Went to my first music festival last weekend, shit's wild. It felt like a hot, dusty version of white-peoples' heaven, filled with unabashed hedonism, drugs, thumping music, and sunburns as far as the eye could see. I got my month's worth of dancing in without re-injurying my knee and found a few new artists I enjoyed, including a glitch / edm / house / weeaboo artist, here's a song reminiscent of Daft Punk: I also got 6x36 new mouse brain tissue samples last week for three more projects, which should round out my work schedule for the next year or so. Pretty much every major experiment I will be doing has now been planned. It should now just be a matter of a shitton of pipetting, coding, and learning a last few set of techniques like working with viruses and stem cells (Each of which could 1-2 months of training...). I can't decide if I'm happier now that the rest of my aims / PhD proposal are starting to be set in stone or sad that the wild brainstorming will be shut down for a while.
Where'd you go? Most mid-size/large festivals are kind of...well...I'm not a fan, to put it mildly, because of exactly how you described it.
Delaware, and yes, it was weirdly, dehumanizingly large, with large hoards of people forming massive rivers as they migrated from one stage to another. The entire weekend I kept catching glances of people at their top / bottom, dancing like crazy or bruised and doing drugs out of dollar bills on the lawn, only to never see them again. But it was still fascinating to see the people who went all out to every apparent outward extreme to have fun: dressing up, making signs, dancing, and drunkenly enjoying the shit out of their food. It was both a turn-off and weirdly attractive to see how happy people were when they let go for the weekend. I do feel bad for the service workers who had to clean it all up afterwards though.
Firefly! A coworker was there for five or six days. He slept for 30 hours afterwards. I saw him last night, and he tells me, "Yea it was a ton of fun. The four of us got a night's worth of sleep every three days. We spent like $600 on drugs. Each." Don't feel too bad for the service workers. I have a ton of friends who work festivals, and not only do they get paid pretty fat day-rates, they often get time off to see shows.
I imagine a combination of ecstasy/MDMA, long-term and short-term psychedelics, and sundry stimulants. Because all regular life-responsibilities are abdicated for a few days, those festivals approach a level of experimentation usually unheard of.