This one really grabbed me. You obviouslly put a lot of effort into it. Color me impressed. +1.
Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!
SCP-1348 / Discussion
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This is the discussion related to the wiki page SCP-1348.
This may not go over terribly well. It's extremely elaborate, and it's a type of SCP that many people don't like. I'll point out something, however: basically every name, date, or word which isn't commonly known is an easter egg. Going over this SCP with google may be interesting.
(account deleted)You missed "SCP-XXX-SMR-9." you got it while I was typing.
Otherwise I'm enjoying this + 1
this is very well written, but MAN do i hate religious containtment procedures.
I like them a lot, particularly when they are as… de-religiousified as this in the document. This's not a statement for or against religion itself, but I like the implication that humanity's tendency for magical thinking is actually how we survived anomalous threats pre-Foundation. We don't quite know WHY the ritual works, we only know that it DOES, and we're slowly figuring out the details.
I especially like the interview "where we happened and we weren't supposed to happen but it's not our fault"
Just as a matter of structure, this SCP had to have religious containment procedures. So if you hate it, I think it's basically intractable. On the other hand, I think the SCP shares your view of religious containment procedures — I did my best to convey that the Foundation is very leery of letting a mystery cult handle containment of a potentially world-ending situation. That's why there are two containment teams, and the inner team is essentially treated like crap.
This is really well done, and in some respects it's similar to what I was trying to do with my attempted 616 rewrite; of coruse, in other ways, it's exactly the opposite of that. "Analogous structure present in anomalous frontal orbit" sounds familiar, but it's also incongruous with the rest of what's implied— I gather that you're going for something like [http://www.scp-wiki.net/dr-clef-s-proposal].
Y-chromosomal haplotype CMH-6. Heh.
Not sure why "South Semitic" is the language group that you have there, though: with the except of Ge'ez (which survives as the liturgical language of Ethiopian orthodoxy), the other main Abrahamic languages (Aramaic, Hebrew, Ugartic, Arabic, the Canaanite languages and what have you) are Central Semitic, not South Semitic.
Why bother blanking Dr. ██████'s name if you're just going to call him Moshe in the dialog?
I think that Moshe is Dr. Kahn's assistant who is recording/transcribing the meeting.
This actually exists because of your 616 rewrite. I was talking with some other people about what it would take to make a good Abrahamic SCP. As for the rest, it's intentional. If you want to avoid a man-behind-the-curtain analysis, don't read below:
This isn't any Abrahamic religion presently practiced. It's a 'prototype' of the other Abrahamic religions. The culture area which built this site essentially stretched from Anatolia to Mali, and had its culture center in southern Syria. The language family they spoke only survives in east Africa and Yemen; central Semitic languages are a late branch of their language family. In my headcanon, this isn't the only SCP they're responsible for.
Also, Moshe is Dr. Kahn's assistant, not the blanked out doctor. Headcanon for me is that the other doctor is an Israeli Druze who served with Ben Kahn (who is Israeli-American) in the IDF.
While I'm posting spoilers on this thread, a note on why I chose South Semitic rather than Central Semitic: I needed something which correlated well with the origins of humanity, and which provided an explanation for the fact that more PACG sites haven't been found. This site in Syria is actually one of the furthest-east of their settlements, and the center of their culture was in what is now the Sahara, but which (when they were still around) was the temperate shores of a warm, shallow inland sea.
The early Homo sapiens in Ethiopia are their descendants, and Amharic, Ge'ez and a bunch of extinct Yemeni languages are direct descendants of PACG languages.
This is obviously very well-written, and I commend the effort you put into it.
Although, I feel like the entire concept of the article has gone over my head. They perform a ritual to stop something, and there's a veil… But I got lost reading this. What is this, really?
This is in that semi-final stage between 'up on the main site' and 'absolutely, no-question done.' Now that I've got someone who doesn't understand it, I'm going to need to do some digging to find out what you don't understand — I'd prefer not to just give the entire thing away. Let me start out by pointing you at something:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Aaron
After reading that, do you still have a sense of missing something important at any particular point? Like, in the final logs?
Well, you didn't take my advice on the number. But it's still really good.
I decided that part of the appeal was that the Foundation doesn't treat this as a special part of their collection. Out of their relentless dedication to objectivity (and institutional atheism), this is something they have to contain, but hate what they have to do to contain it. If the Foundation was formed to contain this in particular, then the Foundation would be a much different place. A place more like the GOC.
see, i could deal with it if the current containment procedures were old, inherited, archived procedures - that have been superceded by modern, rational, scientifically defensible procedures. after a certain point, the foundation would move past performing a musical number every day, and just pump the damn thing full of concrete (or something along those lines).
That's actually why there are two separate containment teams.
The inner containment team is performing rituals to contain this thing, on the principle that it appeared to have been working when the Foundation first showed up. The outer containment team is trying to develop some sensible scientific way to keep this thing in check (as well as working on the ritual). Under no circumstances does the Foundation want anyone on the inside to escape, for fear that they might accidentally escape and start a religion. There's a good reason that religious faith disqualifies you as part of the outer containment team: the present religious containment procedures are highly deprecated by upper-level staff.
Then there's 228-MELECHAH, which — in the last log — has already been ordered. Obviously, I don't want to get into precisely what it entails, but 'pump the damn thing full of concrete (or something along those lines)' isn't far off from what I intended.
We only found it in 2006, and I tried to make it clear that present containment procedures are highly deprecated.
That's precisely why there are two containment teams: the outer containment team of confirmed atheists are working on a workable substitute containment procedure. 228-MELECHAH is essentially the best available alternative to ritual propitiation of the SCP.
if the article said that, i'd love it forevers - but as written, it conveys the exact opposite to me. the outer team seems to just be recruiting, supporting, and facilitating the inner team.
there's just too much obfuscation going on for an executive summary.
(freaking wikidot…)
Yeah. I may have undershot the amount of lolfoundation. I tried to include a bunch of indications as to how much the Foundation dislikes Team B:
- The fact that the Team B director's name is blackboxed, but the Team A director isn't.
- The fact that they can only exit the containment area on scheduled furloughs.
- The fact that if a member of Team B escapes, Team A is to implement an implicitly punitive containment regime.
- The fact that the director of Team A is visibly upset at the consequences for Team B if it fails to disclose what's inside the veil — he clearly has a longstanding relationship with the Team B director.
- The fact that Team A's security personnel can't ever be exposed to anything the site contains. Why does it have security personnel? They're not to shoot what's inside the veil. It's not even clear that that's possible. They're to shoot Team B.
What could I do to make it clear?
I touched up the containment procedures to make O5's distrust of Team B substantially more explicit, and indicated that Team A was working on 228-MELECHAH. Does that help?
it does help, yes. it's still not clear enough to me, though, that 228 is intended as new containment procedures. i understand that it's a reference for readers, but this is still an executive summary, and the intended audience needs to know that new containment is being actively devised.
Hokay. I think I've done that — I'm moving incrementally here, because I'm worried about my word budget, which I'm very, very close to exceeding. You can see that in the other comments: I'm already starting to get some complaints about length.
So, okay. This is a little Man Behind the Curtain-y, but here's what I'm trying to do. The problem with religious containment procedures, as you've pointed out, is that they don't work well within the context of a scientific document, which is what the SCP purports to be.
/forum/t-472499/scp-1348#post-
page revision: 1, last edited: 02 Apr 2021 15:16
