Quick journal since we are still enjoying our vacation abroad in Tulsa Oklahoma. We can publicly reveal we will be GOHs for Free Fur All 2023.

This means you can see our art all over the convention center, on exclusive shirts and swag, attend our panels and hang out in person! If you are a fan of our work, this will be the year to come see us as we'll be going all-in on deep diving on our game design, doodling fursonas, doing charity work and parties.

register here to pre-reg!

Reveal Trailer

Thank-you to all the awesome, beautiful people we met this year. We hope to see everyone again in 2023!

Sadly our white Shiba Inu Tori passed away yesterday while visiting my wifes parents. She unfortunately was never 100% even as a puppy and managed to make it to 9 years old. She had the best year of her life going to the park every day even if she couldn't keep up too well with other dogs. She loved chasing birds the most, keeping to her namesake (Tori translates to bird in Japanese). She started to lose weight rapidly this year and we managed to extend her quality of life with appetite stimulants and injections, allowing her to a few months of vitality and fun before she stopped eating again due to her kidneys giving out.

 kabier is getting a tattoo of Tori and her parents are coming up this weekend with a little box of her ashes with her paw print on it.

Sorry for the slight delay on content posting, my appendix decided it was time to go to war with my body and I had to spend a few days in hospital to get it removed! Back home from surgery now and feeling a lot better, will need to take it easy for a few weeks but it won't effect our upload routine!

Expect a BBS game update pretty soon! All the assets are done and we're just getting the last touches done. I'll start posting monthly dev blogs on Patreon as the current feed of updates is patreon only viewing due to adult content so for a newcomer it's just a sea of locked content. Little news nuggets will be viewable publicly!

Me &  kabier are soon to be parents! After making double/triple sure, we're officially 5 weeks in after trying for most of the year.

I am grateful to in good health, married and in our own home to safely start a loving family. Exciting times to be a father! 🤰🌟

Click here to follow my Twitter!
Click here to ask questions via CuriousCat

Back in November Twitter got permanently banned with no reason provided. One year later I received an email that the account was false flagged during an automatic ban wave for spam bots and they unlocked it today admitting mistake. A few sad furries tried to take credit for the ban or celebrate that their moderate adversaries have less of a platform to share opinions.

In that time frame I learned how social media really isn't necessary both in terms of building community or a career making furry art. Since November, our income has quadrupled. In part because we have been able to better focus on our work being outside of the furry drama bubble, and likely getting censored sparks interest and curiosity to find and support that content by other means (Patreon).

Either way, if you would like to hear my opinions and hear news on our projects again it's an option! I will likely use it less then I did a year ago as I do still think it's not healthy to use more than casually. Nobody should take tweets too seriously.

Quick update on Fellden: Development is in limbo until we have a US-based owner as the laws are more forgiving there for an adult business. Currently it does not seem that our current team members are too enthusiastic about opening an LLC and taking it seriously. Unless furries want something like this and demonstrate that passion by committing to regular weekly scheduled development, it's unlikely it will be ready to launch anytime soon. For now I'm shifting my priorities to our games, as there is more enthusiasm towards prototyping Amorous 2 rather than a new art platform.

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Poll Post, Vote here!
I've been ignoring viewing my inbox for over a year, peaking at about 19,000 new submissions. I'm only watching 361 artists but they produce a lot of content. I decided to put on West World and try to plow through it in one day. I managed to get it down to 4,000 but still, it took hours to organize what I found inspirational for various reasons into folders. When I was younger I would check FA daily, leaving comments and messaging artists thinking I'm helping the community grow. However, that in combination with social media lead to a lot of wasted time. My life has become a lot more productive after cutting social media out of my life but I do think there is still a lot of value to staying in touch with furry art, I just really don't like this platform.

Don't get me wrong, the inbox does the job for delivering new content to you but I would enjoy more depth to the experience than just consuming. It's really cumbersome for interacting in more creative capacities and the beta only does so much to modernize it's aging features. I do read all the comments we receive on our content but social features like the shoutbox has been broken on my profile page for over a year. FA's moderation team hasn't allowed any discussion on new policies (Mostly political agendas) being added to the site in over a year, making it very opaque that the staff composition is corrupt. There is still no Webm/Mp4 support and replacement for flash is half-assed at best. We still have to use avatars that are 100 pixels and less than 50kb, it's a joke. These aren't the types of people I want in charge of my content distribution.

If you can look past all of that however, it's still one of your better options right now for finding furry creators, mostly due to their not being anything better on offer. Complacency breeds stagnation and so long as what we experience here is good enough for most, there won't be enough demand for change to see any real innovation or progress. I really don't want to still be using FA another decade from now ideally. Most of my good experiences in the furry community was not a result of the platform but the people, I could chalk it up to the same utility as an email. I personally would like a better proxy for making and sharing art but I may be in the minority of people willing to act on it. For many, furry art isn't a career but just a fun distraction from their already busy lives. It's not their responsibility to -fix- it and it's not really mine either.

As of late I've been focusing on building local friendships/relationships in our area and using the internet as a social outlet less. It's easier to relate to people in person and the conversations you have come off as more genuine. Things like Twitter/VRChat allow you to edit your social mask to such a high degree that you stop being a human capable of vulnerability and true intimacy after a certain point. It's in part why I stopped making VRchat videos on Youtube as I felt that streaming and by extension life in the spotlight was in service of the ego. I don't need to be showered in constant attention to be happy, just a few close friends who are at a similar level of development so we can help each other grow. I don't think there is much left to grow from FA but I'll keep using it and find my own meaning in it. Currently, that's building up a rich archive of references for creative endeavors I want to pursue in the future. There is some truly fantastic talent still here making beautiful art.

I wanted to give folks a quick update on the progress of Fellden, which is a furry art platform currently in early development that myself, my wife and a small team of ambitious furries have been chipping away at on a weekly basis for a few months.

My goal in the past few weeks was to solidify the community guidelines, terms of service, infrastructure hosting and get the approval of at least 2 adult payment processors to offer an alternative to Patreon and Paypal, with many furry artists needing to live on the razors edge of what these platforms accept in order to make a living. After contacting a couple of lawyers, it immediately become evident that we have a sizable immediate problem, Canada.

The laws here regarding speech, social platforms and adult content are strict and unforgiving. Unlike the US where you can take some risks via an LLC (Limited Liability Company), little to no such protections exist for Canadians. We would need to jump through many burning hoops to simply allow UGI (User Generated Content) without proactive moderation and 3rd party solutions, which already puts us at a disadvantage with existing platforms. Canadian hate speech laws also mean the extent in which you can communicate ideas would be censored (Just like FA). Digital artwork containing 'obscene' content is treated the same as the real thing, meaning drawing Judy Hopps (Despite being 24) could be interpreted as CP, regardless of context. Same goes for any sex containing themes noncon, violence or horror. Artistic merit is left vague and subjective.

Payment escrow services, commissions, refunds and a digital wallet adds another dimension of legal hurdles to conquer. There will be some laws that we will need to comply with such as letting users opt out of analytics and data collection (Achievements and Trophies), defamation laws (Report Ticket) and Copyright that are more universal and easier to handle with a small team size and budget. Due to the way liability works in Canada, we cannot own nor participate in the investment/corporation of the platform without putting ourselves at higher risk than we're willing to take now that we are trying to start a family. This unfortunately means I can't be the primary investor as a Canadian resident and must step back in terms of responsibilities until we discover new solutions.

I love the furry community and will continue to aid this project in the ways that I can, such as artistic assets and consultation so long as it remains in active development. It's very upsetting for me to have to pass the torch already while it's just picking up momentum. The desire for a better, more open experience isn't unique to me and it if compelling enough, will find the right people to get to the finish line. Thankfully, our US devs are considering taking on the lead role and we're currently exploring those options.

I know I'm likely already in a small group of creators who can/willing to finance a new ambitious art platform, but if the prospect interests you and you would like to learn more, feel free to contact me and I'll introduce you to our development team. It's ironic as Canada is currently trying to pass bill C-10 which will force Canadians to consume 50% Canadian made media.

I really hope we can have a better furry content experience and I'll be really bummed out if the best we can do is several flavors of FA.

I've been researching what we can and cannot do with the new art platform Fellden that we are developing. Our primary goal is to encourage and protect creative expression and innovate on the tools and resources to do so. Obviously most of the content on these types of platforms are adult-oriented, which seems fairly straight-forward to moderate with a common sense TOS that bans and removes any illegal content. Please note that this journal is not an endorsement of the following mentioned content, but to obtain more infromation from the community as to high profile cases and legal history pertaining to furries and these types of platforms.

The legality and morality of fictional illustrations (specifically underage characters) varies depending on which country you reside. To my knowledge, there has yet be a high profile case of someone being charged for possession of furry art that appears to fall under this category, however cases do exist for depictions of cartoon characters like the Simpsons, and another involving pixies and elves, which is more commonly considered fantasy. Both cases were appealed, but it still puts users (And plaftorms) at risk. There have been a few accounts of anime that contains loli (underage human girls) being seized at borders. Some countries will lump in digital/virtual porn with the real thing.

Inkbunny is well known for allowing young depictions of furries on their platform, however human depictions are banned. This implies cub content is legal in their location (And by extension the international servers in which it is hosted). To my knowledge, no legal strife has come their way in over a decade as a result of hosting this content. FA originally allowed cub content but then pulled the plug in 2006 after receiving pressure from their payment processor and it has remained that way since.

I live in Canada which is one of the countries that considers fictional illustrations in the same boat as the real thing. This has me worried that the new platform will need to take a scorched earth approach to young-looking characters. This is worrisome because there are a lot of furry species and characters that have small bodies and big heads but may not necessarily be underage like Otters, Rabbits, Foxes etc. The same can be said for character designs that fall under 'Short-stack'. If elves and pixies aren't protected, neither would these. Hopefully, so long as it is clearly stated that a character is 18+ that they would be fine, but how do you prove it if it's just an image? What if a user saves an image without the associated disclaimer tags and then gets in legal strife?

We will be scheduling an appointment with a lawyer who specializes in these types of platforms but for now it would be interesting to hear what the community thinks on the matter. Out of the high profile digital art cases in the last decade, not enough information is available online to get a consistent answer for these more strict countries. If we do need to ban this type of content in order for the website to operate safely within local laws, I hope our users understand as it may not apply to their own country.

Our new Etsy Store is doing extremely well, selling way over expectations, making comparable profits to Patreon, that's crazy!

As such we are pretty confident that we can take some additional risks stocking the store with cool merch you would like to see (A Coby plushie is currently in the works😘)

Let me know in the comments here if there is any characters/content you would like to be added to our existing options such as dakis, masks, plushies etc or brand new categories you would like added to the store such as apparel and accessories. Nothing is off the table, let us know what you would like to see!

Had a long interesting conversation with my wife kabier over dinner tonight about what separates the furry fandom from broader nerd culture. This is a bit of a piggy-back on the journal discussing the current state of the furry community posted earlier today.

We have conflicting views in regards to how to expand and evolve our content over the long-term. I feel crafting little worlds of furry characters is still an untapped well that can be further fleshed out. I don't like the idea that there is something to be shameful about enjoying furry content and if there is, the solution is increasing the quality until it's worthy of respect. Better writing, characters and ofcourse, artwork to tie it all together. I don't see porn as something -dirty- or otherwise degenerate as it's just fiction, like many other creative mediums. I feel we are making decent progress in that regards expanding our character universe to a website, developing characters over a series of comics and making them canon with our games.

The issue comes with the amount of flack that comes with pushing the furry envelope and trying to play the fence by bleeding into other fandoms. Bareback Valley, our 2020 comic about a human character getting up to antics on a barn with furries turned out to be too controversial for Patreon, getting heavily censored and kind of ruining the plot. We wanted to expand our furry universe to include other species and races like many other creators end up doing as their content evolves with time. Older comics that were acceptable in their time such as Lesson Learnt, Double Trouble, Man's Best Friend etc have all since been censored from Patreon due to consent not being transparent. This kind of censorship isn't exclusive to Patreon, the comic Servants of the Serpent caused enough controversy on e621 to warrant it's admins banning on the content to avoid drama.

We anticipate our new BBS comic will also get censored to some extent due to the themes of the game not being very consensual, having a lot of feral looking characters and monsters. We are also bringing back old characters which need to have their relationships retconned to work on Patreon. For whatever reason, furries are not treated with the same familiarity as more traditional fantasy races like kobolds, dragons, elves, orcs etc. Porn of these species has been getting a pass for a long time, getting more leniency on these platforms.

Patreon also recently pressured to censor our website due to it hosting our back catalogue of furry characters and their comics. Instead we just removed all Patreon advertising and replaced it with Subscribestar which so far has been far more supportive of adult content creators. Twitter also has a track record of censorship in which they blacklist adult content with shadowbans to limit their exposure and issue suspensions if you demonstrate dissent.

We have been debating on whether the BBS comic should have it's more risque scenes cut to tame it down and make it more palatable for platforms like Patreon/Twitter, but why are we suddenly willing to bend the knee to these platforms? Patreon didn't exist when we started out in the community and I don't see why it is suddenly so important that it's worth sacrificing the creative freedom of your content. On the other hand, not willing to compromise or make a sacrifice can be a form of strangling the golden goose. Our supporters on Patreon and Subscribestar make us some very good money that allows us to hire a full team of supporting artists, it would put all their jobs in jeopardy by trying to rock the boat.

How this ties into the fantasy community is I feel a lot of these issues would be avoided if we were crafting stories set in a more traditional DnD themed universe where humans and anthropomorphic species have already been long since established. Having sex in a tavern seems to get more of a pass than modern settings and furry characters remind people too much of their real counterparts. kabier wants to take our content in that direction as there is far less of a risk to be misinterpreted. It would also allow us to branch into a new, more mature community that has been around for a long time. We recently made local friends who are heavily into DnD and the established universe that it presents to you is a lot of fun. I however, feel this genre has been already done to great extent already and writing comics in that setting feels a bit overplayed. There is an appeal to making your own universe.

She feels part of what makes a being a -furry- shameful is it looks basic, taking a real animal species and making them sexy with human attributes, but can't the same be said for most fantasy characters? I feel every community has basic designs and power fantasies. I've seen my fair share of WoW porn where it's just peoples ingame avatars, Skyrim etc. Any fantasy game has an adult community if the universe is compelling enough to draw people in.

There are cringey aspects of the furry fandom but I feel the same can be said about every single nerdy fandom that exists.

What and where is the heart of the furry community in your opinion? Where would you recommend someone should get active to have the best experience?

• I feel even after all these years that if your looking for a heartbeat in the fandom is Fur Affinity. There are enough loyal users to the platform to keep it active enough not to be considered dying or dead, even if it's not profitable for the owners. I only really use FA to post updates on our content and check my notes, I pretty much avoid the submission inbox as I don't like the format. It's too much content to consume at once and becomes distracting. Many competitors have popped up to challenge FA but end up pandering to the same people and adopting similar agendas.

• Twitter as an alternative, is more modern in terms of paring a content post with an opinion, making content feel a bit more personal and easier to consume in chunks. However, the -community- aspect doesn't really exist, as what is considered suitable for your attention is determined by algorithms that wants to maximize engagement and advertisement. It feels as if everyone exists in their own bubble and rarely overlap organically. This has fallen into the same routine as FA for me, only posting updates and checking DMS, I do not check my timeline.

• Discord has so far been a good solution for making small communities as it has good tools for streaming/sharing content and rewarding progression for those that actively participate. However, this falls apart with server sizes consisting of 5k or more as only 1 or 2 channels will remain engaging to the user. Their DM system is rather lackluster with upload limits, lack of a competent tagging system or grouping. You can lose long-term conversations easily in the mix. It's basically skype/ventrillo with a few more bells and whistles, not something permanent for creating content.

• I know a lot of younger furries use Telegram for it's stickers/emoji sharing but I've never taken an interest. Making groups can be done on Discord and it's far too easy to impersonate someone. I would rather talk to someone and leave the stickers out. I don't think it's a good space for posting content unless your looking for instant gratification.

• Most of the furries I've seen on Youtube post videos about drama or aim the content towards kids. Considering most of the content you see on FA is suitable for adults, you won't see much of it there. Trying to watch this type of content often makes me cringe as the furry avatar or personality often doesn't compensate for the lack of entertainment. It's played like a gimmick to accompany something else.

• Conventions I feel are a concentrated form of furry culture, centered around sex and pride for better or worse. Fursuits become far more valued here as it's the go-to way to stand out from the crowd and express your furry interests. Artists do get a space to sell and share their work and enough panels exist to encourage people to socialize. However, the price to commit to a fursuit, travel, accommodation and other expenses limits attendance to only a select few, causing a lot of gate-keeping and snobbery. Only a small portion of the overall community attend conventions, with the rise of the pandemic they have all been cancelled for the foreseeable future.

Am I missing a few? There are small furry communities in video games like TF2, Second Life, VRchat and the like but they mostly boil down to customizing your avatar. Is the status quo of the furry community still going to be stuck on FA years from now? Is that a bad thing? I'm curious as to what you personally think.

In an attempt to make FA a less toxic place, I will be giving mental health advice (within a reasonable character limit) for the next couple of hours to anyone that requests it. If it's a private matter you can send me a DM.

Advice may be frank! I may need to stop responding to comments and get back to work if the volume of requests gets too high for the time I've allotted.

For BBS players who encountered difficulty getting the game to load past the character select, a hotfix has been released!

https://www.patreon.com/posts/40770458

Yo my Wikifur page is in serious need of an update. Many of the links are dead and it's using a Second Life thumbnail from half a decade ago 😂

If you have experience writing those types of pages DM me for new links and info!

I apologize for the lack of journals recently! I tend to use Twitter for sharing my more general opinions. However, a high production value furry documentary dropped this week titled The Fandom over on Youtube via Ash Coyote's channel. Immediate red-flags are drawn, as most of the producers and contributors listed push a leftist political agenda online, blocking anyone who disagrees with them and getting belligerent at conventions towards conservatives.

Regardless, any major coverage of the fandom deserves attention and fair criticism:

[Pros:]
• Well produced, great coverage on the origins and history of the fandom.
• Explains in great detail the trials and tribulations of the 70's, 80's and 90's

[Cons:]
• Falls apart upon reflecting on modern times.
• Second half of the documentary fixates on Identity Politics and completely skates around any major controversies surrounding the fandom in the last 20 years (Rainfurrest, STDs, Pedophilia, Antifa, Political Activism etc) To obsess about Trump and the 'Alt-right Nazis'.
• Claims LBGTAA+ furries are still oppressed in modern times while simultaneously showing the facts that they actually hold the majority at 80% of the fandom in the 2016 study.
• Not a single major adult artist was given an interview despite being a quote 'Sexual Community'.
• The gender of a Conchair is stressed multiple times to implicate feminism. Tokenism extends to trans people and other minority groups.
• Uncle Kages anti-sex rhetoric is pushed throughout the second half without much rebuttable or perspective, insisting we look the other way.

It's like the producers went into the documentary wanting to leave the viewer with a positive outlook on the fandom and implying it's grass-roots nature still applies today. In reality it's become a corporate safe space for left wing political extremists. We have personally met some of these contributors in person and they are incredibly rude, cliquey and toxic towards who they deem their oppressors such as 'Cis white straight people'. The majority of which utilize block chains and silence dissent towards towards anyone who dares challenge victimhood narrative, seemingly for profit. We are fortunate in which we have a business independent of the existing corporate structure, but what about new and smaller businesses who rely on revenue generated from conventions who face actual discrimination if they don't sell and celebrate LBGTA++ content? Most of my content is gay, most of my wifes content is gay and yet we are still demonized for being evil straight people. How queer you are has become the measure of value in this fandom, which I feel is a huge mis-interpretation as to why Confurence was made in the first place.

Being a furry to me means the freedom to express imagination, creativity and sexuality without discrimination. Everyone is equal, immutable traits such as gender and race should not matter. This does not absolve us of adult responsibility, accountability or self-evaluation when those core values are shattered for status, profit and political gain. We are ALL fans of anthromorphic animals, but not all of us are activists.

To further my goals to be a good game developer, I determined it was important to share core values with my team by fleshing out a collaborative mission Statement. I also wanted to make it public so that we can keep a commitment to our supporters. If you would like to read it, check out our new website page! https://www.jasonafex.com/bbsmissionstatement

We've had some requests to set up an alternative way to support our work. If you would like to cut the fluff, you can now send any quantity of Christmas tips via Kofi! 🎅🎄💕
https://ko-fi.com/jasonafex

Me & my wife  kabier have been streaming party games and VRChat for about 15 months in a row! I always enjoy the people we meet from streams and the funny videos made for youtube as a result.

Kabs has been having a harder time keeping up the energy to entertain on weekends as of late, leaving her feeling burnout on the chaotic VR sessions with all our fans. It leads to some great moments, but I can totally get how it can be an overload to the senses.

I think a break of routine would be healthy to re-invent the stream and get a fresh perspective. Less of a reliance of banging out a video every week and forcing wacky escapades. Check the announcements over on Greenie Meanies to stay tuned as to when we go live! The good thing about streaming when your in the mood, is that VRgames etc may appear on different days now, at different time slots. I've mostly gotten my friend group into Dota 2 as of late, and it's not too stream friendly when they are still learning as they need to focus and co-ordinate. Once they get a bit more comfortable it's a social event I can share!

Our main priorities are Bare Backstreets, BareBack Valley and 3D modelling, so we'll have more time now to make those as good as they can be. Anticipate a new update for BBS before New Years!

I was ruminating yesterday as to when it's an appropriate time in ones career to start hosting panels at conventions, The unanimous answer was once your at a professional level.

I would share entrepreneurial skills I've learned over the past decade. Would you be interested?

If you are a new and upcoming distributor, or an established brand looking for collaborators, we're currently considering new merch for 2020.

This includes Comics, Shirts, Standees and Dakis. If you feel you can satisfy one or more of these products, shoot me a note!

VR Shack Public Link

Found the link for our VRchat Avatar Hub! Please give it a favorite so we can exit the Community Labs, allowing us to update the world with more 3D models. Once the world is public, we will also be releasing download links for use outside of VRchat.

We're honeymooning in Japan for two weeks! If you live in the area or are having an overlapping vacation and would like to hang out with Jasonasenpai, let me know here or:

Twitter: JasonafexFA
Discord: Jasonafex#2284

Btw if you were on my discord friends list before you'll need to readd me.

To help coincide with the release of our New Chest Mimic Update, we also Now Have an Official Website!

In other news, myself and  kabier are flying out at 6pm this evening to have a destination wedding in Australia! We will then be having a honeymoon in Japan. We'll be stuck on planes for the next couple of days as we're traveling around the world, returning to Canada October 1st.

In OTHER other news, we offically have a VRchat world available under the community labs called the VRShack. You'll be able to find it under the community labs tab when searches for worlds, made by kabier. The icon will looks somewhat like the cuckshacks logo! We've got a bunch of our 3D models available for you to download there, with more coming once it goes public. The more engagement the world has, the faster it'll hit the public feed.