Rakuen Growlithe's stories

Summercat will be releasing the first issue of his new furry magazine, Anthroview, at Antheria at the end of this month. I got to speak to him about the magazine and touch on some of the other aspects of the furry fandom in which he is involved.

Rakuen Growlithe: You're planning to release a new magazine for the furry fandom called Anthroview. When did you first get the idea for Anthroview?

Summercat: About three or four years ago, although it's gone through a lot of changes since then.

RG: What sort of changes are we talking about and why did it take three or four years to get to this point?

The documentation of Alpha and Omega (trailer) is as much a cliché as the content. Its closing disclaimer assures us that the story is completely fictitious; all well and good, yet it continues with: "No identification with actual .... products is intended or should be inferred."

This could only have been added out of tradition, as this is little more than a rip-off of prior animated films, Disney's in particular. The only difference is that the originals did a good job.

In the 1930's wolves became extinct in France. Sixty years later, wild wolves crossed over the Alps from Italy into France. This group has since expanded to up to 200 individuals in 20 different packs. The wolves have spread to cover 15 out of 94 départements (map) reaching North to the Vosges in Lorraine and West to Cantal in Auvergne (map), and occupying the French Pyrenees for the first time in a century.

The presence of the wolves has caused considerable distress to French shepherds — particularly in the French Pyrenees, where they are forced to contend with a growing wolf population, along with a now-discontinued government plan to reintroduce brown bears.

At the end of 2009, Yiffstar was relaunched with 'completely new code' as SoFurry. Reactions were not entirely positive; the forum was horrible to use, and the main site had numerous performance and navigational issues, though speed improved over time.

In April 2010, work began on SoFurry 2.0, originally planned to release in first quarter 2011. As time passed, various previews of the new Espresso theme were released and covered by both Flayrah and FNN – the latter reporting on SoFurry's 150,000-user mark by interviewing SoFurry owner Toumal and lead designer Alex Vance.

On 8 July, Toumal announced a public beta of SoFurry 2.0, running in parallel with SoFurry 1.0 for 'some time'. The beta launched today, albeit without chat.

In stark contrast, Fur Affinity's plans for new software, Ferrox, were announced in 2006, but stalled in 2009. Since then, the site has been plagued with coding problems.