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Ladies lead a group of tech employees in... a singalong? Photo via Trending in China/Facebook

Read: What China's 'Black Monday' Means for the British Economy

In a practice that's offensive to basically everyone, Chinese tech companies are hiring female cheerleaders to boost the spirits of their largely male staffs.

Dressed as high school cheerleaders, the women take on such duties as: buying the programmers breakfast, playing ping-pong with employees and "chitchatting," according to a Facebook post by news site China.org.cn.

Because programmers are "terrible at socializing," according to one HR manager, the presence of pretty, young girls improves productivity at the office. It's a claim that's difficult to reconcile with this image of a developer strumming guitar at his desk while cheerleaders and his colleagues clap along.

The post has sparked backlash online, with many commenters asking why companies don't just hire more female coders instead.

Notably absent was any mention of strategies for making the male-dominated field more comfortable for female developers. (Read: there are none.)

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Inside Verde, one of Marbella's cannabis clubs

Over the last five years, Spain has come to rival the Netherlands as Europe's cannabis hub. The country's legal framework around weed, which allows its use and sale within private members clubs, has been fully taken advantage of in the north of the country, particularly in the Catalonia region, where clubs reportedly make an estimated $6 million in sales each month.

These private spliff societies—which, unlike Amsterdam's coffee shops, only allow entry to members, rather than any old sweat-suited stoner straight off an EasyJet flight—have risen in number from around 40 in 2010 to over 700 today, according to smokers' groups. And just as America's "cannabis revolution" was initially centered around California and Colorado before spreading boisterously throughout a number of other states, southern Spain is now also enjoying its very own network of private members cannabis clubs.

I recently visited the pearl of south, Marbella, to get to grips with what a burgeoning "green economy" looks like on the ground, and how a number of British nationals are playing their part.

Arriving in Marbella, it didn't take long to notice the amount of "cannabis expats"—foreigners who'd moved to Spain's sunny south to take advantage of freedoms not afforded to them in their home countries. One British guy who calls himself Paz (which, fittingly, means "peace" in Spanish) is in the process of opening a new association in Marbella, and also founded the online community "Medical Cannabis Spain."

His intentions—as you may have guessed from the name—are centered around improving access for medical users of plant, as opposed to catering to recreational users. There are very few clubs focusing solely on medicinal cannabis products, so Paz hopes to open a location that will operate purely as a medical dispensary, and perhaps one day serve as a model for future clubs with a medical slant.

"I was recently informed that only two of 38 associations in Marbella were actually catering for medical, nonsmoking consumers," Paz told me, alluding to the range of cannabis products that can be ingested without inhaling the smoke of burning plant matter. "Medical patients can still struggle to receive the right medication, but it's a changing culture worldwide, so I do expect this to change."

TRENDING ON NOISEY: We Interviewed the Girl Whose Mom Disowned Her for Going to V Festival

While Paz was realistic about the current access available to medical cannabis patients in Spain, he was optimistic about the country becoming the most important player in Europe's cannabis scene. "With the sun, the solar technology, and the cultivation skills, if you were planning things on a resource-based viewpoint, then you would select Spain to supply the whole of Europe," he said.

Considering Marbella's Andalucía region is nearly on the same latitude as the legendary cannabis-filled Emerald Triangle in California, boasting similar conditions and climate for cultivation, he isn't far off.

Away from Paz and his medicinal aspirations, there are plenty of clubs following the established Dutch model of simply providing somewhere for weed smokers to get high. However, locations here vary tremendously compared to those in the Netherlands' capital. While the majority of canal-side coffee shops are characterized by their wooden bars, neon signs, and complete lack of natural light, those in Marbella range from the unpretentious to the upmarket. There's the Honey Bud Club, for example, a pretty standard space with a pool table and a painting of Tupac on the wall; all the way up to Joe's Marbella Smokers Club, which looks a bit like the VIP lounge of a Milton Keynes nightclub.

Cannabis capsules and butane hash oil in Verde

I had a contact at Verde ("green" in Spanish), a club that—like most others—focuses on the recreational and social aspects of cannabis consumption. The building its housed in is perfectly innocuous, with a small buzzer at the door for guests to announce their arrival. Inside, the place is reminiscent of one of Amsterdam's coffee shops—dark, with a neon back-lit bar—only slightly more homely.

I sat down with Verde's British manager, Levi, and asked him what the Verde association stands for. "Our ethos is that we are a relaxed, very social, English- and Spanish-speaking environment for people interested in cannabis," he said. "Everyone is welcome, whether you are a smoker or nonsmoker; whether you are a heavy consumer or partake occasionally—all providing you meet the requirements to become a member."

So what does the average member look like? "Dubai, London, Paris, the US; pretty much name a country and we will probably have a member from there," Levi answered. "These guys are all from a mad variety of backgrounds—some businessmen, some lawyers, some hippie stoners... all sorts. We even have one member, who I obviously can't give any details about, who's a senior CEO with over 1,000 people employed beneath him. [Our members'] ages range from 21 to 60, including people who use cannabis medically."

A "Sublimator" pipe in Verde

Looking around, Verde's patrons certainly didn't look like stereotypical stoners. Mind you, the more time you spend in that world, the more you realize there's really no such thing as a stereotypical cannabis user.

Behind the counter there were a huge number of products that reflected the variety in clientele: organic medicated body creams, infused jellies, caramel slices, cakes, biscuits, and CBD capsules—CBD being the chemical component of cannabis believed to have a range of medical applications. Alongside this new breed of products were your standard selection of sativas, indicas, and hybrid flowers—some of them grown organically, some hydroponically—as well as homemade hash, resin, and dry sift, and the on-trend butane hash oil and "shatter," all made with latest technology shipped in from the States.

WATCH: Our documentary about butane hash oil:

So is Spain catching up with the US in terms of cannabis production and variety? "Probably not yet, but there is certainly great potential for Spain to be a leading cannabis market in Europe at least," said Levi.

Domestically, why has the rest of Spain lagged behind the north's progress? "The movement had its roots in the north, and with Barcelona being a main city of the north with a relatively big population, it really took off there," Levi told me. "Now, other parts of Spain are catching on to the movement because of the success in Barcelona. Other local authorities have seen the experiment in Barcelona and have decided whether [or not] they want the same happening in their province."

A local government's political leaning plays a large part in how easy it is for clubs to operate unmolested. Malaga's right-wing local authority has been shutting down the clubs with force, for instance, while authorities in Marbella have generally left them to flourish peacefully, hence why it's proving a popular destination for people hoping to open a private members association.

Inside Marbella's Organic Cannabis Club

The Organic Cannabis Club (OCC) is one association that has experienced the problems caused by inconsistent local policy firsthand. The club's founder and only member of staff, Dominique, who's originally from the Netherlands, first opened a club in Malaga, but was forced out of the area by police. I met her recently at her new club in Marbella—a bright, airy space with its own terrace overlooking the beach—which is proving to be much less stressful than her previous location.

"Malaga is one of the only places in Spain where the raids are being done by the local police and not the national police. It makes no sense there," said Dominique. "I'm just glad to be out of Malaga. Here, the atmosphere is much better. Much more relaxed."

She told me how the development of cannabis clubs will come on even stronger if, in November, the country votes out the current conservative government. Mariano Rajoy's People's Party, said Dominique, is the only thing holding the clubs back. "Public opinion leans towards supporting the private club system," she argued. "In Barcelona, the mayor suddenly announced that he would close down 80 percent of the cannabis clubs right before the election. You know what happened? He's not the mayor any more."

The OCC's cannabis safe

Of course, it's highly unlikely that Xavier Trias was replaced by Ada Colua earlier this year purely because of his views on cannabis clubs. But considering the associations in Catalonia, of which Barcelona is the capital, reportedly boast over 165,000 members (about 2 percent of the Catalonian population) it's clear that there's a dedicated network of patrons in the area.

Dominique told me that associations in other areas should use this as inspiration if they want to develop, saying that clubs could become far more influential if they worked together politically. "I think we should get together properly as a united front in order to have lobbying power with local and national governments," she said. "When we become a significant united body, politicians will listen to us in order to get votes in the elections—but if we are all just hiding, they won't do anything for us."

Visiting Marbella, I found a community optimistic about its place in Spain's cannabis scene, but aware of the fact that there are still a number of forces working against it. So much has changed within the past five years, and there's scope for more in the half decade to come. However, as Dominique made me realize, that change might never be realized unless there's a concerted, communal effort from all involved.

All photos by the author

The modern legend of the Lizard Man of Scape Ore Swamp begins in 1988 with Christopher Davis, an African American teenager, who pulled over in the middle of nowhere, South Carolina to change a tire on his way home from a late shift at McDonald's. "It was green, wet-like, about seven feet tall, and had three fingers, red eyes, skin like a lizard, and snakelike scales," he told a local paper at the time. According to Christopher's account something had damaged both the door of his car as well as the roof.

Arriving home in hysterics, his father made him report the incident to the local sheriff. He would later take a polygraph test and pass.

In 2007, the South Carolina Education Lottery used Lizard Man as a promotional tool to move lottery tickets. With heightened interest in the legend, new Lizard Man incidents began rolling in. Suddenly, dead cows and coyotes were attributed to the Lizard Man. In 2011, a mauled car caused a local news report to ask, "Is the Lizard Man back in Lee County?"

I grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, and first heard about the Lizard Man at the age of ten while at a basketball camp. The kid who introduced me to the legend was from Sumter, South Carolina, and sported a rat tail and a twang in his voice that put my mild Southern accent to shame. That kid painted a tale of violence and horror—a red-eyed, seven-foot-tall reptilian beast sporting three claws on a constant search to maul people, cars, and tires near the outskirts of the swamp.

"Never go out alone at night. That's when he'll git ya."

I had nightmares starring the Lizard Man. But, like with most things in my teens not called "masturbation," I grew out of it.

Earlier this month, Lizard Man made national news by being photographed and filmed strolling through the woods. Other than a set of footprints found outside a butterbean shed in 1988, there has been very little physical evidence of the Lizard Man's existence. In the most recent photo the Lizard Man is ridiculously buff and appears to be strutting like Ric Flair, but he does possess all the key features—the three claws, the red eyes, some feet that could make some footprints.

The butterbean shed where the Lizard Man's footprints were allegedly found

Along with the renewed interest came the news stories, tweets, and posts, most of which offered an air of superiority from larger outlets. I saw the teasing; I saw the memes. Mocking cryptids is low-hanging fruit, but mocking the Southerners who report these sightings is like kicking the fruit you already knocked on the ground. This legend permeates my state, and is indelibly linked to Lee County. Lizard Man is much more than a punchline to a joke. Even if this photo looks to be a bored herpetophiliac adept at sewing, how can anyone say with certainty that Lizard Man does or does not exist? What's scarier: what we don't know or what we think we do?

I wanted to know more about Him. I wanted to find Lizard Man.

From Cox's collection

When I arrived in Bishopville, the small town where the legend began, my first stop was to see Janson Cox, head curator of the South Carolina Cotton Museum and a local Lizard Man historian. Cox is a classic Southern gentleman: measured, gregarious, and armed with a wit that let's you know he's smarter than you think he is. He is capable of making you feel like an outsider and like family. During our time together he made sure I felt like both.

Cox is rightfully objective, and protective, of Lizard Man. He won't outright admit that He definitely exists ("we're here to supply the fantasy"), but then again his role isn't to speculate. It's to document. Every newspaper clipping involving the Lizard Man has been compiled into a plastic-ring binder. There is an "exhibit"—a few pieces of paper explaining historical context, a collection of vintage t-shirts, and a plaster mold of Lizard Man's huge footprints in a glass case scattered with dried butterbeans.

"Much of the attention about the Lizard Man centers around the 1988 attack... but the legends of the Lizard Man go back, talked about for centuries." Cox explains.

Published in 1520, "The Testimony of Francisco de Chicora" contains some of the first eyewitness accounts of Southeastern Native Americans, and within those stories they tell of "men with tails a metre long and as thick as a man's arm" who "ate nothing but raw fish." Even the nomenclature of the area helps legitimize the myth. Locals posit that "Scape 'Ore" refers to a British phonetic bastardization of Sceloporae—plural of Sceloporus—which is the scientific genus of the abundant eastern fence lizards that inhabit the area.

In March of this year, paleontologists found skull and bone fragments in North Carolina, which led to the discovery of Carnufex Carolinensis ("Carolina Butcher"), a land-dwelling crocodylomorph. Carnufex is a crocodile-like creature that walked on its hind legs and lived in the Carolina swamps around 230 million years ago. Even if our friend the Carolina Butcher didn't directly evolve into a man that was also a lizard that ate cars, the image of Lizard Man has, in a very direct and obvious way, been embedded in the very soil of the Carolinas.

In order to fully understand the Lizard Man incident of 1988, it's important to remember the context surrounding life in the South. This is, after all, South Carolina—a state that until this summer, still flew the Confederate flag over its capital. Everything has a racial undertone, especially an attack on a young black man. Cox says, "You had blacks feeling like Davis was being exploited, and whites felt like their sheriff, Liston Truesdale, was being made a fool by the media."

Which is to say: Davis had clearly been made a target of something. "Whatever it was put the fear in him," Truesdale later said.

At the time, the Lizard Man caused a media frenzy. In an interview with a local newspaper, the Sheriff seemed genuinely overwhelmed by the attention, recalling that a radio DJ called him, on air, at six in the morning.

Truesdale never quite figured out what it was that terrorized Davis on that night. In 2001, he said of the Lizard Man, "I can't prove it's real, and I can't prove it's not real." The Huffington Post reported that in 2009, the now-deceased Truesdale was called in to help investigate a car mauling similar to the 1988 attack on Davis.

I left the museum with a map and excitement. Remembering that the Lizard Man had attacked Davis as he'd been changing a tire, I assumed the guy might have had a fetish for rubber. I wanted to entice him with something tasty, so I stopped at a gas station that still offered a full-service pump, a relic of the past I had always heard about but never seen. I chatted up a man whose name tag identified him as "Spyder" and then asked if he had a cheap tire I could buy to use as an offering to the Lizard Man. "Ah, man. You can have one for free," Spyder said.

Spyder guided me around back to an elephant graveyard of tires where rubber silos of various sizes, treads, and conditions had been waiting patiently for me.

The author and his tire

After picking out the largest one of the bunch I drove around to investigate where every sighting or incident happened. I drove to where Christopher Davis was attacked. I drove to the butterbean shed where the creature's footprint was taken. I drove to Scape Ore Bridge, where it's said Lizard Man gets in and out of the swamp.

I planned to actually traverse back into the swamp and see if I could catch Lizard Man in a moment of vulnerability. I pulled up my waders and ventured underneath the bridge. I noticed a number of tires already resting in the creek. None of them appeared to have any attack marks, but perhaps these were not up to Lizard Man's discerning palate.

After following the creek back into the swamp for about an hour, I stopped. I hoped Lizard Man would be nice enough to show himself or answer my calls of "Hey, Lizard Man. It me." He did not oblige. Scape Ore Swamp is not a place you go to do some recreational kayaking. It is a hostile place, and what struck me most is how heavily wooded it is. There are no real clearings, or apparent designations of old growth and new growth. It's all old growth. There are an infinite amount of places for a creature to lie in wait or obscure itself. It's easy for your eyes to play tricks on you. Still, I never saw the Lizard Man. I never even thought I saw him.

With several hours still until nightfall I sat in my car parked downtown. I watched as a man in front of me set up and scaled a ladder underneath a building's marquee. The inside of that building itself was vacant. He swapped the letters, climbed down and did the same to the other side. He folded up his ladder and walked off. I got out of my car to read what he'd put up:

Was this a reminder or a warning?

Equally parts creeped out and bored, I killed some time in an abandoned carport until the sun set.

It was after midnight when I revisited the area where Christopher Davis was attacked. Although I had been there hours ago, I didn't recognize shit. With my headlights on, I couldn't see more than 20 feet in front of me. With my headlights off, I couldn't see anything.

I cut my headlights, exited the car, and crept forward through the void. I felt like something was watching me, so I turned on my flashlight. In the distance, two yellow orbs reflected back. All of the Lizard Man sightings have been made by people who were alone at the time. And I was all alone right then, in more or less the same spot Christopher Davis was when he first encountered the Lizard Man. It's in moments like this—in the moments of silence between the cricket chirps, frog croaks and rustling leaves that make up the white noise of rural America—when you can feel totally alone and yet surrounded by terrifying monsters of your own design. It's in moments like this that the Lizard Man feels real.

I adjusted my flashlight, and the body attached to the pair of eyes came into view.

Damn. It was just a cat.

I returned to my car embarrassed and exhausted, thinking back to a small interaction I had earlier in the day. On my way out of the South Carolina Cotton Museum, I crossed paths with a man walking in. With a chuckle bubbling beneath his drawl he said, "You find Lizard Man for us, you hear."

I was just another out-of-towner who visited, and most importantly spent money in, their city. They won.

Sheriff Truesdale understood the nation was looking at little old Bishopville, and most were doing so with derision. But he was smart enough to know the small town was winning nevertheless: in an interview with a local newspaper, he once said, "One person from out of town said that a lot of people are laughing at us, but we should be laughing at all of them. They are the ones who are coming as far away as the West Coast."

I may have thought I was trying to be some defender of my state, but they didn't need my help. Bishopville doesn't have much to offer but the town saw an opportunity and seized it, found a way to exploit the interest and gullibility of others for attention and money, which isn't much different than many of the Vine stars and internet celebrities we have today. Lizard Man is much more than a punchline to a joke. He is a token, and a key to an entire local economy. Shirts, butterbeans, sandwiches, lottery tickets. He shills it all. The town depicts Lizard Man as a bloodthirsty monster or benign vegetarian depending on the need.

We may never get definitive proof of Lizard Man's existence, and maybe that's exactly the way Bishopville wants it.

Follow Justin on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Franco Folini

Read: Reasons Why San Francisco Is the Worst Place Ever

About six months from now, tens of thousands of people are going to flock to San Francisco for Super Bowl 50, turning the already overcrowded, extremely expensive tech mecca into a fucking nightmare. When they're not raising hell and chugging $12 beers inside the Levi's Stadium, all those sports fans will be encouraged to hang out in Super Bowl City—a massive "interactive theme park" being built near Market Street.

Problem is, the future site of Super Bowl City is currently filled with a bunch of homeless people, and Mayor Ed Lee isn't about to put up with that shit. Instead, he said, the city's homeless "are going to have to leave."

"We'll give you an alternative," Lee told CBS affiliate KPIX 5 . "We are always going to be supportive. But you are going to have to leave the streets."

The city is planning to debut some new programs for the homeless and construct about 500 new apartments in time for the Super Bowl in February, but the plan sounds a little vague and difficult to pull off in a handful of months. Still, the mayor insists, the city's vagrants have to GTFO.

The Super Bowl host committee has a different, equally-bizarre plan to help with the homeless population: get so many people doing shit in Super Bowl City that there's not enough room for the homeless within its walls.

"All around here we are going to have entertainment—family-friendly activities that will keep it vibrant and crowded," the committee's Nate Ballard said. "We're going to have 24/7 security."

As anyone who's spent about five minutes in Times Square can tell you, crowds and entertainment aren't some magical homeless repellant, but the mayor and the host committee are sticking to their guns.

Mayor Lee plans to enlist several local departments—from the SFPD to social services—to help keep homeless people out of the public eye.

"They can't be on the streets," Lee said. "Not just because it is illegal, but because it is dangerous for them."

Alexandra Kleeman. Photo by Arturo Olmos. Courtesy of HarperCollins

Author Alexandra Kleeman texted to say she'd be a few minutes late to our meeting at the Lodge in Williamsburg for wings night. She was getting some Aspirin for a sore back, she explained, when she sat down. She was just coming off six days bed rest at a convent in Washington State as part of her research for an article on the topic. It turns out that bed rest really isn't good for you, at all. Especially not if you're pregnant, which is the only time it's still prescribed.

"I never knew what a big part of your mood is feeling like you have the potential to move around," Kleeman, who is an occasional VICE contributor, told me. "When you get up for your 15 minutes a day, your body is not charged with energy. It feels like you're dipping into reserves to walk around."

The difficulty of possessing a contemporary female form is the subject of her first novel, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, which she began while attending the Columbia MFA program. In it, the narrator A begins in a stable place—cooking for her possessive, lemon vodka-swilling roommate B; watching Shark Week with her upbeat and patient boyfriend C. Then she joins a cult and ends up on a dating show called That's My Partner! It's kinda tough to summarize, as you can maybe tell.

Anyway, we had a good talk about Philip K. Dick, why she understands the appeal of Scientology, writing dystopian sci-fi as a woman, and the intensity of female friendships.

VICE: Where did the book start? Did you want to address consumerism, roommate stuff?
Alexandra Kleeman: What I really wanted to do at the beginning was try and create a character who loses herself in another identity so it was going to be half A, half a portion told from [the book's snack mascot] Kandy Kat's perspective, until they would loop around and turn into one another. I imagined a cartoon world that was deeper and more fleshed out than our world, so there'd be a lot more detail in the scenes and more emotions describing the cartoon characters than the real-life characters, and that still sounds like an interesting project to me, but I didn't know what I was trying to say at that point.

I'm trying to think of what that would look like just because this book is so spartan in its tone and descriptions.
I think it was easier to turn all the gears when I stripped the situation down to only the important moving parts. I always think about Philip K. Dick, who I love, how he always pulls these narrative inversions and part of that is using this very functional science-fiction writer prose. If there's too much going on ornamentally you wouldn't be able to track what's going on. Like, imagine if his women characters had full-blown internal monologues that you had to drop into! It'd be hard.

Then how did you come to the third act with the cult? It gets sort of plotty. It struck me as so different, like you were discovering it yourself.
I wanted to get the main character really lost, to have her fall out of her life into the other place. As I was thinking about a claustrophobic psychological situation, I was wondering what kind of information could feel like a genuine solution. There is no solution, but sometimes an advertisement or a religion or a philosophical thing presents itself and you're like, "Oh, yeah. Everything makes sense in a new way now," even though it's just a rehashing.

I started writing the cult by trying to write a pamphlet that I thought would be really startling and alienating and also make all the weird pressures in the earlier part fit together in a new way. I wanted to make it like a funhouse mirror of what had come before so a lot of the same logics are at work, but they make different things good and different things bad. They take a situation we've seen before, but then they read it as, "No, you're not crazy—that person's an impostor!"

"I think there's a lot that hasn't been written about in those sorts of postmodern dystopian books by men. I mean, obviously, the female experience, for one."

Are you at all religious?
I was raised very carefully without any kind of religion. My dad's an ancient Chinese religion professor. That made me want to not know anything about the field he was already an authority on, but I did start getting more into religion through cults. My dad, he hates Scientology, right? Who doesn't? So he'll download pirated versions of their secret valuable texts and he'll email them to me be like, "These texts are worth $100,000." Reading those texts was really compelling in that I could see how someone could read them and feel a chance happening in their body and feel a change happening in how they perceived the world. They give you a lot of procedures on how to show you that your mind is growing. Like, "Imagine a wall. Hold the wall in your mind. Now the wall is green. Do you see it's green? Do you see how you made it green?"

I was always interested in the idea, in cognitive science, that mental representations are stored bodily structures too. So when you hear the word hammer, you activate all the knowledge about what a hammer is used for and what it looks like you. You prime the muscles in your hand that will operate a hammer and have [operated one] before. That's actually what I worked on when I was an undergrad. I worked in a cog-sci lab. I did a weird experiment trying to test that. Basically, if your arm is actually involved in your remembering the word hammer, doing a conflicting motion that has nothing to do with hammering will slow down your recollection of the word hammer.

So if you're doing a sawing motion, you don't remember the word hammer as well?
It takes you like a millisecond longer.

Your cult seems so trenchant in that way.
I wanted to explore the possibility that you could be living in a situation where the place where you leave and the place you go to are functionally the same. There's no elsewhere in this world, and the place that looks like it's free of capitalism turns out to be just a stop in the system, it's where they package the goods. And also where they create readymade consumer base for Kandy Kakes that otherwise wouldn't necessarily sell, because they're disgusting.

VICE Meets novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard, Norway's leading cultural export:

I like how you don't dwell on that, the way maybe an 80s author would have, or a Don DeLillo or Dick would have. It seems like these fun paranoid, conspiracy, systems-y, postmodern-y books are so often written by men. And I don't know what my question is, except... why did you feel compelled to write one as a woman? Something like that?
I think you can ask, "Why did you feel compelled to write one as a woman?"

That feels patronizing, though.
I think there's a lot that hasn't been written about in those sorts of postmodern dystopian books by men. I mean, obviously, the female experience, for one. I'd say a lot of those books are about a male psyche, not a male psyche, but the political subject in America at the time. But I think the body is kind of secondary. I think part of the kind of dystopian state that we live in that it is lovable and hatable at the same time. And the way that it shapes us physically. I think we're much more aware of problems in the food production industry now, and those are things that like weren't really on the visible horizon back then.

Those books were mostly about concerns about freedom, what's happening to freedom. I feel like, in our time, our concern is less about what's happening. We never believed that we were ever so free that freedom could be impinged upon in a meaningful way. But is our quality of life [the same] as we are being told it is? Is our identity our own, or how dependent is it on other people in terms of media feeding into us? I think that [Don DeLillo's] White Noise has this in it, but it was important to me to make sure [the argument of the book] is not just that monoculture or generalization of culture makes us less individualistic. There's a weird way in that it produces a sense of home distributed throughout the world that can be a very positive or comforting feeling. We live in a really ambivalent state about this, so I really wanted it to be horrifying but also a little enticing.

In that way I thought you did roommate dynamics very well.
Even in your experience?

To be honest, no. More with girls, ones I've witnessed sleeping over at my girlfriends'. A and B's relationship did seem uniquely female.
I think there's something really intense about it. I was an only child, and I wasn't really used to being around a lot of people. But girls who were always with their friends or with their siblings, I think there are people who really don't like to be alone. So you get put into that kind of situation with a person like that and you have an obligation to their emotional state.

"If it happened, a guy would be like, 'That's weird, I don't want to deal with that.' Which is healthy."

Did you ever have a sort of, what's the movie, Single White Female situation, in college or otherwise?
Most of the female roommate situations I've had, even when they've gone well, they've been a little stressful for me emotionally. Like, someone's watching a Kardashian show. You don't want to watch it, but if you don't watch it, it's like you're saying there's something you don't like about the roommate, or their taste. And so you watch it, and then you're learning all these things about the Kardashians and learning all these things you never wanted to know about them, and it's changing you as a person! I had a roommate who resembled B a little bit. Her name was also Alexandra.

Whoa.
I actually didn't put in a lot of the strangest things about that relationship in the book.

When it was going well, I had this great sense of being accompanied all the time, and I'd go home and the day wouldn't end there. We'd do one thing together then another thing then another thing, but there was no choice about it. You'd come home and go from work zone to her zone.

Anytime you get into a close female friendship it's really interesting and exciting to feel like you've got this person—more than a boyfriend—[with whom] you can just upload and download your consciousness. But I think it can go wrong so often because whenever anything interrupts that flow it's like now the relationship is in peril, and what's going to happen next? Are you going to try to reinsert yourself into that kind of mode—or blow it up?

On Motherboard: 'The Apple Watch Is the Perfect Wrist Piece for Dystopia'

Do you think the problem is too much intimacy?
I always get into intense friendships when the other person asks for something from me that's very personal. All of a sudden: We don't know each other very well, but something happened with some guy and [the other person is] very upset. And when they do that, you feel very flattered and very connected.

But I've also had a lot of other girl experiences where a friend will say, "I saw photos of you with another friend on Instagram, but you still like me the most, right?" And then you've got to say yes to maintain the intimacy you're supposed have, and then if you don't maintain it, it can all fall apart all of a sudden. I don't think guys do that. Or if it happened, a guy would be like, "That's weird, I don't want to deal with that." Which is healthy.

Yeah, male friendships don't seem that competitive. Or maybe they are a little, if you're a writer.
Well, writers are just all like open sores.

Follow Dan on Twitter.

You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman is out Thursday, August 25, from HarperCollins.

Paul Alexander was a young British skateboarder full of charisma and drive. His talent won him a cover of Sidewalk magazine, opportunities of sponsorship, and the chance to travel with his board. After a move from Leicester to Bristol in his late teens, he started living with pro skateboarder Danny Wainwright and became engulfed in the fun, responsibility-free lifestyle that came with his chosen pursuit. He smoked weed every day and hung out in College Square skating.

Paul seemed destined for success, but then something happened and he started acting differently, claiming that the police were after him and that a film of his life was being made when none of his friends could see any cameras. And then he vanished. Eventually, he was placed in a mental institution.

This is his story, directed by his friend, Tim Crawley.

Think about how much raw sewage is in that water! Photo via Flickr user Tracy O

Read: Victoria Is Still Cleaning Up Last Century's Toxic Mess

The Seattle Times is demanding Victoria, BC get its shit together—literally—or risk being shunned by its neighbours down south.

In an editorial titled "Sewage treatment: Victoria's constipated political process needs fixing," the newspaper calls out BC's picturesque capital for continuing to use the ocean like a giant toilet.

This is because Victoria doesn't have a sewage plant, which means every day it dumps 130 million litres of untreated poop and chemicals into the Juan de Fuca Strait.

"This has been Victoria's foul problem for decades. But years of ridicule and a 1993 tourism boycott didn't end this neglectful approach to sewage treatment," reads the editorial. Even pleas from Mr. Floatie, a six-foot-tall, falsetto-voiced turd and sewage-treatment advocate, seem to have fallen on deaf ears.

According to editors at the Seattle Times, "it is time for Washington to renew a tourism boycott and a return of Mr. Floatie."

For a while, things looked promising; Victoria was slated to open a treatment plant as early as 2018. But bureaucracy including the rejection of a rezoning application killed that plan and it now looks like a solution is a long ways off.

It was enough to make Pam Elardo, King County's wastewater treatment division director, go (and I'm paraphrasing here): fuck it.

"It appears that construction and operation of a wastewater treatment system is now years, if not decades, away," she wrote in her resignation from the task force addressing the issue.

"I don't have the time to spend on something that, at this stage, does not seem likely to be successful," she told VICE, adding the project was lacking necessary backing from the provincial government.

Elardo pointed out that communities who share the same body of water as Victoria and are much smaller all treat their waste.

"It's really just not OK with us anymore."

Victoria mayor Lisa Helps responded to the criticism in a letter to the Seattle Times' editor, in which she admits it's pretty ridiculous that "in the 21st century Victoria still flushes its sewage into the ocean."

"We're also motivated to become a responsible and sustainable contributor of the rich Pacific Northwest region," she said. "I look forward to the day when we can hold a retirement party for Mr. Floatie."

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Jane Doe woke up on the wrong side of the bed with her world upside down. Through the haze of a hangover, the 22-year-old surveyed room 527 at the Red Roof Inn near Miami International Airport and tried to figure out why she was facing the window. She'd only had some Smirnoff wine cooler the night before, and what she calls her "extreme OCD" would never allow for any deviation from her normal bedtime habits. But as she became more and more alert, the panic started rising in her chest.

Her double bed was soaked. The floor was covered in clothes and she was wearing a crop-top she'd planned on showing off at the beach but didn't remember ever taking out of her suitcase. When she touched her face, she felt her lips—perfectly painted the night before – were now bloody and busted. When she urinated and wiped, the toilet paper came back stained red.

So at 9:55 in the morning on February 18, 2011, she grabbed her cell phone with trembling hands and dialed. In a Texas twang, Doe tried to tell a 9-1-1 dispatcher how what seemed like a dream opportunity quickly turned into an unimaginable nightmare.

"I only came to Miami because I thought this would be a benefitting opportunity for me," she said, according to a transcript of the call. "And I, I feel like I've been molested, maybe, or raped. I don't remember anything from last night. I don't remember how I got in my bed. I woke up in my bed with my panties off."

On Broadly: How It Feels to Be Pregnant for Ten Years in a Row

Months earlier, a man named Lavont Flanders had contacted her on the website Model Mayhem—sort of a MySpace for wannabe video girls and amateur models. Although he was actually a disgraced ex-cop turned bus driver, Flanders presented himself as a casting agent.

Thinking it was her chance to break into the big time, she'd flown down from Brooklyn, and was picked up from her hotel by Flanders and taken to a Kinkos so they could make copies of her ID and portfolio. Then she was instructed to do a test shoot in a nearby parking lot. Flanders handed Doe a drink and instructed her to say some lines as she consumed it. "I want to see how you work under pressure," he explained.

When they got back in the car, Doe felt very drunk and asked for something to eat, but was told she couldn't have anything because the audition needed to be completed quickly. They headed back to the Red Roof Inn, where Doe held her ID up in front of a camera and said she was 18 and not being held against her will.

The last thing she remembers is opening the door for Lawson's colleague—but while she was blacked out from the Xanax Flanders had slipped her, she had been raped by a heavily tattooed Jamaican porn star named Jah-T, and filmed without her knowledge for a series called Miami's Nastiest Nymphos.

Later, she'd find out that she was far from alone. Hundreds of police and court documents reviewed by VICE show how Flanders and Callum raped dozens of women between 2006 and 2008 using Model Mayhem and another site called Black Planet. When they were arrested and let out on bail in 2009, they—unbelievably—went back to the same scheme, and raped dozens more. A federal complaint puts the number of total victims at "about 100."

Not only that, but civil court documents show that the owners of Model Mayhem knew about the first wave of rapes but failed to issue a warning to users. The FBI told VICE in response to a FOIA request that they are actively investigating the site.

Doe is currently fighting for the right to sue the site through which her rapist contacted her, and her efforts have turned a case about sexual assault into a case about free speech on the internet and the responsibility social media websites have when their users commit crimes. Facebook, Google, and Craigslist are desperate to prevent her from seeking damages; the three companies claimed in a court brief that such a decision would have a "chilling effect" on the web and inhibit free speech. However, others claim that re-tooling (or at least re-interpreting) the part of the law that shields online publishers from liability is necessary in the age of revenge porn and the trollish harassment of nearly every woman who expresses an opinion online.

Today, when Doe recounts waking up that February day, her teeth start to chatter from fear. She's moved to the Deep South and now works a nine-to-five job; she spends her off time trying to keep a rambunctious one-year-old from climbing on the furniture. "Everything is scary for me," she explains. "I never will look at a fashion magazine again."

To understand the First Amendment issues involved in Doe's lawsuit, you have to go back to 1994, when an anonymous messageboard user wrote a post claiming that brokerage house Stratton Oakmont, the subject of The Wolf of Wall Street, was involved in some seriously shady dealings and that Danny Porush—the basis for Jonah Hill's cocaine-hoovering character—was a "soon to be proven criminal."

Naturally, Porush and Stratton sued for defamation, but since he couldn't sue the anonymous user, he sought $200 million in damages from Prodigy Services, the company that owned the messageboard, for giving the user a platform for the insults. Back in the mid 90s, the question of whether a website was a publisher, like a newspaper, or a mere distributor of content, like the mail, was a novel one.

In May of 1995, the New York Supreme Court issued a summary judgment saying Prodigy was a publisher rather than a mere distributor of content. Judge Stuart L. Ain based his decision on the fact that the company employed moderators who were tasked with making sure the service's boards adhered to certain community guidelines.

The problem was that this created a divide between websites that monitored their content and those that gave their users a sandbox and stepped aside—and if they exerted control over posts, they could be liable for damages. As Heather Rafter, the legal affairs director for software company Digidesign told Variety at the time, "The more you try to maintain control, the more you open yourself up to liability."

In response to the ruling, Congressmen Christopher Cox and Ron Wyden proposed an amendment to the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Section 230, as it became known, made internet service providers and website operators distributors rather than publishers, which meant that they couldn't be held accountable for information distributed by a third party using their services. Without Section 230, Facebook and Twitter and Reddit would likely be deluged with lawsuits over the bad behavior of their occasionally hateful, libelous, copyright-violating user bases. Section 230, in a way, made trolling possible.

On April 25, 1995—shortly after the Oklahoma City Bombing—an anonymous AOL user posted an advertisement for "naughty Oklahoma T-shirts." If people wanted to buy apparel with slogans like, "Visit Oklahoma... It's a BLAST!!!" they were instructed to call a man in Seattle named Kenneth Zeran.

"Advocates of the First Amendment have a knee-jerk reaction, and that's problematic in terms of the big picture."
–Kenneth Zeran

Zeran wasn't actually selling those offensive shirts, but he was soon inundated with death threats. Within five days, he was getting a call every two minutes, and an Oklahoma City radio personality even told listeners to barrage Zeran with calls. "One minute I and the entire country are grieving over the Oklahoma City Bombing," Zeran told the New York Times. "The next thing I know, I'm associated with it."

Because of Section 230, Zeran had no legal recourse against AOL, even after he asked the service provider to remove the postings and they did not. A district court judge in Virginia said print publishers had time to check on every statement they made and make sure it wasn't defamatory, but "the sheer number of postings on interactive computer services would create an impossible burden in the internet context."

The Zeran case became a cornerstone in a body of case law that insulates social media networks and other websites from the criminal acts—from libel to death threats—committed by their users. Today, Zeran imagines himself as something of a crusader for Section 230 reform. The 68-year-old says that the Model Mayhem case is the perfect example of Americans being overly precious about free speech.

"Advocates of the First Amendment have a knee-jerk reaction, and that's problematic in terms of the big picture," he says. "My point of view is: Did somebody in control of that information know that this stuff was damaging someone? Was it criminally damaging someone? If they knew that, and they had control over that server, that's not a very good situation is it.

"They owned the server and they chose to do nothing about it."

Watch: Inside America's Lucrative Divorce Industry

Model Mayhem was founded by Tyler Waitt, a student at Florida State University who was the son of a publisher who produced magazines for strip clubs. Many of Waitt's dad's advertisers were using One Model Place, a website where aspiring models could post photos and hope to be discovered. Wiatt, a self-taught coder, thought One Model Place was "crappy," he tells VICE, so in 2005 he purchased $50 of server space and launched Model Mayhem. His tagline was "MySpace for models," and he posted a couple bulletins to the actual MySpace with hopes of recruiting users. "Two people would sign up, then the next day ten people would sign up," he says. "Suddenly it was a million people."

Revenue from Google Ads paid for his servers, but he couldn't afford to hire employees. Instead, his mom and grandma were recruited to manually sift through dick pics and approve or reject users—a time-consuming task, because, at Waitt puts it, "dealing with models pulls all the psychos out of the woodworks."

Despite the long wait to get approved, Model Mayhem became the number-one site for the young women and men who wanted a chance to break into the glamorous worlds of the LA and New York fashion scenes from behind computer screens in obscure, square-shaped states.

"It's just sort of a fantasy in America where you're validated if you become a model," says Meredith Hattam, an advisory board member for the advocacy group Model Alliance. "It's a job that little girls grow up dreaming of, and Model Mayhem offers girls entrance into this elite industry they know nothing about. If you live in a small city and literally google 'How to become a model,' Model Mayhem is what pops up."

Is Model Mayhem responsible for allowing these men to prey on the young women who used its services?

But the website was also used by a predator named Emerson Callum—who, under the name Jah-T, starred in and distributed porn videos, including a series called Miami's Nastiest Nymphos—and his partner Lavont Flanders. Police records show that at least five women claimed they were drugged, sexually assaulted,and filmed by the two men between August 2006 and May 2007 in South Florida, and that at least one of them was "not 100 percent sure" what county she was assaulted in. The overwhelming majority of the victims were black, and all were first contacted by Callum through Model Mayhem.

The Broward County Sheriff's Office finally arrested Flanders and Callum in July 2007 and charged them with criminal conspiracy, kidnapping, and sexual battery.

On May 13, 2008, while the two men were being held in prison, Waitt sold Model Mayhem to Internet Brands Inc. He didn't disclose any information about a pending criminal investigation regarding the site, according to a civil suit filed by the California-based new media company in 2010. (Today, Waitt says he sold the site because he wanted to party with his friends rather than run a business.)

In May 2009, Flanders and Callum were let out on bond, and by the end of the following year, most of the charges against them were completely dropped. Victims—especially those who weren't from the area—had difficulty telling police which county they were assaulted in, making the crimes difficult to prosecute. But even as a detective with the Miramar Police Department tried to help the feds put together a case, the rapists got right back to their depraved scheme that had landed them in jail the first time, terrorizing Jane Doe and scores of other women.

Eventually, the feds indicted Flanders and Callum in August 2011 for using fraud to cause seven women to engage in commercial sex acts and for giving them controlled substances. They were convicted that December and sentenced to 12 consecutive life terms apiece. (Both are currently appealing.)

Then, in 2012, Doe sued Model Mayhem owner Internet Brands, raising a thorny question that hadn't been considered during the trial of Flanders and Callum: Is the site responsible for allowing these men to prey on the young women who used its services?

On Motherboard: What It Looks Like to Use the Internet for the First Time

Although a California Circuit Court judge initially said in 2014 Model Mayhem wasn't protected by Section 230, Facebook, Craigslist, and Tumblr joined together and filed a brief in support of Internet Brands on November 10. They argued that if Doe's failure-to-warn argument holds, their sites could be held liable for all the people injured who gathered at Occupy Wall Street (a protest largely organized on social media), for people who hurt themselves while doing the Ice Bucket Challenge, or for people who bought bikes on Craigslist and were subsequently hit by cars. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit that advocates for the broad application of Section 230 on free speech grounds, also filed a brief in favor of dismissing Doe's suit.

Eric Goldman, a law professor and staunch defender of Section 230, says the court has "mucked up" in not shutting down Doe's lawsuit immediately. He says that there's no doubt in tech companies' minds that the suit will fail, but if it's not summarily dismissed on Section 230 grounds, that means there's a loophole that needs to be closed ASAP. He adds that the argument that Model Mayhem should have been required to warn its users about the rapes is bogus.

"We live in a society that is rampant with disclosure, and if the solution was 'Well, they should have just told me,' you know what that means in practice," Goldman says. "Do people really heed warnings?"

The question of how much responsibility websites have for their users' behavior has become increasingly complicated. Over the past several months Twitter has revised its policies on abuse and harassment multiple times in an effort to curb the number of violent threats tossed around on the social network that are disproportionately directed at women. This month Reddit took steps to hide its most toxic, hateful communities from the average site visitor; earlier this summer administrators banned five subreddits that were being used "as a platform to harass individuals."

"They're arranging these real-world interactions and all of a sudden they say, 'Oh, we have no responsibly for anything that goes wrong.'"
–Tom Slee

More serious crimes seem likelier to occur on sites that encourage users to engage in IRL interactions—Uber, for instance, has maintained that it's not liable for any actions committed by its drivers, which the company considers to be independent contractors, not full employees. "Uber's first line of defense" against lawsuits over drivers' bad behavior, according to Forbes, "is that it's a marketplace and not a transportation provider."

"They're arranging these real-world interactions and all of a sudden they say, 'Oh, we have no responsibly for anything that goes wrong,'" says Tom Slee, an author who writes about technology and politics. "Section 230 has been stretched in so many different directions its becoming a travesty of what it was originally intended for."

Lawmakers have tried to topple Section 230 before and failed. In 2012, Washington State passed a law that made it a crime to publish "any advertisement for a commercial sex act... that includes the depiction of a minor." The intent was to force Backpage, the classified site that's come under fire by everyone from Alicia Keys to the New York Times's Nicholas Kristof, to take steps to verify that all of the escorts who advertise on it are of legal age and that none of them were victims of human trafficking.

Three months after it passed, Backpage and the EFF sued Washington, arguing that the new rules violated not only Section 230, but the First and Fifth amendments. In the end, the state backed down, agreeing to repeal the law and pay Backpage $200,000 in legal fees.

And victims of rape and exploitation haven't had more success fighting Backpage in the courts. Last year, three women who were the victims of trafficking and had been raped hundreds of times sued the site for enabling child trafficking in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. In May, a federal judge in Massachusetts dismissed the case, citing Section 230 and rejecting the plaintiffs' argument that the law should be regarded as out of date.

Doe's lawsuit doesn't appear to stand much of a chance if judges in her case follow suit. But, she argues, Section 230 was written two decades ago, when interactions on the internet were relatively rare, and before people were routinely using the web to get everything from jobs to transportation to shelter to sex. Do we want the giant companies that facilitate these online transactions to be so thoroughly protected that Model Mayhem isn't liable for not taking any steps, no matter how small, to protect users from rape?

"This is a new age of time," Doe told me. "This is how we network, and there has to be changes to it. When my one-year-old son is old enough to use the internet, I want it to be secure."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

When I was a kid, I used to imagine daily life in the Eastern Bloc countries during the Cold War as a black and white film full of pale people who could never experience joy because they were so worried about being spied on by the secret police. Edward Snowden hadn't been born yet, so the idea that a government would actually eavesdrop on its citizens seemed like the kind of grotesque nightmare only a monstrous communist dictatorship would dream up. We, the privileged and perpetually happy citizens of the United States, could only pray that this dreary, invisible world was never visited upon our shores and allowed to destroy all our TV shows, candy bars, and cute outfits.

The Cold War lasted 40 years and for most of that time, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was visible only through a veil of government-controlled propaganda and secrecy. Then the Berlin Wall came down, followed by the process of re-unification. As the "new Germany" formed, it decided to excise those disturbing images of the GDR from its history. East German street names and consumer products were all changed; iconic buildings, monuments, and art of the east all disposed of.

But when a society vanishes, what happens to everybody's stuff?

What did the former secret police do with their terrifying James Bondian briefcases full of spy gear after they resumed their identities as unemployed German guys with wives pleading for more closet space? What did the border guards from Checkpoint Charlie do with their uniforms, their weapons, and their training manuals?

As it turns out, all the aforementioned and more live on in Los Angeles, thanks to Dr. Justinian Jampol, a historian who created The Wende Museum.

A collection of spy technology. All photos courtesy of Dr. Jampol and The Wende Museum

In 2002, Jampol was a 25-year-old graduate student at Oxford, working on his master's degree in Russian and East European studies. While studying in Berlin, he realized that the official East German archive didn't contain the kind of source material he needed to answer his questions about life in the now-defunct GDR.

"When a regime falls, at first everyone wants to get rid of everything. A whole culture vanishes because it is not yet recognized as historical, just old." - Justinian Jampol

"I was fascinated by the way people talked about the Eastern Bloc as so discomforting. It seemed like a big hole that no one was looking at," he recalls, describing how it felt to watch a culture being dismantled on the streets of Berlin in real time.

"You could see fragments in the midst of being destroyed: murals being painted over, everything being taken down and thrown away," he told me. "When a regime falls, at first everyone wants to get rid of everything. It happens so fast that most things are abandoned. A whole culture vanishes because it is not yet recognized as historical, just old. Everything was being seen in light of a narrative that they were forming about the GDR as oppressive and bad. The only things that were kept were those deemed 'culturally significant.' But by whose definition?"

That was when Jampol had an epiphany that changed the direction of his research. "I realized that to be the historian I wanted to be, I needed to get out of the archive and go find my own stuff."

A stack of visa papers in a file cabinet

The first task: figuring out where the most fascinating GDR relics were stashed. Following up on a series of tips, Jampol found himself in people's basements, attics, flea-markets, and fall-out shelters. He searched through what remained of once bustling population centers now turned into ghost towns full of abandoned buildings. There, he discovered "the things people were traumatized by, the things they loved and threw away."

"History is saved by the crazy people, the people in the margins." he says, "We are the place these things can exist while the battle is being waged."

Clip from Collecting Fragments

In a short documentary the museum made called Collecting Fragments, you can see glimpses of how The Wende was formed. One scene shows Jampol standing in a private garage, outside of Juterborg, Germany, in an area once designated "a secret city." A former employee of The Ministry for State Security shows him through a personal collection he has amassed of 7,000 mortars. "A history of Russian artillery," the former policeman calls it. Jampol calls it "the largest mortar collection in the world."

Another scene shows him out hiking in the German countryside with a group, on their way to examine the contents of an abandoned fall-out shelter.

Some of the most fascinating items now on display at The Wende were donated by former citizens of The GDR who feared their collections would be politicized if they donated them to a European institution.

"Especially the stuff that comes from some of the perpetrators—the East German Border guards, the Stasi [the secret police]," says Jampol. "If they gave their stuff to a German institution, they would be outed."

Hundreds of black and white photos fill the "Facing the Wall" exhibit

As our tour through The Wende continued, I found myself riveted by an exhibit called "Facing the Wall," which consisted of hundreds of pairs of black and white photos of nearly-identical looking people. It turned out to be part of a testing kit used to teach East German border guards how to spot someone not using their own passport.

"They could tell fairly objectively whether your passport was real using other equipment," Jampol explained, "but how could they be sure it was really you? Each card has two faces on it and you have to be able to answer, 'Are they the same person, true or false?'"

Of the 200 photos, only nine are actually the same person. I examined each pair as carefully as I could and still guessed wrong almost every time.

Physical recognition drawings by Peter Bochmann, head of the passport division of the border guards at border crossing Friedrichstraße-Zimmermannstraße (the east side of "Checkpoint Charlie") in East Berlin

The materials here aren't just fascinating, but extremely rare.

"We have the only known text on how to become a border guard," Jampol tells me. Within the text is a "taxonomy of facial features" to help the guards in training increase their observational skills. We were standing in front of a display table that contains elaborate eye, nose, and mustache comparison charts designed to help a new guard prepare to catch citizens with fake passports before they could successfully escape to the west. Beside the text is a completed workbook along with a few pages of handwritten notes made by the former guard who donated them.

A page from Peter Bochmann's facial recognition book featuring drawings of eyes

By the time my guided tour through a selection of the 100,000-plus items presently archived at The Wende Museum concluded, some of my grimmest illusions about the quality of human life "behind the iron curtain" were shattered—or, at least, expanded. Because the goal of The Wende Museum is to present all the recovered details of this disappeared world, both good and bad, it came as a pleasant surprise that life there wasn't all a living hell.

For instance, in the GDR, unemployment and homelessness were almost nonexistent. There were state-sponsored programs to care for old people and an active commitment to gender equality. The GDR's 10-mark note featured the image of Clara Zetkin, the German feminist who started International Women's Day.

For all its obvious limitations on freedom, the GDR also sponsored art, music, a theater company for Bertolt Brecht, and a number of surprisingly sophisticated films. Then there were the East German Westerns, which distinguished themselves by having plots in which the Indians always won. And its hard not to have at least a little sympathy for a government, no matter how repressive, that tried in vain to promote a state sponsored dance with the slogan "Do the Lipsi!"

Part of Jampol's PhD thesis involved deciphering the kind of underground subcultures that no outsider would be able to spot without a playbook. "Like, you might see a guy on the street wearing an East German 'Swords into Ploughshares Symbol,' and conclude that he's just another pawn of the state. But in the late 70s, the head of the GDR Dissident group, Robert Havemann, claimed the same symbol as their official symbol, just to fuck with The Stasi," he tells me. "They knew no one would be able to tell if a person was wearing the symbol in a negative or positive way. So they had to ask everyone they saw, 'Are you wearing it in support or opposition?' If it seemed suspicious, they would rip it off."

"And of course," Jampol adds, "eventually having a ripped off badge became so prestigious that East German punks started making marks on their clothes that looked like the Stasi had ripped a badge off of them."

A display made of signs from Checkpoint Charlie

Ultimately what emerges from a trip to The Wende, thanks to Jampol's tireless collecting, is a picture of a distinctive East German culture that some of its survivors still miss to this day, even if they are glad that the state itself is gone. Among old timers, there remains a feeling that the reunification happened so quickly they were deprived of the chance to negotiate what should be kept and what should be discarded and therefore lost the opportunity to try and form a new improved and hopefully better GDR.

"History is complicated because people are complicated," says Jampol. "Were they repressed? Of course. But that makes the creative material even more impressive because the human spirit always finds a way to get through the cracks, right? If it wasn't for us, it would all disappear."

An archivist at The Wende Museum

On any given visit to The Wende Museum you might run in to some or all of the following: a room full of Stasi spying equipment; a display made of signs that used to be up at Checkpoint Charlie; an assortment of East German household products; a musical instrument called the Shalmei that was closely associated with the German labor movement; a woman digitizing one of the 6,000 health, hygiene, and educational films made by the GDR. The day I was there, we watched the deadly earnest GDR produced "A Visit to the Laundromat," designed to show citizens, in mind-numbing detail, how they were expected to prepare their clothing for drop off at their nearest state-sponsored laundry facility.

The day after my visit, Jampol headed back to Berlin to continue his race against time, before the window of opportunity for finding relics from The Cold War closes for good.

"We were tipped off about a collection that a woman has about an hour and a half outside Berlin filled with 100 years of clothing and fashion from the Imperial time to Weimar to Third Reich to the GDR," he tells me. "The way we collect speaks to the ethos of the museum. We don't wait on pins and needles for the next Christie's auction."

A Stasi suitcase with a recorder insid

At the same time, he is also eagerly amassing art and cultural ephemera from Hungary. "The current right wing regime sees everything that happened between 1945 and 1989 as 'inauthentic' and 'tainted,'" he explains, "so they're getting rid of all this important work. It's all just flowing out of the country." And fortunately for us all, flowing right into The Wende Museum.

The future of The Wende looks bright. Currently located in the back of an office park in Culver City, they are only open to the public on Fridays or by appointment. But by the end of next year, they will move into a newly renovated 15,000-foot space that was once a National Guard Armory. They have also signed a multi-year deal with The Getty Museum to work on a book and contribute to exhibitions.

"So the stuff we collect goes from a situation where people are getting rid of it—where it's basically considered garbage—to going into the Getty. It's just so weird," Jampol says, smiling.

Follow Merrill Markoe on Twitter.

Nicky Blue Eyes enlisted in the Marine Corps in 2005 and served until 2012, when he lost his left leg to an improvised explosive device in Kandahar, Afghanistan. After over a year in recovery, he found himself strapped for cash.

"When I first got my prosthetic leg, my husband and I, we were broke," he told me matter-of-factly. "And I had enjoyed escorting before so I thought I'd put an ad up [online] and see what happens."

Blue Eyes (his escorting name) is a gorgeous, athletic, 26-year-old with super-blue eyes. He's been escorting full-time out of San Francisco for about three years now. His profile on Rentboy.com, a site for gay male escorts, advertises his military service, billing him as a "Striking US Marine for Your Active Duty!"

"I recently returned home from active duty deployment in Afghanistan and have over a year of built-up testosterone waiting to be released," it reads. A little later, Blue Eyes goes into his injury, explaining, "I lost my lower left limb from an IED detonation in Afghanistan but wear a top-of-the-line prosthetic as seen in my photos." He adds that 10 percent of every date is donated to a charity for injured Marines.

It's quite a marketing tactic—playing into the fetishization of servicemen and selling it—and apparently, it's not uncommon.

Historically, the military man has been an archetype of masculinity, held as a high-status social and sexual symbol. A litany of Hollywood military action films, from the Rambo installments to American Sniper, featuring superhuman, super-jacked military men, speak directly to this. Now, it seems men like Nicky Blue Eyes—sex workers who have served in the military—are finding a way to capitalize on that wider cultural mythology, by taking jobs as escorts.

Photo courtesy of Nicky Blue Eyes, as advertised on his Rentboy.com profile

Blue Eyes joined the military when he was 17. He says his time in the service was positive, but seven years, four tours, and one lost limb took its toll physically and financially. At first, sex work was an economic solution—but it also helped him regain his confidence and adjust to civilian life.

"[When I first got back to the US], it was really weird and incredibly difficult, especially for me being an active person, someone who moved around a lot," he told me. "I've always enjoyed looking good and all of a sudden I was... you know, I felt like I was disabled. I was disabled, I was crippled."

"I had no idea I'd be more popular [with a prosthetic] than I ever was with two legs." - Nicky Blue Eyes

Blue Eyes assumed his prosthetic leg would make him less desirable as a sex worker, but learned quickly that wasn't the case. In fact, he says being a veteran with a prosthetic leg turned out to be a huge selling point. "I had no idea I'd be more popular than I ever was with two legs, that'd I get more clients than I could ever do in one day, and I'd be traveling all over the world. I had no idea that would happen."

According to Blue Eyes, while his military status is a selling point, a lot of his appeal has to do with "seem[ing] like a real human being." He elaborates: "I think a lot of clients who are hiring escorts can be villainized, but the truth is that they're just regular guys. A lot of the time, they're very lonely and don't have a lot of self-confidence, which I can relate to. A lot of them have scars from biopsy surgeries or transplants."

Photo from Nicky Blue Eyes's Rentboy.com profile

Though we have information about the various fields employed veterans work in—12.6 percent in manufacturing, 5.4 percent in construction, and so on—there are no statistics that estimate the number of veterans who enter the sex work field.

In an interview conducted before multiple members of the site's staff were arrested on prostitution charges, Hawk Kinkaid, chief operating officer at Rentboy.com, told me the site has no idea how many of the escorts advertised are former service members. Escorts are only required to provide very basic information, like age and email address, on their profiles, so "the only gauge I have is whether they voluntarily list themselves on the site as having served in the military," Kinkaid said.

But Kinkaid said that escorts who do advertise their service may be trying to capitalize on the fetishization of military men.

"The idea of the hyper-masculine has long been the subject of high regard for gay men and, today, there are clients who still revel in [the military] fantasy," Kinkaid said. "The military represents a machismo, a clumsy grace, a radical heroism," which, he added, appeals to some gay men. "Especially when, for hundreds of years, the internalized fear was that we were 'less than' other men."

Watch: Gay Conversion Therapy

The evidence is all over Rentboy, and other similar, although less searchable sites like Rentmen.com and Men4RentNow.com. Though not all of the ex-military escorts I found emphasized their service as prominently as Nicky Blue Eyes, searching for terms like "military," "Army," "Navy," and "Marine" yield pages and pages of results.

In some cases the escorts are matter-of-fact about their military service, and leave it at that:

"Good-looking, well-educated, ex-military, versatile jock here." – AF MUSCLEBOY

"Friendliest guy in town. Former US Army soldier. Sexy All-American jock into most scenes." – ANDY

Others play more directly into the fantasy of having sex with a soldier:

"Talented in the bondage/BDSM arts ~ Shabari rope work, masks/hoods/cuffs... Role play: Daddy/boy, coach, military, leather, cowboy, wrestling, etc." – TYGERSCENT

Related: Soldiers Looking for Hookups on Craigslist Are Being Warned of a Military Sting Operation

The military has long been associated with a specific brand of masculinity, bravery, and toughness. So when Kayden Pierce survived a brutal gay-bashing that left him in a coma for 16 days, he did the only thing he thought he could to heal himself: He joined the Navy.

It was 2003, and Don't Ask, Don't Tell was still in effect. Pierce enrolled anyway: "I decided that I wasn't gay anymore," he said. He still chokes up when he talks about it, describing how he rounded up his friends and "pretty much told them to fuck off, that I wasn't gay, and that they were all gonna burn in hell. It's one of the few things [in life] that I regret."

Besides joining the Navy, Pierce also married a woman and had a son. He trained as a medical corpsman—a "pecker checker," he says—and was eventually deployed to Iraq with a Marine Explosive Ordinance Disposal team.

During Pierce's service, he started doing gay porn on the side. He eventually divorced his wife ("because, you know, I was gay") and she told the military about his porn gig, which eventually led to an investigation and his discharge.

"Right after the military is when I started escorting," Pierce explained. "I started hanging out with some people, and they were always talking about going on 'hooker tours'—four to five people traveling together, zigzagging across the US, working in a city for three or more days depending on demand. One day, they asked me to go along... and I loved it."

Like Blue Eyes, Pierce found some emotional relief in escorting. He saw it as a form of caregiving, not unlike the work he was doing in the Navy, but with the freedom to be unabashedly, unapologetically gay.

Leo Sweetwood bills himself as "a college-educated former Rifleman in the United States Marine Corps, and award-winning escort."

When Leo Sweetwood left the Marine Corps in early 2014, he too moved on to sex work. Sweetwood had done porn before leaving for bootcamp, and enjoyed it, so he decided to try it again. Then, in March, he put up his first online profile, billing himself as "a college-educated former Rifleman in the United States Marine Corps, and award-winning escort."

According to Sweetwood, the military helped him develop life skills, including the ability to form relationships with people to whom he might otherwise feel very little connection—interpersonal skills he uses as an escort. But despite giving the armed forces credit for helping him develop these abilities, Leo said he doesn't incorporate his military status into his escorting.

"It's part of who I am and some guys have that fetish—they want me to act like I'm an intimidating guy or something like that—but that's not so much about the military and me as it is about an idea they have about what they want," he mused. "Sometimes [I don't take a job] because they really want the fantasy. Like, they want me to shave my head. I'm not shaving my head to a high and tight just for an hour of work. No way."

Chauntelle Tibbals, PhD, is a sociologist living in Los Angeles. Follow her on Twitter.

A game of three-sided football. Photo by Mark Dyson

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

It's a cool September evening in 2013, and somewhere among Istanbul's minarets a clock announces that today has passed into yesterday. The streets are quiet now, a stark contrast to the energy that had been coursing through them in the months prior, when the Turks were occupying Taksim Square. The protest camps were cleared out by August, but the police presence remains, water cannons at the ready should the protesters decide their work was left unfinished.

A number of silhouettes emerge from side alleys and descend on the dead civic space, chatting in a confusing mix of English and German. They begin to remove their jumpers and arrange them to form a hexagonal football pitch in the center of the square. There is the soft smack of polyester colliding with brick as they begin passing a football around, throwing an occasional glance at the police officers who are eyeing the foreigners with suspicion.

Within half an hour, the footballers have attracted the curiosity of a number of locals and there are nearly 100 people running around the square, a cacophony of languages splintering the silent evening. The boundaries of the pitch have long since ceased to matter, the teams are amorphous and no one can quite seem to remember what the score is any more—which is pretty much exactly how this game is meant to work. Because while those tasked with policing the square might not have realized it at the time, what they were watching was revolution in action, coded in the language of football.

"It was stunning—one of the best games of three-sided football I've ever played," recalls Mark Dyson. "Just absolutely gorgeous."

This means a lot coming from Dyson, who plays for the Deptford Three-Sided Football Club and has been intimately involved in the world of three-sided football (3sf) since the beginning—or at least since it made its way from paper to the pitch.

3sf was originally conceived by Asger Jorn, a Danish artist and philosopher, in 1966 as a method of explaining his refinement of the Marxist dialectic (resulting in something Jorn referred to as "triolectics"). Jorn was a member of the Situationist International, a loose organization of anarchists, Marxists and avant-garde artists who had become disillusioned not only with the promises of the increasing technological rationalization of everyday life under capitalism, but also the dogmatic responses of the anti-capitalist intelligentsia at the time. They sought creative alternatives to all facets of life, seeking to deconstruct the limits of work, play and everything in between. Although Jorn's theoretical reworking of a central Marxist tenet never really took off, his attempt left a legacy that is increasingly felt around the world.

Keep up with VICE Sports' coverage of the more conventional two-sided football here.

"Jorn was hopeless at trying to describe [triolectics]," said Dyson. "He was coming completely out of left field, and no one had a clue what he was talking about. So he came up with the metaphor of three-sided football to explain it."

In keeping with the antiauthoritarian spirit that gave birth to the sport, the rules of 3sf are few, and considered more as guiding principles than steadfast laws. In general, the game should involve a ball, three teams and a hexagonal pitch—anything beyond this is subject to spontaneous revision.

Unlike conventional football, a team doesn't win by scoring the most goals, but rather victory is predicated on how few goals a team concedes to its opponents. This arrangement is supposedly meant to expose the ideological underpinnings of conventional football, which is confrontational, aggressive and deterministic: There is generally a clear winner and loser, and players must operate in accordance with rigid rules and well-defined strategies.

With 3sf, much of this disappears.

FIFA's video "How Three-sided Football Works"

"When we started, we thought you would consciously go up to other teams and say, 'Should we have an alliance?' and strategize like that," said Dyson. "But it never works like that. When you are playing, you genuinely have no idea whether you are going to be playing with that team or that team. You can look at it with rationality and say, 'This should happen if you want to win,' But then the dynamic of the game takes it in a completely different direction. It is, as Jorn predicted, an absolutely sublime form of spontaneity."

By all accounts, Jorn never lived to witness an actual iteration of his theoretical game. Following his death in 1973, it seemed as though 3sf was destined for obscurity, like much of the rest of Jorn's philosophy. Yet, in 1994, the game was given new life by a group of Situationist-inspired architecture students who had convened in Glasgow for their annual winter school session.

Known by many as the Anarchist Winter School, the group was dedicated to pretty much everything except architecture and was comprised of radical leftists and members of the avant-garde art community, such as Reclaim the Streets and the London Psychogeographical Association. It was here that Dyson first met Fabian Tompsett, a member of the Psychogeographical Association who happened to be translating Jorn's works from Danish.

Dyson didn't know it at the time, but this chance meeting was the beginning of a close friendship that would eventually give rise to the first 3sf league in the world.

Photo by Mark Dyson

According to many three-sided footballers, if Jorn was the father of the sport, then Tompsett was its son. At the 94 Winter School, it was Tompsett who first suggested that the group test Jorn's theoretical sport to see if it was really as valuable as the Dane assumed it to be. So at Tompsett's behest the group donned their jumpers to brave the frigid Glasgow temperatures, playing what was the first manifestation of three-sided football in history. Although it only lasted about half an hour, by all accounts the game was both a monumental success and a dismal failure.

"Most of us had had a bit too much to drink and certainly a bit too much to smoke when we went out to the pitch," recalled Dyson. "I vaguely remember the first five to ten minutes as about 50 people just running after the same ball. None of us were footballers, so it must have looked appalling. This went on for about half an hour, but it was bloody freezing so we quickly abandoned it and fled to the pub."

Despite the lackluster spectacle of the first 3sf match, the game was all but dead. It continued to spontaneously spring up in the most unlikely of places (including a slurry dump dubbed the "Dundas Hill Moonscape", tenement roofs and even in the middle of a forest), largely living on in the European anarchist book fair circuit thanks to Tompsett's ardent promotion of the sport.

Following the initial match at the Winter School, 3sf quickly became little more than a happy memory for Dyson. Then, while attending a performance by his close friend and artistic collaborator Stewart Home in 2011, Dyson met Neil Transpontine, an artist and member of the Disconauts, a group of experimental artists intent on going to space with a profound interest in 3sf.

According to Dyson, the duo got on "like a house on fire" and decided to host a memorial 3sf match in the Southeast London neighborhood of Deptford.

WATCH: Our documentary about the fierce rivalry between Rangers and Celtic.

Deptford was perfectly suited to the match for a number of reasons: Not only does the area allegedly have the largest concentration of artists per square kilometer in Europe, but, more importantly, unlike most of London's parks, Fordham Park is a free communal space that is not policed.

"Normally we'd have to pay the local authority a fee to use the grass because someone is mowing it and police are making sure that no drunks come into the park and start kicking off," said Dyson "There are lots of drunks in Fordham—it's lovely. They normally come and watch, and occasionally they even run onto the field to help us out."

Unlike most sporting events, the unsolicited participation of drunk spectators is not a nuisance, but rather an integral part of the spectacle. As Dyson puts it: "This is a free and open game. Even though we have teams, anybody who turns up and wants to play is always welcome to come on the pitch."

As Dyson's allusion to the game's principles of radical inclusion suggests, 3sf will always remain philosophical at heart, as much a game as an effective form of social critique. This is especially true for the Philosophy Football Club's manager, Geoff Andrews, who views the sport as not just a theoretical vision come to life, but a salient counterpoint to the corruption of conventional football by way of runaway corporate investment and the rigid control by massive clubs.

Members of the Association of Autonomous Astronauts play a game of 3sf at the 1997 Intergalactic Conference. Image courtesy of Ewen Chardonnet

"[3sf] seems like an idea whose time has come, given the state of world football," said Andrews. "We play on free pitches, don't need the patronage of the state or commercial bodies and it sits easily with the amateur spirit and internationalist values."

With a significant presence already established in Europe thanks to the efforts of Tompsett and others, the game has also found support down under, where league matches are regularly held in Melbourne. There have also been teams established in places such as Turkey, Malaysia and Japan, suggesting that the appeal of the sport easily transcends cultural and national boundaries, much like its conventional analog.

In light of the global proliferation of 3sf, a decision was made to host the first three-sided world cup in Silkeborg, Denmark in May of 2014. While the rest of the globe had their eyes trained on Brazil for the FIFA matches, teams from Turkey, Lithuania, the UK, France, Poland, Denmark and Germany duked it out for the title of the best 3sf team in the world.

Following the relative success of the 3sf World Cup, the London three-sided footballers managed to garner enough attention to form the six-team Luther Blissett league, which meets on the Deptford Green on the first Sunday of each month to play two simultaneous matches, September through June. Like almost everything else associated with the sport, the name of the league is derived from a nom de plume adopted by hundreds of artists and activists around the world in reference to an England footballer whose heyday was in the 1980s.

"The Luther Blissett league is still very much predominated by either surrealist/Situationist types or anarchist/Marxist types, or a combination of the two," Dyson said. "We are influenced by... the life of the street, graffiti, posters, using the city as an ongoing art gallery, going on drifts to see what we find. [We're] just trying to work as little as possible and play as much as possible."

Follow Daniel on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Jason Rogers

On Tuesday morning, federal agents and New York City police officers descended upon the headquarters of the internet portal that bills itself as "the World's Largest Gay Escort and Massage Site." Seven people, including company CEO Jeffrey Hurant, were arrested as part of an alleged money laundering and prostitution scheme, as NBC-New York reported.

In the past, advertisements for Rentboy.com have been careful to clarify that they are not for sex, suggesting instead that the men on the site were merely offering up companionship or body-rubs. However, a cache of the site shows that you can—or at least could—select dudes based on categories like "cock."

Perhaps it's unsurprising, then, that a federal indictment alleges that the company was making money off of sex. More specifically, its owners are charged with conspiring to violate the Travel Act, which criminalizes going from state to state to commit certain offenses. In this case, the Act gave the feds the ability to go after Rentboy for promoting prostitution.

"As alleged, Rentboy.com attempted to present a veneer of legality, when in fact this internet brothel made millions of dollars from the promotion of illegal prostitution," acting United States Attorney Kelly T. Currie said in a statement.

Rentboy was founded in 1997 as the first-ever all-male escort site. Users pay a minimum of $59.95 per month to place advertisements there, and between 2010 and 2015, the service raked in more than $10 million, according to a press release put out the Justice Department.

The others arrested this morning were Michael Sean Belman, Clint Calero, Edward Lorenz Estanol, Shane Lukas, Diana Milagros Mattos, and Marco Soto Decker. If found guilty, each defendant could see up to five years in prison and pay a $250,000 fine.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.