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bible

************************ 1998 Bianca Bible *************************

----------------------------- TO DO LIST -----------------------------

- One 24' Budget truck at $500/week and $0.15/mile (pickup 10am sunday).
- One 15' Penske Truck at $300/week and $0.15/mile (pickup 8am monday).
Load the couches in the 24' sunday and fill up any leftover space.
Leave late sunday, or early monday, or with the Penske.
Pack the Penske early monday, and hit the road mid-afternoon.

- Pick up some couches (& fabric & chest freezer?) from mikl's east bay source, Ragtime.
Can we do a pickup on Sunday the 30th?
Cause that's when we'll have the truck.

- We have 34 curtains 8' high and most about 5' wide. That covers the outside of the
shack and a few interior walls. We need about 45 of them, so we need to make 11 more.

- Buy conduit, cut uprights to 8'.

- Get foam rubber to wrap conduit junction boxes where tarp is stressed.

- Get lots of 100' rope to hold the roof tarp down.

- Where do we get pallets? Wouldn't it be useful to have a pallet dolly, and move things
using the pallets?

- {ff} thinks we need 20 couches (vs. 18 in '97). Moses thinks we need 35.

- Make signs: 'tips', 'fire extinguisher', 'first aid', 'no bikes', 'staff only', 'free
condoms', 'entrance', 'beauty room', 'bianca accepts food donations', etc... Is Brady
doing this?

- Danielle and Mikl are driving one truck, Freeform drives the other.

- BM doors open officially at noon on Monday 31. Can come earlier if you help set up BM.

- Mon arrivals: Dean Gaudet, Jimp, Danielle, Mikl, Freeform, Lucie, Moses
- Mon nite: 10 from Chicago (William Pietri mob)
- Tues/Wed arrivals: Mikek
- Fri arrivals: Veenu (maybe), Dean Gaudet's friend, airport people?

----------------------------- COSTS -----------------------------

$2,000 --- truck rental
$1,000 --- generator rental (one big one + one smaller back-up)
$ 800 --- sound system rental
$ 200 --- wood + screws and stuff
$1,000 --- food (+ vitamins, condoms, alcohol)
$ 300 --- water
$ 200 --- fabric
$ 300 --- tarp (if we are lucky, could be more)
$1,000 --- miscellanious and things we forgot
----------
$6,800

We have $3000 from foreplaya and bianca will contribute $2-3k more.

itemized:

24' Budget truck at $500/week and $0.15/mile (sunday - tuesday)
15' Penske Truck at $300/week and $0.15/mile (monday - tuesday)
A 30x50ft shack is 62 pieces of conduit at $2/ea = $124.
A minimum of 24 junction boxes at $1.50/ea = $36.
A minimum of 76 connectors at $0.50/ea = $38.
24 4' rebar at $3.50/ea = $84.
20 3' rebar at $2.50/ea = $50
400ft of decent rope, at $10/100ft = $40.
Nice silky printed rayon from the remnant bin at Discount Fabrics near Wired: $1.50/yd
(about 5' wide)
mikek bought $300 of xmas lights (125 strands)

----------------------------- KITCHEN ACCESS -----------------------------

- Design to keep crowds away from kitchen entrance. Trolls disliked having to push people
aside just to get back to the counter, and the serving trays were extremely hard to get
past the kitchen throng.

- Expand the kitchen to occupy TWO 10x10 rooms and partition with tarps from the rest of
the shack except for the serving counter section.

- 'staff only' sign for the kitchen

- Rear exit, so servers can cum & go without fighting the mob in front of the kitchen.

- Bead door to front entrance to kitchen, or no front door at all.

- Self-serve water should be seperate from the kitchen (draws less people to kitchen, less
mud in kitchen).

- No self-serve food, except for water ... it made it impossible for us to control the
quantity of bread we needed, and people mobbed the kitchen counter.

----------------------------- KITCHEN SETUP -----------------------------

- wooden flats (pallets) to raise the kitchen floor so stuff doesn't get muddy, and one
for the shower. Last year's shower floor was a futon frame, which worked.

- wash basins (one soapy, one clear) for washing dishes

- a table to place the wash basins on outside of the shack

- dish-scrub-brush-things-filled-with-soap ... you know what I mean.

- mikl rants: Restaurant style Blue tablets which sanitize. Pickle bucket size will do
the trick.

- more utensils (knives in particular)

- cutting boards

- the shelving worked great last year, do even more of it this year

- More counterspace, perhaps (burnable!) plywood "extensions".

- Small compartment units for spices, pills, candies, utensils, etc -- maybe hanging from
ceiling.

- Serving bowls of all sizes, maybe serving platters with the dip bowl in center.
Compartmentalized trays keep the cigarettes separate from the grilled cheez separate from
the vitamins is a Good Thing.

- Spray bottles for spraying people. Water during day, vodka tonic at night.

- first aid kit (location known to all, maybe make a sign)

- fire extinguisher (location known to all, maybe make a sign)

- Need a gas stove and at least two cheez grills.

- tip jar! made money last year, but we only had it late in the week

----------------------------- FOOD -----------------------------

- There's bulk stores in Reno/Sparks where we can get bread & cheez & water & (dry) ice &
generator gas. (seth and mikl scouted them out in '97). The current consensus seems to
be that the first wave supplies will last through thursdayish, with supplements from
latecomers, and then friday we go on a real refueling mission. The friday mission can
also pick up the people flying into the Reno airport that day.

- Must arrange permission with the BM folks for the supply trips. Mikl is doing that:
Chris Lewis, aka spaceghost, is in charge of the gate. He's a really nice guy and has been
on bianca.com for about 3 years or so.

- The initial crew needs to have enough food to last 2/3 days (i.e. bread AND cheese), the
second and third deliveries need to have bread AND cheese. It's futile to send bread in
one vehicle and cheese in another because one of those vehicles will arrive late.

- 100+ loaves of bread

- 5 bricks of presliced cheez bricks

- 5 bags grated cheddar, 5 mozzarella for the quesadillas

- 500 tortillas (50 10-count bags) for quesadillas

- *generic* cigarettes, lots of 'em. In '96 we brought paper and tins of tobacco to let
guests roll their own, but {ff} & tox sez they were a pain in the ass to make, and the
tobacco dried out by the second day, and nobody knew how to roll their own anyhow.

- Ask SFSI and clinics for condoms. Maybe have a sign on the bowl sayng "Condoms provided
by XXXXXX"

----------------------------- WATER -----------------------------

- 250 gallons of water. 50 5-gallon bottles of water costs $300 from alhambra. We might
use a van to make several water stops in Reno, rather than bringing it from the bay area.
This would save space in the trucks, and we'd only need to buy as much water as we needed.
We could resupply on food in the same trip. Crystal Springs Water Company can get 250
gallons for $250. 901 South Center Street, Reno, NV 89501 (702) 323-4710

- Are we getting *any* water from Wired?

- A catch basin for water, like a keg ice bucket.

options for water accesibility:
- A non-electric water cooler. Since it'll to be trashed, get two.
- A $14 pump gizmo from the water delivery service that you stick on the 5 gallon bottles.
Cheap is good because no solution will survive 9 days, 1 ton of water, and several
thousand tweaking partygoers.

- Public water in one of those 5 gallon gatorade football-type water coolers. Smart N
Final has them.

----------------------------- FOOD STORAGE -----------------------------

- Watertight containers for cheez. Makes for nicer cheez and noone has to dump out gallons
of milky cheese-water from the cooler.

- Rent large coolers (like the one the wedding couple lent us) or a dead chest-style
freezer. For the chest freezer, put dry ice in the bottom and regular ice in tubs on top
of that, to prevent water from leaking & refreezing in one huge solid mess. Plus, it's
impossible to drain water out of them. Since we're running a generator, we might want to
get a WORKING freezer , but still need ice to get the food to the playa, though.

- Labelled shack communal coolers, with their own wet/dry block "breeding" coolers. This
prevents newbie cookers from accidently using private food. Many people's private food,
and 'staff only' food, got assimilated. "We were just using everything that was in front
of us, esp. when conventional foods-tuffs ran low."

- More 'staff only' food which isn't pb&j, under lock and key so that ff doesn't serve it
up :)

- We had a lot of waste water which was hard to dispose of. It would be easy and cheap to
build a solar still to turn most of that back into usable water, and then we could pack
out the resulting sludge and avoid dumping it on the playa.

- Most of the condoms disappeared the first night. We should try to keep them available by
giving them out on request. Maybe have the servers keep them in their pockets to give to
people who look like they need it.

----------------------------- GENERAL CONSTRUCTION -----------------------------

- two stepladders

- more screwdrivers (how many?)

- two sets of vise-grips

- 5 pair of work gloves (everybody go buy their own pair, they're $3)

- normal wood hammer, mostly for the nail remover

- hacksaw. Do we need a power saw?

- pickaxe, for breaking ground on post holes

- axe

- several $5 conduit pipe cutters. (The conduit is 10', we cut it to 8' for stability &
strength.) William Pietri has one.

- manual post hole digger (the screw type, not the scissor type). The scissor type's
about $50 from hardware store. Don't make right shape for 2x4, but William Pietri's used
'em for 4x4 posts. Dean Gaudet's going to get one.

- dolly for loading/unloading (especially if we have chest freezer)

- yellow tape to direct traffic away from the sensitive tie-downs at the sides of the
shack

- extra stakes to make "fencing" out of the yellow tape so that we can protect the
sleeping area

- more duct tape (how much?)

- 10 permanent markers for labelling crap, like food & ice chests.

----------------------------- POWER -----------------------------

- {ff} got a 5K generator from big4rents. Pickup: friday aug 28, return: tuesday sept
8th.
Do we have a 3K backup rented? Do we *want* a backup?

- Two generators, for redundancy. The second one can be small, so if the first one blows
up we can limp along, powering just the essentials. We'd definitely need two generators
if we brought a full-on fridge. Others say we DON'T need two generators: the problems
last year were related to putting everything on one circuit, and using distribution strips
that aren't rated for more than 600W.

- Rocky sez: for a couple hundred bucks you can rent a quiet, simple, reliable deisel
generator for a week. Sooper quiet, tons of power (read: fridge!!) and ready to accept
cable and stuff that is ideal for running distro power in tents.

- Separate circuits for the music (vital), and kitchen + lights (not so vital).

- Strategically placed fuse/circuit breaker.

- Use all circuits the generator provides, including the 30A circuits. Build three
extension cords, two with 30A jacks, one with a standard 15A jack. Each with a few power
outlets spaced at 10' or 20' intervals. Or Rocky sez we can rent cords with distributed
outlets in them. They're called tent stringers. It's usually something a generator company
will rent to ya...

- Get one of those small-width spades the wbl folks used to bury their ultra long
extension cord, so that we can bury the power cords.

- {ff}: distribute the power before plugging everything in.

- Xmas strands are rated to have 6 chained together. Jimp sez that 12 blows, so we've got
a limit of 8 - 10.

----------------------- SHACK LAYOUT & CONSTRUCTION -----------------------

- Sound system: two 8800 top end speakers (large 52") , and two 415 sub-woofers and one
amp rack ($700). These are better speakers than the two we had in '97.

- A staff shack where any troll could just flop down in the shade. Use two trucks to make
shade structure for TrollCamp. Set up one truck as a daytime crash dorm.

- An uncovered playaside patio/dance area maybe delimited by christmas lights on posts or
conduit. Hang the mirrorball out here, high, so trolls lost in the playa can find their
way home. We could hang the ball on a 2x4 frame cube cross-stabilized on top, or mikek's
thinking of a cantilevered pole. This could also be the tower where we hang the neon
heart, which is also a beacon for lost trolls. Moses is concerned that the dance area
idea won't work because the music is loud at the shack and soft away from it. Who wants
to dance away from the music?

- We're using conduit, like we did in '96 and '97. The conduit is sold in 10' lengths, we
cut it down to 8' high for strength and stability.

- The big roof tarp in '97 was tied down tightly to the conduit. Strong winds came and
tore the tarp and its grommets and bent the conduit. This year we're laying the tarp on
top of the conduit but not attaching it. We stretch ropes over the tarp to keep it from
flying away. Within the ropes, the tarp will crumple up (hopefully) if the wind gets too
high. We stretch the tarp back out when the wind dies down. If it turns out the tarp
crumples all the time from the prevailing breeze, we use the tarp's grommets to attach it
to the posts with bungie cord or weak rope, so it breaks before the tarp tears. We can
also remove the tarp entirely during hurricanes.

- We're putting 4x4s posts (or two 2x4s lashed together) outside the conduit to bear the
stress of the roof tarp ropes. If we don't manage to to erect the 4x4s, we do without
them. In this case, the ropes over the roof tarp will stress the conduit in high winds,
but hopefully not as much as years past when the tarp wasn't allowed to crumple.

- Duct-tape pillows or foam rubber over the conduit junction boxes/4x4s where the roof
tarp will be stressed. This is where the tarp tore in '97.

- The '97 shack was about 30'x50', this year we'll do the same. But our roof tarp is
40'x60', so it has slack to billow.

- {ff} sez: get the roof tarp prepped BEFORE we put it on, like reenforcing the grommets
(don't think we're using the grommets).

- There was an idea to attach wall fabric via clothes pins to rope strung along the top
edge of the shack. It won't rip if people trip, is easily reattached, and can be removed
in high winds. But we did what we did in '96, which was sewing sleeves at the top for the
conduit to go through.

- Much of the exterior fabric billowed in the wind, often attacking innocent
couch-sitters. Attach a curtain-rod or other weight at the bottom of divider curtains.
Con: the weights at the bottom will hit people.

- Wind xmas lights around rope, and attach rope to shack. Last year we had problem with
1) wind stretching & breaking xmas strands, and 2) drunk/clumsy people breaking xmas
strands.

- Need lots of nice sturdy visible premade signs for kitchen, entrances, bike racks, etc.

- Mark entrances more clearly. Especially towards the end, people were entering randomly,
and rarely through the hall. More fabric on the non-entrance areas would help. Mark the
entrances with arrows during the day and lights at night. Perhaps we could put Xmas lights
in plastic tubing on the ground to indicate traffic paths. Christmas lights around the
entrances (also means tripping on ropes less).

- A facade out of conduit or wood in the shape of the smut shack logo. This would provide
a clear entry point, provide places to hang xmas lights, and help trolls lost in the playa
find their way home.

- Mark the boudary of the shack with conduit & rebar. Put a wedge of duct tape on one end
of the conduit, and then erect the conduit. Use the wedge of duct tape as an anchor for a
rope running from post to post. Wrap the rope with christmas lights (may also have to run
a strand down the poles, or mark them with something reflective). Playaside of the shack
we use these poles/ropes/lights to outline the courtyard/dance area. Then where we also
want to direct traffic we can use the same technique to create the walkway.

- Designate a bike zone, and possibly construct a rack or hitching post (railroad ties
cut in half are much cheaper than 4x4's). In '97 was worry that someone would trip and
fall full on a bike, scattered the way they were. Another solution was to make the
central thoroughfare crooked, so bikers don't see a straight shot through the shack. One
contributing factor to the bike mess last year was that it was hard to go from one side
of the shack to the other except via the central thoroughfare because there were too many
cars & tent ropes on either side. We should pay more attention to the area around the
shack to make sure it's bikeable.

- The bike hitching post could be combined with the bianca bulletin board that brady is
into. A few pieces of plywood for the bulletin board... a few 4x4 posts... and a few
2x4s going from post to post at the right height for locking bikes.

- Maybe have "no bikes" signs at the entrances: a circle/line-through-it and a picture of
one of those old banana seat bikes, with glued on tassles hanging from the handle bars.

- No couches in the entry hallway -- it was impossible to move through the shack because
we constricted this corridor. On the other hand, the central corridor was such a great
animated hangout space because of the couches.

- Outside couches were a great advertisement, night and day.

- Bring 4 or 5 doors to make tables (use 5-gal water bottles as legs). Also bring the
'gaudet' style table.

- LOTS of pink x-mas lights. Mikek ordered from aachristmas.com for $2.37/ea. w/
shipping:
50 pink
25 red
25 teal
25 purple (for Vagabond Jim)

- Too much good stuff disappeared. If we wanted to nail down the beauty room, we could
glue or tape the various bottles to small racks (which in turn were connected to cords, so
they could rove around the room). I don't know how to secure the smutty magazines; those
got shredded and stolen with great vigor. One camp even offered a prize to the person who
brought them the "10 greatest come shots" issue that was in the bianca library. NOTE:
get Paul to buy lots of stuff, like he did last year.

- Wall curtains: Discount Fabric on 3rd St. has a remnant bin with silky rayon prints for
$1.50/yd. The fabric is usually about 5' wide, so for example buying 3 yards of it would
get you a 5' x 9' piece. The shack is 8' tall and divided into 10' wide sections, so we
make curtains that are 8' tall and 5' wide (the standard width of the fabric) with a 3-4"
sleeve sewn along the top to stick the conduit through. So two curtains make the wall for
one 10' section of shack.

----------------------------- SHACK STUFFING -----------------------------

- The Cherry Poptart xeroxes were one of the most popular things about the shack and we
didn't mind them being trashed.

- We should have a masseuse every day, perhaps in shifts (Sam and Tyler who brought the
table were thrilled to do it and the response was awesome--they offered to do it this
year, but we'll see if they contact us). The masseuse was great ... except I saw some
dirty-old-men (DOM) joining in when there was a woman on the table.

- permanently attach an ashtray to the tables (as long as we figure out an easy way to
clean it, like a mini-vac).

- Perhaps someone with a moving whatever could give rides to Bianca's? Shacklet on wheels
that ferries people to the shack.

- Make sure to have body paint for the beauty room.

- Grope room where either it's completely dark and groping is allowed, or have a curtain
between the gropers/gropees. Or have a small cubicle with one gropee, and many outside
gropers. Periscopes? $50 Tyco videocamera from Toys R Us?

----------------------------- SMUT POLICY -----------------------------

The problem: last year some trolls were disturbed by the amount of drooling voyeurism and
possible unwanted sexual advances.
There was a somewhwat predatory atmosphere at times. How do we curb this without being
authoritarian and without becoming
the Non-Smut shack?