From: gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us (Gary S. Trujillo)
Subject: OOBE discussion group name
Summary: oops on oobe?
Date: Wed, 22 Jul 1992 16:54:15 GMT

Since creating the alt.oobe newsgroup earlier today, I've received a
couple of messages saying it would have been better to have discussed
the name of the group in alt.config.

My control message that created alt.oobe contained the comment:

> Creating new newsgroup to discuss Out-Of-Body-Experiences, as agreed to
> by a goodly number of participants in alt.dreams.

The first message I received today reads:

| And if you'd mentioned it in alt.config, we could have suggested a better
| name instead of just ignoring your request of of hand.
| 1/2 :-)

And the second says:

| 	It would have been nice if you had discussed this in alt.config.
| alt.oobe is perhaps the worst possible name you could have chosen.
|
| 	alt.dreams.oobe would at least have been an attempt at a proper
| name.  alt.dreams.out-of-body would have been even better.

What do others feel?  Now that it's done, I suppose we might as well leave
alt.oobe in place - but I suggest the first order of business should be to
talk about the name some more.  (I wasn't aware of the protocol of discussing
the name in alt.config, so I apologize to those who feel that I have violated
that protocol.)  If there is a strong majority opinion to call the newsgroup
something else, we can destroy alt.oobe and create a new newsgroup to replace
it.

My suggestion is that all articles about renaming take place in alt.oobe and
alt.config (please cross-post your articles), but not in alt.dreams.  Any-
thing about the subject of OOBEs should be cross-posted to alt.dreams, both
for reasons stated in my earlier article, and so that if we do make a switch
at some point, articles will not get lost during the transition.

Now - about the name itself.  I got a call this morning from someone who
thanked me for creating the newsgroup and who said he feels that a name of
alt.dreams.<anything> would not be good, since it would characterize the
experience as being somehow related to dreaming.  I agree, for reasons
related to what we discussed before about not using the "astral-projection"
name, which would characterize the experience.

For me, then, the choice is among alt.oobe, alt.obe, and alt.out-of-body.
As stated before, I prefer alt.oobe over alt.obe since the first term, used
by some authors on the subject (such as University of California professor
Charles T. Tart, who wrote the foreword to Robert Monroe's _Journeys_Out_of_
_the_Body_) can be pronounced ("oobey").  I would accept alt.out-of-body,
and think it has the advantage of being more descriptive than alt.oobe or
alt.obe, but it's more of a hassle to type, and, since it's more than four-
teen characters in length, the name would be truncated by sites running
"notesfiles" rather than some flavor of Usenet news (I'm thinking especially
of the IGC/APC systems (PeaceNet/EcoNet, and affiliates like GreenNet, Web,
Pegasus, etc)).  Well, I guess "alt.out-of-bod" isn't all that bad.  :-)

However, I wonder just *how much* more descriptive "alt.out-of-body" is than
"alt.oobe."  There may be people who have heard the term "out of body exper-
ience" who have not come across the acronym "OOBE," but I suspect they are
fewer in number than those who have heard of neither one.  Yes, perhaps the
term "out-of-body" is more intriguing than "oobe" to someone who knows of
neither.

What do others feel?  I hope we can get this matter settled quickly.  Sorry
for having "jumped the gun," folks.

Gary
--
    Gary S. Trujillo                            gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us
Somerville, Massachusetts              {wjh12,bu.edu,spdcc,ima,cdp}!gnosys!gst