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指称Corgi Events所有人有财务不端行为的电邮在网上疯传

Furry publishing company Fenris Publishings started to sell books from Goal Publications, another furry publishing company. Goal Publications will close by March 2022. For their books they have in stock now, that is it. We do not know how many there are. No more new stock. No more direct orders from their printer. No more […]

If crossed over, things will have to cancel. What’s that? A ‘breakpoint’. That is what German convention Eurofurence’s chairperson Cheetah said in his statement on Jan 25. “We have a break point where we can cancel things – which we really do not want to do – and that is February 15th. To be able […]

Leaving 2022? Not so fast, says New Zealander furcon FurcoNZ. The convention at first cancelled their 2022 in-person event, planned for mid-Feb. But less than an hour later, FurcoNZ says, they are not leaving yet. They will hold in-person May 20-24 this year. Attendees can transfer tickets to someone else, to FurcoNZ 2023 or ask […]

TigerTails Radio Season 13 Episode 50. Join the Discord Chat: https://discord.gg/SQ5QuRf For a full preview of events and for previous episodes, please visit http://www.tigertailsradio.co.uk. See website for full breakdown of song credits, which is usually updated shortly after the show.

Have you ever felt the need to hold something soft and fluffy in your sleep? When you go to the toy section, are you keeping an eye out for a new fluffy friend? Is build-a-bear your favorite store? Or does the idea of being soft and fuzzy, filled with stuffing sound great?

This episode, Sammy, Nuka and guests Sideways (@Sideways_Wolf), Reese (@PineReese) are sewing tags onto their behinds and diving into a bin full of plushies. We’re gonna be talking about being soft, cuddly, and plush.





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Opening Theme: RetroSpecter – Cloud Fields (RetroSpecter Mix). USA: Unpublished, 2018. ©2011-2018 Fur What It’s Worth. Based on Fredrik Miller – Cloud Fields (Century Mix). USA: Bandcamp, 2011. ©2011 Fur What It’s Worth. (Buy a copy here – support your fellow furs!)
Break: Mystery Skulls – Ghost. USA: Warner Bros Records, 2011. Used with permission.
Closing Theme: RetroSpecter – Cloud Fields (RetroSpecter Chill Mix). USA: Unpublished, 2018. ©2011-2018 Fur What It’s Worth. Based on Fredrik Miller – Cloud Fields (Chill Out Mix). USA: Bandcamp, 2011. ©2011 Fur What It’s Worth. (Buy a copy here – support your fellow furs!) S9 Episode 17 – Soft and Squishy - Have you ever felt the need to hold something soft and fluffy in your sleep? When you go to the toy section, are you keeping an eye out for a new fluffy friend? Is build-a-bear your favorite store? Or does the idea of be

Hi everyone! Welcome to the next set of highlights I've seen in the Furry Community in the last week. Links to information mentioned in the video: Furnal Equinox https://furnalequinox.com/2022/02/04/updates-and-covid-plan/#respond Tails And Tornadoes https://tailsandtornadoes.org/ CanFURence https://twitter.com/canFURence/status/1489715338790858752?s=20&t=wlHdtjP3mB5Aw-QvzO6v4w PAWAI https://twitter.com/PAWAI_ID/status/1490183061756993536?s=20&t=wlHdtjP3mB5Aw-QvzO6v4w Furality https://furality.org/ Vibe Night https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc5gRnx3tfNPfZUswknNDbvl1ruCBlFpva1Q7g8hweEG7lJnQ/viewform Golden State Fur Con https://twitter.com/GSFurCon/status/1487925502304079873?s=20&t=wlHdtjP3mB5Aw-QvzO6v4w Denfur https://twitter.com/DenFurCO/status/1487925862217314306?s=20&t=wlHdtjP3mB5Aw-QvzO6v4w Aquatifur https://twitter.com/AquatiFur/status/1488212261223104514?s=20&t=wlHdtjP3mB5Aw-QvzO6v4w Furry Invasion https://www.furryinvasion.org/vending-application Megaplex https://twitter.com/MegaplexCon/status/1490180298474233857?s=20&t=wlHdtjP3mB5Aw-QvzO6v4w Fur the More https://furthemore.org/art-show/ Furnal Equinox https://furnalequinox.com/participate/ FetchNW https://fetchnw.com/ Coastal Furry Event https://www.eventbrite.com/e/golfland-roseville-fursuit-friendly-outing-2022-tickets-260827581317 If you like the work I do please like/follow/share to support the channel I'm on multiple platforms https://twitter.com/GrovelHusky https://www.twitch.tv/grovelhusky https://t.me/grovelreports Subscribe to show support https://www.youtube.com/c/GrovelHusky/?sub_confirmation=1 Grovel Reports Studio made by Kydek https://twitter.com/FluffyKydek Banners used in the channel were made by Slushi https://twitter.com/Slushi3Brushi3?s=09 Music created for Grovel Husky by Whooshagg https://whooshagg.com/ Grovel Reports Feb 6th 2022 - New Furry Convention Dates + Event News #FurnalEquinox #FetchNW #Furality

Papabear,

​I'm looking to buy a Bad Dragon toy; I'm a gay furry bottom. What toys do you recommend? I would like something that fills me yet can fit easy and feels good like not a bunch of weird surfaces. Thanks :). New to fandom. How do you cool down in suit in 103 F Louisiana air? It's humid and hot.

* * *

Hello, DarkStorm,

I don't know if this will shock you or not, but I have never purchased a Bad Dragon product. Not that I wouldn't recommend them (they seem like a good company and are very popular with many furries), but I'm not into sex toys. Even if I did use their products, I wouldn't know what to recommend to you, given that I don't know anything about your needs, so to speak. I would therefore suggest you contact their customer service people by following this link: https://help.bad-dragon.com/.

As to your other question, keeping cool in a fursuit is important, indeed. Even experienced fursuiters will have trouble staying in suit for more than a few hours (my max is about 5 hours). But this max is while being in an environmentally controlled room such as a hotel lobby. I would not recommend going out in 103-degree, humid heat and fursuiting. At least, not for very long. 

To stay cool, fursuiters do a number of things. Number one on this list is wearing a cooling vest or other cooling suit tech. There are a number of them on the market (just search for "cooling vest"), including one invented by the furry community's very own EZWolf (EZcooldown.com). Other things you can do include having a small fan installed in your fursuit head (I have one; it helps), wearing a balaclava to help direct sweat away from your face, wearing heat gear (e.g., Under Armour athletic wear), and, of course, keeping hydrated. Be aware of your body and dehead and cool off as often as necessary to keep from overheating.

Now go suit up and have fun!

Papabear

Destroy your root chakra with this one cool trick!

This week - Art and music theft from cryptodorks, furries pushing back against library censorship, Facebook eats shit in the market, and Build-A-Bear has a very different idea of 'after dark' than we do. 

LINKS

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Southpaws is creating and promoting The Queer Agenda | Patreon 
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Episode 510 - Chakra Rooting

MOOBARKFLUFF! Click here to send us a comment or message about the show!

Moobarkfluff!   Bearly and Taebyn chat about a lot of things including calendars, deeds and IWII! What is an appropriate funeral cake?  What happened on the way to the Math Forum? Can you construct a number with a compass?  Tune in to find out the answers to these and other exciting questions on this weeks episode! Moobarkfluff!

 

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Bearly Furcasting S2E41 - Awards, This or That, Math, Construction Paper

Papabear,

​I'm in the closet, and if I come out I lose everyone I still care about except for my brother. My mom hates gays but thinks my Greek grandmother molesting me and hitting me and starving me as a kid is ok and says I am being a sissy pretty much cause I don't want to be around her.

[I'm] single, male, no job cause of stuttering, can't drive yet, and severe nightmares. i can only sleep in daytime. These nightmares are so bad I can't fall asleep at night. Every sound makes me jump and turn on all lights. I feel pain, and I can't wake up from them, like, Freddy Kruger-style.

Of course, no marks when I wake up, but my mental health is declining. I feel so alone, and I am starting to see my nightmares when I'm awake, too.  Like, I can see it but only as it rounds a corner or out the corner of my eye. I know it's not real; in fact, I'm an atheist, but this terrifies me. It'ss a deer who wears its skeleton on the outside of its body and stands 12 feet on hinds legs. I'm 6 ft 7, and it holds me down and bites me, causing extreme pain and suffering.

[At] age 21 and a half, [I'm] not sure what conversion therapy they were talking about [Papabear note: this is a follow-up letter of one I received in which the letter writer asks if he should go through conversion therapy; I asked for more background, which resulted in this current letter], but I read and watched vids, so I'm scared of that shock therapy stuff.

Dating site stuff, all want me to pay, and I currently can't. Money issues and no credit card. When I put my mind to it, I can do tough jobs, but my mind has been deteriorating for years now. I've lost hope. Only reason I ain't dead is my brother, and I am too sissy to end it, and idk how to end it.

If you can help that would be wonderful. Also, current counselor is way too queer. I guess I just need someone to tell me it's okay and [get some] advice. Racist south Louisiana, but gay is the new black (aka, gays are being beaten every day, and no cops interfere). I spend time on video games hoping that tomorrow is a better day. Like walking dead, taking it one day at a time.

The way my grandma did stuff was she was like the Baba Yaga in [the Witcher]. She weaved a web of lies and fed off my pain but sexually. Grooming and touching and rubbing and hitting and starving. Now [that] I'm larger, I cant retaliate. Why? Cause she is a woman, and I'm a man, and she is old now. Please help if u can. I don't sleep much, and I fear I may go crazy if I already haven't. 

Solmyr Wizard22 (Louisiana, age 21)

* * *

Dear Solmyr,

Yours is a terribly sad story.  I see why you might ask about conversion therapy. So, we need to be clear here. Conversion therapy does not work and never has. It is, indeed, a form of mental and emotional torture and has been banned in several states (see this map https://www.lgbtmap.org/equality-maps/conversion_therapy). People who still believe in conversion therapy consider being homosexual a type of mental illness or social deviancy. This is not true. There is nothing wrong with you, which is why conversion therapy doesn't work (you can't "cure" something when there is nothing to cure). Indeed, as you can see here, conversion therapy is dangerous: https://www.hrc.org/resources/the-lies-and-dangers-of-reparative-therapy.

Being gay and having family hate you for it seems to be only part of the issue. Your grandmother is a huge problem, too, as you know. The nightmares you are having are likely a manifestation of your fears and horrors experienced while living with this horrible woman. She is the deer with the skeleton on the outside of her body. Because your anxieties are depriving you of sleep, these dreams are now manifesting in your waking world. When you do not get enough sleep (REM sleep), you can experience many side effects, including hallucinations, and this appears to be what you are experiencing now.

Of high importance at this time, therefore, is for you to get some sound, restful sleep. Here are some tips from Harvard Medical School (https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/tips-for-beating-anxiety-to-get-a-better-nights-sleep). If need be, try over-the-counter sleep aids (I would avoid ZzzQuil as it tends to exacerbate nightmares). You can also talk to a trained therapist about how to alleviate your anxiety to sleep better.

Speaking of counselors, yours is evidently not a good match. There is nothing wrong with shopping around for a therapist until you find one with whom you are comfortable and who helps you.

Your mental health issues are peaking, which is concerning since you are entertaining thoughts of suicide. For this, I would ask you to please call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 800-273-8255. It is a free call and you will reach people who are trained specifically with this issue. And, FYI, it is GOOD that you are "too sissy" to kill yourself. This means you still have a will to live. Hold onto that healthy desire to live.

You also need to start working toward getting away from your present environment, especially your grandmother, but also your gay-hating parents. YOU are NOT the problem. THEY are. You have not done anything wrong. Being gay or bi is not a moral failing.

You don't make clear why, at 21, you don't have a job, but you need to amend that. If the problem is your anxiety, then deal with that first and then work toward employment. If you are disabled and cannot work, then apply for government disability. Do anything to get some money so you can take control of your life.

That's my initial advice to you. You can write again any time when you have more questions.

Hugs,
Papabear

February is here, and that brings a couple of important events to the start of the year.

Firstly, in the USA February is considered to be Black History Month. The Furry Writers’ Guild fully supports the push for equality throughout the world, and that includes fair representation in arts and media, including writing spaces. We hope to have a few features through the month to showcase our diverse authors. If this is something you want to be involved in, please get in contact with us.

Secondly, February is also when the Coyotl Awards open for formal nominations. They are not yet open as of posting this newsletter, but they should be before long. All details can be found at the Coyotl Awards website.
Furry Writers’ Guild members may nominate any work published in 2021 (except their own) to the relevant category. The nominee does not need to be an FWG member – just the nominator.
Nominations will be open for about a month and a half. We encourage all guild members to nominate and vote in March.
If you want to nominate some works and think you might be eligible for guild membership, check out the requirements here. You only need to be a member by March 14th to be able to nominate works in time.

There are a few ongoing submission calls for short stories, though we have not seen many themed anthology calls at this stage. If you see something that you think can be highlighted by the FWG, then please contact us with information about it!

FURVOR #1 – Deadline Around March
Isekai Me! – Deadline When Full
Children Of The Night – Deadline When Full
#ohmurr! – Deadline: Ongoing
Zooscape – Reoccurring submission period.

The start of the year has also been a time where some of our members have had new books released, or have works available for pre-order. We hope you’ll check these out as well.

Toledot, by Madison Scott-Clary. Released January 21st 2022.

C.A.T.S.: Cycling Across Time And Space: 11 Feminist Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories about Bicycling and Cats – an anthology featuring guild member Alice Dryden. Available for pre-order. Released February 8th 2022.

A Furry Faux Paw, by Jessica Kara. Available for pre-order. Released May 24th 2022.

As always, any guild members who want to see their upcoming books included in the newsletter, please let us know! We try to keep up to date with everything, but there will always be some things we miss.

We hope that you all have a safe and productive February. We encourage people to seek out those telling the true stories of Black History Month.

Happy writing and stay safe.
J.F.R. Coates

February is here, and that brings a couple of important events to the start of the year.

Firstly, in the USA February is considered to be Black History Month. The Furry Writers’ Guild fully supports the push for equality throughout the world, and that includes fair representation in arts and media, including writing spaces. We hope to have a few features through the month to showcase our diverse authors. If this is something you want to be involved in, please get in contact with us.

Secondly, February is also when the Coyotl Awards open for formal nominations. They are not yet open as of posting this newsletter, but they should be before long. All details can be found at the Coyotl Awards website.
Furry Writers’ Guild members may nominate any work published in 2021 (except their own) to the relevant category. The nominee does not need to be an FWG member – just the nominator.
Nominations will be open for about a month and a half. We encourage all guild members to nominate and vote in March.
If you want to nominate some works and think you might be eligible for guild membership, check out the requirements here. You only need to be a member by March 14th to be able to nominate works in time.

There are a few ongoing submission calls for short stories, though we have not seen many themed anthology calls at this stage. If you see something that you think can be highlighted by the FWG, then please contact us with information about it!

FURVOR #1 – Deadline Around March
Isekai Me! – Deadline When Full
Children Of The Night – Deadline When Full
#ohmurr! – Deadline: Ongoing
Zooscape – Reoccurring submission period.

The start of the year has also been a time where some of our members have had new books released, or have works available for pre-order. We hope you’ll check these out as well.

Toledot, by Madison Scott-Clary. Released January 21st 2022.

C.A.T.S.: Cycling Across Time And Space: 11 Feminist Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories about Bicycling and Cats – an anthology featuring guild member Alice Dryden. Available for pre-order. Released February 8th 2022.

A Furry Faux Paw, by Jessica Kara. Available for pre-order. Released May 24th 2022.

As always, any guild members who want to see their upcoming books included in the newsletter, please let us know! We try to keep up to date with everything, but there will always be some things we miss.

We hope that you all have a safe and productive February. We encourage people to seek out those telling the true stories of Black History Month.

Happy writing and stay safe.
J.F.R. Coates

Savrin sells books to furries while conservatives try to make a moral panic about them. What a stupid timeline.

The addons Savrin uses to make their twitter / internet experience better are "Calmer Internet" in MS Edge or "Calm Twitter" on Chrome/Firefox. 

Southpaws is creating and promoting The Queer Agenda | Patreon

LINKS
Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs - YouTube
We're All Going To Make It — A Short Story | FoldableHuman on Patreon

Fan chat- https://t.me/+6pbv_U1AY95jOWU5 

Episode 509 - Peddler

TigerTails Radio Season 13 Episode 49. Join the Discord Chat: https://discord.gg/SQ5QuRf For a full preview of events and for previous episodes, please visit http://www.tigertailsradio.co.uk. See website for full breakdown of song credits, which is usually updated shortly after the show.

Update: Thanks to The Daily Beast for linking this and quoting me. – Patch

No school ever had litter boxes for students who identify as animals. So how did the rumor explode into mainstream consciousness, like bad diarrhea from a diet of concern trolling and right-wing blogs?

In January 2022, the malodorous myth rose from local news in Michigan to the New York Times: Litter Boxes for Students Who Identify as Furries? Not So, Says School Official. Furries in the Times is a rare achievement. (Check the 1996 example at bottom of this story.) That isn’t simply debunking, it also has cultural potency for a post-truth era full of flat-earthism and Qanon cults.

I can’t count how many headlines there were about one incident. One is just absurd, but it keeps happening. That shows cynical calculation by Otherphobes. They’re demonizing minorities by proxy, with a target behind the target. It’s a cousin to transphobic memes like “I sexually identify as an attack helicopter” using weirdos to make it easier to swallow. But before we digest that, let’s go to the splatter zone and trace the patterns.

At Dogpatch Press, I’m obsessive about tracking media mentions and memes, and we also do debunking — like for a misinterpreted “nazi furries” photo — and I’d been asked to trace the old litter box myth before. So I dug deeper than the mainstream news. Furry News has the real shit.

The oldest mainstream source I found is in this 2008 photo from Anthrocon in Pittsburgh. He’s a broadcaster who likes furries, although it’s complicated.

How the media gave us the shitty end of the stick — and wacky radio personalities.

Furries are loveable misfits born from 1970’s underground comix, nurtured by 1980’s nerd conventions, full-fledged before the web, and they secretly run Silicon Valley. Those are deep roots beneath the costume look. Inside the fandom, their default lore is full of grievance about sensationalizing from around the turn of the century. Vanity Fair, MTV Sex2K, and CSI were the villains. The problem with blaming them is overcompensation and ingroup pressure.

I think furries do plenty of their own exploitation with Rule 34, and it’s OK to laugh about. Bad news was a phase, not a box to hide in. A dose of media literacy can help sort PBS from the National Enquirer. Someone should track how the fandom and mainstream have a dance, not a war. You can even Be The Media.

A cake made with tootsie rolls. Yum!

The first time I heard the “litter box” myth, I wasn’t offended. I laughed shamelessly and used it to write satirical promotion for a furry orgy at a club in San Francisco. The party was real and you could get a ticket (like almost nowhere else in the world.) For the Wild Things party, I made a Cat Box Cake.

The inspiration came from a 2014 post on Anthrocon’s forum by one of the con’s original founders:

Litterboxes: This one’s the bonafide urban legend, first circulated around 2007 when the Brewers baseball team and Bob Uecker shared one of our hotels.  Their subsequent sports broadcast ridiculing furries with manufactured tales of litterboxes and such was widely heard.  To this day, comments to articles about furries have often included one or more individuals making the litterbox claim, insisting eyewitness veracity.  It’s proven to stick with the same tenacity of CSI and Vanity Fair.  The inclusion of this in the respective comment thus throws every prior claim into question as well.

When I did another story about pro sports team mascots and fursuits, I found the exact Brewers baseball broadcast with Bob Uecker, from 2007. It’s a hoot! Here’s some of Bob’s snappy stories he told to all the sports fans, that he pretended were proved by hotel staff:

• “These people dress as animals, and come together for a convention. What do they do? Gather in a huge furball. You can’t really see the leader, he’s in the middle. You can hear him mumbling and talking, trying to talk… Kind of like a mom with a cubby, trying to keep him warm. There were a couple of suffocations last year. Revived, I might add, by personnel at the hotel. They told us that this morning…”
• “The Pennsylvania Animal Society are there to make sure none of the members are infected with anything, licenses are being issued”
• “Two of the members were in front of the bus, they didn’t get out of the driveway in time… boom-boom, roadkill”
• “They’re having a furball, with a dinner, catered by Purina”

I think it’s good humor. Bob Uecker’s co-broadcaster Jim Powell made a blog post too, and it has the much meaner judging that pitted the media against the fandom. A Hair-Raising Time In Pittsburgh: “Having the Furry convention at our hotel in Pittsburgh was quite disturbing, to be honest.” It joined a spate of “sports teams share hotels with furries” stories from that time. They juxtaposed weird vs. accepted fandom with the Brewers, the Sabres, the Yankees, the Mets…

But those don’t mention litter boxes. Maybe the Anthrocon forum post mixed up Bob Uecker with another Bob. He’s the guy in the Anthrocon photo above, and source of the oldest example I could find, from a 2008 blog post titled “Frickin’ Weirdos”. Big Bob from Pittsburgh’s Morning Freak Show on 96.1:

14 years later, hearts change, and Bob is still on the radio. He covered the 2022 litter box story (at 18:40, 5 min). It criticizes “unhinged” rumor spreading and stands for fans: “Every year when we do a charity for Toys For Tots, we have a furry night when a bunch of furries come out, we have Anthrocon in Pittsburgh which is one of the bigger conventions… we absolutely love furries!” He also said Pittsburgh’s best-kept secret is Anthrocon: “It’s just a little taste of the magic of our city.”

Fandom origins for the urban legend.

The mists of time may hold more inside sources, complicating the attribution. Bob Uecker and Jim Powell did enough research to link alt.lifestyle.furry, the Usenet discussion group formed in 1996. I asked a contact familiar with 90’s fandom about it:

I would say that the litterbox and identifying as a cat stuff are all very old (like late 90s old) otherkin jokes brought into today’s hyper-fucked extremely online crapworld. Like, people were talking about bringing litterboxes along with them to cons or something on usenet, and it was so long ago I can’t remember how many layers of irony and/or hearsay that stuff had on it, but I doubt anyone actually did anything like that, it really sounded like people were just joking.

I wish I could narrow down when those posts might have been made and where, probably alt.lifestyle.furry or one of the many alt.fan.furry threads about lifestylers. But there’s no comprehensive, usable usenet archive available to the public as far as I know and I’ve always suspected that there are some rather seedy reasons for that (the possibility of old posts from virtually every politician and tech CEO under 50 for one).

Background of 1990’s Culture War.

The 1990’s fandom was part of culture war long before Vanity Fair, MTV, or the Bobs came calling.

The war rose out of 1980’s Reagan era policies and Moral Majority “family values” conservatism against social change. Activists clashed with official homophobia during the AIDS crisis. Now families had both parents out to work and latchkey kids home alone. That pushed Stranger Danger, high profile “ritual abuse” hoaxes, and Satanic Panic. Heavy metal and Dungeons & Dragons were scapegoats. Obscenity trials targeted sexy rap music by 2 Live Crew and speech by N.W.A. and the Dead Kennedys. Comics faced censorship. The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund was founded from a first amendment battle with furry comic Omaha the Cat Dancer.

The war came to furry cons. (Dogpatch Press): A 1990’s fax to troll Confurence shows how long there’s been culture war with furry fandom. A parent sent complaints to the hotel about adult art dealers. The war came from outside fandom — and inside — with Burned Furs moralizing that flamed out in 1998-2001. Do you get a feeling of deja vu?

The new moral panic: Not just bad media.

The media informs and debunks, and this isn’t just blaming them. Sometimes the fans start a joke themselves and take it over the top. The problem is when there’s an OtherPhobic agenda behind it all.

The 2022 panic in Michigan was not the first outbreak. I investigated one just a few weeks earlier in Minnesota.

A high school teacher was smeared by association with furry, and for poetry assigned in class. The hit piece shows no furry evidence, portrays “young students” at risk, and doesn’t mention it was advanced study for college credit. Right-wing parents got anti-gay activists involved (who supported “conversion therapy” that was banned for harming kids.) I saw a familiar bigoted therapist who attacks furries and lost his job. They roped in far-right politicians and blogs. When a local news source reported the story, it responsibly didn’t mention furry. I kept track…

Students get treated like victims when there's no crime because "think of the children". The attacks are mostly against LGBT expression, but recently furries got lumped in to one. I have more info on file about it, but won't go into details for now to avoid hype.

— Dogpatch Press (@DogpatchPress) December 29, 2021

Stories like this abound. In Missouri, a school’s only black teacher was threatened for showing kids a book about a black astronaut. Ironically, treating students like victims hurts them by taking away curriculum — maybe they don’t want kids to learn about anything after the moon landing or civil rights? This isn’t a campaign to protect kids, it’s an attack on information and media. The escalation shows libraries are next.

More escalation and reaction.

Embarrassment about faking didn’t stop it, and the claims get even more absurd. (TexasMonthly) A Texas GOP Candidate’s New Claim: School Cafeteria Tables Are Being Lowered for “Furries”. A conservative parents activist lied about accommodating lunch “like a dog eats from a bowl”; and Idaho radio lied that furries are being excused from homework because of struggling with paws.

Back to the 2022 Michigan story. Reactions shred the loaded wording: (Midland Daily News) Andrew Mullin: Recent Midland ‘furry’ scare is transphobia in disguise. The word “agenda”, “misuse of the word “identify” and her mention of the gender-neutral bathroom, signifies that this concern is merely a thinly veiled Trojan horse to fear-monger over transgender students and efforts to be more inclusive.” — “The “agenda” of making kids feel included is not scary, or a joke.”

Facebook reaction to a right wing politician.

More furry takes.

Lux weighs in:

From the Texas cafeteria article, it looks like patient zero was someone’s granddaughter getting bullied by kids wearing those Kitty Ear headbands.

But then again you can also get Barbie dolls in fursuits… so who the hell even knows what’s moving in the other direction, right?

To our inside guy at Mattel: maybe pump the brakes. The conservatives are asking about how we poop.

Since furry is something people “choose”, it’s safe to make us the butt of a joke. They can use furry panic as a dog whistle for just about any oppressed minority but brush it off and laugh. It feels like a stand-in for some kind of amorphous and frightening other. You can fabricate weird stories about funny animal people because you can’t do it openly about other groups. But weird xenophobic hate has to be metastasized into something. So the fandom has become a gutter in which conservative people can take massive steamy frightened shits. God this sucks.

How does this coalesce into a single person who ends up standing in front of their school board and stringing a bunch of gobbledygook together?

There’s malfeasance at the top layers of conservatism, but you can’t really plan chaos like this. This gal just seemed to follow a path of “something different at my school connected with something I don’t understand ooga booga” and then stumbled blindly into a school board meeting while goofed up on Boomer drugs. It’s not a long shot that it’s a combination of blood pressure medication and Ambien while browsing social media that caused this. It’s like the butterfly effect only really really stupid.

Soatok adds:

This is a proxy attack because conservatives think being trans means “I can choose my identity, willy nilly, and change my answer 6 times a second and if you get it wrong I get to imprison you for hate speech”. They’re trying to stoke hatred among their constituents. “Look, schools are indoctrinating your kids in these weird alternative lifestyles and they’ll choose weirdness over Jesus and the American Flag if you let them.”

This isn’t even coherent propaganda, they’re just throwing shit at the wall and seeing if it sticks. If not, they iterate onto something else. My conclusion is that hate and paranoia are the most impersonal things in the world.

Fear-mongering furry rumours started 20 years ago on Somethingawful and 4chan, now many internet bullies have trad-wives and red Maga hats, of course they’re gonna bring that energy to parent-teacher night. 20 year old cringe rumors are now entering the realm of pearl clutching parents as they dogwhistle about trans and queer kids existing.

Me:

Furry involves recasting Otherness to make it yours and make it fun. People who attack that are joykillers.

The fixation on bathrooms, and lies about eating like dogs in the cafeteria, shows how they’re imagining their kids. It’s failure to understand how kids think or what they care about. They’re reducing them to feeding and pooping. They’re the ones animalizing their kids! Like property at a zoo.

It’s about control when they target places kids have a little privacy, like lunch or bathroom breaks. It’s about fear too, to treat other people’s kids as so different they’re the wrong species. It’s othering on the most knee jerk level. They made a Human Centipede of credulous people, retrograde Anita Bryant style hatemongers, craven politicians, and mainstream media called to mop up the mess.

Joykillers and worse: the real cancel culture.

It goes from hobbies to teachers fired and books banned. But kids are having banned book clubs, and there’s a crowdfund to get support for a defunded library.

https://t.co/gIwpNhWwl8

— Dogpatch Press (@DogpatchPress) January 27, 2022

And these people have the nerve to talk about cancel culture.

— Under Deconstruction (@ingvar_arni) January 26, 2022

New cartoon: An American book ban… #Maus pic.twitter.com/QEWzxn7YT1

— Andy Marlette (@AndyMarlette) January 28, 2022

"First, club members discussed George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”

“A classic piece that has been banned or challenged many times in American schools and libraries,” Jordan said."
https://t.co/GLRvZXwuxX

— Dogpatch Press (@DogpatchPress) January 27, 2022

The mayor of Ridgeland, MS is threatening to withhold funds from a public library if they don't comply with a demand to purge the shelves of LGBTQ+ books.https://t.co/BrqMhBSHSJ

— Soatok Dreamseeker (x64) (@SoatokDhole) January 27, 2022

The rare times we made the New York Times.

There you have a chain from absurd jokes to culture war.

In this wild cultural moment, I dug up the few occasions furries were ever mentioned in the New York Times. In 2013 an online blog had Pirates fans and furries at Anthrocon (another clash of the weird and the accepted sports fandoms). And then we have to go all the way back to 1996. I looked up the featured fan, and he’s still around and as furry as ever. We’re here, get used to it.

NY Times magazine, October 27, 1996 (page 352)

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The most complex questions are often the most deceptively simple: What is furry? Is it a fandom? A lifestyle? An aesthetic? A mindset? Our panel discusses the question alongside answers from more than 1,500 in FurScience’s 2021 international furry survey! 





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