Seven-month pregnant belly ballooning out from her petite frame, Saba, an Ethiopian journalist, sat on the couch of a sparse Virginia apartment where she prays each day for a letter from US Citizenship and Immigration Services. The 33-year-old has been waiting more than two years for an asylum interview, and has no indication from USCIS when she will be called. She doesn’t know what is going to happen to her or her unborn child.

“There’s something dragging me behind like I don’t belong here. I cannot go ahead or go back,” said Saba, who requested that I use a pseudonym since she fears speaking out could compromise her pending case. “I’m like in the middle of nowhere.”

In Ethiopia, she told me, she worked for the national TV news channel and was tortured, threatened, and detained for reporting on government corruption. So she got a visa to travel to the US for an international women’s right conference in 2016, and once here she applied for asylum. She first stayed with a friend in West Virginia, then moved to the DC area to stay on her friend’s family’s couch, and finally recently got her own apartment with her partner. She's done all of this while waiting to see if she'll be allowed to stay permanently in the US. The stress of this wait, on top of the trauma she faced in Ethiopia, is now causing her memory loss.

“I’m in a conversation with family or friends, and when they talk about some of the things we’ve done not too far ago I have a hard time remembering,” said Saba, noting that her relatives and friends raised this concern repeatedly with her. “I’m definitely becoming forgetful of a significant amount of things nowadays.”

She still has no idea how long her case will be delayed—and can’t imagine raising a child amid such uncertainty. Saba had no insurance when she found out she was pregnant and cannot access Medicaid until she gets granted asylum. Her partner, a fellow Ethiopian asylum seeker who worked as an IT specialist before coming to the US, is struggling to find work and also has no updates about his three-year-old case.

“I didn’t know what to do—I’m not settled, this is not a good life,” she said of her pregnancy. She admitted that at one point she’d nearly lost all hope. “I felt like I should not be living anymore.”

Asylum seekers who have been waiting for years to present their cases have now been booted to the very end of the line: The Trump administration ordered in January that USCIS process new claims first and then work backward. And the government is giving longtime asylum seekers—going back as far as individuals who applied in 2013—no indication of when they will have an appointment, access to social services, and the security of a permanent status until after they have finished the process. According to the USCIS, the agency faces a “crisis-level backlog” of more than 300,000 cases.

“There’s no sense of when it will be over for them,” said immigration attorney Lindsay Harris, a professor at the University of the District of Columbia who specializes in asylum. Previously USCIS published a schedule with anticipated wait times for asylum interviews, but this year the agency removed the schedule, Harris noted. “Now we have no idea when they're going to be interviewed.”

Organizations working with asylum seekers now rarely, if ever, see appointments scheduled for their clients who’ve applied for status in the past few years, immigration attorneys and advocates told me. “This is causing people a lot of mental anguish,” said Megan Brody, managing attorney for the refugee resettlement organization HIAS, which is providing legal services to Saba.

“We in the last month have had two clients have what I’d describe as mental breakdowns because of this policy,” said Brody, noting that none of her clients who applied for asylum between 2014 and 2017 had been called for interviews since the policy change. “One of them went back to his country where he faced persecution and then had to escape to another third country.”

Even asylum seekers who surmount the psychological difficulty of this limbo confront constant practical challenges, such as finding healthcare, a job, or a place to stay. Asylum seekers are not eligible for public housing, food stamps, Medicaid, or other social services. And though they can apply for work permits 150 days after filing their asylum applications, many do not speak English and almost all struggle to get employment in an unfamiliar system. Small nonprofits are stepping up to fill in service gaps for this population that receives no government support, but the providers are scarce and there’s no way for them to keep up with the need.

“We don’t advertise because it’s a floodgate,” said Joan Hodges-Wu, founder and executive director of the Asylum Seekers Assistance Project (ASAP), a two-year-old nonprofit that serves roughly 25,000 asylum seekers in Washington, DC.

ASAP helped Saba with a weeklong job-readiness training that enabled her to move up from working at a gas station to a hotel—which, while still far from her field of journalism, was able to offer health insurance, helping immensely with her pregnancy. ASAP is also organizing a baby shower for Saba, who visits their office regularly for moral support.

Hodges-Wu noted that many asylum seekers’ lack of access to toiletries, housing, and other basic necessities revealed a “destitution that you don’t see in typical American experiences.” Saba slept on a friend’s couch for over a year before she was able to move into a small apartment with her partner—and she was relatively lucky. Many asylum seekers without friends or family in the US can end up on the street, said Tiffany Nelms, who runs the Asylee Women Enterprise in Baltimore, another of the critical nonprofits catering to asylum seekers’ needs.

“I have a husband and wife right now that we put in a hostel for a week to try to figure out where we’re going to house them,” Nelms told me of a West African couple who speak no English. “Otherwise they would have been homeless tonight… These are situations we face on a regular basis.”

Perhaps the greatest tribulation for longtime asylum seekers in the US is their separation from relatives abroad. Once an individual is granted asylum, she can apply for her immediate family to join her, but until then doing so is impossible. Marta, another Ethiopian asylum seeker in the DC area, has been waiting in the US with her two young children since 2013, but her husband has still not been able to join them. “The hardest thing is being apart from my husband,” said Marta, who asked that I only use her first name.

Currently USCIS still has yet to adjudicate several hundred asylum applications from as far back as 2013, USCIS spokesperson Joanne Talbot told me in an email. She emphasized that the change in processing order was meant to tackle the asylum office’s backlog. Talbot noted that this processing order was also used from 1995 to 2014 in order to deter illegitimate asylum seekers from taking advantage of backlogs.

“USCIS is returning to this approach in order to deter individuals from exploiting the backlog to obtain employment authorization by filing frivolous or fraudulent asylum applications,” she said in an email.

With fewer applications, the backlog would decrease, the agency has maintained. “Delays in the timely processing of asylum applications are detrimental to legitimate asylum seekers,” said USCIS Director L. Francis Cissna in the agency’s January announcement about the program. “Lingering backlogs can be exploited and used to undermine national security and the integrity of the asylum system.”

This “last-in, first-out” approach worked to deter fraudulent applications in the past, said Doris Meissner, who oversaw the program as Commissioner of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service during the Clinton administration. “It is possible in a last-in first-out policy to put the asylum system back onto footing where decisions could be made in a timely basis but also in a way that is fair,” Meissner told me.

Still, she said the government in the 90s continued to balance both new and old applications and kept to a schedule that informed those waiting of when they could expect their interviews.

“The resources have got to be used not only on the recent cases but also on a parallel track to be working off the backlog,” she said. “We put resources increasingly onto the backlog cases so that that caseload would also have the opportunity for an interview and for cases to be decided. It took longer but there was some degree of predictability to it all.”

But under the current system, asylum seekers have been left to languish for years in uncertainty.

“I was expecting this place to be where I could be safe and continue my life and career as a journalist, but this is an endless process and I feel like I don’t belong here,” said Saba. “I have a lot of fear. I feel like they're going to send me back home, and that my life is going to be over.”

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It's been more than two years since I last ran a half-marathon, and the events of that day can probably help explain why it's taken me so long to get back out there. About three seconds after crossing the starting line, I felt my ankle buckle. I'm not a doctor, but I'd guess the typical advice after experiencing something like that would be something like this: "Stop running immediately and head off to the side for an ice pack and a nice sit-down."

I did neither of these things. Instead – maybe because of my stupidity, maybe because I'd travelled from London to Cardiff for the race – I ran 13 miles on my busted ankle.

After hobbling to the pub, screaming internally for the entirety of the three-hour train journey back to London and shuddering at the sight of stairs for a full week, I came to a decision: if I was going to do another one of these, I wasn't going to trust my own terrible decisions – I would need to pin the blame on everyone else.

So when I was offered a place in the Hackney Half, which took place this past weekend, I settled on a plan: I'd let my Twitter followers dictate every feasible part of my preparation. It could have ended up as a fantastic use of the Twitter hive-mind, bringing in the expertise of people with far more running experience than me. Of course, this is absolutely not what happened at all.

WATCH: Running Is the Worst Way to Get Fit

There are some plus-points this time around: a) I can get from my flat to the starting line in less than an hour; b) I've found a pub that's offering free pints to finishers. On top of this, the route looks pleasant enough, involving a run around the Olympic Stadium and taking in a good chunk of east London. Even if I don't end up getting a great time, I ought to at least enjoy the experience.

The main negative comes from the fact that the majority of my Twitter followers are sadists, something I learned with my first poll:

In fairness, putting this to a poll was, broadly speaking, more helpful than my general call for advice. The only responses that elicited were multiple cries of "keep running" and a selection of tips clearly plagiarised from Baz Luhrmann's "Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)".

It probably says a lot that the one suggestion I was most willing to listen to was both extremely helpful in isolation and completely useless in 99 percent of contexts.

You might argue that I should have realised what I was dealing with and managed the questions to prevent especially vindictive or irrelevant voting. But, at this point, I was still on the precipice between serious preparation and self-sabotage, which meant I thought it would be a laugh to tweet stuff like this:

Which, obviously, resulted in stuff like this:

If there's one area where I can trust my Twitter followers, though, it's music. So, after hopelessly misjudging how long a playlist I'd need to see me from start to finish, I asked for a bit of help.

My friend Ben has actually completed half-marathons before, so I'd told myself I'd listen to any suggestion of his, only to be greeted with:

I am Walter White. Victoria Park is my log cabin. Andrew WK is my Mr Magorium's Wonder Emporium.

There was still space for one more, though, and when someone asks so nicely, how can you refuse?

I've read a couple of running blogs before, so I know the week before a half-marathon is meant to only involve a couple of shorter runs. I've had enough of experts, though, so it was time to propose a couple of options which are categorically A Bad Idea:

"An ultra-marathon friend of mine has just told me running any further than 10k this close to Sunday is a spectacularly stupid idea," one reply read.

Still, my ten-mile Thursday run wouldn't even register on the stupidity scale compared to my next question. By this point, I definitely should have known better, but I know my followers are good people deep down. I sensed they'd have a change of heart at the last minute and help me ease my way through the race on Sunday, even when presented with such a tantalising way to ruin it all.

I should point out at this stage that the official Hackney Half paperwork recommends you stay off alcohol for the 48 hours ahead of the race: sound advice, and something I'd have been duty bound to listen to – if only they'd tweeted it to me.

Still, fresh off no sleep and nursing one of my worst hangovers in weeks, I made it to the starting line.

I don't know if you have distinct "hangover playlists" and "workout playlists", but the crossover on the two is pretty much zero. "Party Hard" (twice) might help me go faster, but it wouldn’t soothe my head. I was surprisingly grateful for Dido, though, and for the people who'd told me to wear sunscreen.

At the halfway point I looked down at my running app and was greeted by an alarming sight: I was somehow on track for a personal best. I made a mental note to google "is vodka a performance-enhancing drug?" while remaining grateful that, in among the terrible advice, I'd been urged to stay off class As for the sake of my heart. At least my friends were keen for me not to die, which I guess counts for something.

Ten miles in I was still on course, before hitting a wall – but that could have been down to a general lack of fitness more than the hangover. I struggled to the finish line in just over one hour and 35 minutes – two minutes off my PB.

This is generally the point at which you get the moral of the story – where you find out what I’ve learned from the whole experience. However, that would required me to have learned anything.

I recommend delegating responsibility, I guess. If you fail, you have someone to blame; if you do well, you can claim all the credit. Lovely.

@tomvictor

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Not sure I even have to tell you what happened this weekend, aware – as we all are now, innately, biologically, the information stored deep within the global psyche – that there was a wedding a lot of people cared about very much. A wedding watched by 18 million people in the UK, streamed live in its entirety by YouTube, Facebook, the BBC and all sorts of other media and social media outlets.

Of course, for the majority of Harry and Meghan's big day, these media outlets' cameras were trained on the guests: the royals; the periphery royals; the aristocrats, billionaires and heirs; the David Beckham and the Oprah Winfrey. So you may well have missed what was happening outside of and behind their shots, where the great British public had gathered to drink cans, cover themselves in assorted Union Jack tat and cheer at projected images on a massive screen.

Luckily, photographer Chris Bethell was there taking pictures of it all, so now you can see for yourself.

@CBethell_photo

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Over the course of its run, Arrested Development has spawned a slew of hilariously bizarre references: hot ham water, the deadly cornballer, the contentious difference between "tricks" and "illusions," and the timeless wisdom that "there’s always money in the banana stand." But one of the show’s most memorable gags is Tobias Fünke’s "never nude" condition, which the narrator describes as "a rare psychological affliction of never being able to be completely naked." The running joke comes up multiple times throughout the series, most notably when the analyst and therapist (or "analrapist," as he prefers) turned aspiring actor auditions to be an understudy in the Blue Man Group, and consequently spends part of season two covered in blue body paint and denim cutoffs—the latter being the go-to undergarment worn by fellow never nudes.

In preparation for the release of the show’s fifth season on May 29, Netflix threw a "Never Nudes Blitz" on Saturday in Washington Square Park and Central Park in New York City. Dozens of people—dozens!—came out in cutoffs and red hats embroidered with the phrase "Make America Bluth Again," many of them covered entirely in blue body paint despite the pouring rain. If you weren't able to "blue yourself," don't worry—you can see VICE's photos from the event below. —Meredith Balkus

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More than two weeks after Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano blew, sending lava spewing into residential neighborhoods, the destruction is only getting worse. Rivers of molten rock are swallowing cars, homes, and everything else in their path as new fissures continue to crack open, and though thousands of people on the Big Island have managed to evacuate, it now looks like the seemingly never-ending stream of molten lava has claimed its first injury.

According to Hawaii News Now, a man was hit with spattering lava that shot up to the third-floor balcony of his house near the volcano, "shattering" his shin, according to Hawaii County officials. Spokeswoman Janet Snyder told Reuters that lava spatters, like the one that hit the resident, "can weigh as much as a refrigerator, and even small pieces of spatter can kill." Luckily, the man was rushed to the hospital, though it's not clear what his condition is now.

Meanwhile, four people were airlifted to safety Friday as lava closed in on their homes. It's spewing from at least 22 fissures on the Big Island's east coast, and it's already claimed at least 44 structures—houses, mostly—in Leilani Estates and Lanipuna Gardens, two subdivisions near the volcano.

On Saturday, a wall of lava barreling toward the coast hit the ocean, pouring into the water and shooting up massive plumes of something called "laze": a combination of steam, hydrochloric acid (which burns through skin), and tiny particles of glass, the Washington Post reports. Like smoke, the massive, terrifying cloud "travels with the wind and can change direction without warning," according to a Hawaii County alert warning residents to avoid the laze.

The scene on Hawaii's Big Island is, in short, a nightmare—and scientists don't know how long the destruction will continue. Tina Neal, the head of the US Geological Survey's Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, told Hawaii News Now there's no way to tell when the spill of lava might let up. After a massive explosion shot boulders and ash miles into the air last week, and as new fissures send more lava gushing into residential areas each day, it looks like it'll be awhile before residents can even think about going home.

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Related: Volcano Car Insurance

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Spoiler warning: this article does not contain overt spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War or A Quiet Place, but the necessity of a spoiler warning is sort of the point of the article, so. You know.

Ten years and 20 films in the making, Marvel's Avengers: Infinity War is a titan of a movie, every bit as formidable as its purple-toned, Brolin-voiced villain Thanos. Having already become the studio's most successful feature in the UK, it's now well on its way to become the first summer movie (and only the third film ever) to gross $2 billion worldwide. And, unlike films such as Jurassic World – which made similarly tremendous amounts of money but evaporated quickly in cultural and critical terms – the pop cultural response to Marvel's mega-movie has been seismic.

Quote, if you can, a single line from the $2.7 billion-grossing Avatar? Exactly. You can't. But even before many viewers made it to the cinema, the Avengers' "I don't feel so good" meme had made it into the collective conscious, and discussions of "that ending" and the future of the franchise have dominated the cultural discourse. Put bluntly: you had to see Infinity War because everyone was seeing it, and you had to see it in the cinema. More than just a movie, Avengers: Infinity War became a cinematic event.

This is an increasingly difficult thing to achieve in an age of streaming and among a plethora of new franchises. Seeing through that noise has been one of the major reasons for Marvel's cinematic success: the MCU has grown steadily bigger and stronger while the attempts of others have crumbled upon inception (looking at you, The Dark Tower). Marvel Studios' continued ability to create the sense that each new movie is the movie event of the year – a mere Avengers trailer is greeted with a more ravenous response than most films – hasn't hurt. Their marketing machinery is so robust that it can thrive in an environment of depleting attention spans, information overload and franchise over-saturation. It even survived Thor: The Dark World.

Marvel Studios have also maintained their movies' "Big Deal" status while stocking Netflix with their street-level heroes, The Defenders – an especially impressive feat, given how the two ways of engaging with content are increasingly seen as warring kingdoms. The Netflix/Cannes feud was just the latest proxy war, with shots fired from either side: Steven Spielberg dismissing Netflix films as "TV movies" was the first rasper, with the announcement that Martin Scorsese's long-gestating The Irishman would arrive under the streaming kingpin's big red banner the retort.

It's been argued that Neflix brings smaller and more obscure films to an audience they would never have had before; another contests that it reduced Okja and Annihilation to smaller screens than they deserved. So the back and forth continues. There’s a lot of politicising behind the platform you relentlessly rewatch Peep Show re-runs on.

The economy and ease of streaming services is quickly turning them into the preferred way to watch for many people, and the entertainment industry is still very much in the process of adapting to that change: how to compete with something you can half-watch while looking at your phone, or eat a plate of chicken nuggets in front of? Fundamentally, streaming is a very different experience to sitting attentively for two hours in a theatre: you can laze on your couch, scroll through Instagram, talk to your friends and break when you want. But in the urgency to watch Avengers – and the experience of watching one of 2018's major hits, A Quiet Place – the cinematic experience might have clawed some points back.

A Quiet Place is especially reliant upon the audience's goodwill because it uses silence to create tension. The sound of a room full of people sitting silently is powerfully unnerving, and John Krasinski's film thrives and feeds on this feeling. It's an untapped perk of the cinema experience – horror and comedy both benefit immensely from being viewed in a theatre, because they play for reactions, which are amplified in a group watch. (One of the best cinema experiences I have ever had came watching Paranormal Activity 2, which is obviously awful, but shitting your pants at a jump-scare in the middle of a room full of similarly tense viewers makes for a singular collective watching experience that Netflix could never rival.)

It goes both ways: the spell is immediately broken if the audience won't play ball, and social media has been full of angry tales of A Quiet Place screenings ruined by obnoxious movie-goers and pleas for advice on where best to see it uninterrupted. But as a film it’s fundamentally designed for the traditional cinematic experience, so it relies upon an audience who know and care about what that is.

If you think about it, going to the cinema is an innately weird experience. You enter a room filled with people – often alongside friends, family, partners or first dates – and then, as the lights go down, you hope that the movie will be good enough for all of them to fade into the dark so that you can disappear into the film alone. It is a bizarre, half-paradoxical and part-sacred experience whose place in society is rapidly changing under the challenge of new technology and new viewing habits.

But a new era of event cinema can change that. Avengers and A Quiet Place are just two examples of films that project their own "cinema etiquette" onto the watching experience, and that can only be a good thing.

How many times have you checked your phone since you started reading this? Not to sound like your dad, but we spend our lives surrounded by screens which blare addictive bursts of instant gratification all through the day, and it’s not hard to see that as having a corrosive effect on our attention spans. Maybe the role of cinemas today should be as movie temples where we briefly turn all that shit off, tune everything else out and enjoy the film.

In a way, watching a big purple lad called Thanos threaten to kill half the population of Earth is, actually, very zen.

@onebigwiggle

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Last Sunday night, the city of Lake Worth, Florida, suffered a power outage. It was after midnight, and these things happen, so it likely didn't seem too big of a deal for residents, especially the ones who were already heading to bed. But when phones across town started buzzing with an emergency alert, residents realized that there might be a lot more to worry about than just resetting the clocks and trying not to stub your toe when you get up to pee in the dark. Not only was the power out across town, the alert said, there was also, uh, "extreme zombie activity."

"Power outage and zombie alert for residents of Lake Worth and Terminus," the alert read. "There are now far less than seven thousand three hundred and eighty customers involved due to extreme zombie activity."

Of course, residents didn't immediately leap for their crossbows or whatever, since the alert didn't seem particularly real. First of all, it mentions Terminus, which fans of The Walking Dead know is a location on the AMC show. And secondly, the alert seems to nonchalantly imply that there are only a few hundred survivors left, which seems like something you might be a little more frantic about. Finally, there's the whole fact that zombies aren't real—at least not human ones.

Lake Worth public information officer Ben Kerr jumped to release a statement apologizing for the false alert, saying the city is "looking into the reports that the system mentioned zombies," and made it clear that "Lake Worth does not have any zombie activity currently." Still, the question remains: How did the city accidentally release an emergency zombie warning? Was it something that was prepped, just in case?

On Tuesday, Kerr told Gizmodo that, no, Lake Worth city officials haven't secretly geared up for a zombie apocalypse. According to Kerr, someone possibly hacked into their system of pre-programmed alerts and changed some to add "a zombie fantasy."

"We first became aware of the zombie messages during Hurricane Irma," Kerr said, and the city is now combing through the messages to make sure none of the future alerts are zombified.

"Hopefully the next time there is a zombie invasion alert, it will be a real zombie invasion," he continued, though when that day comes, everyone will now probably just assume its another false alarm and wait passively as an undead horde rips their Floridian flesh from their bones. Until then, though, let's try to keep these terrifying false alarms to a minimum.

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Finally, a new documentary project aims to answer Special Agent Dale Cooper's immortal question: "Who's the lady with the log?" Last week, director Richard Green launched a new Kickstarter campaign to raise money for the first authorized documentary about Catherine Coulson, the actress most famous for playing Margaret Lanterman, a.k.a. the Log Lady, in David Lynch's Twin Peaks.

The Log Lady was one of the most enduring pieces of Lynch's original Twin Peaks—save for Cooper's love of coffee and that scream that will haunt your dreams forever. In the decades since the show's original run went off the air, Coulson's character has popped up everywhere from The Simpsons to Psych to a Sesame Street parody, and has been the go-to Halloween costume for people who need to throw together a costume using stuff they can find in their backyard and closet.

Although best known for that role—which she reprised in the 1992 Twin Peaks prequel film Fire Walk with Me, and Showtime's recent revival, Twin Peaks: The Return—Coulson collaborated with Lynch for decades on a variety of projects, both in front of and behind the camera before her death in 2015. Now Green, a close friend of the late actress, is trying to raise $250,000 to make a documentary about her life and career, appropriately titled I Knew Catherine, the Log Lady.

"I knew Catherine from the Eraserhead days," Green says in the Kickstarter video about Coulson's work as the assistant director on Lynch's first feature-length film. "When I heard that Catherine died four days after shooting her last Log Lady scenes, a character who was also dying, I knew we had to tell the story. And when David spoke to me so intimately about Catherine, I knew we had a story to tell."

When she wasn't working with Lynch, Coulson's varied career included gigs as first assistant camera on movies like The Wrath of Khan and starring in numerous productions for the prestigious Oregon Shakespeare Company, Variety reports. She died just days after filming her final scenes for Twin Peaks: The Return.

Green has already raised more than $30,000 to finance the documentary, but he's still working toward the Kickstarter's $250,000 goal. The quarter million-dollar budget will go toward offering a personal look at Coulson's life and career, and feature extensive interviews with those who knew and worked with her, including Lynch himself. It will also cover licensing fees to use Coulson's scenes from Twin Peaks in the film since there can't really be a Log Lady documentary without footage of the Log Lady herself.

Kickstarter donations will also earn you a whole lot of tree-related perks, including your own tree planted in the "Log Lady Grove" and a $250 custom, Magic 8 Ball-style log of your very own, though no promises that it will whisper secrets of the forest into your ear or whatever.

Ultimately, though, all perks aside, Coulson's Twin Peaks performance was instantly iconic, and her scenes from The Return brought a rare, emotional power to an otherwise cold and distant season. The world could really use a documentary celebrating her life. You can head over to the Kickstarter page and help I Knew Catherine hit its goal before the campaign ends on June 16.

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Good news everyone: Instagram has caught up with the rest of the social media world and is adding a “mute” feature that allows you to remove people’s photos from your feed without unfollowing them. Finally, you can preserve the veneer of being interested in your friends and family’s photos without actually having those photos clog up your timeline. No longer will you have to pick between an awkward, “Hey, did you unfollow me?” conversation or having to scroll past another selfie.

This means you’ll now be free from having to look at the following characters all day:

Wannabe Lifestyle influencer

Your Instagram feed is a carefully polished cliché: heirloom salads, chia seeds, seasonal fruit, Rupi Kaur’s milk and honey, Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist. You delete anything that doesn’t get 30 likes. The only thing stopping you from posting #spon content is that no one has offered. Despite knowing your online life is a facade (I know you IRL), I’m somehow also jealous of you?

The “Expert” Photographer, a.k.a. “Every Meal Is a Photo Op”

Art lurks in every corner. Crack where the sidewalk meets the pavement? Line that shit up with your sneakers—that’s a photo. Your bio lists a fancy DSLR that makes all photos look beautiful regardless of their composition. (Muting you only solves part of the problem, since you’ll inevitably show me your photography on your phone when I see you in real life. You will also tell me about your new drone.)

Gym devotee

You just used my kitchen scale to count your macros, get your abs out of my timeline.

The Person Who Posts 32 Photos in Their Story

You’ve posted so many times the bar at the top of the screen started to look like a dotted line, and then went back to looking like a solid bar.

Your Partner's Hot Ex

This is perhaps the most vaunted category of hate-follow—the 3 AM Instagram hole where you watch all their stories even though they can see you watching. (You can’t unfollow them because that means they win.)

Any Engaged Couple

My heart won’t go on.

New Parents/People Who Are About to Be Parents

I love you and I love your partner. I am very happy for the new chapter in your life. I even might want to see photos of the kid, once in a while. I do not, however, need to learn about every step of your “beautiful journey” through captions of black-and-white photos of your pregnant stomach, nor do I need to see multiple photos every day of your baby doing baby things. Sorry—I know the baby is the most important thing in your life, but it’s the 1,184th most important thing in mine. I look forward to unmuting you 18 months from now.

Note: If you have a gender reveal party I am unfollowing you immediately.

Your Mom

She just discovered hashtags.

Your Mother-in-Law

She just discovered she can make videos.

Perpetual Vacationer

How do you have enough money to go to Hawaii on every summer Friday? And why do you always include #travel #adventure when you clearly own a house there? I’m muting you not because I hate you or your photos, but because they send me into a pit of despair.

Your Friend Who Just Got a New Puppy

Actually, can you follow someone twice?

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It's no secret that President Donald Trump's Twitter—an amalgamation of egregious spelling mistakes, terrible grammar, and bizarre exclamation points—is one of the most notorious accounts online. Not only does the president regularly throw shade at other world leaders, he seems to do so with the linguistic skill of an unhinged eight-year-old.

But it turns out Trump—who once claimed Twitter allowed him to be entirely "honest and unfiltered"—might actually be getting help to sound so bananas. According to the Boston Globe, White House aides allegedly help draft some of Trump’s tweets in his uniquely primitive style.

Two sources “familiar with the process” told the newspaper West Wing staff imitate Trump’s voice by adopting grammatical errors and disorderly syntax. Officials reportedly present Trump with “three or four sample tweets” and allow him to choose one. Apparently they believe poorly constructed sentences connect best with his authenticity-seeking supporters.

The final process could look a little like the tweet the president's account blasted out over the weekend about the Mueller probe. One that, according to the Twitter bot @TrumpOrNotBot that analyzes how the tweet might have originated, only had a 49 percent chance of actually being something Trump would write.

If the @realDonaldTrump voice can be so easily faked, it leaves us to wonder: Which of his tweets have been legitimately spontaneous, and which have been carefully planned by his underlings? Remember the time he actually tweeted the word "amoung?" What about when he accused China of an "unpresidented act"? Or the time he said he was "honered" to become the 45th president? And what the hell was "covfefe"?

At the end of the day, it might seem depressing that some White House government employees spend their time thinking up things for the president to say incorrectly, but then again, they're not the office responsible for vetting Trump appointees that goes around "Icing" one another all day long.

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Faced with crushing student loan debt, a shitty job market, and rent that's just too damn high, more and more millennials are moving back in with their parents. While it's not a glamorous life, if you play it right, crashing with your folks can be kind of awesome. But if—like one particularly comfortable 30-year-old in upstate New York—you decide to be a total dick about it, your parents can always come back at you with the full force of the law.

According to the New York Post, Michael Rotondo has lived with his parents at their place in Camillus, New York, for the past eight years. They've apparently been trying to get him to move out for months, but the man-child just won't go. Now, they're suing their own son to force him to spread his large, adult wings, and find his own place to live. And what seems like something they should've been able to hash out at the dinner table is spiraling into a full-blown legal fiasco.

Mark and Christina Rotondo, the guy's parents, have sent him five (five!) written notices letting him know he's been evicted from their house. And according to Syracuse.com, he's just been ignoring them.

"After a discussion with your mother, we have decided that you must leave this house immediately," Rotondo's parents wrote in a letter dated February 2. "You have 14 days to vacate. You will not be allowed to return. We will take whatever actions are necessary to enforce this decision."

In a separate letter, they even offered him $1,100 to move out, and threw in a few pieces of bizarre "advice" to help him get on with his life.

"Sell the other things you have that have any significant value (e.g. stereo, some tools etc.). This is especially true for any weapons you have," his parents wrote. "There are jobs available even for those with a poor work history like you. Get one—you have to work!"

The Rotondos' son insists that his parents have to give him six months' notice before they can evict him, and now—serving as his own lawyer—he's taking that argument to court. He's facing off against the people who gave him life in Onondaga County Supreme Court on Tuesday, where his folks are hoping a judge will legally force him out of their house for good. Meanwhile, Michael's allegedly refusing to contribute to the home's expenses, help out around the house, or move his busted-ass Passat out of the driveway. Even the Rotondos' neighbors have weighed in on the feud.

"It's time," Lashea Wright told News 8. "He's 30. And not paying rent. You need to be independent."

We get it—times are tough, paying rent sucks, and getting sued by your own parents is a sad state of affairs. Then again, we're talking about a 30-year-old boy who's been living at home for eight years and doesn't seem to even take out the garbage. Christopher Adams, a neighbor of the Rotondos who spoke to CNN affiliate WTNH, probably summed up the situation best:

"That doesn't make no sense if you're going to your mother's house," Adams said. "Thirty years old and don't help do nothing—grow up."

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Related: Millennials Are Stuck Living with Their Parents at Highest Rate Since WWII

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This article contains spoilers for The Usual Suspects.

The first time I saw The Usual Suspects was in 1996. I was a freshman in high school, and I’d taped it off cable. It had already been heralded as a masterpiece when it came out the year before, the next big seismic shift in indie filmmaking. Michael Wilmington at the Chicago Tribune called it a “near-classic blend of mystery, personality, humor and terror, laced with one stunning shock after another,” while Peter Travers of Rolling Stone said it was “the freshest, funniest and scariest crime thriller to come along since Pulp Fiction.” This was in the days before movie reviews aggregate websites, but even now, using those archived reviews, it has 88 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and 77 on Metacritic.

But more than that was the word-of-mouth buzz surrounding it. Unlike the universal praise that gets heaped onto more traditionally “respectable” film-making enterprises like 3.5-hour period pieces, this one actually seemed cool. People in my high school were talking about it as a movie that you have to see, hype generally reserved for, like, Billy Madison or Tommy Boy, not legitimate films getting top-notch reviews from critics.

When I finally sat down to watch it, it seemed fine enough—vaguely badass, in that way every low-budget white guy director back then was aping Tarantino’s fast-talkin’ wise guy dialogue. But when that final scene rolled, and Kevin Spacey twisted his ankle back into working order just as the coffee mug shattered on the precinct’s linoleum floor, I jumped up and down in the basement like my favorite team had pulled off a miraculous last-minute upset. I ran upstairs to my parents. “I may have just watched the greatest movie of all time,” I told them. They remained skeptical.

The second time I saw The Usual Suspects was a week later. I’d harangued friends over for a viewing of that same VHS tape. During the first hour and a half, whenever my friends would start to doze off or lose interest, I’d prod them along. “Pay attention,” I’d say. “It’ll be worth it.” When that ending came again, my friends were ecstatic. “What a goddamn film!” I remember one of them saying.

But I wasn’t as pumped this time around. I got some primal enjoyment out of watching my friends be tricked as I had been, and seeing their faces during that ending, but this time I had a lot more questions throughout. Holes started to develop. If Keyser Söze’s entire complicated scheme was set in motion to kill the guy who was going to ID him, well... wasn’t he just ID’d by that fax that came in at movie's end with a sketch of his face? Söze lights a cigarette and hops in a getaway car, leaving chaos in his wake as Chazz Palminteri's Special Agent Dave Kujan figures it all out just seconds too late, but why was he even dicking around at the police station anyway? Kujan said he could go whenever he wanted, and instead of leaving, the master criminal decided to kill an hour messing with a cop?

Anyone who has ever watched even a single segment of a cop procedural or dealt with police in real life knows you have the right to remain silent. It's actually recommended you do! It's never a good idea to talk to cops. By choosing to spin a tall tale in literally the laziest way imaginable—by weaving references and names together that he's pulled from flyers hanging on a wall behind the officer's desk—Söze is being, as Stormy Daniel's lawyer Michael Avenatti might say, "very undisciplined," and hence a gift to those looking to nail him down. There's no upside to talking for a defendant. Surely the genius criminal we're to believe Söze is would know this, and put it in practice.

Beyond that, in his original one-and-a-half star review of the film in '95, no less than Roger Ebert explained that he simply couldn't follow the plot, even after multiple meticulous viewings with the aid of a notepad. The "blinding revelation" at movie's end, Ebert writes, didn't delight him so much as make him wish the movie could've just told a good story. "I prefer to be amazed by motivation, not manipulation." This is something I felt strongly, in college, when I watched the movie for a third time. Absolutely none of the movie matters. Its twist ending makes everything that preceded it pointless, just a bunch of cut-and-paste classic film-noir dialogue for characters created in an Oddball Tough Guy Generator. That was all it took to trick the bro sect and critics not of Ebert's salt into believing this shit was deep and meaningful.

Twelve years after his review ran, a reader wrote his website to thank him for it. After years of fighting with friends who loved the film, he finally felt seen by someone who, like him, the movie simply "doesn't make narrative sense." He writes: "The film is told in flashback via the Kevin Spacey character, and like a lot of movies with flashbacks what's told concerns a lot of events peripheral to the character's story (to give background information on the event told), such as conversations between characters that didn't involve the Spacey character (and which he wouldn't know about)...

"So in the end when it's revealed that the story told was a lie, down to the characters names, by Spacey's character all the peripheral business doesn't make sense (since in the film's world it doesn't exist)."

Great points all, Joseph Brunetta from Santa Rosa, California.

The fourth time I saw The Usual Suspects was in Los Angeles in 2005. I’d just moved into this foreign land and was home sick with flu, and decided to give it another whirl. By then, Stephen Baldwin had pivoted to Jesus and Benicio del Toro’s mumble routine was exposed as a waste of a decent actor. I made it about halfway until I fell asleep. I woke up to see that coffee mug explode, but didn’t care. I began to accept that this adored, Oscar-winning cult hit just wasn't for me.

I watched it again in February. A lot’s changed since I first saw it. The movie's then hot-shit director Bryan Singer turned out to mostly be a dud, making a bunch of debatably bad X-Men movies, an undeniable stinker in Superman Returns, and the overlong Tom Cruise snooze Valkyrie. Meanwhile, the screenwriter, Christopher McQuarrie, parlayed this frat house trickery into one of the most jaw-dropping opening scenes of all time, and then a bunch of gimmicky action movies that also star Tom Cruise.

Kevin Spacey, meanwhile, has since been outed as the predator he’d long been rumoured to be, and Singer has removed himself from the public spotlight after similarly accusations. And though, depending on where you fall on the whole art versus artist debate, that may not weigh on how you feel about the content contained within The Usual Suspects, the recent revelation that the set was temporarily shut down due to Spacey's behavior is pretty hard to forget while watching it now.

This last time I watched The Usual Suspects I was high, and throughout was mostly just upset McQuarrie didn’t use his blank slate, where the first hour and a half literally doesn’t matter, to do something—anything—interesting or cool. Put in a magician, add a talking lion, who cares, go nuts. “What a waste,” I thought. (It was really good weed.)

I was upset at the generation of suckers who allowed gimmicky schlock to trick them into thinking there was something profound or clever about its paint-by-numbers bullshit. It was this hype, and its place as some Generation X cultural touchstone, that had me, like the reader who found solace in Ebert's words, returning to the well so many times to try to find what I was missing. But no more! Fool me five times, I won’t get fooled again.

Turns out, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was making anyone think this movie was groundbreaking.

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Jesse Galganov was supposed to return home to Montreal after an epic eight-month backpacking adventure last week. Instead, his mother returned from a trip to Peru after retracing the steps of her missing 23-year-old son on a four-day, three-night, 50-kilometre trek.

Galganov went missing while hiking the famed Santa Cruz trail in the Andes in the fall. The last to see him, his mother said, were a group of Czech tourists on the trail who he asked about getting water on the afternoon of October 1.

“We spent the summer basically together planning out the route that he was going to take and shopping for all of the stuff for his trip,” Galganov’s mother, Alisa Clamen, told VICE. They booked and planned his travel, down to specific campgrounds he would stay at.

Alisa Clamen (left) and her son Jesse

Since he’s gone missing, search costs for Jesse have neared $1.5 million, Clamen said. Part of that has been funded by a GoFundMe, “Help Us Find Jesse,” which has raised over $200,000 to date.

Clamen’s son had just graduated in May 2017 from Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where he studied mathematics and completed pre-med requirements. He’d been accepted to med school at Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, which he was to attend upon his return. A paper Galganov is credited as an author on was published in a scientific journal after he left on his trip. He set his ultimate goal, Clamen said, to work with Doctors Without Borders. She describes him as having a “huge heart” and “core empathy” to him, as well as a great group of friends.

“He just loved learning about other cultures and seeing new places, and he knew that he had a long, long path ahead of him in medical school,” Clamen said of her son’s decision to go on his trip. “He wanted to take this year to explore, immerse himself in cultures, and see part of the world.”

Galganov had spent a semester his junior year in Prague and seven weeks backpacking through Western Europe. Though he was to make most of his journey through South America and Southeast Asia alone, Galganov planned to meet up with friends on his travels. His mom said the purpose of the trip, in part, was self-discovery.

Galganov packed, unpacked, and repacked his backpack to perfection before his flight out of Montreal on September 24. The plan was, following his travels in South America, that he would fly to Asia in December, eventually ending his trip in Bangkok on May 15. Some of the items he brought were hiking shoes, a one-person tent, a mattress, a small stove, utensils, clothing, a headlamp, medication, his Kindle, and a journal. In total, his backpack weighed 24 lbs.

Jesse just before he left for his trip to Peru, wearing his backpack

Days after Galganov landed in Lima, though, he disappeared. The last text he sent to anyone was to his mom, who he communicated frequently with, on September 28 “Love you… Probably will be out of touch until Monday afternoon/eve. Going on a four-day trek,” part of it read.

Clamen just completed that very trek Galganov referred to in his last message, on the Santa Cruz trail in Cordillera Blanca range in the Andes. She described the hike as “incredibly challenging,” noting that it was steep, at a high altitude, and not well-marked nor well-patrolled.

Clamen, who works as a lawyer, had never been into hiking and said she hadn’t even camped since she was 17 years old.

“It was powerful. I could picture him walking ahead of me,” Clamen said. “I needed to see what he saw. I needed to not have these names just be words on a map—I needed to understand what it looked like and where he was.”

Though Clamen just trekked through challenging terrain on the same trail her son was last seen on, the months since Galganov went missing have presented her with a unique and difficult set of other challenges.

Part of those challenges have been dealing with Peruvian authorities, which she says lack in professionalism and experience. “It’s a different culture—it’s not Canada,” Clamen said, referencing a difference in standards.

Clamen ended up hiring an elite Israeli team, Magnus International Search & Rescue, to assist in finding her son. During their investigation, they’ve used drones to sweep the area where Galganov went missing and have conducted interviews, as well as aided in pointing local authorities in the right direction. Recently, Magnus had bodies of water in the area swept.

None of the items Galganov brought on his trip have been found so far.

Clamen stands in front of a lagoon on the Santa Cruz trail with her friend

Clamen believes her son may not have been adjusted to the altitude when he went missing. She said he took an overnight bus from Lima on September 27, arriving in Huaraz, Peru, the following day. “He got off the bus, he spent a day gathering supplies, he spent the night at a hostel,” Clamen said. Then, she said, he left early in the morning, noting that he wouldn’t have slept much with that timeline.

“The theories are that he was not in good shape and either something natural happened, or someone came upon him and assisted the process,” she explained. “I suppose it’s possible he fell into a body of water or someone dumped him into water, and then of course someone could have buried him somewhere."

Investigators are looking into a theory about “muleteers,” or people who drive mules in the area, having a role in moving Galganov, if they found his body.

Clamen said her son’s story is “a parental nightmare of the absolute worst kind.”

“Jesse’s tale is a cautionary one—people have to counsel their children to be safe and be conscious, and realize that this could happen to anybody,” she said.

She refuses to give up on finding her son. Her most recent trip to Peru to follow in his steps, though, brought her “a little bit of peace.” It was her third trip to the country since her son went missing.

The search for Galganov is ongoing.

“Jesse, he’s my son, my best friend, my confidant, my ski buddy, my everything. So, I can’t give up,” Clamen said. “Even once I find him... I have to honour him. I can’t just give up on life, because that’s something he would never, ever want me to do.”

Some day in the distant future we will tell our grandchildren about the time back on Earth, before the monthly Musk Buck stipends, when humans had to exert 40-plus hours of physical or mental labor each week to justify the continuation of their life.

As the sun sets over the Martian horizon, we will explain how, despite this societal arrangement, our species spent an inordinate amount of time scheming ways to work, game, and cheat this system so as to maximize returns and minimize efforts.

To aid our future selves in passing along these tales to the coming generations of the entirely automated age, we asked people of the present to share the most creative, roundabout, and arguably genius methods they've employed to avoid working while at work.

May these tales of slacking off serve as both a warning to not repeat the systemic employment mistakes of our past and a testament to man’s unyielding but entirely necessary desire to loaf.

In the early days of Lyft, before the low rates of today, the company was offering guaranteed $25 per hour for as long as you were logged in as driving. A bunch of us drivers figured out that if we went to the furthest corner of the region map where nobody was likely to request us, we could hang out there all day, active but unpinged, and get paid for it. It didn’t take long before they figured that out and added stipulations to prevent us from doing that but we got a few sizable paydays from that. A few times we even brought beers and a barbecue and made a little party of it.
- Mel, Irvine, California

Ages ago, I worked in an office. One of the tricks I used to slack off then was rigging our noisy dot-matrix printer (which we didn't actually use for anything) by removing the print-ribbon and taping over the thing that checks if it’s in place. Then I’d run a taped together loop of paper through it on that old-school tractor-feed. This would create a credible sound of "computer work" happening in my office while I took afternoon naps sitting upright in my chair.
- Albert, Seattle

My somewhat rural state capital hometown hosted a big farm convention every year. Though not raised on or interested in that lifestyle, I saw they were hiring and paying something insane like $14 hour (over a decade ago) and signed up for the two week gig while on my college winter break. I got the job and, on my first day of work, quickly realized that I didn’t have any specific supervisor and was apparently meant to just wander around and offer myself up to move a table or fence or whatever to anyone who might need me.

Armed with this knowledge, I spent the next two weeks going out to party with friends until morning every night, then driving to work at 7 AM, clocking in, and immediately slipping off to the parking lot to get a full day’s sleep in my car.

The second to last day of my employment, I was woken from my car sleep by a man in a suit rapping his knuckles on my window asking what I was doing. I told him I’d felt sick and came to have a mini nap to try and recharge. He told me to leave the premises and not come back. I was so worried I was going to catch a charge for time theft or something but I ended up just getting a check for the full two weeks of pay a month later.
- Bryce, St. Paul, Minnesota

I worked a summer job selling lockers, towels, and knick knacks at a water park when I was a teen. I remember one day I came into work and saw a memo at my station about this squirt toy we’d be selling from that day forward.

As we were unsupervised for a while, my coworker and I decided to open some of the product boxes and shirk all our other duties to spend the entire morning running around our area in the park having a knockdown, drag-out water gun war. This was all under the auspices of “promoting the new product” in case anyone asked.

When our supervisor finally reached us on her rounds, rather than reprimand us, she decided to ditch her responsibilities too and join in on the war. She was just a slightly older teenager who didn’t really care about the job either, after all.
- Garrett, Trenton, New Jersey

Worked for large, three-letter organization, on large contract for another three-letter organization. I automated 80 hours of financial analyst work down to 15 minutes. Used the remainder of my time to play computer games, day trade stocks (profitably), write a blog (before they were called that), and to woo some of the dozens of women who were online at the time via AIM. Monitor on that computer faced away from the cubicle door, but I surrounded the bezel with cardboard "barn doors" for extra protection, claiming that the interaction between the fluorescent lights and the monitor frequency really bothered my eyes (it was basically true, but I exaggerated it). On the computer I wasn't using, which had a monitor facing out of my cubicle, I ran a screensaver-type program that I had put together which did Hollywood-style printing things on screens (think green text printing out slowly in a window, as if over a modem) and graphs updating themselves every few minutes. Every so often, it would throw up a large white banner in the middle of the screen with red text that said "COMPILING."
- Fletcher, Washington, DC

A friend had a cast that had been cut off them and, being the lazy-but-scheming young adult I was, I asked for it so I could pull a fast one at my warehouse job. I spent two months wearing this janky cast wrapped in gauze so it stayed together on me. For some reason, nobody inspected it too closely and I spent most of that summer up in the office doing minimal assistant work at a desk instead of hard manual labor downstairs.
- Jordan, Atlanta

At one job, I found a pristine, never-used, lockable restroom on the unleased floor above ours. Any time I had to leave the building for a meeting or something and come back, I’d take the elevator up a floor and just hang out in my special room for an extra hour or so watching stuff on my laptop or napping on the floor—I must reiterate, it was spotless in there—before going downstairs and back to work.
- Shannon, New York City

Back in college, I worked at a call center where we weren’t ever really allowed to be off the phone. So, if I ever wanted a break, I’d dial my sister or a friend while they were busy at work. They knew what was up if I rang and they’d just pick up the phone and leave it off the hook at their desk and I’d improvise stuff to say to the nobody on the other end of the line while secretly reading a magazine under my desk.
- Kate, Hartford, Connecticut

When I was a floating post-production PA at a major TV network, I didn’t have much to do and there was very little oversight because my supervisor had her own stuff to worry about. I knew I always needed to look busy if I wanted to A) stay employed for the duration of my seasonal contract and B) look good to the people I was there to network with, and C) not have someone give me something to actually do. This resulted in me spending many hours each day going out on fabricated missions to hand deliver papers/scripts/etc. to and from non-existent recipients spread all around our big studio lot. This was just my excuse to meander the grounds and get fresh air for half the day and, as I had my badge and a folder in hand, nobody ever gave me a second look.
- Stephen, Burbank, California

Interviews edited for length and clarity.

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Eirik Johnson’s Pine series could be the perfect photographic score for the Smiths discography. His large-scale pictures of tree trunk carvings display words like “Timothy X,” “ Alex is NUTS,” “Goodbye Etc,” and “We Were Here.” Lit by sparklers and other unconventional lighting sources, the photographs preserve the timeless urge to make one’s mark. They combine elements of teen angst, love, loss, and uncertainty as monuments to fragile existence.

Minor Matters will publish a book of the images this fall. Keeping with the photographs’ deep connection to music, it will be accompanied by a 12” record that includes songs by Tenderfoot, Sassyblack, Whiting Tennis, and others. For Johnson, music stands in as a harmony for the work, helping to shape and contextualize it with sonic reflection.

VICE recently spoke with the Seattle-based photographer to learn more about the fragile magic behind his images.

We Were Here

VICE: How did this project start, and what was the first tree you photographed?
Eirik Johnson: I was on a hike with my son through a wooded urban ravine on a late afternoon winters ago. The day’s light was fading quickly so I had a flashlight out to lead our way down the steep trail. When we came to a switchback in the trail, my light fell on a carving in an Alder tree lining the path. It read “I Love Lianne” and in the dramatic yellow beam of my light, appeared like some aquatic ruin I had come upon while scuba diving. I felt an emotional tug to know who Lianne was and who had loved her so much they’d felt compelled to carve these words.

"Magical" is such an overused word in photo headlines, but these photographs really are magical – in the carvings themselves, and in your use of fire as a light source.
I’ve found most of these carvings in parks along urban river banks, or other places I could imagine a teenager disappearing to at dusk to leave a proclamation of love, alienation, or something in between. Illuminating the carvings during that twilight hour by way of sparklers, fire, prismatic light, or moonlight is a way of connecting to the sentiments they hold. I imagine the carvings alluding to a graffiti-strewn dance hall or the pigment drawings on a prehistoric cave wall.

Alex Is Nuts

Why is this important to these pictures?
My initial experience coming upon that first carving by flashlight at dusk felt magical and I think it was how that singular blue/green beam of light removed the context of the forest while also striking a deep emotional chord with me. I eventually started using a variety of light sources including gel filters, sparklers, fire, prismatic light, and moonlight. The exposures can range from 30 seconds to 40 minutes and the whole process is like a performance. It allows me more creativity in my response to what I find. In one image someone had carved “ALEX IS NUTS” into a tree that had earlier been burned perhaps by lightning. I used fire to illuminate the carving and the charred surface of the wood, which seemed like a fitting response to the dark emphatic phrase.

You're including a 12” record with this. How'd that come about?
There’s a deep connection to music that runs throughout all this work. Some carvings commemorate favorite musicians like The Smiths or read “I Miss Kurt” or celebrate lyrics like “The Wild Wolves Around You” from Bon Iver. Other images, “SAVE” or “We Were Here”, allude to potential songs or lyrics. While I was working on this project, I kept returning to memories of favorite mixtapes from my youth and the emotional connections they still hold. It was in this spirit that I asked seven different musicians to compose original songs inspired by specific photographs or from the project’s atmosphere. It seemed fitting that we press a vinyl record, given that the songs are carved into its surface.

The Smiths

The original title was We Were Here — but is now Pine What sparked the change?
The earlier title came from one of the carvings. Pine came from conversations with the editor/publisher at Minor Matters Books, Michelle Dunn Marsh. We wanted to move away from using one of the carvings as a title and to find a word that alluded to the sentiments of the work while still maintaining an enigmatic reading. Pine obviously is connected to the idea of the trees themselves, but it also is an efficient fashion, conjures up the longing and nostalgia that lies at the heart of the work.

This has been years in the making. Have your ideas changed since the first photo you made?
The ideas haven’t changed really. If anything, the contributions of the various musicians and my own recording for the album have reinforced the initial romantic notions that inspired me. I came upon the first carving to photograph when I was still carrying my first son in a backpack. Now he’s nine and he’s running around discovering carvings for me on his own.

Tell me something unexpected, crazy, hypnotic or delirious about the project and its process over the years.
Go wandering around the woods at night illuminating tree carvings, and you’re bound to have a few such experiences. All I will say is that coyotes turn out to be big fans of red sparklers.

I miss Kurt

Goodbye Etc.

Green Valentine

Her

It's Only Me

Save

Star

Te Amo

Timothy

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Greg “Mishka” Rivera is one of my best friends and the finest hoarder I have ever known. I’ve watched Greg’s collection outgrow his apartment and spill in to his office, then into the Mishka stores, into his brother’s spare bedroom and a storage locker in Florida. I think he also has some of his shit possibly stashed around various secret locations around America. What makes Greg’s hoarding so fine is that the things he collects are more unique and bizarre than the stacks of newspapers or Star Wars figurines the average collectors stockpile. In his possession is an animatronic E.T. puppet arm from this old Pepsi commercial. He also has a mummified human hand and various body parts, a lot of obscure old Japanese toys, and a baseball signed by disgraced baseball star and tremendous gambling addict Pete Rose that says, “I’m sorry I shot JFK.” Greg's an expert on and collector of realms of things most people have never heard of. His obsessive collecting became so over the top that Johnny Ryan made a comic about it for VICE.

In Greg's possession are some of the most bizarre and beautiful objects that I have ever beheld with my own eyes, but the crowning jewel of his collections is every piece of Mr. T merchandise ever made. When I met Greg, I thought I was a Mr. T collector. I had a few of the Mr. T & Me children’s book series and the Mr. T’s Commandments album, but that wasn’t even the tip of the T iceberg. Greg has every goddamn commercially available object that Mr. T ever allowed his name and face to be stamped on, as well as all the bootleg merchandise too. He owns concept art that Jack Kirby drew for a never-produced Mr. T cartoon show. He owns the promotional standee for Mr. T cereal that once encouraged the parents of the 1980s to feed their kids cereal with a large ostentatious man who yelled at everyone on the box.

The highlight of Greg’s Mr. T stuff is his collection of more than 100 handmade Mr. T dolls, all custom sewn for sons, daughters, nieces, and nephews by parents or relatives with too much free time on their hands. The doll pattern was sold in the wake of Cabbage Patch Kid mania, and there are a surprising number of these dolls floating around. They’re amazing and very kitschy folk art. Despite all having been produced using the same pattern, each doll is unique. Assembling the doll wasn’t all that easy, and the recommended fabric used to make the doll’s skin isn’t that easy to come by. Each Mr. T doll is differently imperfect from the next, and the imperfections are what make them so beautiful.

Greg got the idea to make a book that documents his collection in the fall, and since then he’s been busy retrieving his Mr. T collection from it’s various storage locations, photographing it and writing about Mr. T. He’s got a Kickstarter to fund the book which has some pretty unique incentives for those who choose to contribute.

Here, I talk to Greg about his collection, Mr. T, and—well, that about covers it.

VICE: How much do you know about Mr. T?
Greg "Mishka" Rivera: I think I know enough.

What's his real name?
Laurence Tureaud. But I heard a story once about a guy who saw him and started chatting with him at an LA supermarket. As they were parting, he said to Mr. T, "All right, see you later, Laurence." And Mr. T told him, "Nobody calls me that but my mama." As far as I'm concerned, his name's Mr. T, except to his mama, he's Laurence.

That's a good story. What year was he born?
May 21, 1952. I’m not sure how many more facts I can rattle off. I was always more fascinated with collecting his stuff more than enamored with the man himself. At the end of the day, he's just a person. I still to this day haven't met him.

What?! You've met all kinds of people at autograph shows and you haven’t met Mr. T?
Yeah. When I was younger I was really excited to meet him and tell him about my collection. I think if I met him now, I probably wouldn't mention it. I would never want to think that Mr. T would care or be excited that I collected his stuff. I'd like to meet him, but it wasn't ever a situation where I was, "Oh, I'm obsessed with this guy."

There's not a lot of Mr. T collectors. I only know, including myself, four. One of the guys that we know, he collects a lot of autographs and original clothing Mr. T wore in movies and stuff and that never really interested me.

You like the image of Mr. T?
I like the image of Mr. T. I like the artwork associated with him.

Was there anything from your childhood that made you really want to start collecting Mr. T memorabilia?
I remember really wanting the 12-inch Mr. T doll as a kid. I remember my cousin had it, and I was really jealous. I also remembered today when I moved from Connecticut, my mom made me sell all my toys.

Did we just discover the root of your problem?
Probably... I remember being in middle school and going to the flea market in Florida and finding a life-size Mr. T Cereal cardboard standee display. It's actually one of the rarest pieces I own. That's the first thing I remember having and thinking this could be the start of a collection.

How much did you pay for that?
Five bucks.

How much do you think it's worth now?
A few hundred bucks.

So Mr. T stuff's not really all that valuable?
No, it's not really that valuable. That was part of the appeal when I first started buying it on eBay. It was something that was pretty easily obtainable because there was really no one else buying it.

Until you came across—
Until I came across Mike Essl, who became my main rival in online bids for Mr. T stuff.

Had he been collecting Mr T stuff for longer than you?
No, I’d started getting serious about it long before meeting Mike, while I was still in college. There was this store called Populuxe. Brian, who owned the store, had two or three shelves of Mr. T stuff, and I had I bought a lot of it from him. Then eBay came along, and I started buying stuff there.

How big was his collection at the time?
It was nowhere near the size of mine. His was maybe one bookshelf full of stuff and mine was almost two walls filled with stuff. This was around 1998. Then we decided to make an eBay truce instead of bid against each other.

He was like, ”Look man, I can tell you're a real tough customer and you have a lot of T lust in your heart, and I got some too. We'll get out of each other's way." He had a full-time job so he had more money than me. I was still in college so I would also let him get more of the high-ticket items. The goal was to make sure that at least one of us won whatever Mr. T auctions appeared. It got to a point where it didn't matter who owned it because it was a mutual collection.

Eventually I moved to New York where Mike and I became friends. We started a website called Mr. T and Me. For a while it was a big part of who I was. I was this Mr. T guy that had this collection, and we were on different TV shows like Totally Obsessed, a VH1 show hosted by Fred Willard.

What was it like appearing on TV to talk about your Mr. T collection?
I really liked it. I think Mike was a little embarrassed to appear on TV talking about our collection. I was just some dumb punk kid and more of a ham. We had to send a video into VH1 of why we wanted to be on the show, which I think is still online.

When was the first time you saw one of the handmade Mr. T dolls?
Brian, who owned Populuxe, eventually sold me his entire collection. I had ended up working there and in lieu of getting paid I got Mr. T stuff. The one thing he wouldn’t sell me was his handmade Mr. T doll that looked like a bootleg Cabbage Patch Kid. He also introduced me to eBay, and as soon as he did, I literally started buying any and all custom Mr. T dolls that I saw.

How common were they at the time?
A couple would pop up every month, and I'd always win the auctions for between ten and 20 bucks.

They're all handmade, and I appreciated how different each one was. Each one was a labor of love, and each one represented the level of craftsmanship of each person who made them. I loved that some adhered to the pattern, potentially made by a professional doll maker. Then there were some that were just made for their kids as best they could manage.

When I was buying them on eBay, a lot of the descriptions would mention how the seller had made the doll for their son and he hated it and left it in the closet. Now he was off to college and their parent was just trying to get rid of it.

Why did so many people think, I know what my kid needs: a really soft cuddly Mr. T doll?
It's a grown man doll that looks like George Jefferson.

Everybody wanted a Cabbage Patch Kid doll and couldn’t get them... All these companies were making their own doll patterns. Then Martha Holcombe came up with the idea of making a Mr. T version. Cabbage Patch was popular, and Mr. T was popular so she combined them.

It's actually really hard to make the doll exactly the way the pattern book instructs you to. I think that's why they look so unique. Some people couldn’t get the exact fabric. Some people painted the eyes, some people embroidered the eyes, some people got the transfer eyes. Some people handmade the clothes, other people just went and bought baby clothes which didn’t fit right.

Thousands of parents investing all this time to hand make dolls that looked like Mr. T is very odd to me.
I think that's what probably attracted me to it. I was talking to Martha Holcombe the other day, and she mentioned that at one time Walmart was one of her biggest customers, and she was selling them thousands of doll patterns a month.

Which of the dolls are your favorites?
There's a few that we've kind of given names to. There's Sinbad. He looks like Sinbad, Gary Coleman, John Belushi and Eric Wareheim. There's one that looks like a Bollywood star. He's got orange skin and he's got this really flashy outfit on. There's another guy who has bushy eyebrows. We call him Evil T. There's also a lot of Baby Ts. There’s the ones that have the beard but no mustache, I call them the Amish Ts. Then there's a few that are anatomically correct.

How many have dicks? And how many of them also have dicks and balls?
I think all the ones that have dicks also have balls. There's not just a dick coming out of it.

That wasn’t in the original pattern, was it?
No, somebody decided to do that, and I'm still trying to figure out why. Martha thinks there was a point where people were making the dolls for adults. But I wanted to think that it was more like hippie sex-positivity.

Do you collect the dolls even if they don't have a complete outfit?
I like to leave the dolls as they are. Occasionally over the years when I’ve seen toddler Nikes or little boots at a thrift store I’ve bought them for the dolls. But, generally, all the dolls that I have are as I found them. A lot of times people ask “Why is this doll naked?” or “Why doesn't this doll have pants?” At some point the pants were lost, and this is just how it is.

How many of those Mr. T dolls have you got?
I think about 200.

Do you still buy them?
I've been trying not to buy anymore because I feel it's kind of pointless. There was a time where I thought I was going to collect them all, but I've collected enough of them and who knows how many were made? If you just had one people would be amazed, and then if you had 50, people would be even more blown away. Having 200, people respond with, “Wow, this is kind of crazy.”

I wouldn't describe you as kind of crazy, Greg. Do you think you have a disease called T-mania perhaps?
I do.

Do you think of these Mr. T dolls as folk art?
I do. The American Folk Art magazine interviewed me about them ten years ago. In the issue I’m in there's a weathervane and a really oddly shaped girl with her dog painted, and then there's me and my dolls. My collection was recognized by the American Folk Art Museum as modern-day folk art. I would love for my dolls to be in the American Folk Art Museum’s permanent collection, but we'll see what happens.

So where are all the dolls now, your house?
They are actually at Quang Le’s house in Santa Ana. They take up an entire room while he’s photographing them all for the book.

Now that the dolls are out of storage are they going to come back and live with you and your wife, Lesa, in your home?
No, I think Lesa would kill me if I brought all that stuff back now! I have to remember Mr. T’s words. “Don’t be possessed by your possessions!”

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

In 2018, the British press has been full of stories about young drug dealers leaving their inner-city lairs to cause knife crime epidemics across commuter towns and the countryside.

It's true there has been a rise in gang-related violence, particularly knife crime, outside the major cities, and that the proliferation of young drug dealers "going country" to sell crack and heroin in rural and coastal towns is contributing – if not driving – this. But there is a danger here of swallowing a simplified narrative: of faceless inner-city thugs bringing death, addiction and destruction to otherwise sedate home counties and peaceful rural backwaters.

The story, of course, is more complicated than that. But if Britain's crime map is being redrawn, and violence and gang-related crime is expanding outwards from our urban hubs, how exactly is this happening and who is involved?

Looking across the River Thames at Dartford Creek Barrier – Royal Hotel, Purfleet.

In search of some answers, I headed up the Thames Estuary to the borough of Thurrock in Essex, an area, like many parts of Britain, experiencing a rising presence of London gangs. It's only 30 minutes out of London on the train, but Thurrock is a limbo-land. Best known for the huge Lakeside shopping centre and Tilbury Docks, it's neither urban, suburban nor the countryside. Fields of horses and verdant river banks merge with nondescript town centres, bleak housing estates and heavy industry.

It's fitting that the Daily Mail is printed here. Like much of Essex, Thurrock – a traditionally white working class area – is Brexit Country, polling one of the highest Leave votes of any constituency in the 2016 EU referendum. It's now Tory, but in the 2015 general election UKIP came within a few hundred votes of having an MP in Thurrock.

In the last decade there has been some grumbling from locals about the number of "foreigners" moving into the area. In 2010, Neil Rockliffe – a Tory councillor for Chafford Hundred, a new-build settlement popular with Nigerian families from south and east London – was forced to step down after referring to his constituency as "Chaffrica".

But now local concern has shifted to the looming presence of London drug dealing gangs. As Labour councillor for Tilbury, Steve Liddiard, warned in April: "Drug dealers are in every road. The gang culture is developing. Young men [of] 13 upwards are being groomed."

A teenager cycles past the boarded-up working men's club – Tilbury

He's got a point, because dealers affiliated to the London gangs are all over Thurrock, as they are across Essex in Southend, Clacton, Colchester, Harlow and Chelmsford. In response to this new problem, in 2014 Essex police set up Operation Raptor, tasked with hunting down drug dealing gangs from London. In 2017, Raptor made 668 arrests, seized drugs with a street value of £684,530 and locked up those involved in drug and gang-related crime for a total of 336 years.

There has also been an uptick in gang violence here linked to London drug dealers. In March, two dealers from London were jailed for murdering a local man in Thurrock's South Ockendon. Last December, a 20-year-old from London was charged with the murder of a local heroin user. Acid attacks have also increased. A local court house banned all drinks bottles in fear of gang members using acid to attack rivals or staff.

This rise in violence is, unfortunately, not restricted to Thurrock alone. "Over the past five years, knife crime has been growing in areas surrounding large urban centres," Callyane Desroches, a Senior Policy Analyst at criminal justice consultancy Crest Advisory, told me. "This is particularly true of areas surrounding London, such as Essex, where knife crime is up by 116 percent."

Over this period, the five police forces which have seen the highest rate of increase in recorded knife crime are Norfolk, Hertfordshire, Wiltshire, North Wales and Essex.

The 16-storey Brisbane House dominates the skyline of the surrounding area – Tilbury

Ceryl Marsh, now an independent gang worker, has worked with young criminals and their families at Thurrock's youth offending unit for 13 years. She has seen first-hand the expansion of gangs out of London into the area, and was herself threatened with violence by one of the London boys. She says the drivers behind this are far more complex than simply "county lines" – London gangs have also been in part enabled by the capital's housing crisis and the clumsy relocation of some of London's most vulnerable families and at-risk young offenders, often with very little afterthought.

"Some families from London chose to move here to get their kids away from the gangs," says Cheryl. "I think the families believed that Thurrock would offer them better outcomes and opportunities. Others were placed in Thurrock involuntarily because they were homeless or had been evicted for anti-social behaviour or because of gang tension." She adds that some families told her they had been re-housed in Thurrock because their sons had been involved in the London riots in 2011. Others said they had been encouraged to relocate out of the capital as councils prepared for the London Olympics in 2012.

A decade ago, many of these families were being relocated to outer London boroughs; now, they are being sent out of London altogether. Between 2012 and 2015, Newham, Barking & Dagenham, Greenwich, Redbridge and Waltham Forest councils sent 448 homeless tenants – the majority of them in families – to Thurrock, more than any other area outside London.

In addition, a number of families were moved to Thurrock by police and social workers because teenagers were deemed at high risk of being victims of gang-related violence.

"Now, Thurrock is a diverse place – it's a good thing," says Cheryl. "You've got a good ethnic mix, some African hairdressers and cafes, Polish stores. But at the same time, these tough new drug dealers from London came, with a negative attitude to police because of stop-and-search and the riots. For us, they were tough to engage with. We earned our money."

The move worked for some families, but not for others. Coming to Thurrock was not easy for them. "They lived here, but they weren't integrating locally," says Ceryl. "Their kids were still going to school or college in London, so they weren't wanting to be 'local'."

For teenagers with gang affiliations, being re-housed – a gang exit strategy advocated by the Home Office – did not work in Thurrock, according to Ceryl. "Thurrock was so close to the boroughs they were moving them out of, it didn't work, because they could jump on a train and be 'home' in 30 minutes."

To compound the problem, boys from rival gangs were accidentally being dumped in the same street or council estate as each other in Thurrock.

"Some of the relocations for high-risk families or offenders took place without us being notified," says Ceryl. "So the first we would hear was when someone had been arrested and we’d find out they had been living in Thurrock for a few weeks. This proved difficult, especially when they’d been moved due to threats to life from one gang, and you find out they’ve been moved into a small area where the gang they are at significant risk from also have people living."

The youth offending unit had to start monitoring court lists for potential clashes of London gang members, to ensure that rival gang members were not appearing at the same time.

Housing surrounding the Olive Alternative Provision Academy, which opened in 2014 – Tilbury

Driving around Tilbury, Ceryl points out the flats where the Newham boys from Stratford do business, 200 metres from where the Custom House boys are located. "They've all been moved by London authorities and now they are on each other's doorstep," she says.

Some young offenders who were moved to Thurrock used it as a bolt-hole, stayed out of trouble and went to college. But others took advantage of the change of scenery. They began selling in Essex for the London gangs, sometimes working with rival gang members because they were free to do what they wanted outside of the city. "I think the relocations also eventually saw the blurring of lines in terms of people from opposing gangs hooking up to have 'numbers' in this area, rather than being at risk or outsiders locally," says Ceryl.

Ceryl shows me a well-produced YouTube video complete with drone footage showing one of the crews – a London gang known to the Home Office, now operating out of Thurrock – hanging around a Porsche and singing about stabbing people and dealing drugs, in Grays, the largest town in Thurrock. The footage shows them crowding around a confused-looking police officer sitting in a car, who probably has no idea he has been viewed 64,000 times on YouTube.

A pan-tilt-zoom camera overlooks the Seabrooke Rise Estate – Grays

A five-minute daytime stroll through Grays town centre, best known for producing Russell Brand and the woman who was photographed pissing on the town's cenotaph, reveals a surprisingly open drug market. Young dealers are laughing, playing music and serving up crack and heroin on the high street opposite the main council building as office workers head for lunch. Round the corner, outside St Paul's and St Peter’s Anglican church, a team of dealers sell in the graveyard and the alleyway, watched over by lookouts at Grays train station.

For the London gangs, Thurrock – with its high number of struggling working class families – is not just a place to sell drugs or a spring-board to markets further afield, but an ideal recruiting ground. Ceryl says one London gang member, who was attacked by local Thurrock dealers with a hammer two years ago before asserting his authority in the area with knives and acid, has signed up for college in Basildon, Grays and Southend purely to recruit drug sellers.

Ceryl tells me about one teenager from Grays who was 13 when he was groomed into selling crack and heroin by members of a crew from east London who had settled in Thurrock. Gang members bought him food, took him out for a spin in their cars and gave him money for his mum’s birthday. Soon, he was nipping over on the ferry from Tilbury to Gravesend in Kent (child fare £2) to deliver small packages of crack and heroin for £500 a week.

When they accused him of stealing money he had to work off his debt by trapping in Norfolk and Suffolk. His mum reported him missing the first few times, but then gave up and he was booted out of school. In Norfolk, he was caught with a large amount of class As, but dodged jail because of his age. After four years of trapping for the London boys and having knives pulled on him, he says he’s in control, a level up from the new recruits. In reality, Ceryl says he's still at the bottom of the rung.

Ceryl says the rising tide of London crews in Thurrock "shook up" the local crime scene. "It's so insular here, a lot of street gangs thought they were the big guys until the London crews came, but now they are silent," she says, adding that she warned police eight years ago that incoming London dealers were starting to recruit local kids, cuckoo local drug users' homes and create gang tensions in Thurrock, but says she was ignored. "Now it's easy for anyone to go trapping for a week if they want to go and buy their sister a birthday present," she says. "A lot of the kids are doing it now, and a lot of them are carrying knives – it's become a more acceptable thing to do for kids from all walks of life."

"Danny" describes robbing over 150 cannabis farms across the UK – Tilbury.

Behind an abandoned shopfront in Tilbury, we meet 20-year-old "Danny" (not his real name), a highly proficient cat burglar who was moved to Thurrock from east London in 2014, as an alternative to a jail sentence. He’s had a front row seat as various London crews have come to dominate Thurrock.

Arriving in Essex, it was easy for him to reprise his source of employment for the east London gang – as a specialist in robbing cannabis grows – because they were here already. Since coming to Thurrock he has crossed the paths of several other London gangs, and burgled cannabis farms for them too. Danny estimates he's robbed 150 illegal cannabis factories of their crops, the proceeds of which he splits with the gangs who provide the tip-offs. Sometimes he has gone seeking out cannabis farms himself, using a handheld heat-seeking device designed for plumbers.

"The London gangs have been in Tilbury for about five years, they’ve slowly been creeping in," he says. "First, I made friends with the locals, the Tilbury boys, who are hillbillies. I call them Sylvanians, because everyone is family, everyone knows everyone. They don’t like the black boys from London. It's a badly racist area. Now, more of my friends are London lads. One of them is reckless; him and his boys will squirt [acid] or stab someone over nothing. He’s now one of the main dealers here."

Danny has worked with rival London gangs on the same job: "I had two boys from rival gangs in the back of the van on the way to a cannabis burglary last year, even though they had been slagging each other off on YouTube the day before. Any other circumstances they would be at each other’s throats. Life ain’t nothing to them, but because it involved money, that changes everything."

"Lewis", an ex-county lines drug dealer and victim of knife crime, describes being chased and stabbed. He has subsequently been relocated by Trident – Undisclosed location.

For some Londoners, being shifted out to Thurrock can exacerbate their sense of disconnection. "Lewis" (not his real name), now 18, was moved from a north London borough with his father and brother to Thurrock for his own safety. His mother stayed in London. He had been heavily involved in "going country" from an early age, selling crack and heroin in numerous locations including Cambridge, Nottingham, Northampton, Winchester, Norwich, Andover, Basingstoke and Boreham Wood. He had also been involved as a victim and perpetrator of knife crime, and was a 24/7 knife carrier.

Although he was used to trapping around the country, life in Thurrock did not suit him, even though he had been the subject of death threats in his home town. "I wanted to leave straight away," he says. "I told my dad, 'I'm not fucking living here. I'll help you unpack your stuff, but the shops are half an hour away.'"

Lewis spent most of his time dealing drugs back in London. But because he had officially moved to Thurrock, he was left to drift, a 16-year-old in serious danger of being murdered – yet effectively off the radar. His only contact with the authorities was with Ceryl at the youth offending unit in Thurrock, as a condition of his bail. "All my teachers at school told me was that I would end up dead or in jail," he says. "No school I’ve ever been to has helped me. They’ve just brushed me aside. I got told I was worthless. It broke my spirit. But Ceryl was the first person who encouraged me."

Even though Ceryl was making headway with Lewis, when his mother died he became angry and nihilistic; he "wanted to kill or be killed" and ignored increasing warnings from a rival gang that he would be stabbed if he stepped into their territory. Last year he was chased down by a mob and slashed and run through with a machete in a north London high street. He shows me one wound where the machete entered his back and came out of his stomach. Sitting on a bench in a London suburb that he was moved to by Operation Trident for his own safety, Lewis remembers sitting down after being attacked, eyes closing as a pool of his own blood spread out beneath him on the pavement.

He was taken in for emergency surgery and survived, but the next day his best friend, who had promised to visit him, was stabbed and ended up losing his fight for life on the same hospital ward. When I ask Lewis about the connection between rising violence and county lines, he says: "We started off just kids trying to earn money. Now, no one cares about the drugs, they are just killing each other."

Back in Thurrock, Ceryl says there is a new breed of teenagers growing up with an attitude to violence that has been normalised by the London gangs' presence here.

"Imran" (not his real name), a 14-year-old schoolboy from Grays, was caught two weeks ago with a ten-inch hunting blade. "A 'friend of a friend' told him he needed to carry a knife to protect himself," says Ceryl. "He started associating with local gang nominals who were older than him. That added to his reputation locally. He wanted people to be afraid of him, wanted others to know who he was and not to mess with him. He’s very clever, but he wants the 'thug life' too much. His leadership skills are likely to be used to pull others in. He has the ability to come away from it all and the support around him to do so, but is choosing not to. I fear he's lost to them already."

Thurrock is not the only area experiencing these kinds of problems; this is a phenomenon being repeated across the country. Once buffered against the extremes of inner city crime by being "out there", satellite towns and rural capitals are now having to adjust their tactics, at a time when police and councils are struggling to make ends meet.

But as more and more people get priced out or dumped outside the major cities, and city gangs continue to snowball across Britain as they use commuter towns to consolidate and recruit, this urbanisation looks set to run and run. Unless the root causes of gang affiliation – bad education, racism, claustrophobic living and lack of opportunity – can be addressed, then it is inevitable that the fruits of inequality will come knocking, wherever you live.

@Narcomania / alexandermcluckie.com

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Habits are hard to break, especially the ones that cost a ton of money and give you nothing in return. Case in point: alcohol, cigarettes and the vast majority of products unleashed on the world by Big Skincare.

Over the past ten years I have spent an embarrassing amount of cash on serums, toners, cleansers, moisturisers, masks, exfoliators, oils, mists and everything in between. Anything I could splash out on that promised me the face of a cherub, I would buy. At its peak I was up to an impressively thorough six-step daily routine – and I felt strangely proud that I had reached such complex and long-winded heights. Mind you, I never cracked it: I was always "on the cusp" of finding the winning combination of products that worked for me, so I could finally gain clean, righteous skin.

After trialling what felt like hundreds of different products, I found my skin had never felt more irritated, spotty, dull, dry, uneven and greasy. So, in the hopes of starting anew, I cut out the bulk of the products, the faff of the "skincare steps" and stripped back to the bare minimum. I wanted to cleanse away everything that I'd been taught about skincare.

I limited myself to an occasional cleanser, a simple exfoliation product and, if I was feeling fancy, a sheet mask. The result: annoyingly, that my skin is finally looking clear and healthy. This isn’t me boasting, but instead me crumbling under the knowledge that, seemingly, both my skin and purse were previously under attack, while the skincare industry laughed all the way to the bank.

The author when she was obsessed with skincare

This, obviously, was no real revelation: articles are regularly published about the "skincare con". Mind you, pro-skincare articles are also regularly published in response. So what's the answer?

Founder of Elite Aesthetics, Dr Shirin Lakhani, who works with clients on skincare regimes, said, "We are brought up to think that the ritual of cleanse, tone and moisturise is as important as brushing our teeth, and yet, contrary to common belief, only 15 percent of us actually need a moisturiser. These are people who have genetically dry skin, leading to conditions such as eczema or psoriasis.

"The rest of us have normal skin with large pores, an oily T-zone and oil or sebum, for which a moisturising cream is of absolutely no benefit to your skin. Instead, using a moisturiser will likely perpetuate the problem, leading to the accumulation of dead surface skin cells, dryness, acne and sensitivity. Using a moisturiser for just three weeks turns off your national skin hydration and results in your skin becoming lazy and reliant on external moisture."

Essentially, if you don't actually need to moisturise, all that cream is just sitting on the surface of your skin and acting as a barrier. Instead of providing deep hydration, our creams are suffocating the skin and creating excess oils.

"Natural hydration ultimately has to come from within the body and cannot be reversed by applying moisturiser on the skin's surface," said Dr Lakhani. "What most people really need from a young age is a good cleanser, exfoliator and sunscreen. One of the first things I do with my patients is break this dependence and start them on active products which wake up the skin cells and restart the skin's own moisture production."

Of course, basic facts don't always stand up to massive marketing budgets: Dr Lakhani adds that the kind of low-quality products many high street retailers promise as cure-alls can lead to otherwise healthy skin becoming more sensitive.

Beauty blogger, and founder of Awake Organics, Melissa Kimbell, agrees: "If you cleanse with detergents, over exfoliate, use synthetic moisturisers or use alcohol-based toners that are too harsh, you can disturb your skin’s natural balance," she explains. "This can lead to excessive oil production, dryness and even eczema-like skin conditions. It can also start a vicious cycle of feeling as though you need to apply more products to counteract the effects."

Sheet mask by cushyspa.com via Flickr; CC2.0

Of all the products I tried, sheet masks – a one-stop shop, unencumbered by any other "complimentary" creams or oils – were my favourite, and really the only thing that gave instant results.

With most other products – whether affordable or expensive – there was always this unwritten rule about loyalty: that you had to invest in the entire range before the initial product actually started to kick in and work. On a day-to-day basis, whether I double cleansed, used simple toners, eye creams and organic moisturisers, or did my full six-step routine, it didn't make much of a difference – I'd still end up with breakouts and greasy and blemished skin. On a bad day, bumps and cyst-like spots would appear, even when I was following the skincare manual.

Lynne Baker, founder of Calla Salon, said, "The biggest single issue I see as a busy facialist is that of misdiagnosis. People are, on the whole, absolutely hopeless at correctly diagnosing their own skin. Few people know the difference between dry and dehydrated skin, and almost without exception will over treat their skin, especially when it's oily, believing that more is more, rather than less is more. I regularly see skin stripped of its oil, sensitised from using harsh products, or from using products way too often, or too much of it. But most of all, from using completely the wrong product for their skin type."

Of course, you can see why people get themselves trapped in this cycle: in an era where a social media-friendly, sheet-masked face is a simple way to tell the world "I take good care of myself," the skincare pressure is on. I felt the same way – it's inescapable.

But when I changed to a simple wash and go approach, not only did I have more time on my hands and money in my pockets, my skin was able to do its thing naturally. My hormones still bring up spots, and when I'm suffering from a particularly bad hangover my skin is dehydrated, but on the whole, it's the best it's ever been.

The main takeaways from this hard-learnt lesson was that there are a few things every person can do to help them get flawless skin, if indeed they're bothered in the first place. After running through the usuals – avoid sun, wear sunscreen, remove make-up – Dr Lakhani said, "Exfoliating at least twice weekly is vital for perfect skin. We all tend to either skip it or overdo it. It keeps the pores minimised, keeps the fine lines at bay and resurfaces the skin perfectly.

"Retinol [Vitamin A] is essential for healthy skin. It wakes up the cells and encourages them to produce natural moisture from within, speeds up exfoliation, stimulates collagen production and encourages circulation to help take away the toxins and bring essential nutrients to the skin."

Lynne Baker reminded me to watch my sugar intake. "I see skin suffering from glycation [where sugar molecules attach themselves to other molecules, for example proteins and fats, causing ageing] as a result of a high sugar intake," she said. "Avoid alcohol, too. A source of hidden sugar, it leads to broken vessels and can be a cause of rosacea [a red facial rash]."

As I had suspected, the overwhelming conclusion was that less is more. As Melissa Kimbell explained, "I think it's best to keep your routine simple and natural, and to look for quality over quantity. Despite what Instagram tells us, we don't need a 12-step skincare routine."

While I appreciate stripping back a routine may not work for everyone, personally, I've found there's definitely something to be said for curbing the creams. Everyone's skin is different, of course, and although some medically-prescribed products may be a godsend for those who suffer from skin problems like acne, eczema and psoriasis, for the majority, a gargantuan skincare regime just isn't all that necessary.

Plus, if you cut down on your exfoliator expenditure, you'll have the fun of finding something else to waste all your resources on.

@jesshopeevans

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Taking ecstasy can be an extremely blissful experience – it's why the drug is called "ecstasy", and generally why people take it. However, it can also have many downsides: the comedown, the fact it can be extremely dangerous if you don't use it responsibly, and – as anyone who's taken it will know – the fact it can make you do and say some very embarrassing things.

By way of illustration, we asked some people to relay the cringiest stuff they've ever done on ecstasy.

Photo: Alchemy / Alamy Stock Photo

– "Watched Coldplay."

– "Started a WhatsApp group with some people I met in the smoking area called 'we're all going to the aquarium tomorrow'. We did not go to the aquarium."

– "Got my face glo-painted in Lakota – a club in Bristol – by a hippie who would only accept payment in drugs and had a single trainer full of various powders and tabs next to her. It was a real low point for me. Obviously, at the time I thought it was the best sensation in the world and that I looked amazing."

– "Genuinely enjoyed a drum 'n' bass night."

– "I was on a stag-do in Barcelona and 'double-dropped', by which I mean 'dropped two individual quarters of a pill over the course of about four hours'. Everyone else had done much more than that, but I got a bit freaked out for some reason and started applying cool gel packs to my head and back. Everyone else went out for the night and I stayed in, watching videos on my laptop."

– "I know someone who cheated on their boyfriend because they actually thought the guy they were getting with was their boyfriend, and then was like, 'Wait, you're not Sam, WTF,' mid-kiss."

– "You sort of had to be there, but in 2016 I inspired this video with my 4AM chat:"

– "The day I bought my wife's engagement ring I went round my friend's house to celebrate, and he put a stupid amount of MDMA in bombs, which we all dropped quite early on in the night. I don't remember a huge amount very clearly, but I do remember having what I thought was quite a nice conversation with someone next to me on the sofa about, inexplicably, pork pies. Turns out there was no one next to me, and two of my friends had been sitting opposite me and half-laughing, half-being very concerned for about 15 minutes."

– "Came up on a coach and spent some of the journey hassling the stranger next to me about wearing bowling shoes outside of an alley. They were Nike Cortez."

– "The first few times I'd done pills they hadn't had much of an effect on me anatomically, if you know what I mean. So the first time I got peanut-dick – they must have been really strong pills, I was very loved-up – I thought it would be a good idea to show an entire room at a house party how small my dick had got. I still cannot believe I did that. Even writing this to you know is making me hate myself."

– "Took a fully-clothed bath with three of my mates, and we spent the whole time stroking each other's hair and faces. Probably looked quite cringe, but it felt amazing."

– "I suddenly declared that I'd found total inner peace in a club and insisted my mates and I left immediately. When we did eventually leave, I struck up a conversation with some equally out of it guy, and we said he could come in our taxi, as we were heading the same way. I was retelling my story about finding enlightenment – for about the fifth time – and he got weirdly jealous, saying he wanted it too, and lashed out at me across the seats. My inner peace ended right there."

WATCH: How to Use Ecstasy as Safely as Possible

– "I've only done ecstasy twice, because I am a square, I have the smell of squarehood upon me, and people don't often offer me drugs as a result (they gaze at me and know I was Too Into Books at secondary school; they smell the pheromones I pump into the air and fundamentally know I still buy myself a Lego advent calendar some years). So, the first time: I did half a tablet and turned into the most monstrously horny man alive, an entire personality 180, and chatted up (and instantly struck out with) every single woman present in the bar I was in, revolving around the dance embarrassing myself in front of all of them in turn."

– "Second time: I did half a pill at a day rave and invented the concept of sitting down. This is important, because a lot of people sat down before I invented sitting down, but they didn't sit down. This is very hard to explain, but it helps if you are on ecstasy: sitting down is a fun activity for all (you are probably sitting down right now! Your ass bones are actively engaged in the chair or bed beneath you!), but you're not sitting down. Some things feel very good when you're on stimulants (warming yourself under a hand dryer, having your back rubbed, watching The Jungle Book (1967)), and sitting down is one of them: so good, in fact, that I found a soft padded leather seat-cum-cube and sat down on it, and then I refused to move. For, like, four hours. 'Please,' my friend was begging, after travelling from Manchester down to see the headline DJ. 'Please, please, stop sitting down. I want to see music. I came here to dance.' And I would sip my Strongbow Dark Fruits and say: 'Can we just sit down for, like, 45 more minutes.' I stayed there until kicking out time at 11PM, when I promptly got on the Overground home, really sitting down, then got back to the flat and just really sat the fuck down in it. 'Why don't we do this all the time?' I asked him. 'This is great. Just: sitting down.' Haven't seen him since."

– "Somehow ended up on a duel carriageway in east London at 5AM after a Christmas party and tried to hitch-hike my way home. After what seemed like forever, a van started to slow down as it approached me, and I understandably got extremely excited, until the driver popped his head out of the window, shouted 'Wanker!' at me and sped off."

– "Completely lost my mind and started asking my girlfriend when we were going for dinner with David Cameron. She thought she'd lost me forever."

– "I work in the media, and cannot recall the amount of times I've met an aspiring writer / photographer / illustrator in a smoking area and very earnestly told them to email me about working together."

– "Either when I texted my uni boyfriend – who I hadn't spoken to for three years – to forgive him for everything (we broke up because I cheated on him) or basically every cuddle-puddle conversation I've ever had."

More on VICE:

This Is What Super-Strength Pills Will Do to You in the Long-Run

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I Spent a Month Testing Comedown Cures

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

“No… more like this.”

Carla* sashays down the alley, turns around at the dumpster and sashays back. A lit Player’s clings for dear life from the corner of her lipsticked mouth.

“Like that.” She bucks out her hips from one side to the other like a showgirl, sucks the smoke from the last of cigarette and tosses the butt into the plastic bucket—it once contained sliced pickles—which serves as an ashtray for the cooks and floor staff. “It’s got to come, like, from the hips.”

I try a series of uncertain steps down this impromptu catwalk. I’m wearing a pair of Payless flats. There’s a hole in the toe where I’ve worn through it, running back and forth from the kitchen to the patio a thousand times a day.

It’s the end of my shift, nearly midnight. Mid-July in Ottawa, one of those city nights that’s like living inside an asscrack, impossibly hot and sticky and close with fumes. I work on Sparks Street at a greasy dump I wouldn’t let my worst enemy eat at. A tourist once left a Tripadvisor review for our restaurant that (accurately) claimed our burgers “slid through him like a rat through a drain pipe.”

“Fuck girl—kick out those hips… you’re not going to the fuckin’ barn. Tits up, ass out!”

On the street beyond us a stream of Friday-night taxi-cabs come to barely-legal rolling stops. What Carla and I are doing out in the steamy half-dark—her dictating, smoking, correcting, me trotting back and forth on command like a show dog—is trying to teach me “how to walk like a girl.”

A few hours ago while I was still on the floor, Carla, the front of house manager, approached me as I was bringing a chin-high stack of dirty dishes down to the pit. She told me the restaurant’s owner—a portly elderly man—had asked her to speak to me. He had been in for dinner, had seen me serving tables and had not been impressed with what he saw, she said—specifically, with my “unfeminine” way of walking and standing.

“Like, I know you’re gay,” Carla had said, shifting back and forth on the heels she routinely wore to work. “But you clomp girl. You walk like a dude.”

In order to “correct” this flaw in my service style, Carla—our only female manager—had been asked to “show” me how I was “supposed” to walk.

I turn on my heel and come back, stand before Carla. She’s is in her late 30’s; tall with black hair, bleached highlights, short skirt, low-cut top. I am 23, short, with a rough pixie-cut that grew out from an unspeakably bad haircut I got from a student barber. My pants are too large and too long for my frame and my shirt—an ugly orange thing with the name of the restaurant emblazoned like a brand someone would actually recognize across the back—is also too large. I feel like a child wearing my parents clothes, awkward and ugly and small standing in front of Carla’s appraising, mascaraed eyes.

“We’ll keep working on it.” She fishes a lighter from her pocket, starts another cigarette. She blows smoke, crosses her arms. “You’ve got nice curves, you know? You’d be so pretty if you just did a little more with hair, wore a little make up.”

With that, I’m dismissed. I unlock my bike from the grate outside the restaurant and go home.

Sweeping down Rideau Street, I dive past the Parliament buildings, the National War Memorial where the lights from the base of the statue shine up into the face of a motherly angel holding a fallen soldier. I weave and dodge between cars, watch people and lights flicker by. I feel curiously distant from everything, as if I am watching a movie about myself and the person playing me is a stranger.

At home, I turn on the television, get a beer from the fridge, roll a joint and sit down on the couch. I crack the beer, light the smoke. I wiggle my toes and look at them. You clomp, girl. You’d be so pretty if you just wore a little makeup.

And I’m suddenly just so mad, my face hot and flushed, sucking on the joint like it’s going to make me feel better even though I know it’s not. I’m embarrassed, furious with the attempt to retrain me into something I am so obviously not, some outdated, heteronormative version of what being ‘feminine’ and ‘female’ means. Moreover, I’m angry with myself, because I let them humiliate me, because I was too young to know what to say and in the face of such sexism and homophobia, and because, even if I had known how to respond, I wouldn’t have. I needed that job, couldn’t afford to lose it. And they knew it.

I fall asleep with the television on and my bare, traitorous feet still propped up on the coffee table.

That was all in 2010, back when I was still waiting tables to put myself through school. While tinted with homophobia, what this story is really about is what our culture views as feminine. If I were male, the way I walked, even if I were a gay male, would never have come into question, at least not in the service industry. That I am queer was not really the problem; the problem was that I am queer and refused to adhere to a heteronormative standard of attractiveness in a position in which I was expected to serve the public.

You would hope that, now, eight years later, things would be better; it would be easy to dismiss this anecdote as the kind of backwards thinking we are in the process of outgrowing as a culture, but I can tell you first-hand that the service industry is still a stagnant, writhing shit-hole of sexist, disciminiatory behaviour.

Recently, while living in Montreal, I asked a friend to hook me up with a job at a bar where she was managing. I was writing a book and wanted some part-time scratch. My friend, who had worked with me when I was still serving full-time, readily agreed; she had a stable of younger servers, she said, and would love to have someone older and more experienced around. She told me to come to meet the bar owner and to dress for a training shift, which I did; a crisply pressed black dress shirt and a pair of slacks.

After three hours of sitting at the bar waiting, it became apparent that not only was the owner not coming out to meet me, but no work was forthcoming. My friend, in the throws a Thursday night cinq-a-sept bar rush, looked embarrassed but was too busy to talk to me. I went home.

A few days later we met for drinks and she admitted to me that I hadn’t got the job. When she told her boss she wanted to hire me, he told her no. In his words, I “did not fit the aesthetic of the bar” and since he had “just hired a male bartender” he didn’t need me as well.

Allow me to translate: My short-cut hair and tiny titties do not sell drinks, so no job for me.

This sexist horseshit is endemic in the industry. I worked in it for over ten years, right up until 2015. I put up with a lot of harassment from both management and male customers, the latter of which still feel surprisingly entitled to flirt, taunt and even touch female servers. During my time in Montreal, I belonged to a Facebook group for servers and cooks in the city which acted as a kind of job board. Often, young female servers would simply post an attractive photo of themselves—a low-cut top, nails and hair done, makeup judiciously applied—with the tagline ‘looking for work.’ No resume, no credentials. Like they were making a Tinder profile and not seeking serious employment.

That these young women would look for work this way—and that there were usually responses to these posts from employers—reveals what female servers and managers all know but would never publicly say; that female servers are hired as much, if not more, for their bodies than their skills.

You could pin this nasty facy on restaurant owners, but the problem is actually much deeper than that. What the hungry and thirsty public—which is to say, largely men, who still have more earning and therefore more spending power than women—want is pretty young thing to bring them their order. That’s part of what they’re paying for. And businesses know that for a cultural fact, one they can exploit and boil down to dollars. Hooters has 430 locations worldwide, a success which is based on a standardized, heteronormative and obviously extremely marketable version of what “feminine” and “attractive” is.

In the era of #MeToo, if we are truly serious, as a culture, about changing the way women’s bodies—and male entitlement to those bodies—is perceived, then perhaps we need to start thinking about how and why we spend our dollars.

As for 2010 me—the one whose walk did not meet the standards of my employer—I quit that job a few months later. Shortly thereafter, I would fall in love for the first time. My partner would later reveal that what first drew her to me was not my hair or my clothes, not my smile or the way I did my (non-existent) make up, but the way I had walked across the bar to meet her.

*name has been changed to protect people too stupid to protect themselves

Follow Lori Fox on Twitter.

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