All illustrations by Joel Benjamin

Garden of Delete, the new album from Oneohtrix Point Never, comes out tomorrow. For those of us who grapple with mental illness, scary minds, or just life itself, this album holds up a mirror to the experience of powerlessness in the face of one's own brain. Recognizable in OPN's sounds are both the beauty and horror of existence, when the trajectory of our own consciousness is really out of our hands.

In preparing to talk with Oneohtrix Point Never's Daniel Lopatin about feelings, wants, and existence, I imagined that the conversation would be easy and lacking social anxiety. Lopatin and I are internet friends and the convo would take place online. Yet I found that I was still nervous to talk to him, namely because he has more integrity than any other artist I know. Throughout our conversation, I feared that he would discover I am a loser and never text me again.

So Sad Today: Do you have depression?
Daniel Lopatin: Yeah, I have it. I don't deal with it therapeutically or medically, which is dumb I guess. You?

Lol. Yes, I have it. But I ask because one thing that resonates about your music, particularly this album, is that it contains a weave. Like, every song braids both the darkness and the light. No one track is ever just one. So in listening, I can't rest in a gentle moment and be like: OK, that horror is over, it's all going to be OK. And the same is true of anxiety and depression. Like, the moment you think you're going to be OK, things get sinister again.
Well I think that maybe the weave of many competing psychological horrors / seductions etc. is a way of me being honest with myself about stuff. I need my "art work" or "entertainment work" or whatever to have empathy for or connection to the way I experience the world as a person. I have a hard time making a linear-idea song, because that's not the way my thoughts work. Or a linear-texture song, because for me it's impossible to marginalize all the context around a specific texture (other textures).

Right, there is a definite humanity in your work beneath the electronic tools. In the song Sticky Drama , I feel like I can hear the presence of a human voice, maybe trying to be heard or maybe trying to hear itself, in a fucked up world.
Yeah, it's all very human.

Do you feel cool?
I did until I saw that you have like ten times the amount of Twitter followers that I do.

That's funny because I always assume whatever I have or do is wrong. If I have more followers than you, I assume I am shittier than you and have less integrity. Whereas I look at you and perceive you to have a protective moat comprised of black smoke, video game glitches, and wantless cosmic isolation (as opposed to my isolation, which feels want-y) that shields you from making such comparisons.
That you associate video game aesthetics and black smoke with my oeuvre is indicative of how lame my brand actually is... like I think I do all this cool shit but to the average celebrity I'm at best a magician or clown. Then again you just totally complimented me on seeming wantless, which I didn't notice because I was so busy feeling humiliated. Is that something you want for yourself, to be wantless? Like a chill object floating in space?

The important part is your sacred moat, which provides the mystique, distance, and fascination. The moat's composition is less pyrotechnics, and more your inherent shroud of mystery—like, the smoke is coming from inside you. It's aura, not David Blaine. I relate you to video games, because to me they are elusive—not what I loved as a child (pretending my bike was a horse, closet eating) so I exoticize and elevate them. On certain tracks on Delete I get a game vibe. The song Child of Rage is a childhood videogame machinegun hell, as synonymous with the horrific powerlessness of childhood. But then there's a peaceful valley at the end and it's all going to be all right even though it's totally not.
You're right. I just so badly want to be thought of as like... solid since I don't use reverb THAT much. Like so scared of being reverbcore. The future is definitely aridcore, with a small chance of downpourcore. Childhood is totally violent (in retrospect). Only the traumatic memories prevail.

Traumacore. Adolescent longingcore. And yeah, all I've ever wanted is to be chill and floating in space. Like, who wouldn't want that? Whenever I hear the word "spirituality" I still think "heroin." What about you? Would you want that or nah?
I'm down for indefinitely chilling as long as I'm not self-aware during it. That seems like it could be torture on some level but a lot of people pray for that so who knows. Maybe being "alive" offers us an embarrassment of feelings we cope with by dying. Bottom line is I just don't want to have to make any choices or judgment calls beyond my time on earth lol.

Related: Watch our interview with Daniel Lopatin at his home in Bushwick

Right, like some people strive to be one with their inner witness—the one who watches themselves. But for you, the witness might be the torturer and not the thing that sets you free? I guess I pretend you are wantless so as to feel worse about my want. How want-y are you, on a scale of 1-10, re: success, death, ego death, any other form of personal annihilation, your parents' approval, to be swept away into a sensual mystic with another human being, food, money, weed, hoes.
2, 3, 6, 7, 10, 0, 10, 10, 1, 4. I'm materialistic but in the name of distracting myself to death. Food is 10 and the only way to get it is money, so 10 for that as well. I really don't care if anyone thinks I'm special or not, I just want to be able to live my life without thinking about money all the time, or where I'm going to get it. I get into all of this as a cast member on VH1's Death & Hoes. Do you ever wonder if you're just a piece of software that aliens invented so they could research what it's like to have zero self-esteem?

No, and that's my problem. I blame myself for everything, never aliens.
What is usually going through your mind when you're chewing food?

How many calories are in this. What are your fav foods?
Russian foods... Can you remember the first poem you wrote and what was it like?

Yes. I was eight and it was about food. The want and fetishization of candy.

I read in this interview that when you fall out of love with a piece of music it's a "melancholic experience," so you are looking to make music that will "grow with you as you get older" rather than music geared to a "' get addicted to it and throw it away' mentality." I respect this and it's something I value in art: universality of feeling and timelessness of experience. It's like infatuation vs. love: an intoxicating, short-lived romp vs. love that lasts for a long time but is less flashy and possibly more work. Do you ever create a piece of music thinking it's going to be something long-lasting, the real deal, only to realize later it was an addictive throwaway. Have you ever been really hurt by music?
I'm hurt by music all the time. I'm hurt pretty much every time I turn on Vevo. I can love formal aspects of music without any kind of emotional commitment so it's not like bad songwriting or bad arrangement or production hurts me. It's the bullshit around music that hurts me. My friend Arthur (Autre Ne Veut), the whole conceit of his new record is that we're all dying to buy into the performance of honesty. We'll pay money to see an artist say something in earnest. That earnesty is somehow something "new" to be performed well and then exploited as a way to individuate "real" from "fake" is in my opinion a tedious and ugly thing happening in pop music. Pop music has always been about the fake. If I want fake real I'll watch Top Chef or some shit. There's other super problematized shit I could go into.

What about that 'performance of honesty' pisses you off most? Is it the feeling that a genre that should provide escape is being co-opted? Is it the emotional hustle—that the artists are being fake, but pretending to be real, and thus getting away with something?
No it's just that most celebrities' idea of honesty is so tedious. They're asking "why" a lot and then crying. It's essentially the Nancy Kerrigan incident but taken to the most boring levels possible.

What about when this happens in "alt" culture. What about when alt bro musicians pretend to be "sensitive" and "hurt" and "alone" in their music so they can have sex with seven people a night and not text them back.
They're boring, too but I'm more interested in their attempts to be "real" because there's a good chance I know them, which amplifies their dishonesty in comical ways. The actual problem is that fake has become unappealing, and that because everyone is their own "brand manager" there's no objective intervention—like it's one thing if I'm hearing about person from band X's struggle via let's say... a poet for instance. But straight from the horse's mouth is weirdly way too curated.

One could say So Sad Today is a performance of honesty, in that any attempt to reveal ourselves is in some way curated. If a performance artist takes a shit onstage, she chooses to take that shit. It may be a genuinely vulnerable and authentic act, but there is always something more vulnerable, often way more subtle—very not alt, like where she does her banking—that she would never reveal.
I think of So Sad Today as a hyperbolic, fabricated version of some "realness" known as Melissa Broder. Or some composite of the many Melissas through the ages. But there is also a very adolescent thing about the way you talk as So Sad Today... it's like Daria in that there's these very adult ideas injected into an otherwise teenage lexicon.

In a lot of ways I'm still 16. Like my mind is older but my heart or impulse control is maybe 14. There is that adult/adolescent juxtaposition in Garden of Delete . I get the vibe of a sensitive kid hiding in video games: the sadness and terror of childhood and teenhood where you have zero control over your life. We carry those emotions with us forever, but perhaps are able to push them under the surface more as adults. But I feel like Garden of Delete, particularly in the song "I Bite Through It ," is lifting up that surface.
Yeah. Sometimes I see myself in the mirror and I literally am like Oh wow I'm just a more grizzled version of this creature I vaguely remember from the past , and I still eat cereal 400 times a day out of uncertainty. The rest is hard to picture now. My hygiene has improved, and I'm 7 percent more self-assured.

Follow Daniel Lopatin and So Sad Today on Twitter.

Beachy Head in East Sussex. Photo by Ian Stannard via Wikicommons

In 2014, the day after Robin Williams committed suicide in his home, the number of calls to a suicide hotline in the US doubled from 3,500 to 7,400. Earlier this year, a study found that more middle-aged white people in the US are committing suicide than ever before. In the UK, a study by the charity CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably) shows that 12 men are ending their own lives everyday and that suicide remains the single biggest cause of death in men under the age of 45 in Britain.

It's in this light that the philosopher Simon Critchley has written his book Notes on Suicide, in which he deconstructs the stigma, the clichés, and the romance around ending your own life. Critchley has experience in this area; he was responsible for a (tongue in cheek) "Suicide Note Creative Writing" class as part of his month-long School of Death (a prod at Alain de Botton's School of Life), in which he analyzed the suicide note as a literary genre and got people writing their own. He talked to VICE about the high-profile suicides of recent times, what it is to write a suicide note, and whether even just talking about suicide can act as a catalyst to the act.

VICE: Why do we have a problem talking about suicide?
Simon Critchley: We don't know what to say. When you hear that someone killed themselves, you find yourself resorting to banalities, clichés, or you find yourself changing the subject. You try to help on some level, but what comes out is nothing particularly interesting. We don't have a language for suicide. What's peculiar about taboos and inhibitions is that they silence us. We used to have a taboo about sexuality, now we talk about sex endlessly. That's not necessarily altogether a wonderful thing, but it's better than not talking about it. Death and suicide are still things surrounded in silence, or just a kind of fake seriousness. It's a profound social problem.

How do you think we handle very public suicides, those of celebrities or people known in the media?
Badly. On the one hand there is this regret: "We'll miss him," and so on. On the other hand, there's a desire to find out the nasty details: How did he do it? Who was in the house? How did he hang himself in his office? But we're too ashamed to ask it. There's a kind of pornographic dimension to suicide. We find it more or less impossible to think about suicide as a free act. We want an explanation, like, "They were clinically depressed," as if we know what that means—as opposed to just a little bit depressed?—or they were addicted, as if we know what addiction means. We've closed down the free space for the consideration of suicide. If anyone is even thinking these thoughts, then we have to intervene, right? And that makes us unusual creatures. Every human being alive has that free capacity to end their lives, and that's maybe what is distinctive about us. We have to at least ponder these questions.

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In your book, Notes on Suicide, you say that suicide is the last act of an optimist. Can you explain that a little?
The idea is adapted from the bleakest writer, Emil Cioran, a Romanian aphorist. He deals with the pessimist's reputation for suicide, in that something is going to be solved by your death, or something will be saved or changed. And that's one of the delusions that's often driving a suicidal act—that your death matters. Cioran very coolly notes that nothing will be saved by your death. You know, who do you think you are? Why not calm down and observe the elegance of the melancholy spectacle of the world, which lays out so deliciously in front of us, and linger a while?

How have suicide notes changed over time?
They seem to appear in the modern form in the 18th century in England and elsewhere, and they were usually sent to press to be published. The suicide note was an act of publication. Not just an act of publicity, but an act of publication. The idea that we have now, that the suicide note is shrouded in secrecy, I think is something we need to think again about. The suicide note is a fascinating literary genre. Here's someone in their last moments, trying to communicate but failing to communicate, because they've decided to end it.

Are there any defining characteristics to suicide notes?
The one thing I found was this ambivalence of love and hate. Suicide notes are usually expressions of profound hatred, usually hatred towards oneself, often hatred towards another person—the suicide is an act of revenge against that person. But through this kind of final expression of self-hatred, one is finally able to articulate love in the strongest sense. One suicide note I read was:

Dear Betty,

I hate you.

Love,
George

That's the essence of the suicide note, the flipping around of love and hate.

Do you think the fact that suicide is guaranteed an audience in some way encourages the act?
Yeah, no doubt. That's always been the case. The flourishing of the suicide note led to more suicides and more suicide notes. There's always a pattern in suicide. When someone kills themselves in a certain place and that is publicized, it's very likely that someone else will kill themselves in that place. The Golden Gate Bridge, for example—people go and commit suicide in the same place. But what's also particularly interesting about that one is that they always kill themselves on the side facing the city, rather than the side facing the ocean. It's a kind of public act, an act of publicity, of making a statement.

What do you think about the gender paradox of suicides? The fact that women are more likely to attempt suicide than men but less likely to complete the act?
It's very hard to pin down. There are places where that's not the case, for example in China, where the people who commit suicide appear to be women in positions of rural poverty, and it's often done with pesticide. So there's not such a gender rule. I know a lot of women who attempted suicide when they were younger and are trying to come to terms with that, but, yeah, it is the case that a significant number of younger women attempt suicide and then that drops away later in life. The reasons for that are very hard to explain.

A sign on the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco. Photo by David Corby via Wikicommons

What are your thoughts on the rise in male suicides? Some people have talked about it being down to a "crisis in masculinity"—do you think that's the case?
I think we should make the link to any "crisis in masculinity" with caution, as the more likely causes are relative poverty and the relatively easy availability of prescription drugs that can be easily assembled into lethal cocktails.

What about calls for suicide among men to be considered a public health issue, along the lines of smoking?
I sometimes think that the way in which people immediately say "this is a public health issue" conceals the ugly fact that we would simply rather not take responsibility for such phenomena. It must be someone else's responsibility. When it comes to suicide, each of us has the power in our own hands. What we choose to do with that, how we think it through, these are the issues we have to face up to.

You ask this in your book, but do you think we're entering a time when a new, extreme form of suicide-as-homicide has emerged?
Yes, and I think it's out of a strange combination of depression and exhibitionism. You find in a lot of cases that someone is suicidally depressed and they want to go out in a blaze of glory, particularly in the US, but also elsewhere. Like the Sandy Hook shootings. What no one was talking about there was the mother. Adam Lanza's mother worked as an assistant with kids at Sandy Hook Elementary school, so the first person he kills is his mother and then he kills these kids, then himself. Now we have a possible motivation: that he killed these kids because here was somewhere she went and seemed to love these kids, perhaps, more than him. And that's a more interesting discussion than saying he was playing Call of Duty a lot, so we should ban video games.

Related: Watch 'Aokigahara Suicide Forest', our film about the most popular site for suicides in Japan.

Kurt Cobain says in his suicide note, "It's better to burn out than to fade away." Is this a theme that regularly appears in suicide notes, the fear of fading away?
Yes, although in my view it would be better the other way round! The thing about this is it's from a Neil Young song; it's indirect, it's delusion—and there's lots of references like that in his lyrics. The other side of this is that with artists, or pop-stars, they know on some level that they'd be better off dead. In the sense that they know there would be more money if they died.

That's very cynical.
There's a great Smiths song about that, which basically says the best pop-star is a dead pop-star. Cobain, on some level, knew that. He knew that, at 27, you end it and then you become immortal and your music is remembered. And we have a kind of sick obsession with that, that we need to own up to. Think about how many Cobain documentaries have come out, and how we salivate over the details of his last moments.

You think we romanticize these things?
I think the more words we have, the less romantic suicide becomes. The more detail, the dirtier, the messier, the more complex it becomes, the more interesting it becomes, and the less romantic it is. The romantic idea of suicide is based largely on ignorance. Read a lot of suicide notes and that will de-romanticize the whole thing.

If you are feeling suicidal, there are people you can talk to. Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline:1 (800) 273-8255

Follow Henry on Twitter.

Ian Bick has crammed a lot of living into his 20 years. For one thing, he's a budding nightlife mogul; as a teen he ran Tuxedo Junction in downtown Danbury, Connecticut, a venue for EDM shows that's had a few dust-ups with police and the city over booze regulations. He's also, if the feds are to be believed, the mastermind behind a Ponzi scheme that raked in $500,000, money he and his buddies used to cavort around California, Key West, and New York City. He allegedly bought jet skis, stayed at the W Hotel, and shopped at Gucci and Tiffany's while using money from new investors (who thought they were investing in shows and an eBay business) to pay off the old.

According to US Attorney Deirdre M. Daly's office, in the course of the supposed scheme, he also allegedly lied to a Postal Inspector and falsified financial records.

The most amazing thing about Bick—who's out on $250,000 bail after getting charged in January—is not his alleged misdeeds, but the fact that he was doing all of this while still a teenager.

"That is the youngest I have ever heard of," says Kathy Bazoian Phelps, an attorney who runs the Ponzi Scheme Blog. She says the average age of a schemer "is in the 50s with the outliers much older."

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A Ponzi scheme, named after one of its earliest modern practitioners, involves collecting money for a supposed business venture, using dough from new investors to pay previous ones, and pocketing the rest while making little or no effort to actually invest in anything. Typically, the perp "is someone with a track record in business," according to Phelps. "That's how he creates an air of legitimacy." The con artist usually starts with family and friends; once they get paid, the "investment opportunity" spreads through social circles. Others soon want in, creating a financial house of cards that often comes down when the schemer runs out of cash to pay the growing ranks of investors.

In the Bick case, the seeds allegedly got planted among Connecticut teenagers and spread outward, enveloping parents and the broader community.

Watch our documentary about Aussie pro skater Chima Ferguson:

Danbury is a small city with a median household income of about $65,000, well over the national average. But it sits atop Fairfield County, a refuge of hedge fund managers and Wall Street commuters. The children of Danbury often spend their lives in the shadows of hulking country estates and the waterfront homes of Candlewood Lake, many of them paid for by exponential returns on investments and an endlessly self-replicating money cycle.

According to the feds, they were clueless to an adolescent take on Bernie Madoff–style deception that went on right under their noses.

Within the city, Bick enjoyed a reputation as a business whiz kid. In middle school, he sold soda and candy for a profit in a city park. In high school, he put on well-attended DJ shows and hosted an EDM "teen night" at Tuxedo Junction, already a long-standing city nightclub. A classmate who eventually invested with Bick and did not want to reveal his name recalls him as a quiet guy who kept to himself, but also an industrious type. "He was always known for these dances, always known for planning things," the classmate says.

Bick, now 20, did speak to me for this story, though he declined to answer questions related to the federal indictment (including, "Do you own a jet ski?"). Soft-spoken and patient, he outlined his short path from high-school social butterfly to club owner.

He planned his first event at age 15, a benefit for the Dorothy Day House at Danbury's Matrix Conference and Banquet Center. "We did a dance and we raised $2,000 in admission and $1,500 in bracelets," Bick tells me. "It made me see that you could make money in this business."

To celebrate the end of his sophomore year, Bick says he hired DJs and rented the Palace Theatre, a 1920s-era downtown Danbury venue that today gets sporadic use. Two hundred people showed up, and teen night at Tuxedo followed, where Bick initially charged a $10 cover and later raised it to $15.

After graduating from Danbury High School in 2013, Bick says, he had little interest in college and dedicated himself to the nightlife scene. He linked up with an EDM promoter in Rhode Island and started putting on shows in Danbury and around the Kingston campus of the University of Rhode Island.

The building that housed Tuxedo Junction had a separate bar space, one that had been dormant for a while, so Bick decided to rent it from the owners, opening the Sky Bar and Longue. That spot folded after six months, but in August 2014, Bick heard that Tuxedo Junction might close, too, and stepped in to purchase the place. Tuxedo has a storied history: In the 90s, Western Connecticut State University students caught alternative rock bands traveling between New York to Boston there. The venue had a knack for booking acts that eventually went multi-platinum, with Korn, Blink-182, Jewel, and Oasis all gigging there on the way up.

But shows had become irregular in recent years, and Bick wanted to make Tuxedo Junction a destination again.

As for where a teenager got the money to buy one business and then another, Bick says he raised it through "family and friends." His father owns a catering company (actually) called Some Things Fishy. Plus, Bick owned the businesses, not the buildings, meaning he just needed cash for operating costs.

Almost immediately, Bick developed a sour relationship with local cops. This summer, the city revoked Tuxedo Junction's entertainment license for a month, citing three prior alcohol-related violations. However, Bick, who does not have a liquor license, says police only cited him twice in his capacity as club owner. Once, police claimed someone brought booze into the venue. In the second incident, Bick claims, he had rented out Tuxedo Junction and the outside event planners hired a catering company with a liquor license, and the caterers allegedly served someone underage. "I heard about it after the fact," he says.

The videographer he hired to fill the venue's YouTube page paints of a picture of a Red Bull-fueled funhouse full of smoke machines, glow sticks, pulsating beats, tattooed MCs, fishnet-clad dancers, and oceans of jumping teens. Bick appears on the channel, spouting maxims like some kind of business guru. "If you have the will to never, ever, give up, no matter what, then you're going to make it," he says, "and I'm nowhere close to making it yet, but I know in my heart I'm going to make it." In coverage both positive and negative, the Danbury News-Times referred to Bick as a "young entrepreneur" and "teenage businessman."

According to US attorneys, while Bick was launching his career as a small-city rave impresario, he had a criminal side gig.

Starting in his senior year of high school, Bick and a friend, John Wrobel, allegedly started soliciting investors for an eBay business. (Wrobel is deemed "a co-conspirator in the scheme" in the government's trial memorandum, but has not been charged. When contacted, he declined to be interviewed.) According to the feds, the plan was to purchase eBay user accounts with pre-established high positive feedback ratings, buy electronics wholesale, and then sell them on the site for a steep markup. (Bick would only confirm to me that he had, at one time, had an eBay business.)

The first investors were high school classmates, who knew Bick as a promoter prodigy, according to the feds. Bick "falsely and fraudulently" claimed "he was successfully promoting concerts and generating profits from various events," when, the indictment claims, his shows made little money.

When Bick's first round of investors got paid, more wanted in, according to prosecutors, and the scheme spread from classmates to friends of friends to their parents and so on. A microcosm of this process allegedly infected the Sigma Pi fraternity at the University of Rhode Island. Bick's high school friend is a brother and the teen businessman traveled to the school and recruited investors in 2013, according to another Sigma Pi brother, who asked that his name not be used.

That fraternity member recalls Bick as "chubby" and "dorky," but business-savvy. "He said he could buy 4s for $100 and sell them for $400," he recalls. "He seemed he had a good idea and was motivated by the idea."

But that frat member didn't hand over any cash at that time. Meanwhile, some of his brothers started getting returns, and others regretted not investing.

"He was getting great word of mouth," says Dave Litchman, another Sigma Fi brother. "He had shown good faith to people by returning their investment and then people were reinvesting their money."

Litchman says he forked over $10,000 from an inheritance from his grandfather. He also says he convinced members of his family to invest "a great deal more."

Bick's high school classmate, who declined to be named, says he took Bick's business partner, John Wrobel, out on the family's boat, where Wrobel convinced him to put down $6,000. He also says he had a lawyer draw up a contract stipulating the partners would return $7,000 within 40 days. "I had heard from some friends he'd made some good returns," the classmate says. "The contract made me feel secure."

But the only person who stood to reap a posh lifestyle from this scheme was Bick, according to prosecutors. They say the club owner was soon spending the cash on shopping and travel (one foray included admission to Manhattan's Museum of Sex.)

One investor coughed up $50,000, and afterwards Bick bought two jet skis and a trailer, the feds say. "This purchase not only allowed Bick to enjoy the fruits of his crime but also allowed him to present himself as very successful," the indictment reads. Bick's nautically-inclined school friend says he's seen the skis docked on Candlewood Lake.

Eventually, of course, Bick fell behind paying investors.

"I was supposed to get paid one day and then he kept BS-ing me," the anonymous Sigma Pi brother says. "He said he'd run into some complications and would get it to me soon." He says he hounded Bick with texts and emails for about a year.

"It was a gradual thing," according to Litchman. "He just slipped out of the picture. Then he wrote me a check that bounced."

The next the two college students heard of Bick, the feds were calling them to get statements, they say.

It's not clear exactly how Bick landed on prosecutors' radar, but in July 2013, he allegedly lied to a US Postal Inspector (an office tasked with investigating allegations of fraudulent bank activity), claiming that one investor's money had been put into artist deposits for his shows when it hadn't.

The indictment also references a sad incident from May 2014, when the alleged scheme was apparently in its death throes. "When he was hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt," Bick allegedly returned to the "modest home" of an "elderly woman" who had invested "to ask for an additional $10,000, a request for funds she declined as she literally did not have the money."

The garden weed of white-collar crime, Ponzi schemes pop up ceaselessly. Phelps's blog includes a monthly round-up of new ones. She reported an average of seven a month over the last year, and she suspects many never make the news because the victims are too embarrassed to go to authorities.

She says sentencing usually depends on the sum swindled, and Bick's alleged haul of half a million is tiny by Ponzi standards. "A small Ponzi scheme is about $3 million," she says. Still, Bick is charged with 11 counts of wire fraud, each of which carries a potential 20-year sentence, along with three counts of money laundering and one count of making a false statement to federal law enforcement (the Postal Inspector). The trial is ongoing, as the feds work through progression of 64 witnesses, a handful of experts and dozens of alleged investor-victims.

But for Bick, free on bail, there is no reason to put away the turntables and subwoofers. Tuxedo Junction has a schedule of shows, and unlike the high-roller depicted in the US attorney's report, Bick claims he lives humbly with his parents, having yet to make a livable profit from Tuxedo Junction, though he's committed to doing so.

"I am really just focused on Tuxedo Junction right now," Bick says. "My goal now is seeing a thousand kids having the time of their lives."

Photo via Flickr user North Shore Rescue

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A BC emergency rescuer penned a blog post yesterday where he called out ill-equipped hikers who keep getting stranded in frigid temperatures because they're dressed in summer clothing.

John Blown, a member of BC's North Shore Rescue team, wrote on the rescue team's website about how hikers need to better prepare themselves before going hiking on a freezing mountain.

"OK Vancouver hikers – we need to have a talk – it is winter in the mountains, and apparently most people do not know this," reads the post, entitled "IT'S NOT SUMMER!"

"Last year at this time a hiker fell on the way to 3rd Pump on Seymour and sustained a broken neck, brain swelling, broken arm, and broken ribs causing a pneumothorax and a collapsed lung - he was in rough shape and had we not been able to get him out very quickly he could have died. This area is not a walk in the park."

So far this year, the North Shore team has received 128 rescue calls to the mountain in question, Mt. Seymour, up from just 78 at the same time last year.

The blog post goes onto urge incoming hikers to prepare for the trek up the mountainside with stuff that can help them survive, such as warm clothing, food and water, survival tools, and, maybe most obviously, hiking boots.

According to Blown, however, would-be hikers have been totally blowing it.

Blown described the general attire of new hikers to the CBC as extremely unprepared. Just yesterday, Blown said he saw "hundreds" of people trying to climb the mountain in sneakers and/or street shoes, many of which were made of leather or had no treads (gotta look fresh if you freeze to death).

Blown also describes attending to situations that range from laughable to potentially dangerous, such as directing a hiker back to a parking lot and running into hikers with no gloves, hats or backpacks.

"We're feeling a bit frustrated and we're asking ourselves... what else can we do?"

Closing the post on a hopeful note, Blown said he hopes that idiots will stop hiking up dangerous mountains.

"We would really prefer that our call stats do not increase for the year—we don't need any more searches, medical rescues or fatalities," he wrote.

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

Automation is predicted to see the erause of two billion jobs by 2030. Photo via flickr user Peter O'Connor

My great granddad Charles was a world champion coach horn-blower, which was an important job until the invention of the railway, when it became about as useful as your collection of Mini Discs. In 1920, there were over a million coal miners in the UK. Now there are just four thousand. In the 1970s, 200,000 people worked in the UK's steel industry. Today, it's close to collapsing.

How quickly work changes.

You might hate your job, but have you ever considered that it might not even exist in the not-so-distant future? The threat of automation—of machines and robots doing our jobs—is real, and only one of things we risk losing our livelihoods to. But then automation has always been there, from the Luddites onwards. When culture changes, so does work. Ten years ago, who would have thought you could have a legitimate, respected career as a massive douchebro on a video website? Will people look back at YouTube and Twitter jobs in the way we look at old mining communities and chimney sweeps now? Which jobs will seem archaic in the future and what will be out there for us that we haven't thought of yet?

It's the latter question that is at the heart of The Castle of Trades "future heritage museum." Located in Barking and Dagenham—a borough that used to host 40,000 former workers at Ford and housed the pharmaceutical giant, Sanofi—The Castle is a project by filmmaking pair Close and Remote, who were commissioned by arts organization Creative Barking and Dagenham to travel around the borough in a Ford Transit Van interviewing residents about work. I remember visiting a mine in Wales as a kid and treating it like a visit to the V&A. In much the same way, this is a project which asks the question: "Are traditional working class jobs destined to become museum exhibits?"

The back of a Ford transit van, a.k.a. The Castle

The first film that caught my attention was about Royston Brooks, a builder by trade:

Royston Brooks - Builder from close and remote on Vimeo.

Royston has enjoyed a successful 30-year career, but, he tells us, didn't do an apprenticeship or receive "any formal training" after he left school. He found employment where his uncle worked and picked everything up on the job. To me, in an era of workfare projects, unpaid internships, and forced employment programs, this sounds like a dream of years long gone.

But according to this Oxford University study, a lot of construction jobs will become "susceptible to computerization" in order to eliminate "variability." What might keep jobs like Royston's alive is the level of "manual and finger dexterity" involved, coupled with the ability of humans to improvise or be creative.

Job automation, or computerization, is predicted to see the erasure of two billion jobs by 2030, but by then, we all might be jittery wrecks. According to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, nearly half of employers have seen a rise in stress-related illnesses in their workforce. Aside from wage stagnation and rising costs of living, a culture of abandonment has entered working life, making us feel that we are at constant risk of being fired, or euphemistically "let go" by our employers.

Perhaps, then, we will see a rise in work-related psychotherapy jobs. Awele Odeh, who is the subject of in another of Close and Remote's Barking films, is employed to help people with "stress management" and training for "self awareness and self leadership":

Awele Odeh - Psychotherapist from close and remote on Vimeo.

It seems we are still in the era of the self. Self-employment is at its highest since records began. Depending on your perspective, being self-employed can be liberating and give you freedom from management structure, or it can drive pay down and make you feel insecure about work.

I spoke to Khushnood, a resident of Barking Riverside, outside The Castle. She has set up a social enterprise—a business that trades for a social and/or environmental purpose. A trained nutritionist, Khushnood couldn't work full time after having children, so she set up her non-profit organization. "Our community needs lots of support because of the government cuts," she told me. "The government no longer provides as much support as it used to. Charities are restricted to only some things and private business obviously won't be able to get the funds that are available for particular community projects. With a social enterprise you fill in these gaps."

Kushnood Ahmed

Perhaps social enterprises are one of the areas of work that will increase. Depending on future governments, direct public spending may never reach the heights it did in the 1960s. Kushnood certainly feels compelled to address this, and by setting up a business that acts as with a quasi-welfare interest, she is providing a very 21st-century solution. However, she also mentioned that her father was a businessman and, "it seemed much easier to set up a business back then. Financially difficult of course, but the approach and way to do things was easier. Now there are so many laws and so many procedures you have to go through. Things have become much more complicated."

But even setting up a business—something a machine can't currently do—is trickier than you might think. Computerization might destroy most of the bullshit jobs that currently make us feel useless, but what will it create? With destruction, also comes opportunity. Following Rohit Talwar's advice to head teachers about helping young people safeguard their future, I spoke to another futurologist, Richard Watson about work.

He told me that work exists now for social reasons as much as productive ones. "It would be a disaster if formal work vanishes. Work isn't just about money, it's essential to identity, status, meaning, and the social aspects are vital. If we all end up working alone, at home, part-time we will be anxious, stressed, and lonely."

He also said that he sees the amount of hours we work increasing with automation, rather than decreasing, as luxury automation utopians would like us to believe. "We're living longer so we'll need more money. Our pensions system is largely bust. One in seven people in the UK have almost no savings for retirement. But this isn't always bad. Working is good for us. When people (especially men) retire they do tend to die!"

Watson predicts that "anything involving data input or repeatable or repetitive tasks" will be automated. It won't be the higher level of jobs, but the lower level. "Low-cost lawyers are at risk from completemycase.com and Google are offering US case law searches for free, but any lawyer that's creative and good is safe. The safest jobs will be those that involve human empathy or creativity, intuition, or abstraction. Good teachers, good nurses, doctors, artists, writers, inventors—they're are all safe."

Watson also tells me of jobs that will appear that don't currently exist, jobs like a digital executor who, "will carry out directions for the dispersal of our digital property and manage peoples' digital identities after death." Or, "brain augmentation and implant surgeons that improve certain functions such as memory or cosmetic brain surgery."

I ask Kushnood if she's positive about her young children's working future. "I don't want them to think, I should have known this, I should have seen this earlier. There are so many new jobs and job titles that have emerged that you have to have an open mind. Because of all the things I do, some people call me an 'activist.' But I don't like that word. So people said to me, you can call yourself a 'social architect.' Now I've decided that's what I am!"

The unknowable is always daunting, and despite the opportunities that inevitably arise, it's hard not to worry about job security. I asked Richard what the safest job of all would be. "A vicar. Because how do you automate belief or spirituality?"

Follow Kit on Twitter.

Cover Image by Scarlet Evans courtesy of Ladybeard Magazine

If you really sat down and tried, you could turn a lot of pages in the space of 30 days. While we've spent over a decade providing you with about 120 of those pages every month, it turns out VICE isn't the only magazine in the world. This series, Ink Spots, is a helpful guide to which of those zines, pamphlets, and publications you should be reading when you're not reading ours.

Ladybeard's first issue is all about sex. Not that you needed to be told that. The front and back covers display sex toys artfully arranged on bright pink velvet and flower-sprinkled turf, and the inner covers are a wallpaper of miniature couples engaged in myriad different sex positions. It's almost shocking, but then isn't that what all women's magazines are about? From Cosmopolitan to Vogue, sex is ingrained in every issue of every glossy mag.

It's only once you start reading it that the difference becomes clear. Inside the 200 pages, over 70 contributors give their unique take on the theme, covering sex shops to sex work, through porn, art, drag, and something known as "ecosexuality." Instead of teaching you "10 Ways to Please Your Man," Ladybeard celebrates the infinite possibilities of human sexuality, without judgement. It's as informative as it is attractive and lands a heavy blow to the shallow, consumerist culture of women's mags.

Now, two years in the making, the issue is finally ready for release. Ahead of their launch event this weekend, I caught up with some of the team to talk about sex culture and the changing face of feminism.

Illustration by Peter Stemmler, 'The Sex Book by Suzi Godson (2002)' courtesy of Ladybeard Magazine

VICE: Hi Ladybeard. Where did the idea for the magazine come from and how did it start?
Ladybeard: The idea came about at University, where we met and became friends. We've all been massive fans of glossy magazines—Vogue, Elle, Heat, Sugar (great freebies), Cosmo, Grazia—since we were kids, and we loved them, but we started to hate the way they made us feel. So we thought it would be cool to take the form and format of the glossy, make something really beautiful or something really aspirational, but change all the messages within it and really revolutionize the whole content.

How did you choose sex for the theme of the first issue?
Sex is so misrepresented and overexposed in mainstream media but you only see one view of it: one cis, slick, penetrative, too-perfect-for-words, depiction of sex in advertisements and film. There's a brilliant collage of Cosmo covers over the last 20 years and they all say sex in the top-left corner because that's where your eye's drawn to. We thought if the premise of Ladybeard is to invert the glossy mag, there's surely nothing better for the first issue than sex, which runs through these magazines and has been a bastion of mainstream media for so long.

Illustration by Peter Stemmler, 'The Sex Book by Suzi Godson (2002)' courtesy of 'Ladybeard Magazine'

How did you find your 70+ contributors?
Quite a scattergun approach really. Often it was through things we liked ourselves, and if we read about an article of someone doing something we liked, we'd get in contact with them and be like "will you write for us," "can we interview you," "will you do this for us." We came together, brainstormed all the different aspects of sex we could think of, hundreds of them, and thought about how we could cover each of those things. And because it's been about two years since the promo issue , we've had quite a long time to garner material.

How important is your voice in the publication?
We're very very conscious of our privilege as white, cis, middle-class women and while obviously there's only so much we can do about that within ourselves, in the magazine we have tried to seek as many different voices as we can. We wanted to make something we wanted to read and we wanted to read about things that we actually know very little about. The idea was to counter the damaging messages about sex that you digested yourself at a formative age, and then produce something we wish we'd got to read six years ago so maybe we could have avoided six years of really bad sex.

Photography Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens courtesy of 'Ladybeard Magazine'

Do you think this is an important time for feminism?
Feminism is at quite an interesting point right now. Not that long ago a lot of people really didn't want to identify as feminist or there was a lot of jargon in the mainstream media—you had Taylor Swift and Katy Perry, these two huge pop female icons, being like 'yeah, I'm not a feminist.' Now, it's really mainstream. Stylist have feminist issues, Elle has feminist sections: It's become something really popular and topical and it's been rebranded.

The thing is, that kind of feminism is still not really that great and actually continues to perpetuate a lot of toxic messages. There was a women's hour debate about glossy magazines and the editor of Elle said something like "advertisers love feminism." That was the point we realized feminism is now a fashion. But it's got nothing to do with believing in the tenets of feminism or wanting to make any change. It's like Chanel staging their fashion show as a protest last year, or Brew Dog launching its ridiculous "No Label" gender-free beer as a 'sign of solidarity' or some shit. It's like pink pound culture is now moving out of being a LGB thing and it's now a trans thing as well.

Courtesy of 'Ladybeard Magazine'

Surely it's better that people are talking about feminism and declaring themselves feminist now though?
Maybe, but also we're just not that crazy about the kind of feminism that's really palatable, and which falls short from asking the kind of uncomfortable questions that feminism needs to ask if it's going to do anything meaningful or changing. If you look at these magazines, you have the kind of feminist content like Elle's #morewomen campaign highlighting gender inequality for instance—but then you turn the page and there are still those ads telling you to be a certain kind of thing as a woman or as a man and projecting those very damaging messages about gender and about sexuality. It's just hypocritical.

Photography Scarlet Evans courtesy of 'Ladybeard Magazine'

You say Ladybeard's like an inversion of a women's glossy. How does that work in terms of who your target audience is?
We don't really have a target audience because we like to think anyone who sits down with it will find it interesting and confusing and fun. You don't know what it's going to be like until you open it up and you actually dig into the contents. At the beginning of the magazine, we have these ten sexual experiences, and people have said to us they didn't even know whether the people writing them were men or women. And then after that, we go straight away into four spotlights which have a whole bunch of different sex going on. So we were trying to throw off the usual coordinates: start with a pink sparkly cover so you think you know where you are, but then you open it up and you're disoriented and get further disoriented until, maybe, you'll come out the other end with your perspective a little bit changed.

The problem with women's magazines is that it has to be awomen'smagazine. It's again putting all genders into boxes so that then you cant stray or move out of those boxes, you can't self-define. We really wanted to get away from that, like we are feminist but we're not just for women. We think feminism should be for everyone and hopefully that's reflected in the magazine.

Thanks Ladybeard. Good luck with the launch.

Ladybeard's Sex Issue launch will be held at Hackney Showroom on Saturday November, 14. For your own copy book tickets here or follow them on Facebook.

Follow Joe on Twitter.

All screenshots courtesy of EA

I own a car, and have been known to drive it at speeds some might consider on the wrong side of quick enough. I don't go mad at the wheel; I don't get dangerous. But I'm occasionally eager enough on the accelerator to have my wife suggesting I ease off, maybe slipping above the speed limit while westward bound on the M4. It happens to us all—I mean, who doesn't want to get to Wales in a hurry?

You can't drive all the way to Wales in the new, rebooted Need for Speed, another Ghost Games production for publisher EA, following the Swedish studio's celebrated work on 2013's Need for Speed Rivals. The game locks you into a relatively expansive open-world city by the name of Ventura Bay, an American West-Coast sprawl of industrial complexes, snaking mountain lanes, downtown high-rises, and waterside condos. It's an analogue of Los Angeles, loosely. I've never been to said real-world city, but I have played a shit load of Grand Theft Auto V, and if you forced me to declare one of these two virtual versions of the City of Angels as more impressive than the other, it'd be Rockstar's Los Santos I stuck my thumb up for.

Which isn't to say that Need for Speed isn't a very attractive game, because at times its Frostbite 3-generated visuals are astounding. Most of those times occur within the first hour of play, when Ghost's almost photo-real rain-slicked streets, always crowned by night time skies—you'll be waiting an eternity for the sun to come up over the east side of Weid Canyon—still feel fresh to your fizzing retinas. From a distance, this doesn't look like a video game at all, a compelling facet of its presentation further enhanced by the inclusion of full-motion-video cutscenes.

The impression doesn't last, as very occasional instances of asset pop-up break the illusion, and the various shades of grey that make up road, central reservations and sidewalks rather blur into each other, making high-speed turns tricky as it's not always obvious where smooth tarmac ends and vertical concrete obstacle begins. Be prepared for impacts once you tweak your vehicle of choice into reaching some properly high speeds. (It's OK, though—damage is only ever superficial, and can be popped back into shape instantly upon going back to your hub garage. And I'll have more on that workshop space in a couple of paragraphs.)

Getting to those top speeds isn't something you'll achieve within your first few hours of play, though—expect to be pushing only slightly beyond my limit-breaching motorway runs. At the very outset, you're presented with a choice between three entirely rudimentary cars. Unremarkable wheels, sure, but upon them you can build, and how. But first you need to get out onto the roads and compete, at least a little, with your initially skittering vehicle—you soon enough realize that with modification comes handling options, making steering more or less sensitive and the overall performance of your car leaning either towards grip-happy down-force or stylish drift potential. Again: expect to crash. You will. It's no big deal. Amy will sort that ding right out for you.

Who's Amy? Hang on, I'll get to her, and the rest of the rag-tag crew of Actual Proper Actors who pirouette and pout and fist-bump endlessly and call each other "bae" in front of the camera that is your Not So Actual Face, aka your in-game cutscene perspective, like the Mega-CD never died but spawned a legion of lookalike FMV titles, the offspring infernal of Ground Zero Texas and its ilk. (Sorry, got side tracked.) In the garage, you can upgrade your first car to make it go faster, turn sharper, drift longer, sit higher, rim wider, and so on and so forth—you use currency won by completing story objectives and any number of anytime extras that are scattered around the map, from drift contests where flair takes precedent over who's fastest, and straightforward sprints from one line to another.

Alternatively, you can take your escalating cash pile and splash it all over a new, sportier, sexier mode of transport—there are what feel like hundreds of cars available (checks the number; it's actually only 51), and any one of them can be yours if you have the readies and you've put in enough work to reach a level that unlocks certain models and mods alike. Thankfully, leveling up is a breeze—play for three hours and you should easily be at level 20, rolling around in a powerful machine that'll see you through until much later challenges, at which point you can chuck all the money you've got at a tricked-out Murciélago.

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE's film, 'London Bike Life'

I stuck with my (eventually fairly monstrous beneath the paint job) bright pink Honda Civic for as long as I could, license plate "AWFUL," garish transfers all over, as I'd become rather attached to my self-made horror. Which is a good thing, as there's so little personality to Need for Speed for the most part, and you never truly feel as if you're competing within a living, breathing urban center. Unlike Ubisoft's ambitious but flawed open-world driving game The Crew, which gave you "all" of America to explore, there are no pedestrians pounding the pavements of Need for Speed's built-up areas. I accept it's night time, but come on: people go out after dark these days.

Other cars, both AI controlled and driven by other players—the game requires an internet connection at all times, meaning there's always an "L1mpB1zk1tM8" or "ApocaLOLps3" just around the corner to crash into (they'll be stationary in the middle of the road, since always online means there's no proper pause function)—do pepper the Ventura Bay streets, but in my experience never in numbers to deliver convincing density. Trains rocket by on overhead lines, but no commuters are ever seen walking the rest of the way home. Petrol station forecourts sit silent and still; 24-hour stores are mere shells of stocked-shelves potential; apartment blocks have all the right lights on, but nobody's home.

The only times that Need for Speed conveys an impression that human beings live within its world comes in the cutscenes, which feature five main characters and a number of real-world experts in various motorsport fields. Sometimes you're in a diner, sometimes a garage, sometimes a space somewhat sacred to the ostensible father figure of this quintet of colorful, albeit one-dimensional characters. Robyn will challenge you to drift-offs in the nearby hills. The inexperienced Spike has simply got to go fast. Manu preaches a brand of oil-specked spirituality, a connection between man and machine that Travis, the leader of the crew, has significantly less interest in.

And then there's Amy, the gang's mechanic, played by Game of Thrones and Fresh Meat actress Faye Marsay. She hails from Middlesbrough but adopts an accent here that no amount of randomly stabbing a pin into a large-scale map of all 50 states will ever locate the home of. It's an acutely off-putting sound, a thousand-times more painful to the senses than the mindless EDM that forced me to turn the in-game music off entirely after a whole ten minutes of play.

Need for Speed's core cast is joined by people who may well be known to bigger petrol heads than me: Ken Block is here, likewise Magnus Walker, and if you're familiar with those guys then well done, as I'd never heard of any of them before playing this game. (But then, I also had to Google what a gymkhana was, in a motoring context.) Each of these real-life professionals will make contact with the player, with new missions, once the not-so-famous fivesome have built a big enough reputation in Ventura Bay, mostly courtesy of your achievements. I can't say that any character is especially likable, more there simply to facilitate progression than become personally attached to, and Need for Speed never does an Until Dawn and reverses first impressions, transforming those once loathed into well-liked hero figures. Not that any of the plot (yes, there's a plot) or the filmed sections really matter, as the vast majority of your time here is going to be spent positioned either up front and low or behind the spoiler of your favorite car.

'Need for Speed,' official launch trailer

There are a lot of events squeezed into Need for Speed, although they primarily stick to the varieties listed earlier: go fast, get twisty, or head home. Some are locked behind level gates, others accessible from the beginning. The better your car, the more you're going to win, obviously; but knowing when to compete with a drift-centric set-up and when to maximize your top speed is key to succeeding in higher-level contests. Sticking to a nicely balanced car will get you only so far, so be prepared to either stock a couple of options at the garage or constantly head back there to play around with primary settings sliders and your array of performance-altering gadgets, from nitro boosts to hard or soft handbrakes. Tip: have two cars on the go. There are collectibles to scoop up, too—trucks that have bonus gear in them, photo opportunities to skid along to, burnout spots to spin donuts at. It doesn't reach Ubisoft levels of sweeping the clutter from the map as you go along, but Ghost have provided enough tat to tick off that nobody in their right mind will ever 100 percent this game. What's this? A photo of a petrochemical plant? Nah, you're alright.

There are police cars to watch out for, too, before I press ahead to my conclusion without mentioning that. Fly past one at illegal speed and it will chase you—it's not like they have anything better to do, with the city's coffee counters unmanned and street assaults at a never-better low of precisely zero per night. The pursuits can get pretty annoying. Constant screen-obscuring notifications and irritating phone calls from Spike and company make escaping the law's attention a chore more often than not. Indeed, why the hell are the pop-up notices so unbelievably massive? Would it have hurt Ghost so bad to stick them in a corner, rather than right across your field of vision?

New on VICE Sports: Where Will Formula E Find Itself Ten Years From Now?

OK, let's wrap this up. As a foundation from which to grow the Need for Speed franchise anew, which is EA's plan, this glossy reboot does a decent enough job of providing fundamental thrills for driving game fans. It's got its share of obvious flaws, the most jarring of all being some incredible rubber banding in race situations, where rivals that left your rear view mirrors long ago are suddenly right on top of you when you misjudge one corner. (Though, this can benefit the player too, as even if you stack your car dramatically with just a few race checkpoints remaining, you still have a good chance of a high finish.) Having to pull over to check the map grows tiresome very quickly, but hopefully both this and the magical AI teleportation can be dealt with in later updates. While the FMV has been criticized in some reviews, I'm a fan of games reclaiming it, and the acting here is straight out of the Digital Pictures handbook—and that's a plus for me (that accent aside).

Don't come to Need for Speed expecting a standard racing game, as it's more in The Crew mould—a choose-your-own-adventure open-world affair with customizable hot wheels in place of courageous hirsute warriors, presenting a sizable buffet of challenges without quite perfecting any recipe along the way. But it's as engaging as a title of its ilk can hope to be, from the perspective of someone whose favorite recent racer is Mario Kart 8, and while it's unlikely to be anyone's top-ranking Need for Speed in 2015, what it becomes a year and more from now will ultimately determine whether or not Ghost's hard work has revitalized a veteran series that was probably overdue a hard reset.

Need for Speed is out now for PlayStation 4 (version tested) and Xbox One, with a PC version released in 2016.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

Rocinha. Photo via Flickr user Alex

I was 22 when I randomly decided to go backpacking in Brazil.

At the time, I was bored as hell of life in overly sanitized Vancouver. Brazil turned out to be an excellent antidote, and I found myself completely charmed by its natural beauty as well as its overwhelming chaos and suffocating crowds.

Rio, in particular, I never wanted to leave. The first thing everybody notices about Rio is how stunningly beautiful it is, which is true, but the most interesting thing about it is its paradoxes. Far from glamorous, the most famous beach, Copacabana, is more or less a red light district where it's not uncommon to see gaggles of underage girls surrounding much older men. Meanwhile, nestled on a hillside in between two of the city's wealthiest neighbourhoods, Gavea and São Conrado, sits Rocinha, the largest favela . I went deep in the favela. On four or five occasions I would do that and I came across young men with semi-automatic weapons in large numbers sitting around, and in wanders this gringo. So I did what any sensible person would do in that situation, which is I acted like a dumb gringo, which in many respects is what I was.

What did you talk about?
Once, I talked about the upcoming World Cup and the fact that they thought England's chances were completely zippo and Brazil was going to win. And the other occasion I was with a friend who knew the head of the gang and so we sat down and chatted and he was very affable, he was extraordinarily shot down three days later by the police.

You wrote about alcoholism in Nem's family, what types of addiction issues did you witness?
If you want to see crack addiction you go to other favelas, but my god, what you see is just hair raising. It's teenagers who are zombies, they all gather in various areas which are known as cracolândias, and these are places with teenage and sub-teenage crack addicts. And they're just sitting there—they don't know whether it's night or day, it's horrible to watch.

What do you think needs to change for life in favelas to improve?
The key thing favelas need in the mid to long term is better educational access, and they need to confront the issue of domestic violence. The reason domestic violence is so important is because exposure to domestic violence leads to the replication of violent behaviour through the generations.

How do you think your book will be received by the Brazilian government?
They're not going to like it.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

All screen grabs via the author

For better or worse, there are virtually no photos of human shit on Instagram. Or at least they're very hard to find. Try to search for them. Under #poop (over 680,000 posts) it's mostly photos of emoji and selfies. Similarly, #diarrhea (over 35,000 posts) is mostly memes, while #turds (roughly 20,000 posts), #crap (400,000+ posts!) and #buttchocolate (a disappointing 50-ish posts) are all mixed, feces-free bags.

But what if there were an app specifically designed to share poop photos? And also photos of garbage, dead animals, and bloody hypodermic needles? And what if it was made by the government?

Behold, the revolting world of 311 apps.

The apps, now offered by most major cities in the US, provide an alternative to calling 311. Users can anonymously request non-emergency city services—things like street light repair, tree maintenance, potholes, and sidewalk cleaning—all without having to look up from their phones. In addition to the standard details, users are encouraged to provide a photo. The best part is that it lets users view everyone else's complaints.

A search for "311" in the app store reveals dozens of apps, all with cheesy logos that resemble the title card of an early '80s public access show. Download one—say, San Francisco, Baltimore, or Philly—open it, tap the "recent requests" button, and click the "sort by photo" icon. A photo feed appears, except instead of photos of eggs Benedict with hashtags like #icouldgetusedtothis, it's bags of garbage and piles of human turds.

(These apps are not to be confused with the iOS app offered by the reggae-rock band 311, which according to a post in the band's forum regarding its sudden disappearance in ~2013, allowed fans to "track Nick & P-nuts tweets" and "crashed and never worked.")

That the government has effectively offered an Instagram full of only terrible, gross stuff is purely unintentional. 311 apps were designed as a more efficient way for cities to handle 311 service requests. The app first appeared in Boston in 2009, and was designed by the company Connected Bits. Since then, they've built over two dozen of them.

Connected Bits works with cities to build the apps over the Open311 infrastructure that they also helped implement. A portion of workers at 311 call centers in each city are then diverted towards responding to app requests. According to San Francisco's 311 Customer Service Center's Deputy Director Andy Maimoni, the apps have been downloaded 24,178 times, and 195,863 requests have been submitted.

It seems that, much like ordering food or calling a cab, people prefer reporting issues on the apps, rather than over the phone. According to Connected Bits co-founder Dave Mitchell, "Within a year or so, 30 percent or more requests came through mobile alone."

Photos are a crucial feature of the apps. "Providing the photo and position via mobile instead of a phone call may aid departments in identifying the problem and assigning the correct resources," Maimoni told me. "For example, the sign repair team can see the damage to the sign and ensure they have the correct materials on hand."

The ability to view other's complaints turns the apps into bizarre local social networks. Each city's grid functions like a photographic census of the irritations of its citizens—or at least, certain plugged-in, cranky citizens.

The common themes in each city's grid vary. For example, in Baltimore I saw a lot of abandoned cars.

In Philly, piles of garbage.

And in San Francisco, a whole bunch of shit.

Browsing through the grids is surprisingly entertaining. This isn't to say that looking at excrement and dead animals itself is fun, but the photos of them reveal Dickensian tales of civic frustration.

They offer peeks at neighborhood drama, like this photo someone took of their neighbor hanging a dead deer in their backyard, "in plain sight of children."

There are contemplative moments regarding the tenuous nature of "trash."

And moments of existential despair.

Aesthetically, the photos are amateurish, with crappy lighting and focus. There are no filters to give the poo a nostalgic yellow glow. But what they lack in technical ability they make up for in expressiveness. They are taken in moments of quiet rage. The shit pics offer a venting opportunity for those with little power in a city jammed up by bureaucracy, decaying and corrupt like a city in the beginning of a comic book for adults.

The apps show a grim version of the city that is often invisible, at odds with the rosy mirages typically depicted on social media. Scrolling through 311 photos feels like anti-tourism.

Not to be a huge buzzkill, but it would be irresponsible not to mention some of the apps' darker aspects: That 311 requests (both via app and telephone) are potentially an indication of gentrification. And that many of the problems photographed indicate severe desperation due to a shameful lack of services. And that the ability to report "homeless concerns" makes criminalizing homelessness more efficient. The apps also depict a distressing view of our collective intolerance to witnessing the many indignities caused by our inability to help those in need.

If the photos offer vivid depictions of a hidden city, their captions offer beautifully concise, poetic commentary. Imagine an alternate history, in which Hemingway is a virulent NIMBY:

311 Requests: The Collected Poems

Boxes, human feces, 2nd request.
— #5249591

Someone left bags of trash on sidewalk,
Looks like lots of glass.
— #5241798

Poop bandit returns.
— #5266535

Homeless woman has been screaming and shouting,
at someone named "Marvin" for at least an hour.
— #5266477

Feces, hypodermics, clothing, cardboard, condoms, etc.
— #5263859

I would very much like to spend a chilly fall Sunday curled up with a good book of 311 poetry.

Related: You Don't Know Shit

If any app consists of shit and garbage pics, it's interesting to think about what moderation, if any, is required. What images are forbidden when the worst images are permitted? Is it even possible to troll such a system? According to SF 311's Andy Maimoni, they get few, if any, false complaints. Curious, I submitted a photo reporting halloween decorations.

A few hours later, they were promptly closed and labeled "invalid" and removed from the grid. I suppose I'll just have to post them on Instagram.

Follow Joe on Twitter.

This article contains what you might consider spoilers for the single-player campaign of Black Ops III. Screenshots captured by the author.

Like L.A. Noire, like Dark Souls, like Silent Hill 2, Call of Duty: Black Ops III represents a small miracle in the gaming industry, whereby, despite presumably myriad pressures to be mainstream and financially safe, it still has personality and something to say. It managed to slip through the meat grinder. It's filled with guns, robots, suits of armor, and a thousand other typical video game components, but verily, I've never played anything like it in my life.

I'd say I have two big problems with games at the moment. First, the mainstream is idiotic and unimaginative, and it's only maybe once a year you get a boxed game that's got any substance or worth. There are plenty of conversation pieces but as for big-budget titles that resonate beyond the tiny, blinkered world of video games, those are few and far between—there seems to exist a culture that prohibits Big Games from being too intelligent or too provocative.

Second, a lot of the acclaimed new wave games feel to me incredibly timid and minor. We talk about Journey, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, Braid, and titles like them as exemplifying how video games are becoming more astute and grown-up, how an ability and willingness to represent "issues" is overshadowing conventional desires for mechanics and fun. But these games dance around and approach in only the most superficial ways the topics they purport to confront. Beyond Eyes, Papo & Yo, Always Sometimes Monsters, and dozens of other games in the beloved independent canon feel to me too affected and ethereal to be called cutting edge. I think games are largely insecure.

A lot of Black Ops III takes place inside characters' minds. There are these fantastic dream and nightmare sequences wherein the geography of the level warps, the enemies change from soldiers to monsters, and the protagonists, instead of swapping information about the mission, start asking one another existential questions about whether they're really in control of their own actions. At the same time, it's produced by Treyarch and financed by Activision—it's a multi-million dollar game, made with the most powerful technology, designed to be loud, boisterous entertainment. It's never subtle. Even when you're trawling through someone's subconscious, you do it with a gun and some power-ups. And that's what I like. I like Black Ops III's confidence, I like its brashness, I like its disregard for propriety.

There are plenty of pretenders but rarely do you find a games-maker that has managed to compellingly represent philosophy in its work. Black Ops III, also, is hardly edifying, or itself edified, but at least it isn't dry, or timid, or patronizing. In a way, that feels wholly appropriate for a franchise worth billions of dollars. Black Ops III is at ease with itself. While in the past, Call of Duty's self-assuredness has made for tone-deaf, sophomoric, non-entertainment, this time around Treyarch uses its power and style to attempt to do something good, and in a way no other studio would dare.

Related: Watch VICE's film on Poland's independent paramilitary groups

I don't understand how anyone could play Black Ops III's campaign and not be moved by it in some way. At the very least, it's a great illustration of video game industry excess, not just in the sense that it's loud and expensive, but because it's bizarre, febrile, and unrestrained. Video games are this strange cultural grotesque, massively popular, and disgustingly rich, while at the same time resistant to heterogeneity, immune to good taste, and oblivious to their own obnoxiousness. Similarly, Black Ops III is a phantasmagoria of colors, numbers, and people yelling—it does for video games what Full Metal Jacket's "Surfin' Bird" sequence does for the Vietnam War. It's an evocation, a mood piece. And the creators know it, they must.

I wouldn't say Black Ops III is self-effacing, since it never compromises or apologizes for what it is, but the makers are definitely conscious of their own hyperbole. Whether to make a statement or just through hubris, this is what video games look like naked. If you respond to Black Ops III's campaign by calling it dull or half-hearted, I think you've been deadened.

New on Motherboard: 'Fallout 4' Modders Are Already Making Cool Stuff

And the more I think about it, the more confident I am that Black Ops III's excess is deliberate, for reasons beyond showing off and meeting customer expectations. This is the first Call of Duty campaign where you design and create your protagonist (well, to some extent). At the beginning, he's implanted with a computer chip that lets him interface with his teammates and receive live information from the battlefield. Eventually, though, this chip is corrupted—a rogue AI takes it over, and begins to wipe out the protagonist's identity and replace it with its own. At the end of the game, your protagonist is reciting the AI's words, screaming them through gritted teeth as he tries to fight it off.

Your squad-mates are infected also. One of them, Taylor, asks: "Have you ever done or said something and not known why? What if it wasn't you? What if it was someone else?" He also remarks that the AI "isn't even that clever," explaining: "It doesn't know what it wants, it just grows and grows." Video game consumers want content. They want agency. They want what they want. And that's how Call of Duty has grown fat—especially when you think about the multiplayer, it's less a video game in the expressive sense and more of a service, optimized and re-calibrated year-on-year in response to popular demand. But in Black Ops III you have characters that are fighting (and mostly losing) against poisonous outside influence. They're struggling with identity. The hive mind created by their computer chips, and the AI that starts to corrupt it, pull them in different directions, changing their thoughts until they end up losing themselves entirely.

It's a sly response to Call of Duty's highly corporate identity. Given player demands and the risk of losing hundreds of millions of dollars, the series is unable to move. It has to be this. It has to be that. It's a franchise so weighed down by expected and supposition, so symbiotically bound to customers and stakeholders, that like the characters in Black Ops III it struggles to retain an identity, or at least an identity that hasn't been given to it. So now you can make your own character, and he or she is mentally tied to a dozen other people, and they lose their mind to a malevolent but largely unthinking computer virus. And it's as if the makers of Black Ops III have finally tired of their own status and grown angry with the industry in which they work and the audience that they have.

How can you possibly be yourself, or do anything that you really want to do, when you're working on a game that belongs to so many people? How can you tell a story, or retain any sense of control over your work, when you're constantly battling this rogue consciousness that wants to just run around with a gun and not pay attention? Like the makers of Call of Duty—like the makers of a lot of video games, yanked in myriad directions by expectation, money, and the capriciousness of players—the characters in Black Ops III are amalgamations of ideas and intelligences, losing their minds over conflicting thoughts and contradictory ideas. When they scream at the AI—"Who are you? What do you want?"—they are in fact screaming at us.

Follow Ed on Twitter.

Look at Anna Haifisch's art and comics at her website and Twitter.

Holly Woodlawn on her Cleopatra thrown in Hollywood. Photo by Robert Preston Coddington

When Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn appeared on screens across the world in the 1970 movie Trash, it was a pioneering moment. Her raucous performance broke new ground, and a transgender woman stepped out into the public eye. From Miami FLA, she's the very same Holly in Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side," who "shaved her legs and then he was a she." And now, sadly, she's terribly ill.

Holly met Andy Warhol at a party at the Factory in 1968. It was after a screening of Flesh, the first in a series of movies directed by Paul Morrissey. Holly became a part of the Warhol entourage and was a regular at legendary nightclub, Max's Kansas City. It's there where, according to her, she once had a tryst with Jim Morrison.

Photo by Jarry Lang

In June this year, Holly was admitted to a hospital with an unknown condition, which turned out to be cancer. After initial treatment was successful, she was about to move back to her West Hollywood apartment, when it became unlivable due to flooding. At the moment, she's in an assisted living facility, unable to undertake further treatment. Once her place is repaired, she'll have to return home.

After Holly fell ill, fellow Warhol Superstar Penny Arcade set up a GoFundMe campaign to help finance the medical expenses. So far it's raised over $67,000. But Arcade told VICE more is needed to fund the round-the-clock nursing Holly now requires and hopefully so she can remain in the facility instead of returning home. "It would be far better to keep Holly there than bring her home to a much grimmer environment," Arcade explained.

In 1971, Holly and Arcade starred in the Morrissey film Women in Revolt, alongside the transgender actresses Candy Darling and Jackie Curtis. As Arcade puts it, Holly was one of the first trans women to "gain visibility in America and internationally as a personality," different from Christine Jorgenson—who came before her—because Jorgenson only appeared in newspapers.

And unlike Darling and Curtis, who both died tragically young, "the public has known Holly as a performer for nearly 50 years," Arcade said, adding "People talk today about 'out' transgender women, but Holly was never 'in.'"

Photo by Jarry Lang

Born in Puerto Rico in 1946, Holly moved to Florida with her family when she was an infant. In 1962, at the age of 15, she ran away from home and, as the song goes, hitchhiked her way to New York City. After a period of living on the streets, she fell in love with a man and lived as his wife for the period of seven years, working as a clothing model at Saks.

In 1969, Paul Morrissey cast her as one of the leads in Trash. The avant-garde director made a series of movies produced by Andy Warhol, revolutionizing the cinema of the day, due to their raw subject matter, marginal characters, and unscripted scenes.

In Trash, Holly played a garbage picker who's sexually frustrated because her boyfriend, played by Joe Dallesandro, is suffering from heroin-induced impotence. The two decide they'll clean up their lives and try to get on welfare in order to live in a more respectable manner.

Photo by Jarry Lang

Dallesandro, who spent more time on camera with his clothes off than on, said he was "flabbergasted" by Holly's improvisational talent: Morrissey was known for providing actors with the storyline just before filming. "Holly was so great to ad lib everything within the perimeter of the story Paul wanted us to tell," Dallesandro told VICE. "I recall being amazed she was able to do that."

Holly's performance drew critical acclaim and the Oscar-winning director George Cukor started a petition to have her included in the Best Actress category of that year's Academy Awards.

On a visit to the hospital, Dallesandro said he was happy to see Holly but "saddened by the state she was living in," referring to the facility she has since moved out of. "She was in good spirits, happy to see me," he recalled. "She told me her cancer had not gotten worse."

Holly on stage. Photo by Robert Preston Coddington

Throughout the 70s, Holly continued her acting career. Then after a break from the limelight, she returned to the screen in the 90s appearing in a string of movies. Since the early 2000s, she became a regular on the cabaret circuit and has been performing in shows across the US and Europe, some as recently as 2013. And she's even penned a memoir called A Low Life in High Heels.

For the last ten years, Robert Coddington has been her manager. He told me Holly is "unstoppable" and she's now more determined than ever to complete a documentary being made about her life. "She knows she has cancer and yet this is only making her stronger," he said. "Last week she told me, 'Honey, I'm surprised it took this long to rear its ugly head.'"

Coddington was the archivist for transgender rocker Jayne County. In 2004, County insisted on a meeting. "Jayne told me to meet Holly because she would be dead within months—ha." And although he wasn't initially interested in being her manager, his role "has been better than a Willy Wonka's factory tour."

Holly in front of the former site of CBGB. Photo by Robert Preston Coddington

He pointed out that Holly's influence has been phenomenal. "In 1969, she was at the Stonewall Inn, the night the cops busted the place," leading to the riots. "She fought for the rights of transgender people before they even knew she was fighting for them," he said and went on to explain that she did so because deep down she "had no other choice."

Arcade said Holly has a wish to leave a legacy to support at-risk trans youth and her friends are trying to make this a reality. "Holly has made the world safer and more welcoming not only for other trans women and men and LGBT people," Arcade said, "but for everyone who felt themselves an outsider."

Follow Paul on Twitter.

All photos from 'Snow Monkey,' courtesy of Gittoes Films

With his long, gray beard and Pashtun dress, artist and filmmaker George Gittoes seems to maneuver the streets of Jalalabad, Afghanistan, like a local—that is until he speaks in his booming Australian accent. In his latest documentary Snow Monkey, we follow the Sydney native as he recruits street kids to come and learn filmmaking skills at the Yellow House Jalalabad, the name he's given the artist collective and independent film school he started with his partner Hellen Rose back in 2011. The kids that Gittoes befriends aren't even teenagers, but they already have jobs to support their families. They're excited about making movies, and in turn, the locals are eager to buy DVDs of the films they make with Gittoes's help. Even the Taliban are supportive. Then the Islamic State comes to town, and things get ugly in a hurry.

The gonzo documentary has the violence and B-movie tropes of The Act of Killing; the peace-and-love spirit of John and Yoko's Bed-Ins; and the meaningful-yet-not-corny community engagement of Jaimie Warren's social-practice art. The title Snow Monkey comes from the name the little gang of ice-cream boys give themselves. These boys roam the streets selling frozen treats out of their little carts, and they're everywhere like the monkeys in the city, they explain.

Watch an exclusive clip from 'Snow Monkey':

Courtesy of Gittoes Films

There's other little gangs in the film, too. The Ghostbusters are a group of Kochi children—the Kochi are Nomadic people in Afghanistan, kind of like the Roma in Europe. These kids make their money stopping cars at traffic intersections and offering to ward off evil spirits with their canisters of fragrant smoke. And then there's a gang of kids who hang around the park where the older gangsters sell opium. These ten and 12-year-olds spend their days smoking cigarettes, playing pool, and brandishing razor blades that they use to extort money from the other children, including the tiniest recycling kids as young as three and five who drag around sacks of cans as big as them.

Gittoes approaches even the bleakest scenarios with a warm enthusiasm. When I spoke to him, he punctuated many sentences with my name, a small but intimate gesture. And in the documentary you see the same gracious and affable manner on display. He's always hugging everyone hello and goodbye. He's always saying, "Fantastic!" to the children's suggestions. Although Gittoes is a total hippie, he's not naive. Wrapped up in the art-making that he's encouraging is the idea that there's an inherent value to radical self-expression, as is his understanding of media as an ideological tool. And there's an even more practical element to the film school: These kids are learning a trade that can hopefully provide them with a brighter future.

Gittoes has made two other documentaries in similar style to Snow Monkey. Love City (2013) is also set in Jalalabad and tracks the founding of the Yellow House, while Miscreants of Taliwood (2009) finds Gittoes at the heart of a culture war in Pakistan, getting involved in the local Pashto tele films at the same time as the Taliban are cracking down on the entertainment industry. In all of these films, Gittoes adopts the kitschy aesthetics of the popular Pashtun-language cinema, most notably abrupt cuts to explosions and neo-gothic fonts. And in Snow Monkey, there are other local textures woven in. Gittoes's partner Rose directed the soundtrack with local musicians, many of whom had never been recorded before.

I caught up with Gittoes over Skype when he was recently back from Jalalabad in Australia getting the final cut of Snow Monkey ready for its November 20 international premiere at the International Documentary Film Festival (IDFA) in Amsterdam.

VICE: How much time had you spent in the Middle East before you started making these films?
George Gittoes: Well, it's been a lifetime, Whitney. I worked in Somalia and Palestine and Iraq. I shot a lot of footage for the film Fahrenheit 9/11 in Iraq. Being in Afghanistan goes back to the 90s, when I did a job for an international campaign to ban land mines. I went in and helped create a mine-awareness program that could go out to villages to let women and children working in the field know the dangers. I got to know the Taliban and the country fairly well prior to 9/11, so I have a way different view of Afghanistan from most people. I don't see the Taliban as the demons that they are normally painted as.

Zabi said, 'I've got to become a documentary filmmaker like you. The world needs to know about the terrible things these people are doing and what I've seen.'

A lot of documentaries are interested in just representing people and places, but you are interested in how people represent themselves and how they create their own myths. Are you interested in enacting something in the world with your storytelling?
The greatest example of that in our film is little Zabi. He was just one of these ice-cream sellers. We brought him in along with the other ice-cream sellers to help sell our DVDs, but very quickly those boys saw what we were doing and wanted to make their own movies. They really pushed themselves. The day of that terrible massacre, Zabi was out filming. He was making a little film about the rickshaw drivers—an exercise I'd given him. Then that terrible bombing happened only a few hundred meters away. So here is this 13-year-old kid with a camera, and he got the most dramatic footage in our movie. And then he says, "I really want to learn how to use the cameras not just to make pictures but to show the world what's happening here."

And that story is ongoing. When we were away, Zabi was captured by IS and was forced to carry guns for them. He had to carry guns three times up to the mountains. The IS know that if the predator drones and the helicopters see anyone carrying guns, they'll assume it's Taliban and IS and shoot them. So they get big boys like Zabi to carry the guns, and then the boys get killed. So Zabi did three of these very dangerous trips, and then when he heard we were back, he decided to make a very dangerous escape. For a kid to escape IS is a big thing.

One of the most beautiful moments of my life was sitting in the kitchen of the Yellow House and just suddenly seeing him. We all thought maybe Zabi was dead, and seeing him walk past the window, he was so excited to know he was alive and we were there that he couldn't talk to begin with. He was just gasping and then immediately when he started talking, he said, "I've got to become a documentary filmmaker like you. The world needs to know about the terrible things these people are doing and what I've seen." He said, "I'm more keen now more than ever to become a filmmaker."

Sharia and Steel in 'Snow Monkey'

The whole film is about how artists and communicators can do a lot more to bring about peace and understanding than you can ever do at the point of a gun.

Even before the Islamic State moves in, it's hard not to notice just how poor Jalalabad is.
You know, whatever is going on, the American people are being duped. A couple of trillion dollars are being spent there and . In Jalalabad, we haven't seen any assistance for school or jobs. The only jobs that have been created are they've trained the Afghan army, but they've created an army that is too big for a poor country with no exports or industries to pay all of those soldiers. So naturally, like in Iraq, they are switching over to the Taliban and IS, and they've taken their guns and equipment with them.

I don't know what kind of people are on top of decision-making with the American war machine, but they're either not very smart or their interests are not the same as what the rest of humanity would imagine they should be. In Jalalabad, where we fund the Yellow House, I fund everything with the sale of my own art because I am a very well-known artist. And we're the only place providing an art school, a film school, and even now, we're doing a kind of an entry school for the street kids to get into normal government school because the school can't accept kids that are 13 and 14 and completely illiterate. We can't see anything else going on in that city, and yet trillions of dollars are being spent. The whole film is about how artists and communicators can do a lot more to bring about peace and understanding than you can ever do at the point of a gun.

Cast with 'Snow Monkey' director George Gittoes

Do you see the art you are encouraging as having a practical value?
I do, particularly for the women we are working with. My partner Hellen started the women's workshops, and we have women making their own radio programs and writing their own television dramas. The amount of change that is needed in that society is huge. These women are never allowed out of the house. Their husbands are telling them that they shouldn't let their daughters go to school. And then in the films that women are making at the Yellow House , all the female characters go to school and to university.

We made for an audience of people like yourself in the wider world to see what we are doing, but the most important work for us really is training people there to make their own movies and to change that society from within.

There is nothing wrong with artists going to a place like Jalalabad and helping any more than a physician going there with Doctors Without Borders.

I think it's interesting, too, the way art and the idea of the artist kind of circulates in your films. You have idea of art as radical self-expression, but there's sometimes tension with how other characters in your films see what they are doing. In Miscreants, for example, some of the actresses don't see working in movies as self-expression but as desperation. Has your idea of an artist changed?
I haven't changed. The position of women in Pashtun societies is just straight-up terrible. Actresses are princesses in our culture. And the most famous actress in that culture is running the risk of being killed and seen as a prostitute.

Miscreants was a long time ago. And over that period of time, everyone has had their self-esteem changed. The main teacher at the Yellow House is Neha Ali Khan, who was an actress in those movies. She had all that low self-esteem that we see in Miscreants, but she turned to me one day and she said, "George, I know what I want to do. I want to be an director. I want to learn everything." And now she's made films, and they've won awards. [She's credited as one of the editors on Snow Monkey.]

We brought Neha to Australia for the Sydney Film Festival, when Love City was playing there, and she didn't believe that women could have the kind of freedoms that you've got. She'd heard that women could ride bicycles in Australia and America, but she didn't believe it. She thought it was propaganda. We took her to Bondai beach with a bicycle. And she had on a pair of short shorts on and a T-shirt and she went riding this bicycle and she was the happiest person in the world.

If I told that to the women that we're teaching at our film school that story, they probably wouldn't believe me—they would probably think that's just a Westerner lying about his culture. But Neha coming back with that story, it is incredible. So we try to bring as many of the teachers from the Yellow House to Australia.

The leader of the Taliban, who is in our documentary—Molvi Abdul Zaher Haqqani—he's got 14 sons and seven daughters from two wives. And now he's letting all of them who are old enough come to the Yellow House and learn media.

Do you ever feel a conflict between promoting women's rights but perhaps importing Western values in a colonialist way?
Hellen and I are the only foreigners there. And we would have those concerns if it hadn't been for the fact that we talk independence in everything. Now the films that the students are making, we don't even see the scripts. We just help with getting the cameras and updating the equipment. We bought them a drone this last time we came. That may seem like a funny thing, but for women filmmakers who are not allowed out in the street, they are now able to get the aerials they need using the drone.

The drone is an empowerment thing, too, because it's quite hard to fly. It's like flying an airplane. And in their lives, they haven't had these opportunities to show their abilities. All a woman's friends will see her using something like a drone, which they are normally told that they are too stupid to use.

There's nothing colonialist about that. I think a lot of these inhibitions have been taught at university—you probably heard about colonialism at university. It inhibits young people from wanting to go and do things like we are doing. There is nothing wrong with artists going to a place like Jalalabad and helping any more than a physician going there with .

Everything we do has to be done with enormous care because if we help these women or anyone there makes films that are socially unacceptable, we could literally get them killed. So we've got to make films that abide all the current social laws in that country and yet push the boundaries. So each film is pushing the boundaries a little bit, but not enough to close the Yellow House down and get the filmmaker or actress killed. For example, we could never have a couple holding hands or kissing in a film. Now maybe in five years we could. For example, in these films, we have women going to university, but if we had them meeting a young boy in the back of a university and kissing him, we would be closed down.

We have the Taliban come in to the Yellow House and see films that we are making. And we are very aware of what goes over the line. But, for example, the leader of the Taliban, who is in our documentary—Molvi Abdul Zaher Haqqani—he's got 14 sons and seven daughters from two wives. And now he's letting all of them who are old enough come to the Yellow House and learn media. That's children of the leader of the Taliban.

All a woman's friends will see her using something like a drone, which they are normally told that they are too stupid to use. There's nothing colonialist about that.

So why on earth does let them come? What image of the Taliban do we have that's a misrepresentation?
The Afghan Taliban are a nationalist movement, and they were evolving when I was there before 9/11. They were evolving into a better culture. Molvi Abdul Zaher Haqqani, for example, knows me from back then. He is very well-educated. His latest thing is that he backed the last democratic election. He sat in the election himself. And he said, "In all future elections, I am going to fight for the representation that there be one woman candidate for every man candidate." So the Taliban themselves are evolving. And the information that is being put out about them is completely unfair.

In our film, Molvi Abdul Zaher Haqqani says that there are Taliban who are worse than IS. What he is talking about is that there are Pakistani Taliban who do really bad stuff, like with child suicide bombers and so on. But they are different from the nationalist Afghan Taliban, and yet they are all being tarred with the same brush.

When the Taliban fought America, they saw America as no different from Russia. They saw this as an invasion of their country, and the American army called them insurgents . You can't be an insurgent unless you are coming from outside. They are fighting to protect their own villages.

The only accurate news reporting in the Western World is sports reporting. If you look at the most recent thing that happened with the American bombing in Kunduz, the Taliban had 30 or 40 guys with AK-47s, and the Afghan army backed by the Americans had tanks and jet planes and helicopters and drones. It's not a very fair fight, is it? So I would say the guys who took on that hugely overwhelming force had balls. They had real courage, but that will never be reported. If it was sports news, it would be reported: "Oh, ladies and gentlemen, we have this featherweight fighter, and he's fighting two guys as big as Mike Tyson, isn't that amazing?" But we just hear that the Taliban are coming to Kunduz and we all know that they are bad guys and this is a terrible thing.

What you're getting is incredibly imbalanced reporting. And now that IS is coming to Jalalabad, they are terrible, and the only people fighting them are the Taliban. The American forces are still fighting the Taliban, and yet the Taliban are the only people who are going to fight IS. So by weakening the Taliban, they are making it easier for IS to take over Afghanistan. Just like by destroying Saddam Hussein and his armies, they made it easier for terrorists to take over in Iraq.

On VICE News: Embedded in Northern Afghanistan: The Resurgence of the Taliban:

In your film Miscreants, we see that the Taliban there use media as an ideological tool. And IS has their own propaganda. There's a physical war going on, but also a war of images. How do you see what you are doing fitting into that?
What we are doing is totally pro-Western world without being colonialist in that we're helping people in Jalalabad to make good positive movies that encourage peace and education. And everyone would agree that most of these problems are caused by a lack of education. So by encouraging not only girls but boys, too, to go to school and get educated, they are much less likely to be manipulated. Because it's uneducated poor people that get manipulated into carrying suicide bombs. It's very hard to imagine a person with a good education agreeing to blow themselves up to go to paradise.

A lot of IS propaganda has really been targeted at Western audiences. There's a lot of stuff that's English language. With the kids you know in Jalalabad, is there different propaganda being targeted at them?
The kids in Jalalabad know how evil and bad they are. IS's tactic in the West is to win people over to their cause by offering adventure, basically. They really are appealing to the ultimate in machismo. I've seen in Australia, boys that were listening to rap music and selling drugs, they have now switched to following IS because it's cooler. It's more dangerous; it's more sexy.

As you see in our film, the bad guys capture the kids and they kidnap them like they kidnapped Zabi. And they force them to do things for them out of traditional blackmail. In the case of Zabi, they said, "We will kill your mom and sisters unless you cooperate with us." But the difference is that all of the kids going through the Yellow House want to fight IS back through media and film and let the world know what it's like to be them and how bad these people are. The tactic of IS in Afghanistan is to rule through fear, not through propaganda. They know that there's not enough people using internet and stuff like that to get them that way.

I don't think Zabi will ever recover from being a witness to something he saw when he was with these IS guys, something that was terrible beyond belief. They heard shooting in a village, which was a village that Zabi knew, and he was forced to come down with them. They said to the people in the village, "Why were you shooting?" And they said that it was because this couple had had a baby, and it looked like they couldn't have children, they were getting old and this was their first boy child—would you like to see it? The father went and brought the child out, and IS grabbed it, one held one leg and the other held another leg and they cut it down the middle. And then they shot the father for trying to stop them. That was their tactic. Now everyone in the village is terrified of them and will do whatever they say. And poor little Zabi, I don't think he will ever get that experience out of his mind, but he managed to escape and now he wants to tell that story. He wants to make films and let people know what's happening, and he had other stories as bad as that. So we've had to counsel him and try and help him recover. And he's recovering through his art.

Follow Whitney on Twitter.

Snow Monkey makes its international premiere on November 20 at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam.

Deserted streets. Photo by Julia Wright

The social terroir of the Maritimes is an acquired taste: a contradictory melange of oil/potato/beer money, and sweaty all-ages punk shows in abandoned buildings. Desolate salt marshes and jazzy little cities. Ultra-hip artist collectives and age-old linguistic traditions. It's the birthplace of Confederation. It's among the most depressed regions in Canada. The spirit of the people is a pure beam of light; the daily reality for many is dark and deadly crags.

If you wanna thrive on the ferocious coast, you'll need to negotiate the following areas. Here's how to do it, from someone who lives here.

Hard Times

You haven't really lived here until you've sipped from the stained, crumpled Tim's cup of poverty. It may well be your lot to dig in the couch for change, or dine for weeks on toast while waiting for your ship to come in. Experiencing firsthand the ebb of Fortuna's Wheel lets you bond with the neighbours—many of whom have been hustling minimum wage jobs/seasonal jobs/no jobs since grade school. When things are going right, don't be tight. The code dictates you must share the wealth: rounds, smokes, and rides to Giant Tiger.

Oh fuck off, couldn't leave Anne out of it, could ya? Photo via Flickr user Richard Martin

People

"THE PEOPLE ARE SO GREAT," locals intone, nervously scanning the forest covering 80 percent of New Brunswick. "I REALLY FEEL AT HOME HERE," they say, their voices nearly lost in the dismal howl of the wind. But the cliches exist for a reason: friendliness, creativity, and tenacity really do seem to flourish here. It still sucks when the "bar district" is a deserted bank of VLTs, and your only recourse is to down buckets of Radler, crying "Hello???," Adele-like, into the fog. No one will answer. If you can't locate the romance of loneliness on the East Coast, we'll see you in Vancouver in a couple years, wearing a hip windbreaker, paying $2,300+ per month in rent, and still complaining that it's impossible to meet anyone. Sorry: loneliness is the modern condition.

Location

Treading ruts in the sidewalk of the same, three-block radius of coffee shops, work, and friends' houses is a fast-track to hating it here. Avoid stagnation. Sidle into the silent film night, the rave at the Legion, the unlocked cathedral. Go examine that weird monument at the edge of the old graveyard (or leave an empty at Alexander Keith's grave in Halifax). If you're in the middle of nowhere, you might as well try to map the void.

This building burned down two weeks after the photo was taken. Photo by Julia Wright

Housing

Stunning, historic mansions that would cost millions anywhere else are dirt cheap and plentiful in places like New Brunswick. Can't afford one? Happily, it's a renter's market, too: Vacancy rates in 2012 were 5 percent in Prince Edward Island, 3.4 percent in Nova Scotia, and 6.9 percent in New Brunswick compared to 2.8 percent nationally. Despite this, your friends still all seem to cycle through the same handful of apartments. When Keith moves into Jess's old apartment off Quinpool Road, which used to be Matt's place before he moved to Alberta, you may get disoriented about whose house you're in and where the couch is this time.

Old age

You can extend your adolescence for longer in a land where the median age hovers around 43. The rapidly aging population means you make friends with diverse demographics. You soon realize older people have the most kickass parties and the best oysters, order single-malt whiskey from the States, and dispense life-enriching wisdom and tips for using power tools. Millennial ennui loses its sting after you've hung in a trailer with a 78-year-old war vet who needs your help bottling homebrew at 11:30 PM. You will start hanging out with all your friends' parents.

Winter is harsh. Photo by Julia Wright

Gossip

"I don't care if anyone talks about me. Why, what are they saying?" The rumour mill is the biggest drag, and greatest joy, of small town life. It is a poisoned chocolate cookie: SO BAD and SO GOOD. Knowing everything you say can and will be held against you, you've gotta choose the time and place wisely. Prince Edward Island writer Dave Atkinson offers this dicta: never gossip in a restaurant. "You have a 100 percent chance the person at the next table knows that person. It will get back to them." 100 percent, can confirm.

Inequality

Securing anything good, from a job with dental to decent weed, requires "knowing a guy." Nepotism is so ingrained in the Maritimes that it generally passes unremarked. How much you choose to learn about vast companies that control the region's economic livelihood, the future of the environment, and god knows what else, is up to you. Don't worry: they definitely have our best interests in mind. Shh. Learn to love Big Brother.

Nova Scotia at sunset. She's a beaut, b'ys. Photo by Josh Visser

Booze

Binge drinking is a hallowed social sacrament: the Maritimes report the highest rates of alcohol abuse anywhere in Canada except the far North. Depending on your temperament, you may need to cultivate serious self-restraint. If you buck the trend and decide to quit drinking, expect at least one old guy to sneer, "Huh. Don't drink? Don't smoke? What do ya do?" Break free. Don't ever romanticize John Thompson.

Cigarettes

All government-issued drugs are a hit here: New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, PEI, and Newfoundland have more smokers than anywhere else in Canada. You don't wanna be a statistic. Unfortunately, statistically speaking, a solid 65 percent of interesting conversations, flirtations, and juicy scandals occur when you leave the kitchen party to get out for a dart (usually Player's). Pick your poison.

Sussex, NB. Photo by Julia Wright

Dating

Revisit the ill-advised hookups of the past. Consider new and unforeseen possibilities: butcher-boy at the Halifax farmer's market, the middle-aged bookstore lady, D-list musicians you meet on Twitter, oilfields workers who are only available in two-week stints, tattooed bikers, genius nerdy lawyers, blind dates, speed dates, you will date all of them, because if you're not open-minded you will end up dating no one. Which actually, in all likelihood, is probably best for everyone.

Fashion

Shop at cool boutiques if you wanna; however, it's a happy sartorial accident that toques, flannel, badly cut hair, etc. do double-duty for both blue-collar labourers and hipsters. Normcore has been a thing here for decades. Whatever your style, strangers in the coffee line get familiar enough with your wardrobe to say, "Bustin' out the vest again, huh?" or "Always like it when you wear that blue sweater." When That Lady At Korner Grocery gets a new barrette, you'll notice.

Downtown. Photo via Flickr userSean McGrath

Cars

Yeah, okay, you moved to Toronto when you were 21 and rode bikes and public transit and you don't believe in car culture and now you're 30 with no license. Good luck with the Maritimes' unpredictable, pee-smelling inter-city bus service, drastically underfunded municipal transit, and thousands of kilometres of crumbling highway infrastructure. You probably need to get a car (either a 12-year-old Toyota Corolla or a brand new Ford F-150) at some point. Sorry.

Nodding

When you can't say "hi," nod. Follow the rule: if you know them, nod up. If you don't, nod down.

FOMO

You are missing out. It's a big world of killer beach parties and clubs and exotic food and non-community-theatre and repertory houses. Soaring, glittering concrete and glass, interesting metro stations, beautiful brooding Czech girls, and superlative curries. All of it's happening without you. Yep. Next. Enrich your inner life. Read some books. Explore every cranny and country road. Live vicariously via the internet. Fuck FOMO. Embrace JOMO.

The past

The Maritimes lag a couple decades behind the rest of the world: blame the time-warp on traditional industry, 19th century architecture, fascination with genealogy, and lingering casual racism/sexism. On a smaller scale, prepare to be haunted by things like your own drunken belligerence on NYE 2006, that girl you ghosted after one date, and that lady who thinks you stole their cat.These spectres will emerge, unbidden, as you're trying to grab a six pack or walk to work. You will avoid eye contact.

Death

Moody Alistair MacLeod and depressive David Adams Richards were right: death is a part of life in the Maritimes. So pour out a little liquor for those who didn't make it, and pay your respects. As Dave Atkinson puts it, "Know the person well? Go to the wake. Barely know the person? Go to the wake. Too busy to go to the wake? Go to the wake." Confronting mortality in this way is healthy: whether or not we survive socially in the Maritimes, there will come the day when we've all gotta say farewell to Nova Scotia, forever. Reflect on this. Hopefully, we'll leave this place a little better than we found it.

The author appreciates the Fundy coast. Photo via Julia Wright

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Entrance to the mall. Photos by the author

The first thing I notice as I breach the entrance of a store called Mirage is a table piled with multicoloured underwear and a display of store-designed t-shirt unironically bearing slogans like "CAUTION Slippering when it wet" and "Happy Birthday Jesus 2015." While browsing through the shirts the store owner—imagine a hobbit with alopecia wearing too-big raver pants—approaches me and points to a shirt on the wall that depicts the Chicago Bulls logo wearing a bandana with text that reads, "No Bull Shit." The owner, chuckling before managing to get out a word, says, "That one's for Donald Trump." This begins a speech that concludes with the metaphysical relationship between God and Satan.

This type of encounter is not uncommon in the Kingsgate Mall, a modest shopping center in the heart of Vancouver's Mount Pleasant neighbourhood that's home to a hodgepodge of stores and services. This tiny worn-down space is a microcosm of the city's diversity, hosting weird establishments that should have perished at the turn of the century (any century). The result is a place that exists outside of a recognizable time. Such is its charm. And it's not just me that feels this way. There's even a popular tongue-in-cheek Twitter account for the mall.

As Vancouver continues to expand, a handful of chic condos and multi-use developments have surrounded the Kingsgate Mall, which has also been tagged for redevelopment. As a result, Mount Pleasant is an area becoming increasingly hip for its proximity to downtown with the benefits of not actually being downtown and it's only a matter of time before this mall becomes gentrified.

I know there's a soul to this place, beyond its reputation for alcoholism, small-time gambling and resistance to consumer trends. It's unlikely this place will be here for much longer so I needed to write a living biography, not a eulogy. And there was only one way to do this—I had to spend 18 hours at the Kingsgate Mall.

6:00 AM

It's still dark. I'm standing in front of the Kingsgate Mall, knowing it doesn't open for another three hours. I regret agreeing to doing 18 hours at this place, instead of 12. The lights are on inside but it's empty. Vacant malls are inherently eerie because we are used to experiencing them packed with people and seeing them empty makes us feel alone and vulnerable, not unlike walking into a dark basement at night.

6:40 AM

In the parking lot, between the gray sky and the gray pavement, a light gleams on a billboard that reads, "Lonely? Be Loved" followed by a Bible quote. I look around and I am alone on the sidewalk. This message of piety for nobody to read verges on apocalyptic. Or maybe I've seen Dawn of the Dead too many times.

7:00 AM

The Rize is a development company and one of their projects is directly across the street from the mall, titled "The Independent." By 2017 it will be a "mixed-use development" that towers over the Mount Pleasant area. Right now, it's a no more than a hole in the ground.

As I snap photos a construction worker hops out of his truck. I ask what the neighbourhood thinks about the building and he says, "We're getting a lot of complaints from the locals, but it'll be great for the area. We'll introduce some commerce, it'll be good for business." We stand in silence, looking across the street. "And they'll finally do something about that horrible mall."

7:30 AM

I gaze at the sign that lists the stores. Another construction worker with a long ponytail shuffles by and mutters, "It's a brilliant display of post-modern expressionism." I can't tell if he's joking.

8:30 AM

I realize the side of the mall with the Shoppers Drug Mart has been open since 8:00 AM. I take a last breath of fresh air and enter. Workers trickle in, preparing to open their shops. Pop ballads drone through tinny speakers. The kids' rides flash bright colours, but they're also gloomy: a pink sports car with one broken headlight, and a shabby model of Noah's Arc.

No stores are open, so I decide to explore, glimpsing into my day ahead.

The most intriguing storefront is an unrented, boarded up space that currently hosts church services. A WordArt sign on the door that says they hold a Bible Study session on Thursdays at 7:00 PM. Today happens to be Thursday.

Off the main drag I find Unisex Hair Palace. The lettering on front window reads, "Ear Pier," and I can only assume the other letters have fallen off. I make note to come back later to get my "ear piered."

9:30 AM

The security guard opens the liquor store gate and a swarm of gray-haired men flood in. A man with liver-spotted hands who had been sitting next to me on the bench outside for the previous 10 minutes is in and out, holding a bottle concealed in a paper bag.

9:40 AM

There's an ancient man with a painting booth set up in the mall foyer where he paints portraits of babies and lap dogs. I ask how long he's been in the mall and he says, "Many years." He tells me that he used to travel the country painting landscapes, but not so much anymore.

10:00 AM

I've walked the length of the mall five times already. It's roughly 160 steps from one end to the other.

A woman with one eye walks by. Her appearance frightens me, and I feel bad about my natural reaction.

A child hops into the Noah's Arc ride and begs his father for the dollar it costs to experience the great flood. The ride begins and its antediluvian 8-bit tune compliments the nearly vacant mall.

10:30 AM

I see a small crowd gathered at the lotto booth. The woman working the counter tells me they're playing Keno, a mix between Bingo and a standard lottery. She suggests, since it's my first time, that I only play one round. I immediately buy ten. I move to the table where a group gathers below a Keno screen and I sit. A motley crew of people approach as the rounds progress. They all know each other, and speak like family.

The signs around the booth read, "It could be YOU!", offering the impression that anyone could be special. That's part of what brings these people here every day and I understand the appeal.

11:05 AM

I win six bucks, and I decide to play out my winnings until I lose it all or win big.

11:20 AM

I lose it all.

11:25 AM

I'm standing in front of the only place in the mall to get food, the Sugarcane Café. According to their signage, they can also help you to acquire a sugarcane juicer if you're a true juice lover. I order a banana muffin and an Earl Grey tea. It's mediocre.

I notice familiar faces pacing back and forth through all 160 steps of the mall over and over again. I'm staying in this mall for a piece of journalism, but other people do this on the regular by their own volition. But as Camus wrote, "One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

12:00 PM

The woman with one eye walks by again. I am not scared this time, but the repetition makes me feel like I'm trapped in a dream.

12:10 PM

It's time to enter every store in the mall. I begin at the tiny nameless convenience shop. Beside the cash desk, a glass case hosts bongs, grinders, utility torches, poker chips, condoms, and nude playing cards. It's a tiny display of hedonism that's likely been here since the 80s.

12:30 PM

Dollar Land. This is a shop filled with useless oddities, the perfect place to buy gag gifts and rejected holiday paraphernalia. I try on a rubber Halloween mask and it stinks of chemicals and someone else's saliva.

The toy section is The Island of Misfit Toys. Sifting through bins I discover "My Super Dinosaur," the offspring of Godzilla and a comb. The product description says, "Different type with different funny."

Digging through the baskets of notebooks, I find the "memories journal. "I'm not sure who it's targeted toward, but the only two memory options listed at the bottom of every page are "fighting" and "farting."

I take my dinosaur and memories journal to the cashier. Dollar Land has been part of the mall for over 25 years, and she's been with them 10. I ask what she thinks of the construction projects across the street and she tells me, "I'm not too happy and neither are a lot of my customers. They say their rent is increasing around here because of the new buildings. It affects us because it brings change."

1:45 PM

Coming out of the surprisingly clean bathroom I spot the claw crane hidden under the stairs. The decal reads, "$2 – Play Till You Win" and I need to find out if that's a guarantee or a suggestion. I insert my toonie, move the crane, and, for the first time in my life, I see the claw rise from the pile with a stuffed-animal in its grips. The guarantee/suggestion remains a mystery.

2:00 PM

I round the corner and I bump into the woman with one eye. This third encounter freaks me out more than the first. Why is she still here? Is she asking that same question about me?

2:10 PM

I continue my tour of the shops with Jay Set. The clerks glance at me with disdain. The customers are elderly women lurching through the rows of pastels, florals, and faux-fur. It all stretches to fit the form. One of the clerks approaches me with an inquisitive, "What're you doing?" I tell her I'm taking pictures, doing a piece on the mall.

"You picked a boring day to come."

"Boring?"

She tells me she does a lot of watching herself, especially so on Wednesdays after the senior citizens get their checks and flock into the mall for the sales. "Then," she says peering over her glasses, "the mall gets busy and there's no telling what will happen."

2:30 PM

The nightclub-ish bass thumps in my chest before I even cross into Ruffles. It's all low cut shirts, halter-tops, and skirts of leopard print and black lace. The clerk steps out from behind the counter to follow me. The music changes to Poison's PG-rated classic, "Talk Dirty to Me." When I'm about to leave, I spot two racks of black t-shirts hidden at the back. It's the only men's apparel in the store—an assortment of the crudest graphic tees I've ever seen. The most unsettling of which features a grunting egg with a political face thrusts its genitals into a wide-eyed chicken from behind. The text reads, "Who came first?"

2:45 PM

Mandarin Photo—a full service photo shop and key cutter. The owner wears a standard blue button up and black slacks. He tells me he's been in the mall for 35 years after moving to Vancouver from China. He tells me that one day he hopes he can be like me, taking photos to make a living, "but right now," he says, "it's only family portraits. Just family portraits... it's easy, I guess."

When I ask if he thinks the mall will still be here in a few years his face contorts, like an infant tasting something bitter for the first time. I tell him that they might tear it down and his face drops with genuine shock, "I didn't hear." He pauses and looks at the wall. "There's nothing I can do. No point to worry for now. I'll just... go somewhere else."

3:00 PM

I saunter over to Mirage. The window display is so dejected that it almost works as a piece of modern art: the mannequin's shirt shows a hybrid of Tupac and King Tut, beneath which, socks, wallets, and belts lay on the floor in no identifiable order. Inside the walls are crowded with graphic tees endorsing the American dollar, marijuana, guns, and the two people all potheads idolize: Che Guevara and Tony Montana. There's a noticeable division—one side of Mirage hosts white shirts, and the other hosts black shirts.

The tiny proprietor's semitransparent white button-up tucks into his billowing black raver pants. A gold clip fits snug near the knot of his black tie. His gleaming button eyes fill their sockets, their near imperceptible movements expressing caginess.

I browse the rack of store-designed shirts with slogans like, "GET DIRTY." The owner walks over, sweeping the floor, and after showing me the Chicago Bulls shirt, I take the opportunity to ask how long he's been in the mall. "A long time, my friend. Long time," he says.

I ask about the construction, and he responds, "In life I don't worry about nothing or nobody. Like a bird. Wake up, bathe, eat, and fly without worry about nothing or nobody." I'm not sure how to counter, but the window display begins to make sense, not a piece of modern art, but a small revolt of "let it be."

He brings the conversation back to Donald Trump, asking me what I think of him. Taken aback, I say, "Not much."

"I like him. People don't like him. He has money, power, but", and he points to his heart, "he has no kindness."

"But you like him?" I ask.

"He's unique. But so was Hitler... Trump's father is German, you know?" he rings a man through the till, welcoming the audience. "People say that listening to Satan is bad, those who do are lost. I say, no. Satan is a child of God, just like us, and if you run from him, then you are lost."

The sudden inclusion of creed does not surprise me, and I wonder about black and white shirt division. He steps back over to me as EDM pulses. "That is why I don't mind Trump. You cannot escape Evil. You cannot defeat Evil."

He says a big problem nowadays is that we pursue "earthly knowledge," and that knowledge lives in the darkness with Satan. "But wisdom," his eyes widen and shift, "is the love of God. It's perfect. Pure." Gleaning his insight, he says that problems do not exist outside the mind of man, not in time or in space, only in thoughts, and that between thoughts is where God lives. I look around at the shirts encouraging weed, infidelity, and guns.

He sees my confusion and clarifies, "The soul guides the body, not the other way around," he says. "That is why you are in front of me."

I ask him how one gets in the light. He tells me to pay no attention to earthly knowledge. "Not even religion," he continues to my surprise, "Who's to say God exists in one temple, but not another? If you walk in the light, darkness finds no life there."

He parts his dry lips, bringing the conversation back to the beginning, "This is why I ask you about Trump." I fail to understand, wishing I did, and at this point a gaunt woman wearing a fluffy pink shirt enters. He sticks out his hand to shake mine, "I don't want to waste your time. Thank you." He shuffles to the back of the store, following the pink shirt.

I walk out in a daze, like I'm looking at something up close that usually remains in the distance.

4:30 PM

Feeling like I lost part of myself in Mirage, the only way to feel whole again is to fill the void with a hotdog from the Sugarcane Café. I also elect to test their namesake and order sugarcane juice. The elderly Asian woman who takes my order grabs long stalks of sugarcane from the fridge and inserts them into a cumbersome silver machine that moans with the pain of usage. The hotdog is standard, and the juice is better than expected.

4:45 PM

I've put off going into Lely's because this is a shop I frequent, my favourite movie store in the city. I sift through the sections, and find the DVD that holds the power of 1,001 classic TV commercials, and consider that sitting through all 16 hours would likely evoke a similar mood to my current one: a faraway torpor.

I cash out and shoot the shit with the owner, who explains that they've been around for eight years. He believes there's such an eccentric community in the mall because it's one of the only places in the area where people can gather for free. He sees people coming from all over the city because they are one of the last movie stores. And maybe that's why I love this mall: because it lives in the past, it allows me to do the same, bringing me back my childhood, of days spent eating hot dogs and wandering video stores.

I ask him the same question I asked all the others, "What do you think of the new buildings?" and he tells me that such developments are always controversial because change is controversial. Like the others, he appears to acquiesce.

6:25 PM

I return to Unisex Hair Palace feeling to get my ears pierced. The woman behind the tiny counter has her hand in a bag of chips, watching TV on her phone. I ask if I can get my ears pierced. To my disappointment, she tells me the piercer isn't in until tomorrow at noon.

6:30 PM

I've exhausted all the shops in the mall. All the familiar faces have abandoned their haunt for the day. A few gamblers still perch near the Keno tables and I decide to sit with them because it offers a good view of the "church" entrance. People continue gathering around the Keno tables. It's the centrepiece of the mall, a place to congregate, a place of worship in its own rite.

6:50 PM

A man with considerable paunch, holding a two-four of soda, opens the church doors to reveal two rows of gray tables inside what used to be a clothing store. Slowly the members trickle in: A woman with a limp, a little man with a guitar case, a handful of others, and finally a wiry-moustached teenager, wearing all black with huge headphones on either side of his ponytail.

As soon as I get near the entrance, the seven members wave me inside with warm smiles. The teenager has found a bag of chips, the congregation snack, and shovels them in his mouth. He turns to me with glazed eyes, stoned, and says, "What's your name?" I tell them and they welcome me as "Brother Lonnie."

The small man with the guitar case rises and stands in front of the tables—Brother Billy. He wears what would be short-sleeved shirt for a bigger man. They ask everyone to begin by saying what they are thankful for. Most everyone says family or health, I say for finding this Bible study. Then it gets to the teenager.

He finishes off the bag of chips. Finally, he lets out, "I am thankful to God for teaching me a lesson in cleanliness this week." He rambles about how he had to clean his apartment or else his landlord would kick him out, and so he cleaned and got to keep his place.

Brother Billy says, "Yes, cleanliness is important," and asks everyone to open take out their worksheets. He explains that today's topic is community.

The teenager rises, licking his fingers, "Uhh. Yeah, I still have some more cleaning to do, so... Thanks... God bless." He puts his headphones on, and stumbles out.

I'm made to read from the worksheet as a way for me to feel included. It's going well until one passage about evil things happening when we turn away from Jesus, like "the creation of Islam". I think about their topic of the week being community, about Mirage man saying, "God is not a religion."

At the end of the session, the man with the paunch brings out a cake as they deliver a modest rendition of Happy Birthday to the woman beside me. I consider just how bizarre it is that I'm eating birthday cake for someone I don't know, at a Bible study, in the middle of a mall. At this point, a timeworn black woman with cloudy cataracts eyes leans over me and explains that I am a sheep, and God guides my soul. Again, it harkens back to the words heard in Mirage, adding to the day's wistful repetitions.

The amount of religion in the Kingsgate contrasts with the apathy, gambling, and drunkenness of of the regular patrons, but it's fitting at the same time—a place with an uncertain future, a place that rebuffs change, is a bastion for faith.

9:10 PM

I'm back on the bench where I started my day. It's dark and unoccupied once again. In the reflection of the Payless window, I swear I see the one-eyed woman, if only for an instant.

9:45 PM

Boredom sets in for the first time—frankly, I'm amazed it took this long.

10:30 PM

I enter Shoppers and the woman who runs the cosmetics counter is as bored as I am. I ask if she'll do my makeup, and she agrees. I tell her I want to look like Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet.

11:15 PM

My makeup is done, and the other customers look at me like a freak, and I wonder if the afternoon crowd would even notice. I pick up a pitchfork from the Halloween section and walk around the store for no reason other than because delirium is setting in.

12:05 AM

The last of the Shoppers employees have left the building. The security guard walks up to me, wary because of my eye shadow, and tells me I have to leave.

The mall is closed.

I walk out into the fresh night air.

Follow Lonnie Nadler on Twitter.

Denpasar Airport. Image via flickr user Sergey

Around ten days ago the Mount Rinjani volcano next to Bali started spewing ash into Indonesian airspace. The inevitable result was cancelled flights and disgruntled travelers—volcanic ash brings down planes, and no one wants to risk flying through it.

I'm also stuck but I'm happy about it—there are worst places to be stranded than Bali, after all. Then I happened to overhear a conversation between two guys down at the pool.

"Mate, all I want to do is just go home," said one. "I hear you," replied his buddy. "It's like a bloody prison here. What are you missing out on at home?" The first guy paused a moment before answering, "To be honest, I'm just missing sitting on my couch and eating sandwiches."

Were these guys really representative of the Australian reaction to altered plans? To find out I went back to the pool and also the airport to ask around.

Greg, stranded since November 3

VICE: How do you feel about being stuck in Bali?
Greg: Horrible! It's like being stuck in jail together. The only positive about this whole situation is getting to meet more people. We're all in the same boat. That's the only positive though.

Who's to blame for this?
Not enough virgins. We need to send virgins up to Mount Rinjani and then it might stop erupting.

How do you defend complaining about it?
We have lives we need to get back to. I have a meeting next Thursday in Bangkok that I needed to prep for, and now I don't have that luxury.

Will this change the memory of your holiday?
Oh yeah, for sure. You give yourself a schedule for relaxing, for a holiday, and when that's over and you're forced to stay somewhere, it changes everything.

Paul, stranded since November 8

Hi Paul, how do you feel about being stuck in Bali?
Paul: It's a luxury prison. I'm extremely anxious, I'm even scared. I mean, I haven't cried or anything, but it's like that. Not having the power to leave is scary.

Who is to blame for this?
What I'm upset about is the communication. The airlines aren't contacting us, we have to contact them and check back every day. Mount Rinjani erupted on October 27 and if I had known that this might be a situation at the end of the holiday, I might not have come. But they didn't send us a text or anything.

Some people say you're in a tropical paradise and you should just shut up. How do you respond to that?
Yeah, those people are really upsetting. I mean, I'd like to put them in a situation where they could have limited contact with their friends back home, and their work. Even if you're in the nicest resort, it's still a loss of freedom. I don't think they'd be saying the same thing.

Would you fly out today, even if you know it's dangerous?
Yeah I probably would. I might not leave the kids but if I had the opportunity, I'd probably take it.

What are you missing out on at home?
Work! I have to get back to work. I have a shop, a pharmacy, and right now I have someone covering for me but if we had to shut down for a day or two it just wouldn't be acceptable.

Will this change the memory of your holiday?
Completely.

Darrelle is scheduled to fly out on November 17. She's not stuck but wanted to voice her opinion.

So you're not stuck here?
Darrelle: No but it's changed my entire holiday. Now it's all about when I'm going, not what I'm doing. I'm not going out and doing activities or anything like that. I'm worrying about whether I'll be able to get home.

Can't you just relax?
No. There's no information and everyone is anxious, and I feel anxious because they're anxious.

What would you potentially miss out on at home?
I'm a pensioner, so it'd be OK. I'd have to get extra medicine though, I only have enough extra for four days over my scheduled holiday, but I could do that and it'd be OK.

Tegan, stranded since November 9

How do you feel about being stuck in Bali?
Tegan: Well, ordinarily I'd love it.

But you don't like it now?
No, but that's only because I had my wallet and phone stolen last week so I have absolutely no way to get money out. The past week my friends have been paying for me but they've all left now.

How are you going to pay for accommodation?
I explained my situation to Jetstar and they've given me a room at the Ramada, which is really great of them. So yeah, normally I'd be totally fine staying longer but not now.

Will this change the memory of your holiday?
I guess it's going to end on a massive downer but I had a great time.

George, stranded since November 9. George wasn't OK with a photo so here's another one of the airport. Image via Wikipedia

Hey George, how do you feel about being stuck in Bali?
Terrible. We've just been hotel hopping, and that's it. It's not a holiday anymore at all. We've all got lives back at home in Australia that we have to get back to. I'm a painter and I've got to go back and make money.

Who is to blame for this?
I don't know. I really don't know. But something needs to be done—more needs to be done, especially by the airlines.

But you're in a tropical paradise.
Ah, yeah, it's paradise, but it's schedules. Sure we've been having a good time, but the last week has been hard.

Would you fly out today, even if you know it's dangerous?
Mate, it's not dangerous. If some flights are going they all should be going.

Paul Hannaford

Last week I spoke to four former London gang members to see if their experiences tallied with the media depiction of the city's gang situation. They were all interesting characters, but one guy in particular struck me as having a story to tell that went way beyond his involvement in gangs.

After developing a heroin habit and being kicked out the crew that he had once led, Paul Hannaford finally got himself clean and decided to leave his life of crime behind. The only issue was that he had no qualifications and no way of earning a living. Being a resourceful guy, however, he used his past to his advantage and hired himself out to schools and youth clubs as an example of how drugs can fuck you up.

The tell-all nature of Paul's talks set him apart from other anti-drug speakers—i.e. police officers and charity workers—and he soon found himself doing up to five sessions a day; grossing kids out about the horrors of hard drugs had become his full-time job. I was impressed not only by how he managed to turn this into a proper career, but also by the fact that he was willing to divulge information that most former addicts would want to keep hidden.

His life story made for a drug talk that would have certainly put me off hard drugs for life if I'd heard it as a child. I caught up with him again on the weekend to delve a little deeper, putting the focus on his role as a professional drug casualty.

VICE: How did you first get into giving these talks?
Paul Hannaford: One of my pals was doing the odd talk to kids and I thought, I'll do that. I turned up at this youth club, spoke to ten kids, and they loved it. They went back to school the next day and told their teacher. He contacted the council, the council contacted me, and then I did an assembly. From there, it kicked off, and now I've spoken to quarter of a million kids, some aged just six.

I assume you tone the content down a bit for that age group?
Of course. When I go into primary schools, I don't tell them about cutting my wrists and smothering myself in shit. These kids wouldn't understand those things.

Covering yourself in shit?
Yeah, I had a bad relationship with the police, because I was pissed off when they nicked me, so I'd fight with them. There was one situation where I tried to punch a custody sergeant, and the other coppers chucked me in a cell. I thought, I'm going to get bashed up here. Let's even things up a little bit. So I stripped off, shat on the floor, picked my own feces up, smothered my body in it, and as soon as they came back to beat me up, I ran at them. They ended up begging me to wash and get out of there.

Another time, I was coming out of Debenhams when the police arrested me and took me to the police station. I was really pissed off that I'd been nicked and was withdrawing from heroin and crack, so I thought, Right, I'm going to escape. I pressed the buzzer in the cell, and when the copper came I said, "Can I have a shower and a shave?" He said, "Alright, I'll be back in a minute." An hour later, he opened up the cell doors and said, "Come with me." I followed him round to the shower and he gave me a bar of soap, a towel, and a razor, and said, "Hurry up. Have a shave and a shower and I'll put you back in the cells." I got the razor blade, snapped it, busted it open, stripped down to my pants, walked up to him a few minutes later and slashed my wrists in front of him. "Sort that out," I told him. There was blood pissing out of me. The police took me to the hospital, where I was operated on. When I woke up, the police weren't in the room, which is what I'd been hoping for. I snuck out of the hospital that night and escaped.

So your plan worked?
It worked, but I mutilated my body and nearly died to get out and use.

I guess it's not too much of a victory, when you put it like that. What other incidents do you tell the kids about?
Well, I just tell them how it was. Within the first year of being on heroin, I lost five stone (70 pounds). Within two years, I'd started injecting. I started off using little needles. All the veins in my hands started to die, so I injected my arms, neck, penis, toes, everywhere. Then I started smoking crack. Crack cocaine is washed up with ammonia or bicarbonate of soda. When that hits your bloodstream, after a while, your veins go really hard, and I had some needles snap off in me and didn't go to hospital until weeks later. When I went to hospital to get them removed, the doctor told me I'd got infected. After that, I started using a two-inch-long syringe needle. Hold on, I'll show you the needles. I've got them in my bag.

I started using this little needle, but ran out of veins, and the doctor said, "The only place you've got left to inject is your femoral artery." The femoral artery runs deep inside your leg, through your groin, into your heart. The best way to access it is through the groin, but that needle was too small, so I had to start using one of these a day.

You use a lot of graphic imagery in your talks, like the photo of the wound on your leg with all the maggots in it. What's the story behind that?
You're meant to use a needle once and chuck it away, but I'd use the same syringe 50 times. By the last ten hits, it'd be blunt and I'd have to force it in my groin. As I was ripping it out, membrane and blood would squirt out my legs, so my legs got blood clots, and they blew up like balloons. When you're on crack and heroin, you scratch yourself a lot, which created a little scab the size of my fingernail. To heal something, you need a blood flow, so because the blood clots wouldn't allow the blood to get near my leg, the scab went from being tiny to being a hole down to the bone that spread out from the bottom of my knee to my ankle.

Paul's damaged leg still bleeds regularly, nearly nine years after he stopped using.

That sounds horrendous.
Yeah, it got so bad that I couldn't walk any more. I'd been running out of shops with racks of clothing to get my money, but now I was struggling to even walk, but still needed £400 seven days a week. When I was a gang leader years and years before that, I had a revolver, and I'd buried it behind a fish and chip shop. I dug it up and it still worked, so I started robbing dealers. The West Indian crack and heroin dealers that I was robbing were no mugs, though. They made it known that when they caught me, they were going to nail me to the floor, torture me, then kill me.

One day, one of the bags I robbed was pure heroin. When I took it, I overdosed and had a heart attack. I woke up in hospital hours later, and a doctor said, "You were clinically dead for two minutes. We started your heart again." I said to him, "Where's my clothes? I'm going." He said, "No you're not. If you leave, you're going to die. You've got septicaemia and pneumonia." I pushed him out of the way and left, because I'd left the bag of drugs I'd robbed in a crack den, and knew in two or three days time someone would find it, sell it, or use it. I thought, I'm not having that! That's my gear! I went to go and get the gear, but on the way there I had to walk past the police station. I was wanted there, but thought, This is it; I can go on to the crack den and die, or into the police station and live.

I hobbled into the police station, walked up to the desk, and burst into tears. They arrested me and took me back to the hospital, where they put maggots on the hole to clean away the dead tissue. After that, I contacted a rehab in Somerset and slowly recovered. I've not had drink or drugs now for coming up to nine years.

WATCH ON NOISEY: Stormzy & Muzi – from South London to South Africa

Would you say the buzz that you get from helping kids stay on the right path has replaced the buzz you got from drugs?
Yeah. I'm lucky to be alive to do the talks. A doctor once told me that the chances of surviving seven stabbings, two overdoses, and spending a million pounds on crack over the years was one in a million.

What's the story behind the stabbings?
Gangs and owing drug dealers money. Sometimes it was only over £50 as well. They'd stab you in the arse or the leg. I've also had my finger nearly severed, been stabbed in the right hand, stabbed right through my arm... I've got holes all over me. If you become heavily involved with gangs and become a heroin addict and a crackhead, then that's the life you're going to lead. It's going to be violent, it's going to be dishonest, and it's going to be brutal. That's why it's my job to make sure these kids don't end up doing what I did.

You can follow Paul onTwitter.

Illustration by Wren McDonald

Student loan debt is a fucking scourge. It leaves countless recent college grads struggling to keep their heads above water while simultaneously trying to find steady employment, and makes it impossible for many young people to begin saving for the future. As someone who is almost $100,000 in debt, a pile that's only growing despite my making payments every month, I have a vested, uh, interest in figuring out how to untangle this clusterfuck.

Unfortunately, there's not a lot that can be done. If you have federal loans, like I do, the government will stop at nothing to extract every last dollar it can from you, to the point of garnishing your wages. There are a couple of tricks that can ease the pain of private loans, but they involve haggling or borrowing more money to pay off what you already owe. The last possible option, I figured, was to refinance.

That's a word politicians have been throwing around a lot lately in order to court millennial voters. In August, Hillary Clinton announced a new plan that focused on making public universities debt-free and lowering interest rates, included those of people who've already graduated. In fact, all of the remaining Democratic candidates have promised students they'd be allowed to renegotiate their loan under more favorable terms if they were elected.

But that doesn't help me right now. So in an attempt to figure out what I could do, I signed up for something called StudentLoanHero.com, which is supposed to help you figure out a repayment plan. I quickly learned why my debt keeps growing —my interest rates average out to more than 7 percent, my balance is going up by $354, and I'm paying like, a third of that. In a word: Fuck.

Previously: How to Save Money When You're Young, Dumb, and Broke

Immediately I got on the phone with Andy Josuweit, the company's founder, to ask what I could do to renegotiate my loan. What I learned is that refinancing is not a panacea, like I always hoped it would be. "At the end of the day, I don't think refinancing is for everyone," he told me. "It's not, to be honest."

VICE: First off, what's your own experience with student loans?
Andy Josuweit: I went to a fancy private school in Boston, and I graduated with a lot of student loan debt. At the time of graduation, I was close to $74,000, which meant I had 16 different loans with three servicers. And then it was the bottom of the recession, and I couldn't get a job. Monthly payments were at like $1,100. I ultimately went into forbearance and income-based repayment. Over three years I accrued roughly $30,000 in interest, so at the worst of it I was at upward of $107,000.

I started StudentLoanHero because I wasn't getting smart financial advice. What we do is allow people to sign up for free and then we give them recommendations based on their socioeconomic situation.

It sounds like you get my problem then. I was like $80,000 in debt, and now I'm like $96,000 in debt. Can refinancing solve all my problems?
It depends on a few certain circumstances. Your federal loans come with certain protections. What you need to do is figure out if you're actually gonna use those benefits. The way I typically have people think about it is: If you lose your job, are you gonna have the ability to make payments? Private lenders may give you six months or even 12 months deferment, but they're a lot less flexible in helping you out when you're in a bad financial situation. If you're not totally secure it might not make sense to finance.

Another thing you can do is cherry-pick. If you have some high-interest rate loans and then some other ones, you can just refinance the highest ones and keep the lower-rate ones with the federal government.

Watch our documentary about the Cleveland Strangler:

What about consolidating? That also sounds like a cure-all. Is it?
It doesn't really help people. It's really a way to just make it easier to manage your student loans. It actually keeps people from being able to cherry-pick for refinancing. So it's OK to consolidate, but you have to figure out what debt-repayment strategy you're using. For instance, the "debt avalanche" is paying off your loans in accordance of the highest interest rate loans first. The "debt snowball" is paying off your loans by the lowest-principal loans first. So as soon as you consolidate, you just have a big loan sitting there and you can't use these strategies. The government really pushes direct loan consolidation, and if you're gonna enter into an income-based repayment plan or public service, sometimes that's required. The long story short is that it's not really a beneficial tool for anybody.

OK, so wait, what is refinancing, and why would a lender want to give me a lower interest rate? What's in it for them?
The definition of refinancing is basically somebody is giving you a new deal. You're literally re-financing. It comes with a new term, a new interest rate. Typically student loans are on a ten-year term, so you would be able to choose five, ten, or 20 years. With Earnest, one of our partners, you can choose any term, like 11.3 years, which helps you find a payment that fits your situation. So refinancing is simply changing the term of the loan and typically the interest rates.

The reason why lenders are willing to do this right now is because interest rates are low. It's based on LIBOR—London Interbank Exchange Rate—which is the rate at which banks get money from central banks. It's super low right now. It's basically an arbitrage situation in which we got loans five or ten years ago and the market was different. Now there's an opportunity for people to buy those loans at a lower rate.

So what happens in refinancing? The bank pays off the loan to the government, and then I just owe them, right?
That's basically how it works. They don't need approval for the government or your lender. They have you fill out an application and check your employment history, credit score, and income. And then they ask you to give them a ten-day payoff balance. Which is if you were going to pay off your loan in ten days, what would it be. And then once the lender has that, they send the current lender a check for that amount, and will literally pay off the loan. In the process you sign legal documents saying you owe the debt to the new lender.

How much money do I need to make to convince a bank they should let me do this?
Some of the sponsors we work with, the minimal annual income is $24,000. Other lenders we work with, it's like $50,000. So there are options if you are right out of school and not able to build your career yet. The minimum credit score on average is about 680 FICO. You can offset that with a cosigner—we don't recommend that.

That's pretty reasonable. But there's a big difference between making $50,000 while owing $50,000, and making $50,000 while owing $400,000. Doesn't that matter?
So they look at your debt-to-income ratio to determine how strapped you are at the end of the month. That is a big indicator for a lot of lenders. The cool thing about Earnest is they use debt to income to savings. So, have you been making payments, is the debt increasing or decreasing? A lot of other lenders just look at FICO score.

Who do I get to do this? Do I just go to a bank, or are there startups that are doing it better?
A lot of our partners are speciality lenders. We do work with some banks, like Citizens Bank. Wells Fargo does refinance private loans but they will not refinance federal loans, so they're a little bit harder to work with. They're not one of our partners. For the most part, the big entities like SoFi, CommonBond, Earnest—they're all kinda startups. Venture-banked lenders.

I think there's a lot of risk here. Student loans are a different beast than an auto loan or a mortgage, because there's no collateral. There's nothing to kind of back up the risk.

You can't revoke a degree, basically. But people can't declare bankruptcy on loans—doesn't that give enough protection to banks?
Well, they're also not convinced that there's a big market, which I disagree with. Goldman Sachs did a report that found the market size is about $200 billion to $300 billion. And the refinancing market is about $6 billion to $8 billion this year, so there's a lot of opportunity for banks and lenders to enter this space and create a big business.

So, how do I contact all these lenders at once and get the best deal?
We don't do that. A lot of lenders don't like that, because it costs money to see if you're eligible. But you could check out Credible.com, which is a competitor. I shouldn't even say that. But they'll let you check out multiple places at once.

Should I look out for variable interest rates (where the interest rate on the loan changes according to the market) like I did the first time? The idea is terrifying to me, but maybe I should get one?
When you're shopping around, I recommend that you check out at least two or three places. It doesn't hurt your credit score if you're asking about the same product within a 30-day period. So, yeah, if you're planning of paying off this debt within five years, or less than ten years, a variable interest rate might make sense for you. If you're gonna take like, 20 years, the chance that the interest rate market will eventually rise and you'll be stuck with a high rate is probable.

I think I was afraid because I assumed the rate was at the whim of a banker whose goal is to fuck you over. Is it not arbitrary?
It says in the contract that it depends on what happens with LIBOR. You're 100-percent right that if you get a 0 percent APR credit card offer, they can just whack you with 22 percent. But that can't happen here. I guess it can, if the lender puts it in the contract, but typically it's pegged to a market index. A lot of lenders also offer a variable rate cap, which means it can only get as high as like, 8 or 9 percent even if the market goes over that.

Wait, if I refinance, do I lose the ability to make income-based payments?
Yep.

OK, so that's one check in the "no" category for me. My plan was to make 20 years worth of payments and then get loan forgiveness.
Yeah, yeah. That's interesting. To me, my personal opinion about loan forgiveness is that you're discounting your future income. Like, God forbid your parents pass away and you get some money, for some reason you join a startup and get equity... you should try to pay off your student loans. Your income will likely increase over your lifetime, and taking the back seat to this is gonna discount your ability to get credit cards, an auto loan, a mortgage. It's gonna put a strain on your life. If you wanna wait to live your life until you're 40 or 50 years old, that's an option.

Can you elaborate on how this is fucking me over?
Your debt is gonna keep increasing, so your debt-to-income ratio is gonna keep increasing. What's reported on your credit statement is probably gonna be your standard payment, rather than an income-based one. Lenders are gonna look at the aggregate amount of debt. That's the risk you're taking on.

Hm. That's bad.
This is more conspiracy theory, but what if the government says in 20 years that they're not gonna forgive those student loans.

Fuck! I just don't want this to keep growing. My recommended payment is half of my income. Is there absolutely anything I can do?
Increase your income. Airbnb. Uber. For me, I was living in New York City and I moved out. State income tax is like 9 percent. I moved to Texas where there's no state income tax. I'm saving $10,000 a year right there. Leaving New York, I'm saving another $10,000 because cost of living is so much lower. I still have like $89,000 in student loan debt, and I'm working on it. Once you make a dent in it, it starts snowballing.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Photo via Wiki Commons

On Tuesday, a report from the libertarian nonprofit Institute for Justice documented the explosive growth of the law enforcement tactic of seizing cash and property from suspected criminals. Known as "civil asset forfeiture," this practice has become increasingly controversial because police are empowered to take someone's stuff on the mere suspicion that it was acquired illegally—no arrest or charges are necessary. There were $29 billion worth of such seizures in the last 14 years, including $4.5 billion in 2014 alone. Even if you're found innocent of any crime, getting your seized property back can be a long, arduous process, one that costs a lot of time and money spent tied up in court.

To learn more about what regular citizens can do if they ever get into a legal tug-of-war with the cops over their money and property, I got in touch with Ezekiel Edwards, the director of the ACLU's Criminal Law Reform Project, which "seeks to end harsh policies and racial inequities in the criminal justice system."

VICE: Why has civil asset forfeiture grown so much in recent years?
Ezekiel Edwards: The failed war on drugs fueled civil asset forfeiture abuse. In 1984, people's property.

As a result, between 1986 and 2014, deposits into the Department of Justice's Assets Forfeiture Fund increased 4,667 percent to $4.5 billion. Furthermore, civil asset forfeiture laws heavily favor law enforcement and place numerous legal and financial burdens on people seeking to reclaim their property. Basically, when one combines profitable ends with easy means, abuses abound, and you end up with legalized robbery by the government.

Say I'm pulled over with, to use a real example VICE wrote about a while ago, an exorbitant amount of cash I just won at a casino. The officer making the stop suspects I've obtained it illegally. Is there any scenario where I drive away with my money?
It depends, but I wouldn't like your chances. Legally, the officer only needs probable cause to suspect that your property is related to criminal activity, even if the police officer lacks probable cause to arrest you for a crime. In practice, even if the officer is merely suspicious about your property, the prospect of reaping financial rewards can often (if illegally) result in a seizure. And in most states, officers know that your money can pretty easily become his department's money. That temptation has proven irresistible time and again.

Watch the VICE documentary on the Cleveland Strangler:

What can we do right now to start reversing the trend of civil forfeiture?
Well, we can do what New Mexico did earlier this year: abolish civil forfeiture outright. Now in New Mexico law enforcement can only forfeit property after a criminal conviction, and all post-conviction forfeiture money is deposited in the general fund, not into police or prosecution coffers. Where state governments aren't correcting abuse, we can file lawsuits like the one we filed this year in Arizona challenging the constitutionality of civil asset forfeiture laws that allow police and prosecutors to steal from its citizens. We can also continue to pressure Congress and the White House to reduce the federal financial incentives that help make civil asset forfeiture so enticing to law enforcement.

Even if you're innocent and face no charges, it can still be a nightmare to get your seized goods back from police. How are these cases not slam dunks for lawyers?
First, it's important to remember that many people who have their property taken cannot afford to hire lawyers to fight for them—and there is no constitutional right to counsel in forfeiture proceedings. Indeed, the people the ACLU has represented in individual forfeiture actions have had little money, and all have been people of color. In Georgia, half the properties taken in 2011 were worth less than $650.

So the reality is that in many instances, there are no lawyers fighting for people to get their money back from the government. But even if you can afford a lawyer—and such an investment (which often includes filing fees for initiating a claim) isn't worth more than the property you are trying to reclaim—in a majority of states the government need only meet its burden by a preponderance of the evidence, which basically means by a tad more than a coin flip. And if you are an innocent owner of property the government suspected was used in a crime, in 35 states and under federal law, you bear the burden of proving that you had nothing to do with the alleged crime.

Any legal advice for someone who finds themselves mired in a long court case to get their seized assets back from law enforcement?
If you can afford an attorney, hire one—ideally one who understands civil asset forfeiture procedures. If not, you can still challenge the taking of your property. You are entitled to notice of forfeiture. Pay close attention to the deadlines for filing claims to your property (and/or opposing forfeiture) after you have been given notice.

Follow Brian McManus on Twitter.

Photo courtesy of Hopscotch

The limousine rolled through Boyle Heights, a neighborhood near downtown Los Angeles, where I was waiting to get in. There was a harpist with dreadlocks already seated inside, dreamily strumming, as the limo circled around a car accident. It wasn't a real car accident, of course—the whole thing had been constructed from wood, and we watched through the limo window like it was a movie screen. A distraught redhead in a yellow dress and a handsome motorcyclist were dealing with the aftermath of their collision. Their voices were being piped in through the speakers, so you could hear that they were both upset—but not so upset that we couldn't also feel a spark starting between them.

This was just one version of the beginning of Hopscotch, an opera unlike any I've seen. (Full disclosure: I haven't seen many.) It's a world away from the traditional stage performance you'd expect from an opera, and a fantastical world at that. The performance unfolds throughout 36 chapters, which are told from within several moving limousines. There's no particular order to the chapters, and the limos circle on one of three routes, which each tell one-third of the narrative. There are 128 performers, many miles, and a dizzying feat of logistical planning.

A wood-constructed accident scene in 'Hopscotch.' Photo by the author

Hopscotchis the latest iteration of experimental opera, a trend that's appeared everywhere from Stockholm to Dallas. Unlike the formal posture of operas past, these new experimental operas play with new storylines, use of music, and even reject a traditional stage and audience. None seem to challenge the convention on a scale as large as Hopscotch, which was dreamed up by director Yuval Sharon and created in collaboration with six composers and six writers. Sharon is the Artistic Director of The Industry, a Los Angeles-based opera company making "musical, operatic, visual, and immersive experiences."

Sharon is no stranger to bending convention: His last major project, Invisible Cities, took place entirely within LA's Union Station, the audience listening on headphones as singers and dancers performed among regular passengers and passersby.

As for Hopscotch, Sharon says "the whole project began with a conversation that had... It actually was, in a way, a challenge; we were sort of daring each other. What's harder than Invisible Cities that will make completing Invisible Cities seem easy? So we started thinking about driving."

Driving is the centerpiece of Hopscotch. The production eschews a traditional stage and audience in seats, and instead uses the limos to transport the audience through the story. During one performance, there are multiple limousines driving around simultaneously, visiting different chapters in different orders, giving each car a slightly different version of the story.

An ultra-small audience watches Hopscotch from inside limousines. Photo courtesy of Hopscotch

When I saw the show, I took the "red route," on which four of us were ushered around the city, shuffled into a new limo in a new location for each chapter. We watched the story and music unfold as musicians, singers, and actors performed next to us, inside the vehicle, or out on the streets in a carefully chosen stretch of city.

But one route only tells a third of the story, and it's totally out of order, so unless you read the entire synopsis ahead of time you really only get an abstract, fragmented glimpse of the overarching story of Lucha, the girl in the yellow dress. Themes of love, time, and death bubbled underneath the surface, but always just out of reach. Hopscotch rejects the simple idea of a linear narrative and I didn't mind at all.

We listened on headphones to an actor's amplified monologue as we trailed behind him into an actual bookstore in an actual courtyard filled with actual people. From there, we followed a girl in a sparkly Quinceñera dress into our next car, where she sang about becoming a mujer as we drove. Three guitarists accompanied her in real-life stereo on either side of us in the limo.

For another chapter, we followed an older Lucha to a rooftop, who sang to a younger version of herself until, in a breathtaking moment of realization, my red route partners and I saw the tiny, faraway horn players playing along on the rooftops of two nearby buildings. One car drove us through a spooky cemetery as a man in our limo belted out notes to a (presumably dead) woman in extravagant red Day of the Dead garb; one ride had us simply sitting in total darkness, left to our imaginations while a song played.

Old Lucha sings to young Lucha in Hopscotch. Photo by the author

Like most young people, I've always considered opera one of those things that makes you feel cultured, in a stuffy, rich, English grandmother sort of way. There was nothing stuffy about Hopscotch. For such a classically grown-up genre of entertainment, I'd never imagined opera could be so legitimately appealing to my overstimulated millennial sensibilities.

Hopscotch is immersive and surprising and, especially with the incorporation of technology—like the animated chapters online, or the cell phones in each car that stream the whole thing onto 24 video screens at the show's Central Hub—decidedly modern. For a generation that has little interest in opera (hell, we barely even watch broadcast television), it could be the kind of retooling that opera performances need. With traditional opera's demographic quickly aging, experimental opera—something that appeals to younger audiences—could be the future of the genre.

"That is our vision as a company," Sharon explained. "To consider opera an emerging art form and one that should be expanded using the latest developments in music, narrative strategies, and technologies... I definitely hope projects like this will contribute to an audience becoming curious in the art form beyond what The Industry produces."

And somehow, amazingly, Sharon pulled off the collaborative, synchronized, moving multimedia opera he'd envisioned. Hopscotch is a glorious patchwork portrait of Los Angeles and Lucha's mysterious life, and it's such a multifaceted stimulation that a single slice of spectacle is plenty on its own.

Hopscotch the Opera is on view until November 15. Get tickets here.

Follow Lola Blanc on Twitter.