Priceless v2 will be very similar to how it was originally planned. It will be a little cooler (80’s during the day, 50’s at night) and a little more of a celebration of the end of summer, rather than the beginning, but a celebration of our community nonetheless. Its been a crazy summer and we have a lot to celebrate. There will likely be some changes to the music, art and activities we originally put together, but we’re doing our best to keep things as close as possible and to fill in the gaps with new delights. We will continue to update this site with this information as it comes in and email you if needed. So please, mark your calendars.

We understand that there are will, undoubtedly, be a few of you who will sadly not be able to gather with us because of the rescheduling. It is our priority to help you out. We have been talking to Inticketing and together have set up a refund policy. The policy is that refunds are available to all ticket holders for the next TWO WEEKS ONLY (ending 11:59pm July 31st) with no exceptions. See In Ticketing for details. However, we would like to encourage folks to not seek refunds through In Ticketing if possible. This is for two reasons. First, the service fees are non-refundable. Second, False Profit is charged a small fee for every ticket refunded. So instead, we encourage you to exchange your tickets with friends. If you have willcall tickets, you can exchange tickets by changing the name on the will call list by visiting this page and following the directions.

In addition to these services, the Priceless team would like to assist those who are wanting to sell tickets and buy tickets get in touch with each other. Our current plan is to use tribe.net to facilitate this. There are two urls: one for ticket sellers and one for ticket buyers. Please post on the appropriate link if you wish to participate. We will also be importing this information into our ticket page on this website for ease of viewing messages and contacting others. However, to post, you will have to join Tribe.net.

As always, thanks for your patience and excitement. We can’t wait to see you in the forest and on the dancefloor. Until then, enjoy your summer.

Best,
All of us at False Profit

Black Rock City, NV – ‘Inevitability’ is usually a term incompetent economists wield indiscriminately and talented economists avoid at all costs. There is nothing inevitable about the moneyed economy—the single exception of course being the unequal distribution of wealth. However, the well-respected Life-Quality Economics Institute at False Profit, LLC, has just made an announcement that could change all that.

“Our Aural Economy division is reporting that, against all odds and predispositions, False Profit, LLC will once again be throwing a party on the Playa,” explained Jay Oberhelman, Director of the L-QE Institute. “We had to find a model for this kind of behavior.”

They are calling it ‘Tuesday Night Syndrome’, though it is now assumed that there are other inevitabilities in the field of life-quality economics. It has even been suggested that Priceless, False Profit’s annual campout may fit this model of inevitability.

“We believe it is a Pavlovian response to high-quality basslines,” remarked Lazlo Jamf, Chief Psychoanalyst at the Institute. “It has been verified that False Profit was recently exposed to very good beats, which may have triggered this conditioned reaction of throwing a Tuesday Night Party.”

Spokesperson for the company, Nevada Valentine, advised all participants in the life-quality economy to show up around 10pm at False Profit’s camp at 4:30 and Esplanade on Tuesday Night.

Why is commons licensing important and good? This is just one example.

Read on to increase your exposure to this hot segment. Our first pick is to use Tor and Privoxy to make your online activity anonymous. (Vidalia and Torbutton can make this easy.) False Profit is currently multiplying returns with a Tor relay at our headquarters.

The latest research from False Profit, LLC indicates that letters, and words made from them, continue to compete strongly in the conscious mental activity market segment. Despite recent challenges from YouTube and other blinky things you click, the 26 traditional Latin characters and their associated punctuation and numerals are still providing solid returns.

For example: The October XLR8R cover proclaimed “BERLIN WASTED YOUTH” to announce their special issue devoted to the city. After cutting out each letter of this headline, our senior staff of financial linguists put together a number of attractive anagram investment packages. With a small up-front mental payment, you too can leverage the latent power of deep structure for maximum entertainment. (Particularly if you turn the “W” upside down to get “M”. But you do have to use all the letters. Scrabble rules apply for deciding if a word is a word — unless it’s really, really good.)

Post your XLR8R cover anagram remix photos on flickr in the False Profit group pool with the tag “berlinwastedremix” and they will show up over in the left column. Bonus points, of course, if your anagram is vaguely poetic, actually makes sense, or references the content of XLR8R. We’re pretty sure you can spell “Tiesto” with those letters.

Trackback from XLR8R, November 14, 2006: [...] While surfing the web we ran across the October issue of XLR8R, only to find that particular cover had sparked an anagram face-off among users of False Profit’s website. All of the “attractive anagram packages” were put together using the letters of XLR8R’s annual city issue, which focused on Berlin this year. [...]

This is a big one, in my mind. We’ve removed comments, since this is annoying to manage on our own, but we can simply use Tribe’s social network, authentication, hosting, etc. to power our community, instead.

He went on to suggest that we use custom fields to set up the relationship between a page/post and a Tribe thread, which I implemented. Since Tribe publishes an RSS feed of every thread, that’s a natural way to get the data. The only problem is doing something useful with it once we get it. Fortunately, there’s Simplepie to do downloading, parsing, caching, etc. of RSS feeds. A little bit of glue code, and we’ve got Tribe posts and links showing up on our site! Yay for the new internet.

So we’ve got URLs like this (pages):
http://staging.false-profit.com/partners

And URLs like this (categories):
http://staging.false-profit.com/category/events

That’s annoying, because I really want the second URL to just be http://staging.false-profit.com/events/ — it shouldn’t matter that it’s a category. There’s a thread on the WP forum about this:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/41363

But no one there seems to have made much progress. Setting the category-base to ./ doesn’t work. I see our two options as this:

1. Use a PHP eval plugin like RunPHP to execute loop code within pages set up at each URL we care about. Use the get_posts template tag.

Pros: Not much code to write. Makes the page for a given URL easy to find and update. Each page can be totally customized as far as how it displays things.

Cons: Need to put what’s basically the same loop code into many pages. (Could package it up as a function and include it to avoid some of that weirdness.) Results in two places to find the same stuff: /news and /categories/news would both list news posts, maybe in different ways, which is weird. There might be extra overhead for the RunPHP plugin.

2. Use mod_rewrite or a custom 404 to proxy queries for anything not found in the root to /category/that_thing. Use sticky category posts or custom category templates to provide the static content in each page.

Pros: Don’t need to create a page for each category in addition to the category itself. No plugins or code. Only need this one rewrite rule.

Cons: To customize the category appearance, you have to create a custom category page within the theme. If someone requests a page that doesn’t exist and doesn’t have a category, we’ll end up looking in /nonexistent and /category/nonexistent, which is weird if they’re asking for nonext.jpg or something like that. It doubles the overhead of each 404.

I lean toward the former. (Makes customizing the appearance of what’s going on at each URL simpler and keeps people from needing to muck around in the theme with stuff like category-8.php which is annoying to try to figure out what it goes with.) Thoughts? Other ways to handle this?

Update: Third option to hack the classes.php. I still prefer the first method.

Postscript: What we’ve actually done is two things:

Use a redirect plugin to forward the URLs we want to the URLs that exist. This makes it easy for any of our editors to create a new top-level URL by just creating a page and setting a Custom Field on that page called “redirect” — no mod_rewrite hacking necessary.

Write some PHP to put The Loop on pages (as the original option 1 suggested). Examples at the Dividend and Equity pages.

I added stuff to the stylesheet to make this go, but nothing big. The tradeoff versus FAlbum is that this doesn’t have the on-site features (individual photo viewing, sets, tag cloud, etc). We’d just be bouncing people off to flickr when they click… but at least bouncing them to our photos or groups. Of course the benefit is that we can incorporate anyone or any group’s public photos, not just those of a single special user. And it would save us some bandwidth.

To help your thinking about why this might be cool, here’s photos tagged with ‘fire’ in the False Profit group pool.

I think a lot of it comes down to how we see integrating photos in the future. Do we want people browsing photo albums on our site? Do we want to create a whole photo section? How will we keep it updated? Should we buy a “falseprofit” pro flickr account? Or, should we use the social power of flickr and the images that are already there to lace little keyword / group driven thumbnails through our various pages?

[Update: Based on the Socratic line of questioning here, we did indeed decide to ditch FAlbum and use modified flickr badges for all the photos on this site. Taking the flickr badge code, parameterizing it, and creating a PHP function that can be called from the templates made it easy to integrate. We now use a Custom Field on each post or page to indicate the desired flickr tag and the template does the rest.]