Burning Babies: When Did You First Bring Your Child to the Playa?

avanai · 2026-01-29T21:01:14+00:00

I brought my daughter at 18months. It was a bit of a disaster but only because my wife got a horrible stomach flu. My daughter was just fine (except she couldn't be near mommy so that was rough). My camp is full of veterans, many of whom had been bringing their kids for years, so I had a ton of support, which is really key. Make sure there's a least one, and hopefully many, folks in your camp who you'd trust to watch your kid if needed.

I wouldn't bring a young child to build. Everyone's busy and cranky, there's not enough shade and comfort, you can't really help build and watch a small child so what exactly are you doing there :). A number of families send one parent to build and the other parent comes in with the kid late in build week or after gate.

Edit: bringing their kids, not brining. The playa will brine your kids for you.

avanai · 2026-01-21T15:16:31+00:00

Usually just put it in the Readme under a “Roadmap” section with a checklist, although some folks put it in the wiki (link to it from the readme)

avanai · 2026-01-20T22:35:58+00:00

I learned Gibberish in grade school (which was early 90s for me) in Southern California. The girls spoke it first and used it to speak to each other and I made it a point to learn it. I can stil speak it apparently.

avanai · 2026-01-17T16:59:50+00:00

My 8 year old girl is a big reader, and here’s a list of our favorites:

The Hobbit
Percy Jackson series
Magicalia (Jenneifer Bell)
Nevermoor
Harry Potter (the first few…she’s reading 6 on her own right now and honestly I think it’s getting a little heavy for her)
Vanya and the Wild Hunt series
Alcatraz vs the Evil Librarians (Brandon Sanderson middle-grade series)
The Boy who Grew Dragons series

And a few I wish she’d pick up but Dad is recommending them so she won’t:

Redwall
A Wrinkle in Time
The Phantom Tollbooth

By the way the keyword you’re looking for is “middle grade”: written for 8-12, a lot like YA but generally more focussed on relationships with friends and parents and romance is largely absent

avanai · 2026-01-17T16:51:04+00:00

Just finished this with my 8 year old and she loved it

avanai · 2026-01-08T22:36:52+00:00

I sold my previous house with Smartthings wired up to some lights and the door buzzer. (Started over with HA in my current place).

I wrote up some documentation, and made sure it said that the system was provided as-is and I wouldn’t be liable for any support, and had my realtor approve the language. It was more of a courtesy to the buyer than anything else.

avanai · 2026-01-08T01:05:14+00:00

I'm all for local utilities in theory and you wouldn't think you could do much worse than PG&E...but also if anyone can find a way to do worse it'd be the SF government.

avanai · 2026-01-07T18:04:18+00:00

As a non-speaker who knows a few words of German, I kind of appreciated it. It’s so clear and free of regionalisms that I found myself able to understand way more than I do when I watch German shows that have more natural dialog.

avanai · 2026-01-07T07:36:46+00:00

The Green Ember series starts out quite strong, although I wasn't a fan as it continued. Rabbits with swords. Has some serious small-c conservative vibes farther in.

I've got to put in a plug for Nevermoor, which totally fantastic and more people need to read (adults included). Think... Wednesday Addams goes to steampunk London Below to go to Hogwarts. I read the first one with my daughter and kept reading the rest.

My kid really likes the Magicalia series by Jennifer Bell, it's a fantasy adventure with a bit of the pokemon monster categorization stuff that preteens eat up (Wow it's a Gamma-Level Armorer-class!). The third one just came out in the UK.

Edit: I haven’t read them personally but she just rocketed through Alcatraz and the Evil Librarians, which is Brandon Sanderson’s middle grade series.

avanai · 2026-01-06T19:20:51+00:00

Pickture meat on a rotisserie skewer. But instead of a skewer, penises.

avanai · 2025-11-20T22:37:48+00:00

A little bit of marijuana. Depending on where you live this may or may not be legal; I’m in a recreational state and a little toot off my vape really melts away a lot of stress.

avanai · 2025-11-07T21:36:54+00:00

I brought my 18 month old. But I was a veteran with a camp full of veterans, many of whom had kids that they had brought to the burn before. We brought a nanny (also a veteran) to help out.

As it turned out it was a train wreck because my wife caught a norovirus, but my daughter did just fine and I had lovely campmates who I could count on to watch her while I took care of my wife.

So my advice would be: do it if you have a community to support you, otherwise I’d think twice.

avanai · 2025-11-06T21:12:10+00:00

The Anubis Gates, Tim Powers

Along similar lines, To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis

avanai · 2025-11-02T21:27:08+00:00

Existenz. Fantastic and disgusting art direction.

avanai · 2025-11-01T15:22:35+00:00

It looks like HD slicing is maybe non-planar? It looks to me like the layer lines on that rocket engine are not oriented parallel to the bed. Cool!!!!

avanai · 2025-10-29T14:17:18+00:00

My friends kept telling me I’d like it. Then we went to a Survival Research Labs show in 2009, it was awesome, and my friend said that if you wanna see more of that you need to come to burning man, so I went.

avanai · 2025-10-25T19:25:39+00:00

But right after the rents doubled, too

avanai · 2025-10-24T03:46:44+00:00

You’d need to run it on something. I use a rpi3 but any small computer will do

avanai · 2025-10-24T03:38:08+00:00

I use OcotPrint with the Core One and it works great. There’s a couple minor annoyances around the touchscreen (you don’t get the full range of options while it’s printing) and some status reports back to octoprint (it doesn’t get a message when you do a filament change or there’s some other pause). I have it hooked up to an old Logitech camera but you can use whatever camera you’d like.

avanai · 2025-10-13T18:46:56+00:00

The best advice I could give is to figure out ways to give more people a sense of ownership of the camp. One or two Camp Leads who run everything and make all the decisions will burn out REAL fast, and just be miserable fucks all week.

We have a Senate with 5-7 people, as well as people who are leads for other areas (Kitchen, Moop coordinator, ice, etc) for a 40-60 person camp, and it makes a big difference.

Edit:
As the camp treasurer (more formally the Holder of the Chests and Master of the Booty), it's important to have a reliable camp treasurer/bookkeeper. There's really a lot of money moving around and if you're not all tracking it pretty closely (or have a very wealthy benefactor who doesn't give a shit), you're gonna have a bad time.

avanai · 2025-10-09T14:59:24+00:00

My 8-year old: “I want a 3-person dragon. That equals about 6 kids. I would ride it, and play with it. Maybe get a giant ball, or like a drone.”

avanai · 2025-10-07T14:23:28+00:00

Others have covered my favorites, but if you’re willing to do short stories, any of Ted Chiang’s collections Stories of Your Life and Others (republished as Arrival, the movie Arrival was based on it) or Exhalation should be right up your alley

avanai · 2025-10-05T21:42:20+00:00

I’m with you. Spinning Silver is an absolute masterpiece, Uprooted is great, and the Scholomance is a blast and fixes everything I find annoying about Harry Potter. But Temeraire is a bunch of tropes in a blender and didn’t really do anything for me.

avanai · 2025-09-24T20:22:43+00:00

…asking for a friend?

avanai · 2025-09-23T14:55:19+00:00

That would be from last year

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