Old News – And Some New!

When we started a fake company in 2005, we needed some fake news! Then it turned into real news. Start at the bottom of the page and read upwards to see how much fun we had with you back then!

 

August 11, 2008: Playatech Introduces its “Bike Jack” – The Rack That Saves Your Back

With all due elation, Playatech presents its new “Bike Jack”, the rack that saves your back.

In years past, the noble knight Dragi manifested a comely bike rack in the manner of the House of Playatech. Yet the Dark Ages following The Psyche left no trace, with the achievement lost to civilization but for a sole rendering.

For the Renaissance of the American Dream, Her Excellency Harley K. Dubois, Commissioner of the Kingdom, sent word to Knight Sunshine of the need for a simple plywood bike rack design, to be ordained for use by all Noblepersons’ camps. And thus in eternal service of our King, Playatech endeavored to improve upon the lost art.

By consequence of slave labor, parchments scribed in the official seal of Playatech were rendered, duly delivered to Her Excellency in all formality, and presented to all common folk upon the Playatech web site – www.playatech.com. To avail you of one, merely render the required royalty of five doubloons to Black Rock Arts Foundation, and seek ye an artisan to execute it.

Presently, Her Excellency proffers the finest rack in the Kingdom, and it dispatches exactly one sheet of precious wood. The plywood rebellion is proceeding -ñ what has your palace done in revolt against the reign of IKEA lately?

Playatech – Servicing Peasants and Royalty with Equality since the Golden Ages

 

June 12, 2007: Playatech Announces Its 2006 “Green Home” Furniture Line of The Future!

Playatech is pleased to announce the long awaited introduction of its BM06 “Green Home” Furniture Line of the Future! Delayed a year by hope and fear, the Green Home line includes everything needed to furnish a home for $500, move in one minivan load, and save the planet while you’re at it. It rocks for Burning Man too! Check it out now at www.Playatech.com.

The new Playatech line features three dozen radically cool furniture and entertainment products anyone can fabricate entirely from standard plywood, and every one collapses flat for shipment. Yes, all the furniture for a 2 bedroom house or large bar camp will fit in a mini-van!

According to Playatech founder Sunshine, “At BM05, Playatech launched the Playa Love Seat, Playa Pew, and Larry Boy Lounger to insane acclaim. We changed camp seating forever, but we failed to kill IKEA – so we huddled and muddled and redesigned every piece of furniture you need to live, work, and play!” The new line includes a sofa that converts to a queen bed, daybeds that push together into playpens, bars you can dance on, and a dinette that turns into a den. Even recycled 1972 designs we found in a book.

All Green Home products turn you into an artist, and are radically cheap, easy to own, and available exclusively from Playatech – the world’s only brand built on the 10 Burning Man Principles. And they’re GREEN! Exterior plywood is 95-99% renewable wood, much of which now comes from FSC-Certified sustainable forests, and the rest is relatively innocuous glue. Playatech eliminates factories, packaging, end-product distribution, retail stores, exploited child labor, and nearly all bad things capitalism introduces between natureís end product and your rear end.

When obsoleted by next year’s “Tall” theme products, the entire energy content of Green Home furniture can be cleanly recovered as useful heat in a proper furnace ñ it is food for giant Mechabolic slugs! If burned in an open fire, the wood puts out more noxious fumes than the glue.

Playatech offers great green furniture for your mobile lifestyle that obsoletes landfills, at an unbelievable price! And that is no Silicon Valley pipedream.

Playatech – The Greenest Furniture Money Can’t Buy

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November 3, 2005: Paint For Profit, and Put Burning Art In Every Home

Playatech’s first ‘personal use business model’ enables everyone to build their own cool playa furniture while paying it forward to the arts through a $5 royalty to Black Rock Arts Foundation. Now we’d like to explore a ‘commercial use business model’ designed to help burning painters increase their own income, and increase the royalty flow to BRAF. If you build it, more will come.

Paintings last centuries and our walls are full, so selling framed art must be hard – but furniture is a much larger industry because it wears out. Playatech invites professional artists to exploit this financially as follows:

  1. Build a Playa Love Seat or find someone to build you one. It’s easy.
  2. Treat it as a 3D canvas and paint it with your own beautiful design.
  3. Place it in a gallery, street fair, or wherever you currently sell art with a fat price tag and a photo of it collapsed for shipment. See if it grabs customers. No, don’t sell it to burners; they can build their own so they won’t pay much!
  4. If it sells, you are using Playatech technology for commercial gain instead of personal use, and the royalty should be more than $5. Can we try 10% of the dollars you get? This is about supporting artists and not Playatech, so we’re open to negotiating.
  5. If you made more money in less time this way than creating and selling a conventional painting, please do it again, and tell us about it so we can learn and improve – sunshine@playatech.com.
  6. Please mark any Playatech furniture you sell ‘Licensed by Playatech; All Rights Reserved’. Otherwise boatloads of this stuff may start showing up from China in weeks.

Yes, we have radical ideas about how to stop money and branding from being bad words around Burning Man. And we’d love to see many more ideas from everyone. To be successful taking our magic world to the streets everywhere, we’ll need to evolve our culture in ways that embrace money flowing within the 10 Principles. If Playatech found one way to do it there must be others, so please explore with us – because all good things that nature didn’t grow really do come from our psyches, so that theme will never be over.

About Playatech:

Playatech is a real brand and fantasy company exploring fun ways to make money flow that honor the 10 Burning Man principles. It lies somewhere in the radically innovative realm between art project, non-profit, and corporation, and exists to pay it forward. It is in no way affiliated with any unnamed cruise ship operator.

Playatech – The Only Brand The Man Can Stand

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September 26, 2005: Burning Man LLC Names Playatech Exclusive SF Decom Seating Supplier

Burning Man LLC today announced it has awarded Playatech exclusive rights to furnish SF Decom 2005 with rapidly deployable seating. In making this award, the LLC stated a goal of ensuring comfort and community space for all participants, and cited 10 selection principles including radical inclusion, decommodification, civic responsibility, and gifting.

To fulfill the terms of the award while supporting principles of self-reliance, self-_expression, and communal effort, Playatech has committed to invite every Playa Love Seat and Playa Pew within 50 miles of SF to attend the event and congregate around fires that will heat the street. All furniture interested in participation should contact sunshine@playatech.com ASAP to RSVP and for logistical details. Playatech will provide paints, woodburners and its official fire brand ñ this will ensure that furniture arriving without playawear gets unpredictably transformed into insanely fine art by an ad hoc team of 10,000 creative burners intent on experiential immediacy.

According to Playatechís Sunshine Daydream, “While the financial value of this award wonít pay the BRAF royalty on a single love seat, this event will mark an important milestone as we expand our dominance over IKEA from the desert to the streets. Unlike those box store boys, we believe that furniture should be created as art, and when worn out it should become fuel, not landfill fodder”.

As additional incentive for the exclusive right to rest body parts at Decom, Playatech has committed to updating its aging web site with more radical innovations sometime afterwards, and has agreed not to hire Reverend Billy as its pitchman at least until the 2006 theme is made public. And we promised to remind you ALL to leave no trace at this event and everywhere!!!!

For more information about Playatech, visit https://www.playatech.com. For more information about SF Decom, go there.

Playatech – The Only Brand the Man Can Stand

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August 20,2005: Playatechís Once-Only Annual Labor Day Desert Snuggle Sale @ 6:01 & Ego!

Greetings Black Rockers! Are you still sitting on a stupid folding camp chair wondering why youíre not an artist, or passing out alone on a skanky old couch you canít even burn? If so, your psyche needs Playatech, the worldís leading brand of rapidly deployable artistic lifestyles.

Visit Playatech’s Black Rock Factory Showroom and Outlet Store at 6:01 and Ego for our once-only annual Labor Day Desert Snuggle Sale ñ yes, our entire award-winning line of plywood love seats, couches, loungers, bars, tent organizers and accessories is 100% off, burn week only! Come decorate something and weíll give you the plans, or maybe a schwag lighter to leave no trace with. And donít miss our subconscious lifestyle showcases at Borg 2, The Dicky Box, Critical Tits, and somewhere on the playa only the Artery knows.

Playatech ecstatically offers Black Rock City’s first-ever dust-proof guarantee, good for the life of the LLC: yes, we guarantee that even you can build the world’s most advanced collapsible, burnable, easily constructed period furniture for the 21st Century Burner. We guarantee that if you build it, the industrial artist within you will come. We guarantee each piece is a plywood canvas that will release the fine artist hiding in your psyche. We guarantee that remitting our required royalty to Black Rock Arts Foundation or Borg2 will make you an art philanthropist, and art we canít imagine yet will emerge from your psyche and others. Burn week, we even guarantee someone will share your Playa Love Seat with you, and that you can achieve catharsis at our final clearance sale by burning it midnight Saturday in the Man embers. No one beats Playatech ploduct plice/perflormance, and if you don’t agree weíll give you your money back!!!

A new era in rapidly deployable lifestyles is about to arrive at 6:01 & Ego, and neither your brain nor your bottom will ever feel the same about plywood again. Only from:

Playatech – supporting asses and the arts since a few weeks ago

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July 31, 2005: Urgent Factory Recall Information! (Note: Joke – Anchors Not Needed)

Playatech regrets to announce that it is taking the unprecedented step of announcing an urgent safety recall of all Playatech ploducts. Please return your Playatech creation to your nearest Playatech factory immediately to perform necessary safety modifications.

According to Federal Aviation Administration officials, all Playatech ploducts were appropriately designed to resist catastrophic disintegration under normal burner loads, but high winds may cause unsecured Playatech furniture to become airborne. The FAA is now concerned that rapidly increasing numbers of Playa Love Seats and other Playatech ploducts may interfere with near-term Black Rock City Airport flight operations.

To prevent unintended pyrotechnic population control impacts, Playatech recommends all factories drill a large hole near the bottom of one or both side supports on all ploducts intended for outdoor use. A carabiner may then be used to secure your Playa Love Seat or other fine furniture item to a hooked rebar sunk into the playa.

Thank you for sitting safely, and don’t miss our giant once-in-a-lifetime 100%-off Labor Day Desert Snuggle Sale at Burning Silicon Collective, right behind Center Camp at 6PM and Ego. For more information about Playatech, visit www. playatech.com. A little participation makes the magic happen, so if you like our stuff enough to build it, please support art no one can imagine yet by paying it forward through our radically unique shareware royalty program. And do leave no trace by throwing your Playatech furniture on the Man’s embers at midnight, which will make room for our unconceived 2006 ploduct line.

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July 13, 2005: Playatech today announced that it has filed a formal request for curatorship with Burning Man, LLC.

Playatech’s application for curated status is noteworthy because no one including its creators know whether Playatech should properly be classified as an art project. Unlike other Artery applications covering individual physical structures located in one place, this application is for a brand that will be marketed on-playa, and for everything under the brand’s umbrella. The broad array of creative media encompassed in this curatorship request includes an e-commerce web site, radio, newspaper & tribe promotions, dozens of physical wooden furniture art installations on-playa including the Playa Hearth Stop funded by Borg2, and a yet-to be constructed or approved mutant vehicle.

According to Playatech’s chief radical innovator Sunshine Daydream, “We really have no idea what curatorship means, but we like new experiences and this one sounds like something that would feel good, especially if LadyBee can figure out how to do it to us. Besides, Playatech asks the question ‘am I art now?’ about many things that usually are not considered art, and we want answers from a professional.”  Sunshine daydreamed, “My first Burning Man taught me everybody can be an artist if we free our psyches from their little boxes, and my gift back is to try showing that everything can be art if our psyches escape other boxes.”

According to an unnamed Playatech source, all revenues generated by the Playatech e-commerce site go directly to Black Rock Arts Foundation or Borg2 under a shareware revenue model. ìIf you creatively market creative gifts you created to support creation of other creative gifts for others by others, doesn’t all that gifting and creative creation make the marketing art, and indeed, make the entire concept art? Burning Man declared its theme ‘The Psyche’ this year, so I am confident the definition of art at the event cannot be limited to solid matter that can be weighed and burned!” opined the source.

The curatorship request filed today also includes a grant request for $20 to support a proposed playa installation called “No Sitting On the Playa”. This installation will consist of a single Playa Love Seat on the playa boldly marked ìNO SITTINGî. As the deadline for art installation grant applications recently expired, Playatech does not expect to receive an award but is hopeful. “After all”, said Sunshine, “Jim Mason got slammed for demanding fifty large after the deadline, but all we asked for is a couple burritos and a back-stage pass to Center Camp. That’s much more creative, so our request is art and should be honored.”

Another unnamed Playatech source indicated that Playatech staff are concerned the Artery might interpret the Playatech curatorship and grant requests as a playa joke. This source claimed that everything about Playatech is a playa joke until psyches make it real, and hinted that if curatorship is denied, a 4×8 plywood sheet with a creative complaint letter painted on it might show up at the Terminatorís own California Curatorship Commissionerís Office. This information could not be confirmed.

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July 5, 2005: Playatech Partners With Critical Tits

Playatech today announced that it has successfully beaten IKEA to win the coveted contract for supplying the Critical Tits After Party at BM05 with the worldís most advanced playa seating. The value of the award is hugs and kisses.

According to Corporate Mouthpiece, corporate mouthpiece for Playatech, ìWe are thrilled to win this imaginary contract, as it proves our Playa Love Seat is ergonomically designed to optimally support, appreciate, honor, and empower goddesses. Our Chief Radical Innovator Sunshine Daydream intends to fulfill the contract by organizing a team of ëLine Loversî who will adore goddesses waiting in line for various experiences, and who will offer use of Playa Love Seats for seated adoration.î The contract includes an option for Critical Tits Camp members to build additional Playatech ploducts as needed for the camp.

Separately today, Playatech acknowledged that it failed to win the even larger contract for Critical Tits massage tables. According to Critical Tits organizer and erotic superhero Captain Erotica, ìwe carefully considered Playatechís bid, but in the end we were forced to conclude that lying face-down on plywood just isnít comfortable for goddessesî. An unnamed Playatech source indicated that Playatech regrets this decision, and could have offered the same padding used in beds designed by competitor www.fedexfurniture.com.

For more information about Playatech, visit www.playatech.com. For more information about Critical Tits, go there.

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July 1, 2005: Playatech To Sponsor Project X

Playatech today announced that it has become an official corporate sponsor of Project X. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but word on the street suggests it might involve seating for the project.

Project X is an ambiguous endeavor aiming to construct a large playa art installation for BM05 using a team method in which no team member knows more than their own isolated task. The result is complete ambiguity about the process, team, installation design, or other outcomes, if any. It is believed that a research study into team performance under conditions of ambiguity is being conducted.

According to Sunshine Daydream, Playatechís Chief Radical Innovator, ìPlayatech elected to sponsor Project X due to a perceived common interest in plywood supply chains and construction techniques. And, because like Project X, everything about Playatech is a study in ambiguity designed to explore the Psyche.î

According to Joe Priff, the researcher behind Project X, ìI canít confirm or deny our use of plywood nor specify Playatechís role in the project, but Project X is excited to have Playatech as a corporate sponsor.”

For more information about Project X, visit http://wizzard.com/bm2005/index.html . For more information about Playatech, visit www.playatech.com.

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June 20, 2005: Playatech To Acquire Burning Man Headquarters June 30, 2005

Playatech today announced that the Burning Man LLC Board of Directors has accepted its offer to acquire Burning Man Headquarters (BMHQ). The closing date of the acquisition is expected to be Thursday June 30.

Playatech will establish a radical furniture factory on the ground floor of the BMHQ site and will initiate production at 4PM on June 30, for the benefit of all burners. From 4-8PM sawdust will fly as we help you construct massive quantities of Playa Love Seats and Playa Pews to take Home ñ factory workers will be asked to donate only the wholesale cost of their plywood plus Playatechís standard $5/sheet royalty to Black Rock Arts Foundation – $25/sheet total. From 6-10PM we will celebrate art, share BYOB booze, and BBQ playa potluck style while we decorate our new furniture.

At 10PM on June 30, Playatech will announce it is divesting all corporate assets including BMHQ, and will sell the facility back to the LLC for one BM05 event ticket.

Psyche! Silly rabbits, you know Larry would never give in to a corporate raider. But he does want you to support BRAF by making art at Playatechís first SF DIY Factory Dance Sale, so heís lending us his basement ñ if we leave no trace, maybe heíll do it again.

RSVP required – creative insanity drives us to choreograph furniture production as a dance performance with plywood partners, and doing anything this outside the box requires coordination. See vital information at www.playatech.com right away for how to participate.

For more information about Playatech, visit www.playatech.com. For more information about BRAF visit www.blackrockarts.org.

June 20, 2005: Playatech Seeks Draftsperson

Playatech seeks a minimally experienced draftsperson who can take our crappy hand-sketched construction diagrams that we barely used rulers for and turn them into something pretty enough to use for patent applications and venture capital presentations. You must work with little or no direction. Digital CAD tools preferred.

Compensation for this position is all in your psyche, and Playatech offers all employeesí psyches the following benefit plan:

  1. Contributing to a fun art project that spawns more art projects that raise money for even more art projects.
  2. Getting showered with imitation glory, fake stock options, and maybe company swag someday if our yet to be defined VP of Swag position is ever filled.
  3. Receiving immediate consideration when positions open up for Playatech Customer Service Hotties just in time for our giant Labor Day Desert Showroom Sale.
  4. Maybe something else, but we canít think of it right now.

To apply please send something youíve drawn and dimensioned to sunshine@playatech.com (weíve gotta keep the riff-raff out somehow). For more information about Playatech, visit www.playatech.com.

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June 10, 2005: The Playa Hearth Stop Project

In some unknown way, the psyche is transformed at Burning Man by connecting it with art, fire, and community. This project stimulates those connections by establishing intimate neighborhood meeting points for participants to congregate and make new friends as they create art and fire together. Want to build a cool playhouse for our giant sandbox? It ís so easy.

Each Playa Hearth Stop consists of a burn barrel or other fire piece surrounded by four wooden Playa Love Seats to define the space. See pictures at https://www.playatech.com. Each four foot wide Playa Love Seat is easily cut from a single 4×8 1/2î plywood sheet in under an hour pre-playa. It fits in a car as six flat pieces, and assembles on-site in seconds using slots in the parts, without fasteners or glue. Cost is maybe $25-35/seat. The bulk of the playa effort is pounding one rebar per seat and then stoking the flames! During the early days of the event, art can be painted on the Playa Love Seats by participants in the morning, and baked by the hot sun for seat use that night while the community shares a fire ñ see photo on this tribe of this weekís creation painted by many at BMHQ.

Use Playa Hearth Stops as the psyche suggests – village rendezvous points, art car stops, deep playa contemplations, dust storm shelters, theatres, passionate connections, or Ö? Playa Love Seats may be burned by their creators at conclusion of the event if suitable paints are used, or shipped flat back to default for reuse should they survive the playa. They also make great camp chairs! Burn barrel use and fire art are subject to event rules at www.BurningMan.com.

So, would anyone like to create a Playa Hearth Stop in your neighborhood where we can chill awhile? The Playatech website provides drawings for cutting the plywood, and weíll share pointers to suitable paints and other ideas as we find them. Weíll even tell Playa Info where we think youíll locate your stop, and perhaps we’ll arrange a rickshaw tour. You will be self-sufficient about the rest ñ after all, this is Burning Man so if you want a sweet spot to entertain in the middle of nowhere you damn well better go build it yourself!

They say ìitís just a week in the desertî. And this project is just four sheets of ply around a discarded oil drum – everything else will be in our psyches. Want to play make believe in the worldís biggest sandbox with me? Itís been a long time.

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May 26, 2005: Playatech Announces the New ‘Playa Pew’, and the End of Skanky Playa Couches

The purrfect place to plant some parts, indoors or out!

Our target market wants to dump its bulky, smelly, dusty old playa couches, and now just in time for Memorial Day, Playatech is pleased to introduce an 8-foot wide couch version of the soon to be infamous Playa Love Seat!

Construction requires just 8 straight table saw cuts and 24 slots with a router or saw using exactly two sheets of plywood. Each Playa Pew ships in under 2.4 cubic feet when broken down into 8 flat boards ñ thatís better than an inflatable couch that won’t go pop till you cook it!! It will not fit in most cars due to 8-foot long planks, but WTF, just try this with IKEA technology.

The new Playa Pew uses exactly the same design as the Playa Love Seat but with the seat, seatback, front support and rear support boards cut the long way down plywood sheets instead of the short way, and with two added center supports. Plans are now available for paid download here. Please do not forget your $5/sheet royalty to the BRAF or BORG2 art gods to ensure your Playa Pew does not give your ass splinters! Thatís $10 per pew for those that canít add; one helluva deal for such a fine product.

You can build one or two Playa Pews in an hour but our psyches are faster than our pens or saws. It will work, trust us. Playatech is a shareware company which means YOU get to share in creating this corporate art project that spawns art projects to fund even more art projects – so can YOU please build a Playa Pew ASAP and send pictures to sunshine@playatech.com, or at least make nicer cutting drawings for us that include the slot details?? Weíll make you and your art famous on our web site, which already gets more hits than IKEA within the all-important 24-35 year-old burner demographic.

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May 25, 2005: Playatech Independence Day BLOWOUT!

When IKEA announces a blow out, you save a few bucks at a silly sale and some Scandinavian prince eats a little less caviar that night. When Playatech announces a blow out, weíre thinking something a little more…EXPLOSIVE!!!

Weíre really happy peoplesí psyches are supporting the arts by building our products and we want everyone to check them out, so here is OUR kind of July 4th blowout:

Playatech will award one prize of $100 to the person or team that demonstrates the best use of explosives to either a) launch a Playa Love Seat at least 30 feet in the air without completely demolishing it at least until landing, OR b) demolish it to smithereens leaving no piece larger than one square foot in area. Use of a two-stage explosive approach to accomplish ìbî while the seat is near the top of the trajectory caused by ìaî will result in a special Blowout Master award to that entrant consisting of one BM05 event ticket instead of cash.

All entries must be submitted by midnight July 6, 2005 in web-ready video clip form attached to an email addressed to sunshine@playatech.com. The email must specify entrantís name, contact information, name of your submission, and a sentence or two about your approach. The mail should also grant permission to use your submission for any promotional purpose, because we want everyone to see your creativity!!! We will do our best to post all submissions received by June 30 in time to provide some July 4th fireworks. All entrants agree to assume all liability for the results of their artistic efforts. Do not try this at home. Adult supervision required. You may get splinters. Playatechís normal $5 royalty must be paid to BRAF or BORG2 for every Playa Love Seat exterminated.

The winner will be selected by one or more expert judges. The judgesí decision will be final and may only be appealed by filing sexual favors. If your vid is cool we wonít be too picky applying our VR measuring technology. In the event it is determined that no submission meets the stated criteria with adequate visual documentation to justify an award, the $100 prize money will be donated to Black Rock Arts Foundation, and weíll try to come up with something better for our first big Labor Day Desert Showroom Sale.

The Independence Day Blowout – just another radical innovation only from Playatech – better living through plywood, at playatech.com.

May 19, 2005: Introducing Playatech and the radically cool Playa Love Seat!

Playatech is the Black Rock’s new answer to IKEA, offering the South Bay’s most advanced low-tech playa furnishings to those willing to cut their own plywood. Visit Playatech.com now to see the new Playa Love Seat, destined to become the playaís new standard in ergonomic art!

Each four foot wide Playa Love Seat is easily cut from a single 4×8 1/2î plywood sheet in under an hour pre-playa. It fits in a decent-sized car trunk as six flat pieces, and assembles on-site in seconds using slots in the parts, without tools, fasteners or glue. Cost is maybe $30/seat for the ply if you donít shop price. Best of all, each Playa Love Seat is a canvas for art, and may be decorated with paint, pillows, fur, woodburning, routers, jigsaws, or whatever your psyche can imagine. The seats may be burned at event conclusion if non-toxic decorating methods are used, or collapsed flat to 1.2 cubic feet for re-use in default.

Playatech has been established as the worldís first open-source shareware Silicon Valley dot-com furniture company to benefit the arts, with no legal entity or accounting system in sight – each time you slice into a sheet of plywood using our unique designs to make a really cool and useful art project for your camp, we ask for a $5 donation to Black Rock Arts Foundation or BORG2, and we provide links from our web site to make it so easy.

Check out playatech.com, then get off your duff and make something cool to put under it!

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