 Last week I did an honest feedback of my own SCP article. This week I've decided to do something that is someone else's, and what was suggested to me is SCP-4951, the South Central Protective Services New Containment Insurance Entity. Now I should note that most of the people who recommended this article to me said it was underrated, and after reading it I'm not entirely sure I agree with them. It is good, and it is rated plus 33, which if your article is rated under 40 after a month it's probably underperforming. I don't know that that means it's underrated though. Now it's only been up for about 19 days, so it may still hit that plus 40 in a month thing, but it is worth taking a look at and understanding what it does right, and what it does wrong, because it does a lot of both. So let's get started. So I'm not going to read the article to you. That would be silly. The article exists on the wiki, you can always go look at it if you'd like. I will put up on the screen several important lines if I cover them, but I will summarize it to you for the sake of brevity. The article is about an object which is a self-propagating digital cloud-based entity capable of writing portions of itself on any operating system to which it is exposed, and it's believed that it's the digitized consciousness of Horatio Avalar. Now apparently, this individual uploaded themselves into a computer system, but in a distributed sense that they exist in, you know, a desktop in Wyoming and a desktop in England and a desktop in Russia and a laptop in China in little parts, but is somehow still a cohesive entity and personality. And it has decided that it's going to use anomalous abilities to create insurance companies. Now you may be wondering how do those two things connected and really thematically they aren't, which opens up some of the early problems with the SCP, but before we get into that, I want to talk a little bit about what it does right. Now first of all, the special containment procedures are very concise and for the object we're talking about, which is a Keeter and also a Thamiel, it's a slash, which we could get into that if we wanted to, but it's not really that important, except in as much as to tell you that there are people on the site who will downvote your article simply because you put it as Thamiel, so keep that in mind, but the special containment procedures are fairly concise and they also really do a good job of telling you a little bit about the object without using any descriptive bits. It uses phrases like Foundation Assets are to maintain no less than 51% stock share in any publicly traded corporation created by SCP-4951, which makes you think, oh lord, this thing is making corporations. It mentions the insurance policies as well. And this is a very key piece of advice for most new writers. When you are creating your special containment procedures, you can tell the reader about your object without describing anything. Because special containment procedures are containment procedures. They would be you telling the audience, say for example here, all proposed insurance policies generated by the SCP are to be immediately sealed. Now when you're doing that, you're not telling the audience SCP-4951 creates insurance policies, but they also, through context, can figure that out. This is a very important and oftentimes very difficult thing for people to get right. And this SCP article does a very good job of that. It also does a very good job of showing images alongside it. I'll tell you this, images only help. If you can find a good Creative Commons compliant image to go with your article, always include it. Now the description itself is also very concise and it doesn't go into very much extraneous details. But the description is where we start to run into some problems. Because concise though it may be, it's dealing with two different, basically thematic choices. One is a AI that used to be a person and the insurance companies that that AI is creating. So this isn't always a bad thing. If you can unify them in a way that works. And it's especially not a big problem if the two competing elements actually make sense together. And sometimes if you do it like that, people don't even notice that there's two different elements involved. If you have an anomalous cell phone that is indestructible that also allows you to place anomalous calls into the past, those are two separate anomalies and they're sort of unrelated. But the indestructible cell phone is the base and core object. Then you go into what it can do. So I'm not saying that's a good idea for an SCP, I'm just saying if you can unite your elements together in a way that is seamless, that is for the best. In this case, it's not seamless. You've got an AI that used to be a person that makes insurance policies or I'm sorry, makes insurance corporations that issue insurance policies. Now these insurance policies are sort of the split focus of the article between it and the character and both stories or I should say both narrative arcs that it tries to paint are done a disservice by splitting your attention between the two of them. Finally the very first log is where the SCP starts to run into bigger problems. So the first log is an example of computer systems that the AI has put part of itself into. The problem is that there are nine individual instances listed and most of them don't actually add much to the story that this is trying to tell. You can get away with four of these, probably even less if you really really wanted to. But the important part is that when you're creating a long list of notes or component law, this is an object log so it's just basically objects that the SCP foundation has in its custody that are related to this object. And of course there are more of them than just nine, but this is supposed to be the nine that are so important they have to be included in this document. But when reading them, I don't understand what about them is necessarily so important that they have to be communicated to the reader. And this drags down the pacing considerably in the article, almost to a standstill before you get to anything particularly interesting. And a lot of this includes needless detail. The kinds of detail that don't really grab a reader. Like the second one, I'm going to read it for you real quick. Device is a Nokia 5610 express music. Screen is inoperable. Device rests at 41 degrees Celsius when in a powered state. Battery life when disconnected from power supply is 112 seconds. Now importantly this object is key to the communication of this object to SCP foundation staff or literally anyone. We can't talk if this is turned off. And that's important, but this section goes on for far too long. And then we get to an interview log. Now the interview logs are where the article actually becomes somewhat interesting, primarily because it focuses on the character that is SCP-4951. It gets just a couple of pieces of dialogue in the first interview log. What the hell do you want you vapid bitch? You'd be upset too if the best parts of your brain were offline and yes I would very much mind telling you a single damn thing. And then piss off. These are all responses to things that the researcher says. Now at the end of this, it says hostile AI hosted within multiple electronic devices recommending anger management counselor. Now that line on its own is quite entertaining to me. It's very funny to think that the foundation runs into AIs so often that they have a policy in their mind to go, this one is angry. We should probably get an anger counselor. That to me is pretty funny. Now this is compounded by the next test in which another person comes in and asks them basically is once taught to them whether or not they're angry or not, you know, just like what's what's up? And it starts talking to them in French instead. And it turns out that it's not angry at all. It was just having trouble communicating previously in English. The line I'm sorry, but my English file seemed to be offline. I'm sorry for being so rude earlier. I had trouble thinking right apologize to the young woman for me please. And this log ends on something that I find to be particularly funny and probably saved me from downvoting the article. It's SCP-4951 entity, not hostile merely French. Now that is a perfect line to end your article on. Now if we condense this down, we removed some of these testing logs and we just went into the interview logs and covered this thing, this actual thing here and probably altered the description a little bit and probably not worry about the insurance thing at all. That's a distraction from what is essentially a fairly interesting character that you're starting to build here. So if you were to do that, take out the insurance parts, take out some of the component logs and dive into your article's interview logs, I think this article would probably be doing much, much better. Now I say this because the fourth log is yet another interview log, but it tries to tie everything together in one neat bow and this is an example of basically taking away from your article by adding more to it. This article is done, the line entity is not angry merely French is a great ending, everyone wants to make it go a little bit longer. It's a very, very common issue, I've done it before myself, I'll probably do it again when you get to an ending and you have a really nice ending but you want to add in extra lines. Sometimes it's just one sentence extra. And it's a whole interview log, but this is the problem here because this article includes that whole insurance thing so you have to tie it all in and that's done here because you actually get the guy, they finally get the guy a translator and the conversation commences. Of course, four times five one does the little ending monologue thing and this is inherently a problem, but it's required for the way this is set up. He spends, I don't know, two or three, no, one, two, three, four, five, about six paragraphs here talking to the researcher about basically telling them the plot of the story because it didn't come across already and it needs to be tied up. And in fact, it like reiterates stuff that you already know, like kept myself for a while after that but eventually I wound up storing bits of my thought processes wherever I happened to be when they came up, a train of thought in a desktop in Oregon here, a little bit of calculus knowledge in a bingalees computer mainframe here. This is essentially an as you know to the to the SCP researcher because researcher already knows this stuff. And then of course, what's this insurance thing? And then he talks about it as the matter of he's basically predicting anomalies. This is another thing that hasn't I haven't really talked about because it wasn't particularly interesting. But essentially, he's using the corporation to predict anomalies and then offer insurance to people who are going to be affected by those anomalies, which I got to say is not a great idea for a company because it's just going to go bankrupt. Like insurance companies work when no one has to make a claim. This guy sells insurance policies that actually have to pay out like 70% of the time. But like that plot hole is sort of tied up by the idea that he's just creating the company so that the foundation buys them and gives him money. Essentially this article is about twice as long as it needs to be. You could get the merely French thing done in one interview log if you really wanted to. You don't need the final interview log if you can remove the insurance policy thing, which doesn't really add to your narrative. And finally, there's one more thing about this that I think really does a disservice to the story that's trying to tell. Now I've read the tale that actually precedes this. This character existed before the SCP. There's a tale linked in the final log. And it's actually not necessarily required reading, but it makes the article significantly better if you have already read that article. But any time, and this is going to come up because a lot of new writers think this way. What if I do an SCP and then I write a tale based on that SCP? Well, here's the problem, and then this is even more to that point because this is an SCP based on a tale character. When you do that, and the article doesn't stand on its own, which I don't think this fully does, it almost does. It kind of does. Enough that it's surviving on the site, but not fully, not 100%. It's not standing completely on its own. You kind of got to read the previous article to really get a feel for the character that's being described here. But when you do that, you're essentially narrowing down your voter base. And on the SCP Wiki, this is important if you want something to be highly rated. And if you're okay with something just surviving, then fine. Build on these things. This comes up with Tales series, too. And you'll see it more often than not. It's not always true. It's not a universal rule. But generally, the first article in a Tales series is pretty highly rated. It's why people decide to continue writing in it because they're like, oh, the first one did well. I'll continue in that vein. But the next one does less well, and the next one does less well. And the next one does less well because when the second piece of a Tales series requires you to read the first one, only the people who have read the first one will actually read or enjoy the second one. And it will never be everyone. If you get plus 50 on a tale and then write a second part to it, your second tale is almost certainly going to be rated less than that. Probably significantly less than that. Maybe plus 30 or plus 40. The third tale will be rated less than that. The fourth tale will be rated less than that. You're always narrowing down your audience. And this is true of, say, using a particular meme or a joke or an inside joker or using any other article, no matter how popular. You are restricting your voter base to only the people who understand and have seen the previous work. Now, it's not necessarily a bad thing. It's not necessarily going to doom your work, but it will oftentimes limit how well it can do because it's all about eyes. People can't upvote something if they haven't read it yet. And if they don't finish it because they don't get it, they might not vote at all or worse, they might downvote it. So let's go over real quick what SCP-4951 does right and what it does wrong. Now, first of all, the special containment procedures are very well written. They do a very good job of communicating to the reader. There's a good use of images in this article in the sense that it creates kind of an idea in your head of what the SCP looks like. It introduces and focuses mostly, mostly, on a character that works for it. And it has a couple of very, very good lines that are quite memorable and that will have an impact on the reader after they're done reading it. But what does it do wrong? Well, the pacing is a little slow, especially in the middle. It doesn't quite stand on its own and relies a little bit too heavily on knowledge of a previous article. And finally it's got two completely separate story elements that are integrated together well, but they're still very recognizably two separate story elements and they're not seamlessly integrated, which is a serious problem. Anyway, that's it. I'd like to thank Gabriel Jade for letting me do this with his article. I'd like to thank you for subscribing. You've done that already, right? If you haven't, go down to the subscription button and hit it right now. And I'd also like to thank all of my patrons. Thank you very much for pledging. I appreciate it more than you can know. That kind of thing helps me continue to help writers on the wiki. And honestly, I didn't think I'd be able to keep doing this on my own, but I'm not on my own anymore. So if you'd like to join them, go to patreon.com. forward slash decimarian. And thank you very much for watching.