Burning Man is HELL

[ericbarbour]

Proof? it's been raining on that stupid dry lake for 2 days and will rain some more tomorrow. Never happened before.

The BM management has shut down the exits (under orders from the federal government!) and are telling people to "shelter in place, conserve food and water, don't travel". The result is seen on their webcam, which has been going up and down today. It looks like a hellscape to me. People disconsolately wandering around in random directions, most of the displays are shut down, bikes and cars are stuck in the mud. Lookit all these pathetic millennial suckers. Some of them paid tens of thousands of dollars to attend. Yet another cult operation for fools.

https://burningman.org/live-Webcast/

https://www.rgj.com/story/life/arts/bur ... 749751007/

[suckadmin]

it rained the one year I went and it is worse than the sand storms because it becomes nearly impossible to move around. You quickly find yourself walking on platform shoes made of mud and bike chains are quickly seized up by the extremely acidic clay that covers everything

[ericbarbour]

The man burned yesterday (I guess?) so today they start to break up the encampment.

But it's now starting to come out that people suffered chemical burns from the highly alkaline mud.....and the organizers knew it would happen...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/darreonnad ... val-chaos/

[suckadmin]

But it's now starting to come out that people suffered chemical burns from the highly alkaline mud.....and the organizers knew it would happen...

Well I'd be really surprised if this is the first and only time that's happened

[ericbarbour]

Well I'd be really surprised if this is the first and only time that's happened

It's not. When they first moved BM to Black Rock in 1990, they held it in June. Then discovered that OOPS it can sometimes rain in June, then you get instant mud lake. So they moved it to August/September because (supposedly!) northern Nevada doesn't have a late-summer monsoon season like southwest deserts and it will remain dry for a few months. And for 30 years they were right, except for one or two passing minor storms that made short-lived mud.

This year was either the "extreme outlier", or climate change. Maybe both. Either way, Black Rock is an ugly nasty place, and BMers are fools to go there any time of the year.

A small kicker: the Burning Man Foundation bought the nearby Fly Ranch a few years ago. It has a large dry lake, where they could have their stupid party and do whatever idiocy they like. They did it there once before, in 1997, because the BLM was objecting to the mess early BMs left behind.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/9avb9a/ ... ave-ghetto

But NOOOOO. They won't have BM on their OWN land. They will keep having it on BLM land, because they damn well know how ruinous and CO2 generative their own stupid festival really is. Plus at Black Rock they don't have to file permits with Washoe County, which REALLY doesn't like Burning Man festivals. I'm guessing that sucking up to the BLM is easier and cheaper.

Instead they call the ranch a "nature reserve", and make noises about "sustainability". While also begging for donations and volunteers. It's a cult--basically little different from Wikimedia.

It's also hypocritical to call the ranch a "nature reserve". Ranchers made a mess of it long ago. The famous geyser only exists because the owner tried to drill a well there in 1916, and hit a pocket of superheated water. Someone tried again in 1964 and created an even bigger mess. And now it's a "tourist attraction".

I'm gonna keep calling it BM because also means "bowel movement". Feel compelled.

[SkepticalHistorian]

It’s not He’ll unless someone moves a generator next to your campsite. Someone died a few years ago when they went to sleep in their carwith the AC on and it sucked in carbon monoxide.

It’s not He’ll, it’s overcrowded, hard to find a good campsite location. I used to camp near all the sound camps on the 10:00 edge as close as I could get to the open playa.

Like the United States, population there doubled (maybe tripled) since my first trip to That Thing in the Desert. Used to be easy to get a ticket and the artwork was spectacular, I walked everywhere and now Center Camp is dead.

[ericbarbour]

In years past, those who didn't get tickets in the initial sale had to work all their connections to find a spare one. With regular-priced $575 tickets vanishingly rare, some threw down $2,750 to secure their spot. But this summer, a surprising number of tickets were being offered for below face value on social media.

After Hilary drenched the site, Burning Man build employees and volunteers paused what they were doing and waited it out inside their RVs, only venturing out to use the porta-potties. By Wednesday, August 23, the playa was dry and the gates had reopened to camp builders, who rushed in to frantically erect shade structures, DJ booths, bars, and art installations.

Climate protesters blocked the one road into the festival by chaining themselves to a 28-foot-long trailer across the road, demanding that the Org ban unlimited generator use and single-use plastic and shut down the temporary private airport in Black Rock City that serves the jets of elite Burners. But the protest barely registered for most attendees. (Massive traffic jams in and out of the city are completely normal.) “​​They think they’re going to fix climate change by blocking Burning Man? I don’t care what their argument is, they can go fuck themselves,” one attendee told The Guardian.The trailer was scooched to the side so cars could get around. Then a Pyramid Lake Paiute tribal ranger, shouting obscenities, rammed his truck into the blockade and the protesters were arrested. (The ranger’s conduct came under review.) Burners continued to stream into Black Rock City.

The rain had accomplished what the protest had not: shutting down the airport. Even the wealthiest Burners were unable to arrange for their comfortable extraction. The DJ Diplo (commonly believed, on social media and the group chats I’m in, to be the most annoying human on the playa) was among the first of the elites to leave on Saturday, September 2, hiking an estimated 6 miles in three hours out with Chris Rock and getting picked up by a fan with a truck while igniting a media frenzy with his posts to Instagram. False rumors circulated on social media that Ebola had shown up and the National Guard had been called.

And ever since the Org banned camps from renting out bikes on the playa, the number of trashed bikes left behind has exploded.

“We talk about it a lot,” says Bob, a lead for a large camp who works in sustainability in the real world. (Bob is not his real name; he requested anonymity because he fears retaliation against his camp from the Org.) “It's really hard to ignore the smell of all the generators, it's really hard to ignore all of the waste that the whole thing produces, and it's just getting worse and worse because more people want AC.”

“What the Org is missing is some big long-term strategies,” Bob says. “Asking every camp to self-generate power means you're going to have a lot of carbon cost.” The smaller the generator, the less efficient it is. “But there's just no vision. There's so much politics internally. They're just not a functioning organization.” The Burning Man Organization didn’t respond to requests for comment.

And on and on and on.....

https://www.wired.com/story/the-end-of- ... ts-future/

[ericbarbour]

and I'm not the only one bitching

Burning Man is so “Brave New World” in the way it is run, and so many of its flaky participants are annoying in a way that makes me somewhat embarrassed these days to admit to outsiders that I’m a “burner.” I guess all the Kool-Aid I’ve been drinking over the past three decades finally went sour.

https://thebolditalic.com/why-im-breaki ... e43bb5c9c5

[Strelnikov]

And on and on and on.....

https://www.wired.com/story/the-end-of- ... ts-future/

Crap like Burning Man was part of the arty early '90s that Wired emerged from, which if why they've written a War and Peace-sized article on it -- their editors or founders still probably go. Early Wired was shot through with this idea that computers, IT, and computer-derivative technology should be arty and not clunky like the Wintel clone market was in the late 1980s. Instead Burning Man became this Tech Bro/rich dumbfuck hangout. It should have been this moving thing from one desert to another in a circle at sites that aren't dry lakebeds, because any Southwesterner will tell you that it might not rain often inland (and you keep track of when it rained last at a location) but when it does.....that's when the flash-flooding happens.

[ericbarbour]

Crap like Burning Man was part of the arty early '90s that Wired emerged from, which if why they've written a War and Peace-sized article on it -- their editors or founders still probably go. Early Wired was shot through with this idea that computers, IT, and computer-derivative technology should be arty and not clunky like the Wintel clone market was in the late 1980s.

God, I could (but really shouldn't, they deserve no more free publicity) write a long and ranty textbook about the failings of WIRED, Kevin Kelly, and his annoying pseudo-intellectual friends like Ray Kurzweil, Cory Doctorow and Paul Saffo. "Cyberculture" started as a religious movement and morphed into the techbrodude money-grabbing scam. If these assholes had not been "prominent thinkers" in the 90s, pushing their hokey "visions of the cyberfuture", we would NOT be saddled today with cryptocurrencies, Burning Man, Facebook, Google, unreadable cyberpunk novels, and Elon Musk. WIRED carries a lot of polluted water for bad actors. (And probably will deny it aggressively.)