| 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. 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.1 So try not to be surprised when you notice how many hundreds of revisions my sandboxes and articles have.
| The Site-43 is Fuckin' Bonkers Trilogy |
| "The Constant Companions" |
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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" |
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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" |
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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" |
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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" |
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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" |
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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" |
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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 only-recently-published 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 Collaborative Cursing Unilology |
| "Skippy the Unicorn Has Had Enough of Your Shit!" (with |
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Item #: SCP-5583 
My "art" without the background. Object Lesson: Who entertains the entertainers? Special Quotation Procedures: "♪ Birthdays come but once ♪ the FUCK, you sick son of a BITCH!" Dissection: This collab was more like the concept of draft crit, extruded. nickthebrick1 had the whole thing figured out from the start; he came to me with a series of great ideas, and we chose his favourite one, and he came up with this crazy character, all his backstory, and all the stuff he was gonna do before I even wrote a single word. Every scene was written by nick first, and then I did a do-over in my own style. I did contribute the image myself, and I'm proud of that. I'm proud of the whole thing, really, I think it's sweet and cute and dumb and fun and more than a little bit sad. I had a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese's when I was a little kid, and I have only a few, remarkably vivid, images of it. The animatronics in the far distance, on the stage, being weird; the dim lighting; arcade machines that took tokens… man, I think I still have one of those somewhere… and the ball pit. There was no puke in the ball pit. At least, as far as I can remember. Long story short, if nickthebrick1 wants to collab with you, do it. Assessment: TBD. |
Alright, sequel time baby.
| The Site-43's Present is Fuckin' Morbid Trilogy |
| "The Dead End / The Placeholder" |
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Item #: SCP-5618 Object Lesson: The end is nigh. Special Quotation Procedures: "Saw that twist coming." Dissection: Shortest thing I've written, by far. This one came to me as a pretty pure concept: a set of instructions for what to do when you're in the bad future, and the good guys set right what once went wrong, and your bad future is about to collapse… and the twist is, that's happening RIGHT NOW, and the reader is IN the bad future, and when they refresh the page… their reality has been deleted. I was super pumped about the idea, which is bad, because I get more terrified to share an idea the better I think it is. So I put a lot, a lot, a lot of time and effort into making it into something extremely short and punchy that still had characters, detail, and interest. Nothing extraneous, a few chilling lines, and a use of ACS in the second iteration that even the haters have to admit adds something to the proceedings. Tell me that series of "N/A" doesn't do anything for you. Okay, actually, don't tell me that. It'll make me sad. Oh, yes, by the by, this is technically a Site-43 thing. It's also a Foundation-wide thing, but you'll see, some day, that it ties in with some tales I've got in the pipeline. Unfortunately, the pipeline is very, very blocked at the moment. Listpages! Assessment: So far it's getting pretty much the reaction I expected: more often than not, the stark twist at the end works for people. But! About a third of the readers go "I want a story, this is shallow." And they're not wrong to want that, but for once, I wasn't planning on giving them one. This one's about you, with just a bit of a narrative gloss to keep you reading for the punchline. Hopefully it survives, I think it's neat. |
| "The Significant Others" | |
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| Part "B" | |
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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 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! 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. 
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And now for something completely collaborative.
| Canon Renaissance Contest - Team Resurrecting Resurrection |
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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 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. Update: Holy shit, this contest. My tale just hit fifty. And this was just the entrée. Update 2, No Sequel Joke: Uh what the fuck this is my highest-rated thing now. Thank you? Update 3, Update with a Vengeance: This just spent rather a long time as the highest-rated contest entry. Currently, it's tied for that honour. No matter what happens, I want you all to know that I have appreciated your votes and comments tremendously :) |
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I revise. It's what I do, it's how I write. I start with whatever part of a story immediately grabs me, banging out the context as I go, building where I can and developing a structure on the fly. When I've got most of the structure figured out, most of the parts in place, I re-write the entire thing from scratch. Literally type all the words out a second time, while my brain tidies it up before it hits the keyboard. I do this several times for everything I post. I have thousands of revisions on my sandboxes. It's a good thing I do it that way, because Moon Champion is so hard to write. You might think you can just have him say Moon-this and Moon-that a lot, spout some gibberish, and be done with it. Nope. A very little of that goes a very long way. Too much of Moon Champion being Moon Champion quickly becomes infuriating; part of the undeniable beauty of the original article, by Sauelsuesor also took a few passes to get right; I think I can say that was the result, getting it "right," because people seem to have found the piece charming so far, and that's what I wanted. These characters, and their creators, are fantastic, so I hope they take this as my thank-you to them for their great work. Wait'll you see what I do with them next, mwahaha. Oh, also, holy shit thank you all for reading and voting, love y'all. |
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When I want to write, I want to write. Once I knew what canon we were doing for this contest, and once I knew our overall plotline, and once I'd picked my main character, I quickly figured out what I could get started on without stepping on anyone's toes. Site-19's inventory dumped out on the world, and creative solutions to the problems that poses; what a premise! It took an incredible amount of work. I opened every SCP that contains the term "Site-19" and scanned it, looking for stuff I could use. I made up a list of about forty skips, and started trying to imagine what mini-stories I could tell with them. There were some real winners in that list, and I wanted to make more extensive use of them; I got in touch with a few authors, for more recent or more famous skips, to make sure I wasn't stepping on any toes. But I particularly wanted to showcase stuff that's not doing as well as it should be, because there's a lot of that on this site. With that in mind I made sure each part of this story includes skips from all six series, and at least a few things with two-digit ratings. I hope I can get a few extra eyes on that stuff with my little (huge) ode to anomalous wackiness. Each part of this tale escalates said wackiness until it's balls-to-the-wall insanity. I hope you enjoy that progression as much as I have; this has been endlessly entertaining and rewarding for me. |
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The idea was to buffer my Bowe Decommission tales with stuff that wasn't my Bowe Decommission tales. Originally TBD was a two-parter, so it was just gonna be the collab in between. And then I realized I was writing an epic three-parter. So, the idea here was to tell an off-side story. I wasn't trying to "show off" my stuff, I just thought I could use it to write a quick, fun action story showing how one Site, my Site, dealt with the situation. Did that come through? I dunno. But it's what I did. And I'm still super proud of that ending. I'll be writing a lot more about these people in the days to come. |
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So, here's where I'm clearly just endangering our lead in the contest by writing long stuff. Yeah, yeah, I know, you don't like long stuff. Well listen, strawman, I wanted to really dig into Dr. Dan and this disaster, and it turned out that I couldn't cover all the really important story beats without taking my sweet-ass time. So, I did. I think each of these stories ended up telling a different sort of tale, as Dr. Dan's hour grew increasingly late and the chaos ramped up. This is the tale where it becomes apparent that we're dealing with the full extent of our site's insanity, that Harry takes a Grant Morrison view of canon - it's all real. This is also the tale where I got to have a lot of fun with other people's toys. My goodness, Bigg Redd and Moon Champion and Turbo Thompson are fun. Writing for this series has taught me something I thought I already knew: shared universes are fantastic. |
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This thing, wow. It call came together so fast! I wrote most of my stuff after the other three members had submitted their scenes. I knit them together, and was amazed at how well the whole thing worked as a… well, as a whole. Kara's parking scene and gull's FEC mixup were the first two ideas floated, and on the strength of that nuttiness I suggested calling it all "Scenes from a Generalized Clusterfuck." A slightly different name, and many, many scenes later, and we have this thing here. I think it's quite coherent, and I like it a lot. I built many of my scenes on the backs of what my colleagues gave me, used them as glue for my more disparate ideas. It was a real group effort, just like the project writ large has been. Collab at me, bro. |
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I've had this endgame in various stages of constuction for the entire time I've been writing for the contest. I knew how I wanted this to end, the scenes I wanted to set. I laboured long and hard over these three long tales to make sure they did what I wanted them to: expose people to popular and overlooked SCPs that I think are great, play around with fun characters, build Dr. Dan into someone I can use a lot for tales going forward, and present some wildly hilarious fanservice along the way. I'm extremely proud of the way it turned out. |
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Originally we were just going to end with gull's General Bowe skip. And then I suggested we do a collaborative epilogue, in addition to our other collaborative tale. And then I wrote the epilogue! Oh well. I wanted to hammer home what had happened, explore the characters some more, do a sort of Animal House check-in on our protagonists, set up future directions and introduce a few last-minute twists. I think a good epilogue should be melancholy, bittersweet, kinda funny and cute, and it should also put everything that came before in a different light. Did I manage all that? Well, uh, you tell me. This contest has been the most fun I've had writing for the site, and I have had NOTHING BUT FUN writing for the site. I'd do it all over in a heartbeat, and I hope to continue to write for Res in the future. It's great fun, and I think it has real value as a showcase for the best of what the community has to offer. In these five tales, we reference fifty-four SCP files. How do you like them anomalies. |
| The Scariest Thing I've Posted (But It's Only Scary to Me) |
| "The Lake Huron Research and Containment Facility" |
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Secure Facility Dossier: Site-43 Object Lesson: Worlds build themselves while you're doing other things. Special Quotation Procedures: "The victors are written by history." Dissection: I have wanted a Site dossier, and not wanted to post one and get critically savaged, for a long time. I've been working on this one since the end of my first trilogy of articles, although only the basic boilerplate text from the earliest iterations survived. I was going to make the meat of the dossier the story of how the Site came into existence; in the end, the whole thing came to a whopping 5.5k words, and Once I was definitely making the history pieces their own separate things, I got the idea of using the dossier as a hub for Foundation academic material. If the two articles I already have up don't fail utterly (one of them is in serious danger of this) I'll produce more… and shop them around a bunch before posting them, this time. I think it's a fun idea. God, was I afraid of posting this thing. Assessment: So far, nobody hates it. That might be because the hatred has been reserved for the academic articles, though. |
PlaguePJP DREW MY THING
Portrait of my IRC persona by XilasCrowe who thinks I look like a hairy turd apparently
| 43NET: Staff Profiles | |
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| 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.
- SCP-5056 (+41)
- SCP-5109 (+67)
- SCP-5056 Experiment and Incident Reports (+17)
- SCP-5243 (+78)
- This Page Intentionally Left Blank (+49)
- The Significant Others, Part "A" (+52)
- The Significant Others, Part "B" (+31)
- SCP-CASH4D-J (+53)
- SCP-5382 (+59)
- SCP-5494 (+91)
- SCP-5520 (+67)
- Such a Shame It Didn't Work (+95)
- Sun (Sister) and Moon (Champion) (+83)
- Resurrection: Old Foes Hub (+55)
- The Bowe Decommission, Part One (+46)
- The B&B Decommission (+28)
- The Bowe Decommission, Part Two (+38)
- Scenes from a Comprehensive Clusterfuck (+34)
- The Bowe Decommission, Part Three (+38)
- Broken Bowe (+38)
