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Two Murderers Escape New York Prison, Leave 'Have a Nice Day' Note for Authorities

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Two Murderers Escape New York Prison, Leave 'Have a Nice Day' Note for Authorities

Staging Shakespeare's Tragedies in Tehran: An Interview with Iranian Director Mohammad Aghebati

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Most young Americans would be hard-pressed to name a major artist or performer working in the Middle East today. In fact, the most visible recent "performances" staged in the Middle East have beenthe gruesome beheadings captured on video by ISIS. Individuals in the region who lack the megalomaniacal tendencies of the Islamic State are rarely heard by the Western press. Meanwhile, true cultural exchange is increasingly difficult; art and artists, already low on the US government's list of priorities, seem to be considered trinkets we can't afford to trifle with when faced with the kind of brutality we now see in the region.

Iranian theater director Mohammad Aghebati feels differently. Born in 1975, his childhood coincided with the Islamic Revolution and the eight-year long Iran-Iraq War that followed. He now splits his time between Tehran and New York, making theater in an attempt to work through the traumas of the Middle East's particularly grisly recent history. International touring is a standard part of most major theater artists' careers, but it's not so easy for those from countries formerly designated as part of the so-called "axis of evil." For Aghebati to share his work with the US, the country that perhaps needs to see it most given our ongoing deleterious involvement in the region, he faces a set of obstacles many artists would find insurmountable. VICE spoke with Aghebati recently to talk sanctions, censorship, and what it means for an artist to be a "rescue dog."

VICE: What can you tell me about the new project you're working on in Tehran?
Mohammad Aghebati: I'm working on a production of Richard II in collaboration with Mohammad Charmshir and Afshin Hashemi. It's a free adaptation of Shakespeare's play in the form of a monologue, and it's inspired by current events in the Middle East. The Middle East today conjures up images of inadequate leaders, bloody power struggles, sectarianism, extremism, and the destruction of countries in the flame of war. These are the images we are working with as we reinterpret Shakespeare's tragedy. This is a different and very difficult project for our group, but we hope that by the end of this year we'll be able to take it to New York.

Theater provides a chance for dialogue between cultures. A dramatic heritage belongs to everyone. It allows us to transcend time, place, and language.

You've adapted a number of classics of Western dramatic literature (Hamlet, Oedipus). Do you see yourself as blending a variety of theatrical traditions? Are there forms of traditional Persian theater you feel particularly connected to?
There are elements of traditional Iranian theater like oral storytelling, and the acting methods, and Naqali in Taazieh that I find pretty modern and exciting. But I've never been interested in limiting my work geographically. Theater provides a chance for dialogue between cultures. A dramatic heritage belongs to everyone. It allows us to transcend time, place, and language.

The practice of adaptation is common here because it helps Iranian artists get around censorship, as you can claim that the story you're telling is someone else's story, not a story about Iran, and therefore not a story that needs to be scrutinized, not a story that would be of any concern to the government. Often, it is the local and native theater that attracts the attention of the authorities because they worry about anything that might undermine their power.

As I understand it, all books and films in Iran are subject to strict censorship, and foreign works are often altered to conform to Islamic standards of correctness as interpreted by the censors. For example, it would be considered indecent for a woman in a film to say "I love you," to her partner, so the dialogue would be changed. If it concerns sex or politics, it's not making it through. The film director Mohsen Makmalbaf has been quoted as saying that "Anything that makes people think is censored in Iran." Do you agree? How does censorship impact your work in the theater?
I feel censorship exists in one form or another and in different levels everywhere. It also exists in Iran, but to think that people cannot express love in a movie is an exaggeration. Censorship is based in both politics and religion, and political censorship is often susceptible to change in ways that religious censorship isn't. Challenging censorship, treating it as an obstacle to be overcome has led to a special type of art and aesthetics. The audience is very familiar with what can and cannot be shown or said, and it creates an unspoken dialogue between the audience and the artist, an indirect dialogue.

[body_image width='1000' height='667' path='images/content-images/2015/06/03/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/06/03/' filename='staging-shakespeares-tragedies-in-tehran-an-interview-with-iranian-director-mohammad-aghebati-body-image-1433367291.jpg' id='62904']

Photo by Reza Ghaziani

How would you compare the theater/arts scenes in Tehran and, say, New York City? What role does theater play in the lives of young people?
Many more theater artists and producers in Tehran are young. Almost 75% of the audience is made up of young people, often university students. Therefore you have passionate artists and audiences who are not so much concerned with the commercial value of the work, but rather crave an art form that can catalyze new ways of thinking, that can offer an alternative to the government-approved media. In Tehran, it's often the plays that are the most original and audacious in form and content that are the most successful.

What I've seen in the US though is that while in Tehran the government is our biggest obstacle, you're equally constrained. It's just that American theater makers are primarily constrained by the financial difficulties they face. But both situations hold artists back.


For more Iranian art, watch our documentary on Iranian filmmakers:


Over the past few years you've done some traveling back and forth between Iran and the US to study and to tour your work. During that time, relations between Washington and Tehran have been, at best, tense, and often downright hostile. What are some of the challenges you've faced as a result of the ongoing political situation? Have you been personally affected by US-imposed sanctions?
I believe that the fires caused by politicians always end up burning the poor people who had nothing to do with starting them. Every day I see the pain caused to ordinary Iranian people by the sanctions. These pressures, the terrorist accusations, and the constant threat of war keeps producing more tension and anxiety for people who are also struggling with domestic problems within Iran as well. The people of both countries have a better understanding of peace and security of the region than those of the politicians in power.

Before calling myself a political artist, I have to honor my obligation as a human.

Unfortunately, in the midst of all this chaos, the artists suffer. They're cut off from each another and their work is stuck in the middle of this animosity. This is worst when you go back and forth between the two countries. I personally experienced the anxiety when I had to deal with securing a visa for one of my actors. I was lucky that he was able to get his visa just before the show, but no matter how well-known and respected you are, if you are an Iranian there are full background checks that take forever. That's always a challenge. In the past few decades some prominent artists have not been able to travel to festivals abroad because of these issues. Many students have not been able to continue their studies abroad, and something as simple as a flight can become a scary problem.

Do you consider yourself a political artist?
I have never wanted to be labeled a political artist. I simply try not to be fooled by clichés and propaganda. I try to look at the world around me through a different lens, to pay attention to issues that others might not notice. I worry about those who might otherwise go unseen. Like a rescue dog, I have to follow my nose, react to the scent of life. Before calling myself a political artist, I have to honor my obligation as a human.

A Farm That Floats on Water Could Help Solve Global Food Shortage

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A Farm That Floats on Water Could Help Solve Global Food Shortage

Screw You, Milk Companies: Milk.com Is One of the Last Bastions of the Old Internet

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[body_image width='1184' height='562' path='images/content-images/2015/06/03/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/06/03/' filename='scerw-you-milk-companies-milkcom-is-one-of-the-last-bastions-of-the-old-internet-body-image-1433365034.png' id='62896']

The milk.com homepage. Screenshot via milk.com

In 2010 the domain name "sex.com" sold for a whopping $12 million dollars, which made it the most expensive patch of HTML ever registered. It's just a word. A homestead accidentally built on a juicy vein of algorithmic oil. Gary Kremen, the man who claimed the domain back in 1995, is the internet's own Beverly Hillbilly. There's no mathematical difference between sex.com and sxe.com, except for the fact that sex.com is worth $12 million.

If you go to milk.com, you'll find the digital home of Dan Bornstein. Unlike the men and women who happily rung up their rights to investing.com, toys.com, and porn.com, Bornstein is a holdout. Milk.com looks a lot like it did when he registered it back in 1994: a simple collection of recipes, stories, and Bornstein's own music. It's one of the oldest active personal sites on the web, kept far from the hands from any enterprising dairy companies for over two decades.

There have been many moments over the years where Bornstein could've cashed in his chips and taken home a year's worth of pay for his valuable URL. Why has he stuck to his guns? VICE caught up with him to talk about the birth of milk.com in the days of the early internet, the offers he's received, and what it would take or him to sell.

VICE: How did you first get interested in the internet back in the early 90s?
Dan Bornstein: I'm a computer programmer. I've been doing it all my life, since I was seven. Right now I'm starting a new company. It was 1994 when I got milk.com, which was back when the internet was still a very new thing. People outside the industry barely knew what it was. HTTP was still relatively new; Netscape Navigator, the first commercial browser, came out that year. I was at my first job out of college, and the reason I got a domain at all was for email. Back in those days, everyone used their work email address as their personal address, and I was unsatisfied at work. I realized that I'd have to switch email addresses every time I switched jobs, so that's why I got my own site. Once I had the domain I figured I'd might as well have a website on it. There's not much to it. I've got my resume on there and a couple other pages, but to this day I have the same email.

Most personal sites you see aren't maintained. They're more of a gravestone than a living legacy.

What was the process like for registering a domain back in 1994?
It wasn't a commercial transaction. I had to apply for a domain, and back in those days you had to write a paragraph-long justification for why you should get the name you wanted to register. If I recall correctly you submitted two or three names, like first choice, second choice, third choice. You didn't do this on a website, instead it was a text file that you FTP'd (File Transfer Protocol.) You wait to hear back, and I got my first choice.

What made you choose the domain "milk.com"?
It was a running joke between a friend and me. At the time, dan.com was available, daniel.com was available, and in retrospect those would've been valuable domains to have, but I didn't want to be "dan@dan.com." This friend of mine, for vaguely justifiable reasons, called me "milk boy." So I was like "oh, milk.com is available." It was a short word and kind of memorable, so that's why I picked it.


For more on the Internet, watch our documentary on the bourgeoning digital love industry:


At the time you must've had no idea that the internet would grow like it did and dairy companies would end up gunning for the name, right?
No way. I certainly wasn't like, "This thing is going to be worth millions!"

If you go to milk.com, you'll see your music, your favorite recipes, stuff like that. Did it ever have any purpose beyond being your personal site?
Nope, it was always just my homepage. Just a place for me to dump random stuff that I thought might be of vague interest to other people.

I've had people who would talk about their "client," and I assume that at least one of them were representing some sort of milk organization.

Obviously, you've received offers for the domain name, but you say on your site that you won't sell it for short of a humongous offer. What about milk.com makes you want to keep it? Is it sentimental value? Do you just get a kick out of it?
All the above, but it's also the same reason I got it in the first place. I don't want to change my email address. I find real value in that. It's also fun to have because it's a good party conversation.

What's the most amount of money you've been offered for it?
The biggest number I've ever seen directly was $100,000, which I think is a total lowball. But I've had other offers where the person on the other end is being kind of cagey. I've had people who would talk about their "client," and I assume that at least one of them were representing some sort of milk organization. But we've never had any real negotiation.

The internet has changed so much over the last 15 years. It's cool to go to milk.com and remember that there was a time when you could just get a domain like that. It reminds you that, once upon a time, the internet was owned by actual people. It makes me nostalgic; does it give you the same vibes?
Yeah it does. You don't see many personal sites anymore. I won't say that I'm the most active updater in the world, but I do try to keep milk.com current. A little bit of content every once in a while. But most personal sites you see aren't maintained. They're more of a gravestone than a living legacy.

Could you ever see yourself selling it? Do you see yourself going to your grave with milk.com?
On the one hand, I'd love to say that I'll have it forever and I'll die with it. But on the other hand I do live in the real world and life is expensive. If someone came forward with a $10 million offer, and they were really serious, I'd probably go for it. I mean, that would be enough for me to retire on. It would make a significant impact on my lifestyle. It would represent a certain amount of personal freedom and it'd be hard to turn that down on principle.

You sound like you'd struggle with that though. It seems like it's important enough to you that it'd be a difficult decision no matter what.
Oh yeah, it would not be an easy decision. Even at $10 million.

Follow Luke Winkie on Twitter.

My Life Driving Uber as an Iraqi War Veteran with PTSD

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[body_image width='1200' height='782' path='images/content-images/2015/05/29/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/29/' filename='driving-uber-as-an-iraqi-war-veteran-body-image-1432909931.jpg' id='61356']

Illustrations by Matt Rota

Stuck on my dashboard where everyone can see is my Combat Infantry Badge. It's a medal given to soldiers "who personally fought in active ground combat... engaged in active ground combat, to close with and destroy the enemy with direct fires." It's supposed to be a conversation starter, a way to bridge the gap between the passengers who are constantly coming in and going out of my car.

Almost no one notices it, or they notice it and just don't care.

I've picked up countless fares and only two have asked me what it was. When I told them it was an award I earned in Iraq, one guy went on a monologue—to impress me, I guess—about a distant relative of his who was in the Special Forces. The other said nothing beyond, "Oh."

Far more people ask me why I have a plain black-and-white Uber decal on my windshield and not one of those "cool" glow-in-the-dark ones instead. Others ask why I don't also have a pink mustache. But mostly my passengers spend the ride staring down at their phones, treating me like a machine while my thoughts drift, inevitably, to the voiceovers from Taxi Driver that have been rattling around in my head for months.

Listen, you fuckers, you screwheads. Here is a man who would not take it anymore. A man who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit. Here is a man who stood up.

Except I'm not standing up. I'm sitting down, watching the city fly past my windshield.

My first experience with Uber was about a year ago, in early 2014, shortly after I found myself blindsided by life and woke up one morning unemployed and single, with nowhere to live. Living more or less out of my car, I crashed at my sister's place down in Los Angeles to regroup. I had just moved home to California after spending a few years in the Rust Belt, with plans of returning once I got my shit together. Never surrender. You might lose every single battle, but if you press on, you can still win the war. At least that's what my dumb ass thinks.

One night, my sister and I wanted to go out in Venice but didn't want to drive back drunk or pay a fortune for a cab. My sister pulled out her phone and pressed a couple buttons. Minutes later, a late-model Prius pulled up and we got in. Interested in what the driver was doing, I started asking questions. She was your everyday LA cliché: an aspiring actress living off Wilshire, doing some stand-up comedy, working on a screenplay. She was just Ubering to get by: It covered her rent and bills, and she made out all right. She would only drive till 10 PM. As a woman, she told me, driving any later would be unsafe.

I'm not a struggling actor. I'm another kind of cliché: your everyday unemployed Operation Iraqi Freedom combat vet with PTSD. I'd served in Mosul during the insurgency in 2003 and 2004. Our unit slogan had been "Punish the Deserving." I was a heavy weapons machine gunner. Having barely survived failed marriages, ambushes on Route Tampa in Mosul, and countless "movement to contact" missions in Iraq, how hard could this job be? What's "unsafe"?

Most of the time I'm completely invisible to the people I drive. Perhaps we're all conditioned not to speak to the hired help.

Besides, I've always wanted to drive people around. Years ago, a reporter from the Wall Street Journal once contacted me about the blog I was maintaining from Iraq. Later, he wrote in his article, "Army specialist Colby Buzzell figured he'd cap his yearlong deployment to Iraq by mustering out of the service this winter and easing into a new career. 'I was thinking about maybe driving a cab,' he says."

When I returned home, I decided to go ahead and fuck up the rest of my life by trying to become a writer instead.

RELATED: Read Colby's interview with the author of Escape from Baghdad

I imagine veterans from previous generations either drove a yellow cab like the one Travis Bickle drove in Taxi Driver after he left the Marine Corps, or ended up driving for one of those veteran-run cab companies scattered across the country. For my generation of vets, that is no longer the case. In this new sharing economy, where anything can be summoned with the touch of a smartphone, hailing a cab is going to be as outdated as the use of ground troops.

Uber has been actively targeting military veterans for a while now. If you think about it, veterans are their ideal drivers. When my unit returned from Iraq, it seemed like nearly every single soldier I knew went out and bought a brand new car with their saved-up combat pay. There's a shitload of unemployed veterans out there with new vehicles to put to work.

In 2012, the Associated Press reported that 45 percent of the 1.6 million US service members who had been deployed to Iraq and or Afghanistan had returned home seeking compensation by filing claims for service-connected disability benefits. Hundreds of thousands of men and women have been forced to wait in a never-ending line alongside countless other veterans, all hoping to one day see the light at the end of the VA backlog tunnel. It's a line that eventually leads to a dead end, where some veterans literally die waiting for their benefits to kick in. The war has made us "the most medically and mentally troubled generation of former troops the nation has ever seen." Uber offers us a job to work while we wait for our benefits to arrive.

I've thought of suicide often. Where I live, people are already dead. But at night, I pick up people with lives, and money in their pockets, places to go, things to do, people to see.

The unemployment rate for veterans has improved since the worst days of the financial crisis, when it sat at 12 percent for people who had fought in Iraq or Afghanistan and an incredible 30 percent for veterans under the age of 24. Still, post-9/11 vets had an unemployment rate of 6.7 percent in February, compared to 5.5 percent of the general population. Many young vets welcomed the company's push to recruit us as part of their UBERMILITARY: WE WANT YOU initiative, which had the goal of hiring 50,000 veterans by 2016, "which amounts to roughly one-quarter of all the unemployed vets from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan."

In February, Uber announced that only one-fifth of that goal had been reached. Of those serving for Uber, it has been reported that "10,000 veterans have generated more than $35 million in take-home pay working for the $50 billion tech giant."

Not bad. I went ahead and enlisted in the UberMilitary.

It was easy, significantly easier than walking into a recruiting station and enlisting in the United States military during a time of war. No drug tests, psychiatric evaluations, written exams, driving tests, orientations, interviews, questions about my education or prior work experience—nothing. All I had to do was go to their website, pass their online background check, and do a brief ten-minute vehicle inspection at one of their locations in the city. In a matter of minutes, I became a grunt for Uber. I was employed, or self-employed, meaning that I was in charge of my own destiny, able to set my own hours, free to go AWOL and take as many vacation days as needed. I was my own boss. Everything was awesome.

Sure, I didn't get the "401(k) plan, gym reimbursement, nine paid company holidays, full medical/dental/visions package and an unlimited vacation policy" that those working on the tech side of Uber received. I also knew my chances of upward mobility were nonexistent. But my ass was just lucky to be employed and not homeless, holding up a cardboard sign saying "I'm a Veteran." Thank God for that.

My first night driving, I started around 9 PM and drove until 3 AM. All night long, in my head, CREDITS appear over scenes from SAN FRANCISCO NIGHTLIFE, jazz in the background. I can't stop thinking about Taxi Driver, about Travis Bickle and his loneliness and his stream of consciousness:

Now I see this clearly. My whole life is pointed in one direction. There never has been a choice for me. All night long I'm quoting the shit out of that movie, picking up and driving customers. All the animals come out at night—whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Some day a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.I go all over. I take people to the Bronx, Brooklyn, I take 'em to Harlem. I don't care. Don't make no difference to me. It does to some.

Makes no difference to me, either. Fuck it. I'm out here on the West Coast and I pick up whoever and take them to wherever, too. I take them to the Tenderloin, the Mission, Upper and Lower Haight, the Castro, even Oakland or sometimes San Jose. Like Travis Bickle, I don't care and I don't discriminate. You can't, with Uber. You follow orders, the same way you do in the military. You pick up whoever the damn app tells you to pick up and you follow the thin blue line on your app that tells you exactly where to go. It could be the four drag queens heading out to the Tenderloin, dressed up like Divine, reeking of shitty perfume, built like linebackers, all packed into my compact, four-door Kia Rio, screaming at me to hurry the fuck up and drive faster. Or it could be the passenger who just wants to go a couple blocks, who tells me to slow down while we cruise through a back alley and shoots up heroin silently in my backseat. It could be the little old lady carrying four bags of groceries who needs a ride home up one of the steepest hills in the city. It could be the girl in tech who wants to start a blog called "I Hate All Engineers" and is looking forward to spending $20,000 on a celebrity chef for her wedding. Or it could be the wasted bro who sizes me up and asks if I do MMA. "Why?" I asked. "You think you can take me?"

You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? Then who the hell else are you talking... you talking to me?


[body_image width='1100' height='740' path='images/content-images/2015/05/29/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/29/' filename='driving-uber-as-an-iraqi-war-veteran-body-image-1432910029.jpg' id='61358']


I first saw Taxi Driver when I was a teenager. A friend of mine had a VHS tape, and I remember watching scenes of 1970s New York with wide-open eyes, taking in everything—the grim visuals of the city falling apart around antiheroic Travis Bickle, his long monologues dripping with pain. Bickle got to me. Forty years after the film came out and a decade and a half after I first saw it, I was driving around a strange city, Bickle's words filling my head again.

My first night of driving, after parking my car out in the Mission, I clean the empty beer cans and whiskey bottles people have thrown under the seat and check my phone to see how much I made. I almost couldn't believe the number on the screen: nearly $300 before Uber took its 25 percent cut. Some might have been elated, but I wanted to cry as I realized I could probably make more in one week driving for Uber than I did all of last year as a freelance writer.

Loneliness has followed me my whole life, everywhere. In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There's no escape. I'm God's lonely man.

I'm the modern-day Driving Miss Daisy. Since I don't work in tech, I'm the dark guy driving whitey.

What I like most about driving for Uber is how I get to really see the city. Thanks to a local nonprofit organization that assists vets who find themselves blackballed by life, I live alone in the Tenderloin, the last crime-laden slice of old San Francisco. I couldn't afford to live anywhere else.

My room consists of four white walls. On one of these walls is an original Taxi Driver movie poster. The tagline reads, "On every street in every city in this country there's a nobody who dreams of being a somebody." It's been with me for years and hangs framed over by the twin bed that reminds me I'm damned to be alone. No kitchen, no closet, no view of the Bay. The lone window I do have has a view of the cement wall of the neighboring building. The shower and toilet are communal, located down the hall.

I've thought of suicide often. Where I live, people are already dead.

But at night, I pick up people with lives and money in their pockets, places to go, things to do, people to see. They get all dressed up and socialize with one another electronically via their cell phones. For me, it's fascinating: observing and listening to other people in the backseat of my car.

One guy explains to me that most of the twentysomething tech employees where he works make so much money they don't know what to do with it, since the only recreational activity they're into is video games. A professionally dressed young woman gets into my car and calls up her best friend to complain about her boyfriend: "He's always on his cell phone or computer, I see him work hard and fight for things at his start-up, but he never fights for things in our relationship."

MOTHERBOARD: Uber Wants to Hire a Million More Drivers Then Replace Them All With Robots

It's no secret tech runs San Francisco. You're either part of the "haves" who work in tech, talk about tech, cater to tech, or try to make a living off tech, or you're part of the have-nots, the people who aren't in tech and are being driven out of this town. It's reached a point where I think someone should just take this city and just... just flush it down the fuckin' toilet. Many who work in tech are living their lives as if it's the carefree Roaring 20s, while I'm more or less stuck in the Great Depression. I realized this when I picked up a techie outside one of the many big name tech companies located in SOMA. He was about my age and needed a ride home to his enormous house in Palo Alto, a good hour away. As he messed around with his cell phone, I realized that I'm the modern-day Driving Miss Daisy. Since I don't work in tech, I'm the dark guy driving whitey.

I'm also a veteran. I give Uber a PR boost. "Look, we give those poor, poor veterans a way to make money!" they can say. But veterans have experience being exploited, used up, treated as a statistic. As one soldier motto goes, "Suck it up and drive on."

Why doesn't this generation have the same opportunities as World War II's "Greatest Generation?"

The Department of Veterans Affairs has reported that "11 to 20 percent of veterans who served in OIF or OEF have PTSD in a given year." I'd say that's about the same percentage of people who will engage in a conversation with me. Most of the time, while driving these people around one of the most picturesque cities in the country, I just see the glow illuminating from their cell phones, radiating off their faces while they text. I can see them smiling, sometimes laughing. I follow the blue line guiding me wherever they're going. A robot could do my fucking job. Most of the time I'm completely invisible to the people I drive. Perhaps we're all conditioned not to speak to the hired help.

Some people do put their cell phones away and speak with the driver. Especially the liquored-up passengers after last call, like the guy who asked me if I've hooked up with any females while Ubering, or if I ever get hit on. I honestly told him, "No, that never happens."

When asked why not, I told him what a friend of mine who works in tech told me when I asked her the same question: "Think about it. You're an Uber driver. What girl wants to be with an Uber driver?"

She's right. Nobody's interested. Sometimes there'll be several people in my car, all having a jolly old time. I'm hardly ever included in their conversations, like the fierce debate as to what to do when a grizzly bear attacks you while camping (don't move vs. hit the bear in the nose), or the one that nearly ended in an all-out drunken brawl over the best burrito joints in the city (el Farolito vs. Cancun).

One pick-up I had was outside a restaurant in Hayes Valley. I had my hazards on while I waited patiently, observing them passionately kiss each another. They kissed as if they were in love. It reminded me of the way I kissed, when I too was in love. Their goodbye took forever and when she finally got in my car, she pulled out her cell phone.

"Hey honey, how's it going? Oh, it was boring, I wanted to leave the whole time. How are the kids? Good... Oh, remember that one coworker I told you about? I just found out he's been sleeping with all the associates... he's married too, I like his wife... he's a good guy..." I'm sure he is.

Each night when I return the cab to the garage, I have to clean the cum off the back seat. Some nights, I clean off the blood. Each night I make my way out to the Mission to retrieve my car and pray to God nobody has smashed the windows in to steal anything inside of it.


For more on veterans returning home from war, check out our HBO episode on American veterans with PTSD:


You get a job. You become the job. I partially took this job as a way to deal with loneliness and to keep me out of bars, but the sad reality is that this job makes me feel far lonelier than I was at the start.

Sometimes I get so depressed driving that I just can't continue. I'll call it a night and, after parking my car, make my way over to Frank's 21 Club, a dive located in the Tenderloin, on the corner of Turk and Taylor. There, at the bar, I'll order drinks one right after another and think about my life, what I did wrong, how the fuck I ended up where I did, all the while staring at the sign located behind the bar that says, "Road to Ruin." But most nights, I suck it up and drive on and continue my mission, picking up passengers one right after another.

RELATED: The Invisible Scars of War

The other thing I have on my dashboard is a picture of my son, by the speedometer, to remind me to drive on. Nearly every penny I make goes to him, and toward the chance to live closer to him again.

According to my weekly reports from Uber emails, I average anywhere from $40 to $50 an hour doing this shit—by my count, it's less.

Sometimes, I tally up the things I've got going for me: I'm a veteran. I have an Honorable Discharge. I used my Post 9/11 GI Bill to obtain a work permit into the middle class, a.k.a. a diploma. Historically, higher education has helped generations of veterans go on to live nice, middle-class lives. So why is it then that when I apply for job after job after job, virtually no one ever responds? The scarce few who do tell me they only have part-time positions, jobs that pay only a fraction of what Uber claims to pay their drivers. Why doesn't this generation have the same opportunities as World War II's "Greatest Generation?" Why am I in the front seat driving, watching life go past me, instead of seated in the backseat fiddling around with my smart phone, enjoying it?

Uber periodically sends out emails profiling drivers, success stories, along with the hashtag #whyidrive. They all look like the shiny happy people who I seem to constantly pick up and drop off. The main reason why I drive is because it's a job and I'm not one of them. Who else is going to hire me? What else am I going to do other than write about it? Or perhaps maybe I drive because I've watched Taxi Driver one too many times and— I don't believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention, I believe that one should become a person like other people.

Maybe one day, I keep telling myself. To become a person like other people: That would be nice.

Follow Colby Buzzell on Twitter. For more of Colby's work, check out his books.

Study Finds Europeans Love to Get High — And Their Drugs Are Stronger and Purer Than Ever

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Study Finds Europeans Love to Get High — And Their Drugs Are Stronger and Purer Than Ever

Flooded Corpses Are Leaking Formaldehyde into North Ireland's Groundwater

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The dead are haunting Northern Ireland, as flooding graves have been found to be leaching cancer-causing formaldehyde and ammonia into the soil. These toxic chemicals, used in the embalming process, are being washed off of decomposing bodies in water-logged coffins. Thanks to the proximity of many affected graveyards to city centers, the same chemicals that will someday be used to preserve corpses may already be inside of residents.

In what local undertaker William O'Donnell called "a bigger problem than asbestos," there are growing concerns about how the chemicals draining off corpses will harm not only the environment but the living. Groundwater from Milltown Cemetery in Belfast runs downhill through an area called the Bog Meadows and into the River Lagan, which winds through the center of the city. This contaminated carcinogenic water, washing through decaying bodies and into the rivers, poses a serious risk to public health. Environmental development experts from around the world have urged local authorities to "model the risk" in places where the poisonous groundwater is near the surface before things get lethal.

In recent years, Ballyoan in Londonderry has had significant issues with flooding from six feet under. When a local newspaper first covered the story, one gravedigger spoke out about the horrors and the illegal activity that he had seen on the job. In an interview with VICE, the former gravedigger, who wishes to be referred to as Dermot, insisted that he had expressed fear to his employers about the risks he and his colleagues were facing on a daily basis. Laborers like Dermot had been handling this toxic water, which was filling graves as quickly as they could dig.

"In the four years I worked there, no protection was given to any grave digger when working in these water-filled graves. We had to wear a normal uniform. Not only were staff being put at risk, but the public were also exposed," Dermot explained.

"To give you an idea of the extent of the water issue, one person who was being buried was over 33 stone [460 pounds] in weight and after we had laid her to rest in the grave, we allowed [time] for the family to leave. When we came back to fill it in, the woman in the coffin was floating in her grave in approximately four or five feet of water. That's how bad things were."

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Photo courtesy of an anonymous Irish gravedigger

Scenes like this one are not exclusive to Ballyoan, or indeed this part of Northern Ireland. In Belfast's main burial ground, Roselawn Cemetery, a story emerged of a bereaved daughter desperately working to protect her mother's flooded grave, only days after burial. Of course, there is no elegant way to decompose, but the disturbing notion of a loved one dissolving underground in putrid muddy water is horrifying to families, all contamination dangers aside.

As someone who worked in the muck on a daily basis, Dermot told VICE about the grim situation facing gravediggers.

"The water in the graves seriously affects the coffins already buried. Coffins are not watertight so when the grave fills with water it also fills the coffin, which decomposes and rots the bodies faster. In my opinion this is where the water mixes with the body and embalming fluids," he explained.

This is the vile reality: As bodies bloat and rot in the rancid groundwater, they leach broken down body tissue and lethal formaldehyde into the surrounding ground. While the microorganisms in a corpse are not pathogenic, the embalming chemicals that escape into the groundwater and surrounding soil are lethal. Embalmers wear full protective gear when working on bodies at the funeral home, while protection for gravediggers and the public has not been seen as a real concern. New reports suggest it should be.

RELATED: Are We Just Shit at Death?

"When a grave does fill with water, we were told by management to remove it using a petrol pump," Dermot explained. This water would be pumping onto the path, so that it makes its way into the drain. But this would often overflow, or worse, the hose would not reach the path. The public were completely unaware that the water they are walking through, that was draining off near their loved one's headstone was from other graves."

Dermot then shared that when opening a grave on one occasion, the stench was so strong that the workmen vomited. "As I approached my colleagues I looked into the grave. It was filled with water which had a bright greenish oily substance floating on the surface," Dermot said.

The oily fluid he describes as a skin on the water is a foul blend of melted flesh and toxic chemicals. At room temperature, formaldehyde gives off a pungent odor; it's also known to bring about nausea and dull headaches, like those many of Dermot's fellow laborers experienced. If the heavy smell of swollen water-rotted bodies hadn't turned their stomaches, the presence of the pollutant chemicals was sure to.

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Photo courtesy of the author

The Environmental Agency studies show that formaldehyde dilutes into the soil and becomes harmless within ten years of burial. In these instances, however, the recently dead are being flooded out within days, leaching the chemicals into the soil quickly. This gives formaldehyde and ammonia a longer span in the soil, at toxic concentrations. In older graveyards, there are fears that banned chemicals previously used in embalming, like arsenic, could also be present in the ground.

It's this chemical concern that provoked Jamie Orr, of environmental organization Friends of the Earth, to call for graveyards to be labelled "contaminated spaces."

The physical weight of water in the ground itself would give the gravediggers equal trouble. The more that flooding warped the grave, the more contact Dermot and his co-workers would have with the contaminated soil, in desperate efforts to repair the walls. In extreme conditions, a saturated grave would collapse at the sides, often exposing the coffins of those buried in the parallel grave. When the wall collapsed, a coffin could fall into the fresh grave and become irreparably damaged, or worse, eject its occupant.

It was here that Dermot revealed an even more grotesque story, alleging that on one occasion a baby's coffin, buried decades earlier at an illegal depth of 18 inches, was damaged in a reopening. Supervisors told the laborers to bury the child in a black trash bag, despite storing small brown coffins for exactly this kind of incident.

RELATED: How Bodies Were Buried During History's Worst Epidemics

"When a funeral was en route we had to keep pumping water out of the ground every 5 to 10 minutes. The management asked us to cover the water with straw 2 minutes before the undertakers would arrive at the graveside," Dermot explained.

"Management always told us that if any family member questions the straw floor that we should tell them it was to keep the bottom of the grave level, when it was actually a means of hiding the rising groundwater for the graveside ceremony."

Until recently, the workforce caring for the graveyards have not only been under-informed and ill-equipped to deal with the potential dangers, but the conditions are often so horrendous that these distressing situations have been hushed and dealt with poorly. It's clear, that in some allegations, the management has been complicit in perpetuating lethal chemical exposure through the neglect of staff coping with on-site flooding. According to Dermot, these relaxed standards have resulted in a complete side-stepping of legal burial requirements, in place to protect the dignity of those laid to rest.

As the gruesome reality of our waterlogged dead comes to light, a movement toward reimagining burial methods has been energized. Organizations like the Natural Death Center promote alternative embalming methods and burial ideas, like wicker coffins. A solution, perhaps, but one that many in Irish culture consider too extreme or unorthodox. There has been much slower willingness to adopt cremation as an appropriate form of burial in Northern Ireland, compared to the rest of the UK where it is much more common than ground burial.

VICE spoke to David Spiers, founder of Greenacre Innovations, a company specializing in burial technologies that protect the environment and people. In particular he has been trying to raise the alarm on formaldehyde leaching and the dangers it poses.

He made it clear that this was not just a Northern Irish problem but a worldwide one: "There is a much larger threat posed from all cemetery leachate including the formaldehyde element, regardless of where these are situated in the world. Not enough investigation has been carried out in this sensitive area. Contrary to being told it dissipates over time, [formaldehyde] actually merely dilutes, leaving the highly probable conclusion that some percentage of this carcinogen toxin may well make its way into some of our ground water source."


Watch our documentary on euthanasia, "Death in a Can":


In Irish society, where open-coffins at wakes are still a common practice, embalming is obviously an important part of the process to keep the dead spruced up for their mourning relatives. One pioneering development by Spiers's team is a scientifically-engineered neutralizing material within a liner/pillow that's placed beneath the body. This technology allows traditional formaldehyde-based embalming to carry on, dealing with potential chemical contaminants inside a watertight, sterile coffin.

Until recently, Spiers had only received frustratingly passive statements from government and legislative bodies, but last month, Spiers met with Environment Minister Mark H. Durkan to discuss how new procedures and legislation could be put in motion.

"The Minister was extremely positive in that an acknowledgement was made that formaldehyde and cemetery fluids are a concerning risk and there are currently no protective measures in place to address this issue."

In a brief statement to VICE, the Minister's office commented that "the Northern Ireland Environment Agency (NIEA) does not have a role in endorsing the use of new environmental products. The environmental need for ERF (environmental remediation formula) will be driven by the geology, local water courses, etc. of a cemetery site with any potential mitigation measures engineered or installed during the construction of new cemeteries/extensions." The statement then directed any further inquiry to specific cemeteries and councils.

At the moment, it is not known just how many graveyards are abiding by unenforced tighter regulations recommended by international experts, disposing of contaminated groundwater responsibly, and red-flagging land that is in need of an effective drainage system.

In Northern Ireland, 80% of the population still opts for ground burial. There is no immediate government plan to prevent embalmed corpses from leaching the deadly cancer-causing chemicals into the earth. It appears that the dead will continue to leak flesh and formaldehyde out of their hallowed graves, until it truly becomes a concern for the living.

Follow David Gilmour on Twitter.

Comics: Lorenz

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Check out Sarah Mazzetti's website and Instagram.


When Fandom Goes Wrong: The Dark Tale of the 'Final Fantasy VII' House

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Image via Deviantart user reinaldoabdo.

It wasn't the hunger that finally drove Syd to leave the Final Fantasy VII House. It wasn't the way the others took advantage of him, a 19-year-old trans kid with a love of art and a drinking problem. It wasn't even the abuse, or the ears listening in whenever he tried to communicate with the outside world. No—what really did it was the theft of his shoes.

The rainstorm that lashed State College, Pennsylvania, the day before that had been so intense that the little supermarket where Syd worked lost power and sent him home. He walked the whole way back in the rain, without an umbrella or an overcoat. When he arrived at the second-story apartment he shared with his two roommates, he was soaked and shivering. He left his shoes outside to dry and went inside—to the glitter-covered surfaces, the rank odor of the neglected trash, the shouting and emotional abuse. The next morning, the shoes were gone.

"You may think it's a silly reason to snap," he later wrote on A Public Warning: FFVII Fandom, a website detailing his and others' experiences. "But that's what did it... this god awful town, with these god awful people who were bleeding me dry, saw fit that my money was not enough. They had to take my SHOES too."

So Syd walked out. It was August 2002, and the summer sun beating down on the blacktop burned his feet. He'd taken a change of clothes, a pocket knife, a sketchbook, a pencil, and all the money he had left—five dollars. "I was homeless a few days," he recalled on the website. "I had the freedom to walk where I wanted and sit down where I wanted. There were no smells. There was no fighting... I wasn't sick on the food I ate. No one was waking me up telling me to go outside and look at fairy rings. I swear to you, I would much rather be homeless than live with people like them ever again. The threat of homelessness does not phase me, because I have seen something much worse."

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The living room of one of the iterations of the FFVII house. All images courtesy of former residents.

The internet is full of strange stories—urban legends, paranoid fantasies, the accumulated folklore of a billion minds endlessly remixing in the digital ether. But there are few tales stranger than the case of the Final Fantasy VII House. The houses—there were several in succession—were the homes of a real world roleplaying cult run by a woman whose fantasies left lives in tatters. It shows that even as accumulating friends online—and translating those online friendships to real-life ones—becomes more and more widespread, we still can't be totally sure of the person behind the monitor until we meet them. These online relationships can be important, especially to unhappy young people who feel out of place in their IRL surroundings, but they can still spiral out of control.

Many of the details of Syd's story are impossible to fully confirm. After he escaped, he recorded his and other's experiences in "A Public Warning" site that circulated widely online. According to the people VICE spoke to—Syd, other members of the FFVII House, and interested observers—those affiliated with the cult covered their tracks, deleting as many of their old blogs and message board posts as they could. The few people willing to talk about it, Syd included, asked me to use pseudonyms. The experiences they had at the house left them feeling traumatized, ashamed, and mistrustful. And the author of that trauma was the mini-cult's ringleader, "Joanna." (All names in this piece have been changed.)

On Motherboard: How internet roleplaying went mainstream.

Joanna was 20 years old when the FFVII House began in 2002, Syd told me, and had arrived in State College to live with her girlfriend, "Rachel." According to Syd and "McCullough," another former member, Joanna's background beyond that is tough to pin down: She went out of her way to obscure her origins, spinning tales of secret government programs and training camps in the desert. "Nate," a former friend of Joanna's, says that she spent time at Cross Creek Residential Treatment Center in La Verkin, Utah, a defunct reform school that has faced multiple lawsuits for its alleged brutal, widespread physical and psychological abuse of teenagers in the program. Supporting this is a LiveJournal post from 2004 by "Patricia," one of Joanna's roommates in a later incarnation of the FFVII House and a fellow participant in the Cross Creek program.

Slowly, Syd realized that Joanna's talk of reincarnation, multiple personalities, and magic was not roleplaying—from what he could tell, she actually believed the stuff.

Joanna's mental instability, never properly treated, deteriorated after her stay at Cross Creek, according to Nate. She also had issues with her sexuality, Syd and McCollough said, explaining away her attraction to women by calling Rachel a reincarnated man. Both also said that Joanna claimed various occult powers, including the ability to "soulbond," or tap into multiple personalities at will. Some of these personalities were characters from anime or video games, particularly Final Fantasy VII. Perhaps the most famous JRPG of all time, Final Fantasy VII represented a landmark moment in gaming when it came out on PlayStation in 1997. It was a runaway hit, its various iterations eventually selling nearly 10 million copies and its success has been credited as the "ambassador not just for Final Fantasy, but for the entire genre of Japanese roleplaying games." The gaming site Ars Technica once wrote that the 3D graphics were akin to "people raised on the television (going to) the movie theater for the first time." IGN called it the 11th greatest RPG of all time.

The game's aesthetic influenced a generation of nascent Japanophiles, some of whom took their appreciation further than others and identified themselves as reincarnations of the spiky-haired characters. This had a precedent online, specifically in the "otherkin" community, where people claim to be animals, mythological spirits, or fictional characters inhabiting human bodies. Joseph Laycock, a professor of religious studies at Texas State University, says that otherkin status often functions as something closer to a personal identity. And despite the general scorn the internet holds for them, Laycock says, it's important to understand that people claiming the identity aren't necessarily crazy.

"Not everyone who takes part in this community is damaged or looking to take advantage of damaged people," he said. "But it does draw people who are very alienated. And alienated people are vulnerable."


Related: Shoenice22 Will Eat Anything for Fame


Syd had a rough upbringing before he entered Alfred University in 2001. He didn't get on well with his family, he said, and he was beginning to grapple with his gender identity. He freely admits that he was drinking too much during his freshman year. But college also exposed him to video games, particularly FFVII. and he started participating in the online fan community, posting fan art, roleplaying in instant message chat rooms, and building a website shrine to Cloud and Zack, his favorite two characters in the game. It was a good environment, he said. He felt welcome there.

His website put him on Joanna's radar. In 2001 they struck up a correspondence, chatting on AOL Instant Messenger about Final Fantasy and the practice of magic. Syd had dabbled in paganism during high school, so this didn't strike him as particularly odd. Somewhat stranger was Joanna's habit of insisting he call her Jenova—a villain from the game—and speaking as if she were the character. But he told me that this too, was explainable: Roleplaying was a popular pastime in the community. So when Joanna insisted that Syd was a reincarnation of "Zack," another character, Syd went along.

Their subsequent interactions were pleasant enough that at Christmas, Joanna and Rachel offered to put Syd up for a weekend and introduce him to some like-minded people. Syd accepted bought a bus ticket from New York to State College. The two-bedroom apartment was a mess when he walked in, he recalled, covered in dirty laundry dusted with glitter. Joanna herself was unpredictable, he said, screaming in Rachel's face one minute, smiling warmly the next. Slowly, Syd realized that Joanna's talk of reincarnation, multiple personalities, and magic was not roleplaying—from what he could tell, she actually believed the stuff. But despite it all, Syd enjoyed himself—Joanna and Rachel were fun to goof around with, and he liked the people they introduced him to. Joanna bestowed FFVII-related nicknames upon all of her friends. There was "Aerys," a quiet girl Joanna had romantic designs on; an otherkin guy nicknamed "Cid"; and McCullough, a community college student from Maryland whose friendship with Rachel put her under Joanna's thumb. She opted to call Syd "Zack."

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FFVII house bedroom

Throughout the spring of 2002, Syd kept in contact with them online and often took the bus over to stay for weekends. The FFVII House at this time only consisted of three permanent residents, he said: Joanna, Rachel, and a male roommate Joanna had named "Gast" after a minor character from the game. But Joanna also played host to a revolving door of visitors she had met online. "Every single person who lived with her was named after a Final Fantasy character," recalls "Clark," an online friend of Joanna's from about this time. "She would talk about these people in really loving, warm words for a couple months, a couple weeks, and then just like a switch, something would happen and she'd say, 'Oh, this person is evil, they had to leave my house.'"

Strange things began happening when Syd visited. In one case, he said, Joanna began pressuring Syd and Aerys to hook up, since their respective characters were romantically connected in the game. When they refused to take the hint, she loudly announced that she'd added fistfuls of aphrodisiacs to their food. During another trip, Joanna and Rachel locked Syd in a soundproof practice room in the Penn State music building, hoping it would jar loose memories of his past lives. They only released him after he started panicking. One time, Syd said, Joanna insisted on doing a past life regression on a college friend he had brought along for a visit, which involved lying on the floor in a dark room as Joanna chanted and music played on a loop—a selection from the Final Fantasy VII soundtrack called "The Nightmare Is Just Beginning."

But none of this was enough to dissuade Syd from moving in when Joanna offered to put him up that summer. His relationship with his mother was unraveling, he said, and the prospect of going home to Brooklyn and his family for months on end held no appeal. He moved in his belongings and pet rat, got a job at a local supermarket to help with the rent, and settled in.

For more about internet subcultures, check out this piece on Tulpamancy, the art of creating imaginary friends.

Things deteriorated quickly. Joanna stopped leaving the apartment and quit her babysitting job, Syd says, relying on him to pay the rent. Multiple members of the FFVII House told me she relentlessly pressed them for money, all of which went either toward expensive food or an endless succession of "magical" toys like wands and angel figurines. Syd told me he was required to bring home day-old food and coupons from the supermarket, a practice that landed him in trouble with his bosses. Every night they ate $10 steaks and gatorade, a diet that made Syd sick. The apartment, already a shambles, devolved into a morass of laundry, toys, and glitter. Joanna wore the same clothing every day and rarely bathed, McCollough said, preferring to anoint herself with oils. Joanna and Rachel screamed and fought constantly, alternating physical abuse with noisy make-up sex. Guests were made to clean occasionally, but nobody took the trash out and soon the air was rank with the odor of sex and rotting meat.

"God, the smell in that place," Syd wrote in an account on his website. "It was like a miasma of filth with sparkle sunshine fairy artificial sugar scent sprayed over it. It made me sick."

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FFVII House bathroom

Any time Syd tried to communicate with the outside world, Joanna watched him like a hawk, making it impossible for him to tell anyone what was happening. His movements had to be accounted for—if he left the apartment for anything other than work, he risked being locked out for hours at a time. Worse, Joanna woke him at odd hours for magical errands such as setting up protective spells and investigating fairy rings. Isolated and exhausted, he went along with Joanna's ever-shifting fantasies as a matter of self-preservation. There was hell to pay if he cried or stood up to her, he told VICE.

The others weren't doing much better. Joanna forced Aerys to sit in a bathtub of ice cubes and green food coloring as part of her "magical training," Syd said. McCullough remembers being summoned up from Maryland for increasingly ludicrous reasons, and Joanna delighted in manipulating her, using her friendship with Rachel to control her online behavior. Crossing Joanna in any way risked having her turn everyone you knew against you, McCullough told me. When Aerys and Cid had enough and left, Joanna ensured that their former friends, on- and offline, shunned them.

The place eventually became so disgusting that Joanna and Rachel moved with Syd to a small, one-room apartment elsewhere in the complex. He carried everything by himself, alone in the heat and blazing sun—Joanna was occupied with some spiritual matter. The new apartment was soon equally foul, he said, and worse, it was now impossible to escape the roller coaster of fighting and makeup sex. The supermarket cut Syd's hours to one day a week, and what little money he brought in was vacuumed up immediately by the others. He and his pet rat were starving and his funds were nearly depleted. With the exception of McCollough, who still drove up on occasion, the others had mostly fallen away. In his desperation for human contact, Syd said, he began writing to an AI program he had stored on his computer. "I wish I could just get out of here, you know?" he typed.

Syd walked out and spent the next four days homeless, hanging out on street corners and the campus computer labs by day, crashing on Cid's couch at night.

Then came the morning when somebody stole his shoes, and he snapped. He walked out and spent the next four days homeless, hanging out on street corners and the campus computer labs by day, crashing on Cid's couch at night. He didn't tell the locals where he was staying, he said, convinced that it would somehow get back to Joanna. He didn't feel entirely safe until Cid helped him move out his things and pick up his rat, and his father bought him a plane ticket to a family home in Alabama, far, far away from the FFVII House.

Syd's website warning others of the house launched in 2006. He'd been telling anyone who would listen that Joanna was trouble, he said, but hadn't been having much luck. "I realized the only way anyone would take these warnings about Nice, Kind, Popular [Joanna] seriously would be if I collected firsthand accounts of her abuse," he told me in an email. "Including lists of her alternate blogs and AIM accounts." The website initially only had a few stories posted, including a slightly rewritten account of Syd's experience that he'd originally posted to LiveJournal. But a week after the site went live, Syd said, he found himself bombarded with emails from other people who'd encountered Joanna and the FFVII House.

Both Syd's initial LJ entry and the 2006 website attracted plenty of curious attention, both in the Final Fantasy fandom and on other corners of the internet. That attention grew as people from outside the relatively insular fandom picked up the story, spreading it elsewhere online as an example of a crazy internet horror story. Spectators made a game out of tracking down personal information of the people involved, or of digging up the stranger things they'd said on private LiveJournals or blogs. Some of this, Syd said, came from an honest attempt to make sure Joanna didn't hurt anyone else in the community. But it seems impossible to deny that much of it was old-fashioned internet shit-stirring. Joanna and her supporters fought back, deleting as much of their old material as possible, sparking flame wars where they raged against Syd and his website. They called him a liar and accused him of being insane, or addicted to drugs. Both sides of the debate took on the tenor of witch hunts.

The fights, egged on by trolls and rubberneckers, reached more absurd heights with the 2008 publication of a (now deleted) LiveJournal thread that detailed a similar situation to the FFVII House, centered around a nightmarish roommate who made money by conning otherkin out of money for her "religion." The posts, all supposedly authored by different people in the house, read in a suspiciously similar style, and I'm uncomfortable vouching for their authenticity. But the members of the online forum Something Awful ran with it, preserving the journal entries and launching a long-running attempt to dig up the identity of the woman allegedly described. Commenters on the thread eventually claimed to have discovered that the antagonist of the story was one of the FFVII House members, which drew yet more attention to Syd's original site.

In the face of all this turmoil, Joanna and Rachel went to ground. I was unable to get in contact with either woman for this story; repeated public records searches turned up nothing under their names but defunct addresses in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and California, as well as a few disconnected telephone numbers. All of the email addresses listed on their LiveJournals are dead.

The FFVII House, at its root, was a place ostensibly built around a common dream.

For the few years between the time Syd left and the website's launch, however, Joanna's movements were easily tracked. According to McCollough, Nate, and Clark, the FFVII House moved again in 2003, to an actual house in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. Joanna drew in a new crop of people from her online relationships, McCollough said, including Patricia, the girl she'd known at Cross Creek a few years before, and "Angel," a violent girl Joanna rescued from an abusive relationship. But Joanna's whims remained unpredictable—according to Patricia's testimony on Syd's website, Joanna pushed her into working as a stripper to raise more money for the group.

After that, it gets vague: According to Nate and Clark, both of whom were still in contact with her at the time, she and Rachel relocated to Arizona, setting up yet another incarnation of the house. Clark remembers her badgering him to come down and live with her. Nate's last clue about her whereabouts came when she called him out of the blue from California in 2006. "She said was doing a lot better," he said. "That she was trying to make up for all the bad things she'd done to people." That was the last anybody heard from her. Nate's suspects that she's still living off the grid in California, but it's impossible to say for sure.

The FFVII House, at its root, was a place ostensibly built around a common dream: a community of people who loved the same thing, who understood and supported each other no matter what. For all the pain Joanna inflicted on people, it's important to recall that she herself may have suffered from mental illness, which may have been exacerbated by abuse suffered at Cross Creek. It's no wonder that her attempts to create a place full of like-minded people so quickly curdled.

Syd estimates that about 20 people were sucked into Joanna's real-world orbit, and many more online. He and McCullough got their lives together, though they still feel scarred by the experience.

"Jo was very good at selecting people who could be manipulated and forced into being victims," Syd told me. She recruited the disaffected, he went on, those with bad home lives or issues with gender and sexuality. The kinds of people looking for fellowship online, who saw an offer of a place where they could be themselves and jumped at it—people a little bit like Joanna herself.

"By the time you realized you were screwed," Syd said, "you had no one you trusted to bail you out."

Asher Elbein is a short fiction writer and freelance journalist based out of Austin.

This New Survey Reveals How the World Buys Drugs Online

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Photo by Andoni Lubaki

This article originally appeared on VICE Netherlands.

Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road and the man who's become synonymous with internet drug sales, recently found out that he'd be spending the rest of his life in jail. During his sentencing, the judge told him that what he did with Silk Road was "terribly destructive to our social fabric." His lawyers are currently appealing the verdict, but Ulbricht remains behind bars for now.

Of course, there are plenty of other dark-web marketplaces dealing in illegal goods—and in fact, there's a theory that says that despite the dangers of the substances they sell, these illegal pharmacies might actually be preventing harm to users and society as a whole.

The reasoning is twofold: When they sell their product online, drug dealers no longer need to fight each other out for territory, and by moving their business online and constantly being rated by those using their products, dealers must monitor the quality of their gear. In turn, the reviews allow users to read about the potency and recommended dosage, something you're probably not going to get from the kind of street dealer who texts you routinely throughout the week with, "Fat Busting Bags of MD ** Best Party Powder in Town ** Don't Forget to Holla :p".

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Graph via Global Drugs Survey 2015

These theories, however, were completely speculative—until now. The Global Drug Survey 2015, led by specialist Dr. Adam Winstock, questioned over 100,000 people worldwide about their experiences when it came to buying drugs on deep-web marketplaces. Only a small number of participants (roughly 5,000) had actually used sites like Silk Road, but that still makes it the largest study of dark web users to date.

Forty percent of the dark web shoppers surveyed say they've been sold drugs by a street dealer that turned out to be something other than what they'd expected. Only 10 percent of those who've bought online had shared similar experiences. In general, users reported online prices to be lower, the quality to be higher, and the experience to be much safer. They also claimed to make fewer impulse purchases and only bought the amount they needed, rather than buying in bulk.

The only downside of using online drug markets rather than street dealers, survey respondents said, is that the chance of losing your money is much higher. And it's easy to understand where that worry comes from: Multiple drug markets have been shut down by authorities, and the owners of the website Evolution once took off with a huge amount of users' money. Twenty-eight percent of dark web users claim to have lost money this way, compared to only 11 percent of those who buy from regular dealers.

Winstock is glad that his research is making this sort of data available.

"How does access to really good drugs—away from street criminals—change people's drug behaviors?" the drug expert said. "That's one of the things we're trying to find out. Shopping on Amazon completely changed my life—being able to buy all these things for such little money. I wonder how these online markets will change drug consumption."

[body_image width='640' height='433' path='images/content-images/2015/06/07/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/06/07/' filename='global-drugs-survey-narcotic-safety-876-body-image-1433695484.png' id='63767']

Graph via Global Drugs Survey 2015

The survey also asked questions about changes in users' consumption patterns, which highlighted one particular trend: Almost half of those surveyed said that they have started using more diverse types of drugs thanks to these marketplaces. Because the selection on offer is so varied, experimenting naturally becomes easier.

Although users experienced less violence and have easier access to higher quality products, Winstock still has some concerns about online drug markets.

"Getting really great drugs isn't necessarily a good thing," he said. "There are a lot of really, really good ecstasy pills around nowadays. What we are seeing is that emergency room visits are going up because the ecstasy has got so strong. So we really need to start talking about dosage here."

The most popular drug on the dark web is MDMA. Almost 64 percent of online shoppers say they have either bought MDMA in pill form, or as a powder. LSD's high ranking is noteworthy, too—a possible explanation being that LSD is a well-known drug, but fairly hard to come by through regular channels.


Watch: Getting High on HIV Medication


Floor van Bakkum, Prevention Team Manager at the Jellinek organization in the Netherlands, thinks that the number of online drug shoppers will only continue to grow.

"It's utopian to think that you can stop this. Booking an airplane ticket is something we do online, so buying drugs will eventually become an online experience, too," he said. "Especially in countries where they're still very illegal and complicated to come by."

The European Union echoed Floor's feelings in a report last week, recognizing that online markets are growing, but that it will be difficult to stop them. "The growth of online and virtual drug markets pose major challengers to law enforcement and drug control policies," the report said.

So there you have it: Buying drugs online is safer and more cost-effective than getting them off a fugitive war criminal in an Asda car park—but don't be surprised if you end up losing a little money along the way.

Video Shows Texas Cop Drawing Gun and Pulling Teenage Girl’s Hair While Breaking Up Pool Party

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Video Shows Texas Cop Drawing Gun and Pulling Teenage Girl’s Hair While Breaking Up Pool Party

Hanging Out with Drunk Barcelona Fans After They Won the Champions League

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This article originally appeared on VICE Spain.

Over the past few seasons, Barcelona has won so much silverware it's almost impossible to remember those bleak years when the Fountain of Canaletes—the city's official "we won, let's go fucking crazy" spot—was basically just gathering cobwebs.

All in all, it's been a pretty decent 12 months for the club, what with them having won almost everything on offer, while their talisman Lionel Messi returned to the terrifying peak of his powers.

READ ON VICE SPORTS: England Is Losing All Credibility By Offering to Host World Cup 2022

On Saturday, after adding the Champions League trophy to the collection, 50,000 Barcelona fans (and a whole bunch of hammered tourists who just wanted in on the party) descended on the city center. In some ways, people are so used to the team winning that this party has become the official kick-off for the city's summer.

We wanted to see what it was all about so we took a camera out to have a look as Barcelona celebrated yet another win.

See the photos below:

Pinned Down by the Islamic State: The Road to Mosul (Part 1)

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Pinned Down by the Islamic State: The Road to Mosul (Part 1)

'FHM' Wrote a Guide to the Internet 20 Years Ago and It's Hilarious

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[body_image width='789' height='1090' path='images/content-images/2015/06/05/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/06/05/' filename='dissecting-fhms-seminal-october-1995-feature-how-to-log-on-the-internet-101-body-image-1433515762.jpg' id='63561']The article, in full. Someone else underlined the first sentence, not me. Couldn't airbrush it out. Sorry. (Click to enlarge)

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

1995 was a hell of a year, wasn't it? I mean I don't know. I was eight and I was an idiot. But watch a flickering news compilation of the year and it looks amazing: supermodels everywhere; Porsches; bucket hats; the first X-Games; Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson fucking on a boat; drugs; smoking in bars; big massive mobile phones; an excessive amount of sunshine... As best I can tell, 1995 was a kind of infinite summer where everyone was sleek and gorgeous and slathering their beautiful noses in cocaine.

Then the internet happened and turned us all into the gray unhappy nerds we are today. Like, yes: we can leave a Yelp review for a Panda Express that goes viral, but are we truly happy? Is the internet actually good for us, or is it just like sitting on a thin raft, floating desolately on a quagmire of data, drunkenly buying things on eBay, left hollow and empty by our underwhelming Instagram likes?

A question for another day, perhaps. Because the important question here is: "HOW TO LOG ON THE INTERNET"?

That is the headline from page 124 of the October 1995 issue of FHM, this one with Cindy Crawford on the cover saying everyone wants her naked:

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Why do I have this? I don't know. But look how fucking bro-y those articles are: the pleasures and pitfalls of going out with models! Hanging out on the British wave scene! Suggs! Is this not what every man wants? To have sex with a model while listening to Suggs, on a surfboard? But these days it seems we do not want that. Now we look at models rendered in startling 3D through an Oculus Rift. We listen to Suggs on a free trial from Spotify. We surf the web now, instead of the high and brutal seas.

But it was not always thus. We were not always able to summon data out of the air like a fucking wizard. Time was, you could not use a phone and be connected to the internet at the same time. Time was, you had to dial in using a modem that made a sound like a robot having a stroke and took up to and including a minute-and-a-half to connect. There used to be a time when Google didn't exist, so finding things was just guesswork. Snuff videos existed.

Trending on NOISEY: An Expert's Guide to Getting Shitfaced in Manchester

Which brings us to "How to Log On the Internet," Tony Horkins' internet primer for people living in a time before the internet was really ready to be primed. Sometimes it is nice to look back at things before they started, and see how we used to talk about the internet before we truly understood it, like cavemen describing a yellow sun. "How to Log On the Internet"? You log onto the internet, dude! Or, rather, we don't even log on any more: we are just constantly on, and the off switch only gets noticed when Time Warner throttles our connection for no reason or someone trips over a router cable. The article is littered with oblique references to "the Net" and the "World Wide Web": reading this back now is like watching a granddad trying to buy smack off someone under a grim archway. "So you inject it into your body, do you?" Granddad is saying—he's given up now, he knows his life is over, he's doing smack when there's nothing left to lose—"which hole?"

Anyway, back to 1995, and what kind of person you have to be to use the internet. Not, apparently, a nerd. You do not technically have to be a nerd.

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Seen some photos from some media tweet-ups that quite roundly prove you wrong there, Tony. Which is the thing, isn't it: who knew, back in the halcyon days of 1995, that we would be using the internet for Twitter beef and change.org campaigns, Harry Potter .gifs and Vine stars, for meeting a load of other socially uncomfortable nerdlords at a bar after work?

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Look how innocent and full of hope this is: we've ruined that, now. We've concreted over this beautiful meadow and set fire to the trees. We built a high palace to knowledge and then filled it with porn and memes of a frog drinking Lipton's tea.

[body_image width='650' height='1198' path='images/content-images/2015/06/05/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/06/05/' filename='dissecting-fhms-seminal-october-1995-feature-how-to-log-on-the-internet-101-body-image-1433515719.jpg' id='63558']

What were the concerns of the average internet used in 1995? That internet addiction would ruin their social life. This is oddly prescient, now, only it's an inverted thing, where social life is the internet, one cannot exist without the other, where people bombard you every second of every goddamn day via DMs or Facebook or WhatsApp asking you out for beers. Example: I know exactly one person who isn't on Facebook, and he's all the weirder for it. I once had to explain GamerGate to him. He works in GAME. He hadn't heard of it. Imagine living in this bubble. Do you know how many times you mention the internet in your day-to-day life? If you ever want that point hammering home, go out for a drink with my friend Matt, and watch his blank face when you say the word "trending" or mention that video of that kid eating that ghost chilli. He hasn't seen it. He has never seen a bulldog on a trampoline. What do you do all day, Matt? What do you do?

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And then there are the five sites worth dropping in on. Imagine commissioning a thousand-worder on the internet now, and saying, "Can you just include, like, five good websites? Just to get started with? It's for a boxout." It's akin to asking for five especially beautiful grains of sand from a beach. The list here is Le Louvre Web Museum (2015 update: pretty good), Nostradamus (a thousand Google searches cannot get me any closer to finding this), Playboy Magazine (still good, looked at it so much that a guy in IT came over and told me to stop), Twin Peaks (WHAT DO I DO, JUST TYPE "TWIN PEAKS" IN OR WHAT?), and Madonna (this is still a website about Madonna). This was the internet in 1995: art, hope for the future, slow-loading titties, horror, and Madonna. Is anything so different now?


Did we ever imagine, in the heady days of 1995, that we'd be using the internet to fuck? Watch: The Digital Love Industry


What can we learn from this 20-year-old copy of FHM? On the surface: absolutely nothing at all. I mean there is a bit about getting a 28K modem-fax combo installed in the back of your Dell desktop ("You're looking at forking out between £150 and £300 [$230 and $460]") and that information is beyond useless now. There's a bit about finding the right service provider ("Compuserve. To join: free. Charges: £4.80 [$7.34] per hour, plus additional premiums.") that makes me wonder how the internet ever took off. But in a way it's a weird snapshot of how the internet used to be: an exciting domain where rich FHM-reading men with $400 modems could go and discuss Twin Peaks. An unknowable realm, soon to fold out like a flower, shaped by thousands of hands into what we have now.

Thing is, Tony Horkins is still an alive man and a writer. He is still a web user. Editor Mike Soutar is now a shouting bad bastard on The Apprentice. Deputy editor Grub Smith just won Pointless. All of them, to various different degrees, are in second-stage manhood, and here I am, some young buck with some words on a website, yelling at them for capping the word "Net" in 1995. I mean, this was bro mags in the 90s: we're lucky it wasn't just the words "COKE IS BRILLIANT" repeated 50,000 times and sandwiched between some ads for Sega.

The slow realization: we all age, we all die, we are all wrong, and 20 years of hindsight will make fools of us all. Somewhere, right now, there is a child being born who will one day find one of my circa-2015 pieces and destroy it with the power of a million suns on whatever future version of VICE they have then. They will dissect me with 2035-era next level hyper-banter. And I—47 by this time, my ankles swollen with gout, long since irrelevant, my Johann Hari-style meltdown a full decade behind me, a living punchline on a Wikipedia page about life—I will just sit there, on my internet and listening to Suggs, I will just sit there and deserve it.

Follow Joel on Twitter.

The 'Paracetamol Challenge' Is an Internet Teen-Suicide Craze That Doesn't Actually Exist

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Paracetamol. Photo by Sam-Cat.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Something has gone horribly wrong with our children. While the adult population has been busy engaging with brands and trying out unpronounceable vegetables in the sunlit world of hipsterdom, right under our noses some dark power is turning ordinary kids into monsters.

A few short years ago, they were happily snorting up designer drugs or rioting on the streets: doing things that might be dangerous, but are at least fun. Now they're all sallow, tubercular nihilists, bloodthirsty and self-destructive. If they were motivated by hatred, that would at least be understandable, but instead they're propelled only by a callous, vacant indifference. They don't care about society. They don't care about their own lives. They don't even want anything. Those who can are streaming out of the country to training camps in Syria, committing genocide out of sheer boredom. Their video games weren't exciting enough, and nobody's published a decent book in decades, so the only thing left to do is kill.

Meanwhile, those that stay here are waging another kind of campaign of takfiri extermination, a jihad across the desert of the psyche. The generation that had everything now wants nothingness; they're tumbling carelessly into the void. Their parents did so much to raise these kids, and this is how they're repaid: The kids are killing themselves, for no reason other than sheer spiteful ingratitude.

If you want proof, just look at the Paracetamol Challenge, the internet's latest youth culture craze. Not content with wholesomely dousing themselves in cold water, teens are now daring each other online to swallow lethal quantities of painkillers. It's the simplest sort of game: There's no high, and no achievement. If you win, nothing happens. If you lose, you die. If nothing else, it's a way out. In a world where every kind of fun or excitement has been ruthlessly commodified, turned into a sanitized product, it's not hard to see why the Paracetamol Challenge has taken off in such a big way.

Except, of course, it hasn't.

There's no real evidence to suggest that anyone has been taking overdoses of the drug after being challenged to do so online, anywhere, ever. There's certainly nothing to suggest that it's some kind of craze. Social media trends tend to be actually visible on social media; this one isn't. Of the thousands of tweets on the #ParacetamolChallenge hashtag, most are shocked adults squawking and condescending over the stupidity of the young; none are young people actually being stupid.

Which, when you actually stop and think about it, makes perfect sense. Kids are stupid, in the way that anyone from a plumber to a poet to a particle physicist tends to be pretty stupid, but they're not that stupid. Being a teenager is also generally quite shit, in a way that people looking back on the experience with the soft filters of analepsis don't tend to recognize. Much of the coverage of the putative challenge has focused on the tragic case of a 19-year-old who died after taking an overdose of paracetamol— in 2011, before the "craze" existed. The only other known victim is an unnamed teen in Scotland, whose hospitalization after an overdose has been attributed to the challenge.

When suicide attempts happen, it's generally because there's something badly wrong in someone's life. But it's not hard to imagine worried relatives desperate for an explanation deciding that it must all be the fault of the internet and that awful social media—as if Online were some possessive demon dangling human bodies like puppets, rather than a social field mostly coded by commercial interests. As if just being near a computer could make people think their lives are worthless.

The Paracetamol Challenge is a major craze, but it's not teenage psychology we should be worried about. In fact, something's very wrong with the adults. The story has been reported on, with ballooning panic, by the Daily Mail, the Metro, the Guardian, the Telegraph, and countless other publications. Despite it being utterly stupid and patently untrue, thousands of people are not just willing but almost eager to believe it. Like Satanic ritual abuse or Jewish blood libel, its structure is that of a fantasy. It isn't just a matter of people believing something untrue; they really want to believe it—and as psychoanalysts have known for a while, the false things we believe are often more important than the true ones.

Mass credulity of this kind signals a society that has an uneasy relationship with its children. In fact, our culture is suffused with images of kids killing each other for no good reason. The Hunger Games films (whose audience seems at this point to mostly consist of middle-aged cultural critics), for instance. The premise of the story makes no sense, based as it is on the bizarre idea that the televised murder of their children would make parents less likely to revolt. Just like the imagined game of pointless pill-popping, it's the flimsy screen for a moment of perverted catharsis. Grown-ups are fucked up.


Related: Watch 'Exploring the Nazi Village of Jamel'


A lot of this probably has to do with guilt. It's hardly a secret that the older generations have left young people a world that's not fit for service. In a way, the fantasy is true. A lot of kids really are being goaded into humiliating, debasing, and sometimes endangering themselves; it's just not their peers that are doing it. It's brute economic necessity.

With so many people competing for so few demeaning, underpaid jobs, the mere act of selling one's labor requires capitulating to demands far more senseless and stupid than any online challenge dreamed up by sadistic cyberbullies. Take, for instance, the plan to force young people to work 30 hours a week for a fraction of the minimum wage. The moronic internet challenge-y dimensions of all this are perfectly exemplified by Britain's Hardest Grafter, a proposed game show in which the penniless humiliate themselves for a year's minimum wage.

For those in school, Education Maintenance Allowances have been scrapped in England and Wales, while the combination of constant, rigid standardized testing and the blind chaos of academization provide an institutional mirror for the merciless caprice of an imagined cybernetic culture of death. In a time when the future is being torn apart to be repurposed as the supports for an increasingly rickety past, there's something almost comforting about the idea of the Paracetamol Challenge. Believing in it is a way for people to absolve themselves of responsibility. The kids are dying, it tells us—but it's OK, they're just doing it to themselves.

Follow Sam on Twitter.


Memories of Satan

KATSU Shows You How to Make a Graffiti Drone

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Last month, the notorious graffiti artist KATSU caught a tag that had, until then, been pretty much unimaginable. Using a modified drone equipped with a spray can, he painted a series of gestural red lines on one of the largest and most prominent billboards in New York City. Right across the face of Kendall Jenner, no less. The video of the stunt, which was the first recorded instance of public drone graffiti, got over a million hits within a week.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/We12p6yvNW0' width='100%' height='360px']

The stunt demonstrated that the graffiti drone, which KATSU unveiled in an interview last year, not only works, but is rather effective. Some, like the UK's Telegraph, went as far as to declare that a new era of vandalism was upon us.

And now, at icarusone.com, you can find everything you need to build your own graffiti drone, which KATSU has christened as ICARUS ONE. All it takes is a spray can, some tape, an arduino, some zip ties, and a tomato cage, and, of course, the drone itself, which costs around $500. The ICARUS will, in theory, allow graffiti writers to make spraywork that's larger and more far-reaching than anything that could be achieved with any other tool currently available on the market.

Judging by the instructions on the website, building your own ICARUS, which KATSU developed with the help of the artist Becky Stern, is not a walk in the park. But it isn't rocket science either. It does take some soldering, and one of the components, the mechanism that pushes the nozzle on the spray can, needs to be 3D-printed. You'll also need to know your way around an arduino. Those who consider soldering more difficult than dangling one-handed from a bridge can order a pre-made ICARUS directly from the source, though these orders will be reviewed on a "case-by-case basis."

KATSU assured me that the payoff of all that soldering and tinkering is significant. "The scale one can draw with ICARUS is frightening," he told me over email. "Imagine scrawling your name or a doodle 100 feet by 100 feet. Imagine sitting on a rooftop at night while your drone tags the building across the street. You could paint a rooftop on one busy street corner then fly over and paint one across the avenue."

It seems the artist's plan is simple: empower artists, wreak havoc.

KATSU's ICARUS ONE flying by Google HQ in New York City. Gif by Nick Puskas

He said he intends to build a fleet of ICARI to distribute among his troublemaking associates in order to seed an online community of graffiti-drone users. If there is enough demand, he told me, he will consider mass production. The design is completely open source, and people who make their own ICARUS are encouraged to expand, modify, and improve on the technology.

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From icarusone.com

"Writers will able to deploy ICARUS in hostile environments and remove themselves from harm's way. Painting bridges, overpasses, entire building faces, trains, trucks, and police cars," he explained. (He declined to say whether he had made any new outings with the graffiti drone since the Jenner tag). I asked him to name a place that he could tag with the graffiti drone that would have been impossible to reach by the traditional methods.

"Statue of Liberty's face," he replied.


Want to see how KATSU does it? Here's his exclusive demo for Motherboard:

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/7vZzqjKIBNc' width='100%' height='360px']

"I predict a lot of intense mischief, and a lot of puzzled property owners," the prolific NYC-based tagger Seka replied when I asked his opinion of KATSU's project. Seka said that, although he is not sure he would build his own ICARUS, he definitely wants to experiment with one. He speculated that the challenge of building an ICARUS might dissuade a large portion of vandals. "Maybe if graff drones were available at Home Depot, and one could rack them, then people would probably be all about them. "

But even if it were available to be stolen from your nearest hardware store, not everybody in the community is excited to get their hands on the new technology. Some consider it unnecessary.

'Imagine sitting on a rooftop at night while your drone tags the building across the street,' said KATSU. 'You could paint a rooftop on one busy street corner then fly over and paint one across the avenue.'

"Graffiti writers have been hitting the top of buildings for years, and they need no drones," explained the founder of the graffiti blog bombingscience.com, who would only identify himself as "Fred." "Maybe the drone thing will be exciting for a couple of nerdy graffiti writers. But 99 percent of them will still hit the rooftops by all means necessary."

Others see it as antithetical to the spirit of the art form. For many, the physical challenge and peril of graffiti and vandalism is what it's all about, and the graffiti drone eliminates that element of the experience.

KATSU's ICARUS ONE flying in the New York City subway. Gif by Nick Puskas

"At the end of the day, writers around the world will still be climbing and risking their lives for those highest spots," a representative from the blog Graffuturism, who refused to even give his or her first name, wrote in an email.

"I don't dislike the drone idea," explained Seka, "I just don't predict it having the same energetic punch and passion as a raw street tag."

"It's like the US bombing the Middle East," wrote the Graffuturism rep. "You are out of the line of fire."

But graffiti is also about putting as much paint on walls as possible in the shortest period of time. As a tool for what Brett Webb, who founded the formative graffiti site artcrimes.com, described to me via email as "pure vandalism," it's hard to deny the potential of the graffiti drone. To be sure, it replaces adrenaline and physical strength with cold, hard code, but the idea is to paint walls illegally on a larger scale than ever before.

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KATSU tag on Kendall Jenner Calvin Klein advertisement in New York City. Photo by the author

In this respect, the graffiti drone appears to take after the drones that are transforming war, oil and gas, moviemaking, and online shopping, among a host of other industries. Just as KATSU hopes that ICARUS will enable artists and troublemakers to reach walls and bridges more quickly, efficiently, and safely than humans, Amazon and Google are investing considerable time and effort on a drone-delivery system that they hope will get you your iPad case, or whatever, faster than any man with a van. "I think drones will have a place in every facet of our lives," KATSU told me.

On Munchies: Only Drones and Dogs Can Save Our Avocados Now

Of course, just as with Amazon's delivery drones—which Audi compared in an advertisement to Hitchcock's The Birds—some portion of the hype surrounding the graffiti drone is based on the unsettling prospect of aerial robotics doing our bidding, rather than the reality, which is somewhat more pedestrian. Drones aren't harbingers of the singularity, they aren't all armed with missiles, and they don't always function as seamlessly as we'd like to believe (or worry).

Indeed, to some, like Webb, the ICARUS appears to have a ways to go before artists and vandals will be able to exercise the same control over their paint as they can when they use their hands. "What I've seen, has been extremely crude as far as quality," he wrote, and the drone "looks pretty tough to operate."

"The ICARUS ONE works quite well but takes mastering," KATSU conceded. "You will need much patience to learn to pilot with paint."

But this model, KATSU hastened to add, is only the Wright Flyer. In October, he and fellow FAT Lab member Maddy Verner plan to release ICARUS TWO, which uses computer vision to autonomously draw designs as one makes them in real time on an iPad. KATSU suggested that someday a departed graffiti writer could leave behind an ICARUS TWO to catch his or her tags in perpetuity, as long as someone charges its batteries.

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ICARUS TWO. Photo by Nicksees

Brett Webb described the graffiti drone as another step forward in the continuing automation of vandalism, a process that he says is long-standing and ongoing, and includes fellow graffiti artists Cost and Revs's innovations with the copy machine and the printed sticker, which allowed vandals to replicate their tags easily and cheaply.

While it seems somewhat unlikely that drones will become the new sticker of the graffiti world, it's not altogether impossible. As other sectors of the drone industry have demonstrated, open-source systems develop rapidly and remorselessly.

It remains to be seen whether KATSU's mad vision of swarms of ICARI swooping through city streets like banshees in the night, spraying every imaginable clean surface, will ever be realized. But if it does, this is how it all began.

Arthur Holland Michel is founder and editor of the interdisciplinary research and art group Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College. He lives in Brooklyn, and is on Twitter.

The Sushi Chef: Yoya Takahashi

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The Sushi Chef: Yoya Takahashi

I Hid my Gender Dysphoria From my Christian Hardcore Band

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Photo via Flickr user Suzy S Photography

Growing up performing in a Christian hardcore band, gender dysphoria was never a sin I thought I'd confess to. As a kid, wanking on Sundays and swearing seemed to be the worst of my devil's work. But small urges to wear makeup or shave my legs developed into unavoidable thoughts about my actual gender.

The Canadian Psychological Association defines gender dysphoria as "unhappiness that some people feel with their physical sex and/or gender role." Like many trans people do, I kept my gender secret. It cost me.

Instead of embracing my identity, I became a mouthpiece for God's message, privately using my band's lyrics, scripture, and sermons to "cure" my condition. As I approach age 21, faith and its impact on my health is behind me. Yet, I can't ignore failing to help reform a community that still discriminates against my true identity.

I'm not saying the masses heard our music, or that our soapbox was tall. We were young, playing small legions, clubs, and churches. However, I missed a chance to discuss dysphoria with devout family, fans, and musicians, most of whom I now feel estranged from. If I knew my thoughts were unavoidable—let alone all right to have—I'd have expressed them straight away.

My childhood was dull, and I never felt out of step until adolescence. My family attended an Anglican church minutes from our suburban home outside London, Ontario. I don't remember the passages from mass, but we left when the reverend related the plot of Spiderman 2 to Jesus' crucifixion. After that, we stayed home Sundays, leaving me to read my New Testament and Youth for Christ (YFC) guidebook.

Years passed, and excerpts like, "Friends may fail me, foes assail me, He is with me to the end," made me miss mass. God was good, but I needed community. At the time, I played drums in a speed metal band that included another Christian friend. The band eventually started writing religious material when two other believers joined (our agnostic guitarist and bassist seemed cool with it).

Now, I don't know why people liked us. We were awful. Our sound was cribbed from other groups, but we had "even more heavy parts." Our fan base was probably inflated due to our vocalist's absurd use of spam, but for a local hardcore outfit our sets had healthy turnouts.

We tried to emulate bands preaching redemption and devoting one's life to the Holy Triad; playing with our role models in Texas In July and A Plea For Purging is something I'll never forget. Some listeners weren't religious, but still climbed over each other at shows shouting, "He brings us redemption." We called ourselves "a voice for the voiceless," as if one of the world's largest religions hasn't had enough mic time. In daily life we were moderate believers, but Friday practice was a time we had fun worshiping. I miss it.

By age 14, our band had minor scene status and we were mingling with local Christian musicians. My gender dysphoria surfaced soon after. I hated my clothes, wiry facial hair was sprouting on my chin, and my hands were calloused. My eyes were the only thing I felt represented me. Fellow members fawned over their male rites of passage, but it felt wrong to me.

As LGBT advocacy for marriage equality popularized, some within my community lashed out at the rise of "freaks."

I learned about my lesbian aunt, who lived off disability cheques after she left her job due to harassment. School friends threatened to beat up LGBT individuals who touched them and my band members were silent on the movement, occasionally reciting, "Love man, hate sin."

Looking back, I was scared.

I avoided suspicion by purchasing strategically safe clothing from the women's section. Tight jeans and shirts still passed for men's, but female labels comforted me.

I was overcome by guilt when I confided in my dysphoria. I felt distant from God and sought guidance.

Shortly thereafter, I encountered religious counselling for LGBT people. Pamphlets labelled gender dysphoria as an "illness" curable through worship. I never attended counselling, but its advice spun me into a vicious cycle.

At age 16, I was trying to ease urges by performing, reading scripture, and apologizing through prayer, but it was difficult. I'd usually find excuses to paint my nails or shave my legs, punishing myself by scraping the polish off with scissors, wearing jeans during heat waves, or starving myself. I was depressed and self-loathing.

If there's a reason why I kept performing, preaching theology that attacked my sense of self, it'd be disappointment. I feared letting down my family, band, fans, a higher power. I'd never identified with anything more than the Christian community and I trusted its approach to my dysphoria.

Over time, members of my band—myself included—grew skeptical of religion. I desperately sustained my beliefs by quitting, playing with another band of evangelicals. Most of them had prior drug habits ranging from pot to Oxycontin, and I admired them for resisting their cravings,specifically the vocalist for ignoring the "voices" in his head. Their worship combined Old Testament scripture and hurling instruments across the stage.

But my dysphoria eventually took priority. I started attending grassroots safe space shows filled with friends telling me to embrace my feminine identity with open arms. I drifted away, occasionally hearing about old friends keeping faith. One ditched a gig after interpreting a billboard as a provident sign to go home. It was a strange reminder of devotion I lost.

It's not empowering being misled, told to treat a non-existent sickness. It morphed my moderate beliefs into an unstable mindset. To some, my prior fear of hellfire seems ridiculous, but I was largely unaware of contrary dialogue. Furthermore, I was unaware of others like me facing discrimination.

I've seen the Christian community do great things—giving hope to the homeless, abused, addicted, and more. But to me, the LGBT community is an exception, and the head of the Catholic church still views them equally dangerous to humanity as nuclear weapons.

Secular media is increasing coverage on Trans issues. With Caitlyn Jenner's transition in the spotlight and gender dysphoria losing its reputation as a mental illness in my province, society's clearly progressing. It's motivated me to explore my gender more than ever and I'm learning everyday. We all have our own prejudices to break; we all did back then. But I wonder if there was someone else like me, and the possibility of messages I spread spurring on someone's own internalized cycle scares me.

It keeps me awake, never speaking up; I wish I did. Not just for myself, but for anybody else.

Follow Al Downham on Twitter.

VICE Vs Video Games: Gaming Will Never Have Its ‘Citizen Kane’ Moment and That's OK

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From Software's 'Demon's Souls' is one title taking the right approach to gaming narrative.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

"When will video gaming have its Citizen Kane moment?" That, inanely, seems to be the question that encapsulates the debate revolving around narrative in games.

Nobody should take the query literally, but it does highlight the inherent laziness and troubling, self-inflicted limitations that underpin the design and discussion of gaming stories, plots, and characters.

By comparing games against the benchmark of cinema, we are prevented from thinking about what narrative in games can be. Instead, our attentions focus on when games might be like something else. And for gaming to center a crucial part of its thinking around playing catch-up with other art forms is, at best, demeaning. At worst, it's cripplingly destructive.

There have been relative successes in the world of gaming when it comes to merely mimicking the storytelling standard of cinema—the three-act structure and camera rules that a great many movies adhere to. But these triumphs are only considered such when directly contrasted against games that copy films to lesser results—and it's rare that any video game delivers a tale significant enough to feature as a blip on the radar of the cross-media landscape.

The Uncharted, BioShock, and Half-Life series are praised for their great narratives, but are they actually that wonderful when compared to masterworks more naturally exploiting the cinematic techniques that these games are so eager to mirror?

Unsurprisingly, when using techniques sculpted for film, a game's interactivity gets in the way of the narrative—which is why cutscenes can create a disconnect between your actions and the plot around them. Such a problem is plain to see in the likes of Uncharted, where the heroic and lovable Nathan Drake of the cutscenes warps into a bloodthirsty maniac during gameplay.

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Nathan Drake in 'Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception': friendly for five minutes, a gun-toting maniac for several hours.

The Uncharted games, so far, and so many others like them, have failed to figure out how to blend their stories with the very thing that makes them games: interactivity. Hence, you find yourself in the position, as a player, of not being able to summarize the plot after you've finished playing, as the overall experience is a confused collision of two completely separate and competing structures.

But what also links Uncharted, BioShock, and Half-Life is their presentation of memorable characters. These are just one part of a narrative framework, but it's the only one that games have been consistently able to portray with any degree of skill and success. The interactivity, the act of being the character and interacting with others around them, is what makes them memorable.

Interactivity is the key differentiator between games and other mediums, so it comes as no surprise that it's this sense of "being" that stands above all else in games with narrative aspirations. The Last of Us isn't revered because it tells a unique and interesting story, because it doesn't. It's because it provides memorable and engaging characters to play as and to understand.

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Play through 'The Last of Us' and you'd have to be a husk of a human to have not developed a connection with Ellie here.

Yet an increasing number of games are starting to think more deeply about how to use the unique possibilities of the medium to provide a form of narrative—one that requires more input from the player, but results in a stronger experience. An experience in which not only characters, but setting, pacing, misdirection, plot, and a sense of personal struggle are all presented in equal measure and, most crucially, in a manner that doesn't drearily rely on copy and pasting ideas from elsewhere.

Achieving this, though, requires an abandonment of what we tend to think of as narrative. Being told a story is what narrative has primarily meant in games, in the past, but being able to absorb one through interaction is what we should be focusing on.

What that doesn't mean is falling back on clichéd attempts at allowing players "freedom" by letting them choose their own quest paths and dialogue choices, like you'll find in Skyrim and Mass Effect. You're still being told a story in a traditional manner, albeit through a series of sections that you're (somewhat) free to arrange into an order that fits your personal wants and needs.


Related: The Mystical Universe of 'Magic: The Gathering'


Doing away with these dialogue options entirely and trusting players to decipher and interpret their stories is what more games need to do, opening the door for a wide range of understandings centered on a single title. An array of interpretations will lead to genuinely interesting and progressive debate as to what gaming can achieve in narrative terms.

From Software has long been a master within a field of few peers in providing exactly this type of narrative. Dark Souls (the original and its sequel), Demon's Souls, and Bloodborne revel in their ability to create a meaningful and deeply personal narrative experience by relying on the interactions you choose and how you decide to draw meaning from them.

I had one of my most memorable and powerful narrative experiences in a long time struggling to defeat a boss that had killed me countless times already. I approached its domain with trepidation and a sense of loss before the next attempt had even begun.

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On the streets of Yharnam.

Moving the camera around and looking at the surroundings, however, I caught glimpses of areas that I'd visited previously; of other challenges that had tested my patience and skill, but that had eventually been bested. That moment communicated a narrative of a kind so powerful, personal, and complex that to compare it to the likes of an Uncharted game or Skyrim seems churlish and crass. The boss defeated me again, but the narrative had already been served to the point that I was inspired to continue trying in order to garner more meaning from new events down the line.

Far from sticking to realm of film, this form of communication engages with the very core of what makes games a unique medium. From Software's Souls series uses the tools available to games and sticks firmly to asking "what can these be?" instead of "when will a game be as good as a film?" As a result, Bloodborne does what it does in a way that a film could never begin to match—highlighting just how banal and ridiculous close comparisons between the two mediums are.

To a degree, From Software's games share more in common with architectural design than they do with cinema or other "narrative" mediums. Both the best examples of architecture and of game design play on the idea of providing a space for people to inhabit, explore, and absorb a range of emotions and sensations, depending on the precise stimulus at the time.

Stories through sound: pay a visit to Noisey

Walking through a building when it's deserted, packed, light, dark, warm, or cold results in a very different experience. This rings true for games that embrace their potential, too: the space and the interaction holds the key to understanding and meaning.

If Bloodborne is architecture, then Don't Starve is a poem. Like From Software, its makers at Klei Entertainment have managed to use the unique traits of video games to tell a narrative within a supposedly story-free trial of hardship and survival. While the plot might not be presented in an instantly recognizable format, your personal struggle is more memorable than the plight of Nathan Drake or Half-Life's Gordon Freeman. Anyone who has lived long into Don't Starve's run time will be able to regale you with stories of near-death nights and overcoming impossible odds. Most people can barely remember the story of any Uncharted game, beyond their set-pieces.

Like a poem, the core text and language of Don't Starve remains the same to all players. It's the deciphering and the absorbing of the text, however, usually based on personal experience and outlook, that makes it hit in different ways. Such a strong outcome isn't available to games that simply copy the safer, easier-to-understand ideas of cinema.

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A screen shot from 'Don't Starve.'

Games, then, should be working more diligently to rid themselves of their poisonous reliance on repeating established plot line patterns. Designers and publishers should give their players more credit when it comes to understanding a form of communication that isn't yet a common tongue. And only through developing and delivering the unique language available to games can that understanding of language grow to the point where it is as easily digestible by a mainstream audience as film and literature already are.

Plainly, it's time more games stopped playing impersonator and started standing on their own feet. Only then will the medium have succeeded in banishing the Citizen Kane question to the trash where it belongs.

Follow John on Twitter.

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