John and his fox-kin. Image via ryleeisitt.ca

Otherkin are people who identify as partially or entirely nonhuman. A dragon, a lion, a fox—you name it—there is probably someone out there who feels like they are more these things than they are human. The otherkin community can be found lurking on Reddit, Tumblr, TV Tropes, and other online forums.

The popularity of the otherkin phenomena seems to have been steadily increasing—particularly on Tumblr—since 2012. But what does it mean to truly believe you're nonhuman? Do people genuinely wake up one day and think that they are a fox or is this just a bizarre form of escapism? Is it body dysmorphia or fantasy?

I spoke to John on Reddit, a 19-year-old from Knoxville, USA, known on the web as Noslavic. He introduced himself: "I am a red fox-kin who was, as we call, awakened about a year ago." He said that awakening felt, "at the very least, relieving," because "everything seemed to come together for me.

"I started getting odd dreams where I would change physically into a fox, and they were very realistic—honestly. And after a while, in real life, it felt quite real, like I actually had a tail, I actually had ears, I actually had paws.

"At first it was one of those things that I freaked out over, and then after a while it was like ah... I'm just gonna play with my tail for a minute." Every so often, John says he gets mental shifts: "I could just be at home, and all of a sudden, click, the fox part of me just kind of comes out for a while, and then it just goes."

Sounds a bit like an elaborate horror story, kinda like Kafka's Metamorphosis or Cronenberg's The Fly, but the sensation John experienced with his tail has been identified by scientists as possible and compared to phantom limb sensation.

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While some otherkin identify as the animal, others identify with the animal—in more of a spiritual way. This is the case for Ri Na Gach, an 18-year-old "lionkin" who wishes to remain anonymous:

"I feel a special connection with the lion. I feel like I demonstrate many of the same characteristics as the animal. It's mostly a secret in my day-to-day life, but the traits that I share with lions do help me. In pagan religions of the past, it wasn't uncommon to believe that humans would be reborn as animals, so the idea that I was, in a past life, a lion, is not as far-fetched as some would think."

Ri Na Gach's tattoo: "It's a tribal running lion. It symbolizes my connection with lions and my Leo sign."

Fiona, or "Feef," 34 and from the UK, is not otherkin herself but participates frequently in otherkin forums: "I know some otherkin very personally, and it's very hard to put into words, but you can tell there's something different. It's not something tangible, it's just a quality about them."

Feef searched long and hard but never "awakened": "I tried a lot of the kinds of experiences people were talking about, like guided meditation, but I just didn't get anywhere near," she tells me. Instead she defines herself as a furry: The definition of a furry is not fixed, but it is generally thought of as someone who likes fictionalized anthropomorphic figures and dresses up in fur suits.

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Online, she is called Fionacat, her furry being a European shorthaired house cat: "I first developed the character back in 1996 or '97, and at the time I was just looking around for something fun, and I found this furry thing and was like, 'Ooh, I like the sound of that!'"

Of the 11 online otherkin I got in touch with, only about three maintained that they were openly otherkin in real life. As Dragonkin Azurel explained, "My dragon persona lives strictly online. I believe myself to be entirely human, but online I like to stay as perfectly in character as I possibly can."

There does seem to be an appeal to creating another self, another identity, that no one can judge you for online. It's an opportunity to try out your acting skills, to release some creativity in an anonymous space. "It's kind of the anonymity," Feef tells me, when I ask her if this is the case. "You get to be anonymous, but rather than being anonymous, you get a distinct personality behind what you're actually saying."

It would seem, from reading otherkin message boards, that a significant percentage of otherkin are also transgender, and there are many forums online arguing that if you support transgender rights, you ought to support the rights of otherkin. Feef is transgender and can "personally see the correlation between transgender and otherkin."

She explains that, like transgender people, some otherkin do feel dysphoric with their human bodies, "they want to become more like that animal," just like how some trans people want to alter their physicality. Some otherkin actually have surgery to look more like their animal or creature, Feef tells me. "I do know some people that have done that, and yeah, it just doesn't look that amazing."

Stalking Cat, born Dennis Anver, had extensive body modifications. He sadly committed suicide in 2012. Could he have been an otherkin? He "strongly identified" with a cat. Photo taken by WWGB. Image via Wikipedia

I ask Feef if the fact that she is transgender and already has a fluid conception of her identity could be what attracted her to the whole idea of otherkin. "I would say that is actually a fair assumption to make," she replies, "but the same thing that clicked for my own gender realizations just didn't click for the other stuff... While I could tell that I was never really supposed to be male, there wasn't anything like that in terms of being otherkin."

The distinction between otherkin and transgender is frequently outlined by users on Reddit. While there has been controversial research showing that being transgender might be caused by number of physical anomalies in the brain, including a difference in the brain's white matter, no such physical difference can be found for otherkin. While otherkin may protest that this is due to a lack of research, Azurel adds that "it's a significantly larger jump from 'other gender' to 'other species.'"

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Despite having the conviction it takes to make such a big jump, otherkin get a hell of a lot of criticism for their beliefs. One Reddit forum labeled "Otherkin are delusional and should be treated as such" received 751 upvotes and more than 450 comments. Other disparaging commenters compare the otherkin community to religious fanatics and argue that they need psychiatric help. But is this all just fursecution, as some genuinely call it in the otherkin community?

Sarah, a 17-year-old fallen-angel otherkin, tells me that she struggles with a number of disorders including generalized anxiety disorder, ADHD, and social phobia but maintains that she is medicated and still lives a fulfilling life like most humans. "Some say it's a coping mechanism," she tells me, a way of escaping one's own anguish by becoming something nonhuman, something without imperfections. Sarah wants to say to people, "You know what? If it is, then so be it."

On Reddit forums, otherkin frequently point out that there was once a time where people thought that being gay was strange and that this is just another progression that people are yet to come to terms with. Ri Na Gach agrees, stating that being otherkin is a private matter. "No one can tell me, 'You're a human,' and no one could tell David Reimer he was a girl. I'm me, and only I will ever truly know 100 percent who that is."

Images via

Image via Tumblr

Still, this doesn't stop the bombardment from trolls on Reddit, Tumblr, and LiveJournal. Feef notes that the otherkin community tend to react "exceptionally well" to any piss-taking or abuse, adding that, unfortunately, trolls are to be expected; "Whenever people have something different about them, you're always going to find people wanting to make fun of them."

Most otherkin seemed to be suspiciously interested in video games and fantasy novels, which doesn't seem like a coincidence, when you consider the element of imagination required for both. Fiona said she could see that, "for a lot of them, video games are a route into becoming otherkin." Customizing a character, for example, is just another mode of self-fashioning. Through these video games a certain freedom is created: a virtual fantasy world, a virtual self, and an outlet to be your otherkin—to be whatever you want to be.

From what I have gauged in my time speaking to otherkin, many admire certain aspects of their kintype (the animal they feel akin to) and seek to develop their own characteristics to mirror this. It's almost like having a role-model within yourself. Azurel tells me about one particular dragonkin who does his best to emulate what he thinks of dragons—he thinks of them as "wise, thoughtful, thrifty, and brave"—so it's an aspirational kind of transition. No one I speak to wants to be a goblinkin.

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Jonathan's games room

Board games are big business. Geek culture has gone mainstream through the painfully trite filter of The Big Bang Theory. Suppressed memories of endless, bitter games of Monopoly have been transformed into nostalgia. Last year London's first board game café, "Draughts," opened after raising over £20,000 [$31,000] on Kickstarter. Crowdfunding has been huge for the industry; as I write this, table top games are raking in thousands.

Evidently there's a lot of money being spent on little laser-cut plywood people and hypothetical livestock trading right now. And there are some really weird games on the market—from Antler Island, where you encourage Scottish deer to rut, to Barbarossa, which sees you guide anime Nazi schoolgirls to conquer a wizard version of Stalin. But who are the cardboard zealots buying in to all this, and why?

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Jonathan is a math teacher in his forties from Hampshire. When he's not educating kids about polynomials and scalene triangles, he collects board games. A lot of board games. His collection is currently at around 1,300, with which he lines the walls of the games room in his house like a ludo version of the Library of Alexandria.

When he was a teenager, he lived near one of the first specialist games shops in the UK. "That opened my eyes to a range of games beyond Monopoly and other traditional board games," says Jonathan. (Monopoly, he tells me, is almost universally hated in the board gaming community, as it is by all rational people). "There was a period in the early 2000s when a lot of interesting games had started appearing after the success of Settlers of Catan [the first game to show people the fraught joys of bilateral trade agreements]. I had a reasonable disposable income and I was buying a huge number of games."

Even within such a vast collection, Jonathan's got favorites: "The ones I spent longest tracking down are the Twin Peaks [including donuts but no log lady] and Noggin the Nog games. My favorite is Princes Of Florence"—in which you are, as the name suggests, a Florentine Prince competing to create the most baller mansion. Jonathan explains that while this isn't his best game, it does involve juggling. This element gives it five victory points—as he himself is a juggler, magician, and unicyclist.

He even owns a "six-foot giraffe unicycle." After an injury in his early twenties, he focussed on his circus skills until he was good enough to do professional magic and juggling shows at weddings. "Performing paid my way through teacher training college," he tells me, which allowed him to quit his job in finance. Now he works in a school where he runs a circus skills club that allows him to practice as well as instruct students. "I also run a weekly games club," he adds.

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After 20 years of teaching, Jonathan is finally leaving this year to follow his dreams, after being offered a job to go and work at a board game company. "I'll be working as a buyer for a large distributor," he tells me. "The maths analysis appeals, and the opportunity to look at new games before they come to market is a major draw, but I am sad to be leaving teaching, as it is a real passion."

Brian, from Bolton, has also been collecting games since he was a teenager. He now has over 2,700 games in his collection, which is split between a dedicated room in his house and overspill storage in the garage. He initially estimates that, at an average of £30 [$45] a game, his collection is worth around £81,000 [$126,500]—though he adds that, "because of rare games, it's probably double that."

There's a broad range of "styles" of board game, from old 70s war games with enormous rulebooks and confederate flag-swathed recreations of Gettysburg, to heavily fantastical "Ameritrash" games about galactic freight agencies and Lovecraftian demons. Brian is into German-style games or Eurogames—"I would say 95 percent of my collection are Eurogames," he says. These tend to be less about eliminating the other players, and more about building an unstoppable economic machine to destroy them with irrefutable strategy and cold logic.

A part of Brian's collection

The high-point of the Eurogaming calendar is the SPIEL game fair in Essen, Germany. It's attended by up to 150,000 people a year, and is where most Eurogame designers release their new games. Brian tells me, "I'd love to get to Essen, but I doubt I ever will. I've been disabled since I was 18, when I had cancer and lost my left leg—another reason why I enjoy gaming so much."

We get onto the topic video games, which Jonathan plays occasionally, but says, "sitting in a room with some people just has a better feel than talking with a headset." It's common for fans to have regular group nights to play each others' games together, and specialist stores often run after-hours events. Brian has a couple of weekly meet-ups as well as a slew of conferences he attends in the north-west of England.

"You discover the best parts of the community at conventions. You can safely leave your games near your gaming table and know they won't get touched. Everyone knows the value of the games, so trust is high." I asked Jonathan about the kind of people he has met through gaming. "In general, people who play are sociable and not affected. There's a real sense of community, and I've met some incredibly generous people. Like anywhere, there are those who are superior, opinionated, and inflexible. The stereotype of the larger, sweaty gamer has a bit of truth too unfortunately."

Jonathan with his game face on

On stereotypes, my hunt for huge collectors turns out to be a bit of a brodeo. Jonathan reckons there's a lot more women playing games now than a while ago, but concedes that "collecting is more of a male thing."

Visiting Draughts—the board game café in Haggerston, East London—most of the crowd is young couples who look to be on awkward first dates, along in with mixed gender groups in threes and fours mulling over rules and craft beer. Going on the evidence of recent game design, it does seem like the idea of women as either meek homemakers pumping out babies for victory points or bra-liberated Amazonians is disappearing, and the playing field (board?) is becoming more equal.

I was a bit worried that board game hoarders might be Gandalf-impersonating, rule-wrangling dice hermits, but having spoken to a few of them, it feels like their lives are enriched by board games rather than limited. While I'm not sure I'll ever have enough space or cash to build up a collection like Brian or Jonathan's, I can definitely see the appeal of spending an afternoon with friends exploring boxes full of strange, new worlds.

Follow James Read on Twitter.

Greek Prime Minister, Alexander Tsipras. Photos by Panagiotis Maidis

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This article originally appeared on VICE Greece.

Arriving at the entrance of the Greek Parliament, my gaze immediately fell upon an elderly gentleman who was dressed rather curiously considering the occasion: On his right foot he wore a tsarouhi (a traditional handmade shoe adorned with a pom-pom) and on his left foot, a trainer with thick stripes. He had a huge picture of Georgios Karaiskakis pinned to the lapel of his white shirt. Karaiskakis is a Greek military commander from the 1821 Greek War of Independence—he is to the Greeks what William Wallace is to the Scots.

The security guards tried their best to remove the old man. "Call the President of the Parliament. Call Mrs. Konstantopoulou now! Tell her that her teacher is looking for her," he yelled, but to no avail.

"Stand to the side, sir. You cannot enter," they said as they parked him to the right so that all the stressed government officials and international journalists could walk past.

Greece loves a good character, but at that moment, an elderly gentleman, dressed like an amalgamation of a footballer and a presidential guard, fell somewhere short of the mark. The Greek Parliament seemed chaotic enough as they prepared for what could easily be described as the most critical vote in decades—a vote on austerity measures so tough that they'd have Margaret Thatcher dancing in her grave.

Some Syriza MPs publicly denounced the agreement that the head of their own party, Prime Minit Alexis Tsipras had negotiated before the parliamentary meeting. The evening of July 15 was set to go down in history as the beginning of a new age of turmoil in an already embattled Greece.

My head full of unpleasant scenarios, I passed through the usual security checks and entered the intimidating Greek Parliament—an elegant concrete ode to urban classicism. Until the monarchy was deemed outdated, it had served as a base of kings. Now it would play host to the next act of Greece's tragedy.

Minister of the Interior and Administrative Reconstruction, Nikos Voutsis

Walking towards the pressroom, I took a moment to stand in the hallway and stare at a portrait of Rigas Feraios, leader of the Greek Enlightenment, as well as Dionysios Solomos, Greece's national poet. Both works were crafted by Dimitris Mytaras, one of the most influential contemporary Greek artists.

Entering the press room, I encountered chaos: Fingers hammered away at keyboards, while information, speculative scenarios, and estimates were screamed down mobile phones. Most media outlets seemed to be there—it was obvious that the world was watching Greece. I knew that the measures demanded by Brussels would be voted in—it was a given seeing as it had support from so many parties. What I was mostly concerned with was how much Syriza would bleed on this critical night. People were talking about a mutiny of up to 40 members, while others predicted much lower numbers. But they still predicted it a split.

The media room stressed me out, so I decided to take a walk around the building. I met a friend, who was currently working as a fixer for the Washington Post. He stood with two American journalists as they took statements from Gerasimos Giakoumatos, a New Democracy MP and a favorite of daily newspaper political gossip columns. It struck me that two journalists from the paper that broke the Watergate scandal had traveled thousands of miles across the Atlantic to take statements from Gerasimos Giakoumatos. People were taking this seriously.

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In the lounge, I queued for a bottle of water behind To Potami MP Gregory Psarianos. He was decked out in the ivory waistcoat that he's famous for never taking off. He stood deeply engaged in conversation with Communist Party MP, Thanasis Pafilis. Around the room, there seemed to be similar small congregations of Greek MPs, all having their own little arguments.

The lounge is notorious for being a venue of endless micro-political discussion and that certainly rang true more than ever. At the far end of the room, the government ministers, Panagiotis Lafazanis and Dimitris Stratoulis, as well as Syriza MP Thanasis Petrakos and Stathis Leoutsakos, had set up their own low-key post—all eyes were aimed at them. All four had made it clear that they planned on voting "No." The fact that Panagiotis Lafazanis neurotically fiddled with his komboloi—(also known as "worry beads")—while pacing up and down the corridors hinted at what was coming next.

The session began at 8:30 PM, so I ran upstairs to secure a good place in the journalist gallery, which was already packed. Finally, the time had come for the vote. The speakers took to the podium one by one. The discussion was chaired by the Parliament Vice-President, Alexis Mitropoulos. The air in the room was thick with tension. It was in every look and every word. "On Monday morning, I experienced the most difficult time of my life. I made a decision that will be with me for the rest of my life," said Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos in an emotional speech.

All of the speeches that followed were equally charged. Evangelos Venizelos exchanged deadly glances with Deputy Parliamentary President, Alexis Mitropoulos—it was like something out of a western. The drama peaked when Syriza MP and Speaker of the Parliament Zoi Konstantopoulou took the floor for her highly anticipated speech. Amongst other things, she said that it was "a black day for the Greek parliament" and that "the parliament would within 2.5 hours ratify an agreement that crushes the Greek people." Nobody was in doubt that she would strongly oppose the "Yes" line.

Paradoxically, the leader of far-right party ANEL, Panos Kammenos, dropped the anti-memorandum stance that he's been brandishing for years and, instead, gave the green light for the country's third memorandum. The Prime Minister of Greece, Alexander Tsipras took the floor and laid his cards out on the table: "I bear the responsibility for this looted society."

Inside the Greek Parliament

Slowly, the "Yes" and "No" votes were recorded one by one. When former Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis voted "No," some people started booing. The real highlight was when Syriza MP, Yannis Michelogiannakis—a man revered as an anti–memorandum superhero—voted "Yes," even though he made very clear that he wanted no more memoranda. Finally, the agreement was voted through: 229 MPs said "Yes," 64 "No," six "Present" and Alexandra Tsanaka of Syriza remained absent.

The Prime Minister immediately left for his office following the plenary. A lot had changed in only a few hours: On the one hand, he had experienced dozens of his comrades cheering his speech on and later turning around and voting against the agreement that he had brought before the parliament. It's certain that the cohesion of Syriza has been shaken for good. A broad reshuffling is clearly only a matter of time. Many things are uncertain right now but one thing is for sure—the Greek people will continue their voyage into recession for yet another summer.

Zoi Konstantopouloi, President of the Hellenic Parliament

Finance Minister, Euclid Tsakalotos

Syriza MP and Former Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis (left)

Syriza MP, Rachel Makri

Alexander Tsipras leaving the Parliament

Greek Parliament

Golden Dawn MPs

President of New Democracy, Evangelos Meimarakas

Alexander Tsipras delivering his speech

All images via GX.

Next year GX (formerly GaymerX), the San Francisco–based queer video game convention, is coming to Sydney. It will be the first event of its kind in Australia, and the country's sizable LGBTQ gamer community is understandably stoked. GX was established as a reaction to gaming's dominant "bro" culture, and serves as a place for queer geeks to hang out and enjoy cool shit in a safe, inclusive space. Founder Matt Conn said the experiences of queer people, women, and people of color feeling they needed to "keep their guard up" at traditional conventions was his motivation to create GX.

Seeing as Australian gamers have to wait until February before they can experience the convention themselves, VICE Australia called Matt to talk about queer culture and his approach to homophobia.

VICE: Hey Matt, so why have the first international GX in Australia?
Matt Conn: We met Liam and Joshua, the two guys who are leading the charge in GX Australia. They were just like, "I love what you're doing with GX, there's a huge gay gaming population here, we've always wanted to do something like this."

They're people who have the passion, skills, and more importantly the temperament. It's so stressful putting on GX. There have been times I thought I couldn't do it. I don't know if a lot of people have the mental fortitude to put up with the abuse. Liam and Josh are really nice, but also so passionate they can handle it. And it's going to get really nasty.

GX is about creating a positive space for all gamers, this guy included.

It's that intense?
Even just announcing it, they got abuse. I think a lot of white guys don't know what it's like to be a woman or person of color online. But they're really tough and smart, and there are a bunch of amazing queer gamers in Australia, so it's the perfect formula.

How do you respond to that stuff?
People just need to understand no one is coming to take away their things. If you want your sexy characters in games, cool. But queer people, and women, and people of color want to enjoy this medium and you're resisting them being able to create their own awesome space. And that's gross.

Generally how queer-friendly is gaming?
It's getting a lot better. But there's a mixture of American bro culture with this very conservative Japanese culture. When you combine those, it creates an environment a little behind the times on social issues.

Do you feel that's shifting?
Yeah, but for the most part if you're a queer gamer and you go out to events, read gaming publications, or play 99 percent of mainstream games, you feel like the content isn't made for you.

A handful of titles have made an effort to broach that, but are larger developers engaging a more diverse audience?
Sort of. I can see how it's tough for developers and publishers when you're working super hard, you're doing your life's dream, and people are saying, "This isn't inclusive enough." But we've got over that initial wave of people feeling like you're just criticizing them and trying to cause trouble. People are realizing inclusivity in video games is not going to ruin them.

They can still make their super bro games, but there's success in things like Mirror's Edge or Dragon Age Inquisition. Dragon Age Inquisition had a trans character and Iron Bull—who is basically there to be a sex object for the female and gay gaze. And it sold more, and reviewed better, than any other Dragon Age game.

People are realizing diversity and inclusion doesn't mean the product is going to end up not selling. It actually opens up sales channels to them.

There's still a lot of homophobia and misogyny in gaming, how do we address more aggressively?
I think more Japanese developers need to look at inclusivity. JRPGs (Japanese role-playing games) rarely tackle these issues. Or if they do, in the case of Persona 4, they handle it poorly. I appreciate queer people having a storyline, but it's obvious it wasn't written by someone who is familiar with those things.

People having a good time at a past GX convention.

Why didn't you do your first international GX in Japan?
I wanted to. I feel like Australia and America are awesome, but Japan is the birthplace of gaming. Everyone we've talked to has been like, It will never succeed there, that's not their culture, they would be very against it.

Is GX a traditional convention in an open environment, or is the content specifically LGBTQ-focused?
Both. There are people who don't give two shits about politics. They're super gay, and they love gaming. I want them to be able to come and play games with their friends in a space that's positive.

But we try have people on the forefront like Robert Yang, Naomi Clark, and Zoe Quinn who are making really cool games about queer issues.

There are a lot of approaches to consider.
I know, when I came up with the name (GaymerX) it came from a place where I feel comfortable. And I had a lot of amazing people say, "Matt I dig what you're doing, but it's problematic, or non-inclusive of this group or that group and we want to make it better for them."

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You mean because it sounds like it's only for gay men?
Yeah. So instead of being like, "Hey you suck because you're a white straight dude," it's like, "Here are some cool ways to make this more inclusive to trans and non-gendered folks." Or even for straight allies who think gaming's toxic. As long as you're cool with queer people that's all we want. We don't want it to be a space that's just for gay people.

I guess it's about making people comfortable, but to change something you need to speak beyond your audience. You need straight white guys to understand and care. But how do you do that?
In a way I can understand this weird pushback where straight people feel victimized. If you're a kid living in rural Kentucky, struggling to get by, and these people in San Fran are telling you that you have all this privilege, I can see why you wouldn't get it. So we try not to make it accusatory. We want change to come from a happy place where we can bring people in and make them see diversity isn't scary.

There are a lot of things conventions can do to make queer people feel welcome that don't make others feel bad. Like having gender neutral restrooms, or preferred gender pronouns at the registration table. That costs nothing and doesn't affect the experience of people who aren't gay. But for people who are queer, they know they were thought about.

It's more productive to engage someone with queer content than tell them they're homophobic.
We have a lot of panels that are just weird things we think are cool. We had the first openly gay WWE wrestler last year. A lot of straight people came and said it was cool to hear him talk about his boyfriend, but also being wrestler.

GX Sydney will be running from February 27-28, 2016. Keep an eye on their Facebook page for more information.

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Inmates at New Zealand's Mount Eden Correctional Facility (MECF) have been filmed beating the shit out of each other in organized fights that somehow ended up on YouTube. Mobile phones are prohibited at the 120-year-old prison, as is fighting, so there's an understandable amount of confusion and embarrassment surrounding the release of the videos.

The prison was identified from inmates' clothes bearing the words "SERCO MECF." Serco is the global outsourcing giant that, in 2011, signed a ten-year $300 million NZD [$196 million USD] contract to manage Mount Eden. In the three years that followed, Mount Eden recorded more prisoner assaults than any other prison in New Zealand prison.

Speaking with New Zealand's One News, Serco's Director of Operations, Scott McNairn, said the video is being looked into. "I have commissioned a thorough investigation which will examine these incidents. We will work with the Department of Corrections on any necessary actions arising," McNairn said.

The footage shows one-on-one fights taking place inside cells with other prisoners watching. Throughout the clip, chatter and laughter can be heard in the background. During one clip, a prisoner falls down and another inmate can be heard saying "let him up." Visible tattoos suggest that at least some of the participants are Black Power gang members.

Screen cap via YouTube

While punches and kicks do land, and the fighters at times seem visibly dazed, the action seems more in the vein of something you'd see in a ring than your spontaneous, garden variety prison assault. Despite onlookers shouting and cheering throughout, none of the altercations are interrupted by guards.

For its part, the prison is investigating the incident for any procedural breakdowns. It also stated that despite authorities' "best efforts to ensure risks are mitigated, we cannot prevent all assaults and no jurisdiction in the world has achieved this." However, preventing single assaults and missing at least six raucous and seemingly organized fights that were filmed on a contraband phone do feel like different things.

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Corrections northern regional commissioner, Jeanette Burns, told stuff.co.nz they're currently working with prison management to find out how the footage made it to YouTube. In this year alone, 27 mobile phones and 22 SIM cards have already been found after being smuggled into the facility.

In response to the situation, Mount Eden Corrections Facility has announced it will increase the frequency of contraband searches. Any inmate found in possession of a cellphone could face internal or police charges.

The leaked footage came only days after convicted murderer Nikki Roper was hospitalized following a severe beating in the Mount Eden prison yard. Corrections has reiterated its zero tolerance policy for assaults on staff, prisoners, or guards, commenting: "No assault is acceptable; however, it is an unfortunate reality that from time to time this will occur."

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People in the Southwest have been stocking up on ammo these days, readying themselves for a fight in case President Obama decides to impose martial law. This is standard for doomsday preppers, but this week, the threat became just a little bit more real. That's because something called Jade Helm 15 started on Wednesday, and it isn't expected to be over until the middle of September. So according to the New York Times, some citizens of Christoval, Texas, have piled up as many as 20,000 rounds, preparing for all-out war.

So far, their fears haven't panned out. But it would still be great if someone would tell us what the hell Jade Helm 15 is.

We do know it's some kind of military training exercise, and that will take place for two months across at least seven states. In a statement Monday, the US Army assured us that "the public can expect little disruption in their day-to-day activities since much of the exercise will be conducted in remote areas." It will involve about 1,200 military personnel, mostly from the Army, but also some from special operations forces units in the Navy, Marines, and Air Force.

Army spokesman Mark Lastoria told the Texas Tribune that troops will be spread out over a multi-state area and that 700 of the servicemen will only join in for five days at Camp Bullis in San Antonio. What exactly those 700 troops will be doing there, however, is still unclear.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott went on TV last week ostensibly to calm people down, saying, "We have the greatest assurances that these are normal military operations. They're going to work out just fine." That's a change in tone for the governor, who in April, after getting wind of his constituents' worries about the exercise—mostly that Obama would use Jade Helm to seize everyone's guns—directed the Texas State Guard to monitor the military's operations in his state.

Abbott seemed to be suggesting that the Texas State Guard was getting ready to train their guns on the US Army, lest Uncle Sam pull any funny business. And that's when the media coverage really picked up. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest even had to address the controversy during a press conference this spring, saying that "in no way will the constitutional rights or civil liberties of any American citizen be infringed upon while this exercise is being conducted."

As paranoia reached a fever pitch, Abbott started easing up on the hysterics, claiming in May that he was "serving as a communication facilitator between the Special Operations Forces and the people of the state of Texas and nothing more than that."

The truth is, there is precedent for large-scale training exercises in the homeland, although while some seem to follow the same woman's-name-plus-random-noun naming convention, none of them have been quite this large. And they haven't always gone off well in the past.

Another Army exercise, called Robin Sage, has been conducted in the small towns and rural wilderness of North Carolina since the 1970s, by ROTC cadets trying to earn the Green Beret. In a horrifying incident in 2002, however, a sheriff's deputy shot and killed a soldier during Robin Sage because he wasn't aware that Robin Sage was a training exercise, and apparently some of the gunplay was a little too realistic. Still, that was just one incident over the course of four decades.

Assuming it's true that nothing sketchy is going on with Jade Helm, the federal government doesn't seem to grasp how weird it all looks. The whole Jade Helm 15 conspiracy theory was kicked off when a map related to the operation was leaked, marking Texas, Utah, and part of California as "hostile" territory.

Watch VICE News's Jason Leopold talk to Congress about government secrecy:

That might not mean anything real, but the Army didn't explain away the natural suspicion that such a map would provoke, particularly among the conspiracy-minded gunslingers living across the American West. Instead, in an official statement, the Army basically said that Jade Helm is a secret but that it would actually be a good thing, because it would bring "economic gain: an increase in the local economy, in fuel and food purchases and hotel lodging."

Unsurprisingly, those who were concerned about Jade Helm weren't reassured, filling the information vacuum with conspiracy theories. Suddenly, Jade Helm was everywhere: Bluebell ice cream trucks looked suspiciously like mobile morgues; recently closed Walmarts were being converted into government processing centers, perhaps to control the food supply; FEMA and its "death domes" were obviously involved. Alex Jones helpfully suggested that "Helm" stands for "Homeland Eradication of Local Militants."

Now, as Jade Helm kicks off, a group civilian group called Counter Jade Helm is gearing up to act as a voluntary watchdog group and presumably signal to America's bunker-dwellers if it's ever time to break out the gas masks. Counter Jade Helm claims to have about 200 volunteers across seven states, although as Texas Team Leader Eric Johnston, a former sheriff's deputy, ominously told ABC News, "I would like to think that if the situation were to turn afoul, many more of our people would stand up and come to assist."

The group is run out of Phoenix, Arizona, by a 44-year-old former Marine named Pete Lanteri, who has spent the past decade running civilian border patrols to catch undocumented immigrants trying to sneak into the US, and is now using those skills—and his network of civilian volunteers—to monitor the military.

"We're going to be watching what they do in the public," he told the Houston Chronicle. "Obviously, on a military base they can do whatever they want. But if they're going to train on public land we have a right as American citizens to watch what they're doing."

On the official Counter Jade Helm website, there's a helpful map of known operations. Another section provides a method for creating and sharing "SALUTE reports." SALUTE is jargon from actual military reconnaissance, used when scouting the enemy. It stands for "size," "activity," "location," "unit," "time," and "equipment." In other words, they're borrowing tactics from the military to monitor the military.

The SALUTE reports section is sitting empty at the moment.

And as far as Jade Helm operations go, there's not much to report. ABC News reporters heard a few gunshots from a military base in Bastrop, Texas, but that's to be expected from a military drill.

Still, two uninvited Texans named Derrick Broze and Mark Jankins decided to scout the base on Wednesday afternoon. But the two volunteers—who may or may not be CJH members—told the the Austin American-Statesman that nothing looked unusual in Bastrop.

Broze pointed out, however, that "there's a perfectly legitimate reason for people to fear their government will see them as the enemy."

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Wim Hof first caught the attention of scientists when he proved he was able to stay submerged in ice for one hour and 53 minutes without his core body temperature changing. Since then, he's climbed Mount Everest in his shorts, resisted altitude sickness, completed a marathon in the Namibian Desert with no water, and proven—under a laboratory setting—that he's able to influence his autonomic nervous system and immune system at will.

Almost everything Wim has done was previously thought to be impossible, but he's not a freak of nature; he's a master of meditation.

To demonstrate that any human can learn his methods, Wim offered to teach VICE hosts Matt Shea and Daisy-May Hudson how to climb a freezing cold mountain in their shorts without getting cold. But when Matt and Daisy signed up for the training, they had no idea that the so-called Iceman was planning to lead them on a psychedelic journey across Europe that circled the chasm between science and spirituality.

Follow Daisy and Matt on Twitter.

Thumbnail via screenshot

Watch: Berlin's Refugee Crisis

According to the Guardian, German Chancellor and notorious hard-ass Angela Merkel reduced a Palestinian refugee to tears on live TV last night, explaining to the teenage girl—who will likely be deported, along with her family—that "politics is hard sometimes."

"I have goals like anyone else," the girl, who arrived in Germany four years ago from a Lebanese refugee camp, told Merkel in German. "I want to study like them... it's very unpleasant to see how others can enjoy life, and I can't myself."

When the girl began to cry, the German politician awkwardly rubbed her on the shoulder and told her she "did it so well," which made everything OK. Just kidding. The girl kept crying.

The German government has already received twice as many applications for asylum this year as they did in the entirety of 2014, and with more and more refugees landing in the country each month, policymakers are struggling to find ways to house them. According to Merkel, the country simply can't.

German locals, afraid of being overrun, have set fire to several refugee camps in the past few weeks and shot at a home near the city of Leipzig twice this past weekend. Police say almost all of the attacks can be chalked up to xenophobia.

Merkel's half-assed attempt at comforting this girl now has started to blow up on the internet thanks to the hashtag #Merkelstreichelt, which translates to "Merkel strokes."

A Greek man stands in front of a police vehicle during a June anti-austerity protest in Athens. Photo by AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris

More on the Greek Crisis:

Photos of Young Greeks Protesting the Bailout
What Greece's 'No' Referendum Vote Means for Europe
Do Greeks and Germans Actually Hate Each Other?

It was Sunday, July 12, the night that one way or another, the fate of Greece, and some have said Europe, would be decided. I was at the bar where I DJed most nights, the Black Rooster—a stylish jazz bar in the old Venetian quarter of Chania, Crete—and there was only me with Anna and Giorgos, the bar's owners.

Business had been bad, very bad—with the banks closed and ATM withdrawals restricted to 60 euros a day, few people wanted to spend their money on going out. In Brussels, the Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, was negotiating with the country's creditors over a possible deal for a financial lifeline—it was either that or leave the euro, and probably the European Union. This was the "Grexit" many worried about over the past few months, and it would have further devastated Greece's already depression-level economy. The terms on offer were worse than humiliating. Tempers were running high that night—a week before, the Greek people gave Europe a decisive vote against more austerity in a national referendum, a result that surprised everyone—and Giorgos, a powerfully built Greek man and someone I've come to call a dear friend, told me to pack my bags and get out of his country.

"I want Greece for the Greeks!" he shouted. "Everyone out! Everyone who is not Greek out of my country. This is my country, my soil, my home! They come and take my home, my soil—I will kill them!"

I knew Giorgos didn't want me, or any of the foreigners here, to leave, but the sting hurt. As an Indian kid in England, and then as an adult in New York, I had been told again and again to go back to "my home"—it was only because I understood how difficult the situation here had become that I held my anger in and let my friend rant. Giorgos hammered the bar with a fist. "I tell you this, Ranbir, what they are asking for is war—and now this is what I want too. I want to go to Germany and kill them, so they understand what they have done." After a few minutes, he quieted and wrapped an arm around my shoulders. "War," he said, the friendship returning to his voice, "this is what I want."

For months it had felt to me that Greece had long ago fallen over a cliff's edge and, as if in a cartoon impossibly slowed down, was crashing toward the hard ground of a valley floor. Or as if someone had hit pause mid-fall, and we were all hanging there, in the air, waiting for whatever asshole kid who was clutching the remote control to press play again. It was an excruciating feeling, even for someone like myself who was an outsider here to be stuck in that moment of pause. Greeks have felt it for years now. The January election victory of the hodgepodge of left- and radical-left parties that is Syriza gave a brief sense of hope and motion, but the country has once again been brought up violently short and now—with Greece's Parliament having just approved the latest bailout, austerity measures and all—hangs with its nose almost touching the ground.

What Anna wanted was out: out of the euro, out of Europe, and out of the coming decades of debt slavery.

Originally conceived as a means to end centuries of conflict, the European Union, and the smaller Eurozone, which shared a common currency, had begun to fray at the edges, especially after the global financial collapse of 2008. Greece hadn't yet recovered, and was still mired in deep financial depression, with 26 percent unemployment and 50 percent youth unemployment, and little prospect of those numbers changing much for years. For months, Greece had been locked in battle with its creditors, seeking better terms that might fuel growth instead of further deterioration.

Then less then two weeks ago, at the climax of what was billed as the truly truly final (we've had many) make-or-break talks in Brussels, prime minister Tsipras broke off negotiations dramatically and flew back to Athens where he convened an emergency cabinet meeting. We sat at the bar, waiting until the news broke around 10 PM. There would be a national referendum: Yes or No to the stinging conditions demanded by the lenders.

"Finally," Anna told me, "we're going to come to an end to all this horrible waiting." She already knew how she would vote: No, or Oxi as it's written in Greek, pronounced Oh-hee. She wasn't interested in what the referendum actually said—it was written in bureaucratic legalese and was more Rorschach test than actual choice. What she wanted was out: out of the euro, out of Europe, and out of the coming decades of debt slavery, which was the only deal on offer.

Most people I met echoed her sentiments. Pangiotis, who owns a tourist shop in the old leather market, told me that on the day Greece leaves the euro, he will ask every customer who walks into his shop where they come from. "If they say Germany, I will tell them to go fuck off! Fuck off out of my store!" He drank his beer, and started talking about the atrocities the Germans committed in Greece, and especially in Crete, during World War II. The war is an shadow in almost every conversation about the crisis, about Germany, about the euro project. It's hard to avoid, as the ghosts still populate the town. Outside my house, several buildings stand in ruins from German bombing raids. If you follow the lines of bombed-out buildings punctuated with postwar construction, it's possible to retrace the flight paths German bombers took as they sought to reduce the city to rubble.

Drive into the hills and you soon come upon village after village marked at its entrance with the sign "THE MARTYRED VILLAGE OF —." These are villages where the Germans rounded up the residents and slaughtered them, then killed the livestock and salted the ground, with the intention that no one would live there again for generations to come. It's a testament to Cretan resilience that soon after the war ended, the survivors returned and repopulated the hills as best they could. The memory of these atrocities, and how little they've been recognized in Germany or the rest of Europe, is an ever-present, if often silent, motif in the discordant symphony that is negotiations with the creditors.

The enormous power of no should not be underestimated in modern Greek culture. Oxi carries a great emotional weight here, and is sometimes called the Big No. On October 28, 1940, the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini presented Greece with an ultimatum: Accept occupation by Axis forces or face total invasion. Ioannis Metaxas, Greece's ruler at the time, responded with a simple "Oxi," infuriating Mussolini, whose forces attacked the following morning, pulling Greece into the war on the side of the Allies. It was this defiant oxi that echoed across every ballot and on every lip which said no to the creditors.

That Europe isn't Europe anymore is a common theme in many of the conversations about the crisis.

The day after the announcement of the referendum, Giorgos had me take a photograph of him of holding up two old drachma notes. Anna posted it onto the bar's Facebook page with the announcement that the Black Rooster was now accepting drachmas. It quickly earned a considerable number of likes. "I want to get out of this shithole of Europe," Giorgos told me. "It's not Europe anymore, it's something else, something that's not human. It's just little men with their calculators and books ticking off numbers."

That Europe isn't Europe anymore is a common theme in many of the conversations about the crisis, and about whether Greece should leave and find its own feet, with its own currency. Pope Francis echoed such sentiments last November in his speech to the European Parliament, where he despaired that the continent's "humanistic spirit" was being replaced by a "haggard" spirit of "trade and commerce." And even the (to me) usually incoherent philosopher Slavoj Žižek recently attacked the ascendency of the technocratic state in Europe when writing about Greece. He summed up the bureaucratic nightmare of modern Europe with grim precision, describing it as "a dialogue between a rape victim who desperately reports what happened to her and a policeman who continuously interrupts her with requests for administrative details." I agreed—this was not a European Union, but every dog for itself, while the thin veneer of so-called bureaucratic process hid much murkier agendas of power and capital.

Watch: Immigrants Are Walking Hundreds of Miles from Greece to Germany

That week I visited a Swedish couple I know who own a holiday home in town. They were regulars at the bar, but I hadn't seen them for a few days. "I can't go there right now," John told me. "It's Anna—I can't look at her. She's too angry, angry about everything." If he could, he would have voted strongly Yes, though he said he didn't mind talking to No voters, as long as they had a sense of humor. He told me a story about a waitress at a nearby village-style taverna. A French woman sat down at one of the outside tables and without even saying hello, demanded to know which way the waitress was voting. A tough local woman from a nearby village, she responded immediately, "No, of course!" The French woman said it wasn't right to vote No, it wasn't European, that it was "no good," and the waitress answered by saying, "Then no food!" and ordered the woman to stand up and leave.

All I could think about was Europe, and how instead of ideas, hopes, ideals, it had become imprisoned by its own depressing fixation on numbers.

As the conversation progressed, it struck me that it was John who was really angry, not Anna. This was her country, after all, and she was watching it die. And while I sympathized with their point of view, in the end, all John and his wife were protecting was a sunny holiday getaway from the icy north. The three of us talked about the failures of the Greeks over many years to tackle corruption and a failed civil state—all undeniable—and the impossible demands of the creditors. Whenever I defended Greece or criticized Europe, John shot back with rising anger, contradicting almost everything I said. One of the demands—a rise in the sales tax on island restaurants—would be a crushing blow to the economy. He insisted that the tax here was already 23 percent, the highest rate the creditors were proposing, but I suspected it was lower. It seemed a small point to me, but Louise began searching through her purse, then jumped to her feet and dashed upstairs and returned with a handful of receipts, which she assiduously examined. One she believed was from a local restaurant, though she wasn't sure. She claimed it showed the higher tax rate, but I didn't bother to look at the receipt. All I could think about was Europe, and how instead of ideas, hopes, ideals, it had become imprisoned by its own depressing fixation on numbers.

Moses, a part-owner of a boutique hotel on the harbor, told me he's had one cancellation after another all week. He remained convinced Yes would win. "Nothing will happen," he said. "Don't worry, they'll make a deal and we'll be back to where we were last week." He showed me one of the emailed cancellations. It was from a German couple who claimed they had been coming to Crete since 1996, but now refused to return after hearing Germans being slandered in the Greek media as liars and criminals and monsters. I asked Moses how he responded. "Simple," he said. "If that's what they thought we were saying about them, I told them to get lost and not come back."

On VICE News: Death Boats to Greece:

In the days leading up to the national vote on July 5, it seemed clear early on that Yes would win, and perhaps win decisively. The media carpet-bombed the airwaves with anti-No propaganda, while the Yes rally in Athens's central square, Syntagma, was reported to be larger than the previous night's No rally, and this despite a constant rain. When playing the game Bejeweled on my iPad, I was bombarded by slick, made-for-mobile Yes ads. The Irish bookmaker Paddy Power had even gone so far as to pay out four days early on their Yes contracts, calling the result a foregone conclusion.

So as the results started rolling in, there was a sense of disbelief. Initial exit polls suggested the No vote might actually win by a handful of points, but this was expected to tighten. It never tightened—and all night long the gap grew wider and wider. The final results—61 percent No, 39 percent Yes—were a shock to everyone. Here in Chania, we delivered the most resounding No vote in the country—74 percent. This shouldn't have been a surprise. All across town were hung hand-painted No signs, No posters, no graffiti, while No handbills littered the streets. All that week, I didn't see a single Yes sign. Even though I know I would have voted No given the chance, it was a bittersweet outcome. I was glad the Greeks had conquered their fear and told Europe where to shove it with their fear-mongering—but if they actually found themselves outside the euro, I thought my friends would suffer enormously. Anna and Giorgos would lose their bar and others their shops and restaurants and pensions, and their children would have little of the opportunities they might inside Europe.

"Remember this: Whatever happens, Greece survives. It has for 4,000 years and will for another 4,000."

Anna remained jubilant—that night she couldn't have cared less about losing the bar. "Maybe," she shrugged when that possibility was brought up, downing a shot of tequila, "but we Greeks have gone through much worse, much, much worse. Remember this: Whatever happens, Greece survives. It has for 4,000 years and will for another 4,000." She was right, of course, but I was thinking more of my friends. There was little comfort in Greece surviving if they were going to be sacrificial lambs to the edifice of a technocratic Europe. In these last days, as I watched Anna and other friends, I had a distinct impression of watching a people preparing to go to war. And many, not only Giorgos, said as much. "This is war, baby," Anna told me, "war for our country, war for our lives, our future." In the past, such disputes almost certainly would have found their way onto the battlefield, but what replaced this—the bureaucratic lack of finality to anything, the endless fudges, the continual pushing the problem farther down the road—was less a solution than a mask for much deeper problems, ones few wanted to look at directly.

A couple days after the referendum I visited the beach at Nea Chora. Over winter, violent storms, the like of which even the old-timers couldn't remember, battered the island and wrecked the beaches. Despite this, Nea Chora, was packed with tourists, elbowing each other on what was left on the beach, and all seemingly indifferent to the world that was crashing down around the ears of their Greek hosts. But for the first time in weeks, I'd begun to see locals with a spring in their step, their faces bright and confident and happier. Many really had found their sense of pride again. It was good to see after watching so many distraught faces for so long, and I couldn't judge one way or the other on the merits of it—the seemingly willful decision to potentially crash the country if that also meant crashing Europe with them.

On Monday morning, July 13, we learned the details of the deal Alexis Tsipras negotiated with the creditors after 17-hour marathon talks, where one observer described the prime minister as looking like a "beaten dog": far more, and far more biting, austerity measures; massive tax increases; cuts to pensions across the board; the loss of all valuable national assets; the loss of the nation's ability to write its own legislation without approval; and only the suggestion that debt relief might one day be discussed. Some of the demands were positive, and may yet help the country tackle a longstanding culture of corruption and nepotism. But taken together, they mean years, if not decades, more of ruinous economic difficulty. That night at the bar, I asked Giorgos, who was drunk and grinning ironically at the new situation, if he had a name for his new country. "That's a very interesting question, Ranbir," he said, and told me he'd think about it. He walked away, returned, opened his mouth, said nothing, walked away again. This happened several times. Finally, he returned triumphant. He had decided on a new name for the country, and letting his rich voice boom across the bar, he told me what it was: "Fuck You, Everybody!"

At the beach, the sun was high, the water pristine and bathtub warm, and children shrieked in joy as they ran in and out of the shallow breakers. No one seemed to notice that half the beach was missing. I wondered if next year, after another winter of crushing storms, whether they would notice if the whole beach had disappeared.

Ranbir Singh Sidhu's first novel, Deep Singh Blue, will be published by Unnamed Press and HarperCollins India in 2016. He is the author of Good Indian Girls, a collection of stories. He is on Twitter.

A couple pose outside the Uniqlo store where the fuckin' allegedly went down. Photo by Ng Han Guan/AP.

Read: Hero Woman Refuses to Be Shamed After Her Public Threesome Goes Viral

In the wee hours of Tuesday morning, the Chinese internet lit up like a pinball machine with China's newest sex scandal. The sex itself was nothing special—a young couple got down to business in a Uniqlo changing room and filmed it with a phone. But while the foreign press has focused on CCP censure and Uniqlo's apology, in China, the real payoff has been in the internet's reaction.

The craze began with a trickle of Uniqlo jokes in the early hours of Tuesday, before many had seen the video. Newsfeeds on WeChat, China's 549 million person-strong social networking and messaging mobile app, began to fill up with jokes about the sex sesh. A meme emerged of a kid peaking under a changing room, captioned "Me tonight!" Soon enough, everyone on WeChat began forwarding around links to the video. The nation, collectively, then watched a bit of sex.

Without missing a beat, Zara's public WeChat account posted a comment, "Come to Zara! Our fitting rooms are brighter and more spacious!" H&M posted a nearly identical one. The comments were later pulled down and said to be impostor accounts, but not before screenshots went viral.

READ: The Chinese Government Is Asking Citizens to Stop Hiring Strippers for Funerals

Meme after meme emerged. One featured the iconic IFS mall in Chengdu, famous around China for the three-story panda statue clambering up its side. Just to the left of the panda is a huge Uniqlo sign. The meme reads, "I finally know why the Panda has been climbing for so long!" The panda, it seems, was just trying to sneak a peek.

The video's clincher comes about midway through, when a voice announces over the store's loudspeaker, in crystal-clear Mandarin,"Dear customers, welcome to the Uniqlo store in Sanlitun. There are no fitting rooms on the first floor. Please proceed to the second and third floor if you need to try on clothes."

Perhaps the reason this video caught on like wildfire in China is the fact that it was (presumably) made by two of its own citizens. Porn is technically illegal in China, and although the Japanese porn industry has ensured that the sight of two Asian people—or three, or five, or two and a squid—getting intimate on-screen is far from novel in China, the fact that this video was shot inside the country's borders made it special. Also, it was made by amateurs. Most Chinese sex scandals feature government officials posing with prostitutes. This was just two people having a romp, what Chinese netizens call a 野战， yězhàn, an "operation in the field." Many of my Chinese friends described feeling refreshed at seeing Chinese folks having relatively normal, if not a touch ambitious, sex.

RELATED: Watch our video on the Japanese love industry

The Uniqlo sex tape and the ensuing internet mayhem felt like a collective sigh of relief, a national easing of the guard akin to everyone laughing about a dirty joke at work. It gave people a reason to talk about sex, and the nation's young people took that opportunity and ran with it.

Just 15 hours after the video dropped, clothes inspired by the incident had already hit the market. A video emerged from Guangdong province of two guys wearing shirts with the Uniqlo logo over a blurred out picture of the sex scene. The shirts went up for sale on Taobao, alongside scarves, blouses, and shoes advertised as identical to those in a pile on the floor in the Uniqlo changing room. At a comical price of 9999 RMB [$1,609], the blouse has yet to sell.

Just as quickly as the video went viral, the government attempted to strip it off the web. The link I was sent went dead minutes after it hit our group chat. Thus ensued the whack-a-mole experience that is censorship on the Chinese web. The government takes something down; a replica pops up somewhere else. The government smacks that down, another one boings up to the surface again. Smack, boing, smack, boing, until one party or the other runs out of energy. Hardcore Chinese netizens are so well accustomed to downloading and redistributing information that this sex tape scandal was child's play. It is impossible to estimate how many people saved the video directly to their phones.

A tattoo inspired by the changing room romp. Image courtesy of the author, via WeChat

The night of the Uniqlo Changing Room Incident culminated in one guy getting a tattoo and another one making a pretty good rap titled "Thank you, Fitting Room."

Unfortunately for the budding porn stars, their contribution will likely prove thankless. The police are already investigating the situation, including an investigation of Uniqlo. Some suspect the video was made as a publicity stunt, but Uniqlo has denied that accusation.

Zak is a writer living in China. Follow him on Twitter.

This article contains some story spoilers, such as they are, from the start.

My first time through Journey was much the same as many other players'. I abandoned the suggested motion controls at the very outset, pressing forward through the endless-seeming desert using the analogue sticks, onwards towards a towering peak that looked unreachable. No prompt. No arrow flashing above me. No mini-map. Just the draw of adventure, curiosity pulling my wordless avatar through ruins and caverns, beneath a haze of yellow dust, and through to skies washed a glorious emerald. I traveled alone, I traveled accompanied; I traveled, moving contently, momentum my only language, until the mountain was met and I pushed up through its defensive winds, past its prowling guardians, to a snowy infinity, and my demise. To my rebirth, and final ascent. And I cried.

Seriously. I'm not ashamed at all to tell you that the first time I experienced Journey, by the time its credits were rolling, I had at least a couple of tears on my cheek. It was late, and I'd almost certainly been drinking, but there can be no discounting the powerful emotional effect that this game, the third "proper" release from the (then) Sony-affiliated studio thatgamecompany, had on me. And on many other players, too. The 2012 game was exclusive to the PlayStation 3, but with a great many 360 users defecting from Microsoft and picking up PS4s over Xboxes in this eighth console generation, Sony are wisely putting it out again for their priority home system.

On July 21, a massive new audience for Journey will open up, as the game is given a fresh lick of 60fps paint as befits the increased processing power of the PS4. In a nice move, anyone already owning the PS3 version can download the PS4 one for free. And, really, why wouldn't anyone want to play this again? When I got home last night, tired from Brighton's Develop conference (and just a little groggy from a few IPAs at the Games by the Sea indie bash held afterwards), I powered up my PS3, dusted off a controller that'd not been touched in a few months, and set about seeing all of Journey again, to feel how a fifth playthrough of it would compare to that first time.

Glorious, still, basically. Journey is short enough to play in one sitting, about 90 minutes long, with no risk of meeting a game-over state and a wonderfully rich (and ground-breakingly Grammy nominated) orchestral score complementing the beautiful visuals. It is a multiplayer game unlike any other, when it wants to be, where at most you'll only ever witness another wanderer in your space, at any one time, and the game doesn't insist that you go anywhere near them. There's no traditional communication—interactions are restricted to chirps, to the most limited of body language. In one part of the game "you" can write in the snow on the ground, if the urge emerges. On one previous playthrough, my company for the game's final leg paused long enough to draw a heart in the snow, around me, before we moved on. It's a common sight, widely documented, but I melted nonetheless, just a bit.

Related: Watch VICE's new film, 'Iceman'

The way that Journey unfolds is much like an amazing album—a parallel that's no doubt been drawn before (though I've not actually read it) on account of the game's short duration and environmental diversity, each new scene a different track while the artist remains the same, essentially; the artist being that diminutive figure in the middle of colossal landscapes, you. And it's a classic album, too, one that welcomes repeat plays like a favorite LP that's more closely connected to your heart than actual members of your family. Its looks aren't going to date at pace, as its singular aesthetic is supremely striking. The music will sound just as sublime 50 years from now, and more. Whatever your personal favorite record is, Journey is akin to the video game equivalent: a pick-me-up when you're down, an escape from the gray days that we all have. Each listen can reveal something new, in the game's case ranging from power-enhancing collectibles to inside-joke Easter eggs. It's a powerful piece of interactive art that truly does argue the case that video games can be so much more than toys.

The unspoken story that guides every walk and glide from dunes to drifts (sorry, did I not mention your little explorer can fly for a little while? You can fly for a little while, it's all in the scarf) is an eternal one: of the corrupting quality of power, and how we can all learn to lust after less for the benefit of others around us. Journey's world is not a barren one, each grain of sand sparkling with life, caught in the wind, and dancing to its song; but the society that once called it home has gone, buried beneath where your footless legs carry you. It's a deeply melancholic game, long before its final moments knot your heartstrings and the score surges to a literal peak (and, oh, that peak). It's lonely, but comforting: no harm can come to you here. Your adventurer will pick themselves up, time after time. He or she—it's quite deliberately unclear—will always be alright, forever, and ever.

'Journey,' PS4 trailer

On Motherboard: What to Read if You Want to Study Video Games

Journey crosses barriers of taste, of genre preference, of gamer denominations, on account of being completely unlike anything else you'll play on modern gaming platforms. Some might look at what they've seen (but not felt) and determine that it's boring, a walking simulator, incompatible with their adrenaline-streaming action affairs, but I'd urge all 20 million and more PS4 owners to download this short game. It doesn't cost a lot, and it won't take up a great deal of your time (or space on your hard drive). To adopt a parlance I'm wholly uncomfortable with, it can be "beaten" in less time than it takes to navigate the prologue of your average triple-A release. But once completed, it's a game never forgotten. I know I'll always be happy to play it, when the night's set in and my head's crowded with the day's static, accumulated into a suffocating fog. Journey clears the mind and fills the heart like few (I hesitate to say no, as I've not played them all) other games can. Assuming you even call it a game, as like that album you'll never tire of listening to, it transcends its medium to mean so much more to those who hold it dear.

But this is something you've likely read before. The internet isn't short on personal testimonies of Journey's lasting power, and this is but one piece of many (which handily makes me feel less like I've just accidentally written free advertorial). I'll play it again, when it's available for the PS4. But if you have only read about Journey until now, because you had an Xbox before, or a Wii, or you're simply coming to the game for the first time for some other reason, play it. A neat, complete 90 minutes: it's enough, if you weren't already au fait, to convince you that video games are capable of being deeper, more moving creations than the shooters, sports sims and competitive multiplayers that dominate the commercial space, and that they can mean so much more without actually saying anything. You might not cry, but you'll be sure to want to tell someone about your first Journey. And the second. And the fifth.

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US Army Recruiting Center on Lee Highway in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Photo via Google Street View

A lone gunman attacked two US military facilities in Chattanooga, Tennessee, late this morning, killing four Marines, the Associated Press has reported. According to a local NBC affiliate, the incident began around 10:45 AM at the US Army Recruiting Center on Lee Highway before concluding at a US Naval Reserve Center about seven miles away.

According to the AP, in addition to the four Marines killed, multiple other people were injured, a Chattanooga police officer among them. The Chattanooga Police Twitter feed informed the public that the shooter had been killed—and the situation effectively neutralized—around 1:15 PM. The officer is said to be in stable condition.

Local, state, and federal law enforcement—including the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF)—are reportedly headed to or already at the scene, and the Department of Homeland Security has activated its Chattanooga Strike Team. US Attorney Bill Killian told reporters at a press conference the incident is being treated as "an act of domestic terrorism," CNN reported, though FBI special agent in charge Ed Reinhold told reporters, "We will treat this as a terrorism investigation until we determine it was not."

"We have not determined if it was an act of terrorism or a criminal act," Reinhold added.

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All images by Fiona Clark. Diana and Sheila at Mojos nightclub 1975

In the 70s and 80s, Fiona Clark was one of the first photographers to shoot New Zealand's LGBT scene. She captured her friends at parties and in their homes, and her images were warm portraits of the city's cultural fringe. In many ways she's a contemporary of Carol Jerrems, Rennie Ellis, and Nan Goldin. But censorship and public outcry kept her from exhibiting much of her work. As a result she never reached their levels of fame.

Rather than moving to New York or London to become an alternative art star she returned home to Waitata. There she began documenting another community with the same dedication she gave her city friends.

Thirty years later, a new wave of fans have begun to discover and appreciate her work, and her photos are enjoying another life. Now she considers herself an artist activist, and focuses on environmental and social issues around her home. We called her up to talk about New Zealand in the 70s and 80s, and the art of shifting focus.

Bev at Dance Party Auckland 1974

VICE: Hey Fiona, I feel like a lot of young New Zealanders see their culture as being pretty progressive. But what did the social climate feel like as a young person in the 70s and 80s?
Fiona Clark: I don't think it was as progressive as people think. I couldn't show the work I did publicly as a collection until 2004. It was as progressive as the homophobia that existed. Within institutions there was homophobia, and that restricted the way people worked. It was a reflection really, and some of it was really hard for me. Galleries told me I was unsellable. Although 42 years later, there is a new interest.

Your show Active Eye was infamous and had images removed in 1974. What was it specifically that upset everyone so much?
That it was letting people be visible and saying we're here, we're not going away, we occupy space, accept it. They weren't confrontational—for me they weren't. They were portraits of people I had an affinity with, and who I wanted to record.

People said, "can't you just photograph common people?" But these were the common people in my life. And still that doesn't exist that much.

From Fiona's 1970s go Girl Series

Why did you hand print all your images?
Quite often in those days, if you sent something off to a Kodak lab they censored the work so I was running a colour darkroom as well.

With attitudes that ingrained, how did you manage to develop any reputation? As you said, a lot of your work is only now being fully exhibited.
I'm like the people I photographed and hung out with, we're survivors. I just survived it. I admired the tenacity and survival capabilities of those people. They are more hardened than I am. People have lived far tougher lives than me. And I have always had a belief in the work. The work is about survival.

K.G. Club, 1974. Opened in 1971, The K.G. Club was Auckland's first lesbian social club.

Why didn't you just leave New Zealand? London, New York, even Australia were beginning to celebrate content like this.
I considered it. I thought of going somewhere and studying—to London to the Royal College of Art. That was the progression from Auckland as an artist. But after the Active Art show I had a prosecution, and I felt pretty beaten up. Galleries were saying, "no you're not showing here". I sort of snuck off to the country. And I still live here, in the same place a snuck off to 40 years ago.

Then I had a bad accident so I couldn't go anywhere for a couple of years. But I didn't get any offers of people saying you should show this work somewhere else.

Diana and Peri at miss NZ Drag Ball 1975

Do you have regrets?
I don't regret not doing it, because I fitted into here, into the community I'd come back to. Unfortunately, not comfortably for a lot of people. But the involvement I have with the community now is on the same level. I'm taking photos of things people aren't recording, and of parts of our community that are still invisible.

Carmen in her Sydney home 2006

Has the controversial label ultimately been a prize or a burden?
It's something I've accepted. I call myself an activist artist now. I'm not just a photographer, I believe I am an activist. But people don't sit comfortably with that. They certainly don't like the work I've produced so they'll dismiss it. Sometimes it's hard, but I know to just dig my toes in. I've spent this year cataloging my work. I'm more determined now that it lasts even longer.

Miss K aka Ella at home in Auckland, 2001

Have you had any more brushes with controversy?
Yes I have actually. I live near oil and gas fields, and the local community has gone in front of the local council and said we're upset by this, we want these things changed. I've produced images and said, these are toxic waste sites and they're harming the people who live nearby. The previous mayor challenged me and said, "you can't say that". I said, I'm not saying it, the image is there. There is a warning sign, but here's a house, all in the image.

Todd Energy flaring after fracking at Mangahewa D well site 18 June 2014

I do get challenged about presenting images that are upfront. I've had a trespass notice served to me from an oil company. I've photographed the run off and the way the oil industry effects local people. The politics of it are interesting, but I do get called to the mayor's offices. But I just think, this is calm when you compare it to being threatened in a club in Auckland.

Follow Wendy on Twitter: @WendyWends

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