Item#: 256 Object Class: Keter Special Containment Procedures: SCP-256 is to be handled in isolation, only when required for further consideration. Any necessary actions are to be taken by Security Operations. As of ██/██/20██, no further action has been taken.
Description: SCP-256 is a 4 x 6-inch, high-density “slicing cutter”; it comprises the top three parts, two of which contain the top end of a large, flat top. An iron chain is located on top of the cutter, with a metal buckle around the center. The chain can now move approximately a meter or so along its length, along the length of the upper surface. The chains have been equipped with a thin membrane, which forms an insulating layer. The bottom end acts as a lock and the middle of the edge acts as a brake.
The chain is secured to the base of the cutter, but can be removed once the chain is no longer attached. The chain is held in place with a screwdriver while its motion controls the blade. The hand-held device can be used to operate a knife through its blade unless held on a metal base using a rubber band, or when the knife is moved with the tool to the point where it reaches the cutting surface, or when holding the cutter by the hand. When the blade is moved, the knife will slide back and forth. Any remaining sharpening force will be applied to the base of the cutter, which will cause it to produce a sharp edge in the manner described herein.
SCP-256 was initially discovered to be a 1 x 1.5-inch “slicing cutter”, but was soon discovered to be much larger, and developed a reputation for being capable of slicing through objects, causing several deaths, including that of three individuals, at ███/██/20██. Due to its size, this “slicing cutter”(1) was not sufficiently able to tear through wood, however, and SCP-256 was eventually discovered to have a thick, tough steel casing around its edge. The casing is also thin and hard as iron, so it can easily break down and cause injury, as seen in the following pictures.
Due to the low quality of SCP-256 (3), it was placed in storage at Site 12 on █/██/20██. SCP-256 began producing sharpened knives during this time, as demonstrated by one of its most recent incidents: one sharpened by one man who cut it off in the middle of the day. At ███/19
I completely lost it at “due to the low quality of SCP-256, it was placed in storage”, then remembered it earlier today while a barber was shaving my neck with a straight razor and had to desperately suppress my laughter for fear of being cut open
Yeah, that’s how it gets you
OpenAI’s language model wrote an SCP and it’s… a knife what kills you…
It has an impressive understanding of Sharp Thing = Danger Scary
Tags:
#SCP #GPT #death tw #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #also holy shit it knew to redact stuff #I guess now we know that GPT has read SCP Foundation entries #unreality cw #(which isn’t *quite* right but I feel like ”post was written by non-sapient entity: #if you try to interpret it as being from a person you’ll just end up confused” needs some cw and that one seems close)
“If you’re watching this video, I’m already dead. Not because I left it to be viewed in the event of my demise, but because that’s the only rational explanation for why somebody would be fucking with my laptop.”
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #death tw #storytime
Harry, Hermione, and Ron are killed early in their search for Horcruxes. Voldemort orders a full invasion of Hogwarts to find the remaining ones. In a panic, Hogwarts is evacuated. One student slept through the evacuation order: 4th year American transfer student Kevin McCallister.
That is part of why….I hate it……bc I genuinely to the core of my being believe that Macaulay Culkin could probably have finished Voldemort faster than the golden trio & Dumbledore combined…………this kid could play a fake recording of Dumbledore saying “Merry Christmas ya filthy animal” with the sound of spells being fired off from the Room of Requirement and Tom Riddle would be tf out of there so fast & slip on a Portable Swamp and fall down a changing staircase…………..
OK but what if the final battle was like this instead.
Like.
The Hogwarts students have spent the entire year peripheral to a war zone, with some of the enemy already present and actively tormenting and then hunting them. They have some idea that Hogwarts might be invaded by Voldemort at some point in time.
As part of their ongoing campaign of defiance of all things pureblood-supremacist and to keep up morale, they have a series of movie nights wherein they get everybody together and watch Muggle films on a TV that they’ve gotten Flitwick to charm into working at Hogwarts.
One of these films was Home Alone.
It was such a hit that they watched the other movies in the series.
And somebody, some little first year who’d been Crucio’d six times that month, raises her hand and suggests, “what if when HE came, we were prepared like Kevin was?”
And they spend the next four months booby-trapping every single inch of the castle.
People use the DA galleons to communicate, and the graduates provide supplies and research and high-level spellwork. Fred and George turn their joke shop’s entire production output to the purpose. Muggleborns, despite being on the run from the now-corrupt Ministry, buy technology like video cameras, remote controls, computers, and Muggle explosives, and research every method of sabotage, petty revenge, and dirty trickery they can think of.
When the evacuation order comes, the younger students retreat to the Hog’s Head with their arms full of screens and remotes and VR headsets, each with their assignment of an area to watch and a set of traps to deploy.
The first casualty, as it were, is Severus Snape, who takes a swung paint can to the side of the head and spends the first half hour of the war locked in a disused classroom, before he can do more than demand Harry Potter’s whereabouts from Minerva McGonagall.
When Voldemort arrives with his Death Eaters, giants, werewolves, and assorted other lackeys in tow, and demands Harry Potter, the answer–from Neville Longbottom–is “If you want him, come and get him, you snake-fucking arsehole.”
Minerva has to turn a laugh into a hacking cough, and surrepticiously awards ten points to Gryffindor when nobody’s paying attention.
When Voldemort strides up to the doorway, the lawn collapses and he finds himself chest-deep in a Portable Swamp.
Ginny Weasley, responsible for the first line of defense at her own request, is downright gleeful as she activates the hundreds of freezing charms the students had added to it, and he and several Death Eaters find themselves temporarily stuck in the ice.
Everything is brought to bear. Electricity, zapping some Death Eaters. Tar and feathers, turning some werewolves into a sticky mess. Maple-syrup balloons, hidden in nets suspended from the ceilings. Legos and D4 dice, scattered across the ground after a set of permanent sticking charms that attach the attackers’ boot soles to the floor.
Some traps are magical in nature. The suits of armor, charmed to attack, and both sides of the giant magical chess set that used to guard the Sorcerer’s Stone. Others are purely mundane: tripwires that drop trapdoors full of stones, rotten pumpkins, and metal shavings on the heads of unsuspecting giants. Still more are a spectacular mix: hand grenades that bounce down stairways before exploding at the touch of a button from some second-year in the Hog’s Head.
Hogwarts’ defenders throw spells, gunfire, and molotov cocktails at the enemy, and whenever a Death Eater aims a spell at someone, a trap is sprung upon them by a watchful younger student.
When Voldemort retreats, his robes tattered and dripping with substances he can’t name and his follower count cut in half, there are no deaths among the other side.
He delivers his ultimatum anyway.
Snape, at this point, has awoken and escaped by the simple means of opening a window and flying next door; he tracks down Harry by listening to students talk, and heads to the room of requirement, dodging two or three traps (impressed despite himself) until one of the watchers contacts Harry via radio and Harry says to let the bastard at him.
What the two talk about, only they know. Hermione and Ron grab the diadem while watching them dubiously, and Snape offers to call up Fiendfire to destroy it. This perhaps proves something to Harry, who accompanies Snape to the Headmaster’s office despite Hermione’s and Ron’s, and then Minerva’s, protests.
When they are done, Harry Potter walks out the front door of Hogwarts and duels Voldemort, who starts on the count of two and kills him.
Shock, then hundreds of protests of cheating, and when Voldemort starts to gloat the chants of “CHEATER! CHEATER!” drown him out. He tries to say that it’s irrevelant; Harry Potter is dead, but is heckled in the form of thrown objects. From the shadows, Snape flings the shattered, scorched remnants of the diadem, the cup, and Nagini’s severed head. Voldemort catches the first, and shock paralyzes him long enough to get beaned in the head with the second; his shriek of rage is cut short when the third bounces right off his face.
(The Sorting Hat, begging anyone who will listen to put it on, was listened to by Snape. Being hit on the head a second time did his oncoming headache no favors, but the Sword of Gryffindor appears for bravery, and on his way down, meeting Nagini trapped in something resembling a magical tar pit, he does with the sword what the sword is for.)
There is laughter, and then that laughter becomes a roaring, thundering cheer when Harry Potter stands back up and taps Voldemort on the shoulder. Voldemort turns, and is knocked flat to the ground by a devastating punch that held every bit of misery Harry’s been through in his whole life thanks to Voldemort’s work.
Then when he gets up, Harry makes his request that Voldemort try for some regret. The Elder Wand does its thing. Voldemort falls, never to rise again.
Death Eaters escape, only to find out that some of those traps were full of pigment visible under ultraviolet light, and it is very easy for Aurors to figure out who was present at the attack.
The cleanup is a trial and a half, but the story is told for centuries.
Tags:
#Harry Potter #Home Alone #fanfic #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #death tw
Today, we’re expressing gratitude for the opportunity to rove on Mars (#ThanksOppy) as we mark the completion of a successful mission that exceeded our expectations.
Our Opportunity Rover’s last communication with Earth was received on June 10, 2018, as a planet-wide dust storm blanketed the solar-powered rover’s location on the western rim of Perseverance Valley, eventually blocking out so much sunlight that the rover could no longer charge its batteries. Although the skies over Perseverance cleared, the rover did not respond to a final communication attempt on Feb. 12, 2019.
As the rover’s mission comes to an end, here are a few things to know about its opportunity to explore the Red Planet.
90 days turned into 15 years!
Opportunity launched on July 7, 2003 and landed on Mars on Jan. 24, 2004 for a planned mission of 90 Martian days, which is equivalent to 92.4 Earth days. While we did not expect the golf-cart-sized rover to survive through a Martian winter, Opportunity defied all odds as a 90-day mission turned into 15 years!
The Opportunity caught its own silhouette in this late-afternoon image taken in March 2014 by the rover’s rear hazard avoidance camera. This camera is mounted low on the rover and has a wide-angle lens.
Opportunity Set Out-Of-This-World Records
Opportunity’s achievements, including confirmation water once flowed on Mars. Opportunity was, by far, the longest-lasting lander on Mars. Besides endurance, the six-wheeled rover set a roaming record of 28 miles.
This chart illustrates comparisons among the distances driven by various wheeled vehicles on the surface of Earth’s moon and Mars. Opportunity holds the off-Earth roving distance record after accruing 28.06 miles (45.16 kilometers) of driving on Mars.
It’s Just Like Having a Geologist on Mars
Opportunity was created to be the mechanical equivalent of a geologist walking from place to place on the Red Planet. Its mast-mounted cameras are 5 feet high and provided 360-degree two-eyed, human-like views of the terrain. The robotic arm moved like a human arm with an elbow and wrist, and can place instruments directly up against rock and soil targets of interest. The mechanical “hand” of the arm holds a microscopic camera that served the same purpose as a geologist’s handheld magnifying lens.
There’s Lots to See on Mars
After an airbag-protected landing craft settled onto the Red Planet’s surface and opened, Opportunity rolled out to take panoramic images. These images gave scientists the information they need to select promising geological targets that tell part of the story of water in Mars’ past. Since landing in 2004, Opportunity has captured more than 200,000 images. Take a look in this photo gallery.
From its perch high on a ridge, the Opportunity rover recorded this image on March 31, 2016 of a Martian dust devil twisting through the valley below. The view looks back at the rover’s tracks leading up the north-facing slope of “Knudsen Ridge,” which forms part of the southern edge of “Marathon Valley
There Was Once Water on Mars?!
Among the mission’s scientific goals was to search for and characterize a wide range of rocks and soils for clues to past water activity on Mars. In its time on the Red Planet, Opportunity discovered small spheres of the mineral hematite, which typically forms in water. In addition to these spheres that a scientist nicknamed “blueberries,” the rover also found signs of liquid water flowing across the surface in the past: brightly colored veins of the mineral gypsum in rocks, for instance, which indicated water flowing through underground fractures.
I’m sick and tired of being called “mortal” like, you don’t know that. Neither do I. I have never died even ONCE. Nothing has been proven yet. Stop making assumptions. It’s rude.
Why do people use video chats with Basilisk, anyway? Seems like it’s asking for trouble, and “death by videophone software glitch” is not one of the better ways to go.
(Limitations of the webcomic medium?)
Mostly because “Basilisk’s face censored with an emoji” was too good a visual gag to pass up.
this is me thinking out loud some more, not exactly replying, but.
“kindness costs nothing” is a popular saying for why you should be nice. but if you give what costs you nothing, what merit is there in that? if you give only kindness and empathy without material, measurable help, are you giving anything at all?
it comes back to christianity, again. it always does for me. talk about brainwashing.
specifically: the widow’s mite. (a coin, like a farthing or a centime, not a bug.) the story goes – jesus was chilling near the donations box at the temple, and these rich holier-than-thou people came and put big bags of money into the box and made a big deal about how much they donated. and then this poor widow woman came and put in two halfpennies, or mites as some version of the Bible translated it.
and jesus said “see you should be like her. those other people all gave money they didn’t need, and they made a big deal about it so people would think they were holy. she gave god all the money she had, and she didn’t make any fuss about it, because she loves and trusts god That Much. y’all do that too k?”
so, yanno, i mean, brainstuff. giving more than you can afford is How To Be Good. give money, time, gifts, food, but always give what you need for yourself, not just the stuff you could spare or didn’t want anyway; that stuff is no good cos you’re not giving it From The Heart. this is the mindset.
“faith without works is dead.” i think that’s from the book of st james. it’s a Really Big Thing in the catholics vs protestants headbutting match, bc if you boil them both down to a reductio ad absurdam in the bottom of the stockpot (i might be getting sleepy and overextending my metaphors), protestants say “if you have faith you are saved! doesn’t matter what you do!” and catholics say “if you do good things you are saved! doesn’t matter what you believe! although you should still be catholic cos of reasons.” ^_^ so – like brin said, we have no concept of supererogation (i.e. where is the mark that when you go above and beyond that you are going Above and Beyond), you have to do all the good things. and if you catholic this thing in your brain, you cannot be a good unless you are always doing the good things. (idk how that psychological part works if you are protestant. i never really talked religion with any observant mainstream protestants.)
so but like. there’s a line from hamilton the musical, i see it on gifsets. “(death) takes and it takes and it takes”. and i feel like… you give and you give and you give, and there’s a void out there of infinite… it’s like an infinite sponge. it can soak up everything you give it, your whole existence, and you won’t have even made a tiny little difference to the infinity of need. you give and you give and you give, and when you’ve given everything you are, it’s just like you never existed at all.
i know it’s late and i’m getting morose. i had thoughts about dying for a cause too but i’m not sure what they were yet. and what stuntmuppet said about revolutionary selfishness, ethan would like to expand on that at GREAT LENGTH. not tonight tho.
i will mention though cos i think it fits here. i keep feeling like a good way to do assisted suicide, like officially incorporated into society and everything, would be to drain out the person’s blood, put it all in those donation bags like the red cross uses, and then you could give the blood to other people who actually wanted to stay alive. it would be nice. if that was available i would probably do it. and i suspect part of why it seems so appealing is that you can literally give your life helping others live. (also it wouldn’t hurt much and you could just quietly slip off and stop caring.)
The thing is, food still has nutrition regardless of whether you gave it From The Heart. A dollar buys a dollar’s worth of stuff, no matter how small a percentage it is of the donator’s net worth*. And someone who gives a smaller, sustainable portion of their wealth can end up donating more over the long run than someone who goes out in a blaze of glory.
Blood donation is actually a very good example of that. An adult human body contains somewhere around 10 pints of blood, depending on the individual. The regulation quantity and frequency of blood donation is 1 pint every 8 weeks. Someone who donates every 2 months for 2 years has donated more blood than someone who gave every drop in their body, and can still donate again in another 2 months. (And, you know, they’re alive, for whatever that’s worth.) (Some people take longer to recover and can’t sustainably/safely donate every 2 months, but even if you can only do every 4 months, or every 6, all you have to do is live 6 years to outproduce a one-time 10-pint donation.)
I’ve never met a cause worth dying for, but some causes are better served by living, anyway.
(This argument does assume a basically consequentialist mindset, that the amount of help you provide is more important than how you felt while you were doing it. As you described above, there are moral systems that don’t accept this assumption. That’s something fundamental enough that I don’t think I could really talk you in or out of it: if you think “things would go better if you became a consequentialist” is a good reason to become a consequentialist, you already are one.)
I swear I have seen writings from charity nerds about how (and why) to avoid burning yourself out, but I’m having some trouble finding them. Perhaps the charity nerds among my followers know of some?
*Although sometimes a dollar can buy more than a dollar’s worth of stuff if you have enough of them, because of bulk discounts. This is why–though food donations are certainly better than nothing–food banks generally prefer monetary donations: they get excellent discounts and can stretch your dollar farther than you can.
It’s worth noting that, in both Mark and Luke, the story of the Widow’s Mite (from the KJV, which translated the relevant copper coin into the then-contemporary mite) is immediately preceded by a passage condemning … well:
45 While all the people were listening, Jesus said to his disciples,46 “Beware of the teachers of the law. They like to walk around in flowing robes and love to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces and have the most important seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at banquets.47 They devour widows’ houses and for a show make lengthy prayers. These men will be punished most severely.”
These are clearly part of the same anecdote, and some commentators argue they should be interpreted as the same passage – rich people take from the poor, then laud themselves for being generous with their money. The widow hasn’t helped more than anyone else; she’s been cost more than anyone else.
Of course, Jesus was famously in favor of people selling their possessions and becoming wandering monks who may or may not get murdered for their troubles – it was, after all, his own career path – so maybe this theory is wrong, and it’s just a feel-good message.
Still, I think it’s important that Jesus never advocates starving. Letting people stab you in the face, sure, but not starving. Wandering preachers get fed. (And there’s a limited market for them, and it’s hard to build a movement entirely out of penniless wandering preachers; which is one reason I tend to lean toward interpretations where it’s decidedly not meant as a universal calling.)
The Widow is merely cutting things rather close, not sacrificing her life, even in the standard interpretation.
No, I think the closest thing to the standard interpretation would be the also currency-nicknamed Parable of the Talents.
In the parable, with which I daresay most readers are familiar, different servants are given different amounts of money to look after. Two servants invest them and make good returns, and thus are rewarded; one merely holds onto it and then gives it back, and is punished.
If you just give what was given to you, then what’s the point? You’re supposed to invest it, to make more.
One person can’t save the world. Ten pints of blood is nothing against the darkness. But invest it? Use that life wisely? And that can become a whole flood of blood in what is an increasingly sticky metaphor.
Of course, even that probably isn’t enough. A servant given two talents isn’t going to make the same amount of money as one given five. But it’s better than handing back your seed money with nothing to show for it.
catholics say “if you do good things you are saved! doesn’t matter what you believe! although you should still be catholic cos of reasons.” ^_^ so – like brin said, we have no concept of supererogation (i.e. where is the mark that when you go above and beyond that you are going Above and Beyond), you have to do all the good things. and if you catholic this thing in your brain, you cannot be a good unless you are always doing the good things. (idk how that psychological part works if you are protestant. i never really talked religion with any observant mainstream protestants.)
Many but not all Protestant denominations regard supererogation as a Catholic heresy.
Focusing on the bottom line is important. But there are two opposite, but related, mistakes in effective altruism that stem from focusing on it too much.
One is, of course, the rich person who goes “oh I saved fifty lives this year, why not buy another yacht?” TBH I have never encountered this mistake, but it definitely happens with non-EA charitable movements, and I don’t know a lot of rich people, it probably happens.
But the other mistake is the opposite.
Most people aren’t rich. It’s easy to look at your bottom line and say this is too small, I’m not doing enough because you don’t have very much to give.
But this misses the entire point.
Utilitarianism not about getting the bigger number. It’s about getting the biggest number. Whether this is larger or smaller than the other guy’s number, whether it’s large or small on an absolute scale (probably small), is not a concern.
If you only have two pennies, and you invest them wisely, then you are a better investor than the rich guy who has an enormous amount of money and spends half of it on a yacht. Simultaneously, he has more money. But you’re still better.
Tithing is a good idea, and I’m glad EA has adopted it.
But you have to apply that to other things too. Giving more than 10% of your blood, of your life, is definitely supererogatory.
I’m not saying that sacrifice is bad, but for most people, you run into diminishing returns after the first few sacrifices. Being smart about what you do with that sacrifice is far more effective.
And yeah, sometimes that involves “wasting” time making yourself better; using the perfume instead of selling it, being Mary instead of Martha.
Tags:
#(October 2016) #(I have decided to queue aglet posts; queue is currently set to four times per day) #conversational aglets #death tw #suicide cw #scrupulosity cw
i want someone who’s never seen star trek try to make sense of this.
the replies to this post are the fucking funniest thing:
Tags:
#Star Trek #DS9 #god kiwilapple is extremely close though #good job kiwilapple #(ftr: man is realising that he’s just contracted a bioterrorist virus which) #(causes your attempts at linguistic communication to come out as gibberish) #(and you perceive others as doing the same) #(also a couple days later it kills you for good measure) #((you know what really weirds me out about this episode?)) #((when Patient Zero turns up everyone leaps straight to ”holy shit what’s wrong with O’Brien?!”)) #((rather than ”*sigh* great‚ now we have to fix the *translator* too”)) #(((also why *didn’t* the translator mask it?))) #(((a given patient spouts the *same* gibberish when trying to communicate the same thing through speech and through writing))) #(((which suggests a consistent verbal remapping that you can just treat like a new language))) #((((of course thinking through the implications of stuff has never been Star Trek’s strong suit)))) #((((and especially not in a season one)))) #illness tw #death tw #tag rambles
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #the humour of my people #Shakespeare #recs #according to AO3 there are three of them at the moment #so far I’ve read the first one and it’s hilarious #(my favourite part was ”I literally just returned”) #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #death tw
Brinens and Things 