I

At 1.2 million acres, Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake is the largest parcel of land owned by the US Navy. It fills an expanse of remote and rugged desert terrain bigger than Rhode Island; to the naked eye, there's not much going on inside. You might spend a whole day driving around the perimeter of the base and, notwithstanding an occasional low-flying F-16 fighter jet, never guess there was anything outside your window beyond barren volcanic tablelands, stands of brittle burrobush, and the occasional sidewinder rattlesnake.

What makes NAWS China Lake special—beyond being a secret test center for the world's most advanced weapons—is that inside a handful of its narrow lava canyons lies the largest concentration of Native American rock art in the Western Hemisphere. The images, carvings known as petroglyphs, are found throughout China Lake's Coso Range and are the oldest in the Americas. Archeologists have dated some of the images as far back as 15,000 to 19,000 years, and nobody has ever successfully counted them. A single canyon—Renegade Canyon, or as it's more commonly called, Little Petroglyph Canyon—may contain more than 1 million images of bighorn sheep, shamans, and abstract geometric symbols.

While archeologists have argued over the function of these and other figures for half a century, their original meanings largely remain a mystery. What nobody contests, however, is that the Coso Range was once one of the most spiritually important sites on the continent.

Petroglyphs of bighorn sheep in Renegade Canyon. All photos by author except when noted

Some New Age types consider the Coso Range a "vortex"—a geographic location where harmonizing spiritual energy is supposedly highly concentrated. Examples of such places apparently include the Pyramids at Giza, Stonehenge, and the red rocks of Sedona, Arizona. Even if you don't put stock in such dubious concepts, being in the presence of such ancient and sacred symbols can be a powerful—and humbling—experience.

For decades, however, their location inside a military base dedicated to top-secret weapons testing meant that the only people who knew—or cared—about the petroglyphs were a handful of Native American tribes, professional archaeologists, and a subculture of Indian art geeks and New Age vision seekers. But Ridgecrest, California—the small desert town just outside the main gates of China Lake—is attempting to change that, and turn the petroglyphs into a full-fledged international tourist destination.

This effort has created a clash between competing economic and cultural interests. For many members of the Native American tribes throughout the region, the Coso Range and its petroglyphs are the most sacred things in the world, but some say that the sanctity and very survival of the artwork is threatened by Ridgecrest's attempt to cash in on the petroglyphs and sell itself as "California's newest cultural mecca"—the Petroglyph Capital of the World.

A display at the Petroglyph Festival that many Native Americans find disrespectful

II

In 2014, Ridgecrest's then-mayor Dan Clark proposed an entire festival centered around the petroglyphs, describing it as a potential "economic engine" for the city of Ridgecrest. "The petroglyph festival will be our signature event," he told the LA Times. "We're going to saturate this community with representations of rock art." Denny Kline, a field officer for Mick Gleason, Kern County's District 1 Supervisor, told reporters, "It's going to be the city's 50th anniversary on steroids." Sponsors for the four-day festival included Coca-Cola, General Electric, NASA, the Ford Foundation, McDonald's, and Home Depot, among others.

A year later, the town remains committed to becoming the "American 'Machu Picchu,'" as a recent press release proclaimed. That release quoted Doug Lueck, the executive director of the Ridgecrest Area Convention and Visitor's Bureau (RACVB), as saying, "Not only is tourism up, we're also experiencing an upward trend in filming for movies and commercials as well." According to Leuck, the first annual Petroglyph Festival "had over 1,000 media impressions over television and radio" and sold out local hotels. Harris Brokke, the former director of Ridgecrest's Maturango Museum, told the local paper. "Not only is the festival successful, but when people come to the festival, they come back again and again, and that's our whole goal."

"Ridgecrest has tried to brand itself in a lot of different ways," a retired Navy veteran named Mike tells me. "There's no real tourism here. Most people either work on the base or the service industry that supports it."

We're standing in the parking lot of Ridgecrest's new $6 million tourist attraction, Petroglyph Park. House finches flit between palm trees and brown monoliths carved with depictions of bighorns, zigzags, and shamans; in the background traffic hums along China Lake Boulevard.

"The city tried the Balloon Festival two years in a row, but the winds were horrendous and just destroyed everything," Mike says. Ridgecrest also launched a spring Wildflower Festival, but given the reality of the California drought and the fact that Ridgecrest only gets a few inches of rain each year, the flowers didn't always show. "But the Petroglyph Festival is something that's uniquely Ridgecrest," Mike says.

Behind us, across the street, music booms from the stage at the center of the Balsam Street Fair, where 200 vendors have set up tents selling scented candles, foreign war memorabilia, and dreamcatchers made in China. It's the second annual Petroglyph Festival, a showcase for the best parts of the town held in November. Balsam Street functions as Ridgecrest's version of a downtown arts district. Elsewhere in the city, abandoned storefronts mingle with used furniture dealers; bail bonds shops sit in squat strip malls with asphalt that looks like it hasn't been repaved since the Vietnam War—but on Balsam Street you find a newly painted bighorn sheep or shaman on nearly every available wall. This is, without question, the Petroglyph Capital of the World.

The catch, however, is that historically it's been extremely difficult to see the actual petroglyphs of the Coso Range. According to the RACVB, 15,000 people traveled from over 50 countries for the 2014 Petroglyph Festival. But only around 40 American citizens who applied early and passed a federal background check were able to view the carvings inside the base. This year, though, an RACVB spokesperson tells me, the Navy had "agreed to forgo the vetting process" and let 500 people see the petroglyphs, including many non-Americans, who would normally be barred from entering the base at all.

Among them is a woman from Germany named Karin. She waited years for the opportunity to make a pilgrimage to the petroglyphs; during November's festival she finally did it. "Everything from the drive, the Joshua trees, the beauty of the mountains. The whole landscape was just magic. We saw wild horses," she tells me. "It's obvious why the petroglyphs are there." I ask if she learned anything. "Imagination," she replies. "Imagination is what you need."

Another woman, a Japanese citizen named Maiko, had been waiting nine years for the opportunity. "I'm actually a petroglyph freak. I go to all the sites. It's just attractive to me. I want to see the art. So I do the research on the internet. And then I go there and look for it."

Those whose love for petroglyphs burns less arduously make do with Petroglyph Park, where you can gaze at reproductions of the carvings and experience an Epcot version of the ancient etchings. City and county officials often emphasize the sacredness of the petroglyphs and the educational aspect of the attraction—"the concept of the park is to honor the Native American heritage of the Indian Wells Valley," says Denny Kline—or as Mayor Clark has said of the petroglyphs, "We can bring it to the public's attention what a national treasure they are and, hopefully, they will respect them."

But the park and the festival are unquestionably money-making affairs—the whole point is to draw in vendors and tourism dollars. And many aspects of the festival seem less interested in history and education than hustling and speculation.

A booth at the Petroglyph Festival

I head over to the north end of Balsam Street, where Rod "The Buffalo Man" Blankenship—a Korean and Vietnam War Veteran, and "an Elder in the Cherokee Indian Nation"—is talking about the buffalo to a crowd inside the Old Town Theater. The animals were "a supermarket and hardware store," according to Blankenship, who punctuates his pronouncements with shakes of a ceremonial rattle made from dried buffalo scrotum. Toward the end of the talk, I raise my hand and ask him how important the buffalo was to the Native American tribes in the surrounding area, and he admits that the animals weren't out here in California. But maybe some of the petroglyphs depict buffalo?

"It's possible," he says. "You know what you'll see in some of those petroglyphs, though?" He pauses and seems to stare out above the audience, straight through the back of the auditorium at something unseen. "You'll see pictures of what you call,"—another pause—"aliens. They're pictures of space people. With big round heads. Oval heads."

Other lecturers in the festival's educational "Speakers' Series" include a local wilderness entrepreneur who runs private tours of petroglyph sites that aren't on Naval land—"If you're interested, we can talk prices later," he tells the audience—and an archeologist who also offers private tours. Both do so despite heavy discouragement by the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which fears that if the locations of off-base petroglyph sites become widely known they'll be vandalized or stolen.

Outside the Old Town Theater, across Freedom Park, smoke billows up from the cookers stationed behind the Intertribal Powwow and Cherokee Hog Fry. The powwow has all the usual signifiers of Native American life: tepees, donkeys, women dressed in buckskin suits, men on folding chairs beating a large leather drum, vendors hawking dream catchers and geodes. The festival advertises the drummers, dancers, and vendors as members of the local Native American tribes, but the Cherokee have no ancestral ties to the land or the ancient peoples responsible for the petroglyphs.

"I don't know how people would take it if there was a painting of Jesus up there and people were sticking their faces in it. Right? It just wouldn't be cool."
–Jonnie Benson

"We didn't use tepees and we're not a powwow culture and we didn't eat pigs. They're teaching people that this is what the people looked like that were here," says Jonnie Benson, a member of the Lone Pine Paiute-Shoshone who adds that it's the "miseducation" of the community that is most upsetting. "They took a real touristy approach. Now we have all these people walking away after this weekend thinking, 'Oh, wow, I've learned all about the natives who live here,' when in fact they don't know shit. They learned the Hollywood story."

Down the street from the powwow sits another sore point for some local tribes: a plywood board painted with two shaman figures, their faces cutout to allow tourists to poke their heads through and smile for pictures.

"It's so offensive. Our ancestors put those marks on the rocks, whether people want to believe that or not. It's sacred to me, and to see it as basically a caricature, with people putting their faces in it—they don't know what those symbols mean," says Benson, who'd seen the pictures on Facebook. "I don't know how people would take it if there was a painting of Jesus up there and people were sticking their faces in it. Right? It just wouldn't be cool."

Petroglyphs depicting shamanic figures at NAWS China Lake

III

Though the Petroglyph Festival is based around the cheerful, corporate-ready commercialization of the Coso rock art, the petroglyphs themselves depict strange and often violent imagery. On nearly every cliff face of Renegade Canyon, you find not simply pictures of bighorn sheep, but bighorns etched in the throes of death, their bodies impaled with spears and torn by arrows.

The mood on petroglyph tours is, if not somber, generally one of quiet reverence. Tour guides do an especially good job just hanging back, allowing the art to sink into the group, and not pushing forth any interpretation. Though they do occasionally step in. I remember on my first tour of Renegade Canyon, a woman kept pointing out the strange round-headed humanoids carved in the walls, and saying, "Look, an alien wearing a space helmet," or, "Look, an alien with a cell phone."

"Archeologists call those 'patterned body anthropomorphs,'" a guide eventually told her, adding that the art was still sacred to the tribes throughout the region, and it was disrespectful to infantilize the art of their ancestors in such a way.

When the festival isn't happening, normal tours of Renegade Canyon, arranged through the Maturango Museum in Ridgecrest, take 20 people on select weekend dates determined by the military during the fall and spring months. The Navy makes you sign a form that releases them from responsibility should you break a leg or catch a stray bomb, and the background checks conducted by the military usually take two to three weeks. The tours cost $40 and nearly ever one sells out. Excluding the festival, only about 800 people make it in to see the art each year.

In many ways the tours seem like a routine trail walk. People park in a dusty lot, tightening their boots and backpacks while guides take a headcount. In the distance below, the black gash of Renegade Canyon cuts west across the wide desert terrace, its exit at the lower ridge too far off to see.

A trail winds out through the fragrant burrobush, sage, and creosote, out from the edge of the dirt lot to the rim of the canyon, where it drops down through a steep side wash. Below, bright lichens cover the brown walls of the canyon, but you can't see anything yet. Guides remind you to watch your step as gravel crunches underfoot. Sunlight burns against your back, painting your blue outlines as you file forward and the walls narrow and voices hush. A carpet of soft sand covers the canyon floor. Like children sneaking into some forbidden sanctuary, everyone keeps trading excited and worried glances, scanning for the first petroglyph—but there's only the vast silence of the canyon, impenetrable as the rock walls closing you in. You glance back. Faraway, along the eastern horizon, a pair of perfectly formed volcanic domes lay like soft breasts tanning in the morning sun.

By the time most people reach the cliff at the end of the canyon, they've stopped taking pictures, stopped talking altogether—they just sit and stare off into the expanse below.

Then, without a word, the digital camera shutters start clicking. Up ahead, a dozen people stand aiming at the rock wall, while others crouch and kneel, jostling for position. Five pale shoe-sized sheep engravings cover the dark basalt. Geometric designs wrap around the periphery. A man crawls up for a closeup and one of the guides tells him that it's close enough: "Everyone, please keep back at least two feet from the petroglyphs." People keep vying for position, standing on their toes with cameras raised, as though the tiny darting sheep were actually alive, actually running away, fleeing the hungry tourist photographs.

Just minutes later, this initial flurry of photography seems absurd. The canyon contains more petroglyphs than any camera eye or human memory can record. By the time most people reach the cliff at the end of the canyon, they've stopped taking pictures, stopped talking altogether—they just sit and stare off into the expanse below.

The cumulative effect of the canyon is hard to describe. It's not something you can get from simply looking at a few panels of petroglyphs. You have to spend the whole day walking the canyon's entire length to let the images wash over you. Not everyone who takes the tour hikes the mile and a half down to the end—some people only go halfway and then return to the shaded picnic table beside the parking lot. You cannot get this cumulative effect if you turn back. Nor can you get it from other petroglyph sites off base or the tours during the Petroglyph Festival, which only spend an hour at the canyon's entrance.

Everyone's experience differs, I'm sure. For me, an initial impression, if there ever was one, that the petroglyphs resembled something inspirational or alien faded away the further I walked down the canyon. It was replaced by a sense of awe at the sheer number of etchings, which in turn gave rise to a sensation of mild dread when I realized that they all mostly depict the same image—bighorn sheep.

And as you continue to wander down the length of the narrow lava canyon, despite the open sky, the clean desert light, and the quiet conversation of the people around you, a feeling of claustrophobia begins to assert itself. And the further you venture, the more the canyon narrows, and the more pictures you pass, the deeper this feeling extends, until you come to understand that you've entered a place that is not your home, gawked at pictures not made for your enjoyment, photographed panels of bighorn sheep never made for pleasure but rather in pain, ripped out from the walls by desperate men with bloody fingers over so many lonely millennia, and once you reach the end of the canyon and see how many times that single intentional image occurred, a final conclusion presents itself: Something went wrong here.

Image courtesy of BLM

IV

No one knows for certain what the rocks record. But they have been perfectly preserved thanks to airtight military security. Even the tribes who revere the rock art of the Cosos have to jump through hoops to pay their respects.

"The sites still have their power but we can't use them properly; we have to be escorted and they watch us down at the hot springs and it's very irritating," says Kathy Bancroft, the Cultural Officer for the Lone Pine Paiute-Shoshone.

"At this point in the journey," says Jodie Benson, "I'm just grateful that the art is out there on Navy land, and not just anybody can go out there."

Not all the petroglyphs are on land protected by the military, however, and as the art has become more famous, Native Americans and archaeologists worry about people damaging other unprotected sites or stealing the petroglyphs right off the walls.The worst case of vandalism occurred not long before the first annual Ridgecrest Petroglyph Festival, in an area north of the Cosos. In a matter of hours, looters wielding power saws, electric generators, and ladders managed to steal a handful of petroglyphs that had survived thousands of years of natural erosion.

"Anybody could have driven out on top of them, there would have been a dust cloud," Greg Haverstock, an archaeologist at the Bureau of Land Management, tells me. "These people were extremely bold." The event was the worst case of vandalism ever seen on the nearly 1 million acres of public land managed by Haverstock's BLM office.

Though multiple people I talked to say that cases of vandalism were on the rise, there was some disagreement about the cause. Donald Storm, another BLM archaeologist, says that China Lake's severely restricted access is a problem—if people can't enter the base they might go looking for petroglyphs on unprotected land. "If they're out in the public domain, damage is more likely because these sites are hard to control," he says.

Bob Robinson, the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer of the Kern Valley Indian Council, thinks that the festival is not helping to reduce the destruction. "As it is we have enough problems with sites being vandalized without all the promotion of the festival." Robinson says that tourists need to know that the petroglyphs are not doodles on rocks, but put there for a reason, and they're part of a living ongoing culture that is here today: "People need to understand that they're sacred and they need to be treated with respect." According to Robinson, this is the "education part that I hope will be there at the festival, and not this thing of creating this whole New Age story around aliens putting them there."

But Robinson isn't very optimistic. He describes the festival as "commercial exploitation. They're turning it into a Roswell bullshit."

This, ultimately, is the dividing line between Ridgecrest and some local Native Americans, who see the festival not just as a commercialization of their culture but something that could literally fuel the destruction of their sacred symbols.

"The worst thing about it is the town of Ridgecrest," says Kathy Bancroft. "They want to be the petroglyph capital of the world. I heard that on the local radio station and I thought, Who said they should do that? " Bancroft says it's incredibly disrespectful for the festival to be promoting the petroglyphs with vandalism on the rise.

On this point, everyone agrees: Protecting the petroglyphs is the most important thing. "The only way that the petroglyphs will continue to be here for a very long time is by protecting them and respecting them," says Debbie Benson, the current director of the Maturango Museum, which organizes tours of Renegade Canyon. "Not all petroglyphs are on the base. If people are harming them and don't understand them and not respecting them, they will not last."

Artwork at Petroglyph Park, which experts say doesn't resemble Native American rock art.

Some of the materials in Petroglyph Park are of dubious educational value, however. One large engraving near the entrance is entirely unlike any of the actual petroglyphs; when I asked archaeologists about it they said they had never laid eyes anything like it. "I can honestly say I've never seen an image in rock art that resembled that even closely," Greg Haverstock said. "I look at that and I think 1950s sci-fi aliens."

The particular stand of petroglyphs is labeled "Shamanic Visions or Alien Visitors." The placard in front of it pays lip service to the popular New Age concept—promoted by Erich von Däniken's 1967 bestseller Chariots of the Gods—that many rock art images throughout the world portray aliens who visited earth, planted the seeds of consciousness in primitive humanity, and made possible all the cultural achievements of ancient man. This notion has been criticized for minimizing the actual artistic achievements of indigenous people and for simply being shoddy history. "That writing as careless as von Däniken's," Carl Sagan wrote in 1976, "whose principal thesis is that our ancestors were dummies, should be so popular is a sober commentary on the credulousness and despair of our times."

"They're just cashing in on something sacred. They're selling it. And I don't want any part."
–Bob Robinson

V

As it stands now, the tribes have no interest in participating in the Petroglyph Festival. None of the Native Americans I spoke to had ever attended it, and some, like Bob Robinson, openly condemned it. "They're just cashing in on something sacred. They're selling it. And I don't want any part," he says. "We don't want to participate because of the money."

Kathy Bancroft says that Ridgecrest never even approached her tribe about the festival. All they did was send advertisements. "If I really felt they cared and wanted to do it right maybe I'd participate," Bancroft says. "They've taken something sacred and spiritual and created a stereotype, a team mascot for the city of Ridgecrest, and it makes me sick."

Some Native Americans I spoke with emphasize that a festival that educated the public about the petroglyphs could be beneficial, if it made people more aware of the sacred nature of the rock carvings and the history behind them. Barbara Dutton, a member of the Death Valley Timbisha-Shoshone, tells me the festival was "a good opportunity for educating the general public about how important these sites are to the native people." But Dutton did admit, "I don't know what kind of information they have out there."

Given the information I encountered there, the Petroglyph Festival appears to have little interest in educating the public about the sacred nature of the rock art or the history behind it—which is truly a shame.

The petroglyphs at China Lake can be interpreted many ways. I prefer an explanation offered by archeologist David Whitley, who thinks that the Coso Range was once the central pilgrimage point for rainmaking shaman throughout the Great Basin.

"The images should not be interpreted in a literal sense," Whitley says. The petroglyphs represent not literal hunting scenes but rather "graphic expressions of the visions of rain shamans that, themselves, were metaphors for the rain shaman's supernatural control over the weather." The images of mutilated bighorns represent prayers for rain, not bighorns, according to Whitley.

As anyone who has lived through California's ongoing drought knows, we still pray for rain, though we do it in different ways. It was in China Lake where the military crafted the rain-making technology of "cloud seeding," which was deployed during the Vietnam War in an attempt to flood the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Today the technique, which involves shooting particles into clouds to form ice crystals, is used across the American West, including California, to ward off drought. It isn't clear, however, that cloud seeding is any better at bringing rain than carving bighorns into the sides of rocks.

If you go to the Ridgecrest Petroglyph Festival, or if you visit the rock art of the Coso Range, don't approach the art lightly. Don't dismiss its creators as being primitive, or assume they needed to be influenced by UFOs in order to make their art. Think about their world, plagued with uncertainty, their struggles to scratch out lives against the harshness of the Mojave Desert. And think about the uncertainties of our own world today—the reality of global climate change and a perpetual war on terror. Remember that at China Lake, while the military continues to protect the traces of past man, in the same breath, in the same location, they continue to perfect the art of erasing him from the present.

And if you have a chance, take a look some of the most impressive petroglyphs, the rare ones depicting the skinny men riding strange animals, the white men arriving—the aliens. Ask yourself: Who will last longer—us or the petroglyphs?

Barret Baumgart has published essays and stories in the Gettysburg Review, The Literary Review, The Seneca Review, and Camera Obscura. He is currently working on a book about the history of military weather modification and the future of global climate engineering. He cleans beer glasses for a living at brewery in downtown Los Angeles.

I hate spoilers, but I'll make an exception for spoilers that spoil a really shitty part of a movie, which I believe actually improve a moviegoing experience by lowering expectations. In a similar vein, at the start of every new year, I like to know as much as possible about the inevitable horrors to come in the next 12 months. That way, while everyone else is talking about "fresh starts" and "resolutions," I already know exactly how the new year is going to disappoint me.

So when the geopolitical forecasting firm Stratfor announced last month that they would brief members of the media on their forecast for 2016, I jumped at the opportunity to find out how conflict and economic strife were going to shape the year ahead. That briefing informed much of my research below.

Strap in everybody, because 2016 is probably going to suck just as much as the last year did:

Flooding and Mudslides in Los Angeles

To paraphrase Travis Bickle, someday a real rain will come to Los Angeles and wash all the scum off the streets. And with El Niño rains on their way, that day looks like it's going to be Tuesday, January 5. And the deluge isn't expected to let up until March.

Los Angeles has been in an agonizing drought for four years. In October when I last wrote about El Niño, it was still 90 degrees in LA, and the idea of the skies opening up and unleashing a biblical-type flood on us sounded just fine. Now it's cold (relatively speaking), and the thought of dealing with floods and mudslides—which seem pretty much guaranteed at this point—sounds awful. We're Californians—most of us don't even own jackets or boots.

Let's not forget, however, that El Niño also causes droughts, and those could starve millions in other parts of the world, and exacerbate unstable conditions in places like Syria, South Sudan, and Yemen. Experts predict that the ongoing famine in Malawi alone—which has been exacerbated by El Niño—will have affected 2.8 million people by March of this year.

Yet Another Attempt by Congress to Gut Obamacare

On January 6, the GOP-controlled Congress will return from its holiday recess, and get the good old machine of American democracy grinding again. A big part of the Republican agenda for the new year will be the Restoring Americans' Healthcare Freedom Reconciliation Act of 2015, a bill aimed at amending the Affordable Care Act that would remove most of the parts that mandate individuals and employers get insurance, and repeal a tax on medical devices.

Regardless of how you feel about Obamacare, politically speaking, in all likelihood the bill will amount to one more failed attempt to undermine the healthcare reform law that passed all the way back in 2010. Republicans on Capital Hill are no longer going after a full repeal—something they've tried no less than 56 times—but the fact that this fight won't go away is pretty embarrassing for all us.

Looking for an escape? Check out VICE's documentary on Magic the Gathering:

A European Union Strained by More Nationalism

With Syrian refugees continuing to flee their country's prolonged and horrifying civil war, the inevitable influx of migrants into the relatively safer and more politically stable environs of Europe has come with a side effect: the rise of potent right wing political sentiment. Already a geopolitical factor in 2015, the rise of right-wing nationalism will continue to rattle the stability of the European Union in the coming year.

According to Mark Flemming Williams, a European analyst at Stratfor, "the European Union is an attempt to subdue nationalism," and this new nationalism will "create divides" in the coming year.

In most cases, the power of nationalist parties remains limited—often members hold office only in small regional councils—the movements are expected to flex their muscles over the next year. In Denmark, France, and Sweden, for example, nationalist parties once regarded as relics of Europe's dark past have gone mainstream, sweeping into seats in national legislatures.

In Germany, the refugee crisis is tugging Chancellor Angela Merkel to the right; a centrist, Merkel has shied away from condemning violent immigrant-bashing, a move that has displeased the left. And in France, the country's foremost nationalist politician, Marine Le Pen, is expected to seek the presidency in 2017 despite a recent defeat in a regional election. Which means that over course of 2016, she'll undoubtedly increase her international profile, bringing her notorious lack of tact to bear on geopolitics.

A Messier Syrian Conflict Thanks to Turkey's Escalated Involvement

As for the five-year civil war in Syria, Reva Bhalla, Stratfor's vice president of analysis, predicts that "this is the year that everyone is going to be talking about Turkey." Turkey is facing a possible military and political crisis this year, now thatKurdish forces in Syria, who are allied with the United States, have moved further west than the Euphrates River. For complicated reasons, that move really pissed off Turkey, and in response, "Turkey will likely make a military move into northern Syria," Balla said.

Otherwise, the Syrian crisis is mostly going to be more of the same, said Omar Lamrani, a Middle East analyst for Stratfor. Russia has met its goal of stabilizing the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and seems ready to stay in the region for the long haul, or at least long enough to set up a sort of weird, war-tourism industry there.

And a stabilized Assad regime doesn't mean a peace agreement. "We will certainly see one of the biggest concerted efforts at reaching a peace deal," Lamrani predicted. But unfortunately, he said, a few ceasefires are probably the best we can hope for, adding that "we do not see a comprehensive resolution this year."

More Unrest than Usual in Latin America

When you think of Latin America, you probably think of drug wars, and Latin America will have some drug wars in 2016 to be sure. "Cartel related violence will remain high," according to Diego Solas, Stratfor's Latin America analyst. But Stratfor also thinks the main driver of headlines will be Venezuela, where declining oil prices are sending the country's oil-based economy into a tailspin.

Balla added that the firm expects to see "significant social unrest," in Venezuela, and that the country would "likely default"—a disastrous outcome that has been a long time in coming.

It's part of a larger trend in Brazil, Argentina, and Venezuela—a trio of countries that make up the stronghold of Latin American leftism. That historic leftism seems to be on its way out, though, in what's being called the turning of the "Pink Tide," as the region's oil economies decline, and citizens get tired of corrupt governments. And some civil unrest generally follows such political tumult.

Stratfor also predicts that Colombia will be likely to reach a peace agreement in the war between its military and the FARC rebels that has dragged on for about five decades. While the agreement won't mean instant harmony in Colombia, it would likely make the country one of the region's few nominal success stories in 2016.

More Mass Shootings, and More Black People Shot by Police

Police in the United States killed no fewer than 1,134 people in 2015 according to The Guardian,and the American public has become increasingly aware of—and angered by—the racial bias involved in police violence. According to that same report, 15 percent of those killed were black men aged 15 and 34, a demographic that makes up just 2 percent of the US population.

At the same time, mass shootings have become a fact of life in America. According to numbers gleaned by The Independent from Mass Shooting Tracker's count (which is currently offline), there were 373 mass shootings in 2015, which adds up to more than one incident per day—an exhaustingly high number that illustrates how pervasive these shootings have become.

It would be crazy to expect anything other than more police shootings and active shooter scenarios in 2016. In the US, these two topics produced more grim headlines, and sad head-shakes than any others in 2015, and without a doubt, there's more misery to come.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Screen Grab via the Wiki page of Geospatial summary of the High Peaks/Summits of the Juneau Icefield, the second-most edited Wiki page of 2015

Yesterday, Wikipedia released its list of the most-edited Wikipedia articles of 2015, compiled by Wikimedia Foundation's Aaron Halfaker, who also released a similar list last year.

This list can be loosely broken down into super obvious stuff that you'd assume people would edit (i.e., "Deaths in 2015" "Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant," or "November 2015 Paris Attacks"), as well as extremely specific Wiki pages such as "Geospatial Summary of the High Peaks/Summits of the Juneau Icefield," "List of the works of Bastien and Henry Prigent," or "Pangako Sa 'Yo (2015 TV series)." The former category Wikipedia surmises were edited by oodles of people, while the site guesses the majority of the edits on the terrifyingly specific Wikipedia pages were conducted by one individual.

1. Deaths in 2015 (18,121)
2. Geospatial Summary of the High Peaks/Summits of the Juneau Icefield (7,291)
3. 2015 in sports (6,163)
4. 2015 Pacific typhoon season (6,130)
5. Charlie Hebdo shooting (5,202)
6. Miss World 2015 (4,792)
7. ATP World Tour records (4,764)
8. November 2015 Paris attacks (4,675)
9. Asia's Next Top Model (cycle 3) (4,474)
10. List of the works of Bastien and Henry Prigent (4,424)
11. United States presidential election, 2016 (4,168)
12. 2015 Pacific hurricane season (4,008)
13. April 2015 Nepal earthquake (4,008)
14. Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (3,893)
15. 2015 in Philippine television (3,717)
16. The Voice (U.S. season 9) (3,605)
17. 2015 in film (3,592)
18. Jurassic World (3,561)
19. 2015 in South Korean music (3,533)
20. Pangako Sa 'Yo (2015 TV series) (3,472)

For a snapshot of whatever's trending on Wikipedia on any given moment, visit the English Wikipedia Top 100, and if you'd ever like to compare interest in one Wikipedia page with another at any given moment, head over to Wikipedia's analytics page, which is still in its demo stage.

Follow Drew Millard on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user David Goehring

For as long as there have been suckers in the world, there have been con artists waiting to take advantage of them. Grifters' deceptions can be both incredible and incredibly humiliating to their victims – just ask the Oxford historian who lost his formidable reputation swearing fake Hitler diaries were real or the man who "sold" the Eiffel Tower to a metal-scrap dealer in Paris in the 1920s.

But as psychologist and journalist Maria Konnikova explains in her new book, The Confidence Game: Why We Fall For It, Every Time, you don't have to be particularly gullible or greedy to fall for one of these schemes. Anyone who doesn't believe life has quite meted out what it owes them is also likely to fall for a fraud who promises they can. And our reliance on technology is making us even easier to fool.

Indeed, 25.6 million Americans fell prey to hucksters in between 2011 and 2012, based on the most recent data from the Federal Trade Commission's survey on consumer fraud. (The biggest culprit? Fake weight loss products.) The Confidence Game is a gripping examination of exactly why so many of us are such suckers for schemes that shut down our saner instincts.

VICE sat down with Konnikova to discuss why cons thrive when we're on technological overload, the insecurity and shame that bind the scammer and the mark alike, and some tips on how to resist that particularly persuasive Nigerian prince – even as new technologies allow the scam to evolve.

VICE: You explain that people are more likely to fall for a con when they have multiple streams of information competing for their attention. This seems like a pretty good description of many people's average, hyper-connected days. How do con artists capitalise on our constant connectivity?
Maria Konnikova: You are absolutely right. Few things throw us off our game as much as so-called cognitive load: how taxed our mental capacities are at any given moment. And few things create as much cognitive load as that constant companion of hyper-connectivity, multitasking. A con artist doesn't even need to do much to capitalise on it. All he has to do is approach us when our attention is distracted – we're texting a friend, checking Twitter, posting the view of the park on Instagram – and we become far more likely to believe what he says. Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert points out that we understand the world in two stages: First, we believe everything, and only then do we verify and confirm or disconfirm. Cognitive load disrupts that verification step, so we end up remaining in the "believing" state, which is precisely where the grifter wants us.

I was struck by the number of people and institutions mentioned in the book – from Sotheby's auction house to the United States Navy – who were too embarrassed to prosecute people who conned them. Do you think con artists pick their victims in part based on how much their pride would prohibit them from prosecuting?
I do think that's part of it: Who has too much to lose by admitting they fell for my wiles? The other part, though, is that con artists are expert at creating such a situation in most any victim – almost all of us can be held back by pride in certain circumstances. If you've been strung along long enough, and have invested enough emotional and material resources, you become far less likely to admit it. Because admitting it would mean admitting you're a sap, and no one wants to believe that.

Do you think there are some people who don't really want to know if they are being conned?
Oh, absolutely. I think most of us would rather not know. We love having a positive image of ourselves in our heads. We love to think of ourselves as intelligent, discerning people. We want to believe we're good judges of character. Being a victim of a con goes against all of that. Far better to keep believing it was simply bad luck.

On VICE Sports: How Frauds and Con Artists Crippled Scotland's Greatest Soccer Club

Are there any particular cons you predict will become more common in the future?
I think we're in the midst of huge technological changes, some of which we can't even begin to imagine. We're living in a con artist's dream land. It's like the Wild West of yore (and it's no coincidence that cons absolutely flourished in the days of westward expansion). Honestly, we are all becoming more vulnerable along with every rapid technological advance.

How have cons have evolved with technology?
Technology breeds crime in two ways: First, it has expanded the possible ways for grifters to approach us – social media, dating sites, and the like – so that our area of vulnerability, so to speak, is far greater. All it takes is for one weak link to bring down an entire network. And second, it has made us feel safer. We think we are terribly sophisticated because we've created all of these tech advances, so we let down our guard. Technology makes us feel invulnerable, and it shouldn't.

Right – you have a great story in the book about the evolution of the Nigerian prince scam. Do you think that will continue to evolve with new technology?
Yes, the original Nigerian scam was perpetrated through the newspapers. I'll leave the particulars in the book, but it looked remarkably similar to what we get these days in the 419 scams that pepper our inboxes. All you need is to give a small advance amount, and lo and behold, countless riches are yours. It's the good old Spanish Prisoner, one of the oldest scams of all time.

How will it evolve? We will always want something for nothing, huge returns with little investment – and so, we will always be susceptible to different ways of framing that same basic request. It might be via email, or maybe a Facebook request, or perhaps a Twitter follower, or through a platform not yet invented, but the basic contours of the story won't change. Someone will be able to offer us a lot of money, and we won't have to do all that much for it.

Unlike old media, which was largely run by publishing houses and other corporations, the internet has few gatekeepers. How have scammers manipulated this impulse to believe what might seem credible because it is published online?
There's a lot of that shows that people don't really discriminate between outlet quality online. Many are just as likely to believe some shady site as the New York Times. It makes it much easier for con artists to beef up their credibility – create a few links, a few profiles, a few pages, and suddenly you seem totally legit. One con artist I write about, Matthew Brown, loves to create Wikipedia entries and social media profiles, all linking to one another. It's easier than ever to build up a paper trail that's difficult to distinguish from the original.

Follow Elizabeth Nicholas on Twitter.

Screengrab from YouTube

As reported on Polygon and Eurogamer, University of Colorado engineering student Terry Garrett has finally completed The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the classic N64 RPG, having started the game in 2011. You might be thinking that's a long time to finish a game that takes between 27 and 35 hours to beat, usually. But this is a really special achievement, because Terry is blind.

Terry had previously finished the 2D PlayStation game Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee using just audio cues in order to progress, and the best part of five years ago he set himself the challenge of taking that approach to "seeing" the virtual world in front of him into a three-dimensional space. His chosen game was Ocarina of Time, and here he is in May 2011, beginning his quest in the Deku Tree, taking out spider enemies by listening for their movements.

Terry ran an emulated version of the game for easier, anytime saves – pretty essential with so much trial-and-error play ahead of him. And on January 2, he posted his final video, of Link's climactic battle with the Zelda series big bad, Ganon (or Ganondorf, if you prefer). The video, titled "Best gaming achievement ever," features in its description a thank you to those who'd been following Terry's adventures through Hyrule:

"Well! here it is! After about 5 years of working on this series, I have finally uploaded the entire play through first! a totally blind person completing Zelda Ocarina of Time, with just walkthroughs, helpful vids from fans, and save states. It has been long in the making, but I have finally accomplished my goal! Who knows what is next! Thanks for all those who have stuck with me through this series even after it seemed like I was giving up. Please enjoy the last vid of Zelda OOt, the final battle against Gannon!"

Related, on Motherboard: This Handheld Device Will Help the Blind Echolocate

I think we can all forgive Terry the misspelling of a major character's name, there, so warmed are our hearts by this conclusion to an epic saga. Watch his final 20 minutes with Ocarina of Time below.

Isn't that completely wonderful? Yes, obviously. It is.

Read more gaming articles on VICE here, and follow us on Twitter at @VICEGaming

A war veteran retreats into a box in the play 'Give Me Your Love.' All photos courtesy of Ridiculusmus

To put on stage the histrionics that exist in someone's head is one of theater's greatest challenges. How do you show the inner workings of a person's psyche to an audience sitting 25 feet away in the dark? For theater director David Woods, the solution is simple: get in a cardboard box.

Woods is the artistic director of experimental theater company Ridiculusmus, which is known for what he calls "serious comedy"—anarchic plays that tackle serious mental health issues via painstaking research that has taken him from psychiatric hospitals in India to schizophrenia workshops in Lapland.

For Ridiculusmus's new show, Give Me Your Love, Woods and his partner Jon Haynes have turned their attention to MDMA-assisted therapy for post-traumatic stress. In the play, Woods plays Zach—a war veteran who has retreated entirely from the world into a grubby cardboard box in a kitchen in Port Talbot.

It's the second part of a triptych of plays by Ridiculusmus which all focus on drugs, mental illness, and the sometimes positive, sometimes grim relationship between the two. Their previous show, The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland was a surreal and hilarious look at Open Dialogue—a radical treatment for psychosis that, if taken to its logical conclusion, could wipe out the need for pharmaceuticals altogether. Their next show, which currently has the working title of The Grief Play, will look at how the formal classification of grief as a mental illness in the DSM-IV will open the floodgates to billions of dollars worth of medical drug sales as we seek to swallow our way out of humanity's only inevitability.

We spoke to David Woods about anxiety, so-called "moral injury," and how MDMA can help us reach the darkest parts of our minds.

The World Mouse Plague, a play about mouse genocide, by theater company Ridiculusmus

VICE: MDMA-assisted therapy for post-traumatic stress seems like a subject ripe for drama. Was that why you chose to do it?

Ultimately, our solution, as for most of these things, is social inclusion. So we've tried to create this form of extreme social exclusion on stage. The audience will just see a box on legs in a room, but inside that box I'm doing basically what Ryan Reynolds does in Buried.

How does MDMA help people with post-traumatic stress?
Therapists in the US like Michael and Annie Mithoefer, who deliver the treatment, look after the patient almost as a houseguest in this very comfortable suburban home. They're with them for over 24 hours, they lie on a futon bed with an eye-mask and these headphones playing quite trippy music. The treatment allows the person to calmly enjoy the chemical effects of the MDMA.

What supposedly is happening is that your pre-frontal cortex is being stimulated so you have increased reasoning. But at the same time the fear, fight, and flight response in the amydgala is being suppressed. Your brain is also flooded with these very positive hormones like oxytocin—the attachment hormone you find in post-natal women—and serotonin, so you have this very quick feeling of bonding and connection with the therapist. All of that comes together to put you in the right context to receive psychotherapy. It's not so much about passive listening, it's more about meeting the voice of the trauma, in this case, and trying to understand or unpack it.

Is that voice of the trauma what you turned into the play?
Well, in some ways, yes. We didn't want to make a play that follows the format of a family drama where a big secret is revealed. So—and this is a plot spoiler—the character hasn't actually had any exposure to a traumatic event in our play. It's being surrounded by people who have been hurt that has traumatized him. It's a sort of secondary exposure. So he feels this pressure to pretend that he has experienced something that's worthy of his illness. He makes up stories but eventually he is exposed.

But it's not easy to respectfully stage this subject at all. MDMA therapy is so successful that what it does is actually quite undramatic—it neutralizes conflict rather than creates it.

Ridiculusmus's previous play, 'Ideas Men'

Have you ever taken MDMA?
No. Never. I actually do athletics to quite a high level—I sprint 400 meters on a regular basis—and I know from my experience of other intoxicating substances that it's the most powerful thing I've ever come across.

Though when you do this level of research and watch people under the influence and talk to them at length, you get more than enough, as an actor, to portray that.

In your research for the show, you spoke to a lot of veterans who have been or are suffering from trauma. How did their experience influence the staging and plot of the play?
We met a number of war veterans through organizations like Save our Soldier and Poppy. We spoke to people that had been involved in different conflicts, including Northern Ireland and the Falklands.

One of the initial inspirations for the show was coming across this small box that had been attached to a warship to detect chemical and nuclear attack. It was a sealed box stuck on the side of a ship, so the person inside is simultaneously vulnerable and safe. We later spoke to a woman who had served in the Falklands on a ship. She said our confined staging was very close to her feeling of being "Spam in a can" during her time there.

I only know one person who served in the army—an old school friend of mine. I approached him when we were researching the play, but he very quickly pushed me away. He said that it was a bit of a sensitive topic; that nobody would want to talk about that.

'The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland,' which looked at a radical treatment for psychosis

It must have been challenging to get veterans who have suffered that kind of trauma to talk about it.
Of course veterans demand a certain delicacy because you don't really know what's going to come up. We're not therapists and often people get quite emotional. One of the guys I talked to in Salford was initially very angry because he felt that the way we were portraying the story wasn't violent enough and didn't represent his experience. Luckily we had a psychologist there who defended our choice to make the lead character quite blank—someone the audience could project on to.

A lot of modern conflict, including the current airstrikes in Syria, are carried out at a distance—either with drones or from the air. Does that create a different type of trauma than that found amongst ground troops?
The phrase "moral injury" is used quite a lot in connection to this, and it's something being explored already in films like American Sniper and Good Kill. We train soldiers to respond to fearful situations in an aggressive way, but they're not trained in how to decompress and come back from that state. Even something like Homeland engages with this strange dichotomy; the buddy culture, celebrating soldiers, gathering in uniform, yet as soon as they get home they're expected to put all that away and behave like a civilian. We can't approach the subject in the same way as those big movies, so what we've done is present a sort of blank space where people can hopefully learn about this new therapeutic approach.

Making theater about mental illness is a balance between communicating universal experience and reflecting quite specific anguish. Do you find it hard?
While post-traumatic stress has been our way in, that's a catch-all term for multiple ways of being unwell. Give Me Your Love has become a piece almost as much about anxiety as trauma. I suppose it's how we've articulated anxiety—a boxed life.

This play is probably the most disturbing thing we've ever done. It's a universal existential horror movie, on stage. But it's also the biggest journey one of our characters has ever been on. I hope it brings some chinks of light to this very dark situation.

Give Me Your Love is on at the Battersea Arts Center, London, from January 12-30

Follow Nell on Twitter.

For the past two decades, the Webby Awards have sifted through the annals of the internet to unearth genuinely good things buried within the bog of crap online. Once discovered, those true gems of the web are given awards, which look like silver springs or duck penises, depending on where your mind's at. We here at VICE have been lucky enough to win a few Webby Awards over the years, and we stare at the shelf full of them here in the office when we're having a particularly shitty day.

The Webby Awards began in 1997, handing out honors to sites like Entropy8 back when you were still marveling over the Windows Maze House screensaver. This year, the Webby Awards will be celebrating their 20th anniversary, and in honor of their big 2-0 we've decided to put together playlists of some of VICE's classic Webby-winning docs.

Some of the Webby favorites include our documentary about the Mexican-Mormon War, the Motherboard documentary 3-D Printed Guns, and our series The Real, among others.

Give them all a watch in the playlist above. Also, keep an eye out for The Internet Cannot Be Stopped—the Webby Awards' massive project featuring collaborations with VICE, Pitchfork, Google, and other Webby winners.

Felix Lane, one of the founders of Open Barbers. All photos by Jake Lewis

If you identify as transgender or gender neutral, going to the hairdressers can be a daunting experience. Even knowing where to go can be a hassle as both traditional male-oriented barber shops and female-targeting hairdressing salons tend to have very set ideas of how our hair should be cut.

Even in unisex salons, customers perceived to be female are often expected to pay more than those perceived to be male. If you're trans or gender-neutral, getting a haircut can be disappointing, frustrating, and ultimately demeaning. Not only might you leave with a style you don't want, but in the process a complete stranger may have made an offensive and upsetting judgement about your gender.

This is why Greygory Vass and Felix Lane, two trans men from London, have launched a £25,000 crowd-funding campaign to secure their queer and trans-friendly hairdressing salon, Open Barbers, its first permanent home. Greygory says the idea for the salon, which he co-founded in 2011 as a pop-up, came from personal experience.

Felix Lane and Greygory Vass

"As a child, going to a hairdressers was always a really uncomfortable experience for me," he explains when I visit Open Barbers' temporary home, which they share with a pop-up bookshop in Kennington, London. "I'd want short hair, but the hairdressers would always want to make it look feminine. I didn't realize at the time, but there's this idea that girls can't have short hair and if they do, it has to be in a very particular style. As a teenager, I tried to go to a barbershop with my dad and they wouldn't serve me because I wasn't a boy."

Greygory cut his own hair until he was 27. "Then when I came out as trans, I realized there were lots of other people who'd had similar difficulties and were continuing to have these difficulties in their adult lives. People in their 20s and 30s are still being told they can't have certain haircuts by hairdressers."

Gregory cutting Nat's hair

Two clients booked on the busy weekday I visit Open Barbers have experienced these difficulties themselves. Laura Milnes is a cisgender female who describes herself as "the most loud-mouthed advert" for the shop. "I tell everyone how amazing it is. I'd been told so many times in the past that I can't have the haircut I want, even though it's on my head! It's like, why can't I have that? Just because of my gender?"

Nat Gorodninitski, who identifies as genderqueer and uses the pronoun "they," says that after meeting Greygory and Felix three years ago, it took them a while to book their first Open Barbers appointment. "I didn't start coming here straight away because I had really long hair and I was really terrified about getting it cut because I'd had really unpleasant experiences in the past," they recall. "I think some time around a year and a half ago I decided it was time for a big change and I came along and it was great and I've been coming ever since."

Open Barbers' temporary space in Kennington, London

Greygory and Felix's entire business model is designed to dim memories of these unpleasant experiences. Clients aren't rushed in and out with some kind of identi-cut; appointments proceed at a speed with which the client is comfortable and the styling process is defined by collaboration.

"The staff here aren't all-powerful experts who deliver what we think is the right cut for that person," Felix explains. "It's led by the client—they're the person who's in charge of what's happening and we're here to listen to them and facilitate for them whatever they want facilitating." There's no set price, either. Clients pay "what they can," between £10 and £40 .

"We don't think haircuts should be something that only people with lots of money can access," Felix explains. "There may be particular reasons why queer and trans people struggle financially and they need to be able to access a haircut that isn't super-expensive. Lots of people imagine this system wouldn't be sustainable, but actually it works really well. Open Barbers now sustains me and Greygory in full-time employment and also covers all the costs of the business, which we run as a not-for-profit enterprise. I don't ever feel that people abuse the system."

I believe him. After watching the warm, respectful, and intuitive way that Greygory and Felix interact with their clients while cutting their hair, I can't imagine anyone not wanting to pay as much as they can afford. Open Barbers isn't really like any other hairdressing salon or barbers' shop I've visited before. I didn't even get my hair cut and I left feeling significantly less stressed than when I walked in the door.

"We've realized that some people won't know what to ask for when they arrive because they've never been given the opportunity to find that. And that can lead to people feeling a lot of anxiety and sometimes defensive—they tell us about all the times it's gone wrong for them," Greygory says.

"Often people share things with us and we share things with them," Felix continues. "You may be helping someone in a moment where they need support and that can lead to a strong bond. I feel quite strongly that we're trying to create a community relationship between us and the clients. That's something that's really important to us. It's not just that you come in, get your hair cut, have some small talk, and then leave. We try to make it a more rounded experience and create a space where people can be who they want to be and share what they want to share and ask for advice."

Open Barbers are crowdfunding for a bigger, permanent premises.

This is why Greygory and Felix have decided to relocate Open Barbers to a new, larger, permanent home. If they reach their £25,000 crowd-funding target, they'll start renovating a space they've found near east London's Old Street in January and hope to be moving in by March. "We're feeling quite a lot of responsibility in a way, because it's not just about moving into a new hairdressing salon," Greygory says. "This is a great opportunity to build something that doesn't really exist. At the moment, there isn't really a daytime, non-alcohol-centric kind of social space that is led by concerns around queer and trans issues. The new space will provide a space they can have refreshment, read books, and look at the community noticeboard; or they might want to bring their laptops and just use the Wi-Fi. We want it to be a place where people can just be."

Donate to Open Barbers on Crowdfunder.

Follow Open Barbers on Twitter.

Follow Nick on Twitter.

Forget it being one of the best mobile games of 2015, the Scrabble-ish 'Alphabear' was one of the most fun games of last year, full stop.

I thought 2015 was a good year for video games. We played some amazing titles—20 of them made VICE's best-of-the-year chart, with our top three of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, Bloodborne, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt all legitimate contenders for lofty positions on any "all-time" list. That whole flare up of summer 2014 pretty much dwindled to a flickering handful of irrationally disgruntled people circle-jerking themselves dizzy. The Last Guardian, Shenmue III, and the Final Fantasy VII remake all got confirmed during a PlayStation E3 conference apparently beamed directly from our wildest dreams. But 2016 is going to be better. Here, let me explain.

Developers are getting to grips with the not-so-new consoles, finally

Remember the earliest days of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4? Knack. LocoCycle. Angry Birds Star Wars. Crimson Dragon. Contrast. Total garbage. And even when the games looked good, they weren't always all that much beneath the hood—both Killzone Shadow Fall and Ryse: Son of Rome impressed visually but fell apart under scrutiny. The same was true a console generation ago—the Xbox 360 launched in the UK with Gun and Kameo, both showing their age by the time of Gears of War, Halo 3, and Grand Theft Auto IV, which felt like truly new productions that could only be achieved on the most modern hardware.

We're seeing the same progression now—from games that straddle generations, like Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag and Call of Duty: Ghosts, to those that really showcase the power that the Xbox One and PS4 have beneath their black shells. Games like The Witcher 3 and Bloodborne have begun to illustrate just how developers can push these systems, but just as The Last of Us and Grand Theft Auto V appeared to use every grain of processing grunt the PS3 had to give, 2016 is going to present us with many more of those next-generation experiences every console upgrade promises.

Look at Uncharted 4: A Thief's End. Crackdown 3. Quantum Break. Far Cry Primal. Mass Effect: Andromeda. Horizon Zero Dawn. Mirror's Edge Catalyst. This is triple-A gaming finally catching up with the technology available to it. And indie developers are loving the current-gen consoles, too—Microsoft's ID@Xbox scheme will deliver Below, Cuphead, and Superhot in 2016, all of which are looking essential, and over on the PS4 there's this little adventure called No Man's Sky set for a summer release (he says), as well as many more intriguing console exclusives, like Eitr, The Witness, and Hellblade.

A screenshot of 'Land's End,' by 'Monument Valley' makers ustwo

Virtual reality doesn't feel so gimmicky anymore

Rather than simply applying VR technology to existing gameplay models, developers are now actively creating products from the ground up for the platform(s) we're all going to be wearing on our faces—at least, their manufacturers hope the headsets will take off in such a way. I'm still skeptical on VR working in the home, to a widespread degree; but experienced at events, in gaming bars and expos and the like, with friends around you, these trips can be incredibly affecting.

Take Capcom's Kitchen, for example, a terrifying tech demo for Sony's Morpheus that shows off the company's new game engine in gloriously grimy 1080p at a super smooth 120fps, complemented by DTS surround sound. I squirmed through it in 2015, and just about got away without shitting myself. Close call, though. It's not a game as such, more a punishment, but just look at the reactions people have had to it.

London studio ustwo's rather friendlier-on-the-blood-pressure Land's End is the sort of tailor-made VR experience that can have the doubters double-checking their opinions. Effectively the follow-up to the studio's mobile success Monument Valley, it's a puzzle game for the Samsung Gear VR that went through a handful of revisions before it was really making the most of the platform it was destined for.

"We're at a stage now where we can be one of the first to establish a language for this new medium," ustwo's David Fernández Huerta told me in 2015, "but the medium is so immature that we've had to start over a few times, to make the most of the opportunity." Expect to see many more studios reveal their own takes on this new medium's language in 2016.

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE's new film, 'Wolf of the West End'

There really is a game for everyone, on a platform that fits around you

And I mean that. Back in the summer, we copped so much flack from those aforementioned angry young men of the internet, for daring to suggest that someone who just dabbles in a few mobile games while riding the bus is a "gamer." Chucking semantics to one side, the point of that piece was far simpler that the blinkered minority made it out to be: Access to video games has never been better, and we should all enjoy them.

You don't need a console, an expensive PC or specialized handheld system to enjoy video games—if you're carrying a smartphone around with you every day, you've already got a brilliant way to experience this most fantastic of entertainment mediums. Don't let anyone tell you that the likes of 80 Days, Alto's Adventure, Hitman GO, Super Hexagon, Monument Valley, The Room series, Alphabear, or Year Walk aren't masterpieces on a level with anything "bigger" in scope, available for "proper" gaming platforms. These are all expertly made games designed specifically to get the most out of touch-screen devices. And the Wii Us, Xboxes, and PlayStations of living rooms across the world are attracting competition, with Apple TV, Steam Link, and Nvidia's SHIELD all hoping to grab a slice of television-based gaming in 2016.

Whatever you like, however your life is playing out, there's a game to fit you, that you'll completely fall in love with, I promise. If you've not found it yet, hopefully you can in 2016. We try to only cover the good stuff on VICE Gaming, if that's any help. Oh, and loads of girls play games nowadays. It's really not a guys-only sort of deal. Granted, there's lots to do in the games industry in terms of bringing more women into the picture, and that's true of the entire tech sector for the year to come (and beyond)—but if you've been put off getting yourself that new PS4 because you figured it was more of a dude's plaything, nope. Get involved. I look forward seeing you in a Rocket League arena, soon.

Just like Geralt here, gaming's getting a few grey hairs—but that's a good thing

Gaming is growing up, and playing better for it

With the average age of someone who regularly plays video games somewhere around the early 30s, depending on what information you look at, it's clear that this is not a kid's pursuit nowadays. But the medium's early adopters, those who played when they were in their 20s, in the 1970s and 80s, are now nearing retirement age and not giving up their hobby. I'm hoping that this means greater depth and detail in gaming narratives to come, as we're all tired of rescue missions and massacre simulations without any tangible meaning.

You can see that the leading men and women of gaming have grown up, too—where once we had Alex Kidd and Wonder Boy, anthropomorphic mammals and tubby Italian plumbers, our heroes of today are a whole lot more realistic and relatable. Joel in The Last of Us. The rebooted Lara Croft. Hell, it's not too hard to see something of yourself in the monster-slaying Geralt of The Witcher 3.

Sure, Geralt's an awesome swordsman, something of a fantasy-world stud, loved and loathed in equal measure by villagers across the Northern Kingdoms. But he's also a father figure rendered distraught by family ties doing their utmost to come undone, an outsider who's forced to lead a largely isolated existence, someone who most common folk wouldn't piss on if he was set ablaze by a dragon. He's complicated in a way that video game protagonists weren't five years ago—and 2016 is going to show us all-new nuances to familiar faces like Uncharted's Nathan Drake, Deus Ex's Adam Jensen, and, um, Link?

'Street Fighter V' is released in February, for PS4 and PC

Competitive gaming is going to grow bigger than ever before

Revenues for professional competitive gaming, eSports, shot past $250 million in 2015, and may break $465 million come 2017, which makes 2016 another year of incredible growth for this explosive sector of the wider video game industry.

Streaming numbers on services like Twitch and YouTube continue to rise—Twitch's summer 2015 "By the Numbers" report showed concurrent viewers peaking at 840,000, up from around 400,000 the year before, and you can bet that'll beat a million in 2016. And with (old-term) mainstream media players like the BBC in Britain and Turner Broadcasting in the States turning their attention to eSports in 2015, it's clear that watching people play video games isn't a hobby to take the piss out of. Well, maybe it is, just a bit. But not when the gameplay's as awesome as this.

"People watching other people play video games professionally has no ceiling in sight," is what eSports expert Rod Breslau told me at the end of 2015. "With folks like EA, Microsoft and Activision finally stepping up their worldwide efforts to support competitive gaming, and heavyweights like Riot, Valve, Blizzard, and HiRez continuing to raise their game, things look good for 2016."

Street Fighter V is imminent, too, which is going to give the global fighting game community one hell of a Gohadoken up the ass.

Nintendo's next Zelda game may be released for both the Wii U and the NX

Nintendo is back in the black, and back in the game

After a few years of swimming around the red, 2015 saw Nintendo turn a profit again. Okay, so that result had at least something to do with the Japanese yen depreciating against the US dollar, but still: nice one, Mario and company.

It's easy to point and laugh at the Wii U for being the weakest of the main three consoles available to consumers right now. But while it's fair enough to criticize Nintendo's twin-screen system for its lesser processing power versus the PS4 and Xbox One, and desperate shortage of third-party-developed titles, how's this for a not-quite-hot take on the state of contemporary console libraries: the Wii U has by far the best exclusive games of the three. Super Mario 3D World. Mario Kart 8. Splatoon. Bayonetta 2. The Wonderful 101. Super Mario Maker. Pikmin 3. Super Smash Bros. FAST Racing Neo. I'll count ZombiU as an exclusive, too. I'd take any one of these over 90 percent of the exclusive output on Sony and Microsoft machines.

Now you've picked yourself up from the floor after a bout of guffawing so raw you almost coughed up your Christmas spouts, what's no laughing matter at all is the sales for Nintendo's 3DS. Sony's flatlining PlayStation Vita hasn't simply been beaten by its only real handheld rival, it's been obliterated. Over 53 million 3DS consoles have been sold since early 2011, against something like 13 million Vitas (although it launched several months later). And in new business, Nintendo has now sold over 21 million amiibo figures, showing that they've been able to break into the "toys to life" market once dominated by Skylanders without breaking a sweat.

And next up is the NX, the ninth-generation Nintendo console that may or may not come out in 2016. The company is promising a completely new gaming experience, a machine that operates both as an in-home system and portable device. Recent reports on what could be a leaked patent for the NX suggest the controller will feature both a touch screen and twin analogue sticks, but do away with the familiar foursome of face buttons. "We're not building the next Wii, or Wii U," is what company president Tatsumi Kimishima told Time in early December 2015, and that gets me excited. Nintendo has always led the games industry in terms of innovation, and I can't wait to see where they go next.

One inevitable step, regardless of the NX's arrival, is a price drop for the Wii U. Nudge it down from around £200 in the UK, or $250 in the US, and it immediately becomes everybody's "second system" of choice. Speak to many PC gamers and they'll tell you that it's a perfect complement to their mainline setup, and the same should become the case amongst PlayStation and Xbox aficionados.

The initially Xbox-only 'Rise of the Tomb Raider' goes multi-platform

Seriously, it's great, one of the ten percent, and the sooner that PC and PS4 users get their hands on it, in Q1 and Q4 of 2016 respectively, the better.

And, just to repeat myself, loads of great new games are coming out

Really.

Follow Mike Diver and VICE Gaming on Twitter.

Check out more from Julian Glander at his Twitter, Instagram, and blog.

On Monday, Donald Trump released a dystopian-looking campaign video that, among other things, talked about his plans to build a border wall and make Mexico foot the bill. Now fellow GOP candidate Ted Cruz has released his own immigration-focused ad that invokes similar fears while taking shots at rival Marco Rubio and media elites—but mostly, it shows white dudes and ladies in suits slogging through rivers and trekking through the desert.

OK, so there's a bit to unpack here. The gist is that the media doesn't report on illegal immigration being a crisis because the sort of immigrants entering the country illegally don't threaten upper middle-class jobs— but they sure as shit would change their tune if a lot of lawyers and reporters were sneaking into the US.

"When the mainstream media covers immigration, it doesn't always see it as an economic issue," Cruz says in voiceover, as actors splash through knee-high water with their briefcases over their heads. "If a bunch of people with journalism degrees were coming over and driving down the wages in the press. Then we'd see stories about the economic calamity that is befalling our great nation."

Near the end, the Texas senator says, "If I'm elected president, we will triple the border patrol, we will build a wall that works, and we will secure the border," while Marco Rubio is shown on split-screen looking uncomfortable. Rubio has been criticized by conservatives for having been soft on immigration in the past, and the message to Republican primary voters is pretty clear: He's not gonna do that stuff. Fuck that guy,

The effect of immigration on wages and the economy—and on low-paying jobs in particular—have been hotly debated and are controversial, but in GOP circles at least there's widespread agreement that a huge wall or fence on the Mexican border is needed. On that issue, Cruz and Trump aren't far apart—the only difference is that the former is making the sell based on a cocktail of humor and economic fears, while the latter prefers black-and-white footage of explosions.

A guy dressed in typical skhothane attire (Photos by Alice Inggs)

The skhothane scene of South Africa blew up seemingly overnight and fell apart almost as quickly. Local slang for "hustlers," skhothane was a subculture of status, wealth-on-display as a fashion statement. Cut from the same cloth as the Converse-and-overall-sporting pantsulas and the hip-hop-inspired umswenko subcultures, skhothane were the "boasters," the "braggarts," the cash-money club of a cross-section of society that has precious little to waste.

It was 2012, and in townships like Katlehong and Tembisa outside of Johannesburg, this scene was common: crews sporting silk shirts and bucket hats, Italian-made shoes, designer jeans, and bottles of Johnnie Walker Blue Label. There were parties in parks, where contending crews held dance-offs that often climaxed in the burning of luxury items—something outsiders would consider gross waste. Indeed, to the rest of the world, these skhothane gatherings looked unsettlingly like the tragic society predicted by Steve Biko, anti-apartheid activist and founder of the Black Consciousness Movement: " driven to chaos by irresponsible people from Coca-Cola and hamburger cultural backgrounds."

This is what the skhothane came to represent. The possessions, the passions, the fashions, and the actions revolved around one all-encompassing creed: "Look at me; I can afford this."

What came with it, though, were rumors of arson, violence, and crime—wastefulness gone mad as cash was burned, clothes torn, food strewn on streets.

As soon as a local investigative news program called The 3rd Degree picked up on the craze, the scene began to devour itself as viewers recoiled in horror—and perhaps shame. Here were the 99 percent adopting what they believed were the values and characteristics of the 1 percent—the ultimate underscoring of a gaping wealth divide: an entire subculture that saw wearing two different pairs of $150 shoes as "luxury," while somewhere in the world an oligarch flew his pet cat to Paris by private jet.

But the images beamed across the internet were compelling—here was the new exotica, a hybrid of contemporary materialism and freaky Africana. The skhothane scene snowballed into an international youth culture phenomenon that saw even the BBC come down to explore this "bizarre" subculture. The program revealed the high-intensity with which the skhothanes approached one another, and themselves, including the tearing of money, the biting of iPhones, the stomping on designer shirts and buckets of KFC chicken, all set to the tune of a restless kwaito, hip-hop, or house beat while a crowd of hangers-on and supporters sip on expensive whisky and cheer for their chosen crews. These might not have been regular occurrences, but the media-selected picture was there—and the world wanted more.

As camera crews came down looking for the braggarts who burned things, the image itself went totally meta and the youth played into it. Whereas diehards in 2015 still think of skhothane as more fashion and flash than arson and assault, the media had a different story to tell. And thus skohthane culture was appropriated for the media market—it became part and parcel of the township narrative, appearing in Nando's ads, online cartoon serials, myriad local music videos. It became a brand of brands and swallowed its children, who were only too willing to take their materialism to the next level. At some point, the spectacle slid from legitimate scene to more of a media construct, and in doing so penned itself off on the final chapter of a story that had been written for it.

The shoes of some Tarianas, a subculture that followed skhothane. All photos below by Alice Inggs

So what actually happened during its inception? How often was cash burned? How often were clothes torn, fists thrown, and Lays chips poured over Lacoste golf shirt emblems in a move known as "feeding the crocodile"? Was the media skewing a story too good to pass up? Did it matter? In the echo chamber of the internet, the demise of skhothane subculture was spelled out amid a haze of moralizing, art world hot air and pseudo-sociological analysis. It peaked in front of the cameras and crashed behind the scenes. Where it's at now is hard to pinpoint—many lay claim to the legacy, yet few are in agreement as to what exactly this constitutes.

What is fact: skhothane culture saw its brightest night on September 29, 2012, a night where tens of thousands of skhothane and residents of the Thokoza township came together for the East Rand vs West Rand battle in Rockville, a suburb of the Soweto township outside Johannesburg. Three years later, there are hardly any skhothane to be found in this area. Police have clamped down on the often raucous gatherings, and a campaign of community vitriol has dampened the spirit of most. Plus, as "reformed skhothane" Lister Khotment puts it: "Skhothane isn't cool now; there are new subcultures, things are always changing." What is left of the once-thriving skhothane scene is a smattering of crews across Gauteng's townships, from Tembisa to Daveyton.

Tshepo Pitsa (a.k.a. The Don Dada) was there for it all. He was barely out of matric—the final year of high school—when the media swooped in and skhothane gained international notoriety. He featured in magazines and blogs from ELLE to the BBC, and is the most viewed skhothane YouTuber. His crew, The Material Boys, are strictly anti-burning and anti-tearing. For them, it's all about fashion and dancing.

For Pitsa, skhothane is simply a way of looking and feeling while going about your day: "We do what all people do, but we look different," he says. Is that all there is to it? Hard to believe post-hype. But Pitsa is perhaps on the money; forget what you've seen on TV, he warns. As cultural commentator and academic Sarah Nuttall writes, the "accessorisation of identity, including racial identity, through compositional remixing"—cutting across sartorial and sonic cultures, as with skhothane—is "decreasingly attached to the transfer of meaning... but rather inhabits a matrix of transfiguration." Skhothane wasn't—and, for guys like Pitsa, still isn't—some deep, artistic undertaking. Nor was it all superficial. It was about transforming oneself and thus one's circumstances. Fashion maverick Miuccia Prada knew the deal: "When you get dressed, you are making public your idea about yourself," she told New York Magazine. Fashion as elevation, as identity.

Pitsa also tells us why there are so few, if any, skhothanes to be found in this area, when just a couple of years ago it'd be impossible not to spot the bright shoes and floral shirts blooming across Thokoza park and alongside Moroka dam, where we stand now.

"That thing was happening and do these things."

A guy in skhothane clothing

Pitsa pauses, summing us up, then continues earnestly: "They didn't know that this would kill us and destroy our image. They asked us to burn money or tear something or waste something. We saw that this thing was killing our culture, so we started denying doing it. We are normal people like other people, but if we do something wrong it's a different story. They won't complain if some other person from some other culture does it. We do interviews like this to explain better. We sometimes come across newspapers that make up their own stories, just to sell the paper. And we can't be going around suing people all over the world. We'd waste our time and money. So I'm fixing things now."

The skothanes of 2015 are fakes, says Pitsa—counterfeits, undeserving of the title, shills of the big-name media who are handed bottles of whisky and fresh pairs of designer shoes, given a match and told to smile at the camera while they set it all alight. There's no centralized authority or regulatory agency to dole out punishment to those who don't conform, because there's no central idea marking out what exactly skhothane is. Skhothane is a culture—it can be anything that's put into it. And this is what it's become. Apparently.

Pitsa has also grown skeptical of an international media that he feels has no way of knowing or accurately conveying what truly takes place in the seething mass of culture and conflict that is a South African township.

Watch on Thump: Spoek Mathambo's 'Future Sound Of Mzansi'

Certainly when we asked the police in Katlehong (where the original investigative documentary was shot) if they received complaints about skhohane, the answer was a resounding "no"—something that renders implausible the idea that funeral pyres of Italian shoes and R100 notes were being lit up all over the place every weekend. But that hasn't stopped the image from sticking, or the various ex-skohthane and locals we quiz from talking it up.

When we asked another crew to meet us somewhere, their response was, "What do you want us to dress like and what do you want us to bring?" So clearly there are different types of skhothane—the question is, which are the originals and which are the counterfeits, and, more importantly, to what extent does authenticity allow for the dictates of the documentarian and not the practitioner?

The exposure of the scene by the media was only part of the reason for the disappearance of the crews. Police apparently started clamping down on showdowns that often became violent, and a black market trade sprang up as tsotsis (township gangsters) looked to capitalize on the big money being blown. Muggings became common at events, and original garments were taken and sold to unscrupulous buyers at discount prices. Local stores also began importing counterfeit skhothane styles as the subculture ballooned in the wake of the media interest. The skhothanes themselves were even rumored to have delved into crime to support their habit. It became a vast culture of imitation that had kids and community alike foaming at the mouth, albeit for different reasons. The suicide of a local teenager, allegedly due to his inability to afford expensive clothes and thus fit in, capped off a round-robin of negative press and publicity that seemed to sound the death-knell of skothane. What happened in reality was more of a divergence.

A group of Tarianas

The Tarianas—slang for "Italians"—are an example of this: a crew of ex-skhothane based in Tembisa who now do things their "own way." The expensive attire remains, but there's no destruction. It's about the "spirit of the Italian" as Thembisa Matsepe, leader of the crew, puts it. It's about a style of dance and a style of clothes, a kind of skhothane-lite, reveling in the sartorial as status symbol and dance skill as a measure of township savoir faire. It is, as they put it, a direct result of the continued community and media reaction to the hate that the skhothane elicited from the people around them. No one really owns a scene, but it's clear when one has evolved beyond at least the first cycle of decay. Matsepe says that many of the skhothane he used to respect are now in jail, and that he never wanted to be a part of that.

The story is murky, like anything related to street culture. It's predicated by an organic, evolving nature—no one can lay claim, truly, to what it meant, or means. The story of skhothane is complex and constantly changing, warped as it was by conflicting narratives and a frenzy of media coverage that left little room for interrogation. The Tarianas are the logical end product of the clash between society and street culture. Fashion changes, style endures. The crocodile has been tamed, but not before it was fed fat on myth and merit in differing measures.

The culture might not have had "meaning" insofar as its audience wanted an exotic nihilism prepped for YouTube or reality television, and the skhothane may have had their own unexpressed agenda, but for some the subculture became a kind of echo of something else. A sign of the times. In a country with endemic corruption, shambolic service delivery, a faltering civil service, regular national power outages, rampant wealth gaps, a plummeting currency and an increasingly restless, frustrated population, who knows how important that might be? Certainly the skhothanes didn't know—or perhaps they didn't care. People stared. They made it worth their while. Meanwhile, we saw ourselves reflected in the blistering curve of the skhothanes flight-path.

But hey, it was only fashion after all.

Follow Alice Inggs and Karl Kemp on Twitter.

Dime bags. Photo via Flickr user Miranda Nelson

A BC pot activist and former NDP candidate has mailed out a gram of pot and a copy of his history of cannabis book to all 184 Liberal MPs across the country, and he's not afraid of the police.

Dana Larsen, who was previously in the news for mailing BC Premier Christy Clark a half ounce of marijuana, is no stranger to this type of self-promotion.

Larsen told The Province he knows the pot mailing move isn't legal, but that he's totally OK with the possible threat of legal action—based mainly on the fact that he doesn't think the police will do anything.

"It's not legal to mail people weed ... but most of Canada's marijuana laws are made to be broken, so that's just another one," he told the BC newspaper.

"I don't think any Liberal MP is going to call the police, and if they do I don't think the police are going to come after me for a gram of pot."

The gram of doja is bundled with a copy of his book Cannabis in Canada: The Illustrated History, which tells the tale of how marijuana in Canada has come so far from its humble beginnings as just another herb, man. The book costs $10, which is roughly around the same street price of the dank it's sent with.

When asked by VICE if any Liberal MPs had received the pot yet, the party could not immediately confirm, although a media spokesperson called the move "very ambitious."

Toronto Police Const. Craig Brister said that the legality surrounding the issue is a little tricky, mostly because of the various investigations that need to be done for such a small amount of pot. Brister said that even if it's obvious that Larsen sent it, the amount of effort that would be needed to prove he sent a gram of pot in the court of law would render it a waste of time.

Brister did note, however, that if the RCMP could prove that Larsen sent all 184 grams, it could be a larger issue for him, but that the person who opened the mail is definitely not getting in any shit.

"There's no two situations that could be handled the same," he said. "Like, if you found a bullet on the side of the road, you brought it home, and you called the police, I'm not going to come and arrest you. That doesn't make sense. There has to be a level of common sense with these situations, and this clearly isn't one that warrants a ."

The BC RCMP detachment was not immediately available for reply as to whether they would be pursuing charges against Larsen.

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

Left to right: Carl, Dan, William, Chris. Photo by the author

William is the guy sitting third from the left in this picture. He's also the first man to hit on me in 2016, and he's my first kiss of the new year. As well as my second. And third. And... you get the picture. William is part of a group of British guys who travel thousands of miles across the pond just to get laid. On New Year's Eve, they went to San Diego on their international pickup tour, and I went with them. San Diego was an atypical place for them, as they'd made a tradition of following a model I'd compare to a plotline from the film Love Actually: go to a bumblefuck college town in America, impress girls with their British accents, and have as much sex as possible. Frustratingly enough, this plan was working its magic, and shamefully enough, it was working on me.

"I don't fuck my stories," I told William.

At this, William balked: "Who says I'm trying to fuck you?" Well, for one, his friends did, as one of them was making penetration motions with his hands to me behind William's head. On top of that, that was the entire point of their trip. Though this was William's first foray into anglophile-baiting sex tourism, his friends Dan, Carl, and Chris had fucked their way through several college towns, including Auburn, Westchester, Syracuse, Tuscaloosa, and Tempe, all trading off the basic assumption that British dudes are more attractive than American ones. Their operation has proven effective: the Auburn student newspaper wrote about the fact that they came to the town at all, which should give you an idea of how excited some American women are at the prospect of simply interacting with them.

In the 12 hours we spent together from 10 PM on New Year's Eve to a very hungover ride back to Los Angeles International Airport the next morning, I saw three naked girls in the flesh and heard tales of run-ins with Ron Jeremy, a British pornstar, and angry parents who tried to assault Chris for sleeping with their daughter in the middle of a forest in Pennsylvania. I spent the entire evening with them, yelling over a crowded table of several women competing for their bottle service, watching over the aftermath the next morning in their hotel suites (after all but William had gotten laid; William and I "snogged and cuddled," as Chris put it, adding that it made him feel nauseous), and riding along in the car during their last moments in the States.

I talked with girls who called themselves sluts for sleeping with them, but never once heard the guys talk down about their entire operation. They were adamant about not being cast as pickup artists in my story. But they readily admitted to lying to girls when they met them, saying they were writers from the British GQ, or the entire band the Arctic Monkeys. And even when they didn't, they were still using their accents to get pussy. Their very presence in these places seems to be the neg: we're here, we sound cooler than that guy you fucked last week, and we'll give you a more interesting story to tell than anything you could drum up in this town. Perhaps if every pickup artist had a British accent, a boarding pass, and a current passport, they wouldn't have to resort to traditional negging.

Here's our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity:

VICE: Why do you think it's so easy for you to hook up with girls in the United States?
Chris: Well we have a joke that girls in like, middle America are just like, "Help, help!" about the men here. You go to West Virginia to any bar and see what you're up against.
Carl: Backwards cap, sneakers.
Chris: They wear hunting jackets out to the bar!
Dan: We wear our street clothes out, casual clothes, and birds are like "Oh, you look so nice! You're dressed up!"
William: Girls give me a lot of credit for the name William here, even, they're like, "Oooh, it's so English!" It's as easy as an accent and a name.

The aftermath. Photo by the author

Have you seen Love Actually? Who came up with your plan to come here and do this, and when did it start?
Dan: About two years ago, I did. Other people come, my brother and that. This is William's first trip with us. We just thought, and not based on that movie, but in general, "Why go to Vegas and make things hard?" Everyone there is trying to show off, money and that.
Chris: But in America in, say, Arizona, or wherever, it's absolute nothingness! You know, in Westchester, Pennsylvania, it's forest for miles.
Carl: It's that pull. That pull of being foreign, of being English, that's a big pull here.
Chris: Right. Like, Alabama is the best place!
William: A British accent is nothing . We're like, fun-loving English people having a good time. We don't fuck anyone over.
Dan: Right. We all have regular professions. I mean, this is tourism. We just do it more regularly.

How many American girls have you slept with? Each?
Carl: Oh, I don't keep track.
Dan: Yeah, I don't think any of us have. I couldn't tell you how many in the last three months.
Chris: I mean, A lot.
William: Oh, like, five. Only.

How long are you going to do this for? 'Til you fall in love?
Chris: To be honest, I just take it a day as it comes. I don't like, plan my life. I don't plan on what's going to happen on these trips.

Do you tell anyone you do this?
Chris: Yeah. Everyone at work knows.
Dan: We keep a low profile, though. We have real lives. We don't wanna be judged.
Chris: My parents know I do well.

Have you ever had a girlfriend in all this?
Chris: When I went to Athens, Georgia. I was really good! I behaved. After we broke up, I went on spring break in Panama City. Nine girls. Five days.

Follow Crissy on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user gaelx

In a bizarre he said, she said case playing out in the BC court system right now, a registered massage therapist facing sex allegations is using his client's alleged body odour issues as a defence.

Prince George RMT Trevor Scott was accused of masturbating for 25 minutes straight while massaging a female patient during an appointment in 2014.

According to the College of Massage Therapists of BC, Scott "allegedly masturbated himself with his free hand, and touched or wiped his penis twice against the complainant's wrist, which was covered by a draping sheet." The woman didn't actually see Scott jerking off, the CBC reports, but heard him undoing his fly and then felt his penis on her arm. She later told the RCMP but didn't press charges; the police force passed the message onto the college.

Scott claims he wasn't masturbating, but was covering his face with one of his hands to shield himself from his client's excessive body odour.

While awaiting an official disciplinary hearing, slated for March, the college decided to restrict Scott from practising on female patients without a supervisor and instructed him to tell clients about the allegations he was facing.

Scott lawyered up and went to BC Supreme Court, arguing the order was unfair and should be lifted. He won, with the judge deciding the complainant could have looked up to confirm her suspicion that Scott was masturbating. The college is now challenging that decision in the BC Court of Appeal.

In order to place conditions on him prior to the disciplinary hearing, a panel must determine that the complainant's story is plausible. In this case, Scott's lawyer, John Green, told the CBC it isn't very likely that Scott was pleasuring himself for nearly half an hour while simultaneously keeping up the massage.

"It's certainly not something I've found in any case in Canada, and I've looked."

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Photo of Samantha Hunt by Tim Davis/courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

I'm not supposed to write in first person. Or at least, not about myself. That's the new way, I guess, or maybe the right way. But I don't know how to introduce Samantha Hunt's new novel Mr. Splitfoot without talking about Hunt herself, and I don't know how to do that without saying that I met her more than a decade ago in New York, shortly after McSweeney's published her first story. She came into the McSweeney's store—the weirdo one up on 16th Street and Seventh Avenue, not the one they made later that was dedicated to superheroes and had tutoring in back. I was sitting up at the desk that me and two interns made, which had my head about three inches from the ceiling. She came in with her boyfriend and she gave me a book she'd written and made herself by hand. There wasn't really any reason to give it to me. I was just some nobody who was sort of tangentially connected to McSweeney's(and on my way out, by which I mean soon to be fired, but that's another story). But I understood why she did it. She did it because she was happy to be published. She was so happy she wanted to make something and give it to someone. And I was there. It was the kind of thing I used to do, but usually when I did this kind of gift-giving bad things happened, like I got fired from a temp job in Seattle, and sort of vaguely accused of stalking someone.

Anyway, I don't want to ramble, though I could. I have more stories here I want to tell, but I'm gonna dial it down. My point is Samantha Hunt is a good person. She is a generous person and a creative person. I have this secret theory that all bad writing comes out of character flaws. But then if that were true, it'd mean good writers were good people. And we all know that isn't true. (I heart V. S. Naipaul.) But a lot of shitty writing, I think we can agree, comes from character flaws like pride, and the many ways pride expresses itself. But enough of this.

Mr. Splitfoot is Samantha Hunt's new novel, out January 5. It's about an orphan girl who grows up in a house run by a woman who holds séances. This girl's story is told, and so is her story as a woman. Ruth's niece is pregnant and Ruth comes to find her, and takes her on a journey. In this excerpt, Ruth and her niece are talking about motherhood, and the sacrifices of motherhood, and how having children makes you constantly fear their death. Which is true.

—Amie Barrodale

An excerpt from 'Mr. Splitfoot'

We'd be able to travel a lot faster if all these mountains weren't in the way. Up we go. Down we go. Up to the sky again. This road follows a ridge through state land, and once we reach the top, the going is easier in the clouds. I expect bear or moose. I look for deer-crossing signs. There's a closed ranger's station and four or five shuttered hunting camps. No large mammals appear. Around one turn in the road, the sun is setting. It's cold and it looks like we'll be sleeping outside tonight. But then around the next turn, we see a large building up ahead, a series of stone shards cut into the cliff like the Wicked Witch's castle. Its lights are coming on. There are diamond-shaped windows, some with blue glass, some with gold. We hear singing inside. Hymns, I think, until I recognize South Pacific. "I'm Gonna to Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair" and, as we get closer, "Willkommen" from Cabaret. Ruth rings the bell.

"Yes?" A voice greets us over the intercom.

Ruth says nothing. "Hi. It's Cora."

"I'll send someone down."

Ruth exhales in measured, forced breaths.

A nun opens the door.

"Good evening." A squat toadstool in very comfortable shoes and suntan support hose. "I'm Sister Leah." Dressed in a habit. Every synthetic fiber is made to stretch and shape. "What brings you here so late?"

"We were walking by."

"You walked all the way up here? Hiking? A pregnant hiker? My."

"Yes."

"Come in." Sister Leah pokes a finger under her wimple. She has papery cheeks. "Come in." She takes the measure of my belly. The downy fur of her chin trembles. We have a seat on a bench in the foyer. It's draped with two acrylic afghans. The inside of the building is as plain as the exterior is magnificent. "One moment, please. I need to notify Sister Kate of your arrival." Leah disappears down a hallway.

I smell food and cooking gas. There's a crucifix made of yellow pine. There's beige paint, a vase of fake flowers on a wall pedestal, and a series of portraits, Mother after Mother. The song becomes unmistakable, "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." Two windows focus our attention on the dizzying view and its command, Look outside yourself, but I'm too tired to look anywhere. I lift my legs onto the bench, going back to back with Ruth. She stiffens so I can rest through "Happy Talk" and "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?," a local favorite. "Some Enchanted Evening" gets interrupted. The convent falls silent except for the occasional door opening and closing down unseen hallways. Sister Leah does not return. No one shows up. It's warm and dry. I have a hundred one-second dreams in between the roll and jerk of my sleeping neck. I wipe drool from my lips. Ruth stands, walks the hall twice. I lie down. She studies a piece of framed calligraphy. "To set the mind on flesh is death." I roll my lumpy body to one hip. Ruth covers me with an afghan. She lies down on the bench across the hallway.

A bell tolls one, two, three times, followed by a rush of footsteps, people walking above. Then Sister Leah's head. "Are you coming?"

"Where?"

"The bells for Compline. Come."

"Compline?"

"Service." The bells keep ringing. "Come."

I can't serve anyone right now. I look out the windows, rub my face awake. The nun leads us down another beige hallway set with heavy wooden chairs. She totters, side to side. I totter behind. The hallway darkens up to a door. Nuns pass into a chapel. The crucifix over the altar is carved from dark wood showing Jesus's ribs and thick nails driven between the bones of his feet. On either side of the chapel, two pews are filled with robed monks. The nuns and a few laypeople find seats in the small nave facing the altar. It's dark, smells of wax. Sister Leah passes me a breviary for Ruth and me to share. "Don't try to sing along. And don't talk when it's done. Great Silence begins immediately afterward."

"'The Lord Almighty grant us a peaceful night and a perfect end.'" The monks sing in voices high as girls', even two who require oxygen tanks. The girls don't sing. The monks are round under their robes, minds clearly not set on flesh. They chant the Psalms in alternating voices, one team to the other, varying the amounts of silence between verses. The calculus of these sacraments could take a lifetime to decode back to 26 letters. "'Render evil to those who spy on me.'" Brown Jesus is almost naked, slender and long, tortured. The wound carved into his side looks like a vagina.

On the road a few days back, a woman stopped me. "Your first?"

"Yes."

"It's awful. They cut you open right up the middle." She gestured to her crotch. "You get what I'm saying?" Her finger points in my face. "They are going to use scissors on your twat. Got me?"

The monks sing, "'Do I eat the flesh of bulls and drink the blood of goats?'"

She was the fourth mother to tell me about her episiotomy. A collection of scars. Or maybe it's a hazing ritual. If Jesus is to move us beyond the flesh, why make him sexy? Because beyond the flesh is not the point.

The monks sing, "'When you see thieves, you make them your friends.'"

I'm shushed by Sister Leah as we file out of the chapel, though I hadn't said anything. No one speaks—the Great Silence—but I hear plenty: footsteps, clothing, carpeting, a cough. Upstairs the nun opens a door labeled ST. TITUS. One twin bed, a reading chair, a lamp, and a crucifix. Only one bed. Ruth doesn't seem to care and no talking allowed. So. She takes a seat in the chair and shuts her eyes. She's got no curiosity or cause for concern. I'm not like that. I can't sleep until I try the lamp's switch, look out the window, feel the weave of the blanket. I have to make sure I'm safe, make sure for the baby.

There are words in my throat like bits of gravel, questions about the monks and the strange songs they sing. Out of habit I almost loose these words on Ruth but stop myself. In the Great Silence, I hear my body like being underwater with the sounds of my heart, my breath, the baby's rhythm. Silence is anything but, at least at first. If Ruth does this every day, I can do it for one night. I switch off the light and lie down, but it's hard to sleep now that it would be easy. The baby moves a heel or elbow across my stomach.

Someone passes down the hallway. Night ticks by. Quiet as rocks that grow in layers and erode in too much sound. Does Ruth mind the silence? Is her brain still filled with words and thoughts that agitate her? Or did she give up all that when she gave up talking? In the air between us, her breath seems solid, a pill I can swallow and feel what it is to be Ruth, to be silent.

VICE Meets Norwegian literary sensation Karl Ove Knausgaard:

Eventually Linda Thompson got some of her voice back. I can wait around until the same thing happens to Ruth. I've got a lot of questions I need to ask her, like, How does she know herself without a mother? How does she know herself without sound? I guess she knows the shape of things that aren't there instead. Imagined or borrowed ideas like: mothers make food; mothers provide homes; mothers tell stories before sleep comes and remain steady when you are sick; mothers answer the phone when everyone else is asleep.

El was homeless when she went into labor with me, living on the streets of Troy, having contractions on the curb, and still she never hated me. She was alone through her whole labor. Nurses were few between in the welfare ward. She did the work herself, and at the very end an old man who'd specialized in podiatry in med school caught me. "You keeping this?" he asked her.

"That's my daughter." She held me close as she could, not alone anymore.

I've been a little shit, a spoiled, selfish brat. In this silence, when I close my eyes, I'm standing on stage and El's the only audience member, clapping her heart out. El made herself into a really good mom with nothing, rubbing dirty hands together. And then I slunk off. I had no idea how hard this was. All I've got is a loose plan: Tell the baby it's lucky to be here, then spend the rest of the time watching out for wolves. It's not much of a plan, only slightly more evolved than El's for me, which was something like: Don't throw bleach on the baby's face. That's a good plan too. I'll incorporate that into mine.

Even when I try to be silent, I can't because worry is like words, hard to stop them from getting in, messing up your house. I need to call El. And after we're done here, after I see what Ruth wants me to see, I will. I'll go back. I'll let El be a grandma. She deserves that. She deserves way more than that.

Ruth's hands are squished together under one cheek, a sleeping child from a Christmas card. One of the sisters shuts off the exterior floodlight and the window disappears, but I still feel it lurking somewhere out there—a clear idea of what being a mother means, and every day I'm getting closer.

When I wake in the night, there's a pair of knobby knees under thick brown hose in front of me. It's still dark. I look up from the knees. The nun smiles. Her headgear conceals all but a few silver-brown hairs, the thin ruddiness of blown-out pores. "I saw you at Compline." She tugs at a thread that's unraveled from her wimple.

Ruth sits up.

The nun continues. "So it's time to go."

"What?" I rub my face.

"Time to leave."

"You're kicking us out in the middle of the night?" Not very Christian.

"We're going together."

"We don't have a car, lady. Sister." I swing my legs to the ground. Dig fingernails into my scalp.

"No car?" She holds her chin. "OK. We'll walk."

"Can't we wait until morning?"

"No."

"Where? Why?"

"I'm leaving the convent."

"But we like it here."

"You wouldn't after a while."

"Why do you need us?" I whine. I'm tired.

"Because the Lord told me you'd come."

I look out the one small window. The Lord didn't tell me anything.

"I'm Sister Margaret. Just Margaret now. Come on."

"I'm Cora. She's Ruth."

"Ruth?"

"Yes."

"Come on."

It's hard to look tough while slipping on maternity jeans. I tie my hair into a ponytail. Ruth finds our bags. Why don't we resist? Why do I have the idea that I'm in training and must meet every challenge?

Sister Margaret heads downstairs and we follow. She hesitates by one door, holding its handle without opening it. She bows her head against the wood.

"Where's that go?"

"The enclosure. The cloister. Sisters only." Her wimple keeps much hidden.

"What's enclosed?"

"Exactly." She wags her finger, smiles. "Wouldn't you like to know."

"Yeah."

"I know you would."

"You're not going to tell me?"

"Why buy the cow when the milk's free?"

"But I was never even looking to buy this cow."

"Still."

"But what is it? What does that even mean? An enclosure?"

"It's space. Protected space, fenced in, walled off, boxed up."

"Why? What's in the space?"

"I can't tell you."

"Why not?"

"A girl's got to have her secrets."

The night air's cold. Ruth pulls on my hoodie, covering her head. It's filthy. We need a Laundromat. She adjusts the pack, hefting my bag up on one shoulder. The nun looks at the stars. Ruth starts walking and we follow. The nun switches on a flashlight beside me. "There," she says.

That's different, talking company. "Why are you leaving?"

"The Lord said someone would come when it was time to see my kid again."

"You have a kid?"

"Yes."

"How, like, how did the Lord tell you? In words?"

"Yes."

"How'd you know it was the Lord and not your own voice? I'd have trouble separating the two."

"Yes. You might."

I think that's an insult. "So. You have a kid?"

Ruth looks back at me.

"A daughter. From before."

"How long have you been at the convent?"

"Since she was eight months."

The mountains are moist before dawn. "You left an eight-month-old?"

The beam of her flashlight bobs. "I did."

"What'd you do all that time you were gone?"

"We support a brother monastery. I was a seamstress. Lots of silence." The nun uses her fingertips to tap her side, then her shoulders.

"What do the monks do while you're supporting them?"

"Pray." She rubs her hands together to stop the tapping. She moves faster.

"What'd your kid do?"

"Her father took care of her." When she looks at me now, the flashlight's under her chin, a horror show. "That's a cruel question," she tells me.

"Sorry. I haven't had anyone to talk to in a long while."

"Yes. Your friend's quiet."

"My aunt. She doesn't talk."

"She doesn't talk?"

"No."

"I'm pretty good at that too."

The damp air's medicinal. I like the privacy of walking at night and how it fuels dread and excitement. If something interesting's going to happen—say, aliens landing—it's going to happen in private. It's going to happen at night.

"To be in touch with our smallness," the nun says. "Closer to God up here."

"Feels that way."

"The world needs stillness."

"True."

"I wasn't always still. I sat with the dying. Cooked for the hungry. Once we visited prisoners. I made decisions. I helped pregnant women like yourself. I spun thread."

"Huh."

The nun sizes me up. "Why? What did you do back in reality that was so great?"

"Sold insurance."

"Wow. Real important stuff."

She's a mean nun. Even if she's right.

The sun blues the sky. We head down her mountain into the valley of the next peak. I have to lean way back to stay balanced. "What's with the show tunes?"

"Sister Kate. I'll miss that."

The road flattens eventually, and we head into town. We leave the berry briar and white pines. We pass through a forest of car dealerships, three on the left, two on the right. Despite their open, optimistic nature—broad plate-glass display windows, generous lots with wide drives—only one of the five dealerships remains in business. A battery of fast-food restaurants lures travelers off the clover-leafs. Sister Margaret sets her hands evenly on her hips. She stops walking. "What's that sound?"

I stop to listen. Water running. We must be back by the canal. "The Erie." We should have taken a canoe down the canal instead of all this walking.

"I haven't been off the mountain in a while."

"Why are you going to find your kid now?"

"Think she forgot about me?"

"No. But—"

"Listen." Margaret sharpens again. "Do you have any idea what's about to happen to your life?"

"Some."

"You won't ever know peace again."

I shrug.

"I was a terrible mom. I couldn't stop worrying. I thought about men with machetes, pedophiles, high staircases, electrical sockets. You name it. Once on the street, a stranger chucked my daughter under the chin. He thought she was cute. I went home and covered her with anti-bacterial gel. She was three months old." Her eyes roam the air behind me as she makes her list. "Redneck drunk drivers, brain damage from a fall off her changing table. I thought about her soft head all the time. I couldn't sleep and I couldn't let her sleep. Sleep looked like death. Eating looked like choking. Friends looked like murder.

"Hormones attack you," she says. "Hormones will try to kill you."

"You didn't let your baby sleep?"

"I imagined danger so well, I made it real."

"You didn't let your baby eat?"

"Her father took better care of her than I could." She looks up. "Motherhood," she says, "despite being immensely common, remains the greatest mystery, and all the language people use to describe it, kitschy words like 'comfort' and 'loving arms' and 'nursing,' is to convince women to stay put."

The sun lands on us awkwardly. I don't say it, but I think she's forgetting half. There's a lot about mothering that's good. I had a really good mom. We walk on in silence.

"Where are you going?"

"My aunt's taking me somewhere."

"Where?"

I hesitate. "I have no idea."

"Exactly. That's what I'm telling you." She looks at Ruth. "Maybe she's hardening you up into the warrior you'd better be before that baby arrives."

"Maybe."

Feels a little bit like more mother-hazing, so I prepare for another episiotomy story, the horrors of child birth, blah, blah, but one doesn't come.

"How old is your girl now?"

"Ten."

"Well, what are you going to do? What's the plan?"

"Catch a bus to Forked Lake. Find her. See if she'll forgive me. Let me in her life somehow."

"What if she won't?"

"Yeah," Margaret says. "Then there's that."

In town the nun points to the pharmacy where the buses stop. HALF GALLON OF MILK $1.50. The terminal's not open yet. The nun takes off her wimple and shakes out her hair. With the wimple removed, I can see her neck and it's a horrible thing. Thick brown, purple, and black lines, ligature marks, damaged and ghastly as if she'd been hanged then resuscitated or her wimple had been fastened so tightly it choked her. I worry her head will detach entirely without it now. She sees me staring and nods. "I'm telling you, it's not easy. Life and death are not clean, separate functions." She gently touches the marks on her neck.

I want to get away from her, but she keeps talking.

"Motherhood makes you a dealer in death. No one tells you this beforehand. You will become obsessed with all the ways a person can go because while it might be easy to deal with the fact that you will one day die, it's not at all easy—totally unacceptable—to deal with the fact that one day your child will die. Do you hear me?"

I nod. I hear her. I do. "What am I supposed to do? Just give up? Not even try to be a good mom?"

The nun exhales. "You've got yourself a real live one here," she says to Ruth, smiling. "Are we done? We're OK?"

Ruth gives her something, money maybe, like she'd hired the nun to teach me, though clearly that can't be true.

Margaret tucks whatever it is into her bra. She has a seat, waiting for the bus with a drunk and a soldier on a bench out front, feet planted for battle, rubbing her neck.

"Good luck," I mumble.

"Same to you." Then the nun asks God to be with us. Then the drunk hums "O Night Divine" though Christmas is still a long way off.

Excerpted from Mr.Splitfoot by Samantha Hunt. Copyright © 2016 by Samantha Hunt. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Illustrations by Alex Jenkins

Sexually abusing kids is about the worst thing you can be accused of in our society. The hatred reserved for those who do it is so intense that moral values we otherwise hold sacrosanct can be thrown out of the window in an instant in the rush to condemn. In the summer of 2013, for example, residents on a housing estate in the English city of Brighton burned a 44-year-old disabled man to death who they accused (wrongly, it turned out) of being a pedophile.

But pedophilia can be especially hard to live with for those who haven't committed a crime, and are forced to come to terms with an identity that most people regard as monstrous. For many pedophiles, that reality is the source of major depression.

"When I hear other pedophiles tell me that they are even relatively happy in life, I sometimes am tempted to ask them what fucking planet they live on," said Brett (not his real name), a 40-year-old landscaper who lives with his parents in the suburbs of a major US city and has suffered with depression since his early teens, when he first realized he was attracted to children. "How in the world can anyone go through every day living with this curse and not want to fling themselves off the nearest bridge on a daily basis?"

Sure enough, happy pedophiles seem to be the minority. A 1999 study of pedophilic sex offenders by the University of Minnesota's Department of Family Medicine and Community Health found that 76 percent had suffered from major depression in their life and another 9 percent met the criteria for mild depression.

"When you have a sexual preference that is as stigmatizing as pedophilia, then there's nowhere to go with it, there's no one to really talk to about it," said Professor Michael Miner, one of the study's co-authors. "So you stew in your isolation, which certainly makes one depressed."

Todd Nickerson is a 42-year-old pedophile from Tennessee. Struggling to come to terms with his sexual identity caused him many years of crippling depression. "I look back on it now and find it amazing that I never got to the point where I picked up a gun and ended it," he told me. "There were days when I got up and it was all I could think about. I'd tell myself, 'I just want to die. I just want to die.' All day, for days on end."

Nickerson's depression was made worse when, in his early 20s, he made the mistake of confiding in a cousin his attraction to young girls.

"Maybe it was an act of conscious self-sabotage because I knew my cousin and I knew he would spread it around," he said. "I live in a small southern town so I thought the whole town knew. I couldn't go out in public. I was constantly anxious and didn't want to leave my room."

Read: Does the Pedophile Next Door Need Our Help?

Nickerson is a self-identified pedophile, but he insists he has never acted on his attractions and believes strongly that any sexual contact between adults and children constitutes abuse. Since most pedophiles are secretive about their sexuality, it's impossible to know how many share Nickerson's stance, but there are at least enough to have spawned an online forum, Virtuous Pedophiles, for those who acknowledge their taboo sexual interest without acting on it.

One of the co-founders of Virtuous Pedophiles, who goes by the pseudonym Ethan Edwards, said depression is so common among members that they have an ongoing poll on suicidal thoughts. While he acknowledged the results aren't scientific, they are nonetheless startling: Nearly 90 percent of responders said they have thought about killing themselves; 20 percent said they have tried.

Edwards, 60, who claims only to have realized he was a pedophile when he was well into middle age, said there are common reasons members give for feeling depressed. "Some just hate the awareness of the attraction itself. Some hate keeping a secret. Some hate having to be single. And a few worry about offending against a kid. I think a lot worry about not downloading child porn, which is a very compelling desire."

It's hard to feel sympathetic for someone who is depressed because they're resisting a temptation to watch child pornography. But even those who work with victims of child abuse stress the importance of separating pedophilic desire from behavior.

"Pedophilia refers to a strong sexual attraction to prepubescent children," said Dr. Ryan T. Shields, assistant scientist for the Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse at John Hopkins University in Baltimore. "Many people who commit sex crimes against children are not pedophiles—they are situational offenders who are actually more attracted to peers. Likewise, many pedophiles never act on their attraction because they don't want to hurt children."

Of course, these nuances are largely overlooked in mainstream media, which tends to use the terms "pedophile" and "child sex offender" interchangeably. The truth is that not all pedophiles are child molesters, and not all child molesters are truly pedophiles, according to Dr. Shields.

"When we assume that only 'monsters' or total strangers are capable of hurting our children, we fail to see, much less act on, evidence that something might be wrong in our own social circles, because none of us believes our friends, relatives, or partners are 'monsters' and therefore they couldn't possibly be trying to engage a child in sex," said Dr. Shields.

Yet in reality, he said, "most of the time child sexual abuse is perpetrated by someone the child knows. In fact, half is committed by other children."

Read on Motherboard: One Step Ahead: Pedophiles on the Deep Web

The "pedophile as monster" trope has also helped encourage the kind of vigilantism which, even when it doesn't lead to the horrific violence in Bristol, England, can still have terrible repercussions.

In 2013, someone accused 48-year-old Steven Rudderham of being a pedophile in a Facebook post. It's not clear what prompted the post (Rudderham had no record of sex offenses, and no one had complained to the police about him) but the post, which called him a "dirty perv," was circulated hundreds of times and Rudderham began receiving death threats. Three days later, Rudderham hanged himself.

The zenith or, depending on how you look at it, nadir of the vigilante justice movement came with Dateline NBC's show To Catch a Predator, which ran for three years until 2007 and featured stings operations where men seeking sex with children would be outed on TV. (The series was rebooted last year, and is now called Hansen vs. Predator.)

Men were lured via online chat rooms to safe houses where they would find themselves confronted by the show's host, Chris Hansen. In 2006, the show's crew joined police at the property of Louis Conradt, an assistant district attorney accused of grooming young boys online. After SWAT team members burst down the front door of his home in Murphy, Texas, Conradt shot himself in the head.

"There are a lot of people out there who want to paint pedophiles as ticking time bombs. But I've been out for ten years and I've never abused a kid." — Todd Nickerson

Much of the investigative work behind To Catch a Predator was carried out by volunteers from Perverted Justice, an online vigilante group that has made it their mission to expose pedophiles. Nickerson was targeted by the group after he outed himself as a pedophile in an online pedophilia forum.

"They called my job—I was working at Lowe's at the time—and got me fired," he told me. "Then someone in town found out and printed out my biography from the website and started leaving it around town. My dad's boss found out and fired him. My dad was mad at me and threw me out of the house."

Nickerson left town and went to live with a friend in Michigan. His depression grew worse and he started seeing a therapist. Before then, he had always steered clear of therapy, fearful that if he told a therapist about his sexual preference they would be bound by professional ethics to report him to authorities. This therapist didn't report him, but told him upfront there was little she could do for him since this was his sexuality and it wasn't likely to change.

"How in the world can anyone go through every day living with this curse and not want to fling themselves off the nearest bridge on a daily basis?" — Brett

While some people are unbothered by the idea of persecuting someone not because he committed a crime but because of a sexuality they didn't choose and don't want, there are good reasons to be against this kind of mob justice. While studying adolescents who sexually abused other children, Miner, the professor from the University of Minnesota, found these individuals had often grown up socially isolated and that this isolation "more likely predicts committing sex crimes against children as against committing other sorts of crimes."

"The less they have to lose, they less likely they are to adhere to social convention. It seems like it's to society's advantage to have those individuals with a propensity for acting out in some sort of deviant way to have better contact with social institutions, social norms, social involvement. That's a protective factor," Miner told me.

So pushing pedophiles further into the shadows by persecuting them at every turn may well increase the possibility that they will offend. Distancing pedophiles from society has also made some adopt extreme stances, like Tom O'Carroll, a British pedophile activist, who during the 1980s chaired a notorious pressure group called the Paedophile Information Exchange, which advocated abolishing consent laws completely. O'Carroll, who has been jailed for child pornography charges, admits on his blog that his views remain at odds with mainstream thinking with regards to "children's sexual self-determination."

Brett, while self-identifying as a pedophile, has "nothing but disdain and contempt" for people like O'Carroll, who are known within the pedophile community as "pro-contacters."

"It's partly because of that crowd so many people are unwilling to listen to me and pedophiles like me," he told me.

Read: Inside Miracle Village, Florida's Isolated Community of Sex Offenders

At the height of his depression, Todd Nickerson found himself being pushed towards the "pro-contact" agenda while using a pedophile forum, which he describes as being "like a cult" dominated by a few influential moderators.

"That's both the advantage and disadvantage of the internet," said Miner. "It allows these isolated people to reach out and find a likeminded community. The problem is that in reaching out they might make contact with those who encourage them in negative ways."

Nickerson said he eventually abandoned the forum and as he emerged from his depression was able "to see things for how they are, and not for how I want them to be."

It was around this time he also discovered Virtuous Pedophiles, which he credits with helping saving his life. Like Brett, he now works as a moderator on the site and is committed to helping other non-offending pedophiles find a way to learn to live with themselves in a world that still regards their existence as anathema.

"There are a lot of people out there who want to paint pedophiles as ticking time bombs and when you think that way it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy," said Nickerson. "But I'm here to say it doesn't have to be. I've been out for ten years and I've never abused a kid."

And while most of us are understandably horrified by Tom O'Carroll's belief system, it's worth considering how he believes he got to it. He told me that when he was younger he "accepted the general view that pedophilia must be harmful."

"Seeing only a bleak future with nothing to offer to a family or society or myself, I tried to take my own life," said O'Carroll. "If I had received some sympathetic help before it reached that point, my life might have taken a course for the better as many would see it: not so confrontational, working with society, not against it."

Follow Paul Willis on Twitter.

Obama tears up while delivering remarks on his new executive actions to curb gun violence. Screencap via The White House

This article originally appeared in The Trace.

President Barack Obama is ushering in the new year with his sights set on gun reform. On Monday, the White House began the rollout of a suite of new executive actions designed to curb firearm-related violence. The move is a presidential counterpunch to a Congress unwilling to pass tougher gun laws, and represents Obama's most significant effort to alter gun policy since an earlier display of executive power following the Sandy Hook massacre.

Obama officially announced the executive actions during remarks late Tuesday morning, but a fact sheet circulated by the White House beforehand sketched out the package. It includes a plan for the FBI to increase the number of federal gun background check examiners and staff by 50 percent; a proposal to hire an additional 200 federal agents and investigators to focus on gun offenses and regulations; and a directive to the Departments of Justice, Defense, and Homeland Security to develop research agendas for firearms safety and possible procurement strategies for smart guns.

The centerpiece, however, is an action destined to draw pushback from the gun lobby, as well as questions from those new to the gun debate: a push to ensure that persons "engaged in the business" of selling firearms register as licensed dealers. How does the law currently work, and what is the White House hoping to change? Below, a breakdown.

What's this "endangered business" business?

Gun sellers fall into two categories: federal firearms licensees (FFLs) and private sellers. FFLs are regulated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), and conduct background checks on their customers. The same rules do not apply for private sellers who, in 32 states, operate without government oversight, and are not required to vet their purchasers to ensure that guns stay out of the wrong hands.

Under existing law, there's no expectation that a gun owner who occasionally sells a weapon from his or her personal collection—to offload an under-loved model, make room in the budget or gun cabinet for their next purchase, or set up a friend new to shooting—register as a licensed dealer. But anyone who sells guns with the primary goal of bringing in income, and "devotes time, attention, and labor" to that pursuit, is considered "engaged in the business." And that person is supposed to register as an FFL.

Why is the current definition a problem?

Because it leaves the question of who is "engaged in the business" open to broad interpretation—and by extension, makes the lawsubject to abuse. Private gun sellers can move large quantities of firearms while claiming to be hobbyists, not retailers, and never subject their customers to safety checks nor themselves to ATF oversight. Reform advocates have called for clarifying the "engaged in the business" standard to set more objective criteria that would in turn drive more sales out of the unregulated private market and into the background check system. As things stand, case logs indicated that persons who avidly peddle a significant number of guns are not merely cutting corners while selling to lawful owners, but instead have a tendency to be engaged in trafficking to the black market or flouting other gun restrictions.

How "engaged in the business" is defined also matters for law enforcement officers and prosecutors: It's one of the tools they use to combat arms traffickers, and it has proved to be a less than well-honed one. In November, an analysis by Everytown for Gun Safety (a seed donor to The Trace) found that federal prosecutors accepted only 54 percent of "engaged in the business" cases in 2011 and 2012. (In comparison, 77 percent of drug trafficking cases were accepted for prosecution during the same time period.) Of those firearms cases that made it to court, one-third were dismissed by a judge, and half of the cases that went to trial resulted in an acquittal. With a clearer standard, investigators and prosecutors might be more inclined to go after sources of crime guns, and more successful when they do.

The ATF told The Trace in October that as of that month, it had only prosecuted 57 cases in 2015 for illegal engagement in the gun business. Those who do manage to run afoul of this law are usually the most flagrant offenders. In one case, a California cop used his police credentials to not only sell guns without an FFL, but to sell gun models banned in California. In another, a former Texas judge sold guns without a license despite a warning from the ATF. A Chicago man boasted to an informant of the trips he made to gun shows in Indiana, where he stocked up on "duffel bags full of guns" to sell at a mark-up back home.

Does Obama's move close the "gun show loophole"?

No. It would more accurate to say that it shrinks it—but how much it shrinks it won't be clear until further details emerge. Reports had indicated that the Obama administration might set a sales volume past which a seller automatically qualified as "engaged in the business," but the executive action Obama announced Tuesday does not include such a numerical threshold. Instead, the White House says that sales quantity is one of the factors—along with how long guns are held before being sold, and how much a seller markets him- or herself—that will go into requiring that a seller be licensed.

How are the presidential candidates reacting?

Predictably. Chris Christie and Jeb Bush slammed the actions as executive overreach—with Christie saying the directives were evidence Obama acts like "a dictator," and Bush calling them "quite dangerous." Donald Trump promised that he would "unsign that so fast." Ditto Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, with the latter challenging that the presidential "pen has got an eraser."

The Democratic candidates, meanwhile, are welcoming the move. Bernie Sanders, who has taken heat for his gun-friendly votes in the past, praised the action on a political talk show. Hillary Clinton, who vowed in August to take executive action against illegally "engaged in the business" sellers herself if elected, tweeted that she was "so proud" of the president.

Late last year, some gun violence prevention activists close to the Clinton campaign told The Trace that the candidate would likely find political utility in executive action on guns by Obama. Republicans' uniform contempt for Obama's package, and their vows to undo it, mean that should Clinton gain her party's nomination, she'll be running against a rival who has effectively come out against the very popular background check system.

What are the risks of this approach?

In opposing Obama's executive actions, Republican presidential candidates warn that his reliance on presidential authority flouts the US Constitution. The legal scholars at the American Constitution Society have begged to differ. But as the executive actions are fleshed out, that may not be the question on which the fight turns.

"Executive action" is a catch-all phrase for policy pronouncements originating from the White House; executive orders are legally binding directives, like the Emancipation Proclamation. Put another way: The president could issue an executive action recommending that his employees spend time with family over the winter holidays, or instead give an executive order declaring the office closes early on Christmas Eve (as Obama did this past December).

Obama's new executive actions on background checks do not approach the level of an order. Rather than a hard-and-fast regulatory change—which can take longer to develop than Obama has left in his presidency—they represent less formal guidelines that the ATF will implement for gun sales. Which means that Obama may wind up facing criticism not just from those who think he's overstepped, but those who could conclude he has not gone far enough.

Follow The Trace on Twitter.

President Obama discussing executive actions on guns Tuesday. Photo via WhiteHouse.gov

This story was co-published with the Marshall Project.

Stymied by Congress and determined to do something to reduce gun violence, President Obama announced Tuesday a slate of new "executive actions" on the issue, which he has made a priority of his dwindling presidency.

Sound familiar? That's because Obama already tried to take many of these actions—three years ago.

Back in January of 2013, after the Newtown school massacre, the president unveiled 23 executive actions (and a dozen proposals for legislation), covering everything from closing loopholes in background checks to investing in "smart gun" technology to promoting research on gun violence—all of which he is attempting again this week.

A look back at how his 2013 initiatives have fared offers some clues to what we can expect this time around: not very much. Some of his original actions were blocked in Congress, where enthusiasm for the Second Amendment is undiminished. A few are just now, three years later, nearing implementation—and likely to be reversed if a Republican wins the White House. Some were more exhortations than actions.

"Most of the president's actions were small-bore, basically a punch-list of things he wanted to press ahead with, like 'maximize enforcement of gun crime,' and 'launch a national dialogue on mental health,'" says Robert Spitzer, a political scientist at SUNY Cortland and an expert on gun control and the presidency. "What he's releasing this week builds on the ones from 2013 and will hopefully be more substantive."

Here's a rundown of then and now.

What President Obama is doing this week that he actually did already in 2013:

Closing the "gun trust loophole"

President Obama is getting attention this week for acting to close the "gun trust loophole" through which felons, domestic abusers, people with mental illnesses, and other "prohibited buyers" of guns can purchase assault weapons by registering them to a "trust" or "corporation," thereby avoiding a background check.

The president already took this action—three years ago.

As part of his suite of executive actions from 2013, Obama proposed a rule that would require individuals associated with corporations to go through background checks just like anyone else. It is being finalized, and implemented, this week.

Closing the HIPAA loophole

The Obama administration is also taking executive action this week to make sure that states report those "prohibited buyers," including the mentally ill, to the federal database (NICS) that is used for background checks. One goal of this action is to reassure states that reporting individuals with mental health problems is not a violation of the privacy rights enshrined in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. This, too, was originally proposed in 2013 and is only now set for implementation.

Investing in "smart gun" technology

The administration is announcing new research and development of "smart gun" technology—personalized guns that can only be fired by their legal owner—to be carried out by the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and Justice. No dollar amount was mentioned.

This is a continuation of Obama's order in 2013 that the Department of Justice conduct research on the availability of (and that the private sector develop) such a technology.

Background checks

Back in 2013, Obama issued a "memorandum" (essentially an executive order by another name) instructing federal agencies like the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) to be more consistent about reporting information to NICS, the database used for background checks. According to the White House, such reporting improved dramatically after Obama's action: in the first nine months alone, agencies made 1.2 million additional records available to NICS, identifying hundreds of people who should be prohibited from getting a license to buy guns.

The Obama administration in 2013 also offered incentives, totaling over $20 million, to states that shared more information with the system. By the end of that year, according to The Trace, these grants had generated an 800 percent increase in reporting—but most of that reporting was done by only 12 states, while many of the other 38 have continued to share little or no information.

The administration, this week, is attempting to expand on those efforts by revamping the database, hiring over 200 new FBI agents to operate it, and making further exhortations that states should report information.

What President Obama tried to do in 2013 that collided with Congress:

Encouraging research on gun violence

In perhaps his most ambitious action in 2013, President Obama instructed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to resume its long-dormant research on gun violence—a nice idea that has since gone up in smoke, thanks to Congress.

For two decades, pro-gun lawmakers on Capitol Hill have threatened to de-fund the CDC for pursuing any research on gun violence. As a result, little is known about whether background checks prevent violence; whether and how often law-abiding citizens use guns to protect themselves; and whether, if at all, video games contribute to school shootings.

Obama's executive action was meant to rejuvenate such research, and, for a moment, it appeared to have been successful. The CDC sponsored a report on everything it would like to study, if allowed. But then the CDC conducted...no new research, apparently out of a lingering fear of Congress. And only one week after the Charleston shooting, Republicans in the House of Representatives rejected an amendment that would have allowed funding of CDC research.

Tracking of lost or stolen guns

In 2013, the Obama administration took a first step toward compiling a central record of lost and stolen guns. The Department of Justice issued a report tallying 190,342 firearms that had been lost by or stolen nationwide, of which 16,677 were reported missing by gun dealers—all in 2012 alone.

Yet neither the executive action taken three years ago nor today's renewed push ( to track guns lost or stolen in transit) will result in a complete tally of lost and stolen guns. That is because dealers are exempt. Congress, in an amendment introduced in 2003 by Representative Todd Tiahrt (R-KA) and permanently enacted into law in 2013, has barred the Department of Justice from compelling dealers to keep an accurate, complete inventory of their stock. Some dealers take advantage of this loophole by pretending that inventory is missing when it has actually been sold off the books.

Nominating an ATF director

When Obama issued this executive action in 2013, there had not been a director of the ATF for seven years due to the stalling of Congress. After he issued it, the Senate finally confirmed his nominee, B. Todd Jones.

But Jones resigned in March of 2015, and the job—one of the most crucial in America's battle against gun violence —remains unfilled.

What President Obama did in 2013 that has been partially successful:

Mental health

President Obama also took action in 2013 to make sure that health insurance policies—including Medicaid and other insurance plans acquired through the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare—would cover mental health care, not just medical and surgical care. This is called "parity": the notion that mental health treatment ought to be covered in the same way as a surgery or doctor's appointment.

School shootings

At Obama's request, the Department of Justice in 2013 provided incentives—in the form of grants—to jurisdictions that hired "school resource officers," otherwise known as school cops. Then-Attorney General Eric Holder soon announced nearly $45 million in funding for hiring such officers.

From webinars and training on "active shooter preparedness" to a new FBI website on how to prepare and respond to shootings to workshops and new handbooks distributed to first responders across the nation, the Department of Homeland Security is most definitely taking this part of Obama's 2013 executive actions seriously.

Fighting gun crime

"Tracing" guns—identifying where a gun was purchased and by whom, where it traveled to and who possessed it when—helps law enforcement solve cases and understand larger patterns in gun trafficking. With this action in 2013, Obama instructed federal agencies to trace all guns recovered during investigations.

Meanwhile, in many cases, the police must return to the rightful owner any guns they seize during an investigation. So Obama in 2013 also created a new rule allowing law enforcement to run a background check before returning a gun to someone.

Gun safety

As per Obama's order from 2013, the Consumer Product Safety Commission has recalled several defective locks, safes, and other accessories, hopefully making the storage of guns safer.

What President Obama did in 2013 that was largely symbolic:

The Obama administration in 2013 published a letter instructing licensed gun dealers around the nation to help private individuals run background checks before selling guns. Whether it convinced any dealers to change their practices, or made anyone any more likely to run a check before making a buck, is dubious at best.

Obama also sent a letter to healthcare providers informing them that they can, and should, tell the police if one of their patients has threatened violence—another minor step.

The Department of Justice, meanwhile, spent a modest $1 million on public service announcements directed at gun owners, explaining how to safely lock up their guns, report any missing or stolen guns, and more.

And in response to the president's order that his cabinet "launch a national dialogue on mental health," there was a conference, and there was, indeed, a dialogue.

This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that covers the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletter, or follow The Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

All photos by Luis Mora

Save for the couple times I've drunkenly had sex in public—once in a hotel room full of strangers and friends, and later on the ground at a reggae music festival—I've never been much of an exhibitionist.

As for porn, the last time I extensively watched it was when I was 12 years old and would sneakily peep X-rated movies on the family Pay-Per-View cable box while my parents were asleep. Over the years I caught snippets of stuff, obviously, but nothing really piqued my interest, likely because it wasn't geared towards women and frankly I didn't care enough to go searching for female-friendly alternatives. Suffice to say, I had zero expectations walking into a recent live porn shoot at Oasis Aqualounge, a sex club in Toronto, but I was certainly intrigued.

The monthly event, called Money Shot, offers erotic photographers, pornographers, models, and actors a chance to do their thing at various locations set-up throughout the club. The venue itself is a restored 19th century mansion with a heated pool and courtyard, two bars, a dance floor, several stylized play areas, and a private bedroom spread out over four floors.

Basically, the deal is industry folks shoot/film free of charge and the club's patrons get to watch it all go down (men/couples pay $50, single women are free).

"I have friends who are involved in various areas of the sex industry and I thought it would be cool to bring them all together to share a collective, sexual energy," event producer and marketing director for the club, Fatima Mechtab, told me.