Oregon Trail LARPers are weird.

[sabotabby]

Strongly support this raw water trend. There are too many rich assholes driving regular people to ruin or exile in Silicon Valley. This should hopefully thin the herd a little and make rentals affordable for working folk so that they don't need to sleep in tents while their billionaire bosses get rich off their labour. Now the rich assholes can die of dysentery and Burning Man will get cool again.

Comments

[the_siobhan]

I seriously read that entire article with my mouth hanging open.

These are all people who grew up in cities, right? Who don't know what your pure local spring smells like when the farmer upstream finishes spreading manure on his field in the spring.

[sabotabby]

I saw it earlier and ignored it because I thought it was an Onion headline.

I can only imagine they grew up not just in cities, but without the benefit of any sort of science or history education, which is probably also why they think libertarianism is a good idea.

[minoanmiss]

This causes me pain in my biology degree.

[sabotabby]

Hahaha. I'm sorry.

[minoanmiss]

You're not the idiot rejecting basic sanitation! And you totoally deserve to cackle at them.

[mistersmearcase]

Sometimes I'm curious about smaller Burning Man knockoffs, which do exist, but...I dunno. It's probably not for me in a bunch of ways, but the core idea of stepping outside norms, while overstated into a kind of gross teenage libertarian bullshit fountain, is a little bit interesting to me.

Also raw water lulz. Silicon Valley, you do not disappoint.

[sabotabby]

I really wanted to go to Burning Man back in the day. I hear there's a good local burn around here which is free of the teenage libertarian bullshit fountain, but I've never been. I enjoy lighting things on fire, cool maker stuff, music, even camping. But I do not want to spend all the moneys to hang out with techbros.

[mistersmearcase]

And Grover Norquist! Honestly here I just feel like I'd be hanging out with the people I'm thankful mostly don't live in Oakland who everyone's glad when they leave for a week in the summer. We toyed with trying to go, the first year we were here, but what put me over the edge was someone telling me "uh, I don't think you'd like it. How do you feel about very loud EDM literally all night?" Staying home with the cats is how I feel about that.

[ltmurnau]

I went for five years consecutively, 2002-07.
I think you've seen my accounts and reviews on Livejournal.
I stopped going because it was getting too big, with too many people who didn't Get It and because it was getting too much like work (though I was happy to work on the newspaper we made out there and contribute, I couldn't have walked around as a spectator for five years).
That was ten years ago... no way would I go now, far too big and expensive of full of people I would not want to meet anywhere, anywhen.
Larry Harvey's vision was that the big Event in the desert would split into many regional Burns, and they can be a lot of fun with the right people.
It might be a good idea to sound out the local Burners, monitor the chatter on their groups... you could make some good friends (I still have such friends, ten years down the road).

[sabotabby]

I know a few of them, which leads me to believe that they're probably full of good people in general. A lot of it is a time thing, too; I just don't have consecutive days in a row to do fun things that are new to me. But one of these days...