Dogpatch Press

Tips: patch.ofurr@gmail.com. 

Headlines, links and little stories to make your tail wag.  Guest posts welcome. “Local correspondents” wanted to talk about your local networks. 

CORRECTION: Fangcon was NOT the first con to sponsor a float in a Pride parade – FWA was earlier.

Tip from Slickkat: “FWA has had a float in the Atlanta Pride parade for the last two years.” It corrects this week’s headline calling Fangcon the first. Queer media outlet Project Q wrote about the FWA sponsorship:  Furries cuddle up and show their Atlanta Pride. The active Georgiafurs site organizes the Pride float since 2013.

Florida Times-Union: Meet the Furries.

Nothing new here, but nicely written.

Guess who’s #5 on the CRACKED list of “6 Groups Who Shouldn’t Be Sexual Punchlines.” 

This article gets a Hallelujah.  It has comedy and sexy furries, but they aren’t the target.  Instead, it makes fun of judgemental assholes.  That’s refreshing, after a tendency for media to be sadistic to innocent people, who happen to have richer than usual fantasy lives.

The writer couldn’t be more insightful, while avoiding making sex a definer.  “Not all furries are interested in dressing up as anthropomorphized animals and having sex with each other…”  Some do that, but kinksters are as devoted as anyone else who loves their hobby, AND they like the art and community too. Consider them equal fans, plus a little extra.  The article skillfully implies that they’re not sub-normal, they’re super-normal – in terms that anyone can understand: “They’re putting more work into pleasing their partners than some people put into their wedding night.” Right?! Some furries aren’t even this enlightened towards other ones.

CASPER mattress company winks about their ad.

There was high traffic for my list of mainstream advertising with furries, including the ad on the right.  Casper earns a high place on the list of ads:

My hard hitting investigation reveals which mattress is yiff-tested, and tough enough for a furpile.  OK Casper, there’s a plug – send my payola in milk bones.

TEDDYBÄR Book – unsettling vintage photos show a strange piece of German history.

An art director for a French publishing house collected vintage photos over several decades, then published them to document an unusual tradition: ordinary Germans from 1920-1960 who loved to pose with Polar Bear costumers. Why? It was just a thing to do.  Even for some Nazi soldiers. We like fursuiting to conjure a sense of fantasy – this book may inspire an unsettling non-sequitur sensation, that asks us to think about history through an innocent image casting a shadow of darker animal instincts. More provocative is juxtaposition with a companion publication about Blackface. What does identity play say about society?

The author sheds a little light on how the German fad started, in his interview for an article in VICE: Bizarre Vintage Photos of Americans in Blackface and Nazis Posing with Men in Polar Bear Costumes. Jean-Marie Donat says:

At the beginning of the 1920s, two polar bears came to the Berlin Zoo. Many families go to the zoo to see the bears—they’re in fashion—and all of the children want photographs in front of the zoo with these guys in bear suits. It’s a huge success in Berlin. And after, throughout Germany for the next 60 years, there are lots of these teddy bears.

There was a little more English language press: Extraordinary photos reveal how Germans loved to pose with men in POLAR BEAR costumes.  The other coverage posted by the publisher seems restricted to French and German.

VICE article unexpectedly uses a famous Furry photo.

Speaking of animal instincts and VICE, prejudice is the subject of this article about trolling a “white power” group on Facebook. The use of a furry pic drew some comments from Redditors on r/furry.

Finnish Dinosaur Metal band has a live action movie.

The “Berenstain bears” theory – a bunch of people think anthropomorphic bears are a sign of parallel universes.

This is too dumb and silly for me to explain. Let the article do it.