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A sketchbook commission I did for someone
Furries Return To Pittsburgh, Going For World Record
An article about Anthrocon 2013, dated June 3 on the CBS Pittsburgh website:
http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2013/07/03/furries-return-to-pittsburgh-going-for-world-record/
(Some fursuiters are "frustrated clowns"?)
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) – The Furries are back. Pittsburgh is hosting the annual Anthrocon convention for the eighth year in a row.
Visit Pittsburgh CEO Craig Davis says the four-day event is one of the city’s top ten conventions, revenue-wise.
“This year alone,” he says, “will be 6-point-three million dollars in economic benefit for the city.”
With nearly six thousand visitors, downtown restaurants like Tonic Bar and Grill are happy to temporarily waive the “no pet” rule.
Anthrocon chairman Sam Conway doesn’t wear a costume, but helps explain those who do.
“Different people have different reasons,” he says. “Some are frustrated clowns, others are just natural performers. Others just like the reaction that it gets.”
Saturday at the Convention Center, more than a thousand Furries will march in what they hope is a record setting “fur suit parade.”
“So we’re going to be numbering these people as they go in,” Conway says. “We’re going to try to certify this as a Guinness World Record: Largest number of fur suit costumed characters in one place.”
Let the Magic Begin
Having made waves and conquered new worlds with their wildly-successful new-storyline comic book series My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, IDW now turn their eyes on a more obvious task: Adapting the TV series to comic books. Witness My Little Pony: The Magic Begins, coming in full color this September. Using a combination of screen-grabs and original artwork, this 112-page trade paperback tells the story of our hero-fillies from Ponyville, just as they came to us in the first-season episodes (as created by Lauren Faust, of course!). Amazon is already taking pre-orders.
image c. 2013 IDW Publishing
Just beat Dust; Elysian Tail
And I cried at the end. There were a few close calls throughout the game but the ending got me.. I loved everything about this game. Everything. The gameplay was great, controls were easy to get used to. The scenery was BEAUTIFUL. The monsters were fun to fight too. I loved the voices of every character along with their design. I quickly became best friends with Fidget and thoroughly enjoyed the company of Ahrah. I quickly found myself staying at the map selection screen(at the campire) just sit there, watching the stars with Fidget sleeping on the tree or eating a marshmellow, I found some peace sitting there for 10 mins every time in between the fighting(I figured Dust could use it). I HIGHLY recommend that anyone who hasn't picked this up, to do so.
submitted by Skycoyote[link] [37 comments]
World’s Largest Cartoon Animal Convention Returns to Pittsburgh
Here is an article on the website of Pittsburgh radio station 90.5 WESA, about Anthrocon 2013:
http://wesa.fm/post/world-s-largest-cartoon-animal-convention-returns-pittsburgh
Billed as the world's largest furry convention, Anthrocon is returning to Pittsburgh Thursday through Sunday. The much-anticipated Pittsburgh tradition is expected to attract more than 5,500 participants, some in costume, some not.
“We’re all furries,” said Anthrocon Inc. CEO Samuel Conway. “That’s the catch-all term for the fandom. We are furries. The people in the costume – we refer to the costumes, our own little lingo, they are fursuits. So they are fursuiters, the people who are wearing them.”
Anthrocon started in Albany, N.Y. in 1997 and has been held there, as well as in Valley Forge and Philadelphia, before coming to Pittsburgh seven years ago. Conway said he fell in love with the Steel City, and the convention has been here ever since.
“It is gorgeous, and then when I got to know the people here, the people are gorgeous,” Conway said. “They rolled out the red carpet; they threw open their collective arms for us. We have been here since 2006 — We’ve doubled in numbers since then, and we’re going to continue to grow and we do not foresee ever going anywhere else. This is our home.”
Goldenwolf is a yellow and white wolf husky. He said he comes to Anthrocon because it’s the most social, memorable and fun convention he’s ever been to.
Due to television and movies, Furries can sometimes be misunderstood, but Goldenwolf said attendees of Anthrocon are just looking to have fun and share their furry fandom.
“With any type of group, no matter what group it is, there’s always going to be negativity for it, but it’s better to get your own personal view, and actually go out there and see what it’s all about instead of just looking online and talking to people,” Goldenwolf said.
Anthrocon 2013 includes numerous events such as dances, lectures, an art show, performances and Saturday’s big event: a furry parade. This year, the Anthrocon will attempt to set a Guiness World Record with the “World’s Largest Fursuit Parade.”
Return of the 'furries' an annual Pittsburgh event
An article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette of July 3, 2013, about the upcoming Anthrocon convention:
http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/local/neighborhoods-city/return-of-the-furries-an-annual-pittsburgh-event-694178/
It's hard to put a finger on it -- or a paw -- but there's just something about the furries.
The annual Anthrocon convention, now in its eighth year at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, may be first and foremost a gathering of thousands of people who are fascinated by anthropomorphism, many of them wearing full fur suits or ears and tails.
But it's also become somewhat of a Downtown Pittsburgh attraction.
Furry convention considers Pittsburgh home
"It's gone from a curiosity to being embraced in the city," said Craig Davis, president and CEO of VisitPittsburgh. "A lot of people tell me that it's their favorite time of the year to come down and people-watch."
So while Anthrocon's approximately 5,500 participants this year are expected to generate $6.2 million in direct spending, the actual economic impact is likely much higher.
"It's become an economic driver," said Mr. Davis, who was not wearing a fur suit, making him one of the few people standing in the third-floor lobby of the Westin Convention Center Hotel this morning who wasn't.
Yes, the four-day convention doesn't begin until Thursday, but the fur has already arrived.
The furry fans included Cyndie Boster, a 33-year-old leather crafter originally from California but now living in France, who wore ears and a tail to become the fox character she named Zura. And Chaz Beckett, a 20-year-old biology student from Phoenix, wearing a fur suit of a lion-tiger-wolf-fox hybrid to become the furry character he calls Wuffy.
"You come for the animals and you stay for the humans," said an electrical engineer from Stockholm, who wore a partial fur suit and called himself Jake Greystripe.
Inside the Westin, the humans dressed as animals were attracting some long glances from the humans dressed as humans.
Jeff Smith, manager of the Westin's gift shop, said he sold out his stock of 30 Anthrocon T-shirts in less than 24 hours and had placed an order for more. Some were purchased by furries, but they were also selling well to non-furries.
"Some businessmen buy them for people back at home who don't believe it," he said.
Most city residents -- or least people who work or visit Downtown believe it by now. Begun as a small party in Albany, N.Y., in 1997, Anthrocon has been in Pittsburgh since 2006.
"We're here to stay," said Samuel Conway, the CEO and chairman of Anthrocon.
If there's anyone who believes in the furries, it's Fernando DeCarvalho. Last year, Fernando's Cafe, the Liberty Avenue restaurant that became a destination for the furries, was struggling and due to shut down before the start of Anthrocon. The furries found out, however, and raised enough donations to keep Fernando's Cafe open during the convention.
A short time later, Olie Budak, owner of Pizza Parma, purchased his friend's Downtown restaurant, and Mr. DeCarvalho departed to achieve his dream of becoming a pastor.
But for Anthrocon, he has returned to the temporarily named Furryland Cafe as its temporary manager, selling special Anthrocon T-shirts and dog bowls for eating.
"They won't let me not come back," he said.
Mr. Budak, like his predecessor, loves the furries, and not just because they are good business.
He likened the Pittsburgh furry attraction to the way the person dressed as a dancing cow outside a Chick-fil-A restaurant catches the eye: when you see someone in a costume, you want to take a picture with them.
"Especially," Mr. DeCarvalho added, "if there are 800 of them."
I was thinking about giving out free badges like this one for my first year at Anthrocon.
On “Real Life”
One of my classmates in college was pursuing what I believe was a double major in engineering and music composition. He was a pretty great guy, at his most helpful when it came to the discussions on sound and acoustics. He was also a huge nerd, but so were we all: we were the first class to help get the composition department at the university up and running, so we were the ones actually pushing to get the degree program started – my nerdiness took the form of running the composition lab.
For his junior recital, one of the two we were required to give consisting entirely of pieces we composed, he performed an extended three-movement piece for solo French Horn titled “Journey To Arelle”. It’s one of those titles you have to say out loud to get the joke. The song was a tone poem about what mental processes a character left to idle on Word of Warcraft must go through when their player went off to “deal with RL”.
The idea of RL – “Real Life” – in opposition to things furry is, I think, an interesting and telling one. There’s a lot to be said for immersion when it comes to gaming, for sure, but many furries apply it to much more than just an experience that can be had sitting at a console. We’re hardly the only ones, of course, but it helps in understanding just how the fandom works to know that it occurs in a context that is not always “real life.”
Role-play in and of itself is usually set as an opposite to real life. The idea of something in opposition to structured activities such as role-play is not a new one; this is easily seen in the previous example, of course. One is spending the time and effort to pretend to be this character within the set bounds of the game, computer or otherwise, in which that character ultimately resides. There is a literal role to play of some other living (or perhaps undead) being, here, and to attend to daily tasks that may be wildly out of character if not outright out of period is certainly returning to “real life”. There just isn’t the connection tying the two lives together, there.
The difference between a strict role-playing type scenario and furry, however, is that furry has no rules, no objectives, and no canon. This isn’t to say that it can’t, of course, as plenty of folk I know within the fandom play furry-themed RPGs such as Ironclaw or Usagi Yojimbo, or even appropriate not-strictly-furry games to their own uses, creating new species to be used in, say, Star Wars themed pencil-and-paper role-playing games.
Furry lacks a central story, though: there’s no canon to guide us other than the shared interest that ties us together. In our case, though we often play the roles of our created or chosen characters in various ways, from interacting with them in text-only chat rooms and MU*s to commissioning artwork or dressing up in giant animal bags at conventions, we don’t have rules or story to separate out a perfectly livable daily life as an animal person from a perfectly livable daily life as someone pretending to be an animal person.
I think this shows that furry is something beyond just role-play: it’s a whole separate context, a separate life lived in opposition to what a lot of people still think of as “normal”. We incorporate role-play as a tool rather than as some sole form of interaction. We live our lives out as furries here and there, but for the large part, much of our interaction within the fandom remains a form of escapism. Beyond that, however, furry as a subculture is still seen by many both inside and outside the fandom as an interest that’s bizarre at best, downright abnormal at worst.
This isn’t an opinion held by just those outside, as I’ve said. The fact that we maintain such a strict separation of concerns when it comes to our shared affinity for anthropomorphized animals and day-to-day interaction with those who don’t share our interest shows our own willingness to accept what we consider a normal life alongside the lives we lead within our chosen subculture. It’s willful and, as JM and I both point out, hardly negative and not without utility. A sense of normalcy pays off just as much as all that we gain by virtue of this transgressive subculture.
This isn’t the type of thing that furry is alone in creating. There are other hobbies and lifestyles – especially the latter – which readily fit into a separate context from everyday life. These are the types of things where one might find oneself being reminded, “don’t cross the streams”. The further something is from being regarded as a part of the main-stream (you’ll forgive the mixed metaphor, here), the more likely it is to be seen as constructive when one prevents it from overlapping with day-to-day life. Philately, while definitely a bookish and stereotypically nerdy sort of hobby, is something one might freely talk about with friends and coworkers outside the stamp-collecting subculture. One’s collection of firearms or bedroom proclivities rarely mix well in so-called polite company without also being some sort of transgression.
This holds especially true for lifestyles. In recent years, even in this last year, being lesbian, gay, or bisexual has hardly entailed the same amount of hiding a core part of oneself at work and with friends, separating out a portion of life from what’s considered normal by society at large. This wasn’t always the case, though, and it’s humbling to look back, as someone who grew up fitting more or less solidly into one of those categories, and see how differently the world works today in terms of “crossing the streams”.
The interesting thing to consider with this analogy is the level of choice involved in furry as compared to sexual orientation. I used the term “lifestyles” intentionally above, though it’s fallen out of favor when referring to one’s orientation, because of the fact that there exists a significant portion of the furry world that lives furry, identifies as furry, and feels that they don’t necessarily have a choice about doing so, much in the same way that many live gay, identify as gay, and feel they don’t have a choice in the matter. One can look at a hobby from the outside and see it as something that someone chooses to do and generally be correct about that, but not always. For some, those often called lifestylers, it truly can be seen as something more akin to an orientation or identity than a simple hobby, and thus be harder to separate from every day contexts.
JM and I have both discussed the usefulness in both accepting and rejecting a separate context for furry in our lives, depending on the scenario, and I think this acceptance of our subculture as a slightly-less-than-real life when stood up next to what so many of us refer to as “RL” is worth taking a step back and looking at. It’s hardly a big thing, or an exciting thing, or a new thing, but it does show the ways in which we differentiate furry from other things in our lives, and even define the boundaries of what each of us considers to be the furry fandom.
It's my first Anthrocon! Is there anything I should see or do while I'm there?
I'm a seasoned con fursuiter. I've been to Rainfurrest, RMFC, MFF, FC, and a couple others multiple times, but Anthrocon is huge and I've never been. Is there anything I should be sure to do or see while I'm there?
submitted by chipfoxx[link] [16 comments]
Gary's Mod Furry groups or servers?
For those of you who play Gary's mod I wanted to know if there's any furry groups or servers that I could join.
submitted by Im_Toph[link] [9 comments]
AC Post? Please xpost it to /r/anthrocon as well!
We're trying to get all the AC stuff into /r/anthrocon, a new subreddit for the convention! So please cross post there!
submitted by STrRedWolf[link] [4 comments]
![[link]](http://i.imgur.com/yFQn2yE.jpg){kind=link}