List: What do people do at Burning Man?

This week, many San Franciscans have left the city to go to the Nevada desert and attend Burning Man. What are they doing there?

• Making the difficult choice, each moment, between looking at art or naked people

• Sitting in 100-degree heat, choking on the dust from a sudden windstorm, and running out of water, just like last year

• Judging each other not by the color of their skin but by the quality of their costumes

• Pretending to enjoy themselves

• Raising global consciousness

• Falling in love with someone named GlitterPeaches

• Lecturing other Burners about how they're not radically self-expressive enough

• Trying to get away from the incessant techno music

• Being completely environmentally conscious, except for the part where 50,000 people use millions of tons of fossil fuel to go to a party

• Saying "Ooh, fire!" a lot

• Taking themselves much more seriously than you would expect, under the circumstances