All images courtesy VICE News. Please note the men in these photographs are not PMC employees, but others in the fight against Boko Haram.

Over 2015 and early 2016 there have been reports, ranging from staid to hyperbolic, about the Nigerian government's decision to hire Private Military Companies (PMCs – or mercenaries to many) to bolster its armed forces' efforts to deal with Boko Haram. In spite of the ubiquitous if underexposed presence of PMCs in the world's conflict zones, where they regularly provide security and logistics for, among others, the US and British military – this recent action raised some uncomfortable questions about the future of conflict in the region, and on a global scale. We spoke to Sean McFate, a former mercenary with firsthand experience of PMC operations in Liberia and Burundi, about why this deployment matters. McFate is a professor at the National Defense University and Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. He is the author of Modern Mercenary : Private Armies and What They Mean for the World Order, and his first fictional title, Shadow War: A Tom Locke Novel, a thriller based on his real-life experiences in the private military industry, comes out in May.

VICE : The recent employment of mercenaries by Nigeria in its fight to subdue Boko Haram has attracted rather a lot of attention in some quarters. Given that PMCs are so prevalent in, say, Iraq or Afghanistan, where they constituted up to 50% of all persons deployed by the US, why do you think people got excited about this?
Sean McFate: It's attracted attention for at least two key reasons. The first is that it happened and there was really no public outrage, certainly not in the way that there would have been, say, twenty years ago. And that shows you what the US and Great Britain have done in terms of normalising the use of PMCs. The second big factor is the fact that Nigeria is West Africa's regional superpower. They have the most powerful military in the region, and for six years they couldn't control Boko Haram. Then they hired mercenaries to do it, and within weeks those mercenaries did it. So that suggests that mercenaries are more powerful, or at least as powerful as the most powerful military in West Africa.

Another thing that grabbed attention is that these guys had Mi24 attack helicopters, which are like flying tanks – extremely heavy weaponry, and were conducting offensive operations.

We don't really know a whole lot about the circumstances in which these mercenaries were hired. But it seems to me, though this is speculation, that it was possibly a slightly underhand move by Goodluck Jonathan, the outgoing president, in a reelection bid – to show military strength – and that the mercenaries were not initially meant to be taking as big a combat role as they did.

This was a more full-blooded mercenary operation than the sort that we are used to of late.
These were real, hardcore mercenaries. This was very different from the ways PMCs were used by the coalition in Iraq, say, where they were did convoy protection, defense of buildings or people. This was pure offense, and they did a great job. Well... an effective job, at least.

WATCH: The War Against Boko Haram

That qualification you make there, can you expand on it? They were effective. But there's a sense that – due to the very nature of PMCs and this sort of engagement – this will be far from a long-term solution to the region's problems.
They were effective operationally, but I think there are a lot of bigger strategic questions at play within Nigeria.

The big question, of course, is how do you defeat Boko Haram? All that these PMCs did was effectively push them into neighboring countries. And now they will push back. Is it a long-term solution? Probably not.

The second question is, what does it mean more generally, that we have a rising industry of mercenaries around the world? This is not an industry restricted to employment by the US, or the UK, or European countries operating in Iraq or Afghanistan. We are seeing their increasing use elsewhere - for example at present in Yemen where South American, ex-special forces mercenaries are being used. It's going global. The Nigeria case marks a bigger trend.

What do you get when you have industries invested in conflict going to the most conflict prone regions in the world? Fundamentally, to me this means you are going to get a lot more war in the future.

What are the advantages for these nations in using PMCs in this way? As you already mentioned, their combat effectiveness, hardware, and training are clearly attractive in places where the national armed forces are less professional. But what else do they offer employers?
There are tons of advantages. Firstly, PMCs are generally cheaper than maintaining a standing army. Second, you don't have to deal with corrupt, politically ambitious officers. The third is that if you are rich, small country that wants to participate in war, but doesn't have the citizens who want to serve in the military, PMCs are a good option. UAE is a country like that – small and rich – and they want to participate in the current war alongside Saudi Arabia, but their citizens aren't interested in bleeding so they hire the job out. There are a lot of 'advantages', quote unquote. A lot of them are dubious or raise concerns, but they certainly offer short-term advantages.

How big an issue, in the case of Nigeria, do you think was posed by the toxic history of PMC use in Africa? Specifically the fact that some of those mercenaries hired to fight in Nigeria appear to have been former Apartheid-era South African military? Does that legacy pose particular problems for PMCs in the region?
I think the big issue for people is that what happened in Nigeria smells an awful lot like Executive Outcomes (EO), a South Africa-based PMC which was largely formed of former South African special forces, and which carried out military campaigns in Africa in the early 90s. In the private military industry, EO represents both an apogee and nadir of the industry's potential in modern times. It was the most combat effective mercenary corporation in recent history (much more so than Blackwater et al) but also demonstrates the power of private military companies. EO has an "alumnae" network in Africa that remains strong today. Many of the mercenaries hired by Nigeria in 2015 came from this network. And there are all sorts of concerns about the legacy of EO, and yes, I think the ghost of EO was resurrected with Nigeria's decision here. There are laws against mercenaries in South Africa, because in part of EO, and the government of South Africa put out a very strong dictum in effect saying that 'these are mercenaries and if they show up in South Africa we will arrest them on the spot'. But outside South Africa people pretty much shrugged their shoulders at this; maybe they were thinking, 'Wow. We could use a group like this to go after Al Shabab or ISIS or something.' I am sure people had those conversations, but of course I don't know that for a fact.

Bearing in mind South Africa's specific laws on this matter, does this appear to have been an above-board example of PMC use? Was this deployment any murkier than your average PMC deal?
There's no international law banning the use of these sorts of private soldiers. It's more that it contravenes an international norm, but that norm is winding down. This example is a little different, again, because of the PMC's use in an offensive setting, as a combat power in this case. Now, to be fair, in modern warfare the difference between offence and defense can be rather grey and nuanced. Blackwater did a lot of offence-type stuff. What makes this so interesting is that Nigeria hired these guys with their own private armored helicopter, and I'm not talking about a Blackwater-style helicopter with men with machine guns in the exits; these mi24s are Russian military standard gear, armed with missiles and so on. It's a private air force. It's the degree and the intensity of this event that's amazing. It's no longer PMCs being hired to defend convoys and so on. And of course, again, it's the fact that the Nigerian military couldn't deal with Boko Haram. What South Africa is to Southern Africa, Nigeria is to West Africa, it says a lot that mercenaries are more powerful than the army there.

And that's where this fear of PMCs in the region, linked to EO's past, comes into play - mercenaries are not a threat to the UK, or to the US, but they could be a threat to other countries that are weak. Could these mercenaries stage a coup de tat? I don't know. But if they can take care of Boko Haram, it's a pertinent question.

The PMCs of the 2000s were at pains to make it look like that era of was behind us, it was all 'we are good guys, we are helping the US army, or the marines' or what have you. And this deployment is interesting because it shows that the industry is actually not over the Executive Outcomes stage, at all.

So you think this could hail a return of the EO model for PMCs?
I think that as the US and others scale back the lucrative contracts that have been in place in Iraq or Afghanistan for years, the market is diversifying. You have people like UAE, Nigeria, hiring these guys, and it's a case of supply and demand. My prediction is that we will see more of this, not necessarily PMCs taking over countries, but more of this sort of offensive action by PMCs hired to do the jobs we these days associate with state militaries.

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Illustration by Dola Sun

Mona Awad's debut collection 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl will be published February 23. The stories in the collection are funny and frank, and centre on an overweight girl on a diet. It's a side of life that hasn't been looked at much in fiction. Being fat has been written about, of course, but the act of going on a diet, not so much. In this story, our hero has lost some weight and goes into a dress shop to try on a dress she's been fixated on for a long time. The idea going in is that, with her new body, she'll slip right into the dress. But in her heart, she knows it won't go that way, and it doesn't go that way.

The von Furstenberg and I

Despite my better judgment, I'm in the fitting room wrestling with the von Furstenberg again. I've thrown it over my head and I'm attempting to wedge my arms through the armholes even though it's got my shoulders and rib cage in a vice grip. The fabric's stretched tight over my face so I can't see and it's blocking my air supply but I'm doing my best to breathe through twill. This is the moment of deepest despair. This is the moment she always chooses to knock on the door.

I can hear the slow-approaching clicks of her heels. Three light raps on the door with her opal-encrusted knuckles. I brace myself for the sound of her voice, all of my nerve endings like cats ready to pounce. When she speaks, I hear her disdain, bright as a bell.

"How are we doing in here?"

We. She means me and the von Furstenberg. The von Furstenberg and I. She saw me out of the corner of her exquisitely lined eye going to the back of the store to retrieve it between the frigid Eileen Fishers and the smug Max Azrias and she disapproves. She knows the von Furstenberg is a separate entity, that it and I will never be one.

"Fine," I say. I remain absolutely still, try not to sound breathless. Like all is well. Just a regular shopping trip.

"Oh good," she says. "You let me know if you need anything." But in her voice I hear: Give it up, fat girl.

Cobalt, formfitting, with a V in the front and one in the back. Cute little bows all down the butt crack, like your ass is a present.

She knows I've been coveting the von Furstenberg ever since I first stood on the other side of her shop window, watching her slip it over a white, nippleless mannequin, looping some ropes of fake pearls around its headless neck. I didn't know it was a von Furstenberg then. I only knew it was precisely the sort of dress I dreamed of wearing when I used to eat muffins in the dark and watch Audrey Hepburn movies. Before I knew brands, I'd make lists of the perfect dresses – and when I saw this dress it was like someone, perhaps even God, had found the list and spun it into existence. Cobalt, formfitting, with a V in the front and one in the back. Cute little bows all down the butt crack, like your ass is a present. The sort of dress I'd wish to wear to attend the funeral of my former self, to scatter the ashes of who I was over a cliff's edge.

"Can I try this on?" I asked her.

Her eyes opened a little wider. Small glimmers of incredulity like slicks of oil.

"What? The von Furstenberg?"

"Yes."

She looked from the von Furstenberg to me, then back to the von Furstenberg, sizing both of us up. We two? Never we two. Sighing, she led me to a fitting room, rearranging items as she went – insect hair clips, Baggallinis, peacock – so it wasn't a totally wasted trip.

The whole time I was in there being asphyxiated by the von Furstenberg, I felt the fact of her clicking on the other side of the door, waiting for me to admit defeat, to come to my senses. Come on.

***

Today, though, I'm determined to prove her wrong. Today, I won't come out of the fitting room, let her snatch the mangled von Furstenberg from me, ask me, How did we do? as if she did not know how we did. As if she didn't already have the steamer turned on and ready to smooth out the creases of my failed struggle, a task she always undertakes with overdone tenderness. Then after I've left the store, through the shop window, I'll watch her pointedly press a damp rag all over the von Furstenberg, presumably to get rid of the slashes of Secret I leave behind. But those stains are always there when I come back. That's how I know it's all for show. Like, Look what you do, fat girl. Can't you take no for an answer? The von Furstenberg doesn't want you.

Well maybe I don't want the von Furstenberg. Has she ever thought of that? That maybe I despise it? That maybe I'm trapped in this dance with the von Furstenberg against my will?

Knock knock.

"Still all right in there?"

"Great," I say, and I'm tugging so hard on the back zipper, my tongue is lolling out of my mouth like I'm dead in a cartoon. But I feel it going up. Higher than it ever has before. And it's not a mirage, it fits. It's on. It's miraculous. And even though I'm panting, my hair in disarray from the struggle, I see we look immortal.

I'm just thinking how I'll wear it out of the store. Picturing how I'll pull back the curtain in the von Furstenberg, turn my zippered, von Furstenberged back to her and say, all casual, over my shoulder, Cut the tag, please? Maybe I'll even ask for a bag for my old dress – would she mind terribly putting my old dress in a bag? Mm? And that's when I see the jagged rip down the side seam. Maybe I couldn't hear the ripping over the sound of my own grunts. That happened once before, with the flesh‐colored Tara Jarmon. It was impossibly tight when I bought it and then I was out one day walking, insisting, and it suddenly wasn't. It suddenly felt easy breezy, beautifully loose. I didn't understand. Until I caught a glimpse of myself in the reflective glass of an office building and saw the slashes on either hip.

Knock knock.

"We sure we're still doing okay in there?" Her voice says, A rat who insists on hitting its head again and again against the maze wall gets taken out of the maze. It gets escorted out, politely but firmly, by mall security.

"Yeah," I say, my hands fiddling with the zipper in a panic. But they're so slippery from all the exertion, I have to wipe them on the von Furstenberg just to get a grip. And the zipper still won't go down. I Gazelle. Five miles every morning with a photo of me in a no‐name shroud taped to the little window that counts you down. Five miles, only to be told by the von Furstenberg in no uncertain terms that it counts for nothing.

"Do you need another size?" she asks. By "another" she of course means larger, which we both know isn't in stock.

I asked her once for a larger size and she said, Let me check. And then I loved her. Very briefly I loved her. Loved her hands clasped over her tweed‐clad crotch. Loved the thin curl of her lips, a smirking red line. Loved all the bones in her ostrich throat, the arrowheads of her décolletage, her ash blond hair gathered in a glittery comb shaped like a praying mantis. Then, as she picked up the receiver, presumably to place the order, she said in a low voice, That will be 500 dollars, please.

And I said, What?!

And she said, Well. Obviously you'll have to pay for it in advance. Or you could order it online on our website?

And I said, But I don't even know if it'll f—

And that's when I saw it, the smile on her face. The flicker of triumph. Like, Ha! You know and I know even the next size up wouldn't fit you, fat girl.

"I'm fine," I tell her now through my teeth, tugging with all my might.

***

I don't know how long I've been sitting here, half in and half out of the von Furstenberg, the pull tab of the zipper in the damp cave of my fist. My old dress, the one I thought I'd never have to wear again, lies like a jilted lover in the corner. I hear her clicking not too far off, rearranging the perfectly arranged merchandise – sequinned hair clips shaped like butterflies, purses shaped like swans, perfumes that smell like very specific desserts and rains. I could just put my old dress over it. Go to the cash register. Explain. Offer to pay for the von Furstenberg. But the truth, as she well knows, is that even if it did fit, I cannot afford the von Furstenberg.

***

I have this terrible image of her coming in here with the jaws of life tucked under her arm. Ash blond tendrils escaping from her chignon as she attempts to wrench me out of the von Furstenberg. How the give of my flesh will be abhorrent to her hands, but not half as abhorrent as her bone white hands will be to my flesh. Other customers will look on as they pass by the open door like I'm a car crash in the opposite lane.

Or.

Or maybe I could learn to live like this.

As I sit here, I can already feel myself oozing out of the von Furstenberg. Oozing from the V in front and the V in the back, the volume of my ass threatening to crack the little bows along the fault line. And I begin to think maybe this is it. Maybe this is the only way out. Maybe, if I wait long enough, if I'm patient, I'll just ooze out. First the fat, then maybe we'll find a way to coax out the organs. Some organs I won't even need, like my appendix. Of course, even if we leave some things like my appendix behind, it'll be a slow process. Slow in terms of biological time, but not if you think say, geologically, like, in ages.

I'm patient.

From 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl: Fiction by Mona Awad, to be published by Penguin Books on February 23rd, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2016.

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Image courtesy of James Hyman of the Hyman Archive

Late last year, Playboy caused a fuss when the venerable nudie mag announced that it wouldn't have naked ladies in it anymore. Well, there are still naked ladies, as the New York Times has pointed out, but they're the sort of naked ladies who might live in GQ or Esquire, their most provocative bits hidden behind some equivalent of a fig leaf. The strategy is pretty obvious: People who want to look at naked women have more than enough ways to do that on the internet; as Gloria Steinem told Time: "It's as if the NRA said we're no longer selling handguns because now assault weapons are so available."

Still, the first full-nudity-free issue of Playboy, which is coming out in March, marks a big shift in the brand. Founder Hugh Hefner's 24-year-old son even publicly broke with the company because he's so appalled by its decision not to publish photos of vaginas anymore. But the people in charge of the magazine are betting that millennials in general will approve of the move. The Playboy website went SFW last August and as a result, executives told the Times, quadrupled its traffic. The hope seems to be that by removing the whiff of baby boomer seediness from its pages, young people will read and subscribe to it.

But what about the people who are already obsessed with Playboy, the collectors who have watched the magazine go from sultry pinups to bleached-blonde implants to the nebulous combination of celebrities and feigned taboo-breaking? How do they feel about this change? To find out, we spoke with three Playboy collectors of varying fanaticism to get their perspectives on the magazine's past, present, and future, and whether eliminating the explicit will help Playboy build back what once made it so appealing.

Image courtesy of the Hyman Archive

James Hyman
45 Years Old, from London
Guinness World Record Holder for Largest Collection of Magazines
866 Playboys Collected

VICE: Why do you collect magazines?
James Hyman: One of the initial reasons for collecting is that I was a scriptwriter for MTV in the late 80s, early 90s. I had to write things for the VJs, or video jockeys, to talk about, and the best thing you had before the internet was magazines. Let's say a was in heavy rotation and you needed to keep writing about Prince or Madonna or whatever – where better to get more information than a Rolling Stone interview? Magazines were full of rich information that was not easily available.

So when did you start collecting Playboy, formally?
I saw it in a newsagent and thought it was another interesting magazine that had pop culture, and my thing was always collecting pop culture. So you look at a Playboy and it had a naked woman on the cover, but that woman would always be a pop culture staple, like Bo Derek, Kim Basinger, Janet Jackson, whoever. I was collecting the news ones, but then after going to crazy shops in London I discovered the dangerous pursuit of back issues. They would have Playboys going from the 50s through the 80s. I thought, Right, I've got to fill my collection of magazines, and that's what I did.

What do you like about vintage Playboys?
I think they really capture a time. The writing was always fantastic; you had amazing interviews in them. John Lennon's last interview was in Playboy. Malcolm X, Martin Luther King were in Playboy... James Bond was serialised in it! People say it as a cliché, but I would read Playboy for the articles.

Do you think going away from full nudity is a good move for Playboy?
Whether it's desperation or not, I don't think it's a great move because you expect nudity in Playboy. Now, maybe parameters need to be clear because I understand Playboy Brazil and Germany are keeping the nudity. Without the nudity you could argue it's like French fries without ketchup. There's a magazine here, Horse and Hound , you're not just going to call it Hound magazine. People expect it.

Is your collection up to date? Are you a subscriber?
Yeah, I'm still collecting it, so I get it every month. I'll keep [my subscription] going after the re-launch, sure.

Will you still read it, or is it just being archived for your collection?
I don't read every magazine I get. I don't read tons and tons of magazines like I used to, but I still read the articles in Playboy. I read Playboy hoping there's going to be something of interest in there. Maybe there'll be, I don't know, an in-depth interview with Quentin Tarantino or something interesting. But yeah, weirdly, I do still read it.

Learn more about the Hyman archive by going to its website or following it on Twitter.

Danny Bowes
37 Years Old, from New York City
Hundreds of Playboys Collected

VICE: When did you start collecting?
Danny Bowes: I started in the spring of 1992 when I was 13.My dad gave me a copy that had an interview with Michael Jordan. [The interview] was sort of a turning point in his relationship with the media. My dad had sensed the significance of it at the time and he gave me the magazine because he figured I was old enough where I wouldn't be like, "Oh my god, there are boobies in the magazine!" But of course, I read the interview, and then was like, "Well, I do believe there are boobies in this magazine." So my interest was piqued.

How did you collection grow from there?
Later that year I turned 14. As a birthday present, I think it was my mom who had seen the magazine lying around and thought, Eh, I'll get him a subscription . So basically for my entire teenage years and the whole time I was in college, I was a subscriber to Playboy, and I think only one month in all that time is missing from my collection.

So why did you keep back issues?
I'm not big on throwing stuff out in general, but in each of them there was always something worth keeping. Like an interview from one issue was interesting, or one of the short stories from another issue was good. There was something of interest every month – most of the time not for the pictures, but, admittedly, I flipped through a few times.

Did your dad collect too?
He bought it a lot and had it around the house, but he didn't have a formal, organised collection. And it was just better in the 70s. The 90s were a really weird time to collect Playboy because it was on this weird trajectory into plasticity that I felt kind of uncomfortable with as an aesthetic. It was promoting this very weird and I didn't feel very philosophically healthy about it at that point.

How would you describe that aesthetic in the 90s?
It was all very exaggerated and artificial. All of a sudden, all the models had very unnatural enhancements and looked like they were shot this way by somebody with a slightly unhealthy view of femininity. And I never really got that sense in the early years, when it was just good-looking naked women.

How do you feel about Playboy eliminating full nudity?
I feel that it's time at this cultural moment. The value of the magazine was never entirely about the nudity; it was always a major part of it, you know, founded to be that. But the way that things have evolved, with print giving way to digital, it's the time to make that transition if you're going to make it at all. And there's enough merit in the magazine over the years to make it possible. The new editorial direction they've taken in the last couple of years has been a lot more progressive. I stopped my subscription in the 90s, but now I sort of wish I was still a subscriber. During Hefner's Viagra years, it was sort of like, Jesus Christ. But now it's a home for a lot of good, progressive writing.

A 1960s Playboy image via Lysette's Etsy account

Lysette Simmons
30 Years Old, from Los Angeles

VICE: Will you tell me about your Playboy collection?
Lysette Simmons: Well, it's dope. I really love it and I don't even know how many I have – at least a hundred, maybe 200. I only collect the first 30 years. I've only recently realised why I like this era – Art Paul was the art director for those specific years. There are some covers that are just... art. I don't actually have the holy grail of them, which is the first issue in October, 1953 – you can't find that one for less than two grand.

So why did you start collecting?
It's kind of odd, I guess. I had a few that my grandma gave me when she was cleaning out all of the magazines that my grandparents had subscriptions to. And then my dad died in 2012 and I just needed to destroy things. And I don't know why I picked on Playboy, but I started making paper snowflakes out of the pages of the issues I had. They were very beautiful. I liked that if I folded this woman up and couldn't see any part of her body and did all the cutouts and unfolded it, such a beautiful thing would be the result.

Do you cut up every magazine you get today, or do you preserve some?
I have started to not cut them up as much, and actually purposely out legendary issues that I know of. I just got one I'm really excited about the other day in the mail – August, 1955. [The cover] is just a drawing of a mermaid and a rabbit scuba diving, nothing unsavory going on.

Do you have thoughts on Playboy's new direction without nudity?
Good for them. Not having to take your clothes off to get somewhere in LA? That's great. One more reason not to take your clothes off to get somewhere.

It looks like the models might still be getting naked, but not everything is going to be shown.
I'm fine with that. I haven't read any articles about the decision to do that, but if I were running Playboy, my thinking would be to try and legitimise the magazine again.

Have you found that collecting Playboy is rare among women?
I haven't met any other women who collect Playboy. And when I first told people I was collecting them so I could cut them up, they were horrified because at the time I had no idea what they were worth. I was just grieving for my dead father by desperately cutting up snowflakes. I thought if I could make one every night, if I could make something beautiful every day, I could keep going. I thought, Well, I need more Playboys if I want to live, so...

Follow Dana on Twitter.

Tony Tulathimutte. Photo by Lydia White/courtesy of William Morrow

Tony Tulathimutte is a virtuoso of words, and not just the big ones that have you Googling definitions on your smartphone. He's a copy editor's nightmare, as is shown by the lists of slang terms and neologisms from his debut novel Private Citizens that he's been posting, including words such as "Masturbate-a-Thon," "ladycanon," and "listicles (n.)."

Which is to say, he doesn't shy away from the preoccupations of internet-grown, fauxthentic millennials. Despite winning an O. Henry Award and graduating from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the 32-year-old's writing edifies and entertains in language that's highbrow yet unwholesome – gourmet junk food, like the cereal-milk-flavoured soft-serve at Momofuku Milk Bar. This comes through especially in Private Citizens, which is about four estranged friends in San Francisco circa 2007. Though the book tackles some notorious Bay Area subcultures like Silicon Valley, progressive nonprofits, and Stanford (where Tulathimutte attended), it also gets into weirder niches like dumpster-diving communes, motivational cults, Craigslist escorts, and social-media optics when you're disabled.

I recently spoke to Tulathimutte (who is an occasional VICE contributor) over Skype to discuss his time in Silicon Valley, hot-take culture, and the inevitable comparisons young Asian-American novelists get to Tao Lin. Tulathimutte was dressed for the office in a collared shirt, though he'd spent the entire day inside his Bushwick apartment and was – as our interview began – drinking cans of Brooklyn lager between hits from a vape.

VICE: Why don't we start out with your self-written Goodreads review: "A fine book by an anxious man."
Tony Tulathimutte: Yeah, five stars. It was a gag, but here's the thing: I'm basically from the internet. I spend a ton of time commenting and reading comments and being generally aware of the world through what people are doing there, which gives you a weird mix of awareness and isolation.

You wrote an essay for the New Yorker about the rise of personal branding. To a specific audience – maybe other writers and MFA students – you seem a master at it.
You want to know something hilarious? Half the people who shared that article thought I was writing in favour of personal branding. If I'm good at it, I don't seem to have much control over how people see me. When you're online, you may participate here and there, but you're always playing the spectator. When you write something like a novel that's attached to your name as a signal of achievement, you can wind up the subject of a menagerie of online comment. For me, that's been a real head-fuck. I know how nasty I can get when I'm dealing with whatever random topic is in front of me. Because it's fun to be nasty. It's fun to gossip and overreact. It's easy to dismiss any of the stuff that's always flooding at you. It's usually more entertaining to other people and beneficial to you to have a hot take. To be known as a dispenser of hot takes.

I've been mistaken for Tao Lin on OKCupid. I was also mistaken for Paul Yoon at an award ceremony where he won the Young Lions Award. — Tony Tulathimutte

When I think of your online presence, I'm vaguely reminded of Tao Lin.
I'm appalled. But he's a useful example here. In the 2000s he was notoriously aggressive and shameless about his branding. Like, he'd relentlessly pitch Gawker to write about him because he was a cool, hip, relevant person. But he'd pepper it with self-aware quotation marks to show he wasn't too serious about it, but he was still doing it. He did it in an irony-delimited way that made it a considered aesthetic position rather than crass self-marketing. The classic dissociative hipster move. The higher-level joke is that the fiction he was promoting was all about stripping away identifying markers like personality and affect and even names.

Tao Lin's one of very few well-known Asian-American writers, so I've anticipated for a long time that I'd be compared to him. You know, I've been mistaken for him on OKCupid.

What?
I'm not even kidding. I got a message from someone that said, "Really loved your book, Eeeee Eee Eeee."

Maybe she was trolling you?
Maybe. I was also mistaken for Paul Yoon at an award ceremony where he won the Young Lions Award. He was in a suit and had slicked-back hair, and I was just wearing a bag or something. So, to bring up Tao Lin in light of the irreparable hit he's taken to his deliberately crafted personal brand is interesting now, when there are so few cultural referents we can attach to an Asian identity that you become grotesquely fixated on defining yourself in relation to them.

I get that sense, too. Like, if you have to be tokenised, you want to be the token, not a token.
This problem of sizing yourself up against other people in your demographic node is way bigger if there are only a few well-known people in it. The reason why you and I grew up being compared to Bruce Lee is because he was the only game in town, except for a few other demeaning roles. It gets a little easier if you open the floodgates.

Something I like about Private Citizens is how much attention you paid to how your protagonists look. Will being Asian, Linda being attractive, Cory being overweight – just to name some of their outward attributes. Were you thinking consciously about this as you wrote?
First of all, unless you're writing a Tao Lin-esque novel where you're purposefully discarding significant markers of identity, then you're usually just obliged to talk about how people look. It informs what you know and how you feel about them, and how they feel about themselves. With Cory, it's physical, internalised self-disgust. Will is uncomfortable at being looked at because he's hypersensitive about racism. But he's dating Vanya, this super-hot paraplegic woman who wants to be seen, for the ostensibly noble purpose of repping people with disabilities. So the idea of image is all over the place, especially in Will's storyline.

And from a real-life, personal-branding standpoint, by cultivating an interesting Instagram, Facebook feed, and being really careful about whom you take photos of.
Right. What's the quickest way to boost your image? Post a photo of yourself with a celebrity. Or a sex tape, even better. I used to teach that Daniel J. Boorstin book, The Image. It's one of the early alarmist books about media images replacing the written word. Of course there's some truth to this, and the most obvious victim would be literature, which relies not only on an interest in words but facility and patience with them.

VICE Meets Norwegian literary sensation Karl Ove Knausgaard:

Do you often think about how you look?
When I was a freshman and just starting to write. I asked my friend Alice what it was like to be female. Instead of trying to answer this massively stupid question, she just said, "For starters, we think about how we look a lot." It opened up this face-scalding Pandora's box of identity issues for me. I'm emotionally stunted in all these ways and racial self-awareness is one of them. It never really occurred to me at that point that the way I saw myself basically as a Whitmanesque transparent eyeball was way different than how others saw me.

All of your characters are deeply failing somehow. They're broke, undisciplined, emotionally stunted, self-medicating... which seems to get at millennials in general.
That's the line about millennials, right? That they're these diapered adolescents who have to live with their parents and are lazy, self-absorbed. I can't think of a single generation who thought the next generation wasn't inferior.

Personally, I have nothing to say about millennials. I'm not trying to represent them. I'm just trying to write about some aspects of my life. If some people see themselves in that, I'm lucky, but I also expect that lots of people won't relate at all, which is fine.

How does pragmatism and idealism play into both having attended Stanford and having had a pre-novelist career in Silicon Valley?
It depends on what you call pragmatism. My training's in cognitive sciences.

It seems enviably useful to me, I don't know why.
Well, it enables you to score jobs in Silicon Valley. Whether you do anything useful there is another question. You can go and make six figures designing the UI for an app that tells you when your friends are farting. Is it practical? It's definitely lucrative. I marginally enhanced the usability of login forms for some websites. I was unhappy and I made a shitload of money. I wouldn't call it practical.

The Ice Bucket Challenge wasn't relevant because everyone sincerely cared about ALS, it was relevant because everyone was doing it and it provided a convenient platform for people to perform their own brand. —Tony Tulathimutte

It's smart you unpacked that. When I was saying pragmatic, I was automatically thinking about the financial dimension. The fact that I immediately went there and you called me out on it seems to strike a chord with current preoccupations or the ways in which the values are placed.
When you live in a small Bushwick apartment with two roommates at the age of 32, you're going to constantly question the value of what you're doing. I mean, it beats doing work I don't find useful or meaningful making a lot of money for myself and even more for other people.

But it's important to also frame this in privilege. My parents paid my tuition. I live pretty efficiently and I've saved up enough that I can literally afford to be cavalier about money. You cannot advise everybody to say fuck it and chase the dream. Realistically, you know there are limited opportunities to go around. Even people pursuing what they want full-time often end up failing. I don't know what the solution to this unfairness is. Probably dismantle capitalism.

Sure.
What do you think is the thesis of this interview?

I was thinking we would go with whole millennial angle, but you've convinced me otherwise.
It actually points to a larger problem of how things are accorded significance online, on the basis of relevance. The idea that what's relevant is what's important. I mean, if we're being honest, besides fandoms or politics, the stuff we care about most usually doesn't resemble what everyone else cares about. I think most people believe this intuitively, but still behave as if Latin poetry is unimportant and Snapchat is important just because everyone's talking about it. It's circular, that what we should talk about is what people are talking about. That's one of Boorstin's big points, that relevance is self-perpetuating, so celebrities are people who are famous for being famous, and so on. The Ice Bucket Challenge wasn't relevant because everyone sincerely cared about ALS, it was relevant because everyone was doing it and it provided a convenient platform for people to perform their own brand.

But there's this unspoken pressure to keep current. That's how the internet makes money, off the economy of relevance, and creating and strengthening trends is a big part of that. So there's an incentive to, you know, make fetch happen. No major publishing organisation is innocent of this, even VICE, which I write for and obviously like. The publishers that are growing right now are those that understand the nature of trends and have good social-media game, and the people who do best within them can turn a ham sandwich into an 800-word think-piece.

Follow James on Twitter.

Private Citizens by Tony Tulathimutte is available in bookstores and online from William Morrow.

Illustrations by Alex Jenkins

One of the fundamental experiences of growing up is earning an awful roommate story. On the other hand, being an awful roommate is also a fundamental part of being young and dumb. The tricky bit, however, is figuring out which category you fall into. Unfortunately, most of us never actually find out until a mutual friend tells us how much shit our old roommate talked in our absence.

So the staff of VICE Canada reached into our dark roommate past and asked what they were like to live with. Here's what the people who are still willing to speak to them had to say.

A Review of Allison Elkin by Her Roommate, Pittsburgh, 2008

For being younger than most college freshmen, at 17, Allie was ahead of her time. With a more sophisticated fashion sense than myself and invites to Carnegie Mellon frat parties, I wasn't sure what to think at first. Within 24 hours of living together in our one-room dorm, I sustained a clove cigarette burn to the arm from her when we were drunk and had the opportunity to greet her obsessive ex-boyfriend at our door, whom she had just broken up with via telephone the night before so she could fuck a frat boy.

Of course, a long-distance boyfriend would have been better than the unplanned and unwanted second roommate I obtained for the whole year. The lovebirds would cuddle and play World of Warcraft... all day. Her boyfriend's roommates and I would argue over who got stuck with them the most, but I'd say it was me. Nevertheless, it wasn't all bad, if you don't count that time her friend snorted some pills off my desk in exchange for an American Apparel discount. Or the times I had my heart broken by a few of her boyfriend's rollerblading friends (yes, rollerblading). Or the time we got stranded in a sketchy neighbourhood after an indie show and she convinced me to take a ride home with a stranger. But really, I digress, without her taking me shopping so many years ago, I might still be a scene kid, so for that I will always thank her.

A Review of Manisha Krishnan by Her Mom, Vancouver, 2006–2012

Manisha and I moved into our apartment in 2006. She was young and still in school, so obviously I cut her some slack. There were some interesting times over the years and I kept telling myself "she will grow up and this will all pass." "Growing up" took a lot longer than I expected. During her high school years Manisha thought she was very smart and I was naïve. This notion continued into college years and even into early adulthood. Having a "no alcohol" party thinking she was smart enough to get away with it when there were telltale signs all over the place. Having weed in her room and when I asked what it was she told me it was one of her Asian friend's grandmother's homemade "medicine" for headaches. Funny it didn't cure her hangovers! Coming home at odd hours, waking me up because she forgot her keys somewhere, trying to "cook" noodles and setting off the fire alarm with a house full of smoke, and sleeping through it all. I can't forget the night she went out with four of her visiting cousins and came home with three – had no idea where the fourth one was.

Organising dinner parties and funnily enough not being around when it was time to shop and cook. I am amazed Manisha managed to find her way around her room with the floor barely visible. I can't imagine another roommate putting up with all this.

A Review of Navi Lamba by Her Roommate, Paris, 2014

Living with Navi was very similar to the experience of living with a sister: We enjoyed each other's company immensely, while also annoying the fuck out of each other. We were different in most ways, so clashes were inevitable. I love bright, open windows and fresh air like a well-functioning human, while Navi preferred to watch old episodes of Frasier alone in her room, in the dark. I went to sleep early, and Navi would sneak through the apartment at 5 AM to get to her bedroom. I'm obsessively clean, Navi was more... lax smile emoticon. Even our taste in music clashed, which is an unfortunate difference when sharing a small, not-at-all soundproof living space of 35 square meters.

It's easy to focus on our hideous differences, but it was a pleasure living with her. Our dinners, drinks, heart-to-hearts were all treasured experiences and looking back now I hardly remember the times she had fairly audible sex in the room next door.

A Review of Josh Visser by His roommate, Cardiff, Wales, 2005

How few specific events I can actually recall about it is probably a pretty good measure of the type of housemate you were – mostly drinking and giving me things to drink. In the sober times you were good conversation about the relative merits of the early Nine Inch Nails albums. On your first Canada Day in the UK we went shopping to buy as much Canadiana as you could find on a barman wage – mostly Peaches albums and Canadian Club – and threw an excellent house party that included a food fight that was never fully cleaned up until the day we moved out. You never paid rent or cooked or cleaned, but you did regularly buy me hoagies on our way to work and use your exotic accent to start conversations with girls in bars after work. Then there's the time you woke up after a night out, bloodied and convinced you were a drunken assassin...

A Review of Jake Kivanc by His Roommate, Toronto, 2015

It's been a few months since you moved out, but I still hear that incredibly annoying opening to Drake's "Digital Dash" during quieter evenings. At the beginning, you played it modest sleeping in shorts – glad you eventually got comfortable roaming around in your boxer briefs. Thanks for waking me up in the middle of the night because apparently screaming absolute nonsense in your sleep is normal. I plucked your eyebrows, listened to your masturbation adventures, charged you nearly pennies for rent, and yet still, losing a bet was the only way to motivate you to wash the dishes without me asking. The only things that were consistent was the relaxed environment, the good chats, and the trail of Cheerios I'd always find the morning after your late-night snacking because, maybe, you thought ants would make good pets.

I must be delusional because through it all, I still enjoy your company.

A Review of Raf Katigbak by his Roommate, Montreal, 2007

Living with Raf was great but it was his place and it was a total party house and sometimes there were people still up and high on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday mornings when I had to get up for school or work.

I once ate breakfast with a posse of French Canadian ravers who were so fucked they were pretending to be snakes and trying to "slither" into the hardest-to-reach corners of the living room. They were knocking over shelves and spilling everything everywhere and knocking over ashtrays and stuff, and Raf just came down and was like "whatever" and left for the day.

Also half the ground floor was like a weird 70s recording studio/band space with so many plugs and wires I'm surprised the building never burned down. I think I lasted a year.

A Review of Jordan Pearson by His Roommate, London, Ontario, 2011–2015

Email printed in full:

150 words bitch

My experience of living with Jordan can be boiled down to two things: music and discussion (often about music). Jordan has both an aptitude for singing, and a plenitude of opinions, so you could say I heard his voice a lot. However, he is genuinely modest, and will bemoan his lack of social skills while at the same time elegantly introducing you to this or that interesting person. I owe a lot of my best connections to his ability to generate a meaningful dialogue with anybody.

Throughout the years, even as the Pabst era peaked (plateau'd ), declined and gave way to the 4Loko era, we always retained some capacity for musical discussion, whether it was about his own projects, that of friends', or Tatsuro Yamashita's. Living and talking with Jordan for a significant chunk of my life was extremely fun, gratifying, influential, and above all educational.

--

love

A Review of Dan Brioux by His roommates, Toronto, 2012–2015

During my time at University, I lived in a mint-green house formerly owned by notorious Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel with 11 other young men whom I love dearly. Here's what they think of me:

• Steve: Dan took me to salad king when my girlfriend and I broke up. Then we watched the Simpsons. That's Dan in a nutshell. Good friend. Loves the Simpsons. Also, he would often steam his face with freshly cooked pasta and drink out of plastic cups. Let that be his legacy.
• Brendan: Dan is one seriously patient dude, considering he had a full band practicing every day directly above his room and has yet to murder anyone. He even comes out to our shows! What a guy.
• Eddie: Ask Dan to do his Owen Wilson impression, that'll really make his day.
• Sam: Ask Dan to do his Gord Downie impression, that'll really make his day. If there's one thing I learned from living with Dan, it's to always keep your chips in your own room.
• Jason: When Dan showed me Snoop Dogg rapping "Drop it Like it's Hot" over the Kirby theme song, I knew we would be best friends forever. That happened on the first day we met. I didn't become a man at my bar mitzvah. I became a man when Dan didn't have to tell me to take the trash out anymore.
• Griffin: Wednesday, October 28. Day 80 of impersonating Dan. Took his dad Bill out for lunch. We had a nice chat, but I feel as if we're growing more and more distant. He complimented me on my sweater. Griffin? Dan? Hard to tell anymore.
• Will: Dan would also always leave his dishes in our living room. He was the worst at that. Thanks for finally giving us a forum to publicly shame you, Dan.

A Review of Sasha Kalra by His Roommate, Toronto 2007–2008

FYI: Noisey, ballsy move turning your social media feed over to a guy who used to get noise complaints for playing the All-American Rejects too loud. That should work out well.

Outside a café in Delft, a suburb of the so-called Cape Flats in the Western Cape province of South Africa, a security camera picks up a young man standing by a door, lighting up a cigarette. A hand with a gun in it extends from the frame of the door and lights up the screen with muzzle fire – a noiseless bang. The young man falls to the floor, before another man, holding the gun, exits and double-taps inexpertly to finish the job. The one on the floor shakes with the force of the shot and is still. The other man runs.

Welcome to the Cape Flats – part of a province where 310 gang-related murders took place in 2013 alone. A relic of South Africa's apartheid legacy, it's staggering on the brink of a gang violence crisis that has few parallels in the modern world. It has its own particular mythos, a blend of celebrity status, urban legends, a monster meth-derivative known locally as "tik" and a violence rate that ranks Cape Town 20th in a recent study of the most violent cities on Earth – higher than many high-profile crime-ridden cities in the US, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico.

Most news reports and analysts estimate that there are about 100,000 gang members operating in the province, spread out over 130 official gangs. With a homicide rate of 50 per 100,000 residents, and 70,000 drug-related incidents recorded between 2010 and 2011, the situation is truly virulent. Names like the Junky Funky Boys, Hard Livings and Americans are the most common – in conjunction with the internationally notorious and mythical prison "Numbers Gang".

Officers from the City of Cape Town's Metro Police Unit sifting through seized drugs and paraphernalia.

The situation has escalated to the extent that schools are closed down when the violence and tit-for-tat shootings become too widespread. Premier of the Western Cape, Helen Zille, has repeatedly called for the deployment of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) in the area. The violence permeates every aspect of every resident's life. According to a report in The Guardian last year, a life is lost to gang violence every five days on the Cape Flats, and 25 to 30 firearms are seized every week.

The security camera footage is shown to us by Charl Kitching of the City of Cape Town's Metro Police Unit, half an hour before we embark on a 50-man operation with him and his team into the Flats. It was taken about a week prior, in a period of escalating gang violence related to the release of key players from prison. "They make damn sure that guy is dead. They don't play games," says Kitching. Along with Alderman JP Smith, Mayoral Committee Member for Safety and Security, Kitching and his team undertake this operation as part of the Gangs and Drugs Unit that was launched in 2011 by the Metro Police in response to the crisis on the Flats.

The Cape Flats, as they're known colloquially, are a collection of informal settlements and suburbs that were formed in the 1950s in line with the apartheid government's forced relocation policies and legislation. Historically, the area is also home to South Africa's largest "coloured" population; one of the four main designations of race under apartheid that has a mixed race ancestry consisting of European, African and Asian blood. The Western Cape is the only province that is not majority black African – and also the only province not under majority control of the ruling African National Congress (ANC). Coloured persons were granted more political concessions than black persons in the 80s by the Nationalist government, and the two groups generally see themselves as culturally distinct. Racism between coloured and black folk is not unheard of. This means that when democracy was negotiated in the years between Mandela's release in 1990 and the first democratic elections in 1994, the ANC was not the coloured voters' default choice.

The Western Cape is thus a key symbol in South Africa's political landscape, giving rise to a power struggle that often leaves communities out in the cold. The response to gang crime is not homogenous – it's intricate, bureaucratic and plagued by infighting. The ultimate irony here is that the race-politics that created the Flats in the first place are now ensuring that a cooperative, effective solution to end its woes is nowhere in sight.

The Metro Unit, consisting of around 600 members, is accountable to the city, thus the ruling provincial government, the Democratic Alliance (DA). Whereas the SAPS, as the primary law enforcement agency in the country, number around 22,000 and answer only to the national executive: the ANC. The broader political playing field, that of the ever-present struggle between the ANC and the DA, is leaving a horrendous mark on a community that couldn't care less about who takes care of the situation – just that it's taken care of.

The Metro Police are generally intended only to enforce traffic and by-laws. In the Western Cape, they've had to undertake further responsibility in violent crime prevention and form supplementary units such as the Gangs and Drugs team in response (unofficially) to SAPS inefficacy – poor conviction rates, endemic corruption and shocking administration. Rumours of police complicity are widespread, and in June last year a former officer, Christiaan Prinsloo, was arrested in a highly publicised case for supplying gangs with firearms. The conviction rate for gang-related offences is estimated to be around 2 percent – 35 successful murder convictions out of 950 reported murders in the last three years.

Metro now resemble a highway patrol on protein powder. The department has grown by 53 percent in the past nine years. Officially, they can make arrests, conduct search and seizures, and carry more firepower than is usual for any council-controlled cop. As JP Smith puts it, the SAPS have forced them to "reinvent the wheel", with R46 million set aside by the city last year just to combat gangs.

"The public have no trust in the police stations. There is no confidence in SAPS – they are completely discredited to the public," he says. "The National Prosecuting Authority is now talking to directly us, which is unheard of. They're taking cases directly from us."

Smith feels very strongly about the politics of it all: "There's purposeful malicious undermining on a political level, and you see that in the starvation of resources."

The gangs become social institutions, an aspirational cult for the disillusioned and the poor. At night, with the Gangs Unit, the city-subsidised council housing resembles a Soviet-style communist area. The apartments are lined up in neat rows, blocks extending skywards with narrow, poorly lit alleys cracking them open. Everything is tarmac, cement, faded, glum.

The Gangs Unit undertake this large-scale operation on a bi-weekly basis. As we slink through blocks with Afrikaans names like Geduld (patience), residents peer at us from up high. The Unit plays an almost matronly role – tough love. People loitering about are told to get indoors: "Wat maak jy nog so laat buite?" ("What are you doing out so late?") and the entire process is one of search and seizure based on intelligence gathered throughout the week. Some residents take issue with Metro on these seemingly random searches – others are welcoming and friendly.

The officers all tell us that this is the quietest night they've had in months. Generally they can expect lines of frustrated residents throwing rocks, bricks and sometimes even Molotovs at them. Many of the Unit are coloured people from the Flats themselves. They know the areas, and they know the people.

A call comes in of an inter-block shooting. The stench of cordite is still heavy in the air when we get there. The gangsters literally shoot from one apartment block to another across a street. Apparently the residents help them stash guns and blend in with the others as soon as the boere (pigs) show up. In many cases, the Unit tells us, the residents tell them to go find other gangsters; that these ones are theirs and that the OTHER gangsters are the bad ones. The tension and the mistrust, despite the efforts of the Metro to work on a more personal level than the SAPS, is clear to see.

"It would help if SAPS were properly deployed. The fact that you have a 2 percent conviction rate for gang violence tells you the whole story," says Smith in the van. "It's completely political. It's also why they don't want specialised units. Because the guys who have one foot in the gang environment don't want their businesses to be scratched."

Premier Zille has often drawn the same conclusion. Speaking in 2014 regarding the banning of the famed specialised units in 2003, she said: "That leaves only one conclusion: they were shut down by the then commissioner, Jackie Selebi, because he became friends with some 'big fish' who did not want their activities effectively investigated."

Selebi, a former president of Interpol, had previously admitted being friendly with high-profile gangsters. He was convicted in 2010 on charges of corruption but was released on medical parole two years later and died early in 2015.

READ AND WATCH ON MOTHERBOARD – The Sakawa Boys: Inside the Bizarre Criminal World of Ghana's Cyber-Juju Email Scam Gangs

The SAPS, however, have had their own successes. Launched in 2010, Operation Combat is an anti-gang strategy spearheaded by Major General Jeremy Veary. In addition to the promulgation of the Prevention of Organised Crime Act, the strategy has seen the successful conviction of 16 high-ranking Fancy Boys and six 28's from Bishop Lavis and Valhalla Park – purportedly as a result of two years of high-intensity intelligence gathering and effort. The overall conviction rate remains low, however. Smith alleges that Veary and his team are unwilling to work with them.

"We are very willing to cooperate and have reached out to them continually. I have made three appointments to . I've even gone through a political colleague of his to set up a meeting," claims Smith. "Three meetings, all of which were cancelled within minutes. It was an open 'diss' to us. We've tried – there isn't willingness."

The ANC and its comrades have also fired back in the public sphere, accusing Smith and Zille of being rudderless and lacking in leadership: "Smith is copying foreign gimmicks at huge cost to the city, with no original idea to solve the problem," wrote Tony Ehrenreich, a trade-unionist and ANC member. "His so-called Crime interrupters have been of no use in this crisis, as the most high profile area is falling apart, while he blames everyone else."

Compounded by the political divisions between provincial and national authorities, the crisis seems no closer to being resolved, particularly due to the recent White Paper draft bill on the "streamlining" of SAPS and Metro Police announced in August of 2015. It was described by Western Cape provincial authorities as "proof of the fact that this remains primarily a political move and that the desire to seize control of the Metro Police services around South Africa was born from and is driven by a party political agenda and not the broad public interest".

Sure enough, a week after our ride-along with Metro in November of 2015, the Mail & Guardian's acclaimed investigative journalism unit revealed that current president Jacob Zuma had met with gang lords in the run-up to the 2011 local elections. Political support was promised by the gangsters in exchange for business opportunities, with the gang lords allegedly addressing Zuma in "friendly" tones. The report was dismissed as fake by the ANC, despite its corroboration by two independent witnesses.

The fact that gang lords can make these kinds of promises and meet with the president is indicative of the sway they hold in the community. Metro Police can only do so much with the resources available, all while their superiors battle it out on a political playground wholly removed from the realities of life on the flats. The officers we accompanied refused to be named for fear of gang retaliation, but they all share a kind of beleaguered inevitability. The night's report ends with a preparatory brief on the next day's mission: the monitoring of the funeral of the kid who'd been shot in Delft.

A senior official caps the night with a smoke. We ask him why he does it, when the communication between community and cop has deteriorated so badly, when the job seems so thankless and the prospects so bleak, so enmeshed in South African stereotypes. How do you police a community that often doesn't want to be policed by you?

He replies: "Eish, man. Somebody's got to start cleaning up this country."

@karlkemp8 / @shaunswingler

More on VICE:

Investigating Birmingham's 'Super Gang'

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UK Gang Members Love Social Media, Too

Illustration by George Heaven

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Online dating as a bigger woman can be brutal. I've been called a "fatty" or "fat bitch" by men on Tinder, or told that men would only have sex with me as a favor, because men could never be attracted to someone my size. I'm not insecure about my appearance, but when I first got into online dating, I found myself obsessing over my weight in an entirely different way. I worried my pictures made me look thinner than I actually am, and men would call me out for "lying" about my size. On sites like OkCupid, where you have to fill out a series of questions relating to sex, dating, and personality, I'd preemptively check how a guy answered questions like "would you date someone who is overweight?" before messaging him.

I eventually got over this, and I realized I'd created problems for myself that didn't need to exist. But I was intrigued when I heard about WooPlus, a new dating app for plus-sized men and women to date freely, without the fear of being fat-shamed. According to Michelle Li, one of the co-founders of WooPlus, the idea for the app came after viewing a viral "social experiment" video, where men reacted viciously to being set up on a Tinder date with a woman who ended up being fatter than she appeared in her photos.

"It stuck with us," Li told me. "But not everyone is interested in small, petite-framed women so we decided we wanted to create a dating site that caters to admirers of bigger-framed people."

This same video cites a study that says women's greatest fear in heterosexual dating is that they'll be matched with a serial killer, and men's greatest fear is that they'll be matched with a woman who is fat. If that's actually true (I couldn't find the study), I can see how an app like WooPlus is meant to be a safe space of sorts. "We're trying to make people comfortable with their bodies, and comfortable with themselves," added Li.

Related: How to Come to Terms with Your Attraction to Fat Girls

Of course, the idea also has its flaws: Does an app like WooPlus put too much emphasis on weight, rather than looking past someone's size to get to know him or her as a person? Does it fetishize big women, or attract people who are simply looking to fulfill a fantasy with someone BBW? (When I later asked Li about this, she said: "We can't stop it all, but we have a lot of features already in place where we're detecting certain words so figured it'd be worth a shot." Clearly, there are people on the site who see this as a solution to a problem.

But after being on the app for close to a week, I found that the biggest hurdle was the lack of users. The men I was being forced to interact with often didn't live in my city, or even my state, which makes it literally impossible to date. According to statistics Li sent me, since its launch in November of 2015, WooPlus has amassed around 10,000 users, most of whom live in the United States, and it's almost two-thirds men. But even still, it didn't feel like there were many men to choose from.

Even if WooPlus continues to grow, I'm not convinced that removing myself from men who are not loud and proud fat admirers is going to do anything to change negative stigmas. A lot of the men I've dated in the past told me I was the first "big" girl they dated. If I were strictly on a site like WooPlus, I might not have ever had the chance to change their perspective on fat women.

That's not to say WooPlus is a bad app. Li and the team behind the app really do want to create a safe space for plus-sized people, but it's hard to do so without marginalizing us in the first place. Plus, if you're going to have a gift-giving feature, you should really give away real cake.

Follow Alison Stevenson on Twitter.

Idris Elba arrives at Baftas. Not sure if he's excited or yawning.

Alicia Vikander commented recently that awards season is like "celebrating the same person's birthday." If that's the case, then the BAFTAs, supposedly the most important night of the British film industry's year, is the fancy dinner with the parents where everyone's on their best behaviour. It took place on Sunday night at the Royal Opera House, extravagant to the last, but ultimately too well stage-managed and far too good at avoiding anything that may be branded controversial to be of any interest at all.

Eddie Redmayne, the suave older brother in this scenario, seemed to dominate the evening, despite not winning an award. Eton-educated, knowing exactly how to behave at a soiree, he's the perfect poster boy for the modern BAFTAs. Even journalists, allowed for one night to be on the fun side of the VIP rope, were seen posing for mock-hysterical selfies with Redmayne. Fans screamed his name over and over. "Please sign my autograph," one very audibly cried as he carried on talking to an interviewer. "I've been waiting here for hours."

Most stars took their cue from Redmayne: camera-ready, media-trained, experts at the non-quote quote. There was a vanishingly small but audible #BaftasBlackout protest from the Creatives of Colour group. (John Boyega, Peckham-born son of a preacher and childhood friend of Damilola Taylor, and Idris Elba, native of Dagenham, were the only non-white faces to be nominated this year.) Creatives of Colour handed out flyers and unfurled a banner calling the film business "male, pale and stale". They called for a quota system, chanting that those on the inside were "scared of diversity". No one seemed to take much notice, and they were cordoned off by a security presence at the northern edges of Covent Garden.

The fact is that the film industry, despite its best liberal intentions, is a historically racist, patriarchal bun fight, defined by nepotism and insider-access. A recent survey by the trade magazine Screen found that, of the 75 the most prominent film companies in the UK industry today, all were led by white people. Only a tiny amount had a black, Asian, or ethnic minority executive in their senior management. The BFI, BBC and Channel 4, recipients of public money for filmmaking, provide the lion's share of funding for these companies. Journalists, in search of talking points, can try and make a stink, but it feels like a losing game.

To exacerbate the staid feeling ever further, the BAFTAs have been bought to the hilt by sponsorship. Even host Stephen Fry was furiously tweeting about the #EEBaftas. The night seems designed to be narrow in its ambition, shaved of its edges so as not to offend a brand, covered in a Best of British triumphalism so sticky it's asphyxiating. Just to drive it home, the broadcasters gave themselves a two-hour lag, rather than airing the ceremony live on BBC1. By that time, of course, the winners had been tweeted to the moon and back, and everything of even remote interest had been edited out.

Fry is in his 15th year of presenting, and was his usual avuncular, ever-so-slightly racy self – everyone's fun distant relative, now only seen at weddings and funerals, more and more in need of an earlier night. He proceeded to attempt the Orwellian "KissCam" - a very obvious attempt, like DeGeneres' Oscar selfie, to make BAFTAs go viral. You can picture the creative agency strategy meetings in your mind.

Maggie wonders how she's going to get out of this one.

Leo rudely avoided the octogenarian lips of Maggie Smith when the KissCam landed on them, grabbing her in a bicep curl and bear muzzle to the neck, as if he might, somewhere in his mind, still be fighting Tom Hardy on a snowy mountainside. Julianne Moore was properly ambushed by Bryan Cranston. Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander, a real couple who are famously very private, refused to play game when the camera landed on them. This was edited out in the televised version, apparently too awkward for the Sunday night viewer to handle.

Ultimately, the BAFTAs took place without a headline to muster. Even the awards went where they were expected: The Revenant, Leo, and Brie Larson all picking up the gongs they were favourites to win. It was all over in time for Eddie Redmayne to get the bus home.

On we march to the Oscars, to the eagle-eyed scrutiny of yet more suits and dresses, more pre-rehearsed acceptance speeches (The Academy are now asking to pre-screen 'thank you' lists), to more moments engineered only to be shared the world over. The hope of something spontaneous happening has been forever lost in a thousand hashtags.

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Kanye West perfoms on SNL Dana Edelson/NBC

His extravagance makes Liberace look like Frank Gallagher, but over the weekend, Kanye West tweeted that he was $53 million dollars in personal debt and asked tech billionaires such as Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg to help fund his future projects rather than "open up one school in Africa like you really helped the country."

You can imagine Kanye has a few big bills to pay at the moment. Last week's huge Madison Square Garden fashion show, beamed live to cinemas around the world, was just the latest in a string of very expensive projects. When he proposed to Kim Kardashian, he rented out the entire AT&T baseball stadium in San Francisco and got the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to perform. His last big US tour, for Yeezus, included a 60ft-wide circular LED screen, a custom soundsystem and a 50ft-high mountain that could change into a volcano.

Just days before tweeting about his debt, Kanye had offered to give Puma their "measly" million dollars back after they signed Kylie Jenner as a model, something Adidas-sponsored Kanye saw as "dividing the family".

Perhaps because he regularly compares himself to an omnipotent deity, people don't tend to think too much about how Kanye pays for all this. Still, it seems confusing that one of the biggest music artists in the world would have fallen so far into the red. We spoke to music industry expert Chris Cooke, MD and Business Editor of music-industry website Complete Music Update, to find out if someone as big as Kanye could be broke.

VICE: Hi Chris. So $53million seems like an awful lot of debt for something other than a nation state.
Chris Cooke: It does. I mean we can't know if that's true, but I tend to assume that around two thirds of what Kanye says is bollocks. He has his fair share of businesses, both in music and fashion, and so he could be running up debts there. But that does seem like a lot of money still, and Twitter is a very odd place to admit it if it were true.

I do worry about his expenditure though. How much does it cost to rent out all of Madison Square Garden for a fashion show and beam it around the world? How much does it cost to create a bespoke soundsystem for your tour, especially if you don't play that many dates and keep postponing shows?
Yep, absolutely. For example, as a record company, you make most of your money on the first few albums a successful artist puts out, in part because when you're a big artist putting out records, it becomes incredibly expensive. You want the best studios, the best producers and the most outlandish marketing, and that all effects the profitability of the record. Live too, profitability depends on the ambitions of the artist. One Direction live shows, for example, are basically just them jumping up and down. That's an incredibly profitable way to tour. Whereas Kanye sees himself as more than just a performer - he has artistic vision and so he puts on a big show -but that will affect the profitability of touring. If you're not willing to just tour it for 18 months solidly so it becomes more cost-efficient over time, then you're not going to make big profits.

So how do you think Kanye makes most of his money?
If you're a big star then your single biggest revenue stream is often trademark licensing, which is basically licensing out your name and your brand to other companies in sponsorship deals and products. That will always outperform record sales, partly because you keep most of the money from those deals rather than the record label taking a share. Kanye remains a very bankable artist. He has decent sales. He's streaming this album for seven days exclusively through Tidal, and presumably he's being paid quite well for that.

What do you think is going on here then, if Kanye's not as in debt as he say he is? Did he just get a shocker of a credit card bill and freak out?
Well the callout to the tech world is interesting. In the hip-hop world, it seems as if the people he aspires to be are more like Dre and Jay Z, who arguably have achieved more as entrepreneurs as they have as artists, certainly in terms of their wealth. It's interesting his rant is aimed not at the entertainment business or his record label but at the tech industry. It's kind of saying: you bought Dre's business, why won't you go into business with me?

Right, and maybe as a designer for Adidas, you're not making the same kind of money that you would be if you owned a big stake in Vitamin Water like 50 Cent, or sold your headphone company to Apple like Dre?
Dre made a lot of money with Beats but 50 Cent was pleading poverty last year, albeit as part of a messy lawsuit, so these business aren't always successful.

Do you think that Kim Kardashian, who does countless brand partnerships, as well as perfumes and apps, is making more money than her husband is from music?
Oh yeah, if you're getting to the level where you're doing those kinds of deals then you're making more money from that than anything else. For Beyonce, perfume is one of her biggest revenue streams. That's why One Direction and Justin Bieber have perfume deals, because they're incredibly lucrative. It's almost all profit.

So should Mark Zuckerberg return Kanye's call?
I'm not sure about that, but he could certainly afford it. And I'm sure if he does, Kanye will be the first to tell us about it.

In 17 numbered tweets, no doubt. Thanks Mark.

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Bees are dying, sea levels are rising and every green space in Britain is turning into luxury apartments. Thankfully, there are some people out there trying to stem the flow of environmental disaster, including a protein bar company called Exo.

Beef and pork farming, as vegetarians are constantly reminding us, creates huge amounts of greenhouse gasses, and as such are a key factor in global warming. But those animals also create a delicious source of protein, so what can you do?

Well, Exo claim they've found a protein source that has almost no environmental impact, and that source is – crickets. Apparently crickets produce 100 times less carbon dioxide than cows and contain 12 times as much protein as beef. So Exo ground crickets into a "flour" and made cereal bars in flavours like Banana Nut and Blueberry Vanilla.

Let's find out how ground crickets go down, shall we?

TOM USHER, STARVING WRITER

I went for the banana bread-flavoured bar. Said bar is brown, shiny and smells like a Christmas pudding. It's actually all right - once you get past the psychological fact that it was made from bugs, then really it was no different from any other kind of flapjack-type thing that you get in Holland and Barrett or whatever. Considering I've literally eaten just protein bars for dinner at some points in my life then I'd be fine with eating them again, maybe over a candlelit dinner for one at home tonight.

3/5

SAM WOLFSON, HUNGRY EXECUTIVE EDITOR

You know that episode of The Simpsons where Homer is sponsored by an energy bar company to eat nothing but Powersauce Bars, which turn out to be made mostly from old Chinese newspapers? I feel like the same company might be behind these, judging by the consistency. It's so gristly I was still fishing bits out from my gums two hours later. I had the Banana Bread one but the only discernable flavour was Glastonbury chai tents and stale Soreen. This would not stop me eating beef and if anything has put me off eating bananas or bread.

1/5

JOE ZADEH – PECKISH NOISEY EDITOR

I guess it tastes exactly like anything that Ant and Dec would force Z-list celebrities to eat live on television should taste. Like regret. Like desperation. Like "has it really come to this"? It says on the packet that it's like eating shellfish. Cool. Who would eat cocoa or blueberry-flavoured shellfish? Now my mouth is working overtime to get small bits of decapitated cricket out of my teeth. It's a massacre. I don't feel good about crickets dying for this. I was having a decent morning but I don't feel good about myself anymore. This was an awful experience. Thanks mate.

1/5

MITCHELL STEVENS – RAVENOUS SOCIAL EDITOR

I've eaten insects before but I don't want to talk about it, thanks. It wasn't traumatic at all. I thought this would be all right because it's flavoured like blueberries which makes me feel safe, but there was actually a bit of an uneasy crunch to it which really brought me back and made feel a bit queasy. Still, what's one more repressed memory, eh? It's pretty tasty as well to be honest. I'd give it a solid four out of five. Only the stickiness let it down a bit.

4/5

ZING TSENG – FAMISHED BROADLY EDITOR

This basically tastes like every other overpriced energy bar I have ever bought in a foolish attempt to be "healthy". However, a tiny warning on its packaging also says that you may be allergic to crickets if you are also allergic to shellfish crustaceans. This immediately makes me think of the giant alien bugs from Starship Troopers, except processed into breakfast bars for foolish millennials. Maybe after we all start doing spin classes on exo-bikes listening to Avicii's 112th chart-topping record in the year 2028, cricket bars will seem normal. I'll settle for eating an actual banana for now, thanks.

2/5

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On Monday, it was reported that the NHS has pledged to invest in excess of £1billion extra annually in mental health by 2020-21. According to the Guardian, people facing mental health problems will be able to get community care 24 hours a day as part of what will potentially be the biggest transformation of NHS mental health services for a generation. This news couldn't come soon enough. Over the last few years, the extent of Britain's mental health crisis has been slowly and painfully drip fed to us with stats that've almost desensitised us as a public body. This positive development comes as a response to a damning leaked report into mental health services in the UK held by an independent task force last week.

The report painted a picture of a system in tatters. It revealed that one in four people experience mental health problems over the course of a year while the number of people killing themselves is soaring. Sick children are being sent "almost anywhere in the country for treatment" and three-quarters of those with psychiatric conditions are not being helped. A quarter of people with severe mental health problems need more than is currently on offer and many are at serious risk of self-neglect. Worryingly, there has been a 10 percent increase in the number of people sectioned under the Mental Health Act over just the past year. Undoubtedly, this is a system that routinely fails the entire country.

The report's bottom line: ministers needed to find an extra £1.2billion a year for mental health services by 2020. This £1billion pledged by the NHS, then, is not enough. But it's something. Is this cause for celebration? What will this £1billion really mean for a devastated service?

Currently, £9.2billion is spent on mental health services – less than a tenth of the overall NHS budget. This has been decreasing dramatically over recent years. Mental health trusts saw a real-terms fall in budgets of more than 8 percent between 2010 and 2015, as reported by the BBC. On Sunday, the BBC revealed that 2015 budgets fell 2 per cent when adjusted for inflation in the financial year. When you take this into consideration, the £1billion pledged barely makes up for cuts made in the first place.

Paul Farmer, chair of the report and chief executive at MIND, however, is positive that this money, along with the "landmark" report, will ensure "another one million people" receive improved support. Speaking to VICE, he said that MIND is pleased with the pledged amount as it is based on the recommendation in the report. "The fact that the NHS and government are committing to that figure is really important; it's a significant step. What needs to happen now is that it's worked up over a period of time. Some of the people you need to have in place to deliver these services have to be trained so there's a period of time to get to where we need to be. But it does mean that by the time we get to 2021, the NHS will be spending a billion pounds a year extra on mental health, which is big news."

An obvious problem here: those suffering need help now. But it's impossible to fix something overnight. Will the money start getting spent sooner? "Yeah exactly," said Paul. "Some pieces of work will start from the new financial year in April. Our recommendations around children and mental health will start immediately. We know there is £250million available in this coming year that hasn't been spent to invest in that. Other services need more time so we've got the right standards of people in place in order to deliver them. It's one of those situations where we want the services to be there as quickly as possible."

Paul hopes that the report will mean a focus on transparency for the future so that things can't be allowed to get as drastic again. "What happened previously was that at a national level we're told money is being provided but at a local level people just aren't seeing that money, so there's something going wrong there. Money wasn't flowing down the system... One of the things we're calling for is knowledge about where that money is going and how it's spent on mental health."

Paul is optimistic this money represents a fresh slate. "This is all about a chance of mindset within the NHS. The priority for mental health here is very transparent. I haven't seen a level of commitment to mental health like this before from the NHS or government."

@hannahrosewens

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The number of non-completely embarrassing pieces of art about rock music, outside of rock 'n' roll itself, can be counted on a sole two-finger salute. Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, which I haven't read because I hate reading about rock music though smart friends say it's great, and the comic book Love and Rockets. Everything else, every other comic book, film, and novel about rock has been not just dancing about architecture but the cliché "dancing about architecture." Velvet Goldmine, while certainly loved by some, is still better known for its soundtrack. Phantom of the Paradise is beloved by me, but is more about being odd than about rock music, per se. Repo Man, probably the best rock movie, is not about rock at all; rather, it's about transcendence and death. No, unless you've deluded yourself into liking, say, the Doors, you have to admit that rock, adolescent hooey, the most glorious kind of hooey there is, doesn't translate to other mediums. But, god in heaven, the old and getting older don't stop trying.

Vinyl, the new HBO phantasmagoria of hard drugs and gormless sideburns, brought to us by Martin Scorsese and Mick "Marianne Faithfull's Ex-Boyfriend" Jagger, is way better than it should be. I can't speak to the quality of the filming itself. My TV watching is pretty much confined to The Expanse, Rick and Morty, and New Girl in the background while I play Warhammer 40K on my phone. TV critics ranging from Vulture to the Washington Post say the camerawork on Vinyl is very fine, and I'll take their word for it. Apparently it's Scorsese's best film work since The Departed. As someone who enjoys both Ben Affleck's Boston oeuvre and that one song by Dropkick Murphys I'd agree it was a fun flick, so that's reasonably high praise.

As far as Vinyl's success at trying to convey what can't be conveyed through film, which is to say what it's like to lose oneself to music and drugs, I'd say it's a solid B. To enjoy the show, it helps to either have never done drugs or seen a band, or to take the production as a kind of magical realism. I, not to brag, have totally done drugs and seen bands, so I went with the latter.

In the opening scene, "record man" Richie Finestra (somewhat though not quite based on Marty Thau and played well throughout by Bobby Cannavale) is sitting in his car in SoHo, buying coke. Two-hundred-and-eighty dollars seems steep for a quarter ounce in 1973 but, as I was not yet a glimmer in my father's eye at the time, the filmmakers would know better. Richie tears off his rearview mirror to cut lines on, using a detective's business card that must have been made of reinforced cardboard. I guess it was more cinematic than using the webbed skin area between your thumb and pointing finger like a normal person would.

After doing his massive line that makes him react like people in movies that take place in the 70s react upon doing lines (and please don't get me started on the rubbing-it-on-your-gums bullshit), his car is then overrun by cascading rockers running Wild in the Streets to the nearby Mercer Arts Center, and he follows. "Punk" is spray-painted in the hallway and even though this is a few years before Punk Magazine premiered and the term itself was still pretty much just being used by a few writers for Creem Magazine, I'm game. And let's not get into my deeply held belief that not a single fan of NYC music between the years of 1967 and 1983 ran anywhere but from the cops, or maybe to the bathroom when the pills went south. It felt strange that the maker of After Hours has a vision of New York that is so corny, so unhip as having young people operate at a speed faster than drugged swagger.

I mention all this stuff that occurs within the first 15 minutes and hardly matters because if you're like me, these glaring inconsistencies coupled with some perhaps necessary personality-establishing, ham-fisted lines, you may be inclined to stop watching. Don't. It gets better. Either that, or I got worse. That's fine, too; I don't look for art to improve me.

The basic plot is Richie trying to save his record label, first financially and later spiritually. After becoming the controlling owner of a now seriously uncool legacy label, he hopes to cash in on the label being sold to German conglomerate Polygram, which is dependent on he and his partners (Ray Romano as Zak Yankovich, a consistent series highpoint, and Max Casella as Julie Silver) all hiding financial irregularities and signing Led Zeppelin. The actors do a swell job of making these big-picture low stakes seem the life or death propositions they are to the protagonists.

Ray Romano. Photo by Macall B. Polay/courtesy of HBO

There are a few main subplots, including a secretary (Juno Temple)'s attempting to move up to A&R by signing a pre-punk band, whose singer is played by Mick's son James Jagger; Richie's wife Devon (Olivia Wilde as a wonder of love and dissatisfaction); and foul-mouthed comic Andrew "Dice" Clay as Frank "Buck" Rogers, a grotesque and aggrieved-by-Donnie Osmond radio-station owner. The show's black characters are generally portrayed as saints, purveyors of soundtrack funk and soul, and objects of clueless characters' casual racism. There's even the cringeworthy validation from fucked-over blues man Lester Grimes (Ato Essandoh), told in flashback to Ritchie, "Are you sure you're not a black man?" I'll reserve judgment on that aspect for a few episodes. I want to believe Vinyl won't be corny.

Vinyl is ostensibly about rock 'n' roll music. It works better than most in that regard. The soundtrack is good, a nice mix of old R&B, rerecorded pre-punk standards, and thankfully there's nary a montage set to "Gimme Shelter" to be found. But the show shines as an oversized morality play. Names like ABBA or Suicide work less as plot points than totemic place-setters. The viewer has to decide to take pleasure in hagiography, even if it's about a music that was supposed to reject such sentiments, with Richie Finestra as a Zelig type given total selfish agency. When he rises, Christlike, literally from rubble, at the end of the first episode, it's hard to not be supremely moved. It's only utter fucking hogwash, but I like it.

Follow Zachary on Twitter.

I'm sat at the wheel of a McLaren Le Mans GT car, just about to exit the pit lane. It's a couple hours before the start of 24 Hours of Daytona, a legendary endurance race that runs for, you guessed it, 24 hours.

Every driver is taking part in a qualifying session – the faster your lap time, the higher your starting position on the grid. But it takes an incredible amount of concentration to complete even a single lap without losing control of the car. Every time I try to cut into a corner, the steering jolts in my hands as the car bumps over trackside curbs. I'm constantly struggling to keep control of my vehicle. After just under two minutes of white-knuckled driving, I clock a time good enough to place me in the top ten for the race proper.

But I can go faster. I begin another lap, eager to improve on my time, and my screen goes black. My computer's power supply is fried. There's an hour to go before the daylong Daytona ordeal begins, but the race is already over for me and my co-driver (after all, one man can't race for 24 hours alone).

Naturally, I wasn't competing in the real 24 Hours of Daytona – the whole screen snapping into silence thing might just have been the giveaway. The actual Daytona ran on January 30th and 31st, with Pipo Derani leading the Ligier-HPD Honda home in first place after 736 laps at an average speed of almost 110 miles per hour. I was experiencing the event – or, at least, the build up to it – on iRacing, a racing simulator regarded as one of the most realistic available, at the forefront of a virtual racing community that's edging into the eSports picture.

The iRacing Daytona attracted over 500 teams and 2,000 drivers, split between 15 lobbies arranged by skill level. I might have been putting in some intense practise, but even at my best my team and I were still rock bottom in the lowest-ranked lobby available.

That's no surprise, though – the top iRacing lobbies are strictly for professionals, and I do mean that literally. Alongside drivers who've only ever raced from the comfort of their homes, with an HD screen and expensive wheel for company, several competitors with plenty of real-life experience are getting involved in the simulations. NASCAR driver Timmy Hill won the Nationwide Series Rookie of the Year in 2011, and is regularly involved in iRacing events. So too is Mitchell DeJong, an X Games gold medallist in rallycross.

DeJong and his team, VRS Coanda Simsport, dominated the top Daytona race and ultimately took the win. If anything, DeJong spends more time racing in iRacing than he does in Global Rallycross, a series that he was the champion of in 2014.

"Besides testing on the day of a race, the only other driving I get to do is in the simulator," DeJong tells me. "How I look at it myself is that the physics of the car in iRacing are really similar to the real thing – you just don't have that same seat of the pants feel that you get in real life. You have to kind of use your other resources, like what you see, and the sounds of the car to compensate."

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With the level of competition raised to the level of pro-drivers, it's not as if you can just jump into an iRacing lobby and get stuck right into a race. Especially when it comes to endurance events, the amount of preparation work involved is enormous. Even in the bottom tier, my team spent a couple hours every day for a week leading up to Daytona. You have to figure out transmission, suspension and aerodynamic settings that fit not only your driving style but also those of everyone else on your team. Setting up the car is complicated – go for something forgiving for a newcomer, making the drive easier, and you'll also be running slow. Setting up a car to be snappy and tight can lead to it being impossible to drive – unless you've put in some serious hours of practise, expect to crash, and crash, and crash again. Quite possibly for 24 hours straight.

Tuning is a long arduous process, and it doesn't get more complicated in sim terms than it does in iRacing. The game's screens are a dancing orgy of numbers, on which you can change the very slightest details, from spring rates to compression ratios on the dampers. And no, I've no idea what that actually means, either.

"It's quite a lot of work," DeJong says. "Lots of people spend a lot of time preparing for these races, and you have to absolutely be perfect."

Because the game can be so difficult to understand, and the equipment to play it can be quite pricey – an "entry level" racing wheel costs around $100 (£70), while top end ones can cost upwards of $1,000 (£700) – the level of competition is fierce. And that means DeJong has to be as on his game in the simulator as he is when racing for real. Such high standards are seeing competitive simulator racing creep into the eSports market, with iRacing at the very centre of its drive.

Just like well-known eSports games like League of Legends and Counter-Strike, top-tier iRacing events are broadcast to a growing global audience via the internet, and sometimes even on regular television channels, like the pan-European Motors TV.

Wil Vincent is the co-founder of Racespot, one of the biggest broadcasters of iRacing. He's been commentating on races for two years now, and one of the most striking things about iRacing broadcasts is that they're almost exactly like the real-life equivalent. With live timing, screen overlays, comments on driver records and even commercial breaks, the only real difference is that the racing is virtual.

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The realistic broadcast style is unique to to sim racing, but it also highlights why iRacing might lag behind other eSports when it comes to breaking into the mainstream and bringing in big money. "You can't have League of Legends' products or DOTA's products in real life," Vincent tells me. "I can't go to a football stadium and actually watch people doing real-life League of Legends. But I can buy a ticket and go to a speedway, or a club race, or Formula One."

Vincent thinks that eSports needs to become mainstream enough to live on "regular" television before enough people will accept watching a virtual race rather than, or as well as at least, a real one. So while he's confident that eSports will be widely broadcast on mainstream sports television within the next five years, he believes that sim racing is about another ten years away from the same status.

Right now, though, it isn't as if sim racing is a tiny spectator sport by any means. Racespot has about 10,000 core viewers according to Vincent. That same number of people tuned in to watch the virtual 24 Hours of Daytona. In some of iRacing's other events, like its version of the IndyCar Series, Vincent says that a higher number of people are watching Racespot's broadcasts than are actually attending some IndyCar races in for real.

For everyone involved, though, the hope is that iRacing will make it big in eSports. Vincent believes that in five years he could be commentating on virtual iRacing races full time. And while DeJong is a real-world champion in the Global Rallycross Lites, he has high hopes for iRacing's future, especially with how much time he spends playing the game. After winning the 24 Hours of Daytona with his team of four other drivers, he went on to win the 8 Hours of Sebring on the same weekend. "If it becomes as big as some of these other games, I think that would be incredible for a lot of people that don't get the opportunity to race in real life," he concludes.

It's lack of opportunity that's the reason for iRacing to exist at all. Racing for real is highly expensive, not to mention dangerous, so for the Average Joe to get close to the action, sim racing is the easiest option available to most. It's certainly the closest I'll ever get to racing around in a sports car costing the best part of half a million dollars. Even DeJong only gets that "seat of the pants feel" on race weekends, making iRacing another place, or space, where he gets a shot at being in the spotlight. And if it can thrill him, having done it all with his own body on the line, imagine what it'll do for you.

@salmaanfarooqui

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Kate Moss is as British as the Queen, shit train service and shirtless men drinking Stella. She's become such an icon of everything UK that those shops on Oxford Street that somehow manage to stay afloat selling bedazzled New Eras and Big Ben broaches now screen-print her face onto cheap white T-shirts as just another souvenir for tourists visiting London.

Her early tale is well told. The Croydon-born 14-year-old was discovered by Sarah Doukas, founder of Storm Model Management, at JFK Airport in New York City. By the following year, she'd appeared on the cover of a British magazine – a monumental milestone for any model. She rose to fame in the early 90s and became known as the "anti-supermodel" of the decade. She's appeared on the covers of more than 300 magazines and been the star of ad campaigns for most of the top fashion houses. But you know all that.

Over the years, various old shoots have emerged, but recently Kate's first ever professional photographs were rediscovered in a drawer and shared with the world. I spoke to photographer Owen Scarbiena, who had the career-defining job – unbeknown to him at the time – of taking the shots.

VICE: Hi Owen. So how did you initially land this gig with Kate?
Owen Scarbiena: I'd been doing photography for fashion shoots and stuff, and I'd done some stuff for Premier, Select and Storm, so obviously I knew Sarah and Caroline in the agencies – and I was always looking for new girls. At the time I was working on a new project: white designer blouses and sports knickers that girls used to wear at school many moons ago, and it was about that time that Sarah Doukas called me from Storm saying she loved my work – which was very clean, minimalist – and that she'd got this girl, Kate, who I'd love, and it just so happened to fit in with the type of stuff I was doing because she was very fresh.

What was the shoot like on the day?
Kate didn't have any preconceived ideas of how a model should stand. She was just her, which I loved. We did the test with her in the designer blouse and sports kickers, and she was brilliant. It was very slightly awkward, but natural. I would say something like, "It's ten to four at the bus stop" and tell her a story, and she would follow it while I was just clicking away. There was a thing we used to do back in school called natural movement, where you had to pretend you were like a tree. And we did that. So that's how we got those pictures; she wasn't really posing, but just following the story.

She was very open, friendly, very confident. Easy to get on with, so the whole thing was a laugh. Very easy to mould. You get some girls who are new and are a bit nervous – she wasn't. It was like we'd been hanging out for ages. My daughter was there as well, and they got on, so it was just like shooting an old mate.

How did you find these unseen pictures? Did you just have them locked away?
We shot lots of models – some of them had become famous, but didn't get into editorial or a publisher, and then they just got shelved and forgotten about, so I forgot they existed. So when I met my best friend about a year ago, she was telling me about another friend who ran a gallery and whose job it was to find pictures of gorgeous people, and she said "Haven't you got pictures of Kate Moss?" They were in my negative drawers, so I hunted through and found them. I didn't even have contacts done, so I had giant contacts done. There was a big picture done and I saw it and thought, 'Oh my god, is that Kate? That is gorgeous' – because I'd only seen them in 24/36, tiny little negative sizes never blown up. Anyway, my friends loved them and wanted them in the gallery, and that's how it started.

Thinking back to that photoshoot, did you have any idea she would become as iconic as she now is?
Absolutely not. You've got the normal models – Cindy Crawford, for example – who all gorgeous, but there were other models that were odd, quirky and incredible, and Kate fitted into that bracket. So I didn't think she would make it because she didn't fit into that obvious beauty. She's not six foot tall. She had her own quirky gorgeousness, which isn't taken up by the masses.

Did you shoot her again over the years?
I didn't, no. That was it: first and last. I think shortly after that I went to Milan and while I was away she got big and then I didn't see her. I bumped into her in Notting Hill and that was it.

What is it about the photos you particularly like looking back on now?
It's a period in my life where I felt bombarded by lots of messy images, and I liked to have things that were clean and feminine, and she was just so fresh and personified the look I loved. So when I look back at them, I think, 'I love that.' With all of the shoots I did the hair, the make-up and the styling. Not that I was any good at any of the aforementioned, I was just happy to get a lip shine going. I called it guerrilla hair styling: if you have the bare necessities then you can't muck it up. I didn't have hair spray, so I just used a bit of water and olive oil on her hair and skin. Hair stylists used to be my biggest fear, because they go in and just create this thing that was the opposite of what you wanted.

What I remembered the most about Kate was that I thought she'd be able to work well with anybody. She was just so easy. She was good friends with another good friend of mine, Corinne Day, who also used to take loads of pictures of her.

@hannahrosewens

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IDW Comics has joined forces with Capcom and Hasbro to produce a Street Fighter x G.I. Joe series, with issue one (of six) released on February 24th. VICE has the first fight in all its glory here, ahead of it hitting retailers. And to start, here's an introduction from the comic's writer, Aubrey Sitterson.

"What do Street Fighter & G.I. Joe have in common? Though the scale varies, both franchises are all about struggle, conflict and combat. Fighting. So what better way to highlight both Street Fighter and G.I. Joe than a 16-entrant, single-elimination tournament?

"Previewed here is one of our inter-promotional match-ups, a high-octane slug-fest pitting the ninjutsu techniques of G.I. Joe's Snake Eyes against the high-tech gadgetry of Street Fighter's Crimson Viper. Also teased is something rather different – Cobra's resident femme fatale, The Baroness, will go toe-to-toe with the self-taught "kung fu" of Street Fighter's most generously proportioned martial artist, Rufus."

On The Creators Project: Retro 80s Toys Build a Plastic Civilisation In This Stop-Motion Epic

Street Fighter x G.I. Joe will be available in comic shops and on digital platforms (comiXology, the IDW app, Google Play, iTunes) on Wednesday, February 24th. Don't know where your nearest comic stockist is? Use Comic Shop Locator. More information at the IDW Publishing website.

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

All screens via streetfighter.com

VICE contributor Andi Hamilton is a bit of a Street Fighter wizard. He emerged victorious at a recent event for the UK games media, making him the best British journalist at the game, by our reckoning. So VICE Gaming editor Mike Diver, who's just started playing Street Fighter V, exchanged a few emails with Andi in the hope of learning a few tricks for competitive play success.

Mike Diver: Historically, I've always been a Ken man, since Super Street Fighter II on the Mega Drive. Going online with V for the first time last night with him, though, I found myself in trouble against fighters who used Nash. Like, they could inflict massive damage to me in no time at all.

Is that just something that can happen in that particular match up? Or is there a killer Ken technique that I need to be taking into online play? Or, is he just the wrong character for a V beginner, altogether?

Andi Hamilton: One of the main design decisions with SFV is that every character is quite different from one another. That's why the roster features lads like Dhalsim and Zangief over more popular but way more standard characters like Akuma and Sagat. Because of this, they've completely changed Ken and the way he plays – he's no longer a "palette swap" of Ryu. So if you're trying to play him the way you're used to, you're going to encounter a few problems because you're simply not playing to the character's strengths. The community seems to think that Ken should be used at mid-range and use his dash, which is the best in the game, to move into range whenever he gets the opportunity.

So, if you're just getting started with V, I'd lean towards using Ryu. He's got way more in common with the older Street Fighter games you're more accustomed to and, not only that, he's really good. He doesn't have much immediately flashy stuff, but his fundamentals hit really, really hard and played with a little bit of knowledge and patience, can cause a lot of good players a load of problems.

The problem is that the game explains absolutely none of this, at all. So in lieu of a proper tutorial, I'd recommend checking out this video. It's an episode of The Excellent Adventures of Gootecks and Mike Ross, two veteran and highly skilled Street Fighter players who, for this episode, have WWE wrestler and video game YouTuber Xavier Woods as their guest. It's clear from the very beginning that he's simply not very good at the game, but it is fascinating to watch him, even over the space of that first half an hour, go from that to actually quite a solid player with even the smallest amount of coaching.

MD: I did notice that SFV begins with a very brief tutorial that takes you through some moves as Ryu. Are we back to him being the "hero" of the game, the character that Capcom really want players to be proficient with? Because I don't think he was regularly used in competition play for SFIV, was he?

AH: I think because he is the "hero" of all things Street Fighter, it makes sense to make him the character so reliant on being proficient with the basics, as new players will likely go for big man Ryu on their first go. He was used in competition in Street Fighter IV, but was kind of tossed to the side when Capcom brought in Evil Ryu. The biggest example of this was career Ryu player and Street Fighter legend Daigo Umehara (who just lost a match to Lupe Fiasco) making that jump to the dark side in the past few years. He's back to Ryu now in SFV, by the way.

MD: And, getting right back to basics, what essentials does the Ryu player need to learn in order to take themselves online, right now, and maybe steal a few wins? Special moves aren't going to win you many matches, are they?

AH: The reason why Ryu is so good for beginners is because he has a bit of everything. He has decent pokes – strikes that you use to jab away at your opponent from the very tip of their range – and a few anti-air options – strikes that will hit an opponent who is jumping in on you. He's also got special moves that cover a few different scenarios, and a couple of easy to do combos that you can use to punish your opponent when they leave themselves open – a missed Dragon Punch, for instance. A reliance on super technical combos is less of an issue in SFV, as knowing what buttons of yours are most effective in any situation and against a particular character, are way more important in this game.

Article continues after the video below

Watch the trailer for VICE's forthcoming film, commissioned by Capcom, 'Street Fighter V: KO Dreams'

MD: So what does the newcomer, who's using Ryu and been practising a bit with him, need to look for in the behaviour of opponents? As that's half the game here, isn't it, reading the other player's intentions?

AH: You need to look for tendencies. Some newer players do things like always throwing a Dragon Punch on wake up – in other words, when they get up off the floor. So you can walk up to them to bait that out, block then watch them fly straight past you. Or, if they jump a lot, as jumping is very bad. Seriously, don't jump too much. And yes, half the game is knowing the match up and implementing the best possible strategy based on it.

MD: I know you're a Dhalsim player - are you sticking with him for SFV?

AH: Yeah, I play as Dhalsim, and if I get matched up against a Zangief then my entire plan their is to keep him as far away from me as possible. If I do it well and don't screw up, it's a fairly easy match for Dhalsim. However, 'Gief hits so hard that I get maybe three mistakes. Three good combos from the big man and I'm dead.

I'm also looking at playing as Vega and Necalli for SFV. Vega is really, really good now they've made him a motion character instead of a charge character; and Necalli is currently acting as a surrogate for Alex, who was my guy in 3rd Strike, who is being added to this game in March. They've got similar tools – a command grab, a charge dash move, an anti-air Dragon Punch thing. I'm treading water a bit until Alex shows up.

MD: For total beginners, can you explain the difference between a motion character, and a charge character? Which do you think is the easier type to pick up and really get ahead with?

AH: A motion character uses the traditional Hadoken-style directional inputs to perform special moves, like Ryu and Ken, whereas a charge character has to hold a direction first, effectively "charging" it up, then push the opposite direction and a button to perform a move. The archetypal charge character is Guile in Street Fighter II, IV, and soon to be V. Remember: never jump at a crouching Guile. That's because he's sat there holding down-back, which means he can push forward and punch to give you a Sonic Boom or up and kick to give you the old Flash Kick. Which is easiest? Honestly, it is personal preference, but some of their bigger combos require you to be charging a direction during another move, and that takes a bit of getting used to, so I'd say motion, for sure.

MD: Okay, so what would be your premier tips for coming to SFV cold, so that absolute, no-previous-experience newcomers can earn a win or three? Give me, I suppose, a five-point checklist for getting that all-important head start at SFV?

AH: Sure, here are five pieces of advice:

One, jump less. I guarantee you this is the top of most Street Fighter tips guides all over the internet. Basically, when you jump, all you can do is throw out an attack and if your opponent has that scouted, you're in a world of trouble. Jumping leaves you incredibly vulnerable and by reeling it in you'll instantly see results.

Two, learn your buttons. Learn what sort of attack each button throws out. Whether it hits an opponent jumping in or whether it has quite a bit of range on it. Street Fighter V relies quite a bit on "footsies", which is two characters trying to hit one another with the absolute tip of an attack, so they can then quickly follow it up with something else, so learning what sort of range and space you get from each button is key. After all, it's easier to react with a button press than a special move. That's something that'll come with practise.

Thirdly, watch some videos. For a game so designed around attracting new players, there is absolutely nothing in it explaining what exactly does what. Training mode is fine once you actually know what you're doing, but there's nothing explaining even the basics of combos or even special moves in SFV. I highly recommend Bafael's BnB tutorials for SFV. He shows you a few basic options for each character, then a couple of simple combos you can use against your opponents. If something like this were in the game, it'd be a revelation. For now, you'll have to do your learning elsewhere.

This is an obvious point maybe, but it's important: remember to block. If you press buttons, you'll get hit. If you block, you won't. It's dead easy. If you knock an opponent over and hit them easily when they're getting up, without fail, it's because they're pushing a button. If they just blocked, they'd be fine. Obviously you could throw them, but that's part of the mind games involved in Street Fighter. In SFV every strike, move and throw has to be committed to, and leaves you open for big punishes. So don't mash buttons – just block.

Finally, practise, practise, practise. Yes, I'm aware that drilling Ryu's crouching medium kick into a hadoken is dryballs as fuck, but all practise is good and you're building that muscle memory so that when the split-second opportunity for a particular move or combo appears in a real match, you'll hit it no problem. Drill stuff from both sides of the screen, do it ten times without screwing it up. Soon, you'll be the next Daigo.

On Motherboard: Windows 10's Killer Apps are Xbox One Games

MD: More critically, as someone with fireballs in his blood, what do you think of the game? It's not "all" out yet, of course – there's more characters and content to come. But it's a pretty damn slick fighter, isn't it? What little time I've spent with it so far, across expo sessions and a few nights at home, has been great.

AH: I was at a local multiplayer session last night, playing endless games against a load of ridiculously skilled players at Situational Damage in London. In that setting, it is an untouchable fighting game. Unfortunately, that's not something that everyone is going to do and right now, on launch day, the servers are – surprise! – completely ballsacked. They're dropping games all the time, and Battle Lounges barely work at all. It's a mess. The offline content is basically non-existent and although this is all promised in an update next month, I fear it might be too late for newcomers to the game who are put off by this somewhat botched launch. It's very hard to defend the lack of really obvious stuff currently available – you can't even play two rounds against the CPU or invite more than one person into an online game right now. Saying that, the game is grand and, for what it's worth, there's a real chance that this will be a fixture of the gaming landscape for the next five years and more, like SFIV was. With that in mind, what's a month? It's great now, and hopefully only going to get better and better.

Follow Andi on Twitter here, and Mike here. Street Fighter V is out now, check out the game's official website for more information.

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Issues 1-4.

Print zine Little Joe is the queer cinema bible – and would no doubt revel in such a sacrilegious accolade. A sense of mischief runs through its pages, whether in the form of erotic stills from long-lost gay movies, the platforming of marginalised filmmakers, or the rebellious act of challenging cinema's heteronormative status quo.

Little Joe is the offspring of Sam Ashby – a London-based cinephile and the designer behind the memorable posters and artwork for recent film releases like Andrew Haigh's Weekend and Sean S. Baker's Tangerine.

To delve into Sam's motivations for starting Little Joe, we asked him about why it's necessary, or even just compelling, to continue to map and remap cinema's illustrious queer history. It's a potted history, and one that dips proverbially "in" and "out" of the closet – which is to say that, while some films are overtly LGBT, others have the potential to be read that way. Here, Sam shares some insight into how we can learn to read them.

VICE: When did you first have the idea for Little Joe?
Sam Ashby: I was watching Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey's Flesh with some friends one drunken summer night in 2008. I couldn't understand why I hadn't seen or heard of the film before. I'd wanted to create a magazine for some time, and here was the concept: a film publication that instilled a sense of discovery in the reader.

The unforgettable sight of 'Little Joe' Dallesandro's bare arse as he lay face-down in bed gave the magazine its name. It's a wink to those who get the reference and a point of discovery for those that don't. It also gives the publication a certain personality, and defines its diminutive format.

What was your initial vision with the design – and how has it evolved over the years?
Little Joe started out as a fanzine really, albeit one with academic articles! I wanted it to feel familiar, nostalgic, like an object of the past. At the time of producing issue one, I was photographing an old cathode-ray TV screen showing VHS versions of films like Cruising and American Gigolo, and was playing around with layering found images and turning GIFs into print. Due to budget constraints I printed the first issue in an edition of 500 copies on a risograph machine with Ditto Press. It is mostly two colour throughout, and the print effect is wonderfully low-fi, further imbuing a VHS aura. The second issue was influenced by the 70s, in particular the book 'Film as a Subversive Art' by Amos Vogel.

As Little Joe became more popular and we began to print more issues, the risograph became less cost-effective so we made the difficult decision to start printing with a lithograph printer. This has partly led to the magazine's shift from fanzine towards the more 'legitimate' journal, although I think it still sits somewhere in between.

You have quite the contributors list, including the academic Douglas Crimp, MoMA curator Stuart Comer, author Abdellah Taïa, and writer and activist Sarah Schulman. How do you go about soliciting such talented people?
When I started I was amazed by how responsive people were to the project. I was just an eager fanboy asking nicely! The way in which the magazine has grown and gained such respect means that the whole process has become easier in a way because people understand what Little Joe is.

What do you think has been the biggest coup for you?
I think getting to work with Mike Kuchar, who is one of my all-time favourite artists and filmmakers, has been the most exciting for me. Johnny Ray Huston interviewed him for Issue 4 and for Issue 5 Kuchar designed a selection of lurid temporary tattoos that we have slipped inside each copy. I'm almost tempted to get one of them for real.

Little Joe is obviously a geeky place, and yet, it's also a friendly place; to me, it's almost been a guidebook. How do you maintain the balance? Is it something you think about?
Absolutely. The project is about inspiring discovery, so that's why you'll rarely find articles about films that are very well known or in some cases accessible, even. Some of the films you will never be able to see, because they are locked up in an archive somewhere. This is an interesting tension for me. In an age when people expect everything to be accessible online, I have created a magazine that is print-only, and printed in a limited edition, which talks about films that are difficult to find. I want our readers to come to the magazine by chance or word of mouth. I want them to spend time with it, and get involved in that process of discovering the films for themselves.

Little Joe isn't just about discussing the work of filmmakers whose work is queer on their own terms – sometimes you actively queer movies.
There is a long and rich tradition of this, simply because we queers have always been underrepresented on film, meaning we work especially hard to read between the lines. I was amazed by how many people's formative sexual experiences were the result of watching films, and that these were almost entirely lacking in queer sexual content. Asking people their personal tales of filmic identification is so enjoyable to me that I do it for every issue under the section 'Visual and Other Pleasures'. We don't need queer content to identify, but rearrange 'subtext' and what do you get?

Issue 5.

Good point, but do you think there's less of a need to search for this queerness on screen now, because – for our generation, at least – it is more overtly present? In Issue 5 there's a piece on Boyd McDonald who conducted queer readings of "oldies" in his book Cruising the Movies. The writer William E Jones, in looking back at McDonald's work, refers to a certain type of "cinephilia in which past generations indulged". Is that something Little Joe aims to preserve?
It's an interesting point. I think Little Joe is actively trying to preserve something that is absolutely being lost but, that said, since the publication first launched in 2010 I've witnessed a growing interest in these subjects and, due to the explosion in online journalism, seen so many more people writing about queer film. Obviously we are watching films in an entirely different way than our queer elders did when they were our age – there are so many more films being made with a wider variety of subjects and representations today.

We don't need to search for queerness on screen anymore because, as you say, it's just more present, but that doesn't stop us searching for queerness that we actually identify with, and I think for me this is still something difficult to come by. Gay, lesbian and trans folk are now ten-a-penny on TV and in film, which is obviously worth celebrating, but I still seek out the films, people and artefacts that complicate or question, and these are frequently harder to come by. I hope Little Joe helps to point the way towards a messier, seamier, and altogether more interesting history of film from the margins.

Buy Little Joe here.

@MillyAbraham

More in the series Ink Spots here.

A man, who may or may not be a parent, smoking a bong. (Photo by Jake Lewis)

It's not been the best year so far for British parents leading by example, with three schools in as many weeks sending letters out to parents to encourage them to stop doing stuff they probably shouldn't be doing.

At the end of January, Kate Chisholm of Skerne Park Academy in Darlington had to warn parents over their wearing of pyjamas and slippers, not only on school runs, but also in assemblies and parent meetings.

Reportedly, this totally reasonable demand for parents to wear clothes prompted a "pyjama protest", with one mother defiantly doing the school run in her PJs, and another removing her two kids from the school altogether.

On Tuesday, news began to circulate that a primary school in Manchester had to send a letter out asking parents to stop smoking weed at the gates. Deborah Binns, a deputy head at St John's Primary in Radcliffe, warned parents not to use "cannabis around the school premises". The offending elders had apparently "been noticed by some of the older children", who then grassed them up.

A Greater Manchester Police spokesman said: "The policing team will be working closely with the school, and anyone found to be engaging in such activity will be dealt with accordingly by the police."

Down at Heathcoat Primary School in Tiverton, Devon, meanwhile, parents should be washing their mouths out with soap and water. Staff issued a letter to parents saying they had noticed "some adults swearing on the school grounds", adding, perhaps somewhat naively, that "we know that children get upset when they hear these kinds of words".

Schools seem powerless to change parents' behaviour. In the old days, headteachers were able to give naughty parents a hard strike across their backsides, but in today's PC culture, the only way to discipline them is with a 10-minute timeout and, if they repeat-offend, send a note home to their children.

Cocaine. Photo via Flickr user Valerie Everett.

Happy Family Day, you magnificent bastards!

For those of you out of the loop, Family Day is a cherished statutory holiday invented to break up the New Year's-to-Good Friday grind. It's a welcome respite from the Seasonal Affective Disorder you inevitably pick up by living through a Canadian winter. It's not celebrated in Quebec, New Brunswick, or Newfoundland and Labrador (because they hate families) and in Manitoba it's called Louis Riel Day (because they hate Canada). PEI and Nova Scotia also call it something different too but who cares.

But while most provinces have only been taking off the third Monday in February since 2007, Alberta has been marking Family Day since 1990. As it turns out, Edmonton is ground zero for Canadian Family Values.

And we owe it all to the premier's son getting busted in a drug sting.

Don Getty drinking out of the grey cup in the 1950s. Image via Wikimedia.

Pity poor Don Getty, Alberta's forgotten premier. When the ex-CFL superstar took over from Peter Lougheed as leader of Alberta's Progressive Conservatives in 1985, the province was in hard shape (oil hit nine bucks a barrel in 1986). Worse, everything the government touched turned to shit. Half the businesses they subsidized through the recession went under anyway, leaving the province to eat the damage.

If things were rough politically, they weren't any smoother at home. On August 18, 1988, his 31-year-old son Dale was arrested in an Edmonton motel room on trafficking and drug possession charges after trying to sell an ounce of cocaine to an undercover Mountie. Getty Sr. was in Saskatoon for a premiers' conference at the time, resulting in an awkward scrum about Senate reform that was also about his son's failed attempt at dealing coke to cops.

Someone at the Medicine Hat News had a sense of humour.

Six months later, the 1989 Throne Speech announced that the government would bring in a new February holiday so families could spend more time together, and Family Day was born. At the time, it was the word around the province that the holiday was born out of the premier's own guilt about neglecting his family.

For his part, Getty has emphatically maintained over the years that the new holiday "had absolutely nothing to do with the problems Dale had and that he has handled and conquered, and I'm so proud of him."

Don Getty never did catch a break. The economy didn't really improve, and when he called an early election in 1989, one of the only seats the Tories lost was his. He eventually won a seat in a by-election, but the knives in the Tory backrooms came out shortly thereafter. He retired from politics at the end of 1992.

Since Don Getty is otherwise remembered for being forgettable (and for leaving the province with so much debt that Ralph Klein could come in and burn Alberta to the ground), Family Day is probably his greatest legacy.

"I'm extremely proud of how Albertans have responded to it," Getty told the Calgary Herald in 2009. "They're coming to the conclusion it's the most enjoyed and focused holiday other than Christmas that they have."

That might be a bit of an exaggeration. Many people can't (or won't) take the day off, especially if they're in the service or retail industry. And those who do are as likely to spend it running weekday errands or working from home as they are to cuddle around a fireplace and read from the family Bible.

(As a childless couple in our mid-to-late 20s, there's a very good chance my fiancée and I will either do a bunch of chores or get day-drunk and watch Netflix.)

Life is pretty frenetic these days. Most people are now chained to their jobs 24/7 thanks to the joys of omnipresent high-speed internet, and a lot of kids are more overscheduled than their parents. All things considered, setting aside a dedicated day to being with your loved ones during the most depressing stretch of the year was a pretty boss move.

So this Monday, whether you're building treasured memories with your loved ones or getting paid time-and-a-half at work, take a minute to toast Don Getty, the Father of fuckin' Family Day. Thanks to his eldest son's extraordinarily bad attempt at becoming a drug dealer in the late 1980s, most of us get a three-day weekend.

Follow Drew Brown on Twitter.

Every year in a post-Valentine's Day haze, the prestigious Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show rolls around. The canine competition is fierce, and as you tour the booths, you begin to realize that although Best in Show is technically a mockumentary, those characters, or caricatures, definitely seem to exist in real life, with cutthroat dog owners primping and fussing over their four-legged charges.

When not being coiffed, the exquisite pups are available for ogling at the annual "Meet the Breeds" event. This is a chance for owners to show off not only their dogs, but also their majestic, themed to breed booths. We love arts & crafts that involve Chow Chows in traditional Chinese garb, so VICE decided to send photographer Caroline Tompkins to cover the event. Caroline's photographs often deal with the beautiful ironies of daily life, and her knack for framing the eccentric really shows through in these epic pooch snapshots. - Elizabeth Renstrom, VICE Photo Editor

All photographs by Caroline Tompkins. You can follow her work here.