News for May, 2022
rating: +13+x

What this is

A bunch of miscellaneous CSS 'improvements' that I, CroquemboucheCroquembouche, use on a bunch of pages because I think it makes them easier to deal with.

The changes this component makes are bunch of really trivial modifications to ease the writing experience and to make documenting components/themes a bit easier (which I do a lot). It doesn't change anything about the page visually for the reader — the changes are for the writer.

I wouldn't expect translations of articles that use this component to also use this component, unless the translator likes it and would want to use it anyway.

This component probably won't conflict with other components or themes, and even if it does, it probably won't matter too much.

Usage

On any wiki:

[[include :scp-wiki:component:croqstyle]]

This component is designed to be used on other components. When using on another component, be sure to add this inside the component's [[iftags]] block, so that users of your component are not forced into also using Croqstyle.

Related components

Other personal styling components (which change just a couple things):

Personal styling themes (which are visual overhauls):

CSS changes

Reasonably-sized footnotes

Stops footnotes from being a million miles wide, so that you can actually read them.

.hovertip { max-width: 400px; }

Monospace edit/code

Makes the edit textbox monospace, and also changes all monospace text to Fira Code, the obviously superior monospace font.

@import url('https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Fira+Code:wght@400;700&display=swap');
 
:root { --mono-font: "Fira Code", Cousine, monospace; }
#edit-page-textarea, .code pre, .code p, .code, tt, .page-source { font-family: var(--mono-font); }
.code pre * { white-space: pre; }
.code *, .pre * { font-feature-settings: unset; }

Teletype backgrounds

Adds a light grey background to <tt> elements ({{text}}), so code snippets stand out more.

tt {
  background-color: var(--swatch-something-bhl-idk-will-fix-later, #f4f4f4);
  font-size: 85%;
  padding: 0.2em 0.4em;
  margin: 0;
  border-radius: 6px;
}

No more bigfaces

Stops big pictures from appearing when you hover over someone's avatar image, because they're stupid and really annoying and you can just click on them if you want to see the big version.

.avatar-hover { display: none !important; }

Breaky breaky

Any text inside a div with class nobreak has line-wrapping happen between every letter.

.nobreak { word-break: break-all; }

Code colours

Add my terminal's code colours as variables. Maybe I'll change this to a more common terminal theme like Monokai or something at some point, but for now it's just my personal theme, which is derived from Tomorrow Night Eighties.

Also, adding the .terminal class to a fake code block as [[div class="code terminal"]] gives it a sort of pseudo-terminal look with a dark background. Doesn't work with [[code]], because Wikidot inserts a bunch of syntax highlighting that you can't change yourself without a bunch of CSS. Use it for non-[[code]] code snippets only.

Quick tool to colourise a 'standard' Wikidot component usage example with the above vars: link

:root {
  --c-bg: #393939;
  --c-syntax: #e0e0e0;
  --c-comment: #999999;
  --c-error: #f2777a;
  --c-value: #f99157;
  --c-symbol: #ffcc66;
  --c-string: #99cc99;
  --c-operator: #66cccc;
  --c-builtin: #70a7df;
  --c-keyword: #cc99cc;
}
 
.terminal, .terminal > .code {
  color: var(--c-syntax);
  background: var(--c-bg);
  border: 0.4rem solid var(--c-comment);
  border-radius: 1rem;
}

Debug mode

Draw lines around anything inside .debug-mode. The colour of the lines is red but defers to CSS variable --debug-colour.

You can also add div.debug-info.over and div.debug-info.under inside an element to annotate the debug boxes — though you'll need to make sure to leave enough vertical space that the annotation doesn't overlap the thing above or below it.

…like this!

.debug-mode, .debug-mode *, .debug-mode *::before, .debug-mode *::after {
  outline: 1px solid var(--debug-colour, red);
  position: relative;
}
.debug-info {
  position: absolute;
  left: 50%;
  transform: translateX(-50%);
  font-family: 'Fira Code', monospace;
  font-size: 1rem;
  white-space: nowrap;
}
.debug-info.over { top: -2.5rem; }
.debug-info.under { bottom: -2.5rem; }
.debug-info p { margin: 0; }

DISCLAIMER: This is the Site News for the English Branch of the SCP Wiki. The opinions of the individual members of the Site News team that are presented in each edition of the Site News are their own thoughts and are not meant to be representative of the Site News team as a whole nor are they representative of the staff body as a whole. If you take issue with any of the contents, then feel free to reach out to the editor(s) and they will review the contents to see if there are any edits that need to be made. We intend to always deliver interesting content to you, and we understand that there may be times where controversial or unpopular opinions will be presented whether by our writers or our editor(s). Thank you for your understanding!

May 7th

Winning Deptcon: One Fire at a Time

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Header from Uranium Empire's tale Turn the lights off when you leave.

As the gates close and we wave goodbye to the very successful Department Contest of 2022, now is the time to cheer for the teams that pulled through and posted some amazing work. One team in particular, 'Marge is canonically incapable of farting' led by Uncle NicoliniUncle Nicolini (orange!) with teammates T RutherfordT Rutherford (pink!) and UraniumEmpireUraniumEmpire (green!) has everything to celebrate as the Fire Suppression Department wins with great pride!

In lieu of our winning team, it seems only suitable that we step forward and question them about their plan, how they went about putting it together, and maybe a bit of the ethics of it all.

I hope you'll join us as we are granted the opportunity to ask a thing or two!

Being a participant myself, I know some teams had a bit of difficulty communicating and coming up with a strong concept. I'm curious myself, what mindset did you find yourselves in? Did you already have the idea, did you have to make it up as you go? Did you enter with the idea of winning?

I had the idea for something like FSD for quite a while. My personal headcanon about Foundation recruitment was that despite billing itself as hiring "the best of the best", the actual criteria was psychological/financial vulnerability and a capacity for undue loyalty. Dr. Rivka Yarkoni and Researcher Yehezkel Yarkoni, two recurring characters, were one of the things I had in mind: both are Iranian immigrants who went into the Foundation's debt and transferred to America so Yehezkel could safely convert and they could both marry.
Although I proposed the initial idea, FSD as it is in the articles was largely developed during pre-posting through group planning. It's as much Nico and TRuther as it was me.

UE and Nico came to me with the barebones in hand – which was great. We had a title, “Fire Suppression Department”, and a concept, “they keep people from being fired or quitting the Foundation through any means necessary”. From there, it was just a matter of determining tone, narrative, and the nitty-gritty.
Those initial planning stages were ludicrously fun, especially when working with such magnificent monsters like Nico and UraniumEmpire. It felt a lot like planning the practical, bureaucratic version of SCP-5000; dreaming up the most inhuman things the Foundation could do to serve this single purple… though ours was employee retention, not genocide.

UE had the base idea for the Fire Suppression Department. The mindset going into it was, at least for me, "what's the worst thing you can imagine an employer doing to keep their employees?" I think living with a disability really coloured my perception of this going in, as for a long time while I was working I depended on the insurance my employers provided me to be able to afford my medications and treatments. I dealt with some truly ghoulish behaviour just to keep my insurance, and I feel like a lot of people out there do too. I think that's why our concept resonated with most folx. As for going in to win, I never set out to do anything with the intention of being the best, I just wanted to participate in the contest with my friends and was pleasantly surprised at the win.

I think we could all agree that the themes were pretty dark in your articles. Do you consider your personal outlook on the foundation to be grimdark as a whole? Or was this something out of your usual reach?

I personally view the SCP Foundation, both as an organization and as a setting, as a reflection of American neoliberalism and the carceral state, and my post-2018 work largely attempts to reflect that. To me, FSD is only "grimdark" because the real world is grim.
I see a few people who are looking for a tale where the FSD loses. Personally, it wouldn't feel right for me to write that kind of story right now. If people want to see that sort of thing, I really think they should turn their attention towards dismantling the structures the FSD is meant to reflect, or at least volunteering with a mutual aid program such as Food Not Bombs or Mutual Aid Disaster Relief. There's nothing our miserable establishment is more afraid of than grassroots Dual Power.

The Foundation is a character just as much as any person, anomaly, or abstract entity. Besides the baseline of “shadow organization that secures, contains, and protects”, the Foundations personality is whatever you need to suit the story. Noblebright, grimdark, true and unflinching neutral – whatever you need. There is no canon! For our purposes, for the FSD to flourish, the Foundation itself took on the role of a background character. It was an organization so immense and mission-driven that the FSD was allowed to fester from within.

I personally consider the foundation to be a fascistic organization because, in reality, that's simply what a shadow organization interested in keeping the status quo would be. However, I do think that there are people within such an organization, and people will always bring with them a little light because people have hopes and dreams, which aren't always squashed by the terrible world around them. My outlook on the Foundation is a bleak one, but I think there are people within it who make it a not so terrible place, even if it's just a little bit. Like Eric Idle said, Always Look On the Bright Side Of Life. Though that really doesn't come through in my FSD work, does it? lol

What do you think grabbed the attention of so many people? Winning by an absolute landslide, It's clear you did something one might consider 'right'.

Two things:
The FSD is, fundamentally, a horror story about being unable to quit your job. We wrote our articles during an extreme uptick in voluntary resignations and a significant interest in the concept of "Antiwork". Horror tends to reflect the anxieties of the societies it's written in, both in what gets written and what gets popular; with this in mind, we struck some real fucking gold.
I've written quite a few pieces that I don't personally think are particularly dark, but that people read as exceptionally grimdark (BaWaRAO gets this a lot). Part of me wonders if this isn't because my media consumption habits tend towards the dismal, and I'm just desensitized; if that's the case, it makes me wonder just how much the SCP Wiki skews towards what some people call "noblebright". In that case, I think we might've filled a niche that most modern authors aren't trying to fill.
Sorry for being a grumpy art socialist, I promise I listen to hip-hop and stuff

I think the FSD grabbed so many people’s attention because, ultimately, it's a narrow-scope and personal series. These are articles/tales about individuals crushed under the weight of an impossible, unstoppable juggernaut pinning them in place. The runner-up, Telecommunications, appealed in much the same way; watching people you care about lost in a strange, vast, unknowable system.
Moreover, as UE alluded to, the FSD aimed to appeal to the modern ennui (said the pretentious author). The enemy in these articles isn’t an anomaly, a cosmic force, or even other people. The enemy in the FSD is the system we all experience in our day-to-day lives: the commodification of a human being. We are numbers, we are labour; we are cogs ground down in a vast, invisible machine.

Like Truther and UE said, FSD appeals to the feeling of being crushed by the unstoppable turning cogs of the machine, which is something many people find themselves relating to nowadays. The revolution for acceptable working conditions and living wages is just beginning to enter the mainstream, and I personally can't wait for the day we'll be able to look back on our work on the FSD and consider it a relic of a bygone era. Sigh. Someday, right?

Do you expect people to pick up FSD and write it? With many new characters and plotlines introduced, one might consider it a great opportunity to write for the department.

In theory, yes. Pretty much everyone has an employment experience they could turn into a good horror story, whether that be the ennui of a half-dead and claustrophobic computer shop or "the soda boxes are pumping blood fungus into the drinks machine".
In practice, I don't get a lot of people writing about my characters and settings, but maybe that's different w/ Nico and TRuther…

I hope so! Since the win, there's been a lot of chatter about people aiming to write their own FSD article and the specific hows/why nots. The most common argument is that this is a very easy concept to hamfist. People might miss the point, and aim for cruelty without the requisite humanity. Then again, that's a concern when writing to any canon, isn't it? Never stopped anyone before! If you'd like to write an FSD article, go at it!

I hope people write more FSD. It's cathartic to write something like it, and I think that we could all do with some good catharsis every now and then. Though I will say, there are people who don't like how grim the FSD is, and I get it. Not everyone wants to read fiction where people needlessly suffer. As Trutherford said, I hope people don't use FSD as an excuse to write torture porn. I have high hopes for the next crop of FSD articles, whenever it may come.

Thank you so much for the opportunity Nicolini, Rutherford, and Uranium! We wish you all the best for future contests and a grand congratulations on stealing the win!

- By Luxaiko

Editorial

Apologies for the late release this month! My personal vehicle gave out on me and that pre-occupied a lot of my time. Luckily though, I have a wonderful product to present to everyone this time around in the form of the above interview with the winners of the Department Contest by our very own reporter, Luxaiko!

Additionally, if any of you readers have a desire to contribute to this project and help it grow, feel free to let us know by following the directions on this page: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/forum/t-14532477/community-outreach-team-recruitment-thread.

The Community Outreach team has some fun stuff planned for this summer, so be sure to be a part of it!

- By WhiteGuard

Features Last Month

Top Articles of the Month

Ratings of course do not mean everything, but they are representative of what people happened to like seeing at the time. With this in mind, the following are the top-rated works last month, so if by some chance you haven't encountered them yet, be sure to check them out!

Top-Rated SCP

SCP-6337 Dinner Party by syuzhet

A tarp has been placed over SCP-6337 for the convenience of others.

Top-Rated Non-SCP

The Bathrooms Wiki by AnActualCrow, Deadly Bread, DodoDevil, Dysadron, Elenee FishTruck, Fishish, GremlinGroup, Grigori Karpin, HarryBlank, Its a Bad Idea, JakdragonX, LORDXVNV, PlaguePJP, R4_EX, Ralliston, Rounderhouse, and Trotskyeet

The unwashed can't or won't recognize it, but we do. The forgotten spaces on the edge. The music of the pipes. The geometry twisted in knots by straining minds, the flowing matter in the deep darkness, the unplumbed depths of utter madness. You should have gone before you left.


Front Page Features

Every month, an article is selected from each of the three common article types: SCP, Tale, and Group of Interest Format. These three articles are displayed on the front page for the month to bring further recognition to them.

If you would like to view the previous front page features, you can view the archive for the SCPs here, the archive for the Tales here, and the archive for the GoI Formats here!

SCP Article

SCP-5952 (by UraniumEmpire): The Warbalang [Department-Con first place prize feature, requested by UraniumEmpire]

According to eyewitness accounts, SCP-5952 is a bipedal humanoid entity in excess of 2.4 meters in height.

SCP Article

SCP-5657 (by T Rutherford): Nicki Knows [Department-Con first place prize feature, requested by T Rutherford]

Please wait… Please wait… Please wait…

SCP Article

SCP-5783 (by Agente Shuffle, BattleblockB0ss, and Meserach): Accidents Never Happen [Department-Con second place prize feature, requested by Meserach, BattleblockB0ss, and Agente Shuffle]

Full containment of SCP-5783 is considered both prohibitively disruptive and undesirable at this time.

Tale

Gluttony Is Impossible by Uncle Nicolini [Department-Con first place prize feature, requested by Uncle Nicolini]

Curtains. Light, a spotlight.
Applause, then silence. The curtains rise.

Tale

The Phoenix, The Nightingale, and The Magpies by GreenWolf [Department-Con first place prize feature, requested by Greenwolf, ch00bakka, and TyGently]

A series about surviving Minnesota, accidental arson, fighting fire with fire, unusual hiring procedures…


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