The Old Man at Burning Man. "When I mentioned to friends that I was going to Burning Man with my 69-year-old father, 'Good idea' were the words out of no one's mouth."
posted by zarq
on Feb 9, 2013 -
65 comments
Burning Man sold out for the first time in its history last year, marking another painful
evolutionary event and, in the process, attracting
scammers and scalpers who violated the dearly-held Burner tradition of selling tickets for no greater than face value.
In an effort to thwart scammers and scalpers this year,
The Burning Man Project replaced the event's long-standing first-come-first-served web-based ticketing system with a controversial new
lottery system to distribute the first 43,000 tickets at random. Prior to ticket registration, the system required entrants to fill out the
Burning Man 2012 Tickets Main Sale Participant Survey, which asked, among other things, how many years the respondent had attended Burning Man.
"(Don't worry, your answers will in NO WAY affect your likelihood of receiving tickets.)"
When stalwart mega-camps like
Deathguild,
Disorient and
Opulent Temple came to realize that a disproportionately small number of their members were awarded tickets,
one Burner smelled a rat and created an
informal survey to test his hypothesis that the survey did indeed affect one's likelihood of receiving tickets.
His survey is
beginning to show an inversely proportional relationship between those who have previously attended the event and those who were awarded tickets.
This, combined with the description of
this year's theme, Fertility 2.0, is leading some Burners to wonder whether these are indications that
Larry Harvey has tipped
his hat to his most insidious prank yet: "killing off" Burning Man's faithful and its intelligentsia, like the love child of Jim Jones and Joseph Stalin, to make room for an all-new Burning Man populated by wide-eyed Virgins.
[more inside]
posted by eatyourlunch
on Feb 2, 2012 -
111 comments
Before it was a website, Ask A Mathematician / Ask A Physicist was two guys sitting in the desert at Burning Man, presuming to answer (almost) any question that happened to occur to whomever happened to appear at our stand. [more inside]
posted by Obscure Reference
on Aug 27, 2011 -
42 comments
Sure, you've heard of
Burning Man, that art festival/intentional community/temporary autonomous zone thing in the desert, but did you know that it has spawned a host of events called
regional burns? As the name implies, these are smaller and mainly draw a local crowd; they operate under a charter from the Burning Man organization and all abide by its
Ten Principles. Most are in North America, but they have crossed the pond with
Nowhere in Spain.
[more inside]
posted by adamrice
on May 16, 2010 -
46 comments
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published a
criticism of Burning Man, LLC's
Terms and Conditions, saying that the automatic rights assignment to BMOrg for photos & video taken during the event is "creative lawyering intended to allow the BMO to use the streamlined “notice and takedown” process enshrined in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to quickly remove photos from the Internet" and that this is corrosive to our freedom of speech. Burning Man
responds.
posted by scalefree
on Aug 14, 2009 -
123 comments
Founded in Berkeley by artist
Jim Mason,
The Shipyard, a collaborative industrial arts space constructed from recycled shipping containers, has hosted numerous large-scale projects and events including a
Survival Research Labs show,
Power Tool Drag Races,
gassification experiments and workshops, and various large-scale Burning Man projects such as 2005's
Clockworks. Short documentary
here (quicktime). However, relations with the city of Berkeley have been consistently
tense. Recently, the city shut off the Shipyard's power, to which the Shipyard responded by going
off grid. On May 8, Berkeley issued 3-day vacate and abate notice, with which the Shipyard is
attempting to
comply (auto-playing video).
posted by treepour
on May 15, 2007 -
8 comments
'Girls Gone Wild' goes to Burning Man. The denizens of Black Rock City get pissed; Voyeur Video tries to save face. "Instead of stopping the sale, Voyeur changed the festival's name on its Web site, the suit alleges, to "Rainbow Fire Festival," but kept the description.
("Rainbow Fire Festival is all running around naked
and exposing yourself in front of your peers," the Web
site now reads.)" Lord help me, why do I find this all really, really
funny?
posted by maura
on Aug 28, 2002 -
64 comments
Reasons not to bring a dog to Burning Man. Find-and-replace "Burning Man" with "Manhattan." Replace the bit about the alkali with comments about cramped shelter and lack of green space. Add to the comments about the undue heat so they also refer to snow and cold. Now you've pretty much mirrored my thoughts on why it's unfair to for selfish humans to have large dogs in Manhattan.
Link circuitously via Memepool.
posted by Mo Nickels
on Sep 2, 2001 -
12 comments
Bianca's is shutting down. One of the oldest community sites on the web is going away. It's been kept alive for so long through the hard work, passion, and sheer enthusiasm of the founders and volunteers who cared about the site. You
Burning Man participants take heart though, Bianca's will most likely still continue on as a
theme camp.
Bianca loves you.
posted by captaincursor
on Apr 27, 2001 -
10 comments
Eat your heart out, Burning Man... Allahabad may become the world's largest city for the next six weeks. It's expected that at least 20 million people will attend the Kumbh, but numbers could rise to
70 million. Wow.
posted by holgate
on Jan 7, 2001 -
10 comments
Burning Man. Does anyone really care anymore? It always seemed like a bogus 'artsy' version of Spring Break to me. Plus it pisses me off that a bunch of rampaging fools trash a perfectly good desert.
posted by Mr. skullhead
on Sep 2, 2000 -
5 comments
