It normally isn't (unless you're Russian or North Korean), which is a large reason why this story is so fascinating.

This is from 2008. Back then, North Korea was still living under the previous Kim. Back then, the border was very leaky and Koreans could move to China and Russia without a lot of barriers.

There are just no people anywhere. Do they clear everyone out when westerners come through?

[image of the show with a giant screen beside] https://imageshack.com/i/exQrNAZnj

I was like "wow that is a big screen although not very bright".

> Each background picture is created by about 40.000 childrens holding tables containing pages with different pictures/colours

[zoom of the "screen" with endless pixels: a color square a little head on top of each - impressionist style] https://imageshack.com/i/exw2BFluj

Yes! There are a whole series of posts with photos and maps. Click the red "Tumangan, we are coming!!!" link at the bottom of the first post to jump to the next one, etc.

Yeah only after clicking the home button did I realize that '<' is next. It suddenly got a lot less ominous.

The old internet is still there, it just hasn't scaled as quickly as everything else. And frankly, we have a role to play if we want to preserve and nourish it. You say you liked the site. Drop the author a thank you note. Amplify it beyond pressing the "up" arrow on HN. It's not just about the author: show others that this kind of stuff is valued.

Today, the signals young content creators get is that they can make dumb videos on YouTube or TikTok and get 10M subscribers and ad revenue, or set up a geeky blog that will get 100 views a month. But it's not Google or TikTok that did this: it's the content consumers.

I am reposting one of my favorite Quora adventure stories for the sake of posterity:

What is the strangest thing you've seen at the airport?

By Aurelio Germes: The strangest thing I've seen was to find nobody not even police or security at the airport, so I took a plane and left the country without anyone noticing it. It was at the international airport in Malabo, island of Bioko in Equatorial Guinea.

It happened that I had missed my flight from Malabo to Madrid departing on Sunday and I didn't want to wait a whole week for the next weekly flight, so I decided to call a pilot in Cameroon and charter his plane to come and pick me up in Malabo and take me to the Douala airport in Cameroon where I could more easily catch a plane to Paris. We arranged date and hour of his arrival to Malabo.

On the date agreed I went to the international airport only to find out that it was closed since that day no flights, neither international nor domestic, were scheduled. There was nobody there not even a guard or a clerk, but it was already too late to cancel the trip. The only way out was to jump the wall surrounding the airport and wait on the runway until an aircraft arrived, and that's what I did.

I didn't have to wait long. A small plane with a French pilot arrived and soon we were ready to fly to Douala with me in the copilot seat. We could not take off in our first attempt since a door of the aircraft opened unexpectedly when we were about to take off, but we succeeded in our second attempt.

Due to lack of security, nobody noticed that a plane had arrived at the international airport and left with a passenger.

I think you can find the authentic content you are looking for here: https://www.horizonsunlimited.com/

This is probably the wildest story. A couple drove across the Democratic Republic of Congo from Lubumbashi to Kinshasa on their own.

https://www.horizonsunlimited.com/hubb/ride-tales/democratic...