Photo by Andoni Lubaki. All other images courtesy of FSA cats.

Video footage online shows Syrian government troops massacring cows, killing horses and torturing cats and goats. In the torture scenes, the men “interrogate” the “rebel” animals, sadistically re-creating scenes that have no doubt been played out with human victims. These aren't the worst atrocities carried out during the conflict, but to Mahmoud Khatib, they seem to underscore the dehumanizing effect of years of war. 

In August 2012, Mahmoud, a Syrian-American living in Atlanta, saw a Guardian report that noted the kindness shown to stray kittens by fighters from the Free Syrian Army (FSA), one of the main rebel forces battling the regime of president Bashar al-Assad. He started digging and realized that the FSA’s treatment of animals contrasted sharply with the cruelty shown to defenseless creatures by Assad’s forces. He thought this was an obvious, internet-friendly indicator of how much better for Syria they were than Assad and his animal-torturing thugs. In a bid to draw the world’s attention to the cause, he set up FSA Kittens, which collected photos of FSA fighters and kittens, first on Tumblr and then on Facebook.  

Since the blog started, things have changed for the worse. With the war showing no signs of coming to an end and with the Islamic State adding a new layer of horror to proceedings, Syria looks further from peace than ever. I called Mahmoud to talk about Syria, the relevance of social media and whether there was any hope left.

VICE: Hi Mahmoud. Famously people love kittens and cats on the Internet. That’s often dismissed as being an example of how shallow we are, but in this setting it somehow feels a little different.
Mahmoud Khatib: It’s funny you say that. I began to notice a pattern of these kittens that were being cared for by the Free Syrian Army. It was a good story that really showed the human side of the revolution. A lot of folks will turn away if there are photos of killed Syrian children or orphans; it’s really depressing to look at. Cats are uplifting; I understand the Internet's obsession with cats. In this case I saw the cutest of cats as something that was directly challenging the narrative and showing that the Free Syrian army were human beings, they had the overwhelming support of civilians around them and were kind to animals. In contrast, Assad’s soldiers have machine-gunned livestock and donkeys and, in one case, swung a cat around on a chain. The regime actively tortures and kills opposition activists and shows the same cruelty towards animals.

So the fact that the FSA treat animals well is a very obvious indicator of them being kinder than Assad’s troops?
Yes it is and there’s nothing that says good vs evil more than one side treating children, orphans, the elderly and animals with kindness versus the other side beating the elderly, killing children with chemical weapons and killing animals.

It seems that, as the war has dragged on and got worse, Syrians abroad have become more depressed and far less hopeful. Were you full of hope when you started FSA Kittens?
I started the blog in the summer of 2012 when Syrians were really inspired. They saw this as part of the Arab Spring. Dictatorships were crashing down and democracy was rising up. That was the heyday of the blog. As the situation progressed it became more and more disheartening. Lots of Syrian Americans ended up feeling like Obama really let us down. We still support the revolution, we still want to see Syria free, but we also feel jaded.

Do you feel more isolated from people in Syria now? Has that early hope for change turned into a feeling of isolation?
The Syrian people went into this thinking, “OK, the world’s eyes are on us, surely they can’t ignore us for much longer. The aid and support is just around the corner.” But no one wanted to do anything about the slow motion genocide that’s taking place and Syria left was left on its own to become a failed state. Me and other opposition activists feel helpless. There’s very little we can do—there’s fundraisers here and relatives have gone to the region to help refugees with medicine and so on. We’re trying to speak out in every possible way that would get interest in the US but it just hasn’t yielded results. I guess if orphans aren’t going to do it, you try kittens, and if kittens aren’t going to do it, we’ll try something else.

So FSA Kittens is just one attempt among many to engage people?
Yeah, I used to be very active on Twitter, sharing pictures of activists and massacres. People realize the Assad regime is evil. The Assad regime defector "Caesar" recently gave his report to Congress detailing, with 55,000 photographs, the industrial-scale torture and execution of opposition activists. It was little more than a footnote on CNN. Syria is old news, despite the fact that it’s ongoing. The coverage amounts to, “Well, there’s not a lot we can do and we’re not really sure who the good guys are.” People forget that the Syrian revolution is about pursuing freedom and that it started in a non-violent way. The news cycle has a very short memory.

At the beginning of the Arab Spring there was a lot said about how important Twitter might be. Having been involved with this yourself, how important you feel the Internet and social media has been in Syria?
I think at the onset of the Arab Spring, in terms of organizing protests and showing that we all think the same way, it sort of lit that fire and helped the revolution take place. But now, when you have the government and their allies committed to using military force to put down a popular uprising, I think the Internet has become more or less irrelevant, particularly for ex-pat Syrians like myself. We’re a drop in the ocean and the stuff that’s happening that matters in Syria is happening on the ground.

I can create a blog about kittens but I cannot even begin to imagine what the Syrians have endured. I like to think I’m making a difference, but I really can’t take myself too seriously. In the beginning we were inspired, we thought online would have an effect, but essentially all the meaningful online activism is now in Arabic. The narrative the West and the media are following is detached from the themes of the Arabic-speaking tweeters and activists.

Maybe there are two different conversations going on, and the Arab one is more vital and connected to what is happening on the ground.
That’s correct. And it’s interesting how media savvy everyone is becoming—particularly Islamic State (IS), who’ve been copycatting the FSA Kittens type themes.  

I iz play hide&seek with my mewjahid :) pic.twitter.com/ADRGGGwqDF

— Islamic State of Cat (@ISILCats) July 28, 2014

What do you think of IS’s Islamic State of Cat Twitter account? Are these guys ripping you off?
Haha, maybe. IS’s propaganda is two-fold. On one hand, they want to show their brutality and ferocity as a way to literally terrorize their enemies. This is where their penchant for decapitation comes in. On the other hand, they want to humanize their fighters with Sunni audiences. Fighters cuddling up with cats helped humanize the FSA and so IS is keen to do the same thing.

Whereas FSA kittens seems like an organic response to something that was actually happening.
Right. When Martin Chulov’s report for The Guardian was probably the first bit of coverage about rebels and cats. I don’t think it was a deliberate plan by the FSA to use cats as a PR weapon. I think they’ve just seen a lot of stray cats and who doesn’t like cats, you know? I took the initiative and I wanted to make it a theme. IS, by now, is very Internet savvy, they recognize the usefulness of cats, why did they choose cats? Are they copycatting me? They have an image problem that I don’t think cats are going to fix.

Having said that, does Islamic State's cat blog undermine your original idea that the morality of the different military players in the region can be determined by how they treat animals?

This war has put morality in the blender and turned it into pulp. Although it is more difficult to recognize, the components of morality are still discernible if you look hard enough: Caring for civilian populations, accountability and justice for all, humane treatment of prisoners, protecting minorities, kindness to animals—all of these are pieces that make up the greater whole. Taking care of cats while committing gross human rights violations misses the point.

It is interesting to think about the contradiction though. Whereas Assad forces have butchered and tortured both humans and animals alike, IS highlights their kindness to animals while simultaneously publicizing their extreme brutality to people they deem enemies or heretical. The actions of Assad forces can be explained by cruelty towards life in general. The paradoxical actions of IS can only be explained by religious extremism.

Thanks Mahmoud.

Follow Oscar Rickett on Twitter.

Blood, water, and wine—suicide on a balcony. All photos by the author

I still remember the first time I smelled brain. It was my grandfather, cracking open the skulls of squirrels he’d killed. They’d scamper down the sides of pecans and live oaks among the Louisiana timbers where I grew up, enter his sights—then, oblivion.

I was very small then, so it never seemed odd when those brains found their way into the scrambled eggs my grandmother would cook up for Papaw. When I was there I’d have some too. The gray matter of tree rats adds a certain sweetness generally absent from an otherwise bland backwoods diet.

When I was older, and working in the morgue, the scent would hang in my nostrils for days. Maybe it was the acrid combination of blood and cerebral spinal fluid. The smell of souls.

I vividly remember the last time I smelled brain. It was July 2004, and I was peering up at the underside of a Camry. I lay on my back considering the strata of accumulated road filth, spots of tar, and oil coating the wheel wells, tires, and front axle. Wedged among the dark-speckled tapestry were brilliant arrays of pink and gray. They had accumulated in little globs that organically glistened among the machinery. Some hung like stalactites, their tips pointing at my nose. Others were smeared here and there—evidence of something brutal and violent.

These particular bits of brain belonged to a 23-month-old child. Earlier that day, his mother had dropped him off at his grandmother’s house. As she pulled out of the driveway, the child ran back, perhaps to say goodbye to his momma one last time. She would later recount the slight bump she felt as she turned the wheel and drove away. Obviously she had no idea that bump was her son’s skull being crushed between a tire and the outstretched roots of a pine tree. She continued on, unknowingly spraying her son’s brains across the underside of her car.

When I arrived on the scene, the paramedics had already shot her up with Ativan. She had been whirling about, slamming her head into the pavement, screaming and tearing at her blouse. In the context of morbidity, one could say that she finally had a true purpose. Bile burned in her throat. Maybe for the first time in a while she felt aware of her flesh, tingling with fear, the nausea causing vomit to rise from her gut.

I can tell you from more than 30 years of experience that this is the sort of awakening that death investigators witness daily. It is part of our job to watch humans as they awake from the illusion of happiness, ripped from their mundane existence by the ferocity of death. When this inevitable reality finally punches them in the face, it plunges many of these people into madness.

On my second date with my wife, she quipped, “I never thought about death till I met you.” In my view, death is the fart of an old person that’s politely ignored. One that most folks don’t turn into their profession. For my colleagues and me, death is a siren song. One with crescendos of blood, maggots, trauma, and screams that, for whatever reason, lure us in.

The author teaches his students that we all become furniture after we die, subject to the same environmental changes an old bed or chair is.

I’ve spent most of my life employed as a medicolegal death investigator. My career began at a coroner’s office in New Orleans, and it concluded more than three decades later following my tenure as a senior investigator with the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office in Atlanta. During that time, I participated in 7,000 forensic autopsies and completed more than 2,000 next-of-kin death notifications. Eventually, the stress was just too much, and in 2005 I was forced to retire after suffering from crippling anxiety and PTSD.

I have investigated all manners of deaths: homicides, suicides, and accidents—both natural and inexplicable. My job was to understand the various mechanisms that end people. I had no interest in convictions or those who were arrested or who got away with murder. That was the cops’ problem. I was just the nosy geek who dug around crime scenes. The answers that I sought were, while many times salacious, much more complex than an investigation into the drive-by shooting of a crack dealer.

I had three main tools to arrive at my answers: autopsy, toxicology, and microscopic tissue examination. When these assets are combined with an investigator who understands forensic applications, the right questions to ask, and how to integrate the information collected in the field with physical findings in the lab, they become highly effective methods of solving complex questions.

On first hearing what I did for a living, most people’s reaction was to open up about their deepest fears of death: “I don’t want you to see me naked in the morgue!” I assure you that after the last breath leaves your nostrils, your lack of toned abs, penis length, or cup size is the last thing you should be concerned about. Your death is a “golden ticket” for various types of voyeurs and sociopaths carrying a badge. We have backstage passes for things you never wanted anyone to know and can no longer defend. We stand over your remains, shaking our heads over pathetic suicide notes, snickering at your taste in porn or the medication you failed to take before you became the dead. We judge you because you happened to die on our watch. It’s our job, and I bet you make fun of and bitch about a lot of people at your workplace too.

Many death investigators hold the dead in contempt. The stories the dead tell are always slightly different, but they all end the same, and the investigators are often the only ones who bother to read them. I learned early on that it was fruitless for me to care about the dead, for they are unaware. They are meat that used to have a pulse.

I couldn’t care less about the families whose lives I destroyed with bad news about their expired love ones, because I had no more room in my head for screams and hysteria. But somehow I did not become unhinged.

What kept me nailed to the floor was the science behind it all. The “How” never accused you of failing the dead; it never writhed in pain from the reality of the finality of absence. It was simply a mechanism. Most folks, by way of their own vanity, never realize that who they are, what happens to them, or where they are will never really matter to a seasoned death investigator. If we focused on that, we wouldn’t last a year on the job. Focusing on the particulars in a cold and calculating way provides the intellectual stimulation that allows us to slog on. Ironically, a death investigator comes to terms with the fact that, for most of us, the “How” is the coping mechanism we use to survive. Anything more macro will have you deep-throating a pistol in no time.

An atypical suicide: The victim used a power cord.

Investigating death, of course, raises existential questions of morality and mortality. And there is one question that is more prevalent than the rest: Of the seven deadly sins, which best sums up the ills and follies of mankind?

If researchers were to gather a group of crime-scene investigators, medical-examiner investigators, homicide detectives, and other forensic practitioners into a room and pose this simple question, I believe the vote would tally squarely on gluttony. Not in the sense of Falstaff drowning in a tankard of ale, or of engorgement on lamb hocks, but rather the gluttony of daily life. Most of us live like starving hounds, sitting and slobbering at the backdoor of life, waiting for slop to be delivered by our master.

I am chief among sinners. In my years as a death investigator, death owned me. It’s all I thought about. I lived in fear that I would die at any moment and numbed myself through chronic masturbation and food. It wasn’t uncommon for me to leave a scene stinking of decomposing bodies and race to the Burger King drive-through to order two Triple Whoppers with cheese, rushing home to slather on more mayonnaise before forcing them into my mouth with hands still dusted with talcum powder from the exam gloves. The soothing wash of food, alcohol, and self-love would last until the next call, or until the next vision of destroyed humans entered my mind’s eye.

When I started my career, working for the coroner’s office in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, death investigators were required to assist in autopsies. “Assist” kind of cleans it up a bit. The process demands little to no formal training, just simple application of the “cold steel” wherever the forensic pathologist tells you. After a time, doing autopsies feels like making biscuits: Turn the lights on, take the dough out of the refrigerator, roll it out, cut it up. In fact, it’s more like butchery. You use only the sharpest instruments to cut up corpses—“tongue to nuts,” as we called it.

I was good at it. My fastest time was less than four minutes. It’s a curious thing to slice through somebody’s chest, using limb shears to remove the ribs and sternum. At first all bodies looked the same, but the more I gutted, the better I became at interpreting what I was seeing: bullets tracking through the bowels, rebar entering the eye and settling in the brain, hearts the size of Christmas hams, women with fake tits accentuated by bellies full of pills.

Death scenes are no different. Everyone thinks he’s mommy’s little angel, but in death you’re nothing. Bodies lie lifeless before the investigator like crushed roaches or deer struck by cars.

As an investigator, you look for evidence. You slouch through the motions. Sometimes you take the work seriously; at other times you barely meet the baseline. The general population views death investigators as heroes who seek justice, caring for the dead as if they were relatives. Wake up. It’s like church and Hollywood—a false front. Every now and then something stirs in you, but most of the time it’s mental masturbation with no happy ending. There are always more bodies calling for your attention.

The painted toenails of a decomposing body

It was hot and humid when I arrived at the Texas Inn on Airline Highway in New Orleans. This strip was once infamous as a haunt for mob figures, but it’s always been a home for pimps and sore-laden whores, scratching themselves, unable to focus on my questions. During my tenure in New Orleans, any number of homicides, overdoses, and suicides happened in the “no-tell motels” along Airline. The rooms were always dirty, with an unknown black substance caked into the carpet like Silly Putty shit out by a monkey with dysentery. These spots clutched at your feet like a vile form of quicksand.

As I entered the motel room, a man in his late 50s with salt-and-pepper hair lay naked on the floor, purple from the nipple line to the top of his head. His tongue protruded, clenched between his teeth, and his eyes seemed like they were about to pop out of his skull. A rubber rested loosely over his now flaccid penis, which was surrounded by crusty pubic hair, and his body lay in a puddle of liquid feces. Witnesses and the desk clerk told me that a local lady who regularly sold her body to pay for crack was seen running from the room in only a denim miniskirt, her breasts exposed, screaming.

This kind of scene is not uncommon. Prostitutes often have disagreements with their johns. When we spoke to her and examined the body, nothing pointed to signs of trauma. The room was as ordered as any other room in that hellhole could be.

I interviewed the prostitute in the manager’s office as she trembled and chain-smoked Virginia Slims. Her shoulders were draped by a sheet that hung over her stained denim skirt and black flip-flops, which used to be pink. She told us that the bald man had picked her up at least twice a week for the past month, and one time he’d paid for an entire day, a point she seemed particularly proud of. Still, she begged me not to take her back to jail. “Look,” I told her, “if you did nothing wrong, nobody is going to jail.”

On this particular day, the bald man had picked her up on the street behind the Texas Inn, telling her he didn’t have much time. She paid for the room, and when they got the key and entered the room, he started rubbing her all over. I sat there, like so many other times before, listening to what many would find prurient. By this time in my career I was far from being interested in the goings-on at any of these motels—it all seemed to be on a loop, and I struggled to concentrate on the details.

She told me how she’d put the condom in place with her special technique, which, according to her, involved her nose and teeth. When she got on top of him, his face was red and he was sweating. He grabbed her shoulders and pulled her down, coughing loudly and spitting into her face. Then his tongue stuck out and he started straining and farting, and she ran out of the room.

The man, as it turned out, had suffered a heart attack. The autopsy later revealed that two major arteries were blocked. It’s not uncommon for men to go into cardiac arrest during the throes of intercourse, or even while rubbing one out—no surprises here. But as usual, it fell upon me to track down the next of kin to deliver the news of his death, so my partner and I drove to the address listed on his license.

The victim was lured into a car and stabbed more than 20 times.

The home was located in a neat little neighborhood in suburban New Orleans. Like many of the homes in this distinctly Catholic city, religious iconography lined the yard—a shrine to the Blessed Virgin on the left and a shrine to the Sacred Heart on the right. My colleague, who was usually hungover or still drunk, climbed the steps behind me. As I knocked on the door and pulled out my coroner’s badge, I heard the footsteps coming toward us. The bald man’s wife stood there, maybe five feet tall, with dyed black hair and pink terry cloth slippers.

I introduced myself. My partner said nothing. I felt my stomach seizing up on me, as it always did. Next-of-kin notifications are usually filled with horror for the family and are always potentially dangerous. I hated doing them.

She let us in without saying a word, and just as I was about to impale her with the news of her husband’s death, she looked at me and said, “He’s dead, ain’t he?” Pope John Paul II stared at me from his position on the wall. I stood there for a moment, stunned, not knowing what to make of her. Many people said the same thing when they saw my badge, but her tone put me on my heels.

“Ma’am,” I said, “I need you to sit down.”

She didn’t sit. “He was with a whore, wasn’t he?”

My jaw dropped. “Ma’am,” I tried again, “please sit down.” She sat on her plastic-wrapped couch, her knees slightly spread, hands fisted at her side, leaning forward on her toes. “Your husband is dead.”

She vaulted into the air, shouting, “You mean to tell me I’m off my cross in this life? He’s burning in hell! Hallelujah! God has heard my prayers and delivered me! Do you know how many years I’ve waited for this? Praise God! I couldn’t divorce him, but God heard my prayers and delivered me!”

She asked me again if he’d been with a whore when he died, and I told her he was with a lady at a motel down on Airline. “A whore! I knew it!” She danced around the living room, offering praise to the Heavenly Father. Before I left, I told her where the body would be, and that she’d need to make arrangements with the local funeral home. I handed her my card and walked out of the house toward my car. She stood in the doorway, smiling and waving.

That kind of marked me as an investigator. It was the only time I had brought someone pure joy. Joy, not closure, a word I despise. It was surreal.

Four weeks later my secretary handed me a gold-embossed envelope addressed to me in beautiful calligraphy. It’s not uncommon for death investigators to receive thank-you cards, but this one was different. It was an invitation to a party, called “A Celebration of Death.” The wife was past her mourning stage and wanted the world to know she was off her cross. I didn’t attend, but I can’t help myself from smiling when I think back on it.

This is what happens when you and three of your friends are left in a van for two months after being executed. Death investigators call it “skin slippage.”

By the time I get to you, you’ll have died at one of three places: at the scene, on the way to the ER, or in the hospital. The chances that the last words you hear will be “I love you” are infinitesimally low. Most people die with the hollow dinging of hospital equipment ringing in their ears, if not the screaming of sirens, blasts of gunfire, crunching of metal, or crackle of radios.

If you die on the scene, or in the ambulance, your spirit will pass from you on some county or federal roadway, floating over the roofs of Cracker Barrels and Jiffy Lubes. If you survive the trip to the hospital, your last thoughts will be of sliding through sci-fi double doors—no control, strapped to a gurney with strange hands touching you and pushing those who care for you away.

After the machines are turned off, the IVs will be removed, your pockets will be emptied, and you’ll be stuffed into a black plastic “morgue pack” so some kid working his way through college can push what’s left of you down a hall. He’ll bump you into walls, wave at the nurse he wants to screw, wonder whether it’s time to eat. He’ll wheel you into the morgue, struggling with the door, since there will be no one there to help him. By now, no one will be interested in you anymore, not even the housekeeper cleaning your blood from the floor of the ER. What’s the point? she’ll think as she wrings your blood into a mop bucket. Them folks are just gonna mess it up again.

The young student will grab your feet and swing you onto the cooler’s stainless steel tray. This is the hard part. He has to get your upper body into the tray. Sometimes he forgets to lock the wheels on the gurney, or other times he’s too stoned, so your body may fall off and hit the floor. After brawling with your body long enough to get you on the tray, your weight will pinch his hand between the tray and your shoulder, and the last words that bounce off your eardrums will be a muffled “piece of shit” before you’re slammed into the pod. Despite the cold, your decay begins.

The author takes a reflection selfie while investigating a rape, torture, and homicide.

If it is deemed necessary, the medical examiner will claim your remains and take a look at you. A pathologist I once knew referred to this process as “making human canoes.” The law sometimes demands it, families request it, and pathologists need it as justification for their jobs. Your body will be measured, weighed, opened, and split. Portions of your organs will be kept in what look like Cool Whip containers, the rest thrown into plastic trash bags and eventually stuffed back into your chest cavity. Your torso will then be sewn up with stitches that look like baseball seams.

If your family cares, maybe you’ll be claimed. Eventually, you’ll be moved to an elegantly adorned “home” built on the profits from the dead. Your next of kin will sit on expensively covered sofas and chairs, weeping. Funeral directors, morticians, and undertakers will speak in a tone and cadence that will set the mood for crying. Hushed and still, lacking swiftness in movement, but all with a specific purpose, they’ll press their scripted pitch to those still in shock. The air will be pumped with peaceful music.

While the preacher is arranged and payments are made, you’ll be in the back room. Your blood will be drained out and replaced with sickly-sweet-smelling fluids, and your mouth will be wired shut.

Our dead are prepared and hauled off to eternity by those who never knew them, and years later families say they are still seeking “closure.” Ultimately, we have institutionalized our very beginnings as well as our ends. All that remains of our start in this life is images from a camera operated by someone who in times past would have been warming a blanket, swabbing a sweaty brow, or cutting a cord. As the dead bid a final fare-thee-well, they are honored with PowerPoint presentations set to music we think they liked. It all seems as cheap and pointless as Mardi Gras beads.

Happy Dalmatian, unhappy man. He killed himself in the kid’s toy room.

The old adage among death investigators is, “We speak for those who can no longer speak for themselves.” Do the dead really wish to be spoken for?

That statement neatly ties things up and makes it easier for us as a people to ignore death and the bigger questions we may have about life. Solving mysteries wears thin after a while, at least it did for me. Nothing that I ever did as an investigator stopped people from killing one another or themselves; I just kept answering the same questions. Humans rarely, if ever, learn from the choices of others. All that is left is the memory of bloated forgotten men and women, tortured children, and screams.

A few years back I was in charge of an undergraduate student from Tulane University who had been selected for a summer internship at the Medical Examiner’s Office in Atlanta. She was majoring in physical anthropology and, per our telephone interview, really knew her stuff regarding forensics. My colleagues and I felt that she would be a good fit.

Summer is the height of decomp season, and with the heat comes an increased weekly flow of bloated carcasses. If a student is going to make it as a practitioner, this is a great test. These internships are highly competitive, and we had to be selective.

The student arrived at the start of the day shift, 6:30 AM. When she walked into the investigative area, the three of us, drinking our coffee, couldn’t but stare. Two or three skull necklaces hung from her neck. Spikes jutted out from bracelets on both wrists. She wore a cut-off Misfits T-shirt, revealing a paper-white stomach and navel adorned with shiny piercings. Around her waist was a gray-and-black plaid miniskirt and some kind of black leather belt with a buckle in the shape of a revolver. Without extending her hand, she introduced herself and wanted to know whether we had any autopsies she could attend that day.

Of course, being the brutally honest investigators that we were, we collectively said, “Not dressed like that.” All we thought about was death, all day, every day. But we avoided connotations of morbidity, fearful that notified family members would view us as the Angels of Death. Our staff giggled as we sent her home to change.

I teach college now, and from time to time I see a student walking around campus, nails painted black, hair dyed black, skin as white as ivory, begging to experience death. I smile and think to myself, Glad it’s not me who has to notify the parents.

Another crime-scene selfie, taken by the author at the site of a drive-by shooting

A screen shot from Valiant Hearts

Perhaps the best war game of 2014 so far involves very little shooting, has a distinct shortage of blood and gore, and never once gives you a bonus for a perfect head shot. Valiant Hearts, reviewed here, is a puzzle-centered affair set during The Great War—in fact, its full title is Valiant Hearts: The Great War—and it uses four entwined character arcs to weave a coherent narrative of tremendous loss gradually giving way to the slightest shoots of hope. It’s a beautiful vision of the most terrific horrors.

Published by Ubisoft and developed by the company’s Montpellier studio, the game is rendered in the same UbiArt Framework that’s brought two previous Rayman games, Origins and Legends, to life, as well as the diminutive but delightful role-play game Child of Light. It came out for Xbox 360 and One, PlayStation 3 and 4, and PC platforms in June—but, from the 4th of September, iOS users will be able to feel its grip on their emotions as it comes to iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.

To mark the game’s move to mobile devices, for which its control scheme has been completely redesigned for the best accessibility possible, I spoke to Ubisoft IP development director Adrian Lacey and Valiant Hearts’ audio director Yoan Fanise to learn more about the making of one of this year’s most arresting interactive dramas.

VICE: The First World War is a subject that’s rarely been explored in video games. It was a time of incredible losses, and immense pain for those involved directly and through having family members on the frontline. How did you begin to address it, so as not to be disrespectful or trivialize it?
Adrian Lacey: To turn World War One into a game is really tricky. If you turned it into a shooter, it’d be horrendous—one shot, one kill, people just dying constantly. We were nervous about treating it that way because it was so violent and so aggressive. Instead, we decided on this other angle, to see the conflict from the people’s point of view—how they lived, or how they survived, through that experience.

We took away the guns and the shooting to a great extent. We didn’t know how people would react to that, because we’re effectively telling a love story as well as a war story. It’s brilliant to see the emotion in the game, from the artwork to the sound, and I’ve seen people well up a little bit playing it. I’m glad that it helps them understand war in a different way from how most games present it.

The art style helps, I think, to maintain a necessary division between the realities of the time and the fact that what you’ve got here is a game. What you’re playing through is horrific, but also—because of its stylized look—you can learn from the experience without feeling, I suppose, repulsed by it. 
The art direction, from the very beginning, became a foundation for everything we did. The way that Paul [Tumelaire, art director] approached the artwork, his style had both a comic book look and darkness to it. That allowed us to treat the war in a very serious, but also somewhat characterized way. I think that allowed us to retain this respect for the people who went through it, while also making it accessible.

We had moments of doubt, but we found that even through the darkest times of the war, people still found joy, fell in love, and had a great time. They played games and lived, and you can see that in the documents, these moments of happiness. And that helped us find our balance, too.

You mention documents—you did a lot of research going into the game, didn’t you? The team would bring in artifacts from the time that were special to them, right?
It was an advantage to have people on the team whose families had been through it—we had the stories from their families, and that direct attachment to the war made us feel that we weren’t trivializing anything. We put so much research into this—we went to the area, to the trenches of the Western Front in France, and spoke to so many people. We collected all of these facts and figures, and it’s rare to be able to show what you’ve learned, as a developer, in a game. But with this one, we’ve flipped that: we’ve put that information in the game, so they’re learning as we did.

Some reviewers felt that the stage-specific information, particularly grizzly details, interrupted their enjoyment of the game. I can’t say I feel the same. I really appreciated learning more about what I was putting these characters through, about the reality behind the fantasy you’ve drawn. Metro called it “heavy handed,” for instance, but I felt the value of having the facts relayed to me, to gain that greater context.
It’s always a fine line—some gamers don’t want to feel like they’re being educated. They just want entertainment. And that’s fine. For us, on this game, we were really focused on the emotional experience, and that’s tied to the information from the time. I don’t think that the information for each stage is too intrusive—you’re not forced to look at it, it’s optional. When we were making the game, we knew we didn’t want these things to be too in your face. We didn’t want to force them on anyone.

But I think it’s important to have the context of how and why 30,000 dogs were on the frontline, and other interesting facts. We thought that people might go through the game and Google as they went, so why not put the information right there? As part of the overall experience, it adds to the story. It’s a bit of an interactive learning experience on the side.

One of the Ubisoft IP team recording sound in the trenches

As well as the art style, the sound is very striking. It’s probably, for me, the most impressive aspect of the whole game—I don’t think I’ve heard a war game sound this, well, awful, if you get what I mean.
Yoan Fanice: We wanted to present an immersive soundscape that would essentially bring the player right into the trenches. Through soldiers’ testimonies, we learned that the moment they were asked to charge was very brutal, and quite sudden: horrific scenes filled with machine gun fire, explosions, screams and cries of anguish. The intention was to express human feelings during war through cries and music that would resonate with players, so we recorded a lot of screams from the development team. We really pushed them to the limit, to the point where they had to imagine how they would be screaming in agony as if they had taken a bullet.
Adrian: The team went down to the trenches, to record sounds in there. They worked with the French Foreign Legion as well, and went through their archive material. We took the sound side really seriously. Not all of the weapons are still active, and of those that are we might have got into trouble for firing them for this purpose.

And that approach to sound design carries over to the music, doesn’t it? 
Yoan: Since my field is audio, I had all the game designers listen to the tracks I had selected in order to help guide the mood for their gameplay sequences. This, along with real First Word War photos of the places and events that we were recreating, was really productive in terms of imagining gameplay situations that fit with the story and the characters’ mindsets during these moments.

With respect to the choice of music tracks, it had to reflect deep emotions, and so mid-range levels weren't that interesting. If you put music in a game it really has to say something; I hate music that’s just used as background ambience in order to avoid silence. Silence, at just the right moment, can sometimes say more than anything else.

What was it like, going to the actual trenches used during the First World War, as part of the game’s research?
Adrian: The freakiest thing is the distance, more than anything else. You’re in one trench and then someone tells you: "That, over there, is where the German trench would be." You could throw a rock at it. It was right there. That freaks you out—these people were that close to one another, digging trenches above and below each other. Imagine what that must have been like: you’re all quiet, and then you can hear the people in the opposite trench talking, and who knows what about.

The other thing was the size of the trenches. The Germans were pretty organized. They dug deep trenches with plenty of room, and they had bunk beds and stuff—they really worked on their trenches, to make them liveable. On the Allied side, they were very rough and ready, and really small. If you were taller than about five-foot-five you’d have been hunched over all day, every day, walking through mud with dead bodies everywhere. It certainly was not a nice image.

Our guide would point out places where they’d stack bodies, hundreds of them, and they’d be beside where the soldiers had to live. We were in a group of, say, 20, and already the space felt really cramped. I can’t begin to process how someone could live there, in that environment, for years. That’s something that will stay with all of us forever.

During the game you play as a Frenchman, a German, a Belgian and an American, and get air support from a Brit. The impression seems to be, to me, that you’re not presenting distinct good and bad sides with Valiant Hearts. There are bad people in the game, but ultimately both sides suffered.
Adrian: In war, it’s usually the good guys who win, historically—whether they were actually the good guys or not. In the First World War, there wasn’t that pronounced division, between good and bad, that you had in the Second World War. The lines were very much blurred. Communication back then was bad—it could be the case that you got a message too late to stop 100,000 people from going over the top to their deaths. It didn’t matter what side you were on, because thousands of people were being affected. And most of them didn’t know what they were doing, or where they were going—they were just told to be somewhere.

A lot of the documents from the time, that we found, talked about families being torn apart, because a lot of the combat was on the borders, where multinational families lived. Because a husband was German but his wife was French, he’d be called up, away from her, to fight against her countrymen. And that’s the story of Karl in the game—he’s taken away from his wife and child. There were so many stories we found like that. And the real people involved in the war weren’t always aware, fully, of why they were fighting—there wasn’t really that much information available to them. They were just there to do a job. And what happened? They got shot. They got shot doing their work—and if they didn’t want to do it, they’d get shot then, too.

And it seems none of us are learning from the mistakes made in the First World War, the Second and beyond. Warfare is part of any nightly news broadcast. Somewhere, right now, someone is pointing a gun at someone else they consider their enemy. It’s maddening, isn’t it, that by now we’ve not found a better way?
I’d love for people to play the game and for it to go some way towards helping them appreciate how stupid this kind of war is. Karl is our German in the game, but he wasn’t responsible for the war—he was just drawn into it. He lost just as much as the Frenchman Emile, or Freddie, our American. Everyone loses something. There wasn’t a winner.

I hope that our generation, which is able to communicate on a global scale, can maybe begin to make a change. Boundaries have changed so much, and communication has improved so much. Making games like this—sure, perhaps it can help. Maybe it can inspire someone to think differently. I’ve done traditional shooters in the past—and don’t get me wrong, because I really like them—but it’s nice to be able to show this other side of video gaming, an emotional side with a different set of messages. We’ve been lucky to have the opportunity here to try something different from the usual blockbusters, and if it does well then we’ll have the opportunity to try more different things.

Valiant Hearts: The Great War is available now for a variety of home platforms, and comes out on iOS on the 4th of September.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

Photos courtesy of the author

If drugs are your thing, 2014 is a great time to be alive. The US seems to be full steam ahead on inevitable marijuana legalization, Vermont is now looking at heroin abuse as a health problem rather than a criminal offense, and the public stigma of using harder party drugs seems to fade day by day. But with this new frontier of drug Perestroika comes a new set of challenges, and for some users, the chief among those seems to be boredom with the old delivery methods.

In a recent lengthy thread on an infamous and private Facebook group for women in Southern California, users mentioned getting cocaine blown—literally blown, not inserted—up their butts. According to the young lady who started the discussion, she would “never do coke the old way again.” Others responded, days later, extolling the pleasures of this new approach. “It hits you faster.” “The numbness.” “A more intense high.” I had to dig deeper and see if this was just an isolated incident or if it was, in fact, a trend on the rise.

Sure enough, googling “coke up butt” took me right to this LiveLeak video (NSFW) of a young lady in Rothbury, Michigan, at the Electric Forest music festival, having a young man blow a straw-full of cocaine into her anus. Sadly, despite the completely chaste nature of the act filmed, many of the tags for the video contained pejoratives like “whore” and “skank.” More importantly, the upload date was July 16 of this year! Not long after that, hundreds of people talked about it on Reddit in a post titled "Is it ok to blow cocaine up a girls ass?" 

The trail was hot.

A simplified form of the practice has existed for ages, and it even has its own slang term, "boofing," but it never seemed like something I would try. I'd always dismissed it as the kind of schoolyard rumor perpetuated by kids who will believe anything, or occasionally as just one short chapter in someone's myriad anal adventures. Suddenly, though, It was being discussed as a fad.

I called the Kaiser Permanente Media Relations team for a physician's viewpoint, and a very nice woman named Kate spoke with me. I asked her about it and she fell silent. “I know it’s funny," I said, hoping the conversation could recover, "but I just want to understand the possible health effects on a more fundamental level.”

“I’d say it’s more sad actually,” Kate replied.

“Oh. Yeah. That’s the word I should’ve used. Sad.”

Right before zero hour, I showered and scrubbed like I’d never done before in my life. My assistant (who shall remain anonymous) was wonderful enough to volunteer her time and lack of squeamishness for this experiment. The least I could do was give her an immaculately sterilized field of operations. I had looked up how anal porn stars prepped for a scene to make sure no dookie made an appearance, but an enema seemed a bit like overkill so I made do with a bunch of cupped handfuls of water in the shower.

I prepared the three methods described online. First, we’d attempt blowing the coke up my butt through a tube with lung power. Second, I’d mix a bit of water with the powder and inject the solution into my colon using a liquid syringe. Finally, I’d try just poking some dry powder right up there with my finger. My assistant, a virgin to cocaine herself, wouldn’t ever need to touch the stuff.

For the first method we used a plastic tampon applicator as the tunnel, both for ease of insertion, and because I feared no mere plastic straw could stand up to the strength of my clench. I started by chopping up approximately one third of a gram of blow into what I considered normal sized lines. It had been a while since I’d used this stuff in the more traditional sense, so I erred on the side of shorter lines. I spooned two lines into the applicator, careful not to tip it too far, lest the powder spill out the slits of the domed end.

We got the tip in me without any real difficulty. We let our laughter subside a bit and put on our game faces. She took a breath and blew into the Tampax tube. Had we the slightest bit of understanding of aerodynamics, we’d have been fully prepared for what happened next, which was the dead end of my rectum forcing the blown air to turn around and exit the side of the tube it came from.

“That didn’t work. And, my lips are very numb,” she said. “I think the coke went into my mouth.”

This may have been the most unique first time coke experience for anyone ever.

I let myself wait for a bit to see if I felt anything. Perhaps some of the coke had found its way in me after all. It was supposed to hit in about 20 seconds. Much more quickly than with inhalation. But I wasn’t feeling anything, so we moved on to round two.

I scooped two lines into the un-stoppered barrel of a baby medicine syringe. After adding a tiny bit of water and shaking up the whole solution, we put the plunger back in and slid the head of the syringe into my bum. This time it worked. Once the plunger was fully depressed, the thankfully empty syringe came back out and I instinctively shook my ass around like we were in a Looney Tunes cartoon. I guess I wanted the solution to fully coat all exposed surface areas of my rectum walls.

Success! I was chatty and a little sweaty a minute later. My assistant was enjoying her own high at that point. “My teeth are numb! How long will this last? This tastes so weird!” I was determined to give her a typical coke high experience, so we rode out the buzz with some lively discussion about the issues of the day, the representation of women in video games, and how we should totally, like, go camping some time, y’know?

Once I was on enough of a comedown that I’d be able to judge the efficacy of the third, and crudest, method, I pinched the final line between my thumb and finger, and pressed the powder into my balloon knot. Coke (of course) spilled onto the carpet, and I stood there like an idiot, afraid to pull my pants back up, lest more of the stuff decide it wasn’t going to stay up there. I suddenly realized that it probably wasn't the only time during this process that I looked like an idiot.

My butthole got numb, and I felt a little re-up from the drug. But I was mostly ready to be done with this. I was antsy and uncomfortable. I felt like the teaspoon of water from that mixed solution was going to leak out of me at any moment like a 1990s-era Olestra discharge, and my anesthetized asshole wouldn’t be able to tell. Coke can make you have to shit as it is. 

In the end, my high was no more significant than when I opt for the more orthodox approach, so the effort-to-payoff ratio is wildly lopsided. Who needs a Rube Goldberg-style delivery method when snorting will give you the same results? Maybe the girls from that original Facebook thread were just excited to be early adopters. Maybe they were having a laugh, and I ended up becoming the joke for trying it myself. Maybe I have a broken ass, and am doomed to never fully tap into the sensory pleasure center that others have there. Whatever the reason, coke up the ass is not worth the trouble.

If it ain't broke...

Follow Justin Caffier on Twitter

Photo of J-Law via Wikipedia user Stemoc

If ever the word “fap” stood a chance of entering the dictionary, this was it. The leak of over 100 actresses’ nude pictures this week, known as “The Fappening,” has exposed the world’s most famous bodies and triggered a media firestorm.

The popular view among feminists has been to encourage others to avoid the pictures entirely. But this argument is self-defeating: by mentioning the pictures and watching their own articles get retweeted, journalists still draw their readers into a “scandal.” Which isn’t to say that writers should ignore the story, it’s just ludicrous to expect readers not to follow it up and find the images. Hadley Freeman, in an otherwise agreeable piece, says that she has “never understood the appeal in looking at naked photos of people who I don’t know and who certainly have no interest in me.” Dear Hadley Freeman, I love you, but the rest of us sometimes watch porn.

Such arguments imply that looking at an image will plant the seed of misogynist evil, Videodrome-style, inside a viewer’s head. Unless the leak was a combined effort by one hundred celebrities’ ex-boyfriends, it has nothing to do with “revenge porn.” Nor is it, ultimately, a grotesque act of theft, "thought crime," or body-shaming to look at the pictures. We can’t feasibly expect everyone to ignore clickbait, though the news that McKayla Maroney’s images depict her while underage is a horribly grim twist to the affair, rendering the images child pornography, and definitely not OK to be shared.

Pornography is exactly what this incident is about, though perhaps in less obvious ways. Though the images show only female targets, it’s less of a gender issue than one of voyeurism and celebrity culture. In most of these pictures, the nudity itself isn’t what's especially remarkable: Olivia Munn and Christina Hendricks were subject to previous leaks, Kim Kardashian built a career on her sex tape, and Rihanna wore a see-through dress on the red carpet back in June. We live in a post-Miley world of songs about Iggy Azalea’s pussy and Nicki Minaj’s ass. A world GoneWild. A world where nudity is mainstream.

A list of things potentially more pornographic than J-Law on a sofa might include:
– Islamic State beheading videos
– Britney Spears’ shaved head
– Rob Ford on crack
– Rihanna’s swollen face after being attacked by Chris Brown
– Joan Rivers’ live-tweeted life support

All of the above are disturbing, and all received mainstream media coverage. The issue with The Fappening is definitely one of consent—that, of course, is what separates anything in the uploader's cache from Rihanna's see-through dress; Rihanna chose to present herself in that way, the victims of the Fappening absolutely did not. But our appetite for pornographic trespass is no longer for accidentally bared skin, but accidentally bared humanity. We want to know the setting the woman is in, the story behind each shot. This makes the denials or the humbled explanations on chat shows after a photo leak part of the process of getting off. We don’t care about seeing a celebrity naked—we just want to see them suffer.

I think Olivia Munn’s originally leaked pictures, which surfaced in 2012, remain more revealing than anything in more recent leaks. In them, text overlays a series of otherwise mundane shots, graphically detailing Munn’s fantasies. Anyone who has ever attempted sex talk over Facebook chat will be familiar with the recycling of formulaic terms heard in porn, mawkishly guessing what the other person wants to hear, and how mortifying an experience it would be if those clumsy but personal fantasies were exposed.

Similarly, it’s the DIY imperfection of images like Kate Upton and Justin Verlander looking over their shoulders into a bathroom mirror that are memorable, not for the bared skin but for how adorably goofy they look. This is where the internet stops wanting your body and begins to eat away at your soul: ultimately, we look to invade the lives of our celebrities. What will succeed the sex tape—the death tape? The celebrities-going-to-the-toilet tape? The giving-birth-live-on-E! network special?

Nudity is no longer intimate enough: what we want to see, most of all, is failure. And this is where the trolls get off: because they view the leaks as confirmation that the women in these pictures are stupid. “The Fappening” confirms their tenet that men, not pretty girls, are what makes the world—or at least the internet—go around. It confirms that they know more about technology, and privacy, and basic iCloud maintenance. It reassures them that the web is a patriarchal place, that the biggest risks in online life apply not to them but to nubile young women, who, granted the power of sex appeal, risk losing it all when that sex appeal is publicly distributed. You’d have to wonder if these men – who you can find in your nearest Fappening-related comments section – get off more on lecturing women about online security than they do on the actual pictures.

Some women, too, are complicit. The “If My iPhone Got Hacked” Twitter hashtag is an info-orgy of Mean Girls-style faux self-deprecation: following suit from Anna Kendrick’s tweet that her phone “would just be food and photos of other people’s dogs anyway,” Twitter users—a large number of them female—are smugly listing the brunch shots and blurry pictures of housepets that fill their phones, the implication being that these boring collections make them somehow morally superior and "unfappable." If not outright slut-shaming, it’s certainly slut-shading, and subtly othering the victims. 

Jessica Valenti tweeted that “People are titillated by leaked nude photos BECAUSE it is nonconsensual.” Which is true, but what many overlook is that the risk involved in taking these pictures might be exactly what their subjects enjoyed in the first place—not the risk that they'd be shared with the world, obviously, but the risk involved in sharing such intimate snapshots with one other individual. This is absolutely not intended as victim-blaming, but one of the oddly reassuring takeaways from this has got to be that celebrities really are like us: they pull unconvincing selfie faces, they emulate (badly) the poses they see in porn in cheesy pictures meant for their partners. They feel entitled to all the rituals of a normal relationship.

People are titillated by leaked nude photos BECAUSE it is nonconsensual. Please consider that before you go searching for images.

— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) August 31, 2014

Because this is normal relationship behavior. It's one of those generational things that older readers might not fathom, but for anyone who has grown up in the eye of a smartphone lens it seems natural. We all take pictures of ourselves, some of them pornographic, and will continue to do so as long as humans fap and smartphones are available on contract. The "pics or it didn’t happen" rule has filtered into the fabric of everyday relationships, and surveys show that the majority of us are at ease with the idea of sexting. One Vox piece aptly noted that telling young people not to take these pictures is another form of abstinence education. They’re going to happen, and it’s up to us to teach responsibility rather than condemnation.

The unpleasant truth is that every child after the late 80s was born with human SEO, along with a duty to maintain it. We willingly pose and download and blindly click through terms and conditions, feeding the surveillance society we live in. We’re used to being sold out and repeatedly failed by our technology: why not just admit defeat and give our bodies to the internet? Already our past selves are littered all over it: our surly LiveJournal accounts we’ve forgotten the password to, those drunk photos from Freshers Week, that clothing malfunction on a beach trip... Which brings me to my final point: by the time the Snapchat generation comes of age, all of us will be naked on the internet. We might as well get used to it now. I’m not saying it’s fair or remotely ethical that photos are leaked, or hacked, or posted by angry ex-boyfriends. But by accepting the inevitable we can begin to regain some control. 

Follow Roisin Kiberd on Twitter

Mell Masters is something of a young New York street legend. The kid is like Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind, if that movie was on some skating/street and music shit. Honestly, he is one of the most interesting and talented people we know. Not only can the dude produce, he can rap his ass off. He just never got the exposure he deserves because he was always wilding out or making music that went over people's heads.

As a rapper and producer, Mell Masters has worked with everyone (a lot of the songs are unreleased) from A$AP to JunglePussy and Kilo Kish. He was even doing the electro-style hip-hop that's hot right now way back in like 2004, for a never released project called Trash Attack. And he's gone by a million different aliases like Todd the Surfer and Mel McCloud. If you ask anyone from New York about him, they'll have crazy stories that may involve him fighting or getting stabbed in Wendy's or something off the wall like that. He's got this crazy stigma around him because he’s a wild kid. The dude was even locked up in an asylum for awhile. 

Right now, Mell Masters is in Arizona working under the moniker Playboy Sunny. He was locked up on the West coast for like six or seven months. Since he got out, he's just been sending us a bunch of the crazy tracks he's making with the most rudimentary equipment you can imagine. Needless to say, his new music is still incredible. So give this a listen. 

There will be a lot more music by Mell Masters AKA Playboy Sunny to come. So stay tuned to VICE.

The Black Out Boyz is A$AP Yams, A$AP Lou, Leeks, and J. Scott AKA A$AP Snacks. Follow them on Twitter.

Image via screengrab

It is really very easy to forget that celebrities are human beings. They birth children and morph right into their bikini bodies in a matter of weeks. Their hair is always flawless. They maintain the utmost poise even when their clothing is literally just strapped over their nipples with double-sided tape.

Celebrities are widely regarded as superhuman idols built for worship, hatred, or a vapid combination of the two. And women’s bodies are routinely marketed as goods to be enjoyed by the public at large. Mash these viewpoints together and you get the perved-out pedestal actresses that people find themselves stuck spinning around on. The very idea of privacy for an actress is a joke, and to prove this (as I’m sure you’ve seen or heard by now) nude photos of a number of famous women were stolen and posted Sunday on 4chan, Reddit, and basically anywhere else on the internet where naked pictures are published.

As we consider the horrendous nature and implications of what happened to Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, and others, it is our responsibility to also consider the language used by media in the aftermath. Media outlets have made four crucial mistakes when it comes to the language they use to describe what happened over the weekend. The names of the women are splashed all over every headline. The word “hacker” is used to describe the person or persons who stole and posted the photos. The word “leaked” is also used to describe their actions. And many outlets were quick to blame holes in Apple’s security for the massive privacy breach.

When sex crimes happen IRL, we keep the name of the survivor secret for obvious reasons: safety and protection from public scrutiny and embarrassment, among others. Why, then, is it okay to spread the names of those experiencing virtual sex crimes all over the internet? What will using the names so prominently do other than re-victimize? I understand that big names like Lawrence and Upton help draw attention to the magnitude of the crime. It’s hard to get people to care about a nameless, faceless celebrity. But we as journalists need to be more responsible about it and think twice about which aspects of a story constitute public interest. Headlines like “Jennifer Lawrence’s Leaked Nude Photos Remind Us How Crappy The Internet Can Be For Women” are simply begging people to google “Jennifer Lawrence leaked nude photos” without having read the story. Outlets aren’t posting the photos this time around, and that’s good to see. But these headlines are blatant SEO plays shrouded in self-righteousness.

Let’s be clear: The person or persons who stole the photos is a sex offender, not a hacker. Hackers aim to make all information open and free. Hackers do not, by definition, steal another person’s intimate and very private photographs and flaunt the results to the entire planet. By calling the perpetrator a hacker, we gloss over the issue at hand. We focus none of our attention on the sex crime, and all of our attention on the perpetrator’s intelligence—and the naked bodies of the celebrities in question.

Further, the word “leak” makes the whole affair sound like a hapless accident. It implies it’s somehow the fault of the naked person whose photos were stolen, as though the photos were a publicity stunt. And blaming Apple is, again, ignoring the crime—although, calling awareness to such a major security flaw is, at the end of the day, a good thing.

Even still, the fact that our society wants to actively ignore crimes against women is nothing new, but casting around to blame anyone but the perpetrators is next level.

We need to care about this because actresses are just women. Because of their desire to pursue their art, they are already forced to give up such basic joys as not being chased by paparazzi in public, or not being photographed by various peeping toms whilst in a bikini on vacation. As Roxane Gay says, anyone who dares to threaten the status quo is in danger of this kind of crime. But they shouldn’t dare to have sex lives, which is funny because the same people who are saying this are the ones looking at the pictures of their sex lives. How ironic! The logistics just do not hold up, and the hypocrisy in the criticism of Lawrence is grotesque.

Many of us (ahem, Ricky Gervais) behave as though others should meet with certain punishment for venturing to have a private sex life. This is a ludicrous argument. We do our banking, register for classes, communicate with colleagues, make friends, go shopping, and learn online—in so many ways, our lives have transferred to the virtual realm, and sex is no different.

As noted Toronto feminist advocate and social media expert Steph Guthrie points out to the CBC:

“We all feel that we are entitled to access to celebrities, to their bodies, to their private lives. And I think to some extent, that’s always been the case. But certainly nowadays, in the culture that we have—the 24-hour monitoring, TMZ, being able to follow celebrities on Twitter—people feel an even greater right to be able to access that celebrity’s private life. And unfortunately, for some people, that seems to include images that they’ve shared [which are] being stolen without their consent.”

It is not on celebrities to avoid having a cyber sex life. It is not on celebrities to keep their sex life off of their computer, out of the cloud, or out of their inbox. They’re not servants of the church, they’re entertainers. It is up to us as individuals to not deem ourselves entitled to the naked bodies of others. When some individuals fuck that up royally, it is on the rest of us to uphold basic human decency by not seeking out the photos, not masturbating to them, and not blaming the celebrities who are no doubt humiliated enough.

Jennifer Lawrence and the others who have been exploited are objectively desirable, sure. But that doesn’t make them our property. They are entertainers. They deserve to go home at night and have a private sex life. There are tons of gorgeous women who choose to appear naked on the internet, who like being sexually desirable to the masses, and who get compensated appropriately for doing so. This consensual virtual sexuality is called pornography. Try it.

@sarratch

Elder women of the Shinnecock Nation. Photo by Andrew Brannan

The Shinnecock Indians have lived on Long Island's famed East End for thousands of years. Like so many other tribes along the east coast, the Shinnecocks were ravaged by disease brought by European settlers. Today, the Shinnecock Indian Nation consists of less than 1,500 members, about half of whom live on the tribe’s 750-acre reservation on the island’s southeastern shore. The Nation finally earned federal recognition in 2010 after a brutal, decades-long legal battle that one tribal leader described as a “degrading, humiliating, intrusive experience.” Four years later, though, some of the optimism that accompanied that historic moment has dissipated. Economic development remains a serious challenge. It would not be a stretch to describe the Shinnecocks as desperate.

The story of what has happened to this proud tribe over the past century and a half involves some fundamental questions about the American project: Who owns what? What is to be done for those victimized by the system and left with nothing? When do grievances from the past cease to be legitimate? As with so many other native tribes, none of these questions have thus far been resolved in the Shinnecocks’ favor. Their saga serves as a sobering reminder of how those who stand in the way of the capitalist mission—merely by existing—get bulldozed and forgotten.

The Shinnecock Indian Nation’s tribal lands are entirely within the parameters of the Town of Southampton, which happens to be a favored vacation spot for economic elites, including some of the most powerful people in the world. Tycoons like George Soros and David Koch own mansions there, as do a bunch of faceless financiers, those people no one’s ever heard of who somehow become billionaires by doing work no one understands. They are joined by the likes of Howard Stern, Kelly Ripa, and other big shots from the entertainment industry. Truth be told, if you don’t have a place in the Hamptons, you’re really not balling like you should be. It’s a place for obscenely rich white people, and P. Diddy, to just get away from it all, and spend their summers lavishly.

Anyone who has ever walked the streets of Manhattan—or any other major American city—has witnessed the acutely nauseating spectacle of extreme poverty and egregious wealth existing side by side. What makes the contrast between the Shinnecocks’ exceptionally modest existence and the virtually unrivaled affluence that surrounds uniquely jarring, though, is that all that land on which the Masters of the Universe play their precious golf and throw their fabulous parties once belonged to the tribe. Today, this land is considered some of the most valuable real estate in the world, worth billions of dollars. And the Shinnecocks want it back.

To understand how the Shinnecocks lost their land, we need to go back to 1703. That year, English settlers representing the Town of Southampton completed a lease agreement with the Shinnecocks that recognized their ownership of thousands of acres of land on eastern Long Island. This land was to be controlled by the tribe for a period of 1,000 years—in other words, in perpetuity. And for more than 150 years, the Shinnecocks lived on this land, occasionally fighting off raids from other tribes, while engaging in the fishing and whaling for which they were famous.

Then, in April of 1859, white residents decided there was no compelling reason why the natives should get to keep all the land that was legally promised to them. So they concocted a transparently bogus “agreement” in which the Shinnecock leaders inexplicably consented to transfer the “right, title, and interest” to 3,600 acres of pristine land to these white people. Residents brazenly forged tribal leaders’ signatures and presented the document to state legislators, who authorized the transfer in defiance of federal law, which required congressional approval for such things. The economic stakes here were not insignificant, with a railroad included in the development plans business interests had for this land, and that may have been enough incentive for the state to look the other way. In any case, there was very little legal or political risk in strong-arming an Indian tribe back in those days, and the theft was swiftly carried out.

Fast-forward about 150 years. In the summer of 2005, the Shinnecock Indian Nation filed a lawsuit in federal court against, among other parties, New York State and the Town of Southampton. The Nation sought financial compensation and the removal of all current residents from the land so that it may be returned to the tribe.

The Shinnecock Hills Counry Club. Photo by David Hilgart

The lawsuit created an uncomfortable buzz around Long Island; local elites were irked by the tribe’s inexplicable act of insolence. In November of 2006, a US District Court ruled against the Shinnecocks. District Judge Thomas Platt cited the same “pragmatic concerns” that had led the Supreme Court and the Second Circuit to rule against the Oneida and Cayuga tribes in vaguely similar cases in 2005. Platt’s opinion repeatedly refers to “laches,” a seldom-applied legal concept designed to prevent parties from waiting an unreasonably long period of time before asserting a claim to property. Since 1859, the land has been “the subject of occupation and development by non-Indians,” and there has been a “dramatic change in the demographics of the area and the character of the property.” Any sort of land transfer would therefore be prohibitively “disruptive.”

It’s reasonable to wonder why the Shinnecocks did take so long to proceed with a meaningful attempt to reclaim these lands. “The language barrier and lack of familiarity with the US legal system at the time would have made it nearly impossible for the tribe to assert their rights,” said Greg Guedel, chairman of Native American Legal services at the Foster Pepper law firm in Seattle and a researcher at the University of Washington, when I asked him what the holdup was. Indeed, one of the central points the tribe made in the suit is that “institutional barriers prevented the Nation from having a forum to subsequently vindicate its rights.”

The Shinnecocks’ inability to take serious legal action for all those years hardly means that they’re only now realizing the injustice of what happened. It’s not like they were ever cool with having this land stolen. Tribal leaders did not wake up in 2005, look outside, and say to themselves, “Oh, shit. Where did those 3,600 acres go?”

The Nation credibly claims that it has vehemently objected to the theft ever since it occurred. There was just no realistic way for them to do anything about it. Aside from the language barrier, the unfamiliarity with the legal system, and the fact that virtually nobody in power at the local, state, or federal level would have been on their side—the Indian Wars were raging at this time—the Shinnecocks would have been unable to even prove with documentary evidence what had been done. Guedel pointed out that all documentation from the fraudulent land deal would certainly have been created solely “for the purpose of justifying the seizure of the tribe’s lands” and “without any input from the Shinnecock people.” He described it as “theft wrapped in legal paperwork.”

In short, the Shinnecocks had no concrete evidence to prove that this was an institutional crime that changed their entire way of life and dramatically altered their future prospects—and even if they did, the people in a position to do something about it would have given approximately zero fucks. These realities were of little concern to Judge Platt, though, who ruled:

"To be sure, the wrongs about which the Shinnecocks complain are grave, but they are also not of recent vintage, and the disruptive nature of the claims that seek to redress these wrongs tips the equity scale in favor of dismissal."

An appeal of this decision is still pending.

Consider how incredibly surreal all of this must feel to a Shinnecock Indian. They have a massive chunk of their land brazenly stolen by white Europeans. For a century and a half, the downtrodden tribe ekes out a meager livelihood on a small parcel of land—a fraction of what it once had—as some of the wealthiest, most awful people in the world turn what were once sacred grounds into their personal playground. All this time, through all these decades, the tribe is without recourse, having no conceivable way to do anything about what has happened. Finally, with the help of some dedicated and highly skilled lawyers, the tribe brings its case to federal court, to “only seek what is due us,” in the words of one tribal leader—only to be told by an 80-year-old white judge, “Sorry, you really should have come to us sooner, and besides, we can’t ‘disrupt’ the lives of the Wall Street titans who now reside on your ancestral lands.”

People on boats in the Shinnecock Canal. Photo via Flickr user Mr. TinDC

While tribal officials declined comment for this story, I did speak with one tribal member who asked not to be identified due to the sensitivity of these issues. “It’s a shame that we have to live in damn near poverty,” she told me. What seems to most upset her is not the extreme opulence of those living on sacred tribal grounds or the fact that the Nation “isn’t reaping any of the benefits” of the prime real estate, but rather the general lack of respect afforded to the Shinnecocks at the local level.

She didn’t mean disrespect in some abstract sense, either. It’s disrespect that manifests itself in the daily lives of Shinnecocks. “What pisses me off the most,” she told me, is that “we can’t even go to the beaches here.”

Wait, what? The beaches off of which the Shinnecocks have fished and whaled for thousands of years? “We have to pay $300 for a town permit or pay $40 to park at Cooper’s Beach for one day. I don’t have that kind of money,” she said. The breathtakingly beautiful Cooper’s Beach, which consistently ranks among America’s top ten beaches, is less than 10 minutes from the reservation.

Fed up, she recently decided to take a stand and refused to pay the required $40. “You’re on our land,” she told the beach official. “I’m not going to pay you $40 for nature that you shouldn’t be charging for anyway.” When the official insisted on the $40, she didn’t back down “out of principle.” The Village of Southampton responded by serving her with a $250 ticket.

What has been done to the Shinnecock Indians is pure class warfare, on a colossal scale, and it’s ongoing. Given the sheer relentlessness of the mistreatment they have suffered, and all that has been lost, it’s remarkable the Shinnecocks aren’t even more furious. Indeed, the tribe’s overall equanimity is striking, given everything that has happened. As Randy King, a former tribal leader, put it: “We have been good neighbors to the very people who stole our ancestral land for their own financial gain.” Now, after what King called “hundreds of years of lies, broken promises, and exploitation,” it does not look like the Shinnecocks will ever actually get their ancestral land back.

And this is not the only bad hand the Shinnecocks have been dealt since the jubilance that accompanied federal recognition in 2010. The Nation has struggled with internal political squabbling, and economic development has been stagnant. The casino project into which the tribe pushed a substantial chunk of its limited resources remains mired in legal conflict. When their gaming plans didn’t materialize, the Shinnecocks were “left with nothing,” as the tribal member told me. Along with the perpetual struggle for economic survival, the Nation continues to be saddled with the condescension and outright disrespect of its neighbors, many of whom are ignorant of the history of where they live. (Time studying history could be spent making money.) In fact, according to the Shinnecock I spoke with, not only do many residents not know the history of the area, “some of them don’t even know we exist.”

After having their signatures forged, their land stolen, and their way of life disrespected in myriad, unconscionable ways, how else can the dignity of Shinnecocks possibly be attacked? By being oblivious to their very existence. They’ve become such an insignificant blip on the radar in the Hamptons scene that they might as well not even be there. That’s the final blow.

Follow Justin Doolittle on Twitter.

GIFs by Kelton Sears

The first thing we heard when we pulled into the Finney Farm was the clattering of drums, followed by a high-pitched howling noise.

Suddenly a wild pack of young girls came running out of the woods waving sticks in the air. The youngest, maybe two years old, had sticky berries smeared across her face. She was inexplicably waving a $5 bill in the air. The leader of the pack, maybe 13, suddenly noticed us and halted her group—who all promptly dropped their sticks.

“Oh, hi, I haven’t seen you yet, so I guess you’re new here,” she said. “Well, um, welcome to the farm. If you go way down the forest trail, past the big fallen tree, you’ll find a clearing that I think would be nice to set a tent up in. I dunno. You’ll figure it out.”

Then the pack took off howling back into the woods.

We were here for the Cascadia Rainingman Festival, held on Labor Day weekend at a gorgeous 100-plus acre organic farm in the foothills of the North Cascade mountain range in Washington State. Unless you follow the fringe politics of the Pacific Northwest, you’re probably wondering what Cascadia is, and that’s a tricky question, because self-described “Cascadians” hold all kinds of different beliefs. (The first of many workshops at the festival was titled “What is Cascadia?”)

The idea of Cascadia can be traced back to the 70s to a couple of sources. The most prominent is Ernest Callenbach’s 1975 classic Ecotopia, a goofy but lovable utopian novel full of solar panels, ritualistic warfare, and druidic sex. In the book, the West Coast secedes from the US to form its own country, Ecotopia, a land governed by president Vera Allwen, of the Survivalist Party. In Ecotopia, people have completely shifted to renewable energy and have structured their entire lives around the concept of ecology and sustainable living. They smoke marijuana freely, wear rain-resistant fitted serapes, and are all borderline tree worshippers. (This may not sound that odd to you if you’ve been to certain parts of Seattle.) The first US journalist ever permitted in the country serves as the book’s naïve narrator. He’s really freaked out at first, but he comes around and falls in love with the place.

The term Cascadia didn’t start being used to describe a real-world culture until a professor at Seattle University named David McCloskey started using the term in his class “Cascadia: Sociology of the Pacific Northwest” in the late 70s. Geologists and botanists had long used the term “Cascadia” to refer to the bioregion of British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon, a naturally linked ecological region connected by shared watersheds and the Cascades. But McCloskey was the first to link “Cascadia, land of falling waters” to what he perceived as an emerging “sociocultural unity.”

In 1994, a Portlander named Alexander Baretich designed the “Doug Flag,” the unofficial flag of Cascadia. Featuring a Douglas fir and blue, white, and green stripes (for the regional landscape’s colors), the flag quickly became the dominant symbol of the nascent Cascadian identity, making its way into cheeky microbreweries’ beer labels, Portland Timbers MLS matches, and an increasing number of local gay pride, Occupy Wall Street, and environmental protests.

Since then, the Cascadian movement has birthed a vast, decentralized network of groups who meet up in cities all over British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon. For some, it’s chiefly an environmental cause. For others, it’s a chance to decolonialize a region of the US whose culture is already distinctly un-American.For a few, it’s a shot at Ecotopia-style secession. But in the end, what it really boils down to is a new identity, one that is uniquely Pacific Northwestern. Cascadians are quickly recognizing that despite the vast array of cultures and attitudes that make up the region, many people here share the same set of values: an affinity for nature, a distinct open-mindedness, and a desire for societal and technological progress.

But rather than explaining it for them, we asked seven people at Rainingman to tell us why they identify as Cascadian. This is what they said:

Portraits by Allyce Andrew

Brandon Letsinger, founding director of CascadiaNow

For me, being Cascadian is a way of living, the choices we make in this region, and the interconnectedness of the area, both culturally and geographically. What I love about Cascadia is it’s this region that’s brought together by the commonalities of all these layers. It starts with the ecology—we share the watershed of the Columbia and Fraser rivers. From that comes this interconnected culture, whether it’s beer or art or music or food, and within that all these other things as well.

CascadiaNow is working to establish this regional identity so that we can stop identifying as American. It’s about reframing things so that we think of ourselves as inhabitants of this place. When that perspective shift happens, you can start thinking about what living in this place means, both as a cultural identity, socially, and, in the end, politically. Why is our political system failing us? I know we can do so much better here. 

Alexander Monsanto, a Seattleite who works in finance at Nintendo and is studying computer programming

I grew up in the region, but I was born in Puerto Rico. I think that’s part of the reason I resonate so deeply with decolonization. Puerto Rico and Washington are both under control of a capital that’s something like 2,000 miles away.

So much of the original culture has been washed away through colonization. We could start with things like renaming Mount Rainier Mount Tahoma, like it used to be called.

I marched with a Rainbow Cascadia flag in the Pride Parade in Seattle because I think it’s important to show other LGBTQ people and minorities that we identify with Cascadia too, so people don’t think it’s some sort of radical separatist movement or some white supremacy thing—we have to show that the idea of the whole concept is actually all about inclusivity. 

Lennée Reid, a spirtualist and poet from Olympia, Washington, with her daughter Olivia

I identify with Cascadia because it’s a region I feel connected to with the Earth, and a region that possesses an openness with ideas. The way that I put it is, “I will not get stoned or shunned for expressing my different ideas” in Cascadia. That’s just not how it is here.

It’s all these different ideas and cultures coming together, connecting with the Earth and looking to sustain each other—that’s the flag, that’s the tree. I think there should be a mountain on it too, in my personal opinion [laughs]. I want to raise my kid with the vibes and the values here. 

Illona Trogub, a farmer and chef from Portland, Oregon

I think identities are really important. I’m Jewish and Russian by birth and I question what that means. I’m from Ukraine, and while I was living there it was still the Soviet Union. So am I Soviet? Am I Ukrainian? Am I Russian because the language I speak is Russian? I really question these ideas of borders and nations and states. When I came to the US and the Soviet Union collapsed, I had to say I was from a country that no longer existed.

Looking at the vastness of the US and Canada, the diversity of cultures that exist here, and the lack of representation of the people living throughout—I had to severely question whether or not it’s worth it to identify as this giant structure… you know, as American. I’d much prefer to identify with the place where I inhabit, the place I want to learn and know.

When I got to British Columbia, I knew it was that region I wanted to know. I wanted to learn about the food traditions and the culture of the Secwepemc people. Those traditions have been ravaged by racism, though, which is why I’d like to work to create a culture that respects those traditions and gives them space to recreate those original cultures of place.

When I say, "I’m Cascadian," it means the Pacific Northwest is the place I want to know deeply, and that has called me home to it.

You can read Illona’s thesis from Portland State University on Bioregionalism here. 

Andrew Lee, a Vipassana meditation practitioner and wanderer from Vancouver, British Columbia, by way of Calgary, Alberta

I believe in bioregionalism. I believe a lot of political borders weren’t drawn properly. Western North America was drawn out by a couple of explorers who were staking out land for whoever they represented at the time. I know John Thompson staked out British Columbia for Canada, and I remember someone telling me if it weren’t for a fork in a mountain valley that John Thompson took, Washington might have been part of Canada.

Bioregionalism makes sense in that regions with a similar biology and culture of people should have their own country. Everyone here is a lot more open minded. People live here more sustainably. I think it’s the mountain culture. I believe that mountains have a very humbling force, and people who live around them naturally have more of an affinity for nature and work to take care of it. The idea of raising chickens in your backyard is probably a lot more foreign in the East, but here it’s more commonplace. People grow their own food here all the time.

Kelly Dale, a hairstylist from Seattle, and his son Milo

Milo: I like Cascadia because—‘cause it feels good. ‘Cause, when it’s night, then my eyes can see at night.

Kelly: Yeah? Because when it becomes night, your eyes can see the stars?

Milo: Yeah!

Kelly: Milo is four and a half. He’s a typical city kid that doesn’t get out at night very much and doesn’t get to experience the sky at night.

Milo: Sometimes I stay up late at night to look at the sky. But not tonight. It’s going to rain tonight, but our tent will keep it out ‘cause it has a cover.

Kelly: This is maybe our fourth camping trip, and that’s part of why Cascadia is important because…

Milo: WE WENT TO CAMPING IN BREMERTON AND THERE WERE CANNONS. They were not new though. They were very old.

Kelly: Cascadia is important for me, and in raising Milo, because it’s about opening your eyes to the magic of the place that’s around you, so you’re not always on the internet going, “Where can I go that’s not here?”

Milo’s learning about where we are on this floating rock spinning through outer space, in this galaxy, on a planet called Earth. That’s kind of how I brought up Cascadia to him—I told him, “We live in this state, but also in this great place called Cascadia.” We talk about being a steward to the environment and how coal terminals and oil pipelines impact our region. He’s already talking about renewables.

Milo: I love this place I love this place I love this place I love this place. I want to get a camping trailer. Imagine if a camping trailer were right there, but it just stayed there FOREVER and you LIVED in it.

Amy Carlson, a jeweler and singer-songwriter from Seattle

Cascadia just resonates so deeply with who I already feel I am and where I am. Being a part of a community that really wants to change themselves, the people around them, and the area around them out of this sense of needing to be a part of the nature and ecology here.

(On Cascadian Black Metal, which is a thing): I think a lot of the things bands of that genre, “Cascadian Black Metal” or whatever you want to call it, the subjects they sing about, the song structures, the sound in general—I think they just resonate with a lot of the ideas behind the Cascadian movement. There’s a lot of melodies and song structures in that genre that come from Northern European music—and a lot of the early settlers here in the Northwest were from that region, you know, Swedish, German, what have you. Those cultures also have a close connection with nature, I mean, that shit goes back through people’s family histories. When you’re around the ocean and the mountains and the woods, you can’t help but draw from that. 

Kelton Sears plays in a "treepunk" band named Kithkin, and writes about news, music and the future for Seattle Weekly.

Kitsune, a tulpa hosted by Maciej from Wroclaw, Poland

Kitsune was a mercurial orb hovering above a marble obelisk. Maciej looked at her. “What do you want to be?” he asked. The orb vanished. Then Maciej heard the pad of feet on grass. He whirled around. There she was. Naked. With large fox ears and a bristly tale. She looked at him with large, primitive eyes.

When Maciej opened his eyes he was lying on his bed in his house in Wroclaw, Poland. Outside it was a gray day. He jumped up, sat in front of his laptop, and got in touch with me.

“I did it, she’s here,” he typed into Skype. 

“Can I speak to her?” I replied. Maciej paused and listened internally. In between his thoughts came a sweet little tone; it seemed to move his fingers automatically,

“Hi, I’m Kitsune and I’m a tulpa.”

Tulpas are sentient beings imagined into existence using meditation-style exercises. Their creators, known as “tulpamancers”, form the internet’s newest subculture, meeting online at tulpa.info and the subreddit r/tulpas.

“I have three tulpas,” said Nick Kingston, a game design student from Plymouth, England. “They’ve been with me 20 months; their names are Twi, Dash, and Scoots. They are three anthropomorphic ponies about a foot high.”

Nick has a very close friendship with the three ponies living inside his head. “With other people, there is always something you hold back; I guess I don’t do that with them.”

An example of the form a tulpa might take in Tibetan mysticism

Tibetan mystics have long practiced a method to create sentient beings from the power of concentrated thought. Explorer Alexandra David-Neel was the first Westerner to discover the practice. “Besides having had few opportunities of seeing [tulpas], my habitual incredulity led me to make experiments for myself,” she wrote in her 1929 book Magic and Mystery in Tibet. “My efforts were attended with some success.”

Tulpas remained the preserve of occultists until 2009, when the subject appeared on the discussion boards of 4chan. A few anonymous members started to experiment with creating tulpas. Things snowballed in 2012 when adult fans of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic—known as “bronies” to anyone who's been near a computer for the past three years—caught on. They created a new forum on Reddit and crafted tulpas based on their favourite characters from the show.

“The Reddit forum has 6,000-plus members,” writes Dr Samuel Veissière, Visiting Professor of Transcultural Psychiatry, Cognitive Science and Anthropology at McGill University in Montreal. His study is the first academic literature about contemporary tulpamancy. “The Russian social networking site Vkontakte also boasts 6,000+ members… [Although] actual numbers are difficult to estimate.”

“The My Little Pony fandom was one of the first online communities to really grab hold of the tulpa phenomenon,” said Ele Cambria, a tulpamancer from Warrensburg, Missouri. “Bronies are very accepting of weirdness; they have that mindset of, ‘Wow, that's not normal; that's cool.’ The [My Little Pony] characters evoke a simple goodness… what fan wouldn't want one for a friend?”

In the cross-pollinating fields of the internet, it wasn’t long before tulpamancy also started to attract manga and fantasy fans. “My tulpa is called Jasmine,” said Ele. “She’s a human but from an alternative reality where she can do magic. I created her a dozen years ago for a fantasy series I write and then made her into a tulpa.”

"Tulpa" by Jeffee Slimjim

So they’re fanboys with imaginary friends, right? Not really—tulpas are believed to be conscious beings with their own preferences, and they're not completely under their host’s control.

“Tulpas are understood as mental constructs that have achieved sentience,” writes Veissière. Nearly 40 percent of his respondents reported that their tulpas “felt as real as a physical person,” while 50.6 percent described them as “somewhat real… distinct from [their] own thoughts.”

"Hehe, daddy taught me this one,” said Storm, a tulpa hosted by Ryan Painter from Oregon, who typed her words into an email for me. “Cogito Ergo Sum—I think therefore I am,” she continued. “I’m not totally independent, though; I have to use my host’s brainpower to think and we occasionally get jammed when we're trying to think at once.”

Tulpamancers note how their creations say unexpected things, recall forgotten memories and make them laugh. “I can recall any hidden or faded memory that [my host] has forgotten,” said KT, a tulpa hosted by Sam Isatis from Maryland. “I control a lot of her subconscious functions—as a joke I even made her yawn multiple times a few months back.”

"Amon" by Daia Le

“I can't be sure, but I know that I exist,” says Kitsune, the fox-eared tulpa hosted by Maciej. “Maybe I'm only an illusion, a mistake in his brain. No one will ever know, but we have to believe.”

Tulpas are a broker between their hosts and the latent potential of the subconscious. Hosts claim their creations can retrieve any memory, heal trauma, block chronic pain, cheerlead their studies or just be a companion.

“[Tulpamancers’] happiness levels were assessed through a variety of qualitative interview tools,” writes Veissière. “[The results] suggest that the experience of tulpamancy has an overwhelmingly beneficial impact on their general happiness.”

For most, simple companionship is enough. “My motivation for having a tulpa was the same as there is for having any other kind of friend,” said Ele. “Someone who knows everything about you but still loves you… who knows not just the outer portion, but the deep inside, too.”

For people who want to experiment with the energetic mush of the mind there are guides that explain the tulpa creation process, also known as “forcing.” A tulpamancer must first create an imaginary environment called a “wonderland” where they begin to interact with their tulpas.

“My wonderland is a little forest grove,” said Ele. “I’d imagine myself there hanging out with [my tulpa] and we’d talk… or we’d go explore, basically the same stuff you’d do with a friend in real life.”

A diagram of a tulpamancer's brain, demonstrating where they feel their tulpas 

After first meeting their tulpa in the wonderland, hosts begin to feel odd pressure in parts of their head. This is their tulpa beginning to communicate. As the forcing process continues, the tulpa’s voice becomes clearer. Ultimately, a practitioner can “impose” their tulpa on reality by creating a realistic hallucination. One guide pegged the amount of time it takes to do this at 200 to 500 hours. 

While voice is the most common way tulpas communicate with their hosts, tulpamancers can learn to stroke their tulpa’s fur, feel their breath on their necks, and even experience sexual contact.

Tulpas soon get curious about their host’s body; some want to experience life as a “meatperson.” Indulgent hosts then use a practice called “switching,” which allows their tulpa to possess their body while they watch from the ringside of consciousness. For some, this sounds dangerously close to schizophrenia or dissociative identity disorder.

Not so, say the tulpamancers. In 99 percent of cases the host can choose to switch back at any time. And Veissière said via email that “[Tulpamancy] could have radical implications for the treatment of schizophrenia and other malignant psychoses… In the age of big pharma and the marketing of madness… 'tulpa-therapy' could offer a free alternative that doesn’t require institutionalization and social isolation.”

"Shira", by Daia Le

Some tulpamancers already use the practice to self-medicate. “I have been suffering from depression and suicidal thoughts for a decade now,” said Sam from Maryland. “My tulpa would try and attack my anxiety and even forcefully possess my hand to keep me from harming myself with a knife.”

But what about the 1 percent of cases where switching turns sinister? Take the strange case of Koomer and Oguigi. Koomer was a tulpamancer who documented his attempt to have his tulpa, Oguigi, take permanent possession of his body, eventually having a breakdown.

“I know what happened was not Oguigi’s fault,” Koomer blogged earlier this year. “All the bad things came from a year of stupid behaviour inspired by my reckless pursuit to switch permanently… Don’t try to have [your tulpa] take over. Not because they would harm you in any way, but because other entities will harm you if you open yourself up to such a level. I did that and it nearly made me schizo.”

Koomer’s case is rare, and for Veissière “schizophrenia [could be understood as]… an incapacitating example of ‘involuntary Tulpas,’" therefore, by forming positive relationships with their symptoms, sufferers can start to recover. It's an idea shared by the “Hearing Voices Movement,” who challenge the medical models of schizophrenia and suggest that pathologization aggravates symptoms.

“My schizophrenia manifested itself by having many thoughts and ideas all conflicting and shouting at me,” said Logan, who wanted his last name withheld. “Turning them into tulpas gave those thoughts a face and allowed them to be sorted out in a way that made sense.”

A drawing of Siouxie, a tulpa hosted by Kelson

Tulpa sex is a controversial subject in the community. “Imagine how that would make them feel,” writes Linkzelda, the anonymous author of a Tulpa creation guide. “That they were only created as a sex doll.”

However, if sex is part of close relationship that’s another story. “In short, yeah, we have,” said Scoots, one of the three My Little Pony–style tulpas hosted by Nick. “All three of us have [had sex with our host] at one point or another.”

“We totally bang,” said Siouxsie, a tulpa hosted by Kelson, who wanted his details withheld. “I guess you're asking about the mechanics of it, right? It's like jerking off, but you mentally disassociate with the actual world and just go nuts in the wonderland.”

For all their penchant for banging imaginary ponies and weird cat things, tulpamancers have a great sense of humor. They created the totally safe-for-work subreddit, r/TulpasGoneWild where users post pictures of their conquests—only, since no one else can see them, that means the message board is full of pictures of empty beds and vacant rooms.

A picture posted on r/TulpasGoneWild titled, "[F]ucked in public"

Thousands of young men have taken to the tulpa community and started exploring their imaginations, populating private wonderlands with talking ponies that they may or may not have sex with. Is this really what our grandfathers went to war for?

In a move that would make Terence McKenna proud, it is the dominant culture itself that pushes them into gender-dubious subcultures. “[Tulpa enthusiasts] draw less energy from the world than from thoughts and ideas,” said Ele. “And that’s something that’s shunned in boys and encouraged more with girls… that can push people to want to have a friend who doesn’t judge them in that way.”

“[For tulpamancers], the male to female ratio is approximately 75/25 (male/female),” writes Veissière. “Though up to 10 percent identify as gender-fluid, and explore further ‘creative’ gender and ethnic variations through their humanoid tulpas.”

Tulpamancers, like the bronie culture before them, have their own ideas about gender. “I think the idea of masculinity and femininity might be on its way out,” said Nick. “The norms or boundaries that have been erected over time to stop males or females or anyone from doing what they like are something that, thankfully, seems to be going away.”

This is the first article I've written that quotes an imagined being. It felt odd to me at first, but if I remember the work of William James correctly, a worldview does not need to rest on verifiable evidence in order to be significant.

And what is significant about the tulpa phenomenon is that it illuminates the dialectic of our time; the meeting of gushing internet culture with the slow, quiet world of the imagination. This fusion attracts people who were once marginalized and engages them in the process of community-building. 

Back in Wrocław, Maciej is in his wonderland with Kitsune. She’s now over a month old. “Souls—we don't believe in such things,” Kitsune told me via Maciej’s email. “It's just an illusion that our minds create. Maciej and I are created from bunch of neurons; we live together and we die together.”

Follow Nathan Thompson on Twitter.

This Monday was New York's 47th annual West Indian Day Parade, a Labor Day street procession that wraps up a week's worth of festivies aimed at developing and celebrating West Indian culture, arts, history, and tradition. As usual, nearly every party involved—police, politicians, and plebians—got something unique out of the spectacle.

For elected officials, it's the perfect place for political grandstanding. If there was ever a time for Mayor Bill de Blasio to flex his ethnic pedigree by bringing along the First Lady (who is of Bajan and St. Lucian descent) and their mixed kids, this was it. Governor Andrew Cuomo showed up, too, and even tried to shake my hand—though that might've just because the Times recently ran a story about how he hates interacting with the masses.

For the commonfolk—aside from the occasional violence that comes with almost any large group of humans—the parade is one of the last good street festivals the city has to offer, with over a million people showing up each year. And for the NYPD—whose parade detail topped out at around 4,000—it's little more than an annual reality check, a "scheduled riot" that highlights just how outmanned and outmatched they are.

For these and other similar photos, make sure to pick up a copy of Airhorn at the NY Art Book Fair later this month.

Follow Bobby on Twitter and Tumblr.

As we approach the back end of what feels like the summer that never was, and we start thinking about the impending chilliness of fall, it's easy to forget the sunshine-y good times that the season is supposed to embody. As a helpful reminder, we put together a collection of photos from one of our favourite photographers Maya Fuhr, that we feel capture the essence of the bright, sticky sweetness of the dog days. We hope you enjoy. 

Check out more of Maya's work on her Tumblr.

After the devastating 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti in January 2010, reporter Sebastian Walker arrived in Port-au-Prince to cover the aftermath. He ended up staying for more than a year. In the midst of the chaos, a mystery disease began to spread rapidly across the country. In October, 10 months after the devastating quake, the outbreak was diagnosed as cholera. Walker and his team heard rumors that a sewage spill might be the origin of the epidemic and went out to investigate. What they discovered was a global catastrophe.

Ant Smith, singing about his baby dick. Photo courtesy of Ant Smith

Genitales, a series where we explore the untold stories of our genitals. For our inaugural column, we talked to men about dick size; next, we interviewed women about their vaginas. Here, we focus on one man who is on a crusade for penis size acceptance.

Ant Smith has a small penis. He has written a poem about it. The poem is called “My Small Penis” and is excerpted throughout this post.

I have a tiny cock
Like a crooked little finger
Everybody else's dick
Is inevitably bigger

The 47-year-old engineering manager from London was one of the 55 men who responded to Genitales’ first junk-related survey, and thinks a lot about his dick: “My anxiety over my dick size is a companion in my life that visits me at least daily,” he writes on his website. Or at least, it used to.

If six inch as an average
Can truly be believed
Someone here in this room
Is twice the size of me

Ant is unreserved and incredibly direct when talking about his dick, although he prefers to call it his willy—as he puts it, “it doesn't seem to deserve aggressive terms like cock or dick.” When we talked willies, he said, “For most of my life I've been subconsciously very shy about it. Now, I really love my dick. It's like if I can't be hung like a horse I'd rather be a bit special for being kinda small than average. Who wants to be average?”

If you can do your algebra
Already you will know
Four inches is the maximum
My dick will ever go

Soft, his penis is no longer than an inch at maximum. Hard, it gets to be four inches or so—not a micropenis, but certainly smaller than average. “I think I’m in the lower five percent of men, or less,” he said. “Certainly I don’t know anyone personally smaller.” He was 18 the first time he really noticed his penis was small. “[I was] play wrestling with my best mate, as you do. At one point, quite naughtily, he squeezed one of my balls and made me submit in the match... Then he said "You don't have much there, do you?" That's the first time it was in the open. And I had to accept it.”

My pubes are even longer
They make a comfy nest
With a little acorn sat
Upon the very crest

A self-portrait of his penis. Illustration by Ant Smith

Ant said that despite that late realization, he’d always “exhibited behaviors that you'd expect from a guy embarrassed about having a tiny cock (e.g. using the stall rather than the urinal in public toilets). "At school, aged 13, I'd get changed for gym swapping trousers for shorts before taking my overcoat off. I didn't consciously know I was embarrassed about my 'button dick' then—but looking back, that had to be the reason. Honestly, I always hid my embarrassment more from myself than from others. I was the king of suppression. It was such a crushing thing, I hid it from even myself.”

Searching frantically
I recover just the head
Get a little piss drip
Up on my finger tip
There's absolutely nothing there
For me to get a grip

A penis this size does pose its share of problems. “Condoms don’t fit well and often slip off, and shame about the size often makes me undress in the dark or under the covers when being intimate,” he said. “When sat at the toilet, it doesn't hang, so if I forget to stretch it and push it down the stream shoots forward and wets my trousers.” Despite what sounds like a fairly high frequency of teen fingering, Ant was too nervous to lose his virginity until he was 20. “When faced with it... I felt extra-human. Not sub or super human, but something different. Something apart from real people,” he said, adding that he was more afraid of what others thought than his own opinions about his junk. “I've always actually really liked my own dick, but I've kept it as a secret to myself.”

He's got a little willy, a tiny baby dick
But at least he's got the balls, to admit to it!

Ant said he finds himself fixated on penises as a result of his smaller size. “My attitude to my small dick has subconsciously led me to suffer penis envy so that I am fascinated by 'real men's dicks' and feel very submissive in comparison. [This] has driven me to sexual acts with men, but I think I'm more submissive in those terms rather than genuinely bi.”

I wank it with one finger
If you really want to know
And no, I can't imagine
The feeling of deep throat

Now, Ant is on something of a size-acceptance crusade. “At 47, I finally started talking about my tiny willy. I started to tell a friend and he said he suffered anxiety too. I asked his size and he said six inches. I thought, Christ—that a man on the high end of average should suffer so is ridiculous. I determined then that this was a major body dysmorphic issue for men. If I dared to say ‘I'm a babydick’ other men would feel better, and get a more realistic image. I also thought, How can I ask my wife to love me when I hate myself?”

With this in mind, he sat down and wrote “My Small Penis,” which he has since performed at venues across the UK.

Sometimes it is inverted
Even when it isn't cold
Like a little turtle
Inside of me it goes
Girls they like to tell me
It' such a cute surprise
Until I have to tell them
I left the condom stuck inside

“As soon as I wrote the first draft of the poem that fully explored all of the experiences I've had with my small cock I knew I had to perform it, that if I'd performed other pieces but bottled this I'd lose any credibility I might have as a poet or an artist or a person,” he said. “I've always pushed boundaries with my poetry. And much of it has been about the joy of being in an intellectually and sexually stimulating partnership. My wife has been unfortunately embarrassed on occasion when I've been extolling the virtues of her cum guzzling abilities, onstage. As a poet I value truth above all else. But it is easy to sell a truth that embarrasses others, not yourself.”

I'm hung like Mickey Mouse
I'm glad now to admit
For the greater pain exists
In propagating myths
According to the internet
Real men have massive dicks

Ant said the response to his poem has been overwhelmingly positive. “The first time I performed it I was blushing beet red, even on the London tube train heading to the gig. It was the most difficult thing I have ever done. But it really worked. Not one person laughed in my face and called me a dickless bitch. They got it. And every time I perform it I get at least one very earnest handshake from a guy.”

So if you're sat with five or six, then
Feel the relief
You no longer have to hide it
In shame and misery

The poem is intended to be tongue-in-cheek look at small dicks, by small dicks, for small dicks—the FUBU of the barely-hung. Ant said a sense of humor is crucial to size acceptance, and joked about his own dick throughout our correspondence. “I really, really do have, the most beautiful little cock. It ain't twisted bent crooked angry... It's a cock that could make a princess's jaw drop,” he said. “You just have to imagine it isn't small, just far away. Haha!”

I'm the living proof you've got
Way more than you need
For even with four inches
My girl's in love with me

Does our society place too much emphasis on penis size? Ant doesn’t think the topic is the issue. “We place too much emphasis on fantasy monster dicks and not enough on the reality. I think variety is glorious and should be celebrated. Guys with nine-inch dicks should stand up proud and flaunt it [and] not worry about making me feel bad, because I don't and I don't need to. If everyone was free and easy about their size there'd be less judgement. We should talk more about penis size!”

He's got a little willy, a tiny baby dick
But at least he's got the balls, to admit to it!
Yes!
He's got a little willy, a tiny baby dick
But at least he's got the balls, to admit to it!

Now, Ant’s looking for 48 men willing to pose (clothed) with objects roughly proportional to their dick size as a visual accompaniment to his poem, in the hopes of creating a viral message of penis size acceptance. He hopes the video will spread and with it, a renewed interest in human, humorous conversations about genitals. “The more people that know [I have] a four inch dick and don't give a shit, the more guys with five and six inch dicks are going to stop worrying about their size,” he said. “I want the world to know Ant Smith has a little willy and it just doesn't matter!”

Read the full text of "My Small Penis" here.

Follow Monica Heisey on Twitter.