Nominations are open for the 2010 Ursa Major Awards, intended to recognize the best works published in the field of anthropomorphics.

Nominations close on February 28; voting starts March 13 and closes April 17. Furry fans may nominate up to five works in each category.

Available awards include Best Motion Picture, Dramatic Short Work or Series, Novel, Short Fiction, Other Literary Work, Graphic Story, Comic Strip, Magazine, Published Illustration, and Game.

Read more: Coverage of last year's rule changes and award winners. Consider Flayrah's 2010 articles for Other Literary Work!

Fur Affinity turned six this weekend, offering a preview of a new site template to go live May 21, plus a commission system with integrated ratings.

Site owner Dragoneer has promised that underlying security issues will be fixed too:

Things have been slack in the coding department, and we know that. It's time for a change, and we're long overdue. We're going to fix that. [...] The vulnerabilities will be fixed between now and then, and some of them require complete system re-writes

However, offers to help with these vulnerabilities have been rebuffed for now. It is also not the first time that a new layout has been promised.

Here is another newspaper profile on Furry fandom for the general public, in the new "Los Angeles Alternative Press". At least this one is reasonably objective. It also includes a URL link to the website for ConFurence 2003, next week -- dunno whether this will hurt or help the ConFurence...

The Internet was seen as a major catalyst for the furry fandom finding one another during the times before we held conventions. During that earlier period in the 1990s, conventions and meets were rare, and finding one another was done mostly through the chat rooms and message boards of the past. There was no bandwidth for video or sharing major animation projects, therefore most of our intimate conversations were textual.

For many younger furries, it was a time that was lost in the annals of a distant history. Instead they found themselves joining in amongst a wave of growing conventions being held in various places around the world on any given weekend. Ones where those in custom fursuits march out in the streets openly rather than feeling a stifling isolation of being cooped up in hotel spaces, with a handful of home made creations, being wary of a hostile media looking for a freak show.

Coming out of 2019, it seemed that the time where furry was just an Internet thing was fully behind it. However a series of unfortunate events were in line for 2020, a year that has led humanity to be forced into their rooms by an irate Mother Nature as an easily spread virus has forced governments around the globe to take drastic measures to slow its spread and put strict limits on social gatherings. A situation which has forced both the furry fandom, and the internet that brought it together, back to their roots.