1. What was your thought process when writing SCP-___-J’s containment procedures?

My first thought was to keep them as short as possible, since the whole article is premised on brevity. The second was the story I had in mind for this — namely, that the rock is causing one *specific* researcher to procrastinate (or, depending on your interpretation, being used as a scapegoat), which did lengthen it from “In a box.” to “In a box *in my office.*”. I figured the tradeoff was worthwhile, since that’s just a funnier story to tell.

2. Was the brevity in SCP-___-J a reaction to the Wiki at the time you wrote it, or something else entirely?

While I’ve been fairly outspoken about lengthy articles in the past few years, ___-J came out in January of 2012, when I was 16. This was well before I had really gotten the wherewithal to make metacommentary on Wiki trends, and if memory serves me correctly, it was also at a time when most SCPs were fairly brief (at least by modern standards). Truthfully, I can say that Underscore Dash Jay was just me joking about struggling to do my homework on time, but I do think that the joke is richer in the context of a site stocked with lengthy, ambitious articles.

3. Were there any specific articles which influenced how then containment procedures were written?

None in particular, though this came in when “put it in Researcher X’s office” was something most site members recalled being acceptable, so I have to assume this was a reaction to that.

4. Is there anything Dr. Vang would need to add to the SCP-___-J procedures to make them more effective?

The scary thing is it’s impossible to know.

5. What role do containment procedures have in Joke articles?

It depends whether you’re going for a -J that keeps a light tone throughout, or one that plays it straight until the punchline. If it’s a straightforwardly silly article, then containment procedures are just one more place to put in gags and goofs. If it’s a setup-punchline article, there’s a very real risk of giving the game away prematurely if you try to get cute during the procedures, and they should either contain some of that setup or be as unobtrusive as possible.

6. Are there ever situations in which containment procedures are unnecessary?

Yeah, absolutely. For starters, there are articles that have an in-universe reason to not have any containment procedures — maybe it’s impossible, or it’s possible and can’t be written down, or the situation is developing too quickly to make them matter. A few times, I’ve chosen to replace the procedures with something like a ‘Containment Status’ section, which basically lists what’s going on and what the Foundation intends to do about it.

More commonly, though, there are containment procedures that are fully vestigial — the SCP is an object, so keep it in a box. It’s a humanoid, so it’s in a containment chamber. It’s a meme, so don’t look at it. It could happen anywhere, so keep an eye out for media reports. These articles only really include containment procedures as a formality, since all the actual storytelling is done in the Description and beyond.

7. How have your feelings on SCP-___-J evolved over time?

When I was writing it, I thought it would be a funny idea that I could put minimal effort into and, if I was lucky, get a page on the site out of it. For a bit after it was posted, it was at about -5, so I was sincerely worried it would be deleted. And then it started, uh, getting popular. Over the next few years, my feelings shifted between amusement at the upvote-to-effort ratio, anticipation for the next time its rating overtook an older article or hit a big round number, and irritation that nothing I actually cared about would ever be this popular. I also quickly grew tired of the discussion section, where a lot of extremely funny people decided to talk about commenting later. Eventually, though, all my energy for feeling anything about the procrastination rock was used up. I ran out of things to think about it, and now I can’t help but feel entirely disassociated from it — like it’s something funny that happened to me a long time ago.

8. What is your personal approach to writing containment procedures?

I usually start by groaning, and then looking in the mirror and questioning my life decisions. Then I work backwards from whatever the anomaly is and try to make 2-6 very broad sentences that encompass the things I would expect the Foundation to do about the anomaly. This is because my distaste for writing containment procedures usually leads to me straying away from concepts that would require a lot of specificity. That’s not to say that I phone them in, though — once I know what *has* to be in them, I try to think of something that *could* be in them that would set the tone for the article to follow. I don’t want to put essential information in the containment procedures, since I know not everyone reads them, but if I can put a flavorful sentence in there for the people that *do* read them, that’s always nice. A lot of the time I put off writing the containment procedures until the rest of the article is done, but other times I’ll know *what* the anomaly is before I’ve really pinned down how I want to write it, so I’ll write the procedures while I’m brainstorming.

9. How would you describe the role of containment procedures in contemporary site culture?

I don’t think I can speak to what role they play in the *community*, since I’m only engaged with that on the periphery. I can say that, when I read newer works, I notice a larger gap between the articles that care about the containment procedures and the ones that don’t. Either the author definitely has an idea for integrating the procedures into the article, or they definitely don’t. Both are fine IMO, but I think authors don’t have as much willingness to loosely tie the containment to the description, and I suspect that within the next few years we’ll see people either largely abandon containment procedures or put them back in the spotlight fully.

10. What is your opinion on SCP-173’s containment procedures?

I’d argue they’re the most iconic part of the article, provided you include “The enclosure must be cleaned on a bi-weekly basis.” Countless stories, fanarts, and videos center around the image of three hapless personnel entering the room, cleaning up the puddle of blood and shit, and taking turns blinking in hopes that they don’t get instakilled. If they had taken the “rational” approach — installing a drain and never ever opening the door — I don’t think nearly as many people would have cared about this weird little creepypasta, because there would be so much less inviting them to ‘take part’ in the story.

The real *innovation* of SCP-173, I’d say, is bothering to frame the reader’s encounter with the monster that way at all. While the Foundation is probably the most central aspect of SCPs today, back then, the one thing that properly distinguished SCPs from anything else was that they are *contained*. The Rake is not locked in a box somewhere. Nobody has worked out the safest way to approach Slenderman. Jeff the Killer is not under control. Containment procedures are what really make SCP-173 stand out, and they opened an entirely new venue of writing about the unknown and the monstrous.