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Looking for a good domestic feline reference sheet commission, any suggestions?

Furry Reddit - Thu 24 Jan 2013 - 12:16

When I searched for links, most were over 7 months old, so I thought I would pose this question fresh! Would appreciate any suggestions from other furs who have had reference sheets done.

Bonus points if you know they are currently accepting reference sheet commissions or are about to open them! :)

submitted by Jaycatt
[link] [3 comments]
Categories: News

*clap, clap* for makn’ me cry

DailyFurBlog - Thu 24 Jan 2013 - 11:32
Most times I post things from Foxamoore I post about just the music. Well, in my adventures to find more furry videos on YouTube I found this which was posted 1 week ago. This actually made my tear up, the music and story are amazing. Animation was done by a talented fur ” Tirrel ” . See the video above or click the link below to comment and subscribe !!

 

VIDEO LINK

 

Categories: News

Table Flip

Furry Reddit - Thu 24 Jan 2013 - 09:39
Categories: News

Need help finding a fursuit maker

Furry Reddit - Thu 24 Jan 2013 - 00:49

Hi theres, I need some help finding a good fursuit maker. I just need a head done. My limit is $450. I'm would like follow-me eyes and movable jaw (moves when I talk). I was looking for something like this sort of style.

I'll probably by it within the next few months. Anyone who's taking commissions soon you recommend? Any help is greatly appreciated! Thanks~

-Lexi <3

submitted by Sasukesis247
[link] [3 comments]
Categories: News

I need some help finding a furry web comic I happened upon about a year ago.

Furry Reddit - Thu 24 Jan 2013 - 00:36

I, unfortunately, can't remember much about it, but I do remember that it had to do with collage, and like, four or five main characters. I remember there being a Rabbit girl who I think was a ninja... I am positive there were two ninjas. And they worked in a game store. Everything else eludes me about it, but the word "rascals" Pops in my brain when I think about for some odd reason and my novice level Google-Fu has failed me. It had some level of romance and quite a bit of comedy. Any and all help is appreciated.

submitted by leadmuffin
[link] [2 comments]
Categories: News

Christianity Should Be about Love

Ask Papabear - Wed 23 Jan 2013 - 23:59
Dear Papabear,


Well, a couple of days ago I went to the Tennessee Christian Teen Convention (TCTC). While I was there I made the choice to be baptised. My problem is the fact that I'm bisexual. Even my own mother says that I can't be a Christian. I'm extremely confused about what I need to do. I'm even suffering riddicule from some of the members in the church.


~Shadowrunn

* * *

Dear Shadowrunn,

I am not a Christian, but I know what a Christian is (having grown up in a Christian home). A Christian is someone who believes that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and that God sent His only Son to live as a man on this world and to be the Redeemer of Man’s sins so that anyone who believes in Him shall be saved.

Do you believe that? If so, then you are a Christian.

It doesn’t matter if you are straight, gay, bisexual, asexual, or have fallen in love with a turnip. If you believe in the above, you are a Christian.

Papabear personally does not consider bisexuality a sin or a fault, but even if you do, aren’t we all imperfect? Does not Christ forgive us of our sins and our flaws? I will guarantee you one thing: there is not a single person in your church, including your mother, who is without sin. There is not one person in your TCTC who is perfect.

I also believe, though I am not a Christian, that Christianity should be about love and acceptance, not hatred and exclusion. I have a very very dear friend named Motoko who is a very devout Presbyterian. When I told her that I was gay and that my marriage was ending, she loved me anyway. She is a Christian. Your mother can take a lesson from her example.

I know that there are a lot of Christians out there who are like my friend Motoko, but lately I seem to hear more and more about Christians who hate people, especially people in the LGBT community. They also seem to love guns a lot and hate Democrats. People like Pat Robertson make me ill. It makes me sad because Christianity is supposed to be a faith of love and hope, but the current leaders seem to think the opposite, including those in your family and community.

Tell your mother it doesn’t matter what she thinks. It only matters what Jesus thinks and you know in your heart that God loves you unconditionally.

Feel the love, hon.

And to my Christian readers, please chime in with a comment of support for Shadowrunn. Thank you.

Papabear

Misunderstood Furry

Furry Reddit - Wed 23 Jan 2013 - 23:09
Categories: News

Read This: ‘Divisions’

Weasel Wordsmith - Wed 23 Jan 2013 - 20:52

Divisions
Kyell Gold
Sofawolf Press

It’s pretty cool that in the few short years since Kyell Gold started the Dev and Lee series, the notion of gay football players has gone from a dream for the future to a reality that is so close you can taste it. It’s rare for a story so heavily grounded in pop culture to get more relevant over the years, but Divisions is a novel that has its finger on the pulse of culture so much that the furry aspect is actually the least interesting part (in a good way!).

The roller coaster relationship of Dev, the gay linebacker tiger, and Lee, his activist boyfriend fox, picks up not long after the conclusion of 2011′s Isolation Play, and jumps right back into the world of football and fighting couples.

I’m always very impressed with how exciting Gold portrays football. If you don’t know anything about the sport it might be confusing, but the descriptions of the action are tight and fast-paced. It’s more exciting than real football (see: any football movie ever), but it embodies the sport exceptionally, and the team dynamics are some of the more interesting parts, mostly because of the characters.

The secondary characters in Divisions accent Dev and Lee wonderfully, shining on their own without upstaging the protagonists. The clueless, foot-in-mouth cheetah Lightning Strike is a hilarious parody of the more ostentatious sports personalities, but also comes off as one of the more real characters in the book. Hal the sports journalist returns, and gets an expanded role as the much-needed sounding board for Lee, someone to at least try and point out when the fox is being stubborn and irrational (which is, like, constantly).

Lee’s ideals for gay activism and borderline obsession with the suicide of a gay college student are sometimes overshadowed by his many poor decisions. Not that this is new for a character that committed infidelity, lied to a reporter on the record, and physically assaulted his boyfriend’s father. Lee is a character I love, when I don’t want to punch him for being an idiot.

I’m rooting for Dev and Lee’s happiness, but at this point I’m not sure I’m rooting for their happiness together. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen relationships get utterly destroyed over just a fraction of the shit that’s happened to these two in a mere six months. As broken as their partnership is, though, it’s staying intact through sheer force of will, and there’s something to be said for a couple that doesn’t give up even when they probably should have.

Divisions‘ story “ends” before anything really gets resolved, leaving a lot of questions about the Firebirds, Lee, his family, and his career. According to Gold his original draft was so long that he split it into two books, and it definitely feels that way. It’s a “to be continued” instead of the more satisfying finales of the previous two books. Despite that, Divisions feels like the most balanced book in the series thus far, straddling the football and home life aspects well, as well as the romance and the melodrama.

P.S. As always, the illustrations and cover by Blotch are incredible. The selection of images might be the strongest yet, showcasing some of the most humorous (and sexiest) parts of the story.

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Categories: News

New short furry survey I made!

Furry Reddit - Wed 23 Jan 2013 - 19:58

Hey guys, I made this small survey and it would really mean a lot to me if you would fill it out. It just asks you some basic questions: What's your fursona, do you own any furry accessories, etc. It's for a paper i'm working on ;3 It's only 2 pages long, thanks! Here's the link.

submitted by XiamTheFox
[link] [19 comments]
Categories: News

Not My Art, But My Character

Furry Reddit - Wed 23 Jan 2013 - 18:27
Categories: News

If Polly Ran The Ship…

In-Fur-Nation - Wed 23 Jan 2013 - 14:49

Another discovery from Further Confusion — and we wonder how we missed this before.  Black Beak the Parrot Pirate is a creation of Jennifer Sopranzi, Catherine Van Riper, and Tony Sopranzi, featuring CGI tricked-up photos of real animals as illustrations for their rousing sea adventure stories for young readers.  “In the crystal blue waters of the Southern Seas lies the home of the fierce pirate parrot Captain Black Beak. Welcome to Conure Cove, the beautiful Island home of the brave and gentle beasts and birds who live in this mystic land. These are the first seven tales of Captain Black Beak, the greatest pirate parrot to sail the seas. Long may his tales be told in stories, songs and poems.” Now the first seven short books in the series (all of them available on Amazon) have been collected into a single volume, Black Beak: Pirate Saga, which also includes some new material. You can find out more about all of this at the home page of  Black Beak Press.

image c. 2013 Black Beak Press

Categories: News

Notes from FC2013

[adjective][species] - Wed 23 Jan 2013 - 14:00

I just got back from Further Confusion 2013, and have a few notes to share.  It’s a little meta, and I’ll try to make it quick, but I wanted to get these out there while they’re fresh in my mind from the convention.  I’ll try to stay away from making this much of a con-report, as well, as [a][s] isn’t really the place for that, but if you’re interested on some of the directions we’d like to head in moving forward, read on!

That was…a lot of furries in one place.  There were 3232 registered attendees, and I know that several people also wound up “ghosting” the convention, which probably pushes the numbers up higher.  It was quite the crowd there, which had both its ups and downs, but it was a positive experience, overall, to see that many people interested in such neat things all gathered in one spot.  On observation, one unique aspect of the whole thing was the communication media used to coordinate between individuals at the convention.  Twitter has, and continued to be, an excellent way to coordinate activities among groups of generally diverse furries, and it was quite common to see people walking blind or standing still in the hallways, fixated on their phones, especially before mealtimes.

[adjective][species] hosted a panel this year, titled Exploring the Fandom Through Data. Unfortunately, I set the camera up on the stage, aimed it at where I’d be standing, and turned it off to save battery, only to forget to turn it back on again once the panel started.  For that, I apologize, as the panel did wind up going quite well.  However, the panel materials are available on GitHub here.  We were given the second stage, which seated about 120, and we wound up with about 50-60 attendees* over the course of the 90 minute panel.  The presentation itself lasted about half an hour, and the remaining hour was devoted to questions and discussion.  Lots and lots of good points were raised about the data, the visualizations, and the idea of taking a step back to look at furry, and I’m just pleased as peach that there are so many out there interested in doing so.

I’d like to give another thank you to GreenReaper for helping so much with the discussion and with answering questions for which I didn’t have a ready response.  Thanks as well to the [a][s] readers, old and new, who stopped by the panel to talk through so many neat ideas.  Additionally, I’d like to apologize for being so twitchy up on stage; I was not able to control that as well as I thought I would.

So, what directions do we have to head in, given all that discussion?

  • Visualizations – the visualizations for the Furry Survey were completed late in 2010 and are now, honestly, starting to show their age.  They were originally a project that I’d picked up to teach myself the Protovis library, and I think that my novice status on those is doing the data a disservice.  They sorely need to be redone, and now that Protovis is deprecated in favor of D3 (which I work with in my job), this might just be the time to do it.  Additionally, other visualizations might be shifted away from Protovis, or at least cleaned up and locked down (yes, we know about the spammers on the FA Stats visualizer, and that’s a high-priority item, right there!).
  • Data – along with the visualization improvements, we’d like to update and help maintain our data-stores.  With [a][s] taking over some of the responsibility for the Furry Survey, we’d like to make sure that we have as much of that data as possible for a few reasons.  First, it’s good to have a lot of that data warehoused in one place, but in addition, we’d like to be able to expand the information that we share with the community, both in terms of visualizations (such as expanding the survey series to recent years) and in terms of openness.  We’d like to set up an explorer for simple queries of the data, as well as be able to provide expanded sets to other researchers out there.
  • Surveys – there was quite a bit of discussion after the panel on what information was collected on the various surveys and how.  The Furry Survey was intentionally kept much as it had been in previous years in order to make it easier to track various points of data through time – that’s part of why we ask that people take it year after year.  Even with that, however, it came up several times that there are questions that are easy to ask in such a way as not to prime an answer, and there are many, many more questions where that’s much more difficult.  These are still things we’d like to know about ourselves, though, and so working to find a way that would eliminate any self selection bias and priming as much as possible is key.  We’ll keep working on those to make sure that they get out there as best as possible!

There really is a lot to be done when it comes to information about furry, and I think that there’s a lot of momentum in that arena.  There are several good resources out there, and many, many excellent fuzzies (and so on) working on various projects that are pushing forward our knowledge of ourselves, our past, and, of course, our future.  It’s all very exciting, and I do hope that people will stick around and keep asking all the interesting questions.  Cheers, and thanks again to everyone out there, both panel attendees and our readership: keep on being awesome!

* Edit: Apparently, a reporter from Kotaku visited the [a][s] panel!  Whoa!  Check out their write-up here.

Is there a life cycle for the fandom?

Furry Reddit - Wed 23 Jan 2013 - 13:52

I've noticed at the conventions and meets I go to, the demographic seems to be 16-26 years old. Does something happen in the fandom that makes people over 30 disinterested in it?

I'm in my 40s and I still enjoy the fandom very much (and only discovered it at age 34), but it's difficult to find people my age still in it. What makes people leave as they get older? Or are the older furs just not going to meets and cons as much?

Just curious what people's thoughts are!

submitted by Jaycatt
[link] [44 comments]
Categories: News