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What It's Like to Win Millions Playing Poker in Your Twenties

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Charlie Carrel. Photograph by René Velli

In May 2015, 21-year-old Charlie Carrel won almost $1.25 million playing poker. At the Grand Final of the PokerStars European Tour in Monte Carlo he beat 215 other players in the high roller tournament—a game that cost $28,000 to enter. Because he was a 21-year-old who'd just won a life-changing amount of money, papers and websites across the UK and Jersey island—where Carrel grew up—made a big deal of his win.

"It was strange seeing my face everywhere for a while," says Carrel, reflecting on articles that sprung up in places like the Sun and LadBible, which he felt described his success more like a lottery win than something that took years of practice and studying to achieve. "I don't think they were very good at capturing anything about me."

Carrel was already pretty well-established in the poker world before Monte Carlo. He'd finished fifth in a tournament in Malta, Europe two months before, winning $205,000, and won a tournament in London in November of 2014, walking away with $144,000. "The beautiful thing is nobody knows how lucky they get for winning a tournament," he says. "I can feel as though I played well, but human bias and emotions cloud judgment too heavily to really know."

Carrelwas born in Jersey island in 1993 and lived there until he was seven, when his family uprooted to London. A smart kid, he endured the same thing a lot of smart kids are forced to endure: merciless bullying for a big chunk of his time at school. "Intelligence and no social ability to hide it is not a great mix," he admits. "I was severely bullied for quite a large part of my childhood."

Thing is, he says, all that bullying turned out to be kind of helpful.

"Having no more than one friend—shout out to my best friend, Matthew Pettit—for a long period of time definitely stunted my emotional and social development," he says. "I created a defense mechanism—I can detach from my emotions. A poker example would be how I never feel stressed if I'm on a final table. I can turn it off. I'm grateful for that."

Charlie bounced from hobby to hobby throughout his teens, focusing his attention on something until he got bored of it. But the one thing he didn't get bored of was poker.

Ask any professional poker player under 30 how they got into the game and you'll get a similar story; it always starts with small games at home with friends. Then comes a small deposit on an online site. Often, beginner's luck strikes and that initial success evolves into a passion that they focus all their time and energy on. Carrel's story is the same: he made a $13.27 deposit on a poker website, won his first tournament for $39.84 and has never had to deposit again.

This part of Carrel's story is something that was covered by those tabloid articles. He turned his $39.84 into $1,328.07, then a bit more, then a bit more, and eventually a whole lot more. What they didn't cover, though, is what it took to get to that point. It's not a lottery win time and time again; it takes work to get to the top, just like in any other game. The game of online poker evolves so quickly that keeping up with the trends—and all the new software designed to help players improve—takes hours of studying, playing, and revision. Regular life is often a distraction.

"My social life was annihilated by poker," says Carrel. "I lost contact with 90-something percent of my friends because I knew that poker was likely going to be one of the most important tasks of my life."

When he was 19, and with some decent results under his belt, Carrel came up with a plan: he'd move back to Jersey to live with his grandma and only leave when he was rich. "I had a bankroll of around $2,500 and a target that I didn't want to leave Jersey before I made $100,000," he says. "So the only points of socialization I had were the various Skype groups and study groups I participated in to learn the game and develop a more rounded approach. Safe to say, my social skills deteriorated along with my social life."

Luckily, all that studying worked: about two-thirds of the way through his $100,000 goal he won $201,711 in PokerStars's biggest weekly online tournament, the Sunday Million.

"Suddenly I was getting messages from people I once met at a festival, to people that used to bully me in school, to distant family members that I hadn't spoken to, to complete strangers," he remembers. But obviously he didn't share any of his winnings with them, because that would be an extremely weird thing to do. Instead, he took some of his friends on a trip to Amsterdam.

Ben Heath (left) and Carrel after his win in Monte Carlo. Photo: Tomáš Stacha, copyright of PokerStars

There's one friend in particular who Carrel can't speak highly enough of—fellow pro Ben Heath. "I could speak about my friendship with Ben for years," Carrel says. "He's special. After two years of living and traveling together, we've never really had an argument. What I love about my friendship with Ben is the way we handle the swings of poker. When I was eliminated from my biggest ever buy-in tournament , the first thing Ben did was point and laugh at me. And I would do the same to him. And it works for us."

As I'm writing this, Carrel is at home in Jersey instead of attending the World Series of Poker (WSOP) in Las Vegas. The career of a poker player is often judged by the amount of tournaments they win at the WSOP, so the fact that Carrel—considered one of the best young tournament players right now—has skipped it raised a few eyebrows.

"It's been one of the hardest yet best decisions I've made," he says. "But I've been able to explore new things like Jiu-jitsu, cooking, strenuous exercise, and creative writing. Most importantly, I've been able to spend time with my family."

Now 22 years old, Carrel has more money in his current account than most of us will earn throughout our entire careers. So what's he going to do next?

"I have no idea what's in store for the future," he says. "I have so many plans it's impossible to have enough time to do them all. It's the infinite outcomes of the future that excites me."

Follow Jack Stanton on Twitter.


Leslie's Diary Comics: 'Father's Day,' Today's Comic by Leslie Stein

The VICE Guide to Right Now: Werner Herzog Thinks 'Pokémon Go' Is Unnecessary and Perplexing

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Illustration by Liz Renstrom

It was inevitable. Somebody asked revered filmmaker Werner Herzog, known for making some of the most daring and fiercely original films and documentaries over the past 40 years, what he thinks about Pokémon Go.

Werner Herzog: When two persons in search of a Pokémon clash at the corner of Sunset and San Vicente is there violence? Is there murder?

The Verge: They do fight, virtually.
Physically, do they fight?

No—
Do they bite each other's hands? Do they punch each other?

The people or the...
Yes, there must be real people if it's a real encounter with someone else.

Well, it's been interesting because there are all these anecdotes of people who are playing the game, and they've never met their neighbors, for instance. And when they go outside to look for Pokémon they realize they're playing the same game, and start talking to each other.
You'd have to give me a cell phone, which I'm not going to use anyway, and I have no clue what's going on there, but I don't need to play the game.

The acclaimed director was doing press around his forthcoming documentary about the internet, called Lo and Behold. The film explores the origins, possibilities, and abuses of the internet, and includes positively Herzogian lines such as, "Does the internet dream?" and "The corridor here looks repulsive" (said about the computer-engineering wing of the UCLA campus).

It seems unlikely that the 73-year-old Bavarian-born documentarian, who has bragged about not owning a cell phone—OK, only for emergencies, he concedes—has taken such an interest in technology. But in addition to Lo and Behold, Herzog recently launched an online filmmaking course for MasterClass.

When you think about it, perhaps it's not so odd that the director of unforgettable documentaries about the death penalty, ski-jumping, erupting volcanoes, and life at the South Pole, would be into the exploring the role of humanity at the edge of the digital abyss. After all, this is the same glorious man capable of consuming his own shoes, obsessing over WrestleMania, and speaking from the point-of-view of a plastic bag (the short film, a PSA against pollution, is surprisingly affecting).

Could we be in for a Herzog-narrated romp through "augmented reality," flinging Poké Balls and ensnaring Charmanders? In a world littered with Herzog's takes on Curious George and Pokémon Go mash-ups of David Attenborough, it's only a matter of time.

Follow James Yeh on Twitter.

Gay Country Superstar Patrick Haggerty Is Still 'Cryin' Those Cocksucking Tears'

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Photo courtesy of Patrick Haggerty/Paradise of Bachelors

In 1953, when Patrick Haggerty was 13, a little girl showed up to his summer camp in a ballerina outfit. It was a rural camp in eastern Washington run by the agricultural organization 4-H, and while Patrick was a farm boy accustomed to manual labor and callused hands, he found himself hypnotized by the girl's dainty tutu and leotard.

"I knew it would fit me," he told VICE. "And that I was going to get into it."

And so he hatched up a plan, talking his friends and counselors into a skit where they would "dress up silly."

"We do our little skit," he said, "and the day after, even though I was 13 and it was 1958 and at a 4-H camp, I wore the ballerina outfit all day. Dancing up and down and putting on shows and acting like Tinkerbell." He was a hit.

Patrick in a 4-H "drag show." Photo courtesy of Patrick Haggerty/Paradise of Bachelors

To the surprise of absolutely nobody, Patrick grew up to be a gay man, and spent the next 60 years toeing the line between the country roots to which he remained unfailingly loyal and the gay community for which he tirelessly fought. But blending the two wasn't always as easy as it had been at camp.

As a teen, he taught himself to sing and play serviceable guitar chords, and as a young man formed a band with friends called Lavender Country. They recorded one self-titled album in 1973, filled with queer numbers like "Come out Singin'," "Back in the Closet Again," and the song that would decades later launch him to fame: "Cryin' These Cocksucking Tears." It was the first country album known to be released by a gay man. Lyrics included: "It seems you've forgotten/your daydreams are rotten/your ways are alarmingly clear/them victories aren't wanted/as long as I'm haunted/crying these cocksucking tears."

Patrick had no formal musical training before Lavender Country. "I sort of picked it up on my own," he said, absorbing country songs throughout his childhood and learning a few chords from a straight boy who used to let him ride around on the back of his motorcycle.

"I did OK with straight men in my childhood," Patrick said. "I was a sensitive little soul and I could see where my friends were missing gaps emotionally and what they needed, maybe what they weren't getting at home. There were a lot of emotional gaps in rural Washington in 1955, especially for little boys."

Patrick's father, a dairy farmer, was remarkably supportive of everything Patrick did. "Don't sneak," he told his son on one occasion, as Patrick recounted in an episode of NPR's Storycorps. "If you sneak, it means you think you're doing the wrong thing. And if you run around spending your whole life thinking that you're doing the wrong thing, then you'll ruin your immortal soul."

Patrick took that lesson to heart. "If I'm going to be homosexual, I'm sure as fuck not going to sneak about it," he said. "Fuck that."

The only surviving photo of Lavender Country. Photo courtesy of Patrick Haggerty/Paradise of Bachelors

When asked if he ever experienced a heartbreak that worked its way into his music, Patrick responded, "yeahhhh, honey. They found out I was gay in the Peace Corps in 1966. I was 21 and I was in India. I loved India. A lot. One thing led to another, they found out I've sucked some dick, and boom—I was out of the country in 24 hours." His housemate, with whom he had fallen in love, was left behind.

He came out of the closet in full after the Stonewall riots in 1968, but paid a price for his refusal to sneak. Once, he and some gay friends got into a fight when they tried to join a peace rally. "I think our sign said something like 'faggots for Ho Chi Minh,'" he said. "They tried to take our banner away from us, and assumed that because we were faggots were going to lose the fight. But they were wrong. We kicked ass."

A few years later, he recorded Lavender Country. "We performed up and down the coast, Portland, San Francisco," he said. But "there was no call for gay country. It was, like, ridiculous . So I went into all the other things I did in my life—ran for office, activist work. Got married, had two children." (His wife pre-dated his coming out; the kids were co-parented with friends.)

Patrick running for Washington state senate in 1988. Photo courtesy of Patrick Haggerty/Paradise of Bachelors

The album earned meager attention from a few gay venues, the band performed at two gay pride festivals, and a lesbian DJ was fired for playing it in 1974. After that, Lavender Country faded into the memories of its few fans, and his performances have been mostly limited to old folks' homes since. "I was making some extra money singing old songs to old people and having a nice life," he said. "Hadn't even played Lavender Country to anybody in years."

But then "Cocksucking Tears" was posted to YouTube. A music critic stumbled across it, located a vinyl copy on eBay, and passed it along to friends. And in 2014, a North Carolina label called Paradise of Bachelors called to offer a record contract.

"I almost hung up," said Patrick. "I thought it was a gimmick. But it was two straight men out of North Carolina offering me a 50/50 contract. It's completely transformed my life. I turned into a notable in about 2.5 seconds."

He's been covered in Pitchfork, just returned from a midwest tour, and collaborated with recognized country artists like Jack Grelle. Meanwhile, a new documentary about Patrick's career called These C*cksucking Tears is currently rounding the film festival circuit, and has earned jury awards from SXSW and Outfest.

"I grew up in New York, born and raised, so I have no business listening to country music," said Dan Taberski, the film's director told VICE. Dan reached out to Patrick to make a documentary because "he didn't write a gay disco song or a gay poem. He wasn't meeting gay people where they traditionally met in the creative world. He co-opted what is, traditionally, a super straight art form."

Patrick and husband JB in 1988. Photo courtesy of Patrick Haggerty/Paradise of Bachelors

And Patrick, in turn, is using that art form to stand up for gay rights in a way he couldn't have imagined in the 1970s, by bringing together an audience of music fans both straight and gay who are prepared to fight for equality. His shows today draw crowds larger than he's ever seen—over three hundred people packed the patio of Austin's Barracuda for a SXSW showcase—and Patrick swells with pride when describing his fans.

"There's the kids, the anarchical punk fuck-you throw-the-guitar-down eat-shit-and-die crowd. They love Lavender Country and I love them," Patrick said. But an older crowd turns up, too, some of whom remember the climate in which the songs were originally written. "Whoever wants to come to a Lavender Country show, to stand up and be counted, they have an activist heart or they wouldn't be there. They want to move, politically. And that's a fabulous audience."

Even if some of his fans aren't gay, he said, "they're all militantly gay-rights, they all want to fight. They see it as a vehicle and a banner for them to pick up. 'Count me in, I'm on your side.' Straight white men have a lot of power, and they saw Lavender Country and said 'we know what to do with this' and kicked it up into the motherfucking stratosphere."

He paused. "It's like waking up in a new world from 1970, from how they treated us then."

Follow Matt Baume on Twitter.

​How to Make Friends When You’re Young and Broke

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There comes a time in nearly every young person's life when it becomes necessary to shake off the shackles of your hometown and carve out a new life for yourself someplace faraway and unfamiliar. Or maybe you're the one stuck in your hometown while everyone you know has moved onto bigger and better things. Either way, it's a hallmark of young adulthood to suddenly find yourself in a situation where you don't know anyone, and you don't have any money.

Before you resign yourself to a life of isolation—or worse, mistake your parents or coworkers as substitutes for real friends—take a deep breath. It may seem like a herculean task, but making friends only gets harder as you grow older, when things like spouses, children, and your fast-approaching mortality get in the way of your quest to meet new people. So now, while you're young, is actually the best time to expand your social circle.

First, there's the internet. It's not exactly rocket science that you can meet people online. Plenty of people have used dating apps as a means of finding friends in new cities, and there are actually some apps designed for non-sexual matches, like Wiith, the "Tinder for friends." Sure, you're mostly going to find other people who are lonely and desperate, but beggars can't be choosers.

If you want to weed out the weirdos trawling for sex, meetup.com is a surprisingly decent resource for connecting with local people who share similar interests. With the mission of "using the internet to get people off the internet," the site has been successfully connecting people around the globe since 2002. Whether you want to bond with fellow Dallas Cowboys or Cowboy Bebop fans, there are groups in nearly every major city that can put you in the proximity of likeminded individuals. Meetup also organizes group events, which can take some of the pressure off meeting new people. The events scheduled by Meetup organizers are usually free or very low-cost, so your broke ass won't have to worry about joining a new group only to be hit up for dues.

Kristen Hodgson, Meetup's communication director, told VICE there are already 15,000 site-orchestrated meetups happening every day, spanning from hiking groups to cannabis entrepreneurs. She also pointed out that "when you start with that shared interest, and you bond while doing whatever you love to do, that's a great catalyst for friendship."

On the other end of the online friend-sourcing spectrum is RentAFriend.com, a website that basically works like a friend escort service. It's reasonable to worry the site is a front for actual escorts, and the janky, domain-squatter appearance of the homepage doesn't do much to assuage those fears. But RentAFriend explicitly states that they are "strictly a platonic Friendship website... not a dating website, and not an escort agency."

I've personally offered my friendship services through RentAFriend.com, which resulted in an awkward but ultimately harmless older gentleman paying me $90 to have some drinks and shoot the shit for a couple hours. I wouldn't exactly call that dude my new best friend, but he made for decent company and I earned $90. Even if you don't wind up making a friend, you'll walk away a little less broke.

But let's say you want to get off the internet and meet some friends the old-fashioned way. One of the best ways to do this without spending a ton of money is to volunteer. There are approximately 200 charitable causes for every human on Earth, so finding one that suits you should be a breeze.

Whether you're passionate about a socio-political movement and ready to help organize marches or you just want to just play with puppies at the local animal shelter, there's a place for you to volunteer your time and energy. You might walk away smelling like cat piss, sure, but a few shifts should provide you with ample opportunity to meet other people, and getting to know each other by cleaning animal cages is a hell of a lot cheaper than getting to know each other over drinks every weekend.

For those who lack the moral fortitude to volunteer, there's always improv. There's no better way to make friends than getting thrown into a circle of strangers and acting out what Bernie Sanders would be like in caveman times. Improv is great for the broke and friendless, because the craft is predicated on anyone being able to do it anywhere, and you'll quickly break down those walls of awkwardness that come with meeting strangers. And while improv schools like Upright Citizens Brigade, Second City, and Groundlings are all expensive as fuck, there are scores of free improv workshops and classes in most large cities.

Paul Storiale, who's been running a weekly free improv class in Los Angeles for the past two years, said making friends was one of the main reasons he started the group.

"I've seen a lot of friendships form over the years in these classes. A couple that met in my class is now expecting a child, even," Storiale told me. "If you're coming into a town and don't know anyone, it's a great way to expand your social circle."

If all else fails and you find yourself broke and alone, you can find other lonely people on Pokémon GO. The internet is rife with stories of would-be Pokémon trainers spotting each other wandering aimlessly around public parks, 7-Elevens, and graveyards, only to buddy up in the shared task of hunting down the wily Dratini hiding somewhere in the vicinity.

A little dorky, sure, but as one Redditor put it: "I've made friends online before, but never something as tangible as this. This is nuts. It's dawning on me how this is a long time coming for us who grew up with these games and always wanted to be like Ash or Red. It's really a dream come true. Can't wait to meet way more people through this game."

Follow Justin Caffier on Twitter.

I Tested Some Tasty Space Food Made for Astronauts

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This article originally appeared on VICE Italy

In August 1961, the Soviet cosmonaut Gherman Titov became the second human in space and the first human to vomit outside earth's atmosphere. He had a serious case of space sickness, but you couldn't really blame the guy considering the kind of food cosmonauts had to eat then: his predecessor in space, Yuri Gagarin, had to squeeze puréed meat from a tube into his mouth for lunch.

Since then, culinary circumstances in space have changed drastically—last year Samantha Cristoforetti became the first person to brew a proper espresso in space. In the past, research into space food had been mostly focused on technical aspects like weight, volume, and a long shelf life. The ingredients in space food are sterilized in an autoclave—a kind of pressure chamber. The food needs to last for two or three years and astronauts should be able to consume it without having to prepare it and at zero gravity. It needs to be packaged so it's easy to transport and store—since a space station is very cramped, every centimeter counts.

Inside the HQ of Argotec in Turin

Faced with all those limitations, you'd soon forget that other aspect of food: that it's supposed to taste good. But luckily, more recently researchers in the field of space food are giving more attention to that particular part of the culinary space experience.

Argotec is an Italian company producing food for people in space, and its main focus is to make their dishes as tasty as possible. Like everyone, I too grew up dreaming of becoming an astronaut, so I'm very curious to see what's on the menu once you get to outer space. I went to the Argotec HQ in Turin, Italy to get wined and dined like an astronaut.

Appetizer: Barley and Prawns

You can't light a stove in space, so space food is ready to eat and dishes are packaged in vacuum bags. And there's no reason to bring out the nice cutlery at zero gravity, so astronauts eat from these bags directly with a spoon.

Given that space stations are so small and all the food is vacuum packed, it's notable that astronauts apparently do find room to stash some appetizers because that's what we're being served first. It might be space food but we're still in Italy. It's a salad of rice, prawns, and courgettes—a bit bland, but the Argotec employee explains that your perception of flavors changes completely in space. In the absence of gravity, your saliva becomes congested between the nose and the throat, which has a similar effect on how you perceive flavor as when your having a bad cold. One dish could taste like nothing to one astronaut and be an explosion of flavors to another—which is why it's important to provide a wide variety of flavors.

We take only a few bites to keep room for the rest of the courses. The first thing that strikes me about the barley and prawns is the consistency of the dish—the ingredients have largely retained their natural texture, which I wouldn't expect from food prepared in an autoclave. The flavor wasn't mind boggling but I had prepared for the worst, and rather than being the sort of thing that you'd only eat on a spacewalk, it seemed like something you could very well bring to a picnic.

The First Course: Rice with Chicken and Vegetables

After the appetizer we move to the first course: a dish of rice, chicken, and vegetables that isn't really a risotto and isn't really a chicken curry. But the rice is al dente, the meat feels like real meat and the vegetables have maintained the color they're blessed with here on God's green earth. It's pretty amazing, really.

And the flavor is intense, thanks to the fact that they've been generous with the turmeric. It's actually so heavy on the turmeric that it drowns out all the other flavors. Humankind has used spices to preserve food for centuries, and it's heartwarming to know that the tradition continues in the era of space exploration.

The Main Course: Sorghum with Beef

As a main course we're served beef and sorghum—a type of grain. The dish is tasty, its structure is great and it's my favorite of the day. While the other dishes were served on a plate, we ate the beef directly from the plastic packaging—just like astronauts do. The best thing about it is that when you open the packaging, the food clings to the sides of the inside. According to the Argotech people, this was the most vital part of the research into their dishes: how to make sure the food clings together and keeps the different grains from having a grain party, floating through your space station and getting in your machinery.

They figured it out (don't ask me how), and the technology is now being used for earthly means, like sustenance for people going on Arctic expeditions. That shouldn't come as a surprise, really: many civilian technological innovations are based on developments in space technology.

The Side Dish: Quinoa Salad

The quinoa salad is fine—it reminds me of the rice dish, but here the mackerel dominated and hid all other flavors. It was also apparently Samantha Cristoforetti's favorite when she was on the International Space Station. Cristoforetti wasn't just the first astronaut to brew an espresso in space, but she also was the first to "cook" there—in the sense that she chose and mixed what she wanted to eat from bulk packaging, instead of just having a ready made meal. That might not seem like much, but on a space station getting to choose what you want for dinner is a giant leap for mankind.

Dessert: A Chocolate Bar and Smoothie

For desert, we're having a chocolate-goji berry bar and an apple-pear-strawberry smoothie. The bar itself has a particularly uninviting greenish brown color, but it tastes okay—though not chocolaty enough for me. It tastes only of goji berries, so I figure the bar could make some yoga instructor very happy someday. A space yoga instructor.

The author and his friend Federico

The juice is exactly that—juice.

When people think about the future and functionality of food, images of protein shakes and pills that make any other kind of food unnecessary come to mind. But it's a comforting thought that engineers are working on space food that isn't just about the functionality. When sooner or later a mad visionary actually makes space tourism a reality for us mortals, it's nice to know we'll have something good to eat along the way.


Not Every Mom Needs to be a MILF

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Snooki's back as the new face of MILFs. Photo via Yung Mommy.

Everyone's favourite alcoholic smurf, Snooki, is back in the spotlight with a new "music" video about being a sexy, yung mommy. Having rebranded herself post Jersey Shore from an orange trainwreck to a slightly less bronzed lifestyle blogger, Snooki is the latest pop culture icon to capitalize on Motherhood ™.

While Snooki does manage to shout out stretchmarks and saggy nipples in her video, keeping it somewhat "real," the song is a rally call to fit, fabulous, young mothers who breastfeed but still wear four inch pumps and leopard print bustiers. I had the same feeling watching this as I did when I saw Fergie's "M.I.L.F $" last month. Her first video since giving birth a couple of years ago, Ferg's new song is a very confusing ode to hot moms and features a bevvy of supermodel mothers who I think are fucking the milk man. I have no idea what the song is about or what M.I.L.F. money is and why it's different from normal money.

But confusion about sexual milk aside (please someone tell me what a milkshake is in this context), what bothers me about both of these videos is the sell that all new moms now have to be M.I.L.F.s.

Since when does giving birth and raising a tiny human also require you to remain in a constant and unerring state of fuckability? I understand the desire to not lose your identity to motherhood, to remain an individual whose desires and needs are separate from the entity you've created. But why are we still defining that identity through the horny lens of pubescent Mrs. Robinson fantasies, where you gotta be a mom in the streets but a MILF in the sheets?

The pressure to get back your post-baby body is such a damaging and bizarre cultural phenomenon. To tell someone who has just undergone a complete physical transformation that they now have to get back to bangable seems insane to me.

My mom was a different type of MILF—a Mother I Legitimately Feared. She didn't worry about being a "cool" or "hot" mom. She wanted to make sure I didn't die or walk into a stranger's van or hang out with shitty kids and fuck up my dumb life. It's not that she wasn't a fully-fledged individual with interests beyond motherhood, it's just that she didn't give a shit about getting her tits out for the milk man. She didn't feel pressure to be sexy and cool while trying to keep three kids alive.

I'm not mad at Snooki or Fergi for wanting to revel in their yung motherhood—kudos for still having time to get that gym-tan-laundry in while trying not to screw up future adults. But in an effort to hype new moms as fuckable, rather than present the reality of insomnia and weird new lumps and that thing where they cut open your vagina, we're adding unnecessary pressure to a group of people who probably just want to take a fucking nap, rather than show (?) their milkshakes to strangers. I'm sure if you asked my mom her biggest concern about being a new mom, she wouldn't have said "getting her ass tight for the grocery guy."

Follow Amil on Twitter.


How Scared Should I Be?: How Scared Should I Be of Putin?

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Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File

In the column "How Scared Should I Be?" VICE staff writer and generalized anxiety disorder sufferer Mike Pearl seeks to quantify the scariness of everything under the sun. We hope it'll help you to more wisely allocate that most precious of natural resources: your fear.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is one slippery fucker. For instance, remember that time he faked an IED attack on his own troops in the Jordan Valley in order to tempt the US military to try and sneak into the attack site, sparking a disastrous battle that allowed him to stop a multinational peacekeeping project on his own terms? Holy shit, what a crafty chess master!

Wait, I'm thinking of fictional Russian President Viktor Petrov from House of Cards! But I should be just as scared of Putin as President Frank Underwood is of Petrov, right?

According to Anthony D'Agostino, a "Kremlinologist" and professor of Russian history at San Francisco State University, no I shouldn't. Putin's Russia is just one more country with its own interests, and the recently regained ability to stick up for them. Russia now "bucks us on a range of things," D'Agostino told me. "This is not fatal, or it would not be if we did not still expect Russia to cave everything."

This week, the big story on Putin is the theory, largely out of lefty publications like Talking Points Memo, that he and presidential candidate Donald Trump are in bed together. The media consensus seems to be that the hacker or hackers who stole a huge cache of internal communications from the Democratic National Committee, and sowed discord among Democrats, must have been backed—or even directly hired—by the Russian state. "The move has also helped cement Russian President Vladimir Putin in the minds of many US observers as not only a strategic mastermind, but also the Trump campaign's secret weapon," Julia Ioffee wrote in Foreign Policy.

Then again, when it comes to Putin's involvement, there are a lot more questions than answers.

On one hand, there is the Trump/Putin "bromance." Yes, Trump's isolationist views mean the Kremlin most likely prefers Trump to Clinton. And yes, Trump has praised Putin's leadership, and kinda-sorta-but-not-really said the Putin hacker machine should go after Hillary Clinton's emails next.

On the other hand, as Glenn Greenwald pointed out, latching onto the first opportunity to smear a presidential candidate as though he's some kind of Russian sleeper agent isn't just drastic; it's borderline McCarthyesque. "The history of linking your political opponents to Russia is a really dangerous and ugly one in the US. That's basically how, for a decade, the right demonized the left," Greenwald said in a recent Slate interview.

So granted, this conspiracy theory about Putin holding the puppet strings of President Trump is a paranoid Cold War fantasy, but what is the agenda that Putin would be furthering if he hypothetically had a Trump Manchurian Candidate working for him?

"Putin has, step-by-step, acquired this mythical quality," said Nikolai Sokov, senior research associate at the Middlebury Institute's Center for Nonproliferation Studies. Sokov described Putin's reputation in the West as that of "the ultimate bad guy, who is behind everything that we don't like." Although he hastens to add that "Putin is not a nice guy," and that some of his aims are "harmful."

Putin's tendency to act like an emperor and an autocrat is pretty scary if you're inside of, or near, Russia. Putin appoints regional governors instead of holding elections, including the iron-fisted Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. And while he entertains the idea of term limits for elected officials, he does not, himself, adhere to such limits, and looks like he plans to reign for at least 24 years. And of course, through a protracted show of force, and some sleazy justifications, Putin has redrawn Russia to include the Ukrainian state of Crimea.

And even if you set aside hearsay—some of which is pretty compelling—about Putin's support for political violence, his domestic policies are monstrous by US standards. A notorious gay "propaganda" law Putin supports provides a legal framework for the crackdown of out-of-the-closet gays. Putin's government literally orders dissenting news stories to be clipped from magazines before they can be sold, and unsanctioned protests are now punishable by lengthy prison terms. Even Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower whom Putin is shielding from extradition and prosecution in the US, is horrified by Putin's surveillance measures. Oh, and Putin has banned bad words.

But according to D'Agostino, we all just need to get used to Russia as a major world player again, regardless of how we feel about its internal politics. Fifteen years ago, he said, "Russia was falling apart, yielded to our advice on all things, and looked to us as a model for economic policy." Today, it has "revived somewhat," D'Agostino told me.

For instance, last September, Russia began carrying out airstrikes against militants who opposed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. It was an act of defiance against the Obama administration's vision of a future Syria that's free of ISIS, but also free of Assad. In Sokov's opinion, " policy ourselves."

But if you take Putin at his word, there's no Russian mission to destroy America. "America is a great power. Today, probably, the only superpower. We accept that," Putin said at last month's St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. "We want to and are ready to work with the United States," he added. Sure that quote is obvious political glad-handing, but the alternative to cautiously believing Putin when he's saying reasonable things is surrendering to paranoia.


Final Verdict: How Scared Should I Be of Putin?

1/5: IDGAF



Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.


How the All-Drag Movie 'Vegas in Space' Forever Changed Queer Cinema

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Intergalactic drag stars of 'Vegas in Space.' Photo courtesy of Phillip Ford

Nineteen-Ninety-one proved to be a remarkably bittersweet year for acclaimed San Francisco drag troupe Sluts-a-Go-Go. It was when they released their feature film Vegas in Space, a magnum opus nearly eight years in the making. But before the movie had its world premiere, two of its stars, drag icons Doris Fish and Tippi, would succumb to AIDS, leaving an indelible absence in the celebration that followed.

The film, a joint vision of Doris Fish and filmmaker Phillip R. Ford, would eventually traverse the globe, playing the likes of Sundance and Cannes. E! would broadcast images of Miss X, who plays Queen Veneer, Empress of Earth, marching the streets of France in support of the festival run, and the movie eventually became a staple of the once-popular late-night cable cult film showcase USA Up All Night.

For many, Vegas in Space was a cinematic revelation. A loving homage to B-movies and drive-in era sci-fi, the film follows a group of astronauts who "change their sex" (using drag) to infiltrate planet Clitoris, a pleasure world without men, investigate the disappearance of vital gems of Girlinium, and save the universe from certain peril. Campy, psychedelic, and utterly bizarre, Vegas in Space is one of the first truly queer midnight movies, and while it wasn't the first film to toy with gender-bending and drag (The Rocky Horror Picture Show being a noteworthy example), Vegas has the distinction of being the first—and possibly only—cult film to feature an all-drag cast.

Despite screening at venerable international film festivals and making it onto late-night cable, finding an audience for Vegas was difficult. While it's hard to imagine in a world without RuPaul's Drag Race embedded in the mainstream, back in 1991, drag culture was a black sheep of the LGBTQ community. It "was not the image were trying to present when they were fighting for 'gays in the military,'" Ford has said in interviews.

It was a time when a new school of rising filmmakers, from Todd Haynes to Christine Vachon, sought to minimize camp influences and maximize mainstream legitimacy in gay filmmaking through subtler, fully realized on-screen characters.

Photo courtesy of Phillip Ford

But no one ever said that to blaze a trail was to be lauded for the journey, and Vegas in Space did eventually earn its stripes. Though distributors of the period shied away from acquiring outwardly gay films, Lloyd Kaufman's independent film studio and distributor Troma eventually purchased its distribution rights. Thanks to Troma, the company responsible for such classic midnight movie fare as The Toxic Avenger and Blood Sucking Freaks, Vegas found audiences both queer and fringe.

And in the 25 years since its initial release, fans have banded together to maintain its legacy. A quick internet search will reveal cult fandom for Vegas in Space is as strong as ever. But I would argue it's incorrect to conclude that Vegas was ahead of its time. Instead, the movie emerged at exactly the right moment.

Thanks in no small part to Vegas, 1991 would turn out to be a watershed year for queer cinema, one that hasn't been replicated since. It was the year that brought us Todd Haynes's Poison, Pedro Almodovar's High Heels, and Derek Jarman's Edward II, establishing each as visionary directors with new kinds of queer stories to tell. These narratives eschewed stereotypes and obvious morals for subtler characterizations of queer lives. It was also the same year that filmmaker, writer, and photographer Bruce LaBruce released his first feature, No Skin Off My Ass, a film about lust and skinheads that kicked off a lauded career, which continues to explore the intersection of pornography and cinema today. And Isaac Julien's Young Soul Rebels became one of the first major international releases to showcase queer romance between people of color.

The year kickstarted an era that came to be known as the New Queer Wave, and rightly so. As queer people pulled themselves up from the devastation wrought by the AIDS crisis throughout the 80s, LGBTQ artists found themselves ready to tell new kinds of queer stories. These were films that sought to show the world that a queer person could be more than a statistic. Within each of these narratives, one found radically different voices yearning to be heard.

And heard they were. With the onslaught of queer cinema that invaded film festivals, the New Queer Wave forever changed the landscape of LGBTQ film to follow. Movies like Tom Kalin's Swoon, Rose Troche's Go Fish, and the aforementioned Priscilla all have films released in 1991 to thank for their existence.

Photo courtesy of Phillip Ford

Not every film adored by horror nerds and cinema geeks can claim to be an important part of cultural history, let alone one populated with intergalactic drag queens. Vegas in Space and the New Queer Wave showed a generation of queer youth and aspiring filmmakers that it was OK to embrace their otherness, rather than bury what makes them unique—it taught us that it was all right to speak out, seek representation, and reach for the stars.

Michael Varrati co-produced a 25th anniversary screening and cast reunion of Vegas in Space for San Francisco's Frameline Film Festival. Follow him on Twitter.

Comics: 'Smut Philosopher,' Today's Comic by American Nature Comics

I’m Not Even 30 and I’m Too Old for Music Festivals

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My nightmare. Illustration by Adam Waito

Last weekend was my first (and last) attempt at festival camping.

I've been to music festivals before, but they were either day-long events or I wussed out and chose to stay at nearby accommodations instead of slumming it on the campgrounds with general pop.

Still, even though I hate camping, I kind of felt like I was missing out on a rite of passage. Most of my friends have camped at festivals and they all had great war stories about late night E-fuelled dance parties and disgusting tent sex. This being the last year of my 20s, I figured it was now or never.

So I headed to WayHome, a three-day festival a couple hours north of Toronto, with a few dudes from work. I was pumped on the lineup—in particular LCD Soundsystem, who were headlining the first night. But even before we arrived, there were red flags. The temperature was slated to be in the mid-30s—literally the hottest weekend of the summer—and in that heat, my colleague, who is the approximate size of a baby giraffe, and I would be sharing a tiny "three man" tent.

As soon as we got to the grounds, I remembered that almost everyone who works at music festivals is a teenager who is just there for the free admission—aka completely useless when it comes to being helpful. We set up the tent and asked one guy to point us in the direction of the stages. He responded by giving us a blank stare. "Where's the music?" we clarified, to which he shook his head and said, "I have no idea. Not gonna lie." I laughed passive aggressively and felt myself brace for a weekend of being annoyed.

Eventually, we got to the right place and seeing as it was hot as balls, I beelined for the drink stand, passing by girls attempting to Snapchat themselves doing cartwheels and one bro who came up right behind me and screaming "HIGH FIVE!? HIGH FIVE!?" while en route. I hate everyone here, I thought to myself, followed by, Maybe I'm just a bitch? Both of those statements are in fact true, but I digress.

Once I got to the drink station, I asked for a Perrier water, but when I reached to hand the clerk cash, she shook her head. "We're cash free," she said. "You need to download the app and load money onto your wristband." Awesome. I'm in the middle of a massive field in Oro-Medonte, Ontario, with shit cell service, and my only hope of not passing out from heat exhaustion is downloading a fucking app. Forty minutes later, the app had been downloaded but still wasn't processing my payment. That's when I ran into my friend and he told me I could just go see a "top up station"—there was one a few feet away from me— and use my credit card to put money on my wristband, something I wish the drink lady would have mentioned. All told it took me more than an hour to get a 250-ml can of Perrier that carried an $8 price tag.

This cost me $8 and an hour of my life.

Unfortunately for me, I have a tiny bladder and a phobia of portapotties. My dad was OCD about cleanliness growing up. He made us wash our butts every time we went number two and take two showers a day. My mom had to ban him from giving our dog a bath because he would aggressively soap her entire face, giving her this weird recurring eye irritation. Anyway, it wasn't long before I had to go pee, so I headed over to one of the blue boxes of hell. Positioned directly in the sunlight, it was hot and smelly inside, like being in a microwave after someone had warmed up a bowl of shit. I did my business and got out of there as quickly as I could. (I packed a Shenis—a dick-shaped funnel chicks can use to pee—but it was about a foot longer than I expected it to be, resulting in difficulties aiming. I ditched it after I almost pissed on my leg.)

The first show my friend and I ended up watching was Metric. During the last song, there was a nice moment when the entire crowd was singing the chorus to "Breathing Underwater." I couldn't really enjoy it because the bro next to me, clearly rolling out of his mind at 7 PM, kept screaming, "SING ONE MORE!" and accidentally hitting me in the tit.

It was time to get drunk. I hustled back to the car to chug down some of the $50 worth of alcohol I'd purchased. I was in a rush because I wanted to get a good spot to see LCD, so I quickly unscrewed the cap off my two-six of vodka and poured some down my throat. Bad call. It had been baking for hours at that point and was roughly the temperature of freshly brewed cup of coffee, the nastiest coffee you could imagine. Instantly, I puked it back up. Still, I packed a little in a water bottle to take back to the show. Desperate times, you know.

LCD was awesome, so I won't bore you with the details of that. It was the shining moment of the weekend. Because I was wasted, falling asleep that night was pretty easy. But that's where my luck ran out.

Read more: We Asked Friends At LCD Soundsystem's Reunion Show When They Started Losing Their Edge

I awoke to unbearable heat at 9 AM to discover that I'd gotten my period. Surprise. Being a dumbass, I hadn't packed any tampons, so I had to use the really old one that had been sitting in my backpack, unwrapped and stained with pen ink. I spent an hour charging my phone at the media tent so that I could coordinate meeting up with friends. As it turned out, I wouldn't need to do that anyway because I was too hot to care about anything. It seemed no matter how much water I consumed, I couldn't stay hydrated. I had told myself that unlike every other festival I'd attended, I would actually take advantage of the stacked lineup this time. Instead, I found myself being shaken awake by a security guard who found me passed out on a viewing platform during Third Eye Blind's set.

Heat stroke selfie.

By the time Arcade Fire came on, I was a bit better, in that I was conscious, but still barely able to stand. The second it was over, I rushed back to my tent to crash. In sharp contrast to the blistering daytime heat, it had suddenly become very cold, which coincided nicely with the fever and flu I felt settling in. No matter what I did, I couldn't get warm, and it didn't help that I was using a lumpy towel as my pillow and stuffed toilet paper as a defacto tampon at this point. My coworker and tent mate, whom I had barely seen all day due to how little I gave a fuck about anything that was going on around me, lumbered into the tent and almost immediately passed out. I remember staring at him angrily—he was blissfully unaware of how I uncomfortable I was—sick, cold, dehydrated, and bleeding through my pants.

This is the most uncomfortable night of my life, I thought, then scolded myself for being dramatic. I quickly mentally scanned through all of my memories backpacking through Southeast Asia, taking 24-hour bus rides seated in the aisle. No yeah, this is worse, I concluded.

The next morning I made the long trek to use the "fancy" flush washroom in the media area to freshen up. Haggard af, my coworkers and I rode back in silence—when the baby giraffe tried to start a singalong to "All My Friends" by LCD, I quickly turned around and snapped "Shut up!"

At home, I threw out my favourite pair of white sweat pants. And with it, any foolish notion that I would ever be able to stomach another music festival.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

What UGK’s ‘Ridin Dirty’ Means to Houston's Souped-Up Car Culture

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"Everything I ride original, no kits on them chops," Pimp C proudly declares on "Pinky Ring," a thick slice of Curtis Mayfield-sampling funk from UGK's 1996 opus, Ridin Dirty. The Port Arthur, Texas duo managed to make waves 90 miles down the road in Houston by applying to their music the same virtue that was paramount to the city's auto aficionados: originality. For decades, H-Town's car culture has revolved around "slabs"—slow, low, and bangin' riders outfitted with candy paint, a fifth wheel mounted on the trunk, and rare rims outfitted with protruding spears called "pokes," "swangas," or "elbows." These aftermarket details required imaginative customization from any number of the city's experts. In 1996, Houston already had a well-established hip-hop scene. Geto Boys put the city on the map with their unadulterated realness, and by the mid-90s, the Screwed Up Click's pitched-down, glacially-paced sound came to define the region. But by the time Pimp C and Bun B hit their stride on Ridin Dirty, they, like H-Town's custom car artists, injected even more vibrant originality into the city's culture.

Similarly to Atlanta's Organized Noize, who Pimp actually shouts out in the outro of "Pinky Ring," Ridin Dirty's production team (primarily comprised of Pimp and Scarface confidant N.O. Joe) breathed life into their beats with a heavy use of live instrumentation, hiring a number of keyboard, bass, and guitar players to bolster samples of golden-era funk. The result was a vivid document of both the good and bad—from the crystalline laments of mortality on "One Day" to the sun-kissed glory of "Hi Life"—that was to the increasingly stagnant Houston sound as slabs are to factory-made car models.

Of course, Ridin Dirty was tied to slab culture in much more than a metaphorical sense, too. References to Fleetwood 'Lacs, Mercedes Benz 600 Ss, AMG and Lorenzo rims, Yokohama tires, candy paint, and trunk-popping jump off the page as colorful scene-setting devices, as well as aspirational luxuries for the listener. Cars are so central to the album that Bun and Pimp actually appear in one on the cover, looking over their shoulders in a perfect distillation of Ridin Dirty's intoxicating blend of paranoia and pursuit of wealth.

As Bun B tells it today, he and Pimp were just like any other auto-obsessed Houstonites in '96. "Comparing, showcasing, and talking about the newest car innovations is a way to bond between Southern men and I think car men in general," he told VICE over email, going on to explain the importance of the city's car washes that offered detailing services. "The car wash is the common communal area for car people in the South. Meet up, get clean, and show your sound. The detailing took an hour tops, but guys hung out for two or three times that."

Unlike, say, the stretch Hummer in Juvenile and Lil Wayne's "Bling Bling" video, or the prohibitively expensive (starting at only $189,350!) Maybachs immortalized in the name of Rick Ross's record label, the cars UGK touted were more competitive on the street level. They actually required some work on the owner's part. Constructing slabs has become a much more attainable pursuit in the years since the album's release, thanks to specialized auto parts businesses popping up in response to fierce demand that sometimes proved violent in Houston. UGK's impact on this culture still reverberates through South Texas's custom shops today. So in celebration of Ridin Dirty's 20th anniversary, we hopped on the phone with some of the region's longtime slab artists to get their thoughts on the landmark album.

EDDIE KENNEDY, OWNER OF 3RD COAST CUSTOMS

Bun, Pimp, and I, we're all from the same area. I'm originally from Beaumont, they're from Port Arthur and put it in everybody's face. And a lot of people for a long time never knew what a slab was, but it started to get major exposure and people actually started to accept the slab scene. People in Canada, New Zealand, Tokyo— we ship swangas everywhere. There's people everywhere that want to be down with it now, it's crazy.

Follow Patrick on Twitter

​Is America Becoming Numb to Mass Shootings?

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Over the past seven days, America witnessed 11 mass shootings that left 11 dead and 55 wounded. These attacks bring the US mass shooting body count so far in 2016 to 245 dead and 834 injured.

Meanwhile, Europe suffered two mass shootings over the same period of time. Exactly a week ago, details were still emerging about 18-year-old David Ali Sonboly's still mysterious but apparently xenophobic attack in a Munich, Germany shopping mall, which ultimately left nine dead, not including the lone shooter who killed himself as well, and 27 injured. Then on Tuesday, a familial dispute over an apartment in Magas, Russia, left the local chief of police dead and four wounded, two of whom were also officers, in still unclear circumstance. These incidents bring the continent's body toll in such attacks so far this year to 37 dead and 125 injured.

In America, the defining shooting of the week hit just after midnight on Monday morning when at least one gunman opened fire on a teen-centric party at Club Blu in Fort Myers, Florida. The shooter(s) killed 14-year-old Sean Archilles and 18-year-old Stef'an Strawder and injured 17 others between the ages of 12 and 27. Police arrested three people of interest right after the attack, 19-year-olds Derrick Church and Demetrius O'Neal and 22-year-old Tajze Battle. But they were charged with resisting arrest, not with anything directly related to the shooting; as of publication it remains unclear whether they had anything to do with the attack itself.

The attack in Fort Myers drew a fair amount of international coverage toward the start of the week. But ultimately it did not receive as much attention as one might have expected for an attack in which over a dozen mostly young people at a supposedly safe event were injured. After all, while we can be shockingly blasé about many large scale shootings, as Jaclyn Schildkraut, an expert on media coverage of mass shootings at the State University of New York in Oswego, recently told VICE, Americans tend to consider children the ultimate "worthy victims." As such we're riveted by attacks involving predominately children, especially in public venues, like this.

Part of the seemingly mild reaction to Fort Myers may have stemmed from a continuing global focus on Sonboly's Munich massacre, which hit almost every hallmark laid out by Schildkraut for a headline-grabbing attack: The shooting unfolded in a public and unlikely location—a mall in a nation which has largely avoided major attacksfrom any party in recent years—and was perpetrated not by the Islamic State as many feared, but by a seemingly bigoted, troubled teen. His victims were moderately targeted, but predominately random, and mostly young as well. Chaotic, narrative defying, brutal to innocent youth, and massive by any standards, especially those of Germany, it was a fittingly archetypal media spectacle-ready rampage for a shooter who apparently made it his business to study and ape some of the worst mass shootings ever.

Meanwhile aside from the high number of children involved, Fort Myers in many ways fit established narratives of large scale US gun violence, conceivably making it less extraordinary from a media coverage perspective. For starters, it took place at a nightspot, an incredibly common site for such attacks. (There were three other mass shootings at bars or clubs this week alone: One on Saturday morning in North Charleston, South Carolina left four injured. One on Sunday morning in Hamilton, Ohio, left one dead and seven injured. And one on Thursday morning in Elmira, New York, left five injured.) And, given that we measure the importance of attacks in part by their numbers relative to other incidents, the fact that this nightclub shooting happened just over a month after Omar Mateen's massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, about three hours away—the largest mass shooting in modern American history—might have compressed the impact of its overall body count.

While the identity and motives of the shooter(s) still remain mysterious, witness reports and speculation by individuals associated with the club indicate that it may all have stemmed from a conflict between rappers. A local DJ said he had previously been warned about potential violence at the event, while the owner of the club (which had seen previous, if smaller-scale, attacks) noted that shootings are a regular occurrence in the area. Combined with the fact that many of those involved were from minority communities, whose lives recent events have repeatedly shown us are chronically devalued in American society, you can start to see why Fort Myers might read to many as a simultaneously large and tragic yet also routine shooting, easy for us to move past.

Yet while the Fort Myers shooting may not be the most exceptional attack of the week, and while it may play into mass shooting tropes, it still left two teens dead—and many more wounded. That is an unacceptable and unnecessary tragedy. So were the five injuries in a street shooting in Kankakee, Illinois, last Friday; the two deaths and two injuries at a home in Cincinnati, Ohio, on Saturday morning; the four deaths and one injured in Bastrop, Texas, and four more injured in Brooklyn, New York, in apartment shootings later that night; the four injuries in a shooting at a home in Panola, Alabama, Tuesday evening; or the two dead and two injured in Chicago, Illinois, and four more injured in Baltimore, Maryland, in street shootings Thursday morning.

All of these deaths and injuries take a lasting toll on real lives. They are also collectively part of an epidemic of mass shootings much larger than any individual tragedy, slowly grinding away at America. Whether or not they fit patterns of violence, or seem subdued relative to tragedies like those in Orlando or Munich, each of these incidents deserves its due consideration. And America's mass shooting problem in aggregate deserves our continued collective focus.

First-Person Shooter: The Definitely-Not-Sober Faces of Guests in a Colorado Hostel

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For this week's First-Person Shooter, we handed off two disposable cameras to Nigel Peligree, a desk clerk at the 11th Avenue Hostel located in the middle of Denver's downtown. As a longtime hostel employee, Nigel has seen a variety of unique characters crash at the space—from 20-somethings passing through town on holiday to Vietnam veterans looking for a comfortable bed for a reasonable price.

On top of snapping a few pics of some regular guests, Nigel also burned through a few exposures during the hostel's Fourth of July party—during which he passed out blue and red jello shots that were "gross as hell." Here's what else happened during the weekend he shot the following photos.

VICE: What'd you get up to during the day you took photos?
Nigel Peligree: I woke up, drank two giant cups of coffee, and drove to work. There isn't a specific order of tasks that I follow every day. I'm responsible for making reservations, doing laundry, helping guests with any advice or recommendations they need, security (when needed), and keeping a nice environment for our guests.

What's your usual hotel patron like? In the photos there seem to be lots of old men.
Our patrons range quite a bit from person to person. We often have retired military guys who come to Denver to see family and friends, but aren't in town long enough to get an apartment lease. We have international travelers looking to save a couple dollars on lodging while they road trip across the country with their friends. We have extreme stoners who come to Denver to get as high as possible on our legal marijuana and marijuana products for a few days. We have guests from Denver who are in between housing and need somewhere to stay while they wait on their apartment or house to be ready. We have bands playing local venues who need a room that can fit at least four people and doesn't cost an outrageous amount of money. We bring in a diverse crowd.

What's the worst thing you've ever had to clean up?
Overflowing sewer and rain water in the basement during an extremely bad storm.

Can you tell me about your regulars?
They're generally a little older and have interesting life stories. There's a girl in her late 20s who just got a job in Denver's financial district but hasn't found an apartment because of the extremely competitive housing market. We have another guy who lives in the mountains, rents his house out on Airbnb, and comes down to the city every few weekends to hang out with his friends in the city. We have a bluegrass musician who's been coming to the 11th Ave Hotel once a summer for over ten years to play shows. We also have regular partiers who come to the hostel every few weeks from the suburbs or neighboring cities such as Fort Collins, Boulder, and Colorado Springs. They usually stay because they don't want to make the drive home after going out clubbing for a night or two. I like our regulars.

How can people book some time to stay there?
People can book with us online or by calling us. See our website for more details.

Follow Julian on Instagram and visit his website to see his own photo work.

Beautiful Shots of Berliners Sunbathing Nude on Their Lunch Break

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This article originally appeared on VICE Romania

If you're in Europe and you're reading this, there's a big chance that you are sweating your shirt off in a heatwave. For a lot of countries this is pretty bad news, because even though you have lakes and rivers going through most major cities, you're not really allowed to go swim in them, for safety reasons or simply because the authorities are too lazy to supervise that area. In some countries you aren't even allowed to relax on the grass in the parks, which only leaves you with air-conditioned apartments and expensive swimming pool memberships.

In Berlin, however, things are a little different. Coyness is not held in high esteem in the birthplace of Free Body Culture—to the point that in many parks it's generally allowed to sunbathe naked. Photographer Ana Topoleanu took a stroll around the city's parks and took some beautiful analog shots of naked Berliners on their lunch breaks.


An Exhibition of Seats Taken From Deadly Car Crashes

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"The Survivors" expo in central Bucharest

This article originally appeared on VICE Romania

Earlier this month, the Romanian police launched an eerie awareness campaign about the life-saving qualities of the seat belt. 15 car seats were placed in central Bucharest, all taken from wrecks of cars in which people lost their lives because they weren't wearing a seat belt. The seats are still stained, but the passengers sitting in them at the time of the accident survived because they did remember to wear their seat belts.

The aim of the exhibition is to reduce the number of traffic-related deaths—Romania has the second highest number of deadly traffic accidents in the European Union. According to the police, about eight lives are lost on the Romanian roads every day because people can't be bothered to wear a belt, forget about it, or actually tie it behind the seat to fool the car's sensors.

Each seat in the exhibition comes with a corny title celebrating the virtues of the seat belt, and a heartbreaking story from the survivor of the crash. Like this one:


"I wish it had been me instead of Cristi and his brother Vali. They were young and full of life. Cristi had just moved to Bucharest and his brother was living with their parents in another city. They had hung out together over the weekend at Christi's, and then we drove Vali back to their parents. They were both tired. Traffic was pretty slow, so Cristi told Vali to relax and leave his seat belt. Suddenly we went off-road, I still don't know why. I yelled at them, but there was no one left to hear me—we hit a concrete wall."

Depending on how decent your Romanian is, you can read more stories here.

How to Disappear Completely: The Unsolved Missing Persons Case of Damien Nettles

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK

It should have been a standard Saturday night. On November 2, 1996, gangly teenager Damien Nettles headed out in Cowes on the Isle of Wight with his good friend Chris Boon. They'd been out at a party earlier in the evening. Nothing special. Bored, they'd bought ciders, taken the ferry to west Cowes, and then tried to get served at a couple of pubs, underage, before giving up and going their separate ways on the high street. Chris would be the last person close to Damien to see him alive. Damien was 16.

But this isn't the story of a horrifying murder on an island that most Brits barely think about beyond planning their Bestival fancy dress. It's the bizarre tale of a boy who just disappeared. About 25 minutes before midnight, Damien walked into a chippy and stumbled his way through an order. From what we can piece together courtesy of the chip shop's CCTV footage, he bought his food, briefly chatted to a few men at the counter, and walked outside into the darkness.

His story has crept back into the news now, almost 20 years later, as the subject of BBC Three serialized documentary Unsolved: The Boy Who Disappeared. It's an attempt at a British take on Making a Murderer or Serialwhere a quick Google search could tell all about how the story's unfolded so far—and fronted by Panorama investigative journalists Bronagh Munro and Alys Harte.

"Quite quickly we came to Damien's story as this remarkable case that had thousands of people involved in the police investigation, hundreds of witness statements taken, and then... nothing," Harte says, speaking over the phone on the day Unsolved debuted online. "They made eight arrests, there was a massive effort over 20 years, and yet still nothing. Other people had tried before so we thought, we should give this a go." The results of she and Munro's yearlong investigation is an eight-part show, split into bite-sized episodes that each run to about 15 minutes long. You're taken onto the island, introduced to a score of characters believed to be linked to Damien, and left fumbling in the dark after quiet whispers of leads, bumping into one dead end after the next.

Damien's mother, Valerie Nettles, shows up early as a key resource. She flies back to the Isle of Wight from her Dallas home to meet Munro and Harte, sending them all the information she's gathered on the case to date. Watching her walk along the streets that somehow snatched her son away, it's hard not to feel moved by how calm she seems. How composed.

I ask Harte what it felt like to work with Valerie, no doubt opening up old wounds about the night that changed her life for good. "The kind of grief that Valerie's dealing with is a really complicated, heartbreaking one," Harte says. "She's ... pretty sure that her son is dead but she's not 100 percent sure. And she doesn't have anywhere to grieve him—she doesn't have a grave—so it's really difficult." You see that written on Valerie's face, first when she video chats with the two reporters and later when they meet in person.

Surely, after years of speaking to the press about a story that's barely progressed, Valerie would feel drained at the prospect of dredging everything up again, this time for the BBC. How did it feel to be back on the island during filming? "Going back after Damien went missing is bittersweet," she says, speaking from her home in Texas, "because I love it, but something terrible happened to us there. Something ripped our family apart and caused us to spiral off in a direction we would have never had to go in our lives."

Valerie, with Damien as a baby. Photo courtesy of Valerie Nettles

She goes on: "I knew it wasn't going to be easy, going into this program, and that we may not get all the answers we would hope for. But I think it's highlighted more questions surrounding the case—it's been a hard slog for nearly 20 years to make some sense out of all of this."

She's right. You can go through all eight episodes of Unsolved and walk away as confused as you started. Harte and Munro present plenty of leads, and most of the evidence they uncover seems to point in the direction of a couple of drug houses run by some of the town's dealers. One in particular, Nicky McNamara, stands out as a prime source of potential knowledge. That sounds promising, you might think, until you learn that he's dead. He was found in 2003, reportedly after taking an overdose at a friend's house—and obviously "dead men can't talk," as Valerie tells me.

By the time you meet Shirley Barrett—who used to live in the house where McNamara died and is doorstepped extraordinarily by Munro and Harte in episode six—then encounter Dan Spencer, another former drug sidekick, you can't tell who is or isn't telling the truth when questioned. "With hindsight I've found out so much," Valerie says, "not just about Shirley Barrett, in the film, but about young people—the age of my kids then—who've come forward now." From them she's learned that drugs featured more heavily in local teenagers' lives than she was aware at the time.

The people who served Damien on that November night—known only as Rob and Sharon—remember him acting strangely, in an account shared second-hand by the former chip shop owner. "It wasn't drink, was Rob's opinion, and Sharon agreed with that," says Denis Welsh in the show. "She said we can recognize drink—it was a 'drugs effect,' if you like."

The Nettles family: father Ed, Damien holding Valerie, and siblings James and Melissa

According to the show, the Hampshire constabulary police lost a few crucial surveillance tapes that could have shown where else Damien walked after midnight; that's just one of a few reasons Valerie has for deeming their handling of the ongoing and open case "lackluster, shoddy, and pitiful." From the police force's perspective, they've spent 20 years involving 1,134 people in the investigation—"either as investigators, witnesses, or people of interest," they say—taking 357 witness statements and reviewing more than 2,500 documents.

But really, it's the banality of Damien's last known whereabouts that make this story so frustrating. Everyone's been on those nights, where you wander from one place to the next in the vague hopes of landing on something entertaining for a few hours. But most of us make it home. Damien never again saw his parents and three siblings—Sarah, now 38, James, 32, and 28-year-old Melissa. To be clear, Unsolved doesn't quite match Making a Murderer or season one of Serial in terms of production value and intrigue, but puts in a valiant effort at digging around for reasons why things turned out the way they did.

"Up until a few minutes after midnight," Harte says, "it's almost minute-by-minute, the eye-witness accounts of where Damien was and who he was speaking to. And then"—she pauses—"it stops. How did a 16-year-old boy disappear? Even if there are great leaps forward in the coming months, I feel there will always be unanswered questions about this case." For Valerie, those questions give her a sense of purpose. "I'm not the only mother of a missing child to feel desperate, but we go out there rattling cages," she says. "That's what we do."

Unsolved: the Boy Who Disappeared is on now available for UK-based viewers to stream on BBC iPlayer

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Comics: 'Foyer,' Today's Comic by Becca Human

The World's Most Poisonous Creatures Could Get You High and Save Your Life

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Christie Wilcox examining a bullet ant at the Tambopata Research Center in the Peruvian Amazon. Photo by Aaron Pomerantz

A large dose from the dreaded Australian box jelly, a.k.a. Chironex fleckeri, can kill a grown adult in a matter of minutes. Even small jellyfish can pack potent toxin, such as the matchstick-sized Irukandji box Jelly, whose venom can kill a human in as little as four hours, though its immediate effects sometimes go unnoticed. As a species, human beings have an inborn and intrinsic fear of jellyfish, spiders, snakes, and all things poisonous. From a young age, we are conditioned to avoid these creatures like the plague, but venom and poison are more than just an organic weapon found in nature, and studying toxins can reveal a lot about life and evolution.

In her new book, 'Venomous: How Earth's Deadliest Creatures Mastered Biochemistry' (out August 9 on Scientific American/Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), molecular biologist Christie Wilcox explores the culture and history of venom. Weaving together research, personal narratives, photos, and diagrams, the author paints a vast portrait of poison, including descriptions of the venom found in spiders, snakes, octopi, urchins, Komodo dragons, duck-billed platypuses, ants, cone snails, as well as in-depth explanations on how each defense tool affects victims. Wilcox goes on to argue that the animals we grew up fearing now hold the key to life. She details how venom can be used to treat numerous ailments, such as high blood pressure and erectile dysfunction, plus illnesses that currently do not have cures.

No stranger to encounters with these poisonous creatures, Wilcox brings years of personal insight to her research and analysis. She's cataloged the venom of a myriad of creatures in locations as disparate as the beaches of Indonesia and the rainforests of Peru. By studying the evolution, adaptation, and immunity of poisonous creatures, Wilcox hopes Venomous will both lead the conversation about the groundbreaking research in the scientific community involving venom, as well as enrapture the average zoology enthusiast curious about snake bites. VICE sat down with her for a chat about her interest in venomous creatures, the medical benefits of venom, and how some cultures use venom to get high.

Christie Wilcox, photo by Aaron Pomerantz

VICE: How did you first get interested in venomous creatures?

Christie Wilcox: I've loved animals of all kinds since I can remember. I was that kid, the one you'd find chasing snakes or poking at jellyfish that washed up on the beach. The species that others feared fascinated me. But I would say my obsession with venomous animals didn't fully blossom until I was thinking about what I wanted to do for my dissertation. After I started lion fishes, I became completely infatuated with venoms and venomous animals, eager to learn everything there is to know about them.

Humans have an innate fear of poisonous creatures. When we see a snake or spider, it's like an alarm bell goes off in our head. How did this relationship develop?
We know that our relationships with many venomous animals goes back thousands of years. They are depicted in some of our earliest artwork, and appear as heroes and villains in our oldest myths and legends. But there is some evidence that our relationship with these menacing creatures dates back even further than that, to the early origins of our species, perhaps even our lineage of primates. Snakes, in particular, are instantly recognizable to humans and apes alike. We can see a snake in a picture and react with fear even before we know that we're seeing it. Even young children and infants react to videos of snakes with fear, long before they could have learned such a response from their parents, which suggests that our fear of snakes is innate, ingrained into our DNA through millennia of coevolution.

When did scientists first start cataloging and researching venomous creatures? How far do the records go back?
We have made note of venomous animals for as long as there is recorded history. Many famous naturalists, doctors, and philosophers were aware of nature's little biochemists, and often spoke or wrote of their dangers. You can find references to species like stingrays, snakes, and spiders in the writings of Aristotle, Plato, and Pliny. As scientific inquiry became more formal (the word "scientist" didn't emerge until the 1830s), so, too, did the study of venomous animals. The effects of their venoms and methods of treatment can be found in some of the oldest medical texts, dating back centuries. Still, we have only scratched the surface when it comes to the rich resource of knowledge these animals represent. Most research has focused on easily accessible venoms, leaving the vast majority of venomous species unstudied.

'Flight of the Mongoose and the Serpent Armies,' a watercolor depiction of the age-old battle between snake-eaters and their prey. Image courtesy of Wilcox.

What does this book add to the study of venom and anti-venom that was previously not available to the public?
When Greg Laden reviewed the book for ScienceBlogs, he gave it what I consider to be the highest praise possible: He said that he learned something new on every page. I think this book takes the scientific papers on venom, which scientists have access too, and translates them and presents them to the reader in an engaging and accessible way.

During your research, did you discover any weird stories or unexpected findings?
The most unexpected story was how there are people who use venoms recreationally, claiming it's a better high than heroin. In the medical literature, there are several papers describing people paying for bites from deadly species like cobras to get their fix. Cases are few and far between, but I was shocked there were any cases at all.

Could you imagine humans experimenting with venom-based drugs to get high in the future?
There's no doubt that our species has a preoccupation with mind-altering substances. So it's not surprising that people have experimented with anything they think might get them high, and venoms are no exception. I think the danger factor and difficulty of obtaining and maintaining animals for their venom has so far prevented illicit uses from going mainstream, but cases of using venomous animals recreationally can be found in places with long cultural histories with these animals, such as India. Personally, I wouldn't want to risk a cobra bite, even if it was the purest, most incredible high on Earth.

Are there any misconceptions or urban legends that you disproved or found valid while writing the book?
There are lots of misconceptions about venoms, mostly related to how to treat bites or stings. For example, you might have heard you should pee on a jellyfish sting. This is bad advice. Urine can induce stinging cells to fire, injecting you with even more potent, painful venom. Instead, you should douse the area with vinegar, which inhibits stinging. Or, you might have heard that you should suck snake venom out of a bite—not so! You're not able to remove the venom that has been injected like that, so sucking is a waste of time. Instead, focus on getting the victim medical aid.

A speckled rattlesnake, photo by Chip Cochran

Why did you think these creatures develop venom?
There are all sorts of reasons to develop venom. Some species use their potent chemical cocktails to take down prey that would otherwise be unavailable to them, while others use their toxic mixes to ward off potential predators. Platypuses even use venom in battles over females! So, "why" varies. All of these uses can be boiled down to: venom helped each venomous species survive and reproduce better than similar animals without it. Once a lineage started down the evolutionary path to creating venom, natural selection honed the toxin mixtures, creating potent and effective toxins. How they start down that venomous path remains somewhat of a mystery.

For some species, we can connect the evolutionary dots, connecting venom toxins to things like antimicrobials found in saliva. Thus, we can deduce that the venom form evolved out of a duplication event which created an extra gene for natural selection to work with. But in many cases, we don't know exactly where a toxin came from, or even how an entire venom system came to be. Venomous animals still have many secrets to tell which will further our understanding of how evolution works.

How do animals like the mongoose develop immunities?
There are two main ways that an animal can be innately immune or resistant to a particular kind of venom: either they have altered their own bodies to make it so the toxins don't work, or they produce some kind of venom-inactivating compounds in their blood. Mongooses are an example of the former path. They are essentially immune to cobra venom because they have mutations in the ion channels that the lethal toxins in cobra venoms target. Other animals, like opossums, produce special proteins that bind venom toxins, making them useless. These compounds are especially exciting to scientists, as it is possible that they could be modified and used to treat snakebites in people.

In addition to innate immunity, many animals can become resistant to venoms much in the same way vaccines make us resistant to diseases, through the production of specific antibodies. If non-lethal doses of venom are introduced repeatedly over time, the adaptive immune system may be able to create antibodies which target venom toxins, binding and removing them from the blood. This is how scientists make the anti-venoms that are used to treat the deadliest venoms. They repeatedly inject small doses of venom into an animal like a horse or a sheep and then extract and prepare the venom-binding antibodies for human injection. It's not a perfect process—some toxins aren't terribly good at activating the immune system, and thus slip through the cracks. Others are too locally toxic that it's impossible for injected antibodies to arrive at the site in time.

What does venom teach us about evolution?
Venoms are unique and fascinating adaptations. There are hundreds of thousands of venomous species littered amongst the sundry branches of the tree of life, from some of the oldest invertebrates, to insects, reptiles, mammals, and even some of our recent kin (like primates). Many of these venomous lineages evolved their toxic cocktails independently, thus by studying these groups and the toxins they wield, we can gain a better understanding of how novel adaptations arise.

We can also better understand the limits of natural selection by looking at what kinds of molecules are co-opted for nefarious purposes, such as making a venom-derived biological weapon. And lastly, in many venomous lineages, there are also non-venomous animals who have secondarily lost their toxicity, like the Marbled Sea Snake, which lost its venomous abilities. To really understand evolution, we have to understand how and why traits are lost, in addition to how and why they are gained. So by studying species that no longer bite or sting, we can gain a more complete picture of the often mysterious nature of evolution and natural selection.


The venomous spur of the platypus. Photo by Christie Wilcox

How can venom help us in the future and what can it treat?
We've only just begun to investigate how venom toxins can help us medically. Every venomous animal has a unique chemical cocktail made from dozens to thousands of compounds, many of which have pharmacologically-useful effects on our bodies, such as lowering blood pressure or killing cancerous cells. So far, there are six venom-derived drugs approved by the FDA, with many more in various stages of testing and clinical trials. So far, the possibilities seem endless. There are venom compounds which appear to tackle the world's most notorious diseases, from diabetes to Alzheimer's, and ones for more minor conditions, including erectile disfunction and crow's feet.

And that's just what we've found so far with the relatively few animals whose venoms have been characterized. There are hundreds of thousands of venomous species whose venoms have never been studied, any of whom might be harboring the next blockbuster drug. If we don't conserve our venomous biodiversity, and let habitat destruction, pollution, and climate change wipe them from the face of the Earth, then we will lose invaluable biochemical resources that we can never replace.

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Pupdates: Inside a Fetish Kennel in Upstate New York

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All photos by the author and Thomas McCarty

When I met Pup Scrubs at the Cleveland Leather Annual Weekend (CLAW), he was non-verbal, only speaking in barks, and he sported full football pads as well as a custom-made sports jersey that read "Raptor Pups" on the front and "Pup Scrubs" on the back. At the convention, the pup carried a dog bed stuffed with plush toys, and I saw him curled up for a dognap during one of the lectures at the event. Days later, on the eve of the convention's closing, Pup Scrubs hopped on to the couch I was seated in before proceeding to nuzzle my lap. We cuddle in silence for a half hour before he popped his head up and asked me about my column, Pupdates.

After a lengthy conversation about the extremes he went through researching and purchasing his gear and the time he went to Alaska to live out a cold weather gear fetish, I knew Scrubs was a truly a good boy and wanted to get to acquainted with him outside of the convention setting.

After talking online at length, Pup Scrubs invited me to upstate New York for a visit at his one-of-a-kind kennel. Most pups in the community only know Scrubs as a non-verbal puppy who's always masked, so it was a rare privilege to be invited up to his home and learn about his lifestyle. We stayed the weekend in the sprawling, cobalt blue estate, tucked into the countryside along the coast of Lake Ontario. The secluded lake and forest allow the pup to don his functional fetish gear in the environments where he enjoys the equipment best.

In other words, it's a dream playpen for a pup to live in year round. After Pup Scrubs picked me up at the Greyhound bus, we spent the weekend learning about the functions and applications of different pieces of fetish gear, as well as ways to ride out the inevitable collapse of industrial civilization, a hot-button issue for Scrubs. As we ran on all fours through the forest and doggy paddled in the lake, I got an up-close look at the home life of a pup who was truly dedicated to the lifestyle. Below is an edited transcript of our conversations, as well as photos from my visit to Pup Scrubs' pup haven.

VICE: Who's a good boy! Tell me about your pup name and how you decided on it?
Pup Scrubs: My pup name is Pup Scrubs, and I didn't decide it. No self-respecting pup gives themselves a name—a handler or an alpha has to give you a name.

How did your handler decide on your name?
Because scrubs are my favorite thing to wear, and it's probably the gear I wear most often. I'm wearing them now, of course!

You have a lot of different kinds of gear looks as a pup. Can you remember the pup gear you were first infatuated by?
The first gear I was infatuated by, and always will be infatuated by, was football gear. A complete set of football gear was the first I ever bought with my first credit card when I was 18. When I'd see football on TV, or see football players in the locker room at school, I just knew I always liked big, padded football gear. I always will enjoy football gear, but it's not very practical to wear around the house on a daily basis. Scrubs are practical.

How do you see the different looks playing into Pup Scrubs as a fleshed-out character?
I would say that they're all expressions of the same character. They're just different flavors and that's often how I'll refer to them—football Pup Scrubs, camo Pup Scrubs, or even proximity Pup Scrubs, which is firefighting proximity gear, like what firefighters would use during a high-intensity fire. There are many different flavors, and they're all variations on the theme that is Pup Scrubs. They're all different ways of highlighting certain aspects of my personality.

What do you do when you're not a pup?
I work. It's not really fun to talk about. Unless I'm on a video conference call, I have my collar on at all times. I always keep a little bit of pup with me. And when I write to my employees, we use puppy terms, bonuses are called Scooby Snacks, we do wags, we don't hold people's hands, we hold their paws. In very small, modest ways, I try to bring my pup-ness into my work.

What brought you into the pup lifestyle?
I was looking through the catalog of hoods. While browsing, I saw a puppy hood available to buy. I remember distinctly thinking, That must be the stupidest thing I've ever seen! Who would ever want to wear a hood like that and make themselves look like a puppy? This was before I met a pup. I always liked dogs. I always liked the simplicity of interacting with them, but it wasn't until I actually put a pup hood on and got into puppy head-space for the first time that something clicked. I realized it was just who I was. In 2004, I met my first handler, the one who gave me my pup name, and that really helped awaken my inner pup.

One of the outfits we photographed you in was this big red-down coat that you acquired as part of a cold-weather pup outfit. Can you tell me about your cold-weather gear fetish and how that plays out during the actual winter?
It's the ultimate kind of gear. It's big, fluffy, and extremely comfortable. Cold weather can be a magical time to explore nature and interact with people in really special ways. Once, I went to northern Alaska to commune with the Inupiat Eskimo population and find my inner pup spirit. I got myself kitted up with the finest down gear before going to the northernmost city in the entire US. I timed it to be the coldest time of the year and I spent 34 days in Alaska during their 30 days of darkness. It was a real magical time.

Can you tell me about the float pod you keep at the kennel, as well as your two different sleeping methods?
Recently, I've acquired my aqua crate, which is a float pod . What a life-changing experience floating is! It allows me to enter a state of zen and really bring my inner pup to the surface. I also have an outdoor crate on my patio that's really nice. I can put a big, fluffy sleeping bag in it. The colder it gets, the more comfortable I am out there because I can actually cocoon myself in a big down sleeping bag, and I have a powered respirator that injects air into a gas mask that I wear all night while I'm sleeping.

You've told me that you want to impart lessons of wisdom to younger pups. Do you have a pearl of wisdom that you could give to the pups reading this?
People will want to marginalize your puppy personality. It's easy to be dismissive of it, and to say, "Well, this is just you being silly." But don't be afraid to be yourself. Don't be afraid to change sometimes, even if that means the people you're hanging around with. The pack that you're with can make all the difference.

Right now, I'm happy, but I had to take a few years away from the pup lifestyle because my husband actually really isn't that into puppy play. His disinterest almost beat the pup out of me because he just wasn't willing to engage in it. But then I met the right group of people, and my inner pup just woke right up, stronger than ever. I've been contacted by people who're having a hard time communing with their inner pup, and the most important thing is to believe in yourself and get your pup on. If the people in your life can't accept you for who you are, you need to find different people who will. You can suppress it all you want, but you're still gonna be a pup. It's a beautiful thing, it's one of the best parts of my life, and I wouldn't give it up for anything.

Visit Zak's website for more of his work, and see more photos of his visit to Pup Scrubs' kennel below.

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