The art gallery Bunker Projects in Pittsburgh, located three miles from Anthrocon's events, is currently hosting a furry exhibit. Co-curated by Brett Hanover who directed the documentary film Rukus, this exhibition is called Room Party: Furry Art at the Beginning of the World in celebration of the unofficial gatherings of furries that occur during conventions, typically where art exchanges and sketching would occur.

More information on the list of artists being exhibited can be found here. While there will be special events during Anthrocon weekend, the exhibit will be available until July 20th during their normal Thursday and Sunday open gallery hours. These events are not run by Anthrocon themselves, but by Bunker Projects.

Furry Weekend Atlanta CEO Ranan announced that prices for FWA 2026 ("Nowhere Inn Between") will increase twice by the time the convention happens next May. "Despite our most fervent wishes to the contrary, FWA isn't immune to the rising costs of goods and services," Ranan wrote in a letter to prospective attendees on June 30th, 2025, citing "inflation and increased tariffs [which] have impacted us just as they've impacted many of you."

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

As the sleepers awakened from their slumber in early June, a total virtual attendance count of 26,405 and a total of $109,000 was raised for the returning charity, The Center of Orlando Florida, at the 2025 virtual gathering of Furality. The sleep in the ninth iteration of the gathering was not always an easy one, with a VR Chat system outage during Saturday’s peak times. But in relation to the prior year’s experience, things actually went much smoother for the event itself. It continues to be a wonderful experience for people who like to explore new worlds, and the revel creation of their fellow eccentric dreamers.

This year we’ll go over the worlds and environment and their purposes, and other general thoughts now that I have been to two and can see the foundation and standard layout. Preliminary thoughts about Virtual conventions in general and their comparisons to real world gatherings can be found in last year’s Umbra review found at this link which remain generally unchanged in this passing year.

We're sad to report that Ed Zolna passed away on November 4, 2024.

To most new participants in Furry Fandom, that's not a name that will mean anything. Ed played a vital and largely unique role in the 80s and 90s of the fandom, before the Internet kicked in, and consequently didn't leave much of a digital footprint. He's most known as the founder of two furry mail-order distribution businesses.

The first was Mailbox Books in 1987. There were a lot of furry fan-made zines, art folios and comics being produced, but the fandom had no obvious center nor common area in which to find them, so that's where Ed's mail-order business came in, based out of his home in Roslyn, PA. By 1995 his catalog was a 40-page booklet.

It seems like just yesterday (or February, if you want to be technical) that we had a Steam Next Fest. Well, we here at GF are back with the June 2025 edition list! Every game that we could find that featured an anthropomorphic character, or featured animals primarily, is on this list. Yes, we went through all 2500+ games to get to this list of 260+ games.

We have an actively updated Furry & Animal Games & Developers List over at @GamingFurever and that you can follow and get constant updates for lots of indie titles with TONS of lovely furry characters! (We're still working on a Bluesky version!)

If you're a developer of any of these games, feel free to hit us up on email over on our Contact Us page!

Recently an opinion piece was published here by Cassidy Civet about alleged fraud in the fandom and its infestation of furry spaces. I feel many would believe that it is beneath this platform to have released it to the general public as it is “obvious” that its intention was not to foster improvements within the community, but instead to act as a platform for the author herself in order to rant about the situation she finds herself in when it comes to her desired musical career in the fandom. Which we'll cover is mostly true. However, I do think allowing such a piece to publish can act as a springboard for a larger conversation on situations that actually has come up in the fandom from time to time.

This is where someone with a stage addiction gets caught up in the euphoria and gets poisoned by narcissism and typically guises it as altruism and virtue.

This may seem harsh as a counter statement to Civet’s article, especially since sprinkled in there are genuine concerns that other furries do hold. But the way in which they are presented leads to her own words countering herself in such a way where when all of them are put together, all that truly remains is a rant about our convention boards having agency on those they are allowing to have a stage and what can appear to be purely sour grapes towards those that are getting it.

So let’s take these issues from another angle to try and separate the chaff from the wheat.

Nimona (trailer) is a 99-minute American animated movie released in 2023. It was eventually directed by Nick Bruno and Troy Quane, with a script by Robert Baird and Lloyd Taylor (plus additional writers), and was adapted from a webcomic/graphic novel by ND Stevenson. Originally it was produced by Blue Sky Studios, whose parent company was acquired by Disney before the project was finished. Disney cancelled it, likely due to its overt LGBTQ+ themes, and closed down Blue Sky to focus on their own, pre-existing animation studios. Luckily, they were willing to let Netflix acquire the rights, and it was completed by DNEG Animation and Annapurna Pictures.

And I am the wrong person to be reviewing this movie.

In my years of writing reviews, this is the second time this has happened. The first time was when Kyell Gold sent me a copy of Green Fairy to review. By no fault of Kyell's, or the story itself, aspects of the book set off multiple buttons in my head due to personal experiences from my past. This caused my brain to mis-map story elements, and it didn't work for me. I tried writing a review, and I couldn't bring myself to publish it at the time. It wasn't fair to the book, nor to Kyell's writing craft.

And so now I'm facing a similar dilemma with Nimona. This time, I'm going to attempt a review, but without all of my internal brain slop. You'll be getting some of it, but believe me when I say I'm leaving a lot out. (Deep breaths. Focus on the positive.) At this point the film is two years old and I'm assuming that most folks here have seen it, so I'm not going to be shy about major plot details.

However, despite my personal opinions, let me be clear: If you haven't watched this film, it's worth a watch. It's good. It's just I'm not the audience it's for. And that's ok! I still appreciate it for what it is. Stop reading here to avoid spoilers.

Welcome to the sixth [sic] episode of Digging Up Positivity this year starting a month where we are proud of our fandom and our community! And to celebrate this wonderful colourful month, I am giving away one of these T-shirts, details at the end of the video! Also, we have an interview with one of the driving forces behind MeetsFurYou: PolkaSpots and of course we have a bunch of charities, exciting news from the games industry and other uplifting news, but first, lets go to the charities of last month!

Quote: "It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled."

- Mark Twain

A Preamble; I remember when I first joined the fandom, and decided I wanted to be a musician within it. No one was really making Pop music like I wanted to make, and the day I decided to abandon using my “human” name in my art was the climax of an internal months-long struggle. I also decided if I was going to put music out there for people to listen to, that I would fund it entirely myself. I didn’t want to start my time in this community by asking for money, or borrowing, or anything like that. Maybe it’s a symptom of how I was raised, but regardless I held true to that goal and managed to release 2 full length, studio recorded, mixed, and mastered albums. All I’ve ever had is a Patreon, and my supporters' names have been permanently etched into the inside cover of both physical CD releases. I had sought to make my work as professional as possible, and hoped that this sheen of professionalism would be appreciated by the community I was just beginning to join.

Skipping ahead over the dirge years of COVID in which most cons were frozen, things are relatively back to normal now (even if they really shouldn’t be). Thus the fandom carries on! But these past few years have been transformative for many of us, and brought to light the side of the furry fandom I had long heard about but was now witnessing in full view.

Reality of Hope, the Sundance Film Festival documentary around a furry friendship founded in spaces for Virtual Reality that turned into a real world life saving procedure of a kidney donation is set to publicly premiere on the weekend of furry's largest virtual gathering, Furality, on Sunday, June 8th.

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

The winners of the 2024 Ursa Major Awards have been announced! (The full statistics are also available.)

If you've got any ideas or suggestions for the Awards, they're interested in hearing from you! You can fill out their online feedback form until Saturday, May 31.

The winners (in bold) and runners-up, arranged from most to least votes, are...

Furry Weekend Atlanta finished its gathering in the first weekend in May and announced a total of 17,736. This currently makes FWA 2025 the largest in person furry convention on record by a narrow margin overcoming Anthrocon 2024’s attendance count of 17,639.

Overall growth had slowed by half from 4,693 attendees between FWA 2023 and 2024 to only having 2,715 more in 2025 than 2024. Factors at play are economic slowdown due to instability from government policies revolving around tariffs, along with a slow down of overseas visitation to the United States given concerns of more aggressive border control policies have caused concerns and issues for travelers.

Welcome to the April edition of Digging Up Positivity, this month we are interviewing two amazing beans from the virtual world, however their friendship influenced their lives much more than anyone expected!

We also feature a new furry game, some lovely animation news and of course, our charities, because my dear friend, we sure had a lot of those in April, so lets gooo!