125 Hot Takes To Go

100% guaranteed to ruffle your feathers or your money back

Lack of Lepers logo run through ControlNet with prompt: “containment chamber”.

I promised one more article on this blog to make it an even 100 posts. Here it is. True to form, most of these are about the SCP Wiki and its sociopolitical ethos vs mine. Honestly, I wish I could say these were carefully collected and stored over the duration of these blog posts, and I guess to an extent they kind of are, but to be honest; these are just the first 125 hot takes I wrote down after opening the word processor. I felt like that was enough, even for the most dedicated of readers. Enjoy.

1. Providing hot takes per like/comment count is whorish and the people doing it are sad attention seekers with shitty fast-food, made-to-order thoughts that are forced and rarely hot. (If you want to dish out hot takes, don’t make it an elaborate throat-clearing spectacle that can only exist thanks to a transaction in social media asspat points. Either your thoughts are worth saying, and people need to hear them irrespective of how many likes you get, or not.)
2. There are only so many actual hot takes you can have, express, and still be socially allowed to participate in places like the SCP Wiki. They can only get so hot too before you burn the flimsy, straw bridges that connect the people there.
3. You write confic your way, and I’ll write it the right way.
4. AI text generation will catch up to the compositional skill and narrativic complexity of most authors writing confic in a matter of years.
5. AI art has already caught up with the compositional skill of most visual artists in the space.
6. AI art will never replace human art and it is not a threat to it. Most artists who are threatened by AI art are scared by the sudden change, and feel that their passion and livelihood are on the line, but once that wears off in about a year or two’s time, they (along with the rest of society) will be as casual about it as musical performers are to recording equipment.
7. Most of the people up in arms about AI art are ignorant of anything to do with it, talking before they actually know anything about it. (“You just press a button, duhur”, “DUHURP! AI art isn’t evolved enough to be specific to SCP articles anyway” LOL)
8. Most of the people strongly decrying AI art are secretly using it to make porn, and loving it.
9. Training AI art models on others’ (copyrighted) images is not unethical in the slightest, is no different from how your brain compiles (copyrighted) influences to produce a derivative work, and the idea that such models “exploit” artists is as inane as it is over-eager to appear morally enlightened. (Is AI art exploiting human art, or is it poised to replace it? Which one is it? It can’t be both, but many people believe these two things simultaneously.)
10. 99% of people who casually use slurs online do not mean ill-intent or endorse racist views beyond the “meta-ironic” insensitivity of using them, and do so solely because the theatrical, uptight formality of police-heavy spaces like the SCP Wiki and The Backrooms make them the butt of the “joke”.
11. You shouldn’t use slurs, but you also shouldn’t magnify their use into something world-ending. Both encourage more usage.
12. Be sure to also implicate the popular culture when you disapprove of the N-word usage, which simultaneously glorifies the term (in action), and limply attempts to discourage it (in words); a ridiculously doomed and feeble attempt at “do as I say, not as I do”, this coming from cultural icons and superstars. (Corollary: Have you ever sung a rap line with the n-word in it, even to yourself, when no one is around?)
13. 99% of the Twitter world is imaginary, including the likes, followers, and ideas.
14. The belief that you need to adopt as many of the superficial body parts and consumer goods in order to successfully identify as an “opposite” gender, is an insult to the definition of that desired gender, reinforces the stereotypes of that gender, and is an affront to the philosophy of gender on the whole. It’s more about the spiritual alignment than a physical one. Don’t overemphasize the physical.
15. The idea that the lipstick line in DISC-J was transphobic is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen argued and accepted on the SCP Wiki.
16. It is incredibly dangerous to tell anyone that one quality of theirs is the most important (e.g. skin color, sexual orientation, gender).
17. Transitioning can be a grass-is-greener ideal. It will not resolve gender dysphoria for many people. At a clinical level, the dysphoria is something that might need to be lived with, if with some difficulty. Existentially, this is because “gender” is and always will be an imperfect term for a highly fluid, social concept, and will exist to be in conflict with no matter what you identify as (which itself vacillates with time).
18. The leftist ethos (read: “scp twitter”) glorifies emotionally wimpy, habitually whiney people who would prefer to commodify their insecurities and frailty into social points. Their ideal status is victimhood, and they will do or believe anything to attain a victim status, or feel/appear victim adjacent.
19. Biological sex is a real, concrete thing that you can’t socially erase for society’s sake.
20. The most confused SCP Wiki members are pro-Communism, and also at the same time have the most pro-Capitalist mentality I’ve ever come across; they substitute capital for upvotes or likes or followers, and are oblivious of this to the point of complete, silent self-parody.
21. SCP Wiki users flying the communist flag in their profile pictures who also vehemently condemn Nazi dog-whistles with permabans is a massive self-own.
22. The SCP community is the pop-music equivalent of the confic space. There are very few genuine artists or serious writers there not mainly interested in pop confections that garner upvotes as their primary motive. Most authors there conform as much as possible to the sociopolitical and compositional conventions in order to be liked.
23. SCP is like a soap opera that doesn’t know when to quit or care to know because its only directive is to keep producing as long as people will create/read it. This makes it a great collaborative project, but prevents it from being art, and so instead is strictly entertainment.
24. People who self-insert are self-conscious and have low self-esteem issues.
25. Visual art is a 1000x more beautiful medium than writing.
26. Music is a 1000x more beautiful medium than visual art.
27. Some confic authors are better than some professional writers.
28. The idea that a book/novel as a product and art medium is somehow a literary level “above” a collection of containment fiction is nonsense.
29. Authors who write pulp-fiction novellas in the SCP format should just cut the cord and write pulp-fiction novels; they are diluting and cheapening the genre for the sake of doing their best impression of “important” trad prose authors.
30. Containment fiction shouldn’t be an adolescent medium, but it really, really, really is.
31. Don’t hold what someone said in their teens or twenties against them.
32. The SCP Wiki is currently the lowest quality containment fiction site. Both RPC and the SCP Commune have a better literary product.
33. The ability to check “.au” has been the most destructive poison to the SCP’s culture, aside from Bright.
34. SCPPER stats doomed the SCP into becoming a dick measuring contest.
35. Most people at the SCP are pro-censorship because they are insecure in their own convictions and reasons for believing things. They must believe somewhere deep down that they will be the sole exception in the history of humankind where outright censorship that’s based on partisan ideological differences will end up being on the correct side of history.
36. The conviction of one person can overwhelm an entire community, when it is strong enough; both good and bad.
37. If someone doesn’t understand why I choose to spend so much time around and about the SCP and associated spaces (“trolling” is the best they can term it), their opinions of me are automatically incorrect.
38. Only three people currently in this space fully understand the importance and value of containment fiction as a new genre. They are all in the SCF Discord server. Many others existed but have left the space.
39. If RPC would drop the 4chan-level giddiness for meta-ironic slur usage, it would be far and away the most attractive containment fiction site.
40. The average new RPC article is superior to the average new SCP article.
41. I am terrified that my ideas will catch on and become mainstream one day, because there is no idea, thought, stance, opinion, or set of beliefs that can’t be made to look disgustingly ugly and evil by idiots, or just the wrong people.
42. One of my greatest fears is after having died, I’m revived as a figurehead of a movement or school of thought that I would 100% disapprove of, and be ashamed to be associated with.
43. I am terrified of commercial success because I don’t know if I could resist letting it pollute and twist me into everything I currently despise.
44. My life is absurdly blessed. Most people who dislike me would dislike me even more if they realized how good I have it. I am genuinely very happy and am thankful to have the life I do. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
45. Most confic writers don’t know how to write skillfully or musically. (Their sentences could be written by AI.)
46. The idea that you have to retire Series 1 style articles after 1,000 of them because “we have enough of those” and “that is enough and it has gotten stale”, but at the same time the current narrative-centric, character-centric, & politics-centric style can persist for 7,000 entries without getting stale, is idiotic.
47. Most people don’t read newer SCPs because those articles are too self-indulgent and with an excess of pseudointellectual pretensions. It’s not that these new articles are too complex, as I’ve literally seen some people assess is the case, it’s that the authors have to do this in order to remain “new” in the one-dimensional compositional mindset at the SCP Wiki (see #44). The bit about them being more narratively complex and shit is just something that makes them feel better about being less successful than Series 1 (see SCP-093).
48. Similar to #44 and #45, SCP writers are immersed in a competitive battle to produce increasingly frenzied “comedic” articles in order to make up for their impoverished, stale, simpleton sense of humor, which is severely handicapped by their fear of being politically incorrect. The culture has done away with needing the “-J” designation because they are that unfunny, also desperate for “new” mainlist material.
49. The SCP Wiki is a social media site that uses pseudo-collaborative writing as an excuse to defer suspicion of it as an act of self-absorption.
50. The SCP Wiki has been embarrassing itself to the larger culture for years.
51. The SCP Wiki’s popular opinion (and the one that everyone conforms to by law) is on average 2 years behind the intellectual thought-curve.
52. The deletion of Bright’s List and the ensuing scandal is the first time the SCP’s popular opinion has turned inward on itself, contradicting itself, and collectively admitting (though indirectly) the flaws of popularity as the supreme good and virtue, effectively capsizing it as the guiding light of the culture.
53. Authors who think that the only viable methodology of writing containment fiction is “the anomaly as a vehicle to the narrative” are not writing containment fiction. They are writing traditional prose that is being stuffed as awkwardly as possible into the confic genre. This does away with all its strengths and highlights all its weaknesses.
54. It’s a sad fact of today’s authors at SCP that they can be told apart by their characteristic weaknesses as writers, not by their unique and individual strengths.
55. There are no leaders at SCP. It is a collection of followers.
56. Dr. Gears is ashamed of what the SCP has become, but as “Papa”, is also too nice and beloved to say it.
57. Dr Kondraki (bondsmagii on tumblr) has turned out to be the better-adjusted one, regarding his split with the SCP. This was not initially the case.
58. The SCP Wiki is the one worth leaving.
59. SCP staff invent terms to get rid of people they don’t like (“negative value user”, “AHT-associated community”) as a result of, like a child, desiring zero meaningful intellectual friction, ever, and to mask that they have no real arguments for unpersoning someone besides a shared, DrMagnus-level personal animosity.
60. SCP staff and thought-leaders are terrified of people listening to people like me. They are terrified of us being correct.
61. The solution to SCP’s major problems (“the rating module and ego” — Dr Gears) lies in elements too refined, too complex, and too personal to be addressed collectively. It can only come from the direct, unmediated relationship of the author to their work, a relationship only attainable when understanding what the containment fiction format and genre is and isn’t. Until authors relearn how to enter into their own process of writing free of concern for upvote reception, the situation will not improve. (In other words, SCP’s problems will never improve.)
62. It is the ultimate arrogance and self-importance of the SCP staff to think they can manage or fix anything in a top-down fashion.
63. The DrAkimoto incident is just as corrupt, damning, and involved as the Cerastes one, but the SCP staff covered their tracks more effectively with DrAkimoto, so no one noticed or cared.
64. Everything AI aside, CityToast was bad news, and it is a great stroke of happenstance that the SCP took him out of power as a licensing lead. He would have meant tremendous disaster for the site, and had proved his inability as a leader or competent legal representative far before the survey. (It just took a party-line infraction for most to see that.)
65. CityToast was marked for ostracization as soon as he expressed pro-AI sentiments. The rest was just the fulfillment of that desire to see him gone. (And he made that pretty easy.)
66. Those objecting to new AI art on the grounds of “they took our jerbs” are like 1990s graphical artists going ballistic over Bryce 3D (look it up) being able to render ray-tracing landscapes, or crying that the typewriter will put handwriting out of practice.
67. I am a real-life, less-likable Greg Turkington (of Victorville Film Archive fame), cataloging and specializing in expertise that is useless and uninteresting to nearly everyone.
68. Trying to make a specialty publication about containment fiction is like making a youtube channel about hat news, or something equally as obscure and ridiculous, like global harmonica trends.
69. If someone who was well-liked in the SCP community was making the products I am (Confic Magazine, Confic Wiki) those products would be very well-received & popular. (This tells you something about the SCP community and its products.)
70. The highest rated articles on the SCP Wiki are either poor quality or complete non-examples of writing (SCP-173, SCP-2521, SCP-___-J).
71. People who think containment fiction is purely entertainment for an audience aren’t wrong, just deeply and destructively wrong-headed.
72. Most SCP authors base their writing habits on Marvel movies, Adult Swim shows, and most of all, Twitter posts.
73. SCP’s political articles show just how much of their success relies on the political part.
74. The weakness and frailty of the SCP community is that they want and only want to be around people who think exactly like themselves. They are fundamentalist purists, bordering on thought-eugenics.
75. Most SCP authors are fine with sacrificing quality for political messaging.
76. SCP is no doubt commercially successful, but literarily, it rarely exceeds the mediocre.
77. For several years now, SCP has become more of a volume brand than a quality one.
78. The only expressive point of most SCPs are to show off.
79. The SCP Wik is a mainstream. (I mean that both as a humble recognition of its popularity, and as an insult.)
80. I lost respect for a certain SCP author after he capitalized on the Bright List Scandal by posting a satire of it, and posting a comment on the Bright List discussion advertising both that satire and his off-site novel work. That’s disgusting.
81. The SCP top articles list is like the Amazon best sellers or NYT best sellers lists; full of commercial-minded, intellectually impoverished garbage.
82. SCP is intellectually unsatisfying.
83. The SCP doesn’t have the focus, wisdom, or self-awareness to appreciate or respect their own history. They are categorically obsessed with the “new”, despite not creating anything truly new in years, and the drive for this mythological “new” has driven the good things they had going off the rails, and off a cliff.
84. Authors demanding their works be removed from the confic project they contributed to is petty.
85. Despite #82, SCP’s refusal to take down Harmony’s articles when she asked is more morally reprehensible than her asking that they be removed.
86. Unfortunately for all the discussion and planning going on at this moment, Bright’s stain on the SCP Wiki and its greater internet outreach cannot ever be removed. This is the result of bad leadership. Years of it. It is permanent and cannot be undone.
87. SCP staff haven’t ever done anything to help the community, except host contests and ban trolls.
88. There are no negative social consequences that are important enough to me that they can waver my sense of purpose.
89. Being a good writer and being smart, or having smart thoughts, are not the same thing.
90. Many people say I am a worse writer than others, but I may be a better thinker than them by the same token.
91. SCP-7000 is a very good article, and imo the best example of neo-lolFoundation, but is the weakest x000 by far.
92. Staff positions at SCP are purchased with upvotes, unless you have burnt bridges.
93. Aesthetically and intellectually, SCP is led by the space’s equivalent of frat boys.
94. If I could do it all over again, I would do everything the same.
95. The SCP Wiki wasn’t smart enough to see Agent Jackrabbit for what she always (and clearly) was until it was too late.
96. The SCP Wiki wasn’t honest enough to see AdminBright for what he always (and clearly) was until it was way way too late.
97. (Up)votes have more authority than staff at the SCP Wiki.
98. If Siddartha Alonne didn’t nuke The List, it would never have been an issue, or ever taken down. Think about that for a minute.
99. Have you thought for a minute? Here it is: Most people at the SCP Wiki need permission from each other before addressing difficult, sensitive, and meaningful topics.
100. You cannot, and never really have been able to, separate the work from the author.
101. Re: Bright, the average KiwiFarms poster was able to see more than the average SCP Wiki’s “leader”; not by comparison of sheer IQ, but because the SCP Wiki has inadvertently made itself stupid to the point of critical inability, in order to feel morally superior in the name of outward political theater. (How has that worked out, morally I mean?)
102. The SCP Wiki is more concerned with its brand than with its writing, which are two very separate things by now.
103. The heroes who are responsible for doing the unglorious dirty work needed to eventually take Bright down will never get the proper recognition or thanks for it. This includes vdnb9, Cyantreuse, BetterMyButter — of “Doctor, Doctor, Doctor” vandalism, now a respectable author at RPC —, and pixelatedHarmony, all of whom were lightyears ahead of the most respected thought-leaders at the SCP, and all of whom sacrificed their reputations and participated on KF to do that dirty work. Each of them are community heroes and are owed recognition of their unfair demonization in the name of improving the culture.
104. The SCP Wiki’s community cannot critically think because it has too strong of a demand that its members abide by a single, relatively narrow political canonicity. (There is such thing as canon!)
105. Someone thinking that the authors at the SCP Wiki are the most relevant voices to the culture is hilarious. (It’s the critics.)
106. The more SCP-001s you have, the more each one of them sucks ass.
107. Trigger warnings don’t work; they instantly hike and gradually increase reader anxiety throughout the read. To boot, they often are needlessly overblown relative to how bad the content actually is. They are a fad that will be looked back on as utterly ridiculous.
108. The one-two punch of ACS and the esoteric class explosion have damaged the SCP Wiki’s appeal & readability, immeasurably.
109. Some SCP authors who dislike Series 1 do so because they know the better stuff on the Wiki isn’t as conducive to bland, mainstream tastes. However, if you say that about new pop-geared articles, especially ones they write, they will disagree.
110. The SCP Wiki revolves around sex. Despite the current drama regarding a sex pest who people ignored for a decade and who was comfortable in the SCP Wiki’s culture, the same culture at SCP is unabashedly obsessed with sex, and encourages young people to be or become obsessed with it along with them, as much as they are. (Authors and community members are equally as interested in writing as they are signaling to others who they want to have sex with.)
111. SCP authors, most of them teenagers or in their twenties, will grow up to be embarrassed that they put so much public emphasis on sex, certainly in conjunction with creative writing, which has nothing inherently to do with sex.
112. Sigma9 is the best theme, not because it is the prettiest or because of any dumb Stockholm Syndrome theory, but because it is simple, doesn’t feel the need to update to modern sensibilities, and so is timeless.
113. The new SCP front page looks like absolute shit, will age poorly.
114. Others do hot takes on Twitter only when it is a herd fad that the next Twitter user over is doing, and so can’t keep up their supply with the demand of their post likes. I was born in them (and have few post likes).
115. Actively reading the SCP Wiki is just not worthwhile. You would look back on your life and ask why the hell you wasted so much of your time. Best to just let whatever reach you through osmosis.
116. If you want your work to be read by a more dedicated and appreciative audience, post on RPC. Or Confic Magazine.
117. SCP authors habitually look to see who upvoted or downvoted their stuff. Let that sink in for a minute, and you’ll see it is in fact a hot take.
118. SCP-2721 is a terribly written article that most people on the SCP Wiki want gone. Not many people know this, but the staff unlocked voting on it in March 2019 (unannounced), but locked it back again a day or so later when it was painfully clear that the Wiki-based community members were overwhelmingly downvoting it. (No external raid here!) You can verify this on SCPPER.
119. SCP-2721 was massively downvoted by existing members of the SCP Wiki. The assumption that SCP-2721 was downvoted by an external brigade, and not site members that had been there for years, is objectively false. Staff locked apps before the raid took place. This is demonstrable.
120. If you think a minor should be able to surgically transition before they are developed enough to pay for it with their own money, you are or would be an awful parent. Contrary to your daydreams, your kid would not thank you when they were older for letting them do this, just as I wouldn’t be very thankful if my parents in a misguided effort to look progressive and sensitive, told me that at the naive age of 8, that I had all the artistic discretion and maturity needed to get a face tattoo of a Dragonball.
121. My personal hell would not only involve reading shitty SCP articles, but the Tweets that those authors believe I should find interesting, because they write shitty articles. (Your Twitter account is an anus.)
122. There is no evidence or support for the claim that I doxxed someone. My AHT ban is based on my direct criticisms of people in power who dislike me because of those criticisms, and because of my affront to that power.
123. There is no evidence or support for the claim that Harmony doxxed or harassed anyone. Her AHT ban is based on disinformation that people gobbled down because they are idiots with a mob-style mentality. Hers is the most egregious and incorrect one on the list, is completely undeserved, and will be overturned, along with an official apology.
124. There is no evidence or support for the claim that Furrett doxxed someone. His AHT ban is based on a lack of critical thinking, disinformation, and willful vilification of someone who participated in KiwiFarms in order to publicly and intelligently criticize the SCP staff, who were housing and protecting a child groomer at the time. The SCP officially owes him an apology.
125. The SCP Wiki will remain without a soul until it deletes Harmony’s articles.

I’d say it’s been a pleasure writing here, but Medium has no backbone, so I’ll just say it’s been a pleasure writing, as always. With this decisive ending, I now pronounce this blog a piece of art.

© Lack of Lepers