(Photo: Tommy Bruce)

This article originally appeared on VICE US

It was after midnight on a Sunday when the fire alarm went ringing through the halls of Hyatt Regency hotel in Rosemont, Illinois. Phaedra Lewis had planned on ignoring it, figuring it had been innocently triggered by the smoke of a cigarette. Besides, it was cold outside and she was already in her pajamas, having stopped by a friend's room to hang out before going to bed.

She didn't know anything serious was happening until she was told by another hotel guest to evacuate immediately. With no time to grab a jacket, she fled to the nearest stairwell—and that's when the toxic odor hit her. "It smelled, for all the world, like the worst Pool Shock you've ever been around," she reminisces, referring to a type of pool cleaning chemical. "Like it was eye-stingingly bad, even outside the hotel."

The Rosemont police and fire departments rushed to the scene around 12:45 AM on December 7, 2014. But it wasn't just local law enforcement that stormed the hotel. There were throngs of reporters with bright cameras, hazardous materials technicians wearing space-like suits, and later, detectives from FBI Chicago's counter-terrorism and weapons of mass destruction unit.

It didn't take authorities long to confirm what many convention attendees had intuitively suspected: The intense fumes they'd smelled were the result of chlorine, the oxidizing chemical commonly used as a cleaning agent in swimming pools. The gas can be toxic when leaked into the atmosphere, causing respiratory problems and irritation of the eyes. Nineteen people were sent to the hospital as a result.

When Lewis appeared briefly in the background of a national television newscast, it triggered panic among her family. More than 600 miles away in Asheville, North Carolina, Lewis's mother was woken from her sleep in a nursing home and informed that her daughter had been involved in a terrorist attack. Lewis, who lives in a suburb near Chicago, assured her mother she was fine. Her cell phone blew up with texts from co-workers who asked if she'd been hurt. Their second question: Are you at a furry convention?

Photo by Pieter Van Hiel

The incident became a national news sensation not only because authorities deemed it a deliberate, criminal act, but also because it occurred during Midwest FurFest, the second-largest furry convention in the country. The annual gathering brings together more than 4,000 people from all over the world, many of whom engage in role playing as anthropomorphic animals, sometimes while dressed in head-to-toe fur suits.

The Rosemont Police Department launched a criminal investigation into the spread of the chlorine gas, enlisting the help of federal investigators. But more than a year later, no charges have been filed and neither agency has made an arrest. Today, the source of the chlorine gas that sickened 19 people and catapulted furries into the media spotlight remains a mystery. Convention attendees still reminisce about standing in the cold together until the wee hours of the morning, and while some laugh it off as an unfortunate one-time prank, many others are still searching for answers.

An incident report filed by the Rosemont Police Department shows the case was logged into the system on December 8, 2014, assigned to a detective on December 29 of that year, and closed on July 29, 2015. But the reports reveal little about what took place after December 2014—let alone seven months later. The last page of the report sent to VICE by the Rosemont Police Department shows that the FBI had emailed the department its set of reports relating to the Midwest FurFest. The FBI did not respond to a request for the documents.

Special Agent Garrett Croon, a media coordinator for the FBI's Chicago Division, however, said that while the Rosemont Police Department may have closed its case, it's not uncommon to reopen an investigation if either department were to get a lead. "It's always ongoing because whether a year from now or three years from now, evidence is developed or tips are called in or somebody comes to the FBI and informs us, 'Hey, I know who the bad guy is,'" he told me over the phone. "Well, if it's not past the statute of limitations, the FBI reserves the right with the US Attorney's Office or the State's Attorney's Office to prosecute the case." He said they still consider it a criminal investigation.

Photo by Tommy Bruce

Detectives from the Rosemont Police Department declined to comment directly on the case, but reports they provided to VICE show that in the days following the incident, officers interviewed at least 30 hotel guests, more than 19 hotel employees, and a number of hospital workers, taxi drivers, and staff employed at local pool and hardware supply stores that sell chlorine. While officers investigated the whereabouts of several individuals, it's unclear how many were considered suspects and during what time.

"Who would've done it? Was it a furry from the inside who was looking for attention in this sort of messed up way?" asked Tommy Bruce, a Maryland-based photographer who attended Midwest FurFest in 2014 and has been documenting furry conventions all over the country for the last six years.

On Vice News: Somebody May Have Tried to Poison a Bunch of Furries With Chlorine Gas

Photos Bruce captured the night of the evacuation—all tinted red and blue from the flashing lights of nearby cop cars—depict scenes of chaos, panic, compassion, friendship, and then boredom as crowds waited in the convention center across the street for hours before they could enter the hotel again. In one image, a person dressed as what appears to be a large black and white skunk wraps white fuzzy mittens around a friend's shoulders; the friend cradles his mascot-like lion head under his arms.

In another photo, a shirtless man wearing a bear head and a leather harness strapped around his chest raises a fist to the sky, as if in protest—or joy, or maybe rage. But not every scene was quite as pleasant: One image shows a woman on a gurney being wheeled into the back of an ambulance; another shows a man gasping for breath as he clings to someone in a white fur suit for support.

Photo by Tommy Bruce

When first responders arrived at the scene that night, they used a chlorine meter to lead them to the source of the noxious odor. Donning self-contained breathing apparatuses—or large face-covering masks attached to an air tank that's worn like a backpack—the firefighters headed to the ninth floor of the Hyatt Regency, where the meter recorded a gas level of 1.4 parts per million. That's about the rate at which humans will generally start to experience mild irritation from chlorine, and can typically only tolerate it for about an hour or so, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).

Though Midwest FurFest panels, dances, and exhibits were scheduled in ballrooms and meeting halls on the first three floors of the hotel, attendees booked a majority of the 1,000-plus guest rooms throughout all ten floors, meaning furries were spread throughout the hotel that night.

By the time firefighters reached the stairwell of the west wing, the gas level had soared beyond 60 parts per million—double the rate at which people exposed to it immediately start to feel chest pain and shortness of breath—exceeding the meter's maximum reading. Humans who inhale that level of chlorine in the atmosphere risk contracting toxic pneumonitis or acute pulmonary edema, which can develop into respiratory disease, according to the NCBI.

But hotel guests complaining about having itchy, red eyes and trouble breathing had reported the odor long before emergency responders encountered it, says Lewis, who had been on staff at Midwest FurFest at the time. "But it was at night during the convention, many of them had had a few drinks, so our medical just assumed, 'Oh well, somebody spilled something on the stairs, maybe a maid did it or something,'" she said. "It was only fairly late in the evening that it really became clear, somebody had done something deliberately."

Photo by Tommy Bruce

Firefighters spotted the evidence in a stairwell landing between the ninth and tenth floors: a white powdery substance and the broken glass remains of what appeared to have once been a mason jar. The firefighters retreated from the stairwell and requested back-up assistance once they noticed a yellow and green liquid running down the walls. When the hazmat technicians arrived, they swabbed eight samples—both of the wet liquid and the dry powder—from four different stain patterns on the walls and the landing of the stairwell. The samples were then packed in absorbent pads in a steel drum, but the tests later conducted turned up inconclusive due to a faulty instrument, according to the police reports. Investigators had already confirmed the heightened levels of chlorine gas with the chlorine meter. It's unclear whether there were substances other than chlorine present.

"Outside of initial first responders and assisting in the evacuation of our attendees and staff, Midwest FurFest relinquished complete control of the onsite emergency response and the subsequent criminal investigation," the convention wrote in a statement published last November. "The furry community has been exceptionally supportive of our convention in the wake of this criminal act and our resilient staff and remarkably understanding and sympathetic attendees helped us finish the weekend on many positive notes." Matt Berger, the convention's director of programming and marketing, declined to comment further, citing the ongoing investigation.

Midwest FurFest sent out a series of tweets throughout the evacuation to keep attendees informed of the situation—but the tweets provided little clarity, stressing how little organizers knew about the nature of the emergency. In the absence of information, rumors quickly circulated, becoming magnified and multiplied through social media.

"Twitter was just like blown up for the entire night with people at the convention," recalls Bruce, explaining that furries commonly use the social network to follow stories and updates from a convention—especially if they can't attend in person. "It was interesting to be a part of that experience within the furry community where there is this sort of internet megaphone–like system throughout the whole community, throughout the whole , and there's so much ability to communicate ideas rapidly."

Photo by Tommy Bruce

Some of the early speculation included one theory that chlorine had leaked from a hotel swimming pool or a storage area—or that maybe a ceiling pipe or an air conditioner had sprung a leak, spewing nasty chemicals out into the atmosphere. But the Hyatt Regency O'Hare didn't have a swimming pool—and why would chlorine be carried through pipes, anyway? Others posited that maybe things got out of hand during a domestic dispute; or that a kid's science experiment had exploded; or that a hotel guest had decided to clean rubber work equipment with chlorine products.

After all the hotel guests—including those who had nothing to do with Midwest FurFest—got herded into the nearby Donald E. Stephens Convention Center about an hour after the evacuation began, social media served another practical purpose: locating those who had been separated during the evacuation. " were holding their cell phones up in the air in the convention center and taking panoramic pictures and then posting them to Twitter so that you could make sure your friends were OK," remembers Lewis.

But being holed up in the convention center wasn't all doom and gloom. After all, many people had been coming from parties and raves that typically last until all hours of the night on the Saturday of the weekend-long convention. Some were intoxicated or chemically altered; and some were in various states of undress, from fetish wear to pajamas to full-on fur suits.

"One guy seemed to be trying to start a revolution," said Pieter Van Hiel, a Hamilton, Ontario–based science fiction writer known for authoring a series of role-playing games set in 17th-century Japan. "He was standing there and in a very loud dramatic voice he kept starting to deliver an inspiring speech but would get like three or four words in and forget what he was saying and start again and a bunch of people told him to sit down."

Coincidentally, the convention center had been hosting another kind of furry convention earlier that day—only at that one, the animals on display were real. The cages and kennels strewn about suggested that a dog training show had taken place in the massive auditorium, and some of the dogs had been left in crates overnight, their barking and yapping audible, according to Bruce.

A photo he snapped at the scene showed that the Rosemont Police Department had also been a dog-training exhibitor during the convention—little did officers know they'd be returning to the scene again in the middle of the night. "It was sort of like, all the people dressed as animals were walking past all the accoutrements for grooming animals. That was kind of funny," said Hiel.

Photo by Tommy Bruce

Amidst the chaos, there were also moments of tenderness: the furries in warm animal suits giving up their winter coats to those who needed them, the man who ran to McDonald's and brought back bags of McMuffin's to distribute, the neighbors who brought carafes of hot cocoa, and the nearby hotels that offered up their rooms so people wouldn't have to sleep on the floor of the convention center. All in all, the evacuation lasted nearly five hours. Firefighters had ventilated the area by opening a rooftop hatch in the stairwell and opening the doors on the first floor. Around 4:20 AM, when the chlorine meter read zero, guests were free to return to their rooms.

The convention ended that Sunday night, and thousands evacuated the building once more—this time to return to reality and bid farewell to their weekend escape. The Midwest FurFest went on again last year without a hitch, but the mystery of the chlorine has not yet evaporated.

Ken Smith, whose fursona—a term widely used to describe a furry's persona—is a leopard-fox hybrid named Malkontent, is still haunted by the gas incident, even though he didn't attend Midwest FurFest in 2014. But the San Francisco–based furry is a regular at half a dozen conventions across the country, including Further Confusion in San Jose, Furlandia in Portland, Biggest Little Fur Con in Reno, and the RainFurrest in Spokane. He often takes gigs working in the so-called headless lounge—the backstage area where people in fur suits can feel comfortable to remove their heads, unzip their suits, and cool down.

Photo by Tommy Bruce

Smith worries that violent threats against the furry community may not have been taken seriously in the past because of stigmas that make furries afraid to identify themselves, and fear within the community that authorities will not take them seriously. "That's a big problem with things like this, because furries have been so ridiculed and so misrepresented, a lot of us don't want to speak up about something affecting the furry community," he said. "If we look at the way we're handled , I think we really do count as being marginalized," he adds.

He points to a 2003 Crime Scene Investigation called "Fur and Loathing," which depicts rampant sexual deviancy and even murder at a furry convention. There was also a 2014 episode of Dr. Phil dubbed "Animal Obsessed" that he says painted furries as low-lives and freaks. (One of the talk show's guests, for example, eats dog food out of a dish and another chooses furry conventions over a college education.) But for many in the community, the biggest blow to their image dates back to 2001, when Vanity Fair ran a cover story set at Midwest FurFest. Many furries took issue with writer George Gurley's depiction of the community as sex-crazed misfits with bizarre fur fetishes.

For example, one attendee Gurley profiled has an entire hotel room filled with stuffed animals; he calls people with an erotic attachment to stuffed children's toys "plushophiles." Another section of the story describes furries as using their own language for mating: Terms like "yiff" means sex, and the word "spooge" denotes semen—one possible outcome of a so-called "fur pile," Gurley explains. "That was the first big exposure people had to furries, and of course they turned it into a bunch of lurid sex references," said Lewis. "I'm not saying there are not adult aspects of our fandom... but that is not even 20 percent of what happens at conventions."

After the Vanity Fair story was published, most furries collectively decided to shun the press, banning reporters from attending conventions. It's the reason most of the people I spoke to for this story were reluctant to grant an interview request, initially referring us to spokespeople or doing extensive background checks to ensure I had no intention of misrepresenting them. And then, of course, there was the sometimes-superficial reception to the otherwise horrifying chlorine incident itself. For example, a segment from the MSNBC news show Morning Joe went viral after anchor Mika Brzezinski erupted in a fit of giggles at the mere mention of furries while attempting to report the story. Some furries call it "fursecution," believing they make easy targets for others to persecute.

Photo by Pieter Van Hiel

While that may be the case, Samuel Conway, a North Carolina–based scientist and researcher who also chairs Pittsburgh's Anthrocon, the world's largest furry convention, brushes off any suggestion that furries should be fearing for their lives. He says all the hype surrounding the chlorine incident at Midwest FurFest was just that: hype. "Was it a nasty event? Yes it was. Did people get injured? Yes they did," said Conway, a former Red Cross volunteer who's trained in emergency management services.

"But the news media kind of painted this picture, like they had the world thinking that there were probably 50 al Qaeda agents descending on the hotel with grenades or something like that," he said, admitting that others in the community have accused him of being too flippant about the incident.

"There's no worldwide anti-furry conspiracy," stresses Conway, better known online and during conventions as the lab-coat clad samurai cockroach Uncle Kage. "The mentality out there that some people have is that if they don't understand something, they immediately want to mock it. OK, if it makes them happy, swell. Whatever—knock yourselves out."

Many people have done just that: In 2007, several protesters picketed outside of Anthrocon, seemingly ironically, holding signs plastered with anti-furry statements like "Yiff in hell furfags.". That's not the only time Anthrocon has been the target of harassment or worse. In 2014, the FBI and Pittsburgh police investigated a string of social media posts that threatened the convention with violence, including the use of bullets and bombs, local news station WXPI reported.

"It turned out that the person who made these threats was, let's just say, in no position to carry them out," Conway said. "He had a nice large uniformed person show up at his door and I don't think he'll do that again." Some speculate that the person responsible for threatening Anthrocon also had something to do with the chlorine gas incident at Midwest FurFest, but authorities have not confirmed that link.

"I really hope that a lead really comes up with what happened in Chicago because it looks like somebody got away with something that was marginally successful, and the next person with a motive can learn how to be more successful. And that worries me," said Smith, who uses a wheelchair and says fire alarms can already be scary enough for people with accessibility issues.

Photo by Pieter Van Hiel

Lewis says the chlorine incident at Midwest FurFest has had a lasting impact in ways that aren't always quantifiable. She says she noticed a higher police presence at the convention this year, for example, and that some people opted not to stay at the Hyatt Regency because they were concerned about the potential for another attack at the convention's main grounds. Lewis also packed a rebreather—a device that recycles oxygen in case it becomes restricted—for her girlfriend, who uses a wheelchair, just in case there was another incident and she couldn't immediately be carried down the stairs.

"I feel that the mood was grimmer this year, I really do," she said. "I think that there was a whole lot of 'us versus them' , like people were staring really hard at anybody that didn't look like they fit in with us, just to kind of keep an extra eye on it."

One unintended but welcome side effect of the chlorine disaster: It has forced Lewis to become more open about her involvement with furries—opening up a dialogue she says she wouldn't otherwise have initiated with some of her co-workers if her image hadn't been broadcast on television during Midwest FurFest.

"I hadn't brought it up just because you never know who has a weird impression of what a group is," she said, adding that she's an independent contractor, and she didn't want to put her job at risk. "It went way better than I'd been afraid it would. I think ultimately I'm saying that people are generally less of an asshole than you worry they'll be."

Follow Jennifer Swann on Twitter.

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Airbnb's Toronto office (Photo via)

This article originally appeared on VICE US

On Wednesday, a report revealed that Airbnb had removed over 1,000 New York City listings as a way to alter the data in a public report on its user base. The mass removal, the report's authors Murray Cox and Tom Slee alleged, was a "one-time targeted purge" meant to help the controversial service "paint a flattering picture" of itself—specifically, to create the illusion that 95 percent of those who rented entire apartments on Airbnb were only listing one property, presumably the one they lived in. In a statement delivered to the media in response to the report, an Airbnb spokesperson claimed, "The vast majority of our hosts are everyday people who have just one listing and share their space a few nights a month to help make ends meet."

Cox and Slee's data suggests that this purge was an isolated event, meant to combat one of Airbnb's most frequent criticisms—that the site knowingly profits off of landlords who rent multiple properties on the site as a way to skirt short-term rental laws. In addition to being illegal in many of the markets Airbnb operates in, this practice can also drive up rent prices by removing apartments from the long-term rental market.

In an email, Slee—who today published a book critiquing the sharing economy titled What's Yours Is Mine—told me, "When there's a lot of money at stake, there's a strong incentive to bend the truth and to take short cuts. That's what Airbnb did here: It got rid of over a thousand listings so its numbers looked good, and then misrepresented what the numbers said." Slee would know: He's been tracking Airbnb since 2014, collecting data on the company's user base through a self-written computer program (his data is available for perusal on his site).

The report was yet another piece of evidence that the so-called "sharing economy" is often not what it seems. Companies such as Airbnb and Uber often traffic in what Slee calls "the language of empowerment." Need cash and own a car? Well, just sign up for Uber, and now you're a taxi driver. Have a spare room and want to beef up your savings? Congrats, this Airbnb listing means you now run your own miniature hotel. But as Slee points out, it rarely works out this way in reality. As evidenced by its recent purge, a substantial chunk of Airbnb's user base appear to be landlords with more than one listing on the site. And while Uber may very well allow people to turn their blue Prius into a modern yellow cab, it does so while excusing itself from assuming the lion's share of the responsibilities traditionally associated with car services.

Speaking with me over the phone from his Waterloo, Ontario home, the 56-year-old Slee and I chatted about why the sharing economy is a misleading term, his problems with Uber and Airbnb, and why venture capital-backed tech companies are the new neocons.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

VICE: Where does your interest in the sharing economy come from?
Tom Slee: I grew up in the UK in a Labor Party family, so that social democratic outlook is in my DNA. And I work in the tech industry. If there's one thing that pisses me off, it's companies that take values and language that I and a lot of leftists really identify with, ideas of community and democracy, and delivering entirely the opposite. They're taking these ideals and twisting them so that they can inject free-market capitalism into every aspect of our lives.

What are the limitations of the sharing economy?
The sharing economy can, in a certain way, be seen as an extension of companies finding ways not to pay people their full value. That also takes form in unpaid internships and using independent contractors instead of full-time employees. It's always been a left-wing ideal that all are entitled to a universal basic income, that we as a collective have a responsibility to make sure everyone at least has something. That idea is now being taken up by Silicon Valley, which would claim its services help people provide themselves with that universal basic income, without actually paying it to them. I think Silicon Valley is going to take that idea and see how far it can run with it.

It seems as if one can really draw parallels between neocons in the 80s and the quote-unquote "disruptors" in the tech industry today.
The neocons used rhetoric that stressed freedom and individual choice. When Margaret Thatcher denationalized the gas industry in the UK in the 80s, she talked about privatizing it as "handing it over to the people." The tech industry seems to say, "If we build something into a big enough business, we can say, This is us!"

Something you write about in your book is how a lot of services don't comply with current laws, and these companies argue that the only reason they break the law is because the law isn't modern enough.
It's a very strange argument. What we see is Uber coming into a city, saying, "We don't need insurance because that's up to our drivers. Sales tax... that's up to our drivers too. Inspections? That's up to us, but it's really none of your business. Screening drivers? Don't worry about that one." It's like Uber pretends to objectively assess its own capabilities. The company has all these costs that any business would be expected to carry that it pushes onto its drivers, knowing full-well that most of these drivers just need a paycheck and aren't going to go through with those requirements. On top of all that, Uber is losing huge amounts of money—it loses money on every ride. But the company presents itself as a technology company, and it does a very good job of saying, "We're successful because we've got this new technology that's really efficient." But that technology is only a wedge that lets it get into an industry and build its business model by pushing all the costs and responsibilities onto whoever's out there that's not it.

Image via Mark Warner on Flickr

Talk a bit more about Uber losing money.
Uber is a privately owned company, so we don't know what its books are. But there have been a couple of leaks, insinuating it's losing money—quite deliberately so, because it has the funding to cope with it. Right now, it's not a sustainable business model, but losing money allows the company to say, "Hey! We're cheap! We're efficient!"

That reminds me of a joke from the show Silicon Valley, where a company's main investor tells them, "If you show revenue, people will ask how much, and it will never be enough."
I think there's some truth to that. Certainly here, Uber's goal is growth, not profit. It's possible that it might be using the taxi market to get itself into other markets, such as the delivery market with Uber Eats. The company knows that down the road it has a number of ways to make money, but it has to become the incumbent. So Uber wants to become the big kid on the block, and then it wants to make money.

If Uber keeps losing money, how does it keep sustaining?
Well, Uber has raised $7 billion from venture capitalists and wealthy investors. The message around this is populist—that it's taking down yellow cab owners. But compared to Uber's investors, they're small fries. There are a lot of wealthy people putting money into an outfit that will succeed based on whether or not it can change democratically made rules.

Your other big topic in the book is Airbnb.
Airbnb projects a really friendly image. Uber, on the other hand, is really easy to hate. The company is aggressive, overtly in-your-face, and it doesn't mind offending people. Airbnb has an open and friendly demeanor, so it seems like a much harder company to hate. But what gets me about Airbnb is it takes the language of sharing to build a business that's not about sharing at all. I've spent quite a bit of time collecting data from the company and its market, and the contrast between how it presents itself and how its business is really structured is quite dramatic. It's not that Airbnb lies, it's just that it stretches the truth in ways that favors itself. The most obvious example is that Airbnb retells the company's founding myth: that some guys were struggling to pay their rent, so they rented out air beds because there was a design conference coming to town, and as people were crashing on their floor, they said, "Hey! Maybe there's a business here." That original model, which it has replicated in its headquarters as a shrine to the company, is now a of its entire business.

What are the other facets of its business?
You can rent out three types of rooms—a shared room, a private room where you have your own space in an apartment, or an entire apartment. Private rooms are maybe 30 or 40 percent of the business. The bulk of the business is people renting out entire homes and apartments. And in the same way that Airbnb talks about, "This is just regular people occasionally renting out the home in which they live," depending on which city you look in, somewhere between 40 percent and 70 percent of its business is people having multiple listings on the site. The reason people like that use Airbnb is because they can get away with not doing a lot of the things you'd have to do if you were listing those homes for rental through a service for professionals.

And Airbnb's argument would be that it's not its problem because it's just a platform.
Airbnb says repeatedly that it has the odd bad apple, and every now and then it'll throw a few people off the platform so it makes the company look better.

Follow Drew on Twitter.

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Lena Andersson with the writer. (Photos: Camila Catalina Fernandez)

This article originally appeared on VICE Sweden

Lena Andersson is one of Sweden's most talked-about authors – her 2013 novel Wilful Disregard won her the prestigious Swedish August Prize and the rights to it have already been sold to 19 other countries. She's also the country's leading authority on love – her work has an astonishing capacity to deconstruct even our darkest fantasies, creating characters that are passionate, desperate and complicated, while at the same time remaining completely relatable.

I meet Lena Andersson at The Blue Door restaurant in Djurgården, Stockholm. The sky is blue and the sun is out but there is a crisp chill in the air, so she asks to sit inside. Our photographer comes over to our table to take her picture. Once it's over she says' thank you' and 'goodbye' and then sighs with relief: "You're usually supposed to stand up and pose for the camera," she says. "But nobody ever actually stands the way they do in photos, in real life."

It's this observational precision that makes her writing so startling. Willful Disregard might only stretch over 200 pages but every sentence is there for a reason. Her main passion, she says, is in the way language can be used to evoke feelings. Her immaculate, almost surgical efficiency at describing the consequences of being desperately in love is a startling contrast to our tendency to think about passion as something warm, comforting, generous. It's a stark antidote to the boy meets girl fantasies that dominate literary fiction.

A relationship is a natural contract between two people who are interested in each other. It's built on shared values which regulate everything that happens before you start calling yourself a couple.

It's almost scary how relatable her book is. And everyone I've spoken to about it so far has had the same experience. It's the kind of novel that forces you to remember every stupid thing you've done in the name of love; Like the number of times you've changed your plans on a night out to up the chances of "bumping into" someone you have a crush on, or the hours and hours you've wasted composing the perfect text message.

Willful Disregard is peppered with text messages that should never have been sent, chance encounters that would more acutely be described as stalking, and borderline obsessional attempts to read hidden messages with every exchange with the object of your affection. We've all been there – moping for an entire week because your work crush hasn't emailed you back, only to be propelled into a delirious state of euphoria because she looked at you across the office. But the real question, and the one you're left asking yourself again and again throughout her book is why do people keep finding themselves stuck in these situations.

Watch our documentary – The Digital Love Industry:

This is where Lena's own experiences and research came in handy. Willful Disregard isn't autobiographical but that doesn't mean she's never felt the same. "All of my novels are research projects," she says thoughtfully, sipping her sparkling water and putting forward a theory: "A relationship is essentially a natural contract between two people who are interested in each other. It's a contract built on shared values which exists in order to regulate everything that happens before you start calling yourself a couple."

"It goes like this: You meet and something happens. That establishes a relationship but not one that is obligating. Then you might meet again and have dinner or something and notice that the other party seems as interested as you are. But you still need to check if it's real because that's part of the natural contract too. So you meet for a third time. That is when you decide whether you want to hang out again," she explains.

The problem comes when one of the people in the yet-to-be-defined relationship believes that such a contract exists. For them, talking, meeting or having sex with the other person means something. This contract isn't constructed but rather something natural that each and every one of us carries inside ourselves.

Take Ester, a poet, essayist and the main character in Willful Disregard. She is certain of the contract's existence, because she has had sex with Hugo – the artist with whom she falls in love – because she has had sex with him three times and that means more than having sex just once.

If both parties were on the same page of this invisible contract, everything would be fine. But Hugo doesn't believe that it exists, claiming that Ester is just making stuff up. It's a similar psychology to the one totalitarian regimes use to torment their citizens – questioning things that are thought to be natural.

But Ester refuses to accept that she might have misunderstood the signals given to her. She is smart, intellectual, philosophical and maintains that her own interpretation of the world is real and that her feelings towards Hugo are reciprocated. How could this guy who texts her all the time to say he's thinking about her and even buys her presents claim there is nothing between them? How can he maintain that there is no contract, no obligation? After a while, her need to have her perception of the world acknowledged turns into an obsession.

Most people have a 'mother of drugs'. Mine is sugar – I love cinnamon buns.

"Ester is getting just enough attention to make her unable to move on and never enough attention to feel safe," says Lena. "It's a desperately cruel psychology." But it's the breach of this natural contract combined with one partner's insistence of its non-existence that is, according to Lena, what can lead to us obsessing over someone.

Alcohol, I tell her, is the main reason I'll text someone I know is fucking me around. "Most people," she says kindly, "have a 'mother of drugs'. Mine is sugar – I love cinnamon buns." But for the male characters in her books, "alcohol is what makes them blunt. Ester is a dependent personality too, but she isn't looking to abuse anything or anyone. She just wants to find peace and harmony. That's her main objective."

Lena has just got back from a stint of traveling to promote her book in different countries so I asked if she's noticed any cultural differences in the reception of Willful Disregard? "There isn't one single difference in how people around the world talk about love or the book," she says. I guess that's the thing about love; we are all as desperate for it as each other. "Love is universal," she smiles.

(Photo via)

You probably haven't heard of Julius Fromm, but have him to thank if you've ever desperately slotted money into a vending machine, jammed a freshly bought condom in your pocket and staggered off for a night of mediocre, inebriated – but protected – sex. Fromm basically invented the condom vending machine. He was a Jewish-Polish immigrant who moved to Germany as a child, before setting up hugely successful condom brand Fromms Act in 1922, opening up a few factories and capitalising on the roaring trade in contraceptives to fend off postwar STDs.

Then Hitler came into power. Within a few years Fromm had a swastika hanging in one of his factory canteens – courtesy of two senior staffers who'd been early members of the National Socialist Party – and by 1937, Fromm's family and seemingly lascivious condom brand had been the subject of a smear campaign in an anti-Semitic newspaper.

At 55, Fromm moved to London in 1938 when it became clear that Jewish people were being systematically expelled and murdered in the Holocaust. Though he always hoped he'd be able to return and reopen his factories, he died in London three days after the end of WWII – at which point the German government had made him sell his business to a woman close to the Nazi party. We spoke to historian and journalist Michael Sontheimer, co-author of Fromms: How Julius Fromm's Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis, about Fromm's life, legacy and how to make serious money off condoms in the 1920s.

None of us seem to know much about Julius Fromm, even though he was a big player in the condom game. How did you first come across him?
Michael Sontheimer: I grew up in West Berlin, and we used to call all condoms Fromms without really knowing why. Much later I learnt that there was a Fromm family, and within it an entrepreneur and chemist called Julius Fromm. When I heard he had a son, Eddie Fromm, who lived in London I found out where Eddie lived and rang him up to get to know about the family history.

What was the story, then?
They were this very poor Jewish family who moved from modern-day Poland – which was Russia then – to Berlin, and started a life there. Obviously Julius Fromm was one of these young Jewish men who worked hard and wanted to make something out of his life by not staying in low-paid work. I happen to live two houses down in Berlin from where Fromm started to make condoms, in a traditionally shabby room in the courtyard of his house. The demand was so high and his success so enormous that within 10 years he had three factories. He had an ability to find a product that would become very important and sought after.

What was one of the most interesting things you learnt about Fromm during your research?
He was a pretty genius businessman. When he started he was making nothing, rolling up cigarettes as a job. Then he started evening lessons in chemistry, and had this brilliant idea that contraception would become more and more important. He set a good example for all these really clever Jewish businesspeople who lived in Berlin and contributed towards the German economy, before a psychotic government decided to get rid of the Jews.

How did he go from rolling cigarettes to taking classes in chemistry?
Ah, in the beginning Fromm didn't only produce condoms – he also made gloves or dummies for toddlers. Even his son Eddie didn't know why Julius chose chemistry, though.

Were the Germans interested in his success from the beginning?
In the 1920s there were numerous Jewish business people with fantastic careers, and it didn't matter so much that he was Jewish. It wasn't a matter of anti-Semitism before the Nazis came into power. When they took over the country, Fromm even had some Aryan Germans who had been working with him, to whom he sold some of the company. Then later he was forced to sell Fromms Act to a woman very close to leading Nazi party member Hermann Goering. It's a weird story because Hermann Goering then traded a castle in Austria for the Fromms company, with this Austrian woman.

What did Julius gain from that?
The original Fromm family had to escape to London, so Julius got a bit of money from the company and was compensated – many other Jews were not compensated. He managed to get to London, and thus he and his three sons survived the Holocaust.

He knew something was going on so got himself out?
Everyone knew that something was going to happen. He luckily survived the Holocaust but after the war the communists – the Russian and East German communists – they expropriated the Fromm family again because they said, "Oh Fromm was a bad capitalist, so the family shouldn't get back the company." First the Nazis and then the communists prevented them from getting it back. In the end the three sons started to make Fromm condoms again but the original factories in East Germany were all gone.

This is ridiculous. The whole story sounds like a film treatment.
Actually there were some film producers interested in it, but that didn't work out because there wasn't a central love story. And, really, because condoms are somehow a difficult product to turn into a film. People are shy about them.

Is it true that Julius invented the condom dispenser machine?
Yes, he was very much into public relations and advertisements and understood from early on that it wasn't enough to have a good product. You also had to make it interesting.

Where were the machines?
Like they are today, he placed them in communal bathrooms, somewhere slightly out of the way and out of sight.

I've read that the formula for making condoms hasn't changed much since Fromm pioneered "cement dipping", where glass moulds were dipped into a solution to make seamless sheaths. How much have the methods changed since?
In the 1920s when Julius Fromm was making condoms, there was a huge workforce in his factories whereas today it's all automatic. But the basic principle, of a glass penis shape which is dipped into a latex emulsion, is the same. They did lots of tests in Fromm's factories so that the condoms were 100 percent protective, and hole-free. So they blew them up. The workers took them and blew them up like balloons; if they didn't pop then they were safe. And today that is done automatically with a machine they blow them up and go really big, it's quite amazing how big they get before they pop.

Is that a testing method that Fromm made up?
Yes. He was known for having a great guarantee and a quality product.

Your book tells of relationships the Fromm family had with celebrities, too. Can you tell me more about that?
Julius' oldest son Max was an actor, who fled Germany in 1933 after training in theatre in Berlin. He ended up in France, where he featured in Hollywood movies with Bert Lancaster in the 1960s. As a blonde, he often had to play Nazis – he was a Gestapo officer in The Train, a famous film about art robbery during the Nazi occupation in France. That is somehow tragic, and happened to quite a few German refugees who ended up in Hollywood: they had to play Nazis.

How did Fromm advertise his products?
Openly. There was a big debate in the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, on whether condom advertising ought to have been allowed in commercials and magazines. Condom ads were banned. Fromm worked around it with some tricks, for example with shops putting up signs saying: 'you can get the famous Fromm rubber sponges here.' But of course everyone knew that they weren't only selling sponges. If you saw one of those signs in a shop you could go in and ask for condoms.

Do you think he ever struggled to cope with the loss of his company?
Yes it was quite terrible. He was living in London and had nothing to do, after he'd been in Germany running this big factory. He was always waiting for the war to be over and he wanted to go back to Germany and build up the whole company and the factories again and then just a few days after the war ended in May 1945 he tragically died. He got up in the morning and wanted to open the curtains, and fell over and that was it. He was hoping so much to get back to his company.

@ameliadimz

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Warning: Spoilers ahead.

This article originally appeared on VICE US

HBO has released a huge batch of new photos from season six of Game of Thrones, and here's what we've learned. Daenerys is in trouble, Tyrion is drinking wine, King's Landing is a mess, and although winter is coming, no one in the North has figured out that they should put on a hat.

These photos, along with teasers released a few weeks ago, sketch out the conflicts that are going to dominate the early part of the season. In so many cases, the Lannister, Stark, and Targaryen families have sown the seeds of their own destruction.

Consider Daenerys. In the recent teaser, a previously unheard Dothraki voice snarls, "You are nobody, the millionth of your name, Queen of Nothing." Now we have a picture of the Mother of Dragons to match, hands bound, standing before the Dothraki. Drogon is nowhere in sight. This all started, of course, when Daenerys's brother sold her as a bride to the Dothraki in exchange for promised military support. Everything she's experienced, as well as the carnage brought to so many cities and peoples in her wake, stemmed from that fateful decision. Note: The Dothraki did not, in fact, help her brother retake Westeros, but instead killed him, which is fine, because he was a dick.

Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen. Courtesy of HBO

As for the Starks, the teaser shows the tattered dire wolf banner fluttering against a stormy winter sky. Ramsey Bolton says, "Winterfell is mine. Come and see." Lightning flashes. The pictures show Sansa, red hair flecked with snow, pulling Theon from a wintry stream. Others place the Boltons comfortably in Winterfell. This all happened because Robb Stark trusted Theon to bring help from the Iron Islands, and trusted Roose Bolton with his life. Roose rewarded this trust at the Red Wedding, by thrusting a knife in Robb's heart and delivering the valediction, "The Lannisters send their regards." The pillaging of the North, the Bolton reign of terror, and even Sansa's repeated rape and torture all stem from these acts of trust.

Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister, Nathalie Emmanuel as Missandei, and Jacob Anderson as Grey Worm. Photo by Helen Sloan/courtesy of HBO

At least the burden of the Lannister mess falls most heavily on Cersei, although plenty of more innocent individuals are suffering as well. In many ways, that teaser is the most interesting, because it reveals something about the High Sparrow's plan. As the golden lion of House Lannister flies over the lovely harbor of King's Landing at sunset, the High Sparrow, in Jonathan Pryce's distinctive voice, says, "Every one of us is poor and powerless, and yet together, we can overthrow an empire." Listen closely, in the background bells ring and the Septas' voices repeat, "Shame!"

Dean-Charles Chapman as King Tommen Baratheon, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as Jaime Lannister, and Nell Tiger Free as Myrcella Baratheon. Photo by Helen Sloan/courtesy of HBO

The photos show the Septas before the imprisoned Margaery and the High Sparrow, in his rags, looking inscrutable. The Lannisters are seen mourning the death of Cersei and Jaime's daughter. Things look fine in the palace, but clearly, revolution is in the air.

Beyond that, we get glimpses of other storylines. Arya is a blind beggar. The Greyjoys are back in the mix. Tyrion, Varys, and Missandei have to reckon with Meereen (we have no hint of the status on the ground there). Bran is having visions of an old man in black rags, whom we've been told is the three-eyed raven. Other bit players spin through the chaos of Westeros, trying to grab a little peace or safety.

In season six, it looks like peace is going to be hard to come by, but that's not exactly a surprise. What's new is that the High Sparrow is calling for a revolution, the Dothraki are back, and everyone's chickens—or dragons—are coming home to roost.

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Condoms are, as a premise, ridiculous. That we roll squeaky polyurethane, latex or lambskin sheaths over erect penises, while maintaining arousal, is a feat in itself. And while there are plenty of other contraceptive methods out there, we can largely agree that condoms represent a relatively easy way to steer clear of diseased genitals or unwanted babies who grow up to sap away your lifeblood and cash.

Well, that's when condoms actually work – 98% of the time, officially. They're otherwise prone to ripping, sliding off or sort of bursting, especially when not put on properly. It's International Condom Day, so naturally we made people tell us about all the times condoms tore, snapped or disappeared inside vaginas. Happy almost-Valentine's Day.

THE LOST "BALLOON"

I was 16, and having sex with my first boyfriend at his parents' house while his 5-year-old sister knocked on the door. True romance. My boyfriend finished, and the condom was completely missing. We were dumb kids, so thought it must be somewhere in the bed and started looking frantically. Meanwhile, his sister had somehow got the door open – we, obviously, were still naked.

After dashing to slam the door in her face and quickly getting dressed, we let her in as though nothing had happened. When she asked what we were doing, my boyfriend told her we were looking for "a balloon" and she enthusiastically joined the search. After she got bored and finally left (thank God), we knew there was only one place where condom could be: inside me. So we went on the hunt and found it. It was ripped and I was pissed off and I still hate condoms partly because of this.
– Stephanie, 26

THE CHILLOUT GONE WRONG

I was having sex with one guy at his place – let's call him Tom – while there was another guy in the room. I think they'd been having sex before, but guy number two was chilling out in his underwear, on his phone. I remember feeling a sort of pop. I didn't think much of it, and we continued having sex, before I came inside Tom. I pulled out, and thought 'whoops': looking down, there was just a ring of rubber around me.

I told Tom and he started to freak out, but I was like, "hey, I was STD-tested the other day and I'm all cool." The other guy in the room was arbitrating between Tom and I, meanwhile, saying I seemed like a good guy and wouldn't have done it on purpose. I ended up leaving, at Tom's request, then coming back in after messaging him to apologise again on Grindr. We had a nice, sweet sleepover, though I'm pretty sure he was high. Maybe that explains why he let me back in.
– Jamal, 23

THE DAY-LONG SOUND EFFECTS

I ended up with a squeaking vagina. During sex, my boyfriend at the time came, pulled out and then realised that the condom had sort of come off. There was some prodding around, and some miscommunication that led to me thinking he'd found the condom in the bed. I spent all day in severe discomfort with this weird sound inside my body – I thought I was imagining it. Later that night, I described the sound to him over text and he was like, "You did find it, didn't you..." I said, "Find what?" And then it dawned on me. I rushed to the loo, fished it out, then started bleeding immediately. I was crying, and made him call NHS Direct. It turns out the condom bit had lodged up there and triggered my period.
– Charlotte, 21

THE GYNAECOLOGIST TRIP

I hadn't seen my girlfriend at the time for a month. But I hadn't packed the boxes of condoms I'd bought, so when we finally got to her place, I checked my bag and saw that I didn't have any. Luckily there was one condom left from the last time we'd spent the night together – an old, super-thin kind. We started fucking and while we were going at it, I felt something tickle my balls. As I pulled out to check, the condom had, like, disintegrated so I had to spend the rest of the night cleaning all the bits out of my girlfriend's lady parts. Also we didn't get all the pieces out, so we had to go to a gynaecologist to peel them out. A word of advice: put your condoms on properly because those air bubbles are a real threat.
– Andrew, 28

THE EXPLODING BATCH

The first time I had a condom break, I was 17 and having sex with my girlfriend at the time in a park. During sex I checked the condom to see if it was okay, and I could see it, but when we finished I looked down and just saw a ring of latex around the base of my dick. Neither of us really cared about it, assuming it was on the ground somewhere after a quick look. A week later she called me to say she had found the condom inside herself.

Why are there so many pictures like this on the internet? (Photo: HAMM via)

Years later, I was having first-time sex with a girl I'd met a club through mutual friends and it was pretty rough and aggressive and good. We went through three or four condoms, which were all exploding immediately – and yes, I was putting them on correctly – so we decided to quit the condoms and have really fantastic sex anyway. She ended up getting pregnant, and that was fine. So thank you condoms for sucking, I'm now a dad and it's amazing.
– Mathew, 32

THE 6AM PHARMACY HELL

The week after I'd decided to stop seeing Elliot, an OKCupid guy, he said that he "just happened" to be in my neighbourhood and wanted to come say hi. One thing led to another and we started having sex, and as he was coming inside me he casually said, "Oh, I think the condom just broke." His condoms came from some social services outlet in Canada – who knows how old they were. Exasperated, I got on my phone to look up when the nearest pharmacy opened up, for the morning-after pill. It was about midnight, and they were shut until about 6am. We dropped off to sleep before Elliot insisted on coming with me to the pharmacy, sheepishly handing me a £10 bill before I sped down the escalator to the counter. I could hear him shouting my name from a few aisles away, lost, but I paid the cashier, ran back up the escalator and left. I took the pill outside, and Elliot was calling my phone, over and over again. I ignored him.
– Rachel, 26

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It's a pallid November afternoon somewhere off the M40. You spent last night in a Premier Inn just outside Maidstone. Now you're stood under hot lights in a clammy studio, just desperately trying to be charming. You're surrounded by 30 women from all walks of life, all corners of the UK, and not a single one of them will go on a date with you.

Thirty lights once dazzling have now faded to black. Celine Dion's "All By Myself" starts blaring out of the studio speakers, and the women, the studio audience, the 3 million or so people watching at home wave goodbye to you, the man who couldn't find love in a room full of people looking for it. Blackout.

"That was the last thing I ever expected to happen," says Ola. He's a 30-year-old fitness coach, who made a brief appearance on this season's Take Me Out, Britain's biggest dating show. "My friends had said, 'what will you do if you get a blackout?' and I'd been like, 'oh come on, that's not gonna happen'. That sounds big-headed, but I don't think I got a fair round to be honest."

Ola seems like a nice guy. On the show he avoided laddish banter, instead demonstrating his unworldly upper body strength (see above). For whatever reason, they just weren't interested. "I wasn't annoyed, I was just shocked. I took it okay, like it's not the end of the world. I just wish I'd known because then I could have planned a way to style it out."

Take Me Out has, in a relatively short time, become a TV institution: a big family-friendly dating gameshow that seems almost from another era, with it's cheesy catchphrases and 1970s gender politics. If you are simply so middle-class that you haven't watched ITV in a decade then here's how it works. Thirty women, dressed head to toe in River Island dresses you sense still have the labels on, stand behind lit-up podiums while some preening bloke tries to peacock for them. If they're into him they leave their light on, if not they switch it off. At the end the man picks which of the women with their lights still on he finds most palatable. Blackouts like Ola's, where none of the thirty women are up for a date, are rare. More often they find a match and are sent to the mystical isle of Fernando's for a date.

It seems like a simple enough process, but it takes months of planning. Long before host Paddy McGuinness threatens to "bring on the girls", a team of overworked researchers doggedly attempt to find women who are up for appearing.

Most of the women appear on the show after sending in applications, but some have to be found through scouting. "I don't want to generalise, but they get a lot of the same girl applying: false eyelashes and acrylic nails," says Becca, a runner on the 2012 series, "so they give a quota of girls they need to fill. They'd look at past seasons and be like, 'right – we need a tattooed Burlesque dancer', or 'we need an old woman'."

It's a similar story with the men. While the number of applications is high, the show's researchers still spend a lot of time persuading people to go on the show unsolicited. Para-athlete Tony Mills was successfully approached to go on last years Take Me Out via social media. "I think they just wanted to see a para-athlete in there, and see how the girls would react to me missing a limb," he says. "Apparently they stalked me the year before, but they saw that I was in a relationship. I think once they realised I was single they pounced."

Para-athlete Tony Mills and Paddy (Photo: ITV)

When Becca needed specific-looking women she would spend whole days trawling through a site called Star Now, a £4.99 per month service where would-be celebs can upload images and their showreel. "It's basically a poor man's version of Spotlight. I'd spend hours on that. It was a very strange time of life..."

Once the show had been cast, Becca's job was to bring the girls from the hotel down the road to the studio each day, and help the lucky ones pack a miniature suitcase for "Fernando's" (on her series it was in Tenerife). She became more like an in-house counsellor, and got bollocked a couple of times for being overly involved with the contestants. "They told me I was interfering with their emotional lives too much. This one woman who had kids used to say, 'I can't handle this' – she was much older than the others and she'd had a couple of shows where she put herself on the line and then got turned down. I think she just thought: 'I'm a mum, what am I doing here?' She was really upset, so whenever I saw her, I'd just whisper, 'Go home! Get out – they can't keep you here.' She did actually leave half way through the series.

While the boys come and go, the girls stay on the show until they are picked and so they can end up staying in the hotel together for up to four weeks. Unsurprisingly, things sometimes get a bit heated. "There were fights, and there were lots of tears. Girls would get amazingly stressed about getting their lights turned out. What I found amazing is that people who'd obviously been quite unlucky in love would still choose to go on. If your self-esteem is already quite low, I always thought that was a strange thing to want to do," says Becca.

Not everyone was looking for love. One male contestant, Ben, went on the show to promote veganism, and actually consulted with PETA about his comebacks. The charity was responsible for the one-liner, "one date with me and I'll be the only piece of meat you want."

Most of the girls I speak to have the same explanation for how they ended up on the show. What starts as a joke progresses into a load of application forms, phone calls and screen tests. With the completion of each stage comes the, "well I might as well see it through" attitude. Until one day you're in a cab to Maidstone.

"I just didn't think I was the right kind of person," explains Lotte, a 24-year-old editorial assistant. "I applied, sort of for a piss-take but it ended up becoming reality."

When the realisation hit that she'd be joining in week three, Lotte made a game plan and stuck to it. "By the first Monday I was like, I want to fucking go to Fernando's. I don't care what happens, I am going. You get told that you need to leave your light on for an average of five times before you get picked. If there is a guy you fancy and you leave your light on, you can hope, but you probably won't get picked. There are 30 other girls and it's all just completely shallow. If Paddy doesn't come over to you then you're automatically less memorable. So I started to think, 'Okay shit, I need to keep my light on a bit more; I need to up these odds.' I left my light on about five times, and then voila – I got the date."

With dating in 2016 such a colossal headfuck, Take Me Out was no less intimidating than the real-life version of trying to get a date for many people I spoke to. And in fact, over the six years of the show, there have been a handful of success stories. In 2014, Adele from the original 30 girls got engaged to Dave, a guy she'd met on the show two years earlier. Series five's Gemma and Gavin recently had their first child.

The Cardiff para–athlete I spoke to, Tony, is still on-and-off dating a girl he met on the series ("We're still trying to make it work, but I'll be honest, its not easy"). They didn't cross paths until after his episode aired, when she started messaging him – both contestants were part of that season's contestants' Facebook group, which is apparently quite a common launchpad for a blossoming Take Me Out relationship after the show has finished. "People know what they're doing when they put everyone together in a Facebook group" Tony assured me. "That's them trying to find their love matches, rather than on the show."

In fact finding love in Fernando's seems to be basically impossible. Lotte was given a 5am call time and told to wear a bikini, shorts and trainers. "They give nothing away", she explained. "You don't know if you're going to be doing water sports, hiking, horse riding or nothing at all. That's the worst, not knowing..." It turned out she would be Bob-diving with Ben, her amateur magician and incredibly keen date.

Lotte knew so little about her date that before he arrived, she admits she thought he was of Indian heritage. "I have really bad eyesight, but I didn't want to wear my glasses on the show. I didn't see him properly till he came over to me and by then I was so distracted doing the whole, 'don't you dare turn my fucking light off'– that I didn't really know what was going on." After the show, they keep the pairings totally separate until they're on the date.

He kept trying to hold her hand, "it was kind of creepy, he kept rubbing his thumb on me. I realised then that he probably wasn't the sort of guy I thought he was." Luckily for Lotte, she didn't actually have to interact with him until they were on camera. "We were chatting and then we actually got told to shut up, which for me was ideal because I was sitting in a boat in my bikini thinking: this is great, I don't have to talk to this weirdo.

It goes without saying that Take Me Out basically invented Tinder's swipe-left or swipe-right way of matching potential partners – the lights off or on are the same conceit. But the show itself isn't much of a dating service. Maybe a few of the contestants are looking for love but mostly people are searching for fame, a free holiday, or trying to promote veganism.

"The producers kind of said, 'Don't sit here waiting for the man of your dreams coming down your the lift because at the end of the day it's just a game show'," Lotte says. "I met a few girls who were looking for love but I didn't really understand why anyone would go on national TV to find a genuine relationship."

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Photo courtesy Dr. Alan Duffy

This article originally appeared on VICE Australia

Around a billion light years ago, in a part of space that's nowhere near Earth, two giant black holes collided with one another. The scale of this collision is pretty hard to imagine: One of the black holes was around 29 times the mass of our sun, the other 36 times. "They released the same amount of energy as 8.5 billion trillion trillion Hiroshima nuclear bombs," explains Dr. Alan Duffy, a professor of astronomy at Swinburne University, Melbourne. When they merged together, the resulting black hole was 62 times the mass of our sun.

We know this because scientists detected it not by using telescopes, but by shooting lasers along 2.5-mile tunnels as part of a massive physics experiment called the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. Stephen Hawking has called it a key moment of scientific history.

"The idea is that the lasers go up and down these tubes... they bounce off a mirror and come back, when they meet at the LIGO center they should cancel out," Duffy explains. But if one of the beams has traveled a slightly different distance, it means it has been stretched by the gravitational waves emitted from the black hole. "They won't perfectly cancel, and you'll get a little bit of light hitting your detector," Duffy says, which is exactly what the scientists at LIGO saw on September 14, 2015.

On Motherboard: Why Gravitational Physicists Don't Sleep at Night

Why is this discovery important? Well, two reasons. First, we've never directly seen black holes before this moment. Scientists have been pretty sure they exist, but this is solid proof. "That in itself would be Nobel Prize–winning," says Duffy. "But, to put it in perspective, it won't even get a mention because of the enormity of the gravitational waves themselves."

A LIGO facility. Image via Flickr user Tobin

Confirming the existence of gravitational waves matters because it proves what Einstein predicted 100 years ago when he put forward his general theory of relativity. "In his theory he showed that spacetime—the actual thing that we live and move in—can ripple, just like when you throw a rock into a pond," Duffy says. "You get the same effect if two massive objects, just say black holes, collide. That will actually cause ripples in spacetime."

Einstein thought we would never see these ripples because they'd be too weak to ever detect. But the fact LIGO was able to detect them gets even more incredible. Until just a few days, before the waves were seen, LIGO was shut off for upgrades. "The facility turned on just days before. So these gravitational waves had traveled for hundreds of millions of years and hit us just a few days after we switched on our detectors," Duffy says. The gravitational wave passed through Earth in the blink of an eye, and it stretched the detector by less than one thousandth of the size of the nucleus of an atom.

The detector is so powerful, the scientists had to make sure it hadn't been affected by things like the vibration from a truck driving past over a kilometer away. "I think even one of the teams had to worry about whether a lumberjack had felled a tree nearby," Duffy says. "This is the level of detail you have to go to be sure that you're seeing these gravitational waves because it's just one of the biggest, most important discoveries in physics."

A LIGO tunnel on the decommissioned nuclear complex, Hanford Reservation. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

After the wave passed through Earth, there was a frequency, or a ringing—the echo of the black hole crunching down on itself. This billion-year-old sound that has traveled across space and time is audible to humans. You can go and listen to it right now. "The most extreme collision we've ever seen in the universe has ended up turning out to be middle C on a piano," says Duffy.

Turns out the scientific community is better at keeping secrets than Beyoncé, given that LIGO's findings were pretty much under wraps until they were published Thursday in the Review of Physical Letters. Duffy says the LIGO team asked every telescope on Earth to point towards the area in the sky where it knew the black holes collided, searching for more proof of the explosion. "Essentially, it's one of the most intense searches humanity has ever undertaken, and it's managed to be done almost perfectly in secret... until now when we were 100 percent sure," he says.

Duffy says the next step is detecting bigger and better black hole collisions. "Australia has a leading role in using distant stars, called pulsars, which actually detect far larger black holes merging," he says. "Tens of times of the mass of our sun is pretty big, but we know that black holes can become millions or even billions times bigger than our sun. They just keep gobbling up matter." For now, though, the scientific community is celebrating one of the biggest discoveries ever. "It really means that we get to see into the universe with an entirely new sense," Duffy says. "Sight, sound, touch, taste, smell—all those human senses use light. This is the first time that we'll be using gravity, and it's an incredible moment."

All photos by the author

This article originally appeared on VICE US

New York City is full of characters walking around in costumes – the topless women of Times Square who perform for money, the bankers roaming Wall Street in their double-breasted blazers, the cops and ravers and Bloods and aspiring fashionistas. But of all the city's outfits, the red jackets and berets of the Guardian Angels are branded deepest in my brain.

Founded in 1979, the Guardian Angels were supposed to be a counter to the muggings and assaults that back then were commonplace on the streets and subways. The local authorities, as you might imagine, weren't too keen on private citizens fighting crime, but in 1981 the city and the Angels reached a "memorandum of understanding" where the vigilantes agreed to work with the cops.

How much crime the Angels prevented is unclear. In 1992, founder Curtis Sliwa admitted to faking a half-dozen acts of heroism to gain publicity in the group's early years; by that time, his former associates had accused the Angels of becoming, according to the New York Times, "little more than a security force for a block of midtown restaurants." Sliwa is also known for his sexist and racist remarks, which hasn't exactly improved the group's image.

Still, the legend and iconography of the Guardian Angels persists. I first became aware of the volunteer-based group through a photograph I saw when I was 12. In the 1980s, photographer Bruce Davidson documented the NYC subway system in all its gritty glory. In one of his most striking images, two young men in white tank-tops emblazoned with "Guardian Angels" stare stone-faced in front of subway doors. The photo is unequivocally of another time: The mustache on one Angel, the glasses, the sleeveless muscle shirt, the neat afro, and the graffiti that lined every exposed inch of the subway.

Today the subways are cleaner and the city is more orderly; romanticized though it is, no one wants to return to the grimy, gritty days of the 70s. Nevertheless, earlier in the month, local news outlets reported that the Guardian Angels are "back on patrol" on the city's trains. But to hear 32-year Guardian Angel veteran EQ (a.k.a. Benjamin Garcia) told me, "We never left" – New Yorkers just haven't been paying attention.

One reason for the Angels' resurgence is that despite statistics demonstrating New York's safety, tabloid accounts of subway knife attacks, among other things, have some residents spooked. (That Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, has supposedly been insufficiently pro-cop has made some conservative New Yorkers skittish about a return to the "bad old days.")

To learn more about the Angels and what purpose they serve in 2016, I spent a full day with them as they patrolled the subways.

During the morning patrol, I met EQ, Tito Colon (appropriately nicknamed "Mumbles"), and a third, seemingly mute, member named Chavi at 11AM outside Columbus Circle. After we went underground, the members did a pat down of each other near the Metrocard machines to make sure no one was carrying weapons, intentionally or unintentionally, while on patrol. Once through the turnstile, they alerted an officer behind a desk in the police department at the 59th Street station that they were going on duty. The police officer, looking baffled, replied "OK," and gave an awkward wave.

With only three members on duty, the Angels roamed the same subway car together and changed cars at every stop. "The most dangerous train is the A to Far Rockaway," EQ explained to me authoritatively. "All the muggings happen there." He also lists the Brooklyn-bound L, J, 3, and 2 trains, as well as the Flushing-bound 7 train, as the other dangerous lines they frequent.

EQ told me that the Guardian Angels are taught self-defense and regularly practice role-playing scenarios, and some of the members know mixed martial arts. EQ couldn't clearly answer when I asked him what the procedure was if they found something or someone who was suspicious. In all the different responses he gave me, he never mentioned notifying the police.

Chavi, who remained silent for the entire six-hour morning shift, often picked up garbage on the subway platforms, sometimes using tools from his utility belt to assist in the pickup. EQ acted primarily as the group's promoter. Whenever someone so much as glanced over at the men in costume, he quickly gave them a handshake with one hand and magically procured a business card for the Angels with the other. When a train car was empty, all three would place little fliers in between the plastic cover for advertisements. EQ told me, "With these cards and fliers, we get about five recruits a day."

After riding the 7 train to 103 St-Corona Plaza, we stopped in a McDonald's so that EQ could follow-up with some of the recruits over the phone. Most of the conversations ended with, "Sorry, thanks for your time."

EQ estimated that they stop an actual fight once every three months, often involving gangs or bullies picking on high school kids. The Angels take it upon themselves not only to fight immediate physical violence they witness, but also to return lost children to their parents or protect women who are being harassed by men.

"Ten or 12 years ago, there was a 15-year-old girl in Queensboro Plaza," EQ told me. "She had this stalker. We switched cars and the stalker got on with us. Looking at me, he said, 'There's nothing you can do and I'm gonna get away with it." EQ said that he tackled the guy while doors were open in a station and pinned him down until the cops arrived.

A few hours later, I joined several more Angels for a night patrol. There were three new members: 22-year-old Crazy J (a.k.a. Jose Gonzalez), 16-year-old Blue Blood (a.k.a. Ivan Cruz), and Rock (founder Curtis Sliwa), as well as EQ and Mumbles working a second shift. On the A train downtown, Crazy J told me how he believed that the recent subway slashings were an anomaly and that the city is much safer now than it was when he first became an Angel.

The vibe on the evening shift was more intense than the day shift, and the volunteers acted as if there was more gravity to what they were doing, perhaps because their leader was overseeing them. Upon entering the train cars, all eyes were on the Angels with their crossed arms and red berets. There were two types of reactions: Those who simply stared and appeared baffled by the men in red outfits, and those who approached the Angels and shook their hands. Many people who approached them were shocked that they were still around. On multiple occasions, middle-aged men stopped the men to thank them for their service and to retell stories of how safe they felt seeing the Guardian Angels patrol the trains when they were kids.

"It's good to have you guys back," one commuter told them. "We need you." After the man exited the train, several of the Angels seemed to follow the fan with their eyes until the train left the platform and headed south to Canarsie.

Visit Jackson's website and Instagram for more of his photo work. See more photos of the Guardian Angels below.

Illustration by Stephen Maurice Graham

Five years and the best part of 58 million units sold since its February 2011 launch, Nintendo's 3DS is the only handheld games console you need in your chunky backpack, subversive print-tote or remarkably roomy coat pocket in 2016. Its only "console-proper" rival, the PlayStation Vita, is as good as dead, with Sony refusing to commit first-party resources to developing new titles for their commercially flat-lining portable. Following the 154 million sales of the DS range before Nintendo's twin-screen system took on the (autostereoscopic) third dimension, the 3DS's market dominance is absolute. And the console's completely changed my relationship with video games since I got one to call my own. Not that its early reception was entirely positive.

Writing on IGN just a couple of months on from its stateside release in March 2011, Audrey Drake remarked that her 3DS had been "collecting dust for weeks", highlighting a lack of launch window third-party titles, adding: "I'm now an extremely dissatisfied customer." Sales were slow, and Nintendo laid the blame for the console's sluggish commercial performance on a lack of high-profile software. With the company losing money to the tune of billions of yen, a price cut had to come – and when it did, it was dramatic. In the UK, the 3DS's initial price of £229.99 was slashed to under £150 just months after its launch. It was a gamble for Nintendo, but one that paid off – it knew that some big-hitters were on the horizon, games that could push the 3DS into profitability.

In November 2011, Super Mario 3D Land began to change the fortunes of the 3DS, ultimately selling over 10 million copies. A month later came Mario Kart 7, which has (to date) beaten that figure by over 2.5 million. Pokémon series titles in 2013 and 2014, a handful of Monster Hunters, "life simulators" Animal Crossing: New Leaf and Tomodachi Life, and more Mario Bros. entries have all racked up sales figures in the multi-millions. The rest is history, save a few headaches. The 3DS is more than just a success; it's another Nintendo phenomenon to rank up there with the handheld that started them all, the Game Boy. Not that Nintendo's debut portable of 1989 was the first on-the-go system – that was Milton Bradley's Microvision, released in 1979. But ask anyone aged between, say, 25 and 40 where their mobile gaming experiences began, and they'll almost certainly answer the Game Boy. (With DS being the most likely response of anyone younger.)

A range of Game Boy models – I eventually owned (and still do) the clear version of what you see here in green, front left (photo via Wikipedia)

I wasn't allowed to have a Game Boy, as a kid. I'd pore over pictures of the whitish-grey machine, with its monochromatic LCD screen, recognisably NES-like face controls, and glowing red power indicator. I'd go to bed with the Argos catalogue, dreaming of what it'd be like to own one, with a copy of the always-bundled Tetris and whatever else I could grab from the store in question – some Bugs Bunny platformer, Alleyway and the first Super Mario Land. But my parents never relented, despite my repeated requests in the run up to several Christmases and birthdays.

Maybe today I can see their point of it "just being a toy", something I'd quickly grow out of – it was a plaything, a time-killer/filler, whereas the family Amiga did so much more (not that we ever used it for homework). Years later, in the late-1990s, my then-girlfriend got a summer job at Nintendo, and one day brought me home a Game Boy Pocket – the clear model – with a couple of games: The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening (amazing), and Disney's Mulan (I'm not sure I ever played more than five minutes of it). I quickly picked up Tetris, Tennis, Pokémon Blue and a couple more cartridges – including the impossibly difficult Star Wars – but Zelda aside, few held my attention. I had grown out of these simple games – that, and as an 18 year old, many more ways to fill my evenings had just opened up to me.

Handheld gaming didn't pique my interest again for 15 years and change. I'd been through a degree and a publishing job in London, worked for well over a decade in music journalism and begun writing about games as a paid gig (I know, right?) before an email from Nintendo caught my attention. Super Smash Bros. was being relaunched for the company's contemporary consoles, the Wii U and 3DS. I'd played 2001's Melee on the GameCube, liked it, and was keen to check this new version out. Small problem: it was coming out first for the 3DS, and I didn't have one. No problem, as it turned out – Nintendo would loan me a 3DS XL (the bigger-screened model), and a copy of the game. A few days later, sure enough, the postie delivered me a little bundle of joy. I got more than stuck in – every commute was a chance to face a new challenger, and I worked hard on unlocking every character, from EarthBound's Ness to Falco from the Star Fox franchise and Mr Game & Watch. Link and Kirby became my main guys, and while I'm certainly not proficient enough at the new Smash to take on the pros, I reached a personally satisfying level. Eventually, Nintendo needed the 3DS, and game, back. I was close to inconsolable (no pun intended), but another games writer came to my aid.

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I bought a second-hand 3DS XL from a gentleman called Dom. It had a few knocks, nicks and scratches on it, no big deal. So if you see a slightly battered 3DS covered in VICE and Ninja Tune stickers on a train anytime soon, take a peek around it and you'll probably find me – hiya. It's perhaps the greatest gaming investment I've made in recent years, and I absolutely include the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 in that snap assessment. I adore my 3DS, and to repeat a point you might have missed earlier: it completely has changed the way I relate to video games, how they impact my life, and the amount of time I even get to spend with them.

You might think that covering games full time means that I play a lot of them. Wrong. Covering games full time means spending hour upon hour chasing stories and commissioning articles; subbing, publishing and promoting content; liaising with other in-house departments about potential new projects; handling everyday admin (people have to get paid); responding to events and announcements that demand instant coverage; and generally keeping on top of an inbox that's got more pitches in it right now than an entire Major League Baseball season. So when it comes to getting hands-on with the "big" console releases of any given year, most of the time I'm in for five, six hours, top. Fallout 4? Barely four. Metal Gear Solid V? Nine. I finished The Witcher 3 and its Hearts of Stone DLC, but that is the exception to the rule. Bloodborne? I'm still the wrong side of Father Gascoigne.

Related: Check out the top 20 games of 2015, according to VICE

But I've sunk a solid 12 hours, at least, into The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, and I'm still some way short of finishing 2013's fantastic 3DS RPG. It's a beautiful game, portable but so far from being a compressed take on home-console cousins. And I think that's why, for me, the 3DS has become such an essential amongst my gaming hardware – its games are only rarely "pocket-sized editions" of others you'll have played on more-powerful systems. A Link Between Worlds is a bespoke production that is both lovingly crafted with nostalgia for the SNES's A Link to the Past and the Game Boy's Link's Awakening, and built to perfectly fit the specifications of the 3DS. It makes great use of the 3D, for one thing, with dungeons playing out across a number of simultaneously visible levels, and Link's wall-merging ability always looking exquisite. The same is true of Super Mario 3D Land, which uses the system's stereoscopic top screen to better telegraph routes through stages, and its gyroscope for aiming first-person tools, like binoculars. Neither of these games would work so sweetly on any other platform.

Promotional art for 'The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds'

Which is why it's slightly saddening to see Square Enix's brand-new Final Fantasy Explorers – an engaging take on Capcom's Monster Hunter series, albeit simplified and featuring famous Final Fantasy characters – completely ignore the graphical potential of the 3DS. While every game on the handheld can conceivably be played in 2D, Explorers is only ever that way, no matter how far you push the side-mounted 3D slider. That doesn't particularly detract from what is an enjoyable romp through FF-series sights and sounds (so far, at least – my blue-haired Gary is only six or so hours into her adventuring), but Explorers isn't a game that feels unique to the 3DS. Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon, a ghost-busting blast through a series of haunted houses, absolutely does; likewise the sublime Mario Golf: World Tour, a sunshine-kissed sports sim that never fails to brighten my day. The 3D is a vital gameplay ingredient of the terrific puzzler Pushmo (aka Pullblox), and makes N64-era Zelda titles Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask look better than they ever have.

On Motherboard: Nintendo Direct Is Still the Best Event in Gaming

And it's accessibility to older games that really makes the 3DS such an indispensible companion for me, on my travels. I've armed mine with a 16GB memory card, onto which I can load any number of old-school NES and Game Boy titles, via Nintendo's digital eShop. So whereas the Game Boy was a toy, the 3DS is a window on the very history of gaming culture. I can use it to play NESsentials like Super Mario Bros. 3, the original Castlevania and Metroid, and Punch-Out!!, as well as GB winners like Kirby's Dream Land and Super Mario Land 2 (both in black and white, of course). And it's not just Nintendo's past that's preserved here – a number of releases for SEGA's Game Gear are on the eShop, while Japanese developer M2's series of SEGA titles "remastered" for the 3DS is regularly delivering the definitive versions of childhood favourites.

"I think all of these classic SEGA titles have much to offer, in terms of evergreen gameplay appeal," is what M2 president Naoki Horii told me in 2015. And having played through the 3DS updates of Streets of Rage 2, Out Run, Fantasy Zone and Sonic the Hedgehog 2, each of which add new gameplay modes to familiar experiences, I can honestly say that these are the best these games have ever been.

'Chrono Trigger' is playable on the DS, which means you can play it on the 3DS, and you really should

The 3DS's backwards compatibility with DS game cards (all 2,000-plus of them) is another massive part of the handheld's appeal. In recent months I've laughed myself sideways while simultaneously saving a high-school girl's relationship in the awesome rhythm-action game Elite Beat Agents; built a drug empire capable of impressing real-life dealers in Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars; and shat my pants exploring the USS Sulaco in Aliens Infestation, aka the one Gearbox-made Aliens-series game you should play, and not the stinking Colonial Marines. And then there's Chrono Trigger. Perhaps my favourite SNES RPG, narrowly edging out Secret of Mana and A Link to the Past (I was never much into Final Fantasy back then, sorry), the time-travelling, world-saving Chrono Trigger was ported to the DS in 2008, and to have access to it again, anytime I like, is just glorious. Not that I've been able to get past the sodding Golem Twins on this run. Forgot my element-absorbing armour, didn't I.

The author's somewhat battered 3DS beside his Pocket-edition Game Boy

And even when it's faced with a genre of game that it maybe shouldn't be suited for, like a frame-precise fighter, the 3DS impresses. I actually prefer the portable Super Smash Bros. to its crisper-of-visuals Wii U relative, and Super Street Fighter IV on the handheld, a 3DS launch title in Japan, holds up well against the tournament-play console versions. VICE contributor Andi Hamilton is something of a Street Fighter authority, and says of the 3DS port of IV: "It's a surprisingly fully featured version of Super, and if you're a pad player you can actually use it as a decent practise tool for combos and execution." Not that French Street Fighter pro-player Luffy swears by it – the last time I saw him with his 3DS out, during downtime at a London tournament, he was taking on his girlfriend at Smash.

In conclusion, the 3DS is, for my money – and I've spent plenty of it on it – the best handheld console ever made. I appreciate that there's a lot of love for the Vita, and that the Game Boy will always be in the hearts of gamers of a certain vintage. I respect, too, those who fought so valiantly in the battery wars of the 1990s, but ultimately succumbed to plugging into the wall: the Game Gear and Atari Lynx had their fans. And, yes, Sony sold a certifiable shitload of PSPs, despite those awful UMDs. But the 3DS isn't just a portable for the present – it's a platform for gaming across the ages, and better yet, a means to play (and replay) so many beloved titles from more than three decades of gaming history while on the move. Which is why it's so perfect for me. On the train, at a station, in an airport: I'm rarely bothered by spread sheets, meeting schedules or inbox woes. I can just get my head down and press on with playing. It's a feeling of freedom, really, that I get whenever I switch on my 3DS – and wherever the game in question takes me, I'm almost always happy to be there.

@MikeDiver

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This article originally appeared on VICE Greece

It's fair to say that things kicked off on Friday, when Cretan farmers in Athens outside the Ministry of Rural Development protested against the Greek government's proposed new pension reform plans. By 10AM riot police had positioned themselves around the ministry at Archarnon Street and two platoons, with a pile of vegetables chucked by the farmers already scattered at their feet, stood firm at the entrance to push back the farmers determined to storm it.

The traditional Cretan boots worn by many of the farmers

The farmers were part of a large group that's been protesting across Greece for more than two weeks now, against new measures by the Greek government that would increase their taxes and abolish many tax breaks. Across Greece, farmers' tractors have staged blockades on major highways. This Friday, the blockade arrived in Athens with a crew of farmers from Crete, where farming is the island's lifeblood.

A mix of ages, the farmers looked mostly to be fathers with their sons. When I approached the younger men and asked why they'd gone through all the effort to hop on boats to Athens for the day, they shouted: "We were too angry to stay at home." From what they went on to tell me, they're not only angry but frustrated, and determined not to let the new insurance laws pass. The new measures affect them more than their elders, they said, mainly because their simple dream of staying in their villages and cultivating the fields feels unattainable and may collapse altogether.

The first skirmishes began when a farm truck loaded with tomatoes tried to approach the entrance of the ministry to "show the minister their produce", the farmers put it. A street fight erupted with the police reacting first, then the farmers responding by throwing vegetables, bricks, bottles, improvised smoke bombs and wood. With every effort to push them back, the police shield was met with blows from traditional Cretan walking sticks. Soon after, stones began to fly and the first two floors of the ministry now have barely any windows left intact. The riot police responded with tear gas and stun grenades to repel the protesting farmers, making six arrests in the process.

Soon the intensity died down and when I could breathe through the tear gas again I noticed that most of the farmers were just wearing traditional Cretan headcovers and boots. Only a few, wary of what might have happened, showed up with gas masks or helmets. Despite their inexperience with big protests, they threw whatever they could get their hands on with gusto.

Some of the farmers explained that their goal was simply to talk to the minister and prime minister to negotiate the new bill from scratch – a plan that they weren't willing to give up. By noon, things had calmed and the farmers gathered a little distance away from the police, shouting that the cops should be ashamed about those who they were protecting, before singing a traditional song with tear gas-countering maalox around their eyes. Trash bins burned nearby. In the moment of relative calm, I spoke to some of the young men in more detail.

Michalis, 22: "If they don't agree to meet us we'll burn the building down."

"We set out last night from Crete to fight for our future and we will stay as long as necessary. We came here and the police forced us to react. If the bills pass we will carry out the blockades again in Crete and in Athens until we get what we are entitled to so that we don't take the law into our own hands. I'm a farmer, I cultivate grapes and olives. Not just me, but all my family and relatives. If they don't agree to meet us we'll burn the building down. There is no way we will accept the new bill."

Giorgos, 23: "All of Crete lives on agriculture"

"We came here to find a solution, but the police started throwing tear gas at us, as if their own forefathers didn't work as farmers too. The new pension and tax measures should be scrapped for all professions, not just for us farmers. I'm 23 years old and a farmer in Hania, where we cultivate tomatoes, and I never once thought of leaving. But with all that's happening I don't know how much longer I can stay. It's like they're telling us we don't exist anymore, since our main occupation is farming and now we're forced not to produce anything. But all of Crete lives on agriculture."

Giorgos, 21: "We won't let the new measures pass or let Alexis Tsipras sit on a throne he doesn't deserve."

"They're preparing our tombstones for us; we can't accept that. We're 14 days into the blockade of Crete and this time we took over the tax office in the capital Heraklion, without causing a single penny of damage. The police here didn't let us protest as we wanted.

"We won't let the new measures pass or let Alexis Tsipras sit on a throne he doesn't deserve. I am 21 and a farmer, but I see that there is no future in the profession. Nevertheless, I do not want to leave and throw away all my father and grandfather's hard work. I know I won't be hungry because I can grow my own food, but I'll stop working as a farmer. What will then become of the rest of Greece?"

Spyros, 29: "It would have been better if Crete had held a referendum last year"

"I studied electrical engineering but decided to go into farming and stay in Crete. If these measures pass, we're finished. I think we won't become producers again, because from where I come from in Crete, everyone is in farming.

"I hope that the government will think logically and will withdraw the new measures for all those concerned. It's like having to sell off our land and become labourers in our own fields. We're not yet 30, but we don't want to give up farming. The way things are going we'll be forced to have a referendum, which we should have done last year and become independent from the mainland."

Yiannis, 26: "I studied to return to Crete and go into farming."

"Our basic demand is the withdrawal of the new social security bill, which is a coup de grâce for the Greek farmer. I'm 26 years old and graduated in oenology (wine-making) and viticulture (the study, science and production of grapes) because I wanted to work in the fields. I studied it, because like many Cretans, even though it is a hard and difficult profession, this is what we wanted to do. But I'm thinking of leaving for someplace else, maybe Holland or France that has rural areas and is connected to what I studied. Here, the production costs are increasing and the product prices falling. Now with the new bill I'm really thinking of leaving. They're forcing us to go because they're wiping us out."

The tractor blockade then moved from the ministry to Syntagma Square

More on Greece from VICE:

Meet the Heroic Greek Fishermen Saving Refugees from Drowning in the Aegean Sea

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Greek Millennials Are Sick of Politics

Greetings from Auschwitz (Photo: K Krajewski, via Krakow's Foundation for the Visual Arts)

This article originally appeared on VICE Poland

Now that you can call or email anyone, at any time, the effort of sending holiday postcards – buying and writing a note to your loved ones – feels somehow beautiful.

Then I learned about the postcards from Auschwitz, first sent in 1946 a year after the Jewish prisoners were rescued. I'd visited the Nazi extermination camp once, but never noticed any gift shops there. Even if there were postcards to buy, I wouldn't have known how to communicate from a genocidal death camp – what do you write? "I'm, all things considered, doing fine"? Would you send a postcard from a place built to literally wipe out an entire generation?

How long it takes to turn a concentration camp into a tourist attraction was the first thing on my mind when I read Paweł Szypulski's book Greetings from Auschwitz. Szypulski, a Polish artist and curator, pulled together a collection of postcards that were sent by tourists who visited the horrifying site. On the postcards, we find messages ranging from mundane reports on the weather to politically incorrect jokes: a "shipment of warm greetings from Auschwitz" accompanies an image of a death block, for example.

I sat down with Szypulski, to talk about human nature in the face of death and trauma.

VICE: How did you manage to find the postcards and how long did it take to collect them?
Paweł Szypulski: I started this project eight years ago. When I first found out about the existence of these postcards, I was looking for a way to get to them – intuitively I started with antique shops and flea markets. Pretty quickly, that turned out to be an extremely time-consuming, or even barely possible, method. I ended up buying all the postcards on an auction site. Basically every two weeks I set myself the task of typing "Oświęcim" – Polish for Auschwitz – into the postcards section of that auction site, searching through and only buying the postcards marked as "circulated" – those that had been written on, postmarked and sent. I was interested in the ones with greetings, because they had a story to them.

How did you choose what went into the book? What was your pattern you use any type of pattern in making a selection for the book?
I mostly wanted it to be a showcase of my collection's variety, of everything I managed to find. After creating an archive of postcards, I then had to figure out how to order them. The sequence of the postcards in the book is a story itself; when readers are going through Greetings from Auschwitz's pages, they are taking part in a "journey" through the Auschwitz death camp; from the gates, through the barracks and barbed wires to the gas chambers and crematorium. The same journey we repeat in Birkenau.

Are these postcards from all over Poland?
Indeed, what's interesting they were also sent from different places. Some cards were bought in the town of Oświęcim, but a few were from some museum's branch. It seems those postcards were available in other places besides the death camp. I remember as child I was on a holiday in the Polish Kashubian region in some sort of open-air museum, and I noticed they were selling postcards – with an image of sun setting through a barbed wire – from Stutthof concentration camp.

(Photo: K Krajewski)

Have you ever contacted any of the senders and addressees from the death camp postcards?
I haven't and I never intended to. I wasn't looking for them, because this project is not about specific senders or addressees – it is about all of us, people who live in a post-Auschwitz Holocaust world. The first thing I did when I started this project was cover up the names of the addressees. Not because it's illegal to breach their privacy, but because I didn't want to associate Greetings from Auschwitz with specific people. This project is not judgmental. It's not about pointing fingers with moral superiority over people who send the postcards from Auschwitz, or some kind of reproach.

Don't you think that the fact that the death camp postcards exist is somewhat offensive to the survivors, who lost their loved ones in the Holocaust, possibly whole families?
It was the first thing that hit me – the enormous impropriety of the postcards. I could not understand them. How can you not only send one, but to even produce it? That was what got me into this project. Nowadays though, I have more complex attitude toward it. I'm finding more questions with time.

The first postcard from Auschwitz was made in the actual death camp in 1943, when people were being murdered on a mass scale. What was the story there?
Wilhelm Brasse, a Polish man with Austrian roots, made the first one. He was sent to Auschwitz for refusing to join the Wermacht armed forces, and got lucky, as they needed someone to take photographs and he'd been a professional photographer – this saved his life. He was appointed to what they called the "museum," an artistic "kommando" or unit that used prisoners for taking photographs, reproducing pictures and forging money – all of which required artistic skills.

Brasse took a huge number of photographic portraits of the prisoners – the double front and profile pictures that we all associate with Auschwitz. He also documented some of the medical experiments that took place in the death camp. With all the horrifying images he had to take, he also took one that was completely different from the rest: a picture of a flower in a vase or glass. He picked the flower in front of one of the death blocks, where his friend Eugeniusz Dembek – also from artistic unit – planted it. In all horror, this flower was something pretty, and something they needed to not lose their minds.

One of the German supervisors found this photo by Brasse, and decided to make copies of it and sell it in the camp's canteen. The picture turned out to be so successful that Brasse was asked to do a version in colour, that sold out in hundreds of copies. So, the very first postcard from Auschwitz was of a vase with a flower in it. Unfortunately no copies were preserved, and we only know the story and a description.

I know that in 1943, prisoners of the camp were made to send postcards to their families. Can you elaborate on that?
This was an act of propaganda, organised to show that people at Auschwitz were doing fine, and had proper living conditions. We have to stress though, that these postcards had blank backs. They were called "uncovers": undivided back postcards with more room for writing than an average postcard. Uncovers were censored before they were posted to the families of Auschwitz prisoners, and often people who received them didn't believe what was written on them.

How would you explain this commercialisation of death?
The question is: could it be any different? We, as people who've lived "after" the genocide, don't really how to properly commemorate it. Auschwitz quickly turned into a museum, which was also down to the effort of the survivors, but it took other death camps like Bełżec or Chełmno years to be commemorated in a similar way. A good example of our memory failure is the Umschlagplatz in Warsaw. People were transported from it to the extermination camps – today most of it's a luxury flat complex, and there was a petrol station on it for years too. It turns out that the only alternative for a lot of our empty gestures is no action at all, but I can't tell if that's a good thing.

(Photo: K Krajewski)

The oldest postcard in the book was sent in 1946, when Auschwitz wasn't yet a museum. When you go through the messages on the postcards in the book it's hard to tell if there was any sense of place within notes about the weather, or awkwardly worded attempts at humour. Is this an expression of ignorance? Or is trivialising the Holocaust a way to deal with the trauma?
I think partially all of it. You said that the postcards were sent right after the war; today we take selfies in concentration camps. Sometimes it's just plain ignorance, but I think it's a self-defence mechanism, to transform a place of trauma into something that resembles a ski resort. It helps with turning a blind eye to a place where horrifying things beyond most people's imaginations happened. Have you ever been to Auschwitz?

Yes, once, to Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II.
Do you remember what you thought of it?

At first I felt like my body was being crushed. Then I remember two emotions: incredible sorrow when I saw the pile of hair that had been cut; and anger, when in one of the barracks I noticed that some tourists had carved something into the wall – a juvenile, primary school-style confession like "Katie loves Johnny".
That's unbelievable that someone did that. I guess it's a sign that, even after such a calamity, life goes on. I think that the postcards and selfies are telling the same story about this place, where death happened, and where grass finally grows. New people come to visit it, and they are sightseeing it, like it's a holiday resort – like nothing ever happened. This confounds the idea that learning about Auschwitz should teach us something.

Exactly. American philosopher George Santayana said: "Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it", and not so long ago in Wrocław a group of people burned a dummy of a Jew. Similar thing happened when it was announced that Poland was going to accept refugees, and those against the decision were posting images of Auschwitz captioned "welcome" on social media. Does this prove we've come full circle?
The last few decades since WWII show that humanity can't break away from such atrocities that quickly. The only certain "never again" is that Germans won't be ever again killing Jews in Warsaw in 1942 like they did. Since the Holocaust, there has been genocide in Rwanda and Srebrenica, not far from Poland.

Do you consider yourself an artist or a researcher?
I don't consider myself an artist. If I had to describe myself somehow, I feel more I'm an author of the project, and this book is to me, is a form of visual essay, an intellectual statement.

How would you describe your goal for creating this project?
The goal is definitely not a criticism, because I did not want to make people stop sending or making these postcards. I made this book because I'm interested in people who are "alongside" the traumatic historical events. In English there is a perfect word for it: "bystander." I want to know, what people do when they are close to something so horrible. We all are – not literally – bystanders, because we live with the knowledge of the Holocaust, that it happened here, in Poland. We can become the bystanders in a literal way any moment, while other wrong things are happening. We know that there is no "right" way to react in the face of terror, which I actually find out myself...

What do you mean by that?
I was in Paris during the recent terrorist attacks, having dinner with my Swiss publishers at their flat about 300 metres from the one of the attacks. I knew that somewhere near us something utterly horrific was happening, and I was sitting at the table with coffee and biscuits, awash in pleasantries. In moments like those you realise that you have no idea how to act or what to do with yourself, to be fair to the victims.

Your book ends with an unaddressed postcard that was never sent. When I saw it, I was speechless and in shock: it depicts a pile of dead bodies, waiting to be burned. Could you explain this postcard?
This image from the Holocaust is one of the most commented-on. Some reports say it was made from the inside of the gas chamber. This image was taken by Sonderkommando, a unit of prisoners responsible for burning the bodies, and is one of four pictures that they secretly took.

I remember when I found out about the existence of this postcard. Even though I'd been collecting Auschwitz postcards for a couple of years, I was still shocked. There were 32,000 copies made of it – and I own few of them – but I never stumbled on a one that had been sent. I want to believe that not every postcard can be sent. But on the other hand I am aware that in the US, people used to send each other lynching postcards, so maybe I'm slightly naïve.

(Photo: K Krajewski)

Can you still buy postcards at Auschwitz?
Of course you can. If you are going to visit it these days, there will be no problem in finding postcards there. I don't know about the prices but they are cheap—like in any other tourist attraction.

Thanks for your time, Paweł.

This article originally appeared on VICE US

At 28, I've finally started to feel like a grown-up. When I was in my early 20s, I dated sleazy photographers or DJs who never introduced me to their friends. At 28, though, I'm partnered with another 28-year-old, and we're even buying a dining room table so we no longer have to sleep in spaghetti sauce.

Based on statistics, it's getting harder and harder for people to find their soul mates. The percentage of married households in the US is lower than it's ever been and people are waiting longer to tie the knot. It's becoming more and more common to meet divorcees below the age of 30, too. I wanted to know what it's really like to attempt to find true love or spend Valentine's Day with the same bag of bones for decades, so I called up some veterans dating experts: three grandmas.

These women have literally created lives, yes, but they've also lived vibrant ones. Joanne, a 66-year-old from Brooklyn, warns of the importance of encouraging people to come out of the closet, and says online dating is just as shitty at 66 as it is at 26.

Bella, who asked to use a pseudonym, is 77 today, but she left her husband after 25 years of marriage at age 45 to travel. Since her divorce, she's found difficulty finding a man who can keep up with her passion for seeing the world, though she recommended that others don't give up on their dreams for a relationship.

Honey is a happily married cancer survivor. Before we got off the phone, the 71-year-old warned me: "Be very nice to your girlfriends, because they're going to outlive your boyfriends." Point taken.

Anyway, I'm spending Valentine's Day on a beach in the Caribbean with my boyfriend. If you're solo masturbating and eating some nachos to fill the romantic void this weekend, or simply need some encouragement about finding your perfect mate, take a break and read what these grannies have to say.

For a different take on relationships, watch our doc on America's lucrative divorce industry:

Joanne
66 Years Old
Brooklyn, New York

VICE: Are you currently dating?
Joanne: Right now I don't have a love life. I've had two husbands. My daughter says I'm a man hater, which I'm not! When I separated from my husband eight years ago, my daughters put me online to meet someone new. I was reluctant, but did use the dating site to meet a man who seemed nice. He came to my house, but had I known what he looked like in reality, I would have not opened the door. He had this turquoise car and was like, "I'm going to take you out to coffee. Is there a Dunkin Donuts anywhere?"

I will never date a man who has less than me. I have a new car, I have two homes, I'm not rich by any means, but I don't want someone who wants me to support them. I find these women who are older than myself, with younger guys, or men their own age, and they're supporting men. They all say the same thing: they don't want to be alone. I'd rather be alone.

What was your first love like?
My first husband, my daughters' father, was this macho, Italian man. I'm Italian, but that's not my type.I married him on the rebound after breaking off my first engagement, which was with my first love.

Why did the engagement end?
We had a wonderful relationship. My girlfriends liked him, he used to say to them, "I want a platonic relationship ." We had to look up the word "platonic." At the time, I didn't understand, you know? I was madly in love, he was madly in love, and we got engaged anyway.

A month before the wedding, we were looking for an apartment, and my parents said, "Why don't you buy a house? There are houses for sale, we'll give you money and he can get a GI mortgage," because he was in the Navy. I found out that he couldn't get one because he had a dishonorable discharge.

Why was that?
I didn't know why at the time, but I should have known. He said, "You have to come some place with me, Joanna. I need to introduce you to this woman I speak to." So he takes me to the city to meet a psychiatrist I didn't even know he had. And she told me he's gay! Now this was in 1970, and everybody was in the closet. And of course, I didn't marry him.

What did he say?
He was devastated. He begged, he pleaded, he said he loved me. He said yes, he did have a relationship with someone in the Navy; he did have a boyfriend before me. I should have known—he worked on Wall Street but was a hairdresser on the weekends.

What happened to him? He was your first love, after all.
I don't know. It feels like he disappeared from the Earth. One of my girlfriends saw him with a boyfriend at a beauty parlor once. He was very paranoid about dying, and I'm sure the spread of AIDS intensified those fears. I remember he had a white shirt and a pair of jeans and he said, "If anything happens to me, Joanne, I want to be buried in this." Maybe he committed suicide, maybe he had AIDS, but no one ever heard from him after we split up.

If you could have given yourself any love advice when you were in your early 20s, what would it have been?
I didn't look for the right things. I never thought about what my husband made as far as a living. It was just getting married and getting out of the house because my folks were kind of strict. All my girlfriends were married or engaged, I was supposed to be married with them. So I married my husband quick, or else I was going to be an old maid.

I would never feel like that again. My father was always putting me down, telling me I was stupid. I think if I didn't have that negativity toward myself, thinking I wasn't good enough, I don't think I would have married my first husband. I love my children. I feel what is meant to be is meant to be. But I would have lived my life totally differently if I thought more of myself and thought more about myself. I would have picked the man; he wouldn't have picked me.

Bella
77 Years Old
Charlottesville, Virginia

VICE: Tell me about yourself.
Bella: I'm divorced. I married when I was 20 in 1961 and stayed married for 25 years. We had three children. We got married because I was pregnant.

Do you think you would have gotten married if you weren't pregnant?
Maybe not. Well, I was not happy in my home life [at my parents'] so it was a door for me to escape.

Have friendships been an important part of your life?
They're very important, especially since I recently dislocated my shoulder! If it hadn't been for friends, I wouldn't have had enough food in the refrigerator. I do like living on my own and being dependent on myself. That's very satisfying to me. I have two cats.

Do you stay in touch with your ex-husband?
Yes, I do. We're in touch because of our children. He's on his third marriage right now. When I see him, I often wonder what interested me, but I think escape was the motivation. He's a good man; he's a good honest man.

Why did you leave your marriage?
I had goals that I wanted to pursue. The industry I was working in allowed me to travel, which became my biggest goal. At the time, my children were of the age where they certainly didn't want me interfering in their life other than simply being there. And since I had gotten married very young, I wanted to do the exploring that I wasn't able to do when I was young. I needed to have a sense of freedom, which I really never had. Between ages 45 and 69, I had a lot of that! It was great. Plus, I met a guy that I started dating that I really liked. A lot of good things fell into place.

What happened with the guy?
I lived with him for eight and a half years, [first in Cleveland]. Then we were both transferred to Florida for our jobs, so I moved with him to Florida. I was at the point where I wanted to get married again, but he couldn't make up his mind if he wanted to do that, so I had to leave. This was 1998.

Have you dated since?
Oh yes, but nothing serious.

Did you have any foreign flings while traveling abroad?
Yes, I did! Again, nothing serious.

How is it dating different when you're older?
There's no naivety. When I was living in Chicago, I decided to join one of these dating programs where it's " just for lunch." I was really surprised how a lot of the men really weren't into travel. They were content in a simple lifestyle, so it didn't turn out to be that interesting to me.

How does dating in 2016 seem different to you?
It seems like all of those programs like Match.com asked, "Are you interested in more than one date?" That was interesting to me, because if you went on one date and it wasn't what you wanted, then you could go on to another date. You didn't have to want more than one!

Honey
71 Years Old
US Virgin Islands

VICE: Hey, will you introduce yourself?
Honey: Everybody calls me Honey instead of Grandma. My first grandchild heard my husband calling me "honey" all the time. He said, "Honey, can you get me a glass of wine?" and my little Jack, who was two at the time, said, "Honey, can you get me a glass of milk?" and it stuck. I've been married eight years, and together we have five children and six grandchildren. Three of the kids are mine, and two of the kids are his. We're all mixed up.

How did you meet?
We met at a party in 1980. We're both cancer survivors. I'm a 25-year breast cancer survivor, and he's a 12-year prostate cancer survivor. That's probably what brought us together.

What advice do you have for searching for the right partner?
You better like them. Never mind being madly in love with the person; you better like them. I have a sign in my kitchen that says, "Kissing don't last, cooking do." But old or young, you meet someone, you're attracted to them, and you hope they are as nice as they appear to be when you first meet. You ought to spend some time really making sure that that's true. If you jump into something, there's no going back. Just because it's the time to get married doesn't mean that the person you are dating is the right one to marry.

So how do you know?
Well, that's the mystery. Maybe when you care more about them than you care about yourself, or when you can comfortably imagine yourself taking care of them when they're not as as they are now. You have to know that the person is going to have your back—and you're going to have their back—no matter what.

It's scary.
Love is the scariest thing on the face of the Earth. But it's also the most wonderful. It's why we get sucked into it over and over. But eventually hopefully you meet the right one and it all works out. It really helps if that person is your best friend. If you'd rather spend time with this person more than any other person, then that's a good sign.

Do you believe in finding "the love of your life"?
Yes, I do. I absolutely do. That's what I call my second husband, "the love of my life." Love is just as scary when you're old as it is when you're young.

@TheBowieCat

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So, it's Valentine's Day. Remember? The day you pretend not to care about if you're forever alone, or want to play it cool with your girlfriend? It's not as though everyone's been writing and talking about it since Thursday.

No one seems to know exactly how we ended up celebrating love and sentimentality on the 14th of February every year – spare your friends the "invented by Hallmark" chat, please – but a general consensus revolves around the brutally violent ancient Roman feast of Lupercalia, the two martyred men named Valentine (also Roman!), honoured by the Catholic Church and the French Normans' Galatin's Day.

Whatever. Either way, we've ended up with a not-quite holiday that boosts flower sales, gives couples an excuse to try not to fall asleep before having sex and thrusts an inferiority complex upon anyone single by early February. Love is great, obviously, and makes us feel a combination of effervescent and unhinged but is wielded like a battering ram at this time of the year.

Not anymore. The people at site NewHive have set up a chatroom primed for a congregation of "lonely cyber-souls" to talk to one another and generally not succumb to the stereotypical anti-Valentine's defensiveness. The chat is to start on Sunday evening, from 1AM GMT (8PM ET).

"Whether you are single and not ready to mingle or married and hiding from your family – dating and over Tinder or in a relationship and looking for something non-commercial to do – come broadcast as you are, in disguise, or just text-chat," reads the statement sent by NewHive's media director. "All without leaving the solitude of your room." So there we have it.

NewHive is the sort of digital art website that hosts pieces like this one-man video version of an error 404 message, and tweets things like: "MASS-REPLICATED IMAGERY GOT ME FADED." In any case, the chatroom's technically already open, and will allow users to broadcast live webcam video feeds into the chat, or stick to text if feeling shy. I logged in at about 2PM GMT from London, to see what it was like. Two people popped in briefly, as guest-11418 and guest-11415, then logged out as soon as I tried to get some chat going by typing "We're early". So much for that. I'm sticking to "my boyfriend was at the football" as my excuse.

If you'll still be awake by 1AM in the UK, this ought to be the place for connecting with a bunch of strangers who aren't morosely scrolling through Instagram and wondering why they weren't hand-delivered a heart-shaped stack of pancakes in bed.

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This article contains some spoilers for Firewatch. So don't read on unless you've finished the game, or have no intention to. You should, though; it's a great game, and only takes three hours or so to get through.

Strange things happen in America's national parks. Perhaps you've read about Dennis Martin. Dennis was a six-year-old boy who, in 1969, went with his family for a camping trip to the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee. During a game of hide and seek, Dennis's father saw him crouch down behind a bush – moments later, when Mr Martin went to find his son, Dennis had vanished. For almost a month, 1,400 people, including local law enforcement, FBI agents and the Army's Green Berets searched for Dennis, but no trace of him has ever been found.

Perhaps more strange is the case of Jaryd Atadero, a three-year-old boy who in 1999, went missing in the Comanche Peak wilderness of Northern Colorado. Four years after his disappearance, Jaryd's remains were discovered on a steep, rocky hill, 550 feet above the trail where he was last seen alive. Bobby Bizup, a 10-year-old boy who disappeared in August 1958, was discovered in similarly mysterious circumstances. His body was found more than three miles from where he had vanished, 2,500ft up at the summit of Mount Meeker.

The CanAm Missing Project has documented hundreds of disappearances in the national parks of Canada and North America, and also identified a handful of patterns and profiles. Sometimes victims are found next to a neat, folded pile of their clothes. Sometimes the missing people are found alive, but have no memory of where they have been since they were last seen. CanAm's book series, The Missing 411, stops short of drawing any conclusions. Penned by a former vice detective and SWAT officer, it never strays into conjecture or supernatural nonsense – it's simply a document of each case and the people who were involved.

And that's why it gets under my skin. The disappearances aren't connected. There isn't some big conspiracy, or paranormal phenomenon, that's kidnapping and killing people out in the wilderness. But strange things do happen in America's national parks. And the thought of someone I love vanishing, or dying, and then never finding out what happened to them, frightens me a great deal.

It was that fear, and those cases of missing people in Canada and North America, that kept running through my mind as I was playing Firewatch. This is a horror set in broad daylight, a suspense thriller that takes place across a sweeping, open landscape. I've never played anything like it before. Corridors, darkness, a predatory creature stalking you from one moment to the next – these are the staples of today's horror games. But Firewatch finds terror at the opposite pole. Its beaming sunshine and empty meadows feel just as threatening as a dank, narrow dungeon.

Your boss Delilah's tower, positioned high above the Thorofare, is an ominous reminder that you, as Henry, are constantly being watched. Your own tower, supposedly a safe place, high above the flames of any possible fire, identifies you for miles around – amidst the trees, caves and foliage, you are exposed. And then there's the silence, the constant, fragile silence. I personally enjoyed Firewatch a lot more once I'd gone into the options menu and turned the music off. Take a long hike through the forest, with nothing for company but the sound of creaking bark and the occasional crackle of your radio, and you'll experience a kind of dread that I don't think games have pulled off before.

Article continues after the video below

Talking film with Todd Haynes

Typically in horror, it's the slamming door, the distant scream, the off-screen moan that makes me tense up. In Firewatch, it was the nothing. Silent Hill is a big town and you often feel like the only person left alive, but at least you have the monsters for company. Towards the end of Firewatch, it is, very literally, just you.

If games have used sandboxes for the same things over and over, filling them with missions, ambient challenges and collectibles, Firewatch is an open world with a different purpose: its empty expanse makes you feel abandoned. For that at least, I respect its makers, Campo Santo. So many teams, once they'd created a big, colourful world, would be unable to resist the temptation to put things in it – the pressure of convention would compel them to make a more populated sandbox. Firewatch could have easily had side-quests. Firewatch could have had animals scampering around, and if you snapped a photo of one, you unlocked an achievement.

But, to a fault, Campo Santo understands discipline. The same sense of restraint that makes Firewatch's script timid and overly vague makes its environment terrifying. So empty and quiet is Shoshone National Park that the act of simply turning around and looking behind you is loaded with dread – any artefact of another human presence, be it an empty beer can, a torn strip of clothing or a pulaski, shatters the perfect, untouched nature and with it your sense of security.

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I think that's the most interesting part of Firewatch. It's scary when you feel like you're utterly alone. But it's also scary when you feel like there's somebody else with you. It's hard to describe without completely spoiling the game's story, but Henry is in a similar dilemma – he arrives in Shoshone because he's running away from something, but he also wishes he could go back. Being isolated from people is something we all fear. At the same time, the idea of someone knowing you entirely, and sharing your most intimate secrets, is also threatening.

Firewatch plays on the very real fear of going missing and nobody finding you, or someone you love going missing, and never knowing what happened to them. But it's also a game about fear of company, exposure and emotional vulnerability – wandering around a desolate space, surveyed constantly by an unseen presence, it's a game about having your personal space abandoned and having it invaded. At how great a distance would you like to keep people? To what extent would you like to let them into your life?

Beneath Firewatch's primal fears, the fears of dying and being forgotten, and of being watched and stalked, there are deeper questions about our relationships to other people. I like to think that the very ending, where Henry literally reaches out and grabs somebody, is optimistic.

Firewatch is out now for PlayStation 4 and PC – read our (pretty much) spoilers-free conversation about the game here.

@mostsincerelyed

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Image via Wikimedia Commons

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

It probably won't shock you to learn that Valentine's Day in America's prisons tends to be pretty depressing. I remember from own two-plus decades inside sending cards out to my girlfriend (and future wife), my mother, and anyone else I was lucky enough to correspond with. But usually the best I could do in the way of gifts was some kind of homemade ceramic crafted by a fellow inmate.

I once resorted to commissioning a painting of my wife and I based the image on a photo of us hanging out in my prison's visiting room.

These days, companies like JPay help inmates not only send out emails, buy music and receive attachments, but even blast out e-cards just in time for Valentines Day. As of 2012, Jpay was catering to 1.5 million inmates throughout 35 states, and since I've been out, I've used it to correspond with friends in the Ohio, Michigan and South Carolina state prison systems. I reached out to a few of them for some perspective on how Valentine's Day is evolving within the confines of America's prison-industrial complex thanks to private-sector innovation.

"The E-card thing is cool," a prisoner we'll call Sha emails me from the Mansfield Correctional Institution in Ohio. "I like it, especially coming from the fed system where we only have emails. Just about every email I send out now I includes an e-card attachment. The Valentine ones been on there all this week. It's easy to do. cards because cards are still real personal to me and I know people still value cards as well."

Sha says there's a huge selection to choose from with services like JPay, and embraces it as a luxury of mass incarceration in the 21st century. But some inmates aren't so fond of the service, likening it to a scam—albeit one they can't always resist.

"I don't got no Valentine—I'm in prison," my friend Rick says on the phone from Oaks Correctional Facility in Manistee, Michigan. "It's a cool way of communicating, but 20 cents for every e-card—there's a charge for everything."

That may not seem like much, but many prisoners only make $15 dollars a month, leaving Rick with a bad taste in his mouth.

"You can scroll through these pictures and it costs 20 cents each," he tells me. "JPay is one of the biggest rackets going. I use it, but it's just a photo. Not really a card. I used it to send out a birthday card. It's something that's quick and fast and convenient and you feel like you're semi-attached to the real world by using email."

(JPay declined to comment on the specifics of Rick's beefs.)

I got the same feeling when I first started using email around 2010 at FCI Loretto, a low-security federal prison in western Pennsylvania. It was like instant back and forth communication, and I'm sure a lot of dudes will be using JPay to send Valentines Day e-cards to their significant others and loved ones. But most inmates I spoke to still prefer physical cards to the digital iteration.

"There's nothing personal like a homemade card," Rick argues. "The majority of the cards we send are homemade, and we use old fashioned snail mail." I got plenty of cards made when I was in, paying about six to 12 bucks per. These things can get really elaborate, and there's actually a decent selection, with various card hustlers pitching their wares on the compound.

My personal favorite Valentine's Day move was always to call my mom and get her to order my wife roses. Showing that you can deliver a physical gift even when you can't be present is everything for an inmate.

"I sent my ex-wife roses straight to her front door," an inmate named Willie tells me from FCI Terre Haute, a medium-security federal prison in Indiana. "To be honest, I timed it so her old man would be home when they arrived. He might as well find out now that we're getting back together when I come home."

Any sign of interest from the outside world is welcomed by inmates, but the key is often finding that friend on the outside who will lend you a hand. A guy called "Big Fridge" in the Ohio state system, which offers JPay, asked me for help this year with his mom, sister, and two girlfriends.

I took care of it for him. The heart-shaped boxes of chocolate didn't cost much, but they made my buddy—who's been down two decades—look like he could still make things happen for his loved ones, and that's probably the greatest gift of all.

Follow Seth Ferranti on Twitter.

Mortgage Pipe Dreams
RESEARCH SAYS THERE'S A 90% CHANCE YOU'LL NEVER OWN A HOUSE
Nine in 10 modestly-paid young people will probably never get on the UK property ladder

(Photo: David P Howard via)

(via)

The future will be a good time to be old and rich, as an analysis by think tank Resolution Foundation revealed that nine in 10 people under 35 won't likely be able to afford a house in the UK by 2025.

People aged 45 and older now make up about three-quarters of all homeowners, while those aged 16 to 34 account for about 10 percent of all UK homeowners – down from 19 percent in 1998, and representing an overall drop of 49 percent, according to the Telegraph.

"If that pace of decline continues, we can expect home ownership to be available to fewer than one-in-ten by the end of the next decade," said Matt Whittaker, chief economist at the think tank. "With the average modest income household having to spend 22 years to raise the money needed for a typical first-time buyer deposit – up from just three years in the mid-1990s – it's no surprise that owning looks so out of reach," Whittaker told the Guardian.

It used to take people about three years to earn enough to buy a house? What a time to be alive.

Seasonal Cliches
SOME GUY PROPOSED TO HIS GIRLFRIEND ON A MAGAZINE COVER
The Observer gave over its magazine cover to a guy on one knee, brandishing a ring

Sang Woo Kim (second from right) in a United Colors of Benetton ad

Last Friday, the long-awaited Zoolander 2 opened in cinemas across the UK. The film is just as ridiculous as the first one and, bar Kirsten Wigg and Penélope Cruz, includes the majority of the original cast – it's just that, this time, they all look 15 years older and know how to work a selfie stick.

As with the original Zoolander, the sequel attempts to satire the fashion industry. However, the film has already been roundly criticised both for just not being that funny and for inviting members of the industry to take part in the film. Zoolander was so successful partly because it was made by outsiders lampooning people who take themselves exceptionally seriously, whereas this time round it relies heavily on cameos from some of the most famous names in fashion, begging the question: can Zoolander 2 work as satire of the fashion industry if the fashion industry is now in on the joke?

A question as big as that can only be answered by someone with firsthand knowledge of the fashion world, so we decided to take male model Sang Woo Kim to see Zoolander 2 in the hope he'd be able to help. Sang, born in Seoul and based in London, has fronted campaigns for DKNY, Dolce and Gabbana, Armani and, most recently, Diesel, so certainly has form when it comes to being professionally good-looking.

The trailer for 'Zoolander 2'

VICE: What were your initial thoughts on the film?
Sang Woo Kim: It's the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen in my life. I thought it was great because this time Ben Stiller has managed to manipulate really famous members of the fashion industry into being a part of the film.

What do you think about the fashion industry's relationship with celebrity in general?
The majority of people in the fashion industry just want to be famous. I think it was a sign of desperate measures for people from the industry to appear in the film, in order to gain some kind of celebrity status. But I also think that a lot of people in the fashion industry who were asked must have rejected the roles. I reckon Cara Delevingne's managers didn't allow her be in the film. Cara is trying to take this whole acting thing really seriously, and good for her.

How are you different from Derek Zoolander?
Although I do my job as a model and things have gone well for me, this isn't what I want to do as a career. But for Derek and Hansel, modelling is their life; they are the two biggest models ever – taking on all the female roles. So, in that sense, the film is really taking the piss, because there isn't a Derek or Hansel in the real modelling world. A guy could never get to that level. Also, the elements of action in the film are completely out of the question.

So is modelling just a stepping-stone for you?
It's difficult when people ask me what I do. I always say I'm a model, but I really should say artist first – but I'm almost embarrassed to say that, because I know everyone knows me as a model. That's what is hard, because my passion is art. I haven't really done anything to become a model. I've been very fortunate – I thank my parents for the way I look, and thank god I'm Asian at the right time. Diversity is a trend now and that's why I get picked.

What is the reality of modelling?
For me, the film isn't really the best advertising of what I do. Modelling can be difficult at times. I think the hardest part is when people start seeing you as something you don't see. People see you as just a face, and obviously I don't think that way about myself. All my friends from my old school act very differently towards me. Being a minority race at my school, it was difficult, being the one who looked different, and I was ridiculed for that. I had to do a lot of thinking about my appearance and my insecurities, which other kids didn't necessarily have to think about. It made me grow up a lot quicker, but I'm confident with myself because of that, so when someone tries to question who I am, that's what I find difficult.

Are there issues within the fashion industry that you think the film could have poked at more?
I think the film makes fun of stereotypes rather than actual issues within the fashion industry. If they actually started to pick on the real issues then it would have been more of a sensitive – and a less ridiculous – film. Obviously diversity is an issue, and it's always going to be an issue. The film didn't pick up on that so much. Personally, as an ethnically Asian model, I've always found myself in a really fortunate position because of the fact that I can speak English and communicate with people and maintain relationships. Whereas all of the other Korean or Chinese models find it really difficult to be able to do anything abroad, apart from runway shows, because of visa problems or language barriers. Although that doesn't give brands an excuse to not pick Asian models.

Sang in a DKNY ad

Does your agency stress the importance of having a strong online following?
The use of social media was a really big part of the film. The agency definitely pushes you as a model to use Instagram because it's something that generates money at the end of the day. With social media, the industry has the attitude that the more you can get your face out there the better. As a model, all publicity is good publicity. For example, when those Kate Moss photographs surfaced, the only consequence was she was offered more major campaign deals. Models can get away with those kinds of things because people don't see you as a person; you're basically an object used to sell.

What's the maddest fashion party you've been to?
The party for Philipp Plein was in Milan and the whole middle circle of the area was a huge bar. They had people in jet packs flying out of a swimming pool. It was the most surreal thing in the world. Then Snoop Dogg performed in his own blue-lit room, singing "Drop It Like It's Hot". That's real-life ridiculous.

Have you ever felt like your life was in danger as a model – that you could potentially be assassinated?
No, you can't do anything that might be unsafe. Sometimes stylists can't even cut people's hair because they need to speak to the agency first.

Sang in an Armani ad

What has being in the fashion industry taught you?
I have learnt a lot about certain experiences that I wouldn't know if I stayed at university. Learning about money, for example. I'm earning quite a lot, so now I know about taxes, and the privileges of paying taxes in some respect. I feel like many of the things you learn throughout your twenties have been condensed for me through modelling into the space of a couple of years. The amount of people you meet and the constant travelling has tuned me into the world around me. I'm very grateful for that.

In the film, Mugatu is put into a fashion prison. Do you think there should be actual fashion police?
I think people should get red cards, like in football. If London Fashion Week starts and you have an awful collection you get a yellow card, and if it's absolutely outrageous designers can get a red card, which means they are banned for a season. I could preside over the jury: "Anna Wintour, you've been issued with a red card, which means you are confined to the second row for two seasons."

Finally, have you ever finished walking a show then looked up into the sky and asked yourself, 'Who am I?'
Yeah! You get alienated in this world – modelling isn't even a job; it really gets into your mind. Loads of times I've had to question what I'm actually doing in this industry. As a model you are constantly being told that you are beautiful, which fools you into thinking you have a good life. I'm always going to parties surrounded by loads of really drunk male models, who are all asking, "What am I doing?"

Thanks very much, Sang.

@ameliadimz / @sangwo0

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Whether it's in the morning eating toast; at work on my lunch break; and especially during the night when I'm unable to sleep, spooning peanut butter from the jar like the disgusting mouth-breather I am, you can guarantee I'll be hypnotised by what some 17-year-old who still lives at home and is studying for her AS Levels has consumed that day. I spend too much time watching YouTube videos about vegan food. Like, every fucking day.

It was only a matter of time, then, before I stumbled across a dark secret. The holy grail of HCLF (High Carb Low Fat) and raw veganism: the fabled full eye colour change.

The queen of this phenomenon is Fully Raw Kristina. Her video in which she explains how her eyes changed from brown to blue-green on a raw vegan diet has over two million views. She went to an iridologist, who explained that each part of your body and organs is reflected in your eye. It's like reflexology where your body is mapped out on your foot, but with your eye. Using iridology, you can see if there are internal problems.

If you're immediately thinking that this strain of science sounds like bullshit, then let me share with you this video I found in a late night peanut butter wormhole, featuring elderly man Dr Robert Morse, a revered natural doctor and iridologist, pointing at a little fleck on a picture of a woman's eye with a laser pen and talking about that says about her uterus, suggesting she 'get in there' and strengthen the vaginal wall. Yeah. This stuff gets deep.

Anyway, young pre-raw Kristina was only going to the bathroom once a week and was very constipated, eating a poor, high-fat diet. She says her iridologist told her: if her colon was all bunged up with toxins and other shit, that gunk was literally reflected in her eyes. After turning raw vegan: boom! Gone was the clogging and the nastiness and magically her eyes became blue. Already this sounds a bit dodgy. Quackery alarm bells will no doubt start ringing for the cynical when she starts talking about seeing the soul through the eyes and raw food cleansing the soul, yadda yadda.

Kristina before

Kristina after. Crazy, hey!?

As odd as this is, she's not the only one talking about it. There are forums on most HCLF blogs about it and a few videos of vloggers discussing changes to their eye colour with FAQs, what to expect and what not to expect. It's almost aspirational: a prize for those who commit their time and money into the extreme lifestyle. Physical, visible confirmation – besides the usual emphasis on weight loss – that what they are doing must be the good and right way to live life. There's definitely something problematic somewhere deep in there about blue or light eyes are used to signify a clean "pure" body, while people of colour question whether it can happen for them in comment sections.

ANYWAY. Let's get down to it. Is it a truckload of bollocks? A thorough Google will tell you there is little proof that raw fruit and veg can change the colour of your eyes. In fact, there's no evidence that suggests a change of eye colour can ever be a good thing, but there is evidence that it can indicate something bad: Horner's syndrome and pigment dispersion syndrome, for example.

All five iridologists I asked said the idea sounded weird. Yorkshire-based iridologist John Andrews said: "Alas, it is a misconception that eyes change colour with diet. It is a scientific impossibility." Yvonne Davis, an iridologist from London, was similarly sceptical but explained how the colour-change could potentially have happened. "Most iridologists believe the colour of your eyes really can't and doesn't change that much. By the late teens to early twenties, your eyes are how they will last until you die. But until that point they're still changing; depending on your age, it might just be this, rather than anything to do with your diet.

"Sometimes when people are older, in their forties and fifties, if they've had a toxic lifestyle and then go total detox – we're talking for at least a year – their eyes might appear lighter. When you get older you also might get some more pigmentation in them." I showed her the video of Fully Raw Kristina for reference. "If someone does detox or eat vegan, some colours and signs in your eyes can change – slightly. But it's very, very rare for eyes to go from brown to blue-hazel like this. I find it highly suspect."

Someone who disagrees vehemently with these eye experts, though, is Ondrej Matej, a vegan dietician and personal trainer. "Absolutely, diet can change your eye colour. That's been known for a little while." He explained that his eyes had in fact changed on raw food. "They went from a very dark brown to a light brown with very slight green circle around it. You can tell eyes get lighter depending on what you eat." He started talking about iridology stuff, too. "You have little dots in your eyes and each one is connected to organs in your body. They show the health of your organs. Healthy means clearer."

If this is legit then, then should people – mostly girls, it should be said – talking about it online be expecting this physical change? "It's not like one day they're brown, then they're blue. It's a process that takes years," he said. Pushed harder he admitted that not everyone would see the change. "It'll be down to genetics as well. It's a very difficult subject. It's not something that'd happen every time and it might just be your eyes will become more open and clear."

Ondrej believes that people might be noticing this now because raw veganism or HCLF is a recent trend. Additionally, it takes a long time to see these results so if it was real – as he insists it is – we would only really be finding out about it now. "People might not believe it now but this could be something that might be recurring a lot more in the future." More and more people are going veggie or vegan and Rawtil4 and HCLF is attracting plenty of people for health or weight-loss reasons. But the bottom line is: no one really seems to know if it's bollocks or not – although my bullshitometer is firmly swinging towards the iridologists' hot take on this one. Until a future where each one of us is gnawing on twenty bananas for breakfast and spiralized courgettes for lunch, maybe we will never know the truth.

@hannahrosewens

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A mural inside the United Grand Lodge of England (All photos author's own)

In 2017, British Freemasonry will celebrate its 300th birthday. The exact origins of the infamous secret society are still unknown. While the first Grand Lodge opened in 1717, evidence suggests that Freemasonry began much earlier. The most romantic history, press officer Mike Baker tells me, points to the Knights Templar. More realistically, it may have been the product of the medieval guild system combined with elements of Rosicrucianism. We're at the United Grand Lodge of England (UGLE) in London's Covent Garden, the imposing stone building decorated with esoteric symbols. The Masons' reputation for mysticism has made them a beacon for conspiracy theorists, ranging from purported links with 9/11 to the Illuminati and New World Order. Now, in the lead up to their tercentenary, the Masons are trying to manage this centuries-old PR problem. The question is, what happens when the world's oldest secret society tries to open its doors?

Part of the Masons' makeover is challenging the most persistent myths. "We actually prohibit politics and religion in what we do," Mike tells me. They're even hesitant about making public statements, "because of our history and because we would not want to seem politically motivated. You know, the conspiracy theories around, with Bilderberg and things like that." So why join if there's no opportunity to meddle in politics? It's all about the values, Mike says. The Masons make charitable donations as part of their community involvement. Right now they're in the middle of funding London's second air ambulance. "The next time you have a serious accident and the air ambulance flies down and, underneath it, you'll see a square and compasses – just think how that happens to be."

One of UGLE's more surprising requirements is that members must believe in a Supreme Being. "As long as it's a creative force," Mike quickly adds, meaning no Satanists. It's true that other orders of Freemasonry, like the Grand Orient in France, will admit atheists. But UGLE has been steadfast in refusing to imitate the French. "It adds a degree of credibility to promising to be good basically," says Mike. "The overall obligations we have, which are purely and simply about being a good person and upholding our values. So that's why the Supreme Being is important to us."

Another mural

While they might not be a religion, allegorical plays and symbolism are key to how the Masons operate. The Grand Lodge is filled with evidence of that mysticism. The main room is decorated by a fantastic checked carpet, ceiling murals, and a mindboggling golden organ. There are also several majestic thrones. During ceremonies, Mike explains, the Worshipful Master sits in the east where the sun rises and the Senior Warden in the west, where it sets. Like so many Masonic rituals, it symbolises the progress of man from darkness to enlightenment.

Thrones turn out to be a theme in the Grand Lodge, with three enormous specimens in the Grand Officer's Robing Room. The walls are decorated with portraits of Royal family members who were Grand Masters before being crowned. The reason the thrones are so large, explains Mike, "is that Prince Regent, who became George IV, was quite a big chap. Somewhere in the region approaching 30 stone I believe, so he needed a big chair." Stools are provided during investiture to keep the royal feet from dangling.

Watch: Confessions of an Internet Troll

What about the famous Masonic handshake, I ask him. Is it real? "Yeah," he says. "They're nothing really odd... All they are is a form of qualification for you to pass from one stage to the next. So after your initiation you're given another token of recognition or handshake, which allows you to pass into the next level... And really it's rather boring." Talking to the press officer, it's clear that part of their strategy is downplaying anything too weird.

A stained glass window at the United Grand Lodge of England

More contentious than the handshake is the issue of female Freemasons. The male-only sentiment is built into their rituals, with Masons bearing their breast to prove their masculinity. In England there are women's lodges which are recognised by UGLE as "regular" in everything but gender. "Regular," Mike explains, "is a word that means that they do things the way that we would expect." UGLE doesn't acknowledge the small number of mixed lodges. It's "a heritage thing" Mike says, and not one that their members are eager to change.

In that respect, the Masons resemble so many other old boys' clubs that are being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. But that reluctance to change is becoming a demographic problem for the Masons. The overwhelming number of Freemasons are, unsurprisingly, men. They're also ageing quickly. Right now, there are five times as many members over 80 as there are aged 21-30. The mean age is late-50s. So the Masons are reaching out to younger men. This has meant going online, being role models in the community, and possibly modernising the more archaic texts.

Part of the problem for the Masons is that their distinctiveness is both a blessing and a curse. They're a deist non-religion marked by a disjointed mixture of conservatism and high theatre. Surely some of the attraction for any potential member is that weirdness. After all, what's the point of joining a secret society that wants to be open, transparent, and normal? But with that comes more of the same reputational hammering the Masons want to avoid. I ask Mike if there's ever the temptation to just open everything up? Almost all of their material, he tells me, is available online anyway. However, for UGLE's members, looking would spoil the surprise. Right now they're trying "to demystify it but without removing the element of fascination – that's the difficult thing." If the Masons want to celebrate their fourth centenary, they'll need to square that difficult circle.

@DylanBrethour

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