This guy is cute, and I like him, but…what makes this an SCP? It doesn't seem to break the laws of physics or anything, doesn't have any anomalous properties, and the caustic mucus is odd, but nothing impossible.
SCP-955 / Discussion
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This is the discussion related to the wiki page SCP-955.
The thing I find odd is their diet. They can somehow get by only on pure sugar.
Piffy is an SCP Foundation Moderator, Lv. 9001 Squishy Wizard, and Knight of the Red Pen.
Responding to the "is it really an SCP?" issue, would it help to add the following text to the description?
- It appears that in the absence of a mucus emission episode, dogs and children under the age of seven do not perceive SCP-955's appearance or behavior to be alarming or threatening. (blah blah blah, this text went through subsequent rounds of honing and polishing)
This would basically solve all my problems with the article. Neutral vote for now.
FWIW, the addition of this paragraph is what clinched the upvote from me. I love this.
No, this doesn't address my problem with it. This is odd, yes. Nature has come up with weirder shit, and this doesn't do anything that I couldn't believe if I saw on the Discovery Channel. Compare this to something ordinary, like the spitting cobra, and you'll see my complaint more clearly.
I mean, I like the critter, and apart from the failure to actually have a single anomalous property that would justify containment, it's well written and a good article. It's just that spitting caustic slime (which animals can produce) when startled (similar to many real animal's defensive reactions) isn't enough to make it an SCP.
That said, all you need to do is ratchet up on the implausible aspects. I wouldn't go for making the slime odder and odder, but possibly give it other oddball biological aspects that simply are not plausible—it can survive on only sugar water, which is a good start, but not enough.
I want to like this, because there are so few items the Foundation contains only because they would disprove modern scientific beliefs, and not to protect anyone. Make this outright impossible to be natural under the current understanding of biology and evolution, ensure that the implications of said disruption are present, and BAM. You'd have a very good article.
If you have anything more than one line snark, then I'm all ears. If I missed something, it'd be more worthwhile to point it out (almost assuredly resulting in me removing my downvote) than to snipe at me. Right now, it's improbable biology, but nature is REALLY GOOD at freaky weird stuff that makes little to no sense, and various aspects of this SCP exist in real animals.
Admittedly, not all in the same animal, but modern science can already produce chimeric animals. This is a bit more extreme, but nothing outside reason, so…why the containment, apart from being dangerous if provoked?
It appears that in the absence of a mucus emission episode, dogs and children under the age of seven generally do not perceive SCP-955's appearance or behavior to be alarming or threatening. Several children who had interacted with a SCP-955 specimen without adverse incident were asked to draw or describe the organism, with the results consistently representing SCP-955 as "cute" or "fuzzy". Young children, in particular, have been observed to enjoy interacting with SCP-955, often including maintaining close physical contact with them or handling them. The specimen depicted in the photograph, together with several other specimens, had been encountered by pupils at ████████ Day School in Connecticut. The pupils designated the specimens as "Mr. Sillybug and his babies" and introduced them into the school facility where they remained for several days until they encountered a mixed group of pupils and adult faculty, with traumatic results.
Read it. No, shut up, actually read it this time. Sorry, last time I checked, being perceived by adults as a horrifying scaled creature while being seen by children as "fuzzy" and nonthreatening is not a normal biological trait.
Either the thing has a passive ability to affect the perception of certain age groups and personality types or something magical is going on. Either way, it's absolutely an SCP. I am doing you the favor of assuming you simply skimmed the article and missed it, rather than just being too thick to get the point- work with me here.
I like this idea greatly.
Piffy is an SCP Foundation Moderator, Lv. 9001 Squishy Wizard, and Knight of the Red Pen.
Is the picture supposed to be below the containment procedures? If not, the code for the picture should be just underneath the rating module. I'd fix it myself, but maybe you're going for something here that I'm not aware of.
EDIT: You know what, I'm just going to change that. If it's not supposed to be that way, feel free to revert it.
if your reading this your gay
My original intent was for the description to at first sound somewhat innocuous, then the reader would scroll down, see the picture and have an "oh, fuck, that thing looks like a nightmare" moment. But that probably doesn't work so well.
Yeah, it wasn't very far down on the page.
if your reading this your gay
I know we're not supposed to like friendly-nifty SCPs, but I can't help it in this case. The trope of a monster that's non-malicious, but misunderstood and dangerous when threatened, is done well here and tugs at my heartstrings.
Piffy is an SCP Foundation Moderator, Lv. 9001 Squishy Wizard, and Knight of the Red Pen.
Exactly what I was going for. Poor Mr. Sillybug, don't you just want to take him home and cuddle with him?
Please explain why this is an SCP.
Nature has come up with things that are much more wierd than this… like Immortal Jellyfish.
See above. IT CAN MAKE CHILDREN PERCEIVE IT DIFFERENTLY. That's scary in itself, to some extent.
It's funny because up there they are arguing about the perception thing being innately a supernatural power, which would mean that yes, it is making children perceive it differently, either intentionally or unintentionally.
Down below we're arguing about whether or not it might be memetic, which would mean that it is not making children perceive it differently. Children just happen to perceive it differently because of something innate to childhood.
Personally I much prefer the memetic interpretation. I like the idea that children perceive this for what it really is. We're blind - we can only see the alien unnatural 'scary' bits. Hell, maybe we want to believe these things are psychically brainwashing our children so we can justify treating them like monsters (with whatever possibly horrible things that entails).
Of course, no need for the article to pick an interpretation. Would take some of the fun out of it.
I don't like the researcher note. Borders too much on LOLFoundation territory for me.
…However, I like this, maybe more than I should. I definitely think it needs improvement, but upvoted anyway.
EDIT: The edits make this great. Well done.
How… how can this even be downvoted. How can people even be questioning why this is an SCP. My mind is boggled.
It's clearly not natural. It is a bizarre monster that loves people and wants to interact, but its signals for interaction are completely unnatural. We perceive it as a horrible threat. And kids don't, bless their hearts.
It's so fantastic on so many levels.
And hell, the very fact that these things have just recently been discovered is pure grounds for containment right there. Sure, someday this might turn out to be an -EX when the Foundation is done poking and prodding at it, but a sudden encounter with a new species as unusual as this would be grounds for containment on its own.
I'm not voting either way, but I can see wanting to. It describes a land animal and I can see the tail of the fish in the picture…
I'm open to changing the text of the physical description to explain away the tail. (I can't see the tail myself, and I thought I explained away the side fins.)
I don't think there IS an explanation for that one what doesn't let my mind still scream "IT'S A DEEP SEA FISH!!"
Wait! A solution!
http://tinyurl.com/5sb3y2n
Bland that is terrible and you should feel bad >:[
I like the picture just fine, myself. If the tail is bothersome, someone can photoshop it out at some point.
On the list of things I'm supposed to feel bad about, this rates lower then using melted ice cream on breakfast cereal…
My problem is that it's an angler fish. It's VERY MUCH an angler fish. I can't unsee that the fact it's a famous fish. The five-year old used to watch "Finding Nemo" CONSTANTLY and there's this great shot of an angler fish.
I don't have any real problem with the article, it's the picture. Of an angler fish.
(just so you know I was referring to the picture you linked)
The article is good. I like the creature, though I'm not sure if arthropods as a group are that big on mucus. It's certainly understandable why it's an SCP; the unusual response of children is very interesting.
But Bland is right: It is, unmistakably, an angler fish of some sort. There's no particular reason for it to be so, and every reason for it to be otherwise. Arthropods simply don't have physiology even remotely like that, and you devote a whole paragraph to explaining why it does, which still doesn't satisfy.
I understand why you use a picture of an angler fish. Mr. Sillybug (incidentally, I'd make that the name of the article on the main list) should look horrific, and angler fish do certainly look horrific. But it seems like it would be pretty easy to get an actual close-up of the head of some not terribly recognizable arthropod and just use that as the image, and cull that pointless paragraph and remedy some of the complaints.
So, this is SCP-075 with a memetic effect? Did I get the gist of this right?
You missed the part where it loves you, and just wants to cuddle or play. The nasty toxic discharge only happens if you frighten it (which would happen if you react like a normal person and scream or try to beat it with a shovel).
Except that the typical scenario is that your kid comes home with it in her pocket and says "Look, mommy. I found a cuddly bug! Can I keep it?" at which point you scream in horror which triggers the critter spewing the caustic goo all over the kid and you.
Well, it could be memetic. There might be something about dogs' and childrens' minds that causes them to innately perceive this particular monster as cute and cuddly, as opposed to the creature somehow projecting that perception to them. Either way, it rules, and is easily a new favorite.
Hmm… if we had to split hairs I'd say this seems more memetic than cognitohazard — it's a matter of perception after all. I can totally buy that kids could see a certain type of monster as being more cuddly than an adult would. The monster doesn't need to screw with anyone's brain to make that happen.
But trying to throw in a memetic or cognitohazard tag into this would just detract from the entire article.
Memetic rewires the brain - if this made kids think scary things were safe, that would be memetic. This changes the way they perceive it. That's cognition.
Best way to test would be to show the kids a picture of how it looks and ask if the PICTURE looks scary. In other words, did it save the change to the kids brain?
Memetic rewires the brain
no
no no no no no no no no no no no no no
no
absolutely not
unless you think I just rewired your brain right now
Sorry - I know it's not technically correct. I'm just trying to get you to buy the first round.
The thing is, this thing is even less a memetic then my incorrect "rewire the brain" is.
My understanding is that memes, in general, add on thought structures to the brain - ideas and ways of thinking. Most of the ones here either cross connect or replace existing thought structures with something else - usually harmful ones.
(Say, even if it's wrong, isn't "memetics rewire the brain" a meme in itself?)
(Say, even if it's wrong, isn't "memetics rewire the brain" a meme in itself?)
Only in the sense that all words and phrases are memes, and some memes die out faster because they are wrong.
But yeah, you could say that memes play off of the existing structure of your mind. In that sense they can even change someone. But this is not a matter of re-wiring anyone's brain. It's a matter of the memetic information Mister Sillybug presents being interpreted in different ways by different minds.
Children's brains are wired differently, so they respond differently. As they mature how they perceive the world changes. Suddenly they are aware of new things like sexual attraction and other things they had heard about as kids but were never able to really understand until they hit adolescence. And then they see Mr. Sillybug and all of a sudden he's a hissing, spitting, thrashing wad of teeth and terror instead of the wiggly little cuddlebug they remembered.
The creature doesn't have magical powers in this interpretation. It's not actually a cognitohazard that hypnotizes children into lowering their defenses so that it can … play with them (dun dun dun). This sounds more like a terrible accident of the cosmos that there is a creature that could get along with people just fine if not for the fact that it is ugly and its play signals are interpreted as hostile by adults.
And that's not an argument that says this is just an ordinary animal that doesn't need containment. The Foundation contains memetic threats, and this is a memetic threat. Not because it is out to get us, but because of how we perceive it. Such as it is with all memetic threats.
Hay Sorts: I love 'understanding memetics', but FWIW, I had to read it several times to understand that what it meant. This isn't really a fault of the article so much as the concept itself being difficult (or maybe I'm just dumb!), but it occurs to me that if the article had a few more examples, fewer people might read it and still misunderstand it.
The example & explanation you just wrote is top-notch, for instance. Hey, I'm just thinking of your liver…
(Of course maybe it wouldn't make any difference but just my $0.02)
"The Foundation contains memetic threats, and this is a memetic threat. Not because it is out to get us, but because of how we perceive it. Such as it is with all memetic threats."
This basically completed my understanding of memetics. This needs to go on the understanding memetics page.
…What happens when you're a manchild?
Living the dream, or dreaming the life?
Why is that doggy flickering so much?
if your reading this your gay
Well, /I/ thought it looked pretty fuzzy and cute…
The organisms average between 20 and 200 centimeters in length
Okay, a little 955 I would be okay with. But one of these monstrosities being two meters long is horrifying.
One does wonder how one that size could live on sugar water.
if your reading this your gay
One does wonder how one that size could live on sugar water.
Like a boss.
The Bug in MIB seemed to be fine living off of sugar water.
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page revision: 1, last edited: 02 Apr 2021 15:16
