It appears to be on privately owned land that is part of a huge ranch in the area. So maybe the hero's journey is avoiding angry texans with shotguns if you either (a) cut the padlock off the gate that blocks vehicle access to the road up the mountain, or (b) park your vehicle near the gate and ride a mountain bike up the road.

Cookiemon's comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16451497 links to Danny Hillis's lecture at https://soundcloud.com/longnow/progress-on-the-10000-year-cl... which also talks about the Monomyth and theme park design.

The 4chan CTF was truly epic and hilarious though.

I looked up the story expecting "epic and hilarious", and got "/pol/ Neo-Nazis harass a bunch of people for not liking Trump and steal an anti-Trump flag. But look how clever they were about stealing it!"

Is there some other, similar story that I'm missing?

As far as the "Nazis!" claim goes you need to be able to read between the lines if you want to read an imageboard as trollish as 4chan. And if you want to see who really is behind the posts you can look up the first "He will not divide us" event at a New York museum. Spoiler alert: It's not nazis. ;)

"The trolls started targeting people who went to the protest and, when figuring out their identity, fucking with them for days." https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d7eddj/4chan-does-first-g...

'"I've never had so many people tell me that they wanted to see me die and to kill myself." Then 8chan users got hold of Paper's address. He said they've been harassing his family. "I just got off the phone with my mom and people are basically like calling my house and leaving voicemails, racist voicemails," he said.' https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/what-happens-when-alt...

"Hitler did nothing wrong" went from a provocative joke to a political stamement. 4chan is the embodiment of "any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company".

That puts modern 4chan in the somewhat ironic position of being actually on the side of the American government for the most part something I couldn't really imagine 2007 ever endorsing, regardless of the who's in charge.

I'm sort of fascinated by the phenomenon, which I think of as "LOLgical argument". You start off with a joke where the humor is based in an extreme and socially transgressive statement. It could be "Hitler did nothing wrong," or "The Earth is flat," or any number of similarly absurd ideas. The original users are trolls who privately do not actually believe what they are saying, but enjoy "rustling jimmies" and the increased status their daring obtains.

But as more members of the community join in, the original statement loses its edge, and even more transgressive poses are needed to continue the joke. Often this means doubling-down, and telling others that you do indeed believe the thing that they had, at some level, still been treating as a punchline.

This meta-joke involves finding "proof" that the shocking thing you said before was actually true, and demonstrating your commitment, by creating memes and other "evidence"-based arguments for it. In doing so, you begin to create a community that becomes indistinguishable from a community that actually believes the original statement.

As these arguments pile up, even trolls who started off disbelieving their original statement find themselves surrounded by "evidence" they were right all along. There is a swell of camaraderie as those who were bold enough to question the official version of reality begin to support each other. The community pressure, the ego boost of having discovered some secret suppressed knowledge, and the psychological difficulty of abandoning their previous position all contribute to the complete conversion of a troll into an earnest believer.

I find this fascinating because it works in such opposition to the ways we normally talk about convincing people of new ideas. It's not the logic of the argument here that leads people to a new conclusion but rather the logic of the joke, the idea that the funniest punchline to an absurd joke is to actually believe it. When enough individuals in a community feel that way, they can actually end up convincing each other.

So it's not so much that the community becomes "flooded by actual idiots" as it is the original trolls who become believers themselves.

Vonnegut once wrote, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be." He was probably more right here than he knew.

But I also think you need to take into account that many of the original users who genuinely did not seriously believe the "Hitler did nothing wrong"/"Hearth is flat"/"Donald Trump would make a great president"/... meta-joke end up leaving when things get serious. It's actually a feature for the extremists who push these ideas, if you're not with them you're against them, it's all about creating an echo chamber at this point. Reddit is terrible for that because of the moderation and voting system but even on 4chan good luck trying to argue against the hivemind, you'll just get insulted over and over until the thread 404's. Eventually you give up and stop bothering.

Besides, 4chan is still the fedora-tipping site that mocks religious fundamentalists, it’s just progressives have become just as uptight and strict about their sacred beliefs (if not more so), so 4chan mocks them too. Because it’s funny.

4chan behavior is canary in coal mine.

Remember that white supremacist march last year where one of the marchers suddenly tore off his white shirt and started crying that he wasn't really a Nazi, he was just doing it for the lulz and everything got out of hand?

That makes it all okay, then.

Despite their ... Dubious intent.

1. watched live streams of the flag

2. studyied the flight patterns and contrails of the airplanes passing overhead

3. mapped out what they saw and took their findings to flight radars to try and pinpoint a general area.

4. Using the knowledge gleaned from the flight patterns they found that the location was near Greeneville, Tennessee

5. users studied the star patterns and their movements and with that, plus a tweet that Labeouf sent out in a Tennessee diner, the trolls were able to narrow the area even further—to a small patch of land between a house and a river.

6. Drove around and honked their car horn until picked up by the live stream

This is not hard to do and hardly novel. Also done using all public information and the target used poor opsec.

But the entire talk is worth listening to.

It's not intended to be a secret - it's there to be visited (I hope one day to visit it myself), the mountain is part of a pilgrimage to better frame the experience.

I never got the impression it was supposed to be hidden--just physically difficult to reach.

Can't wait for the first ADA lawsuit, though...

I'm not sure if obesity will prevent them from visiting though.