Missing the target audience yet again

Can I just take a moment here to talk about what is one of my favourite things in the entire world?

This is the Ryugyong Hotel.

It is also known as the "Phantom Hotel", "Phantom Pyramid", or - my favourite - the "Hotel of Doom". The Hotel of Doom. That should probably give you an idea of why I love it so, but it gets better.

It's one of the tallest buildings in the world. It's in Pyongyang, North Korea. Nobody knows why - it's not like anybody visits there (not being mean, that's actually true). Anyway, it was built as a hotel, obviously, but in 1992, five years and US$750,000,000 later, construction was halted. It has remained completely empty and unsafe to inhabit ever since. (Apparently in '08 construction resumed - however in '08 it also ceased to be one of my favourite things).

Now, okay, I realise I'm sounding like a giant nerd and this isn't interesting at all. What is fantastic, though, is North Korea's reaction to having an uninhabitable waste of resources sitting hideously in their capital city.


They decided to pretend it didn't exist.




...




No, really.

You weren't allowed to take photos of it. The government would regularly Photoshop it out of pictures, or crop it out. You weren't allowed to talk about it. They would actually just pretend that thing - scroll up and look at it again, and don't ask me how the person who took that photo managed to get out without getting into some serious business - isn't there at all. LOOK AT THE THING. IT'S HUGE. If you need a comparison, it's bigger than Q1 on the Gold Coast, which in turn is bigger than the Eureka Tower. Hey, also, check it out on Google Maps, you can scroll out basically forever and still see it - well, its shadow anyway - if you know where to look.

IT'S LIKE IGNORING ALL THEM BUSHFIRES. "No, okay, I am absolutely certain that your land was not burned by out-of-control wildfire. Charred and blackened, you say? Well, I'm sorry sir, maybe it was coyotes."