Welcome to Tempe O’Kun, author of Paranormal Furry Romance, anthropomorphic-animal Westerns, and a frequent guest of the site.
The smash-hit furry anime Aggrestuko that came out April 2018 is already slated for a second season, but we got a Yuletide treat: a Christmas special. Read the rest of this entry »
If you find yourself in Utah and want fun in Salt Lake City, follow the secret furry scent trail to Fluff Party. And if you sniff a whiff of popcorn, it might be the newest coolest thing I’ve been wanting to see. This is an idea whose time has come.
Proud to announce something big is coming to the furry community in 2019! Introducing the Furry Film Festival ("F3")! Open to anybody in the fandom, anywhere in the world! Submit a short film showcasing your creativity. More info soon! https://t.co/PGk4lsUFfS - @UtahFurryFandom pic.twitter.com/GaoXxZ05T4
— ChronoWolf 🔜 @MAGFest (@ChronoWolfMusic) December 11, 2018
Being fluffy is its own reward. Fun and creativity don’t need representing. What is this, a religion? But if a spotlight happens, it could be for hard work to help others, a lucky chance, or having the right dance moves at the right time. Chasing attention might not be necessary, but it’s nice to show how cool this group is because that helps make it cooler. So here’s why the fandom is great in 2018.
Part 1 had good media: CNN’s This Is Life with Lisa Ling, Sonicfox at The Game Awards in Los Angeles, and Bucktown Tiger on Jeopardy. For Part 2 here’s conventions, charity, art, celebrities, awards, spending, and more.
Midwest FurFest got the first five-figure furry con attendance! It took 29 years since ConFurence 0 to match the biggest WorldCon (started in 1939, that’s perhaps one of the longest running nerd events, where they hand out fancy awards like the Hugos). Now we’re giving Science Fiction fandom a run for its money. It’s not on Comic Con level and may never be (…good?) but that’s millions of dollars of support to build and share the wealth. And furry is still grassroots with little outside investment and high DIY power.
In 2018, fandom had so much going on that this needs two parts. Part 1 has the media, and Part 2 is for conventions, charity, art, celebrities, awards, spending, and more.
Pic: Cecil Shepherd (center) with Mr. Disko and Patch
Ever been on an aircraft carrier? The USS Hornet, in Alameda CA, is docked across the bay from San Francisco. It’s a fearsome wedge of rust-flecked metal bigger than most city blocks, and bristling with guns, planes and artifacts from WWII to the Apollo Space Program. Now it’s a national historic landmark and museum, but if you walk down the cavernous hangar deck and look at photos of Pearl Harbor in flames, it almost tingles with the smells and sounds of a global struggle against the evil of fascism. It made me think of my grandpa in the South Pacific, taking islands from Japan. It could make the world’s biggest hippie feel a sense of pride and humbleness from the history there.
Look ahead a few months, when this ship will be full of furry animals throwing a rave. That’s the cutting edge of turning swords into plowshares!
The second Space Camp Party is coming. On 12/9/18 it started with a photoshoot on the ship that drew a whopping 130 fursuiters just for a pre-planning meet. Previously in March 2018, over 500 went to the first party at Faction Brewing (a converted aircraft hanger on the same navy base). From early demand, the followup is likely to reach the size of a single-day con.
While I was doing silly poses in my rat suit against a giant ship anchor (does Bad Dragon make one of those?) – I thought of furries taking over the ship and conquering the nation. Next, the world. Then the blue skies above, and then the moon.
2018 is an intense year with many furry news stories topping ones that just happened. It’s too much to easily keep up with, and Fred Patten’s death affects publishing here, but on the plus side, I’m now paying for articles. Get in touch about submitting your story. And check out how much cool furry stuff there is to share.
Last year, I did an article highlighting some Furry YouTubers you might not have seen. At that time I wanted to share some creators in the growing field of Furry YouTube. Now, it’s grown enough so being a Furry YouTuber is seen as a creative field like for any artist, writer, musician, or dancer in the fandom. There are tons of creators big and small in this little corner of YouTube, working to get your attention. Although sometimes it can be hard to see what makes one stand out from another.
When you have so many who put on their fursuits to do silly vlogs just like everyone like them, it can make viewers burn out because there’s little difference for watching one over another. That’s why someone like BetaEtaDelota who uses character stills over blurry gameplay footage, with his soothing voice, was able to stand out and grow as he did in this space.
Doing YouTube is like riding a bike. It’s easy to say how to do it (Be yourself, have decent audio and lighting, compelling titles, SEO, a consistent schedule, etc…) It’s another to actually ride it, and juggle all these factors together to make content that stands out and gets people to watch it. I’ve been making videos for over five years and have learned that the hard way.
So today, I have six creators for you who put their own unique spin on being a Furry YouTuber. This was actually inspired by a tweet from one creator who wished to share how other small creators have made an impact on the fandom in 2018. It’s not hard to see why they were recommended. Each of these creators goes beyond the fursuit, and uses their Furry as a part of their content without having it define their content.
The only thing to note is that this isn’t a “go subscribe to these creators” piece. Some of the creators I knew before the tweet. Others were new, and one is my personal pick. Each I believe is worth watching as examples to other creators, but I’ll leave the decision to you if you wish to follow them. Plus there’s some light criticism for some, because we’re always growing and there’s room to improve. Now here are more Furry YouTubers you might not have seen.
Welcome to Tempe O’Kun, author of Paranormal Furry Romance, anthropomorphic-animal Westerns, and a frequent guest of the site.
You might not be into pro gaming. Maybe your interest in gaming is limited to what you play yourself and the occasional piece of fan art. That’s cool.
But let me tell you why you should care.
You might not have noticed, but we’re rainbow animal-people. Midwest Fur Fest just passed 10,000 in attendance, a world record for furry cons. In some ways, the fandom will always be our weird little club, but we’re not some unknown niche anymore. Not when one of us breaks into the trending topics on Twitter.
So somebody is going to be the face of the fandom—or rather, various people are at different times. And we’re lucky that our two recent high-profile furries (SonicFox at the Game Awards and Bucktown Tiger on Jeopardy) have been really upstanding guys.
And it’s not just a public persona. As it happens, I talked to SonicFox at MFF last weekend. I ducked away from my book launch for a few minutes to say hey. And, even in suit, he made a little time to stop and chat with me. Just as you see in the video, he comes off as a sweet and sincere person. He’s absolutely someone we want as a go-to example of a furry.
Here’s a guest article from Joe Strike, a first-wave furry greymuzzle, writer about animation for Animation World Network, and author of Furry Nation, the first history of fandom in mainstream bookstores. His website shows work with TV cartoons you may know. He sent this in around the time of MFF. (- Patch)
Our community had been buzzing for months about the “furry” episode of CNN’s This is Life with Lisa Ling before it finally aired on November 18th. I kept my fingers crossed; like most other furs I’ve been watching the media get us wrong for years. (The primary reason I wrote Furry Nation was to correct the record; as I occasionally told people, “I’m tired of outsiders getting it all wrong—I decided it was time for someone in the furry community to get it all wrong.”)
But what really piqued my curiosity was that several people told me the episode was titled… “Furry Nation”!
Okay, what’s going on here? Shortly before the episode aired, I emailed the production company to ask, wazzup? how did you happen to borrow my title?, to which they responded:
Thank you for reaching out! Your book sounds amazing! We actually learned about this community from Lisa’s viewers. It was a suggestion someone sent in. Our research and facts came from FurScience.
Well, thank you “someone” for the free plug for Furry Nation The Book. (Said title never appeared in the episode by the way; I assume it was only used in the episode’s listings, although a search of cnn.com failed to discover it.)
Lacking cable, I caught up with the episode later via a relative’s DVR. After taking a few days to digest a second viewing, I’m finally ready to share my take on Lisa Ling’s take on Furry.
Grubbs Grizzly
is known for his “Ask Papabear” advice column, and Greymuzzles group popular among the original generation of fandom. He’s at work on The Furry Book and made The Good Furry Award for furs who demonstrate outstanding community spirit. Nominate one for a $1000 prize! Thanks to Grubbs for this guest article.
Corgi Events appeared here for their con Aquatifur. They made the fandom applaud in August 2018 when Denfur filled the vacancy left by RMFC. All eyes were on them when Denfur’s first year beat attendance estimates by double, as high as RMFC would have grown if it still existed. More than a mere numbers success, it represented fans rejecting bad behavior that ruined its predecessor, and embracing the ideal of a community. For that I would give Corgi Events all the support I can.
(UPDATE 1: a twist in the story shortly after publishing makes me modify this to say I support fandom and its members, volunteers and community that makes cons happen for the love of it.) – Patch
Corgi Events Is the Fandom’s First Convention Management Company
By Grubbs Grizzly
The history of furry conventions is an interesting one indeed, one that was recently written about by the late, great furry historian and book critic Fred Patten in his Furry Fandom Conventions, 1989-2015. As anyone who has read that book or is familiar with convention history knows, it all started with Confurence 0 in Costa Mesa, California, in 1989. After a couple years, new conventions started opening their doors. The phenomenon has snowballed until now there are nearly 100 conventions worldwide.
Up until recently, one thing fur cons had in common was that they were operated independently of one another. Often these would be organized by local fans, perhaps sharing crew with other events, but based in one community. Each would be organized by—typically—a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in the United States.
But the other day my attention was drawn to a company called Corgi Events LLC, when I heard its announcement of a new fur con in Irvine, California, to be called Golden State Fur Con. GSFC is debuting next year, along with another Corgi-created con, the Painted Desert Fur Con in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Reading this, bells started ringing in my fuzzy bear ears. Was Corgi trying to replace Califur, which failed to hold a convention this year, and may or may not in 2019? And Phoenix (Scottsdale is a suburb) already has the young Arizona Fur Con. Next, I saw that Corgi also runs DenFur, which has effectively replaced the failed Rocky Mountain Fur Con. The chosen locations look strategic, and multi-con management over distance is a departure from the furry norm.
ThiccPup was relaxing at home when his phone began to bark a series of woofs that spelled HIDE YIFF in Morse code. Thanks to home defense preparation and training drills, he was ready for action. He buttoned a dress shirt over his “Fuck Bitches Get Scritches” t-shirt, while his bookshelf flipped around to switch his werewolf erotica with a selection of sports magazines. His bed sank into a recess in the floor and a new one flipped down from the wall, hiding his plushies, Paw Patrol sheets, Tsaiwolf daki, and the framed art of an anthropomorphic femboy husky blowing a blushy jock rottweiler. His Furry Fuel energy drink was safely stacked behind a jar of mayonnaise.
“I got nervous when my mom saw my lunch on the floor, but I told her I was just dogsitting. Close call!” said ThiccPup.
Being caught with adult content has dire consequences for some furries. In California, one was forced to tell their grandma what a tailplug was for. In Pittsburgh, a con security SWAT team was deployed for a pup play lobby incident, with orders to neuter on sight. The threat of public exposure has never been so high.
CNN’s This is Life with Lisa Ling: Furry Nation aired last Sunday. As Furries do, some loved it and some hated it. That’s not surprising. When the critically acclaimed show (built around exploring the different corners of people’s lives) tweeted their season five episodes, fandom freaked out. Furries were tweeting about how CNN would cover them in the same season with MS-13, meth, screen addiction, and gender fluidity. Or how Furries complained that Anthro Northwest was letting TV do recording at their convention. Or how this episode was either the second coming, or the dawn of the apocalypse.
Boy, that changed overnight. If it sounds like I’m salty, I am to a degree. The reactions leading up to the premiere were just tiring. Many furries painted all journalists as TMZ tabloids looking for the next juicy clickbait headline, but looking at an episode shows Lisa Ling being a thoughtful reporter who wants to show the human stories behind the topics she covers. (You can see all episodes legally with a TV subscription here.)
It’s funny to see Furries wanting to share their stories and promote the good this community can do; yet push away anyone wanting to report on it. It lets rumors continue to define us. Of course, as I’m writing this, the BBC has done a piece about the hacking of an adult furry site many haven’t heard of. It’s actually a relatively neutral story in comparison to what happened to Ashley Madison (the website devoted to helping people cheat in their relationships), but with buxom zebras and scantily clad lionesses instead of mistresses/guys on the side (or whatever). Beyond the furry aspect, it’s neither positive nor negative, it’s just there. Perhaps those rumors are losing power just from becoming old and familiar.
It’s not without merit to be skeptical about the media covering this fandom. YouTuber Quartz Husky did a video about cable news coverage:
The issue as I see it, isn’t pointing out that there are people who will use us for sensational clicks. The issue is then finding positive examples to compare and contrast for what we, as a community want. The dialogue about the media vs. the fandom is so black-and-white, that any form of coverage is seen as bad. It leaves very little room for us to showcase who we are because there are no “good” reporters.
