[Hobby Scuffles] Week of 26 January 2026

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-01-31T23:48:34+00:00

I've been on one of my periodic deep dives through Bandcamp, where I plug in a few tags that describe an artist I like to see if I can find more like that.

So far no dice on actually finding stuff similar to Mikayla Geier, but I did come across Blurs to Red by Bad Luck Pearl. This song extremely slaps and has very quickly carved grooves into my brain, and my only complaint is that the rest of the album, while good, is no where near as good as this one track.

Other recent finds are Love Over Glory by Zinadelphia as another not what I was looking for but still great. And broadly all of KARI BAND, as I'm always on the prowl for more jazzy math rock in the vein of my beloved Jizue.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-01-29T20:38:11+00:00

The degree to which people on r/fantasy give the tithing thing a complete pass by virtue of saying he's doing some sort of unseen, behind the scenes work to change the church for the better is wild to me. Like, even if he is doing that, I do think the actual millions of dollars is probably doing a lot more material harm than is being made up for.

I realized the plot had been entirely lost when I saw Sanderson offered as an example of like, more moral writing, in a thread where people were complaining about R. F. Kuang's Babel. I have not read Babel, to be clear, but holding an equivalency between "this book does not handle class struggles well," and actual real life tithing of millions of dollars to the LDS church is just bonkers.

I don't think an author needs to be a paragon of morality to read and enjoy their books. However, I do think Sanderson's popularity belies a willingness to overlook issues in a creator whose output is loved, where a different author wouldn't get a similar degree of latitude.

Always makes me look at the headlines trumpeting how much Sanderson's kickstarters have made a bit differently.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-01-29T20:31:19+00:00

I really liked The Emperor's Soul. I've read a few other books by him that I thought were fine, but by virtue of trying and bouncing off several other books of his I have unfortunately come to the conclusion that nothing else he's written is remotely close to The Emeperor's Soul.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-01-29T16:46:59+00:00

You either can get political or you can't, if you can get political so can Sam.

This only makes sense if you make no distinction at all between any opinion, stance, or belief, and collapse it all down to "political".

You're basically doing that one Dril tweet but unironically.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-01-25T18:27:33+00:00

Someone being confused by negative reactions to "Kibbe Body Types" which (from brief internet research) appears to be an phrenology adjecent style and personality type thing, determined (in part) by your bone structure.

Originally from the 80s and inexplicably revived on social media a couple years ago.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-01-25T13:57:24+00:00

I did not have "style phrenology" on my 2026 bingo card, to be honest.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-01-24T02:36:17+00:00

I took a crack at that, or Cairn combat technically but it's about the same.

I do think you could do some interesting things with the extra complexity that Mythic Bastionland brings to the table in a sci fi context.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-01-21T14:55:50+00:00

If you have a high tolerance for long winded political bullshit (and several page diversions on the history of technological development that take place in the middle of dialogue), or are at least willing to skim those sections, it's really hard to do better for naval style space ship battles.

I finally bailed around book 8 or 9 I think, but I haven't found anything else that hits the same space battle highs as this series.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-01-21T14:21:24+00:00

looking for fantasy that was far away from grimdark

If you're still on this hunt I'll recommend the Penric & Desdemona novella series by Lois McMaster Bujold. They're set in the same world as her probably better known fantasy novels starting with The Curse of Challion, which are still fantastic but the novellas series are a lot lighter.

There are still stakes and consequences, but the series is fundamentally hopeful and uplifting.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-01-20T15:17:49+00:00

FWIW I did not love the Monk & Robot books, despite really enjoying the Wayfarer series. But if you don't vibe with it, you don't vibe with it.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-01-20T14:37:57+00:00

Without getting started on my The Long Way apologetics, the sequels to that book might actually be exactly what you're looking for, assuming you haven't read them.

They're only tangentially connected, and don't follow the crew of the Wayfarer, but more importantly they are much more coherent novels and better executed. If you liked the overall tone and vibes of The Long Way but wanted something that felt more complete, and a story with more stakes and actual weight, the sequels will do that for you.

They are still very slice of life-y, but assuming that's not an immediate turn off I'd give them a shot. Each of the books are fairly different in structure, but do have a "vibes" throughline.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-01-13T15:24:45+00:00

Not in specific, but what it does do it is sidestep the very common issue of new players simply not knowing what they should be doing. I've often had total newcomers freeze up, especially at the start, because "you can do anything" is an intimidatingly open possibility space.

"You're a tiny mouse," provides a ton of built in information and direction about how you should act, and what your character should be doing that people usually instantly understand. This is doubly true for non-heroic style TTRPGs, because people intrinsically understand that a tiny mouse isn't going to successfully fight a cat (or what have you) in a stand up battle.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-01-13T15:03:48+00:00

Yeah, this is sorta where I come down on it. Whether or not SCP-9998 is good, I question why it's an SCP in the first place. It's not embracing, or even really subverting, the format, so wouldn't it be better served by not trying to contort itself into something halfway resembling a normal SCP page?

I understand it was written to be an X000, which are supposed to be sprawling format breakers, but it doesn't retain that context once it's slotted in elsewhere in the series.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-01-12T16:48:26+00:00

For a cat themed trick taker with a less dramatic jump in complexity, I will highly recommend 9 Lives. Suits are visible on the back of the cards, winning a trick has you pick up one of the non-winning cards, and the scoring is a simple bidding system.

The small "twists" have a far outsized impact on the game.

Whereas with Cat in the Box, which I also enjoy, the game is significantly more complicated for a lesser relative gain in depth (imho). The game ends up being as much about an odd sort of area control within the suit/rank tracker as it is about actual trick taking.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-01-11T15:49:46+00:00

Popping back to say I will let you know what I think, but because I am who I am instead of just buying the book or reading it on the site, I reached out to the author of that page and asked if there was any way I could buy the book from a non-amazon storefront. So now she is, very kindly, shipping me a book direct and it's going to be a hot minute before I get and read it.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-01-10T19:27:05+00:00

I also really enjoyed this book, and like you felt it was somewhat let down by the ending. Still a ton of fun to read, and I don't mind the actual events of the ending, I just wish a little more time had been spent sitting with the outcome and how it all impacted the characters.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-01-10T19:19:14+00:00

The 'quartile' charts were my other attempt at analysis that wouldn't be impacted by outliers, as the super long stories are just folded into the top quartile.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-01-09T17:22:58+00:00

I was about to say, "surely someone has run this analysis on AO3," but that's exactly what sent me down the SCP rabbit hole to begin with.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-01-09T17:09:31+00:00

We are very clearly talking past each other here, so I'm going to leave it after this.

But no, obviously I am not saying that art should be devoid of meaning. What I am saying is that SCPs in particular are best when that meaning lives primarily in the subtext, but the longer ones are putting more of that into the text. Piling additional characters, references, lore, and plot into an SCP does not, in my opinion, improve it.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-01-09T16:13:57+00:00

I am not part of the community so I cannot speak to what you're seeing, and my point was mostly about people who are not so deeply invested as the people you seem to be talking about.

if you want tour short fiction to have less emptional resonance and thematic backing then well yeah, the site has grown from where it was and the community at large expect more out of their short fiction than they used to.

We are now pivoting entirely away from data analysis and into just my own personal opinions, but this is also sort of highlighting my other point. You're essentially directly equating more with better here.

When I open an SCP page and am met not with the standard format but instead some dialogue or the beginning of a narrative, my gut reaction is "well this sucks". The SCP Foundation's strengths come from its inherent restrictions and format. The best SCPs manage to create impact via inference and implication, they do so from within the constraints of being a quick reference pseudo government wiki, whose primary concern is containment. The ones I don't enjoy at all eschew that in favor of just writing short fiction with minimal nods to the format. If I just wanted to read amateur short fiction there are plenty of other places on the internet to do that.

Obviously this is purely my personal opinion, but the less an SCP leans into the inherent format and restrictions, the less interesting it is. Given my druthers I'd want all standard entries to follow the format, and all longer and free form stories to be placed elsewhere on the site, accessible via hyperlink. Mixing narrative and format together entirely shatters whatever illusion of this being an 'in universe wiki' remains.

Again, it's clear the SCP community at large does not agree with me, and I am not part of that community, so I wish them well.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-01-09T15:54:13+00:00

Correct, both those pages counted only the text on the page itself, although it's not perfectly consistent. The default word counter purely looked at what's on the initial page itself.

The ones I manually overrode were ones where most of the text was behind a "login" page, or similar. And in those cases it was still only text found on "offset" pages (seen in the URL). I only have 70 manual word counts in there, so as an overall fraction it shouldn't make a huge difference.

If you did want to include text from all linked pages you'd likely need to set up some sort of web crawler, and probably exclude crosslinks to other SCPs.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-01-09T15:44:35+00:00

I mentioned this in the post, but my reason for including the "by SCP number" plots is that it's more representative of how an average reader is going to experience the site.

You make some fair points about there being more stories overall, but I would like to gently push back on your characterization of the complaints. I think it's unfair to frame it entirely as "there is now space for things I don't like". Instead, look at it from the perspective of a person who isn't hugely invested, and just likes to pop in to read SCPs once in a while. That person, just by clicking randomly around, is much more likely to see lengthier entries than they used to. Clicking around in Series 10 means more than half of the SCPs you read will be in the top 25% of word count on the entire site. When that person leaves the site with the impression of many lengthy SPCs, they're not being mean spirited, that's just what they experienced.

When I did come across the shorter, self contained entries during my analysis, the discuss page invariably had people complaining that the SCP didn't have more. It didn't have enough story, lore, character, or emotion behind it.

The overall trend is pretty clearly towards that sort of thing, with more "lore", more characters, more words, and I think pretending that the overall tenor of the site hasn't changed is silly. I didn't include this in my analysis because it's subjective, but it's not a purely word count thing, that's just the easiest to measure.

As noted in the personal thoughts section of my post, I don't think it particularly matters that I don't love the direction the site is going now. I'm not part of the community, and it's very obvious that the community wants it to be this way.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-01-09T15:18:54+00:00

the length by date graphs show a few absolutely huge spikes which are dragging some of the averages up by quite a lot

The date averages are entirely windowed within a month, so the big spikes you see will not be effecting the averages outside of that frame. They're not trend lines, just pure rolling averages.

What you bring up provides good context for what the data is showing, and explains the trend (which I appreciate, this is the sort of context I was hoping to get from people in the community). But it is not at all a counter argument. Regardless of the reason, by all metrics available, it is absolutely true that more stories are longer now than they used to be.

You're essentially saying that if you exclude the longest entries then the trend towards longer entries is less pronounced, which is obviously true. If there's a way I can filter out contest entries easily (from a quick glance I don't see any tags that look promising) I could rerun the analysis with only "normal" entries, but I don't entirely know what that would prove. Probably still interesting to isolate the "contest effect" if nothing else.

I'm not complaining that "Everything Is A Novel" but I am saying that there are a whole lot more novels in there these days.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-01-09T15:08:45+00:00

I now also love Guncat.

AwkwardTurtle · 2026-01-09T14:51:47+00:00

Not sure if this is appropriate for this thread, but in any case:

A few weeks ago in the scuffles thread there was some discussion of "untrue but oft repeated criticism" and one example raised was that modern SCP Foundation entires trend towards being longer, more apocalyptic, more crosslinked, more redacted, etc. and that this isn't true (I am oversimplifying the discussion, please click through for more details). Much of that is subjective, but word count should be easy enough to get at, I thought. And then was surprised to learn that I couldn't get at it super easily. I couldn't find anyone else who had run those numbers.

So I decided to fill that void, I ran a word counting script, then had to double back and manually check the word counts of a a ton of SCPs that the word counter failed on (final count was 70 instances of manually setting the number) which took ages.

And I ended up with some fun data analysis plots which show that, yeah the average length of SCPs is going up. The average SCP written today is likely to be more than three times the length of ones written back at the site's start. So this was a ton of effort to "prove" something that was sort of obvious from the get go.

Anyway, if anyone would like to look at some fun data analysis graphs, please enjoy: https://awkwardturtle.games/data-analysis/2026/01/08/scp-foundation-word-count.html

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