Burning Man 2012 flyover

Here's a rather magnificent flyover of this year's Burning Man's Black Rock City. Look closely and you'll see our glorious Liminal Labs camp, just off 6 O'Clock and Rod's Road.

BURNING MAN FPV - Black Rock City Aerial Tour 2012 (Thanks, Nicola!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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kamilothoris

Jelloooooooed out!
http://twitter.com/matcatastrophe mat catastrophe

Hiring some good PR people has really helped this festival of misfits get all sorts of mainstream.

Yay! Mainstream!
- http://twitter.com/james4765 Jim Nelson
  
  Oh, yes. We’re mainstream as fuck. We had Motorola and Google out there, handing out free cell phones to all the special people, and Prada was giving the beautiful people special feather boas that would get you in to the VIP area, where Daft Punk was playing every night at sundown.
  
  Then, we had a sing-along with One Direction at center camp.
  - http://twitter.com/matcatastrophe mat catastrophe
    
    Not having corporate sponsors does not automatically mean you’re still an underground operation. There’s a lot of slick PR involved and that just means that the values of how Corporate America Does Things has been adopted by the Festival, as opposed to the values of the Festival becoming a norm in Corporate America.
  - http://twitter.com/matcatastrophe mat catastrophe
    
    Or, you could just take a closer look at this: http://blog.burningman.com/2012/01/news/public-relations-manager-position-available/
    - http://twitter.com/james4765 Jim Nelson
      
      Or, you know, the values of Burning Man might just be leaking out into the greater world after all. Because that would be a horrible thing, to have a little more wonder, and excitement, and love in this world.
      
      Instead, we’ve got to be snarkier-than-thou, and not in the fun, ridiculous way that has been part of Burning Man from the beginning, but in the cynical, ‘jaded’ way that people who have lost something essential in their soul.
      
      Or we’re dealing with DPW, who just plays the game a bit rougher than everyone else :)
      
      But in all seriousness, Burning Man exists in a tenuous legal spot – all it would take is one Senator to decide to make an issue of it, and hold up funding for the Department of the Interior, to shut it down. So, keeping the perception of that thing in the desert as something other than the drug-fueled hippy orgy sounds like a good thing to me – and if you think that hiring a PR person for a 50,000 person festival is adopting ‘how Corporate America Does Things’, you are entirely too allergic to organizations of this size.
      - EH
        
        Instead, we’ve got to be snarkier-than-thou, and not in the fun, ridiculous way that has been part of Burning Man from the beginning, but in the cynical, ‘jaded’ way that people who have lost something essential in their soul.
        
        What are the chances that “fun ridiculous snarkier-than-thou” requires BM not to be a target of the snark? I’m just trying to be sure lest I be accused of having lost “something essential” in my soul.
      - Ito Kagehisa
        
        Or, you know, the values of Burning Man might just be leaking out into the greater world after all. Because that would be a horrible thing, to have a little more wonder, and excitement, and love in this world.
        
        I sure hope you are right, because I love seeing all the energy and creativity, but I am totally not going out in the desert. Burners, mad dogs & Englishmen can have it all to themselves.
        
        Ugh, new BB design does not overcome the failings of Disqus. Edited to remove spurious newlines.
nixiebunny

Looks like about 9 AM. Hardly anyone is out and about.
- macegr
  
  Makes it easier to get permission from everyone.
anansi133

This video makes me so happy! A unique perspective without having to get all crispy and dusty and overloaded… what’s not to like?
- giantasterisk
  
  It’s not so hard to keep from getting overloaded. Just don’t do a bunch of e. A week at Burning Man while sober can be plenty underwhelming.
http://northierthanthou.com/ northierthanthou

Cool visual.
Richard_Kirk

No tin-foil beanies for us. We gonna lay out the whole daam site as a Fresnel zone plate, and focus them mind-control rays back up at the govmint satellites, and burn em all out, yeah.

Sigh. Wish I was there…
thejaymo

Just been comparing my anual Hexayurt deployment count on the GeoEye aerial photo for the Hexayurt Project against this video :: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thejaymo/7986877363/in/photostream

It appears that I have missed lots/many were not identifiable. The numbers might be ~10% higher than the 739 hexayurts i counted this year!

Thanks for posting Cory!
- Henry Pootel
  
  “Leaving no trace”….
rhodian

I have a serious case of Burning Man envy.
unaboomer

Burning man has SO many things that look like they’d be fun to see, but none of them seem to draw me past the presence of the blaring sun, dirt air, and proximity to conspiro/hippie/drug/ugh folks that appear to dominate this scene. I ain’t no square, but I easily gag on a single whiff of patchouli, the sight of Ron Paul stickers or talk of illuminati et al. Can’t we have a gathering with the creative/construction side without the parts I dont like?

Oh yeah, those are called maker faires. Can we have more of those, please?

Im ok with the burning man people doing what they do, All I ask is that you shower upon your return to L.A. Thank you.
- http://twitter.com/photonghoul photon
  
  “conspiro”, “drug”, “single whiff of patchouli, the sight of Ron Paul stickers or talk of illuminati”
  
  I saw (and smelt) none of this….. “hippies” of course.
- nixiebunny
  
  Ron Paul and Illuminati were nowhere to be seen, and very few actual hippies either.
  There was a lot of creativity and construction present.
  Dust, yes. Sun, yes. Those are good for you.
  - unaboomer
    
    Really? Cause I know at least a dozen of those folks that went and they have friends. You two must have been on drugs. (KIDDING! KIDDING!)
    
    How were the drugs, btw? <3
http://bannedsorcery.com/ Bryce Anderson

Bah. The flyover was so much better last year.