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Fluff Pieces Every Week

Tag: camp

Get freaky at Dante’s InFURno – the Burning Man theme camp for sex-positive furries.

by Patch O'Furr

Burning Man in photos (Reuters/Jim Urquhart)

Burning Man in photos. (Reuters/Jim Urquhart)

Burning Man is the annual, radical art festival in Nevada. It draws creative people of all stripes to a temporary city in the desert for anything-goes social experimenting.  It’s been there since 1990 (the year of ConFurence 1 – maybe we can call them subcultures of a shared zeitgeist.)  It fertilizes the roots of some of Furry’s most exciting activity.  It’s one of those Furry Illuminati connections that casual members may not know. (There’s no Wikifur page for Burning Man).

Find the Burner/Furry connection in my interview with Neonbunny. He founded the festival’s Camp Fur. Those carroty roots grew into his series of dance parties in the San Francisco Bay Area, which led him to found Frolic party in 2010. That spawned a mini-movement of furry dances across North America.

See Camp Fur and what it’s for at Furryburners.com:DSC02200FUR-Events-2

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NEWSDUMP – Fur-friendly culture, mascot boot camp – (7/25/16)

by Patch O'Furr

Here’s headlines, links and little stories to make your tail wag.  Tips: patch.ofurr@gmail.com.

Mascot Boot Camp in the Washington Post.

They sent a reporter to Mascot-Boot-Campattend Mascot Boot Camp. It’s run by Dave Raymond.  “Dave was the original Phillie Phanatic — the first to inhabit the green costume in 1978. In the mascot community, he is something of a founding father.”

Dave is also founder of The Mascot Hall of Fame. It’s scheduled to open in Indiana in 2017.  They said that he has run the Mascot Boot Camp for more than 20 years and it will continue at their new venue. Here’s a video for the 2016 camp.

In 2015 I did a series about crossover of fursuiting and professional sports mascots. Look for update articles next week with a Q&A from Uncle Kage, an MFF organizer, and Cornbread Wolf (who fursuits for fun at sports games.)

Frog and Toad are a proto-furry relationship story.

The New Yorker covers the beloved classic children’s book series by Arnold Lobel. “During his career, he worked on dozens of children’s books, both as a writer and as an illustrator… His specialty was animals and their misadventures.”

According to his daughter:

“Adrianne suspects that there’s another dimension to the series’s sustained popularity. Frog and Toad are ‘of the same sex, and they love each other… It was quite ahead of its time in that respect.’ In 1974, four years after the first book in the series was published, Lobel came out to his family as gay. ‘I think ‘Frog and Toad’ really was the beginning of him coming out'”…

frogIt’s interesting to look at how anthropomophism, character and sexuality came together in simple friendship stories. You don’t need to know about the author for the stories to be just as good, but the writing is very personal.  These are mainstream children’s books, but I might dare to say that the hidden meaning gives them more in common with furry fan fic than anyone but us would understand.

“Furlesque” at Cincinnatti Fringe Fest.

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Camp Feral!: Fifteen Years, 1998 – 2012 (Part 3) – by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

Article with Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.  Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

Camp Feral! An all-inclusive furry summer camp where the registration fee covers your food, lodging and activities for the most unique and memorable furry experience of your life! Your fee covers all the coffee you can drink, [and] all the breakfast lunch or dinner you can eat.” (from the Camp Feral! 2012 website)

Camp Feral! is the oldest of the recorded outdoor furry conventions, going back to 1998. It is also Canada’s oldest furry event, and the fourth oldest continuing furry convention (after EuroFurence in 1995 and Anthrocon and Mephit FurMeet in 1997). It was started after the oldest furry annual convention, ConFurence in Southern California (1989), gave rise to U.S. East Coast furry conventions in 1995 to 1997 (Furtasticon, Confurence East, Albany Anthrocon), inspiring Canadian furry fans to start their own convention – but with a difference.

300px-Feral

Camp Feral!:  Fifteen Years, 1998 – 2012, Part 3

Camp Feral! X, at Camp Arowhon, was August 27 – 31, 2007. The U.S. financial crisis affected attendance adversely, dropping it back to about 80 campers. It focused upon the Camp’s tenth anniversary. The Feral! Survival Guide featured a retrospective by Terry Wessner titled “It’s Like Herding Cats, Only Moreso”. Registration was now C$325 for regular campers, C$375 for Sponsors, and C$495 for patrons, plus the C$45 bus fee.

Guests of Honour were three Canadian furry artists; Ferris (Chuck Davies), Gideon Hoss (of Club Stripes), and Max Blackrabbit (Malcolm Earle). The FeralCom staff was mostly the same: Potoroo and Patchouli (co-chairs), Verec (registration and logistics), Grex (finances), WilyKat and Growler (security), Dralen (workshop coordiator), Crono (activities coordinator), Cobalt (conbook and activities editor), and Blake, Desertwolf, Khaki Wolf, and Srice (gofurs).

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Camp Feral!: Fifteen Years, 1998 – 2012 (Part 2) – by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

Article with Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.  Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

Camp Feral! An all-inclusive furry summer camp where the registration fee covers your food, lodging and activities for the most unique and memorable furry experience of your life! Your fee covers all the coffee you can drink, [and] all the breakfast lunch or dinner you can eat.” (from the Camp Feral! 2012 website)

Camp Feral! is the oldest of the recorded outdoor furry conventions, going back to 1998. It is also Canada’s oldest furry event, and the fourth oldest continuing furry convention (after EuroFurence in 1995 and Anthrocon and Mephit FurMeet in 1997). It was started after the oldest furry annual convention, ConFurence in Southern California (1989), gave rise to U.S. East Coast furry conventions in 1995 to 1997 (Furtasticon, Confurence East, Albany Anthrocon), inspiring Canadian furry fans to start their own convention – but with a difference.

300px-Feral

Camp Feral!:  Fifteen Years, 1998 – 2012, Part 2

“The park had brought in a naturalist to lead a Wolf Howl.  Apparently this is a regular event in Algonquin Park.  First there was a very informative slide show and presentation, then the naturalist took us outside and tried to get the wolves to howl.  What he does is that he howls three times, then waits to see if the wolves respond.  If after a few rounds they do not, then several naturalists howl together as though it was a pack howling, sometimes that will get the wolves to howl back. Unfortunately, on this night they didn’t howl.  Might have been the rain. I could imagine them sheltering themselves from the rain and laughing at the stupid humans out getting soaked and howling.

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Camp Feral!: Fifteen Years, 1998 – 2012 (Part 1) by Fred Patten

by kiwiztiger

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

200px-Feral

Camp Feral! An all-inclusive furry summer camp where the registration fee covers your food, lodging and activities for the most unique and memorable furry experience of your life! Your fee covers all the coffee you can drink, [and] all the breakfast lunch or dinner you can eat.” (from the Camp Feral! 2012 website)

Camp Feral! is the oldest of the recorded outdoor furry conventions, going back to 1998. (There may have been earlier informal furry camping trips that made no claim of being conventions.) It is also Canada’s oldest furry event, and the fourth oldest continuing furry convention (after EuroFurence in 1995 and Anthrocon and Mephit FurMeet in 1997). It was started after the oldest furry annual convention, ConFurence in Southern California (1989), gave rise to U.S. East Coast furry conventions in 1995 to 1997 (Furtasticon, Confurence East, Albany Anthrocon), inspiring Canadian furry fans to start their own convention – but with a difference.

Camp Feral! was conceived by several Toronto-area Furry fans. P. Pardus said in the Feral! 99! Survival Guide that it got started by him and Terry Wessner asking each other “what if” questions during Albany Anthrocon ’97. Other furs remember the planning as starting just after the first Albany Anthrocon in July 1997, while still others remember it as preceding the first Anthrocon but inspired by Anthrocon’s pre-con publicity. In any case, everyone agrees that Albany Anthrocon gave them the idea. The original plan, to have an outdoor summer camping retreat with furry workshops instead of a traditional hotel-style convention (it is often called the “uncon” because it is so different from other furry conventions), is credited to P. (Panthera) Pardus (Ken Suzuki) of Mississauga, and Silfur (Dan Markey) and Terry Wessner of Toronto. They held several organizational meetings from summer 1997 through early 1998, led by Pardus in Wessner’s 22nd floor Toronto apartment. The Camp Feral! name is credited to MelSkunk (Melissa Drake), in response to a call for a name that was “evocative without being too open to ridicule”. The initial committee consisted of Pardus (chairman), Wessner (facilitator), and Silfur (activities coordinator), plus Simba (Benjamin Eren Robinson, also known as Benjamin; advertising director and web site developer) and Wilykat (Colin Bolton; safety and security), all of Toronto-area furry fandom. The committee and workshop instructor posts for this and future years have not always had the formal titles that they do today – Pardus and Wessner were known at FeralCom meetings as “president-for-life” and “facilitator” — but these are the furs and the jobs that they were responsible for. Wessner bankrolled the first Camp Feral!, which operated at a steep loss because the committee seriously underestimated expenses. (He was reimbursed over several years.) Read the rest of this entry »

“All the Single Furries” parody fursuit video provokes special awe

by Patch O'Furr

It’s the video they LOVE to hate.  They can’t tear their eyes away while they stare.  There must be some German word for that emotion – something that means spellbound horror. hell

I shared it without comment, shortly after it was posted on August 31.  Now, it wormed it’s way back to my attention. It’s attracting special antipathy, with Youtube likes outnumbered by double dislikes… but the nearly 90,000 views keep rising.  (In the lag for this to post, it’s risen by 10,000 a week.)
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