One man's mech suit and its dog, from 'Fallout 4'

It's September, and the last of what Brits pitifully like to call summer is, most likely, over. You get home from work, and collapse on the sofa, trying to ignore EastEnders by playing Fallout Shelter on your phone before The Great British Bake Off begins. (Editor's note: You are British in this scenario, just go with it.) Your partner turns to you, puckers up, and presents you with the impossible question: "So, what game do you want for Christmas?"

Game. Singular. One game. A shelf of software hangs imposingly in the room, with the complete collection of every limited-edition release of the Halo franchise, the last three FIFAs (because they're worth nothing in trade-in value) and a Kinect game you brought once for a party... You no longer have parties. "You can't do this," says the part of your brain completely disassociated from your credit card. "There are so many games between now and then," it protests. "How do you just choose one? Let alone wait until the end of December for it?"

Nutshell: This is the busiest time to be a gamer for years. There is a big, triple-A game released pretty much every week between now and the end of 2015. I count at least 18 of them, and these aren't exactly small, easily consumed games either. You're looking at some that are already out, like the weeks-consuming Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain and expansive open-world of Mad Max. And on the horizon, just so many titles to lose yourself in: Fallout 4, Halo 5: Guardians, Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, and Star Wars: Battlefront, to name but four. That's not counting the upcoming remasters, backwards-compatible games, or the excellent batch of indie games like Volume and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture that are already out but you can be forgiven for missing (but, really, you should play them, eventually).

Again: how do you just choose one? This is impossible. And now your partner is freaking out because you've given them a potential shopping list running to hundreds of pounds and they're more confused than you are over what's needed right now and what can wait until the January sales and oh just stop it already, here's Mary Berry.

Look, you're never going to get through all of these games. Not between now and Christmas—not between kids, in-laws, work, inevitable car repairs come the cold weather, energy bills, the world's economy exploding, and Jeremy Corbyn seemingly about to fire us into the sun if he wins the Labour leadership—and that's assuming you could afford them all, anyway. As for picking just one, well, it's one that you're at least guaranteed to be enjoying, albeit after the flurry of hype for it has dissipated somewhat. But that's OK. Seriously, it's OK.

You don't actually have to get every game. The current marketing machine around video games is very good and, yes, journalists like me are a part of it, but the truth is that nobody expects you to buy every game. Well, maybe Activision does, and perhaps EA, too. But apart from those two companies, nobody else expects you buy All The Games.

This may seem blatantly obvious, but in our socially interconnected world you'd be forgiven for feeling like you have some contractual obligation as a gamer to play everything. You might well feel the fear that if you don't keep up, you'll be left behind. As a gamer hurtling towards middle age, I'm becoming increasingly aware of the generation below me being vastly knowledgeable about a lot of different games, and that's even before you look at the generation of YouTube viewers living vicariously through their subscriptions—I mean, who even needs to play the games when your favorite Let's Player is doing it for you? But if you do prefer to be hands-on, what you need is a system, a way to prioritize what to buy and what to dedicate your valuable free time to while everyone else is watching Strictly or The X Factor this autumn. So I've broken it all down for you, so you don't have to do any of that thinking rubbish. Whatever your immediate desire is, or your personal circumstances are, here's the game to match it.

Article continues after the video below

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'Metal Gear Solid V'

Ending Chapters

You might be ready for a bit of closure this year. Preparing for the end of something close to your heart. While the real world squeezes itself into a ball of post-capitalist destruction, you might need to console yourself with the big, the bombastic, the outrageous, and the cardboard boxes that natively inhabit the Afghan desert in the mid-1980s. If so, then Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is for you. Hideo Kojima's last stand is already being heralded as not only his best, but also one of the greatest stealth games ever made.

'Dishonored: Definitive Edition'

More Nostalgia

Every winter, the blues about how great things used to be haunt us, whatever our age. Thankfully, gaming has you covered with a slew of HD remasters, or as I like to call them: games I'd forgotten about or didn't get around to playing the first time. It's been a big year already for such releases, but you can pick up Gears of War: Ultimate Edition if you're an Xbox owner right now, or Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection in October if you prefer the PS4. But the smartest purchase might be Dishonored: Definitive Edition, which takes Bethesda's excellent steampunk stealth adventure of 2012 and retunes everything for today's more-powerful consoles. If you missed it before, don't in 2015.

Just 'Fallout 4,' Please

Speaking of Bethesda, Fallout 4 is the game that's almost certainly sure to steal the year, and it comes with a cool Pip Boy app for your smartphone. It's not out until November though, and it's going to be massive, so even if you've plenty of holiday owed, you still might want to arrange some gardening leave to fully enjoy the wastelands of Massachusetts.

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'NBA 2K16'

Sports, Whammy!

If you really insist, then I'm sure you can find more room on your own shelf of untradeable games. EA Sports are bringing you the usual trio of its FIFA, Madden NFL, and NHL iterations, while 2K is going full on Hollywood with Spike Lee's involvement in NBA 2K16 and Arnold Schwarzenegger delivering a T-800 turn in WWE 2K16 (which is shaping up pretty well). But if you want to look outside of the box a little, Pro Evolution Soccer 2016 is looking like it really can deliver this year, and Tony Hawk is due to make a return with late-September's Pro Skater 5, which, at my age anyway, is much more appealing than actually skating.

'Rainbow Six: Siege'

Pew Pew Pew

This year hasn't been a great year for shooters, but there are a few options imminent. You have your upcoming Call of Duty release with Black Ops 3, and Halo 5: Guardians is evidently trying to push that franchise forward. But if you're doing any shooting this year, you should be doing it in Star Wars: Battlefront. Even if you don't like Star Wars, the new movie will be in the cinema and you won't be able to escape it, so you might as well embrace its video game side. The DICE production could well set the highest bar yet for Star Wars-based games.

Or, you may be interested in Rainbow Six: Siege, assuming it stays on schedule, as a good story-based alternative to the current glut of multiplayer shooter options. Plus, Xbox owners can get the two Rainbow Six: Vegas games on backward compatibility, which technically represents three games for the price of one.

'LEGO Dimensions'

I Need Something the Kids Can Play While I Cry In the Corner

Oh, come on now. What you really mean is a game that's supposedly for children, but that you secretly want to play, but having sprogs provides justification for the purchase, yes? Well, Disney Infinity 3.0 can have you covered with its Star Wars crossover (see, you really can't escape it), but the fun money is definitely on LEGO Dimensions, especially if you haven't already plunged unseemly amounts of cash into Skylanders or Infinity. It certainly feels like an entertaining game with the ability to give each kid (you) a level pack of their own (they're all for you), to keep everyone (you) happy, and they double up as actual usable LEGO. But the retro kid in you might just fall in love with Transformers: Devastation, the 1980s cartoon-inspired fighting game that could turn out great simply by being everything that Michael Bay's interpretations are not.

'Just Cause 3'

Is There Anything Else, Though?

Just Cause 3 is there for big open-world explosion fun, Destiny has its The Taken King expansion, there's a new Need for Speed, and if you're an Xbox One owner you've both Forza Motorsport 6 and Rise of the Tomb Raider as exclusives to look forward to. On a multi-format front there's also a new Hitman game, if you aren't already bored to tears with stealth games, and an Assassin's Creed set in London, Syndicate. Mad Max is an Ubisoft title in disguise, doing all of those unlocking of new challenges and character upgrade things that you expect from the Creed series, but setting its action amongst surprisingly beautiful wastelands and borrowing some combat mechanics from Rocksteady's Arkham games. It's a lot better than it perhaps sounds on paper, and is out now.

But if you want to alleviate some of the familiarity, head to the digital stores. Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is the standout PS4 game of the summer, closely followed by Volume, made by Thomas Was Alone designer Mike Bithell. And the Xbox One should have Frontier's Elite: Dangerous coming out of its preview program shortly, which will take years off your life with its incredibly vast scope. Until Dawn is a PS4-exclusive that's a must for horror fans, and already out.

'No Man's Sky'

Is There Anything Really NEW, Though?

Unless No Man's Sky gets a release date, nothing that's not already listed up there.

But I Haven't Got Any Money

Then you should be playing Hearthstone already. Why aren't you playing Hearthstone?

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And that's your lot—and yes, I know what I've done here. I've told you that you don't need to buy every game, before highlighting more than 30 of them. But prioritizing is the key here, along with some savvy shopping. The retail space is dangerous, and one-click purchases can destroy your finances long before Black Friday. But while the choices before you may be vast, there's never been a better time to be a gamer. So a final piece of advice: just go with what you like. It's easy to forget your own tastes amongst so much pressure from advertising and sites like this one to get involved with a wealth of new video games. Ultimately, much like any entertainment, you'll tell your friends about what games you enjoyed the most, and you'll be smiling because that's the confirmation that you've chosen what you like, and that's all anyone can ask for.

Follow Sean Cleaver on Twitter.

'Mr. Robot' protagonist Elliot Alderson, played by Rami Malek, hacks. Image via Mr. Robot trailer

Warning: spoilers ahead.

On Monday night, the latest batch of Hillary Clinton's emails during her tenure as Secretary of State were made available for public viewing by the State Department. The emails are mostly boring—Clinton and her advisors and aides setting up phone calls, discussing news articles, going over itineraries—but as you read through them, you get the sense that Clinton has little to no sense of technological know-how. On one level, the disparity between Clinton's tech illiteracy and that of her team isn't a big deal—one of the reasons powerful officials have such large staffs in the first place is because they can't possibly be an expert in every field, and just because Hillary Clinton didn't know how to plug in an iPad doesn't disqualify her from potentially being the leader of the free world. But the cynical, paranoid hackers of USA network's Mr. Robot might look at the situation like this: If Hillary Clinton can barely use technology that we use in our daily lives, her tech advisors could have been telling her anything and she would have taken it at face value. They could have told her to sign off measures that would have imposed an electronic police state, and she might not have even understood what that meant.

Now, clearly, we're a few levels away from full-on e-Panopticon. But Mr. Robot, a startlingly good, insanely complicated show, illustrates that we're closer than we might realize. The show, whose first season concludes in the US tonight (and which premieres in Canada on Showcase on Friday), takes place in a world extremely similar to our own, in which a massive conglomerate called E Corp is a leader in both the tech and banking fields, and as a result is owed over 70 percent of the country's debt. They are as close to a totalitarian government as a corporation can get.

The scariest part of Mr. Robot's dystopia is how close to real life it is.

At its heart, Mr. Robot is a show about being monitored. Its protagonist, Elliot—played by the intense, nervy Rami Malek—hacks everyone he meets, peering into their emails, social-networking accounts, and finances to discover their weaknesses and exploit them. Once he's, say, exposed his therapist's new boyfriend as a philandering piece of shit and confiscated the guy's dog, he exports his findings to a disc, deletes the files, and then often throws his hardware in the microwave. He's the guy who knows everyone else's secrets and who's obsessed with keeping his own secrets to himself.

And make no bones about it, Elliot's got a shit-ton of secrets. He's an on-and-off morphine addict who's so invested in orchestrating the biggest hack in history that he's hidden his plans from everyone, even himself. Elliot is the show's narrator, and we see every scene in which he appears from his perspective. From the jump, it's fairly clear that Elliot has some mental issues, as he's trained himself to hear every mention of "E Corp" as "Evil Corp." Christian Slater plays the show's title character, the leader of fsociety, the Anonymous-esque hacking group that's trying to take down E(vil) Corp. Mr. Robot turns out to be Elliot's dad, who turns out to have been dead all along. Meaning, in a decidedly Tyler Durden-ish plot twist, Mr. Robot is Elliot and vice versa, and that Mr. Robot is a projection of Elliot's unidentified mental illness. This throws the entire narrative of the show for a loop—we're meant to retroactively reframe all of the scenes featuring Mr. Robot as scenes featuring Elliot, or at least a version of him. The show's penultimate episode left off where the show's finale will pick up: in fsociety's Coney Island headquarters, Elliot and his nemesis—a sociopathic former hacker/disgraced Evil Corp executive named Tyrell Wellick—preparing to team up to take Evil Corp down.

As a piece of entertainment, Mr. Robot is pretty damn airtight. Whenever the show presents the viewer with a twist, it feels logical and justified, like signals suddenly making themselves clear through the noise. However, it rarely feels like the show's telegraphing, and it never seems like showrunner Sam Esmail is plotting the show by the seat of his pants. It's a delicate balance, and the show hits it more often than not.

Part of Esmail's painstaking attention to detail also involves his adherence to the real-life conventions of computing and hacking—the show employed experts to make the techniques of Elliot and fsociety as accurate as possible. As a result, the show—which Esmail admits was inspired in part by the Arab Spring—has ended up mirroring the real world in uncanny ways. fsociety orchestrates a data dump of Evil Corp's emails, allowing Elliot's childhood best friend Angela to discover evidence of negligence on Evil Corp's part that led to the death of her mother (and Elliot's dad). This recalls the ongoing fallout from Clinton's email dump, as well as the data breach of the cheaters' dating website Ashley Madison. Most recently, USA elected to postpone the finale of the first season from last Wednesday to tonight, due to the inclusion of a scene that features a gruesome, on-camera murder, offering an eerie parallel to last week's shooting in Virginia, in which a local news reporter and cameraman were murdered on live TV.

The scariest part of Mr. Robot's dystopia is how close to real life it is. As the show wraps up its first season and extends into its second, I have no doubt it will continue to express uncomfortable truths about modern society's relationship with technology: namely, that we have passively agreed to participate in a system in which our data can be compromised at any moment. Data is, after all, neutral: It can be unfairly used against individuals to manipulate them, or it can be used against institutions to take them down. One of the inherent contradictions of speaking truth to power is that, if you want a large platform to reach people with your message, you inevitably have to do so within the constraints of power itself.

Mr. Robot is, in part, a show about the perils of late capitalism and dangers of corporate control. Yet USA president Chris McCumber told Vulture, "(The show) is a hot property right now. We have more demand than we can handle for Mr. Robot, and it's bringing in new advertisers."

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To his credit, Esmail understands the inherent contradictions of making a show for a major network. In an interview with Slate, he said, "We are part of the machine, because we get paid by them to basically sell their products, but I've been pretty firm that we're not toning things down. If advertisers still are brave enough to put their commercials on this show that maybe is offering a different point of view on our economy, I think that's kind of cool of them, but the minute I start censoring myself, when I start watering things down, that's where I would draw the line."

The question of whose side anyone is on weighs heavily upon the Mr. Robot finale. As the show's ninth episode concluded with Elliot and Tyrell still negotiating the terms of their uneasy truce, we're meant to wonder if the pair are nothing more than two sides of the same coin. Elliot never seems to fully understand why he's decided to take down Evil Corp, viewing his mission as self-evident. But by teaming up with the ruthless and power-hungry Tyrell, he's created the possibility that something even more evil could be created in its ashes. Has Elliot even considered that taking down Evil Corp might disrupt the entire world economy? Is fsociety secretly working for an even shadier entity? The only bit of agency Elliot has left is in the form of a loaded gun sitting in a popcorn machine near him. What will he do with it?

For a show that revels in the contradictions created by a data-rich society, it's the information that Mr. Robot doesn't give us that's the most compelling.

Follow Drew on Twitter.

Canada should be ashamed of making Bill Nye sad. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

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Everyone's childhood science hero, Bill Nye The Science Guy, is currently in Alberta working on a climate change documentary. And not surprisingly, when Nye went to the tar sands, he thought it was a "depressive" sight.

"From an environmental point of view locally, it's astonishing and overwhelming," he told APTN National News.

The Alberta tar sands is one of the largest deposits of crude oil in the world, and has been the focus of plenty of controversy in Canada—especially among First Nation communities—for its damaging environmental effects.

On Monday, Nye visited the community of Fort McKay First Nation, where the land and the community has been severely impacted by decades of tar sands production.

"I think anybody would say that First Nations have rights that have been abridged or catastrophically curtailed," Nye told APTN.

He added that the hope for the environmental future in Canada could lie in the federal election—although Nye did not endorse any specific party. But he did point out that new views on the environment is what would be most helpful to address these issues, while remaining critical of the Harper government.

"Everybody says they feel like the tipping point's been reached. Everyone we speak with, where enough is enough kind of thing," he said. "But then you have people that are in denial of climate change, who justify all of this extraordinary exploitation to the environment."

Nye, who is also CEO of The Planetary Society, has been speaking out about climate change for years. Last year in an interview with VICE, he was already talking about Harper's focus on fossil fuels and how it's hurting Canada.

"The government in Canada is currently being influenced by the fossil-fuel industry," Nye had told VICE. "Stephen Harper is a controversial guy in the science community because [of] the policies, especially in Western Canada."

Follow Sierra on Twitter.

Photo of some other dude via Flickr user Jakub Zeke

Read: These Women Are Turning Dick Pics into Art

Sending a dick pic is very seldom the right move, and basically never the right move in the workplace, unless you work for that app that will diagnosis STIs through photo messages. And if you were just offered a position at a new job, sending the HR manager a picture of your peen is objectively the wrong move 100% of the time. Ditto for sending a second photo through after the first, for good measure.

Unfortunately, that's just what a 23-year-old from Aurora, Illinois, did in August, according to the Chicago Tribune. Now he's got some explaining to do to the cops.

"There was a conditional offer of employment made to this particular applicant," Michael Ruth, the police chief involved with the case, told the Tribune. "He texted the HR director and sent a nude photo of himself."

When the HR manager decided not to respond, the guy, naturally, sent another. Then he opted to call, presumably to double check that the pics were going through. The phone call alerted the manager to the identity of the man behind the cock shots, and she went straight to the police.

"My understanding is they've rescinded the offer of employment," said Ruth.

According to the police report the guy was trying to send the sexts to someone else, but blasted them to the HR manager by mistake.

Although the manager decided against pressing charges, police advised the man—wisely—to avoid initiating any contact whatsoever going forward.

Though he may be out of a job, the guy has hopefully learned to be a little more careful when texting, and maybe he'll even take the opportunity to step up his dick pic game.

Look at Stephen Maurice Graham's website, Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram.

The shed is circled in case you cannot see the shed. Photo via Mercury

Every week or so an advert for a London rental property appears that plumbs new depths of bad bastardry. Rent a bunkbed above a wardrobe, that sort of thing. Pay £1,500 a month [$2,300] to sleep in someone's shed. They got so difficult to comprehend that we decided to start cataloguing them.

What Is It? A shed! We've always joked about it in the nobody-reads-it-because-it's-in-italics paragraph at the top, but a shed! A fucking shed!
Where Is It? In someone's front room! In Bethnal Green!
What Is There to Do Locally? Think about your life choices up to this point, I would've thought;
Alright, How Much Are They Asking? £530 [$812], per month, bills included.

"Is London good, Joel?" my friends back home ask me, in their quaint way, with their funny little accents and their cursory-at-best knowledge about metropolitan things like Ubers and guacamole, and I tell them "Yes," I say. "It takes an hour to get anywhere and all the burgers have pulled pork on them, and you pay to take a elevator to the top of the tallest skyscrapers, and look down but not jump. It's brilliant," I say, "how everything is unlivably expensive and mad. People give you promotional bottles of Lucozade sometimes on the Tube!" I say, and their eyes bulge in awe. "You can rent a shed in someone's front room!" I say, and they start screaming.

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It's difficult to process this one, mainly because this is a shed in a front room. A shed—a shed, remember, is a specialist wooden box for dads to cry in and a place for normal people to keep their old plant pots and bikes—but it has been erected not in a garden but in a front room, painted an inoffensive shade of off-white, nestled behind the sofa. It's like looking at a whale carefully hidden in an airplane, or a lamppost coming out of a frog—something anonymous and boring, rendered insane by its context.

This was the discovery made by flathunter Joe Peduzzi when he went along to a SpareRoom viewing in Bethnal Green. "'When I first walked in I sort of noticed the shed in the background but didn't really take it in," he said, after the viewing. "Then I scanned around the room and couldn't see a bed so I asked where it was and the guy just pointed to the corner. I stuck my head in for a look but there was basically no room for movement. The mattress was right against the walls of this shed and the windows were blacked out." You might have missed it at the first scan-through, so please just read this quote again, with feeling: "I sort of noticed the shed in the background but didn't really take it in".

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The shed—which was in a communal room, notice, so you would have to try to sleep in your shedbed while your flatmates eat curry literally inches away from you, or watched Big Bang Theory, or went on Snapchat—or did any of the other millions of annoying housemate activities that housemates do, like legitimately try to engage you in a conversation about philosophy—all while you tried to deal with the fundamentally clawing despair of trying to sleep in a blacked-out shed in a room in Bethnal Green, suddenly very much missing your family and your home, suddenly very much feeling like London isn't the city for you, because you're just playing at being a grown-up, aren't you? You're just a child, lost and alone and sitting in the dark in a locks-from-the-inside shed, and you think you're independent but you're not, and your job didn't turn out as good as you thought it would be, did it, and nothing really worked out how you envisioned it, and the nights are drawing in—close and dark and cold—and it's just you, in your Sonic pajamas, trying not to alert your housemates to the fact that you're trying to escape the doom with a cheeky shed-wank, trying not to move the mattress around too much as you try to manipulate your genitals because the mattress makes a sort of creaking sound against the side of your shed and they know, they know. Your parents were married by this age, had kids. They were eight years away from paying their mortgage off. They knew how to drive and both had a car. They had skills and read books. You've only just broken 100 followers on Twitter. Life. Life. It's shit.

Here's that shed again, just in case you forgot about it somehow

In a way you have to respect the "What? This is totally ordinary" attitude of the dude trying to rent the shed, though. "I had quite a hard time getting my head around it to be honest," Peduzzi said. "I didn't ask what the story behind it was but he seemed to think it was pretty normal." Similarly, SpareRoom director Matt Hutchinson was pretty blasé about the whole thing. "We're no strangers to quirky ads but this one puts a whole new spin on the phrase 'beds in sheds,'" he told the Mail, invoking a phrase literally nobody has ever used. "There's no clear reason given for putting a bed inside a shed, inside a bedroom, but it could be because the other housemates use the room as communal space. It's a sign of the times that fewer house shares now have living rooms."

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But then this probably isn't the first attempt at indoor shed rental in London, and it won't be the last. Landlords are robots designed to spot how to turn slithers of potential space into a semi-livable but fully rentable opportunity, robots who say things like "I fixed the boiler promptly as a sign of goodwill, but I will now be bringing up the rent to market value," robots who say, "a handyman will be hitting everything in the house with a hammer on Sunday morning, hope that's OK," robots who say, "no wonder you've got damp in here, you keep opening the windows! Don't open windows. That's an extra £40 [$60] a month each on the rent," landlords who heave a flatpack shed up two sets of stairs to assemble it in a front room in an attempt to squeeze an extra £530 a month out of this broken, broken rental market. And until we do what I have long been suggesting we do—round up the landlords, in a line, blindfolded and stood against a wall and shot—until we all collectively rise up and get that done, this is how it goes: all of us, tired and poor and alone, living that "beds in sheds" lifestyle.

Follow Joel Golby on Twitter.

Dungeons & Dragons has had a good year. The release of the 5th Edition of the classic tabletop roleplaying game has been hugely popular: The Player's Handbook hit the number-one spot on the Amazon bestseller list, attendance of players at events in gaming stores is up, and there's even a new D&D movie in the works at Warner Brothers.Players often guide their characters through prepackaged adventures, and the latest one to be released isOut of the Abyss, out September 15 involves evil elves, demons, and the Underdark, an underground world the adventure's writers have redesigned from a dank, gray maze of caves to a more colorful, hypnotic, Alice in Wonderland-like realm. When the 5th Edition was released last summer, it seemed like D&D was on the verge of being "cool." Now, a year later, Wizards of the Coast, which owns D&D, seems to be getting Out of the Abyss to as broad an audience as possible.

In the 15 years that I've been playing D&D, I've never seen a marketing push behind an ancillary product (i.e., not a new edition with its Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide) like the one that's being marshaled for this new adventure, including a high-budget CGI trailer featuring howling demons, squid-faced mind-suckers, and various other underground beasts. The minds behind the game are bringing the character Drizzt Do'Urden (star of a slew of R. A. Salvatore's New York Times bestselling D&D books) to the forefront of this story, where in previous adventures, Do'Urden and his pals have always seemed one step removed from the action. All this is an attempt to get more eyes on the D&D brand, and this marketing push matches a move toward openness and accessibility that the game's never seen before.

"Geek culture and nerd culture is now just culture." –Chris Perkins

Dungeons & Dragons started out in 1974 as a strange passion for the nerdy and fantasy-obsessed. "In the early 80s, D&D actually had a cultural cache because it was like, 'What is this weird, kind of occult-inspired activity?'" said Mike Mearls, head of research and development at D&D since 2005. "And if you didn't play it, you didn't understand it. And if you watched people play, it still didn't really make any sense."

With its mix of magic and witchcraft, D&D has received its fair share of fundamentalist backlash in the past—like in 1989, when William Schnoebelen railed against D&D in his article " Straight Talk on Dungeons & Dragons" (and followed up in 2001 with "Should a Christian Play D&D") published by fellow D&D-hater Jack Chick.

However, Chris Perkins, principal designer for D&D since 2013, wasn't so concerned, citing a greater tolerance for the game's occult themes due to the prevalence of video games and the internet. "Demons are a part of D&D and always have been," he said.

Art from the new D&D adventure 'Out of the Abyss.' Courtesy of Wizards of the Coast

Occult concerns weren't the only troubles nagging early D&D, according to Ethan Gilsdorf, author of the pop-culture memoir Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks. "People began to notice how much time the game takes up," he said. "It was seen as something so immersive and so involved that people supposedly lose track of reality, or lost the ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy." This idea was taken on in the made-for-TV movie Mazes and Monsters, which starred Tom Hanks as a college student who becomes obsessed with a D&D-like game and eventually loses his mind,.

Over the past year, however, the general public's reaction to D&D has been "shifting," according to Mearls. "I was just watching Wet Hot American Summer," he said, "and there's a D&D reference in the original movie, and the D&D player is a total nerd, right? They got all the details wrong. The person who wrote that dialogue probably never actually played D&D, or didn't have much firsthand interaction with it. These days, people who are generating our pop culture now have actually played D&D."

"For those in the know, for those who follow popular culture, the game has gained a kind of legendary status," agreed Gilsdrof. "It's almost like a badge of honor. People who used to play D&D in the 70s, 80s, and 90s are now reaping the benefits."

"Geek culture and nerd culture is now just culture," observed Perkins.

"Now we're getting lumped in with comic books and everything else," said Mearls.

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David M. Ewalt, author of the hobby-delving D&D history Of Dice and Men, attributes D&D's more mainstream success to the fact that people are, generally, playing games more often. "The game doesn't have the same stigma that it once did," he explained. "Games in general have become so much more mainstream."

It's a trend that Wizards of the Coast seeks to continue by broadening the public perception of the brand.

"Our vision of D&D has evolved over the past few years," explained Perkins. "While the tabletop roleplaying game is, and always will be, the spiritual heart of Dungeons & Dragons, we're thinking of the game as a larger entertainment property. Similar to the way Marvel uses their comics as the heart of their brand but they are branching off to other entertainment experiences in order to capture a larger audience. They can then take that new audience and reintroduce them to the comics and say, "See, this is where all this great stuff comes from.'"

"[Wizards of the Coast] knows that this is a different world," agreed Ewal. "They know they're competing against video games and other tabletop games, so they've done a lot to reach out to new players."

But Dungeons & Dragons isn't just evolving from a business or franchising standpoint. The game's making strides to embrace diversity and acceptance within their community.

"A lot of it starts with us and how we approach our storytelling," Mearls said. "When you're a creator, and you're trying to be mindful of race, gender, and sexuality, it's very easy to create a caricature. But for us we want everyone in the game to see themselves."

Much has been written about D&D's push to catch up with third-wave feminism, and many were pleasantly surprised when the official rulebook commented on gender binaries and fluidity. "We kind of thought, Would people freak out about this?" Mearls said. "I can't think of anyone who's directly told me that they had a problem with it. I mean, who wants to admit that they're a bigot?"

Part of this uptick in inclusiveness comes from how the game is played. Mearls noted that the very nature of the game—as an activity you sit down with your friends to play—means that there's a smaller barrier to entry. You don't have to go into a comic book store and have a know-how showdown with strangers. You don't have to seek out cosplay conventions and build a place for yourself in a new community. If you like it, and your friends like it, you can play.

"I don't necessarily need this big support network to take part in this culture," said Mearls. "So I think there's a certain amount of built-in accessibility helping D&D."

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"We see about a 40-60 split of female to male players in our store," related Lauren Bilanko, co-owner of Twenty Sided Store, a game shop in Brooklyn. Though she admits, "We are in New York, so I imagine that might skew the numbers a little bit." Bilanko said that, growing up, she was never introduced to Dungeons & Dragons. "I'd heard about it, but I grew up in a house of all sisters, and fantasy wasn't as in your face in popular culture back then. Sci-fi was huge, but fantasy really wasn't."

So now, when "women are coming in and buying the game all the time," she can't help but think it's related to the prevalence of fantasy in pop culture. "That being said, it's still very intimidating for women, really for anyone new to the game, to come and play in a public space. We try to fight that by creating an open, welcoming environment, and I think a lot of stores are following suit."

Mearls said the inclusiveness, and their attention to their diverse audience, has strengthened the game's following. "We're seeing a bigger audience than we've seen in a very long time—in decades. It's so easy to cast this idea that technology will be the death of D&D, but it's been really interesting to see how that has been absolutely incorrect."

As the game continues to grow, Perkins is convinced it will remain important to those who play it. "Once you actually experience the game," he said, "it's something that you end up loving your entire life."

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"'We've been tossed into the societal refuse heap. It's the landfill of humanity.'"

It was 2013, and Daletha Hayden was reading aloud from an open letter written by her son. Those were dark days. Ian Whitson, then 30 years old, had been in a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitations (CDCR) security housing unit—or SHU, a.k.a. solitary—for four years at that point. In his letter, Ian wrote that he spent 24 hours a day in his eight-foot-by-12-foot cell at the California Correctional Institution in Tehachapi, with two hours per week of "yard" time in a steel cage. "My son isn't refuse," Daletha told me then. "He's a human being. And I'm proud of him that he's standing up for his rights."

She was scared, too. Her son had stopped eating. Whitson was participating in the largest hunger strike in California history, along with 30,000 other inmates across the state, in an effort to bring attention to the plight of long-term SHU residents. The strike lasted 60 days (two smaller, briefer strikes took place in 2011), and was conducted in tandem with a class-action suit filed in 2012 by a group of long-term inmates in the SHU at Pelican Bay State Prison, some of whom had been there for decades. The suit, Ashker v. Governor of California , was born of litigation started by Pelican Bay SHU inmates Todd Ashker and Danny Troxell in 2009. They alleged that SHU conditions amounted to cruel and unusual punishment, in violation of the Eighth Amendment, and that inmates put into solitary were denied their rights to due process.

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Things got a bit brighter for SHU inmates and their families on Tuesday, however, when a settlement was reached that should end unlimited detention of suspected gang members in the state prison system. The terms are promising for the reduction of the volume of inmates stuck in the hell that is solitary in California, and perhaps beyond, as advocates hope other states will follow in reforming their own solitary confinement regimes.

"Very prolonged" solitary will be limited, and those in it will get more time out of their cells. Among the other settlement terms: No more indefinite SHU sentences will be given, no inmate can be housed in the Pelican Bay SHU for more than five continuous years, and a new type of housing known as the Restricted Custody General Population Unit will aim to offer a more humane mode of segregation for potentially dangerous inmates. For at least 24 months, transparency will increase, so that inmates' conditions within the SHU are monitored by plaintiffs' legal counsel to ensure CDCR adheres to the settlement terms.

One of the most important reforms sounds like a minor semantic point, but in fact is a game-changer: California's use of solitary confinement will change from a "status-based" system to a "behavior-based system," in which inmates can only be placed in solitary for a so-called "SHU-admissible" offense—prison-speak for "serious rule violation." The "status" in question was membership or affiliation with a gang, and for years, actual or suspected gang affiliation has been enough to put an inmate in the SHU for an indefinite period of time, with a case review taking place only every six years. The status-based system was part of prison officials' attempts to manage the gang violence that took root in California prisons in the 1970s, and led to the conditions of extremely long-term, severe isolation Ashker et al . protested in their class-action suit.

Watch: Life Inside Norwegian Prisons

"Why these SHUs were created in the first place, you have to look back at what was going on in this department 30 and 40 years ago," said Terry Thornton, spokesperson for CDCR. "There was a lot of gang violence, a lot of employees murdered, inmates murdered, riots, it was a horrible time... the department needed to get control."

So officials got control. They segregated inmates "validated" as belonging to gangs, which broke down along racial lines, with the most powerful organizations bearing names like the Mexican Mafia, the Aryan Brotherhood, and the Black Guerrilla Family.

"Gang members and associates needed to be removed from the general population inmates so that they don't influence them, coerce them, recruit them," Thornton explained, adding that segregation worked and violence went down.

The system relegated gang members—or suspected members—to a kind of black hole, where, the saying went, the only ways out were to parole, snitch, or die.

But the status-based system took on a life of its own. To reduce gang activity in prison, inmates like Ian Whitson were put in the SHU upon being identified as gang associates. The evidence for their affiliation might have been literally worn on the sleeve, such as a tattoo, or it might have been that another inmate mentioned them in a " debriefing process" (in other words, snitched) or—one of the factors in Whitson's case—because they made drawings deemed to have gang connotations, such as a dragon or Aztec imagery.

The system relegated gang members—or suspected members—to a kind of black hole, where, the saying went, the only ways out were to parole, snitch, or die. The lack of human contact, the long waits between case reviews, and the indefinite length of a stint in solitary were excruciating facts of life.

After a time, conditions in the Pelican Bay SHU were so intolerable that a group of men of various races and with various gang affiliations came together to produce a document titled "The Agreement to End Hostilities."

The agreement, released in August 2012, declares its signers' intentions to "collectively seize this moment, and put an end to more than 20-30 years of hostilities between our racial groups... we must all hold strong to our mutual agreement from this point on and focus our time, attention, and energy on mutual causes beneficial to all of us [i.e., prisoners], and our best interests. We can no longer allow CDCR to use us against each other for their benefit!!" Some of the documents' authors, Todd Ashker, Arturo Castellanos, Sitawa Nantambu Jamaa (Dewberry), and Antonio Guillen, are named plaintiffs in the class action against California.

"The prisoners have been leading this movement from the very beginning and they have to get the lion's share of the credit." – Rachel Meeropol

Ashker and his team earned a victory earlier this year, when federal Judge Claudia Wilken ruled that long-term Pelican Bay SHU inmates who had been relocated to other SHUs since the suit began were still eligible as plaintiffs. According to Rachel Meeropol of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and co-counsel for the plaintiffs, it was the inmates themselves—many of whom have studied law in prison—who came up with the idea to file a claim allowing the relocated SHU inmates to remain eligible, urging their lawyers to keep the class as broad as possible to make the suit more potent.

"The prisoners have been leading this movement from the very beginning and they have to get the lion's share of the credit," Meeropol told me. "They really pushed hard for us as the lawyers to move to supplement the complaint and to enlarge the class. We followed their lead on it and they were 100 percent right that this was the most important approach to take."

For its part, CDCR officials say their policies were heading in the same direction as the settlement terms anyway. The prison system started looking at issues around segregated housing (officials maintain that they do not use "solitary confinement") in 2007, and has made several adjustments to rules since then, including no longer putting inmates in the SHU based solely on gang validation and creating a "Step-Down Program" to reintroduce SHU inmates to the general population over the course of three to four years. The settlement is "part of this journey we've been on," according to Thornton, the CDCR spokeswoman. "It gets us to the direction we were already headed."

This weekend, Daletha plans to take the long trip up to the Oregon border to see Ian at Pelican Bay (he was transferred from Tehachapi earlier this year). She hopes this will be her last visit to her son as a SHU inmate—he's scheduled to be released into the general prison population any time now.

"It's wonderful," she said, the pride audible in her voice. There's more work ahead in reforming California's prison systems, she pointed out, but for the moment, "I'm very optimistic. I feel like the public is more aware and we're on the road to treating one another like human beings."

Follow Lauren Lee White on Twitter.

Geralt faces off against one of the game's bigger beasts, a fiend

Like video games? VICE has a whole section devoted to them, which you can find here.

Gaming's fallow summertime season, where major new releases grind to a near-complete halt, presents the opportunity for reflection and expectation. What's been played in 2015 and near enough forgotten already, what's been parked in the memory for nostalgic butterflies to flutter around later in life, and what I'm positively swollen with anticipation for. I care not for its exaggerated hype potentially skewering its end-product reality, as I am so hot for space-faring, planets-discovering, procedurally-generated epic No Man's Sky right now that I swear, crack an egg into the palms of my pad-contoured hands and that albumen will pop and sizzle for a solid four seconds. And there are more amazing games coming between now and Christmas. A new Fallout. A new Tomb Raider. A Star Wars game that almost certainly (hopefully) won't be shit. Sonic 2 in stereoscopic 3D. I haven't properly started Metal Gear Solid V yet, but when I do, oh boy.

But I can guarantee you that, after the presents are opened, the wrapping paper crunched into bin bags like the giant waste of time and money that it is, and disappointment stinks up the air of your familial home like someone's basted the turkey in underarm sweat, I'll still be playing a game I essentially started in January. It was way back then that I first got my hands on The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, the third role-playing game in Polish developer CD Projekt RED's series based on the fantasy novels and short stories of author Andrzej Sapkowski.

I was invited on a press trip to Stirling, Scotland, at the start of 2015, the game's makers keen to preview their title in surroundings that inspired some of its environments, inside and out. I feasted in Stirling Castle's Great Hall, its design mirrored by the game's Kaer Trolde. I soaked my inappropriate footwear in the snow that'd fallen the day before my arrival, freezing my toes. To be honest it was a beautiful location, and I felt pretty bloody lucky to be there, not being the kind of person who generally goes in for such jollies—but the abiding memory I took away with me was of the game itself.

I played only its prologue, set in the small but open area of White Orchard, effectively a training zone for the main game to come. As the series' monster-hunting leading man Geralt of Rivia, I took care of a griffin that'd been plaguing the locals and invading Nilfgaardian army alike, as well as a great many minor monsters. I upgraded my gear and sought out hidden loot, foraged for herbs to concoct potions and oils, and cultivated my dynamically growing beard (one of the game's countless small but so very satisfying delights). On the way home to the south coast I thought of little else than playing more of this amazing game.

Article continues after the video below

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I'd not been all that familiar with the supporting lore of the Witcher series ahead of the third game. I'd played some of the second, Assassins of Kings, on Xbox 360 when it came out as an "enhanced edition," but found its controls fiddly and its prison-set opening off-puttingly claustrophobic, and I didn't stick with it much beyond its first "boss" fight with a magical octopus (or whatever the hell that was). But from its dramatic opening cinematic onwards, I've been hooked by The Witcher 3, following up that north-of-the-border taste with a good 50 hours of "review" play on an advance version of the game, and I'm now catching up to where I was when I had to hand that disc back by using a regular, retail PlayStation 4 copy. That means seeing some of the same scenes, sorceresses, and specters for a third time—and I've not minded one bit.

Because the expansive, fantastic world of The Witcher 3 has become my happy place in 2015, a destination I'm eager to reach at the end of every shitty day that quite naturally comes (now and then) with publishing video games-related content to an unseen audience consistently featuring a vocal minority full of clickbait-this and liberal agenda–that commenters crowding my timeline with horseshit. I've worked in the online press long enough to feel no deep personal burn from pricks trash-talking content I've worked on, or that the many freelancers to VICE's web-based games coverage have spent several hours shaping into something (IMHO) pretty bloody great; but if I'm ever the slightest bit bummed out, the streets of Novigrad, swamps of Velen and peaks of Skellige make for fine pick-me-up retreats, swarming with interesting characters to exchange a quip or two with, or simply murder for a few more florens in the money purse.

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And I'm picking through proceedings quite deliberately slowly, to make the experience last. The Witcher 3 doesn't skimp on side-quests, treasure hunts and monster contracts—Geralt's bread-and-butter, missions where a particular nasty is neutralized in exchange for a bulging coin sack—so I can go a good fortnight without so much as touching the game's main narrative. Recent evenings have seen me, as Geralt, get leathered with a couple of loquacious travelers and wind up significantly lighter of clothes and possessions the next morning (oh, don't worry, I got them back, plus interest); track down and kill a spectral hound that was threatening the productivity of an apiary; and helped a troll decorate his dilapidated military post. I also took on a poisonous basilisk several levels above me and brought it down, to be rewarded with the treats it guarded. That was a good fight.

I'm still a little way short of where I was when I had to abandon the main story the first time around, having actually put in extra hours—but I'm enjoying myself a great deal more, straying from the beaten path and seeing what CD Projekt RED has filled my game of the (whole) year's extremities with. Wonders, basically, and while they will one day cease, I aim to make them last, through until the next snow's fall.

This article is taken from VICE magazine volume 22, issue 8. More information here.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Rishi Luchun

I first read The Game, the controversial bestseller exploring the culture of pickup artists (PUAs, for short), when I was 22 and I've remained fascinated ever since. The PUA lifestyle, which has a reputation for being misogynistic, manipulative, and devious, is devoted to forming strategies for picking up women. I'd heard the conversation openers in bars, and recognized that some of the methods had even worked on me. The idea of being vulnerable to them made me a little uncomfortable, and I wanted to know more, if only to be able to detect them when it was happening.

So when I heard that Neil Strauss, the author of The Game, helms a self-help program for pickup artists called Neil Strauss' Stylelife Academy, and that two friends of mine (Byron Seingalt and Jay Schultz) teach the weekend-long boot camps, I opted to tag along to see what I could glean from a workshop that claims to teach me how to hit on women like me.

Video via Stylelife Academy on YouTube

DAY ONE

The first day of the bootcamp began in Jay's apartment in Los Angeles. A sofa and some chairs were haphazardly arranged into a circle in the living room, where Byron and Jay—known respectively in the pickup community as "Evolve" and "the Sneak"—were waiting for students to arrive.

Byron is bearded and handsome, in a masculine, vampirish sort of way. He studied genetics at Yale before coming to work for Strauss. His book on seduction, Attract and Seduce, offers a four-step system for "attracting beautiful, high-caliber women and becoming the most interesting guy in the room."

And then there's Jay. If Byron is a movie villain, Jay is the wacky sidekick. He's warm and easy to talk to; he keeps his wild, curly hair swept up into a gravity-defying ponytail. When he read The Game as a lonely teenager and began taking responsibility for how girls saw him instead of being resentful, he says his life changed.

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Byron was in the middle of a rant about the alpha male, directed at no one in particular, when the students began shuffling in. First to arrive was Eric, a sweet-faced redhead with a mustache and an exaggerated Southern accent. Then came Tomas, a young-looking Hispanic guy, followed by two bald men, John and Paul, who arrived separately but both in burgundy button-ups. Paul was English. A salt-and-peppered fellow named Charles showed up not long after, and finally there was Alex, who had a red-blooded, clean-shaven Texan sort of vibe. I was struck by, on the whole, how reasonably attractive they were.

"You're always trying to put the best parts of yourself out there," Byron said. "That in itself is a show."

It felt like the first day of school, except instead of children fidgeting in their seats, it was grown men—and me. I could tell that my presence made them uncomfortable. Byron began by discussing the nature of seduction and how it applies to everything, whether or not we're paying attention. He doesn't believe in "naturals," he professed; he believes in people who are practiced.

The first principle to learn was to always be the exception, he said. He referenced a Chris Rock joke about how, when men talk to women, they're really saying, "How about some dick?" So women develop knee-jerk reactions to men who approach them—much the way we brush past petitioners on the street. The students' job was to be the guy who's not offering penis on a platter. Making people feel comfortable in conversation, he stressed, was the primary goal.

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Byron and Jay gave some examples of conversation openers, all of them questions. There was the cashmere sweater one, which goes, "Hey, quick question! I've gotta get out of here in a second, but I was planning on getting my friend's little sister a cashmere sweater for her birthday, and she wears both smalls and mediums. If someone gave you a sweater, would you rather it be a little too small or a little too big?" In the coffee shop version, you stage a phone "conversation" within earshot of a girl, debating which to get, so it's natural to ask her about it.

They had the students pair off to practice saying openers to each other and then answering the questions—over and over again, all at the same time. The cacophony of pickup lines drowning each other out was absurd. Half the group was stiltedly reciting the lines, but a few were quite natural.

"It's like acting," I whispered to Byron. That's the whole point, he said. "You're always trying to put the best parts of yourself out there. That in itself is a show."

Each student was to aim to do four to ten "sets," or cold approaches, with real-life girls at a designated club that night. Before it began, I privately asked Byron and Jay about the perception that every guy who pursues pickup is after barrels of pussy.

Jay told me how, years ago, he desperately wanted to have a one-night stand. He finally got a girl home and then, once in the act, came almost immediately. That was a necessary step toward becoming more evolved, he explained, since only by experiencing his fantasy's awkward realities could he discover that he preferred sex when it was serial.

Though there will always be those with less savory goals, Byron and Jay said what many of their students are looking for is simply a larger selection. They may even want to fall in love or get married, but nobody should settle for the first person who comes along because the pool they're choosing from is small or nonexistent. And, while it's important to work on yourself personally, Byron said, practical experience is realistically the only way to break through that social hymen (my term). That's why guys come to Stylelife. Often, they're desperate.

At the bar later, I watched the students nervously shifting their weight back and forth, sneaking glances at nearby girls. You could practically see their mothers waiting around the corner to scoop them up and rock them. I felt the urge to give them all hugs.

Video via Stylelife Academy on YouTube

DAY TWO

The next morning, we heard about everyone's experiences. Overall, it was uncomfortable, but a couple of the guys managed to enjoy themselves. Paul seemed to have the most luck.

Byron began discussing ways of adding value—like being able to give sincere compliments that aren't looks-based, and knowing about a variety of things. "The more you know," he lectured, "the more conversations you're capable of being a part of."

And then I heard the word I was most anticipating: negging. A neg is an insult wrapped in a compliment, and is perhaps the best known, most hated element of the PUA world. Negging, Byron and Jay told us, falls under what the seduction community calls "active disinterest"—basically anything that could potentially plant a seed of doubt in a girl's mind about whether you like her. Things like teasing and leaving the conversation hanging also work, or saying, "You're amazing! You'd be great for my friend."

Active disinterest, they explained, is designed to deactivate a girl's automatic reaction to a pattern (an assumed offering of dick), so she can respond to the person, creating room for a real connection. Jay reiterated, "It's still real, whether or not we think about it."

I mean, he's right. In my dating life, I make fun of guys, call them out on things, and make comments which, if I'm being honest, are subconsciously intended to make them feel just a teensy bit insecure. I essentially practice a version of active disinterest just inherently. So why exactly, I wondered, is it taboo to try to learn something that comes naturally to so many?

Byron added that people should avoid referring to human beings as "obstacles," stop rating women with numbers, and ditch the term "friend zone"—anything that implies a woman's only value is sexual.

Jay told me he thought everyone should try to get to a place where they don't decide they like someone before they know her, or because she's hot. That way, it's appropriate to plant seeds of doubt, because they're real.

He and Byron added that people should avoid referring to human beings as "obstacles," stop rating women with numbers, and ditch the term "friend zone"—anything that implies a woman's only value is sexual. This wasn't at all what I'd expected to hear in a pickup workshop.

I got to know some of the guys better at the club that night. Charles, the salt-and-pepper-y one, told me, "I'm not here to hook up with a bunch of chicks. It's more about improving my social skills and bedside manner with my patients." Charles is a chiropractor who's nice-looking if you like Michael Keaton (and I do), but he seemed uncomfortable whenever he spoke. It detracted from his attractiveness, but I had hope.

The other guys had similarly fascinating stories: Eric had studied meditation in India and joined Stylelife when he returned because he hoped to attract more women. He wanted to find someone he's compatible with, rather than settling for the first girl who's interested in him. Paul, who was stylish and conventionally good-looking, told me, "It's easier for me to talk to the chief executives of the top 500 companies in the UK than it is to talk to those two girls over there," gesturing to two mildly attractive women across the bar. I learned that he'd set a goal to do 1,000 approaches in two years, and write online "field reports," as they're called, about all of them.

Video via Stylelife Academy on YouTube

DAY 3

On the last day of the workshop, the guys seemed more comfortable, their body language relaxed. But we had yet to address a crucial moment: the kiss. Making the first kiss memorable was important, but if she rejects it, Byron said, don't act weird or get angry. Take responsibility. You read the moment wrong. He suggested saying, "You're awesome. I just felt like I had to do that." It might make her decide to kiss you after all, but mainly it's a nice thing to do. And, worst-case scenario, he noted, you end up with a cool friend.

Especially for the world of pickup, in which the most talked-about programs recently are the horrifically misogynistic ones headed by men like Roosh V and Julien Blanc, who've been banned from multiple countries, a lot of this seemed kind of revolutionary. They're saying women can also make good... friends? Even after they don't want to sleep with you?

Jay hit on health, grooming, fashion, and various ways of increasing your perceived external value. He told the students to think of four words that described how they wanted to be seen by women. I studied their faces, trying to guess their answers as Jay played the Jeopardy theme.

They selected words like protector, honest, kind, and secure. A few guys threw out smooth and exciting, but on the whole it was really... nice. Paul, who wanted to be powerful, charismatic, and exhilarating, was the only exception.

During the goodbye dinner, Paul quietly told me he'd met two women the night before and slept with both of them in his hotel room. He showed me a picture of the three of them in bed. I laughed.

I finally talked to Tomas, who'd been quiet with me throughout the weekend. "Everything they're teaching is stuff I've learned in my social evolutionary classes," he told me, referring to his psychology degree, "but learning the principles and applying them are two completely different things." Tomas was reluctant to read The Game at first. He's not interested in sleeping with random women at all. He joined Stylelife because, again, he wanted enough options to find the right person one day.

Yeah, I thought to myself, I guess I want that too.

Follow Lola Blanc on Twitter.

Photo by Tomas Gislason. Courtesy of Little Sun

Olafur Eliasson makes art designed to be felt. In recent years, his most notable works have included the installation of a faux sun in London's Tate Modern, its orange light transporting museum-goers to the beach they'd been waiting for all their lives; creating waterfalls in the East River, mist splashing the faces of tourists when the wind picked up; transporting mini icebergs from Greenland to a Copenhagen square; and dying rivers in Tokyo, Norway, LA, and Berlin a sickly green, without warning local authorities.

The Danish-Icelandic artist creates these large-scale sculptures and installations using natural materials such as ice, water, air, light, and dirt to bring attention to our fraught relationship with the natural world and the increasingly negative impact humans are having on the planet.

But in the last few years, Eliasson's gotten fed up with the exclusivity of the art world and has wanted to do something that would reach a massive, global audience. His goal was to move from just provoking a conversation about the climate, to actually producing positive action. He did this by building a simple solar lantern called Little Sun to bring clean, reliable, affordable light to the 1.1 billion people in the world who lack direct access to electricity. The lantern launched three years ago at the Tate Modern museum, and is now distributed in over ten African countries as well as Europe, Australia, Canada, Japan, and the US.

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But today, Eliasson is taking his mission one step further and launching a Kickstarter campaign to start the rollout of a solar-powered charger that can fully juice a phone using only five hours of sunlight, hopefully resulting in increased communication and opportunity in the developing world.

We sat down with the artist to talk about his decision to move from the art world to product design, why he thinks no one cares about global warming, and how the only way to solve the climate challenge is to replace all the representatives of the United Nations with artists.

VICE: It seems like you've sort of been enamored with the sun and its power for a long time. Obviously you had your installation at Tate Modern a few years ago, you launched a solar lantern and now a solar charger. What is it about the sun and its power that you find so interesting?
Olafur Elliason: The sun is something that we talk about without having to agree. You think it's too hot, and I think it could be a bit hotter, but that doesn't mean that I don't like you. So for me, the sun is something that we share without having to be the same.

In our society today, you have to be bloody normal to fit in. So I've used the sun as a metaphor for space, where we can actually share something without having to be the same. This, I think, started when I did the "Weather Project" at the Tate Modern, because I think that was one of the good examples where people were having all kinds of reactions, and it just became clear to me that sometimes culture, or creativity, or art, can actually host a space or environment where we can be together without having to agree. There is something inclusive about the sun, there is something that I think is really touching. It's something we all own, or that nobody owns, and nobody has bought it... yet.

The Weather Project at the Tate Modern in London. Photo courtesy of Studio Olafur Eliasson

If you think about where we are as a political society today, as soon as people don't agree, it immediately results in some kind of exclusion. If you're not like me, you're not really welcome. I think it's very important to look for places where, if you don't fit into the very narrow definition of normality, you're still welcome. The sun is one of these, sort of, inclusive environments, metaphorically speaking.

This is kind of how it started, and then of course it turns out, when one starts to think about it, everything derives from the sun. A diamond is, in fact, compressed carbon, which would not be there without the sun. A head of salad that you're going to have for dinner is essentially just a battery that has been charged by the sun. Now I eat it, and I take the energy from the salad and I release it in my body, and I become a solar machine.

Is that the thinking that led you to take this next step in your career and embark upon the Little Sun project? Your art has kind of a participatory element, as you were saying—was this an extension of that?
Yeah, but also I was feeling a little bit locked up in the art world. I felt that with creativity, you can do more than just be in museums and put on art shows. As an artist, I think you need to take on the world. I think you need to participate in society—taking on these questions that we all have in common.

I don't think I'm any better at taking these questions on than anybody else, but I do think that coming from the angle of creativity or art gives me some other tools, that are very important to throw into society. So when I started Little Sun, it was kind of an attempt to see, "Well, if I take my resources and my language and my means—the talent that I occasionally can canoodle together—if I take that and I toss them into a challenging area, such as energy access, where does that leave me?"

And it was very satisfying for me to be suddenly outside of the normal art world, on the street, in Sub-Saharan Africa, but also in New York and England, testing out whether the language that I use in the bubble called the "art world" would actually have traction in the real world.

The Little Sun solar lantern being sold in Africa. Photo by Michael Tsegaye, courtesy of Little Sun

Right, and what was it specifically about the art world that you were finding limiting?
The truth is, I'm a very big supporter of the cultural segment of our society. I think our society would have very little satisfaction if it was not for culture. And I'm so honored and excited about being a culturally engaged person. I'm quite excited about being an artist. But you also have to see that museums are becoming—sometimes—very exclusive.

There's no doubt that the New York art scene—where I show at an amazing gallery in Chelsea—as much as I like it, it is also, frankly speaking, a pretty predictable group of people that come there. It's a closed circuit. And this might not be fully fair to the art world, because I do think there's a lot of political traction there—but let's just face it, the art world has also become a part of a cultural elite, and I need to break out of that as well as being a part of it.

What I was hoping to do is to take the network that I have built up over 20 years working as an artist—such as reaching out to political leaders, financial leaders, activists, NGOs—and ask them whether they would embark on a creative path to address energy access.

The Little Sun solar charger. Image courtesy of Little Sun

So what do you think is the role of art in these kind of future-shaping technologies—whether it's for the developed or the developing world?
Well as I started working with this, I came to realize a few things. One was that to be an artist, to make art, is really to learn how to use a language. What defines a good art work is not necessarily the extent to which you can master this language, but literally what you say with it. Essentially, it is not about how one does things, but it's about why. And I think it was very rewarding for me to learn that if I want to be successful I need to figure out why, and then the how will sort itself out.

It's a mistake to think that creativity is only in the art world. Creativity is everywhere. There are creative people everywhere. It's a sort of snobbish thing for an artist to say that creativity is only in the art world. My excitement is really just to connect the dots to see if I can address how we can use energy to empower ourselves. It was then that I started to get confident about how to talk about the climate problem, because it's not really about the climate, it's about how we feel about it.

Let's talk more about that, because I do think there's a barrier, certainly in the developed world where we're not fully experiencing the effects of climate change yet, and people have difficulty connecting with those issues. What do you think is the best way to get around that?
I totally agree. The thing is, we have now learned what we need to know about what is going on with the environment and the climate. We've kind of got the story. But it is in our heads. It is not yet something we have embodied. And that's why you're right when you say we haven't fully experienced climate change, we haven't felt the impact on our own bodies. I'm trying to bring over some inland ice from Greenland for the UN Summit in Paris in December, so people can actually touch the ice. Instead of thinking about it, they can touch it. There's a significant difference between thinking and touching. You can also say that about thinking and doing. So now the question is, how do we turn people from knowers and thinkers into doers?

That's why the Little Sun took on the quest to ask people: "How does it actually feel to hold five hours of solar power in your hand? How does it feel to hold hands with the sun?" And especially for children who are not so narrow-minded in how they understand the world. Kids just say, "Wow, I am powerful." Whereas we grownups, we are idiots because we say, "I own energy," as if it's some kind of commodity. And so with Little Sun, we're interested in turning something we know into something we feel, something that is tangible.

The Little Sun charger can power up an iPhone using only five hours of sunlight. Image courtesy of Little Sun

And what do you think the role of design, aesthetics, and packaging plays in that? Obviously, your solar lantern and charger look very different from most of the other ones on the market. Why is that?
Well, because I think a great design can amplify the non-quantifiable success criteria. Clearly the functional side of it has to be in order. With the charger we are about to release, we are going to have the strongest solar panel on a small, handheld device on the market. So the quality has to be competitive on the one hand, but then on the other, the design, the shape, the communication, the language, is like an amplifier—because we are on a mission to campaign for the planet. We are out there to actually talk about things for which we are seeking solutions ourselves. So this means that the design in itself is creating a new message on how to turn thinking into doing.

From our conversation so far, it seems like you have a relatively optimistic view of the future—but do you ever feel sort of cynical about what we're going to be able to achieve, or worried about how to best keep pushing the next generation to care?
Well, I choose to be optimistic. I'm just so tired of the doom and gloom, and the kind of apocalyptic language of some media, of some politicians and some scientists. So I think we have to look at what originally created the climate challenge. It was innovative people. It was the people who actually made electricity, who turned fossil fuel into energy, these are the innovators who created modern society. We need the same type of innovators today to renew and replace our sources of energy. And that's why optimism is always much better to follow than criticizing the heroes of the past. So I do think that being optimistic is just more productive.

Photo by Inka Recke, image courtesy of Little Sun

Is this what led to the decision to take your project to the next phase and create a solar charger to continue innovating?
Well, it was two things. One was, as we traveled around Sub-Saharan Africa with the Little Sun lantern, everybody said, "This is great, we love it. Next time you come, can you bring a mobile phone charger?" At an unbelievable speed, in rural areas where the economy is very scarce, people were getting mobile phones. So I was immediately convinced, my god—the biggest challenge is the fact that there is no access to energy and phone batteries keep dying. But obviously that is not just a problem in rural Africa. It's really something that I need in my life, too.

And that sort of creating awareness and getting people involved is obviously important. Did that contribute to your decision to do this as a crowd funding campaign?
Yeah, I mean, we're using quite high quality materials, so only through quantity can we push the price down. We funded the development of it for two years—but to actually get the first batch through the production machine, we need to make thousands. And that's why we have to reach out to people and sell it up front—just to get the machinery rolling. Once they're rolling, we want to be able to make this into a socially conscious business. But we literally need a "kickstarter" to get going.

In terms of looking to the future, what do you think we need to be doing better as a society?
I think we should ask artists to run the UN. I think we should get rid of all the heads of state in the UN and put artists in the General Assembly. Besides that, I think that we should get rid of the politicians in the EU, and put artists in the European Parliament as well.

I think we should make an artists revolution around the world, and ask the creative people, the emotional people of our society to take on a much more sustainable and inclusive approach to how we actually change the future into something better. The truth is, I'm actually not joking. I think it would be great. And while doing so, I think we should take all these heads of state and put them in art school. It would be a good education both for the artists to actually get some dirt on their hands, and for the heads of state to actually get creative. And then after one year, or maybe six months, we should switch it all back and then see if the world gets better.

For more information about the Little Sun charger, or to fund the campaign, visit their Kickstarter page.

Follow Dory Carr-Harris on Twitter.

The guy who helped Liz retrieve her GPS. Photos courtesy the author

The stomach cramps came swift: gastrointestinal waves warning of an impending shit storm. I immediately regretted washing down my goat soup dinner with swigs of fermented horse milk. I felt sweat beads forming on my forehead, while across the dark tent I could hear the deep breaths of my slumbering Mongolian hosts.

It was my first night camping out on the Mongol Derby course, a 1,000-kilometre horse race through the wilds of Mongolia, and I was overnighting in a stranger's ger (aka a portable hut), in the unfortunate predicament of feeling I was about to shit my pants. Hours earlier I'd ridden up to this family after covering 100 kilometres of steppe, jumped off my horse, and through an impromptu miming performance told them I wanted to crash in their home. The race organizers had assured us Mongolian hospitality guaranteed we wouldn't be turned away and we could ask anyone along the route to open their doors and they'd happily oblige. My family just seemed bewildered that a white girl swathed in technical fabrics, with a GoPro stuck to her helmet, would show up on their doorstep begging for a place to sleep.

I sat up in bed and listened to their dog pacing outside, the same dog that earlier had lunged at me, teeth bared. I was saved by the woman of the home, who yanked it back by the scruff of its neck, screaming at it in Mongolian and body slamming it to the ground. It continued trying to dart around its masters to rip me apart, but they repeated the same disciplinary tactics until it whimpered and curled up in the shade.

But now it was the middle of the night and it was back on the prowl. I had a choice—shit the bed—or risk being attacked by the dog. In a fit of desperation, I dug through my pack and picked the third option: swallowing three Immodiums in an attempt to right my rolling stomach.

This is the logic of a Mongol Derby rider—a person insane enough to think it's a good idea to strap themselves to 28 different semi-wild horses in a mad dash across one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world. Eleven months previous, I'd filled out an application, gone through two interviews and put down a $3,500 deposit (just a portion of the $17,000 entry fee) to guarantee that one of the 40 spots on this race would be mine. I was warned the Derby was difficult and dangerous with a serious fatality risk (previous riders have returned with broken necks and collarbones as souvenirs), but figured even though I hadn't climbed aboard a horse in almost seven years, my inner farm girl strength would help me finish.

But as I awoke the next morning at 6:30, the Immodiums having averted my first derby crisis, I began to wonder if I really had it in me to repeat this for another eight days. My tongue rolled in my mouth like a hunk of sandpaper, dehydration now setting in as my picky western palette rejected the goat-flavoured water my gracious hosts offered. I sucked the remaining drops of chlorine-tab treated water from my Camelbak to try to quench my thirst and slapped on a smile, scooting past the woman now sitting on her dog as the man of the ger readied my horse.

Fastest horse I rode on the derby. Looks more like a Shetland pony than American Pharoah but definitely thought I might meet my end aboard this guy. These are his owners with me.

Ten minutes later, I was back in the saddle at a brisk clip counting down the remaining eight kilometres until the next horse station, where I could get a fresh horse. Three kilometres away, another dog began loping toward my mount and I as we trotted along a dirt road. In another two minutes it was barking and snarling and lunging at my pony. I screamed and took my whip to it, but it lunged again, missing biting my foot by a hair.

"I DON'T HAVE A FUCKING RABIES SHOT!" I yelled at it, kicking my horse into a gallop. The dog sped up alongside us and it took two kilometres of galloping to lose him, with me mocking him when he finally slowed his chase and it was clear we were pulling away. But my smugness was short lived as I realized I'd dropped my Garmin—the tool I needed to navigate the race—somewhere during the chase.

Two hours later I was on the back of a Soviet-era motorcycle, my arms wrapped around the waist of a Mongolian herder as we motored at 135 km/h over the steppe looking for my GPS. The locals seemed nonplussed when I asked them through an interpreter if someone would help me retrieve my GPS. It wasn't until I offered a 20,000 tugrik ($18) reward a guy jerked his head towards his motorcycle. I threw my riding helmet on as a safety measure when I caught a strong whiff of vodka on his breath, but I needn't have worried, because even through a boozy filter his reflexes and eyesight were better than mine. He found my GPS almost immediately, lying next to a pile of cow dung just 50 metres from where the dog started its chase.

For the next few days this was my Holy Grail tale when I came across other Derby riders. It seemed the bunch of us in the middle of the pack, who stood no chance of winning the race, were instead intent on topping each other for wildest story. And the tales that trickled down the line were good ones.

One girl just ahead of me had been coping with a horse that wouldn't move in the driving rain, so she got off to lead it the last few clicks to the next horse station. The horse thanked her by fucking off and kicking her in the head as he bolted past, just for good measure. She was OK because she was wearing a helmet, but a few minutes more of walking in the icy rain caused her to faint from hypothermia. Another girl was bucked from her horse and did a face plant on a rock, gashing her cheek down to the bone. I watched as she stoically laid in a ger while a medic sewed her face back together and a Mongolian woman sewed her shredded rain jacket.

For two and a half days I rode with a Swede named Thomas, a father of three in his late 30s who, early in our collaboration, on Day 4 of the race, confided in me his "dick was chafing."

"I've duct taped my dick," he yelled to me as we galloped across the steppe, any shred of personal dignity disappearing with as the kilometers ticked by. On Day 6, when he ran out of duct tape, he asked me if I minded if he rode for 40 kilometres with his hand down his pants, cradling his penis so it wouldn't rub against his balls anymore.

I told him I didn't give a shit, but "if you get bucked off out of stupidity I am NOT waiting with you for the paramedics."

That's what endless days of riding weird horses in a foreign land will do to your compassion.

At times my best friend was an Irish jockey named Paddy Woods who supplied me with a constant stream of painkillers to quiet the screaming in my knees and lower back. I mixed them with the Percocets I packed for the journey and at a horse station announced—perhaps a touch too giddily—to one of the race officials that I felt fantastic, to which she replied, "cool it on the pills," and told me a story from a few years back of two riders who brought morphine on the race and took so much they started hallucinating and got lost in the mountains for eight hours.

Paddy, Thomas, and I were the deranged Musketeers as we hooned about the Mongolian countryside, leaving locals with a backlog of stories to tell their friends for years to come.

On the first night we slept in a ger together, Paddy introduced us to his chainsaw snoring and we fought the urge to strangle him. Evidently, so did the man of the ger, who lit his lantern and glared at us until we shook Paddy awake and all moved outside and set our sleeping bags in a pile of goat shit for five hours of restless sleep before we were off again.

It's funny when you find contentment laying in goat shit, gazing at the Milky Way, a 52-year-old man's snoring cutting through the stillness. There were four more days of racing to endure and I still hadn't had a bowel movement, but I'd found a happiness that had evaded me for years.

I finished the race in nine days, in the unremarkable 50th percentile. I was 10 pounds thinner, unable to walk, and with much less inner thigh skin than I had when I started. I was now able to get drunk on a third of a can of beer and had the ability to drink any kind of water without getting sick. I celebrated my greatest athletic achievement by peeling duct tape off my chafing sores and sleeping for 14 straight hours.

I'd entered the longest horse race in the world hoping to have some life epiphany, to find a solution to my first world ennui, but the only great revelation I had as I crossed the finish line was that my hunger for extreme events had intensified.

As soon as this Immodium wears off, I'll be looking for that next big adventure.

Follow Liz Brown on Twitter.

VICE's Amsterdam office co-produced Prince, the debut feature film by Dutch writer and director Sam de Jong. This stylish, coming-of-age tale follows a Dutch-Moroccan teen as he cares for his junkie father and falls in with criminals in order to impress the neighborhood girl.

The movie is equal parts authentic and surreal, and uses a cast of non-professional actors to portray life in the streets in contemporary Amsterdam. There's also a killer 80s-style soundtrack. For this five-part VICE Special, we take a behind-the-scenes look at the film's production.

Prince is now in theaters and available to watch now on iTunes and OnDemand.

Illustrations by Joel Benjamin

If there's one thing that awakens my fear of aging and death, it's a music festival that I'm not attending. There's the feeling of missing out on an eternal summer: photos of beautiful people in their flower crowns, crop tops and fringe, evoking feelings of first times and the wonder that comes from new makeouts with other beautiful people, new drugs and seeing your favorite band live.

My own time spent as a teenager at music festivals was not exactly idyllic like this. Either I was not getting fucked up because it conflicted with my eating disorder—I was afraid alcohol would make me fat and weed would give me the munchies—or I got so fucked up that I ate everything, tried to make out with not-beautiful people and then got dragged around in a black-out. I'm not really good at having fun.

Yet, in spite of this retrospective clarity about the way things really were, I still yearn to go back. Perhaps it's because I never experienced the fantasy of youth as I imagine it should be. It's like, I feel nostalgia for something that never existed. Maybe it never exists for anyone like that, at least, not in the way youth is made to look on blogs, Instagram, and in ads. Still, when I see photos of people at music festivals, I feel an ache in my heart. Such is the nature of romanticization.

This year, tired of feeling FOMO, I decided to go to the FYF Festival in Los Angeles and perhaps try to live out my fantasy. If nothing else, I thought I might at least see some suffering amongst the younger festivalgoers up close—a line for the port-o-potty, a bad shroom trip—something to debunk the grandiose fantasies that cause me pain.

For the first day of the festival I had a very special goth-youth-eternal summer-dream-makeout outfit planned. Then I got my period, a week late, and the outfit didn't fit. I felt gross, and not feeling gross is crucial to my festival fantasy. I didn't go. I pretended my bed was FYF.

On the second day, it took me 90 minutes to get into the entrance of the festival, because I parked in the wrong place and have spatial issues. I was glad that I wasn't on acid or shrooms, because if I had been tripping I never would have navigated my way in. I probably wouldn't have made it out of the car.

Once inside the gates, I was also glad that I didn't have a crush with me. The language of big, organized events can be embarrassing when you have to say certain words—like "voucher"—out loud in front of a crush. Also, as I hurriedly made my way to one of the stages, I felt self-conscious that I looked like I was "marching" to the beat of the music. I felt like people were watching me (they weren't) and tried to walk on opposite beats.

But other people weren't so self-conscious. At Girlpool, I talked to Lev—one half of a beautiful, 17-year-old festival-going pair.

"It's just good to be in the moment, not looking to the future, just embracing everything as it is right now," he said. He and Natalie, the other half of the pair, said they were "sort of together."

Natalie wore her long, thrifted Goodwill floral dress, bleached-out hair and chewed off red lipstick immaculately. She said she felt that "17 is a great time to be alive, because you're not close to old but you can do more stuff than when you're 15." Good for her.

Some of my friends were roaming around the festival, but I didn't make an effort to find them. I liked being alone. At one point, I sat on the ground in an outdoor area called "The Woods" watching all the kids on molly dance as Leon Vynehall DJ'ed. I became hypnotized by the sounds, also captivated by their different styles and apparent happiness. I remember when I used to take ecstasy at clubs in my late teens. Instead of dancing, I preferred to just recline in a big chair—particularly when the ecstasy had heroin in it—not speaking, just watching and feeling. Back then I always felt ashamed of going to events by myself, but now I don't feel like I have to defend it so much. Like, I'm more OK with being an introvert. Score one for being old.

So are festivals a good place for introverts? I talked to Chaz Bundick, known by his artist name as Toro Y Moi, about this. He was wary.

"Festivals are just like being thrown into a giant social gathering, like, OK, hold your breath, try to remember people's names," said Bundick. "I wanna do what I gotta do here and then sort of go back to my hole, recluse back to wherever I came from. I'm not much of a socialite. I'd rather hang out at a friend's house or my house than go to a bar."

But he did have fond memories of his first festival.

"The first time I went to a music festival was in Columbia, South Carolina, and it was called Fallout. It was about as South Carolina as you can imagine. Filter played, Incubus played, not the most ideal bands, like I wasn't really into those bands, bands like Puddle of Mudd, that kind of stuff. But that was my first time being in a crowd of people, smelling pot for the first time, seeing crustpunks for the first time, people that I'd never seen being in high school in the suburbs. That was definitely an amazing experience. And still to this day I talk about it all the time."

The difference between Bundick's experience of music festivals then and now made me wonder if the ability to be totally swept up and captivated by these events is relegated to novelty and youth.

At one point, I thought I spotted a sullen teen—seated by the fry truck, dressed in all black with heavily kohl-lined eyes (I would say "soft goth"), no older than 16, sadly dipping a fry into some ketchup. Her name was Emily. But when I asked her if she was having a good time, her pale face brightened with delight.

"Oh, yeah. It's so amazing! The vibe and the music. It's the best environment to meet new people because if you guys are listening to the same music it's already something you have in common. Live music is a whole different level of thing. It's like... the vibes. It's soooooo raw."

Emily said she had been to four other festivals this summer, including Coachella. "It's heaven," she said.

Then I asked her about romance, if she had ever been to a festival and experienced love.

"Yeah, she said. "Last night. I think he's really cute. But I don't know his name so I have him saved in my phone as 'blue shirt.'"

"Do you think you'll ever hear from him again?" I asked.

"Yeah," she said. "He's meeting up with me in ten minutes."

The closest I came to experiencing heaven for myself was at Nicholas Jaar in a seat high above the crowd, in the dark, watching the people morph into swaying shadows, then joyful ravers, then sort of like a Nazi Youth rally, waiting for their next aural command. It was cool watching Jaar be the puppeteer of so many people.

I decided to go down onto the dancefloor. In the heat of those bodies, I found this one gorgeous boy and sort of danced my way over to him. He was early 20s, scruffy, wearing a weird blazer, but otherwise perfect. I wanted to ask him to kiss me. I wanted to be like, "Hi, can you just kiss me totally anonymously in the dark?" I wanted to script the kiss, the way Jaar was commandeering the crowd: dance up against him, maybe bump teeth or tongues to teeth. I felt that the anonymity would be almost like a first kiss. Also, I would be emotionally safe, because we wouldn't exchange numbers and I wouldn't have to wait for a text. It could be the total fantasy. Then I saw he was with a girl. So I didn't approach him further. I felt stupid for thinking I wouldn't have seemed creepy. I felt sad.

As I left the arena, I was intercepted by a tweaker—about my age, probably—a white bro with dreads. Never good. He tried to touch me—first on the shoulder, then the waist. I kept walking and looked at my phone. He followed me.

He said, "Texting texting texting texting texting."

I said, "Get the fuck away from me."

It's never the ones I want who follow me. Even when the follower in question is not a tweaking harasser, the reality of being pursued does not match my fantasies. Perhaps this is because I need distance to make things beautiful. Perhaps it's because the adrenaline of want makes everything gleam a little shinier. As a fantasist, I am always the wanter, even when the fantasy involves being wanted. Such is the case with youth. It looks so delicious now that I want it. But back then I just wanted out.

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 abiweekly column on this website.