gm foxes,

Happy Anniversary!

To celebrate the beginning of Year Two of the Philosophical Foxes project, we’re getting everyone a shiny new content engine for Narrative 01.

This week, we will be launching the first of three stages for our new Heads & Tales content initiative.

The goal of Heads & Tales will be to incentivize and direct our community as we collaboratively create our characters’ shared reality in a simple and asynchronous way.

We will slowly and steadily be establishing lore, discovering new lands, and taking our beloved 2.5-dimensional foxes and turning them into full-fledged 3-dimensional characters with loves and fears, wants and needs, histories and futures.

In this initial introductory phase, the team (Picnic, Lightning, Palefire, and Redemption) have set bounties for 50 terms we would like the community to define.  Each approved definition will:

• be added to the project’s Wiki

• be tweeted from the main PF Twitter account

• pay the holder/author .01 ETH.

These 50 terms can be found at the bottom of this Mirror post. The logistics of the submission process will be described in more detail when we’re ready to receive entries later this week.

The second stage of Heads & Tales will have two parts:

1.) bounties for the best Heads submitted by the community. These submissions can be created painlessly using the Endless Thinker app.

2.) I (Red AKA Redemption) will select which Heads will be shared via the PF Twitter account and build a Story Seed (AKA Twitter thread) around each Head

Heads and Story Seeds will launch in November. More details on these will come later in this article and then even more details will follow next month when we are ready to accept submissions of Heads.

The third stage – bounties for Tales – will start in January 2023.

Heads & Tales: The Bird’s-Eye View

The three stages of Heads & Tales are designed to build on and replenish one another in perpetuity (we hope).

In Stage One, the Wiki entries will establish our “base reality” for the project’s lore.  The Wiki content will be like the soil in our story ecosystem.

In Stage Two, approved Heads will be the core of Story Seeds that will be shared with the world as Twitter threads. The most successful Seeds will sprout into Tales.

In Stage Three, holders can write (or sponsor someone else to write) Tales based on their Story Seeds.

Each Tale will set new precedents in the lore which will lead to new Wiki entries (and updates to old entries) which will in turn provide fertile new soil for the next batch of Story Seeds.

Stage One: The Fox Wiki

Wiki entries should be:

• At least 125 words.

  • There is no maximum limit, but the PF team reserves the right to edit them down if we feel it necessary.

• Fully aligned with, and inclusive of, already established Philosophical Fox lore

• Written in the voice of fox historians far in the future. This means they can be opinionated, biased, imperfect, or inclusive of knowledge not yet known to our current generation of foxes.

  • If your wiki entry is too dry (i.e. just a series of factual statements strung together, or reads like a wikipedia article), you’re not doing it right. This is a creative endeavor, not a copy+paste endeavor.

  • So, for example, if you are writing an entry for The Dark Sea, you wouldn’t simply say “it is to the West of x and the South of y.” Instead, possible angles could be: 1.) famous events and/or disappearances that happened there, 2.) descriptions of how the sea behaves in different seasons and the changes the seasons have on the local ecosystem, 3.) a description of an adventure that your Fox had on The Dark Sea that has echoed through the ages, etc.

  • The goal of these wiki entries is to create a rich understanding of the environment and lore so that your entry can inspire future Fox storytellers and provide a number of launching-off points for those future authors.

• The best wiki entries will connect to 2-5 other wiki entries in a way that expands the known lore and creates new connections that were previously unknown.

• Once approved (by me, Palefire, and Picnic, Lightning), entries will be eternalized in the Notion wiki for all to reference.

  • The logistics of submitting entries, receiving payments, etc. will come later this week as we iron out specifics with our new partner, Station.

Prior to full approval, some wiki entries may receive notes for requested revisions and will then need to re-submit the updated entry via Station.

Stages Two & Three: Story Seeds, Heads, & Tales:

We’re going to keep information on the latter two stages at a high level for now – plenty of more details will be coming down the pipe over the next few weeks.

Story Seeds are an evolution of the Heads from my original “Heads & Tales” bounty pitch. Community members will submit a Head (logistics TBD), and – when it is approved – that Head will serve as the core for a Tweet thread I will create and publish.

A Head is an image of a fox (that you own) paired with a philosophical quote that is meaningful to both you and your fox (based on their character traits and personal philosophy). These can be created incredibly easily through the Endless Thinker webpage.

Example of a Head:

So, the Heads are the meme-like images created through Endless Thinker. Story Seeds are the Tweet threads that are then built (by Redemption) around the Heads.

Each Seed will be a concise and interesting premise for a potential Tale. The goal is that each Seed contains the essential story foundations of: Character, Setting, and Story Arc.

The Seeds that drive the most engagement on Twitter will be turned into Tales and will build on those already-established story foundations of Character, Setting and Story Arc.

If you are going to turn your Story Seed into a Tale, that Tale will feature your fox (the same fox from the Seed) and the Tale’s story arc will seek to prove, disprove, or otherwise explore the quote used in your Head.

Selected Seeds will be shared by the main PF Twitter account at least 2x a week with the possibility for more if supply and demand allow.

Heads used in published Seeds will net its creator .01 ETH and open the door for the submitting Holder to write (or sponsor someone else to write) the corresponding Tale about their Fox.

Approved Tales will be inducted into our canon, published on Mirror, immortalized in The Fox Wiki, and net the author .15 ETH.

The goal will be for 50% of Seeds to be created by Redemption and 50% to be created by the community, although Redemption will fire off the first few to establish precedents for format, etc.

More specific details on the processes and logistics around Seeds and Tales will come as we get closer to launching those initiatives.

If the above wall of text was too much information, hopefully this amateur-ish infographic can help:

Let’s build our world together!

CVS,

Redemption Fox

FAWQ (Frequently Asked Wiki Questions):

Can I start writing wiki entries now?

Yes, but you won’t be able to submit them for a few days as we spin up our collaboration with Station.

We’ll be sharing more information on each initiative (Wiki entries, Story Seeds, and Tales) as we get closer to launching each phase, and would suggest that folks wait for the formal launch of Story Seeds and Tales before starting to work on Heads or Tales!

As always, if you want to create and share Heads just for the fun of it, please do so! Not all Heads have to be created with this project in mind.

Do I have to be a Holder of a Fox NFT in order to participate?

Yes! Station submissions will be token-gated so only confirmed holders can submit and earn bounties. We will re-visit the idea of completely open submissions at a later date.

Is there a limit to how many bounties I can complete?

At the moment, no! If you’re excited about creating lore for our Foxverse, we welcome multiple submissions.

What if multiple people submit for the same term?

Multiple entries can be submitted for the same term, but only one will be approved and added to the foxes wiki. The author of the approved term will receive the bounty for that term. Once an entry has been approved/accepted, the “state” of the term will change to reflect that the entry is now closed from further submissions.

Will I get paid immediately upon submitting?

No, but hopefully soon after! We’ll be reviewing / approving submissions in bulk. We’ll likely batch all payments together once a week. This is subject to change as we discover what processes work best for us and the community.

What about Chronicle?

Heads & Tales is not replacing Chronicle.  When Chronicle comes online, it will serve as another – hopefully complementary – engine for our community to create Fox content.

The First 50 Wiki Bounties:

This information will be shared in more conveniently accessible places (Discord + GDocs) once we are ready to accept submissions. At that time, we will also share the logistics of submitting your definitions and receiving your rewards.

A starting point for the first 44 terms can be found in our Mirror article “The Mythology of Foxes”. The final six terms are Fox character traits that we think could use some clarification for the community.

Without further ado:

1 Terra Volpa
2 Perdita
3 Alucinora
4 Shadowoods
5 Rostrum
6 Grand Hannibal
7 Cax
8 Multo
9 Dark Sea
10 Slow Copse
11 Chrome Peak
12 Long Lagoon
13 Oseaan
14 Sleeping River
15 Little-End
16 Mahka
17 Mimicgorge
18 Singan
19 Karai-Gol
20 Telescope hills
21 Corpus Colossi
22 Trace Fork
23 The Unknowing
24 Silly Hills
25 Kapatagan Plains
26 Stogai
27 Absentia Pass
28 Interruptors
29 Hamoban Feuen
30 Splinter Lightning
31 Not-here River
32 Hidden Hillocks
33 Somni
34 The Long Sleep
35 Belua The Insane
36 Binary fur
37 Limnus
38 Ore
39 Catalus
40 Feral Range
41 Zwilling
42 Retrogradi
43 Hummm
44 The Ellipsis
45 Genesis foxes
46 Noosphere N00b
47 Uwu
48 Smooth love potion
49 Proletkult
50 Gifted Child Syndrome