spikebrennan's Personnel File

spikebrennan, with his Apparatus

spikebrennan, with test subject

spikebrennan, inspecting SCP-1036

GOC Case COLD HARPER: Archival photograph of Vassily Strelnikov

Site 06

Site 32

http://alexandra-scp.wikidot.com/spikebrennan
http://scp.bz/scpper

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Note: I created:

SCP	Rating	Comments	Created	Last Comment	Length
SCP-2008-J	138	36	15 Jun 2011 13:42	13 Oct 2017 15:31	2919
SCP-955	177	67	13 Jul 2011 01:42	31 Aug 2019 19:24	5620
SCP-831	215	48	03 Aug 2011 02:53	31 Aug 2019 19:12	14943
SCP-908	236	54	22 Aug 2011 19:48	03 Sep 2019 12:33	8183
SCP-1060	89	46	23 Aug 2011 15:49	16 Jan 2019 22:17	3336
Transcript of meeting, June 2 1972	102	25	14 Sep 2011 18:42	02 Mar 2013 10:47	12993
Spring Cleaning	113	43	08 Oct 2011 04:35	22 Apr 2019 21:48	10410
SCP-1012	273	67	15 Nov 2011 14:40	31 Aug 2019 19:27	4879
Memorandum Dated 6 November 1944	54	10	20 Nov 2011 22:49	24 Nov 2014 17:25	6336
SCP-926	173	38	19 Dec 2011 21:10	01 Dec 2017 21:38	5152
SCP-089	574	112	05 Jan 2012 21:27	13 Sep 2018 21:52	8390
SCP-1036	288	57	07 Feb 2012 23:32	31 Aug 2019 19:09	12496
SCP-920-EX	145	59	09 Mar 2012 03:45	21 Apr 2017 03:48	8525
SCP-1322	870	199	25 Apr 2012 19:28	10 Oct 2019 02:39	16269
Scroll fragment 13Q29	32	31	02 Jul 2012 21:23	05 Sep 2017 17:33	7780
SCP-1512	257	74	11 Oct 2012 01:21	13 Sep 2018 21:55	5826
SCP-1844	302	69	14 Dec 2012 01:59	20 Sep 2019 16:58	15835
Transcript of telephone conversation, August 9, 1991	62	21	18 Jan 2013 05:15	14 Jun 2016 18:16	10529
SCP-1746	234	42	11 Oct 2013 19:27	31 Aug 2019 19:03	8974
Sic Transit Gloria Mundi	162	12	06 Nov 2014 21:56	01 May 2018 19:15	5086
SCP-2236	137	62	07 Nov 2014 17:40	07 Aug 2019 16:29	6640
Ad Majorem Bonum	19	3	20 Feb 2015 23:26	25 Oct 2016 18:42	3537
SCP-2914	127	34	25 Feb 2015 23:09	31 Aug 2019 18:47	12714
SCP-2553	245	45	06 May 2015 22:12	13 Apr 2018 21:34	10319
SCP-2336	154	43	18 Dec 2015 15:23	20 Sep 2019 18:30	5221
spikebrennan's proposal	236	65	29 Aug 2017 22:04	20 Sep 2019 16:41	17633
SCP-3236	186	60	04 Sep 2017 23:37	21 Jun 2019 06:05	6423
SCP-4336	93	18	06 Jul 2018 19:54	05 Apr 2019 19:55	35732
Stray Katz (part 1)	31	3	31 Aug 2018 02:07	02 Sep 2018 12:26	10057
SCP-4436	80	13	29 Aug 2019 02:35	08 Oct 2019 16:31	13833

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See commentary for specific articles below:

• SCP-089 (Tophet)

Commentary

This is not as old an article as its low number might suggest: the number became available due to the deletion of an older article, and I jumped on it.

While reading about the religion of the ancient Carthaginian culture (why, how do you spend your afternoons?) I came across references to child sacrifice.  Specifically, it seems to have been their practice for parents to sacrifice their own children.  The scholarly consensus is still out on how prevalent this was, but there you go.  I'm the father of two wonderful young children, so this practice struck me as the most repugnant and awful thing imaginable.

To make it work as an SCP article, I wanted to play up the psychological horror.  The concept here isn't merely that a child is being painfully murdered- rather, the concept is that the child's parent has to do it.  What's worse, this isn't a case where the parent who is committing the murder is insane, or indoctrinated as some kind of demon-worshiper, or under some kind of outside compulsion.  Rather, the parent has been put in the position of having to choose to do this, for the greater good.  I think that at some level, the ancient Carthaginians went through the same process.

But for the Carthaginians, they thought that their sacrifice was necessary in order to obtain the favor of the gods and avert a crisis affecting their own society.  It seemed to me that as an SCP article, the sacrifice would be made even more poignant if the crisis were on the other side of the world, so to speak.  The point of the sacrifice wouldn't be to save the mother's own society, but that of a bunch of strangers.  

Photosynthetic, in the discussion pages for the article, correctly figured out the redacted events that are described in the addendum: the Great New Orleans Fire of 1788 (destroyed virtually the entire city), the Taiping Rebellion (to which tens of millions of deaths in mid-19th century China are attributed), and the 1970 Bhola cyclone in Bangladesh (one of the deadliest natural disasters in modern times).  The 1951 volcanic eruption is nothing specific— the whole point is that there's nothing in particular that anyone remembers about such an event, because the prompt sacrifice to the Tophet solved the problem.  I'm not going to say anything about the "ongoing" event.

My first draft of the piece involved a somewhat more complicated sacrifice (based on the historic sources) involving turtledoves, cattle, etc. in addition to the human.  But my first draft was poorly received, and for good reason- the lengthy discussion of various animal sacrifices distracted the reader from the intended gut-punch of the child sacrifice.

My next draft only involved sacrificing the child… and was also poorly received.

For my third draft (which is what you're reading here), I simply re-organized the article and buried the lead.  Specifically, I moved the wham line ("For each locution event, SCP-089-A is a healthy, unblemished human infant or child between eight months and six years of age, and SCP-089-B is that child’s natural mother.") further down the article.  

It seems to work.

Yes, at its heart it's an "evil idol demands sacrifice, or else" concept.  I think it's the presentation that actually sells it, and I'm delighted that the article has been well-received.  Djoric featured it in his Mary-Ann and Salah tale series.

The inscription on the back is a quotation from Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl".  Maybe I'll delete the quote- it's intended more as an easter egg.

• SCP-831 (Tinker bugs)

Commentary

Of all my articles, this is the one I'm most pleased with.

Termites are creepy to begin with, and the notion of termites with an agenda…

This piece pre-dates Smapti's similar SCP-1942 by nine months or so.  The two articles approach the same general concept (tool-using bugs) from different angles.  His bugs are basically cute (relatively speaking): they have communicated with researchers and there's no indication that they've ever hurt anyone.  I think mine are creepier because they don't talk to us.  (They're talking to somebody, but not us- which is creepier still).

• SCP-908 (Colocated rock)

Commentary

Sometimes articles take a long time to write.  This was not one of those.  This fell out of my head almost fully-formed, and I wrote the first draft in about an hour.  I've subsequently played with the test log a bit.

The thing that I like most about this one is the way that I've tried to present how the Foundation would systematically study a phenomenon like this.  Change one thing at a time; try to explore the attributes of the subject in an orderly basis.  In my headcanon, every SCP item has this type of documentation.

• SCP-920-EX (evil workgroup printer)

Commentary

The cutesy premise that I started with was "what if there was a parasite that affected organizations, rather than organisms?"  In an early draft, most of the containment protocol was crossed out, but readers complained that it made the article damned hard to read.

• SCP-926 (Guqin)

Commentary

This is another attempt by me to do a non-Western-culture-based SCP article.  I hadn't know about SCP-580 when I wrote it up.  (I like 580).  It's not based on any particular existing legend or folklore that I'm aware of, and it's certainly not based on Terry Pratchett.

• SCP-955 (Mr. Sillybug)

Commentary

My first SCP article.  (Actually, my third.  My first was- no kidding- the zombiefied body of former US president James Garfield.  It was terrible.  My second was SCP-2008-J, but I'm not sure that a -J counts)

This one almost got deleted because as initially presented, it lacked the "kids perceive it differently" feature. In other words, it was basically an ugly but friendly animal.  Once I realized that this wasn't enough of a hook to make it worthwhile, I edited it to add the "kids think it's cute" attribute.  This seemed to capture readers' imagination.  Still, I'd like to think that I've improved since this one.

• SCP-1012 (the Secret Chord)

Commentary

This is a re-write.  The first draft played a much more Abrahamic religious angle: playing the chord would cause various Old Testament/Book of Revelation types of phenomena to manifest.  Some of the writing that I did for those parts subsequently got worked into other articles such as SCP-1844.

The "it destroys the world at the particle level" part was, therefore, a concept that came later to the process.  Since that's so over-the-top, I figured that the best way to make it work would be to make the containment process over-the-top as well.  So I provided for the deliberate extermination of a (fictional) species of whale, and a worldwide conspiracy to cause speakers and media broadcast signals include cancellation tones.  (Yes, I know that the physics don't really work that way.)  But I liked the idea that speaker hum, and the sound made by fluorescent lights, and the Taos Hum/Bristol Hum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hum) are all side effects of a SCP Foundation containment program.

Yes, the title is thanks to Leonard Cohen.

• SCP-1036 (Nkondi)

Commentary

We have an unfortunate shortage of SCP articles that are based on concepts from non-Western cultures.  I aimed to address that.  I saw a nkondi (the one here at the top of my userpage) at the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia, and drew inspiration from it.  The concept here is drawn from, but does not precisely track, the concept in Kongo folklore.

As a matter of tone, the technical description doesn't say "spirit", but "incorporeal entity". One thing that it's important to keep in mind when drafting is that these are scientists and technicians talking; engineers dealing with an engineering problem.

• SCP-1060 (Penanggalan)

Commentary

This was my entry for the "contest for SCP-1000" (http://www.scp-wiki.net/forum/t-376556).  The challenge was to create an SCP object based on folklore or an urban legend.  My first thought was to submit an entry based on the Jersey Devil, but (1) that isn't much more interesting than a generic cryptozoological beast, and (2) somebody at the time had mentioned on the discussion forums that we have relatively few non-Western culture based articles.  So I decided to borrow something from Malay folklore.  Yes, the D&D Fiend Folio has a similar monster drawn from essentially the same source.  Yes, it's a relatively straight SCP-ification of the folklore beastie.  Not really my best work.

• SCP-1322 (Glory Hole)

Commentary

As of this writing, this is my most highly-rated article, and I couldn't be more proud.  I'm pleased that it has spawned such a healthy diversity of interpretations.

As I pointed out in the comments page to Photosynthetic's excellent tale All Things Considered (which is based on 1322):

When I wrote SCP-1322, I intentionally omitted most of the details about the Hartle culture. Part of this was in order to make it a short story rather than a longer world-building exercise, but another part of it was in order to implicitly get across the fact that, fundamentally, the Foundation really isn't all that interested in the Hartle culture. They're more interested in the anomaly itself— in whether it constitutes a threat that needs to be secured and contained …  I think it's important to stress that the SCP-1322-1 civilization is, basically, regular people. Like us. They're not incomprehensibly foreign. This is part of what makes the tragedy of my original piece work. A piece about sterilizing a planet inhabited by inscrutable hive-mind lobster people or whatever would be a shame, but not necessarily a tragedy which is why I didn't write it that way. Instead, these folks have families. They write poetry. They go on vacation and sit on the beach and watch the sun set.  The other half of the tragedy is that this whole society is slowly but inexorably dying, but the Foundation doesn't give a fuck. The bastards.

Oh, and: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hartle

The drafting process for this one was pretty quick: the first thing that came to my mind was "one- inch wide war". The second thing was the title (juvenile, I know, but I have very poor impulse control). That left the problem of "why is this inch-wide war being fought?  And the rest flowed from that.

• SCP-1512 (Irrational Root)

Commentary

See discussion of SCP-1844 below.
Yes, Dexanote, the title was intended as a pun with a double meaning.  "Irrational root" is a mathematical concept, and the concept of this SCP item incorporates the notions of irrationality (the required cognitive dissonance in the containment protocol) and of a root (the thing's shape).

Jesuit priests really do engage in faith exercises that would presumably be helpful in containing this thing.

This is the closest thing I've written to a Lovecraftian horror. Someone in the comments described it as "fighting Yog-Sothoth with math", which us almost exactly right. (I even made the thing squamous and rugose. Yes, I looked those words up.). But more importantly, what I think makes this concept fit well within the SCP Foundation milieu is that it's a Lovecraftian horror solved as an engineering problem.

• SCP-1746 (Anomalous weather pattern)

Commentary

I decided that what the SCP Foundation staff really needs is a squirrel wrangler.
More generally, I fell in love with the concept of the Foundation being required to very precisely re-create a very specific series of mundane actions, including something as silly as the behavior of a squirrel.  The original inspiration came when I watched the closing credits of a movie (I forget which one), and marveled at the many strange-sounding but undoubtedly serious job titles that various crew members had- including a squirrel wrangler in one case.

It's kind of the mathematical inverse of Procedure 110-Montauk.  Where Montauk is (presumably) monstrous, the Foundation must perform it for the greater good.  Conversely, there's nothing particularly special or interesting about Protocol 1746-Aleph.  What's important is that it- whatever it is- be carried out exactly according to plan.  And if you think about any given sequence of mundane events, think of how difficult it would be to replicate that sequence again, exactly, to the level of precision that I mean to imply here.  Especially when it involves things like melting ice cream and squirrel behavior.

On the other hand, notwithstanding the inherent silliness of the concept behind this article, it's intended to imply something rather dark about the Foundation - that the Foundation is willing and able to involve children in containment protocols.  (In my headcanon, not only are there children among the Foundation's agents, there are D-class children.  (I acknowledge that this is not a popular opinion.)

This article is a re-post.  First time around (see top of http://sandbox.scp-wiki.net/spikebrennan-storm ), I actually tried to include a long, technical blow-by-blow description of Protocol 1746-Aleph.  And the commentary that I got, before the article was downvoted below -20, was that it was too long.  That commentary was correct: what this thing needed was for the article to imply the content of Protocol 1746-Aleph without stating it outright.  Instead of seeing the machinery, all you get is a brief glimpse of the man behind the curtain- just enough to see that he's wearing clown shoes.

And he's worried.

• SCP-1844 (Crater at 31.7███° N, 35.1███° E)

Commentary

Want to know what I hate?  SCP-616, that's what I hate.  Particularly the fact that (1) "just kidding, it really isn't an actual religious metaphysical phenomena", and (2) whoever wrote the pseudo-"religious" parts just Did Not Do the Research.

I made up my mind to correct that.  But the result was http://sandbox.scp-wiki.net/spikebrennan-scp-616 .  

So I decided to re-work the concept, by keeping the "religious people praying with all their might to hold something at bay" concept, but I decided to put it on a derelict upside-down submarine instead.  Because submarines are creepier than airplanes.  Thus we have the top half of http://sandbox.scp-wiki.net/spikebrennan-submarine .

But that didn't work either- there was too much of a disconnect between the praying, the eldritch thing that was being held at bay, and the submarine setting.  And lots of people hated the "centiakiva" concept.

So I shelved it for a few months, tinkered with it some more, and ultimately broke up the content into two separate, not-obviously-related articles: SCP-1512 (the Irrational Root) and this one.  Taken separately, they both seem to work.  I guess the lesson is not to try to pack to many disparate concepts into a single SCP work: pick a limited number of ideas, and use your excess ideas for a different piece.

Lots of people still have the "centiakiva" concept.  But I managed to slip it into the final project and get it to stick, so nyah nyah pbbth.  (I also snuck all kinds of other fun stuff into the article, such as a reference to Pope John Paul I, and putting the snake-handling preacher on equal footing, so to speak, with the other "prince of the church" types.)

I still hate SCP-616.

• SCP-2008-J (Cryptozoological life form)

Commentary

Sometimes I come up with a single line, and then I write an entire SCP article around that line.  I know, a good writer is supposed to "murder his babies," but I can't help myself.

In this case, the line was "SCP-2008-J's diet is unknown; however, a rectal probe of the specimen that was conducted under sedation indicated the presence of a whole, undigested human in the life form's body cavity."

They say that a new writer shouldn't try to do a -J on his first try out.  Nonetheless, this article was my first bit of writing on the site (if you don't count stuff that got deleted).

The COLD HARPER timeline:

• Part 1: Memorandum dated 6 November 1944
• Part 2: Transcript of meeting, June 2 1972
• Part 3: Transcript of telephone conversation, August 9, 1991

Commentary

Of the three, Part 2 (the Nixon one) is the one that I'm most proud of; and it's the one that I wrote first.  The genesis for the whole series of stories was having Nixon order the relevant military commanders to target the entire United States nuclear arsenal at a single point, and to add that by the time the American attack got there, the Soviets will have already attacked that spot with everything they've got.  From that point I did a lot of research into the form and content of Nixon-era archival memos; the structure of the American military apparatus in the early 1970s, and so on.  Everyone and everything referenced in the story is factual, except for Agent Sachs of the GOC and, of course, the COLD HARPER object itself.  And Vassily (the guy with the eyepatch) - if I get around to it, I'll write more about him.  He's this guy: (http://www.kulfoto.com/interesting-things/38715/russian-soldier-from-ww2), he's intended to be the grandfather of a certain other Russian military figure who features prominently at the SCP Foundation, and he's got an interesting story.

The second piece that I wrote was the WWII-era one, which comes first in internal chronological order.  I was inspired by the history of the Enigma program, and by the real-life Nazi expedition to Antarctica and by the career of the (all-too-real) Reinhard Heydrich.

The third piece, both in order of writing and chronologically, was the George H.W. Bush one.  Incidentally, I've met George Bush (41).

As to what the COLD HARPER object actually is?  I have some ideas, but I think it's better to be vague.  It's not a specific SCP object (as indicated by the number that was assigned to it once it actually came into the Foundation's custody, which doesn't correspond to any existing article.)

Other tales:

• Spring Cleaning

Commentary

This is more of a puzzle-box than an actual work of fiction.  I tried to be clever and do SCP-style write-ups of certain famous historical and legendary artifacts.  At one time I just had a stand-alone "cabinet of curiosities" section to this personnel file, meaning to do something with the write-ups at some point.  Then I constructed a somewhat lazy and half-baked narrative to go along with them.

I shouldn't provide an answer key, but what the hell (most of them have already been figured out):

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Regalia_of_Japan
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excalibur
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relic_of_the_tooth_of_the_Buddha
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_heifer
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Granth_Sahib
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relics_of_Muhammad#Blessed_Sandals
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Fleece
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Lance
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Stone
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gandiva
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Treasures_of_the_Tuatha_D%C3%A9_Danann
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosopher%27s_stone
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heirloom_Seal_of_the_Realm
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_plates
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_cross
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Grail

• Scroll fragment 13Q29

Commentary

I hate SCP-682.  Hate, hate, hate.  Sorry, but it's true.
But I had always wanted to do a Bible-speak style writeup of an SCP article or tale, kind of like Page 285 of the Guild Ledger but specifically in Biblical prose.  I opened up the Book of Daniel and the piece basically wrote itself.  I figured that Dead Sea Scrolls-type physical damage to the document could be used in place of traditional redaction.  Unfortunately, the formatting means that the piece looks ugly on certain browsers.

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I added some stuff to a few other articles, including Observation Log 709 (the Dr. Garcia bit), SCP-294 ("Hic est enim Calix Sánguinis mei"), SCP-738 (specifically, the Sheldon Katz bit), Log of Anomalous Items, Experiment Log 261-AD-DE (the Dr. Garcia bit) and SCP-887 Log (the Dr. Garcia bit).

I don't have an "alter ego" character.  Dr. Garcia and Dr. Patel are my Rosencrantz and Guilderstern.  Sheldon Katz, Esq., of the Foundation's legal department, is an extremely self-centered lawyer.

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