Dogpatch Press

Fluff Pieces Every Week

Category: games

February 3, 2016

National Hugging Day, #tonytigergate, #FC2016, cool furs and hot news. NEWSDUMP (2/3/16)

by Patch O'Furr

Headlines, links and little stories to make your tail wag.  Guest posts welcome. Tips: patch.ofurr@gmail.com. 

Site goes down with high traffic for #tonytigergate – and the hits keep coming.

The Twitter joke of #tonytigergate drew enough mainstream curiosity to overload this site. (An upgrade may hopefully prevent that next time.)  After the story about it was posted here, it kept getting mainstream traction – highlighting a cheeky dichotomy. On one hand, there’s reputation concern – on the other hand, tickling an audience is kind of validating. It’s two sides to the coin of furry subculture and I don’t think that will ever change.

It reminded Fred Patten of something else:

Dear Patch; I vaguely remember that during all the news and publicity in 1987 for  Who Framed Roger Rabbit, there was a report that Charles Fleischer, the voice actor for Roger, got many NSFW erotic invitations from women, addressed specifically to Roger, not to him.

For National Hugging Day, the new episode of Culturally F’d is based on a Dogpatch Press article.

National Hugging Day is every January 21 for normal people.  (It’s every day for furries.)  I propose making a special occasion of it next year. And it was like a big fuzzy hug to get surprised with an entire video based on my article – “Hugs are the handshake of furries.” Wow thanks Arrkay and crew, nice to see you used it!  Anyone can freely use any content on this site that way.

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October 26, 2015

Zootopia characters revealed, Furries on NCIS, 7 foot tall furry hugs – NEWSDUMP (10/26/15)

by Patch O'Furr

Headlines, links and little stories to make your tail wag.  Guest posts welcome. Tips: patch.ofurr@gmail.com. 

"Bonnie Hunt provides the voice of Bonnie Hopps. Judy's mother. Don Lake voices Judy’s father, Stu Hopps, a carrot farmer from Bunnyburrow. (Disney)"

“Bonnie Hunt provides the voice of Bonnie Hopps. Judy’s mother. Don Lake voices Judy’s father, Stu Hopps, a carrot farmer from Bunnyburrow. (Disney)”

USA Today shares a lot of new Zootopia images and story hints.

Are you excited for Disney’s new furriest movie?  Mrs. Otterton’s missing husband spurs the action on.  There’s “Duke Weaselton, a small-time weasel crook with a big-time mouth”. Judy Hopps is “a ground-breaking rabbit trying to make it as a cop” – it sounds like bunnies usually aren’t cops, so we get a nice hint about what species means in the Zootopia world.  Enjoy more from USA Today’s exclusive Facebook gallery.

You know furries everywhere are getting ready for the 2016 Furmageddon*… in the SF Bay area, dozens are already signed up to go fursuiting to the opening in March. (*I’ve been reminded that Furpocalypse is a convention happening this weekend.)

Furries on NCIS Los Angeles.

Last week there was a CSI-style bad furry stereotype on iZombie.  This week, two NCIS characters revealed furriness.

Go to 18:00 in the link.  The important part starts at around 19:00.  It goes for about a minute, with one more remark before the scene cuts at 21:00.  It’s lightly humorous, maybe flirty banter between the two characters.  They joke about how furry conventions can “go off the rails”, but that’s the worst judgement.  They discuss fursonas and share appreciation, making a nice, innocuous minute in the pop culture spotlight. Isn’t that a relief?

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September 23, 2015

Sad Ending for Oklacon – Jungle Book – Furry blogs and games – NEWSDUMP (9/23/15)

by Patch O'Furr

Headlines, links and little stories to make your tail wag.  Guest posts welcome. Tips: patch.ofurr@gmail.com. 

Oklacon_Temp_LogoOklacon canceled permanently in a tangle of prejudice and bad faith, coinciding with a misbehavior incident.  

Read more via Reddit. Expect a longer article here soon.  The official website has replaced the front page with a final statement.  Oklacon’s history is at Wikifur.

Former FurAffinity Forums taken down by Cease and Desist letter from IMVU.  Tweeted from @fatransparency.

“On Conventions, Cosplay and Furries” – One blogger’s nice personal recounting of how he discovered Furry fandom.

“At Home With The Furries” photographer Tom Broadbent recounts 2008 beginning.  Tom was assigned to cover furries for the UK’s “Bizarre” magazine.

Special Features and Top Articles at Dogpatch Press get illustrations. Thanks to Spalding, the article list has some spiffy new art.

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June 29, 2015

Exclusive: Nordguard game and Windfall novel coming out at Anthrocon, from Tempe O’Kun.

by Patch O'Furr

tempo321In November 2014, I shared news about the very active Furry author Tempe O’kun.  Public Radio interviewed him about his writing – and they treated Furry writing as just a genre, not a “weird news” item.  Even the romance kind!  That was refreshing, and I thought he did a great job representing it.  So do other furries, it seems, because he’s been honored as an award winning Furry Writers’ Guild member and a convention guest of honor.

Tempe got in touch to share exclusive news about upcoming projects.  His novel Windfall sounds like a unique genre-mixing delight, with cute furry romance and paranormal horror.  There’s also art from the Nordguard card game below.  They’re coming out at Anthrocon 2015.  If you can’t wait to see them in person on July 9-13, here’s a taste.  I asked Tempe to round out his news with personal chat about how his year has been – and if he had stories about making projects happen.  I asked: “Are you excited for Anthrocon, and what else do you plan to do there?”

Tempe responds:unnamed

My year has been great thus far! I was guest of honor at Camp Feral 2014, and I have been invited to GoH another con in the spring.

ThinkTank Games and I started work on what would become Nordguard: Tribes of the White Land expansion before the game’s core set even came out. Originally, we’d planned it as a series of smaller expansions (about the size of Magic booster packs), but eventually took the most interesting elements from each set and combined them into a 36-card pack. It shuffles directly into the main set and, just like the original, it’s a boxed set—no buying multiple packs to get the cards you want, like in a CCG. The highlights include two canon characters (Iyoto and Manny) who were mentioned in the first book, but haven’t been seen yet. It also has Team Fortress 2-style side-grades for every character. BlackTeagan also developed an entire new tribe—the Nituuyik, arctic lynxes—for the expansion, who will later appear in the books. So this is the first time the card game will have a direct influence on the graphic novels!

We’re also reprinting the core set. We’ve gotten some great feedback over the last two years and we’re pretty confident about the streamlining we’ve done for the second edition.

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April 4, 2015

Furcadia had amazing funding success, so they’re throwing a party for you today.

by Patch O'Furr

photo-original

Wikipedia says that Furcadia holds “The Guinness World Records title for the longest continuously running social MMORPG.”  (That’s all the research you get, because I have to post this with mere minutes of preparation! Whee!)

Furcadia’s founder Dr. Cat (AKA Felorin) tells me:

“We hit our $250K funding goal to finish up our 32 bit client, and we’re throwing a HUGE celebration of it this Saturday (April 4)! The team will be live-streaming all day as well as doing stuff in-game, and we’ll be showing off some of the 32 bit editors and artwork we’ve been making, and more.”

More about this news is on their journal.

Their funding appeal achieved it’s highest level, offering stuff like “a full 32-bit client for Windows, new layout & user interface, Redo ALL of the default patch art in full 32-bit,” – new places to explore and more:

$250,000 – Super Super Awesome Bonus Level 

Getting this level of funding would be like a dream come true for us at DEP, Catnip and the whole community. We will all celebrate our accomplishments together!

I said to Dr. Cat: “2400 backers means $100 average, that sounds like a healthy amount each… I’m guessing it’s unexpected and awesome to hit the highest level.  Why now?  How is it budgeted?  Any local connection for this story?”

He said:

“Our core team lives and works in Alamo, California. (I actually commute to San Francisco for a day job at another game company currently.)  That’s Emerald Flame, our Executive Producer & Head Designer and Community Director (along with a lot of other hats), Game Designer Gar, and company founder, President, Programmer, Game Designer Dr. Cat. We manage a team of folks all over the country & the world, all of whom we met originally in Furcadia (that’s where I found Emerald & Gar too!) We have a team member in Southern California too, Ninja – as well as people in Canada, Germany, and England.

Our core team is still paid from Furcadia’s revenues, the Kickstarter & followup fundraiser money has gone entirely to pay a mixed group of a little fulltime staff with a lot of part-timers, commissioned pieces of art, and some volunteers to stretch the money as far as possible. We built Furcadia initially with two people and $50,000 back in the mid 90s, where most MMORPGs took at least a couple million to make, even then. We have a lot of experience getting the most out of a small budget – most game companies would take millions of dollars to do the amount of development work we are squeezing out of $250K. If we didn’t have a lot of people highly passionate about this game & willing to work at a modest rate (and also hugely talented), we couldn’t do what we do.”

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January 15, 2015

3D Social Network IMVU loves furries, wants to meet you at FurCon.

by Patch O'Furr

I don’t often see outside companies actively reaching out to the small but thriving Furry subculture.  Not directly.  If I had to guess where it would happen, I’d guess for Second Life users.  But there are signs that Furries count as modest but valued audience, for some game media like Furvilla aimed right at them.

One of these companies, IMVU, reached out:

“IMVU is the world’s leading 3D social network with over 130 million registrants… IMVU’s users seek and create new connections, lives, and lifestyles in a completely user-generated world that combines custom avatars, chat, community, content creation, commerce, and anonymity.”

It was cool of them to search my blog to talk about their plan for Further Confusion:

“I’m writing to connect with Dogpatch Press and let you know that Mountain View-based IMVU will be at the show to embrace the furry community, many of whom are a part of IMVU’s 3D, avatar-based social network. As a company, we meet “furries” every day on IMVU but look forward to meeting them in real-life at FurCon 2015.

If you plan to be at the show, stop by and see us at FurCon – we expect out “fan table” to be in an area outside the Dealer Marketplace – 2nd floor of the San Jose Convention Center in a walkway/hallway leading to the adjoining Marriott hotel.”

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January 5, 2015

Edmonton Oil Kings hockey hosts fursuiter race. “It’s looking hairy at ice level!”

by Patch O'Furr

On video: “Louis the Lion battles for racing supremacy in the first ever Frantic Furry 500!”

Sometimes I joke about my low interest in sports. (Sorry, Canadians!) I’d love it if the teams were all mascots, while one sports guy runs around for laughs.

I imagine mascots worry about being upstaged by fursuiters. But the furries showed they’re good sports to Louis.

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