Fahed jumps between destroyed buildings in Gaza. Fares, having already completed the jump, runs ahead. All images by Loulou D'Azi, UNICEF

Since they were kids, Fares and Fahed have used parkour as a way to cope with their lives in Gaza. Now in their teens, the friends spend the long summers days running across bombed out buildings with a group of roughly 20 other young men. Of his hobby, Fares says: "I don't know about the future, we live under siege. This is the only thing that makes us feel free."

For the past few years, the group used a clubhouse to meet and train, but they were forced to abandon their meeting place during last year's 51 days of conflict with Israel. Without the clubhouse they now practice outdoors, favoring the crowded streets and the beach, where they can land on sand to break their falls.

Those in the group practice whenever they can, ideally for several hours a day. The heat means they often have to limit their training to the early mornings and evenings.

On VICE News: Gaza One Year On, Life Amid the Ruins

Despite the issues and the uncertainty in which they live, Fares says parkour is a welcome break from his responsibilities. His father died when he was two, and he lives with his siblings and mother. Without their father's income, they live on monthly benefits from the government and support from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). "Gaza is an end," Fares says. "We live here because there is no other choice. This is the life we have, and we just make it work."

You can support UNICEF's work for the children, youth, and women of Gaza here.

Ihor "The Pianist". Photos from the personal archive of Oleksandr Tkachuk.

This article originally appeared on VICE Romania

I find it hard to feel empathy about the conflict in Ukraine through reading the news. The dead and the wounded, regions won and regions lost, shots fired, winners and losers. When reading about it in the paper, the numbers gradually lose their meaning. I can, however, feel empathy toward someone's life experiences. That's why, earlier this month, I traveled from Bucharest to Kiev to meet the people whose lives the war is affecting.

One of the people I met was Oleksandr Tkachuk. Oleksandr is normally a filmmaker but has spent the last year of his life commanding a squadron of Ukrainian soldiers on the Russian border. "This war isn't just physical," he told me. "It's also cultural. I have nothing against Russian culture, but at this point there's an ideological conflict."

Watch our documentary 'Selfie Soldiers: Russia Checks in to Ukraine':

His wish to contribute to that cultural revolution motivated him to start the Music of Warriors—a project documenting soldiers' musical talents. He explained: "I was walking through Kiev and I saw a musician playing a cello—he wasn't military, just a street musician. But the sound of his instrument was so dramatic that it really told me the story of what has happened in Ukraine in the last year. So, I convinced him to dress up as a soldier and play his music in a video. The video was unexpectedly popular online. After this, I decided that I could go even further, so I invited all sorts of soldiers who played musical instruments to join."

He then opened his laptop and showed me a video of Ihor, the "Pianist"—a soldier from the Donbas Battalion, whom he had filmed at the Kiev Military Hospital. "Last summer, after the massacre of Ilovaisk, Ihor was taken prisoner by Russian separatists. Ironically, they held him prisoner in a former music school, where he found an old piano, which he was allowed to repair. Almost every night, he would sit by that piano and play classical music. The guards and the prisoners would gather to listen to him and they would all cry and cheer for him together."

It's not hard to draw a comparison between Ihor and the titular character in Roman Polanski's The Pianist. But despite his fantastic story, the only public mention I could find of Ihor was a small piece of news on local television. "He's an introvert. He doesn't like to be interviewed and foreign journalists don't know how to get in touch with him," said Oleksandr.

The Pianist, as his battalion comrades call him, was born in Western Ukraine 24 years ago. He graduated from music school in Kuty, but never played in public before the Euromaidan revolution, when he and other musicians gave concerts in solidarity with the protesters in Independence Square. At the time, he was a law student at the National University of Chernivtsi.

After a couple of failed attempts, I managed to speak with Ihor on the phone. The connection was terrible and the call would break every few minutes. He was shy but nice and tried his best to answer my questions but, as Irina warned me, he refused to tell me how he was treated during his detention:

"Those four months I spent in detention were hard. All 100 of us tried to stick close together, like brothers. There were a lot of difficult moments, but we tried to get over them with humor and music. Music is the only language everybody understands," was all I could get out of him.

Ihor, "the Pianist." Photos from the personal archive of Oleksandr Tkachuk

Though I could only imagine what Ihor went through during those months, it was even harder for me to understand how he had the strength to return to the front after that. "War is like a drug: once you experience it, it never lets you go. Now, I want to see it through. We won't give up. We'll see it to the end, until we are victorious," he explained.

Ihor's tale is rather different to what you'd expect from a war story. But I'm glad that, instead of another gory depiction about the horrors of war, I found one about its humane side. The Music of Warriors project is ongoing and Alex is still looking for soldiers who—like Ihor—are able to express their experiences through music.

Image via the Festival of Dangerous Ideas

Chances are your childhood home did not have a nuclear bunker. For people born after the Cold War, the threat of nuclear annihilation doesn't seem likea terribly imminent threat; it's been 70 years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in that time, nobody's managed to nuke another population.

Meanwhile, Russia and the United States have 1,800 warheads on standby. There's about another 14,000 across nine other countries. These newer models are far more lethal than the one that destroyed Hiroshima: they could kill millions within minutes, and many more over following years thanks to radioactive after-effects.

Investigative journalist Eric Schlosser looks at potential nuclear bomb-related doomsday scenarios—both the idiotic and the hostile—in his book Command and Control. He's coming to Sydney for the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, so VICE Australia thought we'd ask him if we need to start building our own fallout shelters.

VICE: For people of my generation, the threat of nuclear war isn't as imminent as it once seemed. How concerned should we be?
Eric Schlosser: Maybe this is an issue that people right now need to be a lot more aware of without panicking. You're lucky. In the 80s when I was at university, there was really this sense that a nuclear war might happen any day. That's no way to live.

But to me, the two great existential threats that we face today are global warming and nuclear weapons—and the latter isn't getting anywhere near enough attention.

What's the likelihood of two states using warheads against each other?
Statistically, the greatest probability is of a terrorist either stealing a weapon, or making a weapon and using it. But there's also a risk between India and Pakistan. There's something about the hatred between neighbors that's a lot more intense. With India and Pakistan, you've got ethnic differences, religious differences, extremist differences in both countries, and that's the most likely place where you would have a nuclear war.

With the capability of today's warheads, what power would a strike now have in relation to Hiroshima?
It really depends on what sort of weapon you're talking about. The Hiroshima bomb was an incredibly crude, inefficient, and rudimentary weapon. Since then, they've become so much more sophisticated. The typical nuclear weapon on an American missile is about 20 times more powerful. But you also have to go back to the Second World War to look at how cities were annihilated, and how their inhabitants were basically left to their own devices.

The World Health Organization and the Red Cross have concluded that there's no country in the world that has the emergency response capability to deal with the aftermath of even one nuclear strike.

Not a lot of democracies seem to elect politicians running on a platform of disarmament, why do you think that's the case?
Some politicians have spoken about nuclear weapons giving them a seat at the 'big table,' and it feeds a national ego's sense of power. Right now, Germany is more powerful than Great Britain as a world power, but they don't have nuclear weapons. So what's going to satisfy voters? Having your people well fed, well educated, and having a good life, or having an arsenal of weapons that can slaughter not thousands, but millions of civilians?

So really, nobody's made them do it. We can't just wait and expect the world leaders to disarm; there needs to be public pressure to do it.

Related: Watch our documentary, 'Bulgarian Dirty Bombs'

What do you think we need to get this pressure building?
People worldwide need to be aware that these weapons pose a great threat to their lives. Look at the logic of the landmine ban: they disproportionately harm civilians. It's the same thing with nuclear weapons—they're really good at killing large numbers of civilians but not really good at anything else.

So people have to ask this question: There's about 200 countries in the world, but only nine have nuclear weapons, so maybe it's possible to be a sovereign state without weapons of mass destruction that cause extraordinary harm to innocent people?

OK, so where do we take the discussion in 2015?
This is getting very grim and apocalyptic, but I'm not saying there's no hope. I'm just concerned. To me it's a greater threat than global warming because strikes are irreversible and it's instantaneous. People need to tell their leaders with nuclear capability that these weapons are not what it means to be powerful. Actually, it's the most simplistic, obvious manifestation of power. And you know, we don't want to have the ability to kill millions of people in our names.

Follow Alan on Twitter.

Eric will be speaking at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, including on a special VICE-curated discussion on prisons in Australia. To win tickets to see him and a bunch of other interesting speakers, click here.

HMP Strangeways in Manchester, one of Britain's category A prisons. Photo by Stemonitis

When you read horror stories in the news about men killing their wives or girlfriends, they might come across as one-off tragedies that could never really be properly explained. But do you ever wonder if there's a pattern to the murders of women by men?

A husband and wife team of professors wanted answers, and have devoted a large part of their lives to finding them. Professors Rebecca and Russell Dobash, criminologists at The University of Manchester, spent ten years interviewing murderers serving life sentences in British prisons and conducted the biggest ever study of men who kill women.

Their research uncovered several unnerving societal issues. Most importantly, they found that many women are murdered by jealous, possessive, and controlling men. The ideas of entitlement bound up in masculinity are, in some cases, deadly.

I spoke to Professor Russell Dobash about his and his wife's book on their decade-long study of these types of killings, When Men Murder Women.

VICE: Why was it important to do such an in-depth study into why men murder women?
Professor Russell Dobash: Most studies of homicide only involve statistics like the age and gender of the offender and victim. We don't think this tells us much about why people commit murder and wanted to go further.

We got data on men killing men, women, and children. Most studies focus on male on male murders, but we wanted to make sure we knew more about women, because in Great Britain 30 percent of the victims are women, and 20 percent in the US.

Can you outline what the study consists of?
We went into seven British prisons and looked at the case files of murderers and identified three main types of murders with female victims. We looked at 105 cases of intimate partner murder—wives, partners, girlfriends. Sexual murders, the killing of an individual woman who was not an intimate partner, but was killed in a sexual murder, looking at 98 cases, four of which were serial killers. And the murder of women over 65, with 40 cases. We also compared 424 cases of male on male murder.

We looked at 866 case files in total, and collected statistical information about the nature of the murders, number of injuries, kinds of weapon used, etc. We also collected information about their life courses, such as their problems in childhood and adulthood, if there were any, and interviewed 200 male and female murderers ourselves.

What were your key findings?
We found that in the vast majority of cases, men kill their partners because of sexual jealousy. Either at the point where the female says "I've had enough of you whacking on me, I'm out of here,"—because 65 percent of the men have previously used violence on their partners—or after they'd left. What generally happens is he wants the woman and thinks she's his, so he tries to get her back. Often, he tries cajoling her or, ironically, beating her up. In these cases, eventually they realize she won't come back and change the project to annihilating her.

The intimate partner murders were some of the most intentional killers we saw. Many had problematic childhoods and adulthoods, a lot had alcohol problems and were unemployed. But there were a proportion who didn't have any convictions, or alcohol issues, and were regularly employed. These guys had the same proprietary orientations towards their partner. Whether she's middle or working class, she's left him and she's had it. We also found 62 collateral murders. These involved the killing of either her children, or "protectors" such as friends, relatives, new boyfriends, and husbands, which shows you how important this sense of possessiveness is.

So that's intimate partner murder. What about sexual murder?
Sexual murderers are generally, but not always, [carried out by] sexual predators. In the majority of cases, what happens in sexual murders is he's doing his usual thing, either he jumps on the woman in an isolated area, or he sees her across the road and tries to get sex, and she resists. He then carries out a very vicious assault, often involving strangulation, but also kicking, punching, and stomping on her.

Sexual murderers usually have very troubled backgrounds, far more so than intimate partner murderers. They have usually used alcohol and are dependent. About 37 percent of the women were strangers, and the rest knew the perpetrator as their neighbor, relative or friend. Only about 20 percent of the murderers had been convicted of a sexual assault, which is very worrying. Some had been brought to court and the prosecution didn't succeed, or the woman withdrew the complaint because she couldn't go through with it.

Related: Watch Andre Gets Heckled

There's a belief that drugs are a factor in homicides, which probably comes from the US, and it could be important there, but here in Europe and Great Britain, it's most often alcohol. With sexual murders, often these guys are at the pub, decide they want a woman, stagger out, find a woman walking home from work or the pub and go after her.

And the third category you looked at was the murder of older women.
With the murders of older women, 40 percent of them were strangers who had seen her around and knew she was living on her own. Others were neighbors, friends, and relatives. In the main, these guys targeted older women because they were vulnerable. Half of them committed a sexual murder on a woman over 65. Only a couple were sexual murders in care homes. The sexual murders of older women were usually of women over 80. Often the man broke into her house with the intention of robbing or having sex with her, she tried to resist and he became violent. Only a few had the intention of committing an assault, but then they don't think consequentially and batter her to death. The burglars were often substance abusers, unlike the others. Murders of older women only make up around six percent of homicides, but this could grow with the aging population.

Can you give examples of some case studies?
In one case of intimate partner murder, the woman had left the man seven years ago and was married to a new partner. The ex is possessive about her, thinks she still belongs to him, and he kills her.

In another, the couple has separated and she has custody of the kids. The ex-husband has them for the weekend, two boys, and kills them. Not because he hates the kids, but because he's angry at her.

One guy started using violence against women when he was 12, working at an old-people's home and beat up and robbed an old woman there, before going on to kill a woman as an adult.

Were you disturbed by your work on the project?
Doing the interviews was sometimes startling. How they talk about the murder, like "someone was killed," or "a knife came out," or saying "it died," about the woman, was quite disturbing. The men saw themselves as acted upon, and rarely the actor. Remorse was largely absent. We wouldn't be human if we weren't disturbed, but the police, psychologists, and probation officers are the ones really on the frontline.

What, if anything, has changed over the decades you've been doing this work?
In the 1980s we used to lecture to the police about intimate partner murders and sexual murders and the pervading attitude was that either the women deserve it because of the way they dress or look, or it wasn't the perpetrators fault and he was led on.

Over the last ten years, the revelations in the media about child abuse in institutions, and survivors talking publicly, made people begin to recognize that this is a real thing. They started to realize this wasn't a figment of the woman or child's imagination. Crime reports indicate there has been a 17 percent rise in the successful prosecution of cases of physical and sexual violence against women. The police are held accountable now, more than they ever have been before. The women's movement—and more specifically movements like Women's Aid, Rape Crisis, and others—should be proud of their positive impact on the police, prosecution, and prison services.

What can we do as a society to prevent more of these types of murders?
We need to get hold of these guys who are violent to their partners and/or sexually violent and get them under control and surveillance, and depending on the case, in a program that forces them to face up to the way they think before they go on to murder someone. They need to understand denial, remorse, and empathy, and start working through it. Women's safety is the most important thing when we are talking about this sort of violence and should guide how we deal with it.

Programs for batterers to go and talk to someone before they murder anyone are highly important. We also need to start teaching young people about relationship breakups and how to deal with them, because generally men deal with breakups worse than women, and a minority become violent. Last year a 15-year-old boy killed his ex-grilfriend and some other kids in a school shooting after she left him.

The real issue is the sense of entitlement in masculine culture which is so prevalent. The idea that men have to be in control. It's present in a lot of pop culture, not only rap, but including it. There are so many examples which are quite scary, and indicative of the wider problem. One example is the lyrics of The Police's Every Breath You Take. The possessive, jealous male is such a present figure in pop culture. But we shouldn't be condoning or encouraging this mindset, because that is what many of these murderers have in spades.

Thanks very much, professor.

Follow Sophia Rahman on Twitter.

Warning: Some pretty major spoilers for the entire second season are ahead.

And now, True Detective season two is over. What started as a hashtag, then morphed into a potential hot mess hate-watch before becoming a pretty great show about fuckups ended last night with justice being served to no one. Corruption will live on in Vinci, most of the main characters died, and the Mexican gangsters made it out with a duffel bag full of money.

But wrapping the often confusing story up with a nice, tidy bow on top was never the point of True Detective. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, the season's real aim was to introduce a set of characters, show us what they wanted and why, and then give them on an uphill battle to get it. And by the episode's end, everyone got what they wanted, even if they didn't make it out alive.

But how, exactly, did they get what they want? Even Rachel McAdams's Ani, who by all measures of judgment had the happiest ending of the four principals, finished her storyline on a fairly dour note. Then again, in the True D universe, achieving your life's goal isn't necessarily going to make you happy. It simply means that you've justified your purpose—oh, and the evil forces that govern this world have all the more reason to bear down upon you and suck you into the abyss.

With that in mind, let's look at our four protagonists and how they fought back against the fucked-up world they'd been handed.

Paul Woodrugh (Taylor Kitsch)

Status: Dead before the episode started.
What he wanted: To be one with the road.
How he got it: Paul, the deep-eyed motorcycle cop whose connection with a Blackwater-esque private security organization ended with him getting shot in the back by the insanely crooked cop Kevin Burress, was, as this sentence implies, not a particularly lucky guy. His closeted homosexuality had led to him getting blackmailed by his former employer, and just when he'd gotten out from under their yoke, Burress shot him. The symbolism of Paul's death was almost hilariously heavy-handed: He was free from the specter of his past, and after he literally reached the light at the end of a tunnel, Burress killed him. Though his pregnant fiance was probably very sad about this, it's fine because the highway patrol dedicated a stretch of highway to him.

Watch: VICE Talks Film with Kevin Bacon

Ray Velcoro (Colin Farrell)

Image via HBO

Status: Dead
What he wanted: His son's love.
How he got it: Colin Farrell's Ray Velcoro realized pretty early on that he was too embroiled into the drama of Vinci to ever get out alive, and we the viewers realized equally early on that he hated himself too much to really try. And even though Ray's voice message to his son never uploaded to the cloud, he still had a bunch of great stuff happen to him before he died in a hail of bullets. He and Ani fell in love, and in the process he realized that if someone else could care about him, he wasn't truly worthless. He and Frank got to kill a bunch of people while wearing gas masks (I suppose that was the bro-bonding equivalent of the Ani-Ray sex scene), and then put millions of dollars in duffel bags. It was Ray's selflessness (or self-loathing, depending on whether your tumbler of whiskey is half-full or half-empty) that did him in, though—on his way to meet Ani and flee to Venezuela, he decided to make a pit stop at his ginger son's school to get one last look at him. Ginger Son saw Ray, they saluted each other, and then Ray went back to his car—and realized there was a tracking device on his car and he was fucked.

Ray never cared too much for himself, and could be viewed as a martyr for those around him. He gave himself up so that Ani (and, unbeknownst to him, his unborn son) might live, and it's eventually revealed by a DNA test that his son truly was his. His legacy lives on, and hopefully #TrueDetectiveSeason3 will be about his ginger son avenging his dad's death.

Frank Semyon (Vince Vaughn)

Image courtesy of HBO

Status: Dead in the desert, stabbed by a Mexican gangster for not giving up his suit.
What he wanted: Dignity.
How he got it: Frank Semyon was a guy who tried his damnedest not to play the game; hell, most of the time he wasn't even playing the same sport as everybody else. And he almost made it out, too: He'd managed to sever the ties that bound him to his old life, and hatched a plan for him, Ani, and Ray to hightail it to Venezuela. There, the "shit extradition laws" as he put it would help them (plus his wife) remain free and, if not happy, at least alive enough to feel the ponderous weight of existence, which is the best thing that can happen to any character unlucky enough to inhabit the show. But just as he was on the home stretch, he was taken by the Mexican gangsters he'd done a deal with into the desert, where they robbed him. They were getting ready to leave him in the desert to walk back to civilization, when one of them told Frank to give up his suit. If there's one thing we've learned about Frank, it's that he's had to fight tooth and nail for everything he has and that he doesn't give it up willingly. So instead of giving the guy his suit and trying to find a road or a gas station or whatever while only wearing his underwear, he decided to punch the gangster in the face. This led to him getting stabbed, which led to him staggering through the desert, buzzards following the trail of blood behind him, hallucinating. While he was dying his dad berated him, a gang mocked him, and his wife ushered him into the afterlife. Frank might have been a gangster, but he was still a crooked absolutist: There was a hard line between good and bad to him, and if you were on the right side, he'd do his best to take care of you.

Ani Bezzerides (Rachel McAdams)

Image via HBO

Status: Alive, raising her and Ray's child, in Venezuela with Frank's wife.
What she wanted: Justice in the world.
How she got it: OK, Ani didn't necessarily get justice in the world. Both she and Ray understood that they were pawns in a game they couldn't possibly comprehend. But unlike Ray, who allowed himself to succumb to the pull of the darkness around him, Ani knew when to go rogue and to fight for what was right. Her moral compass pushed her to rescue Ray from his standoff at the improbably fancy Vinci train station, and it was her who, throughout the season, was genuinely interested in getting to the bottom of the case rather than helping someone else cover their ass. She might have gotten the last laugh, too: Her last move is to give a Vinci journalist a bunch of sensitive documents that could expose the corruption that runs all the way to the top. The details of that corruption is too complicated to explain, but rest assured that it deals with orgies, plastic surgery, blackmail, train lines, stolen diamonds, private security companies, and weird sex masks. Did I mention this was a pretty confusing season?

Follow Drew on Twitter.

Illustrations by Cathryn Virginia

Anna Demarco was 21 the first time she smoked weed. She was having an anxiety attack in the car with her friend Patrick, who had a habit of burning while cruising, and he passed her the bowl to try to help calm her down. Anna didn't know what else to do, so she took a hit.

Anxiety was a regular thing for Anna, who had been anorexic for as long as she could remember. She weighed less than 100 pounds until her junior year of high school; by the time she turned 20, she was fluctuating between 115 pounds and a dangerously-low 85 pounds. The anxiety seemed to feed her eating disorder, and sometimes manifested itself in throttling attacks like the one she felt that day.

In the car with Patrick, she coughed a few times, the unfamiliar smoke curling in her lungs. Then she sat back and realized she felt... calm. Her breathing steadied, and her anxiety began to melt away. She was relaxed. She was free.

She was hungry.

Five minutes later, Anna called her mom and said she was trying to decide where to eat. Her mom started to cry. When Anna and Patrick went to a buffet for lunch, Anna ignored all of her usual rules about eating food—the kind of compulsive, compartmentalizing rules that mark an anorexic—and made it all the way to the end of the buffet, where they kept the soft serve.

For the first time in her entire life, she felt normal. She loaded up her plate with a slice of pie and a scoop of soft serve and sat down to eat.

By the estimates of the National Eating Disorder Association, there are 30 million people in the United States living with an eating disorder. Finding adequate treatment can be difficult, since the illness is both psychological and physical, it often occurs in conjunction with other disorders, and the relapse rate is high (about one-third of anorexic patients remain chronically ill, some of whom eventually die). Treatment often involves some combination of cognitive-behavioral therapy and medication, but since the source and symptoms of an eating disorder are highly individualized, treatment options are not one-size-fits-all.

Of the 23 states with medical marijuana programs, only five of them include anorexia nervosa on the list of conditions eligible for medical marijuana cards (none of them include bulimia or unspecified eating disorders). Neither the Academy for Eating Disorders, an organization responsible for developing research and best practices for eating disorders, nor the National Eating Disorders Association acknowledge cannabis as a viable treatment option (both also declined to comment on this story).

Eating disorders have a high degree of comorbidity, which means they're often fueled by underlying problems like anxiety, depression, and body dysmorphia. This can complicate treatment options, since without dealing with other issues, eating problems rarely go away. Currently, over 50 percent of those diagnosed with anorexia nervosa are also prescribed psychotropic drugs as part of their therapy. Those drugs go toward treating the related disorders—but they don't always work.

After Anna had been hospitalized for her eating disorder twice—once at age 13, and again at age 17—she was prescribed a cocktail of pills. Every night, she took an SSRI and a sleeping medication; benzos to allay her anxiety attacks; trazedone, an anti-psychotic medication; and a special medication to block out the anxious nightmares that often shook her awake at night.

Despite all the medications, she still wasn't functioning. For many eating-disordered patients, this is not uncommon.

Why is it so hard to talk about male anorexia?

The American Psychiatric Association offers a 128-page document outlining guidelines for treating patients with eating disorders, which rattles off an extensive list of psychiatric medications that might aid in recovery—benzodiazepines, SSRIs, anti-psychotics, topiramate, lithium. Marijuana is not on the list. Of the medications listed, the guide acknowledges a litany of possible problems: Malnourished patients tend to have worsened side-effects from antidepressants and anti-psychotic medications, both of which are commonly prescribed. Patients taking anti-psychotic medication need to be monitored for akathisia, a type of corollary distress from the meds. Certain antidepressant (like bupropion) come with a black-box warning because in underweight people, there is an increased risk of seizure. Benzodiazepines can become highly addictive. Other medications can cause "insulin resistance, abnormal lipid metabolism, and prolongation of the QTc interval," which can lead to heart problems.

Dr. Beth Braun, a psychologist in Los Angeles who works specifically with eating disordered patients, says she's seen greater success with her clients who smoke weed than those who take psychotropic drugs. Dr. Braun doesn't recommend pot to her patients, since she can't legally prescribe drugs (she's a psychologist, not a psychiatrist) but she says if it works for her patients—if they feel better and it helps them start eating—then she supports it.

There's always a risk that marijuana can negatively affect younger patients, whose brains and bodies are still developing, but Dr. Braun points out that practitioners already "give kids benzodiazepines, Valium, and Xanax." Those drugs can have lasting effects on kids, too, and the side-effects are way more dangerous than weed.

"Which is worse—the benzodiazepine or the marijuana? I guess medical research would have to show that." - Dr. Beth Braun

Other experts disagree. Dr. Kim Dennis, CEO and Medical Director of Timberline Knolls, a leading residential treatment center and partner with the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, pointed out that while marijuana may be seen as a more natural alternative to psychotropic drugs, marijuana is also virtually unregulated compared to the pharmaceutical drug industry, meaning it's hard for patients to choose the right dose or the right strain. She also said that 50 percent of those with eating disorders also have substance abuse problems, and worries about creating dependency on the drug. A mental health counselor in a well-known center for the treatment of eating disorders in Massachusetts added that "with a lot of these kids, their cardiac system is compromised. When you smoke weed, your heart rate can spike." She says there was a 14-year-old in her center who was sent to the hospital for symptoms of a heart attack—something that would only be exacerbated with weed.

And since marijuana induces "the munchies," it can increase the risk of binge-guilt—the feeling of shame and regret after an eating-disordered person consumes food—leading to greater purges later on. For bulimic patients, this is a major risk.

To be sure, marijuana is not a panacea. Kaitlyn Jones, who had been restricting food since she was 16 and purging since she was 19, felt consumed by her disorder and smoked weed occasionally as an escape. But when she did, she told me she became "hyper-critical of my body and the food I was eating. Most of the time, I would just not eat." She said her obsessive-compulsive disorder would kick in tenfold when she was high, and instead of relaxing her, weed made her tense up—almost as if she was overcompensating for feeling out of control.

Dr. Braun says that a successful eating disorder treatment depends on the individual, and marijuana doesn't work for everyone. But when smoking weed does help some of her patients get on the road to recovery, she doesn't see anything wrong with it. After all, she says, it's the same idea as taking a psychoactive drug.

"So which is worse—the benzodiazepine or the marijuana? I guess medical research would have to show that."

Other controversial uses for weed: VICE meets the kids who are taking medicinal marijuana.

Except, the research on marijuana and eating disorders is scant. The US Department of Health & Human Services budgets $30 million for the research of eating disorders each year, which comes out to about $1 per person living with an eating disorder. By contrast, the department budgets $81 million for research on post-traumatic stress disorder (about $16 per person), $259 million on schizophrenia (about $74 per person), and $404 million on depression (about $122 per person).

It's not just that eating disorder research receives less research money per person—it's that eating disorders affect more people in the United States than PTSD, schizophrenia, and depression combined. Eating disorders also have the highest mortality rate of any psychological illness, and they are the only one from which the actual symptoms can cause death.

Can Weed Really Help Addicts Recover from Alcoholism and Hard Drug Use?

One of the few researchers who's studied the relationship between marijuana and eating disorders fairly extensively is Dr. Alin Andries, a physician at the University of Southern Denmark. Dr. Andries has so far published three peer-reviewed studies about the relationship between cannabinoids and anorexia—one looking at changes in physical activity, another measuring changes in body weight, and another tracking hormonal changes.

"There are many studies revealing the appetitive effect of cannabis and its synthetic derivates. This effect occurs rapidly after ingestion and is known as 'the munchies,'" Dr. Andries told me via email. "We thought that this aspect could be further investigated in anorexic patients, due to the impaired relationship between appetite and weight gain"—that is, anorexia patients won't eat or gain weight, even if they're hungry. Plus, anorexia nervosa offered the "purest study environment," since the disease's causes are exclusively psychiatric, unlike previous research on cannabinoids and weight gain among cancer, AIDS, or Alzheimers patients.

Previous research has suggested that people who suffer from eating disorders may have a variation of the CB1 receptor gene, which creates a type of cannabinoid resistance. A study published in the journal Biological Psychiatry found deficits of this receptor in the brains of anorexic and bulimic patients, which can affect "body perception, gustatory information, reward, and emotion," according to Dr. Koen Van Laere, the lead author of the study. Prior research also suggested that by creating a compromised endocannabinoid system in rodents, researchers could simulate anorexic symptoms. Dr. Andreis' expected to find similar conclusions in humans.

In each of Dr. Andries's studies, he gave patients either capsules of synthetic cannabinoid called dronabinol or placebo pills. He found that the cannabinoids seemed to have stress-relieving effects ("our pateints were less perfectionistic and keen to lose weight," Dr. Andries told me), and there were modest increases in body weight after four weeks of dronabinol therapy. But there was also a small increase in physical activity—something the researchers didn't expect—which is associated with "activity anorexia," or a way to expend calories besides not eating. And while the therapy proved to be safe and generally well-tolerated, the research noted no change in the patients' eating disorder-related psychopathology. In other words, the cannabinoid therapy didn't relieve the body dysmorphia, the concern about weight, and the fear of eating food that all characterize an eating disorder.

In the end, none of Dr. Andries' patients overcame their eating disorders.

Still, one promising part of Dr. Andries research was his three-year clinical study on cannabinoids and weight gain, which found that anorexic patients who took the synthetic THC pills for four weeks gained about a pound and a half more than anorexic patients who took placebo pills. A pound and a half might not seem like much, but for someone who is drastically underweight, it can be the difference between life and death.

When your body is in a period of starvation, it uses the fattiest tissue first—which, in the absence of body fat, is the brain.

When you're starving, weird things happen to your brain. A famous study, known as the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, found that when people lost 25 percent of their body weight, they experienced severe emotional distress and depression, but also severely compromised cognitive abilities. Participants were unable to concentrate, their judgment was poor, and some experienced hallucinations or a desire to self-harm. (Diagnostically, anorexics are more than 15 percent below normal body weight.)

When your body is in a period of starvation, it uses the fattiest tissue first—which, in the absence of body fat, is the brain. The brain is literally broken down, piece by piece, causing mental fogginess, lack of concentration, and an inability to focus. For eating-disordered patients, this can feed into the cycle of body dysmorphia and the strange logic of eating disorders. As little as five pounds can make a huge difference in how people think—especially about themselves and their disorders.

Many eating disorder therapies focus on raising patients' body mass index, both because it lessens the risk of death and because weight gain is one of the only ways to reframe patients' thinking about their own disorders. Successful treatments focus on rebuilding patients' brains as much as they focus on rebuilding their bodies.

On MUNCHIES: Coming out about eating disorders might not be cathartic, but it's important

So if cannabis can help patients keep a few extra pounds on their bodies, it makes sense that some people credit it as their gateway to recovery. In the course of reporting this story, I spoke to over a dozen people who had self-medicated their eating disorders with marijuana—and while their stories included varying degrees of success, many of them told me that weed was the one thing that made them believe they could get better.

"Marijuana opened parts of my mind that allowed me to find control."

One man in his mid-20s, who struggled with restrictive eating throughout his teenage years, said he turned to weed for a "necessary cognitive break from the misery I felt." He toked up when things got really bad, and found that it could provide the relief he needed. "Of course, this was no magic solution, but it really helped in those stupefied hours," he said. Smoking weed was "subversive enough to demonstrate that another life was both possible and desirable."

One person remembers how, the first time she was high, she forgot how many calories she had eaten that day—something that she had tracked compulsively. Forgetting felt like a burden was lifted off her shoulders, and reminded her that a life without constantly tracking her nutrition was possible. Another person told me that "it was probably a combination of things that helped me get back to a healthy weight, but I always figured smoking pot is what tipped the scales and made me [hungry] those two or three first times."

Then there was Christopher, who told me at his lowest he weighed about 70 pounds. He used marijuana as a coping mechanism during his early recovery, as a way to quell his depression, anxiety, and stress, as well as stimulate an appetite that he had long ago lost. For the first time since his eating disorder began, he was able to shift his mental focus from calories to other things, like watching a television show or having a normal conversation.

The most surprising thing he said was not that the marijuana made him feel calmer, or hungrier, or even less anxious. It was that he finally saw himself in the way that other people saw him.

"When I was high, the thoughts that told me I was an awful piece of shit got a bit quieter," he said. When he was high, he could see himself as he really was—frighteningly, rail-thin—rather than the distorted image of himself he saw when he was sober.

"Marijuana," another person told me, "opened parts of my mind that allowed me to find control. It was as if I didn't have access to these parts [of my mind] prior."

We have an entire video series dedicated to marijuana. Watch Weediquette here.

It's been five years since Anna Demarco smoked for the first time, and she now considers herself in recovery from her eating disorder. She smokes about three times a day—before meals, and before bed—and she's able to eat normally.

Dr. Kim Dennis, the Medical Director at Timberline Knolls residential treatment center, does not consider this to be true recovery. "If a person becomes dependent on marijuana to manage her eating disorder, she doesn't have the freedom that a person in recovery has. The person in recovery has done work to uncover and heal the underlying issues."

Anna also worries that she's become dependent on the drug. "I can't eat without smoking, because my anxiety is constant and my stomach is always in knots," she said. She's gone through periods where she tries to smoke less, but whenever she does, she loses her appetite and her anxiety spikes. Once, when she quit smoking for three weeks, she caught herself "obsessively watching my figure everyday and weighing myself any place I found a scale."

With marijuana, Anna says she feels more normal. "Without it, I am not a functioning person."

Marijuana isn't a "cure" for her eating disorder, and she knows that weed is not a permanent fix. But she says it's part of what's keeping her alive, and there's no shame in surviving.

If you are suffering from an eating disorder, please visit the National Eating Disorder Association.

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

Paul Gascoigne cries in the company of England teammate Gary Lineker at the 1990 FIFA World Cup. Screencap via YouTube

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

It's like 11 at night and your friend turns up at your door with all of his things in a depressing duffle bag. It's raining and he's wearing all the extra clothes he can't quite stuff in there. It's grim. He's been dumped and you look into his blotchy face and tiny, red eyes and know that all he wants is to be silently passed a single bottle of beer and hear you say "FIFA?" in a nice, even voice. He'll always say yes.

Most men don't really know what the fuck to do with their feelings. They're either actively repressed to the point of extinction or they just sit there, docile and lumpy, synapses clumped together uselessly like a cerebral beanbag. This inability to get our shit together means that when emotions finally do decide to come out, they're all strained and weird and scary; overwhelming, impressionistic renderings of human feeling spat out with no real thought process, especially when it comes to talking to our friends.

A well deserved shout-out to all the alt-Twitter safe spots and endlessly loving and attentive significant others who're trying to help their idiot man-children through this, but we're still miles off. Not learning to accept our own emotions is not only really fucking aggravating for everyone involved, it can be really dangerous. And for millions of men, for whatever reason, that's where FIFA comes in.

For me, FIFA has always been a thankfully banter-free zone, refreshingly lacking the kind of lank chiding and casual racism you might usually associate with the game and its players, and it's also a place where you finally feel comfortable talking about your feelings with your mates. It's where my friendships were originally formed, for starters, having learnt that the answer to "Pro Evo or FIFA?" was one that worked better than any algorithm for swerving boring dickheads that you can think of.

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My teenage years were about two things: isolation and football. Having moved from East London to Essex aged 11, I was lost. I felt like an outsider, having swapped my comfy hub in a council estate for the banality of leafy suburbia. I didn't know how to make friends anymore, was the thing. At my old gaff, it would usually involve going up to random kids kicking a ball around and asking if you could play, but now that was out. Prospective pals would look at me, mouth open, like I was crazy for daring to talk to someone I didn't know. After knock-backs reached double-figures, I started to go into my shell, eventually quite liking it there, and got quite good at playing FIFA.

And then, when I got really good at the game, things started changing. It still required me to butt in on conversations when I was not invited to, but making big claims about my ability to score, quote, "right good counter-attack goals with Martins and Adriano and that on FIFA 2005" seemed to do the trick. Once I proved I could back it up, it became that great equalizer: something brought the disparate lunch-table cliques together. The cool kids who smoked fags and fingered girls in the park and the rest of us, together at last. My social status didn't really matter as long as I was really fucking good with Inter Milan.

A tearful David Beckham leaves the field during his final professional appearance. Screencap via YouTube

In this vague era called adulthood, FIFA remains a safe spot, unencumbered by thought, where you can share feelings point-blank in amongst the crashing ones and zeroes onscreen without it all getting "too real." Eyes are transfixed on the screen as what you say beams directly from your unconscious mind, softly lulled into a meditative state by the amiable feedback loop of inane cliché presented by the Martin Tyler/Alan Smith aural tag-team. You go zen while dribbling towards goal with Andrés Iniesta, and now you can say whatever you like. Go nuts. Just say what you're thinking. Free at last.

Almost all of my professional achievements have been thanks to the pub—to the English, cheers!—and almost all of my deepest chats with my mates have somehow ended up spilling out over a game of FIFA. Under the guise of last-minute equalizers and mid-match tinkering apparently lies what's necessary for blokes—all "Leave emotion out of this," all "Just man up and be quiet"—to act like functioning adult human beings. While there might be a well-timed pause or a passive-aggressive screamer to really drive a point home, the game and the conversation flows freely. Plus there's something in the length of the game that seems perfectly suited for a short outburst of Hard Truth.

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It's better this way. Unless you're the kind of sociopath who changes the game settings, you're in for a game that lasts about 20 minutes. Being stuck in a heartfelt conversation longer than that could make anyone want to fork out an eyeball, and the half-time break adds yet more much-needed rest. That halftime break is the "Fuck this, I'm going to have a fag outside" when things get a bit too heated, and thank god for that.

Over a beer and a testy game of Chelsea vs. Barcelona you finally speak on a level, air grievances, and share what you really think. Among all the emotional outpouring, points are clear; while you bang in three with Neymar, you sort all of that awkward personal shit out on autopilot. It's beautiful. You talk about how you became mates in the first place and why. How it ran aground and what needs to be done to set things right again. You fix it. It's the kind of thing that you'd usually attempt in a drunken embrace, slurring, "I fuckin' love you, mate" in their ear at last orders, but this is much better: a cheaper cognitive lubricant that harbors little risk of an ill-advised kebab on the way home.

"One more game?" is all you need to hear to make things right.

Follow Sam Diss on Twitter.

James McIntyre's death. Photo via Facebook video

James Daniel McIntyre was an introverted and sincere person who felt targeted by the police for years prior to his death, say members of the online hacker community who knew and communicated with him on a regular basis.

While information has trickled out on 48-year-old McIntyre, who was killed by police in the early evening of July 16 outside a BC Hydro public information session on the Site C dam, much is still unclear about the circumstances of his death and who he was.

What is known about McIntyre centres largely on his death: A lonely figure in a grey hoodie and Guy Fawkes mask, shot outside the Fixx Urban Grill in Dawson Creek, where he lived.

There are accounts of him holding a knife, from both police and travelling businessman Mike Irmen, who told the National Post that even after McIntyre was shot he wouldn't surrender it. McIntyre swiftly became a flashpoint for hacker collective Anonymous, who claimed him as one of their own. Within 24 hours, they issued a statement that called for the arrest of the officer involved and vowed to avenge his death.

Since then, Anonymous swiftly made good on their threats of retaliation, announcing that they had attacked RCMP cyber infrastructure (which the RCMP denied). They then leaked what appears to be a government Treasury Board document from 2010 and claim to have decrypted text messages that allegedly reveal the real reason former federal cabinet minister John Baird left his office.

Their latest leak are documents they claim detail a court case between businessman Nathan Jacobson and CSIS, and Anonymous have said there will be more substantial Canadian cabinet leaks in the fall.

Though McIntyre's death has landed him at the centre of a national controversy, who he was remains unclear. No photos of him have yet been made public, nor have family members been willing to come forward. He worked at Le's Family Restaurant, but neither staff nor ownership have said much about him publicly.

"He might be an ordinary dishwasher in real life but online he was a big shot," said a woman who goes by the Twitter handle @tsargirl in an interview via online chat. Tsargirl claims to be part of the Anonymous splinter group Antisec and says her and McIntyre pulled off a number of hacks.

Regularly in contact with McIntyre for years, she was one of the last people he messaged the day he died, in which he cryptically wrote, "No malfunction, some1 is watching us. We have played this game b4. Reverse Engineering, trying 2 trap/locate them."

"I have a strong feeling that he was targeted," she said. "Because he was attached to Kabuki and other German top hacker groups who really caused chaos."

Though they never met in person, she first came across McIntyre three years back when he followed her as the Twitter user @jaymack9 after she "hacked [a] bunch of sites."

She paints a picture of a man who spoke fluent German and whose English had a thick accent.

From what she remembers, he had roots back in Germany, but was from an Alaskan town where his family was in the wood business. She estimates he had moved to Dawson Creek about four years ago.

They took at least two years to get to know one another, and eventually made the rare move of sharing their real names. Describing herself as a nomad who frequently moves around the globe and often goes into hiding, she had planned to travel to Dawson Creek this December to finally meet McIntyre in person. Maybe she could even stay put for a while, she thought.

"He's one of the sweetest guys I've ever met virtually," said Tsargirl. "He was emotionally very supportive. He thought of me as a friend he could trust and I felt the same way about it. We would actually discuss personal affairs with each other. At one time I got pregnant by a sick bastard and went through an abortion. It was James who knew and he helped me out emotionally by staying in touch 24/7. God I miss him."

They began to pull off hacking actions in association with a variety of other online activists, she claims, including two hackers who went by the names Frillox and Tarzan.

Tarzan, died in a car accident last year, had met James in person and it was through this connection that she began to trust McIntyre more, she said.

"Tarzan, Jay and I were a real trio. Then came others. I taught Tarzan how to steal credit cards and donate money to hungry worldwide, like [through] UNICEF. We donated like 50,000 plus US dollars to charities," she claimed, and added that actions like this fit into McIntyre's beliefs of the power of the 99 percent—that governments shouldn't control a nation's decisions. "I was mostly the hands on. Tarzan identified the targets, Jay gathered the info and acquired more info when needed, and we actually helped people. Didn't use a single penny on ourselves. Never."

In a blog post written in the days after McIntyre's death, former Anonymous associate Devon Hall, who works at Surrey Youth Alliance, said she met McIntyre while he was busy with OpLithChild. Launched in 2012, it was an Anonymous-initiated campaign focused on a high-profile pedophile case in Lithuania.

"He was bound and determined to end child sex slavery, even when we knew it was a lost cause. J never stopped fighting against sex slavery in women, men, and children. He believed every person on the planet should have enough to eat, sleep, and be safe," she wrote. "I don't think I will ever have the pleasure of knowing someone as devoted to doing the right thing as this man was."

As Tsargirl continued to interact regularly with McIntyre, often on a daily basis over the last three years, she noticed his ongoing apprehension of the police, and said he talked often about being tracked and monitored.

"It was like he always had a fear that he was being watched. Police cars parked outside his place. [...] He always said 'the police' so I assume it was Dawson Creek's," she said. "One time he literally shut down his computer and said bye for a month. He said police was downstairs watching him."

Early on in 2012, Frillox remembers McIntyre got scared about a pastebin file concerning Mossad surveillance, and at the time he didn't pay much attention to it.

"Many hackers get paranoid in some way," he told VICE via online chat. "Its just a course, if it's true or not, who am I, to judge on that?"

Another online friend, Davood Hersh (not his real name), who goes by the Twitter handle @webwildink, said he and McIntyre talked often about the possibility of being jailed or worse, and agreed to look out for one another.

"When [then-Natural Resources minister] Joe Oliver called environmentalists radicals, we both laughed. We both understood the serious nature being a 'so called radical' in BC because of the history here, but it didn't bother us," wrote Hersh via email. "James shared the same view that one day we could get hurt, jailed or killed. We were both being monitored. Cars outside and our computers breached. We were both monitored at the same time, James where he lived and me here in Agassiz and in Penticton."

By all accounts McIntyre shied away from confrontation, was reserved and rarely public about his activism and never talked about violence.

Thus far, the only record of how his life ended is contained within some blurry footage recorded from what appears to be the hotel across the street, which was then subsequently uploaded onto Facebook by a man named Corey Pfeifer.

Missing from the video is the events leading up to the shooting, but as McIntyre lays bleeding, the officer kicks at something on the ground. Canada's Independent Investigations Office have since said a knife was later recovered from the scene.

"It was a switchblade," commented Pfeifer on Facebook, below the video.

It was likely a small Swiss Army-style knife, said Tsargirl, who feels certain about this detail because they had joked about it once, how silly it was that they both carried pocket knives on them for defence.

"It just came up one time when I was temporarily somewhere in hiding. He was telling me how to set traps outside the door and set up alarms and was concerned for my safety," she said.

As McIntyre's friends struggle with the aftermath of his death and the space it has left in their lives, questions remain about who will be held accountable.

"My world has lost a dear friend and it hurts, and I can't do anything about it," said Hersh.

"I'm angry that he was killed because I never knew him as being someone that deserved that kind of treatment. Environmentalists are caring people, not bad people."

It could take up to a year for the investigation to reach a conclusion, according to the IIO, whose investigators have now left Dawson Creek, reported Jonny Wakefield in the Alaska Highway News on July 29.

The article also notes that since April 1, six people have been shot by police in BC.

Follow Julie Chadwick on Twitter.

The headquarters of the GEO Group, a private sector prison giant, in Boca Raton, Florida. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Last year, I bought some prison stock. It was just for research, I told myself as I linked my checking account to the online brokerage firm that promised a fast and easy transaction. I was working on a story about the economics and politics of criminal justice.

What better way to understand the prison economy than to own a piece of it myself?

There are only two publicly traded prison companies on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE): Corrections Corporation of America (CCA, or CXW on the NYSE Big Board) and the GEO Group (GEO), which together account for about 70 percent of the for-profit prison sector nationwide. CCA is strictly domestic, while GEO runs about 85,000 prison beds here and abroad. Plus, the GEO homepage has a real-time stock ticker, links to SEC filings, and other shiny lures for a rookie prospector like me.

On VICE News: Police Have Killed at Least 1,083 Americans Since Michael Brown's Death

I bought 30 shares of GEO Group stock for a little less than $1,000—enough to make the exercise real. I clicked through a few steps, handed over my social security and routing numbers, and joined the community of shareholders invested in sustaining and expanding the American corrections system.

Initially, my stock purchase triggered waves of anxiety. My first concern was financial—did I just fritter away money that could have been spent on health insurance or to fix my car? Second, had I crossed a clear moral line? My personal interest now runs parallel to the perverted logic of mass incarceration. Amid social unrest and unrelenting evidence of racially-biased police brutality and an unequal application of the law, my bottom line only asks for more.

"We believe that shares of GEO are undervalued" wrote Sterne Agee CRT Research in their January 2014 report, "Crime Pays & Geo is Inexpensive; Buy." The Connecticut-based analyst group explained how state and federal governments are "reluctant and unwilling" to fund new public prison construction, and that every major prison built in the last five years has been a private operation.

Financial experts worth their salt will tell you that it's always a bad idea to invest heavily in any single stock. No one can predict the future, and it's safer to diversify. Any number of factors could cut into GEO Group profit: falling crime rates, a truce in the war on drugs, real criminal justice reform. Fortunately for investors like me, the corrections industry has considered all of these variables. In fact, the more I learned, the safer my investment seemed.

Prison companies are doing the diversifying for me, expanding their holdings beyond basic jail cells. In 2010, GEO bought Behavioral Interventions, the leading provider of electronic monitoring devices and ankle bracelets, and as Bloomberg reported, in 2013, CCA likewise acquired Correctional Alternatives, a rehabilitation firm that runs work furlough, house arrest, and residential reentry programs. They build temporary housing for immigrants caught on the southern border, and at the same time help states transition jails into federal facilities.

These corporations don't face the uncertainties of the free market, and don't describe themselves in terms of private-sector money machines. "We have a limited number of competitors in this market," CCA assured its shareholders in a recent annual report. About 90 percent of the company's revenue is government-sourced, much of that from non-compete bids, according to prison policy analyst Christopher Petrella. The majority of GEO and CCA facilities are funded by subsidies paid before a brick is laid.

This kind of government patronage provides shelter from even the harshest economic storms. As CCA CEO Damon Hininger told investors on a conference call in May 2010, "Between 2007 and 2009, when earnings for the S&P dropped by 28 percent, ours grew by 18 percent."

The industry often avoids words like private or for-profit. In marketing, political lobbying, and internal corporate communications, the preferred term is "partnership corrections." Prison companies match up with government entities short on cash and low on prison real estate. These include the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), Immigration Control and Enforcement (ICE), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), state and county jails, and various OTHER correctional services. The partnership binds the interests of the corporation (producing revenue and profits) with the goals of the state (finding a place for all those prisoners).

The relationship runs deep. The state and the corporations agree to turn their respective needs into shared goals. The best example of this are prison occupancy quotas, wherein the state agrees to provide a minimum number of offenders to the prison facility, and if it doesn't, taxpayers make up the difference.

In late 2014, my GEO stock surged on news that DHS needed additional housing for thousands of migrant children streaming across the southern border. As long as illegal immigration remains an urgent federal issue and the government is committed to housing migrants, no matter how prison-like the accommodations, my investment grows. Another financial analyst group published a report which predicted that even if prison populations fall nationwide, several market growth opportunities remain. Fifteen years ago, private prisons housed just 6 percent of the nation's convicts. Today, that figure is closer to 8.5 percent, and the analysts forecast an upward trajectory for the long haul.

Should I feel guilty, worried, or bullish? After peaking this past spring, GEO stock slumped back to my original buying price. I thought briefly about getting out. After all, criminal justice reform is national news now. Barack Obama's upcoming VICE interview from inside a federal facility in Oklahoma was the first of its kind for a sitting president, and in the past few months, CXW and GEO have taken a beating.

But analysts are bullish on the long-term outlook. The Obama Administration is fighting a federal court ruling to release families housed in prison facilities on the southern border.

"We remain encouraged by [GEO's] growth prospects," Sterne Agee CRT Research wrote in May. The bottom line hasn't changed: "It is more cost effective to privatize the management of prisons."

The price may drop, but long-term, when it comes to America's sprawling prison apparatus, Wall Street still has the same message:

Buy.

This is definitely the right place. All photos by the author

You can fit the population of a city inside Gamescom, spread across its five days, and multiple halls heaving with screaming HD screens and scale models of Star Wars vehicles. Last year, 335,000 people descended on Cologne's Koelnmesse, players and professionals alike, to gawp at upcoming video games and, just occasionally, actually play them.

The event, the world's largest computer and gaming trade fair and an annual destination for countless kids and adults alike (many dressed up as League of Legends avatars and Pokémon, Lara Crofts, and Final Fantasy favorites), is a place for sharing and caring, wearing passions quite literally on sleeves (not to mention heads, shoulders, knees, and toes) and pressing flesh to seal fresh business deals. It is quite the big deal, and that much is evident from the second you step off the S-Bahn: If you're doing Gamescom, your personal space is going to be invaded several hundred times per hour.

Unless, that is, you're a member of the press. Which I am, which means I could do Gamescom without spending all that much time amid the regular punters, in the booming main halls of the Koelnmesse, housing huge booths for countless big-budget games to come, from Fallout 4 to Star Wars: Battlefront via Mad Max and FIFA 16. When you've a press lanyard around your neck, you can slip inside smaller rooms within the labyrinthine complex—all of which are still huge compared to your average space for such exhibitions—and enjoy pre-booked, hands-on appointments with a wealth of forthcoming wonders. And that's precisely what I do at my first-ever Gamescom.

As massively anticipated as it is, there was nothing to play of Fallout 4 at Gamescom, with members of the press instead shown a gameplay video with an introduction from director Todd Howard. The keyword taken away from the presentation is "color," as many people I spoke to confirmed their pleasant surprise at how bright it all was. Hacking and lock-picking was shown, and is essentially the same as it was in Fallout 3—if it ain't broke, I guess—but the basic gunplay is faster than before, with VATS slowing the action to a lesser degree and members of the Brotherhood of Steel available as support. The game won't feature any kind of level cap, meaning that even after the story's complete, you can roam around the wastes skull-cracking super mutants until you're more powerful than God. At least, that's how I heard it from a whole bunch of other journalists—I wasn't about to book in time with a video that'll probably end up on YouTube soon enough anyway.

Instead, I went to play Dark Souls III, which plonked my naïve little knight onto some battlements and basically proceeded to kill me via a combination of ghoulish warriors wielding sharp and pointy things and a fuck-off enormous dragon firing flaming fur balls in my general direction. Now, as someone who has tried and mostly failed at previous Souls games, it came as no surprise to me to find myself sucking salty ballsacks at this new iteration, and my repeated failures to dodge lances and parry sword slashes were made to look all the more tragic on account of playing the game right next to an expert at such things from Edge magazine.

'Dark Souls III,' screenshot via Bandai Namco Entertainment

But during a few of my (plentiful, given the time) respawns, I stole a peek at how he was faring, and it feels to me that DSIII has taken a cue or two from Bloodborne, regarding its speed of combat, brutal counter attacks and how defense isn't always the best direction to take when up against an angry undead thing. Perhaps that's to be expected, given Bloodborne director Hidetaka Miyazaki is in command here. He's known to be less than satisfied with Dark Souls II, and is sure to keep a steady hand on the development of III.

All the same, it's great to see pronounced progress where the hardcore Souls fans might well have expected a straight stylistic return to the methodical attack-and-retreat-and-roll-away battle management of the original Dark Souls. This is a step in the right direction for all things Souls, mixing influences from the past with those of Bloodborne's gothic present. It's prettier than ever, too (about time, really). Thirty minutes is all I got with DSIII, but it was enough to illustrate that the old girl's got some lethal new life in her—assuming you can stay alive long enough to appreciate it. It's out in early 2016.

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Ken as he appears in 'Street Fighter V,' screenshot via Capcom

I get to play Street Fighter V against VICE Gaming contributor Ian Dransfield, who soundly thrashes me most of the time (we have six or seven bouts, and I win just two—I'm putting it down to the fight stick, as I've not used one of those, hmm, ever*). Capcom's all-new-gen entry in its long-running one-on-one franchise is shaping up well, though anyone coming to it expecting all those special moves and combos that worked so well on IV and its predecessors to do the job here will find that this next iteration takes some getting used to. The redesigned Ken's tatsumaki, or hurricane kick, arcs up and, sometimes, over an opponent, for example.

Classic characters like Ryu and Chun-Li appear aesthetically unchanged from IV, but Ken and Vega have been given more than a once over (I'm not really into the former's new look, yet), and chain-swinging tubby punk Birdie's a new addition from the Alpha series. Cammy is going to catch a yeast infection, so deeply inside her ass crack has her outfit gone. The most noticeable gameplay development is the inclusion of the V-Gauge, which fills as damage is taken (and, possibly, as it's dished out). Its perks are triggered by pressing medium kick and punch simultaneously, leading to improved offensive capabilities like increased speed in Ken's case, extra hits per connected blow with Chun-Li and M Bison's glowing purple "Psycho Reflect," used to absorb opponent's fireballs. Capcom's approach for V is to charge players just the once, for the game at launch, meaning every future update—Super, Ultra, whatever, and everything such tinkering brings—will be made freely available. Which is nice. Like Dark Souls III, Street Fighter V is released early (well, "spring" is what I'm told) next year.

(*Just kidding, I'm simply shit at it.)

These people don't care that I thought 'Homefront' was a bit crap. Not yet, at least.

Less nice is Homefront: The Revolution, which I won't dwell upon for too long because it's not looking great. The premise is still cool: North Korea has invaded the USA and you're part of a guerrilla force fighting to take the country back, however you can. But it plays like a poor man's Far Cry 4 set in a dull, grey city, with predictable AI, played-it-all-before objectives and a remarkably swift to arrive feeling of give-not-one-fuck tedium. That's based on a preview build, anyway. There's a long way for the game to go before it's released, and with greater environmental variety, smarter enemies, and a clearer picture of your character's personality, maybe it'll be worth digging deeper into when it comes out sometime in 2016. Or, perhaps it'll be Just Another Shooter, a six-out-of-ten in an era where only the best of this breed need bother going gold. I'm told that other people liked it, and there was always a decent queue for the game at its public hands-on, so maybe it's just me. But I'm not holding my breath for it to prove me wrong.

I'm counting the days until the new Pro Evolution Soccer, though, which comes out in about a month, in the middle of September. I get to play a couple of matches and I've got to say that I'm really impressed with what Konami's achieved here. The game plays with an increased physical clout that past versions lacked, fluid animations running more quickly, and player responsiveness turned right up to perfect, all of those little stats exerting their influence on individuals and squads alike. It's a thrill to pass your way out of defense before powering down the wing and pinging over a cross to... Well, in my case usually nobody, but with a little practice this is going to be an endorphins-rushing essential. The lack of the FIFA series' ample licenses continues to hurt PES's commercial chances, in the UK at least, but there's the suggestion here of it being the better game of the two. He says, without yet playing FIFA 16, but EA's titan will really have to impress to better this effort, and not simply rest on its established laurels. Time will tell, then, but I'm tempted right now to spend this season in charge of Hampshire Red over the real-deal Southampton FC.

Trending on Noisey: Watch the new Joanna Newsom video for "Sapokanikan"

Also out this September, albeit very late in the month, is Lego Dimensions, the plastic brick company's version of the successful Skylanders formula, where physical toys meet interactive entertainment. The game plays much like previous Lego titles—you smash stuff up, rebuild the pieces into something useful, collect a bunch of studs and enjoy the occasional joke that's likely to fly over the heads of really young players. These games have long been parent-and-child affairs, brilliant for cross-generational co-op, and Dimensions is no different in that respect.

The addition of the "Gateway," which beams Lego mini figures and vehicles into the game, is much more than just a gimmicky way of extracting additional cash out of moms and dads—you need to use it to solve puzzles, such as "hot-and-cold" searching for useful objects (the unit glows green when you're going the right way, red when you're not), and to get past color-coded, almost Simon Says-like conundrums. I play as Batman, Gandalf, Doctor Who, Chell from Portal 2, Scooby Doo, and more, encounter Homer Simpson spread across a wrecking ball, and fight the Wicked Witch of the West and her winged monkeys, and every character has their own unique skills necessary to unlock new areas or complete special tasks. It's not a cheap acquisition—the game's starter pack will retail for about £100 [$155]—but having played Dimensions now, I'm definitely considering making it a joint present for son number one and me. Don't tell him (or the wife, for that matter).

A smaller version of this dude is in 'Lego Dimensions,' assuming you pay for the relevant level pack

I'm only in Cologne, usefully, for a day and a half, so I don't get to see several serious-budget games that I'm eager to check out in the near future—count amongst them Mirror's Edge Catalyst, Crackdown 3, Mafia 3, and Star Wars: Battlefront. Their time will come. But I do just about find space in the schedule for a breathless run around some pretty damn decent DLC for a certain released-earlier-this-year zombie holocaust affair which might have been made by Techland, which I can't say anything more about Because Embargo, and for Gearbox's new first-person-shooter-meets-MOBA title, Battleborn. And despite going into my 30 minutes with the latter expecting very little, I came out enthused to check out more.

Battleborn is what it is, a colorful multiplayer shooter with a shitload of loot to collect and a multitude of skills to dick about with per session (perks can be selected on the fly, unlocked as you shoot up more bad things), but it's got a lot of character to it (25 playable ones, actually), and is evidently being put together with plenty of love. I play as a rapier-throwing lady with a billowing skirt and teleportation powers, whose plummy voice does start to grate after so many kills but I expect that can be muted. You can also choose to play—solo, co-operatively, or competitively—as a hawk dude with a rocket launcher, a mushroom-headed cyclops thing, a space marine the size of a bungalow, a strutting sun goddess, or a gentleman robot, to name but a few members of the game's oddball controllable cast. Battleborn might be the shot in the arm Gearbox needs after Aliens: Colonial Marines shipped as it did, as a dud, and assuming it sells enough copies to avoid doing an Evolve, could spawn a new franchise for its makers, following the wildly successful Borderlands games. Look out for it in February 2016.

Part two of this series will look at some of the indie games on show at Gamescom 2015. So, I guess come back for that, when it's live tomorrow.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

What I like best about Lucia Berlin's stories isn't their verisimilitude (although they do feel very true)—rather, it's their casual artfulness, their compressed lyricism, wry humor, and searing insight. But also their adventurousness and speed and sentiment and thrilling, reckless poetry. During various stories in this collection, I was struck by connections to Dubliners-era James Joyce, Grace Paley, and Lydia Davis, who wrote the book's introduction. But most of all, perhaps, I thought of Denis Johnson, with both authors' clear intuitive gifts and addictions and fleeting salvations. Berlin's stories feel, to me, both inevitable and surprising. They are deeply evocative of their place and time and yet singular to their author and, because of that, ultimately timeless.

The following story, "Friends" is taken from A Manual for Cleaning Women, the new book of collected stories by Lucia Berlin, available August 18 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

–James Yeh

Friends

Loretta met Anna and Sam the day she saved Sam's life.

Anna and Sam were old. She was 80 and he was 89. Loretta would see Anna from time to time when she went to swim at her neighbor Elaine's pool. One day she stopped by as the two women were convincing the old guy to take a swim. He finally got in, was dog-paddling along with a big grin on his face when he had a seizure. The other two women were in the shallow end and didn't notice. Loretta jumped in, shoes and all, pulled him to the steps and up out of the pool. He didn't need resuscitation but he was disoriented and frightened. He had some medicine to take, for epilepsy, and they helped him dry off and dress. They all sat around for a while until they were sure he was fine and could walk to their house, just down the block. Anna and Sam kept thanking Loretta for saving his life, and insisted that she go to lunch at their house the next day.

It happened that she wasn't working for the next few days. She had taken three days off without pay because she had a lot of things that needed doing. Lunch with them would mean going all the way back to Berkeley from the city, and not finishing everything in one day, as she had planned.

She often felt helpless in situations like this. The kind where you say to yourself, Gosh, it's the least I can do, they are so nice. If you don't do it you feel guilty and if you do you feel like a wimp.

Hours later, exhausted, she would drive home to her house in Oakland, saying to herself that she couldn't keep on doing this.

She stopped being in a bad mood the minute she was inside their apartment. It was sunny and open, like an old house in Mexico, where they had lived most of their lives. Anna had been an archaeologist and Sam an engineer. They had worked together every day at Teotihuacan and other sites. Their apartment was filled with fine pottery and photographs, a wonderful library. Downstairs, in the backyard was a large vegetable garden, many fruit trees, berries. Loretta was amazed that the two birdlike, frail people did all the work themselves. Both of them used canes, and walked with much difficulty.

Lunch was toasted cheese sandwiches, chayote soup, and a salad from their garden. Anna and Sam prepared the lunch together, set the table and served the lunch together.

They had done everything together for 50 years. Like twins, they each echoed the other or finished sentences the other had started. Lunch passed pleasantly as they told her, in stereo, some of their experiences working on the pyramid in Mexico, and about other excavations they had worked on. Loretta was impressed by these two old people, by their shared love of music and gardening, by their enjoyment of each other. She was amazed at how involved they were in local and national politics, going to marches and protests, writing congressmen and editors, making phone calls. They read three or four papers every day, read novels or history to each other at night.

While Sam was clearing the table with shaking hands, Loretta said to Anna how enviable it was to have such a close lifetime companion. Yes, Anna said, but soon one of us will be gone...

Loretta was to remember that statement much later, and wonder if Anna had begun to cultivate a friendship with her as a sort of insurance policy against the time when one of them would die. But, no, she thought, it was simpler than that. The two of them had been so self-sufficient, so enough for each other all their lives, but now Sam was becoming dreamy and often incoherent.

He repeated the same stories over and over, and although Anna was always patient with him, Loretta felt that she was glad to have someone else to talk to.

Whatever the reason, she found herself more and more involved in Sam and Anna's life. They didn't drive anymore. Often Anna would call Loretta at work and ask her to pick up peat moss when she got off, or take Sam to the eye doctor. Sometimes both of them felt too bad to go to the store, so Loretta would pick things up for them. She liked them both, admired them. Since they seemed so much to want company, she found herself at dinner with them once a week, every two weeks at the most. A few times she asked them to her house for dinner, but there were so many steps to climb and the two arrived so exhausted that she stopped. So then she would take fish or chicken or a pasta dish to their house. They would make a salad, serve berries from the garden for dessert.

Sam's stories always began, "That reminds me of the time..."

After dinner, over cups of mint or Jamaica tea they would sit around the table while Sam told stories. About the time Anna got polio, at a dig deep in the jungle in the Yucatán, how they got her to a hospital, how kind people were. Many stories about the house they built in Xalapa. The mayor's wife, the time she broke her leg climbing out of a window to avoid a visitor. Sam's stories always began, "That reminds me of the time..."

Little by little Loretta learned the details of their life story. Their courtship on Mount Tam. Their romance in New York while they were Communists. Living in sin. They had never married, still took satisfaction in this unconventionality. They had two children; both lived in distant cities. There were stories about the ranch near Big Sur, when the children were little. As a story was ending Loretta would say, "I hate to leave, but I have to get to work very early tomorrow." Often she would leave then. Usually though, Sam would say, "Just let me tell you what happened to the wind-up phonograph." Hours later, exhausted, she would drive home to her house in Oakland, saying to herself that she couldn't keep on doing this. Or that she would keep going, but set a definite time limit.

It was not that they were ever boring or uninteresting. On the contrary, the couple had lived a rich, full life, were involved and perceptive. They were intensely interested in the world, in their own past. They had such a good time, adding to the other's remarks, arguing about dates or details, that Loretta didn't have the heart to interrupt them and leave. And it did make her feel good to go there, because the two people were so glad to see her. But sometimes she felt like not going over at all, when she was too tired or had something else to do. Finally she did say that she couldn't stay so late, that it was hard to get up the next morning. Come for Sunday brunch, Anna said.

When the weather was fair they ate on a table on their porch, surrounded by flowers and plants. Hundreds of birds came to the feeders right by them. As it grew colder they ate inside by a cast-iron stove. Sam tended it with logs he had split himself. They had waffles or Sam's special omelette, sometimes Loretta brought bagels and lox. Hours went by, the day went by as Sam told his stories, with Anna correcting them and adding comments. Sometimes, in the sun on the porch or by the heat of the fire, it was hard to stay awake.

Their house in Mexico had been made of concrete block, but the beams and counters and cupboards had been made of cedarwood. First the big room—the kitchen and living room—was built. They had planted trees, of course, even before they started building the house. Bananas and plums, jacarandas. The next year they added a bedroom, several years later another bedroom and a studio for Anna. The beds, the workbenches and tables were made of cedar. They got home to their little house after working in the field, in another state in Mexico. The house was always cool and smelled of cedar, like a big cedar chest.

Anna got pneumonia and had to go to the hospital. As sick as she was, all she could think of was Sam, how he would get along without her. Loretta promised her she would go by before work, see that he took his medication and had breakfast, that she would cook him dinner after work, take him to the hospital to see her.

The terrible part was that Sam didn't talk. He would sit shivering on the side of the bed as Loretta helped him dress. Mechanically he took his pills and drank pineapple juice, carefully wiped his chin after he ate breakfast. In the evening when she arrived he would be standing on the porch waiting for her. He wanted to go see Anna first, and then have dinner. When they got to the hospital, Anna lay pale, her long white braids hanging down like a little girl's. She had an IV, a catheter, oxygen. She didn't speak, but smiled and held Sam's hand while he told her how he had done a load of wash, watered the tomatoes, mulched the beans, washed dishes, made lemonade. He talked on to her, breathless, told her every hour of his day. When they left, Loretta had to hold him tight, he stumbled and wavered as he walked. In the car going home he cried, he was so worried. But Anna came home and was fine, except that there was so much to be done in the garden. The next Sunday, after brunch, Loretta helped weed the garden, cut back blackberry vines. Loretta was worried then, what if Anna got really sick? What was she in for with this friendship? The couple's dependence upon each other, their vulnerability, saddened and moved her. Those thoughts passed through her head as she worked, but it was nice, the cool black dirt, the sun on her back. Sam, telling his stories as he weeded the adjacent row.

The next Sunday that Loretta went to their house she was late. She had been up early, there had been many things to do. She really wanted to stay home, but didn't have the heart to call and cancel.

The front door was not unlatched, as usual, so she went to the garden, to go up the back steps. She walked into the garden to look around, it was lush with tomatoes, squash, snow peas. Drowsy bees. Anna and Sam were outside on the porch upstairs. Loretta was going to call to them but they were talking very intently.

"She's never been late before. Maybe she won't come."

"Oh, she'll come... these mornings mean so much to her."

"Poor thing. She is so lonely. She needs us. We're really her only family."

"She sure enjoys my stories. Dang. I can't think of a single one to tell her today."

"Something will come to you..."

"Hello!" Loretta called. "Anybody home?"

A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin will be published August 18 and is available for preorder here.

Lucia Berlin (1936–2004) worked brilliantly but sporadically throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Her stories are inspired by her early childhood in various Western mining towns; her glamorous teenage years in Santiago, Chile; three failed marriages; a lifelong problem with alcoholism; her years spent in Berkeley, New Mexico, and Mexico City; and the various jobs she later held to support her writing and her four sons. Sober and writing steadily by the 1990s, she took a visiting writer's post at the University of Colorado Boulder in 1994 and was soon promoted to associate professor. In 2001, in failing health, she moved to Southern California to be near her sons. She died in 2004 in Marina del Rey.

'Batman: Arkham Knight' was in a sorry state when it released on PC earlier this year.

You get up in the morning, take care of the basics, grab the controller, and begin a marathon in front of the monitor. It sounds like the ideal script for a chilled-out Saturday, but for a game tester, it's just another day at work. Getting money for beating The Witcher 3 seems like a sweet way of life, but testing video games rarely has anything to do with entertainment. Meet two people who lose their senses and stay up all night analyzing the behavior of Lara Croft's bust.

Names have been changed.

VICE: You play games all day and get paid for it. It sounds like a dream job.
Link: It's hard work, but satisfying. Sometimes you'll get a task that actually resembles normal playing, but that's actually when you have to be more careful not to lose vigilance, and remember to test the game, not just play it. Most of the time we prod each element of the game from every possible side, observing whether it will fall apart, which is often time consuming, tedious, and requires a lot of patience. Once, for almost a day and a half, I ran around one small location, searching for an alternative way of evoking a weird crash at the request of the developer. And when the premiere is approaching and the deadlines fast approaching, we often work after hours and nerves start to plague us.

Mario: Everything depends on the game that I am testing, the superior, team, and client. The key word here is "tester," because a tester does not play games, he only tests them. Sure, when we get the really early versions of a Batman game, or any Grand Theft Auto, in the beginning it's great—but after 18 months, it can get boring and frustrating. For example, say you're a big fan of a series of games, and get a task where you have to come to the end of the new game and you need to fuck something up. As a potential player, you've now spoiled the game for yourself before even buying it. I know, first world problems.

Are the earnings proportional to the effort?
Sometimes it's chill, and other times we grind. It's not uncommon for us to experience so-called "crunch time" towards the end of projects—in other words, overtime, weekends, holidays, maximum sacrifice. Sure, not every tester cares and prefers to keep their free time, but sometimes you just have no option—and you need to stay. Some stay voluntarily and for the next two or three months barely experience a social life, especially when you're taking on evening shifts. Earnings in the industry are quite varied—some pay quite well, and others a little less. In most cases, the earnings are proportional.

Can you briefly describe the process of testing a game? How long does it last, and how do you try to break the game?
Link: The testing process depends on the needs and financial possibilities of the client, and the type of game. Testing open-world video games goes something like this: we go out into the world and find errors or test specific locations in terms of textures, collision, and lighting. Sometimes we create dozens of scenarios with different types of weapons, vehicles, main and secondary tasks, objects, and other elements, and systematically select each item, seeing whether it works or not.

Mario: We can have tests lasting up to 18 months, but also ones that take only a day. It's also important to remember that some games get tested even after they are released, maybe not by a big team, but with some games that is necessary.

Is it easy to burnout playing for a living? Do you still look forward to new titles?
Link: Looking at the more experienced colleagues, it's hard not to get the impression that burning out, sooner or later, is inevitable. But new projects still excite me and the challenges are always interesting.

Mario: After some time, it's only natural that a person wants to do more, go further, but with this type of career it's hard because there are a certain number of team leaders and project managers, so it's hard to maintain high morale without the possibility of promotion. And, as I mentioned, after a few months spent with one title, a person can have enough.

Playing is supposed to be a pleasure, not a chore, [but] sometimes you are so tired physically that it's just not possible...

After work, do you ever play for pleasure? And if so, what sort of games?
I always try to find time after work to play—it's a kind of return to normality. In the end, playing is supposed to be a pleasure, not a chore. Sometimes, you are so tired physically that it's just not possible, but that's another matter. Eyes hurt from staring at the screen; hands are sore from using the controller all day.

Link: I like to play strategic games, some shooting games, a lot of RPGs, some Metroidvania-style games, a lot of adventure games, and various other weird games. But the old genres are often inadequate for today's games. For example, look at Deus Ex—it's a shooter, a stealth game, and an RPG all in one. But returning to the question:Iit depends on the person. Some completely stop playing for pleasure after working as a tester.

When you're playing privately at home, are you still in test mode, looking for mistakes?
Mario: For sure, it is easier for me to notice certain things. In some triple-A titles, there are incredible, glaring errors regarding data storage, but probably few people care, because in theory, these matters are of little importance for the casual player. But I don't send the publishers any hate mail saying that they released a fucked-up game. Let them figure it out for themselves.

What's a day in the office of a game testing company like? How's the atmosphere?
The atmosphere is usually very chill. Sure, when it's crunch time, everyone is stressing and working hard, but no one around is hunched, like Chinese children working in a shoe factory. We joke, but sometimes the situation can get tense and then we sulk. We used to have LAN parties in the office, after hours, until they were banned after one morning when it turned out that someone smashed the glass by the entrance. The whole office stank of vodka, and one of the team leaders was lost, to the extent that his own wife couldn't find him. Instead of that, every few months, we organize company outings.

Link: Generally, we sit and test, but when, for example, a new build is being installed, we have nothing to do but stare at the download progress bar—so then we gather in the kitchen, we make food, we talk. During second shift and on weekends, especially during the second shift on Fridays, the atmosphere manages to become a bit bizarre. It's then that we get a little crazy, which results in the most absurd jokes and conversations.

Related: Watch VICE's film on competitive gaming, eSports

Do you have any spectacular examples of bugs that you've detected?
Once, we got a game with a build in which there was a co-op mode. It so happened that three of the four testers had Nvidia graphics cards, and one had a Radeon, on which the enemies did not appear at all, so the other three had to lead him blind with commands like: "Run to the left! No, the other left!" One of the first functional errors that I reported in my career was: "If you run a child over with a car, it disappears." I was new, and did not realize that the mistake was based on the fact that I was able to drive the car to a location that was out of bounds.

We've seen some high-profile new games released with errors. For example, Batman: Arkham Knight was a wreck on PC, and it was swiftly taken off sale. So who failed the players here: the testers or the developers?
This is a question that I just absolutely can't answer because of a confidentiality agreement, but it is quite an unprecedented situation. As far as I know, no publisher of a large triple-A production has ever voluntarily withdrawn games from the shelves, but it's interesting that it happened just a few weeks after Valve introduced the possibility of returning games on Steam.

Mario: I think communication failed, or perhaps rather the desire to release a game regardless of its actual state won. Actually, it's the second blow in a short time for this game. The first regarded the withdrawal of the Batman: Arkham Knight Batmobile Edition. Of course, these are quite different cases, but still, it looks bad. I find it hard to believe that testers didn't report obvious drops in FPS or other problems associated with the game's functionality. And if so, it's QA that is responsible for it, for losing their customers.

New on Motherboard: How a Former Drone Pilot's Guilt Kept Him Awake at Night

Who issues the most polished titles, and who releases games with the most defects?
Link: From my experience as a player, the most polished and pampered titles are released by Blizzard and Valve. You have to remember that these are two of the richest developers in the industry—releasing a new game takes them forever, but once they do, it's polished in every respect. Concerning the most "broken" games, I would unfortunately nominate Obsidian Entertainment. I love their games, but on the day of their release they are usually filled with bugs and it's best to wait a few weeks or months if you want to play without hitches and the risk of errors that outright prevent progression. Although, I should mention that they have recently improved their games—for example, both South Park: The Stick of Truth and Pillars of Eternity were fairly stable and refined on release day.

'South Park: The Stick of Truth' worked on release, which was nice.

What is currently the best platform for players, and what consoles do you own yourselves?
The best set-up that you can have at this point is a PC and Wii U. More and more exclusive titles from PlayStation and Xbox are available for PC, too, and PC wins with its power, better graphics, loading speed, and cheaper games. The Wii U, in turn, has titles that only appear on this platform—the Mario and Zelda games of course, plus Bayonetta 2 and many others—and it offers truly unique gameplay mechanics created specifically for a touch-screen controller, which in many games is used in a very interesting manner.

Mario: It really depends on who is looking for what. It is obvious that, for example, The Witcher 3 looks better on a PC with the highest settings than on a PS4, but I don't mind. I prefer to have the opportunity to actually play the newest Batman, to jump right into it as you can on console, than to play with the configuration settings so that the game works as it should.

And what advice would you give those who wanted to join your profession? What is needed? Who would not be able to handle games testing?
Perceptiveness is needed, but also patience. You need to have an interest in games, but you don't have to be a fanatic. English language skills are essential, as are teamwork skills, but you also need to have a strong sense of independence. I think anyone who meets most of these criteria should be able to manage. Well, and you have to be able to cope with stress—keep calm.

Link: Gaming experience is always welcome, but not necessary. Amongst the best testers I know there are people who do not play privately at all, or rarely. Definitely, those who should not apply are those who believe that they will play for eight hours a day and get paid for it. There is a big difference between playing and testing. You have to be prepared for the fact that even if you are fortunate enough to test even the best game in the world, after several months of work on the title, you will not be able to play it normally. Taking part in the creative process, we are sacrificing the possibility of receiving the game as a normal player. We know all too well how they're created, we know by heart all the texts in the game, and any objectivity is simply impossible.

Follow VICE Gaming on Twitter.

The newest issue of the National Enquirer is a real doozy. The tabloid got their hands on a photo of Bobbi Kristina Brown on her deathbed and made it the cover. Not the sort of behavior that wins you friends online.

But apparently it's still part of a good strategy for selling ink-and-paper magazines.

The Enquirer sold 360,612 copies per week in 2014. Those are solid sales figures that keep the magazine on the Alliance for Audited Media's top 25 list. But that number was more like 1 million per week around 2004, and overall circulation has dwindled as well.

Those are old-media metrics, though. If you only know how to judge the 88-year-old tabloid by its social media footprint, the situation would look downright dire. Incredibly, the paper has fewer than 7,000 Twitter followers, which is pretty shameful for a media outlet with the history and reach of the Enquirer.

But the past couple years at the Enquirer have also been full of internal activity. The publication went through an editorial shakeup over some very flawed reporting about Philip Seymour Hoffman, handed over the editorial keys to the very young Dylan Howard, and moved its offices out of self-imposed Floridian exile, and into New York. It could be that their period of almost complete internet irrelevance is coming to a close.

Still, how did it get so bad?

"We're no different than any other publisher or brand. Social media plays a vital role in our continued growth and success," editor-in-chief Dylan Howard told VICE in an email. But his paper's online underperformance seems to tell a different story about the role of social media in the company's strategy. Its Facebook updates and one-note all-caps tweets are like kryptonite to likes and retweets, and—judging from the site's Alexa global rank of 34,498—the social media posts aren't getting clicked, either. For reference, the not especially popular People.com ranks 557 at Alexa. Of course, Radar Online is a web-based gossip site owned by American Media, the same company that owns the Enquirer. The two, run out of the same room, are viewed in some ways as sister publications, and Dylan Howard is considered editor-in-chief of both, with those duties apparently falling under his large-umbrella title, "Vice President of News," at American Media.

According to Compete.com, which roughly tabulates a site's traffic though Nielsen-like extrapolation from small samples, the Enquirer's traffic peak from the past year was less than half a million unique visitors per month.

Meanwhile, RadarOnline is doing serious business. It nearly reached 5 million views.

Radar Online, with its superior reach, appears to function as a way for American media to profit online from Enquirer content, as evidenced by their synergistic posts of concurrent stories, often about older celebrities like hyperactive fitness guy Richard Simmons, or 60 Minutes host Steve Kroft, usually on Wednesdays, when new issues of the Enquirer drop. Running your magazine and web businesses separately is far from unheard of, but operating them as two similar publications with different names is puzzling, particularly when one name is on the obscure side, while the other is so powerful it's practically synonymous with "shameless tabloid."

"They get a story and they say 'Would it be best to save it for print, or would it be better to go on Radar and drive traffic that way?'" Shawn Binder, a former web producer at American Media told VICE. Radar and the Enquirer are largely differentiated by the age of their readership. "There's an older, and a little bit more conservative, generation that have grown up reading the National Enquirer. They don't necessarily know who these younger stars are."

When that generation becomes too old—or too dead—to keep reading, it follows that Radar might one day swallow the Enquirer whole. That'd be a waste of an iconic brand. After all, say what you will about the National Enquirer, but you can't call it boring. For 88 years, they've been in the honorable business of reporting trash, and doing so without regard for anything other than what will make people buy a magazine while they wait in line at the supermarket. For decades now, that's been mostly celebrity news.

But if you actually treat yourself to a copy next time you're at the supermarket (and I recommend it) you'll notice that it's not like other tabloids. The Enquirer lacks the constant swooning over hotties that fills pages at publications like Us Weekly. There are usually stories in there about crime (no other publication offers this much coverage of the now two-decade-old JonBenét Ramsey mystery) and terrorism, treated with their trademark hysteria. And most issues have a genuine news scoop much more riveting than who looked flabby at the beach.

From time to time, Enquirer scoops even escape the tabloid quarantine, and enter the news cycle. High points from the past included the discovery of photos of OJ Simpson in his telltale Bruno Magli loafers back in 1996, destroying John Edwards's presidential ambitions by uncovering his affair, revealing Rush Limbaugh's painkiller addiction, publishing photos of Elvis in his casket, and exposing Jesse Jackson's out-of-wedlock child.

"Our content has never been more suited for the 'internet age' as you put it. The fact that digital outlets curate and aggregate Enquirer stories each Wednesday, is testament to that," Howard explained. But in the aforementioned internet age, churning celebrity news into money takes more than shamelessness.

For instance, last month, TMZ ran a story saying someone had approached them offering to sell the photo of Brown which graces Enquirer's current cover. They then ran another story when the deal was made. The subject matter is in TMZ's wheelhouse, and the resulting TMZ blurbs, combined with TMZ's incredible social media reach stand to turn the topic into clicks without even buying the photo.

But in contrast to the popularity of the social media posts which correspond to the TMZ posts about Brown's deathbed photos, even Radar Online's treatment of the genuinely shocking subject matter didn't attract much engagement. Radar's tweet of the photo got two retweets, while TMZ's taking-the-high-road tweet about the sale of the photo was retweeted 56 times. The Enquirer's tweet of the photo was retweeted once.

Selling hundreds of thousands of magazines is impressive in 2015, but clicks in these quantities translate to more real revenue that the Enquirer isn't seeing. Despite Sean Binder's claim that Enquirer readers are on the old side, they're not too old to be counted by advertisers. According to their own analysis, National Enquirer magazine readers are 49 on average, and users of the site are 54. That's hardly geriatric.

But then again, their site doesn't appear designed to do much but market their ink-and-paper magazine, and maybe their app, which just sells exact replicas of the ink-and-paper magazine.

Clarity as to the actual roadblock in the way of online relevance, other than apathy, is hard to come by. It might have been the bizarre choice to run their magazine out of culturally isolated Boca Raton, Florida, for the past 43 years. Publishing lore has it that this was because the mafia ran them out of New York in 1971. Still, being in Florida shouldn't stop anyone from getting their shit together online.

Furthermore, the Enquirer has a fascinating ability that would make for internet gold in anyone else's hands: its knack for attracting attention to itself like some kind of famous-for-being-famous reality TV star. It's an ability Howard alluded to in his emails when he pointed out how often his publication "becomes the story itself, like we have in Vanity Fair, The New York Times or GQ," referring to the John Edwards story. However, last year, the Enquirer made headlines elsewhere by using some apparently flawed intel to posthumously out Philip Seymour Hoffman as gay, which turned out to be both trashy and inaccurate. Then in November, The New York Times reported that in 2005, they made an interview deal with Bill Cosby in exchange for burying a story about his rape allegations.

Howard must be aware of the seriousness of these accusations, but that didn't stop him from being extremely reverential about the Enquirer's reputation. He said his future plans for the magazine are "rooted in an extraordinary 88-year heritage," adding that he would "put any of the reporters from the Enquirer's great history, through its current time, up against those from any other media outlet."

When he puts them "against" the writers from other media outlets, it's doubtful he's talking up their journalistic high-mindedness. More likely he means they've had the ability to attract eyes, and in that sense, I'd have to agree with him. So why shouldn't they be able to attract favs?

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NOTE: A previous version implied that the The New York Times claimed money changed hands between the Enquirer and Bill Cosby. This was reportedly a deal for an interview. Enquirer sales numbers have also been updated for accuracy. Our interpretation of a quote from Howard was also clarified. We regret the errors.