SCPs and Commentary:
SCP-1193: This was my first SCP, and pretty much a pure formal exercise in SCP creation. There's no plot, no backstory, and no interesting effects.
So, here's the trick. You can replicate it yourself fairly easily. The trick isn't the arm is horrible. The arm is just scary-big, which isn't much of anything on its own. The trick is the phone. Via the phone, whatever's on the end conveys that it's life is just like ours in some respects. In response to that, we can do one of several things:
(1) We could believe it's lying. In that case, why does it believe that we're likely to be convinced by its lies? In fact, why is it talking to us at all? It doesn't seem to be actively resisting containment, and it seems to have gotten itself into the predicament it's in (and it's unclear what that is) under its own power. It does not need our help, and if it does, we are unable and unwilling to provide it. This is the least horrible answer.
(2) We could believe it's deluded. But in order to be deluded, there must be some sort of reference. Presuming it is what it appears to be, how does it know about ovens and hospitals and cakes? Can it sense the surface? This is the second-least-horrible answer.
(3) We could believe that there is a world of ovens, hospitals, and cakes in the center of the Earth, and that somehow a creature with a seventy-kilometer arm can participate meaningfully in this world. The world where this entity is telling the truth is inconceivable. This is the second-most horrible answer, and one of the answers I was hoping people to come to.
(4) We could believe that we are somehow wrong about the nature of everything that surrounds us. The world of conventional objects which the being with the arm describes is not subject to the conventional and comprehensible laws we believe it to be. Its dream-logic about ovens and cakes and casts and invulnerability is the way the world works, not a deluded fantasy by a buried giant. The Foundation's attempts to rigorously study it are futile, because reason itself is a bizarre delusion. This is the most horrible answer, and what I'm trying to get at.
That's what the barely-disguised contempt by the voice on the other end of the phone is. We could help it climb out of its oven, or get its hand out of the jelly jar, if only we understood a few basic facts about the universe. The same facts which the person who installed the telephone understood to a degree that he thought the arm was unremarkable. And that's the terrible part: how commonplace our misconceptions are, and how desperately wrong our attempts at grasping the nature of the universe have been.
TL;DR: The arm isn't horrible. The arm is normal. The world of unremarkable things is horrible.
SCP-1272: This was my second SCP, and (in my mind) my least-successful. Basically, I wanted to do something interesting with a containment breach and real-world physics, and this was my attempt at doing so. My continued insistence on using made-up physics to describe what's going on here, however, made it a somewhat difficult read — especially considering that, in the real world, I'm a lawyer, not a physicist.
The blue guy is Emile Abruzzo, the sculptor who made the sculptures. In my mind, he's the (unintentional) founder of AWCY, but I sort of hate AWCY, so I stripped out that backstory. I think he's better as just a bizarre blue guy.
SCP-1539: I actually wrote this several years ago. It's basically an exercise in mindfuckery, and follows the same sort of pattern as SCP-1193. The 'problem' with it, insofar as there is a problem, is that all of the interesting stuff is obfuscated behind the technical language I made up to explain what's going on with it. In other words, it's a bit of a tough read, and that's partially my fault.
SCP-1348: This is my favorite of my SCPs, but it's a bit of a tough sell. It's Abrahamic, which some people don't like. It's got long containment procedures, which some people don't like. It's pretty circumspect about what's going on in there, which some people don't like. On the other hand, it's got great pictures of Assyrian art and Nabatean ruins, and I really enjoy the underlying story of what's going on. I sent it out in email several times, but it's sat for long enough that I thought I might put the spoilers out here:
(1) All Cohainim, descendants of the Jewish priestly caste, belong to Haplogroup CMH-6.
(2) 'Kahn' is a Germanized form of the last name 'Cohen,' which refers to descent from Cohainim.
(3) The Israeli strikes against what was believed to be a Syrian reactor complex actually happened in 2006.
(4) The anomalous humanoid is a seraph.
(5) Though it's subtle, the article indicates that the Foundation believes this site is related to SCP-1115.
(6) The snippet of ritual cited by the Class Omega celebrant actually states the name of God in this proto-Abrahamic religion: 'Yehom.' It's intended to be the same language as the transmissions from 1115.
(7) The proto-Abrahamic religion cited here still has 'echoes' or 'remnants' among a few heretical Muslims.
(8) The Koran refers to a mysterious fourth Abrahamic religion known as 'Sabateans.' This is the primary holy site of that missing faith.
(9) The underlying religion is something like inverted Gnosticism or Promethean Judaism: the Demiurge did something horrific on our behalf, and is being punished for it forever.
(10) 'Herev' is the Israel Defense Force's minority unit, mostly composed of Israeli Druze.
SCP-1427: I like this one. Most everyone else doesn't. I'm not sure why. In any case, this was originally an artifact built by the same people who built SCP-1348, to keep populations of primitive humans from getting near their important military sites. (And also to prevent them from developing sentience.) The SCP-1348 subspecies died off; we're descended from the primitives that infested their culture area. As a result, when this thing turns on, it's designed to obliterate human minds — except for those humans who were completely subservient to the 1348 culture.
In my headcanon, the nuclear war which destroyed the 1348 culture caused the human population bottleneck, not the Toba supervolcano.
