All photos by Pete Voelker

I arrived at Times Square in Manhattan around 4:45 PM on Wednesday, and a bit of meandering through the sea of people brought me to 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue. Fences were up, and NYPD cops were trying to navigate the hoards of tourists through the "Stop Iran" rally. One lady who had just seen the Broadway musical Amazing Grace joined the crowd, which was already pretty substantial and grew quickly after my arrival. Each side of Seventh had a pen for attendees, stretching a few blocks south, though traffic mostly kept moving throughout the action.

The big theme with the speakers was to "kill the deal"—the pending nuclear deal with Iran brokered by the Obama administration. Basically, in return for the UN easing up on crippling economic sanctions, Tehran promises to cap its enrichment and stockpiling of uranium. The Israeli government and its supporters have been upset about the deal, as have many conservatives in the US.

Organizers hyped attendance as reaching 12,000 people. I don't know if that's an accurate count, but there were a lot of people, and many of them were extremely upset about the deal, and at Obama in particular.

Here's what I saw at the rally.

Photo by Flickr user Bryan Ledgard

Read: My Favorite Sneaker Campaigns

The appeal of Chucks has never been the blisters or calluses it takes to break them in. So we're pleased to see that all of that uncomfortableness is going to come to an end. On Thursday, Converse Inc. released a new version of their 98-year-old faithful foot friend with added arch support. The shoe is called, creatively, the Chuck Taylor II.

When the Boston Globe asked what medical specialists thought of the shoe, Dr. John Giurini Chief of Podiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center said that "flat shoes with limited support can exacerbate issues such as achilles tendonitis, plantar fasciitis, posterior tibial tendonitis, among other problems." But he gets that people suffer for fashion—and who understands all those big medical words, anyway?

Converse hit up their parent company, Nike, to brainstorm ways to fix up the outdated All-Star insole support. The shoe gods at Nike grabbed some of the Lunarlon technology, which usually resides inside Nike shoes, and crafted a new insole for Converse to use in the Chuck Taylor II.

Along with Nike's space-age Lunarlon tech, Converse has also beefed up the All-Star with added memory foam in the inner lining and tongue of the shoe, theoretically making it lighter and more comfortable than ever before. The Chuck Taylor II's will hit stores at the end of July.

In episode 3, Andre reminisces with comedian Bryan Hatt about the time getting T-boned by a car on the way to a Marvel movie led to him understanding his own superpowers. Andre gets into how insulting it is that his scooter is sometimes seen as a toy.

Sexy, sexy sex shops. Photo via Flickr user Eric Parker

Strap-ons, butt plugs and similar pleasure tools do not constitute "health or hygiene products" under Quebec law.

That's the gist of a precedent-setting Quebec Superior Court decision that came down on July 10 following a Montreal business owner's legal battle against the province's business hours regulation.

More specifically, the court ruled that the health benefits provided by sex shops are not significant enough to let them operate outside of the mandatory closing hours of 9PM on Thursday and Friday and 5pm on weekends.

Claude Perron is the owner of three sex shops in the Montreal area, one of which—Boutique Séduction—is the largest in Canada. Perron was first warned by provincial authorities in 2009 but he decided to remain open late, which he had been doing with impunity since 1992.

But this year, facing over half a million dollars in fines, Perron ended up in court to fight for the right to get freaky after 5 PM on weekends.

Under provincial law, pharmacies are allowed to stay open outside of usual retail hours because of the obvious need for basic health and hygiene products like soap or gauze.

"Let's face it, people don't usually use sex toys at 7 AM," Perron told VICE. "It can happen... but usually people need sex toys at night and that's when we're forced to close."

Perron says this isn't fair and that his stores offer products which are equally "urgent" and "necessary."

"This is a common sense issue. According to Health Canada, pleasure, well-being, and eroticism are key elements of sexual health," he said. "If these products can help with sexual well-being and health, I don't see why they should be considered different from other health products."

In court, Perron backed up his argument with expert testimony from a sexologist who said that any product that increases sexual excitation or reduces sexual anxiety should be considered a "health and hygiene" product because they can benefit those suffering from sexual dysfunctions or those who have particular tastes like "light S&M."

Superior Court judge Louis Gouin obviously didn't buy this extremely broad definition of "health or hygiene" products and in his judgement used the examples "sports paraphernalia, ambient music or books" as offering similar stress-relieving benefits but hardly making them "health or hygiene products".

This isn't Perron's first brush with a bureaucratic bonerkill either. In 2010, the province's Office de la langue française, commonly referred to as "the language police," gave him a slap on the wrist for selling the Super Stretch Sleeve (a girth-enhancing penis ring designed for clitoral stimulation) in English-only packaging.

Despite annual revenues in the ballpark of $3,500,000 according to court documents, it's not all about money. Perron says he's not afraid to litigate in the name of civil liberties and the free market.

"For me, it's also a matter of principle. I went to court to have my rights upheld because if nobody does anything about this regulation, nothing will change. Society can regulate itself. If consumers didn't want sex products at these times, then we would have closed our doors."

Perron told VICE that he will respect the court's orders to operate only within the provincial hours but that he is unsure about the decision. He cited the exorbitant costs of an appeal as a factor.

"I am disappointed. I didn't think I would lose, I wouldn't have fought this case if I knew I was going to lose."

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Is the sniper Quiet, seen here with main protagonist Big Boss, really Chico? Konami are remaining tight lipped. (Screencap via YouTube)

Going back to the day of Custer's Revenge, when the rape of an indigenous woman by a gun-toting cowboy was used as a sort of shock appeal to draw in audiences, video games have continuously tried to entertain players by glorifying or contorting complex scenarios into flagship moments. When Cloud cross-dressed in Final Fantasy VII, when Grand Theft Auto let you burn a prostitute alive after throwing her out of your car.

These moments have ranged from funny to laugh at with your friends to a total and complete misrepresentation of important and marginalized issues and groups. In the case of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, franchise creator Hideo Kojima may be treading some dangerous water if theories about the identity of Quiet, a character that was met with stark criticism over her scantily-clad and objectified reveal in 2013, turn out to be true. Particularly the one that suggests that Quiet is not a cisgender woman, but is actually a post-operation Chico, a central character in the (Metal Gear timeline) preceding Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker.

The theory, while bizarre in nature, actually has a lot of evidence to support it. For starters, Quiet and Chico both have very similar appearances, sporting the same hair colour and general facial structure. Their ages also match up – at the end of The Phantom Pain's prequel-game, the 1974/75-set Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes, Chico is 13, and Quiet looks to be in her early 20s by the time of Konami's forthcoming fifth title proper, set in 1984. In Peace Walker, set just before the events of Ground Zeroes, Chico mentioned he wanted to be a hunter and concept art shows him sporting a sniper rifle.

Most important to supporters of the theory is Chico's supposed guilt, over both being forced to rape his friend and partner Paz and due to admission of his comrade's whereabouts and logistics after enduring brutal torture by Phantom Pain and Ground Zeroes villain Skull Face. The million-dollar scene, which is revealed on a hidden tape in GZ, contains a conversation between Chico and his captor where he gives into the torture, only for the tape to end with Paz telling Chico to "Just be quiet." Quiet-is-Chico theorists purport that it's Chico's guilt from these events that pushes him to transition into a woman and cut his tongue out, all in order to avoid ever hurting anyone ever again.

Critics of the theory are quick to jump to the translation of an interview with Quiet's body actress Stefanie Joosten, in which she reiterates that Quiet is a female and that Chico is male. But this is hardly compelling evidence as she doesn't address the actual issue of transition at all, not to mention how often creators of entertainment use careful wordplay in order to avoid spoiling unreleased content (Jon Snow is dead, right guys?).

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You're probably thinking this sounds like a stretch, and that's because it is, but creator Hideo Kojima has made some of his own eyebrow-raising tweets in response to criticism about Quiet's appearance as a sexualised, voiceless hero, some of which suggest that theories about Quiet's identity being that of a transwoman, even if not formerly that of Chico, might be right.

"I know there's people concerning about 'Quiet' but don't worry. I created her character as an antithesis to the women characters," Kojima said on his English-translated Twitter account shortly after the reveal of Quiet. "But once you recognize the secret reason for her exposure, you will feel ashamed of your words and deeds."

Kojima's track record of exploring taboo concepts is consistent with the MO of the theory: child soldiers, nanomachines, cloning, mental health, drug use, androgyny. The list could go, but it's clear that Kojima's not afraid of crossing uncharted territory, therefore it's very well possible that he may be trying to be a champion for trans rights by introducing what would arguably be the first central-role trans character in a mainstream video game.

'Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain', "Quiet But Not Silent" trailer

However, according to Carolyn Petit, a transwoman and video game journalist who contributes to VICE Gaming, there are a number of concerns to be had with using a transgender narrative as a form of plot device.

For starters, she points to the infamous scene in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, in which a transwoman is humiliated in front of multiple people when Ace Ventura tears her clothing off to reveal that she still has male genitals, as evidence of how trans issues are trivialised to scenes of comedy or shock value. This is more or less what would be happening if Quiet turns out to be a transitioned Chico, and that reveal is used as a pivotal moment in the game. Even if well intentioned, Petit says that this can seriously simplify the diversity of trans narratives.

"When I read the theories about Quiet, I see the same sort of thing," she tells me. "What Kojima is doing, provided the theories are true, is using transness as a kind of clever plot device that doesn't in anyway reflect the actual emotional and psychological reality of what it means to be trans."

If true, Quiet wouldn't be alone: a character like Poison from Capcom's Street Fighter and Final Fight franchises is a good example of how transgender people can be reduced to easter eggs or sex objects in video games, with further proof being in the way the community reacts to it. Typing "Is Poison" into Google will retrieve the first-most-searched item as "Is Poison a man", a question that leads to thousands of pages of speculation and analysis, all of which either miss the complexity of the situation or are riddled with blatant transphobia.

Screenshots taken on July 24th, 2015, in the UK – searching at a different time from a different place may produce different results, naturally.

Petit says that while she's happy to have more trans narratives in video games, it would be a disservice to use a single character as the torchbearer for the trans community.

"There isn't one universal transgender experience, one person's journey is often vastly different than another," she says. "There are definitely ways to represent the trans experience that are completely inaccurate and, I think, sensationalistic and damaging."

The struggle to properly represent LGBT characters in gaming has been a battle long fought, like a never-ending tug of war. In 2007, when the first Mass Effect was released, it was revealed that despite the ability for female Commander Shepard to romance shipmate Liara T'Soni, the same could not be done with male Shepard and Kaidan Alenko, due to developers BioWare cutting the scene from the game. Yet when gay romances were finally introduced in Mass Effect 3 and Dragon Age II, many forum goers and commenters rose up in disgust.

Krem, from 'Dragon Age: Inquisition', was born a girl according to his backstory

Recently, with characters like Krem, a transman introduced as a mercenary in Dragon Age: Inquisition, reception in the community has been better due to popularization of trans issues in the last few years. However, Brianna Wu, co-founder of indie studio Giant Spacekat and a games media activist championing equality in the medium, says that the mainstream development community has still yet to nail down the formula for creating narratives true to the reality of marginalised groups.

"I can't think of anyone that's got it right," she tells me. Wu adds that many developers miss the ball by relying on visual representation without having a deep understanding of the character they're trying to create, often leaving the represented group disenfranchised. "What I'm constantly hearing from the transgender community is how frustrated they are that they're being misrepresented in games."

For Wu, situations like the one involving Quiet are much more serious than people realise, noting that misrepresentation can be not only be damaging to the public understanding of what trans people face but also how they view themselves.

"The truth is that the public has so little information about transitioning. Like, shockingly no information at all. I think when you're putting out a major game like Metal Gear and you're conflating childhood sexual abuse with gender dysphoria, that's such a tremendously harmful narrative."

Check out Against Me!'s Laura Jane Grace performing for Noisey's Acoustics series

Wu also stresses the importance of how severe these issues can actually be by pointing out the grim cycle trans people often get caught in due to societal pressure and harassment.

"It's really, really important to get this right," Wu says. "It's not often that you're faced with life or death through creative choices that you make, but let's just look at the facts here: transgender people have some the highest suicide rates of anyone. The reason those rates are so high is because we have a society that continually makes them the butt of the joke, abuses them, makes fun of them. It's like you're constantly told that you don't matter. So let's say this theory comes true and Kojima puts another harmful narrative about this out there – it could literally cost lives."

Exactly who Quiet is in the lore of Metal Gear remains to be seen, with nobody at Konami yet willing to confirm her identity (we did ask). It may well be that the only way any of us find out for sure is to play The Phantom Pain, when it's released in September. Until then, the only guarantee is that speculation will continue to spread across the internet, resonating the very real fear that Kojima could have bungled a central piece of what is potentially his Metal Gear series swansong.

@kivancjake

More from VICE Gaming:

In the Mouth of the Moon: A Personal Reading of 'Majora's Mask'

How 'Fallout Shelter' Turned Me Into a Miserable Prick'

'Metal Gear Solid 3', I Love You With All My Heart

Suzanne Crowe and Ian Gust, the head lab technician, in 1989. Images supplied

Earlier this year VICE profiled the progress made in battling HIV with a drug called Truvada. When taken daily, Truvada is 99 percent effective in preventing HIV negative people from contracting the virus. It isn't a cure, but it is miles from where we were in the early 1980s.

It is difficult to comprehend the fear that HIV/AIDS spurred when the virus first appeared in 1981. Nor is it easy to appreciate how much hospitals have done to improve their responses to new diseases, simply because of lessons taken from that early period. To get a sense of this progress, we spoke with Professor Suzanne Crowe, an infectious diseases physician who co-established Australia's first HIV clinic at the Fairfield Hospital in Melbourne.

VICE: Hi, Suzanne. Do you remember when you first heard the terms HIV or AIDS?
Professor Suzanne Crowe: The first time I heard about it, I was sitting in a journal club at the Alfred Hospital in 1983 or 1982. We were hearing about a new disease that was affecting gay men in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. And we were all sort of listening to it, wondering, "Oh my goodness, I wonder if that will ever come to Australia."

Do you have a vivid memory of the first case you encountered in Australia
Yeah, I do. There was one fellow, an American. He was a young man with an Australian partner, and he'd come here to say goodbye to his friend. So he arrived in Melbourne and they went out to dinner in a fancy restaurant in Armadale and while he was there he developed seizures so he was brought by ambulance to Fairfield Hospital and he was one of our very first patients.

He had an infection in the brain and stayed in the hospital for weeks getting sicker and sicker, and all that time he wanted to go home to the US to say goodbye to his mother. But in order to fly, he needed a medical escort because he was receiving intravenous treatment and oxygen. In those days the airlines were very, very nervous, so I was his medical escort and the airline insisted that I dressed in a yellow plastic suit and wore a mask. When we got to the US, the airline in Texas had cancelled our tickets so that delayed us another 12 hours. By the time we got there, he'd died without seeing his mother. That was a very poignant case that I remember.

In those early days, how much did we know about the virus?
At the very beginning, we didn't even know how the virus was transmitted. We knew it was sexually, but we didn't know if there was any other way, so I remember examining patients and having to look in their eyes and holding my breath while I was doing it because I didn't know if there was aerosol transmission of HIV.

It was tough. People were dying left, right, and center. We didn't have any treatment; we just best managed their infections and malignancies.

Fairfield Hospital in the 1980s

What was life in the clinic like at that stage?
Fairfield at that stage was known for its culture of care. The patients who came in were almost all gay men, mostly young, and virtually all of them were really grateful.

They really retained their sense of humor as well; we'd be on a ward-round taking young medical students around who probably had never seen an outwardly gay man before in their lives, it was a totally new experience for them and I can remember one young medical student who was asked to take a history of one of our new patients. The young medical student asked my patient, "Do you have a history of engaging in homosexual sex?" And the patient said, "Of course, darling." So my student asked, "How many sexual partners do you have?" And the patient said, "Oh, maybe 20." And the student asked, "Is that in a year?" And my patient replied, "No, darling, we're talking every night."

Our patients were gorgeous, many of them would stay with us for months because they were too sick to go home and we became very good friends.

There were other hospitals in Melbourne that left food for patients outside the door because no one wanted to go near them.

What was the first bit of medical progress in combating the virus?
I think it was August of 1984, Ian Gust, the head of the laboratory at Fairfield Hospital heard there was this new diagnosis and he brought the test back from the States. That was when we first learned that it was caused by a virus and we could actually test for it. If I look back on it, at that stage, 25 percent or more of the gay men who came to our clinic turned out to be HIV positive.

There was a sense of impatience because we knew we had a test but we didn't know if people stayed positive for life. We also didn't know if it meant the person had just recently been infected, or if everybody with a positive test would go on to get AIDS. It was really hard.

Did you feel supported by the Australian Government at that time?
Yes. There was a very rapid and strong response and there were people in government who came on board very quickly to support our efforts.

Certainly there were other hospitals in Melbourne that left food for patients outside the door because no one wanted to go near them. There was certainly that kind of discrimination in hospitals in the late 1980s. But it boiled down to fear and not understanding how the virus was transmitted.

In terms of the learning curve for Australian medicine, how do you think our treatment of the HIV epidemic shaped how we deal with new diseases?
The learning curve in Australia was incredibly steep and incredibly rapid. There were probably a dozen people in Australia who very quickly moved into leadership positions and those same people have since helped the government and hospital administrations with responses to other epidemics since. We now have mechanisms in place and experience from HIV that has been translated to SARS, Asian Flu, and Ebola.

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Legal highs are set to be outlawed by the British government. The bans—announced in May—come as a response to the growing number of news reports about students overdosing on synthetic drugs after using them recreationally. That could mean no more readily available laughing gas, poppers, or cannabis substitutes, such as the synthetic cannabinoid Spice.

In Spice Boys, VICE reporter Ben Ferguson travels to Manchester to meet some users who have become addicted to over-the-counter substances. After hearing about how drugs like Spice have ripped their lives apart, it becomes clear that solving the problem won't be as simple as making these legal highs illegal.

More from VICE on legal highs:

The Death Stats That the Government's Using to Ban Legal Highs

In Defense of Poppers: The Banned 'Gay Drug' That Everyone Loves to Ridicule

A Look Inside the British Government's Legal Highs Lab

Earth next to Pluto (who it should fuck). Image via Wiki Commons

In the roaring 20s, the era of pearls and flappers and inexhaustible idealism, men and women of all classes and distinctions associated the term Pluto not with the outer reaches of our solar system or the album by the rapper Future, but with warm and liquid shits.

"When Nature Won't—Pluto Will" went the slogan of Pluto Water, a well-advertised mineral water laxative, bottled at the elysium springs of French Lick, Indiana. Cheekily drawing its name from the Greek god of the underworld, it was the only mineral water that really opened up the sluices, see, to put that extra pep in your morning step. "Make your food pouch right as rain!" said some pre-Depression Pete Campbell in a newsboy cap, probably.

That was the tenor of the ads for Pluto Water, which feature a mischievous devil just winking at you, as if by drinking it you engage in a Faustian deal with the dark lord of the runs. "Know the joy of life!" read the ad for a product that makes you have diarrhea.

An advertisement for Pluto Water. Image via Wiki Commons

It wasn't until after Pluto poop water was a fixture of early 20th-century American lifestyles that the trans-Neptunian ball of ice and rock we now know as Pluto was discovered. After it was identified at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, New Mexico, on March 13, 1930, astronomer Vesto Silpher sent around an "observatory circular" (a 1930s version of a group text, but for astronomers) to the other telescopes around the world asking them to check out this tiny new body in the celestial sky, way out there, glistening in the distance, covered in craters and hope and cash and jobs.

Unaware of the whole American sensation of Pluto poop water, a young girl from Oxford, England heard tale of this new small, listless body in the sky and, considering the godly names of the other planets (Neptune! Mars! Mercury! The other ones!), asked, "Why not name him Pluto?" This little girl's grandfather probably cabled the Lowell University with her bright idea, and that's the rather short tale about how we got a ninth planet in our solar system.

Naturally, if social media existed in 1930, this 11-year-old girl would have been owned online: "lol nice, name the planet after the good poop water" or "More like Shit Planet, right? this kid is an idiot" or "You can't spell 'Pluto' without 'put lo'...ts of crap in this toilet," they surely would've tweeted, especially those without a grasp of Greek mythology. It was a terrifying moment in Pluto PR, the first of many. What if a daily gets a hold of the story, and the newsie on the corner stands on a milk crate and yells, "Extrie! Extrie! New Planet Pluto Just a Little Squirt!"

The excretive puns never stuck, thankfully, and Pluto was out of the gates as the neighborhood new guy with the longest orbit around the sun. Against all odds, he puttered around outside of the clamor of our planets unfettered, bindle over his shoulder, ready to prove his mettle and secure his place in the solar system.

For years he lived a quiet life. He was innocent and alone, save for his sister moon Chyron, as they waltzed together in icy silence. Pluto—the runt of floating satellites, just wanting to belong to the clique of larger planets—was thriving.

Misfortune soon befell Pluto. In 2001, controversy swarmed when Neil deGrasse Tyson, then director of New York's Hayden Planetarium, quietly removed Pluto from the display of the nine planets. Was Pluto a planet... or nah? A nation was torn apart. Whole ways of life would have had to be reinterrogated if Pluto was not a planet.

Much fanfare and controversy followed in the next five years, but the guillotine finally dropped in 2006. After years of being bullied by the press, after being superseded as the "farthest planet from the sun" by Neptune, after several demotions and merciless thinkpieces and "clear, inarguable scientific evidence by renowned astronomers and physicists" on whether or not he was was a planet or not, he was killed by a group of ruthless astronomers at a convention in Prague, who decided that no, actually, Pluto was not a planet. It was a dwarf planet, along with a few others out past Neptune.

Pluto wept. In its brief 75 years as a planet, it didn't even get halfway through its 258-year orbit around the sun. Its agency was stripped. Now shivering and adrift on the far edge of our solar system, the trans-Neptunian body dances on, in its stateless orbit around the sun as a planet non grata.

Image of Earth via Wiki Commons

Earth looks in the mirror and sees a vision of God. She is a blue marble, swirling with clouds. She believes she is perfect. Her beauty is unending, like a thread pulled from God's cardigan. Today her skies are bluer, her oceans cleaner, her soil more fertile, her mountains more majestic. In her eyes, she's more planet than she's ever been, a confident 4.8 million-year-old teen in the prime of her adolescence. Not only is she unquestionably a planet but she is the queen of the planets, unconcerned with the Venusian sulfur volcanoes or the Martian dirt, because she has the birds-of-paradise, the Amalfi Coast, Lean Pockets, and dank memes. She could give a linty fuck about Pluto and its planetary status.

And up until this week, this way of thinking for Earth was perfectly understandable. But two photos revealed of these two bodies have caused an unprecedented shift in the solar system's paradigm, irrevocably altering both Earth and Pluto's self-worth.

NASA's new picture of Pluto: a revelation. No longer the pockmarked aberration of the outer orbit, Pluto is young and vibrant. The photo of him is gorgeous, showing signs of mountain ranges, volcanic activity, a nascent and nurturing piece of rock that may have underground oceans. Scientists were flabbergasted by its appearance, by how he's doing, as if the decade in exile has only strengthened him, like a prison gym rat. He is a comeback story waiting to happen, full of pluck and moxie, ready to reenter the planets with the kind of sentimental fanfare reserved for Disney sports movie climaxes. He's the best looking bachelor in the solar system.

NASA's new picture of Earth: Jesus Christ, what a mess. Turns out that this is the first picture of earth taken in 47 years that wasn't a composite stitched together. Which is basically saying that earth Photoshops every selfie it has taken or only uses a picture from 47 years ago and guess what—the picture now is pretty busted. Earth is using the most basic and duplicitous move one can do when trying to represent who they really are. Earth needs to take a good look at herself and check exactly where she stands in the pool of options here.

On Motherboard: What You Need to Know About Kelper-452b, the Most Earthlike Planet Yet

Earth, girl, what do you really see? Do you see the holes in the ozone getting larger and the glaciers receding? Do you see what's happening to your forests and oceans? Do you see that you literally have a colossal garbage patch floating in one of your seas like a boil that can't be lanced? You see all that pollution in Asia? That creates a chain reaction to affect weather patterns in the United States. That's who you really are: a poisonous garbage heap full of selfish creatures whose memes are not funny.

Look at that photo. That's the real you with no makeup. You are damaged beyond repair and within 200 years you're going to cry so much you will flood your seaboards. You realize deep down inside that your status as a planet may be in jeopardy after years of mismanagement and lapse in care for your topography. You are starting to see the breaks in the skin, the transition from young to old based on years of inadequate attention. Your mountains perhaps aren't as majestic through the smog, and the sea-life not as fecund through the oil spills, whose irreparable damage to your oceans have not gone unnoticed by those around you. The moon laughs at you now, as it tugs and pushes your oceans around, doing its job, watching you wither exponentially faster into a state of complete, fogged-over decay. It whispers your business to the other satellites, it knows you ain't what you used to be, that the supervolcano underneath Yellowstone is an extinction event waiting to happen, and yes, they all read the New Yorker article about the big earthquake that is set to raze Seattle and kill the decrepit old people. Don't think that didn't get out to the rest of the planets.

Your credit is maxed, your luck has run out, no one likes you, and your slow decline into irrelevancy is now galloping apace, faster than the speed of the universe can keep up with. You will die soon, Earth, with nothing to show for it other than antibiotics, a fjord here and there, and eight installments of the Fast and Furious movies. You need one last hurrah, Earth, a dalliance with a young, fresh solar body, to remind yourself of the hope you were once filled with, before it turned to bitter, barren regret.

Which is why you should reconsider the advances of a young guy from far away, a young guy who's got a name that's tainted with evil and poo-water. Earth, you should finally fuck Pluto.

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In May 2007, Bill O'Reilly welcomed former Growing Pains actor Kirk Cameron as a guest on his Fox News talk show to convince viewers that God's existence is a scientific fact. "Darwin said in order to prove evolution—which is the number-one alternative to God—you've got to be able to prove transitional forms, one animal transitioning into another," argued Cameron, producing a rendering made by a graphic artist. "And all through the fossil record and life, we don't find one of these: a crocoduck." This past September, however, Science magazine reported that newly found fossils of the first swimming dinosaur had been discovered. It is named Spinosaurus and is a direct answer to Cameron's mythical "crocoduck."

Inspired by the whole silly ordeal, a 7,500-word erotic e-book and paperback calledKirk Cameron and the Crocoduck of Choas Magick was self-published earlier this month. The news of the novella was immediately picked up by sites like Huffington Post, AV Club, and Jezebel, where author Mandy De Sandra's words were described as "so incredibly vivid that I can almost hear the crocoduck squealing with pleasure." De Sandra was invited to appear on podcasts and radio programs. But first the author had a confession: De Sandra doesn't exist.

Christoph Paul, a.k.a. Mandy De Sandra. Photo courtesy of Paul

The scribe of Kirk Cameron and the Crocoduck of Chaos Magick is actually Christoph Paul, a 31-year-old man earning his master's degree in psychology at a New Hampshire college. Using his given name, Paul has published five previous books in the bizarro fiction genre, including Demons in the TV and Great White House (where a shark tsunami attacks Capitol Hill). As he drove from New Hampshire to Virginia to participate in Scares That Care Weekend, a horror convention/benefit, I gave Paul a call to talk about his breakout book and how he came to write an e-book about a creationist, a crocoduck, and stigmata hand sex.

VICE: How would you describe Kirk Cameron and the Crocoduck of Chaos Magick to someone who has never read it?
Christoph Paul: It involves Kirk Cameron trying to revive his career by starting Pray Away the Gay camp. And we have J. J., a young gay man who practices chaos magick. He puts a spell on Kirk Cameron to have him sleep with a crocoduck and Jesus, and he gets caught by the police and is actually sent to the Pray Away the Gay camp. But he finishes the spell at the camp and then Kirk Cameron meets the crocoduck, Jesus, and [ Growing Pains character] Boner Stabone.

What was the catalyst for writing the book?
I'm always into weird anything. I noticed there were these two women [Christie Sims and Alara Branwen]—I was lucky enough to interview them for my website—and they were writing dino-erotica. I heard they're two students from Texas A&M, and they're basically putting themselves through school writing these dinosaur-erotica things. I read Taken by the T-Rex, and I was like, This is so bad, it's genius . I remember even writing a fake review saying that this is actually an allegory for our relationship with Saudi Arabia and oil. I thought it'd be fun to write something like these dino erotica/monster erotica, but to do it in a bizarro way.

"That's the beauty of bizarro: You take the most ludicrous idea, and approach it as seriously as possible." –Christoph Paul

How do you define bizarro fiction?
I think bizarro fiction is just taking a genre and just fucking with it. My friend Raye, a big bizarro fan, put a thing on her [Facebook] wall with Kirk Cameron and a crocoduck. And I just thought, Holy shit! Has anybody done an erotica with Kirk Cameron hooking up with a crocoduck? I think that's the beauty of bizarro: You take the most ludicrous idea, and approach it as seriously as possible.

So you didn't necessarily want to write gay erotica—you just saw an opportunity to lampoon Kirk Cameron's homophobia?
Yeah. I think also I've always wanted to kind of bring South Park to books in one way or another, so that [story] appealed to me. It had a satire. There's a writer Chuck Tingle—he's really funny and he writes these like ridiculous gay erotica books, like My Ass Is Haunted by the Gay Unicorn Colonel .

Where did the name Mandy De Sandra come from?
I loved Marquis de Sade, and I just thought, Man, Mandy, and I wanted something like "de Sade" so I'm like, De Sandra!

"Someone did call me the Rachel Dolezal of bizarro erotica, which I thought was awesome." –Christoph Paul

Do you care that people might assume that Mandy De Sandra is gay?
They can say that, that's fine. I mean, ethically, I want to just say that I actually got a really good response from the gay community. I am not gay, but I want to just say you have a straight ally. I used to work at a porn store—I have no problem with gay porn; I actually think it's better. Compared to a lot of straight porn, I think it has more quality. And I talked to Bryan Keene, a horror writer, about this over the weekend. He's a big mentor to the bizarro community. I'm like, "What do I do here?" I want to keep writing as this, but I'm supposed to get interviewed on podcasts and radio—I don't want to use a female voice. And he's just like, "You've gotta come out about this. Especially if you're getting certain communities behind you. You don't want to pretend to be something." Someone did call me the Rachel Dolezal of bizarro erotica, which I thought was awesome.

Why do you think this book has taken off more than your previous ones?
Even if it's not as well-written, I actually think it's a really great horror story. I don't see myself as good as Carlton Mellick or Cameron Pierce—Pierce wrote Ass Goblins of Auschwitz and Mellick wrote The Haunted Vagina, and there's Jeff Burk with Shatnerquake. It just has the idea of, "What the fuck is this? I have to see this." The Kirk Cameron aspect, that's a big part of it.

Watch our documentary 'Cult Kids: Westboro':

Have you gotten any blowback from the religious right?
A few [comments] on Twitter, but nothing big. The religious right's pretty quiet right now. I think they blew their wad after the gay marriage announcement. I think the religious right is going through the five stages of grief right now. They're mindset is an anachronism.

I know there's a lot of people on the right who love Kirk Cameron. Huffington tried to contact him and he had no response. I really doubt if Kirk's going to even do anything; I don't see that happening. As Mandy, I would debate him [ laughs] on evolution. I would like give the [book] proceeds to charity if he won.

"I have to admit the term 'stigmata hand sex' does make me laugh." –Christoph Paul

Why have Jesus made out of cheese?
It kind of just happened. [Cameron] went to the craft table, and I'm just like, Why not? And then [I had] the idea of stigmata cheese sex and just was like, Let's do it.

Why was it important to you for Cameron to have sex with the hole in Jesus's hand?
Honestly, if I'm Christoph Paul, I don't know if I would have done that. But Mandy De Sandra is just like, "I don't give a fuck, motherfucker." She just has this energy, writing as her. I forget how actually transgressive and fucked-up this book is.

I mean, I have to admit the term "stigmata hand sex" does make me laugh. [Also, the act is] actually Satan's dirty work. That is something I would imagine Satan would [do]: pretend to be cheese as Jesus, and have somebody fuck the stigmata.

Your Satan might have more of a sense of humor than other incarnations we've seen in pop culture.
Yeah, he tricks Kirk Cameron in the end. And what's funny is it actually was a very Christian story unintentionally. [Cameron] sinned, and he ended up in hell. And hell's not in a good place.

Do you believe in that stuff though?
No, I'm an agnostic. I have an Italian Catholic father and a Jewish mother who converted to Catholicism. I went to CCD school, so I think there's always that like ten-year-old in me who like wants to piss off CCD class. I hope to grow out of that one day as a writer, but I'm just not mature enough yet. Maybe one day I'll not have to use stigmata hand sex as a crutch.

Anything you'd like to say to the real Kirk Cameron?
I think it's sad, honestly. I loved Growing Pains as a kid. Boner and Mike Seaver were like my heroes. I have no problem with religious people. I understand—we all need meaning in one way or the other. I think that Christianity has a lot of beautiful things. [But] when you try to disprove science and get crazy about gay people, you're not doing it right. I tried to be empathetic toward him in a way in the story. I wouldn't apologize, but I'd sit down and talk to him about God if he really wanted to.

Kirk Cameron and the Crocoduck of Choas Magick is available from Amazon.

Follow Jenna Marotta on Twitter.

Hailed by Benjamin Moser as "the most important Jewish writer since Kafka," Clarice Lispector was a celebrated national icon in her home country of Brazil during her lifetime, and is now recognized as one of the greatest writers to come out of Latin America in the 20th century. ("Actually, I think she is better than JL Borges," Elizabeth Bishop confided in a letter to Robert Lowell.) I first encountered her work back in 2006, in a class taught by the writer Rebecca Curtis. To talk about form and register, Rebecca assigned us "The Fifth Story," an unforgettable, formally inventive short story about a woman who decides to solve her apartment's cockroach infestation. Related in five vastly (and hilariously) different ways, the story displays Lispector's mystic intelligence and charm, as well as her perfectly unhinged sensibility.

On August 18, New Directions will release The Complete Stories, all 86 of the Brazilian master's stories, from her teens through her death, at 56. The following story, "Report on the Thing," newly translated by Katrina Dodson, is taken from that collection.

For more thoughts on Clarice Lispector and her work, check out Blake Butler's excellent essay for VICE, "The Dark Logic of Clarice Lispector."

–James Yeh

Report on the Thing

This thing is the most difficult for a person to understand. Keep trying. Don't get discouraged. It will seem obvious. But it is extremely difficult to know about it. For it involves time.

We divide time when in reality it is not divisible. It is always immutable. But we need to divide it. And to that end a monstrous thing was created: the clock.

I am not going to speak of clocks. But of one particular clock. I'm showing my cards: I'll say up front what I have to say and without literature. This report is the anti-literature of the thing.

The clock of which I speak is electronic and has an alarm. The brand is Sveglia, which means "awake." Awake to what, my God? To time. To the hour. To the instant. This clock is not mine. But I took possession of its infernal tranquil soul.

It is not a wristwatch: Therefore it is freestanding. It is less than an inch tall and stands upon the surface of the table. I would like its actual name to be Sveglia. But the owner of the clock wants its name to be Horácio. No matter. Because the main thing is that it is time.

Its mechanism is very simple. It does not have the complexity of a person but it is more people than people. Is it a superman? No, it comes straight from the planet Mars, so it seems. If that is where it is from then that is where it shall one day return. It is silly to state that it does not need to be wound, since this is the case with other timepieces, as with mine that is a wristwatch, that is shock resistant, that can get wet as you like. Those are even more than people. But at least they are from Earth. The Sveglia is from God. Divine human brains were used to capture whatever this watch should be. I am writing about it but have yet to see it. It will be the Encounter. Sveglia: Awake, woman, awake to see what must be seen. It is important to be awake in order to see. But it is also important to sleep in order to dream about the lack of time. Sveglia is the Object, it is the Thing, with a capital letter. I wonder, does the Sveglia see me? Yes, it does, as if I were another object. It recognizes that sometimes we too come from Mars.

Things have been happening to me, after I found out about the Sveglia, that seem like a dream. Awaken me, Sveglia, I want to see reality. But then, reality resembles a dream. I am melancholy because I am happy. It is not a paradox. After the act of love don't you feel a certain melancholy? That of plenitude. I feel like crying. Sveglia does not cry. Anyhow, it doesn't have a way to. Does its energy have any weight? Sleep, Sveglia, sleep a little, I can't stand your constant vigil. You never stop being. You never dream. It can't be said that you "function": You are not the act of functioning, you just are.

You are just so thin. And nothing happens to you. But you are the one who makes things happen. Happen to me, Sveglia, happen to me. I am in need of a certain event of which I cannot speak. And bring me back desire, which is the coil spring behind animal life. I do not want you for myself. I do not like being watched. And you are the only eye always open like an eye floating in space. You wish me no harm but neither do you wish me good. Could I be getting that way too, without the feeling of love? Am I a thing? I know that I have little capacity to love. My capacity to love has been trampled too much, my God. All I have left is a flicker of desire. I need this to be strengthened. Because it is not as you think, that only death matters. To live, something you do not know about because it is susceptible to rot—to live while rotting matters quite a bit. A harsh way to live: a way to live the essential.

But one night I was sleeping soundly and could be heard saying in a loud voice: I want to have a baby with Sveglia!

If it breaks, do they think it died? No, it simply departed itself. But you have weaknesses, Sveglia. I learned from your owner that you need a leather case to protect you from humidity. I also learned, in secret, that you once stopped. Your owner didn't panic. She fiddled around with it a little and you never stopped again. I understand you, I forgive you: You came from Europe and you need a bit of time to get acclimated, don't you? Does that mean that you die too, Sveglia? Are you the time that stops?

I once heard, over the phone, the Sveglia's alarm go off. It is like inside us: We awaken from the inside out. It seems its electronic-God communicates with our electronic-God brain: The sound is low, not shrill in the least. Sveglia ambles like a white horse roaming free and saddleless.

I learned of a man who owned a Sveglia and to whom Sveglia happened. He was walking with his ten-year-old son, at night, and the son said: Watch out, Father, there's voodoo out there. The father recoiled—but wouldn't you know he stepped right on a burning candle, snuffing it out? Nothing seemed to have happened, which is also very Sveglia. The man went to bed. When he awoke he saw that one of his feet was swollen and black. He called some doctor friends who saw no sign of injury: The foot was intact—only black and very swollen, the kind of swelling that stretches the skin completely taut. The doctors called more colleagues. And nine doctors decided it was gangrene. They had to amputate the foot. They set an appointment for the next day and an exact time. The man fell asleep.

And he had a terrible dream. A white horse was trying to attack him and he was fleeing like a madman. This all took place in the Campo de Santana. The white horse was beautiful and adorned with silver. But there was no escape. The horse got him right in the foot, trampling it. That's when the man awoke screaming. They thought it was nerves, explained that these things happened right before an operation, gave him a sedative, he went back to sleep. When he awoke, he immediately looked at his foot. Surprise: The foot was white and its normal size. The nine doctors came and couldn't explain it. They didn't know about the enigma of the Sveglia against which only a white horse can fight. There was no longer any reason to operate. Only, he can't put any weight on that foot: It was weakened. It was the sign of the horse harnessed with silver, of the snuffed candle, of the Sveglia. But Sveglia wanted to be victorious and a thing happened. That man's wife, in perfect health, at the dinner table, started feeling sharp pains in her intestines. She cut dinner short and went to lie down. The husband, worried sick, went to check on her. She was white, drained of blood. He took her pulse: There was none. The only sign of life was that her forehead was pearled with sweat. He called the doctor who said it might be a case of catalepsy. The husband didn't agree. He uncovered her stomach and made simple movements over her—the same he himself made when Sveglia had stopped—movements he couldn't explain.

The wife opened her eyes. She was in perfect health. And she's alive, may God keep her.

This has to do with Sveglia. I don't know how. But that it does, no question. And what about the white horse of the Campo de Santana, which is a plaza full of little birds, pigeons and quatis? In full regalia, trimmed in silver, with a lofty and bristling mane. Running rhythmically in counterpoint to Sveglia's rhythm. Running without haste.

I am now going to say a very serious thing that will seem like heresy: God is dumb.

I am in perfect physical and mental health. But one night I was sleeping soundly and could be heard saying in a loud voice: I want to have a baby with Sveglia!

I believe in the Sveglia. It doesn't believe in me. It thinks I lie a lot. And I do. On Earth we lie a lot.

I went five years without catching the flu: That is Sveglia. And when I did it lasted three days. Afterward a dry cough lingered. But the doctor prescribed antibiotics and I got better. Antibiotics are Sveglia.

This is a report. Sveglia does not allow short stories or novels no matter what. It only permits transmission. It hardly allows me to call this a report. I call it a report on the mystery. And I do my best to write a report dry as extra-dry champagne. But sometimes—forgive me—it gets wet. A dry thing is sterling silver. Whereas gold is wet. May I speak of diamonds in relation to Sveglia?

No, it just is. And in fact Sveglia has no intimate name: It preserves its anonymity. Anyhow God has no name: He preserves perfect anonymity: There is no language that utters his true name.

Sveglia is dumb: It acts covertly without premeditation. I am now going to say a very serious thing that will seem like heresy: God is dumb. Because He doesn't understand, He doesn't think, He just is. It's true that it's a kind of dumbness that executes itself. But He commits many errors. And knows it. Just look at us who are a grave error. Just look how we organize ourselves into society and intrinsically, from one to another. But there is one error He does not commit: He does not die.

Sveglia does not die either. I have still not seen the Sveglia, as I have mentioned. Perhaps seeing it is wet. I know everything about it. But its owner does not want me to see it. She is jealous. Jealousy eventually drips from being so wet. Anyhow, our Earth risks becoming wet with feelings. The rooster is Sveglia. The egg is pure Sveglia. But the egg only when whole, complete, white, its shell dry, completely oval. Inside it is life; wet life. But eating raw yolk is Sveglia.

Do you want to see who Sveglia is? A football match. Whereas Pelé is not. Why? Impossible to explain. Perhaps he didn't respect anonymity.

I want to send this report to Senhor magazine and I want them to pay me very well.

Fights are Sveglia. I just had one with the owner of the clock. I said: Since you don't want to let me see Sveglia, describe its gears to me. Then she lost her temper—and that is Sveglia—and said that she had a lot of problems—having problems is not Sveglia. So I tried to calm her down and it was fine. I shall not call her tomorrow. I'll let her rest.

It seems to me that I shall write about the electronic thing without ever seeing it. It seems it will have to be that way. It is fated.

I am sleepy. Could that be permitted? I know that dreaming is not Sveglia. Numbers are permitted. Though six is not. Very few poems are permitted. Novels, then, forget it. I had a maid for seven days, named Severina, and who had gone hungry as a child. I asked if she was sad. She said she was neither happy nor sad: She was just that way. She was Sveglia. But I was not and couldn't stand the absence of feeling.

Sweden is Sveglia.

But now I am going to sleep though I shouldn't dream.

Water, despite being wet par excellence , is. Writing is. But style is not. Having breasts is. The male organ is too much. Kindness is not. But not-kindness, giving oneself, is. Kindness is not the opposite of meanness.

Will my writing be wet? I think so. My last name is. Whereas my first name is too sweet, it is meant for love. Not having any secrets—and yet maintaining the enigma—is Sveglia. In terms of punctuation ellipses are not. If someone understands this undisclosed and precise report of mine, that someone is. It seems that I am not I, because I am so much I. The Sun is, not the Moon. My face is. Probably yours is too. Whisky is. And, as incredible as it might seem, Coca-Cola is, while Pepsi never was. Am I giving free advertising? That is wrong, you hear, Coca-Cola?

Being faithful is. The act of love contains in itself a desperation that is.

Now I am going to tell a story. But first I would like to say that the person who told me this story was someone who, despite being incredibly kind, is Sveglia.

Now I am nearly dying from exhaustion. Sveglia—if we aren't careful—kills.

Watch our documentary 'Snake Island':

The story goes like this:

It takes place in a locale called Coelho Neto, in the State of Guanabara. The woman in the story was very unhappy because her leg was wounded and the wound wouldn't heal. She worked very hard and her husband was a postman. Being a postman is Sveglia. They had many children. Almost nothing to eat. But that postman had been instilled with the responsibility of making his wife happy. Being happy is Sveglia. And the postman resolved to resolve the situation. He pointed out a neighbor who was barren and suffered greatly from this. She just couldn't get pregnant. He pointed out to his wife how happy she was because she had children. And she became happy, even with so little food. The postman also pointed out how another neighbor had children but her husband drank a lot and beat her and the children. Whereas he didn't drink and had never hit his wife or the children. Which made her happy.

Every night they felt sorry for their barren neighbor and for the one whose husband beat her. Every night they were very happy. And being happy is Sveglia. Every night.

I was hoping to reach page nine on the typewriter. The number nine is nearly unattainable. The number 13 is God. The typewriter is. The danger of its no longer being Sveglia comes when it gets a little mixed up with the feelings of the person who's writing.

I got sick of Consul cigarettes which are menthol and sweet. Whereas Carlton cigarettes are dry, they're rough, they're harsh, and don't cooperate with the smoker. Since every thing is or is not, it doesn't bother me to give free advertising for Carlton. But, as for Coca-Cola, I don't excuse it.

I want to send this report to Senhor magazine and I want them to pay me very well.

Since you are, why don't you judge whether my cook, who cooks well and sings all day, is.

I think I'll conclude this report that is essential for explaining the energetic phenomena of matter. But I don't know what to do. Ah, I'll go get dressed.

See you never, Sveglia. The deep blue sky is. The waves white with sea foam are, more than the sea. (I have already bid farewell to Sveglia, but shall keep speaking about it strictly because I can't help it, bear with me). The smell of the sea combines male and female and in the air a son is born that is.

The owner of the clock told me today that it is the one that owns her. She told me that it has some tiny black holes through which a low sound comes out like an absence of words, the sound of satin. It has an internal gear that is golden. The external gear is silver, nearly colorless—like an aircraft in space, flying metal. Waiting, is it or isn't it? I don't know how to answer because I suffer from urgency and am rendered incapable of judging this item without getting emotionally involved. I don't like waiting.

A musical quartet is immensely more so than a symphony. The flute is. The harpsichord has an element of terror in it: The sounds come out rustling and brittle. Something from an otherworldly soul.

Sveglia, when will you finally leave me in peace? You aren't going to stalk me for the rest of my life transforming it into the brightness of everlasting insomnia? Now I hate you. Now I would like to be able to write a story: a short story or a novel or a transmission. What will be my future step in literature? I suspect I shall not write anymore. But it's true that at other times I have suspected this yet still wrote. What, however, must I write, my God? Was I contaminated by the mathematics of Sveglia and will I only be able to write reports?

And now I am going to end this report on the mystery. It so happens that I am very tired. I'll take a shower before going out and put on a perfume that is my secret. I'll say just one thing about it: It is rustic and a bit harsh, with hidden sweetness. It is.

Farewell, Sveglia. Farewell forever never. You already killed a part of me. I died and am rotting. Dying is.

And now—now farewell.

Translated from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson.

Clarice Lispector was born in 1920 to a Jewish family in western Ukraine. As a result of the anti-Semitic violence they endured, the family fled to Brazil in 1922, and Clarice Lispector grew up in Recife. Following the death of her mother when Clarice was nine, she moved to Rio de Janeiro with her father and two sisters, and she went on to study law. With her husband, who worked for the foreign service, she lived in Italy, Switzerland, England, and the United States until they separated and she returned to Rio in 1959, where she died in 1977. Since her death, Clarice Lispector has earned universal recognition as Brazil's greatest modern writer.

Photo taken by John McKeon, via Wikipedia

Related: Watch our documentary, 'The British Wrestler'

Hulk Hogan, the 12-time wrestling champ, is having a pretty tough time of it at the moment. He's in the middle of suing Gawker media over its publication of his sex tape, and now WWE has apparently started taking all mentions of him off its website.

Hogan is no longer listed in the WWE Hall of Fame, despite being inducted way back in 2005, and all of his merchandise has disappeared from the online store. Weirdly, a URL still exists for his "Superstars" profile, but the page redirects to a message telling Hogan fans "You are not authorized to access this page." He's also no longer listed as a judge on the MTV show, WWE Tough Enough, which is in the middle of its sixth season.

The WWE hasn't commented on why it's seemingly disassociating from Hogan, but some sites have reported that the split is linked to a 2012 interview that has recently resurfaced, in which Hogan talks about his use of the word nigger.

Hulk Hogan interviewed on DJ Whoo Kid's show 'Whoolywood Shuffle'

Hogan—real name Terry Bollea—hasn't commented on what's going on, although he did tweet this cryptic message:

Whether Hogan has done anything new to piss off WWE remains to be seen, but the immediate future looks bleak for devout Hulkmaniacs.

Your home to begin with in 'Fallout 3' is inside Vault 101. But where you go from there is up to you.

Having recently uprooted myself to move from England to Scotland, the question of what "home" really means has been on my mind a lot. The very nature of what makes a home is intangible in a way, while also being grounded in the physical: the smells and colors, the feel of the carpet between your toes. The people you share it with, your memories and roots. A home is more than where you live, more than the books and bricks, and that abstract feeling of comfort and familiarity is built out of any number of overlapping memories and associations which all differ from person to person. There's no single formula that creates that feeling of home, it just is.

The types of homes that video games represent differ widely depending on where you look. There are homes you can customize, homes you spend very little time in and homes that can act as narrative devices. In the process of moving out of my student room in Southampton I came across a number of forgotten-about possessions, including a barely used notebook. It had just a few disjointed words and sentences scattered through its insides, with a shameful amount of blank pages completing its content. Within the white spaces there was one hasty scribble that stood out.

"I've felt homesick for most of my life. A feeling that I don't belong and, perhaps naturally, trains feel like home. Perpetual movement from place to place gives me respite from the biting homesickness that follows me."

That was it. With no context or following comment to connect the statement to a specific place in time, it still managed to hit a nerve. The idea of the "forever traveler" has long been romanticized; the lovable vagabond who makes friends everywhere they go and, despite not truly having a home, somehow always has a safe place to lay their head. They drink all day, soak up the local culture and learn about their delicacies and art before heading to a home where they're welcome and loved to rest, before another day of excitement.

In 'Mass Effect 2,' the Normandy becomes a temporary home for an unlikely band of heroes.

In reality, this kind of lifestyle is exhausting and largely comfortless. Post-apocalyptic video game series Fallout represents a world in which the lack of a home and constant traveling are central to life outside your abandoned vault. Spending days padding across hostile deserts, defending yourself against radiation-fueled monsters like Radroaches and Cazadors to finally bed down in a dirty tent, with nobody to turn to for comfort, before you repeat the process the following day. The Fallout series shows a central fear present in all post-apocalyptic fiction: the loss of the home.

The loss of personal space for an individual reflects the larger loss of the world for the human race. Your home is, in effect, your world. In the Fallout games your ability to shape your world based on what's important to you is taken away, and the guarantee of safety that a home provides is no longer attainable. Instead, you have to do what you can to survive through an increasingly hostile environment. Similarly, in Mass Effect 2, the companions you recruit to help you on your mission against the Reapers do what they can to carve out homes for themselves on the game's "hub"-style spaceship, the Normandy. Though, like the nameless traveler in the Fallout series, your companions cannot guarantee themselves safety, they do what they can to replicate that feeling of home and make what limited space they have truly their own.

Related: Watch VICE's new documentary, 'ICEMAN'

Jack tucks herself away under a staircase, hidden from the foot traffic of the ship, hugging the cold, metallic structure of the ship instead and shying away from human (or alien) contact. This haphazard, temporary home is representative of what's important to Jack to make her feel safe and happy. Like Garrus in the engine room and Thane in the driest room on the ship in a desperate effort to slow down the progression of his illness, the personalities and quirks of your companions are emphasized by the way they emulate their previous homes.

When replicating your friends, favorite fictional characters and celebrities in Nintendo's Tomodachi Life, every aspect of their personality is taken into consideration; they develop tastes for certain foods, fashions, and activities. As they build relationships with other residents, they can choose to invite some of them into their homes and share their space with them as they hang out together. Once two characters are friends, they'll often be found in each other's apartments chatting away or just standing around together. That level of trust isn't afforded to everyone on the island and, as such, these relationships take on a greater sense of intimacy and can progress into romantic ties.

A screen shot from 'Tomodachi Life,' showing how your pals and you can get up to activities outside the home

As a result of its privacy and intimacy, the home is often used as a thematic symbol for family, safety, and love. While presenting all the trappings of a happy family setting, Gone Home subverts the traditional idea of the home as once-familiar objects become unknown in the context of an empty house and an ominous letter from your younger sister.

Gone Home is the uncovering of a ghost story. Items that once represented everyday life become foreign, suspicious, and capable of extreme harm. Books rashly thrown on the floor, letters, or cassettes or any object that may have been absentmindedly left on a table or a chair can be picked up and examined for hints of malicious intent in an attempt to uncover what's happened. The home is utilized to tell the story of Gone Home and becomes a physical sign of betrayal, its grand, all-American foundations hiding something altogether darker.

In 'Gone Home,' the house itself becomes a kind of threat.

Homes are complicated. There's no singular universal experience of what a home is that ties everything together in a neat checklist. Homes can host good and bad memories alike, they can be messy or neat or they can lie anywhere in between that binary. American author and poet Maya Angelou perhaps sums it up best: "The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned."

For now, I'm still attempting to make my own safe place, which I envisage as being warm, tacky, and welcoming all at once. And when I eventually get to the point that my Tomodachi Life islanders are at, and can casually invite Nicki Minaj over to sit on my floor and play 3DS, then I think I might finally feel at home.

Follow Ria Jenkins on Twitter.

'Ocarina of Time' action at Awesome Games Done Quick 2015. Image via DSOGaming.com

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

I've been watching speedrunning charity marathon Games Done Quick for a few years now, and that warm, fuzzy feeling just gets bigger every year as the donation totals continue to rise. The first event raised $10,000, which is no small feat in itself. Five years later, in January this year, Awesome Games Done Quick 2015 managed to collect $1,576,085 for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. That's a truly heartwarming result that everyone in the speedrunning community is hoping to build on at Summer Games Done Quick, which starts on July 26.

Chris Grant of Games Done Quick tells me that it all started as a casual meetup between 20 members of Speed Demos Archive, a website focused on hosting high quality speedrun videos and fostering a tight forum community. It quickly turned into a charity event thanks to Mike Uyama, founder of the GDQ marathons.

Chris says, "This was Classic Games Done Quick, the first GDQ marathon, and it was originally going to take place at MAGFest, The Music and Gaming Festival. But internet issues at the venue eventually placed Classic Games Done Quick in the basement of Mike Uyama's mother's house."

Apparently, Classic Games Done Quick was rife with technical issues—problems that, surely, would only grow as the event did? "We've had a few fire alarms go off," Chris tells me. "A large majority of the staff, including myself, are ready to be on-call at all times. Most GDQs run smoothly, but we have to be ready in case anything happens—tech issues, runner issues, stream issues. Since we're not centralized anywhere, we're essentially building a large temporary streaming space every marathon, and we also use a ridiculous amount of old technology like the NES that doesn't necessarily work well with modern streaming technology. Even getting the marathons started is impressive to me, let alone switching from a Wii U to a Nintendo at a moment's notice. Most nights the staff gets a decent amount of sleep, but some days we end up having to nap or load up on caffeine because of a late-night stream or tech issue."

Games Done Quick has grown massively since those first 20 people got together in 2010. January's Awesome Games Done Quick had over 1,000 attendees, with 150 runners among them. Who are these other 850 people not running, you may ask, and I did. "Some community members only care for finding glitches and exploits, a sort of hobby quality assurance," Chris says, "and there are others who enjoy spectating and talking about speedruns, who aren't necessarily interested in speedrunning themselves."

Summer Games Done Quick promotional trailer.

"I'm amazed at how huge the GDQ events have become in such a short time," Kari "Essentia" Johnson tells me. At Summer Games Done Quick she will be running Half-Minute Hero,and then Chrono Trigger cooperatively for the big finale in the early hours of August 2. I ask about how she got into speedrunning, and what the appeal was. It's a tight community, but a relatively small one still, so clearly it's not for everyone.

"I started speedrunning in late 2006, when I first discovered the community. There is a competitive aspect to speedrunning of course, and when I first started I cared a lot more about being the best than I do now. The main reason I speedrun today is that it gives me a reason to keep playing the games I love, with a goal besides just beating the game."

Is it possible to make a living out of it, in the same way that some standard video game streamers do? "I don't think it's really possible unless you're amazingly popular and stream quite often," Kari says. "I'll certainly never make a living out of it, because I would rather spend time with my family and keep it as a hobby."

Related: Watch our documentary The Mystical Universe of 'Magic: The Gathering'

Despite her attitude towards speedrunning, Kari has pulled off some impressive feats, and is something of a trailblazer in the scene. "I think one of my greatest achievements was the first time I completed a single-segment speedrun (completing the game in one go without resetting) of Final Fantasy VI in 2007. Back then, people didn't think it was possible to complete a single-segment run of an RPG. But after my run was posted on Speed Demos Archive, people started doing single-segment runs of other RPGs. It's interesting that single-segment runs are now much more popular than segmented runs."

The most impressive moment that I've seen on a GDQ stream was the Tetris: The Grand Master exhibition earlier this year, particularly when the board became invisible during the game credits (from around 1:10:00 into this video). I ask what's most impressed the people who actually put these events together.

"The blindfolded GDQ runs have been spectacular," says Chris. "My favorite moment is when Zallard1 at AGDQ 2014 managed to beat Super Punch-Out!! for the SNES blindfolded. He accidentally performed a frame perfect counter at one point in his run and had to adapt his strategy a bit because it changed up the pattern of that fight."

Zallard1's blindfolded 'Super Punch-Out!!' run in 2014

Looking down the sizable list of games (speed)running at Summer Games Done Quick, it's hard to notice one particular theme that connects the chosen titles. Does something in particular make for a good speedrunning game, or can it be anything?

"Just about any game that has an ending can be speedrun, but what makes one game better to run than another is pretty subjective," says Kari. "Some might say that lots of randomness makes for a bad speedrun. However, I've run longer games that have lots of random elements, and it's kind of a fun challenge to find ways to be prepared for whatever the game might throw at you. So I think it's really up to the runner's preference."

You've probably noticed by now that many games that get speedrun (this is the past tense, I have been reliably informed) are pretty old. Is this a nostalgia thing, or is it that older games are easier to bend to your whims?

Speedrunner Obdajr in 'Chrono Trigger' action at Awesome Games Done Quick 2014. Image via YouTube

"I'd say it's mostly nostalgia," says Kari. "Speedrunners are more likely to run games that they love and have played a lot. Also, older games have had more time for people to develop speedrun routes. In some ways it's easier to run an older game, because a lot of the planning and routing has already been done. If you want to run a new game, you'll most likely be doing a lot of that work yourself."

Doing everything yourself must be a time-consuming ordeal. But people persist, whatever the game, always striving to shave milliseconds off their best times. "Generally, shorter games take less time to learn," Kari says, "but sometimes there will be a lot of technical tricks that can take lots and lots of practice to be able to do consistently. With longer games, like RPGs, there will always be little mistakes, like time spent in menus, that can be done faster."

Read on Noisey: What Your Favorite Music Festival Says About You

You have to have an element of perfectionism to your personality, then? "Yes," confirms Kari, "but you also have to take into account randomness. For example, the most random part of a Chrono Trigger 100 percent run is in the last dungeon, where at one point you can get between zero and six battles. Until someone plays perfectly and gets zero battles in that last dungeon, there will always be possible improvements."

I'd highly recommend watching at least some of Summer Games Done Quick, and if you can donate, even better. Take a look over the schedule, find something that tickles your fancy, and I guarantee you'll be enthralled by what you see. We've discovered that just about anything can be speed run, even Gone Home, so there really is something for everyone. Not that everyone has the skill and patience it takes to be a speedrunner, of course, but I'm glad those that do find the time to entertain the rest of us so often, and for a great cause.

Summer Games Done Quick kicks off on Sunday, July 26 and runs until August 2.

Follow Matt on Twitter.

On Wednesday, Beijing was buzzing with news and pictures of an army of Spartan warriors, wearing only capes and loincloths, storming the subways and marching on Sanlitun, a shopping district known for its drug dealers and the recent headline-making Uniqlo sex tape. The Hellenic invasion might have succeeded if not for a last stand by Beijing police, who arrested some of the bare-chested marchers.

The cosplayers were actually foreign models hired to plug Sweetie Salads, a lunch delivery service based out of the central business district that was celebrating what is now probably a pretty awkward one-year anniversary. The arrests speak to the growing tension between China's embrace of market capitalism and its old-school security apparatus.

"Passersby scrambled to take photos of the scantily dressed men when they first appeared on the street, and the volume of onlookers was deemed disturbing by authorities," reported the state-owned China Daily. "Beijing police issued warnings and ordered them to stop, and those who failed to cooperate after several warnings were eventually escorted away."

The paper adds, "In China, those who want to parade for any purposes must obtain a permit from the authorities beforehand."

"I was at a lunch session when they were promoting at Jianwai Soho," said Stephanie Wang, a business developer for a local design studio. Soho is a brand of upper-crust business and shopping centers.

"It was cool," she continued. "It was just guys dancing together and letting people take photos and scan the QR code on the bottom of the salad. Nothing weird happened."

The epic march continued to Sanlitun, about two subway stops away, where the salad-tossing procession ran into Beijing's finest. What happened next is not entirely clear, but photos on social media show police holding down two of them on an overpass.

"It's a good promo for that salad company" said another spectator, who happened to be passing by the promotion. "Now everybody knows about this fucking salad."

Watch: China's Elite Female Bodyguards

It is not clear how many participated or were detained. The Global Times (nicknamed "China's Fox News" by Foreign Policy) published a breathless report of "around 100 scantily-clad foreigners," of whom "dozens" were arrested. A security guard at Sanlitun Soho, who did not give his name, was more conservative: "About 35" participated, he told me, which seems consistent with the number shown in online photographs. He only saw about three arrested.

Many expats moonlight as models or actors, although such work is illegal on most visas. In the past, police have posed as agents to trap unsuspecting student models.

Sweetie Salad apologized for the commotion. "We did a Spartan activity, but did not anticipate that people's interest would exceed our expectations," the company admitted in an online mea culpa. "We will strictly follow the police's instruction," the company promised. "Thanks for everyone's support and thanks to the police for directing and maintaining our activity." (A phone call on Thursday afternoon was not returned by the time of publication.)

This is not the first time the Beijing Fun Police made headlines by being a total buzzkill. In 2008, police detained members of a local running club until 4 AM after mistaking their baking flour for a chemical weapon. In 2010, a group in Santa costumes was expelled from Tiananmen square for an attempted group photograph.

The Spartan drama played out not far from Sanlitun's Uniqlo, made famous last week by a sex video shot in a changing room. Authorities arrested five people connected to the steamy film, prompting some to speculate that local police were being unusually vigilant on the day of the Spartans' arrest. (The 70-second quickie was condemned by the Chinese Cyberspace Administration for infringing against "core Socialist values.")

Despite Uniqlo's firm denials, some netizens still believe the viral video was a marketing ploy. In either case, CNN reports that the store is benefiting from a stiff rise (so to speak) in popularity, prompting authorities to scrub the store's name from social media searches. The Global Times called it "the best marketing campaign of the year."

Silly stunts have backfired before. Last year, a risqué campaign brought heavy fines to a Shanghai laundry service after actors stripped to their underwear on the subway.

All of which raises a delicate question for Chinese authorities: How long can the state and market continue politely ignoring each other? As long as the government remains determined to fertilize innovative startups ("Innovation" and "startup" being among the most tediously overused words in official newspeak) we can probably expect a steady rise in desperate publicity gambits by both established businesses and wannabe zillionaires.

Echo Wei contributed translation.

A bail bond shop in Vegas. All photos by the author

In downtown Las Vegas, not far from Fremont Street, a cluster of bail bond firms surround the Clark County Jail—bars on the windows, neon signs declaring OPEN and AS SEEN ON TV.

The one-story buildings, barely bigger than mobile homes, look incomplete; if hotels on the Strip are gaudy architectural diamonds, these offices are cheap rhinestones. There are a litany of competing firms in the area, including All Pro Bail, Godfather's, and AAFORDABLE BAIL BONDS—its double-A ensuring it's at the top of the phonebook list.

Inside, bail agents—or "bondsmen"—take collect calls from prison pay phones, offering to front money to get arrested people out of jail until their court appearances in exchange for 15 percent of their bail (a percentage set by the state) or $50—whichever is higher—along with a separate $50 filing fee. These bail agents have all completed a required 20-hour course, are licensed by the state of Nevada, and can put up bonds like $3,000 for domestic battery and $15,000 for strangulation.

Related: I Spent 24 Hours in a Las Vegas Casino

I spoke to three bail agents working within a block of each other. "Carlos," 34, and "Scott," in his 40s, both asked to remain anonymous, while 25-year-old Victor Alvarez—who was born and raised in Las Vegas—was less concerned about exposure. They told me stories about fronting $500,000 for a doctor who was re-using syringes and infecting patients with hepatitis C, as well as what happens when a client skips town after being let out of jail.

VICE: What did you do before you got this job as a bail agent?
Carlos: I worked in security. Family members have all worked here in the past, so they called me. Now I've been here 12 years.

Victor: I worked in a warehouse. I actually still work there. I do two full-time jobs, working 75 hours a week. I've been doing that for three years now. It sounds bad, but I like money!

Scott: I've been a bail agent nine months. I worked in automobiles for 27 years—I was the GM of a car showroom. I used to earn $400,000 a year but I got burned out. A 90-hour week dealing with the public gets tiring. My niece offered me a job here. I knew nothing about the bail business, but I needed a change.

What sort of charges do your clients need to be bailed out for?
Carlos: The majority of our cases are domestic violence and DUIs. These are considered gross misdemeanors and they make up at least 50 percent of our cases. The most common misdemeanors are traffic tickets and the most common felonies are burglary and possession of controlled substances.

Victor: Thirty percent of our cases are for domestic battery and 20 percent are for DUI. The other 50 percent is a mix of possession, trafficking, controlled substances, lewdness to a minor, child molesting, theft, and robbery with a deadly weapon.

Scott: Seventy-five percent of our business is domestic battery and 60 percent of those arrested for it are women. Most of them are out-of-towners. Nice hotels don't want any problems. If a couple's drinking and they fight, the woman might slap the man. The hotel employee will call the cops. The cops'll look at the replay on the camera and decide if they have just cause. Most of the time, they arrest them. The couple might have forgotten the fight—it doesn't matter whether they want to press charges—the police tend to arrest them. 50 percent of the people arrested are on vacation.

There's a lot of domestic battery?
Carlos: Yeah. There was a couple who got married here—they were arrested on their honeymoon. They were heard making noises [and] the people in the next room called the police. When the couple answered the door, the police saw marks on them. According to the couple, they'd been having sex, not fighting, but cops went to arrest the husband. The woman started fighting the officers, so they arrested her, too. Their bail was $3,000 each.

Victor: A lot of people are surprised about domestic battery here. Mostly it's in the casino, if a couple shoves one another, the casino will call the cops and the cops will arrest them. People say, "It wasn't serious, we were just playing around!" Or they could be play-fighting in an elevator. Security will see it on camera and they wait for the couple when they get out. Cops take them to jail, to be safe—to prevent anything more serious happening.

Scott: Nobody knows it's like this here—not until it happens to them! And once you're arrested, you're not allowed back into your hotel—the staff pack your things up for you and you have to collect them from security.

Are there any charges you won't provide bail for?
Carlos: We won't take soliciting or engaging in prostitution unless we get full cash collateral. This is a tourist town so the girls arrested for it aren't even from here—they'll just head to another big city.

Victor: There's no bail for murder. Some homeless people get arrested on purpose. They'll steal from a Walmart because jail means a shower, a bed, and three meals a day. They won't apply for bail—they'll try to stay there as long as they can. Prostitutes are tricky. It's $1,000 bail for soliciting, so if you bail them out, you're risking $1,000 and you're only getting $150—unless you get collateral.

Scott: We don't deal with prostitutes; they're a pain in the ass. They don't show up for court and they're transient, like strippers. They move from town to town.

How do decide whether to risk posting someone's bail?
Carlos: We always look at the co-signer—the indemnitor. We look at them because we don't know anything about the defendant, because they're in custody. The co-signer makes or breaks it. We say no if they're not working, because if the bond is forfeited, how are they going to pay you? But we might say yes if they have vehicle titles and property—depending on how high the bail amount is, we'd look at property as collateral.

Victor: We don't base it on credit scores, it's more about you—what have you got to lose? If you live in Vegas and you have a steady job, you're less likely to disappear. If you live in budget rental accommodation and you don't seem to have ties to Vegas, you're more risky. We look at how long you've had your job—are you a responsible person? We tend to take employed people but we do take some SSI [retirement/disability]. Every case is different.

Scott: You have to pick and choose who you help out. You have to read that person, understand them. We ask as many questions as possible to make sure they're not full of shit. It's a red flag if there are inconsistencies in the stories.

For more on weird jobs, watch our doc on America's lucrative divorce industry:

Are there any cases you won't forget?
Carlos: The biggest bail we had was for $500,000. It was for a doctor who had a clinic here in Vegas. The doctor was re-using syringes and infecting people with hepatitis C. There was another bail for $250,000: A 14-year-old girl made up a story that her grandfather touched her. She wanted to go to a Britney Spears concert with her friends and her grandfather wouldn't pay for her friends' tickets—she got mad and claimed he touched her. He owned several coffee shops and his wife gave us the 15 percent—$37,500—in cash. He was cleared when the girl admitted making it up.

Victor: I remember the people! We get a lot of crazy people. They threaten you because they don't want to go back to jail. They say: "You've got to let me go, I'll come back for you when I get out of jail—you don't know who you're messing with!" Usually we just blow it off—no one ever comes back anyway. The biggest bail we had was over $300,000 for drug trafficking.

Scott: There was a guy walking through the MGM [Grand casino] with his wife. Nice couple, well-dressed. The guy sees an iPad on floor, picks it up. He's walking to the front desk to hand it in and suddenly three or four cops with handguns tackled him to the ground. They arrested him for theft—grand larceny. The police set him up. There are a lot of cases where police have set people up—it's a con. It's all about the money.

"We get a lot of crazy people. They threaten you because they don't want to go back to jail." –Victor

How often do you have to chase after someone who skips bail?
Carlos: I've had a couple of clients who've tried to escape. I was taking one guy to the City of Las Vegas Detention Center. He was in the vehicle, handcuffed, with his seatbelt on, but when we got to a street light, he managed to unlock the door with his foot. I grabbed him by his shirt. He was yelling like a little girl, "Help! Help!" The driver got out to put him back in and everybody was staring at us. All for a traffic ticket—for $1,140 bail.

Victor: Some people disappear—if you can't get them back, you pay off what you owe to the jail. You don't chase people to other countries. But yeah, we'll phone, we'll turn up at addresses. Facebook helps—people post where they're at, you just have to keep checking on them. I once had someone extradited from Alaska.

Scott: I'm looking for a guy in Mexico right now. He's a known drug dealer who was arrested for sexual assault and impersonating a police officer—his bail was $60,000. He's now in Mexico City. We think he works for El Chapo, the drug lord. I can spend the money and go to Mexico. I can hire someone to find him. But I can't arrest him or legally bring him back here because he's not a US citizen. Our next step is to turn him into ICE [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. We need to alert police there that he's a fugitive from the US, and get him deported here so we can get our money back. If we don't find him and put him back in jail, we're $60,000 down. He's been missing three months.

Follow Samantha Rea on Twitter.