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Photo by Flickr user Mike Mozart

I started masturbating when I was five. Long after my parents had gone to bed, I'd hump a pillow while watching whatever scrambled pornography I could find on our then top-of-the-line satellite dish. When I was alone, which was often, I'd raid my father's nightstand and rub one out to his dog-eared copy of Penthouse Forum. I didn't understand all the words, but I got the gist.

Many children who become hypersexual at an early age do so as a result of being diddled by a family member. I was not. I was just a precocious, intellectually advanced little shit who had learned to read by the age of three. That, coupled with the fact that my non-religious parents never taught me to fear or hate my body, made it easy to know the ins and outs of sex a full decade before I actually experienced the ol' in-and-out.

Of course, I am an anomaly. Most girls don't discover that their bodies can be sources of sexual pleasure until they're well into their teens; a great many don't achieve that enlightenment until adulthood. It can happen in any number of ways—from consulting the internet, reading a book, watching a film, or, in the case of a group of women I recently spent a weekend with, attending a sexual health expo in Los Angeles.

This expo, the "first-ever upscale consumer event dedicated to sexual wellness," was composed of "the best advice from leading professionals for making sex hotter and boosting intimacy between couples." Sexperts gave seminars in prostate play, dirty talk, post-menopausal sex, female ejaculation, and "fellatio fun" to ballrooms full of eager learners. Outside of the seminars, exhibitors peddled vibrators designed to look like conversation pieces, sensual candles, and, of course, Fifty Shades of Grey paraphernalia.

The Fifty Shades trilogy is an inescapable pop-culture phenomenon—the series of pulpy novels, which has sold more than 100 million copies worldwide, introduced countless women to paint-by-numbers BDSM. A major motion picture based on the series' first novel, starring Don Johnson's daughter, will be released this Valentine's Day for those who hate the act of reading, or who want to relive the book on the screen.

As harsh as critics have been about Fifty Shades, it opened up a world of sexual possibility to a group of women who had lost their proverbial mojo. Sure, they might read salacious sex tips in Cosmo, but most were too terrified to act on them until a best-selling novel gave them permission to do so. As a result, they are ready to start living, as Oprah would say, their "best lives."

And so these women came here. One hopes they were not too late. After all, according to an uncited study in the expo's glossy, Cosmo-esque guidebook, which was given to all attendees upon entry, "more than 50 percent of marriages end in divorce, with 87 percent of couples reporting lack of intimacy as causing a major strain on their relationships." If they couldn't relive the glory days of lust they shared with their husbands before kids gummed up the works, and stat, they might very well find themselves replaced by a younger model.

"The pain of a passionless relationship furrows on their faces. Every day feels like a slow walk toward a grave instead of the ecstatic aliveness of a fully expressed sexual passion between them."

On another page of this guidebook, an "award-winning somatic sexologist" relayed a harrowing tale of the perils of lost lust to them:

Black tears are running down her cheeks. He shifts nervously on the red velvet lounge chair. In front of me is a couple deeply in love, yet they are not connecting sexually. The pain of a passionless relationship furrows on their faces. Every day feels like a slow walk toward a grave instead of the ecstatic aliveness of a fully expressed sexual passion between them.

A "slow walk to the grave"? Christ—this was literally life-or-death shit. If these women didn't learn how to fuck right, they could die. I could see why they were so eager to do so. Their Fifty Shades–inspired enthusiasm for BDSM, which was rampant in the expo's guidebook and reflected in its programming, could be seen as a by-product of this eagerness. Not only do I want to learn how to fuck, it said, I want to learn how to fuck like CRAZY.

As I perused the guidebook in the tastefully decorated lounge, trying to decide which of the expo's seminars I should attend ("Male G Spot: Prostate Pleasure" or "Fellatio Fun: The Fundamentals of Oral"?), a middle-aged woman to my right read a passage about "mind-blowing orgasms" aloud to her bored-looking husband, a man who wore glasses connected with a croakie around his neck. He was not particularly engaged in what his wife was describing; most of the other men, however, were. I watched old flames reigniting all around me—couples wandered the exhibition floor hand in hand and nuzzled one another while listening to seminars dedicated to "creating bedroom bliss."

One such seminar, devoted to "Long-Term Lust: Imaginative Ways to Keep Sparks Flying in Your Sex Play," was the last of the day and brought the audience out en masse. The event was standing-room only. As a couple composed of two little people sitting side by side in a single motorized wheelchair listened intently to the presentation, I found myself becoming insanely jealous of their closeness. Why wasn't I sharing a wheelchair with my beloved? Why was I single, childless, and alone?

The more I witnessed, the more I learned, the more paranoid I became. I mean, I've had some pretty degenerate sex, the kind that would make your average Fifty Shades aficionado throw up. In fact, I insist on it. I've always thought I knew what I was doing. But God—what if I didn't? What if my sexual hubris was entirely unwarranted? What if I was just as clueless as the other attendees here—full-grown women I assumed to be the kind of gals who still used pads during their menstrual cycles because they're afraid of their own vaginas?

If I had attended a backdoor-sex workshop ten years ago, would that have changed the course of my life? And would my attending it now ensure that, during the twilight of my years, I'd have an anal and wheelchair partner to call my own? It seemed to be working for the couples around me.

"Life is short," the woman teaching the long-term lust seminar told us. "You've gotta be fuckin' stuff."

It was sound advice, regardless of age. I decided I would do just that— now, before it was too late. Although, as my fellow expo attendees reminded me, it is never too late. You can never be too old, or too young, to fuck stuff. All you need is the inspiration, and the knowledge, to do so. And if an inane pop-cultural phenomenon like Fifty Shades is what makes people want to achieve sexual satisfaction, who am I to judge? I haven't been laid in months.

Follow Megan Koester on Twitter.

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Photo of Richard Dawkins via Flickr user Jason

By now, you've undoubtedly heard that a 46-year-old man named Craig Hicks has been charged with killing three Muslim students near the University of North Carolina campus in Chapel Hill on Tuesday evening. Although his wife, and the local police, maintain that he did what he did because of an argument over a parking space, it's been assumed by many in the Muslim community and elsewhere that the shooting was a hate crime, and that Hicks, an atheist who had condemned religion, was motivated by his hatred for Muslims. Some, including the New Republic's Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig, have even said that the murders "should be a wake-up call for atheists."

For those not well-versed in the various strands of contemporary atheism, this is a weird turn for the discourse surrounding a tragedy to take—do that many atheists hate Muslims? And is there so much Islamophobia being preached by prominent atheists that they deserve to be blamed for Hicks's actions?

For starters, we should define "New Atheism," which Bruening calls "the contemporary phenomenon of aggressive disbelief coupled with a persistent persecution narrative." Essentially, New Atheists aren't just satisfied in not believing in God or gods, they want everyone well. to lose their beliefs as well. The four most prominent New Atheists—Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Dan Dennett, sometimes called the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse"—have written books about how God doesn't exist and debated priests and rabbis on the topic. Hitchens is dead, but the remaining three are extremely combative public intellectuals who have a history of saying nasty things about Islam.

Their critics—who have multiplied in the past few years—say their intellectualism is just a dressed-up excuse to be an asshole. For instance, when Harris argued we should "profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim"—people were like, Yeah, that looks pretty racist. The next year, when Dawkins called Islam "one of the great evils of the world," people similarly raised eyebrows. It doesn't help that these guys, and most of their fans, are the whitest of white dudes.

Hicks is one of those fans—his Facebook page was full of New Atheist quotes, including some from Dawkins—and in the wake of the shootings people have been throwing shade at Dawkins, or at least asking him to come out and publicly condemn the violence. And after first sending flurries of Tweets that promoted the parking-spot narrative in the headline, he did eventually make a statement—that was yet another shot against Islam:

[tweet text="Alas, criminal individual killers exist. But there's only 1 ideology now that preaches the legal killing of dissenters. And it isn't atheism" byline="— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins)" user_id="RichardDawkins" tweet_id="565651522709901314" tweet_visual_time="February 11, 2015"]

Of course, #notallatheists are prone to this sort of dickishness, and some are annoyed that some of the New Atheists' hijinks give nonbelief a bad name.

Chris Stedman, the executive director of the Yale Humanists and an interfaith activist, is one of those atheists. When he attended his first atheism conference in 2010, he was shocked when his fellow attendees put on a sketch making fun of burkas.

"I think the idea behind the performance was supposed to be a parody and critique of practices that oppress women, but it just made them the butt of the joke, " Stedman told me. "The jeers, the laughs, the mocking comments... Oof."

He thinks that kind of behavior is insidious and that it's ridiculous to deny that there's no connection between the murders and the rhetoric. "Obviously we don't know what [Hicks's] motive was, but if you're not taking seriously that there isn't something going on here, I think you're absolutely in denial about it," Stedman said. "I think this is should be used as an opportunity for atheists to reflect on how what is intended to be criticism of ideas can become attacks on people."

Other atheists disagree, as you might imagine. JT Eberhard is a vocal new atheist who buys the parking-spot motive offered by cops. In the past he's written diatribes on why "Islam is a shitty religion" but finds it inconceivable that someone could peg what happened in North Carolina on New Atheism.

"Not only have the 'New Atheists' never called for violence, we've consistently spoken against it," he told me. "I'm not sure how you can blame us for violence now." He doesn't even think religious animus has anything to do with what happened. He sees his movement as a social good, because it gives people talking points that can be used against extremists who, for example, refuse to take their sick kids to doctors.

But Sadaf Ali, a Muslim turned atheist activist, says that many New Atheists are just grown-up version of the bullies who called her a "terrorist" as a kid.

"I've had to debate people often who make gross generalizations of Muslims and Muslim cultures," she told me. "People hide their bigotry behind their promotion of atheism, and I think it's disturbing." She has a pretty easy solution to changing the movement's alleged-racism rap: Giving people besides Dawkins and Harris a prominent platform.

"When it's just white men talking about Islam," she said. "It's not really helping anybody."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

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Photo via Flickr user mysouthborough

It's hardly news that America's commitment to a policy of mass incarceration has produced the most locked-up society on the planet. With more than 2.3 million people behind bars, America has the highest incarceration rate of any country, ten times higher than some European countries. The toll this takes on the country's economy, government budgets, families, and social fabric is well documented. But defenders of mass incarceration have argued that whatever its costs, it has been effective. Crime after all, has dropped precipitously in the last 30 years.

But a report released Thursday by New York University's Brennan Center for Social Justice guts that claim. "When other variables are controlled for, increasing incarceration had a minimal effect on reducing property crime in the 1990s and no effect on violent crime," the authors found. "In the 2000s, increased incarceration had no effect on violent crime and accounted for less than one-hundredth of the decade's property crime drop."

When incarceration rates are low, the Brennan Center report suggests, putting more people behind bars can actually have some effect on crime. But that effect diminishes as you keep locking folks up. That's partly because, when you put more people in prison, fewer of the them are hardened career criminals. It's also because incarceration is itself "criminogenic"—a stint in prison can lead people to commit crimes they wouldn't have otherwise.

More influential on the drop and crime, the report finds, are social and economic factors like the aging population and decreased alcohol consumption, as well as the proliferation of data-driven policing, commonly known as CompStat. The report also considers some of the more unusual theories proposed for explaining the decline in crime, including decreased lead exposure and legalized abortion, but finds that while the influence of these factors during the 1990s can't be entirely ruled out, they're unlikely to have had any meaningful impact on crime in the last 15 years.

There is some good news in the report: In the 2000s, 14 states managed to reverse the mass incarceration trend, cutting their prison populations while also managing to continue to reduce crime. In New York, where that trend is most dramatic, the state reduced imprisonment by 26 percent at the same time that property crimes dropped by 28 percent.

But even if some states appear to be starting to slow the legal machinery that pumps citizens into prisons, that's only one piece of the problem. A report issued Wednesday by the Vera Institute of Justice examines the nation's jails. Unlike prisons, which are run by the federal or state governments, America's jails are locally run by municipalities or counties, holding inmates awaiting trial and people convicted of relatively minor crimes.

The Vera report found that there were 11.7 million admissions to US jails in 2013—more than the population of Los Angeles. Even as violent and property crime rates began to decline in the 90s, the jail intake continued to surge, nearly doubling over the last 30 years. Much of that growth is attributable to an increase in the number of defendants jailed on drug charges as the war on drugs accelerated. But the report also highlights the overwhelming rate at which people with mental illness are being warehoused in jails, citing a finding by the Bureau of Justice Statistics that fully 60 percent of inmates reported having symptoms of a mental health problem in the previous year. Of course, the racial disparity of jail populations is unlikely to surprise most people, as is the degree to which the use of bail and other factors disproportionately send poor Americans to jail.

In recent years there's been a growing awareness and acknowledgment of the socially destructive consequences of mass incarceration, its staggering expense, and the demonstrable injustice of its administration. These reports provide further ammunition to critics of American incarceration policy, and could serve to foster the kind of conversation about mass incarceration that last year's police shootings started about law enforcement.

As Columbia Economics Professor and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz writes in his introduction to the Brennan Center report, "The United States has limited resources. We must foster opportunity and work to bridge inequality, not fund policies that destroy human potential today and handicap the next generation. The toll of mass incarceration on our social and economic future is unsustainable."

Follow Nick Pinto on Twitter.

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Screenshot of a tweet sent to Anita Sarkeesian. Photo via Feminist Frequency Tumblr

A few months ago I was on television speaking about rape culture. It was shortly after the allegations against Jian Ghomeshi had come to light, and I was part of a panel discussing sexual assault and violence against women. I made sure to keep what I was saying was pretty basic—not too radical, and completely based on easily available statistics. I wasn't in "angry feminist" mode; I was more like "nice girl on TV who maybe smiles too much," I was aiming to came across as likeable and reasonable.

Later, the television program uploaded the segment to YouTube. The first comment was a man saying that I deserved to be raped.

I wish I would tell you that this comment was some kind of anomaly, but of course it wasn't. Rape threats, death threats, and general threats of violence populate my inbox, Twitter mentions, and blog comments. I've had people target my family—one popular tactic is to threaten to report me to Children's Aid as an abusive parent.

What makes these incidents even worse is just how common they are, not only for me, but for any woman who speaks out or takes up space, especially on the internet

"Men in formal and informal networks are engaging in targeted speech with the express intention of silencing women," said professor Joanne St. Lewis, member of the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa and lecturer at the University of Southern California CREATE Homeland Security Center of Excellence Executive Program on Counter-Terrorism. "They are not willing to subject their ideas to the challenges posed by women's advocacy. Instead, they target and intimidate women."

They target and intimidate women with the express intention of silencing them. These attacks aren't just "trolling." They aren't people just randomly lashing out. They sure as hell aren't simple expressions of "freedom of speech."

We need to start calling things by their real names. This is gender terrorism.

A terrorist is, by definition, someone who uses violence or threats of violence in order to intimidate or coerce. With that in mind, these men are textbook terrorists.

In an era where the word "terrorist" is so frequently used to describe certain types of violence that the BBC recently warned its staff to use "careful thought" when deploying the term, it seems unbelievable that people continue to be reticent about applying it to the online abuse and targeting of women.

Says St. Lewis, "It might initially seem that referring to the online speech targeting and silencing of women as terrorism is over-blown. However, these attacks are having real-time impact on the lives of individual women activists and result in pre-emptive censorship, by the women initially targeted and other women, to avoid further attack. This is limiting our ability to advance our rights, shape our activism, and participate in democratic policy-making processes."

This past year has offered plenty of evidence of the real-life consequences of this type of online harassment.

At the height of GamerGate, game developer Brianna Wu was advised by the police that she should leave her home after receiving repeated and detailed threats against herself and her family. She recently tweeted that she has received 45 serious death threats.

A talk by media critic Anita Sarkeesian at Utah State University had to be cancelled after someone threatened to carry out a "Montreal Massacre-style attack" (a reference to the 1989 murder of fourteen women Montreal's École Polytechnique); Sarkeesian has also been driven from her home at several points.

Firefly alum and noted anti-feminist Adam Baldwin circulated videos whose comments contained doxxing of Zoe Quinn, the game developer at the centre of the GamerGate conspiracy theories, making it necessary for Quinn to (you guessed it) flee her home.

When Model View Culture founder Shanley Kane criticized the Linux community for their ongoing support of one of their leaders, a man with a long history of abusive and oppressive behaviour, the home addresses of every member of her immediate family were published online. Kane herself received thousands of threats of violence, rape and death.

Writers and activists Feminista Jones, Sydette, Pia Glenn and Imani Gandy all recently spoke out in an article for Alternet about the gendered, racist abuse Black women face on twitter just for Black women in a public space.

These examples are only the tiniest slice of the violent harassment women face online. These are only the biggest, most egregious cases, the few that manage to make it into the news. The reality is that threats like these are being volleyed at women on a near-constant basis. Sometimes they escalate to the point that law enforcement becomes involved; other times the outcome of these attacks is women stepping back, shutting down social media accounts, and retreating from online discourse. But whether the result is a woman being forced to leave her house or a woman locking her twitter account, the intent is always the same: to silence women. Not just one woman, but all women.

According St. Lewis, "These men want to shift the terrain from the realm of ideas where speech resides, to one of psychological and/or physical warfare. The stratagem of using sexual violence is not accidental—it is deliberate and gendered."

These are all threats that are happening publicly, in broad daylight, by men using their real names. That is how minimal the consequences are for this type of harassment and abuse.

We continue to refer to these occurrences as "harmless threats," and blame women for not being willing to engage in "robust debate." The idea of free speech is often invoked, and women who are targeted are often told that if they can't take a joke, they should get off the internet. People will often say that men experience just as much online harassment as women, an argument which completely ignores the violent, gender-based threats that women receive.

"When we call it terrorism we are clearly stating that the harm to women online creates a democratic deficit for all of us," St. Lewis countered. "Women's citizenship and entitlements to dignity and respect do not stop at the virtual border of the internet. The word 'terrorism' should make people sit up and pay attention. It calls for acknowledgment of a serious problem, quick action, resources and accountability. These are all overdue in this area where the trolls and cyberbullies thrive."

This type of terrorism needs to be treated with the same type of gravitas that we give other forms of domestic terrorism. There needs to be accountability, and there need to be swift and just consequences. Above all, there needs to be a recognition that these online threats are neither random nor harmless but rather part of a systematic effort to terrorize women.

Follow Anne Thériault on Twitter.

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Photos courtesy of Gold Teeth God's Instagram

I first met 23-year-old Gold Teeth God, born Ian Marks, in high school. Marks was svelte, his perma-stoned Mizrahi Jewish features usually hiding behind wide sunglasses. He walked, talked, and acted like Malibu's Most Wanted in real life—the kind of pajama pant–wearing semi-literate you find balls deep in a bag of Sour Patch Kids courtside at the Staples Center. I didn't pay him much attention.

Years later, though, I can't help but notice what he's made of himself. Marks, reborn as the Gold Teeth God, is a celebrity jeweler with nearly 40,000 followers on Instagram, hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales, his own reality TV series on Russell Simmons's YouTube channel, and plans to spread his own informal belief system.

Gold Teeth God has it figured out now—the swagger, the daily breakfasts at the Beverly Hills Hotel, the expense accounts, the watches, and the whips to prove it. His signature item is a 14-carat gold Xanax bar. And although he no longer does the impressions himself, his grills—uppers, lowers, and fangs—worn by Tyrese Gibson, Christy Mack, the late A$AP Yams, and even Kylie Jenner, attest to his rising six-pointed star.

I called him up to find out about his 17-month-old jewelry startup, the baby baths he took in Evian water, and what his new religion is all about.

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VICE: Hey, Gold Teeth God. How's your day going?
Gold Teeth God: It's pretty good, actually. I've been getting a shitload of direct messages because I'm buying people souls because I don't have one. I'm a god, so I just want to be like a normal person; I just have to buy people's souls. People have been letting them go for a pretty cheap price, so I'm doing well.

What's the going rate for a soul these days?
Some people are selling them for less than a G. Girls offered them to me for free—Ah, I can't even talk, I've got my teeth in. Let me take this out. [Removes grill]

I'm also looking for underprivileged kids to adopt so I could swag them out and shit, and I'm giving them Jordans. I've been telling everybody on Instagram, "Listen, if you can prove that you're the most underprivileged kid here, I'm going to adopt you."

That's pretty generous.
Yeah, that's what gods do. I'm going to turn a poor kid into a god. They have to prove on Instagram that they're poor. Poor kids shouldn't even have an Instagram though—their friends should be tagging them.

I'm going to ask everyone to do a video where those kids are crying like on those infomercials, like those 1-800 numbers, remember those? One of those I'm going to adopt.

What else you up to?
I'm getting a store on Hollywood and Cahuenga, which is right next to Supperclub LA. I'm opening it with Taz Arnold and Bailey Roberts from the company Ti$a so it's going to be Ti$a's store, but I'm going to have a little section. It's going to be crazy.

I also started this cult called the Young Jewish Mafia. Pretty much the Young Jewish Mafia has to live the God lifestyle. The God lifestyle is: I offer you free weed, free money, free jewelry, women, free bitches, and food. The god is the best, I do the best at everything. I'm the Jewish Father Theresa. I'm like the hot Oprah.

The cult stuff isn't a religious thing, is it?
No, it's not a religion at all. It's like for people who want to be balling and then do other dope shit too and fuck bad bitches. That's just it, like having fun. Don't fucking go to school and be an idiot, fucking join the god's cult and do whatever you wanted to do in life and fucking succeed.

Religions and cults say stuff like that too.
Dude, I'm going to hold sermons at my new store—my new store is 20,000 square feet—I'm going to stand on top of the stairs with a microphone and just talk shit. Be like, "Listen my children, your girlfriend's a whore. When you figure this out you'll live a better life." Funny-ass shit.

I'll be like, "Listen, you don't fucking wear fucking shitty white diamonds because you're going to look like a douche, and don't wear them if you can't afford them." I'm going to tell everyone everything. You want to be a god? You can listen to my sermon.

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OK, go back in time with me. How did this start?
I was at my friend Victory's house, and his family is in the music business. We were hanging out with Juicy J, and Johnny Dang came through and sold them a piece with diamonds, and some diamond teeth, and all this stuff. I was sitting there and I was like, Yo, if Johnny Dang can do this, I could do it too. I went and found an impression kit, and then I just started blasting all my friends. I'm a pretty smart kid so I understood the internet. I used all the networking that I had to get celebrities to buy from me. Now I'm selling chains to royals from Saudi Arabia.

Was it something you had to learn or did you just play it by ear?
I don't think anyone could do it if they weren't me, but I had no prior jewelry experience. None of my family is in the jewelry business, but also God came and talked to me and he was like, "Listen, I'm getting tired so you're going to have to take over."

Plus, I wasn't going to work—I was just going to smoke and do whatever I wanted. I was Gold Teeth God back when I was Ian. When I was little my mom would bathe me in Evian water—a huge tub of Evian water. I was a fucking god. That's not even a joke.

You were actually bathed in Evian water?
Swear to God.

That's insane. OK, walk me through an average day in your life.
I wake up. I check out how my website did online. There's usually a lot to take care of, so I have the assistant tell the intern what to do. They just run around dropping off teeth and taking impressions, and I'll go meet up with my customers, have lunch with them, and smoke.

I just I go meet up with whatever rapper I'm meeting up with, whether it's Riff Raff or Juicy J, or Little Debbie recently, or Fredo Santana or Chief Keef, since they've been out in LA recently. I'm just bouncing around picking up cash all over LA.

Do you stick out, since you're a young white Jewish kid selling jewelry?
I don't know. I think I get along with everyone pretty well. I have all the diamonds and shit so they all want to fuck with me.

Every person I meet up with I like stick my hands in their mouth. I've stuck my hands in everybody's mouth. In a way, it's kind of disgusting. I really don't fuck with it so that's why I have the interns and people doing that shit now.

"I'm the Jewish Father Theresa. I'm like the hot Oprah."

How big is the operation now?
Well, it's only been around for a year. I guess it's big enough to have internships and interns and I'm getting a bunch of jewelry and watches and shit so I'm doing well. It went from something that was a joke and something laughed about to like, I'm shitting on everyone.

It seems like your Instagram is half people who are stoked and half people who want to kill you. Can you talk to me about the haters?
Actually, I love the haters. They're fucking awesome. They say some really funny shit. Some of them are just mad because they're a little religious, and then some of them get mad because they wish they could do stuff that I do, like I jump on cop cars and don't get in trouble. I'm expressing on Instagram the lifestyle that everyone wants to live: disposable money, cars, chains. I'm living the life, bro.

Young Chop was just on your reality show, can you tell me about that?
Yeah, Young Chop was on my web series. He bought some golden Xanax for him and all his homies.

I hear you have an excellent process for finding interns and assistants.
Oh, yeah. I let posts out on the internet and I just get 50 resumes or more every time I do it. I just have a list of crazy people that are all hooking up with me and smoke and roll my blunts and get my coffee and do a whole bunch of stuff like that. Then I have a real assistant who's the backbone of my assistant who handles everything because really I'm just out here having fun. If you ask me to swipe a card I'll swipe your card but I'm not going to get all your information and all that shit so she has to do that. I'm just like regularly doing whatever pleases me.

Can you tell me about what you've learned through this process so far?
I've learned that if you really believe in yourself, you can literally do whatever you want. If you think it's going to happen, it will happen.

That's pretty inspiring.
I mean it's not like do whatever you want. Like, I did something that crazy, but I just understood what I was doing. If you understand what you're doing, and execute it correctly, you'll have good results.

What would you tell the kids who want to get into the game?
To come up with a hit piece of jewelry and hopefully you know the correct people to make it happen.

So like, the American dream?
Nope. It's all god shit.

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Lingerie by What Katie Did. Necklace from Rocket vintage.

PHOTOGRAPHY: OLIVIA RICHARDSON

STYLING: BRIDI FODEN

Photography Assistant: Bree Hart
Styling Assistant: Alex Whitehouse
Set and Props: Marisha Green
Hair: Sharmaine Cox
Assistant: Oliver Drama
Make up: Kristina Ralph
Assistant: Polly Doggett

Models: Holly Horne and Kajsa @ Milk Management, Nuha Ruby Ra, Jessica Taylor, Rheanna Duffield, Anne

[body_image width='1000' height='606' path='images/content-images/2015/02/13/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/13/' filename='in-korea-single-people-celebrate-valentines-day-by-eating-their-feelings-214-body-image-1423788523.jpg' id='27153']The author celebrating his singleness in Korea

Valentine's Day has never held a particular importance for me. As a self-described pansexual with asexual tendencies, with absolutely no (current) desire to be loved by anyone or anything but a cheeseburger, I could really give less than two shits about February 14. That being said, I recognize that it does make some of friends in relationships quite happy, and my mom usually sends me a box of I'll always love you even if you die alone and single! chocolates in the mail, so I don't have any beef with the holiday itself.

That is, until I moved to Korea. One might think that Koreans aren't nearly invested in Valentine's Day as the Western world is, but one would be wrong. Koreans have fully embraced coupledom and hell hath no fury like a Korean displeased with your relationship status.

For those unfamiliar with Korea, it's important to note that in the last few decades, their celebration of romance has been stretched out over the course of three months: Valentine's Day is celebrated on February 14, but here, only the women buy chocolates and gifts for their lovers. Men reciprocate on March 14, which is called White Day. If a guy buys a gift for the same girl who bought him a gift the month before, then it's basically happily ever after.

If you remain giftless throughout that whole process, you've got April 14, also known as Black Day, to look forward to. That's when singles commiserate to together by eating jajangmyeon, or noodles in black bean sauce, while reflecting on on their sad, single lives. There's just a touch of nihilism.

But secretly, lots of singles hope that on Black Day they'll meet someone else who's also single and also eating their feelings and fall deeply in love or some shit like that. I'm not sure if this actually happens. The only time I ever made a serious connection over food in Korea was when a member of the Korean mafia drunkenly threw his McDonald's French fries at me, but I suppose love comes in all forms.

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Jajangmyeon, the noodles traditionally eaten on Black Day in Korea. Photo by Flickr user Stu Spivack

Anyway, the fact that Valentine's Day essentially lasts a quarter of the year is pretty terrible if you're single. And as any ex-pat with Korean friends or coworkers will tell you, we are not exempt from this romantic scrutiny. At least on Valentine's Day I get a free pass, since only women are expected to buy gifts.

But White Day? Men do not get a free pass on White Day. I remember one particularly awkward conversation, just before my first White Day, with an otherwise nice Korean dude during a language exchange mixer.

"So, why don't you have a girlfriend?"

"Oh, I like being single!" I said, brushing it off.

"But aren't you lonely?"

"Yeah, well, I have a lot of friends, so it's OK."

This was a lie, but a lie important to my argument's credibility. The conversation continued:

"Let me help you find someone."

"No, really, it's OK! I like being alone. Without anybody. By myself. With no company. No humans."

He kind of stared blankly at me.

"Yep, all alone. No girls for me!"

More staring.

"Anyway, I really like kimchi, though!"

This was the end of our potential cross-cultural friendship.

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I don't want to give the idea that all Koreans take pleasure in prying through the romantic lives of ex-pats. I'm sure the vast majority of Koreans give zero fucks about our dating lives and are more concerned with whether we're doing a good job teaching their kids English. But it's certainly a glaring cultural difference when your romantic life becomes fair game for casual conversation right along with the latest Kim Jong Un–related drama.

My second White Day in Korea was significantly less uncomfortable—mostly because I had developed the cultural dexterity to lovingly tell my friends and co-workers to fuck off when they pestered me about my relationship status ("Alex, how have you been? Do you have a girlfriend yet? Let's find you a Korean girlfriend!").

But Black Day? Black Day is a holiday I can fully support. Like my single Korean brethren, I've spent my last two Black Days eating noodles just as dark and endless as our solitary, loveless lives. Jajangmyeon has a distinct taste: Made with oil, soybean paste, and meat stock, it's lightly salty with a much hardier flavor and consistency than most noodle dishes in Asia. Jajangmyeon is actually considered "Chinese food" in Korea (much in the same way that orange chicken is Chinese food in America), so those who want partake in the Black Day festivities have to go to a specialty restaurant. For the singles truly distraught by their lack of a lover, they can always grab a microwavable pack from the convenience store and eat it from the comfort and misery of their own home.

While the noodles are meant to remind Koreans of the sadness of being single, and possibly to exacerbate the urgency to find a partner, I take great pride in the fact that every April 14, the only woman or man I need in my life is the one whipping up some noodles in the back of the restaurant. Because nothing says love like food.

Follow Alex Castillo on Twitter.

Photo by Lucian Read

1. CANADA
The Politics of Food: Seal Meat

Seal hunting in Canada has been a controversial issue for decades. Animal rights groups want it outlawed, while native populations fight to preserve the tradition. In 2010, the European Union banned seal products, but in recent years the culinary world has taken an interest in the sustainable harvest of wild seal meat. To learn more, we sent writer Adam Leith Gollner on a journey to seek out the key players involved in the debate. Gollner traveled to Newfoundland to speak to Canadian chefs who believe seal meat is a crucial part of their country's culinary identity. He met with activists who consider killing seals to be a cruel, antiquated tradition. Gollner also spoke to locals who claim that animal rights groups have ulterior motives for interfering with seal hunting.

Watch The Politics of Food: Seal Meat, coming soon to Munchies.

2. BANGLADESH
Steel Salvaging in the Bay of Bengal

When large international cargo carriers retire, they're sent to the Bay of Bengal to be salvaged in the Bangladeshi city of Chittagong. The industry is a vital part of Bangladesh's urbanization, employing 200,000 workers and supplying the country with 80 percent of its steel. Ship-breakers dismantle the massive vessels wearing flip-flops and T-shirts, exposing themselves to lead and asbestos on a daily basis. In 2013, 20 deaths were reported, though the numbers are actually much higher. International criticism has escalated, and the powerful families who run the industry do everything they can to keep it from scrutiny. Muhammed Ali Shahin, from the NGO Shipbreaking Platform, said the practice will never stop. "It's a good place for people who don't care about the environment, who don't care if a human dies."

Watch the documentary, part of our VICE Reports series, this month.

3. IRAQ
Robot vs. IED

The Hurt Locker got it only partly right. Just ask Brian Castner, a former bomb technician with the US military. He served three tours in the Middle East, two of which were spent leading an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit, and deployed small remote-controlled robots to battle a blitz of insurgent-rigged car bombs and improvised explosive devices in and around Kirkuk, Iraq, in 2006. "In the Iraq War, each side sent its champion into battle," Castner said. "Their champion was the IED. Our champion was the robot." Castner and his crew grew so reliant on these machines, which can disarm explosives from afar, that they considered them part of the team. Years later, does he still feel an attachment to the machines? We met Castner to find out.

Watch Inhuman Kind, now playing on Motherboard.

4. CALIFORNIA
California Soul

California has a long history of drought, and 2014 marked the third-driest year since the state began keeping records, in 1877. With the total economic cost of the 2014 drought at $2.2 billion, and hundreds of thousands of acres going fallow, the future for California's farming industry, its workers, and the surrounding communities is looking bleak. A report released in July 2014 stated that the drought could lead to a total loss of 17,100 seasonal, part-time, and full-time jobs in 2014 and 2015. One of the cities most affected by the drought is Mendota, with more than 80 percent of its population relying on agricultural jobs. Up to half of the nation's fruit, nuts, and vegetables are grown in this area. We traveled to Mendota to see firsthand how the drought is impacting the city's farmers.

Watch the documentary, part of our new California Soul series.

5. NEW YORK
The Monumental Comeback of Judge

In 1991, at the height of its popularity, the New York hardcore band Judge broke up, leaving a long and storied career of incredible music and hyper-violent gigs for the history books. The band's caustic mix of straight-edge hardcore and metal connected with fans on a profound level. In the decades that followed, Judge's meager output became hardcore punk 101 for much of the growing scene, which built upon their metal-tinged riffs and attitude. While the legend grew, lead singer Mike Ferraro virtually disappeared, only to reemerge in 2013 at Webster Hall to headline one of the most respected hardcore punk festivals in the country, Black N' Blue Bowl. Where did the revered front man go and why did he vanish from the public eye? We found Ferraro and talked to him about his monumental comeback.

Watch the documentary this month on Noisey.

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About a year ago we sent two awkward strangers on a first date and streamed the whole thing live on this website. Today, in celebration of Valentine's Day, we're doing it again. The people above are sitting in a pub in London right now just trying to find a connection, a spark, in this cold and lonely world. Are we witnessing the beginning of two lives becoming one in real time? Probably not! But maybe! Let's watch and find out.

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Still from 'Queen of the Desert' (2015) by Werner Herzog

This is the second part of our three-part coverage of the Berlinale. For the first part, on Jafar Panahi's Taxi, click here.

By all accounts, Werner Herzog is not the sort of person who worries about self-parody. With a career-average output of one to two films a year, he hasn't got much time to reflect anyway. And it's hardly in keeping with his philosophy of forward momentum, as described to Paul Cronin in last year's collection of interviews, Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed: "I wouldn't hesitate for a second if given the chance to venture out with a camera to another planet in our solar system, even if it were a one-way ticket."

The 72-year-old director has also reveled in his self-made mythology as a shoe-eating, bolt-cutting, Europe-trekking, fence-hopping, permit-forging, guard-bribing, gun-waving criminal and adventurer. Yes, he has made guest appearances on Parks and Recreation and The Simpsons. He has played the voice of a plastic bag. In 2013, he made From One Second to the Next, a short film for AT&T about the dangers of texting while driving. But he has also partied with warlords, kings, Amazonians, and Nicolas Cage. He has enacted the absurd over a half-century of art and life—what can self-parody mean to him?

And yet, it must be said, his oeuvre is a minefield of parodic ordnance: the existential dread of his documentaries, the Technicolor globetrotting of his feature films, the deadpan voiceovers, the protagonists driven to murderous ends in pursuit of an insane goal—parody beckons with every new iteration of his oversized themes. Even Herzog's famously unconventional working methods have become a convention unto themselves, ripe for satire, and so we know to expect from behind-the-scenes anecdotes an intransigent on-screen partner (Klaus Kinsky, Bruno S., Cage), an easy relationship with international border law, and an even more relaxed attitude toward the finicky distinctions between fiction and fact.

If Herzog has avoided self-parody over a career of more than 50 films, it is because of the relentless and overwhelming focus he brings to bear on his subjects. Having established himself in the 1970s as one of the best of the German New Wave (with classics like Fitzcarraldo, Aguirre: The Wrath of God, and The Enigma of Kasper Hauser), he has continued to surprise in the new millennium with such diverse and unyielding documentaries as Grizzly Man, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and Encounters at the End of the World, produced alongside mixed but worthwhile feature films like Rescue Dawn and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Whatever the subject, his singular Herzogian perspective—simultaneously exotic and banal, antediluvian and apocalyptic—is like nothing else in the history of the medium.

I caught his latest film, Queen of the Desert, during its much-hyped premiere last weekend at the 65th Berlin International Film Festival. Herzog was back on home turf with the mostly German-speaking audience at the Berlinale, and the mood was, well, appropriate. Just before the screening, I asked a well-dressed man, in German, which film he was in line to see. He stared at me for a moment, arched his eyebrows, and turned away with all the silent disgust of Kinski in his prime.

For this film, Herzog seems to have attempted something completely new: a romantic epic featuring few of his bizarre or sordid flourishes. Yet Queen of the Desert is nevertheless a descent into self-parody inexplicable and even mysterious in its badness, like some kind of cumbersome, lazy genie. It has many of the hallmarks of Herzog's great work, including an outrageous and mostly true story, insurmountable natural obstacles, and the usual mix of death and danger. In every aspect, though, the blows are glancing, the flaws glaring.

Clip from 'Queen of the Desert' (2015) by Werner Herzog, featuring Nicole Kidman and Damian Lewis

The film is a historical epic about the life of Gertrude Bell, the turn-of-the-century British adventurer who helped divvy up the Middle East in the aftermath of World War I. A contemporary of T. E. Lawrence, Bell was an uncompromising explorer and amateur archaeologist (in an era when moneyed enthusiasts could get away with it). As convincingly played by Nicole Kidman, Bell drives herself toward the desert with the cold gaze of the obsessed. Unfortunately, Herzog chooses to locate the source of her obsession in a laughably unlikely love interest: James Franco (an occasional VICE contributor), who plays a consulate secretary, orientalist, and gambler in Tehran. What should be the world's most fascinating man becomes, in Franco's hands, a squinting, disinterested adolescent with a flickering British accent. Every scene between the lovers is literally cringe-worthy, from their spontaneous translations—in rhyming English couplets!—of Omar Khayyám, to their promises of everlasting love, symbolized by an ancient coin cut in half. After Bell's father rejects their engagement, Franco's character commits suicide. The remainder of the film is structured not around Bell's solo desert adventures, which occur almost incidentally, but around her improbable mourning for him and, later on, her flirtations with other men.

These men include a young Lawrence, played by Robert Pattinson, and Charles Doughty-Wylie, the British consul general to the fracturing Ottoman Empire. Played by Homeland's Damian Lewis, Doughty-Wylie ends up the film's most interesting character, torn apart by incompatible allegiances in love and politics. Unhappily married and devoted to Bell, he throws himself fatally into the defense of an Empire he already knows is dying. His story should be of secondary concern, but the film gives us too little of Bell's own internal mettle.

This is both a narrative error and an injustice to the real-life historical figure. Bell was a focused and resourceful worker on her journeys, as even a random glance at her diaries will attest:

[1 March 1911] ... The Shethatha Arabs left us. I made a bad map with a plane table and then photographed interiors and began measurements for elevations with 'Abud. A messenger came from the Mudir bringing us our dabiyeh full of semneh which had been stolen at Shethatha. Worked till nightfall.

In the film, we encounter no such marvelous diversions. The entries Kidman recites are concerned instead with her latest suitor, or else with her new-agey connection to the landscape. Such moments are love letters to the desert with all the nuance and personality of a National Geographic spread: swirling sandstorms, suggestive rock formations, and—the film's worst offender—an abrasive pan-Arabian score better suited to a Putomayo CD.

Shooting on location, Herzog has at least managed to find beautiful vistas. There are uncanny depictions of outposts and oases in Morocco and Jordan, often from the angle of a swooping overhead camera: expensive Hollywood shots that the Herzog of Fitzcarraldo or Stroszek could not have hoped to afford (nor would he have wanted for them). But the desert never coheres to the 19th-century drawing-room story that surrounds it.

There are other problems. The orientalism espoused by the film is hardly more complicated than the kind championed by the imperialist heroes onscreen. It is a film packed with offensive paeans to the White Lady's Burden, such as the moment when a befuddled servant asks Kidman how to cook an egg. ("The desert knows no eggs! No hens! No chickens!" he cries.) It is a film filled with obsequious servants and shrewd but easily placated local chiefs. Bell's eventual role as Iraqi and Jordanian kingmaker is applauded by Bedouin and Brit alike.

Speaking of which, here is also a film with convoluted geopolitical context that nevertheless betrays itself—even to this halfway-educated reviewer—as so much Wikipedia-sourced hash. Timelines are confused beyond recognition. The Arab Awakening is barely a footnote. The events that are shown are conveyed so broadly they might as well be invented, beginning with an opening scene in which a cigar-chomping Winston Churchill from the Spiderman Villain School of Acting discusses postwar strategy with a simpering Lawrence, who is gamely and decently played by an actor, however, best known for his insuperable role as a sparkling vampire in The Twilight Saga.

At no point does Queen of the Desert step boldly onto the surface of self-parody, like an astronaut planting a flag. (Some would argue this was the route of Bad Lieutenant, which lifted some of Herzog's inclinations to indulgent yet captivating heights.) Instead, the constellation of his obsessions is presented perfunctorily, without focus or enthusiasm. Bell's relationship to the desert, made subservient to the underwhelming loves in her life, remains unexplored. Queen of the Desert ends up playing like a Merchant-Ivory picture minus the literary merit, or a TV movie with prettier stars. At best, the film is a colorless homage to the director's previous Hearts of Darkness, such as Fitzcarraldo or Cobra Verde. (And hopefully it is not indicative of his next project: a romantic thriller about supervolcanoes set in the Bolivian salt flats.)

There is one scene—and only one—with the old Herzog magic. This involves a Zoroastrian burial tower outside of Tehran, an attempted embrace between Kidman and Franco, and the sudden, fish-eyed appearance of a vulture feasting on rotting human flesh. Far from self-parody, it's a satisfying reminder of the body of work that brought us into the theater.

Then the moment ends, and Kidman and Franco are making out against an expanse of Persian badlands, the camera swooping overhead in its overpriced cherry picker.

Ben Mauk is a Fulbright Scholar living in Berlin and a regular online contributor to the New Yorker.

[body_image width='640' height='640' path='images/content-images/2015/02/12/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/12/' filename='an-entire-community-of-clubbers-just-got-catfished-465-body-image-1423738426.jpg' id='26861']'Katelin' (NB: This isn't Katelin). Photo via Instagram.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

In late 2005-early 2006, I joined what was then the Godskitchen Forum, named after the popular club and club night. I wasn't a big clubber. I preferred house more than anything else, and wearing cyber gear and dancing to trance music was not really high on my list of priorities. But I joined because I had opened a small sheesha café in the vicinity of the club and hoped that my poor attempt at spamming the board would result in windfall sheesha profits and make me a millionaire. I'm still driving a Volvo, so you can figure out how well that plan worked out.

It was a forum, so obviously there were some trolls who gave me a hard time immediately, but I stood my ground, buried in like a tick and became an actual, non-sheesha mentioning member of the community—I'm still friends with many of them, or at least familiar with their names.

To the point: there used to be a very attractive girl on the forum called "Katelin McMillian." Aside from looks, she also had a great job as an interior designer and apparently was pretty well off, too. A full package, some would say, and as a result she was a popular member of the community.

[body_image width='2359' height='1668' path='images/content-images/2015/02/12/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/12/' filename='an-entire-community-of-clubbers-just-got-catfished-465-body-image-1423738853.jpg' id='26867']Modeling shots of DJ Miss Nine that "Katelin" used. Photo via Kristin Schrot.

Over the years, she came across as someone who loved the soulful side of house, as well as being a jazz fan. She was also a big Manchester City supporter, as well as Motherwell. A good handful of men on the forum would salivate over her every post, giving her a lot of attention—even female members would comment politely on her looks. She was a frequent poster, speaking at length about her music, her business, and, on one occasion, a major job she had going for RBS. She had sisters, too: Aaltje (pronounced Al-cha), Marieke, and another, whose name I can't remember (she wasn't on the forum, so might as well have not existed). All were good-looking. She said her mother was Dutch and her late father was Scottish, so clearly that combination works.

The forum came and went, and as we got older our posts turned from music and drugs to footwear and documentaries. The community grew quite guarded—newbie members were quickly slapped down by veteran members, just like I was back in my spamming days—until it all got too much and the forum administrators all banned us and shut the whole thing down. We all—including Katelin, and her Dutch-Scottish hybrid sisters—migrated over to a new forum started by another member, until that sort of dissolved and we all moved over to Facebook.

Katelin has been my friend on there since 2008, along with other former members. During that time, she has posted various holiday photographs but kept personal photos at a minimum. She eventually moved to New York. There, she set up a night called Sundays Are Lazy and would DJ regularly, then went ahead and turned her club mixes into a radio show. She got plenty of DJs on the hook—non-forummer but Southport Weekender DJ Sean McCabe contributed a guest mix; until recently she was asking DJ Andy Ward of Soul Central fame about uploading mixes. This was all backed up by a trail of Mixcloud and SoundCloud links, and endorsed by her boyfriend, Harry, and a female friend of hers named Erin.

Then suddenly, in 2011, while in Dubai or Abu Dhabi, she had a massive car accident. Her sister Aaltje made herself available on Facebook to provide updates on her progress—she'll recover, but there's going to be a lot of physical therapy and even more pain. More people prayed for Katelin than for fucking Malala, and the majority of these bastards are godless heathens. We all loved Kate. When we thought she couldn't get any sweeter, her sister logged on to tell us the taxi driver she collided with was working day and night to put his daughter through university, but couldn't work post-crash—so—Katelin just straight-up paid her fees. Praise be to the DJ.

Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit.

When you write it down and compact it like this, it's probably obvious that Katlein was a catfish. All the hallmarks are there: the fantastical, jetset lifestyle; the sprawling web of neatly-named friends and family; the catastrophic, outpouring-of-pity events; the unfeasibly hot woman spending her precious hot woman time on a forum with a bunch of us. But spread out over ten years, you don't notice it in the same way. Plenty of people have lived their lives through this community—why not Katelin?

Well, because she didn't exist. On Monday morning, we all woke up to a (since deleted) post explaining that Katelin was a phantom, operating behind someone else's face. She wasn't real, or if she was, she wasn't who she said. Katelin McMillian, my friend for ten years, didn't exist.

[body_image width='1600' height='2560' path='images/content-images/2015/02/12/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/12/' filename='an-entire-community-of-clubbers-just-got-catfished-465-body-image-1423743361.jpg' id='26919']The moment everyone realized Katelin and Miss Nine shared a face.

When I first heard the news, I felt like I had been kicked in the stomach. This was a person in the community we accepted as one of our own—who people shared their concerns with, who some discussed the loss of loved ones with when she mentioned her mother was sick. I guess people gave her a part of themselves, a part of their youth, a part of their lives. I look back now and try and put the pieces together but it's a real struggle—the truth is we were all too busy making sure our inner circle wasn't accessible to anyone and then we get fucked by one of our own. It has certainly left people feeling vulnerable and wanting answers, but the bottom line is that I guess we'll miss her.

Comment followed comment—everyone has some kind of link to her. Whether it's sending mixes, asking for suggestions on club nights in NYC, sending well-wishes to her post-accident—everyone had a connection. This wasn't just Facebook, or the Godskitchen forum: she was on Twitter too, as were her friends, and sprawling across every music-sharing site you could imagine. And then boom: nothing. All taken down.

[body_image width='649' height='719' path='images/content-images/2015/02/12/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/12/' filename='an-entire-community-of-clubbers-just-got-catfished-465-body-image-1423739381.jpg' id='26872']"Luke Steiger" was deleted in the purge, so it's pretty safe to say he doesn't exist, either.

It all unraveled when a guy from our group decided to google search images of female DJs, for reasons that remain unclear. He came across a DJ called Miss Nine who looked an awful lot like Kate. Slowly, the dots joined together into one gigantic "WTF?" moment, and the spell was broken.

He messaged "Kate," and she started talking about how she's sorry and that she only did it because she was being stalked—that everything and everyone and every car accident was real, apart from the looks. At this point, a gobsmacked Facebook blows up—I'm getting notifications left right and center. I can't even concentrate at work—I need to take the day off. We've been catfished to fuck. Men, women, all of us.

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I don't know what to think any more. Over the course of the last couple of days, Kate's made a few communications (through others) to explain her actions, but the waters are just getting muddier. Nothing makes sense: I have to eat two Lion Bars just to feel human again. People are in a state of shock—someone they thought they knew, for ten years, is a figment of someone else's imagination. People shared things with her; passed messages of support on to her; flirted shamelessly with her. Now we don't know who she is, where she is, or whether she's even a she. All of those connections: cut.

[body_image width='810' height='850' path='images/content-images/2015/02/12/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/12/' filename='an-entire-community-of-clubbers-just-got-catfished-465-body-image-1423741621.jpg' id='26912']A transcript of a conversation with 'Katelin' after the news broke.

The reaction is primarily one of confusion rising to banter, but through it is a thread of concern: many people are now saying it could be a mental health issue, because, whatever way you spin it, doing this and keeping it up for a decade—across multiple accounts, through multiple cities—veers quite far away from being normal. It's a full-time job. That said: there's also talk about calling MTV's Catfish, and someone is making serious steps towards printing a batch of "JE SUIS KATELIN" T-shirts. A Kickstarter to hire a private detective to figure out who Katelin is looks increasingly likely, but I'm not sure how much they'll be able to dig up now that her entire social media presence has been deleted.

Before this happened, I had only three questions in life:

1. Does God exist?

2. What happens after we die?

3. Why the fuck did Cheryl Cole get a rose tattooed on her ass?

And now I am having to add a fourth one: who the fuck was Katelin McMillian?

Follow Tan on Twitter.

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The author and his wife on Southend Pier, on their wedding day day. Photographed by Paul Tait.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Two years ago on the day before Valentine's Day I proposed to my girlfriend of over a decade by text.

The method was an unwitting one. I had visited the nonsensically long mile-and-a-third pier at my hometown of Southend, Essex—a place where we both did a lot of our growing up—earlier that day, and had realized that they'd started doing weddings at the end of it. So I texted Hayley, who is also from the area: "Do you know they do weddings at the end of Southend Pier?"

It was enough to make the one-knee business with the engagement ring passed down from her grandmother when I got back home to Walthamstow a formality. When the idea formulated between us right then, we knew it was going to happen.

What fueled our certainty about getting married on the pier was this feeling of a fantasy idea achieving a sudden sense of reachability. To hold anything at the end of the pier seemed miraculous. Ever since I was a kid I'd known there was nothing to do when you finally got to the end. The cafe and a pub closed down after there was a fire. The puny RNLI Museum offered only keyrings and disappointment. Every now and then, Eastenders actors had been carted to the end of it—some of whom try and throw each other off it.

The fortune teller had the wherewithal to to know the game was up long ago. But it's the promenade into nothing that has long been the pier's appeal—you walk all that way to get nowhere. The Southend sense of humour grows from this curious sense of fatalism, which you can feel everywhere from the pubs to the pie-and-mash shops. It will all turn out shit in the end so you might as well laugh.

But now Southend Council had hired a Danish architect to design a "cultural center," built it out of glass and reclaimed timber, and had it shipped to the end of the pier via Tilbury Docks. There was something there at last, a building built for an occasion (even if its first wedding descended into a brawl).

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The end of Southend Pier, a mile out to sea. Photo by Hayley Hatton.

I was reminded of this minor anniversary last week when I read the news that Southend was voted "the most romantic town in the UK" in local newspaper, the Echo.It was one of those marketing surveys designed for placement in local newspapers: Southend "pipped Wigan to the post" by buying more presents online than any other place in the UK.

"The kinky folks here are most likely to buy adult gifts," reported Postcode Anywhere, the address management service that took out the survey, leading one to imagine a commuter town (Southend is a 45-minute train ride away from the heart of the City) chock full of budding Christian Greys. Fifty Shades-style serious romance; office fantasy imagined by the pulsating click of a Parker pen. But it's not the whole story, or even half of it.

There is a rift between those who measure "romance" via its commercialization and those who see it as unquantifiable—that the former fits with Southend chimes with its image of vulgarity, its stereotype, is not exactly scandalous. "Southend is twentieth century," wrote the Irish novelist Kate O'Brien in the 1934 collection Beside the Seaside, edited by Yvonne Cloud. "It has set to face its future, and has run through the dangers, crudities and mistakes, which are the lot of the courageous and the outgoing. It has decided to be a place of pleasure and a home from home."

O'Brien set up Southend as a place of innocence and naivety. "In aesthetics it is innocent and unselfconscious... If anything is old, it is so by accident, and no one thinks the worse of it for being so—but nothing else is dressed up to humor it..."

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Photo by Hayley Hatton

Like much of Britain, Southend does have an air of the "bad rep" about it, but anyone who knows it even a little bit can probably deduce that it has never, on the whole, been consigned to the same Shit Britain pigeonhole as many places up and down the rest of our island have. It houses the bourgeois as much as it does plebs. Its history is not so much one of underdog as outerdog. In being so close to London and at times feeling so far, it can sustain within you a feeling of escape.

Southend was the motive for the Cockney holiday-makers who came in their hundreds on bank holidays during the Victorian era, to eat cockles and shrimps from the estuary and dance in the promenade. The East End pioneers who upped sticks to start families made it into the large urban conurbation it is today.

This part of the world grew up as a promised land for the working poor, including immigrants from Ireland (my mum was one of seven brothers and sisters in a family of Irish immigrants in Southend), eastern Europe and elsewhere. The town grew significantly during the 19th and 20th centuries, but the innocence of Southend—unconstrained by the foreboding of the past or a grim architectural school to live up to—has always made it feel a bit silly. It carries with it a certain feeling of pointlessness, typified by its pier, of which England's populist laureate of place John Betjeman remarked succinctly: "The pier is Southend, Southend is the pier."

Serious occurrences never seemed all that serious. I remember watching the black smoke rose form the burning PMS factory on the A127 from my school playground; playground gossip the next day suggested it was full of Mr. Blobby toys.

Since the 1889-built iron pier replaced the original wooden one (1830) its use value as drop-off point for day-trippers on boats and paddle-steamers had declined with the advent of the railway.

Southend is an architecturally unremarkable seaside town, as evidenced by Betjeman, who called it a "cheaper Brighton." From the vantage point of the Kentish side of the Thames Estuary, from the more acceptably bourgeois Whitstable or the wholly more industrial coastline gothic of Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey, Southend is imperceptible. It's a bank with tiny specks of miniature buildings, barely anything at all. Much of its shambling Victoriana has been pulled down through the years. Newer lego-brick concerns such as the university halls of residents have been added. But that the architecture isn't particularly coherent, or much to write home about, might suggest that this is a place for people rather than ideals.

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Photo by Hayley Hatton.

Vulgarity is another word for innocence, for unlearned codes. From Southend, it is still possible to view the logic of the City as an aggressive confusion, whereas the estuary and its big sky makes total sense.

As London's skyline increasingly resembles a series of gargantuan upturned penis extensions, as if imagined into being by some top geezer who has to check his smartphone when he takes his missus to see Fifty Shades of Greyin case he is missing any important work banter, the city's collective state of mind is fairing similarly to its vista. Assumptions become representations that become mediated truths, which in turn are fed back to us. It might be why it's hard to fall in love in London , or at least with anything other than the city itself: its unforgiving nature, the way it steals your time and makes you beg for each modicum of comfort. The Christian Grey of cities.

Southend has always had an air of failure that could be attributed to its feeling of inadequacy next to London, which at once sustains it in terms of the endless job opportunities, but also deprives it in other, less quantifiable ways. Of image and identity. But there is a freeing quality to be found here. If London is the city built on the smoke and mirrors of media saturation, Southend is the slipstream where certainties begin to waver.

Along the promenade, couples and family members hold hands on sunny Sundays (it is one of the sunniest places in the UK). Back in adolescence we didn't really consider the water the place where the sea met the Thames—and if we did it was some abstract Thames, as if the Thames was water itself. Container ships glide by, as Wilko Johnson had it.

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Photo by Hayley Hatton.

Recently revived, Dr. Feelgood are not a band you'd immediately describe as "romantic." Their songs were written from the fictional point of view of the woman-afflicted tough guy who sat at the heart of Dr Feelgood, and which singer Lee Brilleaux and the guitarist Johnson used. But it is the romantic urge that guides their view of Canvey Island and the Thames Estuary. The push and pull from sea to city, city to sea; fragmented lives and lifestyles, residual reminders that this was once a countryside hamlet on the edge of a river, a meeting point of off-key outsiderdom and the churning London machine.

To be from Southend is to be saddled with a knowledge that nothing is as it seems. Nothing is real. The amusement park was called Peter Pan's Playground (now it's bigger and called Adventure Island) and was accompanied by the oddity that was Never Never Land over the road on the verdant cliffside—a surreal haven that included an animatronic He-Man figurine as a highlight. A visit to the seafront was sometimes soundtracked by the sound of bombs being tested at the MOD-owned Foulness Island on the edge of the estuary.

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Photo by Hayley Hatton.

Serious occurrences never seemed all that serious here. I remember watching the black smoke rise form the burning PMS factory on the A127 from my school playground, and the playground gossip the next day that suggested it was full of Mr. Blobby toys. My neighbor once made the front page of the Sun with the headline, "Werewolf Seized in Southend," after an bestial altercation at Southend police station.

Like anywhere in England, Southend has an industrial-sized drug problem, for which David Amess, Southend West's politician (knighted in this year's honors), sought out a fictional solution that turned out to be an infamous stunt by Chris Morris for Brass Eye—he was fooled into filming an elaborate video warning against the dangers of a fictional Eastern European drug called "Cake," and went as far as to ask a question about it in Parliament.

Another fine "Amess" occurred in 2013 while bidding for Southend as the Capital of Culture 2017. Amess branded rival towns as "absolute dumps" and, after a disastrous press launch at the end of the pier that apparently included an impromptu operatic turn from a council employee, Southend was beaten by Hull, which, incidentally, was named the country's "least romantic" place in the same recent survey that Southend topped.

Love is often framed as a conformist act in the current climate, but it's as much a silly and childish thing as it is something that should be taken seriously. Entering into it requires a kind of stupidity, to let in the rushes of intense feeling to make the heart skip a beat. If Southend represents nothing, it is a cyclical nothing, and it's beautiful. Like life. Love.

Out at the mouth of the Thames, nothing is the same as the day before. The tide sees to that, coming in, going out, coming in, going out. The marshland around Leigh-on-Sea and the Dengie seems to speak to an in-betweenness akin to the place it could be said love is found.

For Hayley and I, like many before us, it represents the oxygen outside London's claustrophobic pile-up of representations and ambitions. So near yet so far. On our wedding day the weather was a little odd for July. It wasn't quite raining but there was a fine mist that obscured the industrial towers over at the Isle of Sheppey. I met her at the shoreline to walk to the end of the longest pleasure pier in the world, into a haze that seemed charged with the innocence of a temporal dreamworld of our own creation: into love.

Follow Tim on Twitter.

All illustrations by Adam Waito

For the past two years I managed customer service at a national flower company. I only had to threaten to call the police on angry customers twice. As you can imagine, February 14 is the worst: it's a day when "you fucked up my engagement" is considered a mild complaint.

Every year on Valentine's Day we delivered hundreds of bouquets, almost all of them the unimaginative red-roses-and-chocolates combination. I was never a fan of the holiday, but working 16-hour days was a nice change of pace from an otherwise boring gig, and seeing florists forced to draw penises on cards and boyfriends jokingly mention their partners' thongs in messages almost made the lack of sleep worth it.

I got used to being blamed for breakups, and customers caring more about their money than their partners. For Mother's Day, kids usually just want something nice sent sometime soon, but on Valentine's it's like watching gremlins being fed after midnight. Vicious husbands and boyfriends look for any reason to complain about the boring gifts they're giving. Requests like, "Can't you just write the card message for me? You're a woman, you know what they want," were common. But between recommending our most Instagram-able flowers and acting as a personal therapist to worried couples, I witnessed a few truly unique scenarios.

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Poems are hard
Last year, I got a call and the customer on the other end sounded like an elderly lady. She asked me for step-by-step instructions for ordering online, but the internet was obviously not her strong suit.

After claiming to get errors on our website she finally caved and decided to place her order over the phone. Between chatting about the weather and picking out the appropriate bouquet, she told me she's calling on behalf of her son: a deployed soldier who couldn't get to the phone himself, but wanted to surprise his girlfriend on Valentine's.

As we got to the last stages of the order, the lady was getting audibly more anxious. I figured she had errands to run and hurried the process along to the last step—the card message. She didn't answer. I asked again and she responded with a deep sigh. Stressing the message was from her son, she said, "Roses are red / Violets are blue / Poems are hard / And so is my penis." I giggled and she hung up without another word.

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Death at a Valentine's Day
If there was a lull in phone calls I would often help the overworked florists. They usually asked me to write card messages and stick them in the appropriate bouquets. One time, I got to work and saw two names from orders I had just taken. Feeling personally responsible to get everything right, I carefully penned both messages and attached them to the bouquets.

Later that day, I got an angry phone call from one of the two customers.

It turned out I had accidentally switched the messages, and the woman on the phone was not happy about it. One of the orders was sent to a new widow by her family and instead of deepest condolences, she received a profession of undying love.

"How could you put a Valentine's card on a funeral arrangement?" she asked as I sheepishly blamed the florist. Dripping with cold sweat, I called the second customer and explained the situation. The world's coolest girlfriend calmed my anxiety and made a bad joke about undying love. The florists never asked me to help again.

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Don't read the card message
Gay couples sending each other flowers on Valentine's Day is nothing out of the ordinary. A sweet man called me to send two dozen roses to his boyfriend's work and I happily obliged. The order was sent out as scheduled but the boyfriend wasn't at work to get it. Not giving up, the driver dialed the recipient and asked for his home address. We train our drivers to never mention the gift is flowers to avoid ruining a possible surprise, and this case was no different. The gentleman provided us with an alternate place of delivery and we thought nothing of it until the owner of the company, who was helping with the phones, came out of his office laughing hysterically.

Apparently, he'd just fielded a phone call from the recipient's wife. She was fuming and wanted to know who sent the flowers to her husband. We didn't cave even after she begged, pleaded, and cried for us to tell her the name. She said this could end her marriage, but the owner still didn't budge and reveal the name of the gay lover. After she hung up in a rage, we looked up the full order. The sender's name was signed at the bottom of the passionately loving message. We did not hear from any of the three again.

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Special delivery
During Valentine's Day, there's a lot of stress on drivers to be punctual, often not leaving them much personal time to eat or even go to the bathroom. They start making deliveries first thing in the morning and only return to the warehouse in the late afternoon. This is, after all, the biggest money-maker of the year for florists, and more deliveries means more cash. Most staff working during the holiday run exclusively on energy drinks, but drivers get the worst of it.

"I don't know how to tell you this," were the first words one client said to me over the phone. After awkwardly beating around the bush and insisting to speak to a manager, the caller finally told us the problem was with the driver.

Her delivery was going according to plan. She was at home and answered the door right away. The driver gave her the correct order and she loved the flowers. But after getting the gift, she peeked out her window and was shocked by what she saw. The driver, unable to hold it until he reached the nearest gas station, unbuckled his belt, pulled down his zipper, and took a leak on the lady's driveway.

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Flowers with greens
When making a delivery to an office building, drivers often leave the flowers in the mail room. Employees then distribute them to the recipients and the driver saves precious time. When I got a Gchat from one of our agents in Pakistan saying the driver left a package in a mail room, I wasn't surprised. I told Sharjeel to alert the recipient like he usually would. I watched three dots disappear and reappear in the chat window and wondered why it was taking so long to type, "OK." Sharjeel told me I didn't understand what he was trying to tell me.

He fielded a call from a disgruntled mail room employee who got our number from the business card attached to the flowers. He struggled to explain to Sharjeel why he was calling just as much as Sharjeel was struggling to comprehend the situation. As the mail room employee prepared to bring the flowers upstairs to the intended recipient, he noticed something beside the bouquet. He wanted to know whether the bag of weed, undoubtedly left behind by the driver, was part of the package. The driver never fessed up to the mistake and we told the caller to flush the drugs. Whether he actually did, we'll never know.

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Can I see your ID?
A love story for the ages. A shy bouncer called us to send flowers to a stripper he had a crush on at his place of work. He picked an extraordinarily expensive bouquet and wrote a sweet message, obviously nervous about the grand gesture. Endeared by the devotion, we put extra effort into the order. We already envisioned a happy relationship and a rom-com starring Owen Wilson.

Although his name was on the card, the stripper had little idea who the sender was. She called us to ask his name or phone number, but for confidentiality reasons we had to clear it with the bouncer. Nobody wanted to be the bearer of bad news so everyone in the office pulled straws. With a deep sigh, my co-worker dialed the number. She explained the situation to the gentle giant and told him not to give up. But, like most people on Valentine's Day, he ended up heartbroken and out a hundred bucks.

Follow Jane Lytvynenko on Twitter.

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Photo via Flickr user Imagens Evangelicas

From the widespread rumors about Kate Moss's cocaine use to clothing lines with ad campaigns that feature a model blatantly sniffing poppers, it's no secret that drug use and fashion go hand-in-hand. While not all models and scene-y industry types are cocaine fiends (there's Adderall too, duh), things get turned up a notch during New York Fashion Week, when countless Europeans in panther fur jackets, greased-up hair, and disposable incomes descend on the city to stand next to their equally-terrible New York counterparts at runway presentations and after-parties.

A couple years ago, VICE spoke to a drug dealer about how biz skyrockets during Miami Art Basel, so we decided it'd be a good idea to talk to another dope peddler about putting in work at NYFW. After our regular connects blacklisted us the moment we said "question for an article," we remembered that our one friend who works in the fashion industry as a modeling agent used to push weight. He works at a top-tier company, and doesn't want his employers to know he mixed business with shady side hustles, so he asked us to use his pseudonyms "Dick Tracy, Brian Boitano, or Manny Ribera lol."

VICE: What kind of work do you do in the fashion industry?
Dick Tracy: I'm technically an agent, booker, manager—they're all the same thing. I'm going on year five. I manage 70 to 90 models, but they're not all in town at the same time. The biggest show my models are walking at this fashion week includes spots at Calvin Klein and Marc Jacobs.

Do you currently sell drugs on top of your fashion job?
Right now, I just buy weed in bulk—mostly as a means to smoke for free. It started the same with the other shit. I never sold coke, but for a couple years, I had molly all the time. That sparked out of nowhere. My friend who sold was going out of town and I took over for him. It sold itself. I sold to friends and some people who I work with.

For the other stuff, the harder drugs, I sold more to the club kids—that stuff goes hand-in-hand with people in that world. I try not to sell to people I work with, and keep those worlds separate, though sometimes it was too easy not to. I stopped selling harder stuff over a year ago. I was taking way too much, and the only way to stop was to get it out of my hands.

Are all the stereotypes about the fashion world and cocaine and drug use true?
All the stereotypes are true. They aren't even stereotypes—they're just true. My coworker just got back from the menswear shows in Milan and supposedly one of the big designers passed around a chalice of cocaine at an after-party.

Are any designers notorious for drug use at their parties?
I'd say any party with an open bar wins. That's a given. You can guess about the partying culture based on the overall vibes from the brand itself, you know?

Which drug do you think is hot this year and why? Is cocaine still the most popular?
Coke definitely. Molly had its time and then became really shitty. I felt like molly was hotter than coke last year—maybe because of all the rappers getting more involved with fashion around the time. Hip-hop ingrains a lot of the "what's hot" shit in people's head. It seems everyone ditched molly this year once it got really diluted. You'll find that with coke too, but not as much. It's the staple.

Do you think people buy more drugs during fashion week, compared to another week in the winter?
Yes, interest increases during NYFW. First off, there are more people in town. It's February, so people haven't been going out as much in general. But now that it's Fashion Week, there's always something to do every night no matter what. Interest surges.

I'm sure fashion week is a boost for most dealers. NYFW is coupled with the NBA All-Star Game this year, so I can imagine it'll be a good "season." There's a huge influx of users that are not normally here, especially the Europeans.

I still get hit up all the time even though I don't sell anymore. But often, people just want to be pointed in the right direction since I've been out of the game for a bit. And they hook me up—I'll get a kickback in some form or another.

How much more would you be pushing during fashion week when you were in the game?
I would buy a lot. Quadruple as much as the typical load. I forget how much, in specific, but I would guess $2,000 worth in a week, which is about two pounds. The most I ever sold in one sitting was probably an ounce of molly—it gets up there when it comes to weed, too.

The people who were buying from me would spread the word right away and I'd be getting blown up off the bat by customers... That'd go really quickly. I'd go through a pound in a week—way, way faster during fashion week. I liked to get in bulk because getting more after the first pick-up was often a pain in the ass.

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Image via

Where would you sell drugs during fashion week?
I pretty much always sold at the after-parties. I'd also carry shit on me during the day because people would hit me up all the time. They'd meet me at the office, the gym, the parties. I didn't have to go anywhere, but rather people came to me.

Do dealers take advantage of people who are buying during fashion week?
I could see people taking advantage, especially since customers aren't going to come back again. They're just in town for the week or weekend, typically. Girls are in town for the shows, it's often their first time here, and they're going crazy. If they have money, then yeah some people take advantage.

What about people in the industry using drugs to get favors?
When you're a female model, the non-model, fashion crowd types will do a lot of stuff to get your attention. Promoters, for example, will do anything to get you at their table: pick the girls up in a car, take them out to dinner, make sure they come out, maybe get them drugs. I always hear about a ton of shady shit in the male modeling world. "Gay for pay" is definitely a thing, and I'm sure drugs are associated.

As a model agent, do you care if your clients are doing drugs during fashion week?
As an agent, I want to know what they're doing, and it helps if they are honest with me about what they're up to so I can help them out if they get into any shit. But I'll see it on social media either way—they put it all online and it's hard for them to hide stuff. As long as they don't look like shit at their call time, and there's no last-minute frantic phone calls in the morning, it's fine with me. I'm always covering shit up—it's just the nature of the job. I'm falsifying things or smoothing things out to make it better.

There are the girls who are gung ho about becoming a star and are troopers when it comes to getting there—and they won't do drugs. Others get sucked into the partying world and think they can still do both. The younger models are more prone to be getting into this stuff because they're often by themselves and don't get the city yet. Girls who don't sleep and are drinking all night end up with bloated faces, and that doesn't work too well when you're out on castings.

Do people ever do drugs during the day during fashion week to keep up?
Absolutely—I've witnessed and partook. Sometimes, you gotta do what you gotta do to get through the day. Especially during fashion week, you're working all day non-stop, and then out at client parties after. Matthew McConaughey's character in Wolf of Wall Street comes to mind.

Do you have any stories about deals gone sour or just general complications of selling during fashion week?
One time I gave myself a legitimate panic attack. I got drunk and hid my drugs somewhere I don't normally put them. I freaked out and thought they were stolen.

Another time, a group of Israeli guys who were going out after they asked me to meet them at a strip club. They bought from me, and then wouldn't let me leave. They bought me drinks, bought me lap dances, etc... it took forever to get out of there. And this was all for a couple grams of molly.

The worst was one time I sold to someone in his car. I accidentally left my phone in there and realized it the moment he started driving away. I whipped out my iPad and used the "Find my iPhone" app while chasing the car down Lafayette street like a maniac. I should have used a burner.

Do models from specific countries party the hardest?
Australian models, for sure. Everyone down there is full of energy, and down to do whatever. British models come in at a close second.

Follow Zach on Twitter.

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Follow Gilbert Hernandez on Twitter and buy his books from Fantagraphics and Drawn And Quarterly.

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An intimate scene from 'Heavy Rain'

" You don't have a date on Valentine's Day," your friends in relationships have probably announced piously, "because you spend too long sitting indoors playing video games."

A tired cliché. Reductive. Bullshit. Like all art forms, video games are an invaluable aid to successful courtship. Films, for instance, have been instructing humans on how to go about jiggling secret bits of their anatomies inside other secret bits for a hundred years. What lessons are there about wooism that can't be learned from When Harry Met Sally, or the dithering buffoonery of foppish tooth-tent Hugh Grant? None that'll get you off, that's for darn tootin'. The same goes for books and music—and so it is with video games.

Far from being an activity generally undertaken in lieu of more romantic, Durex Play-assisted bum-poking, games teach us a litany of lessons about how to instigate a stanza or two of the horizontal arts. Here are a few of them.

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TRY TO SLEEP WITH ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE

Anyone playing Dragon Age: Inquisition will be familiar with the little heart icon that flashes up as a conversation choice on occasion. This is the "flirt" option, with which you can change the flow of discourse from drier topics involving the end of existence—"I wish Corypheus would stop with this nonsense," and the like—to more salacious fare, like, "A peer inside your smock, perchance?" and, "I can smell your junk from here, and it smells terrific."

You can try this with any gender or race in the game, meaning you can simultaneously try and finger louche conjure-oaf Dorian and steely scar-fox Cassandra, while also having a stink-fumble with the Dwarven scout Harding and the Howitzer-abdomened horn-bastard Iron Bull ( pictured above). The lesson here? Lose your inhibitions, abandon shame, decide not to give a shit about being found out, and scatter your fuckoats as far and wide as possible.

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MANUFACTURE DRAMA

How many times has Princess Peach been kidnapped? Once is too many, but how many is it now? Five? Ten? And Mario hasn't thought to upgrade castle security? He's a plumber for fuck's sake, surely he knows a guy called Robbo who'll give him a good deal. And Peach? Convenient she always leaves the back door open, isn't it? Almost like something's going on with her and Bowser that, whenever discovered, becomes, "Oh, he's kidnapped me, again." Come on, nobody believed Mary with all that "immaculate conception" bullshit, and no one believes you, Peach. All in all, it sounds like a clusterfuck of a relationship, doesn't it?

Well think again, because it's a relationship that's 30 years strong. They're actually smashing it. This is how it all started after all: Mario wooed Peach by "rescuing" her from Bowser in the first Super Mario Bros.—a case of history repeating, as he'd (as "Jump Man") also saved past squeeze Pauline from the then-antagonistic Donkey Kong in 1981—and then they went home for the most riotous sex it's possible for two clumps of rudimentary pixels to attempt. And they've been doing the same merry dance ever since. This keeps things fresh, electric. Any nascent relationship needs excitement. Emulate this IRL by hurling a drink in a potential mate's face, pushing them in front of a subway, or telling them you thought you recognized them because you fucked their mom and/or dad. Then strap in for several decades of bliss.

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TAKE A FUCKLOAD OF PILLS

Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man have been an item for even longer than Mario and Peach, so they're clearly doing something right. But that's where the similarities end: rather than the Nintendo pair's basing of a relationship on explosive fucking, like a pixel-y take on Crash starring James Spader, Namco's yellow icons' kinship rests solely on the ingestion of frankly reckless amounts of class-A contraband.

Take their advice about pills cautiously: The first time you meet your new squeeze you'll be so busy discussing your grandparents, the worst jobs you ever had, and exactly what happened during the recording of Second Coming that you'll forget to make your move. Plus, penises won't work properly.

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DEVELOP A BIOLOGICALLY IMPOSSIBLE PHYSIQUE

If games have taught us anything it's that, whichever sex you are, the opposite one finds even the slightest physical imperfection repellent. So, for men, this decrees that—in order to copulate—you'll need either the rugged E4 handsomeness of Nathan Drake or the tiny-assed 'roid-stackery of Gears of War's Dom Santiago. Either way, full heads of hair and six-packs like cattle grids are totally non-negotiable.

For women it's even worse: Dead or Alive (pictured above) and Tomb Raider stipulate that, if you aren't packing a stomach firmer than the middle of a neutron star and tits like vast bouncy Moomins' noses, passing men will actually vomit all over you, possibly drowning you. Both sexes might as well accept this and get to work. This will probably mean extensive surgery for all of us, not to mention foregoing fun and life itself in favor of six hours a day in the gym. But focus on the endgame: when we all look as we should, we won't be able to pass someone in the street without diddling them silly. The only problem then becomes where to drown all the ugly kids we produce.

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BECOME A PRICK

Duke Nukem ( pictured above) was a misogynistic, violent, stripper-ogling, luddite prick. Kyrie from Devil May Cry was a prick who had a corrosive ball of pulsating dullness where her personality should have been. Far Cry 3's Jason Brody was a mass-murdering, extreme-sporting, "WHOO-YEAH!" American prick. Heavy Rain's prickish Madison Paige jumped the bones of the apparently bereaved Ethan Mars (prick) at the first available opportunity, like a prick would. Harley Quinn was a criminal and a prick. Yet all of them got their fun times at some point. Are you being too nice? Is that pesky personality of yours getting in the way? Do you have some kind of ingrained moral code? Well then. You know what to do. You prick.

SAVE THE WORLD OR DIE TRYING

Nah.

Follow Luke on Twitter.

Warning: The pictures below depict gay stuff and are very NSFW. If you're not into that, this is probably not for you.

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The photographs in Keim, the forthcoming book of Matt Lambert's cinematic gay nudes, are shocking. Many of the LA-born, Berlin-based filmmaker's eerily visceral pictures depict boys engaged in sexual acts. Others feature dudes in repose, drinking and texting naked, or lazily playing with themselves. They seem smutty because of their content, but the nudity is somehow diffused, and treated in turns with cool distance and intense intimacy. Maybe the reason I find them shocking is because I identify with them, and the psychology of the pictures sometimes feels uncomfortably familiar. The book's cover, which depicts an erect penis blowing its load, is the erotic epitome of Cartier Bresson's decisive moment. It's a dirty triumph of photography's ability to freeze time. Yet Lambert doesn't cite photographers among his influences, instead referencing filmmakers from Fritz Lang to Greg Araki. Even more surprisingly, he doesn't think his pictures are subversive.

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^"If anything, I aim to take subversive issues and humanize them," Lambert told VICE. "Living in Berlin has allowed me to see sexuality as something that doesn't need to be feared. It should be embraced and a vital part of becoming a complete, honest human. There's such a casual quality to the way Berlin deals with sex—it's not even always sexual. I see very little of my work as being about sex. It's more about the intimacy that forms as a by-product of friendship or sexual encounters. There's a camaraderie and trust that I'm trying to capture. Sure, some of these images are pure sex, but most I don't see as sexual at all."

Robert Mapplethorpe was widely accused of using shock tactics to get the art world's attention with his X Portfolio. Maybe Matt Lambert's ability to normalize this kind of imagery is to some extent the inheritance of that shock. In the end, the book is about love and relationships between men.

"I want to reflect a world where there's nothing to fear when it comes to love."

Matt Lambert's first book, Keim (translated to "seed" or "germ"), will be released in April. It's published by Pogo Books and designed by Studio Yukiko. Pre-order it here.

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Follow Matthew Leifheit on Twitter.