Observations of the Fox

I recently discovered gifcities.org , while building the new neocities website for vulpinoid studios (if you're interested, look here ). I've been interested in the concept of the underground resurgence of the free web as a backlash against Web3.0 which is awesomely punk in its aesthetic. Neocities feels like the way the web used to be before the rise of Facebook and other social media platforms, a bit of a wild west where people can lay claim to an address and just do whatever cool stuff they want.  As a part of this, there has been a reclaiming of the 88x31 gif button, which is how I got led to GifCities. There's argument about how this standardised size was developed, with folks pointing to an early Netscape Navigator button as the prototype.    But it moved beyond there to other programs, and other links between sites back in GeoCities and MySpace days.   It's not hard to make something like this, and the file format is pretty small, so I figured I'd make my own...

 This is one of my oldest surviving notebooks, and it's so packed with ideas that I'll split the overview into 2 parts... It begins with an idea I had called "New Hope City", I can also see some old geocities web addresses written inside the front cover, so that's the first piece of evidence I'm using to pick my date of late 1990s for this notebook (I wonder if those links still work at any level).  "New Hope City" is an idea I've revisited a few times over the years, but it's never managed to get anywhere beyond a short campaign, and a couple of visits during various plane hopping and dimension jumping stories. We can start to see ideas that will be common through this notebook, where I had an absolute fascination with tying the Kabbalistic Tree of Life into a game system. This goes on for almost twenty pages, and there is a gradual shift from the "New Hope City" setting to the ethereal "Floating World" setting that I dev...

 Vulpinoid Studios hasn't had a website for a while. It got to a point where the domain name had been adopted by a random advertiser, and then it seems that even they gave up paying for a domain name that wasn't generating a worthwhile amount of traffic.  Redeveloping a website is something that's been sitting in the back of my mind for a couple of years, along with so many other projects... but, in the last couple of days I've found a site hosting hub called Neocities . It kind of feels like a return to the pre-social media days of mySpace, or even further back to those days of Geocities (whoich is probably where the name derives from). I've even seen people developing webrings on this platform, and that brings back memories. If you're interested with where I've started on this new website, the address for the experimental site is... vulpinoid.neocities.org    

It was my finding of this notebook that prompted this series of posts.   When I found it again during my art studio clean up at the end of 2025 I remembered the notebook, but I couldn't remember when I was writing in it. I've seen it in my notebook piles for years and every now and then I've cracked it open to see if "past me" could give "current me" some inspiration. Like a lot of my notebooks, there's artistic practice and drawing exercises scattered through them. This was obviously in one of my "stippling" phases, which I've gone through a couple of times after a few conversations with artists I've met of the years. When artists I respected like Keith Parkinson told me that they'd never been able to get the hang of stippling, it was probably a combination of hubris and spite that got me to practice the technique. Other pages are sequences of worldbuilding ideas... this instance is the start of an idea about a sci-fi setting b...

I've been sorting some things out at home while I build a new library for my collection of gaming books and other texts. As a part of that sorting, I've found a whole heap of notebooks stretching back over 30 years of design  I don't know if anyone's interested in actually seeing a few scanned pages from these books, mostly because even though I've had hundreds of thousands of views last year, I've only had a handful of comments and most of them have been spam... so I'm just throwing more stuff into the void to see what might get a bit of traction.  So for the next few days (or weeks), I'll just upload a few scans from different old notebooks, and consider what I might have been thinking at the time. A part of this will probably then go on to explain how my game design and worldbuilding ideas might have changed in the meantime. We'll see what happens. 

 He wasn't a close friend, he was an acquaintance I knew who shared a passion for game design. He was someone I shared meals and drinks with, and who I talked gaming and game design with... ...and now he's gone. Steve's last public work was a blog post with a link to an unfinished game . Curiously, there's a bit of overlap with my last post with topics of Dunning-Kruger in it, and it generally touches on a lot of the ideas that arose in discussions I had with him. There's lots of mediocre stuff out there and mediocre people who have only managed to get public attention because they've got confidence more than refined skill or natural talent. The catch is that you need to actually do things, and not be discouraged by the mediocre crap that's getting more attention. Like Steve, this has been a long term struggle for me, and I know plenty of other talented designers who feel a similar way.  Steve was generally a friendly and genial person (at least that's w...

It's a heavy start to 2026, but here goes...   I saw this news article a couple of days ago, and was really conflicted in the thoughts I had about it. The title of this post basically sums things up, yet I really need to deconstruct the ideas embedded here. I just need to get those ideas out of my head, because they've been festering. It also goes back to the earliest posts I wrote on the blog when I started it. ( Here 's where it all started, but I really got to the point in the second and third posts)  In the second post I referred to an idea that I called "Corporate Chromatography" at the time, and a lot of my thoughts at the time hold true almost 18 years later (wow, 18 years, has it really been that long) . The point behind that post was the idea that those at the top of the corporate world love to say that "the cream rises to the top", however in my experience "pond scum rises to the top". Those with the lowest amount of ethics to weigh...