Hello everyone, and welcome to our first official newsletter. If you're receiving this, congrats, you made it onto our mailing list! Want to tune into the newest episode? Check it out now

Today, we're heading into SCP-4703, written by PeppersGhost. You can read more of PeppersGhost's work here. We've covered a couple of their articles, like SCP-1861: "Crew of the HMS Wintersheumer", and SCP-2030: "Laugh is Fun". If you haven’t read any of their work, I highly recommend checking them out!

Get your Retro photos!

ICYMI: Today is the last day to sign up on our Patreon to receive our first batch of retro pictures (printed on actual photo paper)!

I'm super excited to send these out, I've even started stuffing envelopes! This is, of course, our first test batch, so if you love them or hate them, let us know how we can improve. Our first batch of "retro photos" features two terrifying designs from the incredible Valdevia. You might recognize his work from our episode covers!

These two designs feature SCP-173 and SCP-6000. Wanna hear a little history on Val's SCP-173 piece? You might be thinking, "That's not the peanut I recognize..." and you'd be right!

A Micro-History Lesson

When the SCP fandom first moved onto wikidot in 2008, it brought with it a collection of posts and artwork from 4chan. Included in this first set of stories was "SCP-173." As the wiki grew, and new authors started contributing their own stories, a couple of rules were set.

The most important one was this: Everything on the SCP wiki must be released under the Creative Commons Share Alike (CC-BY-SA 3.0) license. Meaning anyone on the internet is free to reshare, adapt, and otherwise modify the content from the wiki as long as they give credit to the original author, and release their artwork under the same license. This license is what allows us to make our podcast!

But not all the images on the wiki were cleared correctly for use. A couple of years ago, the Licensing Team began sweeping through the wiki and replacing old images with properly licensed ones.

The one major exception to this rule was the inclusion of Izumi Kato's Untitled 2004. Kato kindly allowed the wiki to use his artwork on the site, with the condition that the CC-BY-SA license didn't apply. As it was one of the very first images ever uploaded to the wiki, and became synonymous with much of the fandom, it remained for a long time.

But, as time went on, and other images were updated, SCP-173 remained as the sole outlier. In 2022, the licensing team made the decision to remove Untitled 2004 from the website. You can read more about the decision on this reddit post

Many were disheartened by losing such a big piece of fandom history, but this gave way to a very unique contest on the wiki! Introducing, The Peanut Gallery. To celebrate 173's storied history, artists from all around the globe took a stab at their own interpretations. And there's some pretty fantastic interpretations. Here's a couple of my favorites:

Val's wonderful design came from this contest! And it's my favorite interpretation of SCP-173 (though I suppose I'm a bit biased, right?)

I promise, future newsletters probably won't be this long, but I thought I'd share a fun SCP history lesson with you!

Reader Mail

Each week we’re going to collect your burning questions, and some of our favorite comments online and share them here!

If you’d like a chance to have your comment featured, check out the question I posed at the end of this newsletter. And if you have a burning question for the team, let us know below or by emailing contact@midnightdisease.net.

Here are a couple of my favorite comments from Spotify last week!

Daisy? Daisy Tonner?! Is this a MAG reference? A Dog Names Smack

Please do “there once was a crooked man” one of the best scps I ever read, would fit perfectly into the archive, can’t remember the numbered though, sorry. Nik Madanayake

Great news, Nik! We covered SCP-783: “The Crooked Man” back in ‘21! Check it out!

Just found out if you spam rewind you can go into negative time -14 to be exact (fun fact). The Chaos Consoler

And shout outs & thanks to !!⭐starsillyshark⭐!!, Quinn Pollard, and Ima_Bread for the birthday wishes! Thanks y’all

We want to hear from you!

Hey! If you stuck around to the end, thanks for reading! I just got one question for you: What's the most interesting job in the Foundation?

Next Thursday, we'll answer your burning questions, and share some of our favorite answers. Do you have a question for us? Let us know in the comments below, or by emailing us at contact@midnightdisease.net.

We'll be back with SCP-4511: Swine God. You don't want to miss it. See you next week!

~ Pacific