Screencap from Street Fighter 5 by Capcom

Read: Video Games Are Finally, Finally Including More Female Heroes

You know how about a year ago, there was this whole big thing where part of the hardcore gaming community lashed out against some women, and everyone was like "Whoa, what's going on there? Stop it!" And those particular gamers were like "No, you don't understand! We're mad at journalists!" And then most of the internet was like, "Wha?"

Well, science still doesn't know what went down there, but a new study available on Plos One demonstrates that sexist behavior and crappiness at video games might actually be correlated, and there might be a simple evolutionary explanation.

The study by Dr. Michael Kasumovic of the University of New South Wales, and Dr. Jeffrey H. Kuznekoff of Miami University is called "Insights into Sexism: Male Status and Performance Moderates Female-Directed Hostile and Amicable Behavior." Drs. Kuznekoff and Kasumovic used team-based Halo 3 online as a place to study the behavior of anonymous gamers in their natural environment—yes, non-consenting gamers—while they interacted with a female-voiced player.

The scientists dared to wedge a lady-person into a situation where an otherwise male-dominated hierarchy had taken shape on the team, and then measure competence. Then they stacked those numbers up against "positive, negative and neutral statements by a player," about the female in their midst. As a control, results were also measured for a male player in their midst. The comments themselves were analyzed to determine whether they counted as hostile sexism.

Read: 'E.T.' Boiled My Blood: Testing the Stressfulness of the World's Worst Video Game

The conclusion? It's not exactly "Sexist gamers suck," but that's not far off. Essentially, the data showed that crappy players were more likely to be hostile toward a woman, particularly when they were losing, and that in a similar situation with the male control player, they'd be "submissive."

Skilled gamers, meanwhile, were typically nice to the female player. The study suggests that since the high status of good players is not in jeopardy either way, good players have nothing to gain by being dicks, while poor players are being dicks in order to preserve their status.

Now, it's worth pointing out that it's too soon to call these results totally conclusive when Halo 3 is the only gaming ecosystem that's been tested. Also, the experiment didn't record any data on the gamers' ages, marital statuses, and other demographic information that might be relevant.

It also centered on impulsive utterances, which are one of the faces of sexism, to be sure, but it's not clear what that has to do with the other, more insidious, systematic forms of sexism that may or may not be floating around in the gaming world.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Image via Pixabay.

A new study published in Psychological Science indicates that convicted murderers on Death Row are more likely to have an "untrustworthy face" than convicted murderers who have not been sentenced to death, NPR reports.

John Paul Wilson, a social psychologist at the University of Florida, organized the study, in which researchers showed over 700 images of Florida prisoners to a test group of about 200 people. Testers were shown about 100 images of prisoners (they did know know the men were convicted of murder) and asked to rate their trustworthiness on a scale from one to ten. It turned out that generally, those who received lighter sentences were found by testers to be more trustworthy.

Researchers then repeated the study, this time showing testers images of men who had been convicted of murder, as well as those whose murder convictions had been overturned. Though the testers were not aware who was innocent and who was guilty, they generally rated men whose convictions had been overturned as more trustworthy than those whose convictions had stuck.

This suggests that those who are on trial are often unconsciously judged by not just the evidence on hand, but their facial appearance.

Wilson told NPR, "These effects aren't just due to more odious criminals advertising their malice through their faces, but rather suggests that these really are biases that might mislead people independent of any potential kernels of truth."

Five In-Depth Articles About the Justice System

1. Why Is New York's Juvenile Justice System Still Such a Disaster?
2. President Obama Heads to Prison in Pursuit of Criminal Justice Reform
3. I Spent 16 Hours in a Manhattan Criminal Court
4. The DEA Just Cancelled Its Contract with Hacking Team
5. Jade Helm 15 Is a Board Game for People Who Think Obama Is Invading Texas

Follow Drew on Twitter.

Photo by Flickr user Don Hankins

Read: Hacker Has Sudden Change of Heart and Gives Ransomware Victims Their Files Back

The University of California, Los Angeles, announced today that their health system had been hacked sometime in the past ten months, potentially compromising the personal data of 4.5 million people.

UCLA Health first noticed the security breach in September 2014, when the system detected "suspicious activity" and the FBI was called in to investigate. At that time, it didn't appear that hackers posed a threat. Then, in May 2015, the healthcare provider realized hackers had accessed their internal system, which contained privileged information like names, addresses, social security numbers, and medical records that may have been stolen.

According to a statement from UCLA Health, "there is no evidence that the attacker actually accessed or acquired individuals' personal or medical information," only that there was the potential for a hacker to do so. If it did happen, the data would likely be distributed and sold on the black market, where medical records are worth ten times as much as credit card information.

James Atkinson, interim associate vice chancellor and president of the UCLA Hospital System, told the Los Angeles TimesLos Angeles Times, "They are a highly sophisticated group [of hackers] likely to be offshore," before adding, "we really don't know."

UCLA Health is offering one year of identity theft recovery services, credit monitoring, and a $1,000,000 insurance reimbursement policy for those whose information has been compromised. Cyber attacks are becoming increasingly common among healthcare providers, since their information is valuable and their cyber security is typically weak. According to CNN, 4.5 million patients' personal data was stolen last year after a security breach at Community Health Systems and an attack in January against Premera, America's largest health insurance company, affected 11 million patients.

The memory of that day won't leave me. My mom had just received a small settlement. Suddenly, we had disposable income. Back then, I didn't care whether my mom saved or invested it. All I wanted was new toys.

I was selfish that way. Still can be. We weren't poor, I guess, but we certainly weren't rich. Rather, we were decidedly middle-class with a little bit of struggle sprinkled in to keep things interesting. A Sony DVD player was the perfect little bourgeoisie item to warm our hearts. Like the VCR and the color TV before it, and later the internet-enabled computer, this was something I felt put us on the level of the Joneses. I'd gone with them to Montgomery Ward to pick up the bigger Magnavox TV (all of 20 inches), the Sony, and what would be the start to our DVD collection: Shrek for my kid sister, and for me, The Fast and the Furious. And so began my love affair.

Related: I Watched Six Fast and the Furious Movies at the Same Time

Released less than three months before 9/11 would turn America into the nation we were always destined to become, The Fast and the Furious is the only movie I've seen more times than Bad Boys II, and that's plenty. (Jordana Brewster looked just like my high school crush.) After 2000's epic year in film—Gladiator; X-Men; Memento; Almost Famous; O Brother, Where Art Thou; Traffic; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Requiem for a Dream; Battlefield Earth—no one could've foretold that in 2001, this moderately-budgeted Point Break ripoff would actually work, cleaning up at the box office and establishing a franchise now seven films deep and counting. Hollywood's present-day remake mill could learn something from the example Universal set all those years ago: Since making something original is already off the table, instead of remaking an old flick in the hopes of cashing in on a name, just jack an old film's premise and plug it into an unrelated new property.

Like its unofficial inspiration, The Fast and the Furious centers around a pretty-boy cop who must infiltrate a crew of criminals who just so happen to be balls-deep in the hot adrenaline-junkie subculture du jour. In 1991, it was surfing. In 2001, "ricing" out one's Honda Civic and getting real reckless on city streets was the trip. Seeing a Japanese economy car with a huge spoiler, decals, and an obnoxiously loud exhaust today would seem like some fuck shit. But in 2001, it was our collective truth.

Screen caps via Youtube

In director Rob Cohen's auto opera, undercover cop Brian O'Conner (Paul Walker) must mob with Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his family of racers in order to crack the case of who is ripping off trucks full of goods on California highways. Themes of trust, non-biological familial ties, and power are set against a backdrop of LA street racing: faceless women in bikinis, revved engines, and nü metal by the bowlful. Like Keanu Reeves's Johnny Utah before him, O'Conner ends up deep in the game, both with Dom's sister Mia (Jodana Brewster) and with the street racer culture at large. From the Limp Bizkit blaring on the film's soundtrack to the colorful vinyl halter tops, barbed wire tattoos, and frosted tips, there really wasn't a better example of the "other" 2001—the one before September 11—to be found in cinema. The film prided itself on its use of real racers as extras, drawing the audience into that world the same way Brian was drawn into Toretto's clan.

A few years ago, I went joyriding in a BMW, getting up to 140 MPH on empty stretches of highway at 3 AM, while listening to G-Unit and Nine Inch Nails.

At 16, besides wanting to hook up with girls, there was nothing I wanted more than to turn my mom's sky blue 1989 Honda Civic DX hatchback into something I could roll into Toretto's shop proudly. Unlike the rich kids I went to private school with (shout-out to the kid whose dad let him drive his Ferrari 360 Modena to class), I didn't get a car for Christmas or anything of the sort. Entitled little shit that I was, I expected this of my hard-working parents from 16 on, and I held it against them when they couldn't deliver. I threw a boy-tantrum when my mom eventually traded that old Honda in for a new car. Reality biting yet again. I know now that I should've been grateful for all that my folks worked hard for, hell, least of all that DVD player and the movie that would bring me ease and comfort.

The Fast and the Furious was an escape, more so than other movies at the time. I wasn't allowed to get my license—my parents could already sense that my drinking was getting out of hand around license time—and I always wanted to be a part of something, whether it was with black kids I was "too white" for, white kids I was "too black" for, skaters, musicians, mall goths, cyber goths... Living among the characters in The Fast and the Furious and the "import" scene as a whole seemed like a natural fit, if only in my mind.

A few years ago, I went joyriding in a BMW rental, getting the car up to an (indicated) 140 on empty stretches of highway at 3 AM while listening to G-Unit and Nine Inch Nails. I know it's not all that fast in the grand scheme of things, but before the guilt and morbid what-ifs settled in, the body high from the speed had me feeling like the black Paul Walker circa 2001, apexing turns and stepping the tail out in a prime display of the often dangerous mixture of male ego and high-performance vehicles.

In a turning point scene in The Fast and the Furious, after Brian enters and loses his first race to Toretto, he tells Dominic he almost had him. Vin Diesel shoots back with the iconic line: "Ask any racer. Any real racer. It don't matter if you win by an inch or a mile. Winning's winning." His asphalt aphorism was like a sort of foreshadowing for Dubya's "stay the course" rhetoric during the Iraq War years later. The internal truths of men of conviction, laid at the feet of young, willing blonde boys. It was at that point that Diesel became more than a black tank top, some biceps, and a bald head. He became a mainstay of American machismo.

Even after the first film's success, Vin Diesel poo-pooing the second movie to try his hand at sci-fi ( Pitch Black) and action (xXx) is a classic case of ego as liability. Director Rob Cohen and, most importantly, Ja Rule also declined to take part in 2 Fast 2 Furious. It was a fuck-up that only Diesel would rectify by returning with a weird cameo at the end of the Tokyo Drift.

WATCH: Boy Racer

If you saw the first film, hopped into a Mitsubishi Eclipse, wrecked it during a street race in a drainage canal, slipped into a coma, and came to just in time to see Furious 7, you wouldn't be to blame for not recognizing what the hell is going on in the newest installment. As an OG TFATF fanboy, it can be hard to digest the latest entries in the franchise. Each successive movie puts Dom and the gang closer to the Avengers than a street-racing crew, with stunts, action, and a lack of story that really has teetered into "We don't give a fuck, you'll still pay to see this shit!" territory. This makes revisiting the first film, over a decade later, that much more special.

Paul Walker's death in 2013 didn't hit me the way it might have when I was 16, but I can't front like the customary internet trolling surrounding his fatal car crash didn't shake me up a bit. Maybe I'll just have to file the Paul Walker death memes in the same corner of my mind as the 9/11 ones. In the online atmosphere of "Better them than me," the psychic distance the internet permits brings out the worst in us as much as the best.

I called my sister upon hearing the news that November night, and though neither of us are on celebrities' dicks like that, we both spoke as though we were mourning a close friend. We'd watched The Fast and the Furious together so many times we'd destroyed the DVD, which I promptly replaced with my graduation money. We'd never bonded over something like this flick. And weird as it may sound, seeing Tyrese and Vin Diesel get all weepy during press events for the new movies when talking about Walker has been like watching a friend who's lost a loved one try to press on, because that's what "they" would've wanted.

No matter what your appraisal may be of the franchise's development over time, Universal and other mega-studios' frequent claim that European and Asian audiences don't want to see diverse casts has been obliterated by the box office returns of these seven movies (just over $3.9 billion worldwide). Though anti-blackness is global, people across the world—at least the ones seeing these movies—seem to have more open minds and more sense than the average Hollywood suit. After watching the trailer for the official Point Break remake due out later in 2015, I'm convinced Hollywood would be better off just re-releasing the original TFATF.

In the film's final showdown between Dom and Brian, on an isolated stretch of LA street not unlike the one where Paul Walker met his end IRL, Toretto's mantra of living his life "a quarter mile at a time" ends up biting him in the ass during a balls-out drag race. With the dust settled and sirens encroaching, in an epic display of honor, O'Conner hands over the key to his orange Toyota Supra, the "ten-second" car he'd promised his bro-for-life earlier, allowing a shaken Dom to make his escape into the franchise's next six films. But in my mind, no matter how many more of these movies they make, my ride-or-die will always be the one that started it all, with Paul Walker riding into the sunset of the spirit plane in a black tee and low-top Chuck Taylors 'til the end of time.

Follow Kasai on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Anthony Easton. All other photos courtesy of the author.

Last November, when Felix Cuesta walked through his South Bronx strip club, there were no naked women dancing on the poles, or men throwing bills at them. The club was pitch-black and completely silent.

Cuesta had closed down the strip joint, Platinum Pleasures, several months earlier when he lost his liquor license. But every week, he came back with a flashlight to inspect the shuttered gentlemen's club. In the unlit main room, he could only see what the beam of his light shined on: some red drapes, metallic poles running from the floor to the ceiling, and a golden glass-cased shower.

"That was for the weekly shower shows," said Cuesta. "We were one of the only clubs in the city that had one."

Platinum Pleasures was the latest strip club to close down in the South Bronx amid the crackdown led by local and state-level politicians. Their tactic has been simple and effective, particularly in the Hunts Point neighborhood of the South Bronx: Instead of going after the clubs themselves, they went after their liquor licenses.

"From day one, when I became district manager, we learned the process of liquor licenses," said Rafael Salamanca Jr., who serves as the Community Board Manager for Hunts Point and is leading the battle against the neighborhood's clubs. As of now, the five existing strip clubs in Hunts Point have all been shut down.

The legitimacy of the methods being used by Salamanca to close the clubs down has been questioned by researchers and those in the industry who believe a witch-hunt is underway without much factual evidence of wrongdoing.

There's a battle that goes on every day to keep the clubs open. - Jeff Levy

The secondary-effects doctrine, a legal tool that has empowered government officials to regulate strip clubs and adult-oriented expression, has come under scrutiny from those who believe it gives too much power to municipal officials to restrict adult entertainment and infringe on First Amendment Rights.

Using the secondary-effects doctrine, government officials claim adverse side effects, such as increased criminal activity, prostitution, and lowering property values around strip clubs. But the doctrine also allows officials to camouflage their aversion to businesses like strip clubs behind declarations of harmful effects. In 1988, Justice Brennan warned that the doctrine "could set the court on a road that will lead to the evisceration of First Amendment freedoms."

"There are people who love this industry and people who hate this industry," said Jeff Levy, the executive director of the Association of Club Executives of New York, a trade and advocacy organization for the industry.

"There's a battle that goes on every day to keep the clubs open."

On Motherboard: Although the government seems to directly be after adult entertainment businesses, it turns out that 2013's shutdown lead to an inadvertent boost in sex business.

For many cities, choosing where to permit different kinds of businesses is a hot-blooded political struggle. When it comes to zoning strip clubs, this fight becomes particularly fiery.

In 1976, Detroit became one of the first cities in the US to introduce zoning laws that were designed to counter the clustering together of adult businesses into a red light district. The law banned strip clubs from locating within 1,000 feet of any two existing adult businesses or within 500 feet of any residential area.

Eagerness to follow the Detroit zoning method quickly spread to other cities. New York City's former Mayor Rudy Giuliani famously abhorred New York City's adult establishments, once calling them a "corrosive institution." It was during his reign in 1995 that New York City Council amended certain zoning laws to ban adult entertainment in commercial districts like Times Square and barred them from operating within 500 feet of residences, schools, or places of worship.These restrictive zoning laws are what forced strip clubs to sprout in neighborhoods on the peripheries of the outer boroughs, like the South Bronx, an industrial zone.

"You had to be in certain zone requirements, and if you weren't in those zones, you couldn't operate as an adult entertainment establishment," said Levy. "As a result, adult entertainment was put in the worst zoning in a particular municipality.

Bordered by the Bruckner Expressway to the West and North, the Bronx River to the East, and the East River to the South, Hunts Point is located in one of the poorest congressional districts in the country. It has long held a reputation as a hub for drugs and prostitution, and the 41st Precinct, which polices the area, consistently records some of the highest violent crime rates per capita in the city.

"For years, Hunts Point has been known as anything goes," said Salamanca, "It has a huge portion that's industrial, so legally, it's where a strip club is supposed to be at."

Salamanca's campaign to rid his neighborhood of topless entertainment is part of his wider effort to change perceptions about Hunts Point both from within the community and outside of it. A year ago, Salamanca donned a bulletproof vest when he joined police on a nighttime raid of two strip clubs in Hunts Point. Afterwards, he encouraged other Community Board managers to do the same.

Between 2006 and 2009 there was a murder, three stabbings, three shootings, and two bottle slashings inside the strip club.

Platinum Pleasures had seen its share of violence. Before it was taken over by Cuesta, it was a strip club called BadaBings. Between 2006 and 2009 there was a murder, three stabbings, three shootings, and two bottle slashings. On most nights, a 41st Precinct police car could be seen outside the club, a use of police resources that Salamanca said distracted police from other quality-of-life issues in the neighborhood.

When Cuesta took ownership of the club, he bolstered security and tried to create what he called a "high-end gentlemen's club"—the kind where "you couldn't wear sweatpants." According to Cuesta, violence at the club diminished during his time running it, but Salamanca already wanted him out.

Watch: VICE talks to the Atlanta strip clubs that popularized twerking.

For Salamanca, the fight is personal, but he holds no ill feelings towards the owners themselves.

"It's a business, and these are businessmen," said Salamanca. "You can't knock their hustle, you can't knock them for that. However, the type of business they wanted to open was not appropriate for our community."

"We had power of voice when it came to liquor licenses, and we advocated," said Rafael Salamanca Jr. By working with locally elected state officials and requesting the New York State Liquor Authority (SLA) to revoke licenses, Salamanca closed four clubs in two years.

In Cuesta's case, he did not notify the authorities of the temporary closure of Platinum Pleasures due to construction work. Because Cuesta failed to obtain permission for a "substantial alteration," he lost his liquor license.

Once a liquor license renewal is rejected, owners must apply for a new license, which is far more challenging to obtain. Though the women kept dancing even without a liquor license, at Platinum Pleasures the patrons stopped showing up, and in 2013 it closed its doors. A giant FOR SALE sign was put up.

If you think a strip club without liquor sounds bleak, try a strip club without meat.

"They will do everything and anything within their power to put pressure on gentleman's clubs," said Levy. "Customers won't come if they don't have a liquor license. It's not very profitable."

One prospective dancer at Platinum Pleasures was turned off by the lack of job security once the club ran into trouble with the Community Board.

"It was a light switch—one day it was opened, the other it was closed," said Zionyi, 26, as she shook her mane of long black hair. "It seemed like an irregular job. Then you have to wait or find somewhere else. When I came back, it had shut down."

In February 2014, Pastor Reggie Stutzman of the Real Life Church walked by the closed doors of Platinum Pleasures and had an idea. For four years, Stutzman and his wife have been working in Hunts Point without a permanent location. His "church without walls" had grown to around 50 congregants who met in a nearby recreation center.

"We've had a four-year identity crisis," said Stutzman. He called the number on the FOR SALE sign and was inside the club 30 minutes later being shown around by the building's owner.

"I've never been in a strip club before," said Stutzman, "so it was just kind of crazy."

As the owner of the building gave Stutzman a tour of the club, they came across the golden-cased shower. A shower in the middle of a bar didn't make sense to him.

"I asked the owner what it was," said Stutzman. "He said guys get a turn-on by watching a woman shower."

Still, even standing in the presence of the shower, strip poles, and bottles of booze gathering dust, Stutzman saw a potential home for his congregation and began fundraising. He took his plans to the Community Board and Salamanca, who instantly supported him.

"It is unheard of," said Salamanca. "He's taking a piece of property which had a negative impact on this community, and he's turning it into something positive."

Related: Noisey goes out to a strip club with members of Doughboyz Cashout.

The bizarre symbolism of a strip club turning into a church was not lost on Stutzman. He used the attention he began receiving in the media to raise awareness for his church.

Yet, the main barrier between Stutzman and his new church was money. He didn't have much of it. Stutzman said that when he contacted Cuesta asking to buy his lease, Cuesta named his price: $1 million. He later lowered the asking price to $100,000.

After fundraising for the better part of a year, Stutzman had only raised about $50,000. Though one large donation of $10,000 was made, most of the donations only amounted to a few hundred dollars here, or a thousand there.

"I'm really waiting for God to put it on one person or a couple other people, and just say, 'Hey, we want to get this done,'" said Stutzman.

Pastor Reggie even began inviting his congregation to pray with him outside Platinum Pleasures. Lined up outside the building, the small number who showed up would put their hands on padlocked doors and pray as cars whizzed past.

Cuesta, who met with Stutzman, never believed Stutzman would raise the money required to take over the lease.

"He had no money, he had no way of doing this," said Cuesta. "I just think, personally, it was a way of him getting on television, asking for donations."

Cuesta said he was willing to work with Stutzman by bringing down his price.

"I wasn't against him putting a church there, I just needed to get a certain amount. I brought my price down. I did everything I was supposed to do."

Stutzman, still without a home for his church, has lost congregants in recent months.

"We're in limbo, and it's been very uncomfortable," said Stutzman. "This building has been a cesspool of a lot of bad things in Hunt's Point for a long time, and it just continues to be the thorn in everyone's flesh."

When Cuesta was 18, he was a bouncer in Manhattan nightclubs and had dreamed of one day opening his own. When he finally opened his club, albeit a "high-end" strip club, he felt he found his stride as an entrepreneur. He liked the high-energy and the respect he commanded inside the walls of Platinum Pleasures.

"You become a celebrity in your own right inside a club," said Cuesta. "And they make a lot of money... that was one of the lures to it."

For Cuesta, the fight to keep his club running has ended. For Levy, the fight is far from over.

"For me, it's always been about First Amendment rights, and being able as adult to choose for myself," said Levy. "This industry is nothing more than part of the colorful mosaic called America."

Follow Nadim Roberts and Yasmine Canga-Valles on Twitter.

All photos by Aditya Pamidi

Back in 1977, a dude named Xavier Roberts stole artist Martha Nelson Thomas's designs and turned his art degree and penchant for soft sculpture into a brilliant money-making scheme: chubby-cheeked, creepy-eyed plush dolls. Originally hawked as "Little People," with an "adoption fee" around $40, Roberts soon changed their name; Cabbage Patch Kids went on to enjoy immense popularity in the 80s. In 1985, America rallied as a nation to pull off something extremely important: sending one of these dolls—specifically one named Christopher Xavier—into fucking outer space. Why not!

It was important to the Cabbage Patch backstory that these wholesome toys couldn't come into our mortal world by the vaginal canal. All Cabbage Patch Kids are delivered in a weird-ass vestibule: BabyLand General Hospital in Cleveland, Georgia, a place where people can come and witness a "live birth."

Cleveland isn't known for much. It has a vaguely charming downtown area, and it's close to the mountains, but that's about it. As such, it isn't hard to miss BabyLand. The doll hospital sits proudly at the top of a rolling, well-manicured hill. It looks, as my photographer eloquently offered, "like some fucking legit plantation mansion. Gone with the Wind shit." He wasn't wrong. An ivory porch wraps around the building, with roomy rocking chairs and sturdy, overcompensating columns. Ethereal children's voices sing over piped music from the porch out into the expansive parking lot—which, to my surprise, was pretty full.

In a way, the idea of hyperstimulated kids choosing " vinyl-faced dolls" with vacant expressions slicked across their doughy cheeks and plastic marble eyes over iPads seemed charming. Children are still independently interested in Cabbage Patch Kids, as evidenced by the enormous swarm present at Babyland on a random July Saturday afternoon. There's also this video.

BabyLand is less a theme park or an "experience" than a toy store on steroids. The lobby is white and sterile, keeping true to the hospital vibe. The staff rocks scrubs of various pastel varieties, flitting in and out of the opening area. Glass cases line the walls with physical evidence of the Cabbage Patch Kid's "natural progression." Non-white Cabbage Patch Kids didn't show up until much, much later down the IRL timeline. Another visitor, a large gruff man, muttered sincerely to his child, "I'm sorry we couldn't find one with the Dixie flag." Welcome to BabyLand.

During our visit, we caught three Cabbage Patch births. Not entirely impressive, considering the fact that "Mother Cabbage" gives birth "several times a day," as one young man in green scrubs explained. He was the OB GYN on duty, apparently, and barely out of high school. The young man requested not to be identified, so we'll call him Adam.

Adam moved jovially throughout BabyLand's innards: crates of stuffed baby dolls up for adoption (starting around $60), endless accessories (including diapers and bibs), weird candy (who knows why), and just heaps and heaps of junk. His enthusiasm was palpable and, as far as I could tell, genuine. Adam later revealed he'd been "delivering" at BabyLand for just three months, following a tip from his FFA sponsor.

Loudspeaker announcements boomed manic reminders of the upcoming birth. Swarms of large, sunburnt families pooled at the base of Mother Cabbage. She stands tall and proud like an animatronic nightmare, fat roots sprawled to the ground with her branches spraying outward and holding tiny, twinkling "Bunnybees." The infants nestled in their individual cabbage bases occasionally twitch mechanically, to mimic life. It's upsetting.

But we're gathered to celebrate new life! Adam begins the operation while guiding the group through a series of slick punchlines like "Mother Cabbage is dilated ten leaves!" Adam hooks the tree up with "imagicilin," something bubbling in an IV bag, and performs a procedure called an "easy-o-tomy."

Then, he asks the audience which sex they'd prefer today. Following a shouting contest, he illuminates a sonogram in Mother Cabbage's trunk. And that's how little baby Gatlin Carter came into this world, feigned umbilical cord cut and all.

It isn't exclusively children huddled around Adam and the freshly swaddled cloth baby. Lots of older women and a few grown men coo gently, apparently here by themselves.

I find a bored-looking nurse and ask what her deal is. Why does she work here? This nurse is responsible for controlling the BabyLand Facebook page. She explains that she's from Cleveland and BabyLand is sort of it. There aren't many more options around beyond donning a set of scrubs and shuffling around inside the retail wonderland. Steady streams of people roll through the place year-round, ranging from families to tour buses of senior citizens to the highly-esteemed members of the Collector's Club. Plus, she added, "Look at them. Look at these faces." She had a point. There was a lot of joy hanging around.

It's easy to rip on a place like BabyLand because it is, by definition, ridiculous. Packed to the gills with cheaply-made wares marked up 300 or 400 percent, the doll hospital is ethereal and opportunistic and absurd. But a quick 360 echoed the nurse's point: people were stoked to be there. And the fact that kids raised on iPads could still get excited about a bunch of IRL dollies can only be a good thing.

Follow Beca on Twitter.

Image via Flickr user ficusdesk.

Reddit, one of the internet's largest and most successful discussion platforms to date, is undergoing a monumental existential crisis. What comes of this crisis will not only define the "front page of the internet" as a company, but also this particular moment in digital history. As we navigate this paradox: How can the internet stay fundamentally "free"—and more importantly, safe—for all its users while still, you know, making money?

This all started about a week ago, when Reddit forced the resignation of its interim CEO, Ellen Pao. During her tenure, Pao (who is sort of a totally a supergenius badass) oversaw the reasonable ban on things like revenge porn. In response, a certain subset of Redditors began whining extra loudly about "censorship" and "free speech," which was somehow being hindered by the site's newfound lack of revenge porn (check this sublimely whiny thread from May, following Pao's move to ban harassment). It escalated into a full-blown moderator blackout during the first week in July, in which users shut down parts of the site in protest, hemorrhaging huge chunks of advertising revenue in the process. (J. Nathan Matias, a ph. D. fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, wrote a great scientific breakdown on that fun moment.)

There are many theories circulating among the Reddit and tech communities as to why Pao finally stepped down. The biggest one, though, is the unceremonious firing earlier this month of Victoria Taylor, a popular and high-profile Reddit employee in charge of facilitating the site's most beloved subsection, the AMAs (Ask Me Anything, a forum for community Q&As with famous, important, and otherwise fascinating individuals).

People saw Pao's resignation as her taking the fall for that decision—problem is, former CEO Yishan Wong alleges that Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, a white guy, was actually the one to give Taylor the boot (he "didn't like [her] role") and stayed quiet while Pao, an Asian-American woman, was being eviscerated by the Reddit community instead of speaking up and taking the heat created by his own decision. The other Reddit co-founder, Steve Huffman, has taken over for Pao as CEO.

When Reddit was spun out as its own entity under Condé's parent company in 2011, the board, which includes its founders, hired Wong as CEO; Pao was hired in 2013 and promoted to interim CEO when Wong quit in 2014. In a suspiciously plausible "joke" post, Wong (who's been on a pretty magnificent tear, openly criticizing his former colleagues and spilling unpleasant details about the way the company operates) recently mused that this was part of a larger plan by the cofounders to distance Reddit from the publishing giant Condé Nast. Condé acquired Reddit in 2006, and shifted the site over to its parent company Advance Publications in 2011 (at this point Reddit is technically independent, though the site readily admits Advance remains the largest shareholder).

In response to the community's continuing battles about free expression and harassment, Huffman announced he'd be doing his own AMA to address their concerns (while also claiming that Reddit was never supposed to be "a bastion of free speech"). That happened Thursday, and resulted in this new policy, which Huffman says will be official soon:

A kebab maker on the outskirts of Grozny, outside of the restaurant where he works, which has been decorated with a poster of Shrek

OLGA KRAVETS

In 2009, Ramzan Kadyrov proudly announced that "peace has come to the land of Chechnya."The head of the Chechen Republic's rise to power started back in May 2004, when Vladimir Putin appointed him deputy prime minister of Chechnya after the death of Kadyrov's father. Since the age of 30, he has been given free rein in his country so long as he keeps the rebels at bay.

Officially, Chechnya remains part of Russia as the result of two wars, but Russia's constitution is applied selectively here. The government tortures young men if they show any sign of dissent. The houses of rebels' families are burned to ashes at the direct order of the president, and outspoken human rights activists face angry, violent mobs who torch their offices and beat them. Alcohol is sold only in five-star hotels to foreigners, and Kadyrov was able to summon about 60 percent of the republic's population to a "Love for the Prophet Muhammad" rally.

Once, when asked where he gets the money for his lavish lifestyle and Turkish-built skyscrapers, Kadyrov notoriously answered, "From Allah."

Students of the Russian Islamic University in Grozny (men in the front, women in the back) listen to a lecture by a guest mullah from Jordan.

A choir of schoolgirls sing a song dedicated to Akhmad Kadyrov, the father of the current Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov. Ramzan has declared May 10 Remembrance Day in Chechnya, to commemorate his father's deportation and death. He couldn't make it May 9, when Kadyrov senior was actually killed, because Russia celebrates Victory Day then, marking the end of World War II.Chechen leader Ramzan Kadykrov greets a widow of a policemen killed in clashes with rebels during the parade dedicated to the 65th anniversary of the Soviet victory in the WWII held in downtown Grozny, 2010.

The election banners of Vladimir Putin outside of the infamous Knankala military base, which is now the main facility for the Russian forces, 2012.

Young Chechen men visit the shooting gallery in the newly opened Grozny City shopping mall, 2010.

Aset Borchashvili, 43, poses in the yard from where her son was seized by security forces. Unlike many others before, she is aware of his whereabouts. Her son, Yusup Ektumayev, is accused of participating in a terror attack and is awaiting trial in a detention centre. Mrs. Borchasvili claims that he was forces to confess under torture, 2013.

Mairbeck Yunusov, a healer and exorcist at the government-sponsored Islamic Medical Center in Grozny. An aide to the warlord Shamil Basayev in wartime, he changed sides after getting disillusioned with rebel ideology, 2013.

A gun that used to belong to a Chechen rebel during the wartime is on display at the republic's Ministry of Interior Museum, 2013.

Men belonging to the White Hats Sufi sect is attending Dhikr, a religious ceremony to praise Allah at the funerals.

Chris Barker. Photo courtesy of author

Today, July 18, a rally is being held at the South Carolina statehouse in Columbia* to protest the removal of the Confederate flag. The action has been organized by a North Carolina group called the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which bills itself as the "largest Klan in America." Understandably, this chapter of the KKK has been receiving a lot of attention; a pair of its members, Robert Jones and James Spears, have been widely quoted in the media praising the flag and Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old charged with the shooting deaths of nine people in an African-American church.

Except Spears* and Jones aren't real people—both are aliases for Christopher Barker of North Carolina, an unemployed man in his 30s with an extensive rap sheet who is despised even by other white supremacists.

On VICE News: Rallies, Memorials Mark Anniversary of Eric Garner's Death

Barker's involvement has not been reported elsewhere, but over the course of numerous phone conversations acknowledged to VICE that he used Spears and Jones as pseudonyms and was responsible for organizing the rally—even though he also says that he's banned from Klan activity as a condition of his parole. (That's the reason he won't be attending the rally in person, he told VICE.)

Barker's name doesn't appear on the official application for permission to protest at the Columbia* statehouse—it was filled out instead by his wife, Amanda, who also runs the LWK website. (A copy of the application obtained by VICE can be seen here.)

Watch our documentary on a "White Student Union" at a Maryland college:

Barker's criminal record, according to law enforcement documents, spans at least 18 years and includes arrests on at least 20 charges, including larceny, possession of stolen goods, malicious arson, at least five DUIs, and possession of a firearm by a felon. Most of the charges aren't related to white supremacy—instead, they are indicative of a man with an alcohol problem and a short temper who can't stay out of trouble.

"We have long been aware of Chris Barker," said Craig Blitzer, the Rockingham County, North Carolina, District Attorney. "We have charged Barker over the years with forgery, assault with a deadly weapon, making threats, an arson charge, an assault on a female in 2011 and again in 2014, DWI in '07 and '09 and '04, possession of stolen goods, larceny, two charges of possession of a stolen weapon, and an open container charge last month. And that is just in Rockingham County."

On Christmas Eve 2008, Barker was arrested for trying to burn down the house of a man he apparently thought was having an affair with his wife. "We found his electronic discount card—the kind you swipe at the cash register at Walmart each time you buy something—at the fire scene, which traced back to Barker," said Rockingham County Fire Marshal Robert Cardwell. "When we went to talk to him, he was so drunk we couldn't understand half of what he was saying. He was drinking beer through the whole interview."

"I think Mr. Barker has a problem with alcohol," he added.

The arson charges were dismissed in April of 2009 after "the prosecuting witness failed to appear," according to the Rockingham County Court clerk, who noted that the "prosecuting witness had pending charges against him." (The man whose house Barker allegedly tried to burn down is now in prison himself in Florida.)

In 2011, Barker was charged with assault on his wife, but those charges, too, were dismissed "when the prosecuting witness failed to appear," said the Rockingham County court clerk. She added that the "prosecutor asked for a motion of continuance, but it was denied by the judge so the charges were dropped."

Barker founded the Loyal White Knights in April 2012 after being expelled from at least three other KKK groups, and established a reputation shortly afterward for squabbling with other Klans online and for allying himself with neo-Nazis—a tactic that many Klan members disagree with.

"There are many old Klansmen turning over in their graves because of Barker."
–JB Elmore, Grand Giant of Virgil's White Knights of the KKK

Despite its boasts, the LWK hasn't attracted much in the way of membership, according to law enforcement officials and members of other KKK groups.

"We don't know of any other people from here who are members of his group. It is just a website," said Lieutenant Richie Jeffries of the Eden, North Carolina, police department, the small town where Barker lived until this month. "We have arrested Barker many times, but as for his Klan, we haven't seen anyone else but him."

His fellow Klansman are even more dismissive of Barker.

"They are inciting the public over a hot issue to gain publicity and attract paying members over the internet... He has conned the media into believing he is something he is not," said JB Elmore, the Grand Giant of Virgil's White Knights of the KKK. "There are many old Klansmen turning over in their graves because of Barker and his sort of modern day fake 'mom and pop' Klans."

"To be honest, what they're doing just makes me want to walk away from the Klan in some ways," said the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard Frank Ancona, whose organization has long been a rival of Barker and his LWK. "It just goes against everything I've worked for. The image people are going to have in their mind when they think of the Klan after the South Carolina Confederate flag demonstration is those are a bunch of nutcases."

UPDATE 7/18: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of the article mistakenly identified Charleston as the capital city of South Carolina when in fact it is Columbia. Also, the pseudonym James Spears was mistakenly referred to as "Smith." There errors has been corrected.

Nate Thayer is an award-winning freelance investigative journalist and correspondent with 25 years of foreign reporting experience.

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This week's episode features the world premiere of DonMonique's "Fifty Kay ft. Noah Caine." Her brand new Thirst Trap EP will drop on Noisey this Monday. VICE will also play a mix of the music we're loving this week featuring new tracks from Chief Keef, Sophie, Young Fathers, Fekky, and more.

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It was a Wednesday, Cadeem Gibbs remembers.

Commissary day, to be precise—the time of the week when inmates can buy food with their own spare money, which he strongly preferred to the grub served up by jail staff. Mostly, though, the day stands out to Gibbs because his fiancée was coming to visit him: January 7, 2015.

But that day, on 6 North, the floor in New York City's downtown Manhattan jail where Gibbs was being held, a fight broke out between two inmates. It quickly escalated: The pair drew knives, stabbing and slashing each other numerous times before correction officers could pull them apart, Gibbs said.

Once the inmates were detained, the standard aftermath procedure followed: emergency service units (ESUs) swarmed the place. Nicknamed "turtles" for their outfits' resemblance to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the ESU officers had every inmate face the wall while their cells were searched for weapons and contraband. As the facility was shut down, Gibbs's fiancée idled in the lobby, waiting to see him. She was told to come back another time.

The next Tuesday, Gibbs was moved to 7 North. A few days after that, on January 17, another fight broke out on his new floor. Six inmates got slashed with weapons smuggled in from the outside, he told me. Again, the facility was shut down, and again, Gibbs's fiancée was told to go home.

"The same ESU officer that searched my cell in 6 North had searched my cell in 7 North, coincidentally," Gibbs said. "I remember him looking at me, saying, 'Didn't I just search you last week downstairs?'"

In a May interview with VICE, Gibbs added that there were "many, many, many other instances" of violence, usually gang-related and often over something frivolous. He even claims to have seen his fellow inmates fight over a salad.

As fighting became routinized, the days began to blur.

"You kind of get desensitized because you see it so frequently, right in front of you," Gibbs said. "After a while, you get emotionally detached." And when the turtles come, he added, you're already against the wall.

Cadeem Gibbs after his release. Photo courtesy Cadeem Gibbs

From December 2014 through this April, Gibbs was detained in the Manhattan Detention Complex (MDC), also known as the Tombs, a jail complex that generally houses low-security inmates awaiting trial. The two 15-floor colossuses of criminal justice house a total of 881 beds for male inmates who can't make bail in America's largest city and are lucky enough to avoid Rikers Island, the abuse-plagued complex north of Queens.

Former inmates told me the atmosphere inside is dark and damp, and temperatures vary. Sometimes it's as cold as a refrigerator; at others, the kitchen feels like a sauna. Not much light makes it through the slits that serve as windows, and little movement is allowed outside of cells, especially on high-security floors.

At 125 White Street, the two faceless towers loom. Bail bond offices sit across the block, their neon lights tucked in between bars and coffee shops. There are only two doors open to the public at the ground level: one to pay bail or send money to an inmate in a small, dim room, and the other to visit inmates.

But posting up outside of the Tombs is always a bit surreal. When I last visited, some sort of alarm was emitting white noise from somewhere near the parked inmate transport buses and staff cars. A quiet, automated voice explained visiting hours in both Spanish and English, while tourists passed by without paying much attention.

City Hall is down the block; Manhattan Criminal Court is connected to the jail through an underground elevator. Chinatown is right behind you, the Financial District is in front, and SoHo is a stone's throw away.

Gibbs was there for a parole violation after doing time for a cocaine possession charge, and as a result of past brush-ins with the law, he was placed on a high-security floor. He called the Tombs a "permanent dark cloud," and during his time there, he'd sometimes stand on his bed and stare out the small slit of a window, down onto the bustling streets.

Gibbs is now 24, free, and working as a criminal justice consultant with the Juvenile Defense Fund. But in letters to his fiancée in Harlem from the Tombs, he would write of his location, "So distant, yet so close."

Rikers Island might be the scariest jail in America. Reports of brutality and corruption there have attracted attention from the federal Department of Justice (DOJ), city officials, and civil liberties advocates, though a pending legal settlement offers hope for reform. But according to interviews with former inmates, officials, and lawyers, the Tombs—though far less prominent in the public imagination—has a violent legacy of its own.

"You had strange things happening in the Tombs," one former high-ranking New York City Department of Correction (DOC) official told me. "The corruption part was heavy. It was always heavy."

Watch: Inside Norway's Prison System

The Manhattan Detention Complex is one of two active "borough houses" in New York City. The other is the Brooklyn House of Detention, which closed in 2003 and reopened in 2012. There were once similar facilities in the Bronx and Queens as well, but no longer. The Bronx House of Detention was demolished in 2000 (a Staples and a Home Depot now occupy the land where it once stood), and the Queens House—which had its own sordid streak of violence—was closed by the DOC in 2002.

The only other borough facility (though technically not a "house") is an 800-bed floating barge of a jail off the coast of the Bronx called the Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center, which houses Rikers's overflow.

The Tombs gets its name from one of its predecessors, a monolith built in the 1830s that was done in the Egyptian Revival style and based on the design of an Egyptian mausoleum. The name is an anachronism—The Tombs is an ordinary jail in many ways, and the only two underground areas are for inmate intake and transportation.

These days, Rikers is New York's most notorious jail, but at the end of the 1960s, the Tombs was an overcrowded nightmare that drew lots of negative press. According to the New York Times, "Prisoners slept on concrete floors without blankets and contended with roaches, body lice and mice. Guards were frequently accused of brutality. A suicide was attempted every week."

In August 1970, the inmates there rioted and took five COs hostage on the ninth floor. They were released after negotiations with Mayor John Lindsay, who, balking on his promise, sent the rioters to Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York—a move that helped set the stage for the infamous riots there a year later. In 1974, after a class-action lawsuit filed by the Legal Aid Society, a judge named Morris Lasker found conditions there to be unconstitutional, and ordered the Tombs to be shut down immediately.

After a slew of similar court orders, the city dedicated millions to modernizing its correctional facilities throughout the 80s. The "New Tombs" (or at least the South Tower) reopened in 1983, after a $42 million renovation; seven years later, the brand-new North Tower was completed. A bridge was built to connect the two, which are known by inmates as the "hotel" and the "projects," respectively. In the North Tower, a button opens your door, and the cells have long tables where you can sit. In the South Tower, the cells are more cramped, and a guard must open the gate to let you out.

South Tower. Photo by the author

By the end of the 80s, conditions at Rikers had become so bad that borough houses had become refuges of sorts for inmates—no one wanted to cross the bridge to the terrifying island.

"The inmates wouldn't want to get an infraction. If you got an infraction, that meant you were transferred from the borough house to Rikers," Stanley Richards, a former inmate who spent time there and in the Bronx House, told me. "The borough houses, back when I was in, [were] the place you wanted to be. Your family has access to you, and they don't have to do that whole Rikers Island bit, with travel, the alarms, and the bridge closings. It's a whole different culture. So inmates would work really hard not to be taken away from the borough houses."

Richards is the vice president of the Fortune Society, an advocacy organization that helps former inmates readjust to regular life. In May, he began a stint on the New York City Board of Correction (BOC), a regulatory panel that is supposed to set standards for all city jails. It also monitors the DOC, the city agency in charge of an inmate population of approximately 11,400. He is one of just a handful of former inmates to ever serve in that position. (I've interviewed him before for VICE about prison reform.)

By the time Richards was released from state prison, where he spent four and a half years for robbery, the violence in the city's jails was getting out of control. Rikers was on the brink of riots; in just two months in 1994, there were an estimated 176 slashings or stabbings on the island, or one for every 90 inmates. And the city's jail population was soaring, as Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's signature broken windows policing policies sent more New Yorkers to jail for low-level infractions than ever before.

For Glenn Martin, founder of JustLeadership USA, a prison reform group, all that came to a head in 1995, when he was detained in the Tombs for almost three months before moving to Rikers. Back then, he said, the violence was coming not only from the inmates, but also the officers tasked with maintaining law and order. While not as hellish as Rikers, where US Attorney Preet Bharara last year found a "culture of violence," the Tombs of the mid 90s was a dangerous place.

Glenn Martin. Photo by Jason Bergman

Martin described the environment as a "microcosm of society, but very perverse." White inmates would be favored for maintenance jobs over black inmates like himself. A competition of alpha masculinity, he said, existed between inmates and male guards determined to impress female COs. If an inmate openly flirted too much, he'd pay for it later on with a beating. Female COs would lead on inmates, and if a fight broke out that didn't involve or implicate any COs, guards would look the other way, former inmates said.

"I remember the officers creating an environment where, as long as you weren't embarrassing officers in front of [their] supervisors, that it was OK to get into a fight and hurt each other," Martin recalls. "As long as you cleaned up the mess afterward, and it didn't happen when the supervisors were coming by. Even the officers would let you know when their supervisors were coming by."

In the public eye, though, things seemed to quiet down for a while by the early 2000s, when the Tombs were formally renamed the Bernard B. Kerik Complex after the man who got a high-ranking position in the city's jail system in 1994, and was promoted to DOC commissioner in 1998. Kerik would go on to become NYPD commissioner two years later, and eventually the interim minister of the interior in the temporary Iraqi coalition government (no joke). Before pleading guilty to tax fraud and serving four years in federal prison, Kerik was in the running for the head of Homeland Security. He lost that chance, as well as his name on the Tombs, in 2006.

Bernard Kerik. Photo by Jason Bergman

Before his disgrace, Kerik brought the city's jails back from the brink, earning praise from Harvard University's JFK School of Government. From 1994 to 2000, inmate knife violence dropped 93 percent; serious use of force incidents plummeted 72 percent. Under his management, aggressive searches of inmates and seizures of inmates skyrocketed, while a data-driven system called TEAMS—or Total Efficiency Accountability Management System, similar to the NYPD's COMPSTAT crime mapping scheme—helped pinpoint "hot" facilities, or those with the most violence.

Aside from the rare inmate suicide, Kerik said he doesn't remember much drama at the Tombs.

"There was nothing that stands out to me. I mean, six years. Don't remember ever having a problem there," Kerik, who after his stint in federal prison became a criminal justice reform advocate, told me. "If you're going to and from court, you were housed in Manhattan, unless you were super violent or needed some administrative segregation somewhere." (In that case, you'd go to Rikers.)

"When you have a facility like that, right in the heart of a community, you want to make sure that the facility is safe and secure," Kerik argued. "You don't need problems in those facilities."

But Kerik said he's heard from former and current correction officers that these days, the Tombs is basically "another facility out on Rikers."

Twenty-nine-year-old Anthony, who would not give his last name, lives in a three-quarters house in Harlem. He told me he's been detained at the Tombs nearly 20 times for selling crack cocaine between 2007 and 2012.

When he arrived for any given stay, he said he would meet inmates from all over the greater tri-state area. "Sometimes, I'd see guys from Brooklyn and Long Island. And I'm like, 'Yo, how'd you get here?' and they'd be like, 'Yo, I don't even know,'" he told me. "'When they first arrested me, I was in the Bronx and they sent me to the Brooklyn House and then they sent me to the Manhattan House.' And I'm like, 'Wow, you did a lot of traveling.'"

Anthony said his time at the Tombs was marked by violence committed by guards rather than inmates. He recalled COs using force on inmates to impress female colleagues, and guards hitting inmates for talking back to them (similar incidents were cited in a 2014 DOJ report on Rikers). The COs would also temporarily cut off inmates' mail and phone privileges, or come into cells and hit them, Anthony said. During visits to the medical office, Anthony added, guards ignored his plea for Advil. He even referred to COs who drank on the job, the smell of alcohol on their breath all too apparent. (Some guards would apparently push back against those rogue colleagues, saying out loud that what they were doing was blatantly wrong.)

Along with other inmates he knew, Anthony said he had received an extra assault charge for fighting back against a CO. This, of course, lengthens the time spent behind bars, but from what Anthony described, it's a no-win situation: You're constantly talked down to, but if you decide to talk back, you're the one who pays.

"They'll put out their pen, and say, 'My pen will hurt you more than anything,'" Anthony recalled. "They always say that: 'My pen will hurt you more than anything.'"

In June 2007, when he first arrived in the Tombs, Anthony said an inmate talked back to a CO in the gym on 7 South and was then beaten in front of Anthony and his friends. Anthony and other inmates locked the door,so the turtles couldn't immediately enter; in their minds, this was so the fight could continue fairly. Eventually the door was opened, and the inmate was "jumped and maced," as Anthony recalled.

Later that year, on December 5, Anthony said he watched a fight break out between a CO and an inmate. Same reason: The inmate said something, and the CO smacked him. The kid was beaten so bad, Anthony said, that when he was brought back to the cell later, all the inmates were told to stand against the wall; this time, it was so they couldn't see the bruises. "'Sit on your bed, don't look through your window,'" Anthony said, impersonating the COs. "If they catch you looking through your window, they'll rough you up. 'Close your eyes. Look at the wall.'"

Like Cadeem Gibbs, Anthony said the days lost their significance, instead forming into one long sequence of violence that put every inmate and CO on constant guard. It was "mind-rattling," he said—something he couldn't believe was going on in downtown Manhattan.

"I used to go to Catholic services for peace of mind and just to feel like I'm not there," he said. "Just to keep my mind sane, because being in there, your way of thinking is totally different. A fight will break out over there, or someone was cut over there. You have to be very regularly aware of what's going on—you're on pins and needles. Because you never know what's gonna happen."

In the past several years, a number of scandals have hit the Tombs. In June 2009, the longtime rabbi at the facility, Leib Glanz, was suspended for regularly arranging feasts of roast beef, salmon, and chicken for a group of Orthodox Jewish inmates, as well as a 60-person bar mitzvah for an inmate's son. Later, it was reported that Glanz had satellite trucks park outside of the Tombs so an inmate could watch a relative's wedding in Israel on the jail's television. (Glanz was eventually charged and convicted in 2013 for defrauding the feds of public housing subsidies.)

In 2010, a chaplain at the Tombs was arrested for smuggling in three razor blades and a pair of scissors. This March, according to a pending lawsuit, a doctor at the Tombs allegedly told an inmate to throw away his finger in the trash after it was accidentally severed by an electronic door. In May, a 19-year veteran CO was arrested, according to the Daily News, for smuggling in "cell phones, tobacco and lighters, in addition to nine grams of crack and three ounces of marijuana." The plot reportedly involved an inmate and two of the inmate's as well as two relatives.

And then there's the guy who, in June, filed a lawsuit claiming that he became impotent because a shady doctor failed to treat his six-day-long erection back in 2011. Earlier this month, that man won a $750,000 settlement from the city.

North Tower. Photo by the author

Despite all of this, if you search in recent DOC or Department of Investigation (DOI)—the official city watchdog—press releases or plans, you wouldn't know the Tombs even existed. The facility is merely a footnote in last year's report on Rikers released by the feds, and when I first inquired about the Tombs via email, a DOC spokesperson responded by asking me if I had seen the latest anti-violence action plan for Rikers Island.

No current correction officers were willing to speak for this story. Under DOC rules, officers are not legally allowed to talk to media without authorization, and requests and calls to the Correction Officers' Benevolent Association, as well as its head, Norman Seabrook—who is reportedly facing a federal probe for alleged kickbacks—went unanswered.

One of the main problems consistently cited by critics of the Tombs is the declining state of oversight. As it stands, four agencies generally monitor living conditions in city jails: the NYC Board of Correction, the New York State Commission on Correction, the New York City Department of Investigation, and the DOC's own internal investigations division.

"The one thing I do hear is that the management has continuously deteriorated over the years," the former high-ranking DOC official told me. "People in the management never would've been managing years ago, from wardens on down."

Of course, critics say it's telling that it took the feds and media outlets like the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Village Voice to reveal the brutality on Rikers, rather than the agencies whose job it is to keep an eye the city's jails. As Stanley Richards told me after he was confirmed as a BOC member, "The report that came out of the DOJ on Rikers... that should've come out of the board!"

Another pressure point has been the Prisoners Rights Project at the Legal Aid Society. The organization has filed a series of class action lawsuits against the city over poor hygiene, excessive force, mental health, and outrageous wait times for arraignments in the Tombs-connected court pens—which, several former inmates told me, can still last beyond the legally mandated 24 hours. Along with the feds at the DOJ, the Legal Aid Society just won a major settlement against the city, which will lead to new federal oversight at Rikers, as well as reinforced rules, surveillance, and body cameras.

In 2006 testimony to the City Council, John Boston, director of the Prisoners Rights Project, stressed the advantages of jails inside boroughs: Their location means inmates don't need to be transported as far when going to court, and it allows prisoners to be closer to their family members and attorneys.

Boston said his organization receives a steady flow of complaints from inmates about violence, medical attention, and unprofessional behavior in all city jails. So he wasn't surprised about stories of mayhem downtown.

"In the New York City jail system, there's nothing particularly special about the Tombs," he told me. "I don't find it too coincidental that you've heard these stories, because it's part of a vile and dangerous jail system."

"It's all the same population, and same staff [as Rikers]," Boston added.

In recent years, New York gang violence has exploded, contributing to a rise in shootings in the city, Mayor Bill de Blasio has said. His administration's efforts have targeted visitors to city jails like Rikers who have gang associations, and a 34-hour partial lockdown on the island in March reportedly stemmed from gang-related violence. And according to the New York Times, all city jails—not just Rikers—were locked down as recently as late last month.

That gang activity helps explain why complaints provided to the Legal Aid Society are confidential, Boston told me. He argued that fear of reprisal is what prevents inmates from talking to reporters. "There is a serious threat of retaliation within the borough jails," he said. "They would be... foolish to talk to you."

When asked about the Tombs, Diane Struzzi, the director of communications for the Department of Investigation, pointed me to the aforementioned arrests of the 19-year veteran CO, an inmate, and other individuals by the DOI and the Manhattan District Attorney in early June. "DOI does not comment on pending investigations but has been, and continues, to examine the significant issues affecting the City jails, including assaults and false reports and contraband smuggling, among others," she said in an email.

In a statement to VICE, a DOC spokesperson emailed, "Commissioner [Joseph] Ponte's 14-point anti-violence initiative is creating a culture of safety at all DOC facilities. DOC has added security cameras, reformed entrance procedures to stem the flow of contraband, increased inmate educational opportunities to reduce idleness, and is developing crisis intervention teams to respond to incidents more quickly. Meaningful reform takes time, and we are confident that our reforms are leading to a safer DOC."

Citing DOC data, the spokesperson indicated that the Tombs is "less violent on average than the rest of DOC." However, uses of force are up 15 percent between December 2014 and May 2015, compared to the same period a year before. Those incidents resulting in any kind of injury, the spokesperson added, are down 7 percent, reflecting a citywide trend where uses of force are up 26 percent since January but those resulting in injury have dropped 5 percent. The spokesperson failed to provide any information on specific incidents or allegations of violence, and said that the DOC was unable to provide stats on violence by year.

When Stanley Richards met the BOC's field representative for the borough houses in early June, the Manhattan Detention Complex wasn't listed among the "the darkest," which is to say those marked by heavy gang violence and abusive COs. He has heard, however, that there have been a number of significant transfers of high-security inmates from the Tombs to Rikers lately.

Richards said a lack of transparency could help explain why these stories, whether intentionally or unintentionally, haven't gotten more exposure.

"The borough houses are out of sight, out of mind, for the most part," he told me. "The [DOC] Commissioner doesn't visit them as often as he'd visit the island. So yes, there's a very real possibility that the borough houses are filled with violence and it's not reported up. It's managed on a very local level."

As for how to rein in excesses at city jails beyond Rikers, "It has to be two directions," Martin argued. "It has to be bottom-up, with COs thinking differently about their jobs, having a different understanding and role and being rewarded, but doing the kind of things that we say we care about. And then top-down, as in holding people accountable and setting that culture."

He added, "I don't see either of those things happening."

So as city officials struggle to overhaul Rikers, former inmates at the Tombs hope they don't forget the jail that sits just a few blocks from City Hall—one that, to them anyway, has been too violent for too long.

"You can't not see it when you're walking by," Cadeem Gibbs told me. "But when you're on the other side of those walls, you have no idea what's going on."

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

All photos by Justin Schmitz

On Saturday, the South Carolina Statehouse in Columbia played host to a fierce rally organized by the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a North Carolina–based group. Coming just weeks after the murder of nine people at a historic African-American church in Charleston—and the subsequent removal of the Confederate flag from the Capitol—the event felt like a throwback to the Jim Crow era. It was a spectacle defined by anger, racial tension, Confederate flag burnings, and a wide spectrum of idiosyncratic and not infrequently confusing ideologies.

Media coverage had been thick in the preceding weeks, ratcheted up by a counter-protest organized by the Black Educators for Justice, a Florida-based group led by James Evan Muhammad, a teacher and former education director of the New Black Panthers. As two police snipers stood sentry on the roof of the Statehouse, Muhammad spoke along with other Black Power allies, including Niecee X of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club in Dallas.

Around 3 PM, under heavy protection from state police—many in body armor—a procession of around 60 Klansmen (and Klan women) and supporters filed up the south steps to the Statehouse. They headed toward a barricaded area where they might capitalize on their state-sanctioned right to assemble. Dressed in black shirts adorned with various Klan-related badges and white supremacist insignias, the group had no microphone, and no podium. The Educators had spoken since noon on the themes of black power and unity and the need for social and systemic change; the Klan offered up an unamplified, archaic message, shouting obscenities and racial slurs and striking taunting poses.

The spectacle had the appearance of some terrible play, or maybe a parking-lot brawl, only instead of actors or drunk teenagers, you had what once were America's most feared and dangerous white supremacist group waving Confederate flags, one Nazi flag, and tearing up the flag of Israel. (Later, when cornered in the parking lot though still protected by police, one of the Klansmen would moon the protesters.) Another supporter, wearing a white tank top and camo pants, pantomimed gorilla gestures at black protesters. It was all a part of a belligerent if somewhat effective middle finger aimed at just about anyone who wasn't white and in favor of the flag.

A KKK supporter en route to the North steps; moments later he would be knocked down by an anti-KKK anarchist

Turnout was noticeably below the 200 attendees promised by group leader Robert Jones a.k.a. James Spence a.k.a. Chris Barker, but total attendance of anti-KKK protestors of all colors, unaffiliated Confederate flag supporters, curious onlookers, journalists, and camera crews numbered as many as 2,000 (as estimated by the South Carolina Department of Public Safety and reported by the New York Times.) This was in spite of pleas by Republican Governor Nikki R. Haley and Columbia Mayor Steven K. Benjamin to ignore the out-of-state hate group's rally.

The stultifying 93-degree heat was matched by the tempers of those in attendance. Over the course of the day, numerous scuffles and confrontations broke out between protestors and counter-protesters as local police rushed in to break things up, their equipment jingling as they hurried through the crowd, ordering the crowd to disperse: "Move, move!" "Step back! Back up!"

Protesters at the New Black Panther rally

"They said that blacks need to be shackled, and I lost it," Chris Daugherty, 32, a former corporal in the US Army, said after he got into a shouting match with the gorilla-mimicking KKK supporter that had to be broken up by police. "I said, 'I went to war for this country. Not for blacks, not for whites, not for Muslims, not for Christians, but for the people. I saw my comrades die. I fought for the people.' He says he's not racist, but see how he talks to anyone who doesn't have pale skin. He wanted to say I was shit from the get-go because of the color of my skin.

"Emotions flare up over racism," continued Daugherty, who was wearing an Iraqi Freedom baseball hat and a CamelBak to stay cool. "Once the nerves hit, then the tensions go from zero to 100. They say heritage, but they use that word to hide behind their real intent. If they had it their way, they'd be screaming out the N-word at a microphone."

"Hey man," one white law enforcement officer approaching Daugherty—who is biracial—remarked a few minutes later. "What you said earlier was powerful."

The Klansmen walking up to the Statehouse steps

Confederate flag supporters in the shade during the KKK rally

I then came across a white woman in her 40s who had been in a heated argument with a black woman in her 60s—another dispute broken up by the cops.

"I was trying to take a picture to be fair and document both sides," said the first woman, who was standing with her teenage son wearing a Confederate flag baseball cap. "That racist black lady said, 'Get your smart-ass, white racist...' and she goes, "You don't F-ing start with me." You notice we're not on the KKK side. Just because we're wearing that hat, and I believe in it—my family died in it—it don't mean I'm racist. God knows it really doesn't. But I don't appreciate being called a smart-ass and a racist. She needs to sit down and shut up because she's obviously the racist, not me." A few minutes later, the two women worked it out, and the son came over to apologize.

"Ain't no problem, baby," said the older black woman. "No, you don't have to apologize to me, because you were standing up for your mother."

Speaking of the KKK, check out our documentary 'Triple Hate':

As the Black Educators continued their rally, I spoke to a middle-aged white man named Billy from Florence, South Carolina. Billy wore a Vietnam veteran baseball cap, and I asked him about the interracial procession of motorcyclists who had just loudly passed, several of whom wore black bandanas obscuring their faces.

"They're just saying, 'Shut up,'" he told me of the motorcyclists, we would later see onstage as part of an anti-racist anarchist group standing in unity with the Black Educators, their signs reading "Fuck the KKK," "Death to 88," and "Burn this Racist System." The Florence resident pointed out the two snipers stationed on the roof of the Statehouse, then told me he disagreed that the flag should have been taken down.

"All I hear is racism and slavery," Billy said, gesturing toward the North steps, where the Black Educators had been speaking since noon.

I asked about the reforms to the education and legal systems the Black Educators were calling for.

Billy reflected, "Some people hear what they want to hear."

"It might be all people who hear that," I offered.

Just then his wife hurried over with an aggrieved look. "Did he just say we're the enemy?" she asked her husband, about the speaker, whose voice could be overheard carrying aggressive tones. "Is he talking about the people holding the flag, or us?"

"Let's go," she said, pulling him away. "This is racist."

A few minutes before the KKK rally, I saw the couple sitting in the shade, waiting amid a group of flag supporters and anti-KKK protestors, their own allegiances unclear.

Two attendees from Dillon, South Carolina. The man wrapped in the flag could be heard screaming, "Hang all y'all!" at the KKK. "They took my flag," he said to me, as one black man in dreads stared him down before walking away. "Fuck the KKK!" came a voice accompanied by drums. "Damn right," the man in the flag replied.

An anti-Confederate flag protester shows his opinion of the flag

The events of the day offered a stark departure from the scene in court after the tragedy unleashed on Emanuel African Methodist Church in June by white supremacist Dylann Roof. Some family members of victims unexpectedly forgave the 21-year-old South Carolina native.

"This is not the state it was when you left," Brett Harris, a 20-year-old University of South Carolina political science major, told me the night before the rally as we had dinner at the classic downtown restaurant Yesterdays. Harris, who self-identifies as a libertarian-leaning "liberty" Republican, works as a page at the South Carolina House of Representatives, where he witnessed the 15-hour debate over whether to join the State Senate's 37-3 vote to follow Governor Haley's call to remove the flag.

"I can tell you, it would've been a cold day in hell that that flag came down. It took something of this magnitude to bring it down," Harris told me. When I brought it up, he acknowledged the political convenience, but emphasized our shared home state wasn't famous for bowing to what's politically convenient.

"At the end of the day," he said, "I think that the moral imperative is what really brought it down. The legislature wanted to match the grace that the victims' families showed to Dylann Roof."

As I took in what Harris was telling me over dinner—I was as pleased and surprised and proud as anyone to hear the flag was coming down—I asked him if the large portrait on the wall next to Confederate General Robert E. Lee was Stonewall Jackson, and he confirmed it was. In the bar area hung another portrait of Lee, this time standing in front of a Confederate flag.

Daughters of the Confederacy member Catherine Harris, from Upstate South Carolina

At Saturday's rally, one of the few things everyone seemed united on was a mistrust of the media.

"Are y'all going to report this fairly?" Daughters of the Confederacy member Catherine Harris (unrelated to Brett as far as I could tell) asked a group of citizen journalists. Harris, who waved a large South Carolina Sovereignty flag (the flag used by the state when in seceded from the Union) in front of the African American History Monument, said she had driven from upstate to attend the protest. Harris wore a black veil until police asked her to remove it. When confronted by annoyed black demonstrators asking how she chose to stand at that exact spot, Harris pulled out a paper to deliver an emotional reading of the text from the Confederate soldiers monument in front of the Statehouse.

"You have people who are scared because of the media," said one Black Educators speaker dressed in camo fatigues and a bulletproof vest with the silhouette of Africa on it.

Another white woman in her 20s carried a handwritten sign that read "The MEDIA created the 'Race War'!" When I asked if I could take a photo of her with her sign, she agreed, then became concerned.

"Well, I'm not on either side of this," she said defensively. "I was for taking the flag down, so," she continued in a low voice. "When you read this, you don't think like, in a certain way—"

"Do I think you're a racist for having that sign?" I offered.

"Yeah."

"I don't know. I think you're someone with a strong opinion. I don't know you."

"OK, I just wanted to make sure that you didn't think that," she said.

Plastic water bottles were thrown by both sides, protesters and counter-protesters alike

An anti-Confederate flag protester puts out his cigarette

"As far as interpersonal relationships, the South has made progress," Chenjerai Kumanyika, an assistant professor at Clemson University, told me Saturday morning before heading to the Statehouse for what he described over email as "a day of hate that shouldn't be missed."

"People will be really polite," added Kumanyika, who is black and had been present at the Statehouse the past two weekends, for the NAACP anti-flag rally on July 4, and then again, on July 10, when the flag finally came down. "They'll invite you to church. And then they'll go and vote for policies that will destroy you and your entire category of people."

Kumanyika continued, laughing a bit sadly: "A lot of people who are supporting the Confederate flag, if you came to them with racist things, they'll be like, 'I hate racism!' and be disgusted by it. But they're [also] deeply committed to the Confederate flag."

James Yeh is a South Carolina native, now living in Brooklyn. Follow him on Twitter.

Justin Schmitz is currently living in Athens, Georgia, working as the Lamar Dodd School of Art Photography Fellow.

Image by Natalie Silvanovich

On November 23, 1996, Aki Maita and Yokoi Akihiro created a needier world. Maita and Akihiro had developed an egg-shaped virtual pet that dies on its owner daily unless afforded generous love, care, and attention. They were a wild success, and we all loved them. Though it's been nearly 20 years since the Tamagotchi trend hit the fever pitch that had helicopter parents juggling to keep their kids' toys alive ("I wake up every morning and something is dead," stay-at-home mom Madeline Sayer Umans said at the height of the craze), those demanding digital pets are still kicking around in various incarnations.

Since their invention, 79 million Tamagotchis have made their way into the grubby palms of the middle-school set. They were Pogs plus personality, My Little Pony plus the risk of imminent death, Magic: The Gathering minus the brainwork. The Tamagotchi could hang around your neck and signify, "I am not in the upper echelon of kids that are already making out with each other, but I have also not yet met social death." Obviously, a 90s kid couldn't bring Tickle Me Elmo or buttered-popcorn-scented Gak to class. But you could stick your Tamagotchi—or in my pathetic case, Tamagotchis plural—under the table, feeding your little pet while feigning interest in fractions at the same time.

Like a needy lover, we confused our Tamagotchi's digital clinginess for devotion. But why did we fall so hard?

Photo via Flickr user mujitra

They were attached to us—literally

The Tamagotchi had "a prosthetic of presence" that made it less of a toy than an extension of self, Duke University Anthropology professor Anne Allison told VICE. This intimate connection was precisely the dream of its co-creator Akihiro, who was touched by a television commercial in which a boy packing for vacation put his pet turtle in his suitcase. The Tamagotchi, Allison writes in Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination, was "if not the first virtual pet of all time, the form in which this cyborgian fantasy was popularized and (re)produced as mass culture." Also, of course, they were on a keychain.

They made us consider the deep questions

One of the Tamagotchi's most loyal adherents is Natalie Silvanovich, a 29-year-old Information Security Engineer on Google's Android Security Team and an off-duty "Tama hacker." As a child, she and a friend would track their pets' behavior by drawing pixels on a graph. "One day I grew up and realized: I'm an adult, and I can figure this stuff out," she told VICE. Over the past few years, she's tracked down a Tama-Go—a larger version of the 90s classic—at Walmart, and one of the Tamagotchi Friends models at a Toys "R" Us. Silvanovich dumped the code, determined to answer what she jokingly calls "the deep questions": how it turns into a boy or girl, which character it becomes. She tinkered with the circuit board, directing the Tamagotchi's actions; as Joaquin discovers in Her, many outcomes could be controlled, but others were purely random.

"I'm sure even in ancient Greece, the children wished their dolls were alive. It's a human dream." —David Cheok

They had the same problems we did

Control is both the premise and the point of the game. Users like Silvanovich connect on devotee sites such as TamaTalk and Tamazone; they worry their Tamagotchis are too skinny, or too fat. Snacks are a problem. User Yukiyuna frets about Tama hygiene; hers won't wash itself. "I thought maybe it was because I was giving her baths without her asking so I waited for her to ask on her own but she never did," she writes. In all the ways that count, it's a parenting blog; panicked posts such as "MY TAMAGOTCHI WON'T MARRY" force the comparison. The Tamagotchi wasn't trying to collect a million bananas or jump through flaming hoops. They did what we did—just with higher stakes.

Zoya Street, Editor-in-Chief of game e-zine Memory Insufficient, told VICE that "Tamagotchi is part of [the idea] that a handheld plastic thing is OK for girls to play with, and that girls playing with these things doesn't threaten the masculinity of the gamer identity as it had been constructed back in the 1980s." It played into existing societal structures, rather than challenging them.

Photo via Flickr user _mubblegum

They were every child's fantasy: a toy that came alive

The Tamagotchi followed in the footsteps of disparate technologies; rag dolls, stuffed animals, the Pokemon game. Video game historian Carly Kocurek credits Star Wars with paving the way for adorable androids and living electronics. And as special as the Tamagotchi felt in that sunny 90s moment, its basic features are now everywhere. Street says that mobile games like Farmville, Puzzle & Dragons, and Neko Atsume, as well as video games like Monster Rancher and Digimon, the demonic Furby, and the Nintendogs DS series each draw inspiration from the Tamagotchi.

Adrian David Cheok, Director of the Mixed Reality Lab, calls the Tamagotchi "the right toy at the right time." "I'm sure even in ancient Greece, the children wished their dolls were alive. It's a human dream," Cheok told VICE. "But until the technology caught up that couldn't happen. This was the intersection of what children have desired for millennia, and what technology could provide." Cheok predicts that within 25 years, instead of jointed cyberdogs and screen interfaces, we'll have viable robotic friends, pets, and true lovers.

"There are the naysayers who say that if you have an electronic connection, it's an impoverished form of connection; the best is face-to-face, and anything other than that is degraded. Others ask, is Tama really a lesser connection? It's a different kind of connection," Allison explained. "Does that mean it doesn't have its own benefits and attributes?"

WATCH: The Mystical Universe of Magic: The Gathering

We knew our time together was precious

As with most passionate connections, the Tamagotchi never promised forever. One of Tamagotchi's distinguishing features is its unwillingness to shield users from life's most difficult reality. In the Tama world, your tiny alien can die from:

• Thirst
• Contact with octopus ink
• Polar bear attack while napping
• Toothache
• Overfeeding
• Failure to clean up droppings
• Severe neglect
• Being stepped on
• Barring all else, old age

Prolonged mourning is a symptom of the 'Tamagotchi effect,' an over-dedication to one's robot.

In the Japanese version, the Tamagotchi becomes a ghost, then a tombstone. In the Tamagotchi Friends 2014 America version, it simply packs its bags and leaves, which is as American as anything.

TamaTalk hosts a Tamagotchi Memorial for those unable to reset and forget their plastic egg. Some lament their errors, such as poisoning by ice cream, with a bit of comic distance. Others are shattered, as in this entry:

Akbar was a friend, a brother, he was always there for me in my darkest times he made me feel happy on the inside, Akbar made me a better person, he was a part of me just as I was a part of him, we understood each other... I can't believe he's gone, be free Akbar, fly with the birds in tama heaven...

Kocurek refers to this prolonged mourning as a symptom of the 'Tamagotchi effect,' an overdedication to one's robot. "After the Japan bubble crash of 1991, the economy has never bounced back. Unemployment is way up, a lot of people seem nervous about earthquakes and nuclear disaster, the birth and marriage rates are way down. There's a real sense of insecurity," Allison told VICE. "One woman in Japan said, 'My kid is kind of a loner, thank God he has a Tamagotchi.' She was totally sincere. She was pleased that her child had something that he connected with."

Photo via Flickr user joi

In 1998, at the height of the world craze, a pet cemetery in the English countryside dedicated a section of its real estate to our ovate brothers and sisters, who were placed in wooden coffins, lowered 6 or so inches into the ground, and memorialized with little placards reading "Zena," "Maryan," "Sid," or "Arty." Their owners left tiny flowers. The cemetery owner said he had buried Tamagotchi bodies for devotees from Switzerland, Germany, France, Canada and the United States. The same year, in Hungary, tamagotchis were packaged in clay urns.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil wrote in the prologue to his classic The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, "Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it." It seems indisputable that by 'our' he meant himself and his Tamagotchi.

They last forever in our hearts

Even 20 years later, reactions to Tamagotchi are varied, and typically declarative; they're "cutesy," or "annoying as fuck," or "creepy," or "fun." Many Americans still carry their little buzzing electronics to the toilet. Technological dependence didn't start with the Tamagotchi; it didn't end with it.

What made their advent such a memorable moment in time? Fervent caring, combined with the illusion of control, makes a strong imprint on the young mind. In the words of The Little Prince, "You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed." They were ours.

Follow Melissa on Twitter.