<kaktus> Thanks for chatting with me. You're one of the only moderators I could get a hold of.
<Drewbear> no prob. so what did you want to ask me?
<kaktus> Mainly what led you to join and then leave the SCP Foundation.
<Drewbear> well, I remember that I found the wiki around… spring of 2009? March-ish? somebody I knew linked it on Livejournal. I thought it was fun and decided to stick around.
<kaktus> Did you ever contribute anything?
<Drewbear> just comments and stuff. I never wrote anything for it. the atmosphere was kinda toxic, even when I joined, and I didn't want to put myself through that
<kaktus> So why did you join Staff?
<Drewbear> 'cause I felt honored, mostly. they liked me enough to want me on board and I thought that I might be able to fix some of the toxicity
<Drewbear> didn't work, though
<kaktus> In the end, what made you quit?
<Drewbear> well, it was fun at first, there were a lot of really neat things on there. my favorite was that rock that opened up mirrors to another world. don't remember the details, though. it's been a while
<Drewbear> anyway, I left because there was just so much… garbage on there that it got boring or just disgusting. anyone could post anything and nothing got deleted, so /so much/ crap stuck around
<Drewbear> literal crap, too. there was this mobile sentient mass of shit and filth that stalked people… whatever, it was bad
<Drewbear> I think it came to a head for me when someone posted this really disgusting rape fantasy thing and I realized that it would be there forever. I mean, sure there was a voting system, but it's not like it /meant/ anything
<Drewbear> something could be at 100 and great or -20 and utter shit, and they'd both stick around. and no-one seemed to /care/ that it would all stick around
<Drewbear> "just don't read it if you don't like it, newfag!"
<Drewbear> "STFU u don even write!'"
<Drewbear> stuff like that
<kaktus> Yeah, I can see how that would be demoralizing.
<Drewbear> no kidding. there had been talk of doing a staff-controlled cleanup, but nothing ever came of it. I left a little after that, around the end of 2010
<Drewbear> didn't see a reason to keep going with something that couldn't/wouldn't weed out the increasing amount of awful
Hey, Clef,
Took me a while to find your email address. Just wanted to let you know, good work on Lightning Princess. I can't contribute to your Patreon, things being tough around here, but I don't think it will be necessary, all things considered.
I'm sure you've heard about the situation with SCP Foundation. In case you didn't: Admin had been throwing his lawyer at every single derivative project, threatening them with lawsuits that he couldn't really back up. I mean, he had a point with some of the T-shirt sellers and the bumper sticker guys, but then we went after that really cool 'Containment Breach' video game and the dude on Youtube doing the readings with the cool voices, and people started to get pissed.
Anyway, it all came to a head when the Containment Breach guys got the attention of the guy who made the original statue. Man, was Kato pissed. You should have seen the letter that got sent to the Wiki. Admin tried to throw his lawyer at the problem, but it turned out the lawyer in question didn't know that his name was being tossed around in defense of a project entirely based on infringing on the copyright of another person's art piece.
Admin is trying to raise money to keep the wiki afloat, but given how many people he's pissed off, and the fact that everyone pretty much hates him, it's not looking good. So if you've got any content on SCP Foundation that you want to keep before the entire thing goes down, you'd better grab it fast.
Hope you'll try to keep in touch this time. I know there's still some bad blood between us considering the way you left, but like you said at the time: it was him or you, and it up to the userbase to decide, and they decided on the other guy. If you want to say 'Told You So,' I won't hold that against you.
- Gears
Ryan sighed and came home from another day, dropping his bag onto the couch and crossing to the kitchen, feeding Jessie and Todd, then opening the fridge to get himself some milk.
He frowned slightly as he looked at the window over his sink, thinking maybe the lines of water there looked like letters, but he quickly discarded the idea and laughed to himself. He wondered what the thing on the other side of the glass might say. How it would act when it found him. And then, he discarded the thought. New episode of Sherlock was coming on tonight.
He walked to the couch and settled down, pulling the laptop into his lap to get some editing done on the new supplement, when one of the cats suddenly slunk onto his keyboard and settled down with a warm purr. He shrugged and started scratching. He had time, after all.
Drew sipped the rum and coke, laughing and snuggling a little closer to his boyfriend, laying his head on his shoulder. "You know, I had this idea for an awesome story," he said.
"Oh yeah?" the other man replied.
"Yeah," he said. "It's about this group of people who hunt down paranormal objects."
The other man laughed. "Like Warehouse 13?" he asked.
"Yeah, but… like… darker."
"S'already been done, bear."
"Heh. Yeah, I know. Just sounded fun."
He smiled for a little bit, enjoying the warm, fluffy edge of the alcohol eating away at his wakefulness. He yawned, widely, then bit the other man on the arm, grinning a little as the other man jerked.
Albert pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, though they slipped back down again almost immediately. He'd finished the short story two weeks ago, but his editor had more changes he had to deal with before it got into the anthology. He sighed into the phone.
"Listen, George, I know you want this for the next Wildcards, and I'm working on it, but I can't just spell it out for them. They have to figure out what it does for themselves!"
He waited, listening to the other man complain for a minute, then reached up and took his glasses off, laying them to the side.
"…No, I don't know what happens when it touches a dead body!" He paused and listened to the inane stream of arguments. "I get it, but that's not important. The slime is a maguffin." The complaining turned slightly less acidic. "Well, if that ever comes up in a later story, the other guy can come up with the answer! Though I think it'll be more fun if it turns out to be a big in-joke that no one ever figures out the answer to…"
Mitch hefted another sword into the back of his van, situating them carefully and dropping his hat on top of the pile.
He smiled at Jennifer as she came around the back of the van, reaching up to wrap her arms around his neck. "What's taking so long back here? Do I need to take you to the dungeon?"
Mitch smiled. "Yes, ma'am."
As he walked around to the side of the van and stepped up into it, Mitch grinned slightly. "Hey, I heard a great joke… what do you get when you have a fuzzy green ball in one hand, and a fuzzy green ball in the other?"
Jennifer sighed, knowing the answer wouldn't be anything good. "I dunno, husband. What?"
"Kermit the frog's full attention."
Jennifer didn't groan, she just stared at him as he loaded up the last bag of gear… and quietly made a mental note to skewer him somewhere painful in the next show. "By the way, I saw you talking to those belly dancer. I know what you're thinking. And it's a sin."
Mitch glanced up with a guilty smile. "Yeah. But a fun sin." He winked at her and walked around to the driver's seat.
"And illegal!" she shouted… still smiling.
"Actually, JD, you're the picture of health," the doctor said. "No ulcers, low stress level, and your heart sounds like a drum." The portly older man laughed as his lanky patient grinned.
"Awesome," JD replied. "I don't know why, but I had the weirdest feeling that I'd dodged a huge bullet, and I was worried it was stress or something. I've been spending so much time writing lately that I thought maybe I'd done something to myself."
They both laughed. "When is that novel coming out?" the doctor asked.
JD smiled. "Next month."
Anthony woke up with a start, reaching his hand up to rub his head for a moment. It came away hot and wet with his sweat as he swung his legs over the side of the bed and pushed himself up. He walked to the adjoining bathroom and stepped into it, getting under the shower head and turning it on, letting it rinse him off.
With a slow sigh, he turned and looked at the shower wall, remembering only fragments of the nightmare he'd had. A strange, laughing man chasing him through a hallway full of pipes. At the end, there was a massive clock, and hundreds of people inside made of little, clicking brass gears. There was a man there who looked like a bear with a human face, and his stomach burst open, and it had been full of eels instead of intestines.
He reached down, turning the water off again as he stepped out, grabbing his towel and starting to dry himself. He heard one of his children crying from somewhere down the hall. He was only two, but it seemed that nightmares were hereditary. He walked back into the bedroom, quietly keeping from waking his wife up, and stepped into the hall.
It was a relief when the little boy asked for The Cat in the Hat.
Alexa pushed her glasses up her nose, grimacing slightly as they slid back down again. She right them, then narrowed her eyes as she leaned in closer to the plant, holding a needle and pinning the petals quietly as the examined the stamen and pistil.
She leaned back, then took off her glasses and looked at a clipboard, sighing and putting them back on as she realized she needed them to read, then quickly entered some data. For a moment, she tilted her head at the flower, tracing the branching leaf veins. What would the world be like, she wondered, if plants like this one could get up and move? Her imagination sketched out a skittering thing darting along on sturdy leaves… what if they were the dominant species? What would sapience look like, if it was descended from something photosynthetic?
She laughed and discarded the thought. It was a bit silly, after all. And she had another forty specimens to get through.
The coffin slowly lowered into the ground as the man narrowed his eyes at the headstone for a moment, flicking the ashes off the end of his cigarette as the long, wooden box was dropped into the hole. The gravedigger climbed out, nodding to the mortician, then started to shovel dirt in on top of the casket.
"So, what got this one?" he asked, grunting as he tossed in the shovel full of dirt.
"House fire," the undertaker responded.
The gravedigger shivered just a little, narrowing his eyes. "That's not the way I wanna go," he said.
"That's not the way anyone wants to go."