Illustrations by Joel Benjamin

Dear So Sad Today,

It's been months and every time my ex posts a picture with his girlfriend I have a panic attack.

He blocked me and then he called me and told me he cared about me and then he followed me again. And then he started posting about some ugly girl with a mom name, Linda. Beware boys who smile at you when you go down on them and who date girls with mom names like Mary Pat or Linda.

Sometimes I always feel dead and then sometimes I see him and I feel sort of not dead but then everything hurts. Sometimes I think he loved me but then I realize he just liked how easy I was and that's OK?

Yours,

Zombietime

Dear Zombietime,

As someone who seeks out stimulation—no matter the cost—so as to feel "alive" or "different than I feel now," I have to say I think that might be what you're doing.

First of all, you're still following this dude. While panic attacks are awful, I think that some part of us finds them preferable to depression or sadness or ennui or just sitting there. If you weren't getting some kind of emotional payoff (as brutal as it can feel) from the panic attacks, you would have unfollowed him and never seen another mom name pic again.

Some boys who smile when we go down on them are wonderful people. Some may even be in love with us. But I too have mistaken "just sex" for love: particularly when the boy has a kindly or "glowing" face during the act and kisses me a lot and I want it to be love. It is absolutely fine to be "easy," as you call it—as long as you're OK with it. But it doesn't really sound like you are OK with it. Sometimes I wish I were "easier." Like I will feel "easy" in the act but then I catch unrequited feels and things no longer feel so easy. In fact, they feel hard. That's OK too though, because it's how I have learned the difference between who I really am vs. the "chill person" I imagine I am supposed to be or wish I were. Also, I'm a very slow learner and often make the same mistakes repeatedly. It hasn't happened overnight.

Having said that, one thing I've learned is that some people are like drugs . With these people, the dynamic between the two of you never really changes no matter how new or different it seems with each reconciliation. I know that this bro gives you a relief from the deadness. But like a drug, it sounds like it's only a quick fix. If he were a real solution, you wouldn't feel the pain after. That pain is withdrawal.

You can continue to see this guy and check his social media. Just know that most likely you will get fed up with the cycle again and then have to go through the deadness all over again. The good news is that if you cut him off entirely (think: ripping off a Band-Aid) you aren't going to feel dead forever. If you ever felt alive before you met him, you will feel alive again. Don't put any time pressure on yourself. Just know that one night in the future you will discover Holy shit, I wasn't that dead today. Like, I was actually alive for a few minutes. Trust me on this. I've been dead and undead a lot.

xo

SST

***

Dear So Sad Today,

I recently [Mayish] threw out a little over a year and a half of sobriety. The reasons are dumb and complicated but it was OK for a bit. Maybe two months. I then left Portland after ten years in July to spend the summer in California [my gf's parents live here], and it's gotten real bad, real fast. Concussion, broken foot.

All of that said: what I'm struggling with right now, and maybe the biggest reason I started drinking again, is I was just as miserable sober as I was drunk. And drunk, despite the obvious physical injuries, seems to be preferable at this moment?

What I'm asking is: assuming your inner life resembles @sosadtoday and your VICE column, how did you decide, and continue to choose, sobriety as preferable over non-sobriety?

Sincerely,

Turnt in California

Dear Turnt in California,

This is a really really really good question.

There are some sober people who say their worst day sober is better than their best day drunk. For me that's definitely not true. I had a lot of amazing, beautiful experiences fucked up. If I could have stayed fucked up 24 hours a day I never would have gotten sober. But at some point I always came down. And the comedowns got too painful.

I've had to deal with some difficult external things in sobriety. But the hardest stuff is always between my own ears: particularly my struggles with panic attacks, general anxiety, and underlying depression.

One might think that sobriety would make the feelings more painful. And while it's true that a drink or drug temporarily alleviates both small fears and existential dread, I found that the fear and dread would come back even worse after the substance wore off. That temporary relief would inevitably create much more suffering. I would wake up every morning and within 20 minutes feel like I was dying. These daily withdrawals only catalyzed my anxiety.

Obviously, as documented in this column, I still go through cycles of bad panic attacks in sobriety. I'm also often still scared of people, as well as death, life, my body, my mind, the meaning of being on earth, and whether I am "good." But overall, it's not at the frequency or intensity I experienced when I woke up every morning feeling like I was dying. Like, now I only die 75 days a year?

Also, I know through experience that I would have no chance for mental health if I were still drinking and using. Zero. The way I feel is that I would be lucky to even die. What would be worse would be to continue to drag my carcass around the earth, stuck in that horrific daily cycle of temporary (and messy) relief followed by a boomerang of worse pain. Even sober, I can't control myself around food or texting (or Twitter). If I were still drinking and using, I would be eviscerated.

Also, my sobriety forces me to use my creativity more. I rely on creativity, because I don't have anything else to take the edge off of life. Sometimes I used to write when I was fucked up. I'd be like "oh my god this is brilliant." Then in the morning it was like "what is this shit?" I doubt that @sosadtoday or this column would even exist if I were still getting fucked up.

Lastly, I've found a good deal of meaning, purpose, and shared dark humor, amongst other sober people. I don't understand people who are content with having a nice glass of wine and just being "chill with how life is." I like people whose minds won't let them rest (like me). It feels good to get out of my own disgusting head and be with them. I have found a genuine human connection—despite any differences in politics, gender, ethnicity, age, socioeconomic status, or sexuality—amongst sober drunks and addicts that I haven't found anywhere else: even the internet. I don't want to lose that.

Wishing you luck on your journey.

xo

SST

So Sad Today is a never-ending existential crisis played out in 140 characters or less. Its anonymous author has struggled with consciousness since long before the creation of the Twitter feed in 2012, and has finally decided the time has come to project her anxieties on a larger screen, in the form of a biweekly column on this website.

Photo via Flickr user marcn

Read: Hillary Clinton Is About to Launch the Most Boring Presidential Campaign in Years

Elaine Fydrych, who died from lung cancer last week, was many things in her 63 years: a loving wife, mother, and charismatic performer. But one thing that she was most definitely not was a Hillary Clinton supporter.

As reported by the New York Daily News, the New Jersey resident's obituary highlights her lifelong love for the theater and comedy; she had a stand-up set on a local Comcast comedy special in 2008. But at the very end of the obit were explicit instructions: "In lieu of flowers, please do not vote for Hillary Clinton."

Fydrych's husband told Fox News, "Elaine was a very beautiful woman inside and out. She was very talented, and she did a lot of comedy, and always had a line, a wisecrack."

In the 71 comments in her online memorial guestbook, people from all over the country have offered their condolences and vows not to vote for the Democratic presidential contender.

One woman from Easton, Massachusetts, went one step further and wrote: "Elaine, I will gladly honor your request to not vote for Hillary Clinton. I will also one up that and I will make campaign contributions to her political rivals in lieu of flowers."

Illustration by Elizabeth Renstrom

The legendary horror author H. P. Lovecraft has been given many titles in the 78 years since he died: "The King of Weird," "The Copernicus of the Horror Story," "The 20th Century's Greatest Practitioner of the Classic Horror Tale," as well as "Popular Culture's Racist Grandpa."

Today, to mark his 125th birthday, I'm giving him one more: America's Unlikeliest Sex Symbol.

The so-called "Dark Prince of Providence" probably isn't the first writer you associate with doin' it. Tropic of Cancer author Henry Miller, who was born 16 months after Lovecraft, and whom the New York Times credits with "ma[king] it possible for Americans to write about sex," is a more obvious choice. But the vast kingdom of Lovecraftiana is a lot kinkier than you might think. And this animated video of Lovecraft pole-dancing is only the beginning.

First, consider the merchandise: corsets emblazoned with Lovecraft's face; books and stories with titles like Cthulhurotica and "Booty Call of Cthulhu"; the sex-toy company named Necronomicox (a nod to Lovecraft's NecronomiCon), which sells 11-inch silicone dildos with "a mass of seething tentacles" and a "stimulating tentacle tail."

Then there's the 300-page treatise, Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos, which covers everything from Lovecraft's views on pornography, to his father's hallucination-inducing syphilis, to the magazine Cthulhu Sex (1998–2007), to the appearance of sexual/Lovecraftian imagery in Japanese manga and anime.

And we can't ignore the movies. There seems to be an unwritten rule that Lovecraftian adaptations must have a gratuitously topless woman or some other sexual scenario missing from the original stories, which contain "virtually no women" (Joyce Carol Oates) and "virtually no sex" (Lovecraft biographer, S. T. Joshi). The psychedelic B-movie adaptation of Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror" gave us perhaps cinema history's first tentacle-rape scene. Re-Animator (an adaptation of "Herbert West—Re-Animator") delivered the brain-scorching image of a disembodied head attempting cunnilingus. And Dagon (an adaptation of Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth"), includes a scene in which the protagonist—an unlucky guy named Paul who eventually lights himself on fire—makes out with a woman he encounters while being chased through a mansion by murderous fish-people. As the encounter heats up, Paul reaches under the woman's shirt and finds gills along her torso. A moment later, he sees she has two wriggling tentacles instead of legs.

All of this posthumous sexualizing is more than a little ironic, considering how non-sexual Lovecraft actually was. In 1945, the New York Times noted that his "loathing for fish was even stronger than his aversion to sex." His biographer, S. T. Joshi, classifies him "among the most asexual individuals in human history."

His disinterest apparently began as a young child, when, after reading anatomy books, he saw "the whole matter... reduced to prosaic mechanism—a mechanism which I rather despised," as he later wrote. Thanks to a number of additional hang-ups—persistent nightmares; a smothering love/hate relationship with his mother, who called him "grotesque"; a years-long mental breakdown as a teenager—this attitude never significantly changed. Lovecraft remained a virgin until his marriage to Sonia Greene, in 1924, at age 33.

The interest in Lovecraft and sex may also be stoked by the ever-intensifying conversation about his racism.

We know the intimate, depressing details of this ill-fated union thanks, in part, to a short essay by a Lovecraft scholar titled "Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Sex: or The Sex Life of a Gentleman." Before the wedding, Lovecraft reportedly "purchased and read thoroughly all subject matter he could obtain regarding the marriage, sex, and the duties of a husband in the connubial bed." Nevertheless, Sonia later reported that, though the marriage wasn't entirely sexless, her husband was "squeamish and prudish about perfectly natural functions," and "the very mention of the word sex seemed to upset him." He also "never mention[ed] the word love," she later said, in a memoir. "He would say instead, 'My dear, you don't know how much I appreciate you.'" The marriage lasted less than three years.

'Booty Call of Cthulhu' (2015) by Wren Winter

So, how did this guy end up inspiring porn flicks called The Cunt of Cthulhu (google it) and a small shelf's worth of erotica?

Well, the short answer is capitalism. Lovecraft's stories—which earned him pitiful sums from pulp magazines like Weird Tales during his lifetime—have since spawned a multimillion-dollar merchandising empire. Lingerie and sex toys are just a tiny sliver of a market that includes key chains, coloring books, board games, mugs, T-shirts, action figures, and commemorative coins.

Furthermore, plenty of Lovecraft readers have found sex in his stories, even when—superficially, at least—it doesn't exist. Despite Joshi's claim that it's "mere armchair psychoanalysis to say that he somehow sublimated his sex urges into writing or other activities," Stephen King has called Lovecraft's work "a Freudian three-ring circus" in which, "when Cthulhu makes one of its appearances... We are witnessing a gigantic, tentacle-equipped, killer vagina from beyond space and time."

His biographer, S. T. Joshi, classifies him 'among the most asexual individuals in human history.'

The interest in Lovecraft and sex may also have been stoked by the ever-intensifying conversation about his racism. Lovecraft, in case you haven't heard, was a devout white supremacist who sprinkled his letters with impassioned diatribes about Jews, Asians, African Americans, French-Canadians, various European immigrants, and basically anyone else who didn't look like him. And Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos author Bobby Derie tells us, "It's difficult to really separate out Lovecraft's views on race from sex... because of how tightly they were intertwined with his understanding of evolution, biology, civilization, and sense of self." In one letter from 1930, Lovecraft called interracial sex a "melancholy and disgusting phenomenon" and encourages "placing the heaviest possible penalties on miscegenation."

But more than anything, the porn-ification of the "Father of Weird Fiction" seem less of an outgrowth of any aspect of his life, and more of a sign of his legacy's remarkable elasticity. His fame may not have surpassed contemporaries like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, but it's a hell of a lot more interactive.

The Lovecraft-inspired magazine 'Cthuthu Sex,' which was published from 1998–2007

Lovecraft left no children or grandchildren who might guard his name from being freely stamped on comic books and bumper stickers. And he probably would have told them not to bother, anyway, since he encouraged other writers to make use of his monsters in their own stories. (Who doesn't see untapped possibilities in "a sentient blob of self-shaping gelatinous flesh"?) Add this to the fact that Lovecraft's fiction is freely accessible online and translated into countless languages, and you start to understand how we have Lovecraft beer and hand-knitted Cthulhu balaclavas, and, yes, X-rated sequels to Lovecraft stories.

These days, some writers are actually using sex, gender, and sexuality to stretch and re-sculpt Lovecraft's legacy. Alan Moore says he gave his comic Providence a gay, Jewish protagonist specifically because that "resonated interestingly with some of Lovecraft's prejudices." And in the intro to Cthulhurotica, editor Carrie Cuinn describes the book as a missing piece to the Lovecraft puzzle. "When I read HPL's works, even when I was swallowed up by everything that he put in, I couldn't help noticing what he left out," she writes. "Where was the romance... Where was the secretary with the tight sweater and the heart-shaped ass?... What we needed was a book that showed off the potential in what he left out."

Related: VICE Talks Film with Rashida Jones, director of the porn documentary 'Hot Girls Wanted'

At NecronomiCon Providence—the "International Conference and Festival of Weird Fiction, Art, and Academia," in Lovecraft's honor, which starts today—there will be a panel celebrating female-written Lovecraftian fiction that will include Silvia Moreno-Garcia, a Canada-based writer who has co-edited a new all-female anthology called She Walks in Shadows.

Moreno-Garcia (who contributed a story to Cthulhurotica about a porn theater in Mexico City) has recently become a kind of spokeswoman for a more expansive concept of "Lovecraftian." When news of her all-female anthology broke, one Redditor said she was "tarnishing the legacy" of Lovecraft; another fan wrote an email calling her a "little bitch." She responded to the comment in a brilliant blog post (quote: "Cthulhu says no to sexism and harassment").

"Some fans want to erect firm walls to encircle the genre," Moreno-Garcia told VICE in an interview last week. "They want to define what counts and what doesn't count... However, whether you like or don't like a certain take on a sub-genre—whether it be Lovecraft's Mythos or steampunk—doesn't mean you get to determine whether it can exist or not."

NecronomiCon Providence director Niels Hobbs added that Lovecraft has been "completely open-source" from the beginning. The man who wrote nearly 100,000 letters was "generating his ideas with crowdsourcing, with conversing with myriad correspondents and bouncing ideas off them... and collectively generating this mythology," he says.

"So, from the start, it was already de-centralized," he said. "It wasn't just Lovecraft writing these stories."

Follow Philip Eil on Twitter.

Guy Masterleigh, the leader of the Wales-based fetish group the Tawsingham Society, sent us these photos. Looks like fun.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

A British heritage-themed fetish meeting group known as the Tawsingham Society was in the news this week for upsetting the neighbors. "We are in the school holidays and we like to get our kids out from computer games to enjoy our fabulous environment," said one local from Bancyffordd in Wales. "Please do not permit outsiders to bring their disgusting habits here and tempt our young folk."

Away from Bancyffordd, reactions were less negative. Many online commenters asked for the postcode and the incident netted the Tawsingham Society 50 new Facebook followers.

The leader of the society, Guy Masterleigh, has been running the fun and games at the site in Wales for six years. The group's tagline is "bringing fantasy into reality" and the kink play is open to anyone 18 or over. For just £10 [$15] per day, guests can join Guy and his band of "ponies, puppies and piggies" on their private site in rural Wales. Although remote, these events attract dozens of kinksters, and Tawsingham's profiles on Facebook and Fet Life are relatively popular in the scene.

I talked to Guy about the intersectional play Tawsingham offers, how the group is themed around British heritage, and the recent outrage they've attracted.

VICE: Hi, Guy. Why did you start organizing kink events?
Guy Masterleigh: Because it's more fun to do it with friends than it is alone!

Fair enough. What about the rural setting? What does that offer?
Space, privacy, a chance to see the stars and enjoy grass beneath your feet. Also it means we can camp, which is much cheaper than a hotel.

Tawsingham combines British Heritage with extreme kink—is this a common fetish? It doesn't sound like it is.
It's unique, I think—though there are a couple of parallels elsewhere. The closest parallel is probably the Other World Kingdom that existed in the Czech Republic for a few years; but that was binary, femdom, and very expensive. The appeal with us is to slip into a new role; whether it is to step up or down in social class, to adopt another gender, or some other role for a while.

A uniquely British, class-guilt heavy form of escapism, then?
Absolutely. A chance to shuck off the responsibilities, duties, and inhibitions of your mundane life.

Understood. Can you explain the animal role-play aspects?
"A holiday from humanity." People's reasons vary; they're rarely the same. But there are clues in the types of animal people choose to be: "ponies" generally love to be of service, to be under control, cared-for, to show off. "Puppies" want the freedom of just being there to please their master or mistress, naked, and unashamed. "Piggies" just want to "be."

Where do you find your guests?
Through kinky social media; Yahoo lists, Fet Life, and my own websites; many I've been in touch with for years, decades. The groups are small, ten to 20 or so normally, and most are regulars.

Do you think the group will expand? What's a good number for an event?
It fluctuates according to the location, format of the event, price, weather, etc—there are afternoon-only pony-play events with 50 or more people, but I like to keep things cozy and go for a week, long weekend or weekend. That way we can get to know each other well. You can choose your social station, your level of freedom, your gender, even your species. Then live that life for a while.

Fetishists on a horse walker

I've heard that you think Larissa Lewis, who was quoted as a disgruntled villager on Wales Online, was actually a "saboteur." Why?
Because there has been a long history of antipathy from a malcontent connected with the site, against both me and the landowner. Placing this story is entirely consistent with their modus operandi. They will use any means to get at us. A hater's gonna hate. We are doing nothing immoral at all. I don't want to go into detail, as that would be libelous.

You've had some vandals down at the site recently, right? They set fire to shit?
Yes. Had the vandalism not occurred the event that was in the Wales Online would have looked very different. We'd have had a static caravan there as my base; tool-sheds; a garage for our kit; a Dutch barn for our digger and materials; a barn fitted out with stables, kennels, and a pig-sty for human critters; proper showers and toilets—quite a neat facility.

What do you think was the vandal's motivation? You've said it was "a drug-fueled gang-bang"?
Yes, there was a gang-bang party. I imagine the motive of the organizer was profit and/or malice. There were beer, wine, and cider bottles strewn everywhere, needles on the floor, crack-smoking works on the table... I can't know if the arson and criminal damage was premeditated or spontaneous, so I won't speculate.

WATCH: Our documentary about a Chinese sex doll factory:

Do you think Tawsingham's brand attracts special interest?
Most in the fetish scene don't see the appeal, their concept of it is something that takes part in clubs of an evening; they see what we do as being too needlessly complicated. I entered the scene nearly 30 years ago, pre-internet. It was organized through magazines, mostly. The only club was in London, called Der Putsch. Through the 1990s, it was a slowly growing movement, and most of us knew each other, directly or through a friend of a friend.

Then the internet came along and flooded the scene with new people. Whereas in the early years we'd share a club with goths, gays, lesbians, cross-dressers, swingers, etc just to get enough bodies to make it viable, the scene fragmented into different cliques, because the newbies often don't "get" the need for acceptance and tolerance.

Not sure what this is. Some kind of trap.

What do your children think of kink? Are they aware of what you do?
They were made aware at a very early age, thanks to us having to tell a blackmailer where to go. Then our exploits appeared in a tabloid newspaper, much as with this recent story. They are now adults and never had a problem with it, because they checked for themselves and know it is all with fully informed, freely-given, and revocable consent among adults.

Thanks, Guy.

Follow Becky on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user AZAdam

Read: The Real Reason Why Donald Trump Will Never Be President

The great thing about being a teenager is retaining the stupid bravery of a child while inheriting the comedic timing of an adult. It means you can do things like run for President of the United States of America under the name "Deez Nuts," which is exactly what 15-year-old Iowan Brady Olson has done.

But in a twist to what undoubtedly started as an innocuous smirking gag, the high schooler is polling high: According to Public Policy Polling, 9 percent of voters in North Carolina favor Deez Nuts when matched up against Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump—and same goes for 8 percent of Minnesotans, and 7 percent of Iowans.

Speaking to the Guardian, the promising young comedian said: "It's amazing how this campaign caught on. Right now it's mainly just the name recognition, but hopefully as we go down the stretch people will actually take the time to look at my campaign website and look at my platform."

Deez Nuts is for the immediate deportation of all illegal immigrants, pro-gay marriage, and thinks government salaries should be tethered to the state of the national economy. He also likes the Iran deal, and would give people in US territories the right to vote in presidential election.

The phrase "Deez Nuts" has had a bit of a renaissance of late, after its inception on Dr. Dre's debut release The Chronic in 1992.

Under the Constitution, 15-year-olds are not eligible to be president.

Photo courtesy of TabooCouple.com

Rob and Bianca (not their real names) met in Atlantic City about nine years ago, where she was seeing David Copperfield with her mom and he was participating in a bodybuilding competition. At first, Bianca thought her future beau was a player, given that he was surrounded by meathead friends who were prone to crude jokes.

"It was like the Adonis gods were kind of shining on me for whatever reason that day, and every girl was like looking at me, and talking to me, and suddenly this one girl was not," Rob says of his sudden infatuation.

Despite the minor hiccup, the two fell deeply in love relatively quickly. Bianca visited New York for about a month, and decided to move in right afterward. Their sex life at the time, they told me, was extremely active. But they didn't realize that it was vanilla until they had a wine-fueled dinner with friends during which the topic of conversation turned to sexual adventurousness. Basically, Rob and Bianca found out they were pretty boring when it came to boning.

That conversation led to them becoming an escort tag-team, which led to them "sex coaching" men who weren't getting the sex they wanted. As Bianca put it in the New York Post earlier this week, "We might not be formally trained sex therapists, but—as a kinky couple who enjoy opening up our sex life to others—we've got a lot to offer."

On VICE Sports: Life as a Trans High School Athlete

I called them up on the phone to ask how exactly they went from the most boring couple at a party to "The Taboo Couple," and what exactly qualifies them to teach other people how to fuck good.

VICE: When you were doing escort stuff, who were your typical customers? Was it usually men with bisexual fantasies, or people who had voyeuristic fantasies and wanted to watch a couple have sex?
Rob: They were primarily heterosexual males, executives, professionals, masters of their own little universes. They would come to us because their fantasies were ones that they could not reveal to their equally professional wives, or whatever. These are heterosexual males, but they had bisexual fantasies. I was open-minded enough to help them explore that. It was just equally as revealing to me as it was to them to have those experiences we had.

And when you coach, what do people typically need the most help with? Is there a specific act that they seek your help for?
Bianca: Communication, actually—how to communicate with their wives. That's the biggest thing they have a problem with, communication.

Rob: If you Google "pornification," pornification is a sociological term that defines what's happening with society where sexual content is so mainstream. A lot of men—women too—watch porn, and when you watch pornography, you develop these certain fantasies. If somebody watches a certain genre of porn and it turns them on, there's a lack of communication between these people and their partners. And so they need a release for it, and that's why they would go out and seek [from] people like us, or anyone else. So we wanted to change that. We wanted to help them communicate [by saying], "Why don't you just find a way to smoothly communicate with your partner what your fantasy is?" We've got virgins who would come to us to learn how to kiss, how to perform oral—

Bianca: How to talk to a girl.

Rob: I would help them with that as well—we have a lot of virgins in their 20s, they're nervous, they're not confident, so we'd help build their confidence. She in how to please a woman, and I in how to approach a woman. Does that make sense?

"It doesn't hurt that I'm an expert cocksman." –Rob

Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
Bianca: Sometimes we disagree, so it's good to have it both ways.

Rob: Imagine the value of having both perspectives of things, where you're not just hearing it from a woman—

Bianca: He can give advice on things and I say, "You know what? I don't think so, I think you should do a little more this way," and then both pieces of advice get mushed together, and that's what makes it perfect.

Rob: It doesn't hurt that I'm an expert cocksman.

So do people come to you specifically and say, "I want a one-off lesson on how to go down on a woman," or something like that? Or do they come to you and you have like a weeklong class, where you cover a bunch of different topics? How does it work?
Rob: We've had moments where someone just wants to learn a specific thing. For example, someone's girlfriend or wife specifically liked oral, and this person just consistently performed badly, and we together have taught him how to perfect his rhythm. And then I would teach, when it wasn't an oral issue, an issue of I guess technique, in terms of maybe angling the body a certain way. I would teach him, "Look, sometimes the penis has to—just the same as there's a G-spot, you have to angle your penis a certain way." Or you have to think of logistics, like, "OK, if I angle her this way, then my penis is touching that, and blah blah blah."

Bianca: And each woman has her own style, and I teach them how to find the G-spot.

Rob: It's all about body language. A lot of guys just figure, "OK, I'm just going to lick, or just pound away."

Bianca: A lot of women, they don't like to give a blowjob, and I was shocked about that actually. I have a Facebook page, and I also have a blog. And I send a lot of emails, and I talk to all of [the people who contact me.] And that stuff I do for free, because I see how much people fulfill me. I'm helping. I look at emails that say, "I think my wife is disgusted by it." And the women say, "I don't like it, I think it's disgusting, I don't like the taste." And I have to explain about [if] you love your husband, how to love his cock.

"You have to think of logistics, like, 'OK, if I angle her this way, then my penis is touching that, and blah blah blah.'" –Rob

Do you ever have them actually practice oral sex on like a dildo or a fleshlight or something?
Rob: We also do have physical consultations where we have a prosthetic vagina, which we'll teach someone, or even a doll, that type of thing. We have a series of props that work really well. Sometimes it's comic, depending on how you look at it, but it works.

Bianca: One woman, she's in Switzerland and she can't come here so we do a Skype call, and she got her own dildo. So I'm looking at her, she's looking at me, and she's imitating me with the dildo.

Rob: And meanwhile, I'm in the back masturbating, watching these two women—no, I'm kidding!

Watch: America's Lucrative Divorce Industry

So a 20-year-old kid could come pay you to watch him fuck a blow-up doll and then evaluate the technique and tell him what he could have done differently?
Rob: Well, a 20-year-old kid... No, no, we do have standards. We are contacted by youngins, [but] Bianca's 28, she'll be 29 in a few months, and I'm 35—we don't even entertain it, we just tell them, "Thank you for contacting us, but I think you still have a way to explore in your own way."

Bianca: I'm very careful what I talk about with them because they're not really mature. So we don't want to confuse them.

Rob: The moment that a kid says, "I just want to fuck a bunch of bitches," I immediately cut him off. Go to your frat parties bud, you're not trying to change your life, you just want to be a stud. That's not what we do.

So say a 30-year-old guy comes in and says he wants to learn how to fuck, and you evaluate him, you give him feedback. What does that cost?
Rob: Our rate varies. Typically, our sessions run for about an hour, and we charge $600 for our time. But it varies. If it's over the phone it's $300, if it's Skype, it's $300. If it's physically, where we have to set up props and whatnot—

Bianca: And some people buy more hours, things like that.

Rob: If, for example, someone determines that after we talk they're going to need more than just one thing, then we have little package deals, if that makes sense. As a personal trainer, I know the package deal world. So prices vary, I guess is the best answer.

There a lot of people out there who think that they're good in bed when they're not necessarily that great in bed. What makes you qualified to teach other people about sex?
Rob: Here's a fun fact: two of the top sexologists, literally the top sexologists in the country, they're both male, they're both doctors, they have PhDs in sexology and whatnot, we talk to them regularly. When they first heard of us, and we talked via Skype, they were shocked, and even admitted themselves—mind you, they don't know one another, individually—they were like, "Look. There are certain things in life where seminars and the best schooling, the best teaching, it cannot teach it. It's practical knowledge that would teach you how to perfect a certain thing." And one of those things is sex. You can't watch a seminar about sex and claim to be some expert on sex. You have to experience it yourself. We took the courses and laughed about the content. Our credentials are life experience.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

A handmade cock-drill.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

A few months ago, I traveled to Amsterdam to explore the ways the city utilizes its label as Europe's sex capital. While hanging out in the Red Light district, I began wandering into the city's many sex shops. Inside, I started to photograph the most unusual items I could find on offer. I eventually gathered a collection of about 60 pictures that I believe show exactly how creative humans can be when our orgasms are at stake.

This is part of that collection.

See more of Sergei's work here

Why are young men on London's council estates performing deviant acts on a person they call "Spitman"? This is a journey through the depths of West London. A story of what some of the young men on these estates will do for money.

For the last ten years, numerous generations have been meeting a person known as Spitman. Gathering in stairwells they'll meet him and take their turn. All in exchange for cash. Is Spitman taking advantage of the boys? Are they taking advantage of him? This is a strange story that gets stranger the deeper you get.

Here is a note from the director, Marlon Rouse Tavares:

Last year, I was sitting in Pizza Express when a friend called saying, "Bruv, I've just heard about the maddest thing." I'd never heard the name Spitman before, but I was about to find out that a lot of other people had.

Spitman has been around for at least 13 years. He will pay groups of young guys to do weird things to him on the council estates on West London. This was a story that had to be told.

Most people's reaction to my plans was "Why make a film about that?" We're constantly being presented with narratives that are easily digestible, where it's clear what we're meant to feel and what side we're meant to take. The Spitman story is complex and difficult. It makes people uncomfortable, most people don't want to hear about these things.

The film was shot between midnight and 3 AM. I wanted to visit these locations and interview the boys with no disturbances, no distractions. There was a lot of late-night lurking. The boys who feature in the film were brilliant. Despite it being a part of their lives they hadn't really shared before, they were so open and honest with me. Some of what they say is much more profound than my voice over.

I'd like to say that this is not a journalistic film, it's not an episode of Panorama. I'm not popping up at the end with a conclusion or telling you what to think. I'm not going to say these ones are the villains or those are the victims. People will watch this and have a range of different feelings and opinions at the end. And that is the point.

I won't tell people to enjoy the film, because "enjoy" is the wrong word. But I hope they allow themselves to be fully consumed by it.

— Marlon Rouse Tavares

Image via Instagram

Mystery Show is a new project from Starlee Kine, who podcast fans will know from the time she asked Phil Collins how to write a break-up song after her ex-boyfriend Anthony broke up with her, the time she rifled through Andy Warhol's rubbish on This American Life, the time she talked about waiting to meet Marina Abramovic at the Moth, and the time made an onion chopping board inscribed with instructions on how to cry.

In Mystery Show, which is brought out by podcast platform Gimlet and already ranks as the third most popular podcast on Podbay and iTunes, Kine solves mysteries. It's that simple. Like the droll, well-connected lovechild of Columbo and Nancy Drew, she spends each episode solving a question that couldn't be answered just by googling it. The mysteries manage to be simultaneously banal and extraordinary, and in so doing end up revealing far more than originally intended. Cases to date include: Did a video store in Tribeca really close overnight without her friend returning a copy of Must Love Dogs? Why was Britney Spears photographed holding Kine's friend's woefully unsuccessful book? And who was the owner of the car with the numberplate I LUV 911 that Kine spotted at a traffic light? Mysteries all, thankfully, now solved.

So how did the show come about? How does Kine get people to open up to her? Does she hate the people at Serial? Why are so many women making podcasts? And, most of all, what does Britney smell like? I spoke to her on Skype to find out.

VICE: Hello Starlee. I'm sort of intimidated to talk to you after hearing you interview so many people. How do you always get such interesting stuff out of them?
Starlee Kine: I used to do this live show called The Run Down—it was kind of a set of instructions on how to eliminate small talk. One of the rules was, "Why chew the fat when you can chew the meat." In Mystery Show, the clues are what people really care about.

What you define in the show as a clue is often what a journalist would define as the story—the bit that makes you itch to learn more.
I've been thinking a lot about the difference between being a detective and a journalist for these stories. In journalism, you're hoping for the good anecdotes. But the clues here are more about a human connection. I don't know what I'm going to get in The Mystery Show; everything feels like a discovery.

Have you had much therapy? Because there are times in the show where you seem to be enacting quite a therapeutic role with some of the interviewees.
I had a therapist in Chicago and he was great. But then I had to move, and I feel like it takes a lot of time to find the right one. I really haven't had enough therapy. In Mystery Show I suppose I'm like a therapist who's allowed to talk about their feelings.

A successful therapy session simulates your real life in a little, controlled room. I would lash out at my therapist, and he said it was good because I was simulating how I would treat someone in my real life. In Mystery Show I'm trying to create the texture of real life in these little moments.

I'm not afraid of people saying they feel bad—and a lot of people are. Although I'm not one of those people who actively seeks out people who are feeling bad.

At what point do you tell people you're talking to that you're recording them?
I tell them right away. I say the call is being recorded for possible broadcast. I haven't had anyone say no. I think they kind of forget they're being recorded—even people like the book store woman or the Ticketmaster guy. I don't want anyone to feel bad; I'm not trying to trick anyone.

Related: Watch VICE meet Bel Powley, star of 'Diary of a Teenage Girl,' to talk teenage sex and challenging performances

The detective is quite an ambivalent figure—like a spy. Has doing this made you feel differently about that role?
This feels more natural. A lot of time with This American Life stories, you only talk to that person once—you don't follow it up. My favorite thing is when people in the show start to become part of the investigation. I loved how chef Rene—who's this retired chef, in his seventies, in Arizona—straight away just totally got it. It was like he'd been waiting his entire life for someone to ask him to help solve a mystery.

It definitely made me understand that it's the whole conversation that matters. There can be a clue anywhere—it's not just about going from beat to beat. The raw tape of my interviews are so long and meandering. I keep people on the phone forever.

The thing about the detective—I'm thinking of Columbo and Humphrey Bogart in all his detective roles—is that, even at the beginning of the case, they look exhausted. Like someone who's living on coffee and cigarettes and sleeping in their cars.
I identify with Columbo so much. You feel like you've already been on a lot of past cases with them as soon as you meet them. They're weary.

The first episode of Mystery Show


Are you jealous of the success of other podcasts like 'Serial'?
Are you kidding? Serial has been super-helpful to me. I'm reaping the benefits of it because they made it so much more mainstream.

Before Mystery Show came out I saw a lot of things that said, like, this is Gimlet's attempt at Serial, and I didn't like that, because I'd had the idea before Serial. But everyone has been so supportive. I write to Alix [Spiegel] and Loulou [Miller] from Invisibilia for advice all the time—I feel no competition. I mean, if all our next seasons come out at the same time it will be interesting, but I really truly think it only helped.

Do you think there's a reason that so many women are making podcasts at the moment?
This American Life was primarily women. When I worked there it was only Ira and two male producers, and the rest was all women. I always felt that radio was less burdened by age and gender, because no one sees you.

What I like about my show and Serial and Invisibilia is that it isn't about being a woman at all. I have to say, I've got more feedback from guys about Mystery Show than I ever got from This American Life.

Read on Broadly: Is My Sex Life Emotionally Scarring My Cats?

When you tracked down Britney Spears for your second case, what did she smell like?
I was so focused on asking her those questions [relating to the case], I feel like I dropped the ball; I wasn't able to observe as much as I usually would have. The lights were so blinding, I felt like I'd slipped into a weird space and time. I can't remember why I stopped speaking—it's not like they had a hook and pulled me off. I think she just turned to the camera and we were done. She smelled like sun tan lotion, but more flowery than that. She smelled like someone who was wearing a lot of lotion—not perfume, but lotions. She smelled prepped, glossy.

I don't want to talk to you about break-up songs because I know you must have to talk about them all the time after that chat with Phil Collins about Anthony, your ex-boyfriend.
I don't mind. I just got bored of myself. Truly. And it's a weird thing to talk about. I still get tweets saying 'Hey, do you still talk to Anthony?' or 'How's Anthony doing?' The reason I think people respond to it is because they can feel that I was in pain while doing that story. It's super weird to have a really painful break-up, but for the guy you don't talk to any more to stay alive in your mind because people talk to you about it all the time.

Do you get accused of vocal fry?
I do sometimes. And it's always by men. I have a lisp, too. I read things that are like "Starlee overcame her lifelong struggle with her lisp," and actually I don't think I was even aware of my lisp until I went on the radio. I just don't speak correctly—I don't speak in proper sentences and things.

I do find the vocal fry thing really sad, because I'll be editing my own voice tracks and it just makes me more self-conscious, which is terrible. It seems like such a bullying thing those guys have done.

How many mysteries have you been sent?
So many—like 20 to 30 a day. I like it. I just can't believe how nice people are to me. People tweet saying, 'I hope you're getting enough sleep,' and, 'We're happy to wait—we want it to be good.' I feel like you should take time and take care of things.

Although, I want to make the next season as quickly as I can. I already have mysteries that are pretty far along. There will be some international mysteries next season; I'll go wherever the mysteries take me.

Follow Nell Frizzell on Twitter.

'Extra Ear - 1/4 Scale,' by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr in collaboration with Stelarc. Created from biodegradable polymer and human chondrocytes cells. All images are courtesy of the Tissue Culture & Art Project

When Oron Catts exhibited Victimless Leather Jacket at MoMA in 2008, it was not without controversy. It was a highly acclaimed work of "biological art," which uses and manipulates the materials of life itself (human or animal tissue, living organisms, cell lines), to create unclassifiable forms of life. The fleshy, stitchless "jacket" was created from human and mice stem cells, housed in a glass bioreactor, and tube-fed serum from the heart of an embryonic calf. It was living, growing thing, dependent on nutrients for survival. But events soon took a Frankensteinian turn. The jacket, it seemed, had a life of its own: Its cells multiplied so rapidly that it began to grow in an uncontrollable, unpredictable fashion. Its sleeve was starting to fall off, its bioreactor was clogged in a matter of weeks. In the end, the exhibition's curator had no choice but to deny the jacket its food, therefore "killing" it. The artwork was designed as a critique of the type of research that goes on behind closed laboratory doors, but its "death" triggered unease. What are the ethics of manipulating biology? And does it matter if it's for the sake of art, rather than the sake of medicine?

Related: They Told Me I Could Be Anything When I Grew Up, So I Became A Cyborg

In an era of robots, aspirational cyborgs, and regenerative biology, it's comforting to believe solid lines can be drawn between man and machine, the organic and the synthetic, the living and the dead. But advances in science and art are dissolving these boundaries. To wax nostalgic about a "natural world" elides our present reality: one in which scientific design and bioengineering are silently (but significantly) reshaping the way we see ourselves and the world around us.

'Victimless Leather' a prototype of stitch-less jacket grown in a Technoscientific "Body." Created from biodegradable polymer skin and bone cells from human and mouse

Catts, a globally renowned biological artist based in Perth, Australia, hopes to probe these distinctions. Biological art, he says. encompasses a hands-on engagement with the manipulation of living systems, ranging all the way from the sub-molecular to the ecological, and according to him, is still a nascent field even though Catts has been working with living tissue cultures since 1996. Today, he says, the field has "exploded," with thousands of artists now working with and manipulating biological phenomena in labs and biohacking spaces around the world. "When we started back in the mid 90s, there was no one," he says. "Maybe one or two people were working in a similar way to us as artists, engaging in a very hands-on way with living systems."

Oron Catts and a scientist colleague harvesting pig mesenchymal cells (bone marrow stem cells).

Catts founded SymbioticA in 2000, an artistic research lab housed within the biological science department of the University of Western Australia. Under his direction, the lab has been at the forefront of cutting-edge artistic practice and has attracted artists and scientists from all over the world. Just recently it hosted JJ Hastings, a US bioartist who has, among other things, processed photographs using her own blood. Perhaps there's something in the water on the west coast: Stelarc, a performance artist and head of the Alternate Anatomies Lab at WA's Curtin University, has been growing an implanted human ear on his arm. It's hoped the ear, which already has its own blood supply, will eventually be able to connect wirelessly to the internet and act as a remote listening device.

The thought of manipulating stem cells to create an artificial living system—meddling, some might say, with nature—has made some some uneasy about the ethics of biological art.

'Tissue Engineered Steak No.1.' This was the first attempt to use tissue engineering for meat production without the need to slaughter animals.

"I share those reactions, in a sense," Catt says. He doesn't make art to celebrate the triumph of manipulating biology, but to critique developments in synthetic biology and tissue engineering that are already taking place in research laboratories, biotech companies, and major corporations around the world. "Art is one of the last places—the last discipline, if you like—that allows this type of ambiguity and deals with things that are problematic while actually engaging with them," he says.

It's commonly said that the Inuits have 90 words to describe snow, Catt says, but English has only one word to describe life in all its forms, though biological life is hierarchical and exists on a spectrum. Lab-grown or modified lifeforms, for example, are often not quite "alive" in a conventional sense, but they're not quite dead, either.

When Catts first started to work with living tissue in the mid 90s, his laboratory used the cells in rabbit eyes. "The rabbits were killed for food in the morning, and we would only get them around lunchtime. We were initially working on eyes, so we would get them out of the rabbits' heads, put them in antibiotic solution in the fridge, and could only start to culture cells the morning after," he says.

Related: Like art? Check out our interview with Christy Karacas

The lab gave an inanimate carcass new life, he says, but a taxonomy for this category of specimen had yet to be coined by scientists. Instead, Catts and his team settled for "semi-living." Since then, Catts and Zurr have created works like NoArk Revisited and Odd Neolifism, which aimed to ask questions about where such lab-grown specimens fit in our ecological systems, as well as the ethics of their creation.

This October, Catts and other members of SymbioticA will exhibit Futile Labor, an installation that uses the tissue-engineered muscle cells of a mouse to delve into the relationship between life, engineering, and automated labor. Like the Victimless Leather Jacket, it too will be housed and nourished in an incubator, but the muscle will be stimulated by electricity and its movements will be translated into vibration, light, and sound. The mouse is 35 years dead, but its cell lines have been "immortalized" by scientists: that is, they've mutated to multiply and divide ad infinitum. Not only will gallery-goers watch this specimen twitch and contract before their eyes, they must also confront how they feel about it—and about engineering a kind of life that is, in some ways, not so far removed from their own.

Follow Gillian on Twitter.

Jared Fogle in 2007, around the time the feds say he began committing sex crimes that will affect him in prison. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Jared Fogle, the former Subway spokesman who famously lost hundreds of pounds by eating the fast-food chain's sandwiches, is what's known in prison parlance as a chomo. As in "child molester"—the lowest of the low, the scum of the earth that other prisoners kick to the side to make themselves feel more human.

Prison culture is all about making yourself seem bigger, stronger, and, crucially, more righteous than everyone else. Pedophiles and others convicted of sex crimes against minors are universally detested. So when Fogle agreed to plead guilty to federal charges of receiving and sharing child pornography and paying for sex with teenagers on Wednesday, inmates took notice. The good news for the disgraced sandwich mascot, who's expected to be sentenced to between five and 12.5 years in prison, is that the federal system has slowly been improving conditions for inmates who would be pariahs in prison. The Bureau of Prisons (BOP) in 2015 is a totally different animal than it was back in the 1990s.

The bad news is he's still going to be singled out.

"Child molesters have minimal rights in federal prison," Steve, who was recently released after serving two years at FCC Forrest City—a low-security facility in Arkansas where plenty of sex offenders are incarcerated—tells VICE. Chomos' fellow inmates often "keep them from watching television. They give them a very small amount of space on the recreation yard or in the chow hall, they're not allowed to go in certain areas or be around certain functions. And given the high-profile nature of this case, I'm sure [Fogle's] not going to even have the opportunity to leave his cell or cubicle without being harassed and threatened. His best bet is to do his time in segregation where no one can get to him."

Indeed, if Fogle is put in a higher-security prison with murderers and other violent criminals who prefer to see him as a sort of unique evil—and doesn't seek out or receive protective custody—he's in trouble.

"As far as the Subway guy goes, if he is sent to any USP [United States Penitentiary] other than Tucson, then he will be hurt or worse once he lands in there," a prisoner we'll call Tim who's been inside for over two decades tells VICE. "However, things have changed for chomos in the past few years... Prisons have so many of them that they make certain prisons, such as USP Tucson and [medium-security facilities] such as Marianna, Florida, just for them. If you are not a chomo and go to there, they tell you up front, 'If you put your hands on one, then you are getting ten more years.' They screen everyone going to those places."

The facilities in Tucson and Marianna have special housing units for sex offenders, and others, like FCI Forrest City, have informally become safe havens, which suggests the BOP has learned to house sex criminals with caution.

"I think the Bureau is tired of paying for all of the hospital bills and perhaps lawsuits over them getting smashed everywhere they go, so they have whole prisons of them," Tim says.

Another penitentiary veteran we'll call Judge agrees. "The dude is going to go to a low or an FCI, and they aren't about shit down there," he says. "With any luck, he'll go to a place where they'll extort the shit out of him before they kick his face off. If he came to the pen... It'd be a wrap, he wouldn't have time to even put his bedroll down, because he'd be the prize—someone you'd get famous off of for smashing out."

I went to federal prison myself in 1993 on an LSD conspiracy charge, and back then, you didn't really see sex offenders on the block—you only heard about them getting beat down or checked into the hole when their paperwork didn't pass muster. (Inmates are often asked by others to present documentation to prove they didn't commit sex crimes against children, among other things.) But around 2008, when I was at FCI Loretto—a low-security prison in Pennsylvania—I started noticing an abundance of convicted pedophiles on the yard. There were still some dudes who towed the hardline anti-chomo convict stance, but the paradigm was shifting.

"I think in this day and time these chomos is not getting treated like they are supposed to," Ali, a prisoner who's been in for over 20 years, tells us. "In fact, most people respect some of them whores. Of course some of them will try and get money from [Fogle]."

Check out our documentary about former VICE Prison Correspondent Bert Burykill trying to stay out of trouble after he tastes freedom.

I remember one incident from later in my bid when it was driven home by staff that sex offenders had a right to be on the yard. I was lifting weights in the gym with a couple of older Mafia guys who, like me, had spent a decade or more in higher-level institutions, and we had the dumbbells we used for our workout all lined up by the wall. A slight, geeky kid with glasses walked over and picked up a pair of 15-pound dumbbells we used for shoulder raises and started curling them. His whole demeanor just screamed child molester .

One of the guys in our group hurried over and yelled at the kid. "You don't touch no fucking weights in this gym, you fucking chomo. Ever."

The kid, his eyes downcast, put the weights down and retreated, not wanting any problems. But one of the guards witnessed the whole incident and called the block's lieutenant, who summoned us to his office.

"Look," the lieutenant told us. "I don't like these guys any more than you do, but I am here to make sure they do their time safely. So next time one of them come up to you, you give them the weights, understand? This is their compound, not yours."

We had a good laugh over that, but the truth is we didn't fuck with the guy again. The low-security prison was too sweet a deal with its reduced rate of violence and less of an emphasis on hardball prison politics. After doing decades in higher-level joints, all of us enjoyed the comforts of the low. We let it ride.

So while the former Subway mascot might get harassed and dudes might talk shit to him because he is so high-profile, I doubt he'll get beat down all the time. In fact, the celebrity status could help him—whether in terms of his treatment by others or the fact that correctional officers take pains to prevent a bold-faced name from making news from inside.

"He looks just like a chomo and he'll be treated like a king," one prisoner named Will who's doing 16 years for a cocaine conspiracy charge and did most of his bid at FCC Forrest City tells VICE. "He'll get to play softball... and be treated like a star... The feds take care of their chomies."

And on yards where a lot of sex offenders are already housed, the speculation has already started.

"Here the debate has already started over whether or not he'll immediately be checked in [to protective custody], or whether he'll be allowed to freely walk the yard," says T-Mac, who is doing time at FCC Forrest City. "Forrest City offers Jared an excellent 'around the clock chomo protection' and the chomos here are praying that he's sent here to join their huge chomo-hood. It's also being predicted that perhaps Jared will be selected 'chomo shot-caller' for the chomos at whatever institution he's sent to."

Chomos aren't necessarily complete pariahs. I even had a buddy at FCC Forrest City that used to run game on a sex offender. He called the dude his "chomeboy" and used to walk around the yard with him, let him eat in the chow hall with him, and basically just hung out with the man. He said the guy was buying him bags of commissary—prison goods—each week, so it was a bit of a soft extortion game.

I personally had plenty of conversations with sex offenders informing them of the rules when they arrived in prison, and most of them didn't want any trouble. They just wanted to do their time and maybe play some Dungeons and Dragons. Prison is what you make it, and if you stay quiet, blend in, and don't make any waves, even a convicted sex offender can do time relatively peacefully in the feds.

Of course, that doesn't mean Fogle will be enjoying himself.

As one former inmate named Jimmy who did over a decade in medium-security institutions like FCI Beaumont put it, "He will have a rough time in prison."

Follow Seth Ferranti on Twitter.

An MQ-9 Reaper Drone. Image via Wikimedia

Generals and other top military staff who ran the US "Drone Wars" in the Middle East now work for the top drone firms, with lucrative positions at private contractors holding big contracts to help run the remotely controlled killing machines.

Supposedly "targeted killings" by drones have led to international concern, as victims of "surgical strikes" carried out by the unmanned weapons include wedding parties in Yemen, friendly-fire killings of Afghan soldiers, and nearly 200 children in Pakistan.

So, wreaking mass death from above is a negative, but on the positive side they have also led to big contracts for defense firms. A Bureau of Investigative Journalism report identified a bunch of large companies that have major contracts for analyzing data and providing other support work that drones need to operate.

The Bureau found a booming private business dedicated to helping the American military decide if and when the unmanned aircraft should launch their missiles and kill people. This was a new, privately run info-war, with companies on contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars supporting the "intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance" (ISR) that makes drones kill.

Now a separate analysis by VICE reveals a revolving door between the parts of the military responsible for drone attacks, and the private firms that have lucrative contracts to support drone warfare. In other words, ex-Generals are using their cache as military experts to work for drone companies with a financial interest in promoting new forms of war.

General James Mattis in 2012. Photo via US Naval War College

To take one example, ex-General James Mattis is on the board of General Dynamics. General Dynamics is a drone manufacturer and has held a contract for analyzing footage from drones. They are both involved in the old fashioned "physical" war and the new "info" war.

Mattis—who declared in 2005 that it was "fun to shoot some people" in the Afghan conflict—was the head of Centcom in 2010 until 2013. Centcom is the US Department of Defense's Central Command in charge of all operations in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia. As head of Centcom, Mattis "oversaw the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and was responsible for a region that includes Syria, Iran, Yemen."

Mattis is now regularly quoted in the media calling for a firmer military stance in the Middle East. He even testified recently at Congress alongside Jack Keane—another former General (and architect of the "Surge" in Iraq) who also sits on the General Dynamics board. In January, Mattis warned Senators against "mindless sequestration"—budget cuts—because America has to use "its ability to intimidate to ensure freedom for future generations" with more "forward-deployed forces overseas," and a military prepared for different types of warfare "including the pervasive cyber domain." I guess that would be the domain that his employer operates in.

Consultants Booz Allen Hamilton were also identified as a drone war firm, with a contract for "supporting special operations." Last February, Booz Allen hired US Army Chief Information Officer Lieutenant General Susan Lawrence as a Senior Vice President. Lawrence had also been the Commanding General of "Netcom"—the US Army Technology Command, in charge of all their "Command, Control, Communications, and Computers." She was in charge of the technology which was used for the surveillance of the battlefield enemy.

Lieutenant General Lawrence's first public appearance for Booz Hamilton this year involved showing off the firm's cyber capabilities at a military conference organized by the "Association for the United States Army" attended by "key leaders from the Army, Department of Defense, and Congress."

General Ann E Dunwoody. Photo via US Army

L-3 Communications won a contract for imagery analysis and earned $155 million over five years from 2010. The company boasts that, "Many of L-3's top business leaders are former military personnel." Their board includes General Ann E Dunwoody. She is the first woman to become a four star general. She was put in charge of the US Army Materiel Command by George Bush in 2008 until her retirement in 2012. This position included responsibility for the research and development of weapons systems. Now L-3 can draw on that experience.

Related: Inside Poland's Independent Paramilitary Groups

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism identified a lesser known firm—Ohio based MacAulay Brown—which has had contracts to "support targeting, information operations." The firm's advisory board includes Lieutenant General Rhett Hernandez. Until 2013 he was "the first Commander of Army Cyber Command," in charge of what the firm described on its website as "building a cyber force of more than 17,000 people" for the US Army. The company boasts, "He developed strategic direction, requirements, and an acquisition approach for all cyberspace operations in the Army." Hernandez could be a valuable asset as America outsources the building of a cyber force to companies such as MacAulay Brown.

Britain's BAE Systems is another company gaining from drone wars. They have contracts for "video analysis" and other drone-supporting work with the US military. The arms company has tried to attract the talent of the military-security establishment to the top of their corporate structure, but its US board lacks an equivalent of the former generals and drone war specialists found in other arms firms.

Lower down the totem pole, however, BAE has appointed this kind of staff. They seem to have had a hard time hanging on to their expertise. John "Jack" McCracken was BAE's director for "Global Analysis" in its "Systems Intelligence & Security" group in Washington, which hires many ex-military "intelligence analysts." According to BAE, Jack McCracken "holds extensive experience conducting joint and combined intelligence operations in the Middle East." He worked in Washington for the "US Special Operations Command"—the "anti-terror" command, which runs many of the drone attacks in the Middle East. McCracken helped them form relationships with the "national intelligence community," upon which the drone wars rely to identify targets.

Robert Fectau, previously "Chief Information Officer" for the "US Army Intelligence & Security Command," went on to become the Chief Information Officer for BAE's "Systems Intelligence & Security" group.

McCracken appears to have left BAE, while Fectau joined their competitor—a US firm called SAIC—"a leading services and solutions provider for homeland security, military, defense, intelligence, and other government agencies."

On VICE News: What We Learned While Embedded with Kurdish Forces Clearing the Islamic State From Hasakah

In 1961 US President Eisenhower spoke of a new danger in American politics—a "conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry." He warned that, "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

Concern about this military-industrial complex has waxed and waned ever since Eisenhower's warning. During the height of the Iraq War, the obvious sins of politically connected contractors like Halliburton or Blackwater became a big political issue. But the turn to drones has taken the war on terror off the front pages, not least by reducing western casualties.

Nevertheless, the military-industrial complex is fully exploiting the drone wars, as rich companies encourage, enable, and profit from a new wave of IT-enabled killing. This is all with a little help from their new employees, freshly recruited from the ranks of the US military top brass.

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Cover art detail from 'Dark Souls'

I know the Capra Demon boss is hard, Blighttown, Ornstein, and Smough, but for me the true difficulty of Dark Souls isn't presented in any of its ludic or mechanical challenges. For me, the struggle in that game is an emotional one. It reflects an intensely painful period of my life, one that, like the ghosts in New Londo Ruins, haunts me to this day.

In the United Kingdom, there are thousands upon thousands of cases of child abuse—fortunately, mine was relatively minor. Angered by divorce, my dad took it out on my sister and me. He drank, he disparaged, he neglected. From time to time he got physical. For griping that I wished I could stay up longer, as seven-year-olds are wont to do, I was dragged out of bed by my arm, pulled down the stairs, and made to sit up all night. When my sister, all of 14, once refused to speak to dad over the phone, he drove to where we were staying, grabbed her, and hit her.

It's difficult to communicate the intricacies of his brand of abuse—you really had to be there. But because of him, some other people, and those years as a child, the mantra I carried into adulthood was this: everything is your fault. I developed a guilt complex. An unassailable truth, supplied by my father, catalyzed a life of self-punishment and self-destruction.

No matter how small or insignificant, how removed from my possible realm of influence, everything that went wrong was because of my personal shortcomings. To an extent it's narcissistic, the belief that every problem in the world is directly caused by you, but it certainly doesn't manifest as pride. On the contrary, if I so much as spilled my drink, forgot to buy something on my shopping list, or didn't hook up my computer correctly, I'd furiously and violently admonish myself.

Bloodstains in 'Dark Souls.' Photo via the 'Dark Souls' Wikia

Sometimes this meant screaming, shouting, calling myself fat, ugly, idiot, cunt. Other times it meant punching myself until I either got dizzy or my hands started to bleed. I couldn't stop my dad from drinking. I couldn't get him and my mom back together. I couldn't stop him from beating my sister. And every time he told me I was useless, stupid, and unloved I believed even more that if I could just be a better person, I could stop fucking everything and everybody up. As an older man, if I wasn't getting it right all of the time, I was taking dad's place and punishing myself.

It was a single conceit of Dark Souls that almost broke me. Yes, it's swift to punish. But what hurt the most was how it made me live with and remember each of my mistakes. When you die in other video games, the action is essentially rewound, like a VHS tape, back to where you were before you messed up. Your death—your mistake—is deleted by the game. Nathan Drake might "die" a hundred times before the end of any Uncharted game, but as far as that virtual world and the other characters are concerned, his demise never happened—it doesn't become canon. Not so in Dark Souls. As an Undead, each time your character dies and comes back to life, it's within the context of the game's world and laws. You were able to come back to life, but you did die—the bloodstain left on the floor where you were killed is to remind you that you made a mistake, that you got beaten, that you fucked up.

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Nothing is forgotten by Dark Souls. That mark on the ground, the loss of any Souls you may have collected, and your reversion from human form back to Undead force you to carry each of your mistakes. Unable to let myself off the hook, constantly and painfully aware of errors—or at least perceived errors—I'd made in the past, Dark Souls was the equivalent of my dad's voice, inside my head, making me want to die. It was the guilt complex, the self-hatred, crystallized into a game. Each mistake meant more name-calling. Each death meant more self-harm. At best, I'd describe Dark Souls as a kind of scream therapy, a full and fast embrace of all the pain, followed by an unrestrained and violent outpouring of grief. But in truth, there was no moral, no "but it got better." Dark Souls was agony, and whatever catharsis I might have felt whenever I finished a section, beat a boss, or even reached the end of the game was nothing compared to the pain of revisiting, over and over, the reasons I hated myself.

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But within that experience there's a rare commodity in video games: truth. Dark Souls just fucking hurts. And even the parts that seem like closure are never true resolution. You finish the game and your character, finally, gives their life to re-ignite the world. You've done it! But then the main menu reappears and there's the option for New Game Plus. It doesn't stop. It never stops. Dark Souls, like living with this voice in my head—like life, in general—is fucking painful. And I admire it, so much, for not succumbing to easy sentiment or trite conclusion, for being, essentially, a simulation of life's unfairness.

Some people describe Dark Souls as masochistic. I don't. For me, it's a victimizer, a real piece of work. Arbitrarily, it picks on you, admonishes you and hurts you. It's my experience of being dragged through town, shoved in the car, driven back home, and made to go to bed, just because dad saw something that reminded him of mom, rendered in a video game. It's just pain and punishment, dished out on a whim, to people who most of the time don't deserve it. It makes you hate yourself for something you didn't do wrong. By that measure, Dark Souls is as close as video games have come to representing life—or at least, a large portion of mine.

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