Mortos' Author Page

Link to article: Mortos' Author Page.

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[[>]]
[[module Rate]]
[[/>]]

**Articles**
You're off the edge of the map, and here there be monsters!

[[module ListPages created_by="@URL|Mortos" order="created_at" separate="no" tags="-author -tale -goi-format -hub" perPage="250" prependLine="[[include :icebox:inc:author-table]]" appendLine="[[/table]]"]] 
[[row]]
 [[cell class="table-cell"]] %%title_linked%% - %%first_paragraph%%[[/cell]]
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[!--
[[module ListPages created_by="@URL|Mortos" order="created_at" separate="no" tags="-author -tale -goi-format -hub" perPage="250" prependLine="||~ Item # ||~ Rating ||~ Comments ||~ Created ||~ Last Edited ||"]] 
|| %%title_linked%% || %%rating%% || %%comments%% || %%created_at%% || %%updated_at%% ||
[[/module]]
--]

**Tales**
Unlikely to ever be a long list.

[[module ListPages created_by="@URL|Mortos" order="created_at" separate="no" tags="tale" perPage="250" prependLine="||~ Title ||~ Rating ||~ Comments ||~ Created ||"]] 
|| %%title_linked%% || %%rating%% || %%comments%% || %%created_at%% || 
[[/module]]

**GoI Formats + Stuff**
Go go Serpent's Hand (and others, I guess)!

[[module ListPages created_by="@URL|Mortos" order="created_at" separate="no" tags="goi-format hub" perPage="250" prependLine="||~ Title ||~ Rating ||~ Comments ||~ Created ||"]] 
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[[/module]]

**Notes**
Some thoughts and notes on all my articles. Probable spoilers if you care about that kind of thing.

+++ Series 1-4

[[collapsible show="➤SCP-2964 - Xtreme Videozzz" hide="▼SCP-2964 - Xtreme Videozzz"]]
[[[SCP-2964 |SCP-2964 - Xtreme Videozzz]]]
The original idea for this came from a joke with some friends about how they were probably still making Police Academy movies somewhere (which is why the reference is in the list of notable videos). The original draft of this lacked the mini-narrative element involving the researcher that ended up becoming a reality tv show star, but it was pointed out to me that it was fairly dry and needed a bit of punch to it. I'm a big fan of concepts that subvert modern technologies like this, and one of my long-term goals is to develop a series and/or GoI that deals specifically in this kind of stuff.

An interesting thing that no one seems to have picked up on is the specifics of the interactions between the SCP and the Foundation. A lot of people read it as the SCP retaliating against its containment by attacking the Foundation, but I see it a different way; its a TV service, and TV services typically cater to their audiences. Since containment began, the only audience this thing really has is the Foundation and so now its making a lot more Foundation-specific programming, including turning Researchers into TV stars - because who doesn't want that, right?
[[/collapsible]]


[[collapsible show="➤SCP-3008 - A Perfectly Normal, Regular Old IKEA" hide="▼SCP-3008- A Perfectly Normal, Regular Old IKEA"]]
[[[SCP-3008|SCP-3008- A Perfectly Normal, Regular Old IKEA]]]
I'm frankly blown away by how well this has done - I never could have predicted it would be this popular and now I spend most of my time resisting the urge to write articles exclusively in the same style in an attempt to replicate it. 

The original concept I had for this was actually fairly different - it started off in my head as an arbitrary portal that routinely "abducted" people, transporting them to some other reality; ultimately enough people had been taken that mini civilisations had formed in this place. The reality itself would have been pretty mundane - forests, deserts, rivers and all that. The idea to base it in an IKEA happened kind of spontaneously, and it all kind of fell into place fairly quickly after that.

I knew I wanted to have some kind of monster in there which hunted the people living there, and the staff developed pretty easily from that. I knew I wanted them to be passive some of the time, hence the day/night cycle. The rest of it just made logical sense; restocking shops for food, towns with walls made of furniture named after whatever signage was nearby etc. I had 2 potential angles for the exploration of this space - the journal of someone inside, which is what I ultimately went with, or the logs of an MTF team who were sent in to explore. The journal made a lot more sense to me, as I couldn't think of a valid reason the Foundation would send a team into this place with a good chance of them never getting out again.

There's a lot more stuff about this endless IKEA in my head that isn't written down somewhere; maybe I'll write a tale about it one day. Spoilers: staff need managers.

[[*user SunnyClockwork]] made this totally awesome piece of art based on 3008 and I love it! [*http://sunnyclockwork.deviantart.com/art/SCP-3008-684852228 Check it out!]

Another piece of art from tumblr user hikikomochi - http://hikikomochi.tumblr.com/post/164557239224/scp-3008-is-my-fave-bc-ikea
I love this - it's basically the perfect representation of a Staff member how I imagined them.

For those who don't know, a guy called [*https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCr6Ojg6WA9Lk-ynphZE9gtg Lord Bung] has been producing an animated series based on SCP stuff, and it's very cool. Even cooler, he made an episode set in infini-ikea, and it's amazing! Check it out [*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vcq1lLCgk7E here!]
[[/collapsible]]

[[collapsible show="➤SCP-3600 - Documenting Doomsday" hide="▼SCP-3600 - Documenting Doomsday"]]
[[[SCP-3600 |SCP-3600 - Documenting Doomsday]]]
I actually wrote most of this one before the IKEA skip, but that ended up getting finished and released first, but in my head this is my second. The original idea for it was to have an anomalous language that when read filled the persons head with the perfect knowledge of a specific way to end the world, and then compelled them to form a cult or religion in order to get the people and resources required to carry it out. 

Ultimately I dropped the cult and compulsion aspect and focused more on how having your head filled with knowledge of the multiple ways the world could end up affect people, and how the Foundation might try and use this for their own gain. The Project Theia section was a fairly late addition to the skip and ultimately I'm not sure how I feel about it, but overall I'm happy with how this turned out, even if it didn't set the world on fire.
[[/collapsible]]

[[collapsible show="➤SCP-3399 - Family Tree" hide="▼SCP-3399 - Family Tree"]]
[[[SCP-3399|SCP-3399- Family Tree]]]
The idea from this came entirely from Updog on #site19, while I was trying to think of an angle on making the "its a gun but does weird stuff!!!!" that seems popular with new members work.

This mostly evolved pretty organically - the original concept was a tree, so obviously it should be created by a seed. Daevites have a history of weird trees that do stuff, and having something they could use to ensure the strength of their royal family lineage would be something they would do, so they got linked in. The link between the genetics and the health of the tree was added in the second draft to make things more interesting and strengthen the Daeva link so that it didn't just feel tacked on for the sake of it. 

I intentionally left what's actually going on here a little ambiguous - is it making solid predictions or just guesses - because in situations like this I find it more interesting to let the reader decide. The reality is though that the answer is a bit of both. It predicts on a probability based model, but if you planted 100 seeds from a single tree and they all grew, it doesn't mean the person is going to have 100 children. 

The ending is also ambiguous and I've seen a couple of different interpretations of what it means that are both great and perfectly valid, but in my head the seeds don't grow because the child doesn't live long enough to have kids - the fact that they are constantly bringing him to the Site ultimately gets him caught up in a containment breach that ends badly.
[[/collapsible]]

[[collapsible show="➤SCP-3044 - Evolution In A Bottle" hide="▼SCP-3044 - Evolution In A Bottle"]]
[[[SCP-3044 |SCP-3044 - Evolution In A Bottle]]]
This was the first article I ever drafted, sometime in 2013. When I first tried to get feedback on it, the only person who read it was... lets just say rude. Which is why I didn't do anything else on the site in the interim. It basically sat idle for about 4 years before I finally decided to spruce it up for the main list. It went through a lot of refinements and tweaking but ultimately the core bulk of the article remains unchanged from the original version. I'm glad it's finally out there!

Random specifics of the object itself:
* If you were to place a camera inside the bottle, you wouldn't see the world outside. You'd see a larger version of the environment within, not bound by a bottle.
* The exotic matter that appears causes life to develop into intelligent forms with anomalous powers.
* The anomalous power of the species who cut their way out of the bottle was the ability to perceive and interact with the bottle directly. The species in the final entry had powerful telepathy, and could read the minds of the researchers observing them.
* The list was originally twice as long as it is now. Had to trim it down a lot!

[[/collapsible]]

[[collapsible show="➤SCP-3299 - One Weird Trick" hide="▼SCP-3299 - One Weird Trick"]]
[[[SCP-3299 |SCP-3299 - One Weird Trick]]]
The idea for this came from a screenshot of some clickbait a friend of mine posted on twitter - "This uncomfortable video of a clam will irreversibly change you!" If that isn't SCP fuel I don't know what is. So obviously the concept was clickbait ads that literally did what they claimed to do. The idea evolved from that to include the more esoteric effects in the second half of the article after some people commented that straight-up obvious effects probably aren't that interesting.

The rest of them were fairly easy - all but one of the headlines in the article are actual clickbaits that I've seen. I made one of them up just to fit the effect; try and guess which one!

This also starts the setup for my longer term plans for a Group of Interest that deal in digital anomalies; the link back to [[[SCP-2964 |SCP-2964 (Xtreme Videozzz)]]] is meant to imply that they are linked, which is an idea I will develop more over the course of my future articles. Technology is definitely my wheelhouse, and you can probably expect more articles that subvert aspects of modern digital life into horrible horrible nightmares.
[[/collapsible]]

[[collapsible show="➤SCP-3088 - Law Of The Land" hide="▼SCP-3088 - Law Of The Land"]]
[[[SCP-3088 |SCP-3088 - Law Of The Land]]]
This is the first article I wrote that I actually planned out properly ahead of time before I started writing it, and I'm very happy with the results. The original idea for this came to me more or less as-is; a town with laws that cannot be broken. From there I got the character of the Mayor who discovers this over time and ultimately gets corrupted by the power (as power tends to do), and the MTF Team. I think the MTF Team are my favourite part about this article, and I'm actually a little sad that I had to kill them at the end.

I feel like I managed to get quite a lot of character out of Sorsby and Peters with just a few basic character traits in mind; Sorsby, brash, confident, not one for over-planning, and Peters, stoical, man of few words. In my head, MTF Sigma-9 ("Kansas City Hotsteppers") were a team specifically assembled for dealing with anomalies in American towns and places like that.

Anyway yeah, if you're reading this and haven't upvoted it yet, what are you waiting for?! ;)
[[/collapsible]]

[[collapsible show="➤SCP-3122 - You Have Reached Your Destination" hide="▼SCP-3122- You Have Reached Your Destination"]]
[[[SCP-3122 |SCP-3122 - You Have Reached Your Destination]]]
My original intention with this one was to write a series of 3 or 4 articles based around this person who essentially spent their time feeding various aspects of people (their minds, their souls etc) to a dead god. I was going to write all of them and post them in one big go. Then life happened and I ran out of time for months, so I decided to just post this one and see what happens. The others may still come along in time.

I got the idea for this one while on holiday in Italy - we arrived pretty late and ended up driving up twisting mountain roads in the pitch black darkness with only the satnav to guide us. All of the road names were Italian, obviously, so it ended up being a pretty surreal experience. Hence the Italian road name reference in there (yes, it's Italian, not Spanish, the D-Class just doesn't know any better).

Pretty happy with this one, and designing the logo for the company was actually pretty fun and I like how that turned out, so if I do go on to make this part of a series I'm sure that will get used again.
[[/collapsible]]

[[collapsible show="➤SCP-3331 - With Apologies To John Cena" hide ="▼SCP-3331 - With Apologies To John Cena"]]
[[[SCP-3331 |SCP-3331 - With Apologies To John Cena]]]
This is the dumbest thing I have ever written. I suspect this will remain true for quite some time. 

Believe it or not, this isn't meant to reference any of the John Cena memes, the idea came from a John Cena cardboard cutout I saw. The original idea was just a cardboard cutout of John Cena that made duplicate John Cenas. The idea evolved a lot since then; the original version of the draft, it was just a chunk of crystal that periodically made new John Cenas, until they threatened to overrun the earth. Then it evolved to randomly anomalous John Cenas, and then [[*user The Great Hippo]] and a few other people in chat helped me nail down the final result. 

So yeah. It's dumb, and I found the entire process of writing it to be hilarious. 
[[/collapsible]]

[[collapsible show="➤SCP-3933 - Bigger Than God" hide ="▼SCP-3933 - Bigger Than God"]]
[[[SCP-3933 |SCP-3933 - Bigger Than God]]]
This is one of those ideas that basically went unchanged during the entire process - a super-famous band whose new song makes everyone forget them. The original intent for the article was meant to be a bit more lighthearted, but as something I wrote directly after finishing the John Cena article, I basically swung the completely opposite direction.

Not sure how I feel about the response to it, to be honest. I'm very happy with how all the interviews and everything turned out, it's probably the best dialogue I've written so far, but a lot of people have reacted pretty negatively to the whole thing. I guess if you've been around long enough, everything becomes a trope to you; not much I can do about that unfortunately. 
[[/collapsible]]

[[collapsible show="➤SCP-3363 - The Citizen Kane of Lightning-induced Reality TV" hide ="▼SCP-3363 - The Citizen Kane of Lightning-induced Reality TV"]]
[[[SCP-3363 |SCP-3363 - The Citizen Kane of Lightning-induced Reality TV]]]
The original idea for this one was simply that being struck by lightning would cause people to start broadcasting random videos showing their death. The idea to format that video as a "home movies" show came after talking to some helpful people in the #BrainStormers chat channel, which then led to the obvious idea that the show needed a host. The idea for Orson Welles came from another SCP idea I was kicking around, which would have featured an animated poster of Orson Welles drunkenly trying to sell people things - I decided that was surreal enough to use in this article instead.

I've been enjoying the use of ambiguity in my stuff lately, so I specifically avoided trying to describe exactly what was going on, as the stuff readers tend to imagine is going on is probably far more satisfying to them than anything I could shoe-horn in for the sake of closure, and I think that works well enough here. 

The dates I used for this event were originally pretty different, but during my research I noticed that the dates of Welles' death and the first home movie tv show lined up pretty neatly, so I decided to run with it. 

It's kind of sad that the thing a lot of people know Orson Welles for these days is that video of him drunkenly trying to perform a champagne advert. While I'm hardly well versed in his work, by most accounts he was an incredibly talented individual. 
[[/collapsible]]

[[collapsible show="➤SCP-3566 - Not Even That Funny" hide ="▼SCP-3566 - Not Even That Funny"]]
[[[SCP-3566 |SCP-3566 - Not Even That Funny]]]
Not a huge amount to say about this one really. It started off as the idea "laugh tracks are anomalous" and more or less followed the obvious track from there. Happy enough with how it turned out.

I intentionally left it a bit vague as to what's going on, but the general idea is that this guy was having his laughter broadcast into various shows, and then died in the process, trapping him there. So then he started screaming instead.
[[/collapsible]]

[[collapsible show="➤SCP-3688 - You Can Dance If You Want To" hide ="▼SCP-3688 - You Can Dance If You Want To"]]
[[[SCP-3688 |SCP-3688 - You Can Dance If You Want To]]]
This one was inspired by someone randomly quoting the song Safety Dance by Men Without Hats in chat while I was actively trying to come up with ideas. The idea started off pretty simply - it's called the safety dance, so obviously it needs to be a dance that makes you safe while you do it. The original draft of the article was just that, with nothing else expanded on it. I also had the idea of writing a tale that would expand the idea to the Foundation developing other anomalous dances that do different things. 

It became obvious pretty quickly that just the single part of it wasn't enough to carry an article (the original version was basically just the first couple of paragraphs of the description, and that was it) so I decided to put the idea of the Foundation-developed dances into the article itself. 

The whole thing was a lot of fun to write, especially coming up with the difference dances, and even now after it's been out for a bit I still find the idea very funny. I was kind of worried everyone would just think it was really stupid, but it seems like people like it, so I'm glad it's been so well received! 
[[/collapsible]]

[[collapsible show="➤SCP-3455 - 411 Days A Year" hide ="▼SCP-3455 - 411 Days A Year"]]
[[[SCP-3455  |SCP-3455 - 411 Days A Year]]]
The original idea I had for this concept was a watch with 14 hours on its face instead of 12, and whenever wearing it you would experience those extra 2 hours (with the catch that at the end of those 2 hours, everything would work itself out to be exact as it was at the start). Then [*http://www.scp-wiki.net/forum/t-5968080/magnus-is-holding-a-contest DrMagnus' birthday contest] started, and I figured I could adapt the idea to fit that.

So the core concept remained the same - but instead of a couple of hours it became an extra month every year; the catch being that no one remembered anything that happened during that month except for during the same month in subsequent years. The driver for this being a contest entry became the interviewed character, a person feeling his own mortality and having sufficient resources to do something about it.

All in all I'm pretty happy with how this turned out (though I did delete it and repost it after making some core changes when people kept saying the original was too much like The Purge, which I've never seen), and I'm happy to say that it won the contest!
[[/collapsible]]


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[[/div]]

[[collapsible show="➤ Doomsday Contest Entries" hide="▼ Doomsday Contest Entries"]]
[[[squelching-blunderbuggers-hub |Team Hub]]], [[[the-slumbering-prince |The Slumbering Prince]]], [[[SCP-1798]]]
As part of doomcon, me and my team, The Magnificent Squelching Blunderbuggers, decided to write about an entity that could only enter reality if every human was asleep, and in doing so would completely remove the ability for humans to sleep again. 

As with most things I write, the idea for this started as a joke; we were brainstorming ideas, one of my team mates said they were going for a nap, and I said our doomsday should be the "ultimate-nap-time apocalypse". 

Even though the reception to our doomcon entry has a whole has been fairly luke-warm, I'm happy with what we put out. It was the first time writing anything for the site for both my team mates, the first time we'd collaborated on a project like this and the first time I've worked with anyone during the writing process. Considering all these factors and the sheer improbability of getting three grown adults to successfully work on anything during their free time, I'm pleased with what we've done!
[[/collapsible]]

[[div style="height:15px;"]]
 
[[/div]]

+++ Series 5 

[[collapsible show="➤SCP-4008 - Wormwood" hide ="▼SCP-4008 - Wormwood"]]
[[[SCP-4008 |SCP-4008 - Wormwood]]]
This was my contest entry for the 4K contest, and is easily the best thing I've written for the site so far. The theme being history, I wanted to write something had layers to it, and started off as a mystery. Technically, the whole thing is operating on 3 different time periods; the current time, as seen by the reader in the article itself, the time leading up to the event, generally through the eyes of the researcher Dr. Daniel Roberts and their notes, and finally at the very end, a brief peek into the Daevites view on the whole thing and where they got their weapon from. I actually wrote out the full parts for each of the corrupted documents, and then selectively corrupted parts of them, which I felt helped make them a bit more internally consistent. 

The implication of the ending is that the Daevites got this great city destroying weapon from the remains of the Children of the Night, more commonly known as SCP-1000, a vastly more intelligent race that preceded humans but were eventually wiped out. This weapon is the thing from which they derived their 2 most potent magics; reality manipulation (as seen in the article that first created the Daevites, SCP-140) and plant-based wizardry (a theme that I myself helped popularise with SCP-3399).

Finally, there's the name itself, Wormwood. This is a reference to the entry in SCP-3790, the Department of Abnormalities (a concept that I love), which is itself a reference to the biblical Wormwood - a star that poisons a third of the worlds water. The connection there is a little loose, but ultimately it's a thing that poisons the land, so I felt like it fit. The idea for the seeds being painful to look at came from the fact that the shutter on the DoA door for Wormwood (they somehow managed to get their hands on one of these seeds) is sealed shut.

This finished 9th/10th (depending on how you consider ties) overall, which I'm very very happy with, and I snagged the 4008 slot as a tribute to my IKEA article, the popularity of which is probably the reason I've ended up sticking around for as long as I have. 

I'm immensely happy with how the article has turned out, and with its reception.

[[/collapsible]]

[[collapsible show="➤SCP-4545 - Trojan Horse" hide ="▼SCP-4545 - Trojan Horse"]]
[[[SCP-4545|SCP-4545 - Trojan Horse]]]
Naming this one simply "Trojan Horse" was tough, as I much prefer giving my articles funny or stupid titles. But, as it was pointed out in one of the comments on the article itself, doing so would probably give away the ending, and basically ruin the article. So, with that in mind, consider the following as alternate titles: "Yo Dawg I Heard You Like Horses", or "Just Horses All The Way Down".

Anyway the idea for this came from a throw-away comment someone made about trojan horses in #site19, and my brain immediately latched on to it to see if the idea could be made into a workable SCP. Turns out, yes. I had a lot of fun writing this one; it's fun, stupid and short and the whole idea behind it makes me laugh, so I'm glad it's being pretty well received (it's been live for ~ 14 hours as I write this).

I love the photo on it too; I was so glad when I found that it was released under creative commons - I doubt I would have been half as interested in finishing the article if that photo wasn't usable!
[[/collapsible]]

[[collapsible show="➤SCP-4144 - The Most Important Meal Of The Day" hide ="▼SCP-4144 - The Most Important Meal Of The Day"]]
[[[SCP-4144 |SCP-4144 - The Most Important Meal Of The Day]]]
The idea for this one originally started as a joke in chat, as many of my ideas do. As soon as I said it though, I knew I had to write it. A bunch of people also agreed so this started off as a collaboration between a few people (you can check the author post on the article for who) and we hammered out a bunch of ideas, and started writing.

And then stopped.

The collab group quickly lost steam and the unfinished draft of this sat untouched for probably 6 months, until I decided to pick it back up again. A lot of it got trimmed off or replaced or changed entirely (there was a pretty cool image that was made for the article but in the intervening period the person who made it left the community, so it wasn't used unfortunately) so very little of the original collab work is left in the published article, but the base idea remained unchanged. No one has ever eaten breakfast, and whenever you *think* you're eating breakfast some interdimensional horror is actually feeding off of //you//.

It's the exact kind of article I like to write. It's not too long, it punches you in the face with the concept right upfront, smashes the place up a bit and then leaves you in the rubble. It's not for everyone, but it works for me!

[[/collapsible]]

[[collapsible show="➤SCP-4454- Looking For Someone To See The World With" hide ="▼SCP-4454- Looking For Someone To See The World With"]]
[[[SCP-4454|SCP-4454 - Looking For Someone To See The World With]]]
The original idea for this one was that the satellite would just repeatedly grab things and smash them into earth, and keep going it with greater and greater force until the results ended up being pretty devastating. It ended up being pretty boring so I sat on the idea for a few months until the new angle came to me; the thing would obviously be trying to complete it's mission, which was to send pictures back to earth.

I already had the idea of the invincible guy (left intentionally ambiguous as to whether he was already invincible or if its something the satellite did to him), and it just kind of evolved from there. Happy with how this one turned out, and I really like the image I found to use for it.

[[/collapsible]]

[[collapsible show="➤SCP-4244- Great Taste In Musicians" hide ="▼SCP-4244- Great Taste In Musicians"]]
[[[SCP-4244|SCP-4244- Great Taste In Musicians]]]
The idea for this one came to me as I was falling asleep after playing a game of Civilisation 6. There's a Rock Band unit in the game and after playing a bad gig, they disappear. That had happened to one of mine, so I just assumed the crowd had eaten them. And so, here we are.

Not much else to say on this one. It was written, edited and posted in about 6 hours, and was the second article I'd posted in as many days.

[[/collapsible]]

[[collapsible show="➤SCP-4474- Steve, and 0ther Gods" hide ="▼SCP-4474- Steve, and 0ther Gods"]]
[[[SCP-4474|SCP-4474- Steve, and 0ther Gods]]]
Like many of my ideas, this started as a throw-away joke in chat, but then I decided I liked it so it got added to the idea list and sat there for about 6 months. Then I decided to write it and liked the idea so much that I decided I needed a picture for it. Unfortunately there are exactly zero Creative Commons photos of a lamp with a smiley face sticker on, so I had to stage my own photo for it. 

Probably the best £10 I've ever spent.

It took a bit of photoshopping (attaching a sticker to a conical surface without creases is basically impossible!) but I was so happy with the final image that I've made it my avatar pic both here on the wiki and on twitter. Even now it still cracks me up looking at it!

This is what the original unedited photo looked like vs the edited version:
|| [[image steveraw.jpg]] || [[image steve.jpg]] ||

[[/collapsible]]

[[collapsible show="➤SCP-4464- Dogs Could Be Bigger (JamCon 2019)" hide ="▼SCP-4464- Dogs Could Be Bigger"]]
[[[SCP-4464|SCP-4464- Dogs Could Be Bigger]]]
This one was written for the first entry in Jamcon 2019, "Shaggy dog". I had never heard of a shaggy dog tale at that point, so literally all I had was "dogs". The entire process of how the idea developed can be found in the following chat log:

<Mortos> idea: its like a huge dog
<Mortos> like, huge
<Mortos> like 600m tall
<Mortos> also it lives on the moon
<MaliceAF> sounds pretty compelling ngl
 <MaliceAF> gotta love a tall doggo
<MaliceAF> although
<MaliceAF> .s very tall things
<Secretary_Helen> MaliceAF: SCP-2256: Very Tall Things (Rating: +411. Written 3 years ago By: qntm) - http://scp-wiki.net/scp-2256
<Mortos> those things are way taller than 600m
<Mortos> im still sad I havent managed to write a working article that uses "gigafauna"
<MaliceAF> same
<Mortos> maybe i'll do it right now
<Mortos> dog is > 1km tall
<Mortos> problem solved
<Mortos> moon dog, 1km tall
<Mortos> does uh, other things that somehow make it interesting
<MaliceAF> Mortos: it grows taller due to reduced gravity, obviously
<Mortos> well OBVIOUSLY
<Mortos> theres 2 of them
<Mortos> one on the moon and one in space
<Mortos> the one in space is huge because of no gravity
<Mortos> has its own moons
<Mortos> DOG MOONS

This is pretty much my entire process for like half my articles.

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[[collapsible show="➤SCP-4494- The Specter Fights For Justice! (JamCon 2019)" hide ="▼SCP-4494- The Specter Fights For Justice!"]]
[[[SCP-4494|SCP-4494- The Specter Fights For Justice!]]]
My entry for the second theme of JamCon 2019, "Pulp fiction". I immediately knew I wanted to something involving a pulp character, and it was my hope that The Shadow had fallen into public domain, but it hadn't. I did find an awesome photo of someone cosplaying The Shadow though and I thought it would be a shame not to use it, so I came up with something else - a wholly unique character who is definitely not The Shadow at all; [[span class="shadow"]]The Specter![[/span]]

After photoshopping the photo into its current mostly-black state, the rest of the idea just kind of popped into my head fully formed. I knew I wanted to have the vague format screw of the altered font, so I spent maybe an hour working that one out and trouble-shooting a few problems and the rest of it came together pretty easily after that. I'm real happy with how this one came up, and I even got to carry its format-screwy name over onto the main list page!
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[[collapsible show="➤SCP-4744- Stay Woke (JamCon 2019)" hide ="▼SCP-4744- Stay Woke"]]
[[[SCP-4744|SCP-4744- Stay Woke]]]

This was an idea I'd come up with a few days before JamCon, based on a line from a [*https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2019/03/06/active-compounds Penny Arcade strip] and some brainstorming in chat. When the third theme ended up being "So it was all a dream...", I realised I could adapt the idea a little and it would do the job nicely - the quote has "nightmare" right in there!

This one stormed through a couple of different versions during the evening I had to work on it; it initially started as 2 page article, the first being an Are We Cool Yet? project proposal page that basically proposes the art piece that is the SCP, the SCP itself being the second page. Some feedback I got wasn't too keen on the idea and ultimately the entire AWCY? doc angle got cut entirely. Fun easter egg though - I didn't want to just bin the whole document, so you can find it hidden in the source for the article!

Anyway while I'm perfectly happy with how this article came out, after a fairly decent performance for my first 2 JamCon entries, this ended up doing terribly, and at the time of writing is my second lowest article. So, I decided to write a second entry for the theme.

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[[collapsible show="➤SCP-4188- What Dreams May Come (JamCon 2019)" hide ="▼SCP-4188- What Dreams May Come"]]
[[[SCP-4188|SCP-4188- What Dreams May Come]]]
My second entry for the third theme of JamCon 2019, "So it was all a dream...". I wrote this after my first entry for the theme performed terribly, this one based off an older idea I had that I could never make work - a drug that gave you reality warping powers that you couldn't control, basically creating a total trip for yourself and anyone nearby. Tying it into dreams seemed like an obvious angle, so I went with it. 

Ultimately, after getting some great feedback from Roget, basically the most prolific author on the wiki, I changed it from a narcotic drug to a sleeping pill which caused you to project your dreams into the world and then sleepwalk through them. It all got tied into the Oneiroi Collective, a group of people who deal with dreams in very, very weird ways, which I thought helped bring the whole thing together. There's some imagery in there that I'm very pleased with, and considering I stormed the entire thing out from concept to posting after work that day (and even regardless of that fact), I'm very happy with how it came out.

It's currently my lowest rated article on the site. 

No idea what it was about that theme but my 2 lowest rated articles are both entries for the Dream theme, and I honestly have no idea why. I didn't expect either of them to set the world on fire but honestly I'm a little stunned at how poorly this article has done. I may have had a minor rage out about it, but don't tell anyone.  

Anyway I'm over it now, I'm still happy with the article, and the fact that I found the awesome image it uses in public domain is just the cherry on top.

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+++ Tales

[[collapsible show="➤Anniversary" hide="▼Anniversary"]]
Not a huge amount to say about this. It was my first tale, inspired entirely by the 173 Anniversary Celebration. It's a little bit meta - the creator of 173 pays it a visit on the anniversary of its creation. Obviously its locked up by the Foundation, but he has transcended such mundane concerns. 

The whole thing took about 2 hours to write; 1 hour for the first draft start to finish, and another hour or so editing and tweaking. I was adamant that I wasn't going to spend ages fiddling with it as I usually do with my writing, so I got it to a point that I was happy with it and posted it.
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[[collapsible show="➤Tjalla" hide="▼Tjalla"]]
Not much to say about this either. It was written for the [*http://www.scp-wiki.net/ao-hub Tales of Anomalous Items] hub, and since there was an item close to the top of the list that was from IKEA I decided to write a tale for it that ties into [[[SCP-3008 |3008]]]. I wrote, edited and posted the whole thing in about an hour.
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[[collapsible show="➤You Can Leave Your Friends Behind" hide="▼You Can Leave Your Friends Behind"]]
I had so many ideas left over from writing the Safety Dance SCP that I basically had to put them into a tale. A bunch of people basically demanded that I include the Fusion Dance in there somewhere (which was already one of the things on the list anyway), so I wrote it more or less straight away. I hammered the entire thing out more or less in a single sitting in a couple of hours and then added the final section to create a more decent ending. A bunch of edits thanks to some wonderful draft readers helped tune up the wording, and that was it!

Honestly I probably had more fun writing this than the original article. The whole concept it just so bizarre and hilarious in my head, and I wanted to combine the ridiculousness of dancing MTF teams with the kinds of actual action they might find themselves in while doing this stuff. 

My current plan is to write another couple of tales featuring this concept, with the next being "Your Friends Don't Dance", and finally "No Friends of Mine", which is also the code-name of the dancing MTF. Whether or not this will actually happen I can't say (the Doomsday Contest is currently underway as I write this, and I'll need to work on my entries for that with my team first), but I'm hopeful that I'll get around to it eventually.
[[/collapsible]]

**About Me**
I'm a --30-- 40-something game developer and generally a huge nerd. I used to DM a regular game of D&D involving a group made up of 3 Bards and a Rogue who act as a band (but now that's over, and I'm sad), play boardgames and videogames far more than is probably healthy, and recently have spent far too much time thinking about SCPs. I'm massively left-wing politically, but given the chance I would definitely overthrow the government and become a dictator. You know, a nice one. I have a big fluffy Maine Coon cat called Link.

I originally joined in mid 2013 but left for reasons that aren't worth going into. I was reminded about the wiki in April 2017 during the closing days of the 3000 contest by a friend and got sucked back in all over again, and this time it looks like I'm here to stay!

I can regularly be found in #site19, under the nick --Icepick-- Mortos.

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