Dogpatch Press

Fluff Pieces Every Week

Month: May, 2018

The Complexities of Problematic Kinks

by Patch O'Furr

Due to mob harassment, The Complexities of Problematic Kinks – guest post by Maybelle Redmond is now moved to the archive with this editor’s update.

“Say THING BAD, there are no complexities” … “If you talk about the bad thing then you must support it” … “Screw you for supporting the bad thing”

The original article was attacked for one niche issue: Of course cub porn is bad. But describing the problem isn’t. The original guest author was an abuse survivor who called it a dangerous thing that needs control. This site doesn’t support it but does welcome discussion.

It’s real to call it deeply rooted in the community. It was here long ago. Warner Bros threatened to sue furries for Tiny Toons porn in the 1990’s. It isn’t coming from outside and incongruent like racist stuff. It is furry. Anyone with a pencil can make it and anyone with a smartphone can share it. Some furries draw their art before they know there’s a fandom. Self-generating adult art is one reason why furry thrives without corporations that don’t make such things.

That’s a potentially infinite problem. When there are furry art sites like Inkbunny that thrive with it, condemning users at the bottom doesn’t stop distribution at the top. They will just keep coming to the furry platforms. It’s easy to get mainstream platforms to separate from it. But inside fandom, rejection creates opportunity. Perhaps the same opportunity that let the furry fandom grow as an autonomous, self-feeding creature apart from others.

It’s a good subculture that simply has human problems, like every part of the larger culture. If we take it for granted that cub porn is bad but intrinsic here, it’s like how drugs are illegal but people keep using them. Consider how the 1980’s “war on drugs” failed and made problems worse. If you imprison small users, they still need humane care or rehab, with a plan for bigger priorities like the distributors. Saying THING BAD and “screw you” isn’t a plan.

If cub art is condemned there can still be consideration for it being self-generated, or users may be led into it and trying to get out, or they may even include abuse victims who need help. Attacking someone who posts porn they made of themselves isn’t unlike making kids face jail for sexting pictures of themselves. (Read that news story. How is that fair? There are better options. And here’s a story of a minor, “babyfur”, and rape survivor who came to this site for help and understanding. Similar to the guest article author.)

That’s why there are complexities. This is one of those murky, dark topics people don’t want discussed. They just want to shun it. But that doesn’t get rid of it.

People who do age-play as consenting adults are already condemned with a bad reputation, and bringing this up will bring you harassment. Even in an appropriate place with a history of speaking about community things. The guest article was originally meant for [Adjective][Species] but their site went inactive so the author submitted it here instead. That was using the community access function this site often offered to anyone. It can’t be denied that it’s an ongoing topic that didn’t start here. Unlike here, places where it started have uncomplicated promotion for it. But that isn’t why the article was hosted here.

[Adjective][Species] and Inkbunny, a real source for the art, got no real challenge from harassers who targeted this site. But this site was open to discussing how to challenge it, and had a history of doing that.

Welcoming discussion is risky with an audience who don’t give the attention to read a long article about Heavy Stuff. That brought knee-jerk reactions and a communication breakdown. But apologize-and-delete-it doesn’t fix the problem. It keeps communication broken and enables everything from “did you stop beating your wife yet” type of baiting, to appeasing death threats. Harassers who use such tactics aren’t interested in the truth.

The harassment of this site put loyalty above getting to the root of the problem, with zero in return for catching flak for years of work on behalf of others. Ironically, the harassment served trolls who spent a long time pushing false accusations in retaliation for that work. People who pretended to be friends a day earlier then tried to score points with the same false accusations sourced from trolls, such as:

  • They attacked this site for not being a performing monkey with overwhelming amounts of “callouts” that weren’t useable to write news (and senders had no intention of helping with the labor.) These callouts were bait by a small circle of clout-chasers.
  • They falsely claimed the site defended “friends” who weren’t friends, spreading lies about a photo taken with a stranger before knowing about their past. (Notice the post being liked by altfurries who originally started the lie).
  • Facts were ignored and words were put in mouths to harass, especially by playing “telephone game” with outrageously- out-of-context screenshots, then boosting each other’s misinterpretations, adding rounding-errors and malicious distortions until they could rope others into a mob.

It was very ironic that this site was bashed way harder than the original smaller target (Timburrs) who actually posted offending art. That was hypocritically carrying out different priorities that were suggested in a few comments that set off the harassment:

  • A post that literally said “pick your battles” about Timburrs was twisted into “pedo” attacks against this site. Suggesting that it was ineffective to blast random individuals as if they were crime bosses was twisted into “you support cub porn”.
  • Casual comments that small individuals were “low-value targets” (in other words, change would come from focus on distributors, instead of bullying single individuals) were twisted into false attacks that this site was chasing clout… ironically projecting what the harassers did.

The original target was passed over, and harassment of this site was encouraged from inside a Discord group by a troll who then deleted their account. The bad-faith callouts piled on manipulation when they pointed at blocking to justify what they did, as if abuse and death threats should be rewarded with apologies.

It’s sad to see no consideration for the difference between describing bad stuff and causing it. When reporters report about murder, they don’t have to say they don’t support murder — saying “Helter Skelter is a good book” isn’t supporting Charles Manson. Looking for understanding to reduce abuse isn’t encouraging it. A great deal of work done by this site shows that this site isn’t for that. It has never had anything to do with cub art.

But many people didn’t even read the article before lashing out. Nobody bothered to dispute for seven months (posted in May) until suddenly attacking in January. The harassment was so thoughtless and toxic, that the article had to be archived and replaced with this look at their abusive nature.

After forgetting their first small target and mobbing this site, the harassers then wildly threw more false accusations at others with thoughtless targeting, excused themselves while attacking critics, excused cub porn users they likedturned on each other with breakups and verbal abuse, denied involvement, deleted their accounts because of causing so much harm, and demanded to be left alone while realizing they have no plan to make real changes.

___________________

Now here’s some feedback about the article that was stopped prematurely. We should have been able to discuss this.

It’s real to describe people using BDSM for coping, where it helps them take control over bad experiences in the past. BDSM isn’t abuse, just like furry art isn’t bestiality (or half the fandom would be targets for attack.) If cub porn is created by people who seek coping too, describing them isn’t excusing it. Of course it’s different because the art has a danger of being an abuse tool. The article said so, but it was a mistake to host the article without emphasizing the unacceptability more strongly. (Nobody bothered to bring it up for fair response when it published.)

That’s how the article is liable to be criticized for too much weaving between condemning abuse, but giving victims a grey area with the idea of a “walled garden” with “policing” inside. Ideally that has good intentions, but less ideally, policing can happen with blind spots or in corrupt ways.

The article talks about policing as a step forward for an imperfect world, with a need for more education. You can say a step forward isn’t enough but the article does recognize a problem. Perhaps it’s the wrong solution when expecting education from general society leaves things too far out of our hands, but at least it describes it. Perhaps it’s better to have an ideal of eliminating the porn with a plan for distributors.

There is no plan. Those who attacked this site for discussing will see history repeat when the problem keeps coming up, and they attack people instead of causes. That’s like putting a pin in a voodoo doll and thinking it solved the problem. It was a mistake to let these bad-faith harassers get too close to this site by helping some of them. This helper was crucified for suggesting that one-size-fits-all attacks could use better strategy.

A plan is now even less likely.

Ironically, Califur was attacked like this by altfurries who killed the con. Pointless reaction like this helps their plan for a Burned Furs/gamergate/”Pizzagate” attack movement. (See altfurs discuss it: Burned Furs 2.0 Telegram channel.)

In private message to this site, a Califur staffer said:

I can really relate to the guest article thing. The Baby fur panel was used to kill Califur. A fur asked if they could run a panel and it was that panel. I do think “What if” on occasion.

As an important contrast, altfurries aren’t content producers, they’re parasitical on fandom. That’s how rejecting hate groups can work, but if the cub porn is intrinsic and self-generating, then the two problems are apples and oranges and call for different solutions.

What could be a better strategy that doesn’t just hurt people and drag things backwards? There is a way: organizing artists to change their marketplace, and make the art less accessible from the source.

Imagine an artist trade compact with mutual standards for members. This site has often suggested forming an artists guild for that. There are active examples like the Furry Convention Leadership Roundtable and the Furry Writers Guild. But nobody has cared or bothered to try organizing artists, even with growing businesses and websites distributing their stuff.

Instead, things have fallen backwards by using bad-faith harassment, and misleading a mob who didn’t bother verifying what they lashed out at. They didn’t even read the article, or treated it like a Rorschach test, picking out pieces to make false pre-judgement that this site “supports” cub porn and justify vicious harassment. Thoughtless callouts like that will only hurt people. Doing it one-by-one will be an infinite cycle while ironically, platforms will grow from it.  Indie furry platforms will gain users for the targeted content, and outrage-traffic will feed giant social media companies.

For many who sent private support for accommodating discussion, but were too afraid to speak openly, good luck with it.

This site was often asked to help report a heavy load of stories nobody else would handle, until that work was killed by supposed allies. It’s so abusive to do that thing where “I sent you callouts and you didn’t throw huge amounts of unpaid labor into them, be our slave or it means you support ___”. Obviously, with huge amounts of work done on the Zoosadist story that came out in September 2018, this site has to sort by priority but doesn’t support such things. You wouldn’t know it from harassers who dragged it down pointlessly. The fandom has a terminal problem if that’s how things are supposed to work. Until the most extreme content trading is illegal, or there’s a plan for getting real policy changes with art sites, or Twitter goes away or takes harassment seriously, these will be lasting problems.

Another “eating their own” story about the game of clout-chasing:






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FurAffinity updates Code of Conduct, backlash by hate groups promoted by 2 Gryphon

by Patch O'Furr

IN THIS ARTICLE: FurAffinity bans hate groups – click through the Twitter threads to see many screenshots of what they were promoting. 

The true story of FurAffinity account bans

Furry art is full of cute, cuddly cartoons. Many FurAffinity users wanted to know – why was the site being used for hate imagery? If the art has to be edgy, couldn’t they just stick to good old-fashioned Hyper Diaper Pokemon Porn or whatever? At least sex is positive and life-affirming.

On the site and on Twitter, protest rose against activity that seemed to violate the Code of Conduct, while complaints were being dismissed by site staff. The CoC looked toothless because promotion of hate groups was excused with an exception for “fictional” activity.

What furry stuff ISN’T fictional? And depicting hate imagery in a positive light IS promotion. That’s part of the history of propaganda. And making excuses that it’s just historical interest reminds me of when I used to sell rare books at an antique mall; let’s be honest here, that chicken-necked skinhead with a swastika on his elbow wasn’t visiting that creepy dealer down the lane just for memorabilia. (His money was no good to me.)

During the protesting, FurAffinity users openly claiming to be alt-right trolls were gloating about driving traffic from the site and taunting those who left. That’s like getting acquitted for a hate crime and then mooning the judge. Sometimes nazis dress to impress, but nobody ever accuses them of being smart.

The dumpster fire kept burning until the complaints started tagging FurAffinity’s corporate owner IMVU. Perhaps they got worried about their anime-eyed avatars being the lesser evil on the site.

Soon the Code of Conduct was updated, and dozens of accounts went dark. It seemed to follow a precedent set a few months earlier when Discord Inc. flushed many of the same assholes and their alt-right servers down the drain.

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Discover the best of furry fandom with the 2017 Ursa Major awards, and 2017 Cóyotl Awards.

by Patch O'Furr

Thank you for helping Dogpatch Press to win the Ursa Major Award for Best Magazine of 2017!

 

Ever have a hard time knowing where to start with furry media? Does the horizon get lost in the digital sands?

Look no further than the Ursa Major Awards.  That’s the Furry equivalent of science fiction fandom’s Hugo Awards, mystery fandom’s Anthony Awards, or horror fandom’s Bram Stoker Awards. The Hugos also have the Nebulas to  complement them – and Furry has the Coyotl Awards for literature, as voted by the Furry Writers’ Guild. That’s not all – furry literature will also soon have the first Leo Awards, to be announced at AC 2018. (What’s the difference? The Leos are fandom-specific and voted on by a panel of judges.) The Ursa and Coyotl winners were both announced this month, so they’re all listed below to encourage you to check out some cool stuff you might not have seen.

URSA MAJOR NEWS

The winners for 2017 were announced at a presentation ceremony at the Furry Down-Under 2018 convention in Surfer’s Paradise, Queensland, Australia, on Saturday May 5.  FurDu posted a video of the ceremony including a slide show created by Ed Otter:

There was a lot of talk about it here before they were announced. Fred Patten saw growth in activities like fursuiting competing for attention with fan media, while maybe the awards could use a boost for reach after lower voting this year than in the past. A lack of staffing and funding led to appeals for help, while Anthrocon began offering matching donation to support writers. For 2019, the Awards will be presented at AnthrOhio.

Here’s a few things that stood out about the winners:

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Small World, by Gre7g Luterman. Illustrated by Rick Griffin – Book Review by Fred Patten

by Pup Matthias

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

Small World, by Gre7g Luterman. Illustrated by Rick Griffin.
Lansing, MI, Thurston Howl Publications, April 2018, trade paperback, $11.99 (301 [+ 1] pages).

Small World is Luterman’s The Kanti Cycle, Book 2. Book 1 is Skeleton Crew. Luterman says here that The Kanti Cycle is a trilogy, to be completed in Book 3, Fair Trade.

Skeleton Crew seemed to end with a definite conclusion, but Small World continues the plot in a new direction.

Skeleton Crew is set on the generation exploratory starship White Flower II, populated entirely by 10,000 furry geroo and one giant dragonlike krakun, Commissioner Sarsuk. The protagonist is Kanti, one of the geroo.

400 years ago, the krakun came to the overpopulated primitive world Gerootec and offered to hire thousands of geroo as their starship crews. The geroo who went into space and their descendants would never see Gerootec again, but they would live in luxury compared to the backward geroo on their homeworld. After 400 years, the geroo are asking if the krakun are their employers or their slavemasters. The White Flower II would be a paradise for the geroo, if it weren’t for the krakun’s cruelly arbitrary representative, Commissioner Sarsuk. It doesn’t help that Commissioner Sarsuk openly refers to them as slaves. In Skeleton Crew, matters build to a flash point, but Kanti, a lowly deckhand, maneuvers Sarsuk into seriously injuring himself before he can slaughter any geroo. The Kanti Cycle, Book 1 ends with Sarsuk returning to the krakun homeworld to recuperate, leaving the geroo on the White Flower II in peace — for awhile.

Small World begins with Sarsuk returning to the starship. He’s not happy, and he’s going to make as many people suffer as he can.

“‘On my shuttle you will find a cage. Fill it.’ Commissioner Sarsuk clipped his strand back onto his necklace. ‘I know that you love to agonize over choices, trying to make the perfect decision. So in the infinite compassion that I have for you –’ He rolled his eyes. ‘—I am giving you some extra time.’

‘Fill … a cage …’ the captain said quietly. ‘With?’

Sarsuk crossed his arms and leaned on his elbows so he could comfortably lower his face down to Ateri’s level. ‘You’re smart. At least you always act that way. What do you think? What’s the one thing on board this ship that has any utility at all?’

[…]

‘My crew?’

‘Fifty slaves should do, Ateri,’ Sarsuk said. ‘I had a ringel cleaning crew previously, but I can’t see any reason to buy more of them. Fifty geroo would be a nice perk considering how much I’ve had to endure for the company recently,’ he added, his eyes filling with self-pity.” (pgs. 4-5)

The blurb summarizes the setup: “The commissioner accidentally let his last cleaning crew starve to death, so now Kanti and forty-nine of his teammates will have to spend the rest of their lives living in a one room barracks with only a single airlock protecting them all from the planet’s poisonous atmosphere.”

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Furry Dance Parties in Europe – A look by Soffy

by Patch O'Furr

Independent dance parties by furries, for furries: the concept has been growing around the world since the late 2000’s. It can spin off from cons, but doesn’t depend on them. It’s more ambitious than informal meets and events that happen once. Those can stay inner-focused, but dances bring new partnership and support from overlapping communities and new kinds of venues. It crosses a line to public space, so a stranger can walk in and discover their new favorite thing. It encourages new blood and crossover. It makes subculture thrive. It’s a movement!

Parties that give a Q&A get a featured article. See The Furclub survey for questions and party list.

The big list recently got enough entries that it needed to be split between continents. It brought a tip about a bunch of Euro and German parties that hadn’t caught notice, too many for an article for each. There are already well established ones on the main list, so this is just the extras. Most seem to be once-a-year, which makes it great to find so many.  Soffy, a journalist and furry in the UK, stepped up to collect them. (Thanks Soffy!)

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A&H Club, Volume 1, by Rick Griffin – Book Review by Fred Patten

by Pup Matthias

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

A&H Club, volume 1, by Rick Griffin. Illustrated.
Seattle, WA, CreateSpace, April 2018, trade paperback, $18.29 (unpaged [82 pages]).

Popular furry writer/artist Rick Griffin has two Internet comic strips. Housepets! is the one that everyone is familiar with. Once a year he collects them and publishes a Create/Space album.

A&H Club is his other Internet strip. In one way it’s just more familiar high-class Griffin anthropomorphic art, and jokes about not wearing any pants. In another it’s the opposite of what Griffin does in Housepets! It’s serious, not comedic, even if it does view today’s society as semi-comedic. It’s realistic, not fantastic; aside from featuring anthropomorphic animals who walk about nude below the waist. Its two main characters are a pair of lesbian lovers (Adrian is really bi), one of whom is a single mother. It consists of full pages rather than strips.

Griffin first collected his A&H Club into three comic books of between 22 and 28 pages each. Now he has gathered those into a CreateSpace album of 82 pages including the three front & rear covers.

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The Milo Story, Nazi Prevention, and A Simple Hope – by David Lillie of Dreamkeepers

by Patch O'Furr

Welcome to David Lillie, artist of Dreamkeepers, a comic with a connection to here via Fred Patten’s reviews. A fantasy comic doesn’t need to tie to current events, but that changes when it embraces controversy.

Dreamkeepers did that by hitching their marketing to Milo Yiannopoulos in 2016, buying an ad on his show and giving him a fan art fursona. Milo was known as a demagogic celebrity who rose with Gamergate and the alt-right, and fell by condoning pedophilia. He addressed furries by bashing them on Breitbart, as I mentioned in this article about looking at conservatives before Trump was elected. But the topic here isn’t really Milo, it’s the things he rode in on, and they need to be clearly defined.

Regular readers will be familiar with reactionary groups aligned with the alt-right, like Altfurry. An honest look will find them inseparable from racism. Despite their claims to be defenders of free speech, I think they aren’t motivated by limitations being imposed on freedom, but the opposite; they’re reacting to society getting too free for the targets of their hate, who they consider lesser humans. Their leaders want unaccountability for it, and many of their collaborators simply don’t understand the greater context, or don’t care as long as they personally come out ahead.

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River Water, by Eikka – Book Review by Fred Patten

by Pup Matthias

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

River Water, by Eikka.
Capalaba, Qld, Australia, Jaffa Books, May 2016, trade paperback, $9.00 (122 pages), Kindle $2.99.

This is a happy nature novella, like Bambi by Felix Salten – not! (Not that Bambi is very happy.)

Flix is a pregnant young vixen, happily mated to Bracken, a strong but not very bright tod. This is fine with her. She doesn’t love him as much as she feels that she can relax with him as the protector of her and her (and his) kits. This is a great relief after her own orphaned and very insecure childhood.

“His brain wasn’t talon-sharp, if that wasn’t obvious from his idea that shrubberies could spontaneously attack, but that was fine by her. She knew he’d sooner let his bones collapse than let anyone get a strand of fur on her, and she’d given him a litter of magnificent kits growing inside her body alongside a growing feeling of being protected than she’d had in a very long time.” (p. 8)

Unfortunately for her, Bracken is immediately killed while she is out hunting. She does not grieve for him as much as she’s panic-stricken at being without a protector once again. Even worse now that she has a wombful of growing kits to also care for.

Flix is so desperate for a new protector that when she comes across a lone stoat, even younger and more naïve than she is, she grabs him for the job. He takes some persuading at first –

“The stoat blinked open his eyes, and reacted just as expected, twisting, scratching, biting, kicking. Flix, feeling disturbed but making sure she remained calm, called out as clearly as she could.

‘Okay, stop! I’m not going to hurt you! I know you’re lost and I know you’re alone – but that’s why I’m here! I want to help you! But please, I need you to stop!’

The stoat began to slow his struggling, but whether this was because he believed what she was saying or just getting tired, Flix didn’t know – she just continued speaking regardless.

‘Are you listening to me? Are…? Look, what’s your name? Mine’s Flix. What’s yours? Mmm?’

He just stared at her. She asked the question again. ‘What’s your name?’

‘…You’re a fox” the stoat breathed out.

‘Yes, I know,’ Flix said, ‘but there’s nothing I can do about that. And anyway, I’m not an ordinary fox… I’m a good fox.’

‘G… Good fox?’

‘Yes,’ she said, astonished at what she was saying; the amount of animals she’d torn the fur off, she was akin to a good fox as much as a stick insect was to a vicious destroyer of nature. ‘Ground squirrels, tree squirrels – good foxes, bad foxes. So you don’t have to be afraid. Just tell me your name.’

The stoat stared for a while longer, before sliding out the word ‘Nezzick’.

‘Nezzick,’ Flix repeated. ‘Brilliant name. Now… You know I’m here to help you, don’t you? … Just say yes or no.’

He didn’t say anything.” (pgs. 11-12)

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Meet Emma the Tiger – A Showcase of Fandom Love from BLFC 2018

by Pup Matthias

Thanks to Matthias and Rune of Rune’s Furry Blog. Her guest article about the story was submitted at the same time, so some of her info is included too. – Patch

This was the sixth year for Biggest Little Fur Con (BLFC), one of the biggest and fastest growing furry conventions in the fandom. Last year it had over 3,500 attendees and raised $36,000 for charity. This con has been The Con on many Furries lips… (or is that maws?) Many furs will travel far and wide to attend for a weekend of anthropomorphic fun. It’s attended by many fandom favorite suiters and seems to have good control of its public image.

However, with cons as big as BLFC, news and drama from within can spread like wildfire on social media, for better or worse, becoming the “face” of the convention for that year. Things were going smoothly at first, but during the con it was reported that a 10 year old girl was a target of verbal bullying.

The story of Emma the Tiger and how she almost left the fandom emerged on Twitter.  A user posted a screen grab from Instagram by Krysta Kennedy (xrainbowdawnx) explaining what happened. Emma was there for the fursuit photo shoot that takes place at every con’s massive fursuit gathering. She was approached by two mice who started to mock her fursuit. Emma was so embarrassed that she ran out without her father, saying that she hated being a furry and didn’t want to be in the fandom anymore.

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AZ Republican Leader Exploits Furries To Disguise Anti-LGBT Policy, “Concentration Camp”

by Patch O'Furr

By Tempe O’Kun and Patch, with thanks to Tonya Song for interview questions.

Recently, AZ Rep. Kelly Townsend (a politician in the Arizona House of Representatives since 2013) stumbled into the furry fandom.  She’d been threatening to sue teachers who were organizing for resources to fix a crisis in schools with leaky roofs, 25-year-old textbooks, rats in classrooms, and no budget to afford toilet paper. It all started when she responded to criticism by Pepper Coyote, a furry who happens to be a teacher in Arizona.

Furries, as we are naturally inclined to do, welcomed the curiosity with the usual range of mostly-SFW responses. This sort of interaction happens with some regularity. Some innocent outsider happens upon the fandom, and we get to watch him or her discover the wacky world of talking animals. Sometimes they even become a loved fixture of the community like Boozy Badger.

Except that’s not what’s happening here.

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