Completed Interviews

Meet the Administrators

These are my spare drafts of each interview I have conducted with the Administrators.

After recently coming across Roget's An Interview With "The Administrator" for the first time in a long time, I was inspired to begin a series of interviews based on the current Administration of the SCP Foundation Wiki. As a member of Junior Staff for the Community Outreach and MAST teams, I have the pleasure of working alongside Roget. Due to his work being the inspiration for this project, I approached him first to conduct an interview, and he graciously obliged. ~ WhiteGuard

Who is Roget?

Roget was officially promoted to Administrator on the 3rd of March, 2017 and continues today as a Team Captain for the Maintenance and Ancillary Staff Team. Roget has been a member of this site since the 19th of January, 2012, and as of the time of writing, he has contributed a total of 164 SCP Articles, 95 Tales, 6 GoI Formats, and 38 other pages for a grand total of 303 pages on the site. This makes him the holder for the most total pages on the site with the user Ihp in second at 169 pages. Roget's most popular page on the site by rating is SCP-031: What is Love? at +486. In addition to his writing prowess, he happens to be our site historian with his excellent series on the History of the SCP Universe. The following interview will consist 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 Roget's responses.

Interview Questions:

How did you originally find the SCP Foundation? What were your first impressions? Did you realize this could be a place that you could spend almost 8 years of your life writing for? If not, when did it occur to you that this could be "your thing"?

In my freshman year of high school, a friend who was into it showed me a Facepunch thread about it. I started reading, and I was hooked. I had always been a writer, and I wanted to see if I could contribute to this awesome community that appealed to my sensibilities and interests. After I got started, I haven’t ever felt like I wanted to stop.

If you were to describe your style as a writer, how would you go about doing so? Do you believe it has remained the same throughout the years or do you believe your style has undergone some kind of drastic change? What do you believe has most heavily affected your writing over the years?

I prefer to be succinct. Long-form writing was always challenging for me. I take a lot of influence from Mary Beard and Stephen King. I always gravitate back to keeping things simple, not trying to impress the reader but to communicate with them as best and as quickly as can be done.

It is quite well-known that you are a history buff. I am into history as well. It has always been a subject that has fascinated me; however, there was a particular teacher I loved to listen to in middle school who helped me turn my interest into a passion. Was there any event in your life that triggered this love for history? Please describe what fascinates you so much about this field.

My Dad used to drive us kids around in an old pick-up and tell us kids all the ways our town had changed since he was a kid. I credit my father with instilling a great love and appreciation for learning about the past and learning about all things generally. I find that learning history is a great way to learn about everything else. I generally view historical events through the lens of historical materialism, and I find that to be the most instructive ways to take stock of the past and then use the knowledge to improve our present.

Of the SCPs featured in the now-famous SCP: Containment Breach game from 2012, which SCP happens to be your favorite? After you have chosen, would you care to share what charm or interesting feature draws you to this classic article?

I’ve never played it, so I had to look it up. It’s 066 for being one that always creeps me out no matter how many times I read it.

Speaking of classic SCPs, you were around when the now-infamous "Heritage List" was rolled out. Despite its poor reception, do you think there could ever be a hope of resurrecting some semblance of it? Or even perhaps creating an altogether different list to celebrate particular SCPs in the same vein of the Heritage List?

I think we should take greater advantage of the user-curated lists to do the work that one Heritage List was not intended or suited for. I think the Heritage List is a last gasp of the movement for a singular canon and has rightfully been relegated to the dustbin of history.

Do you happen to remember the first SCP you ever read? Possibly one of the first articles you read that really popped to you? What was so interesting to you about these early creations that compelled you to want to be involved?

I remember reading the Critical Tomatoes, then The Old Man. I read SCPs on an old iMac in a disused computer lab we kids played D&D in, and I think that atmosphere contributed to my diving in head-first.

If you had to say, what would be your favorite SCP? Favorite tale? Favorite author? Favorite 001 proposal?

1. SCP-3001, it gave me the only real nightmare I’ve had since I was 10.
2. Pila
3. We are all standing on the shoulders of Sorts, Gears, AbsentmindedNihilist, TroyL, and DarkStuff.
4. I don’t think anyone can match Mann’s Proposal. The spiral path is such an elegant concept.

You have been on the site for close to 8 years now. You have seen a lot of people move on in terms of authors, readers, reviewers, staff members, and even admins. Whose involvement do you miss the most? If by some crazy chance they were to see this interview, what would you like to say to them?

I would love to know how Accelerando is doing and hope he is faring well since we spoke last.

Now that you have been an Administrator for 3 years, do you believe you are on the right track to accomplish everything you desired to do? Is there anything you wish you could have done differently?

I don’t really dwell on my past beyond taking lessons from failures and defeats. I feel very bullish about our community I don’t think we’ve reached a tenth of our potential.

Any pets?

Where to start? I’ll go largest to smallest:
1. Slugger - Big handsome yellow lab.
2. Kissinger - Manx kitty with a big attitude. Rescue Cat!
3. Nixon - Fluffy cat to the max. Rescue cat!
4. Atari - Little squeaky goblin cat. Rescue cat!
5. Sauerkraut - A ball python who just moved into a new bin and she’s loving it.
6. Spoon - A betta fish living his best life in a ten-gallon tank.
7. Snail - We used to have two but one kept jumping out of the tank until it died.
8. Shrimp - They’re fun.
Also the ~50 houseplants my s/o cultivates.

What is SCP-055?

A round peg looking for a square hole.

Community Asked Questions:

What do you do to motivate yourself for working as an SCP wiki administrator? ~ barredowl

I think the SCP Wiki is a wonderful and unique place and on balance, the past nine years have been very good to me. It’s a privilege to be able to help make the wiki its best self.

You have helped originate a lot of stuff on the Site: Class of '76, Arcadia, the Old Man in the Sea Canon. What is your favorite thing to have created? What do you wish got more attention? ~ Ihp

Vehicular Lazer Pointer, Crash Course Diet, AutoHeaven: My CRSHCRS series. The first in particular is definitely among my most fun work.

What has been the most impactful change that you've seen in the site during your tenure here? What is the biggest problem you can see the Wiki having to deal with in the near future? ~ MalyceGraves

It would be the evolution of senior staff from a loose group of long-time users to an organized institution with a strong legal tradition. I think our biggest problem is that a lot of our back catalog is hard to access, and if we don’t have people reading some of our best stuff that’s just sad. We can help fix that.

How do you get inspiration for your writing? ~ Hexick

I take inspiration from my everyday life. My first SCP, 1507, was inspired by my mother’s obsession with all things both decorative and flamingo.

This concludes the interview. I hope you enjoyed it! I would once again like to thank Roget for agreeing to do this with me. Thanks again to the community members who provided questions: barredowl, Ihp, MalyceGraves, and Hexick. My next interview will be with Zyn. If you have any questions for her you would like for me to ask, feel free to leave them in the discussion portion of this page, and I will choose my favorites from among them.

Thank you for reading!

HUB | Zyn »

‡ Licensing / Citation

As was the case for many other users on the site, Zyn was the first admin I came into contact with concerning some forum rules. Due to her tremendous impact on the community from her helpful feedback on the writing forums to the formation of her Butterfly Squad reviewers, Zyn stands as one of the most well-known, admired, and appreciated pillars of the SCP community. This status is clearly evident when observing her Ask Zyn thread from 2013 which continues to be active with over 1000 posts to date. Despite her busy schedule, Zyn graciously accepted my interview request. ~ WhiteGuard

Who is Zyn?

Zyn was officially promoted to Administrator on the 3rd of March, 2017 and continues today as the Team Captain for the Forum Criticism Team. Zyn has been a member of this site since the 23rd of July, 2012, and her most popular page on the site by rating is SCP-348: A Gift from Dad at +1154. As previously mentioned, Zyn is also responsible for the Butterfly Squad, a group of skilled reviewers dedicated to aiding authors in their conceptualizing and drafting processes. She is known to address many forum threads per day which further showcases her unmatched work ethic and her leadership as the captain of the reviewers. The following interview will continue the previous format consisting of 11 questions from myself and 4 questions from the community with her responses.

The bold text represents the questions whereas the text within the boxes are Zyn's responses.

Interview Questions:

How exactly did you come across the SCP Foundation? What ended up drawing you to the wiki? What inspired you to become a writer on the site rather than remaining simply a reader and reviewer?

I originally stumbled upon the SCP wiki after seeing a link on the subreddit r/tipofmytongue. This was in 2012, I believe.

I read some of the articles and tales, and decided to try out the SCP article format for myself and see if I could contribute something lasting to the Foundation universe.

After interacting with the community (and coldposting my first article, which got some great feedback even though it was rather cliche and non-memorable) I was motivated to improve. I wanted to be able to contribute something that the audience would enjoy reading, the same way I enjoyed reading when I first joined.

You mentioned in your ask staff thread that you enjoyed your high school's creative writing class. Do you believe that your experience writing in this class contributed to some of your success on this site? What did you learn from it?

It's been awhile since that class, but yes, that experience definitely helped me develop skills pertinent to writing for the SCP wiki.

The lasting lessons I remember most are things like "if you're running low on inspiration or motivation, try finding a different environment to write in" and "if you're heavily basing a character on your own traits, make sure you can distance yourself from them so critique of the character doesn't feel like a personal attack". And of course, always be polite to reviewers. Practice looking at your own work from the perspective of an outside reader.

On your author's page, you say that your favorite articles usually involve Safe class anomalies with heartwarming and emotional narratives. As a reader, what specific aspects create a really enjoyable article for you? Reflecting on your years of reviewing, what is an example of a draft you looked at that you were really excited to see become a fully-fledged article?

I tend to have very little time for leisure reading these days, so at surface level I'm admittedly more likely to enjoy shorter, "punchier" articles. Beyond that, I like anomalies that are unique, whether because they're an unusual entity or item that we haven't seen before, or because they're so wacky and unpredictable it gives the reader pause. I love to have a good laugh even if the humor is in serious professional-sounding tone. And if there's an emotional or memorable aspect (as in, the article makes me feel strongly for someone/something in the narrative, or it makes me remember something of my own life), even better.

I'll be honest, the drafts that I tend to be the most excited about are the ones I'm co-authoring, after I've reviewed an author's material and liked it enough to want to be more involved in the writing process. So far as articles written by other authors goes, the one that sticks out the most in my memory is SCP-2295 (The Bear with a Heart of Patchwork).

As a reviewer, do you find it challenging to review ideas and drafts that do not fit your preferences? What is your procedure when you find an idea or draft with potential, but you know that you would not personally enjoy it? Is it difficult to provide advice in those situations?

It really depends on the material. If something isn't to my preference due to headcanon or personal views on professionalism/realism, usually it's not an issue since I can still identify suggested edits fairly quickly. Reviewing becomes more of a challenge if I'm not familiar with the background (Groups of Interest, series plotlines, etc.) or comfortable with the themes (violence, mental illness, controversial topics, etc.).

In cases where I don't personally enjoy something but I can see it doing well on the site, I just state honestly that I think the author should seek out more reviews to get a better feel for the overall audience reaction. I do still try to provide some feedback on general elements like formatting and Foundation portrayal if applicable.

I myself don't think it's difficult to provide feedback in the aforementioned situation. It shouldn't be too hard for a reviewer to acknowledge their personal reading preferences straightforwardly, and it's common sense that one's own opinions are not necessarily reflected by the entirety of the wider site community. Just a matter of both sides being aware of context.

In the past, you mentioned that TroyL's SCP-091: Nostalgia was your favorite SCP article. Is this still true and would you explain why you gravitate toward this article in particular?

091 is still my favorite (though SCP-408 is a very very close second). I feel like it's a good example of the quieter, more peaceful side of the Foundation Universe, the small bit of good that exists to remind readers and in-universe personnel that not everything is hopelessness and grimdark. It's also pretty straightforwardly relatable to a wide audience, which is something I always hope is possible with my own writing. 091 has been a huge inspiration to me as one of the earliest examples of a harmless anomaly that stands out amidst the monsters and madness, and is high-rated partially because of that contrast.

You have also mentioned that DrEverettMann's Mann's Proposal was your favorite 001 proposal with Aelanna's Mackenzie's Proposal being a close second. Is this still true and what is it about these early proposals that charm you?

I would say yes, those are still my favorites. Honestly mostly because they're relatively short and to the point, and for me that just makes them feel all the more poignant.

As the captain of the Butterflies and the Forum Criticism team as well as your personal experience as a writer, what voting trends and discussions have you observed from the general audience? Which aspects have you observed to be present in highly-rated articles?

There isn't really a good way to neatly list all the trends observed since they change week to week and often are affected by factors like popular media and news, recent site members joining the wiki from specific fandom groups, or contests. The type of page in question factors in as well (compare SCP article to tales, works reviewed by lots of people to works looked at briefly by one person, etc.).

So far as discussions go, I can't really say there are any solidly consistent patterns I've noticed in particular, since new pages get all kinds of comments and sometimes conversation depends on how the author responds to posts. (Granted, low-rated articles tend to exhibit the same recurring areas of needed improvement and tend to receive the same sort of comments. There are several pages in the Guide Hub and lots of forum discussions that address this in detail! I could probably write an entire series about voting and commenting trends…)

I think the most consistent elements I see in high-rated articles are that they are very unique and/or very relatable. Alternatively, there's something immediately memorable about them, whether a particularly vivid image, a catchy phrase, or fictional situation that makes a reader think deeply about the implications.

We have a large number of inactive staff who have dropped out due to burnout and other outside circumstances. How do you avoid burnout with the high level of activity you personally contribute? What type of activities do you like to participate in apart from the site? Have you ever felt like giving up? Ignoring the circumstances which contributed to their departure, if you could see one of these members return, who would you like to see?

I avoid burnout mostly by pacing myself. I give myself a certain amount of time to work on the site, and then make sure to take breaks in between my usual daily staff tasks. Also, I try to train myself to step away and cool down if I feel myself getting frustrated. It helps a lot to talk to others (even if it's just incoherent keyboard mashing all-caps and symbols over chat) if I'm feeling overworked.

Outside of the SCP wiki, I take care of plants and two betta fish and also do some gaming and origami when I feel like it.

I don't think I've ever considered giving up being on the SCP wiki entirely—though I've definitely thought about taking leaves of absence.

With regards to the last question… I'm not sure. There have been plenty of staff who have retired over the years, and it's difficult for me to pick one out of them all.

In 2013, you were asked "What changes would you like to see on the site within the next year? Next 5 years?" Your 1-year answer consisted of establishing a culture where people comment on new posts asking "Have you gotten feedback on this?" to nudge them in the right direction for critique before posting. Your reply for the 5-year change involved "a more detailed system for accessing tales" as you felt that tales were disorganized at the time. Now that it has been 7 years, do you believe these desires were realized? Are there any changes you would like to see within the next few years?

Both desires have been addressed, as it's now fairly common to see site members notifying coldposting authors that they should seek critique, and I feel like the current tag system and tale hub displays are a big improvement over the previous setup for sorting tales.

With regards to the future, the change I want to see the most is more site members engaging in the reviewing process and helping others improve their reviewing skills.

From Pokémon, do you believe Absol gets a bad rap when it is just trying to help warn people of the danger or do you believe the label "doom-bringer" is deserved?

Absol definitely gets a bad rap, since Absol is bringing the warning, not the actual disaster.

Haiku?

落花枝にかへると見れば胡蝶哉
rakka eda ni / kaeru to mireba / kochō kana

"Thought I, the fallen flowers
Are returning to their branch;
But lo! they were butterflies."

Arakida Moritake, translated by William George Aston

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 Zyn's responses.

Community Asked Questions:

What is something you love about the wiki community that you haven’t talked about? Additionally, what is your favorite part about working with the other staff members? Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ ~ DianaBerry

I love how there are so many unique hobbies and stories site members have—over the years I've chatted with someone who owns two axolotls, someone who does historical reenactments, someone who rescued a kitten from heavy machinery… there's a fair bit of overlapping interests and I really enjoy being able to just talk for half an hour straight about topics like Dungeons & Dragons, Magic: the Gathering lore, indoor plants, tropical fish, and on and on.

Staff don't give me a hard time when I call my betta fish my cats/dogs and share pictures of my fish making silly faces. I appreciate that a lot.

As a longtime member of the site, you’ve seen a lot of change on the wiki. What’s the biggest change you’ve seen from when you first joined to today, and do you think it was a positive or a negative? ~ TheHouseOfBalloons

I would say that the biggest change I've seen is the shift of focus from horror and grimdark to expanding the Foundation-verse with works of plenty of different genres. Personally I consider this a positive—I feel like we could all use more stories where we end feeling determined or at least hopeful, even if they're in the minority.

What inspired you to create the Butterfly Squad? εїз? ~ Truc Linh

Butterfly Squad initially started when I would do mass forum crit-calls in IRC chatrooms, pinging lots of people at the same time. Someone suggested having nicknames or callsigns, and someone else compared the descent of critters upon the forums to a swarm of butterflies descending from the skies. We liked the mental image a lot and I started a sandbox to keep track of preferences when I got questions about matching authors to reviewers. Eventually that was prettied up and posted to the mainsite so authors could look up reviewers themselves without needing staff to be the constant go-between.

As a writer who tends to prefer benign anomalies and happy(ish?) stories, how do you go about writing stuff that often doesn't heavily feature struggle, conflict, suffering, and all those other unpleasant topics that fiction (SCP in particular) often rely on to drive a plot forwards? ~ TheMightyMcB

Usually I try and find a core object/narrative that immediately inspires a sense of wonder and/or light amusement. Alternatively, I work with a memory from my own life that made me feel particularly emotional. Then I sort of build on that in pieces—I rarely ever write a draft straight from start to finish. I guess that makes it easier to ensure that the different elements of the piece fit together well enough so there aren't any plot holes or narrative questions I as the author can't answer?

For the most part I can usually go with my gut feeling until I have a rough draft, and beyond that it's a matter of getting lots and lots of reviews to be certain that people enjoyed the read. I try to focus on writing material that pretty much anyone in the audience can relate to; it's just a matter of using positive emotions and scenarios rather than negative themes. My foremost hope with my writing is that readers will remember the positive feelings they experienced when reading the piece, and will want to return and reread to experience those positive feelings again.

This concludes the interview. I hope you enjoyed it! I would once again like to thank Zyn for agreeing to do this with me. Thanks again to the community members who provided questions: DianaBerry, TheHouseOfBalloons, Truc Linh, and TheMightyMcB. My next interview will be with DrMagnus. 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!

HUB | DrMagnus »

‡ Licensing / Citation

DrMagnus may be a recent addition to the administration, but that does not mean that he has not already been instrumental in keeping our site afloat from a technical perspective. He has been around the site for quite some time, and although he is a busy guy, he was still kind enough to have an interview with me. ~ WhiteGuard

Who is DrMagnus?

DrMagnus was officially promoted to Administrator on the 8th of March, 2020, and continues today as a Team Captain for the Technical Team. DrMagnus has been a member of this site since the 20th of May, 2009, and his most popular page on the site by rating is SCP-028-J: PC Load Letter?! at +347. In addition to his various SCP articles and tales, DrMagnus is responsible for the Advanced Formatting and You guide, the CSS Policy guide, as well as being the creator of The Alchemy Department canon. As the developer of our Secretary_Helen pronoun and IRC bot, DrMagnus' impact is felt among the community every day. 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 DrMagnus' responses.

Interview Questions:

Since it is an interesting question to ask, I will likely keep this one consistent across each of the interviews. How exactly did you come across the site and what was the main draw for you to the site? Your account says that you have been here since 2009, and you mentioned that you took a hiatus until 2016 after accomplishing a BS in Computer Science. What did you learn during your 7-year hiatus that helped prepare you to become an administrator of the site?

So this is a bit incorrect, timeline-wise. I did join the site in 2009, and I was active till around 2012. At that point, I went back to school and finished my degree, and came back around 2016. The honest answer is, I don't remember how I found the site. I think one of my friends who was a frequent 4chan user introduced me, and I joined IRC long before I joined the site. That's the nearest I can remember. As for what I learned during my hiatus, mostly how to be a reasonable adult. I had a lot of flaws before I took time to work on myself, and the time away from the site was mostly spent fixing those.

Did you ever write any before the site? Currently, your oldest surviving article is SCP-773: Voodoo Dartboard. Was this your first attempt to write on the site and what was the inspiration for this article?

Honestly, no. This was my first foray into creative writing outside of school assignments. My inspiration for 773 was basically MC&D. When I wrote the article, they were just being formed as a GoI and all I could picture was a bunch of guys in smoking jackets using this dartboard for their amusement.

From looking into your history as a writer on the site, I have noticed a number of -J articles present, including your highest rated article. Your author page seems to be humorous as well. Would you call yourself a funny guy? Going along with this train of thought, I am curious as to what your preferences are in an article. Do you enjoy reading light-hearted articles more or is it that you just enjoy writing them?

I like to think so. Any staff member could tell you that I make a lot of really dumb jokes. Contrary to my relatively scary reputation, I'm a pretty easygoing, agreeable person. I like humor, and I find a lot of humor in really dumb concepts. My wife is my sounding board for -J's. You can hear both of us singing in SCP-030-J. As for my article preferences, ironically, I have really high standards for articles. Proper formatting, lack of cliche, humor has to land if it's there, dialogue has to be on point, etc. I'm not sure if I have a preference per se for light-hearted articles, but it's definitely easier to appeal to my sentimentality than wow me with writing.

A lot of your works on the site revolve around your Alchemy Department canon. What inspired you to create The Alchemy Department and invest so many works to it? Is it finished in your mind or do you intend to continue writing further tales and SCPs related to it?

Good lordy, no the alchemy canon isn't finished. I've only finished phase 1, I have two more phases to write for the "main" story arc, hopefully culminating in my 001 proposal, down the line. Alchemy came from the phrase "consult an alchemist" which was a meme for the longest time in the early days of the site. I took that and ran with it. Plus, I like writing science fantasy, so I kinda just said "frak it" and wrote what I wanted to read.

From the articles, tales, and other formats that you have written while on the site, what would you say is your favorite work to have produced?

That's a really tough question. Overall, I think my favorite thing I've ever produced, is one of my lower-rated articles: SCP-029-J. It's about Jesus as an uber driver, with a bunch of sarcastic angels for a car. I had a blast writing it, and consider it one of my better articles.

I believe that I will continue this question throughout my interview series. So, what would you say that your favorite 001 proposal happens to be? Would you provide some detail on the reasoning behind your decision?

This one is going to be boring, but DrClef's 001, the gate guardian is my favorite 001. It was the first one I'd read, and it's got so many unanswered questions. I really like articles like that. Honestly, I'm a huge sucker for giant forbidden things that shouldn't be messed with. I'm also a fan of forces completely beyond our comprehension or scale.

From reading into your information found on your Technical Team bio, I understand that you teach historical swordsmanship? I am a sword collector myself as I am a fan of history, and I have studied techniques that correlate to the items in my collection. How did you get involved in such a niche study? You also say that you hold three black belts. Where does the interest in learning these combat styles originate?

Always nice to meet a fellow swordsperson! I got into fencing a very very long time ago, when I was a teenager. I fenced in high school and found myself a teacher in Italian Longsword in my late teens. I'm Italian-American, and I can trace my ancestry back to the renaissance, so I figured it was a good way to connect with my heritage. As for the black belts, I had to take a physical education in college, so I took Muy Thai, Wing Chun, and Okinawan Karate, each of which ends with a black belt at the end of the semester. I've always been very interested in martial arts and self-defense. Of the three, the only one I keep up with is Wing Chun, and I practice a couple times a week with it.

Of course, a major project that will largely rely on the Technical Team in the future is Project Foundation, the site's migration away from Wikidot to our own standalone platform. There has been a number of proposals in the past regarding this project. Would you mind briefly explaining to the community the importance of moving away from Wikidot as a platform, and are there any details about the current proposal that you would be able to share at this time?

Another doozy. Okay, so Project Foundation is in a nutshell, getting on to our own website. This is critical, because Wikidot, as a software product, is pretty dead in the water. It functions, the bills get paid, but there's no new development, and there are things we'd like to change about how it works. Our current and most successful approach is basically completely dependent upon the drive and brilliance of my co-captain, Bluesoul. I don't want to give too many details, because it always sparks a lot of speculation, but our current approach is to get our own version of Wikidot running, based on the open-source version on GitHub from several years ago.

So, you have been on the site for 11 years, a member of staff for 3 years, and became an administrator this March. Throughout that entire period of time, what are some of the major changes you have observed take place, good or bad? What desires do you have for the Wiki and for yourself in the future?

The largest change I've observed has been social. We've gone from basically being 4chan-like in our attitudes, to being significantly more progressive. It used to be that "crit" was "This sucks, try again." or even worse things. Now we have policies to make sure criticism is constructive, and our staff, in general, is so much better organized. The quality of writing has improved tremendously as well. I'm really proud of our standards, and practices.

On your author's page, you have a link to non-SCP poetry. Do you still happen to write any poetry?

Tons. Most of it by hand in my journals, I just don't have a lot of time to transcribe it. I write poetry as a way to destress and tend to write 5-6 per week. Anything from simple couplets, to longer pieces. Most of it is trash, honestly, but I enjoy writing it.

"His master's insisting tone unbidden to mind,"

"Repetition is the best teacher one can find." :)

Community Asked Questions:

As the captain of the Tech Team, what're your sentiments about using an infrastructure that is, as we all know, not the best to use? ~ The Pighead

Honestly, Wikidot is a good platform as far as platforms go. It does a lot of things very cleverly. It does a lot of things very not-cleverly. If it was still maintained, I think it would be a stellar product, but it's relatively stagnant at this point. The development required to make it good isn't difficult, we just don't have access. We also use IRC, so I don't think we have a lot of stones to throw about outdated infrastructure.

Would you say you're at all similar to how you were when you first joined this wiki? How has your experience here changed you? ~ DianaBerry

Absolutely not. The Magnus of 2009 and the Magnus of 2020 or even 2016 are so vastly different. I am a significantly kinder, more empathetic, mature, and just….better person than I was back then. To paraphrase one of our staff members, when I was first writing Secretary_Helen and asked to bring her into #site19, their response was "Wait, Magnus wrote a pronoun bot? What?!"

How did you come to learn all your coding and technical knowledge? Was it voluntary for the site, or something like a running theme in the family? ~ chiifu

I'm the first programmer in my family, for sure. Funny enough, I didn't even own my first computer until I was 18. I started programming at 23. I'm a professional software developer in my regular life, and I've been in the industry for about seven years now. Web development is ironically one of my weakest points, so I tend to leave a lot of the coding for any of our projects to the experts on the team when at all possible. I've also been an IT professional for a few years, and a server technician for several months so I've got a good grasp of hardware. I just can't write you a website. But if you want to do a huge volume of electronic trading using big data and risk analysis, I'm your guy.

This is more of an IRC based question, but what inspired you to create Secretary_Helen and/or any other past chatbots? I've always wondered that. ~ Mew-ltiverse

Good question. So originally I wanted to write Helen to be a dice bot. Then someone suggested that I write a pronoun setting/retrieval function which was the first major "CRUD" function for Helen. (CRUD functions are create/retrieve/update/delete operations. Basically holding information for you, such as with .tell or .pronouns). With that, I felt that Helen had a lot of usefulness as a bot in #site19, and I approached chat staff to bring her into #site19 officially. From there, I started to expand her functions a lot, and when Jarvis started to become less reliable I tried to copy as many features as I could get my hands on. Eventually, she became the primary bot, and after a large push a year ago or so, I'd call her mostly feature comparable with Jarvis. There are a few quirks here and there, but she's solid in general. Chatbots are fun, you can really do a lot with them. They're basically command line interfaces you can show off with.

This concludes the interview. I hope you enjoyed it! I would like to give a big thank you to DrMagnus for agreeing to do this with me. Thanks again to the community members who provided questions: The PigHead, DianaBerry, chiifu, and Mew-ltiverse. My next interview will be with Dexanote. 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!

« Zyn | HUB | Dexanote »

‡ Licensing / Citation

Dexanote is a kindred spirit to me. As a fellow lover of early Foundation works, we quickly hit it off with our lengthy preliminary interview. Dexanote is a long time member and has been an administrator for a few years now. I am glad to say that he accepted my request for this interview. ~ WhiteGuard

Who is Dexanote?

Dexanote was officially promoted to Administrator on the 3rd of March, 2017, and continues today as the Team Captain for the Disciplinary Team. Dexanote has been a member of this site since the 13th of June, 2010, and his most popular page on the site by rating is SCP-013: Blue Lady Cigarettes at +448. He is a founding member of the Anti-Harassment Team, and as previously mentioned, he is the newly appointed head of the Disciplinary Team. As a longtime member, contributor, and staff member of the wiki, Dexanote has successfully left his mark on our community. 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 Dexanote's responses.

Interview Questions:

Thanks again for agreeing to this, Dexanote. It was fun chatting during our preliminary interview. Let's start off with an easy question. How did you come across the SCP Foundation? If I recall it had something to do with TVTropes? Do you remember what the first article you read happens to be?

It began there, yeah. In April 2010 the Doctor Who episode “Eleventh Hour” was broadcast. I hadn’t WATCHED Doctor Who before so since it was a new season I decided to check it out, and I was hooked. While I haven’t watched it since about Series 7 (and scattered other episodes, Heaven Sent rips.), I DID go back deep and watch a bunch of Nu-Who and some old Who. And of course, like everyone in 2010, I decided to read about it on TvTropes.

I was scrolling through Nightmare Fuel, cause of course I was, and I came to something about some “Foundation” and clicked a link that was a number. I was greeted, at about 2 am on my laptop in bed, with 173’s picture. Freaked me the shit out - I wasn’t expecting THAT bullshit, so late at night, while also already vaguely unnerved about various other things. I clicked away cause the site was weird - “This is probably not real, that’s ridiculous, but not right now-” and I went to bed soon after.

Kept watching Doctor Who though, sometime later in I was still on TvTropes and was reading the page for Omnicidal Maniac. I sort of recognized the numbering scheme - “Was this the same as that one fucked up statue-”

So I click and get to 682’s article, and IMMEDIATELY recognized the picture. It was of the “Moscow Monster”, which I’d recognized from news stuff a few years earlier. Probably a beluga whale, but I was like, “Oh, oh I like that. I really like that.”. The idea of a creepy fiction site using found scary pictures to make creepypasta? Absolutely GENIUS. Immediately I knew the absolute potential of fiction on the site, and found Random SCP - found The Hawk, and went from there.

And now I am here. :D

From a quick search, I believe your oldest surviving article is SCP-517: Grammie Knows. This happens to still be one of your highest-rated articles to this day. Could you take us back to the time when you were writing your first article for the site and what you experienced early on?

Well this wasn’t the first article I ever wrote, it was my third. It IS my oldest surviving, though.

Back then I really wanted to write just for the sake of writing. The highest-rated SCP was 914, at around 60ish? The highest rated 001 was Clef’s The Gate Guardian, the membership was maybe a few a day at most. There were fewer than 600 SCPs - I remember there being HUGE chunks of open [ACCESS DENIED] slots in every block from 500 through 900. I mean I STILL want to write for the sake of writing, but I wanted to be part of it, right? Something scary, like SCP-513 or SCP-017. Something mine.

My first SCP was a poor attempt at what later became SCP-806, Resurrection Projection. I was actually inspired by a song, which is the best way to be inspired imo, by art that moves you, so you can move others. Said song is “B-13” by Jump Little Children, which is the perspective of the person who created the actual projector machine.

The article tanked and died a terrible early death before I even got back online the next day. We didn’t have a 24-hour stay, it was bad, lol. I didn’t actually feel bad about it being deleted - I was curious as to critique, but in review, it wasn’t good at all. So I decided to try again, eventually

Next SCP was a set of weather balloons that would ‘choose’ a random person within their line of sight and cause people to gradually trust and follow their leadership. Anyway, the Hitler Balloons died slightly quicker than the projector, good riddance.

A few weeks later I was dozing off in bed and I had the vivid image of arms reaching up from outside my room, up the stairs, and dragging me downstairs into the dark. At that moment I knew that was my idea, my 513, my 076. My “image”, my monster. I wracked my brains for a while, on chat too, trying to figure out what to attach it to - Dr. Burns, an old old old user, suggested a fortune teller box.

I wrote 517 in about a day and it’s rocking even now. I actually sorta hate the fortune part itself - that’s tacked on and I think I’ll figure out how to remove or reintegrate it later. But overall I’m very happy with 517, it’s my baby.

Back then, the site wasn’t so stringent with how writing was done. You write something creepy and fun to read, it got upvoted. That’s still how I personally see it, but with the sheer unrelenting numbers of users now we need to have the systems in place now to let them be filtered, refined, and thrive. I personally preferred the Old Way cause they felt like they could better channel a seat-of-your-pants writing style, but the new systems we have now are fabulous to help more people actually be part of this colossal phenomenon we’re all part of now.

On your old staff AMA thread from 2012, you said that SCP-517 was one of your favorites to have written along with SCP-806: Resurrection Projection and SCP-1679: Post-Mortem Peoples' Choice. Posing the same question to you, what is your favorite work(s) to have contributed to the site?

I feel 1479 (pre-image purge) was my best article because it’s so simple and pure as an idea. The old image was an industrial storage room with a tundra/sparse conifer forest cleanly transposed over and was the core inspiration of the article. It has everything I love in so many of my favourite SCPs - a clipped portrayal of the SCP, not-exaggerated-Containment, implications on the Foundation’s inner workings but only if you squint, a strikingly great photograph/image, and the phrase “is as of yet unknown”. It’s very clean, and I really need a new picture for it that’s CC-Compliant. And yes, I’ve found the original and messaged the creator - no response. Oh well. :(

But 806 is great too. It isn’t PERFECT but the very last part is wonderful, the visual image in my head brings everything together. A good SCP needs a moment that sticks with you - 015 does this, 014 does this, and I feel 806 does this. “The film contained 5.8 seconds of SCP-806-a laughing and saying “I love you”, repeating in various states of quality and colouration.”. Where did he get the film? Why is it in different quality and colouration? Why so much? Why JUST that clip? It’s because that’s all that mattered to him, the sound of her voice and her laugh, driving him to this failure with this dumb necromantic gesture, and in abandoning the machine, coming to peace with finally moving on. It reads to me like an early 1000s article, which honestly after rewrite it really is.

On the same thread, you mentioned your two least favorite works to have contributed. These happen to be SCP-013: Blue Lady Cigarettes and SCP-808: The Mechanical Choir. Over the years, you have modified these articles to some degree. Would you explain your original distaste for these works and what modifications you have made to them over the years?

Haha no. 013’s been fixed, its last note was poorly done in my mind. It should have 200 fewer upvotes minimum (it has a huge number cause it’s number ZERO ONE THREE) from that alone. But I tweaked it enough that I’m happy with it.

808 as well, I’ve fixed it with some phraseology and adjusted the photographs to be CC Compliant. That’s all a piece of fiction really needs sometimes - adjustments and coming back with a fresh set of eyes.

My biggest issues with them were phrasing. I couldn’t get it to feel correct - I want to communicate a feeling, but it doesn’t always come out clean. The ideas themselves were sound, as were the Image In My Mind, or as many call it, Concept.

806 is supposed to be a “parade float of doom” - my image of the Church of the Broken God is one of having dozens of small cults of people previously ‘inspired’ by 882’s existence. I don’t care MUCH for Mekhane/Yaldabaoth stuff, it’s not at all my kind of thing, way too Over The Top for my taste - 808 really fits how I imagine a CotBG thing to be. A machine. With the go-over I did a while ago, that vision’s there. It’s no longer super awkwardly phrased, no-longer-needed to use said phrasing in order to brute-force the article to have aesthetically clean formatting, and just enough detail is there to give enough actual explanation of how it works. The insinuation of what happens if it gets going - a Mechanical Choir, not literally alive, a bizarre mechanism that CotBG cultists through the lens of French Catholic worship style.

I re-approached the 808 article from that concept first and disassembled the parts I liked and didn’t like. I rebuilt the bad chunks and fastened them in place, and moved some concepts around for flow. The core is to get the emotion and the idea across - so that’s what I did. Focusing on structure first will screw your fiction.

For 013 I just scrambled the note at the end and redid it to have less, hastily scrawled by a dying or mid-breakdown young man who had something to do with 013 (the cigarettes themselves). You know the one Linkin Park music video for Breaking The Habit? This one, imagine The Guy Who Had Something To Do With 013 prior to its containment having a moment like this. Not the literal lyrics, but how the mentality is portrayed. The hazy reality and feverish heartbreak.

We talked at length about our mutual fondness for Old Foundation work (mid Series 1 to late Series 2). I believe we mutually agreed that these works have their own charm which extends further than simply being the bedrock for later works to come. Please take a minute to state your case on why you believe these older articles still stand up to the well-accepted articles we see today. If you would, also mention how you are a proponent of "there is no continuity" and what exactly that means.

Lemme answer from the bottom up. EDIT: Also TLDR at the bottom.

“There Is No Continuity” is the stance that the site has always taken. Nobody needs to write and be beholden to any other piece of fiction in the entire SCP catalogue when writing any article. I personally REALLY do not like most of the ideas behind the Yaldabaoth/MEKHANE thing, or a lot of the Ethics Committee Being A Scarier Group Than O5 Command stuff, or really almost any GAW or dado stuff. This is all for different reasons, and my personal reasons. Execution is usually great, so we’re clear. And I don’t fault anybody for liking them, they all have charm of some kind that appeals to people. But not to *me*. I don’t even like most of the Doctor Wondertainment stuff - and I helped create it. But I appreciate that people DO. It’s what this site is for - people writing what appeals to THEM.

808 above was a great expansion of this argument, actually - my personal image of the Church of the Broken God is that of cultists addled with the itch of 882. Maybe they passed over it while ocean tides were pushing it around through the seas. It’s a bug on their shoulder, and it burrows in gradually. Real Pickman’s Model stuff - Pickman himself, not the narrator. THAT is my ‘headcanon’ of how it all goes. There aren’t any specific other parts that need to be found. It’s like a fungus, it simply is. Not MEKHANE cosmic mystic stuff, not 001-Kaktus kaiju mecha.

But if they’re written well and come from the heart, I’m happy they’re on the site and part of the site. They simply need to be done nicely - people should write what speaks to THEM, and if that speaks to them, that’s good. But If/When I write an SCP in the CotBG family, it probably won’t reference any of that.

Now regarding Old Style vs New Style, I need to establish one thing: They’re not better or worse. I just feel a lot of older SCPs (NOT ALL, of course, lmao not at all) feel viscerally like they have a warmth, a smoothness that lets you fill in blanks and ask questions as you read them.

This doesn’t make old articles OR new articles Better or Worse inherently - there’s a LOT of jank back then, but that’s the point for a lot of the older. AND they’re a lot of subtlety and extraordinarily well-executed stuff today. Sure you might have a few like 752 Altruistic Utopia that could use a fine-toothed comb for flow and structure (and to be honest 752 could use it, I LOVE this SCP but it falls apart structurally)- but the content doesn’t need to be expanded on. Sometimes this is done well, but sometimes there’s this pressure to Keep Writing, Keep Giving More. You don’t always need to. Write a companion Tale, or let others write them if they’re inspired.

An example of this is 980, Absence of Detail. It’s a humanoid that has no details and gradually ‘simplifies’ objects and beings around it. It’s horrifying, it’s dangerous, and it’s all that it is. And it’s not short, necessarily - it’s a bit longer than 097 and 517. But there’s no connection to any GOI, there’s no real context to where it was found, there’s no explanation of what it WAS. It simply is, it’s simply described, and… apparently it has an experiment log, lmao. It could be an AWCY thing if someone a few years ago wrote it, or maybe a Serpent’s Hand thing dumped on the Foundation for them to contain safely, like toxic waste. Or maybe it’s simply An SCP, and we can fill in the blanks ourselves if it spoke to us.

Then there’s stuff like… Liquid Polecat, 845. It’s a type of polecat that can become liquid. That’s it. It’s a straightforward, charming animal article that absolutely could fit in Today. Shit, it’s just like the snake with boots that ARD wrote a little while ago, 5430 - A Snake Wearing 48 Sneakers. Some of the best articles are timeless like this, written competently, sleek details, not too much but not too little. Microfiction with a solid idea behind it.

Timelessness is a key to good SCPs, is what I think I’m getting at. And a LOT of Series 1 and 2 are timeless. 415, Harvested Man, is fabulous in concept and description. Vivid imagery and it feels like something from an actual creepypasta, but written decently well, from the other direction - not from someone who encountered him, but from who is investigating him. 433, A Ritual, super solid, brief article with a great test log that leaves implications open and is very cleanly written. All of these I’ve mentioned hold up and all of these will forever FIT into what an SCP is.

TLDR Good writing is timeless, and a lot of Series 1-2 are Good Writing because they’re Timeless. Half the fun of reading this site is building your own Foundation in your mind.

Initially I had a segment about gimmicks and was geared up to rag about the IKEA SCP but then I remembered that 426 I Am A Toaster exists and I reminded myself to not be a jackass. Brand name SCPs bother me for many reasons unrelated to the actual quality of the article and that segment was unrelated to the question.

You mentioned to me that your favorite 001 proposal happens to be Jonathan Ball's Proposal: Sheaf of Papers. What do you love so much about this early proposal?

You kidding? /rhetorical

It’s so simple. It’s so good. Straightforward, shockingly dangerous - the origin of everything, as it’s implied. But it’s not obscure in concept, it’s not hidden behind a pile of descriptor, it’s not building on previous lore that a reader needs to know. I firmly believe a 001 should work whether it’s intended as the First SCP, or the Final.

Again no shade towards other 001s - Gate Guardian is badass and super cool, The Children is very A Few Years Ago obscure and grand and tells a GREAT story that fits super well in-universe, When Day Breaks is a FABULOUS story and Tale. But 001 is An Origin, and could thematically be the Final Entry in the database on a meta-level. It needs ZERO other context to work as an origin or as a destination.

I feel similar to 001-Gears The Prototype or 001-Mann The Spiral Path. They’re “origins” - the title of ‘The Prototype’ isn’t describing the monster, it’s describing the document, it gives us (my personal headcanon) origin for the term “Keter” as a classification, it’s clearly a prototype written quickly on a typewriter by a harried aide after six and a half days and nights with no sleep and nearly at wit’s end from Dr. Keter’s death at the hands of this monstrosity.

Spiral Path is attached to a Tale (Make Companion Tales a thing people) and together the SCP and Tale paint an utterly separate origin for the Foundation, wherein it’s the crux of many organizations and people and happenstance coming together, tampering with things they don’t understand, and now carrying a grim burden.

But 001-Ball’s… It’s got a special kind of simplicity to it. In a meta sort of way, it IS our origin - someone found a scrap of writing on the floor somewhere, opened it up, and somewhere else, something scary appeared.

And THEN TroyL decided to write Pila.

During our preliminary interview, the concept of perfect SCPs was brought up. You listed SCP-014: The Concrete Man, SCP-015: Pipe Nightmare, and SCP-908: Colocated Rock as perfect SCPs. What makes a perfect SCP for you and why do these stand out to you?

I need to first establish here like I did with you - by “perfect” I mean ideal, not “unable to be matched or bested”.

SCP-014, The Concrete Man, is IMO the ‘greatest’ SCP article on the site, in the same way that people will say Godfather is the greatest crime movie, or Exorcist is the greatest horror film. It’s gorgeously done, and it feels like a freaking classic Twilight Zone episode. I can HEAR Rod Serling reading the addendum - go read it right now, then come back. That’s not the most common thing to feel in an SCP. A moment in time, a single snapshot of the Foundation - a paper on a clipboard, a man who will live forever. No more, no less. And yet, it’s written with the exacting amount of detail, the perfect amount of description, the exact amount of information necessary to make that final Addendum note work.

It gives me questions - COULD he move if he decided to? What else is possible in this universe? What else is possible, at all? But none of the questions are actually answered, because they don’t need to be - the article is the perfect, ideal execution, up and through that last Addendum.

It comes together immediately, it gives you something that can stick with you, and it doesn’t rely on a gimmick or a cool image. It simply is an idea that the author wrote and published, and it will maintain on the wiki forever. Somehow.

SCP-015 Pipe Nightmare is similar. Containment is exactly enough, a balance between danger posed to the Foundation and potential benefit from further containment. The actual description is enough - one paragraph on the structure of this object, one on ‘activity’. A link to a Tale I hadn’t read previously read (it’s great!) (MAKE COMPANION TALES A THING, PEOPLE) woven into the article. And then that final line -

“Okay, right, it was bigger, cut back… oh Jeez, killed and missing- Wait. What—”

“Reports have been made of banging and screaming coming from within SCP-015.”.

SMASH CUT TO CREDITS.

No explanation, no expansion, just that - you’re left with that. And then you get the thought, “why- what happened there??!”

Here’s a fun fact - I actually joined the site so I could one day become a good enough writer to be confident enough in writing an exploration log for 015. With 087 and 093 being the then-premier exploration logs, with Cabinet Maze and Blue Key also existing at the time, I wanted to expand 015, which with that perfect final line grabbed me like Ball Of Sharp. But as I’ve stayed and grown as a person and a writer, I’ve realized that 015 doesn’t need an exploration log - it’s perfect as it is. And the tale Plumbing is a super cool image of what my exploration log could have been, even - but like, y’know. Written by the original author instead.

908 Colocated Rock is a really interesting idea expanded in Classic SCP Fashion. It’s a colocated rock, but it’s explored really well, with a little more than enough actual added detail. The amount of writing here, just a bit more than you’d expect from the concept, makes it feel like there’s actually More Going On Here Than Lets On, even without the sea monster incident in the test logs. It’s just enough to satisfy, yet implies there’s more to be discovered. While it’s not necessarily as GRABBING as 014 or 015, it shows how great execution can satisfactorily land a great idea. It’s a perfect SCP to use as an example of a Good SCP - one to aspire to and exceed, rather than 014 and 015’s isolated ideals.

Taking a brief look at your staff work, you are a founding member of the Anti-Harassment team and you are the head of the Disciplinary team. Would you mind explaining a little about what you do in these teams for any readers who are unfamiliar with how site-staff operate?

Disciplinary team is the team that deals with bans, ban appeals, and trolling stuff. For example, people being jackasses on the forum, chatbans, people who might be acting unsavory (slurs, etc), that sort of stuff. We also keep tabs on people who post unsavory crap to the sandboxes, like pornography or really immature or uncomfortably edgy garbage - usually racist stuff, or actual porn stuff.

Basically Disciplinary tries to keep crappy stuff from happening too much, and tries to keep the wiki open and reasonably comfortable for its users. I’m a new head of Disciplinary, taking over after Mann took over Anti-Harassment several months ago.
Anti-Harassment, or Harassment, it’s the same team (we use Anti-Harassment so people don’t joke about us literally having a team just to harass users l o l) is the team that investigates harassment. We’ve had stalkers, we’ve had malicious activity on the part of predatory users, we’ve had shock images sent to people’s inboxes and as PMs on IRC Chat, and a LOT more. With the sheer unrelenting size of our community, it’s bound to happen. Anti-Harassment is the team designated to try and investigate all claims of harassment activity, gather all possible evidence (logs, screengrabs, etc), and act on them.

We keep a forum outside of Wikidot to safely and discreetly collect evidence and keep running threads on cases, so as to keep organized and follow patterns of behaviour. We’ve had some sour events in the last few years, and we’ve excised every user we’ve found actual fault in and wrongdoing by.

I’ll take the opportunity to say that if you ever have any really sour things you want investigated, bring it to someone on IRC Chat or one of the discords you know is a member of Staff, and tell them to bring it to me. I’m not head of Anti-Harassment but I’m the most available member on the team.

You have been here for a decade, you have been an admin for a few years now, and you told me that you will "be here until it's all over, and then after." You also mentioned that you "believe there's a power in this site." What all have you observed change concerning the site over the years and why do you believe it is so special?

See I think the site’s stayed fundamentally the same. It’s a creative writing community wherein the stories have an air of mystery and a sense that there’s always something else.

The lack of continuity lets anything be possible. You can imagine anything, even if it’s not written, and it’s your Foundation.
The articles themselves are varied - hundreds of authors, hundreds of hands and voices, all creating something of their own vision that becomes part of everyone else’s. A gorgeous swirling patchwork of passion and ideas and images and monsters that resonates when someone asks, “Have you ever heard of SCP?”

SCP came from a single creepypasta written as a throwaway thread on a shitty imageboard on a shitty website in the summer of 2008 and now it’s a global multinational juggernaut of collective fiction. High-quality fan-made games and films have exploded across the internet, and you cannot pay me to believe that 2019’s Control game wasn’t inspired by SCP Foundation, or 2018’s Annihilation film didn’t have a few crewmembers that were fans of us. People cosplay as author avatars at fucking conventions, as Gears and Bright and Clef and Kondraki and I even saw a Dr. Light cosplay once. These stories resonate with people beyond what literally any of us could dare to imagine in the summer of 2010. They were roleplay characters and now kids who were born after the games they were played in ended are drawing fanart of them.

AND YET, despite what SCP has become, you can still open it up and start from 002 and read the Mulhausen Report at 2 in the morning. And you’ll be back where I was in April 2010, and work your way through just like tens of thousands of readers before.

I’m gonna be here until after the end because I want to see where it all goes. Writing this here makes me realize it’ll probably break my heart, but alas. There are no happiest endings with the Foundation, in-story or out.

What Pokémon describes you the best?

Why did I agree to this question

Does the black moon howl?

If you answer.

Community Asked Questions:

So I heard you like Pokémon this may be a stupid question but I'm genuinely curious, what is your favorite pokemon and generation/games? ~ IAmReal

Every generation has its ups and downs. The music of Gen 2 (GSC) is gorgeously nostalgic 16-bit glory, a completely different world from 5’s mania or 8’s pep. Designs are great in every gen, though I feel like 3 and 4 dipped a bit (fuck OFF Magmortar). Also, 5 gave us the monkey triplets, and frankly, that just won’t do.

I wrote SCPokemon, a Tale featuring my author avatar, war-crimeing his way through Red version on a whim. It’s silly shit, and I do really like Gen 1 and remakes a lot, but I recognize it has issues. Nidorino and Mewtwo and Venusaur and Feraligatr and Dunsparce and Wobbuffet are fabulous designs, but so are Pyukumuku and Clawitzer and Toxtricity and (unironically) Basculin.

I’d have to say Gen 5 was the best objectively, curve-wise, difficulty-wise, and story-wise. The endgames were fabulous and the stories are solid for Pokemon - I actually wanted to beat Ghetsis’ ass in Black when I played through, but then he crunched my team through and I realized it wasn’t going to be easy. I had to WORK to punish a proper villain.

The other generations are all great but are imperfect. 1 has a LOT of problems and is shackled by its heritage in remakes - I LOVE going through Viridian Forest but it’d be great if it was expanded upon (replace Viridian Forest with any other area of the game save for Seafoam Islands). Were they in Let’s Go? I dunno and don’t care, didn’t realize they were remakes till like ten minutes ago. 2’s GREAT (FERALIGATR!!) but its level curve is dogshit and Kanto’s limited, both in original and remakes. 3’s designs are a little too clean (Compare Zangoose and Raticate, there’s a level of ‘wildness’ lost in design philosophy beginning around here) and I really just think the remakes missed the mark, in some way. Gen 4 had huge issues, feeling empty in Diamond and Pearl and a poor balance of types available - as well as really janky and unnecessarily difficult methods to obtain certain Pokemon. Vespiquen? Munchlax? Goddamn, I prefer Feebas Gen 3 to that shit. I hear Platinum was better but I never bought it. Gen 6’s way too hand-holdy, and I wanted to punch Tierno and Trevor in the jaw. Lemme have a jerk rival, Nintendo. Gen 7’s pretty good but way too easy, the level curve is too smooth and it’s not got the best exploration options. Solid shiny hunting though, and the Ultra Beasts while stupid were also cool - and Ultra Necrozma was the closest thing to a challenge I’d had since I walked in on Cynthia in Black. Gen 7 also gave us Team Skull, and they’re Great. Gen 8’s railroady and you can’t get lost or really explore in any fundamental capacity, and there’s always broken bridges - Is there a reason I can’t challenge these Team Yell geeks to a battle and breakthrough? No- uh right on I guess. Character design’s A++ though in Gen 8, holy crap it’s all fantastic. But the story is… ehn. I should probably get the DLC sometime lol I completely forgot.

TLDR Gen 5 is good, but I actively like all generations but 4, which is Just Okay and I hope they remake so I can play Platinum properly.

Do you have any favorite SCPs or tales that you think are under-appreciated? ~ DianaBerry

It’s not exactly “underappreciated” as it’s +151, but The Ambassador is a fabulous SCP. It’s a GREAT example of the phenomenon I mentioned above with Altruistic Utopia. It could use a touch of cleanup, but in itself is a super cool SCP, fabulous implication and visuals, super cool setting. Another similar one is Inland Lighthouse, 934. Vivid imagery and super cool microfiction.

But as for ACTUALLY under-recognized SCPs - 1273, Stuck. It’s absolutely a melancholy, or even tragic, SCP. It’s actually one that TOTALLY sticks the Series 2 style and it’s a home run.

As for Tales, there’s a LOT. I could go easy-mode and talk about Quiet Days, or gush about In His Own Image or Video-Oddity, or pretend people don’t appreciate something like Document Recovered from the Marianas Trench and That Goddamn Thing (holy shit it's a great Tale), but really, the tales I remember from WAY back, are Running and Stop. Both of these could very well be companion pieces to the SCPs in question. Running is written as a creepypasta that fits its subject SCP super well (Read the Tale first, then the Discussion, it’s right there), and Stop is very well what could have happened to create its subject SCP. This is the kind of thing I envisioned when I first joined the site, Tales beside their SCPs in a bubble. I love them. Running’s janky and reads JUST like a classic creepypasta (cause it IS one!!), and Stop’s masterfully designed. Read them! Then read their SCPs.

To my knowledge, you're probably the most discreet Admin on the site and we know less about you than the other admins. So, do you have a fun fact related to the SCP community that you would like to share with us? ~ The Pighead

there are no fun facts Years ago in Staffchat (when it was more of an ‘unofficial fun chat for cool people’ we had the idea to troll users by pretending we sold the site to SpikeTV. Now I might be misremembering, so literally any old Staff is welcome to correct me in the discussion page and I’ll edit it in, but I’m PRETTY sure it went down with Clef initiating in 19 by starting to rage about the sale, and Bright and either Mann and/or TroyL backing it up. It was hilarious in hindsight but like I’m rapidly running out of story I remember. I won’t even say “you had to be there” cause it wasn’t THAT funny at the time either lmao. Makes me smile now though.

Sometimes there are fun little stories or explanations behind the screen names that people give themselves on the internet. Is there such a story behind the name "Dexanote"? ~ TheMightyMcB

Honestly? In like, the mid-2000s I wanted a name that wasn’t a real word and didn’t need a number at the end. It’s the first thing that came to mind.

This concludes the interview. I hope you enjoyed it! I would like to thank Dexanote for helping me out by doing this interview with me. Thanks again to the community members who provided questions: IAmReal, DianaBerry, The PigHead, and TheMightyMcB. My next interview will be with pxdnbluesoul. 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!

« DrMagnus | HUB | pxdnbluesoul »

‡ Licensing / Citation

Interviewing Icons

These are my spare drafts of each interview I have conducted with iconic authors and figures.

This new series will focus on me interviewing famous authors or figures who have left their impact on the site in some way or another. When I first approached various authors about starting up this new series of interviews, I was pleasantly surprised at the reception I received. Among the authors who seemed excited to do this with me was djkaktus. Kaktus was gaining popularity when I first joined the site and never stopped. Being the author of some of my favorite works on the site, it was an absolute pleasure working with him to create this interview for the community. ~ WhiteGuard

Who is djkaktus?

The user djkaktus became a member of this site on the 12th of May, 2014, and his top 3 most popular pages on the site by rating are SCP-049: Plague Doctor at +3184, SCP-1730: What Happened to Site-13? at +1879, and SCP-3000: Ananteshesha at +1818. As an author, djkaktus has written a total of 88 SCP articles, 33 Tales, 3 GoI Formats, and 14 other pages for a grand total of 138 pages contributed. From these pages, he has amassed 41596 net upvotes from the community making him the most upvoted author in the history of the site. He is also the only author currently with 6 articles that have +1000 or more upvotes on the site. The user djkaktus' Ouroboros Cycle marks the culmination of 4 separate 001 proposals linked together as a single narrative, something that has yet to be replicated. As the winner of the SCP-3000 contest along with his coauthors A Random Day and Joreth along with his other listed achievements, djkaktus has established himself as one of the great authors we have here on our site. The following interview will consist of 20 questions from myself with his responses.

The bold text represents the questions whereas the text within the boxes are djkaktus' responses.

Interview Questions:

First of all, I would like to thank you for agreeing to do this interview with me. Although a simple question, I always enjoy hearing how people first came across the site. Would you mind sharing your story? Something about Reddit and SCP-087 I believe?

I first heard about the wiki during casual internet browsing years ago, but I didn't discover it as a tangible thing until 2012. I posted on nosleep (I know, I know) back in those days and a comment comparing something that someone had written to 087 linked to that article. I started reading articles and was hooked from the word go, but lost the email address for my first account before I could even apply to the wiki and, in my great shame, decided to forget about it.

Years later the wiki showed up in my periphery again and, deciding there's no time like the present, I signed up with a different account in 2014.

Did you ever do any writing before you found the site? At what point did you realize that you wanted to contribute to the wiki? What about it compelled you to do so?

I very briefly worked editorial for a technical publisher just after college, but I've been writing fiction forever (most of it was very, very bad). The wiki, at the time, was captivating to me because it was one of those places that felt like something you weren't supposed to see. I never really fell into the trap of "scp reel" - I was a little too old for it at that point - but was a definite cursed quality of articles back then. The wiki was less ubiquitous (though the rapid response to Containment Breach would quickly dispel that) and the lower quality of those articles actually served to make them feel more mysterious, somehow.

I wanted to contribute back in 2012, even though I didn't have any idea what that would look like. Just before I joined the wiki for real in 2014 I spent weeks fretting over what my first article would be, knowing I wanted to come out of the gate swinging. I read so much back then - not just other articles, but critique threads and O5 posts - everything to figure out how to maneuver through the site like I knew what I was doing. I think I just didn't want to be embarrassed, but at the end of the day, it made the process of writing my first article that much smoother.

That was maybe what compelled me to actually do the thing most of all - the knowledge that I knew what the process looked like and knew how to react to it. I knew the first article didn't need to be perfect, it just needed to be coherent, consistent, and appeal to somebody. I also knew that if I could manage that, then I could tell whatever stories I wanted to tell - and that was the real appeal.

On the 14th of May, 2014, you posted your first article to the site, SCP-2812: Echoes of Yesterday. In the info section of that article, you mention that it was written while you were working for a dentist in a small town in southern Indiana. I remember reading this back in the day before taking a hiatus from the site, and the small-town vibes resonated with me. Take us back to 2014 djkaktus and remind us of the things you experienced writing this article of yours?

Oh boy. 2014 djkaktus had a much different view of the wiki and his place in it. As mentioned above, more than anything else I wanted to just get one, because I figured if I could just get that one I could figure out how to write others. I can't remember now if I wrote that article before or after I created my account - I think it's likely that I had a nearly finished draft ready for critique the day I joined the wiki.

I wanted to start with something small, and local, and unique to my situation. The town I worked in in southern Indiana was one of those old limestone towns whose heyday is just a memory and whose populace is generally isolated by both distance and culture from the rest of the world. That town, and the small towns around it that made up our patient base, felt to me (someone from Indianapolis) like they were evaporating away, almost like there was something within them that was driving people out (eventually I'd learn this is called "economic depression" and "basically capitalism in general").

There are some elements of 2812 that I probably wouldn't add now, but I had things I believed should be part of articles back then that I know now probably weren't necessary. Still, the writing process was made easier just based on how much homework I'd done prior to joining the wiki - I cannot tell you how many articles I read before creating my account, and how zealously I watched Recently Created to see what to do and what not to do. There were a ton of very bad articles being posted in those days so there were a lot of examples of what not to do.

I also got a lot of really great support on that first article. Chubert and Eskobar were both helpful and probably the reason I stuck around. I didn't know anybody on the site, I was just trying to stick my head in here, and these two people who didn't know me went out of their way to help me with my first article. That meant a lot to me.

How often would you say that you base articles and tales on your personal experiences and surroundings? You have mentioned before that you like to watch hospital dramas for writing dialogue for anomalies who are scared of their anomalous properties. Do you ever watch certain shows or movies with the intent of trying to gain inspiration for your own works?

It sort of depends. Experiences - yes, absolutely. 90% of what I write is me attempting to capture how a certain "something" made me feel in a moment. I've not been quiet about the fact that Ouroboros came about as a concept after I had spent a week listening to Tool's Lateralus on repeat during my commute to work. Early on it was much more locational - I wrote a lot about Indiana, because I'm from there, and because it was one of those places where you'd hear things or see something that would just catch you kind of funny and make you feel a certain way.

A lot of what I've done is like that - not just drawing inspiration from theme and plot elements, but from the impact a piece of media has on me in a moment.

In our preliminary interview, you talked to me at length about your favorite SCP article, SCP-1739: Obsolete Laptop by Chubert. Would you please repeat what you told me about your fascination with this article and your belief about this article in regards to aspiring authors?

I think 1739 tells perhaps the most concise, well-rounded and impactful story in as many words anywhere on the wiki. I don't know if 1739 is the best article on the wiki - though I'd be hard pressed to find an article that is more efficient and compelling than 1739 - but I do feel that it should at least be considered something of a barrier to entry for serious writers on the wiki.

A lot of people make the mistake of believing that if you don't have flashy graphics or some kind of long-winded story then nobody will give a shit about your article or it won't be any good. This is an easy trap to fall into (one that I myself have likely perpetuated) but in truth, quality comes from within. 1739 isn't flashy or grotesque, it's not a multi-part supernarrative. It's short, contained, and powerful.

I strongly believe that if you aren't able to explain why that article is as good as it is, then you're not going to be able to succeed on the wiki long-term just by virtue of not being able to take away the correct things from pieces that you read (though - when I say correct things, I don't mean to imply there is an objectively correct takeaway from the article; simply, I mean the article itself has, I believe, inherent virtue that may not be apparent to someone with a base-level understanding of fiction in general and the Foundation/wiki specifically).

Let's talk about your highest-rated article on the site, your SCP-049: Plague Doctor rewrite. Why did it need a rewrite? What was your thought process while working on an already-established and famous article on the site? Despite some people disliking the rewrite, are you pleased with the result?

The original 049 was rough - something that the original author conceded as well. It was written for a different wiki, by a younger kid who was just getting into this sort of thing. 049's popularity came from, I believe, three places: it was a creepy monster man who talked, it was old, and it was easy to cosplay. Couple that with the fact that it showed up in Containment Breach and you've got yourself a recipe for a cult hit.

But none of that made the article itself good, which it very much wasn't. Aside from a lot of period-appropriate formatting and structure issues, the dialogue was pretty juvenile and the article itself lacked a narrative compelling enough to make up for its shortcomings. So it had to go.

When we sat down to rewrite it, I wanted to accomplish a few things: it needed to be the same character, even if that character was fleshed out more, so it needed to keep some of the same camp it had in the original version - it needed a stronger narrative to support what is, frankly, a pretty thin humanoid anomaly - and it needed to not deviate too far from the original version so as to not contradict the copious amount of material in various media about 049 that already existed.

To that end, we almost ended up writing a prequel to the original 049 - or rather, so far as I see it the article we have now sets up both the original article (sort of) and all of the other non-wiki iterations of that character (definitely). It does this all while maintaining - if not a tragic character - at least an interesting one.

The response was, at times, admittedly pretty rough, but for every one person complaining about us not leaving well enough alone (or the "if it's not broke" crowd who continued to miss the point) there were about fifty who had nothing but high praise for the update. Indeed - that article's rating has gone up substantially since the update, especially since it took pressure off the people who already liked the character of 049 but didn't like the article itself. We heard a lot of "I can finally admit to people I like 049 now, thank you" in the aftermath of that rewrite, which was super cool.

SCP-1730: What Happened to Site-13? is your most famous solo work on the site, and it happens to be one of my top 5 favorite articles to date. Take us through your thought process with this massive work of yours. On the 15th of May, 2017, you added a new log to the end of the article. Why did you decide to add onto an already very successful article?

It was always my intention to get 1730 to the place it is now, but when I started that article I didn't really have the tools necessary to do it. I thought the idea of a horror story turned into an action flick was really compelling - something like Aliens, which I drew a lot of inspiration from (and Ridley Scott/James Cameron in general) for much of the stuff I've written here. That being said, once I got through the first half of the article I kind of cratered out and didn't know how to proceed with it, and instead of fretting about it I just chopped the back half off and said "good enough" and left it as that.

Some time later, though, I came back to 1730 with the notion of finishing it. I knew the scale I wanted to be able to achieve, and I knew the kind of stakes I wanted it to have, but being able to accomplish that without the article turning into a blender for MTFs would've been a nightmare. Fortunately, ARD and TyGently had written Samsara about a year earlier, which ended up being the cherry on top of the violence cake I wanted to bake. Finally, I could tell the story I wanted to tell, including all the characters and monsters I wanted to include, and do so in a way that didn't force me to throw dozens of lives away (in fiction) because Samsara were already an established entity at that point.

I know rating isn't the end-all-be-all of everything, but I like to think of it more as a function of audience interest and participation. With that framework in mind, the updates to 1730 have been almost universally lauded, with a few holdouts who pine for the days when it was just a horror article, and lament that I've usurped my own original vision. None of them ever stop to consider whether or not this is the original vision - which it is. It just took a while to get to it.

You won the site's 3000 contest with your collab article SCP-3000: Anantashesha alongside the authors A Random Day and Joreth. Would you mind providing some insight into how this article came together from the minds of three excellent writers?

Prior to the 3000 contest I had been working on a rough draft of an article called "The Gaslight" about a giant eel in a big underwater containment sphere somewhere in the ocean that changed your perception in malicious ways in order to draw you into the containment sphere so it could eat you. I had the image and a basic premise, but little else - so when the 3000 contest came along it felt like something we could roll with.

In our discussions about what actually scared each of us (for the purposes of a horror contest) a common theme was this idea of the obliteration of consciousness, a slipping away of your existence, and a realization the moment beforehand that there's nothing waiting for you beyond death - just annihilation. ARD introduced the Hindu aspect with tying that anomaly into Anantashesha, which was a really, really cool addition, especially since the site up to that point was sorely lacking for articles centered around or with a focus on Hinduism.

Joreth did a lot of framing of that article with regards to the environment we were trying to create. We had a lot of difficult conversations in those first few weeks about what we should do and how we can write something that not only scares us but scares the audience, as well. My original idea fell short, I think - when Joreth came on the scene and said "yeah but what if after that there's nothing" and that more or less wrapped that article up neatly.

I believe every SCP article you have posted to the site has some kind of image attached to it. You briefly talked about it during our preliminary interview, but what do you believe images add to articles, and why have you seemingly made it a point to add them to yours?

I think storytelling is at its best when the author or storyteller is doing their best to convey as much of what is in their head to the reader as they can. Fiction as a medium is a direct link between the dreams of an author and the imagination of the reader, and adding visual media to that equation feels like, to me, a way to grease the wheels.

Not to say that all the images I've chosen are perfect - plenty aren't. But I always feel like it gives the reason a place to start, something to ground themselves on. Less than that but still pretty important as well is the fact that opening your article with a flat wall of text is so boring. There are plenty of great articles out there that I had to be absolutely pushed into reading because opening them up was so dull.

I don't even believe that images need to necessarily be directly relevant to the subject of the article. So long as they are adjacently relevant, and you can justify them in-universe, then I think they are worth it.

TroyL was a great writer on our site as well as a great administrator who helped build up what the site is today. You have talked fondly about his writing prowess. What do you think made him such a great writer for you to say "his talents were severely underutilized because of the work he was doing on staff."?

Troy was a great writer who spent too much time dealing with bullshit and not enough time contributing. He was remarkably talented and immensely underappreciated. The fact that he's not frequently mentioned alongside the site's greatest writers is a crime.

Your first 001 proposal was The Children. To you, what makes a good 001 proposal and what were you trying to accomplish with this one? Out of all of the proposals you ended up creating, where would you rank your first one?

I think the best 001 proposals leave the reader with more questions than they answer. I think a lot of readers go into reading 001 proposals expecting to gain some new and useful insight about the nature of the Foundation et all, but I've always felt like that's pretty dull. "This is how the Foundation was formed and that's it" is so uncreative, especially since the nature of the site's canon can easily consign those articles to obscurity.

That's one of the reasons why I like Past and Future so much, and still think it's probably the best of the group. There are a lot of questions asked and left unanswered by that proposal, and it's that sort of thing that sticks with me more than some of the more straightforward, explanatory articles.

That said, I think djk1 is probably the third best. djk3 is the best, tg/k is second, and djk2 is the worst. I still have a lot of work to do there.

The Ouroboros Cycle, the culmination of 4 different 001 proposals crafted into a single narrative. What made you decide to undertake something so unprecedented? You have spoken about wanting to work on part three in the cycle, your djk2 called "Atonement". What do you believe needs to be done for you to be pleased with this portion of the series?

So I didn't start thinking about the idea of a larger, overarching narrative until I was in the process of writing The Way It Ends, when I realized that my first two proposals were both located in Mexico. The characters in The Way It Ends were always supposed to be the same as those referenced in djk1, but I hadn't considered that connection too far past that relationship.

I think at the end of the day I just got to a point where I realized it would be easy to tie them all together (one way or another) but I was left unsatisfied with how Atonement fit into that story. Atonement has always sort of been the black sheep of that group - it was, for all intents and purposes, a failed contest entry with a couple of cool images that is not holding up its own weight. I made it fit within the context of Ouroboros as a whole, but it's just not there yet.

As for what I need to do - basically rebuild the narrative from the ground up. It's currently too swamped with cliche and bogged down with what was needed for the contest it was intended for. Cleaning that up, while taking the intent of the characters in a new direction, would probably go a long way towards making that article palatable again.

You are the highest rated author on the site and one of the most famous authors among the community. However, you also happen to be a seemingly polarizing figure. There have been times in the past where you have come off as abrasive to users criticizing your work as well as with other situations. Some people believe that some of the fame associated with your accomplishments has gotten to your head. Throughout my interactions with you and the people I have spoken with concerning you, you have come off as a very likable person. Why do you believe you have attracted this kind of attention? Feel free to share any thoughts you have on the matter.

This is a hard one because I don't know if it's possible to respond without bias. I'll try, though.

When I started writing here, I just wanted to write spooky stories on the internet. While my scope has changed somewhat over time, the intent has not. I don't make money doing this, but I do work hard at it and have always desired that people meet me (with regards to criticism) at the same place I'm at - a place of mutual respect.

With that being said, I am fairly confident that if you were to go back and look, in the overwhelming majority of cases where I've been accused of being too abrasive towards criticism, the critic in question has not exactly been operating in good faith. I've received plenty of criticism from people whose opinions I respected, even if the comments themselves were not necessarily positive, but the interactions we had as creator and critic were those of mutual benefit to ourselves and each other. Seeing another "buh scp-049 rewrite bad because old one was good" is not really beneficial to anyone.

Moreover, perhaps the most public cases of this have come from what I felt at the time (and still do, in many cases) were inconsistencies in staff's approach to the criticism policy. In the past, there have been a number of instances where criticism towards my works would toe or outright cross the line towards criticism of me personally, and there would either be no response from those charged with handling that sort of thing, or a response of "there will be no response". In those instances, yes, I have met those "criticisms" with what I felt like was an appropriate amount of sarcasm considering the circumstances. I know this is not popular, but it is frustrating to see a policy wherein your most vehement detractors are allowed¹ to essentially say whatever they want about you, but a similarly-minded response to those remarks is met with a slap on the wrist - or worse.

I realize it goes deeper with that for most people, and I'm not going to pretend I've been some kind of saint - I'm too familiar with all of my many faults and failings to ever imply as much. All I mean to say is that I love the SCP Foundation Wiki - I wouldn't still be here if I didn't. I've had great success here, and I like to think I've managed to give back as much as I've gotten from the wiki and this community as a whole. It is just hard sometimes to get battered with bad faith criticism when you're trying something new and realize that the cavalry isn't coming. Besides, it's not like I'm showing up outside these people's houses with a knife. I'm being smarmy with them on the internet. I think they'll probably survive.

I could go on, but I think what it boils down to is that a lot of people, by their exposure to my stuff off the site or by interactions they've had with other users, have got this image in their head of what "djkaktus" is. They're convinced that this image they've created is an accurate representation of reality, which may or may not be true, but provides them an easy voodoo doll to stick any perceived sleights into. There are users on the wiki right now, some of whom I can count my interactions with on one hand, who have longstanding grudges against me for reasons I can't understand - and I believe if pressed they would probably have a hard time expressing those reasons too. A lot of very vocal people have got it in their heads that "djkaktus" is somehow out to get them, or belittle them, or that "djkaktus" is the enemy, which just isn't true - partly because I'm legitimately just here to write fiction on the internet, and also because I barely remember half of these people and don't actually know the rest. There are probably only a handful of people I've had such negative interactions with that I would even consider carrying a grudge for, and most of those are permabanned².

tl;dr: I'm just trying to write stories.

You used to be a member of staff for the SCP wiki. Would you mind sharing the ups and downs of your time serving as a staff member?

I had a really great experience as a staff moderator and disciplinary head, right up until the moment I didn't. I don't want to go into too much detail because it's really not worth dredging up all these years later, but suffice to say I really enjoyed working with that staff team at the time - especially Troy, Moose, Roget, etc.

Wish things had turned out differently, but I know of at least a few people who are thrilled to pie that it worked out like it did, so it's probably a wash.

Onto the topic of SCP-5935: Blood and the Breaking of My Heart, this was a difficult article to read through for me after understanding the story behind it. I am truly sorry to hear about the loss of your grandmother. Death is a painful reality, but sickness is cruel. Is there anything you wish to elaborate on concerning this article?

Blood is maybe the most esoteric thing I've ever written here, but a lot of that is just a reflection of where my head has been at the last year or so. I don't think I can add too much else without giving anything away, but suffice to say that everything in that article means something, even if it doesn't necessarily mean something.

You began writing in 2014. It has been 6 years now. What changes have you observed concerning the wiki? How do you think you have changed over the years?

There was a time when I would have told you that I didn't know if the wiki would be able to maintain the pace set in 2012 indefinitely, but there was a moment a few weeks ago when I was flipping through recently created and didn't recognize any of the author names. So many pieces of great fiction, and not a single person I recognized. That, I think, is what makes the wiki special.

A lot of the big names from when I was coming up are gone now. I've persisted, in a way, but who knows how much longer that will last? But seeing new authors bringing fresh ideas to the wiki and making their own space on it is something that brings me no shortage of joy.

I think a lot of people pine for "the way things were", but I don't think I've ever felt that way. Fresh blood brings new experiences and injects new life into this thing. I was that fresh blood once, and then a few years later it was Hippo, and then it was Kirby, and then it'll be someone else. The wiki has definitely changed, but that change isn't bad. It's just change.

As for me, I've certainly slowed down. I'm taking my time now on the projects I'm working on. I still have a lot of gas left in the tank, but I want to do the thing right, and not rush through it.

In 2014, you started a podcast entitled KaktusKast where you would have authors from the site join you as guests to discuss various topics and articles on the site. Can we expect any future episodes as the last episode aired in 2018?

As an interview show, I can't really imagine going back to that now after all these years. I really enjoyed when I was doing it, but the dynamic between myself and the other authors has changed, and those interviews don't really feel appropriate anymore - besides, there are plenty of other people doing that sort of thing that do it better than I could. A discussion show, maybe, but I can't even begin to think about it until I get some of these other projects off my plate! Maybe in 2021, if that year isn't shite as well.

Are there any projects outside of the wiki that you would like to talk about? Anything applies.

Go listen to Tanhony and Darnell's Discovering SCP podcast. It's hilarious and very good.

So, after all of that, who is the person behind the name "djkaktus"?

My name is Ben. I grew up near Indianapolis before moving to Atlanta after college. I like writing fiction on the internet and napping on the couch. I've got two real dumb cats and some really great friends and family.

I know I'm not perfect. I know there are probably some people out there who grind their teeth because I somehow ended up #1 in votes. I try really hard and I really love what I do here, and I'm sorry if I'm not what you wanted. I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing, and hopefully you'll enjoy the stuff I make.

Shoutout to the lads and lassies of the orbicular wigwam, and to all of my other mates on staff and elsewhere. Keep doing what you're doing.

Does the black moon howl?

Only when it upvotes djkaktus.

This concludes the interview. I hope you enjoyed it! I would like to thank djkaktus for agreeing to do this with me. It was a blast. I intend to continue this series, and I still have several other authors scheduled for the future!

Thank you for reading!

HUB | Tanhony »

‡ Licensing / Citation

For this interview, I worked with the longtime member and contributor to the site, Tanhony. He was a pleasure to work with as many of my interviewees have been. Tanhony is a very respected member of the site and started up an SCP related podcast this year called "Discovering SCP" which I frequently listen to. I hope everyone enjoys the little discussion I had with Mister 5000 himself! ~ WhiteGuard

Who is Tanhony?

The user Tanhony became a member of this site on the 10th of August, 2011, and his top 3 most popular pages on the site by rating are SCP-5000: Why? at +1833, SCP-993: Bobble the Clown at +1227, and SCP-1437: A Hole to Another Place at +1084. As an author, Tanhony has written a total of 111 SCP articles, 19 Tales, 0 GoI Formats, and 2 other pages for a grand total of 132 pages contributed. As host of the Discovering SCP podcast with his cohost DarnellJermaine and as the winner of the site's 5000 contest, Tanhony has been a dedicated member of our community. The following interview will consist of 20 questions from myself with his responses.

The bold text represents the questions whereas the text within the boxes are Tanhony's responses.

Interview Questions:

Thanks for doing this interview with me, Tan! First off, would you mind sharing how you came across the SCP Wiki?

I first came across the SCP wiki through a discussion thread on a forum I was part of around nine years back. I mostly lurked in that thread for a while, just reading specific SCPs that were linked to there, before deciding it was something I was interested in contributing to.

Was the wiki your first experience writing creatively? Why did you decide to write on the site rather than just sticking to reading and rating works instead? In your AMA, you shared that your first few articles failed. What do you believe the main issues were and would you mind sharing a little about them?

I first joined the wiki in high school, and creative writing was already something I enjoyed at the time, so for me, the SCP wiki was a way to use that creativity productively.

My first article - "Chocolate Goldfish" - failed, I think because there just wasn't much to it. This was a problem with a few of my earlier articles, where I just put down an idea that briefly interested me and didn't go as far into the concept as I could. Chocolate Goldfish was just what it said on the tin - chocolate goldfish that turned other fish into chocolate if put into the same body of water. Not very exciting.

Your first successful article was posted on the 18th of August, 2011 entitled SCP-670: Family of Cotton. Why do you believe this article succeeded instead of your previous attempts?

I would say two factors helped 670 out. When I first posted it, it had four really striking, iconic pictures that jumped right out at the reader (unfortunately, they weren't CC, so they're gone now). Second, there was an actual story to 670 - the relationship between these cotton people and the disturbing twist near the end. There's a little bit of bloat to it - the mention of "Grandfather" in the interview doesn't really go anywhere - but you could get away with that back then.

Which authors or works would you say have inspired you on the site? What can be learned from these writers, and what do you believe your best traits are as a writer?

I feel like, over time, I've taken inspiration from quite a few different writers. I'll just go over a few here.

Salman Corbette - this guy was the absolute master of comedic articles as far as I'm concerned. He was really nice to me when I first started out, and I'll always appreciate that. Come back someday ;(

DJKaktus - I love the way Kaktus can expand on a simple concept and make a huge narrative about it that stays interesting throughout. Plus, I love deep lore and the Kaktusverse has that in spades.

PeppersGhost - I love Pepper's stuff, each one of their articles gives off a very unique atmosphere and a lot of their best has that mysterious open-ended-ness that I just love.

CadavarCommander - His character writing is absolutely top-notch, and the way he can so easily make something relatable so quickly.

It's a little weird to talk about things I myself am good at, but people have told me I'm pretty good at presenting a surreal tone. That makes me really happy, as surreal horror and comedy are something I really love - so being able to contribute to that, if only a little, is great.

In your eyes, what actually makes a good article, tale, or format on the site? What do you believe is the most common aspect that new authors often struggle with on the wiki?

The narrative, definitely. With a lot of content on the website, there's the temptation for a magic item or a basic idea that doesn't fully explore the implications. The concept should be the starting point, not the whole thing. Once you get that, you'll naturally start enjoying the writing process more, and your writing will naturally improve.

SCP-5000: Why? is your most popular work on the site and rightfully so. It is always a risk to link many other articles to your own work, but what you decided to do with 5000 was very ambitious. Talk through your process with this article. Are there any aspects you would like to explain further or any parts you decided to cut out of the final product?

My initial concept with SCP-5000 was wanting to write a 'big' SCP, something with an in-depth story like SCP-1730. It's the kind of thing I've attempted a few times previously, but never really had an idea that could accommodate it. The concept of the Foundation turning against humanity was one that I thought I could get a lot of storytelling mileage out of so, uh, I did.

As for things that were left out, I can't really think of anything. I always wanted to focus on Pietro's single perspective, with just little looks at what's happening in the rest of the world like the Ganzir situation. To be honest, I think I went a little nuts with the article. Pretty much everything I wanted in there is in there.

There have been a number of articles that reference your SCP-993: Bobble the Clown article. Being one of your most popular works, what about this terrifying Pennywise-Ronald McDonald hybrid makes for an interesting story in your opinion?

I feel like I managed to hit while the iron was hot with both creepy clowns and haunted televisions with Bobble the Clown. He's a pretty monstrous character but just cartoonish enough that it can be darkly funny rather than just horrifying. To tell the truth, I don't know if he'd do as well if posted today, but I can't overstate how pleased I am with the reception to him over the years.

Your article, SCP-1437: A Hole to Another Place, is one of my favorite works of yours. The concept of a path between parallel universes itself is nothing new, but something about the way you introduced it made it interesting. What inspired this article and how do you rank it among your work?

I really love SCP-1437; it's probably one of my favourite things I've written. The idea developed naturally from wanting to have an SCP article presented from the perspective of numerous different parallel Foundations. I've always wanted to expand on Our Masters Above from the last log - which I've done a little with 2874 - but haven't fully gotten around to yet.

You have been around for the creation of many Groups of Interest over the years. Which GoI is your favorite thus far and why?

I have to say, the expansion by so many writers has really made the Church of the Broken God my favourite GoI. The unique mix of fantasy, alternate history, science fiction, and horror they allow has really broadened their appeal for me beyond the somewhat standard 'crazy cult' they were in their first appearances.

For anyone who is not aware, what exactly is BobbleCon? Do you have any future plans for the series?

BobbleCon is a tale series I've been writing (in the loosest possible sense) over the last two years about a breach of SCP-993's containment. I honestly have no idea what I am doing with it, but I'm having fun.

Your first 001 proposal, called Dead Men, was posted on the 21st of February, 2018. This proposal deals with the Ethics Committee, the introduction of MTF Omega-1 Laws Left Land, and a neat dynamic between the Committee and the O5 council. Take us through the mind of 2018 Tanhony writing this. Was the final result what you originally envisioned?

Dead Men only became an 001 proposal about an hour before I posted it. It started off as just the first section, ending with the Ethics Committee note, then expanded with each draft until it became as long as it did. I'm pretty sure the AI framing device was the last thing to be added. I was really happy with the reception, but as it didn't originate as an 001 proposal, I didn't quite feel like I'd managed to properly made my mark in the way that other proposals had.

For many authors on the site, a successful 001 proposal is a great accomplishment. You happen to have two. The Black Moon is your second proposal, which of course pays homage to the old phrase on the wiki "Does the black moon howl?". Would you explain what the phrase pertains to and then describe your newest proposal to those who have not seen it yet?

I was so surprised nobody beat me to calling a proposal 'The Black Moon'. The very basic idea of this proposal was with me for a couple of years, but I didn't really know how to expand on it until I came up with the idea of doing it as an anthology of linked stories rather than one big article.

In the context of the article, the black moon 'howling' is it wiping something from existence - a kind of 'the bell tolls' deal. My second proposal basically charts the universe from beginning to end following the conflict between the Administrator and the Black Moon.

If you had to pick an article of yours that you believe is currently underrated compared to your other works, what article would come to mind? Please explain what you enjoy about this particular work of yours.

I don't know whether I'd call it underrated, but one of my favourite articles I've written to go back to is SCP-4972. It was partially based on a nightmare I had - one that really messed me up - and so I feel like I really managed to get this surreal horror out of my head and onto the page to a degree that I haven't matched since.

You have a member of staff since the 28th of August, 2019 as part of the Site Crit team. I have seen community members who were confused as to what the point of Site Crit is. Why would you say that this staff team is necessary?

Without engagement, there's no community. Something I hate to see is a good article with only six or seven comments, especially when those comments aren't really talking about the piece very in-depth. I love talking about the things I like, and the things I dislike, and in my mind, there's no better way to do that than through criticism - especially as that can help improve the things you like.

How have you changed as a writer and as a person over the years? What have you learned that you would like to share with whoever reads this interview?

My writing pace has slowed down, but that is probably because I don't write every idea that pops into my head regardless of quality anymore. I also have a much clearer idea of what I want to accomplish when I go into writing something, whether that's narrative, character, or just the general vibe I want the article to get across.

As for advice, I'd say - try weird stuff. Stuff that really shouldn't work. That's when you have the most fun.

You have been writing on the wiki for 9 years. In what ways is the site different from how it is now? In what ways have the community and staff developed over the years?

Quality has definitely gone up - and, weirdly enough, so has quantity. As a result, it's easy for individual articles to get looked over. I don't know if there's a way to fix that, but it's a little sad.

Staff has definitely become more professional, which I appreciate - looking back, some of the stuff that happened around the time I first joined just seems absurd now. The community, too, has matured quite a bit: the writing has become so much more complex since I first joined, and the site is so much more friendly to newbies.

This year, you and a friend, DarnellJermaine started a podcast called Discovering SCP. For those who have not tuned in yet, what is the premise of the podcast and why have you decided to undertake something like this?

In Discovering SCP, me and my friend Darnell (who knows very little about the SCP universe) read through the wiki starting from Series 1 and going through the different famous articles, tales, and groups of interest. I always love seeing people's reactions to things I enjoy, so doing this podcast with my friend is my way of sharing with him something I have a huge passion for.

Are there any projects outside of the wiki that you would like to talk about? I know of at least one that you have been working on.

I'm currently working on a web serial called Aetheral Space. It's a kind of science-fantasy space opera that I update every Wednesday and Sunday over on Royal Road. If you're interested, I'd love for you to check it out here!

So, after all of that, who is the person behind the name "Tanhony"?

[DATA EXPUNGED]

Why?

Why not?

This concludes the interview. I hope you enjoyed it! I would like to thank Tanhony, he was great to work with. I really appreciate all of the positive comments I have received since I began the Meet the Administrators series. I will be resuming that series soon with Bluesoul's interview. In addition to that, I already have the next interview in this series prepared, and I believe everyone will enjoy hearing from my next interviewee!

Thank you for reading!

« djkaktus | HUB | Rounderhouse »

‡ Licensing / Citation

Rounderhouse was great to work with. Rounder was one of the first authors to accept my request when I proposed this series. Once I was able to get the questions to him, he quickly completed them for me and has been helpful in every other aspect of the process as well. I hope everyone enjoys this interview that Rounderhouse and I put together for everyone! ~ WhiteGuard

Who is Rounderhouse?

The user Rounderhouse became a member of this site on the 2nd of June, 2018, and his top 3 most popular pages on the site by rating are SCP-5140: EVEREST at +522, SCP-5555: Made in Heaven at +396, and SCP-4511: SWINE GOD at +362. As an author, Rounderhouse has written a total of 26 SCP articles, 8 Tales, 3 GoI Formats, and 16 other pages for a grand total of 53 pages contributed. Rounderhouse is the winner of two contests on the site, the 2018 Halloween Contest with his tale entry MTF Sigma-5 "Pumpkin Punchers" and the Second 144-Hour Jam Contest for the "Theme Grand Prize" with his entries SCP-5983, Adoption Poster: Pearl!, and SCP-5149. The following interview will consist of 20 questions from myself with his responses.

The bold text represents the questions whereas the text within the boxes are Rounderhouse's responses.

Interview Questions:

Howdy Rounder! Thanks for agreeing to do this interview with me. Let's start out with your beginnings on the wiki. How did you find this place?

Honestly, I don't really remember. I do recall that one of the first articles I read was 1499, and it freaked me out a little bit. But then I guess I forgot about the site, and only rediscovered it in the summer of 2018. I was staying out of town that summer and didn't have much to do, so I downloaded an SCP reader app and spent the summer spamming the Random SCP button, devouring everything I came across. First thing I did when I got home was sign up and submit my application for the site - good timing, too. Apps temporarily closed about a week or two later.

Did you have any trouble getting used to the site? The high learning curve can be daunting as Wikidot is becoming an aging platform and writing on the site is subject to high standards. Did you have any experience writing like this before the site?

Not really, which I guess is uncommon. I see a lot of people talk about their first articles failing and struggling and like… it never came as particularly hard to me. I guess that sounds a little bit conceited, but I never struggled too much with learning to write in the SCP format. I think I actually prefer the epistolary format to straight-prose if I'm being perfectly honest — the site suits my style. I didn't really have any experience writing in a collaborative community before SCP, but the idea was thoroughly appealing. Being able to adapt and spin out other people's articles totally sounds like my jam.

SCP-4049: Beast Pits was your first successful article on the site. What is it about and what did you learn from your previous attempt that helped make this article successful?

I guess… technically Beast Pits is my second successful, I think. My first was also Beast Pits, under the 3849 slot or something. I got crit, posted it, and after a couple of days it had flattened out at like, +19 or something. Which I think most first-time authors would be fine with, but I was thoroughly unsatisfied. I self-deleted it and adapted the criticism in the comments - there wasn't much - into a newer draft, that was marginally better. I posted it a few weeks later into the 4049 slot, and now it's at +70 something. I think the most important lesson I learned wasn't any particular writing advice: it was just the fact that if you put in the work, you can always make something better. 4049 isn't particularly good by my modern standards, but I think it's important for me not to delete, just as a marker of how much my writing has changed.

In your early days, and even now perhaps, which author's did you look up to on the site? What was your favorite article on the site at the time? Has it changed over the past couple of years?

There's a long list of authors I admire on this site. A few of them, in no particular order: Tanhony, djkaktus, Michael Atreus, CaptainKirby, Tufto, Rumetzen, The Great Hippo, Woedenaz… there's more. I respect and admire all of them for different reasons, but still. As for my favorite article… I'm not sure, honestly. I can certainly tell you that 2718 has a special place in my heart. 2764 is the article that made me join the site, and 1555 remains one of my favorite articles ever. 5005 is also a more recent pick, but has quickly become one of my favorite pieces of internet fiction, let alone SCPs.

You mentioned on your AMA with Captain Kirby that you both often sit on drafts for a long time before posting. Is there a particular reason for this?

Not a good reason, haha. Mostly it's because I like getting lots of input on drafts from varying sources, trying to incorporate bits and pieces to make it as good as I can. I think of articles a lot like statues - you start with a big, ugly block of stone, and bit by bit you chisel it away to make something really special. The more effort you put in, the better it turns out. But then again, if you put in too much, you might ruin the whole thing, which is why I try to pick and choose what parts of critique mesh with the article. That entire process ends up taking a long time — along with the fact that I get distracted from rewriting sections really easily, lol.

SCP-5140: EVEREST is your most popular work currently. In your opinion, what about this article makes it stand beside the title? Describe the dynamic you set between the MTF and Base Camp and how you came up with it.

I think the ending is pretty bomb. Like just the mental image it inspires is really freaky, to me, and freakiness is good when you're writing horror. But I think without the log it would kind of blow, which is why I'm glad the log turned out well. I tried to set up a dynamic that was riddled with paranoia, so I brought in an unreliable narrator - you have no idea whether he's actually witnessing this shit go down or just hallucinating. It was deeply inspired by one of my favorite horror pieces, 2409, by the aforementioned Michael Atreus. They go a little differently - 5140 tells you what's happening but you don't know if it's true, 2409 skirts around telling you what's going on so you have to fill in the gaps yourself. But the dynamic between an agent beset by hostile forces and a handler that can't help them is the same.

Your collaboration work with A Random Day and Uncle Nicolini, SCP-5555: Made in Heaven, has been a big success. How long did this project take and what aspects did you chiefly contribute to? How was working with these other authors to create an innovative project such as this one?

God, you have no idea. The first iteration of the article that would become Made In Heaven was written by me in March of 2019. It was literally unrecognizable - it was a story about a DoA church housing 13 graves, 12 of which were full. I brought Nico on to help me clean it up, and we decided to show it to ARD for some crit, since he did a lot of DoA. He wasn't a big fan, but he offhandedly mentioned he had a DoA draft with a similar vibe — a mass grave of Foundation anomalies and personnel, all slightly different from how they're usually presented. We decided to combine the two articles into one, called Graves, and began hacking away at it. It got grander and grander, and more and more different from the original two drafts. Along the way, we decided it was going to be a 001… and then 5Kon rolled around, and it still wasn't done, so we decided to enter it. If it didn't become 5000, 5555, or 5999, we would've made it a 001 - luckily, it panned out. I did a lot of the code and emails, along with some of the dialogue sections - ARD and Nico handled the notes and newspapers. It was an absolute blast to work with my friends on something like that, even if it was hectic.

SCP-4511: SWINE GOD was another collab piece for you, this time with Jade Skylar. Briefly, what is this article about, and what is with the "Pending" classification? Also, for people who are unsure about working with other authors on projects, what advice would you give them to produce a good collaboration piece?

In short, it's a horror piece about obeying something blindly. The pending fits into the in-universe story - they've just discovered this anomaly, they haven't quite figured out the kind of hazards it poses yet. I think that collabs can be really fun and enjoyable if you do them with the right people, but you need to communicate really well and know how to work with them. And sometimes they just don't pan out, and that's totally fine to. Some people's visions of writing just don't quite mesh.

You seem to be pretty handy with themes and components in the site. According to your author's page, you have listed 16 total hubs, themes, and components that you have either created or contributed to. Do you have any sort of background with this work? How does it feel whenever you see others using your work on their pages?

I'd never done CSS before I joined the site. That's one of the things I picked up here - at first I just took stuff, then I learned how to modify it, then I learned how to make my own styling. I like it, it's a fun respite from writing sometimes - much more mechanical and technical, clear rights and wrongs. As for people using my components and stuff - the only time I ever mind is when it's my personal component. I obviously can't stop people, but it's just not something that I really like to see people do, for various reasons. But all my other themes and stuff? Absolutely, I love seeing what people use them in.

What is Sky Sermon for any who happen to be unaware and what sparked the idea for this? What are the intentions for this series since there is an empty Chapter 3 section currently?

Sky Sermon was my team's series for the International GoI Contest! I was captain, with Tufto, Woedenaz, Elogee Fishtruck, and SecretCrow as part of my team. We adapted the Galactic Federation group of interest from the CN branch for it - we turned it into a kind of internet UFO cult, with sprinkles of Buddhist imagery, worshipping a gigantic sentient psychic spaceship hurtling towards Earth. We never finished it, unfortunately — I always want to, but I never quite get around to it, with so many projects. One day, though, I'll finish the ending we discussed - it was a good ending, I can tell you that much.

Are there any big projects you happen to be working on for the site right now that you would like to provide some insight on? What can we expect from Rounderhouse in the latter half of 2020?

Well, the Canon Renaissance Contest just opened, so that's going to be dominating my plate until it wraps up. My team is planning to revamp the Nobody canon, The Man Who Wasn't There, into something…. rather special. No spoilers, but keep an eye out. Aside from that, I'm still hacking away at some not-entirely-standalone Rounderarticles - my only hint is that the uppercase titles aren't just to look cool. Though they also do that, haha. And if I finally find the time, who knows - maybe a House 001?

SCP-4661: Sin City is an article I read of yours in preparation for this interview. I believe it is likely my favorite of your solo works. I believe my favorite part is the closing memo with all of the typical Vegas phrases that you put your own spin on. Was this an article that you worked on for a while or did you come up with the idea and quickly got through the process of getting it posted? What were you attempting to accomplish in this article?

I had this idea of Hell in Vegas for a very long time, but the draft that became Sin City didn't really brew for that long. I brainstormed it with some friends, then cranked out the majority of it over about a week, and then shopped it around for crit for a while - I hadn't really read anything long-form comedy like that on site, so I didn't know how well it was going to do. I wanted to get that idea and setting out onto the site, primarily - but in a more meta sense, I wanted to show people you can totally do long dialogue-based comedy articles, and have them be actually funny.

I think I succeeded on both counts.

You won the Halloween 2018 contest with the very popular tale, MTF Sigma-5 "Pumpkin Punchers". I bet that was a fun one to write. If you don't mind, please talk about what you enjoyed the most about this article. Additionally, there is some excellent dialogue here. What do you do to accomplish natural dialogue such as what is present in this tale?

Ooh, this is a tough question, haha. I actually… really dislike that tale, in hindsight. It's kind of messy and all over the place, with a one-note punchline and not really clear prose. There were a lot of better articles posted that contest that 2020 Rounderhouse would have supported. But I always did like the dialogue and action scenes - I've always been a fan of action writing, so even if this did it poorly, it encouraged me to keep doing it. As for dialogue, I wouldn't go so far as to call it excellent, but I thought it was certainly fun, haha. I didn't really do much to accomplish it - it's just one of those things that emerged naturally.

SCP-5633: This Will Require A Great Amount of Blood was recently posted with you as a coauthor. Can you explain the unique circumstances for how this article came about?

This article was posted a bit after the Exquisite Corpse Contest, which is a funny timing thing - we'd been passing around the draft since long before the contest was announced. Thought it would be a fun little experiment, so Woedenaz and I gathered some friends and started passing it around. We only saw the last sentence of the previous writer's section and were capped at 150 words, which I thought led to an interesting result, if not a technically good one. I had a lot of fun writing it, which I think is what really matters to me — people are free to dislike it, it's fair, but I'm not one of those people.

The Rounder Page, pretty controversial for an author page, eh? Talk about why it had such crazy comments when it came out, Mister Rounder.

It was a very different page when I first posted it, lol. Unrecognizable from 2020 Rounderpage. But over my almost-3 years on this site, I've made additions, deletions, revamped portions, included page-breaking CSS, crashed Wikidot not once but twice, and a hell of a lot of other shit. In a funny way it's been a cool reflection of me as an author over time - but I'm the only person who thinks about it that much, lol. Everyone else was either intensely amused by my antics, or intensely skeeved. Either way, they made their thoughts very, very known in the discussion. And I'm not sure I would call it controversial, haha — highest rated author page on site! 💪

You happen to be one the administrators for the official SCP wiki sister site, The Wanders Library. Beyond the title, what do you do on the site as an admin and what is The Wanderers Library for those unaware?

If SCP is my daily beater car, then Wanderer's Library is the vintage sports car I've lovingly and painstakingly restored in my garage over the years. It was founded a year or two after the SCP Wiki by DrMann and Pair Of Ducks, initially as a place to write freeform speculative fiction stories that weren't necessarily SCP-related. It's come to hold about 700 entries from adventures in the SCP-verse to completely original fiction settings and standalone stories. Even has its own GoIs, canons, tale series, etc. Unfortunately, it fell into hibernation shortly after its creation, for a variety of reasons. But I took over as Admin a year and a half ago, and, along with my staff, I've turned WL from an essentially-dead SCP experiment to a thriving little community of its own. I do basically everything for upkeep - fiddling with the theme, updating navigation, choosing featured articles and picks, organizing contests and events, tagging articles, writing guides, and general maintenance, along with moderating the official Discord server. One of the only things I don't do is critique - we have our own homegrown Crit Team for that. I'm really proud of what we've done over there, it feels like something material I can look on.

As an author on The Wanderers Library, what would you say your writing there is like? What stories on that site do believe are worthwhile to introduce SCP wiki users to your site?

My writing on the Library is generally worldbuildy-type stuff. I like thinking about what kind of creatures, patrons, history, and events the Library holds, so I try to explore that kind of content in my articles, stuff to really lend some concreteness to the world of the Library. We actually have a recommended reading list, along with a hub on the SCP Wiki that has an introduction to the site, lore, and content. I love introducing the site to people, and encouraging them to post their own stories — SCP is nice, but some stories shouldn't be restricted by format.

Do you have any projects outside of the wiki going on currently or perhaps any events being planned for The Wanderers Library?

Outside of the wiki directly, plenty. Some of my more notable are the occasional YouTube video and owning r/nuscp, a subreddit dedicated to new, less-known articles, away from the clamor of r/SCP. The Library's ongoing event is the Serpentine Sorting System, a set of biweekly prompts for writers to adapt, though I'm planning something bigger than that. Outside of the SCP-sphere as a whole, I've got some stuff going on but nothing I'm quite ready to promote just yet, haha. But when I do start stuff up, I usually loudly go on about it on my Twitter.

Who exactly is "Rounderhouse"?

YOU'LL NEVER KNOW!

What is with the pistons on the left side of the Rounderpage? They emit a strange sensation.

Haha, yeah. So the story with that is [REDACTED]

This concludes the interview. I hope you enjoyed it! I would like to thank Rounderhouse for patiently going along with my process for these interviews. It was awesome working with him! Once again, if you haven't already, be sure to check out my Meet the Administrators series. Bluesoul's interview will be released soon!

Thank you for reading!

« Tanhony | HUB | Stay Tuned! »

‡ Licensing / Citation

Ihp was great to work with during the making of this interview. This interview took me the longest to complete on my end thus far due to work, staff-work, and school occupying a lot of my time. Despite this, Ihp took the delays well, and I appreciate that. Ihp was the author of an SCP which helped spark a lot of interest and articles concerning one of my favorite groups of interest, the Church of the Broken God. For this reason, among many others, it was a joy to interview Ihp.~ WhiteGuard

Who is Ihp?

The user Ihp became a member of this site on the 23rd of December, 2011, and his top 3 most popular pages on the site by rating are SCP-2217: Hammer and Anvil at +533, SCP-4100: Future Imperfect at +426, and SCP-5500: Death of the Authors at +422. As an author, Ihp has written a total of 48 SCP articles, 107 Tales, 6 GoI Formats, and 7 other pages for a grand total of 168 pages contributed. With his 107 Tales, Ihp is the most prolific tale writer on the site with Roget at second with 94 tales. Additionally, over a third of Ihp's writing comes from the S & C Plastics canon where he has contributed a total of 61 pages to the popular canon. The following interview will consist of 20 questions from myself with his responses.

The bold text represents the questions whereas the text within the boxes are Ihp's responses.

Interview Questions:

Hi Ihp! To start off, how did you first come across the wiki? If there happen to be any stories or a friend recommended it or whatever, feel free to include that. What were your first impressions?

I was browsing Tv Tropes, back in late, late 2011— literally right before Christmas. I came across the “Humanoid Abomination” page and saw the entry for the Foundation on it. I clicked the first entry on the SCP Foundation page proper (back then, it could all fit onto a single page), which was “Absurdly Sharp Blade”, which took me to SCP-585. I did a bit of digging, found 087, and had trouble sleeping for a week.

I was intimidated when I first came across it— I’d gotten slowly better at writing throughout the course of 2011, thanks to me joining an RP site (which I won’t name due to the fact that the creator of the site has gotten a bit unhinged) and I wanted to test it out. My very first SCP was based off of the site — and it immediately bombed. I didn’t look at the crit, just hid away from the site in shame until January of 2012.

That’s when I wrote SCP-1071, which was based on my anxiety of the upcoming SATs (I was still in high school at the time, only seventeen when I first got published!). A lot of my early SCPs were based off of shit going on in my life— 1310 was based off of me having to wait for two hours in a doctor’s office after getting shots to try and get rid of my allergies, and 1366 was based off of me reading about Ohio’s “Helltown” of Boston.

I was legitimately scared of the people here. It took me getting into 19 for a few weeks to realize you were a bunch of regular folks, not people who were looking to scrutinize every single word written by an unmedicated guy with autism for glaring flaws and rip them apart for it.

How would you best describe yourself as a writer? Strong points? Weak points?

I've been told multiple times that I'm good at writing characters, but I'd disagree: I'm good at writing character traits, but I have a hell of a time actually describing them, to the point where when someone made fanart of the majority of the crew from S & C Plastics, they had to do it from scratch because I barely described them in the tales.

Descriptions are where I falter the most, honestly. I have a map of Sloth's Pit, WI in my head but I cannot, for the life of me, describe it in actual prose. Also, I have trouble writing LGBT characters, which is… kiiiind of ironic in a bad way, considering that I'm pansexual myself. The only queer characters I've written are in a pretty much defunct tale series, unfortunately.

From years of being part of the site, which writers have been your favorites to read from? What would you say the best quality of each author happens to be?

Djoric: One of the greats. Cynical as hell in some of his works, but that bitterness only contributes to the dry humor employed in them.

UraniumEmpire: In college, I'd read an attempt someone made to write a story with 'punk' themes, and it was bad, to the point where I thought the aesthetic just didn't work in literature. Turns out it does, and UE's Trashfire is definitively punk.

faminepulse: Easily the most creative author on the wiki. Everything they do is incredibly unique, and whenever they release something new, I look forward to reading it. I'm actually envious of them— I don't know how they do it.

Fantem: If Famine is the most creative author, then Fantem is easily a runner-up. Pitch Haven is a wild series, and more than anything, I wish she'd come back and pick it back up (or at the very least, that there was more fanart of it— it's literally about reincarnating semi-anthropomorphic animals, how have furries not latched on to it?)

Hammermaiden: Another classic author. She helped out forming the Broken God mythos back during the 2014 GOI contest, and her work with the likes of 2000 and the Department of Temporal Anomalies speaks for itself.

Dr Gears: I might be just name-dropping at this point, but Gears legitimately does great work, especially his horror stuff— if he's not a published author off the wiki, I am legitimately surprised because the world doesn't know what it's missing out on.

DarkStuff: Just. Everything about his work. Man's a savant. The fact that he was only 17 when he finished writing his criminally underrated Dancing with Rachel: Ascension series is mind-boggling to me— if I had an ounce of his talent when I was that age, I'd have a novel written by now.

You have been on the site for quite some time and have seen many authors come and go. With that being said, who would your bet be placed on for the next up and coming author on the site?

That's a tough one, in part because I have trouble keeping up with the site because my job takes up so much time. HarryBlank and Grigori Karpin have both done some amazing things, probably my favorite stuff on the site in the last six months. Beyond that, I can't say much, because work has destroyed my ability to read the site.

You mentioned in your AMA that you graduated from Wright State University with a bachelor's in English. How would you say your writing has improved or changed due to what you learned in your studies? Are there any literary issues you see among articles now that you used to not notice before?

Let me be up front with you: my English diploma isn't worth the paper it's printed on. That being said, I did pick up some interesting ideas in college.

WSU was actually my second school, I transferred to it from another one. At my first college, I took a lit crit class, and learned about a work called "A Cyborg Manifesto", and while I don't remember much of it, it helped inform my writing for the Church of the Broken God to a degree.

At WSU itself, I had an amazing teacher for poetry, Dr. DeWeese. I hated poetry up until I took his class, and after that point, I've started seeing value in it. There needs to be more poetic works on the wiki, I don't care if it's songs, format screws, what. Just do it.

SCP-2217: Hammer and Anvil is your most successful article on the site by rating. Additionally, a lot of writers use this article for their own Church of the Broken God works. What are your thoughts on this article 6 years later and what are your thoughts on the CotBG works that were influenced by it? What do you think about their Sarkic adversaries more or less coming from this article?

2217 was written during a period of my time on the wiki where I considered up and quitting. My time at college had gotten me stressed enough that I just wanted to curl up in bed and not get out of it most mornings. It started out as an SCP that was a riff on the Watchmaker Analogy— an argument for creationism/intelligent design that says the world is too perfect and well-constructed, like a watch, to just come about by random chance. I struggled for months to get it to work, and was on the verge of quitting the wiki when something clicked.

Earlier that year, I had participated in the GOI Contest, where a large amount of Church of the Broken God lore was formed. The idea of the Watchmaker Analogy collided with the fact that we hadn't really managed to finish up the lore we had planned for the contest, and 2217 was born. And since then, it's… kind of snowballed? Bumaro got a fanbase (and he's portrayed as bishonen for some reason), St. Hedwig and Trunnion are considered girlfriends, and there's a lot more CotBG stuff on the wiki as a result of it.

I have… kind of mixed feelings on Sarkicism now, considering that it came out that a lot of the early Sarkic SCPs had plagiarized content in them— plagiarized content that, mind you, was in the public domain but was uncredited. I'm amazed at the fact that 2217 inspired an entirely new GOI, but that wasn't my intent. Still, Sarkicism that's gotten away from that is typically very enjoyable.

Moving on to your SCP-4000 contest entry, SCP-4100: Future Imperfect. You mentioned you came up with the draft within a few hours of the contest being announced. Is that true? What are your general thoughts on the article, and what do you think about how some people have interpreted the ending?

I've been told I write very quickly. 4100 I got a full concept of it (not necessarily a full draft, I needed to make the images) up within maybe two or three hours. When I get motivated, I can write thousands of words in the course of an hour— but it's hard to get that done at times.

The ending though… the way people interpreted it is not at all what I was going for. A few common things I see thrown around is that the Destroyer is a reference to the Mass Effect reapers (never played Mass Effect), that it's the Scarlet King (not my intent) and that the image at the end is the Foundation saying "We're coming for you next, buckos"— that could not be further from the truth. It's the Foundation leaving a warning to the Stellar Congressional Protectorate that there are more of these things out there, and they aren't safe yet.

Still, it's kind of appropriate. The SCP is about people from the future making interpretations of the past with incomplete data, so it works.

Let's briefly talk about SCP-5500: Death of the Authors. Although it is one of your most popular works by rating and has had a predominantly good reception thus far, you seem to have a particular distaste for it. What do you believe went wrong?

I made the mistake of trying to make it an interactive article, and moreover, trying to write said article entirely in the game creator I used. Twine, much to my chagrin, doesn't have spellcheck, so a good part of the bug reports I got for it were spelling errors that I would have to dig through the code to find, and then try to figure out if that broke any other nodes. There's still problems with it that I have neither the time nor patience nor will to try to fix.

I dislike 5500 because of how big of a hassle it was for me in proportion to the reception it got. +400 is good, but it was not worth weeks of anxiety and hard labor as I tried to fix mangled code from my phone at work on my half-hour lunch.

Shaggydredlocks actually offered to have me join the team that made SCP-5999 at one point. I wish I'd taken that offer instead of wasting time on 5500.

Something you are most well-known for is your vast amount of writing for the S & C Plastics canon. Although S & C Plastics was started by Djoric, you are the most prolific writer in the canon with 61 articles to date including a 001 proposal. What is S & C Plastics, and what has inspired you to contribute so much about the denizens of Sloth's Pit, Wisconsin?

S & C Plastic is about the life and times of Foundation personnel who work at Site-87, a research site which monitors the anomalous small town of Sloth's Pit, Wisconsin. When Djoric started it said that it was inspired by Gravity Falls (which remains one of my favorite TV Series ever) I jumped on. I grew up in a small midwestern town, and a lot of the stuff in S & C Plastics draws from that— there's a minor running gag where a restaurant called Berry's has the worst food in town, which is inspired by an actual restaurant in my hometown.

It was initially inspired by the fact that I realized the Foundation, at the time, didn't have a lot of named characters outside of the likes of Clef, Bright, etc. and I wanted to write just… regular people. No crazy anomalous abilities, no positions of higher power, no real connections. Just people trying to get through life in one of the weirdest universes out there.

In short, it's an attempt by me to try to write researchers doing their best to live a normal life in an abnormal town, while also satisfying my love for metafictional tomfuckery. Other big influences on it include Remedy's Alan Wake (which, considering Remedy's Control is based on the Foundation, might count as recursive inspiration, assuming they've read my stuff), Twin Peaks, and Eureka, an obscure SyFy show that also centered around a research organization overseeing a weird small town.

Black Autumn, Black Autumn II, and Black Autumn 3. Briefly describe your three tales series which make up over half of your writing for the S & C Plastics canon. I also must ask, why did you drop the Roman numerals for the title of the third series?

The Black Autumn quartet (yes there's a 4th one coming! Hopefully) was inspired by my efforts to do an annual Halloween tale. In 2017, I had an idea for a series that was originally going to be an anthology— each tale focusing on a different part of Sloth's Pit, where a different, unconnected anomalous scenario would be taking place. I settled on a narrative focused around SCP-097 and good god I hate the way it ends here. The final two tales are the weakest writing I've ever had on the site.

BAII is much better— right up there with 2217 as my magnum opuses (magnum opii?). It helped that SCP-4040 was ground within S & C Plastics already, and it helped me elaborate on a lot of lore I'd had in my head that hadn't been put to paper yet.

BA3 is… not great. At all. I had gotten my first real full-time job when I started writing it, and combined with the fact that I was on a very stressful vacation at the time (long story short, family member got severely ill on the trip) I feel like I phoned it in and it died. Had to outright rework the tale I was going to make the finale of that into one of the parts of Black Autumn IV.

AS to why I dropped the numerals… I'm not consistent, what can I say?

I.H.Pickman's Proposal was your 100th article on the site as well as being your 001 proposal. As previously mentioned, this proposal is part of the S & C Plastics canon. How long did it take for you to come up with the finished product? What would you say you are most pleased with concerning it? Feel free to talk a little about it.

I had three or four previous 001 proposals in mind over the years. The one right before this, which got shot down by someone I respected as being 'completely stupid', was that the Serpent from the Serpent's Hand and Library was trying to devour the universe bite by bite. After wallowing at the fact that the idea got shot down, I figured I should make my 100th thing something special.

I'd considered doing the phenomenon of Nexuses as a proper SCP before, and this is probably the closest I'll ever come to it, outside of SCP-5352. And thanks to the existence of S.D. Locke's Proposal, I knew that people would be okay with an 001 that was not traditional in structure. It's even got a bit of traction off the site, mostly in comparison to the Swann proposal, which has me feeling… a little paranoid, honestly? Because S. Andrew Swann (assuming it's the same S. Andrew Swann who wrote the proposal) lives maybe an hour's drive from me, so I'm in danger of him coming here and beating me up.

In your opinion, what is necessary to create a good canon in the SCP Universe?

This is oddly pertinent, considering the Canon Renaissance Contest is going on. For me, the basis of a good canon has five big components:

A firm world to build everything in, with characters ready to populate it

Strong themes throughout the work

A consistent tone

Room to grow from the original works of the canon

A hub to line this all up

Resurrection is a good example of this— the premise is clear, the world is populated, the tone of 'oldschool Foundation shenanigans but better written', and the theme of the past coming back in ways both good and bad are all there, and the hub is well-constructed to top it all off. Credit where it's due, as much as I dislike Resurrection, the foundation is well-constructed, so props to the original authors.

On the other side of the coin, you have pretty much every canon established during the 2013 Canon Contest. The majority of them are built less like canons and more like a tale series written round-robin style, in that not much room seemed to have been considered for growth beyond the original contest, which is why a lot of them have faltered.

For instance, take Competitive Eschatology. The premise is amazing: every apocalypse is kicking off at once, and the world is caught in the middle, with the Foundation being reduced to a bunch of independent cells to try to stop it. But it falters in that the only apocalypse we see from the start is the Christian Armageddon, with SCPs standing in for the horsemen, and not much was done with it after that. Personally, I want to see if any of those UFO cults from the 20th century had the right idea in that setting.

A Suicide Note is your highest rated tale on the site. What is it about, and why did it almost give Roget a heart attack?

It's exactly what it says on the tin: Clef writes a suicide note explaining various things about him and why he's doing it (and elaborating on my headcanon about him as well). It nearly gave Roget a heart attack because when I announced it on Reddit, I think that Roget thought that it was an actual suicide note by the author Clef.

SCP-1265: The Mesozoic Preserve is a popular article of yours within the site and offsite communities. Why do you think your little dinosaur SCP is so well-liked?

I think part of it is the picture. Paleoartist Alain Bénéteau was very gracious in letting me use it in the SCP, and it's probably the best "photograph" I've seen of a feathered dinosaur (from what I know, it's actually a Bearded Vulture with its beak painted over in photoshop). A good SCP with a great photo gets read more than a good SCP without any photo.

Another part of it is that I had fun writing it— like, an unreasonable amount of it. I have ADHD (unmedicated at the moment) so I tend to hyper-focus on certain interests, and at the time, I was hyper-focused in dinosaurs, because dinosaurs have always been, and will always be, awesome. And the fun I had writing it seems to have translated into the fun people have reading it.

SCP-026: Afterschool Retention by DrEverettMann is an article that you mentioned in your AMA that you have a particular fondness for. What do you like about this classic Mann article?

I like 026 in part because it reminds me of my own school experiences— there's an innate horror in being stuck in school for extended periods of time, unable to go and decompress after a hard day, a horror I know all too well in my soul-crushing retail job.

Plus, the original pictures that were on it looked uncannily like the high school I went to in some places. Unfortunately, they've been taken down as part of our CC Compliance policies, but they were evocative as hell when I first read it.

The horror of being stuck in school is a big reason the Class of '76 appeals to me as well— I've wanted to write something for it, but I don't feel qualified, outside of that weird thing I did for Aces And Eights.

Since you have been here for almost 9 years, in what ways would you say that you as well as the site have changed since you arrived?

Nine years, Jesus H. As to how I’ve changed, I’ve gotten better at writing, definitely. My early writing was influenced by the likes of Djoric and Roget, but I think I’ve carved out my own style as somewhere between “off-brand Jim Butcher” and “really wants to write Gravity Falls fanfiction for a living”. I’ve also gotten better-medicated; there’s a reason my author page lists 2014 and 2015 as being a year of “Brain fog and horrible writing”. I was a terror during those years due to some unfortunate choices in medication, culminating in a hiatus over a year-long starting in August of 2015 after I blew up at another user in a side chat, and I don’t remember a lick of it. Burned a lot of bridges that I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to fully rebuild.

As for the way the site has changed… I feel we’ve simultaneously grown more accepting and more insular. More accepting in the sense that we’re more diverse in terms of demographics (with a lot of the more prolific and popular authors on the site being LGBTQIA+) and as well as what sort of stories we’re willing to tell — nine years ago, I don’t think something like SCP-5926 or SCP-3312 could have survived on the main site. People are also willing to write actual characters for the Foundation that aren’t Clef or Gears or Kondraki or Bright etc. — I still remember when Hammermaiden posted her essay on characters, and how it made me realize that the Foundation didn’t really have any.

As for the insular part: we have higher standards of quality for writers than a lot of sites do, and that can scare people off. AO3 and Fanfiction.net are largely unmoderated in terms of quality, so someone jumping over from there is going to get major culture shock when they’re told that their OP OC Donut Steel SCP isn’t going to fly on the site. People have to genuinely improve their writing to post here. On top of that, disciplinary measures have grown more stringent, which (with how much people seem to like to troll this site) is a good thing, but it’s also got me kind of paranoid that I’m going to be banned one day— I have a disc thread on O5 for a reason.

Since you are known for writing a large number of tales, do you happen to have any suggestions on ways to help tales receive more attention or comments on current efforts to do so?

If you write tales, you have to accept that, by and large, the off-site fandom isn't going to want to read them, so they get less traction on the site itself. Suicide Note is an exception that is successful because it name-drops half a dozen characters that are popular off-site and focuses on Clef— people don't want to read about Mary-Ann Lewitt or Ruiz Duchamp when they can read about the adventures of Bright and the Flanderization Patrol. If you want to get your tales read by the off-site fandom and aren't already incredibly popular and don't want to use senior staff author avatars, you need to plug it yourself, even if it means going onto the meme subreddit and making a shitpost about it.

I'm told that the efforts towards the new tale discovery project are going well by someone on the team, so I'm excited for that, because the best works on the site (The Cool War, Et Tam Deum Petivi, Portraits Of Your Father, Pitch Haven) are tales, and it's downright criminal they're not more popular.

Do you have any projects outside of the wiki that you would like to talk about? If not, feel free to mention something outside of the wiki that you are either passionate about or something that you are excited about.

I've actually started working on something recently that's probably never going to see the light of day— a TTRPG based around working for an artifact collection agency that's basically the Foundation with the numbers filed off. I figure that if I can't make my writing work outside of the Foundation universe, I'd just write something Foundation-ish.

I'm trying to work on a novel as well, with a fairly simple premise: people who have had their souls torn from their body are the most effective soldiers in the war against the supernatural, and nobody has had their soul torn from them harder than your average graveyard-shift worker. But damn if I can't write it.

Who really is "Ihp"?

Are we talking in an ontological sense or what? I’m a guy who’s burned through more therapists from the ages of 12 to 25 than most people will in their whole life, and the best advice I’ve gotten from any of them is ‘you can stop seeing me anytime you want’. I’ve got issues up the wazoo, from paranoia to an inferiority complex to anger issues that have resulted in a friend describing me as “John Wayne Gacy-like”, and that’s before you get into my autism, depression and self-deprecation.

More than anything, I’m afraid of people seeing me as arrogant. I’ve lived with a narcissistic parent my whole life, and the absolute last thing I want to do is to grow up to be like them. I constantly second-guess myself at every turn, and I constantly worry that I’m a bad person, that everyone hates me, etc. Goes back to the paranoia (which a former friend once told me is just another form of arrogance, which I’m not sure I agree with) and a whole host of other stuff.

And over all else? I’m kind of bitter. Everyone works hard for what they write, but despite the fact that I'm the second-most prolific author on the site, you never really see my stuff outside of the site. Night Mind did a reading of The 12 Days of Site 87's Christmas, which had me riding high for a week, but that's the only time I've seen S & C Plastics (which is essentially my child) referenced off the site.

…until a few days ago. A Wikidot user (who is too young to join the site at the moment) PMed me with a folder full of fan art of characters from S & C Plastics on a Google Drive. It made me realize: "Holy shit, people actually read and like my stuff." So that feels awesome.

What are your thoughts on butterbees?

Sorry, I couldn't hear you over the sound of me strangling ProcyonLotor to death.

This concludes the interview. I hope you enjoyed it! I would like to thank Ihp for being a pleasure to work with and for being understanding about my time constraints. The next interview is underway, and my list is ever-expanding. My next two interviewees will be a blast from the past; I am sure everyone will enjoy hearing from them!

Thank you for reading!

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