Introduction
Mirror and backup blog: https://lack.substack.com/
PINNED— This is a blog that will act as an asylum and refuge from the impending, inevitable collapse of Wikidot, which has hosted all major forms of containment fiction thus far. It will be a publishing platform for future pieces of containment fiction, well as an archive of my prior works (if and when it collapses). In the meantime, it’ll be a news/opinion column on the genre and cultures involved in it.
I have become somewhat of a “prepper” in the last year or so, starting with COVID, which coincided with the birth of my first child. Stocked medical supplies, long-shelf-life and non-perishable foods, survival gear, water filtration systems, and defensive weaponry with lots and lots of ammo. Hedges against the dollar in precious metals, inflation-yielding bonds, and cryptocurrencies. A garden out back with basic vegetables, able to sustain a meager life for my family, were it to come to that.
WikiDot, a hosting platform from the 2000’s, has begun to display long-subclinical signs of its chronic neglect and lack of upkeep. Its code is struggling like a failing heart, unable to push blood to sustain its most basic functionalities. Like heart failure, or the collapse of a hollow national currency, or the tearing facade of a media-propaganda complex, the warning signs are meek and oblique until the threshold at the point of no return. It is a downward staircase that hangs off of a cliff.
I don’t know where containment fiction will resurface, or if it ever will in a centralized manner. The fractioning of the SCP and RPC wikis may prove to be an Obi-Wan moment for the genre, with the resulting decentralization paradoxically an exponent to its cultural dispersion; seeds in the wind.
I would like there to still be a community of supportive and like-minded authors. Perhaps the destruction of the Wikidot code will force the less important but currently over-emphasized elements of the genre (hyper-obsession with the typical dopamine-saturating metric feedback mechanisms common to all modern social media platforms) to be shed — as they should be, just as surely as a snake’s skin might find itself pushed to the side of the road. Maybe that community is to be a network of independent nodes.
I hope in the coming diaspora that I will find those authors whose souls have been poured into their works, and whose intentions have been a store of value, resisting the rust and corrosion of the degenerate sides of the genre’s historied and scandalous past.
Those for who the simple act of writing is its own reward.
© Lack of Lepers, 2021
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