SCP-055 | Hacker News Reader

SCP-055

scp-wiki.wikidot.com

134 pointsrbanffy72 comments

If you don't know about the SCP wiki, I really recommend checking it out, but be aware that it can be a really deep rabbit hole. The most important articles are the SCPs like this one, basically anomalous objects or beings. But often much more interesting are the tales, which are storys about the SCP foundation and everything else in the fictional universe.

And if you are confused: There is no shared canon, so articles can contradict each other (and they often do).

I was reading about this and then... What isn't canonical? I don't understand your question.

I don't see a question in the parent's comment?

Nothing in particular on the 055 page isn't canonical. But any other page on the wiki might contradict anything on any other page. For instance, there are a number of other SCPs and articles that provide conflicting explanations of SCP-055.

SCP is the opposite of say, the Star Wars franchise where George Lucas (now Disney) gets to say what's canon even if all the fans disagree. In the SCP-verse, everything is licensed Creative Commons (I think), so your own headcanon is equally valid as anyone else's, and fanfic doesn't exist because it's all fanfic.

That also means it's popular to make live action movies like this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVx2jyDPinw)

> What isn't canonical?

Yes.

Exactly.

(Glad to see somebody gets the joke!)

And if you like SCP and videogames you should definitly check out the game Control.

That was pretty hard to search for https://www.remedygames.com/games/control/

Just have to know how to get google to go to the right category. Just use Control game instead of just searching control and it pops right up.

My strategy is to go straight to Wikipedia. It's not perfect, but their disambiguation pages are great for lots of ambiguously named proper nouns.

I had that in my library from PS Plus but hadn’t tried it, so thanks for the recommendation.

Recelty finished it. It's a great game.

After a long enough time reading, I've come to the conclusion that the contradictions are shared canon. Reality in the SCP universe is just such a fucked up place that trying to make consistent sense of it is entirely futile.

The Elder Scrolls series has various interesting in-universe explanations which help account for the multiple actions a player character could take:

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Dragon_Break

I suppose this fulfills the same purpose for the SCP universe:

http://www.scpwiki.com/document-recovered-from-the-marianas-...

There probably is an anomaly or two that allow interaction between parallel universes. The different SCP foundations in different universes might be working with each other.

If anyone's interested I'd also recommend The Exploring Series¹ youtube channel which does summarized narrations of SCPs.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/ManggMangg

You just sent me down a 4 hour clickhole. I both blame and thank you.

This reminds me of early "Welcome to Night Vale" episodes when it was still revelling in novelty of desert-themed myth creation and delightfully paradoxical weirdness -- stories spawned from--but creatively fighting with--previoiusly assumed premises about that world (but with the added bonus of humour.)

Yes. The site has also been through several rounds of civil war level drama, so you may or may not be able to find an article or version of an article you want to re-read. Don't give up; what you're looking for will be in the edit history or on an archive site.

I didn’t know about the SCP wiki. I started reading TFA and then I started reading the home page, and I don’t know what any of this is, nor see any kind of About.

I got a job and two kids. What is this?

SCP is probably the largest and most successful collaborative fiction project on the internet. It is presented as a series of database entries on SCPs, or "skips", which are anomalous objects, entities, or events that the SCP Foundation has contained or would like to contain if they could figure out how. It is largely horror themed. There are also "Tales" which are simply stories set in the SCP-verse.

Like anything, 90% of it is kinda crap, but that last 10% can be really really good.

It is a massive collection of the notes of a fictional organization that finds Weird, Dangerous, Magical Shit and keeps it out of the lives and hands of normal people.

Wikipedia has a decent capsule summary of the fiction and its real-world history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCP_Foundation

On the SCP wiki, you could have two jobs and a kid.

There are a few in-universe explanations of the fractured canon, my favorite:

http://www.scpwiki.com/sandrewswann-s-proposal

I read through all of qntm's Anti-memetics series a few weeks back, and this is where it all begins. Highly recommended.

If you'd like to support the author, you can buy it as an eBook from Amazon[0].

>This ebook collects all of my Antimemetics Division fiction: SCP-055, SCP-2256 and the complete serials There Is No Antimemetics Division and Five Five Five Five Five.

[0]: https://www.amazon.in/qntm/e/B091P6ZQLW

The ebooks are a cheap and more convenient way to read these particular stories. I've bought all three of them from https://gumroad.com/qntm, because they're great.

Thanks for this link. Bought!

Oh! I thought qntm was familiar. I think I read Ra a while back (probably also on an HN recommendation).

I only read the blog version, I'll definitely pick up the kindle version.

My favorite SCP: http://www.scpwiki.com/scp-1981

"SCP-1981 appears to be a home video recording of former United States President Ronald Reagan delivering his "Evil Empire" speech to the National Association of Evangelicals at Sheraton Twin Towers Hotel, Orlando, FL on 3/8/1983. However, at 1 minute and 10 seconds, the speech begins to deviate heavily, eventually resembling no known speech ever made by Reagan. Beginning at approximately 5 minutes, multiple incisions, lacerations and penetration wounds can be seen being slowly inflicted, though no corresponding source of these wounds is visible. Despite suffering bodily harm that would likely incapacitate an ordinary person, Reagan will continue to deliver his speech until either his vocal cords are severed or the tape degrades to static at 22:34."

Deliciously creepy.

I love that the last sentence implies that the wounds are different each time you watch the tape.

Check out the whole article at the link, it contains more and goes into that. It is a good one.

Thanks for the recommendation, that was worth it.

I wonder if this is some kind of reference to The Picture of Dorian Gray?

Sorry if this is off-topic, but why does the OP link to a different domain from the one you linked to? They appear to be nearly identical sites.

The answer is at the end of OP page:

  Recommendations: It may be worthwhile to post at least one
  staff member capable of remembering the existence of
  SCP-055 to each critical site.

It's hosted on Wikidot. The bottom-left of the site says "Powered by Wikidot.com" and Wikidot wikis can be hosted on custom domains as well as subdomains of wikidot.com:

https://www.wikidot.com/features

The SCP Foundation wiki is hosted on Wikidot, which provides free wiki hosting. It can be accessed either via a Wikidot subdomain or via the dedicated domain. Annoyingly, it seems like both alternate routes into the same content have about equal search engine optimisation, so a random SCP link has an even chance of using either domain.

I recommend using <http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/> rather than the alternative. Wikidot has some problems with it; one of those is that some browsers have trouble logging in when the domain name isn't *.wikidot.com.

My favorite is 3008, the Infinite IKEA: http://www.scpwiki.com/scp-3008

On the outside, you see an IKEA. On the inside, the store is infinite and fully staffed. At night, the staff begins to strange. Even stranger than regular IKEA staff.

It inspired a Minetest mod (Minetest is a FLOSS voxel game like Minecraft): https://content.minetest.net/packages/benrob0329/ikea/

I believe there's a Minecraft version too.

The antimemetics division sequence is great

"What happened to him?"

"You don't want to know."

There is a very long pause while both O5-8 and his assistant react to this. In fact, they pass through a long, discrete sequence of reactions. Indignation at the seeming rudeness; confusion at Wheeler's incaution in front of sinister superiors; surprise at the magnitude of the claim; pure disbelief; comprehension; and finally, horror.

"What…" O5-8 asks carefully, "would happen if we did know?"

Ah, 055. The beginning of a whole arc on the Antimemetics Division, which has been formed from scratch over and over again every time someone realized there ought to be an antimemetics division.

And to clarify, the beginning is here: http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub

For all the unsettling or violent or dangerous SCPs on the wiki, my favourite still remains SCP-348. I teared up a little the first time I read this:

http://www.scpwiki.com/scp-348

It's a ceramic bowl with "thinking of you" written in Chinese on the side. When a person with a mild sickness like a runny nose or a cough is nearby, it fills with soup. People who eat this soup say it's comforting & reminds them of their parents' cooking. Once eaten, a message will materialize in the inside of the soup bowl in the language most familiar to the person eating from it.

I won't spoil the rest.

Side note: the closest game to capture the feeling of reading the SCP wiki is Control. If you enjoy reading the SCP wiki, you definitely owe it to yourself to play Control.

just not on a console. it's a PC game with no compensating mechanics for joysticks. play it on PC with a mouse.

My favorite non-horror SCP is SCP-4239. It kinda requires knowing a little background on the Foundation and some of the Groups of Interest to understand, but overall its pretty great.

http://www.scpwiki.com/scp-4239

Hey, that's a rabbit hole I've gone through recently!

I highly recommend the 'There Is No Antimemetics Division' short stories:

http://www.scpwiki.com/antimemetics-division-hub

First time seeing this and I'm completely obsessed now.

There's a lot of good ones! One of my favorites, a retro computer that gained sentience: http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-079

> Description: SCP-079 is an Exidy Sorcerer microcomputer built in 1978. In 1981, its owner, (deceased), a college sophomore attending , took it upon himself to attempt to code an AI. According to his notes, his plan was for the code to continuously evolve and improve itself as time went on. His project was completed a few months later, and after some tests and tweaks, lost interest and moved on to a different brand of microcomputer. He left SCP-079 in his cluttered garage, still plugged in, and forgot about it for the next five years.

I also liked the stories about the space ship and crew...

The angel one, and the guy in the sarcophagus were neat too.

Oh - and the factory!

Do you mean this one? http://www.scpwiki.com/scp-914

Because that's definitely another one I love

No - I like that one, and how its used in other stories.. but I was thinking of the factory from:

http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-001-o5

I also loved how they mix-n-matched scp's to see how their effects would interact. The most prevalent example has to be trying to kill 682(2) by using all sorts of other scp's. But also stuff like sticking the cure-all pills in 914, etc.

2: http://www.scpwiki.com/scp-682

oh - and I never did figure out what was up / finish reading with the clockwork men from the toy factory ? I seem to recall starting an arc about a girl that worked there...

Although a late-1970s computer definitely couldn't encompass all of the unconscious parts of a thinking mind, it's interesting to think about whether the surface level, conscious thoughts of one's mind could fit on a small computer...

That was all fun to read until, at the middle of it, I realize that I remembered reading it a few years ago.

Oh no.

The book about this[1] has been on my to-read list for a while. The reviews seem to be very positive.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54870256-there-is-no-ant...

It's pretty good! A little dry (I like dry - it helps me sleep) but the ideas in it are very cool.

I read it recently. Four star book for me. Will recommend.

From the final part of this story, set in 2020:

"We have learned that there is time missing from our world. Almost a year of extremely recent history. And there are spaces, significant spaces, in every population center, which cannot be perceived or entered. The cities are rerouting around them, like mountains or radiation zones. And along with that time and that space, we have learned that there are enough people missing, without any explanation whatsoever, that if I spent the rest of my considerably augmented lifespan counting them, I could not count to that number."

He says, his voice rising, "These things happen. And we say to ourselves, 'Never again.' And a hundred years pass. And they happen. Again."

Yeah, feels about right.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#Public_health_mana...

You'd probably like this one too, some what similar and is built out further in Ad Astra canon: http://www.scpwiki.com/scp-3848

Recent and (distantly?) related:

●●|●●●●●|●●|● - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27120460 - May 2021 (193 comments)

If you like this kind of thing, the game "Control" is basically this, as a game, and it's amazing. Also probably still the best execution of raytracing in a real, modern game. I strongly recommend playing it. Whatever itch SCP scratches for you, this game will do it in 4 dimensions in realtime.

qntm's works are the best thing I've read this year. The anti-memetics stories, Ra, and Fine Structure are sublime. The link at the bottom of the SCP-055 page leads to the first of his anti-memetics series.

https://qntm.org/fiction

There's a book about this - "There is no Anti-Memetics Division", written by qntm.

SCP-055 sounds very much like the mnemonomorph in the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde. I can't remember her name...

Maybe SCP-055 escaped to Jasper Fforde's universe, or vice versa

My favorite line: "Do we have an Irony Division?"

This is how you kill 55.

Kill what?

SCP-055

Whoosh

lol

Sorry to interrupt, but what are you laughing at?

I don't think there is such SCP.

I love the Tetris one.

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