As the winner of the March edition of the BVWSC, I was duty-bound to send soap smushes to my fellow shavers across the pond. Alas, as I am writing this, there is no legal and/or financially viable way of getting soap samples (or any letter, for that matter) from France to the USA.
Therefore, the BVWSC in its current form is dead. There has also been a notable decrease in interest, so maybe this is just the right opportunity to say farewell.
On the other hand, we might find a way of continuing the community event, but in a different form. Our go-to has been the Tabac edition – which seems to be the only type of gear every self-hatingrespecting wetshaver has. Or we could do something else.
So, what shall we do?
I’m a noob. I’ve participated several times and nominated once. I haven’t had the pleasure of winning the vote. I think it’s a neat idea and this feels more like a community to me than reddit or disco.
As someone who has benefited but not really contributed yet, I don’t think I have a lot of sway.
Thinking of similar situations, if we were at the bar and buying rounds, I owe y’all a couple of rounds at least.
I’m up for whatever (pause or reconfigure later) – just don’t break up the band. :)
As a newcomer to this community (and wetshaving as a whole) I have basically no idea what the BVWSC is all about. Up until today I thought it was only for people living in or near Buena Vista. Is there some post or wiki where I can learn more about what this is?
For the name: we started our live on the fediverse at the mastodon instance wetshaving.social, and with the Buena Vista Social Club, we simply spliced in the “Wetshaving”. Voilà.
For the idea behind: we are the fruit of the great reddit diaspora two years ago, and several of us (at least in the beginning) continued posting on reddit, but we didn’t get much traction from people coming over to us. So the idea was that we would create an event that would get people interested, and that they would come over. It didn’t work out quite as imagined…
When we starting this Fediverse stuff a couple of years ago, someone came up with the idea of having a monthly “event” since we are such a small community. A lot of us crosspost our shaves to other places like Reddit and Discord chats, so the hope was also to bring attention to the existence of the shaving fediverse.
And so, we started the BVWSC. Every month everyone who wanted to participate nominated a soap from their den. Then everyone would vote, and the winner would prepare close to 10 smushes and send them around the world. We’d all shave with the same soap on the 3rd Wednesday of the month.
I liked the idea of BVWSC very much and assumed that participation would grow as redditors, and others, observed the activity and would want to participate. As that happened, I also thought we would have to move away from one person providing all of the smushes. I know that we all have done this multiple times, and with such a small group, it really isn’t an imposition to create and distribute smushes, but it would be if there were 20 people or more participating each month.
For a while, I’ve thought that maybe we could submit soap ideas, vote, then choose the most popular entry that we could distribute on as local a basis as possible. For example, if I owned Tundra Artica, I would be happy to send out smushes to the US recipients. Unfortunately, while I have a sizeable investment in SV products, I don’t own TA. (80th is terrific, btw.)
I like trying the soaps along with others in this group and, let’s face it, the name BVWSC is cool. I hope we find a way to keep this going.
I also enjoy this way of discovering new soaps – and yes, BVWSC is indeed cool.
The problem for the moment is that it is impossible to get things into the US. I believe getting things out is not the problem. One possibility would be for the moment, if you tolerate me as a parasite hanger-on, and allow nominations just for you guys from the US, and once/if postal services have gone back to normal (in 150 days/after the midterms/2028/???), I am in charge for a couple of rounds…
I’m certainly willing to do this.
A couple ideas:
- Pause BVWSC for now and resume with the same format when shipping is less fucky, and only meet quarterly.
- We all vote on a tub and split it amongst participants for use on meeting days.
- Something else?
I do really enjoy the event. It’s been a great way to try new soaps and bases, and it feels like a low stakes event that makes this place feel a bit more like a community.
Interest has been down though, for sure.
Speaking for myself - I was starting to get burned out on the BVWSC which is surprising because it was only once a month. With the added global challenges I agree that maybe it’s time to put a pause on it.
