A gay western centaur romance isn't the kind of story I encounter enough, even in furry fandom. Hotblood! A Centaur In the Old West is a webcomic by Toril Orlesky that ran from 2013-2016. The color artwork is as stark as the landscape, but the story is a bit more complicated than the black-and-white world that the western genre is known for.

The art is lovely enough that I was mostly able to put aside the sometimes uneven pacing. As the story circles around the action, it digs deeper into its characters' pasts - and their hearts. The two main characters are not morally whole men, and therefore they caught my interest.

Rook is a centaur. In the story universe, centaurs are an integrated part of American society. There's some social stigma, but not as much as you might think for someone who looks half-animal. There's at least one centaur in the U.S. Senate, for example. Rook is employed by Asa, a human steel tycoon. We don't get to see much of the world outside of their relationship, and it's only by the second half of the story that we really start seeing the two of them bond, sexually and romantically.

The end of last month saw the finale of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Season 7. To celebrate the conclusion of another season, I will look back and rank all the episodes from worst to best. There are some spoilers.

25. Fluttershy Leans In

Although I know this episode has its supporters, it was undoubtedly the worst episode in season 7 for me and one of the worst in the show. It's nice that Fluttershy is becoming more assertive but I found almost nothing funny in the episode, I thought the plot was pointless and the lesson, while not totally wrong, seemed to conflict with previous lessons. All around, it was awful.

24. A Health of Information

Another Fluttershy episode and another disappointment. I really expected to like this episode. I like the characters involved and the seriousness of Zecora's condition was a big change of pace from an average episode. Despite that, it never caught my attention. The characters behave in some very strange ways and there's a lack of any logic behind the plot. DWK though his parody review of the episode, does an excellent job (w/ some strong language) pointing out the unusual callousness of almost all the ponies involved.

23. Forever Filly

This one, and the next few, are on the lower end of average. They are not bad episodes but they don't try to be anything more than filler. Here, it's nice to see how Sweetie Belle has matured but nothing in this episode is particularly memorable. Finally, I would've preferred if the ending had been Rarity sharing one of Sweetie Belle's newer interests rather than just eating ice-cream like children.

The main cast for the live action remake of The Lion King has been announced by Disney. Donald Glover will play the lead role of Simba, while Beyoncé has been confirmed to play the role of Nala, finally settling rumors that Disney was trying to cast the pop star in the role.

Contributors this month include 2cross2affliction, dronon, Equivamp, Fred, GreenReaper, InkyCrow, Rakuen Growlithe, RingtailedFox, and Sonious. (Also added an amusing link from our Twitter feed that didn't get posted here.)

This article was written by someone who worked on the game described.

Update (23 Dec): Crimestrikers has been released.

Crimestrikers, a furry role playing game supplement, is scheduled to be published in November by Spectrum Games.

The game is set on Creaturia, a world of anthropomorphic animals with futuristic technology. The colorful, highly skilled heroes are the best agents of CIPO (Creaturian International Police Organization), who are called into action after the world's most dangerous super-villains escape from the Quarry, a maximum security prison. The Crimestrikers pursue the escapees, including several cunning evildoers who work for the a variety of nefarious groups.

• Outrage - An international crime syndicate whose leader, Vance Coffin, is the Crimestrikers' major enemy.
• PARCH - A terrorist organization that wants to destroy the amphibious humanoid species known as the Hydrerans.
• Emperor Rasavanto - A Hydreran "Warlord of the Seas" who seeks to conquer the surface world.
• The Time Terror Team - Three legendary criminals from Creaturian history brought into the present.
• The Righteous One - A costumed vigilante with sinister motives.
• Steelwing - A bat with cyborg wings who seeks to retake the nation he once ruled as a dictator.

First of all, happy Halloween!

For our final foray into lycanthropic cinema, comes— a movie I saw as a Sci Fi Channel original movie. It never even had a theatrical release in America. I will point out that it is by far the greatest Sci Fi Channel original movie ever produced, but I need hardly point out that is not a big accomplishment.

But, sometimes, hidden in the terrible filler, something emerges from the shadows. Perhaps I waste my time watching bad Sci Fi movies, but they provided a baseline. It's harder to know when you've got a good werewolf movie if you've never seen a bad or even just indifferent werewolf movie. Of course, if you don't have the patience to sit through the bad (with or without the MST3K patter), you can just take my word for it.

Dog Soldiers is a gory blast.

I Am Dragon (trailer) is a Russian fantasy/drama film that came out in 2015 and yes I know it's technically a wyvern. When I showed clips of it to dragon furries, that's the first thing they said, in a tone of voice like I'd gotten their hopes up and then betrayed them.

For a live-action film, it uses a lot of computer graphics (around 85%), and looks pretty good! The setting felt very real to me. Production costs were about $18 million, and it flopped at the box office. As movies go, it's... ok. I say this with some reluctance. If you're a fan of dragons, you're not missing much.

Back-story: A line of dragons lives on a secluded island, and in a medieval town, the people perform a ceremony and song with which they offer their maidens as sacrifices. This summons the dragon who flies off with one of them, until one day a warrior decides he's going to rescue the woman he loves. He finds the island (too late to save the maiden), slays the beast, and the sacrificial rite is turned into a local wedding ritual, minus the dragon.

A recent video has popped up on Youtube and was sent to me by a corgi friend of mine. Apparently someone by the name of Stefan Molyneux had interviewed a furry in a video named: The Shocking Furry Fandom Conversation. Yes, Really!. Given the thumbnail containing the mugs of the leaders of the Furry Raiders I thought this person was interviewing them, but as it turns out the content of the video didn’t seem to have anything to do with the controversial alt-furry group.

Or at least that is what I thought coming away from the video. As I did more investigation into this Mr. Molyneux and the methods in which he is infamous I started to come to a bit of a more darker conclusions and questioning the intent of the video. Could this seemingly innocent interview with a random YouTuber actually be a propaganda piece crafted to fulfill as a recruitment tool aimed at furries? A way to take aim at those in the furry fandom and have them join the Freedomain fandom, a group which seems to have been noted as having cult-like qualities by some press releases?

Well I don’t know about all that. In fact, the reason I put the word cult in the headline is simply because Stephan put the word sex next to furry on his video’s thumbnail. And like me seeing those two words together for the purpose of click-bait made me eye-roll, I’m sure seeing his organization being called a cult all the time earns similar expression from Mr. Molyneux. Also, inquiring to Patch, he seemed to indicate that Leon was an actual person and the conversation was legitimate. So, with that in mind, I gave it a second watch and highlighted items of interest, both good and bad in the conversation.

Occasionally, there comes a pair of movies that share remarkably similar themes that come out together. Sometimes, as in Antz versus A Bug's Life, there's evidence that one of the movies was designed as a direct competitor to the other. More often than not, however, there's just something in the water. Just last year, Disney went out of its way to advertise how unique a movie Zootopia was for featuring a fully anthropomorphic animal world in the one year in the history of American feature animation where that was not a unique quality. These things just happen.

1981 was one of those years, featuring not one, but two werewolf movies utilizing cutting edge (for the time) makeup effects that also happened to be horror comedies as opposed to straight horror movies. The Howling came out first, but it was the scrappy underdog that went up against the real Hollywood juggernaut, An American Werewolf in London, written and directed by John Landis, an up and coming director who hung out with the likes of Steven Spielberg.

Though An American Werewolf in London is an acknowledged classic of the horror genre and features a ghoulish sense of humor (Landis was, and still is, best known for Animal House, early poster taglines noted this movie featured "a different kind of animal"), it is, like The Wolf Man, very much a tragedy. And not all the tragedy is on screen.

News out of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania from September announced that one Carl R. Rickwood was charged with 20 counts of dissemination of child pornography. It has recently been revealed that this perpetrator was actually a furry by the fandom name of R.C. Fox. A full breakdown of the documentation can be found on a video by Ragehound.

R.C has been a prolific member of the fandom, having his own fursuit since 2014, and also attending and volunteering for multiple conventions. They were also slated to run a disc jockey session at the upcoming Furpocalypse until this news was brought to staff's attention and they indicated they would not be in attendance. They were also featured in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette piece 'Meet the Furries'.

Since the news emerged, R.C.'s social media accounts on Twitter, Fur Affinity, and even YouTube have been removed, renamed, or disabled. As of now no arrest can be confirmed.

As a kid, I was given many cheap Wal-Mart editions of the writings of children's author Thornton Burgess, including The Adventures of Old Man Coyote, which contained a back cover blurb that was given a header simply saying "The Howling".

I bring this up because the movie referenced not very appropriately by that children's novel back cover is, on one hand, overshadowed by a similar werewolf movie that came out the exact same year, but has still managed to find itself embedded into pop culture deep enough that it gets its own call outs. I'll be covering that more popular werewolf movie eventually, but of the two werewolf movies of 1981 (three if you count the sorta-werewolf movie Wolfen), The Howling is my favorite.

Of all the werewolf movies I plan on covering, it has the most obvious flaws. It, more than any other, is going to take a very forgiving attitude to dated special effects. At least The Wolf Man has its iconic status going for it. The Howling also features one really cheap jump scare early on, but, to be fair, it makes up for this with one of the most earned jump scares in horror movie history later on. And finally, one of the main reasons I really love it so much is also something people can find annoying.

It's a postmodern werewolf movie. The rules of the werewolf movie have been codified. Now it's time to start playing with them.

In January 2015, FurPlanet Productions published the first volume of Roz Gibson’s s-f novel “Griffin Ranger”. Now, as of August 2017, the rest of the novel is now available.

Gibson has been a furry fan favorite since the 1980s, but as a comic-book artist, not a novelist. She wrote and drew “Jet: 2350” for the Rowrbrazzle in 1987, and went on to create one of his most popular characters, the antihero Jack Salem, the sable psychotic killer, in a series of comics published first by Radio Comix in the 1990s and later republished and continued by FurPlanet, notably in the “City of Ice” series.

In 2014 Gibson turned to writing. Her first Jack Salem novelette, “The Monkeytown Raid”, published in the anthology “What Happens Next” edited by Fred Patten, won that year’s Ursa Major Award for the Best Anthropomorphic Short Fiction of the year. She has written a few more stories since then, the most recent being the time-travel thriller “Matriarch: Elephant vs. T-Rex”, published as an original Kindle novella in April 2017.

Update 10/15: A statement made about FurPlanet publication on the original article was found to be inaccurate and removed.

Sad news has come to the web journal of the furry convention Fur 'the More. Their most recent announcement tells of the passing of Cobalt the Fox (David Gonce) last Friday (October 6), due to a heart attack. The fox's final tweet indicated he had felt particularly ill.

This dedicated staffer worked in the security group, known as the Rangers, for the Baltimore area furry convention. He also had the opportunity to MC for their furry dance competition.

The blessings of the staff, and their sorrow over the loss speaks volumes for Colbalt's contributions to the fandom he loved.

I have met and talked to so many people and in all my life i have not met anyone who isn't special and unique.

— I'm Cobalt! (@Cobalt_The_Fox) July 13, 2017

"I guess I just sort of ... grew up."
— Ask Jappleack

"Me too!"
— "What Good Will Wishing Do?", My Little Pony: The Movie (1986) (my review)

It's been seven years to the day since My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic was first aired, and the geek world changed that day.

So let's talk about the 2017 movie. As far as the story goes, it's pretty bog-standard at this point for MLP:FiM. Bad guy appears (the Storm King, voiced by Liev Schreiber), three of the four magical alicorn princesses prove themselves worthless by getting instantly captured, so it's up to the fourth princess and series protagonist, Twilight Sparkle (voiced by Tara Strong), with her six friends - Applejack (voiced by Ashleigh Ball), Fluttershy (voiced by Andrea Libman), Pinkie Pie (also voiced by Libman), Rainbow Dash (also voiced by Ball), Rarity (voiced by Tabitha St. Germain) and Spike (voiced by Cathy Weseluck) - to save the land of Equestria with the magic of friendship. Which they used to be able to straight-up shoot people with, but they lost that ability back in season four.

Night in the Woods (trailer) is an adventure game by Infinite Fall, a joint venture between game designer Alec Holowka, co-writer Bethany Hockenberry and animator Scott Benson. Kickstarted in October 2013 in the hopes of getting $50,000 USD, it not only reached its goal within 26 hours, it raised over $200,000 within a month!

This was probably helped by Howolka's credibility from making Aquaria in 2007 with Derek Yu. Although Night in the Woods (NITW for short) took longer to develop than initially expected, it was released in February 2017 to very positive reviews.

Featuring a cast of animal characters, it's a story-driven game with easy-going 2D platforming and exploration. It takes about 8 to 12 hours to play, and it's available on PC, Mac, Linux and PS4.

I liked this game a lot, and the tricky part with this review is that the less you know about the story, the better. It takes place in Possum Springs, a mid-sized (possibly Rust Belt) town with a struggling economy. You play a 20-year-old cat named Mae who's dropped out of college and returned home, trying to deal with (or avoid) some personal issues. Then a couple of… worrying things start to happen.