This year's Burning Man festival, a celebration of community, art, and chaos held in the Nevada Desert hit the headlines for two reasons, one comic, one tragic. The festival culminates in the burning of a large effigy of a man, but this year one Burner took things into his own hands and burnt the Man itself a little early. It was patched up and from what I hear the burn went on as a normal. That was the comic bit. The tragic bit was the suicide of one Burner, who hanged himself in a tent in the small hours.

There's lots of things to say about Burning Man: personally, I loved attending the festival and was always amazed at the way something that seemed to teeter on the brink of chaos was actually planned, managed, and conducted with superb organisational and technical skills. From the time the first golden spike is driven into the desert to the day the last cigarette butt is picked up, Burning Man is, among other things, an extraordinary exercise in civic planning, engaged volunteer work, and hard graft. It's the ultimate Amish barn-building ceremony.

One aspect that always amazes me about the festival is the extraordinary intricacy of the things that people build there. There are art cars – vehicles chopped, changed, and adorned into unrecognisable configurations. There are themed camps, with lounges, bedrooms, theatres. There are also amazing pieces of installation art and sculpture. One of the most impressive is the Temple of Sorrow, a large wooden structure into which long lines of people walk to place wooden blocks on which they write the names of loved ones they've lost. This is then burnt, in silence, on the last day of the festival like some enormous funeral pyre. The sheer hard work and craftsmanship on display is hard to convey to people who haven't seen it. Of course it's not all great: there's usually some lame performance art, terrible sculptures, and it gets old seeing a naked geezer covered in blue paint. But so what? Most of everything isn't that great. You look for the good stuff.

To give you one example, one night I was walking along in the darkness when I came upon a piece of installation art featuring a circle of sculptures depicting a swimmer, rising up out of the ground and then submerging back into it. This was then lit by a strobe light, creating the illusion that the sculptures were alive. It was absolutely superb, precise, and beautiful – the antithesis of the beer, boobs and partay images you often see of Burning Man.

It's easy to go off to the desert, do freaky things, and then go back into the office on Monday, so one constant source of soul searching for Burners is how you take some of that radical creativity and bring it into your normal life. I see exactly this spirit in a magazine called Make, published by O'Reilly. This is a wonderfully goofy celebration of the same kind of fiendish craft skills and obsessive hobbyist tinkering you see at Burning Man. The August issue features stories on how to make your own mobile drive-in projector, a feature on a competition in the US to build air cannons that can fire pumpkins nearly a mile, and another on how to make a swiveling balcony hoist so you can pull your bicycle up to your apartment's balcony via a rope.

It's all absolutely bonkers, and it's the perfect antidote to what the magazine's founders call the horrible monoculture that's taking over the world. It asks people to put down the computer mouse, the game controller, and the television remote, and pick up their hammer, their drills, and their lathe. It suggests that we will live better lives, have more fun, save money, and generally be better human beings if we are engaged with science, physics, and the world, rather than prepackaged corporate entertainment.

My brother subscribes to the magazine, and his first project was to build an incredibly powerful potato bazooka. This is basically a plastic pipe, with lighter fuel for propellant and a kitchen lighter for a trigger. Words cannot express the excitement of his children and their friends at seeing their dad produce a large, dangerous weapon that could propel a potato at great force into their garden fence. This, my friends, is what childhood is supposed to be about: life's what you make it. What have you made today?

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Michael Parsons, now editor of CNET.co.uk, was once European correspondent for The Red Herring magazine, and spent five years working in Silicon Valley and worrying about technology. He can be reached at michael.parsons@cnet.co.uk

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