Oh you big spoilsport!
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I’m up for a Manbang.
…anyone?
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In NK I think a Manbang may involve an anti-aircraft gun 
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Fetishes are weird.
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Reminds me of Spike TV’s laughable “alternate history” special where they tried to portray the present, but nazified:
North Korea’s adoption of new technologies is morbidly fascinating. They can’t afford to feed their own population yet somehow are able to manufacture custom smartphones and tablets for the rich. (The Dear Leader uses imported Apple Macbooks, of course.) Desktop PCs in North Korea are locked into Red Star OS, a Linux distro straight out of Stallman’s worst nightmares, with terminal disabled and pervasive surveillance/watermarking. I absolutely wouldn’t be surprised if any electronic product with a camera is basically a telescreen there.
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Given the strong autarchic and isolationist themes, I suppose that masturbation to (indigenously produced) pornography is a plausible candidate for ‘juche sex’.
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That was impressively tactful of you.
I’d have been sorely tempted by “Oh cum on, you can’t possibly be serious?”; but that doesn’t work when spoken since the pronunciation is the same.
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This is arguably a testament(for good and ill) to the truly remarkable impact of international trade and ‘software eating the world’:
Thanks to trade, your ability to access high-tech goods(though generally not your ability to cultivate skilled human capital) is effectively divorced from your internal economic and technological situation. As long as you have something you can sell, it is perfectly possible to provide cutting edge widgets to your elite, reasonably high end weapons to your loyalist guard, and so on even if the population is all starving mud farmers or child slaves in the coltan pits.
Thanks to software, more or less identical hardware can be turned to a wide variety of purposes: I haven’t been able to find specs; but it’s a very good bet that this ‘manbang’ thing is virtually identical to either one of the cheapie Android set top boxes or one of the Linux-with-proprietary-UI devices(like the Roku); just pointed to a different library of videos on different servers.I doubt that Netflix will be looking to poach North Korea’s cutting edge datacenter skillz in the near future; but that’s the power of software customization: the tech required to run a dystopian propaganda-on-demand system is almost entirely identical to that required for every other video-over-IP arrangement, with some hostnames changed.
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I think the unfortunately named service may soon renamed to “Dead English Translator”.
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I can understand how his privilege got him access, and how he and his friends could get away with it, but blabbing about it on Western media? Seemed like pushing it.
Anyway, since then I picture DPRK kids watching Pixar and Disney movies and having their minds blown.
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That is awesome. I tried watching it and found it hard to take, but skimming through it was delightful.
I still have an 8" floppy in the top drawer of my desk. I’m keeping it around in case I get a chance to get a program I was working on to finally compile. BTW, this was on a Terak that was also used in some early work in the development of Matlab. (I suppose that really belongs in the “Are you old” thread.)
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The movie is problematic to watch as the director was kidnapped by North Korea to make that movie and others. But there are overtones of the monster/leader of the revolution making things worse for the people which is a shot a Dear Leader.
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Comedy ManBang, with your host Plop Talkerman
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Honestly, that makes me feel a lot better than if they were frequently updating the technology to the “latest and greatest” just for technology’s sake. Given that the government doesn’t seem to be able to prevent sophisticated hacks of some of our most sensitive information, maybe using archaic, non-networked hardware is actually the best possible defense against a hack that takes control of our nuclear arsenal.
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I was not aware of this; at least their ordeal reunited the director and the actress (and they eventually escaped). The connection to Toho is pretty clear in the movie, though I would have guessed that it was imitation, not actual participation.
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There’s a This American Life about it…
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Still imitation they were both South Korean but South Korea has history of some good and bad giant monster films. A really bad one that is a favorite of mine is APE which is a sort of rip off of the 1970’s King Kong though you start with the ape on the ship coming back… never mind with a story lets just get right to the giant ape on a rampage action starting with it fighting a giant shark after escaping the boat and get even more insane from there.
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I might give it a listen. I’m not crazy about the show, Ira Glass’s vocal fry drives me up the wall.
Funny, we watch a lot of Korean stuff (hard to avoid on local TV), but the closest I’ve come to a S. Korean monster movie was this TV series.
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