Fursday - Reading List
fandom, or of relevance due to the involvement of animals or
anthropomorphic characters.
Animal group name posters
Michael Mulvey regarding his Kickstarter project:
Ever since I was a kid I've loved animals. Nature shows were the best. It could have been about grizzly bears in Alaska or lions in Africa, it didn't matter. Whatever Marty Stouffer's velvety voice was narrating over on Wild America, I was glued. […]
Now let's fast forward to 2012. This is when I began to collect 19th and early 20th century printed matter in earnest. I'm always on the hunt for beautiful illustrations and etchings I can remix into my own art and design (specifically where copyrights have expired on images and they're in the public domain).
As I scanned more and more images into my laptop, I noticed I had inadvertently acquired a ton of animal illustrations. At some point in early 2013 the odd names of animal groups popped into my head so I started investigating all the ones I didn't know. They really were peculiar. An unkindness of ravens. A shiver of sharks. Atroubling of goldfish. Haha! Wow!
I love the old style animal graphics, it’s like something from an O’Reilly book cover. Animal groups are a fascinating trivia to share among animal loving friends. My favourite is a parliament of owls. It sounds the part when you imagine all their furrow brows.
Fergus Wyrm’s art site comparison list
Fergus Wyrm has posted in a Google Doc an extensive comparison of FurAffinity, InkBunny, SoFurry, Weasyl, as well as throwing a few others into the mix such as Tumblr, VCL and DeviantArt for variety and contrast. I don’t have an account with all of the sites so I’ve learnt some differences, especially on the submission end.
I have some amendments I feel are worth mentioning:
FurAffinityFA’s tagging system is limited; you cannot use spaces within a tag else the characters typed afterwards get counted as a separated tag. For instance “Snow Leopard” would become “Snow” and “Leopard”, resulting in artists joining words together which is ugly. Other art sites have addressed this problem, though I can’t remember which.
InkbunnyInkbunny doesn't seem to be making any changes, but it hardly needs any.
I was under the impression a lot of updates take place on Inkbunny relative to FA snail pace schedule of fixes. At least it felt like that in the early days. What would be the criteria to judge whether enough changes are happening? The last bunch of fixes were a fortnight ago.
SoFurrySoFurry allows you to quick preview an image by hovering your mouse over a thumbnail.
On top of having writer friendly features also has reader friendly features. You can hide the sidebar, narrow the content and inverse the colours so you have light text against a dark background (which can be friendly on the eyes instead of having a lot of light beaming out).
SoFurry also includes several applications, including an app for browsing on Android Mobile Phones natively.
Inkbunny & SoFurry APIInkbunny and SoFurry both have public APIs that can be used by developers to create applications that draw in data from their respective websites. Not immediately useful to most people, though there’s cool potential behind it and also displays an attitude of openness when they allow developer-friendly features.
WeasylWeasyl's website is built on the principle of responsively design, that means the layout of the website changes depending on the screen (or browser) dimensions it is viewed on. In other words it is optimised for viewing on mobile phones compared to the other 3 furry art galleries.
SustainabilityMight also be worth comparing how the sites are funded. FA and SoFurry take advertisement revenue. I presume all 4 furry art galleries accept donations. I think it’s the case that FA can make money off affiliate links if users opt-in, not sure if that is the case anymore. It’s something I feel is worth addressing as users ought to be aware of the strategies each site use to stay alive.
Not your usual stuffed bear
via designboom:
New York-based artist deborah simon walks the line between taxidermy and toy, fabricating a series of faux-bear sculptures that materialize their vulnerability to human-initiated adversity. the three species are meticulously crafted from clay, imitation fur, and embroidery tools, and hold near perfect proportions and facial likenesses to their living counterparts. influenced by the evolutionary process and biological classifications, simon crafts an embellished coat for each species — wearing it rather than their own — ornamented with intricate organ systems hand-stitched to their exterior.
via io9:
My work walks the line between taxidermy, toy and sculpture. Each animal is meticulously fabricated to create an unnervingly accurate but slightly off version of the natural animal. Evolution has always held a particular fascination for me, informing how I create and group the animals in my work. As I've read and dug through museum collections to research my pieces, western science's mania for labeling, codifying and collecting has stood out. Most of this categorizing bears little resemblance to how animals and plants exist out in the natural world and I find this disconnect fascinating.
Adult-comedy animation “BoJack Horseman” slated for mid-2014
Essentially one of those comedies about a has-been actor trying to get back into the industry; in this instance their gimmick is that the actor is a horse. The lead character is voiced by Will Arnett of Arrested Development fame and will be distributed on streaming video service Netflix.
I’m a big fan of Netflix because they represent the future of where the entertainment industry is going. They are working on a lot of original content including animations for children, so we could be seeing a lot more programming of interest to furs in the future.
Edit:
BoJack Horseman is being animated by ShadowMachine, the same studio that does the claymation for Robot Chicken. [Source: The Next Web]
You might encounter killer rabbits if you cut your cable
In the first video, a man with a gaping hole in his chest (get it?) is bicycling on a road through the desert when he happens upon a little bunny he believes to be in need of his help. He gets off of his bicycle and approaches the seemingly cute and friendly rabbit. Upon closer inspection, we see that the rabbit actually has glowing red eyes and sharp, jagged teeth. The man doesn’t seem to care.
Then, the all too important question is asked: “Give ‘em cable” or “Cut ‘em loose?”
The cable cutter continues to embrace the bunny, and offers the small creature a ride on his bicycle. The rabbit then leaps up and latches on to the man’s neck, biting down and continuing to hold on despite the man’s struggles.
“And because he didn’t get the news,” a tablet tethered to a cactus reveals, “he didn’t know mutant bunnies were on the loose.”
Speaking as someone from the UK, I never quite get the situation in the US about cable. Still, my interest in linking to this is purely for how mind numbingly ridiculous this propaganda video is. And it features killer rabbits.
[adjective][species] advertisement experiment
[adjective][species] recently concluded a month long promotion and experiment into how well advertisement works within the furry fandom. The results are interesting but nothing surprising, though it goes someway to validating why websites (and not just furry ones) put up advertisement and why so many will spend money on marketing.
A concerning issue for any furry site not called FurAffinity is the fight for advertisement revenue. FurAffinity brought in 1486 referrals compared to 174 from SoFurry, a staggering difference. That was for [a][s] alone, it was a similar scale of difference for their other properties: Love – Sex – Fur, The Furry Poll and Bookmarfs.
The natural order of things is that the site that brings advertisers the most traffic command a higher demand and can charge more, leaving other sites in a cut throat market to fight for the remaining marketing dollars.
I think that the advertising experiment was useful in seeing just how the fandom utilizes advertising. Judging by personal interactions with friends and through comments here on the previous post, our reaction to advertising is decidedly mixed. Several people I have heard from have described ads in general to be intrusive and a nuisance, especially on the Internet.
This is something for me to write about another day, the contradictory "can't live with them, can't live without them" relationship with advertisement. There is a prevailing attitude among web surfers that adverts are a nuisance, yet the same people I would bet are not willing pay for services that are normally funded by ad revenue. If you could corner someone with the reasoning, just what would their response be? Do they just expect the likes of YouTube to be free through magic?
Advertising does play a role in our community, and I think that these few examples have shown just how that information is transmuted into a measurable and visible change. For those out there questioning whether or not their business within furry will benefit from advertising, I think this serves as a fairly strong “yes”. I placed four ads on two high-traffic sites for a month for just about $130 (about the cost of running all of the above sites except for the furry survey for one year) and the results were immediate.
I have noticed that advertisement is all the more important if you wish to gain mindshare within a special interest community like the furry fandom. It would make for an interesting article looking into how websites achieve mindshare. Some sites can gain wide recognition within a short space of time, whilst others have to be persistent in order to become accepted as a long term player in the fandom.
Achewood is pitching a TV series
Achewood is a comic series by artist & writer Chris Onstad, inspired by his ex-wife’s stuffed animals. The Verge's culture section has run a profile piece:
Most of Achewood is about the mundane daily activities of the characters, who throw parties, have internet relationships, start Subway franchises, and take road trips. They go to heaven, hell, and the moon. They time travel and produce platinum albums.
Onstad has a few other tricks that make Achewood distinctive. He relies heavily on pop culture references, French cuisine, and obtuse, often made-up slang. The site TV Tropes notes that Achewood relies on "Genius Bonus," inside jokes buried where only insiders can find them.
"Achewood is transcendent," says Cohen, a fan and fellow comic writer who asked not to use his last name, in an email to The Verge. "On the surface there’s his obvious genius of phrasing and timing that’s unlike anything before or since. He’s also able to convey more with a raised eyebrow than anybody — part of that’s the minimalism of the art; when stuff is simple minor changes get magnified … It’s also just plain the funniest goddamned thing there is, in a way that’s hard to objectively qualify without getting into a really tedious (for some) discussion about discourse and dialogue mechanics and subversion."
After over a decade he's decided to branch out into a TV series he has been pitching around. See more about the video on The Watchlist.
Inkbunny leadership passed to GreenReaper
Starling on GreenReaper:
He never asked for the position. I approached him out of the blue, back when I was getting together a core of staff to help with the launch. We had met and chatted in the past, and I knew he had a wealth of experience with running furry community projects. But I had no idea if he would have even the slightest interest in giving his time to yet another random startup furry art site.
GreenReaper surprised me by agreeing to help, and since then he has consistently dedicated himself to Inkbunny. Over the years his ideals and goals for the site have echoed my own at every step, and I now see him as a close friend and someone I genuinely look up to.
Our disagreements have been just as important to me. He has always been willing to let me know when he thought I was doing something that wasn't wise. More times than I can count now, his maturity and level-headedness have stopped me acting on impulse or out of anger in tense situations. He has been a voice of calm, reason and logic. This is a crucial state of mind to have when weathering the kinds of storms you endure as a site owner.
Since Inkbunny launched in 2010, the furry art social media scene has found room to fit Weasly to create arguably the most competitive market space since the last decade when ArtSpots and Furry Art Pile were still kicking about.
The future bolds well for Inkbunny as I view GreenReaper as a highly competent administrator. When he became editor-in-chief of Flayrah in 2010, not only did he continue maintaining the news website but also broadened its appeal. I distinctly recall Flayrah being a site that you might know was around, but in recent years he's increased the site's mindshare within the fandom as an established and reputable furry news institution.
On a personal footnote, GreenReaper originally hails from Britain so some small pride is felt that one of our own is involved in so many influential furry websites.
Claw & Quill raises the bar
Earlier this month Watts Martin published the first issue for his online magazine Claw & Quill, consisting of an introductory piece and 3 articles.
Here is a taster of "Is Furry Fiction Science Fiction?" by Kyell Gold.
If your story’s central idea is “how would the world change if everyone became an animal-person,” then that falls into the realm of science fiction (or, some might argue, fantasy, or slipstream; at the very least, it’s speculative fiction). If your story is about a new world in which everyone is an animal-person, then you are pretty okay with fantasy (my own Argaea series is sort of thinly fantasy, because there is no spellcasting nor anything else fantastical—except the characters). If your story is “how hard is it to be gay when society wants you to be straight, and also you’re a fox,” well. That’s not science fiction, and it’s not fantasy: it’s our real world with animal-people dropped in place of human people and the world changed to suit them. Scent markers become important and houses take on different shapes and sizes, for instance. But that’s not enough to make it a fantasy world.
To me C&Q set a new standard that other furry publications (including my own) should take inspiration from. My praise for Martin's site is not just centred around the quality of the content, but how it has been packaged up into a reader friendly format. The minimalist clean design emphasises the content and does away with distractions like sidebar clutter, social media responses and excessive links.
This is the first time I have seen a furry publication that would not look out of place with ones I have seen in the tech blog world. It is a sign of the fandom's ever growing maturity when it can produce the equivalent of Medium and The Magazine mixed with the blog aesthetics made famous by Apple blog Daring Fireball and its legion of imitators.
Dogs wagging their tongues
Ty’s idea for the project formed back in March of 2012 when he was shooting a project for a client. “While running through all the images that were shot I would find myself laughing out loud at how great the expressions were that some of the dogs had while licking in studio. The best way to describe it would be an ‘a-ha’ moment, I just kept thinking to myself, ‘this would be a great book!’”
Unlike most of us, dogs don’t have too much tongue licking their own noses.
Ty Foster's Lick Gallery
Just what does a fox say anyway?
if you ever wanted to give an intelligent answer to the meme, this article provides all the answers, plus some facts you may never had considered before.
I will also leave you with the conclusion which asks a more pressing question, why don't we know what the fox says?
That's what sound the fox makes! But equally interesting is why most people don't know what sound the fox makes. It's a widespread, enormously successful and adaptive species, living worldwide, in all sorts of climates, in forests, on mountains, in suburbs and sometimes even cities. Americans and Europeans are very familiar with the red fox. And unlike, say, a raccoon, it's a highly vocal animal. So how come we have no idea what it sounds like?[...]
Foxes are common and cute, they feature in myths and we have gone to extreme lengths to make them our pets, but the noises they make are sort of...awful. The red fox does not have a mellifluous voice; even when it's happy, it mostly sounds like it's being strangled. It would be awkward to teach your young child that the cow goes moo, the frog goes croak, and the fox goes YAAGGAGHHGHHHHHHAHHHH!!!!!
About fursuit snark blogs
A fortnight ago the team behind Fuck Yeah Fursuiting were asked about their opinions on 'fursuit snark' blogs.
My favourite response come from Growly:
Once in a while a suit will pop up that will make me giggle… I chuckle and move on, I think it’s tacky to leave rude comments in the open and I really try not to. I admit I’ve struggled with this and have occasionally let my opinions loose. It’s too easy to forget these costumes were made by real people who tried really really hard and put their heart into their work. While I think some costumes are pretty funny looking, it’s still really cool that they made something from nothing with their own two hands. Making Things is pretty much my reason for living, so it is cool to see other people discovering that love too. I wanna be a better, nicer person and find something good about everybody’s work :)I like Growly's take because it goes beyond the usual victimisation responses you might read on an FA journal, instead opting to takes a balanced and reasoned approach. Instead of moaning Growly writes with reasons and balance, explaining why cheap snarks are detrimental to the learning development of fursuit makers and risk discouraging the future Mixed Candies from emerging.
I think fursuit critique blogs have their right to exist and can be enjoyable or informative. I wouldn't be afraid to add one to the link directory. Just that too often the tone is less about being a critique and instead being snarky (especially tumblr ones) and frankly they think too highly of themselves and aren't as funny as they believe they are.
Fursuit watch: Don’t turn into a bull
Short advert for British train booking website Trainline.com, the message being book with them else you’ll get into a rage when you realise the savings you missed out on.
Scientists decipher dog-tail wags
An interesting report on how dog's express emotions. It's not the case that the dog is communicating directly using the tail, but that the tail expresses the emotional state which other dogs are able to pick up on. In other words dogs can read into each other's body language.
SoFurry's chatrooms upgraded with status commands
SoFurry has long provided not only an XMPP backed instant messaging system but also a chatroom. Today they announced a small change to their chatroom adding some convenient /commands to change your status. Especially handy is the /rp status to change the bar next to your name to blue to indicate you're actively looking for role play.
The canine virus that doesn't respect the species barrier
The latest victim of this virus is the Siberian tiger, struggling enough as it is with shrinking habitat and poaching. The glimmer of hope is that there's a vaccine for CDV, but the problem is in cost effective delivery. Scientists are currently looking for where the source of the infection outbreak is happening so they can do a targeted vaccination programme.
Comics interview: Howard Hardiman on “The Lengths”
The premise of the comic is about the life and love life of a male escort, set in a world where all characters are dogs. It sounds like the kind of slice-of-reality mixed with down-to-earth humour that characterises many British works.
One interesting aspect that stood out, when asked about how much of a contentious issue it was getting a book about gay sex workers published:
There wasn’t resistance particularly, but I think several places weren’t sure how to categorise it or market it when most of the comics about gay people’s sex lives are overtly pornographic and not character led (Steve McIsaac’sShirtlifter books being a lovely example of being both, mind you).It’s fair to say a lot more people worried about offending people than there were people offended. Distributors feared publishers might not support a title like this, publishers feared retailers might not support it and some retailers feared an audience might not be there for it. In the end, I think that caution was a little excessive and there’s been a great audience and lots of support - right from the start when I had to beg for support though crowd-funding to pay for it.
The Romanian stray dog conundrum
This is a conundrum with no easy answers for everyone involved. Having that many stray dogs on the streets is neither good for the dogs nor for the safety of the public, yet from a practical stand point what is the solution that provides the best balance between being humane for the dog, being cost efficient and bringing reliable results? It seems where one solution excels at one criteria it is at the cost of the other.
Yet on top of that, if dogs are on a level similar to human infants in brain intellect…
Müller Rice, Rice Baby
How quite I never saw this on tele 3 months ago I’m not sure. I would say it looks very much like animatronics rather than CGI.