GerrymanderBassist's Author Page

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Dr. Gary Mander-Bassen
Research Specialist
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__**Work Experience:**__

**Deputy Director of Ectoentropic Research, SCP Foundation**
2017 - present

Responsibilities: 
- Understanding how the laws of thermodynamics are some times more like suggestions
- Finding a way to make bends in reality not happen, unless my supervisor asks really nicely
- Figuring out whether 6 Humes is a lot or not nearly enough
- Messing around with an all powerful jukebox and pretending it is strictly for research
- Writing things sloppy in my terrible handwriting and not bothering to write any of the language to match Foundation's scientific writing standards, providing countless lower level employees with constant work and keeping the local liquor store in business
- Attempting to find ways to explain games of Dota 2 as "critical memetics research". 

Accomplishments:
- Foundation Lavender Medal for Passion in Boring Research, 2019
- Foundation Aluminum Circle of Consistency, 2019
- Bright Award for Unexpectedly Helpful Cowardice, 2019
- Employee of the Week, December 30th, 2018 - December 31st, 2018 
- Temporal Affairs Badge of Precognitive Excellence, 2040 (awarded in 2017) 
- 1st Place at Site 19 Annual Cosplay Contest, 2019
- Three-time Winner of Site 99 Monthly Karaoke Contest (August 2017, April 2018, November 2019)
- 3rd Place at Lunar Area 32 Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Tournament, 2020
- 4th Place at Containment Area 25b Chili Cookoff, 2020

**Consultant, Black Moon Strategies**
2016 - 2017

Responsibilities: 
- Helped candidates reach important election goals
- Spread powerful memetic hazards to influence electorate 
- Canvassing anomalous voters

Accomplishments:
- Some of my candidates won some times.
- Helped get that no parking sign in front of O5-6's house.

Reason for Leaving:
- Boss ended up being some Foundation guy

__**Education:**__

**Masters in Anomalous Communications , UnLondon University, 2018**

**Bachelor of Science Fiction in Astrophysics, University of American Antarctica, 2016**

**__Quotations from Coworkers:__**

"Dr. Mander-Bassen is a fantastic person to work for. Some people in higher staff positions can become very stern and easily upset. That will never happen with Gary, because getting angry requires way too much effort and cannot easily be done while reclining on a couch." - Researcher Gary Weinrib 

"That guy is at least easy to tolerate. If the entire staff of Site 19 was stranded on a mountain and we had to eat each other, I'd eat him last. I'd still eat him though." - Researcher Nick Mason

"Oh yeah that balding guy. Yeah he's nice I guess, kind of weird though." - Senior Researcher Guillaume Emmanuel 

"Gary is a sweet, friendly, and compassionate man. He tries to the best of his ability to befriend everyone in the office. This is a perfect example of someone growing their positive qualities to make up for their incredibly disappointing █████." - Dr. Madison Acid

"This is the worst resume I've ever seen. It looks terrible, most of it is completely irrelevant, and you don't put quotes from coworkers on a resume." - Site Director Rody Walker


 

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+++ Dr. Gary Mander-Bassen is highly regarded for his prolific and illuminating work in researching the following SCPs:

[[module ListPages created_by="GerrymanderBassist" order="created_at" separate="no" tags="-author -tale -goi-format -supplement" perPage="250" prependLine="||~ Cool SCPs ||~ Rating ||~ Comments ||~ Created ||"]]
|| %%title_linked%% || %%rating%% || %%comments%% || %%created_at%% ||
[[/module]]

+++ Dr. Gary Mander-Bassen is loved and adored by many for his crucial function in organizing the following supplemental articles: 

[[module ListPages created_by="GerrymanderBassist" order="created_at" separate="no" tags="-author -scp -tale -goi-format" perPage="250" prependLine="||~ Cool Supplements ||~ Rating ||~ Comments ||~ Created ||"]]
|| %%title_linked%% || %%rating%% || %%comments%% || %%created_at%% ||
[[/module]]

+++ Dr. Gary Mander-Bassen is well respected for his effort, vision, and oversight in creating the following documents:

[[module ListPages created_by="GerrymanderBassist" order="created_at" separate="no" tags=" -scp -author -goi-format -supplement" perPage="250" prependLine="||~ Cool Tales ||~ Rating ||~ Comments ||~ Created ||"]]
|| %%title_linked%% || %%rating%% || %%comments%% || %%created_at%% ||
[[/module]]

+++ Dr. Gary Mander-Bassen is routinely thanked and occasionally worshiped for intercepting the following communications:

[[module ListPages created_by="GerrymanderBassist" order="created_at" separate="no" tags=" -scp -author -tale -supplement" perPage="250" prependLine="||~ Cool GOI Formats ||~ Rating ||~ Comments ||~ Created ||"]]
|| %%title_linked%% || %%rating%% || %%comments%% || %%created_at%% ||
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__**Author Commentary:**__


[[collapsible show="+ SCP-3636 - The World's Greatest Jukebox (and Experiment Log 3636)"  hide="- How I wrote a lesbian trickster sorceress in the form of a Wurlitzer and got away with it."]]

Wow what a way to start off my SCP writing career. Easily my most well known and beloved article, this was something that crawled into my head one day after hearing about Elton John's fan music video contest. I just imagined making goofy unauthorized music videos for different songs.Then I started writing it as an SCP. I always liked the rainbow-y jukebox design and that's the famous Wurlitzer design. I didn't put two and two together that I lived like ten minutes away from the place they used to be produced and that probably had something to do with it. 

People love this SCP, and at first I saw that as kind of intimidating that I could never possibly live up to my first article. Now I'm just happy that so many people like the character. People have made memes, web comics, and fan art of my goofy little jukebox. Not to mention the experiment log that has taken on a life of its own. I used to strictly curate everything on there and now I only really clean out things that are complete grammatical disasters or overtly out of place entries when I notice them. The "Ode to a Superhero" entry is not mine, but it is probably the funniest one on there so someone managed to get an even bigger laugh out of one of my ideas, which I love.

If this is the only thing I'm remembered for writing, that's fine by me. 

[[/collapsible]]

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[[collapsible show="+ SCP-5017 - Hard Landing"  hide="- No one is ever gonna solve that cipher"]]

5kon entry. Didn't place all that high. I had a ton of fun writing it though, and the cipher was a fun touch that I'm glad I added. I've always loved druids, Celtic paganism, D.B. Cooper, stories with historical connections, and stories where The Foundation are the cast as sort of an evil protagonist. That all kind of came to a head in this story and for better or for worse, it contains all of those elements. Now it is a mostly ignored article, maybe some day I'll touch up the story a little bit.  

I will buy candy for whoever ends up cracking that cipher. 

[[/collapsible]]

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[[collapsible show="+ SCP-5544 - Are You Sick of All The Stares?"  hide="- ''Because love can burn like a cigarette and leave you with nothing''"]]

I'm glad this found an audience. Needless to say, there's a lot of myself in this character and I think if somebody really did the time and did some digging they'd see that there's even more of myself in there than you'd probably expect. I wanted to give an apt metaphor for my own struggle with panic disorder and depression. I wanted to capture that feeling of absolute dread, knowing that it is going to happen again. Rolling all of my fears into this article the very noticeable incident, the lowering of status, the ability to affect other people negatively, the social barriers it creates, the failed relationships, the inability to truthfully move on because you know it is going to happen again. I somehow turned all of that into an article and it worked.

There's also copious amounts of TV Girl influence, specifically references to their fantastic album //French Exit// which are littered throughout. Lyrical references are sprinkled in throughout and every single song shows up at least once in some capacity. The final line of the article (excluding footnotes) is even an intentional parallel to the final line of the album. 

I saw a fantastic meme about this article that someone made when this was published but it was a really busy time with Jamcon, the 096 short film, and a handful of other fantastic SCPs taking up most of the attention. I hope this will someday go from sleeper hit to legitimate contender for my most popular article, but the road to the Jukebox's throne is long and difficult. 

[[/collapsible]]

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[[collapsible show="+ SCP-5064 - Safety Dance"  hide="- Explosions!"]]

Jamcon 2020, prompt one. 

I used to film dance competitions every weekend. Most of the time quite literally as the videographer but some times as an event manager which basically meant salesperson.  The point being, for three years of my life I was in another part of the country every weekend watching kids dance for incredibly long hours. There's something so unique, so focused about gathering people together for a competition that it just sort of becomes normal that it is all that everyone is talking about. Having a conversation that didn't revolve around the event was just not the norm.

 Anyways the job had great weekends and horrible weekends and you never knew what you were going to get and that made the job all that more interesting to me. I got dropped like a rock recently and reflecting on the experience has made me miss it more than I thought I would. I had kind of romanticized the "I'm going on an adventure to another state to see what awaits me there" part of the job and I just kind of accepted the fact I'd be watching somewhere between six to fourteen hours of dance a day.

That's what lead to these dance obsessed sticks of dynamite. I do someday want to add more to the interviews and give this article a proper ending, but a researcher just enjoying a weird, funny quirk of their job was enough for me, and it seems it work for other people as well.

[[/collapsible]]

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[[collapsible show="+ Just Desserts"  hide="- Delicious"]]

Jamcon 2020, prompt two.

I wrote this in one go and then went to bed. I woke up and did some edits for grammar and clarity. Got a little bit of critique and had it in fairly early. I felt like a fucking badass writing this and I still love that I managed to get some personality for this guy with so little in terms of word count. I did Jamcon because my typical article took months, if not years to reach a point I was happy with it. 

It also helps that I adore SCP-871 and I instantly took a shot to write a tale about it the second I had an excuse to do so. There's some wonderful imagery of someone just eating an entire cake by themselves that the article conjures up and I wanted to give that some emotional power behind it. 

I'm not the first person to employ the "character eats a delicious meal after getting revenge and/or justice" trope but I hope that I'm a worthy example of why that trope works so well. 


[[/collapsible]]

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[[collapsible show="+ When I Saw Her"  hide="- More than meets the eye"]]

Jamcon 2020, prompt three.

What a sweet little song I managed to cook up. Yet again, I wrote this in one go really late at night, fell asleep, and then edited in the morning. Then I spent a day gathering my band to get together and record this, old school hippie style by sitting around the microphone and performing it. There was probably a better method of doing that but we didn't have enough time to think about that.

I've been in an out of bands for about a decade and while none of them last, I always ended up as the primary lyricist. Many musicians, in my experience at least, don't like the process of writing lyrics because there's no "right" way to do it like there is with say, playing a solo in the blues scale or creating a standard four chord progression. In that regard, I've built up a method of lyric writing that translates well to tailoring itself around the "rules" of music. That was an easy skill for me to tap into on something as time limited as Jamcon. 

I've always loved making lyrics, so this was a great outlet for that part of me.

I guess I should actually talk about the lyrics themselves. The story is pretty straight forward. Boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, girl is actually a space alien, girl is actually using some sort of shape-changing to hide her true form from boy, girl feels guilty and shameful, boy loves her anyways, boy and girl continue to love each other. 

There's probably a metaphor in there somewhere. Or maybe I just think aliens are hot.

[[/collapsible]]

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[[collapsible show="+ SCP-4462 - Fan Death"  hide="- Rewrite."]]

Glad I rewrote this. It was an unhappy marriage of two ideas. The trade off is that this article is much more low key and doesn't really build up to any major point, twist, or subversion. The old version was darker, sadder look at authors and mental health. That is still there in the subtext but it isn't the explicit point of this article and remains firmly a background element this time around. This one seems to be more successful so hopefully I don't need to rewrite it again.

[[/collapsible]]

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[[collapsible show="+ SCP-5270 - Press X to Bear"  hide="- CorpseCon."]]

Penguin6 wrote the conprocs for this, which were a fantastic jumping off point. I struggled at first but I was getting a "virtual pet" feeling from it and ultimately went in that direction. An earlier version of this had it as a Tamagotchi, later I considered making this Dado related Nintendo handheld knockoff, but I ultimately went with a Nintendo knockoff without any connections to previous articles so I had a blank slate to write on. That served me pretty well.

It'd be wrong to not also give a massive credit to Bandit "Pixel President" Bebop, who did all the art for the article. Those images help carry the narrative. I told Bandit what would be needed (bear, bear with party hat, bear and researcher hug) and I told him to use Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire as inspiration but ultimately he had free reign over the design of the character and it came out well.

Also Doctor Fullham accidentally created the title. I like the title. 

Grenstern might not be the most in depth character I've written but I'm happy with the relationship he builds with SCP-5270-1. I wanted them to parallel each other in their feelings of loneliness and that gives Grenstern the drive to help resolve a perfectly containable attribute which leads us to the ending. I think the ending basically is the keystone to this, I doubt the article would work without it.

I'm glad people enjoy this one, it was a different experience for me and I was definitely out of my comfort zone writing something I didn't have almost complete control over. I'm happy with how it turned out.    

[[/collapsible]]

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[[collapsible show="+ Silent roars will kill this curiosity"  hide="- CrenCon part one."]]

When I saw Penguin, Proasek, and Fullham on a team for the Aces and Eight canon, I knew I had to join. I love westerns. 

This was fun to write. Most drafts get to a point where they stress me out a little bit but I just had fun writing the story of an anomalous bandit in the wild west. I was excited to be able to establish Marshall, Carter, and Dark into the canon because they're my favorite group of interest. Making them a blend between the MC&D we all know and love and the Pinkertons was great.

This was a fun excuse to throw back to some old SCPs that I love. The invisibility hat is one of those old items that totally ought to come up more in tales, it's a perfectly little plot device. Lucky is a fun one too. That's why I had to write a follow up with him.

Also, the title is from "Mr. Invisible" by Thank You, Scientist.

[[/collapsible]]

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[[collapsible show="+ We draw our own designs but fortune has to make that frame"  hide="- CrenCon part two."]]

I had so much fun with the first one, I had to go for a follow up. Lucky's story needed a resolution and I had fun taking two of my favorite series IV articles and merging them into one especially spooky ghost town. 

Writing the ranger right was a little bit difficult since I wanted to keep him a little mysterious while still making him human. I think I did a good job on that.

CrenCon was a fun idea, my articles weren't wildly successful or anything, but boy was it nice to have a tale focused event and I'm really happy to have made all the contributions to Aces and Eights that I did. Aces and Eights is a really fun canon to write in, give it a try. 

Oh and the title is from "Roll the Bones" by Rush. 

[[/collapsible]]

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[[collapsible show="+ SCP-5232 - Roses in Her Eyes"  hide="- Cupidcon"]]

I'm glad this one connected to an audience. I struggled at first to get this story rolling, then after several days of only adding a hundred or two hundred words, I just had a couple thousand pour out of me. 

This took a lot out of me to write, revisiting in my mind the best parts of my past relationships was not an easy task. I also borrowed from what a few of friends described as their best dates ever. I've heard a few people say that this story made them cry, which is not at all what I expected when I wrote this. I honestly didn't know to expect with this article, but something that was built so heavily on a foundation of what I believe an ideal romantic relationship should be connecting to so many people is kind of alien to me. Suffice to say that recent experiences lead me to believe the opposite about myself. I'm still not quite sure how to process the lesson I may or may not have learned here.  

This is similar to SCP-5544 in that if you were to through with a fine tooth comb and do like, research paper level analysis you could absolutely find out a lot about me as a person. I tried to make the two characters distinct but they both borrow from me as well as various people I've had some form of romance with over the years. It was hard striking a balance between making them seem so instantly compatible and making them unique. Raz and Sage are two of the best characters I've ever written, and I'm hoping to revisit them in the future. 

The fillable form is still probably one of my better ideas. I'm slowly putting variations on just writing a bunch and making everything a collapsible. Hopefully I keep doing new things with format. I'm going to come back to this section of the commentary and laugh at myself later. 

Third place overall (by upvotes that is) in CupidCon. Much as I pushed myself to try and win, I can't realistically be upset about the overwhelmingly positive reception this article has received. If I can turn myself into an author that reliably cranks out articles that skyrocket into the triple digits, I will be a happy man. 

By the way, the title is from "Holland, 1945" by Neutral Milk Hotel. It originally had a different working title that I scrapped when I realized how central a role Jeff Mangum was going to play in this story. I was also blasting that song on loop while writing this article. 

[[/collapsible]]

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[[collapsible show="+ My Life, Aquatic"  hide="- Marine"]]

Jamcon 2021, entry one.

I took this prompt in a pretty wild direction but it felt natural for me. I came up with idea of Marine being someone's name and it just sort of flowed from there. 

I think the single biggest problem people have is that its relatively easy for someone to change their name and she would have had a chance to do so. Funnily enough, that part is something I ripped right from real life. A woman I dated for quite a while fully intended to change her name, but she showed up to her first day of college and they gave her a name tag and she decided to stick with it. I met her right after that happened, and in the entire time we dated she never changed her name despite the fact she hated her name. Last I checked, she still hasn't changed it. I find that concept very funny so I rolled with that. 

I feel bad for Marine, there's part of her that is a lot like me: Opportunities that were too good to pass up at the time were handed to her, and she ended up doing something far different with her life than she originally intended. If that isn't my life story, I don't know what is. Like Marine, I hope to change that some day but I have no idea if I'll ever be at a "good spot" to do that.

I also knew I wanted my Jamcon articles for this year to form a narrative, so I made sure I set myself up for success and gave myself a lot of angles to explore. 

[[/collapsible]]

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[[collapsible show="+ Away From This Place"  hide="- Corruption."]]

Jamcon 2021, entry two.

The song only took a couple hours from the ground up.  The vocals sound whispery because I recorded them around 2:30 A.M. and throwing some effects on it made it come out all distorted and kind of ghostly. 

I knew from the previous entry that I wanted to make my second contribution to Jamcon 2021 to be a song and I was already in the process of writing a lo fi album under one of my other pseudonyms. It just sort of came naturally to me from there.

I'm going to have to return to this character to explain him a bit more.  I think the idea of an Anartist-Fifthism pipeline is worth exploring.  Huh, maybe I could make another song off of that album some day and include that too.

[[/collapsible]]

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[[collapsible show="+ SCP-5276 - Let's Vibe"  hide="- What could possibly go wrong?"]]

Jamcon 2021, entry three.

The finale of the Jamcon trilogy. I saw the opportunity to have the two previous stories merge together and I like the story of the Wu Tang Clan album of which only one copy was made, so I decided what an anomalous take on that would be like. I adore Marshall, Carter and Dark as a GoI and Fifthism as a concept so having an SCP that included both and also music felt like a perfect little narrative. 

Youthful Galaxy is one of many characters you could probably call a self insert, he literally has my voice, but since he's more of a vehicle for the story to happen I think we can let it slide. 

I've been to a lot of parties and social gathering where the mood has turned on a dime, and I wanted to capture that feeling. 
[[/collapsible]]

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GerrymanderBassist's Author Page

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