"There seems to be a plague of jellyfish and really a plague of anything is usually not considered good."

As previously mentioned ("The city would naturally form a line as it tried to get away from itself."), Patrick Boyle is one of the smartest and funniest people on YouTube. I can recommend every video I've seen on his channel, but this survey of failed mega-projects has a special place in my heart, hitting on favorites like the hyperloop and Neom.

To give you a taste of the style (though unfortunately without Boyle's perfect deadpan delivery), I ran some excerpts from the YouTube transcript through ChatGPT which worked perfectly (raising the question why doesn't Google use its AI to clean up its transcriptions?).

BBC reporters who visited Forest City in 2023 described seeing a children's train that someone forgot to turn off, doing endless loops around the abandoned shopping mall, playing "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" in Chinese despite there being no children inside. Residents told the reporters that they were desperate to escape the city, which they called a "lifeless husk" that quickly erodes the sanity of anyone trying to live there... They probably shouldn't put that in their real estate listing.

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They’ve also built attractions like the stairway on the beach, which is supposed to be a tourist attraction. Apparently, it’s very Instagrammable, you know, the way tourists will travel miles out into the middle of nowhere to take a photo on the stairs and hang out on the crocodile-infested beach. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the crocodiles, didn’t I? Yeah, there’s crocodiles. In fact, that sign on the beach near the Instagram stairs is there to warn you about the crocodiles. No wonder they call it the Stairway to Heaven—there’s a good chance that you’re not getting out of there alive. That photo might be your last Instagram upload. Sorry, we seem to have taken a bit of a dark turn here.

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So next up, we have the Hyperloop. That'll be good—at least there won't be jellyfish and crocodiles everywhere. That's the good thing about the CGI-based mega projects; the designers can usually keep the wildlife out of them.