sweet, take your time, and you can attach photos to your posts here if you want.
Alright! Finally got them up! Compiled the photos I took with some that friends took. You can see them all here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/128971208@N08/sets/72157648870059856/
As for the rest -- I had an absolute blast and I definitely encourage anyone interested to go in the future. I would like to mention that the entire Wasteland Weekend is heavily fueled by booze, so if anyone on here is currently recovering or has recovered from the stuff and doesn't want to be around that sort of thing, that is something you may want to consider.
On all the upsides: It was crazy fun, lots of great people, and definitely an apocalypse nerd's wet dream. There were a lot of awesome details people added, for example, some camps chose to set their area up to look like actual little houses, and would put picket fences around them with mailboxes that YES actually had cool items in them at all times that you could take! (Home made mentats boxes, home made magazines, bullet shells, bottle caps, etc etc). NCR was basically border patrol, Caesar's Legion was there (all of whom were very friendly and invited us over for dinner), there was a Library with a lot of burnt and pre-war books, all of the Mad Max mutant vehicles were AMAZING, and a very large amount of people remained in character the entire time. There were even some Six-String Samurai references, which I was stoked about.
There was a camp called the Meat Market Slave auction where you could send them text messages and have them capture your friends for bottle caps. There was a casino where you could win bottle caps at to trade in for cool stuff. My favorite part was probably the Bounty Hunting area. You could sign yourself up to be hunted or you could hunt someone else. They would take your picture and post it to a board and it was free game, someone would snag it and search for you. If you were being hunted, you were given a severed finger to hold on to. If a hunter found you, you would play rock paper scissors, and if they won, they would take your finger and bring it back with your poster to collect your bounty and if you won, they had to try again to find you elsewhere. It was ridiculously fun and a great way to make new friends.
The whole thing really was surprisingly smooth for what I expected. Nearly everyone I met was great, there really were few ass holes at least from what I came across. I lost a few things, and even my friend Emily lost her iphone at some point and all of our things were returned to lost and found, so I thought that was pretty cool and surprising.
There were a couple downsides: Obviously with what I mentioned before about booze (The Atomic Cafe, which was the bar, opened every day at 5pm and stayed open until 3am, and ALL the alcohol was free.) shit can and likely will go down, so there were a few incidents. At one point we met a group of kids who were all really great except for one (and he was obviously the douche of the group because his camp also wasn't even fond of him). He was this macho idiot kid and he kept trying to hook up with my friend Emily, and got super butt-hurt about her not being into it, so he actually came by later and slashed our tent up. We didn't see it, but the camp next to us told us about it. That was a little messy, and he was obviously wasted, but I'm pretty sure his camp kicked his ass when they found out so there's that. I did also hear there were some fist fights and apparently someone actually got mugged? I heard something also about a dog being injured, but I'm not sure if it was intentional or accidental, or really what happened? But the people who ran the whole event were really good about dealing with everything, the camp who saw what happened to our tent reported it, and the Joker (of course) was the guy who came over to talk to us about it and everyone was real cool, they even tried to find us a new tent.
All in all, even with the weird shit that went down at the end there, I would absolutely go again and will be next year. Again, it's kinda to be expected that with a bunch of crazy drunk people wielding weapons in a free-for-all apocalypse setting... something shitty is bound to happen. And a lot less happened than I expected so, hey, I would say it was a success. My nerd boner far surpassed any emotional distress haha.