The National Archives just published a huge cache of previously unseen photos of Vice President Dick Cheney on September 11, 2001. There's no apparent connection to a special anniversary, or some kind of current event with a special connection to the deadliest terrorist attack in US history.

Instead, the photo dump was a part of a larger response to a Freedom of Information Act request asking for "responsive photos from the White House Photo Office." According to The Hill, the FOIA request was from Colette Hanna who works for Frontline on PBS.

In the photos, Cheney looks like a worried Vice President watching something terrible happen, and then talking to his staff about what to do next.

The photos are by a Vice Presidential staff photographer, who snapped the shutter liberally throughout the day as Cheney met with President Bush, and staffers like Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Cheney's chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. It must have been obvious at the time that a whole lot of history was happening.

All 356 photos are available on Flickr.

Screen still from SNL's ISIS sketch, via YouTube

More on the Islamic State:

Do High-Profile Terrorism Arrests Actually Help the Islamic State?

Helly Luv Is Kicking ISIS's Ass with Pop Music

Inside the Mind-Control Methods the Islamic State Uses to Recruit Teenagers

In his famous 1940 film The Great Dictator, Charlie Chapin struts, twitches, and screams in a thinly-veiled portrayal of an unintentionally-hilarious Hitler surrogate, Abenoid Hynkel. Chaplin's intent was to turn the fear and awe of the Nazi's stridency and militarism on its head, turning the Third Reich into an object of ridicule and thereby diminishing its power.

This spring, Saturday Night Live took the same tack in satirizing the militant group ISIS. In a skit, Dakota Johnston plays a young girl saying goodbye to her father before what would seem to be a semester at college. But instead of campus, the camera pans out to show a truckload of crazed, automatic rifle-toting Islamists with a version of the ISIS flag (this one reading "I love cats" in Arabic) speeding up to spirit a willing Johnston away.

This mockery of a brutal reality is a mainstay of counter-propaganda. But is it effective? Some critics are now claiming that the spate of ISIS-mockery which has proliferated in the year since the Islamic State seized control over large swathes of Iraq and Syria may not only be insulting to those whose lives ISIS has upended, but may actually help the group. "I'm not sure about tweets that mock [ISIS]'s reality," the RAND Corporation's Kim Cragin told VICE. "I personally love them, but wonder if they serve to reinforce the us-versus-them mentality of potential recruits."

The idea of shame can play a key role both in recruiting to ISIS, and in fashioning successful counter-ISIS appeals.

To begin with, it is helpful to understand the power of ISIS's propaganda machine. Under the auspices of its "media center" Al Hayat, ISIS produces slick recruitment videos in multiple languages (including English), frequent and often-gory social media posts, reports on its successes on and off the battlefield, and an English-language magazine, Dabiq.

In contrast to al-Qaeda, whose recruiters still rely on videos of aging firebrands' rambling sermons, ISIS's hashtag-heavy propaganda is a firebrand in itself. (See: #WorldCup2014). There was even, at one point, an app for that—the now-defunct Dawn of Glad Tidings, which requested permission to post from users' Twitter accounts in exchange for "news from Iraq, Syria, and the Islamic World."

In the West and the Arab world alike, sardonic counter-messaging has begun to pop up in surprising places. The Financial Times' Roula Khalaf wrote recently that "anti-ISIS satirical TV series, songs, plays, and sketches are proliferating [online]... with everyone from Pokémon to Spongebob and Peppa the Pug deployed to poke fun at jihadi beliefs."

Crucially, this main source of this mockery is not the West. A show called Dawlat al-Kkurafa (translation: "State of Myths") is the most popular program on Iraqi state television. The popular Saudi comedian Nasser al-Qasabi's new television show, Selfie also satirizes ISIS's pretensions of religious authority, and has garnered both accolades from fans at home and death threats from ISIS supporters.

What purpose do these programs serve? Are they comic relief for people who have to live with ISIS as neighbors? Or are they meant to make joining ISIS a less appealing prospect? If they latter is the goal, all "comic" anti-ISIS material would do well to keep in mind what actually motivates people to join ISIS, and what might actually motivate them not to. As it turns out, the idea of shame can play a key role both in recruiting to ISIS, and in fashioning successful counter-ISIS appeals.

"Shame is the opposite of honor, which is a powerful attribute and value in Islamic communities and countries," said counter-terrorism expert Farhana Qazi in an interview with VICE. And shame doesn't have to come from a personal failing. University of Kent senior lecturer in criminology Simon Cottee has spent the past year documenting the social media activities of western female migrants to ISIS, and said cultural shame was a major theme in their messages. "Shame can be experienced just by living in a society that is felt to be spiritually corrupt or dirty," he told VICE. But beyond offering redemption for that kind of shame, there is another strain in ISIS propaganda worth consideration. ISIS pitches itself as made up of a bunch of jihadi James Bonds: Alpha males comfortable with and enthused by weaponry and violence, soigné, polished, and commanding. Separate from its atrocities, ISIS exudes control and dominance. And why wouldn't that be appealing?

"[ISIS fighters] are not stupid, with long beards and dirty clothes, as many people anticipate," Editor-in-Chief of Rai al-Youm (the Arab world's Huffington Post) Abdel Bari Atwan said recently. "Many people think those people are the camel herders, foot soldiers. No. The hard-core of the Islamic State is the ex-Republican Guards for Saddam Hussein."

To mock the belief that ISIS might make life better might mean mocking someone's only remaining avenue of hope.

Cottee highlighted the group's recent focus on civic construction in its recent communiqués, a focus on what it is building rather than simply what it is tearing down. "Big, new, shiny buildings, slick cars, opulent markets, newly opened hospitals and schools." (Even, recently, a "five-star" hotel in Mosul). "It's not all shock and gore, but bricks and mortar, too."

And the most cutting of cartoons cannot diminish this appeal. To mock ISIS in a way that diminishes its appeal would require mocking not the group itself, but the delusion that joining it will actually lead to living in those shiny buildings and driving those slick cars. As Khalaf says, "the idealistic world the fanatical organization claims to offer its young recruits is a real life of misery and horrific violence." We are less comfortable targeting the vulnerable than the already converted, but if prevention is our aim, perhaps we should grow comfortable with this discomfort.

It is an understandable and human impulse to look for control, meaning, and stability when life seems to offer little of it. To mock the belief that ISIS might make life better might mean mocking someone's only remaining avenue of hope. Whether that is a reasonable belief doesn't matter—what matters is presenting and furthering better alternatives. Humor is far less valuable here.

Farce often pushes someone's behavior a bit beyond what it has been in reality to expose its absurdity or hypocrisy. But it's hard to find a line that ISIS hasn't or wouldn't cross. "You can imagine a comedy sketch in which they dangle some orange jump-suited dude over a shark tank, but this stops being funny when they start doing that," Cottee said. "And who knows with ISIS? If they could get sharks, they probably would."

In his 1964 autobiography, Chaplin wrote that he would not have made The Great Dictator had he known in 1940 what the extent of Hitler's crimes against humanity would be. It is up to us to decide whether the entertainment value of anti-ISIS comedy sketches might diminish the group's power enough to prevent us from the same regrets.

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Photo via Flickr user Andrés Nieto Porras

Vampires are real. They don't sparkle in the sun, but they will get sick if they don't feed, and their skin is probably better than yours. Real-life vampires are public speakers, computer programmers, and artists who may be sitting next to you on your morning commute. Because we're a bunch of prudes, they're scared of disclosing their vampire status to doctors, who are encouraging the public to become more accepting so these vamps and their donors will discuss their blood exchanges with their physicians.

To learn more, I went vampire hunting. I met Galatea*, a 29-year-old sang vampire from London, who goes through a nasty blood thirst if she hasn't fed. Sang is slang for sanguinary, meaning she feeds off of real blood, unlike energy- or psychic-feeding vampires. "Many people put psy vampires in their own category, however it is a handy dandy quick fix for those who have the ability to use this skill. What a vampire is looking for is the energy. The thing that's actually carried within the blood," Galatea explained to me. I also chatted with Pixie, a 22-year-old from Seattle, who is both a sang and energy vampire. And I spoke with Arycin, a 25-year-old politically-minded vampire from Long Island who is currently sustaining on energy from the cosmos, but would really like to find a blood donor. Arycin says the local sang community sucks, so if there are any "cloaked" Long Island vampires, please reveal yourself in the comments section.

Photo courtesy of Pixie

VICE: Hey Pixie. What's your vampire lifestyle like?
Pixie: I have two feeding styles. The first is I'm an energy vamp. I feed off of the excess energy around me. Generally during that, if I do it to a few people instead of a large group of people, that person or persons will wind up being lethargic. An excess of feeding on a singular person, at least in my experience, can lead to mild depression. So you always have to be careful not to feed too much from any one person.

The second style is the more traditional, which is sanguinary. Blood. Usually vampires only have one type of feeding style and if they don't feed they themselves get lethargic, lazy, and immobile. I have the benefit of having the second feeding style so that doesn't often happen to me. It's hard to find a willing victim—I hate to say victim, a willing subject—who will let you feed on them via blood and also going through the trouble of getting blood tests done just to make sure they're safe.

If you haven't fed at all, is it noticeable?
Yes, it is very noticeable. It's a lot like if a normal person didn't eat for days and days and days.

How did you discover this about yourself?
People who are vampires all share a common point, their awakening point. It's very different from how fiction portrays it. My awakening point was about five years ago. I woke up in the fridge tearing into a package of raw bloody hamburger. It was pretty shocking to me; I had no knowledge of this prior to that.

How did you become involved in the vampire community?
I am truly a child of the digital age. [I do] research on the computer and [found] other people who also had this issue. I was hesitant to call it vampirism at first. I was scared of what people would think, 'You're confused' or 'You're living out a fantasy dream.' The internet went a long way to finding people who had similar experiences to me.

Will you tell me about the process for finding a donor/victim and then the process of obtaining their blood? What is the etiquette?
A lot of people have a hard time finding a donor because of the skepticism that exists. The best thing is the internet. I found a lot of people who were comfortable being a donor but didn't want to go get an STD test to prove that they're a safe donor to feed from. There are a couple methods of getting it. Some people prefer to use a surgical scalpel because it's a lot easier to do safely. Some people will take more obscure methods because they don't have the money. Some people will buy lancets like diabetics use.

Tasty, tasty. Photo via Flickr user Kenny Holston

VICE: Do you consume human blood?
Arycin: I haven't ingested blood, but I'm definitely in the market. I'd like to think it's easier than I make it out to be. I know that New York has more of a front than Long Island, so it's more difficult for me.

If human blood isn't available, can you feed on your own blood?
No, no, no, no. You never feed on your own blood. Rule number one. That doesn't do any good. To take when you have none, to take more of what you have less of, which can cause physical injury to your body. It's not good.

So without human blood available, what do you feed on?
I go with the cosmos. I spend the majority of the time studying the metaphysics about the universe and theoretical physics about how the universe functions. That's where I go. It's a different form of energy, it's very high vibrational and smooth so it sustains you for longer, but I have to take it in like that. I can't just have one person; I would burn someone out in a day. They'd get sick.

Will people's energies affect the quality of their blood?
Energy quality has to do with a lot of things. It has to do with emotions that the person is feeling. Generally if the person is feeling negative or looks at themselves with a very high ego, their energy will tend to be very muddled and it sometimes won't be the proper color that it's supposed to be. Muddled energy tends to look very greenish, yellow. A lot of humans have it because of the human condition. They want, they want, they want. Sometimes they want too much.

Photo courtesy of Galatea

VICE: Tell us about yourself. Do you consume human blood?
Galatea: I am a modern vampire. I was awakened at a very early age. It is part of who I am. It's very beautiful, very spiritual. I do consume real human blood. Oh yes, I have read all the medical hoo-ha about no human having any medical or psychological need for blood. I personally, do not care what modern medicine or the psychiatric communities have to say about it. I know what I need to be healthy. I've tested the theory over and over for in excess of 20 years. I know others like me. Frankly, the medical world can go to hell. I know what I am. I am a Vampyress. I do not prey on the innocent. I don't go ripping people's throats out. I'm quite mature with what I do. I will only drink from consenting donors.

How did you discover you were a vampire?
My fascination with blood began as a young girl, during my first kiss. I [kissed] him really hard on the lips, and I bit him on the lip. It was my natural instinct to bite him, because for some reason, I associated that sensuality with blood. Needless to say, he never kissed me again. But I was hooked and wanted more. As time went by and meeting fellow vampire fanatics became easier, I eventually met my partner. When we made love, we consecrated our love for each other by sharing blood.

If you do not feed, do you experience negative effects on your health?
Oh, absolutely! There is something called blood-rage, which is a sanguine vampiric response to an unmet need for blood. The symptoms can include unprovoked anger, extreme agitation, unpredictability, physical pain, mental agitation, and if left unchecked, severe depression, apathy, even suicidal tendencies. When I haven't fed I'm an ill, sick, emotionally unstable, apathetic, hungry, disagreeable creature. It's hard getting out of bed, I want to sleep too much, I become angry and irritable on a regular basis. People have called me high strung and hyperactive; my attention span can suck. Or I go in the opposite direction and nothing appeals to me. On occasion, I have experienced such a state of pain and mental confusion from lack of feeding that I've found myself on the floor, writhing in agony, biting and banging my wrists, scratching myself, among other types of psychotic behaviors. When I have fed, I'm less temperamental and apathetic, and a lot healthier.

What is the process for finding a blood donor?
It can be difficult to find a blood donor. The main problem is that vampires are often too secretive for our own good, when it comes to finding our meals. If a donor cannot see you and know that you are a vampire, chances are they cannot, and never will, approach you to offer. My advice, if a vampire wants a donor, is to be more public about being a vampire! Donors cannot approach you or offer to donate if they do not know you are one! Now, of course I don't mean that you have to tell EVERYONE that you are a vampire, just a few select people... more than likely, they will come to you.

RELATED: The Real "True Blood"?

Do you have one blood donor, or many?
Donoring can be exhausting for a donor. So I try not to feed from the same donor too much, for this reason. I like to keep my options open, as donors can develop an emotional attachment to their vampire, and can sometime even become possessive of them. Many donors relate the feeling after having fed their vampire, to the afterglow of sex or deep meditation.

What safety practices do vampires use to make sure their blood is safe?
I'm careful. They have to get regular blood tests, to make sure they're not carrying blood-borne diseases, HIV, any of that. Because I wouldn't want to catch something nasty. If the donor has no desire to get a blood test, then they really do not care about the vampire's health or their own.

Are there other ways to feed than with blood? Do you engage in any of these?
Any vampire who has suffered through a severe bout of blood-rage knows that sometimes there is no substitute for blood. But for times when a vampire's need is not so strong, there are blood substitutes that many members of the community find helpful, if not exactly 100 percent effective. Nothing works all the time. Nothing except blood. There are some substitutes that work better than others, however the main goal of substitutes is to prevent a vampire from becoming sick, apathetic, or falling into blood-rage. I will give you a few: pomegranate juice, dark chocolate, blue-rare steak, black pudding, marmite.

For you, is there a fetish/sexual element to feeding?
Absolutely! With me, it organically happened one night. I was having sex. Sex didn't feel like enough, and no emotions were really enough, nothing felt like it was really... I didn't feel... there was always something I wanted to break out from, to feel more connected to someone, something more honest. And in a moment of kind of wanting to find something honest, I grabbed a knife, and cut him across the chest. I rubbed my hands in it. I tasted it. That was my natural instinct; I was liberated. And he cut me back. Blood ran down my chest, and we had this exchange of something. Somehow covered in blood, feeling my heart racing, there was something dangerous and alive. It suddenly felt more honest than whatever this 'sex' thing was supposed to be.

* Some identifying details have been kept in the coffin.

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The author with her best friend at Warped Tour, 2005. Photo courtesy of Erica Euse

It might sound silly today, but ten years ago, Warped Tour changed my life.

Before I was baptized in the church of teenage angst, my life was steeped in suburban repression. I grew up in a small city north of Cleveland, Ohio that was so staid, you were considered a freak if you shopped at Hot Topic and listened to music with breakdowns. I had just finished my freshman year at rigid Catholic high school where my older brother was the all-American football star. Everyone called me "Euse's little sister"—I didn't even have my own name. I was just an extension of his thriving social status.

Read: The Internet Is Killing Warped Tour

At first, I tried to fit into the mold laid out for me. I was the popular girl, a cheerleader on the sidelines. But secretly, I envied the kids who wore the Against Me! T-shirts and didn't give a fuck about what anybody thought. At that point, I was too scared to step outside the box, even though I spent hours on MySpace admiring emo scene queens and looking for music that sounded different than the popular Eminem and Justin Timberlake tunes I was surrounded by.

I would camouflage myself in Hollister polos and Abercrombie graphic tees, while covertly burning mix CDs with Panic at the Disco!, Every Time I Die, and Brand New. Before Warped Tour, the only legitimate concert I had been to was N'Sync's in 1999. So when I heard there was a thing called Warped Tour that had all the music I'd been digging on the low, I knew I had to go. It was my time.

My first pilgrimage to Warped Tour may have been a little more than a decade ago, but I certainly wasn't the first teen to attend. Kids all over the US have been going to the traveling festival since 1995, when it was first launched by Kevin Lyman and Van's as a way to showcase punk and alternative bands. The debut tour attracted 25,000 attendees, with acts like Sublime, No Doubt, and Deftones.

My Warped Tour, however, looked different than that inaugural lineup. Acts like Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, and Underoath brought poppy emotional ballads and the guttural howls of screamo to the festival that had previously been defined by punk and ska. I came to the festival when it was in the midst of a changing of the guard of youth culture, one that would happen time and time again.

After saving up my allowance for a couple weeks, I had enough to purchase the $25 ticket. I toiled over what to wear for the special occasion, eventually deciding on corresponding outfits with my best friend, who shared the same yearning to break out of what was expected of her. We settled on the edgiest items we owned at the time: matching bright pink Converse sneakers and studded belts.

We woke up early on July 21, 2005, and my friend's uncle drove us 25 miles to downtown Cleveland, which felt like a completely different world. The tour had set up its seven stages in a huge cement lot on the Cuyahoga River. We left behind my friend's uncle, who spent the rest of the day in the designated parent's area, and we walked over a bridge to the entrance.

The first time I saw the huge crowds of people, I was in awe. Enormous tents covered the elaborate steel stages and groups of kids with septum piercings and teased jet black hair piled in by the hundreds.

Noisey: Fall Out Boy, This Is Your Life

Once we got in, we stood in front of a list of the time slots for each act, and strategically planned which bands we would see since it seemed like everyone we loved was playing at exactly the same time. Finally, we joined the crowd and weaved our way around each of the stages.

Fall Out Boy was one band we made sure to get to the front for. We pushed through the throngs to get as close to Pete Wentz as possible, and sang along to every word of "Where is your boy tonight..." from Take This to Your Grave, an album we had listened to countless times.

Have a big night out with VICE on the party island of Ibizia:

As great as the music was, I was just as fascinated by the crowd. Most of the boys had long spikey hair and girls wore heavy eyeliner and thick bangs. They all wore skin tight jeans with studded belts and there were a lot of lip piercings. Most of the coolest kids I'd known at my high school were alternative at best, listening to 40 oz. to Freedom and wearing Dickies. But I had never seen so many emo kids in one place. It was exciting community I knew I wanted to be apart of.

In between sets, we waited in long lines to meet the musicians who were signing autographs and buy T-shirts at the merch booths in the "punk flea market." It was the first time I had access to the bands whose music I had spent hours burning onto mix CDs and memorizing.

Before the day was done, I carried crowd surfers, helped a girl find her lost shoe, and took a few elbows to the face in Underoath's mosh pit. By the time we met up with my friend's uncle to go home, I was covered in dirt and sweat, sunburned, and had dropped my cell phone in a filthy shit-stained toilet. I looked like hell, but it was all worth it.

My first experience at Warped Tour impacted the way I felt about myself and who I wanted to be. I was connected to all the angsty kids around me, who just wanted to listen to music and didn't give a shit about what other people thought.

Following Warped Tour, I immersed myself even more in the scene. I spent every weekend going to shows. I chopped off my hair, I lined my eyes with black eyeliner, and I never went anywhere without my fingerless gloves. I became my brother's weird emo sister, and my family struggled to figure out what the hell had happened to me, but for once I felt completely comfortable being myself.

Gym Class Heros performing in Cleveland at Warped Tour, 2005. Photo courtesy of Erica Euse

By the following summer, at my second Warped Tour, I had evolved from an inexperienced outsider into a true scene queen. I danced to the songs, I screamed all the words, and I moshed until I could mosh no more.

I had my final Warped Tour experience when I was 18 years old. Some of the bands I had seen three years before were still embedded in the lineup, and the crowds were still filled with teens who were eager to get near the stage—but I opted to hang in the back. I can remember hearing Katy Perry sing "I Kissed a Girl," live for the first time and thinking that the festival wasn't the same. It was changing.

Erica and her friend in 2007. Photo courtesy of Erica Euse

For teens that attend Van's Warped Tour today, the experience is different than mine. Large signs hang on the stage to remind the crowd that there is no moshing, or crowd surfing—some of the best things about the performance when I went. Not to mention, many of the bands are playing electronic dance music focused on drops instead of breakdowns. But, every summer the kids still come. The attendance grew to half a million in 2013, so the folks behind Warped Tour are doing something right. Even if it doesn't appeal to me, it's bringing young people together around new forms of expression and that's really what it's all about.

Now, the tour is in the midst of its 21st year, and remains the largest traveling festival in the United States. It will continue to make its way to over 40 locations, with thousands of kids raging at each one. Even though I might never go back, Warped Tour is still one of the most influential experiences of my life. It was a rite of passage that helped me feel empowered enough to defy other people's expectations and follow my own instincts. Every teenager needs something like that.

Follow Erica on Twitter.

Production still via Wikimedia Commons

In case you fans of rebooted franchises weren't sated by the recent rebootings or remakings of Star Trek, Sherlock Holmes, Godzilla, Robocop, Spider-Man (soon to be re-rebooted), Batman, Superman, Daredevil, and Point Break, Fox is set to release a Fantastic Four reboot coming out on August 7. Anything that can help erase the memory of 2005's Fantastic Four, starring Chris Evans and Jessica Alba, is a welcome addition to the reboot parade, but did you know that the 2005 film was a reboot itself? And that the notoriously bad original, The Fantastic Four, starring no one you've ever heard of and probably made just so a company could retain rights to the characters, has never seen the light of day?

Its officially unreleased status puts it in rarified cinematic company—most films that are finished are distributed in some form. The most famous unseen disaster is surely Jerry Lewis's 1972 Holocaust comedy The Day the Clown Cried, which has been locked away in a vault by Lewis himself, never to be seen by anyone again if he can help it. The Fantastic Four was apparently so awful that it's not in a vault—the original negative was supposedly burned by the rights-holders. Could that mean it's actually worse than The Day the Clown Cried?

Twenty years later, a more complete version of the The Fantastic Four story has slowly been pieced together by geek historians, and its much more complicated than the simple myth of a Fantastic Four movie that was so shitty it had to be literally killed with fire.

Director Oley Sassone, for his part, is no fan of movies being burned. "We're supposed to be filmmakers," he told VICE in an interview. "That's really despicable. Just destroy it? And nobody gets to see it?"

"Thank God somebody bootlegged it and got it out there," he added.

Indeed, Constantin Film, the company formerly known as Neue Constantin Film, which owns the rights to The Fantastic Four, doesn't seem interested in sending takedown notices to the sites that host bootleg versions of the film. If you've got 90 minutes to kill, here's The Fantastic Four:

Was that so bad?

"Look at that film," Sassone said. "It looks like shit because it's a bootleg copy from a VHS.' It's so fucked-up looking, I'm sorry." Not that he's defending it as a masterpiece: "I know if falls way short in terms of special effects."

However, he and the makers of an upcoming documentary about The Fantastic Four make a compelling argument that the film is a lot better than it has any right to be, given the bizarre circumstances of its making. It was sabotaged from day one, he said. "We never got a chance to do what we would have liked to have done."

In the documentary Doomed: The Untold Story of Roger Corman's the Fantastic Four, Sassone and his crew say they fought tooth and nail to make something watchable. The fact that they almost succeeded is a testament to perseverance, and—God help me—bona fide artistry.

The Fantastic Four historian and Doomed director Marty Langford told VICE that the German film company Neue Constantin Film had bought the film rights to the Fantastic Four characters "for a steal years and years before [the movie came out]."

It's easy to forget now, when superhero movies are routinely at the top of box office lists, that few people were all that excited about putting comic book characters in films in the late 80s. The blockbuster success of 1978's Superman was a distant memory, and the most competent adaptation of a Marvel property had been the cheesy but fondly-remembered TV version of the Incredible Hulk, and the Marvel brand wasn't the guarantee of huge profits that it is today. But after the incredible success of the comic book adaptations Batman (1989) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, (1990) Neue Constantin's interest in making a Fantastic Four movie perked up.

No one can ever know what was going through the mind of Constantin president Bernd Eichenger (who died in 2011), but Langford deduces that in 1990, Eichenger must have sensed that there was serious money to be made—the problem was, the company's option was due to expire on December 31, 1992. Throughout 1990 and 1991, it appears that Eichenger put his best efforts into securing $40 million and a partnership with 20th Century Fox, neither of which he was able to swing. By the middle of 1992 he had lost hope in ever getting the production off the ground.

There was a loophole in Eichenger's contract, though: He could retain his option as long as a film was in production. No one ever said a movie had to be finished, let alone good. So if The Fantastic Four went into production by the end of the year, Langford says, Eichenger knew he would be able to keep the option for another ten years.

To be clear: All indications are that Neue Constantin never intended to release the film they were hurrying into production. Most likely, according to Langford and Sassone, Neue Constantin just wanted ten more years on its option, and a phony production was a cheap way to get it.

So with the deadline approaching, Constantin called up producer and B-movie god Roger Corman and asked him to produce the movie. "Roger Corman's reputation is fast and cheap," said Langford, "The quality isn't always there. It doesn't have to be." (In those days, for instance, Jurassic Park was crushing box office records, so Corman made his own dinosaur thriller, Carnosaur, and banked a lovely little profit.)

The deal, according to Langford, was that Corman and Constantin would put up $750,000 each, bringing the total budget to a paltry $1.5 million. For reference, producing 1987's Masters of the Universe, which is not noticeably better or worse than The Fantastic Four, cost $22 million.

Neue Constantin Film "didn't really tip their hand as to why they needed to move so quickly into production," Langford said. In fact no one knew it was a scheme to retain the rights without spending too much money. "They just thought it was another gig, and a really interesting one that could help them."

Sassone, a real movie buff to the bitter end, recalls being over the moon about the opportunity. Look guys, we're in the movies! This is great! We're all making movies! he recalls thinking. By 1992, he was a seasoned commercial and music video director with a couple of Corman features under his belt. But this adaptation of a beloved comic book smelled—poor production values or not—like a shot at the Big Time.

"You can't just say, 'Oh, it's Roger Corman. Nobody gives a shit,'" Sassone said—Corman had worked with many big names before they became famous, including Francis Ford Coppola, James Cameron, Ron Howard, and Jonathan Demme. "Here we were, working for the guy that launches careers. You know how it works: You make a film for no money, and it breaks out, and then everybody wants to make a film with you," he said.

Craig J. Nevius wrote a script over the course of three weeks. Casting was in October, with only two full months until production was set to start. During pre-production, stuff like set design was obviously rushed, judging from the final product. But one thing came out astonishingly well: the Thing, the rock-skinned giant who provides the superhero team with muscle and a lot of angst.

Sassone had a vision for the Thing: "He's a lost soul. He can't get any solace from the other three members of the Fantastic Four," Sassone said.

Langford claims a significant portion of the fan community "agrees that this Thing is better than either [the 2015 one], or the Michael Chiklis one," owing to his faithful adherence to Jack Kirby's initial design and his expressive eyebrows. The facial animation is in keeping with the style popularized by Harry and the Hendersons and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles films of the same era.

According to Entertainment Weekly, the shoot started on December 26. "As soon as the first frame rolled, on the first shot, on the first day, they now owned Fantastic Four for another ten years," said Langford.

It was mission accomplished for Neue Constantin. Never mind that there was a crew of schlemiels shooting a movie that they'd been told needed to be rushed into production. Only pre-production actually needed to be rushed to keep the option open. But keeping up appearances requires you to rush production as well. It just makes sense.

"The hours were brutal, and we were in a rush to get it done," Sassone said.

That comes across in the finished product. There's a kind of frantic energy in the hammy but entertaining performances by stars Alex Hyde-White, Jay Underwood, Rebecca Staab, and especially Carl Ciarfalio, who plays the Thing in full costume. The cutting is quick; the camera moves around with startling intensity. Most of it actually kind of works. But there is one giant problem.

"The special effects shots in the film are laughable," Langford said. But he claims this wasn't Sassone's fault. "The guy who was doing them kind of misrepresented himself. He was handing over what are almost the equivalent of animatics—temporary, placeholder effects."

The effects lead to some hilarious midnight movie, so-bad-it's-good moments. At the very end of the movie, Reed Richards and Sue Storm are seen leaving a church after their wedding. As the "just married" limo drives off, a ridiculous 12-foot arm waves goodbye to everybody. "It's almost like they tapes four pool noodles together, put some spandex on it, and put a glove at the end," said Langford.

Still, the authoritative comic book and movie blog Den of Geek called the finished project "remarkable" for its unparalleled "fidelity to the source material" as well as "the absolute sincerity with which it approaches such an impossible task considering its budget."

And as such, Sassone fully expected it to be released. Fan screenings of clips had generated excitement, and Roger Corman had all the infrastructure necessary to distribute a film. When the suits in charge realized that, Sassone said, "they had to pay Roger not to release the film."

Asked to describe when he knew then production was all a dirty trick, Sassone cited a moment alone in his car. "I remember exactly where I was. I was on San Vicente Boulevard, heading to Beverly Boulevard," he said. His phone rang, and it was Corman.

Like geek stuff? Watch our documentary about kids remaking Raiders of the Lost Ark shot for shot:

"He said, 'Oley. This is Roger. I just wanted to call, and thank you for finishing the film. You did such a great job. I just got a check for a million dollars.'" After the odd opening, Sassone said he was expecting to finally get good news about the film's release, or the next step in his career. It never came. Nothing came.

"A copy of the film? A gift certificate for a dinner for two at a fine restaurant?Something?" But all Corman gave him was a thank you. "I said, 'OK, well, you're welcome, Roger. I'll talk to you soon,' and hung up.

"I just was staring around, dumbfounded in LA, like, What the fuck?" Sassone said.

Knowing the film had been abandoned, Sassone set out to find a "pristine copy" of the film for his own uses. As detailed in the Doomed, Sassone and editor Glenn Garland broke into Roger Corman's film vault with flashlights in the hope of finding a negative to steal so they would have something to show for all their hard work. But the negative was gone. Rumor has it, it was thrown in a fire.

"Fuck them for doing that," Sassone said.

Stan Lee, who created the superhero team with Jack Kirby, had visited the set and told Entertainment Weekly that the film was buried, and that he was "very, very sorry for the actors and the director and most of the people involved in the movie." But he didn't grieve for the movie itself: "I was heartbroken to think it might appear only as a low-budget quickie. When you compare it with something like Terminator 2, I'm glad they're gonna do it over."

They did. Unfortunately, 2005's Fantastic Four is no Terminator 2. It's regarded as, well, bad, with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 26 percent. Roger Ebert wrote in his review, "The really good superhero movies, like Superman, Spider-Man 2 and Batman Begins, leave Fantastic Four so far behind that the movie should almost be ashamed to show itself in the same theaters." The 2007 sequel Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, isn't much better, and Fox apparently scuttled plans for a third movie and a Silver Surfer spin-off.

Eichenger's trick really did work, though—his company did retain the option for another decade, and it appears Constantin is still involved in the latest incarnation of the Fantastic Four, as its German-language website boasts.

But in a very tangible way, each ensuing Fantastic Four movie owes everything to the work ethic of an obscure director named Oley Sassone who scrambled through that pre-production rat maze back in 1992, and got his project into production five days before the deadline.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

For information about how to watch, Doomed: The Untold Story of Roger Corman's the Fantastic Four check out the movie's website.

Follow Leslie on Twitter and Tumblr, and buy her books from Fantagraphics.

Heroin has come back to haunt the US. Riding on the back of a runaway prescription opiate epidemic, the number of heroin users has doubled in a decade. In the last four years, the number of heroin seizures in the US has risen by 80 percent. Since 2001 there has been a five-fold increase in the number of heroin overdose deaths in America.

The dead can't talk. The stories of those who die of heroin overdoses are largely confined to the dustbin. But when those who have been teetering on the precipice of death manage to haul themselves back, they become expert witnesses of an extreme existence.

I first came across Anastasia* at an international drug conference in Lithuania in 2013, where she was representing a grassroots advocacy organization helping street drug users in New York. A Russian immigrant to the US, Anastasia had fled persecution with her family and arrived in New York aged 13. By 18, she was speed-balling eight times a day. —Max Daly

The first time I overdosed on heroin, my boyfriend left me for seven hours in an unconscious state. He tried to revive me by doing stuff like rubbing me with ice and I don't know what else, but when I came to, no one was home and it was dark outside. He later came home and told me that he had thought I was dead and he was trying to figure out what hospital he was going to dump me outside.

We shot drugs all over Brooklyn, where we lived, everywhere, on the street, in McDonalds, in various stairways of buildings, public bathrooms, in other people's cars. We sharpened our dull syringes on dirty stairs.

There were many highs. I was 19, totally strung out on heroin, going to art school, working in a men's clothing store, and renting a small studio apartment with my college roommate in Hell's Kitchen, a neighborhood notorious for drugs and prostitution. At times, I felt like I was on top of the world. I felt like I became one with all the dead legends who walked New York City's streets, like Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin, Hendrix, and Basquiat. I felt like I could totally relate and understand all of them, I was just like them. I was hurt, I was looking for love. I was afraid to live, yet wanted to live so badly, and with a purpose.

I had arrived in New York on a refugee visa in 1996 from a small town not far from Moscow, called Alexandrov. I remember being called names in school: I had a dark complexion, because I have a mixed Russian gypsy-Jewish heritage. My brother was nearly beaten to death by his girlfriend's father when he found out he was Jewish.

When I came to the US, I had no friends and spoke no English. I got spat on at junior high for being a foreigner. My family was always arguing. I missed home so much, but I knew that I was never going to be able to call it home again. The only thing I could do was draw; that kept my spirit alive. I ended up studying visual art at LaGuardia, the old Fame school. It was an unconventional place full of immigrants and artists. I felt I belonged.

But I felt uncomfortable in my own skin. I was conflicted about my sexuality because at the time I liked both men and women. Then at 18 I was diagnosed bipolar and given lithium pills. I had a lot of questions about who I was: bi this and bi that. When I tried cocaine with my two friends I was blown away. They liked it, but I was all, "Where have you been all my life?"

Later that year, I fell in love with Sky*, my brother's friend. He was six years older than me, a former model, and a seemingly nice guy. One day we bumped into each other on the train and we started dating. I found out he had been using heroin for a long time. At first, I tried to help him with his addiction, but I ended up shooting drugs with him.

Sky kept on saying that I should try heroin and not waste my money on cocaine, that I was working myself into a frenzy with coke and I needed to start coming down with heroin. We ended up shooting speedballs non-stop every day for six months. It got extremely intense. We would wake up in the morning feeling sick, needing to get some money before the withdrawal comes in. We hustled during the day, robbing stores and pharmacies. I would steal money from home, or sell my things and get money. Sky lived with his mother and he used to sell heroin. Between us we would maybe do six bags of cocaine and six bags of heroin in one day.

Heroin is like Aladdin's lamp: it will make you think that your wishes are coming true, that you are in control of your life.

I shot so much to the point where I had an abscess on my vein and I could not feel it anymore. It was about finding a vein and stabbing yourself with a needle six times before you can find it. I started having auditory hallucinations. I was talking to a person at home when no one was there. At one point, I thought I could walk on rooftops and not die. I stopped the cocaine and just ended up injecting heroin.

Sky was a real piece of shit. I realized that all along he had wanted to get me addicted to heroin just to have someone to share the whole drugs and money thing with. I later found out that he had other women and people coming into his apartment and he would use with them, so I was nothing special, I was just one of the people he used drugs with and occasionally fucked. After he unsuccessfully set me up to be gang-raped in return for some free drugs for him, I started being much more cautious around him. But still, I stayed with him.

Sexual violence, especially for a female user, is a constant danger. I would get sex proposals every week from either a dealer or other people I would score from. I have to say that one thing I promised myself was to never engage sex for drugs, because for me that would be my lowest point; I would rather kill myself than start doing that. That was one of my rules. That said, I still suffered sexual violence on a few occasions. I was lucky to have made it out alive and unharmed for the most part.

I went through withdraws cold turkey multiple times because I refused sex for drugs. I could not get on methadone because I was underage, so I used to buy it off the street to get me over on days when I could not find dope. But if I stayed using longer, maybe ten years, I probably would have eventually broken. That life leaves you with no spirit, just a body.

Death is all around you in that world of clinics, detoxes, hospital wards and the street. You always hear of someone dying, mostly from an overdose, other times from HIV or some violent death. Someone got knifed when they went to score, or killed and got their money stolen, or fell asleep at home nodded out with a cigarette and burnt up their house and themselves in it. Those stories are all over you when you are in the life. That's why people usually see no hope.

I had to retrain myself, like how to love and understand myself better, how to talk and relate to people, how to trust people and be myself again.

One time we got stopped by the SWAT team, put on the ground, and asked to take most of our clothes off. Our car was taken apart piece by piece. It was an outside three-hour interrogation, because the cops were looking for drugs. They took our syringes and arrested my boyfriend. I had drugs on me but they didn't find them, and they let me go. I was 19 years old. That was a pretty traumatizing thing for me, four muscled dudes in black, with guns, just jumping on you.

By the age of 21, I was a ghost walking the street, waiting to die. I had no past and I had no future. I was locked up in psychiatric wards after I tried to kill myself twice, once with a whole bunch of lithium and wine, another time when I slashed my wrists.

I tried cold turkey a hundred times but I could only make it to four days and then I would relapse again. I went to counseling sessions still high. I tried everything: detoxes, rehabs, and groups.

Heroin is like Aladdin's lamp: it will make you think that your wishes are coming true, that you are in control of your life. In reality, people on heroin are usually stuck in some godforsaken bathroom with a syringe in their vein, homeless, broke, and lonely. It spins your head around to make illogical things logical. It makes you lose track of time.

Thing is, I didn't want to die in the street with a needle in my arm.

I started trying to quit not long after I started being addicted. In total, it took me over three years to get off the drugs. I found a good counselor who worked with me relentlessly to make sure I got better. She recommended I try a naltrexone implant, which was very new then. I forced myself to get it three consecutive times. Then I was taking naltrexone pills for the next nine months. I also saw a therapist and was on some mild psychotropic meds.

READ: How the Pharmaceutical Industry Is Making Money on Your Overdose

My treatment experience was hell but I had nothing to lose. I had panic attacks and no sleep. I honestly thought that I was going insane. During my recovery, I enrolled back into college with every intention of graduating. I painted at night to keep myself occupied and went to school studying psychology during the day.

My first clean year was when I was 22. I had to retrain myself, like how to love and understand myself better, how to talk and relate to people, how to trust people and be myself again. I made a decision to get myself off the bipolar pills. By age 25, I was done with them for good.

Since getting clean nearly 11 years ago, I've received a BA in psychology and an MA in criminal justice. I spent about six years working with homeless and at-risk youth at VOCAL-NY, then I worked as an advocate and a direct social service provider for active substance users. Now I'm doing research on drug abuse among Brooklyn youth with the National Development and Research Institutes. I never stopped painting, and I was able to exhibit some of my work. And last year, I had my first, long-awaited son, Nikita. He was named in honor of my grandfather.

* Names have been changed.

Follow Max on Twitter.

^{Photo by Erin Carr: Ray-Ban sunglasses, Ralph Lauren coat, H&M top (Liberty Island)}

This Spring, my photography students at School of Visual Arts in New York took advantage of the recently warm temperatures that are now smothering the city to go forth and photograph tourists and locals on the islands that surround Manhattan. Traveling to famous locales like Liberty Island, Ellis Island, and Staten Island, as well as the potentially lesser known destinations of City Island, Roosevelt Island, and Governor's Island, the students styled tourists and locals with luau accessories and new fashions from Spring/Summer 2015 collections in an effort to turn municipal New York into a tropical paradise.

Fashion Editor: Miyako Bellizzi
Special thanks to Party City for all tropical accessories

^{Photo by Erin Carr (Ellis Island)}

^{Photo by Hayley Stephon, Hannah Hurley, and Nicholas Drew: Hanes top, Adidas pants, Air Jordan sneakers (Staten Island)}

^{Photo by Anthony Costa: Tommy Hilfiger dress (Coney Island)}

^{Photo by Mikaela Keen and Valeriya Vaynerman: Jansport backpack, vintage top, Fjallraven backpack (City Island)}

^{Photo by Crystelle Colucci: Vintage sweater and top; Patagonia jacket, Kangol hat, Ray-Ban sunglsses (Liberty Island)}

^{Photo by Hayley Stephon, Hannah Hurley, and Nicholas Drew (Staten Island)}

^{Photo by Hayley Stephon, Hannah Hurley, and Nicholas Drew (Staten Island)}

^{Photo by Noah Boskey and Allison Schaller (City Island)}

^{Photo by Noah Boskey and Allison Schaller: Kangol hat, Patagonia jacket (Roosevelt Island)}

^{Photo by Hayley Stephon, Hannah Hurley, and Nicholas Drew (Staten Island)}

^{Photo by Emma Castelbolognesi (Roosevelt Island)}

^{Photo by Emma Castelbolognesi: Vintage hoodie, Hanes top, Gap shorts, H&M socks, Doc Martens boots, Komono sunglasses; Levi's jacket, vintage top, Forever 21 t-shirt, vintage skirt, Asos pants, Converse shoes, Komono sunglasses. (Ellis Island)}

^{Photo by Crystelle Colucci: Levi's jacket, vintage top, Forever 21 t-shirt, Asos pants, Converse shoes, SPRZ NY x Uniqlo bag, Komono sunglasses (Ferry to Ellis Island)}

^{Photo by Noah Boskey and Allison Schaller (City Island)}

^{Photo by Noah Boskey and Allison Schaller: Nike shoes (City Island)}

^{Photo by Hayley Stephon, Hannah Hurley, and Nicholas Drew: (Staten Island)}

^{Photo by Alberto Inamagua: Absurd top, H&M pants, Vans sneakers, New Era hat, Komono sunglasses, G-Shock watch, Angola bracelet (Randall's Island)}

^{Photo by Crystelle Colucci: Hanes top, Levi's pants (Roosevelt Island)}

^{Photo by Noah Boskey and Allison Schaller (Roosevelt Island)}

^{Photo by Mikaela Keen and Valeriya Vaynerman: Vintage jacket, H&M sweater, Levi's pants, New Balance sneakers, Kangol hat, Komono sunglasses (City Island)}

^{Photo by Mikaela Keen and Valeriya Vaynerman: COS sweater, Hanes top, vintage hat, Komono sunglasses, Fjallraven backpack (City Island)}

^{Photo by Hayley Stephon, Hannah Hurley, and Nicholas Drew (Staten Island)}

^{Photo by Jessica Frankl: Vintage coat and top, AG overalls, Adidas shoes, Celine sunglasses, vintage jewelry (Coney Island)}

^{Photo by Noah Boskey and Allison Schaller: Adidas shoes (City Island)}

^{Photo by Erin Carr(Liberty Island)}

See more photos by Matthew Leifheit's SVA students here.

Photo by Jhe Ming Hsu, courtesy of IMMABB

On 26 April, a new, American-based K-pop boy band called EXP made their world debut in Long Island City. Like South Korea's idol groups (the K-pop industry term for a meticulously groomed cadre of attractive, often barely-legal performers), the band was smooth and shiny. The six boys sashayed over the stage in form-fitting clothing, flashing Vaseline smiles and exuding gentle sex as they cooed about relationships in their English-Korean single, "Luv/Wrong."

It was exactly what you might expect out of a fledgling group trying to hack it in the K-pop mold. Except for one little thing: None of the six members of EXP (Tarion Taylor Anderson, Frankie Daponte Jr., Hunter Kohl, Šime Košta, Koki Tomlinson, and David Wallace) are Korean. None of them even speak Korean.

News of this K-pop group without the "K" spread rapidly throughout South Korea and the industry's global fan base. Even a week before their debut, K-pop fans started to excoriate EXP for wanton cultural appropriation, circulating fake track lists for a non-existent album and accusing them of explicitly ripping off the insanely popular non-threatening teenage heartthrobs of EXO. As soon as "Luv/Wrong" went up on YouTube, hardcore critics blasted the band's lack of polish, fostered in most idol groups over years of near-martial training within a hit-churning machine. In short, folks seemed to say, the group wasn't Korean, hadn't worked in the system, and as a result was making a mockery of the industry.

After a few days, most of the internet copped on to the fact that EXP was actually a conscious project developed by a conceptual artist. Dreamed up last fall by Bora Kim, a Columbia University MFA student from Seoul, EXP (short for EXPERIMENT) is the centerpiece of a multimedia endeavor, "I'm Making A Boy Band" (IMMABB), documenting her attempt to transform thoroughly American performers into prototypical K-pop boy-toy stars.

Back in 2012, the global success of PSY's K-pop satire "Gangnam Style" got Kim thinking about how South Korea, a post-colonial nation with a long history of importing foreign culture, had rapidly developed its own style and begun to export it through Asia, then the West. She was also fascinated by the way foreign consumers were buying into K-pop's aesthetics, performances, and sexuality.

Male sports fans, [they say], "Yeah, that's fucking great, you should roar like wild animals and paint your bellies!" But when girls scream for One Direction, that's silly. —Karin Kuroda

Eager to play around with these trends, Kim told two friends from art school, Karin Kuroda and Samantha Shao, about her idea to graft K-pop form onto American bodies and see what'd happen. By December, the trio had put out casting calls in New York, seeking young men, ages 18 to 28, with some performance skills and an interest in joining a boy band. After four months of training in how to act like a K-pop group, including several "Cuteness Workshops," the boys took to the stage, performing music composed by Ben Hostetler and Chatori Shimizu. A month later they started a Kickstarter campaign, raising $30,600 to record a mini-album featuring "Luv/Wrong," two new songs, and remixes.

Now, three months after their first show, EXP has started to develop a social media following. The boys, and the girls behind them, insist that they're treating EXP not just as a social experiment, but as a real band.

Eager to learn how, exactly, one manufactures a boy band, VICE met up with Kim, Kuroda, and Shao in their half-dismantled New York studio, just after they'd had finished filming their first music video. (It's set for an early August release date.)

Photo by Jhe Ming Hsu, courtesy of IMMABB

VICE: Bora, you've talked elsewhere about the theoretical basis of IMMABB. When was the moment that you thought, "I should take all of this, and turn it into a boy band"?
Kim: That was last summer. I was in Korea, and I got a bit tired of just researching. I really just wanted to make something.

Coming [to Columbia], I put so much pressure on myself. You're in grad school. You have to make your masterpiece. But I was just stuck in this weird place where I just researched and [wasn't] able to really make a high-quality product that's allowed in the commercial world.

When it came time to actually get boys, how did you choose people? Were you trying to find the perfect little dolls you could mold into K-pop stars?
Kim: We did want someone who we could mold, yes. There were some people who were very, very knowledgeable about K-pop, but we did not [choose] them because we wanted to teach them K-pop and we wanted to document the process.

Sometimes I feel that all relationships among Koreans are a bit S&M. —Bora Kim

What was the audition process like?
Kim: We told them, "This is going to be something in between fiction and a reality show. You're going to be staring as yourself, but yourself as a very successful boy band member. You'll be filmed all the time." We asked them, "Is it okay if we put a lot of makeup on you?" We got consent to that. And we asked them to sing or dance or rap. Then we had our little acting exercise. We would tell them, "Act like a very cocky boy band—you just booked a show at Madison Square [Garden]." If we saw some potential, we asked more.

Do you consider what you're doing could be considered an act of cultural appropriation, or a racially-charged act?
Kim: Our project is cultural appropriation and racially charged. However, the boys are not [making] squinting eyes, nor are they trying to mimic the physical features of Koreans. Mimicking the physical appearance of Koreans is not cultural appropriation. That act is the performing/reenacting of an ignorant stereotype not to be confused with the appropriation of cultures.

We want to raise the question of what it actually means to appropriate culture, because this implies [that people are tied] to the idea of cultural authenticity. How does one determine authenticity and originality in culture? We are interested in asking and complicating the idea of how cultures influence each other. Does the concept of cultural appropriation shift when applied to pop music, a very specific and accessible cultural channel?

You've been putting the boys through tons of training, like "Cuteness Workshops." But what was hard to teach them? What about K-pop was just not getting through?
Kim: We showed [them] videos of K-pop idols with no subtitles, and we would ask them, "What do you think is happening?" [We'd] ask them to read the body language and how they'd act towards the fans and towards each other. Because the essence is about how they present their charm in a very different way than people do here—being cute.

Here, as a default, you are supposed to present yourself as a strong person. But in Korea and in a lot of Asian countries, it's better to be friendly. And acting cute is a way of putting yourself in a lower position, so you won't appear to be too macho of threatening. Because not being individual, but being a member of a group is more important. So the conversation would evolve into talking about bigger cultural differences.

Shao: It's mostly just how to perform sexuality. When we asked them to be sexy, everyone has their own way to do that. It's hard to change that because it's more of a default situation for them. When they think of sexy, maybe [they] think of Brad Pitt. It's hard for them to think of Asian idols, who will do things that people here might think is "gay-ish."

Kim: It really goes to the audience of K-pop, because it is mainly young, straight females. They're catering their performance to sexuality, and the fact that we're highlighting that is very important. We're thinking of what the teenage girls want.

Kuroda: It's seen as vapid. Male sports fans, [they say], "Yeah, that's fucking great, you should roar like wild animals and paint your bellies!" But when girls scream for One Direction, that's silly. Any time girls feel something that's emotional, that's not valuable to society. So the fact that this entire [K-pop] industry is catering—well, not entirely—to what 12-year-old girls want... it's a massive amount of fiscal turnaround!

Photo by Jhe Ming Hsu, courtesy of IMMABB

K-pop has a massive training industry, and you don't get to replicate that. So do you feel like [as K-pop stars] there's anything they're missing by not having gone through that?
Kim: Of course!

Kuroda: The whole thing that makes K-pop Korean is that it's a mirror of Korean culture. The reason that exists is from the military aspect. We're trying to, not critique that, but we don't want to replicate that. Because it's 17 hours a day of dancing, singing, acting. I don't think we want to do that.

Kim: Korean society has that military culture. It's really hard to explain that, and I'm sure it's hard for people to believe that. But it is. Sometimes I feel that all relationships among Koreans are a bit S&M. Because if they are in any way above you—age, gender, class—you immediately lower yourself. And in the opposite situation, you have to perform that very strong or dominant act towards the other [person]. I think the K-pop world shows that aspect very well. You can see that in the product.

I want to pinpoint that in the project, but at the same time, we don't have that power over them. They don't know that culture, so even though they respect us, it's in a different way. Sometimes they don't respect us! It's hard to push that on them.

Shao: That's the interesting part in a cultural clash kind of way. Whenever we try to push that, they're like: "You guys are being ridiculous right now." They can't even function. In a different cultural sense, it'd be like, "Oh, I understand what you're doing, and I want to work harder. I want that humiliation."

Kim: Humiliation is a very important word, I think.

Photography by Wei Hsinyen, courtesy of IMMABB

You were [K-pop] consumers, critics. Now you're producers. How has that changed you?
Kim: I've always had respect for the industry in a way. That's part of why I started this project. Especially in the fine art world, people have this weird condescending look towards pop.

The pop creators are the same creative people who want to make something interesting and new. It's just that they usually have more capital, which is why it's all so shiny. And they lack criticality sometimes. That's where we want to insert ourselves.

Shao: Before, when you look at shiny stuff, you just want to enjoy [it]. But now you're saying, "How did they make this so shiny?"

Kim: The relationship between us and the boys has changed a lot. They are a big part of the creative process. They really care about this project as well. We don't have a background in music. We're making a boy band! We don't know about music! We just tell our producers and composers [what we want.]

How much further do you think this project can go? And how far down the rabbit hole will you follow it?
Kim: I don't even think about it. It's so obvious for me to just keep going.

Shao: It's reality. If there are a bunch of normal guys who want to be a successful boy band, then the end goal is to be a successful boy band with a bunch of fans and bigger stage and a huge record deal.

Kuroda: Eventually in Korea. That's ultimately our end goal. When we get there, we'll decide what the future will be.

Follow Mark on Twitter.

This article appears in The Photo Issue 2015

This spring, Dru Donovan collaborated with a group of men from the Fordham section of the Bronx to stage photographs that revisit their previous encounters with the NYPD. In the following pictures and text, the men re-create and describe the scenes of their experiences.

MOHAMED: It was late at night, and I was going out to get milk for my son [pictured, center], who was barely two at the time. A police van followed me from my building, and as soon as I turned the corner, they stopped, and four or five officers got out. When I asked them what the problem was, two of them got their hands on me and put me against the wall. There was one guy giving instructions: "Check the crotch. Spread the legs. Make sure he doesn't have anything stuck up there." I felt like it excited them, like they were having fun with it. No matter how much they offended me, I knew I couldn't defend myself at that point. They grabbed my wallet and saw my student ID, then started scolding me about how it was dangerous to be there. They told me they were trying to protect me from my own neighborhood. I lived right there. How could they protect me from being in my own home? Every time I walk by that corner I remember how I was pushed up against that wall. Standing at that wall to revisit the experience there with my son watching made me think of what he is going to deal with. It makes me want to prepare him better.

EASY AL: We was all on the block, sitting in front of the building, telling jokes and stuff. And the police just ran up on us and they just started snatching everybody off the stoop. They put us all against the wall, and they had us on our knees. And my knees were killing me. They were yelling, "Who got the drugs?" We were all quiet while they threatened to beat us down. They had one guy shackled up on a leash, like a dog. The fear in that moment is that you don't own anything. You do not own anything. Because they have the power to take away your freedom. They have the power to take away your possessions. They have the power to take away your life.

BRANDON: I met up with my probation officer, and he said I had violated probation. At the time, I wanted to make a call because I had gotten driven up to his office by my mother. She had parked right in front of the probation window, but they had a two-way mirror. You can see the outside from the inside, but you can't see the inside from the outside. I had my phone in my hand. And he told me, "You can't make a call." But I wanted to let her know what was going on. So when I tried to make a call, he called for backup. They came in the probation office and threw me against the wall, trying to get my hands. He had one hand touching my upper back and his other hand trying to reach for my phone. He got it and threw it on the floor and grabbed my other hand. They read you your rights, and after that, it's like you have no control. They'll put the physical force on you, arrest you, and forget about you.

Ronny: I had just moved to New York, and I was driving with a friend back to my apartment. I was new to the area, and I accidentally turned the wrong way down a one-way street. Just as we made the turn, three cruisers pulled up with their guns out. I stopped the car with my hands on the wheel, and the cop yelled out, 'Hands up! Hands up!' So I put my hands up. And then somebody else yelled, 'Put your hands back on the wheel!' In my mind I was thinking that I could probably die over the stupidest thing, like putting my hands in the wrong place.

Petersburg, Virginia, 1960. Activists are trained not to react to provocation at a civil strike. Photo by Eve Arnold/Magnum Photos

A page from the Magnum archives with Arnold's notes about the series School for Nonviolence

Stand outside the emergency room entrance to Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn any day of the week and you'll see them. Sometimes alone, but more often in pairs, they get rolled through the sliding glass door and parked in the air-conditioned lobby with their mouths agape and gazes frozen somewhere in the middle distance, like some terrifying figures that sprang from Goya's brush.

On a recent Wednesday, a young Hispanic paramedic showed up with a middle-aged, unresponsive woman wearing a tie-dye shirt. Although he couldn't be sure, he'd put money that she'd been smoking K2—what people in Brooklyn call synthetic marijuana, although it's known elsewhere as Spice or Spike.

"More times than most it's a guessing thing, but nine out of ten times when they sober up, they'll tell you they were smoking K2," the medic told me. "And sometimes they're ashamed to admit it, but we know what it is."

Patients smoking the stuff sometimes exhibit mild symptoms like cramps and vomiting, but the drug can also push people to polar extremes from catatonia to epilepsy, sometimes all in the same trip. The medic told me that, in the first case he dealt with, a guy went "from zero to 60" and leapt up from unconsciousness to start pounding on the floor like a maniac. In fact, the unpredictability of the user's response is part of why K2, which can be obtained for as cheaply as a dollar, is so terrifying.

And even though a few iterations of the drug were classified as Schedule I—just like weed, LSD, and heroin—by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in 2011, and even though dozens of synthetic drugs were banned by New York State a year later, every day is the same story at Kings County. Ambulances drive in and out, sometimes carrying the same patient in more than once in a given shift. Just before the medic I spoke to helped wheel in the woman in tie-dye, they hauled in her smoking partner. It was the third time he'd been there that day, and it wasn't even noon.

"Just another day in the office," the medic told me grimly.

Records obtained by VICE show that early July day was no fluke. The New York Times Magazine recently reported that one day this spring, the New York city of Syracuse saw 19 overdoses, "more in one day in Syracuse than the number of overdoses reported statewide in most states for all of April." But on a randomly-picked Sunday—June 27—there were more than a dozen calls related to K2 from a single homeless shelter in Brooklyn located at 681 Clarkson Avenue. First responders say that sometimes the number is up to 40 patients per day at just a handful of local shelters, and that the resulting backlog can be the difference between life or death.

Kings County Hospital Center in Brooklyn regularly sees many K2 cases. All photos by Edwin Torres

"It's insane," said one EMT I met outside of Kings County. "I'm spending my entire tour over at the shelter. But it makes sense, because for five or six bucks you can roll four or five big blunts of this stuff. And the stronger they make it, the more the disenfranchised population is gonna be attracted to it."

A recent surge in abuse caused Governor Andrew Cuomo to issue a public health alert in April, but it's also put EMTs, firefighters, hospital workers, and paramedics in the strange position of needing to improvise police work. People working those jobs say that city-run hospitals have no official policy on confiscating synthetic weed, meaning patients actually get their drugs returned to them when they check out—which helps explain how some of them end up there repeatedly in one day.

Watch our documentary about Spice addicts in the UK:

The theory behind "broken windows" policing is that targeting small crimes prevents larger ones. And given the NYPD's past record of cracking down on graffiti, turnstile jumping, public urination, and public drunkenness in the name of public safety, it would stand to reason that they'd be all over K2. But every day, scores ingest a dangerous drug in public as weary parents in East Flatbush try to shuffle their kids past groups of men who could get violent at any second.

"If I picked up a drunk who had a bottle of shitty vodka, I'd pour it out," the Brooklyn EMT told me. "But when a hospital worker finds a packet of K2 in someone's pocket, they give it back to them with their wallet."

"It creates a deep central nervous system disconnect the same way PCP or ketamine does," he continued. "You're outside of your head. You don't have to feel emotions or pain and all those kinds of things. The majority of these shelters don't have programs for these guys, they don't have activities, so this is what they do all day."

"They're like zombies," the young paramedic added. "If you walk around the outside of it, it's like The Walking Dead."

K2 smokers in front of a pharmacy along Clarkson Avenue in Brooklyn

"Outside of it" is a thin strip of dirt littered with Bud Ice bottle caps, coke baggies, and pigeons pecking at dog shit. It's where the men who live inside the Clarkson Avenue shelter congregate. On a recent Sunday morning, two of them sat there drinking their shelter-issued juice boxes and waited for the day to unfold.

One of them called himself Czar. Sitting on a milk crate, he explained to me how he makes a meager living: Every day, he walks a block down the street to one of two bodegas where he picks up as many $5 bags of K2 as he can afford. Then he sits in front of 681 Clarkson and rolls them up into "sticks," which he sells for a dollar a pop.

The other man, called Bless, sported a pineapple-shaped mass of hair, an orange goatee, and a litany of face tattoos, including the name of his dead brother and a tropical flower. The 22-year-old had only been at 681 Clarkson for a week and a half and, leaning up against the shelter's fence, he told me the extent of K2 use there was "ridiculous" and unlike anything he'd seen in years of homelessness.

A man calling himself "G" brandishes a packet of a synthetic weed called Geeked

"I only take three pulls," he said. "I don't do that shit. All the K2 smokers sleep on the ground out here and jerk each other off. No one here cares about getting better."

Synthetic marijuana was first created by a Clemson University researcher on a government grant. Starting in 1984, John W. Huffman spent a decade and $2.5 million creating more than 500 cannabinoids that riffed off of THC, the active component in marijuana. In 1994, one of his students came up with JWH-018—which Huffman lent his initials to—and it started appearing in European head shops soon after.

It was sort of a Frankenstein creation—and like Frankenstein's monster, it quickly got out of control.

"I figured that somewhere along the line, some enterprising individual would try to smoke it," Huffman told ABC News in 2011. "They're playing Russian roulette. I mean, it's just like taking a pistol with one bullet in it and spinning the chamber and holding it to your head and pulling the trigger."

In June 2010, an 18-year-old kid from Iowa named David Rozga literally did pull the trigger—he killed himself with a shotgun after smoking K2 and complaining that he "felt like he was in hell," according to his father. After a public outcry, the DEA used emergency powers to ban five chemicals typically found in legal weed, including JWH-018. They became permanently scheduled on March 1, 2011.

"Now there's all kinds of throw-up of chemical names that would make your chemistry teacher proud if you could pronounce them properly," DEA Special Agent Eduardo Chavez told me. "There are dozens of chemicals that fall under what might be considering synthetic marijuana or cannabinoids."

Chavez added that because the formula for fake weed is always shifting, there are no field tests yet for it. So while police officers can seize what they suspect are illegal drugs, they would have to conduct a time-consuming lab test to determine what chemicals they contain.

"It's not like cocaine or heroin or meth test kits that people have on hand like you see on Cops where they put it on the hood of their car, shake it, and it turns purple," Chavez said. "We can seize it and take it, but oftentimes we withhold charges until we can test it and confer with the prosecutor's office."

But it's only this summer that K2 has very clearly become the drug of choice among the most marginalized members of society. On June 5, at least seven homeless people overdosed on K2 at the largest shelter in Washington, DC, and officials said they suspected a dangerous batch had come in from New York, the Washington Post reported.

Between May 29 and July 18, Travis County—home of Austin, Texas—saw 562 K2 patients. On July 23, a local news station in Austin reported that students around the University of Texas were complaining to local law enforcement that an area near campus had almost become too dangerous to traverse thanks to homeless people using K2 right in the open.

Although the New York City Department of Homeless Services told me in an email that "providers are constantly monitoring shelters for K2 usage" and that users aren't allowed to stay there, anyone with eyes could see that the dirt patch around the shelter has become an open market for different varieties of K2 and that people in the throes of its effects are stumbling around its perimeter.

As a stout, grizzled, middle-aged black man walked up to Czar looking to score on the day I visited him, Bless mocked the customer. "How does smoking K2 make you feel?" he asked.

"It's my second resort to getting lost," the man replied as Czar rolled up a stick and collected his dollar. By then, four other men had shown up, and one started playing Lil Wayne from a tiny boombox.

K2 is also a presence in Harlem. Here, one user rolls up the Green Giant variety.

The 29-year-old K2 dealer—who wore an inside-out orange shirt, has a sabertooth tiger tattooed on his neck, and looks a decade younger than his age—explained that there are four kinds of K2 popular around the shelter. "Extreme, Smacked, and Green Giant are the three safer ones," he said. "The scary one is Flamingo. They say the doctors out here don't know what it is."

I handed over a crumpled dollar in return for a very loosely rolled stick of Extreme. Just then, a 31-year-old named Malik Miller came over to warn me away from smoking it. He said he got hooked on K2 in 2012 when his mom committed suicide, but soon found himself addicted to a drug that made him act erratically, and eventually drove away the rest of his family.

"I had a falling out with my wife, and she didn't want me back because she said I smoke K2," he explained. "She knows everything about me. There's nothing like my wife. I fucked up my whole life." But even though it destroyed his relationship, Miller kept on smoking the stuff—at least until he saw a video of himself on it and had a this-is-your-brain-on-drugs moment.

Malik pulled out an LG cellphone with a cracked screen and showed me footage of him inside the shelter bathroom with the upper half of his body inside the sink. He had one shoe on and looked awfully close to dead. "I'm completely, completely gone," he narrated as we watched the video, which might as well have been a still image.

As he detailed how the drug derailed his life, Bless sidled up and kept asking when the stick I bought was going to be passed around. When he wouldn't stop bugging me to the point of it becoming more than a little intimidating, I handed it over.

"You're just gonna give away a dollar like that?" he asked in disbelief, laughing at his luck as he lit up and proceeded to smoke the entire thing to the face.

"I think it just has tons and tons of crap in it." –Professor Marcel Roberts

All of the people I met who hang out outside of 681 Clarkson asked me two questions, one literal and one rhetorical: Did I know what was in the stuff they were smoking, and why couldn't they just smoke marijuana instead?

An entrance to the 681 Clarkson Avenue Shelter in Brooklyn

To figure out the former, I visited Marcel Roberts, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan who focuses on the chemistry of synthetic drugs and explosives. Even though Bless inhaled the K2 I planned on getting tested, I still had a five-gram green packet labeled "Smacked" an EMT told me fell out of the pocket of a guy who was having a seizure.

This brand of K2 smells like lemon-lime Gatorade and comes in a package featuring a zombified, frog-like figure completely stoned out of its mind.

On a Tuesday afternoon, Roberts put some of the leafy substance into a two-inch test tube and added some methanol so it steeped like tea. After running it though a gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS) machine—basically a giant oven that slowly increases in temperature, thereby separating each of the chemical components in the drug—he was able to discern what, exactly, Brooklyn's homeless are smoking on the regular.

The only organic material present in the sample we analyzed was Clausena lansium, a plant native to Southeast Asia, but when it came to the stuff that's actually getting people high, the professor ran into some trouble.

"I think it just has tons and tons of crap in it," he explained as he went over the results, which looked like they came from a hospital bedside EKG machine. Each peak on the graph represented a different compound, and they were almost uncountable. However, the most prominent—which is to say the most well-represented chemical in the mix—was very, very similar to JWH-018, one of the first synthetic drugs banned by the DEA.

In fact, the only key difference between that banned substance and this one was the presence of some additional chemicals that are virtually certain not to affect the user's experience, according to Roberts. Still, the package says on the back that it doesn't contain JWH-018.

The ability of even the most amateur of chemists to add superfluous stuff to cannabinoids is why it's almost impossible to regulate these substances: People can just tweak whatever formula they're using soon as it's made illegal.

"The chemistry happens so quickly, it's impossible to keep up," Roberts said. "[The drugs] are modified somewhere where it won't affect their function, but it will affect their legal status in terms of it being restricted or illegal."

So, to answer the homeless shelter residents' first question: The kind of K2 that's hitting the streets and filling up hospital beds in 2015 is pretty much the same kind that's been causing a media freakout for the past half-decade.

As for their second question: If they were smoking marijuana, these guys would probably be ticketed. And as it stands, it seems like no one is policing use of this more dangerous drug by the homeless. A spokesperson for the NYPD told me that an officer who sees someone using is legally required to confiscate that drug and send it to a lab to see if it contains one of the banned cannabinoids. However, it's fairly clear the cops aren't making it a priority—at least not in East Flatbush. A spokesperson for the FDNY told me they defer to law enforcement when it comes to confiscating narcotics.

Ian Michaels, director of media relations for NYC's Health and Hospitals Corporation, did not know off-hand the policy for city hospital workers when it came to confiscating K2. "That's a good question. I have no idea," he said over the phone. "Do we confiscate, or do we get it back?" Michaels said he would find out the official policy but subsequently stopped returning calls.

Until something changes, the cycle will inevitably continue: Get up, smoke a couple of sticks, fall out, wake up in the hospital, and repeat. And as the temperatures soar in August, so too, will the number of patients.

"The hotter it is out there, the more it affects their stamina," the Brooklyn EMT told me as we scanned the perimeter of 681 Clarkson. "There are three guys out there on the corner on the verge of passing out. You can crank it up another ten, 15 degrees, and those are my next three patients."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

If you live under this flag—not literally—then you, too, can now buy an Xbox One, anywhere in the country (Image via Wikipedia)

More on games consoles:
Celebrating an Old Gray Box: PlayStation is 20 Years Old
I'll Never Love (or Hate) a Games Console Like I Loved (and Hated) the PSP
How Can the Xbox One Fight Back?

For so many years, China—the biggest PC market in the whole damn world for some time—resisted the lure of video game consoles, to the extent of outright banning them.

In 2000, the country prohibited the sale and distribution of these games-only (but not really, anymore) machines, the thinking being that this was the best way that parents could prevent their kids "wasting their minds" on video games.

All of this is was funny when you consider not only the amazing number of Chinese gamers plugging into online multiplayer titles via their PCs—the country can claim the largest online user base of anywhere in the world—but also that every home system of the previous console generation, the Wii, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, was manufactured in China.

But none of that matters now as the Chinese government has completed a U-turn that began in 2014 when it provisionally allowed its citizens to import consoles from overseas (albeit for eye-watering prices) for sale within the Shanghai Free-Trade Zone. As of right now, the good people of Beijing, Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Tianjin—or anywhere else in the country—can freely purchase the domestically-made games console of their choice, for rather less than the cost of a black-market PS4.

The lifting of the ban will go a great way to growing China's already staggering gaming market value, which is estimated to reach over $22 billion this year. Chinese gamers won't be able to play everything that their Western peers can, though, as titles will be assessed for their content on a case-by-case basis, with the government certain to censor a great many releases.

Sony and Microsoft are already gearing up for a fresh Chinese market push, and have confirmed the intent to upscale operations in the Shanghai Free-Trade Zone and beyond. Nintendo, meanwhile, is remaining quiet on its plans.

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Check out more video games on VICE—we've got a whole section on them.