Exactly why can't a Dom have a collar?

[cfuhrer]

Do you judge books by covers, too?

I see that illustration as an apples and oranges comparison.

Typically the ring itself is meant to act as a symbol of a union between two committed partners. I am a little undereducated on collars but depending on other social signals given by the wearer I would assume the collar to be a symbol of a lifestyle choice of one sort or another.

Cover art on books is meant to draw the potential readers attention and purchase dollar, not necessarily to symbolise what is inside the book.

But that is just my observation and opinion.

 

[A Desert Rose]

*gasp* You don't wear underwear?

You perv.

Well, okay... I wear panties to work. Otherwise, sans panties for me. ;-)

What're the odds, neither do I! We'll change together....


Err... at the same time, I mean.

Unless you want to change together.

If I get to pick, then let's change together, at the same time.

LOL

 

[jadefirefly]

Well, okay... I wear panties to work. Otherwise, sans panties for me. ;-)




If I get to pick, then let's change together, at the same time.

LOL

WOOHOO!!

Sounds like fun

 

[Evil_Geoff]

Hmmmmm... A Dom wearing a collar....

I wrote a rather lengthy reply, but I want to do more research before I post on this one. I'll be going to some of my "traditional leather culture" friends on this one...

 

[chris9]

I have not read through the whole thread, so I'm sorry if I repeat anything said before.
I do see a collar as a sign of a submissive, and if it appears in an AV I'm going to assume the person is submissive. Just like I assume on their gender based on the name and AV. And I believe we all have erred in that respect before.
Now, if a Dominant chooses to wear a collar, I think it's strange, but I can accept is as maybe tradition seen differently in other parts.
As the collar has been compared to wedding rings before I want to say that in Germany the wedding ring is worn on the right hand. So if I wear a ring on my left hand, it does not mean I'm married, even though in most other countries it would be seen as such. If people keep asking me if I'm married, and I get to understand that to them ring on left hand means marriage, I can either take off the ring, change the finger (not the hand, because I would not want to wear a ring on my 'wedding finger' if it's not a wedding ring), or live with explaining that in Germany it's different. I would not get mad at people assuming me married, if that's what it signifies to them. I would get mad at people telling me I'm wrong with wearing a symbolic ring on a symbolic finger that's NOT symbolic in my part of the world.

 

[RJMasters]

I agree with what Catillina said in the beginning of this thread.

However, going on from there. I would say if you want to wear a leather collar, then do it. Just don't be niave enough to think your not going to be sterotypically judged for doing so and don't mind the snickers of those who sit on the sidelines and watch you rage against the machine while toting the snake flag..."don't tread on me".

I just think you need to realize from a perspective view that symbolism carries with it meaning. If you walk down to Comptom in Paramount Ca. and wear a KKK hood and then try to convince that black community that your just exercising your personal expression and the hood doesn't mean what they think it means. Don't be surprised if they start shooting at you and tell you that the bullets don't really mean what they really mean either.

 

[Netzach]

If ignoring someone who is oblivious to long standing tradition is treating them like 'dog shit', then yes. If and when that person wakes up and behaves properly, I'd be more than happy to reevaluate my perception and decide if they are someone I would be interested in getting to know.



Yes, it is wrong.

Yes, it harms others. It harms those who are trying to learn the proper way to live the lifestyle. No, not My version of what is proper, rather what is the accepted norm across the board with those who are serious about this lifestyle, as opposed to those who think it's some kind of game.




If your collar makes you happy, and is accepted by your Dominant, more power to you. Makes no difference to Me if it is fuzzy or leather.

Don't be so damned uptight that you'd actually base a final judgement about someone based off their attire. Yes, Mac will have to deal with the people who assume on first sight. That's his choice, he'll have to make that decision. It's your decision to decide if you're just going to shrug and say "Huh, that's different" and then get to know HIM, or if you're just going to blow him off with a "Dom's don't wear collars, asshole, go learn something before you try to be one of us."

Just because you've never seen it before, doesn't mean it can't exist. Trying opening that mind a little bit.



I have a number of very good friends who are goth, their attire doesn't effect My perception of them one way or the other. A few of them are also involved in the lifestyle, the difference is they know and respect what is acceptable and what is not. A Dominant wearing a collar is not acceptable, they know it, accept that, and don't do it.



I am sick of people not respecting traditions that are widely accepted and practiced. A collar has significance. A collar is a symbol of submission and ownership. There are many who stive to wear a collar, in the true sense, and never reach that goal. There are many who strive to give a collar, in the true sense, and never reach that goal.

Personally, I am insulted by the people who are diluting the meaning of a collar. Wearing it as a 'fashion statement', or to 'be different', takes away from what a collar really stands for. Not so much for those of us who know what it should mean, but for those who are newer and have not learned what a collar truly signifies.

For those who are into "how it was and therefore should be"

I have looked at professional Domination and fetish periodicals hearkening back to Old Guard era. I mean like, mid 70's.

The FemDoms in the media often sported neck corsets, neck pieces and things that are for damn sure collar like, barring the absence of *rings* on them. More so back in the halcyon days of "leather done right" than now.

 

[WriterDom]

I don't care what anyone wears. A Dom could wear a pink sun dress and it wouldn't upset me.

I wouldn't wear a collar in public or private. That's just me. All symbolism aside, a collar to me is also something I use in play. They come in handy in a number of ways.

 

[BeachGurl2]

It was a joke, doll. Sorry, you don't understand me.

sigh...



(edited so I could put the a's back in.)

I thought you might be joking but wasn't sure. No worries.

 

[catalina_francisco]

I have not read through the whole thread, so I'm sorry if I repeat anything said before.
I do see a collar as a sign of a submissive, and if it appears in an AV I'm going to assume the person is submissive. Just like I assume on their gender based on the name and AV. And I believe we all have erred in that respect before.
Now, if a Dominant chooses to wear a collar, I think it's strange, but I can accept is as maybe tradition seen differently in other parts.
As the collar has been compared to wedding rings before I want to say that in Germany the wedding ring is worn on the right hand. So if I wear a ring on my left hand, it does not mean I'm married, even though in most other countries it would be seen as such. If people keep asking me if I'm married, and I get to understand that to them ring on left hand means marriage, I can either take off the ring, change the finger (not the hand, because I would not want to wear a ring on my 'wedding finger' if it's not a wedding ring), or live with explaining that in Germany it's different. I would not get mad at people assuming me married, if that's what it signifies to them. I would get mad at people telling me I'm wrong with wearing a symbolic ring on a symbolic finger that's NOT symbolic in my part of the world.

LOL, you are not alone...The Netherlands also uses the right hand, though I notice now some choose the left hand for a wedding band so I figure a wedding type ring on that finger on either hand more than likely means they are married. It is trendy for some to try and rock conventions, but I tend to think you need to be able to take whatever comes out of that, as well as choose conventions and traditions that perhaps need to be changed such as in gay, racial and women's rights. Doing otherwise just ends up confusing a lot of people, detracting from what some see as very special symbolism and meaning, and eradicating all forms of communication that doesn't entail a long list of disclaimers and explanations before conversation can even begin.

Catalina

 

[graceanne]

You know, when my sister was in hte middle of divorcing her husband she wore a cheap ring on her wedding finger, cause she'd had a ring their for so long she missed it.

My best friend and her fiancee of 5 years just broke up. She wears a different ring on that finger, to help her get over the breakup.

Some jewelry company is advertising rings for single women and one of the things they say is 'why should only married women get to wear diamonds on that finger . . . this ring, cause you deserve it'.

 

[catalina_francisco]

For those who are into "how it was and therefore should be"

I have looked at professional Domination and fetish periodicals hearkening back to Old Guard era. I mean like, mid 70's.

The FemDoms in the media often sported neck corsets, neck pieces and things that are for damn sure collar like, barring the absence of *rings* on them. More so back in the halcyon days of "leather done right" than now.

That may be so Netzach, but as I said earlier, the only places I had ever seen it was in media/porn publications which to me often represents a fantasy more than a reality of what D/s is to the average person. You have mentioned just such publications and professional services which though they may have a place, often play a part for the fantasist more so than what is really happening outside that world of commercial purpose. Talking to subs who have been customers of ProDommes has only further verified that what they pay for and what they want in a realtime, no cash based D/s relationship, are 2 different pictures in terms of dress, setting, services etc.

Catalina

 

[catalina_francisco]

You know, when my sister was in hte middle of divorcing her husband she wore a cheap ring on her wedding finger, cause she'd had a ring their for so long she missed it.

My best friend and her fiancee of 5 years just broke up. She wears a different ring on that finger, to help her get over the breakup.

Some jewelry company is advertising rings for single women and one of the things they say is 'why should only married women get to wear diamonds on that finger . . . this ring, cause you deserve it'.

LOL, good advertising ploy which buys into our modern society view that anything can be bought, nothing has to be earned or worked for, and perhaps why 70% of the US is in debt up to their eyeballs and still buying more in the belief they can ignore it and it will go away without ever being paid for. We have created a disposable society which resembles the antics of 2-3 yo's throwing tantrums when they can't get what they want...only it consists of adults!!

Catalina

 

[graceanne]

LOL, good advertising ploy which buys into our modern society view that anything can be bought, nothing has to be earned or worked for, and perhaps why 70% of the US is in debt up to their eyeballs and still buying more in the belief they can ignore it and it will go away without ever being paid for. We have created a disposable society which resembles the antics of 2-3 yo's throwing tantrums when they can't get what they want...only it consists of adults!!

Catalina

Actually that's why I remember the commercial, cause it was very clever and a smart way to advertise it. lol Advertisers amuse me, with their reverse psychology and all that. I saw that commercial and though 'huh, bet diamond sales go up'.

And you're preaching to the choir about debt and all that. I'm in debt, but that's cause of medical bills. And that leads into another subject you dont' want to get me started on.

 

[Randy_Random]

I hate to disagree but I find it hard to believe that polka is making a comeback.

 

[@}-}rebecca----]

A collar is something I am unlikely to ever wear again. I will resist the wearing of one until such time I feel I have made a genuine commitment on my own quite stringent terms . To what I forsee as an indefinite D/s relationship. A collar worn to mark ownership represents something of huge significance to me.

Having said that I don't project my own somewhat 'extreme' terms of reference/criteria onto others. Just to clarify thats not to say that I devalue traditions within the D/s Community either just that I don't see myself as the 'gatekeeper'.

If you wear one as a fashion statement its simply a 'fashion collar'. Look at the punk/heavy metal/goth average wardrobe as has been cited earlier . Also something I wouldn't wear , most are 'not a good look' as far as I am concerned.

So I am no ones favorite 'girl' on this topic I can see a little sense on all sides of the dialogue taking place. There have been some excellent points made in several different contexts on this Thread. I have enjoyed the opportunity to consider perceptions outside of mine own to date.

I still don't understand entirely why a Dominant would wear a collar with the knowledge of what it generally portrays but I'll get over it........smiles. Out of sight , out of mind I guess.

 

[Netzach]

That may be so Netzach, but as I said earlier, the only places I had ever seen it was in media/porn publications which to me often represents a fantasy more than a reality of what D/s is to the average person. You have mentioned just such publications and professional services which though they may have a place, often play a part for the fantasist more so than what is really happening outside that world of commercial purpose. Talking to subs who have been customers of ProDommes has only further verified that what they pay for and what they want in a realtime, no cash based D/s relationship, are 2 different pictures in terms of dress, setting, services etc.

Catalina

I'm talking about the 70's and early 80's per sources who were there.

At the very beginning of the existence of TES.

There were no fancy codes of dress for the heterosexuals because they mostly were not invited. They were doing either extremely private SM, involved with the professional FemDom scene, or bumping elbows with Gay Leather *rarely* and only with a ton of underground street cred.

There was no "lifestyle community" as we now enjoy. The professional scene and the gay leather scene were more or less where it was for any kind of fetish activity. T

hose "glossy fantasy magazines" were the contact magazines that even allowed perverts to encounter one another at all, so saying the tone they set had no bearing on real BDSM is preposterous.

 

[Guest]

I've seen people come into the dungeon pulling wheeled suitcases of toys behind them, taking half and hour or more to setup their equipment, and then spend most of the evening watching to see who's checking them out. I've also seen people come in with a duffle bag, setup their gear and get going on their playtime without any concern for who might be around. And then there was the woman who came in alone in a cheap walmart dog collar, sat in a corner all night and just watched things. Who am I to judge who or what any of them were? But what do I know anyway?



I often wonder how many of them have ever even heard of BDSM. To most of them, it's just a fashion statement.

Kind of sad really.... Didn't anyone go over and talk to her?

As for the collar... *shrug* It's a bit of a convention... Like the rings etc all that stuff that gets mentioned in knee jerk reaction..

Wear it at a Fetish gathering it "might" cause a misunderstanding (depending on other factors of course).
Wear it at a Goth/Industrial club and you won't get a second look..

As for the response ...LOL!!
There are no more conventional people than those that struggle against convention.

 

[AngelicAssassin]

i found a little "Perl" looking for traditions on wedding ring wear

from Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution.

Diligence, Patience, and Humility
Larry Wall

We have a fondness for sayings in the Perl community. One of them is "There's more than one way to do it." This is true in Perl. It's also true of Perl. And it's true of the Open Source community, as the essays in this volume illustrate. I won't tell you everything about how Open Source works; that would be like trying to explain why English works. But I can say something about the state of Perl, and where it's going.

Here's another saying: Three great virtues of programming are laziness, impatience, and hubris. Great Perl programmers embrace those virtues. So do Open Source developers. But here I'm going to talk about some other virtues: diligence, patience, and humility. If you think these sound like the opposite, you're right. If you think a single community can't embrace opposing values, then you should spend more time with Perl. After all, there's more than one way to do it.

Written languages probably began with impatience. Or laziness. Without written language, you had to meet another person face to face to communicate with them, or you had to persuade another person to convey your message for you. And there was no way to know what had previously been said except to remember it. But written language gave people symbols, symbols that could stand for things--if the community could agree on what the symbols stood for. So language requires consensus. It's something a group can agree on. It is, in short, a symbol that ties a community together. Most symbols work that way.

So let's look at some symbols:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ose.01.gif​

Study it carefully. It's called a circle. It's a very nice circle, as circles go. Very pretty. Very symmetrical. Very simple.

Now if you're a reductionist, you'll say it's only a circle, and nothing more. Well, actually, if you're really a reductionist, you'll say it's a just bunch of photons, but we won't go there, because it wouldn't shed any light on the subject.

If you're not a reductionist, then the circle you see here does not exist in isolation. It exists in relationship to many other things, and in fact takes its meaning from them. In order to understand this simple circle, you have to understand its context, which means you have to understand something about reality.

So here's a picture of reality:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ose.02.gif​

As we all know, reality is a mess.

This is a picture of many things. It's a picture of air molecules bouncing around. It's a picture of the economy. It's a picture of all the relationships of the people in this room. It's a picture of what the typical human language looks like. It's a picture of your company's information systems. It's a picture of the World Wide Web. It's a picture of chaos, and of complexity.

It's certainly a picture of how Perl is organized, since Perl is modeled on human languages. And the reason human languages are complex is because they have to deal with reality.

We all have to deal with reality one way or another. So we simplify. Often we oversimplify.

Our ancestors oversimplified. They fooled themselves into thinking that God only created circles and spheres. They thought God would always prefer simplicity over complexity. When they discovered that reality was more complicated than they thought, they just swept the complexity under a carpet of epicycles. That is, they created unnecessary complexity. This is an important point. The universe is complex, but it's usefully complex.

Evidence abounds that people continue to oversimplify today. Some people prefer to oversimplify their cosmology. Others prefer to oversimplify their theology. Many computer language designers oversimplify their languages, and end up sweeping the universe's complexity under the carpet of the programmer.

It's a natural human trait to look for patterns in the noise, but when we look for those patterns, sometimes we see patterns that aren't really there. But that doesn't mean there aren't real patterns. If we can find a magic wand to suppress the noise, then the signal pops right out. Abracadabra . . . Here is the shape of the big bang, and of stars, and of soap bubbles:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ose.03.gif​

Here is the shape of dimensionality, of salt crystals, and the spaces between tree trunks:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ose.04.gif​

Here is the shape of an anthill, or a Christmas tree. Or the shape of a trinity:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ose.05.gif​

And, of course, once you know the patterns are there, you can pick out the simple figures without the extra chromatic help:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ose.06.gif​

 

[AngelicAssassin]

from Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution.

Diligence, Patience, and Humility
Larry Wall

...

Now, you may be wondering what all this has to do with Perl. The fact is, your brain is built to do Perl programming. You

have a deep desire to turn the complex into the simple, and Perl is just another tool to help you do that--just as I am using

English right now to try to simplify reality. I can use English for that because English is a mess.

This is important, and a little hard to understand. English is useful because it's a mess. Since English is a mess, it maps

well onto the problem space, which is also a mess, which we call reality. Similarly, Perl was designed to be a mess (though

in the nicest of possible ways).

This is counterintuitive, so let me explain. If you've been educated as any kind of an engineer, it has been pounded into

your skull that great engineering is simple engineering. We are taught to admire suspension bridges more than railroad

trestles. We are taught to value simplicity and beauty. That's nice. I like circles too.

However, complexity is not always the enemy. What's important is not simplicity or complexity, but how you bridge the two.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ose.07.gif​

You need a certain amount of complexity to do any particular job. A Saturn V rocket is said to have had seven million parts,

all of which had to work. But that's not entirely true. Many of those parts were redundant. But that redundancy was

absolutely necessary to achieve the goal of putting someone on the moon in 1969. So if some of those rocket parts had the job

of being redundant, then each of those parts still had to do their part. So to speak. They also serve who only stand and

wait.

We betray ourselves when we say "That's redundant," meaning "That's useless." Redundancy is not always "redundant," whether

you're talking about rockets or human languages or computer languages. In short, simplicity is often the enemy of success.

Suppose I want to take over the world. Simplicity says I should just take over the world by myself. But the reality of the

situation is that I need your help to take over the world, and you're all very complex. I actually consider that a feature.

Your relationships are even more complex. I usually think of those as features. But sometimes they're bugs. We can debug

relationships, but it's always good policy to consider the people themselves to be features. People get annoyed when you try

to debug them.

We mentioned that some complexity is useless, and some is useful. Here's another example of useful complexity:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ose.08.gif​

Now, most of you sitting here are probably prejudiced in favor of western writing systems, and so you think an ideographic

writing system is needlessly complex. You may even be thinking that this picture is as complicated as the previous one. But

again, it's a kind of engineering tradeoff. In this case, the Chinese have traded learnability for portability. Does that

sound familiar?

Chinese is not, in fact, a single language. It's about five major languages, any of which are mutually unintelligible. And

yet, you can write Chinese in one language and read it in another. That's what I call a portable language. By choosing a

higher level of abstraction, the Chinese writing system optimizes for communication rather than for simplicity. There are a

billion people in China who can't all talk to each other, but at least they can pass notes to each other.

Computers also like to pass notes to each other. Only we call it networking.

A lot of my thinking this year has been influenced by working with Unicode and with XML. Ten years ago, Perl was good at text

processing. It's even better at it now, for the old definition of text. But the definition of "text" has been changing out

from under Perl over those ten years.

You can blame it all on the Internet.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ose.09.gif​

It seems that when you click buttons on your browser, it makes computers want to pass notes to each other. And they want to

pass these notes over cultural boundaries. Just as you want to understand what pops up on your screen, your computer wants to

understand what it's about to pop up on your screen, because, believe it or not, the computer would actually like to do it

right. Computers may be stupid, but they're always obedient. Well, almost always.

That's where Unicode and XML come in. Unicode is just a set of universal ideographs so that the world's computers can pass

notes around to each other, and have some chance of doing the right thing with them. Some of the ideographs in Unicode happen

to match up with various national character sets such as ASCII, but nobody in the world will ever learn all of those

languages. Nobody is expecting you to learn all those languages. That's not the point.

Here's the point. Last month I was working on my church's web page. Our church has just started a Chinese congregation, so it

now has two names, one of which can be represented in ASCII, and one of which cannot. Here's what the page looks like:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ose.10.gif​

If your browser is fairly recent, and if you have a Unicode font loaded, then this is what you see. There's something

important I want you to notice here.

If I'd done this a year ago, this block of Chinese characters would probably have been a GIF image. But there's a problem

with images. You can't cut and paste characters from a GIF image. I've tried it often enough to know, and I'm sure you have

too. If I'd done this a year ago, I'd also have had to add another layer of complexity to the page. I'd need something like a

CGI script to detect whether the browser supports Unicode, because if it doesn't, these characters splatter garbage all over

the page. Garbage is usually construed as useless complexity.

 

[AngelicAssassin]

from Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution.

Diligence, Patience, and Humility
Larry Wall

...

Anyway, back to simplicity:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ose.11.gif​

We use circles to represent many things. Our circle of friends. A hug, when written on the back of an envelope. The circle of a wedding ring, which stands for unending love.

Proceeding from the sublime to the ridiculous, we also have the round file, which is a kind of hell for dead paperwork.

Spheres of light. Black holes. Or at least their event horizons.

One ring to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ose.12.gif​

Crystal balls. Pearls.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ose.13.gif​

Onions. Pearl onions.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ose.14.gif​

Circles figure heavily in our symbology. And in particular, by adding various appurtenances to circles, we sometimes represent some rather complicated notions with simple symbols. These symbols are the bridges between simplicity and complexity.

Here's a real Zen diagram:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ose.15.gif​

Well, actually, it's not. In fact, the yinyang comes from the Tao, or Dao if you can't pronounce an unaspirated "t". The Tao is an ancient oriental philosophy, and predates Zen by more than a millennium.

 

[AngelicAssassin]

from Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution.

Diligence, Patience, and Humility
Larry Wall

...

Anyway, back to yins and yangs.

The yinyang represents a dualistic philosophy, much like The Force in Star Wars. You know, how is The Force like duct tape? Answer: it has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together. I'm not a dualist myself, because I believe the light is stronger than the darkness. Nevertheless, the concept of balanced forces is useful at times, especially to engineers. When an engineer wants to balance forces, and wants them to stay balanced, he reaches for the duct tape.

When I made this yinyang, I wondered whether I was doing it right. It'd be a shame to get it backwards, or sideways, or something.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ose.16.gif​

Well, you know, sometimes that sort of thing matters. It matters a lot to organic chemists, who call it chirality--if you take a molecule of spearmint flavor and flip it left for right, you end up with a molecule of caraway flavor. Yuck. I used to think I hated rye bread, till I discovered it was the caraway seeds they put in that I didn't like.

Now, which of those flavors you prefer is just a matter of taste, but doctors and organic chemists will tell you that there are times when chirality is a matter of life and death. Or of deformed limbs, in the case of Thalidomide. It was the "wrong" kind of Thalidomide that actually caused the problems. Dyslexics will tell you that chirality matters a lot in visual symbols. This talk is brought to you by the letters "b" and "d". And "p" and "q". And the number 6. Not to mention the number 9. You can see a 6 and a 9 in the yinyang, in this orientation.

In short, I wondered whether the yinyang is like a swastika, where which way you make it determines who gets mad at you.

So I did some research, on the Web, of course. The fact is, the Web is the perfect example of TMTOWTDI--there's more than one way to do it. In this case, there's every way to do it. You can find the yinyang in every possible orientation. I still don't know whether any of them is more right than the others.

A TYEDYE WORLD is some folks on the Web who sell tie-dyed tee shirts. I guess they'd be Tao-dyed in this case. They think it looks like this:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ose.17.gif​

I suppose if you want it the other way you just put the shirt on inside-out. Putting it on upside-down is going to get you stared at.

The folks at the Unicode consortium think it looks like this. I don't know if they're right, but if they're not, it doesn't matter. They published it this way, and now it's right by definition.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ose.18.gif​

Of course, my dictionary has it upside from that:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ose.19.gif​

 

[AngelicAssassin]

from Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution.

Diligence, Patience, and Humility
Larry Wall


Well, back to Unicode. Unicode is full of circles. Many national scripts within Unicode make use of the circle, and in most of those, it represents the digit 0. Here is Unicode number 3007 (hex). It's the ideographic symbol for 0:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ose.20.gif​

Surprise, surprise. It looks like our 0. Chalk one up for cultural imperialism. In English, of course, we tend to squish our 0 sideways to distinguish it from the letter O.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ose.21.gif​

In Bengali, they squish it the other way, but for similar reasons:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ose.22.gif​

I find it interesting that the world has so many different representations for nothing. One could make endless jokes on it: Much ado about nothing, or Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come. Here's something related to nothing:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ose.23.gif​

This is the universal "prohibited" symbol. In Unicode, it's classified as a combining character.

Of course, in Perl culture, almost nothing is prohibited. My feeling is that the rest of the world already has plenty of perfectly good prohibitions, so why invent more? That applies not just to programming, but also to interpersonal relationships, by the way. I have upon more than one occasion been requested to eject someone from the Perl community, generally for being offensive in some fashion or other. So far I have consistently refused. I believe this is the right policy. At least, it's worked so far, on a practical level. Either the offensive person has left eventually of their own accord, or they've settled down and learned to deal with others more constructively. It's odd. People understand instinctively that the best way for computer programs to communicate with each other is for each of the them to be strict in what they emit, and liberal in what they accept. The odd thing is that people themselves are not willing to be strict in how they speak and liberal in how they listen. You'd think that would also be obvious. Instead, we're taught to express ourselves.

 

[AngelicAssassin]

from Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution.

Diligence, Patience, and Humility
Larry Wall


On the other hand, we try to encourage certain virtues in the Perl community. As the apostle Paul points out, nobody makes laws against love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, meekness, or self-control. So rather than concentrating on forbidding evil, let's concentrate on promoting good. Here's the Unicode for that:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ose.24.gif​

Of course, if you're a flower child, you might prefer this one:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ose.25.gif​

Some of the positive Unicodes aren't so obvious.

Here's the symbol for a bilabial click, one of the symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet. You may not know it, but many of you make this noise regularly. If you want to try doing one, here's how. You just kind of put your lips together, then make an affricated sort of noise with ingressive mouth air.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ose.26.gif​

Of course, in English we write that with an X, to go with those O's on the back of the envelope. But you're witnessing the passing of an era. What with email taking over, sending hugs and kisses on the backs of envelopes is becoming a lost art. It just doesn't have quite the same effect as a header line in email. Content-type: text/hugs&kisses.

You know, it's also rather difficult to perfume an email message. Content-type: text/scented. The mind boggles.

Here are more simple circles that represent complicated things. Here's the symbol for earth:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ose.27.gif​

Here's the symbol for Mars:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ose.28.gif​

And here's the symbol for Venus:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ose.29.gif​

Now, I used to work at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and I helped just a little to discover that Mars and Venus are pretty complicated. But as if things weren't complicated enough, the ancients complicated things further by overloading those symbols to represent male and female. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, we are told, but that is not a new idea.

 

[AngelicAssassin]

from Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution.

Diligence, Patience, and Humility
Larry Wall

...

Here's some more history.

If you cut an onion, it looks like this. If we take this to be a picture of the world of Perl, then I must be that little bit of onion inside.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ose.30.gif​

Around me are some of the early adopters of Perl, who are now revered as heroes of the revolution. As more people have joined the movement, new layers have been added. You can also picture this as an atom, with layers of electron shells. Of course, no atom we know of has quite that many electron shells. So stick with the onion.

Now the thing about the onion is that it teaches me something about my own importance, or lack thereof. Namely, that while I may have started all this, I'm still a little bit of the onion. Most of the mass is in the outer layers. (That's why I like to see grassroots movements like the Perl Mongers springing up.) But here I sit in the middle. I get a bit of honor for my historical significance, but in actual fact, most people see the outside of the onion, not the inside. Unless they make onion rings. But even then, the bigger rings have more to them than the smaller rings. Let that be a lesson to those of you who wish to be "inner ringers." That's not where the real power is. Not in this movement, anyway. I've tried to model the Perl movement on another movement I'm a member of, and the founder of that movement said, "He who wishes to be greatest among you must become the servant of all." Of his twelve inner ringers, one betrayed him, and ten of the other eleven went on to suffer a martyr's death. Not that I'm asking any of my friends to throw themselves to the lions just yet.

But back to growth patterns. Natural pearls grow in layers too, around a grain of sand that irritates the oyster in question, which forms layers of pretty stuff. This could be the cross-section of a pearl. People cut up onions frequently, but they almost never cut up pearls. So it's even truer of pearls than of onions. The outer layer is the most important. It's what people see. Or if the pearl is still growing, it's the layer that will support the layer after it. I realize that that classifies me as a mere irritant. I am content to be so classified.

Other things grow over time too. Perhaps if we change the picture to a set of tree rings, it'll be clearer:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ose.31.gif​

If you're familiar with a bit of physics, you know that a pipe is almost as strong as a solid bar of the same diameter, because most of the force is transmitted in the outer layers. The fact is, the center of the tree can rot, but the tree remains perfectly healthy. In a similar fashion, most of the health of Perl culture is in what is happening in the periphery, not in the center. People are saving themselves billions of dollars every year by programming in Perl, but most of those savings are happening out in the trenches. Even closer into the center, a lot more work is going into hooking Perl up to other things than into changing Perl itself. And I think this is as it should be. Core Perl is stabilizing somewhat. Even with core changes such as multithreading and Unicode support, we pretend that we're adding extension modules, because that's cleaner, and people don't have to invoke the new functionality if they don't want to.

All this stuff about growth rings is fine for talking about the past, but what about the future? I don't have a crystal ball. I do own two pairs of binoculars. Here's the typical symbol for that:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ose.32.gif​

This is, of course, the usual cinematic device for indicating that someone is looking through binoculars. I don't know offhand what I should put for the field of view here, so let's see what's at the other end of the binoculars:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ose.33.gif​

Of course, this can also be a picture of two tidally locked bodies rotating around each other:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ose.34.gif​

Each of these planets is raising tides on the other one. People usually understand why there is a tidal bulge on the side facing the other planet. What they don't understand so easily is why there's a bulge on the other side of the planet. But it makes sense when you consider that the other planet is not only pulling the near bulge away from the center of the planet, but it's also pulling the center of the planet away from the far bulge.

This is a really good picture of the relationship of the free software community with the commercial software community. We might even label some of the extremes. Let's just make up some names. We could call the left extreme, um, "Richard." And we could call the right extreme something like, oh, "Bill."

The middle bulges are a little harder to name, but just for today we can call this one on the middle left "Larry," and that one on the middle right "Tim."

This is, of course, another oversimplification, because various people and organizations aren't at a single spot in the diagram, but tend to rattle around. Some people manage to oscillate back and forth from one bulge to the other. One moment they're in favor of more cooperation between the freeware and commercial communities, and the next moment they're vilifying anything commercial. At least our hypothetical Richard and Bill are consistent.