SCP-3241 / Discussion

This is the discussion related to the wiki page SCP-3241.

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Author Post

The Great Hippo 16 Apr 2018 09:28

Well you may throw your rock and hide your hand
Workin' in the dark against your fellow man
But sure as God made black and white
What's done in the dark will be brought to the light

— God's Gonna Cut You Down (Johnny Cash)

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SOURCES:

• Images here, here, here, and here. All from wiki-commons.
• Based around the loss of the SS El Faro, and inspired by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

FEEDBACK:

• A Random Day ([SCP-3850] - I Can't Drown My Demons) helped me come up with the name 'Gambheer Bakshi'.

AUTHOR NOTES

• Odo Island is a reference to Godzilla.
• This is the same Browning from Cragstaff and Counting Station. Rest in peace, you gigantic asshole.
• This is the same O5-5 from Murphy Law. She drinks her tea from a coffee mug that says "WORLD'S SCARIEST GRANDMOM".
  • She takes her tea black. No sugar. She's sweet enough as it is. ~
• DeVorn left Prometheus way before the bubble burst. He saw it coming. But he didn't see that coming.
• This story is based on my experiences in industrial safety, the SS El Faro, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and my desire to write an article that engages in serious lore-building.
• This story is also based around my fascination with reconciling the newer Foundation with the lolFoundation.
• This story is also my stab at fixing some of the narrative problems with SRAs. I'm particularly proud of the idea that the more you build, the more unstable they become. And the idea that DeVorn would try to fix this just by using more SRAs to suppress the effects of unstable SRAs.
• The joke at the end is that 106 is the guy who actually invented Scranton Reality Anchors. So hey! Maybe he really does just want to share notes. xD
• My one regret is that I couldn't find a way to work in a line by O5-5: "Who on earth did you think you were fucking with, Daniel? The US Government?"
• The final addendum's passcode (Nemo me impune lacessit) and final hidden text (in pace requiescat) are both references to Edgar Allan Poe's The Cask of Amontillado. The first is the main character's family motto (No one injures me with impunity), and the last are the lines he closes the story with (Rest in peace).

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Last edited on 27 Aug 2021 21:21 by The Great Hippo Show more

Re: Author Post

The Great Hippo 18 Apr 2018 00:05

I've been tweaking this thing way more than I ought to, but I think I'm done now. If you read it when it first got published, there's only two parts I've really heavily changed:

• The final email from DeVorn has been swapped out for one from his employees (since DeVorn was sounding a bit like a two-bit super-villain, and this gave me a chance to provide a detailed depiction of what's going wrong with the SRAs)
• O5-5's email underwent an overhaul. It is now at least 75% more grandmotherly.

Other than that, all I did was try to streamline the description a little to make the anomaly's effect more clear, and add a bit about DeVorn being a PoI that's still at large.

Re: Author Post (Updates!)

The Great Hippo 19 Oct 2018 02:49

I've made a few significant (though small) tweaks to the article:

• The SS Sommerfeld was now constructed to transport low-risk anomalies and anesthesized ontokineticists (reality-benders). This is to better fit into the lore theme of Scranton Reality Anchors being a way of addressing reality-benders.
• I modified the discussion throughout the article regarding SRAs to better reflect this lore.
• I made the footnotes visible (mobile users reported having difficulty sometimes seeing them), and displaced them above the O5-5 note.
• Changed the O5-5's passcode to something a little more literary (and, in my mind, far more menacing). Also tweaked a few bits of her note that always bugged the heck out of me.

Westrin 16 Apr 2018 09:51

This is a really interesting read, and I upvoted for that, but holy shit The Great Hippo is back.

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Only nerds have signatures

Connor MacWarren 16 Apr 2018 09:57

My God, can it be? Is it really you? The Late (But great) Hippo?

_{Really, love the article man. Keep it up!}

daisybellus 16 Apr 2018 09:59

I'm about to head to bed, so I didn't read 100% of the page, but this seems really interesting! I love the language used in dialogue, it's much more natural than the typical dialogue on this site (which tends to be really contrived and unnatural in flow). I wish more people wrote dialogue like this. Just to give constructive stuff, though:

+ Show bullshit

• When you say "all anomalous behavior ceases after leaving SCP-3241", do you mean the boat, or the area around SCP-3241? The boat should likely be named SCP-3241-A or something along those lines, as it seems to be a part of the SCP at this point.
• Some more detail could be used when describing SCP-3241 itself, as only one short paragraph is used. What does it look like? What does it appear to be made of? What are some anomalies it exhibits?
• You should write "Sommerfeld Assessment and Containment Group (SARC)" the first time SARC is used, not the last time. Additionally, it should be written like that instead of: "SARC (Sommerfeld Assessment and Containment Group)", as notes in parenthesis typically give a colloquial term like "Dwayne Johnson (The Rock)"
• You likely don't have the copyright to that first image. It belongs to TOTE Maritime.

Great work from what I've read, though! I love the themes of debate and corruption.

edit: just realized this isn't a draft, and you weren't asking for critiques. oops.

Last edited on 16 Apr 2018 10:04 by daisybellus Show more

The Great Hippo 16 Apr 2018 10:26

edit: just realized this isn't a draft, and you weren't asking for critiques. oops.

No worries! I appreciate the input either way (particularly about the copyright image thing — oops >_>), and I'll likely implement at least a few of these changes.

Decibelles 16 Apr 2018 21:51

You can always feel free to leave critiques on mainsite work as well!

Fuck you DeVorn

Rigen 16 Apr 2018 10:35

+1

undergroundmonorail 16 Apr 2018 11:05

Overall, really good. +1 for sure.

This one line bugs me: "Now, I realize you and your team have voiced some legitimate, compelling concerns regarding the moral implications of making more SRAs when we know fully well that the more we make, the more unstable they all become." Feels very "As you know…". Not sure what I'd do to fix it, though. It only stands out as much as it does because I adore the dialogue in the rest of the work :D

The Great Hippo 16 Apr 2018 11:25

Thanks! And also, yeah fair — it's meant to be a joke (like he's acting as if he's treating their concerns seriously, then tells them to just shut the fuck up and build him more reality anchors), but the construct I used kind of sets it up as as an "AS YOU ALL KNOW…".

I'll think about it a little and see if there's a more elegant way to accomplish it.

undergroundmonorail 16 Apr 2018 16:50

Oh yeah, I absolutely got and appreciated the joke, it just felt like a slightly clumsy setup to me.

OptimisticLucio 16 Apr 2018 12:22

This is goddamn amazing. Hippo’s back and he’s coming in swinging.

I really like the “the anomalous is normal” approach here (if I got it right), gives us a different foundation to create upon, but also it’s a familiar world. (This might be a thing already and I missed it, and if so, please link me to some other articles like this)

+1. Welcome back, Hippo.

The Great Hippo 16 Apr 2018 13:19

Thanks!

If you're referring to the idea that the veil doesn't exist (IE people know anomalies are a thing), I wanted to leave that vague; I really like the Broken Masquerade canon, but I know it's not everyone's shindig. My hope is that this story works either way — as a Foundation with a veil, and a Foundation without one.

In my own headcanon, the veiled Foundation still works with government agencies, many of whom are at least tentatively aware that there's this organization who handles that "weird dangerous shit that makes no sense".

Gummy_Dragon 16 Apr 2018 13:26

I'm glad you're back!
_{…I will never trust a Scranton Reality Anchor again.}
+1

ModernMajorGeneral 16 Apr 2018 13:33

The basic anomaly feels underexplored to me. While I think using an SCP as a device to get to a different sort of story the writer really wants to tell is usually fine, and that griping about that is generally narrow-minded, this feels a bit too much like the initial thing was described and then pushed to one side, particularly as the middle section of the article shifted into talking about a different anomalous boat, just as weird as the article's subject. The story could have been told with minimal changes using almost any other article about places that do weird things to reality, which I think is underutilising the format.

At the end of the day, though, the story was good, and that's all that really matters to +1.

Raggabrash 16 Apr 2018 14:04

This sums up my thoughts pretty well. The story is awesome, but I would have appreciated a little more detail about what SCP-3241 actually is.

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Situation normal, Cap'n! Spiraling out of control!

DrMagnus 16 Apr 2018 16:59

That was never the point of the article.

This is a really good example of what the entire point of this website is, to tell a story using a specific format.

This was 100% never about the ship. It was about the interactions between the various parties, dealing with SRA's.

It could literally have been a stale marshmallow peep, and the story would have still worked.

Weryllium 16 Apr 2018 17:05

I think it's for this reason precisely that I'm gonna leave my vote at neutral instead of positive.

Myriad 23 Apr 2018 18:22

I don't actually think that's the case here though? My read is that the anomaly itself is due to the SRAs on the boat going critical (and possibly interacting with the other anomalies on board), which ties in rather nicely with the rest of the article. Going into more details about the anomaly itself could just… sort of go on forever, since it's effectively just a chunk of the world where reality is randomly broken.

The Great Hippo 23 Apr 2018 23:34

That was definitely my intent, yeah. The anomaly is the malfunctioning SRAs and how they've interacted with a boatload of low-risk anomalies, resulting in an area of reality that's effectively just "broken".

I put in the bit about the RSV Silent Spring to demonstrate just how fucked up this could get early on, but if I described all the anomalies going on inside of SCP-3241, I pretty much wouldn't know where to stop. It's basically a volume of space filled with real-life video-game glitches that are randomly changing at any given moment.

Last edited on 23 Apr 2018 23:35 by The Great Hippo Show more

rumetzen 17 Apr 2018 14:04

I feel like turning SCPs into MacGuffins within their own articles is not a type of writing we should be striving for.

TL333s 16 Apr 2018 14:11

There's nothing I hate quite so much as being one-upped.

Long stories about anomalous boats never get old, though. Part of me was disappointed the description of the anomaly's effects didn't come before the story, but by the time you got down there, it was obvious why: this isn't a story about a creepy boat, but about the tremendous fuckup that made the boat creepy in the first place.

And your dialogue is absolutely top-notch, specifically how DeVorn's self-corrections make him sound like a sleazy executive trying to keep his last shred of dignity and not piss off the last 1% of the world as he testifies before Congress. +1

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