Pythy's Personal Page

After about 12 years on the site, and about 10 on this account, I now have an author page! Wow! Thank you to everyone who's reviewed or read my pieces, and to the wonderful community on this site.

My user avatar: the Crab Nebula, the remnant of a supernova which occurred in the year 1054. Image in the public domain, courtesy of NASA and ESA's Hubble Space Telescope, the Space Telescope Science Institute, and Allison Loll and Jeff Hester of Arizona State University. Found on Wikipedia.

My pages

Clunk - 8/21/23

Commentary

This is a tale about SCP-087, The Stairwell, written from the perspective of a person being made to walk down the stairs. I wrote it as part of Remixcon2023.

I wrote the character to be aware of what awaited them. Knowing that the crying girl couldn't be reached, knowing about the face in the darkness. And still terrified.

That being said, I didn't do the greatest job of writing it. The ending in particular, where the face appears and the character is terrified and runs, just kind of falls flat. I may try and rewrite it at some point after the contest is over. It might be downvoted, and I might need to delete this author page as a result. It's all part of the learning process.

SCP-7885, Drifting Peace - 8/8/23

Commentary

The SCP is intended to change how we thing about undead beings. Yes, she's alive past her death. Yes, she's animated by a force she does not understand, and send to wander towards an unknown location for unknown reasons. And yes, her body is falling apart.

But it's peaceful, to live through the end. To be parted from this mortal coil but still able to reflect. It's not heaven, not a blessing to strive for. It's not hell, not a curse to avoid. It's just the slow process of ceasing to be.

The piece tries to explore the way so much of our lives are shaped around "I have to do this, so a bad thing won't happen." What if there were no more bad things left?

SCP-5772, A Counterexample - 5/1/20

Commentary

I wrote this SCP because I read several blog posts and papers written about the Navier-Stokes equation by Terry Tao, a top-flight mathematician and a very clear communicator. In one post and paper in particular, Terry constructs a variant of the Navier-Stokes equation which actually has solutions which blow up in finite time. In other words, if a fluid really did work according to this variant physical equation, energy would be concentrated arbitrarily densely in a finite period of time, until the physical model ceased to accurately model reality.

In this SCP, I tried to imagine what that scenario would look like, if it could actually happen in the real world. I definitely took that scenario in the most exciting and evocative direction, rather than the most realistic direction.

I was reminded of a quote to the effect that humanity is very lucky that nuclear bombs are incredibly difficult to create, requiring an extremely slow and/or expensive process to purify the necessary material. If we weren't that lucky, wars would look much, much worse. This piece asks the question: "What if humanity isn't lucky - what if humanity just hasn't yet discovered how unlucky it is?"

Other notes

I also contributed to the idea behind SCP-2885. My original version wasn't great, and it was downvoted and deleted. It was then rewritten into the version up today by Zyn. I'm really honored that Zyn rewrote my piece into this excellent SCP, and really glad that some version of my idea persists today. Note that when I wrote my version, my account name was Dax_Symbiont. You can read my original version if you're interested.