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Tuesday, November 18, 2008

One of the things I would love to be able to do is to bring all the archival news from the BearPress and Bear-Pics days over here to PlanetBears. I have thousands of HTML pages filled with news articles, and almost all the articles have a thumbnail photo accompanying it. I have so many logos and drawings from Bear groups and websites after 10 years of news, it feels like a shame that I don't have all of this stuff online. It almost feels like I have a touch of Bear history in my archives, something that should be made available to all to peruse. If anyone knows how to easily convert HTML into data, maybe this could be a reality. Email me if you're interested in assisting me in this project.

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Tuesday, April 29, 2008

I can remember the evening I was sitting down at a bar with the prez of the now defunct Bears of Montreal... it was late November '98... and I decided then and there that I wanted to run a news site for Bears ~ however I didn't know the first thing about HTML. Well the prez referred me to another Bears of Montreal member, one who was running their site at the time. This is how I met François, aka Pugsley.

We started working together in Dec '98 on a site known as BearPress. Well, to make a long story short, we were just not compatible when it came to work. Pugsley was busy with a lot of projects, so we never got around to actually building that site together. In March,  we parted ways and I picked up a couple of HTML books and built BearPress on my own.

Altho we weren't able to work together, we were able to remain friends over the years. And in 2005, Pugsley was working on many different Bearish projects, one of them being the 1st ever Montreal Bear run. We took this opportunity to model him in and out of his t-shirts, and these photos are the result. I never posted these pics before... and for the life of me I don't know why, but never know matter, here they are. They are no nudes... and again I'm not sure why we didn't do any nudes because François has done nudes with others... but there are some light bondage pics so that kind of makes up for the lack of nudity.

What is Pugsley up to these days? To be honest, I'm not really sure. He was running several Bear sites but none of them are up at the present time. I'm sure he's working on something tho - François was never one to idle his time away.

For a preview - click here, and members go here to see the sets of photos in the gallery section.

Read more here.

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Monday, January 14, 2008

I'm not sure whether reflecting on the past is good or bad but I've been recently thinking on how much the net has completely changed since I started surfing in 1994. So many sites I used to visit religiously just one day no longer existed, but since this is the net, nobody really seems to care about the death of a site since there are just so many other sites available. There's never any time to mourn the webpages that have fallen through the cracks.

Whatever reasons why these sites no longer exist vary: either those who made these sites didn't have the time to work on them anymore, or they've lost interest, or the site got too big, or they past away as was the case with Bear Quay (which was the very first directory for Bear sites) run by the late Dave Hooker.

Since I've been doing Bear news for almost 9 years now, I could mention a myriad of sites that no longer exist, but there's no point in mentioning them all. Still, it's hard not to be a little sad nor a tad nostalgic when remembering some favourite sites that are now 'resting in peace'.

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Thursday, December 27, 2007

You are just not a complete man without visiting The Complete Bear (TubeBear ProProfile). You will be - as they state - 'a Bear in the know' with tips for your sex life, how to survive the dating scene, which runs to attend and an incredible shopping section with some truly unique and well made goods. There's also a great newsletter called Chewin' The Fat which "is here to help. It is designed to supply you with informative, useful, and practical articles twice a month on a different aspect of Bear life. Whether it is love, fashion, fitness, dating, travel, and yes even sex, our newsletter covers it all. We want to provide as many tools as possible to be your Beary best. Whatever it takes to complete the Bear".

Lastly, make sure to head on over to their Bear Bones blog and get your votes in for the Best of the Bears for 2007. Unfortunately neither TubeBear nor PlanetBears were nominated, but there's a ton of great sites, authors, musicians, artists, mags, videos, etc., to vote for so make sure to get email them since the voting ends on December 31st.