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Cash Slaves: Financial Domination Ruined My Life

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Read more about and watch our full length film on Cash Slaves

The internet is a space where every strange sexual fetish is catered towhether it's laying fake alien eggs in your vagina or being stuck partway up a unicorn's ass. Most of these fetishes involve genitalia or some nudity. Financial domination, on the other hand, sits outside the bounds of even the strangest sexual practices made possible on the web.

In fin-dom, "money slaves" happily handover cash to dominatrixes who ridicule them for beingspendthrift idiots. It can also be highly addictive. Some peoplespend thousands of dollars a week engaging in this form of BDSM. Gordon is one of those poor schmucks. At one stage, his desire to be financially dominated almost ruined every aspect of his lifefrom his finances to his personal relationships. This is his sad story, in his own words. Nick Chester

It all started with web cam shows. Thefirst time I paid for one, it was out of boredom. I had some spare time while my girlfriend Rachel was away, and thought I'd treat myself to an expensivewanking session. I never intended for it to lead to me becoming a "pay pig," asthose who succumb to financial domination addiction are known; it just sort ofhappened.

Strangely, I discovered that I was turned on by the idea of paying a beautiful, young girl money more than I was by the flesh on display. I liked the idea that she almost certainly viewed me with contempt but was happy to take my cash. There was something tantalizingly humiliating about it, and I found myself paying for cam shows whenever I had the house to myself.

At this point, I was only spending, at most, about $50 a week. I could easily afford my fetish. But that allchanged when I discovered a cam girl who advertised "financial domination" onher profile. I googled it to find out what it was and came across page afterpage of stunning women who got off on mocking men for paying them money. Theydidn't even get naked or do anything sexual. You might be surprised tolearn that this turned me on even more.

I saw them as sadistic princesses who enjoyedexploiting sexual deviants like myself to feed their wallets. I was instantlyhooked. The rush that I got from it was a bit like sadomasochism, only insteadof the sub enjoying physical pain, I enjoyed the mental pain of being taken fora fool and having my bank account drained. The minute each session hadfinished, I furiously jerked myself into oblivion and had really intense orgasms that were a thousand times stronger than the ones I had when I had sex with Rachel.

The differencebetween conventional web cam girls and fin doms is that the former gentlyencourage you to part with more money, and the latter put as much pressure aspossible on you to keep spending. They really are merciless, and a lot of themdon't care at all about the impact that their greed has on your life. I quicklywent from spending $10 here and there to blowing up to $500 in a singlesession. The more I gave the doms, the more they wanted. Things were rapidlyspiraling out of control, but I lacked the willpower to stop. Financialdomination was no longer a harmless fetish. It had now become a powerful,all-consuming addiction.

I soon got to thestage where I was constantly broke despite working a full-time job. Thisactually added to the buzz that I got from fin dom. It made me feel even morehumiliated, which made me hornier than ever. The problem was that it isn'tpossible to satiate a greedy goddess's thirst for cash forever. When I would reach the point where I had no more cash left to spend, I would steal jewelry from Rachel to give to the doms instead. I never told them it was stolen. I always claimedthat I had bought it especially for them. They would tell me that theypreferred cash, but grudgingly accepted it.

I also startedshoplifting food and essential items so that I had more spare cash to spend onbeing a money slave. I had never broken the law before becominghooked, but found stealing from shops to be relatively easy. Sometimes, I wouldfeel guilty afterwards and promise myself that it'd be the last theft I everdid it. I'd convince myself that I was going to stop the financial domination for good. But I was kidding myself, because I knew deep down that I wouldsoon be doing the exact same thing again.

The thought of having another man perform a sex act on me disgusted me, but the idea of telling a fin dom about it and having her laugh at me gave me a major boner.

My friends were alsothe victims of my newfound kleptomania. Anybody foolish enough to allow me intotheir house would have their jewelry stolen. I was careful to only ever takeone or two items and usually went for small things that they would assume theyhad lost. The buzz from giving the goddesses non-cash gifts wasn't as strong asthe rush from giving them money but was better than nothing. I also got off onthe lengths that they were forcing me to go to in order to please them. I wouldrun through scenarios in my head where I told them how much I was struggling tomake them happy, and they giggled and told me what an imbecile I was.

I actually consideredselling my body at one point. I was browsing through Craigslist and saw an adby a gay guy saying that he would pay money to give a straight man a blowjob. Iliked the idea of having to suffer the ultimate degrading act to get enoughmoney to pay my goddess. Part of me was horrified, but another part was turnedon. The thought of having another man perform a sex act on me disgusted me, butthe idea of telling a fin dom about it and having her laugh at me gave me amajor boner.

I never actuallyended up replying to the Craigslist ad, thank God. I figured the gay guy wouldprobably wonder what a straight guy with a good job was doing letting men suckhim off for fifty bucks. It would be a very awkward situation, and my naturalshyness prevented me from going through with it. The fact that I evenconsidered it now makes me sick. It hammers home the extremity of myaddiction.

Rachel eventuallyrealized that her belongings were going missing and confronted me. She hadnoticed that I wasn't sleeping well and that I'd started to look ill, andthought I was on drugs. In reality, I didn't sleep on the days that I couldn'tafford to be a cash cow for the doms. My mind would race at a million miles perhour, and I'd stay awake thinking of ways to make money. I told her that therewas nothing to worry about, but she wasn't convinced. She was angry that I hadtaken her things and demanded answers. I wanted to tell her about the bizarre,life-ruining addiction that I was in the grip of, and that I desperately neededhelp, but was worried that she'd leave me, so I lied and said I was on drugs.She would never have believed me if I said nothing was wrong, and I figuredshe'd be more sympathetic to a relatively normal problem than aseedy sexual one.

Rachel cried andhugged me, telling me that we would get through this. I was surprised at howsupportive she was, and it made me feel even guiltier for lying to her. "It'sOK," she told me. "We can beat this together."

Watch Our Documentary About Cash Slaves


After that, I stoppedstealing her things and cut down on my spending in an effort to convince herthat I was kicking my nonexistent drug habit. Luckily, Rachel is from quite agood background and knows very little about drugs, so keeping up the charadewas pretty easy. I told her I was gradually weaning myself off heroin, andadjusted my fin dom habits accordingly. Luckily, I managed to get things backto a manageable level and saved our relationship.

Rachel is stillblissfully unaware that I was ever wasting our money on financial domination.After pretending to have come off drugs, she assumed that things were back tonormal. She is occasionally suspicious and asks me if I'm still doing anythingthat I shouldn't be, but I assure her that I'm not. It feels bad lying to her,but I need to lie to cover up the past lies that I've told her. It makes mewonder if I'll ever be able to reveal the honest truth.

I still spend atleast $100 a week on fin doms, but it no longer controls every aspect of mylife. Do I think the doms are responsible for my situation? Not really. Theymostly don't tend to be the nicest of people, but if they did, no one wouldgive them money, so I guess that comes with the territory. They're earning anhonest living and aren't doing anything illegal, so you can't lay the blame onthem.

I think the stigma that's placed on sexual addictions is the main culprit.If I hadn't been so embarrassed about being a money slave, I would have soughthelp. As it stands, I'm still battling my addiction today. I'm sure there arethousands of people out there with similarly strange addictions. Being addictedto anything sucks, but being addicted to something as pointless as financialdomination is definitely a step down from your regular, run-of-the-milladdiction. The only solution is for me to gain the strength to drag myself backup into normalitya place where I no longer have to feel ashamed.

As told to Nick Chester


Meet the Guy Bringing Experimental Club Music to the Japanese Masses

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All photos by the author

Walk into any Tokyo-based CD megastore (e.g. one of the 45 Tower Records locations, which, believe it or not, still exist in Japan) and make your way to the "Western Music" section. In this bent dimension you will find mainstream American pop, but also electronic obscurities from the likes of the genre-bending drone-pop producer Inga Copeland or the Belgian electro-collagist Ssaliva, often straddling the same "Store Spotlight" shelves as EDM heavyweights like Skrillex or David Guetta. An outsider passing by may write this off as a Japanese indifference to the nuances that punctuate "music-from-abroad," or that this seeming curatorial faux pas is just Japan being idiosyncratic, another example of the wacky caricature many attribute to the country's pop culture sensibilities. In reality, the placement of left-field, underground music alongside major label bangers in music stores throughout Japan is a deliberate decision to bring niche music from around the globe to the Japanese masses, an initiative spearheaded by one Japanese music fanatic.

Shimpei "Melting Bot" Kaiho is a Tokyo-based music scene veteran who was simply a diehard experimental music fan before trying his hand to work on the business side of the independent record industry. In 2009, Kaiho founded Melting Bot, a self-described "platform" for fringe electronic music that functions as a label, PR house, and event promotion unit all under one tag. As of 2015, Melting Bot has re-issued dozens of releases from the catalogues of roughly 30 independent labels from around the world, including cult favorites from New York and London like RVNG INTL, Software, and Night Slugs. Kaiho also curates an event series under Melting Bot called Bond-Aid, showcasing non-Japanese artists such as PAN records founder Bill Kouligas and California-based techno act D/P/I alongside up-and-coming Japanese producers (unbeknownst to many outside the country) in hopes of introducing like-minded creatives and audiences to one another.

Although Kaiho originally selected foreign music to release based on his personal preference, his platform has evolved to become a channeling medium of sortsone that filters in sounds that 'fit' with what he sees as the current cultural zeitgeist among young Japanese artists and underground arts enthusiasts in Tokyo, giving Melting Bot a unique gate-keeping propensity. The music will still make it to Japan, no doubt, but it might not receive the status-boosting cred approval that Melting Bot offers, a sign of support that can make or break the success of an artist on Japanese shores.

Read on THUMP: Planet Mu's Mike Paradinas on 20 Years of Flawless Tastemaking

Kaiho is a rare breed in Japan, a gem among pebbles. He's one of the few people in Tokyo who not only has made it his life's work to explore the fringes of Western and Japanese music, but he's aiming to bring them closer togetheror at least spark a greater dialogue between the two. The cultural trailblazer is embracing the positive aspects of globalization by looking for connections and complements among disparate places. There's so much good music being made around the world, but even in the age of the internet, sometimes you need a sheep herder to get it into the right hands. VICE sat down with the man bringing left-field techno to Tokyo to discuss the story behind his multi-functioning Melting Bot, as well as Japan's rich history of avant-garde music scenes.

VICE: You started as a fan, butnow you personally promote this largely unknown music within Japan. Is that position of being a tastemaker something youintentionally sought out?
Shimpei Kaiho:
I didn't intentionally set out to orchestrate some big gesture.When I started out, there were a lot of good labels that I really liked thatweren't getting any placement here, so I reached out and asked to re-issue anddistribute various records. Over time, the work continued to compile and theidentity of Melting Bot expanded. At the start, to be 100-precent honest, I was justserving as . I'm on the ground you know, so I can totally appreciatethe scope of that drop. When I first started Melting Bot... Well, I can't say theexact numbers, but basically our sales are practically a third of what theyused to be, and continue to drop with increasing speed.

In the face of thatreality, how do you see Melting Bot surviving?
One thing is pushing back to the outside: Not only importingsounds from outside Japan, but also exporting the local sounds outside thecountry. I think this is something Melting Bot is capable of doing. Then thereis the event that I do through Melting Bot called Bond-Aid. I think out ofeverything I do, Bond-Aid is the most important.

What exactly is it?
Around three years ago, I started thinking that the real valuefrom the local scene was in live performance and that direct exchange. I reallyneed to start organizing an event. Little by little, I started hosting thisBond-Aid event. This became Melting Pot's direction, using the event as apreliminary step to then distribute foreign artists' CDs and doing their PR inTokyo. The next event,the seventh in the series, will feature Inga Copeland and Lorenzo Senni. Thename itself references the idea of aiding the bonding process among disparatecreators and packaging it all together as one unique type of content. It takesthe jumble of artists and ideas that comprise Melting Bot, and connect the dotsas a live experience.

For more on Japan, watch our doc 'Taking Down Tokyo's Corrupt Diamond Syndicate':

Similar to the decrease inmusic sales in Japan, do you think the number of underground music fans isdecreasing?
That's tough to answer. I think the world, generally, valuesJapan's avant-garde output over its pop. Today, the artists are spread out, andeven in Tokyo these tiny scenes exist in a vacuum. Every major city in Japan hasan underground music scene, but we're talking crazy small ones, collections of30 to 50 people.

I don't think decreasing is the right word; I think they are waymore scattered. There are more creators now than there were before, due to theinternet, but if these pockets of culture aren't directly tied to your personalcircle, it's like they don't even exist in the physical world.

Do you attribute this tothe local cultural traditions? That people don't push themselves out there andkeep things to themselves?
In the past, the process of putting out a record almost bydefault meant that you had to connect with someone. The same for events. Now,with Soundcloud and social media, maybe you don't need an in-person connectionfor your music to be published. Events too have fallen under a similar light,with way fewer people are coming out than before. In the past you had to go toa club to hear a DJ mix, but now the net offers a bounty to that end, so maybepeople here are just satisfied with that because that in itself is funlikethere is no need to experience something directly in a spatial sense.

Isn't that an issue foryou from the perspective of Bond-Aid?
Yeah, totally huge. But when I started Bond-Aid, the thing Ithought was exciting was how, rather than just releasing something from abroad,creating a kind of content that was truly unique, really taking the local andthe foreign and bringing something new into existence was the most interestingpart of organizing this type of event for me. Something truly original, thatreally only happens there at that location. That to me has a very real socialvalue and real meaning, and that translates to attendance.

How do you feel aboutturning your own personal interests and passions into a career?
As someone who is trying to make a living off of this passion,it's a matter beyond me wanting to do this, to promote music and put on events: It's a matter of needing to. I think if I didn't have this, I would live a much lazierexistence. That necessity to keep pushing forward wouldn't be there.

Even for me, trying to make music a business doesn't sit as thebest scenario, especially for independent music. I used to be opposed to theidea of existing off of money made through music, but then I reached thisdramatic point where I thought, if I don't do this I'll die! You know, thatleads you to listen to a ton of music, more than anyone normally would listento. It leads you to dig deeper and connect with everyone.

Pushing the Limits of Limbs at a Flexing Dance Show in Brooklyn

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Flexing looks painful. It looks anatomically wrong, even. It's a street dance that started in Brooklyn and stems from 90s Jamaican dancehall. Its movements seem to reject the limits of joints, muscles, and bones. Dancers hyperextendwell, flextheir limbs in all possible directions, while they slide and turn with pure braggadocio. Over the past decade, the dance, which is also called bone breaking, has evolved into its own arts subculture in Brooklyn.

If you ask flexing pioneer Reggie "Regg Roc" Gray, he describes the dance as a "really extravagant movement that nobody would ever think of doing." In collaboration with theater director Petter Sellars, the two men and the FLEXN dance crew put on a series of performances at Park Avenue Armory last spring, which transformed the street art into stage art, incorporating a loose narrative about black lives in America, police brutality, and mass incarceration in response to the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.

This month in Brooklyn, Red Bull Music Academy hosted a unique performance at the recently-opened venue National Sawdust. Gone was the stage that separated the audience and dancers at Park Armory, allowing the talent and viewers to interact in an intimate performance that felt closer to the stage-less environments where the art first originated. On top of Regg Roc and the FLEXN crew showing off tight contortions and liquid movements, DJ Nire, Jimi Nxir, Octo Octa, and Zebra Katz performed high octane music to electrify the mood.

Photographer Anthony Tafuro got up close and personal to the mesmerizing, mostly shirt-less dancers to document them doing an eye-popping performance in their home city.

Anthony Tafuro is a Tierney Fellow, and author of BA. KU. He is currently based out of Brooklyn, NY.

Montreal’s Dime Crew Is the Best Thing to Happen to Canadian Skateboarding in Decades

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I have a complicated love/hate relationship with Canada. As a child,I went on a family vacation to Ontario and Niagara Falls. At the time, I was a total comic book geek. I fell in love with the country after visiting a wax museum,witnessing real-life flying squirrels, and sitting in a replica of theBatmobile from the series starring Adam West. Fast forward 15 years and I'm beingstopped by Canadian Customs on my way to the Slam City Jam skate contest inVancouver because, allegedly, my driver's license and all of the bills in mywallet had traces of an illegal substance on them. That was the first bump in the road in my relationship with Canada.

The nail in the coffin came in 2004 when thelate, great skater Harold Hunter and I were detained at the border for hoursdue to previous DUIs and felonies. After a lot of smooth talking, lying, andinstructing Harold not to say a word, I was able to buy us work visas for theweekend. As the customs officer rang me up for $400 I asked him, "What is ityou think is so great about this place that you're trying to keep everyone from seeingit?"

"It's not what's so great here," he replied. "But what is not so greatabout your country that we're trying to keep out." Touch.

But Canadian authorities aren't the only annoying Canucks. For as long as long as skateboarding has been documented,Canadian skaters have been trying to fit in with their American counterparts while inadvertently pollutingthe skateboard world with vanilla, suburban pseudo-gangsters in ghetto gowns. Some (i.e. other Canadians) believe the Great White North has produced some of thegreats. And while I must admit that people like Rick McCrank, Mark Appleyard, Paul Machnau, andColin McKay are acceptable to throw around in a game of W. A. T. A. R. (Why Aren'tThey Americans, Right?), the truth is there is only one Canadian skateboarderin all of history who has been truly accepted by American skateboarders as oneof our own: Rick Howard.

Howard,the quiet co-founder of Girl Skateboards and Lakai Footwear, came to America topursue skateboarding at the tail end of the 80s when skating wasrelatively small and unaccepted by the mainstream. Peace, love, and solidarity wasthe code amongst skaters of the neon spandex era, but as we entered the vibin' 90s and thugged out urban street skating became the norm, Howard, theconsummate passive Canadian, feared being ostracized for his Vancouver roots. Hequickly devised a three-point plan to hide his Canadian identity.

First,like Raekwon, Rick "got with a sick ass clique and went all out" by ditchinghis former sponsor, Blockhead, for the very American brand Plan B. Plus, he wiselybefriended Thrasher Skater of theYear 1994 Mike Carroll, in hopes that Carroll's street cred would mask any smellof Vancouver.

Next, Howardstopped dressing in his Canadian Mounted Police uniform, as was tradition forskaters from the North at that time, and instead adopted a hipper, more urban camouflagelike track pants, bucket hats, and the moon boot skate shoes that were popularat the time.

Lastly,when it was time to release his break out video part in Plan B's now-classic Questionable (1992), rather than skatingwith a soundtrack by Bryan Adams or Neil Young, Howard opted for the Englishrock band Ned's Atomic Dustbin. Howard's career ruse has been so remarkablethat the City of Vancouver has designated August 29 Rick Howard Appreciation Day to honor the only Canadian to break throughskateboarding's glass ceiling.

Watch: 'Gone: How Mental Illness Derailed the Promising Career of a Young Skater':

Sadly, inthe 25 years since Howard went pro, no other Canadian skater has picked up thetorch or shown any promise of making it in America. I wish this were the partof the story where I said, "until now!" and segued into the tale of the nextgreat American skater from Canada. But that'd be a goddamn lie and it's notgonna happen. There isonly one Rick Howard and as he creeps up on his 50th birthday, we're seeingless and less of him. So instead of offering you the next Rick Howard, I presentto you the Dime Crew: the self-aware brainchild of Phil Lavoie (Montreal),Vince Tsang (Quebec), and Real Skateboard am Antoine Asselin. Justas French-speaking Quebec is the anti-Canada, the Dime dudesall born in thesame year Howard turned pro for Blockhead in 1991are sort of like the anti-Howardsin their lack of interest in making it in the States. Rather than try and breakthrough the glass ceiling, they instead spit-shined it to better see their ownsmiling Canadian faces in the reflection.

For thepast decade the trio have been embracing their Canadian roots. Dime began firstby sporadically posting skate clips to their site back in 2005, but it wasn'tuntil 2010 with the release of The Dime StoreVideo that the skateboard world began to take notice of their understated 90ship-hop/skate aesthetic. Dime's brand of skating was undeniable: it was smoothand stylish without a hint of the "Hey! Look at me!" showmanshipaka middlechild skate syndromethat is typically associated with Brazilian and Canadianskaters. Their videos are injected with boom-bap hip-hop, feature low-fi camera filters juxtaposed with zero-fucks-given iPhone clips, and slick shredding interrupted by moments of weird shit they see in their city.

I wascertain I would carry my animosity for Canada forever, but over the past yearthe Dime crew has been slowly changing my tune with numerous, humorous webedits culminating with the recent Dime x Vans Glory Challenge in August. In anage when most contests take themselves far too seriously, the DGC was theantithesis of that. It was invite-only, there were no contest jocks allowedexcept Ryan Decenzo, the obstacles were absurd (there was a fucking guillotine),the challenges preposterous, and the judging rigged. In the nearly threedecades I've been skating, only the shitshow known as Jim's Ramp Jam has rivaled this event.

After thecontest I immediately reached out to Vans Canada's marketing coordinator, BobLaSalle, and asked if I could be a part of the planning for the 2016 DGC. They were down to fly me up for the day to pitch my weird skate ideas tied toScientology, spaceships, and Uranus. I landed in Montreal the morning ofOctober 12, Canadian Thanksgiving, as Neil Young's Heart of Gold blared through the airport. The week leading up to myarrival, including my flight, was nerve-racking. I feared that customs wouldrefuse me entrance yet again. Surprisingly, I waltzed right through withoutissue; I didn't even need to show the letter from my lawyer stating that 14years had passed since any indiscretions.

I wishedthe customs officer a happy Thanksgiving and he gave me a cross, veryun-Canadian look. It was a look I'd receive every time I wished someone a happy Thanksgivingduring my stay. LaSalle quickly explained, "We don't celebrate thanksgiving inMontreal. The rest of Canada does but we celebrate French holidays here. SaintJean Baptiste Day is more our thing."

So insteadof OD'ing on turkey and pumpkin pie, we did what any skaters do when an entire metropolitan area is shut down for a fake holiday: we skated and filmed frommorning until night. I was in utter disbelief the entire day. I found myselfgiving thanks for how normal and un-Canadian the Dime guys are. It made methink of that column in the tabloids that tries to prove celebrities are just like us. But rather than force a connection, like, "Look! Britney Spears has aface! You have a face too!" these guys skated very much like the rest of theworld: they didn't beam the camera, they all wore the correct size t-shirts, noone tried to one-up anyone. I didn't see one street grab all day! If it weren'tfor all the French speaking, one could have easily pegged them as Philly orChicago kids.

Our ThanksgivingDay cellphone edit only hints at how good and deep this crew is. (And sadlyall of the karaoke footage from the sports bar we took over for Thanksgivingdinner was too graphic for YouTube's standards.) But between brainstorming anddrawing up obstacles for next year's Dime Glory Challenge under the influenceof an alcoholic energy drink called Octane, they showed me some rough edits ofthe new Dime video coming this winter and I am certain it will convince anydoubters that these are like no other Canadians we've ever seen. They may haveeven convinced me to give our friends up north another shotor, at leastMontreal. Dare I say that the Dime Crew is possibly even better than RickHoward? I mean age 50 Rick. Not prime Rick. No way. Not even close. But they'restill good. Just not that good. No one will ever top Rick.

Check out Dime's website here.

Follow Chris on Twitter and check out his website for more skate talk.

The 'Jem and the Holograms' Movie Party Was Full of People with Dyed Hair and Strong Looks

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All photos by the author

This is my friend Effie Liu (left) and me (right). We're Jeminists. Jeminists are people whose particular brand of feminism is based largely on the tenets of the Saturday morning cartoon show Jem and the Holograms, which ran from 198588, and was created to help promote a line of fashion dolls sporting new-wave styles and holding instruments. This past Thursday we attended an amazing Jem party created by Interview Magazine, Sephora, Manic Panic, Wildfox, and a bunch of other companies that make Jem-based merchandise being released to coincide with the release of a supposedly terrible new movie. Parties like this are never good, but this one was really, really good.

Here's Effie at the entrance to the event, which was inside a converted carwash.

In spite of being essentially half-hour animated doll commercials, the Jem TV show was pretty great. The show centers around a young woman named Jerrica whose father has just died while she's dealing with a multitude of problems. Her foster home for girls needs money and her father's ex-business partner is trying to claim ownership of Starlight Records, which should rightfully be hers.

When all seems lost, she gets these scientifically miraculous earrings that contain teeny tiny projectors that shoot out realistic holographic images. Her father also leaves her a cool car and some instruments and, most importantly, a holographic fairy godmother named Synergy. Jerrica dons the persona of the glamorous rock singer Jem, who looks and sounds exactly like her except that her hair is longer and pink. Somehow, nobody except her bandmates realizes she's not the same person. In the show, she dates the orphanage's groundskeeper, Rio, as both Jem and Jerrica, which leads to her singing a song about not knowing which version of her he likes better.

At a time when it seemed like all women in children's cartoons were female versions of male characters (He-Man clone She-Ra) or secretaries or moms, it's cool that there was a show about a woman who was a glamorous rockstar, a powerful CEO, and a socially responsible lady who took care of orphans. An ex-girlfriend used to tell me that Jem set unattainable goals because she has magic earrings to help her, but I still think it was neat to have a multi-faceted female lead character.

This lady was wandering around at the party with a cigarette girl tray, passing out free candy. She got really mad when I grabbed more than a few things. Maybe her pay for the night was getting to keep any candy that wasn't claimed?


The party hosts were projecting a Jem highlight reel from the show outside the event. Effie and I had shown up ready for some corny baloney, but it was a Jem fan's ideal party. All this neat stuff was happening before we even got inside the building, and Effie and I were already freaking the fuck out at how good everything was.

They were giving away cotton candy with flashing glow sticks inside them. Hooray! I believe the shirt she's wearing was made to promote the new movie, which the Onion AV Club slapped with a D rating. They tried to modernize Jem, and you can't modernize Jemthe character can't be separated from the new-wave aesthetic and pastel 1980s color scheme.

(By the way, I also think that TV show about Sherlock Holmes in modern times is misguided, for similar reasons. As much as the Arthur Conan Doyle stories are about a genius detective and his friend solving mysteries, they're also a portrait of Victorian England.)

This is Darian Darling and her friend David doing a sort of loose interpretation of Jem and Rio Pacheco.

Hasbro was giving away free light-up earrings, modeled here by Mischa Golebiewski. Now every woman can holographically project a more glamourous person onto themselves.

When we actually entered the party's interior space,we you did it through an image of Synergy, seeming to suggest that she was making people look glamorous and beautiful upon entering with her holographic magic. It must have worked because everyone inside looked great.

In a major Freeman and Lowe rip-off move, they created a store inside this carwash named Jem's Closet, in which nothing was for sale. I thought this was so rad. Everything inside the party was pastel and neon colors and shimmering chrome shining in the darkness.

When I got inside Jem's Closet, it was a lot like being back in my house.

For some reason the Pizzazz doll on display is wearing glasses. Who's the smart-aleck who put glasses on Pizzazz?

I liked the dark hair/light outfit, light hair/dark outfit dichotomy these two had going on.

Everyone at the party looked good. These two are sisters and, surprisingly, it's the sister on the right who is the bigger Jem fan.

One of the cool things about Jem is that it's set in a world where everyone who isn't a mustached businessman is fully new-wave. Everyone has crazy-colored hair. It's a place I would like to exist inside of.

Everyone was trying to buy the clothes, but it was a fake store and nothing was actually for sale. I want this shit so bad.

I would also like to wear this.

In the past few years, Hasbro started producing expensive Jem dolls for adult collectors. They cost a lot of money, but the Hasbro PR people said they'd give me dolls. I really want some fancy Jems, but I can't spend $140 on a single Jem doll! These dolls were up really, really high, presumably so that I wouldn't be able to steal them.

At the rear of Jem's Closet was a salon where ladies were getting their hair and nails done.

I thought this room was kind of like what heaven will look like and smell like. The room wasn't very well ventilated, and I got pretty light-headed off the fumes.

This lady from Vanity Projects had a little snack attack before she painted my nails.

This is how my nails came out. I went with pink with a single new-wave accent finger. I don't look happy because all my brain cells had just died from the fumes, but I was very, very happy.

Contributing VICE cartoonist and hitchhiking Belgian person Nina Vandenbempt got a gold and blue lighting bolt.

This is Candy, who came all the way from Cincinnati just to be here. I keep trying to get VICE to send me to Jem Con, but they keep saying no. "No, Nick, nobody cares about Jem!" they bark at me. I care about Jem! I care a lot!

Wowie Zowie, this is a strong look.

Samantha Newark, who was the speaking voice of Jem on the show, came out with dyed pink hair and performed a few songs. This was pretty stellar.

Ms. Newark signed my Jerrica Benton doll on the leg and signed Effie's pink microphone. We were pretty starstruck.

This lady was one of the makeup artists who has a really good Edie Sedgwick look going on. The short aquamarine hair, the simple black shirt, and the tutu are a strong, strong look.

The most popular attraction at the event besides the free booze was this Starlight Express van, which was also a photo booth. Here are two women who look cool waiting to climb into a thing that looks cool. Also, the lighting is cool.

All the neon pink and mirrors made a lot of sense to me.

This Jem looked all tuckered out. Is this what a modern Jem would be like? "In today's episode of Jem, Jem won't get off her phone and all her friends hate her now."

As we left, we noticed that they even made a Starlight Records billboard. I came home and scrubbed off my makeup and looked back on what a neat time it was. I hope I get lots of free Jem stuff and meet lots of other Jem fans because of this article. I also hope other feminists don't tell me that they think Jeminism is offensive and stupid. That would really be a bad trip. I really, really hope my editor doesn't throw in the phrase "truly outrageous" into this article. That's would be the lamest thing ever to say about Jem.

Follow Nick on Twitter.

Mike Dean Might Be Hip-Hop's Biggest Stoner

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All photos by the author

The first time I met Mike Dean, I opened the door to his home studio and was greeted by the smell of marijuana and the sounds of Travis Scott's "90210," which Dean was mixing for the then-upcoming BET Awards. I was there to introduce myself and pitch a story to him about weed. I shook his hand. "It's an honor to meet you," I said.

I meant it. Mike Dean may be themost consistent behind-the-scenes hero in hip-hop over the past two decadeseven Kanye has gone out of his way to say so.Born in a bayou near Houston, the record producer, songwriter, mixer,and multi-instrumentalist started out as Selena's musical director in the 80s(he made her first record and "taught how her how to sing in tune") beforemoving on to help pioneer 90s Houston hip-hop sound, working alongsidevirtually every iconic rapper from the city: Scarface, Geto Boys, UGK, MikeJones, Z-Ro, Devin the Dude, and more.

In the 2000s, he became aninstrumental Kanye West collaborator, starting by mixing The College Dropoutand Late Registration. He made significant contributions to MyBeautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Watch The Throne, and Yeezus.Scroll through the credits of rap classics and you'll often see "Dean"scattered throughout. His fingerprints are everywhere. This year alone, he'shad credits on Yeezy's new music, as well as Travis Scott's Rodeo, A$APRocky's At Long Last A$AP, the Weeknd's Beauty Behind the Madness,Big Sean's Dark Sky Paradise, and several others.

Dean is a bona fide hip-hop legend even if you don't know his name, but he'salso got hip-hop insider gold status as a next-next-level weed smoker. Comingout of the Houston camp, in which "Swishas and dosha" were like pen and ink,this should come as no surprise. Urban legends exist about the time Dean out-smoked Snoop Dogg in a bluntcheefing competition and that he once owned a bird that was trained to retrieveblunts. Some even say that he's the biggest smoker in rap. But, like manystoner stories, the facts are a bit hazy. I wanted to know more about theprolific producer's weed lifestyle. So, after our first meet up where Ipitched him this story about his weed enthusiasm, he agreed to let me hang withhim a couple times over the course of a week to smoke powerful blunts and talkhip-hop mythology.

Mike's crib is a spacious loft onthe penthouse floor of an apartment building. A mat reading "TheDeanagans," in reference to his girlfriend, Louise Donegan, an English artistand model, sits outside the door. I visited him in the early afternoon. Aheavenly light streamed into his crib from the window. On a shelf lay a zoo ofexpensive-looking glass instruments for smoking weed. Packs of Swisher Sweetswere stacked on a table.

After re-introducing myself incase he'd forgotten my name, we sat down on a comfy sofa in his room. Ratherthan waste his time, I thought I'd get straight to the point with an easyquestion: How much weed does the man smoke in a given day? Answering in a gruffHouston accent he replied casually, "At least a quarter a day when I'mnot working"meaning 7 grams, or roughly $100-120. "When I amworking, I smoke more, usually it's like ten bluntsa day. I just came off some trips and my tolerance got kicked down... by notsmoking good enough weed. Not smoking enoughweed." Dean had been in Israel performing with Kanye West.

Dean has a medical marijuanacard, but I wondered how he was able to access bud whenever he traveled. "Fansalways bring stuff to smoke," he told me. "There are fans everywhere, so it'seasy. What's harder is , Travis smokeslike crazy. I would say top five for sure." He zeroed in on B-Real and Snoop. "I'dsay us three are the OGs of the weed smoking game."

But Dean has years on hiscompetition. He's about 15 years older than both B-Real and Snoop. Considering his age, he may have smoked themost blunts out of anyone in hip-hop. When I told him my deduction, heshrugged his shoulders and grinned.

I brought up the story floatingaround the internet that Dean and Snoop had engaged in a smoke-off. Deanclarified for me. "I've hung out with Snoop a few times, and we'll sit thereand go at it. We'll roll up eight blunts each. I'll give him a few of mine, he'llgive me a few of his, and we'll just smoke and not pass and see who lastslonger. I'll get pretty stoned by the end," he said. "It's not likethere's a winner. I just hang on. Vibe out, work on music."

What of the stories about the"weed bird"? Mike laughed. "I had the bird years ago. It was just a bird, itwould fly around and grab your blunts, cigarettes. You'd have to chase himaround the house to get them back."

Want more weed stories? Read 'Stoners Explain Why They Prefer Crappy Weed'

After finishing the second blunt and chilling for a bit with Dean in his home studio, I left his apartment and went back out into the real world. I was incredibly stoned. Coming down from a high like that always sucks. Plus I had a ton of schoolwork to do. I ended up smoking threemore blunts that day just to stay on that level. But they failed to get me there. Dean,like Moses, had shown me a promised land, via a burning bush.

Thanks Distrolord for helping make this story happen.

Follow Zach on Twitter.

VICE INTL: In Search of Mexico's Top Skate Spots

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In this episode of VICE INTL, we follow four Mexican skateboarders on a one-week adventure to find the best skate spots in their country. Max Barrera, Hugo Zurita, Shadi Charbel, and Alfredo 'Blunt' Franco visit Cuernavaca, Morelia, Puebla, and Quertaro and hit spots both old and new.

Narcomania: A History of GHB, the Club Drug at the Center of London's Serial Killer Case

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Photo from shareof via

"I can't go on any more. I took the life of my friend Gabriel. We were just having some fun at a mate's place and I got carried away and gave him another shot of G. It was an accident. I know I will go to prison if I go to the police. I have taken what G I had left, with sleeping pills. If it does kill me it's what I deserve. This way I can at least be with Gabriel again."

This was the "suicide note" clasped in the hand of Daniel Whitworth, a 21-year-old trainee chef from Kent whose dead body was found slumped against a churchyard wall in Barking, east London, in September last year.

At the time, the note made sense to police. A few weeks earlier, Daniel's boyfriend, Gabriel Kovari, had been found dead in the same churchyard of a suspected GHB overdose. "Drugs killed lovers found dead at Barking church" reported the local paper, in what appeared to be a Romeo and Juliet–style tragedy, with GHB, a drug heavily linked to London's gay party scene, as the poison.

Three months earlier, the body of trainee fashion designer Anthony Walgate was found nearby: another young gay man who had died of a GHB overdose. Police described the three deaths as "unusual but not suspicious."

It was only when a fourth body—that of forklift truck driver Jack Taylor—was discovered in similar circumstances last month that police began to suspect a serial killer.

Last week, the Old Bailey heard that Stephen Port—a 40-year-old chef and rent boy with a penchant for online dating sites, who'd appeared on an episode of Celebrity Masterchef—had used GHB as his weapon of choice to kill the four men. Prosecutors allege Port invited the young men to his flat in Barking after meeting them online, before giving them lethal quantities of the drug, raping them, and then dumping their bodies nearby. The note found in Daniel Whitworth's hand is reportedly now undergoing more forensic tests.

At the center of this grim case is the Jekyll and Hyde of recreational drugs: GHB (gamma hydroxybutyrate). Known simply as "G," the sedative anesthetic synthesized in the 1920s provides a euphoric high and can increase sex drive when taken in the right doses. Get the dose wrong, however, and the substance becomes toxic; there's a reason that GHB and its narcotic stablemate GBL—a precursor of GHB, used to make spandex and paint stripper, that transforms into GHB when it's ingested—are known by some as "Satan's urine."

An odorless, oily liquid that tastes slightly salty, GHB was developed in the USA as a pre-medication to help patients sleep before surgery, but later withdrawn due to its unwanted side effects. It was later used by bodybuilders in the 1980s because of its ability to increase growth hormones in the body.

During the 2000s, under the brand "liquid ecstasy," GHB had become a popular alternative to MDMA on the gay clubbing scene. It was cheap, easy to smuggle into clubs in Muji vials or those little squeezy soy sauce bottles you get in Itsu, and it got people going for the post-club orgies that were beginning to rise in popularity.

At the time, GHB was better known to the wider British public as the "date rape drug," after a growing number of reports that it had been used by sexual predators as a powerful sedative to spike women's drinks before raping them.

READ: Meeting the Drug-Addicted Male Escorts Pressured to Take Mephedrone and GHB at Chemsex Parties

In 2003, GHB was swiftly banned after two high profile cases involving the drug. First, Welshman David Meachen was sentenced to ten years in prison after meeting a woman in a bar, spiking her drink with the drug, and raping her. Next, serial rapist Lea Shakespeare was given ten life sentences after it was revealed he had spiked the drinks of three of his victims with GHB.

Soon, women were fearful of leaving their drinks unattended in the pub, or even accepting business cards. The media hype sparked an array of questionable anti-drink spiking gadgets produced to cash in on people's fears, such as beer mats, straws, wine glass lids, and nail polish that claimed to alert people to the presence of GHB. Studies would later show that real-life instances of GHB being used as a date rape drug were far less frequent than the scare stories would have it, with one suggesting that the most common date rape drug was alcohol.

Meanwhile, in clubland, the GHB ban had sparked a heavy rise in the use of its far more dangerous—but legal—alternative, GBL. The substance has an even steeper dosing curve than GHB, meaning that a couple of milligrams too many, especially if mixed with alcohol, can be the difference between getting high and overdosing.

By the late 2000s, men in Britain's gay clubbing scene were increasingly waking up in hospital beds after collapsing on the dance floor or at house parties. One south London hospital near Vauxhall, one of the capital's key gay clubbing districts, reported receiving at least three GHB or GBL overdose cases per week in 2009—and the number of fatalities began creeping up.

These casualties failed to attract much national media attention—possibly because they involved gay men, not children or attractive young women—until 21-year-old Brighton medical student Hester Stewart died in 2009. Her death caused a media furor over how such a dangerous drug could still be legal, and GBL was banned later that year.

WATCH: The trailer for 'Chemsex', our new documentary about drug use during gay sex parties.

Now GHB and GBL—alongside crystal meth and mephedrone—are synonymous with London's growing "chemsex" scene, in which drugs are used—often intravenously—during gay sex parties. It's a phenomenon that has caused spiraling rates of HIV, and prompted David Stuart—substance misuse lead at 56 Dean Street, a drug charity based in London's Soho—to describe GHB and GBL as the "most dangerous drugs on the planet." In 2014, the drugs were involved in 20 overdose deaths in the UK, and the Global Drug Survey found that one in four users had passed out from using the drug in the last year.

GBL is also highly addictive, with some users having to take the drug every three hours, 24 hours a day, to stave off withdrawal. In 2009, a specialist clinic was set up at the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust to help people trying to get off the drug, a process almost as dangerous as detoxing from alcohol.

"Being a GBL addict didn't make me feel crazy, it actually made me crazy," says "Bluestreak" on the Urban75s online drug forum. "It was the lack of real sleep for six months at a time. Seeing and hearing things all the time, me talking to people that weren't there, experiencing things that weren't going on. There were times during my addiction that I wouldn't have cared if it had killed me. Two and a half years I lost to that hideous stuff."

Ultimately, GHB and GBL are equally disgusting versions of the old glue-sniffing scenes of the 1980s, and they're just as toxic, addictive, and lethal. That they have the power to knock people out after being slipped in a drink also make them useful tools for sexual predators and psychopaths—two demographics that should really have the fewest tools made available to them as humanly possible.

It took the death of a young woman for the government to ban GBL in 2009, but four almost identical deaths of gay men over a 15-month period in the exact same area of London for police to sit up and take notice. What that says about the authorities' attitudes towards various social groups is a topic for another article entirely. However, what's very clear is that more could be done—and that more needs to be done—to raise awareness around the dangers of these drugs, because there's far more to them than a quick burst of euphoria and a chemically-enhanced libido.

Follow Max on Twitter.


The Long, Spooky History of America's Oldest Amusement-Park Witch

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Forty-two years ago, on a dark October night, a witch appeared on the grounds of Knott's Berry Farm. She came to the Buena Park, California, amusement park along with an army of ghouls and goblins, cobwebs, and an eerie haze.

The first Halloween Haunt at Knott's Berry Farm in 1973 was the very first Halloween event held at a theme park. It spawned countless imitations, and today the original sprawls across Knott's 160 acres. The normal attractions are replaced with haunted mazes and a wide-open "scare zone." There are monsters of every variety, all of which relish in the opportunity to give visitors a good fright by sneaking up behind them, jumping out from the foliage, or sliding across the walkways with kneepads that create a startling spark when scraped against the concrete.

And there, in the midst of it all, slinking through the crowds or hiding behind the bougainvillea branches, is the Green Witch—one of the original characters of the very first Knott's Halloween Haunt and still its most enduring symbol.

Seymour at the Haunted Shack during the first-ever Knott's Halloween Haunt in 1973. Photo courtesy of the Orange County Archives

Knott's Berry Farm, opened by Walter Knott in 1920, was originally an actual roadside berry farm. Over time, the place became famous for the fried chicken dinners cooked by Walter's wife, Cordelia, and the family gradually added attractions and souvenir shops to entertain people waiting in line for chicken. (The amusement park was bought in 1997 by Cedar Fair Entertainment Company; the fried chicken restaurant now seats 900 people.)

In the early 70s, Knott's had just added the Timber Mountain Log Ride and an expansive theater with approximately 2,000 seats, which attracted the attention of Larry Vincent, better known as "Sinister Seymour." Seymour hosted the horror show Fright Night, which presented—and heckled—B-grade horror films. The production was both cheesy and beloved, and Seymour wanted to translate it from television to the stage. So in 1973, he got in touch with Knott's talent booker, Bill Hollingshead, and asked if he could do a show in Knott's new theater.

To gear up for the October 26, 1973, opener, the park grounds were draped in cobwebs and decorated with skulls made of foam. Diana Kelly (née Kirchen) had worked as a "greeter" at the park before, so she was assigned to play the witch and usher people into the theme park. Admission for the three-day event cost $4 in advance or $4.75 at the door.

Diana Kelly as Spooky the Witch in 1973, next to Seymour and Colleen Hodges as "Lily Munster." Photo courtesy of Diana Kelly

Today, those kind of Halloween events are common at amusement parks, but there was no precedent for Knott's Halloween Haunt; there weren't many rules, except 1) always travel in pairs, because as Kelly put it, "the crowds can gang up on you" (true then, truer now) and 2) spook the visitors however you can without physically touching them.

"We were kind of making it up as we went along," Kelly remembers.

But it was fun, and more importantly, it was a success. Ticket sales soared, and so when Knott's signed on to replicate the event the following year, they amped up the production values. One of the Knott's employees, Gene Witham, had a background as a Hollywood makeup artist (his credits included Planet of the Apes) and took charge of crafting the look of the characters. He created a plaster of Paris cast of each person's face and molded them new, horrifying masks to wear while roaming the park. For Kelly, who retained the role of the witch, that meant a beaked nose and, later, a protruding chin with a plaster wart. For the third Halloween Haunt, they added green face paint. Thus the Green Witch was born.

Diana Kelly as the Green Witch in 1974. Photo courtesy of Diana Kelly

Kelly's favorite fictional sorceresses were the menacing Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz and the bumbling Witchiepoo from H.R. Pufnstuf. Kelly had no acting experience, but she studied these characters intensely, parking herself in front of the TV for Saturday morning cartoons and hold up her cassette deck to the speakers; later she'd play the recordings back, imitating the voices as best she could to develop her distinct witch's intonation.

As the Green Witch, Kelly had two tasks: to sneak up on people and spook them, and to perform in the evening's show, called the Market Street Monster Massacre. After a choreographed "monster fight," the witch would emerge on top of a roof and let out an ear-splitting cackle. Then she'd slip away in a poof of smoke, which was actually the spew of CO2 from several fire extinguishers being sprayed from beneath her. She was paid $2 an hour.

Diana Kelly in 1975, wearing the present-day Green Witch costume. Photo courtesy of Diana Kelly

Kelly's last year as the Green Witch was 1976. By then, she'd graduated from college and started a career in radio. Her successor was a woman named Barb Bess who spent a year in the black dress; then came Karen Parker, who had previously played the Bride of Frankenstein in Knott's Halloween show, took on the role. She was a natural fit: charismatic, big voiced, with a healthy dose of humor. When she caked on the green makeup and the fake nose, she was totally transformed. "It was her voice coming out of somebody else's body," remembers her sister Charlene Parker.

Charlene didn't have the natural performing streak her little sister did. She worked what she called "a real job," supervising the packaging machinery at a honey manufacturing plant. But Karen would coax her, year after year, to come to the Haunt, insisting that it was the most fun a person could have. When Karen was eventually promoted to supervise the ground's characters, she asked Charlene to come try out for a part. "It'll just be six nights," she insisted. Charlene thought to herself, OK, why not?

Read: Being a Real Witch Has Never Been Much Fun

By this point, Knott's had begun holding auditions for characters, and "I saw all these people screaming and yelling and throwing themselves all over the floor and I thought, I can't even do any of that," Charlene remembers. In all the jobs she'd had before, she'd been valued for her steadiness. "I mean, I've never had to scream and yell and act like a maniac."

So to get through the audition, she copied the people next to her, mimicking their screams and movements and trying to slink into the back. "I felt so foolish," she said.

But when it was over, someone came up to her and said, "How tall are you?" She was five-nine. "Perfect," they told her. "You're the next witch."

The costume, which had dragged on the floor when Diana wore it, was just right for Charlene. It draped elegantly on her tall, waif-like frame; and if she walked just so, with her gait steady and her feet close to the ground, the edges of the gown seemed to glide so that it looked like she was not walking at all, but floating. She was terrifying, even if she didn't say anything at all.


Charlene Parker as the Green Witch, circa 1990. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Parker's first year was 1982, the same year Knott's hired Elvira, the notoriously well-endowed "Mistress of the Dark," to host the nightly musical performance. Elvira was witchlike in her own right but she was sexy and campy as opposed to scary.

Parker, on the other hand, was utterly frightening. She didn't do any performances (the Market Street Monster Massacre had been scrapped by then), so instead, she spent all night roaming the streets. She didn't study fictional witches the way Kelly had, and she felt too awkward attempting a scream, so instead she just watch people. A group of visitors would walk by and she'd follow them for a while, quietly stalking them like prey, until one of them might turn around and see her. Usually, that was enough to freak them out.

"Because of the costume that I wear, the best way for me to scare somebody is to blend into the background so that when they walk by they have no idea that there's a live human being standing so close to them, and when they get within a certain distance, I just jump right out at them," Parker explained. "They all scream. I also have a little shaker can which I rattle."

Parker likes to tell stories of the time she made a grown man jump with fear and spill his cup of coffee down his shirt, or the time a teenaged girl pissed her pants from a scare. "She fell on the ground, and when she got up, there was a wet spot on the ground. People were walking by like, 'Look! She wet her pants!'"

Over the years, she's perfected her scare strategy: She stands inside a bougainvillea planter near the Indian Trails stage, then obscures her face with a branch.

"I'll look at a group, and I can tell by their body language if they're starting to get a little spooked. And then the object is to get up close enough to them to get them to start moving quickly. If they start to run, I keep on going and then separate somebody from the group," she said. "That is what predators do. They separate one, and then there's no longer safety in numbers, and that person knows it."

Watch: VICE travels to Veracruz, Mexico, the Disneyland of satanic tourists.

By the 90s, theme park Halloween events had become ubiquitous. Six Flags Fright Fest started in 1989; Busch Gardens began its annual Howl-O-Scream in 1999; Universal Studios started running Horror Nights in both their Florida and California locations around the same time. All of these owe something to Knott's Halloween Haunt.

"There are other entertainment areas and theme parks that are doing haunts, but this one is the granddaddy," says Kelly. It created a formula for success: genuine fear with a dash of camp, Hollywood-quality sets and costume design, and most importantly, a cast of characters who were utterly consumed by their roles.

The park's publicist, Leidy Arévalo, wasn't able to provide concrete numbers on the event's attendance, but noted that "it is one of the most popular events at Knott's Berry Farm" and has been enjoyed by "millions throughout the years." Other reports have suggested that the event makes up as much as 15 percent of the park's annual attendance, and estimated that the month of October accounts for half the park's annual revenue.

"Halloween wasn't a big event prior to the Haunt," longtime Knott's employee Gary Salisbury said in an interview with a website dedicated to the history of the Haunt. "Then, all of a sudden in 1973, a little family-owned amusement park in Buena Park, California came up with an idea that changed the course of Halloween forever."

Knott's Halloween Haunt, circa 1990. Photo courtesy of the Orange County Archives

Parker had been working as the Green Witch for ten Halloweens while keeping her full-time job at the honey manufacturing plant. Her night gig did not go unnoticed. She'd clock in at 7 AM each morning, sometimes with flecks of green face paint stuck to her eyebrows and Spirit Gum affixed to her face where her prosthetic nose had been, eyes bagged from lack of sleep.

Then, in 1993, Sue Bee Honey was bought out by another corporation and the plant moved out of state. Suddenly without a job, Parker asked Knott's if she could help out more. She eventually got hired as a tour guide and now spends most of her time at the park as a spinner-weaver in the old town, where she demonstrates craftmaking.

Every now and again, when she's in her spinner-weave costume, someone will come up to her, study her eyes for a moment, and then whisper, "Are you the witch?"

Photo courtesy of Knott's Berry Farm

This year's Haunt marks Parker's 33rd year as the Green Witch. She still wears the same costume that Kelly did, though some of the feathers have been plucked off and Parker has taken to sewing on new strips of fabric where the gown has grown tattered. She says she never wants to give up the costume—it's part of what makes the witch.

Kelly, who now lives in San Diego, revisits Knott's from time to time. Halloween is still her favorite time of year to come, even without the green face paint and pointy hat.

"It was the most fun job I've ever had," says Kelly. "Every time I come back to Knott's, it's like coming home."

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

Inside Ireland's Nooks and Crannies

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For the past year or so, I have been exploring Ireland with my camera. These photographs are a record of my existence on distant and unfamiliar soil. I'm interested in the idea of a national identity as well as the significance of subculture in a country with 4.5 million people (it's smaller than my home state of Massachusetts). I spend my time trying to gain access to some of Ireland's least inviting people and places, like dissident republicans in Belfast and church services in one of the county's most notorious housing estates. These photographs shift between a distant and familiar relationship with the country since I am constantly traveling and readjusting to my surroundings.

Timothy O'Connell is a photographer based in San Francisco. You can check out more of his work here.

The VICE Morning Bulletin

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(Photo by Ben Dalton via)

Here is everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.

US News

  • Oklahoma Crash Suspect in Court
    The woman accused of driving a car into a crowd and killing four at Oklahoma State University's homecoming parade appears in court today. Adacia Chambers' lawyer believes mental illness, not intoxication, may have caused the crash. —AP
  • Biden: Family Came First
    The Vice President said recovering from the death of his son Beau left him no time to mount a presidential campaign. In a 60 Minutes interview Biden said he wouldn't run for office again, and claimed he and Hillary Clinton "get along together". —NBC News
  • Flash Flood Alert in Louisiana
    Louisiana is braced for more torrential rain today, as the storm that dumped more than a foot of rain on Texas over the weekend moves east. Flash flood watches have been issued for parts of New Orleans and Baton Rouge. —Reuters
  • Could Russian Subs Cut Internet Cables?
    US officials have expressed worry about the close proximity of Russian submarines to underwater internet cables. They fear Russia could cripple the West by severing fibre-optic connections. —The New York Times

International News

  • Five Killed in Whale-Watching Tragedy
    A whale-watching boat has sunk off the coast of British Columbia, Canada, killing at least five people. Coast guards rescued 21 passengers from the wreckage of the MV Leviathan II, while one person remains missing. —CBC News
  • Comedian Becomes Guatemalan President
    Jimmy Morales, a former TV comedian, has swept to power in Guatemala's presidential election. Morales quit his Daily Show-style TV show last year to run for the presidency, campaigning against political corruption. —The Guardian
  • EU Agrees on Migrant Centers
    Leaders in Brussels have agreed another 100,000 spaces in refugee welcome centers. EU nations will also send 400 police officers to Slovenia, where the Prime Minister has warned that without a plan for the refugee crisis, "Europe will start falling apart." —Reuters
  • Conservatives Take Power in Poland
    The conservative Law and Justice party has won a landslide election victory in Poland. Exit polls suggest it will be the first time since democracy came to the country in 1989 that a party has won enough seats to govern alone. —BBC News

Some people staring at each other in Toronto (Photo by Allison Elkin)

Everything Else

  • #LegosForWeiwei
    Ai Weiwei fans have pledged to donate Lego bricks to the Chinese artist so he can complete new work. Bizarrely, the toymaker says it cannot sell directly to anyone using Lego to make political statements. —TIME
  • Pharrell Testy at Testimony
    Footage of Pharrell giving testimony during the "Blurred Lines" copyright suit has emerged. "Silk and rayon are two different things—they just feel the same," Mr Happy told the lawyers. —Noisey
  • Getting High by Staring into Strangers' Eyes
    More than 100 cities have taken part in the World's Biggest Eye Contact Experiment. Turns out that if you push past the embarrassment, the love hormone oxytocin kicks in. —VICE
  • Terraforming Is Entirely Possible
    Recreating an Earth-like environment on Mars will be really difficult. But a NASA astrobiologist explains how synthetic lifeforms can help us survive on other planets. —Motherboard

Done with reading for today? Hey, here's an alternative: watch Cash Slaves, our new film about the "financial domination" fetish, where guys (and it is almost exclusively guys) give away thousands of dollars to a dominatrix they'll never meet.

The Myth of the Lone Wolf

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Illustration by Tyler Boss

Question: What do the following Islamic militants, all recently active, have in common? Michael Adebowale, who stabbed soldier Lee Rigby to death on the streets of London in 2013; Amedy Coulibaly, who killed four people when he took over a Jewish supermarket in Paris on January 9, 2015; Cherif Kouachi, who killed 11 when he attacked the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in the French capital two days earlier; Mohammed Merah who killed seven in southern France in 2012; Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein, who shot dead two in Copenhagen in February this year.

Answer one: They are all young Muslim men living in the West.

Answer two: They have all been described as "lone wolf" terrorists, actors who do not have connections with any major extremist group such as al-Qaeda or the Islamic State.

Answer three: They have all spent time in prison.

That prisons feature frequently on the CV of many militants is no surprise. Prisons are the perfect incubators for extremist violence of all types, as they are for other forms of criminal behavior. You get all the people who are involved in a particular illegal activity together and then lock them up with each other. This is clearly far from ideal. It is particularly problematic if you are dealing with a phenomenon like terrorist activity, including Islamic militancy, which is composed of a series of informal cells, networks, and groups.

If you think of militant groups as a type of gang, offering protection, solidarity, a sense of belonging, useful resources, even economic (and sexual) opportunity or advantage, then it will come as no surprise that they thrive behind bars. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, one of the most savage figures of the last couple of decades, was turned from a street thug into an aspirant jihadi in a Jordanian jail. This transformation may have been less dramatic than it looks. Al-Zarqawi simply swapped one gang for another.

Read: America Incarcerated, VICE's series about mass incarceration

Over the last century different governments have made successive attempts to deal with the problem. One tactic has been to segregate extremists from other "vulnerable" prisoners. But that risks simply reconstituting the groups you are trying to break up behind bars and reinforcing their cohesion. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, built most of the contacts that would allow him to go on to create the organization he now leads while incarcerated in a US-run prison camp in Iraq in 2004. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the current head of al-Qaeda, was held in an Egyptian prison for his membership of networks that had been behind the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat. There is famous footage of him haranguing the court from a cage full of other like-minded militants. Many went on to play key roles in the various extremist campaigns that followed.

The other option for authorities is to disperse the extremists. There are usually not very many of them, so this is a tempting strategy. Over the last ten years, the number of Muslim prisoners in England and Wales has doubled, according to recent statistics, but only a hundred or so of these have been convicted of terrorist offenses.

Yet experience shows that the Islamic militant ideology is highly contagious, and dispersing such men—unless they are held incommunicado in solitary confinement—risks contaminating others with its virus. Merah, Kouachi, and Coulibaly all appear to have become interested in violent extremism while in prison. The latter two were influenced by a charismatic older militant detained before 9/11 on a charge of planning to blow up the US embassy in Paris. Al-Zarqawi had been influenced by well-known clerics.

Is there a solution? Only in part. What happens in prisons reflects what is happening in the rest of a society. In 20 years of reporting on Islamic militancy in the UK and elsewhere, I have noticed one clear trend: the spread of the ideology to ever more young men, and some women. It remains a minority, of course, but a minority that is much larger than before.

Read on VICE News: Here's How France Plans to Curtail Islamic Radicalization Within Its Prisons

The truth is that almost no one "self-radicalizes," any more than any teenager "self-interests" in narcotics, a particular music scene, or an extreme sport that involves significant physical risk. The psychological barriers to participation in acts of violence are higher than for most activities, but the basic mechanics of how people become involved in them are the same. Terrorism is a social activity, albeit an immoral and abhorrent one, and no one becomes a terrorist on their own. There is no access to radical websites in prison, but in almost all the above cited cases individuals ended a jail sentence more committed to violent ideologies than before. What's most important in the making of a terrorist is not some kind of character deficiency, nor psychopathic or sadistic tendencies, but something much more banal: who you spend time with and what they say and do. And if this is true in prisons, it is also true outside of them, too.

This is why it's important to realize that so-called lone wolves do not really exist. Of the five militants mentioned at the top of this article, only two acted alone, and one of these—the Frenchman Mohammed Merah—was connected to a militant faction in Pakistan. They were all part of networks, and were acting in the belief that they were part of a much broader community of militants. Trying to tackle extremism inside is necessary, but will only be possible if extremism outside is tackled, too.

Sex Workers Talk About the Lies They Tell Their Loved Ones

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Photo via Flickr user Paul Falardeau

For a couple years, I told my dad I worked as a caterer. I had been a line cook until I started escorting, so the story fit my skill set and random hours, as well as my ability to take off for month-long road trips at will. He worked in food when he was younger; we had it in common. Periodically I slipped into the macho, aggrieved tones I learned in restaurants and ranted about the imaginary fuck-ups of my coworkers.

If you need to shut down the curious, bore people with hostility. Instant eye glaze.

The lie seemed to fly for a while, kind of. But I wasn't sleep deprived, over-worked, or irritable enough. The sheet-tray scars on my forearms lightened and disappeared. Questions became pointed, so I invented extravagant weddings, and then was promoted to manager, at which point I began doing "on-site estimates."

That story was thin. I knew it.

I hoped it was enough for my dad that I was happy and had no plans to move home to his basement. A fragile economy was sending his friends' kids back to the nest in droves. Sex work isn't completely recession-proof, but it's close enough.

What ruined the lie was money, of course. My dad is not naive—caterers don't live in Manhattan, unless the passed hors d'oeuvres are blow. I realized that we were both lying; me about what I was doing, he that he didn't think I was full of shit.

On Broadly: The Witches of Bushwick

What lies do people tell if they work in the sex industry? For starters, it depends on exactly what they do. An independent escort's schedule is irregular, but not rigid. I spend perhaps a third of my working hours with clients, and must average my fee with the time I spend on my laptop generating traffic, churning Twitter, running reference checks, and writing lighthearted, kissy notes to regulars. Most appointments are in the afternoon or early evening.

An escort named Jane (I've changed the names of everyone in this story) tells everyone she's a real estate agent. It fits all the data, and also explains why her income is variable. That's a good story, but can get messy fast.

"Two years ago, my aunt set me up on a blind date, and it was after I said yes that she told me maybe he could get me a job at his firm," she told me. "I suddenly 'met someone at the gym.'"

Agency escorts have a different set of challenges, mostly surrounding the "call on" system. When an escort calls on at an agency, it means that they are dressed and ready to work; if they get a booking, they pledge to arrive to the call within an agreed-upon amount of time. Large NYC agencies promise anywhere in Manhattan in half an hour. It's not a Domino's-style guarantee—nothing is free if she gets there in 31 minutes. Hanging out at home in Bay Ridge makes things tricky, so the lie has to cover leaving the house in the early evening wearing full makeup, with a variable return.

Karen, who escorted her way through an accounting degree, told her Eastern European family that she was a party promoter. She spent most of her wait time in clubs, so it was close to the truth.

On work nights, Lauren, another agency escort, said goodbye to her four college roommates and left their tiny apartment in the South Slope on her way to a job "cleaning office buildings." Barefaced in leggings with a backpack, she took the train to a coworker's Chinatown apartment. They kept each other company while they got ready and waited for their phones to ring.

It was imperfect, but it worked for a while. "I didn't like lying to them, and the few times that I got a late party call I had to make up insane stories," she told me. "Once, I told them that I slept with my boss in his office. It seemed weird that that was OK, but the truth wasn't."

Strippers have a different set of challenges. The hours are set, and you can wear whatever you want on your commute, but arriving home at 5 or 6 AM—tired, starving, and in need of a shower—requires a specialized fib. Miranda told dates that she worked as a bartender, which did the trick if she kept it casual. When a relationship turned serious, though, her girlfriend wanted to visit her at work. "I panicked—I thought seriously about getting a bartending job, but I couldn't think of how to backdate it," she said. Her solution was to say she'd been fired and immediately hired somewhere else, and so should wait a while before receiving visitors. She was caught when she tried the same story a second time, and confessed.

Predictably, the job wasn't as big an issue as the lie.

Jobs that have a site and daytime hours make it easier. Jill works in a dominatrix parlor, and her hours are ten to six, Monday through Friday. Equipment is stored at the Midtown studio, which has a shower and wi-fi. She leaves the house at 9:30 and is home at 6:30. Her babysitter thinks she works in HR.

"I should make up something else; I don't know what HR people do," she said. "But I don't think anybody does. No one asks."

Lily goes to school three days a week and works two days in a massage parlor. She does homework on breaks. "Most of my friends know, but if they don't, there are three computer labs, and one of them is in a basement and has no reception," she told me. "I don't worry about it."

The best insurance against being caught in a lie is that often, loved ones don't want to know unpleasant facts.

Betty posted an ad on Seeking Arrangement when she was 21. She wasn't sure how to explain the cash and gifts she received from her so-called sugar daddies, but found intricate subterfuge unnecessary.

"I told my mom that I had won my phone on the radio, that I got free upgrades all the time, that my rent was half what it is. She didn't want to know," she explained.

Her family's ignorance began to seem willful. "I started pushing it into her face a little bit, but she didn't want to know anything. Sometimes I want to tell her, I make it easier for them."

If lies can make it easier for everyone, the lack thereof can do the opposite. As Dan, who is in his 30s now but escorted a decade ago, recalled, "I never told my parents anything about how I was supporting myself, but I made it through four years of school. It hurt that they didn't ask. Did they know? Or did they manage not think about it?"

Check out our documentary about the new era of Canadian sex work.

After a year at my fake catering gig, I asked myself why I was lying. Aside from the occasional shame hiccup (cue comments section!), I was not conflicted about my job. My friends were supportive, I was saving money, and I had unlocked the dubious achievement of having anxiety about other, far more nebbishy concerns. Both parents commented on how well I seemed; it gnawed at me to keep the lie going.

Concealment presumes that sex work is fundamentally bad or wrong, and it was believing otherwise that had led to my even keel. What kept me from disclosure was the idea that my dad wouldn't know how to process something that carries intense stigma. If I told him, he might shove it into the brain box where people leave upsetting information and let it rot, pushing us apart from each other.

I didn't feel I had a right to drop something so radioactive into his life.

He is pushy, and I am not good at drinking, so it eventually came out. The conversation went far, far better than I expected. It's been three weeks now since I've lied to anyone, and fuck it, it feels amazing.

Follow April Adams on Twitter.

Ranking Every Single Unofficial Harry Potter T-Shirt from Bad to Absolutely the Worst

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Did that thing this morning where you wake up and immediately look at your phone, in this order: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. Eyes like piss holes in the snow, straining against the backlit sun. Head barely off the pillow. Phone still hooked like an anchor into the wall socket. Alarm pop-up blooping into view every seven minutes because you keep hitting snooze. You do this, too.

Anyway, I'm going to stop doing it now because as I scrolled through Facebook I saw an advertisement for this T-shirt, which is the worst T-shirt, and as a result my Monday morning was ruined even before I'd gotten up to piss.


Available for a limited time only from FunSportsGear

Yes, that T-shirt says, "Just a wizard girl, living in a muggle world, took the Hogwarts train going anywhere." Some notes:

  • A wizard girl is called a "witch."
  • The Hogwarts train is called the "Hogwarts Express" and it runs on a fixed line between King's Cross and Hogsmeade Station, so the train doesn't go "anywhere," it can go to one of two locations depending on its direction.
  • I mean, it's literally cursed by magic to be locked onto those rails, careening six times a year in a Hogwarts–London shuttle, taking 1,000 magical children in one go hither and yon.

So in a fair and just world, the T-shirt should read: "Just a witch / living in a muggle world / she took the Hogwarts Express going to either Hogsmeade (nr. Hogwarts) or King's Cross" (sung to the tune of "Don't Stop Believin'" by Journey).

But we don't live in a fair and just world; we live in a world full of unofficial Harry Potter merchandise like this, and the people who would wear it. Because you can sketch the kind of person who would wear such a T-shirt based on what is written on the front of it, can't you? Example: the Venn diagram of people who think Harry Potter is good enough to wear a T-shirt over and the people who heard "Don't Stop Believin'" for the first time during the pilot episode of Glee is a circle the size of the sun. The person who wears this T-shirt has a favorite energy drink and likes to describe themselves as "hyper."

These people walk among us, clutching children's books close to their chest and actually saying the word "lol." And they wear these T-shirts, and these T-shirts must be ranked. Don't ask why they must be ranked: They just must be ranked. So we're doing it tops-off in a parking lot style: Each T-shirt faces off against another one-on-one, and then we'll go through to the quarterfinals, and then at the end—as the sun sets and a load of hard bald men called Dean hold plastic pint glasses up to the dying light of the sky—one T-shirt will go HAM on the other one in a bid for shitty unofficial Harry Potter T-shirt domination.

Leygo:


Image via Living Dope

SORRY, I DON'T DATE MUGGLES

I mean, essentially here what you are saying is that you are a virgin, for life, because you will not date people who are not wizards or witches, and wizards and witches do not exist. What you are saying here with this $20-plus-shipping tee is you have never entered, or been entered by, another person's genitals; you will never know the visceral thrill of a sexual orgasm; you will never know the warm pull of loving human company. But also this T-shirt acts as a sort of easy wash boner-killer anyway, because I cannot imagine a person—muggle or nay—wanting to date someone who would actually wear that T-shirt outside of the house. You could say it's an "invisibility cloak" (Harry Potter reference) for sexually viable partners!



Image via Lookhuman

YOU DON'T LIKE HARRY POTTER? I AM WINGARDIUM LEVIO-SO DONE WITH YOU

This is the Mean Girls–esque dream fantasy of a thousand lonely 15-year-old girls. They are asleep, the girls, and they are dreaming about being the most popular girl in school—everyone is at their table, looking on at them, rapt, while they say something about how books are cool—and then the actual popular girl at school, fucking Becky, is there like, "Oh my gosh, yes! I think books are really cool, too! Can I sit with you?" And the unpopular girl gets up—unassisted—and goes, "Do you like Harry Potter?" And Becky scoffs, like, "Lol, no." And the unpopular girl, the last giddy whisps of a dream, says, "I am wingardium levio-so done with you," and the canteen erupts, kids hanging from the rafters, flipping tables, chanting the girl's name: "KATH-LEEN! KATH-LEEN! KATH-LEEN!"

And then she wakes up, and turns out no, she still hasn't got any friends, but someone has started a new and incredibly bitchy Facebook group about her. And then she pulls on her T-shirt that is literally an entire conversation—opener and exit—and goes out to face the day.



Image via Polyvore

KEEP CALM AND FIND HORCRUXES

I don't want to be too overblown, but I'm pretty sure this T-shirt disproves the existence of God, because—no, bear with me—because millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of culture have been whittled down to a fine point, hundreds of generations have come and gone, technology slowly crawling forward, language and culture evolving, and now this: this T-shirt that says: "Keep Calm and Find Horcruxes" on it, which is a T-shirt people actually do buy and wear. No just and honest deity would sit there and let this happen. No God, whatever the religion, would stay silent and unflinching in the face of this horror. Earthquakes and volcano explosions and AIDS and meteorites: all fine. But this is too much. Keep Calm and Know That God Isn't Real.

Which is the worst T-shirt? I am wingardium levio-so done with this question!

Image via Amazon

I NEVER GOT MY ACCEPTANCE LETTER FROM HOGWARTS SO I'M LEAVING THE SHIRE AND BECOMING A JEDI

Literally every single person who wears this T-shirt or thinks this T-shirt is in any way good laughs through their nose while making this exact noise: sneck sneck sneck.

This one doesn't have a rival shirt to face off against, but it doesn't need one, because it just goes through immediately, owing to how hugely terrible it is.

QUARTERFINALS: EXPLAINING EACH T-SHIRT TO YOUR DAD

OK, now we've discussed and analyzed exactly how each of the unofficial Harry Potter T-shirts is bad, we need to pit them against each other on a different metric. This is the metric: how long it takes to explain your Harry Potter T-shirt to your dad at a family barbecue.

This is your dad. Explain your Harry Potter T-shirt to him. Photo via Flickr user Brett Taylor

MY MAGIC BRINGS VOLDEMORT TO THE YARD / DAMN RIGHT IT'S HURTING MY SCAR

What's your dad saying? "So, what, it's them books you liked when you were little? Yeah, I remember. We had to wait outside WHSmith at midnight for one. Getting out the car park was a fucking nightmare. So it's that, and also that milkshake song? So do you like Kelis, or...? No? I don't get it, Lisa. You don't even have a scar."

How much food did your dad burn while he was trying to understand this T-shirt? An entire ASDA Savers 16-pack of chicken wings. Through to the next round.

Read on Motherboard: Delusionally Ambitious Harry Potter Kickstarter Shut Down

I NEVER GOT MY ACCEPTANCE LETTER FROM HOGWARTS SO I'M LEAVING THE SHIRE AND BECOMING A JEDI

What's your dad saying? Your dad only saw the first and the third Lord of the Rings movies and keeps calling Star Wars "Star Trek," and everyone at the barbecue is getting angry now, so this conversation has to stop before you've even explained to him that no, you can't get rejected from Hogwarts, because it isn't real.

How much food did your dad burn while he was trying to understand this T-shirt? All of the food. He burned all of the food. He burned so much food that some of the salads your mom made—untouched in a big transparent bowl, sealed tight with tin foil—somehow managed to get charred. On to the next round.

BE WARNED! THE OWNER OF THIS SHIRT MAY LOOK LIKE AN ORDINARY MUGGLE / IN FACT THEY'RE... WIZARD

What's your dad saying? "What's that say, I can't read it all. No, hold it taut. No – fucksake, get me my readers. Right, OK. Fuck's a muggle?"

How much food did your dad burn while he was trying to understand this T-shirt? Nine sausages, including two sausages he was saving for himself, those nice caramelized onion ones your mom gets sometimes as a treat. Those were the last ones. "Dog can have 'em," your dad says, sadly. "Dog can have the fuckers." But in the end, he did understand it. Out of the competition you go, "In Fact They're... Wizard."

On NOISEY: Drake is Your Uncle, Your Uncle and Your Uncle in the Hotline Bling Video

YOU DON'T LIKE HARRY POTTER? I AM WINGARDIUM LEVIO-SO DONE WITH YOU

What's your dad saying? "How's the job search going, then?"

How much food did your dad burn while he was trying to understand this T-shirt? Your dad exited the conversation when you said "Avada Kedavra is the death spell" and instead took the Astra round to the gas station for a thing of sweet chili sauce and, for the first time in eight years, a massive box of cigarettes. Your T-shirt is so bad your dad started smoking again. "Wingardium Levio-so done with you" is through to the final.

THE FINAL

We are now left with just three contenders—"Wingardium Levio-so Done With You," "Be Warned!", and "I Never Got My Acceptance Letter"—and so now we have to start being a little bit tight with what constitutes a shitty unofficial Harry Potter T-shirt. Example:

A Shitty Unofficial Harry Potter T-Shirt Has to Be About Harry Potter Only

I am sorry, "I Never Got My Acceptance Letter," but with your Star Wars font and your bit about Lord of the Rings, you fail this round. Go home to your owner, Dude Who Owns More Than Three Fedoras.

A Shitty Unofficial Harry Potter T-Shirt Absolutely Cannot Be Funny

Wow, fraught round. Because technically, although "My Magic Brings Voldemort to the Yard" is not even remotely funny—not even if you practice it in front of the mirror at home for weeks to get the stilted cadence right before performing the whole thing in front of the school for the end-of-year talent show—it does come from a place where you can almost imagine humor existing, because Voldemort does sound a little bit like "all the boys," and the idea of magic attracting boys is absurd. It's not funny. Not at all. But it's not the cold, dead anti-humor of, "You Don't Like Harry Potter? I Am Wingardium Levio-so Done With You."

Nothing is.

Read on MUNCHIES: Pho Weather Is Coming

The Worst T-Shirt, Then, Is "You Don't Like Harry Potter? I Am Wingardium Levio-so Done With You"

I mean, this is the worst T-shirt possibly in the world. An entire conversation that would never actually happen, arranged, and printed on a tee. That said: decent font choice. But still extremely bad.

Maybe you like it; I don't know. I can't tell you what to think. Maybe the books and movies really mean something to you. Maybe Harry Potter was your only friend when your parents were divorcing. Maybe it reminds you of Christmas. Maybe you like awful T-shirts and hate looking good. Whatever, man. It's just a fun book for kids, isn't it? Just a fun bit of escapism for kids. You do you. I am wingardium levio-so not going to tell you how to live your life.

Follow Joel on Twitter.

Leigh Alexander’s Understanding Games: The Final Word on ‘The Phantom Pain,’ a Video Game About Video Games

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All screenshots captured by Steve Haske, for VICE Gaming's A Song of Metal Gear Solid

This article contains what might be considered plot spoilers for Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Don't say we didn't warn you.

The prologue of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is grueling. You are a legendary soldier, woken from a nine-year coma with your arm missing and your muscles turned to jelly. You crawl along the hospital floor not for stealth, as is tradition, but because at first you cannot stand, bare skin squeaking helplessly along a blood-slicked floor.

The building is concussed by unknown invaders, and while you uselessly hide, you see staff members coldly gunned down right before your eyes, helpless teams of workers hitting the floor. You flop wetly over their mangled bodies—at one point crawling right past a wheelchair which you cannot seem to interact with or use, placed there almost like a taunt.

In the nine years you've been in the coma, your own employees, the soldiers of a rogue mercenary group called Militaires Sans Frontières, have been struggling to rebuild after the attack that left you disabled. The original purpose of their mission is now lost, muddled in revenge fantasies and their longing for your return. You must rebuild your base and its forces, alone in the middle of the sea, answering to no government, only to the higher call of combat.

One of your first tasks as a player is to learn the spread sheet-like interface by which you will manage your base and its private forces for the duration of the game. STAFF MANAGEMENT, it's called.

In the months before Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain launched, widespread news reports alleged deplorable working conditions at Konami, the massive veteran Japanese corporation that has long published the Metal Gear games—and employed their auteur, Hideo Kojima. Staff were said to be severely disciplined for innocuous social media activity, worked under continuous surveillance, and could be reassigned from office work to cleaning and factory jobs if they were deemed noncompliant or useless.

Since the very first Metal Gear of 1987, the series has been preoccupied with the idea of a sacred base of operations. Almost all its plot threads—which sustain admirably right up through the latest game in 2015—lead to the formation of a stateless mercenary body that lives and operates in isolation, obeying only the pure law of the battlefield. The series has several variations on this theme ("Outer Heaven," "Outer Haven," "Zanzibar Land," "Mother Base,") and episodes always include units of highly specialized, potentially even supernaturally gifted soldiers devoted to their own stateless codes.

In the games, the foundation of these sacred spaces is always a response to the betrayal of these specialized soldiers by their leadership or their nation of origin, and often both. Players are always led through Metal Gear games by a trusted advisor whose true nature or motives are later revealed to have been treacherous, and the characters are as decimated by acts of war as they are by these breaches of faith.

The themes of Kojima's work have always suggested he has worn the implicit obligation to "save" the traditional Japanese console industry at times proudly, and at times uneasily.

In 2005 Kojima formed his own studio, Kojima Productions, as a subsidiary of Konami. While Metal Gear Solid V, a game about managing and nurturing staff on a "Mother Base" in the middle of the ocean, was being made, 2015 Nikkei reports said Kojima Productions employees were being isolated: their computers were disconnected from the internet, with only internal messages allowed.

On some level, Kojima's games have always been plaintive messages in a bottle from inside the world of video game development. 2008's Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots was the absurd story of a prematurely aged super-soldier, groaning and joint-cracking through a desert hellscape of automated soldiers and international technology arms races. It was also the jewel in Sony's PlayStation 3 launch plans, which were troubled by the meteoric rise of the Western Xbox brand and the smooth Gulf War first-person shooters that were its vanguard. Japan's long-held console market edge was being eaten alive by auto-aim and American military realism. The character of "Old Snake" in Metal Gear Solid 4, a self-conscious, ailing relic masochistically compelled to one "final" mission in a world that had forgotten him, could have been a stand-in for Kojima himself. The themes of his work have always suggested he has worn the implicit obligation to "save" the traditional Japanese console industry at times proudly, and at times uneasily.

For the development of Metal Gear Solid V, Kojima Productions ran a hiring campaign beginning in 2012 called "Development Without Borders," reaching out to the international game-making community for resumes. It was a gentle concession to the struggles Japanese developers faced on the console market; financial analysts and the game press alike continually urged teams like Konami's to "Westernize," to work more closely with North American and European studios and adopt their ideals and methods in order to survive. Kojima Productions recorded all MGS V's facial and voice performances in English first, divorcing the series from its native Japanese for the first time.

The resulting game is about the Militaires Sans Frontières, a scrappy solo mercenary group that ultimately takes the name "Diamond Dogs." As staff abuses allegedly went on behind Konami's curtain of silence, each mission in MGS V was given its own individual credits sequence, including each person who worked on the episode, as if to address the industry's on-going tendency to attribute massive projects to single individuals—a particular issue with Metal Gear Solid titles, where Kojima's name is given an unprecedented primacy (even in this article).

Ultimately, however, The Phantom Pain's major plot thread turns out to concern a virus that affects only English speakers, and the primary antagonist, "Skull Face," is driven by a deep, principled aversion to Western imperialism. He fears that any concept of international "world peace" would be culturally American—and therefore undesirable.

Whatever you make of that, MGS V, perhaps even more than MGS 4, is a video game about video games. This article comparing Kojima to author Jonathan Franzen says the staff management sections "might be fun if you were expecting Metal Gear to be a human resources simulator from hell"—but of course you should have expected that. When you shunt troublesome staff away from specialized units and into quarantines, or when you logically begin to treat low-grade "D rank" personnel as disposable cannon fodder, how can you not draw an analogue with what the director and his staff may have endured if those workplace reports are true?

That The Phantom Pain is absolutely Kojima's "best" work—eminently playable, open, graceful, funny, efficiently relegating most of the director's self-indulgent quirks to optional territory—almost feels like a triumphant last laugh. It is defiantly massive, eating up hours of playtime only to inform you that you're merely some marginal percent closer to completion. At the game's opening screen, that completion percentage hangs prominently next to a distinctly exhausted and disillusioned-looking hero, as if to casually toss the consumer demand for "hours and hours of gameplay" back into its thoughtless, open mouth.

Time itself is a mechanic, in-game days and hours ticking and yawning into some forever-maw while you wait for it to be night so that you can attack. You are sometimes forced to halt your advance, lying on a hillside in the shadows, until some component has been created or some supply drop has arrived. This is a game so expansive and so impeccable that you know it swallowed nearly every spare hour of a good few hundred people's lives to get made. You can see the chasm of its ambition in all of the pieces of the story that are unglued, unfinished, bare struts, and scaffolding. You feel complicit.

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Is your team called the "Diamond Dogs" because you have to mindlessly hunt for wild gems that will make your resources increase by numbers that start to feel meaningless the longer you play? Ruefully you become keyed to onscreen sparkles, just like in the blingy, touchable, free-to-play mobile games that Konami is counting on to sustain its business. Or is a "Diamond Dog" a staff member hardened by trauma, excellence wrung from it in a crucible of inconceivable pressure?

The way you greet your employees on Mother Base is to hit them, or to knock them to the ground. They like it. It increases their morale.

Kojima has famously and repeatedly threatened to stop making Metal Gear Solid games over the years, but for some reason has been unable. Each one seems to eke just a little closer to what we the audience assume must be his grand vision, repeating the same characters, memes, touchstones, and call signs with an inexplicable determination (MGS V is full of self-aware references to Moby Dick). He has been accused of hating his fans, closing down Metal Gear Solid 4 with a non-interactive cutscene some 90 minutes long during a time when such scenes were enjoying peak derision in design circles; he is assumed to be grotesquely self-indulgent, trapped in a memetic loop of his own ideas he can't escape.

Lots of people even think his success is entirely accidental, stitched haphazardly together from scenes he stole from action movies like Escape from New York and Mission: Impossible. This could be the case; I've used the phrase "the hero" throughout this piece because I cannot expect any reader to take fiction that names its characters "Big Boss" and "Solid Snake" seriously without context. Kojima is also, assuredly, a leering pervert who puts unnecessary breast physics, nude scenes, and first-person ogle cameras in all his games.

In the latter regard, MGS V's Quiet is his worst offense yet. A pneumatic, mostly naked sniper who is either unwilling to speak or incapable of speech—presumably designed to sell action figures and desk models—her character design drew pointed critique right from its first reveal. Modern audiences no longer tolerate commercialistic sexual objectification in video games, not even with the "cultural differences" clause once applied to forgive Japanese developers—but even worse was Kojima's teasing tweet about how critics will be ashamed of words and deeds upon learning Quiet's reason for eschewing clothes.

Spoiler alert: Quiet cannot wear clothes because she breathes through her skin, a stupid magical fiction mutation on par with Metal Gear characters who dodge bullets or control bees. This is hardly a shame-inducing revelation.

At the same time, it's tough to believe that Kojima, whose work acts as shrewd, delicate metafiction just as often as it acts as a vehicle for boob jokes, truly thought it would be. Despite the fact he cannot stop creeping, at times seriously problematically, on his women characters, he has nonetheless drawn some of big commercial video games' most diverse and striking anti-heroines. With Quiet, intentionally or otherwise, he created the fascinating circumstance whereby a slew of editorial, some of it published long before the game's actual launch, self-righteously dissected the body, sexuality, and purpose of a woman who had no literal voice; no means of reply or self-explication.

Not even Metal Gear Solid V seems to know who its hero really is, its final act punctuated by infighting, duplicity, and more lectures on the perils of trusting your leaders.

As a long-suffering feminist in video games, the experience of being bombarded online by men eager to cover this woman up—and then to explain to me, unsolicited, what "objectification" meant and why it was bad—has been uniquely disconcerting. People wanted to know more about why Quiet was naked than why she was silent, which is fascinating when it occurs to you that its well-documented culture of silence is what allows labor abuses in game development to go unchecked.

I might be reaching. I must be. We can notice these things, but we cannot say for sure that they are purposeful. Is Kojima a traumatized creative, a canny participant in the exploitation engine, or just a grinning idiot? Naive film fanatic, master manipulator, slavering creep, martyr for the Japanese industry's heyday, or a quiet leader who wants an island for himself and his staff to achieve their purest vision?

Not even Metal Gear Solid V seems to know who its hero really is, its final act punctuated by infighting, duplicity, and more lectures on the perils of trusting your leaders. Your very identity as the hero comes into doubt. Maybe your legend, your reputation, can be passed around as easily as a job title after all—the first glimpses of MGS V were teased by a completely made-up person of Kojima's own invention. You spend the game extracting gifted personnel from imprisonment and human rights violations; in one unlockable mission, an undeniable bit of commentary, you rescue Kojima himself.

Related, on Motherboard: The Technological Alt-History of Metal Gear Solid

My favorite game in the Metal Gear canon is Metal Gear Solid 3. At the end, the hero has assassinated his rogue mentor, The Boss, as part of a grand conspiracy to de-escalate the Cold War. You learn, to your horror, that The Boss was complicit in your plot, and that she sacrificed herself to the success of your mission and to the larger cause of world peace. You are welcomed into the US president's office and applauded for your success. But when the president extends his hand, you refuse to shake it.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain made $179 million on the day of its launch, a rarefied performance by modern standards. Attempts had been made to scrub Kojima's very name from the marketing materials. According to Simon Parkin's report in the New Yorker, neither Konami president Hideki Hayakawa nor its CEO, Sadaaki Kaneyoshi, were seen at Kojima's farewell party. The company continues to deny Kojima's departure, or that his studio will be shut down.

Follow Leigh on Twitter.


How I Learned Crowdfunding Won't Be Enough to Save the Victims of Syria's Civil War

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I couldn't get the stench of the tannery out of my hair for days.

In September, I was interviewing the director of an NGO in Lebanon for a story about the plight of migrants in the country when he pulled out his phone and showed me a video taken by a Syrian woman. Lebanese Internal Security Forces had allegedly bulldozed her camp while she and seven refugee families were sleeping inside it the night before. The families were forced to move into a tannery near Saida, a city in the south of Lebanon.

In that numbed-out way journalists sometimes have, I was excited to find a story. The NGO director did his best to dent my enthusiasm. "Bring a mask or something," he warned me. "The smell is very bad."


I've been to some pretty smelly places, so I didn't think much of the warning until I arrived at the factory and almost gagged on the aroma of the rotting animal skins strewn everywhere. The harsh chemicals from the tanning process made it difficult to breathe; the kids were all coughing like heavy smokers.

"Most of us need to go to the hospital because we inhale these chemicals," a ten-year-old girl told me as I tried to breathe through my mouth. Before I left, she gave me a hug. "Please come back and visit us," she requested shyly.

It should have just been another scene to add to the collection of suffering witnessed since the Syrian war broke out. Big-eyed children in rags, raped women, amputees—after a while, the horror of these people's lives just seems to bleed together. But weeks later, the tannery was still all I could think about. Maybe I was tired of impotently watching the collection accumulate, but I wanted to change something, and not in a vague, existential, witness-bearing way. So I broke a journalistic rule and got involved directly.

The goal was pretty simple: Find the girl's family and their neighbors somewhere new to live, ideally a place where the air didn't border on lethality. I started two crowdfunding campaigns, on Indiegogo and GiveForward, and began pestering the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). That's the UN agency charged with sending people to inspect the tannery, which they soon confirmed to be unlivable.

But between the two campaigns, I've raised a mere three grand so far, and been exposed to all sorts of depressing defects and systemic problems with the humanitarian process. First, I wasn't about to hand the families a wad of cash and send them on their way; not only might that have placed them in danger at the hands of other refugees, it would be like giving someone who's inches from starvation a plate of foie gras and caviar. These people don't have toilets, so $3,300 in cash could do more harm than good.

In short, I've learned that it's a lot easier to earn some applause by teeing up internet fundraisers than it is to actually get Syrian families out of a hellhole.

I started the campaigns at the end of September. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimates that more than 4,000 people died in Syria that month; 1,201 were civilians, 257 of them children. So imagine 13 bustling grade-school classrooms, then empty them. In the second quarter of this year, 44,000 Syrians applied for asylum in the EU; 19,600 did not get it. There are no asylum statistics out for the third quarter of 2015 yet, but using those numbers as a yardstick, it's safe to say that in the month of September, thousands of refugees were told they had survived the incredibly dangerous, 3,000-mile journey for nothing. The Mediterranean Sea, the primary route taken by migrants fleeing to Europe, claimed an estimated 280 refugees last month. And as of the end of October, the seven families I'm trying to help myself are still living in that tannery.

Crowdfunding has occasionally made headlines stateside amid political stagnation over the issue of refugee asylum. At the beginning of October, the White House mounted a humanitarian initiative with Kickstarter—which normally caters to creative projects—to raise money for UNHCR to help Syrian refugees. The weeklong campaign accrued $1,777,007, but attracted criticism from those who pointed out that the 5,000 refugees benefiting from the campaign mean little next to the 4 million people registered with the UN. Some went so far as to label it a PR move designed to deflect attention away from other issues, like the fact that America has accepted only 1,500 refugees so far.

Bob Ottenhoff is president and CEO of the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, a think tank that strategizes how to fundraise for humanitarian crises. He argues that while crowdfunding campaigns can be an excellent way to provide limited assistance to small groups of people, they won't make much of a dent in the refugee crisis.

"The war in Syria has been going on for nearly five years," Ottenhoff says. "Several hundred thousand people have been killed. There are estimates of as many as 8 million people that have been dispossessed.

"The hope is that Kickstarter will bring in new audiences and some additional funds for the Syrian refugee crisis, but I think we have to be realistic and recognize that it's only going to bring in millions of dollars for a problem that requires billions of dollars," he added.

As Ottenhoff points out, there are structural problems that have to be addressed even as we start to raise money for displaced migrants. "There are bigger issues here, like we really can't fix this refugee crises until we stop the war," he explains. "So there's a large additional amount of money that's needed, and then there is the issue of how many refugees should we allow into this country. There are lots of other parts to the story. Kickstarter raising a few million dollars is only part of it."

Justin Kazmark, a spokesperson for Kickstarter, maintains that the company never had techno-utopian illusions about ending the crisis with some internet magic. "We've seen the headlines over the last few months, and it's clear that this is a global crisis that's affecting millions and millions," he says. "I don't think that any Kickstarter campaign is going to solve this thing overnight, so that was not an expectation that we had. We just felt that we could have a modest effort, in fact, and play a modest role in having a positive impact."

It's clear that crowdfunding has the power to change lives, albeit somewhat arbitrarily. For example, Gissur Simonarson's Indiegogo campaign to raise money for a Palestinian-Syrian refugee photographed selling pens with his daughter in Beirut raised $191,214. Meanwhile, my campaign to help seven Syrian families hasn't come close to the $7,000 I was hoping to raise. How did the internet decide that Abdul, the pen-seller, was more deserving than others like him?

Simonarson, who runs a conflict news website, believes the success of that campaign stemmed from a single image: the picture of Abdul and his daughter selling pens. As with the viral photo of a drowned Syrian boy that sparked a surge of interest in the refugee crisis last summer, a dramatic, intimate vignette of suffering made an impact where statistics could not. "I saw the famous photo of Abdul holding his daughter," Simonarson recalls. "I'm a father myself, I have a five-year-old and actually, a 15-day-old right now... I tweeted the photo out. I just wanted to share the struggles of a Syrian refugee... the image took off. It got 6,000 retweets, and people started asking 'Who is this? How can we help?'"

Simonarson managed to track down Abdul and his daughter in Lebanon, started the Indiegogo page, and has been blown away by the amount raised. But he does admit there are logistics issues involved with distributing the cash. "I think the problem with crowdfunding this crisis is the hassle of getting it to the refugees who have no rights, like I'm having with Abdul right now," he says. "He wants to open up a bakery, so we're going to try to help him invest the money instead of just giving him the money and being like, 'OK, good luck then.' $190,000 is a lot of money, but it will run out still fairly soon if he starts to live a normal life and is not on the street. We're trying to make it sustainable for him and his family, and then he wants to set up an aid organization for other Syrian refugees."

Check out our documentary about Syria's illegal oil wells.

Slava Rubin, the CEO of Indiegogo, explains that the most successful campaigns usually involve personal stories such as Abdul's. "These people want to be able to not only read about it, they want to be able to take action. And when these issues are talked about at a macro-level, like the Syrian refugee crisis, it's hard for anybody to feel like they can do anything," he says. "But when they feel more connected to an individual, and they see on Indiegogo that they can take action, that's where the impact happens."

I point out that had I been so inclined, I could have easily taken the money from my campaign and spent it on a trip to Vegas. Is there any way of ensuring the funds garnered from crowd-funding actually goes to the refugees?

"We work with the fundraisers to ensure are getting the money however they think appropriate," Rubin says. "So if that's through a nonprofit account, if that's into their personal bank account, if that's into somebody else's bank account—If we need to get creative as it relates to disbursing the money because they think that's more important for the safety or integrity of the funds or the fundraisers... We're always working very creatively with our campaign leaders."

It's an imperfect medium, albeit one with potential to empower the public. For the seven refugee families I'm trying to help, the $3,300 I've gathered so far might not buy them a bakery, but it should help ensure their lives are more comfortable once their housing situation is resolved. Other campaigns, such as this one to airlift food and medical supplies to civilians in Syria via drones, or this effort to buy baby carriages for refugee mothers arriving in Greece, should have a tangible impact; both have raised around $40,000 respectively.

"This just shows that one person can do a lot, if they try to help," argues Simonarson. "Many people feel very passive in this whole situation, but that shows the power that one person has. We just hear thousands and millions of the awful stories. We can kind of check out, so we need one good story to help galvanize people and get them interested. I've always looked at this as one act in a much bigger play."

Follow Sulome Anderson on Twitter.

Meet the New Orleans Blogger Whose Story on Senator David Vitter's Alleged Love Child Could Derail His Campaign

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Jason Brad Berry in zombie makeup for Mardi Gras. Photo courtesy of author

Jason Brad Berry showed up to our 1 PM Friday lunch interview sketched out. He was worried his car had been bugged, that he was being watched. He had good reason. Over the past two weeks, Berry's blog, American Zombie, has reported that Louisiana Republican Senator David Vitter had in fact often visited prostitutes in New Orleans (a rumor Vitter had long denied), and made new accusations that the conservative Vitter had fostered a love child with New Orleans escort Wendy Ellis. In a series of interviews filmed by Berry, Ellis claims Vitter demanded she abort the child, which she eventually gave up for adoption.

Significantly, Berry dropped all this on the cusp of Louisiana's gubernatorial elections, in which Vitter is competing with Democrat John Bel Edwards to succeed GOP presidential candidate and American punchline Bobby Jindal. (Edwards got the most votes in Saturday's open primary and will face Vitter, the second-place finisher, in a general election on November 21.)

"And now there is a fucking silver Ford Focus driving up and down my fucking street," Berry told me, sitting down outside the coffee shop, looking around. "Up and down, up and down for like the last two days."

"Someone's spying on you?" I asked.

"My street isn't a through street, so no one drives down it but my neighbors," he replied. "Last night I was out on my patio and the fucker stopped outside of my house. I was standing in my front yard, we made eye contact."

By the end of our hour-long interview, the story had taken another turn, when Berry received a phone call informing him that Jefferson Parish Sheriff Newell Norm and and others had chased down and apprehended a man named Robert Frenzel after he was spotted surreptitiously recording the sheriff's regular morning coffee meeting with a state senator, a prominent lawyer, and a private investigator. "The guy they caught was driving a silver Ford Focus," Berry told me after hanging up his phone. "He had a bunch of surveillance equipment in his front seat, and a dossier of files... labeled 'Jason Brad Berry.'"

Several hours later, another local blogger, Lamar White, corroborated the story and reported that the spy worked for J.W. Bearden Investigative Agency, to which David Vitter's gubernatorial campaign had paid roughly $135,000 this year.

On VICE News: Landmark Haiti Elections Go Ahead Without Violence

This is far from the first major story to originate from Berry and his blog. Just after Katrina, it was Berry, via American Zombie ,who lit the news fuse that led to the corruption trial of former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, now serving ten years in federal prison. Berry followed that up with intensely researched and sourced reporting on the many travesties related to the divvying up of BP's disaster settlements. And while many have uttered the phrase "Vitter's political career is over," Berry, with his new reporting, has the potential make that Louisiana dream into reality.

American Zombie is a valuable resource in a city whose flagship newspaper, the Times-Picayune, recently cut another 37 staffers. Berry's day job as a freelance videographer allows him a loose enough schedule that he can spend years on his important, sometimes Earth-moving stories. As such, the local papers love Berry, or at least love aggregating his hard work . But Berry claims no interest in turning his success into a full-time gig for any outlet."I don't trust any of the newspapers in this city," he said. "That doesn't mean I don't trust the reporters. We have incredible reporters in this city, but I don't trust the media entities they work for. I've been doing this for ten years and... What I have seen time and again is money and influence buying editorial control."

"I think what I do is an invaluable resource to this community mostly because I answer to no one," he added.

Watch: Cash Slaves

Berry earned a journalism degree—and found his calling—at the University of Mississippi. "In college I wrote my first story on a family in Tunica County, Mississippi, who was being evicted off of a farm, and they had lived in a shack with no water or electricity," Berry recalled. "These people let me into their lives, they showed me their struggles, and I was immediately hooked on telling stories, on journalism."

In 2003, Berry partnered with Dr. Vince Morelli to film a documentary on New Orleans public school system called Left Behind. Long before I first met Berry, I'd recommended Left Behind to many of my teacher friends as the best document of the freakishly obscene corruption that has plagued almost every version of New Orleans's Public School Board. "The thesis was that there was enough money in New Orleans school system, but that people were just stealing it," said Berry.

The movie, and the Nagin corruption scandal, made Berry's name, and put him on the receiving end of many juicy insider tips. "This new info on Vitter fell into my lap in 2010," explained Berry." I was approached by an opposition researcher—all the campaigns hire investigators to find dirt on their opponents. Every journalist talks to these people, not just me."

Though Berry has not yet published evidence beyond the interviews, the idea of Vitter having hypocritical dalliances is not unfamiliar to his constituents. In 2007, escort Wendy Ellis had dished on Vitter to Hustler—though that published interview made no mention of the kid. Vitter denied most of it in any case, admitting only to a vague "very serious sin." Still, Berry kept following leads, but found little of real interest. "A few months ago, I was ready to say there's nothing here, it's all crap," he admits. "There was this mysterious baby mama prostitute out there though, and I was eventually told it actually was Wendy Ellis, the original prostitute who came forth."

The opposition researcher Berry spoke with put him through to Ellis, who he interviewed in Texas, where she was being treated for a terminal case of lupus. (Her deteriorating medical condition, she claims, is one reason she is telling her story now.) Ellis revealed to Berry a supposed years-long monogamous relationship with Vitter, culminating in a child. "I believed her story," said Berry, who added that for now he must keep hidden some of the reasons why he believes her. "She says she didn't talk about the baby to Hustler because she didn't want to endanger the child in any way."

Berry is still putting some of the pieces together. Days after his new series debuted, New Orleans television station WDSU and other local media outlets were fed conflicting court documents, including a 2001 handwritten plea from Ellis to a judge who'd just sentenced her to ten years for violating probation. "Sir, yes I [worked in a strip club] as I told you," read Ellis's letter, "but I never worked for an Escort Service." Some geographic details still haven't lined up yet, either.

"My opinion is that letter was selectively cherry-picked out of a large number of legal documents and handed to WDSU to offset my story," said Berry. "And WDSU didn't question that. They just ran it. I think that's how it happened, and I think there are documents in that same thick file that refute that letter itself. And I am getting that. I mean, I hope."

Berry's not doing this for the money; he claims to have made just over $300 in donations though his website since dropping this new bomb. He also claims no interest in influencing the election. "I don't care what it seems like to you or anyone else," Berry replied. "Because I know what it is to me. I just want the truth to come out."

Berry does admit a fondness for pointing out hypocrisy, such as Vitter's ties to right-wing moral crusaders like the Louisiana Family Forum. More pragmatically, he adds, "This potential leverage have over him. I know they do that with other politicians in this state. So it's important to me for sure, to expose whatever skeletons he's got in his closet; if he's gonna govern the state, let's get them the fuck out of the closet so they can't control him that way."

Berry promises more to come on Vitter as Louisianans wait to vote again on November 21. "I am garnering evidence that will prove the adoption. I am getting it. I can't get any info or records myself though; Wendy has to request that," he said. "That's what I've asked her to do. But it's a touch-and-go situation." With no editor breathing down his neck, Berry is in no hurry: "This is a fucking chess match," he has told the many reporters who've called him lately. "It's one guy with a blog and a camera and no funding, up against the most powerful lawyers in the state... and David Vitter's team of investigators who are apparently coming up and down my street every day... I hope it's them, and not some crazy motherfucker who wants to kill me."

Follow Michael Patrick Welch on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: The World Health Organization Says Hot Dogs Are Giving Us Cancer

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Photo via Flickr user eric molina

Read: This Guy's Eaten Nothing but Raw Meat for Five Years

On Monday, the WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer released a report saying that there is "sufficient evidence" that processed meats such as bacon, sausage, hot dogs, ham, beef jerky, and lots of other delicious forms of flesh increase the risk of bowel cancer, according to Reuters.

The WHO report, which was drafted by 22 international experts, makes a clear case for processed meats being "carcinogenic for humans" and says that eating the equivalent of two slices of bacon a day raises your chance of getting cancer by 18 percent. It also says that regular old red meat will probably fuck you up pretty bad too, classifying it as "probably carcinogenic."

The meat industry was less than enthusiastic about the WHO panel's findings. "We simply don't think the evidence support any causal link between any red meat and any type of cancer," Shalene McNeill of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association told the Washington Post.

Ultimately, the WHO study doesn't suggest cutting all red meat out of your diet, just to maybe try and rein it in a bit.

"For an individual, the risk of developing cancer because of their consumption of processed meat remains small, but this risk increases with the amount of meat consumed," WHO's Dr. Kurt Straif said.

That makes sense. Kobayashi is probably fucked, though.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: Why Fans Are Sending Legos to Chinese Artist Ai Weiwei

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The artist announced Lego refused to fill his order on Instagram. Image via Instagram


Read: An Interview with the Persecuted Chinese Artist Ai Weiwei

Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei loves working with Legos. He has previously used the choking hazard to create portraits of Edward Snowden and Nelson Mandela and build a monument to international political prisoners. Despite, the company has rejected Ai's most recent attempt to use the bricks in his work.

In December, the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia will host a show featuring the work of Ai and Andy Warhol. As part of the exhibition, Ai had planned to make Lego portraits of Australian activists. But when the gallery put in a request to the Danish toy company for the pieces needed, they were told the order had been refused.

Image via Instagram

News of the refusal was made public via Ai Weiwei's Instagram account on Sunday, where he posted a photo of a toilet clogged with blocks. The caption included quotes from the correspondence between the gallery and the famed toy company, which said in a widely released statement that it wouldn't allow its materials to be used in conjunction with "political" art.

Lego regularly works directly with artists like Nathan Sawaya and Sean Kenney, and hasn't previously taken issue with Ai using their product in his work.

Throughout his career Ai Weiwei has been openly critical of the Chinese government's approach to human rights issues, democracy, and their complicity in corruption and coverups. In 2011 he was arrested and detained for 81 days under suspicion of "economic crimes." He was eventually charged with tax evasion, but his arrest and detention was widely seen as a response to his provocative art.

In his Instagram post, Ai Weiwei went on to criticize Lego for being "an influential cultural and political actor in the globalized economy with questionable values." He concluded that "Lego's refusal to sell its product to the artist is an act of censorship and discrimination."

The NGV was quick to confirm the installation would still be featured in the show despite Lego's refusal. Following the dispute, fans have tweeted the artist offering their own bricks and sharing their support under the hashtag #legosforweiwei. In the wake of the forthcoming tsunami of donated Lego, the artist announced on Instagram he is planning to create a new work from the crowdsourced bricks.

As someone who is probably about to be inundated with more Lego than he could ever use, we hope someone has pointed out the toy's famously good resale value to the artist. Sure this has probably been a bit of a headache to deal with, but when the show's over why not make a little cash for his trouble?

Follow Wendy on Twitter.

VICE Vs Video Games: ‘Sword Coast Legends’ Is the Dungeons & Dragons Video Game You’ve Been Waiting For

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It must be daunting to begin work on a Dungeons & Dragons video game. Though there's a ton of cultural cachet in the property, it has an intense, loyal following, fans that are fiercely protective of their favorite hobby. The tabletop roleplaying game launched a new fifth edition last summer, and is enjoying larger sales numbers than ever before. So when n-Space announced it was creating a new D&D game for PC, Mac, and Linux—with console versions to follow—a lot of nerds got excited and more, myself included, were worried. Would the game feel big enough? Would it feel collaborative enough? In other words, is Sword Coast Legends the D&D game we've been waiting for?

Well, since I'm VICE's resident D&D geek, I thought I'd best try the game and speak with its creators, to find out.

Previous video games spawning from the franchise have run the gamut from clunky early attempts on the Apple II and Intellivision to the much-loved Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights. But none of these ever really did it for me. They felt too small and too confined. I liked some of the characters I came across in these games, but the scope never felt right. 2002's Neverwinter Nights tried to incorporate multiplayer and a way to create your own adventures, but it was limited by the technology of the time. In a tabletop game of D&D, if my character wanted to go south when the Dungeon Master was telling me to go north, well, with the right DM and a bit of quick thinking, my friends and I could break the script and find other adventures. Whereas sitting alone, at home, at a computer, spamming my attack buttons... it's just not the same, clearly.

"Tabletop D&D is about hanging out with your friends," says Dan Tudge, president of n-Space and game director of Sword Coast Legends. "It's about the relationships that you build, the stories that you tell. It's about something funny your friend did, or you how exploded because you absolutely failed that check. That's something that was really important to us, to recreate that experience of people playing together. To make it easy for them to do that."

I try out the game at a press preview event with a table of other players. We sit down at some fancy laptops, slip on our headsets and get to clicking. From the first moment when we strategized over what classes of characters to take (I played a fighter, because I'm basic), to coordinating together at the boss battle at the end of our crypt, I knew this game wasn't like the ones I've previously played. I could plan imminent actions alongside the other players, I could crack jokes as I lay dying in a fire trap, and I could roleplay in conjunction with the human beings in the game with me. I can only imagine how fun this will be to play with actual friends of mine.

The scenario I played through was a familiar one. My cohorts and I headed into a crypt to find out more information about a necromancer who went missing a long time ago. We cut down vampires, zombies, skeletons, and avoided traps as we ran through the ten or so rooms of this little mission. Our characters worked wonderfully together. I got in the faces of the baddies, slashing them in vulnerable places to slow them down or blind them when I couldn't outright smash them. My paladin buddy encouraged my character and healed him. The wizard lobbed spells from a safe distance. We didn't have a rogue, so we stumbled into nearly every trap. This is D&D as I know it, this is the game with which I'm most familiar.

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE's film, 'LARPing Saved My Life'

"The team wanted to create something that was, first and foremost, collaborative," explains n-Space CEO Dan O'Leary. "And letting people play the game the way they want to play it. There are options for player pausing, DM pausing—and that wasn't originally in there. DM pausing was added so that a DM could stop the game and interject storytelling, they can roll checks, they can insert more of the tabletop game elements into it."

The DM Mode of this game was really the part that cracked my skeptical shell. I could decide I wanted to be the Dungeon Master and grab some of my friends. Then I go about setting up a storyline, traps, dungeons, monsters... all of which highly customizable. Do I want to send out a giant baby-blue spider against my heroes? Or should I send a horde of weak orcs with daggers to overwhelm them? Should this room have a fucked-up amount of traps in it, or am I going easy on my players?

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In a game world as unlimited as a tabletop RPG can be, I worried that Sword Coast Legends would spin out of control and become this huge, sub-par Frankenstein's monster. But it all felt very smooth, and played seamlessly. "Dan and I have had some very heated discussions about scope," Tudge tells me. "The discipline required in making sure you don't spiral into too much game, all at a mediocre level, that's really hard." O'Leary continues: "Our wish-list of things that had to be pushed out past the initial release is always growing, we're always listening to people internally and externally. We've been focused on this initial release but we're looking at this game as a platform to build and share campaigns and adventures. We'll support this game aggressively as long as the community will continue to support it."

'Sword Coast Legends,' PAX Prime trailer

"D&D is more than just a game," O'Leary goes on to explain. "D&D is more of a hobby, it's a platform, and that's something that we realized early on in development. And so what we're releasing here is kind of like the core ruleset. And from there we can go wherever, we can take it through modules or expansions. Whether they're tied in with new storylines or go back to classic D&D storylines."

To answer the question that crossed every D&D fan's mind when Sword Coast Legends was announced, of whether or not this is game we've been waiting for: I think it is. Our connectivity can finally handle smooth cooperative gameplay, and this game's been designed with playing through with friends a priority. The DM Mode allows for a level of customization unheard of in D&D video games up to this point. We've reached a moment in geekdom where tabletop D&D can transfer to the video game world while retaining everything that makes the more-physical alternative so appealing. It's the right time for a good D&D game, and if n-Space support their "platform" the way they say they will, I think we've found it.

Sword Coast Legends is out now for PC and Mac. More information at the game's official website.

Follow Gabe on Twitter.

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