2024 Afterburner Report
In 1990 a small caravan of cars containing members of the Cacophony Society, together with Larry Harvey, and a truck with a wooden man in it, pulled off of Nevada 447 into the desert for the first time, and when they hit the dry lake bed we call playa, they stopped and got out to look around. Michael Mikel (Danger Ranger) said "I took a stick, and I drew a line on the ground, and I had everybody line up. And I said, 'On the other side of this line, everything will be different. Reality itself will change.' We all stepped across that line together, and things have been different."
That crossing-of-the-line-in-the-desert theme has been a significant touchstone of the Burning Man experience. Many of the greeters use it to greet burgins as they arrive on playa. It speaks to how Burning Man is a great transformational experience, not just a festival, or an event, or a city.
Klajdi Tsano's untitled art piece on playa this year, the first placed art by any Turtle, was deliberately lit only from one side and as such immediately creates a line in the desert so that when you step through the piece, everything is different. The work, like all good Burning Man art, invites you to participate and to contemplate what crossing a line means to you. What were you before? What are you now? "By amplifying this simple act of cutting, the installation seeks to evoke a sense of the sublime and the uncanny, prompting visitors to reflect on their own place within the vast desert landscape," Klajdi wrote.
Turtles hit their stride
This was, by all accounts, an easy year to do Burning Man.
Tickets were easy to get. The weather was great. Things just worked.
It was an especially easy year for us at the Future Turtles. In our third year back, after COVID, a lot of the things we've been putting in place in 2022 and 2023 have finally all come together to make a camp that is a pleasure to be a part of.
I've been having a little bit of trouble getting started on this Afterburner report. We spend 9,000 hours on playa collectively, and I can capture only a fraction of that in this inadequate report.
Reno Work Weekends
After last year's mudpocalypse the Future Turtles gathered twice in Reno and once in Empire, NV for work weekends to get our camp gear back into tip-top condition. We started early this year, in October, with a weekend spent going through our tents and bikes to make sure nothing was going to get moldy. Luckily we discovered that our on-playa attempts to dry everything out before putting it away worked great and the camp Shiftpods were in excellent condition. Still, we went through every single one of them, powerwashing and cleaning them as best as we could, and repairing all the broken parts. We also powerwashed the bikes and packed them back in excellent condition.
In mid-May, we came back to Reno to work on cleaning everything in the Tool Fort and the Pillow Fort. We also hit up the Reno Generator for a burner party on Friday night and a local drag night at the Emerson on Saturday night, which was a lot of fun. The next weekend, another set of Turtles went up to Empire for the first time to work on fixing up the Empire Fort, making some major improvements to the Gayflower, and repairing damage to the Food Fort that resulted from our failure, the previous year, to winterize it. The team stayed in Gerlach, NV, and visited the Bruno's and the playa in the evenings.
Our Reno Work Weekends continue to be a great way to work together and bond together as a team and it's a great way to see who will be a good fit as a new turtle.
Build
With a small build team of only about six people, and lacking usual build superstars Yoni and Beam, we still managed to get the camp built in time. The weather was not as cooperative as it had been last year. We had a ton of wind one night and yep, it was another one of those builds where we had to wake up and fix the shade structures to avoid everything blowing away. The lesson from this year is that the sloped tarps have to be stretched tightly so that they redirect wind up and over the shade structure. We had left them a little bit loose, so these tarps caught a ton of wind, something like a sail effect, putting an incredible amount of pressure on the tarps, ripping them to pieces in strong wind.
Another annoying aspect of build this year was that we had an early strong windstorm which picked up literally tons of sand and plopped them on our ground tarps, immediately followed by enough rain to turn all that sand to mud. The net result is that the ground tarps this year weren't very helpful. This was really just poor timing, I think, and the ground tarps are still a good idea.
The rain came on Saturday and caused a bunch of problems for the build team. First was that we ended up spending probably an extra day just moving things around to prepare for the rain, so we lost some time. The second problem was mud everywhere, stopping work on Saturday. The third problem was a delay in the arrival of our campmates on the bus, expected on Saturday at about 4pm, but who really didn't arrive until 11:45pm, just in time for our opening party -- it was delightful for them, but we lost a lot of manpower that we could have used to finish getting the camp built.
But it was nice to "get the weather out of the way," so to speak, because almost the entire week of Burning Man had great weather and almost no wind or dust. 2024 burgins didn't see their first real whiteout until the day of strike.
Parties
Oh, did I mention? We're, like, popular now. Somehow everybody knows about the Turtles and comes to all our parties. And boy did we have some great ones!
Doing an opening night party as soon as the gates open at midnight is a great idea. There is literally nothing else going on, and the entire queerborhood and everyone that had been busy building their camps showed up. It was great timing this year as the bus with most of our camp had literally pulled up just a few minutes before midnight.
The Monday night kink party was probably the biggest hit of the week, not just for the Turtles, but for the entire neighborhood. It was a huge blowout signature party and many only-at-Burning-Man stories are still being told about that party.
Our Thursday night mud party was a throwback to last year's 18 hour epic mudpocalypse party, and featured mud wrestling, mud outfits, and general mud appreciation.
Finally on Saturday afternoon we hosted a great Wardrobe Malfunction party which was a nice way to close out the week.
All of our parties were big neighborhood hits and I'm glad the queerborhood now knows us and sees us as a fun place to hangout. I really feel that with our corner location, our hub, and our reputation, we are now fully qualified as an anchor camp of the queerborhood... and the fact that we can do that with just 43 turtles is a testament to how great our camp is.
Other interactivity
Shuai taught people how to Shuffle, Jihoon did Tarot readings, and Tristan led two popular yoga sessions. Oh, and we apparently hosted a delightful tomahawk steak and crab dinner for some stupid camp down the road, and actually hosted a couple of extra parties that you probably didn't even notice with amazing guest DJs from nearby camps Gymnasium, Paradise Motel, and Dusty Frogz.
We also learned that having a "24/7 play space" is not going to work unless you staff it 24/7. We did a quick course-correction and decided that our play space can only be open to the public when there are a couple of turtles at the door getting people who enter to enthusiastically commit to practice consent. After this correction, we decided the play space would only be open to the public during our parties when it could be staffed and monitored.
Food
One day in 2019 B. Rock invented the idea of chefs who own their own meals. The idea is that they plan it, they design the recipes, oversee the cooking (with assistants if needed), and get a hearty round of applause if we like the results. And in fact this architecture, more than anything else, led to some really insanely superb meals culminating this year in probably the best food we've ever had on playa. I don't think any other camp eats as well as we do, not even the fancy plug-and-play camps with celebrity paid chefs. Kudos goes to Future Turtles MVP Benny Bergon who organized the whole thing, with along with celebrity chefs Jon, AlexSF, Christophe, MJ, AlexW, Spacemaster, Romain, Dimitri, Kevin, and Alejandro who blew us away every time.
Having a distinct dining room team, not a part of the food team, was great in keeping snacks in stock, the dining room clean and orderly, and letting the food team be done when their meal is cooked instead of requiring them to come back to clean the dining room afterwards.