My take on the situations we all get stuck in.
Thanks to A Random Day, kola, Snarky Potato, and TwistedGears for their review in chat!
SCP-2459 / Discussion
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This is the discussion related to the wiki page SCP-2459.
What the fuck? Is this why traffic is terrible in big cities? Is this what you people in Not-New Mexico do when you're on the road?
Seriously, traffic jams are a foreign concept to me. I upvoted this because, to me, this is on 1193 and 2211's level of weird.
This gets exhausting for me to read, majorly.
I'm one of those people who can't focus on reading if there's no shifts in the way text is presented, and lose my place fairly quickly. As it is, from the description to the interview (more specifically, from the history of the anomaly to the interview), it reads as one giant wall of text and is unappealing and hard for me to get through. I dunno what you'd wanna do to make it not just look like words, but something!1
Other notes: this seems like it'd be Keter, because the problem wouldn't just be unpredictable if you leave it alone. That's not to say it'd "break out of containment", but you have a mass group of individuals living in this cramped and tight space full of vehicles, people of all sorts, and an anomaly who's range is not only fairly big, but also unpredictable in of itself. It might just decide to grow on its own in the future, and there's no concrete way to make sure that's not the case. It might be an edge case between Euclid and Keter, but it really seems Keter to me.
The writing style changes starting at "MTF Phi-4 completed securing perimeter on 14 May 2015." which reads weirdly when you transition from full sentences to this, in the same section no less. If you wanna keep it in the description, try changing the writing. Or put it in a new section like this.
I don't know how much the interviews add. The second one is more interesting than the first, and the third one already states stuff that the first one hints at. However, they weren't interesting until the third one, where some of the logic unfolded but it was played fairly straight for the absurdity it tried to present.
Footnotes
1. This opinion is most likely going to be in the minority.
I have some thoughts on how to organize the chronology more prettily, but I'm going to sleep on it. Hopefully that will help.
What is the vector of infection? Why not just block that? This is what's keeping me from upvoting, right now it is reading an awful lot like a memetic "aura". :(
Also, do Urdu speakers not have a "God willing", like Arabic Muslims? Or do they not use it as frequently as Arabic speakers say inshalla?
The blackboxes don't seem to cover any city in Pakistan that is large enough to have this much traffic, but I could be wrong.
Cognitohazard or memetic? It was a real gray area for me. Certainly, the initial disorientation that happens when someone steps onto the roadway is a locational cognitohazard. However, the society that the road people developed is memetic in nature, and ends up supporting the conclusion that it's best not to leave until the traffic clears. I could spend more time dissecting the nature of the anomaly into its cognitohazardous and memetic components, but I thought that would get in the way of the story. I did ask in chat, is this cognitohazardous or memetic? More people said memetic than cognitohazardous, but yes, it's not cut and dried one or the other.
The Pakistanis I know don't say "God willing" with any frequency, so I thought it wouldn't be correct. I'll admit I'm less familiar with Sindhi language markers, so I thought it best not to guess.
The black boxes originally were for New Ordos, as an earlier draft placed the anomaly in China. Originally, this was why New Ordos is empty; it's not that no one moved in, it's that they're all stuck in traffic. But, yes, this was moved to Sindh Province in Pakistan for MrWrong's map challenge, so let's say it's in the town of Bin Qasim.
If it is memetic and the vector is talking to affected persons why don't rescuers just wear earplugs and avoid conversation?
I feel like the mechanics of the effect need to be explained better.
ETA: On reflection, I feel I need to give this my most reluctant downvote yet. I really like this, but I find that the effect is either too incompletely or too incorrectly described and that the Foundation would definitely want to identify the source better and deploy countermeasures. This hole is so conspicuous that I can't ignore it, despite the overall excellence of this article. :(
The vector of infection is just being in the area. That's all there is. I thought that was explained simply enough.
That doesn't make any sense though, being in an area has no inherent memetic content. Location isn't information. Information about a location is, but merely "You are at such and such a place" seems to be too sparse a message to be a carrier for "and you can't leave it without loss of personal property or social status".
Even if that is the carrier, why don't you just not tell the rescue team where they are (a blind drop) and instruct them to avoid reading locational signage or discussing location with the locals? Sending rescuers who aren't fluent in Urdu would avoid all vectors.
It doesn't have to be memetic. That's not necessarily how it works, or how it has to work. It's a phenomenon that just happens because it does and because it can, and it's not bound by specific rules, even anomalous rules. That's why it's so strange and so weird.
SCP-2459 is a memetic hazard
As I said it is either incorrectly or incompletely described. If it is not a memetic hazard, the quoted statement is incorrect. If it is a memetic hazard, there is a vector and therefore hard countermeasures.
Maybe you can help me, then.
- It's not propagated by signage.
- It's not propagated by knowledge of your location.
- It's not propagated by language.
However,
- It is propagated by location.
- It is propagated by societal engagement.
- It facilitates a consensus agreement about values.
What would you call it?
Locational cognitive hazard?
"SCP-2459 is a cognitive hazard affecting an area of four intersections within Bin Qasim, Pakistan. Any person who enters the zone of effect spontaneously generates a complex memetic system representing a consistent set of values which then are refined into a consensus via social contact. Affected persons are convinced that leaving the zone is not an option, typically for reasons relating to social standing and protection of property rights. The primary result of this hazard is a large traffic jam that extends throughout the city blocks in the zone of effect."
Petrol, society, a deadlock situation, reflections on middle east?
Yeah, no reflections on the Middle East. Or South Asia, really. I originally had placed this in China, but as Myriad points out below, this could have happened anywhere.
I like the development of the piece, since most discovery process for SCPs warrant a simple mention. In this case, it is developed as a story element. Furthermore, I enjoy the weirdness of it and fairly creeped out by it.
Overall, an upvote is deserved and I acknowledge you to have passed my challenge.
Honestly, I feel like the article is missing a chunk. This is about an effect targeted specifically at a very high population area that just showed up one day.
There should be at least something dealing with trying to figure out why it happened, whether it's an isolated incident, and how to keep it from happening it again if it might not be an isolated incident. I mean, Karachi (it doesn't fit the name I know, but that's where the pic is from) is bad enough, but what happens if this shows up in New York or Shanghai?
Unless it does happen again, there's nothing to figure out yet, any more than we're likely to figure out where SCP-270 came from or how the sound stage in SCP-024 came to host the Game Show of Death. All we can do at this point is try to figure out how to rescue the civilians caught here, and hope that if the number drops below a certain point the anomaly will cease to be.
I think a possible improvement could come from putting the days as separate events, bolded perhaps. It might make it easier to read.
As for the story and such, I enjoyed it, and it gets a +1 from me.
Very odd.
I half expected it to be a -J, some kind of commentary about economics or such. But it feels like there's something missing and the article doesn't feel complete at all.
/forum/t-1412502/scp-2459#post-
page revision: 3, last edited: 22 Sep 2018 03:57
