Furality finished its eighth gathering on the second weekend of June 2024. When the VRChat-based congregation had finished it had shown continual growth hitting 21,000 attendees registered and raising over $42,269 for charity. It has shown that in spite of the naysayers who thought that online only furry events would die down in the wake of waning 2020 pandemic restrictions, online conventions held in virtual reality spaces show no signs of slowing and are now clearly a new staple in fandom activities.

Being in attendance myself this year, I go over the strengths and weaknesses that these events have over their real-world counterparts. The article will also cover some highlights of the events such as the eclipse and firework show. In short, what we find is that while Furality has taken events and formats inspired by in-person conventions, it is clearly an entirely different beast.

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

In this episode!

• Cool animation news!
• How an actual photographer won in an generative AI contest
• A furry Halloween in Rotterdam!
• The worlds first furry opera!
• How to win this amazing Pride shirt, so fresh, mine is still in the mail.

But first, the latest charity news from the fandom in the June edition of Digging Up Positivity!

Before we even begin, what is some of y'all's problem with Chris Pratt as a voice actor?

He's a fine actor who can do comedy sidekick (his breakout role in the sitcom Parks and Recreation), character actor in supporting role (he had small but important roles in Best Picture nominees three years in row with Moneyball, Zero Dark Thirty and Her), full on movie star (he's great in Guardians of the Galaxy and, remember, I liked Jurassic World), and, yes, voice actor (The Lego Movie). And by all accounts he's a nice guy people like working with, and that does matter. He's hardly the only guy who does a lot of voice work, either. Since theaters like to play ten trailers before a movie before, I was able to notice a lack of Chris Pratt (or another personal favorite who people like to complain about online, Awkwafina), but not Keegan-Michael Key, who is way more ubiquitous as Pratt in voice work, and is often even in the same movie as both Pratt and Awkwafina, but who never gets this sort of backlash when cast. And, not to be too mean to Key, who I mostly like, but I've already noted Pratt is actually a pretty versatile actor and Awkwafina has a Golden Globe, while Key is the half of Key & Peele that is starting to look like he got carried by the other half. I'm sure he'll actually be great as Bumblebee, though.

But, to bring the movie I'm supposed to be reviewing into the picture, I really do not get why people were upset Chris Pratt was cast as Garfield, because, come on, it's freaking Garfield. Bill Murray voiced the role in 2004, and Murray went on to bash the movie in his cameo playing himself in 2009's Zombieland, picking it as his life's greatest regret. On the basis of that, if you don't like Chris Pratt, you should be thrilled he got the role! Garfield's creator, Jim Davis, has always been a pretty open about the commercial aspirations of the character. I mean, kind of like Keegan-Michael Key, I like the character fine, but he barely stands out as a comic strip and Saturday morning cartoon star, mediums that are known for producing mostly safe, crowd-pleasing pablum. And that's basically this movie.

Hoooo boy do we have a long list for all you readers out there! Don't feel like going through 1800+ games to see which ones have furries, animals, creatures, and other wonderfully fluffy, feathery, scaly, or otherwise exciting anthropomorphic qualities?

Well, wonderful GF staff member Valraven did! She's compiled an absolutely crazy list of all the games we could find that had an ounce of furry in em, or some sort of animal focus.

We'll continue to look through the games and see if any slipped through, but even so, this is a big list of games that feature some potentially awesome games in them. Steam links and the image for them provided for easy access!

We'll be playing some of these demos this week and next, hopefully providing some previews, reviews, and developer interviews as many of these games progress through development! We also have an actively-updated Furry & Animal Games list over at @GamingFurever on X that you can follow and get constant updates for lots of indie titles with tons of lovely furry characters.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is the fourth movie in the current continuity of the Planet of the Apes series of movies, and the tenth overall. It follows the adventures of intelligent chimp Noa (performed with motion capture technology by Owen Teague) some generations after the last movie, War for the Planet of the Apes. Directed by Wes Ball, it features a variety of apes, including gorillas and orangutans in addition to chimps (gibbons are also mentioned in passing).

It begins with a quick prologue to the funeral of Caesar, the ape protagonist of the previous trilogy of movies. I felt like those movies came to a definitive end with the last movie; Kingdom is less a direct sequel to War and more the start of a new story set in the same world, so it feels a bit like the proverbial cake that you can both have and eat, too, as far as previous trilogy endings are concerned.

Contributors this month are dronon and GreenReaper.

• Furry convention in Atlanta raising 100.000 for charity!
• Spotlight on several awesome women in the fandom!
• How accessible is our fandom truly?
• Animators working together!

And much more!

Furrlough is an anthology series specializing in anthropomorphic comics. It has returned to its original publisher, Antarctic Press, with Furrlough #194 in shops on April 24, 2024. PreviewsWorld search says #194 "may be available now at comic shops or can be ordered quickly for you if not in stock." The order code for #194 is JAN241389.

The publisher's page for #194 says, in part:

Cover artist "Holly Daughtrey"/"... COMICS' LONGEST-RUNNING ANTHRO­POMORPHIC TITLE! ...

"Blinth" (Jason Dubes, Noel Serrato): The fallen angels have rebelled and now look to their lord Lucifer for guidance. However, the cat goddess Bast and the dark lord Anubis withhold information from their leader, something that will give rise to a potential new deity.

"The Chosen One" (Charles Brubaker): Fox boy Dewey DeSmall is tasked by an ostrich to save the day from a great danger. But what can a small librarian's assistant do?"

The only future issue listed at distributor Diamond's website is Furrlough #195 (with order code APR241265) with an in-shops date of June 26, 2024. Since it won't ship for a month, your local comic shop should hopefully be able to do a late pre-order.

Diamond's website has a page for the Furrlough series, which had a monthly publication schedule from 1993 to 2008. It was published by Radio Comix starting April 1997.

In 1967, Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin entered the woods of Northern California with the goal of filming Bigfoot. Lucky them: they apparently did.

The Patterson-Gimlin film, showing either a North American anthropoid ape unknown to science or a dude in a monkey suit, is probably the single most analyzed piece of "home video" footage outside of the Zapruder film. Hundreds of experts in biology, zoology and costume design have chimed in on the topic, but cryptozoology-themed YouTube channel Crash Course Cryptozoology brought in a new expert: fursuit maker Chloe Fraser.

The video has never been conclusively debunked; though the fact that in the half-century since it was filmed, nobody else has gotten anywhere near the same amount of luck with Bigfoot (and/or Sasquatch) as Patterson and Gimlin has been gotten it a status of "debunked by default" by sceptics. Even if you're a Bigfoot believer, and they really are out there wandering the woods, it doesn't necessarily prove the footage isn't fake.

Robot Dreams (trailer) is a 102-minute animated film released in December 2023, made by Arcadia, Lokiz and other studios. Based on a 2007 graphic novel (Amazon US - UK - Spanish edition) by Sara Varon, this Spanish-French production was written and directed by Pablo Berger, who had never worked in animation before, so he collaborated closely with art director José Luis Ágreda and storyboard artist Maca Gil for a year and a half to plan the project. It worked out really well!

Two neat things: it's a 2D film in an overbearingly 3D market, and there's no dialog. It takes place in a slightly alternative version of New York City in 1984, a funny-animal one. The main character, "Dog", lives in a Manhattan apartment. He's extremely lonely. One day he sees a TV ad for robot friends, so he orders one; after putting it together - he's not lonely anymore! Aside from this modern leap in artificial intelligence and robotics, the film is as early-80s as it gets: boomboxes, cassettes, VCRs, and Walkmen.

Furry Weekend Atlanta continues its monstrous growth, smashing its prior record with a total of 15,021 attendees and raising $100,000 for their charity of Lost-n-Found Youth. This has solidified its position in the top three, and for the time being surpasses Anthrocon – that had a 2023 attendance of 13,641 – making FWA, for the next few months, the world's second-largest in-person furry convention.

The increase this year from last was 4,693 attendees. For perspective, the total attendance of Anthro New England this year was 4,482. So staff at the Atlanta convention this year had to take care of the total they handled in 2023, plus an Anthro New England-sized convention at the same time in 2024. The gathering has never desired further volunteers more.

It was also my first year in attendance, so I wanted to go over my experiences, the challenges, and the strengths of the convention.

Kindle editions of 2023 Ursa Major Award runner-up Furry Planet are on sale, this Saturday only, for 99¢ or the same in Canada - alas, no deal in the UK or EU.

Want a hardback? That's available too, for $23.99 (or £16.50 / €24.95 / CA$31.99). Released last August,

Furry Planet reveals how anthropomorphism—the desire to imagine non-human animals on an equal footing with the human world—is an instinct hard-wired into our minds since the dawn of civilization. It expresses itself in indigenous traditions and among local cultures who adopt animal identities […] especially in the furry community whose members feel the same visceral connection with the non-human animal world as did their ancient counterparts.

The book is the successor to the 2017 UMA-winning Furry Nation (review), both by Joe Strike. An audiobook version read by Kevin T. Collins is available for $2.66.