Wasteland Weekend

“WHERE MUST WE GO, WE WHO WANDER THIS WASTELAND, IN SEARCH OF OUR BETTER SELVES…

Wasteland Weekend is a 5-day fully immersive post-apocalyptic festival in the middle of the Mojave Desert. For about $200 a ticket, it’s like a mix of a Renfaire and Burning Man but completely themed for Mad Max, Fallout, and other post-apocalyptic fandoms. There are no spectators. Everyone is required to be fully costumed to be in theme for the entire event. Wasteland offers attendees a little bit of everything: live concerts, burlesque and drag shows, fire spinning, a free bar run on donations, a rugby-like game called Jugger, the Thunderdome, Mad Max-style cars, a casino, bounty hunting, a Bartertown of vendors, a post office, a swimsuit contest on the deck of the Waterworld Exxon Valdez, and too much more to keep listing! There are many official events, but there are so many more events run by tribes in the community. While Wasteland is essentially a party, for many it is a place where we can truly be ourselves or be our better self.

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On Quitting

We need to take a step back and look at why we love the things we love.

 

This past weekend, I watched Hannah Gadsby’s comedy special, “Nanette,” on Netflix. It was a revelation. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say her words confirmed and shaped some things that had been percolating at the edges of my subconscious for the last several years. In the special, which you should absolutely watch if you have not yet, Gadsby talks about why she is quitting comedy, how jokes are only two parts — setup and punchline — and not a whole story. Essentially, she says comedians create tensions through their setups so that the punchlines can break it, and she no longer wants to create tension. She wishes to instead create connection. Rather than use comedy to obfuscate her painful past, she tells the rest of the stories that inspired her funniest bits, and the humor goes away, but something so much deeper remains.

 

This week, I had meant to write about why I have quit consuming and engaging with so much of nerd culture in recent years. And while I cannot make quite so eloquent a connection as Hannah Gadsby with the two parts versus a whole story metaphor, I can say that I think it’s to do with how mistaking engaging with pop culture the same as engaging with and influencing our communities.

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