 Hello, and welcome to Harsh Critique. Today we're going to go over the draft I created for the video on Tuesday. Just an update on that when I was recording that video, the SCP was up to plus six. It was only like an hour after I'd posted it. After I think it was 12 hours, it dropped down into the negatives, and I decided after taking a bit of a nap, actually more than just a nap I hadn't slept for quite some time at that point. But after waking up, I decided to take it down and decide on whether or not I wanted to work on it some more, because I was not satisfied with it. So given that, I thought it would be a really good idea to go over it in a Harsh Critique video. And here's the thing, normally I would do like I did my very first Harsh Critique, where I critiqued one of my own works and acted like it was somebody else's and treated it, you know, mean and all those things, but I can't really do that here, not honestly. I mean, I can't even do the play thing where I'm pretend, because you know, and I know this was written by me, but I think I can still be pretty harsh with a Harsh Critique of myself, probably more than anything else. So let's get started. First of all, as if you number, I'm gonna, we're gonna go with xxxx now, because it's no longer actually up on the wiki, so it doesn't have a number. Special Containment Procedures. Should the SCP, at any point, discover its capacity for self-propelled flight, it is to be recaptured and administered Class C amnestics before being released back into the general population. An interview should be conducted to determine how this information became known to the object. Also, this was in the original first bit. Right here, there's a problem with the English. The SCP is to be given a lifetime supply of pizza deliveries, no word in between, local spicy crust pizzeria. So that's, I accidentally deword there, which is the kind of thing that you could probably notice if you just read it through once after you're finished with it. But it was in such a hurry to post it, that's what you get for trying to do everything in like an hour and a half. Sometimes it works. I've done that before and it's worked perfectly well, but every once in a while. And here we go. This line here, I thought about it later and was like, I'm not entirely a fan of it. SCPXXX is to be made to believe this was a result of winning a radio call-in contest. So right from the top. The first paragraph is fine, but this sentence here is where it starts to fall apart for me, because it doesn't feel quite right. Is to be made to believe is such an awkward phrasing and then the clinical tone kind of goes out the window, not entirely, but the clinical tone suffers a bit because this was a result of winning a radio call-in contest. Now, I don't need to say any of these things. We don't need to explain how it is explained to the object how he has this free pizza. He just wants some free pizza. Leave it alone. Don't be stupid. SCPXXX is to be granted disability compensation by the US federal government due to several back injuries. This cover story should be reinforced whenever possible, and the SCP should be discouraged by reasonable means from seeking to lose weight. So that parenthetical there, originally it was by any means necessary. I changed it to by reasonable means. I actually mentioned this in the last video I did, but after thinking about it, that whole parenthetical doesn't need to be there. Could just be, should be discouraged from seeking to lose weight. You don't need to put by reasonable means. That's assumed already. And prior to that, this cover story should be reinforced whenever possible. Is it a cover story or is it actual reality? Is getting a disability compensation or is he just being told that he's getting one? It's a little unclear. That is not great. Should SCPXX's weight fall below 150 kilograms, entity has to be remanded to foundation custody and its containment procedures re-evaluated. So again, this is a bit of a problem because it's like, what are we doing here? I've created a world, or created in this particular head canon, in this articles canon I should say, a program. And it's mentioned near the end, and not at the beginning because that's just how SCPs are generally structured, but it could have been mentioned up here. There could be information about the project containment at large, which is the name of the actual project that allows us to take, like say, this guy who can fly, but he can't fly if he's fat. So if he's fat, he's just a regular guy, he's a little lighter on his feet every once in a while. So you can let that man be out in the wild without putting him in the box. But if you're going to do that, that is a deviation from the norm, and you need to address that, you can't just assume that your reader knows what you're thinking when you wrote it. And that is a big problem with this SCP. SCPXXX is a human male that is 57 years old, 176 meters, 176 meters, that would be great, 176 centimeters tall, and weighs approximately 188 kilograms. SCPXXX is capable of projecting a telekinetic lifting force on itself. Now, here's a question that somebody asked me in Discord, and I didn't have an answer for it. How do they know it's a telekinetic lifting force? Think about that. Of course, he can generate a lifting force, but we have no idea how he generates it, right? But how do we know that it's a telekinetic? We list it as telekinetic. And at no point is there any testing done on this, or at least if they should say there's no testing shown in the article, which if you say a thing like that, you need to back it up somehow. And also this next sentence, this extends only to SCPXXX's own body and the entity has shown no capacity to lift other objects. This is a problem because, okay, I say this about other people's drafts sometimes, and I would be remiss if I didn't mention it for when I make the same mistake. Every once in a while, people want to talk, people in their mind, they think that the anomalous is normal, and so they need to explain that what isn't anomalous about a thing. You don't. Like, I think I've used this example before, but if you have a book whose cover is made of living human skin, you don't then need to say, but the pages are normal. At least not in a clinical document. Now, in normal human conversation, you might want to say that just to be sure that people are clear on it. But in this clinical document, there's no reason to say that. So in this case, if I say it's a telekinetic lifting force on itself, that should be the end of it. I don't need to say, also when I say, on itself, this means it extends only to its own body, and the entity has shown no capacity to lift other objects. I already said that when I said, on itself, there's no reason to assume that it could do anything else. Unless I say so. And finally, the entity's speed of movement while utilizing this lifting force is inversely affected by its weight. That sentence is fine. I like that sentence. I like that sentence. I will keep that sentence. At a weight of approximately 73 kilograms, the entity is capable of traveling 4.7 meters per second's capacity for self-directed flight. Oh, self-direct flight. Not self-directed flight, but self-direct flight. I only just now noticed this problem. There's some of this other stuff I've thought about for a little while, but that one I only just now noticed is completely eliminated. That's not a great phrasing. It had approximately 103 kilograms of weight. See, the phrasing there is a little wonky. Any further weight beyond 103 must be supported physically. Not physically, physical. God, you can tell that I wrote this when I was working on NoSleep. I hadn't slept for like 23 hours and I was trying to bang it out in like an hour or 20 minutes. Jesus Christ. I mean, to be fair, I'm not saying that the video I did was bad for the purpose that I created. I'm saying that this article doesn't work. It's not good enough. It needs more polish. It like, because what I was showing you was my writing process, which is still a valid thing that you need, you know, you can look at and you can learn from. And I'll probably do more videos like that. But goddamn, this could have used more polish before it went up on the wiki. And in fact, probably could have used an entire rework because I have some structural issues we're going to talk about in a little bit. SVXXX suffers from sleep apnea, type two diabetes, heart disease and back injuries as a result of its obesity. These injuries, these injuries, that's bad. That's not good phrasing because we listed sleep apnea, type two diabetes and heart disease. The final one, yes, is back injuries. And then when we say these injuries, we're referring to the back injuries. But the way that sentence is structured could be better because these injuries ignores the sleep apnea type two diabetes and heart disease. Are you saying that his heart disease and type two diabetes don't require continued medical attention? Come on, man. And allow foundation staff to monitor his weight on a regular basis. I don't think that last sentence is actually valid. I think that's telling the audience something when you could be showing them. If you want to do that, you could show incidents like because we have the least incident reports, right? Why don't you show him showing up at a doctor's office and getting like, oh man, that's another thing I need to talk about a little bit, a little bit. We're going to go over the rest of the actual article pages first, rather than the stuff that I would like to include. SVXX was founded and developed an all of this, the various incidents things here, like it's this guy starts watching the biggest loser. He starts reading on articles on the internet about losing about people who've lost weight and their lives are either better or worse, whatever. And then there's the solutions. I like the format for this, by the way, this is actually I really enjoy the way this is formatted. I think I'm probably going to use this and something else at some later point. But the content misses for me. And here's why. You've created a character or I shouldn't say you. This is me. I've created a character. I'm making it like it's somebody else's problem, somebody else's mistakes. I created a character here, but I haven't connected the audience to them, right? And there was a line I kept wanting to include something along the lines of SVXXXX's personable and friendly and the foundation is working on rectifying that problem, which as a line is great, but there was nowhere I could fit it in. I think that would have really helped a little bit in that vein. But you need to talk to this guy or at least see him talking to somebody else, I should say, there needs to be an interview. Like if you're going to build this character up and you're going to try and show that the foundation is more cruel when they're trying to not be cruel, which is the whole point of this, then you need to show me the character who's suffering, right? You can't just list off a suffering in a bulleted list. Yes, that's how the SEP format works, but you can still work around how the format will do the interview logs, talk to him, show him dealing with certain issues, even have a journaling or something like that. Those are all different various possibilities. You don't have to do all of them. You don't have to do any of them. You may have some other solution available, but you have to do something to connect the audience to your character or else they're never going to care about what happens to them or worse yet, they're going to care what happens to them, but they're going to think that you're just putting the character through hell in a way that doesn't lead to anything important. And that's another big problem with this SEP. It doesn't have a strong message, right? The idea is this, there's a guy who can fly and the foundation knows that they can keep him in the general population of they can let him be in public because if he's fat, he can't fly. And in order to keep him fat, and this is the thing, they're like, let's not keep this guy in a box. Let's be a friendlier, nicer SEP foundation, and we're going to let him live a life that's going to be limited. There's going to be a lot of monitoring involved, but it might be less expensive and it might be more effective for his morale to let him live a normal life, except they don't do that. They're still so stuck in their ways that they can't let him like have a good life. They have to get involved in every little thing. And the truth of the matter is, is that if dude didn't, if they didn't get involved, dude would probably still be fat. Once you get fat, it's very difficult to not be fat anymore. All they got to do is keep an eye on his weight and like if it actually goes, see, they're not even doing that. They're not keeping an eye on his weight and seeing if it actually goes down. They're trying to preemptively avoid him losing weight. Just remember this problem. But anyway, that doesn't work unless you as an audience really connect with the character that's being affected by the foundation's actions. And the way this is written doesn't allow for that. You just learn about a dude. I mean like, it's just some guy. And people in the worst part about this is because it's not personal enough, it can feel cheap. And we're going to keep going through some of these incident logs real quick. We've got this one about the fresh produce, which it feels, and by the way, the spicy crust pizza ria thing works, except it feels like it makes it into a joke, right? And we're talking about a lot of the people who, you know, every person in the world, almost every person in the world has dealt with weight issues in one way or another, either from being to some people too skinny, some people too fat, but no one's happy with the way they look, right? Everyone deals with this problem. And if you make it into a joke, only a very limited group of people are going to be able to find that funny. This isn't supposed to be funny. It's supposed to be horrifying. And it is, but also in a way that kind of pokes, it feels like it pokes fun at the main central character. And as I said before, you're supposed to connect with the central character. If you're laughing at him at certain points, that's not a good sign for the way your emotional through line is supposed to hit the audience. And we start here with the fresh produce. And this is where it starts to devolve into silliness, because, okay, fine, they replace his fresh produce with decompose with like rotten stuff, whatever. And then he tries to do aerobic exercise and they break up the sidewalk outside. And again, that's fine. That one there, the breaking up the sidewalk outside, cool, whatever. Although as again, as I said earlier, they should probably just monitor his weight. And if it actually goes down, start working to solve that problem, not do this preemptive stuff. But then we get to the last one. And that's where it goes over the top. This is this is was the mistake right here. I think I tried to do a natural escalation, which is good when you're doing so doing a story, you want to do escalations. And generally, you want to do an escalation in the rule of three, which means you start with one thing, and then you escalate again, and then you escalate again. And the final one is the one that gives you the punch. Now here, I put four things in, which doesn't work at all. That's that's a big problem. And honestly, they're not thematically really very connected. They're independent incidents. They don't follow a narrative thread. I mean, the last two do, like, because this one, you know, the sidewalk is gets torn up. So he goes to the park to walk instead. And then they rob him. So those two are connected. But the first two, not really, they're not really connected to anything. And what we have here is not a story, but instead a series of events. And you might be like, isn't that the same thing? Not really. Each individual event might still be connected to the other, like these things do follow one another. But there's no thread. Like if this first event happened six years ago, instead of just before the produce thing, it wouldn't change anything about it. It would still mean exactly the same thing. Correlation doesn't equal causation, right? That's that also applies to your storytelling. Just because two things happen at the same time does not mean that they are related. This I fixed this very shortly after I posted it. But I didn't actually put this in a box and it just like opens up like this. Which I saw this the first time I was like, really? Really? God. It's just that's just bad. That man, how tired I was really shows in this. It feels like I'm making an excuse, by the way, when I say that I'm tired. And that's why I wrote something that was subpar. But to be honest with you, I should say this, I've written things that are subpar before. The being tired thing led me to think that it was okay to post it. I've written things that are bad before. And I've known not to post them. I was so... My problem was it's not what made me write the bad thing. It's what made me look at a bad thing and go, yeah, this is fine. Click. Anyway, I'm still I'm pretty tired right now. Actually, I haven't slept again for almost 24 hours, but I actually don't mind this. And again, this is the problem. The containment at large, which if you watched the video, when I came across it as a title, I was like, oh, that's that's a good I just typed it. And then I was like, that'd be a good title. And then I thought, oh, no, that makes it seem like it's a joke. And so I actually literally went on the internet and looked at like other ways to say at large, and there really wasn't a better way to put it. Plus, it's such a good pun for the for the story. You can still do that in the title. I don't know that it works. Maybe I'll have to still think about that. I'm not entirely sure I'd like this. I even feel like salvaging this. This is definitively salvageable. This is almost there. Although, no, I don't know. I think I could probably make it work as a mediocre piece if I just made a few tweaks and changes in order to make it good. I think it probably requires I could make it survive on the wiki. That's easy. But to get it to the point where it's actually good, I think would take a lot more work. And I'm not entirely sure I'm willing to commit to working more on this. We'll see. But yeah, structural problems with this is just that it's a character focused piece that doesn't really focus on the character as much as the things happening to that character. Always understand that when you have a character, you want to tell his story. He needs to be involved in his story. It needs to it can't just be things happening to him. Your character needs to have agency. Otherwise, what's the point of even telling the story in the first place? Anyway, I would be remiss. I never want to be the per kind of person. And I'm sure I've done it before, like the hypocrisy of pointing out the problems and other people's works and not noticing it in my own. It happens. I've got a couple of articles. Honestly, I'll tell you right now. There's a couple of articles I've got up on the wiki right now that should be downvoted off that weren't. They're worse than this and somehow are still up. So I'll give you that. But I try to aim for higher than mediocre. Like I've said this before in the standards video, like the wiki standards are not particularly high. You can get away with very low quality work. This is below mediocre, which is bad. You can get away with mediocre. You can't get away with worse than that. Oh man. Anyway, that's the video. I hope you enjoyed it. These are all such basic things to what an idiot. I'm looking at this right now. I'm like, why did I think this was okay to post? It was okay as a lesson. I'm fine with the video that I made. Like why did I I just I really wanted I really wanted to post on the video. And I was just like, you know, this is good enough. Fine. Post didn't even give it a second thought. Would have been nice if it would have really been better if it'd been one of the actual ones where I've done the exact same process. Actually, we're at one in like 30 minutes before and it's still up. It's rated like 150 something. But but no, not this one, the one I actually recorded turns out to be not dog shit, but not good enough. Oh man. Gotta love when that kind of thing happens. Oh, and by the way, I was looking at my list of art. I said I was at 99 articles and I still am now because I went up to 100 and then back down to 99 when I self deleted. But there are by different metrics, I've got more than 100 articles on the wiki. It's just some of those articles aren't counted by certain. It's like some of them. Some things don't like say that some of them don't count an author page as an article, even though it is creative work. If you like the video, this is a very, very good time for you to pledge on Patreon because it is the first of the month. And Patreon will actually take your money as soon as you pledge and at the first of the month. So anyone who pledges at the end of the month is really helping me out. But if you'd like to pledge, always a good idea to get started at the beginning of the month so you get the most value out of your pledge. Head on over to patreon.com forward slash D Sumerian and pledge at any level. If you pledge at anything, I think between five. Yeah, anything between five and $20. Your name will be on every video I do. And when you pledge, I will say your name in the next video I do. 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