This Page Intentionally Left Blank
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
- Oscar Wilde |
|
Whatever you're thinking this means, it means that.
- Harry Blank |
Portrait of the artist as a disembodied expression of generalized disapproval
Harry Blank is many things, to many people. To some he's an obscure internet writer they've never heard of, and they only know that much because they looked it up after you asked.
Aaaaaand I'm tapped.
In the real world, assuming it still exists, I'm a PhD student and occasional university course instructor. I'm an historian! That will eventually become obvious in the stuff I write. I'm also from Canada! (I guess you can't say "from" when you're almost never not there, though, can you? Then again, I just did!) If you're wondering, which you aren't, which is fine, but if you are, yes! I can proofread your spelling and grammar. My mental car hits all the speedbumps.
- actually looks himself up -
Oh, hey, I'm a politician from Québec apparently! That's cool, I hope I'm good at it.
I adore words. I think a well-crafted sentence, with proper flow and some bitchin' word choice, is a thing of almost pornographic beauty. For that reason my articles so far have absurdly-long edit histories as I keep thinking of better ways to say things which were already said perfectly acceptably weeks ago.
I am not a snarky egotist, though I may play one on TV for laughs. I am in fact a sensitive hyperresponsible wussy who fears being misunderstood and will receive criticism as a gut punch. I am extremely grateful for said gut punches, because I want anything I post to actually be good. Keep pummeling, people.
And keep being fantastic! Because you are fantastic (especially if you're different from me) and the unimaginative shitheels who want you to think otherwise are just mad that they're going to go extinct and become "those fuckin' people" in the history books next to the original Nazis and the Spanish Inquisition and the McCarthyites. You can trust me on that; I help write the history books.
…in Canada, admittedly, but Canada is at least partially real world-adjacent.
So far, everything I've written here has been interconnected. My first skip established a site and teased a disaster, my second skip fleshed out the site and developed the disaster, and my third skip is the disaster! (I was afraid it would also be a disaster, but nope!) You might get some extra nuance if you read them in order, but they should all work on their own just fine too.
I'm planning on getting through all the common Object Classes, from most to least common. I've just completed the classic SEKT quartet: Safe, Euclid, Keter, and Thaumiel. Now to cultivate some esoteric class downvotes…
Oh, yeah, I've got OCD. So try not to be surprised when you notice how many hundreds of revisions my sandbox and articles have.
| The Site-43 is Fuckin' Bonkers Trilogy |
| "The Constant Companions" |
|
Item #: SCP-5056
The pic that was so terrible it earned me one of my first downvotes! The new pic is admittedly much better.
Object Lesson: Meaning looking for you in all the wrong places.
Special Quotation Procedures: "I'm really sorry about what happened in the bathroom."
Dissection: An asymmetrical love story between a janitor and an eldritch abomination. How many years of being screamed at by a mirror monster can you take before it all gets a bit… samey? Less than eighteen, apparently. The concept came to me as I lay in bed reading the site and asking myself "So, got any ideas, since you're so damn smart?" I hadn't even been thinking that I was so damn smart, so that was pretty rude.
Assessment: My first SCP, and it didn't get deleted! I mean, it came close, but it got better. Literally. Literarily? And that's a good thing, 'cuz it sets up Site-43 and teases SCP-5243.
There's a tie-in tale, as outlined below; both halves are up.
If you haven't seen this article since it was first posted, it might be worth another glance… it's been through a lot, and come out quite profitably scathed. Me being me, further scathing is undoubtedly in its future.
|
| "The One-Time Password" |
|
Item#: SCP-5109
Object Lesson: What kinds of stories can a simple anomaly generate?
Special Quotation Procedures: "…it didn't even occur to me that it would work like that. It shouldn't work like that. Why does it work like that?"
Dissection: Take a phrase you can't forget unless you tell someone else (who then can't forget it themselves), add a bunch of scientists who're too clever for their own good, and stir until somebody loses fifty percent of their skin. I wanted a story where the researchers were the real anomaly — how much mischief could they get up to with this phrase, and how could I convey that without it becoming SCP-050 or some other lolFoundation thing? I wanted to create a whole series of short literary Rube Goldberg devices, microstories whirring with their own bizarre internal logic which only this specific plot device could enable. I ended up covering way more bases than I thought I could.
Assessment: So, apparently this clicks with most people! I am deeply gratified that you didn't think it was stupid, and the affirmation has been wholly uplifting. (Definitely go downvote it if you think it's stupid, though, because what's it doing there, being stupid? I mean what the fuck.)
|
| "The Breach that Keeps On Breaching" |
|
Item #: SCP-5243
Object Lesson: Where does all that ectoplasm go, anyway?
Special Quotation Procedures: "I wish this goddamn anomaly didn't have my forwarding address."
Dissection: A magic sewer explosion is bad. A magic sewer explosion that happens every year, and forces you to roleplay as your past self, and changes history if you do it wrong, is hilariously bad. I've been building to this idea for a while, now, and it was a lot of fun executing. Especially the Provisional Task Force idea, and its logo, which came late in the game. Oh, and all those ridiculous pictures. Clinical descriptions of magical shenanigans are a hoot.
Assessment: Went from a 15k-word magnum opus to a 2.7k-word bonum opus. I hope you think it's as bonkers as I do. I had no idea how this one would go over, because I was living inside of it so long I lost all perspective. So far, it's gone over super well! Well enough that it prompted the creation of this page. (Don't blame it, blame me. You can also blame me for it, though, obviously.)
[08/23/2020] Uh, okay, it's far and away my most popular thing now! I mean, I thought it was pretty cool, but I also thought that maybe nobody else was gonna think so too. Thank you very tremendously much for the month of validation! This breach goes on.
|
Maybe now I can do a prequel trilogy with no soul and a sequel trilogy with no overall game plan?
Or! I could write a symmetrically-divisive joke SCP and tank my own upvote rating!
Yessssss, let's do that instead.
| The Harry Hasn't Posted in Two Weeks Unilogy |
| "The People Person" |
|
Item #: SCP-CASH4D-J
Object Lesson: There is no ethical consumption in containmentism.
Special Quotation Procedures: "I mean, are you killing these losers off at the end of every month or something?"
Dissection: I don't think of this as an attack piece. I prefer to think of it as a celebration of the communal writing process. Things that don't work get ejected from the canons over time, and we can appreciate the intent behind them without wanting them to come back.
It's also a celebration of dumb dialogue jokes that I thought were funny at various fours in the various morning. Mornings. Fournings?
I put way too much time and effort into this; yes, I know, a -J is a shitpost, ha ha ha. I'm never gonna post anything with under a few hundred sandbox revisions. You can't make me.
Assessment: Ah, there's that feeling again, the feeling of posting your first SCP and half of the readers go "bleh." But that's what a lot of humour does. This is apparently not one of those transcendent pieces you see occasionally! If fact, it looked like it might get deleted by the time I went to bed after posting it.
Then I woke up and it was +17, so honestly I don't even know. Put your best foot forward and hope you don't step in anything, I guess!
|
So, about that prequel trilogy comment.
I promise, promise this won't be soulless.
| The Site-43's History is Fuckin' Esoteric Trilogy |
| "The Cure, and What Ails You" |
|
Item #: SCP-5382
The only shoop too fake-looking to use.
Object Lesson: Words have power.
Special Quotation Procedures: "It was once my favourite pub joke, that the German word for poison is gift."
Dissection: And I thought my last (real) SCP was a long haul. This thing took ages to get right. I had so much I wanted to achieve, here: something funny about a fraud who wasn't a fraud, something world-buildy about Site-43, something historical with a present-day twist, something melancholy and touching and ultimately uplifting. Whether I managed any of that, well, perhaps you'll let me know.
Surely you'll at least enjoy the Photoshopping. I certainly did.
Assessment: Kickin' ass for something this long! And the comments I've gotten have been very gratifying. I'm glad this one made an impact on some people, especially after all I put into it.
|
| "The Lords of the Beneath World" |
|
Item #: SCP-5494
Object Lesson: Culture has teeth.
Special Quotation Procedures: "…it's not our lake, and they're not our panthers."
Dissection: I've never written something so quickly before. There were a lot of rewrites, but the core of the article remains what it was when I hammered it out initially: a furious rebuke of the Canadian federal government's policy towards the First Nations, within a vicious swipe against cultural appropriation, within a story about panthers consuming people on a lake. I did my research and made sure to get the details right, because if done correctly this could be, I think, a nice gesture to thousands of people who have deserved better than they got… but if done incorrectly it could contribute to the problems it's trying to tackle.
I hope it was done correctly.
I really piled on the historical injustices here. There were just so many to choose from! I didn't have to make any of them up. Hopefully there's some catharsis in this story, but not so much catharsis that the wrongs committed against the First Peoples appear to have been righted. They most certainly have not, and some tentative further reading is linked in my author post if you want to be a small part of the solution yourself.
Assessment: Seems to have been done correctly! Looks like it'll keep doing the good work for quite some time to come.
|
| "The Rabbit Hole" |
|
Item #: SCP-5520
Object Lesson: Chemistry has power.
Special Quotation Procedures: "The sun sets for you, but never for me."
Dissection: This one, finally, THIS ONE was gonna be short.
It's not short.
It's not as long as the Thaumiel, but I had a story to tell, and a point to make, and damned if I was gonna let a little thing like parsimony get in my way.
That story, as mine usually do, grew in the telling. I didn't know why Rydderech disappeared when I first created him, and I first created him a long time ago (for my as-yet-unpublished Site Dossier for Site-43). For a while I thought he was going to mess around with some indigenous water purification spirit and get burned, and then my training kicked in and I realized how awful that would be. I think it might be that which prompted my previous skip about not stealing indigenous culture!
Please be kind to the elderly. Take care of them. They're human beings, they have dignity, and they need us.
Assessment: I posted it late at night, and it still did well. And I got some of the most gratifying feedback of my short career on this one already! Hope it stays the course.
|
Well, shit, that's two trilogies down. Do I have plans for a third? Do I have plans for something to post in the interval between them?
Yes.
| "The Significant Others" |
|
|
Part "B" |
|
One of the reasons I was excited to write SCP-5056 was its potential to pack an emotional punch — it's about a dude getting permanently stuck with an anomaly, and going about his day-to-day drudgery saddled with all the paranormal baggage which comes with. My greenlighting conversation with  Boogey_Man23 and  Sonderance particularly emphasized this potential.
While the article as it stands does touch base on that theme, I wasn't able to explore it as much as I wanted to without breaking the format. I always intended to write a short tale about Phil and Doug.
This is not a short tale. It's not even two short tales!  Grigori Karpin got it right: it's a novella in two parts.
I'd meant to come up with an adventure for the 5056 couple, something that would allow me to delve into their backstory across eighteen years of awkward companionship. Then I actually started writing, and a romance plot developed out of thin air, and I started seeing Doug as a manifestation of certain… mental mechanisms I have considerably personal experience with, and before I knew it I had over twenty thousand words written.
Geez, I hope they're in the right order.
Oh, fun fact: the title was one I was kicking around for the original SCP. I'm glad I used "The Constant Companions," though, because "The Significant Others" actually has more than one meaning in the context of this tale.
I wanted to put my ersatz drawing "skills" to work this time, since one scene in each half struck me as evocatively melancholic. I think they turned out alright. The real hard part was figuring out how the fuck to draw Doug; as the page image for 5056 shows, it's almost impossible to render the description I wrote without making him look like a fucking electrical socket. (There's even a joke about that in Part "B"; there are also jokes about how bad my original Photoshopped pic for 5056 was, and how much Doug's design has changed since the once presently in use.) I'm pleased that I've now drawn him three times now without him looking too doofy.
Yeah, three times.
|
And now for something completely collaborative.
| Canon Renaissance Contest - Team Resurrecting Resurrection |
|
|
|
This tale is my first contribution to our contest series, Old Foes. I wanted to use Dr. Dan pretty much from the moment we picked this canon, because he struck me as uniquely grounded among the author avatars. Dude's got a personality, and he's got some stuff to atone for. But what could he have been doing all this time, if he wasn't executed? Nobody's ever written a word about him on the site, as far as I can see, except  Dr Dan himself.
When the solution came to me, I knew I had to do this. And boy, it's gonna pay off further with my tales later on. Hope you're ready for some nonsense!
You're not. Trust me, you just aren't.
|
| 43NET: Staff Profiles |
|
|
Dr. Harold R. Blank: Specialist in physics (particularly optics) and history. Security clearance Level 4. Dr. Blank is known for his work with optical anomalies, his facility for archival research, and his inability to bring appropriate gravitas to official conversations and documentation. |
No, I am not an old man. But he is! He's been putting out magic explosions since 2002, after all.
page revision: 85, last edited: 19 Sep 2020 02:42
