There's been a lot of talk over the last decade or so about how the novel, a medium traditionally based on paper and ink, can remain relevant in an increasingly multimedia-driven landscape. Why would you want to read a book when you can Tumbl all day? the thinking goes. But for me, our slide into the digital abyss has only made me appreciate books more, made it more refreshing to disappear from the machines and enter a world of pure illusion and imagination.

In any case, literature's relationship to the internet is growing rapidly, and Dennis Cooper is on the forefront of those web-savvy authors defining the new landscape. From his earliest novels—including a sequence of five deceptively shape-shifting books called the George Mills Cycle all the way up to his latest proper print release, an insanely textured labyrinth of mirage-like ideas titled The Marbled Swarm—Cooper's work promises to totally recontextualize the ground behind it, thereby revising the way we think.

That innovation is particularly evident in his latest release, Zac's Haunted House, a free digital novel composed entirely of animated GIFs. The novel appropriates an experience somewhere between carnival mirror labyrinth, deleted Disney snuff film, and a deep web comic strip by Satan, building out the idea that a book doesn't have to simply be sentences on paper, or even terribly concerned with language at all.

Cooper and I discussed via email his novel, the internet, and what the hell else might be next.

VICE: What gave you the idea of writing a novel using only animated GIFs?
Dennis Cooper: The GIF novel evolved from this thing I was doing on my blog where I would create these tall stacks of images—maybe 70 to 120 of them—that illustrated a particular theme or idea. I began introducing GIFs into the stacks, and then I became so interested in GIFs that I started making all-GIF stacks. That's when I started to notice all these really curious, unexpected things were happening in them and between them when they were combined.

So I started experimenting with that, trying to create really deliberate effects and to organize the accidental things that were happening. Finally, I got the idea to make fiction pieces out of them. That idea excited me, partly because, as much I love writing language-based novels, I've always wanted to submerge the story/characters/plot much deeper within the novels' structures than I've been able to. The closest I've gotten was with The Marbled Swarm where the immediate story and characters are just templates of and secret entrances to this whole substructural world existing inside the novel. But they were still there, hogging the novel's top level.

With a GIF novel, I could see the possibility of those things being built on the bottom, and that the structure and style and trickery in which they were imbedded could be the dominant aspect.

It's kind of strange how distinctly 'readable' the chain of GIFs in the novel is, despite being all image-based. How did you begin to construct the feel of a story underlying the organization of those stacks?
I think the animated GIF is a super rich thing, mostly unintentionally? For the novel, I thought of them as these crazy visual sentences. But unlike text sentences, they do all the imaginative work for you. They render you really passive. They just juggle with your eyesight, and you're basically left battling their aggressive, looped, fireworks-level dumb, hypnotizing effects to see the images and the mini-stories/actions they contextualize. I think, ultimately, they're mostly rhythms, or they reduce their imagery and activity, etc. to illustrative components of these really strict rhythmic patterns that turn the eye into an ear in a way.

My idea is that if you make a novel out of them, the visuals in the individual GIFs can serve double duty in the same way that the instrumentation and vocals in music samples do. They become just the texture of the loop's rhythm, and that somehow seems to isolate the GIFs' content from their source material. When you combine and juxtapose the stacks, if you do it carefully, you can break or disrupt their individual rhythms in a way that makes their imagery either rise to the surface or become abstractions. Basically, you can then use their content and appearance as sets and actors and cinematography in a fiction. They can hold their references, if you organize them to do so, and you can use those associations to create short cuts to some idea or emotion you want to get across, or they can become quite malleable and daydream-like, or you can empty them until they're just motions that are as neutral as a text.

The really exciting thing for me is that the narratives can be as unrealistic or abstract or senseless or trivial or abject or unreadable as you want, and they will always remain inherently pleasurable.

You are a super intense mapper and organizer with your novels, so I was constantly looking for keys to the system, things that linked the project throughout. Is the inspiration of these thru-ways all gut, or gut at first and then figuring the gut out and building outward? Or something else entirely?
It started with a series of motifs or even of things I wanted to use. For instance, I initially wanted there to be a through-line involving earth moving equipment. So I just set off in search of related GIFs. Basically, I just did what I think you can only do—use keywords plus the words "animated GIF" in a general Google image search, and also on Giphy, Tumblr, etc. And then I would add in adjectives to try to get into the less public recesses where GIFs reside. There weren't very many interesting earth moving equipment GIFs, but I found other motifs in the garbage that ended up contextualized in that category, and those were useful and ended up mutating the original motif. It's not really very different than the way I write text novels because I always construct dense subsystems in my novels involving motifs and images that work together via what I call "internal rhyming" of different sorts. The main difference formally is just that you're limited by online resources with a GIF novel rather than being limited by your imagination when it's text.

Long story short, making the novel involved a weird and excitingly difficult combination of working in an extremely planned out way and also kind of in an extremely intuitive way too. Sometimes gut came first, sometimes it was the opposite, and often it was simultaneous. This form is really new to me, so talking about it feels quite raw.

People seem to comment on the gruesome aspects of your work, and yet your sense of humor has always struck me as so important to the voice. What are your thoughts on humor in your work, particularly in Haunted House?
I've always used comedy in my books. Early on, especially in the George Miles Cycle novels, I deployed it judiciously, and it was always in service to some idea I had or another effect I wanted that I thought was more important. I used it mostly as a way to sneak up on the reader or to distract the reader vis-à-vis some impending thing that I knew would be startling and probably off-putting. So, I would think of comedy as a kind dressing and as a sleight-of-hand-like device.

In Zac's Haunted House, I was coming to a medium—the animated GIF—that was largely comedic from the outset. So it was different than my written works because that costuming was already there, and, rather than figuring out how to generate humor at the right temperature and tone, it was more a matter of working as complexly as I could to generate content and emotion and tone and stuff within that preset. Even with the more horrific sequences, visually depicted horror is so tied to generating nervous laughter in the viewer and so designed to cause that reaction that, when creating sequences that were disturbing, it was always like trying put some evil clown through unusual motions.

I was glad to see this creation called a novel, despite being online and made of mostly images. As someone who has always seemed a step or two beyond the edge of where things are headed, I wonder if you have any thoughts about the necessity of the novel adapting to the attention spans of the internet generation, and incorporating media into its narrative.
Obviously, there are writers doing interesting things with internet-only material like memes, links, chat space and its language abbreviations and shorthand. But it's mostly been in short fiction or poetry forms so far, I think. I was just talking with someone on my blog the other day about the idea of a novel written entirely with emoticons. The thought arose because of that guy who wrote reviews of Tao Lin's books using only emoticons. Now that people are starting to create paragraph-length strings of them in their social media commentary, for instance, it might be possible to write long fiction with them, although it sure would be a taxing thing to read.

I wonder if video clips could be interesting thing to work with, for instance. Or maybe writing a novel located in multiple, shifting locations where the sites themselves could be employed to reinvent the space around the text into something that would be plain enough not to interfere with or ick up the writing with novelty, but which could broadcast the different and dispersed contexts' qualities or purposes as backgrounding or marginal input. There must be tons of possibilities.

But I don't think there's any necessity for the novel to mutate in order to live more relevantly on the internet. I think PDFs and eBooks are perfectly in tune and not overly primitive for writers who want to stick to text-only, page-based work. It's just that in every other great art form, there are artists—some of them quite popular and respected—who've studied the internet and soaked its advancements and particularities into their work, especially in music, visual art, and film, without corrupting the identity of their mediums or alienating anyone but hardcore purists. So, what's stopping the novelists?

Read Zac's Haunted House here.

Follow Blake on Twitter.

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All photos by Stacy Lee

Mermaids confuse me. Sexually. They're usually depicted as dreamy, topless blondes combing their hair with shells on a rock somewhere as sea water drips majestically down their naked bodies. But they're also half fish. What does it mean if I'm just unfazed by that? Where have I gone? It's not necessarily a bad thing; it's just sexually disorienting, so I generally avoid thinking about mermaids unless I have to.

This is why, when I heard about "mermaid classes" starting in Montreal, I was hit with equal parts curiosity and anxiety. All I knew was that it was called Aquasirene, and was an hour-long class in a rec centre pool where they dress you up and teach you how to swim like a mermaid. I couldn't tell if it was a joke, a bizarre fitness class, or an actual serious meetup for people identifying as mermaids. At $80 a lesson, it had to have some degree of seriousness, but do I want to meet the type of adults who take mermaids that seriously? I decided I needed to know what this was, so I signed up for a class one Sunday and headed over to the pool to find out.

Once there, I peered through the pool window on my way to the changing area and saw a fairly innocuous scene–20 or so women grazing on the deck in their bathing suits with brightly coloured fabrics hanging off a rack to the side. I shuffled into the empty men's locker room and put my stuff into a rusty locker. As I looked over my shoulders, another guy walked in right after me and put his bag down on a bench.

"You taking the mermaid class too?" he asked nervously.

"Yeah," I answered. "Why did you decide to take it?"

He laughed, "It's a long story. Did you bring your snorkel?"

"What? No. We had to bring a snorkel?"

"I dunno man, I really have no idea what's going on."

He said his name was Mikael, and we shook hands. He looked as excited as he was scared, but our mutual confusion was comforting at some level. Mikael seemed like a good dude.

We followed the tunnel out to the deck where the woman I assume I'd been emailing greeted me with a clipboard in her arm. Marielle was slender and beautiful, and as she looked at me with her big brown eyes and toothpaste-commercial smile, I gulped and my palms started sweating.

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"Just come with me and we'll pick out your tail," she said.

I got to choose out of a small selection of man-tails that were bigger than their female counterparts. I chose a dark blue one with a white tip. I looked over at Mikael, who sat on the side with a similar tail and gave me a nod of affirmation.

I was surrounded by a crowded deck of excited, chattering women in their early 20s.

As I put on my tail and took in the whole scene, I realized how out of place I was. I didn't even like mermaids, or swimming really. Meanwhile, I know I was expecting it, but the other people there REALLY liked mermaids. None of this seemed like the joke everyone on Facebook was sharing it as. They kept shifting their gaze back to the sparkly mermaid tails and fixating on them with these wild, crazy eyes. They were happy and chatty on the surface, but beneath that they seemed to have this laser-like focus. It was as though they'd been waiting for this day for a while, and nothing and no one was going to fuck it up.

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I slid my feet through the spandex fabric into the monofin at the bottom. Vicky, one of the instructors, helped strap me in. I watched a girl in a pink mermaid tail pose for photos and thought about how I wanted to approach this thing. Despite the ridiculous concept and slightly psychotic energy, part of me still wanted to take this seriously. I had signed up and come all the way there. There was no point in swimming around sarcastically for an hour. But with this commitment I risked the possibility of a new level of shame—one that comes from trying and failing at being a merman. As a competent athlete, I was convinced I would be fine, no matter what lay ahead.

Vickie waded into the shallow end to face the row of us sitting on the edge. She explained with large, animated movements how we were going to swim with our tails to the other side of the pool. She had a kind of comforting big-sister presence, like she could have been everyone's favourite babysitter, or camp counsellor.

We jumped in with flutterboards, and a few of the stronger swimmers flipped ahead gracefully. The rest of us splashed our tails in random directions and went more or less nowhere. I tried desperately to get some momentum going, but ended up writhing uselessly like a wounded worm on the sidewalk. Almost everyone had passed me at this point, so I gave up and paddled my motionless body forward with just my arms.

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This wasn't off to a good start.

When we got to the other wall, Vickie told me patiently that I needed to move my whole body together, and push my butt up and down. I was already being labeled the weak link, albeit kindly so. Next we had to try floating on our backs, and sculling lightly across the width of the pool. One by one everyone drifted across in a brightly coloured cascade as I tried stubbornly to raise my fat tail off the bottom of the pool. With every attempt I just dunked my head back below the surface, and I rose and fell gasping for air like a convulsing otter. Vickie came over to hold my tail, and Marielle waded over, visibly concerned as well.

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I was annoyed at how badly I was doing, but tried not to be discouraged. I flapped my way to the wall and gathered some optimism for the next stroke. I followed Vickie along with the arm gestures to try getting the technique down.

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I took a deep breath, pushed off the wall and sunk steadily and pathetically below the surface, completely in denial of my failure for a moment, like Wiley Coyote stepping off a cliff.

At this point I had squirmed around so much in my monofin that my feet had popped out, and were now floating aimlessly in the spandex part of my tail. I pulled myself out of the water and tried to adjust my ensemble. Marielle spotted me and rushed over, smiling and glistening with pool water. I rearranged my limbs, somewhat embarrassed, and was successfully refitted.

Vickie showed us how she could point her legs straight up out of the water, a skill she honed in her ten years as a synchronized swimmer. I was impressed, and looked down at my own pathetic blue legs in contrast.

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Next Vickie told us to try swimming sidestroke, which saw me getting some sporadic breaths in, but basically had the same fate as the last exercises. My tail was starting to piss me off. It basically bound my legs together with a giant thing at the end to make sure my movements were both laborious and useless. How was this supposed to send me gliding majestically through the water like a fucking Greek Triton? So far I had basically just practised different forms of drowning in blue spandex.

I sought brief consolation in the fact that the mantails were a little bigger and harder to manoeuvre, but realistically this wasn't an excuse. I saw Mikael happily splashing around with his girlfriend, who I realized was probably the "long story" that brought him here. Great for you, guys. I'm so happy for you.

I was starting to feel pretty bitter. My tail wasn't cute or ironic anymore. It was the object of the slow, creeping onset of total failure. At this point Vickie told us to find a partner, so I paired up with the other anglophone girl beside me named Theresa. She seemed really sweet, and I felt bad about how I was going to ruin the next part of the lesson for her. I apologized to her in advance.

"I've always really liked mermaids," she said, gazing into rippling water.

Vickie came and explained that we were going to join, tail-to-front, and swim together as a unit.

"I think, um she should go in front?" she told me, trying to not hurt my feelings.

We tried the exercise but I inevitably weighed us both down. We floundered mid-pool, surrounded by more successful and mobile couples. The sound of delightful splashing and laughter bounced off the pool walls as we continued to fail.

The class was all in good fun on the surface, but these people felt it important enough to pay $80 to attend. I felt genuinely bad about unintentionally undermining it.

The whole class then got together to hold hands and swim together as a single line.

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This, too, failed because of me. I sank down and fragmented the line like a complete deadweight, disorganizing the whole setup. At this point I was essentially a physically handicapped merman, and I was pretty resentful about it. I was just slowing everyone down. If I lived in some kind of underwater mermaid city they would have to build special entrances for me to be able to enter libraries and hospitals.

Next we saw how far we could swim underwater in one breath. I hadn't really been breathing properly since the class began anyway, so that was fine. I took a deep breath and propelled myself forward with my arms, dragging my dead, fused together legs behind me. I did pretty well, powered by my brute force and bitterness.

I surfaced about 3/4 of the way across the pool. Vickie came over, impressed and surprised, and said, "Wow that was actually really good."

After that we did a core workout on the side of the pool, making a wave with our line of tails. I had kind of checked out by then but was trying to be a good sport.

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Finally we had a game of "tag" followed by free time. It felt a bit juvenile but then again we were dressed up as creatures that don't exist. I paddled around reluctantly in a rubber dingy before sitting off to the side, swishing my tail back and forth away from the action.

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The class was over and I put on a brave face to speak with Marielle about how this all started. She told me she has backgrounds in business, modelling, and water sports, and decided to combine them. She also, like everyone else there, loved mermaids. There was so much life and excitement coming out of her as she described her mermaid school that I began to cheer up a little.

Everyone lined up with their tails up in the shallow end for a photoshoot, so I joined on the side beside Theresa.

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I thought about what had just transpired with the class in general. It had turned out to be more of an aquafitness class than a chance for people to actualize their aggressive, hysterical obsession with mermaids. Judging by their flushed, happy faces and the fact that they were still wading around in their tails, everyone else seemed to have thoroughly enjoyed it.

I took off my tail and stood there, dejected and shivering a little on the deck. I had learned a lot about myself and my limits. I just don't have what it takes to be a merman. I said goodbye to Marielle and Vickie, and changed in humbled silence. You don't know shame, failure, and the loss of dignity until you've done it in a mythical creature costume.

Follow Stephen Keefe on Twitter.

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Berlin-based photographer Joseph Wolfgang Ohlert recently went to San Francisco to photograph drag queens and trans people for his first book of photos. By day, Joseph met queens at their homes for quiet portrait sessions. At night, he followed them to such hallowed institutions as Trannyshack, Midnight Sun, the Stud Bar, and Moby Dick to document them in full bloom.

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This gallery of photographs is dedicated to the memory of Cookie Dough (pictured below), a pillar of the San Francisco drag scene who passed away last week.

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See more photos by Joseph Wolfgang Ohlert on his website. See more of his recent contributions to VICE here, and follow his instagram @jwo_studio.

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3-D printed knuckle dusters. Photo via Queensland police

During a raid this week on a house in Australia, police discovered a cache of 3-D printed weapons. The arsenal— a set of knuckle dusters and plastic parts believed to be four disassembled guns—was found with some pot, ammo, and a sawed-off .22-caliber rifle.

Officers couldn't make an arrest for possession of parts, but they still took the man in for the other illegal crap he had lying around (guns aren't illegal in Australia, but have been tightly controlled since 1996 —and sawed-offs rarely fly anywhere). In the process, they confiscated the printed parts to confirm they would have been used to create mostly plastic guns, which may result in further charges.

3-D printed guns have drawn quite a bit of attention since 2013, thanks largely to Motherboard's documentary Click, Print, Gun on Cody Wilson, a printed gun wunderkind who pioneered the technology. His Liberator pistol, a functional, one-shot, cheap-and-easy gun (plastic save for one metal plate included so it would show up on metal detectors, complying with America's Undetectable Firearms Act) ushered in a glut of innovation in multi-shot, durable, and cheap gun models, distributed widely over the internet.

At the same time, law enforcement officials have been unphased by the weapons, calling them defective, unreliable, and weak. In the Australian case, police actually talked about the printed gun parts as if they were more a risk of injury to the manufacturer than the potential victim.

To figure out whether the current printed gun scene is something we should be freaking out about, we caught up with Cody Wilson to talk about the popularity of printing lethal weapons, recent advances in home gun tech, and why he and others make the things in the first place.

VICE: What do you make of the haul in Australia? Do you see any indication of a growing concern by police about printed weapons?
Cody Wilson: This was obviously someone who has some kind of connection to the criminal world. But I don't think that I'm finding a particular skittishness on the part of the police about guns. Once they find them, however, it brings up this bigger problem, which is that they don't know who's printing them. The more terrifying thought is how many people in Australia have printed guns for the last couple years just to do it, or because they're criminals? It's probably a much larger number than we might guess.

This derringer that they found [the type of gun Wilson believes the Australian parts were intended for]—I was looking at it last night, and it looked like it was probably a PLA Reprringer derringer. It was mostly like a compound zip gun [an improvised firearm often made out of pipe and tape], not a pure 3-D printed gun. It still shoots, but really the 3-D printed parts just hold the metal assets together. It's not a gun like the Liberator is. You could still go to a hardware store and make a zip gun, which would be much more effective.

Do you have any sense of how common 3-D gun printing is these days? Over the past year or so the technology's gotten pretty accessible. It's not as hard as it was back in the time of the Liberator.
I agree with you and I disagree.

I do think that there's been a wider dissemination of 3-D printers that can do this kind of work. But at the same time the retail space has advanced a type of printing that's not good for gun printing—specifically PLA driven printers . If you really mean to do all plastic guns, you want APS, which is not a common technique in most available printers.

I believe PLA is cheaper, more environmentally friendly, and probably better for engineering reasons for a wider number of applications. MakerBot eventually went all PLA.

Same thing with the file availability. We can probably admit that the files have been more disseminated across the internet in the last couple of years, but the Pirate Bay was taken down successfully—a lot of the torrent sites have been taken down. As a result many of the more accessible files have become a bit more difficult to find. You kind of have to know where the specialized communities are to go get them there.

I think that it's kind of a wash.

Does that mean it would be easy for anyone to track down a person who's printing 3-D guns? Because the tools needed to create one are getting so niche?
You know, yeah. If certain authorities or sovereign governments have it higher up on their priority list, yeah, it would be pretty easy to map out most of the actors in this field, especially online, and then track the people visiting those communities on 4Chan and other websites and very quickly get an understanding of who the personalities are.

The Reprringer was pretty innovative when it came out, but what are we capable of now?
I'm not trying to shit on the gun at all. It's a great concept. There are all kinds of hybrid concepts floating around and we know that that derringer was tested and we know that it worked.

But the guns tested so far [beyond the tests being done at Defense Distributed, the 3-D gun printing research and schematics publisher founded by Cody] have been similar concepts in ABS and PLA—the same materials we were working with 2-3 years ago.

Defense Distributed bought a carbon fiber printer almost a year ago. The material sheets on some of these are way stronger than ABS, and we're thinking there are whole other concepts available like [home printed] extractor mechanisms and semi-automatics.

Basically there's a couple of things that I don't want to say we've done yet—but we've done them. And I don't want to release the details until we have a clear avenue to put them back on the internet. So the field definitely has advanced, it's just publicly it hasn't advanced as much as you might think.

But a lot of people don't have access to those more expensive materials.

How expensive are the kinds of advances you're creating these improved guns with?
They're not really prohibitively expensive—in fact they're comparable to what we were paying a couple of years ago [for plastic guns like the Liebrator]. We're still talking like five, six grand machines for a totally different class of materials. That seems fair to me.

And as soon as this stuff gets out there, there'll be markets for people to start producing more of the materials. Then the prices will fall. These machines are being developed for the home user.

Are 3-D printed weapons something people should worry about more than other firearms?
No. I think in the main 3-D guns are still ghosts that don't actually exist. The Liberator was the closest we've gotten to a full plastic gun that, according to police, can be snuck through metal detectors and move undetected through airports.

Most of the guns that we're seeing in the news actually rely upon a large amount of metal and are really no different from the improvised weapons that we've been dealing with for a couple of centuries. So I'm not going to say that there's nothing new here. But the more things change the more they stay the same.

Has a 3-D printed weapon been used to commit a crime up to now that you know of?
No. I know people who've gone to jail for 3-D printing guns, but not for [committing a] crime.

Why do you and Defense Distributed make 3-D printed guns? What's a maker's intention in producing them and in spreading the technology around the world for free?
Where goods can't travel across borders (Australia's a gun control nation) files can still go there.

The entire world has an antipathy to the popular access to arms and will do everything in its power to divert and frustrate the idea of the common man having access to especially military-grade weapons. And I have an ideology that says you should have access to military-grade weapons. [Defense Distributed] is going to do everything it can to put the files and the information related to the manufacture of military-grade weapons into the public domain for all people to have.

I think the rifle is a birthright and I think it's an instrument of political decision. As a last resort, you should always be able to murder your government.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

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A tweet from journalist Julie Bindel about the "pimp lobby." Background picture by ceridwen via Wikicommons

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

Across the globe, a dangerous, elusive group is gathering force. People call them the Pimp Lobby. The lobby refuses to show its true face, hiding instead behind such apparently benevolent fronts as grassroots activist groups, academics, student unions and sex worker rights campaigners. But make no mistake, the lobby's intention is the same: to protect vast gains; to turn the world into one giant brothel.

Crusaders have begun to tear the mask off this clandestine movement. Kate Smurthwaite, a comedian who's loudly vocalized her belief that paying for sex should be criminalized, recently had a show at Goldsmith's University cancelled as ticket sales were low and a small section of the college's Feminist Society had expressed concern about Smurthwaite's views. In the kerfuffle that followed, Smurthwaite labelled the night "a pro-pimp event."

Meanwhile, calls for full decriminalization of prostitution and requests from people in the industry that they be referred to as "sex workers" have been slammed as cynical obfuscations designed to deceive the public and keep pimps in business.

Some, however, question the existence of this shady lobby, and instead wonder if the label is just a useful way to discredit loud-mouthed sex workers standing up for their beliefs.

Last week, a new guide was released for journalists (easy prey for this secretive group) advising on how to spot members of the pimp lobby. The guide was produced by journalist and researcher Julie Bindel, representing the National Alliance of Women's Organisations, and Eaves, a charity that provides support to vulnerable women. The press pack offers guidelines on reporting trafficking and prostitution. Importantly, it also advises on "how to identify the pro-prostitution lobby" (a.k.a. the pimps).

"The term [pimp lobby/pro-prostitution lobby] refers to academics and profiteers from the industry who put forward the view that prostitution is a form of labour with no consequences, ignoring evidence of long-term effects and the overall way in which it dehumanies women," Bindel told me.

"The lobby suggests that decriminalizing is only to do with protecting women and has nothing to do with protecting profits. It's a bit like the tobacco lobby: not everyone dies or even gets ill from smoking, but the lobby will deny any danger in order to protect its profits. Academics get good money to study the industry, and the viewpoint that 'prostitution is work' is seen as hip and cool."

The launch of Bindel's guide didn't go unnoticed: a protest took place in central London, organized by the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP), who are angry about the "misinformation and lies" which, they say, Bindel's work is riddled with.

On Twitter, suspected pimp lobbyists took the piss:

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Key to Bindel's new guide is the idea that the distinction between sex trafficking and sex work is redundant. According to Bindel, all sex work is abuse. Women in sex work should be referred to as "prostituted women," all their agency removed.

"In reality, the experience of being prostituted—whether trafficked abroad or pimped/exploited locally, is remarkably similar," Bindel writes.

To back this up, Bindel's guide is full of heart-wrenching statistics. Many of them don't stand up to scrutiny, but how important are a few digits?

Nit-pickers were ready to quibble, and the ECP released counter-claims:

CLAIM 1: Eighty percent of women in prostitution are controlled by traffickers.
FACT 1: This is a lie. Less than 6 percent of sex workers are trafficked. [A study by Dr Nick Mai of London Metropolitan University found that the majority of migrants questioned prefer] working in the sex industry over the "unrewarding and sometimes exploitative conditions they meet in non-sexual jobs".

CLAIM 2: The average age of entry into prostitution internationally is 13 years old.

FACT 2: This statistic is a lie. It comes from a survey of YOUNG PEOPLE under 18 years old.

(You can see more of these here.)

"Defending sex workers' rights to safety and against criminalization isn't being pro-prostitution," Niki Adams of the ECP tells me. "Does Bindel not know the difference between workers defending our rights and bosses defending their profits?"

The debate around sex work and trafficking is fierce and ongoing. Neither side suggests that trafficking doesn't exist, but its prevalence and the disproportionate attention given to sex trafficking (as opposed to trafficking for agriculture or domestic labour, for instance) are questioned.

In 2009, the UK's biggest ever investigation into sex trafficking—Operation Pentameter—convicted just five people on the basis that they had coerced the women who worked for them. An analysis of trafficking statistics carried out at the time revealed how "official estimates" snowballed wildly.

More recently, in a wave of panic ahead of London 2012, Olympic boroughs were put on alert for a deluge of trafficked sex workers, but, in the event, well-funded NGOs failed to find anyone to rescue. Likewise, after 2013's raids on the flats of Soho sex workers, no women were found to have been trafficked.

With stories like these fueling the flames of the pimp lobby's quest, abolitionists must be vigilant. At every turn, the movement is there with its bold claims that "sex work is work", and that women's safety is best served through full decriminalization, allowing women to organize and work together for safety.

At last year's Amnesty AGM, when the charity voiced support for the decriminalization of activities related to the buying or selling of consensual sex between adults, those in the know could see what had really happened: this respected, global NGO was not acting in the interests of women's safety; it had been infiltrated and subverted by the pimp lobby.

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Those who fall into the so called "pro-prostitution" camp have defended themselves, claiming that women's welfare is their top priority and that they believe the focus on trafficking obscures other dangers that sex workers experience.

Alex Bryce is director of the National Ugly Mugs Scheme, which allows sex workers to anonymously report abuse. The organization has more than 2,300 sex workers signed up and receives 40 to 50 reports per month.

"We have had no incidents of trafficking reported to us, and that's quite revealing to me," Bryce told me. "We've had more cases of inappropriate behaviour and unacceptable treatment of sex workers by police than sex workers being exploited, controlled or trafficked. The conflation of sex work and trafficking results in harm to sex workers and also moves resources away from combating real trafficking."

Anti-trafficking projects are high in the funding league: in 2011, the EU gave nearly £10 million ($15.2 million) to projects with anti-trafficking aims, while the US government gave $50.7 million to international projects and another $20 million to domestic ones. According to the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW), these projects have overwhelmingly failed to help the women they serve. The GAATW believes this could be linked to the strong anti-prostitution bias within the field.

"The US government's anti-prostitution pledge requires organizations seeking US funding to agree an organization-wide policy opposing prostitution—something that GAATW strongly disagrees with," the organization said in a statement.

While Bindel's 2006 "Press for Change" report (included in the latest press pack) was funded by a US Department of State grant, and her partner organization Eaves was recently awarded European Commission funding, collectively, sex worker organizations across the globe run on an estimated €8 million ($9 million) a year, according to the Red Umbrella Fund.

The British sex workers rights group Sex Worker Open University describes itself as funded in "bits and bobs," from $20 private donations to small grants from sponsors like the Edge Fund.

"Our running costs aren't high, and we're all volunteers who are current sex workers or non-sex workers supportive of sex worker rights," a spokesperson told me.

Launched in 1975, until two years ago the ECP was funded from the pockets of its members—none of whom were pimps or managers. Today, funding covers only the production of a rights leaflet for sex workers. The organization's main spokespeople are volunteers.

Despite this, Bindel warns that the pimp lobby is groaning in cash. Her guide states:

"One of the reasons why you will have pro-sex industry contacts in your book as opposed to abolitionists is because many of them are extremely well-funded, and therefore have more time to talk to journalists."

Some have suggested that this is not entirely helpful:

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While others wonder when they get their pimp lobby perks:

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And some have complained about the negative racial overtones of the term:

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The "lobby" is gathering steam. Across the globe, reputable organizations support the rights of sex workers: the UN has called for the decriminalization of brothel-keeping and the purchase of sex; evidence from medical practitioners in the NHS suggests that decriminalization allows for the better delivery of sexual health services; the World Health Organization is on side; UN Women, the Global Commission on HIV and the Law and the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health are all on side.

For their part, sex workers continue to deny that the "pimp lobby" exists, suggesting the term is simply a method employed by people like Bindel to make their testimony irrelevant.

"We cannot actually be telling the truth and must therefore be the pimp lobby, that shadowy cabal that controls every sex worker who does not scream victimhood," sex worker Jem writes on her blog.

Be vigilant, citizens.

Follow Frankie Mullin on Twitter.

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Illustration by Stephen Maurice Graham

Sex in video games, as has been pointed out extensively, doesn't really work. There's a lot of waiting around, the graphics aren't really there yet, and the only console with a one-handed controller is exclusively for children. On top of that, imagine going into GameStop and buying, like, BMX XXX. Harrowing stuff.

Nope, if you're looking to combine sex and gaming—and as a species, we're apparently persisting with this—a much more logical place to start would be the world of internet browser games. Quick and to the point, usually demanding nothing more of you than a mouse hand, and you're only a click away from actual, proper porn if needs be.

So, have any of the limitless nerds making cheap, casual, online games cracked the code? I had a good, long, not-especially-hard look, and below is what's available.

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There's definitely some Young Money trading hands, here

THE ARCHIVES

All power to Archive.org—the site's collection of playable MS-DOS games is genuinely awe-inspiring. There are over 2,200 games up there to date, and almost all of them work. But come on, you're only human, and there's a text-based sex adventure called Soft Porn II on the first page. And then there are pages on the internet like this. Yes, those are all Star Trek–themed text-based sex adventures.

You can learn a lot about the sexual attitudes of 1980s introverts from their sexy text games. The sex is graphic but vanilla (though Soft Porn II does have a pleasing line in annilingus), all breasts are "pert," without exception, and anything kinky or gay is usually punished with a kill screen, unless it's a wholly improbable lesbian scene. There's also a definite "bag of sand" air to a lot of the descriptions of body parts: "deep red and granite hard nipples," "her damp and torrid pussy," "the black recesses of her womanhood," etc.

Then there's the point-and-click adventure games and the dungeon-based RPGs, which are honestly more noteworthy for their titles than the extremely carry-on sex you'll wish you hadn't wasted an hour working toward. Sex Vixens from Space. Passionate Patti Does a Little Undercover Work. Cuntlet and Cuntlet II. You're better off watching Heavy Metal, at least that's got Cheap Trick on the soundtrack.

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"Not about rape," though

CARTOON SEX SIMS

I guarantee, with about eight seconds of not-especially-focused googling, you can find at least three cartoon sex browser games that'll open up a deep, black pit in your soul that cannot be refilled. Case in point: a selection from the most popular "adult" games on the very first site I found:

School of Rape,which says it's not about rape, but does involve a jilted nerd using magical pheromones to trick girls into blowing him in the cafeteria. That sounds like rape.

Jessica Rabbit FM, in which the cartoon character is animated like a gently shaking water balloon wrapped in elastic bands, and sexually tortured until she likes it.

Trapped Girl, in which a girl (your girlfriend, so it's OK, apparently) is trapped in a window and you have to sexually harass her, or put cat ears on her, before someone catches you.

Kim Possible—you know when someone tweets, "oh my God, kids born in 1998 will be able to vote this year!" Well, kids young enough to have watched Kim Possible are now old enough to design and publish browser games that open with you fucking her mouth.

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The bus is looking more appealing by the second

THE UNCANNY VALLEY

Did you watch The Polar Express, gaze into the glassy eyes of the train-conducting nightmare man, and think, Yes. Sexually, I am finally home. You're in luck: Intrepid animators working for what must, at best, be pretty meagre riches, have started to really push the boat out when it comes to making your computer fuck targets look more like actual people. But also... not.

Take viral sensation Dating Ariane with its individually rendered strands of hair (which, unless you're Pixar or Weta, you should never even attempt), baffling breast physics, and disquietingly detailed skin rendering. But then what would you expect from people who want you to drive a joke car in a cocktail dress?

And then there's Sepe's Cumshot. By all means follow that link. But it's important that you know that beyond it lies a naked man who looks like a jacked-up Peter Pan Thom Yorke, whose head rolls around like he's dying as his dick and balls flop out and inflate like an emergency slide.

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She's smiling, OK? Everything's fine...

EXTREME

Look, I'm not going to tell you how to find it, but there's a game out there where you click on a load of doors, and then at the end there's a sexy naked cat, and then the game ends. I'm also not going to tell you where you can play a game where you make two cats named Labrn and Violet Berry fuck in a "Delight Castle."

I'm certainly not pointing you toward the one where you have a rescue a girl who's being gang-raped by zombies with big ol' decaying erections. I'm also going to suggest that you don't go out looking for it because of the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad things you're going to find on the way.

There's also one where you sort of jack off an alien tentacle that's in the middle of eating someone. It's dedicated to the late H.R. Giger. I'm not going to tell you how to find that either.

Do you know why? Because I'm a good person, and I'm not here to hurt you.

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Just don't ask

BAFFLING

It's worth pointing out, after all this, that none of these games so far are actually sexy. Not one, and not a bit. Even the ones that have tried really hard are mostly just like lightly smudging some porn and moving it up and down in front of your face.

But then there are some games that are so defiantly, obviously unsexy that their entire existence becomes a mystery. Like Bejeweled clones where all the colored circles have nipples. Asteroids, except your spaceship is a big cartoon penis. Whatever the fuck is going on here.

Truth be told, there's a ton of sex games out there whose use cannot be parsed. They're just puzzle games or platformers or whatever else but with sexual-but-sexless cartoon details that make them impossible to play anywhere besides the confines of your bedroom or a teenage boy's sleepover. Half of them require too much concentration to masturbate to anyway—though don't let us stop you trying. So, what does that leave? Rebellion? A laugh?

Oh, and also there's a game where you play a machine jacking off a disembodied cartoon robot cock with a smiley face, and for the sake of the species let's pray it's meant to be instructional.

Follow Duncan Vicat-Brown on Twitter.

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Photo by Flickr user Adam Swank

Two years ago, Madeleine (not her real name) lost her father to cancer. She was devastated. She had about a gram of cocaine leftover from a New Year's Eve party, and she started using it, little by little, to get through each day. She says that cocaine is the only thing that gave her the energy to cope with her daily life, to make the funeral arrangements, and take care of her grieving mother. Cocaine, she says, saved her from her grief.

There are no doctors who would endorse Madeleine's method of self-medication—it sounds dangerously close to a rather serious habit, after all. But the fact that she says it helped her deal with depression doesn't surprise Dr. Matthew Johnson, who researches behavioral pharmacology at Johns Hopkins University.

"The idea of using cocaine, or drugs extremely similar to cocaine, for depression or related disorders is not new," he explained—and it's not scientifically unfounded either.

First, some history: Cocaine was regularly used in medicine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a treatment for everything from exhaustion to pain to asthma—but especially for "melancholia," or chronic sadness. In 1863, the French chemist Angelo Mariani noted that adding cocaine to wine could lift even the saddest people's spirits, and a medical text from 1885 suggested "the best results yet obtained from the administration of the drug [cocaine] have been in conditions of mental depression." In a paper presented to the American Neurological Society the same year, a physician explained how he had injected cocaine into patients who were experiencing "profound grief or sadness" to great success, and how one case of "suicidal melancholia recovered in less than one month," after only five injections of cocaine (the dose is unclear).

The most famous advocate for cocaine therapy was Sigmund Freud, who hailed the drug for its mood-enhancing properties (second only to its positive effects on one's sex drive). Freud was adamant about cocaine's potential to relieve depression; he conducted numerous experiments on himself, and noted that even "a small dose lifted me to the heights in a wonderful fashion." Freud's first major scientific contribution—before psychotherapy or free association or any of his bizarre theories about sex and psychology—was a paper praising the drug, in 1884, titled simply "On Cocaine." (It's a great time capsule from an era when doing drugs with your friends could be considered actual, bona fide research.)

By the 20th century, though, doctors and pharmacologists had realized that coke was addictive and could mess your life up. Freud himself had developed a serious coke habit, and one of his patients and friends, Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, had died at the young age of 45, badly addicted to cocaine. If cocaine was effective in treating sadness, it could also cause a lot of misery.

Modern antidepressants don't have the same instantaneous effect as cocaine, which makes them less addictive. But they work in similar ways the brain—namely by, balancing the monoamine neurotransmitters, which are believed to be the cause of depression. Wellbutrin, a commonly prescribed antidepressant, feels similar enough to a coke binge when it's snorted that it's earned the nickname of " poor man's cocaine."

While cocaine is only vaguely similar to most modern antidepressants, it's nearly identical to another drug: methylphenidate, commonly known by the brand name Ritalin. Cocaine and Ritalin work very, very similarly—both substances block the reuptake of the same neurotransmitters in the brain to increase dopamine levels. Snorting cocaine and Ritalin are indistinguishable to users under blind conditions," said Dr. Johnson.

Ritalin is commonly prescribed to treat ADHD, but it's also used sometimes to address "treatment-resistant depression," or cases of depression where traditional antidepressants haven't worked. "And the general consensus is that, at least for some people, these drugs are beneficial in terms of having antidepressant effects," Dr. Johnson explained.

One of the appeals of using dopaminergic stimulants to treat mood disorders is that the results are instantaneous. It can take weeks, or even months, for traditional antidepressants to kick in—which is too long for someone who's suicidal, or even someone who's dealing with intense and immediate grief. There's a Reddit thread (which, in the three months since it was posted, has made it to the "Best Of" section) about a guy who says he traveled to Mexico to buy barbiturates to kill himself. When he arrived, his cab driver gave him coke, and after a week of snorting it, he "decided life wasn't so bad after all." He believes that while cocaine didn't "cure" his depression, it saved his life.

So far, there have only been a handful of scientific studies looking into the "efficacy of dopaminergic stimulant use in patients with mood disorders," but in the small-scale studies that have been published, the results have been positive. As a 2013 review of previous research pointed out, "the abuse potential of traditional stimulants... would preclude these medications as first-line treatments for clinical depression." In other words, the possibility that you'll get addicted to coke pretty much rules it out as a medicine.

But for patients who don't have a history of substance abuse, and for whom traditional antidepressants haven't worked, the use of dopaminergic stimulants "may provide enough improvement in functional outcome to justify their use," says the review.

Again, Dr. Johnson doesn't find that surprising. "Look, I'm not recommending that anyone go out and find cocaine and use it as an antidepressant," he clarified. "But scientifically, the idea that some people have reported that cocaine has been helpful for their depression is not a crazy idea. And there is sufficient research with very related drugs that suggest that there's probably a core truth there."

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

If you are addicted to cocaine or any other drug, please go here and get help.

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This article was originally published by VICE Germany.

There are more than 300 spa towns in Germany, each boasting a number of illustrious rehabilitation and spa centers that attract people, as well as their pets, from all over the world.

Often surreal environments that combine futuristic technology and traditional architecture, for many these towns offer the sense of having briefly reached utopia. Photographer Alexander Krack traveled to more than 30 of them in search of the aesthetic realm that is the German spa town. I caught up with him to find out a little more about his pictures.

VICE: Hi, Alex. What is it about these spa towns that attracted you in the first place?
Alexander Krack: While researching for another project I coincidentally stayed in a small motel in one of these towns. As I was walking around the "Kurgarten"—the official park area that every spa town has—I came across this painting behind a storefront that was lit up by the evening sun. I took a photo of it and immediately felt that there was more out there that stirred my interest. I guess I liked the idea that I had certain associations with spa towns but could not really grasp a coherent image of those associations. That painting behind the glass expressed that perfectly for me.

What do you think it is that attracts everyone else to these towns?
There are hundreds of these towns in Germany, so it is also a topic of general interest. People go there for different reasons, but mostly for health concerns. A lot of towns have specialized rehabilitation clinics and special treatments for chronic diseases such as asthma or rheumatism. More and more towns have also found a niche in wellness treatments. Thermal baths are one of the main attractions. A lot of people spend their holidays there and can combine recreation and health. This mixture is something I'm really interested in.

So most people are just visiting?
There are loads of visitors to the resorts, but many people grow up there and keep the town running. I also met quite a few elderly people who decided to move there after retirement. I guess the nature of these towns is appealing. Not just the actual nature, which you find in the parks and gardens, but the general feeling of being a little cared for by good doctors and entertainment programs that target mostly older people.

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And what about the animals? What's this dog up to?
This was taken in a special rehab center for animals called the Vierbeiner Reha-Zentrum in a town called Bad Wildungen. Animals, mostly dogs, are treated there, for example when they had an accident with a car. Inside the water tank is a treadmill. That way the joints are less strained while at the same time the muscles are stimulated by the water resistance.

How many different types of treatment do you think you saw?
Roughly I would say about 30 to 40 depending on what one considers an individual treatment. One of the most extreme was definitely a cold chamber where people go in for about three minutes at minus 110 degrees Celsius. It's supposed to help with chronic arthritis or ease the pain after a spinal operation. Even though it seems bizarre, I spoke to some people who had been doing it for weeks and they definitely felt it helped. I went in myself and felt pretty relaxed afterward. Maybe some of it is just positive thinking, though.

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What's going on with these old people sitting down and looking at a wall in a cave?
They are sitting in an adit. Within the adit is a microclimate that keeps a constant temperature of 8 degrees Celsius throughout the whole year. Humidity is at nearly 100 percent, and the air is almost completely free of dust particles, germs, and allergenic pollen. Therefore the air is supposedly really good for your lungs. Also there is a spring inside the adit that releases so-called reduced water, which is supposed to work as a catcher of free radicals.

If you didn't have captions for some of these pictures they could easily be misunderstood. Is that intentional or just the nature of these bizarre healing worlds?
That's intentional as I wanted to find "images" rather than document some treatment in the most objective and scientific manner. It goes back to what I said in the beginning. To me it is about the overall feeling of these places—at least the way I perceived it. However, I didn't want to obscure reality, and from my experience in showing the work, most people understand what they see. Maybe not right away by the single image, but with the series they do. I want them to fill in the blanks with their imagination and create their own narrative.

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Today, February 12, 2015, marks the one-year anniversary of writer, poet, and spoken-word artist Maggie Estep's death.

I thought I saw Maggie Estep across the room from me at hot yoga one night. She stuck out; she was wearing a bright red CBGB T-shirt and a New York City haircut. I'd heard rumors that she'd left NYC for Woodstock, but we were in Hudson. I'd learned of Maggie in my early 20s, had watched her perform Diary of an Emotional Idiot repeatedly. Just a week earlier, I'd bought The KGB Reader because she had a short story in it. I wondered if I should approach her. I didn't want to fan out. But when class ended, she strutted toward me and said, "Hey. I thought you were in Oregon."

Then she laughed, "I just made it sound like you were in a cult."

"I moved back two days ago. How did you know that?" I asked.

"An essay of yours that I read online. I moved to Hudson right after you moved to Portland and when I got here, everyone would mention you to me. Because we both write shit. Apparently, we're supposed to be friends."

She put on her fur coat. She smelled of gum and perfume and dog. She put on lip gloss. (She was never not wearing lip gloss.) We exchanged numbers; she told me she taught yoga on Monday nights and that I should go. She was walking the same way as me. It turned out we lived two blocks from each other.

We were fast friends. We began texting every day, going to yoga twice a week, chatting about books we were writing and reading. It's like that in small towns, especially when you're both female writers. Maggie was THE female writer. The New York Times liked to call her "a spoken-word star." Before feminism was Twitter-trendy, Maggie was putting out work like "Car Guy" and "The Stupid Jerk I'm Obsessed With," breaking doors down for female authors like me. She was personal, political, dirty. She didn't hold back, and she was respected for that. She wrote directly and powerfully about addiction, queers, snorting and shooting drugs, fucking stupid men and dyke-y women in an astute and poignant way. "I'm a Masturbating Idiot and a Sexual Neanderthal. Welcome to my life," she wrote in Diary of an Emotional Idiot. She gave an important voice to not-normal-girls, speaking to them and for them.

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Maggie Estep performing 'Diary of an Emotional Idiot' on 'Def Jam Poetry'

A friend emailed: "I can't believe MAGGIE ESTEP is your neighbor."

Neither could I. I knew this was a lucky strike. At 50, Maggie had published seven novels and two spoken-word CDs. And everything she produced was good. She was a real-deal artist. The year I was born, '86, she was at the Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poets. She'd lived the gritty life in New York City. She'd gone to rehab and recovered from using heroin. Maggie was someone whose trajectory I could appreciate and admire and learn from. There was something surreal about meeting a writer whose work I'd long respected, something magical about how she exceeded my expectations.

I began going to Maggie's Monday-night class. Instead of playing yoga bhajans, Maggie blasted Patti Smith, the Magnetic Fields, and Fleet Foxes.

She had us chant before class. I couldn't help thinking about how funny it was to be singing with Maggie Estep, and how now she was singing songs about Shiva and Ganesha instead of shouting and slamming "Scab Maids on Speed" or "Sex Goddess of the Western Hemisphere."

We met on a street corner one night in early January to swap books. I gave her Legs Get Led Astray and she gave me her novel, Alice Fantastic. That night, I opened the book in bed. It was signed in blue Sharpie:

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Photo courtesy of the author

Maggie didn't like her apartment because it had bamboo floors, and I was living at home. She emailed: "Do you wanna try being roommates a shot? Two women writing and going to yoga could, after all, be the next sitcom. 21st century Seinfeld style. We will both be Kramer. Lots of falling down into rooms." One night, Maggie, her ex-boyfriend/best friend, my then boyfriend, and I went out for noodles. I'd been re-reading Diary of an Emotional Idiot and there's a line in it where the narrator says, "I have a theory: Masturbating leads to productive behavior."

"Masturbating," Maggie explained, eating a forkful of tofu. "Masturbating makes you want to vacuum." We laughed. The guys said nothing.

I ordered her other books online. I listened to her albums. I could tell I was talking and gushing about her too much to my mom, to my dad, to my boyfriend. I listened to "Car Guy" constantly:

So I'm riding my bike down 50th and this guy rolls down his window and looks up at me and says, "Hey! Bike lady!"

So I look down at him and I go, "Hey! Car guy!"

Maggie worked in a real estate firm on Warren Street. We looked at a couple of apartments together, but nothing panned out. She was adamant about wanting a YARD and a TUB. She always capitalized those words. We kept scouring Craigslist.

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Photo courtesy of the author

On February 8 of last year we had a reading at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck, New York, for an anthology we were both in. "Wait, is this a panel?" she said. "I HATE panels."

While getting ready for the reading, my self-esteem plummeted. I texted Maggie.

"Anxiety about my acne. This too shall pass?"

She replied within a beat, like a true spoken-word artist: "I'm old and fat and stupid."

On our way to Rhinebeck, we pulled into a gas station for chocolate and coffees. I got out of the car, and Maggie told me to put a fuck ton of sugars in her coffee. I worried that three wouldn't be enough, so I put two more packets into my coat pocket.

Maggie took a sip of her coffee and announced, "This coffee is vile." She said the Rolos were stale but kept asking for them, holding open her fingerless-gloved hand.

I told her about the dream I'd had the night before, something about having to insert a glitter kit into my vagina.

"I don't know what the eff was up with that dream," I said.

"You know, you can actually say 'fuck' in my car," Maggie said.

Later, when I describe someone as a "biatch," she said, "You can say 'bitch' in my car, too."

You wouldn't have known Maggie hated panels when we sat down in front of the audience. She charmed everyone's pants off. During the Q&A, we were still drinking our gas station coffees. We took our gum out of our mouths and placed it, so classily, on the lids of our cups. I asked Maggie if she wore a helmet when she rode her bike all over New York City, like she described in her essay. She looked at me and said, deadpan, "No. I was an organ donor." The crowd laughed.

After the reading, we mingled. Someone took our photo, and in it we are clearly laughing loudly, smiling huge, arms tight around each other, both dressed in black. She posted it on her Facebook page, "With Darling Chloe last night at Oblong Books." I put it on Twitter and called it "Caffeinated Lovebirds."

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Photo courtesy of the author

It was the last reading Maggie did, and quite possibly the last photograph ever taken of her. When she died, three days later, USA Today published the photo, among other sites.

The next morning I went to her yoga class. Maggie was sitting at the desk. "Long time no see," I said. In Warrior 1 pose Maggie walked to me and adjusted my body. "Fix me," I joked to her. She looked into my eyes and smiled. It was our last interaction in person. I didn't say goodbye when I left yoga, just booked it down the stairs.

That night, texting with Maggie, she asked, "Am I a stupid yoga jerk?"

"What do you mean?" I texted back.

"I mean, when I am teaching class, do you think, God, what a moron?"

I told her no. I told her she knew what she is doing, and that she was a wonderful yoga teacher. "God, I love you," she responded. "I love you too," I wrote.

Sunday morning, lying in bed, my boyfriend and I watched videos of Maggie performing. "Maybe we should see if she wants to get coffee," I mumbled, but I didn't follow through.

Monday afternoon my phone rang: Maggie. I figured she was calling to remind me to go to yoga that night, or had found an apartment for us to look at. "Heyyy!" I answered. But it was a male voice on the other line. Maggie's ex.

"Maggie and I were just hanging out at my place, and she had a heart attack. I took her to the ER, and now she's being transported by medevac to the Albany Medical Center. Will you drive to the hospital with me?" He picked me up 20 minutes later.

"She was always obsessed with medevacs," he said, shaking his head.

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Photo courtesy of the author

At the hospital, Maggie's best friend, Laura the Hot Farmer, was already there. (Maggie had names for everyone. Monikers, she called them. She had the whole town calling Laura "Laura the Hot Farmer." Maggie did this in her art as well: "The Hefty Lesbian," "Dave with Long Dick.")

The three of us—ex-boyfriend, best friend, and me, the new friend—sat for hours. They didn't let us see her.

We drove to the hospital again the next day. Maggie was in a coma. She was being cooled down and then heated back up. Or something. I couldn't follow the medical procedure. After I saw her, I had a very clear feeling she would probably die. Like Laura the Hot Farmer said, Maggie looked dead.

We tried to stay positive. We took photos of Maggie, to show her when she woke up. We'd show her how many machines she was hooked up to, how frail and pale she looked. We decided we would start a blog while she was hospitalized. We wrote letters to Maggie every day, so she would have something to read and laugh at when she woke up.

And then there was the email Maggie had sent me the month before.

"I woke up at 6 convinced I was dying (had this weird horrible burning in my chest) and actually contemplated going to hospital, then managed to fall back asleep and slept too late, though at least I am not dead and mysterious chest burning is gone."

"I'm so glad you're not dead!" I responded.

But she was the picture of health, we told the doctors. But she was a yoga teacher. But sometimes she taught yoga and went to the gym in the same day. But she's been sober for twenty years. But she was vegan, we whined.

In the car on the way home from the hospital after midnight, during a bleak silence, eating apples and chips, Maggie's ex-boyfriend said to me, "You should know, Maggie's moniker for you was 'My New BFF.'"

The next day I didn't go to the hospital. There had been a blizzard, and that afternoon I curled up into the fetal position on my couch and fell asleep in all of my clothes, my hat still on. I woke at nine, ate a tuna melt, and went to bed. Aching. Knowing.

At 7 AM my phone rang. Laura the Hot Farmer.

"Hey. Maggie died last night."

She invited me over to the ex-boyfriend's apartment. The light outside was too bright, like coming down from an acid trip, everything too real. In my coat pocket, the sugar packets from the gas station remained, and I rubbed them like worry stones.

I didn't stop shitting all day. There were doughnuts and fruit on the table we sat around. People dropped by. It was a crystal cold clear freezing day. We sat at the table, made lists, planned the memorial. Someone dies, and too quickly it's all "Who's gonna design the flyer?"

We walked to Maggie's apartment to choose what she'd wear in the grave. I held her dog Mickey's leash while he bolted upstairs. We chose silver hoop earrings and a burgundy shirt. When no one was looking, I grabbed a shiny silver sequined bracelet and shoved it in my pocket.

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Maggie Estep in 1994. Photo by Bob Berg/Getty Images

Just like that, she's dead. It's covered in the New York Times. In Rolling Stone. All over the internet. Photos. Articles. Tweets. Everyone reeling.

I drove to the burial alone, through the flurries. Crosby, Stills & Nash played on the radio. We stood in the snow. I was alone, arms wrapped around myself until Laura walked to me and put her arms around me. I took her hands in mine. I remember feeling so grateful for her. The owner of the yoga studio where Maggie taught said a few words, about how some people are suns and some people are moons, but then there was Maggie, who was a shooting star.

We put sticks of Maggie's favorite gum and rose petals on the casket, before they lowered her into the ground.

At the memorial I was in a foul mood. My boyfriend kept touching my leg and shoulder, and all I could think of was Maggie's line: "Don't TOUCH me, what am I your fucking CAT?"

John S. Hall slammed Maggie's poetry. Stephin Merritt played "The Book of Love," all choked up. Steve Buscemi made a surprise appearance and read his emails with Maggie, lamenting that he hadn't responded to her last one. There was a reception with food and wine and a fire-eater. (Maggie has a song on her album Love Is a Dog From Hell in which she sings, "Let's go to Coney Island, I wanna see the freak show, I wanna see fire-eater, I wanna be a part of it.") Blown up photos of Maggie all around.

In the weeks after Maggie's death, my boyfriend and I were never awoke more than ten minutes before we were watching videos of her. We watched "Happy" and listened to "Car Guy" and "Pee Lady." This is the blessing of being an artist: When you go you leave behind some fantastic trail, physical things that those who love you can cling to, to remember.

On my bookshelf, I put Maggie's books next to my own.

"Where's your new book, darling Chloe?

"I think this is the year we both get big book deals.

"Get your ass to yoga, you trollop.

"Ever seen those yoga mats that say FUCK YOGA on them? We should get those.

"I have an idea: Let's put new books out at the same time and go on book tour together."

At Maggie's memorial I received an email that my new book would, in fact, be published. Two weeks later I found an apartment with a YARD and a claw-foot TUB. "I think you got those good things because of Maggie," my friend said. I dedicated my new book to her.

Six months later, in the summer, there is finally a tombstone. I couldn't find it, so I drove all over the graveyard, the sun in my face. I'd brought a flower but I was mad, so I throw it out the window.

I don't know what I was expecting the stone to say. But I was touched and surprised to kneel to the grave and read the precise words:

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Photo courtesy of the author

"I know you might think this is eccentric and woo-woo," Maggie told the yoga class one day. "But singing is good. Like REALLY good. It's the healthiest thing you can do." Then she lit the candles on the altar, bowed to the ground, walked to the sound system, pushed play and turned up Patti Smith, and began teaching us.

I always understood that Maggie's well-known poem "Happy" is sarcastic satire. But after knowing Maggie, I'm beginning to question that. Watch her performance on Def Jam Poetry. She walks on stage, radiant, with her unmistakable commanding energy. All she has to say is, "This is called 'Happy'" and her delivery makes the audience chuckle. Maggie throws her head back and laughs with them. That signature laugh, her beautiful mouth wide. It gives me shivers.

The last line of the poem is how I like to remember Maggie:

I'm happy
to be here
to be alive to be here to be alive
I'm here
I'm alive
and I'm happy.

Follow Chloe Caldwell on Twitter.

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Last November, the all-girl Korean band Pritz took a ton of flak for performing in provocative outfits. K-pop stars are meticulously packaged, so it's pretty common for every new outfit and lyric to undergo a gauntlet of managerial and popular scrutiny. But the criticism about these new outfits was different from the normal questions about purity or branding. It was about how much they looked like Nazi uniforms.

Pritz's outfits featured sleek-yet-heavy black dresses, high collars, and red armbands with a black cross in the center of a white circle—four short lines away from swastikas. Amid the inevitable castigation from South Koreans and foreigners alike for their insensitivity, the band's managers claimed that no one on their creative team had any idea the getups would be construed as Nazi-esque. They claimed the armband was meant to look like a traffic sign with four arrows pointing outward, representing their desire "to expand without a limit in four directions."

Given how rarely a Korean teenager, several decades and thousands of miles removed from the Nazi ideologies of World War II, has cause to think back on Adolf Hitler, it might be tempting to accept the explanation of Pritz's creative team and write the whole thing off as a coincidence. But the Pritz incident was just one of a deluge of (often more direct) Nazi influences in the fashion and culture in South Korea.

As early as 2000, Time did a piece on the country's Third Reich–themed bars. That trend never fully took off, but it's still fairly common for Korean teens to cosplay as Gestapo agents.

Known widely as Nazi chic, it's different from the skinhead or punk swag you find in the West. The trend stretches beyond Korea—in China in was fashionable to dress up like Nazi officers in wedding photos, and a Hong Kong store once hung Nazi banners throughout their shop. In India, a Hitler boutique (with a swastika dotting the i) opened in Ahmedabad in 2012. In Indonesia, Soldatenkaffee, a bar named after a Parisian Nazi hangout and decked out with Hitler quotes and Third Reich flags, has (despite a temporary closure due to outrage) operated in Bandung since 2011; the Indonesia pop star Ahmad Dhani recently performed at a rally for 2014 presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto in Nazi regalia.

But the worst offender in Asia is Thailand. In 2007, some Thai students had a Nazi-themed parade, and in 2012 a school held an SS sports rally. Some Thai language books that use Hitler in their exercises, and a Bangkok KFC knockoff briefly called itself Hitler and used the Führer's face in place of Colonel Sanders's. In 2013, the country's top university had to apologize when students painted a giant mural of superheroes that included Hitler, with which they posed Sieg Heil-ing. And naturally they have Nazi-themed pop groups as well.

And these are only the major, international-headline-drawing cases. From Cambodia to Japan to Myanmar, it's fairly common to encounter vendors in markets hawing swastika-adorned bike helmets, T-shirts featuring Hitler's mustachioed mug, and Ché-esque Adolf posters of all sorts.

It's not like Asian youths are the first to appropriate Nazi bits and bobs. Europeans and North Americans have used swastikas, martial red-on-black, and other Nazi symbols in fashion (and as parts of bad jokes—think British Prince Harry's 2005 Nazi costume at a fancy-dress party) for years.

" Racist skinheads [in Europe] use Nazi imagery and motifs to deliberately communicate their racist beliefs," explains Laura Kidd, an associate professor of fashion design and merchandising at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Kidd is one of the world's few experts on the use of Nazi symbols in modern fashion.

"[But] Nazi chic as a phenomenon in fashion and in popular culture started with the punk rock movement in Great Britain. Until the 1990s, it appears that the Nazi aesthetic was not a source of inspiration for [non-punk] fashion designers," she says. "However, some fashion designers started showing couture collections that appeared to be influenced by the Nazi aesthetic. Although the designers denied any connection to fascist ideology... most people considered the use of Nazi imagery in fashion in poor taste.

"Fashion has always been used to shock people and gain some attention," concludes Kidd. "And Nazi chic fashions do that quite effectively, especially in Western countries."

But the motives behind and iterations of Nazi symbolism in Asian fashion, where Kidd says Nazi chic is growing much faster than it is in Western markets, are different—there's less cultural baggage attached to Hitler, and wearing a swastika around is less inherently shocking.

"[In Asia], the use of Nazi chic has appeared with greater frequency since at least the late 1980s," says Kidd. "Two popular styles of Asian Nazi chic are swastikawaii, or 'cute swastika,' which uses the swastika as the main design motif, and the other is referred to as 'führer chic,' which uses soft, cuddly, and cute caricatures of the image of Adolf Hitler."

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Photo by Kitty Hamilton/AFP/Getty Images

Although some Asian youth, like Mongolia's Dayar Mongol movement, do buy stark and severe Nazi regalia because they believe in a fascist ideology, most are in it for the absurdist styles Kidd describes. In Thailand, for example, it's pretty common to find shirts featuring Hitler's dour face hybridized with Ronald McDonald, pandas, and Teletubbies.

"It's not that I like Hitler," a Thai führer-chic designer who goes by the name Hut told the Jerusalem Post in 2012, "but he looks funny and the shirts are very popular with young people."

The prevalence of Nazi chic has, unsurprisingly, inspired copious outrage from Western visitors and officials in Asia. Israeli and Jewish organizations especially have denounced the rise of Nazi chic in Asia, seeking official apologies and recalls. A few years back, then Israeli ambassador to Thailand Itzhak Shoham got so irked by his failure to persuade the designer Hut to stop selling führer chic or at least take down his Adolf Hitler–Ronald McDonald hybrid mannequin (which Shoham often encountered on his way to work) that he confronted Hut and damaged his displays. Rather than apologize, Hut apparently just started taking down Hitler merchandise or closing the shop when he saw foreigners coming down the lane.

Part of the Asian resistance to such critiques stems from locals' questions about what right Europeans have to dictate what's offensive, or what responsibility they have to adhere to taboos about political ideologies like Naziism that played out far away and long ago.

"What is the connection between German soldiers and Indonesia?" asked Indonesian pop-star Dhani, himself a descendant of the country's miniscule Jewish population, after he was slammed for his 2014 Nazi-esque political rally for Indonesian presidential hopeful Prabowo Subianto. "We Indonesians didn't kill millions of Jews, right?"

"Nazism is a European taboo," said Indonesian historian Zen Rachmat Sugito during a round of criticism against Bandung's Soldatenkaffe in 2013. "There's no Nazi taboo in Indonesia, but it doesn't mean we deny that the Holocaust happened."

Then there's the argument that Nazi symbols were just stolen from common pre-Nazi mythological motifs, some of them Asian, in the first place. Is it a complete shock that some may just see Hitler as funny and the swastika as part of their own culture?

"In Asia, the swastika is a centuries-old symbol of peace and auspiciousness," explains Kidd, "and is often associated with religious beliefs; swastikas appear in many Asian temples, similar to the use of the cross in Christian churches."

And Westerners appropriate all sorts of political symbols from abroad in their fashion without major international critique, many are quick to add, so why should Asia take all the flak.

"Why is this different from the West's obsession with Ché Guevara?" one Southeast Asian blogger asked during the fracas over the Thai university's 2013 Hitler-and-superheroes banner.

But international critics fear that Nazi chic, beyond just being taboo, will lead to a troubling acceptance of other Nazi products and could play into worrying pro-strongman ideologies in the region. Mein Kampf is pretty commonly available in the same markets that sell Nazi chic in Indonesia, for instance, and Japan actually has a mildly popular manga comic based on the book.

"I saw this for myself in the streets of Mumbai," says Rabbi Abraham Cooper, a Nazi chic expert and associate dean at the Simon Wiesenthal Center. "You have the corner peddlers peddling Steve Jobs's autobiography and right next to it that great bestseller is Mein Kampf. In India the book was (and I think still is) being marketed as a reflection of a highly organized mind for business students."

Cooper adds that he recently heard about a speech by a major general in Cambodia to the police of Phnom Penh and other high officials in which he praised Hitler as a model for population control. The rabbi doesn't think Nazi chic connects to this vein of fascist sympathy just yet, but the potential linkage in the future troubles him.

Kidd thinks that softening Hitler could lead to a resistance to connect him and his ideologies to true horrors. "Hitler is often depicted in a 'cutesy' manner as a teddy bear, on a Valentine greeting card, or even as Mickey Mouse," she says. "When Hitler is depicted in such a non-threatening manner, people may find it difficult to imagine that same man ordered millions of people to the gas chambers."

Many observers believe Asian youths' appreciation of führer chic and swastikawaii is fueled by ignorance of the history and politics behind the images they appreciate out of context.

"I think they just don't know any better," Jason Alavi, an English language teacher in Bangkok, told the Chiang Mai City News last summer. "World history and geography instruction are woefully inadequate in Thai schools... The vast majority of the Thais I have known have very little real, useful knowledge of the details of the rest of the world."

"There's no ill intent," Shoham told to the Jerusalem Post in 2012. "Let's be realistic: Thais just don't know about history, including their own."

In the same piece, a Jerusalem Post reporter asked a university student who had just bought a führer-chic shirt, what he knew about Hitler. This was his response:

"Hitler looks cool because he seems like an interesting character. Actually, I don't know much about him. In school we only learn Thai history. But I know he was a communist leader." Whoops.

Cooper and Kidd are both confident that a broadening era of information and concentrated efforts and Holocaust education can illuminate the horrors of Nazi Germany and turn Asian youth off the concept of Nazi chic entirely in the near future. But that's not actually a given.

Kidd admits that throughout the 1990s the stigma against Nazi fashion waned amongst Western youth, and that as late as 2010 a boutique in Italy saw no problem in launching a Hitler-based marketing campaign. And just this last December, a toy company in Poland released Nazi-themed Lego-esque toys for Christmas, arguing that they'd be a good tool for teaching kids history. This venture didn't get nearly as much backlash as you'd imagine, and the company didn't back down on their campaign when a few stores in Sweden pulled their products.

If Nazi chic persists and grows more acceptable amongst youth in the informed and culturally affected West, then that makes it a hell of a lot harder to chide Asians for their führer chic. And it seriously damages the argument that knowledge will inherently stem the tide of swastikawaii. Kids worldwide love re-appropriation and subversion, and that's all the easier when you're far away from an object's origin and your opponents' voices can be easily muted. So the world may just have to learn to live with Teletubby Adolf until kids in Asia tire of him of their own accord.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

Nowadays it seems every pseudo-intellectual schmuck wants to hate on America and pretend we don't live in a fascinating and storied place. But America is a bizarre, complicated land, and musician Steve Earle has spent the greater part of a 30-year-career exploring it. He's made 16 albums, recorded with Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings, and even written a play and a collection of short stories.

This time around, Earle's delving into the history of the blues on his new record Terraplane to be released next week on New West Records. This track is a poetic retelling of the story of Robert Johnson's deal with Lucifer, and Earle has a sense of sardonic self-aware humor that breathes new life into that story. Just listen to it.

Preorder Terraplane on Amazon, iTunes, or at your local record store.

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Victorian London has been pulled underground, and now lies just downstream from Hell. Surrounding it is an endless, black expanse of water called the Broad Unterzee, and as a ship captain, it's your job to explore it. This is the bizarre premise of Sunless Sea, a Lovecraft-inspired nautical RPG with a heavy emphasis on exploration and storytelling that's just been released for Mac and PC by Failbetter Games. It's a wonderfully original setting for some complex storytelling, and it might just be considered this year's first essential release.

The Unterzee is what superstitious sailors used to think the actual ocean was like: filled with hungry monsters, malevolent sea-gods, and slimy tentacles waiting to drag ships down into the briny deep. You begin by choosing a background for your captain. He might be a priest, a street urchin, or a salty veteran of the Unterzee. Or you can decide to leave their past unexplained and draped in mystery. These are the first of many decisions you'll make in Sunless Sea, and they will shape the story to come. Then you choose an ambition, whether it's exploring every corner of the Unterzee and writing a book about it, finding the remains of your dead father and returning them to Fallen London, or becoming filthy rich.

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'Sunless Sea', trailer

But while this sounds like the create-a-character menu from a traditional RPG, Sunless Sea doesn't slot you neatly into any one role. Your captain's background only affects their stats and certain story elements, and not how you choose to spend your time in the Unterzee. This is a game where you shape your own destiny, even if your destiny is to run out of fuel miles from land and get eaten by an eel.

The first few hours of this game will be frustrating. You'll run out of food and your crew will turn on you. Your fuel reserves will dry up, leaving you lost and helpless. You'll get into a fight with a giant crab and lose.

And when you die, it's game over. Unless you have "merciful" mode enabled, which allows manual saving at any time, the death of a captain is permanent. You'll have to create a new one, but will inherit a map of the parts of the Unterzee your predecessor explored. Over the course of the game you'll go through several captains, each one venturing slightly deeper into the reaches of the Unterzee, adding their discoveries to the map and passing it down like a cherished family heirloom.

Sunless Sea's entirely text-based story is around 250,000 words strong, and you spend a large portion of the game reading. But thanks to vivid, witty, and evocative writing, it never feels like a chore. This is a world rich with history and mythology, and one of the most well-realized game settings I've ever encountered.

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Docking at the many islands that litter the Unterzee reveals a varied selection of funny, strange, and macabre stories that you can interact with by making choices, much like a "choose your own adventure" book. The path you take through these stories can have a positive outcome, earning you supplies and fuel. Or it can be negative, increasing your crew's terror levels, losing you money, or worse. There's no voice acting or cutscenes to speak of, but the expressive writing means there doesn't have to be.

If you spend the game loitering around the relative safety of your home, Fallen London, you won't see much. It's by pushing into the unexplored depths of the Unterzee that you'll find the most interesting stories. This is where the game's survival element comes into play. You're constantly at war with the crew's sanity, your fuel reserves, and how much food you have to keep your zailors fed. Making it to some far-flung island and limping back to London with half a crew, no supplies, and a trickle of fuel is hugely satisfying. If you don't take risks, you won't see the best of what Sunless Sea has to offer.

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Information about the locations you discover on your travels can be sold back to the admiralty in London, and you can use this money to upgrade your ship's weapons and engines—or buy a new one altogether. But, realistically, you'll be spending most of your hard-earned money on fuel and food. Making progress in Sunless Sea is a grueling war of attrition, and you'll need saintly patience to get through those first few hours.

But it never feels unfair, and any predicaments you end up in are usually your own fault. Knowing how far you can travel with the supplies you have is something you get gradually better at, but you'll still make mistakes and end up dying in the ass-end of nowhere. There's a random element too, which keeps you on your toes. I once died because a crew member went on a murderous rampage, and I failed to calm her down. She killed the whole crew, myself included, and that was it. Game over.

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The weakest part of the game is the combat. The Unterzee is swarming with enemies, including glowing jellyfish, albino eels, pirate ships, and those oversized crabs. Fighting them involves slowly circling your target, waiting for an ability to charge, then firing it. It works, mostly, but feels disappointingly video game-y. The challenges you face in the stories and aboard your ship, like having to sacrifice a crew member to appease an angry god, are far more interesting than fighting hokey sea-monsters.

Sunless Sea is a supremely original, clever game. Its choice-and-consequence storytelling is deep, textured, and beautifully written, and the constant looming feeling that you might die at any second makes it exhilaratingly tense. The glacial pace and near-vertical learning curve might make you seasick to begin with, but push through it, master the strange rhythm of its gameplay, and you'll find an experience like no other. Your first captain will probably die in a really shitty, embarrassing way, but that's supposed to happen. The next time you fight that crab you might win.

Follow Andy on Twitter.

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This article was originally published by VICE Poland.

Photos by Aurelia Moczynska.

Thousands of farmers on tractors blocked the highways of Warsaw on Wednesday, February 11, to protest new market regulations. Similar protests took place in other, smaller cities across Poland.

"We are not asking for millions from the European Union—all we want is to work honestly," said one farmer outside the Ministry of Agriculture. A delegation led by the head of the agricultural wing of the National Alliance of Trade Unions (OPZZ), Sławomir Izdebski, had gathered there since 10 AM asking to meet with Agriculture Minister Marek Sawicki.

"The Ministry of Agriculture is trying to make a fool of the polish countryside," said Izdebski. Entering the ministry, he announced he'd come with 13 demands—three of which were non-negotiable. He was referring to the destruction of crops by wild boar for which the farmers are seeking government compensation.

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The farmers also demanded the resignation of Sawicki, because according to them he has failed to fulfill his pre-election promises. The crowd chanted the words "pig" and "moron" while some were holding placards with a caricature of the minister as a wild boar and the inscription "pig from Podlasie."

Podlasie is Sawicki's birthplace, and some farmers who live in the area told me they were ashamed to be from the same place as "that pig." They also kept saying that the money that should be invested in agriculture is meaninglessly spent on aid for Ukraine. "The government can't afford to help its farmers, but it has 100 million PLN [$27 million] to donate to Ukraine," one of them shouted.

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Much to their dismay however, an hour or so into their meeting, Izdebski left saying the minister refused to meet their demands. "This government will soon come to realize the extent of our powers," he warned. "Next week 100,000 people will take over the streets of Warsaw." After that, some of the protesters sang the Polish National Anthem.

At the moment, it does look like the farmers are determined to keep fighting. Which is nice, but also annoying for many Warsaw residents who are annoyed by the constant protests taking place on their city streets. "There are conference rooms, discussion panels—why would you drive tractors to the city center? If they want to protest, they should do it back in their own hometowns," said a man I bumped into on the street.

See more photos of the protest below.

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All photos by Michael Ranta

I was 15 when I first hopped a freight train near Franklin Boulevard In Eugene, Oregon. An older friend of mine said it was easy: "Wait for it to slow down here, on the turn, as it's about to enter town." So I did. I waited for the middle of a train, until a freight-car's short, iron ladder swung near, and grabbed it as I jogged along side, jumped and swung my legs onboard.

It might not have been safe, but it was easy. And immediately, I felt the power of that train, felt the immoveable force of it—felt the potential for adventure and travel.

I hopped on and off a dozen trains that year but never traveled very far, never took a long ride, never hid away and hoped not to be found. I still have a scar on my knee from the one time that I jumped off a train when it was moving too fast through town, but it wasn't serious, and other than that, I never hurt myself. A kid at my high school had his legs cut off by a train in the middle of the night during his sophomore year. Another friend of mine rode trains back and forth between two local towns, meeting people, exploring, then returning before dark, and nothing bad ever happened to him.

I was never good at understanding danger, and have always liked urban adventures. When I was nine years old, I jumped off the unfinished freeway bridges into Lake Washington—40 feet of air and then water. Later, as a teenager, I loved climbing the outsides of buildings or construction scaffolding, getting 50 or 60 feet off the ground, and finding a way onto the roof of a building. I also enjoyed exploring city drainage tunnels, running the storm drains from the opening I found at the riverbank north of town. But trains held a kind of mythical power in my mind, power that scared me.

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Air conditioning is a luxury in the dog days of summer on the Union Pacific lines, so people must find other ways to stay cool

When I was 17, homeless and sleeping for a short while in a Dallas Greyhound Bus station, I met a wanderer who called himself Red Man, a guy with 12 Social Security cards and an army coat stuffed with Ziplocs of weed. Red Man invited me to ride trains with him into West Texas, then on to New Mexico. He had another Social Security card to pick up. But I was afraid of the violence I'd heard about in the trainyards. I was afraid of not being able to take care of myself. I carried only a knife at that time, and I knew that there were people out there whom I couldn't handle. So I let Red Man move on, and didn't jump that train with him. I went back to the Greyhound station and slept under a counter all day. I ate free saltines and ketchup packets.

But I often wonder: What if I'd jumped that train? What if I'd started in Dallas and traveled the rest of that year? What if I hadn't eventually ridden a bus to Oregon and returned to high school? There were legal charges waiting for me, but what if I'd left those behind? What if I'd stayed on the tracks for the rest of that year? Would I still be the writer I am today? Would I be a better writer? Would I have incredible stories to tell my children and grandchildren?

Recently, I caught up with an adventurer and photographer named Mike Ranta who spent five months last year riding freight trains through the Southwest, the Northwest, and on into Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas. I asked him about his experiences.

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VICE: Mike, when did you first hop a train? Where did you ride? How did it feel?
Mike Ranta: I think it was in 2012. I don't know, I could be wrong. I don't remember the date nearly as well as the anxiety. Without any guidance, I knew that I was in way over my head, but I really couldn't seem to stop myself—I couldn't find a reason why I should stop myself. Good thing I didn't. I have never made a better choice in my life. I could never have imagined the things I have seen since then. It was being a latchkey kid all over again.

I remember picking up on stuff pretty quickly, sink or swim. I would go through towns and see "Podunksville Family Liquor and Buffet" and then I would find it on a map and figure out where I was.

About a week after I first jumped a train, I made it to rainy-ass Portland and surprised a friend on his doorstep. I was really lucky I made it as far as I did in the beginning. Getting killed was pretty likely, too.

Last year was the big adventure year, right? What motivated you? How'd you start?
The year was really about moving on and starting new things. I sold just about everything I owned other than some old cameras and a few pairs of Levi's that I couldn't throw away. Everything else went into a pack. I left both the good and bad memories back in Phoenix and headed north again. I don't really know how many thousands of miles I ended up going or how many trains I rode, but I remember just about everyone I met. Especially the guy I thought was going to knife me in my sleep in the woods, Hank.

Tell me about that.
I really thought Hank was going to hurt me. It was probably the first time since I had been riding that I had felt that way. He was the boyfriend that walks up to the bar and sees his girlfriend laughing along with you: Real nice, big smile, keeps smiling, too nice.

Except he was older, almost completely bald, and the hair that he did have was long and white. He approached me by the train tracks in northern California right when I had rolled out my bag and was about to lay down. He started chatting me up about where I had just come from and who I was with. The sun had just set and it kept getting darker and darker, but he wouldn't leave. Eventually, I told him I was tired and needed to sleep and he seemed to nod and then just wandered off deeper into the woods without a flashlight. I rolled out my bag and slept uneasily with a knife and all of my gear close because I knew he wasn't too far away. Funny thing is, I bet he slept like a baby knowing I was more afraid of him than he was of me.

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Even though that situation ended just fine, I've heard stories of brutal violence in train yards: knifings, beatings, shootings... Did you ever have any run-ins with bulls (cops) or other violent characters? If not, how did you avoid those?
I had a really bad image of the people that rode trains until I started meeting people that were actually out there. Living in suburbia during high school, I managed to get in a lot of fights, saw two stabbings, and had a friend get shot. Riding trains can be as safe as you make it, and yes, people get beat up by all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons. But overall, with your wits about you, it's not a huge concern. The bigger dangers are the trains. They'll cut you in half. If you're too tired and take a risk on a bad ride because you can't stand waiting in that ditch any longer, I won't stop you, but I'll be waiting for the next one.

Who was the most interesting person you met along the way?
I've met a lot of really interesting people. Homeless guys who didn't start riding until their 50s and it completely changed their lives. Pretty girls, too. I've fallen in love a few times. I find the average person that you meet riding trains far more interesting than any person I've met in a bar or wherever else you meet strangers. People come from all over, for a lot of different reasons, but each of them has something that made them start riding at some point. Everyone has a damn good story.



What was the craziest thing you experienced or saw during your adventure?
There are a lot of things that happened that I can't talk about. I have a lot of stories that I will tell friends about: close calls, stolen pizzas, hobo handjobs, just some really bizarre stuff. Still there are a lot of really crazy things that I just don't feel comfortable telling a lot of people about.

On this journey, was there a writer or artist or adventurer with whom you identified?
I really tried to be myself. Everyone can be anyone out there and I hardly knew my closest friend's real name, but everyone seemed to end up being themselves in the end. I identified with people's desire to do something that they once had only as a dream, like Chris McCandless [of Into the Wild] ditching his ride in that wash in Nevada and just continuing on no matter what, things that I thought other people did, but not me. I think that looking back on it I could say I felt like all of them at one point or another, adrift at sea and standing on top of the world all at the same time.

So how did you know when to stop?
It's all about balance, when you feel like you're done, be done. This summer, a train came and I didn't want to get on it and I just watched it roll out of the yard, and that's when I knew my summer was over.

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Your photography from this time period is truly evocative. Was it a bi-product of the experience or an intentional outcome? Basically, was this freight-train journey adventure first and photography second, or was high-quality photography your priority all along?

The photography was really an accident that I let get out of control. I took my camera on my first ride with a bunch of black-and-white film because I knew how to develop it myself and was able to grab enough darkroom supplies at a thrift store for about ten bucks and get some chemicals online. Once I got going I really couldn't stop shooting. Everything was so amazing and I wanted to show my friends how much more fun I was having. When I finally developed them, I realized that some of the photographs were actually worth showing some people. Since then I have kept shooting to show my friends how much fun I have, but I keep in mind that a few good photographs can come from it.

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After two days of rain in Oregon, a train rider takes advantage of a break in the rain to hang his socks to dry

In your train photography, even though these aren't nature scenes, I see Ansel Adams–like contrasts, a deep understanding of dark and light. There's also a little of Dorothea Lange. Is there a metaphor for your photography?
I try not to let my own interpretation of a moment influence my photography. I would consider the work photojournalistic and not fine art. But like Dorothea Lange and some other WPA [Works Progress Administration] photographers, I picked each moment that I captured very intentionally.

I struggled a lot with whether to show any of these photographs. A lot of people want this lifestyle to stay low-key. In the end, I decided that I was proud to be a part of an American heritage and I wanted people to see why. So I decided to show it.

This is what we were doing while you were working.

Peter Brown Hoffmeister is the author of three books, most recently the novel Graphic the Valley. He lives with his family in Eugene, Oregon. Follow him on Twitter.

Check out Michael Ranta's work here.