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This week on KnotCast, its our 150th episode! Who would have thought we'd have made it this far? We read a whole pile of email on what the fandom is, then give our own opinions for a while. Marvel as Shiva mangles words, Rekkie is silent for an entire episode, and Savrin tells the tale of why he left the Boy Scouts. Fuzz is here too, we guess. This weeks song is The Astronomical Astronomer's Almanac to All Things Astronomy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLG9aEZa_eg Don't forget our coupon code 'knot' at AdamEve.com for a great deal. Episode 150 - OneFiveOH

08/06/2011
By: CraftyAndy

surprised me for sure. This movie was stunning. It’s emotional, character driven, light hearted when needed to be. I can’t help but gush over this film and how good it is. They did it, they manage to make a competent film from this franchise that I think everyone thought was dead. And that scene involving the helicopter is one of those rare holy **** moments that I haven’t gotten from any other film this year that I can remember.

Attribution Non-Commercial

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" I usually just roll my eyes when people say that … When the first furry convention started in Southern California, there were some overly imaginative people. News cameras just happened to tune in that. [After those truly interested in Anthrocon left], the convention dried up ... These are mostly young people, and young people have sex ... But we have very stringent codes of conduct here, and we want people to feel they can bring their kids. People portray us as we must all be about sex. But that's not us at all. We're all about self expression, but not in that way."

http://www.pittsburghcitypaper.ws/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A97064


Let it be noted that, when Pittsburgh City Paper first covered Anthrocon in 2006, they went into a fair amount of detail, including quotes from GoH Scott Shaw! and Rabbit Valley's explicit titles:

http://www.pittsburghcitypaper.ws/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A28606


Last year they focused on the Furoticon game:

http://www.pittsburghcitypaper.ws/gyrobase/PrintFriendly?oid=oid%3A81191

submitted by Allaun
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It's 2011: Should we resurrect the furry code?

Most furs won't know what the furry code is, specially since the last version was updated in 1998.

The Furrycode is a highly compressed string of text that acts as a profile and summary of your identity.

For example:

If your a Male Cat, fursuiter, 22 year old and like drawing an example of a code would be:

Example: FC-F+D+A:22

(Felis catus, Fursuiting positive, Drawing Positive, Age: 22)

It can then be decompressed by reading it if you know what the letters mean or using a web decoder. It's handy since you can place that string anywhere.

Now the original furcode is obviously muuuuuch more extensive and covers a lot of questions.

This is the original website of captainpackrat: http://captainpackrat.com/furry/furcode.htm

Now the question is the following.

Would it be useful in 2011 to resurrect the Furry Code and maybe even improve it or update it to make it fit to the current situation of the fandom?

I'd find it very handy myself. It's true that we do have FA profiles and F-lists but a standardised that compresses a good amount of information into a single line, making sure that you know a person better by answering to questions which are often skipped or missing on some other forms of profiles might be an excellent resource to a new or old-new form of furry interaction.

Also, a line of text doesn't bind you to any given website and works with multiple profiles or fursonas and identities.

What do you think?

EDIT: For the curious, this is the yiffcode. With online encoder and decoder:

http://www.tigress.com/yiffcode/coder.cgi?E

submitted by DanielTaylor
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Author: Higgs Raccoon

This week saw the opening of Australian family film Red Dog.

Based on the 2002 novel by Louis de Bernières, the movie tells the real-life story of a Kelpie/cattle dog cross who travelled throughout the Pilbara region of Western Australia in the 1970s.

Reviews of the film have been positive, and at present it has an 85% rating on rottentomatoes.com.

 

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Author: GreenReaper

Anthrocon announced Friday night that next year’s convention had been moved up a week to accommodate a mystery event, at the request of the City of Pittsburgh.

The new dates are June 14–17, 2012. Anthrocon was duly rewarded for its flexibility:

Pittsburgh has been given a very rare opportunity to host an event that they have been wanting to host for many years. The only trouble was that the proposed event (and we won’t say what it is until it is officially announced) would lie in part over Anthrocon’s planned weekend. [...] As much as we love our adopted home city and would do anything in our power to support them, we were hesitant to change the date of our convention after having announced it.

Pittsburgh replied with, “What if we got you another hundred hotel rooms within walking distance of the Convention Center?” — We said, “Where do we sign?”

While the event has not been announced, it has been rumoured that the NHL Entry Draft, convened annually in late June, might be coming to Pittsburgh for the first time since 1997.

The city is home to the Pittsburgh Penguins, who fought the Detroit Red Wings for the Stanley Cup in 2008, and won it from them in 2009.
The Penguins recently moved into a new arena (though it didn’t help them this year), and hoped to turn the draft into “a weeklong celebration”.

Anthrocon has faced a lack of hotel space in recent years, and this year’s lackluster growth was directly attributed to the room shortage.

submitted by HappyWulf
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Author: banrai

A chicken known as J-Lo because she was born with two rear-ends has been killed by a fox, ocala.com reports. The chicken – who had a large backside covered by white feathers – become a national sensation when news of her double lady-lumps spread over the Web.

As reported by the Ocala Star-Banner:

The couple brushed the feathers away and found two pubic regions, spaced about two inches apart. Typically, there is one such region in the center with a single orifice.

J-Lo was previously in the news in January, when her owners brought forth the extraordinary clucker. Even Jay Leno cracked a joke as the double-bottomed chicken went viral.

We bid ye farewell, J-Lo. You just had too much junk in your trunk to be in this world for long.

 

Author: RingtailedFox

The past few days have been very active with animal-related stories from around the world.

Our first story in this “digest” article is about an animal rights activist from Ukraine protesting poor living conditions for zoo animals, living in the lions’ den for five weeks to raise money. The second is a tragic tale of a pair of cougars that began attacking humans in Alberta. The third is on the federal government of Ukraine, who vow to end a sickening tradition of animal abuse in that nation. The fourth covers an Idaho man and his interactions with the community. Our final story is about a truck carrying bees that flipped and closed a major highway near Edmonton, Alberta.

Living with Lions: An Artist’s Pledge

Some may call Aleksandr Pylyshenko a crazy person, or one that simply cares about animals far more than the average person might, but he pledged on August 3 to spend five weeks in the lions’ cage in a zoo he owns in his yard, in the southeastern Ukraine city of Vasylivka — in the company of his feline friends, adult lions Katyua and Samson.

When asked by local media why he was doing this, Pylyshenko said he wanted to get money to improve the lions’ living conditions. He will bebroadcasting his survival with the lions on the internet to attract attention to the plight of wild animals living in private zoos in Ukraine, since they do not get enough funding for adequate living conditions.

Cougar Attacks in Alberta

Few things in the wilderness are more frightening than an attack by a wild animal. Cougars are one of nature’s top predators in the Rocky Mountain Range of Canada and the United States, and sadly, cougar-human encounters often prove deadly for one or both parties.

A cougar was shot and killed by Alberta conservation officers after it attacked a little girl near Kananaskis. The attack occurred on June 31, while the girl’s family was hiking near Barrier Lake, in Bow Valley Provincial Park. Her father managed to drive the large feline away, his daughter suffering only minor cuts and puncture wounds.

The reason the cougar was killed is simple, according to district conservation officer Glen Naylor:

It’s attacked a human. It would do it again. That age group tends to be responsible for a lot of the attacks on humans in North America, and we just can’t risk for that to happen again.

Just last month, one of the cougar’s litter mates was destroyed after it attacked a dog near the city of Canmore. Both cougars were under two years old, and Naylor says the reasons for these attacks are that it’s likely that their mother didn’t teach them how to survive in the wild.

The mother ended her life prematurely, or they got kicked out early and they didn’t know what they were doing. They were very poorly educated, and basically anything that moves was potential prey and unfortunately, small children definitely attract cougars’ attention.

Bear-ly Legal Activites to Stop?

Perhaps it’s a stereotype that Russians and Slavic people in general love their vodka and their bears. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know mixing the two is a very bad idea, for a variety of reasons (animal attacks; that getting an animal drunk without its ability to consent would constitute abuse…). This is why Ukraine’s Minister of the Ecology and Natural Resources, Mykola Zlochevsky, vowed on Wednesday to free all captive bears in restaurants, according to Interfax. Kept for entertainment purposes, they are often abused and forced to consume alcohol.

The tradition of using captured and tamed bears for entertainment stems back to the Russian Empire, which included Ukraine, turning the animal into a national icon. Sadly, this practice has appeared to also survived the nation’s emergence from Soviet rule, despite Zlochevsky calling it “inhumane and unacceptable today”:

On television, they keep showing bears suffering in restaurants and roadside hotels. How long can we tolerate animal torture in restaurants, where drunken guests make bears drink vodka for laughs?

Zlochevsky said the Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources was building a large enclosure within a wildlife sanctuary, where 80 bears would live after being liberated.

Man in Bunny Suit in Hot Water with Cops

Fursuiting may not be acceptable in Idaho Falls, Idaho, as resident William Falkingham has found out. Idaho Falls Police have told the 34-year-old man to stop wearing his bunny suit in public, after complaints from residents about him frightening children.

According to a police report, Falkingham received a warning from the police after a woman claimed she saw him dressed in the costume, peeking at her young son from behind a tree, and pointed his fingers like a gun. An investigation of the sighting led officers to question other neighbours in the area, who reportedly “expressed that they were greatly disturbed by Falkingham and his bunny suit”. The police said that neighbours also claimed he occasionally wears a tutu with the bunny suit.

Idaho Falls PD’s Joelyn Hansen said Falkingham told the police he “enjoys wearing the suit”, though he understood the other neighbours’ concerns, and that he could be cited as a police nuisance for his behaviour.

One of Falkingham’s neighbours, Deborah Colson, defended Falkingham in an interview with Reuters. She said he has an “eccentric, but otherwise harmless habit of dressing up in costume and making appearances on his own property”:

He’s got the bunny outfit, a cowboy suit and a ballerina dress, but you don’t see him except where he’s tripping through his back yard.

Colson further added she was worried that news of Falkingham’s at-home habits might make him a target of fear and scorn:

He’s never done anything wrong but wear his little suits in the background. He’s got a strange lifestyle at home but we all do weird things at home. It makes me so sad: people don’t even do anything and they get laughed at.

It appears that Falkingham may have a legitimate civil rights abuse complaint, thanks to the United States Constitution‘s First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of expression, according to the Executive Director of the Boise chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, Monica Hopkins:

On its face, he may have a constitutional claim under freedom of expression. We have not been contacted by the individual, and as of right now, we have no plans to get involved.

Bees create Buzz on busy Alberta road

Perhaps a highway shouldn’t be named “13″, due to the bad luck that number is claimed to bring. Highway 13 was closed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for several hours in rural Alberta, near the city of Camrose, after a truck skidded off the road and spilled a full load of honeybees.

According to police, the truck was headed west on Highway 13, between Camrose and Killam, southeast of Edmonton, when it tipped over, rolling onto its side in the ditch and strewing 104 beehives across the two-lane road.

The accident was caused by one of the truck’s wheels dropping off the highway and into the ditch, causing the flatbed to roll onto its side and skid for several hundred meters, while the driver over-corrected in an attempt to get the wheel back on the road.

As bees swarmed the highway, the RCMP arrived and rerouted traffic around the scene, advising drivers to be alert and on the lookout for the insects, as they may have become angered from the collision. According to beekeeper Tony Rafaat, of the Alberta Beekeeping Commission:

I would not recommend anybody get too close because the bees are going to be agitated. They’re going to be somewhat scared, disoriented and so on. There’s probably a greater likelihood of being stung.

Unfortunately, the swarming bees made cleanup nigh-impossible. When their keeper arrived on the scene, he advised the fire department to spray them down with water and foam. The RCMP said this killed many of the buzzing bees, bringing the situation to a “manageable level.”

Edmonton radio station CHED-AM 630 received a call from a driver named “Chad” who said he witnessed the accident, but it was still dark, and that he could not tell that the flatbed was carrying bees, though he did feel a few stings:

I had not as many as the RCMP officer on site, I think I took maybe 15, 20 hits, but you don’t think about it with the adrenaline pumping.

Rafaat had a bit of good news, however. He suggested that any surviving bees would be unlikely to fly very far from the accident scene because they would want to reunite and protect their queen and the rest of the colony. He also noted that people “shouldn’t get a bee in their bonnet” regarding the wayward nectar collectors, as they are European honeybees – not nearly as aggressive as the potentially-deadly African variety, which are known to give chase, swarm, and sting.

The owner arranged for several of his workers to assist in the cleanup of the accident scene. The surviving beehives were loaded up onto two separate flatbed trucks and returned home, with Highway 13 reopening shortly after. The driver was released after a precautionary hospital visit.

So we’ve got a fresh batch of invites!

If you want to join the service, you can click the link!  This link is good for the first 150 users!

Join us on Google+

 

Once you’re on Google Plus, be sure to add us – Right now, you can add my personal profile, and we’ll send a notice to everyone once Furry News Network has an active business profile.

Add Badwolf to your Circles!

submitted by 123not-it
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Okay, raise your hand if you’re surprised that this got a lot of e-mails.

…yeah, didn’t think so. We read six e-mails this time around, and discuss topics like canine hierarchy, how to handle people who are upset, pregnancy, ninja bees, roleplaying vs. actual attraction, autocorrect, and other random shenanigans! We even have our own soundboard, courtesy of Smokescale Aquatos! We also drop information about the general deadline for e-mails to be written (6:00p CST on Thursday), and include other valuable information!

Our next episode is about things that irritate you. Whatever’s getting you down, whether you want advice on coping with it, advice on how to make it go away, or even just want to vent, we’re here to help! Go ahead, let it all out in Episode 15, Vuvuzela Crazy Frog!

Twitter: fuzzylogiccast
FA: fuzzylogicpodcast
E-mail: fuzzy.logic.podcast@gmail.com

Download:
Episode 14 – Why The Net Was Born
File modified August 5, 2011 – 54.9 MB – downloaded 312 times so far

Episode 14 – Why The Net Was Born - Okay, raise your hand if you’re surprised that this got a lot of e-mails. …yeah, didn’t think so. We read six e-mails this time around, and discuss topics like canine hierarchy, how to handle people who are [...]

submitted by SamuraiSmurfette
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So I recently discovered that the folks who write for a satirical newspaper published by my alma mater have a little game that they play. Though they aren't (as far as I know) furries, they have a tradition of doing staff trips once or twice a year to large furry conventions. At the convention, they have two things: a fursuit and a shitload of psychedelic mushrooms. The rule is that whoever is inside of the former has to ingest large amounts of the latter.

I find this incredibly amusing.

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