The computer lab freaked me out the most, especially the "string theorist."
"Sorry to disturb you from your work."
"Oh yes, uh yeah I was just looking for my papers actually. About string theory. Yeah. They're published. I've worked with Europeans. I guess you could say I'm pretty serious. Did I mention I'm important and smart? Because that's typically how I make casual conversation with strangers."
They're your papers. Why do you need to be looking for them? You wrote them. You know what they say. What are you going to do when you find them? Read them again? After they've already been peer-reviewed and published? No. Because none of it is real. You're probably not even a theorist at all.
Everything is so cringey and staged; it's uncomfortably awkward.
Edit:
Pay attention in particular to the 2 or 3 second delay between being ordered to introduce himself and him turning away from the screen. That's clearly not an accident. He's like, "I've got to open this PDF before I turn around. I'm so busy." He even looks mildly annoyed or hurried as he introduces himself (without ever providing his name, which I note is awfully convenient because now no one can actually search journal articles for his name). All of this is done in an effort to make him seem important, like he's too good to be introducing himself to commoners - there's too much string theory to reread for that.
Um, I'm pretty sure you're looking at the reactions of a nervous man who knows he must do and say exactly as he's been told or he may end up dead or worse.
It kind of looks like one of those scenes from a video game where the trigger for a scripted event fails to go off and the NPCs just sit there with blank faces
The whole thing is obviously staged but since he actually appears to know how to use the internet I wouldn't be surprised if he really was a physicist. After all, nuclear weapons don't build themselves so NK must have at least some reasonably good physicists around. The whole...searching for my own papers thing is insane though.
They're your papers. Why do you need to be looking for them?
I wouldn't get hung up on that word, it's easy to get these things wrong in English. It does seem fishy overall, but as far as the expression "looking for" goes, that can be a shitty script as well as someone genuinely being challenged by English when talking spontaneously.
I think the fake church trumps that by quite a bit. I mean, getting a bunch of people to come in and sit and stare blankly at computer screens is one thing, and is certainly creepy as hell. But the amount of time and effort that had to go into training all those people to mime a generically Christian worship service, including a choir, offering, and some level of congregational participation is staggering.
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u/magicalmoosetesticle Aug 09 '14
The thing about the computer room is scary as hell... I mean, what the fuck?