Jerry standing at a local taxi stand, Katlehong, 2014

This article appears in The Photo Issue 2015

In 2006, when Magnum photographer Mikhael Subotzky started his yearlong project documenting life in and around a prison on a traffic island in the rural South African town of Beaufort West, journalist Hazel Friedman published the crime novel Hijack!, written under the alias Guy Brown, the book is one of the first published references to nyaope, a popular street drug that is a cocktail of low-grade heroin, cannabis, and antiretroviral drugs. Friedman recorded that nyaope was (as it still is) "all the rage with the youngsters in Soweto, Mamelodi, Soshanguve, and Atteridgeville," black settlements surrounding Johannesburg and Pretoria.

It is also popular in Thokoza, the black residential neighborhood southeast of Johannesburg where photographer Lindokuhle Sobekwa lives. Sobekwa started documenting the rituals associated with nyaope in 2013, after a local Thokoza youth asked him to take a photo with his crew. "I was nervous, but I told myself if they try anything I would run away with my camera," Sobekwa told me. "I held my camera very tightly." He had good reason to worry: Youth unemployment is a key driver of crime. But it turned out that all they wanted was a photo.

That evening, reviewing his photographs, Sobekwa was struck by the access he'd been given to a shack owned by a man named Mabhuti. He started returning to Mabhuti's shanty. Photographs of drug addiction and pictures of poverty share a generic sameness: Bare circumstances mirror bare lives. While his photo essay contains familiar scenes of idleness, argument, and narcotic collapse, Sobekwa, who was born in 1995 into a working-class Xhosa family and is considered part of the "born-free" generation, also followed users farther afield, where they panhandled and foraged for scrap metal to sell. This is how he met Jerry, a white drug user living on the street.

Similar to Larry Clark's work in Tulsa, Sobekwa's photos (the black-and-white pictures in this series) are defined by their focus on an insecure family, one created by circumstance rather than biology. Unlike Clark, who was implicated in the good times, Sobekwa has merely been a dispassionate observer motivated by a belief that his photos might have an educational value. When he started out making photographs, Subotzky, who is 14 years older than Sobekwa, had a similar outlook. Photography was a way of learning and communicating.

Much like Sobekwa, Subotzky made his breakout 2004 photo essay in his backyard. Raised near Pollsmoor, a maximum-security prison outside Cape Town, Subotzky—a second-generation descendent of well-off Latvian immigrants—voluntarily spent time locked up with prisoners. "I would explain to as many people as possible in the room what I was doing before I took photographs," he said. "Anthropologists talk about the term 'deep hanging'—I suppose I tried to do that."

While at Pollsmoor he saw a corpse for the first time. Christopher Sibidla had died in a prison fire. Subotzky photographed his body at the request of Sibidla's mother and presented it to her before the funeral. "I could hardly look at the image, but she took one look at my print, kissed its surface, and pushed it to her chest, thanking me for helping her to put her son to rest." The image continued to haunt Subotzky, and in 2012 he smashed it, along with a number of others from his archive, for an exhibition. The gesture was his way of reconciling his feelings about witnessing as well as photographing a violent and traumatic act, and writing it back into the photographic object itself.

The difficulty at stake here is not unique to Subotzky. Documentary photography, a practice that doesn't mind its own business, is bound by ethics. Sometimes it is better not to make an image, but as Sobekwa's photos of Thokoza attest, the instinct to make them can be powerful and brave. But knowing exactly when to be mindful and say no—that is the ongoing challenge for every photographer.

—Sean O'Toole

Sobekwa's series of photographs was initiated as a part of the Of Soul & Joy Project, organized by the Rubis Mécénat Cultural Fund and Easigas.

Illustrations by Ania Leonova/Zona.media

Translated for MEDIAZONA and VICE by Shelley Fairweather-Vega and Benjamin Hugh

A version of this article was published on MEDIAZONA, a new website devoted to covering Russia's criminal justice system.

Andrei (not his real name) served time in Maximum-Security Prison Colony 27, a colony near the town of Gorlovka, Ukraine, from 2013 until March 2015. In September 2014, troops from the separatist and pro-Russian Donetsk People's Republic (DNR) entered the prison camp, allegedly to suppress a rebellion; fighters seized part of the camp's security arsenal and treated prisoners extremely brutally. Rumors of violence towards prisoners in Prison Camp 27 spread to other prisons of Donetsk Province, and as a result many inmates refused to take part in military action on the side of the separatists—though many were forced to become soldiers after their release due to lack of any other work.

MEDIAZONA recently talked to Andrei about the attack on the prison and the conditions that prisoners face in Donetsk Province.

MEDIAZONA: Let's start with the events of autumn 2014. That's when the media reported that fighters from the DNR had entered the prison camp.
Andre: The DNR fighters showed up on September 16, 2014, at 20 minutes till midnight, and they put the whole camp on its knees. Inmates always turn out the lights right after roll call at 10 PM. When there's soccer on, though, especially a cup game, the inmates get together, swarm the fences between barracks, and shout for a while, but that's all. That spreads and the guards turn on the lights. The guys could get away with a certain amount, you know? But there was one section chief everyone hated who was somewhere in the outside perimeter just then. When he heard the shouting start up he didn't know what was happening, and he fired two shots from his rifle. I think that was planned. The DNR fighters had just come back from the front lines. They call him and ask what's up. And he tells them there's a riot at the prison colony. So they came in and laid everyone out flat—the guards, the administrators, everyone. They clubbed people with their rifle butts, shot people. You're lying there, and one of them is standing over you, some fat idiot, firing right over your head. He went through three clips and knocked out all my teeth. It was this crazy bloodbath.

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While there was real shooting back and forth [during the battle for the city of Donetsk], a few shells fell into the camp. One landed between the barracks but thank God, nobody was on the way to the cafeteria just then and the yard was empty. Another fell between the garage buildings. The bathhouse burned down, the building for conjugal visits burnt down, and all the glass was blown out of the barracks windows. But during that fighting, nobody died, and nobody was even injured. It's when they actually came into the camp that people started getting hurt. I was in Division 10, Sector 5, back then. One person was killed and two were wounded. One guy had his hand cut off, because he was so badly shot up that they had to amputate. In Sector 6, where the tuberculosis patients are, people got shot in the sides and in the shoulders. They stood people up against the fence and beat them with their rifles, tortured them, demanded to know where our telephones were and so on, because half of them had served time, too.

How did the prison camp staff behave?
When the DNR guys came in, the guards let them take over right away. There was one who resisted, but they got rid of him fast. They called him out, set him down, and worked him over for a few days. Anyone who didn't want to work for them left for Ukraine, and everyone who was left totally caved. Since the DNR can come in and out of the camp as they please and the prisoners are all terrified, they're selling the humanitarian assistance they receive. You have to pay for everything. They squeeze cash out of you any way they can. They're supposed to send you out to work for two-hour periods, and not every day, but now they do it every day for as long as they want. If you touch a fence somewhere, talk back shit to someone, get fed up with this fucking shit and shove a cop because he loses his boundaries, they bring you into the headquarters building, put a helmet on you, and start clubbing you on the head. Or they put a bulletproof vest on you and give you a pounding, or they stand you up against the wall and they shoot at you with live ammunition. Or, I won't name names, but they suffocate guys: They twist your arms back, one guy holds you, and the other takes a rod for cleaning a rifle and shoves it up under your collarbone. That's how they treat you. Nobody's going to talk things over with you.

Have there been any attempts to rise up against that kind of treatment?
After what has happened so far, nobody is even thinking about rebelling. Everyone has seen how that will turn out. The DNR took half the weapons for themselves then, the better half, and let the guards keep the rest.

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What about food and other services?
Some good humanitarian aid comes through from Russia. A lot gets delivered, but not to the prisons—it all gets sold, both in the prison camps and in the stores.

Did the inmates organize themselves in any way to help each other out?
Sure. We'd arrange for shipments on the outside, from Artyomovsk, figure out how to get to the colony, where they'd let packages through. We'd hunt, gas up the cars, ship things in. That's how we survived.

Gorlovka itself was totally fucked over. This war is no fucking good for anyone. I came here, to Kramatorsk, and everything is alive here. But there, everything is dead. There are still taxies waiting at the train station, but other than that, no people at all. Nine o'clock and the city is totally dead. There have been shootings, executions.

Shootings of civilians, or in the prison camp?
Civilians. They don't give a fuck who gets killed in the camp, who or why.

What do they shoot the civilians for?
Well, I knew one guy, for example, who just got released. He was free for about ten days. He's walking by and these [DNR guys] are standing there. He walks up to them and asks for a light. But he used a Ukrainian word [rather than a Russian word], and for that they broke his ribs and killed him.

Have a lot of inmates gone to fight with the separatists?
The ones who were still there after the release have almost all gone to fight. Especially the ones with families, who have nowhere to go. There are no jobs here, and it's pretty clear that the only way to earn a living is to go fight. You don't earn much, just 8,000 rubles a month [$160], Russian money. If you go to the front lines, you get a little bit more. But in the city you can't earn anything.

And the people still in the camps aren't going to fight for liberation?
That's not happening. When the trouble started, half the inmates were for the DNR and the other half for Ukraine, but after the shooting in our camp—and they didn't come in shooting like that in any of the other prison camps except ours—everything changed. In any case, anyone with any brains knows that we have it much better with Ukraine. When you have some authorities to write to, you have a little bit of power over the guards. But now there's nobody back there. Nobody to complain or appeal to.

The worst part is that decent people are dying on both sides and nobody knows for what. Things have just played out this way and it's shit wherever you look.

This lower back licker could definitely be a sociopath! Or not. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

A few weeks ago, I spoke to relationship experts about what it's like to date a sociopath for another VICE article. After the article was published, I received a few from actual, diagnosed sociopaths wanting to share their experiences. Writers are used to getting weird emails; I ignored them at first. But their words stayed with me, and eventually I gave in to curiosity and decided to hear what they had to say. I spoke to three diagnosed sociopaths—Jessica, Alexander, and Taylor—about what it's like to date, fuck, and fall in love as a person with antisocial personality disorder.

Jessica Kelly is a transgender 30-year-old from the Midwest. Jessica runs the blog called Psychogendered and does not use a pseudonym. Alexander*, a 23-year-old man living in Los Angeles, proves that sociopathy isn't binary, and that some sociopaths are very giving in bed. And Taylor*, a 40-year-old man living in Chicago, is in a happy and kinky relationship with his live-in girlfriend, whom he describes as a "budding sociopath."

My conversations revealed that while the relationship experts weren't totally off-point with their warnings, sociopaths are also very compelling individuals. They will probably make you come, but they also might view you as a houseplant.

VICE: So how were you diagnosed as a sociopath?
Jessica Kelly: My diagnosis story was a bit unusual in that I was diagnosed in my late 20s. My relationship with my ex-husband was fading fast. He gave me an ultimatum to either get help for what [we] thought was just simple depression, or get out. So I spent the past four years in therapy dealing with my own various mental health issues, and we noticed that depression just didn't explain a lot of my traits. It didn't explain my emotional indifference to other people, my inability to feel love, my various sordid experiences earlier in life, so on and so forth. [My therapist] had me read Confessions of a Sociopath because she wanted to introduce me to the possibility in a [gentle] manner. I read the book, I found that it resonated a little bit, and then we started exploring the possibility of antisocial personality disorder. As we started putting the pieces of my life together, it fit like a glove.

What has your experience with love been like?
It seems like love is one of those self-evident truths that a lot of people hold onto. Some people describe it as a pitter-patter or a deep conviction for another person. Whereas for me, it's much more possessive. There's no real emotional state involved, but there's a feeling that it would be unfortunate if the partner would leave. It's kind of alien, kind of like trying to explain color to someone born blind.

We were having sex one night, and he asked me point-blank, "Do you care if I enjoy myself?" I told him, "No, it's all about me."

So then what is the appeal of a romantic relationship that is more than just sex?
I do value companionship, but it has to be on my terms. The analogy that I like to use is that those around me are like potted plants. I like to water them, I like to look at them, but ultimately if I don't want their attention, I want them to leave me the fuck alone. What may set me apart because I was in therapy—I still am in therapy—is the approach [I took] in my marriage and the approach I would take now are vastly different. Previously, I didn't really care whether or not my partner's needs were met. I don't want to imply that I care now, but I realize that there is a self-serving interest.

Another thing that is common with a lot of sociopaths is what I like to call "bait and switch." A lot of people with ASPD will be on their best behavior during the courting phase of a relationship, and then once the relationship is secure, they just say "fuck it." I don't want to use the term "lazy," but they kind of revert back to their antisocial roots. That's what happened with my husband. I was on my best behavior until we were engaged and then I kind of went back to my potted plant analogy: He's mine now, I don't have to do shit.

How did the relationship ultimately end?
It's interesting. The fatal blow—and this ties into sex a little bit—is that one of my flaws is being honest at the wrong times. We were having sex one night, and he asked me point-blank, "Do you care if I enjoy myself?" I told him, "No, it's all about me." I think that's how sex is experienced for a lot of sociopaths, as a one-dimensional and one-party experience. If the other partner enjoys themselves, it's kind of secondary.

Maybe sociopaths, maybe not. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

VICE: Tell us about your diagnosis story. Did you always feel different?
Alexander: I think part of me has always known. I think back to times when I was really young and certain social interactions didn't make any sense to me. They still don't. I was in a theater camp and someone asked me why I wanted to act, and I said because I always acted, which was true. I didn't realize the significance of that until probably around my junior or senior year of college, when I started taking my mental health more seriously and started seeing counselors. My main disorder is an anxiety disorder rooted in ASPD tendencies.

Are you dating anyone at the moment?
No, I am not.

When you've dated in the past, did you reveal your diagnosis?
It's difficult for me because I'm not necessarily a romantic person. But I did end up dating someone for four years. We were more friends than anything else, but we were monogamous. And yes, she knew. I ended up telling her about a year in and we talked about it.

What was her reaction?
Well, she understood, which was good.

Will you elaborate on what you meant when you said that you're not really a romantic person? How do you think your experience is different in a relationship?
It's a difficult question to answer because a lot of my friends will say, "Oh, I'm in love and I can't stop thinking about her." These are things that don't make sense to me. I don't have that sort of attachment to people. I have friends and I will have sex with my friends. I do, from time to time. But I don't have the need to be in a relationship with someone.

It's not like I don't want to feel connected with people. I'm a lonely guy because I can't connect with people on this basis.

So what was the benefit for you in staying with the same person for four years?
It's a matter of finding someone who understands. In my case, she—well, it comes down to mental health. She understood that I wasn't doing well, and in effect she wasn't doing well, and we ended up bonding over that and became close. It's the benefit that I think anyone seeks: not being alone.

What do you think are some misconceptions of ASPD and the dangers of dating someone with such a diagnosis?
There's this reaction that people with ASPD or "sociopaths" or "psychopaths" don't deserve humanity, don't deserve to have the connection. And, for me at least, it's not like I don't want to feel connected with people. I'm a lonely guy because I can't connect with people on this basis.

It's often said that sociopaths are manipulative. Is this true for you?
I mean, I can be manipulative. I have been in order to pursue professional goals. Never in my relationships, but that's because I value my friendships so highly, because I have so few of them.

Let's talk about sex. I've heard that sex with sociopaths can be one-sided. Is this true for you?
Oh god, it's the exact opposite of it all being about me. Sex was actually the first time that I connected with someone on a personal level. Because before that, I didn't have any avenue to connect with someone in a way that I could understand. The way my ASPD manifests itself is more the reptilian brain, the part of me that is angry or fearful, or that has a need for sex. That part is still expressed, but the rest of it is muted. It's like I'm emotionally colorblind.

But then when it comes to sex, it's sacred. It's one of those things that I thoroughly enjoy: providing pleasure. Being able to give someone something that oftentimes, because of the way we treat sex in our culture, people haven't had.

House plants, or how a sociopath might see their partner. Photo via Flickr user Emily Hindle

VICE: So how were you diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder?
Taylor: I found out in therapy, in high school.

Did it come as a surprise? Had you felt different than other high school kids?
It didn't come as a surprise when my psychiatrist said that. I remember being 13 and being asked what I was good at, and my reply was "manipulating people."

Will you tell me about your current relationship status?
I'm dating and living with someone.

And she knows about your diagnosis, correct?
One hundred percent.

How did you tell her and what was her reaction?
It was an interesting thing. I was pretty honest from the get-go, and I sort of sensed it in her also. I wouldn't say that she's a full-blown sociopath, but she is certainly a budding one.

It's the same with sex as it is with relationships: I pay attention more. If I'm pleasing them, they're certainly going to be pleasing me.

Have you had any negative experiences sharing your diagnosis with previous girlfriends?
Absolutely. I had one tell me that I wasn't a real person. That I was inhumane.

What is your perception of love?
I don't have that surge of emotion that most people do. I feel things, but in a very quiet kind of way. The way that I look at it is that I do love her, but it's about respect. It's about seeing her and knowing her and appreciating her, I would say more on an intellectual level. But there is a romantic part to it as well.

What are some common misconceptions you've noticed about dating a sociopath?
One is that they're trying to hurt people. I have the capacity to [hurt others] without feeling much regret or remorse, but it's not something that I set out to do. Another is that we seek out weak-willed partners, someone that is easily manipulated. While I'm sure that's true in some cases, I find myself drawn to intelligent woman with high self-esteem. A person that needs constant reassurance or can easily be beaten down doesn't hold my interest for very long. It's far easier to be with someone that knows how to accept a compliment and isn't filled with self-doubt and self-loathing.

Can you tell us about your sex life? Some experts say that sex with a sociopath can be intense and passionate, but also selfish and one-sided.
Here is the part where I get to brag. I suppose that I certainly can be selfish, if I'm having a shallow one-night stand. But the things about sociopaths—at least for me—is that we're very good at looking at people and seeing them and understanding them and using that to our advantage. On the other hand, when you actually can see someone and know who they are, you can prop them up as much as you can break them down. It's the same with sex as it is with relationships: I pay attention more. If I'm pleasing them, they're certainly going to be pleasing me. My current girlfriend and I have a pretty radical sex life. It's incredibly kinky, and we're very open. We have multiple partners. We don't see other people but we see people together.

That's a great set up. Have you used your sociopathic abilities to your advantage with sex and dating?
Absolutely. I mean to be honest I can't tell you how many women I've been with. If you can have sex with someone and just blow their mind, they are certainly more willing to overlook other deficiencies. And it's a good way to rope and reel them in.

Follow Sophie on Twitter.

All photos courtesy of Maartje Smit

I first met Maartje Smit in a hostel in Bogotá, back in 2013. I hung out with her and her Australian friend Choppy for a few nights and we all ended up becoming friends on Facebook. When I got home to the Netherlands, there was nothing but rain—unlike on Maartje's wall, where there seemed to be nothing but sunshine, pearly beaches, and groups of scantily-clad backpackers.

How long can somebody keep a vacation going for? In Maartje's case, it's been three years. I skyped her to get some insight into how the hell such a jaunt is even possible.

VICE: Hi Maartje, where are you right now?
Maartje Smit: At the moment, I'm in Israel. I'm staying with a friend that I met in Honduras. When I was planning my trip here, I discovered that I had 32 Israeli Facebook friends so looking for a hostel wasn't really necessary.

You're quite good at making friends. We went out for drinks as soon as we met, even though you were tired from a long bus trip.
That's true. I believe that when you're traveling for this long, it's all about making friends. If you have less time, you usually just hop from one landmark to another. I go sightseeing too, but it's not my main goal. I stopped buying souvenirs years ago. No one needs a bag full of unnecessary shit.

Is there anything in your suitcase that was there three years ago?
Yeah, my gray sweater. Oh wait, no, I bought that at my first stop. So nope, nothing.

What do people think of your permanent vacation?
Most people wonder whether I refuse to go back home because of something bad that happened to me. But that's not true: I worked as a project manager at a software company and my life was just fine. People often wonder what I'm doing with my life and how I can afford all this.

Well, how are you able to pay for all this?
I saved a lot. Like, more than a few thousand. I'm also an extremely low-budget traveler, and sometimes I'll take a job if I need to. I worked for five months as a diving instructor on the Honduran island of Útila. I worked on commission for a tour company in the Galápagos Islands. Usually, the work just covers my expenses, but sometimes I'm able to save up a little. It also helps that I keep making friends who have a couch I can crash on.

The underlying theme of your Facebook photos seems to be "beaches and cocktails." Doesn't that get boring at some point?
Oh, those are usually just the pictures I get tagged in. I don't live a shallow life: The friendships I make are profound and sincere, and we sometimes travel together for months. We're in the same bus for hours and hours, we share rooms—basically, we share our entire life. If you know you'll only hang out with someone for a short amount time and then likely never see them again, you're more likely to open up to them. It's that confession phenomenon—taxi drivers and bartenders have it happen to them all the time.

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Don't you miss your family and friends?
I love my family, but I don't miss them or anything. We Skype regularly and when we don't, they just think that no news is good news.

Have you gotten sick a lot?
Not really. I've had food poisoning twice in three years. The first time was when I was in Guatemala, and I honestly thought I was dying. I went to the hospital and they handed me this mug. At first I wasn't sure because of the language barrier, but then I realized they wanted me to poop in that mug. I was like, "Hell no, I'm not doing that in a million years," but then the nurse brought out a rubber tube and told me to lay on my side for an enema. Suddenly the mug didn't look so bad. They gave me a strong antibiotic treatment and everything was fine after that.

Have you been in a lot of dangerous situations?
I never got robbed or anything, but I have ran into a few awkward situations. The other day I was in Jordan, and the bus dropped me off in the middle of the desert at a spot where there were only three cars and no taxis. I had no choice but to get into one of the cars with men whose language I didn't speak. That wasn't exactly a pleasant ride, especially because the driver took a turn I knew we didn't have to make. But nothing bad happened in the end.

Is it hard to keep your love life going when you're traveling all the time?
Love abroad is different than at home, in that it's less about investing and more about just having a good time. You say to each other: If I miss you, I'll meet you somewhere soon enough. I have no problem making arrangements to meet, but I'll never let it mess up my schedule.

So you haven't met the love of your life yet?
At some point I considered going to Australia with this guy I met, but the timing wasn't right. I was in Honduras and I had just gotten my diving diploma. I missed him a lot for a few weeks, but I got over it quickly enough.

Will you ever come back to the Netherlands?
When I was booking my one-way ticket three years ago, I never imagined it would all last this long. But this is my life now. If I want to work, I'm always able to find a job, and I always make sure I have a minimum of savings in case something happens. I don't think it would be a big problem getting my old daily routine back when I return. I know a lot of folks, and I think I can always find a job through my connections. Or maybe I could just start my own little business. I don't know.

It sounds pretty straightforward when you put it like that.
But it is! Sometimes I wonder why more people don't do this. Maybe folks are too insecure about practical details like insurance or something. I'm sure that everyone who is working away in an office, enviously looking at my Facebook albums could live the exact same life. I don't understand why more people don't do what I do.

Museum Victoria staff inspecting the rare basking shark at Portland, Australia. Photo by David Paul

Sitting in the depths of the Melbourne Museum lies a very large and extremely rare fish. Known as the basking shark, it's the second-largest fish in the world; specimens average over 12 meters in length and usually weigh several tons. It's so rare the species has only been spotted three times in the museum's 160-year history.

Late last month, one basking shark came into the hands of Museum Victoria after a fishing trawler accidentally caught one and donated it. While they're usually found in the North Pacific and Atlantic, this one was caught off the coast of Portland, Victoria—about four hours drive southwest of Melbourne.

Little is known about the sharks as they rarely—if ever—break the surface. This catch is a boon for the museum's marine biologists.

Despite being filter feeders that don't bit or chew, basking sharks have hundreds of teeth. Photo by David Paul

Right now, the head and fins are being preserved to form a full-size replica. To find out how you actually do this, we had a chat with Museum Victoria's Senior Curator of Ichthyology, Martin Gomon, and its Senior Collection Manager of Vertebrate Zoology, Di Bray.

"Just like with any new project, we just about wing it," Gomon told VICE.

Once the trawler had alerted Museum Victoria, they basically had to hit the ground running. The Museum Victoria couldn't exactly easily hire the gear that can shift an object of this size—they couldn't dial for an airlift, let alone have the space to dump the fish in or around Museum Vic's facilities. But in the space of a night, a team of five was organized and on its way to Portland the following morning.

"I don't know if you've ever had to rent a crane, but they're bloody expensive," Gomon explained. "Because we were at the end of a financial year, we had no money in the bank, so it only could lift it off the ship and then drop its head into our trailer."

The frozen head being 3D scanned in Melbourne. Photo by David Paul

Working their way into the night, the team had to manually cut the shark with large butcher's knives out of sheer necessity—they had only a trailer to take pieces of the shark back in.

"People kept asking us, 'Why don't you have chainsaws?' Well, the thought of spraying shark all over the place wasn't a great idea," Gomon said.

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The team only took the vital bits—the head, fins, and its "biologicals": stomach contents, vertebrae, as well as skin and tissue samples. The rest of the shark's carcass had to be disposed of in a skip.

The resulting 3D image. Screengrab courtesy of Museum Victoria

Back in Melbourne, the team spent the next two days freezing the head and fins in preparation for a 3D scan—a relatively new process for the museum. Previously, replicas were modeled from 2D images, which would have been much easier to capture when dealing with something the size of a basking shark.

"It's been a real learning curve for us because we don't often deal with objects of that size, but the information in this specimen will be critical to scientists who need it," Gomon said.

An angler fish soaking in embalming fluid

Once this was done, the basking shark was put into a tub of embalming fluid called formalin. In most cases, a formalin bath is sufficient, but the basking shark's size meant the team had to inject the head with five liters of the chemical just to stop the insides from rotting while the solution worked its way through the flesh. "It's really nasty stuff, and if you work long enough with it, it'll preserve you," said Gomon.

For the moment, Gomon estimates that it'll take two months for the shark to preserve completely. In that time, the preservation team will be readying a full-size replica of the Basking Shark in a feeding position from 3D scans as well as 2D images taken in Portland. For Bray and Gomon, they hope this will unlock a wealth of information for both researchers and the public alike.

All photos by the author unless otherwise specified.

Follow Alan on Twitter.

This is the "me" I made for 'WoW,' that wouldn't actually look like this for a bit (all screencaps courtesy of the author)

It had all seemed so breezily easy 15 seconds earlier. A casual stroll with a couple of faithful hounds, while rattling off occasional pot-shots at passing werewolves, then one wrong turn and suddenly we're being chased by, what, 30 of them? It's almost impossible to get killed at this stage, apparently. Call me a trendsetter.

Or, more accurately, call me a clumsy virgin, at World of Warcraft. For years I've blissfully steered clear of this global phenomenon, due to a lifelong suspicion of anything with pointy ears: elves, dwarves, Conservatives. But recently that healthy prejudice has been unexpectedly pricked, by my intended. As if entranced by elfin magic, I've inexplicably become betrothed to a WoW veteran.

"H" (who'd prefer I didn't mention her full name, for reasons that'll become clear) quit cold turkey when we hooked up, but has gradually been lured back by the role-playing hordes. And it's not just the actual gaming, either. As a nifty graphic artist she now spends much of the rest of her time illustrating other gamers' WoW characters, which may well be paid in pixelated gold or goats or something but is still infuriatingly positive.

And so, with co-habitation looming, I'm biting the bullet—or the enchanted bloody sword, or whatever—and accepting a longstanding invitation to enter the WoW zone. Although it does strike me, as I gingerly join H at the keyboard, that this must be how it feels to be a right-wing Christian dad accompanying his son into a gay bar for the first time. It could be a short visit.

Nohawks

H has it all figured out, though. She'll set the scene by first whizzing me through the cinematics, animated trailers that whetted appetites/wetted pants for new expansions of this vast virtual world. H clearly gets a wee buzz watching them again. She's less enthused about the forthcoming film.

Be prepared, Warcraft characters could be everywhere next summer: on buses, Happy Meals, Graham Norton's sofa. At the recent San Diego Comic-Con the first footage emerged from the long-awaited live-action movie, out next June and directed by Duncan Jones (David Bowie's son), who did the fabulous Moon and great-until-the-stupid-end-bit Source Code.

Early reactions were decent but you'd imagine it'll be difficult to wow long-term WoWers. "They should just do full-length versions of the cinematics," muses H, and, true, these shorts are impressive, if often baffling for a beginner. But I do learn something: poking fun will not go down well.

In the trailer for 2007's WoW: The Burning Crusade there's a naughty night elf called Illidan, for example, which strikes me as tremendously amusing. H, much less so. "Does Illidan have a magic limp?" I chortle. "Is the bad elf in bad health?" But that reverie is interrupted by the night elf himself. "YOU ARE NOT PREPARED!" he bellows. You're not wrong, sunshine.

Character creation in 'WoW' is rich in possibility.

This is immediately evident in the character creation zone, and a word of warning to fellow newcomers: mohican haircuts are apparently a massive WoW faux-pas, due to those old Mr T. ads, I think. H looks genuinely horrified when I flirt with said 'do, clearly concerned that I'll ruin her in-game cred. It gets worse.

Swerving the tantalizing cow and panda character options, I plump for a worgen—a Warcraft werewolf—and call him Gary. But that name's taken. Hey, he's a hirsute chap: FurryGary it is. "That is honestly the worst character name I've ever heard," says my stupefied fiancé, who's beginning to see the folly of this venture, particularly when I follow the formula for FurryGary's hangdog hound: JowlySteve. H, manning the keyboard, enters those names with all the enthusiasm of a teenage Kroger employee typing the lengthy barcode of some produce that wouldn't scan. We take an early break.

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

World of Werecraft

In truth, I've mistrusted role-playing games ever since a debilitating mid-00s addiction, which hit rock bottom the night of a cartoon-themed fancy dress party. I was pretty chuffed with my homemade Hong Kong Phooey-related outfit, got it on, then squeezed in a quick game before heading out, then another, and another... I am probably the only person ever to have played a whole half-season of Championship Manager dressed as Penry the Mild-Mannered Janitor.

Beneath the bullshit bravado I'm secretly concerned about becoming similarly lost in this labyrinthine universe, and suddenly finding real life tedious by comparison. WHERE ARE THE HEAVENLY CRIMSON CLOUD SERPENTS? Seven million people play WoW regularly, some of them presumably relatively normal, and for H there's a whole community. Genuine friends, so me dicking about isn't helpful. Indeed, I'm genuinely jealous of those mysterious characters, holding that little virtual party in the corner of the screen, H chuckling away, while I'm skulking on the couch typing bitter Twitter comments that nobody reads. Who's the tragic one there?

Getting friendly with a fencepost

But even she quit, for a bit. "I needed a few years off. I was a Guild Leader, lots of different personalities to keep in check. It was like running a small corporation."

Sounds fun. My own exploits begin in a realm called Gilneas, which is enduring an awkward werewolf outbreak. I thought FurryGary was supposed to be a worgen too, but for now he's just some regular dude, which, frankly, makes the name seem a bit silly.

FurryGary looks even dumber when he's moving. I'm having kittens mastering the keyboard/mouse control combo, so the poor fellow spends his first hour lurching from VERY LARGE to FAR AWAY, disappearing completely, briefly conjoining with JowlySteve to form a disturbing man/canine hybrid, then repeatedly butting a wooden fencepost. H is mesmerized. "This is like when we used to play GoldenEye with my dad," she says, clearly wondering how I've survived in the real world this long.

I may be losing the respect of my significant other, but I am getting quite attached to JowlySteve, as we're proving pretty effective worgen killers, when I'm facing the right way. Although, given my haphazard blasting, could I accidentally kill my own dog? "No, but monsters can," says H, "so be careful."

Man, I'd be devastated if I ever lost JowlySteve.

Sure, I'll look after your dog, as it's not like I have all these beasts to murder or anything...

Worgen, Worgen, with Hope in Your Heart...

Flustered by my cack-handed ineptitude, H keeps wandering off, as does my interest. And yet during those staccato strolls around Gilneas I can't help marveling at the scale and detail of even this tiny element of the WoW environment. Although the soundtrack gets on your tits. "You know I went to see it performed live?" says H, "in Paris." Oops. This was at BlizzCon, it turns out, the regular bash by WoW makers Blizzard, where attendees were particularly thrilled to receive a code for a rare in-game pet. The lucky devils. "My one's worth £700 [$1090] on eBay now." Ah.

In Warcraft, as in life, I lack direction. Even shooting werewolves has lost its sheen. "Look for the chevron, that tells you what to do next," says H, but there's way too much happening onscreen even for me, a dedicated Sky Sports News scholar. And the controls are horribly fiddly. "It's really easy," sighs my exasperated other half. "You just can't steer. Look, now you're throwing yourself off the roof..."

Possibly on purpose. I am hopeless at this. Even my epic worgen-killing isn't great, as it transpires that JowlySteve is doing much of the actual work, like Hong Kong Phooey's cat. Then a lady called Lorna Crowley sends me on a vital mission, one that mainly seems to involve me dog-sitting her mastiff. "Now you've got an extra action bar," says H. "You're controlling the new dog too." Oh god.

FurryGary is no more, for a bit at least

H is off brewing tea when everything comes to a head. My new task is to locate and kill invisible worgens, so naturally I ignore the relatively harmless regular ones. But as we blithely saunter through a hefty worgen gathering, they take offense. Cue the comical sight of me and two mutts suddenly legging it, swiftly followed by 30 furious werewolves. Comical for a few seconds, that is.

"Errr, I think I died?'

"You died?" shouts H, from the kitchen. "In the starter zone? Wow... that's quite an achievement, hon."

To be honest, I'm not too bothered. Clearly I'm not cut out for Warcraft, and dying seems a pretty natural end point. But then H returns, hands over the tea, and breaks the news. "You know this means JowlySteve's dead too?"

'NOOOOOOOO... JowlySteve, what have I done?'

On Motherboard: Watch These Shamed MMO Cheaters Beg for Forgiveness

FurryGary is finally furry

Postscript

Anyway, it turns out you can just resurrect yourself, and your dog, and the dog we were dog-sitting, which is handy as we have to return it.

H, like a patient driving instructor, then takes the reins to complete the stage, which looks a lot more exciting when she's rattling through it, concluding with a corking animation in which FurryGary finally becomes a worgen—with half a pointy ear missing.

"I reckon JowlySteve bit his ear off," H concludes, as we stare at the hairy pair, "just for calling him JowlySteve."

She'll never let me near this world again.

Follow Si on Twitter.

Promotional imagery of Ivan, your solo campaign protagonist

"A cruel joke for Wii U owners." "The end result lurches close to disaster." "A messy, frustrating experience." Games critics have had their say on upcoming Wii U exclusive Devil's Third, in a preview capacity at least, and they are unanimous: It completely blows.

But as a Wii U owner desperately craving something that isn't a cutesy platformer or a twee puzzler or a collection of party-time mini games starring Nintendo's established cast of cartoon favorites, I nonetheless hoped for the best. I held onto the idea that Devil's Third could be more of a so-bad-it's-actually-sort-of-good experience, when played personally. That it might be a gaming world version of a poorly plotted but stupidly explosive action movie, all ham-for-brains characters barking obscene non sequiturs and firing off innumerable rounds of ammo in the name of bringing about the end of some ill-defined but most-certainly-nefarious force of doom. The sort of thing you could play after four pints, laugh at, and pass out in front of on the sofa.

No such luck, sadly. Devil's Third is awful. In many ways, the blame can't be laid entirely at the feet of its makers at Valhalla Studios, who've waded through rivers of shit to get it this far. The game's had to switch engines during its development (the commercial release runs in Unreal 3), and was originally going to be a THQ-published title for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. When that Californian company famously went bust in 2013, the rights reverted back to Valhalla, who eventually did a deal with Nintendo, hence its exclusivity for the Wii U. It's had a rocky road to completion, then, but all the same, Devil's Third is a very curious acquisition by Nintendo, a PEGI-18, blood-splattered slice of software that falls a long way short of the company's usual standards.

This is entirely practical dress for taking on vast legions of enemies, really

The game's designer is Tomonobu Itagaki, whose work on the Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden franchises suggests that Devil's Third would, even if the graphics were terrible (which they are, and the frame rate's all over the shop) and the storyline dead on arrival (assuming it was ever alive in the first place), at least be a competent brawler. But by mixing incredibly basic and disappointingly weightless melee combat—one slow strong attack, one quicker but weaker, a block that's also a dodge when combined with the left stick, and the ability to wield swords and blunt weapons—with the floaty gun mechanics found in second-rate third-to-first-person shooters of two console generations ago—fire from the hip or zoom in for a more accurate shot—it's an absolute dog's dinner of an action game. It does no one thing well, and a shit-ton of them inadequately.

It'd look ugly if the year was 2007, the acting's not so much phoned in as delivered via SMS, and everything feels like it'd have been trashed even as a 360-era title. There is simply no place for a solo game like this in 2015. Whatever Devil's Third might have been before events entirely beyond its developers' control derailed the original plan, what they've ultimately dragged out of the studio, kicking and screaming like a grizzled shut-in who's not seen the light of day for more time than it takes to go to the corner shop and back since the last Friends episode aired, begs to be put down in the street. It'd be a mercy killing. It's the best that anyone can do for this game, now.

Related: Ivan's heavily inked, and so are our stars of 'The Sacred Art of the Japanese Tattoo'

Unless... All anyone, myself included, has played so far is the solo campaign. That casts you as heavily tattooed Russian Ivan, a former terrorist turned American government operative who spends his free time drum soloing inside a luxurious prison cell and who can't find a shirt to properly fit his hunky torso for love nor money. He really likes sunglasses. There's a poster in his cell for something called "Music Beartnik"—look out for their debut album, it's a wiener. He is amongst the most charmless gaming protagonists your eyes will ever fall upon and your thumbs will ever control. He is a relic of gaming's past with all the nuanced personality of unbuttered toast (Asda Farm Stores white bread, and nothing more).

Alongside a squad of Green Berets, Ivan takes on an army of bog-standard soldiers with dumbass AI, short-sighted but blade-swishing ninja sorts, armored tank-style enemies with mini-guns, actual tanks, armored cars constructed from Duplo and depressingly clichéd bullet-sponge bosses (fuck you, Big Mouse). You use the usual array of handguns, rifles, rocket launchers, grenades, and so on. If a bad guy gets in your face, you can swing a sword, a machete, or an ever-reliable iron bar into their theirs, which duly explodes. Headshot them and their skulls pop upwards like that one coconut that isn't glued down at the shy, a silken ribbon of blood sprouting beneath it. That's pretty funny every time you see it, actually, unlike the same canned animation you get whenever Ivan slices an enemy in two, which loses its appeal the second time it plays.

You've done this campaign a hundred times before, basically, and this may well be number 101 if you had to rank them from worst to first. At best, it's somewhere in the 80s. At one point, and I shit you not, one of my buddy Green Beret dudes said, unprompted: "This is getting old." Oh, mate. I could not agree more.

Ivan plays drums, and loading screen information tells the player that he's handy with a guitar, too, which is nice.

Devil's Third isn't without its share of laughs, and I'm not sure they're entirely unintentional. The name of the terrorist gang you're going after becomes "SOD" when broken down into an acronym. Brilliant. A poster at an air force base (or an airport, I forget which it is, such is the level in question's complete blandness) has a picture of a forest landscape with the words "Good Old Japan" beneath it, as if it's apologizing for this new Itagaki work representing a moldy bread roll beside the glorious banquet of 2004's astonishing Ninja Gaiden.

Messages on loading screens treat the player like this is the first action game they've ever encountered: "Be wary of vehicles on fire (as) they are liable to explode"; "Most enemies are vulnerable to headshots." Thanks for that, Valhalla. I'm amazed I didn't see a tip telling me to "aim for the red barrels." Like this game wouldn't have those conveniently positioned beside clusters of enemies, eh? (In case I wasn't clear, just then, Devil's Third features fucking loads of red barrels.) I'm not saying that what I've seen of this so far represents the worst single-player game anyone can buy for the Wii U—that's The Letter, obviously, not that the two can truly be compared—but bloody hell, it's bad. Like, really, ridiculously, phenomenally bad. Not so-bad-it's-good bad, at all. Just bad. Really. It's not a "future cult classic," idiots of the internet, or any of that crap, so you can stop that noise right now. Seriously, stop it. I've got eyes, you know.

That's the campaign, then (as much of it as I could stomach). But the multiplayer, which doesn't come online until much closer to the game's release date, looks like it might be entirely brainless fare of the entertaining variety. An Itagaki-presented gameplay video published in June (in Japanese) shows a varied selection of avatar types chucking explosive watermelons and pineapples at each other, alongside the standard guns and ammo. Now that's more Nintendo-like, isn't it? Using fruit to obliterate your opponents. Perhaps they know what they've got after all, and that will become crystal clear once the game's servers come online in August.

On Noisey: What Your Regrettable Scene Tattoo Says About You

Until then, anyone eager to play a mature-rated new title for their Wii U, after ZombiU and Bayonetta 2, is advised to cling onto their pre-order cash. Please don't spend money on this game without further investigation, after multiplayer's up and running. I know you're hungry for something more adult-orientated than a woolly dinosaur delightfully floating around a knitted world, or a sentient zit exploring landscapes shaped from clay, but please, trust me: hold fire. Keep your sword sheathed and your shirt on. And hope that Itagaki and company can recover from this and move onto something that better meets modern gaming's entry requirements.

Devil's Third will be released for Wii U on August 4 in Japan and August 28 in Europe. A US release date remains TBD.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

One day, almost a decade ago, a middle-aged man and woman walked into Tombyll Plastics in San Bernardino, California. The man introduced himself to the floor manager as Bozzy Willis. He turned to the fake testicles hanging on the wall.

"I wanna buy some of them balls."

Chad Tombyll, the owner and proprietor of the injection molding facility, came out to talk the deal over with Bozzy Willis. But when they met, the man with the strange name looked familiar.

"Do people call you by another name, Bozzy? Do they also call you... David Ham?"

Bozzy looked at Tombyll and panicked. He was then promptly escorted out of the building.

When I recently asked David Ham about this story, he just angrily chuckled and asked me a question.

"Have you ever heard of the term 'industrial espionage'?"

These were some of the first shots fired in a great war that lasted almost a decade. A war of great importance. One that you are undoubtedly just learning about now.

Like any good war, this one started with two charismatic leaders. Two leaders who could not stand the sight of one another. Two leaders who both claim to have invented Truck Nuts.

In one corner stood David Ham, the fiery owner of YourNutz.com and in the other, John D. Saller, the intense founder of BullsBalls.com. There's also a third player in the Truck Nuts game, Wilson Kemp, an 81-year-old retired high school administrator. By all accounts he's a nice man who keeps to himself. In the great Truck Nuts war, he was Switzerland.

Sure, the concept is perhaps a little rough around the edges—some might even say immature—but to the two men in question, those swaying plastic nutsacks were their livelihood.

Just a buncha truck nuts

For those who don't know Truck Nuts are fake testicles that hang down from the back bumper of a truck, usually from the hitch. They are popular in what some would consider "redneck" culture. Driving through Alberta, Texas, or Florida you are bound to see a pair of knackers flopping from the back of a jacked up half-ton cruising down a highway.

Truck Nuts were created as a marketable commodity in the late 1990s. For a long time, the plastic gonads were just a small niche market. Only the most fashionable drivers of kitted-out 4x4s would have sacks a swayin' from the back of their lifted trucks.

In the mid-to-late 2000s, the product hit a tipping point and Truck Nuts exploded. Seemingly overnight, the product went from being an occasional accessory to a massively successful novelty. As time went on, Truck Nuts popularity just kept growing. The product was featured on several television shows and the term seemed to enter our public vernacular. Now you can even get a set of nuts for your bicycle.

Kickstarter video for Bike Balls

Truck Nuts had arrived, much to the chagrin of prudish non-Ford F-150 drivers everywhere.

Ironically, the people who were the most offended by the product may have played one of the biggest roles in their success. Before the boom of Truck Nuts, lawmakers in several states tried to make them illegal by deeming them "obscene." In 2008, Florida attempted to ban the sacks and soon, politicians in Virginia, Maryland, and South Carolina jumped on Truck Nuts proverbial jock. A few states even went as far as ticketing people and in 2011, a woman in Virginia was fined $445 for having a pair of hang-downs swinging from her truck.

In 2012, a man was pulled over in South Carolina and ticketed for his balls. The Deputies' Report had a section that read, "The vehicle was displaying an obscene object from the rear bumper. The object was a pair of large fleshy testicles." The simple fact that people were attempting to emasculate these trucks almost certainly increased their popularity.

After all, is their a better way to stick it to the man than shoving a big ol' set of nuts in his face?

David Ham (occasional alias Bozzy Willis) told VICE that he came up with the idea to create these "large fleshy testicles" after seeing a pair of custom nuts on the truck in front of him during a desert rally in the '80s, and then brought the idea to life in 1996. It was a struggle: at first, he couldn't find anyone to manufacture his faux nads. But in the tenth molding shop he found somebody willing to make them. Eventually, he started selling them online and was eventually taken aback by their success.

The story behind John Sallers' bid for a dangly bits empire is similar to Ham's, but not nearly as flashy. The company lore is that Saller, who passed away last year, allegedly was out 4x4ing with his buddies when someone yelled, "Go Ernie, show'em you got balls!" With that, Saller had an epiphany of a truck with a set of nards flopping around. How Saller realized this vision is actually much more monotonous.

"As far as I've been able to find out, there was a woman in northern Nevada who started selling them in the mid-'80s, but smaller, in a different look," Saller stated in an interview in 2008.

Saller was inspired by the women, and brought the idea to Chad Tombyll, a man who works with injection-molded plastics.

"He approached me as a professional. I was in the manufacturing business at the time, and he approached me in a way not to offend me because he didn't know if I was going to be receptive of the idea," Tombyll told VICE recently. "So he just spent more time trying to describe it tactfully and it took me a long time to know what he was talking about.

"We were probably talking for an hour and a half before I realized he was talking about balls."

Here is where this story begins to go off the rails. The two companies launched within a couple of years of each other, and both attempted to mark the truck nuts territory as their own.

Using domain registrations I was able to see that Saller's Bulls Balls website was founded in 1999, and Ham's in 2002. Ham attributes this to the fact that he had an AOL website up until this point which he stopped using in 2002. When I asked him for more details of the domain, he told me that "the [website] was taken down so long ago that you'll never find it." It is important to note that this is not a definitive measure of who invented the product, but simply who appears to have been online first.

Ham told me multiple times that he has documentation to prove that he was the original inventor, but when I asked him to show me proof he got angry.

"No!" he said. "This is not court."

A pro-Your Nutz video

Regardless of who was the initial inventor of these plastic gonads, neither took kindly to having direct competition. According to Ham, the two first came into contact in the very early 2000's when Saller called him wanting to sell some of the knackers.

"He called me on the phone one day. He said, 'Your nuts don't look enough like bulls' balls.' I told him that he was the only person to ever tell me that, and then he got all indignant, and he says, 'I tell you what. I'm going to make my own Bulls Balls, and I'm going to bury you," said Ham.

"I wished him the best and, sure enough, about six months later I get these balls in the mail that look like he went to a slaughterhouse and put a mold on a dead bull... And that's how Bulls Balls was born."

On the opposite side of the trenches, Saller and the people at Bulls Balls have a different narrative. There was no godfather-esque delivery of a coin sack to Ham's door. Tombyll said that he did hear from Saller of a phone call taking place, but in this story it was Ham calling Saller.

"David Ham had contacted J.D. saying he was the first on the internet and all this stuff, and he told him it wasn't true, so they developed some disagreements," said Tombyll.

For a few years the two allegedlyfought through emails and, at some points, angry phone calls. I asked Ham to show me some of the emails but again he wouldn't.

Then in 2009, shit got real on the fake gonads front.

Ham started the website AlltheNutz.com; it was to be a place where he had a one-stop destination for all your fake ballsack needs. But to do that, he needed, obviously, all of the "nutz."

Ham's attempt to grab a handful of everyone's balls to sell on a website is where everything gets tricky.

Ham tried to get some Bulls Balls, telling VICE that he paid Saller and his associates for the merchandise, yet never received any. But the people at Bulls Balls say that they saw what Ham was trying to do and turned him down, returning his money. Regardless, Ham posted Bulls Balls on his website, reportedly without Saller's permission, and Saller publicly called him out on it. This led to a post on the Bulls Balls website called Truck Nuts - A Quest for the Truth, questioning Ham and his brother Kenneth's business ethics and the quality of the nuts they sold.

When I asked Ham about this, he got angry.

"They're lying," he told me. "That has been their motive since they started... to bad-mouth and belittle my company at every turn. It doesn't surprise me in the least."

This ended up with Ham going down from New Mexico to California under the ridiculously wonderful alias of Bozzy Willie, and heading into Tombyll Plastic to try and get his hands on some nuts. After the little charade, Tombyll let Saller know about his interaction with "Bozzy." Saller once again made a public post about this.

Shortly after this happened, posts started showing up on review sites all over the internet tearing Bulls Balls to shreds, stating that they were price fixing the fake testical market. A few pro-Bulls Balls posts popped up as well, but they were heavily outnumbered. The majority of posts would say things like, "Saller and Beaman are weak minded loosers [sic] who cant compete professionally or legitametly [sic]," or "This person is harmful DON'T BUY FROM bullballs.com, alternatively there are certainly a few websites that provide exemplary support and costs for example allthenutz.com Bulls balls, vehicle nuts, bumpernuts are the same."

On Facebook, a user by the familiar name Bozzy Willis posted on almost every link put up by Unique Truck Accessories, Bulls Balls' Facebook Page. Willis, if that is his real name, maintained this practise up until 2013.

There weren't just a few of these posts, but many of them. All over the internet. I asked Ham about these, and he said, "That is Saller's vile lies again."

Soon blogs started popping up all across the internet with the names Bulls Balls Info (both number 1 and 2), Truck-Nuts-Balls, and Reporter 666. All of these were written under the guise of an anonymous "reporter" who happened to be very anti-Bulls Balls and pro-David Ham and Your Nutz. The posts seemed to be copied and pasted from blog to blog.

Saller dealt with the PR war himself, leaving his manufacturing partner Tombyll to deal with the day-to-day operations of the business, but he did bring it up at times, according to Tombyll. "He did share with me many many times that he was having a lot of issues," Tombyll said, "and was contacting his attorney and everything else to try and get a lot of that stuff negated."

When I pressed Ham about the fact that it seems very likely the blogs were written by him or someone in his camp, he admitted that, "I'm sure I wrote several of them."

All of this came to a head on Ripoff Report where the two faux-nad pioneers had an epic 17,000-word exchange for the ages. In the great Truck Nuts War of the 2000s this was their Battle of Somme. This was their Stalingrad.

It took place over the first half of 2009. The two men both posted under various fake names, but it seems fairly obvious that it was Saller and either David Ham or his brother Kenneth. At points, they refer to themselves, and each other, by their real name while under the guise of anonymity, and at times seem to forget that they have changed characters altogether, and simply carry on with the previous arguments. All their characters seemed to call the other by the same name: The poster who appeared to be Ham would call Saller "Johnny Boy" and the post who appeared to be Saller would use "Unscrupulous Ham Gang" to refer to Ham and his brother.

They posted, in full, the cease-and-desist letters they had sent to each other, accused each other of many shady business tactics—including Saller stating that either Ham or his brother had made threatening phone calls to people that work at Bulls Balls. They took the tone of lawyers and copy-and-pasted sections of the criminal code into the text as proof that legal action was imminent. At one point, Ham shared the fact that Saller had a criminal past. Saller admitted that he "chose to plead guilty to the charge after a long time coming domestic dispute. It is something I am truly ashamed of, but it happened." But Saller in reply said that the two brothers were sociopaths and pasted an entire encyclopedia article explaining the concept.

It was an intense and bloody battle between two older men who didn't really know how to use the internet—over fake balls.

Then, as suddenly as the war began, it was over. Saller bowed out, possibly due to his deteriorating health, leaving this final post under his own name:

"All of the above posts from the Unscrupulous Ham Gang are malicious lies, they should have received letters from my attorneys by now, it is out of my hands and there will be no more posts from myself."

Screenshot via Ripoff Report

After this he posted a letter allegedly from his lawyer sent to the Ham brothers about defamation and trademark infringement.

Over time, the posts on the review sites and blogs started becoming fewer and fewer. Saller's dutiful web host John Beaman passed away, and both companies seemed to coexist in relative peace, like, well, two nuts in a sack. They had reached a detente and, while bad blood still existed between the two, the fighting cooled off.

A few years later, Saller, unable to run the company, sold it to his longtime business partner Chad Tombyll. And after a year being out of the Truck Nuts game, he passed away in April of 2014 with his beloved dog Dudders by his side.

When Ham heard of the death, he called Tombyll to confirm it.

"I read that both his web guy and Saller had passed away," Ham said. "And I thought, 'Wow, they're both dead, that's amazing.'"

Tombyll, on the other hand, called the people who took care of Saller during his final days to hear what happened. He heard that even though Saller had a family, no one took Dudders, Sallers' beloved dog. Upon hearing that, Tombyll got into his vehicle and drove 500 miles to go and get Dudders and take him home. When he got there, he loaded the golden retriever into the truck and they started their long journey from Arizona to California.

There were no nuts hanging from the vehicle as they headed west.

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter.

Not one of the fake accounts mentioned in this story. Photo by Flickr user Karl-Ludwig Poggemann

As told to Arielle Pardes

The term "catfish" has only existed since 2010, when Nev Schulman coined the word in his eponymous film about people who create fake online profiles to manipulate others. Before then, a catfish was just a whiskered, bottom-feeding fish. I resent the comparison. Catfish are stupid creatures; to convince someone that you're someone else online is careful, calculated work. I would know: I've been pretending to be other people online for the past eight years of my life.

My first-ever fake account was a guy named Joey. I was in middle school, and I was not in the "in-crowd." I realized one day that I could create a fake profile to approximate some of the attention that I wanted. I chose a few photos from Photobucket, made a fake MySpace page, and added everyone from my school. I used that account to comment on my real MySpace page, so people at school would see comments from "Joey" saying things like "you're so pretty!" It was so easy—and nobody caught on.

The fake accounts really started in 2008, as my life took a turn for the worse: I didn't have any friends. I had suffered textbook childhood abuse; my father was in prison and my mother was an addict. I wanted to be anyone but me—I wanted a different outcome, a different life. I wanted to be a different person. And with MySpace, I realized I could.

I found a girl I thought was cool on MySpace and grabbed about ten of her photos to create a new profile under the name Amanda Williams. I chose a generic name, so that if you searched for her, enough results would come up to minimize suspicion. I had stolen the photos from a girl named Samantha, who was friends with some kids at my school. She was beautiful, and a real scene queen: She had bright pink hair, lots of piercings, and most of all, her pictures exuded confidence.

Amanda, the fictional character I'd created, was the version of me that I so desperately wanted to be. She liked the same music that I did and shared the same general interests; but unlike me, Amanda was confident and bubbly. And because she was beautiful, lots of people added her, sending flirty messages along with their friend requests. That's the thing about MySpace: If you had the face, people would flock to you.

I spent all my free time on social media, building Amanda Williams' life like an avatar onThe Sims.

Soon, Amanda Williams became popular—the profile had hundreds of friends and I was finally getting the attention from men that I had always wanted for myself. I figured I could use Amanda to get in with the popular crowd at school, so I used the account to message a girl I went to school with, saying something about how awesome I was. I figured if a girl like Amanda said she liked me—Amanda the scene queen, the popular girl—then so would the real cool girls at my school. It backfired. The popular girls figured out that Amanda Williams had the same phone number listed on her MySpace as I did, and everyone found out that I had made her up. I went from being invisible to being totally shunned.

It should've made me stop, but instead, it made me smarter about how to lie online. I made a second account—it was an identical Amanda Williams account, with the same photos—but I made sure to block everyone I went to school with. I became paranoid and obsessed with the account. After ninth grade, my mom switched me from my high school into a vocational school because I was being bullied. But the new school gave me more free time, which meant I spent more time online. What should've been an opportunity to reclaim my social life became fuel for my catfishing. I spent all my free time on social media, building Amanda Williams's life like an avatar onThe Sims.

Related: Donna Simpson spent years getting paid to film herself eating on fat fetish cam sites.

I became meticulous about how I crafted the accounts: I scouted out pictures of pretty girls, but none that were too popular. If someone has over 1,000 followers on Instagram, there's a risk that someone could recognize that their photos are stolen. Once the account is created, I start by adding people from whatever city I decide she's from. It doesn't matter who I add initially—those people are just "fillers." As Nev Schulman on Catfish can tell you, if you don't have enough friends on the list, then the account looks fake (and it probably is). So you have to have enough "filler friends," who are from the city you say you're from, to make it look legit. After I have about 150 of these fillers, I start adding the people I want.

I don't upload all of the stolen photos at once: I trickle them in, just like a normal person would. I always find the girl I'm stealing photos from on Facebook, and I block every single person on her friends list. I've spent entire days doing this—actively blocking people who might catch on to the ruse—just to ensure that none of this person's friends will discover that I'm stealing her pictures for a fake account.

After that, I have to make subaccounts to convince people the account is real. If someone doesn't have any tagged photos, they're probably fake, right? So I make subaccounts—fake people who will pose as the fake friends of my fake profile. To do this, I choose videos from Instagram and post them on Facebook. I've learned how to use Photoshop to fake "proof" signs, to show that the account is "real." If I had to give people advice about the internet, it would be: Don't trust anything. It doesn't matter if somebody sends you a "proof" picture. If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.

When I was Amanda Williams, people cared about me. When I was the real me, I was invisible.

Even though everything on the accounts were fake—the pictures, the backstories, the friends—they made me feel the most like myself. On the fake accounts, I could open up to people in a way that I couldn't in real life. Other girls my age had boyfriends and best friends, but I had my MySpace friends—people who cared about me, who let me vent, who asked me about my day. When I was Amanda Williams, people cared about me. When I was the real me, I was invisible.

I've never asked for money from my profiles; just attention. It felt good to have someone call me "beautiful" or "sexy," even if I knew they weren't talking about me. I've never had someone call me that in real life—instead, people have called me a "land whale," because I've been overweight most of my life. I'm too scared of the rejection, of the vulnerability that comes with being me. I'm too scared of someone telling me I'm ugly, I'm fat, I'm disgusting, and I'm not worthy of love.

I had one relationship through the fake accounts that felt like love—or at least, as close to "love" as you can get on the internet. Eventually, I broke down and told him that I wasn't who I said I was, hoping that he would understand. He shut down and never spoke to me again. I've been tortured by that for years: Could I have had that relationship on my own? And where would I be now if I hadn't lied? There are people out there who make fake accounts because they are sociopaths—and maybe I am one—but I've felt heartbreak from these accounts, too.

Photo by Flickr user Jake Rust

I know that what I've done is wrong, deceitful, and very hurtful. It's become a sick addiction, and I've carried on my fake, internet relationships at the expense of having relationships in real life. There are times that I've befriended people for the sake of stealing pictures from them, and so that I could ask them, "What does your hair look like these days? Send me a picture." Most of my real friendships have been lost for the sake of manipulation.

Over the past eight years, I've made over 20 accounts. Those are just the main accounts—if you count the subaccounts, then it's probably ten times more. Throughout my life, this has been the only thing that has given me stability. The relationships I've had through fake accounts are the only ones I can count on to answer the phone when I call, or respond to a message. I never had that in real life.

The catfishing isn't fun anymore—and the fun that I had isn't worth the anguish and emptiness that I feel today. I'm 21 now, and I've never had a real friend, a real relationship. I've never had a job. I wasted all of my teenage years doing this. I've isolated myself so much that now, whenever I'm with groups of people, I get severe anxiety. I can barely leave my house, because the entire world that I've created for myself is inside of my computer.

I'm in therapy now, but I quitting is harder than I ever thought it would be. I only have one fake account still active, but I don't know how to let it go. The catfishing is part of me. I'm still so addicted, it feels like if I were to quit, I would have nothing. I would be nothing. My existence hinges on this fake account, because it has defined who I am for so long. I spent eight years guiding Amanda Williams through friendships and relationships, adapting her interests and hairstyles, and building the girl I wanted to become. But while Amanda Williams grew up, I never gave myself the chance.

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

Backstage at the Lyric Opera House in Baltimore this Saturday, the consensus among the cast of The Wire was that when Sonja Sohn calls, you answer. Thanks to Sohn, who played Detective Kima Greggs on the acclaimed HBO show, over a dozen of her former castmates—including Michael K. Williams, Felicia "Snoop" Pearson, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Dierdre Lovejoy and many others—came together for Wired Up, an event showcasing the voices of Baltimore's Sandtown-Winchester community. The neighborhood was home to Freddie Gray, the unarmed black man who died from injuries sustained in police custody this April, and the epicenter of this spring's protests and unrest in the wake of his arrest and death.

The event, put on by Sohn's organization ReWired for Change and presented in the midst of Artscape, an annual public art festival in Baltimore, was part play, part concert, part rally, and part reunion. The actors read monologues culled from workshops conducted over a two-day period in the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood last April, in the wake of the protests and violence. The voices represented ranged from the formerly incarcerated to police officers, teenagers to senior citizens.

Andre Royo, who played the addict and informant Bubbles on The Wire, said it was a "no brainer" to participate.

"Without Baltimore, we wouldn't be here," he told VICE. "I feel it's important for us to come back and say bravo to the city of Baltimore, to say you're not alone and you're being heard."

The day had an intimate, improvisational energy, both onstage and off. Cast and community members laughed, snapped selfies, burst into spontaneous song and dance during rehearsal. At one point a young activist laughingly told Whitlock, who played corrupt politician Clay Davis, that he kept expecting him to say "Sheeeeit," his character's catchphrase.

The community's words, spoken by the actors onstage, seemed to share a frustration at how their voices often went unheard by the mainstream media, but also a sense of empowerment and a belief that, though the price has been unthinkably high, Baltimore has arrived at a moment when its most marginalized voices can stand up and be heard.

Gray's stepfather, Richard Shipley, a reminder of that tragic cost, watched alongside the cast and community members backstage. He was quiet for much of the time, listening at one point with his head bowed, but addressed the crowd briefly at the afternoon's close, saying he was "so very, very proud" of what he sees starting to happen in Baltimore.

"I see a lot of progress being made in a short period of time," he said. "And it's just a shame that it had to take a tragedy for us to get off our butts."

Sohn told VICE that having him there was "an honor and a privilege."

"Honestly the event wouldn't have been complete without somebody from Freddie Gray's family," she said. "Because unfortunately the passing of Mr. Gray was the catalyst [...] for an entire marginalized portion of the city to activate."

Shadow, a peer advocate and gang liaison for the Penn North Recovery Center, appeared on stage to read his monologue with Michael K. Williams. For Shadow, the receptiveness of the audience and the feeling of his neighborhood being heard by its city was the true highlight of the day.

"The coolest part of the entire experience," he told VICE, "was watching people's reactions to what was being said."

"I'll be generous and say the crowd was 75% not black," he said. "And to hear them cheering for what was being said it's like, 'Oh, holy shit. Maybe we're not alone.'"

Sohn sees Saturday as only the beginning. Next, she wants to bring the piece straight to the people, erecting a stage production in the middle of Penn North.

"This becomes the story The Wire couldn't tell because of the parameters of TV," she told VICE.

"This becomes sort of like the next chapter in a sense. The real life Wire, you could say. But it then becomes the people who get to finish off that narrative."

- Meg Charlton

All screencaps courtesy of the author

I recently discovered a game called Neko Atsume, and now it's all I think about. It's a mobile phone game in which you "collect" neighborhood cats by enticing them with food and toys. You may have seen screenshots from the game pop up in your Facebook or Twitter feeds, as your friends celebrate their cat accomplishments. That's how I first became aware of it, and from the moment I saw it, I knew I had to have it.

Made by Japanese game company Hit-Point, Neko Atsume gained worldwide popularity after Apple ran a promotion for cat-based games on an informal Japanese holiday called The Day of the Cat. The promotion boosted Neko Atsume into the Japanese top ten, and American games journalists quickly began to take notice of it. The game is entirely in Japanese, but is mostly intuitive enough that you can figure out what's going on without any knowledge of the language. (I have occasionally harassed Japanese-speaking friends for answers, though.)

Neko Atsume is a game in which barely anything happens. You leave food and toys out for cats, the cats come and eat or play, the cats leave you sardines to say thank you, you use the sardines as currency to buy them new food and toys. And on and on the cycle goes. Sometimes the cats come when you don't have the game open (you know they were there, though, because of the sardines). Sometimes they come and just sit there. The most activity that ever happens is a cat rolling around, or clawing at a scratching post. It thrills me.

And I'm not alone. Comedian and writer Emily Heller is also obsessed with the game. (Full disclosure: I introduced her to it.) I ask her what she likes about it. "I don't know why I love this game. It's barely dynamic. But cats are barely dynamic. It's realistic. I think I check it as often as everything else I check on my phone. The difference is I don't worry about which tweets I missed while I was sleeping, but I do stress about which cats came and played with my yarn ball while I was wasting precious cat-gazing hours unconscious. Also, I like their little buttholes."

Looking to spread the joy of the cats' little buttholes, Heller introduced the game to Emily V. Gordon, comedian and cohost of video game podcast The Indoor Kids, which VICE Gaming profiled earlier in 2015. She's now joined our weird cat cult, and can't stop playing the game. "I probably check on my cats 15 to 20 times a day," she tells me. "I think I like the game because I like making cats happy, and I like feeling beholden to something that is easy to satisfy. I love giving them silly names—my favorites are Fremium and Dudith—and checking to see who is eating my food and playing with my weird toys that don't seem that fun. That crystal vase doesn't seem like a toy." (She's right. Frankly, it seems dangerous.)

Why can't we stop playing this game? Almost nothing happens in it, and the stakes are comically low. You don't even own the cats you "collect"—they're neighborhood cats, and the most you can achieve is to lure them temporarily to your house. I ask Dr. Sarah Lynne Bowman, who holds a PhD in Arts and Humanities, why it's so dangerously easy to become obsessed with this game. Dr. Bowman studies games academically, and her current work focuses on applying Jungian theory to role-playing titles.

"I definitely think that evolutionary instincts are at play here," she says. "We have the instinctive urge to care for small, helpless creatures, especially when they are cute. Likely, we experience some sort of hormone release when we play these games, though I'd love to see some cognitive data on the topic. I suspect we experience serotonin and oxytocin releases when we care for people and creatures. Indeed, much of the research on happiness has indicated that money, sex, and status do not keep us happy in the long run; we are more fulfilled by challenging, yet rewarding tasks—like video game play—connections within a community, and helping others."

Related: These felines are puny, though. So watch VICE's film, 'Big Cats of the Gulf'

Dr. Bowman also tells me that games like Neko Atsume give us a lot of those benefits in the "long-term happiness" category—even if the effects are somewhat illusory. "Players are experiencing the simulation of caring for others; of being challenged and subsequently rewarded; of having this community of cats. Games like The Sims and environments like Second Life have similar effects."

Dr. Bowman notes that this virtual community of cats leads people to form actual communities of people. She finds it interesting, for example, that people share their acquired cats on Twitter and Facebook. "They are reaching out to others in a tangible, social way and connecting over this simulation. This practice reinforces communal connection for gamers, people who love cats, and even people who exist in the Twitterverse as a subculture. In other words, people are creating real communities in a virtual space based on their involvement with the game."

Over on Munchies: Watch a kitten eat watermelon, because the internet

Dr. Bowman has a small warning, though. "The game is playing a trick on us, to a degree, by getting us hooked in these virtual 'love-fests.' The balance with these games always involves making sure to stay plugged into your daily life and relationships while you are interfacing with a machine that is not actually providing you a sense of communal connection or love, but rather a virtual simulation of it. However, psychologically speaking, if a balanced engagement in these sorts of games produces similar effects, I think it's a positive development."

So if you, like me, check on your Neko Atsume cats at least 20 times a day, don't fret. It's okay if their little buttholes consume your every waking thought—as long as you maintain relationships with real people and their real, significantly less-cute backsides.

Follow Allegra on Twitter.

Read: How Soccer Despot Sepp Blatter Finally Fell to Earth

Shitty British prankster Simon Brodkin, sometimes known as Lee Nelson, interrupted a FIFA conference in Zurich Monday to toss handfuls of fake $1 bills above the balding noggin of current FIFA president Sepp Blatter, the Telegraph reports. The press conference was to announce the election date for a new president of FIFA, since Blatter has decided to resign his post following the indictment of 14 FIFA officials on charges of bribery and racketeering last May.

During the conference, Brodkin stormed the stage and said, "Sepp, this is for North Korea in 2026," in reference to a fake bid for North Korea to host the 2026 Olympics. Then, Brodkin made it rain on the FIFA president.

"It's all there," Nelson quipped as security guards shooed him out the side door and into a Swiss police van.

Brodkin has a history of storming stages. Most recently, the notoriously mediocre comedian Kanye'd Kanye's performance of "Black Skinhead" at Glastonbury, before getting his ass kicked off stage.

Image via Daily VICE

A sizeable chunk of the Senate is facing misspending allegations, investigations into sexual misconduct, or criminal fraud charges.

So maybe it's no surprise that more than half of Canadians want a leader to come out and promise to abolish the Senate.

A Forum Research poll, conducted for Daily VICE, shows that Canadians are not only committed to getting rid of the unelected upper chamber, but are considering it when it comes to how they'll cast their vote in October.

The numbers are part of VICE's plan to map out what will drive votes in the upcoming election, slated for October 19. So far, we've found out that Canadians really want a leader who will legalize marijuana and repeal Stephen Harper's controversial anti-terrorism legislation.

When asked, 36 percent said they'd be very likely to switch their vote to a party that supports abolition, while 20 percent said they'd be somewhat likely to do so.

Only 30 percent said it likely wouldn't have any bearing on their vote.

This is not all that surprising, given the number of Senate scandals that have come up in recent years.

To give you a brief recap, here's a shortlist of current and past senators who've been in trouble over the past few years: Mike Duffy (fraud charges), Mac Harb (fraud charges), Irving Gerstein (avoided election spending charges thanks to a plea deal), Raymond Lavigne (convicted of fraud), Pamela Wallin (under investigation), Patrick Brazeau (sexual assault charges), Don Meredith (allegations of sexual misconduct and workplace harassment), Leo Housakos (named in corruption probe), and 30 others who are currently under investigation for varying degrees of inappropriate or poorly documented expense claims.

Then there are the various shenanigans that the Senate has pulled. For one, they actively worked to kill a piece of legislation that would afford human rights protections for trans people. Then the Conservative majority overturned the rules in order to force through a bill to force unions to open their books, which has been opposed by everyone from the Canadian Bar Association to the National Hockey League Players' Association, a government minister and the Conservative Senators themselves, from a few years prior. More recently, the Senate authored a study that recommended a wildly controversial certification course to make sure that imams aren't advocating terrorism.

So it's not surprising that the Senate isn't popular.

But what does that mean for the three main federal parties?

It's obviously good news for the NDP, as the party has supported Senate abolition for over eight years, dating back to when they were an agrarian party hellbent on abolishing capitalism.

"I'm going to be turning on the light to Senate abolition," NDP leader Thomas Mulcair told the CBC. "I'm going to work non-stop."

Of the NDP supporters who answered the poll, 63 percent said the party's pro-abolition stance was something that drives their vote.

The numbers may offer some direction for Stephen Harper, and his hand-wringing over what to do. The Conservatives had a go at reforming the Senate, in an effort to fulfill a longstanding promise made by the Reform Party to hold Senate elections and enact term limits for the members of the upper chamber. That failed when the Supreme Court told them they would need to consult the provinces if they want to make any substantive changes. The party, however, has always said that if reform won't work, they're down with abolition.

Firebrand Quebecois libertarian Maxime Bernier, a junior minister in the government, came out swinging in favour of a referendum on abolition: "The only option we have is to try to abolish the Senate," he told reporters at a party convention last year.

And their supporters seem to agree. Over 60 percent of Conservative voters want a leader who will get behind turfing the red chamber and its crazy-long appointments. (Patrick Brazeau, unless he is convicted of a crime, could remain as a senator until 2049.)

The Liberals, on the other hand, want to maintain more-or-less the status quo.

Justin Trudeau is in favour of appointing better senators, by creating some sort of advisory body to help him pick qualified Canadians to sit in the cushy upper chamber, and he would stop requiring that his senators sit as Liberals. Beyond that, he wouldn't change all that much.

Trudeau already kicked out all of the senators from his caucus, yet those senators still choose to sit and vote as Liberals. Nevertheless, he says, having a Senate that is disconnected from the House of Commons means it can do real work.

"The Senate needs to change," Trudeau told VICE in a sit-down interview about his democratic reform plans. "Quite frankly the Liberals are the only party with a plan to do that. Mr. Harper doesn't want to talk about it anymore and Mr. Mulcair is promising things that he knows he can't deliver."

Trudeau accuses the NDP of wanting messy constitutional battles over the Senate that will ultimately fail to fix the Senate at all.

The theory goes that, if a Prime Minister were to try to get the provinces on-board for abolition, a single hold-out—like Quebec or PEI, both of whom are wildly over-represented in the Senate—would block efforts to get rid of the upper chamber.

Yet advocates like Bernier and Mulcair might be on to something, if this Forum poll is any indication.

A majority in every area of the country, except Alberta, said not only would they support abolition, but that they'd be looking to line up behind a leader who promises to get it done. And the two areas of the country often cited as the hold-outs, Atlantic Canada and Quebec, are the most likely to say so—60 percent of the East Coast and 61 percent of Quebec.

One way or the other, whoever wins in October is going to have a headache on their hands. The Senate is currently one-fifth empty, and heavily stacked with Conservatives. Any efforts to abolish it—or, really, any effort to pass any legislation—will have to go through the upper chamber.

The poll, conducted between June 15 and 16, surveyed 1,281 randomly-selected Canadians and is considered accurate +/- 3%, 19 times out of 20.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter