From the PawPet folk, off of alt.fan.furry: "Anthrocon is less than a month away, and Funday PawPet Show is looking to book puppeteers for the 3 hour live show that will be occuring on Friday night between 4-7pm." Read on for more.

Stephen Silver is a British cartoonist & animator who's currently a character designer for Disney. As a personal project, he's developing an ecology-minded animated series involving a group of endangered species who are also time-travelling pro wrestlers. It's called Wild Life Force. Looks nifty, especially the Howard Cosell ferret.

From Chama on alt.fan.furry: "For those of you who asked why the Furry Music Foundation website has been unreachable lately, the server has been down due to a security issue (which is resolved now). You can yet again download furry music from FMF at http://www.furrymusic.org"

There's definitely something bizarre about being attacked by a komodo dragon. Fortunately, the man who got bitten had a good sense of humor about it. Read about the incident, and then for laughs check out Salon's interview with the dragon in question.

Not sure whether to call this sf or furry news; it's relevant to both. Publishers Weekly recently had a fascinating article about selling graphic novels in bookstores, why booksellers should and how to do it... as well as a series of articles on how comics publishers are trying to reach a broader audience through online and bookstore distribution channels. This is greatly encouraging to me, since one of the reasons I've never really considered doing a graphic novel was because of the ghetto graphic novels are shoved into when the time comes to sell them. You don't reach an audience without distribution, and it looks like booksellers might be waking up to the fact that graphic novels do sell. Indeed, I remember the pleasure I felt when I discovered my local Borders had a shelf of graphic novels (and in fact, I bought one; while I don't buy single comic books, I will buy compilations of them). Here's hoping there'll be more graphic novel sections in the future. And hey, wasn't there talk of a Fusion graphic novel? Lex, are you reading? *grin*

Some of you might remember a post I found off New Scientist a while back about rescuers attempting to free a male right whale, one of the few left in the wild. Unfortunately, their attempts didn't work and now they're hoping the whale will be able to free himself. This has to be one of the more frustrating times to be a scientist... being unable to save a creature so rare there are only 300 left, and giving it up to fate. You can read more about it at Salon. On a more upbeat note, cows also enjoy music, though they prefer ballads to hardcore rock and roll.

The NY Times reports an entrepreneur in upstate New York wants to engineer a cat without the protein that causes allergic reactions in 60 to 90 percent of sensitive people. He plans to sell sterilized animals for up to $1000. (Free registration required to access that site.)

In order to provide for a more stable system, FurBid will be moved to a new server tonight, starting at 11pm. As such, FurBid will be down from 11pm to 5am Pacific time, on 6/27/2001. All auctions that are scheduled to close during that time will be extended.


If you haven't been to FurBid, I invite you to check it out at http://furrybid.transform.to



Any questions, please send them to aatheus@transfur.com


Aatheus

FurBid Administaur

Do you like mammoths, sloths and sabre-tooth tigers? 20th Century Fox is betting there's a lot of folks who will with the computer animated film "Ice Age," being produced now at Blue Sky in New York. This is the same group that produced the Oscar-winning short "Bunny." The teaser trailer is now running with selected movies, but you can see it now by going to http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox/ice_age/.

For the women in our audience (and fans of women), a link to Broad Universe seems in order, an organization devoted to the promotion of science fiction and fantasy written by women. Men are also encouraged to join if they support the cause. The website has a regular newsletter with industry and writing tips, a book list and some other info, as well as some cool things coming down the pike (like a PR database). The newsgroup is active and turns up some interesting posts on a regular basis. The Broad Universe launch was noted by Locus Magazine and the website got a review on the latest issue of SF Weekly.

What would you call a real shetland pony/zebra mix created by nature? A Shetland Zebra? Reports from Associated Press and Reuters with video from Brittan via Yahoo! News.

I wanted to share with you my views of Steven Spielberg's A.I.

Succinctly, the movie is long, grim, more Kubrik than Spielberg and will utterly fail in the box office.

I've seen mentions of this in a few places, today. Nature's Guard looks to be a new furry animated cartoon. No information on when it will be out, or what station(s) will be carrying it.

From Mprints Publishing: "Currently we are planning the production of our Ernor:
Destiny of Rai title to be released this fall. It will be a
standard 56+ page comic sized one-shot book with an all new
30+ page story, art gallry, and special preview of our Ernor
d20 project." Read on for more.

I thought this was a rumor, but now I've seen it twice... there's a possibility for a Teenage Mutant Turtles movie using CGI. Coming Attractions has some information on their new site for the movie and SF Wire also has the story.