If you are planning on attending Further Confusion 2013, the furry convention in San Jose, let's meet up! We could talk Furry, Krystal, Star Fox, Video Games, Website Development, Ponies... WHATEVER! I should be there all day Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I'm not giving a talk or anything, just a regular attendee. It would be really cool to meet some of you and put a face with your name.

Edit

Someone sent me an email asking what furry cons are like, and I thought that information would benefit everyone. First, let me paraphrase the email:
"What exactly goes on at a furry convention? Do you sell art? Just talk? Walk around in suits? I've heard rumors of some less respectable things going on there, so I'm curious if that's true."

Different cons are different, but from what I've seen, they usually have these things:

• Panels - These are little events where at least one person speaks. They can be in the format of a lecture, a presentation, a roundtable (where a group talks and takes questions from the audience), or even open discussion, where everyone gets together to talk about a specific subject (like Pokémon).
• Dealers Room - Famous and not-so-famous artists and craftsmakers set up tables where they put their art pieces for sale. Often the artists will take commissions right there for whatever you want (for the right price, of course)
• Art Show - Artists show off their works in an art gallery style. Sometimes the art is for sale or part of a silent auction
• Fursuit Parade - All fursuiters are encouraged to dress up all at once. They all walk through the halls showing off their suits. This is usually considered the highlight of the entire show, happening at the peak time with the most con goers present
• Larger Ceremonies - There are usually a few larger events by the con itself, such as the Opening and Closing ceremonies. They also usually have some kind of fursuit/acting contest complete with judging and prizes
• Gaming - Gamers get together and play games like Rock Band, Smash Bros., Magic the Gathering, Pokémon, and many others
• Dances - Usually every night, there are different DJs playing different types of music and encouraging people to dance. Some dances are specifically for fursuiters. As these dances get later into the night, the music becomes more and more dance/electronic type stuff, going very late
• Charity Events - Where they get a bunch of con goers to participate in a charity activity. I've heard of fursuit runs where they run a mile in a fursuit or something for charity. Most cons have at least one charity, but they don't always have an event associated with it
• General Meeting and Hanging Out - For people who go to a lot of cons, this is usually the most important aspect of the con. It represents the one or two times per year that they can meet and hang out with their furry friends from all over the country (or world)

Other than the fursuit parade, the activities listed above are exactly the same kind of thing you'll find at a Brony con, and I suspect many other types of nerdy cons (anime, Trekkie, etc).

As for less than reputable activities, there are a couple things to avoid:

• There are sometimes adults-only panels late at night, requiring ID. Things like "how to write erotic fiction"
• Sometimes the art show will have adult content artwork. When they do, it's sectioned off with curtains or in a different room, and they require ID
• Some of the dealers sell inappropriate artwork. If it's a dealer selling primarily erotic stuff, just avoid their table entirely. Usually, it's a mixture, with one artist selling both adult and general audience art. They usually separate the adult-only stuff into a separate binder or area, or if not that, they put stickers over the offending parts of the art
• Most con goers have a hotel room, and occasionally they will have a small party in their rooms. This is usually discouraged by the con staff to avoid disturbing the other hotel guests. If anything inappropriate activities were to happen, they would probably happen in some hotel room without the knowledge or approval of the con itself

Also, most con goers do not wear fursuits. From what I saw there are at least five to ten times as many people not wearing fursuits than those that do. Much more common are people wearing tails or ears, and more recently, themed hats. I actually felt a little out of place with my polo shirt and jeans.

It's been way too long since the last podcast! In this episode (which was not done as a live video stream), I talk about the hacking incident, the restoration process, news since last time, and some upcoming developments. Enjoy!

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Show Notes

I asked my local GameStop for the Star Fox Command promotional standie when they were done with it. They said yes, and it's been sitting safely in my closet ever since, or more specifically, my closet back home at my parent's house. I've moved out since then and don't have room for it. This standie is absolutely free to anyone who wants it, so long as you can pick it up.

It would destroy it to disassemble it for shipping, that's why you must pick it up in person. It's located near Shreveport, Louisiana. Depending on how far away you are, I will consider driving half the distance to you.

If you are interested, just email me.

Some students at the Ringling College of Art and Design created a Star Fox inspired scene in the Unreal Development Kit, a game engine. It shows fly-through of the Great Fox and the launch of an Arwing showcasing their knowledge of UDK. Some on the internet have speculated that a Star Fox game on the Wii U might look like this. The platform is certainly capable of similar quality graphics. Unreal Engine 3 does in fact run on the Wii U.

In related news, there is a Star Fox Animated Short Film in the works by a mystery animator named Joe. Starfox-Online.net has all the details that are available.

I attempted to upgrade to the latest Wordpress, but something's wrong with it. I think I switched too early. The site's fine, all the data and pages are here. Something's wrong with the administration. I might have to downgrade or fix something tomorrow. Sorry for the outages earlier tonight.

Update: And everything fixed itself...? Everything seems fine now. Not sure why, the code's the same. Maybe it was an external issue. As you were!

Why is this not a real thing?!

Lego: Starfox by WesTalbott

Somehow I missed this when I posted that hour of Dinosaur Planet footage. IOnEI Falcon has a site called Rare Minion where he collects and displays a huge amount of information on Rare games. He has somehow obtained a ridiculous amount of details on the story and background of Dinosaur Planet. Just look at the info in that image! That's just half of one page on Krystal. There are many pages and pages of documents on his site. I haven't even had time to read them all.

I've spoken with IOnEI Falcon yesterday, and he has allowed the archiving of his information here. Just like I'm doing with some of my Star Fox assets, I will be making a Dinosaur Planet Archive when I'm finished restoring the Krystal Archive. I already have permission to post the content of celebi23's Dinosaur Planet Media Archive, which also contains a bunch of new information.

With the research obtained last weekend, I was able to reclaim data from after the hack, including the posts, comments, and edits to pages made between January and March 2012. Kat the Leopardess is assisting me in modernizing old posts (fixing links, changing how we do YouTube embeds, etc). I added the YouTube hiding technique code to the Podcast page as well, so it takes less time to load. And with all the progress I've made restoring pages to the site recently, we may have the site fully operational in a very short time.

Sorry for such a delay getting everything back together. This has been a very busy year for me. It's still busy. It's just that I've learned some key techniques at my job as a game programmer that allows me to do more work more efficiently.

The Video section has been restored! I've cleaned up the display so videos are easy to view without being too intrusive. As with the Audio section, the content is divided up by game.

I found several new videos of Dinosaur Planet (and am working on getting permission to post them here directly). You will find links to those new videos on the Dinosaur Planet Videos page.

Back in 2010, when I was still co-owner of Starfox-Online.net, I finally got around to posting all of the voice acting files I found in the source code of Star Fox Adventures. It took a long time because I wrote out all the subtitles for every single file! That's 730 sets of dialog, folks!

While the files are still on Starfox-Online, they are no longer in an easily consumable format. So, for historical/archival reasons, I'm making them available here. I put these up because someone was asking about them. I still have tons of other Star Fox-related stuff that's not specifically Krystal-related. Once the KA has been fully restored, I will organize and upload those Star Fox things too.