As of today, I still have not received the smush from @[email protected], and this Wednesday is the last one in March. So, what do we do?

Option 1: We drop the club shave for March, and if we still receive the smushes, maybe convene twice in April.

Option 2: We shave with a soap we all have. We discussed this issue briefly on Free Talk Friday, and the only soap that has a chance to be the common denominator is Tabac. However, I don't know whether everybody here has it, and whether you would be interested in shaving with it in the first place.

Opinions?

It is time again to prepare for the Buena Vista Wetshaving Social Club April edition, which will take place on April 16. Nominate your soap here!

For those new here: we choose a soap, the lucky proponent sends smushes out to all participants, and we all shave with the same soap on the 3rd Wednesday of the month. If you want to join: simply nominate a soap, and vote for a winner!

Proposal thread remains open until Sunday March 2, 22:30 CET (whatever that is where you live).

It's time again!

• Grab your smush (mandatory)
• Heat up your scuttle (optional)
• Hone your razor (optional)
• Moisten your brush (strongly recommended)

It is time to prep again! Please nominate your soaps for the March edition by commenting below.

This thread closes on January 31st, 23:00 Central European Time.

Prepare your smush, and choose your brush wisely!

Thanks to the newly acquired logging capacity of sotd.el (the oldest SOTD plugin for any reasonable^TM^ editor I am aware of), I've been logging every shave this year, and I thought: why not inflict the data on you?

I shaved 231 times in 2024 (roughly every 1.5 days). The move from reddit to lemmy coincides with a switch to straights – straight razors dominated my routine in 2024 (64.5%), though I still used my DE razors (22.5%) [though mostly when not at home], and occasionally I used GEM (9.5%) or AC (3.5%). If this continues, I will never again have to buy new blades. My brush collection splits between horse (45%), boar (32%), and synthetic (22.9%).

Let's go into the details, shall we?

Razors

My top five razors are straights, and it appears that I have somewhere a Friodur that I've forgotten to use.

Brushes

2024 was once again dominated by the Semogue C3 horse brush. Greatly recommended!

Lather

Trivia

I had Claude explain the chi-squared test to me and apply it to my data. It turns out that the Blaireau de la République has become dedicated to Zingari Man soaps (a value of 100.40 with one degree of freedom, highly significant, p>>0.001).

I killed three soaps (Autumn Ash, Schafmilch and Marduk), and bought three others – which is net neutral overall (yay!). I unfortunately was less disciplined with razor purchases.

The BVWSC shaves allowed me to get to know several artisans that were unknown to me, and some impressed me highly. I did not yet jump the gun, though, and my thoughts for purchases are rather geared towards what I could possibly propose as not-so-well-known soaps for the club.

In 2025, one aim is to improve my honing skills – which yield as of yet rather unpredictable outcomes.

Thank you for attending my TED Talk!

It's high time we got started again for our February meeting! Nominate your soap here!

You have until Saturday 4th January, 18:30 CET.

Prepare your samples and get ready!

You should be able to vote now - the address should be available at the BVWSC community.

I hope that I did everything correctly - if not, let me know what the problem is.

It's time to prep for next year!

Nominate here your soap(s) for the Buena Vista Wetshaving Social Club January 2025 edition, which will take place on January 15!

This thread will remain open 48h, that is, until Wednesday 4, 14:00 CET (or whatever time that is in in your timezone).

Now that everybody has digested somewhat their voting trauma, it is time to reopen the wounds. 😱

The voting procedure for the BVWSC consisted up to now in me simply winging it, but last month, I didn't wing it correctly, and dukkha ensued. First, I got trigger happy and announced a winner when some important members (ahem @[email protected] ahem) had not yet voted. In order to prevent this from ever happening again, what I would like to propose is that we formalize a bit more the process, in the sense that there should be some fixed amount of time (48 hours?) for each of the soap nomination thread and the voting thread, and that a winner can be announced only after this time.

Second, there is potentially an issue with the voting procedure and count. What I have done so far is to allot a number of points which is inverse to the rank you proposed. That is, assuming three proposed soaps, the soap ranked first gets 3 points, the soap ranked 2nd get 2 points, and the soap ranked 3rd gets 1 point. Then, I simply add up these points, and announce the winner. This is similar to a Borda count (which I didn't know, but you can read up here and more in detail here. Borda counts are unproblematic as long as every voter ranks every soap - which has not been the case in the last vote, and which may have cost Westman Shaving's Noir the victory. @[email protected] suggested that someone who did not rank all soaps should be counted as attributing some points to the soaps he did not vote for. That is, assuming our example with 3 soaps, someone who ranked only one soap (which therefore gets 3 points) should also be counted as attributing in the end some points to the other two soaps. I see Dave's point, and am sympathetic to it, but I don't know exactly what would be the best formula.

The easiest method in that spirit would be that the unranked soaps get to share the points that could have been, but have not been, attributed (which would make 1.5 points for each remaining soap - which could also be rounded down to 1 point?). Alternatively, we could also require that any voter provide a full ranking. Any opinion on these proposals, or idea or other proposals how to better implement something similar, but better?

I don't have any intrinsic preference, other than I would like to have a method that can be easily implemented in a spreadsheet (by me, without much knowledge of spreadsheets).

Thank you in advance for your input, and if you have any other complaints/proposals/questions about the process or BVWSC more in general, please feel free to do so.

¡Compañeros afeitadores!

This is just to remind you that Wednesday is this day - prepare your Oro Valley!