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The Extraordinary Photos of a Woman Who Returned to Modelling After Losing Her Jaw to Cancer

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With a refined gait, she'd walked down runways through Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong, South Africa, Greece, London, and Manhattan, where she took up residency and spent her days jostling through droves of New Yorkers en route to many casting calls.

Elizaveta Bulokhova studied to become a law clerk, but left Toronto for Hong Kong soon after graduating from Humber College, thusly beginning a seven-year career as a fashion model that saw her live and travel around the world.

But in May 2014, 24-year-old Bulokhova and her boyfriend, Roman Troubetskoi, were in Amsterdam enjoying some much needed, yet seldom spent, time together—during which, they conceived their son, Valentin. During that time, however, the right side of her jaw began to swell.

All photos by Manolo Ceron. Look at his other work here

By July, the pain in her jaw grew unbearable and ensuing biopsies and CT scans revealed a rare form of osteosarcoma—bone cancer—in her jaw. To survive, not only would Bulokhova's jaw require removal, she would have to terminate Valentin before commencing five cycles of debilitating chemotherapy.

"He was very active and I would talk to him often while he was in my womb," she said. "I had to tell him to stop moving because I couldn't keep him and then all of a sudden he did. He listened; he stopped moving."

Sixteen hours of surgery to remove the tumour, then her jaw, followed by reconstruction using fibula, veins, nerves and skin grafts from her right leg, as well as grafts from her right shoulder, all but put an end to her modelling career. Worse still, Valentin was in danger of developmental disabilities because of the anesthesia—that's if he'd survive at all. Successive surgeries over the coming days involved taking blood vessels from her leg and grafting them onto her new jaw.

In all, 17cm, or 95 percent, of her jaw was removed. It would be a month before she found the courage to look in a mirror again. Troubetskoi occasionally caught Bulokhova glancing diffidently at her bedroom window reflection, and he covered their bathroom mirror until she was ready.

Complications arose from the surgeries and postponed Bulokhova's chemotherapy. It was then, two days before her scheduled abortion, that the couple sought their legion of doctors' advice on delivering Valentin 10 weeks early.

"It was fucked up; we basically had to tell the doctors to kill our perfectly healthy baby, but we had no choice," Troubetskoi said of their months-long anguish. "Then with Valentin being nearly 28 weeks, we asked doctors where that put him? Is it safe to deliver him? They said, 'Absolutely, let's do this.'

Added Bulokhova, "I started talking to the baby again and said 'We're back on!' That period was quite tough."

Through cesarean section, Valentin was delivered 10 weeks early and spent the next 51 days in neonatal intensive care. However, given the antecedent months of perniciousness, his birth was hailed a miracle.

Bulokhova, though, wasn't out of the woods.

"Chemo kills all taste buds, so I was not hungry and I couldn't even chew properly," she said, adding that it would take her an hour to eat a single boiled egg. "I was scared to drink because sometimes even water would come out of (the side of my) face and that would really traumatize me, and my stomach shrunk because of the liquid diet. There was no way I could eat at all. I became very malnourished. The mechanical process of eating was terrible."

Fourteen months after the ordeal began—and two months removed from her last round of chemotherapy—25-year-old Bulokhova and 30-year-old Troubetskoi sat side by side in their Vaughan, Ontario condominium while we spoke. When a neighbour stopped by to pick up Valentin for the afternoon, he remarked "He looks bigger every time I see him."

Bulokhova's hair has long begun sprouting; her top row of teeth is still straight as ever, but she struggles to speak at times because only four of her bottom teeth remain. In a couple of years, when her cancer is in remission, she'll have more reconstructive surgery. Standing tall at 5'8" and 108 lbs—only four pounds lighter than before her near-fatal prognosis—her new lease on life is anything but platitudinous.

The fortitude Bulakohova mustered over the last 14 months was captured in a new photo series by Toronto photographer Manolo Ceron. In it, a vulnerable Bulokhova celebrates survival.

"We wanted to use art as a tool to tell her story," said Ceron. "Eli (Bulokhova) is the theme. She is the story and everything else is a tool to enhance that beauty and her strength. It shows how fragile we are and how beautiful we are. It's hard to put one core message in it, but there's a lot of hope and strength and there are a lot of cancer survivors out there who might take something from this, and maybe that's what the underlying message is."

In one of the series' most moving photographs, Valentin reaches for his mother. "He saved my life—that's the biggest part," said Bulokhova. "He really looked out for me. He gave me a schedule to follow that helped me work on myself without stopping. It didn't give me a break, but in a good way. It kept me going. I didn't have time to pity myself. I kind of believe that if I weren't pregnant, I'd have been treated as another patient who's going through cancer and needed surgery. He's the one who took care of me to make sure everyone was on their game."

Troubetskoi was by Bulokhova's side all throughout. He read everything there was to know about her illness and the ways in which doctors would treat her; he spent incalculable hours away from work and in the hospital, day and night.

Unconcerned by a future modeling career rendered nebulous at best, Bulokhova has found peace with her family.

Makeup by Julia Stone. Photography assistant: Ken Appiah. Studio space kindly donated by A Nerd's World.


British 'Vogue' Wants You to 'Buzzfeed Your Wardrobe'—But What Exactly Does That Mean?

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

You've seen The September Issue, right? That documentary about US Vogue's landmark annual issue—the big one; the one with hundreds of pages of glossy perfection, all presided over by Anna "Nuclear" Wintour.

It paints Vogue magazine as a supremely well-oiled machine, motoring away under the hawk-like eye of Wintour as she slashes and slices features and shoots, and expressionlessly judges the new season of Jean Paul Gaultier. It illustrates Grace Coddington's knack for imaginative shoots and impeccable styling, and André Leon Talley's position of general tastemaker and spiritual icon for the brand itself. In all, it paints Vogue as a corner of publishing giant Conde Nast that, above all, prides itself on being luxuriously self-assured.

This all seems a little at odds with a feature in UK Vogue's latest issue, entitled "Buzzfeed Your Wardrobe."

It appears that the editorial team over at Vogue had a meeting to discuss the most effective way to give me an aneurysm, and holy hell they came close. It's as if the feature has been purpose-built to upset, a cruel invention by the sadistic boffins in a Room 101 type scenario. There's me, strapped to a chair, eyes Ludovico'd open, and a "PROOF THAT IT'S SUDDENLY A GOOD IDEA TO DRESS LIKE THE FLINTSTONES" sidebar forced into my field of vision:

But how does one "Buzzfeed their wardrobe"? Or perhaps the question here really is how does Vogue Buzzfeed its editorial content? Let's delve a bit deeper into this six-page mega feature.

Duvet days, am I right? A whole day spent in bed, like a grieving mother, or a hospital-ridden malaria patient. So cute! The mass-appeal intentions here are right, but these duvets just aren't Buzzfeed enough.

Sure, Fendi and Celine are cool, but where's the Adventure Time pattern? Where's the whole slanket vibe? Why are there no references to "nom noms" like pizza, or ice cream, or any other food stuffs consumed primarily by petulant children? Come on, Vogue, you're going to have to do better than that.

This is more like it. An arbitrary claim of something having the ability to change your life—something as inconsequential as, say, a dress. Don't get me wrong: That Peter Pilotto dress, with its hippie-commune-full-of-sad-acid-flashback-waifs vibe, is great. But unless the hem is filled with razor blades that slice off your legs when you try to cross the road too early, I fail to see how any lives will be changed by it.

We're in shaky territory now. You're not fooling us with that jagged white arrow pointing towards content heaven, Vogue. Deifying celebrities with "this is everything"s and "I can't even"s is Buzzfeed's bread and butter, but models who haven't even had a cocaine scandal yet? Come on.

If you want your content to buzz, you need to get the big names. We know you want to promote new young talent, Vogue, but this is no way to go viral.

That's more like it! Seven pieces to wear to make it look like you're famous when walking through an airport. Personally, when I walk through an airport—which is about once a year, if I'm lucky—the last thing I'm thinking is: What am I going to look like on the side bit of the Daily Mail website? Are people going to comment on my arm fat? It's more: That panini tasted a bit like forest fire. I don't feel so good now. Hope I don't vomit on myself over Macedonia.

But none of that matters, because there are famous people wearing clothes in these photos. Not clothes curated by a top-drawer stylist or photos taken by a gifted photographer, but crass, transient voyeurism, momentarily releasing that sweet dopamine before you move onto the next group of colors and words. C'est magnifique, Vogue!

Yes, you're doing it! You're extracting any meaning that could be garnered from this and reducing it to nothing! You're taking your heritage brand and you're pushing it through a juicer, creating a new liquid called "Lowest Common Denominator with Acai Berries." Drink it up, Vogue, you've earned it.

You get the feeling that this feature was the result of an hour's worth of silence. A meeting room of section editors, flicking ballpoint pens up and down against their molars, slouching. Then this idea gets farted into view, watches are looked at, and the go ahead is given. But it's nonsensical: It has nothing to do with Buzzfeed in any way. It's just a bunch of small collated lists, things that magazines have been doing long before BF got the monopoly on it.

You can smell the panic. A nothing, six-page feature existing purely so "BUZZFEED" can appear as a cover line, which might make someone spot it out of the corner of their eye and decide to spend $6 on it. No one goes to Vogue for bullshit internet nonsense, in the same way no one goes to Buzzfeed to stay on board with the high fashion zeitgeist.

For shame, Vogue. For shame!

Follow Joe Bish on Twitter.


The Critics Are Wrong About 'The Human Centipede' Film Trilogy

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

The Human Centipede III (Final Sequence) marks the end of an orifice. When the first of Tom Six's Centipede films splattered onto our screens in 2009, it quickly garnered a reputation as the most comically depraved motion picture this century has seen so far. There have been other, nasty, works (Lars Von Trier'sAntichrist came out the same year), but what makes the THC trilogy stick out is that it's a cut above plain, gratuitous grot. In my opinion, the films are unfairly maligned and should be viewed as a surrealistic, cleverly politicized fables of corruption, excess, and lunacy.

The story of the first film follows a mad doctor, who kidnaps tourists and surgically binds them to one another, ass to mouth. Six's hypothesis and social diagnosis—a thesis written symbolically in feces—is stunningly bleak: The message is that humans are completely, inherently, undeniably evil. It's goodness that is the true perversity in our universe.

Image via

I first saw the series around the time its notoriety peaked: when the sequel to the second film got banned in the UK. The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) (2011) saw the British Board of Film Classification lose both their minds and their reasoning. They accused it of "... encouraging a dehumanized view of others, callousness towards victims, and taking pleasure in the pain and humiliation of others." However, after outlawing the release of the film altogether, the board did a 360 when the distributor appealed.

Aside from the fact that the BBFC is an archaic and next-to-useless institution (because: hello, internet search engines), what the whole affair actually did—as Six pointed out to journalists—was provide the sort of advertising that money can rarely buy (although it did dent his final cut; two minutes and 37 seconds were ordered to be removed by the BBFC). The same goes for all the bad reviews pumped out by critics, who never miss an opportunity to get on their high horse and feel superior to horror as a film genre.


Related: Our recent interview with 'The Tribe' Actress Yana Novikova


However, like the very best horror flicks and transgressive dramas, the THC films are not interested in silly jump scares, but in peeling off society's mask of civility, unleashing the id, examining contradictions and hypocrisies, questioning the unstoppable desire in some for power and dominion over others, and refitting pornographic tropes into grim reflections of our inhumanity. The films create a physical response, yes, but also an intellectual one. Deviant and outsider art must express a higher purpose if it is to ever provoke any reaction beyond bare bones disgust. It must be meaningful beyond the cheap but noble goal of making audiences want to puke.

Image via

Many people would balk at the very thought of watching a bunch of sorry folk stitched bunghole-to-mouth being forced to pass multi-digested excrement through their successive digestive systems, while being brutalized and tormented by a villainous figure. In their eyes, genre movies are trashy and shallow in comparison to the grandness of arthouse films. These naysayers judge horror fans as a bunch of sickos who get off on misery and violence, proclaiming that horror films are dragging art to the dogs.

The truth is, these films are as valuable to us as any other type of cinema. Of the series, The Human Centipede: (First Sequence) (2009) is the most classically structured. After that, it's fair to say, they may have got a bit high on their own notoriety and turned into movies about offending polite society. But they're still rare and worthy tributes to Pier Paolo Pasolini's cult classic Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom (1975).

The second film boldly pays homage to itself: a playful envisioning of society's anxiety and fears that cinema can directly inspire and influence. In the film, security guard, Martin Lomax (Laurence R Harvey), loved The Human Centipede (First Sequence) so much that he re-stages the film in a grubby London garage, taking revenge against those who have wronged him in the past. It truly does, as many would agree, leave more of an impression on you than most films you'll see in your lifetime.

The third film goes Stateside and appropriates right-wing political rhetoric as a plot device. The majority of the action takes place in a maximum security prison, where the centipede format is used as a panacea to cut down costs on the running of the place, and to stop all the in-house fighting among inmates. Six removes all barriers. There is no such thing as "over the top," "too much," or "reining it in." This is all-out nuts, approaching the Rimbaudian principle of the rational derangement of the senses.

Even when THC III opts to look terrible, it's artfully and purposefully bad. It's also a film that obliterates the critical "star ratings" reviewing in spectacular fashion. Give it one star, give it five, Six doesn't give a fuck. THC (2009) is exactly disturbing and confounding because you can't knock it for looking unpolished and like lots of the low-budget pieces of crud that go direct-to-DVD.

It's visually elegant in terms of shot composition and camera movement, and it's complemented with stylish lighting. THC II looks even better. Switching to gorgeous black-and-white cinematography, the film is a cross between those iconic Guinness TV ads from the late 1990s and the works from the early 2000s directed by Nekromantik chief, Jörg Buttgereit. The only inclusion of color is when flying excrement splatters against a garage wall.

And you've got to admire the actors for their dedication to looking beyond ridiculous. Dieter Laser has become a horror icon in his august years. A well-respected actor of the stage and screen in Germany, Laser's portrayals of villains Dr. Josef Heiter and William Boss (the latter in THC III) are poles apart and yet equally extraordinary. The cool-under-pressure German sadist Dr. Heiter "doesn't like human beings," as he tells two unlucky captors. Boss, however, is so unhinged and misanthropic that, in one memorable scene, he sticks his head into a metal bucket and yells with all his might: "I FUCKING HATE HUMAN BEINGS!"

Dr. Heiter is all about the classic stereotype of German control, and Boss is more like an Oliver Stone-penned caricature, but even crazier and more flamboyant than Tommy Lee Jones's cocky prison warden in Natural Born Killers (1994), upon whom, I suspect, the character is partly based. Watching Laser play Dr. Heiter in THC III is like seeing an amateur dramatic society lead, wasted, playing King Lear, forgetting all his lines and instead screaming insults. As with the sweaty visual tones, Laser's performance is artfully terrible. You have to try to be that bad, I'm sure of it.

Ultimately, The Human Centipede trilogy is a benchmark in the cinema of transgression, holding a shit-smeared mirror up to the audience, redefining the concept of quality and reminding us of a crucial home truth: that, as a race of people, we're a bunch of cruel, sick fucks.

Follow Martyn Conterio on Twitter.

Australia’s Gender Pay Gap Is Wider Than Ever

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When people talk about the gender ceiling in Australia's workforce it's easy to imagine women in shoulder pads comparing Cybill Shepherd haircuts and complaining about wage disparity and fax machines. It seems like an outdated conversation that we've moved way beyond. But a recent report by the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that in 95 percent of Australian occupations the pay gap is wider than ever.

Despite increased discussion around gender equality, and everyone on Instagram telling you fourth wave feminism is alive and kicking, the pay gap is at an all time high. And if you're not a cis-man, it's probably fucking you. Women on average earn almost 19 percent less than men, an increase of 14.9 percent from 11 years ago.

While it's tempting to mark this all up to cookie-cutter discrimination, the growing disparity is more nuanced. It's a factor of how we view certain jobs, reward character traits at work, and still assume all women want to have babies.

Yolanda Beattie, the executive manager at Workplace Gender Equality Agency, says the reason women are paid less isn't because we don't value them, but rather we don't respect the industries they lead. "Jobs dominated by women (nursing, teaching, childcare) are undervalued by society. So these issues have a gender component to them, but aren't about gender alone," she told VICE.

In comparison, banking is a high paying industry that's widely valued by society. It's also the industry most affected by pay inequality; with men being nine times more likely to earn more than women. But Yolanda notes this isn't about comparisons between male and female employees in the same job, but rather that traditional corporate structures allows men to advance more easily above women.

Generally speaking, only one in four of people in the top layers of management are women. According to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, that figure isn't a result of sexism, but structural and cultural barriers. Our perceptions of what makes a good worker is deeply ingrained, and a product of decades of men being perceived as the breadwinners, filling senior roles, and collecting the larger salaries. As a result, success in the workplace is often linked to "male characteristics."

Which if you think about it is more depressing. Rather than your boss consciously thinking women are inferior, they're acting on a deeply rooted belief that the fundamental characteristics women are raised to embody make them less desirable employees.

From a young age, women are still more likely to be rewarded for being compliant, accepting, and nurturing. Nice qualities in a mom, but not what we equate to being a successful worker. And when they break out of that model, they face criticism for being a ballbreaker. Anyone who doubts this is invited to watch Nicki Minaj break down the eternal bossy versus bitch debate.

This makes for sad reading, but there were a handful of industries where women routinely earn a comparable, or higher wage than men. Secretaries and fast food workers both fared better than other occupations and all industries that skipped the wage gap placed in the lowest earning bracket of $17,000 to $39,000 a year.

The only occupation that seemed to offer any glimmer of light was librarians. The library system doesn't mirror the country's wage gap, and it's upper management roles are largely dominated by women.


Related: Interested in gender? Watch our video about sextremism in Paris below:


Lucy Goudie has worked as a librarian for almost 20 years, and comments that the industry's point of difference is a product of embracing a more flexible working model. Again, having a business contain mostly women doesn't automatically mean more maternity leave, but Australian library's ability to accommodate working mothers has helped it out in the long run.

Speaking to VICE, Lucy said the findings mirrored her own experience and noted libraries embraced many of the cultural divides other industries battled. "Library work is friendly for children and the support network and general understanding of the requirements of families is amazing." Rather than rewarding American Psycho style yuppy mobility, Lucy details a culture that's progressive, and supportive of women moving up the employment ladder. "There is more mentorship from women at higher levels where they can say I understand what you want to do and this is how you can advance your career."

Although it's an encouraging model, it's not one that encroaches of the aforementioned higher earning areas where men traditionally clean up. The average salary for librarians is just under $54,957. As Lucy says, "You don't become a librarian to be rich."

Ultimately the report was a massive bummer, but it speaks more to how we value certain kinds of work more than how we value gender. And demonstrates that rather than sexism diminishing, we're engraining gendered values more than ever by rewarding certain types of behaviors.

So be encouraged that your workplace probably isn't sexist. Or maybe it is, but just not in the way that you thought.

Follow Wendy on Twitter.

Hannibal Buress Is the Comedian We Need

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Hannibal Buress. All photos by Mark Davis. Courtesy of Comedy Central

The quintessential Hannibal Buress joke appeared on his first album My Name is Hannibal, released in 2010 when he was 27. The set-up involves the difficulties of living with women. His girlfriend berates him for coming home drunk at 3 AM (Aside: "You realize I can do bad shit and make it home at seven o'clock, right?") and then asks what he would do if she came home at three. "Me, I would play video games," he responds, with his standard squint and laid-back register, "and celebrate your absence."

Stoicism and honesty typify his comedy, to the extent that it almost eschews irony. This may be why (by his own admission) he much didn't fit in on the writing staffs of the camp-heavy 30 Rock and Saturday Night Live, which thrives these days on inside jokes and a hollow archness.

Last night Comedy Central debuted Why? With Hannibal Buress the eponymous comedian's first solo show. Although expectations were high, no one really knew what it would like. Buress told Entertainment Weekly in June that he had "no idea" what the show would be about and screeners were unavailable because the show is shoot just one day in advance to keep the material fresh.

Buress came to much of America's attention last fall, through video footage of a stand-up set in which Buress brought up Bill Cosby's sexual assault allegations. "'Pull your pants up, black people! I can talk town down to you because I had a successful sitcom,'" he says in the video, deepening his voice, but not really sounding at all like Cosby. "Yeah, but you raped women, Bill Cosby, so that brings you down a couple of notches."Jibes at Cosby's self-righteousness are not new. There's a long bit in Eddie Murphy's Raw in which Murphy, in his vinyl catsuit, does a high-energy imitation of Cosby calling him to tell him to clean up his act. But this isn't the 80s, and I'd like to think the strength of Buress's attack is the same strength of his comedy—it's low-key. Buress just casually reminded people of a fact. Then encouraged them to Google it.

Buress's stand-up attitude serves him well as the sidekick on The Eric Andre Show, a Larry Sanders-meets-Jackass by way of Tim and Eric back-flip that so deconstructs the talk show it begins every episode with Andre literally destroying his desk, couch, and house band. Buress is in the Ed McMahon/Andy Richter role, which means that, for this show, instead of laughing at monologue jokes he'll often point out how bad they are: "That doesn't make any sense." "What the fuck are you talking about, man?" His deadpan is crucial to punctuating the show's insanity.


Speaking of Eric Andre, check out our VICE Meets with him:


One episode actually has Andre and Buress switch roles, positing what a hypothetical Hannibal Buress Show might be like. During one celebrity interview in that episode, a white man claiming to be Buress's father walks out from backstage with a blur over his crotch and the Buress treatment goes into such effect that the new host actually just describes why the interruption is so ridiculous: "Dad, this is a bad time for us to reunite. If you are in fact my father, why would you step out now during the biggest interview of my life? That means you don't care about me as a son. You haven't been in my life at all and I'm interviewing Nick Cannon, a former R. Kelly collaborator... and stagehands let you walk out here with your dick out!"

These aren't even jokes, per se. Buress thrives when he is the world's straight man. He's sort of a bro, but mostly he's just amused, and sort of exhausted by everything. The perfect comedian for today. He's not looking to add to our noise.

So when it comes to the first episode of Why?, it's a little jarring to see him in a higher energy position, employing the kind of standard wit we're used to in monologues on every other show. It's not a bad joke to point out that Greece is the birthplace of philosophy and that "like philosophy majors everywhere, they're broke as shit." But it is a little uncanny to hear it from Buress, the man who in, his stand-up, confesses that he keeps empty jars of pickles for the pickle juice, which is still good for "flicking" onto sandwiches, and wonders aloud about the racism in YouPorn comments. Probably the best part of the premiere was a sketch in which he tracks down the IP address of a Twitter troll and goes to her home to confront this person, who turns out to be a territorial Amy Schumer. "Comedy Central's my network," she spits. "No!" he responds. "Yes!" "It's owned by Viacom," Buress says sensibly. They get into the fact that it's possible some people could watch two TV shows. Buress offers that he watches Extreme Couponing and the (hopefully) fake Extreme Couponing: Dallas Edition. "There's a Dallas edition?" Schumer asks. "It's better?"

"It's just more specific, and localized," Buress says, half-muttering at peak Buress. "I like that part of it."

It's not fair to expect Buress to be able to flex his strong weird-sleepy-literalist game this way in every sketch. If the rest of the sketches fell occasionally flat, they did show a way forward. The execution on his fake audition tape for host of The Daily Show relied too heavily on the absurd ("In other news: Barack Obama addicted to edamame... that's more interesting than ISIS." Actually, it's really not at all). But there were other moments where he captured Jon Stewart's hunchy, self-serious body language perfectly. He ended that sketch saying, "Why am I even doing this? There's no chance you're going to give this show to a black dude." It's a nice reference to the fact that, with Trevor Noah incoming, almost all of Comedy Central's major shows at the moment are actually headed by minorities or women.

This is balanced out with a nice reality-check sketch in which Buress tries to tell cops that pull him over "I don't answer questions," the way one white civil-rights activist does in YouTube videos. This is going to sound odd, but what makes it funny is just how quickly he gets shot. It feels like the best representation of his directness, in sketch form.

Sketches can be fun, but they involve planning, dressing up. They're not effortless; they're not cool. There's a reason Mitch Hedberg and Steven Wright probably never attempted this. Here's hoping future episodes allow him to exhibit the weird, laid-back honesty that's made him so popular. Because it would be a real shame if he were simply absorbed into some kind of system when he's so deft at critiquing such things, as was the case at his spot at the roast of Justin Bieber this past spring.

"They say you should roast the ones you love," Buress told the singer, "but I don't like you at all, man. I'm just here because this is a real good opportunity for me. Actually you should thank me for participating in this extremely transparent attempt to be more likable in the public eye. And I hope it doesn't work." Those aren't jokes! And yet it's so effective, to say nothing of the great way it manages to be sneakily critical of all parties involved: Bieber, Comedy Central, us, himself.

Buress went on to add that he dislikes Bieber's music four times in a row, without elaboration beyond variants of "I think it's bad" or "It's not good." He honestly might be a genius.

Why? With Hannibal Buress airs weekly on Comedy Central.

Dan Duray is on Twitter.

This Is What Happens When You Become a Meme

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Image via Flickr user Filip Pticek.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term "meme" in 1976, in his book The Selfish Gene, which examines the "biology of selfishness and altruism" from a scientific standpoint. In an introduction speech in Cannes in 2013 Dawkins expanded upon the term which, following the definition he'd laid out for it, became a meme itself. Whereas a "meme" is a self-replicating unit of cultural information, "An internet meme is a highjacking of the original idea... altered deliberately by human creativity."

The internet is a playground; a simulation model for the real world, where everything is easier, faster, and desires can be indulged in on a vicarious level with limited responsibility or real life implications. In video games, people are permitted to fulfill their violent impulses in a display of artificial control. In virtual universes such as Second Life, the user can create avatars as fully customizable selves to inhabit, through which they can engage in activity with other avatars socially, economically, or sexually in a lawless territory of inhibition and relative anonymity. Social media platforms represent the same idea. Through Instagram and Twitter, you have the power to project an idealized version of yourself into the world, that is, until your own image is hijacked without your consent, and then everything, even your identity, is up for grabs.

Some people say that emojis, memes, and selfies are making us smarter–– and bringing us together. But after interviewing people who became memes or produced viral content I came to the conclusion that there are two sides to every story. People—especially people who can hide behind the anonymity of their computer monitor—can act really weird and scary, manipulating your image or using your content as a beacon for their own projected anger or bigotry, divorced from any sense they might have of you as a person.

Meet a few people who've had to deal with just that.

Tim aka 'Shiva'

I first got interested in memes when I randomly found a picture of my friend Tim on Twitter, posted by a stranger with the caption, "I GET MONEY."

When I asked Tim why strangers were using his image online, he linked me to a page on gyropedia.com, essentially the Wikipedia for the My Little Pony fan (i.e., brony) imageboard Ponychan, which features a lengthy page devoted to information about his meme. At a glance, Ponychan looks like one of those drug forums where you go to learn how to build homemade vaporizers out of light bulbs, and everyone uses thematic pseudonyms like SwarovskiTears or TheWitchKingsCall rather than BongRipPlayBoi. (For the record, forums like this are like the black hole of the internet; purgatories where people have literally no filter and are actively trying to get in arguments.)

Gyropedia refers to Tim as "Shiva" (AKA "Thumbs Up Kid" and "The Cunt Destroyer"), describing his photo as, "a short-lived forced-meme that spread like cancer on January 15, 2012." The picture comes from a school photo of Tim taken in eighth grade that he uploaded onto MySpace, from where it was presumably taken and repurposed as a joke on 4chan.

Gyropedia noted, "Like many forced memes, many were opposed to [Shiva], but they were outnumbered, so their opinions don't matter."

After Shiva's popularity peaked, Gyropedia explains, "things got messy. A user... started a thread with a simple rule: Anyone who posted Shiva was consenting to be banned. As one might expect, zero fucks were givin that day and the thread got spammed with an onslaught of Shivas and Shiva derivatives... Little did Shiva's supporters know that they were all about to be handed 15 minute bans for posting him."

I asked Tim how this experience affected the way he thinks about culture and internet users, and what he learned from this experience. He said that mostly it just scares him.

"Sometimes it heightens my cynicism and reinforces my fear and other times it feels oddly liberating. I think mostly it taught me to choose more wisely what I distribute on the internet, which in itself I think has caused me to experience a lot of self-image issues based on ephemera projected on the web or about me. I mostly feel OK with it being a thing but I'm definitely not happy about it. I guess I am mostly embarrassed... It was meant to be funny; I don't know that I think it's funny now."

Tim's advice for people who want to go viral online?

"Nothing, I just hope your meme isn't you being an ignorant or offensive asshole, if so then you should find somewhere to hide and never go on the internet again."

Natacha, 'Interior Semiotics'

Natacha is somewhat of a legend when it comes to viral performance.

Her video, "Interior Semiotics," was leaked onto 4chan.com in 2010 and it now has over 2.25 million views on YouTube. In this performance, Natacha had Spaghetti-O's coming out of her vagina, an element that, she explained, was originally intended as a critique of capitalist consumption and a rehashing of historical feminist performances. Although Natacha's performance was well within the artistic tradition of using one's body for art, (if you need any proof of this, check out the Wikipedia page for Body Fluids in Art), performance art is usually reserved for a niche rather than a viral audience. When the video hit the mainstream, it attracted slews of overwhelmingly harsh criticism; pages and pages of comments and 4chan feeds, YouTube response videos, rude voice messages, texts, emails, and Facebook stalkers. When I asked Natacha what she learned about the internet through going viral, she told me, "anonymity is powerful."

The vast majority of the comments on the video's YouTube page use the power of anonymity to its ugliest extreme. Users call Natacha an "over-privileged cunt," males detail the ways the video makes them want to oppress women, and numerous people left pseudo-intellectual critiques combined with sexual or violent threats and innuendos. Multiple comments mention Hitler and the Nazis.


Related: Meet the Keyboard Cat Guy


Despite the extremely abusive reception from the public, Natacha kept the video online and open to comment, saying, "I didn't try to hide something that people bashed." She saw her performance as visual poetry, and stands behind her viral experience as something both positive and negative, explaining, "I can't control people's reactions."

I asked Natacha what advice she would give to people who want to go viral or become a meme. She told me she's not sure you can go viral on purpose:

"I think part of what makes it a meme is that there's an innocence or genuine feeling to something that people are attracted to or enraged by. There's a difference between YouTubers/ individuals who have built large followings, and someone or something that's blowing up [out of nowhere]. I guess the advice I would give is to 'not give a fuck' because being viral comes with being a jester to society."

Rick, 'Milk and Honey'

Rick didn't go viral by mistake; he did it on purpose when he manufactured a viral story for a class at NYU where students learned how to make their content marketable to large audiences. The assignment was to make a viral video, and Rick used Natacha's Interior Semiotics as the direct inspiration for his viral strategy, since it "had the perfect combination of art, shock value, and perceived privilege to create a successful viral video that the internet would hate passionately." Rick believed that his video would get more attention if people hated it rather than liked it, saying, "People love to rally behind something they hate, whether it's a politician, a news story, or an art project."

Rick's video, "Milk and Honey," was a curated performance that was "basically identical in structure" to "Interior Semiotics," in which a girl puts on a messy, passionate performance in front of an audience of hipsters, only instead of using Spaghetti-O's, the girl is bathing in a kiddie pool filled with milk. In order to go viral, Rick contacted media outlets that he "knew would be infuriated."

Rick's plan worked. His video went viral due to sites like Gothamist and BroBible, who got a kick out of making fun of hipster trash. A writer on Barstool Sports wrote a vicious, borderline hateful article directed at Katherine, Rick's friend who was the actress in the performance, culminating in the line, "Napalm the whole borough (of Brooklyn) and let's be done with them all."

Despite the violent backlash, Rick got an A in his class. I asked him what he learned about culture through this project. He explained that it taught him firsthand how "aggressively hateful strangers can be on the internet." He explained that the ugliest part of the project was:

"The level of aggression and the amount of people expressing violent wishes... the running theme is that either drowning or fucking (or fucking while drowning) Katherine will either solve her problems, or make this video better, or make the commenter feel better. I knew they existed, but this was my first time personally dealing with an army of shitty, sexist men."

Jimmy Kimmel, 'Worst Twerk Fail Ever—Girl Catches On Fire'

In 2013, late night TV host Jimmy Kimmel decided that he wanted to see if his writers could make a video go viral without help from his show, so he released a video called " Worst Twerk Fail EVER—Girl Catches On Fire!," under the personal youtube account of a fictional character named "Caitlin Heller," played by a hollywood stuntwoman. The video features Caitlin twerking against the door to her apartment until someone opens the door, disrupting her twerking session, and causing her to fall onto a candle and catch on fire.

After its release, "Twerk Fail" became popular almost instantaneously. Many mainstream media channels picked it up as real news and it got more than 9 million views in less than a week.

In a phone interview, Kimmel explained that very few people in the media bothered to check the video out to see if it was real. He explained, "There is a race to put things on the air and it seems like nowadays they will check to see if things are real after [the story is] aired rather than before."

On Motherboard: What Computers Dream of When They Look at Porn

Kimmel feels that media doesn't really care if the story is true or not. "The truth is, they get two stories out of it: the story about the video when it was released, and the story that came after the video was revealed to be fake."

I asked Kimmel if people's reactions toward the video changed after he revealed it to be a prank. He said that most people thought it was funny, but there was still a lot of negativity since, "getting mad for no reason seems to be one of people's favorite hobbies on the internet."

He explained that people aren't really themselves when they are commenting on an image or a video, saying that the "anonymity of comments online affords people a freedom that they do not afford themselves in real life. You put a picture of yourself online and instantly everybody's commenting on what you're wearing and that doesn't really happen at the mall."

I asked Jimmy if he had any advice to offer prospective YouTube celebrities. He said:

"I would never tell anyone to go viral. I mean, there are a lot of bad things about it. People get excited about it but you're also inviting a lot of strangers into your life. Instant fame can be dangerous, and it's not something I would recommend for everyone. You just expose yourself to a lot of people, the least of it is being exposed to negative and hurtful comments, but those can have an impact, and the worst of it is if you get people who come to your house. A result of being famous is that people sometimes show up at your house, or you get other unwanted attention."

Lil B THE BASED GOD

When VICE reached out to Lil B via email, asking for a comment about memes and viral content, he responded simply: "I CREATED THAT CULTURE."

Find Emma on Tumblr.

How Do You Crack the Mainstream Without Selling Out?

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How Do You Crack the Mainstream Without Selling Out?

California’s Best Biker Bartender Thinks Bikers Are Pussies

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California’s Best Biker Bartender Thinks Bikers Are Pussies

Ask a Bro - What's Up with Love?

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Broadly is a women's interest channel coming soon from VICE. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Ask a Bro is a column dissecting bro culture in all its beefy, V-necked forms.

If love really is patient, kind, unenvious, unboasting, and unproud, it might be the polar opposite of what we know as the bro, a notoriously self-seeking figure whose quickness to anger might only be matched by his delight in evil. Or that's what I thought, at least, as I made my way south recently to celebrate my brother Evan's wedding. Because Evan spent most of his young life playing on increasingly muscular and intimidating baseball teams, I expected his groomsmen to be bros in a very classic, punching-each-other-on-the-arm-as-they-take-shots-and-talk-about-A-Rod kind of way. What I didn't expect was how damn sentimental they'd be.


Bobby, 22

BROADLY: Since we're at a wedding, we should talk about love.
Bobby: Love? Man, it's a rough topic for me.

Do you believe in it?
Yeah. If you didn't have someone you wanted to spend the rest of your life with, what's the point of spending the rest of your life doing anything?

So you derive all of life's meaning from another person?
Without reproduction, there would not be life, and in my opinion without love there shouldn't be reproduction.

Really?
Yeah. We're human because we go above the biological meaning of reproduction as all other animals do [it]. That's the biggest thing that diversifies us. I don't think any animals share the same love that humans do.

Do you believe in sex before marriage?
I'm not against sex before marriage. I believe sex is a big part of love. Should you really have sex with someone before you love them? Probably not. But will I say I go by that? Not necessarily.

What's a good age to get married?
Whatever's right for you. Whenever you're stable, whenever you know what you want to do with your life. Some people take longer to settle down—if it's going to take you a little longer to settle down, don't rush into marriage, because you're just going to make a mistake. I would say anywhere from 20 to 30.

Do you believe husband and wife should be equal?
Yeah. I mean, why wouldn't they be? Women were made from my rib, but that's equality right there.

How is that equality?
We're made from the same thing. Women were made from men's flaws, in a sense, and it was to make us whole. I think without women, there's no reason for men, and without men, there's no reason for women.

What about gay people?
Personally, if you want to be gay, you can be gay. Do I support you? No. Am I going to go out there and bash you for being homosexual? No. I'm not going to go up [to you] and say, "Hey, I'm so proud of you," but if you want to do it, go ahead and do it. I'm never going to put you on the spot and be like, "This dude's a queer."


Stephen, 24; Teddy, 22

BROADLY: Do you believe in love?
Stephen: With today's times, I believe love is a true thing that's hard to find. Many people find it before marriage, and they marry the wrong person, and that's why almost 50 percent, every other couple you meet, has been divorced. I think love is a once-in-a lifetime thing, and I believe there's a right person out there somewhere, but I don't know if we always find it. I'm not sure we all know what "love" truly is.

OK. That's a lot of different things.
Stephen: I'm saying I think we all fall in love, but we don't always find our true love.
Teddy: I 100 percent think that love is an experience.
Stephen: You're right! What he's saying is—no, what he's saying—I know what you're saying. Can I say something? He's saying that we, like—I love this beer. I love your brother. I love Evan.
Teddy: Oh, yeah. Great guy. Love him.
Stephen: But there's a difference between love and soul mates. I've fallen in love before, but it wasn't "the one."

What does falling in love feel like?
Teddy: I think honestly that whenever I fall in love with a girl, I will look at her like my mother. There's certain times you probably hate your mother as well—she'll tell you to clean your room or do whatever—but at the same time you're doing that, you love her at the bottom of your heart.
Stephen: If you're in love, it's that breathless moment, where you pause—
Teddy: You're reading from a book now.
Stephen: No, I'm not. It may sound like a movie, but it's the truth. It's not a time—it's a moment. It hits you, and you know what love is.
Teddy: 100 percent comfortability around a person, honestly, in my opinion, is love.
Stephen: But you can love things more than other things. That's the difference between falling in love and meeting a soul mate.
Teddy: I can love a lot of things. I love to [quietly] smoke weed. I love to fucking drink fucking beer. I love to fucking sit here at wedding receptions—
Stephen: I love to have sex. But I'm not going to spend the rest of my life drinking beer and having sex with random people. I hope one day I meet that one person, and I know that there's one person, not like a bunch of different people, that's meant for me.

But you like having sex with random people right now, surely?
Stephen: Yeah. I'm not matured to the age where I think that marriage is for me. I'm still, as they say, spreading my wild oats.

Are you single?
Stephen: I am single. How many times have you fallen in love?

Hard to say.
Teddy: How many times have you been occupied by something you really enjoy?
Stephen: There's a difference between enjoying something and loving something.
Teddy: There's something that always takes charge over another thing, dude.
Stephen: If you're in love, you're going to make priorities.
Teddy: Do you mind if I ask you one question?
Stephen: She doesn't mind.
Teddy: What do you think love is?

I think it must be a biochemical thing.
Teddy: One thing that love is, is loving somebody no matter what. No matter what they do, if it's something that you dislike—
Stephen: It doesn't matter if they're a cheating whore—
Teddy: No, that does matter.

Would you forgive someone if she cheated on you?
Stephen: Absolutely.
Teddy: Absolutely not.

Oh.
Teddy: If she cheated on me, the only thing that means is that she was not thinking about me for one second, but she was on my mind the whole time.
Stephen: The fact that she cheated on you—that's her opinion. That doesn't mean that you don't love her.

Evan, 22

BROADLY: What's love? All your groomsmen told me I should ask you, since you just got married.
Evan: If you saw me crying today, maybe you'll understand it.

Lauren Oyler is an editor at Broadly. Follow her on Twitter.

Broadly is a women's interest channel coming soon from VICE. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: A Brooklyn Man Got a $750,000 Settlement After Suffering a Six-Day Erection in Jail

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Image via Wikimedia Commons

Watch: ResERECTION—The Penis Implant

Rodney Cotton, a former inmate of the downtown Manhattan jail usually referred to as "The Tombs," has won a payout from New York City after alleging in a lawsuit that a six-day erection left his penis permanently damaged in 2011.

Cotton was awarded a $750,000 settlement, but rather than trying to repair his damaged schlong, the Brooklyn man plans to join his daughter in Atlanta, the New York Daily News reported Monday.

According to the paper, Cotton was serving time related to violation of parole after being busted in 2008 for illegal possession of prescription drugs. He'd been taking the anti-psychotic drug Risperdal for bipolar disorder, and one of the drug's side-effects is priapism—a.k.a. a painful, persistent erection. The lawsuit charged that Cotton made numerous complaints about his erection, but that after a couple of visits to the jail's infirmary, he was told to stick it out with nothing more than some Tylenol and an ice pack.

When he was eventually taken to see a third doctor, Cotton was quickly ushered to a local hospital and received emergency surgery—the insertion of a catheter—to deflate his erection. But the nightmare wasn't over yet.

Stitches from the surgery, which were supposed to dissolve, apparently got stuck in the skin of Cotton's penis, forcing doctors to surgically remove them (allegedly without anesthesia). The lawsuit contended that this caused Cotton to suffer "permanent injuries to his penis, including loss of function, mutilation of penis, continued pain, and discomfort."

According to the suit, the botched surgery also rendered Cotton impotent. And because his erection was left untreated for so long, the damage went beyond what prosthetics might repair.

"I have to readjust my manhood," Cotton told DNAInfo in June. "I have to readjust myself because I'm not even whole." He added that he worries about his relationship with his girlfriend, whom he fears he can no longer satisfy.

Cotton was awarded $125,000 for each of the six days he endured the erection without medical care. New York City has since ended its contract with Corizon, the healthcare provider whose doctors were originally listed as co-defendants in the lawsuit. The for-profit's problems allegedly go well beyond prisoners with obscenely lengthy erections, and according to the suit, the second doctor that treated Cotton was Dr. Landis Barnes, who's being sued in a separate case for telling an inmate to throw his severed finger in the trash.

Despite the hefty payday, Cotton, who originally sued for $10 million before the city cut a deal just as the case was set to go to trial, insists the payout hasn't done him justice.

"If I had the choice between the reward and having my manhood restored," he told the Daily News, "I'd have my manhood restored in a heartbeat."

The VICE Guide to Right Now: A Demon Cat From Hell Is Terrorizing an Entire New York Neighborhood

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Not the cat in question, but another scary cat photo via Flickr user Jennifer Morton.

Read: We Asked a Cat Expert If Your Cat Could Kill You

A Rockland County, New York, neighborhood is freaking the fuck out over a black cat that is viciously attacking people and pets in the area. Being without opposable digits, the bloodthirsty monster can't bother people inside their homes, but it reportedly sat on one family's welcome mat, daring them to step outside like some angry drunk at the bar. ABC reports that one family was so terrified of the soulless hellbeast that it fled their house to stay with relatives.

The black cat disrupted Fourth of July festivities last week when it attacked one Rockland County resident in his backyard.

"All the sudden the thing leaped at me and started hissing, whatever," Joe Saldano told ABC. "So I kicked him ... and he came running right back at me. I thought he was going to run away."

Saldano and his family, safe from the loathsome cat while surrounded by water. Screenshot via ABC Denver.

Saldano finally got the cat to leave by dousing it with cold water, but it allegedly walked down the block and mauled another victim, who went to the doctor for rabies shots. Saldano has such crippling fear of the cat following his encounter that he only feels safe with his family while cowering in their above-ground pool, where the cat can't reach them.

The cat is still on the loose, so Rockland police sent out a reverse 911 call to area residents warning them to steer clear of the deranged feline until they can deal with it.

There's a New Pledge from North and South American Leaders to Fight Climate Change

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There's a New Pledge from North and South American Leaders to Fight Climate Change

Indigenous Leaders Want to Halt Oil and Gas Exploration in Gulf of St. Lawrence

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What a picturesque scene. The only thing missing is heavy industry! Photo via Flickr user Dennis Jarvis

Indigenous nations are renewing calls for a halt to oil and gas exploration in one of Canada's most biologically diverse bodies of water. The federal and Quebec governments have been slowly but steadily pushing for oil exploration in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, which Ottawa believes could sit on top of 1.5 billion barrels of oil.

Leaders of the Maliseet, Mi'kmaq, and Innu First Nations held a press conference Wednesday to reiterate a demand they made a year ago for a 12-year moratorium on oil and gas exploration in the Gulf. Twelve years is the amount of time it would take to thoroughly research the effects of exploration in the Gulf and consult the public, the Indigenous chiefs said.

The chiefs raised concerns about the potential for an oil spill, which could have disastrous effects on the body of water, and also said companies and governments must consult with First Nations. They want Quebec to declare a moratorium until the effects of oil exploration are fully known.

Last fall, the Globe and Mail reported provincial and federal legislation would allow oil and gas production in the Gulf. In 2011 the federal government agreed to allow Quebec to garner gas royalties from an area of the Gulf called Old Harry.

Last year, oil exploration company Corridor Resources asked for permission to drill in the Old Harry area. Corridor commissioned a study on the effects of an oil spill off the coast of Newfoundland, and found that oil would likely not wash up on shore and any effects would be minimal, CBC reported. However, researchers told CBC the 2012 report's methodology was flawed.

CBC then dropped their own buoys into the Gulf to test the company's findings. Radio-Canada found the buoys reached the shores of Newfoundland within 12 days—faster than the study had claimed.

In 2010, the David Suzuki Foundation released a simulated video of an oil spill in the Gulf, showing that if 10,000 barrels flowed into the body of water over 10 days, it would reach the shores of all five provinces that border the Gulf. The foundation, along with Green Party leader Elizabeth May and other environmental groups, has called for a moratorium on Gulf oil exploration for years.

The Mi'kmaq began fishing and hunting in the Gulf of St. Lawrence 9,000 years ago, according to National Geographic.

When Indigenous chiefs called for the moratorium a year ago, Chief Candice Paul of the Maliseet in New Brunswick said, "The Gulf is a unique and fragile ecosystem. The Innu, Maliseet and Mi'gmaq peoples have depended on the Gulf since time immemorial and we will not stand for its destruction."

Follow Hilary Beaumont on Twitter.

VICE Vs Video Games: Can Anyone Make Chiptune Music?

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Only one of these women truly knows what she's doing. (Hint: it's not the author, on the left. Which means it's Chipzel, on the right.) All photographs courtesy of the author

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Gamers seldom let go of the past. They're like the moaning, slipper-wearing old bastards in the corner of the pub, going off about how many shillings used to be in a pound—except they're blathering about Final Fantasy VII.

You only have to look at the long history of Nintendo regurgitating their old franchises, with about as much innovation as buying a slightly jaunty hat, to see how legacy so easily begets originality. But in some cases that's not a bad thing. If something works, why change it? People love Mario, and if he ever does decide the hat's not working out, perhaps a short spell on Weight Watchers could help with his tormented sibling rivalry with Luigi. (Don't deny it's not there. That's like saying Poppy Delevingne doesn't secretly cut out the eyes of her sister Cara's Vogue shots when she's alone, crying with wine. She was the model first, after all. What a cruel, cruel world.)

The multi-format announcement trailer for 'Spectra'

People love the past, and the sound of eight-bit chiptune music warms the cockles of gamers' souls like little else, reminding them of the good old days. It's a Pavlovian response, the same way the PlayStation start-up jingle immediately has you craving a joint. It's during moments like these that we realize we've all been successfully brainwashed. Good job, gaming!

While technology's improved in immeasurable leaps and incredible bounds since the days when owning anything being eight-bit was a legitimate brag, the chiptune sounds of the 1980s and 90s continue to prevail, inspiring musicians the world over. One of these active artists is Chipzel, who previously penned a VICE guide to this singular strand of electronic music, and who has provided the soundtrack to Gateway Interactive's new fast-paced space racer Spectra, released for PC and Xbox One on July 10. Think Wipeout meets Temple Run—it's certainly the sort of game that I lack the necessary skills to master on first contact.

See, learning is happening.

But I'm at the game's launch for something other than a hands-on preview. I'm getting a one-on-one session with Chipzel herself, who's going to teach me how to create my own awesomely bleepy beats. Well, she's going to try.

Do check out that guide for the full story on chiptune, but to nutshell it for you: The genre is all about the process of making music by playing around with the built-in sound chips of out-dated, mostly obsolete computers and consoles. It's deliciously geeky, but it's also genuinely great to see old kit being lovingly reused. Sorry, is my gamer petticoat showing?


Related: Check out VICE's five-part documentary on eSports.

And if you want more music, watch VICE meet director Brett Morgen to chat about his Kurt Cobain documentary, 'Montage of Heck.'


Chipzel—Niamh Houston to her friends and family (presumably, anyway, as saying, "Hey Chipzel, pass the salt," at a family gathering just sounds weird)—is the mastermind behind the frenetic score to the twitch-puzzler Super Hexagon. That game, from Terry Cavanagh, got so intense that its better players could see through space and time, if it didn't melt their eyeballs some hours earlier. Spectra is calmer by comparison, but challenges the reflexes nonetheless. You'll need to be frisky with your left stick to complete its courses, each one accompanied by a fresh Chipzel track.

From an outsider's perspective, it's easy to bend an ear to chiptune and think: "Well, that can't be that hard to make, can it?" And I've certainly felt that way before, mainly because I once spent half an afternoon on Garageband and reached grade two at saxophone (before I pawned it—sorry mom, I didn't really leave it on the bus), which naturally makes me an authority on these things. But, of course, it's all more complicated than its archaic aesthetic suggests.

Sweet nostalgia, sing for me.

If you're making chiptune, you need more than just some retro hardware—you need to be able to hack the shit out of it, courtesy of some handy software. Chipzel's rarely without her trusty Game Boy, her weapon of compositional choice, but today she pulls out a SNES, Super Game Boy already slotted into place, so that we can see the creative process unfold on a (slightly) bigger screen. I need all the help I can get.

A bundle of energy from the moment I meet her, Chipzel tells me that she always wanted to get into music, and chiptune represented a relatively cheap and easy way to do that. Get a Game Boy—what are they, like, $20 off eBay these days?—and some software from 2000 called LSDJ—it stands for Little Sound DJ, and nothing else, OK?—and away you go.

There is magic going on here, I swear.

As Niamh starts to go through the simplest of music structures and menus, I feel that school moment where you are totally lost but still nodding along with whatever the teacher's saying. She talks about triangle waves, but my brain translates this as a new, innovative future-hipster greeting gesticulation. This is why I never learn things. But once the sensation of secondary education confusion shudders away, it all actually, surprisingly, begins to make sense. The LSDJ's layout is as easy to read, with clear categories and a map that even a small child could decipher. You make your loops, and then you chain them to form songs. Simple, in theory.

But could I do it?

On Motherboard: The Subversive Science Fiction of Hip-Hop

Yes! Albeit with assistance to get through the basic structure. It works something like this. Your main menu has five options. The first is songs, within which each has four channels, which is all the Game Boy has to offer. Each song is made up of chains, up to a maximum of 256, and every chain is composed of phrases, which you can have 12 of. Phrases are made up of notes, and can be modified by selecting different instruments, adding delay, and so forth. Finally, the table lets you mix it all, adding character to every element of your arrangement.

LSDJ provides you with a lot of potential, but its super-simplified interface means you're just sort of putting in notes until it resembles something cool. Well, cool when restricted by the limitations of the Game Boy's sound chip. But that's an appealing limitation to have, and encourages the user to come up with interesting solutions with the slimmest options.

Chipzel gives me some notes to input, and it's all a bit like chess—C5, C4, C3, D5, D4, D3—with the letters being notes and the numbers the octaves. It's like painting by numbers, with sound, and I daren't go over the lines or else we'll never end up with... Hey, I've made myself a sexy eight-bit rendition of some Final Fantasy music. Sure, Chipzel's steered me to this point like a seasick tugboat captain dragging a derelict tanker, but come on: I made music, me, and it actually sounds OK.

Totally just made some music.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think what I just went through is much like what Real Life Proper Making Money musicians do in coming up with new material: just dick about for a while and see what sticks (until the one with the talent decides to take control and polish a potential turd into a smash hit). Or, at least, something that doesn't sound like a dozen tins of spanners falling out of a fire exit. There's no way that today's pop sorts are contemporary Beethovens, seeing the music before them and fitting it together like an aural interpretation of a particularly twisty Game of Thrones episode. Pop music's not chess, is it? I don't suppose any one of the Jonas siblings can plan any number of moves ahead. Play is the cornerstone of all creation, and "happy accidents" are present all across the arts. LSDJ boils music down to its basics, and in doing so proves a damn sight more enlightening than grander software for more casual users.

I play around with it some more, diving deeper into menus that have weird names and do things I'll never fully understand but essentially make everything a bit more wibbly. But there's no barrier here, and I don't need any formal training to get results. It is completely possible to make something from nothing. I come away from my introduction to chiptune tempted to dig out my old Game Boy and make some beats on my commutes. To be honest, it's something that anyone could, and should, have a crack at, because the more people who make music, the quicker we can all stop listening to Madonna, forever.

Spectra is released on July 10 for PC and Xbox One. VICE Gaming editor Mike has been playing it on the latter a little bit this afternoon and, from what he's seen, fans of endless runners and futuristic racers alike should have a wedgie of fun with it. Just don't expect it to fill the Wipeout or F-Zero voids that we all feel. Pull a finger out, Ninty—we all wanna race as Captain Falcon again.

Chipzel is online right here.

Follow Julia Hardy on Twitter.

Cry-Baby of the Week: A Woman Called 911 Because She Didn't Like Her Chinese Food

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It's time, once again, to marvel at some idiots who don't know how to handle the world:

Cry-Baby #1: Tracey F. McCloud

Screencap via Google Maps

The incident: A woman was not happy with her Chinese food.

The appropriate response: Complaining. Taking it up with your local consumer rights agency if the food was really that bad.

The actual response: She called 911.

On Monday, 911 dispatchers in Alliance, Ohio, received a call from 44-year-old Tracey F. McCloud (pictured above). In a recording of the call posted by Fox 8 Cleveland, Tracey can be heard saying, "I have bought some Chinese food and it's not to par for me."

"And this is why you called 911?" the operator asks, before Tracey responds: "What am I supposed to do, jump over the thing and beat 'em up and get my money back?"

An Alliance Police Department officer went to the scene and arrested Tracey for misuse of 911, which is a misdemeanor.

Fox 8 spoke to the owners of New Moon, the Chinese restaurant Tracey was complaining about, and they claimed that the issue stemmed from Tracey asking for a cash refund on food she had paid for using a credit card. They also claimed she had eaten some of the dishes she was attempting to get refunded.

Fox 8 reports that Tracey contacted them by phone to defend herself, saying she felt she was being "misrepresented," as she had made the call to 911 because the food was "spoiled" and the restaurant's manager had yelled at her "in another language."

According to Fox 8, the restaurant refunded Tracey's card for all of the purchases she'd made. So it all worked out in the end for her (assuming she doesn't have to pay any kind of massive fine for this).

Cry-Baby #2: Taylor King

Screencaps via Google Maps, Fox 28 Columbus, and YouTube

The incident: A man decided that the sound a Happy Meal toy was making sounded like the word "fuck."

The appropriate response: To stop being such an idiot.

The actual response: He contacted his local news station to vent his outrage.

Taylor King (pictured above, right), a father in Columbus, Ohio, bought his kids a Happy Meal from a local McDonald's earlier this week.

The toy that came with the Happy Meal was one of 12 toys currently available at McDonald's to promote the movie Minions. It's a Minion dressed as a caveman and speaks several lines of gibberish when tapped on the head.

One of those lines of gibberish is three short syllables that sound a little bit like a chicken clucking. You can hear it in this YouTube video here.

If you listen to the three syllables of gibberish as though the Minion is saying "what the fuck," it sounds a bit like the Minion is saying "what the fuck." It also sounds just as much like it's saying "glass of milk" or "on the bus" or "fuck shit cunt" or pretty much any combination of three single syllable words, if that's what you're listening for when you hear it.

Not to be deterred by reason, Taylor took the toy away from his child and contacted his local news station to complain. "My son has not laid hands on it," he said in his interview with them. "I do not approve of that kind of language, especially from a kids' toy."

Taylor is not the only person upset with the toys. A man in Florida also appeared on his local news for the same reason.

In a statement, a spokesperson for McDonald's said: "Minions speak 'Minionese' which is a random combination of many languages and nonsense words and sounds. 'Minionese' has no translation to, or meaning in any recognized language. Any perceived similarities to words used within the english language are purely coincidental." Which, if broken down to individual syllables and spoken in a high-pitched voice through an extremely cheap speaker, sounds a bit like the word "fuck" repeated over and over again. Which is completely unacceptable.

Who here is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this poll down here, if you could:

Previously: A guy who allegedly pulled a gun in a post office vs. a couple who allegedly attacked their neighbor with a rake in a row over loud sex.

Winner: The post office guy!!!

Follow Jamie Lee Curtis Taete on Twitter.





Brooklyn's Best Step Team Breaks the Stage

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Brooklyn's Best Step Team Breaks the Stage

The Large Hadron Collider Returns in the Hunt for New Physics

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The Large Hadron Collider Returns in the Hunt for New Physics

'Three Busy Debras' Is a Play About Psychopaths with an Interest in Incest and Brunch

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Alyssa Stonoha, Sandy Honig, and Mitra Jouhari in 'Three Busy Debras.' All photos by Sandy Honig

Three Busy Debras, the one-act play that caps the Annoyance Theater's Saturday show in Brooklyn, sounds a bit like a fairy tale. As with certain fabled trios of pigs and bears, the Debras have different characteristics to set them apart. But unlike Mama, Papa, and Baby Bear, in the case of Three Busy Debras, the first Debra is a white supremacist, the second one thinks she can "fuck the autism" out of her son, and the third says there's no such thing as rape.

The 45-minute show—created and performed by the Not 27 Club (Sandy Honig, 23; Mitra Jouhari, 22; and Alyssa Stonoha, 19)—delves into incest, necrophilia, the Holocaust, 9/11, Kony 2012, kidnapping, pedophilia, suicide, mariticide, masturbation, infidelity committed with ghosts, and brunch.

Despite the amount of objectionable multimedia visuals, no one in the audience at the June 27 performance of Three Busy Debras that I attended seemed personally affronted. Perhaps that is because the three (busy) Debras have no idea they hold controversial beliefs. "They have no historical or cultural context for anything," said Stonoha. "They're not consciously trying to be terrible—they just are because they're dumb," adds Jouhari.

Comedian (and occasional VICE contributor) Jake Fogelnest, the show's LA-based director who calls himself more of a "spiritual adviser," said that very likable members of the Not 27 Club can get away with shocking plot points since each one is supplemented with pointed commentary on life in the digital age.

"I think we're in a sort of outrage culture right now," said Fogelnest, who is also a writer on the Wet Hot American Summer series coming to Netflix at the end of the month. "There's something about three young women who are clearly brilliant writers and clearly brilliant performers, who are also clearly strong feminists. In a way it's sort of like, 'Let's take all of the worst things that we're afraid of and that we're sick of, embrace them, and reflect it back to people.' You can joke about anything. It just has to be smart."

Fogelnest argues that his cast is still playing to the top of their intelligence because the exaggerated sight gags are placeholders for sharp criticism. "The last thing I said to them is, 'Just make sure you know what your target is. Don't be offensive and crazy for the sake of being offensive and crazy.'"

For example, Stonoha's Debra (none of the three characters have last names) turns on her friend's television and exclaims, "Check it out! America's Funniest Home Videos is on" when she comes across a clip of the smoldering Twin Towers.

"People love to watch it," said Stonoha. "They've just been trained to be so afraid that they're, like, addicted to watching it... They're not sickos sitting in their basement jerking off to 9/11 footage—everybody watches it a lot. They play it over and over on the news."

Honig, Jouhari and Stonoha, all of the Upright Citizens Brigade improv and sketch community, became fans of each other at the beginning of 2015 over Twitter ("When you're just starting out in sketch and in improv in New York City, you sort of have to find your tribe," explained Fogelnest). In February, they decided to meet up and perform together at Bring Your Own Team, a weekly Sunday night show at UCB where acts put there name in a bucket to vie for five minutes of stage time.

Related on VICE: Filling Gender Holes at Brooklyn's Funniest Sex Comedy Show

Although they had just met, the three—who took the stage last—bonded as the most raucous members of the audience. "We were just kind of like yelling the whole time and as the show got longer and longer, anytime anybody onstage would do something misogynistic we would just be like, [all three chime in] 'Woo! Nice! I like to suck dick!'" said Honig. "So we had definitely gone nuts. "

At one point, the group onstage asked for a suggestion, and Honig, Jouhari, and Stonoha shouted, "Misandry!" defined as a hatred of men.

"This one white boy steps off the back line and pretends to be reading or something, and he goes, 'Just another day in Misandry, Massachusetts,'" laughed Honig.

"It was horrifying," said Stonoha.

Jouhari added: "It was amazing because no one else onstage knew what it was so they were like, [scoffs], 'Probably is a place.'"

When it was the women's turn, they initiated a scene about three friends enjoying a meal. "Someone said, 'My name is Debra,' and then someone called the other one Debra, and then one of us was like, 'We're all named Debra!'" remembers Jouhari. Within five minutes, they had a road map grounded in three tenants: "All Debras are small, all Debras are busy, all Debras are quiet." Debra Messing, whom Jouhari loves and dreams of one day spotting in the audience, might have inspired the name.

Soon after, while working on a script called The Myth of Misandry, Massachusetts, the Not 27 Club was invited to participate in a Thursday night show called Fourplay at the Annoyance, which opened a New York outpost six months ago. Operating out of Chicago since 1987, Annoyance was founded by Mick Napier, a legendary Second City director who wrote the beloved handbook Improvise: Scenes from the Inside Out.

Three Busy Debras is probably one of the most offensive shows I've ever seen, and what is amazing to me is that they pull it off charmingly. —Philip Markle of the Annoyance Theater

Fourplay consists of four ten-minute plays. "And we were just like,Oh! Let's do that Debras thing that we kind of improvised," said Stonoha. They wroteThree Busy Debrasin less than 45 minutes at a diner.

Philip Markle, the artistic director at the Annoyance in New York, encouraged them to expand the play to 20 minutes for the show Triple Feature before eventually awarding them a coveted Saturday time slot.

"Three Busy Debras is probably one of the most offensive shows I've ever seen, and what is amazing to me is that they pull it off charmingly," Markle wrote in an email. "The audience loves them because they commit unabashedly to their characters. It takes risks: three innocent-acting women unafraid to play vile, vulgar, yet also whimsical characters who vacillate from singing show tunes to fucking a dead corpse. I was excited to give this show an audience because it represents how the Annoyance is an uncensored, uninhibited space where artists can push boundaries."

The Debra characters themselves are parodies of Stepford Wife-esque WASPS who speak like GPS systems and seem unexpectedly aware (at times) that they're being watched.

"I think that we're all kind of robot women who are also demons," explained Honig. The Not 27 Club's alter egos are also humorless, which is a shame because Honig, Jouhari, and Stonoha are constantly cracking each other up in real life. There's not a cackle among their three laughs—instead their laughter recalls children who've fallen victim to violent tickling and are gasping for breath.

Very quickly, the ladies learned to establish groupthink by mining each others' comedic voice. Honig, who is from Connecticut and works as a photographer for Rookie, favors wordplay, puns, and "corny dad jokes," as well as Harpo Marx-style physical comedy. Meanwhile, Ohio native Jouhari says she infuses the group with her "hyper-emotional" moments and passion for socio-political discourse a la The Daily Show (her father immigrated from Iran during the Revolution, and she recently visited the country for the first time).

Stonoha's comedic muse is Andy Kaufman for his mix of "fearless antagonism" and "pure silliness." "I think I tend to lean dark in a way that's sometimes people think is just upsetting," said the rising junior at Marymount Manhattan College. Comedy is a tool for Stonoha—who became a recurring guest on The Chris Gethard Show at age 16 when she still lived with her family in Connecticut—to work through emotionally triggering media coverage. "I get really affected by really horrible stuff, to the point where I'm like turning it over in my head so much that the only way I can get it out is by putting it in my comedy. Otherwise I'm just like trapped in my mind, freaking out about things. So then [onstage] I'm being a woman who fucks her autistic son, which is horrific."


Stand-up comedy is hard. Check out All Around Losing with VICE editor Harry Cheadle:


Besides the aforementioned Myth of Misandry, Massachusetts (Jouhari's summary: "There's a prophecy that, when three girls start their period at the same time, anyone who harasses women or treats them poorly gets killed"), the Not 27 Club is writing two additional projects.

"'Three Fuckable Men,'" Honig says, will be thinly-veiled caricatures of actual men who've "treat[ed] us like shit;" "Kidz Bop Live" will focus on the underage hookups that happen backstage on the eponymous tour. When asked about their prolific ability to generate ideas, the three credit genuinely liking and having respect for one another.

As for Three Busy Debras, Markle wrote, "I'm hoping to extend the show for quite some time."

"What's so incredible about it to me is that it's this little crazy show at the Annoyance, and literally I got an email from my agent at William Morris Endeavor like, 'What's up with this Three Busy Debras thing? I'm hearing great stuff,'" said Fogelnest. "That made me very happy because I was like, Oh, people should take notice of them. Because it's just so unique."

A video version of Three Busy Debras has already been written, and the script includes a new fourth character, a non-Debra named Mail Lizard. Dragging a full-size letter, Stonoha said he is "a real lizard"—"With a tiny hat," added Honig. The logistics of acquiring a reptilian deliveryman have yet to worked out. Jouhari finds her words after nearly choking on giggles. "It's so funny—can you imagine?"

Performances of Three Busy Debras will take place at the Annoyance Theater every Saturday in July—July 11, 18, and 25—at 8 PM. For more information, visit the Annoyance Theater website here.

Follow Jenna on Twitter.

Photos: Salad Days

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This article appears in The Photo Issue 2015

All photos by Irina Rozovsky

Irina Rozovsky (born in Moscow, raised in the US) makes photographs of people and places, transforming external landscapes into interior states. Her work has been published, exhibited, and awarded internationally. She is an assistant professor of photography at Massachusetts College of Art and currently lives in Boston. The photos published here are an excerpt from her ongoing body of work,Salad Days.





UK Students Are Calling Bullshit on Universities for Not Living Up to Their Marketing

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"UCL FUCKS YOU OVER." All photos by Chris Bethell.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

A US Senate investigation in 2012 into higher education company Apollo Group, which owns the University of Phoenix, found that 60 percent of Appollo's students dropped out within two years and that the company spent twice as much on marketing to new students than it did on teaching. The students had been attracted by the marketing but repelled by the reality.

Things are no way near as bad as that in the UK, but there are worrying signs that we're moving in that direction. Since 2010 and the effective creation of the student as a consumer, public relations and marketing departments have become vastly more important in British universities. These are the people tasked with selling the universities' "image" to potential students, recruiting them, and therefore securing their tuition fees. Institutional prestige, graduate prospects, and "student experience"—a vague management term roughly equating to customer satisfaction—are the new buzz words in universities.

Universities have always been a bit competitive in terms of prestige, certainly, but now reputations and institutional histories are being packaged up and sold to customers in prospectuses and adverts, the way the "original fittings" of a house might be sold by an estate agent. The question is: How much of this is just marketing hype?

At University College London (UCL) last week, existing students tried to disrupt an open day aimed at new students and their parents. They were there to "challenge the narrative" UCL was trying to market to potential students; loudly and publicly questioning both UCL's claims about "student experience"—one that they thought was a bit shit. The college (which I was an undergraduate at until last year) goes to great lengths to point out its radical, liberal history. Activists were pointing out that it in some respects, the present doesn't live up to the past.

One group, UCL "cut the rent"—holding riot shields that look like tower blocks—said that UCL's promotion of "student experience" was pure hypocrisy. Capitalizing on their central London location, UCL—the activists say—advertise accommodation to potential students that do not live up to even basic standards. "To live in London," the UCL accommodation prospectus reads, "is to experience one of the great cities of the world. Students at UCL benefit from our location in the center of the capital."

"Although it is a fact that studying in London can be more expensive than in some other parts of the UK, the true picture is often exaggerated," the prospectus adds.

And yet, UCL have year-on-year been fleecing their students out of more and more money for rent. When I was a freshman at UCL five years ago, my halls on Charlotte Street in central London cost £110 [$170] a week; this year the same room costs £187 [$290]. Figures that I've seen show that year on year since the turn of the millennium, UCL has gradually been increasing the amount of money it makes from its halls of residence. In 2014, UCL made a net profit for accommodation of around £18 million [$27 million]. In 2010, this profit was £11.1 million [$17 million]; In 2005 it was £8.5 million [$13 million]; in 2000 it was £1.6 million [$2.5 million]. Just to be clear: this is the money UCL is making from charging its own student extortionate rents to live in "appalling" conditions in sometimes cockroach infested halls.

Students questioning, "Why is my curriculum white?"

As well as "student experience," institutional histories are increasingly important ways that universities try to distinguish and sell themselves to undergraduates. UCL was founded in 1826 "to open up university education in England to those who had been excluded from it." It was the first university to admit women in 1878 and has a number of other liberal accolades under its belt.

Activists from a campaign group called "Why is my curriculum white?" have been trying to challenge this view, pointing out that UCL also has a controversial history in the development of eugenics. Activists at the open day put on white face masks to complain that black lecturer Dr. Nathaniel Coleman (he strikes his name out because it was given to his ancestors by slave owners), who'd worked in challenging UCL's liberal image of itself, was recently dismissed from his job.

Coleman spearheaded a campaign at UCL asking why more professors in the UK weren't black, which UCL readily jumped on board with and "boasted about," Hajera Begum, the student union Black and Minority Ethnic officer told me. Coleman was "key in bringing up UCL's past," Hajera said. Activists think he was dismissed because he was critical of the university. The university deny this and say that they merely did not extend Coleman's contract because they were not ready to offer the MA program he was proposing.

Over on Noisey: Exclusive: Watch the Making of "Amy"

Fossil Free UK activists were also present on Friday, protesting against the college's multi-million pound investment in fossil fuel companies. UCL has £21 million [$32 million] currently invested in fossil fuel companies like Shell and BP, activists said. The university also has research institutes funded by mining companies. The ironically named UCL Institute for Sustainable Research is funded entirely by BHP Billiton, the world's largest mining company; UCL's institute for ethics and law is also funded by Shell—both are blatant exercises in greenwashing, activists say—"you couldn't make this shit up," Beth Parkin, a UCL student told me.

"They have divested before—they've taken a moral stand on things before [for instance Arms and tobacco companies]... but the action isn't being taken quick enough especially with the climate crisis," Beth said.

On the open day, this allied anti-bastard squad marched around the campus, letting off smoke flares and handing out leaflets to crowds of wide-eyed, post-A Level 17-year-olds. People sitting on the different stalls looked awkwardly on.

Most open day attendees looked pleasantly surprised being faced with the protestors—I guess this spectacle is kind of more fun than the tedious glossy prospectuses and grandiose talks about "Your Future" normally given at these sorts of events. The only complaint I heard all day was from existing UCL students who were graduating, trying to get a photo of themselves in robes and a mortar board in front of the main building: "we paid for this view," one of them indignantly said whilst protestors draped the portico in a banner. The university, perhaps aware that rowdy protest could even furnish their image as a forum for radical ideas, took a relatively hands-off approach.

Open days are one of the main marketing exercises universities deploy in trying to recruit undergraduates—making them the perfect target for disgruntled students. In 2013, Warwick students targeted open days to "protect the public university" and in 2010, Birmingham University even had to cancel open days over tuition fee protests.

Now branded customers, what students are being sold is all the time worth less and less. Student life is becoming increasingly incongruous with the images and promises universities use to recruit students: The crushing realities of huge tuition fees, expensive living costs, and limited job prospects couldn't jar more with the glossy and unblemished images universities like to show to prospective students.

Follow Oscar Webb and Chris Bethell on Twitter.

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