had the idea for this RPC for about four years now (check the history log if you don't believe me). finally got around to writing it up
http://rpcsandbox.wikidot.com/owldudes-screamer-draft
wrote it in almost one sitting so right now it's very unpolished, I'm looking mainly for typo/tone fixups
Containment Protocols:
Instead of a (formerly …) for your classification it should be a strikethrough.
"All original copies of RPC-473 instances are stored in separate thumb-drives in Site-038's High-Security data server." Uh. Thumb-drives *inside* the server? I'm not an expert but I don't think that's how that works.
Description:
I see that you're proud of the video, but it being where it is right now is a bit of a flashbang. It should be a separate addendum or at least at the end of the description.
Winterrowd Event. Why? There isn't even a footnote explaining this choice. Change it to RPC-XXX Event or something similar.
Speaking of such, I don't think it should be classified as an event regardless. It's just the criteria for the anomaly's activation. "RPC-XXX will activate if the following circumstances are met:"
Discovery:
Missing a heading.
Discovered in when of 2008? January? October?
Replace rash with number. Doesn't add anything. Not only that, but you define the word you use at the end of the sentence.
I would add a cardinal direction to Europe, just to make it a bit more descriptive.
"a disinformation campaign was dispelled" Dispelled should be replaced with undergone, or something similar.
"were likewise amnesticized" Remove likewise.
"Further reclassification to Neutralized is currently pending approval." What? It certainly shouldn't. The anomaly is still very much anomalous. Just because this anomaly is seeing less reproduction doesn't mean it should be called unanomalous.
This last paragraph is very clunky but I can't figure out why.
Addendum 473-a:
Mojibake should be replaced with garbled or gibberish. It interrupts the flow.
The addenda don't need a unique title. Just call them -a and -b. Or better yet, -001 and -002.
Addendum 473-b:
Throwing a new classification at the end of the document is not a good idea. Introduce it earlier. I'm aware that the name of your video has this nomenclature, but maybe a table of notable videos with the classification would work.
The non-anomalous video shocked the creator due to its anomalous properties?
"Subject was later amnesticized after his innocence was fully determined." ax that last part, I think that one can infer that.
I like the idea. The execution is a bit iffy but that's to be expected. I notice that it's called RPC-473 instead of RPC-XXX. I assume you've reserved that classification but if not I advise it be swapped.
I don't have a great deal more to say, keep working at it and I think it could prove to be a splendid little article.
"Winterrowd Event" because it's named after Jeremy Winterrowd, the guy who made the Scary Maze Game and kickstarted the screamer craze.
Thanks for the crit regardless, I'll see what I can do
Short and sweet, but it ends a little bit too soon on a dull note. You have an excellent foundation with a fun spooky narrative, but the whole way through I was asking myself what could have been the source to their existence and some allusion to their curiosity. Having neither of these answered left out a lot to be desired, and I'm sure that can be covered in a paragraph or two at most.
It's fine, what's already here is pretty well executed and that video is a sight for sore eyes in an RPC, but I sense this is missing one bit to satisfy the reader's curiosity. This could be all me but I can't help but feel it could be so much more with one complimentary detail. Also
In addition, RPC-473-Α will manifest.
giving this line its own paragraph break was endearing to me.
designed to starter startle
containing at least one or more sealable entrances (doors, windows, etc).
What's the relevance of this, exactly? For the anomaly to come in and out of the area I'd assume but it comes off contrived.
Winterrowd Events vary wildly widely in duration
had been posted two weeks before RPC-473-46 was originally uploaded and recovered.
Wouldn't 46 be closer to early 2010s that it is to 2017? I'm assuming these are designated by time of discovery or manifestation, in which case around the mid 150s would be more believable.
This draft is disparate enough that I might misremember it as two separate articles.
No insight is given on the Web setting beyond "remember this?" I don't think I've seen an Internet-centric RPC that wasn't at least a little masturbatory, which is disappointing for such a broad contemporary topic, but usually it's serving some other end. Here it's the central topic of the article (this half of it, anyway) yet there's zero introspection. Do you have any clue what changed between the "old Internet" and now? The draft doesn't. The anomaly arbitrarily stops propagating in the mid-2010s. Why was it there to begin with?
Most can at least pay lip service to the creep from a decentralized information transmission network to a centralized, commercial entertainment venture. I don't mean you have to make that point, but it seems the most obvious with many real consequences. "Targeted censorship filters installed by Authority plant agents in large Web media platforms suppress the vast majority of Winterrowd Events." Get it? Because the Internet is no longer decentralized. That alone wouldn't save the draft from mediocrity (it's just a clever little application of an old trope), but it would at least make some sense of it.
Some parts of this draft bring computer literacy into question. I can't ask you to learn expert-level computing for the sake of one RPC, but it's reasonable to expect that you got the gist of the Internet Protocol:
Such accounts appear to post from non-existent IP and email addresses
Could you explain what this means? Accessing the Internet from a "nonexistent IP address" would be like asking someone to send mail to your nonexistent mailing address. Except you can't even format a request without an IP address, so scratch the "asking" part to begin with. If this only means the information is missing from any database or server log that would contain it, that might be plausible, though manipulating files on others' computers without direct interaction would raise concerns about what the anomaly even is.
Side-by-side analysis of both video files shows no apparent discrepancies, although the non-anomalous version was noticeably smaller in filesize compared to the anomalous one by ██ megabytes.
Files aren't magic; just because certain formats aren't human-readable doesn't mean it's a mystery what's inside of them. After all, humans write the programs that create and interpret them: the data must be structured consistently for various different programs to read. Certain formats make it possible to leave extra data that isn't normally read (see the aCropalypse bug), but if I'm to believe this extra data is being used in any way, then there must also be a way to reverse engineer what that data is.
For now, my money's on mundane generation loss.
Winterrowd Events are really generic with no apparent intent. The horror aspects are moot from the beginner's trap of expecting classic horror tropes to fly in an entirely different format. I don't think the humor was entirely lost on you, but lines like "one witness testimony reports it standing over and silently 'waiting' for the subject as they hid under the bed for thirty minutes" are still tryhard and cloying with no better effect.
All doors, windows and other passages leading to the outside will anomalously shut and cannot be opened until the cessation of the event.
Since you mention windows, what if I smash one? This seems to me like one of those endless vortexes of conceptual actualization where the only winning move is not to play and to come up with a different solution.
The entity is inconsistently tolerant of human presence, and it appears to display a curious temperament
We've been over this before. For that matter, this part of the shtick is concerningly familiar. Even moreso when "most sightings report RPC-473-Α fleeing or demanifesting as soon as it is noticed".
The entity is inconsistently tolerant of human presence
I thought this was foreshadowing but nothing came of it.
On December 22th 2016, a non-anomalous copy of RPC-473-46 ("Optical Illusions Gallery - CRAZY") was discovered on ███████.com during a routine platform search.
It took 6 years to discover an instance that had been there the whole time? Your crawler sucks.
Despite being apparently identical, the discovered copy did not possess any anomalous properties and, more disconcertingly, had been posted two weeks before RPC-473-46 was originally uploaded and recovered (██/██/2010).
What about this is disconcerting? And regardless, why should that be stated in the document?
Subject was able to procure his old laptop upon request, and the non-anomalous video file was soon discovered, corroborating his testimony.
In what way did sending them the video file they already had access to corroborate his testimony? Was there any doubt that he had the file he'd already uploaded online?
Subject was later amnesticized shortly thereafter.
Amnesticized? For what? He knows nothing and there was no reason to tell him anything important.
This ending provides no significant information. You mean to tell me that the videos may have spawned from mundane counterparts!? I just shat myself.
It's a botnet of computers posting videos that imitate an inaccurate perception of what the Internet used to be like back when "life was simple" (i.e. you were a kid), to a summon an entity that cuts your power, locks your doors, and wanders about your house before leaving. Error 404: purpose not found. I'm disappointed because I want to see the topic used well.
An anomalous Flash might be more interesting, being something closer to anart, unique to the time period, and potentially interactive. On the complete opposite end, an anomalous YTMND would be kind of funny.
Not all of these are erroneous, but the draft is way too hyphen-happy and all of these could be replaced.
Playback of any of these instances outside of a testing environment is forbidden without the explicit approval of a Level 4 researcher or Site Director.
Why would they want to play the video outside of a testing environment?
RPC-473 is collection of 168 digital video files possessing anomalous properties, recovered from various online video platforms.
Infix the dangly modifier like so: "[…] files recovered from various online video platforms which possess […]". To clarify that the effect is singular and spare yourself the awkward backtrack in the next sentence, change to something like "possessing a shared anomalous property".
All recovered instances vary wildly in content and context, but invariably possess the same effect and include a sudden change accompanied by an unsettling image and/or loud noise designed to startle the viewer
"Vary wildly in content and context, but invariably possess the same effect" draws a meaningless contrast. This description is pretty uninformative, with no attempt to explain the nature of the "bait" content, and the jumpscare is itself vague; is it the same image/sound between videos? (If it's not — and this is more of a philosophical question, but — what's even the point of the screamer to the anomaly?)
characteristic with the "screamer" subgenre of internet videos.
characteristic of
This "subgenre of internet videos" nomenclature strikes me as a retrospective exonym used mainly by the chronically online, not something a serious researcher in the 2010s would say.
A type of practical joke which was prevalent on the internet in the late 2000s and early-to-mid 2010s.
This footnote doesn't really explain anything relevant.
Analysis of metadata shows no apparent oddities.
You mean regular file data, unless they're looking at the bitrate.
When an instance of RPC-473 is played on a digital device and allowed to continue until the "screamer" segment, a Winterrowd Event will occur. Criteria for a Winterrowd Event to trigger successfully are as follows:
Small potatoes, but you explain how to trigger the event, then jump into a list explaining how to actually trigger the event. It renders the whole list fluff since I already know the takeaway before it begins… though the first sentence of the excerpt is oversimplified to the point of being arguably misleading (in many cases, this setup alone would not trigger the event).
You use scare quotes every time you say "screamer". It's a central part of the article, so find a good name for "the screamer segment".
As an aside, I'm cagey on the name "Winterrowd Event". What adult in the 2010s is professionally naming something after the Scary Maze Game guy? But one could say it needed a distinctive name. The bigger question is why it needs a name; you could probably get by without it. At the end of the day it feels like it has a quirky name just because you wanted it to, and that's more damning than anything else.
The video is played between the hours of 8:00 P.M.. and 6:00 A.M..
Erroneous duplicate period after "P.M.". With how the sentence ends, it might be worth considering a less awkward way to write the timestamps. You can omit periods from "AM" and "PM" or just use a 24-hour clock.
The device playing the video is in an indoor "home" environment connected to an electricity supply. [Footnote: Individual apartments can be affected, although the Winterrowd Event will not extend to the entire apartment complex.]
"Indoor home environment" is hopelessly vague and scare quotes didn't help. "Connected to an electricity supply" probably goes without saying if the device is playing digital video. The footnote covers a single special case and doesn't significantly help. (It's also aligned awkwardly at full page width, taking an entire line for itself.)
There is at least one person in the location containing the device (This usually applies to the viewer).
Put a period after "device", is what I would say, but the parenthetical is obvious and should be cut. "The location" is a little vague; saying instead "the environment" could tie well into the existing paradigm.
If one or more criteria for a Winterrowd Event are not met
"If the criteria for" would suffice.
consistent with catastrophic hard-drive failure.
I don't see what's so "consistent" about it. I can think of a few other mundane things that would manifest similarly.
Upon reactivation, the device will not show any signs of damage or corruption, though occasionally text files of unknown origin can be found in random directories (See Addendum 473-α).
I'd consider the sudden appearance of corrupted text files on a hard drive some indicator of "corruption", even if it's not lasting. You don't specify clearly here that (as we see later) "text files" means they have a .txt extension and aren't just files that contain text data. Lowercase "see" in the parenthetical.
succesfully
successfully
All doors, windows and other passages leading to the outside will anomalously shut and cannot be opened until the cessation of the event.
How does a door or window "anomalously shut"? Some poltergeist thing, I guess?
External power/light sources (flashlights, candles, etc) will not be affected.
"External" is a poor word choice, since all of these must be within the environment for the sentence to mean anything. It's doubly misleading because the previous sentence is about the actual outside.
Upon the mass-takedown of confirmed RPC-473 instances
This "mass takedown" subject has never been introduced before, but you use it like it has. "Upon" is not a great way to correlate the mass takedown with the disinformation campaign since they're really parts of a whole.
RPC-473 was initially classified as Gamma-Yellow
I could see that. (Also, a semicolon is used here as though the next sentence will add context, but it doesn't come until three sentences later.)
Authority webcrawler Π-1034 (“JUMP-SCARE”)
What kind of name is "JUMP-SCARE"? It's just a little weird. One minute they talk about "subgenres of internet video" and now they sound like old people coming to grips with the kids' stuff.
programmed search for
programmed to search for
Although the traffic of new RPC-473 instances was initially active
Rephrase.
Attempts to track down the identities of accounts posting RPC-473 instances has proven futile
"Has" should be "have".
and typically self-terminate upon the subsequent takedown of posted content
"Subsequent" is confusing because the latter precedes the former from this excerpt. The intended meaning of "the takedown is subsequent to the posting" is also misleading because the latter is a trait of the anomaly and the former is the result of Authority actions. The word "subsequent" would be superfluous regardless.
This has lent credence to the theory that offending accounts operate from a bot network, but the true intentions behind the spread of RPC-473 instances, if any, remain unknown.
The first half of this sentence is baseless speculation, and the second half is just saying "we don't know". It's wholly inessential.
Upon being interrogated, the subject showed marked confusion and disbelief; he explained that he had created the video in question as a prank for his friends, and he was completely unaware of any anomalous properties or events that had occurred upon being uploaded.
Every part of this excerpt is vaguely poor.
I tried doing a rewrite that preserves the "spirit" of the original, but I'd probably just boil the entire bit down to something like "███████ attested to creating the original video but was unaware of RPC-473 and found to have no further affiliation." If you want to do more, then give him some actual dialogue.
