Per 
. ~ WhiteGuard
Who is 
pxdnbluesoul?
Bluesoul was officially promoted to Administrator on the 8th of June, 2020, and continues today as a Team Captain for the Technical Team. Bluesoul has been a member of this site since the 21st of August, 2012, and his most popular page on the site by rating is SCP-042-J: Billions of Anomalous Pillows at +388.
The following interview will continue the previous format consisting of 11 questions from myself and 4 questions from the community with his responses.
The bold text represents the questions whereas the text within the boxes are Bluesoul's responses.
Interview Questions:
Hi there, Bluesoul! Let me thank you again for agreeing to do this with me. Let's start off like my other interviews. How did you first come across the site, and what about it drew you in enough to stay around for as long as you have?
So, I found the site back in 2012 via reddit, I don't remember the context of the conversation but I was linked SCP-087 without context. I was confused and a bit alarmed, then clicked over to the homepage where it used to read "Classified Material Beyond This Point, Unauthorized access will be monitored, located and dealt with, This is your sole warning" and I was even more confused and alarmed. Then I started piecing together what was going on and really loved it.
The initial appeal for me was the fact that the place was very clear that the community had high standards. The tone was "We're not here to teach you, what can you do for us?" and I loved the possibility of a challenge like that where I could prove myself. I was one of these kids in high school that could breeze through stuff and was always a strong writer. An adversarial relationship with the person grading (or rating, in this case) your writing always did more for me than being told "yeah, it's great, don't change a thing."
As far as what kept me here, it's the relationships I've made with people here. We've had a ton of laughs, we've gone through some shit together, and I've become very close with a lot of folks. I do a lot of what I do because I don't want them to have to struggle without me.
You were promoted to Administrator just a few months ago now. You became a staff member on the 15th of January, 2014 and joined the site 2 years earlier. Would you mind giving us a brief rundown of your activity on the site since joining? Why become a staff member?
I was doing staff-adjacent stuff for a little bit prior to that. I joined the IRC network early and let them know that I could help them with whatever they might need on that front. Chat and site were 100% separate in that time so I believe I was an operator before I was made site staff. I was also in /r/SCP as a contributor before it had 10,000 users, and Dr. Kens was running it at the time along with a non-staffer that used to do the sidebar, SCP of the Week and that kind of stuff. I set up the flair system that is largely still in use now back then, though the current IO team has taken the ball and ran with it.
Joining staff happened during a significant transitional period in the site's history where we abandoned the concept of Senior Staff, where all staff were expected to know how to do, and do, all of the various functions of the site. Troy L and Aelanna had done a ton of work writing up the structure that we still use now with minor changes. I was in the first class of "Junior Staff" along with
ProcyonLotor and
Tuomey Tombstone among others. I was crazy enough to sign up for Tech, IO, and Images, though I dropped the latter pretty quickly as the scope of work was more than I was really able to commit to. I've been off and on IO since then, being an occasional set of helping hands on the subreddit when things are crazy. Tech was unfocused for much of its existence with little actual technical work happening, much of it was (and is) around tags.
Becoming staff was logical to me with the new paradigm, that I could take stuff I was good at and use those skills to make the place better. It's taken a long time to get there, but I think Tech collectively is the strongest it's ever been now, with a lot of exciting things on the horizon.
Some of your highest rated works to this day happen to be a couple of -J articles, SCP-042-J: Billions of Anomalous Pillows and SCP-004-J: Stan from Accounting. As referenced in DrMagnus' interview, you both seem to have a lot of funny articles between the two of you. Do you think having a technical background feeds into this at all? What makes a good -J in your opinion?
I think it's because IT guys are still like 12 years old at heart and stupid things are still very funny to us.
I have a hot take on this one, actually. Making a good -J is easier than making a good mainlister now. The conventional wisdom was that a -J has to do everything a mainlister does and be funny. Now it just has to be funny, because the mainlist format's been stretched every which way, you have a ton of latitude in what you choose to write and it's still gonna resemble a mainlist article somewhere. Funny and, frankly, low-investment/low-effort content is more accessible, more people are gonna get a joke and upvote it than trying to puzzle out an inscrutable horror story wrapped in several layers of allegory.
Setting aside its rating, what is your best work on the site in your opinion? Why do you believe this work is better than your others?
SCUTTLE is probably my most solid piece from end to end. It tells a good story in spite of me not knowing what I was really doing or, indeed, how it was going to turn out. I wrote it basically as a stream of consciousness and the pacing and plot sort of came together organically. The two-parter of SCP-4406 and the connected GOI Format was the one I probably tried the hardest on with
aismallard. SCP-5222 was my only true Bright's Challenge piece, mainly because I wanted that triple, and I'd sat on the idea for seven years before getting to write it.
Along the same vein, what are the best articles on the site that come to mind for you? To you, what aspects do successful articles tend to share, and what would be your advice for aspiring authors on the site today?
My favorite remains SCP-1425 by
Silberescher and I'm glad others saw enough in it to make a cool GOI out of the whole thing. SCP-087 by
Zaeyde has been hugely influential all the way through to today. My favorite piece from last year was SCP-4979 by
DrChandra, it really did just go for broke in trying to paint a really horrifying picture and succeeded beyond its wildest dreams. The original attempt at SCP-2998 by Eskobear does not match any existing user name was to have the story be told through the revision history, one revision at a time, and I was always kinda disappointed that we couldn't really make that work because it was cool as shit. SCP-4205 by
Woedenaz is the coolest thing I've seen on the site from a technological perspective.
What do they have in common? Actually pretty much nothing. Those writers are all very talented, of course. They all go off in different directions with their storytelling, though I suppose a commonality here is that the storytelling is highly evident. None of it feels like a murder monster for the sake of one. Modern pieces go off in every conceivable direction, but the ones that stay above water are ones that tell you a story. That seems overly simplistic, but without some sort of narrative, you can't do anything on the wiki that wasn't already done, and done, and done to death, over a decade ago. And I suspect a lot of the folks that would benefit most from reading this aren't going to, because there are enough other resources on the site telling people to tell a story but that doesn't stop us from deleting around ten articles every day that didn't manage that.
To the aspiring writer, read. Not just the hits. Find stuff from this year. Keep up with newly created things for a few weeks. See what's working and what's not. You'll see pitfalls that failing articles fall into. Read the comments on these pieces. I learn so much from the perspective of others on well-written articles. Able, 173, and the lizard are all over ten years old and we've had over 5,000 articles written since those days, and by-and-large, the voters are really tired of things that look like them. You can't write outdated stuff in a community that self-curates.
I believe you can gain insight into a person's interests based on which 001 proposals they like the most. What proposal would you say is your favorite and why does it hold that distinction in your mind?
I've always loved Clef's gate guardian for its imagery. It's probably my favorite of the bunch. No, sorry, scratch that. My favorite is SPC-001. Put on your best macho man voice and read that first paragraph and try not to have a huge goofy grin when you're done.
You started up a project called SCP Café. What was the impetus for this and tell us a little about it if you don't mind?
The impetus was likely an overwhelming fondness for my own voice. I did internet radio in various communities going back to 2003 and was interested in making a career of radio. I was 18 and hosting the high school's morning news show on the internal TV station we had, rotating with a couple other folks, when I wasn't on I was manning the mixer and doing all that stuff. I called my local classic rock station who had probably the most well-known personality in the region and asked them if I could tour the place, as I was looking to go into radio; they counter-offered by also having said personality around to answer questions. Hugely formative, and informative, experience, and it kept me from making what likely would've been a big mistake. Now I do professional nerd stuff in other capacities.
Cafe was grown out of my own listening to more podcasts and knowing that there's always something to talk about on the wiki, the never-ending supply of new content also means there's an endless supply of new material to discuss. The idea, the overall goal at this point, is to elevate the creators. I want people to know about these authors and what sort of stories they're telling. Finding the right balance of time to do that has been more difficult than ever, but I hope to return to it soon.
Among your highest rated works, you have a tale named SCUTTLE. What is it about and what is with the SCUTTLE you have developed in real life?
SCUTTLE the tale was written during my first extended stint as a systems administrator, it turned into sort of a cautionary tale about the consequences of not testing your backups. I've worked in a ton of environments, managed environments as small as a mom-and-pop with literally one user and developed and deployed infrastructure for Fortune 50s and state agencies. Nobody has a plan to test their fucking backups. It's insane. Until you test them, they're not backups, they're a wish, a lucky rabbit's foot.
By contrast, SCUTTLE the tech project is a backup utility for the wiki itself. Wikidot, our host, offers very (very!) basic backups, no author attribution, no revision history, no forums, just the raw page source for the latest version of each page and literally all the images on the site in one big fucking folder. It was not something we'd ever be able to use for our own platform (Project Foundation) in the future, so SCUTTLE exists to store that information for our own purposes, or for others to use to build their own projects off of. SCUTTLE currently backs up about 18 Wikidot wikis including nearly every international branch on a minute-by-minute basis.
To the question everyone is probably wondering, how far along is Project Foundation and are there any details that you would like to share about the project currently that most people are likely unaware of?
Project Foundation is back in business, something that I've been excited to see develop. We've been able to take an older version of Wikidot's freely-released source code and make it work in a modern context, and we've named the new project Wikijump for any number of reasons I'll let the reader think about. There's a lot of work to be done still, but also a lot already accomplished. If I had to make a guess, the current build we have of Wikijump would be able to correctly display probably 95% of the pages on the English wiki. The scope of work in the future is still significant, and the bug tracker currently has about 200 items for us to work through. Our GitHub is available for code contributions. I took about a month off but we're ramping back up starting soon, we may have even picked it back up by the time you're reading this.
So, I understand you like to play guitar. What do you currently have, and what would you say your dream guitar would happen to be?
I was a big Joe Satriani fan as a teen, the new JS240PS is probably my dream guitar at the moment, the Sustainiac pickup in a JS body with a legendary tremolo system for around $1500 is an awesome deal. Honestly though, I've been playing more bass lately, I've switched over to short-scale basses and I'm hooked. Fender has a limited edition Mustang that's black on black on black and it looks pretty sweet for like $750. My own gear right now is a 1968 Ventura Les Paul MIJ, an Alvarez acoustic-electric, a mid-range Ibanez that my wife beats up on sometimes, and an Epiphone EB-0 copy that I've enjoyed more than I expected, COVID has really crushed availability for gear.
Why Tottenham Hotspur?
There actually is a story here. My cousin married a Londoner, her and her kids were all super into soccer; I was as well but this was before that was a hip (or honestly, acceptable) thing to do. I didn't actually know much about world football, I was in my early teens, so I asked them who I should cheer for. She said Arsenal, her son said Chelsea. Alright, cool. Then she cheated on my cousin. I went and looked up who their biggest rivals were and lo and behold, Tottenham Hotspur.
The following questions were picked out from the community feedback present on the previous interview's discussion page. The bold text represents the questions whereas the text within the boxes are Bluesoul's responses.
Community Asked Questions:
I know you're a busy dude, but you mentioned on SCP Café a while back that you found a writing challenge from Bright in the forums that nobody has attempted yet. Still considering giving it a shot? ~ TheMightyMcB
Right now the thought of writing is, like, laughable. I have a lot of work stacked up, a podcast to resume at some point, and I have nothing in particular I feel like saying right now through a story. But never say never.
Your wikidot bio says that you are a 'dog-petter'. May we see the dogs that you pet? ~ Ihp
Indeed you may. (Remind me, I'll attach some pictures in a collapsible.)
Is there anything regarding the site such as new features or a new organization system or anything of the sort that you would like to see? Additionally, what would you say is your most important role as an admin? ~ DianaBerry
We've tossed around a lot of ideas for things we can do or enable for other wikis to do in Wikijump. One thing that's already been enabled is an explicit no-vote, the ability to vote 0 on something and have it be recorded. We want to do some major rework of the admin panel because, I don't know if you guys are aware, but every admin gets a private message with every application. In the time it took you to read this, I'll have received probably another 3 PMs. If I don't check my messages in a week I'll have about 400. We gotta fix that.
The most important role to me right now is making sure I'm present, that my team feels supported and empowered to do cool shit to improve the wiki. After that, it's a lot of high-level discussion about our path forward, managing expectations with Wikijump, and creating new stuff and quality of life improvements for staff and users both.
What would you consider the unpardonable sins of programming? And how many has Wikidot found itself in violation of? ~ aismallard
Wikidot repeats itself a lot. There's a shitload of code that's copy-pasted all over this bitch and we're going to have to rework a lot of stuff to get that down to acceptable levels, where we only have to change code in a single place to affect outcomes on a broad scale. I've mentioned within tech, I've never actually been a professional developer, all my paid work has been in other areas. Learning those concepts through watching actual professionals do it has been good, and I feel more capable than ever of being able to put out a good product. Laracasts gave me a lot of food for thought not just in writing SCUTTLE but in general best practices, writing tests and all that. Shit's difficult. My own day job is way easier.
This concludes the interview. I hope you enjoyed it! I would like to give a big thank you to Bluesoul for agreeing to do this interview with me. Thanks again to the community members who provided questions: TheMightyMcB, Ihp, DianaBerry, and aismallard. My next interview will be with DrEverettMann. If you have any questions for him you would like for me to ask, feel free to leave your question in the discussion portion of this page, I will choose my favorites from among them.
Thank you for reading!
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