 This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time, so that we may live into yours. Jimmy Carter Welcome to episode 006 of the SCP Foundation. Yes, podcast's name has changed. I googled the podcast last week and discovered that there was already one out there with the same name. So it goes. Today, though, I'm going to be answering questions submitted by the community. As always, the majority of this podcast necessarily includes my own opinions and thoughts about the SCP Foundation and the SCP Wiki. After all, there's only one real rule in the SCP universe. There is no canon. Questions and Answers This Voyager spacecraft was built in the year 42,412 A.D. By the species you come to refer to as the Glycean. We are a community of 300,000 beings and have an Inglis 445-C. This is our message to your world. Ever since we discovered radio, we have lived in your shadow. Decades were spent unraveling your signals, searching for answers among the tenuous strands of reason. Through the static and the chaos we found you. From your small, distant world we found your images, your music, your thoughts, your feelings, and your indomitable science. We communicated with your world governments who kept our existence secret from you to prevent a culture shock within their own populace or to reduce your impact upon our own species. It did not matter to us. We could touch the mind of another and no, we are not alone. We learned from you. The scientific revolution following our meeting was miraculous. We lived beyond our natural years and we lived well. Humans uplifted us into an Elysian state, but we could never thank you. From our far away place, we quietly deciphered your secrets and over time our technology became your equal. Together we went advancing our mastery of the universe. We shared our technology with your leaders in secret to try and repay you for all that you will do. In time came the gates. At a great expense of energy we could obtain limitless velocity. With time dilation preserved, we could fly to the universe's birth and its death. The entirety of creation was within our mutual grasp, however that would not be. Before we emerged the people who live on your planet crippled us. From the sky above in bright blue flashes our lives were ended. We do not know their reasons nor do we know why their hand was state enough to forestall our extinction. But now we live on a dying world. Our children are sick. Our water is polluted. We cannot maintain our technology. We will not go on. To save ourselves we could have tried to destroy you. Cannot be denied that this is how some of us felt we should act. We could still hear your world unknowing, uncaring. With what little power we had left, relativistic destruction could reduce your planet to ashes as it was forming. It is shaming, but we came so close. We hope you can understand why we thought what we did, but but maybe if we could change what happens, if we could destroy you, then you could save us. From the stars came Voyager, your gift. In sending your message, filled with your music and your joy, you showed such touching desperation to find another, and we fell in love all over again. We had but one chance to put things right. I do not know if you can save us. I do not know if you can change who you one day may be. You say you are trying to survive through your time, so you may live into mine. I really hope that you, you do. But above all else, there is one thing you need to know, from one maker of music to another. Across all worlds, all times, no matter what you do or what you become, you are nothing less than beautiful. Excerpt from SCP-1342 by Flameshirt. Our first question is from Mario the Pumer from Reddit, who asks, is there an article that you've written that means a lot to you, either due to the writing process or the reaction it got? You know, I don't personally get too emotionally invested in my own works. I mean, I always pepper them with little details and Easter eggs that sometimes only I get, but on the whole, once something is posted, I usually stop thinking about it. Part of the process involves treating all the constituent parts of a story as easily changed. It's hard for a character to mean a lot to you when you don't know if it's going to exist tomorrow, or the things about it that you might like are going to be stripped away, because, well, I need a villain in the story now. I guess if I had to pick one, it would be SCP-2913, not because I'm particularly connected to the characters or the story, but just because it was my second article that I ever wrote, and it got a strongly positive reception, which gave me kind of a roadmap to figure out how I wanted to continue succeeding on the wiki. Now that said, I've always enjoyed pretty much every collaboration I've ever done, so I guess each of those means something different to me, which in a way dovetails into this question from the sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel, who apparently has taken a quote from Neuromancer for a name. Okay. Now they asked, you've collaborated with other authors on a few SCPs, SCP-2047, which I collaborated with Insepid Paroxym, SCP-2513, also Carthage Must Be Destroyed with Blarg Halt, SCP-2281, Backseat Driver with Rodgett, SCP-2813, Ghost Ship with Von Pincere, SCP-2706, Resurrection Forest with Dr. Atlas, SCP-2986, Outside the Box with Famine Pulse, and SCP-001-J, the Sumerian Cactus Proposal, The Broke God with DJ Cactus. Now they want me to talk a little bit about what the collaboration process is like. You know, first of all, I'd like to thank you for allowing me to read out all of those things that I have an authorship in, and eventually we'll end up linking them in the description, but you know, every body I've ever worked with is a little different, and I personally tend to be on the strong side personality-wise, so one thing I generally, during a collaboration, have to monitor is not taking over the whole project and bending it to my own vision, because that could be very problematic, especially when you're dealing with other authors who also have a strong vision, or even people who don't, but who maybe have trouble communicating to you that you're being overbearing. I guess that's my first, like first step in any collaboration is making sure that I don't do that. I try my best, I think I may have failed in some cases, and in other cases I've succeeded, and honestly though, I've recognized it, and I try to do it better next time. Although, I'm going to note here, I've never had anyone complain, no collaboration partners complain to me about this, this is just something I personally worry about. In the process, I think you want to get your primary writing done while everyone still has that initial excitement about an idea, or if you don't get it done by the first day or two, it's going to drag over a long period of time. You don't have to have a finished draft, but have a first draft, something that you can edit. I mean, editing can take an hour, it can take two weeks, it can take a month, it all depends on what you're doing, but if you plan and plan and plan and never write anything, you're never going to get a finished product out, and it'll always be this thing you were going to do with so-and-so. Now that's true for yourself, by the way, but it's also doubly true for any collaboration since that process is going to be kind of stopping go every once in a while when you want to bring your co-author into where you're at on the story. Ultimately, I think you should try to use the author's strength to your benefit and to the article's benefit. If someone else is better at writing exploration logs, don't force your way into that, let them write that. And if they are the one who is particularly inspired today, and they want to do all the primary writing because they have a clear vision, don't stop them from doing it because you feel like you're not contributing enough. I mean, if you're not contributing fully, they're going to be the one who takes primary writing credit and you're just one of the co-authors. You don't have to put your hands in and grab at everything you possibly can to try and get credit. So never feel like you're a lesser partner, although definitely don't take credit for stuff you didn't do. I mean, if you're acting in an editing and idea pitching capacity, that's your job. Don't try to do more than that. Now, your goal is to have a good finished product, not to attain personal glory. That's something that you need to keep track of in a collaboration. So let's move on. Let's answer a few quick questions from Western, and they posted this on the SEP Wiki itself. Have you ever considered doing an 001 proposal yourself besides your joke proposal? Yes, definitely have. I've got actually a couple of concepts in mind. I'm not really sure how to execute either one of them yet. I've had other ideas in the past. In fact, I had a full-blown draft one time before, but at this point it's so similar to what Collinen eventually posted that there's no reason for me to bother with that draft. But right now I'm working with two ideas. Well, it should say really one right now. I don't tend to work on more than one thing at once. The old one I'm working on is that Marshall Carter in Dark started the foundation in order to keep anomalies rare and valuable. That one I'm not really sure how I'm going to execute. But the other one I just popped in my head a couple of days ago is that the general disbelief of mankind towards anomalies is itself an anomaly, like the veil, literally the veil itself as SCP-001. I think I'm closer to figuring that out as at least how that's going to be executed than I am to any other idea that I've had so far. So that's nice. Okay, Western also asks, do you think that Wiki will survive another 10 years or will we die out eventually? I think it'll continue to live and probably thrive. I think it's on the cusp of becoming a very big cultural phenomenon, like more than it already is online. And I think when it happens, it's going to happen very quickly. Western also asks, what do you think is your most underrated and overrated skip? Now, underrated is sort of easy to come up with. I think SCP-2632. I feel like from a narrative standpoint, it's probably one of my best crafted works. And I mean, it's plus 130, so it's not low rated. I just feel like it should be much higher rated. A distant second to that is probably SCP-3313. I wrote Benjamin Franklin's wish-granting key to rocket penis. I still laugh when I read the article, but it's hovering around plus 30 after five or six months. So maybe it's only funny to me and my friends. Overrated? I'd say my first third and fifth posted SCPs. I won't actually bother saying the first or third number, so I don't have to link them. Although I should note, I'm actually neutral to slightly positive on both of them. They're just, I don't know, I don't really like them like them. But the worst among them is definitely SCP-2065. It was not only one of my earlier works, but also my first attempt at horror. And I'm not good at horror now. But I was even worse at it then. I've voted literally every other work I've posted to the wiki. But that one gets a downvote, yet it's still at plus 68. Now ToadKing07 from Reddit asks, possibly talking about the Creative Commons license and how that works, what problems have come up because of it, and what it means for project and articles, etc. I'm on the licensing team as part of my staff work, so I can't answer this. A Creative Commons license has four possible elements. Attribution, which means you have to credit the original author, and work if you redistribute or adapt the work. Share alike, which means the work has to be licensed under the same license, with exactly the same elements as the original work. No derivatives, which means you can't adapt the work and can only redistribute it. And non-commercial, which means you can't sell redistributed copies or adaptations of the work. There's a lot of misconceptions floating around about the site's version of the Creative Commons license. Chief among them is that a lot of people think the site's license barves them from making money on their project or writing, which is just completely untrue. You have to follow the licensing requirements whilst making your money, but the site is under a Creative Commons 3.0 attribution share alike unported license. Now the important elements there are attribution and share alike. You can't add a no derivatives or non-commercial element to any new works, and you can't remove the attribution or share alike elements. That's about it. Unported just means it's not limited to a specific legal jurisdiction, so it has equal weight in the US as it does in, say, Russia. And as long as you distribute your works under the Creative Commons 3.0 share alike attribution unported license and attribute the author, and originating works properly, you can do whatever you want with the work. You can sell it, you can give it away, whatever you'd like to do. The problem with big time commercial sales is that anyone else can grab your work as long as they also follow the same licensing requirements and they could give it away, or sell it themselves at a discount to put you out of business. That's going to be a big sticking point for any straight commercial adaptation of an SEP work. I mean, before someone decides to spend $10 million on an indie SEP foundation movie or video game or whatever you can think of, they need to get $10 million from somewhere and telling someone that they're investing $10 million in a creative endeavor that no one retains exclusive distribution rights to is sort of a problem. And as the budget goes up and up, that problem is going to be compounded, which is why you tend to see one man passion projects or fan projects on SEP topics. So hopefully that's a full enough answer for you. Redna Van Lee from Reddit asks, a topic you have always wanted to do an SEP about but are scared of. I don't know if you mean like literally it's too horrifying for me to write about or I'm just worried about the ramifications, but neither of those would be true. If I want to write an article about a thing, I just write about it. If you don't think so, I will refer you again to Benjamin Franklin's wish-gratting key to rocket penis. Sledge Hammer Man Guy from Reddit asks, how much time do you put into the process of creating an SEP? Not as much time as you think. I mean, this is flash fiction. I mean, you still got to make it good, but I don't know. Solo works and collaborations are different beasts. I spent long periods of time waiting on other people to complete their parts of projects on collaborations, so those tend to take longer. A solo work, I figure for me, I've never taken more than two weeks and never less than 30 minutes from ideation to posting. I mean, my highest rated work took 30 minutes, so that's one thing. I mean, it depends on how easily I can get a handle on the idea. I'd say most of my works are closer to 30 minutes than they were to two weeks, but not like, not at 30 minutes, just closer to that than two weeks. I mean, probably, if you average it out across the 60 or so pages I have on the Wiki, two, three days, I'd have to be guessing, but you know. TorsionSpringHell from Reddit asks, Pineapple on a pizza? Yes or no? No. Why would you ruin a pizza with pineapple? I don't get that, I will never understand that. Asimov's rule breaker from the SEP Wiki asks, some of my favorite articles are in the mimetic and cognitohazard categories. Mind affecting SEP articles creep me out to the extreme, which is probably why I like reading them the most. What are your favorite categories and why? Less an object type and more genre, I'd say science fiction. A good science fiction article will get me excited more than a good article of almost any other kind. Asimov's rule breaker also asks, I'm currently reading the Anderson Robotics Hub, and I must say it's pretty good so far. Which of the hubs do you like the most, and obviously Straight Until Morning isn't allowed, nor any other hubs you've helped establish? I mean, I'm curious as to what level of my participation requires I exclude them. I mean, I have an article on the Anderson Robotics Hub, so there's that. And I've written for Resurrection, Straight Until Morning, TheGolf, AID, and probably some others that I'm missing. Also, do you mean the actual hub page itself or just stuff linked from the hub? I guess I'll answer both. I've had to choose a favorite hub that I didn't personally have a hand in posting. I'd go with AID, it's very sleek and cool looking, and for the content inside it, I'd say Resurrection. I love that whole canon. Asimov's rule breaker also asks, there's been a lot of talk about SCP-184, and it's being the secret 001. Where do you stand on this idea? You know, I had to reread SCP-184 in order to remember what it was, but I remember it now more that the actual object is kind of limited really to be a secret 001. It doesn't explain all anomalies. I mean, there are other ways for something to be a 001, but I think this particular one would need to be an explanation for all anomalies and not just the few that it's linked to in order to be an 001. I'd say, you know, this isn't really an answer about your question here, but rereading 184, I'm reminded of how the base article is kind of blah. But the supplement, I think, saves it from my downvote more than anything else. And finally, I had a fourth question from Asimov's rule breaker, but it was actually on my YouTube channel. Any hints on when the next podcast will be? I've listened to all four so many times, I got to memorize. This was actually from before I posted my fifth episode. I'm trying to put this on a definitive schedule. Once a month, unlike the 25th was my original thought, but at this point, I think I'm going to try for twice a month. I want to try and build the audience, and I've got a little bit of momentum, especially on the YouTube channel. I mean, I went from 60 to about 100 in a couple, in a few days. Subscribers, I know 100 subscribers isn't a lot of subscribers, but it's also nice to see that kind of growth so quickly. So I'd like to try and keep building on it. So right now, I'm aiming for the 30th, which I hope this will be out by the 30th, or at least the 31st, and the 13th, barring more sickness, which I wouldn't bet on me avoiding. I should be able to maintain that schedule for a while yet. Now, I also took questions from the DJ Cactus website. There's a form there that allows you to submit questions, and there's a dropdown that lets people send it to any podcast they want. This one was sent specifically to my podcast from an anonymous user. Hi, just wanted to leave this here since I don't have a foundation account. You completely ruined SCP-1730 this year. Okay. It's not even that you decided to shit up the tone by adding some overpowered anime O.C. cyborgs into your gritty horror story, but the writing itself completely shits itself too. I don't understand how someone who has written so much great content can be so completely blind to the colossal 11,000 word turd you dropped on an otherwise excellent story. Probably should have screened these questions before I started answering them. The prose quickly falls apart and stays at fanfiction.net levels of poor quality. Wow, this guy has some salt. It's too clunky and amateurish to seem like a mission report and yet too clinical to be interesting or compelling. You spin the first half on raw expositions of things we already know and things we don't need to know like the layout of the sewage tunnels and the second half is devoted to variations of a monster popped out. Everyone shot all their bullets at it. A foundation mission long should never at any point use the words huge sword unironically. Well, I disagree with that. We also don't need to know that the colossal, motionless, flaming, humanoid entities' wings are also flaming. Not fair. If the foundation has access to someone's dumb and wish-fulfillment cyborg squad... Oh, I love this guy. Why would they send three more regular MTF squads in first before sending in the invincible team? You'd think after the second team disappeared without a trace they'd use the cyborgs for more than just extraction. But who expects a foundation to make sense? It's not as if they're world-class scientific minds or anything like that, right? Good job conveniently labeling Emerson for us too. Apparently you can burn a body beyond recognition, but the right bit of fabric will survive perfect for a contrived last-second reveal. Fuck subtlety. SCP was never about that with its scientific tone and read between the lines horror. Anyway, I just thought I'd let you know that you've apparently been disappearing up your own ass for a while. The difference in intelligence, tone, and basic literacy are night and day between the start and end of your article. I assumed someone far less competent had tacked on those sections at the end and was surprised to find that it was all you. I only say this because I don't want you to see someone with genuinely good ideas let a minuscule amount of recognition go to their head and let them think that their farts don't smell. God. You need to redraft your shit. You need an editor and you need to stop to ask yourself is this fucking... Oh, that's a word I'm not going to say. I was compelled to actually tell you all this shit because I also read SCP-3812 recently and that's another piece of writing that completely falls apart. You were so preoccupied with the concept of a God beyond gods and the layered nature of reality that you let metaphilosophical masturbation. Now that is a mouthful. Get in the way of actually trying to tell any kind of story. You devote several sections to explaining your premise outright without any subtlety and then you still can't help yourself from doing it again at the end concluding with a conversation explaining everything again conveniently captured by an undersea microphone. Fucking seriously? That's him, not me, I didn't say that. But fucking seriously this guy? What the hell, man? In short, you've contributed some brilliant articles to the foundation. I frequently read a great one then looked up into the discussion to find it was another one of yours. Bodies in the water so incredibly unsettling and it belongs in the top 10 without a doubt. You need to get over yourself though because your shotgun method of riding is starting to miss a whole lot more than it hits. The SCP community is insular and they will suck your dick for days rather than offer any real critique. There's a reason people like to shit on the site and that's because hitting the random button more often than not makes some embarrassing cancer pop up. I might know your name but the majority of readers don't. They'll read a massive turd like SCP 1730 and their opinion of the site as a whole will go down. Each article does not stand on its own. It's part of a larger patchwork and as the years go by that patchwork is looking more and more like some sort of gaudy hobo tent so to get there from wildly different materials and colors. Oh man. It breaks my heart to see so much good riding get dragged down by hacky OCs and egotistical hipster another word I'm not going to use. Listen. Everything you just listed is a cactus article not a Sumerian article. I think you accidentally sent your question to the wrong podcast but since you sent it to me and I am answering questions I would like to say a go fuck yourself. All right. After that craziness let's circle back around to Mario the Pumer from Reddit who asked what articles would you recommend to newcomers? I really like this question mainly because it's something that we should all be thinking about a little bit more and when you introduce someone to the wiki what articles would you use to introduce them? And I think I could probably think of about three, right? So you've got SCP-093 which is the Red Sea Object and that article supplements. Also SCP-1322 which is unfortunately named The Glory Hole I promise it's not about sex and SCP-1342 which is to the makers of music which I've actually been kind of including it's kind of a theme for this episode. All three tell a story but they tell it in different ways and I think it's important to realize that like093 is kind of the prototypical narrative focused SCP. It's not the first but it's a good example of what it could mean in the earlier days of the site. I know it's been rewritten like more than once. I think twice? I could be wrong I think it might just be once but it's definitely been rewritten and the core article is still just a magic item description. I mean we talk about that as a big problem with new articles and new authors they just write a magic item and go hey this is interesting and to them it is the most interesting thing in the world. Think about all of the possible stories you can tell with it but nobody else is going to do that for you and the SCP foundation has been around so long now that it's like there's nothing wrong with our oldest articles and there's nothing necessarily wrong with the simple articles that don't do anything or really tell a story because they set the tone and stage for tales that surround them. In fact, if you look at Abel or the really hard to kill lizard or the old man or one seven three they themselves are not that interesting but the stories that are told around them in the tales at the time that they were all being written make them so interesting because they develop them but if you look at just the article in isolation and you try to emulate just that you're going to fail. 093 takes a different tag. It is just a magic item but that magic item is used to tell a story through like six or seven supplements it's been a long time since I actually looked but those supplements tell a long drawn out narrative that I really really enjoyed and it kind of leads to today most articles don't do it that way they just tell the story in the article itself they don't bother with eight supplements to try and tease out the rest of their story. A little bit more modern something like 1322 which is just has a collapsible with a time-based log of how the SCP foundation essentially ended an entire other civilization and the other guys don't take it too well and accuse us of either doing it deliberately or being so careless as to still be deserting punishment and it seems unreasonable when you read it and everything in the article says otherwise we just tried to help right but it doesn't plan in you a nagging suspicion about the foundation's motives this is the foundation we're talking about after all is a genocide on that scale really beyond what they might do? A lot of articles use black's boxes and expungement to build up a mystery part of what I like about 1322 is that it doesn't do that there's one black box near the end and it just blanks out a date that basically makes you think that the incident happening there could be happening right now like today or yesterday or five years ago it doesn't matter it's sometime in after the year 2000 I don't find the black box and expungement to build up mystery concept particularly compelling it doesn't work for me and 1322 shows you how you can do it without that 1322 lays all the information out in front of you and then you ask the question yourself is this real or is it not is this the foundation being evil or is this the foundation trying to be good for once and just failing or if you don't want to read into it you can take it at face value and still find horror in the idea that there's another world out there that wants to kill us dead and finally I want to say 1342 it's one of the ending note that explains everything skips and a lot of people will be very down on that type of skip I get denigration of that style but when it works and it does work here it can be like like magic you know I mean this one doesn't try to shock you with a twist I think that's the wrong way to go about it because it doesn't lay bare the inner workings of the piece or leave nothing to the imagination because it spoils the mystery for you instead it just tries to move you as a person you get to put yourself for a moment in the shoes of some alien race that just found the Voyager golden record played it and wanted to meet the strange mournful creatures that created it thank you everyone for the questions that you ask and if you have more questions from the next q&a podcast please submit them as comments wherever you listen to this that can be on the discussion thread on the scp wiki for this podcast or on the disc or the comments below the youtube video or you can submit a question on the cactus cast website although please make sure you send it to the right to the right podcaster just gonna throw that out there uh thank you very much we'll give the credits in just a second my name is Christopher Clayton Morris though you may know me better under the pseudonym Dr. Sumerian this podcast is licensed under a creative commons 4.0 attribution share like unported license all works from the scp wiki used or referenced in this podcaster under a creative commons 3.0 attribution share like unported license including the following works scp 1342 to the makers of music by flame shirt scp 2913 a total ripoff by Dr. Sumerian scp 2047 collaboration by Dr. Sumerian and incipid paroxysm scp 2513 also carthage must be destroyed by Dr. Sumerian and Blarghalt scp 2281 backseat driver by Dr. Sumerian and rogett scp 2813 ghost ship by Dr. Sumerian and von pincere scp 2706 resurrection forest by Dr. Sumerian and Dr. Atlas scp 2986 outside the box by Dr. Sumerian and famine pulse scp 001 dash j Sumerian cactus proposal the broke god by Dr. Sumerian and dj cactus scp 2632 no fury by Dr. Sumerian scp 2065 empty inside by Dr. Sumerian please don't read that scp 3313 poor richard by Dr. Sumerian resurrection hub by the deadly moose straight on till morning hub by von pincere and Dr. Sumerian the gulf hub by kate mcteris a iad hub by alert d anderson robotics hub by jacob conwell scp 184 the architect by dr gears scp 1730 what happened to site 13 by dj cactus scp 3812 a voice behind me by dj cactus scp 093 the red sea object by an unknown author and rewritten by nico chris scp 1322 glory hole by spike brennan this podcast contained the following audio works under a variety of licenses a human being by andy g cohen off the 2016 album through the lens licensed creative commons 4.0 attribution unported the temperature of the air on the bow of the calitine by chris zebrisky off the 2013 album undercover vampire policemen licensed creative commons 3.0 attribution unported you are currently listening to dark was the night cold was the ground by blind willy johnson off the 1927 single of the same name public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 70 years or less thanks for listening voyager in case it's ever encountered by extraterrestrials is carrying photos of life on earth greetings in 55 languages and a collection of music from kurgorian chants to chuckberry including dark was the night cold was the ground by 20s bluesman blind willy johnson whose stepmother blinded him when he was seven by throwing lie in his eyes after his father had beat her for being with another man and he died penniless of pneumonia after sleeping bundled in wet newspapers in the ruins of his house that burned down but his music just left the solar system josh lineman the west wing