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Furfunding Week in Review: 7-28-13
Gotta Explicate them All: The World of Pokémon
Another quiet week in furry crowdfunding, must be the summer doldrums. A few fun new projects, but for me one of the highlights of the week was a pair of excellent podcast episodes from “Fear the Boot,” a thoughtful and long-running tabletop RPG podcast, focusing on Kickstarter strategies, pitfalls, tactics, and so on. Granted, it’s not the furry fandom, but certainly another colony in the great nation of geeks. If you’re thinking of starting a crowdfunding campaign, give them a listen (ep.1, ep.2). Anyway, today a long-overdue look at what must be the Audubon Society of Pokémon fansights.
And then a bunch of other stuff.
Pokémon: Rich world, but aimed solidly at a younger crowd. In his pitch video, author Joshua Dunlop talks about a view of the…uh…Pokéverse that has matured with its older fans: a rich interactive website that looks at the world of Pokémon like a nature documentary, National Geographic, or travel guide might, exhaustively and elegantly.
Ancient drawing of a Charizard
“The World of Pokémon” cracks open every aspect of Pokémon with an almost academic fervor, looking at regional histories, gyms and trainers, technology, the “why” of the Pokémon league, and some artistic extrapolations into religion, ancient history, architecture, wars and lost empires…and the art we see in the KS is impressive, both professional and diverse in style, and the long-term/stretch goals–weekly newscasts from the Pokémon world, professionally-produced pokémon calls, soundtrack, webcomic…it’s an ambitious project.
An ambitious and accredited project! Dunlop’s staff includes students of zoology and biology, composers and sound designers, entertainment professionals…and strangely, more theater people than you can shake a stick at, but maybe you have to be a little insane to take a project of this scope on without corporate backing, and theater people generally qualify.
Is this a viable project? It’s hard to say. Pokémon’s star seems to be setting somewhat, it’s not the international craze it once was–though the games are still doing well for Nintendo, that’s not the same as a base of sustainable support for an ad-driven multimedia project that doesn’t directly feed into the games. And thusfar, the Kickstarter support has not made a deep dent in the campaign’s ambitious goal, which may or may not be meaningful given the peaks-and-valleys shape of most KS pledge patterns. Regardless, the World of Pokémon campaign is an excellent read and an exciting project.
Books/Print
The Dragon Princess (Ends: 8/2/2013)
A princess cursed to be a half-dragon, half-human creature looks for love to lift her curse.
Talonridge: Book II (Ends: 8/5/2013)
Heavily-illustrated young adult series of mice on a mission in a fantasy world, very “Mousegard”
Part two of a planned 63-book series. That’s ambition!
The Tales of Shakespuss (Ends: 8/3/2013)
Stripped-down, lightened up, and retold versions of Shakespeare for kids, live action, theatre, and animated.
Right to Bear Arms tees (Ends: 8/9/2013)
Tee shirts with long, furry sleeves
Cute tees, unfortunately the shirt slogans aren’t as funny as the concept.
Woof — Dog Themed Pinback Buttons (Ends: 8/25/2013)
Cute, quirky, 1.25-inch buttons for your jacket or whichever. Cute little guys! Cats too.
Scroll down a little, the “extra dog” pins are adorable :) Watch the artist on DeviantArt or FA
Piki Charms (Ends: 9/21/2013)
Tiny charms for phones, etc, with an amazing range of designs, by DrawWithLaura
The goal is a little high for the nature of this product, but it’s to fund some business capital equipment. But it’s fixed-funding, so no accidental scams.
Dreamkeepers: Prelude (Ends: 7/31/2013)
A bound edition of the Dreamkeepers “prelude” webcomic, with a cast of graceful, stylized and colorful critters.
More artsnstuff on the Dreamkeepers FA account.
The Legend of MonkeyRonin (Ends: 7/31/2013)
A comic series featuring a Monkey King sort of character, very nice illustrations!
Animal Inphantry: Hupsalupa Beginnings (Ends: 8/2/2013)
A team of five critters takes to the street in a war against bullying.
Rabbit (Ends: 8/3/2013)
The graphic novel story of a rabbit working as a bar bouncer (among other things) in a city of carnivores
Sam & Fuzzy – Two Volume Omnibus (Ends: 8/7/2013)
The story of a man and a bear, in a crazy absurdist comic universe, a 1500-page epic comic collection.
World War Kaiju graphic novel (Ends: 8/12/2013)
What if the ultimate weapon that ended World War II didn’t usher in the atomic age, but the Kaiju (giant city-crushing monster) age? Excellent video, great retro propaganda visuals, and bizarre immersive stretch goal toys.
“Furry” is a stretch, but there’s a lot to like here for fans of giant, Tokyo-crushing armadillos.
Bulletproof Chicken (Ends: 8/13/2013)
Comic about “The most bad-ass fowl to ever wear a badge.” Cleaning up the streets with the cock with a glock.
Of Mice and Madness: Tails from Out There! (Ends: 8/15/2013)
The adventures of the mouse bounty hunter Othello and his trusted if dim cat steed as they travel the galaxy in search of riches.
More galleries and info at ofmiceandmadness.com.
Birdland (Ends: 8/22/2013)
A comic set in New York City, thick with jazz, noir, murder, and anthropomorphic birds
Owlgirls (Ends: 9/1/2013)
A “paranormal detective” genre comic, three shadowy sisters touched by the goddess of Death. Oh, they have owl heads.
Danger Squad (Ends: 9/9/2013)
Sci-Fi Comedy featuring a crazy captain and malajusted crew, and a nice range of anthro characters and villians.
CANterlot, Ontario MLP Con (Ends: 8/9/2013)
Funding campaign for Ontario’s MLP convention in November
DerpyCon South (Ends: 8/14/2013)
Fundraising for Year 1 of DerpyCon South: the New Orleans Brony convention!
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Blood Brothers (Ends: 8/23/2013)
A short, live-action TMNT film with some amazing props already in the works.
From the people who brought you Marvel Zombies: The Movie: The Trailer…. Disorienting KS video, total lack of business plan, but nice mock-ups.
Cat’s View Feature Film (Ends: 8/21/2013)
A crime thriller filmed from a cat witness’s point of view, along with information about the life of a feral cat, trap/neuter/return projects, etc.
Anthro: Animating the Soul (Ends: 8/27/2013)
A documentary look at beloved anthro characters and their creators.
Stitchfan has broken this project up into a series of small-goal IGGs, interesting model and I hope to see it succeed!
BiPolar Bears (Ends: 9/1/2013)
Animated series about manic and depressive polar bear twins Manny and Preston (orderilies in a psych institute), the Post-Traumatic Puffins, Randolf the Alcoholic Reindeer, and other friends.
Bleah. The promo vid is “join me in my philosophy” rather than “here’s this cool product idea.” That plus very high goal/60-day campaign is a bad sign.
Pelted Primacy (Ends: 8/12/2013)
A Bicycle style card deck with anthro court cards and paw-print pips.
More of the artist’s work on DeviantArt.
Room Party: The Game (Ends: 8/15/2013)
A card game about building the MOST AWESOME room party at the con. Concept by the artists of BLOTCH (and stretch goal Furry Con expansion to be drawn by Blotch.)
Reminds me a bit of “Chez Geek,” silly people, silly situations, accumulating cool points.
Zoo Fu: Path of the Samurai Zookeeper (Ends: 8/17/2013)
A silly card game of fighting zoo animals, martial arts, and shouting.
I really want to play a game where you get points by shouting “Crouching Gecko Kick of DOOOOOOM!”
Ponies for Pathfinder Setting Handbook (Ends: 8/24/2013)
A MLP-inspired tabletop RPG setting handbook–inspired by, but not derivitive of.
You may want to look at the Ponies for Pathfinder Racebook first. The writer seems to have tried to create a legitimate stand-alone product, not a MLP mashup or comedy piece. So, points for a clear goal.
Gothitropolis Raven Action Figure (Ends: 8/12/2013)
Six action figures of 6-inch anthro birds in gothic fantasy inspired armor, with stretch goals for several more within reach.
Laika Believes: The Sun at Night (Ends: 8/9/2013)
A 2d action platformer featuring Laika, the Soviet space dog. Check the trailer.
Laika’s such a tragic story, I can’t blaim anyone for creating an alternate reality to give her a happy ending…
Questria: Princess Destiny (Ends: 8/18/2013)
A life simulation game with very familiar characters, human versions of the “mane six” from My Little Pony.
Fable Kart (Ends: 9/1/2013)
Multiplayer kart game in which the hare, turtle, and lots of animal friends crash and zoom around as they try to rescue the pages from Aesop’s storybook.
The Pandas Show (Ends: 8/9/2013)
Multimedia web/print/video game featuring…well, various pandas, and parodies involving pandas. It’s a lot of panda.
Trailer slide show here…I’m not sure it helps!
The World of Pokemon (Ends: 8/11/2013)
A rich look at the Pokemon universe, with artistic, scientific, architectural studies. Fascinating stuff! More images on DeviantArt
Pocket Pussies: The Legend of Seven Purity Seals (Ends: 8/9/2013)
Zelda/Pokemon hybrid exploration/battling seizure monsters game, loaded with cheesecake pokemon, cat girls, and assorted anime-esque hotness.
A Petgirl’s Story (Ends: 8/11/2013)
Petplay meets the children’s book format in a VERY adult and yet charmingly innocent story of a catgirl and her owner.
Okay, “charmingly innocent” is a stretch. Half the illustrations are online already. NSFW seriously. There’s a leather dogboy for canine fans.
Chimera Labs (Ends: 8/27/2013)
Lovingly–that’s the word–detailed adult toys by Kharnak
I would like to meet the fennec fox that had one of those. They don’t usually grow that big…
Erotic Werebeast (Offbeatr voting period)
For transformation/female bodybuilder fans: a group of women test a formula that turns them into monstrous werebeasts (and soft-core stars).
The Elemals Graphic Novel (Ends: 8/31/2013): A bit pokemon, a bit Dragonball Z, a bit long and rambling. I’m sure this comic is about…something…but mostly it follows a somewhat uninteresting main character around on some sort of investigative story. Maybe you can make better sense of it.
Amazon Rage: Curse of the She-Wolf (Ends: 9/6/2013): A Buffy-esque miniseries featuring a female werewolf, possibly from outer space. Mmm, mediocre CGI werewolves are so hot right now.
Wildcats of the World (Ends: 8/25/2013): A web-based interactive resource to spread awareness of the remaining sildcat species.
Save Virachey Park (Ends: 9/10/2013): Campaign to install motion-trigger cameras in Virachey park, Cambodia, to show it’s a worthwhile preserve of endangerd species. Do it for the dholes!
Meme Plus Cats (Ends: 8/17/2013): Stuffed and cartoon anthro versions of a hoste of meme cats (a plush grumpy cat and friends…)
Mahou Shounen FIGHT! (Ends: 8/17/2013): A colorful, humorous, LGBT-friendly graphic novel and webcomic breaking open the Mahou Shounen–crime-fighting magical BOY–genre.
The Wonderful Musical Animals Book and Print (Ends: 8/19/2013): Charming, rhyming book filled with vampire mandolins, rinoccordians, and tuba squid, cobbled together from Victorian illustrations.
Fox, Wolf, and Cat Hoodies by Mermade (prelaunch): Artist Mermade launching a KS soon for her line of hats, hoodies, and tails.
Sick fursuit snowboard jump 2013 (10 sec)
Fresh and Salt Water Meet
Orky the Porky Orca (say THAT fast!) is a new full-color web comic written and illustrated by Brett DeWall. The premise is quite simple really: Orky the killer whale is accused of a murder he didn’t commit, and now he is forced to hide out among human kind. To this end he puts on a trench coat and fedora, and no one ever notices he’s an orca. Simple, yes? Oh, and helping him to adjust is a smoking, drinking frog named Pierre, with a French accent and (supposedly) refined tastes. Got all that? Good. Check out Orky at his web site when it updates every Tuesday.
image c. 2013 Brett DeWall
Arkarian and Star. Two friends of mine! (Star's taking commissions as well! Cheap for all you deal hunters)
What does /r/furry think of the picture I'm using for my iPhone background? [Art by SirRob on FA]
![What does /r/furry think of the picture I'm using for my iPhone background? [Art by SirRob on FA]](http://a.thumbs.redditmedia.com/v6-NdbJ4Fh3pOi_f.jpg "What does /r/furry think of the picture I'm using for my iPhone background? [Art by SirRob on FA]")
Online Relationships
A version of this article originally appeared on [adjective][species] in December, 2011. It has been updated and edited to better fit LSF.
I spent a night a while back cooking dinner for my fiancé (now husband), who was sick with the flu and a sinus infection. Though I was either cooking or working, we had a few moments of banality together, talking about work or taking NyQuil for the night. Eventually, I sent him to bed before he could start another TV show; I was feeling jealous that I was working so much and he had taken the day off. We said our goodnights and our I-love-yous, and he left to go lay down. As he did so, I was immediately struck by how weird the whole evening was to me, then fascinated that such would be the case. The whole night was totally mundane, as are so many others, but it took place in person: something relatively unique to me and seemingly uncommon in the circles in which I hang out in the fandom. Even all of my relationships that weren\’t strictly based online still had some interaction in that arena, and I think there are a few good reasons for this.
Furry is really important to me. Like, really, really important. I\’ve thoroughly entrenched myself in the fandom, have lived it for more than a decade, and relish every moment of my interactions with it. That\’s the whole reason I started these projects, really: the act of writing helps me understand what this is and why it\’s important to me, and the act of sharing what I write is one way that I feel I can give back to the community that has meant so much to me. I\’ve written about a lot, lately, and I feel that my topics have been fairly diverse, but not without their common threads. Of course, there\’s the difference between how we feel and how we act, and the importance of a character separate from our selves, but what I think is the most important attribute of our fandom is the way we interact and the relationships we form with each other in the context of furry. There is a reason that the most-used tag on [a][s] is the \”social interaction\” tag. Second to that is, of course, \”Internet\”, and the obvious combination of the two leads us to online relationships – that is, dating – which play an outsized role in our community.
I am no stranger to online relationships. Far from it, in fact: I think I can say that my online relationships outnumber my in-person relationships two or even three to one. One of the big draws to having a relationship online in a culture that is based in large part on the Internet is that you gain the advantage of the selection bias: by interacting in a primarily furry setting, you have at your disposal for potential partners primarily furries. A good part of a relationship lies in having a good deal in common with your partner, and that is handily built into the fandom. You likely have a group of people with similar levels of technological aptitude, a ready-made shared interest in anthropomorphics, and you don’t have to explain your activities to your partner. That you share this ahead of time makes a good case for dating within the fandom. It\’s simply easier, perhaps healthier to be in a relationship with another furry.
I went through a relationship with a non-furry a few years ago, and while I cared for my partner deeply, there was always this thing we could never quite share. It\’s not that we didn\’t have other things in common, nor that we didn\’t talk about furry. It was that there was this bond that I shared with other people that I could just never share with her, not without her becoming a part of the fandom, which is something I could never force her to do and she did not seem interested in doing on her own. I still care for her and do miss some aspects of going out with a non-fur: particularly, I miss the fact that it often caused me to step back and take a look at the things that I was doing or saying or thinking as part of this subculture from and outside perspective. While I\’ve always considered myself a fairly introspective person, I can honestly say that this was probably the first time that I had started to really look into what furry meant to me, particularly because either it or my relationship was on the line. The relationship didn\’t last and was probably never meant to, with this and other differences keeping us apart.
Another thing that that relationship lacked was not only the interaction between the two parties on a personal level, but interaction on a character level. Even though JD and I rarely talk online (he’s a terrible speller – sorry hon!), we still have this multi-layered relationship that may be essential for a couple within the fandom. For furries, you have to interact well as a couple not only on a personal level, but as characters and vice versa, and this is one of the reasons several of my other relationships did not work out quite as well as either party had hoped. Although things may have been spectacular or mind blowing online, you’re just not really an eFox or iWolf in person (well…probably). Species aside, our characters are very much front-stage constructs, in the Erving Goffman sense. We build up these characters to emphasize or even take on attributes that may be lacking in us, and that\’s what helps to make them a separate entity from our true self. It\’s amazing to think back on all of the wonderful times I have had over the years in the relationships I\’ve been a part of and realize that, when thought of that way, it\’s like watching two people completely separate from ourselves fall in love: my iFox to your eWhatever, and you and I are only the narrators, or perhaps the readers of a story.
More than just these separate aspects of our personas, however, are the barriers inherent in online interaction, particularly in a furry setting. The best, and also quite possibly the worst thing about online interaction is that, being primarily text based, you have the ability to construct your avatar moreso than usual. You have the ability to reread what you\’re about to say, and the ability to build a reply that is carefully designed with the other party in mind. It comes as a shock interacting with someone in real life after having only had the ability to interact with them online for so long. This is, of course, especially true when there are additional levels of fantasy involved in your interactions, one of the most salient (non-species) examples being gender play: not only are you constructing your front-stage avatar with this additional type of foresight, but you are changing a very basic fact about yourself in the process. Gender roles are complicated things that have their tie-ins even with role-play online as animal people, and when those roles are inverted or otherwise changed between the two settings of online and off, the interaction between the parties of the relationship is put at risk. Even so, it\’s important to have that interaction between both character and self within the relationship in both contexts. James is still my dog, and I\’m still his…whatever species I am that day, even though we\’re both grown man-shapes working our day jobs and taking care of each other when we get sick.
All of this relies on technology, though. It relies on the fact that we, as a group, tend to be some fairly tech-savvy people. We are some pretty tech-literate folk, and that just adds to our relationships with each other. It takes a certain type of willingness to embed a portion of our lives in this thin layer of technology that hovers over, beneath, and through everything else, and a certain type of person to find the thought of that enjoyable as compared to perhaps going out to a bar in an attempt to pick up a date.
This is not to say that we\’re all nerds or anything. In fact, I\’m pretty sure that much of the stigma that affects \”nerds\” outside the fandom translates to within it as well. Rather, we are a group of people that has embraced the technology around us and made it part of our lives, even if we don\’t necessarily know, or even care how it works. We may not always be cutting edge, but we are contemporary with our generations, and maybe even a little ahead of the game, in general, and that may just serve as the basis for much of the social interaction within our subculture, and the relationships within that, taking at least second-seat to our interest in anthropomorphising animals.
I should emphasize that I am hardly against online relationships in any way, given my history and current situation. In the long run, I feel that I am who I am today in large part because of them. The way I work has shifted with my circumstances, and though I don\’t really take part in all that I used to, that\’s still a big part of who I am. I\’m one of those \”all experiences are beneficial\” foxes. I think that any chance we, as furries, get to share in the closeness of our bonds to each other and our characters\’ relationships is worth taking, for sure. Online relationships have become almost an integral part of our fandom and it would be strange to see the culture without them in the fore. Love itself is too big a topic for a lay-fox like myself to even begin to comprehend; I\’m simply glad that I had and have the chance to experience so much of it with such an awesome crowd, both on the \’net and off.
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Lookin for a custom Antro for me
i need someone to make an anthro for myself if you can help me please message me?
submitted by GriffinMan101[link] [3 comments]