Alfaj0r.com

And I’m back!
Another Man as been climbed, photographed, burned, and danced around. It was a whole lot of fun. Was it more fun than last year? I don’t know, I think that’s a pretty unfair question. It wasn’t better, or worse, it was just different. Asking that question is like asking your parents if you’re better or worse than your siblings.
Anyway, it was a great time. Our Fallout Shelter was a lot of work, but it was all well worth it. On Friday night, I was the “engine” behind the elevator, and at times I would look over the wall to find that there was a line of people to come in. Then, all my feelings of tiredness or frustration would vanish, and I would once again push and pull to make our elevator work, with a smile on my face.
A few times I overheard people coming out of the elevator, and their reactions were wonderful. From surprise to amusement, and sickness to fear, they all made our huge investments of time and effort well worth it.
Still, even after all this, I feel like our camp didn’t come close to some of the other wonderful camps out there, and I had a much bigger appreciation for the efforts of everyone that put something out there. Props to you, you know who you are!

Another thing that has left a warm fuzzy feeling is my improvement in the field of photography. Sure, I might not be a National Geographic photographer, but have a look. Here are the pictures from 2007. And here are the pictures from this year: Burning Man 2008.
Not only did I bring my DSLR camera (Canon Rebel XT), but I think I have a slightly better comprehension of exposure and composition.
I have also gotten some compliments that have been a huge ego boost, and I appreciate every single one of them. Positive feedback encourages me to get out there and give this thing a shot, so the fuzziness that I talk about is primarily due to people telling me how awesome I am.

Lastly, two people that mean a lot to me joined our camp. My girlfriend Dani and my friend and roomate Cory.
Dani and I started going out last year, right before Burning Man, and when I came back she was amazed at how much fun I had had. When the tickets for this year’s burn went on sale, I bought 2, already planning on bringing her along. And that, I did.
She had a great time, and I think that it opened her eyes to the good nature of people. The night that I worked the elevator, she worked the door, and that line of people that was waiting to get in. She talked to people from all over the place, dressed strangely (or not dressed at all!), and it didn’t matter. The self-imposed social boundaries are much thinner out there, for reasons I probably can’t explain well enough, and I think it does a lot of good to people, and Dani was one of them.
She can no longer call me a hippie, for she was hugging many a stranger, without being concerned about the color of their skin, their religion or political views. She can’t call me a hippie because she is just as much one as I am now!

And as for Cory, I think he’ll probably be putting up a blog post somewhere soon enough, so you can read all about his opinions there. And if he wasn’t going to, now I’m peer pressuring him into doing so, bwahahahaha!

Ah yes, Burning Man is near. I went last year (blogged and took pictures, too!), and I’ve been planning on going this year since I came back from the last burn.
My friend and boss, George, has put together a masterplan for our camp. A theme camp.
It is the Black Rock City Fallout Shelter (aka Afterglow-lounge or AtomiKamp).
It ties into this year’s theme for Burning Man -the American Dream- with a little bit of retro, repression & oppression, propaganda and fear. It’s out there, and it’s fun.

We will be located at 8:00 and Esplanade.

I know! Holy shit, Esplanade! I’m kind of curious to see how the constant flow of burners fares for us, but I’m welcoming the upcoming experience with open arms.
There’s really not a lot to our camp… other than a bar with glowing refreshments, music and dancing, videos, and the personalities of the more than 30 campers that will be staffing it.

We have been working on our camp for the last 3 weeks, and it’s all come together at the right time. And then it came apart, as we need to transport it!
I really hope it comes back together easily, but this should not be a major concern, because modularity was one of our biggest focuses as we built this monster shelter of almost 500 square feet.

Pictures will be taken, unique moments will be shared. My girlfriend, Dani, and my friend Cory are both coming for their first time, and I’m also excited about having them join us.

This post is getting pretty ramble-licious, and I’m blaming it all on my excitement and lack of linear thought abilities. To sum up:
Are you going to Burning Man this year? If so, come by our camp and say hi while you sip on a tasty beverage! :)

That’s right! This Saturday, July 19th, the Atomiks are playing at Zephyr. It’s a fundraiser show for our Burning Man camp: Atomikamp, aka The Fallout Shelter. It’s only $5, and good times shall be had by all.
Tell your friends, and see you there!

This great YouTube series of videos is my current favorite internet “thing”.
The premise is: back in 1968, Alrugo Entertainment filmed an italian action-adventure movie. It was deemed “un-viewable” by italian distributors and never released or shown.
The only 35mm print of the film was lost at sea, but it was recently recovered. Alrugo Entertainment now releases the film through YouTube, one bit a week.
The “production” does give the cheap, cheesy sense of it being an old movie. Or at least, it does for me, because I haven’t seen too many movies from that time. Regardless, it’s awesome. And that’s what matters right now.
Here is the trailer:

And if you go here, you can must see all the episodes.

First, will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas made a video (it’s the first one shown below) about Barak Obama’s campaign. Then, there was a parody about John McCain. I found them both to be interesting, and refreshing. Specially the parody part. See here:

and then…

That’s all. :colbert:

Yes! A new Indiana Jones movie! Scheduled to come out on May 22, this is one movie I’d like to see.

It’s been 19 years since the Last Crusade, both in the real world and in the movie itself, which I think is a pretty cool concept. Word is that there’ll be quite a bit of humor about how Indiana is getting old, but from the trailer alone, I can see that Harrison Ford is not going to be a huge pansy about it all, emulating the bad-assness of Sean Connery.

I’ve finally given in, and in addition to my Pandora account, I now also have my own Last.fm account. I’ve just gotten started using it, but I dig the fact that I can listen to my own music on my computer and it will keep tabs on that too, and when I’m looking for something new, fresh and exciting, I can just listen to the millions of virtual radio stations available!

Best of all, Last.fm is free. So get to it, make an account and make me your friend. :c00l:

When I was in Argentina, I was killing some time at a CD store, when the music being played there captivated me. It was Clocks, by Coldplay… but all of a sudden, trumpets and drums were being played in a very particular way. It was salsa! Check it out:

So, with something shakin’ inside of me, I asked one of the attendants to hook me up with the CD, Rhythms del Mundo. Quite a few of the songs in there have a very fresh sound when latin-ized, so give it a listen and if you dig the sound, go buy it! After all, there’s even a bit of Karma going around from it, since the profits go to APE, which raises awareness and funds for climate change projects and for disaster relief efforts. There’s a bit of a hint about that in the music video, which is something I found out just today, as I wrote this post. :shobon:

Yesterday was opening day for tickets for Burning Man. At 10am, their site enabled a virtual queue, and I was able to grab a spot in the 5000s. Quite a few hours went by since then, with me being extremely careful of not closing the FireFox tab that I had dedicated to it, and a few minutes before noon, it was my turn to check out.
I got 2 tickets, because Dani will be joining me this year. And shortly after I was done, I read that the first 10.000 tickets had been sold. Wow! I’m glad I had set up a reminder to pop up at exactly 10am, otherwise I would have missed out on a pretty good deal.

The theme for this year’s Burning Man is "American Dream", so between now and the end of August, I will be hunting at thrift stores for clothes that convey this message in one way or another. I was thinking a suit like Evil Knievel would be awesome. What do you think? Are you going to this year’s burn?

Last night I watched for the first time the newest version of American Gladiators. It brought back so many memories, I used to love that show! And I do love this new one too!

Most of the games/challenges seem to be similar to what I remember them being when I was a wee lad and watched this show in Argentina, with Powerball and Joust as my favorites :), although Assault is quite awesome when the contestant actually hits the target and the Gladiator flies backwards into a swimming pool!

I also found a bit of resemblance on some of these challenges to that of another similar show, Ninja Warrior. This is also a great show, and if you enjoy Gladiators, you should check out Ninja Warrior!

At any rate, I don’t have a good memory of the Gladiators themselves from the old show, but I do like the new ones. My favorite is probably Wolf, because he’s just crazy mean. I mean, come on! He howls, he’s got the bushiest eyebrows on TV and looks like he belonged to the original cast, and pulled a Walt Disney and got frozen until he could be on TV again. On the other hand, there’s Titan, who seems to be straight out of Pixar’s studios, being the pretty golden boy. I’m sure he’ll grown on me, as the contestants kick his ass for being such a fruitcake.

I’ll end this post with an awesome video including some chilling Wolf action!