fyre festival is going well

Maybe they didn't either

Lol. Hasn't Shaun Ryder just formed some new "super group"?

I didn't know Lung Leg had a stage act (music, I presume).

lung leg are a 90s Glasgow girl group named after the model, and one of my favourite bands.

I was surprised to see her name on a "family-friendly" festival.

Pet peeve: Bands who name themselves after a living person.

That festival is attached to Craig Murray (his son runs it I think and he's a director?), notable Scottish nationalist zoomer, Assange apologist and Salisbury poison denier. The circumstances in which he was sacked as Ambassador to Uzbekistan are certainly worth a read.

Black Grape actually released a new album in 2017, virtually no one heard of it, and for a while I suspected it was actually a different band called Black Grape. but nah, it's them, and the record is actually pretty decent, though idk who really needs to hear a new Black Grape record right now

shouldn’t have crossed goldie lookin chain

The Black Grape reunion album was produced by Youth, who also produced Gina Birch’s solo album, and she was on this bill, too.

It hit the top 30 in the UK!

Always a pleasant surprise to find that Shaun Ryder is still among the living.

different band called Black Grape. but nah, it's them,

reunion album was produced by Youth

might as well be a new band imo if the bloke that wrote all the music and played most of it, and all the musicians who played extra bits, aren't in this version

Let’s go!

https://www.stereogum.com/2233698/somehow-fyre-festival-2-tickets-are-for-sale-now/news/

If you got a spare $500, hey.

Can't stop the press from overanalyzing
It wasn't fuckin fraud, it was false advertising
All of you critics are the people I'm despising
Billy Mac's back, baby, and back to enterprising

White Star Line announces Titanic 2

from here on out it's Fyre Fest 2
starting today and tomorrow's anew
and I'm still loco enough
to serve you a sandwich that's covered in poo

Lol Neanderthal

I don't know that public shaming is always the best solution these days but, I don't know, I kind of feel like anyone who willingly purchases a ticket to this thing deserves what they get

Let's Be Legends...Again!

people will go to this thing because people like to promote their brand and they know if this thing goes ass-up again, they might get to be in a huge documentary that's all over Netflix that shows them as gigantic douches and promote whatever NFTs they want to trade.

plus so they can brag to everyone that they went to this pile of shit and survived

well except that the festival won't actually even kick off this time because nobody will let Billy Mac host it.

I am surprised that the terms of his early release didn't stipulate that he is not allowed to "pre-sell" $500 tickets for a speculative future event (or anything like that).

seriously!

like Snoop was told he couldn't hire ex-gang members after one stint in jail, but Billy is allowed to resume doing the thing that landed him in there?

that's more my point, the odds of people's ticket money at this point just completely vanishing into the ether, never to be seen again, are pretty high.

lineup includes

Firehouse
After the Rain (Nelson tribute band)
Paul Carrack (One Good Reason album in its entirety)
Joe Piscopo (stand-up and Sinatra song set)
a karate demonstration

karate demonstration actually just nth generation dub of scenes cherry-picked from Kickboxer, Karate Kid, and Ghost World viewed on Billy McFarland’s rehomed iPad, over his shoulder

Paul Carrack? Seriously?

Oh. Well-played.

An increasing number of people seem to have viewed Charlie Sheen's extended manic episode/public meltdown as aspirational and a valid business model.

Sadly I can’t find an Artie Lange “fiiiii-yah” gif through Google right now

lol anyone who saw the documentaries had to know this is exactly what he'd try to do after getting out

Credit this Fyre huckster this, at least he knows the value of brand recognition.

Paul Carrack has too much class

I’m hating living in this timeline

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/willy-wonka-event-uk-chocolate-experience-meth-lab-1235837133/

An “immersive experience” that promised to transport Willy Wonka fans into a “magical realm” has turned out to be such an epic letdown that customers called the police and compared the attraction to a meth lab.

The U.K. event was titled Willy’s Chocolate Experience and charged customers $44 each (photos below). The attraction was not affiliated with the Warner Bros. movie Wonka, though the event’s marketing came as close as possible to suggesting it was based on author Roald Dahl’s creation. The ad copy invited fans to journey to “a universe where confectionary dreams are brought to life” that included “mind-expanding projections, optical marvels and exhibits that transport you into the realm of creativity” and “wondrous creations and enchanting surprises at every turn!”

The event organizers apparently used artificial intelligence to generate promotional images that suggested a very high-quality attraction, which looked just like the immersive and trippy Wonka-esque world that the ad copy promised. But the result was somewhat different, and ticket buyers needed pure imagination to think it looked anything like a fantastical chocolate factory.

As reported by The Guardian, customers showed up in Glasgow to find “a sparsely decorated warehouse with a scattering of plastic props, a small bouncy castle and some backdrops pinned against the walls.” Scotland police were even called to the scene, the event shut down and parents said their children were in tears.

apparently this was sold as a live Willy Wonka Experience but they used all AI images on the website to sell tickets and then people showed up and saw this and it got so bad people called the cops lmao pic.twitter.com/tfkyg0G0WG

— Chris Alsikkan (@AlsikkanTV) February 26, 2024

haha I saw that yesterday. I love how they are playing it off as if "things just went haywire at the 11th hour"

lol

oh my god https://t.co/cgvK31eQCZ

— Chris Alsikkan (@AlsikkanTV) February 27, 2024

i think that i vibe with that oompa loompa so so much?!

and it looks like, praise jesus, we finally got ourselves another billy mcfarland in this billy coull fella:

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/willy-wonka-event-glasgow-billy-coull-ai-vaccine-conspiracy-books-1234976876/

fyre festival could never: "santa's dead, ticketholders were told. elves had their faces slapped as tempers flared"

BAH HUMBUG! List things that suck about Christmas in 2016

this has got to be an On Cinema bit

Their most recent FB posting has an amazing last sentence:

I understand that the cancellation of Willys Chocolate Experience something that was supposed to be an artist rendition of a well known novel has caused disappointment , frustration and anger and the money you spent.
The process of giving your money back has already started as a number of people can confirm.
Some hurtful things have been said about people who where just helping out at the event, including personal attacks and sharing private information. Understandably your upset, and you have all made that clear. Hurting people online is no way acceptable and urge you to stop.
The intention was to genuinely create something special for you that didn’t work out.

hahaha

"You people. We tried to create something that was going to fail and all you do is complain!"

I want a detailed behind-the-scenes oral history on this Willy Wonka fiasco and I want it now.

An Oompa-Loompa actress at the centre of a widely criticised Willy Wonka chocolate factory experience has spoken of the “complete and utter shambles” of the event.

Kirsty Paterson broke her silence after a photograph of her in a ”science lab” conducting supposed experiments for paying customers at Willy’s Chocolate Experience went viral on social media.

She was one of several actresses and performers who were hired for the event organised by House of Illuminati at Hubbox on Saturday.

Ms Paterson told MailOnline she had not yet been paid for the role she was not properly briefed on before the event.

“The whole thing’s just been a complete and utter shambles. It was shocking honestly,” she said.

“I was angry at the time because I felt like this is embarrassing for me, and I felt bad for the people coming in as well.

“I actually ended up shouting at the guy. I just said to him he’s a joke and this is like embarrassing, and how can we basically live with himself, doing this to people.

“This is really embarrassing for me. My job is teaching kids yoga and I go into schools and stuff and I do kids’ entertainment.”

Ms Paterson said she was supposed to hand out jelly beans as she carried out experiments from the “science lab”. But after running out of beans, she said: “I was just trying to make slightly exciting for the kids.”

“Then I walked off scene because I was so embarrassed,” she added.

“I went mental about the guy and feel awful about the whole thing, like I really honestly do, and I walked off because I was just like feeling so shit for the kids. The whole thing has just been awful.”

The Wonka-esque impersonator Paul Connell, 31, spoke to The Independent about how he got the gig and how the chaos unfolded.

“I’m constantly applying for more acting jobs and comedy work, then I got a phone call on Thursday saying, ‘Congratulations you are going to play Willy Wonka, we will send you over the script and dress rehearsal is tomorrow’,” Mr Connell said. “The script was 15 pages of AI-generated gibberish of me just monologuing these mad things.

“The bit that got me was where I had to say, ‘There is a man we don’t know his name. We know him as the Unknown. This Unknown is an evil chocolate maker who lives in the walls.’

“It was terrifying for the kids. Is he an evil man who makes chocolate or is the chocolate itself evil?

“They even misspelt my contract but I do have a legally binding ‘Coontract’. But I stayed up all night learning it, thinking this would make sense in the dress rehearsal when I see all the tech.”

amazing

But at the Friday evening dress rehearsal hours before opening, he turned up to find the “immersive and enchanting” Willy Wonka experience was, in fact, an empty warehouse with a few plastic mushrooms.

“In some ways, it was a world of imagination, like imagine that there is a whole chocolate factory here,” he said. “I spoke to the people running it and thought, surely by the morning it won’t look like this, and then I turned up in the morning and it absolutely did.

“At the end of my monologue, I was supposed to suck up the Unknown Man with a vacuum cleaner. I asked them if they had a vacuum cleaner and they said, ‘yeah, we haven’t really got there yet, so just improvise’.

“So I started to cut things out, thinking that would be silly.

“All the actors were lovely people. We gathered together in the morning and said, ‘We’re probably not going to get paid for this but kids are still going to come up. Let’s make this as magic as possible for them’.

“I was making jokes but we were told to give them one jelly bean and a quarter cup of lemonade,” he continued. “No chocolate at the chocolate experience. There was supposed to be a chocolate fountain somewhere but I never saw it.