My 2020 dumpster fire
Posted January 08, 2021
As a wrap to 2020, the team at Basecamp ran a campaign called Dumpster Fire. The premise was simple: Send an email, and watch a contraption print it and feed it into a fire. It was open to anyone, so I joined in to farewell the year as it passed.
So how does one encapsulate the feelings of 2020? I chose a lyrics from The Rhythm Changes by Kamasi Washington, written and sung by Patrice Quinn. Along with my own snippet, of course.
Our minds, our bodies, our feelings
They change, they alter, they leave us
Somehow, no matter what happens, I’m here2020 departs, 2021 arrives, and here I am throughout it all
Surprisingly sending the email itself took several attempts, as spam filters caught my personal email. I resorted to using my Google account to make sure it went through. A week later, I was greeted with a video of my email going up in flames.
Along with the livestream of my email burning, the team at Basecamp were kind enough to capture it in a 30 second clip. In a fitting turn of events, my printed email got stuck on the conveyor belt and avoided burning to a crisp.
You can also read about the making of this experiment on the Basecamp blog.
