Dogpatch Press

Fluff Pieces Every Week

Category: Society and culture

July 9, 2025

Preview The Furry Detectives docuseries, and learn how reporting emerged against backlash

by Patch O'Furr

Full series out July 17. The first 12 minutes of the first episode:

The Furry Detectives docuseries — The story they don’t want told, emerging against 7 years of backlash and interference.

Coming on AMC+: this 4-episode series introduces furries who investigated the 2018 zoosadist leaks. (More summary of the leaks.)

The leaks exposed evidence of deep-rooted, ongoing animal abuse networks in the community. They use furry as a cover, for organizing that isn’t easily dismissed with “anyone can be a furry, we can’t gatekeep it” disclaimers. Half of the truth is that abuse happens in any community — and internet tech and platforms are big factors not fully in our power — but the whole truth is that this behavior is uniquely among us in real-life organized ways seen nowhere else. It’s nobody else’s problem when our groups are run by and for us.

Making our own destiny is how fandom works at its best. However before the show releases, it’s catching some backlash for airing problems that the community didn’t properly deal with for 7 years. It’s like some people want things brushed under the rug so ignoring it can make it worse. That behavior was always holding back investigation over 7 years while publishing tens of thousands of words of reporting at Dogpatch Press.

There was a lot of generous team work as well, but some of the most counterproductive behavior was not just from incuriosity and denialism, putting optics over solutions, or random bad actors… Most alarmingly, there’s also corruption from influence at the top.

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July 5, 2025

Newsdump: Room Party art show during Anthrocon, furries on NPR, public image in the media

by Patch O'Furr

Happening now: Anthrocon and Room Party show at Bunker Projects, 5106 Penn Ave, Pittsburgh

Anthrocon has competitors for the world’s biggest furry convention, but is unsurpassed in other ways. Their street parade is a wonder of the furry world, uniquely partnered with Pittsburgh and swarmed by cheering residents on a blocked off city street.

Fursuiters make public image by flaunting millions in art at such events, but it’s also about the artists. They’re enjoying how Pittsburgh welcomes furries like nowhere else, with their own art show at a gallery apart from the con.

SEE ROOM PARTY: http://room-party.com. The show has a 6-week run with film screenings, workshops, and informal art-making gatherings. Curators include Brett Hanover (previously in furry news with his movie Rukus.) Brett sent info:

Room Party is the first-ever large-scale group exhibition of contemporary and experimental furry art, featuring over 50 artists working in drawing and painting, comics, photography, installation, video, and new media. Curated by furry artists Lane Lincecum, Brett Hanover, Cass Dickenson, and Paul Peng, Room Party takes its name from the unofficial hotel room parties held during conventions—embodied virtual realities where furries try on unimagined identities, invent new sexualities and artistic expressions, and discover alternative ways of being known. Room Party brings the love and creativity of these events to Pittsburgh’s Bunker Projects, putting furry artists in conversation with the fine art world, the broader queer community, and the contemporary moment.

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May 28, 2025

Zeldstarro’s furry event maps – A tool for travel planning and learning about history

by Dogpatch Press Staff

A need for better info about geography and accessibility

Good day (or night) everyone, I am Zeldstarro, a semi-furred dragon that really likes geography and travel. I have made a map of furry conventions which can be found here, and a map of other large furry events which can be found here. You can also follow my project on Bluesky, Fur Con Watch.

I made these maps not just to help other furries find conventions, but also because I had a special interest in transit accessibility. I believe that a good public transit system is an incredibly beneficial thing for any city it’s in, and for the world as a whole. So, I wanted to find one place to compare the locations of furry convention venues with their current transit accessibility (and walkability).

The most easily accessible source I found was a map on Wikifur. Disappointingly, this map was (and is) unreliable. It sometimes lists out-of-date venues and other inaccurate information, and includes events that aren’t conventions and don’t fit my purpose. This led to starting my own solution.

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May 16, 2025

Furgeddaboutit 2025 con report: “Controlled burn” cooks up unprecedented results in New Jersey

by Dogpatch Press Staff

GUEST POST: Eberra Wolf (sounds like “a-BEAR-uh”) is an independent reporter from New York City, and focuses on the northeastern United States. He has been a furry since December 2022. Eberra is using community access to submit news as an on-the-scene correspondent – you can submit news here.

Furries playing outside in the courtyard of the Mount Laurel, N.J., DoubleTree on Saturday. (Eberra Wolf for Dogpatch Press.)

Furgeddaboutit had its inaugural convention over the weekend of May 2-4 in Mount Laurel, New Jersey. Created in reaction to Garden State Fur the Weekend, another New Jersey convention, it was held on the same weekend 47 miles southwest, about 50 minutes away by car.

By the end of both cons, comparison of the respective results would make an example for the global fandom to remember.

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April 22, 2025

The Furry Detectives: Unmasking a Monster – TV docuseries investigates the 2018 Zoosadist leaks

by Patch O'Furr

Furry True Crime is a genre

In 2024, the Fur and Loathing podcast came out with Guardian journalist Nicky Woolf and Dogpatch Press. The show investigated the Midwest Furfest 2014 chemical attack, based on previously unseen FBI documents and interviews across 4 states. Apple Podcasts gives it a 4.5 star rating, and it has 4.8 from critics, who call it “made with deep reverence and contribution from maligned, largely disenfranchised communities… I think Fur and Loathing is pretty much exactly what I want in true crime.” – Podcast Promise.

Those are results to keep in mind when expecting another Furry True Crime show on the way. They make 2 examples of this suddenly-a-genre (and there’s a third one coming later.) Other kinds of documentary may raise less eyebrows, but these examples aren’t fur-sploitation or salacious tragedy porn. Sorry, the mainstream already makes too much trashy stuff for weirdos who aren’t furries, go find it somewhere else…

Here you’ll find intensely curious investigations for smart people who care about problems and solutions. They feature experiences within the community, made with members, using pro resources to tell deeper stories than can be told without their combined forces. Socially responsible true crime media exists, and we’re already in it.

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April 14, 2025

Furgeddaboutit is New Jersey’s new furry con after the disgrace of Garden State Fur The Weekend

by Patch O'Furr

Furgeddaboutit is coming to New Jersey on May 2-4, 2025. Info: Furgeddaboutit.org. There’s also The Big One furmeet. More about this shortly…

Many New Jersey furries have been demanding more honest events while protesting Garden State Fur the Weekend, the corrupt convention with a history of favoring nazi-furries. This has new developments.

  • How often does a community create not one, but two alternative events to make up for a toxic one?
  • Ever seen a con struggle to deny a toxic reputation — while officially operating on a pro-nazi site?

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March 27, 2025

Lone Star Fur Con brings gritty and hopeful weirdness to Austin

by Dogpatch Press Staff

Collaborative guest post submitted by Ash and edited by Patch O’Furr. Ash is a bunny, propagandist, and performance artist in Austin, TX. After you read, please vote for the Ursa Major Awards for the best furry creations of last year. Please consider the Fur And Loathing podcast for Nonfiction, featuring investigation by Dogpatch Press.

Extreme times

Lone Star Fur Con picked the right place for a furry convention. Austin has always been a haven for the freaks and weirdos of Texas. The timing is a little bit less than ideal, because furries are now in the crosshairs of reactionaries in the state government.

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February 21, 2025

How to love the freedom of leaderless fandom, and fight the flipside of organized abuse

by Patch O'Furr

 

Do you know the story where several blind people try to describe an elephant by only touching small parts of it? Nobody can say what the whole animal is.

That happens when furry subculture talks about itself, because of how it’s built. The whole thing is a series of bubbles that don’t see each other, in peer-to-peer horizontal structure. Their limited views go with a longstanding habit of reacting against outside stereotypes by falling into their own: The Geek Social Fallacies.

Fallacies can be actively overcome. Ignorance is bliss, but knowledge is power. If you don’t like the media, Be The Media. That’s the mission at Dogpatch Press, to tell the full story warts and all, and own it from inside — before outsiders tell it for you — but there’s always resistance. The subculture keeps stubborn blind spots. Many stories are too inside for professionals to investigate, but hobbyists lack the resources, especially when they explore problems that demand action that people don’t want to take. Difficult, costly, critical stories are the ones that stay overlooked, underreported, and suppressed. Nobody is immune to the psychology of denying uncomfortable knowledge. This is how you get too much shallow drama between peer-to-peer individuals, but too little intensive research with wider scope.

You may say the solution is showing more of the positive; but that’s not seeing the whole elephant.

It’s important to do the difficult work of telling the full range of human experience within, and maturely accept a place in society, not apart from it. The more we know, the more it empowers people to do better. This is a challenge always lagging behind the way this community grows.

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November 7, 2024

Your fursona has an afterlife: Online community has unique ways to memorialize.

by Patch O'Furr

Furry Family Ofrenda on VRchat

It seems appropriate to write about losing things and carrying on, after a doomful week in America…

Hydraheads, an artist in Canada, is a player of Flight Rising, “a social web-based activity site featuring dragon breeding, adventuring, combat, and collecting.” You get your own clan of dragons and work with other clans. It’s more than solo fun, it was also a family connection. Hydraheads joins Dogpatch Press with a story:

Recently, Flight Rising closed my own account and my deceased mum’s account. I adopted and inherited from her before she passed.

It happened when someone attempted to hack in, and I couldn’t reset my password, so I started a trouble ticket and they investigated. They closed my account and hers, because they considered it an unfair advantage in the game to have two accounts. I had been active on both, and it’s against their TOS.

I appealed anyways, because I didn’t really want to lose my mum’s account or dragons she gave me; but you can’t exactly merge accounts or transfer progen dragons. My appeal was denied and I permanently lost both. They issued half-hearted condolences to my mum and said I could start a new account. It stung, mainly because I used her account to set it up as a comforting memorial for myself. We used to play it together and it was our thing.

This made me recognize and reflect on how furries on a wide scale put importance on and have tendencies to memorialize our lost members, friends and family, in ways that I think are uniquely touching. It says so much about how we value each other and are connected. Community ties can be so widespread through a single furry, and make support for one another when facing mortality… The more I look, it’s everywhere. A lot of us live very digitally. For some furries that were more isolated, this was their life. Maybe it was their only way to participate in the fandom.

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November 6, 2024

Someone I kept out of a furry party is charged with domestic violence murder of another furry

by Patch O'Furr

In 2018, I told Dizzy he shouldn’t come to a furry party at a club in San Francisco. I was one of the organizers who keeps an eye on who is coming. He was a soft-looking guy who acted persistently pitiful about it, so I let him know it wasn’t because of something I knew he did, or any personal issue. It was for caution and to keep things harmonious, and there were other events he could go to. If he had a bad reputation, he could change it by doing good at other ones. I just wasn’t going to be pliable to begging for pity. If you don’t respect someone’s “no”, that’s a red flag itself.

To my confidential knowledge, the caution was because of multiple people tipping me to beware of someone abusive who they were uncomfortable being around, who they said would try manipulating for sympathy.

A few years before this, some other manipulation pulled me in to being a victim of a con artist. (He was judged liable for fraud and elder abuse after I had to defend whistleblower retaliation, cross-sue and beat him to stop it, winning a $32,000 judgement. When people sue me for defamation, I don’t settle and I bankrupt them.) The con artist was a monster with a lot of power over others, who were viciously whipped up against me for reporting abuse by their then-trusted manipulator. The experience of being the only person to point at The Emperor’s New Clothes and fighting for vindication made it easy to say no to Dizzy, stay firm, and watch what happened.

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