…and our hair’s all grey.” Now on display in the museyroom: almost 200 snapshots from my seventh consecutive visit to Black Rock City, Nevada — otherwise known as Burning Man. Visit the index or begin with the first “slide”.

It takes a long time to cull through hundreds of pictures, sort ’em, caption ’em, and upload them over a shitty DSL connection, but it’s finally all done, and I now present (over in the museyroom) photographic proof that I finally made my way to and across the Indian subcontinent! Visit the index or begin with the first shot.

The 2009 edition of my annual Burning Man slideshow, complete with the requisite annotations, is now open in the museyroom: Visit the index or begin with the first shot.

The Burning Man 2008 gallery is now open in the museyroom: Visit the index or begin with the first shot.

Pictures from my recent Hawaiian getaway are now up in the museyroom: Visit the index or begin with the first shot.

It has now been two weeks since I returned from Burning Man 2007 in Black Rock City, Nevada, and the experience is still reverberating within.

T.S. Eliot etched the phrase “unreal city” into my head a long time ago, but ever since my first trip to the playa, I’ve used those words pretty much exclusively to describe Black Rock City. They dance in my head when I daydream of being there; they echo unceasingly as I wander the city during the one magical week it arises each year.

Has there ever been a place more deserving of the tag “unreal”? My yearly slideshow only scratches the very surface, really, but perhaps one or two of these images will convince you that Black Rock City is a place like no other…

The Burning Man 2007 gallery is now open in the museyroom: Visit the index or begin with the first shot.

Hello, everyone. After a coupla months spent out of gas, I think the engine’s fired up once again here at mahnamahna.net. I’ve been busy with a few things while I’ve been silent. In fact, check this out: I HAS WRITED A SOFTWARE!!1


Devidify has its own exhibit over in the newly-renovated mahnamahna.net museyroom.

More fun stuff on the way, I think. There’s gas again now.

I am following in the footsteps of HairyAlien and Majordojo and committing to NaBloPoMo, which means I’ll be posting to this blog every day in November. The idea is kind of an intentional reboot. (And besides, I’ve always been too chickenshit to try NaNoWriMo.)

Will you join us? Commit in the comments.

As happened last year, it has taken me an embarassingly long time to get my Burning Man pictures up. But here they are, at long last.

The word I’ve been using to describe my third Burn is “transcendent.” I am still feeling the playa’s effects; I am still discerning the meaning of all I encountered and experienced; I am still in a state of flux. It is mostly a happy, happy feeling.

Thanks in no small part to a wee bit of Perl coding by Majordojo, I have at long last launched a new comments system here. All old comments have been carried over, and hundreds and hundreds of spam comments have been removed. Let’s see how this goes.

It’s been a while since this blog last completely stalled, but that’s what’s happened again of late. (There were zero posts in April.) What’s up? Truth be told, I am sick of mahnamahna.net’s look, which has largely remained the same since the site’s inception in 2002. I am also sick of comment spam, and defeating it means getting my hands dirty with some serious hacking on the comments system I’ve got in place around here. And lastly, I want to implement modern, whiz-bang templates on my photo galleries, and again, that’s going to be somewhat of an undertaking, as the scripts I use to drive those are not very amenable to different looks and feels. So the upshot is this: Posts are likely to remain infrequent until I get this place whipped into shape. And that could take some time.

At long last, I got off my ass and culled through all the pics I took at Burning Man this year, and put the best ones up in a gallery over in the museyroom.

My second Burn was different in many, many ways from my first, but it was nevertheless a fantastic experience. There were highlights I wouldn’t dare talk about here, and low points that only make sense if you’ve been inside my head. There was growth. There were journeys, each and every day. I spent much of the week with a couple of friends whom I rarely see and who are as dear to me as anyone. And I came back to the default world feeling about fifteen degrees out of kilter, like I was looking at everything freshly, from a new angle. And that, in one sense, is what the Burn is all about.

My home-grown, bare-bones comments system here on the mahna mahblog has long remained esoteric enough to be untouched by comment-spam bots.

Sadly, it’s no longer true. There’s been a shipload of comment spam around here lately. I’ve cleaned up most of it, and, sadly, destroyed a few legit comments along the way. I’ve also made some changes to the site code so as to perhaps hide myself from these evil bastards once again. We shall see.

My photos from Burning Man 2004 are now on display in the museyroom. With that done, this blog should start to flow again.

The mahnamahna.net photo gallery is now open over in the museyroom.

First exhibition: Amsterdam, June 2004