This is the time of year we'd start seeing our live music poster for the past year. Hot take: the 2020 lineups would be looking a little thin.

To more than make up for my thin poster, I imagined every live set I've been present for since 2018, the earliest year I kept track. Put them on a poster, billed in a traditional demand-to-see-them/prestige/how-big-are-they-with-this-crowd order. Gripe about it if you must.

Also, gripe about my taste in music if you want as well. I like rock more than most here (alt, punk, metal).

Also, I made divided them into days because why the hell not. Not like we're doing live shows, so that frees up some time.

On top of the this, I made daily set times, because festival planning is as easy as slapping a bunch of names on a schedule (for socially inept, here's this: /s).

I'll elaborate on that last one: when thinking "gun to my head, how would I most feasibly imagine this being a festival?" I decided on a camping fest with fewer stages and longer set times, with eight days worth of acts (eight days seemed right to me, thought about nine). I haven't decided on a two four-day weekend setup a la Electric Forest when they did that, or a one single Behemoth eight-day shitshow. The captors holding me at gunpoint were benevolent about my lack of decisiveness here.

Because this would be such a Colossus, you figure a lion's share of the ticket sales would be for single day passes, and each day targets a slightly different audience: each day's lineups are determined largely by the headliners of the larger stages: Phoenix, Hydra, Vampire.  The acts filling those stages are of comparable enough styles to the headliner, so that fans of the headliner getting one day passes might think, "that lotta cool stuff here, maybe I'll come early".

The stages are named for fictitious creatures, the aforementioned larger Phoenix, Hydra and Vampire stages, and the smaller Gargoyle followed by the downright intimate sponsored Brawndo stage, The smaller two stages are very close to one another.

The daily schedules were made with minimizing intra-genre conflicts in mind. Sure, some freakzoid's gonna bitch about the raw, screaming hardcore band playing at the same time as the polished, dancey alt-popper, but I'm guessing the former playing against them produces fewer conflicts than them going against a thrash metal or butt-rock band.

Schedules were also made with the demand and prestige to see an artist in mind: each time slot was given a value, as were all the acts, based mostly on how many tickets I think they'd sell if they headlined a show in US in 2020. Assuming the things (pandemic, artists stepping down) didn't happen.

I also tried to keep certain wants/demands I think an artist would have. For example, I caught 3 Bassnectar sets since 2018. I figure there's a good chance organizers and Nectar might come to an agreement about making it a gathering, of sorts, so he'd have to play three days in a row. Insert edgy joke or comment here about the allegations that forced him into hiatus. I digress, this gets more interesting with artists who have multiple sets during this totally practical event.

Hard end at 4 AM. Sorry wooks you can take the party back to your campsites.