NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/soc/motss/48213

Internet Message Format | 1992-11-18 | 5.3 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!ogicse!das-news.harvard.edu!spdcc!rdonahue
From: [e-mail] (Bob Donahue)
Newsgroups: soc.motss
Subject: Re: Bear Crap
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 18 Nov 92 16:57:45 GMT
Article-I.D.: spdcc.1992Nov18.165745.17152
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Organization: insert anything here
Lines: 101

[e-mail] (Daniel Gilly) writes:
>[e-mail]     (Bob Donahue) writes:

>>I can think of two examples specifically that involve me:
>>whenever ANYone posts the NBCS to the net, I get hate mail from
>>people (and I mean pretty nasty stuff).  When I was working on
>>the motss survey II, I had the gall to include NBCS as a thing
>>to fill in - this started a flame war on why this was
>>inappropriate for a "motss" thing since it made speicific
>>refererence to "the bears".

>I'm sincerely curious about your intention in supplying
>the "bear codes" in the survey.  Is it OK for *anyone* use them?
>Is there a "party line" (among self-identified bears or among
>the larger soc.motss community) about this?

    Well, first off - who's to stop you?  :-)  I think
it's important to restate that the codes weren't written with
1) the intent to create a secret society where were could communicate
in public and no one would know... you know the magic glow-in-the-dark
decoder ring that comes with your Teddy Grahams.... or 2) with any
intent at all...  itreally happened spontaneously, at a Wendy's over
lunch... writing it up and posting it was more on the idea of
"hey you can pretty much describe people using this list of parameters...".

    Insofar as people want to "use" it - go for it.

>I assume that the codes are intended to identify someone as a
>bear -- either to other bears or to bear-friendly people.
>In this case, a non-bear using the codes would be intruding on
>bear "safe-space", n'est-ce pas?

    Anyone who would see it like that needs an attitude
adjustment, IMHO.  I mean it's not that serious - at least I
never took it that way... (really).  In fact I have received
e-mail over the couple of years from people "asking" if it was alright
to put an NBCS thing in their .sig file even though they didn't
consider themselves a bear...  I was floored, asking *me*
for permiision?????  I mean if it makes you happy, go for it.

    In the classification sense, I have always maintained that some
people who had no fur on their bods could still be bears by virtue
of the way they came across... at the same time, the codes were played out
to AVOID any prejudgment on "the proper definition of a bear"
(Free clue: there is none!)... so if you were tall, thin, hairless
but felt like a reincarnation of Smokey the bear, you were a B0 t+ w-.
I'm not going to argue with you.  If Marky Mark wants to deszcribe himself
with the NBCS, that's his perrogative...  (if he was the Soloflex
guy he might be the m++ poster-boy...).

>On the other hand, some time (about a year) ago, I seem to
>recall someone (Steve Dyer??) saying that the bear codes can
>in fact be used to describe anyone.  I don't know if he was
>being a mischievous devil's advocate or expressing his actual
>feelings, but this sounds like what you had in mind for the
>survey.

    Well, I won't speak for Steve (do you onotice when someone
says this they still go on to say something anyway?), but I'd hope
that he feels pretty miuch the same way - I mean what's the big deal?
Who could possibly care and if one did - isn't it their problem?

    Re: the survey - all I was trying to do was kill two brids with
one stone... while I  was compiling motss stats I figured I could
also sneak in a few bear stats along the way as a subset that I would
digestify to the BML...  I fugred (erroneously) that most people
who weren't bear-self-ID'd would just ignore them.  There was
no "demand" to fill in anything you didn't waent to.

>Do you encourage the general use of bear codes as a shorthand
>for describing people, a la Personals section, or should their
>use be reserved to identify bears?

    I don't think that question can be phrased with "or"?
Yes, I think it's a great shorthand, with proper calibration
(that was in my mind going to be V2.0 - made up of "standard" bears
to use as a comparison).  I think it would be sill y to expect any
"ownership" to exist, but at the same time it's sorta nice to have something
that is included in the bears community ythat isn't coo:pted.
By the same token, any other non-bear sub-community probably
has their own set of parameters, so the bearcodes might only cover
some things, and would be better off forging on their on.  While
the Smurf and Pig codes were done in jest in response to the NBCS,
they illustrate that quite clearly.


    Like I said it wasn't an intentional development.
And I'm surprised at how MUCH they took off!  And I admit the control
queen part of me takes over when I start seeing things like "f+++"
floating aoround (by definition only 2 or less +'s or -'s!, use
"!" for the most exemplary cases!), but mostly I don't pay much attention.

[somehow a line here got nuked]
>woefully non-bear codes of B0 w- h- f- ...; however, I think
>a lot of people harbor either ignorance or cautious sensitivity
>when it comes to the purpose of the codes.  Maybe someone
>could shed some light on this.

    I hope I have.

BBC