Rugged Outdoorsmen
The chat's first known name. Set by [[Matt]] on **2020-08-13** in the lead-up to the inaugural August 28-30 group **camping trip** — the foundational event of the chat's first six weeks and the proximate cause of [[Matt O.]]'s removal.
Rugged Outdoorsmen
The chat's first known name. Set by Matt on 2020-08-13 in the lead-up to the inaugural August 28-30 group camping trip — the foundational event of the chat's first six weeks and the proximate cause of Matt O.'s removal.
Rugged Outdoorsmen (also rendered Rugged Outdoorsmen with a trailing space, the form preserved in chat.db) is the chat's earliest documented name. It was set by Matt on 2020-08-13 at 14:22 UTC, six weeks after the chat's first message and 15 days before the camping trip it was named in honor of.
Origin
The chat was effectively founded by Kyle Derrick on 2020-07-07, with his first message — "Any of you interested in trying to go camping 7/24? I am thinking that spot we just went to on MR good" — establishing both the seven-month-old chat's purpose (group camping coordination) and its unbroken tradition of typing MR Hood for Mt. Hood. The trip was rescheduled three weeks later for Kyle's birthday weekend:
"Trying to setup camping again for my bday. Thinking near Detroit lake this time. 8/28-8/30. Interests?" — Kyle Derrick, 2020-07-30
By 2020-08-12 the trip had been confirmed, with the chat collectively settling on a dispersed campsite near Detroit Lake. Matt set the Rugged Outdoorsmen name the following day. Kyle Derrick acknowledged the rename in real time:
"Just noticed the rename on the group Matt, 👍" — Kyle Derrick, 2020-08-14
This is the chat's only documented case of a member explicitly thanking another member for a rename.
The "Pregnant wives" line
The trip's pre-departure planning produced what is, in editorial consensus, the canonical statement of the chat's mid-2020 vibe:
"Apparently our pregnant wives liked us camping better" — Matt, 2020-08-12
Jen (Matt's wife) was carrying Dame and Alice (Daniel's wife) was carrying Bruce at the time; both children were born within months of the trip. The line is preserved as the encyclopedia's preferred summary of the chat's August 2020 demographic moment.
The Matt O. removal
The Rugged Outdoorsmen rename comes eight days before Kyle Derrick removes Matt O. from the chat — the only documented case of a member being kicked in the chat's six-year history. The two events are related: Kyle's pre-trip logistical thread on 2020-08-21 ("We all still in except Matt O?") is followed within hours by the kick message ("Matt o, I am gonna drop you from this convo so as not to bother you with unneeded texts. If you can swing coming hit me up."). See Matt O. for the full removal record.
The trip itself (August 28-30, 2020)
The chat's August 28-30 camping trip is the foundational shared experience of the surviving membership. The corpus's references to it across subsequent years have established it as a kind of constitutional moment:
- "That reminds of when we were camping and that women showed her pussy in response to Evan showing his penis" — Kyle Derrick, 2022-11-08, citing the trip more than two years later as a load-bearing precedent.
- "Wives don't approve of a house due to covid but we bring a boot camping" — Cullen Conway, 2020-08-26, the immediate pre-trip logistical statement that the trip's existence at all is contingent on a creative reading of pandemic-era social-bubble logic.
- "This is no longer a camping trip we are going to gulag Dan" — Matt, 2020-08-26, the era's most-quoted single line and the basis of the long-running joke that the trip exists to test Daniel Miller's tolerance.
- "Well I know some of you dudes were taking about having anal fissures when we were camping" — Kyle Derrick, 2020-12-08, citing the trip's medical-symptomatology side discussion four months after the fact.
Era statistics
- Duration: 9 days
- Successor: Gay Frogs and their Lizard Brides (2020-08-22, set by Unknown — see Matt O. for the editorial best-guess attribution).
- Predecessor: None (the chat had no formal name from 2020-07-07 through 2020-08-12).