It's April 18th, 2024, marking this as the Library's 14th birthday! 14 years ago, DrMann and PairOfDucks made a thread to announce their new SCP spin-off site focusing on fantasy and stories that inspire 'wonder'. And here we are.
I'm happy to announce another up-swing year for the Library — looking around now, it's hard to imagine there was ever a time where the doors were closed and the shelves were empty. It's important to think back to those times, but it's just as important to recognize how far we've come, and how much effort and creativity our community has brought to the site.
From April 2023 to April 2024, we've had
- 363 surviving entries posted to the site
- ~700 new members join the site
- 1 explosive and exciting contest
This has been an interesting year for the Library — particularly interesting to me, because I've been watching it very much as an outsider for once. It's been fascinating to see the community grow and develop and change in so many ways.
Right off the bat, so many entries! Some really great new series and canons arising out of them, with dedicated fans and enthusiasts. The Library has always struggled with continuity in works, so seeing series and serials arise and get a warm reception as they have is super heartening.
Contests! We only had the one proper contest this year, but what a contest it was! ComboCon was a novel effort spearheaded by LAN and went super well — having read all of the entries, I can say that the average quality was super high, and an absolutely fantastic way to reacquaint myself with where the site is at. Some truly stellar works came out of that contest — congratulations to everyone who participated!
We also had a new SSS event this year, TitanClash LIVE! A community-crafted cyberpunk setting of corporate dystopia and kaiju beatdowns. Seeing the setting and lore come together was awesome, plus everyone's high-octane entries for it and earning their wings/roles. The event may be over but the setting is, of course, still entirely open for contribution — if you want to write giant horrifying lab-created monstrosities fighting each other for fun and profit, hit up UC's fantastic hub and give it a gander!
Overall, I think this year was more of a relaxed one for the Library — not every year can be back-to-back-to-back contests and events, and that's good! This year has been a great opportunity to let the community settle into a rhythm of reading and writing, a nice natural baseline. But even that baseline comes with constantly-impressive works, creations, series, and collections from you guys.
Looking Forward
I have a happy announcement — Wing One is basically fully tagged according to the new tag system! Our new system has been on a slow rollout for nearly two years now, and it's super exciting to have it in a place where we can formalize it as the default. It's much more flexible and makes it so much easier to categorize and search works by genre, tone, style, and content — super important as the Library diversifies ever-further in the kinds of content we host. We're planning on rolling out an initiative for you guys to tag your own works according to the new system and hopefully get everything brought under the same umbrella pretty soon.
We're also planning on running more contests and events this year than we did this past year. For a number of reasons, contests and events kind of took a backseat for us this year, both because of how many were being run on SCP and our staff's own lives. But with Wing Two being nearly three-quarters full, it's looking like that contest might be on the horizon, and of course we always love offering our writers new opportunities to explore styles. We have been asked to repeat some contest ideas like Debate Club, and we're definitely considering those, but we think that there's still a lot of new contest ideas we'd like to explore first before returning to the old classics. Keep an eye out for those!
I'd also like to explore analyzing our critique culture on the site. We've had a few conversations about the role and position downvotes and 'harsh' critique hold on our site, and it's an interesting conversation! I think the Library is a really chill place for a lot of writers, but we could definitely afford to be more critical in how we process and interact with the works posted to the site if we want to uphold our responsibility to make each other better writers. But that's a big conversation for some time in the future.
It's been a wonderful year for the site, and I'm sure the next will be just as great — happy birthday, Library!