November 2019
Furpoclypse moves venues as Halloween convention's hotel became ghastly
Posted by Sonious on Sat 2 Nov 2019 - 11:52Furpcolypse, out of Connecticut, has always been an interesting Halloween gathering for furries. To fit the season, the convention usually picks themes dealing with decay or a haunted vibe. Over the last few years when the hotel they contracted with fell under new management, one thing started to become perfectly clear. The venue itself was dressing itself up to the themes, and it would not back down from one upping the attendees themselves.
What was once known as the Radisson was now the Red Lion, but its foundation had not moved from its spot off the 91 in Cromwell. The venue's story is one which is cursed. Clearly the architect was mad, as they had adorned it with a lovely indoor pool, however placed it smack dab in the middle of a building that was not prepared for the maintenance and moisture that it brought with it. As a result the costs of upkeep was high, and apparently unmanageable by their owner. What followed was a game of hot potato with the ownership.
Newsbytes archive for October 2019
Posted by Anon on Sun 3 Nov 2019 - 11:06Contributors this month include 2cross2affliction, dronon, earthfurst, GreenReaper, and Rakuen Growlithe. Over half our links this month are to BBC articles for some reason.
The tiger returns in the Jeopardy Tournament of Champions
Posted by Sonious on Tue 5 Nov 2019 - 04:36
The tiger claws come out this Thursday on Jeopardy as Bucktown returns to face his fellow winning players in this year’s Jeopardy Tournament of Champions. When we last covered the seven day winning streak, it was the winningest of the season. In the year and a half since that time, something called James Holzhouer happened, bringing in a brand new high risk strategy that literally turned the game on its head and winning 32 games before being stopped by one Emma Boettcher. Both of them will also be in this tournament.
The streak-stopping Emma will be facing off against the tiger from Arkansas on Thursday November 7th. However, the third contestant is also no push over, with Eric Backes having a 4 day win total of over $100,000 in his belt as well. JeopardyFan has this Thursday contest as the most hotly contested of the week; with Josh, Emma, and Eric all set with a near equal chance of winning. The site commentator Andy has called it a “Group of Death”, which basically means all three are were skilled enough to go deep into the tournament, but are facing off against one another quite early thus causing the early loss of one of them.
Ranked: All the Season 9 episodes of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Posted by Rakuen Growlithe on Wed 6 Nov 2019 - 12:39After nine years, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic has finally drawn to a close. How did the final season stack up? Incredibly well! Nearly every episode was good, and personally I thought that half of them were excellent. What follows are brief reviews of each episode, ranked in order, from what I considered to be the weakest to the best. Spoilers will follow!
Review: 'Arctic Dogs'
Posted by 2cross2affliction on Thu 7 Nov 2019 - 19:36
So, the premise of the movie is that there is a fox who really wants to be a dog. I'm sorry, but I'm having trouble understanding who thought this was a good idea.
Well, movie with an unrealistic premise aside, what is Arctic Dogs? It is directed by that auteur of furry cinema, Aaron Woodley, whose previous movie, Spark: A Space Tail, I reviewed here.
In case you don't want to read a whole different review on top of this one, I'll just spoil that one for you and say that I did not like Spark very much. But, Aaron Woodley now has the unique distinction of having directed two fully furry movies, featuring fully-anthropomorphic animal characters without any humans, theatrically released to American cinemas. That's a notable achievement. We now seem to have a mainstream director who specializes in furry movies. That's good!
Pity about the movies.
WowNow - A whole bunch of animated films to avoid
Posted by dronon on Wed 13 Nov 2019 - 14:56I had some friends over recently, both furry and dragon fans, to show them a retro and entertainingly stupid 1991 anime mini-movie called Capricorn. We poked holes and made fun of it. The following day, in a spirit of— amicable masochism I guess, my friend Dav treated me to the recent movie trailer for A Dragon Adventure:
Confused and somewhat alarmed by the quality levels, I started to look into where it came from.
I am well-aware that computer-animated films with talking animals are churned out all over the world, and most of them are of pretty terrible quality. The theory is that kids will watch anything. So if you believe that, then who cares about quality? Just work on a small budget and make money. What I hadn't done was to take a look down this particular rabbit hole. Now, having done so, I regret it.
How Shere Kahn ousted a furry tiger from the Jeopardy champion's tournament
Posted by Sonious on Fri 15 Nov 2019 - 00:00
As previously covered here on Flayrah, a furry known by his fursona name of Bucktown Tiger had made The Tournament of Champions on Jeopardy. He participated in the Thursday night quarterfinals game against some very heavy hitters. But little could he have known that his greatest enemy would not be the contestants before him that night, but a Final Jeopardy question that would be presented before the contestants on the following game Friday night.
A question whose answer was: “Who is Shere Khan?”
So how could this have happened where a furry fan, whose favorite animal species is the tiger, end up being torn up by the most infamous of all anthropomorphic tigers? Let’s break it down.
Reminder: 'Zootopia' is 'Zootropolis', and has always been 'Zootropolis'
Posted by 2cross2affliction on Sat 16 Nov 2019 - 21:50
Disney launched its new streaming service, Disney+, earlier this week, though not without its share of hiccups (fortunately, the Pirates of the Caribbean did not eat the tourists). However, one strange glitch involving the popular furry movie Zootopia has people believing they've found proof of an alternate dimension where the movie is known as Zootropolis.
Could it be a "Mandela effect", where people remember history in a way that doesn't quite match up with our current universe? Named after Nelson Mandela, who apparently did not die in a South African prison the way some people seem to remember. Mandela effects are taken by believers to be signs of alternative realities, and that people with these kinds of memories are somehow sliding between different realities. Non-believers tend to think that they're caused by people inventing imaginary superpowers and pop sci-fi quantum realms rather than just admitting they don't know as much about South African history as they thought they did.
What is your favorite Fox type Pokémon? (2019 edition)
Posted by 2cross2affliction on Sun 17 Nov 2019 - 21:06ArtWorkTee's T-Shirt Campaign and the Selling of Identity
Posted by Sonious on Tue 19 Nov 2019 - 20:37
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.