(This is a continuation of my earlier post First Two Days at Burning Man. The shoddy photo to the right is of illumination village where we stayed, our camp is just behind the big yellow shade structure at the front left. The thing on the right is the pink pleasure palace.)

Thursday

• Ice run with Serena
  • Stairway to Hairven girl in queue, taking a snip of everyone’s hair
  • Playa beautiful
• Trying to find people, fail and get lost
  • Suburban BRC, not the nicest place to be
  • Clara visits
• Greek salad, and emotionally overwhelmed while eating barbecued chicken
  

• Troll trip, set out looking for fancy dress clothes
  • Questionnaire in the dust storm at a table
  • Body sprayed (2 coats)
  • Post office, woman with stilts went inside it (didn’t really fit)
  • Delivered mail in dust storm, green post troll, went to three places:
  • – Bouncy Bouncy Club
  • – Heavenly something bar
  • – Wagasomething place, camp further round 7 o’clock
  • Took ages as given lots of drinks.
  • Back home, flag building
• Wondering neighbourhood
  • Climbing small scaffold
  • Talking to Kate by caravan, Geena in truck
  • Blacklight theatre
• Dinner
  • at Serena’s brothers, hippies
  • Back to illumination village propane music, firey hat etc.
  • Burning mini-temple, atmosphere felt like Nov 5th bonfire night
  • Cycling round playa, mad light view near man
  • Back to lost penguin

Friday

• Big breakfast and camp tidy
• Trip to the perimeter fence
• Tree of wisdom, philosophy, talking to Liz
• Temple
• Growing mushroom/egg things in the middle of the desert.
• Thunderdome (photo right)
• Scaffold viewing platform across village square, went out to climb
• Ended up invited to full Indian dinner with sides with town planning students from Berkeley
• Mission to Mars
  • A mad crazy maze thing with much trickery and a fireman’s pole
• Hitched lift really lame art vehicle bar, peddled it myself, really highly geared so it took forever to get anywhere. Great fun. Someone filming me wanted me to go back and do it again as they missed it for the cameras. Irritating.
• Chillout dome, lieing down in remote middle of Playa
• Rotoscope diver was working (powered by a moto)
• Space shuttle, got a lift back
• Went out round various places not recorded as I must have been knackered the next day
• Amazing robot
• (Animal capture anecdote)

Account of things degrades a bit from here.

The last week or two I’ve started working for mySociety, a new charity which builds websites which are civically useful. We’ve got funding indirectly from ODPM (Office of the Deputy Prime Minister) to build five interesting projects.

First up is Fax Your Representative (working title) which is an updated version of FaxYourMP. You enter your postcode to find out who all your elected representatives are at different levels of government, and their areas of responsibility. Then you can easily send your District Councillor, Welsh Assembly Member, London Assembly Member, County Councillor or whoever an email or fax. And you have a clue for the first time who they all are, previously very hard information to find out.

What’s the point of all this? It’s partly to use the internet to engage people, to give us all information and resources to help us influence and improve government. It’s also to make new ingenious web services which aren’t profitable, so no company will make them, and which are too hard for an individual unpaid volunteer to make. For example, Pledge Bank is a clever system which lets you say “I’ll do something if all you lot do as well” and follow it through.

I’m spending a bit over half my time working for them at the moment.

It’s hard to give a good feel for what Burning Man was like, since so much happens so quickly. Every line below is just a passing incident. Yet if it happened to you on a normal day, it’d be worth ringing up your best friend to tell them about it.

Each morning, after breakfast, I tried to write down every notable thing I’d seen the day before. I’m posting them up largely unedited, so it may not make sense, but should give you an impression. Here are the first two days.

Tuesday

• View of pyramid lake on the way in
  • Long straight roads
  • Sky, massive landscapes like a fantasy world. Such scope
• Dust storm as entering immigration
• Assembling parachute and lights and tents in the dark
• View of night lights on art car adventure like tron (photo above right)
  • Massive panarama unvailing sitting on back of propane instrument car as you zoom back out from the esplenade
  • Things everywhere, glowing flashing lights, colours, madness
• Strobe thing you pedal (the rotoscope one with sculptures)
• Discos at 2 o’clock (street and time ;)
  • walking round nearby looking at weird glowing things out slightly from into the desert
• Temple at end of playa
  • Solar powered bike/wing thing with huge wheel parked outside

Wednesday

• Making the kitchen
• Securing tent centre on ladder
• Beer wander (set out to get a beer from the next tent, and ended up:)
  • Dust storm while approaching the man, sheletered in the dome under him
  • Hiding from dust inside someone’s thesis
  • Lost penguin cabaret club, eating ice cream
• (Missed pizza and cocktails!)
• Ice mission
  • Unvolunteered from the centre camp cafe
  • Went to post office to volunteer, I think told to come back another time
  • Wheel that rolls with three people pedling inside it, thought it was static fairground ride to start with (picture right)
  • Sunset spectacular from sitting on a big swing platform thing in the process of being built by people speaking in Hebrew
• Flaming lotus girls perimeter duty
• Permiter partying, walked the whole circumference with Bob and James I think
  • Happy New Day party (with countdown, champagne and auld lang syne)
  • Tower at 3 o’clock plaza you could climb up
  • Maze of cardboard box walls, with a party inside it at the end
  • Spinning fluorescent tubes, in alien semaphore pattern