This Blog Will End at 100 Posts

This Post Marks #99

I have had a blast in this space. I don’t regret anything.

My name is Jesse LeJeune. I am a Nurse Practitioner in Alabama. I am in the cardiac subspecialty of mechanical circulatory support devices. These devices keep people alive when they shouldn’t be any longer, and can keep them that way for a decade. They are the reason that death is defined medically by neurological inactivity, not cardiac, these days. Ask Jacob Conwell about it. (Tell him “Dilated cardiomyopathy, HFrEF with LVEF <20%, NYHA Class III-IV, fCI >2.0, usually inotrope-dependent, GDMT maxed out (usually intolerant of it) and in need of either ECMO, an LVAD, RVAD, or a heart transplant”).

For all the people making jokes about “seeing scpcrnp evilly grinning at you while you’re in the hospital bed…”… If I come into your hospital room, statistically, you have 6 months to live on average. My team keeps you alive without a pulse.

My first creative love is music. I have been a drummer since as long as I can remember, and a damn good one. I have played in numerous bands, mostly with friends around town, and had a blast doing that too. Some of the most talented people I’ve ever met, I played music with. Music is God’s art.

The first indication that I was a freak of obsessive-compulsive tunnel vision was in the second grade. My math teacher told our class that she would be giving out bonus points for every digit of pi memorized by a certain date. I sat down with a calculator, and performed the digits, mapping them to a visual sequence of relationships, and in clusters of 3. I memorized 126 digits of pi. When I performed it for the teacher, who didn’t believe me, she was unsure of what to do, and so changed the rules mid-flight to max out at only 20 bonus points. I was too young to not be ticked off by that dirty move. To this day, I can still spout off about 15 digits. I fear that this was and will be the most impressive mental feat I’ll ever achieve in my life.

In college, I got a B.A. in Philosophy at the University of Alabama. I was insufferable. My professors hated me because I would only show up sometimes, yet make good grades. I never had to study in high school, but had a difficult time catching up in college. Eventually though, I would be the model student who never rose to any of his potential. I was on a mechanical engineering course for a time, and my professor called me out one time (in class) for having the best test grades in the class, but not really applying myself on homework; he didn’t respect me for it, and he shouldn’t have. It’s true; I didn’t care. I wasn’t passionate about any of it. But more than that, I was lazy.

All I cared about was music. I started writing music in 2005, and I have never stopped. It’s all amateur, nothing commercial or high-fidelity recordings. But they are mine, and I do each and every step handmade; composition, recording, production, vocals, drums, piano, and etc instruments. I program music as well. I’m not a terrible singer. I’m not a bad composer. I’ve written string quartets, piano sonatas, a symphony, and twelve-tone works. In 2008, one of my electronic compositions was the #1 featured video on YouTube for about a week (they used to Spotlight actual user-created content), and my music video was seen over 500,000 times (that was big in those days). It was cool knowing that people had my song as their ringtones (this was also something big in those days).

I did some work in r/cfb (college football subreddit) where I painstakingly put to-the-second Reddit comments from game threads onto game footage of the national championship games (called “Real-Time Reddits”).

After college though, I found out just how thoughtless it truly was to get a philosophy degree. I was completely unmarketable. That’s the only thing they don’t teach you to think about during a philosophy degree; what to do with it once you have it. But, I don’t regret going the way of philosophy. It has made me the caliber of thinker I am today, and whether that’s meh or excellent, it is orders of magnitude better than what I would be without it.

I ended up waiting tables, as so many undirected do. I excelled at this. I started at Johnny Rockets. Within two years, I was waiting tables at one of the best and most high-class restaurants in the country. I was 25; the youngest server to ever be hired there. The average age of those servers was 40, with the oldest being somewhere around 60, and the youngest besides me being 32.

I learned all about food and wine; how to prepare it, how to select ingredients, how to taste it, how to make it. I am a wine snob to this day, and am sipping on a 2021 Bandol Domaine Tempier rosé as I type (my wife’s favorite… give me a good MSG-varietal Côtes du Rhône any day). I am a decent cook. This would prove to be an invaluable knowledge and skill base to have. I can still carry 5–6 glasses full of water to this day, which is good for parties.

But besides that, it was miserable. I was too easily disgruntled with any sort of authority figure in a world that demands proficient subservience. I remember chatting with the closest thing I could call a friend in that job, a man who was about twice my age, tell me once that in waiting tables, the higher you go the lower you really are. “We are professional brown nosers,” he told me over a cigarette once, “there’s no honor in being the top of the game if your game is to kiss ass.” He was right. Luckily, I wasn’t too old to be stuck there.

Around the age of 27 or so, I left my relatively lucrative job as a career waiter to accept a night-shift, nursing assistant job in the local hospital, putting people on bedpans, waking them up at midnight to fumble around in their arms with a needle for a vein from which to draw blood, and other unglamorous tasks. Mainly cleaning up piss and shit. I got paid $13,000 per year; abjectly below the poverty line.

Living at night was, to this day, one of the most psychologically difficult things I’ve ever done. I am not built for it; in fact, no one really is. But I eventually moved to days and worked through classes, obtaining my B.S. in Biology from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. There, I once met a person, in one of my organic chemistry classes, who couldn’t have a conversation about music; he didn’t like it. No, not “he didn’t like most music” or “a certain kind of music”; he didn’t like music. Period. He was a math major, which made this incredibly ironic to me.

During this time, I was able to save some money. I lived in a “studio apartment” downtown; this was more aptly described as a closet that had some furnishings in it. The building had been a crack house prior to being converted into one of the most grungy, dilapidated housing structures in that part of the city. My apartment was all the way down the hall — all the way — and down a skinny little offshoot “hallway” that you almost had to turn sideways to get down. The tenant just next to me was a dubstep producer; that should tell you about how much peace and quiet I generally got.

I had never lived in more squalor. I got a cat just to take care of the roaches, so I wouldn’t have to wake up to one scurrying across my bed. But these were also some of the most richly artistic times of my life (no coincidence). I took up dancing. I can dance well to this day; hip-hop. I joined a hip-hop dance troupe (the only white guy on it!) and we performed around the city.

Also during that time, I saved up enough money to stop working for a few months and finish the biology degree. There has always been a part of me that must rebel into creative acts at an equal extent to which I am supposed to be doing something else; say, studying. But I always get both done, and well. During this time, I wrote a book of poetry and prose called “Applied Poetics”, that I am still very proud of. I had always been a writing enthusiast, just usually within the mode of musical lyrics, and I had never sat it down and made something out of it, in and of itself.

I also was studying for the MCAT at that time; that’s the entrance exam to medical school. I had enjoyed nurse technician work enough, and read medical textbooks for fun in my spare time. I decided I might as well shoot for the top again. I studied my ass off and got a great grip on general science. I took the MCAT and made a 32 (different scoring system back in those days); this was the average score for acceptance into the local medical school, UAB, which was in the top 30 in the nation.

I never got in. In addition to my extra-curriculars being meager — doubtless due to my philosophy-addled, existential meandering for many years — I took the risk of taking the MCAT a second time. I was sure I could do better. I didn’t; I got a 29 that time. This was devastating. Applications at the medical school, for some reason that I still don’t understand, only consider your most recent score. They won’t take the best you did, just the most recent. Even if they are a month apart. Combined with my clear desperation to make something out of myself in my later twenties, this was enough for the admissions councils to know better than I did. Maybe they could tell I didn’t mean the routine I had sold to myself. They were smart people, wiser than me.

In any case, I think this was the correct decision. I would be miserable as an MD. I work with them every day, and you legit have to devote all of your life to it. As described, I need to do an equal measure of creative acts to match what I deem non-creative ones. I would therefore never have been able to strike the correct work-life balance as a physician to be happy; I know that only now. Call it a dodged bullet that I didn’t even know was shot at me. Nonetheless, this rejection was the most difficult episode of humility I have ever had to accept.

I ended up settling for nurse practitioner. I got into the school program relatively easily and excelled at the classwork; in part because I had already studied much of what was taught in prep for medical school. I was asked to come back and teach, which I haven’t done. I was a teaching assistant for UAB’s anatomy lab during undergrad, you see, and I made life miserable for those students. I was entirely too demanding; I wrote test questions of such ridiculous anatomical detail that looking back I’m surprised I wasn’t mutinied.

I met my future wife. The first thing I noticed about her was her handwriting. The first day of class, we all were standing in line to get these giant textbooks. She had already gotten hers and sat down at a table. I quickly learned that the seats were first-come, first-serve, so I immediately hopped out of my enviable place in line and claimed the seat next to her. The books could wait.

I stayed in that windowless room for over a year, seeing the same people every day, with no free time to do anything creative. I gained about 20 lbs. This was a situation I never hope to repeat. My soul was dusty, bottled up and put onto a shelf so that I could obtain some financial comfort for my rapidly-fleeting life. In retrospect, it was worth the Bachelors + Masters in Nursing.

I found containment fiction shortly after exiting this place, and it was like an oasis to someone nearly dead from dehydration.

Two years later, my wife and I were married. Two years after that, we would have steady careers and bought our first house. In 2020, just at the onset of the COVID pandemic, we would have our first child; a daughter. She is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, next to my wife, and my newest child, who is at the time of writing about 6 months old now, and smiling like Baby Kong. I have always thought to myself that I would die for others who I love, but this is different.

I’ve always fit creative outlets into my life. They all come in phases. Since picking up containment fiction — which I have loved dearly since the first moment I saw SCP-914 while in the crazed boredom of working night-shift — I have let my musical production wane. This is natural and good. For about a year now, I have been aching to get back to music; my true first creative love. And I never want to stop being creative. I hope to always write music, essays, analyses, thoughts in general, and yes, containment fiction. I don’t think it will ever leave me.

But something has come about in my life that has turned it upside down. My children. My children are symphonies. They are +1,000,000 upvote articles. They have all the potential I have in my creativity, born anew, and with the beneficial wisdom of my relative old age. They need a father who can match their attentiveness, which is accelerating by the day, and is like watching something shot out of a canon.

I have stuck around this space for a number of good reasons. First, I found people I am friends with. Next, all of my heroes are pitbulls; they do not let go.

Third, this space is in deep trouble. It is one of the more hideous places I’ve ever been, creatively and spiritually. This place needs a damn role model. This place needs Jesus, for God’s sake! It has no leaders. It has lost its spiritual rudder. It is a crab-bucket, rat-race, lemmings’ cliff, herd mentality… all the animal analogies apply.

I wanted to be somewhat of that role model for quite a while now, cheesy and at odds with my behavior as that sounds. I was happy to do all I did, especially the abrasive things that have gotten me such an ill reputation with most in the space. I have turned over tables at the SCP Wiki. They may yet be regathered and re-positioned in the way they were prior to me, but my outrage at the sheer state of this place has been made known, and I have said all I can say.

So now, everything I have wanted to be for this space, I am now called to be that for my children.

Before I go, I want to leave you with some bullet points of wisdom; the major take-aways I have from my time here. Yes, I suppose this is all very Rounderhousian, but these will be much less in number. Hopefully they make up for it in punch.

Oh and before I leave you with these, I want to let you know that I will still be running Confic Magazine LLC. Anyone who wants to contribute, you know where to find us. I will be happy to pay individuals for their submissions as long as people are interested in writing for it.

Aside from the occasional anonymous drop off to confic communities, any name-associated containment fiction I write will be private, and might as well be written in analog with pen and paper. If I can gather an appreciable amount of articles over time, likely years, I will release it as a self-published book or website that revives the original aesthetic and ideals of containment fiction; to appear convincing as a secret database you have stumbled across. Its existence will only be made known via word of mouth, if at all. I will post one more article to this blog, making it an even 100 posts.

Hardest of all, I’m going to keep my mouth shut about all this political commentary and article critique. The truth is that this is very hard for me; I have a deep desire to call things like I see them, let my thoughts be known. I love to hear myself talk, and particularly the two when someone else is wrong. But, I have been made steady and confident in the belief that those around me can do this as good as me, if not better.

Enough blabbing. Onto the things I’d like to leave you with:

• No one can save this space from itself but its people. They should always hold those who are in positions of power and visibility to task, relentlessly and microscopically. Demand greatness from those who would desire to be your leaders.
• Leaders eat last.
• There are those who would prey upon your short-term memories and capitalize on your relative naiveté. Pay attention.
• Look places others don’t.
• The idea that if an author’s works are good, then they as a person must be just as good or better, is a myth. It is a lie. Articles are like photoshopped pictures; the best is always put forward. What remains are things in need of hiding. Never meet your heroes.
• Find creative ways to snuff out cults of brand.
• The harder you try to be smart, the dumber you will look.
• The smarter you are, the dumber you can be.
• If you define your success numerically, you have failed.
• Find more moral and philosophical principles than just the protection of your preferred in-group. You are not protecting your in-group by lacking integrity and being philosophically pendulous.
• If you do not like a website or community in this space, do not do anything malicious to it, like a hack, or raid, or DMCA takedown, etc. For communities who have lost their collective soul, you do not need to do anything in order to witness their downfall. If they are truly lost, they will do it fine all by themselves, without your assistance.
• Do not let the top-down threat of being mislabeled a “harasser” prevent you from speaking your mind, especially to those who enjoy positions of authority, social notoriety, and power. You are always allowed to write your representatives. If they deny you that, they are no longer your representatives, and you should remove them.
• A staff cannot do anything to help the userbase that the userbase cannot do themselves, and quicker.
• Those within positions of note, whether social or staff, are terrified of the people. If only the people would stand together in a united voice, led by no headlining influencer figure, under no singular ideology; but as a ground-swell (like the Town Halls), then every problem in the space — past, present, or future — could be corrected in a matter of weeks.
• Never encourage the idea that one attribute about you is the most important. This breeds militancy and a dead, religious cult mentality.
• Separate confic and state. The genre doesn’t belong to any one site or political ideal. It is now decentralized and beyond containment. We will carry it to our graves; it is written on our hearts.
• Do not trust anyone who cannot readily say they are sorry.
• Keep track of what people say and have said. You will not know when they have irreparably contradicted themselves if you don’t.
• Archive everything.
• Someone who eagerly runs out into an intersection’s crosswalk as soon as the walk sign goes green has never seen someone be splattered by a car speeding through a red light. Take a second. You do not look as smart or aware as you think you do.
• Anticipate other people’s idiocy.
• State your ideas with the understanding that they are your opinion. If you intend for them to be taken as anything but your opinion, provide sources and citations.
• The most inclusive logo is a neutral one.
• It’s more important to speak differently and be wrong than it is to speak as everyone else is speaking, and be right.
• If you cling onto your status, you will lose it. If you are willing to lose it, you will retain it.
• The political refusal to have intellectual diversity in your community is a death sentence; just as surely as eugenics is a terrible idea.
• People who will hate you for merely believing things differently from them have incorrect beliefs.
• Articles are always in competition with crit. Whichever one is better wins.
• A product can only be as good as the crit applied to it. Do not let your critical guard down for a memetically-tailored distraction (e.g. “milk +1”). Comments like these are the lowest point of the site so far.
• If someone’s criticism of you bothers you deeply, there’s probably a good reason for that. At least a portion of it is likely correct.
• We all share something important in common. This commonality is more powerful than our differences. Anything telling you otherwise is bad news.
• Respect the format. Lean into its uniqueness and strengths. It is the only thing keeping you from being just another mundane, bad fanfic author.
• Success can kill you.
• The grass is not greener, it’s just meticulously dyed that way, and by people hired specifically to make you think it is.
• If you don’t have the discipline to not become to carried away with recognition or fame, they will be unto you as rat poison.
• Find a process, stick to it, and tune out the extra noise.
• Be wary of logos and flags. (This includes SCF & confic.)
• Do not trust anyone in this space who isn’t writing.
• Never stop writing. If you haven’t written and find that you have no plans to, stop everything else until you do.
• It is OK to make money from your writing. Money is not evil. The misuse of it is.
• Jesus was a million times smarter than those around him, and he never lorded it over anyone, except those who deserved it by their leveraging of other people’s naiveté.
• If you write for a site, leave what you gave them. Do not take back what you gave freely. The demand displaces writing as the primary focus.
• You cannot separate the work from the person, but you can successfully take difficult criticism and detach your ego from it.
• Demand financial transparency and accountability for anyone handling money, particularly those you are donating to.
• Don’t knock it until you try it. This includes Neo-lolFoundation, shooting a gun recreationally, and other things; but it does not include meth or cocaine. (Yes, there is a difference between Neo-lolFoundation and cocaine.)
• There is nothing anyone can do or say to me to make me hate them. The same should be true of you.
• For all my disagreements with the space, I have great respect for the people here. There are a few among you who are worthy to be role models. They are usually the quieter, unpopular ones.
• Never type anything that you wouldn’t mind the entire internet reading.
• If people are trying to get a rise out of you, the smartest reaction is no reaction.
• Terminology is technology.
• You are not your political beliefs. You are what remains if they were to change.
• Do not allow authors to make the site and its work about themselves and their name recognition. The baked-in, in-universe airlock between the work and the out-of-universe author is one of containment fiction’s most unique qualities and innovations. Greedy people more interested in themselves are contaminating this airlock, and colonizing it in the name of pure ego. This campaign will be masked in the justification of false virtue.
• Don’t break the defining boundaries of the genre for more upvotes. Bend these lines, flirt with them, but stay within them. Destruction isn’t impressive.
• Call out characters whose only attribute is all-cap text.
• I was able to perform the task of the long-ineffectual SCP Wiki Site Crit Team for 4 months. I had help, but not always. This task isn’t done, not because it is infeasible, but because it is not important or interesting enough to that Staff to do. On a writing site, this should speak volumes.
• Always have more forgiveness ready than criticisms or insults. Forgive anyone and everyone.
• Blocking/banning people due to a disagreement is intellectually tapping out. It’s a tacit admission of your position’s inferiority.
• Relentlessly monitor yourself, there is an evil part of you that is crouching and at the ready to pounce and take over your life whenever you let your guard down. Be wary of yourself.
• Always be yourself so someone can love you for who you really are.
• The truth will always be quiet and unpopular in the moment, and will take a long time to diffuse to the rest of the people. But it is unstoppable. All you have to do is wait.
• No one should have any sort of ego problem here. You are not that important or talented. Your work, on the other hand, might be.
• People will one day look back and wonder why or how containment fiction wasn’t taken more seriously in its first 10–30 years of existence.

And finally:

• Viva la confic!

Love,

Jesse, aka scpcrnp, aka Mnml, aka ghosthorses, aka prey_class, aka ToS, aka ieatcrepes, aka lack of lepers, aka ████████, aka ████████, etc.