On February 24th, the North Carolina based furry convention Bewhiskered announced that furry YouTube content creator Beta Eta Delota would no longer be present as a Guest of Honor for their 2026 gathering.

We want to let you know that Beta Eta Delota will not be appearing as a Guest of Honor this year at Bewhiskered 2026. This decision was not made lightly and was made in coordination with Beta to ensure our ability to host a smooth and safe convention.

As many of you know, Beta has been the subject of a harassment campaign for the last several months. That campaign has unfortunately impacted us as well and generated more than one safety concern for the convention. The unfortunate end result, that we both agree on, is that if Beta were to attend, we are unsure we could offer him the quality experience that a Guest of Honor deserves and would have very real safety concerns to prepare for.

We have been and will continue to be a kink-friendly organization and will always do our best to uphold our values. This will be reflected by the panels we select, the dealers we invite, and more. - North Carolina Anthro Society

This announcement comes in the midst of an ongoing controversy in furry content creator spaces revolving around anti-ABDL furries from TikTok and pro-kink furries from YouTube, which has now bled into real world consequences at physical gatherings.

We are now in the fourth year of reviewing the dramatic shorts category based on the recommendations submitted to the Ursa Majors along with random ones I may have seen during the year, or items that maybe the algorithms caught that only get recommended at this time of year for some reason. The choices here are, once again, polished and only one or two in the whole list had missing elements. Without you all curating your choices these lists would not happen so thank you for your efforts this year.

New to the format this year is that I’ll lean toward sectionalizing so that the text before the video doesn’t go too much into spoiler territory and any text afterwards will go more into elements I liked that address the content itself as to not spoil any desire to view without being painted by those thoughts.

(Prior Years: 2024, 2023, 2022)

In this episode!

• It’s high season for conventions, and it shows in the amount raised for charity world wide!
• Learning about neurodiversity through cute animations
• A wonderful interview how the fandom changed an aspiring cartoonist

But first, the latest charity news from the fandom in this September edition of Digging Up Positivity!

In 1967, Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin entered the woods of Northern California with the goal of filming Bigfoot. Lucky them: they apparently did.

The Patterson-Gimlin film, showing either a North American anthropoid ape unknown to science or a dude in a monkey suit, is probably the single most analyzed piece of "home video" footage outside of the Zapruder film. Hundreds of experts in biology, zoology and costume design have chimed in on the topic, but cryptozoology-themed YouTube channel Crash Course Cryptozoology brought in a new expert: fursuit maker Chloe Fraser.

The video has never been conclusively debunked; though the fact that in the half-century since it was filmed, nobody else has gotten anywhere near the same amount of luck with Bigfoot (and/or Sasquatch) as Patterson and Gimlin has been gotten it a status of "debunked by default" by sceptics. Even if you're a Bigfoot believer, and they really are out there wandering the woods, it doesn't necessarily prove the footage isn't fake.

Welcome to a packed episode of Digging Up Positivity! The convention season is gearing up and boy does it show!
In this episode:

• Many charities in March, pushing us over the $400,000 raised this year!
• A lovely memoriam for Mark Merlino, also known as Sy Sable.
• Nomad Complex is able to return, backed by the fandom.
• AnthroAir: Virtual airplanes for a real fandom!
• And the Good Furry Award.

Also I am happy to work together with artwork-tee, and there is a new pawtastic T-shirt in the store, for more details on how to get one, stay with us till the end of the show!

Google has recently announced its intention to deactivate accounts if the user is inactive after two years of time. This comes only a week after Twitter had announced that they too will be looking to liquidate accounts that lack activity. Soon after this announcement the accounts of deceased on Twitter were found to be suspended for “Terms of Use Violations”, in a similar vein to someone who used the site to spam or harass others.

Dying, as it turns out, is against the rules.

There is an old saying that those who live in a house of glass should not throw stones. This can be seen as true for one furry who has been making a wave in the furry YouTube community for all the wrong reasons. In a video she posted, she shows herself filing copyright takedown requests of furry videos frivolously.

Copyfraud is the false claim of ownership over a work, it is something that the claim site on YouTube warns against doing due to the legal issues that can come with falsely claiming the work of someone as your own. In the mostly automated digital world it has become a common action to utilize false strikes to attack content creators.

But the greater irony was that in this video of the self-admitting copy-fraudster flagging these videos is that there is a grating and sped up music of some description in the background. A closer listen to the first song of the video at the eleven second mark, and slowing it down to half speed and lowering the pitch a bit, reveals it to be a copyrighted song: David Guetta - Turn Me On ft. Nicki Minaj

In October 2021, I opened a survey about fursuits and fursuiting and called for furries (fursuiters and non-fursuiters alike) to take part. This was to provide information for the next video in my Facts About the Furry Fandom series, Facts About Fursuits & Fursuiting.

It's taken me over a year to wade through the data, write the essay, get it professionally reviewed, and create the next video in the series. However, after all that work, it's finally ready. The premiere is less than a week away; I look forward to seeing all of you there.

Facts About Fursuits & Fursuiting will premiere on YouTube on 1^st March at 5pm (GMT) / 12pm (EST) / 9am (PST)

Welcome to the first Digging Up Positivity of 2023! Of course we start off with a bunch of charities, animation news, and our guest of this month is a staple from the virtual furry scene: BioGodz, we will discuss his new projects and how he got into the wonderful world of virtual reality!

But first things first, lets hop into the charities:

Merry Christmas! Recently we stumbled across a new Internet star known as Tito Lizzardo, an animated lizard singer who pals around with a sexy feline dancer named Catty Baby (aka Catty B). Virtual Humans (a site we also just discovered!) has this to say about them: “Tito is a lizard that likes to dress in his school jacket. Catty Baby is a cat that rocks her sporty looks every day. Their TikTok account is exploding with the couple’s dance moves next to the beach and the palm trees in Miami. Tito and Catty are a couple of artists doing remixes of famous Latin songs like ‘Hips Don’t Lie’ or ‘Hey DJ’. Their gang is completed with Juan Gato, Catty’s brother who is always wearing a Miami Heat shirt. All together they create amazing videos of their song remixes, targeting very young audiences with their cute, animalistic appeal.” Tito and crew first appeared in a series of short, at times rather risque dance videos on TikTok. Since then, they’ve released several much-more-family-friendly music videos on their YouTube channel. Who’s behind all this? We don’t know! But we’d love to meet them!

Image c. 2022 Tito Lizzardo

Hello, and a big welcome to the September edition of Digging Up Positivity! These months are the height of convention season and it shows! So many events, both online and offline.

Last premiere I was at Eurofurence together with FoxAmoor, the guest of the previous episode. But when I got back to the Netherlands, merely half a day later I was on the road to Splinter, an amazing four day event in the Netherlands. And after that, we were guests at the Stork Run in The Hague, more about this all that later. And at the end of the episode I will tell you how to win one of these amazing Thabo paw pillows from my artwork Tee merch store.

But first, the astounding amount of charities since last episode!

About 2 years ago, I started to see a growing debate about 'feral' NSFW art, and it was mostly more calm. The first time was when FurryLife.online started to ban most feral furry pornography, which has sparked a lot of debate online here (in the comment section), Twitter, and some other online sites. In the discussions, there were a lot of folks defending it with a fair amount of logic, mainly explaining that human levels of intelligence creates a difference. There were also folks reasoning that many of such ferals being attractive were exactly the same reasoning why furry characters such as Nick Wilde would be considered attractive by many other furries, by the fact that they have animal parts.

After such drama emerged, it felt as if it was dying down, thankfully. However recently on about June 19th, a popular furry known as KaimTime has been publicly “exposed” after some furries found out that they had a “feral” focused NSFW Twitter account known as Feral Fawcet. As a result, angry furries accused the person of being into “zoophilia”. as well as many Twitter folks ending up doing the whole “if you support this, block me” style posts. There was even one popular YouTuber, Crying Blossom, who made a call-out video against KaimTime mainly for KaimTime having the separate Twitter feed with this art on it, and their response video defending their right to have this separate page and fantasy. All of this, likely because of a furry artist partly having an interest in having fantasies with anthropomorphic animals on all fours.

Welcome to the May episode of Digging Up Positivity and this month it is 10 years ago that Thabo was sighted in The Netherlands for the first time! I do have a little bit about that in the very end of the video, including a give-away! This very T-Shirt from Artworktee, more info at the end of the video! But first, on with the charities!

Dorset police are warning of the impact on young children of videos related to Huggy Wuggy, an anthropomorphic antagonist in the independently-developed horror game Poppy Playtime, released last year. The game itself is reminiscent of Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach and has been rated 12+ by Common Sense Media. An official plush toy with Velcro paws was released mid-March.

Media featuring the character is proliferating, including a depiction of Huggy's reassembly on TikTok and 'Free Hugs', a multi-verse song from the monster's point of view. Reports indicate that the friendly nature of the character's name seems to be allowing their content to bypass filtering that would usually defend young viewers from such disturbing content, similar to issues before YouTube's COPPA implementation.

Hello, and welcome to the first episode of the fifth year of Digging Up Positivity! This episode we do highly various members of our community both new ones and older guests with some updates. And there will be some news from nature and the wonderful world of animation. And if you would like to get your paws on the T-shirt I am wearing or get some other Thabo merchandise, check the end of the video! As for now, let’s get started with the charities!