(account deleted) 05 Dec 2014 22:03
Pretty good. Well done, Ihpkmn. +1.
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(account deleted) 05 Dec 2014 22:03
New from Ancient Dragon Culinary Corporation: Author Commentary Stir Fry with Dino Sauce!
Well, this went far from what I expected it to be.
The original concept was based off of Jeholopterus ninchengensis, a pteranosaur that was speculated to be vampiric in nature, and how it spread a prehistoric, vampire-like virus among the human population in China. The Foundation discovered it had a weakness to Garlic, blah blah blah, it was boring.
Then I wrote a bit in the draft about how they were found being served at a butcher shop in Hong Kong, and thought I should expand on that. So, I did. The result? A corporation that makes dinosaurs into frozen food and snacks.
Special thanks to Zyn for help with this; she gave me the idea for some of the products I used in this. Anyway, dig in, Skippers!
Re: New from Ancient Dragon Culinary Corporation: Author Commentary Stir Fry with Dino Sauce!
Props to Ihpkmn. I had a hell of a lot of fun with this.
+1 for dinos yum yum
Clever. But why are some words in the letter absent? Did I miss that it's written in code or something?
It was the first slot empty when I used Alexandra's "Unused" function, so I just took it. *shrug*
Bah, thanks. Did you not see me post my SCP-563 suggestion in chat 1,001 times? xD
http://scpsandbox2.wikidot.com/ravenwrecked
E: Wikidot is a butt.
AH, I see.
In any case, I feel really bad, but this doesn't quite grab me. It's farm for dinosaur meats. The syntax and writing are excellent, but it's the idea itself I take issue with. Reluctant downvote.
Great job! As a dino enthusiast I love this.
My only recommendation is to change the task force name to the english Xi rather than the actual greek letter just in case some people's computers can't read the text.
Also microraptor pets! Sign me up!!
I'd like to pick a little nit here.
Every species named comes from about the same era except the trilobites mentioned in footnote 2. They are off by a few hundred million years.
The suggestion in the letter that there is a place somewhere full of this stuff really sets the imagination working.
Thanks.
I'm… uncomfortable with this, for several reasons.
Minor but importantly stylistic point first, the last document isn't doing it for me. One issue is that there's a focus on translation in addition to the damage. Some of the missing words and synonyms are fine if it's because of the mold, but as far as language goes, this isn't Linear A chipped into a granite block by Mi-Go. This is modern Chinese. The Foundation is a massive global organization, it probably has thousands (if not tens of thousands) of people who speak Chinese.
Also, and this gets to my major point really, I don't think it adds anything significant to the article. Nor do the food items, nor do the corpse/dinosaur use descriptions.
I say this because, well, it's a dinosaur farm. It isn't even a farm that magics up dinosaurs. It just had dinosaurs on it.
Where did the dinosaurs come from? A jungle. Who found the jungle? [Name Unknown]. Who's selling dinosaur meat? A company we can't track. There isn't even any evidence that the company is anomalously difficult to locate, it could just be a crappy off-the-books Chinese enterprise using other people's equipment, or a side brand from another manufacturer. The frozen food isn't anomalous, outside of having dinosaur meat.
The big point I want to make has two parts. First, the focus is wrong. The farm should not be the SCP. A farm covered in anachronous but otherwise non-anomalous dinosaur corpses and unusual but otherwise non-anomalous butchering equipment, and that does not need to be actively contained, is not an SCP. It's something for the anomalous incident log.
A company that produces dinosaur meat or a jungle that still has reproducing dinosaurs in it, on the other hand, would definitely be worth containing. There just isn't a ton of info yet on the jungle, and you didn't focus on seizing the company's products or anything. Edit: Missed that part. But still.
So, to the second part. From my perspective, even if you changed the focus, this isn't an SCP. You have an anomalous event at a farm, an unlocated GoI, and a rumored SCP in northern China. This is a stack of reports that's going to give field agents ulcers for a while, not a skip.
So, final point, it's a dinosaur farm. It's pretty well written, but it is only one thing, and that thing doesn't even do a thing. -1
So, final point, it's a dinosaur farm. It's pretty well written, but it is only one thing, and that thing doesn't even do a thing.
I don't really understand your complaint.
An anomaly doesn't have to do anything to be anomalous, other than exist. If, for the sake of example, a wormhole opened near Saturn, it would be an anomaly by sheer virtue of existing. You seem to be saying that you're disappointment in this SCP because it isn't anomalous.
It is a farm with dinosaur corpses all over, owned by a company that makes frozen dinosaur meals. Also, regarding this:
One issue is that there's a focus on translation in addition to the damage. Some of the missing words and synonyms are fine if it's because of the mold, but as far as language goes, this isn't Linear A chipped into a granite block by Mi-Go. This is modern Chinese. The Foundation is a massive global organization, it probably has thousands (if not tens of thousands) of people who speak Chinese.
I fail to see this "focus on translation". It's being translated, certainly, but it's not the focus. For the last document, the Foundation is using context clues and partially readable characters. According to Google Translate, this is the word for Paleontologist in Chinese:
古生物学家
And this is the word for "scientist":
科学家
Note the last two characters in both words. They both make up the word "xué jiā", which, among other things, means "scholar" or "expert". The word for Paleontologist, "gǔshēngwù xué jiā", literally means "Ancient biology expert/scholar", and "scientist" means "family expert/scholar."1
I'd like to draw your attention to another part, where they are unsure about the word "embryo". The word for emrbyo is a single character in Chinese:
胎
According to Google Translate, among other things, that character can be translated as tire. As in the tire of a car. And it wouldn't make much sense of a tire was hatching from an egg, would it?
Now, let's look at the word for "Zygote":
合子
Note the house-like character there. It looks similar to half of the character for "embyro", doesn't it? Would it be that much of a stretch to assume that the mold on the paper had damaged it enough to the point where only specific characters could be made out?
Also, "Name Unknown" didn't find the jungle. Zhou Song did, or at least, was part of the expedition that did find it. "Name unknown" as the person who received the letter. A majority of the [bracketed text] indicates that it is being obscured or has been damaged by mold, not that it is difficult to translate.
So, in other words: I fail to see your issues with this. Sorry.
Footnotes
1. Apologies to any Chinese readers, I've probably gotten that wrong to some degree.
Further Edit: Collapsing stuff.
For the document…
.. the issue is this sentence:
The document was partially damaged by mold; however, Foundation linguists have been able to reconstruct what they believe is an accurate rendition of the document.
You say that Foundation linguists had to reconstruct this document. You don't say that it's in a rare dialect, or make it seem so damaged that they have to try to reconstruct every letter with digital imaging. What I see is a partially damaged document in a modern, living language.
I don't necessarily take issue with how you fill in the gaps. It's just, that… ok, so, to use one of your examples, the words paleontologist and scientist end in the same characters in Mandarin and those characters have similar meanings.
That is also completely true in English. (-ist typically implying a creative or academic role, and -logist meaning a scholar or expert.) So, what happens here is equivalent to saying, "We found a document in American-style English with '<mold spot>ist', and guessed paleontologist or scientist from context."
This doesn't require linguists, it requires one or two people who are fluent in Chinese and know enough about the context (e.g. dinosaurs) to make reasonable guesses. This could probably be one or two Field Agents seeing the document for the first time.
The reason that makes me uncomfortable is that the recoverd-document/missing-text tropes you invoke here are common elsewhere in SCPs for dealing with deeply mysterious (e.g. ancient or difficult to read) languages. Saying you need expert linguists to read a letter in Standard Chinese and then making the missing terms strongly ambiguous is both overkill and comes off as ethnocentric.
Edit: I'm also probably talking this into the ground. I'm bad at succinctness. What I should say, on an advice side, is that if you back the sentence away from linguists producing an accurate rendition and more towards "this is what was legible", it would not be a problem.
My family leases some of our land to a local ranger for grazing his cows, and my grandpa kept a herd of his own for years. A renewable, breeding population cannot be contained on a single farm, even a large factory farm. You have to have numerous herds swapping heifers and bulls, and occasional introduction of new bloodlines, to maintain a healthy gene pool for more than two or three generations. Large grazers also require rotating pastures, and even omnivores that don't mind small pens like pigs require at least some room to roam or they never bulk up properly- and you have to keep them separated or they fight. (I would imagine raptors would be even worse.)
What they found here was a Production Farm. That is to say, a place devoted exclusively to breeding fresh stock. And its production farm number 22. And they don't know whats being raised on the other 21 (at minimum) farms, or where they came from to begin with. Precambrian shellfish? Mesozoic mammals? Future animals?
Anomaly.
I like this one, it has a real 'classic' feel.
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