State Senator apologizes after defecating Nebraska Senate floor with disproven cat bin rumors

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In late January 2022, the internet was flooded with news stories about a concerned parent in a school meeting in Michigan. However the news of the inaccuracy of the salacious rumor didn’t seem to reach one State Senator in Nebraska by the name of Bruce Bostelman of District 23. He instead took the State Senate floor and defecated it with the rumor he, like the woman before him, was appalled by.

Digging Up Positivity - March 2022

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Hello and welcome to the March edition of Digging Up Positivity. Where one global challenge is slowly nearing its end, another is waiting in its place to take over. But together we stand strong, and remember, in darkness even the smallest ray of light shines the brightest. And with that, I would like to mention that some of this episodes causes are about the Ukraine situation, including this months’ featurette: Blajn.

This months’ episode is packed with so many amazing charities, and even more. It is good to see that there is still plenty of force for good in the world. And with that, let's go on with listing them all!

Every winner of the Best Animated Feature Oscar, ranked

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WhoAreYouWearing.jpgThough it’s the baby of Oscar categories, the Best Animated Feature Academy Award will turn 21 this Sunday, meaning it would be old enough to drink alcohol in America, if it could actually do that. Encanto, Flee, Luca, The Mitchells vs. the Machines and Raya and the Last Dragon will compete to become the next recipient of the award.

First introduced in 2001, Best Animated Feature is the only “new” category to be introduced this century so far. Like many new categories, a few animated features had earned "Special Achievement" Oscars, starting with the original American made animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, with another going to 1997’s Toy Story, as well as one to the live action/animated hybrid Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Other movie awards followed the Oscars, adding their own animated categories, though the Annies, which are for animation, had obviously been awarding Best Feature for a few years.

Since 2001, 20 movies have won the award, which is a nice round number for doing a countdown, worst to best. The following ranking is based on my opinions, and my opinions only. But, even if you think my rankings are horrible, no good, absolutely wrong, well, I’ve also included a lot of factoids and trivia, so that might be worth reading. Also, not all of the winners have been particularly furry, but most have something of interest to furries going on in them.

Update: The original list was through 2021 only, but has been updated to include the 95th Academy Awards' winner on March 10, 2024, the day of the 96th Academy Awards. The plan is to make this traditional.

Furry fandom featured in academic journal written by culture PhD student, who's a furry

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An article surrounding the content of furry fandom, written by a furry university of Texas PhD Student, has been published in the journal of Transformative Works and Cultures. The peer-reviewed journal covers media and fan communities under a variety of mediums. Written by Charlie the Wuff, Furry fandom, aesthetics, and the potential in new objects of fannish interest references many prior non-fiction totems such as: Ash Coyote’s The Fandom: A Furry Documentary, Joe Strike’s Furry Nation, and Fred Patten’s Furry Fandom Conventions 1989-2015.

The three parts of the work go over the foundations of the fandom proper in the 1970s, followed by a dive into the aesthetic of the medium, and finishes with the cultural aspects that make the fandom distinct from other fan groups.

'Turning Red': Does this make you uncomfortable?

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Turning Red Does this sound familiar?

Pixar's newest movie is a woman-directed, coming-of-age film where a red-headed daughter finds herself rebelling against an overbearing mother during the course of an adventure involving human-to-animal transformation of a bear-like nature; that worked out so well for all involved last time.

Let's see: they replaced Brenda Chapman half-way through production, and her career still hasn't recovered; the movie was the first non-Cars Pixar movie to not reach a 90% on Rotten Tomatoes; and, most importantly, readers didn't like my review of it very much. Seriously, the best thing to come out of Brave was the line "She's from the other studio." in Ralph Breaks the Internet, which unfortunately was the best thing to come out of Ralph Breaks the Internet.

Voting is open for the 2021 Ursa Major Awards

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The Ursa Major Awards logo.The vote for the 2021 Ursa Major Awards is happening this month! Send them your e-mail address, and you can vote for any of the nominations in 14 categories. Voting closes on Thursday, March 31.

Links to the content in question are provided, some may be for mature audiences. Ursa's Twitter Feed also provides a summary of each of the nominees for the categories.

Spread the word - Please re-post this announcement if you're on an active furry message forum or social media site!

This year's nominees are...

Newsbytes archive for February 2022

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

Digging Up Positivity - February 2022

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Hello and welcome to the February episode of Digging Up Positivity from a very, very windy Netherlands. Of course we have some lovely charities, including furries making a tremendous impact in Madison County, USA. Furthermore we have some lovely animation news. While I always get a little bit of mixed feelings with reboots, some of the upcoming ones do make me quite curious.

And we have some interesting developments regarding the environment and our special guest is a spectacled cat from the USA, chairman of the Western PA Furry Weekend, car enthusiast and owner of a golden voice: Manicknux. Oh, and if you like my art, or are a LEGO enthusiast, please do check out my twitch channel! Currently I am building the big Ecto-1, the famous car from Ghostbusters.

But now, first, the wonderful causes we have been raising funds for!

Alt-Right furry, Benjamin "Polybun" Smith, charged with murder of 60 year old Portland woman

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The OPB reports that Benjamin Smith, known in the fandom under his fursona name “Polybun”, faces murder and attempted murder charges after he confronted protesters before opening fire into the crowd. Four were injured and one, Brandy Knightly, a sixty year old woman, lost her life in the attack.

Connections to the fandom were fished out by the local Portland community furries as images of the attacker made the rounds. One of the first to report on this to social media was Triss Winters, a furry left-wing activist out of Portland who recalled when Polybun was removed from one of his house parties a decade ago due to him brandishing a knife and threatening to stab someone who took a photo of him at the event.

Subwoolfer's "Give That Wolf A Banana" gets Norway's nod for Eurovision 2022

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Norway has chosen to send masked comedy-dance duo Subwoolfer to Eurovision 2022 in Turin with "Give That Wolf A Banana", after a competitive selection process. [tip: Elysium]

The live performance was accompanied by pyrotechnics and is available in campy sign language. There's an interpreted interview with the duo, in which they discuss difficulties with adapting to Earth's higher gravity, as well as the inspiration for their song – now out in a romantic mix.

Working in the Archives: Researching Fred Patten, furries, and counter-culture media at UC Riverside

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EC-ETON.jpg Located at the University of California's Riverside campus is the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction & Fantasy, a world-renowned archive of books, film, fanzines, and ephemera documenting and evoking the history of sci-fi and fantasy fan culture. Originally formed in 1969, when collector and physician Dr. J. Lloyd Eaton donated his library consisting of "about 7,500 hardback editions of science fiction, fantasy and horror from the Nineteenth to the mid-Twentieth centuries", the Eaton is considered one-of-the-world's largest collections of papers and documents entangled with its subjects. While much of the collection remains to be processed - COVID-19 notably limiting work since early 2020 - both students and staff see the archive as a hidden treasure, with the collection holding such things as first-editions of Dracula, Frankenstein, and Fahrenheit 451.
 

Corgi Events to disband after staff upheaval following Sin City Murr Con's first year

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Corgi Events LLC Inverted Corgi Events LLC, a for-profit organization that operated five furry and two brony conventions, is to be disbanded according to a letter released by one of the conventions, AquatiFur, on February 12th. This follows a series of events and malfeasance concerns that started with an unusual email sent out to their Dealer’s Den mailing list. This letter, sent February 8th, alleged the LLC's sole-proprietor, Corey “Treble” Woods, was going to file for bankruptcy and bail on the organization.

This troubling news followed a stressful slate of Corgi Events running Sin City Murr Con’s première instance, just after Painted Desert Fur Con a month prior. Testimony from Boiler, a prior member of staff, shared their side of the story on this unrelenting demand on staff. It talked of a loss of faith in their organization’s leader due a spate of problematic behavior, including alleged drunkenness, prolonged response times to urgent financial matters, and delays in compensation. Tempers finally blew over into the public sphere when Treble terminated Koi from staff, a person who he admitted was running many day-to-day operations.

Furry hook-up application Howlr to shut down by end of Feburary

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HowlrOn the 26th of February, furry hookup app Howlr will be shuttering its services, after delisting its service from the Apple and Google Play application libraries. This was announced by the mascot of Howlr Lab: Sushi. In this message he encourages furs to move to a new social application Barq.Social as a replacement.

This application, which was released in the middle of 2018, was based on the human hook-up app named Grindr.

Full statement from Sushi below the fold:

F.I.S.T.: Forged in Shadow Torch - Part Brawler, Part Metroidvania, All Fur Fighting Fun

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FIST.jpgWhen some Western furries hear about anthropomorphic content from China they may typically think of web pages that sell knock off fursuits, but F.I.S.T. is here and gives that stereotype a good solid punch in the face. This original property developed by the Eastern developer of Bilibili for the PlayStation (4 & 5) and PC pounds in the action and exploration of any player willing to fight on behalf of the furtizens being oppressed by the Legion’s mechanical beings.

Furtizens, by the way is not my word, but the game’s own neologism describing the furry citizens. It is such a simple word, and it amazes me that of all things a game would be the etymology of it and not from popularization from furry fans (visa vi: fursona). The story’s main conflict is on two rabbit characters: Ray and Cicero.

It is one of three furry games I played released in 2021, and is certainly going on my list of nominations for this year’s Ursa Major. It is a game of two main elements that have been blended together quite well. Combat is intimate and has the feel of a brawler game of old like a more polished Double Dragon, but it takes place in an open and explorable world where your weapons can double as traversal items, putting it in the Metroid space. So it’s part brawler and part metroidvania and it blends these two elements seamlessly.

Blotch and "Dog's Days of Summer" - The End of Two Stories - A Retrospective

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Bayshore dismayed Somewhere in the back of my mind – along with every other soul-searching moment of my youth – is a single panel from this novel featuring Bayshore clutching a fish and crying out Diego's name. I claim it as a symbol of a love long lost in the hazy days of my early adulthood, when uncertainty was the only certainty.

This is the story of a naive young otter chasing a free-spirited rascal. Through lovingly penned dialog and moody colours, it exposes the raw, vulnerable quick of youthful longing; Diego's light-hearted take on all things bursting into life against the shimmering backdrop of Bayshore's persistently searching but fatefully delicate glass heart. Through these illustrations, a pair of artists in love pour their hearts into their work in a way we can never see again.

The story ventures from "what does this mean" to "what do we do now," through "I knew it all along" and finally arrives at its natural conclusion of "I'm sorry" and "I was meant for you." But even after the second part – that was never published on the web, and only available in the printed work – it leaves us wondering how things will play out.

Although the comic, penned by a duo of artists under the pseudonym of Blotch, has been out of print for years, it will forever live in the hearts and minds of a generation of furries who discovered what it is to love and live in the forgiving embrace of furry fandom's nascent youth through to its maturity, and on through its inevitable slide into the mainstream.

From the Yerf Archive