Dogpatch Press

Fluff Pieces Every Week

Category: Media

June 19, 2023

The 2023 Ursa Major Awards and Good Furry Award feature the best of furry fandom

by Patch O'Furr

Check out the winners in 14 categories for the 2023 Ursa Major Awards. The awards feature the furry fandom’s favorite media and other anthropomorphic animal creations they love, with popular voting by anybody. This year there were 1350 voters, with their vote count broken down here.

  • Dogpatch Press was voted Best Magazine. Thank you to everyone who votes, and the volunteer team who manages the voting process and sends physical awards. I’ll post a photo when it arrives.
  • The best novel stood out as unlike other furry fantasy and romance nominees; it’s a young adult novel by an author of other non-furry writing with crossover appeal that isn’t locked to the furry scene. Watch for an upcoming article with the author.
  • The best fursuit category had no award due to low participation, but there’s already eligible fursuits listed for the next awards.

See the current Recommended Anthropomorphics List — it is maintained year-round — you can discover and submit this year’s works eligible for the next awards now if you have something to share. This helps make community, discovery for new creations, and opportunity with campaigning. A nominee can win by simply mentioning it, because few do. Consider donating to support this service via paypal@ursamajorawards.org.

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June 13, 2023

Papa Bear: Indie furry movie nears funding deadline

by Patch O'Furr

If you like making friends laugh and/or wasting company time, and have been on the net for 10-15 years, then you probably know The Onion, CollegeHumor, Funny or Die – and Cracked. At one point it was the world’s most visited comedy site.

Papa Bear is a movie in development from heads of the Cracked video department at its peak. It’s about a furry in the family, and its climax will be filmed at a furry convention. Papa Bear promises to be dramatic, funny, daring, boldly LGBT-positive, and full of heart.

There’s a crowdfunding campaign for Papa Bear that ends in a few days, on June 16 – don’t wait to check it out! 

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June 7, 2023

Fursuit maker Sudoku gets costume adopted by Twenty One Pilots.

by Patch O'Furr

Sudoku has been a fursuit maker since 2015, and was sole proprietor of Strut Your Fluff Ltd. in 2020-2022. That led to something amazing:

“I got my start in costumes in the furry fandom (stumbling across Matrices’ website in 2014!) That foundation helped me to reach my long-term goal of performing as an official mascot. I am Bruiser the Bulldog, NAIA-division, for Concordia University, NE.”

In 2019, Twenty One Pilots made a video featuring a fuzzy creature named “Ned”. As a fan, Sudoku built a mascot costume of him. It was made and worn for personal satisfaction, but as life went on, Sudoku wanted to retire as owner. Recently Twenty One Pilots accepted her gift offer of the Ned costume, so it’s becoming the official property of band members Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun.

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March 21, 2023

Ursa Majors 2022 Nominees Announced – Voting closes at end of March.

by Patch O'Furr

Ursa art by Foxenawolf.

Go HERE to vote, and don’t wait, the deadline is March 31! 

The furry fandom’s annual Ursa Major awards honor the best and most loved anthropomorphic creations of the past year. They put a spotlight on talent that deserves recognition, and lets fans discover and support it directly with popular voting by anyone.

Nominations for works from 2022 ended in February. Nominees are in 14 categories, and the Ursa Majors site has more details about each one. Music has a new category, but Best Fursuit isn’t active this year due to lack of nominations.

Volunteers run the Ursa Major Awards. Please support them. Since 2001, these awards have been run with unpaid work. They appreciate support to defray costs for a website, making and mailing awards, and more. Click the button to donate >

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March 6, 2023

More adventures in Guadalajara at Confuror 2022.

by Patch O'Furr

My art of hosts and friends @gatunomx @MeteorZeroFive @lowemond @MZSLV

Here’s a followup to Confuror makes a crossroads for Latin American furries and international fandom. It’s worth extra time to see the city of Gudalajara, so put Confuror on top of any list of furry cons you should visit. Below are its churches, the 18th century Jalisco Government Palace, and The Immolation of Quetzalcoatl sculpture in Plaza Tapatia, which had a snake head too heavy to mount on top so it’s installed on the ground nearby.

Sights in Guadalajara

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February 7, 2023

Confuror makes a crossroads for Latin American furries and international fandom.

by Patch O'Furr

2018 story The Diversity of the Latin American Furry Fandom is background for visiting Mexico’s largest furry con in October 2022.

Young Mexicans told me that Confuror has taken off to be their first full-fledged con and a beacon for fandom there. It succeeded after they only had meet-sized events that came and went, and wished for ones like North Americans have. The 2022 attendance surged after a first hotel con and then virtual cons for two years. There were 1,861 attendees, with 486 fursuiters at the fursuit festival. The charity auction raised 153,526 MXN (about $7,675 USD) to benefit a shark conservation NGO.

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February 2, 2023

Furries warn each other about casting call for “Life As a Furry” TV show

by Patch O'Furr

A reality show casting call is raising hackles. It presses a hot button of sensitive history. The media can inform and debunk fake news to help us all; but sometimes it lies to make a quick buck or serve the powerful.

(Skip this if you already know about “The Media.”) 

A dogma exists among furries that reporting is offensive, rather than anger at offensive reporting. Dogma can hurt us too, but it started with real offenses. See 2003’s furry-themed episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. It spread a broad caricature of a pathetic loser who donned a cheap costume for sex, which is unfair to those of us who are highly accomplished and sexy in costume or out.

The bad image peaked when internet furries caught notice around 2000. CSI, MTV, Vanity Fair, and others aired exploitation (which isn’t always bad — think cult movies — except when it’s malicious and pretends to be more real than it is.) It ebbed as furry conventions exploded in size. Around 2015 there was a thaw. Nice, well-researched reporting came from independent outlets like Vice and ones as powerful as CNN. Then came the 2022 election and the revival of smear tactics. This time it was maliciously from the right-wing to pit red state voters against minorities. Transphobia spiked up and furries were like stand-ins for the weird, gay boogeyman of tolerance. Debunking fake news about school litter boxes didn’t stop it from repeating. One hit piece by Daily Wire christofascist Matt Walsh used false pretenses to recruit trans people like fandom member Naia Okami.

On the heels of recent attacks: Casting Call Concern

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September 30, 2022

Team games the Zarnitsa way – a gift from Moscow Furries

by Patch O'Furr

Good news helps in bad times. Russian furries like to be part of worldwide fandom, and Erwin, a member of Moscow Furries, has a story about game activities they do in a park. The idea is for any furry group anywhere to share it. Erwin tells how it works:

Furry Zarnitsa

In general, we do quests, which are mostly done in teams. In the beginning, we bring the participants to a park and form the teams, headed by a leader. Then the teams walk around the park and compete with each other by doing pre-arranged activities. In the end one of the teams win and we give them some small rewards.

So far, we have held 6 different quests and 2 simple meets (just chilling with casual games) in Moscow. Here’s some photos from our group on VKontakte (Russian social network).

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September 14, 2022

Fur Affinity bans AI-generated art, but AI has a plot to return.

by Patch O'Furr

Policy update from the furry fandom’s main independent art site.

AI art tools made me think of a term: sequential juxtaposition acceleration.

An AI tool starts with scraping millions of pre-made images from the net. That’s a learning set to combine and interpolate. Prompt it with key words (green grass, old building), and you get approximations of everything that matches. One could call this a form of cheating artists, because people don’t like the scraping of pre-made sources without permission. But after they combine, the output is nothing that ever existed. That’s doing what any artist does to learn from reference, but in a wholesale, industrial way that wasn’t envisioned by the current creative property system.

Back to that problem in a minute, but first think about art context.

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August 22, 2022

Interview with NIIC the Singing Dog – New album on the way!

by Dogpatch Press Staff

Guest Doppelfoxx writes fiction and nonfiction, and last submitted a story about NFTs affecting the culture. This interview with NIIC was dual-submitted to Flayrah. NIIC the Singing Dog is a well known furry musician from Philadelphia, with 5 albums of howling electro-pop and over 7 million views across Youtube, Spotify and other platforms. Fun fact: Patch O’Furr jumped around with his live show at Anthrocon and shared funny reactions from his videos. After a period of low activity, NIIC has new music on the way.

(Doppelfoxx): Welcome and thank you for interviewing with us! Who are you and what do you do? Describe yourself in a few sentences.

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