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Photo courtesy of Andrew Tunks

Andrew Tunks has his whole life ahead of him, but the 28-year-old from the outskirts of LA is vying for the chance to leave it all behind. This week, he found out there's a 25 percent chance he'll die on Mars—which means the opportunity to back out of an impulsive and crazy decision is slowly closing.

Back in 2013, a Netherlands-based group called Mars One put out an open call for anyone seeking a one-way ticket to the Red Planet—the only barrier to entry was $38 and an obsession with space. Mars One got 200,000 applications before it stopped accepting entries that August. Many of the people who threw their hats in the ring were, in a word, weird.

But Mars One only wants the best and brightest—the group is seeking not only ambassadors for Earth, but also stars of a reality television show about the training program. "We fully anticipate our remaining candidates to become celebrities in their towns, cities, and in many cases, countries," program co-founder Bas Lansdorp said in a statement when the pool was whittled down to 1,058 would-be astronauts in December 2013. "It's about to get very interesting."

Things got even more exciting this week, when 100 people, including Tunks, made it past the next series of cuts. There is only one more selection round before 24 future Martians are divided into teams of four and sent into a decade of full-time training. Then—barring some mishaps or some (very public) chickening out—they'll be catapulted to Mars, where they'll either die very quickly or colonize.

When I spoke to him on Wednesday night, the Californian (who now lives in part-time in London) seemed fairly chill about the prospect of leaving behind his family and girlfriend to live out his days on a distant rock. He told me he entered the contest on a kind of whim, to see how far he could get, though he also thought that the idea of a multinational crew of colonists landing on Mars could "really bring people together."

VICE: Because there's a TV show attached, some people might think Mars One is a publicity stunt. What have your interactions been like with them so far, and how serious do they seem about making it happen for real?
Andrew Tunks: I think they are absolutely dedicated to this, really intelligent and going about it in a good way. I've met Dr. Norbert Kraft, who's the chief medical officer for the project, and he's done a lot of work with researching astronauts in confined situations. He's worked for NASA. He said one of the funny things that tends to happen is that people start hooking up pretty quickly. He also said the reason they're going for more "normal people" rather than astrophysicists and the people you would think [you would want on a mission like this], like surgeons, is generally you want people who are good at getting along with other people. And the people who are driven to be the stereotypical astronaut who's super fit, super the-best-at-everything, super smart—tend to be kind of assholes. And he said in multiple runs when they've gotten those kinds of people, it just breaks down because people can't get along. They end up exploding at each other and stuff.

Is there something in particular you think would be valuable to the mission that you possess?
I just think I'm a really kind person—I think that's important. I think I have an artistic sense and a sense of beauty and reflection. I meditate quite a lot and think I'm very peaceful. I think that's pretty important. But I'm also a really quick learner and I really enjoy learning and I'm into all that stuff. It might sound weird but I kind of see my potential role as talking to people in a global way I guess. I hope to inspire people rather than be the best at something or contribute a certain skill. They'll be training us for ten years to learn engineering and medical stuff and all the things we need to operate this colony.

"My mom, whenever I bring it up, she goes, 'Well, you know you're not going. You can't go to Mars. Don't even think about it.'"

Are you depressed or disenchanted with things on Earth?
I really like Earth. I love humans. I think we do so many amazing, beautiful things. i think the major problems that we face like global warming and violence and stuff like that. It's just that it's really hard to coordinate group action on such a massive scale to get countries and individuals who run them who are making tons of money agree to stop lining their pockets and do something that's good for everybody. Our brains are wired to have us survive. It's just a matter of taking that wiring and changing it to a new situation—which is we exploded on the planet and we have no natural predators and we're destroying our planet in the process.

What's it like telling your parents that you want to die on Mars? I can't imagine having that conversation.
It's pretty funny really. My mom, whenever I bring it up, she goes, "Well, you know you're not going. You can't go to Mars. Don't even think about it." When I first applied I didn't know how many people were applying and when I found out how many there were I was like I don't know if I'll get into the next round, let alone be in the final 100. So it hasn't even really been that big of a deal until now. But it's kind of not up to her. As much as I love my parents and thank them for everything they've done for me, it's my life. It is a sacrifice though and I would be really heartbroken to leave everything. It's really scary and everything but I think it's just an unprecedented opportunity, really. I have to at least see how far I can get.

Are you afraid of death?
The thing is whether you're afraid of it or not, it's going to happen so what's the point of being afraid of dying? And also we only have so many years here and then it's all over and done with, so I don't see the point in being afraid of it or needing your life to be a certain way. I think that expectations can be kind of bad for you. I don't know if I can explain this right but I think you're afraid of death when you don't think that you can be happy until you achieve a certain thing.

An MIT study says the first group of settlers would likely suffocate in 68 days. Does that deter you, or at least make you hope to be one of the later crews?
I didn't see that, actually. But I definitely don't want to be in the first group. Let me just say that. [ Laughs] Um, God, four people, eight people is bad enough. But just four people for, I guess it would be like seven months in transit, and then two years? That's a long time to be with just those people in such a stressful environment. I think the next crew would be much easier.

So besides people, what things would you miss about home?
The atmosphere and nature, I'd say. Just having breathable oxygen around you all the time is a blessing that you don't really think about. I really like nature and I really like dense nature. I like rain forests and things like that so it'd be really difficult to go to a place where there's barrenness everywhere.

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Not a lot of "dense nature" on Mars. Pretty much just this. Photo via NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Have you ever considered the possibility of changing your mind as soon as you've left?
I have thought about that but at that point you're pretty much stuck with that decision. It's like, what are you gonna do about it? It's happened anyway so live with it and be happy.

What would do you do for seven months stuck on a spaceship without losing it?
Rock back and forth, chew my nails, write all over the walls. [ Laughs] I don't know, probably watch movies and stuff, exercise to keep up muscle mass, probably exercising for a good two or three hours a day. I might write. It depends what I'm into in ten years. It would be challenging but I'm sure we'd have figured something out to do—maybe we could write our constitution on the way.

"Life is kinda shitty a lot of the time. Life is suffering."

What do you actually have to do while you're there?
I'm sure there will be plenty of science missions. There would also be a lot of daily maintenance stuff, just taking care of the colony, building it up and planning the next steps and building them.

I'm reminded of this book that I read called Giants in the Earth. The author is [Ole Edvart] Rolvaag. It's about these settlers from Sweden who basically cross the country and set up a little homestead in the middle of Minnesota or something like that and there are just these horrifying winters with overwhelmingly cold blizzards and it's a really hard life there and it's just these couple little families. The main character is just consumed with this idea of building a kingdom and everywhere he looks he sees an opportunity to build his kingdom. He works like a maniac building his dreams, seeing something where nothing is. So I kind of imagine it would be like that. It would be constantly seeing opportunities to build your kingdom and to make a better life for yourself and for the other colonists.

What if it turns out to be really shitty and you don't like it, what would you tell yourself to convince yourself this is worthwhile?
Life is kinda shitty a lot of the time. Life is suffering. Everything about being alive is really challenging. If it's not one thing, it's something else—so yeah it might be really tough on Mars, but it's still just life. I think it would be nicer to be on Mars than in Somalia or Syria right now. There are so many horrible places on Earth. At least [on Mars] you're in control of your destiny, more or less. You have this global platform as well. I think that's really inspiring. That's a reason to keep going. You have the entire world watching you and that's such a powerful thing. I feel like it would be really letting everyone down and letting yourself and the universe down to just be like, Fuck it, this is hard. I want to die. I'm just gonna jump out of the airlock.

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter

And check out Andrew's page for his upcoming book, The Occulus, here.

In January, soon after Jeb Bush began "actively exploring" a run for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination in 2016, he and his buddies launched his Super PAC, "Right to Rise." Super PACs, in case you aren't an expert in recondite campaign finance laws, are committees were made legal by the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision in 2010, and are allowed to spend an unlimited amount of money on elections, independently of official campaigns. If you want to be president in 2016, you need at least one Super PAC behind you, and that Super PAC needs to raise and spend an obscene amount of money to attack your opponents and prop up your campaign.

It's a scary prospect, clearly signaling the country's slow descent into oligarchy. But the name of Bush's Super PAC made an impression: It hits all the right campaign-speak notes, but there's something else there, too. Something... sensual. Because the name of Jeb Bush's Super PAC is clearly a double entendre about dicks.

Good for Jeb, of course. Maybe he has more personality than he's given credit for. (Or maybe he wouldn't get the joke even if you explained it to him, which seems more likely.) But Right to Rise was a revelation: Super PACs may be a terrifying harbinger of the death of democracy, but they're also a joke—just another embarrassing quirk of the American electoral circus. Thus inspired, I've gone ahead and ranked the other 2016 Super PACs in order of quality, quality obviously being measured by how many jokes I can make about them.

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Photo by Gage Skidmore

Stand for Principle
If this Super PAC were called "I Am Ted Cruz And I Would Really Like To Be President," it would tell you less about the candidate than this name does. If you understand "Stand for Principle" by its accepted definition—that is, upholding a certain system of morals—the name says nothing. Everyone has different principles, and Cruz, as he contorts himself into something resembling an acceptable presidential candidate, tends to slide all over the map, principle-wise. If, however, you were to read it as "Stand for Principle," like literally standing up whenever someone, somewhere mentions a principle, then the name really does get to the essence of what Cruz is about.

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Humans for Rand Paul. Image via Human Action

Human Action
The name of this Super PAC, created by libertarian fans of Senator Rand Paul, is inspiringly bland and, as befits anything created by Paul World, also kind of weird. It's like opening a restaurant and naming it "Food." It doesn't help that the name references an obscure free-market treatise by the early 20 ^th-century Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, because every American voter who gets the reference is already working for Rand Paul's campaign.

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Chris Christie Super PAC, name TBD
Christie's Super PAC hasn't been named or formally announced yet, but I have a few ideas. Bridge to the White House. Keep America Moving. The One Lane Forward. Should I keep going? I could keep going.

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A Santorum Super PAC ad. Image via Red White and Blue Fund

Red, White, and Blue Fund
Conveniently doubles as the name for the slush fund you collected to buy Budweisers on the Fourth of July. Also funny because it suggests Santorum wrapping himself in a large American flag, and even funnier because Santorum will never, ever be president.

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Jim Webb for Jim Webb. Image via Born Fighting PAC

Born Fighting PAC
This is actually a leadership PAC, not a Super PAC, but it doesn't really matter, because it belongs to Jim Webb, a one-time senator from Virginia trying to run against Hillary Clinton. The name pretty much sums up the whole mythos of Webb: He's a soldier, and under no circumstances will he let you, the American voter, forget that, even if it means he has to mail one of his titillating war novels to your doorstep and then, when you forget to bring it inside, come to your house and read it to you while you sleep.

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National Draft Ben Carson For President Campaign Committee
I love a Super PAC that doesn't mess around. Not only does the name of this group, which was founded by the grandson of John Philip Sousa, say which candidate it supports, it also says 1) what it's trying to do with that candidate, i.e. draft him to run for president, 2) what it wants that candidate to do, i.e. run for president, 3) that it wants him to be president of a whole country, and 4) that it's a committee. While this might not be a dick joke in and of itself, you could approach someone and say, "Hey girl, what's your name? I need to know what to call my Super PAC, which is raising money to buy you a drink. And it's a committee of one." Please do this.

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Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. Photo by Gage Skidmore

Believe Again
With this Super PAC, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is giving you permission to believe again in America, albeit the America that exists only in reality shows about backwoods pageant queens and storage unit auctioneers. But, like most things Jindal does, the name does not mean what he thinks it means: Instead, it reads like he's begging you to believe in him again. And the funniest part about that is how it implies someone, somewhere once believed in Bobby Jindal.

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Martin O'Malley, just a cool dad running for president. Image via YouTube

O' Say Can You See PAC
I actually didn't make this up. Martin O'Malley's leadership PAC is really called "O' Say Can You See"—a flawless combination of the national anthem and the former Maryland governor's last name. It's like a dad joke running for president. It's so perfect that it seems impossible O'Malley isn't president already. And unless Clinton has the name of her Super PAC changed to "From Sea to Shining Hillary," I think we have a new Democratic frontrunner.

Follow Kevin on Twitter

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Remember about ten or 15 years ago when you would ask someone what kind of music they liked and they would say " indie" and it would just piss you off so much because you're a music snob and "indie" isn't a genre it's a way of describing a record label you ignorant bastard? Yeah, me too. But after a short while, like it or not, the term did take on meaning. If someone said they listened to "indie," you could figure out what they were getting at.

Something similar happened with indie movies in the late 80s or early 90s. That golden generation of filmmakers from the 70s had largely gone to the studios, and a new wave of indie people crashed ashore. Audiences wondered who might somehow succeed Scorsese. "Indie" meant gritty or violent (verbally, if not physically). It meant shocking and ironic. Gen-X filmmaking, if you like. The anti-hero is the only hero—that sort of thing. I realize that lumping all indie films of the 1990s together is shortsighted, and about as irritating as that guy you know who doesn't watch movies, only films... But I've got to say, the mash-up parody trailer in my mind for "Indie 90s Movie" looks pretty uniform.

Then, in the mid 2000s, the arrival of the so-called mumblecore genre and mainstream indie dramedies like Little Miss Sunshine served to morph the meaning of "indie" into something else altogether.

But there's another such pseudo-genre of prominence—one that's been slowly developing and evolving for the past 87 years. It's the "Oscar Movie," folks. Not all Oscar Movies win an Oscar. In fact, some Oscar Movies aren't even nominated—but, like with indie music and porn, you know it when you see it.

But how can we define this invented genre? Let's take a look at some that have been nominated over the last few years. First of all, wartime stories are good, something that's pro-soldier, but ambiguously antiwar ( The Hurt Locker, Argo, Zero Dark Thirty, American Sniper). Or movies about people who are driven, and a little crazy (Silver Linings Playbook, Whiplash, Birdman). Or movies that are technically innovative or tell a story in a newish way (Life of Pi, Gravity, Boyhood, Birdman again). Another wonderfully specific type of Oscar movie is best described with a term coined by screenwriter John August: the "Special British Snowflake" movie. These center around unique real-life English figures who triumphed against the odds (The King's Speech, Philomena, The Imitation Game, The Theory of Everything). Finally, and most prominently, Oscar Movies are often based on true stories (The King's Speech, 127 Hours, The Fighter, The Social Network, Moneyball, Argo, Lincoln, Zero Dark Thirty, 12 Years A Slave, Captain Philips, Dallas Buyers Club, The Wolf of Wall Street, American Sniper, The Imitation Game, Selma, The Theory of Everything).

I feel I should make clear that this simplification of mine isn't intended to undermine these movies in any way. I really like some of them, and love a few. I'm just trying to get a handle on how the Academy decides what it likes and how that has impacted the evolution (or lack thereof) of the Oscar Movie.

The Oscar Movie is a film that an artistically minded and socially curious white male over 50 can really sink his teeth into.

The Academy is comprised of nearly 6,000 members. Each year, around 200 new members are invited to join via one of 17 branches (actor, director, designer, etc.). Those invited include past nominees and individuals that current Academy members have chosen by virtue of their body of work. Last year, 20 actors were invited. Of those 20, six were women. Only three weren't white. In a 2012 survey, the LA Times found that the Academy was 93 percent white, 76 percent male, and had a median age over 50. And old white guys are going to like movies that resonant with old white guys. It shows. Not to be reductive, but if the Academy were 80 percent women in their 30s, perhaps the very worthy Obvious Child would have received a nomination. If it were 80 percent Ben York Joneses, Listen Up Philip would have gotten a Best Screenplay nod. If it were 80 percent pink owls made of marshmallows in top hats, The Grand Budapest Hotel would be a lock for Best Picture.

Ranking works of art proves to be a strangely revealing and very subjective activity. Who you are and what you've experienced is a huge factor when you are appreciating a film. And as one anonymous voter's interview with the Hollywood Reporter this week showed, some Academy members aren't afraid to go with what their biases tell them.

It's not only about sex and race, though. Academy members who aren't older white men still live and work in the entertainment industry. The impact here is totally evident. I direct you to showbiz-slanted Best Picture winners The Artist (2011) and Argo (2012). And if The Hollywood Reporter's award expert Scott Fienberg is right, which he usually is, we'll see another showbiz Best Picture winner for 2014 in Birdman.

So based on what we know about the Academy and how the members have voted in the past five or so years, here's my go at succinctly defining the genre: The Oscar Movie is a film that an artistically minded and socially curious white male over 50 can really sink his teeth into.

With that in mind, I've prepared a pitch for the most Oscar Movie-y movie possible:

SPAIN, 1959. OSCAR BENINGTON (Benedict Cumberbatch), 40, British, spends his days painting. It helps him manage his PTSD. Five years ago Oscar won an Oscar, and global praise for his very personal documentary on WWII. A film that proved to be his first and last. An occasional call from Hollywood reminds Oscar that the door is still open, but he wants nothing to do with that life. He just wants to live in peace with his wife VICKY (Rosemund Pike) in Catalonia. Then an eccentric man moves into the neighboring villa... It's SALVADOR DALI (Johnny Depp). Oscar's hesitant to engage with the surrealist, but Vicky thinks he's the bees knees. A kindred friendship soon develops between Dali and Oscar over art, and Oscar is once again inspired to make a documentary... about Dali. But he's plagued by surreal nightmares. His PTSD begins to manifest is frightening ways, and soon Oscar finds himself slipping into a world turned upside down—an unwitting muse for the questionably intentioned Dali. Even Vicky's behavior stirs paranoia in Oscar. The lines between what's real and what's surreal become blurred, as Oscar fulfills his artist ambition and looses himself. Shot entirely by drones. Based on a true story in a Fargo kind of way.

(It needs some work.)

So this brings us to the big question: If you're a voting member of the Academy, is it your responsibility to loosen your grip on personal preference to make up for your organization's structural programs? Should the pink owl in a top hat vote for Selma because its subject matter is culturally important or, should he vote for The Grand Budapest Hotel because on technical and emotional levels he felt that was the best film of the year? The Academy may look like the US Congress in terms of sex and race, but unlike Congress, the people aren't the ones bringing new members in. It's not a public service job. It's not even a job! It's membership in a club. But considering the power that this relatively small club has, are Academy members obliged to cast their vote as if they were performing a public service? Either way, the ideal scenario would be a more diverse Academy—but unless something dramatic happens, it's going to stay old, white, and male for a long time.

In the meantime, I can think of another organization of cultural significance that makes an effort and succeeds repeatedly in recognizing a wide spectrum of movies and stories: Sundance. Take a look at some of the festival's winners in the past few years: Winter's Bone (teenage female protagonist, thriller in the Ozarks), Beasts of the Southern Wild (modern fairytale, black female protagonist), Fruitvale Station (racially charged drama, black male protagonist), Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (highly stylized coming-of-age story based on a YA novel). As far as I can tell, there is no "Sundance Movie." This is due to the fact every year, each section of the festival is judged by a jury of notable filmmakers. These juries change members every year, keeping the perspectives fresh and open. In fact, most film festivals function this way. The Academy is organized according to very different principals, but perhaps it could take a page these film festival models.

Or we could just take a step back and ask why we care so much about these golden statuettes in the first place. In 2013, the Academy Awards were officially rebranded as "The Oscars," a far more casual and less sterile-sounding name for a TV show. And that's what it is: a goddamn TV show, like the Super Bowl. It exists to cultivate drama, incite commentary and make money by selling advertising space. People don't tune in to see who wins; they tune in to see what Reese Witherspoon is wearing. They tune in to see the faces of the nominees the moment they find out they didn't win.

That's what I tell myself—but then again, I occasionally catch myself rehearsing an acceptance speech in the shower. I care. I can't help it. That's why it would be great to see some change.

Ben York Jones is an actor and screenwriter. He co-wrote and starred in the film Like Crazy, which won the Sundance Film Festival's Grand Jury Prize in 2011. Follow him on Twitter.

Thumbnail photo via WikiMedia Commons.

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons user Natasha Baucas

The internet's freaking out over the news that Neill Blomkamp will direct a new movie in the Alien franchise. Though the director of District 9, Elysium, and the upcoming Chappie already teased us with images, we didn't get confirmation that he was actually involved until yesterday, when he posted concept art on his Instagram of a new, streamlined version of the classic alien.

The drawings look amazing, as you can see, and this is the most buzz an Alien movie's garnered since the initial announcement of Ridley Scott's Prometheus. And even though my Facebook and Twitter feeds are full of my nerdy buddies screaming with joy, I thought I'd ask some reputable sources what they thought about the news.

Josh Larsen, film critic and co-host of Filmspotting: "Prometheus hardly convinced me we need another Alien movie, but I am a fan of Blomkamp's. Unlike most, I wasn't blown away by District 9 or appalled by Elysium—I thought both showed equal potential for Blomkamp to some day do something great with his unique sensibility and vision. And while I haven't seen Chappie yet, I'm intrigued. Maybe Alien will be his chance to capitalize on that. As long as he doesn't cast Sharlto Copley."

Rebecca Housel, "the Pop Culture Professor," author of Twilight and Philosophy among other books: "I'm psyched that Neill will be directing the next Alien flick. It's one of those franchises that was at the forefront of female empowerment, and I don't know about the other ladies out there, but when I look at Neill, I start to feel empowered. Really empowered, lol. He's supa-hawt! And yeah, talented, too. The latest Alien will rock thanks to Neill's directorial vision... and overall hawtness."

Samuel Zimmerman, Managing Editor, Shock Till You Drop: "The reaction is a mixed one. My affinity for Alien and the Alien universe is great, but the art revealed I fear is too distinctly interested in recalling and resurrecting. The presence of Hicks and Newt has me believe Blomkamp's significant touchstone, like much of fandom's, is Aliens. Alien is every bit the far superior movie and I just fear the desire to both make and see a sequel to Aliens specifically (especially one that would disregard the fascinating flawed third and fourth films) is a hindrance. Hoping for the best, of course. Would always love to see a killer new Alien film and see Blomkamp truly deliver on the promise of District 9."

Alan Dean Foster, author of the Alien, Aliens, Alien 3 movie novelizations (whom we've spoken to before): "I loved District 9, it was really neat to see what Neill could do with science fiction and it was great to get a South African viewpoint on science fiction, too. I wasn't as big on Elysium. But as far as a new Alien movie goes, Neill being obviously a huge lover of science fiction, that's a step in the right direction, instead of picking somebody who directed the last four iterations of Liam Neeson's chase films. So that's a good thing, of course.

"It's all about the script, of course, what everybody wants to see who likes Alien is something involving the original Space Jockey and the Space Jockey's home world. I'm sure Neill will do a fine job directing, but it's really all about the script... I think somebody, maybe one of the powers that be, saw the reaction [of the explosion in interest in the idea of Blomkamp directing an Alien movie] and said, 'Hey, we might as well do this, as do anything else.' Sometimes good things come out of partial indifference.

"I'd love to see a female director direct an Alien film. It's all about Ellen Ripley and we've got all these guys writing the screenplays and directing the films. There are so many great female directors it would be wonderful to see one of them direct an Alien film."

My feelings are a mixture of everything expressed above (yes, Blomkamp is a total babe). But as much as I want to be optimistic, because I love the Xenomorph, I have remind myself where this remake is coming from. As Alan Dean Foster reminded me, "Only a Hollywood studio could take two successful franchises like Alien and Predator and screw both of them up with one film." Let's see what they do with this sequel.

Follow Giaco on Twitter.

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Illustrations by Tom Scotcher

If you let an average person in on your phobia, chances are they're gonna rinse the irrational factor of a fear and bring you face to face with yours whenever they can. I've laughed at middle-aged people flipping out over a clown, and at that video of the guy who's afraid of peaches. I've even seen a guy I know who is afraid of cheese have liquidized camembert shoved up his nose.

This might be why I've never actually told anyone about my phobia of vomiting. It'd either turn the people I know into puke-crazed tyrants hellbent on making me catch the norovirus, or, even worse, make my weirdness about something seem even weirder to them.

At times, having emetophobia has felt like a debilitating illness. Phobias really do have the potential to ruin your life, especially if you're lumped with a fear that confronts something universal like agoraphobia. One of the main things about the fear of being sick is that, just because you might not be feeling sick or being sick, that doesn't rule out someone else around you feeling ill. Emetophobia isn't just a fear of bringing up your own breakfast—it's the constant uncertainty that someone else might.

It was only around the age of seven that I began to have an issue with vomiting, supporting the belief that every phobia has a root, or a kick-off moment, as opposed to being genetically engrained. I was at home jumping around on the sofa with my sister when I burped, violently, ran into the kitchen and spewed, aiming for the trash but missing by a matter of inches. My dad was making some food, sniggered a bit, and said, "Ah, dear." He took me upstairs to my mom, and she consoled me as I threw up about three more times. The next day, I gagged after an effort to put away some toast, but managed to keep everything down. Then I got better.

Weeks after that illness went away, the memory of it stayed with me. I was inexplicably freaked out by, or anything pertaining to, vomit. More so than the average kid. It seemed a mere four pukes was enough to instill a contempt and dread that has somehow stopped me from throwing up ever again. I'm now 21.

Unlike certain other bodily reliefs, vomiting is a physical compulsion—and that's what freaks me out, the lack of control. The majority of the time, you can refrain from shitting your pants. With vomit it's irrepressible and unanticipated, and, with that, comes the disgust and frustration of other people, friends or family, who can impart a sense of shame and guilt comparable to that of those naked-in-front-of-the-class nightmares.

Just because I wasn't being sick all through the 2000s doesn't mean I wasn't dreading the possibility of it every single day.

To be honest with you, being terrified of vomit has fucked my life up in quite a few ways. Just because I wasn't being sick all through the 2000s doesn't mean I wasn't dreading the possibility of it every single day. There were school trips that I avoided purely on the off chance that I'd see someone get travel sick. And I don't mean day trips but the big weekenders. How pathetic and weird you come across telling your family that you, a young guy, are "not really into quad-biking, canoeing, and rock climbing," or whatever else they got up to on those trips.

School was puke hellfire. Kids don't always tell someone when they feel ill, so that overturned-bucket-of-water ripple was something I'd have to deal with every few months. Either that, or I'd see someone who was visibly feeling shitty, watch him put his pen down, take greedy breaths, raise his hand, and fail to get the teacher's attention in a frenzy of nausea. If he did seize the teacher's focus, he'd get a considerate "just go sit by the window for a second." By the time the kid even made it there it would be too late. And then came the domino effect and the lingering smell in the corridor.

Emetophobia goes hand-in-hand with claustrophobia and agoraphobia, because you're not just afraid of puke, you're afraid of germs and places with no escape-route, in case you need to puke or get away from someone who is puking. Rollercoasters are a no-go. Your seafood intake will stretch to strictly fish and chips only—such is the fear of putting anything potentially "dangerous" into your body that might make you sick. You'll be incredibly anxious and have panic attacks and any nauseous episodes you do have will leave you in the fetal position, shaking so much your ankles are doing a drum-roll.

[body_image width='1200' height='747' path='images/content-images/2015/02/19/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/19/' filename='living-with-the-intense-fear-of-vomiting-body-image-1424353201.jpg' id='28987']

Emetophobia is an obsessional phobia defined by superstitions, routines and avoidance behaviors. Sufferers often avoid engaging in anything that was once linked to someone vomiting. When I was in sophomore year, my friend threw up in class as he was making his way out of the door to the toilet. I could only think that it must have been the milk cartons we'd been given that morning, and I never touched the stuff again. Long-jumping over that pile of sick with my jumper masked across my mouth, was the first "moment" of many. My life would be dictated by patterns of avoidance.

Eventually, at the end of my school years, I searched online for any explanations for having a fear of vomit and realized I was, to a degree, emetophobic. I recall my mom telling me around that time about when my aunt was having chemotherapy, and how she would "get worked up because she hated being sick." She remains the only other person I've ever known to have it, too. There are a few celebrities who have come out as emetophobes—Charlie Brooker being the most noted. Joan Baez and Cameron Diaz are known sufferers and so, apparently, was James Dean.

I often find that there's two reoccurring statements brought up by people without the phobia to people with it: the first is that, "Well, no one likes being sick." See: 2 Girls 1 Cup and secondly, "Being sick isn't going to kill you." See: John Bonham and Jimi Hendrix.

When I try and talk to people about my phobia, the response is usually either: "Well, no one likes being sick." See: 2 Girls 1 Cup and secondly, "Being sick isn't going to kill you." See: John Bonham and Jimi Hendrix.

There's a certain fatality to having emetophobia rather than, say, a peach phobia. Sickness reinforces the idea that you don't have a body but you are a body and it could give out anytime. It's an irrational distrust of your body and a fear of, ultimately, losing control.

Phobias, like the majority of anxiety disorders, can't be magically "cured" as such, but they can be tamed and made livable through therapies like CBT and, often, medication. Usually, anti-anxiety medication is recommended on the basis that emetophobes tend to have baggage disorders like agoraphobia, OCD, and depression, and due to our dubious attitude toward side effects, antiemetics are designated before that.

These can come in the form of simple antihistamines. There are things that can be done to make life better and break down the barriers and obsessional behaviors and avoidance tactics that might stop you from getting a job or starting a family. Like hypnotherapy, for example. Personally, it took a specific event to change my outlook. By my mid-teens, I'd become so germ-savvy (washing my hands 25 times a day, pressing bus bells with my sleeve pulled over my hands, flushing toilets with elbows, et cetera) that I managed to avoid not just being sick but feeling sick altogether. During those years I'd only have to feel a slight glitch in my throat and that was enough to make me freak. I'd completely forgotten what it felt like to be nauseous.

Then, one day when I was 15, I had my first experience of sickness in years. I recognized the warning signs immediately—the flushed sensation, the crippling stomach pain, the dry mouth. Somehow, though, I managed to burp my way out of actually vomiting. Moments like that have come and gone since then and they've been great, because they've proved that a sickness does not always lead to or conclude in being sick. And even if it did happen, it's entirely survivable.

I'm aware that might sound strange if you haven't experienced a phobia, but that kind of confrontation, for me, was the best way to get a handle on a fear that began with one terrible episode. If a specific experience can give you an irrational fear of something, logically, a good one—or one that makes you catastrophize the outcome far less—should be able to alleviate it. Exposure therapy is something undertaken differently depending on the severity of a disorder to make sure each step is consonant with a person's capacity for treatment. Coaching in relaxation and the nature of anxiety attacks is also provided so that patients can begin to understand that throwing up is not associated with mortality.

I am, these days, lucky to have friends who puke very often and very casually. I have one that throws up as if he's yakking on the pavement on his way to the Co-op. It's comforting to watch them deal with it in a rational way, like they're just getting something out of their system. The other week I crashed on a friend's couch and saw that there was a pot full of his vomit next right to it. "Sorry about that," he said, before taking it into the kitchen and rinsing it out. He put it beside me in case I needed it during the night and then left me to it. And I did need it: not to be sick in, but because it was a reminder that I've come a long way from where I used to be.

I'm lucky to have acknowledged so early on that a phobia's seize on you is psychological as opposed to physical, and that these issues can be treated. The track record of therapy is continuously good and you deserve to be in on that. Don't buy into the stigma of weak upper lips and contact your GP. All too many people confuse their illnesses with idiosyncrasies, especially a phobia of something like puke, which grosses most people out. You might not want to tell your mates about your phobia, but you should definitely tell your doctor. No-one deserves a life without smoked salmon.

On the third Thursday of every month at 9 AM, you can visit Hart Island, a massive potter's field in New York City, but only if you've made a reservation in advance.

At the bottom of Fordham Avenue on City Island in the Bronx, past the Nautical Museum and rows of quaint clapboard houses, sits the gate to the pier. To the right is a construction site on its way to becoming yet another luxury housing tower. When I arrived on a cold day in December, the drills had not yet started and over everything lay an eerie silence, broken only by the sound of buoys rubbing up against the hulls of anchored boats. The ferry operator, who called himself Captain Marc, later told me that he can't imagine the new residents will like "all of this," gesturing at the rusty ferry (which he said is the oldest in the Staten Island fleet) and beyond, at Hart Island.

Hart Island is often called the biggest tax-funded cemetery in the world—it's where bodies end up when they are unidentified, or when no one wants to or can pay for their funeral arrangements. Most of the million souls resting there are as invisible in death as they were in life. They existed on the margins and in the shadows of society—the down and out, the disenfranchised, and the poor. Many are John and Jane Does, lying in the ground, forgotten. The site and burial records are maintained by the NYC Department of Corrections; on weekdays, inmates from Rikers Island get ferried over to dig graves.

The 131-acre stretch of land is visible from City Island, a dusty corner of the Bronx with the feel of a sleepy fishing village. You can see a few red brick buildings dotted about the island from a distance. They're empty, dilapidated—in the past, they've functioned as a juvenile detention center, a tuberculosis sanatorium, and a psychiatric hospital.

Despite its proximity to the city, Hart Island is notoriously inaccessible. Until quite recently, family members seeking closure (as well as journalists) were generally forbidden from visiting. Even now, visitations are limited and highly regulated. Earlier this month, the DOC apparently rejected a request from the BBC to visit the island: Reporter Alina Simone wrote that she was told by Robin Campbell, the press secretary for the DOC, that journalists are not allowed to go there.

(I went without being asked why I wanted to visit. The official website for Hart Island does not explicitly state that members of the press are prohibited from visiting, and instead recommends that you call the Department's Office of Public Information. We reached out to Campbell for comment by phone and email, but he did not respond by the time of publication.*)

Since the mid 90s, Melinda Hunt, a Canadian-born artist and filmmaker, has been a champion for the rights of the deceased and grieving. She now runs the Hart Island Project, based out of Peekskill in upstate New York. When I visited Hunt, she was about to launch the Traveling Cloud Museum, a virtual memorial that aims to reconstruct the identities of those buried on the island in bureaucracy and misfortune.

"It's a little bit like Facebook," Hunt said, "but for the dead."

In 2008, after years of filing Freedom of Information requests and criminal complaints, Hunt gained access to 50,000 burial records dating back to 1977. All records prior to that year were destroyed in a fire. The city initially challenged her request on the grounds that the information contained in the documents was confidential. But because the cause of the death isn't actually listed on the records, Hunt eventually won her case.

"We were lucky," Hunt said. "It's confidential to know how someone died but it's not confidential to know if someone's dead or not."

Hunt now has a total of 65,000 burial records. With the help of volunteers, she's worked to digitize the weathered, handwritten data, all of which is accessible online through the Traveling Cloud Museum at hartisland.net. After a short intro of footage from the island, you're invited to look at the records, scroll through pages and pages of names hovering in virtual space, waiting for recognition.

The grave trenches are now digitally mapped using a global positioning system—an innovation that was brought about in part thanks to Hunt's activism. This means that the burial data listed online corresponds to a specific grave and plot position, which can then be located on a map.

[body_image width='996' height='546' path='images/content-images/2015/02/19/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/19/' filename='the-virtual-grave-for-new-york-citys-forgotten-dead-219-body-image-1424372392.jpg' id='29175']

The Traveling Cloud Museum. Photo Courtesy of the Hart Island Project

Technology played a big role in Hunt's conceptualization of the virtual memorial site. "I got thinking about the cloud and Google Maps, and how people's identities are just sort of floating over this island," she told me.

There's a ticking clock next to each name that corresponds to the amount of time a person has been buried and unclaimed on Hart Island. To stop the clock and "save" someone from anonymity, you can contribute an anecdote, a photo, or an epitaph to their burial record.

Hunt was inspired by the collaborative nature of oral histories, and the ways that they often give voices to the past that might otherwise sit in the shadows forever. The Dutch engineers who designed the site thought that the ticking clock feature accommodated Hunt's vision while adding a gaming feature, providing an extra incentive for people to participate.

Christine Yalanis became the first person to contribute a story to the Traveling Cloud Museum after it launched in the first week of December.

In 2011, Yalanis discovered that her father, Roy Foss—who died 12 years earlier—was buried on Hart Island. She was a little girl when her parents split, and Foss was a Vietnam War vet with a terrible drinking problem. Yalanis remembers that he would beat her mother; after he left he "bounced around," sometimes staying with friends or, in fair weather, living in Maria Hernandez Park in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

"Even the babies who are buried there have a story." –Christine Yalanis

Yalanis's uncle heard rumors that his brother was dead. The family went to the park in Bushwick and asked around, but no one knew where he was. Years later, Yalanis's stepfather embarked on an genealogy project and he was interested in tracing Foss's side of the family, which reignited the search for her father. They hired a detective who discovered that he was indeed dead, and buried on Hart Island.

The detective told Yalanis that Foss was found with five times the legal limit of alcohol in his bloodstream. He'd been hit by an oncoming L Train at the Sutter Avenue Station after apparently drunkenly stumbling into the tracks. Foss had been a John Doe until the medical examiners were able to identify him by the fingerprints he'd provided to the government when he was drafted. Yalanis thinks he probably rode the subway at night to stay warm.

But even though he'd been abusive toward her mother and neglected to maintain a relationship with her, Yalanis felt uncomfortable with the idea of her father remaining anonymous forever.

On the Traveling Cloud Museum, Yalanis offers a short and honest summary of her father's life. She concludes, "Even though I didn't know him well as a dad, I mourn his loss and the fact he never recovered from his disease."

[body_image width='805' height='330' path='images/content-images/2015/02/19/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/19/' filename='the-virtual-grave-for-new-york-citys-forgotten-dead-219-body-image-1424373181.jpg' id='29177']Roy Foss's Burial Record on the Traveling Cloud Museum. Photo courtesy of the Hart Island Project

Commemorating the people buried on Hart Island is simply a way of acknowledging their lives, according to Yalanis, regardless of how turbulent, brief, or unfortunate they may have been. "I just feel like (Foss) had a life, everyone has a story," she told me. "Even the babies who are buried there have a story."

That said, not everyone can stop the clock and offer a forgotten life a place in history. The fact that all records prior to 1977 were destroyed means that there are many who may never know for certain if a family member was buried on the island.

Dawnn Mitchell, a filmmaker now based in Georgia, has spent a lot of her life thinking about her great-grandmother, Pocahontas Royster, who died in 1932 in New Jersey. Royster's family was very poor, and Mitchell believes that she was buried on Hart Island, but isn't certain.

As an African American, Mitchell said that knowing her heritage is very important. "Not all of us know where we came from. We're former Africans brought here as slaves without any records, who we were born to, what our names were. I want to trace my roots," she said. "It's important to me to have this closeness."

In an ideal world, Mitchell would have her grandmother's body exhumed and brought to Georgia to be buried properly nearby. Unfortunately for Mitchell, this is an impossible dream.

"People feel that they did something wrong in allowing someone to be buried there." –Melinda Hunt

Roberta Omin, a resident New Yorker who wanted to visit the grave of her brother, David Joseph, encountered similar frustrations and roadblocks.

Joseph died at three days old in 1951 after a premature birth. At the time, in the event of a stillborn or premature baby the parents were offered what was called a "city burial." Hunt told me this was problematic—mothers were often asked too soon after birth and were still under the influence of narcotics, which meant the decision was made under duress, or sometimes by the father. The decision to accept a city burial was irreversible, whereupon a baby's body would be placed in a small pine box and taken to the office of the medical examiner for an autopsy.

Omin was six at the time of her brother's death. Forty years later, she saw an article in the New York Times about Hart Island. For the first time she said she started thinking of Joseph as her brother, rather than her mother's son. She suddenly felt very sad thinking that he'd been buried there, alone, all that time.

Hunt believes that the need to commemorate somebody is less about reaching "closure" and more about responsibility. "They want to visit the island to complete the process of what they feel they owe to that person," she said. "People feel that they did something wrong in allowing someone to be buried there."

After reading the Times article, Omin sent away for David Joseph's death certificate and requested permission from the DOC to visit the island and place a small marker on his grave. But her request was denied and his death certificate doesn't exist—it was destroyed in the 1977 fire.

It wasn't until she heard Hunt speaking about Hart Island during a radio segment on WNYC that Omin decided to reach out. In 2007, the Bronx-based grassroots organization Picture the Homeless was granted limited visitation rights to Hart Island. At that time, according to Hunt, the DOC insisted that visitors to the island declare a religious affiliation. Hunt, who had accompanied Picture the Homeless during one of their visits, complained to the City Council in 2010 on the grounds that it was illegal to designate a nonprofit to screen people based on their religious identities.

"You're constantly having to sue the city to get anywhere," said Hunt.

A corrections officer was waiting for me on the shore by a lectern. He had a long white beard and a missing tooth—a local St. Peter standing by the pearly gates, ready to check you into a low-rent afterworld.

Following Hunt's complaints, the island opened up a little more to the general public. Nevertheless, even today, visitors are forbidden to bring any recording devices, cameras, or smartphones. I left my backpack next to the aquarium in the "office," a dimly lit modular building.

It takes ten minutes to cross over to the island, whose scrubby shore is lined with weathered wooden docking and a few abandoned motorboats lying in the beach grass. A corrections officer was waiting for me on the shore by a lectern. He had a long white beard and a missing tooth—a local St. Peter standing by the pearly gates, ready to check you into a low-rent afterworld.

He checked my name against the one written in red ink on a crumpled piece of paper that he pulled out of his pocket, and asked me to sign into the visitors' book. I was then ushered up a walkway lined with small ceramic angels and saints. Visitors are restricted to a very small gazebo a short distance from the shore. The gazebo is surrounded by a small garden, which is enclosed by a white picket fence.

I asked the bearded corrections officer why we weren't allowed to roam beyond the gazebo. He replied in a non-negotiable tone: "Because those are the rules."

There's a gravestone within the garden, with a few stones balancing on top of it. Omin told me that Jews traditionally place stones by graves out of respect for the dead. When she finally visited the island last summer, on a beautiful day in June, she brought an assortment of stones given to her by family and friends, including one that her mother had painted to look like a ladybug a long time ago.

There are wild flowers that grow on the island. "White and yellow, like Queen Anne's Lace and buttercups," as Omin put it. She picked some and made a small bouquet to place down with the stones. Then she read aloud a Kaddish, an ancient Jewish prayer that is often recited for the dead, that she had written for her brother:

David Joseph,

May your soul rest in peace knowing you are no longer forgotten.

I acknowledge and honor your short, sweet life.

I have come to be with you. We are finally and forever connected.

You are remembered and a part of me.

Your big sister,

Roberta.

Knowing that he was now part of the island itself was enough for Omin. It didn't bother her that she couldn't visit a physical grave. She took some pinecones home with her and placed them on top of a dresser in her bedroom with the Kaddish.

On the day I visited, the wind was biting and a flock of Canadian geese flew overhead. The ferry couldn't depart until the "morgue truck" arrived, which transports pine coffins from medical examiner offices all over the city to Hart Island every day. One of the ferry operators was wearing a navy blue sweatshirt with an orange slogan declaring: "Hart Island—when no one wants you, we'll take you." Captain Marctold me that he and the other ferry operators had them made a couple of years ago. "Some people don't like them, but we don't mean any offense," he said. "When you're out here all day you have to laugh a little bit."

In December, the American Civil Liberties Union sued to have Hart Island brought under the jurisdiction of the Parks Department, opening it up to more visitors. A bill to that effect has been sponsored by Queens councilwoman Elizabeth Crowley and was discussed during a Bronx community board meeting last month. But for now, with the exception of its digital footprint, the place remains largely inaccessible.

As I rode the ferry away from Hart Island, the gazebo looked comically small, like a piece of dollhouse furniture dropped onto the grass by accident. The rest of the 131 acres hovered in the distance, like a mirage.

*Update: A DOC spokesperson emailed VICE the following statement after publication: "The Department of Correction has administered the city cemetery for more than a century and considers this a solemn responsibility. In recent years, we have conducted regular monthly visits to allow family members and others to pay their respects by visiting a specially designated space within the cemetery. While the cemetery on Hart Island lacks the infrastructure to safely accommodate large numbers of visitors or to allow them to wander about the grounds, we continue to explore ways to meet requests of relatives seeking greater access to honor those buried on the island."

Tess Owen is a freelance reporter based in New York. Follow her on Twitter.

Illustrations by Jacob Everett

When people hear what I do, they often assume that I write stories exclusively about men, but women have an important, if complex, role in Italian criminal organizations, a role that Mob Wives can't even come close to depicting. Female gangsters are subject to arcane rules, rigorous rituals, and inseverable commitments. Caught in a confusing place between modernity and tradition, they can give death orders but can't take lovers or leave their men. They can decide to invest in entire sectors of the market but can't wear makeup when their men are in prison—that would amount to confessing a betrayal, as if they were out looking to get laid.

Apart from a few rare exceptions, the mafiosa exists only in relation to her man. Without him, she's like an inanimate being—only half a person. That's why mob wives appear so unkempt and disheveled when accompanying their men to court—it's a cultivated look meant to underscore their fidelity. When they're well dressed and gussied up, their husbands are nearby and free. The man commands, and as he commands, his power is reflected on his woman and communicated through her image. This is the case for the Neapolitan Camorra, for the 'Ndrangheta of Calabria, and for some families of Cosa Nostra.

That's also how it is in the Mexican cartels, which consider the woman a kind of trophy for a drug trafficker, a reflection of his virility and power. The more striking a woman at his side, the more strength he elicits. The popularity of beauty pageants in some states in Mexico, as well as Latin America more generally, is no coincidence. There is no better way for a woman to display her good looks and win over a drug trafficker—which, for some, can mean an escape from a life of poverty into a world of luxury. In some states, like Sinaloa, for example, there are few other ways for a girl to get a taste of wealth and power than to become a narco's wife. The tradeoff is clear: Drug traffickers give these girls money and a comfortable life, while the girls, through their beauty, give the narcos pleasure and prestige. The woman is such an asset to the drug trafficker's résumé that some narcos will even rig the beauty pageants she competes in. With the cartel's help, she brings home the title, and the drug trafficker gains eminence by having her at his side. That's why many women in Sinaloa invest in enhancements to their bodies from a very young age: They get breast implants and butt lifts in hopes of becoming more attractive to cartel members and changing their lives.

Though they have similar mentalities, the women of Mexican cartels tend to be more modern and uninhibited than the women of Italian Mafias. Yet the expectation that mob wives should make themselves dowdy and almost invisible doesn't mean they're entirely lacking in freedom—actually, they're often the ones who command in place of their incarcerated husbands.

Regardless of where they're from, women in organized crime tend to have similar life stories. Husband and wife have often known each other since they were teenagers and are married between the ages of 20 and 25. It's customary to marry the "girl next door," someone a man has known since childhood and can be sure is a virgin. The guy, on the other hand, is generally allowed to have mistresses—before the marriage and after. In recent years, however, the wives of mafiosi have required that their husbands' lovers be foreign—Russian, Polish, Romanian, Moldovan—women they consider to be socially inferior and incapable of building a family and educating children properly. Having a mistress from Italy or, even worse, from one's own town is damaging because it destabilizes the family balance—not only in the sense of the relationship of the nuclear family but also the relationships of the clan. A man can't risk taking the wife of another boss as a lover, betraying the sister of a fellow clan member, or making a fool of his own wife in front of the entire town. These acts would create disagreements and feuds and would jeopardize the life of the clan. It's a behavior that violates the code of honor on which the mob is founded, which means it could be punishable by death.

The specter of death haunts mob marriages constantly, and in Mafia-controlled lands many women dress exclusively in black. It's a sign of mourning. Mourning for a murdered husband or slain son. Mourning because a brother, nephew, or neighbor was killed. Mourning because the husband of a co-worker was taken out or because the son of a distant relative was assassinated. There's always a reason to wear black. And underneath the black, they dress in red. In the past, women would put on a red undershirt to remember all the blood that had to be avenged; today they often wear red lingerie, especially when they're young. It's a continual reminder of the blood that their own pain won't allow them to forget, and the contrast with the black really highlights the terribly intimate color of revenge. To be a widow in criminal territories means losing one's identity as a woman almost entirely and retaining only that of mother. As a widow, you can remarry only if you meet several conditions: Your sons must agree to the marriage, the man must be the same rank as your deceased husband, and, above all, you must have mourned for as much time as the clan prescribed, all the while remaining abstinent.

A female boss I remember well because I saw her come to power in the area where I'm from is Immacolata Capone. She was a businesswoman, but, according to the Anti-Mafia District Directorate of Naples, she was also a godmother of the Camorra. A member of the Moccia clan, Capone had a primary role in the management of public works for the Zagaria clan of Casal di Principe—one of the most powerful families in the area. She had the important and delicate job of obtaining the "anti-Mafia certificate" (the document that guarantees a business is clean and free of criminal associations) for the clan's businesses. Without this certificate, the Camorristi would not have been able to bid for public contracts.

One day in the early 2000s, she met the Camorrista Michele Fontana, known as "the Sheriff," and he told her that he had a surprise for her. He put her in the front seat of the car, where she immediately heard noises coming from the trunk. When Capone asked for an explanation, the Sheriff just told her not to worry. They drove for a while and arrived at a palatial villa in the countryside outside Caserta, about 20 miles north of Naples. At that point, Michele Zagaria—one of the most powerful bosses of the Casalese clan, condemned to life and finally arrested in December 2011 after living 16 years as a fugitive—emerged from the trunk of the car and went inside. Shocked by the presence of the boss, Capone couldn't speak to him even though they'd been partners in successful deals for years. According to some sources, the boss took his place at the center of the parlor, which was covered in rare marble and represented just one of his numerous villas, and began to talk about contracts, concrete, construction, and land—all while petting a tiger on a leash. It was a cinematic, almost mythic scene, drawing on the kind of imagery that crime families use to cement their power.

Raised in the environment of the Camorra, Capone was a tiny woman with a strong character, able to intimidate anyone when discussing business. She grew up under the guidance of Anna Mazza, wife of the boss of the Moccia clan and the first woman in Italy to be convicted of Mafia-related crimes for her role as the head of one of the most powerful criminal and business associations in Southern Italy. Mazza—initially taking advantage of the reputation of her husband, Gennaro Moccia, who was killed in the 70s—soon assumed a leadership role in the clan. Known as the widow of the Camorra, she was the brains of the Moccia family for more than 20 years. Mazza instituted a sort of matriarchy in the Camorra. She wanted only women in positions of prestige because, according to her, women are less obsessed with military power and make better mediators. This was her way of running the organization.

Having learned from Mazza, Capone was able to construct an entrepreneurial and political network of great importance. Many Camorristi courted her in order to become consorts of a high-ranking boss, sharing her bed and business deals. But Capone's talents brought about her own demise. In November 2004, a few months after the Mafia eliminated her husband, they killed her in a butcher shop in Sant'Antimo in the province of Naples. She was only 37 years old. The police never discovered a motive for the murder, but the clans may not have appreciated her attempt to climb the ranks. Her fierce ambition may have frightened them, and given her business acumen, she might have even attempted to undertake a big deal on her own, independently of the Casalese family. The only thing we know for sure is that Capone had successfully navigated the pressures, limitations, and expectations put on women to leave her mark on mob history.

Translated from the Italian by Kim Ziegler

Depicting the vast outline of the world's largest country in one photographic series is a daunting prospect. Russia's border meets with 16 other nations (not including Abkhazia and South Ossetia), and at more than 12,000 miles long, it spans almost every conceivable visual landscape. Maria Gruzdeva's four-year-long survey, titled The Borders of Russia, took up this challenge. With plans dictated by the seasons and weather conditions, and with access contingent on military approval, the project was forced into an organized sprawl. "When I was just starting the project, I didn't have time to think about it properly," Gruzdeva said. "I didn't have all these regions planned out and then think, When I've finished photographing all those places, I've finished the project. I saw it as a work in progress from the start. If I had actually taken the time to think about it properly before I started shooting, looking back, I would have thought it was too much."

Alongside shooting photos for the project, Gruzdeva meticulously recorded her travels in notebooks, combining handwritten names and facts with small contact prints to create a more comprehensive record of her journey. "The nature of work I was doing was primarily documentary, so all that information was an important part of the project. It adds another dimension to the work in general—the facts accompanying the images make them almost more real. Even for me, some of the things I was witnessing seemed at times a little out of this world. Together with the information, the images become a sort of evidence."

This project was supported by the IdeasTap & Magnum Photos Photographic Award.

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Photo by the author

I tend to think I'm a pretty nice guy. I even know the difference between an actual nice guy and a "Nice Guy"—someone who thinks niceness is just part of a transaction for which he should receive blowjobs. But while I consider myself a male feminist, woman-hating might be etched into the very contours of my body. I know this because a recent study out of McGill University has brought a horrifying reality to my attention: I have a finger length ratio that corresponds to a tendency to be quarrelsome with women.

The snappy title of the study in question is "Fetal exposure to androgens, as indicated by digit ratios (2D:4D), increases men's agreeableness with women." That "fetal exposure to androgens" part refers to a previous hypothesis that seems to be widely agreed upon. Namely: being exposed to high levels of androgens in utero—a bombardment in the womb of masculine hormones, including testosterone—has an effect on your finger length, specifically your index (2D) and ring (4D) fingers.

But this new study went a step further, pointing out what behaviors that hormone bath creates, and more specifically—in my case at least—what havoc a lack of such a hormone bath creates. The study involved monitoring subjects' behavior out in the world, not in a lab. It found the following:

Men were more agreeable towards women than men; this effect was significantly greater in those with smaller 2D:4D ratios. Men with smaller 2D:4D ratios were also less quarrelsome towards women than towards men.

Since I found the phrasing a little odd, I got a hold of Rachel Sutton, one of the authors, to find out what this means for me and my woman-hating hands. It turns out there might be some hope for me after all.

VICE: What's the background for this finger study?
Rachel Sutton: We looked at the ratio of the second and fourth digit, so the index finger and ring finger, which previous research shows is a marker of exposure to the level of testosterone that the fetus is exposed to. Previous research has shown that in men, specifically, a smaller digit ratio—meaning that the second finger is much smaller than the fourth—is associated with a higher level of dominance and greater reproductive success, like having more children.

But your study contradicted that?
We looked at those people's digit ratio, in men and women, and the personal behavior in daily life and we didn't find any significant associations in digit ratio in men and dominance. But we did find that men with the more masculinized—or smaller—digit ratio were more agreeable and less quarrelsome with the women that they interacted with. So that was more in like romantic partners, female colleagues, and friends. So this might explain why they have more children and we didn't have any association with women.

I have a ring finger that's slightly shorter than my index finger, so what does that mean for me?
Well how much shorter is it?

A tiny bit.
So that would be a less typically masculine ratio. That means that, on average, men with a digit ratio like that are less agreeable and more quarrelsome with women than men with more of a masculine ratio. It's not that every man with a smaller digit ratio is friendlier with woman and men with a larger digit ratio are less friendly, there are other factors.

How seriously should we take this?
I wouldn't judge someone solely based on their ratio, but it could be an interesting indication of the hormones they were exposed to in the womb. And it's interesting to know that, on average, men may be more or less likely to be friendly with women based on their digit ratios. There are for sure exceptions as well. So I wouldn't base it solely on digit ratio.

So it has to do with fetuses being exposed to hormones. What happened after I was exposed to these not-so-masucline hormones in the womb?
Well the idea is that the hormones in the womb can impact brain development. [Previous work has suggested] that women with a more feminine digit ratio had brain scans that looked more typically feminine. So the idea is that the hormones in the womb can impact brain development, and later in life could impact people's behavior.

Are there any other findings surrounding this?
It's mostly dominance and reproductive success that have come out of it. There's also spatial abilities.

Am I supposed to have worse spatial abilities based on my ratio? Because I have a terrible spatial sense.
Yeah, there's some evidence that people with more masculine ratios have better spatial abilities than people with more feminine ones.

The way you quantified agreeable behavior was by measuring compliments and smiles. Those seem superficial.
Well we measured dominance and agreeableness with different items. So those are basically items that in other research have been shown to indicate agreeable or warmer behavior. Like dominance, on the other hand, would be measured with something like expressing an opinion or directing other people in their activities. So those were specifically to measure agreeable behavior and they have been shown in other research to capture the degree of warmth and the degree of agreeableness in the interaction with another person.

Right, but how do you know those link up with agreeability?
We used a measure called the SBI, the Social Behavior Inventory, which is an item that's used for this type of study where people report on their daily interactions. This measure has been validated in a number of other studies to actually capture dominant behavior.

Well that sucks for me. What else do my fingers reveal about me?
I only know that it's used as a measure of androgen exposure in the womb, but I imagine there are other genetic effects as well. Again, it's on average that it's associated with androgen exposure in the womb. It's not to say that it's a perfect marker.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

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Portrait of John Roberts by Toby Silverman

In the late 70s, John Roberts was a visual arts major at San Francisco's Institute of Art who spent his free time documenting the Bay Area's blossoming punk scene. His photos—a mix of street photography, portraiture, and concert shots—uniquely captured the last moments of the city's pre-AIDS and post-hippie era. Roberts's best shots were from a tiny punk venue called the Deaf Club on Valencia Street. The Deaf Club was a deaf community center that hosted hardcore shows from 1978 to 1980—the resulting scene was grungy, sweaty, and truly bizarre, and Roberts's photos captured it perfectly.

Right after presenting his senior art show, Roberts's car was stolen and many of his prints were lost. He spent a few years struggling in New York City before stopping his pursuit of a photography career for good.

In 2000, Roberts was diagnosed with renal cell cancer. The disease moved from his kidneys to his colon and pancreas about four years ago, but it was not until January, almost 15 years after his diagnosis, that Roberts was finally moved to end-of-life care.

His son Willee moved home last summer as Roberts's symptoms worsened, and they came across a box of old negatives while going through Roberts's house. They told Willee's friend Enosh Baker about the undeveloped film, and Baker contacted local artist Sean Vranizan. Baker and Vranizan scoured through the nearly 13,000 negatives and scanned their favorites. When the pair sent Roberts the scans, it was the first time the photographer had seen them in over 30 years.

I sat down with Roberts and Willee at their home in Berkeley. We talked about his relationship with photography, the San Francisco punk scene, and what it's been like to have his art rediscovered after so many years.

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Photos by John Roberts

VICE: What first drew you to photography?
John Roberts: In 1964 and '65 there was a World's Fair in New York. I remember going there and taking pictures and really liking the experience of it. A year later, Polaroid came out with a "Swinger" camera—a white plastic camera that took instant pictures. I thought that was the coolest thing of all. The photo would come right out of the front, and you'd hold onto it and the image would slowly come up and up and up. That was so exciting. And from then on in, I became the de facto photographer for the family.

How did you come across the Deaf Club the first time?
Music was always a very important part of my life. In my early adolescence was when the Grateful Dead and the whole San Francisco sound became really important. But by the time the late 70s had rolled around, that music had started to become very old and tired and there were these new very exciting sounds that were coming out of England.

There were these two-minute songs with incredible bursts of energy—in contrast to the very long, jazzy [songs from] bands like Rush or Yes. As soon as one song ended, another song would come on immediately after that with twice as much energy.

When I came to San Francisco in '79, all of this music was really just starting to happen. It was really revelatory and exciting to hear. At the Art Institute, we knew about the Deaf Club. It was just such an exciting idea—a social hall for the deaf decided that they would rent the hall out to the loudest, noisiest, and most unruly bands that they could possibly find. It was great for them because they never had to hear the music. And it was great for us, because it was a very inexpensive place to book bands.

What was really available in San Francisco in those days were a lot of young people who were able to create art in a very inexpensive way. There were bands all over the place that were making music in San Francisco. Some that were quite avant-garde. There was a band called Tuxedo Moon,with a tenor clarinetist that played along with an organist and a drummer and the music was not based on 4/4 signatures at all. It was almost avant-garde jazz, John Cage music. You had something as extreme as that as well as straight-ahead punk like the Dead Kennedys.

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And what about the shot of Iggy Pop?
The Iggy Pop picture! There were two spots really to hear that kind of music. One was called the Mabuhay Gardens and that was run by Dirk Dirksen who was a guy more in the Bill Graham mold—in other words, he was he was this older guy really trying to make money. I believe that Iggy was playing there. The Deaf Club was a little too small for him at the time.

What would a regular night at the Deaf Club look like?
As I recall, there were a couple of styles of clothing there. There were the straight-out punks who kind of took their cue from the Ramones. They had to wear a lot of leather, a lot of chains from their belt to their hip. The women had very spiky hair with heavy-duty multicolored makeup. That was one section. Then you had the Talking Heads look, the sort of intellectual crowd. And then you had your basic college kids. We were all aware of the suburban kids who would come in on the weekend. I don't know how we knew it, but we knew they were suburban kids. We would all elbow them to the back of the venue.

Were there deaf people at the shows?
They were working the bar. It would be in the back and they'd only have beer and you would just put up the deaf sign for the letter "B" and they would know what it is. Then you'd pay your dollar or whatever for the beer.

What did you do when you finished school?
I did a show in San Francisco and then I did a show back at Hampshire College and then I graduated. I tried to do some photography work in New York, but I found it very difficult. I couldn't really be financially successful in the art world and I wasn't really looking to do fashion or commercial photography, so I went into the family business in New York. Photography became a hobby instead of a full-time job.

Was it hard to move away from photography?
Yes, it was hard. But New York was very, very expensive. And I really learned that to be an artist, you have to be compelled and it has to be thing that you're really married to and that you love so much that you're willing to give up everything for it. And I found that I wasn't willing to make that sacrifice. I had a real reckoning with myself. In one sense, you got to keep following your dream. But my real dream was having a family.

Did getting diagnosed with cancer bring you back to photography at all?
It did. When I was in school, I was really first looking at photography as a way to look at the world in a very visual way. Once I was diagnosed with the cancer, I started to import meaning into the work—as much as it was important to have the right light, I understood that I was also sort of documenting my family. They always gave me a hard time, they never liked doing it, but somehow I knew that I wanted to document their childhood so that when I'm gone, they'll have that record.

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What did it feel like when you heard that Willie and Enosh had found all of your negatives?
Well, at first I thought, Oh my God. I don't know what was in there. How much partying they're gonna see in there, you know?

But on the other hand, I saved all of those negatives. For some reason, in the moves that I made from New York to California, from Oakland to Berkeley, I saved those pictures. And I was never quite sure why I saved the negatives, because I wasn't working in darkrooms anymore and when digital photography came out, it was just easier to create digital pictures. But there they were. So when Enosh found it and wanted to go through it, I was very happy. I was very flattered. I was excited to see what he would come up with, because I never thought I'd see any of those pictures again.

Your photography really nicely captures an odd moment in time in San Francisco. The street photographs show a lot of the old city, while the punk photographs are something else entirely. Were you hoping to capture that intersection of the young and old San Francisco?
This was a time in San Francisco that was pre-AIDS, but I believe Mayor George Moscone had been shot by that point. I remember John Lennon was shot while I was in San Francisco. But there was still a freewheelingness about everything—an openness for people to be photographed.

The street photography that you saw was a sort of immediate interaction, and then we would go on our separate ways. My intention with the music photos was to be in the front row and to photograph while I was experiencing it. So instead of using a nice big camera, I had the smallest camera that I could possibly have. I got very good at knowing how wide the lens was, so that I could pretty much shoot without looking through the viewfinder. I could dance and elbow and knock people around, all while I was actually shooting. That was exciting.

You were in San Francisco for a small window, and you happened to overlap with the small window when the Deaf Club was open. What does it mean that you got to be in San Francisco for that little moment? How important is it that people remember that scene?
Music was a way to create community. It was a very special time in which young people who didn't have much money could get together and form an identity and a peer group and connect with one another. We'd see each other at show after show after show and everybody was connected to everybody.

We knew that what we were doing in San Francisco was less commercial than what was going on in Los Angeles. It felt more organic. It felt like it was unique music with unique people and we had a sense that it was a special time and place. I felt very fortunate that I just happened to be there at the right time to be able to record it and that people were so willing to allow me to do that.

Scroll down to see more of Roberts's photos.

Joseph Bien-Kahn is a freelance reporter based out in Oakland. He's had articles published in the Rumpus, No Tofu, and the Believer. He's also editor-in-chief of the Bay Area literary mag OTHERWHERES. Follow him on Twitter.

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Vincent Lindon and Léa Seydoux in 'Diary of a Chambermaid' (2015), directed by Benoît Jacquot. © Carole Béthuel

This is the final installment of our three-part coverage of the Berlinale. Part one, on Jafar Pahani's Golden Bear-winning Taxi, is here. Part two, on Werner Herzog's Queen of the Desert, is here.

In Berlin, Sunday mornings are when Friday night clubbers start to flag. Flushed faces emerge from the underground emanating bliss or disappointment, depending on the particulars of their owners' comedowns. Döner is consumed, noses wiped, hay hit.

I hadn't slept much myself Saturday night, but at 10 AM, I was holding a black coffee and simit on the red carpet of former East Germany's—indeed, all of Europe's—biggest show palace, the Friedrichstadt-Palast, waiting for doors to open. I was there to see Benoît Jacquot's Diary of a Chambermaid , one of the 17 premieres in competition at the 65th Berlin International Film Festival. It had been an opening weekend of back-to-back screenings, and even the veterans—whose tote bags, resurrected from previous years (63rd! 55th!) testified to the depths of their festival knowledge—looked a little peaked. But as the lights went down in the theater I felt newly refreshed, and for a moment could have been in any of the city's hot, dark, and crowded clubs, dancing my life away, at any hour of the day or night.

Then the film started.

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Diary of a Chambermaid stars Léa Seydoux as pouting, impertinent, self-reliant Célestine, the heroine of Octave Mirbeau's 1900 novel of the same name. With brooding poise, Seydoux inhabits a role previously played with Broadway gusto by Paulette Goddard in Jean Renoir's 1946 version—one of those well-regarded Hollywood classics that is almost unwatchable today—and later taken up with high pique by Jeanne Moreau in Luis Buñuel's 1964 adaptation.

More accurately, Jacquot's film is Seydoux. Every scene orbits around her, sometimes literally: The camera's favorite position is to be trained on her back and neck as she passes through Parisian corridors and the countryside estate where she finds employment, answering orders with near-otherworldly resentment, or else whispering incredulous asides. "I can't believe it, she counts prunes," she mutters about her new mistress, Madame Lanlaire, on being caught stealing fruit.

Played to icy perfection by Clotilde Mollet, Mme. Lanlaire terrorizes her female staff in order to take revenge for her husband's recidivist lechery. She respects only Joseph, the gardener (Vincent Lindon), who was the mustache-tweaking villain in Renoir's film but who here remains a more ambiguous character: duteous servant, possible murderer, foaming anti-Semite and secret pamphleteer in the era of the Dreyfus affair, and object of obsession for Célestine, who finds in his industriousness her exact opposite.

As Célestine draws closer to Joseph and learns of his own planned rebellion, the film loses interest in garnering sympathy for its put-upon protagonist and becomes a diverting series of battles in which the servant and master classes take to sex, crime, and violence in order to outwit or overpower the other. (A film about class in the traditional sense, Diary of a Chambermaid is better aligned with Renoir's masterpiece of the genre, 1939's The Rules of the Game .) But these more thrilling features—burglary, rape, murder—still register only in passing among the episodes of Célestine's everyday labor: cleaning chamber pots and polishing silver.

Diary is also a refreshingly unsexy film. Perhaps surprisingly (considering Seydoux's turn in 2013's lubricious Blue Is the Warmest Color) there are no titillating sex scenes in a movie dedicated to the power of its star's beauty. In this, the director keeps us close to the point of view of Célestine, for whom desire is something men alone feel, and something a woman—especially one from the lower classes—must manipulate in order to build a more stable and dignified life. When the unrefined cook sighs with pleasure over the bedroom attentions of Mr. Lanlaire (Hervé Pierre), Célestine listens with warm, indulgent repulsion: The cook has given it away for nothing.

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Léa Seydoux in 'Diary of a Chambermaid' (2015), directed by Benoît Jacquot. © Carole Béthuel

What's most beguiling about Diary of a Chambermaid, though, is precisely what several of my fellow festival critics can't seem to abide: The film meanders like a diary. It finds its drama in the episodic, incidental, and quotidian. There's no great dramatic arc, no sense of accelerating momentum, no crisis followed by dénouement. We never witness the moments when Célestine decides to reject or accept any of the numerous male offers—carnal, romantic, monetary—presented to her. As in life, we see indecision, bookended by a before and after that appear pre-determined. The movie ends long before the novel does, and stops so abruptly the audience in the theater seemed unsure whether to applaud as the end credits rolled.

A few days after the screening, I sat in a café recovering from my Berlinale schedule, reading the reviews. My favorite phrase came from the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw: "curiously pointless hokum." It's the sort of thing you want to title your memoirs. All the reviews struck me as unwitting reflections of the critic's desire for order in a film experience, which is how—I thought, a little sleepily—we think about our lives, too. And we're often frustrated. The film's only crisis is Célestine's alienated life itself, disordered by the inflexible class positions of fin-de-siècle France. Each episode of her subordination or rebellion moves into the next without resolution, and without what is amusingly described in writing class as "narrative logic." The film's one-damn-thing-after-anotherness is compulsively watchable, never boring, and successful in its patchwork depiction of Célestine's prison, but it makes it difficult to identify moments that might serve as flash points for her character's growth—the easiest target for a critic's analysis.

What can you say about such a film? I disagreed with those who found it pointless. But then, the whole critical process struck me as one unsuited to the speed of the festival circuit. How could they say anything about Jacquot's Diary without taking the time to revisit Renoir's and Buñuel's versions, as I had in the following days? And what could I say, considering that I'd not yet read Mirbeau's novel? And what could anybody say about a film they'd seen only once, squeezed between other screenings, other reviews?

"There are nothing but bad employers," Célestine tells a recruiter at the start of the film. The recruiter responds: "No, there are nothing but bad servants." We were bad servants, we critics: resentful, indolent, spoiled. Eager to dismiss and find flaw according to some byzantine code of personal taste. Hateful of what does not move us in familiar ways, tug at heartstrings, or light up our empathy cortex. Above all envious of filmmakers, screenwriters, key grips, caterers—anyone who could be said to make films rather than review them.

In short, I was starting to get a little sick of the Berlinale. It was time for a break. Maybe I'd go dancing.

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

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'ZombiU' image from the game's "God Save the Queen" trailer, 2012

How many times have you died in all the video games you've ever played? It seems a ridiculous question—most seasoned enthusiasts expect to bite the dust dozens or hundreds of times in the course of a single playthrough. And besides, as far as most games are concerned "death" isn't really death with a capital "D," but a tedious, cobwebby metaphor for failure. You wouldn't count up the times you've walked into a headshot while plugging away at a Call of Duty campaign, any more than you'd think about how many times you've banged your thumb while hammering together a house.

Occasionally, though, it seems important to know. I can remember exactly how many times I've kicked the bucket while playing Failbetter's naval exploration sim Sunless Sea, for example, because each of the characters in question is a kinsman of the others. Seven merchant-captains have given their souls to the game's ravenous underground ocean and, in most cases, I can recall exactly where their ships sank beneath the waves. Two fell to the cannons and pincers of second-rate privateers and sea monsters, just north of Fallen London; one expired a little more heroically off the Sea of Lilies, after wounding herself in appeal to the goddess Stone, who has been known to conjure up a morsel of coal for beleaguered vessels.

A fourth ran into similar difficulties but prayed to the fickle god Salt instead, and was mysteriously transported hundreds of leagues south to a ruin where he lost his mind (and crew) at the altar of an unholy temple. My most recent captain was the luckiest: she inherited her predecessor's sea chart, and put aside enough money to ensure a comfortable start for her own heir before going down with all hands during an ill-advised smuggling run.

Among the optional story objectives for each captain is a quest to recover your father's bones, which suits Sunless Sea's creation of a continuity between "playthroughs," but even without it, I'd want to visit the places where my predecessors met their makers. It's not just that they didn't—quite—die for nothing: you'll always be able to pass on a small pittance to the next captain along, be it a favored deck gun or a trusted officer, even if you can't afford to commission a will. It's that I want them to know that it wasn't for nothing, wherever they are.

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'Sunless Sea' makes sure you respect death with every new life you're given

Games that make us think this intently about death—fearing it, planning for it, pondering its aftermath—are thin on the ground. Many developers still trade implicitly or explicitly on the idea of multiple, non-consecutive "lives," a concept begotten upon home format gaming by the coin-op titles of the 1980s and 90s, where you'd fork out per attempt like an Ancient Greek paying the Boatman for passage back across the River Styx.

Under this model, death equals not just failure but a complete existential rewrite, the deletion of everything up to that point in either the level or across the entire game—every decision or encounter, good and bad, every twist of fate. To snuff it in a game like Sonic the Hedgehog isn't just to make an end but never to have begun. A victorious character, meanwhile, can be defined as the sum of all the things that somehow didn't go wrong. This not only makes defeat seem all the more deflating, but robs the final, successful attempt of its thrill. You are simply the stone (or hedgehog) that was fortunate enough to roll all the way to the bottom of the mountain.

Perhaps this is a realistic way to think about death. I mean, for all I know you, the universe and everything that has ever occurred are all just figments of my imagination, doomed to be wiped from the slate the second my heart runs out of zap. It certainly makes for fewer headaches among game designers: "failing" the player and obliging a restart is easier than finding some way to weave that failure into the on-going narrative, or account for it in the make-up of the world.

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'The Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver' sent its protagonist spinning between planes of existence

Nonetheless, more and more creators are coming to see death as something a little more, well, invigorating—a variable that can be exploited, like an AI pattern. One of the earliest examples I can think of is The Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, a gothic action-adventure from the PS1 era. It casts you as the jawless yet tremendously well-spoken husk of an obliterated vampire, Raziel, who has acquired the ability to flit at will between the material and spectral planes. Thus, when your fraying meaty self gets clobbered in Soul Reaver you aren't thrown back to a checkpoint, but shuttled to a parallel, otherworldly version of the level you're in.

A less-ambitious developer might have achieved this switchover by spraying all the walls black and making enemies a bit see-through, but developer Crystal Dynamics goes the extra mile: courtesy of real-time streaming tech that was fairly brain-boggling at the time, environments flake and twist grotesquely into new alignments, their physical properties suspended. Hitherto out-of-reach platforms can now be pounced upon, flooded chambers investigated and iron gates waved aside like bead curtains. True, if you get the crap kicked out of you by the denizens of the spirit world an old-fashioned reload is in order, but the game's sense of how death might be a transformation rather than mere cessation is otherwise persuasive.

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'ZombiU': get munched by one of these guys and you have to restart as a whole new character

Ubisoft's ZombiU takes the idea in a grislier direction. Here, you play as one among many survivors of a zombie outbreak, who must roam a festering London in search of things to hit corpses with. Allow the undead to get their molars into the character in play, and you'll have to start over with a new survivor. Your options at this stage are two: you can carry on with whatever you were doing at the time, minus all of your carefully hoarded equipment, or set out in search of your now-zombified former self and ask it nicely to hand everything over, preferably with the aid of a baseball bat.

These transformations need not, of course, be literal. It's impossible to discuss death as a design variable without cocking a wary eye at From Software's Souls series, which is due to re-enter the fray later this spring in the form of tacit Souls sequel Bloodborne. In particular, 2011's Dark Souls has a peculiar fascination with the concept of undeath, which carries a spiritual resonance that compares to the concept of sin in certain forms of Christianity.

Succumb to the spear, ax, or boulder-sized fist of a rampaging demon and you'll resurrect at a bonfire without any of your experience points and, crucially, without the benefit of your Humanity. In the Souls mythology, Humanity equates to a higher chance of stumbling on valuable items, greater resilience, and sunny good looks, while those who have "gone Hollow" appear as emaciated wretches and are unable to converse with certain non-player characters. You can restore your Humanity at bonfires, but there's a catch: while Human, you may be invaded and hunted down by other online players who are in thrall to one of the realm's nastier gods.

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Restoring your humanity in 'Dark Souls' can be advantageous, but carries significant risks, too

To die isn't just to have to try again, in other words. It's to be metaphysically tarnished. To restore yourself, conversely, is to declare yourself deserving of a sort of semi-divine status among the ranks of your fellow strivers, and to face boldly up to the additional tribulations this entails.

It's a fascinating reworking of old ideas about progression and rebirth in video games, which has actually shaped how I think about mortality when I'm away from the controller. Other games have tried to invest the concept of undeath with a similar grandeur, but most merely pick up on ideas established by Hollywood, such as the view that zombies are an allegory for the working class and vampires, aristocrats in coffins.

The key point in all these examples is that the death of a player's character is no longer a non-event, but a step on the road that's as charged with import for other characters, the player or the world as any other. It's a powerful elaboration of a theme that has preoccupied games developers for decades, but which has rarely been approached with much intelligence. Touring the eldritch waters of Sunless Sea, I am conscious in a way I rarely am in a game of all the deaths I've undergone to bring me to this point, and of all those that are still to come.

Follow Edwin on Twitter.

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Ant Smith. All images courtesy of Ant Smith.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Body shaming is a serious issue. What with the world's most popular news site being fixated on "ample cleavage" and "toned midriffs" and the absolute importance of how much weight a little-known reality TV personality has recently lost, it's easy to get mixed up between fantasy and reality.

Good news, then, that earlier this week Ant Smith, a poet from Yorkshire, announced that he'll be throwing a party to celebrate individual body image—a party, to be completely accurate, paying homage to small penises. It will be the first of its kind in Britain. Should you want to celebrate your below-average boner, it will be held on March 7 at the Rhythm Factory in Whitechapel.

Ant decided to put the night on after writing a poem last year about his four-inch penis. Here's a sample of that poem:

I have a tiny cock
Like a crooked little finger
Everybody else's dick
Is inevitably bigger
If six inch as an average
Can truly be believed
Someone here in this room
Is twice the size of me
If you can do your algebra
Already you will know
Four inches is the maximum
My dick will ever go
For the engineers among you
I'll express my ratio
My little one-inch wonder
Up to four times it can grow

"After writing 'Shorty' I had to convince myself it would be OK to perform it," Ant tells me. "In May, when I first performed it, it was quite nerve-wracking. But having been a performer for 20 years, it was nice having some real nerves again; it puts energy into what you're doing."

Unsurprisingly, "Shorty" soon made its way into the public spotlight. Ant started getting emails from people all over the world sharing their stories with him, and it became clear that plenty of men were experiencing penis anxiety. "All of us had started a really important conversation, and people were starting to take notice," says Ant. "I had to take the conversation to the next step, and it suddenly dawned on me that what I was trying to do here was tackle a body image issue.

"I was having a drunken chat recently with a friend who had penis size anxiety, and he told me it was because his dick was six inches. If a guy in that position can be wasting energy and having moments of misery in their life, then the world is seriously broken."

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Promo for the Big Small Penis Party

Ant believes that differences in your physical attributes should not be lamented, but celebrated. At next month's "Big Small Penis Party," men will be asked to disclose the size of their dick before entering the building, before being charged 50 pence per inch. So with the average penis clocking in at around six inches, most men should be able to get in for the price of a Tesco Meal Deal.

Female guests will be charged according to their preferred size. As in, they'll be asked how long they would like their hypothetical dick to be if they were a man, and will subsequently be charged by the inch. So if they imagine themselves as a man with a nine-inch dick, they'll have to pay £4.50 [$7] for entry. Regardless of your gender, the Big Small Penis Party is going to work out as much better value than your average night out in central London. And don't bother lying about what you're packing, because you're only going to end up paying more.

"Honesty is really important in both poetry and comedy," says Ant. "I'd written so much about my life, my wife and my friends, and then I realized they'd had to face that honesty, so it was time for me to face the honesty."

Ant and his wife have been together for 17 years. "She's never done or said anything to reinforce any penis size anxiety," he says. "A relationship lasts that long by evolving. When you know each other so well, having this sort of anxiety creates a shell inside your personality and makes you feel you are keeping something from your partner.

"At one stage, there was a very conscious layer of worry and anxiety I had to deal with. But then it struck me that, for seven years, she had been saying that she loved me. If I turned around and said that 'I'm not loveable because...' it questions and devalues the love she's offering me, and that's not acceptable. I had to work that out, move on and realize that my wife loves my cock and I do as well. What more could I want?"

Some of the Big Small Penis Party will be recorded for a documentary on body image. According to Ant, the short documentary will be released "in three or four months" on Riot TV's YouTube channel. To inject an extra bit of color into the proceedings, Ant has recruited 12 performers—including folk singers, comedians, rappers, and poets—who he reckons will spread positive attitudes about body image.

One of the comedians already has a poem about tits and vaginas prepared. The other comedian is writing a new set specifically for the party. Ant insists that he will probably watch her rehearse at an open night beforehand. Performers will ensure that their content is non-threatening and isn't putting people with penis anxiety down.

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Ant's self-portrait of his penis

Ant hopes that all of the performers will be naked. He intends to have live Twitter conversations with people who wanted to attend the party but couldn't make it. He also wants the audience to be tweeting and replying to tweets as the show goes on. Naked ushers will be there to encourage people to take part in an array of activities.

I ask Ant what sort of people he expects to attend the party. "I think there will be a number of men with specific anxiety concerns," he says. "I don't think the room will be filled with them, though. I suspect there will be slightly more women than men." (Much of the feedback Ant has received since performing the poem and announcing the party has been from women saying that penis size is not that big of an issue.)

"There will inevitably be people who just come along to see what I do with this, which is great, because I want a cross-section of people. It's not saying big penises are bad; it's about saying that humanity exists on a spectrum and the thing to do is to work out the thing that makes you unique," says Ant. "If something makes you unique, it's a brilliant thing. There are seven billion of us. We need to manage to remain individuals by embracing who we are—big piece or little piece."

But will the guests all be naked? "I doubt everyone will be naked," Ant smiles. "Some will want to be, and I will let them use the cleaning room to get out of their clothes or whatever. I'm not sure if they'd want to come through the streets of London naked, though."

Ant's announcement of the party has sparked widespread online discussion about penis size, bringing it into the context of body shaming—which is good, because that's exactly the point of the whole thing.

"We constantly see stories about body shaming women. It's very common and that's wrong," says Ant. "I want to get to the point when men read these stories and they envision how the person experiencing the body anxiety must feel. They can suddenly realize that how they feel with their own anxieties must be preyed on all the time for women.

"We can make positive body image a thing that truly unites the genders. Maybe we can make a difference in how society thinks. That's where I want to get to."

Follow Jack on Twitter.

[body_image width='1200' height='900' path='images/content-images/2015/02/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/18/' filename='inside-kinkcoms-san-francisco-porn-palace-body-image-1424283308.jpg' id='28714']Kink.com HQ. All photos courtesy of the author

The basement of the San Francisco Armory used to be where the National Guard kept its guns and ammo. If you go there now you'll see a chainsaw with all the sharp edges replaced with plastic tongues, a room full of dildos attached to drills, and two bright blue 55-gallon barrels of natural, water-based lube. One hundred and ten gallons is a hell of a lot of lube.

You see, shortly after the National Guard left the Armory in 1976, the former headquarters was registered as a historical landmark. This meant that whoever bought the two-acre, redbrick, Moorish revival castle would not be able to make any major architectural changes, so the building sat more or less empty for 30 years. The trouble was, they needed to find a millionaire buyer with a mountain of cash and a desire to own a network of dingy dungeons, and even in San Francisco that isn't an easy task.

That was, until Peter Acworth came along. Acworth grew up in Britain before moving to America in 1996 to study finance at Columbia. The following year, after reading a tabloid story about a fireman who made $250,000 dollars selling porn online, Acworth decided to start his own website dedicated to the porn he wanted to watch himself. It happened that he was into the kind of stuff that half the planet were in denial about until Fifty Shades of Grey came along.

[body_image width='1200' height='900' path='images/content-images/2015/02/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/18/' filename='inside-kinkcoms-san-francisco-porn-palace-body-image-1424283525.jpg' id='28719']The barrels of lube

Judging by the success of his site, Kink.com, plenty of people were already well aware of the pleasures of a well-aimed whip before EL James sold all those paperbacks. By 2006, Acworth was able to drop a cool $14.6 million to buy the San Francisco Armory and turn it into the world's biggest BDSM porn studio. Kink.com and its various subsidiary sites now produce hours upon hours of hardcore porn there every week. No wonder they get through so much lube.

In an era of free streaming porn, Kink.com's paid-for content and high production values mark it out as an anomaly and a rare success story, so I decided it would be a good idea to go to San Francisco to sign up for their daily $25 tour and see inside the studio for myself.

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Which is how I found myself down on my knees in one of their dungeons. The first thing you notice when you're down there is that although the floors look like they're made from hard, cracked concrete, they're really covered in soft, springy rubber. Dane, who performs at Kink.com under the screen name "Bastian," is our tour guide for the day.

He's one of those conventionally good-looking all-American types who'd seem wholesome to the point of cheesiness if it wasn't for where we were. You wouldn't have him down as a sexual deviant. In another life he'd have made a great Jehovah's Witness.

"We don't like to hurt our models," he says, explaining the rubber flooring. Then his face breaks into a wicked grin. "Well, of course we do like to hurt our models... but only in the agreed ways."

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Dane explains that, even though Kink.com make graphic, BDSM porn, the site still does its best to keep their models safe. "We're making porn for people like us, who can't enjoy a really sexy, really heavy dominant-submissive scene if we didn't know that everyone was actually being taken care of," he says. "We've created a space where someone is free to do that while still maintaining control of their agency throughout the process."

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There's a whole world of different Kink.com sets down in the dungeons which serve their various websites—24 in all. First up is "Ultimate Surrender," an all-girl, college-style wrestling tournament. Part of the appeal of this site is that it's a real sporting event—unlike pro wrestling, there are no scripts. The competitors get a bonus if they win so they really do fight it out to pin their opponents down.

This being porn of course, they also get points for undressing, fingering or even motor-boating the opposition. Once a month, Kink.com invites a studio audience down who sit on the side lines, hold up signs to support their favorites and scream "Sit on her face" at the top of their lungs.

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Round the corner from the "Ultimate Surrender" wrestling arena is "Naked Combat," the all-male alternative styled like an X-rated version of Fight Club. Further on are the cages and chain rooms used for Kink's long-running series "The Training of O." It's based on the French erotic classic Story of O, which was written in 1954 by Anne Desclos under the pen name Pauline Réage, and let's just say Fifty Shades pales in comparison.

In this studio, Kink puts their "slaves" through some of the most physically and mentally strenuous porn conceivable. The series' director, James Mogul, is notorious for putting his models through a gauntlet of "slave training exercises," so even experienced porn stars end up doing things for the first time. There's an air of improv to it all, which I guess makes him the BDSM game's Mike Leigh.

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It's while walking around the "Training of O" set that I really start to appreciate just how good Kink's art department are. You couldn't really use dirty, dingy basements with stagnant water and rusty chains to shoot porn. Health and safety would have a field day. Instead, everything is scrupulously clean but designed to look like it's been rotting away in the dark for years.

As I leave the studio, I see a sign reminding staff of just how clean and careful they have to be "!!! You Must Wear Surgical Gloves Whenever Handling Anything That Has Been In Contact With Bodily Fluids !!!" it begins, before telling staff to always change gloves between "handling different toys." It's the hardcore world's version of those signs in the office toilets reminding you to wash your hands.

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After the dungeons come yet more sets. These are used for videos like "Bound in Public" or "Bound and Disgraced," so they're designed to look like we're outside in the real world. There are houses, bars, doctor's offices, police cells, and school rooms all laid out in flawless detail in the basement of the Armory. Dane tells us that they have to pride themselves on that attention to detail. "If we make a mistake in the algebra on the blackboard behind some people fucking," he says, "then that's what people will write in about."

If you fancy yourself as the next James Deen, appearing as a background extra in a "public" scene is one way to get onto a porn set before you throw yourself in at the deep end. If you find yourself in San Francisco, you can apply online to appear as a member of the public. You can even go as a couple—it'd be a hell of a first date.

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If you're looking to make a bigger commitment, Kink.com is always hiring. Their rates vary from $200 to $800 per shoot for men, or from $500 to $1,300 per shoot for women. When you sign up you'll be given a "Yes-No-Maybe" list so that you can say what you're into and what you're willing to try. Naturally, the highest rates are reserved for those rare specimens who are up for doing the stuff that the fewest people want to.

[body_image width='1200' height='900' path='images/content-images/2015/02/19/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/19/' filename='inside-kinkcoms-san-francisco-porn-palace-body-image-1424341494.jpg' id='28865']The author, pictured with Carol Acworth's statue

I tell Dane I'll get back to him about the "Yes-No-Maybe" list, but before I leave the Armory there's one more place he wants to show us. We head all the way up to the top floor of the building and enter what could be a stately home if it wasn't for the antique gynecological table and all the graphic, hardcore porn portrait paintings hanging on the walls. One of the most eyebrow-raising statues is a naked, large-breasted woman sculpted by Carol Acworth—that's the bosses' mum. After she finished, her son Peter completed the piece by trussing it up with bondage rope. A real family affair.

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This is the "Upper Floor," Kink.com's private member's club. It's essentially Downton Abbey, but with ball gags and more leather than Kanye's wardrobe. On the Upper Floor, models act out master-servant fantasies at regular parties in front of a hand-picked crowd of BDSM fans. They have a strict guest list, so you can't just wander in if you've watched a couple of videos and now consider yourself a budding Christian Grey. You've got to earn an invitation by introducing yourself to a guy called Maestro Stefanos at one of San Francisco's BDSM nights, and I'm guessing guys who call themselves "Maestro Stefanos" know what they like.

What's really interesting about the Upper Floor is that they livestream their parties, and people log in from all over the world to watch and chat to participants and other fans. This means that BDSM fans in Smalltown, Nowheresville, who find it next to impossible to meet anyone who shares their tastes can tune into what Dane calls "transmissions from the kinky mothership." That seems to be what's made Kink.com such a success. The internet might be awash with free porn, but people still have a fetish for community.

Follow Kevin on Twitter.

This article was originally published by VICE Netherlands

Getting a tattoo isn't comfortable. The best analogy I've heard for the feeling is it's like someone digging his fingernail into your skin as hard as possible and slowly—very slowly—dragging it around in the shape of whatever it is you're plastering onto your body. So when a friend of mine handed me a flyer he'd found blowing around in the street for a "painless tattoo" that would heal twice as fast and look better than traditional ink, I was intrigued.

The flyer was for a place called Piercing Works—a piercing and tattoo shop in Amsterdam. Their website revealed that the secret behind the art of a painless tattoo is hypnosis. I've never been a big believer in hypnosis, but getting tattoos is generally a kind of meditative experience anyway, so the idea of getting one while in a trance sounded like something worth exploring.

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"Hypno tattoos" have been around for a while, but Piercing Works is the only of its kind in the Netherlands. The owner, Ira Lutvica, serves as the shop's hypnotist. She fled from Bosnia when shit hit the fan over there along with her husband, and together they built a new life for themselves in Amsterdam with their body art shop. To get an edge on the competition, Ira decided to enroll in a course at the Netherlands Hypnosis Institute. She has dreadlocks and wears a red turban that, combined with her Eastern European accent, means she lived up to all the expectations I had of what a hypnotist would look like. She was friendly, made a good cup of coffee, and the store was very clean—important factors when you're trying to coax your customers into the ultra-relaxed headspace needed for hypnosis.

When I walked in Ira immediately tried to get a sense of who she was dealing with. Do I believe in hypnosis? Have I been hypnotized before? Not really and no. I was a bit worried it wouldn't work on me, but tried to keep an open mind, although it's hard to be open to something that you know won't work if you're not open to it. Ira asked some simple questions like "Have you ever been sedated at the dentist?" but also more difficult ones like "When do you feel completely at ease?"

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A few soul-searching moments later, Ira led me to a room above the shop. It was cold in there, and there were posters of hot babes with piercings peppering the walls—you get that in pretty much every tattoo shop. As the tattoo artist finished the stencil downstairs, Ira started to hypnotize me. Step by step, she explained how I should breathe and what I should feel. The chair was slowly lowered to a horizontal position. "You feel your eyes getting heavy," she said.

My eyes were actually getting heavy. With a soft voice and a mesmerizing accent, Ira guided me up and down some stairs, onto beaches and into saunas. Every now and then, I almost snapped out of it, but I never woke up completely. To be honest, I didn't want to wake up—it felt like a sort of meditation with a tour guide. Step by step, I sunk into a deeper trance.

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Suddenly Ira counted to five and I was awake. The ink was in my skin. As promised, it didn't bleed. The tattoo artist went over one of the lines with the needle again so I could feel the difference. The difference was painfully obvious. And yet, I wasn't completely under while I was getting the tattoo. I was conscious while it happened, but because I was in a trance it didn't hurt. I also wasn't in that cold room with the posters of the half-naked women. I was frolicking by the ocean, relaxing in a hot steam. It turned out the whole process had lasted two hours, but it felt like less than 15 minutes.

Hypnosis isn't magic, and you have to be totally on board if it's going to have any effect. I didn't think it would work for me, but apparently Ira is very good at her job. I'm still a little baffled that my skin didn't bleed at all, except in the spot that the tattoo artist went over again after I came out of the trance.

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I've had my tattoo for two days now, and so far it does seem to be healing faster than my previous ones. All the other promises that the flyer made were kept as well.

Ira even gave me a complimentary fortune telling just before I came out of the hypnosis, predicting that I would be very happy with the tattoo and would make lots of money. I really hope she keeps that last promise too.

[body_image width='618' height='416' path='images/content-images/2015/02/20/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/20/' filename='someone-slathered-a-massive-amount-of-lube-all-over-a-playground-in-plymouth-649-body-image-1424437860.jpg' id='29451']A family torn apart by lube. Photo via Plymouth Herald.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

We're living in highly erotic times. We're living in post–Fifty Shades times. And, really, can we blame someone for smothering a children's playground in lube, as some youths did in Plymouth, England, this week? Add a little sexy to your world today. Lube up your office phone, your laptop. Put your lunch in a medicated condom instead of a sandwich bag. Just get fucking juicy up in here.

And so to Plymouth, where fans of local newspaper photographs where families furiously pose next to items that have offended them— an undercooked burger, a pothole, a can of tuna with a visible parasite in it—will be delighted to learn that angry local mom Clarice Thacker has revisited the sight of the extremely slippery slide that almost injured her two-year-old son Sonny due to all the lube what was on it. Only this time she went with a gilet-wearing boyfriend and a photographer in tow to illustrate just how angry she was about all the lube.

The main gist of the story is: a bunch of youths covered a playground in lube and it was hilarious. But you're not really allowed to say things are hilarious, these days, are you? You are not allowed to replay the mental image of a two-year-old boy—he is wearing mittens, in the mental image, the boy, and one of those big puffy jackets that makes them all tottery and unbalanced—flying rapidly off the end of a lubed-up slide and forehead-first into a swing. Apparently that isn't "funny," these days. Apparently that is "a very sincere health and safety concern."

"At first I thought he'd just slipped, but then he went down the slide and he absolutely flew down it," Clarice told the Plymouth Herald."Then his clothes and his hands were covered in lubricant."

"Another lady was there with her grandchild and she thought it was glue, but it was like jelly and we realized it was lubricant.

"I found an empty packet of lubricant on the way out and took a picture of it before I put it in the bin."

Residents were really annoyed about all the lube because the playground had only recently been transformed from a dilapidated 30-year-old playground to a £40,000 [$62,000], unlubed-slide-and-rubber-safety-tile extravaganza, but now all those joyful memories of laughing on swings and spinning on a merry-go-round to the point of nausea have been ruined by a slick of sex jelly.

"The residents in this area pushed for a playground in the park for so long," Clarice added. "It's the only one in the local area and it's so well used—especially during half term. It's disgusting that someone would do this."

Don't laugh. Do not laugh.

"[Sonny] could really have hurt himself when he slipped from the bars. And it was all over the climbing frame. We phoned the council straight away and they said they'd be out to clean it up."

The council says it takes any and all lube complaints seriously—or anything else you might do to a playground, like drink cider on it while chuckling, or do graffiti, or rub dog shit along a guide rail, or unfurl a condom and leave it in a sandpit—and quickly got a cleanup team to get things sorted out. Pray for the cleanup team that the lube was the water soluble kind, or they'd be there all day.

In a way, covering a playground with a massive amount of lubricant is a message of hope. In this, the year of our lord 2015, there is a worry that the current generation of 13-to-15-year-olds won't get up to any mischief at all, instead staring at iPads like drones all day, occasionally shifting position on the sofa to take a clearer and more vivid photo of their genitals for dissemination on Snapchat.

But here are some kids who are out there, just living: where did they get multiple large sachets of lube? It does not matter. Why did they target the playground? Because it was funny. Did they ever imagine they would cause a child to fly off a slide so rapidly that it made the local newspaper? Never in their wildest dreams. Go forth, you lube-y teenagers, and live your lives. You are the heroes Plymouth deserves, but not the ones it needs right now.

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