The .jpg is broken, Also it needs a caption.
pastarasta1 is quick-talking and often scheming
SCP-3281 / Discussion
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This is the discussion related to the wiki page SCP-3281.
I think you may have caught me in the middle of uploading the file to the page. Hopefully everything is showing up properly now?
Yeah, maybe I shouldn't have jumped on this as soon as it came up.
pastarasta1 is quick-talking and often scheming
This really could have gone in the 3000 contest, but it's just as effective here. A computer program killing people without accountability or oversight, messing important things up, and being allowed to do it because there's no better option yet? Chilling and topical.
if your reading this your gay
This is an idea I've been working on for a few months, now. It's my second (successful) SCP and my first SCP in several years, so I'm excited to see how it will go over. Hopefully the concepts I meant to communicate are clear enough, but if there are parts that don't make sense, let me know.
Because I've been incubating this particular draft for so long, I don't actually remember the usernames of everyone who's helped critique it, with the exception of Communism will win, but if you've given me feedback, thank you very much!
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Edit: Problem resolved.
As a child, I had an irrational fear that if I said something nobody had said before in a place nobody had ever said it, I would accidentally summon a demon but there'd be no way to know it was going to happen because I was the first person to ever try it. The anomaly on its face sort of resembles this concept; arbitrary actions, unknown to the public, have supernatural consequences.
This treatment of that concept is compelling enough for an upvote, but it's even worse to see that even the Foundation doesn't have a full understanding of what's happening or how it works. I don't know how I feel about the report generation gimmick (who is captcha keeping out? the filtering AI itself?) but the report added another dimension to an article I already liked.
I had (sometimes still have) a similar anxiety about arbitrary thoughts or actions, which is how I first got the idea for this SCP.
The idea was that the captcha was meant to keep out AARS538, because of how it could respond if it found out Foundation agents were investigating it and finding out details about SCP-3281. Realistically, it'd probably take more to prevent such a (presumably) sophisticated system out, but I had to make it so people could actually get to the document.
That's a fair justification for it, although I do agree that it's probably not sophisticated enough to keep out the system. It does justify the fact that it creates separate dialogues, which was my main concern about it.
I'm pretty torn on this one.
Cons:
It's ultimately a combination of the massive redaction trope with a compulsion effect. That's not a fair full assessment, because there's still a ton of very good storytelling going on around those, but the persistent brain damage just keeps dragging me back into "bad compulsion effect" territory, and it takes me out of it. It might help if you had a more specific technical definition of the brain damage. That is, is it similar to spongiform encephalopathies (aka holes appearing in the brain) or hypoxic brain damage (cells in isolated brain areas drying from lack of oxygen)? Also, if it's affecting cognition and impulse control, the damage would probably be in the pre-frontal cortex.
I'm not saying your description is incorrect or unscientific (It's actually quite good… for a compulsion effect) I just think more detail would make it feel less like a generic boil-your-brain memetic compulsion effect, even if it's functionally still the same thing.
The other con would just be that 11k casualties is a really big number. I don't… quite buy it. Yes, I know, SCP-579-level spooky dread, but you've already spent plenty of wordcount loading up the casualties, so popping down a bigger number doesn't have as much impact.
On the pro side, as I said, the surrounding storytelling is still excellent. I guess I might've been looking for another reveal or story direction at the end of the investigation document, but it's still very neat. I also enjoy imagining drones with rubber bullets flying around frantically searching for people near phone booths.
So, no vote.
Really good use of elision, but the logs (in particular the -A section) could either be pruned or spiced up with some odd or insidious details. At the moment they seem repetitive.
The storytelling here is massively good, to the point where I could forgive being irritated by the pacing a bit (seemed to go on a bit too long IMO).
The logs are too long to be fully effective - in combination with the redaction, they become pretty repetitive. The redaction itself is over-used to the extent that it becomes unintentionally comic - it's like you're forcing me to play madlibs, rather than directing me to disturbing possibilities.
Yeah, this one isn't doing it for me. Too many redactions in the logs, and it ends with "oh noes the foundation itself is affected". Nothing here gets me interested in the article, nothing sticks with me after I'm finished, and it just felt like a chore to read through.
-1
One of them involves a piggy bank, but I won't say which.
I'm not feeling it. I've never had a particular problem with compulsion effects, but the anomaly is nothing but a bog standard compulsion meme, and the "Foundation Cognitohazard A.I. goes rogue" aspect falls flat on its face for me.
Maybe making the memetic actions more absurd or insidious could at least make the article more interesting, but otherwise, the concept isn't wooing me.
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page revision: 7, last edited: 17 Nov 2020 06:16
