I realized last week, when Hasbro thought it was a good idea to release a movie based on Battleship, that I will probably be reviewing a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic movie within the next couple of years. At least that is a Hasbro property people actually want a movie of.

In preparation, I decided to sit down with the first season of said Hasbro property. Finally, I feel I understand where these “bronies” are coming from.

It involves cats, but first ...

I spent the better part of the weekend surfing around some of the best known artist archives on the World Wide Web. My trip ended with the Yerf archive, which is considered by some to be the premiere archive on the Internet due to its selective nature and supposedly rigid quality control standards. But after spending some time examining the Recent Uploads section on Yerf, I found myself wondering:
What makes Yerf so great? It's like a refrigerator for developing furry artists.

Just to make sure I wasn't having a knee-jerk reaction to a slow weekend of uploads I took the time to go back several weeks. The more I perused this archive the more my sense of dismay and disappointment grew. This didn't seem like an elite archive where the "best of the best" came to show us what hard work and dedication can do. This seems like a place that is very loosely administered and often used for bragging rights. I found frequent, flagrant violations of the much-touted Uploading Guidelines and a general atmosphere of "we're better than you." Not to mention artwork that, to me, falls far below the caliber the site purports to host.

On January 15, Fur Affinity made its latest announcement of its intention to revamp their site. This new effort, code named Project Pheonix, is intended to bring massive updated to the site's interface to make it more user friendly, as well as incorporate a simplification of rules and decrease response time to trouble tickets.

However, the news caused a stir as it was stated that Adam Wan, known in the fandom as Zaush, would be leading the user interface development. Major controversy has shadowed Mr. Wan following the note leaks back in late 2010 revealed a private correspondence where an individual went to Dragoneer to discuss the possibility of going public with their experiences of sexual abuses committed against them by Mr. Wan. In that correspondence Dragoneer told the alleged victim they believed taking this action was not a good idea as making such public accusations would lead to public backlash against both the accused and the accuser. The victim took that advise and did not go public. Only after the security leak did the public get a hold of these accusations.

Portal of Evil (PoE) closed down last week after over a decade of "atrocity tourism".

The site – founded in late 1999 by Cleveland, Ohio-based duo K. Thor Jensen and Chet Faliszek – was a directory of "weird, unusual and evil" websites, each discussed and mocked in turn by PoE forum members. Numerous furry sites were featured, including the website of 2 the Ranting Gryphon (who devoted a rant to PoE), Cub Central, and webcomics such as Sabrina Online.