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Comment by jedimastert | Hacker News Reader

For whatever reason, SCP is some of the best sci writing out there, especially the short stories outside of the (already incredible) entity wiki entries.

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Well there are thousands of entries, bad ones being called frequently, and it has been going on for over a decade. There's bound to be some good stuff in there.

I'd say that sturgeon's law still applies though.

Probably sturgeon's law is an upper-bound, but a small percentage of a very large number is still pretty big.

> Sturgeon's law (or Sturgeon's revelation) is an adage stating "ninety percent of everything is crap."

Why doesn't the browser automate away the hassle of looking up this stuff. I can't remember everyone and their many laws!

Side-note: My favorite Wikipedia page is the List of Eponymous Laws. It's a very eclectic collection of interesting topics to learn about, many of which are worth knowing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_eponymous_laws

> Cole's Law: A salad of thinly sliced cabbage with a mayonnaise dressing

I'm gladdened to see that not all the fun has been sucked out of Wikipedia yet. (Don't BJAODN this!)

Cole's Law was formulated by the 1960's, as shown by its inclusion in a verse in Westerfilk, attributed to Jordin Kare.

  Cole's Law is well known and famous,
  But we never obey it at all;
  Yet for this you really can't blame us.
  It's thinly sliced cabbage -- that's all

https://www.swil.org/FILKS/filkbook4.html

I think there's also something to be said for the canonization and building on more advanced concepts. For example anti memetics, or pataphysics, or even short hand like Scranton Reality Anchor, or telekill alloy. All these concepts are tools the an author can use without having to reinvent or explain which makes shorter fiction easier. Or they just can ignore them entirely if it's inconvenient to the plot. Every entry there stands on the shoulders of all the others.

I'd also like to call out the S&C Plastics[0] "company", especially around this time of year[1] :-D

[0]https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/the-s-c-plastics-hub

[1]https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/black-autumn-hub

Funny how telekill has basically been removed from the mainline SCPs for years, though.

I can see why. Too many containment procedures calling for absurd amounts of it. They rewrote it so it has some more disadvantages and to cull it's usage some. I actually did a reread of Series 1 and 2 recently. Was interesting to go that far back as I haven't read any since the lolFoundation. Amazing how many bad ones are back there, or just ones missing that interesting kick that characterizes even the simpler Series 4 or 5 ones.

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