A 27-year-old Russian man who has been imploring viewers to vote him out of a Chinese boy band reality show for months, has finally got his wish, but not before making it all the way to the final.

Vladislav Ivanov, a translator and part-time model from Vladivostok, Russia, is finally free after two grueling months. Earlier this year, the 27-year-old, who speaks fluent Chinese, got a gig to support to Japanese contestants on a Chinese reality-show that would culminate in the forming of a new boy band. Ivanov agreed, but upon arriving on the tropical island where the show was to be filmed, his good looks kept getting him confused with the contestants. The show’s director noticed this, and knowing that he could speak Chinese, persuaded him to participate in the reality-show, and “live in a new way”. It turned out to be one of the biggest mistakes of his life.

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Russian social media giant VKontakte and online video subscription platform Amediateka recently launched a unique experiment where a person who has never watched Game of Thrones spends a week binge watching the series for 10 hours a day in a transparent glass cube.

The project, called “One More and I Sleep. Seriality”, is designed to promote the 8th season of Game of Thrones, which launches on April 15, in Russia. VK and Amediateka managed to find a young man who had never watched an episode of the popular HBO series and convinced him to binge watch all 7 previous seasons for 10 hours a day locked in a glass cube at the October Cinema Center, in Moscow. The protagonist of this experiment is not able to leave the cube – except the occasional trip to the toilet – until he finishes watching all the episodes of Game of Thrones, which organizers estimate will take about a week.

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