Photo via Filip Aleksandrow/Facebook

Dollarama stores across Canada are discontinuing Halloween decorations made to look like black feet with chains around the ankles, after they were criticized as racially insensitive.

Photos by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

Gropings, genital exposures, grand theft: Andy Dick's litany of offenses to society is long and egregious. Even more remarkable than a storied career of comic hilarity that saw him co-star NBC sitcom NewsRadio for five seasons, host his own The Andy Dick Show on MTV, and sashay his way to the seventh round of Dancing with the Stars, is the trail of destruction and bemusement Dick has left in his wake, fueled by alcohol, cocaine, and an utter inability to keep his hands to himself.

Take a deep breath. In 2004, Dick was arrested on suspicion of indecent exposure after allegedly drunkenly mooning the denizens of an LA-area McDonald's. In 2007, he was famously dragged off the set of Jimmy Kimmel Live! after repeatedly fondling potential future first daughter Ivanka Trump. The next year, he was arrested for exposing the breasts of a 17-year-old girl in the parking lot of a Buffalo Wild Wings while "extremely intoxicated." Dick pleaded guilty to misdemeanor battery, but was arrested again two years later in Virginia after grabbing the crotch of a bouncer and forcing a kiss on a man at a bar. In 2011, Dick was accused of exposing his genitals while dressed in drag and rubbing his scrotum on an audience member's face during a standup show. In 2014, Dick, on a bicycle, rode up to a man and stole the necklace from his neck. Valued at over $1,000 by the victim, the act constituted grand theft. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Bad behavior, indeed. But the incidents that make it into the police ledger or the tabloids are just the tip of the gropey iceberg. When the cameras are off and the cops aren't around, Dick's behavior has been even worse, and tales of his foibles are passed down around dive bar smoking patios of Los Angeles like folklore. Having a run-in with Andy Dick is something of a rite-of-passage for any Angeleno worth their salt, so much so that he has ascended to urban legend status in the city, like the chupacabra or the ghost of Marilyn Monroe. For a period, Upright Citizens Brigade improv squad ASSSSCAT would ask audience members to raise a hand if they had ever ridden an elephant. They would follow up by asking if anyone had received unwanted sexual advances from Andy Dick. The second group was almost always larger.

"When I would get ahold of one of the recovery centers, they would hang up when they found out it was me."—Andy Dick

Field research corroborated this notion. "He stopped me while I was running with my shirt off," Daniel McCollister, 31, a gardening consultant from Venice told me. "He asked to fuck me. I declined, but I did invite him to see our band live that night. He came. He was wasted, got onstage, showed his scrotum to the crowd, and then came to our afterparty and tried to fuck me and my male friends again."

"He strangled me outside of No Vacancy in Hollywood at 2 AM," says Chris Dodds, a 27-year-old photojournalist. "Shortly afterward, he apologized and came with us to an after-hours club, but he wasn't allowed in because of something that happened the week before."

"I saw him by himself, wasted, sitting in the stairwell at Cinespace," says Michael Allen, a 42-year-old projectionist from Hollywood. "He was sobbing and holding a cage with a bird in it."

Dick's antics have oscillated from uncomfortably amusing to concerning to downright sad with both frequency and velocity. People talk about Dick as if he were a force of nature, a torrential downpour of bad manners with no boundaries. His cartoonish transgressions are so public and often that it's become difficult to separate the human being from the caricature. But somewhere amid the whirlwind of sloppy intrusions is a person clearly not in control of his demons and who, at least in the quiet moments, knows that the situation stopped being funny a long time ago.

At the tail end of 2014, his career on the rocks, all of his bridges burned, and his health failing fast, Dick got sober for what he claims to be the 20th attempt. At the time of writing, almost two years later, it has stuck.

"I had to stop drinking, or I was going to die," Dick tells me from a couch at Soba, the sober-living facility in Malibu he's called home for almost two years. "I could see it very clearly. I was bleeding out of my ass. I was going to die."

"I would always say that I didn't have a problem with drugs and alcohol," he recalls. "But I would drink when I was happy, when I was sad, when I was anxious. Without drugs or alcohol, I was depressed, frustrated, angry. Honestly, it just stopped being fun when I was crawling around on the floor to find the phone, not able to dial because both my hands were shaking. When I would get ahold of one of the recovery centers, they would hang up when they found out it was me. No one wanted to help me because I was unhelpable. Why would they bring me in just to have me die in their bed?"

Even more alarming, Dick's son, Jacob (one of a trio of Dick progeny) had picked up some of his father's bad habits. "He got 5150'd," Dick explains, referring to California's involuntary psychiatric hold and confinement law. "He was going crazy from speed, trying to set things on fire. I was drinking heavily, saying, 'That kid needs help!' Three months into his sobriety, it hit me hard that I'm an asshole. I couldn't even come to terms with what a dick I was. I was obviously the one with the real problem. So I made a deal with him that I would stay in treatment as long as he did. He not only completed treatment, he works at the clinic as a technician. He drives the van around with the crazies in the back. He's kickin' ass!"

Dick says that his reputation was so bad at this point that Soba was the only facility in town that would take him. After the first week, a period of grueling detox, Dick had nowhere else to go, so he just stayed put. "I had exhausted family and friends. No one wanted me. I didn't have anywhere to live, literally, no apartment, no house," he says. "I had spent a good two years couch surfing prior to that. And liking it! It's not a sad, boohoo story. I was loving it, or at least I told myself I was."

One of the couches Dick lived on belonged to Mike Gamms, a 27-year-old comedian who went from being Dick's equally inebriated sidekick to his sobriety mentee. "What most attracted me to Andy at first is that the reputation I had heard about him was all terrible. People told me to stay away from him, that he was bad news, an asshole, that I would get in trouble," Gamms tells me. "My thought was people have said those things about me before, too. I've been in a place in my life where I was doing really destructive behavior and making a lot of bad choices, and I still had friends that believed in me. I figured there had to be more to him than that."

The duo cavorted around Los Angeles, crashing parties, talking their way into music festivals, and, they say, almost getting into a fistfight with Slayer at the VH1 Rock Awards after Dick pilfered the band's magnum bottle of Grey Goose. "We hung out every single day, all day, for like nine months straight. Either I was sleeping on his couch, or he was sleeping on mine, or we just weren't sleeping," says Gamms. This intimacy has afforded him some insight into what makes Dick tick. "Andy's most fun trait and his downfall is that he's absolutely spontaneous. Whatever is in front of him, he'll just do. He's never satisfied. He always wants to do more," Gamms says. "We could have had the most crazy, fun experience ever, and he's already thinking of the next thing. He's addicted to life. And when you're chasing the sun like that, you're gonna get burned a few times."

"I've had multiple guns pulled on me," confirms Dick. "Cocked and ready to shoot, but I've laughed my way out of it and gotten them to laugh. I've been punched in the face a number of times. On two separate occasions, the punch was so hard and so painful and so out of the blue that I shit in my pants. Twice. That means you're getting punched hard. I've fallen over and landed on my head. I can't even count how many times I've pissed myself. I've shit the bed. I shouldn't even really be here. I should be dead."

Dick's notoriety as a loose cannon fed back into his bad behavior. Barflies, fellow wastrels, and casual observers alike would enable his substance abuse, often goading him into volatile situations for the sake of a story. "It's really easy to get in those situations," Dick goes on. "I just get fuckin' drunk. All eyes are on me from drink one to drink 21. They've been snapchatting, tweeting it, videoing it the whole time. And they love it. There would be people who would feed me drugs and alcohol just to rattle the monkey's cage. They were feeding the beast. I'd go to these after-hours where cocaine was everywhere, and everybody wanted to be able to say they'd done cocaine with Andy Dick, so everybody would give me cocaine. I never bought cocaine. Ever!"

"When he's sober, he's a really brilliant, funny dude. But we didn't see much of that."—Molly Hankins

This pattern of enabling Dick's addiction was repeated by the people he surrounded himself with. Molly Hankins was a tenant and neighbor of Dick's for five years, in an eight-unit apartment building in West Hollywood that Dick owned and lived in at the time. "It started out fun, but sometimes it was so sad," Molly says of her time living there. "When he's sober, he's a really brilliant, funny dude. But we didn't see much of that." Surrounded by a posse of enablers comprised of fresh-faced Hollywood neophytes awed by his celebrity and sycophants looking to use his notoriety for self-gain, Dick would party to reckless extremes on a nightly basis. Drink and drugs were requisite, and destruction of property––from bongs to bones to Volkswagen Jettas––was a common occurrence.

In 2008, as a result of financial issues, Dick was forced to sell the property—but his anarchic specter remained. "After Andy took the deal, he kept coming back," says Hankins. "He'd show up at like 7 AM on a Saturday and just lay on the horn for 20 minutes. He'd pee on our doorstep. He'd show up with his kids and make us feed them."

"I would lose my barometer of what was appropriate when I would drink. I wasn't just over the edge, I was dive-bombing into the cesspool of what's not OK," he admits. "I've ruined so many friendships because of it. I've left a wake of dead relationships. Some people won't talk to me ever again. I've missed so many opportunities––I lost all five of my houses and my eight-unit apartment building because of neglect and financial mismanagement from being drunk all the time. I really did lose everything."

The key to Dick's behavior, other than the booze and drugs, of course, is his relentless and compulsive sexual appetite, something he admits goes all the way back to his youth. "I didn't have any parenting. My mom was a secret alcoholic. I always say I was raised by wolves," Dick says of a childhood that saw his family relocate frequently due to his father's Navy postings. "I think I was sexualized very early on. I don't know how it happened. I never saw pictures, no porn, movies. In first grade, I remember lining up all the kids in my neighborhood, bent over on a picnic bench with their pants down. I was playing bongos on their butts."

Dick came out as bisexual (and "try-sexual") on Dr. Drew's Sober House series in 2009. "People are surprised to hear I have a family," he says. "They think I'm gay. I can't help what people think. I really can't. I made my bed, I gotta lay in it, too. I have to fuck in it. And I'll fuck who I want."

This all leads to the greater question: Is Andy Dick redeemable to society? To those who know him well: Mike Gamms, his daughter Meg Dick, and the many aspiring comics he still mentors, the answer is yes. Even Molly Hankins, his former tenant, still refers to Dick as "a genius." But in the eyes of many others, the answer is and will always be no.

"People think I'm just a fuck up who never tried," says Dick. "I deserve it. I really do. That's the sad part. Whatever comes my way, in terms of public humiliation, I brought it upon myself. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't hurt my feelings. I'm constantly battling and struggling and trying to work it out. I'm always trying to be sober or, even when I was drinking, trying to manage it. I'll never overturn people's negative expectations of me in my whole lifetime. Even if I'm sober for 20 years. The job that they hire me for could be the job that I snap on. There's nothing I can do for the rest of my life that's going to give everyone a full-on, reassurance thing.

"I've been the boy who cried wolf––'I'm great now!'––I've been on every major talk show going, 'No no, you don't understand. This time. I'm good. I'm fine! Everybody rest at ease and relax!' and then I'm drunk that night," Dick continues. "Literally, sometimes it would be that night. There's no such thing anymore. I've stopped trying to be that. I'm never going to say that I'm never going to drink again. I might drink again. I have to be honest. I'm so old anyways at this point that if I started drinking and died this year––you know what? So did Prince, so did Michael Jackson, they're dead at my age. All of 'em."

These notes of fatalism belie a deep-seated understanding that Dick knows the gravity of this attempt at sobriety. At 50 years old, it really is now or never. Dick at least tries to get his kicks in healthier ways now. "I get up at 6:30 AM every day and jump in the ocean by myself. There's no one else swimming. It's me and the sharks," he says. "I feel the danger so deeply, I know that I could go that way. When I'm about 50 yards out there, where I can't even hear the waves anymore on the shore, that's when I start giggling. It's a high! I really could die. And that's the way to go. I should have died with drugs, but being eaten by a shark while out at sea would be the best way to go out. The only glitch in that plan is if I don't die, and I'm just missing a leg or an arm. Now, I'm the one-armed fuckin' comic."

Despite the bridges he's burned, Dick's career has begun to show signs of life since getting sober. He's featured in a memorable episode of the Judd Apatow produced Netflix series Love, in which he played a true-to-life version of himself slurring his way around Los Angeles that he will reprise in season two. He also enjoyed a cameo in Zoolander 2 and appearances on Workaholics and 2 Broke Girls. He even teaches an acting class and has taken on an official ambassadorial role for Soba, the sober-living facility he says might be his home for life. "I don't plan on moving out," says Dick. "Every day, I mentally pack my bags. But I'm afraid. I really would be one step closer to drinking if I left. It's best if I don't seriously entertain the thought of leaving."

Dick's also back onstage, taking on gigs at small comedy clubs around LA. Outrageous but intimate, the performances function more like a group psychological excavation of Dick's psyche than a stand-up routine.

"I decided that part of my sobriety has to be going back to my roots of why I really love it, going onstage for no money, doing what I did when I first got to town," he says. "It's therapeutic, it's cathartic. I want to move people or help people. Mostly, I'm so selfish, I want to help myself. I do my best thinking onstage," he pauses, before adding: "Besides, what the fuck else would I do? Start training to be a dentist?"

Follow Jemayel Khawaja on Twitter.

The last remaining outcrop of bipartisan consensus is that we all can't wait for this election to be over. No more slogans, no more rallies, no more flamewars, no more obsessing over the coming vote like it's the longest, more boring sporting contest in the world. The people who study this topic—by which I mean anyone who googles "election 2016" and has the attention span to then read an entire article—have a pretty good guess about what's going to happen: Hillary Clinton will beat Donald Trump for the presidency, the Republicans will maintain control of the House, and whichever way the goes Senate, neither party will be able to gather the filibuster-proof 60 seats that's required to pass any piece of truly difficult legislation.

That's to say that Clinton will be inheriting a presidency that looks a lot like Barack Obama's, meaning she'll have to deal with an extremely hostile and legislatively powerful opposition party. In other words, look forward to more gridlock, more partisanship, and more politicians obviously looking forward to the 2018 and 2020 elections. The end of this election won't be the end of anything. It won't be the beginning of anything either—it's just another chunk of agonizing middle.

Let's assume nothing shocking happens before Election Day, like Clinton getting put in cuffs by the FBI, which is still looking into her emails. Clinton will come in with a long list of domestic policies she'll want to implement: her college tuition plan, a push for more infrastructure planning, some kind of gun control, a way to fix Obamacare's problems, an effort to fight climate change, a higher minimum wage, and immigration reform. How is she going to do any of that?

To start with the most obvious obstacle, the House of Representatives will block pretty much anything a President Clinton would propose. House Republicans are already preparing to investigate her for pretty much anything they can, continuing the long inquiries into Benghazi and her private email server. Maybe they'll get lucky and find something they can impeach her with, but more likely, it will be just a way for Republicans to force Clinton to deal with as many micro-scandals as possible while producing a stream of grist for the right-wing media mills and signaling to their constituents that they're good conservatives working to bring down Crooked Hillary.

For years, the GOP has been moving further and further to the right, and any Republican member of Congress has to worry about a primary fight if they stray too close to compromising with a hated Democratic president. Maybe some prominent Republicans will realize after Trump that they need to tone it down, but nahhhhhhhhhh. The second-place finisher in the Republican presidential primary was Texas senator Ted Cruz, a hardcore conservative who has made a career out of rejecting compromise and denouncing accommodation. It's clear that the GOP base really doesn't want politicians who can point to a record of deal-making and legislative accomplishment.

Trumpism will continue to be a force after the election. In the House, the far-right "Freedom Caucus" may make it more difficult for Paul Ryan, a Republican who has criticized Trump, to get reelected Speaker. Maybe more important, Trump's campaign has collected the information and support of millions of angry white people that could provide the ammunition for a continued insurgency against the remaining moderating impulses in the GOP. Trump's team, Bloomberg Businessweek wrote in a profile of the campaign, "may emerge as a new media enterprise, an outsider political movement, or perhaps some combination of the two: an American UK Independence Party (UKIP) that will wage war on the Republican Party—or, rather, intensify the war that Trump and Bannon have already begun." That war is going to make it even harder to pass legislation than it otherwise would be.

On paper, the Senate seems like more fertile ground for Clinton. The former New York senator built relationships with her Republican colleagues during her tenure there, and Congress's upper chamber has been generally more open to compromises—there's already talk of resurrecting the "Gang of Eight" bipartisan immigration reform measure passed in the Senate and killed by the House.

But while some Senate Republicans have said nice things about Clinton, the same incentives against passing bills still exist: Any major piece of legislation will be an accomplishment Clinton will be able to point to in her (earmuffs, children) 2020 reelection campaign. And anything that gets through the Senate will of course have to go down to the much unfriendlier confines of the House.

Clinton will likely do what her predecessors have done and rely on the president's best friend, executive orders. But even there, she'll face obstacles in the form of lawsuits from conservatives—one such suit against an Obama administration action to grant deportation relief wound up going to the Supreme Court, who split on the issue 4–4, effectively blocking the order thanks to a lower court decision.

That brings us to the third branch of government. Having an eight-member Supreme Court obviously leaves open the possibility of a lot more deadlocks. If the Democrats take over the Senate, they would be able to confirm Clinton's Supreme Court nominees, at least in theory. In practice, it's complicated—Republicans could block nomination votes with a filibuster, but if Democrats had a Senate majority, they could use the "nuclear option" to overrule that filibuster with 51 votes. That would further erode the idea that Supreme Court appointments are somehow above party politics, but actually just kidding, that idea is dead and buried already.

Arizona senator John McCain, once known as a relative moderate who would work across the aisle, suggested this month that the GOP would "be united" against any of Clinton's Supreme Court nominees, before his spokesperson slightly walked that statement back. Stopping any and all nominations during Clinton's term would mean leaving the Court short at least one justice, which is constitutionally allowed but unprecedented—though many on the right, most prominently Ted Cruz, seem fine with that.

So that's what we have to look forward to: the continuation of a deadlocked Congress, a heated battle over the Supreme Court, an attempt from conservatives to destabilize the Clinton administration, the ongoing drift of the Republican Party to the hard right, and everyone—from the president on down—looking ahead to the next election. Good luck everyone.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Eduardo Woo

According to a new report from Propublica, advertisers that purchase ads on Facebook are able to target them toward certain users based on what the site calls "ethnic affinities."

Using the social media platform's self-service advertising portal, advertisers can stop Facebook users from seeing the ad based on characteristics like being African-American, Asian-American, and Hispanic. Because Facebook doesn't require users to identify with a race when creating a profile, the site says users are placed in a category based on the pages and posts that they like and engage with.

But advertisers are effectively able use this tool to target only white audiences or those with a caucasian "affinity," according to the report, which some say bucks the spirit and maybe even the letter of the housing and employment advertisement provisions of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and Civil Rights Act of 1964.

"This is horrifying. This is massively illegal," civil rights lawyer John Relman told Propublica. "This is about as blatant a violation of the federal Fair Housing Act as one can find."

Facebook's privacy and public policy manager, Steve Satterfield, insisted the reason the function exists is to help advertisers test their marketing performance on different groups, especially if those ads are in different languages.

"We take a strong stand against advertisers misusing our platform: Our policies prohibit using our targeting options to discriminate, and they require compliance with the law," Satterfield said. "We take prompt enforcement action when we determine that ads violate our policies."

But when Probublica managed to purchase and create an ad for people who might be house-hunting, and excluded users with African American and Hispanic "ethnic affinities," the ad was reportedly approved within 15 minutes. Facebook declined to comment on the ad.

Read: The Future of Social Media According to VICE

Michael Jubie strikes you as the kind of guy who might chase costumed teens off his property with a shotgun on Halloween. As an ex-cop who maintains a closely cropped haircut and insists on a fully uniformed staff, he certainly doesn't seem like the type to actively court hundreds of (often young) people to wreak choreographed chaos on 65 acres of his property every fall. But as founder and owner—with his wife Nancy—of the Headless Horseman, an upstate New York haunted attraction regularly ranked among the best in the country by everyone from MTV to the more niche Haunt World, that is precisely how the horror-loving, no-nonsense Jubie spends his days.

The experience is an hours-long smorgasbord of both typical Halloween fright fare like zombies and ghosts, mixed with a few nods to this century's predilection for torture porn, a decent helping of fetuses in jars (and even one being kept warm by a demonic nurse), corpses convulsing in acid, and—because it wouldn't be 2016 without them—some fucking evil clowns.

All photos by Matt Petricone

Every year at Halloween, we are reminded by pop psychology articles about why people watch horror movies and even why they're good for us: the tension, safely grappling with mortality, possible justice for the killer, and a catharsis for the viewer, to say nothing of the artistic value of a masterful piece of horror cinema. But the seven distinct houses of Headless, though quite theatrical, do not follow a linear plot. There are dozens of killers or victims lurking, and the gore exists for its own sake; the terror is the reason for the terror. It is a melange of a jumpy but fairly wholesome hayride followed by scenes of slaughterhouse abuse and malevolent medical experiments and shrieking corn maze exterminators. Guests feel mortal terror one moment and then walk less than 20 feet to buy apple crisp with vanilla ice cream the next.

This coexistence of horror and fine family entertainment renders the behind-the-scenes atmosphere into a social space somewhere between spooky summer camp and elaborate performance art therapy simulation. It's an environment in which performers repeat a routine that cycles in a matter of seconds, popping out of a corner or lunging from darkness at hundreds of people per night. Somehow, they never seem to tire of it, but that doesn't mean they don't have primordial fears of their own.

Jubie got the idea for his haunted house in an actually dangerous situation decades ago. After running with a tough crowd and working as "a bartender in every punch palace in the count," he says, he had an epiphany one night as the cops were chasing him and his friends. "You know, cops always seemed to win. So I said, 'Why wouldn't I get on their side?' You can't beat 'em, join 'em. Bob Dylan said, 'Every cop is a criminal,' right? So I joined the police department," Jubie explains. Seeing as he already knew his way around unsavory characters, they put him undercover and—not wanting to die at the hands of some dope-shilling miscreant—he made sure his disguises were top-of-the-line: beards, mustaches, and eyebrows that wouldn't fall off and looked realistic. The props were so good that Jubie started a business selling the outfits as costumes.

One night years ago, the ex-cop continues, he and his wife Nancy were out with another couple who also happened to be Halloween enthusiasts (as all decent Americans are) who insisted a Halloween hayride was in the Jubies' future. When I visit him in his attic office adorned with John Wayne paraphernalia and Halloween masks, Jubie gestures more broadly at the large property beyond. He shrugs and says, "The more Miller Lite I drank, the better that sounded. The next thing I knew, I bought this farm."

If those aren't someone's famous last words, they really ought to be.

On a Sunday evening, I find my way through a line of of young men and women dressed in all black, standing in small clusters waiting for their costumes and makeup. Most employees are on the younger end of the millennial set, sporting novelty hair colors, piercings, and tattoos. They're required to wear all-black under their costumes as part of protocol, but there is still an unmistakable touch of the goth about several of them. A survey of the performers at a haunted attraction in New York City might overwhelmingly reveal a cast of actors and artists. But here in Ulster Park, 100 miles north of the city, the jobs at Headless satisfy the thrill-seeking and (for the most part) the wage-seeking all at once.

Brett Houghtaling is built like Popeye's nemesis Brutus and has a black beard to match. But both traits are in sharp contrast to his measured speech and gentle mannerisms as he talks about working out his introversion over six years at Headless. The man sells tires at Sam's Club when Headless isn't in operation, and looks forward to it all year. "The scares that get your heart pumping, it brings out the kid in me, " Houghtaling explains. "Man, I'll never get tired of that."

Dave Berman is a testament to how this stuff somehow never gets old: He's worked at Headless for 15 years while also keeping a full-time job as a life coach with troubled kids. When I meet him, he is already clad in a blood-spattered plumber's uniform and wearing zombie makeup, eating live mealy worms from a plastic container as part of his act. When asked about people who leave crying from this place, he says that while those scares have their rewards, "The biggest badge of pride is when you get punched!" (Which Berman and other performers attest that they have been, on more than one occasion, by frightened guests.)

Knowing the mechanics behind the monsters does little to alleviate the very real fears that linger among the performers. "It doesn't matter if they're slow or fast—they never stop," Rosalyn Raponi, a first-year performer, says of her fear of zombies after an otherwise lighthearted conversation about her role as a feral child of the corn murdering people with pesticides. "Eventually, you're going to get tired. There's never enough sleep." Walt Batycki, a four-year veteran of Headless who left his job in Burbank as a Disney imagineer to live in the area after a family emergency, is as gregarious and genial as you'd expect from an improv coach. But when asked about his greatest fear among the supernatural, Batycki's voice quavers. "Everything I'm scared of isn't stuff you can see in a haunted house," he confides. "Something happening to my son—that's the only thing that really scares me."

The scariest moments from their own lives vary greatly across performers; one named Ruta is terrified of clowns and says that her scariest moment ever had happened just the previous night when several clown performers invaded the house she works in at Headless, unannounced. Houghtaling casually mentions that his home was converted from a mortuary and that he occasionally sees small children out of the corner of his eyes, but that they no longer scare him. And when asked about the scariest thing that ever happened to him, Raymond Edwards, a first-timer at Headless, very casually contributes, "My mother passed away in my arms."

Further elaboration on why this was the scariest is unnecessary.

Among the supernatural options of witches and ghosts and vampires and zombies, zombies and vampires seem the clear winners as the most terrifying. But Houghtaling brings up an alternative option—Death itself—as a more intriguing one. "You don't know who it could be. It could be this sweet old lady. Or this big biker guy. Or this small little child that no one knows about," he says. "And they come over, touch you. And you're gone."

But only Berman the zombie-plumber is willing to plainly state that his greatest fear is death itself. He looks around the scene of young people dressed as the undead, the murdered, and the murdering finding their way to their positions. "This is therapeutic for me—it's a link to the supernatural," he explains. "Nothing ever dies here. Everything is alive here in one way or another."

Follow Alana Massey on Twitter.

This article was published in collaboration with the Marshall Project.

"Farm to Market Road 632."

I have lived on that road for nearly 20 years, yet I've only set foot on it once. But if I am finally released—onto the strip of asphalt that connects Texas's Connally Unit, where I am currently incarcerated, to civilization—I'm sure it will seem like the most beautiful highway in the history of mankind.

The one time I've seen it was when they assigned me to paint the parking stumps in the lot at the front of the prison. I was to designate the reserved spots for the upper echelon of prison staff: department heads, senior officials, any rank above sergeant.

It was a lesson in prison politics where the choicest spots—which I was told to decorate with painted outlines of the State of Texas and wooden blocks etched with their names—went to the wardens and majors.

Working "outside the fence" comes with extra security precautions. There was an armed "high-rider" officer tracking us in a golf cart, another unarmed officer directing us in our work, and the armed perimeter truck frequently circled around the unit. The sharpshooters in the towers seemed extra vigilant.

Before getting to work, three fellow prisoners and I were escorted through the back gate. A dead-faced officer (whom I later learned would be getting the parking spot on the far, far, right) strip-searched us. His lackadaisical approach to the task gave the impression that what he was doing was in the interest of humiliation, not security.

The four of us hopped into the back of a pickup truck and raced around the massive complex of concrete and steel cellblocks. After a decade and a half of not being in a moving vehicle, "raced" may have been an exaggeration, but the yellow stripes of each parking space seemed to shoot from under the rear bumper like lasers. It took at least three minutes to adjust to the sensation of moving while sitting still.

When I hopped off the truck, the world began to shimmer. After 17 years of always having a roof over my head, a wall or fence around me, and my peripheral vision obscured by bars, razor wire or chicken wire, I felt vertigo. The horizon, rolling on and on, made me feel as if I could spin off the earth.

The blue of the sky was more intense without obstruction. I could not believe I had ever lived in such a world.

Later on, halfway through painting the stylized flags, state outlines, and wardens' names, I knelt to clean my brush. When I looked around to see what progress the other guys were making, I saw an unfamiliar face.

He wore a white, collared shirt that was much like my own except buttons held down the collar's tips. He was also wearing boots with decent-looking soles, and brass, not steel, eyelets.

I went back to work, but a few moments later, the gray-haired entrance officer's voice cut through the air. "Can ah help you?" she called out to the stranger.

Before he could answer, the rifle-toting high-rider officer zoomed up in his golf cart, muttered something with the other officers, then said to the rest of us, "Put everything down and go to lunch."

I was a little annoyed. My family had paid for all of my equipment; leaving it unattended in the prison's parking lot seemed like a bad idea.

After 45 minutes, when we returned to work—our equipment still there—we heard what had happened. The inmate-looking man had actually been released from prison not long ago. He had been in solitary and had no television, no human contact. Psychosis—like the mixture of orange juice, sugar, and rotten bread we leave sitting in a bag to make hooch—ferments.

I don't know if the man from the parking lot had taken his sickness into Administrative Segregation (one official name for solitary, a.k.a. Ad Seg) or if he developed it there, but he definitely took it home.

Apparently, he desperately wanted to talk with the captain in charge of Ad-Seg, whom he believed had planted a microchip in his head. He was demanding the captain take it out.

The officers, armed with semi-automatic assault rifles and handguns, surrounded the man and shooed him away.

We are sent to prison because of an act, or series of acts, or suspicion of our potential to commit those acts. But when we leave here, our time inside exacts a toll.

If Farm to Market Road 632 ever takes me away from the Connally Unit, I pray the damage done never brings me back.

Carlos Flores, 40, is incarcerated at the John B. Connally Unit in Kenedy, Texas, where he is serving a life sentence for murder, which he was convicted of in 1999.

Illustration by Matt Rota

All photos via Nightmare Fear Factory

I'm a huge fan of horror films but if I'm being honest with myself, you don't quite get the same visceral thrill from being scared in front of a screen as you can IRL. So with Halloween just around the corner, I wanted to spend a little more time with the heroes whose job it is to freak people the fuck out—the haunted house employee. The epicentre of haunted housedom in Canada is in Niagara Falls, where the falls and cheesy attractions draw hordes of out-of-towners. I decided to head there to see what these haunted houses were all about, in particular the three scariest in Clifton Hill: Nightmares Fear Factory, Haunted Manor, and Frankenstein's. My question for their them? What are the craziest things that have happened to employees on the job. I was definitely not disappointed (only really scared and slightly disgusted).

The first time I saw fentanyl was when one of my ex-boyfriends from high school texted me a photo of him holding a handful of pills. At the time, I had no idea what it was, but he told me it was even stronger than OxyContin and that he was using it to deal with depression. Now, it seems I can't go a week without writing about fentanyl and the devastation it has caused in Canada.

Image via Flickr/Brian Turner

An Edmonton judge has ruled that Canada's sex offender registry is unconstitutional.

In an Oct. 24 ruling, Court of Queen's Bench Justice Andrea Moen said the Sexual Offender Information Registration Act (SOIRA) violates section seven of the constitution which guarantees life, liberty and security of person.

The ruling is in regards to a 2015 case where 19-year-old Eugen Ndhlovu plead guilty to two counts of sexual assault at a "Jersey Shore DTF" party.

Two women said that during that Jersey Shore party Ndhlovu groped them throughout the night. Later in the night one of the women awoke to Ndhlovu's fingers in her vagina. He told the woman it would "feel good," tried to do it a second time and the woman pushed him off of her.

For his actions, Ndhlovu plead guilty to two accounts of sexual assault.

Ndhlovu blamed his actions on alcohol saying he could not remember the night. He was sentenced to six months in jail followed by three years of probation.

Moen found that he was "was unlikely to reoffend" because of his lack of criminal history, took responsibility, showed remorse and has stopped drinking. But, even though Moen doesn't think Ndhlovu will offend again, it is mandatory he be placed on the sex offender registry for life.

Ndhlovu challenged the mandatory inclusion, saying it is "arbitrary, overbroad and grossly disproportionate," Moen agreed.

"In my view, the mandatory registration for all sex offenders upon conviction of two or more offences, without regard to the seriousness of the offences or the offender's propensity to reoffend is overbroad," reads Moen's ruling.

Moen goes on to write that including offenders "who have little to no chance of reoffending" does nothing to protect the public and subjecting them to the rigours of being on the sex offender registry is, again, "overbroad." She also takes issue with the lack of discretion in the act.

"It does not provide the court with discretion to consider the circumstances of a particular offender and a particular crime when determining registration on the registry," Moen wrote.

"The law as it stands will now place Mr. Ndhlovu on police radar for the rest of his life anytime a sexual offence is committed by a black man of average height in his neighbourhood. I find that requiring him to register bears no connection to the object of assisting police officers in the investigation or prevention of future sex crimes."

The ruling is at the provincial level meaning it won't have the power to make changes nationally but it could most certainly prove to be influential.

The ruling is not yet final, as Moen has given the Crown until Nov. 30 to return with an argument or legal remedy.

Follow Mack on Twitter.

Photo via twitter

In most elections a lot of bullshit promises are made, hell, just look at the Trudeau government, but at least those running try to pretend to stand for something.

Not so much the Yukon NDP.

The shallowness of campaign promises came to life recently when the party of frozen socialists accidentally published a variety graphics to their website that showed their plan to be, well, pretty much nothing.

"The Yukon NDP will SOMETHING SOMETHING environment," said one.

"The Yukon NDP will GOVERNMENT GOOD MAKE," read another.

That's some good marketing right there gang —at least throw in a "something, something dangerzone" for good measure.

Photo via twitter

The snafu was discovered by some Yukon voters who were quick to roast the party on Twitter and the NDP have taken it well.

"Something is better than nothing, #amirite, Yukon Party," the party tweeted out shortly after.

They say they accidentally uploaded the placeholder graphics.

"Campaigns are a such a hectic time with lots of creativity and lots of new ideas bouncing around. These kinds of things are bound to happen," Denise MacDonald, the Yukon NDP's communications manager, told the CBC.

"I think everybody who's had a website has had something similar happen. I think the public will be understanding. You have to have a good time and laugh once in a while."

The party has since fixed the error. Now, instead of it saying "GOVERNMENT GOOD MAKE" it says, "Transparent and working with you. Now that's something."

So, I guess, at the very least, the NDP will do something if elected but, in the end, who really knows?

Follow Mack on Twitter.

Image via CrowbCat YouTube video "CSGO hysteria and forgotten TF2 design"

In 1994, the small Caribbean twin-island nation of Antigua and Barbuda began offering licenses to interactive gaming companies, allowing them to start operating there. The same year, on the Isle of Man, a company called Microgaming – one that has since remained near the top of the online gaming industry – set up what is generally regarded as the world's first online casino.

Throughout the 1990s, as the dot com boom grew ever larger, so too did the popularity of online gambling. Its inevitable regulation came with the Kahnawake Gaming Commission in 1996, in the Mohawk Territory of Kahnawake, Canada. By the time the clock struck 12 on the 31st of December, 1999, online gambling had exploded and, as an industry, was worth over $2 billion a year.

Americans loved it; the poker rooms, the slots, the roulette – it fit neatly into their insatiable love of not leaving their houses to do anything. Now they could gamble away their life savings from the comfort of their own homes, in ways more exciting and less gloomy than holding a fistful of betting slips at a race track. For others it was the beginning of extremely lucrative careers as professional gamblers and poker players. College students would drop out to play full time, win millions and quietly become celebrities in their own gaming circles.

But these are the trends of yesteryear. While poker remains perhaps the most popular "casino" game outside the confines of the windowless caverns and tacky online gaming rooms that haven't had their graphics updated in over a decade, different people are looking for different ways to fill their boots. Once again, the internet and technological advancement has opened up experiences to more people than ever before, and allowed them to tailor those experiences to their own tastes, whatever they may be.

This brings us to the strange phenomenon of skin gambling.

The skins are available to purchase on Steam, which is owned by Valve, who also published CS:GO. Some of them cost pennies, others cost upward of £300. The skins have become a kind of currency in and of themselves. And what do people historically do with their meaningless currency? They gamble it away.

Streamers on phenomenally popular game-streaming site Twitch would stream themselves betting seemingly thousands of dollars worth of skins, and in some cases losing it all – though there is suspicion in some cases that the streamers were sponsored by the skin gambling sites. Other streamers, like JoshOG, promoted CS:GO Lotto and sung its praises, encouraging others to use it, but was then found to own equity in the site – which he said he was given as part of a sponsorship deal. Problem is, as has been pointed out elsewhere, when you own part of a company, any deal is no longer solely about sponsorship. People were upset.

Much like any form of gambling and betting, skin gambling has had its share of scandals. In August of 2014, North American CS:GO teams iBUYPOWER and NetcodeGuides.com played each other in a professional eSports league. iBUYPOWER lost the match, though they were the favourites. It was revealed in January of 2015 that iBUYPOWER had skin-bet against themselves and thrown the match, leading to all members getting banned from the game by Valve, aside from a guy called Skadoodle, who didn't wish to revel in the digital spoils.

Chance Morris, also known as "SodaPoppin", has been streaming himself playing live blackjack – where a dealer deals oversized cards to people playing online via webcam – for over a year. There are various compilation videos of him on YouTube winning and losing thousands of dollars at a time, his viewers perhaps getting a dopamine hit via digital osmosis. Live blackjack isn't a new thing, however with the advent of game streaming and the immense popularity it seems to bring, the game lends itself to the medium. Most streamers on Twitch play video games, where there is a similar risk and reward at times, but perhaps nothing compares to the thrill of watching someone lose money. In essence, the people who donate to these gambling streamers are paying for the experience of potentially watching someone fail. Morris plays on a website called BetOnline.ag. The .ag domain is, you guessed it, Antigua and Barbuda – the spiritual birthplace of online gambling.

While it looks like skin betting might have reached the end of its very short lifespan, I suppose there's nothing to say it couldn't return under another guise, one perhaps more regulated, or maybe pushed even further underground. But this type of betting, the stream donations included, is a form of gambling (or gambling by proxy) that yields no real results, no true ownership, no meaningful application.

On Monday, Culture Minister Tracey Crouch likened betting shop machines to "crack cocaine". The fixed odds betting terminals were criticised for allowing people to wash away hundreds of pounds in mere seconds, and campaigners have called for greater responsibility to be placed on the government with regards to curbing the addictions of Ladbrokes regulars. But at least when you win on these you get some money.

Here, thousands of people – a lot of them children – are siphoning their money away to corporations who, on the face of it, are game producers, but in essence are income rakers to the fullest extent, who so far have only stopped the extreme cashflow from idiotic obsessives after someone's told them to.

Guys: you really shouldn't need need an orange and blue camouflage AK47 to be happy. But then again, maybe you do.

@joe_bish

More from VICE:

Big Blinds and Heartbreak: Adventures at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas

Gibraltar's Online Gambling Boom Has Made It a Boozy Haven for British Expats

New Technology Is Making Gambling Even More Addictive

Suspended University of Wisconsin-Madison student Alec Cook, center, appears Thursday, October 27, 2016, in Dane County Circuit Court in Madison, Wisconsin. (John Hart/Wisconsin State Journal via AP)

After a woman came forward earlier this month to tell police she was tortured and held against her will by a male student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, several more women told detectives Alec Cook sexually assaulted them, too. The harrowing tale playing out at the prominent midwestern college suggests many women remain reluctant to report assaults on campus, and is consistent with research suggesting rapists are often serial predators.

Dozens of women have reportedly come forward with stories about Cook, claiming that even if he did not assault them, his behavior was often creepy or downright scary. Cook, who is 20, has been banned from campus while the case unfolds, and remained jailed as of Friday. He had yet to enter a plea for the most serious charges (he pleaded not guilty to the misdemeanor charge), but his lawyers maintain their client's innocence, suggesting he's victim of a witch hunt.

"There's nothing to support the monster that exists in the minds of all of the people of UW-Madison," his attorney Christopher T. Van Wagner said this week, bemoaning Cook being "slaughtered by the social media image of him."

But a search warrant obtained by the Daily Beast shows the club rugby player and business student kept a leather bound notebook—cops described it as the work of someone engaged in "grooming and stalking"—that contained the word "kill," which prosecutors say may hint at murderous desires.

The case against Cook was launched when a woman with the initials JAS told police how, after almost running him over with a bike, the two connected on Facebook and hung out a handful of times. According to a criminal complaint, they spent the day of October 12 at Chipotle and the library, after which point Cook invited JAS back to his apartment. She later told police that before she accompanied him, the young woman explained that she wasn't looking for casual sex and was only interested in a longer term relationship.

"We won't do anything you don't feel comfortable with," Cook allegedly replied.

But JAS was uncomfortable almost as soon as they entered Cook's apartment. Light kissing turned into what she described as "eating my face," which evolved into fingering despite repeated protests. She would later report that for two and a half hours, Cook raped her, with and without a condom, at one point choking her until she began to lose her vision, slapping her, and telling her that since he (eventually) put on a small amount of lube, she had "no excuse" for crying out in agony.

Cook had reportedly been flagged to campus police in the past for making a woman uncomfortable by staring at her in a college library and allegedly following her from the building. Cook apparently expressed a willingness to comply with police instructions to stay away from her.

Meanwhile, Cook's attorneys are doing everything they can to suggest he's not entirely ignorant of the ongoing dialogue about rape culture in America.

"He takes this very seriously," his attorney Jessa Nicholson Goetz told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "He's absolutely devastated to learn women felt pressured or unsafe in his presence. He doesn't desire to come off in a way that is intimidating or frightening."

But once JAS's allegations made the news, the phone calls began pouring in. Detectives soon heard from a woman who took a ballroom dancing class with Cook, who would allegedly grope her every time they were paired together. Cops also made contact with a student who casually dated Cook and described what sounded like being slipped a roofie at his house. She recalled feeling fuzzy after drinking something he'd offered her and says they had vaginal intercourse despite her saying "no."

"I didn't want to ruin his life," she told the cops about why she hadn't come forward sooner. "I felt ashamed to tell anyone, because I thought I would make him look bad. I saw the news story and was empowered by another girl being able to tell what happened to her, that I thought I could now finally tell."

Police also heard from a woman who recognized Cook's mugshot on TV and decided to come forward about a rape she claims took place in the spring of 2015. And on October 24, a woman came forward to describe a consensual sexual encounter that descended into violence that included choking, gagging, and crying.

"She felt like an object and not a person," the criminal complaint concludes.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

As a kid, my life was a combination of scary and surreal. I was a child actor, so I spent many of my days trying to eat dyed-pink mashed potatoes and pretending they were strawberry ice cream. I was also the daughter of an alcoholic, so I spent many nights trying to be cute and obliging while pretending I wasn't freaked out. As a result, scary movies never had much appeal to me. I knew that everything I saw on TV and movies was fake, and I also knew that fear was something I wanted to experience less of, not more.

With 1980's The Watcher in the Woods, though, all of that went out the haunted window. The plot of the film is simplistic, if nonsensical, to the point where three completely different endings were made for it. The gist: About 30 years before the story begins, four friends were doing a creepy ceremony in a cathedral during a complete solar eclipse. Something went wrong, causing one of them, Karen, to be sucked into another dimension never to be seen again. Until, of course, decades later, when a nice family moves into the giant English manor where Karen grew up.

Karen's mother, thrillingly played by Bette Davis, still lives on the property. She agrees to let this nice family move in because the older daughter, Jan, bears a passing resemblance to her missing daughter. Jan immediately begins seeing visions of Karen in every reflective surface, trapped and blindfolded and begging for help. To amplify the creepiness, Jan's little sister, Ellie, begins writing backward all over everything and intoning indecipherable warnings with a cold, dead stare.

"I saw it at some day-camp or rec-center thing," recalled Amy Campbell, a 40-year-old singer-songwriter. "And I remember thinking, I should not be allowed to be watching this. How am I allowed to be watching this!?"

Emily Comeau, a 35-year-old visual artist, shared her incredulity, "It was a family classic at our place. At one point, there is a jump scare with a clown that made me lose my mind. I screamed for so long, even after they shut the movie off."

'Stranger Things.' Photo courtesy of Netflix

For the next three decades, The Watcher in the Woods was the only horror media I had an emotional connection with. I would watch it on Halloween every time I found a new person who hadn't seen it yet. But I still did my best to avoid every other scary movie or book or TV show—until this summer when I decided to watch Stranger Things. (Spoilers for that show ahead.) A quick skim of available plot summaries had made it sound like it probably wasn't nightmare fuel, and everyone I know seemed to love it without reservation.

It helps that Stranger Things is set in the 80s, when The Watcher in the Woods was made, but there are a lot more similarities. Both revolve around the mysterious disappearance of a kid who, it turns out, is trapped in a parallel universe. Both build a sense of dread through flashes of images and suggestion, rather than through prolonged gory scenes. And both feature a cross-section of kids/teens and adults working together on an issue.

Although I wouldn't have known it at the time, this last element is likely what caused my childhood brain to latch onto the movie so strongly. After some convincing, the adults in Jan's life do come to believe her when she tells them what she has been experiencing and what she thinks needs to happen in order to fix it. This was the exact opposite of my own experience growing up. My dangers were much more pedestrian, taking the shape of a volatile mother and a sexually abusive stepfather rather than a faceless monster or terrifying visions. But even so, every adult I worked up the courage to talk to was at best dubious and at worst unconcerned.

I'm aware of the ripple effects of these experiences, but I was still surprised by my strong reaction to a scene where the Stranger Things kids are hesitant to tell Sheriff Hopper what they think has happened to their missing friend. "You won't believe us," one of them sighs. "Try me," Hopper replies, and I burst into tears on my couch.

The Watcher in the Woods and Stranger Things had a similar emotional impact on my friend Beth Lewis, a 40-year-old policy advisor in Halifax, though for different reasons. "After The Watcher in the Woods, I remember obsessing for a really long time about the possibility that any of us could be transported to another dimension, and maybe come back," she said. "It made me think a lot about all the people in my life who had died, mainly my dad. When we started watching Stranger Things, it transported me back to that age and those anxious, but also hopeful feelings."

After my weird and perilous childhood, "anxious and hopeful" is sort of where I landed. I'm thankful that Watcher in the Woods and Stranger Things tell a story that shows those feelings can still be at the center of a happy ending. You just need people around you who will always believe you about your experiences, no matter how unlikely they sound.

Follow Audra Williams on Twitter.

Photographer Daniel Seiffert spent the first decade of his life in East Berlin, within walking distance from the Berlin Wall. Some of his most formative memories are from the autumn of 1989, when the concrete and barbed wire were torn down after 30 years of separation.

Two decades later, Seiffert would make his way to the eastern German town of Lübbenau, a two-hour drive from Berlin, with a friend who was studying urban sociology. Visions from his youth, long forgotten, reemerged; he recognized the socialist monuments, the flagpoles used in old May Day celebrations.

That first visit coincided with the demolition of the BKW Kraftwerk Jugend, a power plant responsible for tens of thousands of jobs. Lübbenau, the photographer explains, is what's known as a "shrinking region." Once a site of booming industry, it's now rife with unemployment and abandoned buildings.

Over the course of a year and a half, Seiffert would make regular visits to Lübbenau to meet up with the local teenagers, who, for the most part, didn't realize what the monuments and flagpoles had meant for the previous generation.

In the young people of Lübbenau, all born after 1989, the photographer witnessed an acute sense of restlessness. The town was becoming more consumerist and globalized, but most teenagers longed to leave behind the quiet life in search of real opportunity. Against the backdrop of a declining place, kids ached for adventure.

The kids Seiffert shadowed became friends; he accompanied them as they made their way through the neglected structures and graffitied landscapes, as they sipped beer and threw rocks through the windows of houses no one would ever miss.

He went with them to the mall and to the skatepark, the universal teenage kingdoms of the world, and he was permitted into their most sacred inner worlds, where few adults were ever allowed.

Though their lives were colored by the history of the GDR—many of their parents had worked in the coal mining before the reunification of Germany—they lived their own lives and diverged from everything that came before.

On some occasions, the adult presence did cause mistrust in those who didn't know the photographer; one time, Seiffert feared a young man would punch him in the face, but the kids who knew the artist stuck up for him, and by the end of the day, that same boy was confiding in the photographer about a recent drunken blunder.

The power plant's promise of prosperity had been broken, but in the wreckage, Seiffert discovered the crackling embers of first kisses, first fights, first heartbreaks, and first loves. The "furious energy" of adolescence, he suggests, filled the chasm left behind by the plant.

Seiffert dedicates the book Powerplant Youth to his daughter, born during the course of the project. At some point, he felt he needed to move on. He swapped teenage shenanigans for playing Legos and building forts.

In 2011, he put together the book, and when he exhibits the work, he plays an amateur YouTube video of the power plant demolition on a loop. The building erupts in smoke, falls to the ground, and nameless people laugh and cheer in the background.

Today, Seiffert is only in touch with a few of the youngsters he met. The successful ones have mostly left and found work in Berlin. The photographer has kept tabs as best he can; a few have pursued more education, and one is now a dental assistant.

Still, some remain in the limbo that is Lübbenau, and the world continues to turn. The photographer admits, "Those without hope and energy tend to stay."

–Ellyn Ruddick-Sunstein

Check out Emile's Tumblr and website.

A stock image of a model posing as a sex worker. Photo by Yui Mok / PA Archive/PA Images

This post originally appeared on VICE UK

Earlier this month a spate of headlines appeared in the UK, spouting messages like: " Cash-strapped women are selling 'survival sex' for as little as £10." They were reminiscent of a similar flurry in February, which included: " UK sex workers selling themselves for as little as £5." Selling themselves. Their very souls perhaps.

It turns out that the same charity—Changing Lives—is behind both reports. Based in the North East, Changing Lives is the operating name of The Cyrenians, a Christian charity working with "people experiencing homelessness, addiction, and a range of other problems." Changing Lives isn't new to controversy and was behind Newcastle's " No Need to Beg" campaign, which encouraged people not to give money directly to beggars.

The charity is a financial success, generating £15.1 million income in the tax year ending 2015 and owning tangible assets worth £12.6 million . "I suppose we're probably more commercial than other charities," chief executive Stephen Bell has said. "We know the bottom line of every scheme we operate."

Changing Lives' latest piece of research looked at the sex industry in Darlington and Durham, and was commissioned by the Durham Police and Crime Commissioner. The strong point of the report is that its interviews were carried out by sex workers, recruited via local sheltered accommodation. The study involved 20 women. Thirteen women had experienced domestic or sexual violence; five had been sexually abused by family members or ex-partners; two-thirds of the "survival" sex workers had been violently attacked or raped by punters; one woman had been kidnapped, gang raped, severely beaten, tortured, and then "left for dead."

Of the lower paid "survival" workers, £150 was the most money charged, while one woman—who made the headline—said she's charged as little as £10 , in "desperate times when she has needed to secure a fix quickly."

Crucially, 11 of the 20 women interviewed live in supported accommodation and others have lived in this type of housing in the past.

The report is heart-breaking, highlighting lives of abuse and deprivation. However, this is a niche demographic, reflecting some of the most deeply vulnerable people in our society. Desperately in need of resources, yes, but widely representative of the entire sex industry, absolutely not.

The report highlights the pathways of poverty and abuse that leave women with few options. However, painting sex workers as an entirely separate population, whose lives, needs, and desires are distinct from everyone else, will ultimately change none of this.

"Over half of the women noted that it's the 'normal' things in life that make them happy," reads the Changing Lives report. The "normal things"—almost like they're normal people, huh? It should be obvious, but it's also the "normal things" that sex workers need to outright survive. Things like housing, childcare, food, healthcare, accessible social services, humane immigration policy, a safe place in society.

Most current debate around sex work is focused on the pros and cons of various legal models: complete decriminalization vs. the Nordic Model, which criminalizes the sex buyer rather than the sex worker. While Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and nearly all sex worker-led organizations worldwide agree that the full decriminalization of sex work is the best way to ensure the health and safety of sex workers, Laura Seebohm, the woman behind Changing Lives' women's services favours the Nordic Model, a stance that seems to conflict with her own research.

The report reveals a significant number of women engaging in "survival sex work," defined as the "exchange of sex to meet survival needs, monetary or otherwise." Alternative currencies include somewhere to sleep, alcohol, drugs, food, and tobacco.

This is a huge grey area, in which abusive relationships, casual transactional liaisons, and what's commonly understood as "sex work" overlap. The Nordic Model would do nothing to protect women who decide they need to exchange sex for a place to stay that night. The point is, they shouldn't be in this situation to begin with.

For those who see sex work unequivocally as violence against women, of course, the logic is different. Consent is meaningless and sex workers who claim otherwise are delusional puppets of the patriarchy. Changing Lives falls into this camp. In its report, the charity says, "Northumbria Police have reported positive impacts when police officers have engaged in [the charity's] 'sex work and sexual exploitation' training." Confusingly, though, when I contact Changing Lives, it tells me the only training they offer is on child sexual exploitation.

Reports like this force sex work arguments to the peripheries, leaving unexamined the vast mainstream of the industry. It can feel like a red flag and polarizes debate. With so many lurid headlines, no wonder some sex workers have been eager to claim "But I'm empowered! I'm educated! This is my choice!"

In reality, most of us—sex workers or otherwise—make choices that are constrained; by money, by health, by class and race and gender and all the other things which confer advantage or disadvantage. Most sex work exists between the dramatic mountains of joy or coercion, on the less colourful plains of ordinary apartments, parlours, and budget hotel rooms, offering unexciting sex to unexciting men, not for pennies but not for great riches either. Things probably swing between being good and boring and horrible and sometimes scary, perhaps because of clients, perhaps because of the police.

It's time for sex work to be discussed as part of the larger mess our society is in; as one of many strategies for coping with this and not as an exotic aberration. Though the headlines will be less juicy.

Follow Frankie Mullin on Twitter.

This is the house. Photo from Caroline Thompson

In 1995, my parents and I moved into the house my great grandma grew up in. It was an old Victorian in St. Paul, Minnesota, built in 1902 and neglected for half a century by my hermit great uncle Frank, who never cleaned or threw anything out. When we moved in, the rusted metal siding was falling off, and the lot was overrun with trees, weeds and trash.

Inside the house, the peeling wallpaper and chipping lead paint were hardly visible behind the piles of junk that lined the walls. My great-great grandfather Joseph Renz had bought the house in 1905. Over the next century, several elderly members of my family passed away inside. I didn't know this when I moved in. My parents knew better than to tell a six-year-old with an active imagination of the bodies that once lay cold under our roof.

But it didn't matter what I knew. I suffered from crippling insomnia, and every night for years, I'd watch sleeplessly as a veritable menagerie of ancestral phantoms tromped through my room. There was the sad woman in my closet, who would whisper to me through my row of patterned Hanna Andersson jumpers. When I could sleep, I dreamed of her at the end of my bed, dressed in a long white dress, her long brown hair done up in a bun. She'd sing to me, and I'd wake to hear the song still coming from the closet.

It's a video that lasts six seconds and loops for as long as you care to watch: A couple young men go into a Staples and learn they actually sell staples. They give one another a knowing glance. "Wait," one says. "You know what this means." Smash cut to the two of them sprinting toward a Dick's Sporting Goods.

On Thursday, Twitter announced that, along with several hundred layoffs, it would be shutting down its video-sharing app Vine, which made silly, unique videos like the one above possible. People reacted to the closure the same way they did when Twitter purchased the "video clip company" before its official launch: They were confounded. In late 2012, when Twitter acquired Vine, ad agencies were skeptical of their ability to make it work for clients or turn a profit, understandably unaware of the incredible wealth of possibility that could be injected in six-second video loops. Now, with Vine dead before even reaching its fifth birthday, the internet has responded with overwrought eulogies and compilations, and seemingly every active Twitter user declaring what he or she considers to be the Best Vine of All Time. (This one, obviously.)

But what will become of all the Vine users, the ones who used the app to propel themselves into minor degrees of stardom in tiny corners of the internet?

Luckily, I went to high school with one (the guy sprinting into Dick's Sporting Goods in the video above), so I called up Andrew Marbach, a self-described "Z-list social media star" who was dubbed the "funniest Rutgers student on Vine" by the Huffington Post in 2014, to see how he felt about the death of his precious platform.

VICE: Can you give me some context for who you are in the Vine world?
Andrew Marbach: I would consider myself, as lame as this sounds, a first-generation Viner. I was one of the first. Earlier on, I was probably one of the top Viners, and then I took a hiatus because I felt the app was slowing down and becoming polluted with generic material. This was like a year and a half ago. I have around 360,000 followers, and I'm probably a tier below what you would consider a "Vine superstar," those guys who have TV shows now or whatever. I never really got into paid ads. I did a few that I couldn't pass up on, but I had a real job. I work crazy hours on something that has nothing to do with comedy and creating content, so it was strictly a creative outlet for me. It was a hobby that conflicted with my corporate job because I would have clients saying, "Hey, I saw you in that Vine chasing after dicks screaming like, 'I love cock,'" and I'm like, "OK, I'm trying to sell you frozen food right now."

Why did you say it slowed down a year and a half ago?
It happened around the time Vine introduced the revine feature, basically like the retweet. I think the feature was a great evolution, but Vine not monitoring or curating people from abusing the feature led to recycled content polluting people's feeds. This discouraged the actually funny content creators from posting, which resulted in losing users.

I also believe Vine trying to be a social media app for too long, in its early stages, hurt it the most. It stood no chance against Instagram and Snapchat, and once it actually realized and accepted that, it was too late. They should've marketed and designed the app as an entertainment app from the get-go.

Are you surprised it's over?
I'm sure everyone was surprised. I was taken back that it happened now, but my reason for slowing down and stopping, taking that hiatus a year and a half ago, was because I saw it: It wasn't going anywhere, and it seemed like it was on a deep decline. It actually plateaued back then, and I should have kept making stuff so I wasn't completely shocked. But I was shocked that it was now, and not like a year from now.

What about Vine appealed to you?
Simplicity. A lot of people liked it because of simplicity, and when the app first came out, you literally just touched the screen and recorded. There was no editing, no reshooting scenes, no swapping out sound. Maybe that's another reason it failed. It got convoluted and intricate. When it first started, it was extremely easy, so the average idiot, like me, didn't have to be a filmmaker to do it.

Is the dream dead now? You're not going to pursue Snapchat or Facebook or YouTube?
What's made it a very depressing day is that I kept putting off getting back into it as heavily as I once was. I figured I had time, and I never really used it as a platform to propel my social media following onto another, more reliable platform.

So you should have used your Vine to get more Twitter followers, but you just let Vine sort of exist on its own?
Yeah. A lot of people did that, that kind of self-promotion. I suspect they realized it might not have the same life expectancy as YouTube or Snapchat or Twitter or Facebook, so they used Vine to get followers elsewhere, in case Vine died. I never did that. If you log into Vine right now, all my Vine friends are making Vines saying, "Oh, this is so sad, but follow me on Snapchat and Facebook."

What was it like being a member of the Vine community?
I used to laugh about it at first, and my friends would make fun of me when I'd do Vine meetups with locals, but it actually did become a genuine community. That sounds so stupid, but it really was.

How many people were in this community?
Shit, I don't know. Hundreds.

Was there a mix between the first-generation people and the ones who got into it much later?
It was definitely mixed. It was like a high school social caste system. There were the most followed people. You went to the Vine parties, and the most followed people still had this sort of chip on their shoulder, and that's why, at first, I was like, "This sucks, I do not want to be here at all." But eventually, as new generations of creators came into it, it really did become this genuine community, like I said.

Are you going to miss Vine?
Of course. It was my only platform, and I might be the anomaly because, as I mentioned, I wasn't a super active self-promoter. I'm definitely going to miss it because it was an option for me. It was an avenue that I had a fanbase on, and you know, I'm kind of skeptical that it's just going to die. I feel like someone might look into investing or buying it. I don't know if that's even true, though.

What stood out about Vine? You think the six seconds is what really defined it?There's going to be a void in the entertainment market that people will crave, and Vine created a niche that is going to want to be filled by something else. Instagram people, in my opinion, are not going to turn to Instagram to get what Vine provided. Vine turned into purely a comedy and entertainment app. It's like reading a short witty tweet. You don't want to read a short story that's funny; you want to read a tweet. A lot of people are spoiled now. They don't want to watch a four-minute YouTube video. They want to hear a quick joke and watch it loop. It's something that people, especially me, are going to miss and crave.

Follow Alex Norcia on Twitter.

All images courtesy of Psychic Hearts

Thirteen years after co-founding beloved streetwear brand Mishka, Mikhail Bortnik is returning to his roots by getting hands-on in the design game once again. While Mishka is known for its skater punk weirdo aesthetic—with clothes often featuring images of bloodshot eyes, references to punk songs, and nods to cult classic sci-fi and horror films—Bortnik aims to create something a little softer with his new brand, Psychic Hearts.

To start, Psychic Hearts' logo is three cartoon hearts in a row. Its colors remain in the pastel range, aside from the staple black T-shirt and velour track suits (both punctuated with splashes of pink or sky blue). And whereas Mishka became a massive international operation that is now sold at stores like PacSun and Zumies, Psychic Hearts pieces are handmade with fabrics from Manhattan's garment district and sold online and in boutiques like Extra Butter in New York and Jugrnaut in Chicago. This is all a good thing. Bortnik feels like Mishka went in a direction he didn't intend it to, and his new project seeks to rectify that both through design and scale.

"For me, Psychic Hearts is very non-confrontational," the streetwear designer told me during a recent interview. "It's very soft, it's fuzzy, it's warm, it's gentle. Our color is pink." In other words, the premier collection, which officially dropped in early May and will be adding a third round of designs in early November, is possibly a Bizarro Mishka, or even its foil. Psychic Hearts is still true to what its founder is known for, though—there will continue to be T-shirts with obscure reference points, as well as original, colorful graphics. As Bortnik says, it's for the same people who once wore Mishka, but no longer want a shirt with FUCK on the sleeve. I spoke with the designer and entrepreneur about his new brand, his current attitude towards Mishka, and the cyclical nature of fashion.

VICE: What was the initial spark that inspired you to start Psychic Hearts?
Mikhail Bortnik: I think that Mishka went in a direction that wasn't necessarily where I would have envisioned it to go or that I wanted it to become. Mishka is in Zumies, Pacsun, and places like that. We started as a boutique brand, and a lot of the stuff we used to do was more niche and weirder. When we left that world and went into the mall/store world, I feel like we alienated people. I always wanted to stay in that world because it was where we thrived. We could have grown. It would have been slower, but it would have been satisfying.

What do you hope to do with Psychic Hearts that you weren't doing with Mishka?
I realized when I started Mishka that I was designing mainly for myself. I was shopping at these stores, but that was at a time in the mid and late 90s when we'd still be seeing Tupac and Biggie shirts—that was just kind of a big vibe with streetwear. I started designing things that fit more in line with my own taste, stuff like horror movies, punk, indie rock. It was a bit difficult getting stores to want to infuse that in, but once Mishka started getting into stores, I saw that there was an audience of kids gravitating towards it because nobody else was really doing it like us. So I kind of realized that while I'm designing for myself, I'm not the only person who's into stuff like this; there's an audience for it.

Can you describe the mood or vibe you're trying to get across with the new collection?
Mishka's streetwear has bloodshot eyeballs across everything. For me, Psychic Hearts is very non-confrontational. It's very soft, it's fuzzy, it's warm, it's gentle. Our color is pink. There are hearts in our logo. It's tween, it's sentimental. For me, it captures both the mood of Sofia Coppola films and Gregg Araki films—that sort of sexual ambiguity and also a kind of tween-ness. That's the world I want it to inhabit. But I don't want to do lookbooks with porn stars, I don't want to do shirts that say "fuck off," or like things like that. I'm sure sometimes I'll veer off into that just because of my nature, but a lot of this brand is about the stuff that I gravitate towards and how I feel about my personality.

Who do you see wearing it? Do you think it's the same people who were wearing Mishka?
I think it is. I noticed that there are a few people who've already found Psychic Hearts who were like really old Mishka fans from like way back. And they're older—they're probably closer to my age and have kids. I think that they're kind of the ones who early on aligned with what we were doing with Mishka, people who'd see a Mishka design with a certain reference and be shocked to see that reference out in the world. And now they're seeing that again and they're kind of gravitating towards it.

But I try to be as inclusive as possible in everything that I do. So whoever finds , whoever likes it, I feel should wear it. There definitely have been a lot of girls who gravitate towards it—that's not really surprising to me because of the graphic aesthetic, and I kind of like that girls want to wear men's clothes, by all means. And if men want to wear clothes with pink hearts on it, by all means.

What's your design process like? Do you start with fabric or construction?
Usually stuff like that will come hand-in-hand. For this coming collection, we're going to do these sherpas with a long collar band. I wanted that fuzzy kind of material and I just think we were debating whether it needed to be sherpa or a teddy bear/Elmo-y kind of thing. Sherpa is more wearable than, like, a muppet, so we ended up going with sherpa. That design came from looking at a Teenage Head album cover. One of them was just wearing something and I was like, "I want to remake that."

How big do you hope the brand gets this time around?
I don't think about it in terms of how big can it get. That was kinda of what Mishka was, and, after a certain point, I wasn't doing what I wanted. It was so far removed from what it should be or what I wanted it to be or what it was succeeding at that it just wasn't as fun for me.

I know that a big part of Mishka's aesthetic is nostalgia, but the brand was created in 2003 and nostalgia means something different in 2016. What type of references are you going to be using for Psychic Hearts?
Right now, it's been a lot of 80s and 90s indie rock and indie film references. I feel like because of the internet, everything's out there and people can discover it, so there's a wider audience for a lot of the stuff we're doing. The audience that understood those references were never shopping and buying things in the streetwear sort of vibe. I think it's different today.

Follow Catherine Pears on Twitter.

Not Lawrence Shrader's basement. Probably no dead people down there either? Photo via Flickr user Orin Zebest

Lawrence Shrader has at least 60 dead people in his basement, but don't let that freak you out. He's not the only one. In fact, if you own a funeral home, like Shrader does, chances are you've got somewhere in the same ballpark of dead. The 60 boxes of cremains—a fancy term for cremated, pulverized bone fragments—in the basement of his Kamloops funeral home are a fraction of the more than two million containers that sit unclaimed in funeral homes across North America.

Depending on your perspective, unclaimed ashes are either a rich human mystery waiting to be solved, or proof that someone was definitely an asshole. Larger funeral home franchises often dispose of unclaimed cremains ("in, for lack of a better word, a mass grave," says Shrader) after a year. But the smaller, family businesses like Shrader's tend to take a more active role in finding the ashes' rightful home.

VICE reached out to Shrader to talk about life, death, weird funeral arrangements, and his most recent, er, undertaking: reuniting some of those boxes with the living people who knew them.

VICE: How long have you been in the funeral industry?
Lawrence Shrader: Well, I've been around it since I was five years old. So, 44 years. I grew up in my grandpa's funeral home in Smithers, BC. And I started working in the business when I was a teenager—about 15 years old. I helped out my grandpa and my dad, but I didn't think it was really for me. I moved to Vancouver for two years, and started working with the coroner's service, and that gave me an interest in pursuing my apprenticeship. Then, about 11 years ago, my brother and I bought Kamloops Funeral Home.

Obviously, cremations are a big part of your business. I understand unclaimed ashes are something of an epidemic in North America. Is that common? Are there instances where people have a family member cremated, and then never come back for them?
It happens quite a bit. I know that at my dad's funeral home, there are still some from 1970 sitting there. I've got at least 60 right now. It's a fair amount. We've actually been working on trying to contact people to pick them up. And we've had some success. But we still have quite a few. We had more than 90 at the beginning of this year. My wife works here, too, and she undertook this campaign about six months ago, of trying to contact people, and since she started doing that, we've probably gotten rid of 30 or so.

Wow. So, they just stay there indefinitely? There's no time-limit on how long you have to keep them?
That's generally what's done, yeah. Legally, after a year, we can run an ad asking for somebody to pick them up. Give them a bit of time—usually a month. Then we can bury them in—for lack of a better word—a mass grave. They all get buried together in one big plot. But it's pretty rare that that happens. I've never done it. We just hang onto them indefinitely. The big corporations will do it, but we don't want to do that to people. Because people come back eventually. I had one instance where somebody came and got them 10 years later. I never got a reason why.

Are there ever instances where you did get a reason? Maybe that they were just a jerk who nobody liked? Why would someone do something like that?
Often it's stuff like someone thought their brother picked up the remains years ago. They didn't realize they were still there. You get a lot of that kind of thing. Somebody else was supposed to take care of it and never followed through. Nowadays people are all over the place. It's not like the old days, when you were born, raised, and died in the same town. It doesn't happen like that. I think that's part of it. Families are much more scattered.

In a lot of cases, with elderly people, one person will pass away, and then the other person will pass away, and the family wouldn't even know that the cremated remains are here. And we wouldn't necessarily know how to get in touch. If someone says: "I'll pick them up in the spring," and then something happened, and it's a couple of years later, we wouldn't necessarily know to tell them. We wouldn't know to notify the family when they come to pick up mum, that dad's cremated remains are still here.

Any idea how common this sort of thing is? I mean, in other provinces or cities?
Well, I'd be speculating here, but I'd wager it is. I know some places strictly enforce that you have to take them. I know of a franchise that does that; they require you to take them when you get the death certificate. It's not really a good policy. We get a lot of people, who aren't comfortable having them at home. And they'll say: 'Can we leave them with you until the spring?' And we don't want to say no to that sort of stuff.

With 40+ years in the business, I take it you've seen a lot of funerals. Has anyone ever made any really weird requests?
I once had a motorcycle take the casket to the cemetery. They built a little trailer for it and drove it down. I thought that was pretty awesome, actually. A lot of people want to be cremated with unusual things. Booze is pretty common. You can pretty much be cremated with anything—except for something explosive. That's happened before; people put a few shotgun shells in a hunter's pocket. We really frown on that at the crematorium. Booze is big. Marijuana is pretty common.

Really? People specifically ask to be cremated with weed?
Yeah. And we don't want to say no to that. What's the harm? It's just going to get burned-up anyway.

Jesse Donaldson is a Vancouver-based writer.