All photos by Jake Lewis

It's incomprehensibly grim to think that extreme poverty to the point of food banking exists in our Keep Calm and Carry On plushie toy society. To many, this level of poverty is something only heard of. Poverty is abstract until you've seen it.

EasyJet baron Stelios Haji-Ioannou has taken it upon himself to open a place called easyFoodstore, which is aimed at people who are too poor to buy groceries at budget stores like Lidl and Aldi, but are not quite destitute enough for food banks. Here he will sell "food honestly priced", with "no expensive brands". His charity, which gives food to the needy in Greece and Cyprus, inspired the shop. On its inaugural day of business, everything in the store was priced at 25p. And it's been such a success that on Wednesday, it was forced to close after running out of stock. It's due to reopen on Friday.

Usually when shops advertise their items at extremely low prices, people swarm like flies to shit. We've seen enough shared Facebook videos of people on Black Friday falling over their own feet trying to buy three toasters. So where was the mad rush at easyFood? You could get enough grub to last you until summer for less than £20, but where were the security guards pushing people back into the road with cow prodders? There was a smattering of people in there, mostly curious passers-by and local office workers, coming to get snacks or a cheeky tin of ravioli.

The store is placed inside another "easy" business venture, easyBus, which appears to have moved. Can you guess what service they provide? Its home, Hanger Lane in north west London, is a place familiar to most people as a prefix to the word "gyratory" on radio traffic reports, usually talking about how congested it is. It's basically a large roundabout surrounded by tile shops, burger bars and residential roads. It would be unfair to critique it as a place, as it serves primarily as a gateway, home to the North Circular and Western Avenue, paths to the suburbs and beyond.

easyFoodstore is sparsely decorated, with items stacked on rudimentary shelves, like the pantry in an army mess hall. The usual suspects were there: tinned beans, tinned peas, vats of salt, bags of flour, jaffa cakes, rice, pasta, pasta sauces. It was like being in a doomsday prepper's fridge. How can Stelios afford to sell all this stuff cheaply? Matthew Gwyther, editor of business magazine Management Today says, plainly: "He can't."

"Maybe his business model is that you'll only pay 25p for you bag of teabags at the beginning, then they'll bump the price up to 40p, or something slightly squalid like that," he says. "The central reason why it's a bad idea is that we all need food to live. It's not a lifestyle choice, like going to the gym or getting a budget flight. It seems to me a kind of race to the bottom between Lidl and Aldi. I think it's thoroughly tasteless. People who are too poor to eat properly is something different altogether and needs to be handled with some degree of care."

In an interview with the Independent, easyGroup press director Richard Shackleton appeared to confirm Gwyther's theory, stating: "With Lidl and Aldi drifting upmarket it has left space at the bottom between them and food banks. Yes, there is a strong philanthropic thread to this, but we are also looking to make money."

Budget supermarkets engaging in a bidding war over who can sell us the cheapest tinned food will not get people out of poverty, or liven up the painful mediocrity of trying to feed yourself for less. I stood outside easyFoodstore and watched an old man walking slowly out with his bags of shopping, head bowed, not wanting to make eye contact with any of the journalists, like me, who had come down to take a look. Maybe he didn't want to be asked stupid questions like, "Why are you here?" This was hunger made spectacle.

Being skint and being poor are two different things. easyFoodstore has a bizarre agony to it, from its gloomy location to its uncomfortable interior and its cheap, laminated signs, but most of all, to its sense of necessity. It's easy to wax poetic about the vibe of the place and how grim it is, but the fact that it exists in the first place is the problem, not how it stands now. For many, the act of going to a food bank is imbued with a great sense of shame. Perhaps with prices this low, that necessity would be slightly alleviated, even though this is clearly a shop designed to feel like what it is – somewhere you have no choice but to go to.

Whether it is genuinely a charity move, or more Stelios Haji-Ioannou trying to get a piece of the rocketing profits of budget supermarkets like Aldi and Lidl, it makes little difference to the people who actually need to shop here. The "easy" brand treads a weird line between giving you services for no money, but making them as unbearably basic as possible. easyFoodstore is bad and it's dark, but sadly, it also serves a purpose.

@joe_bish

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A little cow (Photo by Suzette via)

I think, deep down, we all know the meat industry isn't that great. Whether you've watched Cowspiracy, read those George Monbiot-type articles about how meat production is catastrophically bad for the environment, or just listened to someone at a party go on about how Food, Inc. was, like, so dark it almost made them give up eating burgers, you'll be aware of the ramifications of industrial animal farming.

So it's no wonder that around 20 percent of 16 to 24-year-olds in the UK now follow a vegetarian or vegan diet, and around 12 percent of all adults in the UK are vegetarian. The amount of red meat being eaten in Britain has declined almost year-on-year since 1950, and this trend looks set to continue.

Which makes you wonder: what would actually happen if the whole of Britain just stopped eating meat? Would farmers all lose their jobs? Would we be healthier and happier? Would the streets look like something out of a Mike Leigh film, greyscale, with loads of people sat around starved of protein, their hair falling out, their translucent skin bruising at the lightest touch?

To find out, I spoke to experts in food policy, environmental science and meat-related health.

All photos below from the Anchor village cows advert, 2011

IMPACT ON THE ECONOMY AND FARMING
Professor Timothy Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University London

VICE: Hi Tim. Would it be possible to maintain a farming industry without animals here in Britain?
Timothy Lang: Well, that's a big debate going on in my world: can we imagine British farming without animals? Or can we imagine carrying on doing what we're doing and making it even more brutal? Animals, cows and sheep are major sources of greenhouse gasses, and we're using a lot of "hidden" land for them. Amazonian forest is being chopped down for the purpose of growing soya, which is then fed to the animals in Europe which you eat. We're growing a huge amount of cereals here in Britain and across Europe, which are then fed to animals. Animals used to be part of a fertility cycle, a rotation in farming, but have become an end in themselves. We've made animals not just competitors to us in terms of land use, but also major users of land, resources and indeed food. We have to dramatically reduce animal use in Britain.

What would actually happen to our farming landscape if meat was taken out of the equation?
Well, for a start we would dramatically increase our horticulture. The good things for your diet and mine are actually plants. Fruits, vegetables, cereals; staple foods. And there has been a catastrophic drop in the production of these things in Britain. If we stopped eating meat we would have to resuscitate and reinvest and re-skill ourselves in horticulture. And we have to do that anyway, certainly with climate change. When I was a farmer in the uplands on the Pennines, 50 years or so ago, even then, we'd experimented with growing crops in parts where people would say, "Oh, that's sheep country." You could grow swedes, turnips, brassicas and potatoes very easily and very well, and historically they did.

We would have to re-skill a lot. It would mean the transformation of British agriculture. The politicians are frightened, but they have to address this issue. Climate change is going to make them do it. The food system is being forced to change by climate, by water stress, by population changes, by geopolitics. We've got a food system based on a population being well fed by very, very intense agricultural methods. We now know that has to change.

How long would it take for farmers to re-learn and shift their methods?
That can't be done tomorrow. It's taken 50 to 70 years to get into the mess we're now in. We have to make a very dramatic change in approach very quickly. We should have a 30 year plan. The Labour government started a 20 year plan and then the coalition abolished it and nothing happened. They went back to a Thatcherite notion that markets will resolve themselves. The current government is working on a 25 year food strategy, but it's all about supporting industry and industry taking a lead. Industry cannot resolve this. It's going to have to be consumer culture changes. I'm a critic of the thinking that's going on at the moment in government. As a public, we're going to have to take the movement towards discussion.

Thanks, Tim.

IMPACT ON THE ENVIRONMENT
Professor Nick Hewitt, Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry, Department of Environmental Science, Lancaster University

VICE: Hi Nick. What would happen to the environment if we all stopped eating meat?
Nick Hewitt: Eating meat makes a large contribution to the greenhouse gasses that people in the UK produce. If everyone stopped eating it, the food-related greenhouse gas emissions would reduce by about 35 percent. It's one very effective way to make a big dent in emissions.

Why?
It's particularly cattle – beef is by far the worst. Cows chew grass and digest it in conditions in the stomach with no oxygen, and that releases methane. That's the principle reason. Also, the way the grassland is fertilised causes greenhouse gas emissions. Transporting the food around does contribute, but it's relatively small, unless you use air freight. Lorries aren't too bad. The biggest lifestyle choice you could make to reduce greenhouse gasses is to stop eating meat. It's hard to think of another single lifestyle change we could make that would have the same effect.

So using the same farmland for plants would be the quickest way to reduce emissions?
Yeah. You'd still have to be careful with your fertilisation, but using land for meat is the least efficient way of producing protein. It's just an inefficient way of producing food. By growing plants on the land and eating those, it's much more efficient, so we would be greatly reducing those greenhouse gas emissions.

Would it make more of a difference if everyone was vegan?
Yeah, it would make more of a difference, because obviously if you're vegetarian but eat cheese that's related to the dairy industry and cows. If you eliminate cheese and meat, you'd reduce emissions even further.

Hypothetically, then, meat-free Britain is a lot cleaner.
Our government has put targets on the national greenhouse gas emissions and said that, by 2050, UK emissions have to be reduced by 80 percent of what they were in 2010. It's very hard to see how we'd ever meet that target without reducing emissions from every sector – transport, heating, fuel, food. Food currently makes up about 20 percent of total emissions. If the government wants to reduce by that overall figure, we have to reduce emissions from food.

Why aren't the government telling us that via campaigns or something?
What they are trying to do at the moment is reduce food waste. So, obviously, the more food wasted – and there is a hell of a lot of food wasted – the more unnecessary emissions there are. So if you cut waste, you'll cut emissions. That's the government focus right now. If the government are serious about this they would try to introduce interventions to get people to eat less meat or go vegetarian. The numbers show that. So, hypothetically, if we were all vegetarian in this country, we'd change things drastically. Sadly, in some very large countries, meat is seen as a status symbol and its consumption is increasing drastically. Anything we can do to help that is a help.

IMPACT ON THE HEALTH OF THE POPULATION
Ian Givens, Professor of Food Chain Nutrition at University of Reading's School of Agriculture

VICE: What would happen to the health of British people if we all gave up meat?
Ian Givens: There isn't any real association between white meat and cancer or cardiovascular problems. It's tends to be relatively neutral.

Red meat, though, is a different story. There is an issue in Britain of malnutrition of young females. There is good evidence from several surveys that women, especially between the ages of 11 and 18, have a suboptimal level of a number of key nutrients, and one is iron. In fact, half the population are below the lowest level of iron intake. If you look back over the last 10 years or more, there's been a consistent decrease in iron intake, and that – without too much of a doubt – is down to the reduction of red meat intake, because it's the best form of iron. The question is: does that matter? Probably not in the short term, but one wonders what happens in the long term.

So we'd have to make sure we were supplementing young women especially with more nutrients?
That's what the evidence suggests. There are other issues about zinc, too, and vitamin B12, which would have to be supplemented. But then you have to balance that with the fact that red meat increases the risk of getting colon cancer. Most evidence now says that processed meat has a high increase of relative risk for colon cancer, higher than red meat. If you look at the increase of cancer per amount of red meat per day it's still quite striking.

Overall, then, do you think this new Britain would be healthier?
There would be some health benefits. Colon cancer has the highest prevalence of any cancer that's available to both men and women. The evidence suggests that the risks of colon cancer associated with processed meat especially would be reduced. Processed meat is bacon, sausages, salami, deli meat, hotdogs, luncheon meat and so on. I'm less sure about red and white meats. The BMIs of vegetarians and vegans are also significantly lower and they have lower risks associated with obesity.

Thanks, Ian.

@hannahrosewens

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A screenshot from the 'Ghostbusters' level pack for 'Lego Dimensions'

I finished the Ghostbusters level pack for Lego Dimensions last week, actually on the very same day that news emerged that the next film in the franchise – the Kristen Wiig- and Melissa McCarthy-starring reboot, directed by Freaks and Geeks creator Paul Feig, in cinemas this summer – will have a video game tie-in. Or at least, it might have one – a Retail Merchandiser report on forthcoming Sony consumer products (Sony owns Columbia Pictures, the studio behind the previous two 'Busters movies of the 1980s) states that "a new full-fledged Ghostbusters video game from Activision will release alongside the movie on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4".

Colour me several slimy green shades of actually quite excited, mainly because the Lego expansion pack has scratched at an itch that I'd forgotten I had: the desire to play through a decent video game based on one of my favourite series from my pre-teen years of pressure-free existence. If you, like me, are a child of the 1980s (and yes, I know, millennials exist and will ultimately inherit the Earth; but give it a rest for now, Generation Y), then you know the original Ramis-and-Aykroyd-and-Murray-and-Hudson Ghostbusters of 1984 is amongst the greatest movies of all time. I needn't go into the hows and whys – that's just how it is.

'The Real Ghostbusters' promo. I used to love this show so much.

The sequel of 1989? Yeah, not so much – but the animated The Real Ghostbusters, which began in 1986 and featured highly stylised versions of the first film's spectre-fighting four, was a lot of fun and very quickly convinced me to nag my parents for the accompanying toys. An Egon whose tie would flip up if you squeezed his arm. Ecto-1 with a seat on the top because, obviously, that's where you can bust the best from. The team's fire station headquarters with slime-slots in the roof and floors, so you could ruin your Christmas present within 30 seconds of opening it by pouring brightly coloured gunk all over the thing.

Bringing this back to video games, while I loved the fan service the Lego Dimensions pack provides – it's basically the first movie, in virtual block form, with more physical humour and a whole bunch of lines from the film shifted about in the narrative to fit said scenes of silliness – it's unlikely to last all that long in the memory.

Playing as any one of the four Ghostbusters – once the story itself is done, and you set about exploring the section of New York that makes up its free-roam hub – is a neat touch, but they constantly repeat select few lines from the game's parent picture: "I collect spores, moulds, and fungus"; "You're always so concerned about your reputation." They each play the same way, too. And while it's a genuine treat to face-off against a blocky Gozer, take down a mammoth Marshmallow Man, and hear Winston cry, "I love this town," when Stay Puft's been scorched into so much burning gloop, the story's only ever on wheels – it knows its destination, and you're merely a passenger, unable to really affect the direction of how this tale plays out.

Article continues after the video below

Watch VICE's film in our The Real series, The Real 'X-Files'?

Of course, this isn't an uncommon aspect of licensed video games – if they're based on a movie, chances are they'll stick to the script. And yet, the first Ghostbusters game I ever played – the first video game to be based on the franchise – wasn't quite such a stickler for partner-media accuracy.

Designed by Pitfall-maker David Crane at Activision, and first released in 1984 (though I played it much later than that, owning the '86-released ZX Spectrum version), Ghostbusters the game was just as much a business management simulation as it was an all-action, phantom-trapping adventure. It was tactical, methodical and mature in a way that Lego Dimensions' take on busting – it takes the term literally, with most environmental assets breakable into rebuildable pieces or collectable studs – most certainly isn't. You have to stock up on gear, get your modifiable vehicles out on the streets of New York, and make money. That's the primary goal here: not to immediately rid the city of malevolent spirits, although that helps, but to collect enough cash to stay in business until a climatic encounter with a disturbingly diminutive sweet-tooth-tempting sailor. (He was a little bigger on the Commodore 64 version, but still less threatening than Casper wrapped in candyfloss.)

The first 'Ghostbusters' game really captured the look of the movie, I'm sure you agree (via mecha-neko's Photobucket)

I appreciate that the "real" Ghostbusters embarked on their paranormal business venture to turn a profit, but it felt unusual to me, as a kid playing this game in a bedroom-above-a-garage, to have to count dollars and cents instead of ploughing through zap-and-trap sequences without considering the cost of using these unlicensed nuclear accelerators. I don't recall the lure of lucre being a necessary evil of progression come the game adaptation of Ghostbusters II, which we had on the Amiga – cracked, of course, because even with so many hours of overtime, my dad was in no position to bring us home new games on the regular. But then, I barely recall the game at all.

I remember descending into the sewer system of Manhattan, controlling Ray Stantz, to check out the river of slime. I remember that section being bastard hard. I can't picture what came afterwards. But thankfully we have YouTube these days, so I can shake up my memories with the help of a "longplay" video that only lasts for 15 minutes. A lot of it is slideshow exposition – the video's three minutes deep before we even see the stage I know I played, monstrous hands reaching out from plasma-coated walls, nightmares of the awful controls flooding back. Stage two, it turns out, puts the player in control of a mood slime-animated Statue of Liberty, the section presented as a perfunctory side-scrolling shooter; and the third and final level is an isometric, squad-based battle against the movie's painted antagonist, Vigo the Carpathian. It looks like complete garbage. I'm glad my dad didn't pay money for it.

Ghostbusters II actually had a few games made in its honour, with the NES take on its events framed as a tough-as-nails run-and-gunner. It was followed by the HAL-made New Ghostbusters II in 1990 (it came out a year later in the UK), which upped the cutesiness, flipped the perspective to top-down, turned Winston blue and let you play as Rick Moranis. Think Hotline Miami, but with fewer gangsters and gore and more ghastly ghouls. It's actually still fun to play today, if you've the means and/or time to do so.

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A screenshot from 2009's 'Ghostbusters: The Video Game'

Right, hands up, now: after Ghostbusters II, games based on the franchise rather passed me by. Without a movie to serve as the hook to hang each new release on, the quality and profile of these titles began to dip – he says, having not actually played any of the likes of 2003's Extreme Ghostbusters: The Ultimate Invasion, the 1993 Real Ghostbusters game for the Game Boy, or the 2006 mobile title simply called Ghostbusters. But I don't feel I need to – the internet (oh, the internet) tells me that these games were at times awful, at best irrelevant, and should be burned in a skip. (Okay, I'll concede that the Mega Drive game does look pretty great. Mean Machines scored it 80%, which should have been enough for me to seek it out back when.) However, perceptions of all things interactively Ghostbusting changed in 2009, when the first film's cast got together to effectively make Ghostbusters 3, albeit in video game form.

And here's where I welcome back any younger readers who can't remember what it was like to lust after a Hypercolor T-shirt only to see it ruined after one hot wash. Ghostbusters: The Video Game, for various PlayStation systems, Xbox 360, Wii and Windows and more, had the writers (and stars) of the first movie, Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd, consulting on its story, and also featured the voices and likenesses of the four Ghostbusters of old alongside a host of other familiar faces.

C'mon, Activision, let me play as these rad gals in your next game

Much like the Lego Dimensions add-on, it's a product soaked in amazing fan service; but rather than retreat plot points, it takes the tale of four guys loaded with proton packs to a new place entirely. The setting is Thanksgiving, 1991, and its big bad is a demonic Ivo Shandor, aka the architect behind 55 Central Park West, the towering building that's home to Dana Barrett and Louis Tully in the 1984 film. Everything connects back to the lore that Ramis and Aykroyd laid down 25 years prior – there's even a significant role for renowned Environmental Protection Agency officer with no dick, Walter Peck. "You" are a rookie 'buster who rides with the old pros, ultimately saving New York (and, ergo, the planet) from becoming merged with "the Ghost World". Which isn't to be confused with the Thora Birch-featuring indie flick of 2001, as a world entirely like that would just be the worst.

Anyway, the Ghostbusters save the day, and Ghostbusters: The Video Game got itself some follow-up fun in the form of a lower-budget but respectable sequel, the digital-only Sanctum of Slime. Which pretty much brings us up to Lego Dimensions and the new game in the making – assuming it definitely is in the making. I'd love to see the all-female squad cross over into the gaming medium – I mean, who wouldn't want to play as a virtual Kristen Wiig, wisecracking around New York City, occasionally slapping a spook into a containment unit for "safe" keeping? C'mon, Activision – assuming you are making another Ghostbusters, please don't make it an all-dudes affair. I love Bill, and Dan, and Ernie and the late Harold; but have you seen the photos from the upcoming movie? That, in game form, this summer, thank you very much.

The Ghostbusters level pack for Lego Dimensions is out now, more information at the game's official website.

@MikeDiver

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Iconic (Photo via Simon Haystack)

In olden times, in times of stones and sands, grey-bearded gods and nymph-like goddesses would send us gifts – the gift of music, for example, or the gift of clean clear water, or the gift of fire or bountiful fruit, or the gift of lush fertile lands in which to raise our sheep – and we would say: thank you, gods, thanks to you for these wonderful gifts. And yet: when did you last look to the heavens and mouth a silent prayer of thanks for Wetherspoons, the affordable Curry Club-centric chain of pubs slash restaurants? Was it fucking never? Was it fucking never, you ungrateful shits?

It was never. And that is why Wetherspoons – the only unerring chink of light in these dark and unenlightened times – that's why Wetherspoons is turning against us. That's why Wetherspoons is sending rats to steal our chips.

I suppose the headline news here would be better served with assorted extracts from the Mail Online write-up that broke the news:

A Wetherspoons pub was evacuated after a rat run up a customer's leg and took a chip out of his hand.

Mechanic Reece Combs, 22, was tucking into his meal with girlfriend Lucy Wrenn at Albany Palace in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, when the uninvited dinner guest struck.

Staff immediately cleared out the pub and pest controllers found two rats running around the premises.

I don't want to say 'plague from the Wetherspoons gods' but: I'm not not saying it.

Mr Combs, who described the rat as 'sewer-sized', said: 'I was out for a meal with the missus.

'We were sat there having a conversation and a rat ran up and took my chip out of my hand. It ran up my knee with some speed – it felt like somebody had kicked me.

'I thought: 'that rat has some serious confidence'. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I told a member of staff and there was panic and we were all told to leave.

Now this is the first instance of an attempt to size the rat in question. Reece Combs says the rat is "sewer-sized", which could either mean i. transcription error, and he was actually saying 'super-sized' because it was big, and sack the intern responsible for typing that up, or ii. the rat looked as if it was bred in a sewer, feasting on the plump and bountiful wastage within, growing to a strong, healthy, large size, smelling for all the world like bad shit. In which case: it has to be said that this isn't just a rat, but an especially bad rat, which is quite something to say about a rat. The rat is also described as being confident to the point of arrogance. I feel like this rat and I would get along.

Miss Wrenn was less than impressed with the compensation the couple received – just a £25 full refund for their meal.

She said: 'The rat was really quick and took Reece by surprise. I would say it was just short of a pint glass – it was really big.'

And here we have the second attempt to scale the rat in a way that we, the non-rat seers, can easily understand: a rat the size of a pint glass. Imagine a pint glass. Now imagine a rat, face down, large enough to fill it. Little rat tail slinking out of the glass and delicately touching the wooden table beneath. Now that rat wants your chip. What you doin'? What you sayin', son? You're giving that rat your chip. You're asking the dude if he wants ketchup or mayo. You're offering your chair out and seeing if he wants your shoes.

But the Wetherspoons Rat Plague, at its core, leads us to ask prickly, internal little questions like: can I trust Wetherspoons? A man having his chip stolen by a large cocky rat at a Wetherspoons in Trowbridge calls the whole chain to account. You will sit there, tonight, enjoying your Curry Club, your affordable poppadum/rice/curry/pickle/naan combo with a drink, and you will think: there may be rats here, lurking, lurking for my naan. You will go to the bar and get an change-from-a-fiver pint of Kopparberg and think: what if there is a rat in it. What Wetherspoons has done, here, with the pint glass-sized rat plague, is they have shaken our belief to the core. With the rats, so we doubt the church. With the plague, we scream against the gods.

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It's long been my opinion that anyone who refuses to drink in a Wetherspoons is, in life's order of people, right up there on the red side of the spectrum marked 'bad shits'. If someone ever says to you: "Yuk, Wetherspoons? Can we not go to a £10-a-drink bar?", get rid of them. If someone says: "Don't eat the curry, it is just microwaved from chilled by a dull-eyed kitchen boy": you do not need that person in your life. You need people who delight in getting a round for five people and a plate of chips to share for under £20. You need people who are fascinated by the intricate carpets. You need people who know the high-stress importance of knowing your table number.

But this rat thing plays into the Wetherspoons' doubters hands. And that's why I am making a stand: I am not letting one gigantic arrogant rat in Trowbridge stop me from doing what I love (what I love being: drinking exceptionally affordable pints of Frontier, eating fat consistently-textured chips off a blue ornate plate). I will not let this large cocky animal get inside my head. Wetherspoons forever. Wetherspoons fiveever. You will never take this beloved pocket-friendly pub chain away from me, plague of rat monsters! You hear me! YOU HEAR ME!

@joelgolby

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Stretching her endless limbs on a yacht, Taylor Swift noticed a paparazzi on a boat in the azure blue slipstream. Not wanting him to sell this private bikinied moment, she uploaded a selfie to Instagram, gazumping the pap out of his trade.

That is the feeble victory celebrities have managed to eek out in the war over their private lives. Having accepted that the world owns every inch of their body and each minuscule detail of their sex life, the best they can now hope for is to leak the information themselves rather than let a long-lensed photographer do it.

The latest celebrity to gazump the press to an exposition is George Shelley, a pipsqueak pop star referred to by Nick Grimshaw as "Harry Styles's little sister". George is a singer in X Factor's Union J, a boyband assembled of angelic voices and perfectly plucked eyebrows. Je released a YouTube video to explain that he's loved women and he's loved men.

Very clearly, George says it's not something he feels he can label, that labels themselves are old-fashioned, but he's had girlfriends and boyfriends. But lo the online headlines: 'WATCH: George Shelley comes out in emotional YouTube Video', 'George Shelley reveals he is bisexual' 'George Shelley makes emotional revelation about his sexuality'.

The pieces themselves are at least well-meaning. These days it seems there's a tabloid obligation to present a positive narrative around people "coming out". So, for example, Vicky Pattinson's supportive tweets are screen-grabbed and pasted in to stories alongside collated fan celebrations and aggregated hashtags. George is "brave" for announcing he has fallen in love with people, not genitals.

But it wasn't always this way. A 1990 front page of The Sun read "£1M SOCCER STAR: 'I AM Gay'' with the tagline: 'Justin Fashanu confesses'. Famously, he never played professional football again. In 1999, Stephen Gately gave a hasty coming out interview to the same paper after hearing that a supposed friend was about to sell the story on him. He later suffered from depression and when he died of pulmonary edema, Mail columnist Jan Moir put it down to his "dangerous lifestyle".

And even though it seems as though things might have changed in the past few years - Tom Daley turned vlogger to come out in 2013, and Sam Smith came out in a chat with Ellen DeGeneres in 2015 - it seems as though, for the tabloids, all that has changed is a move from front-page outrage to back-slapping positivity online while poking-fun in the celeb pages.

Dan Wotton, the very same journalist who yesterday tweeted: 'It's so sad that boyband members still feel the need to hide their sexuality. It's 2016 people!' commits to an ongoing franchise in The Sun called "The Bi Bus". With his head photoshopped into the driver's seat, this "proud gay man" drives a bus-load of queer celebrities' cut out heads. The underlying assumption being that being bisexual or queer is a temporary jolly instead of an innate feeling or an approach to love not predicated on the presence of a certain set of genitals.

The Sun's bi bus by The Sun.

Some poor picture editor has surely been tasked with slicing round an image of George's tousled hair so as to neatly superimpose him alongside Bi Bus regulars Miley Cyrus, Tom Hardy, Megan Fox and Harry Styles. More's the pity for George, who came out specifically to halt the "online speculation". But the way a personal announcement can be immaturely co-opted by tabloid writers as a "HA HA" moment is why queerness is stigmatised in the first place, and why so few celebrities feel they can come out.

The oddest bedfellows to emerge from any public coming out are the two factions of the "why do we even care?" school of thought. On one side, there are socially righteous youth who don't think sexuality needs to be solemnly declared like a cancer diagnosis. On the other, we have older harumphy sorts who would rather all this wasn't in their face all the time.

The former group are idealists, but it's not realistic for no one to discuss their sexuality at a time when 1 in 6 LGBT+ people are a victim of a hate crime, and 40% of young LGBT+ people have considered suicide; queers need positive support wherever they can get it. Indeed, the more intolerant the latter group, the more important it is for LGBT+ people to come out, to make queerness acknowledged as a normal and everyday occurrence. But as long as editors of national papers react like jilted lovers, butthurt they didn't get the exclusive nosey on someone's private life first, we're going to get more vlogs like George's, whether the subject wants in or not.

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What's going on over at Serial HQ? When that show launched in 2014, it was scrupulously scheduled, one story told week by week, each episode focusing on another element of Adnan Syed's complex case. Now, in season two, they're covering a story that's also being made into a movie at the same time, then they randomly decided to switch it to fortnightly – "it's a story told WEEK BI-WEEK" Sarah Koenig chortled in a one-minute episode they dropped apropos of nothing. Now, in the middle of season two, they're going back to report of the Adnan Syed case daily as his new hearing continues. Perhaps Koenig is drunk on power and half a bottle of red going "Fuckkkk, you know what we should do, let's cover seven different stories day by day but backwards so you have to listen to the end of story seven on Monday to understand the beginning by Sunday. Guys, I think this could really work."

Anyway, yes, Serial is going back to Adnan (and it's old theme tune, and Mail Chimp adverts) because yesterday a new hearing began for his case. Asia McClain the potential alibi for Adnan, Koenig and Adnan himself are all in the courtroom in Baltimore, with Koenig filing phone reports from each day of the hearing, which will decide if Adnan's conviction should be overturned.

In the time since Serial season one finished, a lot has happened, with spin-off podcasts and internet investigators - which Koenig doesn't really mention. Perhaps most notably, Jay spoke to the Intercept about the case, refuting Adnan's innocence. In one chilling passage Jay tells the reporter that Adnan says "'You've gotta help me, or I'm gonna tell the cops about you and the weed and all that shit.' And then he popped the trunk and I saw Hae's body. She looked kinda purple, blue, her legs were tucked behind her." It provided a very different version of the Adnan heard in the interviews on Serial.

Rather than dwell on that, Koenig jumps straight into the first day of the trial, the headline news of which is that Asia McClain showed up and testified. If you know anything about this case, you know that Asia could potentially have been Adnan's alibi, as she claims the pair were in a library at the time Adnan's then ex-girlfriend was supposed to have been murdered. But Asia was never called to testify at the original trial. This is one of the main reasons this new hearing is happening, to find out if Adnan's legal council screwed everything up for him.

Koenig, who phones from inside a wardrobe in her hotel room, says Asia's testimony "landed" in the courtroom, suggesting there was a palpable sense that she was a missing piece in the puzzle of this case.

As well as her overall alibi, Asia explained some of the more finickity parts of the case. After Adnan was arrested, he and Asia exchanged letters. In one of them, she writes: "I will try my best to help you account for some of your unwitnessed, unaccountable time." In the original post-conviction hearing, the judge noted that it sounded as if she was offering to lie for him.

But, Koenig explains, Asia goes into more detail at the hearing, explaining that she "had been to Adnan's house that day to tell his family what she knew and they told me he was struggling to account for that day". So, Asia claims, it was an offer not of an alibi but to help him work it out.

Asia's letter to Adnan, March 1st 1999

One person we haven't heard much about in the year since Serial was released is Hae Min Lee, the murdered 18-year-old ex-girlfriend of Adnan. Lee's family did not participate in Serial or any other of its associated media and were also not mentioned in this first episode of Koenig's podcast. But they were in the courtroom yesterday and after the hearing their lawyer read a statement from the family, in which they said that the hearing was forcing them to "relive a nightmare we thought was behind us".

"We believe justice was done when Adnan was convicted in 2000, and we look forward to bringing this chapter to an end so we can celebrate the memory of Hae instead of celebrating the man who killed her," the family said.

To listen to these new Serial episodes feels a little like your favourite band reforming. By all accounts, they'll be running through their greatest hits: Jay's inaccuracies, the cell tower records, the failings of Adnan's trial lawyer. No doubt these revived Serial episodes will be riveting, and may provide some closure to the case which was left pretty much unsolved at the end of the original run. But hearing a statement from Lee's family for the first time is a grim reminder about how this entertainment is profits. They say they want to bring this chapter to an end and hopefully, one way or the other, this will allow them to do that.

@samwolfson

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Most of the time, I hear about a game and I'm like, yeah, I'll maybe play that if you actually take the effort to put it in front of me, and even then probably not until next year. Some of the time, I hear about a game and I actively make an effort to play it, to get under its surface systems, to understand what makes it tick. They're not so common, those games, but there's still enough of them for us to make a top 20 releases of any given year, with titles to spare.

And then, very rarely, a game comes along that I know next to nothing about until it's suddenly all over Twitter, being shared by big-name game-makers, where it looks amazing, and its simple, elevator-pitch-style messaging flicks all of my switches. Then, then, I'm straight on the phone: what is this thing you're making, how has it happened, and when can I have it?

In case it wasn't obvious, Knights and Bikes falls into this latter category of forthcoming release. As soon as I saw its entrancing visuals and Kickstarter topline of "a co-op adventure game about childhood inspired by The Goonies and EarthBound," I had to get onto its makers, Foam Sword, for the bottom line on the game behind its from-out-of-nowhere reveal.

'Knights and Bikes', Kickstarter launch trailer

Knights and Bikes is ostensibly an action RPG played from a (not directly) top-down perspective. It stars a pair of main protagonists, Nessa and Demelza, who set out to save the strange Cornish island of Penfurzy from reality developers and/or an array of fantastical monsters that may well be serving as metaphors for real-life problems. One of the girls' companions is the pickled severed head of a fallen knight. Another is a goose. Its key ingredients, to quote directly from its Kickstarter page, are "SNES-era action RPG", hand-drawn 3D world", "1980s island setting" and "excitable adventurous kids... on bikes".

The game is the brainchild of two key partners: Rex Crowle, previously creative lead on Tearaway, and Moo Yu, gameplay programmer on Ratchet & Clank. They've each also made smaller games, and they worked together on Media Molecule's multi-award-winning LittleBigPlanet, albeit before they realised the potential for a collaborative project. I called Moo to have him explain a whole lot more about what's already shaping up to be a special adventure.

VICE: Right, Moo, when did Rex and yourself come up with Knights & Bikes? As it's the sort of title where the world, the characters and the gameplay look as if they've had a fair amount of time to come together.

Moo Yu: We met at Media Molecule, working on LittleBigPlanet, and I'd been a fan of his artwork before then, back when I lived in the States (Moo is currently in London). I didn't know who the artist was, back then, and to begin with we didn't work too closely together, but I quickly came to have an appreciation of what he does, and his abilities. When I left Molecule, I was making a little iPhone game, and he helped me with the artwork. That game never came to fruition, but that was when we started working a little more closely. We then made a Facebook game together, Monstrosity, about raising monsters from table-sized things to being able to destroy Paris. That was a lot of fun. He did some icon art for another iPhone game I did. We kept in touch after that, and remained friends.

Knights and Bikes has been brewing for, I'd say, two years, in a very passive way. It was one of these things that first came about when we were out for a couple of pints, and Rex mentioned the idea. You usually see these ideas go nowhere, but this one grabbed me immediately, and I began working on it during nights and weekends, asking Rex what he thought of ideas I had as I went along. Every now and then he'd sketch some stuff up. We didn't dedicate any real time to it, but we were always passing ideas back and forth. One time, he scanned in a sketchbook page, and I cut out what images I could and made them into sprites, and made a little prototype where you commanded these little characters on bikes – it was always important to have a gang of kids on bikes. That was made in Unity, I shared it with him, and because he also had Unity, he started putting new assets in. So we've never really dedicated all that much time to it, until recently, but we've been talking about it a lot over the past couple of years.

So what was Rex's original pitch? Is that where the Goonies parallel was born?

I think that EarthBound and Secret of Mana were the first touchstones we discussed – and just like I've never played through all of EarthBound, I don't think he's played all of Secret of Mana. But these are important games to us, from our childhoods, and we wanted to sort of find a game that melds those influences as it passed from one brain to the other. So I've brought things to Knights and Bikes that are based on my experiences of playing Secret of Mana on the SNES. I played through it with my friends, and I want that to be the optimal way to play Knights and Bikes – you with a friend, playing together. I think we're very aware that not everyone will be able to play it in that way, so we're making sure that the single-player experience is just as rewarding as going through it collaboratively. But I think there's really something extra about going through a game together, having to coordinate what you're doing. You end up in arguments, but it's an amazing thing to do with best friends. I used to play Secret of Mana with my best friends, like, once a year until I moved to the UK. It's just one of those games that has so many memories for me, from throughout the ages. It's a shame that there's no network version of it, so I could play through it again with them now.

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Oh, man, I would love Mana on a modern, net-enabled machine. Chrono Trigger is so good on the DS, I wish that Mana was on it, too. Anyway, the setting of Knights and Bikes is interesting to me. I'm from the south of England, and I've holidayed in Cornwall plenty of times, and I have family there. There's something about its history that allows mythology to creep into factual accounts, isn't there? Like Tintagel being the site of King Arthur's birth. What drew you to set the game there?

Well, Rex lives down there, and he grew up on a farm down there before he moved to London to be an artist and make video games. So I think a lot of the decision is drawing from his childhood. But also there's this idea of it being a place where there's enough mystery for you not to know what's real and what isn't, and you blur the two together to make this fantastical world – and that's something we really wanted in the game. One of the great, and slightly horrible, things about childhood is that you just don't know "the rules", so anything is possible – but it's also scary, because you don't know how the world really works. So we're trying to play on both sides of that same coin.

And that ties into The Goonies, where you've got this gang of kids, and bad things are happening to the parents, but they're not really sure how to process that. So off they go on this wild adventure that could basically get them all killed. We see in the game's trailer this eviction notice, so clearly our heroines are doing what they are to rectify this state of disorder in their lives... right?

Absolutely, and it's interesting, I think, that when you're a kid, losing your home is a big deal, but you don't see the even bigger picture. You've never been through something that extreme. So on the one hand you don't worry enough; and on the other, you can worry too much and your imagination goes wild. I think we want to address these very real-life problems, and present them through the innocence of children. This is an opportunity for us to use that lens to make things a lot more playful than they otherwise might be.

We're not really pushing any particular message. This should be an enjoyable experience, first. And if it touches on some serious issues along the way, then that's nice and it adds depth to it, and will make it stick with you longer. But if the message is too apparent, it can actually be hard to take it in, because you can feel it being pushed at you. Then you're always fighting it. We just want you to enjoy the game, and have a lot of thoughts go through your head as you're playing it.

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The game's Kickstarter's doing pretty well. You're well over a third of the way to your $100,000 target after 48 hours. How does that feel?

It's amazing how generous people are being. We're big Kickstarter backers ourselves, so we understand the psychology, but when you're on the receiving side of over a thousand pledges, it's incredible and kind of overwhelming. On top of that, the reaction on Twitter has been unbelievable. So many of our heroes have got behind this.

So, one of my favourite games of all time is Beyond Good & Evil, and that game's designer, Michel Ancel, left a comment on our Kickstarter page saying that he's behind us. That's such a surreal moment – I had to post a comment asking if it was the real Michel Ancel. My brain still can't really process it.

And finally, you've said the game's made in Unity. To my perhaps naïve brain, that means that it's easier to port from PC and Mac, your launch platforms, to console. Is it fair enough to say that I'll be able to play it on my PS4, sometime?

Yeah, I think so, and that's one of the reasons why we chose it, to keep our options open. I think it's something we're thinking about, seriously – we're both experienced in making console games, and we've developed the game for use with a controller. So we've started conversations with the platform holders, but we need to get those discussions across the line. I wouldn't be surprised to see it on consoles, one day. We're weighing up the pros and cons of the various options right now, and working out how much bandwidth we have to play with. If we can only do one console port, we need to work out which one the best is. So we're looking into that.

More information on Knights and Bikes can be found on Kickstarter, here. Find Foam Sword online here.

@MikeDiver

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Without creativity, we'd all just be sheep, standing in a field, munching grass. Without creatives we would have only that which is in front of us, because creatives inspire us, they influence us, they ignite us.

Without Beethoven there wouldn't have been the Beatles; without the Beatles there wouldn't have been Bowie; without Bowie there wouldn't have been Big Sean. We're all following someone, even Kanye.

So in the spirit of that burning creativity that hits you in the middle of the night and refuses to leave until you've torn it out of your soul and shown it to the world,we've hand-picked the most influential influencers and tastemakers out there for this year's Hype List. We're talking about the ones pushing the boundaries, challenging perceptions, fucking what you know. The producers blowing up your Mixcloud, the alternative thinkers taking over your news feed, the models smashing your Insta, the designers covering your body in their dreams.

The people who create, the people who kill it, the people who matter, the people whose hype you should believe.

LION W/ NO HART

LION W/ NO HART, the Harlem-based MC/activist, first came to our attention with the 2015 mixtape Prom Kween , a sizzling piece of downtempo ghettotech that quickly became the sound of the NY underground.

The artist sometimes known as Leezy's gender-bending, genre-blending visual language and fractured, wounded flow (particularly on standout track "Lil' Baby Bitch Bo Peep") somehow manage to fuse together, finding a rare middle ground between KRS-ONE and Karlheinz Stockhausen, while retaining a visceral, club-friendly sensibility at its core. Our dancefloor discourse will never be the same again.

Highlight so far: Playing a Hot 97 party, in a wedding dress.

TUESDAY FERRARI

Photographic artist Tuesday Ferrari might hail from LA aristocracy (her mum is Alannah Myles of "Black Velvet" fame and her dad played Gunther in Friends), but don't get it twisted. She's making some of the most exciting visual art out there right now, blending her sun-drenched imagery with a post-internet savviness that's led to some to call her "the Nan Goldin of Instagram".

Provocative, yet ethereal, in-your-face, yet utterly feminine, Ferrari is the peroxide blonde voice of West Coast affluenza. A Bret Easton Ellis heroine with a Hasselblad, we just wish we could be friends with her.

Highlight so far: Splish Splash, her controversial exhibition at the prestigious Greenpoint Gallery Space, featuring candid portraits of Lourdes Ciccone Leon and others in the bath.

GENIE BOY

"Feds, you don't know about me. NSA, you don't know about me. Michael Gove, you don't know about me "

In 2015, these words became a battle-cry for a generation sick of what it was being offered. It was bellowed at Met pigs like a Hakka chant at a Hackney block party, condemned by the Daily Express and even mentioned in Parliament. Most dangerously, they were written by a 17-year-old. That 17-year-old was Genie Boy, the Right Honorable Member for The Endz.

2015 was a big one for Genie. He began the year enrolled at Wolverhampton College and ended it on the front cover of Esquire. Having refused several record deals, he continues to manage himself, handling all his own emails and train bookings. He is perhaps the only man who could work with both Preditah and Paul McCartney (at their internet-breaking Brits collab) and come out with his road-credibility intact.

Highlight so far: His dazzling Fire In The Booth session, which went so hard it reportedly made Charlie Sloth throw up afterwards.

HONEYSPICE

Haggerston-based all-female creative collective HoneySpice are a breath of fresh air in the staid, blokey world of publishing. Their self-titled, print-at-home zine fuses the crisp style of a young Joan Didion with the balls-to-the-wall attitude of a pre-prison Lil' Kim.

Featuring contributions from the likes of Q's Joe Bish and features such as "The Choose Your Own Mariah Carey Tinder Adventure", the magazine is a must-have for every V-Files Carrie Bradshaw with access to a colourjet printer, while their biannual dinner party/clubnight "Bills, Bills, Bills" is a guaranteed bruk-up every time. CondeNast(y) must be shaking in their Prada pumps.

Highlight so far: Publishing a Facebook chat between Julian Assange and Skinny Girl Diet.

L1T0

They say darktronica is dead, but no one told Deptford's L1t0 (pronounced 'light zero') that. The enigmatic producer/vocalist behind Soundcloud phenomenon "Salty 2" mixes old Chris Rea samples with punishing industro-grime and comes out with a sound rooted in his native Bolivia, though it lives and breathes in the chaos of south London's dancefloors.

His NTS show "Rare Minerals" has quickly become compulsory listening, and word is that that he's working with Wiz Khalifa on something pretty special right now. But since he only ever conducts interviews over Snapchat, we can't really be sure.

Highlight so far: "Salty 2". It might be the only thing he's put out, but it remains his best work.

JEN WOZ ERE

The PC Music explosion of 2014 brought its fare share of imitators, but none of them quite match what Jen Woz Ere, the virtual school bully, is doing right now. Taking the bolshy, mean-girl style of 90s pop acts such as Republica and Shampoo, then drenching it in a tweaked-up digital bog-wash courtesy of producers and collaborators Y'VON and newcomer EncartA, Jen Woz Ere is the perfect conceptual pop star for a generation raised on timelines rather than blackboards.

Her track "(I Got Fingered) Behind The Bike Shed" was the sound of last year's Venice Biennale, and she's been hinting at making a workout video with Diplo next year. As she'd say herself: "the girl sure dun gud".

Highlight so far: Launching her debut EP with a mock-viral campaign for a Korean tampon brand.

RIEL SAMMS

In the game for over 30 years, Riel Samms has made the rare journey from the couture house to the trap house. Ever wonder why ATL corner boys wear PVC smocks now? Riel is the reason.

Coming to mainstream attention with his infamous A/W '87 campaign, in which male models dressed as child soldiers fired off real AK47s in the Grand Palais, Riel has consistently torn up the fashion rule book (if he's ever even looked at it, that is), establishing himself as the dark heart of the Parisian fashion scene.

As he nears his 60^th birthday, his style has finally gone mainstream, with a some commentators suggesting that TopShop have paid tribute to his trademark chainmail poncho (something we're sure would amuse him), and a rumoured collaboration with Wiz Khalifa is on the cards.

Highlight so far: Throwing blood diamonds in Hans Ulrich Obrist's face at Frieze 2013.

RYAN VAN BURGH

Scenes from Van Burgh's street-cast performance-installation "Pigmalion" at the Brave Propensities Car Park Gallery last year

Perhaps the only living artist to be both banned from Instagram and MOMA, 37-year-old Van Burgh is the young soul rebel of the international art scene. Meshing traditional performance art with Manga imagery and Babestation found footage, he's been called everything from a "cultural wedding DJ" to "outright charlatan".

So far, his victims have included teen idols Miley Cyrus and Pixie Lott and sacred cows such as Marina Abramovic (whose performance he interrupted dressed as The Ghost of GG Allin, prompting the now-notorious MOMA ban).

Some, like The Guardian's Jonathan Jones, say "Emperor's New Photoshop", but we reckon he's just about the most important multimedia artist working in Brooklyn today. Just don't tell him we said that.

Highlight so far: His fetish realisation of the Jihadi John story.

MOLLI REAGAN

The name "Ronald Reagan" might still divide America, but the opinion on his great-niece Molli is pretty much unanimous: she is HOT. The face of everything from Sacai to Supreme to Saint Laurent, she has quickly become the figurehead for a new gen of models who are so privileged they're actually disadvantaged in the industry.

Like many a model before her, Molli is moving towards acting, having recently starred in a short film directed by Sofia Coppola for Bulmer's, but her creative heart really lies in her punk band Apple Juice, in which she plays bass alongside Beck and model BFF Tani-Lee Schwarzenegger.

Highlights so far: Opening the Chanel show in Paris last year with Julianne Moore and Paul Pogba.

DEAN BLOOM

You might not know the name, but you definitely know the look. The most prodigious son of the notorious south London art collective NVEREND, Bloom's work draws from 90s Japanese RPG games, ancient sanskrit, mid-80s punk flyers and stolen MRA scans.

Having worked with everyone from Hudson Mohawke to Lady Antebellum, he may be the closest thing the internet has to a visual architect, shaping the iconography of our times, one .PNG at a time.

Highlight so far: Collaborating with L1t0 on a Tate installation based on the life of Judge Jules.

JESY NELSON

Everyone wants to do a Bieber right now, but if anyone has a real chance of achieving it, it's Little Mix's Jesy Nelson. Stepping out from the shadow of her bandmates, Nelson has enlisted some of the underground electronic music scene's hottest producers (Lit0, Koreless, Y'VON) to create an as-yet-unheard album to be released on acclaimed label Rectangle Tapes, home of cutting-edge electronic acts like Magic Trees and D()G Shower.

Lips are sealed about what the album actually sounds like, but label founder Ronnie Brandt has said that it is at least partly inspired by "early Cyndi Lauper and Xanax". Needless to say, we can't wait to hear it.

Highlights so far: Narrowly beating Marcus Collins and Amelia Lily to claim the X Factor series eight crown.

PATRICK SWAYZE JNR

They say it's easier if your parents are famous, but tell that to Patrick Swayze Jnr. The actor, musician and Malibu native has done things his own way, turning down a lucrative modelling contract in Milan to go hike around the Orzarks for six months, an experience which formed the basis of his Mountain Songs EP last year.

Now safely back on concrete, in a Red Hook apartment he shares with Dev Hynes and Dakota Johnson, Swayze Jnr has just signed up for a Calvin Klein campaign, as well as the role of his own father in a TV movie about the making of Ghost.

A renaissance man as at home in the wilderness as he is in New York, Swayze Jnr is more than just a lucky sperm.

ALONZO IAN SMITH

We don't rank people on this list, but if anyone deserves to be at the top, it's conscious trap pioneer Alonzo Ian Smith. His stunning album How To Kill a Mockingbird was the defining cultural work of last year, smashing into our collective consciousness like the furious afterbirth of Bootsy Collins and JD Salinger.

Slyly dissecting the American Dream with his acid-hot bars, Smith has become a voice in the wilderness in what he calls "The Divided States Of America". He's an artist who uses the system to make his point, simultaneously questioning a sports company's sweatshop policies in Indonesia while working with them on a new line of sneakers emblazoned with quotes by Noam Chomsky and Nina Simone.

Highlight so far: "They say Jumpman, you say how high,"a seething parody of rap's consumer obsession in six words. Perfect.

HEINZY FENSTERMACHER

The nightmare of the Berlin Wall might not seem like the most obvious inspiration for a one of the world's hottest designers, but Heinzy Fenstermacher is a designer who draws from his own childhood in communist-era Leipzig.

The self-proclaimed "JW Anderson from the bloc" seems to find an innate wearability and utilitarian glamour in the faded photos of teenagers from the wrong side of the wall, kitting out his A/W16 models in stone-coloured, graffiti-covered tracksuits.

It's said that Rihanna and Rory McIlroy are admirers of his creations, but he prefers to stay modest, listening to old Europop mixes in his north Kreuzberg apartment, rather than attending his own shows

Highlight so far: His collaboration with Supreme, particularly the Nikolai Gorbachev windbreakers.

RAGNAR ANDERSON

They call him "the Richard Rodgers of new London cuisine", they call his restaurant "the Versailles of Peckham Rye", they call his food "slow-cooked heroin", they call him Ragnar Anderson, super chef.

From pop-up to roadblock in just 18 months, Canberra-born Anderson is doing for food what Jamie XX did for music: nailing a dynamic, affordable yet uniquely artisan product.

People are queuing half way down to Camberwell Green for his latest eaterie "Meat Fuck". The sign on the door that reads "Eat your chops and piss off" might be said with a slight tongue-in-cheek, but as anyone who's stayed much longer than half-an-hour has probably found out, he means it.

Highlight so far: Have you tried his blackened sour gammon grits?Jay Rayner described them as "a blozza from God", which is good enough for us.

PAUL MICHAEL

Look around you: face-painted boys in sawn-off kaftans stagger out of Turkmenistani social clubs, plastic heels clip and clop down the Old Kent Road, St Martin's students in knock-off Vuitton dance to Hed Kandi remixes, the smell of Silk Cut and M-Cat lingers in the cold city air. London is burning again, and it's Paul Michael who lit the match.

The Monmouthshire native moved to London last year and hasn't looked back since, changing the city's clubbing landscape forever with his nights "Infinite" and "Paul Michael's Fandabadozie", creating vital spaces for a new generation of club kids determined to make the Blitz Club look like the Basingstoke Slug & Lettuce on a weeknight.

The dress code is simple: there isn't one. The music policy is complicated: everything from Fat Trel to Eiffel 65 to Stevie Nicks to Mudvayne. The self-styled Peter Gatien of Peckham is a man redefining what it is to party, and what it is to be young and alive in London.

Highlight so far: Charging Madonna £1.50 for use of the cloakroom at an LCM after-party last year.

SHIRTS

In troubled times, angry music arises, and there aren't many angrier musicians out there right now than Thurrock's Shirts. Lead singer Jakob Holywell is a man who loves his country but hates what it has become. Their infamous Facebook page "The Latte Meinhof Group" is testament to their noble efforts against gentrification and high street coffee chains.

From their HQ (an abandoned teabag factory they jokingly call "Balmoral"), this band of brothers kick and spit against every facet of Cameron's Britain, from chain stores to the congestion charge, with a sound that is equal parts Crass and equal parts MC Creed.

With Genie Boy's verse on their track "House Of Boreds" becoming a genre-splicing viral classic, they've retained a sense of realness, despite the fact that they met at the South Kent School of Performing Arts.

Highlight so far: Their riotous set at the Zane Lowe Memorial Stage at Glastonbury.

As imagined by Clive Martin. All photos by Phoebe Salmon apart from Ryan Van Burgh, Heinzy Fenstermacher, Riel Samms by Gareth Wrighton.

Music by some who wish to remain anonymous.

The minivan in which Chris Trenschel and Tamara Murray live. Photo courtesy of the couple

Chris Trenschel and Tamara Murray thought they had the perfect life. They both had successful careers – Trenschel was a budget analyst for the city of San Francisco, Murray was the vice president of a PR firm. They got married, bought a condo. They blew cash at cool, trendy places. There was only one problem: "In a nutshell," Murray told me, "we were dead inside."

In order to support themselves, they had to support a work-first everything-else-second lifestyle. After too many nights sitting at home, eating frozen pizza and watching Netflix, it occurred to them: What are we doing?

"We basically felt we were wasting our youth," Murray explained. "Travel, learning about new cultures and meeting new people, having meaningful experiences – that's what is important to us." So they saved up money, quit their jobs, and took the plunge. After traveling for a year in Latin America, they bought a red Kia Sedona minivan and converted it into a camper. Now, they both work remotely – Murray in the communications field as a freelancer, Trenschel operating and promoting e-commerce websites – while they travel around North America and focus on the things that make them happiest.

While vandwelling – living out of vans, cars, or motorhomes, as a lifestyle – was popularised by free-spirited hippies in the 60s, it's seeing a resurgence among millennials. Some, like Rachel Bujalski, who jas wandered around California living out of her Corolla and runs a blog for young people unburdened by permanent housing, have even called it the "new American dream."

"I think that vandwelling is become popular now due to its practicality and its lure of adventure," said Zach Frost, a 27-year-old former vandweller. "Many people my age are drowning in student debt, unable to find a job, and don't necessarily want to live with their parents. Living in a van is exciting, allows for mobility, and doesn't cost terribly much." Plus, he said, "being able to live and work remotely anywhere on the globe is making vandwelling seem very attractive."

Chris Trenschel and Tamara Murray work remotely, wherever their travels take them. Photo courtesy of Trenschel and Murray

The promise of greater mobility and more free time compelled Tom Sennett, a 27-year-old game developer, to ditch his job for life in a van. He was making good money as a product manager at a digital agency for mobile apps, but he just wasn't happy.

"I was tired of deferring from my immediate happiness for the sake of long-term goals that I either wasn't committed to or didn't think were going to happen," explained Sennett. "I hated going to work, so I quit."

He gave his two weeks notice, bought a 2002 Dodge Ram conversion van off of Craigslist, and moved out of his apartment in Jersey City. Now, he's making his own video games – including one inspired by his experience, called Hate Your Job. "It's still pretty early going for me, but I don't regret it so far. I am finally putting most of my time towards making games."

Christine On's van, where she lives. Photo courtesy of Christine On

The vandwelling life isn't always glamorous: There are plenty of stories about buying water jugs to urinate in, showering at gyms and rec centers, and just generally struggling to meet daily hygiene necessities. Plus, without the structure of a job or a permanent location, vandwelling can get boring. And not everyone chooses to live out of their vehicle for the romantic promise of a freer, more adventure-driven lifestyle.

In 2005, Christine On had bought a condo in Glendale, California, where she was working as an animation and motion graphics director. She wasn't passionate about the job, but she worked 40 hours each week just to keep the condo, an investment she was quickly regretting. A few years later, when her father was diagnosed with dementia, she knew she'd have to relocate to Northern California, where he lived – but she was reluctant to leave the life she'd settled into.

"I didn't want to rent an apartment nearby, I didn't want to move back in with my parents, and I didn't want to sell my condo because, at that time, it was valued at about 60 percent of what I had paid for it originally," On told me. So she made the decision to rent out her condo and move into a 2004 Chevy Express passenger van, which allowed her to keep up with her mortgage and live closer to her family. "As an added bonus, I would be rid of electricity bills, gas bills, and having to clean three bathrooms."

She tricked out the van, adding a bed, running water from an installed water tank, filter, and pump system, and virtually unlimited electricity through a solar power set-up. Despite her initial hesitation, she ended up loving the vandwelling life. "I think part of the reason why living in a van was so appealing was that it didn't matter if I lost my job, if the stock market crashed, or if the housing market crashed – I'd always have a place to live," said On. "Even better, I could live anywhere."

The inside of Christine On's van. Photo courtesy of Christine On

For most millennial vandwellers, the decision to live modestly and on-the-go comes down to an aversion to work culture. Adam, a 27-year-old engineer (he didn't want his last name used for employment reasons), told me that moving into a van was like pressing the reset button on his entire adult life trajectory. "I went from mechanical engineer with my own office and wearing a tie to work every day to being homeless in my car entirely by choice," he told me.

Adam showers and brushes his teeth at the gym, shaves in public restrooms, parks outside of 24-hour businesses in case of any nighttime bathroom needs, and carries disposable jugs and buckets for rare emergencies. Metropolitan areas and warmer climates are easier to handle, and he typically picks up odd jobs at tourist locations or washing dishes at restaurants. If you're committed to the lifestyle, he says, it's not hard to make things work.

The way he sees it, if you work eight hours per day, plus an hour per day commuting to work, you're spending nearly half your life at or on your way to work. And unless you love your job, that's basically throwing half your life away.

"Why on earth do we settle to only be happy half of the time?" he said. "There is no amount of money which can persuade me to give up half of my life."

Follow David Jagneaux on Twitter.

Photo via Bonnie Rotton's Instagram

Bonnie Rotten was watching football in her living room one Sunday when a comment popped up on one of her Instagram photos:

"So is she gonna stop porn or be one of those disgusting, horrible mothers?"

The comment was in response to a photo Rotten posted of herself with her two-week old daughter. She didn't reply – Rotten says that she tries not to feed the trolls – but comments like this have become routine since the 22-year-old former porn actress announced that she was pregnant last May.

"Every single day, I get the most ridiculous comments," she told me. "'What kind of mother are you?' 'How do you think your daughter is going to feel when her friends bring up to her that her mom was getting railed by a bunch of dudes?' Or, 'How do you think you're gonna raise a child when all you do is suck dick for a living?' Just stupid shit, all day long, from all angles."

Rotten stopped performing in February of 2015, in anticipation of her pregnancy. She was at the height of her career; in 2014, she was the second-youngest woman ever to win Performer of the Year at the AVN Awards. But her pregnancy, she says, has changed her life and her career.

According to Mark Spiegler – one of the top porn agents in Los Angeles, who's represented the likes of Rotten, Sasha Grey, and Asa Akira – it's "pretty rare" for one of his clients to get pregnant. When they do, though, most drop out of the game.

"I don't really have too much to say about this," Spiegler told me, "because when girls get pregnant, they usually quit porn."

When porn actress Dana Vespoli was 33 (married to fellow porn actor Manuel Ferrara), she decided she wanted to have a baby. But when she and Ferrara started trying to conceive, it affected the way she approached work: She had to take fewer risks with her body.

For one thing, she started only doing girl-on-girl scenes and working with fewer people, since "you're more prone to infection when there's that much exposure to different people, different flora."

Vespoli, who has been in the adult industry for 11 years, stopped performing for the majority of her pregnancy. After giving birth, she realised getting back to work would be a challenge for her postpartum body. Porn actresses use their bodies as instruments for their work; new moms use their bodies as instruments to nourish or nurture their children. Vespoli found the divide too taxing.

"I breastfed all my children," said Vespoli, who is now a mother of three, "and my body didn't really feel like it was entirely mine during that time. I felt like it belonged to my children. I didn't want anything else touching my breasts, or to catch an STD and have to go on antibiotics. It's really hard on the infant."

Rotten echoed the sentiment: "I'm a very all-in person," she said. "I'm either going to be all-in as a performer, or all-in as a mother. I can't do both."

While that may be the standard trajectory, there are also ways to capitalise on pregnancy within the porn industry. Sierra Simmons was a freshman at Florida State College at Jacksonville when she and her boyfriend found out they were expecting a child. Simmons had been toying with the idea of working in the adult industry to put herself through college, and when her pregnancy test came back positive, her decision was made.

"I was in school and trying to pay for all of that," says the now 20-year-old biology major. "I needed to have the funds to do everything, and I was so concerned with not trying to stress myself out with working from nine to five."

Her boyfriend, agreeing that they needed the money, gave her the green light. "I was like, 'OK, alrighty,'" she said. "I went ahead and committed."

In 2015, the two-man Manchester studio Acid Nerve put out a game that was all cute pixel art on the surface, but absolutely bloody maddening of difficulty in practice. Said title, Titan Souls – a boss-rush adventure that mixed Zelda-ish looks with Souls series-levels of punishment for the smallest mistakes (you can read more about it here) – immediately marked David Fenn and Mark Forster as indie game-makers to keep a beady eye on.

And now they're back, with a very different game to the one that made their studio's name. Telepaint! is a touchscreen puzzler where the player guides a paint bucket with legs, arms and a face through multiple stages of naturally escalating difficulty, where portals must be navigated correctly to avoid deadly spills. (You appreciate the pun of the title, I'm sure.) Fenn puts it as "the gameplay of Portal meets Lemmings, with a whole bunch of twists along the way". On first impression, I thought of Simogo's sublime Beat Sneak Bandit "does" Splatoon, albeit mainly because the trailer – watch it below – had a clear sense of rhythm to it. And paint, obviously. (Alright, pedant, ink.)

I asked David a few questions about Acid Nerve's new game, to get a real idea of what to expect when Telepaint! comes out on iOS in, he says, "a matter of weeks".

'Telepaint!' announcement trailer

VICE: Hey David. Does Telepaint! have that rhythm I'm seeing in the gameplay, or is that merely for the trailer?

David Fenn: All the movement in the game is synchronised to the music's beat in the same way it's presented in the trailer, which lets us do some fun and clever tricks with sound throughout the game. It's not a "rhythm game" – you can play it comfortably with the sound off – but everything just happens rhythmically, adding a cool extra layer to the game and letting you get into the groove.

So this is a different perspective of play when compared to Titan Souls, with a far cuter aesthetic. But is it going to become comparably challenging, the deeper you get into it?

It's not quite as brutal as Titan Souls, and far more forgiving, but it can get quite challenging at some points. Some of the puzzles will require a lot of thought to beat, but overall the game should appeal to a broader variety of players than Titan Souls, which I would say is quite niche. We'll certainly still be impressed by anyone who manages to 100 percent the game, though.

Article continues after the video below

Watch VICE's film on the history of pinball

As per Titan Souls, too, this is an "old" idea that's now found its way to fruition – Mark and yourself had jammed a version of it a while ago. How pleased are you that you've been able to update it to a slick, iOS-ready release? And what part did Titan Souls' success play in allowing you to get to here with it?

We love game jams, they're great for prototyping unusual ideas and sometimes they reveal hidden gems. That's what happened with Titan Souls and the same happened for Telepaint!, too. The success of Titan Souls has directly enabled us to go back and give this old prototype a similar treatment, which is something we're super happy to have been able to do.

You've gone mobile with this title, with it coming out for iPhone and iPad, but did you play around with making it work with "standard" controls? Did that just not suit the type of game it is?

The original game was made for six giant buttons which people had to stand on to activate portals in the game. We enjoyed the puzzle potential this presented, but it would never have worked elegantly with traditional controls. Being able to see the layout of each portal on screen and immediately tapping to activate without thinking removes a layer of obfuscation that traditional controls would present, and it's also a lot faster and more free than it would be to click them one by one with a mouse. It's import to match the control scheme with the platform, so in the same way that touchscreen virtual joypads would never be on par with a physical control pad, the reverse situation applies to Telepaint!.

On Motherboard: How 'Dark Souls' Is Defeating Depression

You mention twists – what sort of fiendish traps are our bucket-like heroes going to have to look out for?

Each world introduces a new mechanic, and we play with each one extensively to max out its potential. There are keys and locks, pushable blocks, multiple characters, gravity flipping, Thwomp-like characters called Smoochers that chase you around, and some other new things as you get deeper into the game, as well as gradually built-up combinations of all of these things. Anything that moves can be teleported too, so everything is fully interactive and malleable in the game world, creating some interesting possibilities.

Telepaint! is out for iOS, as David says, "in a matter of weeks". Find Acid Nerve online here.

@MikeDiver

More from VICE Gaming:

A Brief History of Ghostbusters and Video Games

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Kim Kardashian's Mobile Game Ruined My Life

Illustrations by Joel Benjamin

Dear So Sad Today,

Have you ever experienced having toxic friends? And if so, what is your advice on that? I just stopped being friends with two of my friends who seemed very toxic to me and even though I loved them, I believed it was best for me to move on. What is your advice on moving on and finding new friends? I've been trying to find newer, closer friends to replace them but it's very hard to find such friends. Should I join more clubs on my college campus? If you could send me some advice that'd be great.

Sincerely,

Smothered

Dear Smothered,

When I was a freshman in college I was friends with a group of girls. One day they decided they didn't like me. This was because I was hooking up with what they thought were too many dudes. Also, sometimes I would just leave them alone at a party to go hook up with a dude (sorry, but that's part of my charm!).

For a few weeks I kissed their asses, feeling insecure, trying to win back their love. But then I realised, wait, I don't even like them. In time, I became friends with some new girls who were sluts just like me. I had only met these girls in passing, but they seemed like cool people to be friends with – way less judgmental and concerned with what I was doing with my vagina – so I reached out to them.

Once I became friends with them, what ended up happening is that the two groups kind of merged. I introduced a few of the girls I liked from my old group of friends to the girls in my new group of friends and we all moved in together, becoming something of a squad.

This being said, I've never felt totally comfortable in a squad. There is something about group dynamics that makes me feel the need to shut a door – any door – and be alone. After college, I never lived with people again. And over time, I've felt like some of the members of the older friend group are still too conservative for me or don't fully understand me. So I have taken a lot of breaks from my friendship with them. I feel that I can be friends with them sporadically and I love them out of shared history, but when I find myself starting to really doubt myself around them, I take a break. That self-doubt is a symbol of too much influence on their part. It's a form of toxicity.

I'm not the type of person to say that everything gets better. But one thing that has really gotten better for me with age is that I don't care so much what friend groups think of me anymore. This might be because I now spend my time worrying what anonymous strangers on the internet think of me, but that's a different story.

When I think back to being excommunicated by that group of girls during my freshman year of college, or by another group in middle school, I feel a great relief in being my own person now. This has only come with time and was not something I could force, but it does happen.

xo

So Sad Today

***

Dear So Sad Today, queen of goth life,

I need your help. I need some advice. What do you do when you're sad like just try to cry an endless river? It's triggering idk what to do.

Thanks,

Goth Princess

Dear Goth Princess,

Despite how it may seem, I am not a good cryer. Like, I'm always afraid that if I just let go then my feelings are going to kill me. I'm scared that if I start crying I'm never going to stop: even though history has shown me that I always stop at some point. So I am definitely more of a bottle-upper. Actually, I guess what I am is a tweeter. Consider every tweet a tear not shed.

But it's weird that I'm scared to cry, because every time I do cry I feel so much fucking better after. It's like, oh shit, why don't I do this every day? I've also noticed that sometimes, if I'm having heavy cycles of panic attacks, they finally subside a bit when I cry. It's like the anxiety is not anxiety at all, but other trapped feelings pushing up against the inside of me.

The thing is, I'm still not great at knowing what my underlying feelings are. Half the time I'm sad for an obvious reason, but I'm like "No, it can't be that." It's usually only after I do something primal and physical, like sex or yoga, that I start crying and realise I've been carrying around a bunch of shit and have needed to cry for days.

Since my yoga practice sucks and I never do it, I tend to end up crying after sex quite frequently. When I feel the cry coming on, I excuse myself from the person I'm with to go pee (always pee after sex so you don't get a urinary tract infection). Then I get a few minutes of good tears on the toilet.

I don't know of anything that makes me feel more alive. Crying alone on the toilet is probably the thing that makes me feel most whole. I guess I could watch a sad movie or listen to some sad music to try and get the same effect. But sometimes I'm just too scared of my feelings to intentionally bring it on. It's like I have to run and run until there is nowhere else to go, and then, finally, the tears come.

xo

So Sad Today

***

Dear So Sad Today,

I want to tell the friend I am in love with my feelings, which is causing me great anxiety. Am I setting myself up for disaster?

Best,

Not Telling

Dear Not Telling,

I think it's usually better for the truth to be out there. Any time I've waited to tell someone how I felt about him, the fear was usually based on some underlying knowing that either the person didn't like me in that way or didn't like me as much as I liked him. It's almost like I was keeping it to myself to preserve an illusion that something would happen. Living in illusion is a high sometimes, but eventually, the person either likes you or doesn't. So if you don't want to delude yourself, it's probably best to say something now.

That being said, you may risk ruining the friendship (or putting it on hold for a while) because one or both of you might feel uncomfortable after you say something. But I think it's hard to just have a real friendship with someone you secretly like romantically anyway—at least if the air has not been cleared.

xo

So Sad Today

So Sad Today: Personal Essays will be released in March from Grand Central Publishing. Pre-order it here.

Follow So Sad Today on Twitter.

As much as I love short films, I never thought I'd be 100 articles deep in writing about them. There are great films out there, for sure. But for every mind-blowing one, there are hundreds of inane, heavy-handed, stupid ones. It's an uphill battle to bring you top-notch content every week, but I've tried to remain vigilant in my quest for goodness and I'm proud to say that this 100th one is a doozy. Plus, icing on the cake, it's the filmmaker's first film, which was animated as part of her thesis for MOME (Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest), which went on to win over 45 awards internationally and was shortlisted for the 87th Academy Awards. I'm proud to present animator Réka Bucsi's acclaimed absurdist short film, "Symphony No. 42," which begins like many landmark things – with a bang.

From the opening scene of "Symphony No. 42," where a fox draws a moving, mystical image before pulling out a gun and shooting itself, you know this short will take you places. The film is a compendium of vignettes that blend nature and pop culture with a surrealist, deadpan sensibility. Whether Busci is poking fun of famous artists like Damien Hirst, who's found painting his dumb dots on his iconic shark, or juxtaposing helpless elephants against brain-dead humans, her absurdist situations illuminate something about our condition. However, in each situation, next to the dry, dark humour is a futility or sadness that is never quite addressed. What does it all mean? Who knows? In the end, her whimsical creatures, affectless humans, and moments of surreal irrationality offer no answers, but they do swirl together into, well, pretty much everything.

I reached out to director Réka Bucsi to see if she could help shed some light on her ideas and her future films. Check it out below.

VICE: Why "Symphony No. 42"? What was wrong with the ones before it?
Réka Bucsi: Forty-two is a magical number that looks good, is a suspiciously central number in the world of science, and still I think means nothing at all. I like to just take things as they are, and not symbolise them, but it's really not easy to do that with movies. Also, I'm sure Mozart had some great symphonies before his 42nd one, but this has nothing to do with the man.

Then have you always been a fan of symphonies? What is it about the classical form that gets you going?
I like classical music – it makes me feel smarter than I actually am. I have huge respect for some composers, and listening to their music is a great inspiration. I also think classical music can build a really great contrast with some of my work. It helps me balance between dramatic and sarcastic.

What came first, your character design or the visual gags associated with them? I especially love the reoccurring gag of the elephant painting for help.
"Symphony No. 42" wasn't meant to be a gag film. But I was really glad when the audience reacted with laughter, as this showed me that I could hit that spot in other people that I thought as a "laugh-cry" moment in the film. The characters came simultaneously with the situations I put them in. It was never first a character and than a story. The situation brought the character along, and the character defined what it could do best. I think that poor elephant doesn't deserve laughter, but I'm really glad you enjoyed watching him suffer!

Well, your short is still absurd, in the best way. I don't think there's any getting around that. But having traveled around the world with it now, what has been the most absurd response to "Symphony No. 42"?
There was a guy once, who asked me in a letter if I am part of some kind of secret society, because of the sign that the fox draws in the very beginning of the film. He was quite suspicious and sent me some screenshots of other films that have the sign as well and asked me what is going on in the film industry, and to reveal the truth. It was really hard to resist not sending him a well-built-up conspiracy theory that would scare him to death.

Even though you're a relatively new animator, both this and your newest short "Love" seem to tell their stories through vignettes. Is that style of storytelling more exciting to you than something more linear?
Actually, "Love" is very different from "Symphony No. 42." The trailer may make you feel it's a similar structure, but it's a way more concrete story. I wouldn't call the situations vignettes anymore, but I wouldn't call it classical storytelling either. I'm just excited about the short form of film. I think it is a perfect platform for experimenting with storytelling, composing pictures and sound. It's only recently that I started to feel a growing interest in feature length, and how I could maybe include the things I like in the short format.

What are you working on now?
I just finished my new film "Love," which is a 14-minute-long, French-Hungarian co-production. That film took a lot of time to finance and make, but will be shown in competition at the Berlin Film Festival for the first time . I recently worked with some great people on a short promotional film for a city in Denmark, but mainly I try to just draw without deadlines for a bit now, and see what happens. In the near future, I would like to do something based on music. I will be part of an artist-in-residence program in Vienna in May, where I want to start developing a new short little something.

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as a film curator. He's the senior curator for Vimeo's On Demand platform. He has also programmed at Tribeca Film Festival, Rooftop Films, and the Hamptons International Film Festival.

For information on Réka Busci, visit her website.

Illustration by Dan Evans

I had a very happy, idyllic childhood. Even though I had Baptist ministers for parents, they weren't frightening or hardcore. They were very loving. I was an only child – my parents tried for 13 years to have a kid and mum suffered lots of miscarriages. Life was great until I was about nine years old. Then the bullying started. It was typical stuff about my parents being ministers, and my faith and Jesus. But I did kind of ask for it: I was always wearing pink pastel sweaters with Bermuda shorts and big badges that said 'Jesus Loves You'. I would have bullied me.

We moved and I went to an all-girls school, I became obsessed with boys. But by the time I was 15, I began to realise that sex was valued as something very precious in my family. When my friends started doing it I was like, sure, that's fine, that's the way of the world, but I'm just not going to. At parties, my friends would couple off and drift into different rooms together and I would be left listening to the BBC World Service. I was sort of fine with that, but no-one else seemed to be.

All through my teens I became known as The Person Who Didn't Have Sex. My decision not to do it was often either used as the reason why a guy didn't want to go out with me, or as the reason he did – so he could break down the barriers, so to speak. But I was quite naughty. Every other sentence was an innuendo. I think that intrigued people – she talks about it, she's candid about it, but she doesn't do it. Guys found it confusing, which I understood. Then, when I was 23, my dad died suddenly. And then I lost five other people over an 18-month period, and I began to question my faith and everything I believed in. It was textbook: 'Why is there so much suffering? Right, bye bye God. See you later.'

After that I went on a three-year atheism rant and although I didn't go off the rails in the sense of doing drugs, I certainly fell in love with a guy I lost my virginity to. The irony was he was willing to wait for me, but by that point I was no longer looking forward to a wedding day with my dad not there to see it.

Since then, I've slept with two other guys, so it's not like I was going for anyone with a pulse. I've had four long-term relationships and not all of them I've had sex in. There was the guy I lost my virginity to, then I met a Christian boy and we didn't have sex for the year we were together. The following year I went out with someone else and he was very upset that we weren't having sex as he knew I'd done it before. We didn't have sex for a year, but then one night we were in the pub and he was complaining I was smoking and, knowing he was about to bring up the 'sex card', I just said 'Oh come on then'. After him I was with someone for five years. And it was during that relationship that I found my faith again.

I gave him the option to leave if he wanted to. He came into the relationship with a very different girlfriend, and his love language was physical – he expressed himself through sex – whereas mine was words of affirmation and emotional availability.

That's not to say my burning loins were not real. Sex is a bit like dieting – once you give up cakes and biscuits, it's all you think about. I started to watch porn to get my kicks, to sexually release myself, and became addicted. It was a total contradiction of my beliefs, but I thought I'm not doing this with anyone else, it's just me and a screen. It doesn't harm anyone. Of course, it was completely hypocritical. And now the irony is that I'm counselling couples and one or both have porn addictions and it's ruining their marriage.

At 31, after five years together, my boyfriend and I broke up. I didn't have much holding me in London so I moved to California, became a pastor and haven't had sex for five years. It was my mother who came up with the term "neo-virgin". 'A "reformed virgin" sounds too convent-like', she told me one afternoon over tea. So that stuck, and I became a girl who returned to a lifestyle that held a battle worth fighting for – exclusivity, something meaningful.

Abstaining from sex after you know what it's like is a lot harder than if you'd never done it at all.

Although sex is the most phenomenal thing, it's created, I think, to bond. It's meant to hold you together and I'm not sure we're meant to use it so lightly. I've got some friends who say 'I just got laid and I'm happy with that', but the majority of the time someone cries at the end of it because it doesn't work out. Abstaining from sex after you know what it's like is a lot harder than if you'd never done it at all: the visuals are there in your brain and you know how great it is. The temptation to do it is huge, but I actually feel more free now than before. Even if it can be difficult on the surface.

When I'm dating, I have to be very upfront. If I'm at a party and I'm known as The Christian, people either make a beeline for me because they want to start an argument, or they leave me the hell alone because they think I'm going to evangelise them. That's never been my agenda. But because I'm a pastor most people know before date one that sex is off the menu. However, if I haven't had The Conversation by date three, there's a problem. It's not hard to give up sex, but it gets difficult when you start falling in love with each other – that's when you have to have strong boundaries.

A lot of the time people say to me, 'You're 35 and single, it's not really working out for you, this whole holding out thing, is it?' But the thing is, it wasn't working out for me before I abstained. I wonder if I was an atheist whether I would have made this decision anyway. By holding out I have more clarity – does that person want to know me for me, or are they co-dependent and just can't not be in a relationship?

What's kind of lovely about it, is that so many of my friends are in the same boat. It's quite quaint in a way: we talk about when he held my hand, or the conversations we had. It's like we're 15 again.

• "Prude: The Misconceptions of a Neo-Virgin" by Carrie Lloyd is out now.

More from VICE:

Meet the British Lads Who Take Sex-Tourism Trips to Small-Town America

Living With Opus Dei Helped Me Lose My Religion and Leave Masculinity Behind

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All screenshots courtesy Taylor Cooper

It's no secret that not everyone who you talk to on the internet is who he or she claims to be. A growing number of men are falling victim to a scam in which catfish accounts on Facebook are adding them and then trading direct messages back and forth before convincing the guys to whip out their dingles and buttholes on Skype. Taylor Cooper, a 26-year-old pipeline worker from British Columbia who asked VICE to use his real name in case other victims want to reach out to him, became one victim of this widespread scam in August.

Cooper says an "average-looking... bookworm-y type girl" using the name Kelsey Smith, who appeared to be in her early 20s and had no mutual friends with him, added him on Facebook, began a private messenger string with him, and convinced him to get on Skype with her. After he got naked on webcam for her, the person he was talking to tried to extort him for over a grand by posting a recording of their Skype session on YouTube and threatening to leak it to his family.

VICE: What led up to you Skyping with this person?
Taylor Cooper: Literally she added me, and then a week later she messaged me and it was just all in one go. In the conversation I sent you, that's the whole thing, and within about an hour, we Skyped.

What exactly did the person get you to do on Skype?
I was just waking up, I was a little hungover, and it was kind of really out of the blue. Then she said, "I'm single," and she's like, "What are you doing right now?" And she's like, "You should add me on Skype." I'm kind of no stranger to internet hookups and stuff like that, so I was all game, and then we started Skyping, and it was the girl in the pictures – she was on the camera. The whole time I'm thinking this is too good to be true. Another weird thing was that she said that her microphone was broken, so I couldn't talk to her via the video, I had to keep going back to the chat on Skype. Then she kept saying, "Show me your cock, and I'll take my shirt off." So of course, I went with it. She said, "Show me your ass" too, which I thought was kind of weird. I just went along with it, and she took her shirt off. Then all of the sudden, the video just went black. Then she sent me the link: It was a YouTube link of the video of me. Then she told me to listen to what she had to say very carefully, then gave me a whole list of my family members with their full names.

What family members did she list off?
I think maybe she could see my whole friend list on Facebook, and since my last name is Cooper, it was all my Coopers that I had as Facebook friends. So like cousins, aunts, uncles, some family members who I hadn't seen in years and just have them on Facebook. I assumed that she only looked at my last name, but I have a stepmom and stepdad too – they have different last names.

What did you do then? Did you consider paying this person off?
No, there was no way I was going to pay. They wanted at first $1,500 Canadian right now." It was just back and forth of me begging her not to do it.

How did it all end then?
I told her my pay day was a couple days from now and that I would send her the money on Friday. She gave me a Western Union address to send to her, and it was Ivory Coast, Africa. I phoned my best friend, and he was like, "Just talk to your family and tell them not to open up any videos that are sent." Nothing came of it; they didn't send it to anyone. But I phoned my dad and was telling him and my uncle not to open anything. Thinking about it now, maybe I shouldn't have done that, but I was just kind of freaking out. My uncle, my dad, and my stepmom knew about it. They kind of understand. I've seen my uncle since then and the whole family, and they haven't said anything about it. I think they know I was kind of embarrassed.

I think eventually the scammer got scared. They ended up deleting all the messages, and nothing ended up happening. I don't know if I just got lucky, or maybe they felt bad for me because I was playing that pouty story.

Did you ever report it to the police?
No, because I just knew that if they're out of the country, there's nothing they can do about it. When I read your previous article about it, I thought it was good that other people were reporting it. I was glad when I found out I wasn't the only person it happened to because it felt pretty silly. I couldn't imagine if it happened to guys who were married – that's when they probably pay.

Do you know anyone else who this happened to?
I actually did. A friend of a friend of mine in BC had the same exact thing happen to him. He just deleted his Facebook, and it kind of went away.

How do you feel about it now that a bit of time has passed and you have heard about it happening to other people?
It was really crazy. It scared the shit out of me when it first happened. I think it's just people in foreign countries just sitting on computers all day adding people, it's just like fishing – you get a bite once in a while. It's crazy how advanced this has gotten. Even when I saw the girl on webcam taking her shirt off, it must have been a recorded video.

I don't mind you using my name because if people are in that situation, they read this, and they want to talk to someone about it, I will gladly try to help them. I don't get embarrassed too easily.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Follow Allison Elkin on Twitter.

YouTube user siedmiokrotny explains that the Earth is flat.

My encounter with the Flat Earth began, like most life-changing discoveries, as a bit of a joke. It's always gratifying to stumble on some tiny, cohesive internet subculture that you never knew existed; it's like picking up an ordinary-looking rock to find that the earwigs have built an entire functioning miniature city underneath. There's a whole other reality there, scurrying under a very different sky: they have as little knowledge of you and your priorities as you had of them, and every new seam of strangeness just goes to show that the world is far richer and more complex than you ever thought. People who honestly, seriously, in the 21st century, believe that the Earth is flat, and that a vast global conspiracy exists to indoctrinate us into thinking that it's a sphere surrounded by empty space. Wouldn't you at least want to listen to what they have to say?

Like most fringe communities, the Flat Earth truth movement is a nebulous and sprawling collection of blogs and forums and long-decayed Facebook pages, a world wide cobweb, but if it has anything like a centre, it's probably YouTube. There are thousands of true believers there, amateur cosmologists with their free copies of Windows Movie Maker, each of them certain that they've managed to single-handedly disprove 20 centuries of accepted science. I must have watched hours of flat earth rants; they're certainly better than anything on TV. Very quickly I learned to avoid the long, popular, pedantic videos, which invariably describe themselves as "documentaries", and tend to consist of one person in a dank little room, trying his best to sound reasonable (and it is almost always a he) as he drones about composite photos of Earth from space over a tedious slideshow.

The really fun stuff comes from the smaller accounts, the people who care far less about sounding respectable to outsiders, who are so deep in their hermetic community that they've forgotten how anyone could possibly not see the truth. Things get weird fast; it's like outsider art, each piece with its own gloriously mad formal innovations. One user has his insights appearing as subtitles over Hollywood footage of monsters and aliens, backed by an Epic Dubstep compilation; insisting that he's not making any assertions, that he's only asking questions, they're all phrased as what-if scenarios, but the titles give the game away. "What if the ILLUMINATI has STARGATE technology and flat earth will NEVER be the same?" "What if I believe that YOU'RE deceived and flat earth is real?" There's the guy who calls himself Math Powerland, and appears for unknown reasons in a suit jacket smeared with metallic paint. Or the people who think that the clues are in the language: the word "planet" is just "plane" plus an unfolded cube! And if we're not living in Hell, why do we greet each other with hell-o? It was funny: look at these people, and how wrong they are, isn't it hilarious? Until, very suddenly, it wasn't funny any more.

You can only immerse yourself in this stuff for so long before you start to believe it. Far more than the people who think hip-hop is run by the Illuminati or that vaccines give your children autism, the Flat Earthers seemed to be tapping into something real, the sense that there's a vast and irreducible wrongness about the world and the way we view it.

Standing on the beach, a brittle winter wind pushing me into the rising foam, I tried to see the curvature of the Earth on the horizon, and couldn't find it anywhere. It's flat! Why is it that nobody's trying to tap Antarctica's vast chemical resources, if it's just a floating continent and not the forbidden wall of ice that surrounds our flat world? Why is it that commercial flight paths in the southern hemisphere curve upwards, towards the equator, when it would make so much more sense to fly over the Antarctic Ocean? How come a flight from Wellington in New Zealand to Santiago in Chile stops over in Los Angeles? If the world is round, it's an enormous diversion, a pointless globe-straddling triangle, but if you map it as a flat plane with the North Pole in the centre, the route forms an almost straight line.

Someone's lying to us. What do they know, and why are we being kept in the dark? Laughing at the weirdness of the flat earth believers became a way of pushing out the unwelcome idea that they might actually be right. It became much harder to be sure of anything, once I was no longer certain of the ground I stood on; the world grew dark and mysterious, and monsters thrashed about just over the horizon. Where am I? Where am I really?

I found that the Flat Earthers really do have something important to teach us. They might be wrong about the shape of the Earth, but when it comes to other, more important questions, they're far closer to the truth than the people who drearily insist that the world is a floating sphere. Late last month, the rapper B.o.B. had a minor Twitter spat with televised astro-bore Neil DeGrasse Tyson over the question of the Flat Earth: B.o.B. insisted it was real; Tyson maintained that it wasn't, and ended up featuring in an excruciatingly bad science-based rap parody to prove his point. ("The planet is a sphere, G!")

Tyson ended the exchange by writing "Duude — to be clear: Being five centuries regressed in your reasoning doesn't mean we all can't still like your music", somehow managing to be more wrong than someone who thinks the world is flat. It's not just the terrible extraneous "u" in "dude" – it's that five centuries ago, in 1516, absolutely nobody thought that the world was flat. Tyson has been pretty forthright in his dismissal of philosophy, which is a shame. If he'd read his Hegel, he'd know that concepts in the present do not emerge undiluted from the past, that phenomena are products of the concrete totality of human relations.

As everyone knows, Columbus never proved that the Earth is round: the scholars of Europe were already well aware of that (and had been since ancient Greece); he thought that the world was much smaller than it is, and ended up proving himself wrong. The flat earth movement is a distinctly modern phenomenon, dating back no further than the mid-19th century, when pseudonymous writers such as Samuel Rowbotham (who called himself "Parallax") started writing pamphlets insisting that astronomy was a deception and the Earth was a flat plane.

It's notable that this development only took place in the context of the emergence of a truly global capitalism and what the philosopher Max Horkheimer would later call "instrumental reason" – scientific reason that doesn't just explain reality, but which is put to use; the mode of reason that alienates people from a world reconfigured as one vast factory. For millions, technological advances meant not freedom, but utter misery – and just as it declares that everything can be known, instrumental reason abstracts that knowledge beyond immediate experience. "Enlightenment", Horkheimer writes, "has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity." Faced with a reality that could no longer be intuitively understood, whose secrets had become the property of a small class of scientists and administrators, the early Flat Earthers tried to claw back some of their autonomy. They insisted that their own experience, not the diktat of a ruling class, was true. And when you look at the Earth with your own two eyes, it doesn't look round. It looks flat.

In his Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments , Søren Kierkegaard tells a parable: a man escapes from a mental institution and into town, but worries that he'll be returned to his cell if he's discovered to be mad. So he decides to answer every question with a statement that's undeniably true: "The Earth is round." This is, of course, madness, and he's quickly locked away again. The banality of angrily insisting that the world is round makes it in a way far less true than the idea that it's actually flat. Because it's not true, in the boring, conventional sense of the word, Flat Earth theory has an enormous creative potential: all those thousands of people, constantly creating their crystalline new realities and uploading them to YouTube. Flat Earth is fascinating because in an era where so much of the world is disenchanting and so much of social existence is already a given – you will have your job, you will have your life, you will be exploited and then you will die – there are people who can dream the Earth itself into a different shape. It's flat.

@sam_kriss

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The original design for Lara Croft was definitely focused on a "lads"-pleasing aspect of her appearance (image via the Tomb Raider Wikia)

In 1996, Core Design's Tomb Raider was released onto the PlayStation and PC after being a timed exclusive for SEGA's doomed Saturn console – and it was on Sony's breakthrough system where it really laid its franchise-forming roots. Arriving after a huge build up of hype, the game achieved the rare thing of surpassing expectations by being not only a more-than-decent adventure, innovative in several respects, but also by starring a sexy, ass-kicking, dual-pistol-wielding heroine, the likes of which the medium had never really seen (at least, not until the end credits). Looking like she'd stepped straight from the pages of a comic book, Lara Croft played a massive part in making video gaming cool for the PlayStation generation.

While the Saturn version of Tomb Raider was near enough identical to the one seen by more people on the PlayStation, it was lacking one telling move. On the PlayStation, Lara could handstand onto a ledge before gracefully flipping over to stand upright. It's ultimately a pointless gesture, extraneous to gameplay needs, just a nice bit of animation. But it speaks volumes about Lara's character, in a moment crystallising her confidence and grace under pressure.

Twenty years later, Lara Croft the capable comic-book (super)heroine is a distant memory. In her prime, she was one of the rare gaming avatars to break into mainstream audiences by crossing over into the wider media sphere. She appeared on the cover of The Face magazine (ask your parents); she was a sales woman for Lucozade (after Viz's The Fat Slags. No, really); and inspired a copycat TV series starring Tia Carrere from Wayne's World.

Lara Croft as she appears in 2013's 'Tomb Raider'

The Crystal Dynamics-made 2013 reboot of Tomb Raider, and 2015's Rise of the Tomb Raider – an Xbox One exclusive now available on PC, with a PS4 port coming later in 2016 – are both great games. Let's not get that message confused here – they are, in their own ways, hugely impressive achievements. And both show a very changed Lara from the one we knew in the 1990s – she's now a hard-bitten survivor, not a supermodel explorer with a habit for running into dinosaurs. They're set up as prequels, of a kind, to the older games, showing how Lara became the infamous icon we thought we were familiar with. But that makes their stories dead-ends – all the questions they ask the player, we know the answers to. The games' gritty aesthetic is a hangover from the military shooters of the Xbox 360 era, too, when video gaming grew up not by innovating, but by layering on more guts and gore atop its grey backgrounds.

And now, allow me to take a brief diversion.

Back in the early 1980s, Alan Moore, with his revival of forgotten British superhero Marvelman, and Frank Miller's run on Daredevil, both deconstructed the concept of superheroes, taking them into bold, darker new territories. With Miller's The Dark Knight Returns and Moore's Watchmen both released in 1986, they brought a new level of maturity to a medium that was constantly dismissed as being "just for kids".

Come the '90s, there was an endless array of supposedly mature comic titles, full of gratuitous violence and titillation aimed squarely at a young male audience. The ideas that Moore and Miller had brought to comics were quickly turned into self-parody through unthinking overuse. Dark and brooding became the default setting for superhero teams. This was the era of extreme grimacing, Rob Liefeld's mutant chests and Batman looking like a shit Gundam.

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Okay, back to Lara.

When Tomb Raider was released in 1996, the gaming landscape was filled with the corpses of failed mascot platformers. (Remember Mr Nutz, or Aero the Acro-Bat? Of course you don't. Nobody does.) Lara Croft stood out as a relatable character because it felt like you could be her. She was at once both a fantasy figure and attainable lifestyle choice, inspiring an excellent ad campaign.

A straw poll of some of my female gaming friends tells me that opinion is still divided over Lara. Some saw her original design as a swashbuckling adventurer version of themselves. Others called out her top-heaviness, tight top and micro-shorts. Given that the creative lead on the first Tomb Raider, Toby Gard, is a guy, it's fair to say that Lara was dreamt up with the lad's mag crowd at least somewhat in mind – the story goes that Gard was even asked to include a "nude code" in the game, something he refused to do. But it's undeniable that she was a bona-fide icon at the peak of her popularity, whatever your take on her, ahem, assets.

It's hard to see the gritty Lara of today's rebooted titles ever enjoying that level of recognition, though. If one aesthetic dominated the previous console generation, it was the brown Xbox 360 shooter. Titles in the Call of Duty, Halo and Gears of War series were real games, for real men. (Shout out to Simon Miller.) Triple-A games, those made at massive studios and aimed squarely at the largest possible gaming market, embraced dilapidated locales and casual hyper-violence. Once a trailblazer, our new-look Lara Croft is now following the lead of muscle-bound meathead super-soldiers while uttering pompous clichés like, "I went looking for adventure, but instead adventure found me."

Adventuring during the early stages of 'Rise of the Tomb Raider'

Diversion time again. I never warmed to Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy. Those movies lacked the romance and wit of Tim Burton's Michael Keaton-starring brace, and the sublime Animated Series. Nolan's take was cynical and dour, an intentional step away from the gaudy Joel Schumacher films that followed Burton's wonders, perhaps. But they never felt comfortable with how patently ridiculous the idea of a man who dresses up as a bat to punch clowns actually is.

Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2, however, firmly embraces the ridiculousness. "Guy named Otto Octavius winds up with eight limbs... What are the odds?" exclaims JK Simmons's excellent J. Jonah Jameson, tongue firmly in cheek. When The Dark Knight Rises attempts to break the fourth wall, it falls flat on its face due to Christian Bale's gruff voice. And that's before you get to Tom Hardy's Bane.

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Both Nolan's Batman films and the two recent Tomb Raider games share more than just the initial similarities of their central protagonists being millionaires with daddy issues. Both go to great pains to show you how grown up and mature they are, spouting half-baked philosophical platitudes that are essentially meaningless, like living, Instagram-inspiring quotes accounts.

Then again, maybe it was the only direction Tomb Raider could take after Naughty Dog's Uncharted series took its place as gaming's top archaeological adventure attraction. Nathan Drake is, by and large, an obnoxious haircut who cracks jokes while committing mass murder. But like Lara, Drake has the same attainable fantasy appeal. Judging from the amount of guys I see at Yates's who dress like him, at least.

'Lara Croft GO' sees the "classic" Lara back in action

But while she may not have the spotlight she once enjoyed, the classic Lara Croft lives on in modern spin-off games like Guardian of Light, Temple of Osiris and the excellent puzzler Lara Croft GO. All are very enjoyable titles, with the latter right up there beside Monument Valley as one of the best mobile gaming experiences of all time.

But even with my many reservations about how she's portrayed today, it's good to see Lara Croft back in big-budget titles, like Rise of the Tomb Raider. There'll always be something timeless about exploring ruins in games, and it's so depressingly rare to see modern triple-A-level developers prioritising a female protagonist – though that situation is improving. I only wish that Rise... and its reboot predecessor didn't take themselves quite so seriously, and better embraced the adventurous spirit we saw back when Lara was chugging energy drinks on her way to taking over the world. Let's see her do another handstand at the very edge of a deadly drop, just the once. Her legendary reputation has to begin, again, somewhere.

Rise of the Tomb Raider is out now for Xbox One and PC. Read our review of the game here.

@jake_laverde

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Many of us spend the beginning of each new year thinking about alcohol. Often, that's because it's coming out of our noses, thickened by the half-digested halloumi we picked up on the way back from our New Year's Eve party. And then comes the rest of the month: Dry January and the rigmarole of discussing a colleague's temporary sobriety for an entire 31 days.

This year the government has helped prolong our booze-related thoughts, telling us halfway through last month that we should drink no more than seven pints per week, and then that we should think about cancer every time we have a glass of wine – both kind of buzzkill memos, but also technically completely true.

When alcohol dominates cultural consciousness in the way it has for the past month or so, it's difficult not to consider its role in your own life. To help a few of our friends and colleagues work through those thoughts, we asked them to write them all down and let us share them with the internet.

(Photo by Robert Foster)

JOEL GOLBY, STAFF WRITER, VICE

I didn't drink until I was 19 because my dad was an alcoholic and it killed him when I was 15, which, on the whole, doesn't make you too thirsty. That means I sort of missed out on that entire teenage rite-of-passage with alcohol – of drinking until you're sick on a park bench, of sneaking into rock clubs with extremely lax ID policies (it's always rock clubs), of loitering outside Londis with a pocket full of change and the one person in your group with the most polite voice asking adult passersby if they can score you some Bacardi – because I had too many searing memories of coming home to find my dad passed out in front of the TV; of having to make him strong black coffee to sober him up before my mum got home and they had yet another argument about it; of him moving out and dwelling in this tiny council flat, alone and watching televised golf, slowly slouching towards death.

Here's a fun anecdote: there was a time, after he had moved out and died, that I went up to the attic to sort some things, and this whole cascade of plastic cider bottles fell down on top of me, icy blue and crumpled, pooling to the floor at the base of the ladder, one final little gift from dad. By the time we counted them up – laughing hysterically throughout, because you have to, because death is so absurd – there was something like 40 empty bottles of Frosty Jack there, chucked drunkenly into the attic to disguise a habit we all knew he had. Was a bad time, if I'm honest. Wasn't a fun time.

But now I love alcohol! It's great!

Second year of university I decided I was my own man – that alcohol wasn't a curse, that it was a vice, that I was better than that, that I could control it if I knew the size of it, and also it's really fucking hard to make friends when you just sit in your room in halls soberly playing Xbox alone – but that was before I knew the statistics about children of alcoholics: that they are anywhere between two and nine (the regularly cited statistic is a firm "three") times more likely to develop drink or drug dependencies, three times more likely to consider suicide.

That seems at odds with how I think of alcohol: the lubricant for the best nights of my life, something I drink to relax and unwind, the pints I drink when I'm bonding with friends. But then sometimes I find myself drinking a few tins at home and I think: this is alright, isn't it? Find myself two or three drinks drunker than everyone else at the party and go: this is... this is cool. This is OK. Wake up with a hangover and spend an entire bottle of Lucozade telling myself I'm not my dad. I got this. I'm in control.

I don't know: I think every child of an alcoholic spends moments of reflection wondering if they've slipped into the quicksand, too. My relationship with alcohol is a complex one, and if I'm honest, there was a two-year period back there where I was drinking too much, too familiarly. My mum died and I didn't know what to do. A relationship died and I didn't know what to do. There's no direct causation there – that feels like I'm firing blanks in the dark, desperately trying to find something to blame – but the fact is that the quantity slowly started to increase. Alcohol was a blanket I could wrap around parts of my brain that got too loud in quiet moments. That's bad, isn't it? That's not good.

I think a lot of us, if we're really honest, are stranded in a similar boozy purgatory: always on that knife between "being drunk and having fun" and just "being drunk". Maybe for me the edges are just that little bit sharper because I've seen what alcoholism can do (makes your family really sad!).

Personally, I'm trying to shift out of the habit of drinking six cans in front of the TV on a weeknight; I'm trying to take a more responsible attitude to myself and my health. I'm trying to lose weight, for goodness sake, because beer has made me look like someone put a haircut on the Stay-Puft man. I'm trying to escape a curse that's not a curse, a too-obvious destiny left by the man who came before me. But I don't want to give up drinking cold, because... well, I like drinking, and it's hard to tear my social life away from it without killing them both, like ivy growing on a tree. I don't want to admit that I'm not in control. But maybe in this, the year of our lord 2k16, it's time to be a little bit more grown up about it. Or get bang into smack instead. One of those two.

Click through to the next page to read VICE columnist John Doran's thoughts on booze, and the pages after that for a few more writers' reflections.

The author in his drinking days

JOHN DORAN, COLUMNIST, VICE

So another DRYNUARY is over. Is there any bigger indication of what a nation of absolute whoppers we've become than this nascent "tradition"? What a truly appalling time to be alive. As we speak, millions of goons all over this green and pleasant land are over-exaggeratedly telling each other about the "struggle" to stay dry for the last four weeks; how they nearly "didn't make it" like they're discussing their participation in the Charge of the Fucking Light Brigade.

Look, I don't want to be the ghost at the banquet, but only an idiot would think that drynuary works. Only an idiot would think that by being a raw-eating, pilates-practising, auto-enema administering fruitarian on a Monday means you can shoot yourself in the face with a rocket launcher every other day of the week – because, funnily enough, that isn't how it works. And it's the same with alcohol.

Any idiot can stop drinking for four weeks when they can count down the days from 31 to zero. The real difficulties (and real benefits) lie in being able to have a few days off drinking every week – or, god forbid, drinking more sensibly in the first place. Instead, we have what is essentially the same as a macho drinking contest itself – a next to useless drying out period that puts strain on the internal organs, with benefits that can be wiped out in the stampede back off the wagon on the 1st of February. It's the equivalent of the coked-up banker insisting on his heart-bursting game of squash every Friday morning, despite the amount of racket he puts up his hooter every other point during the week, and has little or nothing to do with health.

But then everything about drinking culture in this country is hypocritical and ill thought out. As drinkers become thirstier and thirstier, the advice we receive from above gets more and more laughable. In Great Britain, more than nine million people drink "more than they are supposed to", and that figure will have gone up dramatically since the government issued new stringent alcohol consumption guidelines a few weeks ago.

Speaking as a chronic alcoholic (recovering for seven years) who was drunk nearly every day for well over 20 years – who nearly died several times over because of this; who, on average, exceeded the new government guidelines by a factor of 20 to 30 per week – I think it's fair to say I have a horse in this race despite being teetotal.

Everyone who drinks knows this advice is a waste of public money, and no one pays any attention to it other than the sort of people who would drink moderately anyway.

Admittedly clearer links have been found between drinking and cancer than were evident the last time they were updated 20 years ago, but the difference these changes will make to those who already drink moderately are negligible. The new figures reflect a desire by the medical establishment to bring the risk of dying by alcohol-related causes to below 1 percent – what they deem a reasonable figure. But according to Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, an expert in risk analysis, it is important to put this figure into context. It turns out that now, if we follow the new guidelines, it's actually more dangerous to watch an hour of TV or eat bacon twice a week.

Coming soon! New government guidelines report that you can reduce your risks of getting seriously injured or killed in a car accident to acceptable levels by only leaving the house once a week between 11AM and 4PM. It's all based on 100 percent accurate statistics!

Government figures coming soon! Reduce your risk of becoming Pope by not converting to Catholicism and reduce your risk of becoming smeared in bear faeces by not rolling around in the woods!

The real picture of heavy drinking in the UK – the one essentially ignored by this advice and drynuary – is disastrous. Approximately 1.5 million people are either chronically addicted to booze or feel that they really can't control their drinking, and of them, 33,000 per year die because of alcohol-related incidents and chronic drinking combined.

To everyone reading this who is healthy and happy and going out for a drink tonight – I hope you have a really good time. It's none of my business, but seriously, do think about having a few days off a week if you don't already. Being able to drink is great; getting in a position where you have to stop isn't. To all my brothers and sisters who have quit the booze and taken the pledge – right on and stay strong, relish waking up tomorrow morning and your first thought not being either about phoning in sick or apologising to your partner/flatmates/parents. To anyone who is drinking but doesn't feel in control of the experience (anyone who really did struggle with staying dry in January) or doesn't derive any joy from it any more, please get in touch with your doctor or go to a walk-in NHS centre and ask for an appointment as soon as possible. Quitting (or moderating, if that's right for you; chronic alcoholism and habitual binge drinking aren't the same thing) is tough, but if a dickhead like me can do it, then anyone can. Good luck.

John Doran's book on coping with alcoholism and drug addiction, 'Jolly Lad', is available from Strange Attractor.

Click through to the next page to read VICE Junior Editor Hannah Ewens' thoughts on booze, and the pages after that for a few more writers' reflections.

HANNAH EWENS, JUNIOR EDITOR, VICE

A house party was the beginning. We all planned to stay over at the mate's house who had the most blasé parents, who wouldn't mind picking up six squawking teenage girls at 3AM.

In the morning, I found myself wearing a slutty Alice in Wonderland outfit, hugging the toilet and dribbling on the pedestal mat. I called my dad to collect me – the stoic knight who'd always do the lifts out of the parents – and he physically placed me into the front seat of his Ford Galaxy. For the entire drive back around country roads I threw up every time we braked, turned a slight corner or stopped at lights. It was collecting in the curvature of the leg space. After half an hour, it was surprisingly full. When we emergency stopped, it splashed up my white knee-high socks and stained them pink, making me puke harder through burning nostrils. Dad just sat silent and straight-faced, not angry, not disappointed. Just accepting, like he would every time I fucked up over the following 10 years.

On to university: a dystopian social experiment where friendships are based on, and fuelled by, drinking large quantities through funnels, tubes or other seemingly unrelated household items. Drink equals fun, therefore not drinking equals boring. When the second wave of borderline eating disorders descends among your female friends, it's skipping dinner to drink a bottle of wine after work in Spoons in order to have sex with someone from your shit part-time job. It's pre-drinking on the top deck and deliberately annoying other passengers while your feistiest mate sticks her boobs in some bloke's face. It's every weekend. Despite all its faults, it feels like freedom.

Until you're part of a generation who hit their mid-twenties and feel apathetic towards it. For me, it was accepting that the morning after a night of heavy drinking would always mean anxiety rattling through my bones. Without the comfort blanket of best mates there to pile in the bed with you, or spend the entire next day moaning and hungover with, it was different anyway. The sense of all being in it together was gone.

Bar the occasional blow out I usually only drink a couple of glasses. I say this like it was some sort of mental health epiphany, but it's partly down to the fact that, for the past couple of years, I've been skint ­– really fucking skint – so can't afford to go to the pub in London anyway. Maybe when I'm rich and famous I'll be back throwing up my stomach lining in people carriers. Until then.

Click through to the next page to read VICE Executive Editor Sam Wolfson's thoughts on booze, and the pages after that for a few more writers' reflections.

SAM WOLFSON, EXECUTIVE EDITOR, VICE

People really love to tell me about their drunken fuck-ups. I'm not sure why – I'm not very trustworthy and bad at eye contact – but somehow I've ended up being my social group's paper of record for fumbled blow jobs and light trespassing committed under the influence of nine Stellas and a packet of scampi fries.

When people tell those stories, the booze is the first thing they get out the way, almost like a disclaimer. I think "I was drunker than I've ever been" and "the following report contains flashing images" are of similar minimal importance to the narrative of what follows – just something to bear in mind.

That's how it should be. Alcohol is the least important part of any night out. Only the worst kind of schmuck bases their whole evening around the right kind of claret. For most people, the drinking is just a means to an end.

But then this year, I actually did dry January, and I really felt my whole life change colour. I'm not a very dark person – I don't identify with personal essays on Thought Catalogue or anything like that – but stopping drinking did make me realise that there was more mess in my life than I was probably accounting for. Confused internal tangles managed to straighten themselves out; I was able to follow a train of thought with being knocked over by its implications.

It's not like everything in my life changed, or I felt healthier or my skin improved. It was just a bit like I'd been wearing a pair of wet socks all day and I'd popped home and put on some nicer dry ones that had just come out the wash. I told you I wasn't dark.

Christ knows, I couldn't wait to start drinking again. Abstinence, vegetarianism, celibacy, holding in farts – I can imagine all these things have their advantages, but seeing as you only have one life it seems a waste to spend it not doing stuff.

Click through to the next page to read VICE Staff Writer Joe Bish's thoughts on booze, and the pages after that for another writer's reflections.

JOE BISH, STAFF WRITER, VICE

As a teen, I pretentiously shirked drinking. While my peers were going to parks and each other's houses to drink entire two-litre bottles of blue water before sicking them back up again, I was there scoffing, rolling joints, confused and angry at their pointless shitfacing. The main thing that bothered me about it was that they didn't really like each other and would get pissed together to make each other more bearable. At the time I thought this was the height of pointlessness, not knowing that imbibing narcs to make humanity seem more tenable would become a great fixture in my life.

It was only after I got my first job at the tender age of 16 that I really dove headfirst into the world of alcohol. I was working at a record label after avoiding college. I wanted to hang out with older people – people who "got" me – not more guffawing, pizza-faced dilweeds. After a few months the inevitable sleigh bells of Christmas began to chime. This would be my first ever festive work do, so I decided to make the most of it and have a few jars.

As with any music biz shindig, there was a free bar all night, a tab running into the tens of thousands. I started my night with a cocktail called a "Wibble", a crimson liquid in a stupid shaped glass. I had a few conversations, milled about, got a couple of beers. Then came the turning point. I switched to red wine, it having been a mainstay of my childhood and a lot less gassy than constantly necking bottles of Becks. I had one, then another, then I had a dance, then two more. I started shouting gags at people and swanning around, almost knocking over a giant papier maché horse, and had some more wine.

Next thing I knew I was sat with my trousers around my ankles in the bathroom, mid shit. I was sleeping, but woken by an angry bouncer whacking the door, telling me the venue was closing. In a daze I dragged my trousers up and buttoned them. I opened the cubicle door and immediately vomited into the basin, which was a large metal trough. My vomit was a deep red.

I went outside to find my friends, who were all waiting. It was snowing and I was just in a T-shirt because my coat was in the cloakroom. I gave someone my ticket to collect it for me, leaning on my friend's shoulder, which I then threw up on.

We got in a cab and went to someone's house. While they stayed up doing drugs on a table, I slept on the sofa. The house had no heating and was unbearably cold, but I was so pissed I fell straight to sleep. The next day everyone, including me, got a taxi to the office. They had McDonalds breakfasts, but I couldn't stomach it. I spent the next four hours periodically vomiting and lying on a sofa in the middle of the office. At one point I threw up in a metal mesh bin with no bag in it. Some of it went on the head of A&R's carpet. I got a cab home not long after that.

Ever since then I've been getting pissed almost constantly. I love it. That wasn't even my worst hangover. If you wanted to know about my worst hangovers then give me a fucking book deal, because there have been some absolutely catastrophic, life-changing ones that almost always end up in me paying £80 for a taxi. The point is, my first proper experience with alcohol was exactly as it should be: extremely excessive, extremely embarrassing and extremely painful.

Click through to the next page to read Noisey Staff Writer Emma Garland's thoughts on booze.

EMMA GARLAND, STAFF WRITER, NOISEY

Every year, one by one, people around me stop drinking. The reasons cited aren't morally, socially or even health-driven, but usually down to lack of interest. Some were never bothered to begin with and others went too hard on the quad-vods at uni, and now their body is telling them to go home urgently. Either way, it's easy to let go of something when you don't miss it. "Straight meh-dge", Noisey editor Dan Ozzi calls it. For some people, though, it can become more than a choice or even a lifestyle – it becomes a personality trait, something that goes towards defining who you are, whether it's "straight edge" or "alcoholic".

My granddad passed away this time last year, and most of my of memories of him involve drinking – some of them funny, like when he got too plastered to drive so he stole a horse and rode it home over Caerphilly mountain. Some of them not so funny, like when he died because of a clusterfuck of health problems relating to alcohol abuse. It didn't matter how many times I'd visit him and try to explain my vegan diet or social drinking, he'd still offer me a vodka and tonic and a boiled egg the minute I sat down.

There are a number of reasons why I could call that sad or a waste, but to be honest he lived how he wanted and was seemingly pleased about it until the last few months – and that was because they were spent in distinct sobriety on a mattress in his living room. Somewhere in my parents' house there's a faded photograph of him performing in drag as George Michael that says more about his character than his alcoholism ever did.

I always figured dealing with something like that close to home would give me some kind of cross to bear, but it hasn't. What – I'm not going to pop that ice-cold tinny on the bus on a summer's day because my granddad had a drinking problem? Not bloody likely. Will I ever run around a club again chasing shots of Jaegermeister with more shots of Jaegermeister and being sick into a selection of pint glasses? Perhaps not.

There are people I know who base their decisions on where they go not on who else will be there or what the activity is, but on how many beers they can get for a tenner. Personally, it doesn't mean that much to me. I would pick a particular person or a snack over a drink most days of the week, but if I tried to convince myself that I don't spend between 4:50PM and 5PM every Friday refreshing my work email until the announcement about free desk beers arrives, I'd be an absolute sham of a human.

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All screens courtesy of the game's publishers, BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment

When I was a younger man, a teenager you might say, I had a taste for Manga. We all did, my mates and me. Founded in 1991 and headquartered in Los Angeles, the company, not the medium, was the market leader in supplying Japanese animation to Western audiences. In other words, it shipped anime, the cartoons, not manga, the comics, which was very confusing for the 14-year-old me who just wanted to watch Cyber City Oedo 808 on a Sunday morning, or sit down with a mate to plough through half a dozen episodes of Fist of the North Star when we should have been seeing to our homework.

The titles available seemed to stretch on forever, like there was no end to the amazing shows and full-lengths films we could watch. Manga picked up countless series from the 1980s and later, and put out new-at-the-time movies that blew our still-developing minds. The first time I saw 1995's Ghost in the Shell, I was sure it was the greatest sci-fi film of all time. For, like, a week, until I remembered Alien, and Blade Runner, and Total Recall, and Star Wars, and so forth. (It's still magnificent, mind.) But then, without any real reason, I went cold on anime. The fascinating near-future worlds of Appleseed and Akira were committed to memory, but I suddenly wasn't interested in investigating others like them. Going to pubs might have had something to do with it.

Anime remains massive today. It's bigger than it was when I was queuing up to buy a VHS copy of Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie. (I still have it.) The Japanese animation industry brought in over $2 billion in 2013, the highest it'd been since 2006, and films like Studio Ghibli's glorious Spirited Away have done much to make these surreal visions from the Far East more palatable for mainstream audiences (although I hesitate to say that everything Ghibli co-founder and celebrated director Hayao Miyazaki's put his name to is entirely "family friendly"). But much of what I hear modern-day fans of all things anime talking about might as well be Japanese to me – I simply don't understand any of it. I mean, I know of the existence of the Dragon Ball Z franchise, but when 2015's XenoVerse game came out, I had no idea why I was doing what I was, who these characters were, or why I should care about any of it.

And now there's a new game in front of me: CyberConnect2's Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 4. Try saying that after four pints. Of Baileys. It is, it says here on the blurb that comes with a very attractive press-kit promo box, "the latest title in the acclaimed STORM series based on the beloved Naruto anime and manga" – this being the same beloved franchise that I, until this game's arrival, had genuinely never heard of. I've poked my face into Wikipedia and found out that Naruto is a character who had a nine-tailed demon fox shoved into him as a kid, or something; and that now he's an absolute badass ninja who can clone himself and summon "natural energy" to defeat his foes. Hell, if I can buy a teenager rewinding time to save her town from a tornado, and a dude in a cape and cowl being able to see through brick walls at the press of a button, I can get down with an awesome high-kicking supernatural ninja dude with bananas hair and an evil mammal somewhere in his guts. Seems entirely normal, actually, for the gaming world.

But what, exactly, can Ultimate Ninja Storm 4, a 3D fighting game, tell me about the state of anime in 2016? I'm guessing: not a great deal if you're a complete noob regarding 21st century productions, themes and trends. But, you know, I'm going to have a crack at finding out. Because I've written the headline now, haven't I? Idiot. Here's five points from an hour's play that may or may not enrage anime fans because of my blithering beginner's naivety.

The action, oh crikey, the action is just breathtakingly stupid, in a sort of mostly brilliant way

There are two modes to Ultimate Ninja Storm 4, Story and Adventure, the latter of which allows you to explore the game's world after its plot's been seen out (I think?). So it's on with the Story. Immediately a screen pops up explaining "Interactive Actions". So I'm going to see some quick-time events, then. How very unexpected. (That's sarcasm, obviously?)

Cue, titles cutscene: a tale spanning "the history of the ninja", "the story of a never-ending chain of battles". Oh, wait, it's semi-interactive – silhouetted figures are doing a dance of death and I can control one of them. It's a tutorial, of sorts: RT to guard, A to jump, you know how these things go.

'Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 4', opening animation

One of the characters summons a ginormous fox beast thing. Oh shit, this is the game, already – I (whoever "I" am) have to defeat this enormous enemy. And, true to expectations, what follows is fast and loud and full of ridiculous "special moves", exactly how I imagine the anime series to be. Without trying – or, rather, knowing what the hell I'm doing – I nail a 50-hit combo and earn an Xbox achievement for my efforts. I get beaten – I think that's the point.

Turns out it's not the point. I revive, and beat some chap called Madara – I'm Hashirama, turns out. But then he leaps atop his foxy pal and I do some titanic wood golem thing and we set about trashing an area of outstanding natural beauty. Lesson learned: anime is completely ludicrous and this sort of action shouldn't exist in the mind of a measured human being. Imagine Michael Bay absolutely wired on every upper under the sun and given infinite budget to blow up the Earth – it still wouldn't look as captivatingly cataclysmic as what's going on here.

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And the patter is just remarkable, like, I know it's supposed to be OTT, but it's so much fun

The dialogue is absolutely hilarious, so drenched in cliché that I might drown under the pressure of it all. These guys, on their magical monsters, are pals, sort of. "I don't want to fight you," one, me, shouts; "You always were blinded by sentimentality," comes the reply, or something to that effect (look, I'm not taking word-for-word notes here). The pomposity of this curtain-raising battle is off the scale, its visual spectacle matched by the moreish garbage spouted by the combatants.

I mean, really? "You leave me no choice... Sage Art, Wood Style!" Which immediately triggers a 1,000-armed god-like figure to rise out of the ground and slap the shit out of ol' foxy. But then, inevitably, comes the narrator's (?) line about how "the battle will never end". Lesson learned: no matter how much incredible shit you pull out of your arsenal, and however grandiose your slang becomes, the anime wars last forever. You can't bring about the downfall of these evil powers. They're going to be here, always. So why even try? But I'm going to try – I've only been playing this for 13 minutes, apparently. Story completion: two percent!

Except you might take several steps backwards before learning what comes next

I've accidentally restarted the game, replaying what I've already achieved a B rank at (which I'm happy enough with). Lesson learned: anime is incredibly confusing with its messaging (which I guess leads into my next observation, down there). Pause. Return to storyboard. How the hell do I see what's next in this game? Where is this Naruto chap who's on the packaging? These menus are a nightmare. Oh right. Press right. Could have maybe made that clearer, Game Maker People. "The cycle of battle never ended!" Of course it didn't. New chapter unlocked, "Two Unparalleled Warriors". Let's go.

Even when it's doing its best to make sense, it makes barely any sense at all

Finally I meet Naruto, and get a little backstory – basically what I've seen on the internet prior to playing. Except now I get to know my enemies, too – the guys behind these "flames of a massive conflict" oh Jesus this cheesiness is almost, almost, too much. (If the voice acting wasn't so gravely serious with it, it would begin to grate.) I understand the need to contextualise why the player is going through these motions, of course. But this brief recap of what's come before this point is, even with its selling point of "the ultimate deathmatch", completely befuddling.

Naruto is dreaming about being the best of the best at kicking arse, which is admirable enough. But there's an off-putting cockiness to him, ahead of the instruction to "destroy Tobi". Who's Tobi? Was that explained? Did I miss something? (It transpires that he's someone we know already, "we", from our past or something like that. Some chap called Obito. He has a nice jacket.) It's clear that if the Naruto series means as much to you as it does me, no amount of in-game exposition is quite going to bring you up to speed before caving in some other sucker's skull. Lesson learned: anime is a commitment, not a casual distraction. You need to research this stuff or it's entirely alienating when it's not simply demanding you press the B button to smash stuff up, or flick the left stick to meet the demands of a QTE.

I get an A rank for battling Tobi, since you asked, and an achievement for him not busting up my clothes. Which is nice. The game's menu shows two paths through its core story, which you can shift from point to point in to replay for better ranks.

Something, something, the Land of Fire, something about a bridge, something else. Nope, not one real idea what's happening with the story, here. Ultimate Ninja Storm 4 absolutely requires its player to know about its cast of characters, their world, and its accompanying mythology, before pressing start. Coming to it cold is like diving straight into the deep end of a pool of vodka jelly and being told to reach the other end without a) touching the bottom, tough as you're fully clothed in your heaviest threads, and b) consuming any of the boozy deliciousness you're slowly being swallowed by. Impossible. Why would you do it? You wouldn't, unless you were properly prepared, in Speedos, with some packing tape over your mouth. To understand this game, to understand anime, you need to be the Speedos.

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But even when it's all utterly baffling, it's weirdly hypnotic and compelling

I don't give a monkeys about the ninja code, or any of these newly introduced characters who are running about in a gang decking shadow clones of some antagonistic sort. But I'm bashing away at the buttons, enjoying the core combat of this game – which is evidently a system that rewards experimentation with awesome-looking special abilities while also remaining flexible enough for idiots like me to make progress with. Point being: I'm sticking with it, for now. Lesson learned: even when anime's effectively an alien language, it's hard to take your eyes off it. Does this game make me want to find out more about the best Japanese animation has to offer right now? Or investigate the Naruto series itself, in greater depth? Ask me again once I've played it for a second hour, assuming I can cut through all the teenage angst and tangled melodrama – entirely natural for this sort of thing, probably. Right?

Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 4 is out now for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One (version tested). More information is available at the game's official website.

@MikeDiver

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