In the final hours of August 6, furry art community Fur Affinity released a brief news post announcing that its owner, Dragoneer, had passed away, after a nasty respiratory disease that he had posted about publicly on social media. During this time the purple Digimon gave a hopeful prognosis on his last Fur Affinity journal, believing he’d recover in one to two months, but also showing how serious the situation was on Bluesky with anxiety about getting appointments as the condition worsened. A July 15 post indicated he had suffered pneumonia-like symptoms since mid-June, but didn’t seek help prior; likely fearing the cost, being uninsured.

Sean “Dragoneer” Piche was a foundational individual in a new generation of furry community leaders, fostering a struggling art site called Fur Affinity to a dominant position in the fandom - as well as promoting and later taking over responsibility for a companion convention, FA: United, before COVID-19 caused the difficult decision to permanently cancel the con.

Taral Wayne (born Wayne MacDonald), a Canadian artist in both science fiction and furry fandoms, passed away last week at age 72. (October 12, 1951 - July 31, 2024.)

I had the opportunity to hang out with Taral many times from about 1994-2001 until I moved away, after which I sadly let myself become more distant. If you were a friend or colleague of Taral's, even if you're not in furry fandom, please feel free to post a comment or personal memory here!

Taral Wayne was a resident of Toronto and discovered science fiction fandom in the early 1970s. Within the next ten years he was an active participant, lending his artistic talents to zine culture. He was also a member of the proto-furry APA, Vootie.

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

Magic: The Gathering (MTG) is one of the world's most popular trading card games. First released in 1993, there are now millions of players and billions of cards in the world. One way in which MTG differs from games with standard playing cards is that there are numerous cards of differing rarity, creating an incentive to collect and trade cards. The game is also constantly evolving with new rules, concepts and expansion sets with themed decks.

Their upcoming expansion, Bloomburrow, has been getting attention in the furry fandom as it's focussed on anthropomorphic woodland creatures! The official release trailer shows a young mouse—accompanied by a slightly older mouse, an otter and a frog—trying to master magic. Their antics in the peaceful woods are cut short when they find part of it burning and a massive wolf emerging from the smoke and flames. The three older critters are quickly defeated and, when the younger mouse stands up to the wolf, a deer, presumably the forest guardian, appears and the wolf backs down.

The fighting game series Mortal Kombat is a venerable title in the world of video games, with over two decades of history and even a dedicated competitive scene (of which the furry fandom's own SonicFox is a champion player). However, what really set it apart from the slew of other arcade fighter games back in 1992 was its ultra-violent "finisher" moves, known as Fatalities. Variations soon followed, and Mortal Kombat 3 introduced Animalities, basically allowing the characters in the game to violently maul each other with their fursonas.

The most recent game, Mortal Kombat 1 (actually the 12th mainline title, but part of a continuity reboot of sorts), will be releasing a series of DLC known as "Khaos Reigns". Besides a new story line and a few new characters (none of which are particularly furry), Animalities will be returning to the series September 9 of this year, as a free update. The trailer for "Khaos Reigns" is available on YouTube, and only YouTube; it is age restricted, and therefore unembeddable, for extreme, over the top violence.

In this episode!

• An exclusive interview with the force behind Brok the investigator
• Last month's furry charities
• What makes a fursuit really stands out!
• The results of the Pride Shirt give-away and how to get one yourself

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

If you have time this summer, now is a good time to try out some furry games. Below is a list of items that I found that are all available on the Steam platform with a short blurb on each one. Click the title text to open each game's page.

Following a hack by a self-referred "gay furry hacker" organization named SiegedSec, the Heritage Foundation found that two gigabytes of their internal data leaked to the internet. The Heritage Foundation is a right wing think tank within the United States known for their stances against trans rights and abortion. The organization has recently published a manifesto for America known as Project 2025 which catalyzed this hack.

At first the Foundation denied the attack and indicated that the only information obtained was public facing, per a Cyberscoop article, while ironically still calling the action as criminal.

[SiegedSec] stumbled upon a two-year-old archive of The Daily Signal website that was available on a public-facing website owned by a contractor. The information obtained was limited to usernames, names, email addresses, and incomplete password information of both Heritage and non-Heritage contributors, as well as article comments and the IP address of the commenter.

[The story of a hack] is a false narrative and an exaggeration by a group of criminal trolls trying to get attention.

Mostly-furry imageboard e621 has banned explicit art of human and essentially human children:

Due to challenges stemming from changes in the political and legal environment, both offline and online, we have had to adjust our content guidelines to preserve access to our site. As a result, any content featuring young human or humanoid characters in explicit situations is now prohibited and will be deleted. This change also applies retroactively, and we have already removed all existing submissions featuring such content.

Administrator NotMeNotYou later clarified that "busineses partners" had demanded the change, which related to their ability to make money, and that on-site adverts were not the issue:

There is no single law we can point to as the tipping point, and while we were sitting pretty unaffected by most things, the same can't be said to a bunch of our business partners who did not appreciate the heat we attract. And since we can't function in a vacuum we have had to adjust.

Things change, they were okay with it previously and now they aren't. They want to continue making money and we're stuck with the consequences. And no we can't just stop business with them, there's no way in hell we would be able to cover the gap that would cause, be it donations or otherwise.

Guess what put pressure on some of our partners? That's right, governments.

Guess who would like to continue doing business in places where those governments are? That's right, our business partners.

romaniaglory said:
The last thing you ever wanted to admit was censoring your website to appease advertisers.

Nah, all our ads are handled directly by us and as far as I am aware none of them had any issue with the contents we host.

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.