A very big welcome to the June edition of Digging Up Positivity, it was a big month. A lot of good was done, and I hope that you enjoyed the countless of festivities around Pride Month, just remember, you be you and love is love! We saw how many of our friends banded together to help others, both big and small and in the spirit of making this world a better place.

This months’ guest is Star Raccoon! And he has a very special wholesome story to share about his job in one of those biiiig mouse theme parks in Florida, USA! And because I am always streaming on Monday, I am giving a way a license for Clip Studio, the software I use to draw. If you use a Mac or Windows, you can run this, so stay tuned till the outro to learn more. And together we'll learn who has won one of those lovely Thabo T-shirts from ArtworkTee (dot com)! But for now, the charities!

Furries have always been present at Baltimore Pride. They can easily be spotted walking in the crowds, entertaining children, adults, and pets alike, even walking down the side of the pride parade route. For the first time ever, though, the Furries will be participating as official entrants in the Baltimore Pride Parade. 

Mid-Atlantic Anthropomorphic Association, the 501c3 charity behind the Fur the More Convention, reached out to the Maryland Furs community a couple weeks ago to invite fursuiters and community members to join them in the pride parade. Accompanied by ThatCorgitude's Rainbow Dash Mustang car, the furs will walk the one mile parade route along North Charles Street from Art Museum Drive this Saturday June 25th. The parade starts at 1:00pm as part of a week long celebration in Baltimore, MD.

Ursa, we may have a problem. Or at least so it may seem. Over the past few years the number of people voting in the furry fandom’s popular choice awards appears to be dwindling once again, despite continual growth and booming attendance at our conventions - COVID aside - revealing the growing audience and community beneath this stagnation.

But if less people in proportion are voting, is there a reason for this? One option may be that the system may be lead to some strange victors based on popularity of a franchise or personality rather than other considerations. But is this just a coincidence or could it be how the system was inadvertently crafted?

This article’s goal is to highlight why the current system is so sensitive to favoring artists who self-promote or whose fans rally on their behalf, at the expense of voters that weigh more toward judging the quality of the pieces nominated without authorship considerations. It will then propose a small change to make it more fair to both types of voters and creators, without stifling out those who show up with a passion for their artist.

Be wary, this gets long and technical. But if you’re reading this up to this point, I’m sure you knew that’s what you were in for.

This game is going to be tough to review, in essence the game’s strength only remains a strength the less I say about it and what makes it so good. I suppose the best way to approach it is how it displays on its surface. A fox protagonist in a green tunic raises his sword and blue shield to go on an adventure. Many would instantly connect this iconography to the Zelda franchise.

The game can be Zelda-like for sure, but it’s important to know that not all of Zelda’s Link’s outings are created equal. So the best way I can describe this is that it’s a Zelda-like, also known as a “Hero’s Adventure” game, that feels very much like the franchise before it went into a heavy handed narrative focus.

Contributors this month include 2cross2affliction, dronon, and GreenReaper.

Welcome to the May episode of Digging Up Positivity and this month it is 10 years ago that Thabo was sighted in The Netherlands for the first time! I do have a little bit about that in the very end of the video, including a give-away! This very T-Shirt from Artworktee, more info at the end of the video! But first, on with the charities!

The 4th Annual Good Furry Awards will be presented live for the first time on June 3 at Reno's Biggest Little Fur Con. The first three years of the awards were all done online, but the administrator of the awards, Grubbs Grizzly, felt it would be fun to do a live show this year.

The brief ceremony will be in the Ruby Room at 5pm on Friday night at the con. It will also be broadcast live on the Bearly Furcasting podcast.

This year there will also be a new Lifetime Achievement Award! This special award is selected by Uncle Bear Publishing and is in addition to our regular awards.

You can learn more by visiting the Ask Papabear website at https://www.askpapabear.com/

The furry community of South Africa have announced that Ivic Wulfe has passed away on Sunday May 22nd, 2022. Ivic, whose fursona was a green and white fox/wolf hybrid, co-founded the South Afrifur Pawdcast – a show hosted on Furry.FM, a radio streaming service where Ivic worked as English Community Administrator.

In the podcast, they bring in guests from the furry fandom to discuss topics of the day. They then post these to their YouTube channel. Some of these guests included Thabo Meerkat, Kyell Gold, Tonya Song, and myself.

Ivic also helped in the creation of the South Afrifur convention; a small gathering first held July 2017 in Krugersdorp, close to Johannesburg.

Friends of Furry.FM and South Afrifur,

Unfortunately, it is with heavy hearts that we have to inform you that our friend, Ivic passed away today at 7:19 PM. He fell asleep peacefully at home surrounded by his friends.

Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers is the Disney+ streaming service's newest exclusive movie, directed by Akiva Schaffer and starring John Mulaney as the voice of Chip and Andy Samberg as Dale, the titular pair of cartoon chipmunks. The movie is mostly live action, but features cartoon characters interacting with this live action world. The movie's relationship with the Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers animated television show is a bit complicated. This movie is not a sequel or reboot, but instead takes as its premise that the characters of that show were actors playing parts in a world where cartoons and humans coexist.

The obvious point of comparison is the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit, made even more obvious by the fact that Roger Rabbit himself makes a small cameo in this movie. If anything, a few people have interpreted this as taking place in the same world as Who Framed Roger Rabbit, though I'd argue it's actually a bit more meta than that. Unless I'm getting this wrong, the Roger Rabbit that cameos here is another actor who played himself in a movie that is equally fictional in both our world and the world of this movie. Cartoon actors share their names with their characters, for whatever reason. But, the point is, the movie is very meta like that, and though it never explicitly acknowledges it's own fictionality, it's showbiz savvy characters are likely to treat their situation as if it were a movie.

Also like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a major appeal of the movie is nostalgia for its animated characters, both specifically for its titular duo, as well as a series of cameos and walk-ons from others. While this sort of thing can be fun, it can also come off as a cynical branding exercise. However, the movie manages to avoid the pitfalls of this sort of thing better than most.

The results of the 2021 Ursa Major Awards were announced this Sunday, with motivated fan-bases driving decisive voting in certain categories, while others were finely balanced.

Littlefur/adult baby slice-of-life comic Shine by UK artist Star ran off with Best Graphic Story; coming second was a remake of Found, another of her works under the name Toddlergirl. Both had seen strong support in last years' Ursa Major Awards.

Likewise, AC Stuart's Awoo!: Volume 1 (on Amazon) stormed the opposition for Best Other Literary Work, with four more first-preference votes than the other four nominees put together.

Netting twice the points of the next nominee for Dramatic Short Work was Frank Behring's "Nobody Does It Better", derived from Best Comic Strip Carry On. Artist Kathy Kellogg (KD Nightstar) also took Best Published Illustration for "A World of Our Own" — beating all other nominees by 50%.

On March 5 this year, a large stone in the volcanic mountains near the town of Nasu in Japan's Tochigi Prefecture was found to have succumbed to what seems like a normal case of freeze-thaw weathering and split in two. Even setting aside that this occurred over two months ago (though, to be fair, that's a blink in the lifespan of your average rock), such geological processes are hardly news even for mainstream sources, much less a furry news site. But this wasn't just any rock.

The rock in question was the Sessho-seki (or Killing Stone), the rumored earthly remains of Tamamo-no-Mae, the Jewel Maiden, a legendary nine-tailed fox said to have spread chaos throughout Eastern Asia for nearly 2000 years before finally being hunted down in Nasu. Though finally killed and transformed into the stone, you can't keep a good evil fox spirit down; so her final resting place was obviously haunted by it, poisoning anyone who came near. Though she'd apparently calmed down a bit after an encounter with a Buddhist priest, the stone suddenly breaking in two is a bit ominous.

Flayrah has migrated to new North American hosting, with WikiFur planned to join it by the end of the year.

The 'new' server is based on a quad-core Xeon-D 1521 with 32GB RAM and four 2TB HDDs - 2015-era hardware, but double the capacity of prior hosting provided by Timduru. Base software has been upgraded from PHP 5.6 (first released in 2014) to PHP 8.1, resulting in major performance improvements, along with recent releases of nginx, Debian and MariaDB.

These features may be more important for WikiFur, which will be upgraded to a newer and more complex version of the MediaWiki software; with the intent to add Wikibase to process and visualize data about convention instances, as well as better-documenting "furspeech" words used within the fandom and languages such as Foxish, Lapine and Primal.

Hello everybody and welcome to the April edition of Digging Up Positivity! This episode is filled to the brink with charity events and fundraisers. And now that most of the world is slowly opening up again, the urge to go out and have fun again is real with many of us! When I visited some of them, like Elfia, it was like a reunion from a long lost time, and many conversations went like this [scene from the Witcher]:

I haven't seen you since the plague.

But besides new events, charities and just plain old outside fun, recently a new furry social network has been rapidly growing: Barq. And this social network has been founded by a Dutch Fur, Woutske, who is our featurette of this month, but now, without further ado: The charities.

Contributors this month include 2cross2affliction, dronon, GreenReaper, Rakuen Growlithe, and Sonious.

While 2021 was a pretty crappy year overall, for anthro gaming titles it was certainly a renaissance. It also did an excellent job curb stomping my 2018 statements that visual novels seem to be the genre of choice for anthro game developers. In 2021 we had a Metroid-vania mixed with a brawler in Ursa Nominated FIST. We had an isometric top-down combat adventure in Ursa Nominated Death’s Door. Now we have a game that is a narrative and art focused 2D grid exploration and creativity game in Chircoy: A Colorful Tale. Unfortunately this one didn’t get a nomination, because I would not have complained if it did.

This game is interestingly one I would recommend to furries who are artists more than gamers. While it doesn’t require being an artist by any means, and traditional gamers would be able to complete the story just fine, the narrative has more reflection on the power of being a creative type and the stress of societal expectations that comes with artistic pursuits. Imposter syndrome, having people demand things from you for exposure, and other such tropes in the artist world are addressed through your character’s trials.

There is a full world to explore and color to your heart’s content and it's more about the journey than the conflict. But there is no art without some struggle. While your character named after your favorite dish may have started their adventure wanting to wield the magic brush of this world, heavy is the hand who wields.

To avoid spoilers stop reading at Art within the Art