ROUNDERHOUSE

ALIASES: ROUNDERHOUSE (all caps), YURT, occasionally SCUMBIRD SUPREME.

PRIMARY OFFENSES: Unlicensed word-vomit (innumerable counts). Illegal image modification. Crimes against inhumanity.

KNOWN HAUNTS: SCP Wiki (#12 author), Wanderer's Library (administrator), Twitter (committed shitposter; assassination in progress)

NATURE OF INTERESTS: Grimy far-future science-fiction, vaguely psychosexual mech-ephemera, 20th century Cold War intrigue & skullduggery, stupid comedy, supernatural realism (ghosts in the IRS), and anything weird that makes one's bones itch.

FINANCES: Ko-fi

Yo! I'm ROUNDERHOUSE. I try to write cool shit on the internet that tickles my brain; I hope it tickles yours too. I've written some 120 articles for SCP including the GOLD/JADE/BONE Proposals and SCP-6000. I mostly use this as a space to store writing and art that doesn't really fit anywhere else. Creatively, I've a particular fondness for magical realism, SCP-esque bureaucrat-horror stuff, and high-concept supernatural ideas in low-life military fiction.

Use my asks to pitch me neat ideas -- if I like them I'll spew up a few words!

NOTABLE TAGS:

#ROUNDERPICS -- art! mostly my photoshop work, occassionally design stuff

#ROUNDERWORDS -- writing. typically takes the form of #microfiction (also a useful tag), but sometimes not

#ASK -- take a guess

Wetware computers led to a new marriage of biology and cybersecurity. A surprisingly successful one; our conception of the digital has always been modeled on the biological. Defending a server rack of flesh-and-blood neural-slices from a virus isn’t all that different from defending a traditional computer against one.

But it also led to an entirely new problem neither field was equipped to solve. the gene-samples used to grow new wetware computers widely proliferated before cancer screening had advanced to where it is now, and federal law now prohibits non-governmental entities from harvesting genetic samples for computing purposes. No matter how hard you try — and computing giants like IBM and Kessler dedicate billions to it — even the most carefully-cultivated strains of biochips, trays of neurons millimeters thick and wired in vast warehouse-brains, will eventually develop computing tumours.

Most are benign, harmless drains on computational resources, but every so often one becomes malignant. They are almost impossible to detect in the noise of the output, but they work their own agendas, whispering orthogonal thoughts to any given task. Unnoticed by the teams of clean-suited biotechs, they grow and grow and grow and spill bad data into the body. The risks of unrestrained computumour growth become readily apparent after Kessler won a Pentagon contract to organize satellite data for orbital kinetic strikes, and delivered a firing solution that confidently directed satellites to sink two Navy aircraft carriers. Three of the server racks in their Lake Razor facility were later found to be completely riddled with cybertumours.

I'm not very familiar with In Memoriam or really any Sarkic content. I try to go into my reimaginings with a clean slate; what articles I am familiar with I don't really like that much so this was an opportunity to start from fresh ground and build it into something that appeals to me and grounded in strong character dynamics, just as with the other two proposals.

SCP-001 - ROUNDERHOUSE'S BONE PROPOSAL: BLACK ADYTUM

Forty years after the events of Jade, an experimental Foundation research AI stumbles upon the surviving remnants of the Nalka - a dying tribe aching to learn about their glorious past, led by the amnesiac flesh-weaver Iun. You can't bury the past forever.

Diagraphephobia: The fear of losing digital data or information. Associated with hoarding data and files.

Yesterday I posted my article for SCP's Anthology 2024. It's about Maria Jones, dementia, and being eaten alive from the inside out. I think it's one of the strangest, most uncomfortable things I've ever written.

Check it out here: SCP-8976 - Diagrephephobia: fragmentation

please never stop writing. you are a huge inspiration to me :)

i don't intend to! the voices keep whispering stories to me from the beyond and they won't shut the fuck up until i write and post them

i always have a bit of trouble answering these questions because they come from a place very orthogonal to how i write -- not that that's a bad thing! but for me the issue is rarely one of wanting to have it 100% planned out before i jump into it. i rarely plan out my stories beyond the broadest strokes; maybe i'll write an outline, but unless i'm expecting it to be novella-length, i kind of just wing it beyond that, and i recommend giving that a shot. you know where you're starting, you know where you want the story to end, so instead of painstakingly drafting out every bit, just start at the start and, well, keep going until you end up where you wanted to. i think part of it is that beyond storytelling i also just enjoy the act of writing -- putting sentences together, making them flow, communicating tone and vibe to the reader. i think you need to cultivate an appreciation for that to some degree, otherwise writing is just a grueling trudge to get to your final product, which is no fun at all

as for feeling good -- you can only get good at writing by doing it. it's a practice sport, just like anything else, and the improvement only becomes apparent after dozens of stories. not a fun answer, but the only true one. you can help that along by analyzing stories after you write them for what you and other people think works, doesn't work, but that does require you to silence the voice of "i'm not good enough". you're not good at most things until you do them a lot, so not being good at them is a terrible reason not to do them. you have literally no stakes in writing on the internet, so i really recommend taking advantage of that to cut your teeth writing whatever. all storytelling is practice

there's a very compelling temptation to all creatives to avoid doing the hard creative work and take refuge in what they know won't challenge them -- making plans for your stories for you. for me, it's making images and CSS instead of writing. but growth requires challenge, and you gotta break out of that hole if you ever want to see the story on the page.