Photo via the European Space Agency

Read: The Very Serious Business of Figuring Out How Earth Will Handle First Contact with Aliens

Philae and Rosetta, two spacecrafts from the European Space Agency, may have discovered evidence of alien microbial life. Spacecraft Philae made history by landing on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko last November and discovering the comet's organic rich black crust. Spacecraft Rosetta was also reported to have picked up organic material, which scientists say looks like viral particles. According to the Guardian, leading astronomers report that the comet's features are best explained by the presence of living alien organisms beneath its icy surface. That's right—living alien organisms.

Or not. After the Guardian's article on Sunday, physicist Chris Lee quickly penned a piece for Ars Technica, shrugging off the cries of "Alien!" and saying that "sometimes, scientists announce things that are breathtakingly stupid." Lee reasons that the comet's features can be best explained by simple chemistry. In his article, he describes how the comet, after gathering enough material and being fueled by the heat of the sun, has begun to react and produce what certain scientists claim to be evidence of alien life. "Let's not go shouting about life," Lee writes. "What we actually know is that we have some strange lumps of carbon."

Lee also criticizes Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, an astronomer involved in the planning of Philae's landing in November. Wickramasinghe is known to be a radical astrobiologist who has previously suggested that SARS was brought to Earth from space and has testified in favor of teaching creationism in US classrooms. He thinks that people should be more willing to accept the existence of alien life and says our "thinking has remained Earth-centered" and "it will take a lot of evidence to kick it over." Still, though, there's a big difference between some carbon on a space rock and the definitive proof of intelligent alien life. Oh well.

Kurt Cobain's driver's license was photographed as evidence after he was found dead in April, 1994. All photos via Seattle Police Department

About a month after the widely acclaimed Montage of Heck premiered on HBO, a second Kurt Cobain film was released to significantly less fanfare. Soaked in Bleach is a docudrama that peddles in conspiracy theory, along with plenty of re-enactment—two things that are not typically indicators of tremendous quality.

The acting is more than a little cringeworthy, and there's already a documentary called Kurt and Courtney that covers some of the same territory. But certain corners of the internet have delighted in the conclusion to Soaked in Bleach, when former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper suggests Kurt Cobain may not have died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in April 1994 as most of the world believes.

"If we didn't get it right the first time, we damn well better get it right the second time," Stamper says. "And I would tell you right now if I were the chief of police, I would reopen this investigation."

So why was the department Stamper headed so quick to rule Cobain's death a suicide 21 years ago, and why the bizarre change of heart since?

Although Montage of Heck was authorized by the Cobain family, Soaked in Bleach was put together despite their objections, including a cease-and-desist letter on behalf of Cobain's wife, Courtney Love. That's probably because it focuses on Tom Grant, something of a Jesus figure to the people out there who insist that the Nirvana frontman was murdered.

(Love did not return requests for comment through her attorney or through her management.)

Grant, an ex-cop-turned-private-detective, was hired by Love when Cobain went missing after being released from rehab on April 1, 1994. He didn't do a great job of tracking down his subject. Cops determined that Cobain shot himself in his own home—probably on April 5, according to a coroner's report—and it took an electrician stumbling upon the corpse for it to be discovered three days later.

But Grant claims to have found Love so strange and manipulative after first meeting her that he decided to record their conversations. With its emphasis on Grant, the new documentary essentially serves as an extended airing for the outlandish idea that Love may have murdered Cobain, flanked by re-enactments of those taped phone calls and interviews.

Former Chief Stamper declined an interview with VICE, citing a book deadline. But private investigator and Soaked in Bleach star Tom Grant thinks he knows why Seattle's old top cop has warmed up to the murder theory since the 90s.

Basically, Grant argues, the officers serving below Stamper may have been resentful or incompetent.

"Chief Stamper was hired from the outside," Grant says. "He had only been chief for about three months when Kurt Cobain was killed. In general, subordinates often do not like having a new boss who is hired from the outside rather than promoted from within."

Stamper delivers the movie's coup de grâce when he concludes, "We should in fact have taken steps to study patterns involved in the behavior of key individuals who had a motive to see Kurt Cobain dead. If in fact Kurt Cobain was murdered, as opposed to having committed suicide, and it was possible to learn that, shame on us for not doing that. That was in fact our responsibility. It's about right and wrong. It's about honor. It's about ethics."

That whiff of doubt is music to the ears of Cobain Truthers who have been waiting decades for validation—or at least acknowledgment from someone with a vaguely official-sounding title who doesn't think they're total nut-jobs.

If you haven't been paying attention, while the concept of a sad guy who sings sad songs doing a sad thing seems pretty cut-and-dry, a small army of fringe internet sleuths maintain that Cobain's demise stemmed from foul play. And while it's almost certainly not true that one of the most high-profile celebrity deaths of the past 50 years was misclassified as a suicide, people out there are still insisting that Tupac is alive and well in Cuba. So Cobain's death isn't exactly unique in attracting crackpot conjecture.

Another reason Grant offers for the Seattle PD's alleged desire to wash its hands of the case is simple annoyance. He argues that conspiracy theorists come out of the woodwork almost immediately after high-profile deaths, and investigators generally want to steer clear of them.

"There was one guy in Seattle with his own public access TV show who claimed Kurt was murdered within 24 hours of hearing the news of Kurt's death," Grant says. "He did everything he could to create attention for himself by constantly annoying the Seattle Police Department and creating publicity stunts to get the media's attention."

Ever since the age of shitty personal websites like Angelfire and Geocities, People With Opinions have dedicated lots of time and energy to probing Cobain's death. Some of these armchair detectives believe that Love wanted to inherit her rockstar-husband's estate, and point to interviews with acquaintances suggesting Cobain was happy before his death. They mull the plausible trajectory of shotgun shells, note that there were no legible fingerprints recovered from the scene, and pour over the singer's supposed suicide note—especially the final lines, which, they say, look as if they were penned by someone else.

One of the main pieces of required reading for Cobain Truthers is a 1998 paper written by a Canadian chemist named Roger Lewis. He makes the argument that Cobain couldn't have possibly shot himself because he had so much heroin in his system that he should have been comatose. Rather than die with a needle in his arm, the singer apparently managed to place his heroin gear back into a box, which was photographed on the scene by police.

Heroin gear recovered from the scene of Cobain's death in 1994

There's also a 2005 book called Love & Death: The Murder of Kurt Cobain by Ian Halperin and Max Wallace. They quote Dr. Osvaldo Galletta, who treated Kurt Cobain in March 1994 when he overdosed on the date rape drug Rohypnol, aka Roofies. Fans often say it was his first suicide attempt, but Truthers argue it was the first time someone attempted to kill him.

"We can usually tell a suicide attempt," the authors pried out of the doctor. "This didn't look like one to me."

Grant, the private detective who's made the Cobain case his life's work, says that the stuff unveiled by hobbyists just wasn't available to the former police chief when cops ruled the death a suicide in '94.

"I'm convinced that Chief Stamper was never completely filled in on all of the details surrounding the death of Kurt," Grant says.

The PI claims in the movie that the name Kurt Cobain goes through his head "300 or 400 times a day at least." He's obviously on the more obsessive end of the spectrum, but there's enough persistent interest in the late singer's death that the Seattle Police Department reportedly gets at least one request per week to re-open the case.

The fanatics making those requests got their hopes up in March of last year when the Seattle police decided to develop four rolls of film from shortly after Cobain's body was found. However, police officials indicated the evidence revealed nothing and that people who thought the case was being re-opened were "very, very incorrect."

Some people say Kurt Cobain left a suicide note, while others argue Courtney Love took an existing note about quitting music and added a bit to the bottom.

Holdouts will probably cry "murder" in the Cobain case until the sun explodes, and part of that is complicated by the story's main players—a woman with a bevy of highly publicized personal problems and a notoriously inscrutable prankster who loved fucking with the public.

After Montage of Heck came out, one of Cobain's good friends came forward to say that movie was off-base, too. Specifically, he argued the diary entries the filmmakers reconstructed to form some of the most memorable scenes were completely made up.

"People need to understand that 90 percent of Montage of Heck is bullshit," Buzz Osborne of the Melvins told Rolling Stone." That's the one thing no one gets about Cobain—he was a master of jerking your chain."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

The canal the City of Winnipeg dug 100 years ago that cut off Shoal Lake 40 from the mainland. Photos by Allya Davidson

If elected, Liberal leader Justin Trudeau says his government would fund a desperately-needed access road for Shoal Lake 40 First Nation.

"Around Shoal Lake, simple answer: yes. A Liberal Party will step up and do its share," Trudeau said in Calgary over the weekend.

"For too long, the government has mislead and abandoned the people of Shoal Lake 40," Kenora-area Liberal contender Bob Nault said. "Our commitment today is clear. A Liberal government would build the Freedom Road."

The approximately 250 residents of the First Nation have endured a boiled water advisory for the last 18 years. Residents can't drink water from their taps, instead relying on bottled water deliveries. An under-construction access road dubbed "Freedom Road" would connect the man-made island to the mainland, making it cheaper and easier to build a water treatment plant for the community.

Shoal Lake 40 resident Stewart Redsky expressed disappointment following MP Greg Rickford's announcement two weeks ago

The road would cost $30 million to complete, and Shoal Lake 40 has asked three levels of government to chip in a third of the cost each. The City of Winnipeg and the Manitoba government have both said they would fund a third of the road.

In June, Conservative Kenora MP Greg Rickford reiterated a past promise of $1 million toward the road's design. He would not tell reporters whether his government would commit $10 million to the access road.

Following Rickford's announcement, which disappointed some Shoal Lake 40 residents, a Winnipeg man started a crowdfunding campaign to raise the $10 million. Nearly $55,000 had been raised at the time of publication.

Nault said a federal commitment to Freedom Road would be a win for the whole riding.

"Shoal Lake 40 has made it clear to the Government of Canada that without the Freedom Road, the twinning of Highway 17 from Kenora to the Manitoba border would not happen," Nault said. "Today's announcement from Mr. Trudeau makes it clear that under a Liberal government, Highway 17 is much closer to being twinned."

Speaking to VICE last week, Shoal Lake 40 Chief Erwin Redsky said, "Canada created this problem and Canada needs to come up with a solution."

BioWare's Mass Effect series allows the player to engage in same-sex romances, or even pursue relationships with aliens (as seen here in 'Mass Effect 3,' via the Mass Effect Wikia)

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

My first love was funny, strong, and really knew how to handle his sword. He was a virgin, too, so we lost our innocence together. Kind of beautiful, right? It wasn't all jokes and daydreams of the future, though. Life was chaotic, and it always felt like the world was just about to end, but that's young love.

Then there was the wiry Japanese schoolboy who taught me how to fight. And his roommate, so tortured, so mysterious. I had them both.

The business owner was the first one I actually married, and after I built us a house, we adopted an adorable little girl. Everything was great until she was kidnapped. I think of her often and promise myself that I really will go rescue her, one day, if I ever get some extra time.

I loved them all, and it wasn't just about the sex. There was something else. A sly glance, an admiring word, their confidence in me to complete any mission. What I loved most was the romance.

You do know I'm talking about video game characters, right?

People tend to talk a lot about sex in video games, but what about the romance? These characters, Alistair from Dragon Age: Origins, Akihiko and Shinjiro from Persona 3 Portable, and Camilla Valerius from Skyrim, all made me feel something, and I'm not just talking about what was going on in my pants. It was the way we interacted, or how they helped me be better at playing the game, that made me feel for them. Is it possible to fall in love with a fictional character? I don't know, but I can say that some of them still make my heart go pitty-pat.

People love to love in games because it gives the interactive experience an added dimension of reality. You aren't going to beat someone with a war hammer in real life (well, probably not, unless you get into a particularly wild LARP session), but it's likely that you've had a romantic encounter. Video game romances give players one more way to escape everyday life, and it's not really cheating if the "other woman" isn't real. Right?

Alistair from 'Dragon Age: Origins.' You would, wouldn't you?

I'm so interested in this topic that I actually wrote and produced a supernatural romance comedy video game called Strange Loves: Vampire Boyfriends where you can date vampires, slay them, or become one. The three main love interests are a blonde vegetarian vampire fighting to help humans; a tall, dark, and bloodthirsty vampire who embraces who—and what—he is; and a bald beefcake who trains slayers and hates all vampires. They all have different looks and personalities, to appeal to different types of players, and it's always interesting to hear which one stole a particular player's heart.

I wanted to include more gender and identity options for romances in my game, but I realized early on that if I didn't manage the scope of the project, I was never going to actually finish making the game. I did hide an Easter egg female romance option toward the end, which has proved to be quite popular, but writing a whole new branching storyline just for her wasn't in the cards at the time.

Controlling scope isn't just something an indie writer, like me, has to deal with. Mike Laidlaw is creative director for the Dragon Age series, one of the best examples of romance in video games from the game-making giant, BioWare. A lot of discussion about romance in games comes back to the biggest question about romance in the Dragon Age franchise: why do we all keep getting dissed by Varric, the hirsute dwarf who will always have my heart?

Related: Watch our interview with Rashida Jones about her porn documentary, 'Hot Girls Wanted'

Or watch our documentary on an evergreen card game, The Mystical Universe of 'Magic: The Gathering'

"Adding a romantic arc to a follower character in one of our games instantly makes them more involved as characters," Laidlaw says. "Additional romance-only scenes are created, more writing has to be done, and we have some extra steps to go through, such as ensuring the voice actors have both the range and the personal comfort needed to play a role in a romantic arc."

Have you heard Varric's voice? I'm sure he'd be just fine with whispering sweet nothings to me, but OK, fine. I get it. Still trying to get over it. Laidlaw continues: "A lot of extra effort goes into making the romantic characters work 'just right,' in part because the creators fall in love with them a little bit, too."

To get a better idea of the extra effort Laidlaw refers to, I got in touch with Karin and Patrick Weekes, lead editor and lead writer, respectively, at BioWare. Not only is the pair a couple that gets to work together on romance games, but she is also his editor. Drawing on your life is essential for creatives, and being married to your collaborator can add a little extra to those daily tasks. I ask Karin what it's like when personal details find their way into one of their games.

"It's generally cool and interesting to see how a real experience turns into something that supports a character and storyline. Plus, I'm not required to tell anyone else what may be real and what he invented." It's also Karin's job to make sure that, even if it is real, it still rings true. "We editors spend lots of time muttering lines to see how they sound and feel when spoken."

Iron Bull looks hard as nails, but he's gentle in the bedroom.

Drawing on the couple's marriage, Patrick wrote the Iron Bull character in Dragon Age: Inquisition as a mature, experienced romance option. "The sexiest thing Bull ever does is stop (Inquisitor adviser) Leliana the morning after the player's first time with him," he tells me. "Leliana is going to wake up the Inquisitor, and Bull says, 'No, let her rest.' Now, if you are parents like we are, having someone say, 'I care about you, so I am going to keep people from waking you up so you can get a few more hours of sleep,' is like middle-aged parent erotica." Karin agrees: "That is not like middle-aged parent erotica, that is totally middle-aged parent erotica. So hot." Aren't they adorable?

But game writers don't just take inspiration from their own lives. They also look to well-loved stories. In addition to being a senior product manager at EA/BioWare, working on the upcoming Mass Effect: Andromeda, Hilary Heskett Shapiro is also a published author working on her first romance novel.

"Video games are a great way to learn how various stories can be told, and even with a multitude of variables, the basic structure usually falls in line with a story that has been told before," she says. Shapiro is particularly interested in looking for what might have inspired the stories she enjoys playing, and she found something special in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

Vilkas in a moment where he simply can't bear to look at you. Screen shot via Deviantart

"I fell in love with a man named Vilkas. Our beginning wasn't easy, but before long, we tumbled into a friendship. Then, he did something to push me away. It took time for us to get over our pride and reunite once again. Sound familiar? He was the Mr. Darcy to my Elizabeth Bennet. Yes, I was the Dragonborn and he was a werewolf, but our story—in my playthrough—hit similar notes to Pride and Prejudice. Isn't it great that I could find a Jane Austen classic within a video game?"

But enough about the past and present—what about the future? Two people on the cutting edge of the game dating world exploring new ways to handle, among other things, love and gender, are AM Cosmos, a media blogger with a particular interest in dating sims, and Arden Ripley, a writer working on a new dating game called Date or Die. They both have some interesting ideas about what we can anticipate from the romance genre.

Many of Cosmos's friends are aflutter over the newest Dragon Age, Inquisition, and it's not the monster slaying that they're excited about. "They all gossip about the romanceable characters and the story," she says. "They replay the game and exhaust it of possibilities, then turn to me and ask for more games with romance like that." As a fan of Japanese dating sims, Cosmos has a few she can recommend, but she notes that there still aren't enough translated into English, yet. "Localization publishers are starting to notice the need, and we are getting more options coming out soon!"

On Motherboard: Sony Used a Weird Dating Sim to Demo Its VR Headset

Ripley has high hopes that new technology and direct access to publishing will continue to make it easier for all kinds of people to make games. "More marginalized creators, who may not have been able to create these projects otherwise, can publish their work, which means a greater diversity of love interests and love stories seen in games." She also believes that these indies can influence and inspire triple-A developers—the likes of BioWare and beyond.

I've organized a panel on this topic called Foreplay: Romance in Games for several years now at PAX East and PAX Prime, and we're pretty much always standing room only. The fanbase is there and growing right alongside the numbers of games that keep expanding the romantic options. Ripley agrees. She thinks that we'll soon have "more romance with LGBT+ characters, disabled characters, polyamorous characters—just more in general." I checked. More is almost always better, and in this case, it totally is.

Follow Miellyn on Twitter.

To me, Etgar Keret has always seemed to exist in some place beyond personhood. Maybe this is because Keret's many short stories all seem as inevitable and sincere as fables or maybe because he had never, until very recently, published anything about his personal life. There were Etgar Keret stories. There were Etgar Keret books. And presumably, somewhere, there was an Etgar Keret, but this person was probably unreachable and possibly magic, a sort of Oz somewhere behind a curtain that could never be pulled back. Perhaps you'd have to fall down a pipe or into mysterious hole to reach him.

Now, I can attest both from meeting Etgar and reading his new memoir, Seven Good Years, that Etgar Keret is not just an author but also a person, and a very nice one, in fact, who has just published an incredibly beautiful and compassionate book of short personal essays about the years between his son's birth and his father's death. The tone is as personable and inviting as Heidi Julavits's The Folded Clock; it reads as urgently as The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson; and like both of these recent literary hits, it has a voice that is unmistakably that of the author. (In fact, using the word memoir for any of these books feels a bit like putting on a stranger's used socks. We simply need a better word or a better connotation.)

Seven Good Years is also hilarious and offers a genius solution for one of the more vexing problems of being an author: What in the hell do you write in a book dedication when put on the spot? For a while Keret opted against generic dedications in favor of completely fictitious ones that reference lives saved, money owed, vendettas, and broken hearts.

"To Mickey. Your mother called. I hung up on her. Don't you dare show your face around here again."

"To Tziki. I admit that I acted like a shit. But if your sister can forgive me, so can you."

"To Avram. I don't care what the lab tests show. For me, you'll always be my dad."

This goofy sense of humor and love for the absurd can even touch parts of life where others may find it more difficult, like in the essay, "Pastrami," when he's protecting his wife and son during an air raid as they are driving north of Tel Aviv. "How'd you like to play a game of Pastrami Sandwich?" Etgar asks his son as they pull over to dog pile on each other, husband and wife sandwiching seven-year-old Lev. He likes the game so much he doesn't want it to end, so they stay like that for a while before dusting themselves off and going on with their lives.

After getting to know Etgar through such personal and often moving very stories like this one, I was a little apologetic about my stunt-like assignment—taking him around New York City to test a few American bastardizations of a favorite Israeli dish. But when I meet Etgar at the first restaurant, he explains that since he's a vegetarian who can't or won't cook, he survives largely on hummus, and because he is a self-described hummus addict, unable to refuse even the lowest-quality hummus—the airport hummus, the packaged hummus, the hummus trying to be health food—he has developed a breadth of knowledge on the many possibilities and varieties of hummus, the many ways it can reach brilliance or disgrace.

"This is what would happen if French food and hummus got together and had an illegitimate baby. It's good, but it's not even really hummus." —Etgar Keret

"You know how when they're trying to get a heroin addict off heroin, they give them something fake to shoot up?" he asked, dead-panning in his thick Israeli accent. "It's like that. I'll eat anything, but I won't necessarily get that high."

Given this new information, I realize that a large portion of Etgar Keret is made from the reconfigured molecules of chickpeas, that his brain is hewn from tahini, that this humble dip has been the literal fuel of literature I have long enjoyed. Suddenly I felt galvanized to find Etgar the best hummus the West Village could offer.

Alas, by some strange stroke of luck, the first Israeli restaurant where we landed, Bar Bolonat, an elegant and empty space in the West Village, had no hummus. This would not do. We fled. Down the street at a small, bustling restaurant called Mémé, we hardly consult the menu, dodge the waitress's rosé agenda, and order the hummus.

Watch our documentary, 'Palestine Vs. Israel—Against the Wall':

"This is what would happen if French food and hummus got together and had an illegitimate baby," Etgar declared, satisfied but non-plussed. "It's good, but it's not even really hummus." Hummus with an identity crisis and a fake accent. Hummus that was never the same after that year abroad. In my ignorance, I thought it was just regular hummus, and I began to wonder if I'd ever had hummus at all.

Our conversation about religion and politics moved toward the grim realities of growing up and now raising his son in a part of the world where air raids and terrorism are just a part of life. His reverent optimism about it was heartening, just as it is in his work.

"Lev asked me the other day if we could move to New Zealand," he explained as we finished up the French-y hummus, "because he heard that people don't kill each other there."

My heart sank. I asked him what how he copes with that sort of thing while still living in Tel Aviv, a city he loves to call his home, despite everything.

"I think of what my mother says, that even after surviving the Holocaust she managed to still have three kids. People find ways to be happy, even in the worst circumstances."

This hummus is a straight, white boyfriend who watches football and wears button-up shirts. It's OK... But there's something missing. Your friends think you could do better. —Etgar Keret

At the third hummus place, Taïm—the smallest and most crowded—we ordered, again, the hummus and I thought the density of customers might mean we'd found a winner.

"This hummus is a straight, white boyfriend who watches football and wears button-up shirts," he concluded, shrugging. "It's OK... But there's something missing. Your friends think you could do better."

Full on sub-par hummus, Etgar wrote me one of his fictionalized book inscriptions, thanking me on behalf of the Mossad for losing my virginity for the safety of the people of Israel.

On Munchies: Hummus Is a Metaphor for Israeli-Palestinian Tensions

Reflecting on our meager tour of no-hummus, French-hummus, and dull-hummus, I decided it was only right to bring in Brooklyn's secret weapon, the spicy hummus from Sahadi's on Atlantic Avenue before he left town. Full of all the spice that the boring boyfriend hummus was lacking and a little more texture than the too-silky Francophile hummus, I wondered why I hadn't thought of bringing it along in the first place.

"This," he said between reverent mouthfuls a few days later, "is a very good hummus. If a place in Israel made a hummus like this, I would go there often."

I suspected he was just hungry or that he wanted to be polite to me since I'd schlepped all the way up to NYU just to continue an assignment I'd initially thought was kind of absurd, but I must have given him some look that betrayed my skepticism.

"You're sort of reminding me of Kevin Spacey in House of Cards," he said, "so determined about the whole hummus thing."

Etgar Keret's memoir Seven Good Years is now out from Riverhead Books.

Catherine Lacey is the author of Nobody Is Ever Missing (FSG Originals, 2014) and a forthcoming novel. She is on Twitter.

Screencap via YouTube

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

If recent reports are to be believed, and they probably should be, the YouTuber PewDiePie—real name Felix Kjellberg, a 25-year-old Swede living in Brighton who primarily posts Let's Play videos—made $7.45 million in profits in 2014 (for his company, Pewdie Holdings AB). The gaming site Destructoid is amongst several to have picked up on figures published in the Swedish tabloid Expressen, their positive spin on the news leading to some predictable comments criticizing the internet celebrity's elevated profile.

"Joe" posts: "Good for him posting annoying videos on YouTube with an F-bomb every second? This is how people make millions on YouTube apparently? Holy shit idiocracy is real."

"The Laughing Owl" adds: "This guy is just as bad as Justin Bieber, if not worse..." (Note that "The Laughing Owl" fails to mention at what, as I don't think PewDiePie sings for a living, and Beiber's not in the habit of posting Let's Plays.)

Another user, "able to think," crashes straight in with some sweeping generalizing, because hell, this is the internet: "I've never seen him, but he seems like a twat based on what I've heard. He's popular with teenagers, which makes me more inclined to assume he's crap. Teenagers are terrible and like terrible things."

"able to think" makes a valid point: We were all teenagers once, or maybe you still are, and while at that age I've no doubt we all liked some terrible things. I, for one, would drink Miller Genuine Draft when it was on two-for-one at dingy rock clubs, and the me of today wouldn't go anywhere near that pißwasser. I also listened to some awful music in my late teens—remember VAST? Of course you don't, but I played the outfit's Benedictine monks-starring debut album over, and over, and over in my first year at college. What a terrible prick I was.

But to have never seen PewDiePie suggests you're doing the internet all wrong. This isn't some hot-right-now vlogger whose star's ascended to its peak and can only crash from here—PewDiePie's YouTube channel is the most subscribed in the world, some 14 million subscribers ahead of second place. He's almost permanently been top of the 'Tubers since August 2013, and has racked up the most individual views of anyone on the Google-owned video-sharing site—more than Rihanna, One Direction, Katy Perry, Ellen DeGeneres, and Eminem. He's the only games-content YouTuber amongst the world's top ten most-subscribed channels, the next being VanossGaming at 12, with "just" 13 million subscribers.

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PewDiePie is to the internet what Piers Morgan, Jeremy Clarkson, Clare Balding, and Barry Scott are to British TV: always there, somewhere, so you can expect to trip over them during an evening's lazy channel-hopping. Except, he's much more than those opinion-splitting screen stars will ever be, and significantly less aggravating, as he's successfully targeted a youth market that's largely been abandoned by what its elders term traditional media. Linear broadcasting. Analogue entertainment. PewDiePie's brand of humor—crass, blunt, loud, but enthusiastic and big-hearted—strikes a chord with internet browsers in their early teens. He's a big brother figure to millions of strangers. He makes them laugh and shows them cool-cum-utterly-ridiculous stuff that they can subsequently pester their parents for. If the BBC could afford him, he'd be all over its flagging (and soon to go digital only) Three channel.

The rise of YouTube celebrities—to list many more here would merely be a scratching of the surface of the tip of an iceberg that stretches down into the very darkest, most depressing depths (but, gaming wise, you can also check out Stampylonghead's Minecraft-focused content; the PewDiePie-like Markiplier; and the slightly straighter-faced SeaNanners)—has been a Very Good Thing for the video games industry, which has by and large embraced PewDiePie and his peers. Kjellberg's uploads include playthroughs of cult puzzler Catherine, oddball comedy detective game Jazzpunk, and indie role-playing heartbreaker To the Moon. He consistently finds (or is alerted to, one way or another) the weird and wonderful in gaming, and presents these niche works to the very biggest audience.

Part one of PewDiePie's playthrough of 'Catherine.'

"It's the tool, right now," is how developer Mike Bithell sees YouTube. He's one of several independent games makers I've spoken to recently, as I'm writing a book on the indie scene, and he'll soon release his second "solo" game, Volume, the stealth-focused follow-up to the massively acclaimed puzzle-platformer Thomas Was Alone. "YouTube was massive in [popularizing] Thomas Was Alone, and Volume will be doing a lot of work to make sure YouTubers have copies to make content, and all the help they need. The value of one YouTube video from one big creator is insane."

Sam Watts of Brighton-based studio Tammeka, currently working on the virtual reality game Radial-G: Racing Revolved, also values the work of YouTubers, seeing it as growing in impact above traditional media. "We are seeing the rise of YouTube, with Let's Players, as well as Twitch streams and Reddit AMAs, as wholly viable ways to connect directly to fans, and your community, without having to spend mega-bucks on PR and marketing." Basically, someone like PewDiePie playing a game like Jazzpunk does infinitely more for that game's visibility than all the conventional reviews in the world. There have been over five million YouTube views for part one of Kjellberg's playthrough, and just 14,000 for its Gamespot review.

He might rub a great many casual viewers up the wrong way, and believe me I can hear why, but Kjellberg's popularity has been expertly managed. When he was criticized for making jokes that referred to rape, as many young men have been known to do (come on, it's acceptable to be young and naive, if it's checked by adulthood), he stopped making them and offered a frank apology. He defies security at public events to personally meet his fans—even though the resulting commotion can be akin to The Beatles landing in America in 1964. Anecdotally, I'm told by fellow Brighton games writers that he is regularly mobbed by fans if he so much as steps out for some milk.

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He's also good with, and about, his money. As Destructoid's report states, he regularly donates to charities and has spearheaded several fundraising drives, with the World Wildlife Fund and Charity: Water amongst the organizations benefitting from his support. And while he's made commercial deals to plug movies and fizzy drinks in the past, he's not using his platform to, in his words, "max my income." Interviewed by Swedish magazine Icon in 2014, he said: "I think my viewers would call me on that right away, if I did. I've seen other YouTubers start selling and it's a mistake. It's more beneficial to me that my channel grows than it would be to make a few deals." Basically, Felix Kjellberg does not sound like a twat, at all. Sorry, "able to think," but you might want to think again.

I probably won't read his book when it comes out, and I don't make a habit of watching his videos. But I have a great deal of respect for PewDiePie. It's probably fair to say that his fame is part fortunate timing, part singular talent, as the boom in Let's Play popularity has coincided with his own brand's growth in such a way that if it wasn't him, it'd almost certainly be another gaming YouTuber who's getting magazine covers, global fame, and fortune, and the piss ripped out of him by online commenters. And this is something that he's accepted, gracefully.

PewDiePie plays Survivor Mode on 'Alien: Isolation.'

He knows this could all stop tomorrow. It won't, but all the same, he's prepared for it to. "I feel like I've gotten more out of YouTube than I ever wanted or expected," he told ESPN in June 2015. "I've always kept the approach that next month might not work out. That's the healthy way to be. I started YouTube because I was bored, not to become famous. It's not that important. I'm not curing cancer. It's not that special to upload videos on the internet."

True enough, but PewDiePie has been an unstoppable force in the growth of video gaming as a completely accepted mainstream pastime these past few years, and he's done wonders for left field titles that might otherwise have always lingered on the margins of public attention. Love him or loathe him, he's making a difference—it's not curing cancer, that's true enough, but his work is bringing pleasure, escape, laughs, and purpose to the lives of millions. So, what are you doing with your life?

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

Christian Cowan-Sanluis hat, Peter Jensen playsuit, Marc by Marc Jacobs necklace from Harvey Nichols

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

PHOTOGRAPHY: ALEX DE MORA
STYLING: KYLIE GRIFFITHS

Make-up: Daisy Harris d'Andel using MAC Cosmetics
Hair: Shiori Takahashi using Bumble & Bumble
Photographer's assistant: Theo Cottle
Stylist's assistants: Thomas Ramshaw and Nina Bright
Casting: Sarah Bunter
Models: Christina N at Nevs, Holly Foxton at FM, Ella H at Tess

Fred Perry x Bella Freud dress, Jiwinaia earrings

Joyrich dress, Christian Cowan-Sanluis necklace

Moschino top from Harvey Nichols, Freedom earrings

Illustrated People top, Christian Cowan Sanluis choker

Ellesse jacket

O Thongthai x Ryan Lo earrings, Illustrated People top

WeSC top, Smiley hat and earrings

The author with his (surrogate) father

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

When people hear that you once considered bizarre television character Mr. Blobby a surrogate father figure, the words "troubled childhood" instantly pop into their heads. But that pink and yellow-spotted lump of terrifying rubberized 90s excess was just that to me in my childhood years.

Visiting Mr. Blobby Land—now a routinely mocked depressing ruin within the woodland of Somerset, but then a sort of Disneyland by way of a nightmare playground for kids whose parents didn't want to take them to Florida—felt like a one-way ticket to the promised land back when I was a toddler in the summer of 1994. Walking down the streets of Crinkly Bottom and waving at the flamingos, eating yellow and pink spotted cupcakes, and even watching members of the Blobby species take a shower are among my earliest memories.

My mother used to joke about the tears I shed when the real Blobby—in retrospect, probably a sweating bloke named Dave in a rubber suit—unexpectedly emerged from behind a bin and gave me an enthusiastic hug and free cap.

An example of the sort of fun you could have at Blobby Land

That visit to Blobby Land was just a few months after my father unexpectedly passed away due to a heart defect in his mid-30s—a traumatic experience that just happened to tie in with the meteoric rise of Mr. Blobby. Seriously, it just happened that way. I asked doctors, and they're pretty sure the two events are not in any way related.

In the wake of dad's passing, I obtained Blobby curtains, Blobby mugs, Blobby sweaters, Blobby birthday cakes, Blobby Y-fronts, Blobby teddies, Blobby bedding, and Blobby toothpaste. And while I'm sure there are people out there my age who are hip enough to cite something like OK Computer as their first musical purchase, mine proudly came with a cassette of the pink and yellow one's famously lambasted Christmas number one. For my fifth birthday my older brother even dressed up as the beast, with the help of a decorated pillowcase, turning my living room into Mr. Blobby Land and my family garage into a wheelbarrow-based Noel's House Party rollercoaster.

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It was only recently, when looking through a bag of family photos, that I realized my way of dealing with the grief of losing my dad was to latch on to Blobby and never let go. When I tell this to Blobby's creator, Michael Leggo, who served as BBC's head of light entertainment in the early 90s, he jokes: "We scarred you for life, didn't we?"

Long before his days of offering pseudophilosophy to simpletons opening numbered boxes, Noel Edmonds—with Leggo's assistance—was the undisputed star of Saturday-night television. Running for 166 episodes, Noel's House Party on BBC1 was Saturday night entertainment personified, birthing the live interactive format that now pays Ant and Dec's mortgages.

And, as Leggo tells me, it was the show's practical joke on This Morning presenter Eamonn Holmes that ignited the Blobby flame. "We used to do a practical joke segment called 'Noel's Gotcha,' and we had one where Eamonn Holmes thought he was getting paid to record a training video for car salesmen," he explains. "Eamonn was going through sales scenarios with an actor dressed in the Sugar Puffs Honey Monster costume for comic effect, but, unbeknownst to him, halfway through we switched the monster with Noel."

At this point, Leggo says, Edmonds, dressed up as everybody's favorite sugary cereal mascot, demolished the set, ruffled a furious Eamonn's hair, and behaved like a "complete arsehole. When the reveal happened it was such a great moment; something just clicked."

A woman in a Blobby pillowcase terrorizes the children

So in the summer of 1992, armed with an A5 sketchpad and some Crayolas, Leggo got to work. "I just doodled a pear-shaped thing with felt tip and colored it in, and having used 'Blobby' as a mean word in the past, it was a natural fit. I rang Noel and explained what I had come up with, and he said, 'You're on to something.' At that point, I really had no idea what I was unleashing on the nation."

Blobby quickly became a regular fixture of the Gotcha segment, making a mockery of ballet with dance sensation Wayne Sleep and kicking footballs at sad frog-man (and then Tottenham player) Garth Crooks. Due to his growing popularity, he stepped up from Gotcha sketches to co-presenter duties on Noel's House Party.

Related: Want to watch something more entertaining than a Blobby video? Watch our documentary on the world of eSports

The BBC had Blobby appear on everything from Match of the Day to Barry Norman's film reviews show, where Hollywood stars filmed short segments pretending the character was an actor comparable to Brando.

Actor Barry Killerby was hired to play the role full-time and helped to shape the character's trademark menacing voice. Meanwhile, BBC Worldwide licensed Blobby for extensive general merchandise, leaving Americans in fear that he could dethrone their national treasure, Barney.

Leggo remembers: "I think the point we realized things had gone crazy was when Blobby arrived by helicopter at a race course. Noel was hosting a Garden Party event, and when Blobby got out the helicopter 15,000 people were going absolutely crazy—it was like Princess Diana had showed up."

And there was that Christmas single. Its surreal music video—which sees Blobby accosting children, getting a semi-erotic sponge bath, playing with demonic-looking infant Blobbies, and pissing off a chauffeur played by Jeremy Clarkson to the lyrics "Your influence has spread throughout the land"—used to have me sliding across the living room floor with joy. Leggo remembers: "Two weeks before Christmas we went in at number one, one week before Take That knocked us off, then on Christmas week we knocked them back off. Take that, Gary Barlow, I thought."

However, Leggo's son wasn't as impressed as the four-year-old me. "My eldest son, James, was about the same age as you," he tells me. "As I was the intellectual guardian of Mr. Blobby, I would bring home a truckload of toys, and I gave him this four-foot high inflatable Blobby. He had a terrible nightmare that it was coming to get him."

It also seems to have been a bit of a nightmare for the man inside the suit. A quick IMDb search shows that pre-Blobby actor Barry Killerby had some pretty serious roles, even co-starring in a World War II drama. Leggo explains: "Barry was key to Blobby's success, but he was nauseated by people going on about it, as he's a serious actor—he still won't do any interviews about Blobby. It's the past for him."

However, Blobby's rock-star status wasn't to last, and when Noel's House Party got canceled by the BBC in 1997, his popularity waned. No longer sustained by a prime-time show, he was relegated to Jim Davidson's Generation Game cameos before the nation tried to forget he ever happened.

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When I re-watch historic Mr. Blobby clips on YouTube now, I want to feel ashamed—dirty, even—at how I was so utterly won over by a character whose popularity the New York Times famously described as "proof of a nation that had gone soft in the head."

This was an actual attraction at Blobby Land.

Yet, I find myself giggling like it's 1994. Blobby is an anarchist. A pre-internet meme-making, Andy Kaufman-inspired troll, whose sole purpose was to humiliate the questionable craft of Z-list celebrities. A creature whose rebellious anti-establishment blues—well, anti-BBC, too—made working class children smile from Portsmouth to Glasgow at a time when Britain was still recovering from Thatcherism. I like to think my dad would have been sort of proud that a toddler was emotionally-fathered by such a renegade.

Leggo isn't quite as enthusiastic—"When I do tell people I'm his creator, they either want to kick me or hug me," he says—but he isn't completely shut off to the anarchist comparisons, and admits he was thinking about an animated Blobby comeback "a few years back."

He concludes: "I wouldn't call Blobby performance art or political, but he was certainly all about anarchy, a little punk rock if you like. He was larger than life and never played by the rules—I think that's what resonated with people. I just hope my children don't put 'blobby, blobby, blobby' on my gravestone."

Follow Thomas Hobbs on Twitter.

Photo courtesy of Robert Paske.

I was ten years old when I first picked up a lightsaber. It wasn't much of a blade—just a long stick fallen from a tree, the surface covered by rough wood and spots of sticky sap. From a certain point of view, though—one about four feet high, to be precise—it was a weapon as elegant as any that ever appeared on my endlessly replayed VHS copy of Return of the Jedi. To get the full experience, all you really had to do was hum and swing.

It's a hot-ass June day in Round Rock, Texas, and as I'm now discovering, the childhood joy of holding a lightsaber still resonates. These days, they even engineer the hum for you. I'm at a lightsaber fighting demonstration with Marc Tucker, the co-founder of Lone Star Saber Academy. His lightsaber sits heavy in my hand. The hilt shines dully in the Texas sun, formed in a perfect replica of Anakin Skywalker's own weapon, the blade a white tube of reinforced, industrial grade aluminum. I thumb the button beneath the guard and the lightsaber snap-hisses to life. Red light flares inside the aluminum. The hum fluctuates into a growl as I move the saber, and when I bring it down against my opponent's blade the sound snaps like lightning. Tucker nods. "It's the sound card," he says, taking the lightsaber and tapping the bottom of the hilt. "It measures the way the blade moves. Only the really expensive models have that."

He hands me back the cheaper model I'd been using earlier, which glows but remains silent. "Let's run through it," he says. And he brings Anakin Skywalker's blade up, around, and down toward my face. The lightsabers crack together.

Tucker and the Lone Star Saber Academy are about as dedicated as Star Wars fans get. They've taken the childhood dream of wielding a lightsaber and made a practice of it, creating a small organization that choreographs battles, teaches children, and promotes charity for the community. They're also a small part of a wider community dedicated to bringing the way of the Jedi to the masses. And if they're not explicitly imparting a belief in balance and discipline to people, at least they're teaching delivering the latter through their swordfighting.

Robert Paske as a Jedi. Photo courtesy of Paske.

Robert Paske is an American living in Tokyo, and is the head of a local chapter of the Saber Guild, a non-profit group who practices lightsaber choreography for charity and community events. According to Paske, the Star Wars cosplay community is huge and growing. "There are the major groups like the 501st, Rebel Legion, and Saber Guild," he told VICE via email, "not to mention the number of people who aren't part of any costuming organization—I saw quite a few people out and about for May the 4th this year who weren't part of any group. And with the excitement building for the new movies, I think you're going to see even more people at cons and such with new costumes."

Most of the people who fight with lightsabers buy them, Paske says—he himself owns several Ultrasaber blades, which are tough enough to withstand constant blows from other sabers. Other lightsabers, he says, include LED displays along the blade that allow for "an extending effect," a trait that's great for choreography but not for fighting—a solid knock to one of the LEDs can leave you with a blotchy lightsaber. There's a staggering variety of hilt styles and blade styles offered by various manufacturers, in addition to the people who simply opt to build their own.

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Paske has a martial arts background, which he regularly employs in his saber fighting. "Lightsaber is a bit of a conglomeration of other sword styles, mixed in with fancy moves and altered a bit for choreography," he said. "I go to a Japanese sword class on the weekend, I've done a bit of fencing, and in my martial arts training I've worked with the bo staff and a little bit with Escrima... it all sort of mixes into what I do with the lightsaber choreography. Sometimes we take some of the moves and make them bigger, flashier, or do some things that would be considered mistakes in an actual sword in the course of making things more dynamic or visually interesting for an audience, but there's still quite a bit of crossover from real styles, and having a background in a sword or martial art is a great advantage even just in terms of movement and footwork if nothing else." Martial arts experience isn't really necessary, he points out—his branch of the Saber Guild has several members who get by without it. "I like to say, 'Everyone starts from zero, but we all have a different zero.'"

Paske as Darth Maul, destroying the shit out of some bamboo.

Tucker's background is a bit different. A stocky man in his early 40s, he's a former youth group counselor and current independent filmmaker with a day job working for Sears customer service. He's been enthralled by Star Wars since his father took him to see the original film in 1997. Marc was four at the time. "I always had an interest in medieval knights," he told VICE. "I saw the lightsabers on the screen and was mesmerized." Over the course of the next few decades, he moved from Idaho to Florida to Texas, either creating or participating in Star Wars fan clubs. While in Florida, he caught his first glimpse of two of the best organized fan costuming groups: the 501st and the New York Jedi.

The 501st, a group whose volunteers dress as Stormtroopers and other Imperial officers to raise money for charity, has been around long enough to get itself enshrined in the old Star Wars Expanded Universe (a welter of licensed books, games, and television shows whose concepts were discarded when Disney bought the rights to the franchise). After the group's official formation in 1997, heavyweight Star Wars EU author Timothy Zahn included them as the Vader's personal Stormtrooper legion in his 2004 novel Survivor's Quest, and they've popped up here and there in other official Star Wars media ever since.

The New York Jedi, according to their website, are a stage combat group that began in 2005, and place an emphasis on more theatrical performances. They don't adhere to any specific Star Wars canon, instead allowing practitioners the fun of crafting their own characters while meshing together traditional martial arts swordplay and stage fighting techniques. They made national news a couple of years ago when Flynn Michael, founder of New York Jedi, had his lightsaber snatched in a bar in Brooklyn by a guy who claimed to be an emissary of the Sith.

Photo courtesy of Marc Tucker.

Tucker had an early dalliance with the 501st, which fell apart when he tried to make a Sith character, only to be informed that this was against the rules for a Stormtrooper group. (The 501st now allows Sith characters.) The New York Jedi proved more to his taste, with its mixture of costumes and choreography. When he arrived in Austin in 2006, he said, he realized that the saber community was starting to grow across the country. He decided to start his own group, one that married the screen-accurate costumes and charity of the 501st with the lightsaber brawling fun of the New York Jedi.

With that in mind, Tucker and his friend Mike Jackson co-founded the Lone Star Saber Academy in 2010. The group's goal was to offer a chance for interested fans—young and old alike—to practice and perform with lightsabers. Much of their activities, by necessity, are aimed at families, who either bring their kids to be taught or hire the saber fighters for birthday parties, which tend to involve a mixture of fencing performances and some stage combat tutorial for the kids. The practice lightsabers they use run the gamut from foam-wrapped PVC pipes to $80 Ultrasaber replicas and the significantly more expensive personal blades of people like Marc, which can run upwards of $500.

Darth Vader succumbs to an attack by an army of Jedi Knights in Texas. Photo courtesy of Marc Tucker.

Both Paske and Tucker's groups focus quite a bit on charity. "We have an event coming up for the Special Olympics here in Japan," Paske said. "We've appeared at the Red Cross donation drives, and the US Saber Guild has done a lot for Make-A-Wish. There's also the social aspect. We have about 15 'regular' members coming to our local practice sessions, and it's always fun to get together with people with common interests."

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Lone Star Saber Academy is a small group—at present only three people regularly attend the weekly practices—but in the past they've had as many as ten committed members, a decent number for a group that mainly operates in the Austin suburb of Round Rock. The fees the group picks up either go toward buying or constructing practice sabers and costumes, or toward charity. "We've given over $1,200 to Austin Disaster Relief Network," Tucker said, "and we've helped with the John Speasmaker Scholarship for Round Rock Drums and Rhythm workshops." Other events include theatrical brawls during local festivals.

Tucker doesn't have a background in stage combat or martial arts, and as a result, the Lone Star Saber Academy's training for beginners draws heavily from the fencing rules of the Society for Creative Anachronisms, an organization dedicated to helping people accurately recreate the Renaissance and Middle Ages. There are eight acceptable points of contact for duelers to hit, he says, including head, shoulders, limbs, and feet. "Other groups break out into the other forms that the previous Star Wars canon recognized," he told VICE. "Our group doesn't formally recognize them, so I probably can't list them off. There's Shii-Cho, which is the basic one, and then there's the aggression form, and others. It's something that's been made up by people who have sword experience, saying, 'This is what I saw in Anakin's sword style. We'll call this Arturo. This is what we saw in Mace Windu's style, we'll call that something else.'"

Robert Paske as Darth Maul, whose double-bladed lightsaber draws upon bo staff technique. Photo courtesy of Paske.

Despite his lack of formal training, Tucker is fast and polished with his lightsaber. After showing me the first eight forms—basic strikes and blocks—we began drilling, moving back and forth over the hot concrete, the lightsabers cracking together. When I accidentally bashed his hand with my saber he hardly blinked. "It happens," he said. "You can't show it on stage while you're performing." As regulated as the Lone Star Saber Academy's forms are, running them at full speed with footwork still felt incredibly fluid. It was easy to imagine that the lit aluminum tube in my hand was real.

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It eventually gets too hot to keep fighting, so we walked back over to where Tucker left his box of sabers and costume kit on a picnic table. As he shows me his costume—a long black cloak he'd rescued from a clothing bin at his church in Boise—we start talking about the culture of fandom surrounding the films. Tucker, it turns out, is that rarest of Star Wars fan: a person who's unruffled by the much-maligned trilogy of the prequels.

"Everyone always compares the original trilogy to the prequels," he told me. "My filmmaker self looks at it like this: the prequels were George Lucas's original vision. Like he did the special edition of the Original Trilogy, and people complained, but the technology wasn't there to have his actual vision. So from an artist/filmmaker perspective, I'm like, yeah, go George." And what about the prequels themselves? "I loved seeing the prime of the Jedi," Tucker says, shrugging. "Could have done without Jar Jar. Could have seen Anakin directed better, so he didn't come off as whiny." But he points out, if you ask a kid what they think of the prequels after seeing them, they accept them at face value, sans fanboy nitpicking. "It's Star Wars to them, just as much as the original trilogy is." It's a take that reflects the themes of balance important to the Jedi way—as Tucker wryly notes, "many things depend greatly on your point of view."

With Star Wars: The Force Awakens inching closer and closer to its December 18 release date, our culture has seen a renewed interest in the greater Star Wars universe. "All these people will want to be Jedi again," Tucker says. "We'll be able to say, 'OK, we're Jedi, come join us. We'll teach you how to stage fight. Will it look like it does on the screen? Well, that's up to you. But we'll get you started.'"

Read more comics by Lauren Monger at her Tumblr and also her Twitter.

In the wake of the massacre at Charleston's African Methodist Episcopal Church last month, gun rights advocates have been quick to seize the opportunity to evangelize on the merits of gun ownership, insisting that tragedy could have been avoided if only the victims had been carrying firearms during their Bible study that night.

"The one thing that would have at least ameliorated the horrible situation in Charleston would have been that if somebody in that prayer meeting had a conceal carry," Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee remarked in an interview just days after the attack. Charles Cotton, a board member for the National Rifle Association, went further, writing in an online discussion forum that South Carolina state senator Clementa Pickney, one of the nine victims who died in the attack on Emanuel A.M.E. Church, was directly responsible for the shooting because he had voted against concealed-carry legislation.

"Eight of his church members who might be alive if he had expressly allowed members to carry handguns in church are dead," Cotton wrote. "Innocent people died because of his position on a political issue."

Comments like these have become familiar pablum in the wake of mass shootings, echoing the "more guns, less crime" theory that gun-rights activists have been pushing for decades. Following the 2012 rampage in Aurora, Colorado, for example, gun advocates like John Lott blamed the movie theater's "no-gun policy" for the massacre, insisting that the attack and others like it are further proof that there are too few guns in the US, rather than too many.

Evidence, however, suggests that mass shooters are not strategically targeting gun-free zones—and that rather than making us safer, gun ownership increases crime, while also making it much more lethal. In one recent study, public health experts from Boston Children's Hospital and the Harvard School of Public Health found that states with higher levels of gun ownership have significantly higher rates of violent crime than those lowest levels of gun ownership, even after controlling for numerous demographic and social characteristics.

Another recent study, which examines the relationship between concealed-carry laws and violent crime, found that the rate of aggravated assault actually increased in areas where "right-to-carry" laws had been implemented, and that those laws did not correlate to a reduction in crime. This is in keeping with a tremendous amount of research that shows gun ownership increases the risk of homicide, suicide, and fatal accidents while providing negligible protective benefits from the "bad-guys-with-guns" that the gun lobby is perpetually warning against.

Curiously, another recent study, by political scientist David Fortunato of the University of California, Merced, shows that "bad guys" may not even be sensitive to the possibility of meeting armed resistance—a conclusion that suggests gun-rights advocates may be vastly overstating the deterrence benefit of carrying guns.

This seems to have been the case with Aurora shooter Jason Holmes, who left behind a personal journal detailing his plan of attack that contains no mention of the movie theater's status as a "gun-free zone." If Holmes had any fears about the possibility of facing a "good guy with a gun," he failed to note it over the course of 36 handwritten pages. In fact, Holmes seemed more concerned with finding an optimal parking spot than with the possibility that he might face resistance.

What the journal shows instead is how America's lax gun laws directly played into the hands of a psychopath who saw firearms as the easiest tool for carrying out mass murder. It shows that Holmes decided against using a bomb because the materials were "too regulated & suspicious" and saw guns as an easier option, making a note to research "gun laws and mental illness." In the end, he was able to purchase two handguns, a shotgun, an AR-15, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition—because in America, there is nothing suspicious about a man with a history of mental illness buying a small arsenal.

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Still, the myth that guns act as a defense and deterrent against violent criminals and mass murderers continues to dominate the gun policy debate in the US. While gun control supporters have mostly fallen silent since the Charleston shooting, the massacre—which occurred during Wednesday night Bible study at one of the South's most storied black churches—has energized gun supporters, igniting a nationwide push to arm pastors and churchgoers, and to loosen restrictions on carrying weapons in places of worship.

And as federal prosecutors decide whether to file hate-crime charges against the shooter— 21-year-old white supremacist Dylann Roof, whose manifesto lays out his plans to start a "race war"—some gun-rights advocates have argued that new gun control laws would disproportionately hurt black Americans and other minorities, claiming that similar laws have disproportionately targeted these communities and contributed to the already-massive racial disparities in the US prison system.

But these arguments also tend to ignore the devastating consequences that weak gun laws have had for minority communities. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control, black Americans are twice as likely as whites to be victims of gun homicide. According to a report from the Center for American Progress, in 2010, 65 percent of gun murder victims between the ages of 15 and 24 were black, despite making up just 13 percent of the population. Gun homicide is also the leading cause of death for black teens in the US, a group that also suffers gun injuries 10 times more frequently than their white counterparts .

The numbers may help explain why an overwhelming majority of black Americans—75 percent according to a 2013 Washington Post/ABC News poll—support stronger gun control laws. Yet even in areas where local governments have enacted gun control measures, lax regulations elsewhere have sustained a robust network of unregulated private transactions that allow gun dealers to look the other way while supplying gangs and other criminals with a vast assortment of weapons.

This network leaves a place like Chicago, which remains crippled by violence despite relatively strict gun laws, hard-pressed to keep weapons off the street—as this New York Times map illustrates, anybody in the city who wants a gun need only take a short drive outside Cook County to get to a jurisdiction with much weaker regulations.

A similar situation has arisen in Maryland, which despite having some of the country's most stringent gun laws, has been plagued by violent crime in urban areas. Amid finger-pointing over the rioting that ravaged Baltimore earlier this year, it's worth pointing out that the majority of crime guns are trafficked in from outside the state. So while the gun policies Maryland has implemented—including a policy requiring individuals to pass a background check and obtain a permit prior to buying a firearm—have been shown to reliably reduce gun violence, neighboring states like Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Virginia have much looser requirements, making it easy for weapons to flow across the border.

RELATED: Gun Control Will Not Save America from Racism

This haphazard patchworks of state and local gun laws has enabled many private gun dealers to effectively exploit gang violence and crime to boost sales. Chuck's Gun Shop, for example, which operates just outside Chicago, is responsible for selling at least 1,300 crime guns since 2008, and one study found that 20 percent of all guns used in Chicago crimes recovered within a year of purchase came from the store, because existing gun laws allow the store to sell firearms to criminals who would undoubtedly fail a background check if it were required.

The same is true for Realco, a Maryland gun shop on the outskirts of Washington, DC: Between 1992 and 2009, law enforcement agents from Maryland and DC 2,500 crime guns back to Realco, four times more than were traced to second most prolific crime-gun dealer in Maryland.

The disastrous effects of these policies has overwhelmingly been borne by minority communities. In Chicago, for example, 76 percent of murder victims between 1991 and 2011 were black, 19 percent were Hispanic, and just 4 percent were white. The cause of these deaths was overwhelmingly gun violence.

Across the country, the evidence suggests that weak gun laws not only play into the hands of mass murderers looking for the easiest way to commit atrocity, but also exacerbate the tragic, everyday violence that disproportionately cripples minority communities. The solution is not to pretend, as has become fashionable among gun advocates, that gun violence is simply the unavoidable cost our of constitutional freedoms, but to instead support commonsense policies of the sort implemented in nearly every other industrialized nation.

Evan DeFilippis and Devin Hughes are the founders of ArmedWithReason.com and writers for the gun violence magazine The Trace.

Flag photo via Flickr user Richard Elzey

Read: The Dangerous Culture of White Possession in the Carolinas

On Monday afternoon, the South Carolina state Senate voted 37-3 to take down the Confederate flag flying outside the Capitol. But though state lawmakers, and the general public, are overwhelmingly in support of removing the flag, the legislation still requires a two-thirds vote in the state House of Representatives and approval from the governor before the Stars and Bars come down from the statehouse grounds.

That now seems all but inevitable. South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley has been outspoken about her desire to remove the flag and has said she will sign the bill. A recent survey asking lawmakers their stance on the vote suggests that the bill will pass the House of Representatives later this week.

Some Republican lawmakers have expressed an interest in replacing the Confederate flag with a different flag—either the American flag, the South Carolina state flag, or another flag used by Confederate troops in the Civil War but doesn't carry the same connotations as the rebel flag. But Democrats refuse to consider any flag flown by the Confederacy.

The only lawmaker to speak in support of the flag Monday was Republican state Senator Lee Bright, who launched into a rant about how the legislature should be rising up against the Supreme Court's gay marriage ruling, not worrying about flags.

"We can rally together and talk about a flag all we want but the devil is taking control of this land and we're not stopping him," Bright said. Good luck with all that, Senator.