Sonious's stories

Sun 2 Jan 2022 - 12:47

As the world started to show recovery in 2021, the giving nature of the furry fandom also has shown a rebound from the shock of 2020. This year furs raised a total of $727,748.23 for various organizations, an increase of 31.2% from the prior year's half million total.

The video breakdown of each of these events was provided by Thabo Meerkat.

A spreadsheet of the data can be viewed here.

Mon 27 Dec 2021 - 22:17

Aster Squeeze Toon violence is a strange form of affection within the community of toony furs. Dropping anvils, hitting people with mallets, or slamming someone with a meringue pie are all par for the course. However, recently this community has found that the machines overseeing them cannot discern this toony culture amongst the social media landscape. Confused algorithms have recently started to take the violent jest seriously.

This was found out by a toon furry by the name of Aster in late 2021 as Twitter suddenly brought down the hammer to his account. With no warnings, or any form of communication, the toon bunny character found himself unable to access the social media of choice of most furries on December 7th, 2021. Aster himself is quite a prolific tweeter stating he believed himself to have made one hundred and two hundred tweets within the last few weeks before his account’s termination.

Thu 16 Dec 2021 - 21:37

Aritsan Fox.pngIn three hours over $20,000 dollars have been raised on a GoFundMe campaign looking to save a furry operated bakery. The business, Lazy Fox, has been operating for a year in Thermopolis, Wyoming. Their fundraising page goes over the story of their first operating year transforming the empty lot that used to belong to “The Front Porch” into the Lazy Fox.

The urgency to raise funds was brought on by the property being foreclosed on due to their current landlord they are renting from falling behind on payments. Nels and Ian fear the land their business resides may now be at risk of going to a new owner who may disrupt their current operations. They had planned on buying it out from the landlord eventually when they were settled and their business established. But the current circumstances have accelerated their desire to own the land their bakery sits upon, ready or not.

Their goal of $130,000 is the amount it would cost to buy it with little to no debt. Nels and Ian indicate they do not expect to reach that amount, but the more they can raise the less they will need to rely on debt to finance this dream and own the building and equipment outright.

Whether they reach the goal is far from certain, but furries on social media seem very determined to help bring in the bread for this small town bakery.

Sun 5 Dec 2021 - 15:13

On December 11th, a Blue Origin flight will be making a journey to space. Aboard it will be Laura Shepard, who is the daughter of the first American to fly to space, Alan Shepard. But given this is a furry news site, one of the paying passengers has piqued more interest within fandom circles. Cameron “MeepsKitten” Bess, a modest furry content creator of around 2,500 subscribers on YouTube, Twitch, and Twitter, will be riding aboard with his father, Lane Bess.

The video "I'm Going to Space" on MeepsKitten’s YouTube channel shows how he is both excited and anxious about this opportunity. He discusses how he plans to bring the paw of his fursuit along with a pansexual flag, which is his sexual identity, with him on the spaceflight.

Update: Due to high winds forecast, the flight has been delayed from December 9th to December 11th.

Sun 14 Nov 2021 - 13:20

DeathsDoor.jpgDeath’s Door is a game where you play as a crow who has been tasked with reaping a soul. However, things become complicated as someone rips one of your assigned souls from your grasp. This leaves you on a quest to hunt down some monstrous beings who are doing everything they can to stall their egress from the world of the living.

Gameplay-wise it has the exploration and dungeon crawling elements of a Zelda game. However, the large boss fights are punishing and far more difficult than the Nintendo faire. They seem closer to Dark Souls boss fights in terms scale— but not quite as brutal, a nice moderate difficulty.

I honestly hope this one wins the Ursa Major award for gaming in 2021.

Usually, I don’t have a horse in these races, as most of the games I get an opportunity to play are in a backlog from prior years. Luckily, as a furry, I don’t ever feel compelled to keep up with the Joneses of the world and consume the latest titles. Instead I play anthro games as my audience votes on which one they would like to see me play. So it is rare that I get to play a game in the year it came out.

This treat of a game was published in July of this year, developed by Acid Nerve and published by Devolver Digital. It is available on PC and XBox consoles. And this October the voters decided this would be a good game to play. You know, death is spooky. However, the game is not of the horror genre.

Wed 10 Nov 2021 - 20:35

November has been a bit strange as people prepare for the first Midwest Furfest since the closure due to the COVID pandemic. However, in spite of the anxieties, there have been some interesting stories of good natured ribbing that have escaped furry orbit into the mainstream world.

Today we go over two of these events that happened this month from a Human Resource debacle and a fuselage scribble.

Sat 2 Oct 2021 - 11:18

Lindsay Lohan's Fursona Celebrities, gang references, and questionable measures of affluence are not the typical fare for a furry fandom news site. However, this trifecta from the underworld rose from the earth on the 30th of September in the year of 2021.

It all started when a celebrity known as Lindsay Lohan made a tweet prompting a pack of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) called the Canine Cartel, using a dog character designed for her which is being put within this 10,000 token pack. With each of the individual tokens being put up for auction, including her own.

Reception by the fandom has mostly been negative. Some pointing out the lack of ears on the character's art, some showing agitation on having anthro characters being used to promote NFTs, others indicating that this was just a celebrity doing some arms-reach appreciation of the fandom while avoiding actually working with those in the fandom.

Today we’ll go over this event, furries' relationship with NFTs and crypto, and why this event may not be as furry as people in the fandom and media are making it out to be.

Fri 10 Sep 2021 - 10:25

Free Fur All convention logoIn Tulsa, Oklahoma, Tails and Tornadoes is a young convention that's been running in the Central U.S. state since 2019. Its premiere year was reviewed here on Flayrah by one-time contributor Koori Kitty. Like the weather system it was named after, the con has subsequently found itself in a whirlwind that's rattled its organization.

The first shakeup was one that affected most gatherings, in that its second year was unable to be held in 2020 due to COVID-19 closures. But on top of this, the same year brought in political fallout from the final year of Trump's presidency. Riots in the American Midwest soon spurred worldwide protests following the murder of George Floyd by a law enforcement officer, where the unarmed black man was strangled by a knee to his neck that was held there for over eight minutes. The entire duration of the strangulation was recorded on a smartphone and shared over the Internet.

The United States government, under the leadership it held, decided to go against the advisability of de-escalation in these matters and instead responded with hostile rhetoric. Given the shutdown of many non-essential jobs due to the pandemic, this created a perfect storm of vocal protests and rioting towards an unsympathetic system, sentiments that spread far beyond the Midwest where the murder took place.

Update: Correction made about staffing shifts from 2020 to 2021 in Tails and Tornados per Koori.

Update: AWOO has released a statement in their Telegram group that the hotel has withdrawn from their contract.

Thu 26 Aug 2021 - 13:43

John Oliver once again shows off his suspiciously furry stylings of comedy in one of his recent segments. In this case, he compared Brussel's EMT siren sound to Mickey getting ‘spin-cycled’, yes a euphemism for intercourse, on a washing machine. He even went so far as to get a motion-tweened animation of the affair. This joke is what he used to bookend his discussion around EMTs, and America’s underfunding and vulture-like privatization of them.

But what the writers of this particular segment may not have been aware of, is that while Mickey getting plowed on a washing machine may seem like a perfect ice breaking non-sequitur to the tragic state the United States' emergency services find themselves in, for furries it’s a bit too real.

In the year 2012, in the town of West Windsor, New Jersey, a seemingly innocent annual gathering of fursuiters supporting a local emergency services group called the Twin W Rescue Squad became targeted by politicians after allegations of indecent acts of a “spin cycle” style were spread through the press.

So thanks to Mr. Oliver, I feel compelled to go over what may be one of the most unfortunate interactions between furries and the political wardens of our country. And how the incident still sends ripples of fear and concern to this very day on the rules of engagement when it comes to fursuiting for organizations in the United States’ Northeast.

Sat 14 Aug 2021 - 21:31

Megaplex has updated its rules to ban registered sex offenders from attending their convention. This followed a publicly posted Twitter thread from a Megaplex attendee describing how they'd been assaulted by a registered sex offender at the convention, and their subsequent experience of trying to inform the staff.

Although the convention's initial response said they would ban those in the registry, the passive tone used in the opening paragraph of their announcement was not well-received:

We are saddened and sorry to hear that people felt [emphasis added] harassed or worse during the weekend. This is unacceptable and no person attending the convention should be made to feel [emphasis added] this way.

The language then shifted responsibility to victims to be more proactive in informing the con - despite having received an advance conversation before this was announced publicly. Megaplex's poor choice of wording ended up overshadowing the announcement of the ban itself.