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I don’t know the truth
I don’t know the way
I don’t know what to think
I don’t know what to sayBut that’s alright
Yeah, that’s OK
I don’t know anythingAndrew W.K., I Don't Know Anything
Senselessness is the best defense against dangerous nonsense.
Thanks to The Great Hippo,
A Random Day, and
fieldstone for feedback at various stages of the writing process.
The expungements had me concerned at first, but this turned out to be absolutely phenomenal. The page content makes perfect sense in context. The whole thing makes perfect sense in context, even when it's delightfully nonsensical. It's an exceptional execution of an SCP-001 concept that's been staring us in the face for years, yet is only now coming to the surface.
Seriously. This is so, so good. I love everything about this. Brilliant, brilliant.
EDIT: A number of people on chat were scratching their heads at this one, so here's my take on it (though I feel like it's pretty much confirmed by a couple of the endings).
It's written from the perspective of someone who tried to access the SCP-001 files without having clearance, and was subsequently affected by the Berryman-Langford memetic kill agent that the hub page threatens you with. Almost the entire article is their perception of what happens after the cognitohazard takes hold; the only exception is the ending where the employee's body is discovered at their desk.
I KNEW IT! I Knew it was about the kill agent! Seriously though, it surprises me that no one thought to do this before.
Spoilers collapsed. ~Zyn
"Oh Lazarus, how did your debts get paid?"
Can you please collapse this comment? PeppersGhost collapsed it because it's a spoiler.
Okay, I've had two go throughs, but I'm going to have to leave it there for the moment, otherwise I'll be here all night.
This is great. +1 and I'm kind of surprised no one did owt like this before…
It is massively annoying to have to click through 30-something pages to check out a different path.
Agreed. Although I love this, the format screw gets in the way of reading it at points.
Problem should be completely fixed! Sorry for the inconvenience, and please let me know if my fixing has created any new issues. My tests have been fine, but I didn't notice the back button on the browser not working in the first place.
This is crazy, Pedantique. Straight crazy. I love it.
Did anyone else get JavaScript errors when clicking on certain page links?
As above, I managed to break the ending link at each section that was supposed to redirect back to the proposal page on this site. I've removed the links, and you can safely back out of them to branch points.
After lots of frenzied file changing after adding the undo button, I think everything should be fine now.
I don't know how to feel about this article. It's well written and done in a decent format. I'm just unsure of how to feel about it.
Take my +1 until further notice.
Doctor North was here. Just don't let South know, or East….never tell East.
You know, I've written a bunch of these at this point. I've read as many more, critiqued those that never got published, and sat and listened while people with hopeful aspirations ran themselves in circles over what exactly they could do to make their proposal special. They all want to make it special.
Because why wouldn't they? Most people write a single 001 Proposal, and that's their opportunity to share their view of the Foundation, of the universe, of everything that makes SCP-001 unique and try to justify their ideas. This is a monumentally difficult feat for anyone, but it's made harder every time somebody publishes another proposal.
But you didn't do that, did you? You didn't do that, because you figured out something that the dozens of people who have tried and failed to do this before didn't understand. You didn't try to be too clever, you didn't try to think yourself around it. You didn't do any of those things, because you realized that the story worth telling wasn't even about SCP-001 at all.
There's something frustrating about this in a way that I haven't felt before. I've done this four times before, and each time I felt like I was trying to one-up myself, and everyone who has come before me. I am more than pleased with my accomplishments, and thrilled to death with the results of my efforts, but those efforts came at a cost and only after the anguish of trying to be too goddamn clever. Then here you come, with this thing you've done, and you do something that nobody has ever done before - write a proposal that isn't about SCP-001.
I wish I'd thought of it first, you clever fuck.
I'm pretty sure Kate McTiriss's proposal did it first.
Except that proposal is about SCP-001, which is an anomaly that causes reality to warp around whatever is described in that slot. This article isn't about SCP-001 at all.
It still isn't really "about" SCP-001 (the record) though. It comes up and kicks off the events of the story but the actual anomaly that most of it focused on (the SCP-001 slot) isn't SCP-001, just where information about it is recorded. Plus reality warping.
It still isn't really "about" SCP-001 (the record) though. It comes up and kicks off the events of the story but the actual anomaly that most of it focused on (the SCP-001 slot) isn't SCP-001, just where information about it is recorded. Plus reality warping.
This is an objectively wrong reading of Kate McTiriss's Proposal. The 001 slot is the actual SCP-001 in Kate McTiriss's Proposal. I would strongly recommend rereading the description of that article, given that it is entirely focused upon the actual anomaly it focuses around, designates the actual anomaly as SCP-001, and the Containment Procedures even call out Exploring New Sounds in Stereo as NOT being the current 001.
It's mildly obfuscated by the mild format screw, but that's entirely justified by the nature of SCP-001.
Kate McTiriss's Proposal is the exact opposite of an SCP-001 that isn't about SCP-001.
It is in fact, plainly, the proposal that is most about SCP-001.
No signature defined.
This feels almost exactly like the worst acid trip I ever had. So good job for that. You've done an excellent job of capturing the sheer fucking terror of being trapped in an eternal, repeating moment that you'll never be able to escape or comprehend.
EDIT: After realizing what berryman and langford is, this might be my new favorite 001 proposal.
"what berryman and langford is"
you mean, something other than an allusion to david langford and his stories about cognitivist vernon berryman?
Wait, does this have an associated canon?
Had a bad-trip when visuals started coming in while I was seeing recursive graphs and maps like the kill agent and thought I was gonna die. Sounds like fun to read more about.
Someone posted this on reddit: https://ansible.uk/writing/t3_002.html
It's from 1999, notice the line: "I'm about to display the Langford Mind-Erasing Fractal Basilisk …"
I'm guessing the memetic kill agent on the hub page was inspired by that. Pretty neat.
See Voct's comment mostly, though I haven't actually read the fiction that the kill agent's name refers to.
With regards to canon, everything I write resides in the Pedantcanon. It's unifying factor is that it's things I write. See here.
