I might have something profound and authorial to say after I sleep.
SCP-2085 / Discussion
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I have a very simple suggestion: Bold the names in the interviews. It makes them easier to read.
I'll think about upvoting. I'm unsure.
I laughed a bit at the "fuck your boxes" bit you snuck in at the end. On the whole, though, the funny parts put throughout the article mesh well with the theme, and the theme meshes well with the message. Good work.
if your reading this your gay
Now, i'm a patient woman,
Typo.
We were going to get to space. We were going to build the ship, and the six of us would go all the way up past the sky and look down at the world, and we would have won. We’d laugh and cheer and shout “We did it! We fucking did it!”, and for a brief moment we would be completely free. We would be alive. And we could show everyone that it’s okay, that they can be free too, that they can be alive. We’d help them. And now…nothing.
:(
Incident 2000-A-5-1: ██/██/2014 - Upon receiving breakfast, SCP-2000-A-5 sat down and proceeded to sing “Happy Birthday”. Of note is the use of “us” for the recipient.
;_;
Then they grow up, and find out that the world is built on broken dreams.
;_;
+1
Living the dream, or dreaming the life?
cyborg-anime-cat-wizard-anarchist-terrorists.
please tell me you stole this from a show. I wanna watch that NOW!
+1
Nothing so specific, though it does bear some resemblance to the typical Eclipse Phase campaign.
The whole time I was reading this, I was thinking, "Jesus Christ, somebody's Shadowrun campaign leaked into the real world and these are the PCs who got out." +1
This scip was the product of no small amount of frustration: it was the third thing I drafted for this contest, and part of a multi-month stream of ideas that simply didn't pan out. Not for lack of trying, but for lack of room. It's like the opposite of writer's block: the ideas are there, enough to last for years, but they simply don't work within the constraints of the format. This is the Box, if you will.
And so Space Wizard came to be, as my sort of protest against the Box. I wrote a decidedly un-Foundation scip, something to put voice to my frustration at the limitations of the article format and the Foundation as a whole.
This will, hopefully, be the last box I write for this site. For all my scips of 2000 series, I am going to be going with a different approach. Come hell or high water, I'm going to write something new.
Hmm, that's interesting. My favorite part of SCP articles is that the box is almost always there. The item is contained. This is how we contain the item. This is what the item is. This is what the item does. Here is some interview with the item; here you can see, in this collapsible box, what the item's hopes and dreams are. The item is still contained.
So the way I saw this article from a thematic standpoint was that the box was omnipresent. Despite everything, the testimonies from the space wizard and the catgirls are relegated to their collapsibles, inside their quotation boxes. The meat, the interesting part of the article, is all in there. The skeleton of the article, the part that's up front and in our face, is nothing but cold indifference.
Like, no matter how wonderful or fantastical or amazing somebody's dreams are, no matter how childish and pure their sentiments, the box is fucking there. These catgirls are going to be contained for the rest of their lives. And the article itself is…an article. The article doesn't care. It shows a story peeking out behind bars, straining to be free, and that story is compelling and again, that's why I upvoted, and I think the story is even more compelling for the fact that it is restrained in a box like this.
So yeah, my thoughts on what is prolly around my favorite 2000s thus far.
I don't mean to say that the Box can't be used to great effect ( I mean, I did that right here), but it is annoying as all hell to put hours upon hours of planning and drafting only to find out that the only way the idea can work as an article is to shoehorn it into the box by stripping it of all the stuff that made it cool. Getting stuck in a spree like that for months generally does not endear one to the Box.
My headcanon says that they break out within a week.
I would love to see a semi-wacky escape tale that undercuts the feels in this with a polar opposite super-happy ending.
… You should edit this article with them getting more and more out of their boxes every-time you successfully create an article that's not in a box.
For all my scips of 2000 series, I am going to be going with a different approach. Come hell or high water, I'm going to write something new.
[HYPE INTENSIFIES]
I'll be waiting eagerly to see what'cha gonna do.
Living the dream, or dreaming the life?
Leave us blind and crippled but at least let us be blind and cripple and free.
Typo.
Not much else to say other than that I like this.
…But not quite enough to upvote until the contest is over.
(account deleted)So, going into this 2000 contest thing I thought I would temporarily suspend my personal embargo against silly stuff on the mainlist and go in with a completely open mind. So I didn't downvote based on the inherent silliness of a crime-fighting Fremen wizard with a team of anime furries. Though that is exceedingly silly.
I found issues with the execution in regard to the dialogue laced throughout this. With some minor variations, the characters all sound the same to me, which shouldn't be happening with a middle-aged decrepit guy in a bathrobe and a collection of female cat-assassins. Worse than that, this isn't striking me as dialogue, per se, though you're setting this up as a collection of interviews. This is essentially a series of diatribes interspersed with some background story. And that leads to a bigger problem.
The main issue I have with this is how preachy it is. Even without the bonus author commentary in the thread here, you obviously have a Very Important Point to Make. Now, good writing is in no way precluded from having Very Important Points, and the best stories do indeed commonly feature these. But when the Very Important Point becomes the main event, it crowds out the creative nature of the work, and you are less of a writer than a polemicist. It feels to me that you grudgingly wrote a story when what you really wanted to do was write an essay.
The dialogue sounding all the same, that I can see. Perhaps when the contest is done I can finagle with it.
As for the rest, it is what it is. I am not subtle man.
/forum/t-730933/scp-2085#post-
page revision: 2, last edited: 15 Jan 2023 15:06
