It’s time for Degenerate Fat Bear Week, the week where we degenerately gamble and talk shit on the results of an anonymous online poll! (for charity)
Katmai National Park in Alaska has a lot of bears in it. Every year they put a bunch of bears into a bracket, and everyone on the internet can vote for who they think is the fattest. We gamble on the results of this anonymous online voting, because we are degenerates. This year you can see the bracket here:
Different people use different criteria to judge the fattest bear: some people think it’s whichever bear has the highest end weight, some think it’s whichever bear gained the most weight from the start of the season to the end. Some people just vote based on name. We don’t really care why or how people vote, we just care about who wins.
If you’ve ever filled out a sports bracket before, exactly the same way. A correct fat bear the first round is worth one point, the second round is worth two points, the third round is worth four points, and the champ is worth 8 points. Highest total score at the end wins. An example is provided below.
This is not gambling for money, this is gambling for charity. The person with the highest bracket score picks a charity, and everyone who submitted a bracket donates at least $20 to this charity.
Then donate to another charity, or don’t donate. We’re not the cops, and it’s gambling on the results of an internet poll.
Sure, go for it. I will be.
You fill out a bracket any way you want, as long as it’s unambiguous later. Once you have it filled out, reply to this gist with a hash, tweet it, or PM me on any platform. For an example, here is my 2020 entry:
https://twitter.com/yrp604/status/1309654750086926337
It corresponds to the hash of this image bracket:
And here it is scored:
https://twitter.com/yrp604/status/1313694511608995841
Official voting opens October 4th at 9am pacific so all brackets should be completed by then. If you want to enter late you’re welcome to, however you may not get points for fat bear decisions that happened prior to you entering
- https://katmai-bearcams.fandom.com/wiki/Katmai_Bearcams_Wiki
- https://explore.org/fat-bear-week
- https://www.nps.gov/katm/learn/fat-bear-week.htm
A bunch of us in irc just decided it’d be fun to gamble and talk shit about each other’s bear selections. Fat bear is an entirely dumb-but-entertaining yearly event at this point to us. Much of the fun comes from talking to your friends about their dumb bear selections as well as making fat bear memes. That’s it.
