The voting for the 2012 Ursa Major Awards, for the best anthropomorphic literature and art of the calendar year 2012, is now closed. Voting took place from March 15 to May 15. 1,696 registrations were received, but only 1,113 people actually voted.

The winners will be announced at a presentation ceremony at Anthrocon 2013, held July 4–7, 2013 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The placing of the voting will be released at this time.

Registrations were received from Argentina, Australia, Austria, Barbados, Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Brunei, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, the Czech Republic, Denmark, El Salvador, Finland, France, Germany, Grenada, Greece, Honduras, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Romania, Russia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, the Solomon Islands, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, the U.S.A., Ukraine, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Vietnam. This includes the large number of registrants who did not in fact vote.

Furry author/editor Watts Martin has announced a new online magazine about furry fandom, Claw & Quill.

The magazine's submission guidelines call for unpaid reviews, interviews, profiles and nonfiction narratives in the 1000–2000 word range. While acknowledging a "definite overlap" with Flayrah, Watts expressed a wish for C&Q to be "less “newsy” and more curated."

Many know Watts as a story writer, but he has a long history of publishing and contributing non-fiction to furry 'zines. He previously launched a fiction webzine under the same name Claw & Quill in October 2004, although it proved short-lived. Watts planned to reuse the name for a curated, social story archive similar in concept to Yerf, but the project stalled.

As someone who has been in a community of artists, I hear a common conundrum arise:

I really want to leave this art site, but it’s too popular and leaving would mean losing out on a valuable resource to gain/keep customers.

This article presents ways you can use your control over your own works to influence your customers to view them where you wish them to, while also maintaining a presence so that others may find you.

This is written as a neutral piece and the methods can be used on any free art posting site. To that end, we'll call the site you wish to vacate “BadVibeArt”, and the place you want to go “NewBeginningDoodles”. Both are general-use sites for stories and art alike, comparable to sites such as deviantART, Fur Affinity, Inkbunny, SoFurry or Weasyl.

Voting for the 2012 Ursa Major Awards, for the best anthropomorphic literature and art of the calendar year 2012 in eleven categories, closes on May 15. If you have not voted yet, you have a week left to do so on the Ursa Major Awards website.

In addition, the Anthropomorphic Literature and Arts Association has closed the 2012 Recommended Anthropomorphic Reading List. Recommendations for the 2013 Reading List are now being accepted.

All fans are invited to recommend worthwhile anthropomorphic works in eleven categories (motion pictures, short fiction, dramatic short films or broadcasts, novels, other literary works, magazines, graphic stories, comic strips, published illustrations, games, and websites) first published during 2013, plus miscellaneous items. This List is often used by fans to nominate in the next year's Awards.

The Ursa Major Award finalists for 2012 are . . .

Inkbunny is celebrating three years online by announcing a major redevelopment project – and a T-shirt contest.

We want to move to an open source model to get the community involved in extending the capabilities of the site, and so that anyone can easily create their own art/social site.

To do this we are creating the new site engine from the ground up. It will have all the features that people like from Inkbunny v1.0, but will use an established web framework, will have a new and improved interface and will launch with a bunch of new features we've always wanted to see added to the site.

The site, which saw its 300,000th submission this week, was launched in June 2010 after three months of closed testing. Since then, Inkbunny has added various features, including user-suggested keywords, but development has come in bursts due to time constraints.

Flayrah's accomplished reviewer Fred Patten has been invited to contribute to cartoon historian Jerry Beck's revitalized blog, Cartoon Research. He's since reviewed his own history, along with that of Osamu Tezuka, Astro Boy and Atomcat, and described how home video created anime fandom (including a brief mention of Mark Merlino and the C/FO).

Beck co-founded Cartoon Brew nine years ago, but was 'bought out' last month by co-editor Amid Amidi, who plans to "evolve the site while retaining its candid and authoritative voice". The move was discussed at Deadline Hollywood and Toon Zone; FLIP has a brief interview.

Fred was also recently named Fandom Guest of Honor at Rainfurrest 2013 for his extensive history within furry fandom. Their other guests are Soulscape, Temperance and Fox Amoore.

Furry auction site FurBuy has added a classified listings service, among other updates, positioning it as a "furry Craigslist". Listings so far include furry identification badges, a skunk suit for sale, and a request for a sewing partner. However, ongoing competition from social art sites has lead to a threat of closure later this year, reminiscent of those made over a decade ago.

Voting for the Ursa Major Awards for the Best Anthropomorphic Literature and Art of 2012 is now open, and will continue until May 15. The winners will be announced at a presentation ceremony at Anthrocon 2013 in Pittsburgh, July 4-7.

Anyone may vote, and you are encouraged to ask your friends to vote also — please help to spread the word!

There are five nominees in each of eleven categories, except where there was a tie for fifth place. To be eligible, a work must have been released during the calendar year 2012; must include a non-human being given human attributes, which can be mental and/or physical; and must receive more than one nomination.

Read on for the nominees...

Nominations for the 2012 Ursa Major Awards, for the Best Anthropomorphic Art and Literature of 2012, close on February 28. There is only one week left to nominate.

Anyone may submit up to five nominations for works first published during 2012 in each of the eleven categories — Motion Picture, Dramatic Short Work or Series, Novel, Short Fiction, Other Literary Work, Graphic Story, Comic Strip, Fanzine, Published Illustration, Website, and Game. It is not necessary to nominate for all categories.

The 2012 Recommended Anthropomorphics List may be used as a guide for what is eligible, but its entries on the List are not automatically nominated. Titles not on the List that were first published during 2012 are still eligible, in case some gems have been overlooked.

Discussion about potential nominees is welcome at the Ursa Major Awards LiveJournal community. Voting will take place from March 15 to May 15, 2013. The winners will be announced at a presentation ceremony at Anthrocon 2013 on July 4-7.

2012 saw Flayrah double its output – 677 stories from 48 contributors, including 173 from syndication partner In-Fur-Nation. Newsbytes also ramped up, with over 680 submissions (~450 last year).

So what was popular, well-rated, or highly-commented? The answers may surprise you . . .

In honor of the ten-year existence of SexyFur, and the recent publication from FurPlanet, Isiah interviews Jeremy Bernal about his career as a furry artist. Some mature topics are covered.

Isiah Jacobs: Hello, Mr. Bernal, thank you so much for joining me today! It's a great pleasure to have you on the show!

Jeremy Bernal: Thanks for the opportunity of the interview.

Isiah Jacobs: For the very few furries out there who have never heard of you before, you are the owner of two of the most well know furry porn pay sites, SexyFur and Tail Heat. SexyFur has been around for pretty much ten years now, and you just recently came out with your first official publication; a decade's worth of retrospective pin ups.

Jeremy Bernal: I'm not sure if it's the first official publication. We've done some other artist books and comics before the retrospective book. But it's probably the first "new book-like thing" I've put together in a few years.

The ALAA’s 2012 Anthropomorphic Recommended List will close on January 15, 2013, to allow for last-minute recommendations of last-week-of-2012 releases. The 2012 Ursa Major Awards nominations will open on January 17, the first day of Further Confusion 2013.

Go to the Ursa Major Awards website on January 17 to register for an online nomination form. You may cast up to five nominations in each of eleven categories: Best Anthropomorphic Motion Picture, Best Dramatic Short Work or Series, Best Novel, Best Short Fiction, Best Other Literary Work, Best Graphic Story, Best Comic Strip, Best Magazine, Best Published Illustration, Best Website, and Best Game. If you do not have five nominees in any category, you may nominate less. To be eligible, a work must have been released during the calendar year 2012; must include a non-human being given human attributes (anthropomorphic), which can be mental and/or physical; and must receive more than one nomination.

If you cannot think of anything to nominate, you may refer to the 2012 Recommended List. That has at least five titles in each category, recommended by Furry fans. Remember, 2012 Recommendations are not nominations for the awards. Nominations of a work are separate. You may nominate a work that has not been recommended if it meets the eligibility criteria.

The Anthropomorphic Literature and Arts Association, which administers the annual Ursa Major Awards, has updated the 2012 Anthropomorphic Reading List to include the titles recommended by furry fans through the beginning of December. This list is often used by fans to nominate in the next year's Awards.

There is less than one month to add your favorites of the year to the List. All fans are invited to recommend worthwhile anthropomorphic works in eleven categories (motion pictures, dramatic short films or broadcasts, novels, short fiction, other literary works, graphic stories, comic strips, magazines, published illustrations, websites, and games) first published during 2012, if they are not already on the list.

New art site Weasyl has been taken down after just a day online, while developers "work on some obvious issues".

The site's support forum has been flooded with threads reporting a variety of issues and feature requests.

More seriously, some are already probing for vulnerabilities, though at least one has been reported responsibly.

Weasyl appears to be hand-coded, raising the spectre of security holes, although past experience may have been enough to encourage the use of basic precautions.

Update (8 Oct): Weasyl is back, with a laundry list of fixes.