Sittwe beach. All photos by the author

Sittwe is the capital of Rakhine, the second poorest state in Myanmar. The city sits at the point where the Kaladan River converges with the Bay of Bengal. Fishing is a major industry and the economy is set to benefit from a deep-water port under construction that's funded by the Indian government. It was also one of the major set off points for the estimated 25,000 Rohingya—an ethnic Muslim minority—that fled the country in boats between January and March this year.

VICE recently paid a visit to this restive city and found a state-sanctioned system of segregation that has left the Rohingya—a people the United Nations has described as one of the most persecuted minorities in the world —stateless and deprived.

A main intersection in Sittwe

In May, international attention was focused upon the humanitarian crisis unfolding in the Andaman Sea, when thousands of Rohingya and Bangladeshi refugees were stranded in rickety boats after Thai authorities cracked down on people-smuggling routes. As the asylum seekers made their way south, Malaysia and Indonesia began turning back the boats and reports emerged of smugglers abandoning their ships leaving their human cargo adrift.

Later in the month, Malaysia and Indonesia announced they would accept the refugees, as long as they were repatriated or resettled within a year.

Jama Mosque has been closed for three years

Today, Sittwe appears to be Muslim-free, with little trace of its former Rohingya population. One of the most prominent buildings on the main road is the Jama Mosque, but it has been closed for the last three years. The laneway leading to the mosque is cordoned off by barbwire stanchions and armed guards sit at the entrance. Sittwe market was once the site of many Rohingya-owned stores, but now none remain in Muslim hands.

Sittwe was one of the major flashpoints of the 2012 riots, which drove around 140,000 Rohingya people into internally displaced persons (IDP) camps throughout the state. The sectarian violence broke out that June, as extreme factions of the state's majority Rakhine Buddhist population began violently attacking and burning down Rohingya villages.

Rohingya-run stalls are no longer found at Sittwe market.

The violence was instigated by the alleged rape and murder of a Buddhist women by three Muslim men in Kyaukphyu township and the reprisal killings of ten Muslim people dragged off a bus in Taungup township a few days later.

In Sittwe, the attacks moved from one Rohingya area to the next while the violence spread statewide from township to township.

In October 2012, a more coordinated set of attacks was perpetrated upon Rohingya villages in nine townships throughout the state. The Myanmar government and local authorities are reported to have stood by or participated in the attacks. The official death toll of the 2012 riots was around 200 people.

Attacks perpetrated against the Rohingya have continued periodically over the last three years, with a group of fishermen being attacked in Pauktaw township in January this year.

The Rohingya camp in Sittwe. An estimated 140,000 people live in camps like these in Myanmar.

Beyond the main road in Sittwe lies Aung Mingalar, a part of the city where an estimated 4,000 Rohingya still live. The area effectively functions as a prison: it's fenced off, the entrances are guarded by police, and the inhabitants are not allowed to leave. On the day I approached the roadblocks, the police were not welcoming foreigners in.

Aung Win, a Rohingyan rights activist, lives in Aung Mingalar with his family. He told me that the situation is dire for those living in the ghetto. They must seek permission to visit the market in government arranged security trucks and have no access to medical services.

"When we have the infection, we cannot go to the hospital that is very close," he said, adding the authorities are tightening security because the Myanmar general election is about to take place in November.

But the majority of the nation's estimated 1.3 million Rohingya won't be able to vote in the elections, as their citizenship has been revoked.

The 1982 Citizenship Law doesn't recognize the Rohingya as a national ethnic group and denies citizenship to individuals who cannot provide evidence that their ancestors settled in the country before 1823, the year the British began their occupation of Rakhine state, then known as Arakan.

Related: Watch our documentary 'The Philippines's Cemetery Slums'

Even though there is evidence the Rohingya were living in the state between the mid 15th to late 18th centuries, if not more than 1,000 years ago, this law has rendered them stateless. The government refers to the Rohingya as Bengalis, effectively denying them a separate ethic group.

According to Aung Win, it's not average Rakhine people who are the problem, it's the nationalists, extremists, and politicians. "You must understand that. For nearly three years, we're living in the slum area without sufficient food and aid, so many Rakhine people are sending the items we need," he explained.

But the majority of the local Rohingya population are living in IDP camps, west of the city, along the coast of the Bay of Bengal. The conditions are grim: There's little food, no access to medical services, and no employment. Many live in flimsy huts without much protection against the monsoon rains.

Rohingya kids playing on the beach road

Walking down the road heading out to the camps, I again came across another roadblock. A police officer denied access, so I doubled back down to the beach. On the way, I passed a building with large UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) tents out the back.

Vivian Tan, UNHCR spokesperson for Southeast Asia, said the agency has been operating in the area since June 2012, alongside the governmental, UN, and NGO counterparts. "As part of the inter-agency humanitarian response, UNHCR has been leading efforts to provide relief supplies, temporary shelter, protection, monitoring, and advocacy, as well as camp coordination and management," she said.

Making my way down the beachside road towards the strip known as Ohn Daw Gyi—the area where many of the refugee boats leave—I came to a section where the road is no longer paved. In the distance there was a group of people and to the right, across the field, there were newly-built IDP camp shelters and beyond an area of makeshift ones.

On approach, the group made up of Rohingya children, came up close, some barely clothed. One older boy came to the front, putting his hand to his stomach and then his mouth in a gesture showing hunger. Three young women walked up. One, holding a piece of UNHCR tarpaulin fashioned as a bag, communicated that they were from the camps.

These people have been pushed to the edge, deprived of services, occupation, and legal recourse. With no place left to run, they're being forced to risk their lives on the high seas.

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Brain scan during memory tasks. Image by John Graner via Wikipedia

We all have moments when our memory fails us. It gets to Monday morning and we can't tell a coworker where we were Friday night, or we're at a pub trivia night and for whatever reason we struggle pathetically to remember the name of the lead singer from the Cure. However, for better or for worse, remembering stuff isn't a problem for those with highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM).

HSAM—or hyperthymesia, as it's also known—is characterized by the ability to remember almost every day of your life after the age of ten or 11 years old, down to the most minute detail. When given any past date, people with HSAM can usually recall things like what color dress they were wearing, or even what the weather was like. It's unknown whether people are born with HSAM or develop the ability in their early years. So far, 61 people in the world have been identified as having HSAM, including 56 in America and five in the UK.

I asked Joey DeGrandis, a 30-year-old New Yorker with HSAM, to recall what he did on July 9, 1995. He answered down the phone without hesitation: "July 9, 1995—it was a Sunday—I was in Chicago with my family for vacation and I believe we went to Shedd Aquarium that day. Another random memory: I remember watching I Love Lucy a few days later at my friend James's house on Tuesday, July 11; it was an episode where Lucy and Ethel were crying at the end... but it was 'funny' crying."

Joey—smiling because he's lucky enough to remember shit

The date I gave Joey is my birthday, and I can barely remember what I did last year for it, so how on earth did Joey recall what he was apparently doing with such clarity?

Joey tells me that the way he retains and absorbs memory is very chronological: "The best way I can describe it is that I view my life like a movie. It's almost like when you go to a DVD and you're scrolling through the different chapter scenes. When I'm thinking about my life, I hone in on a time and access it like you would a chapter of a DVD."

James McGaugh, at the University of California, Irvine, was the first to discover this phenomenon in 2006, with a woman who identified herself as "AJ." McGaugh has now identified 56 people with HSAM out of hundreds tested. Aurora LePort, a doctoral candidate at UCI's Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, described the condition in a 2012 press release as "baffling." She wrote, "You give them a date, and their response is immediate. The day of the week just comes out of their minds; they don't even think about it. They can do this for so many dates, and they're 99 percent accurate. It never gets old."

It sounds like the kind of skill that could be a pretty handy tool in life, but people with HSAM aren't, for example, any better at exams; their ability lies in accessing a very specific type of memory relating to their life and experiences. There is still much to be discovered about why this is. In that 2012 release about HSAM, McGaugh said, "We're like Sherlock Holmeses here. We're searching for clues in a very new area of research."

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Memory expert Professor Giuliana Mazzoni, from the UK's University of Hull, told me that hearing about HSAM was a "feast for the ears of a memory researcher." When she heard of the phenomenon being discovered in the US, she set out to try to find cases in the UK. Of the 200 people that got back to her, she is certain that five of these have HSAM.

Mazzoni testing someone to see if they have HSAM

Mazzoni uses a number of methods to check that her subjects aren't just making it up. One method is by asking them facts like, "What was shown on TV that day?" or "How was the weather?" People more interested in sports were able to remember games and teams and scores, people more tuned into TV were able to remember TV shows. She also uses a method called "test re-test," taking a sub-group of dates and asking for recall of these after two months, four months, and so on. This was then compared to the content of another sub-set of dates. Mazzoni was amazed by the accuracy of the results. "They could remember seemingly trivial things, and they could remember them reliably over time, which was amazing."

So was there anything really different about these people's brains, which could back up Mazzoni's observations? Astoundingly, no. Mazzoni found no real difference in the structure of the brain. The difference was found not in the structure but in the order of how the brain works, in the areas of the brain that kick in first, second, and so on.

A picture from Giuliana's study of brain activation in HSAM

Mazzoni's working hypothesis is that in these people, episodic memories—that is, contextual memories of autobiographical events—become, to a certain extent, facts. These people exploit their semantic skills, their ability to process ideas and concepts that are not drawn from personal experience, and as a result have an excellent episodic memory. "The date is associated with a number of events, which are linked very strongly and immediately retrieved in response to the date. They are retrieved as pre-packaged facts."

Mazzoni told me how having such an unusual memory could translate in social situations. "People with HSAM are to a certain extent used by others as repositories of memories." They suddenly become the textbook for everyone's past, typically being asked if they remember this or that day, what they did, and so on. Mazzoni acknowledged, "That can wear relationships out because you are put in a certain role. You are seen as a little different, and being seen as different, even if with a superior skill, is not necessarily that easy or that welcome."

When I spoke to Joey, he expressed a similar opinion: "Sometimes I try to gloss over it and just say, 'Oh, yeah, I just have a crazy good memory,' but it does often require that I go into it because nine times out of ten people are amazed. Then it's sort of just like a windfall from there: 'Do my birthday!' or 'What's this date?' It becomes like a little game. When it comes up in conversation it has a way of taking over the conversation." Sounds a bit like when you dye your hair, or break a leg, when you're forced to explain or retell your anecdote to every person you encounter: a useful conversation starter, but a repetitive one nonetheless.

Related: Watch our documentary about divorce in the US, 'Heartbreak Hustle'

When Joey took part in the study on HSAM at the University of California in 2014, he had the opportunity to meet others with HSAM, which he described as "refreshing."

"For one, we didn't have to explain every time we threw out a date," he said. "In normal conversation we usually get a double-take—'How did you know that?'—but with this, the conversation just flowed. We found that we had similarities in terms of our memories and the way that we process things. It was nice to bond in that way."

Many of the people Joey met with HSAM found it difficult to forget bad memories, particularly due to the strong emotional content they retrieved. "Whatever's important to me, whatever I do absorb, it really sticks. The good and the bad: If I'm remembering or recalling a memory, I'm almost reliving it emotionally as well. I'm back in that place in time. It's like time travel." In this way, Joey said that the emotions of his past could be quite overwhelming; they are not left in the past but sustain into the present. "It's bad for relationships because you can think of all the things that went wrong," he says. "It's self-analyzing in the worst way, it's almost like your mind is your own worst enemy."

I asked Mazzoni if she would like to have that sort of superior memory. She wasn't sure. "I have mixed feelings because I think, on one hand it could really enrich my life—remembering all the things that had happened to me would be wonderful. On the other hand, it might also become problematic—in the sense that with the good things you remember the bad things and bad experiences occur relatively often in life and so you might decide that you had more bad experiences than good and start having a negative attitude."

Despite the practical and more sentimental benefits of HSAM, it is undoubtedly a double-edged sword. I asked Joey whether he would want to remove the ability if he could. "Even though sometimes the bad memories may haunt me, I think that overall I'm happy to have the ability."

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Photo via Flickr user Steve Baker

Read: The New Wave of Ultra-Violent Ugandan DIY Action Cinema

Everyone wants to be a movie star. It's the American Dream, right? Fame, fortune, on-set catering, and Vinnie Chase-levels of excess. So when someone casts you to play a prominent role in their horror flick, you have to say yes. Well, maybe not if you're a convicted fugitive on the run from the law trying to keep a low profile, but even that didn't stop Jason Stange from following his actor dreams.

According to the Guardian, the 44-year-old Stange was sentenced to 117 months in jail after admitting to armed bank robbery in 2006. But he broke parole last year and has been on the lam ever since.

While most fugitives go on Odysseus-style adventures or bask in rumors about their humongous junk, Stange decided to sign on to play "an abortion clinic doctor who commits a deranged act" in a low-budget slasher film called Marla Mae. He must have figured that the police are too busy to watch movies, anyway.

Apparently they're not too busy to read the local newspaper in Olympia, Washington, because Stange was arrested last Friday following The Olympian's write-up and photo series about Marla Mae's production—a photo series that prominently featured Stange.

Now Stange is back in jail, but the timing couldn't have been better—production on Marla Mae has already wrapped, so Stange won't be missed, and US marshals even allowed him to return his costume to set before hauling him off. Plus, the people behind Marla Mae are now looking for financing to release the film.

What better way to get major news outlets covering a low-budget slasher flick than casting a runaway fugitive who gets arrested right after production wraps? Genius marketing.

The neighbourhood Gang Yuan lived, and likely died, in. Photo via Google Street View

Read: So You Had a Baby

A Vancouver millionaire allegedly murdered for his money has been named in a paternity suit that will move on to a paternity test to be completed by Aug. 26. Gang Yuan is estimated to have been worth $50 million; his body was found, in more than 100 pieces, on May 2 of this year. Gang's brother has put forward the theory that Li Zhao, who's been charged with second-degree murder, may have murdered Gang for his money. This despite the fact that Gang was allegedly supporting Li and his wife, who is a cousin of Gang's.

Xuan Yang claims she was involved with Gang and that her baby daughter is also his child. If the paternity test bears this out, Xuan's daughter stands to inherit the entirety of Gang's estate, according to a law called the Wills, Estates, and Successions Act that came into effect in BC in March 2014. According to that law, if someone dies with no spouse and no will but with biological children, their entire estate goes to the child or children.

"That [test is] going to be pretty darn conclusive," litigation lawyer Trevor Todd told the CBC. "You can have all sorts of other circumstantial evidence, but it comes to down to blood. It's 100 percent."

Victoria-based lawyer Charlotte Salomon said Xuan stands to gain some material benefit for herself as well. While the bulk of the money would be put into a trust for her child, Xuan could "say, 'I have to provide for my child to live in a nice house, in a nice neighbourhood where there's good schools, and of course I'll need a nice car to transport her everywhere, and, and, and'...," according to Salomon, who added that "you can see where there may be some motivation here. In addition to having something for your child, she gets a little bit of a good ride."

However, given the accuracy of DNA testing, it would be nearly impossible to get access to that money without Xuan's child actually also being Gang's offspring. And if Gang was the father of Xuan's child, that baby is legally entitled to his estate. So regardless of whatever unsavoury motivation Salomon seems to be ascribing to Xuan, there will be no arguing with the results of this test.

Follow Tannara Yelland on Twitter.

Ty Evans. Photos courtesy Mountain Dew Green Label Films and Brain Farm Cinema

Skate video director Ty Evans is possibly the most imitated dude in his field. Almost anyone who has passionately rode a skateboard during the past couple of decades know his work on classic Transworld Skateboarding videos such like Feedback (1999) and Modus Operandi (2000). With a keen sense for music selection, Evans brought a new energy to skateboarding during a time when it needed it most, and carried it through when it seemed skating was untouchable. And he has consistently spread his fairy dust on videos from Girl Skateboards—alongside Oscar award-winning screenwriter Spike Jonze—using tools and techniques never before seen. He exited the skate industry for a brief time, but not before dropping Pretty Sweet (2012), the most technically-advanced piece of skate-cinema ever.

Recently, Evans quietly landed himself behind the lens again for the feature-length film, We Are Blood, which is being touted as the world's first ultra high-definition skateboarding movie due to premiere mid-August. Shot in China, Barcelona, California, and Dubai, the impressive team of skaters and filmers were given access to restricted places in the latter country and employ some of the most cutting edge camera technology to create what purports to be an epic skate adventure. VICE tracked Evans down at his home editing suite to see what's changed and what's been happening with the self appointed "Skate Fairy."

VICE: I've obviously been removed from the skateboarding world for a minute—I didn't realize you left Girl. When did that go down?
Evans: I worked for Girl for 13 years and it was the most amazing experience of my life. I'd love to work there my whole life if I could, but this opportunity [with Brain Farm] came up and I thought it was time to try something different. I think that making We Are Blood is a once in a lifetime chance, and I had to go for it. But working with Girl has been the most amazing experience of my life and I love everything that those guys have done and I'm so thankful. Of course hanging out with Eric [Koston] has been one of the most amazing experiences of my life. He's a good friend and travelling the world with Eric has been amazing to say the least. He's an amazing skateboarder but also an amazing human being—a blast to travel with and be friends with.

Eric Koston on Epicly Later'd, part four.

Did you know Koston before working at Girl?
Yeah, skateboarding is so small. You kind of know each other and everyone within skateboarding through passing over the years. I think I first met Eric in the early '90s.

You were making films with Transworld then, so you probably filmed with him?
Yeah I filmed a trick of him... I was making videos for Transworld and I finished this skate film called Modus Operandi, and in the process of that I became friends with Rick Howard and the guys at Girl and they approached me after making the film to be a part of Girl so it was just a great natural progression. Eric at the time was filming Menikmati for éS, so he was kinda finishing that up when we were diving into Girl's film, Yeah Right! So Eric finished up then came on a minute later, and once he was done with Menikmati it was on, man. He was sitting shotgun with me every day trying to make up for lost time and just going for it. He killed it for Yeah Right! Menikmati is amazing and captured him at his prime, and Yeah Right! is still at that same time and keeps the candle burning.

Did you go to school for video?
No. I didn't. I kind of always gravitated towards filmmaking and learned how to do it just through skateboarding. I think that skateboarding teaches you self perseverance and I just kind of taught myself filmmaking and the basics of it. I started so long ago that filmmaking has really progressed with all the digital stuff. So I've been lucky enough to kind of progress with it as it went along... it's almost like—I use that analogy with people that fix cars, who started working on the very first cars. They know the ins and outs of cars 'cause they were so basic, and then as things changed they kinda grew with them.

Yeah, that totally makes sense. You've had an amazing career within skateboarding with the videos you've directed and now with Brain Farm. Has there been any significant high or low points that stand out to you?
Yeah, I mean I think ever since I was a kid I always wanted to make skate films and to be able to do it, it's amazing to me. I still can't believe it to this day. I mean, I have a wife and a kid and a house and food on the table all from making skate films. Through the years, I've started doing commercial work and doing commercials and stuff outside of skateboarding and that definitely taught me a lot of things and i've been able to bring that into skateboarding. And it's just a really cool, fun, natural progression learning all this stuff, and at the end of the day it's still just about going out with your friends and having fun making a skate film. Travelling the world and having fun. I think some of my best memories are travelling the world with Eric [Koston]. I've roomed with him a bunch and he's a maniac sometimes [laughs].

You mentioned travelling with Eric. Do you have any favourite places you like to shoot? inspirational locations or even go-tos there in LA?
I've travelled the world with Eric, man. I mean [laughs], he's so funny to travel with. He's such a rad dude! There's that crazy photo of him flipping off the camera—that's from like a wild night of me and him in Japan. I dunno if you've seen that photo I think they made like a graphic of it that's Frosted Flakes or something. He gets frosted, he gets a little wild. I haven't seen Frosty in a long time man. I remember at the Yeah Right! premiere in Paris, I look over and he's just sleeping. I dunno, Eric's rad man... I think he's a super funny dude and he's an amazing skateboarder and I'm super stoked to be his friend and travel the world and make films with him, couldn't ask for anything better.

You also worked with Spike Jonze. What was it like working on those skits you guys did together with Eric?
Oh, well, Spike did ones before I was there, obviously. Like the Chaplin one [from Mouse], he did that without me. But once I was around, we did the Invisible Boards [Yeah Right!]. Spike's an amazing filmmaker, man. I've looked up to him my whole life and he's been so generous with sharing his knowledge and letting me be a part of everything and including me. I'm so grateful for everything I've learned just being around him. He's such a rad human being and super nice and kind and it's been amazing to be a part of everything and making films with him is just a dream come true.

Are you bringing elements from your past working with Spike and those guys into this new project?
Not really. I think the stuff we've done together with Spike for Girl is more quirky and fun. We Are Blood is more a straightforward film. The Spike stuff with Girl was more of a fantasy world. But I mean, I feel like we all get inspired by working together and there's a ton of things I've learned from working with Spike. I think just through filmmaking and being friends with everyone, you learn things and help each other pass along everything.

What was your role for Chomp On This?
Chomp was funny—it was kind of like seeing your favourite pros with their guard down. I think that's why kids were so stoked on it—It was funny. It was like me and Atiba [Jefferson] and a bunch of guys having fun, being like, "were going to make our own video"—just joking. Then we started doing it and the momentum started building and then all of our friends wanted to be in it—it just happened organically. It was cool cause all the pros could be in it just letting their guard down and having fun.

What's one of the more memorable projects you worked on over the years?
I dunno, there's definitely been projects I've been proud to be a part of. One of the very first skate films I made was called Genesis (1997)... That was very different at the time, using very different music and editing that I made with Jose Gomez. I think there's been certain films and projects over the years that have been really really fun where a lot of the stuff is just me not knowing if I can even do some of the stuff and just trying it. Boom, you know, let's do it! And then as tech progresses [it's more like], Can I even work this camera? I have no idea. Pick it up and figure it out. So over the years, I think projects like Genesis and Feedback and Modus Operandi... all that stuff, the early Transworld videos and Yeah Right!, and Fully Flared, and Pretty Sweet for Girl and the stuff I'm working on now is kind of just the culmination of everything. And I think each of the films progress as they go, and I'm excited for this one because I think it's going to be something new and different.

I always really liked The Reason (1999) too because it seemed like everyone was at the top of their game. Actually I wanted to ask you about the music aspect too. Do you think you can credit yourself with putting Muska on to drum and bass music?
No [laughs], I think when I met him he was already into drum and bass, but we definitely bonded over that for sure. I had a tape he would put in his ghetto blaster—we'd go out and skate and he'd be like, "Bring your drum and bass tape."

Sick! Have you still worked closely with music selection in the newer videos too, like Pretty Sweet, etc.?
Yeah, we've just been chipping away at it. It's hard with these films because you have a music budget and you only have X amount of dollars to get a song. So sometimes you can't get what you want, you know. A lot of the times you're doing your best working within that budget.

I was wondering if you're still doing anything with Skate Fairy? Because I checked out the site the other day and it went to some like weird Japanese website.
No, I haven't done anything with that in a long time. It's funny now you know... as the internet progressed, you just want a place where you can put photos and videos. You know, now it's like we have social media and all those platforms, Instagram... and it's super easy and you can do it right out of your phone or out of your pocket. Back then, you would have to figure out coding and stay up till four in the morning uploading these photos. Now it's so simple and basic. That's all it was, basically what social media is now. It was just a way to post photos and video.

Working for a skateboarding brand versus what you're doing now with a production house, what's the biggest difference you find with working from skate industry to film industry?
In 2008, I signed as a director with a production company to direct commercials. Outside the world of skateboarding is a totally different world. Doing that, you get to learn a lot of things and meet different people and from working with them I've been lucky enough to learn a lot of different things on these commercial sets that I can in turn bring to skateboarding and figure out a more simplistic way to do some of that stuff. And, in turn, with skateboarding, it's inherent that you want to do something down and dirty and quick and easy and you can kind of implement some of that stuff in the commercial world as well. So they complement each other.

Long before 4Chan and Reddit made him an internet icon and the likes of Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj blasted his mug to the masses, the emotionally expressive amphibian meme known as Pepe the Frog was the work of a single man. After unveiling him on MySpace in 2005, artist Matt Furie officially debuted the character in the following year's Boy's Club #1, a collection of single-page comics chronicling the adventures of an anthropomorphic quartet of funny-animal stoners. An answer to the "What if the Muppets vaped?" question that you were too afraid to ask, the series simultaneously satirized and celebrated the lifestyle of 20-something bros, capturing their lives full of junk food, catchphrases, and bodily fluids with horrifying and hilarious accuracy. But like all things of beauty, Boy's Club was fleeting: Its fourth and final issue came out in 2010, and it's been years since a new stand-alone strip surfaced.

But like Frankenstein's monster, Pepe outgrew his creator. A strip in which the frogman peed with his pants around his ankles—"Feels good man" was his hedonistic rationale—took off among users of 4Chan, who started remixing both the phrase and the face in 2008. Over time, as people redrew Pepe to look sad or smug and attached his face to literally thousands of different scenarios, the character left the catchphrase behind and achieved LOLcat levels of ubiquity, while the self-parodying search for "rare Pepes" invited ever more bizarre modifications of the meme.

Late last week, the artist quietly posted a new Boy's Club comic to his tumblr—the first the world has seen since we reached peak Pepe. And he started off with a bang: It's Pepe, jerking off. Is this semen-soaked strip—surrounded by genuinely rare Boy's Club comics Furie made for The Believer, previously unavailable online—the start of a new burst of inspiration from the guy who planted the seed for it all?

VICE talked to Furie about returning to the frog who made him internet famous, the inspiration he's drawn from the character's myriad memes, and how no matter how gross he gets, Pepe is for the children.

VICE: When was the last time you'd drawn Boy's Club comics before the last week?
Matt Furie: Three years ago? It's been a while. The Believer had a comics section, and I did that for a year or so; a lot of the ones that I posted last week were from there. I just dug up black-and-white versions from my archives, because in The Believer they were in color, and posted them. The one new one that I've done—and I hope to continue my streak—is this one of Pepe, uh, eventually... how can I say this... having a sexual eruption at the end of it. Or perhaps applying sunscreen. It's kind of left to the imagination.

The triumphant return of Pepe. Image via Furie's Tumblr

Could be a ketchup bottle mishap.
Indeed. But coincidentally that was based on a little drawing that I found online of Pepe that I thought was hilarious. I looked up Pepe on Facebook the other day, and this fan page's wallpaper was a really funny collage of all these Pepes. One of them was eating a fly, one of them was gonna shoot himself in the head, one of them was ejaculating on his face, but they were all so charming, and they looked like they were done by little kids. So I did a four-panel gag to kind of just get it started again. God willing, I'll do more. Maybe I'll make the next one based on that whole weird batch of Pepes. I feel I should exploit the internet popularity. Hopefully I will.

How long ago did you start to notice that he'd started to take on this life of his own?
I first noticed that there was a "feels good man" phenomenon a while ago. That became an internet phrase. I noticed it a lot, for some reason, on websites about working out. It'd be all these buff dudes who would write the hashtag "#feelsgoodman" when they were, like, flexing their abs or something, or chicks doing a front view and a side view. I thought that was interesting. It started off as a way to comment on random message boards and graduated into the fitness world.

Image via Matt Furie

Which is so far away from the Boy's Club milieu.
[Laughs] Yeah, totally. I'm not really big on working out. I don't think any of those characters are really big on working out either. But it just translated. There's something weird about the culture of getting buff, the culture of exercise — a weird masturbatory element to it. You're in there, by yourself, pumping iron. There's some similarity, some link there.

Boy's Club is definitely about indulgence.
Yeah. I think working out is also kind of an indulgent thing because you don't need to do it. I don't necessarily think it's that great to your body to be that hard on your body, you know?

So the initial wave was "Feels Good Man"–related, but as time passed that phrase and Pepe's face were separated further, and now there's just all kinds of Pepes out there.
The thing I like most about it is how janky these drawings are. It's cool. It seems like little kids are using MS Paint to do it or something. I'm actually kind of charmed by the quality of the linework. [Laughs] One of the neatest things that's happened recently is that my cousin has a daughter, who's maybe 12 or 13. She has a volleyball team, and she texted me the other day and said "You created Pepe, right?" I'm like "yeah." And she's like "Well, the team we're playing is Team Pepe, and they have that frog as their mascot." She lives in suburban Ohio. It's just cool that it translates to kids. There's all this perverted stuff, but there's also an innocence to it, too.

Related: The Man Behind @DadBoner

You don't feel weird about it being completely removed from its original context in your comics?
I don't really see it as being something that's negative. It's this almost post-capitalist kind of success. I'm not making any money off of it, but it's become its own thing in internet culture. Now, at least, a lot of people make a conscious effort to go out and try and create that kind of meme success, where you're doing these little one-off characters, little gags, little gifs, and that's definitely your intention. I'm just flattered by it. I don't really care. I think it's cool. In fact, I'm getting kind of inspired by all the weird interpretations of it. I wanna use it to my own advantage and try to come up with comics based on other people's interpretations of it.

But there are two things I don't like about it. One, he's mixed in with this weird white guy who he's always hugging, which I don't understand. Have you seen that white character? With the weird face?

Feels Guy, that's his name.
Yeah. I mean, why are they linked together? Is it because he's called the Feels Guy and the frog is the Feels Good Frog? It's got its own logic, you know what I mean? The kids know what it is, but I don't.

Two, he's got, randomly, a blue shirt and brown lips, and that's his accepted outfit now. Those are the two things that kind of piss me off about it. Other than that, I don't really care.

My lady thinks that Pepe's a self-portrait, in a way.

Comics have a history of characters being expropriated from their original creators—
Like Calvin pissing, and how the Robert Crumb "Keep On Truckin'" took on a life of its own?

I actually meant how, say, Jack Kirby never got his fair share from Marvel, or DC screwing Siegel & Shuster on Superman, but your comparison's more direct. It's not like there's some megacorporation that spent a billion dollars to buy Calvin Pissing Entertainment.
It's like a decentralized folk art, with people taking it, doing their own thing with it, and then capitalizing on it using bumper stickers or t-shirts. That's happening to me too. There is a tradition of it.

On Motherboard: 4Chan's Frog Meme Went Mainstream, So They Tried to Kill It

But your main complaints are just a couple of specific aesthetic things, and not a principled objection to art being used by people other than the original artist.
No, because I do art outside of Boy's Club, and I reference Terminator or Ronald McDonald or other pop-cultural stuff that I didn't come up with. If I see someone selling something on Etsy, like a Pepe pin or something, I just ask them to send me some. I have a little collection of bootleg Pepe stuff, some t-shirts and a necklace and an earring and some pins and things like that.

Some of Furie's bootleg Pepe merchandise. Photo via Matt Furie

You've done a children's book, you have a fine art career, you're getting involved in animation. Does Pepe get you in the door anywhere?
[Laughs] Not in the case of animation, no. I dunno, it might? I've met some cartoonists that are familiar. A lot of people know my work through Pepe, because there are ways to trace it back to me. "Oh, what do you do?" "Well, have you seen that frog guy online?" That's what people are most familiar with.

Is it hard to recapture that dirtbag mindset of Boy's Club after all these years?
It is, kind of, but there's a way to exist in that zone indefinitely. Not that I'm as prolific as the Charlie Brown guy or whatever, but he had to stay in that childhood world of interconnected friends and remember what that was like. This might even be easier, because it's a little bit closer to adulthood than childhood is. It's kind of in between childhood and adulthood, you know? I think you can still tap into it, but we'll see. I'll try a few to see if I've still got it. Time will tell. I have a kid now—a little girl, she just turned two months old—so things are a little different. I'm in that zone now, so maybe I'll draw some baby gags in there.

Babies and the Boy's Club dudes have a lot in common, in terms of being adorable but also disgusting.
Maybe that's where I'll draw my inspiration from: all those bodily horrors of babyhood.

Have you ever thought about collecting all the Boy's Club comics in a single book?
I've thought about it. I dunno. The problem with books is I usually end up getting not that great of a deal. If the right situation came along I'd do it, but it's really not even... I mean, I guess it would be worth it, to have it be easier for fans. But I kind of like it not being easy for people to get. I dunno, it's kind of funny to see it on eBay for $400 or something. My lady thinks that Pepe's a self-portrait, in a way—she says I have Pepe's eyes—so it's kind of neat to see something that's so personal to me on some level infiltrate this weird nether-region of the internet. I've made my mark on the internet, so I can relax. I'm retired now, living off all the shares and likes.

Follow Sean on Twitter.

Photo by Gage Skidmore/via Wikimedia Commons

Read: What Would Happen if Donald Trump Actually Became President?

During Ivana Trump's messy divorce from her ex-husband in the early 90s, the blond model and former athlete found herself in a room full of lawyers, listing as many reasons she could think of to justify ending her marriage with Donald Trump. As the deposition dragged on, she began to describe a brutal sexual encounter between the two in 1989, using the word "rape" to characterize what he did to her, the Daily Beast reported Monday.

Later, she would issue a statement clarifying that she "felt violated" by the experience, but not in the "criminal sense."

But on Monday, Michael Cohen—special counsel to the Trump organization and one of the candidate's advisers—denied the business mogul ever sexually abused his ex-wife. He also threatened the reporter asking about the incident with a lawsuit, promising that what he'd do to the journalist—should they dare publish a story about it—would be "fucking disgusting."

"You're talking about the frontrunner for the GOP, presidential candidate, as well as a private individual who never raped anybody," Cohen told the Daily Beast . "And, of course, understand that by the very definition, you can't rape your spouse."

As the Beast wrote, "That is not true. In New York, there used to be a so-called marital rape exemption to the law. It was struck down in 1984."

Former Newsweek reporter Harry Hurt III first shed light on Ivana Trump's deposition, and the incident between Trump and his ex-wife, in his 1993 book Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump. The scene he describes is, to say the least, really fucked up.

One night in 1989, according to Hurt's book, Trump had just gone through a nasty scalp-reduction surgery to get rid of a bald spot on his head. He then began to yell at Ivana, who months earlier had visited the same plastic surgeon.

"Your fucking doctor has ruined me!" Trump reportedly screamed.

He then held back Ivana's arms, ripping chunks of hair out of her scalp in what seemed like a twisted effort to mimic his own pain. He subsequently pulled down his pants and tore off Ivana's clothes, according to the book.

"Then he jams his penis inside her for the first time in more than 16 months. Ivana is terrified... It is a violent assault," Hurt wrote. "According to versions she repeats to some of her closest confidantes, 'He raped me.'"

After the "violent assault" was finally over, Ivana ran upstairs and locked herself in a room, crying there "for the rest of the night." When she came back into the master bedroom the next morning, Trump was still there.

"As she looks in horror at the ripped-out hair scattered all over the bed, he glares at her and asks with menacing casualness: 'Does it hurt?'" Hurt wrote.

Trump has publicly denied the allegation for decades, and in Lost Tycoon even denied having the scalp surgery. Ivana also released a statement around the time Lost Tycoon was released claiming she didn't want her earlier reference to a "rape" to be "interpreted in a literal or criminal sense." (On Tuesday, she released another statement to CNN saying the Daily Beast story was "totally without merit," and Cohen apologized for making "an inarticulate comment—which I do not believe.")

Trump has been saying horrible things about sexual assault for a long time now. In 1992, he suggested that the courts should allow convicted rapist Mike Tyson to pay "millions and millions of dollars" to his victims instead of serving jail time. In 2013, he blamed high rates of rape in the military on the fact that women are allowed to serve alongside men. And when he announced he'd be running for president just last month, Trump accused Mexican immigrants of being "rapists" who bring crime to the country.

Trump's history of nasty remarks doesn't seem to be hurting him, however. Despite his recent suggestion that John McCain, a prisoner of war for more than five years, isn't a war hero—the Donald is still at the top of a New Hampshire poll released today.

The Afghan Institute of Learning, teaching girls literacy skills with mobile phones. Photo via Global Fund for Women

More from VICE on Gender Equality:

Australia's Gender Pay Gap Is Wider Than Ever
Portraits of Afghan Women Imprisoned for 'Moral Crimes'
What the Hell Is a 'Hot Feminist'

As a young girl I was fascinated by the toolbox my dad kept in the cupboard under the stairs. I can still picture the forbidden latch and the words of my grandfather as I peered in for a closer look. "Don't touch." These were men's tools.

Twenty-two years later, and a recent essay written by Musimbi Kanyoro, the CEO of the Global Fund for Women (GFfW), has me thinking about that toolbox again. On reading the title, "Technology is a Women's Human Rights Issue," I heard my grandfather's words and then my own: How much technological progress have women made in 2015? For many young girls in India, for example, the computer in the home and the mobile phone lying idly on the kitchen table aren't for her. Like the DIY kit that intrigued my ten-year-old self, those are men's tools, too.

After the Arab Spring in 2010 the United Nations declared internet access a basic human right. Yet in 2013, only 40 percent of the world's population had access and, more shockingly, an estimated 200 million fewer women than men were logging on in 2014, with 21 percent less women likely to own a mobile phone. As Kanyoro explains in her essay, that number is set to rise to a staggering 350 million women within three years if we do nothing about it.

But tackling the ever-widening digital gender gap is by no means a small task. The media is saturated with headlines over online harassment and internet trolls, while a recent Guardian news story revealed that the percentage of women working in digital jobs in the UK has fallen from 33 percent in 2002 to 27 percent today. This month Twitter apologized for holding a staff 'frat house' party while midway through a gender-discrimination lawsuit.

There aren't any easy, quick-fix answers as to why our shared digital space is unequally accessed and often such an inhospitable place for women. It's a multi-faceted problem that so many of us—including governments, communities, and multinational technology companies—have been complicit in for so long.

As the Global Fund for Women (a grant-maker and global advocate for women's human rights) points out, women face two main problems within the tech world: getting inside in the first place, and influencing it once we're in there. Alongside digital storytelling platform IGNITE and the Technology Fund, the GFfW is trying to push for change from the grassroots up as part of a larger technology initiative.

"The ability to access technology is absolutely critical, but equally is the ability for women to control technology and to shape it," GFfF's Catherine King explains.

"In our world, technology is such an essential part of everything we do—accessing health services, education, employment. Navigating the world digitally is absolutely critical to being fully engaged in society and women and girls are missing, are underrepresented or are dropping out."

When you live in a digital age without the necessary tools or knowledge to help you survive, it's inevitable that education suffers, and so does any semblance of career progression—or, quite possibly, any career at all. With fewer women likely to get educated in STEM or ICT careers, King points out "they're less likely to become the leaders of companies, which means they're less likely to be the ones who are at the forefront of creating and inventing technology."

Related: Welcome to Broadly, VICE's new women's interest channel

The access and influence problem is one that the GFfW is actively trying to tackle. In its own words, it's on a mission to "find and support change-makers" who are harnessing the Internet to implement real and radical change on the ground for women. Projects include Argentinian group ACCT (Coordinated Action Against Human Trafficking, who have used forensic technology to create Argentina's first human trafficking database to find missing women and girls) and Blue Veins in Pakistan—"They've been using web-based mapping to document cases of sexual harassment in 30 Pakistani schools and universities," says King.

Another grantee partner of the GFfW is the Afghan Institute of Learning, which is helping young Afghan girls to read and write using mobile phones—and SMS texting—as a teaching aide. "Their mobile literacy program is really incredible," King says. "Over the course of the four-month curriculum, 80 percent of the girls have no or very low literacy skills, and after four months 80 percent have developed literacy skills. A complete flip of the ratios."

READ ON NOISEY: Do Songs By Female Pop Stars Always Need to Have a Feminist Message?

Keen to speak to some more "changemakers" who are doing great things to make women more visible both on and offline, I get in touch with the SPARK movement: a group of digital activists who are, quite literally, putting women on the map thanks to their newly-launched app, Women on the Map. Utilizing Google Maps through the Field Trip app, Women on the Map sends subscribers geo-alerts every time you approach a location associated with a woman who made history. It launched during Women's History Month this year with 119 women from more than 20 countries. What's more, over 50 percent are women of color.

"We'd been talking about a campaign that was looking at the ways that women are missing from public spaces in terms of being acknowledged for their contributions," Dana Edell tells me over Skype. "We started counting the numbers of monuments, statues, street signs, and schools commemorating men compared to women in various US cities and the gender gap was startling."

Women aren't just missing from motor highways, however. They're missing from the information superhighway, too. For every stone memorial in the outside world, there are countless more digital testaments inside your laptops and tablets and very few are telling women's stories. This became clear to Edell and SPARK through counting the male to female ratio of the Google Doodle—a hyperlinked commemoration that gets over 100 billion homepage hits a month.

Related: VICE visits Saarland, Germany to what it's like for sex workers in Europe's foremost sex tourism hot spot

"We found that it was overwhelmingly white men that were being commemorated," Edell says. To paraphrase their findings, women only made up 17 percent of the Google Doodles honoring notable people from 2010 to 2013 and out of the 26 percent commemorating people of color, only 18 percent were women.

The same day their report was published on The Wall Street Journal's homepage, Dana got a call from Google. One "brilliant phone conversation" led to both parties strategizing and soon they "came up with the idea of digital monuments" to "map the spaces where women have done incredible things in art, science technology, politics, and history," as Edell puts it.

Was Google's gender fail a surprise to them? Dana speaks about an "unconscious bias" that has arguably permeated so many other major tech companies up until now. "It's not this intentional, malicious 'let's keep people out of the tech industry' but it's an un-acknowledgement of the severity of the crisis," Dana says. "Obviously they can't just fire all the white men tomorrow. It's going to take time to see the change happen."

Dana's latterly point might be tongue-in-cheek, but it still cuts to the bone. Workforce diversity data published by Google itself in January this year makes for an infuriating read. Overall, women make up only 30 percent of Google's workforce (out of that percentage only two percent were black and three percent hispanic) and the tech department figures are even more telling, with women occupying just 18 percent of roles. Google's gender issues aren't just theirs alone. A quick search of any of the major players, including Yahoo and Facebook, reveals similar problems when it comes to diversity in the workplace. Like Google, all are transparent in their struggle, and collective in their realization that something needs to be done, fast.

Each company is addressing their diversity issues by implementing programs and strategies but, as Dana at SPARK points out, it's going to take time, and progress is frustratingly slow.

"How can you share the sum of all human knowledge when 50 percent of humanity isn't contributing to it?" Siko Bouterse, director of Community Resources at the Wikimedia Foundation asks me from her office in San Francisco. We're discussing Wikipedia's gender disparity and, in particular, a recent statistic that estimates less than 20 percent of Wikipedia editors are female.

The Blue Veins group in Pakistan use web-based mapping to document cases of sexual harassment. Picture via Global Fund for Women

"The barriers for women's participation in India are not the same as in the US or the UK. It makes the problem [of gender inequality] not so easy to solve," Siko admits.

That said, the Wikimedia Foundation is actively doing something to try and solve it. If there's one collective barrier women face, it's time. "We know there is inequality in leisure time and in most places men will have more leisure time than women do," Siko explains.

Read on Motherboard: How Misperceptions About Math Contribute to the Science Gender Gap

With "international edit-a-thons"—meet-ups held virtually and physically in universities and libraries where people collectively contribute to the encyclopedia—where specific time slots are set aside the productivity is staggering. Siko takes me through just a few of their achievements including: "Knowledge production" for women in science ("which historically has been pretty unimpressive in printed encyclopedias") where workshop teams inserted biographies into Wikipedia, and Art+Feminism which saw 15,000 volunteers at New York's MOMA participate in more than 75 satellite locations to create 400 new Wikipedia articles.

As Siko concludes, fighting gender disparity "requires persistence and it requires the ability to sometimes engage in conflict." "Persistence" is a word that resonates. The will to change what has been missing in the past—much like women online. Now it's finally here, "It's becoming much more of a shared call to action," says Siko.

Encouraging? Yes. But with so much ground for women to recover and occupy, let's not get out the party poppers just yet. Despite recent efforts, the statistics still aren't adding up and, yet again, young girls and women are paying the price. The next time you log in to Facebook or text a friend, picture a young girl in Nigeria stuck at home sewing whilst her brother visits a computer workshop. Or a pregnant woman in East Timor whose pre-natal health depends on SMS texts sent to a trained midwife—skilled care that, due to geographical barriers, is too often inaccessible, putting both mother and baby at risk. This is 2015. We shouldn't be living in a world where young girls are growing up thinking that a toolbox, a laptop, or an iPhone aren't for them. Where women aren't getting the medical help they need and the education they are entitled to. A world where so many women are missing.

Follow Kat Lister on Twitter.

A screen from 'Adr1ft.' Beautiful.

This article is best read while listening to this. Just a suggestion.

Space Invaders, 1978. An alien force lays siege to the Earth. They are unbeatable. The Earth will always fall.

Mass Effect 3, 2012. An alien force lays siege to the Earth. They seem unbeatable. They very nearly are. The Earth almost falls.

The vast knowns and unknowns of space have long served as inspiration to video game makers. Usually, space games have involved combat of some kind, a battle against extra-terrestrial forces intent on obliterating or enslaving mankind. Combat can play out on a massive scale in orbit, or in tighter ground environments, a crack team of just a few committed soldiers doing what they must to save the day, and humanity's future. We've all played these games, and we all have our favorites.

The fascination of space must have been so different to the generation above mine, when humankind was genuinely reaching for the stars in a media-amplified way that we simply don't see now, when the Space Race played out on broadcasts simultaneously seen by hundreds of millions—although the natural fragmentation of modern multi-media culture certainly plays a part in that feeling of disconnection, information disseminated where once it was centralized.

What a thrill it must have been to witness those first steps on the Moon as they happened, and the first televised space walk. And how deeply saddening it was when our manned missions ended in tragedy. I was only five when the Challenger exploded over the Atlantic in 1986, and remember nothing of its coverage, but I was 22 when Columbia disintegrated on re-entry into our atmosphere in the spring of 2003. For someone who'd played with space-themed LEGO, built his own shuttles out of plastic kits and bits of cardboard, and pored over so many books on our Solar System in his childhood—books that very much considered Pluto the ninth planet orbiting our sun—it was heart breaking. The human loss of course takes precedence over anything else, but it was the beginning of the end for NASA's Space Shuttle program—the final mission landed in July 2011.

But hasn't that innate desire for discovery in all humans been stirred lately? First came the incredible photographs of Pluto (which will always be a planet to me), transmitted from the New Horizons probe, launched in January 2006 with its goal to look into the early formation of the Solar System, which means reaching the (Pluto-housing) Kuiper belt. Seeing this distant celestial body's nitrogen ice, its hazy atmosphere and ancient mountains, in such amazing detail, felt like touching another world—one unlike ours, but a sister of it, related by a shared mother sun. And then we found (another) another Earth, the most Earth-like another-Earth yet, Kepler-452b.

On Motherboard: Why Do We Love Pluto So Much?

Shepard and me, we've spent hundreds of hours together across the three Mass Effect games.

So here I am, enthused by man's continuing push into the depths of space, by new discoveries and possibilities, looking over the schedule for upcoming video games, and all I want to do is escape orbit, ideally by myself. I've nothing against traveling with company—I loved my time as Commander Shepard across three Mass Effect games, mixing with an array of alien allies (and, every so often, bonking the shit out of them). But having found myself working to the soundtracks to Solaris (the remake) and Moon today (Sunshine and Under the Skin too, actually, if you're at all curious), my mood has taken a turn for the rather less social. And these forthcoming games are ideally suited to my lonesome adventuring.

First comes Adr1ft, released in September. The work of a small team at indie studio Three One Zero, and published by 505 Games (Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, Terraria, Abzu), it casts the player as an astronaut, Alex Oshima, attempting to piece together the recent past, having awoken in orbit above Earth amid a wrecked space station with no recollection of why the place is in such a state. Alex has oxygen levels that require regular monitoring, because space, while audio logs provide clues as to the fates of the station's crew. The objectives are clear and concise: survive and find a way back home, while in a constant state of zero gravity.

Related: Watch VICE's new documentary about a man on the edge of science,'ICEMAN'

Writer and director Adam Orth is a former Microsoft employee who, after telling upset Xbox users to "deal with it" when the plan was for an always-online Xbox One, was met by a barrage of shit across social media. A standard response, and you might even argue that he brought it on himself somewhat. Nevertheless, Adr1ft is the positive result of that painful time in Orth's life and career, serving as a "pretty obvious metaphor" for what he went through. The game is, in more of Orth's own words, about "action, consequence, and redemption." It also looks stunning, as the below IGN First footage shows.

'Adr1ft' will also support Oculus Rift—so imagine this, in virtual reality. Awesome.

No Man's Sky is slightly different and if you need me to go into what that's all about, where have you been these past 18 months? (Course, you can always catch up.) I appreciate that the hype for Hello Games' space-exploration epic has reached a level that the end product's experience can't possibly surpass, but all the same, I am so excited to strap myself into my little ship and find entirely new (procedurally generated) worlds and wildlife to name whatever the hell I want. First space-goat I come across, he's Dave. The second one, Clive. And so on. Animals need real names, too, and there is nothing wrong with calling a weird bipedal insect thing Colin if it just feels right.

No Man's Sky should be out for PC and PlayStation 4 this side of Christmas (2015), but I'll have to wait until 2016 (which means you do, too) for Tacoma, the new sci-fi game from Gone Home makers Fullbright. Tacoma is set on the lunar transfer station that gives the game its name, some 200,000 miles from Earth (which puts it in a pickle if more of these asteroids come along). Exactly what's going on in the game won't be fully revealed until its release, but Tacoma features on Game Informer's current cover, so some basics are out there. The lights are on in this place, but nobody's home, save for hologram figures all over the place that may reveal clues as to what's happened. Like Adr1ft, it seems more of a cerebral puzzler than a run-for-your-life affair.

You are Amy Ferrier, a new arrival on the station who's set for a year-long working stay. It's the "most remote, least cushy posting in the whole system," Fullbright co-founder Steve Gaynor told Game Informer—and yet, I'm eager to go there and meet its overseeing (and quite possibly secrets-withholding) AI, Odin. The studio doubled in size after Gone Home's success to make Tacoma, which as the trailer below shows, is already quite the looker.

The Tacoma is a beautiful 'ghost ship' in space—but are you as alone as you think?

Both Tacoma and Adr1ft look like encapsulating feelings of loneliness, of abandonment so far from home comforts—but neither will threaten the player in a direct way. Nothing nasty is chasing you though the Tacoma's corridors, or the zero-g of Adr1ft's fractured environments (or, at least, not yet based on what's been seen). Routine, though, presents a very real danger to its player. The work of LunarSoftware, a four-person British team, this is a non-linear, first-person survival horror game set in an abandoned Moon base. I'm not usually any good with scary games, but I stuck it out through a lot of last year's nerves-fraying Alien: Isolation because its setting and atmosphere was incredible (for most of its, to be honest, slightly overlong duration), and this indie production looks to be ticking some comparable boxes.

Routine's been in development since 2012, at least, when it got a teaser trailer for Gamescom, and there's still no release date set for it. The last update on LunarSoftware's website is from March this year, and says, basically, that the game remains a work in progress, although it's now going "better than ever." They're promising new videos in the future, between now and release, but today the one below is the most recent one we have and don't you just want to get stuck right into it? The retro-futurist look of Routine aligns perfectly with my love of things like the first Alien movie, and Duncan Jones' more recent Moon.

You are definitely not alone in 'Routine.'

Of course, rather grander space adventures (not that No Man's Sky isn't grand, but it's a small-budget game compared to these ones) are available both now and in the near future. Elite: Dangerous will soon come to consoles having been a success on PC; ambitious space-sim Star Citizen is expected in 2016, having raised an incredible $85 million in public funding; and the release of the new Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens, will be preceded by EA's Star Wars: Battlefront this November, in which you can choose to be either a Rebel Alliance soldier or Imperial stormtrooper, or play as a character from the film series.

Space, then, is very much the place for video gaming adventures—as it's always been, sure, but the experiences of today and tomorrow offer more than simply aiming at an enemy and slapping a fire button, just as 2001: A Space Odyssey is unlikely to be mistaken for Starship Troopers (and hey, they're both great films). And the likes of Routine, Tacoma, and Adr1ft may well rekindle developer enthusiasm for producing even more ambitious games possessing engrossing sci-fi narratives, set against a backdrop of stars-scattered black, just as New Horizons' eye for a photo and the Kepler telescope's latest discovery has turned so many of us into amateur astronomers. I can't wait to see what's out there for myself—and I will be going there by myself.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

The Black Lives Matter protest in Toronto on July 27. Photo via Twitter

About a hundred #BlackLivesMatter demonstrators blocked traffic on a Toronto expressway Monday evening following what they view as two recent injustices: the police shooting of Andrew Loku, and the lack of charges against an officer who shot and killed Jermaine Carby.

And they're not the only ones denouncing the investigation into Carby's death: a letter leaked to VICE shows the Peel Police are similarly displeased with the fallout of the investigation—but for very different reasons.

Monday's #BlackLivesMatter rally began near Loku's apartment building, where police shot and killed the 45-year-old black man two weeks ago. Protesters then marched to the Allen Expressway, where they linked arms, blocking traffic. As the sun set, the group grew in numbers and police arrived on the scene, but unlike the police pepper-spraying of Black Lives Matter demonstrators in Cleveland over the weekend, no violence broke out.

"It is time for action," the Facebook event for the #BlackLivesMatter rally states. "...Mayor [John] Tory and Police Chief Saunders say that we should wait for the 'independent' Special Investigations Unit report. ...This week, we saw the results of this supposed process: The officer(s) responsible for Jermaine Carby's death will not be charged for his murder. This is the Canadian equivalent of the 'no indictment' decision of the Mike Brown murder south of the border."

Still here. Justice for Jermaine. Justice for Andrew. #BLMTOshutitdown @osope pic.twitter.com/XpeiiFVpVW
— BlackLivesMatter TO (@BLM_TO) July 28, 2015

Carby's death at police gunpoint and the subsequent investigation into his shooting have raised the eyebrows and ire of his family members and supporters.

At around 10 PM on the evening of September 24 last fall, Peel Police told media they pulled Carby's vehicle over near Queen Street East and Kennedy Road in Brampton.

The Peel Police narrative was that the 33-year-old black man was holding a knife, and that police told him to "drop the knife" before an unnamed officer shot and killed him.

On July 21, Special Investigations Unit director Tony Loparco told media his investigators didn't find a knife at the scene, and that an officer had handed in the 13-centimetre kitchen knife to a senior officer "several hours" after the shooting, in a paper bag.

"This conduct is hard to fathom," Loparco told media. "As a result of the officer's actions, the SIU, and in a broader sense the public, is asked to accept that the knife it retrieved from police was in Mr. Carby's possession when he was shot, when that same inference could have more readily and safely been made had the scene not been tampered with."

The SIU didn't lay charges against the officer because, they found, he was defending himself against Carby.

"The particulars of his case are suspicious," the Toronto Black Lives Matter group stated on the Facebook event for Monday's rally. "The SIU confirms the officers tampered with evidence at the scene, producing the apparent knife of Jermaine's hours after the initial investigations began, which suggests that a weapon was planted. Jermaine was defamed by police to justify his murder."

But a July 22 letter from Peel Police to the SIU that was leaked to VICE states the SIU shouldn't have said there was "tampering" in Carby's case.

Letter to SIU Director - July 2015 by TannaraYelland

The letter from Paul Black, president of the Peel Regional Police Association, to Tony Loparco, Director of the Special Investigations Unit, claims the SIU "came to the appropriate and expected decision in clearing the officer of any wrongdoing."

"However," Black's letter continues, "the subsequent Press Release of your findings made comments about our officers, that were inciteful [sic] and inflammatory, while failing to fully explain the exoneration of our subject officer.

"Using the word 'tampering' to describe the events surrounding the knife, leads one to believe that police had sinister motives," Black writes. "It is, quite simply, unacceptable for you to make such an inappropriate and inaccurate statement. Like a gun properly seized from the subject officer, the knife was seized in good faith, was correctly bagged for forensic purposes, was properly turned over to a Supervisor for safekeeping, and in due course turned over to SIU forensic investigators.

"Your comment, suggesting the knife was not turned over for several hours is also misleading. Most of those hours and minutes were derived waiting for the SIU forensic investigators to arrive."

VICE sent the letter to the Black Lives Matter Toronto Coalition, requesting comment.

Rodney Diverlus, an organizer with the group, told VICE over the phone that the letter was offensive.

"I think this letter is incredibly angering and offensive," he said. "It is offensive to the families of Jermaine Carby, it is offensive to the families of all victims of police shooting, and I think that this letter shows a lot about where the priorities of the police association and where the priorities of our municipal police forces are at."

"What we need from the Peel Regional Police, what we need from Police Associations, isn't an angry letter sent to the SIU that plays on semantics. What we need from the police are a real commitment to address anti-black racism. What we need from the police are systemic work to address the way that violence is perpetrated by their officers. What we need from the police are to stop killing black bodies. That's what we need from the police."

VICE also reached out to Peel Police and the SIU, but did not hear back before publication. This story will be updated if we hear back from them.

Monday evening, representatives of the Black Lives Matter Toronto Coalition posted on Facebook that mayor John Tory had agreed to meet with them. A couple hours later the group posted on Twitter, "We got the mayor on the phone, but that ain't enough. We need solid commitments."

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Maggie Nelson. Photo by Harry Dodge. Courtesy of Graywolf Press

I was first pulled into Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts by its opening page, which begins with Santa Ana winds and ass-fucking on a cement floor, then swerves toward Ludwig Wittgenstein's idea of the inexpressible. During the span of the book—2007 through 2013—Nelson falls in love, marries, and has a baby with artist Harry Dodge. But the book also raises and ponders so many vital, beguiling questions that trying to summarize The Argonauts feels a lot like lying. Let's just say the book contains intellectual and cultural multitudes, from Gilles Deleuze to the X-Men. Let's also note that it details a number of notable life changes, including testosterone injections, a mother's death, and a longed-for infant's birth. In Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, which Nelson has called a ghost text for The Argonauts, Barthes writes that bliss is not what corresponds to desire, but what "surprises, exceeds, disturbs, deflects" it. I found that, from one page to the next, The Argonauts inspired bliss.

For weeks, I've been talking to anyone who'll listen about The Argonauts. As it so happens, a good number of my friends have been reading it as well, and in bars and at parties, I've had more than a few opportunities to discuss the book. Still, questions lingered, so I went to the source, the author Maggie Nelson. This interview took place last month over the phone as she went from swimming laps to picking up her son from school in Los Angeles.

VICE: In certain ways, your book seems to grapple with joy, with having found love. Joy can be so difficult to write, and is not often evoked in prose. I wonder if you could speak about your experience of doing so.
Maggie Nelson: I think that happiness or joy gets a really bad rap in writing land. People are always saying happiness kills creativity, or all happiness is the same, or there's no way of expressing happiness without it being glib. So the challenge was to see if all those things were true.

At the same time, in queer theory, there's been a long, at least 30-year conversation between an optimistic and pessimistic stance. Are you going to emphasize shame, trauma, mourning? Or are you going to emphasize pleasure, utopian thinking? I'm simplifying, of course—on many levels, these stances include each other. I was interested in that theoretical conversation, as well as an autobiographical conversation.

The thing about happiness is that it's only produced in the context of knowing what aren't happy feelings. That part at the end with the stalker episode, and with the logic of paranoia, I was interested in that. Happiness doesn't come without its specters, so it was never a book that was pure flight.

You've said that, once you started realizing that what would become The Argonauts was probably a book, you felt ambivalent about it, and that it wasn't something you'd have wanted to have written.
Once you engage words like mother or family, the machinery of them is so ginormous that I have my own phobic relationships going into those things. The machinery that wants to have a narrative of growing up, this "Oh, once you were like this, and now, you've 'become a mother' or 'generated a family'"—I'm not interested in that narrative arc. It's a narrative that's almost irresistible for most people, perhaps unconsciously so.

Also, it's difficult to write about people you live with, so I thought that would be too hard to undertake. But we've managed to get through it over here.

I found so harrowing the scene when you're attending the seminar with the two scholars, Jane Gallop and Rosalind Krauss. Gallop presents photographs of herself naked with her son, and Krauss rips her apart for the work's "soft-mindedness." You also quote from the New York Times Book Review Mother's Day article that says, "No subject offers a greater opportunity for terrible writing than motherhood." What was it like to write about motherhood while being so explicitly conscious of the ways it can be, and has been, marginalized or dismissed?
When you talk back to that dismissive discourse, you can feel frozen in a reactionary mode, like, "Goddamn it, the placenta should be interesting to everybody." But that's not a very interesting place to be for any length of time. So, I think I did in the book what I would try to do with any writing, which is to give testimony to lived experience in the most interesting language or way of thinking that I could find.

When you're writing, you have to write what you have to write. Rather than write something that was a hackneyed defense of "the mother who thinks," I just wanted to demonstrate thinking. To just do, not defend. Of course, the book can't help but get bogged down in a reactionary mode sometimes, but my hope is that it does both. Barthes called this active and reactive writing.

I really like how The Argonauts starts with wind and anal sex, then veers toward Wittgenstein. How did you think about balancing the overtly autobiographical with the more abstract or theoretical?
It's the way that I write and the way that I think. The editing process of any book I write—there's an art to it because no one wants to feel like they're plunked into some huge quote. When I'm reading the work of others, I feel a palpable difference of stakes between when I'm reading somebody's words and when I'm reading a quote. And I often don't want to read the quote. I want to read what the author has to say. But as an avid reader, and a lover of so many people that I'm quoting, I really want to use their words.

So, a lot of that process involves pushing yourself not to use more of the quote than you need to, only quoting when it's exceptionally important that it be in their words, and also doing something with their words, as opposed to trying to make them stand in for something that you didn't think you could say.

I feel like I'm in drag as a mother and in drag as a married person. But that's OK because I think it would be weird and probably self-deluded otherwise. –Maggie Nelson

You said after writing Bluets that your blue wasn't your blue anymore after you wrote about it, and that you felt differently about it. Did writing The Argonauts change how you felt about anything?
That's a good question. It would be too bad if I drifted away from my family the way I drifted from the color blue [ laughs]. But I don't feel like that. What's interesting about writing autobiographically is that you kind of shoot some wad somewhere and feel like you're done. But then our lives are our lives, and similar issues keep coming up in different guises.

I guess I felt on board with making certain aspects of my family public at this moment because it de-privatizes family in a way that probably has good political ramifications for our future. Even if writing the book made me feel more settled about certain issues, I didn't write it to settle into a privatized family and stop other struggles.

VICE Meets Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard:

Is that feeling related to the part in The Argonauts when you say that, while going around talking to people as a writer, you sometimes feel as though you're "in drag as a memoirist"? Did you feel that way about writing this book as well?
In drag as something [laughs]?

Yes.
I think being in drag is a great thing, so I think I resist, say, a collapsed biographical reading of this book as being about "becoming a mother," because of the way that the phrase preserves this role—it has a static-ness. I just don't relate to it. So, when people ask, "What's the biggest change of becoming a mother?"—which I've been asked in many interviews at this point—somehow I can't feel cheery. There are portals we go through in life that do change us, but how do we recognize those and pay honor to them, while also insisting on a sense of identity that's more fugitive than having, like, stations at the cross? So I would say, sure, I feel like I'm in drag as a mother and in drag as a married person. But that's OK because I think it would be weird and probably self-deluded otherwise.

It's not just a cliché that spending a lot of time around small people makes you think differently. –Maggie Nelson

I'm a little flabbergasted, but also not at all surprised, that so many interviews have involved people asking what the biggest change has been in becoming a mother. I feel as though, in that question, there's a fixed idea about what motherhood is, and what mothers are or should be.
What I don't like about it, too, among other things, is that a lot gets shoveled into mother in this culture. When we say "becoming a mother," there can be this whole narrative behind it, like, "I used to be this selfish bachelorette/little girl and now I'm a grownup who cares for other people." There's a disciplinary aspect of "becoming a mother," a disciplinary aspect of shoving all care onto a mother, not to mention a truly wicked disciplinary aspect of punishing mothers who can't "adequately provide" for their children.

At the same time, there are things like a sense of time or a sense of mortality. It's not just a cliché that spending a lot of time around small people makes you think differently. So you have to figure out how to deflate without dismissing. You can deflate the ideology of the thing without dismissing real feelings or observations that come with that experience.

You mention talking about the X-Men with Harry, and you say that what you hate about crappy fiction is that it "purports to provide occasions for thinking through complex issues, but really it has predetermined the positions." What kinds of fiction do you like, then?
I've had conversations with fiction-writer friends who basically think it's the most incendiary claim in the whole book [laughs].

You qualified it with "crappy" fiction.
I did, I really did! I don't think I had that in there originally, but then I put it in later. What I've said in response to fiction friends was, "Look how much fiction there is all through this book, whether it's Beckett's Molloy in the opening paragraph, or Alice Munro—there's so much in there, so that speaks for itself, in a way." I probably read fiction the least of any genre, but the fiction that I love tends to be more conceptual. I do read current people—oftentimes my friends, sometimes not—but I also really love fiction from the last century: I love Henry James, I love Virginia Woolf. I think I'm an impatient reader on a sentence-by-sentence level. I think that some avid fiction readers like plot and structure and character development so much that they can overlook weak sentences. I'm not one of those people [laughs]. If I come across the third bad metaphor, I'm like, "I'm out."

Yes!
What about you?

I think I share your sympathies. Unless the book's come highly recommended by someone I trust, I'll pick it up and read a few sentences from the middle. If those sentences move me, and pull me in, and they don't feel hackneyed or false, then I can keep reading.
When I lived in New York, my mom used to take me to Broadway shows when she came to town, and I remember that every time the lights went down—which, to a lot of people, is the magical moment—I felt horrified that, when they came back up, everyone was going to be pretending. The theater I liked was more like Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theater, where all of those issues of performativity were foregrounded, at play. I shouldn't even say all this because, again, this is going to be more contentious than anything else.

Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is available from Graywolf Press in bookstores and online.

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Grimsby dock tower and fish dock. Photo by Rob Faulkner via

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Few train journeys provide a more revealing picture of England than the TransPennine Express. Depending on which direction you're traveling, the timetable can read like a ranking of either the country's nastiest shitholes, or the best locations for football league away days. Riding high on both of those lists is the route's penultimate destination, my hometown: Grimsby. This week, Shortlist magazine is reportedly going to crown it "the worst place to be a man in the UK."

Grimsby, as much as I love it, has the dubious honor of being the most appropriately named place in the world. As kids, we were taught that the town was named after "Grim," the Viking fisherman who founded it, but it may as well have been named after what immediately comes to mind: the synonym for "bleak."

Described by its former MP as "a tough, taciturn, and unemotional town, inured to suffering because of the death of fishing and the inadequate level of support and spending it gets from government," Grimsby is the sort of place where you'll leave the train station and be instantly confronted by a flock of pigeons pecking away at dog shit.

Plenty of towns across England have suffered from the decline of industry; rising poverty (the town's East Marsh ward is one of the poorest in the country and was the subject of Channel 4's Skint); lack of investment; and the resulting drug, alcohol, and crime problems—but few others seem to attract the same kind of derision as Grimsby. It feels like the town is the punchline of a relentless national joke. A town unable to catch a break. A town whose beauty and softness has been sand-blasted away by a never-ending chorus of Nelson Muntz "ha-has" from the outside world, leaving nothing but the stern interior of passion, pain, and loyalty.

The town's woes began with the fall of the fishing industry. The Cod Wars of the 1970s—and further EU-driven quotas—combined with dwindling fish stocks signaled the end of a working class culture that was ingrained in the town's identity.

My friends and I never experienced those North Sea glory years ourselves, but growing up there were constant reminders. We sang about fish at football matches, bands practiced in old warehouses on the docks, and tales of adventures were recounted in corners of pubs. School trips were swimming and The National Fishing Heritage Centre.

We knew Grimsby wasn't the best place to live—visiting family members as far away as Skegness confirmed this—but we all just got on with it, because that's what you do when you're a child. We made the most of trips to the nearby seaside resort Cleethorpes; we made the most of the Fair World arcade, with regular visits to ensure our Silent Scope high scores were still intact. We made the most of it because that's all we had; nobody famous wrote poetry about our town, it never inspired any notable paintings, and nobody "big" came from the local area, bar national anti-treasures Roy Chubby Brown and Ian Huntley.

It wasn't until Tommy Turgoose made Shane Meadows give him a fiver to audition for the lead in This Is England that the town got a taste of positive cultural exposure. Turgoose's sunken-eyed, glazed-over childhood stare provided a window into the psyche of the town he had come from.

As Turgoose so often points out in interviews, there has never been much going on in Grimsby—but, again, you make the most of it. Kasabian played the auditorium once, which felt huge, as did Pete Doherty. The Pigeon Detectives were on the receiving end of a barrage of piss-filled cups when they played the town in 2008 after announcing it was "great to be back in Yorkshire" (Grimsby is not in Yorkshire).

Related: Watch our documentary, 'Blackpool: Las Vegas of the North'

The auditorium bills have since been monopolized by tribute acts, pantomimes starring forgotten SMTV: Live presenters and the odd touring 8 Out of 10 Cats panel member. Local cult band Orphan Boy's lyrics paint the perfect picture of a pocket of the country a million miles away from the nearest A&R man: "Got a daytime job in a night-time bar / Got no money and he won't get far / But there's no one here and there's no family / And there's no pocket money but he likes it like that."

If the residents of Grimsby are proud of anything, it's our football team. Grimsby Town Football Club is a microcosm of everything resilient and humorous about the town, while also acting as a convenient parallel of its decline. Once modest second-tier relegation avoiders and cup run specialists, the "Mariners," like many other football league clubs, fell victim to the ITV Digital collapse and plummeted season after season into the slippery confines of the Vanarama Conference. While fierce local rivals Hull City's Premier League fortunes coincided with a reinvigoration of their city, Grimsby's downturn played out on its streets and football pitches.

Despite its fall from grace, the fans continue to sing week in, week out; home and away. "WE. PISS. ON. YOUR. FISH. (YES WE DO)!" and "LENELL JOHN-LEWIS, HIS NAME IS A SHOP!" (John-Lewis has since moved on to the greener pastures of Newport County) are just a few of the Town battle cries, swept up in the biting North Sea wind and carried around the stadium.

Blundell Park, the team's home ground, is actually situated in Cleethorpes on the bank of the Humber Estuary coastline. While most home spectators are limited to a view of the crunching muddy tackles and hoof-it mentality of Conference away sides, those in the second tier of the Findus Stand are treated to a panoramic view of the late afternoon North Sea traffic. Tankers crawl along, specks in the distance, before being snuffed out by the horizon. Henry Kissinger once sat through a defeat to Gillingham at Blundell Park after an invitation from the then-foreign secretary and MP for Great Grimsby, Tony Crosland.

READ ON VICE SPORTS: The Quest to Make Baseball Relevant in Its Birthplace

The Mariners' supporters, like the town, find it difficult to catch a break. Known for their passionate and boisterous away support, the lads of Blundell Park enjoy fierce local rivalries, and, according to government figures for the 2013/2014 season, Grimsby Town had more banning orders than any other team in the Vanarama Conference and League 2. These antics have caught the eye of Sacha Baron Cohen, who is currently making a film that looks set to raise the profile of the town from post-industrial globalization casualty to pop-culture joke, instilling it with the same international credibility awarded on post-Borat Kazakhstan.

The general election in Grimsby, a moment for the town to potentially dust down its tired news-fodder stereotype, played out as a similarly embarrassing real-life mockumentary. The UKIP candidate Victoria Ayling, having got the traditional xenophobic quip out of the way early on, asked the hard questions about renewable energy, while the outgoing Labour MP made things difficult by complacently joking in an interview that Labour would win the seat even if they selected "a raving sex pedophile." Nigel Farage also briefly turned up and, as punishment, the media made him go on a boat trip to see offshore wind turbines with Joey Essex.

The one-step-forward, two-steps-back politics the town has been subjected to for years is not limited to parliamentary proceedings. The local council has form for futile attempts at improving things, most recently pouring money into a geometric paving pattern that is so hypnotically mesmerizing that it nearly killed somebody. On a much more promising note, the constituency of Great Grimsby can now boast a female Labour MP brought up on a local council estate, giving her a major insight into the plight local people are facing and answering the calls for "real people" in Westminster.

Grimsby is unfortunate, not just because of its circumstances, but because of an endless comical repetition of them. It's a place long-forgotten by politicians and in desperate need of help. The people are resilient, humorous, and aware of their far from perfect surroundings, but they're at the mercy of macro-economic factors way beyond them. Grimsby isn't perfect, but it's not the one-dimensional shit-hole it's often made out to be.

Thumbnail image via Channel 4

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Photo by Flickr user Hobvias Sudoneighm

Recently, I wrote a letter addressed to my grandma. It was an affectionate letter, full of details about my life and references to hers. The only thing is, I don't have a living grandmother. I didn't even know the woman to whom I was writing. I was simply penning the letter on behalf of a client, who had hired me to do the job.

I make a decent living ghostwriting memoirs, novels, book outlines, and occasionally, personal correspondence. When the work is steady, my pay is comparable to that of seasoned lawyer, and much like a lawyer, I'm working from a retainer that my clients fund as needed. It's a job I never quite expected to have—the ghostwriting snowballed from other writing jobs, and now I advertise my services through Elance, LinkedIn, and Twitter. In most cases, people hire me to do routine writing jobs—punching up a speech they've already written, or providing basic edits—but sometimes, my working relationships evolve into their most intimate letters, emails, and text messages.

When I saw Joaquin Phoenix's character writing cards to other people's loved ones in the beginning of Her, I thought: "Ugh! Never!" It seemed like an overly futuristic, caustic version of communication. But in reality, while the industry is fairly hush-hush, personal ghostwriters are not unheard of. People have turned to ghostwriters like me for help penning their college admissions essays, managing their online dating profiles, or even coming up with their wedding vows.

When I first started this job, I assumed my services were sought only by the very busy, or people who couldn't string together a sentence on their own. I've since realized these assumptions are not true. Most of the people I work for already have assistants (to whom I've also written emails, in the voice of my client) and they use me like a subscription service, to craft their messages with just the right level of expression. I've yet to work for someone who truly needs me—they're all polished and articulate people—which makes me feel like a luxury item on good days, and a sell-out on the bad.

Very few of the people who hire me for this work want to talk on the phone, so I have to learn their voice through the messages they forward, the inside jokes we build, and the details they share with me about each person I write to on their behalf. My job is to read the entire correspondence (either the thread of emails, string of text messages, or whatever) and tap into their unique way of phrasing things. The ultimate failure in this job would be to sound like an imposter, so nailing the tone is important. Since I started striving to become a chameleon of dialogue, I've lost all appreciation for Aaron Sorkin and his characters with their interchangeable speeches. It's also made me a better listener, since I've trained myself to take note of how people use words.

Related: The Man Behind @DadBoner

But writing for other people can be a real head-trip. The whole point of exchanging emails, or sending a card to someone, is to help you feel closer to that person. It's an acknowledgement of your relationship, of the way you feel toward each other. Their choice of words can provide comfort, or romance; it's the very building blocks for relationships. So when you disrupt that natural process by changing the source of the message, things get a little weird. Would it be insulting to know that a stranger wrote that message rather than your loved one—or flattering, because your attention is worthy of hiring an expert?

Like the women who do bikini waxes, I end up knowing everything about my clients' personal lives, while they know very little about mine.

The easiest tasks I handle are drunken texts (even if they come at me when I've been drinking too—this is a 24/7 kind of job). Usually, my client sends me a screenshot of the conversation and asks for a reply. I find that I often get asked to provide my services in response to things like half-naked photos, replying to which can be a real stumper. I'll take a look at the conversation, tap into the client's voice, and draft up a few options for them to choose from:

a) "Can't wait to experience the live version."
b) "I appreciate you not forcing me to get cliche' by asking 'What are you wearing?'"
c) "The Greeks understood the S curve all too well. We owe them much of our modern architectural foundation knowledge. But they didn't know it quite the way you do."
d) "Send another quick! My battery is dying! ;)"

I have to tow a strange line during exchanges like this. Like the women who do bikini waxes, I end up knowing everything about my clients' personal lives, while they know very little about mine. Sometimes I think of a friend I'd like to set up with one of my clients, but I know better than to admit I've been paying attention to their type or their heartaches.

Photo by Flickr user Pro Juventute

More popular than romantic advancements are the messages regarding illness. I recently drafted a message to a client's loved one, who was battling an illness. The client had given me a list of her personality traits, their inside jokes, and some of the history they shared, along with the guidance: "I'm afraid of losing her but I don't want to sound afraid or scare her more." I've emailed suggestions for sympathy cards that were written in my client's hand, grazing their sorrow with a brief opening of condolences just to them. This is the work I get the most out of. It's a form of therapy, as I usually think about someone I love—someone I've not been able to properly address—and write my heart out to them. It's more cathartic than those unsent letters in a shoebox under one's bed because these missives have actual flesh-and-blood recipients.

After working with my clients in some of their most emotional times, my relationships to them have crossed over into a strange, faraway friend zone: I care about them, and I want them to succeed in their relationships and business dealings. But there's a part of me that gets a little jealous too. They're mostly fit, extremely successful, organized, and always sending photos from faraway places that I have to caption as though I've been there. I'm a positive person, and usually inspired by such lifestyles, but on bad days I feel more voyeur than ghostwriter, more closeted captive than creative consultant.

Years ago I saw a high school play about a hunchback locked in a closet with only a typewriter. A young writer had enslaved the hunchback to ghostwrite bestselling books that the "writer" claimed as his own. The real writer begged to be set free, but his captor only laughed or hit him, always forcing him back into the closet, where he would churn out more and more of the stolen books.

I love my job, but sometimes I feel just like that hunchback locked away in the closet. My own social media suffers as I sell my best jokes; sometimes my own emails go unanswered for days. I once had a client tell me, after I'd written a long and painful tale on their behalf, "It feels so cathartic to get it out." Suddenly I knew how surrogate mothers felt: carrying, delivering, and ultimately giving up a baby. I write to each of my clients' recipients with extra care—possibly more care than I write to my own loved ones—feeling so far gone in their own drama and mysteries that I almost lose my own, and a little bit of myself along the way.

Follow Angela Lovell on Twitter.