October 13, 2018

At a Desert Festival, Costumed Campers Show Off Their Apocalypse Survival Skills

Because Burning Man was so 2012.

Glenn Francis/Wikimedia

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In September, thousands of fantasy buffs filed into a valley in the desert to race tricked out cars, flaunt hand-crafted warrior costumes, and party in theme camps. No, this wasn’t Burning Man. It was Wasteland Weekend: An annual gathering in California’s Mojave Desert that claims to be the largest post-apocalyptic festival in the world. The event draws inspiration from the Mad Max film series and dystopic fantasy books and video games.

Jalopnik sent some journalists to cover this year’s event, and they came back with some truly surreal shots.

Reporter Anna Merlan details the festival’s “all-gender, gloriously weird swimsuit competition, an array of bands (most of them astonishingly bad metalcore and industrial acts), burlesque, fire-dancing,” and a “battle cage” whose participants face off with real steel weapons.

“Everyone may look scary,” aerial photographer Pavel Aubuchon-Mendoza told Nerdist back in 2015, “but Wastelanders are the kindest, most wonderful people you could ever meet.”

“Wasteland isn’t just a car show,” one participant told Merlan. “It’s a way of life year-round.”

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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