SCP Foundation

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Finally! An art skip that has nothing to do AWCY. I know there have probably been a few others but I'm glad that is different and cool.

_{Get it?}

+1

At the end of this, I had watery eyes. Congratulations, Kalinin, this is a masterpiece that has to get the attention it deserves.

Also:

a distaste for Borges

I find this surprising; he'd probably love this magnificent piece of magical realism. :)

-1 This is beautifully written… Too beautifully written. The sheer lack of Foundation tone in Esquivel's notes is befitting a tale (and a very good tale), but not a scip file.

But what really gets me is the anomaly itself. Why is this a Euclid class, or a scip at all? A small town with a concentration of art is not anomalous (see Marfa, TX or Jerome, AZ or scores of other towns in the US), and there doesn't seem to be any inherent danger to the town present in this anomaly.

My big unanswered question is how the heck did the Foundation even determine the connection between an artful small town in Nebraska and a vagabond artist a hemisphere away? Even with the resources of the Foundation that seems like a stretch to me. Is this worth devoting decades of an agent's career when nothing harmful appears to be coming from this anomaly?

Honestly, I feel like an asshole down voting something this well written, but I just can't get behind this as a scip.

I wanted to upvote for this mental image alone:

I think I followed all of the Related Artworks, except this one:

6 m tall depiction of the Greek deity Apollo playing the lyre with a sunrise in the background. Painted on the side of a barn belonging to Mr. Grauber's employer

How does this relate to the story? My Greek mythology is pretty rusty.

Fucking fantastic work, Kalinin. Splendid characterization and portrayal of Foundation workers who are not soulless husks. SCP-348 didn't faze me; nor did those ships that the GOC sunk. This skip, though…
+1, man.

This is incredibly long, to the point where it would irritate me or even ruin the piece in a normal article - but the quality of this and the story it tells makes the length well worth it. It feels like I'm reading a novel more than an SCP article, but that is by no means a bad thing in this case. Safe to say this is already one of my favorite articles, +1 and thank you.

First off, +1. You've given us snapshots of this incredibly interesting, quasi-messianic figure who endeavors to make the world around him more interesting. Pablo has minor delusions of grandeur, but seems like the type of person who is aware of those delusions and is therefore immune to the more unpleasant effects of them, like arrogance.

He's an artist in a city where that probably doesn't count for much. I know that when I wrote more often, I'd have an idea in my head that someday I had to have fans, admirers, at least a big audience, but most people will probably never give a crap about my scrawlings. I know that I write for pride, and for approval, and for my implicit knowledge of that approval. Not the most noble of motivations, but it probably drives a lot of us.

What I love about Pablo's situation is that he seems to get joy out of simply inspiring art, and that limited to his surrounding community. But apparently, through no effort of his own, he did have a far-reaching effect on the world, and he died without ever knowing anything about it. And he felt no poorer for it.

tl;dr Your made-up person is very inspiring, and he feels very real, and I'm actually a little jealous of him.

Secondly, I wish there had been more clear connections between Pablo's actions and the "output" in Dotson. I felt like I had to stretch to understand most of the connections, and that a Foundation research team would have to be really looking hard to justify calling many of them connections - the portraits being an obvious exception, of course. Maybe it's just me, and it didn't detract from the story, per se. I think I could have used more cut-and-dry examples of "Yep, that's anomalous," and more early-on, to justify the Foundation's continued interest after the porcupine incident.

Finally, thank you oh so very much for not making Pablo's last words be "Are We Cool Yet?"

This is fucking beautiful and I teared up after reading it. This is not something that happens at all often. Enthusiastic +1

I like the general idea, but quite honestly, tl;dr. I wish the "tale-ier" parts had been extracted into their own, separate thing, to leave the body of the article standing on its own. After the second one, and being somewhat at a loss for how the events relate to the art projects in Dotson, I felt like I had the gist and couldn't see a reason for the rest of the article being there. Also, I'm still not a fan of the inter-Foundation publication footnotes. The writing's above reproach, but the structure needs some rethinking.