N, ███.████° W. The port’s shape is consistent with the standard ethernet cables used in an average data network, however the number of pins, or the number of wires this port connects to, cannot be determined. The faceplate this port connects to appears to be made of ivory dated to ████, and is fussed with the rock, which has been dated to the same point in time.
Deleted at -16 and three votes.
Feedback Ported:
Jacob Conwell
Eh. Considering that your object basically describes a peephole into the workings of the universe, this really is underwhelming. Not only does escalation of the Foundation's containment not really seem to go anywhere, but the actual containment itself seems rather lax.
On top of that, the interview logs are missing line breaks in several places, and don't really add a whole lot of characterization or personality to the story. These are people talking here, but their words just read as so robotic and only as tools to drive more exposition than anything a 3D person might say.
-1. Interesting idea, but less than stellar execution.
DrDromeus
Conwell’s pretty much voiced my opinion. I think the idea really is rather interesting, and could work really well in your team’s scenario. That being said, the execution doesn’t really do this much justice. The dialogue is just kinda…meh, and the article ends before anything really interesting happens.
I mean, this thing can let you recode the universe, and we’re sitting here talking about the number of wires and pins in a wall port? It just…could use a lot more.
-1, but I wish I didn’t have to.
Glory To The Machine: A tale
By three times I coat my body with the oil three times consecrated. By three times I cleanse my body of the stain of the flesh. I was weakly lit by the unstable light of a candle, throwing my own deformed shade on walls. This shade seemed to dance and wriggle in an impossible manner on the walls of my cell.
Deleted at -20 and three votes. Rewrite by
PugMaster3000 pending.
Feedback Ported:
not_a_seagull
Now, I really want to like this, and this hypes me up for whatever's coming next in this doomsday scenario. But the writing quality here is really low. I'd recommend giving it a proofread. Until then, I can't upvote in good conscious.
Novote
Cyantreuse
This is very short and doesn't explore Broken God concepts in any new or unique way (reason for downvote), and I agree about it needing a far better proofreading. You switch from present- to past-tense multiple times throughout, some of the wording just doesn't parse at all ("For some time, my colleagues and I sums invests with the holy driving force to the tiniest fragment of our body" — 'sums invests'?), and the news quote at the end doesn't have any formatting to indicate that it's something new — and occurring elsewhere — happening. Overall there's just not much content here, and what content is here wasn't proofread or edited fully.
"Transport Specialist": A tale
Sweat ebbed from his hand onto the 12 o'clock of the steering wheel. Sitting on his precise slim wrist was a silver wristwatch, expensive but incredibly accurate, which was just fine to him because the eggheads paid for it. Well, he had an engineering degree, otherwise why would they have "hired" him, but those doctors and researchers muddling around in labcoats were some real nerds, I mean-
Deleted at -17 and three votes.
SCP-3782-J
It has.. uhh.. like.. it's living? Wait, no it's not. I think it harms you? Let me just check. I mean, I think it harms people. So, uhh.. I think it'll be best to stay away from this SCP. Yeah. That's right. Just stay away from the SCP and it'll all be alright. Yeah.
Deleted at -21 and three votes.
The Great Religious War:
Hi, I'm Black Queen Marina
Reine Noire Gisèle, présente.
what the fuck
Black queen Mercury, hey
(i'm black queen Faith, btw)
Deleted at -14 and three votes.
Feedback Ported:
Fingo7
Having to try and read this through my limited French and google translate for a simple comedic gimmick doesn't work in the slightest. As said above, not much here but the queens talking about a big war, I'm not getting much to care about apart from "it's big, so it must be important". All and all it seems a bit bland, there isn't really much here to upvote on. -1
FloppyPhoenix
So, there's quite a bit going on here.
What you have here is an incredibly far-reaching doomsday scenario. It's a catalogue of the end of many worlds or universes after anomalous holy wars and/or deity battles. The metric ton of religious imagery sprinkled across the wiki isn't often taken to its logical conclusion and I think you made an interesting attempt here. However…
I think the Black Queen format really squeezes the life out of the exciting stories you're trying to tell here. For example, Timeline L-241 involves two para-humanist organizations battling the Horizon Initiative in an attempt to neutralize Abrahamic anomalies so that they don't destroy the world. This end-of-the-world instance could use entire series of payoff to explore alone. But then it's summed up into a single bloated paragraph by (frankly) an unreliable narrator that isn't the best at explaining things.
That's not the only issue I have. You're referencing multiple anomalous entities and groups of interest—some of them being pulled off-site from the French wiki (which is honestly commendable) and it plays into my headcanon that all the different language wikis are in the same universe. But aside from a line of exposition introducing each of these factions… readers that aren't familiar with these things (which is most of your audience) will feel like they're missing something. I certainly felt like I did.
The French writing (which isn't a 1:1 translation in google translate) and glossing over the motives and strength of each of these factions doesn't help either. By the time I reach the end of the article, I feel like I'm missing something.
Complaints aside, I really like the ideas you've attempted to present here, and I want to read more of it. There are a few ways to fix the issues I've outlined after the contest has finished:
- Either provide an in-article translation of the French dialogue or don't include at all. It's perfectly fine to acknowledge that this takes place in a larger, multilingual universe, but remember at the end of the day: this is an English wiki, and most of the readers come here for English-language stories.
- I would suggest actually writing articles to coincide with each of these Instance stories. The Black Queen format should be used as a framing device to give an alternative perspective of events. It shouldn't be used to tell an entire story.
- Concepts from the other wikis should be fleshed out fully. International users shouldn't shy away from bringing off-Wiki concepts here; they should be welcomed and encouraged. For instance, the para-humanist French-GoI story can be done a great justice by introducing some worldbuilding across multiple articles.
At the end of the day, that's a downvote for me. There are a ton of promising concepts that just aren't explored fully. Good luck.
Minnows: A tale
Maxwell flicked the minnow in its head. His mother might have wondered if he had sociopathic tendencies had she been supervising him instead of fixing the water intake pipe for the third time this week. The lake water wasn’t flowing like it normally did; there was a shift in the winds, which means a lot on a dammed lake. This wasn’t something she had picked up on, though. She only realized the water didn’t come out of the copper faucet into her pot of minnow stew. Unappetizing, yes, but she and Maxwell were out of money, and the fish weren’t biting, so they’d have to eat the bait tonight. Maxwell and the minnow, one not in the stew, were on the dock, and didn’t know any of this to an even greater extent. In fact, from the head trauma, the minnow knew little of anything now. Maxwell dropped him back in the water. He swam in a spiral down into its murkiness until Maxwell was content that he wouldn’t be part of their stew in the coming days. The minnow swam out of eyesight, bounced off the spherical sand gracing the lake’s bottom, and bypassed miraculously all of the algae that had clouded Maxwell’s view when he had started skipping away. Spiraling backwards now, the minnow corkscrewed with a radius increasing, but a constant radians per second as before so that the night air was being forced from above the lake’s surface into the spiral of turbid water that framed the pipe under it. Maxwell’s mother pulled her waders across her back and prepared to enter.
Deleted at -11 and three votes.
Feedback Ported:
Zerox1892
This is really wonderful.
Its like reading a stream of consciousness of the universe as its experiences a massive error that makes a single human thought into the prime goal of the program while the very mechanics of the universe begin to glitch out. Its confusing and hard to understand which fits for the world ending.
I can't help but wonder if I'm reading too far into it.
DrDromeus
You know what? On reread, this is actually kinda awesome. Initially it looks like a weird, hard-to-follow story with long block paragraphs. But looking again, this is a totally psychedelic, sadistic flow of words that actually evoked some emotion in me. I really like this. There’s this consistent, apathetic tone that pervades this story about the destruction of the world, and that tone really resonated in a weird, good way with the situation. I just didn’t expect to see something like this. I didn’t even think there were expectations for what to do in a tale but this somehow broke those expectations.
Man I’m sorry for downvoting earlier. I was wrong. Take a +1.
SCP-3561 is not one single organism, but roughly 500 small insects, with one queen controlling the hive. The creatures look similar to a beetle of the family Scarabaeidae, although a handful of defining features separates these insects from others in the Scarab beetle family. SCP-3561 drones are a deep royal purple. They have four lamellate antennae, rather than the standard two. The reasoning for the extra antennae is that they use these to receive orders from their queen. The final feature of the SCP-3561 drones is the two small pincers at the bottom of the head. Experimentation with these pincers has shown that these pincers release a chemical that hijacks the prey's brain, causing them to become part of the Hive mind, and part of SCP-3561. Before the current containment procedures were put in place, multiple Class-D personnel attempted to approach SCP-3561, and were consequentially taken over by the hive mind. These personnel were transported to cells further away from SCP-3561, weakening their connection to the queen. These former class-d personnel were then categorized as SCP-3561-X. A description of the queen has not been released, as we are unable to separate her from the rest of the hive. We do know that killing the queen may completely shut down the body of the drones, but we are unable to confirm, as killing the queen may disable the hive.
Deleted at -17 and three votes.
SCP-3873 is a Mark 7 Titan model Rho-Wolf Reality Finalization Anchor, a product of Operation Lockout and now the centerpiece for their ongoing mission. The purpose of SCP-3873 is to prevent a XP-Class Reality Blue Screen Scenario.
Deleted at -16 and three votes.
Feedback Ported:
Flaminglog
The XP joke was kinda funny, but the article doesn't really pull me in. About halfway through the non-collapsed portion, I found myself struggling to keep my attention on it. The idea of "this area is far more real than any area outside of it" is interesting, though you didn't really elaborate on that point at all within the object description, which is where that exposition would belong.
Spend more time making the concept interesting, and less time adding lore to an unrefined idea.
WMDD's Proposal
NOTICE: "Project Palisade" is not an SCP-001 file. "Project Palisade" data represents itself as being an SCP-001 file, has all standard protections of an SCP-001 file, can only be read by being entered into the Foundation system as an SCP-001 data file, and can only be accessed or understood by Foundation personnel with access to SCP-001 files.
Deleted at -26 and three votes.
Feedback Ported:
Modern_Erasmus
I really wanted to like this, but ultimately this just isn't what I look for in an 001. This is a much needed exposition dump for your team's plot, but taken in a vacuum it's pretty dry. The timeline changes are an interesting concept but in practice it becomes pretty much the same gimmick as Kal's 001 with the slightly changed skips, and the sacrifice of other realities to preserve our own was knocked out of the park by 1739 years ago.
An 001, to me, should be a monumental work that uses pre-existing familiarity with the wiki as narrative setup to deliver significant narrative payoff on a macro scale. 001s written for team contests generally fail to live up to this expectation because they invert it entirely: becoming sources of setup for further articles. Tufto managed a perfect balance in his by providing narrative payoff on a ten year old multipart storyline while also leaving room open for future story had his team decided to do so. But this really only relates to your own storyline with a few namedropped series 1 skips that only tie in tangentially.
For what it's worth, I loved the mythological clue section.
Petrograd
I kind of feel like this is an info-dump, and you don't really get into the more interesting meat of the matter until the supplement and linked tale. This article suffers for that.
Critique:
I guess in terms of advice, there's a lot of room for show-don't-tell. You tell us that the document is extra-dimensional instead of even implying a narrative for how the reader's Foundation got it. (You also tell us that it isn't an 001 without telling us how they do categorize it.)
There are deviations from typical Foundation language (especially when talking about the leadership, such as in the containment procedures), but they mostly aren't keyed to paint a picture of a different Foundation, even a subtly different one.
The Project First Strike log and following sections are a little repetitive and small scale. Through the early description of Project Pallisade, their implied actions almost don't feel any larger in scale than, say, SCP-1739. I think how mundane these sections are is really a weak point.
The log of RESOLVED motions had some good implications towards the larger madness, but was somewhat bogged down in largely unexplained technical language and not as graphic as the supplement and tale. (Using tabs also didn't help this.) It might have been enough, but was sort of too little too late, and missing too much information.
For example, I don't really understand why key variant SCPs matter or their purpose, even after reading the supplement. It's also hard to care about changing from W to NC and how they're staggered when it's just letters and there's so many of them.
The ancient documents didn't do a whole lot for me, but aren't a problem. That's not really my cup of tea, but I know others enjoy such things much more.
It could use more narrative and world-building, much of it of the kind that could be worked in through small bureaucratic details (such as the opening note). It's also somewhat short of grand imagery, partly because some of the scope is small and partly because you're hiding so much or placing it in supplements.
-1
Ihp
I kind of feel like this is an info-dump, and you don't really get into the more interesting meat of the matter until the supplement and linked tale.
I have to agree; this feels way too exposition-laden, combined with technobabble and phrases that mean nothing in context. I had to read this three or four times because I didn't understand what Project Palisade actually was. It doesn't really stand on its own, either, which is a problem I had with Kalinin's proposal as well; take this out of context, and you're not left with much.
The crosslinks to the Series 1 skips and the mention of Bowe seems extraneous; what do the Living Room, the Missing Number, and the Apocorubik's Cube have to do with each other, or the 001 proposal itself outside of acting as distracting backstory? Looking through the other parts of this canon I can find any mention mention of Bowe, or any of the SCPs mentioned here, anywhere. The cynic in me can't help but wonder if this isn't for the inevitable tie-in to Resurrection some time down the line.
Plus, I gotta be honest? Putting something like this into the SCP Format is a mistake. In this case, the format creates constraint and confusion, which makes an article about the Foundation combating a reality-eating worm have less impact than it should.
Overall, I'm not impressed. -1.
Toa_Vine
I've got quite a few thoughts on this, so I want to express them in the form of constructive feedback and to explain why I downvoted.
I like the Worm, and the idea behind it. And that is probably my largest problem with the proposal: I feel like the focus is on the wrong aspect here. I wanted to know more about the nature of the realities being destroyed as well as the entity responsible for it. In that regard, the focus on First Strike and Project Palisade seems misplaced to me. I understand Project Palisade is the core of the theme for the entry, but ultimately I was disappointed to find out that the proposal focused mostly on the organization of the two projects and not on what I assumed would be the focus.
My other problem is that as an 01 proposal, I feel like the narrative aspect is laking. Of the three contest 01 proposals, I downvoted this one while I novoted djkaktus's second proposal and upvoted Tufto's. In contrast to the others, I feel sort of cheated: I know that as a contest entry this relies on other works, but as a proposal it feels incomplete. Djkaktus's has the same issue, but manages to tell a compelling narrative story within the proposal while still setting up the rest of the entries. Tufto's manages to tell a complete narrative while still having a solid entry. I'm just feeling a little lacking here.
I still think a three person 01 proposal is super ambitious, so I gotta respect that.
TL333s
Given that the last couple 001's have been very "This is the one and true 001 and all other proposals are fake, ha ha!", the opening of "this documentation doesn't actually exist and can't possibly be an 001" was refreshing. I didn't feel like the execution really lived up to that initial hype, though. I can definitely point to the initial description telling me where this object came from and not what it is as being something that turned me off, and I never quite recovered.