Of course this happened in San Francisco – “Furry Mecca”. (Sorry, Pittsburgh… you can borrow that title for one weekend a year, but you have to give it back.)
Andrew WK’s Pizza Party was planned for July 3. Furries called up the venue, 1015 Folsom, and arranged to be part of the show. The show managers went out of their way to accommodate fursuiters and help them change. There was a strong turnout for such an awesome happening.
Headlines, links and little stories to make your tail wag. Guest posts welcome. “Local correspondents” wanted to talk about your local networks.
This week’s Newsdump: Everything Anthrocon! There was SO MUCH of this news, and it was such a busy month, that I will be playing catch-up for a while with it… I’m not able to read all of these links. Good job catching all this attention, AC! Has there ever been this much? Some of it is national (the Onion A.V. Club and NPR notice seems particularly cool.) It was quite a coup to parade outside on the Pittsburgh street for the first time. 5,000 regular public watchers came out to see the furries, and they went nuts for it. I hope the crowd doubles in the future. I’d love to interview Uncle Kage about the planning and reception. (Official Anthrocon wrapup report.)
The official count of members in the Anthrocon 2015 Fursuit Parade Group Photo is 1,460. This reminded me of a neat aspect of the con. All that show value! These costumes represent so much investment… we could do a few estimates to figure out how much. In a previous post, “$3 million sale raises furry auction topic”, I came up with an arbitrary $2,320.51 per fursuit represented in Anthrocon’s parade. Multiply by the count of 1,460 members this year to reach a (rough guesstimate) value of $3,387,944.60 in fursuits.
Gay marriage just became legal across the USA. Even if you have no plan to get one, it’s a big deal. People of a few generations ago thought we’d have flying cars before this happened. The writer of “Furry Force” says:
It was already going to be one whopper of a party. But with the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that gays and lesbians have a constitutional right to marry fresh off the presses, Sunday’s Pride Parade in San Francisco became a rainbow-colored, joyous celebration for the ages.
Headlines, links and little stories to make your tail wag. Tips are always welcome.
____________________________
Media and Fandom News
_____________________________
The Animation Show of Shows: There’s no better source for artistic animation, and they need support.
This touring show presents the best of the best in the world of short films, by the most talented directors. It’s ordinarily only seen by invite at top movie studios (your Pixars and so forth), and at colleges, with special public access to those who hear through word of mouth. You may not have heard of it, because it’s been a personal project funded by one amazing guy, Ron. (He also runs Acme Filmworks, who directed a good couch gag for The Simpsons.)
I don’t ordinarily post crowd funding (too much to cover!) Leave that to awesome Furry journalist Corbeau at Furstarter. (We need more “furry news” specialists.) This is just an exceptional cause. If you like animation, don’t miss it.
Through this show, I discovered the hilarious short, Flamingo Pride. It shows what happens to the only heterosexual flamingo at the birds celebration. It’s almost as fabulous as the San Francisco Bay Furries will be this weekend, in the SF Pride parade.
It was an incredible rush to march with dozens of fursuiters in the 2014 San Francisco Pride parade. It was a good cause, but besides any message, the parade was full of music and cheering that made it pure fun. On ordinary days, it was a main route of the city full of buses and cars, but that day it was blocked off to make a stage a mile and a half long, with crowds on BOTH sides. It’s rare to get such audience (over a million) for jumping around and being furry. The hot sun made me ease up to shady parts of the barrier, and ask watchers if they could spare a dog bowl of beer.
2014 was the first time the Bay Area Furries returned to march since 2005. Excitement is building for the 2015 parade, on June 28. There are 50% more RSVP’s than last year. Friends and lurkers will probably increase it too, with likely attendance of over 70. Everyone is expecting another amazing event.
A valued regular commenter gave skepticism about the idea of “furry pride”, because it’s just liking something, not an achievement. I responded that it’s just one of many social groups supporting Pride (capital P), not a parade representing furries.
Here’s more info courtesy of the group organizers. It’s script info that goes to TV announcers, to help them figure out what they’re looking at. The parade requests one from every group.
On June 28, San Francisco Pride is going to be awesome for furries!
The Bay Area Furries are all ready to march in the parade. Pride is the height of street fair season in “Furry Mecca”. It’s one of the most loved activities for an active section of the community. 2014 was the first Furry appearance in the parade since 2005. They had attendance of 50+, and TV coverage with a million-strong audience. RSVP’s are 25% stronger than last year, with days left to grow. Two leaders got the event organized, despite unavailability of an important third from last year.
Califur visited by television naturalist Figgy Dobbs.
IN THIS ARTICLE: Don’t miss the story of Charles Lauri, a famed “animal impersonator” who thrilled the stages of Victorian London, but is little known today. The story of his acting skill, uncovered from an 1893 magazine, could be an inspiration for fursuiters everywhere.
Many people are familiar with a unique team costume for Halloween – the Pantomime horse, that takes two people to play it. Like a tandem bike, it makes an interesting buddy situation. This jogs a vague memory from when I was very young, of a 1960’s Flintstones cartoon with Fred and Barney in such a costume. It may have been a dinosaur, or a false memory, but the silly situation must have happened in old comedies to the point of cliche. TVtropes has it under Animal Anthropomorphism tropes.
If you (like me) had no idea what Pantomime meant until just now, let’s start to learn. The old-fashioned costuming seems like a traditional kind of activity, more social than commercial. I had an impression of something belonging to the age of door-to-door Christmas caroling, that may be fading away.
Or is it? In 2013, a Panto Horse race broke a Guinness World Record for most runners (42 teams.) And, since this is a Furry blog, you know I’m connecting this topic to you and your thriving subculture. (Imagine that race happening at a con! It would be an easy record to break.) I’m happy to learn that such fun exists… check out The London Pantomime Horse Race: a “fantastically silly”, “must-see event.”
This isn’t about Halloween, or silly races. There’s much more to it. The spark for this article was randomly running across 100-year-old photos of theatrical animal costumes. They made me do a double-take – did some fursuiter have a time machine!? They were incredibly well crafted, and made me very curious. I wondered why they were made so well, and for what purpose? They were fursuits- many generations before there was such a thing as Furries! I thought the topic had a lot of potential.
Headlines, links and little stories to make your tail wag. Tips are always welcome.
Zootopia: Disney goes full furry, and this stuff is going to explode in 2016.
How excited are you for the next furriest movie ever? “Anthropomorphic” isn’t quite an everyday household word, and it’s use in this trailer spells out an open secret. Before they made this, they did market research up the wazoo about us. Of course, it’s still a regular Disney movie, but they KNOW.
I watched the trailer when it had less than 300 views – while I write it’s over 1,300,000. The first comments on it said “furries”, and a lot of the top comments on it still say “furries”. There’s no way they didn’t anticipate that.
My reaction: Furry is the opposite of exclusive to me, but this cool thing makes me fear a deluge of commercially shallow influence. I’m scared, hold me! … NAHH, it will be awesome. I can’t wait for the day this movie comes out, with all the fursuit meets there will be to see it. Fan participation is a big deal. I’ll bet we’ll see tons of actual furries on the news because of this.
Queerty‘s article about sex at Califur has important message between the lines. (Via Greenreaper:)Read the rest of this entry »
The story of the San Francisco Giants’ Crazy Crab, the most outrageous mascot of them all. The 1984 San Francisco Giants were dreadful. But the team’s ill-conceived “Crazy Crab” mascot endured worse.
Shared by Excelsior30 on FurAffinity … a cautionary tale of how anthropomorphic costuming could make you a magnet for abuse. Professional performer Wayne Doba documents his experiences with water balloons full of pee, and back injuries from a “macho” attack by players from a rival team. (Get happier with Hulu’s mascot documentary series, Behind the Mask, that had an Emmy nomination for Outstanding New Approaches in Sports Programming.)
MNFurs becomes a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit.
News announcement. On FurAffinity, Aerak shares what it means to him: now the organization can officially host charitable activities like hospital fursuiting to brighten people’s days. MNFurs have a lot to be proud of:
In a matter of six years, with only the word-of-mouth advertising, MNFurs has gone from a small group of close friends and associates with a weekly meeting number of less then a dozen people to 40 to 60 people in the same room every other Saturday night. At the same time, we went from 20 to over 200 people on our mailing list.
Their growing presence in the world of fluffy stuff is bringing Furry Migration,“Minnesota’s first furry convention having its second year on August 28-30, 2015.”
Headlines, links and little stories to make your tail wag. Tips are always welcome.
____________________________
Mainstream sightings and fandom news
_____________________________
VICE parties hard at Fur-eh!
The article gets super friendly, and stays refreshingly non-judgemental. It can be hard to broadly cover an event with immersion in a tight circle of friends, so it’s only a small slice of the experience. Not all furries are way into parties. Some feel like it ruins think-heavy sci-fi focus. However, sci-fi cons with no parties are a world I don’t want to live in. You can make a furry con anything you want it to be. When they do party, nobody does it better!
Impressions from Biggest Little Fur Con.
I confess to partying too hard to cover this with it’s own article. (Thanks Vox for a great vid!)
It’s really amusing to see someone get covered head to toe in shaving cream. (It takes about 4 cans.)
Favorite shirt I saw: “I’M FAT – LET’S PARTY”
Thank-you’s for blogging? You might as well thank me for eating! Someone joked that it must take drugs to pound these out. Nope. Fursuiting is my drug.
Attendance of 2400+ makes BLFC the 6th largest con. (AKA “Biggest Medium Fur Con.”) That’s impressive to build in 3 years. The subculture is rising!
More interaction I loved were the unofficial “Hug Permit” officers. They were funny, engaging… and helpful with secret wing-man encouragement. (See “code 90944?”) Come on… with 2400 adults together for a once a year celebration, how could that NOT happen? No judging. Further proof that “Hugs are the handshake of furries.”
Many people are familiar with a unique team costume for Halloween – the 