SCP Foundation

I'm craaaazy

Starts at Cave Johnson, escalates to… uh… I guess Chaz Ambrose is the only way to put it. What the serious heck. Up the revolution!

That took a very dark turn that I was not ready for

Stay tuned. The day of redemption will come.
Chaz.

This man really following the path of Papa Johns.

Chaz Ambrose's rapid descent into Gordon Ramsay cannibalism is exceedingly funny but it clashes hard with the format in which it's presented. The biggest problem is that it's presenting what are mostly Chaz's personal thoughts as the only news Ambrose has to offer, which is strange given that the first couple entries offer actual updates on the company. It rapidly becomes impossible to actually treat this as a newsletter… and yet I'm expected to.

I recommend changing the format so that it's presented as Chaz's blog, or adding some kind of denotation at the beginning and end of each section to indicate that Chaz's updates are like the newsletter's monthly Letter from the Editor. The second option would also allow you to preserve the newsletter format by bookending each section with bits of actual news — like the updated Company Policy or the new restaurant in Eurtc — to maintain the tension between Chaz's growing madness and the business of running a restaurant chain.

So - This is riffing hard on Patrick Bateman/crazy tech bro/Richard Branson style personification for Chaz. And that's fine and all, but the issue is that that's exactly what I expect from the person who would have founded Ambrose restaurants.

Unlike ARD I'm actually pretty ok with the characterisation that Ambrose totally would take over the company newsletter as a personal blog. But I think the thrust of this is it's supposed to be surprising that Ambrose is a cannibal monster now… but that just seems like the natural endpoint. So everything ends up happening exactly how I think it would go. I don't think that makes any of this bad - it isn't -, it's just not for me.

There's foreshadowing, and there's blotting out the sun.

HarryBlank rightfully compared this article to Cave Johnson's descent to madness, and unlike HarryBlank I fail to see how this is on the same level (or worse/more extreme) than what Portal 2 told about Cave Johnson. It is very clear from the first mention of "we taste the same inside" that this article is going to turn into cannibalism, and the first mention of "or I would shoot him in the balls" that he won't hesitate to shoot his employee. The entire thing becomes telling what Ambrose did instead of showing us what happened, because Ambrose wrote it and we sees thing solely from his perspective. We don't have our own perspective on things here, so we didn't even get to see the "mandatory bring your child to work day" kind of stuff that Portal 2 did.

Honestly the whole article feels like one big "end of article note syndrome" where the main suspect just…fess up on his crime and documents it in detail.

AMBROSECON AMBROSECON AMBROSECON
LETS GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Jokes aside, this is excellent.

I will say that I really like the presentation - each document is clean and simple, nothing more than it needs to be, and the logo is very slick. Starting with January is a clever way to broadcast how long the article is going to be.

July is the weak point of this article. I now know you weren't going for a slow, simmering build to a reveal, but it's what I was prompted to expect. July makes everything obvious - everything that comes before it is unrelated and doesn't seem to add anything but realism, and everything that comes after it seems to reinforce that point but add little (not nothing!). The title could have been a great way to introduce the intended context and scope of the article to me without compromising on page content. But the reference was lost on me - I had to google it to discover that Huey Lewis and the News is a real-world band, but I don't know what the significance is.

Characterisation isn't really my thing, so I wasn't left with that much of an impression. Novote overall.

Honestly, "person associated with an anomalous restaurant chain is actually a cannibal" is way too predictable; when it comes to food-related taboos that may be practiced by the rich, that's up at the top, with "eating endangered animals" as a far distant second. Plus, most cannibals don't go cartoonishly announcing they're cannibals in their company newsletters.

To put it in restaurant terms:"Interesting presentation, but stale main course and unsatisfying aftertaste."