Marc's Public Blog

Unfortunately it was yet another summer festival that got rain, but thankfully none when I arrived, none when I left, and very little during the festival days when I was there (thursday evening to sunday morning), but it rained apparently a lot on sunday afternoon to the point that the festival prevented people from driving out per some local order, and honestly that felt very questionable. Thankfully I did get out before that happened.

I can report that I didn't get wet, yes! :)

Festival Grounds

the google GPS location was not quite correct, but it wasn't too much of a drive around

getting in took many hours for those who arrived earlier, but thankfully by arriving later, entrance and security were pretty fast

the box office was quick

security was also pretty quick when I arrived (apparently kind of bad and slow earlier)

This is where I owe huge thanks to Bel étoile for getting me the last 4 person tipi. I had way too much gear to carry (and honestly it was not fun to drag all the way from the parking lot in dirt and uneven ground), I had no room extra camping gear, but once there, the tipis were well located related to the festival.

tipis were spacious enough

ready to party!

real showers without long lines, as well as plenty of toilets

Plenty of food options, and they took real money! (some even took cash, just like Ozora)

yum!

Plenty of shops and nice art at night:

All in all the domes and stages were nice and pretty:

even some games

mikado!

fun talks

there was a lake, but it wasn't safe to bathe in

mainstage

Power-wise, which is a concern for me given how much power my outfit, needs, there were a few plugs running sometimes, where I was able to recharge my battery packs a little, but nothing easy. At least it was better than tomrrowland that had absolutely 0 power for campers.

It did rain a bit during the 2nd day, creating mud. The organizers nicely spread some hay to help:

People and Mdose

water theme, some came disguised as jellyfish

The highlight, however, was the audio walk with Aiz. It was a very cool experience, role playing-like with a full story narated while walking around the festival, and doing silly things that no one understood because they didn't have the headphones with the story:

Aiz has both an impressive setup and really good acting skills

Festival Days

I got to see Okapi again, with his hilarious video game-like music

mainstage was Ozora-like, just smaller

video summary:

Final Thoughts/Conclusion

All in all, Hadra was enjoyable, and definitely a worthwhile alternative to Ozora that is easier to get to and experience. Also it did not seem to suffer from the theft issues at Ozora. The main downside is unless you were in a wheelchair, you could not drive your car next to your campsite like Ozora, or Nature One, you had to suffer a long walk with luggage in poor uneven terrain, which is an issue for me when I'm carrying 80kg of luggage due to computer, photography and my LED gear.

Links

People

I managed to use the opportunity to say hi to a few DJs as well as friends:

A few people came with costumes:

Festival Day1

Farius and then Ruben

Nifra was next, but that was more techno than trance

hardcore/hardstyle was a big thing now, 2 days at this nice indoor stage

mainstage was decent

Laura Van Dam

back to trance with Fadi/Aly and Fila

Cosmic Gate

Time to walk around a bit:

the days were long, not much darkness

Back for PvD

After PvD's set, there was a bit of time to see fireworks at mainstage, which were actually decent:

Festival Day2

the hardstyle stage was a bit rough and difficult for me to enjoy for hours

Went to see another stage that had hippie music (Woodstock) but switched a bit for Laura Van Dam

Spent the rest of the day at the used to be mainstage, now 2nd biggest stage. Music was uninspiring but better than nothing:

There were lots of smaller stages but it was hard to know what they were all playing without walking a lot back and forth:

By then I should have stayed until the end for the fireworks, but the music was uninspiring and I had an early flight out the next day. Turns out the fireworks (and drone) show was actually quite good and would have been nice to see, but it was a long wait, so I watched it from my hotel room:

video summary:

The grounds

10mn walk through the park

arrived right on time at the VIP entrance, which really was the backstage entrance, weird...

this one I found reasonable until I saw how many bathrooms they didn't have, and how people were just pissing everywhere as a result. It's ultimately on them

the south side had some cute decords, but nothing to write home about

if you got glasses, they had a recycling system that felt ok enough

plenty of food options, but they didn't accept legal tender, just play fake plastic breakable money

nice, but very uphill

I did mention a freeway cutting a festival in 2, true story:

There was camping, but they also had a small higher class village attached to the festival, like tomorrowland. Nice village:

They had one ride, and you got to ride once for free with VIP tickets:

campsite was reasonably big

Thoughts/Conclusions

What I did like:

water was not really free, it was 8 euros one time cost, free refills

the fake plastic play money, which can be cut in 2

a big more thorough search in GA, VIP was super chill

I was going to say that tokens were complete bullshit since you were forced to buy them with a credit card anyway, but the entrance did let you pay for them with cash. I will let you decide how many people in Holland do not have credit cards or pay by phone:

Now, things get a bit nebulous, but I heard that because the organisers were retiring, they had an incentive to maximize their profit this year, at the expense of the festival itself, not good :-/
Of course, given new organizers in 2 years (and festival cancelled nest year), it's kind of hard to say how it will be.

In a nutshell, I'm happy to have been able to see this very long running festival, and thankful to my friends who helped organize the hotel. The festival itself was ok, but indeed it was not one of its best years. Music-wise it at least had one day of mostly trance (versus potentially 0 for tomorrowland if you pick the wrong week), but the 2nd day, it didn't have much music that I enjoyed, despite many stages. Maybe I didn't find it, or it wasn't there.
I guess let's see how the future edition is, but given that it's been at the same time than burning man, it's been difficult for me to go in the past, and let's see how it becomes in the future with the new owners.
Is it worth flying across the world, for? I'd say no.
Is it a decent, cheaper, easier alternative to tomorrowland? Sure, why not.

Links

Syd Gris opened for us

Great to see Blastoyz next:

Then it was time for Infected Mushdroom with an energized live set, followed by DJ Set:

Great to catch up with friends, as always:

That said, I have some clear concerns with burning Man's Marian Antoinette, the CEO/head of the board who plenty of people have opinions on whether she got there on her own merits, or through her relationship with Larry, the actual founder who sadly has passed away in the last years. I don't know enough to say myself, but looking at the financial state of these last 2 years, cannot really be happy with the state of things that she is ultimately fully responsible for. Of course, paying herself just shy of half a million dollars a year in non profit salary (your money and mine) does not help the image and intent. I'll even add that the more she pays herself, the more will be expected of her in superior leadership and management of nonprofit money. In the meantime, she has been wasting untold amounts of money on projects and expenses that many (or most?) do not approve of, including expensive real estate in San Francisco, because it's convenient for her commute and where she wants to live?
That could maybe be acceptable if she had not then asked for 20 million in additional donations while having published literally 0 accountability on how the money will be spent more wisely along with a serious apology on what went wrong with the significant amount of money that was lost, and which steps have been taken so that it doesn't happen again.

To add insult to injury, she sent that Email to everyone, trying to shame us all for not donating enough and if we don't, she'll have to get external sponsors and kill the spirit of burning man.
WTAF Marian Antoinette? That day, you signed your resignation letter for most of us, and we are still waiting for you to leave.

If you're going to tell me that you don't care so much, or it's not that bad, then maybe you should check other sources of people who work in the org, and some who have spoken up about how bad things are financially and how, according to them, BM is as of 2025 on the way to bankruptcy. Clearly, we should all care about all that not happening, and replace the leadership before more financial damage is done and even more needs to be undone. But yeah, we don't get to vote for the board, so I haven't found any other way than peer pressure and shaming if it comes down to that (she's had a whole year to step down and has not as of right now). If you have better ideas, I honestly want to hear them.

More reading:

While I would love for BM to move away to the ever destructive and unhealthy playa dust (I've had 2 fancy LED art pieces I built and that took weeks to make, utterly destroyed by the playa), I understand it may not happen, but at least I really want to see more healthy and humble leadership at the top. And yes, when the basic money flow issues have been handled (and I'm not claiming they are or will be trivial), maybe they will also consider that the location adds significant costs and challenges to the org itself that may not be worth the money, or liability if a huge freak rain, comes in and causes even more problems than last time.

As for Marian, I agree with many that she has done enough image damage that she has to step down, and her replacement needs to be more humble and go out of their way to show that spending is done mindfully to save costs and apply funds where they can make the most difference, while dropping side projects that many do not approve of, at least not without them being funded from a totally different pool of money, and not from BM ticket price increases. Maybe she did truly good work in the past, if so she can be thanked for those years. But I want to be very clear that just that ridiculous "BM will be sponsored by Mcdonalds if you people don't start donating more money like I told you to", is enough reason to have to step down. I've already seen answers from people inside the org, saying how worried they are about finances and how BM could simply go bankrupt at this rate. Clearly I don't have access to what they see, so that's second hand information, but I sure would like Marian and whowever is working with her on finances, to be replaced without BM having to go bankrupt before that happens.

In the meantime, I'm still sending my mad appreciation to the real heros that make the city happen, from Brian Herbek, Opal Essence, Syd Gris and the entire Opulent Temple crew, Tinic Uro and the Duck Pond Crew, Chuck Sommerville and IllumiNaughty, the DPW heroes to name just a very very few amongst all the heroes that deserve eternal credit, which includes the vast majority of people who make BM happen every year. I wish you all well and hope things work out. I'm not ever looking forward to the destructive playa dust, but hope to be able to see you all again, in that magical environment, especially if it can be on better land in the future.

RIP Mayan Warrior, Long Live Mayan Warrior 2!

End of EDC Day 3 with Trance until Sunrise, couldn't believe it

I just figured it out:

1) step one, become the #1 DJ in the world by playing trance, do sold out 12h Tiesto in Concert concerts broadcast around the world back when it was barely possible to do so (pre-youtube), with live performers, acrobats and all

10) profit!

>>> So as I re-post this today, I think we're at step #8 :) <<<

Tiesto will be at Dreamstate Socal 2025 with a Trance Set!

a rare shot showing both Tiesto twins in the same picture, with the good Trance lover one coming back from a 20 year vacation :)

Video memories from EDC 2025:

After a bit over half a year using it, I figured out that while indeed I don't want to use h265 since it does not decode in every app for licensing issues. At the time, I had also figured out that in ffmpeg, AV1 which is supposed to be even better than VP9, was indeed slower, but not better as far as compression ratio is concerned, or barely enough to matter.

Since then, I came to realize that vp9 is definitely at least 2x slower to encode compare to h264. Originally I considered going back to h264 but then I saw the terrible video quality for lights and lasers, so I'm going to eat the time delay. I will see if for recompressing IG videos before I can merge them, maybe it's fine to use h264 for speed.

vp9 vs av1 comparison and flags:
https://jonathanmh.com/p/encoding-webm-videos-with-ffmpeg-vp9-av1

Gemini says: Compression Efficiency

AV1: Offers the best compression efficiency, resulting in smaller file
  sizes for a given quality level
H.265: Provides significant improvements over H.264, offering better
  compression than VP9 in many cases
VP9: While not as efficient as H.265 or AV1, it still offers decent
  compression and is widely supported.

Encoding and Decoding Speed:
AV1: Requires more computational power for encoding and decoding,
  which can impact performance on older hardware
H.265: Offers a good balance between compression efficiency and
  encoding/decoding speed.
VP9: Generally faster to encode and decode compared to AV1.

# x264 (H.264)	Fastest
# libvpx-vp9	~5–10× slower than x264  => my test shows single pass is 2x slower than h264 2 pass
# libaom-av1	~20–50× slower than x264 (depending on settings)
#
# VP9 (libvpx-vp9): VP9 is a more modern and complex codec. It performs a much
# more exhaustive analysis of the video to find better ways to compress it. This
# allows it to achieve the same visual quality at a 20-50% smaller file size than
# H.264, but this complex analysis requires significantly more CPU time.

# C0012_H264_orig.mp4  (sony camera 1080p h264)
# C0012a_mencoder_H264_4:34.mp4  => terrible quality
# C0012b_ffmpeg_H264_2:08.mp4    => better quality and 2x faster encode
# C0012c_VP9_4:19.webm           => decent enough
# C0012d_AV1_22:03.webm          => tiny bit better?

# h4    9mn  91MB  => join worked
# h4ff 15mn  93MB  => non matching but can read android h265 that mencoder cannot
# vp9  45mn  102MB => join worked
# av1  65mn  93MB  => join worked

Vp9 is around 2x slower than h264 but the output quality is definitely better. Doing single pass over 2 pass still gives decent output. Maybe for IG video stories, which has taken over 24H in the past for just 1 to 2H of video, I'm going to go back to h264 for speed's sake.
Never a dull moment indeed, doing video is really a lot more work than pictures....