Sykespalace.com was created in 2002 by Anthony Bradshaw, known to his friends and family as Tony, to his tabletop roleplaying friends as Kierman, and to the internet as Syke O'Path. You can see what the site looked like in late 2002 (and onward) by clicking the archive tab at the top of the page there (courtesy of the Wayback project).
Originally the domain simply served as an alternate access point for roleplayers.info, a site Tony intended to build into a massive network of roleplayers and tabletop gamers. By 2003 he had decided to make the Syke's Palace homepage into a personal blog and general discussion forum, hosting pictures of his family, some photography, and fragments of stories and writing bourne out of his roleplaying sessions. He also started a forum specifically for parents of children suffering from Cystic Fibrosis, but it didn't get a lot of traffic considering the 0.011% incidence of the disease coupled with the 4% incidence of familiarity with the concept of an internet forum.
Over the years the internet grew older, and Tony grew older with it. By the time people were really getting to grips with blogs, forums and web communities in the mainstream, Tony had moved on to other projects, other hobbies and other online communities. Sykespalace.com stagnated and the domain expired in 2007.
Ten years later, Tony was killed in a car accident, leaving behind a wife, two college-age sons, and a sister.
Since March 9th 2017, Syke is no longer with us, but I thought that maybe he could still have a presence on the internet. I'm pretty sure the internet would feel pretty strange without him.
So I've put this site together, compiling some of the thoughts of his surviving family members, as well as some of his own writing, mostly in the form of some old poetry he had saved on his computer over the years. Also here is his original outline for the Dreamwalker novel saga, and the subsequent article he wrote titled How Not To Write a Book expressing his difficulty in actually writing it.
Because Dad was a writer. Dad was a lot of things, over the years. I wish, now, that I had pressed harder in getting him to write an autobiography, but I guess we're all going to have our regrets, aren't we? Maybe this site will get bigger as time goes on, as we who are left continue to think of Dad- of Tony- of the original Syke O'Path, and write things about him that he never had the time to write himself.
If nothing else, I think this site deserves to stay on the internet for at least a little longer. Here in Syke's Palace, Anthony Peter Bradshaw is remembered.
-Corwin Bradshaw
AKA Ganelon
AKA Syke Jr