rounderhouse

[rounderhouse]

oh holy this is incredible thank you!

Statues by Rounderhouse and Snapdragon133

This is a record, a new bind just a week and a half after the previous one!

I have always been a lurker fan of the SCP Foundation. Over the decade, I have dipped in and out of the site to read the tales and articles that lie within. So when I heard that there was a story in another form—Statues—that links to the earliest SCP ever written, and that one of the writers is @rounderhouse, the man who wrote the REDTAPE series, I just had to see and read.

This bind is a celebration of one of the oldest articles in the SCP Foundation archives, as well as to a story that humanizes the statue that made the universe possible.

(Extra: I further experimented with pasting images into this book—as per the last bind—by gluing them at the top and spine edges, but leaving the bottom + foreedge glue-free. Result: a much sturdier connection with less chance of creasing, yet still with enough freedom for the printed images to breathe and bend without buckling or bubbling. Yes!)

[rounderhouse]

If you want to race in space you have to be committed. The distance is consistent and set, and there's some obstacles you just can't blitz through (doesn't matter how many times the speed of light you're going, cut through a star's mass shadow and the only award you're winning is the In Memoriam one) but beyond that, it's up to you where you want to max out your wave engines and where you want to conserve speed. Every time you redline your thrusters you're losing a few decades of knowing people back home. You could slow down when you're swinging around your home system, but this is one of the rare straights on the course, and if you waste the opportunity to go full-tilt, you'll never get this lost headway back. Look at the right picosecond and you can just about glimpse the planet you were born on smear into the distance behind you.

[rounderhouse]

Excerpt from Wetware: A Brief History of Biological Computing (Park, 2055)

Wetware computers led to a new marriage of biology and cybersecurity. A surprisingly successful one; our conception of the digital has always been modeled on the biological. Defending a server rack of flesh-and-blood neural-slices from a virus isn’t all that different from defending a traditional computer against one.

But it also led to an entirely new problem neither field was equipped to solve. the gene-samples used to grow new wetware computers widely proliferated before cancer screening had advanced to where it is now, and federal law now prohibits non-governmental entities from harvesting genetic samples for computing purposes. No matter how hard you try — and computing giants like IBM and Kessler dedicate billions to it — even the most carefully-cultivated strains of biochips, trays of neurons millimeters thick and wired in vast warehouse-brains, will eventually develop computing tumours.

Most are benign, harmless drains on computational resources, but every so often one becomes malignant. They are almost impossible to detect in the noise of the output, but they work their own agendas, whispering orthogonal thoughts to any given task. Unnoticed by the teams of clean-suited biotechs, they grow and grow and grow and spill bad data into the body. The risks of unrestrained computumour growth become readily apparent after Kessler won a Pentagon contract to organize satellite data for orbital kinetic strikes, and delivered a firing solution that confidently directed satellites to sink two Navy aircraft carriers. Three of the server racks in their Lake Razor facility were later found to be completely riddled with cybertumours.

Interestingly, the original gene-sample for the Lake Razor facility was a 28-year-old war casualty.

[rounderhouse]

Did you know? Did you know that you're the greatest writer on the SCP wiki? I just read the Bone Proposal which was both 1000% worth the wait and such a beautiful robot-becomes-a-person story. Iron Proposal is going to utterly destroy me I'm certain. (Also I love your take on Sarkics, incredible.)

💙

[rounderhouse]

Hi! Anon who sent an ask about Xenophon a few hours ago. Just finsihed BONE and I think that he and Iūn are hitting harder then I expected then oh my god.

they're my favorite little pookies lately. dumb robot and his amnesiac girlfriend

[rounderhouse]

HI HOLY SHIT I JUST GOT DONE READING THR BONE PROPOSAL IM ACTUALLY GONNA DIE ITS SO GOOD GOOD JOB IM SO EXITED FOR MORE YOU ARE SO GOOD AT THIS SCP THING

:D thank you

[rounderhouse]

Excellent entry with the Bone proposal! I loved the lore, the interactions between Xenophon and Iun and all the larger implications for the next entry. Honestly this felt to me like a loving parallel to the In Memoriam Adytum canon. Speaking of, are you familiar with it? What existing Nälka content was influential to you in making Bone?

I'm not very familiar with In Memoriam or really any Sarkic content. I try to go into my reimaginings with a clean slate; what articles I am familiar with I don't really like that much so this was an opportunity to start from fresh ground and build it into something that appeals to me and grounded in strong character dynamics, just as with the other two proposals.

I'm glad you enjoyed it!

[rounderhouse]

SCP-001 - ROUNDERHOUSE'S BONE PROPOSAL: BLACK ADYTUM

Forty years after the events of Jade, an experimental Foundation research AI stumbles upon the surviving remnants of the Nalka - a dying tribe aching to learn about their glorious past, led by the amnesiac flesh-weaver Iun. You can't bury the past forever.

READ IT HERE: LINK

[rounderhouse]

hello! long time no talk.

ROUNDERHOUSE's BONE PROPOSAL will be posted tomorrow, on my 22nd birthday, january 12th 2025. 🦴💛

[rounderhouse]

Diagraphephobia: The fear of losing digital data or information. Associated with hoarding data and files.

Yesterday I posted my article for SCP's Anthology 2024. It's about Maria Jones, dementia, and being eaten alive from the inside out. I think it's one of the strangest, most uncomfortable things I've ever written.

Check it out here: SCP-8976 - Diagrephephobia: fragmentation

FATAL MEMORY CORRUPTION

[rounderhouse]

The mech is neither a tank nor a plane, but a biological weapons platform. Titanium-ceramic plating covering living, pulsating flesh. We can't help it that cerebrospinal fluid is wonderfully conductive and the perfect medium to immerse the pilot in, or that synaptic fibres formed of intertwined nervecords are so good at carrying data. It's just engineering.

[rounderhouse]

Been thinking about wetware. Biologically-based computation tech. Thin neural membranes, trapped between plexiglass sheets, bathed in cerebrospinal fluid. Humming server banks, rows of neural sheets and thick cords of synaptic fibre. Workers in clean suits gently nudging along samples of artificial mind, destined for an offshore compfarm in Hong Kong, long outliving whatever cents-on-the-dollar guinea pig the stem cells were harvested from.

[rounderhouse]

lol, lmao even

[rounderhouse]

finished listening to TES's narration of fratricide and. holy hell. the moment where Bileath answers "one drop." is absolutely incredible. i can only imagine how kathartic it must be, standing in bileath's shoes. to say that, then watch Ansool rot for 6 agonising days, knowing even this would never be enough for what he had done.

please never stop writing. you are a huge inspiration to me :)

i don't intend to! the voices keep whispering stories to me from the beyond and they won't shut the fuck up until i write and post them

fratricide was an absolutely manic experience to write, 28000 words over a week and its packed full of moments that just Came To Me like the one drop thing. i'm very glad you enjoyed it so much!

[rounderhouse]

hello big man rounderhouse, the house is very round 🔥 i'm a big fan of your redtape series and your worldbuilding; i've been writing my own original story for years now, and all i've been doing is planning, planning and planning, but i feel like no matter how much i do, i keep feeling like i won't be able to write a cohesive or good story. how do you plan your stories, and more importantly, how do you manage to actually get those words on the paper ? of course, i know you just gotta do it, but whenever i try, i just hit a wall halfway, and feel like i need to plan even more

i always have a bit of trouble answering these questions because they come from a place very orthogonal to how i write -- not that that's a bad thing! but for me the issue is rarely one of wanting to have it 100% planned out before i jump into it. i rarely plan out my stories beyond the broadest strokes; maybe i'll write an outline, but unless i'm expecting it to be novella-length, i kind of just wing it beyond that, and i recommend giving that a shot. you know where you're starting, you know where you want the story to end, so instead of painstakingly drafting out every bit, just start at the start and, well, keep going until you end up where you wanted to. i think part of it is that beyond storytelling i also just enjoy the act of writing -- putting sentences together, making them flow, communicating tone and vibe to the reader. i think you need to cultivate an appreciation for that to some degree, otherwise writing is just a grueling trudge to get to your final product, which is no fun at all

as for feeling good -- you can only get good at writing by doing it. it's a practice sport, just like anything else, and the improvement only becomes apparent after dozens of stories. not a fun answer, but the only true one. you can help that along by analyzing stories after you write them for what you and other people think works, doesn't work, but that does require you to silence the voice of "i'm not good enough". you're not good at most things until you do them a lot, so not being good at them is a terrible reason not to do them. you have literally no stakes in writing on the internet, so i really recommend taking advantage of that to cut your teeth writing whatever. all storytelling is practice

there's a very compelling temptation to all creatives to avoid doing the hard creative work and take refuge in what they know won't challenge them -- making plans for your stories for you. for me, it's making images and CSS instead of writing. but growth requires challenge, and you gotta break out of that hole if you ever want to see the story on the page.

i wrote quite a bit more than i intended to, but i hope that ramble helps you at all! i look forward to seeing what you make

[rounderhouse]

Just finished reading Fratricide and it fucking destroyed me (Very very positive)

thank you! my goal was to cause my reader immense psychological pain. i think it's my best work yet