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How far will one go for a horrible pun? Months of high quality animation and voice acting? Yup, VoxelWolves did.
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Are your characters failing to make decisions? Is your plot telling everyone how it’s going to be? Are your climaxes failing to have impact? If you answered yes to any of these, maybe it’s time to double check the agency in your story.
Character agency is a fundamental many writers forget to include in their stories. Learn about what it is and how to use it in this episode.

Ep 81 – Character Agency - Are your characters failing to make decisions? Is your plot telling everyone how it’s going to be? Are your climaxes failing to have impact? If you answered yes to any of these, maybe it’s time to double check the agency in your story.

The cast is all together this week, still tweaking things but ready to blab for you all to enjoy! Episode 63 - Sharking the year away

Our new equipment is live! Come and listen to our new sound all thanks to our fine listeners! Episode 62 - Shark has a new sound

Surprisestream! 3-26-19 by Xander & Alkali Surprisestream! 3-26-19 - Surprisestream! 3-26-19 by Xander & Alkali

Animation workshop has put out a bunch of shorts targeting the very young wiht some cute and surreal stuff. https://youtu.be/vfekyLS5bPo
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The Furry Film Festival is the very first festival of its type to come to the international furry community. While some small film festival events have been featured at furry conventions in the past, this event is a completely standalone festival, dedicated entirely to furry movies and film making. It’s a multi-day celebration held in […]

Recently we discovered Crossroads, an urban fantasy comic series brought to you by Crossroads Comix — a collection of creative folks from San Jose State University in California. To hear them tell it, “This multimedia series takes place in the sleepy Pacific Northwest beach town of Crossroads. A washed-up college graduate named Como is at an impasse in his life, but his life is turned upside down as a series of unusual events start to follow him and his friends everywhere they go. Como and his friend Nina set out to find out what is really going on in Crossroads.” Multimedia means there’s an on-line comic, as well as upcoming animation and music videos. There’s even a trade paperback called The Art of Crossroads available. Visit their Tumblr site to find out more.

image c. 2019 Crossroads Comix

Here is an amazing stop motion film by Jie Weng [1] about life, death and our relationship with cats.  I really do love the Professional [2] reference with Leon in cat form. "What we expect from the relationship with the animals reveals how we want to be treated and respected. The film focuses on the evolution and changes in the human beings’ life from the first-person perspective of an animal. In "The Quintet of the Sunset", five cats with distinguished personalities live their healthy and happy lives thanks to the care and love of their owner Gina. When Gina reaches the end of her life, they watch over Gina forever in their own way and their hearts beat as one with Gina’s heart." [1] https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3770023/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9on:_The_Professional
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Here's the first edition of a show we might be doing more often now. We hope you enjoy! for all things Dragget Show -- http://draggetshow.com support us on Patreon! -- https://www.patreon.com/thedraggetshow all of our audio podcasts at https://soundcloud.com/the-dragget-show You can also find us on iTunes & wherever you find podcasts! Dragget Show telegram chat: https://telegram.me/draggetshow Dragget MD #0 (pilot episode!) - TRADITION - Here's the first edition of a show we might be do…

One thing we like about visiting conventions is coming across “how did we miss this?” items. For instance: At BLFC we stumbled across The Tale of Jasper Gold, a black & white on-line comic written and illustrated by Jamil Gonzalez. “When settled rancher Jasper Gold’s bounty-hunting past catches up to him, Jasper must take up his gun once again to track down a gang of criminals as he searches for his lost daughter. The Tale of Jasper Gold is a tale of dastardly villains, gun-toting bounty hunters, and courageous heroes of the West.” Last year, Volume 1 of the Jasper Gold story arc was collected in a trade paperback graphic novel by Jarlidium Press. It’s available now from Rabbit Valley. [In other bunny news: If you didn’t hear, the Rabbit Valley crew are retiring from their appearances at furry conventions. Soon they’ll be moving to on-line sales only. We’ll miss you folks in our travels!]

image c. 2019 Jarlidium Press

I hate furry sci fi. I've reviewed it in the past (Barsk, Bleak Horizons, and Kismet to name a few), and I've managed to keep a fairly objective stance on these books. I can recognize their talent and skill without having much personal attachment. And that's fine! But this Goal Publications' title, Tristan, by Sylvain St-Pierre, blew my f***ing mind.I won't go into detail with my usual gripes about formatting and copyediting. Instead, I want to present you with a list:The Eight Reasons You Should Read Tristan:1. Even though the story is about the typical rogueish Byronic hero (think Drizzt or Han Solo, for example), the author dispenses with the tropish clumsy, goofy, and charming personality and instead infuses him with cold, hard manipulation. From the beginning when Tristan awakes from a ten-year cryosleep, having been tricked and imprisoned, we see him become heartless and ruthless so fast. He is not the noble trickster we see so often. He actually does just want to survive; he's not just saying it and then joins a damn political rebellion (yes, I'm looking at you, Han).2. The pacing is so tight on this book. We have segments where each chapter has Tristan advancing the plot super fast, and we have segments where he has to wait, and so do we. And we get so much character development here.3. The side characters are actually well-done. In the sci fi books I mentioned above, I could not tell you anything about the side characters from memory, but the side characters here will stick with you. I will always remember Miranda. I will remember Alex. Satan below, I will remember Alex.4. As an action book, it does a great job. It has equal parts violence and suspense, so those payoffs are just great. I know that goes back to pacing, but it really is so artfully done here.5. Alex. I will try not to make any spoilers here. But there is an M/M romance in the book that twisted at my heart so bad. If the author is out there reading this review, thank you for having Tristan do what he did instead of what his instinct was telling him. That said, this is not a romance book, but when it appears, it appears well and is handled quickly.6. World-building. For me, good fantasy/sci-fi worldbuilding is actually simple. I don't want a whole Redwall or Star Trek universe each time I pick up such a genre read. And that's coming from someone who read the entirety of Wheel of Time! For a novella, this was just delightful. Most of the world-building was generic and didn't require a lot of memorizing a million proper nouns. I could keep up with it and be super immersed. No, it wasn't the most unique sci fi setting I'd ever seen. But it's the most unique furry sci I've seen anyway.7. So what makes it unique? It's plot definitely. While we are dealing with a sci fi rogue, we are not dealing with corporate scandals like in most furry sci fi right now. It instead tackles questions of just surviving, family drama, and even finding meaning in the world. I will say, using the TRADITIONAL meanings, not the currently in vogue ones, this book is more of a romance than an epic (that is, we follow one character's personal journey and internal struggles, rather than being a large-scale battle of good versus evil [cf. the Solo movie is a romance; the main Star Wars episodes are all epics]; romance doesn't have anything to do with love necessarily). And for me that worked a lot better. I was so invested in the characters, and I didn't want their interpersonal struggles to be given grandiose stakes magically. I appreciated the simple stakes of surviving, completing jobs, having revenge, etc.8. Furry elements. You never once forget this is a furry protagonist. Now, for the life of me, I couldn't tell you what kind of furry the MC is. The blurred cover conveys it's an antlered mammal of some kind, but I couldn't tell you more than that. (And I just pasted the cover above in this post. I swear the printed version has lower contrast and is glossy, so it's a lot harder to tell what it is. I swear I'm not crazy!) But I never once found myself caring. It matters a lot in the book that the character is an anthro animal, but the species never really matters. In this world, he's labeled as Other from just his animal features generally, and that label matters. Thankfully, the author treated that Othering as so much more complex than something like Skyrim does. People hate him because he's Other, yes, but others fetishize him for that.If this isn't enough, then I don't know what else to tell you. Get this book. We need more sci fi like this. Best furry sci fi I have ever read.

Joseph Lallo’s dark fantasy series The Book of Deacon encompasses about half a dozen novels of warfare between humans, elves, dwarves, and your standard Medieval European Fantasy species. But The Story of Sorrel isn’t about them, at least not directly. Rather it follows a family of a somewhat less typical species, intelligent foxes known to the humanoid races as “malthropes”. That name, a fusion of the Greek word “anthropis” or “person”, and the Latin “malus” for “bad”, tells you just what the humans think of them.We open with the malthrope vixen Sorrel and her kits Wren and Reyna playing “the game” as they call it, where the kits try to evade their mother for as long as possible, her way of teaching them how to survive in a world where seemingly everyone is trying to kill them. On the human-dominated continent malthropes are hunted like vermin and have become so rare that Sorrel believes they may be the last of their kind, but sometime before this book she managed to smuggle her family across the ocean to a more sparsely-populated continent and they’ve avoided signs of civilization ever since. The next day, Sorrel’s belief that their kind are nearly extinct is challenged when she happens upon a tribe of fennec malthropes, who mistake her for a raider from a rival tribe of red malthropes and capture her. It turns out that the two malthrope tribes on this continent are under the “protection” of a dragon who demands a tribute of meat and treasure from both tribes, and the fennecs plan to offer up Sorrel for their meat tribute. By the time the kits find her, the dragon is already carrying her off to his lair. Can Wren and Reyna escape and rescue their mother before the dragon gets bored and eats her? We’ll see how well she taught them.SPOILER ALERT: “Children rescuing parents” is a tried-and-true plot arc, but it’s hard to pull off without making the parents seem incompetent. I was pleased to see that Lallo managed to avoid that here: Sorrel stays alive in captivity by her own wits and guile, and their escape is a product of her own efforts as much as the kits. Now, given the grim tone I picked up from the book and series, I was expecting a far more depressing ending, and was surprised when instead the protagonists pulled off a more than Pyrrhic victory using the elements previously shown throughout the story. SPOILERS CONCLUDED.I’d say that The Story of Sorrel works fairly well as a standalone story but I wouldn’t recommend it as an introduction to the series. Sorrel seems to be the only character with any knowledge of the events of the other “Deacon” books, but she’s always vague about it, when the dragon asks her what has become of the land across the sea she simply answers “two great kingdoms wage war.” Another malthrope-centric novel, Rise of the Red Shadow, told me more about the human side of the world in the free Amazon preview than this entire book did.Overall, I’d call this a good story by a good writer, and I’d heartily recommend it if you’re looking for a quick read or are already familiar with the setting. But if you’re looking to dip your toes into an epic fantasy universe I’d check out the other books in the series.

Just today we got the first full trailer for Abominable, the new animated feature from Dreamworks and Pearl, their production partners in China. Animation Scoop has the video. “When teenage Yi (Chloe Bennet, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) encounters a young Yeti on the roof of her apartment building in Shanghai, she and her mischievous friends, Jin (Tenzing Norgay Trainor) and Peng (Albert Tsai), name him ‘Everest’ and embark on an epic quest to reunite the magical creature with his family at the highest point on Earth. But the trio of friends will have to stay one-step ahead of Burnish (Eddie Izzard), a wealthy man intent on capturing a Yeti, and zoologist Dr. Zara (Sarah Paulson) to help Everest get home… Abominable is written and directed by Jill Culton (Open Season, Monsters, Inc., Toy Story 2) and co-directed by Todd Wilderman (Trolls, The Croods).” Look for it in theaters September 27th.

image c. 2019 Entertainment Weekly

To quote George Takei: OH MY!
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Two days ago, US furry convention Emerald’s Fur Summit announced their closure, which included termination of plans for their 2020 edition as well. According to the furcon’s tweet, they cited that they have to make ‘difficult choices’, which ultimately led to the decision of the con’s final closure. They added that all of their remaining […]

The upcoming Cartoon Network series Mao Mao: Heroes of Pure Heart was created by (OK K.O.!) and Black Dynamite [1] writer/storyboard artist Parker Simmons [2].  This is a co-production between Titmouse Inc and Cartoon Network Studios and is going to debut on the channel on July 1, 2019. The show is based on the teaser I Love You Mao Mao made by Simmons for the annual Titmouse Inc [3] "5-Second Day" back in 2014 that was also appeared on Newgrounds [4]. https://youtu.be/w7W5mjhc2O4 "Join along with Mao Mao, Badgerclops, and Adorabat as they team together to bring justice and peace to the people of Pure Heart Valley!" [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Dynamite_(TV_series) [2] https://twitter.com/parkerrsimmons [3] http://titmouse.net/ [4] https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/635187
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This Calarts student film raises questions I'm not sure I want answers to. Cute though.
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Just got back from Biggest Little Fur Con, and of course we’ve got lots to talk about. But first… Udon Entertainment have released the Samurai Pizza Cats Official Fan Book in North America. What’s that you ask? Well according to Wikipedia, “Kyatto Ninden Teyandee is an anime series produced by Tatsunoko Productions and Sotsu Agency. The series originally aired in Japan on TV Tokyo from February 1, 1990 to February 12, 1991… Saban picked up the North American rights to the series in 1991, and produced an English version called Samurai Pizza Cats.” Honestly, that explanation barely cat-scratches the surface of just how weird and wonderful this series was. Fan interest has not waned over the years, and now there’s a book all about it! “The Samurai Pizza Cats: Official Fan Book is packed with the best toppings: Pinup artwork, character designs and profiles, episode summaries, rough concepts, and exclusive in-depth interviews with the show’s creators and original cast.” Check out the preview over at Comicon.com.

image c. 2019 Udon Entertainment

we're trying a new thing, we have to make a few edits to the youtube stream but for now, enjoy the audio! Dragget MD - Tradition, the 90s, Philanthropy (pilot episode!) - we're trying a new thing, we have to make a few e…