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_{Photo by Victor VIRGILE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images}

Ah Rick Owens, fashion's dark prince, master of the deconstructed geometric cut. He has perfected the art of merging shock value with innovative ideas in clothing—with Owens you always get the best of both. In 2013, he made news by inviting various step teams to perform and showcase his collection in Paris. It caused a ruckus to say the least. Earlier today, during Paris men's Fashion Week, he topped that stunt by including some visible penises in a show of his new collection for fall/winter 2015.

The show opened with a selection of coats and outerwear in Owen's signature trapezoidal shape, a solid update on one of his classic staples. The scandal, however, came via experimentations with the repositioning of clothes on the body: a selection of tunics, jackets, and capes, wrapped and draped, designed to be worn upside-down or in reverse. These alternate orientations made for a game of peekaboo on the runway models who were, ahem, obviously without any undergarments. As they did that walk models do they exposed various parts of the body—a shoulder here, a nipple there. But when you wear a top upside-down, with no pants or underwear, it offers a clear line of sight through the neck hole to your naughty bits.

WARNING: THIS PHOTO HAS A PENIS IN IT

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_{Photo by Victor VIRGILE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images}

You could never accuse Owens of being a prude—remember the animal-skin cock ring he sold in his New York store? Eroticism is a theme he indulges often, normally with subtlety and sophistication (note his body-centric cut) and always in an effort to disrupt the status quo. Though Owens sports a formidable physique himself, he is not the sort of designer to show muscled-up lads bounding down the runway in thongs. This particular display of genitals does not so much illicit lust as it does a naïve honesty, a shamelessness of the body, as if Adam never ate that apple and realized his own nakedness. Hey is my cock out? the models seem to ask. Oh, hey, it is. Huh. Well how about that. The show brings to mind the work of another American avant-garde pioneer, Rudi Gernreich, who is best known for his topless bathing suit, introduced in 1964. For Gernreich it was a political reaction against sexual repression, the sentiment then was that women have breasts, get over it. In this instance guys have dicks. Big deal.

Follow Jeremy on Twitter.

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Big Daddy fighting Giant Haystacks in the 1970s (Photo via)

In the 1970s and 80s, professional wrestlers lived in a world of blood, brutality, and bad paydays. They adhered to a territory system that divided the country into 20 distinct parts, each of which they would tour until their act got stale. They traveled by car, splitting beer, gas, and pills, before arriving at shit-box motels to pass out in beds too small for their 300-pound frames.

Nowadays, pro-wrestlers are paid eight-figure sums, tour the country in plush tour buses and break character to console teary young fans at ringside. Back in the days of The Sheik and Tex McKenzie, tears were encouraged. It was a Wild West of greedy promotors and bitter veterans. The holds were hard and the blows were stiff, and with exposés yet to reveal the reality of the ring, the business was strictly "kayfabed" (protected) in fear that no one would pay to see a fake fight. Bill Watts, a promotor from Louisiana, told his wrestlers that if they ever got into a bar fight and didn't win, they were fired.

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A best-of International Championship Wrestling video from the 1970s

All of the wrestlers knew how to work a crowd, and by the time WWE (or WWF, as it was called back then) became a global phenomenon in the late 80s—when the real money started being made—most of their roster had spent years in the territory system already. They were ready, in other words, even if the territories they were leaving behind weren't.

WWE was owned by Vince McMahon, a man whose tastes were softer-edged than the territories. He called his product "sports entertainment," not pro wrestling, and admitted quite openly that it was staged. Regardless, on Hulk Hogan's giant back, he propelled WWE to unheard-of heights.

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Hulk Hogan in the late-1980s (Photo by John McKeon via)

Hogan, a flag-waving tank who told kids (his "Hulkamaniacs") to take their vitamins and say their prayers, was a long way off the territories' blood and guts. Wrestling remained serious there, but in WWE it became embarrassing and cartoonish, with personas including garbage men, dentists, hockey players, prisoners, and clowns.

It was hard to argue with McMahon's ambition, though. Through his international TV reach and willingness to cross territory lines—not just to stage shows, but also sign talent—he more or less destroyed the entire system by the early-90s, leaving it a two-horse race between WWE and billionaire Ted Turner's WCW. This spawned the "Monday Night Wars," with WCW's Nitro competing directly against WWE's Raw.

Despite WWE dominating initially (WCW's product was terrible by this point, sustained only by Turner's money), things changed in 1996 when WCW signed two of WWE's biggest stars, Scott Hall and Kevin Nash. Back then, the internet only had around 10 million users (compared to its 3 billion today), meaning the pair's appearance on Nitro was a genuine shock to most viewers—it seemed unplanned, like WWE was somehow "invading."

Suddenly, what had grown tired became exciting, and that thing we'd all been told was fake felt a little bit realer.

Nitro pounded Raw in the ratings and WCW quickly became the number one promotion in the country. By the time Hall and Nash had called themselves the "new World order" (nWo)—adopting dress and gang signs synonymous with the East/West coast rap wars of the time—their group had been joined by a third member, WWE God Hogan, now wearing black and telling his Hulkamaniacs just how much he hated them.

Wrestling had changed again, even as McMahon persisted with his pig farmers over on Raw. Once dominant, WWE now seemed on the verge of closing down.

Yet, we know that didn't happen. Instead, grudgingly accepting that something had to give, McMahon joined Turner in the real world by creating a show as risqué as everything else on nighttime television. He made himself a character (the villainous owner) and feuded with Stone Cold Steve Austin, a beer-drinking Texan who fulfilled the dream of every man by kicking the shit out of his boss. There was increased violence, but also sex, profanity and a general lack of giving a fuck. The whacky characters became pimps and porn stars, and even WWE began calling this period the "Attitude Era."

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The WCW Viagra-on-a-pole match

Along with WCW's complete mismanagement—which included David Arquette winning their World Championship, a Viagra-on-a-pole match, and tolerating a backstage climate of pointless politicking and aging superstars—this pushed WWE so far ahead that, in 2001, Turner tapped out and sold WCW to McMahon for almost nothing.

It had taken him 20 years, but at last Vince was the only dog in town.

The company launched their WWE Network last week in the UK, nearly a year after doing so in the US. The online archive offers not just every past WWE and WCW pay-per-view, but also every live WWE one—including Sunday's Royal Rumble and March's Wrestlemania—at £9.99 a month. A good deal when you consider that usually pay-per-views cost £19.95 on Sky Box Office.

In fact, it's such a good deal that it makes absolutely no sense for the WWE, unless they're hoping (which they are) to balance out the pay-per-view drop-offs by bringing many more fans to the network than those who would ordinarily pay for the one-offs.

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Stone Cold Steve Austin (Photo via)

The problem with this logic is that the most-viewed things on the network are the current shows, meaning that most people are weighing up their decision to subscribe based on them. This means, with the product perceived as shoddy these days, that the millions who watch Raw, but don't buy pay-per-views normally, are still choosing to pay nothing rather than something.

With subscriber numbers in the US well below anticipated, and with pay-per-view buy-rates inevitably down, all WWE has achieved—along with losing McMahon a third of his fortune—is allowing their hardcore fan-base, who were happy to buy high-priced pay-per-views in the first place, access to them at a lower price.

This is indicative of WWE since they bought WCW, of not just the slide back toward the infantilism of the 90s, but of the mismanagement and bureaucracy now rife in its own ranks. Though McMahon still runs things, he's joined at the helm by his son-in-law, Triple H, a wrestler with the reputation of not letting others beat him.

The product has become stale—it lacks diversity and is again disconnected from the world around it, with wrestlers being taught to look the same, work the same, and act the same in their training camps (a far cry from the territories), and then by a team of writers.

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Triple H in 2008 (Photo by David Seto via)

Though this is probably the result of having old, tired egos in charge, it can't help to have no competition pushing them forwards. In December, having walked out of the company months earlier, CM Punk—real name Phil Brooks—complained of the creatively-stifled culture Triple H and McMahon have fostered, where not much thought is given to any wrestler beyond children's favorite John Cena. A rebellious character in line with Steve Austin, Punk is someone WWE should have been built around. Alas, he's since signed for the UFC.

Left to its own devices, it isn't hard to see WWE continuing down this road until doing what everybody else did: going out of business. I'm not saying it'll happen tomorrow, but with the competition clearly nowhere to be found (sorry, TNA), the predatory practices that propelled it to dominance may ultimately be the same ones that destroy it. Once the example of healthy capitalism, the American wrestling industry now has the look of a failed authoritarian state.

When my parents told me that wrestling was fake, it phased me for a second, but ultimately the dynamic of good vs. bad pulled me back in. This dynamic is everywhere: the Bible, Shakespeare, Greek myths... We identify with it so strongly because it simplifies life into the perfect equation of good equals us and bad equals our pain—and when good inevitably wins, we feel like we've beaten our pain, even if only fleetingly.

As fans get older and become more knowledgable, this dynamic remains: there's always some wrestler who we feel is deserving of more—the hardest worker, the nicest guy—who we identify with in the hope that, one day, he'll get what he deserves.

Wrestling allows us to hope, to escape. And if it does die, we can replace it. But I still can't help being sad at the prospect of something that captured so many minds staying down for the 1, 2, 3.

@0jnolan

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A behind-the-scenes photo from the film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

WRITTEN BY ANA LILY AMIRPOUR
ART BY MICHAEL DEWEESE
LETTERING BY PATRICK BROSSEAU
EDITED BY JOHN CONRAD AND BEN CONRAD

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Image via Jay Black

This post first appeared on VICE UK.

No woman actively looks forward to getting her period. Even after decades of menstruating, it can be a painful, expensive hassle every month that leaves you feeling completely flattened. But if you're a woman living on the street, having a period isn't a hassle—it's a nightmare. Because if you can't muddle together enough money for food or shelter, it is unlikely you'll be able to afford sanitary towels or tampons.

Bar shoplifting, the options for menstruating homeless women can be incredibly limited. It's often possible to access tampons and towels at homeless shelters and hostels, but what do you do if there's no beds available? Given that there's no standard practice of giving out supplies at sexual health clinics—unlike condoms, say—and that it isn't possible to be prescribed sanitary wear at a doctor's surgery, as a woman in need, there are very few services you can turn to.

Sanitary ware in the UK is classed as a "luxury, nonessential item" and is taxed at 5 percent. Precisely what could be considered luxurious about stemming the monthly blood flow that, as women, we don't really have much say over, is a perpetual question. But without the means to purchase these simple "luxuries," homeless women are constantly forced to go without.

I visited Bethany House, a women-only housing center in London's Kings Cross to try to get an idea of what women without the means to buy tampons or towels do each month. Zoe, 21, told me that she was routinely caught short. "When I was on the streets, I actually found it easier to get food or toothbrushes than stuff for my periods," she says. "There was nowhere to find that stuff and I was obviously too embarrassed to ask strangers for it.

"I remember sometimes my old school friends would walk past while I was begging around Camden and I'd be able to ask them if they had anything but obviously that was just down to chance," she continues. In the end, she'd often have to resort to shoplifting—something she really didn't want to do. "I used to hide the tampons under coats and jumpers," she says, arguing that it would be mortifying to be caught shoplifting for anything, but that if she'd been caught stealing tampons it would have been "so much worse."

Zoe became homeless after things took a sour turn with her boyfriend. "We were living together but we both had drug problems and weren't very nice to each other," she explains. "At one point we thought we'd marry each other but things didn't work out so I started staying at all these different places." Zoe would go from place to place, but eventually those places dried up. "I'd find myself walking around outside all night because I was too scared to go to sleep," she says. At the age of 20, she found herself on the streets for six months. During this time, periods were just one of the myriad burdens she faced.

The idea of experiencing those hot, disabling cramps while wandering the streets because you're scared of staying in one place makes me wince.

At the time, Zoe was so underweight that her periods were often irregular. This sounds bleakly fortuitous, but that irregularity meant that she "wouldn't have one for ages" and it would then "come really unexpectedly and be so painful. It would make me feel really weak. I'd be shaking." She visibly recoils as she's talking. "I've put all this to the back my mind because it was so embarrassing and so horrible," she says. Listening to her, the idea of experiencing those hot, disabling cramps while wandering the streets because you're scared of staying in one place makes me wince.

Couldn't she have asked a shelter for some supplies? No, she says, because she had no idea they'd give them out. Nor did she have implicit trust in certain shelters letting her in at all. "People used to come up to me and say, 'There's this really great place you can go and they'll save you,' but sometimes you couldn't trust them," she says. "It's not always as simple as people think. These places don't always let you in." Thankfully, Zoe was eventually housed in a hostel and has been there for six months.

Another woman in the hostel I visited, Ava, 25, also struggled to access anything for her periods while on the streets. She frequently relied on McDonalds toilets: "I'd roll a tissue up and use it as a sanitary towel," she says, matter-of-factly. "There are ways around it." Ava ended up on the streets because her ex-husband kicked her out of the flat that she was, in fact, paying the rent for. She slept rough for four months in total.

"I still don't understand why tampons and pads aren't free," she says, raising her voice. "If the government can supply us with aqueous cream and other prescriptions, why can't they provide money for our feminine care?" And the more you ask yourself this same question, as a woman, the more absurd it seems. How on earth are we in a position where women—who, it bears repeating, have absolutely no choice over whether their womb lining sheds each month—are having to sneak into McDonald's toilets and make do with stuffing toilet paper into the knickers to stop them bleeding through their clothes?

Perhaps Britain's homeless services are too geared towards men to consider the simple provision of sanitary ware. A report from St Mungo's, which looks into women's experience of homelessness, says: "Male focused services often fail to comprehensively address the needs of their female service users. Expecting women to simply fit into homelessness services which have been designed for homeless men is not good enough. Service providers must understand the particular needs of homeless women."

Most homeless shelters do have supplies of tampons and pads for women to use, but the women I met didn't seem to know that they were routinely available. So what use is that? Asking for a box of tampons can be embarrassing—it's an intimate product for an intimate problem. Especially if a young woman has to ask for it from a male member of staff.

Grace Wore, a support worker at Women at the Well, a charity drop-in center for homeless women, says the "embarrassment factor" means women often find it awkward to seek help. "We provide sanitary ware here, but it's very busy and I can see that women often struggle to ask. It's obviously a very private thing—which is also made worse if you're very hormonal and not feeling great." For any woman who struggles with PMS—or its more severe manifestation, PMDD—the idea of dealing with the fierce hormonal and physical turmoil that can come with a period each month is bad enough. The idea of having to deal with it on the street, or in unfamiliar surroundings, is terrifying.

Wore says women often won't ask for fear that they don't have anything, too, because a lot of stock is dependent on donations. She also says it's very rare for individuals to donate sanitary stuff to hostels because it's just not something that really occurs to people. Instead, most of their supplies come from companies like FareShare, who redistribute toiletries that have been sitting in shops for too long. But if the service get really low on donations, women are forced to go out and buy them themselves.

For the women sleeping rough who often have limited contact with shelters, drop-in centers, or outreach teams, sanitary ware or any kind of period ephemera is scarce. There's no drawers of graying, saggy period knickers to reach for. No hot water bottles. No ibuprofen. No enormous bars of chocolate. Homeless women move from one unsafe, unpredictable situation to another and are likely to just have to deal with cramps and discomfort while on the move. They may never feel clean. And, even if they do have a supply of tampons or towels, irregular access to toilets can make it difficult to change them regularly—something that could, potentially, lead to infections like toxic shock syndrome.

We give out condoms for free for good reason—safe sex and preventing against the transmission of STIs is an absolute imperative—but why can't we do the same for pads and tampons?

Access to provisions is one thing, but if you're on the streets, privacy becomes a distant memory, too. Washing in public toilets, as another woman at Bethany House told me, becomes the norm. However, popping to the bathroom to do that can be tricky when you need to find somewhere busy enough not to be noticed.

It seems strange that over 80 years have passed since Dr. Earle Haas patented the first modern tampon, but women who have lost their way are still being forced to stuff tissue down their knickers every month.

If menstrual care was classed as healthcare, sanitary ware would be free and available on prescription for all. For every woman who menstruates, tampons and towels are as essential toilet paper—unless you want to walk around covered in your own viscera, you can't live without it.

We give out condoms for free for good reason—safe sex and preventing against the transmission of STIs is an absolute imperative—but why can't we do the same for pads and tampons? Particularly when they're classed as "sexual health" items. Women spend an average of over 3,000 days of their lives menstruating. Thus, having a period—moreover, a vagina—turns out to be rather costly.

If the 5 percent taxation on sanitary ware seems ridiculous now, it's worth remembering it was only reduced to that in 2001, following years of campaigning for a "zero rate" of tax. Before 2001, sanitary ware was taxed at the full rate of 17.5 percent. Still, our need for products that stop us bleeding all over ourselves is considered "nonessential."

It's hard to envision what, precisely, it's thought we should be doing instead? Using an old, rolled-up T-shirt? A medical pessary of shorn wool, like women in Tudor England? It's made all the more absurd, too, when you consider that, in the UK, exotic meats like crocodile and kangaroo are classified as essential products which are exempt from tax. Other zero-tax items include: bingo, Jaffa Cakes, houseboat moorings, and incontinence products. The latter are, it must be said, often indiscernible from the more robust end of the sanitary towel spectrum.

With increasing numbers of women finding themselves homeless—roughly one in ten rough sleepers in London are women—it's patently clear that not enough is being done to provide free sanitary wear for a completely unavoidable, biological regularity. Of all the battles faced by homeless women, the struggle of how to cope with your period is one of needless humiliation and distress. Tampons are not a luxury. Period.

Follow Maya Oppenheim on Twitter.

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Rise of the Tomb Raider

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Late last year, while I was still deputy editor at Official Xbox Magazine, Microsoft rounded out one of its Xbox sizzle reels with a quote from Rocky Balboa. The key line: "It's not about how hard you can hit—it's about how hard you can get hit and keep on coming."

Nice bit of self-referentiality there, right? It's almost as though they're talking about the Xbox One's dismal showing against Sony's PlayStation 4, which has outsold it by millions of units thanks to a lower launch price, sturdier graphics capabilities, and an unconflicted marketing focus on video games, rather than vaunted "broad entertainment" features.

Is Rocky himself the right point of comparison, though? He's the quintessential underdog, whereas Microsoft's recent activities place it closer to Apollo Creed—the international champ who sets up a match with the Italian Stallion as a PR stunt, only to get bowled over by a good punch in the first round. Still, let's not forget that Creed eventually won the fight, and while it may have squandered the advantage built up during Xbox 360's heyday, Microsoft isn't down for the count in this one yet.

From an official mag writer's perspective, the most annoying thing about the Xbox One's initial, catastrophic emphasis on "TV, TV, TV" and Kinect was that nobody paid much attention to Microsoft's accompanying billion-dollar binge on new games. The console was swiftly and unfairly dismissed by enthusiast crusaders as a glorified multimedia box, particularly in light of its weaker RAM.

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Sunset Overdrive : an Xbox One exclusive that did much to boost the console's sales in late 2014

Nowadays that's harder to do. Xbox One has had a great second winter, thanks in part to aggressive price-cutting, but also to an unequalled (if not quite vintage) line-up of first-party exclusives, with Sunset Overdrive and Forza Horizon 2 perhaps deserving of top gongs. This year's slate already looks pretty robust, with more announcements to occur at June's E3 in Los Angeles. There's a new Halo, a new Forza, and a new Fable on the way, and Microsoft's engineers continue to shave away at the power gap, eating into processing time hitherto reserved for Kinect to secure decent resolutions for the Xbox One versions of multi-platform titles. It's unlikely that the console's games will ever trounce PS4 in the visual stakes, but if the latest multi-plats are any indication, the differences will be negligible from this point on.

It's a shame that Kinect has been put so thoroughly out to pasture after all the blood and sweat poured into its reinvention, but there should be at least one major pay-off—a second lease of life for the legendary Rare Ltd. Once known for such franchises as Mario alternative Banjo-Kazooie and Viva Piñata, where you force cardboard animals to have sex, the elderly UK studio has spent the past six years cranking out Kinect Sports titles. In the process, key designers and coders have departed, and much of Rare's old wit and charm has been lost.

Something tells me that all of that will change in 2015. Perhaps it was all those studied allusions to sealed-off areas during the Kinect Sports Rivals studio tour last year. Perhaps it's this tweet from the studio's composer, which smells like a Banjo announcement in the offing (try playing those notes aloud), or this tweet from Head of Xbox Phil Spencer about a "uniquely Rare" game.

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2015 may see the return of Banjo-Kazooie, originally a hit for the N64 in 1998

Once executive vice-president of Microsoft Studios under Don "backwards compatibility is backwards" Mattrick, Spencer is the man credited with turning Xbox One's public image around. An approachable manner aside, he has done this by working out what Xbox old-timers want and proceeding, by and large, to not fuck them about. So if he's talking up Rare at this stage, I'm minded to get excited. In what seems more than a coincidence, Microsoft has announced plans to overhaul Rare's old Xbox 360 Avatar system on the One, as part of ongoing UI improvements that will doubtless include the long-awaited screenshot feature.

I'm also minded to get all hot and bothered about former Epic man Rod Fergusson's reign at Black Tusk Studios, the super-developer Microsoft has assembled from veterans of franchises like Crysis, Call of Duty, Need for Speed, and Splinter Cell. Once the incubation chamber for a brand new mega-IP, Black Tusk is now in charge of the Gears of War series following Microsoft's acquisition of the rights from Epic. With old gearhead Fergusson on hand to steer the ship, this has the potential to be quite the comeback for the franchise, providing they don't do anything thick like fill it to the brim with microtransactions.

In light of the success (online problems aside) of 343's Halo reboots, I'd put money on the unveiling of a remastered original trilogy for Xbox One at E3 this year—the idea being to test the new team's legs and lock down the supporting technology, before Black Tusk embarks on a proper sequel. Assuming I'm right about that, it's unlikely that the remastered trilogy will arrive this winter, given that Microsoft only picked up the IP in January of 2014—but it will create momentum for the console in the run-up to Christmas.

Other major exclusives lined up for Xbox One in 2015 range from the tantalizing to the nebulous. Fable is the wobbliest of the lot, though I love what I've played of it—as a multiplayer-centric affair that has more in common with Left 4 Dead than previous single player outings, it's hardly a love letter to Fable diehards, and may be dismissed by laymen as just another stab at reinventing Middle-earth. Remedy's time-bending terror Quantum Break has a similar problem—sequences in which you crawl around the innards of a flash-frozen explosion promise to drop jaws, but your thumbs will probably still think they're playing a garden-variety cover shooter with slow-mo and platforming bits.

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Halo 5: Guardians concept art

I'd like Halo 5: Guardians to blow the doors off sales projections, having played and loved the beta, but something tells me that it'll be a strong but unremarkable seller. Were it not for Titanfall, Destiny, and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, the game's jet-powered movement upgrades might have caused a stir, but as it is the response has been merely positive (and punctuated by the odd full-blooded denunciation). Microsoft has yet to reveal much of the single player or story, mind you: There's talk of an open world, which would be quite the change of pace and might help the game see off the winter's traditional assortment of ultra-linear bangfests.

Still, will it be a system seller? Glancing across Xbox One's 2015 offering, the console does seem somewhat at a loss for a killer app at present (as, in fairness, does PS4). Some of the most attractive exclusives or timed exclusives are smaller indie or "indie-styled" releases, the kind of games people supposedly don't buy hardware for—chief among them Capybara's Below (Dark Souls meets Zelda), Ori and the Blind Forest (gorgeous fairy-tale platformer in which a large sad bear starves to death) and Playdead's Inside (like LIMBO, but seemingly set in a Victorian meat factory).

Perhaps a decent third-party deal will help with that. Microsoft's existing Call of Duty and FIFA partnerships are dependable, but they aren't exhilarating, and nabbing a window of exclusivity for this year's Tomb Raider sequel may not amount to much in the face of Sony's fearsome Uncharted 4: A Thief's End. Ditto the timed exclusive DLC and functionality for Evolve, another game I'm utterly in love with, but one that's targeting a niche—after the mighty Titanfall's underwhelming sales, the odds of a multiplayer-driven sci-fi shooter setting records in early February seem slim.

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The Division will offer Xbox One players exclusive content

Tom Clancy's The Division, on the other hand, could do serious numbers. It's another lushly appointed open world extravaganza from Ubisoft, the publisher that has come closest to stealing Rockstar's crown; the gunplay marries Splinter Cell's open-air buffet of gadgets to party RPG tactics; and its quest to reclaim New York from a plague compares favorably to Destiny's tussle over extraterrestrial salvage rights. Microsoft has already snaffled some timed exclusive early DLC for The Division, and if the manufacturer is able to own the game's publicity cycle as thoroughly as Sony did Destiny's, the fallout will be dramatic. A timed exclusive beta this summer ahead of a probable winter release would do wonders for holiday 2015 Xbox One sales, no doubt.

There are even bigger fish to fry, however. We know next to nothing about DICE's Star Wars: Battlefront right now, save that it contains Stormtroopers, landspeeders, Hoth, and Endor, but even if the developer opts to re-skin Battlefield 4 with combustible Ewoks, the result will be 2015's best-selling game. Without question. Not even DICE's disastrous track record for launch day bugs can dispel the lure of a Luke Skywalker simulator running on Frostbite technology, in which B-wings dance around Imperial Walkers as deftly as helicopters circling a skyscraper in Battlefield.

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Star Wars: Battlefront is expected at the very end of 2015. Possibly.

If I were Phil Spencer, I'd be throwing banknotes at EA —a company with which Microsoft already enjoys a close rapport—to bring some element of Battlefront to Xbox One exclusively. That's providing there's any cash left in the money hat after the acquisition of Minecraft and Mojang, a huge move whose ramifications obviously extend far beyond Xbox. The franchise still earns hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and as over-exposed as the game itself is, there's plenty of room to grow. Simply updating the console or mobile versions to match the current PC build will generate momentum, and the potential for spin-offs is vast. Think of a Travellers' Tales LEGO game with Minecraft in it, for example, or MC Steve in Disney Infinity.

And think, too, of a fully 3D holographic Minecraft world—brought to life by Microsoft's just-announced HoloLens headset, which projects computer graphics onto real-life objects and allows you to manipulate them using your voice and hands. You might be wondering why I've left the hottest Microsoft news of the month until last, especially given that Minecraft features so prominently in the device's reveal trailer.

The answer is that its impact on Xbox One is hard to gauge. The device won't be on sale anytime soon, for starters, and its capabilities are largely untested: a few hands-ons with prototypes aside, all we've to go on right now are promises and some predictably ecstatic concept videos. It's also doubtful that Microsoft sees HoloLens as a means of propping up Xbox One's sales—this is, the manufacturer has declared, the future of media consumption and computing across the board, with gaming applications merely a part of the package.

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Microsoft's just-announced HoloLens

Another leap in technology to ponder is the ability to stream Xbox One games to Windows 10 PCs and tablets, available once the new operating system hits shelves. It's a neat addition— Ryse: Son of Rome on the toilet, anyone? But it'll only work across local Wi-Fi networks, which is disappointing given the PS4's ability to output gameplay over the internet to a PS Vita.

There's no magic sales bullet on the way for the Xbox One hardware itself, then, which means that it'll fall once again to the games to make a case for ownership. Thankfully, the console has built up a nice head of steam in this regard. If there's an upside to all those "Xbox 180s," it's this—the traditional role of the Xbox as a delivery mechanism for the likes of Halo rather than House of Cards has been firmly reasserted after years of slack-jawed industry mooning at TV and film. Microsoft seems to have taken the lessons of Xbox One's launch to heart. And as Rocky would say: "It ain't over 'til it's over."

Follow Edwin on Twitter.

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Photos by Titus Bradley and Colin Chester.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

A select group of spear fishermen sail three nautical miles offshore, searching for large black shadows looming under the ocean surface. Once the silhouettes are spotted, a captain shouts from the lookout tower. The dive call is given and the fisherman plunge the depths among the boat wash, loaded with one shot in their spear gun, one breath and the very real fear that they may not be coming back up.

This is the coastline of Ascension Island, a UK military outpost situated in the middle of the Atlantic. Once occupied during the Falklands conflict, it remains a commercial fishing exclusion zone and harbors the highest prized and most dangerous fish on the planet.

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Tony Eyon with a marlin

Tony Eyon is one of the island's spear fisherman. After a ten-year relationship bust up four years ago, he decided he needed to shift his life focus; hunting fucking massive fish was the path he settled on. Within four hours of his first dive on the island, he was staring a 12-foot tiger shark in the eyes.

Tony and a small collection of spear fisherman hunt of some of the biggest tuna, marlin, and sailfish in the world—miles away from any medical support. In the waters off Ascension Island, they've found out the hard way that hunting for trophy fish with a sharp stick offers incredible rewards, but one mistake can be your last. I asked him to talk me through the hunt.

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VICE: Can you tell me about Ascension Island? What's the set up?
Tony Eyon: It's a small volcanic island based in the heart of the Atlantic. If you Google it, it's a pinprick in the middle of nowhere. Hardly anyone knows about the place. You can't fly there on any commercial airline, and you need to apply before you can travel there. Civilians can only get there going through the [Royal Air Force], and the only RAF base you can use is Brize Norton [in Oxfordshire]. They allocate a small number of seats from each flight for nonmilitary.

There is no indigenous or permanent population on the island, although around 880 people live there as of 2010. Six-hundred ninety-six come from Saint Helena and are nicknamed "the Saints." They are great—they drink a lot. Accommodation is pretty rudimentary, but plush living isn't the prize you're chasing on Ascension Island.

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How did you find out about the fish there?
It kind of started as rumor, then pictures started coming through internet forums of giant fish in huge densities. I'd been spearing for about four years when I heard about it, but was still pretty green. I had savings I'd been holding for a small boat, but seeing as I'd lost my missus—who'd been my first mate—I decided to drop it on the trip. It seemed like a wild opportunity.

Despite my lack of experience, I was in the water with a spear within two hours of landing, and, within four hours, face-to-face with biggest tiger shark I had ever seen in my life.

What did you do?
I got out!

But it didn't deter you?
It definitely made the experience a lot realer, a lot faster. But it also got me pretty hooked. That sounds really counterintuitive when you say it out loud.

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What do you hunt for?
Sailfish and marlin are the prize fish in any fishing discipline. They are prize fish even to just see—but to spear them is next level.

What's the process?
You need a big boat, because you're going deep offshore and you chum the waters, which is basically cutting up small fish and creating a blood slick and bits of fish meat. You're also drifting over deep ledges, which attract predatory fish like wahoo, tuna and sailfish, but also hammers, mako sharks, and Galapagos sharks.

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How do you know where the fish are? Do you use fishfinder technology?
No, it's all done by sight, and by reading the birds. If you see birds diving down on shoals of baitfish, you can take a guess at what fish are attacking the baitfish.

You'll be waiting for a while some days; you won't even get a call in. But when it happens, it happens in a split second. You get a shout from the captain who is spotting from a bird tower on top of the boat, usually swearing and yelling that there's something big in the water. There's often no time to put on your masks or load guns. You have to jump off the back of the boat, while it's still moving, into boat wake, swim below the bubbles, open your eyes, and hope that dark shadow isn't a mako or a tiger shark staring back at you.

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Have you come across a mako?
There was a chap who disappeared, but we're not sure what happened to him, sadly. He jumped in the water and never surfaced. No one knows if he got taken, passed out or got caught in his gear. So yeah, your heart's in your mouth when you jump in. That period when you can't see anything? It's scary.

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How deep do you get, and how long do you need to hold your breath for?
We dive to about seven meters [23 feet], and you need to hold your breath for at least 90 seconds to give yourself a chance for a decent hunt. Once you're underwater and you spot a sailfish, there's a bit of an art to hunting them. You can't swim straight toward them; you get as close as you can, and when they start to show their flank then you know they're about to ping off. By zig-zagging towards them, making them move their head from side to side, you make them swim towards you. It's a little weird dance between you and the fish.

The scene until then is almost beautiful, like a calm before a storm. They are intimidating and magnificent, for sure—their colors underwater are genuinely breathtaking.

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Then what? You've got your shot. What's next?
As soon as you take the shot, all hell breaks loose. It's chaos. The best shot is behind the gill plate. The gill plate itself is bulletproof, so it's a high-risk shot. Once you make contact it goes completely mental and you pray it chooses flight over fight.

What happens if it chooses the fight option?
Then you have 130 pounds of pure muscle propelling a big spike at 60 miles per hour through the water.

They charge?
Oh yeah, for sure. When they feel threatened, they go for you. It's happened to me a few times. I was helping a buddy pull a sailfish up from the depths when it wasn't tired enough to be pulled and it wasn't affected by the shot. As soon as it was within 15 meters [50 feet] it went straight under his arm and then straight at me, swinging this sword from side to side. There isn't much you can do, other than try to get a shot off and get out of its way, which is nearly impossible because of their speed.

A lot of it at this stage is out of your control—it totally depends on the way the fish dives. It's chaos! You're wearing belts and knife holders, so there's a heap of stuff to get hooked on. Or the line can just hook up around your leg. Because the mask blocks your field of vision, it's hard to see everything going on, and the wetsuit means you don't feel the line on your skin. You just need to have your knife at the ready to cut the line if it starts getting dicey.

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So assuming you don't have a triangular piece of fish sticking into a vital organ and you're not spiraling to the bottom of the ocean, what's the next stage of the hunt?
Essentially, fighting the fish then involves holding onto your floats and tiring the fish out until it's ready to be pulled up. You get composed and let it pull you around the ocean. You're trying to shorten the line so it has to fight harder to reclaim it. A buddy will jump in at this point and spot for sharks. All the blood and vibrations are pretty much a written invitation for those guys.

When you haul it up and swim to the boat, you have to hold it by its bill. The idea here is that, if a shark attacks, it will come up very fast from right underneath you, attacking the tail of the fish you've caught first.

Seems like a pretty intense battle for the fish.
It may look a bit gruesome, but most fish are dispatched much quicker than if they were left to suffocate. There are also no wasted fish like all the by-catch you get with netting and long liners, who have no idea what they'll pull up. In the UK, for every fish you see in the supermarket, two more have died via by-catch. Spearfishing, by its very nature, is the complete opposite of this. Spearfishing is the most selective and sustainable form of fishing on the planet, actually.

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And you eat them?
We eat everything we catch. I probably don't need to tell you how a prize fish that you've risked you life for tastes, but it's better than fish fingers from Tesco, that's for sure.

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Screencap via Fox News Twin Cities

Two weeks ago David Vanzo brought his elderly mother, Caryl, into a bank in Plymouth, Minnesota to make a cash withdrawal in her name. Caryl didn't say anything during the transaction, and bank employees would later tell officials her feet were dragging the floor and that they "couldn't tell if she was breathing." Seven hours later David reported her dead.

Did David's mother, hours away from death, ask her son to take her to the bank for an $850 withdrawal? Or did David, perhaps inspired by the hilarious 1989 classic Weekend At Bernie's, prop his mother's corpse up in the wheelchair and try to fool people into thinking she was still alive? That's what the authorities are trying to figure out.

David denies the accusations, and told local news reporters, "My mother and I had an agreement. I took care of my mom for years," and, "I'm the good guy here, not the bad guy." But one of the Vanzos' neighbors who saw them leaving in a taxi that day said, "I don't know if she was just unconscious or not alive."

Moving dead weight is hard, and it just gets harder as the body gets stiffer. Noted death blogger Megan Rosenbloom of Death Salon (and occasionally VICE) helped me try to sleuth my way through the plausibility of the accusation. "It's possible that if the person had just died you could get them into a wheelchair before rigor sets in, which usually takes 2-6 hours," she told me.

In a front porch interview, David said, "I loved my mother very, very, very much. I gave my life to keep my mother alive. Look at my eyes."

Well, go on, look at his eyes:

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Police found Vanzo in the home she shared with her son, lying in bed, in a robe, with poop-covered boots on. Consequently, the local Fox affiliate says the investigation concerns elderly abuse and potential financial exploitation, and not the non-crime of going out in public with a dead body in a wheelchair, a thing that shockingly is not illegal or even dangerous. I checked.

Rosenbloom pointed out to me that "it's much more dangerous to your health to be around the living than the dead," adding that "only in rare cases of special infectious diseases [like] Ebola or Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease does the disease persist in a dead body long enough to potentially infect the living."

Currently, no cause of death has been given, but police don't suspect foul play.

While that's a relief, police told reporters that when they got to the Vanzos' house they were "overwhelmed by the stench of urine and feces," and when he was interviewed by reporters David admitted that he hadn't changed her that day.

David had been involved in suspicious financial matters relating to his mother before. Authorities had questioned him about a reverse mortgage worth $118,000 that his mother didn't know about, and withdrawals of $47,500 and $25,600.

When he went to the bank with her on the day she died, the amount he took out, $850, was hardly coke-and-strippers money. According to Vanzo's testimony, the previous large amounts were withdrawn to help his mother. To some extent, it's hard to doubt that he's telling some version of the truth. Caring for an aging relative at home may be less expensive than a nursing home, but it's not cheap, and it's a full-time job.

Best case scenario, it just sounds like it was a job Vanzo was awful at.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter

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Illustration by Dan Evans.

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

Smartphones have their perks; without them, it would be impossible to take a photo of your junk and instantly share it with someone in Brazil. But they also have their downsides. Like constantly having your office in your pocket, or people ruining debates by googling the answer, or the fact that they're effectively just GPS ankle monitors that double up us pizza-ordering devices.

That last point is a salient one for people who spend a lot of their time doing stuff they don't want anyone to know about. People like drug dealers and other criminals, who—thanks to the nature of their jobs—are understandably paranoid that they're having their every movement monitored.

The best remedy for this problem is to switch from an Android or iPhone to a shitty old handset. And the shitty old handset of choice, according to every source I've spoken to, is the Nokia 8210.

The pocket-sized phone, released in 1999, has no Bluetooth, near-field connectivity or wifi—meaning nobody can snoop on your movements—but is equipped with infra-red technology, enabling quick transfers of information when dealers need to swap phones. It's also got a massive battery life, which is handy if you spend the majority of your time calling customers who can't work out which road you've parked on.

Unveiled at the 30th anniversary of the fashion brand Kenzo in Paris, it was the smallest and lightest phone Nokia had ever released. It's also become a popular phone in prisons, with visitors frequently smuggling them into inmates inside their anuses.

A dealer in Handsworth, Birmingham—who would only give his name as "K2"—told me: "I've got three Nokia 8210 phones and have been told they can be trusted, unlike these iPhones and new phones, which the police can easily [use to] find out where you've been.

"The feds can now use wifi and Bluetooth to get information from the phone, and seem to be able to listen to phones a lot easier now than ever before. Every dealer I know uses old phones, and the Nokia 8210 is the one everyone wants because of how small it is and how long the battery lasts. And it was the best phone when it came out. I couldn't afford one in Jamaica back in the day, but now I've got four."

He added: "Every TV program you watch seems to show feds listening to phones, and there are even apps now that record every phone call. At least I can trust an old Nokia. I need to use more than one phone for what I do; I've got the incoming line and ones I use to phone out, which I change the sims in regularly, so I've got different covers so I know which is which."

The Nokia 8210 commercial from 1999

Tony, a 32-year-old addict from Birmingham, told me that the 8210 has also become a good bargaining chip. "I was using an 8210 because my Samsung was bust, and two dealers offered to buy it," he said. "The third one who asked, I snapped their hand off and swapped it for half a six [of crack, with a street value of $50].

"After that, I asked everyone I knew if they had any old Nokias lying around, and managed to get four more, and did the same with them, too. Now I'm going to second hand shops and eBay to get Nokia 8210s. They're wicked phones, and after all, everyone likes a game of Snake. These dealers are the same as everyone—they want to have the best, even it is the best of the shit old phones."

A mobile phone shop owner on the Soho Road, Birmingham, who didn't want to named, confirmed what I'd heard, telling me: "We've had a few people asking for 8210s, and if we ever get one they sell straight away. I don't know what they want them for and don't ask."

So there you have it: if you've got an old 8210 lying around, don't bother with Envirophone—take it along with you the next time you're buying a bag of weed and you might end up wrangling an extra eighth out of it.

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Prue Stent is 21 and only a few months out of college, but she's recently developed a massive online following, especially among young women, for her surreal, dreamy, and strangely gruesome photos of girls in bubblegum landscapes. Her work has started a conversation about the inversions around gender, beauty, and youth—but it's a conversation that the young artist doesn't always consciously lead. We spoke to the photographer about her artistic development and growing following.

VICE: You're only 21, yet your work feels very fully-formed.
Prue Stent: Photos always been something I've been interested in. It started with those little party cameras in [eighth grade.] I would buy hundreds of them and photograph everything I saw. My mom said as a kid she would find me looking through family photo albums and just crying, even though it wasn't anyone I knew. I guess it was an emotional thing.

There is a strong theme of gender and gender inversion in your photos, was that always an interest of yours?
That's been more recent, my photography has been more of a natural thing. As I thought more about why I was doing it and why I was driven to take photos all the time that started to become more important. It's more subconscious—I still struggle to really articulate what I'm trying to say. Sometimes I over-contextualize it and look into it too much.

Your work has got a lot of attention as being connected to feminism, are those associations always helpful?
It's definitely a trendy thing; I think my work kind of goes a bit past that, it's not just focused on that. I guess there's something weird about it, and people are drawn to it for reasons other than feminism.

Why do you think they're drawn to it?
I think it's something familiar that meets something really weird and confronting. It's kind of subverting your typical familiarity of something beautiful into something weird.

Are you ever surprised as to how people respond to your work?
Yeah, I don't personally find my work confronting, but that might be the circle of friends I'm in. We're all really open with each other and we all talk about those kinds of things. But with Instagram and the internet I get some really strange comments. Some people like it, but other people are like, "Why is this art? This is just weird and gross."

What are people reacting against?
I'm not really sure what you would think of this, but I get criticized for not photographing women of color a lot, which I find interesting. I guess the reason is that I'm photographing myself, and my sister, and my best friend Honey, so it's just three of the closest people to me. People are quite offended by it and have been like, I'm not following you anymore because you refuse to acknowledge women of color . Which is something I never have thought about with my own work.

Speaking of Honey Long, she's also a visual artist and you work together a lot. Is she a big influence?
Yeah, hugely. She brings so much into it, her contribution is so important—as with all my close girlfriends I collaborate with. I couldn't do it without them, really. Honey does sculpture so for her it's about using the female form as a sculpture and then bringing it into a certain environment and manipulating it. It all changes and I don't really know what we're actually going to do, but it's definitely important to how and what I photograph.

What are you finding yourself drawn to now?
I guess I'm drawn to trying to create kind of alternate beauty that people aren't really familiar with. And I don't know if that makes sense yet.

Words by Wendy Syfret. Follow her on Twitter.

Texas has a problem with kids: It can't figure out a good way to lock them up.

Following a series of high-profile physical and sexual-abuse scandals that rocked the state's juvenile system in 2007, a string of reforms modernized local punitive measures against offending young people. The state has dramatically reduced both the number of juvenile lock-up facilities and the number of kids serving time inside them.

Now a new study is expected to result in further cutbacks—and could even spur lawmakers to abandon their reliance on the system entirely.

The study, conducted by the Council of State Governments (CSG), digs into the efficacy of costly state-run programs, recidivism rates, and county-based alternatives. Although it's not slated for release until the end of the month, the report is already sparking fresh talk of restructuring youth incarceration programs across the Lone Star State.

Back in 2007, after it was revealed that unchecked physical and sexual abuse by prison officials had run rampant in Texas youth facilities, the entire system was poised to crumble. Reports that followed illuminated a system Swiss-cheesed with nasty problems: Staff members had felony arrests and convictions, hundreds of physical and sexual abuse charges had been filed, fights among inmates abounded, and attempts to investigate allegations had been thwarted at multiple levels for years. In one instance, a high-level prison official allegedly used candy and cake to lure inmates into sexual encounters.

The sweeping reforms that followed resulted in the closing of many state facilities and the release and relocation of thousands of youth inmates to county-run lock-ups closer to their homes. Agencies in charge of juvenile justice, including the Texas Youth Commission and the Texas Juvenile Probation Commission, were dismantled and subsumed into Texas Juvenile Justice Department.

Ultimately, the state legislature moved towards evidence-based solutions, shrinking and tailoring the system by redrawing laws to exclude misdemeanor offenders from automatically being sent to state lockups, and giving $100 million to more cost-effective community-based rehabilitative programs. According to a brief by the Pew Charitable Trusts, by 2013, nearly $143 million had been redirected from secure facilities to localized programs for offenders, and the population of secure residential facilities plummeted 62 percent. Statewide, juvenile arrests fell by 27 percent. Amid all this, no notable decreases to public safety were noted; the reforms, by most measures, were working.

The average number of offenders locked up on any given day was cut from over 4,000 in 2007 down to less than 1,500 today, yet what's left of the old system still produces undesirable results.

Speaking at a Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) panel earlier this month, Tony Fabelo, a national authority on criminal justice and an architect of the forthcoming CSG study, cited numbers outlining the burdens of an antiquated system for Texas taxpayers. "In 2014, the 800 youth who were committed to (state lockups) cost $162 million, enough to educate almost 20,000 students for a year," he said. Of those that are incarcerated, 85 percent are arrested again within five years, with over half of them subsequently funneled into adult prisons.

According to Fabelo, the problems caused by lingering structural outcroppings of a much larger system are multifaceted––an inevitable outcome of systemic reforms. "The numbers of youths incarcerated have declined significantly, [and] the system was not designed for the low number of youth that we have," he told me in a phone interview last week. "[T]he costs are pretty high per kid, [and] the configuration of the whole system doesn't lend itself to any good results in terms of safety within the facilities, in terms of ability to deliver recidivism reduction-type of programs, and in terms of maintaining staff where they have a very high turnover rate."

But given that high-ranking lawmakers were present at the panel two weeks ago, there's reason to think actual changes might follow the study's release.

Though Texas, with its penchant for executions, isn't necessarily the first state that comes to mind when people think of progressive changes to the criminal justice system, it has been surprisingly near the front lines of reform in recent years. Specialized drug courts, a reenergized parole system, and better reintegration programs have moved the state away from the vanguard of the last century's prison-industrial complex excesses. Tackling what's left of a pernicious and costly edifice, then, seems like a no-brainer.

Speaking over the phone last Wednesday, Republican State Representatives James White said lawmakers "need to make sure that we have a juvenile correction system that's focused on not just locking up, but lifting people up and getting them rehabilitated so they'll be effective citizens in our constitutional republic.

"The question is, are we really returning to the taxpayer the type of benefit and return-value that they deserve?"

Thanks to bipartisan support from a diverse array of lawmakers and interest groups, juvenile justice in Texas is poised to see yet another overhaul. The question is what, exactly, it will look like.

"We want to make sure that the taxpayer is getting the most bang for their buck, that public safety is preserved, and that, in the case of juveniles, that [offenders are] getting the rehabilitation that they need," said Derek Cohen, a policy analyst at the conservative-leaning Texas Public Policy Foundation's Center for Effective Justice. "That's a difficult three-part mandate, but it would be something that we generally orient towards."

In a broader national context, new reforms in Texas fall nicely into place. Thanks in part to research showing that juvenile incarceration tends to do more harm than good, as well as lower overall crime rates, juvenile arrests dropped 48 percent from 1997 to 2011. In that same period, some 46 states reduced commitment rates for juveniles.

According to Donald Ross, a manager for the National Campaign to Reform State Juvenile Justice Systems, the shift is as much empirical as it is logical. "What is happening is that there is a realization that, number one, the harsher punitive measures aren't really working," he told me. "Two, they're very expensive and it's not really producing results that do anything other than say, 'Well, you did something terrible, so you're going to spend the rest of your life in jail.' It doesn't make much sense."

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Formation of UFO's photographed over Salem, Massachusetts in 1952. Photo via United States Air Force, on Black Vault

Between 1947 and 1969, the US Air Force gathered information on 12,618 UFO sightings from across the country. Dubbed Project Blue Book, it was the only official program ever set up by the American government and military to try to understand the UFO phenomenon.

Because of this official status, Blue Book has long been assumed to be a trove of UFO data by researchers, but its findings were shrouded in secrecy. Even after the documents were declassified they sat on microfilm in the National Archive in Washington.

That was the case until last week, when John Greenewald, Jr. uploaded 130,000 pages of Project Blue Book documentation onto a massive, searchable online database. The database is on the Black Vault, a website he created in 1996 at the tender age of 15 to give the public access to government secrets.

Since then, Greenewald has made over 5,000 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and has shared over 1.4 million pages of declassified documents on his website, shedding light on supposed government cover-ups ranging from UFOs to CIA mind-control experiments to the Benghazi embassy attacks in 2012.

While the American Government claims to no longer be investigating or interested in UFOs—a claim Greenewald refutes—public interest in the matter has definitely not waned. Since the Blue Book files have gone online, traffic to Black Vault has climbed from about 5,000 visits per day to hundreds of thousands.

VICE caught up with John Greenewald to find out why this Cold War-era UFO program is still relevant today.

VICE: When did you become interested in UFO's?
John Greenewald Jr.: I started more than 18 years ago when I was 15 years old and essentially was just struck by curiosity. I wish I had a great story for you where I experienced something or saw something but I don't have a story like that. I was just curious. I started filing FOIA requests after I read a little bit about UFOs on the Internet back in 1996.

What was Project Blue Book?
Project Blue Book was officially the United States military and government's investigation into the UFO phenomenon. They thought they could explain every single UFO sighting and in that process they investigated over 12,600 reports. In the end they concluded that there was nothing really to the UFO phenomenon and only 701 of the cases actually remained "unidentified", simply due to lack of evidence and lack of facts. So that's the public image of what Project Blue Book is, that's what they want you to believe.

Do you think that there was a hidden agenda?
When you look at the Project Blue Book documents you realize something completely different. They want you to believe that this was an investigation and I throw the idea out there that maybe it wasn't an investigation per se but rather an explanation. The agenda was to explain and slap a "CASE CLOSED" label on everything and say "nothing to see here, folks." But what is provable when you look at the data here is that the Blue Book documents were part of a PR campaign.

Why do you think the US government and military establishment dealt with UFO sightings in this way?
The military had to explain sightings to calm the nerves of the population. For the first few years, the Blue Book investigation wasn't taken seriously. But then in 1952 all hell broke loose, so to speak, and UFOs started being seen all over the country. There was a huge influx of sightings. They started being seen above our Air Force bases, above the Capitol Building in Washington, DC, above the White House. So when UFOs started posing that kind of threat, that they could go wherever they want whenever they want within our nation then you can tell that investigation shifted and the military wanted to figure this out and calm the nerves of the government.

What made you want to put these files online?
There were a few Blue Book files online but not in searchable PDF in form. A fellow investigator had compiled 130,000 JPEG images from the Blue Book files, which had already been digitized. But who wants to download 130,000 pictures of text that you can't search? I wanted to make something that was easy to navigate.

How did you make those 130,000 searchable?
The challenge was first sorting them and then making them somewhat orderly but on top of that we had to convert them to PDF so that they could be searchable. And so what I did was write multiple scripts to do multiple passes and then convert them all to PDF and then once they were converted to PDF then I had to scan every readable English word to a computer.

My last big step was not only to program the website but then I programmed a search engine database that then archived all of the search terms that came up and then created a gigantic database that is searchable. That's what really makes this really unique and something that's not out there right now.

Out of the 12,618 cases that you've put online, which are the most interesting?
What boggles my mind when it comes to the Blue Book stuff is that often the witnesses themselves were the military. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of sightings in the Blue Book system that happened over military and nuclear installations. Those are the ones that I think are the most interesting because those guys are trained to understand what is flying in the air. So if they're looking up and seeing a craft that they can't explain and then Blue Book can't explain it either, that shows that it was definitely a serious topic.

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Some weed. Photo via.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

In November 2012 a 54-year-old Vietnamese woman was found working inside a cannabis grow house in Glasnevin, north Dublin by immigration police. The cannabis farm was padlocked from the outside and the cops had to storm the doors to find her. Although the woman was trapped in the grow-house, she was charged with unlawful possession of cannabis and with possession for the purpose of supply.

After being shut up inside a weed farm, the middle-aged woman is now languishing in Ireland's overcrowded prison system. She's waiting for the courts to preside over her appeal to the high court. Garda Immigration (immigration police) failed to see her as a victim, but she insists that she was trafficked and forced into slavery against her will. It is being decided whether the police's refusal to see her as a trafficking victim were lawful.

This case has thrown a spotlight on Ireland's inadequate trafficking framework, which criminalizes people who have been forced into illegal activities like cannabis cultivation.

Asian controlled grow houses have been operating since the early 2000s, when crime groups from east Asia were drawn to Ireland's booming economy and growing Asian community. Triad gangs like the Wo Shing Wo established a base in the capital, creating prostitution and drug networks, including the cultivation of cannabis.

Workers, trafficked from China, Vietnam, and Malaysia, are kept in confinement in rural locations. Human rights activists claim this is modern day slavery. A report published by the Irish Migrant Right Center last year said 75 percent of Asians jailed for cultivating cannabis claimed they had been exploited or maltreated.

Pablo Rojas Coppari, Policy Officer for Dublin's Migrant Rights Center, has been working with Anti Slavery International to highlight Ireland's new grow-house slavery. He told me about the living conditions of those brought over to toil in Ireland's illegal weed farms. "It's a mixed range of people, some know they're being brought to Ireland, some don't," he said. "They usually live in warehouses or a house converted into a grow-house. They sleep wherever they can. Last week I dealt with a guy whose bedroom was a mattress in the toilet. Anything that is considered 'space' is given over to plants."

For many victims, being discovered by the police doesn't mean salvation. It means a new period of imprisonment—this time by the state.

Wendy Lyon, a solicitor from KOD Lyons, is acting on behalf of the Vietnamese woman. She says the state is still looking for the "ideal" victim of trafficking to help and in doing so, ignores more commonplace human rights violations that take place."I often think there's this ideal trafficking victim stereotype of a person who crosses the border in chains. But the reality is much more complex," she said.

The system in place to deal with it is more about locking people up than helping them, she told me. "The trafficking framework isn't based on human rights, but on criminal justice. It's not set up for people who might have agreed to work illegally or even in criminal activities despite these people meeting the definition for trafficking. Look, if you find yourself padlocked into a building it's a human rights issue," she said.

There's also an unhealthy conflict of interests at play. Irish immigration police—charged with removing illegal immigrants from the streets—are also the ones who are supposed to be identifying trafficking victims.

Pablo explained, "The people who determine whether someone is a victim of trafficking are the immigration police—which is essentially a policing role. So this is conflicted. On the one hand they are responsible for reducing irregular migration, but then they are also responsible for identifying potential victims. The police who arrest these people should not be responsible for figuring out if they're victims," he said.

Ireland is also failing to allow suspected victims of trafficking sufficient time—as allocated by EU law—to recover before engaging with a police investigation. During this time, suspected victims are entitled to food and accommodation without police interference. A barrister for the state claimed that as she was in prison and was getting three meals a day, the government had fulfilled its recovery duties.

Pablo was dismayed at the decision. "I'm not even going to try to understand how that barrister saw a parallel between providing someone with accommodation and food and throwing them in prison," he said. "Victims are entitled to 60 days of reflection and recovery. It is not just about food and board, it's about giving a person time to decide whether or not they want to pursue the investigation and co-operate with the Gardai. These people need that time and space."

The most recent report from 2014 says out of 32 people in jail for cannabis cultivation, 25 are Chinese or Vietnamese. Pablo told me this figure continues to get larger."It's a growing trend, so I'd say we're looking at a lot more than that now, and victims continue to go to prison here," he said.

For most victims of trafficking, identifying and confronting those who subjected them to horrific abuse is an incredibly confusing and distressing process. While the Irish government pursues modern day slaves, the people running Ireland's illegal weed farms remain unscathed. It seems those with the key to the padlocks continue to walk free while their victims are locked up yet again.

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Image courtesy of the Hole gallery.

Mark Zuckerberg is a shitty person to idolize, according to KATSU, the New York street artist known for his hacking and social commentary. Since watching The Social Network, KATSU's thought the multibillionaire should be ridiculed rather than revered, and has launched a campaign against the famous hoodie-wearing 30-year-old.

Back in April, KATSU took his first swing at Facebook by plastering New York with images of Zuckerberg with a black eye. But his second punch was a lot more dirty, literally speaking: According to the artist, he loaded up on Thai food, pooped into a takeout container with the aid of a small mirror, and carefully smeared the shit into a likeness of the Facebook founder. Unsurprisingly, KATSU says it was a messy affair and that he had to change rubber gloves every few minutes, as well as take a couple other precautions.

"I had to wear a respirator and burn organic [incense] during rendering," he told me, adding that human feces is surprisingly thin, so layers must be carefully added. "Too much moisture and a whole area can be wiped away with a stroke."

You might think the idea itself is shit, but there's a history of people using human waste in art. The first contemporary artist to work with feces was Piero Manzoni, who in 1961, he canned his turds ( allegedly) and labeled the finished product "artist's shit." That power move inspired a lot of transgressive pieces that took on powerful figures, with Piss Christ, the crucifix photo submerged in artists Andres Serrano's urine, probably being the most famous. More recently, an artist named Fox Bronte created an image of Justin Bieber using various peoples' pubes .

People have also adorned their work with elephant andbird turds, but until KATSU, there hasn't really been well-known case of an artist painting with his or her own poop, something he calls an "overlooked resource" that he's wanted to work with.

In case you wanna see it in person and live in New York City, it's on display at the Hole gallery, in the Bowery, until February 22. There's a lot of other art on display, and if you're only into paintings that involve poop, there's also gonna be a picture of a puppy made from a, uh, recycled Denver omelet, according to KATSU. If you're on the fence about the whole idea, just know that they only stink upon close examination, even though they're not covered in any sort of lacquer.

And if you're interested in mounting this beauty in your home, take note: KATSU says it's going to be sold as-is, with no promise of archival reliability, meaning if the shit fades, changes color, or flakes off, "that is how the cookie crumbles." And you'll have to act fast, apparently.

"We do have a collector interested in the Zuckerberg piece but we're not going to report who it is," the artist says. "I guess I can at least confirm that the interested party in NOT Mark Zuckerberg himself."

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