[ ( 'The 0utput' ) ]
Issue 0
"series 0 and 0ther things 0f that s0rt and variety"
May 4th, 2026
The Emergence of a New and Sinister Medium
Accusations have been taken to the fore of our fine publication regarding the fact that it has not previously existed. While this matter is considerable and under review by our premier fact checkers, the curators of The Output insist that any supposed lack of prior existence should not concern our wide spanning and numerous readerbase, who attend so duteously to our weekly* periodical and ensure our continued thriving business. The Output has always existed, and, respectfully, our good staff invites you to consider alternate forms of thought which allow this to be true.
Pressley Autographia, the current authorial voice, can personally attest to being immaculately conceived, arriving on this "Earth" fully formed and with concrete opinions on the do's and do maybe's of kerning, glassblowing, and other similarly skill-less endeavors. That Pressley is able to put aside meagre inklings of doubt unto the legitimacy of The Output should encourage you similarly. Be Like Pressley. Avert Your Eyes. (Though solely in a metaphorical sense, your attention is tantamount to the survival of the written word in this barren mordern contentscape)
Focus your eyes on the page, (or stay quiet and listen, if you'd prefer we read it to you) track the words, and narrate outloud as you will. No matter how hard you try, they cannot be unwritten. With that existential threat compartmentalized, we bade you enjoy. This is the first issue of many. Be troubled by The Output.
*The definition of "weekly" and its intersections with the more commonly understood definition of "monthly" may be in wide contention among our authorbase
Before you continue, please extract, sign, then seal this legal waiver by lighting it aflame. Terms metaphorical and objectionable. Conditions may apply.
Sign here. Please present some sort of name.
> The Content <
|
Table of Contents
|
[ ( 'The Features' ) ]
One of the most important qualities of any functioning community is, of course, its author participation. Unlike certain communities (say, greece circa 399 bc) we will not be feeding our prominent authors and philosophers poisoned cups, no matter how much they partake in impiety against the state. We will instead be doing something much worse—forcing them to write for us. The following pieces will be written by our wonderful community authors who have so graciously sort of agreed to do them entirely unpaid.
* * *
Series 0: Excerpts from "Threshold Drift", an Essay
The following excerpt comprises the first two sections of "Threshold Drift", an essay about the history of its own author, the evolution of the SCP Foundation fandom, ghosts, aliens, Boards of Canada, and loving your work even when it's hard to. These excerpts will be accompanied by a unique post-script by the author. "Threshold Drift" will be released in complete form at a later date. Thank you for your time.
Hi there. My name is Animal Hospital, and I'm here to talk about Series 0.
I'm in the unique position as the widely assumed custodian and caretaker of a canon within the midst of unprecedented cultural acceleration. In my limited understanding of the subject on the "management side" of things, though as described to me by my friends, it typically takes a canon a couple of months or a year to fully establish itself.
It's rare for a canon to go from "fully non-existent" to "operational, with a server with more than one hundred people" within two and a half weeks.
The debut of Series 0 as a canon may very well be described as apparitional. It emerged from nowhere, uncannily half-formed and shambling out of the darkness. It is the simultaneous distillation of contradictory attitudes and approaches both to writing and to the concept of "community" itself. It is half-formed because at the time of its manifestation, we didn't have the vocabulary to express it in totality, which may have been a good thing, because that meant the canon, within the confines of the goals I had set forward, was functioning. Series 0 is defined initially by its lack of definition. Series 0, unlike most canons, does not possess an actual custodian or caretaker. It is not based on the singular vision of 1 author, or 1 small group of authors.
It was developed through endless conversation with dozens of people, which manifested itself, incompletely, as the official Series 0 Discord server. (Or, "Zerocord" as we so lovingly call her.) While advancements in the manifestation of Series 0 have most certainly been made, it is not yet complete, nor will it be completed in our life time — Series 0 is always becoming.
The point of Series 0 in all of this was to widen the flow of possibility when it came to writing on the site. Some people have unfortunately assumed Series 0 is an attack on them and the things they like, which of course can't be further from the truth. Series 0 is not a vehicle for critique of the state of art on the site necessarily, but it was developed as a critique of the state of the community, which is a more broad and less individualized issue which is difficult to put succinctly into words. This is something I noticed while I was curating my own series, ANIMAL HOSPITAL.
ANIMAL HOSPITAL is almost laughably singular in its vision. It's about my author avatar, ANIMAL HOSPITAL, and its interactions with the SCP Foundation. Looking around the site, I think this is something we all do. We like having our own little sandboxes filled with our toys, that reflect, very singularly, what we like to do when we play. I think, for a community of the neurodivergent, this is certainly normal behavior. We like to engage in parallel play, and we maybe get a bit stressed out if we see someone else touching our toys in a way we don't like. I clamped down hard on how others are allowed to use ANIMAL HOSPITAL because ANIMAL HOSPITAL is a reflection of me, the author, Animal Hospital, (the person, Susie,) in much the same way I'm sure others have clamped down hard on how their characters and likenesses are used.
I was initially encouraged to clamp down in this manner by my friends Fishish and
PlaguePJP, and while I don't think they were wrong in their advice to me to do this, (as should be evidenced by the fact I did it and stand by it,) I do think it represents a microcosm of an interesting conundrum the community has found itself approaching.
With everyone having their pet projects, who is collaborating?
I, of course, don't mean collaborating in the sense that two people have a page that has both their names on it. I mean, who is collaborating in the discussion page on how their SCPs could interact? Who is coming up with characters, with dedicated character sheets, to share with their friends? There's an attitude of this clamping down which I think is actually a bit stifling. We live in a bizarre and half-formed culture of contradictory attitudes on the site. We, simultaneously, are a "fanfiction site", but we also have made a habit of asking for permission to use each other's characters, settings, anomalies, or just broad concepts. Obviously, I understand the basic necessity of this. At the same time, though, what's the actual harm in letting loose a bit?
If someone wants to write a finale for your series, or, if someone wants to write a story where your character dies, or if someone wants to write a shipfic between your character and their character in a setting where they should otherwise be incompatible… Why not? Back in the day, it was common for pieces of fanfiction themselves to have fanfiction written for them, typically as "alternate universes" or "as told from the perspective of this side character", often employing the Original Characters of the original fic writer in a new way. Famously, H. P. Lovecraft signed a "death warrant" to Robert Bloch, giving him permission not only to kill off Lovecraft's creations, but a depiction of Lovecraft himself. (Which I reference obliquely in my own tale, in which my friend, the actual real life SCP author, and Series 0 co-creator Liryn appears.)
Forgotten Memories is an excellent example of this. It's a retake of On Guard 43 that completely branched off into its own thing. What started as, effectively, an Original Character x Canon Character ship (metaphorically, because all characters on this site are Original Characters,) has evolved into an entirely new world in itself.
I love and admire Forgotten Memories for this. I think more things like Forgotten Memories need to exist on the site.
Series 0, in that sense, is a more radical extension of what Forgotten Memories is doing. It's a "return" in the strictest sense to a more simplistic, fandom-first culture over a more author-first culture. This is an attitude that bleeds into both how I engage with Series 0 and how I presently manage Zerocord. I want Series 0 to be a safe space for first time and veteran writers to engage in collaborative, direct play. I want people to be able to say, "hey, I created this character I'm not doing much with, would you want to do something with her?" I want my own ideas to be radically transformed by someone else's vision when I'm not looking. It's thrilling. The unknown of engaging with the mind of someone else is absolutely wonderful.
Series 0 has had lots of ups and downs for me, as I'm sure some of you readers are aware. In a since deleted post, I despaired in 19cord about how Series 0 felt like a failure. I don't feel that way anymore. I think Series 0 has been more successful than I ever intended it to be. I'm so excited to have shared it with you.
Gods, this is just the introduction. Sorry.
I want to take some more of your time to discuss the creation of Series 0, its development, and what I (personally) am hoping to see from it in the future, as well as revealing some of my possible future plans. I swear these next sections won't be nearly as long.
To begin, let's start with this: What is Series 0? Series 0 is a canon created by Crow-Cat, myself,
ratking666, and Liryn.
It was Crow who came up with the name. In my personal Discord "side chat" POST-MORTEM ANIMAL CARE, ("side chat" in quotes, because I mostly use it to plot my projects,) Crow described my writing style in a unique way. He called my style "Series 0". He described it as though he was looking in on an alternate reality, where things on the site developed a little bit differently, where the meaning of clinical tone, formatting, and the anomalous as a concept were recognizable, but also recognizably different.
What I emphasize and what I strip down are almost in reverse, compared to the way most people on the site write. My friend, PoufyPoufson, agreed and elaborated on this, describing my style as a unique form of internetcore, drawing from absurdism and creepypasta over drawing from contemporary SCP.
This is probably because my exposure to contemporary SCP was extremely limited up until fairly recently. Like I said when I first joined the community, my only real experience with SCP in the beginning was reading through Series I as a kid, forgetting about it, discovering But A Dream through SCP-5045, and falling in love with SCP all over again.
But A Dream, for those of you unaware, is a canon that's more focused on a "setting" and a "vibe" than an actual single storyline. It encompasses a couple of different tale series, including my own ANIMAL HOSPITAL. But A Dream is a canon that's described as "haunting" the world. Its presence is primarily indirect. There are signifiers within the canon that connect its elements, (Toons, Sputnik Studios, the color blue,) but the primary focus on the canon is the feeling it provokes, rather than constructing a particular, functional "world". FLOORBOARDS, the co-writer of the hub, described But A Dream to me as an example of "schizoanalysis", a term I didn't fully understand at the time.
What she meant is that it was a setting in which collaborative psychological play could be performed. "Schizoanalysis" is the analysis of the self through collaboration with the community, like group therapy without a leader or a particular direction. There's a pushing and pulling between the "cells" of the network within the "schizoanalysis" itself, in which certain elements are realized through there being a surrounding community to filter the idea through.
But A Dream is an interesting canon because it is primarily concerned with the psychological underpinnings of what the anomalous itself is, and what the anomalous represents in-universe. The anomalous as a category having a meaning within the universe it exists in is incredibly novel. While the concept of essophysics (the science of embodiments of concepts) from Site-17 Deepwell Catalog is similar, But A Dream's "anomalous" is simultaneously both less and more literal.
An anomaly in the But A Dream universe doesn't represent a narrative construct to us, as readers. The readers are irrelevant to But A Dream. But A Dream firmly rejects the idea that a reader must read the story for it to exist, the lives of characters continue without us — But A Dream is anti-pataphysical.
No, an anomaly in But A Dream represents a narrative construct to its characters. The meaning of an anomaly is clear to the character we follow, but it is not clear to us. What a particular entity represents in the psychology of a character is not for us to know because we cannot exist inside the head of that character. To quote But A Dream's blurb on the Canon Hub, "Quit pretending you've figured us out and just fucking listen to us."
But A Dream isn't exactly "internetcore", and as the hub says, it tries to reject such labels, but it wears its influences on its sleeve. Creepypasta and "classic" SCP are its major jumping off points stylistically, at least for Ratking. The "schizoanalysis" of But A Dream is filtered through this lens. Everything is derived from what Ratking loves (and sometimes hates) about these elements, but also what she loves(/hates) about the specific timeframe from which these elements emerge from, both in a cultural and personal sense. Ratking describes the Foundation of the world of But A Dream as similar to its depiction in the Containment Breach game, which, for many people, is the archetypal Foundation, and its from here the "schizoanalysis" can begin. We are anchored to this vision of a time period, which encompasses the culture of the space we were in at the time, the aesthetic image we mutually absorbed, as well as the feelings and experiences we were going through in our lives at the time.
But A Dream reanimates the spirit of the time period without returning to it, "haunting" its surroundings, half-formed, no longer "internetcore" because what "internetcore" "is" has changed. But A Dream returns to the origin point of "internetcore" and then exists along a continuum where its elements never diffused into pop culture, its specific form continuing to exist as a template for use.
But A Dream is hauntological in its project, but hauntology is something we'll get into later.
A lot of it is partially just how I grew up with the SCP Wiki and how I was one of those people that developed an appreciation for both classic and modern articles. I guess I could also say […] But A Dream kind of has this deal where it sort of recognizes the way the SCP canon is so deeply loose that no matter what your canon is, it can feel overwhelming because of the amount of information written for the site now. And how [But a Dream] kind of has this determined "ending" that isn't actually written out but is very clearly just like, the Foundation WILL become overwhelmed.
Which is an element that exists both simultaneously as a critique but also a tribute. Because I think it is genuinely really awesome how much stuff has been made for the site but I also think it's fine to recognize how daunting and occasionally frustrating that can be.
Ratking
2026
This canon completely transformed the way I look at SCP, and "how to write" for SCP. It's a very basic idea, but this canon triggered in me the realization that SCP can be whatever I want. I can do whatever, just as long as I have fun with it. When I started writing SCP-7256, it was a pretty different article. It was about a farm being haunted by an evil spirit horse. The farm was owned by the Department of Abnormalities, indicated by a yellow plaque on the wall of the barn.
It was a lot more action-like, a lot gorier, and very messy. I was worried about putting my writing up in public for critique, so, weirdly, I surmised it might be easier for me to send it to my writing heroes, the people who made But A Dream, the people who inspired me to write in the first place. I sent it to FLOORBOARDS and Ratking for critique. I didn't want to share my main account on Discord, and this was before I made my Animal Hospital account, so I messaged them both over Wikidot. FLOORBOARDS didn't see my original message, but Ratking did and let her know. Pretty soon, we were talking. The two of them were unbelievably kind to me about the article, even if they didn't like its execution at the time. They helped me shape it into what it became, and, when one of them couldn't get to my revisions that day, they would connect me with someone else instead. That's how I met nessiie, who I consider one of my first friends in the community, and later
Letova, who was a major supporter of my series and later invited me to participate in the Summer of Doom.
Together, we chopped off the evil horse ghost and just made the anomaly the barn itself. I threw in some real world touches to make it feel grounded, and cut down the wordcount to make it eligible for the Classic Con event that had just started. Then, I made one final change.
I switched the yellow plaque's text from DEPARTMENT OF ABNORMALITIES to my own username, ANIMAL HOSPITAL.
I was told it was a ballsy move by everyone who looked at my article. It made me laugh, so, I kept it. Things just spiraled from there.
I made a Discord account to put all my writing hobby stuff on called animal_hospital, (feel free to add me,) I joined 19cord, made friends, got into arguments, started drama, wrote stories, participated in events and contests. ANIMAL HOSPITAL became a series with a hub and a tag. People had opinions on my writing, and shared the things I wrote around. I became part of the community, officially. Going back to the very beginning of this segment, I made a Discord server called POST-MORTEM ANIMAL CARE for myself and my friends to plot out the rest of my series, and any other projects we decided to do.
When Crow called my writing style "Series 0", it stuck with me. It was such a perfect phrase. I started thinking about what Series 0 would look like, on the site. I took Crow's description — an alternate reality Series I — and literalized it as the basic concept. The development of Series 0 from here on out gets fuzzy. It was a time that involved deliberate discussion with a lot of different people. I know for a fact Crow, Liryn, and Ratking helped develop it the most, which is why their names are on the hub. We also credited vampirebats does not match any existing user name for helping with the wording and the format of the hub.
This is where the concept of Series 0 being "fully free" emerged from. Before we even got on the site, we were beginning to engage in our own "schizoanalysis", analyzing what the SCP Wiki meant to us, what the tone of Series I looked like, why specific decisions were made. We knew we couldn't produce a "complete" vision for Series 0 on our own, so we turned it to the public as soon as we could. I built the bones of Zerocord, which at the time was very small, with maybe only two channels. We had a rule that anyone could invite anyone at any time, which lead to a sudden flood of people joining wanting to write for our series. This lead to some clashing and misunderstandings, as many members of many different cliques all joined in at the same time, and as stressful as it was, looking back I realize it was extremely successful. People I knew, people I didn't know, people who didn't get along with my friends, people who didn't get along with me, they all joined in together.
This is exactly what I wanted.
The process began here. We started manifesting Series 0 together, filtering our ideas through each other, debating what goes where and who does what. We quickly produced a dozen different and contradictory anomalies in a quick, messy fashion, some of us inventing characters and some of us inventing new departments and technology. We had some trolls try to poison the well early on, but thankfully staff handled those folks. The "cells" of the network were beginning to formulate, with cross-pollination happening everywhere. In a brilliant move, the author Dr Katalin Bava took my character, Dr. Wrenley Wisp, and made her into a villain. I would've never thought of that characterization by myself.
Series 0 contributors felt comfortable making huge decisions with each other's characters and locations without needing to ask each other. That was amazing. It was a completely different environment from how I managed ANIMAL HOSPITAL.
As fun and easy going as it was to just have my one thing that I completely controlled, I realized that in exerting so much control over it, I was, maybe, stifling someone else's idea for what ANIMAL HOSPITAL could be?
By asking other people to contribute to my singular vision, rather than doing their own thing, was I keeping them from growing as writers themselves? Of course anyone who has contributed to ANIMAL HOSPITAL would say that they wanted to write for my singular vision, they wanted to write for my series, but it's that word, my, which bothers me.
There was an artificial threshold that I had drawn around myself, and in order to contribute to this thing I created, you had to cross the threshold. Now, the barrier to entry for ANIMAL HOSPITAL is fairly low even for a closed series, but there's still a barrier to entry.
I thought to myself, imagine if I had gone through the official process, the process the Wiki officially encourages you to go down. (As much as the Wiki also emphasizes it's optional, it is still the "official" process.) I imagined what would happen if I went about crossing these thresholds the way you're supposed to, participating in the Greenlight System, going through the forums, joining the utterly massive 19cord and diving into Deer College. Jumping through the social hoops of marketing and plugging and finding a clique. I don't know. That just seems miserable to me.
The "threshold drift", as Discord user the_h1ppie called in Zerocord, is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. My hope with Series 0 is to provide an alternative space where the thresholds are much less difficult to cross. All you need to do is prove you can find the password on the hub, and you're given all the resources you need to start creating. Reviews of the general atmosphere in Zerocord have been stellar. An author you may recognize, whenwerewe, called it "freakishly antielitist", which is an atmosphere I hope to maintain. I want to give the gift that Ratking and FLOORBOARDS gave to me to other new authors […]
This is the end of the excerpt. Now begins the post-script.
… A very saccharine place to end on, and fittingly so. I certainly want to discuss the complications around Series 0, and more broadly, my place in the community, and I do so in the completed essay. However, for a first issue, a new beginning, I think it's important to start with our gentlest foot forward.
Series 0, if you couldn't tell from the paragraphs and paragraphs above that I spent explaining it, is my love letter to SCP, to fandom, to my favorite authors, and to authors I don't know or haven't met yet. It's a celebration of what makes our fandom unique as a fandom space, what attracted me to it in the first place. I want to express my love unabashedly, and connect with others who feel that same love.
SCP can be a difficult space to operate in, sometimes. It can make you feel watched, paranoid, it can make you jump at shadows, and guess at hidden codes. But, like any fandom space, it also provides a community in a way that's incredibly accessible.
My author post on the Series 0 Hub is comprised of two words, which I chose because they surmise my entire ideology when it comes to fandom writing. Go check it out, when you have the chance.
Now, I pass the soapbox on to the rest of the talented people here at the Output, who themselves have made an incredible show out of analyzing the writing of the wiki. It's a real treat, and I hope you enjoy.
[ ( 'The Evaluations' ) ]
We here at The Output, like many other so called "publications", are big fans of writing. Reading? Not so much. But, we've been sent numerous fan communication—assuredly from a date much, much further in the future—requesting we get involved with "reading" a little earlier. So, we found a new, never before seen way to combine these two activities into one great setup: evaluations. We will be reading a variety of user submitted "articles" and harnessing that excuse to springboard our own glorious "ideals", "opinions", and "etc's". Please enjoy this section of analysis, advanced investigation, and concrete numerical decisions.
As always, we forewarn you of the ever-increasing presence of "spoils" that will crop up throughout these evaluations. We will always recommend you go and read the articles before consuming any of these pieces, much like you would read them before consuming a more typical meal.
* * *
SCP-5747 — Thank You For Flying With Us
Ever since first reading SCP-5747, I've found myself fairly enamored by the position this article was placed in by the community. It has a (frankly absurd) number of comments—151 next to just 146 upvotes (for comparison, SCP-9000 has around 170 comments with about 1000 upvotes). A cursory glance at the article certainly fails to reveal why; It's a nice shortform piece about a phenomena affecting pilots, causing them to be lauded with gifts and praise after achieving a certain, aircraft-related goal. It's pleasant, even—the experience described is certainly an enjoyable one. How could this page generate so much controversial discussion?
Well, SCP-5747 follows in SCP author syuzhet's longstanding tradition of having an in universe "author note" placed at the bottom of an article following its main text. This author note tends to tie into the textual elements of the article in some way, reinforcing its themes, expanding on its ideas, etc. This is of course present here (although more on that later), but the article chooses to do it in a particular way which has certainly seemed to frustrate a large portion of its audience. Here is the relevant excerpt:
Surely, the only way to escape this loneliness is to become addicted. So, I encourage all readers to adopt a vice today. Cigarettes and alcohol are great, but they may be illegal in your area. Anything is okay!
More on this later, of course. But I think it's important to establish this audience response before I delve any deeper into the contents of the article, since it ultimately colors the piece in a way almost unheard of for any other article on the site. Because people were mad about this. Many people took this suggestion extremely seriously and got very upset the author was including it; others seemed to believe the friend mentioned in the note was a real person who actually died. This created a flurried mix of both angry and sympathetic comments of strange tonal quality, certainly exacerbated by syuzhet's responses which were of an equally esoteric one.
Even now, comments are being made taking the suggestion of the authors note extremely seriously, pointing out the dangers of encouraging drug use and morally crusading against even the idea of addiction. This becomes really, really interesting when we begin to consider the actual contents of the article. There's a kind of purposeful parallel between the articles main content and its note. We are first introduced to these celebrated pilots—people who've flown 100's of aircraft get pulled up into the sky where numerous faceless figures cheer them on. They are then brought to a room with all of their friends and family, told they are loved, and given gifts. But the person in the authors note dies completely alone; the body is not found for weeks. The article even makes a point to mention it being a
solitary bridge where lovers cross.
This is then further emphasized when we see the author of the note themselves struggling with the event, which eventually leads them to "burying" their trauma in substance addiction. In probably the most blatant and direct through-line of the whole work, we are told that the airplane pilots have the
ability to requisition a gold-plated aircraft from any airplane manufacturer of their choosing. Subsequent testing has shown that these requests are universally honored, with little to no skepticism regarding the validity of the order.
Note specifically the line regarding the validity of the order; it certainly sounds like the type of language people use when discussing prescriptions, right? And this isn't the only time the article draws this comparison. Think back to what the pilots are actually experiencing: they get flown thousands of miles into the sky in a way which feels like a very on the nose metaphor for "getting high". Even beyond that, look at what causes the effect. It's people who've piloted tons of planes and have effectively dedicated their life to this one specific thing. What do we call that if not an addiction? I think that is, at least, the question the article wants to posit on us. This article frames flying like an addiction, and then goes on to show us a character who retreats into their own substance abuses out of unresolved trauma regarding the death of a close friend. To quote a comment from KisuMcBirdface,
You can get addicted to everything.
It's just… one kind of addiction is lauded with a 40km trip through the clouds, your idols and loved ones congratulating you, a gaudy trophy and half a million bucks for your 'commitment'.While the other kind earns you six comment pages full of ire from people not remotely affected thinking they have to fight some kind of formless brainwashing evil that destroys people without rhyme or reason.
This is, I think, the ultimate thesis of the article. It's why I spent so much time exploring the comment responses from earlier. It directly proves the articles position. The way people respond to these addictions is based on a socially conditioned understanding of what addiction really is, what it looks like, what it entails, and what it means. 10 pages of comments to pass moral judgement on another for even daring to step these bounds, to "influence" people down this path, as if someone is going to read the article and begin snorting coke the next day. People bring out kneejerk responses to it because it is, on some level, an uncomfortable suggestion. What this article says about addiction is contrary to the story of addiction society holds as a whole. This article has an answer to what addiction means and people don't like it—or worse—they didn't bother to try to understand it.
All of this is to say I think this is one of the only pieces on site that manages to be both an amazingly written article which nails its themes in of itself, but also an attached piece of compelling, theme enhancing performance art that gives the audience a direct perspective on what the article's ideas entail. I guess I can't know for certain if Syzuhet intended the article to have this effect, but I still can't help but be impressed at the fact that it manages to tie itself together like that so perfectly; in no other article are the comments of the piece itself linked so thematically to it, so ironically feeding into its conceptions and reinforcing its ideals. It remains—and will likely continue to remain as—one of my favorite (and in my opinion, one of the most transformative) art pieces on the entire site.
-Evaluation by CRAt26
* * *
SCP-9560 — Ticklish Structure.
SCP-9560 - by Animal Hospital
It’s interesting that none of the comments (as of writing this) mention the containment procedures at all. They make it immediately apparent that this is a different Foundation to the more common conception of it as a near-omnipotent, bureaucratic and authoritarian global superpower, most obviously by mentioning the lack of any sort of container and more subtly by introducing the brain monitoring without any further explanation. This second point, of course, also functions as an effective hook. I could say more, but I don’t intend on turning this into an unnecessarily drawn-out dissection of every single line – this paragraph alone is already about twice as long as the containment procedures without conveying even close to as much information as Animal Hospital packs into three short sentences.
This really hits a specific mark regarding the more classic works on the site, and that is the kind of anomaly that is simply just there. No origins written down, no backstory, not even a discovery log. It just exists and the reader is left to think about what could've possibly resulted this to come into existence. Fantastic.
ratking’s comment comes closest to describing part of what makes this article work so well for me, so instead of essentially paraphrasing it I’ve just copied over the relevant excerpt. There’s one small part I’m not sure I entirely agree with, but we’ll get back to that later.
What the weird and the eerie have in common is a preoccupation with the strange. The strange — not the horrific. The allure that the weird and the eerie possess is not captured by the idea that we “enjoy what scares us”. It has, rather, to do with a fascination for the outside, for that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience. This fascination usually involves a certain apprehension, perhaps even dread — but it would be wrong to say that the weird and the eerie are necessarily terrifying. I am not here claiming that the outside is always beneficent. There are more than enough terrors to be found there; but such terrors are not all there is to the outside.
- Mark Fisher, The Weird And The Eerie
Despite it being the first piece of writing linked on the Series 0 hub, I hadn’t actually looked at the book until I began writing this essay and so can’t really expect you to have read it either. This excerpt from the introduction is enough for me to get the point I wanted to make across. SCP-9560 is undeniably strange, and while many comments describe it as “gross”, “creepy”, “disgusting” etc., I think they miss the point or at least engage with this piece in a very different way to me. The description contains some evocative imagery, and it could just be that I’m desensitised to this sort of thing, but it felt pretty clear to me that this was not something to be afraid of. This only became increasingly apparent as I continued through the description. SCP-9560 doesn’t feel like a monster, just something that’s too weird (from our perspective) to fully understand. Something I want to understand. Fascination for the outside.
Continued brain scans indicate that SCP-9560 primarily experiences lethargy, and it does not dream.
There’s a hypothetical version of this article where the appendix doesn’t exist. This version wouldn’t be as good (and would presumably have a different title) but it would draw more attention towards what I consider to be the best single line in the piece. This strange, undulating mass of metal and fermented brain is lost, tired, and alone. Whatever it is, however it’s come to be, it’s feeling things that we’ve all experienced – almost like the article is directly confronting anyone who felt repulsed by the rest of the description. It’s a much bleaker article if it ends here, and while I did say it wouldn’t have been as good, it would still be a very solid work. But enough about this hypothetical article – the actual version clearly does continue beyond this line.
I see parts of myself in Wisp here. She wants to understand more about this life form she keeps in her lab, but not in the detached, clinical manner common in other articles. For the Foundation as an organisation (well, part of one), it doesn’t particularly matter whether or not this immobile and harmless entity is happy – but it matters to her. And I prefer to imagine that I too would want the strange cow to be happy. There’s a lot more that I could talk about here – and definitely ways I could polish what I have talked about – but that’s not what I was going for. For me, this was an article about refusing to embrace conformity – confronting the reader by forcing them to acknowledge the feelings of something presented to them as strange (or even disgusting) then following it up with an example of exactly what happens when someone does that.
There’s one small part I’m not sure I entirely agree with, but we’ll get back to that later.
- gee0765, “a few paragraphs ago”
Said small part is actually just a single word – “classic”. Yes, at first glance this (and much of series 0 in general) does seem to be similar to the older works. And I completely understand why Ratking used the word – I know them well enough to know that they don’t think Series 0 is supposed to be a return to series 1 (especially because they were involved in creating the canon). It is, however, an easy way to sneak some semi-related rambling into this.
I joined the SCP Wiki in May 2019, during series 5. Occasionally people discuss grouping up previous series based on similarities – typically with series 1 and 2 in one group, and then beyond that there’s no clear consensus. My personal groupings are 1-2, 3-4, and 5-10. That last group is notably larger than the others, isn’t it? There’s obviously been things people would consider innovations in the past seven years – new canons, new tale series, new authors, new css themes, but fundamentally the concept of what the SCP wiki is ‘supposed to be’ hasn’t really changed in the last seven years. The often-heard phrase that there ‘is no canon’ is a little misleading, though not an outright lie. I don’t think this is intentional – like, people do believe it when they explain it to confused new users. I believed it until fairly recently and still do to an extent. But there’s certain dials that people really don’t want you to mess with too much, or at all, without a good reason. The silliest example is obviously people disliking new object classes – surely, if there’s truly no canon, this would be a complete non-issue. And yet, the sentiment persists.
Anyway. The actual point. Series 0 had a slightly bumpy start for a few reasons – one being that it diverged too far from that subconscious quasi-monocanon. Clearly the bumpy start is behind us now, which finally brings me to the actual point. There’s a solid argument to be made that Series 0 is one of the largest innovations in a long time, because it explicitly rejects the monocanon. Instead of adding another branch to the SCP Universe tree, it asks what would happen if an entirely different tree had grown out of SCP-173. D-Class don’t exist, Keter doesn’t exist, Groups of Interest don’t exist. It’s a new type of canon (obviously there have been things like Unfounded but let’s be reasonable); I’m interested in seeing how it develops and if anyone else tries their hand at growing a different tree. So, while I understand the reasoning behind saying SCP-9560 feels more classic-style, it’s not a term I would personally use to describe Series 0. But that’s just pointless semantics.
Write stranger articles. Try and push boundaries – worst case scenario something gets deleted and you move on with your life. The guardrails help when you’re new to bowling but after a certain point you really shouldn’t be relying on them anymore.
-Evaluation by gee0765
* * *
New Ritual.
New Ritual. - by stormbreath
I am not sure of many things. Indecisive, at the best of times, on clothes, and meals, and opinions; generally - idling and fading from whatever impulse called them, because I am forgetful too. I have bad eyes, and so I have reason to doubt what I see. Very simply, I often see two, and this gets worse when I am tired, used up, and spent, after functions, or conversations, or too much time spent resting, too. There are small problems. I always bite my lips. My fingers too. I often miss steps on staircases (the last ones, even more so). I look down a lot. I think I missed what you said. I could go on.
I am in want of purification.
Does this mean the same to everyone? It can't - we all have different problems, but in searching for a baseline we all follow similar steps. It's good to eat and drink, preferably not too much alcohol in the process, and medications can be offered round certain corners and fancies. These tend to be the end of the trip, but can start them. Baselines are curious that way, in that the humble narrative would trick you into finding the folds of every page; the marker in which the grand adventure finally came to a close, but this doesn't track. I have never stopped living, not yet, and even then, I will not have the last word.
This is not purification. This is soup, as all the loose sentences and plot threads from across all lives bob and weave into some otherworldly linen, and as I've said and will say time and time again, this is the habit. To sort and arrange, twine and compartmentalize. We are creatures of habit, but I want closure. Not the false sense of it, which lives in an expansive-ever-expanding weave. I resent it. I want shorter sentences. I need a New Ritual.
The piece is marked by its brevity in many senses. It is informative. There is little extra, and what extra is found is what you yourself have brought along. It says here is your baggage. That change of clothes. Your refuse. Words are skipped.
The reason for this is clarity. This has been tested, verified, and so we trust. Fewer words give less space to doubt. Doubt, that has no place here, because you must keep moving forward, linearly, counting. This awakens in the form. A list is formulaic, and we follow the process. There is a promise of history, steps that have been stepped into before, carving grooves into Badlands National Park that will fill with rain if it does, but the weather is looking pretty clear. Something feels out of place in this clarity, because we know deep within our souls that something must be different this time and that nothing can go so wonderfully to plan. This is the doubt, my double vision, seeing the rain fall in the left eye and the blinding sun in the right. In this, I know I am not yet purified.
Do not smoke or drink. I do not say ever, but it's a good suggestion. I think of my eyes, and how yesterday as of writing this the sun shone blue and a face was green. The emphasis is not mine or yours, but neither is it foreign. We arrange these situations in which we forget our own senses. We talk of the freeing power, all the inhibitions we have shed, but can see that the high is secondhand in many facets. This construction, this night out; this party. We have built this night to throw it all away. We have built this ritual to drink deep of the source and free ourselves, but this is not purification. I am bound to this story. My hand sticks to the table as you paint my nails, because it would be funny if it did so, and that's the story I've told myself. I find glee in these tricks. I vomited six times the next morning. What is the box I've stepped into? Why do I only drink in company? What is this clarity that comes from the blinds so half-skewed?
We all come from away. 50 miles or more, our narrator says, and this strains the thread. Far enough, and the last person you know fades from view. Far far enough, and their story cannot hurt you, because it is yours and theirs alike in the weave, but a weave can be stretched, and the thinner it is, the easier it rips. You must cross lines. You must make barriers and break them. A circle of chalk around your feet is liberating only when you finally break it, after all. It is exhilarating to dive into the cavern. When you climb out, it's different entirely, because,
You're lost, now.
In this world of clarity and sure direction you are sightless. The guiding hand asks that you cover your eyes, and when it does not, it knows what you will look for. You must walk, but the distance is immaterial. There are places to go, and you must not find them.
It will look just like this.
As the steps progress, we lose specificity. We are losing something, but we no longer care, because we sense that the end is nearing and we are reaching purification. We understand the connotations as a nail ringing in a quiet room. We drive them into the ground with our bare feet. We have been walking for so long, and we will not stop. The cars are a temptation because they are not our guide. This is not their story. It is mine.
The destination is a church. (Of any kind, but I see it clearly. I was not brought up religious, but I have been once or twice.)
The destination is faith.
But we must lose the connotations which are so deeply encoded in this word. Faith, not by some god, not by some deified narrator (who haunts this piece, we tread in their steps) but what "feels right." Our guide has taken a back seat for a moment. We are told to look away, and collect. There is a building for us. There are candles for us. Our refuse. My sins, which only I could have brought. Only I can release them.
Say a prayer to whatever you believe in at that exact moment (not in general, but what you feel here and now.)
Do this with me now, but I will not share it. Find yourself in the Wall Drug Store chapel.
I find a cold cup of water tastes best after a horrible night of sleep, which was most relaxing in the grand scheme of things.
Your car is waiting for you. The keys are in the ignition.
You have to turn them.
It's okay to cry.
-Evaluation by IndustryStandard
[ ( 'The Opinions' ) ]
As a tragic consequence of being written by beings with "sentience" the laudable establishment of The Output must enlighten its readers to the troubling undercurrent of discussion, which in this case, are Personal Opinions.
Personal Opinions are Opinions that differ from Person to person, and are distinctly unrefined and under-researched. By this consequence, one could be compelled to "discuss them below" or even "respond to them." The collective spine of The Output editorial room shivers at the thought.
If you must "think freely" however, we suppose this can be allowed.
* * *
Why We Need To Consider The Kalinin Threshold
By CRAt26
For those who at least on the periphery keep up with the goings-on of the wiki (and more specifically 19cord), you may be aware of a sort of “crisis” we are nearing rapidly. Simply put: series 10 is filling up fast. We are only up to May and there’s already only around 400 slots left—and this has to last until June of 2027. Considering how many slots we filled in just a few months? It’s almost certainly not going to. Currently, the only fully proposed solution is simply freezing posting for months—this is clearly not viable. This of course means we are effectively stuck. It’s too early for 10kcon, and we will fill up far before that point regardless. What is to be done?
Well, I’m sure you read the title and have an idea of what I’m about to propose. I think we need to consider the Kalinin Threshold.
What is the Kalinin Threshold? For the uninitiated, it was a proposal by someone to introduce a minimum positive upvote threshold for articles to avoid deletion. Kalinin then at one point suggested a very high threshold (don't remember exactly but somewhere in the range of 40-50), leading to the name it is now known under today. A more toned down version of this idea is effectively what I am going to be arguing for in this piece.
Anyway, to continue:
I don’t think posting is going to slow down. Sure, maybe it was artificially inflated by the “shortform boom”, or the unofficial contests, but I think it is simply that the popularity of authoring on the site is increasing. It will likely continue to do so. This is not a problem we can ignore, unless we start expanding the size of series or freezing slots for a year every two years. Theres already been talks of applying a retroactive threshold where anything under 20 in past series is deleted. This of course comes with a whole load of possible things that will upset people greatly. It’s also not what I’m going to be discussing here. This piece will entirely focus on the viability, validity, and need for a future threshold.
With that said—why do we need a threshold? Well, I touched on it earlier, but, we are simply getting too many posts. Before someone accuses me of perpetuating a “lobster too buttery” situation, or tells me to just not read them, consider this: slots are a limited resource. We feasibly cannot host Kcons yearly. This is simply true. It’s not sustainable for staff, it’s not sustainable for writers, and most of all, it’s not sustainable for readers. This is arguably true of an overload of posting in general. The readers are spread more thin, which means authors as whole suffer. To be clear, the point is not to punish authors for "mediocre work". In my view, the hope is that it will push authors towards posting with patience. Authors who post a lot in quick succession will see diminishing returns. This is how it currently functions, more or less. Forcing authors to care about their articles getting attention forces them to slow things down. To work on unique ideas and good hooks and just generally trying. This is by far the most important effect it can have.
The threshold shouldn’t even be particularly large, either. My proposed suggestion—specifically and only for articles posted in SCP slots—is 10 in a week, 20 in a month, 30 in a year. To me, this reads as entirely feasible. 20 in a week is in of itself easy to pass, and 10 is effectively nothing. These are generous thresholds which will nevertheless cut a sizable portion of articles and make the amount of posts on the site significantly more manageable. Beyond that, it encourages author to pause and think before posting, which should ultimately be our goal to strive towards as a community.
* * *
No-Voting and What's 'Not For Me'
1. Voting: You may vote on any article on the site for any reason you like, as long as your reasoning is based solely on the content of the article.
I like voting on articles. I dislike not voting on articles, but I do it anyway. This is a no-vote. A concrete word for what effectively amounts to doing nothing, and many thoughts have been had about the substance of that very specific and named nothing. One such musing, Abolish The No Vote provides some clear incentive against no-voting, with a caveat, but does not dive too deep into why people no-vote in the first place. To dive deeper into that, I have some Other Musings too.
If it robs us of our voice, why do we no-vote?
Theoretically, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to no-vote on pages. Feeling torn between the good and the bad is understandable. It's counter-intuitive to downvote when there are redeemable aspects to a piece.
The most intuitive reason to no-vote, and one specifically detailed within Abolish the Novote, is doing so because you had mixed feelings on the thing you just read. Nobody (with some historical exceptions) has a scorecard, or rubric, on standby for each and every article they read. Instead, having just spent 10 minutes or so reading any odd article, one has a cluttered mix of wonderful and imbalanced feelings storming about, like say: I liked the tone of the containment procedures, I thought the ending line fell very flat, The description made a very evocative image, It was cliché, so on and so forth. One can imagine, and it is often so, that these feelings can weigh strong enough on one side or another to make you upvote or downvote. When this doesn't happen, however, many resort to frameworks to rationalize the choice, or lack of choice, that follows.
A common logical framework for upvoting is that you are "voting" on if an article deserves to be on the website. For a user with this framework in mind, a downvote can be very strong a gesture - saying that you think that someone's work is either too bad, incomplete, or ill-thought, among other reasons, to continue to exist as it is. This is further complicated by the website being a community. People have relationships, people anticipate forming new relationships, and so don't want to send and sort of signal to the contrary. (Watch now, momentarily, as I gaze longingly at the excerpt from the site rules at the top of this short essay.) Given the presumed amount of effort that goes into articles nowadays, making such a statement (to the degree to which clicking a single button can be a statement) becomes a daunting weight in the mind of this voter. Quickly, we see the margin of the no-vote growing to encompass not sending this potentially harsh message. Instead, softened to "I did not think your article should be removed, I simply had no strong feelings about it" (and keeping my gaze, we see there is nothing unlawful about not voting on something in the first place.) Upvoting, on the other hand, gains an opposite pressure within this context. To upvote in this framework, you stake a claim that this type of thing is (with capital letters) What You Want To See on the website. I would guess that there are fewer folks who dogmatically tie themselves to this end of the framework, after all, it feels less bad to say you like something than dislike something, and with that there is even more complicated subtext bundled in.
What if it just isn't that serious though?
A second framework for upvoting or downvoting is "if I liked reading it or not." This is a much more common way to go about voting, because, dreadfully, sometimes people just uncomplicatedly like (or dislike) things. The trouble arises when one tries to think of an "uncomplicated" no-vote. Did reading it evoke nothing in you? Is that worth a no-vote? Did you just not get it?
This questioning process, I would believe, is what leads to many no-votes. Not necessarily a true neutral opinion on something, but making the (reasonable) decision that mulling over the calculus of caring more about this thing you just read is not worth your time. You read it, were unimpressed, but not necessarily de-pressed, so you just clicked off. Wonderful!
You may notice a strange shadowy figure is standing in the corner, watching intently. Must we address the elephant in the room: Dreaded pit of despair; The Discussion Page? Suddenly, we have discovered an axis in which a no-vote can matter: By showing off your thoughts for all to see! This is another possibility pointed out by Abolishing the Novote, and is encouraged.
But why?
We can take interfacing with a discussion in two ways: 1) Conversation with the author, 2) Conversation with other readers.
In the first case, we take any one no-vote comment as a critique intended to help the author make the article better. It will point out the good and the bad, present the balance which has been maintained that informs the no-vote, and that while it was not quite good enough to get an upvote this time around - with some changes - it could get there one day!
Articles on this site are living documents to some degree, so its not absurd to follow an article through multiple iterations within one instance of it being posted, with the critic leaving space within their heart to change their vote at a later date. The question is - is there a meaningful difference in this interaction between leaving a no-vote and a downvote? One may fear that their downvote is leading to the article being deleted, but this line of thought pre-supposes that the critic already believes there are ways to improve the article significantly enough to be worth following. The natural process, then, would for the not-quite-up-to-spec article to get enough downvotes to get deleted, (or for it to remain stagnant enough for the author to self-delete) implement the significant changes outlined by the critique from the discussion page, repost, and then chance the gauntlet one more time.
In the second case, we reach a strange wrinkle. It is good and wonderful to talk about media, but the equally wonderful rule at the top of this essay (oft cited) tells us we must only vote based on the content of the page. Respectful to any discussion of voting patterns, then, one must presume I have nothing to say on the matter. After all, even though I did not understand the intricacies of this article I just read when I read it the first time through, now that I have read the discussion page, I feel emboldened to actually vote! Am I breaking the rules, or am I simply viewing the content of the article with new eyes? Tough to say! Next question!
-but that is the heart of it, because if you view the discussion page as a place for reader discussion rather than authorial critique, the creation of a no-vote comment is expressly a tool to defer your own opinion to others, and to express thoughts in a way that will guide others to either upvote or downvote - now enlightened to the issues and boons you've pointed out.
These points are not to say I dislike or disavow the discussion page, in fact, I personally adore getting any sort of meaningful comment (be it positive, negative, or "neutral") on any of my works. I simply want to point out a facet that I see as fraught within the oft touted paradigm of the no-vote comment. I could continue, but we have lingered too long on the figure in the corner.
Why else do people no-vote?
It's an abstract framing of the question, but the true most common reason people no-vote is because they didn't read an article at all. Maybe they started and didn't finish it, maybe they clicked on and didn't like how it looked, or maybe they just didn't click on it at all. This brings up the complicated and multifaceted issue of "how do people even find articles to read in the first place" and while I can't comprehensively tackle that question, I can continue to have "some thoughts" about it.
The first is, obviously, the wonderful Discord Bot and API website thing (I'm tech illiterate don't mind me) that is CROM. CROM has a few functions that allow for seamless interfacing between the wiki, official discord, and anywhere else discord-side you allow the bird into. One such feature is the "/search" command, which allows you to search for any article, tale, or whatever on the wiki, and bring it up with its title (number too, if it's an SCP), a short blurb (if the author included one for CROM to grab), the author's username (which links to their author page if they have one), the object class (if tagged with one that CROM respects), the total rating (with an upvote to downvote percentage when controversial), AND the first image on the page that CROM is able to grab.
As the official discord (and adjacent discord spaces; I cannot speak for what IRC used in the past) evolve in tandem with CROM, these elements that CROM highlights become increasingly important for the clickthrough rate of an article. Do you click because something has a flashy title? Do you click because you know you like the author's work? Do you, as an author, tailor these elements to most encourage a user who sees them all together to engage? Now isn't that a foreboding question. Search engine optimization. In my poop statue fanfiction website?
Another person with thoughts could dive deeper into that, but I'm more concerned about the cases where people don't click through, and therefore, no-vote. Consider the inverse of these situations: You think a title is obnoxious or boring, so you don't even click on the page; you did not like this author's work in the past, so you didn't even click on the page; you saw that the page wasn't highly voted, so you didn't click on the page. Many of these decision points only emerge in a post-CROM wiki, and represent a meaningful departure from discovery purely within the website.
While in isolation, the elements highlighted by the "/search" command may not be incredibly impactful, they become dramatically more-so when using the "/latest" command. When used, "/latest" opens an interface showing 5 most recent (and positively rated, with exceptions for very recently posted articles) in a slightly compressed version of what "/search" shows - going without the images (and class tags), but adding how long ago each article was posted. Due to a combined desire to stay up-to-date with the site and read stuff that is high quality, users are significantly more receptive to perceived trends in the statistics they are presented by "/latest". Most often, this manifests in seeing that an article is highly voted in a short amount of time, and deciding to read it too. This, once again, has an opposite effect for an article that does not get much traction early on (and this can be for any number of reasons; most commonly, not having name recognition to get the ball rolling), and gems can easily get buried in the deluge of posting the modern wiki faces (with the caveat that, sometimes - and more often than not - an article isn't a gem, and does bad because it's not very good, which is why newer authors get less reads in the first place; high risk time investment.) While it is easy to react strongly to this phenomenon, there is a degree to which it is just the concretization of more historically subtle community dynamics, because as stated before, this is a community in addition to being a writing site. People read stuff by people they know, and that is both unavoidable, and a feature (with the caveat that hopefully, while one reads stuff by people one knows slightly more, one still reads stuff by people they don't, some.)
The fact detailed in short above can be expanded in scope to what I call "Enclaves" within the site. Enclaves are simply groups of users who read a disproportionately higher number of articles by other users within the same Enclave. These can be soft enclaves in the form of social circles, but they can also be strong Enclaves in the form of delineated spaces and settings. For some examples, and in a loose sense, one could be a part of the 19cord (a nickname for the official discord) soft enclave due to only reading articles which are linked at some point within 19cord, and more often reading articles from people you recognize from within the discord. You could also be part of the Series 0 hard enclave if you only read articles that fit within that canon, with the same going for all canons and sub-communities. Inversely, if I decide that a certain setting is not for me, I am opting into no-voting on a huge swarth of articles. These are articles that are "Not For Me."
And this is natural. The SCP wiki is a massive website, with tons of differently inspired individuals simultaneously creating, collaborating, and most importantly, contributing. No user is obligated to read everything, but if we remain unaware of our own patterns of voting and engagement, it is easy to limit the articles we read both unconsciously and to our own detriment of enjoyment. With that, I speak a plea to all that may hear it - read something today you wouldn't have thought twice about clicking yesterday. Leave a long and exhaustive comment based on the strongest opinion you felt about it (and be nice about it, duh, even if you didn't end up liking it) and most importantly - do not no-vote on it.
With all of this in mind, no-voting (in its many senses) in not only a matter of quality, but also of specific community-minded interactions that occur both on the personal and social level. It is a choice with many levers and weights, but most often, a choice that isn't being made at all.
[ ( 'The Entertainment' ) ]
After sustained contact with various organizations, we here at The Output have decided to "sell out" and include some more forms of "enjoyable" content for our vast, vast, audience. We have prepared a collection of games for your playing pleasure.
We implore you to post your results in the comments below! Who knows, someone may even get a chance to put their own advertisements in next weeks* paper…1
* * *
Crossword
You might need to export this one into another program; heres a handy link!
ACROSS:
1A. Mr. Crouch and Mr. _ _ _ _
4A. Typewriter noise frequently heard in The Output office
5A. A full one of these is at the end of every Series 0 titleDOWN:
1D. The type of supervisor you should report scraping stone sounds to, according to SCP-173
2D. What you might apply to The Easter Rabbit's Eggs?
3D. A quicker way to say SCP
* * *
Matcher
The object of this game is fairly simple; match the article excerpt to the articles tags. You will be presented a series of 4 excerpts and 4 sets of 4 tags from the respective articles. Redactions may be employed to remove identifying information. Figure it out! We implore you to post your guess in the articles comments, or at least on a telephone pole somewhere within your local area code. We will find it.
Answers will be revealed next week*, so stay tuned!
Excerpts:
1.
He said he was curious to try apples but was unsure about making such a drastic financial commitment during the current period of judicial and financial instability caused by the great condensed milk storm of 1986. Ain't that something?
[████ seizes and enters cardiac arrest.]
2.
Individuals who claim to have been harmed or killed by ████ remain adamant about their experience, despite exhibiting no visible physical trauma and being demonstrably alive at the time of reporting. Attempts to convince them otherwise have universally failed.
3.
despite multiple instances of subjects acknowledging the entity's presence via eye contact, adjusting posture to reciprocate or facilitate the entity's touch, breaking into tears when noticing its presence, or verbally thanking the entity when ████ █ ████.
4.
Personnel assigned to work in an area where ████ is in use do not appear alarmed by ████ incorporeal nature or sudden appearance, stating that ████ “████” Due to local personnel’s reluctance to remove the plaque, or inability to remember to remove the plaque, removal is to be scheduled and performed by off-site personnel.
Tags:
1.
food, hallucination, keter, concept
2.
Series 0, Predatory, Worm, Alive.
3.
intangible, memory-affecting, safe, intangible
4.
Bittersweet, teleportation, observational, humanoid
* * *
* * *
And with that, it seems our time together has come to a quick yet indecisive end. (More accurately, we have ran out of money to keep relocating every time someone finds us writing this.) Furthermore, the legal department is telling me none of you people, non-people, and something-in-betweens signed the waiver. We take great personal offense to this, mind-you, and humbly request once more that you bind yourself to our cause.
As you're still around -and more importantly- still standing (or sitting, if you prefer. If you're laying down, don't bother.) Then we appreciate your help in funding next months paper. Your attention is all we crave, and hope that with that, you will not notice as all fades to background noise in the face of our humble monolith.
You have been reading The Output. Stay alert for our next issue, which will increment upward in more ways than one. One, specifically. Zero Zero One, which there is not just one of, but many, much like The Output. Which has always existed, and always will. But must momentarily recede.
Ever be troubled by,
The Output
P.S. Your Input is important to us and so we humbly invite critique, acclamations, and all other forms of engagement within the nebulous realm known as the "Discussion Page" below.
[ ( ' Finit Infinitum ' ) ]