December 2, 2018: a date written into history for fans of furry convention attendance statistics and round numbers. After finally surpassing Anthrocon as the world’s biggest furry convention last year, Midwest Furfest’s next goal was obvious: become the first con to reach 10,000 attendees. Did they manage it? To find out, have a graph that you’ve probably already seen on Twitter:

Will you be attending Anthrocon 2018? Do you consider yourself to have a disability? Does your disability affect how you engage with the fandom? Would you be willing to talk about this in a panel setting at the con? Do you like raccoons? Then I’d love to hear from you!

Regardless of how you feel about their place in the fandom, fursuits are an integral part of the er, fabric, of our community. Many of us have, at least anecdotally, felt their prevalence (and some might say importance) increase over the years, but estimating the proportion of furries who are also fursuiters is borderline impossible. Surveys are one option, but these are liable to considerable selection bias and depend on the truthfulness of respondents. A 2011 International Anthropomorphic Research Project questionnaire, for example, reported 13% and 18.5% of respondents owned, respectively, a full or partial fursuit. However, we have no way of knowing how accurate a reflection of the ‘true’ status of fursuits in the fandom this really is. Are people with fursuits more likely to engage with surveys such as these? Can we trust respondents not to lie (or at least exaggerate)? Wherever possible, more objective measures are to be preferred.

Anthrocon’s 17-year reign as the world’s biggest furry convention is over. As many had anticipated, the 2017 edition of Midwest Furfest eclipsed the 7,544 mark set earlier this year by its Pittsburgh counterpart, with ‘around’ 8,700 furries descending on Chicago’s Hyatt Regency O’Hare. I’m not going to comment on whether furries care too much about who’s on top [eyes emoji], but this gives me an excuse to make graphs, and I would be a Bad Statistician if I didn’t take it. (Although full disclosure: there is approximately zero Actual Stats in this, sorry.)

Furry conventions are great. Where else can you meet (and make) friends from around the world, participate in all manner of weird and wonderful activities, and awkwardly ask a stranger to draw your character in a variety of ENTIRELY NORMAL situations? While by no means the be all and end all of the furry fandom, conventions also offer an insight into the size - and growth - of our community, with attendance figures a semi-regular hot topic (at least among those of us for whom numbers can ever be described as a hot topic…). After my last post exploring furry convention statistics, I wanted to dig a little deeper into the distribution of attendees at some of the fandom’s biggest events - and look at a slightly different way of measuring their relative importance.

After an exciting trip to Anthrocon, what better cure for PCD than playing with furry convention attendance data? I grabbed the numbers from this wikifur page, which claims to list every ‘convention’ with at least 100 attendees. This immediately presents some problems, which given how informal this is I’m definitely not going to try and deal with, but will at least mention in the interests of transparency:

Comments/questions? The easiest place is the original Tweet!

[Content warning: the following features discussion of furry pornography and gaping confidence intervals.]

I was kinda surprised by the level of interest in my recent analysis of foxes in furry porn, and really pleased to get loads of questions about it! I thought I’d put a quick follow-up post together to address some of the issues raised (a ‘Fox FAQ’, if you will), as I think it’s super important to try and make this sort of thing as clear as possible. The following are based on interactions I had both on and off Twitter, and I’ll keep this post updated if other questions come my way. I haven’t identified anyone in particular in association with specific comments (I thought that might seem a bit personal), so instead a general thanks to all of those who commented!

[Content warning: the following features discussion of furry pornography and cold, hard, p-values.]

Midwest Furfest 2016 was a thing! Figured I’d inaugurate this blog with a con report. (Spoiler warning: almost certainly not very interesting to anyone other than my future, nostalgic, self!)

Hello, and welcome to the blog! This is a first post, so obviously I’m just typing into the ether. More tangible content should be coming soon!