mindlace

A for effort, D for results

Burning Man was great this year, but nothing I tried to do worked. My dishwashing station fell over, and was only transformed into something functional by the graces of the portion of the FoodLab crew with actual skill in the construction of physical things. The evaporation system evaporated maybe 100 of the 400 gallons or so that went into it.

I also failed to have much of any social interaction with anyone who wasn’t in our village… par for the course, I suppose, but I should really either let people know that it’s not going to happen, or make more of an effort to hang with people.

Another take-home lesson for me was: don’t bring anything to the playa that other people depend on that hasn’t been fully tested prior to playa time, and preferrably nothing that hasn’t been through at least one burn in test mode.

Despite all that, I had a fantastic time. I especially enjoyed hanging out with Tom and the rest of the Crispy Tits crew. There were a number of other folks I had a good time interacting with, and I hope to participate in IGS again next year.

I have to admit in my “old age” I’m finding the community and building aspects of Burning Man more valuable than the boom-boom blinky-blinky aspects; I got to bed relatively early pretty much every night, and thus despite being bad about staying hydrated and working physically pretty hard nearly every day, I still felt pretty good when it was over. I suspect I will be something like this again next year, though I am not going to be directly responsible for any critical infrastructure.

The one kind-of depressing thing is that FoodLab ended up a few thousand dollars short, and as I was the money holder I feel at least responsible for the fact that I had claimed otherwise- not realizing how much people had spent- all the way up until the end. So another thing that I clearly should not be responsible for is having the money. Certainly it was absurd that I – who didn’t make it to the playa until monday – had the cash while those who needed to do key purchases on Sat/Sun did not. Not only did this make the problem a little worse (because people just spent what they felt needed to be spent, not what was in the budget), but we also incurred a few hundred dollars in finance charges to shuffle the money about.

Anyway, they say that the third time is the charm, so hopefully next year I will avoid these mistakes, and have a fully fuckup-free BM (or at least one with entirely new and different mistakes .