From Magnetic Press comes My Friend Toby, a wordless graphic novel written and illustrated by Gregory Panaccione. “Toby lives in a small seaside village with his artist friend Marcel. Toby was once a stray, but Marcel took him in, and they’ve been best friends ever since. Only now, Marcel is going through a rough patch. Broken-hearted and unable to pay the bills, their future is uncertain. It is all beyond Toby’s comprehension, but he’s not worried. As long as there are scraps in his bowl and new neighborhood territories to claim, everything will be fine. What more could a carefree dog want out of life? Told largely from Toby’s canine perspective, readers will be treated to a peek between the ears of Man’s Best Friend, dealing with such critical topics as: a) strange cats, b) new neighbors, c) car rides, d) territory disputes, e) thunderstorms, f) being left alone, g) puppy memories, and oh, so much more.” It’s available now in hardcover.

image c. 2024 Magnetic Press

This is Part 2 of my commentary on furry conventions, in relation to geography, demographics and statistics. Reading Part 1 might provide more about my perspective and understanding this in context.

Introduction

Furry conventions are hard to organize, put together, and run. They require staff, a venue, and many other complicated things. One aspect that isn't brought up enough is something that con staff don't necessarily "need" to worry about: transportation. Besides the hotel cost, transportation is perhaps the most prohibitively expensive barrier to someone attending. The low focus on this is partially because cars are the most common (and often most convenient) way to get around in the United States and Canada. I would argue that due to the sheer dominance of the car in these countries, it's hard for a lot of people to realize just how disadvantageous cars can be - on both an individual and societal level. I won't focus much on the societal level, but I will focus on the individual level, to show why I care so much about transit, even in a furry context. I'll also talk about how it relates to poverty, and what we can do about it.

On November 28th, Dragoneer posted a message that Fur Affinity's account received on Twitter. It was from the social media site's advertisement team. In the message they indicated that the adult website would not be able to advertise on Twitter.

A user associated with your account is ineligible to participate in the Twitter Ads program at this time.

This determination is based on the following Twitter Ads Policy:
@furaffinity: Adult sexual products and services.

[...]

We appreciate your interest in Twitter Ads

Before the coronavirus shut down many furry conventions around the world, a strange thing occurred at Furry Weekend Atlanta in 2019. The popular electronic dance group Mystery Skulls performed a musical set at the convention. This is a pretty mainstream group, well-known for their singles such as Money and Ghosts.

When in-person events started happening again, Furry Weekend Atlanta's new headliner was again more known for their mainstream work than for their ties to the fandom. FRND, also known as Andrew Goldstein, is not quite as well-known as Mystery Skulls. After having worked with many mainstream musicians (such as Maroon Five's Beautiful Mistakes as a co-writer), he started to work independently and created his own singles.

Now in late 2022, FWA is giving a wink toward Little Nas X, a very well-known rap artist, born and raised near Atlanta. He's known for stirring up moralistic controversy with his music videos. I guess that's how you know it's real rap.

As FWA's drive towards mainstream musical talent has continued, furries have become a lot more pointed in their questioning of the convention. But whoever's been in control of FWA's social media account has continually dismissed such criticism. For instance, during the FRND announcement, they responded to one critique by posting a gif of Clauhauser calling the critical poster "cute". At the time, this post only drew more attention to the critique. FWA later deleted the tweet and apologized for their behavior. In response to the threads that appeared after the Little Nas X announcement, they have started to use their social media tools to limit responses to no one but the artist in question.

In this article, we'll be going over what defines a work as furry, why this is separate from how furry music is defined, and how Furry Weekend Atlanta may be able to help mitigate future concerns for their furry attendees and the musically talented within the fandom.

Celebrities, gang references, and questionable measures of affluence are not the typical fare for a furry fandom news site. However, this trifecta from the underworld rose from the earth on the 30th of September in the year of 2021.

It all started when a celebrity known as Lindsay Lohan made a tweet prompting a pack of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) called the Canine Cartel, using a dog character designed for her which is being put within this 10,000 token pack. With each of the individual tokens being put up for auction, including her own.

Reception by the fandom has mostly been negative. Some pointing out the lack of ears on the character's art, some showing agitation on having anthro characters being used to promote NFTs, others indicating that this was just a celebrity doing some arms-reach appreciation of the fandom while avoiding actually working with those in the fandom.

Today we’ll go over this event, furries' relationship with NFTs and crypto, and why this event may not be as furry as people in the fandom and media are making it out to be.

Since it began in 2015, yiff.party has been a source of ire for artists whose income has been affected by it. The website uses web scraping software to extract files from Patreon, including those meant to be restricted to paid subscribers only, and made them publicly available, for free.

Kotaku interviewed Kadath and other artists about it in 2018. Although DMCA notices were sent, legal action was threatened by publishers like InkedFur, and Patreon promised to go to bat for its users, the site remained unassailed. Now, it’s closed, but not due to pressure from these sources.

King Ghidorah by theBeta-Soldier

Furry art site Fur Affinity has announced its migration to new hosting on Wednesday, September 9. Previously set for August, then Monday, the final migration "may take" 18 hours; during which content modification will be disabled, but interactions will work.

The new hardware was announced in April: a "cluster-based server platform" named after a kaiju with 112 CPU cores, 1536GB of RAM and 153.6TB of "enterprise SSD".

If composed of four 28-core Xeon CPUs, 24x 6.4TB SSDs and 48x 32GB DDR4-2666 ECC DIMMs, the components alone have a retail value of ~US$100,000 – not including servers or switches.

One of the regrets I had on submitting this ranked list of every furry cosmetic "outfit" available in the popular video game Fortnite Battle Royale is that it didn't list any furry Creator Codes, mostly because I was unaware of any at the time. Also I regret that the list left out King Flamingo, but that's not important.

A Creator Code allows for players purchasing skins and various other cosmetic accouterments to have a portion of their purchase go to a "content creator", usually streamers or YouTube video makers, on the basic idea that whatever content is being created is free advertising for the game. Surely there was a furry streamer of Fortnite out there, somewhere, with a Creator Code?

Nearly five months later, I have stumbled upon a furry with a Creator Code while on e621, of all places. Felino (~Feline-gamer on FurAffinity), a Brazilian furry, has a Creator Code, FelinoJ. Surprisingly, the recognition seems to be for his furry fan-art of various characters from the game, of which is oftentimes very furry.

So, furry Fortnite players, next time you see an item you deem worthy of purchase, consider putting FelinoJ in the Creator Code box. If you're not into Fortnite, but do have an Epic Games Store account, Creator Codes work there, too. Alternatively, if you're not into supporting mega-corporations while supporting furries, Felino also has a Patreon and a Ko-fi.

Capital City Fur Con has closed any future gatherings after its premiere in January 2020 due to financial mismanagement. Staffers came forward to discuss the issues caused by the chair’s fiscal malfeasance, and guests have reported that honored guests who were promised compensation were left out in the cold.

The greatest grievance, though, is that it is alleged that the charity they were raising money for, the ALS Association, also were not given their money. ALS has gained infamy in the fandom due to the disease that took the late Tony “DogBomb” Barret, and many conventions over the year have been raising money toward research for a cure since.

More information can be seen on Global Furry Television’s coverage on the below video which is transcribed below.

ArtWorkTee has been quite busy this year when it comes to their charity drives and other Kickstarter campaigns. At this time they are working on their third KickStarter for the year. The first was a calendar drive where fursuiters were pictured for each month. These calendars were sold with proceeds going to a shelter for young horses called Last Chance Corral, which was covered by Flayrah. The second was not covered by Flayrah and was a for helping a feline shelter, Flatbush Cats.

Using charitibility is always a good way to achieve positive marketing and brand recognition, particularly in the furry fandom. In fact, it was a suggestion I had made in regards to the failed ‘designer fursuit’ experiment Zweitesich that if they made those custom designer fursuits a few thousand dollars more expensive and donated those thousands of dollars toward a charity it would have made the fursuit a badge of honor instead of one of purely being a gloating of wealth, which tends to be seen as reprehensible in the fandom.

Now that ArtWorkTee had done these charity kickstarts, the third appears to be using a month drive as an opportunity to introduce a new line of T-Shirts from them. This time it looks like there is no organization that is being supported. Instead, ArtWorkTee is using the same marketing strategy in order to introduce a line of pride shirts based on promotion of individual sexual and gender expression. It mixes a furry character brought to life by LuhBraz Art, mixing the characters with the particular representative flag's color schemes.

There are only a few days left to secure a t-shirt from this initial printing. But they will be available for sale after the campaign at their website and at Midwest Furfest's Dealer's den this year. So what is the incentive for doing this Kickstarter Campaign? It seems mostly to gauge interest, and they will expand their line based on this interest. That's what we will be going over in this article.

The Mid-Atlantic Anthropomorphic Association, organizers of annual Maryland events such as Fur the 'More and Fur-b-Que, have launched a $1000 educational scholarship in memory of former staffer Cobalt The Fox, who passed away in October 2017. Their press release follows.

Leading UK furry convention ConFuzzled has postponed registration for 2020 due to Brexit.

According to convention chairman Rizzorat, "configuration changes to our payment systems" which include switching payment providers necessitated a delay to "reliably implement and test" them. ConFuzzled registration, previously expected to open tomorrow (Friday, October 11), is now to open November 1 at 20:00 GMT/UTC+0 – British Summer Time to have ended October 27.

Organizers apologized to those who may have "made special plans to be available tomorrow evening to ensure you secure your registration", going further to justify and explain the change, which was felt to be "absolutely necessary to ensure your peace of mind" ahead of the event's 13th instance:

Why are we making this decision? As a result of uncertainty surrounding the UKs departure from the European Union, our banking & credit card handling partners have imposed additional conditions that we’re having to work through. Unfortunately, this is resulting in various operational changes, including (but not limited to), switching our payment partners to ensure we can maintain our normal operations.

We’d like to reassure you all that registration will be going ahead on the new date, and that ConFuzzled is not financially impacted by the above changes. Furthermore, we are fully confident that we can continue to welcome those of you who visit ConFuzzled from EU countries. Whilst we expect travel documentation requirements may change, as long as these are satisfied, we see no reason you should be unable to visit ConFuzzled.

This mascot will be licensed, not sold.

Designers of the Phillie Phanatic 'sculpture' have threatened to terminate their copyright transfer after 35 years, per a lawsuit filed by the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team.

Crucially, the Phanatic was not originally a "work for hire", but owned by its creators:

Initially we leased the Phanatic to the team for appearances and paid a royalty to them for the licensed products we did. The first year of licensing we did over two million dollars in sales in the Philly area. Eventually we had a number of successful programs with teams who wanted to be able to control of the characters and were able to enforce the copyrights so we sold the Phanatic and then others to the teams.

Many made light of the mascot's pending "free agency", with the Washingtonian promoting a move to D.C. But for teams in a similar situation, such disputes could mean serious payouts - at least for lawyers - and given the time periods involved, the issue might soon touch on works in furry fandom.

Furry auction site FurBuy remains offline, a month after it was abruptly taken down, leading to severe corruption of the 19-year-old site's database.

Site owners say May 23's emergency shutdown was intended to recover from a freeze triggered by a self-styled security researcher's access, and announced a months-long renovation.

The researcher revealed their involvement, claiming to have been blocked by FurBuy after contacting them on Twitter. They said they did not access the database, but that someone using the vulnerability they found would be able to do so - which is disputed by the site owners.

Modern database systems and server hardware are meant to cope with unanticipated downtime by writing to disk in such a way that the data can always be recovered to a consistent state; however, this requires appropriate configuration, and tends to decrease overall performance. It is also possible for hardware to fail under stress.

The last successful backup of the site was made in October 2017, but this remained unnoticed after the death of long-time system administrator Mordrul last August, from thyroid cancer.

A video released last weekend caught viral attention both inside and outside the furry fandom. In this presentation, a member of a rap group known as the Insane Clown Posse talked with his daughter about being swindled by an online marketplace selling inferior fursuit knockoffs.

Violent J of the ICP and his daughter, introduced as Ruby, discussed their personal experience with an online retailer of OISK, a seller on the website DHGate. The family-friendly breakdown goes over how the final product differed greatly from what was advertised on the site.

The well-produced skit is a good conversation starter, particularly when it comes to the topic of these organizations that would take advantage of the dreams of future fursuiters by siphoning money in return for low-quality costumes.