This year in flooding the market:

What if we had a Burning Man and nobody came? Welp, we just might find out. Every year there's something that's going to ruin the week-long let's get weird in the desert festival, but doesn't. Glampers, bugs, smoke from wildfires. Last time is was supposed to be rain.

Above: ok, it actually was rain last time. We kind of saw that coming.

It was a disaster, Diplo was
very nearly inconvenienced. 

But before the rain rolled in and turned the five square miles of drylake bed into the consistency of cookie dough, the expected catastrophe was supposed to be glut of speculators offloading their tickets at the last minute, which is weird because this year it's a glut of speculators offloading their tickets at the last minute. Yup, it's happening again except this time it's also regular people trying to offload their tickets at the last minute and the Burning Man organization flooding the market with still more tickets. If you ever wanted to go, this is the year.

By roll up, I mean creep towards the entrance
slowly for six to ten hours in 103º heat.

On the other hand, if you don't want to go, this was not the year to have already bought hundreds if not thousands of dollars of tickets on the off-chance you might change your mind because now, you're probably stuck with them. Which isn't unheard of. When I first went back in  2010, you could just roll up with cash and get it, but the following year it sold out and has every year since. You could usually pick up tickets close to the even as people for whatever reason had to sell, but for the most part they've been hard to come by.

Pictured: $925 of buyer's remorse.

This year however, not only is social media drenched in tickets like so much unseasonable rain, but the non-profit that runs Burning Man has released still more tickets into an already saturated--I can't get away from this analogy, can I?--market. Why? I'm guessing that the Org held a number of tickets back so as to keep them out of the hands of speculators. Which, if true, is super. Good for them fighting back against ticket parasites. But plenty of people have unexpected things (kids, work, the sudden realization that it's actually a gigantic pain in the ass and possibly more work than fun) come up and just can't go. 

So now a lot of burners are understandably upset that the Org is making their life difficult. Why buy from some rando on Facebook, when you can get them through the actual organizers? If the Org was indeed trying to look out for Burners, it sounds like it might have backfired. 

This year's Man--that is, the giant effigy that burns at the end of
the week--will be constructed entirely out of unwanted tickets.