This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

What better way to familiarize yourself with a country than via a set of wildly inaccurate stereotypes? For my American friends who've never visited Britain, that's pretty much all there is to go on; yes, John Oliver and James Cordon are on the telly, but the former analyzes American politics and the latter seems to mostly just laugh at his own jokes, so it's not like you can get a particularly good gauge of Britishness out of either of them.

This all means that people fall back on stereotypes to inform their view of the average Brit, the best of which I've rounded up and illustrated below.

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Illustrations and stereotype text by Oliver Holmes; fact-checking by Daisy Jones

BRITISH PEOPLE HAVE BAD TEETH
The stereotype: Seriously, is there something that happens in the womb that means you all end up born with six too many teeth in your mouth? And how, when you have so many crammed in there, do you not notice that they've turned all yellow and brown?

The stereotype fact-checked: The last comprehensive study on bad teeth was conducted by the World Health Organization in 2003. The results suggested that British 12-year-olds actually have some of the best pegs in the world, with an average of 1.2 teeth being decayed, missing or with fillings.

However, hit the 34–44 age bracket and our dental hygiene reaches "high" on the that's-fucking-nasty scale, with an average of 13.9 teeth being subpar in some way—which is quite depressing when you realize that's almost half of them. Mind you, North America isn't too far behind, reaching "moderate" on the scale of wayward teeth.

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BRITISH PEOPLE SPEND ALL THEIR TIME IN PUBS BINGE-DRINKING
The stereotype: Americans certainly don't shy away from a drink, but the British drinking culture is still baffling. Is it your intention to seriously poison yourself every time you go out? What is Lambrini, and does it serve any purpose other than aiding you in your duty to throw up on someone's car? Are you expected to drink more if your football team loses, draws, or wins? Or does it not really matter? It's all a fucking minefield, and I don't understand.

The stereotype fact-checked: We don't all spend every waking minute on the piss, but 28 percent of us do spend most of our time engaging in "heavy episodic drinking," according to a study conducted by the World Health Organization last year. To put that into perspective, the British have almost twice the global average of binge drinkers, which is 16 percent. And when we drink, we drink a lot, with Britons consuming an average of 11.6 liters of pure alcohol per year, compared to the average global intake of 6.2 liters.

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BRITISH PEOPLE ARE ALL PALE BECAUSE THEY NEVER SEE THE SUN
The stereotype: How do you know you're watching a scene set in the UK in a Hollywood movie? Red buses, rain, and lots of people with skin so pale it's almost translucent. The only tan you'll get comes in a bottle, because the sun is literally always obscured by a thick, oppressive wall of clouds.

The stereotype fact-checked: This one is tricky to quantify, but—objectively—it's basically just not true, is it? According to the Committee on Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment, there were more than 8,000 tanning salons in the UK in 2009, so even if they're not getting a lot of sun, there are other ways for Brits to make themselves all copper and leathery.

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BRITISH PEOPLE HAVE ALL MET THE QUEEN AT SOME POINT
The stereotype: Americans tend to picture the whole of the UK as one of those biscuit-tin villages—a place with a nice old bridge, a babbling brook, and a pub that smells of hops and wet dog. Overlooking this village is Buckingham Palace, which the Queen pops out of regularly so she can have a chat with every one of the 200 locals.

The stereotype fact-checked: Again, obviously bullshit. According to a study by YouGov, 67 percent of us want Queen Elizabeth II to remain monarch and continue doing her "royal duties" for as long as possible. In terms of actually meeting her, according to the Official Website of the British Monarchy, "the Queen meets thousands of people in the UK each year," which is a very noncommittal statistic and tells us basically nothing.

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BRITISH PEOPLE CONSTANTLY DRINK TEA
The stereotype: The UK seems to be a nation that survives mostly off liquids: tea during the day, lager as soon as the sun starts to go down. Do you all have massive bladders? Is that something anybody's ever checked?

The stereotype fact-checked: We don't actually have the most tea drinkers in the world—that title goes to Turkey, which consumes 6.916 pounds per year, per person, according to an infographic published by Quartz. However, we're not close behind, with the UK drinking 4.281 pounds of tea per year per person. So yeah, basically we drink a lot of tea.

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BRITISH PEOPLE ONLY WEAR EXPENSIVE TAILORED CLOTHES
The stereotype: Every single British person is essentially an amalgamation of someone out of Downton Abbey and that man who seems like a parody of a posh person off Made in Chelsea. No matter the occasion or the inconvenience of wearing a three-piece suit/petticoats and a formal dress, they will wear a three-piece suit/petticoats and a formal dress.

The stereotype fact-checked: Considering that, as of 2013, the most popular retail store in the UK was Tesco, I'll take a wild stab in the dark and assume that most Brits don't have every outfit tailored on Savile Row. We're far more likely to be seen in Primark jeggings and a George at ASDA fleece than we are in a cummerbund and brogues. Mind you, I suppose this isn't such a bad stereotype compared to the others, so America, carry on believing what you like.

Follow Oliver on Instagram and Daisy on Twitter.

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^{All photos by Anouk Kruithof from Automagic}

New York-based Dutch photographer Anouk Kruithof describes herself as a "frenetic artist-bookmaker." Over the past 12 years, she's published nine outstanding interdisciplinary art books that have explored everything from picture-plane to materiality. Unfortunately, making art books is a tough gig these days. It has never been super lucrative, but we live in an era when even the major publishers are having trouble fronting the funds to put out books.

So, like many other modern photographers and artists, for her tenth book, Automagic, Anouk Kruithof has turned to crowdsourcing on Kickstarter. She has been working on Automagic since 2011 with the hope that the final project will be a 1,000-page tome of remixed, redefined, and recontextualized images and texts collected from the past 12 years of her life.

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Books and prints purchased from Kruithof's Kickstarter campaign will be kissed instead of signed.

Sometimes when I see photographers pitching projects on Kickstarter, I get a little skeptical. So many of the photo books that are proposed through crowdfunding are vain affairs with mediocre photos that the photographer is audacious enough to turn into a charity case. But Anouk's effort is entirely different.

First off, just based on the excerpted images you'll see as you scroll below, it's going to be a spectacular book. Not to mention, she's vowed to use this campaign to not only fund her new book, but also to help other talented artists who can't get their stuff out through traditional channels.

Every dollar she makes beyond her $26,707 goal will go towards transforming StressPress.biz, a website that currently sells all of her previous books and archives her writing, into a "platform for collaboration" that she'll use to create and release work with other artists.

It's rare to find an artist like Kruithof who is actively trying to improve the community as well as produce their own work, but she has long been known for her collaborative spirit. Many of her previous efforts were born out of working with others—like her Happy Birthday to You project, which she made with the patients of a psychiatric unit.

Separately from her the Kickstarter campaign, Kruithof just co-founded a new annual award exclusively for self-published photo books, called the Anamorphosis Prize. With Kruithof, collector John A. Phelan, and curator Charlotte Cotton as a jury, the organization will award $10,000 to the winning book, no strings attached. A shortlist of 20 of the top self-published books will also be collected by MoMA Library.

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^{Artist's rendering of Automagic}

Although Kruithof is clearly a champion of art books, she's also a realist. At the end of her Kickstarter video, the artist tells potential backers the truth: "Artist-bookmaking is not a profitable thing to do." And she's right, which is exactly why this project is important. We have to come out and support innovative efforts like hers to make sure that people as talented as Kruithof can continue to create in this form. At the very least, she deserves your Kickstarter cash more than the folks trying to raise money to make "booty shorts for Burning Man."

Anouk Kruithof is trying to raise $26,707 by April 20th. You can back her campaign here.

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See more photos by Anouk Kruithof on her website, and back Automagic on Kickstarter.

BEST ALBUM OF THE MONTH

BILL FAY: Who Is the Sender? (Dead Oceans)

If you want to make the rest of your afternoon sound like an astronaut's funeral—like the most perfect, loyal astronaut's funeral—look no further. If you want to understand what it sounds like to taste human tears off a catered turkey sandwich, just fucking stop right there. If you want a Kafkaesque lesson in how to be more Kafkaesque, pour yourself a glass of rotten milk and listen to this motherfucker over and over and over and over again.
WHALEBONE

WORST ALBUM OF THE MONTH

MARK KNOPFLER: Tracker (Virgin EMI)

If JNCO can attempt to make a comeback in 2015, I guess the dude from Dire Straits can give it a whirl, too. Let me stop you right there, by the way. I don't give a father fuck if Mark Knopfler has been going at it hard his whole life, releasing records and shit. It amounts to a snail's fart of influence to anyone but that crew of powder-white micropenises who've Soap'd their way down the rails of life. Also, isn't Mark Knopfler a Nazi?
HARLOW BOOT

BEST COVER OF THE MONTH

AMERICAN WRESTLERS: Self-Titled (Fat Possum)

You want to hear some real Illuminati shit? I worked at VICE for five years only to quit to be in a band that everyone said sounded like Pavement. I was always a little bit sore over never getting the coveted gold VICE ring. Years later, I'm in Sydney, Australia, hanging out with Stephen Malkmus, who tells me he just fucking got one for playing a VICE party—nay—extravaganza. I bet I shrugged and said something like, "Seriously?" and the Malk said he would mail me the ring he got—he doesn't want it. And here I am again.
DICK PEE

WORST COVER OF THE MONTH

WUTANG PAENTAL ADVISOY:
Explicit Content Volume One (Self-Released)

Reviewing new Wu-Tang stuff is like the final scene in Enter the Dragon where Bruce Lee keeps fighting mirrors: It's impossible to tell if I think this is kinda average because I'm not compensating enough for the shadow of the original Wu-Tang Clan oeuvre or because I'm somehow being too critical for fear of having overcompensated in the first place. But fuck it. This sounds like it'd mix well with Rich Boy circa 2009, it's cool they released the first single in multiple remix-friendly formats, and "Stay Up" is in the early running for the top drunk-strolling-around-the-city track of the summer. RIP Osiris.
DJ BLUMPKIN THE BLUMPKING

DEATH GRIPS
The Powers That B
Harvest

I'm 95 percent sure that Death Grips are a vast internet musical conspiracy perpetuated by 4chan, and that all the combined PR for their continued half-baked releases and fan-betraying PR antics is the collective effort of the thousands of 14-year-old Swedish kids that populate the forum. I have my suspicions that a few influential meme bloggers on Tumblr may be involved somehow as well. Those first few records were good, especially as a musical accompaniment to your BMX ride to work at the movie theater. It's a tough three miles, sure, but someone's gotta be able to afford to fill Mom's Volvo with gas.
UNCLE RUMPUS

KENDRICK LAMAR
To Pimp a Butterfly
Interscope/Aftermath/Top Dawg

One summer's day, during a humdrum BBQ, the woman who used to live with my girlfriend had a full-blown nervous breakdown in front of me and her sorta boyfriend. She pissed all over the floor like an animal. That's nearly as bad as a girlfriend texting you "You should think about getting an STD test" a week and a half after you tell her you're in love with her. Ladies, if you're about to fuck a guy who lives in a dorm room, I bet you a billion dollars he thinks it's gross for someone to swab his penis. Fellas, you know how you're always worried that you're gonna get a boner at the doctor's? These STD doctors flick your dick like it's overcooked gnocchi. Now listen: I've felt two really confusing emotions due to Kendrick Lamar. Right out the gate, I reinforced a wall with wood and books during the breakdown because my girlfriend's former roommate kept wailing "Bitch, don't kill my vibe" over and over again, like she was amping herself up to murder us; little did I know, she was having one of those "silent raves." What's more, there is no emotion in the English language (though I'm sure there is one in German or the type of Dutch spoken in Flanders) for when an attractive lady doctor rocks your testicles while you babble about how trifling love is until she tells you that although don't have cancer, your heart could explode at any minute. For men, this situation is as dizzying as walking a dog blindfolded through a corn maze. It'd be like if you started dating someone who lived with a crazy person who used to be a lawyer and behaved like South By happened every weekend and that Kendrick Lamar was Jim Jones, but in place of Kool-Aid, Kendrick gave away lobster-claw Bloody Marys by the bucketful, exuding a vibe not to be fucked with. Once you have a vibe, you don't want anyone to fuck with it. I take Xanax for the same thing, and it costs less than $2 a pop. Kendrick Lamar convinced George Clinton that he was the new Eric Clapton, which indicates that maybe music is no longer an imprisoned... hahaha, gotcha.
HOLIDAY NISSAN

ACTION BRONSON
Mr. Wonderful
VICE/Atlantic

We were gonna give Mr. Wonderful Album of the Month if Action had written his own review of the record (which we put out), but he didn't. So we're just gonna give him the classic conflict-of-interest smiley face instead. Fuck, that's obnoxious!
REVIEWS EDITOR

CANNIBAL OX
Blade of the Ronin
IGC/iHipHop Disribution

Wanna hear some non-El-P production and some bullcrap about Pokémon? No? Really?! Man, I wish I could at least endorse this on the principle that The Cold Vein is an untouchable classic—but we're a long way from that one. I'm gonna go YouTube that Def Jux doc from 2002 and imagine this never happened. That being said, why wait so long to put out a record at all if you can't top rhyming basement with adjacent in the first place.
B. J. ARMSTRONG

TWIN SHADOW
Eclipse
Warner Bros.

A year ago, I visited this awful college friend who had moved to LA after a long stint on the East Coast. "I don't know how I ever lived in New York for so long without losing it," he said to me between taking rips from his e-cig and sips of a $15 juice that smelled like donkey semen. "It's just, like, so much chiller here. I finally feel like the real me." A couple months after my visit, this guy went to Coachella and popped molly for the first time while Twin Shadow played. He was wearing a leather jacket and had to be rushed to the chill-out tent after suffering heat stroke and shitting himself mid-set. To this day, he says it was the best concert of his life.
DJ PJS

LOTIC
Heterocetera
Tri Angle

There's this Cronenberg movie called Scanners in which telekinetic humans fuse their minds with technology. Lotic is almost definitely a Scanner, but on top of being able to manipulate a laptop into creating futuristic techno music, he probably uses his powers to make factory machines come to life and engage in metallic, spark-filled orgies with no safeword. This record sounds like a world where soulless cyborgs experience all the ecstasy and sexless humans are left to watch them poke one another from a distance in a postapocalyptic club-cave.
GIMP MAN JR.

TYONDAI BRAXTON
Hive1
Nonesuch

I'm a hundred years old and I don't get why that place in Boston shut down and Battles aren't playing at Berklee tonight. Fuck the internet; ACAB. I'm like, play Mario Kart all day and beat off to XHamster all night. I sold all of my records to buy what I call a "tattoo gun," and what's left of my taste in music is a dwindling fart noise in my brain that—if you listen closely—sounds kinda like the Locust.
JIM FINCH

SUUNS AND JERUSALEM IN MY HEART
Self-Titled
Secretly Canadian

Every morning, when I wake up in my 1987 Cadillac Allanté, I go swig-for-swig off a bottle of Pepto Bismol and the cocksucker-red flavor of Mad Dog 20/20 before my mail is delivered by a young Laotian man named Haimi, which I guess is Lao for "the seeker." He always delivers my mail in bulk, crammed in a manila envelope covered in mango grease. It's mostly junk or some alimony thing, but sometimes it's a press release about two bands who have collaborated on something, and man, that really gets my dick hard. Shit, like that's why I stay on the force basically.
THADDEUS WEAKBISCUIT

JEFF THE BROTHERHOOD
Wasted on the Dream
Infinity Cat

On top of the fact that these guys make unabashedly balls-out dude rock and have an admirably goofy shit-eating attitude despite being workhorses and running a successful label, they look like the inbred McPoyle twins from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. They've also decided to wean themselves off the evil sterile teat of Warner Bros. What more could you possibly ask for?
DADDY GNARBUCKS

THE KING KHAN & BBQ SHOW
Bad News Boys
In the Red

I was at SXSW or Chaos in Tejas or one of those excuses to do bad blow in the Porta-Potty at Red7 last year, and someone told me the dude from King Khan was doing sound, and I was like, Wow, here's a guy who is so good at being front and center and destroying faces every night that he's actually doing the music world a mothersucking service by making other bands sound good live. Later I thought to myself, Wow, here's a guy who is so good at being front and center and destroying faces every night because he can make other bands sound absolutely awful live. I did a quick Google search, and I'm pretty sure Mark Sultan hasn't done sound at Red7 ever. Not even one time.
ABE SEEDY

SWERVEDRIVER
I Wasn't Born to Lose You
Cobraside

Goddamn it. I'll never forgive Swervedriver for stealing the riff from Mayhem's "Deathcrush."
PENIZ PUMPZ

NOEL GALLAGHER'S HIGH FLYING BIRDS
Chasing Yesterday
Sour Mash

Like a Rube Goldberg machine
That sucks out your brain
And pull-unties your sweatpants
REVIEWKU

LITURGY
The Ark Work
Thrill Jockey

I recently ran into Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, the brains behind one of the most disdained bands in NPR-metal. He told me this new album was partially inspired by the Russian composer Scriabin, who wanted to create a music-and-light opera that would be performed on a river and involve the audience. While it was happening, the music and light would interact in such a way that it would trigger the unveiling of the apocalypse, and the country would simultaneously experience the sublime before burning to death—or something. If this album gets even close to enacting what Scriabin imagined, then all the haters can shut their traps before they spontaneously combust in apocalyptic flames.
JIMMY HUNT-HENDRIX

LIGHTNING BOLD
Fantasy Empire
Thrill Jockey

Here we have something like 77 contact microphones set up systematically through an especially petite wormhole as it funnels the wake of an esteemed celestial wizard's heroic fart. Pummeling glittery guitars paired with the wizard's college roommate's cousin's former dental hygienist performing what appears to be the beginning of a promising self-exorcism makes my Dr. Seuss hat stand straight up; what about yours? Could you leave the black light on for me, please? Gives me powers. Thanks, y'all!
BECA GRIMM

MODEST MOUSE
Strangers to Ourselves
Glacial Pace

I once saw Isaac Brock lay into a homeless kid in Portland with a vitriolic Ayn Rand rant about how he slept under bridges but survived, by-fucking-God, without bumming bucks like some shithead. The kid pushed Isaac, and he reeled back to swing before some roadies broke it up. Soon after, my mom drove me home. We got ice cream on the way, and I licked it contemplatively. That was a very important moment in my young life, Isaac. Everyone should have his heroes taken down a peg.
DINGUS CORIANDER

GIRL BAND
The Early Years
Rough Trade

You ever have one of those days when everything just sucks so goddamn much? Your wife divorces you and your mom dies; then at the end of the day, you Dutch-oven yourself in an ALF sheet on your best friend's futon. I can't tell you what this record did for my misery. You get the picture; I'm a piece of shit.
HARPER G.

DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE
Kintsugi
Atlantic

It's 2015, and Seth Cohen is 27. RISD was a lifetime ago, and Chrismukkah even longer. His comic career is done, and each Chris Ware New Yorker cover further wilts his desire to draw. His new sketches feel destined for the sock drawer, next to his wedding ring from Summer and other emblems of his failures. Now comes "the new Death Cab album." Cohen sits and listens, then listens again, anxiously replaying Kintsugi and trying to find some meaning in it, though the songs are as cold and foreign as the title itself. Still, he sits, hoping with each restart that the music will bring him back to a time when things were easier; when albums gave him visceral, emotional reactions; when he could put on "Title Track" and feel somehow more aware of the physical space around him. But he just starts the album over again, and again he feels nothing.
RIVER DONAGHEY

OF MONTREAL
Aureate Gloom
Polyvinyl

Instead of giving you the detached, Pitchfork-esque, Thesaurus.com-cribbed bullshit review I was thinking of writing, I decided to leave you with this: It's worth checking this record out and even more worth seeing this band live. They do wild shit, and sometimes they play earlier shit that you'll confuse for their new shit because this sounds a lot like that.
SAMEER NASEEM

SARAH BETHE NELSON
Fast Moving Clouds
Burger

Every once in a while, the world's prayer for the next Natalie Imbruglia to tear us up and leave us lying naked on the floor is answered. But how would she appear to us? The elders have spoken for years about the illusion turned into something real, and many old texts allude to it, but conversation has run dry. Until now. I guess the fortune teller was right. This is how I feel.
OZONE LIAR

PURITY RING
Another Eternity
4AD

Love 'em or hate 'em, I still wish that instead of a band, Purity Ring were a proto-futuristic masturbation apparatus/gang that existed solely as a Subreddit where you could crowdsource jelly-filled chocolate cakes with pornographic images printed on them (however that would work, don't ask me) but also where there were Bible verses over the porno and you could send the cakes to your friends and enemies alike!
CEE-LOO BIAFRA

SUFJAN STEVENS
Carrie & Lowell
Asthmatic Kitty

While I've never tried to quit drugs, I'm pretty sure that the first relapse must feel a lot like listening to the new Sufjan Stevens album. I know it's embarrassing, but I feel so warm and comfortable as his whispers blanket me. In the back of my mind—a voice—a sense of dread: I know this isn't going to end well. I didn't even touch this stuff for like eight years. I'd made so much progress! I was listening to rap music. I was happy. Now I'm choosing to throw it all away—and for what? A sad-eyed Christian man singing about his mom and his stepdad and masturbating while you check your texts. Am I gonna die like those other junkies who get tuned up after taking nearly a decade off the needle?
YUSUFJAN ISLAM, FORMERLY KNOWN AS SUFJAN CAT STEVENS

MADONNA
Rebel Heart
Interscope

In 2015, I think it's a fairly good barometer of how out-of-touch a person is when she releases the hounds on someone who leaks her dingleberry of an "art thing." I just want to know if she took the trip to Israel herself, adorned in a Stargate headdress and an expensive cloak as she stepped out of her helicopter, the one that ultimately took a nerd to prison. And I wonder if she said, "Bitch, I'm Madonna" before the nerd got chloroformed or whatever happens in a scenario like this.
CLOUDER SANDBONE

BJÖRK
Vulnicura
One Little Indian

Our reviews editor asked a magician on a boat in New Zealand what he thought about the new Björk record, and this is what he said: "I met Jay Z. I met Kanye West, too. I've magician'd myself outright twenty years, back and forth on this vessel between Wellington and Bicton. Magic gets real good 'round near Karori Rip; something about the swells, eh? I think I met Björk once; that's a bit of all right. Musicians sail for free given they put on a performance—fuckin' passengers hate it, though. That's why I picked up the wand, eh? Little sleight of hand'll keep anyone happier than a ruckus."
NIGEL THE BOAT MAGICIAN

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Cinderella: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
Disney

I had a realization the other day that all Elton John did for the Lion King soundtrack was steal the good parts of Roxy Music songs off Stranded and tweak them to be about warthogs sucking their own dicks. The masterminds behind this 'Derella soundtrack couldn't even be bothered to do that. Anyone with a gun can force a bunch of piano players to smoke cocaine and masturbate themselves with some woodwind and brass instruments. Who the hell is in charge at the Magic Kingdom these days?
FRENCH CANDLESTICK

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Furious 7: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
Atlantic

There are a few small mysteries that may always baffle the female gender, and the way these brain-bleedingly bad movies satiate men's lust for oil and blood is one. But let me tell you, it's sick as shit to watch Vin Diesel's creatine-inflated brachioradialis muscles pilot a GTO out the back of a goddamn airplane midflight. Fucking fuck. [Frothing sound.]
JOHN GREY JR.

SCHARPLING AND WURSTER
The Best of the Best Show
Numero Group

Tom and Jon have asserted themselves as the true masters of radio for this generation. They're the Two Stooges of the Orson Welleses of our time. We're sayin' these guys are the Opie and Anthony of goddamn Howard Sternses. When these motherfuckers get on the phone, forget it—magic rains in folks' ears and out their privates, ready for intercourse.
BRANTLER FOOTSTEEM

GABI
Sympathy
Software

It's super difficult to find someone who doesn't like Breaking Bad. I always avoided the thing because so many people declared it mandatory viewing material. Then one day when I felt like I could either full-on commit suicide or watch it, I put the whole damn thing on my MacBook Pro, and now look at my dumb ass watching Better Call Saul.
AWESOME BROOM

[body_image width='1136' height='640' path='images/content-images/2015/04/08/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/08/' filename='emoji-shouldve-made-all-their-characters-yellow-408-body-image-1428530631.png' id='44323']

Apple's iOS 8.3 update became available today, and with it came the long-awaited, racially diverse emoji keyboard. The formerly whitewashed humanlike characters can be made to have one of five different skin tones.

This improvement has been a long time coming—emojis have been accused of racism more times than Star Wars: Episode 1. An online petition, which received a few thousand signatures, made the point that "of the more than 800 Emoji, the only two resembling people of color are a guy that looks vaguely Asian and another in a turban." The closest thing to a black person was the emoji moon.

Now, not only can you select from five skin tones when you send your friends and family any of the basic emojis (high-five, thumbs up, or flexing bicep, for example), Apple has also updated the gender options in some emoji characters, adding a pair of men kissing, a pair of women kissing, and 15 different representations of families, including ones with two moms and two dads.

And yet, if Apple's update was meant to improve the representation of the people who use them, then the new characters are hardly a success. When you start playing the representation game, you're always bound to leave someone out.

When I downloaded the update earlier today, I texted a few of the new characters to one of my best friends. "Look! New emojis!" I wrote to her, sending my signature girl-with-hand-on-the-side Emoji in all five colors. "But still no redheads," she wrote back (she's a ginger). Of the 15 family combinations, none had single parents. There's no emoji in a wheelchair, no trans emoji, no women emoji wearing hard hats or police badges. Also, they added an Apple Watch character, but there's still no hot dog. What's up with that?

The problem with emoji in the past wasn't that you couldn't select one that looked exactly like you—it was the fact that all of the human emojis were white. When white becomes the de facto neutral, that's obviously problematic, as the kids say. But expanding the color palates doesn't un-problemify everything. Plus, as the creators of Oju (an Afro-centric Emoji alternative) pointed out when they spoke with Motherboard last month, "diversity is not about skin color—it's about embracing the multiple cultures out there that have no digital representation." You can't just slap a darker color on one of the preexisting characters and call that "diversity."

One option would be for Apple to give users the option to create custom characters—a service that's already offered by Slack, the group chat medium used by VICE and many other companies. Or maybe Apple should stop trying to represent racial diversity altogether on the emoji keyboard, and instead make all of the little anthropomorphized characters yellow.

Why yellow? The original emoticons—those primitive, simplistic smiley faces that we used to drop into our AOL Instant Messenger chats—weren't meant to represent people. They represented emotions. The first of those smilies was (arguably) designed in 1963, when commercial artist Harvey Ball designed the character to boost morale at his insurance firm. It was a perfect circle with black dots for eyes and a curve of a smile on a bright yellow background. It wasn't assigned gender or race, and it wasn't meant to represent anyone in particular. It was just supposed to make people happy.

Later, as emoticons became more advanced and the expressions became more nuanced, yellow was still the de facto color for the faces—in part, because yellow was neutral. Legos were specifically designed with yellow skin for the purpose of eliminating racial bias; according to the company's customer service page: "We chose yellow to avoid assigning a specific ethnicity in sets that don't include any specific characters. With this neutral color, fans can assign their own individual roles to Lego minifigures."

The new emoji update includes a neutral yellow character for all of its humanoids. Rather than trying to box people into a narrow variety of colors, genders, or situations, I'll probably use that from now on—or at least until Emoji comes out with their next update. Which I hope includes a hot dog.

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

[body_image width='720' height='480' path='images/content-images/2015/04/09/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/09/' filename='whos-behind-a-spree-of-drive-by-shootings-around-surrey-bc-789-body-image-1428589237.jpg' id='44596']

A recent panel on youth gang violence in Surrey. Photo via Facebook user Kal Dosanjh

If you haven't heard, it's "shots fired" season in Surrey, BC.

Easter Sunday marked the latest pop of broad-daylight gun violence in a Metro Vancouver region known for gang activity. But police and experts say the recent rash of over a dozen drive-by shootings around Surrey borders does not signal the beginnings of a deadly gang war—it's more likely just the street-level drug beefs of some recent high school graduates. Corporal Bert Paquet of the Surrey RCMP confirmed via email the majority of the shootings "have been linked to low-level drug trafficking."

To understand why Surrey RCMP aren't calling six shootings in two days "gang related," I called up local filmmaker and public speaker Mani Amar.

His 2009 documentary A Warrior's Religion explored the lives of gangland's major players in the 1990s and beyond. "I would say many of these are youths that want to be gangsters," Amar suggests of the five-week shooting spree that has so far caused injuries but no known deaths. "If they were actual targeted shootings by high-end guys, there would be more bodies."

Amar adds BC's most notorious gangs tend to favour automatic and semi-automatic weapons rather than the handguns used in these recent drive-bys. "It's just a couple shots—pop, pop—and they drive off," he says, adding only a few blocks separate the rapid tit-for-tat incidents. Amar contrasts these "bravado" attacks with the deadly events of Metro Vancouver's gang war in early 2009 (his take: a totally different kettle of criminals).

Yet the shooters' low position in BC's gang food chain does not make their violent spats any less dangerous to the middle-class neighbourhoods they inhabit. Doug Elford of the Newton Community Association says the frequent sound of gunshots have left residents confused and frightened. (About a third of the drive-by shootings have gone down in Newton alone). Elford's calling on communities, law enforcement and local government to work together to bring the criminals responsible to justice. So far city officials have stayed silent.

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Surrey RCMP are seeking info on the activities of these guys in connection with four shootings in March.

A rare public notice released by Surrey RCMP identifies five 20 and 21-year-old locals the city's top cop believes are connected with four drive-by incidents in March. So far no charges have been laid. "For those involved in these shootings or people who know them—I ask you to think about the safety of your family, friends and the general public," wrote Surrey RCMP officer-in-charge chief superintendent Bill Fordy in a March 12 statement. "The manner that you have chosen to resolve this dispute is careless and unacceptable."

Abbotsford police followed suit the next week with a public safety notice identifying three more men who pose a significant risk. "We believe it is in the public's best interest that the identities of these men are known so people associating with or in close physical proximity to them understand their safety could be in danger," said Abbotsford Sergeant Casey Vinet in a news release. "Efforts to curtail growing tensions between these individuals are being made but we are very concerned that violence could occur in public settings."

Longtime BC gang reporter Kim Bolan notes how unusual it is for police to name without charges—a practice questioned by privacy advocates. Vancouver police officer Kal Dosanjh tells me the tactic puts pressure on extended friends and families to turn information over to police. "If you take a look, we're dealing with primarily Southeast Asian communities of immigrants and first generation Canadians," he tells me. "We live in extended families, not nuclear families, and it's about protecting your own."

"The community is tight-knit—I know some of these fools," Amar adds. "Releasing names ostracizes them in the community—shows their extended families, classmates, college teachers and whoever might know them what they're up to."

Dosanjh is hoping to steer these attitudes toward more dialogue with law enforcement. In response to the spike in gun crime, he assembled a youth forum on gang violence for a recent Sunday in late March. Dosanjh brought together religious leaders, RCMP, ex-gang members and education leaders to participate in a dialogue with at-risk youth in the Southeast Asian community.

Amar also applauds the two police forces for outing the eight young men. He says tight-lipped families are still common, but attitudes are slowly changing as the community learns from past mistakes. He tells me a province-wide police force would assist in quicker response to violence that spills over municipal borders.

As for the young, low-level drug hawkers likely behind Surrey's shooting spike, Amar offers his own lesson: "If you're going to be in this lifestyle, people are going to suffer," he deadpans. "It's death or jail—those are your options."

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.

Sometimes you just need to take a break from your usual ear-assaulting Crazy Cool Extreme Music and put on something relaxing and pleasant. Last week, we gave you some new age jazz to chill out to. This morning, we're premiering a little low-key R&B to calm you down after that guy on the J Train sneezed his coffee on your shoulder. The song, "Slow Down," is from Brooklyn's own Richie Quake. It's cozy, endlessly listenable pop music that will make you want to cuddle up at home, light some candles, and bang.

Listen to more Richie Quake here.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Whatever happens, your terrible grammar and eccentric spelling will always come back to screw you over. At school, in birthday cards, in the Guardian or Daily Mail comment boxes: Nowhere is safe when the linguistic nitpickers swoop in, like vultures hungry for their latest, misspelt carcass of a word. But the linguistic nitpickers can also be a force for social good. Because it turns out the way you trip over your words is especially crucial if you're a criminal, with language playing an increasingly vital part in identifying suspects and bolstering law court convictions.

Since the mid to late 1990s, a growing community of "forensic linguists" have been employed to look at textual evidence such as blackmail letters, potentially falsified suicide notes, text messages, and online correspondences in order to spot consistencies and lock down suspects in cases ranging from plagiarism to murder and even terrorism.

Hired by defense solicitors, local police, and national police forces like the Serious Organized Crime Agency and the Independent Police Complaints Commission, academics from the Centre for Forensic Linguistics at Aston University, for example, have provided expert testimony in myriad court cases.

Take Dr. Nicci Macleod, who has specialized in the linguistics behind the power dynamics of police interviews with women reporting rape, as well as how we model our identities linguistically on social networks. Her casework includes the analysis of slang in the diaries of the individuals convicted of the attempted murder of Joss Stone in 2013. I gave Nicci a call last week to ask her about how she uses language to nail convictions.

VICE: What exactly is forensic linguistics?
Nicci Macleod: Forensic linguistics is a term that can be used to apply to any interface between language and the law. It tends to be talked about as having three separate strands. The first one is studying the peculiarities of legal language; part of forensic linguistics is looking at the reasons behind the oddness of legal language and sometimes making efforts to make it more accessible to ordinary people.

The second area is to do with the language of legal processes, so things like what happens in a police interview, for example, or what happens in a courtroom trials, and what's special about those contexts and the way the language works within them.

And the last one, which is probably the most exciting, is the use of linguistic evidence. So, if there's something pertinent to an investigation—like a ransom letter, blackmail letter, or suicide note—whoever is investigating it (it tends to be the police) might want to know something about what kind of person wrote this text: their age, their educational background, their geographical origins, maybe their gender. Or, it might be the case that there's a suspect in mind, so we're looking at texts where we know who the author is and comparing it to a text where we don't necessarily know, commenting on whether there are any similarities there that might indicate that the texts have the same author.

What kind of features of language might you look at when trying to identify the author of a text?
I might look at the way that this author is structuring their sentences or the way they're using particular vocabulary. The register of vocabulary they're using might tell us about that person's background or the area that they work in and so on. Things like punctuation, even the layout, and anything that really stands out about the way this person uses language.

Could you give an example of a case you've worked on?
There was a blackmail case. Two or three elderly neighbors had received blackmail letters saying, "We know what you did and we're going to tell everybody unless you put this money in this particular place, behind a shed." In this case, the police were fairly sure that they had the right person; it was a woman who lived locally and was known to them previously.

So what they did was to collect a lot of writings from her home. They had a search warrant and collected various diaries and letters that she didn't dispute she had written. They were in her handwriting and so on. I was provided with them and the blackmail letters and produced a report based on the consistencies between the two.

There were particular spelling errors that kept popping up. We're not always fortunate enough for the same words or features to actually occur in both, but fortunately in this case, several words did come up in both sets. I was able to say that, based on the misspellings and various other features, the letters were consistent with her style.

How reliable are all methods? Are they usually used to back up some other piece of evidence, or can they be used alone?
We would generally say that they should be taken into consideration in the context of other evidence. In the blackmail case, the only thing I could comment on was the letters that had been received by the victims, comparing them to the writings of the police's chief suspect.

What you need to bear in mind is that, although I said there were a number of consistencies here, they'd also found the typewriter that had been used to type the letters in the suspect's shed. It was wrapped up in a bag that only had her fingerprints on it. Obviously linguists can contribute to convictions, but I would shy away from saying this kind of evidence should be used in isolation in these cases.

I noticed one of your personal areas of research is "modeling online identities." How has forensic linguistics changed in the online world?
We had to work very hard to refine our methods, because traditionally when this idea of authorship analysis first emerged we were working with quite lengthy texts. Obviously with internet developments, texting, instant messaging, and so on, we tend to work with very short texts.

This is why we've moved towards these last couple of projects; there was "modeling online identities," and there was also a project on Twitter. We asked, are we able to actually comment on the authorship of 140 characters? We've actually done quite well—it turns out there is potential for commenting on patterns of consistency with those sort of texts.

Professor Tim Grant

What kind of cases and crimes might this research be useful for? Or has it been useful already?
My colleague Professor Tim Grant worked on a case in Staffordshire. A house had burnt down and there was a husband and wife and two children. The husband managed to rescue his two children, but his wife had apparently perished in the house fire. The police had their suspicions, and there were various things that made them think it was the husband who had murdered his wife and set the fire to cover his tracks.

What they'd established is that text messages had continued to be sent from the wife's phone that entire day, long after they thought she'd actually died. And so what Professor Tim Grant did was to compare the historical texting style of the wife—her name was Amanda Birks—and of her husband, Christopher Birks, and then to look at these messages that were sent on the day of the fire to say, are these texts actually consistent with her usual style of texting or are they actually more consistent with his?

He established that they were far more established with the husband's texting style. And, sure enough, I believe he pleaded guilty to actually having murdered his wife, and he had sent those messages from his wife's phone.

Follow Huw on Twitter.

[body_image width='1200' height='825' path='images/content-images/2015/04/09/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/09/' filename='life-with-a-silicon-penis-876-body-image-1428591196.jpg' id='44606']Micha has had so much medical silicone oil injected into his penis and scrotum that his junk weighs over seven pounds.

This article originally appeared on VICE Germany.

When a friend—a doorman at Laboratory, a sex club for men beneath Berlin's legendary Berghain nightspot—invited me to one of his parties, I spontaneously decided to join. Inside, men crowded the bar, some naked, others half-naked. They pushed through the building's crevices, nooks, play rooms, halls, and toilets. The air stank of poppers, smoke, alcohol, men's sweat, and sex.

I surveyed the amorphous, hairy, muscular mass of beautiful and less beautiful men who had just had sex or were about to. Then I noticed a man in a black latex bodysuit with an extra big bulge at his crotch. Two drinks later, I'd plucked up the courage to speak to him.

He introduced himself as Micha (he didn't want me to use his full name in this article) and patiently answered my questions; he showed me his silicone-enhanced penis and let me touch it. I met him again and again over the course of half a year to find out more about the 45-year-old and his nine-inch-long, three-inch-wide, seven-pound penis.

There were some obvious things that I should get out of the way early on. When it comes to sex, apparently the silicone implants provide no physical pleasure boost, and any erection Micha gets happens "inside" of his massive foreskin. As such, it isn't visible with the naked eye, and obviously Micha's body modification makes sex more difficult (though not impossible).

As for the penis's other primary function, Micha prefers to pee sitting down, as he attracts strange looks when he uses urinals.

Watch the documentary about him below, or read the interview below that.

To turn on English subtitles, press play, wait for the film to begin, and click the "CC" button in the bottom right-hand corner.

VICE: The first time I saw you, I immediately noticed your gigantic bulge. Why did you enlarge your penis with silicone injections?
Micha: That's kind of a long story. I think the whole thing started 20 years ago when I got a penis pump as a present. I was way too curious not to try it out. First, I tried it secretly for myself. But then it happened that I went out pumped up. And I realized that it was a good feeling.

To see the uncensored photo of Micha's junk, click on the blurred photo below. It is extremely NSFW, obviously.

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Can you explain what it was that fascinated you so much about it?
The easiest way to explain it is that I loved the feeling of "being other." But I don't mean that it makes me feel better or manlier or bolder or cooler than other people. I had the feeling that I wasn't trapped in the body I was born with. The fact that I'd made a conscious decision to change myself was important.

What was the next step after pumping?
The next step for me was saline injections—injecting a sterile, isotonic sodium chloride solution.

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The stretched skin needs extra care because of the injections. Here, Micha spreads lotion on his hands before applying it to his penis.

What was that experience like?
The feeling was great, but I didn't like getting the injections—there's always a risk of infection. And also the people around me started to wonder why there would be hardly any bulge in my pants one day, and then a huge bulge the next. That's why I started looking for something more permanent.

And when did you decide to make that next step from saline to silicone?
In the end, it took several years. The whole thing was a process. Over the course of a few years, I've had silicone injected into both my penis and scrotum. At the moment, I have four procedures behind me.

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"I usually try to make sure it isn't too obvious." Micha had these latex underpants made for him in Berlin. They fit perfectly and require upkeep—just like his penis.

How did you get the procedures?
For a long time in Europe, you could only get silicone injections in London. But several years ago, someone's name started to be heard around Berlin. He had a good reputation, and he didn't just inject others—he had also injected himself. I got in contact with him and so I was able to extensively inform myself. Around the same time I met someone in medical school who I talked to about it a lot. He ended up performing the first injections for me.

And how did it feel afterwards?
Right after the injection it pinched or strained, but the sensations were more pleasant than painful. At first the silicone feels foreign, but over time it feels more and more like part of your body.

[body_image width='1200' height='820' path='images/content-images/2015/04/09/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/09/' filename='life-with-a-silicon-penis-876-body-image-1428570894.jpg' id='44404']"Of course, you can penetrate my foreskin. A lot of guys have offered to do that. But I don't get a lot out of that sexually."

Do you face any issues because of your silicone penis in your daily life?
I lead a normal life. I go to work, buy groceries, go to bars, clubs, and to the movies. I usually try to make sure it isn't too obvious. But I guess it isn't as easy buying a new pair of pants.

How does your penis affect your sex life?
After you reach a certain size, you can't do certain things any more. At least not with everyone and not without some foreplay. But there are other things you can do with it.

You just have to free yourself from established roles and hardened ideas about sex and be ready to play. I've been told that my penis looks like an ass or a mouth from the front.

Prior to the last two editions of the Cannes Film Festival, Ryan Gosling had nearly as much goodwill among film critics as he did on Tumblr. Drive was still in the public consciousness, "Hey Girl" memes were going strong, and all was right in the world. Then Only God Forgives happened. Gosling's second collaboration with director Nicolas Winding Refn was greeted by a chorus of boos at its Cannes premiere and didn't do much better once it hit theaters, not least because the Thailand-set phantasmagoria sapped Drive of everything that made it fun and flashy, while exposing the bruised male ego in all its ugliness.

Gosling's directorial debut fared just as poorly the following year: Lost River was heavily booed and the subject of critical scorn last May. In both cases, the negative reactions were overblown. Now being released on VOD the same day it hits actual theaters, the writer-director's dark fantasia is much better than advance word might lead you to believe.

Gosling's tale centers around a young man and his mother whose house is about to be foreclosed on (if not outright demolished) by their bank. It's more akin to an American nightmare than the American Dream. And thanks to wispy voiceover and increasingly surreal plotting, the film owes as much to Terrence Malick and David Lynch as it does to Refn. Although the movie is a bit rough around the edges and not exactly cutting-edge in its social commentary, its consistently dreamy visuals and a moody score help carry the film to great results.

The main character of the film is Bones, an 18-year-old played by Iain De Caestecker. Bones comes across a flooded part of town one day and, after telling his neighbor Rat (Saoirse Ronan) about it, Bones is made privy to a local fairytale. That area, which houses a kitschy dinosaur theme park, was flooded to create a reservoir. The flooding resulted in a number of deaths, including Rat's own grandfather, and thus left the remaining town of Lost River cursed. Lost River will stay under the dark spell until one of the submerged prehistoric beasts is disinterred from its watery grave.

The story feels like folklore for the Great Recession, an urban legend kids murmur to one another to stay scared and hopeful. Lost River belongs to a school of recent movies using the wilds of Detroit as an embodiment of the economic downturn and our slowly decaying society—Only Lovers Left Alive and It Follows preceded it. However, Gosling is less interested in the city itself than its allegorical implications. This may seem in poor taste to some, but the film is too fantastical to take at face value.

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Bones is a metal scrapper. He spends his days stripping cooper from abandoned and condemned buildings, whether they're run-down apartments or old schools. He has to destroy these structures in order to extract their last remaining value, and the tenements he roams through are almost post-apocalyptic in appearance. Lost River takes place in a heightened reality akin to a ghoulish circus full of bullies and monsters, but it's very much rooted in the financial realities of the day. Though Gosling isn't always that clear or articulate in the point he's trying to get across with all this, he is sincere and aesthetically ambitious.

Said visuals are courtesy of cinematographer Benoit Debie, who's also responsible for the dream-pop flair of Enter the Void and Spring Breakers. Lost River has a similar reliance on confectionary colors cutting through the night, finding magic in the tension between light and dark. There's violence, too, though much of it is simulated or intentionally overwrought—Gosling has more restraint than his friend and collaborator Refn in this regard.

At the same time that Bones is getting into trouble with the local bully/copper-stripping kingpin for encroaching on his territory, his single mother Billy (Christina Hendricks) accepts her creepy banker's job offer at an underground nightclub vaguely reminiscent of Mulholland Drive's Club Silencio. Nothing too untoward happens onstage—some fake blood and guts and other macabre displays, mostly—but downstairs, where "the real money" is, are small "shells" the women lock themselves in to the delight of deep-pocketed customers. This hazy, neon-purple netherworld is one of Lost River's two most overtly dreamlike settings, the other being the flooded town itself. These are the scenes where the film really comes into its own.

Johnny Jewel's score is equally important to the movie's success, with synths and bells that would lull you to sleep and disturb your subconscious mind all night long. It embodies the deeply strange nature of Lost River, and like the film as a whole, it draws you in even as it seems poised to push you away.

Follow Michael on Twitter.

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The image that the author used for most of her Craigslist postings

Here's my short explanation: I was young and naive and really needed a thousand dollars.

And here's my long explanation: I was working as a hostess in a two-story, vomit-friendly nightmare of a club in Times Square (a.k.a. I was working at a panic attack inside of a panic attack while having a panic attack), finishing my spring semester of college, and interning. My paychecks were enough for my weekly MetroCard and the occasional iced coffee if I was feeling spontaneous, but I constantly came up short when rent was due. I also planned to move to Rome at the end of the summer to study abroad, so I needed money. A lot of it, and fast.

A friend had asked me if I wanted to be a real estate agent. I didn't know anything about real estate, but that didn't stop me from saying yes.

So it was that I got introduced to "Anna." She was in her mid 30s, intimidatingly Russian, and gorgeous in a way that forces you to accept that drinking kale and redeeming your Groupon voucher for Pilates can only do so much. The office was located in the basement of an apartment complex, which totally seemed legit. Anna and her assistant (and cousin) "Vlad" were the only two people in the office and welcomed me with a mug of tap water. (I've changed both of their names.) Although I immediately felt like this was the sort of place my parents warned me about, the colorful Post-It notes with addresses on them and key-cutting machine somehow calmed me.

Calling what I had a "job" might be a stretch, at least in the legal sense. I didn't sign a contract nor was I given tax documents. All of the money was to be paid under the table. However, Anna assured me that I could make thousands of dollars with them. If I successfully rented out an apartment, I would make half of the tenants' deposit in cash—so if I convinced someone to rent a $4,000-a-month unit, I'd make $2,000. After a quick tutorial in credit scores and Craigslist ads (ask if the client had a score over 720; make sure I pressed the "post" button) I began my new career as a burgeoning real estate mogul.

A part of me knew what I was doing was probably (definitely) illegal, but I chose not to think about it. I figured the less I knew, the better.

I spent my days off posting on Craigslist, eager for appointments. I would write "GORGEOUS 4BR 2BATH OPEN LUXURIOUS SPACIOUS!!!" hoping the all caps and exclamation marks would catch the attention of a desperate renter. And since I had no training in real estate terminology, the only words I used in the ads were open and spacious, because those were the most popular words on all the other Craigslist ads. Although they aren't necessarily lies, there is a certain redundancy in calling an empty space "open" and "spacious." It's like calling an empty mine shaft "deep" and "dark."

I used the same image they sent me for every apartment, whether it was a one-bedroom in Bed-Stuy or a four-bedroom in Bushwick. I should have uploaded actual images, but the image of the fake enormous room with sunlight beaming through kitchen window like a Folgers commercial was sort of protocol.

Another key point in fishing out people to view the apartment was to always call the location "East Williamsburg." Anyone who has ever scrolled through Craigslist hoping to find an affordable anomaly in Bushwick or Williamsburg has encountered this strange locale. Geographically, East Williamsburg is between the Graham and Morgan L train stops, lodged in the middle of Greenpoint, Williamsburg, and Bushwick. But in the eyes of New York real estate agents, it begins at the Morgan L and extends eastward to the Atlantic Ocean. Technically all of the listed properties were all "east of Williamsburg," so I suppose I wasn't lying, exactly, at least not about that.

The way this sort of thing is supposed to work is you sacrifice your morals and make a bunch of cash. I was pretty good at the former, but not the latter, which is to say I made absolutely no money.

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Image courtesy of the author

There aren't enough synonyms or metaphors to describe the frustration of making appointments, taking the subway to a different neighborhood, and waiting for hours at an empty home, only to have your prospective tenants flake. I couldn't run my errands or even step outside to buy a bag of Cheez-Its from the nearby bodega.

Whenever someone actually showed up to view the place, they would walk through the door already dissatisfied. This wasn't a Folger's commercial, nor was it East Williamsburg—this was the heartbreaking reality of a $3,000 3BR in Bed-Stuy. My main riff was to point at a window and confidently say, "natural light!" thereby drawing attention to the fact that the room was exposed to "the sun." As we walked across the floor, I would knock on it with the same confident smile and say, "Hardwood! Or put a rug on it!" My selling techniques were those of a toddler who has learned how to point at and name things.

I tended to get comments like, "I get it. It's an apartment with a window and a floor. I still don't want it!" It was like I roused this "salesperson character" I subconsciously accumulated from movies and TV shows. It always worked for them, but I was so painfully transparent how could anyone buy anything from me?

One problem was that I was an unlicensed realtor making appointments to show empty houses to complete strangers. Obviously I knew this was not the smartest way to make money. But only after it was over did I realize how unsafe and strange my "weird second job" truly was.

I recently talked to my friend, David, who I had recruited to help me rent out rooms and to make tons of imaginary cash. He just got his real estate license so he knows now just how unethical our jobs were.

"There are so many unscrupulous agents and brokers," he told me, "but the law dictates that there are legal perimeters that you have to work within to protect the customer and [the company] wasn't doing any of that."

One obvious way they cut corners is that you have to have a license to sell real estate, and the penalties for breaking that law, depending on the state, can range from probation to fines to jail time. I should have known that already, or at least had the presence of mind to look it up—but I was at least as desperate as the poor schmucks I was trying to unload "spacious" apartments to, and therefore easily manipulated. There was no paper trail tying me to Anna and Vlad, making me, essentially, a buffer between the scammers and the law.

My complete lack of qualifications didn't stop me from posting on Craigslist and showing apartments for months, which really made me aware of the near impossibility of finding a decent place to live in New York. From the instant someone walked in, it was obvious whether they were serious about the apartment. I knew the face I was looking for—excited yet exhausted, a look that says, "'I love this apartment but probably because I don't have the patience or time to find another one." I always wanted to find that face, because I've made it myself. It only happened once. It was actually one of the first apartments I showed, and the dude was clearly anxious and desperate. The apartment itself was uncharacteristically livable: a Bed-Stuy second-story walk-up with a balcony and exposed brick. He took five minutes and reluctantly said, "Yes!" and I thought to myself, "Holy damn I just made $1,000!" But he wasn't approved thanks to lousy credit, and I never so much as sniffed another sale.

As hard as it is to find an apartment in New York, it's almost as hard to convince a total stranger that they should take the apartment you're trying to sell them. That's what I found out when I told my marks that the unidentifiable green and blue mass pulsating in the bathroom corner was "uh... maybe not mold?" and reassured them that "that's just what Brooklyn smells like!"

Another reason I never made a sale was that the business I worked for had an odd way of doing things. For instance, I'd get sent lists of properties that included giant six-bedroom duplexes, but I'd be told I'd have to rent out the rooms separately. Armed with his wisdom as a now-actual real estate agent, David told me, "You don't piecemeal the roommates together. There is a leaseholder and then they find their own people."

It's possible practices like that scared people away from even applying for my apartments, as there are plenty of cases of real estate brokers who will take your deposit, reject your application, then try to keep your money. Maybe my prospective tenants could smell how shady this whole scheme was, even when I couldn't.

It's not breaking news that Brooklyn is one of the most expensive places to live in the country. Gentrification has pushed families further away from the center of New York as their neighborhoods become trendy and desirable. And with all this movement—people leaving, people moving in, everyone attempting to buy or sell or rent all at once—come a lot of opportunities for various middlemen to get a piece of the pie, legally or otherwise.

Although I didn't make a profit, and this was a total waste of my time, I learned a lot about what not to do when looking for an apartment. I also learned that there is no such thing as quick and easy cash, especially in New York real estate. If you are young and trying to make a lot of money, be warned: If it seems remotely illegal, it's probably highly illegal, so just get a bartending job and suck it up.

Jamie is on Twitter.

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All photos courtesy of Sanna Charles

People rarely have just a passing interest in Slayer. To fans, the band is better than whatever you listen to—always have been, always will be, because fuck you. After all, extreme music creates extreme reactions.

The original fan base has remained loyal since the 1980s, the kids scratching the band's logo into their school desks now the fat topless men screaming, "SLAAAAYER" outside every gig. Of course, the group has picked up plenty of new fans since then, thanks in part to the fact they're constantly releasing albums and still spend a huge amount of time touring for a band that's been together for going on 35 years.

Sanna Charles has been photographing Slayer fans for over a decade, starting after a festival slot in 2003 and continuing until now. She's compiled all her work into a book, God Listens to Slayer, which is being released by Ditto Press on April 17, so I thought now would be a good time to meet up for some pie and a chat.

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VICE: Let's start from the beginning: Why did you start taking photos?
Sanna Charles: I started doing photography because of a band called the Parkinsons, a London punk band. I went to their gig at the Boston Arms [in Tufnell Park] and their singer was rolling around on the floor, naked, going crazy. There was a girl taking pictures and she wasn't getting stuck in at all, and I thought I could do better. So I started photographing that band, then Melody Maker liked some of my photos and it started from there, really.

How did you get from there to the Slayer project?
I used to work for NME, and they sent me to Download Festival in 2002 to photograph Slayer. The show had been put back by three hours, it was baking hot, and they were now playing in a smaller tent instead of an outdoor stage. The tent was rammed and people were in there waiting for pretty much three hours solid. That buildup, and then watching them play, was amazing. The other photographers left the pit after three songs but I just stayed because I was so mesmerized by the crowd.

The pure release of anger and aggression by the fans felt so free. Everyone was packed into the tent, kind of like kittens in a pet shop trying to get out. Afterward I got about three portraits of people leaving, just as an afterthought, but when I got them back I really fell in love with one of the photos.

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And that's when you decided to follow Slayer around the world.
Yeah. I thought to myself, I've got a credit card, maybe I should use it? Maybe I could follow them on tour? So I convinced my friend, who had a car, and we went around the UK together, staying at friends' houses. Then we thought, Fuck it, why don't we go to Norway and Finland? So we did, and I put it on the credit card. I wouldn't do that again, but sometimes in life you have to take these financial risks.

It was great; I got to see them nine times and met some really funny people along the way. I continued shooting, mainly at European festivals, to get more fan photos. I think metal fans from mainland Europe are a bit different than America and elsewhere, but I don't know why.

What were the European fans like?
Well, there was an Estonian fan who was in a wheelchair who'd lost his job for Slayer. They wouldn't let him have the time off for the gig, so he told them to fuck off. I asked him if it was going to be hard to get a new job, and he said, "Yes, it's going to be pretty much impossible." But he was so happy to see Slayer.

Did you see many of the same faces at all these different shows?
We saw the same [scalpers]! We'd see them up and down the country. We saw one tout in Norway and we were like, "How the fuck did you afford to fly to Norway to sell tickets?"

Have you seen much change in the fan base since the early 2000s?
Yeah, I think so. I've seen a change in the crowd at metal festivals. It's more accessible now. Not Slayer, per se, but heavier music has seemed to become more accessible. If anything, it's just grown.

Did you ever get a chance to photograph the band?
No, but I didn't really want to; it wasn't about that. The first gig of the tour we went on the tour manager told us that if he saw us backstage taking photos again then we'd be off the tour and he'd take our passes. So we had to tread really carefully.

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Has the band seen the photos?
I tried to send them over, but who knows. There was an extra on one of their live DVDs from around the early 2000s about their fans, but it's just footage of them doing the one thing that I didn't want them to do: the "SLAAAAAYER" scream. I wanted them just as they are. They'd do the scream, then I'd try to get a cheeky photo afterwards. I wanted to capture them more normal, not as insane, hyped-up kids.

What do you think makes Slayer fans so unique, as opposed to, say, Metallica fans?
The music is more extreme than Metallica. Slayer have stuck with a formula and that's what the fans like. In Helsinki, I met the head of the Russian Slayer fan club. He called himself Kerry and had the same tattoos as [Slayer guitarist] Kerry King on his head. He was really nice, and his love for Slayer is just amazing. He doesn't budge in any way. Motörhead are a good example of it, too. People like the formula and the fact that they've stuck to their guns. Younger audiences are into it too because nothing else sounds like it. Also, the stuff they sing about isn't affected by the fans getting older or their lifestyles changing. I think the fans are timeless because the music is timeless.

Follow Jak on Twitter.

Pre-order God Listens to Slayer on the Ditto Press website.

See more photos from the book below:

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

The election is one month away and everyone is courting the youth vote. UKIP leader Nigel Farage has been fist-bumping Joey Essex, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has been pleading with students to give him another chance after betraying them in 2010, Labour's Ed Miliband has been messing about with his selfie stick, and Prime Minister David Cameron has been making six-year-old schoolgirls headbutt their desks, which is odd behavior, given that six-year-olds are currently unable to vote in the election.

To find out what young British voters are really thinking ahead of the most anarchic election in living memory, we went to an anarchic student house party in Manchester to talk to the wasted generation about George Osborne ("bellend"), the common agricultural policy, and nitrous oxide.

More from VICE on Election '15 here.