Old habits die hard in the "spiritual home of the Order of the British Empire" (Photo: Uwe Aranas via)

Each year, Britain relives the decaying glory of its former empire by giving out Orders of the British Empire. It's the reason we're supposed to call Elton John "Sir Elton John" or slap "KBE" onto the end of Bob Geldof's name (he's not actually a sir, by the way). But it's also meant to pay tribute to the "little people" doing commendable community work around the country.

In January, LGBT campaigner Phyll Opoku-Gyimah became briefly best-known for turning down the MBE she'd been offered on 2016's New Year's Honours list. She was flattered, she said to Diva magazine, but wasn't hugely keen on accepting an award linked to "colonialism and its toxic and enduring legacy in the Commonwealth, where – among many other injustices – LGBTQI people are still being persecuted, tortured and even killed because of sodomy laws." The numbers behind her opinions don't look great, in fairness. Consensual same-gender sex is only explicitly legal in 13 of the Commonwealth's 53 member states, according to the Commonwealth Equality Network, with much of the bigotry rooted in colonial-era anti-sodomy laws that haven't changed for centuries.

Fast-forward to February, bang in the middle of LGBT History Month in the UK, and Opoku-Gyimah sounds as though she's moved right on. She's laughing about how hectic her days are – "all I ever want to do is get back home and take my bra off" – and it feels like somewhat of a feat for her to have set aside time to talk at all. Granted, it is 9:30PM on a Wednesday and she's in a cab, apologising for speaking later than planned.

She's busy. On top of her day job as head of campaigns at the Public and Commercial Services union, she sits on both the Trades Union Congress LGBT and race relations committees, as well as the Board for Justice for Gay Africans, and works voluntarily as executive director of UK Black Pride.

Opoku-Gyimah, who is in her forties ("nobody really knows my real age"), co-founded UK Black Pride in 2005, off the back of organisation Black Lesbians in the UK (BLUK), which she'd been running. After taking a coach-load of black lesbian and bisexual women to Southend-on-Sea in 2004, for a face-to-face BLUK event, it proved so popular that they returned the following year to celebrate LGBT pride in a space that felt open to people of all ethnicities.

"It was amazing," she says of UK Black Pride's founding get-together. "It was a moment I will never forget. Just to be in a space where you've got so many people with a shared commonality. We understood each other's struggle, and felt empowered." Opoku-Gyimah stresses that by "black pride" she means what she considers black in its political context: the "African and Asian diaspora".

UK Black Pride mostly deals with the ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender – the classic defining characteristics that can bring out the absolute worst in people. In the UK in 2014 out of 52,528 hate crimes reported, 82 per cent were based on race, 11 percent on sexual orientation and 1 percent labelled "transgender hate crimes". Opoku-Gyimah's organisation has its work cut out, given its remit in looking out for people who could be affected by one or all of those qualifiers.

But, she says, while UK Black Pride was founded to talk about the intersectional difficulties faced by black LGBT people, it was also to celebrate their achievements. "When we start talking about black LGBT people, everyone always wants see just how difficult it is," she says, referencing the harsh transphobia and homophobia highlighted in Reggie Yates' recent BBC documentary, Gay and Under Attack. "You've got some black LGBT people whose parents are totally accepting. We need to hear those stories too." There's no one way to summarise a community made up of this many types of people, which in a way is what makes the tag of "black pride" feel slightly clumsy or jarring.

A video from last summer's UK Black Pride event in the summer, complete with sporadic zoom-ins

The founding of UK Black Pride distinguished itself from mainstream pride organisations. "In an ideal world, we wouldn't need a pride – we wouldn't need a black pride. But we don't live in an ideal world," she says. "I'm under no illusion that there is racism in our LGBT community. Some white LGBT people have found it difficult to grapple with the idea that there is a black pride. It's a shame because you constantly feel that you're having to justify your existence." She describes wanting to provide a platform to talk about this "double-edged bigotry" – "sometimes we feel like we're selling our souls to the devil just to make sure we have a space where people can celebrate and party."

Opoku-Gyimah adds that black pride exists because they felt "marginalised, very much erased" in LGBT history and wider pride activities. She praises the work of certain fringe organisations such as black LGBT archive Rukus and Manchester queer support group Rainbow Noir, but says that this representation has not stretched to "the wider mainstream LGBT magazines and media".

"Black LGBT – or even just black – we don't get the same airtime," she says. When I press her for examples, she is reels off a long list noting that I "might not even know them". On the whole, she's right. She highlights film writer Campbell X, who directed Stud Life, Rukus co-founders Topher Campbell and Ajamu, human rights activist Femi Otitoju, producer Veronica McKenzie and community activist Dennis Carney of the Black Gay Men's Advisory Group. She describes OG intersectional feminist Linda Bellos as "freaking amazing," despite adding that when the media in the 1980s covered Bellos as part of the so-called loony left, "it was about something deemed as negative. It was bad press. She wasn't praised for the work she does on diversity and equality." All the time, however, Opoku-Gyimah is upbeat and optimistic about change. "We have to just amplify that voice, make sure we write to those mainstream media outlets."

In an ideal world, we wouldn't need a pride – we wouldn't need a black pride. But we don't live in an ideal world

Really, she says, part of that responsibility for giving black LGBT people central roles in events like LGBT History Month is down to those individuals themselves. "If I say, 'I'm just not seeing anything about black LGBT people', then I have to take some responsibility in wanting to see that." Opoku-Gyimah places some blame on government cuts to these groups, too. "We're living in a climate where funding is being slashed and seeing organisations like Mosaic LGBT Youth Centre and Broken Rainbow crowdfunding. It makes it even more challenging when we want to put on events or find a space."

Opoku-Gyimah's featured on The Independent's Rainbow List every year since 2011 and was announced as a new judge on its panel in 2015. "Some mainstream media are trying to ensure there's diversity, but there's a long way to go... I don't do tokenistic gestures. I don't do ticking the box for the sake of ticking the box." Still, she explains, last year's list was "brilliant" and commends the inclusion of the first transgender person at number one, actor Riley Carter Millington. "It shows that when you have people making decisions who are diverse, inclusive and intersectional it means more voices and the visibility of difference will be shown," she says.

Now in its 11th year, Opoku-Gyimah has helped UK Black Pride nab several awards, including the Black LGBT Community Awards in 2006 and 2007, the Pink Paper Readers' Award and the Stonewall Community Award in 2011. Personally, she has featured consistently on the on the World Pride Power list and is a Stonewall trustee. But it's not all about accolades, surely. What does she ultimately want to achieve with UK Black Pride? She pauses. "Equal rights for all, and human rights respected. Ensuring the safety of young LGBT people and them not being homeless. Making sure that we can eradicate domestic violence and other forms of violence in the LGBT BME community. It's a massive goal." Maybe then she'll take an MBE, if one's thrust in her direction.

@ella_braidwood

I Hung Out With Shia LaBeouf in a Lift in the Name of Art

Meet the Man Who Discovered Why Weed Makes You High

Stock photography's been the butt of internet jokes for years – and with good reason, mostly. When people decided they'd had enough of the uncanny, plastic-sheened falseness of the average stock image, they let the world know. We've seen iterations of stock photography's sterile scenarios turned into punchlines ever since.

Women-focused humour site The Hairpin kicked things off in 2011 with their caption-less photo blogpost of women laughing alone with salad, skewering the stock image trope of women so delighted to be tucking into a plate of leaves. Within a few years the blogpost had spawned an honorary Tumblr account, and in 2014 The Guardian's Women in Leadership website squeezed out the last few drops of fun with an earnest thinkpiece – by then it was probably too late to tell those responsible for this play in New York that they were about three years late to the party. You just have to enjoy the joke in the moment then, as with any other meme, file it away. At most, you can return to it in private with a chuckle, but for the love of god, let the thing go.

But not every stock image photographer sticks to the grinning in offices, city-skyline-at-dusk cliches. Caran Caravan, who made her start in the 1980s shooting and directing music videos for the likes of Marc Almond and space-rock band Hawkwind, switched to photography in the 90s and ended up selling photos of her own family to Getty Images, filling them with the sort of intimacy you don't normally find in stock image libraries.

Born Karen Bentham, Caran shoots exclusively on film, but isn't a pretentious idiot about it. Before an exhibition of her portraiture opens in Leeds' White Cloth Gallery on the 1st of March she spoke us about casting your own children in images for widespread use, selling those shots to one of the world's most prominent stock photography agencies and maintaining a sense of autonomy through it all.

VICE: You ended up at art school as a teenager but when did you start shooting photographs? Was it a hobby, or linked to your studies?
Caran Caravan: Oh no, I didn't get into photography at art school. That was about painting, finding identity and messing with heads. Photobooths in Woolies were the nearest I got to taking photographs – I didn't even own a camera. I started shooting seriously when I seriously started producing children. I ended up with three kids under 3, and it can get hellishly boring – with the best will in the world. Photography became an obsession and a user-friendly outlet for a dying creative. Two years later, in 1998, I was awarded a Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society, with a submission of black-and-white auto portraits created using multiple negatives – a very hit-and-miss technique that is either fucking wonderful or a complete disaster. Either way, they were one-offs. No negatives, no reprints.

You were making videos for a while, after art school, before moving into portrait-based stock photography. What drew you to still photos, given your work with moving images? Why transition?
Time and circumstance, really. My love affair with the 35mm camera began due to constraints born within my commitment to raising a family. Video shoots take forever. Left to my own devices, and no deadlines, I set up a darkroom, hunted down the hippest kids in town, and started shooting – upstairs, downstairs, and in the ladies chamber. Working with video had already given me the skills needed for setting up good lighting and recognising striking images. The transition was natural and timely.

"Boy Throwing Autumn Leaves"

When was your first official foray into photography, then? Which set of images felt like the first ones that made you think "yes, this is something I could do to make a living"?
It was only last year, in June, when I had my very first exhibition at the Galleon Coffee Bar in Blackpool. Claire Griffiths from Alt Blackpool wrote a review and I suddenly realised I was quite good. She described my work as "beautiful but surreal" with "sadness, joy and whimsical faces staring back at us as we ask, 'who, where and when'?"

Having a critic define a tipping point is unusual, though. How did you make the move into stock photography on your own?
I my had three kids under the age of 3, as I said, and they were sitting ducks as stock subject matter, so to speak. I originally started submitting images to a company called Photonica and they signed me, which was cool. Photography equalled money. They were subsequently bought out by Getty Images, who put me on their books for several years.

What was it like being on Getty's books? Do you still own the rights to those images for example?
I have no idea if I have the rights ... I am the worlds worst at documentation, contracts etc. Sometimes they send me a cheque, haha.

You're clearly into 35mm film for your personal work. Were you shooting your Getty images on film too? What were the briefs like when they would want you to produce work for them?
Oh yes, I did everything on film. I have never used, nor will I ever use a digital camera. Film to the bone. I used to send Getty 10x8 prints, and they'd scan them and send them back. I stopped submitting to Getty when they stopped accepting analogue submissions. The digital camera they recommended I buy was about £11,000 at the time, and I thought, 'fuck that for a game of soldiers.' Haven't sent anything over for a long time.

The briefs they sent over when they wanted work were very specific, and well laid-out. I never really took much notice though, so I suppose the briefs were really only guidelines. If the brief was 'woman juggling career and baby,' I'd have my oldest son holding a screaming baby, mother nowhere to be seen.

How much freedom did you find you had with stock photography?
I sort of tweaked the briefs they sent, and more often than not got away with it. I'm not knocking stock photography – hell, there's lessons to be learned everywhere.

What about staging? The thing that makes so much stock photography so laughable is how transparent its setups look, while yours are more reminiscent of family photo albums pictures.
None of it was staged, really. I'd take photos and then find a brief to fit. That's the funny thing – I'm not really a stager. The plan is there is no plan. It's kind of like street photography, but not. I could never do 'street photography', because I'm too scared – and that's silly, I know. I can confront shop girls who serve me in WHSmith, and shoot awesome photos that very same evening of them, but I'm too scared to take a photo of a bin man on his round.

Did doing the Getty work ever feel corny? How did you consider the balance between it as art and as commerce?
Needs must, darling. I would happily post my Getty stuff alongside my other work, there's nothing to be ashamed of there. It all still takes time and thought. Not involved in that world anymore though – starving artist and all that, you know. Digital? Schmigital.

Caran Canavan's photography exhibition opens at White Cloth Gallery in Leeds on Tuesday the 1st of March.

@tnm___

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Passing through a metal detector, Kenneth Towler made his way into the lobby of the Center for Community Health on Los Angeles' Skid Row. Towler, 47, is no stranger to the clinic's chaotic waiting room, so he quietly took his place against the back wall as various patients filtered through the clinic. The smell of urine and smoke clung to some visitors, many of whom, like Towler, are homeless.

These visits to the clinic had become routine, but now, the 47-year-old was noticeably worried. His mind rewinded to two weeks earlier when he claims the few possessions he had were stolen, including medication for his bipolar disorder and a new prepaid cell phone. "And as soon as I turned my back they just took everything," he said. "It was the phone they were really after."

The incident meant he would have to request a refill on his medication before its scheduled date, which can be nearly impossible for patients like Towler, who has a history of drug abuse. So now he was here, anxiously waiting to be called in to see the doctor.

Towler's situation is common in Los Angeles, which has about 44,359 homeless individuals at any given time, according to 2015 figures from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. For those who are mentally ill – a group that accounts for nearly one-third of the county's homeless population – receiving and keeping prescription medication can be a daily struggle.

Stealing and selling are both problems: many prescription drugs have high street value, and homeless populations are vulnerable to theft. And because so many homeless individuals also have a history of drug abuse – about 50 percent of homeless people with mental health conditions have co-occurring substance abuse problems, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration – it can be difficult to find a clinic that will refill stolen prescriptions.

"Before I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I was already using drugs. I did cocaine in high school and then harder drugs as I grew up," Towler said. "It wasn't until I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder that I realised that I was using the drugs to deal with everything."

The CCH clinic, run by the private non-profit health agency JWCH Institute Inc, tries to fill the gaps in access to mental health care for the city's homeless. Past and even ongoing drug abuse doesn't prevent clients from receiving mental and health care services at the clinic, a sign of recognition that, especially for homeless people living on Skid Row, getting necessary medication can be challenging, in part because of substance abuse problems.

"This isn't about getting to the bottom of things or catching them in a lie," said Jordan Allan, a clinical medical social worker at CCH. "The doctor goes by what they see and what the client relays to them."

Theft, Allan said, only makes the problem worse. "One of my clients had a container of medication. He's in a wheelchair, and he can't fend for himself, so people would steal his medication," she recalled. "I ended up putting a sticker on it saying 'Laxative: Will give you diarrhea' because otherwise people would steal it."

Allan noted that anti-depressants, some of which are used to treat schizophrenia, are often sold on the street. "I know painkillers go for, like, £2.70 a piece, so do some of the larger dosages of the anti-anxiety medication," she said. She added that the clinic's pharmacy no longer fills prescriptions for painkillers because of the high abuse rate.

Allan refers people who need an emergency refill to Exodus, a mental health urgent care clinic about three miles east of Skid Row, sending them with a note describing the patient's mental condition, and, with the patient's consent, information on their progress in the clinic's program. "They'll give them enough medication for the end of the month because I always write in the email their next refill will be ready," she said.

But not all of the physicians at CHS take this approach. In many cases, clinicians will deny a refill if they suspect the client could be selling or abusing their medication. Without receiving the medication, those patients are left to cope with their illness on their own or pay out of pocket at another clinic.

That was the case for Towler who, after waiting for more than an hour, returned to the lobby defeated. Like many others before him, he had been denied a refill on his meds. "He told me no because I was just going to sell it," he said, dejected. "Now I really don't know what I'm going to do the rest of this month."

Follow Celeste Alvarez on Twitter.

I Am One of Britain's Hidden Homeless

How to Treat the Homeless – a Guide By London's Homeless

On this episode of VICE Talks Film, we meet Roger Deakins – the legendary cinematographer behind No Country for Old Men, Fargo, and The Shawshank Redemption – who just received his 13th Oscar nomination for Sicario, a dark thriller that takes place inside the world of Mexican drug cartels.

Fellow 2016 Oscar nominee Matthew Heineman, director of the acclaimed documentary Cartel Land, sits down with Deakins to discuss the overlapping themes of their respective films.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

A few years ago, I started using a digital diary platform called Oh Life. I'd relied on a notebook to jot down daily reflections for years, but this was infinitely more elegant. It was more private than a notebook, less clunky, and the platform even let users upload entires by sending an email, which meant I could record my observations, frustrations, and memories without obviously writing in a diary.

But when I logged on recently, searching for something I'd written on Oh Life years ago, all of my entires had vanished. In fact, the whole site had been shut down, thousands of archives deleted, because they couldn't make Oh Life "financially stable." Years of my personal history were gone.

This kind of disappearance, while manageable on a personal scale, is to historians a warning sign of problems to come with recording and preserving our history in the digital age. Ancient hieroglyphics and scrolls have survived centuries, but digital storage is fragile, the files easily swept away or locked up in encryption. The technology we use to store things today might not be around tomorrow, and many of the platforms we use to store information are owned by private companies, which makes it harder for archival institutions to save them. And how much of what we upload online is worth saving at all?

The dizzying landscape of digital preservation is outlined in Abby Smith Rumsey's new book, When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future. Rumsey, a historian by trade, worked for over a decade with the Library of Congress's National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, where she tried to troubleshoot how to store digital materials in the long-term. She doesn't have all the answers, but her book offers a sweeping view of how societies have preserved massive amounts of information in the past and how our digital age might find solutions in the future.

VICE: Why talk about memory?
Abby Smith Rumsey: My own concern, as a historian, is that our generation be able to leave really robust records of what we've done, so that people in the future can investigate how we lived our lives as we experienced them. In the digital age, there's a lot circulating in the way of information, but none of it is kept very thoroughly. It's a spotty record. Technically, we don't know how to preserve it yet. Even more than that, what do we preserve? How do we know what's valuable?

Are these questions unique to the digital era?
Not entirely. Centuries ago, people also felt overwhelmed by too much information. They thought it was terrible to print in books, and even people like Thomas Jefferson thought the downfall of the world would be all these people reading novels and entertaining themselves. This was an issue that our parents railed against when television first became popular – they thought our brains were going to rot, and we'd no longer have the ability to concentrate on what's important. We'll always have more information than we know what to do with, but our skills and developing filters for sorting through what does and doesn't matter will grow faster. We're experiencing a digital vertigo that people will cease to experience 30 or 40 years from now, when our natural filters have become accustomed to filtering out a lot of what we think of as static now. And that's where we're lagging right now.

So we just have more stuff to sort through today?
Right, there's more stuff to go through. There's more of everything now than there was then . One of the things we tend to neglect is that – and this is unique to our age – it is not just human beings who will be reading and writing. It is machines now who do most of the reading for us. For example, when astronomers gather data from their instruments in space, they don't actually sit down and read that material. It's read by their machines. They tell the machines how to analyse what to look for, they program the machines, but machines are the only thing capable of reading at that scale. We can read our email, but when we actually want to search the entire archive of our email inbox over the course of our lives, we will use a machine, some algorithm of the machine, to do the searching for us.

"Without all the equipment to play it back, a hard drive would be meaningless to me, whereas you could take a book off the shelf at 500 years old and understand most of it." — Abby Smith Rumsey

Is there a concern that, in the future, machines won't know how to read these materials? Technology changes so rapidly that it seems the way we store information today will be totally obsolete in a few decades.
Yes, there are a couple challenges. One is that the materials themselves – digital code – requires machines to inscribe and play back. I could have a hard drive, and without all the equipment to play it back, it would be meaningless to me, whereas you could take a book off the shelf at 500 years old and understand most of it, if you can read the language. It's also very energy-dependent. If we're dependent on this technology, we need to secure reliable streams of electricity.

Another very real challenge, particularly for public institutions like libraries trying to preserve digital materials, is that a lot of the digital code is proprietary. It's owned by companies like Apple and Microsoft. It's actually not in the public domain. If I write my documents in Word, I own the content of the documents, but if Word goes away, there's not much I can do about it. It's owned by Microsoft. Libraries are having a really hard time with this. Copyright is one of the biggest problems in digital preservation and one which doesn't get discussed at all because it sounds arcane.

Right – an entire archive of digital materials can vanish if they're stored on a platform that disappears.
I have a friend who had a family member who died. They put together an online condolence book – it was a site where people could write remembrances and stuff like that. Several years later, when they wanted to look back on it, they found that the site had closed . This is going to happen to more things than we think. Many of the sites we use that are free, or that you rent space on, like a wedding site, they're private companies. You don't have ownership of it.

Is all of that stuff worth saving, though? I know the Library of Congress archives everyone's tweets. Do you think that's useful, or is that excessive?
We won't know the value of these things , and part of what's hard is that machines will make sense of the volume. I think it's brilliant on the part of the Library of Congress, and very brave on the part of Twitter, to save massive amounts of data without tying to figure out which part of it is important but just trying to save it in such a way that people in the future can find the right information and make sense of it. They're going to make it possible for people 20 years from now to figure out what was important about Twitter feeds during those years. Is every tweet really worth saving? All I can say, is we won't know for a while.

What about human memory? Is technology replacing the need for the human brain to remember things?
No, but it's sort of a complicated no. We are very dependent upon our phones, and I have to actually be near the phone in order to retrieve information. Things that, even 20 years ago, I would've memorised – somebody's telephone number, or my own telephone number – these things are now all stored external to me. But that was also true when I used to write things down. The temptation is always to try to save more information than we need to because we say to ourselves, "Oh, I might be able to use that one day." I mean, you should see my bookmarks! The number of things I bookmark because I think I'm going to go back someday and read them... It's just part of the endless human curiosity we have about the world.

We can store more on our machines than we could store on things like notebooks and in photographs before, and I view that as quite liberating. The more the mind can be freed of certain types of memory tasks, the freer the mind is to engage in other activities that machines cannot do for us.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Abby Smith Rumsey's latest book, When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future, will be published in the US on March 1, 2016 and in the UK in May 2016.

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

The green-cloaked shaman lifts his hands to the sky. To his left, one of his acolytes cradles the bowl containing the magic potion. The magic potion, it turns out, is a mixture of glitter and human semen.

"Queer ancestors come forth," cries the shaman, "Stand strong beside us. Banish this evil from time and space." The acolyte hurls the jizz-potion to the ground, and the assembled crowd erupts into furious drumming and chanting.

Don't worry, you haven't stumbled onto a piece of Game of Thrones fan fiction gone horribly wrong. In fact, I'm in a car-park in Shoreditch, outside Chariots Roman Spa, which for two decades has been east London's most notorious and best-loved gay sauna. At the start of the month it was announced that Chariots would be knocked down and turned into a luxury hotel, and the radical queer faeries are pissed off.

"It's an ancient Romany curse," one of them says excitedly. "We're cursing the descendants of these property developers to be queer for 13 generations – only for us to be queer is a blessing – so this is really just a blessing on this space, to make it sacred." As he's talking, the glitter-jizz mixture congeals into a slightly toxic looking sludge on the car-park floor.

It's becoming clear that London's queer spaces, like so much else that's vaguely fun and transgressive in the city, are under attack. We've watched the names of closing pubs and bars stack up: The Joiner's Arms; The George & Dragon; The Mother Black Cap; The Nelson's Head – Chariots is the latest casualty.

The LGBT activists, drag queens, and queer shamans who have gathered for this protest situate this loss within the wider context of London's relentless, steroidal regeneration. "It's another example of stupidly inflated rents forcing out a queer venue. But it's not just the LGBT community – it's people on low income, artists, anyone who doesn't fit that particular mould," says James Johnson from Act Up, an HIV/AIDS charity. John, another activist, puts it more bluntly: "It's the bland following the bland imposed by the rich."

It should be noted, though, that in recent years Chariots, and sauna culture in general, has received fairly extensive derision from within the gay community itself. Saunas are frequently looked down on as sleazy, grotty, and potentially unsafe embarrassments from a time when gay men were forced to live in the shadows. Why do we need saunas, ask a series of snippy op-eds, when we now have apps like Grindr and Scruff?

Activist Dan Glass, also of Act Up, offers a countering argument. "Grindr is great – but it's mainly great for white, financially secure men. Places like Chariots, for all their faults, offer a sanctuary for people who may not feel safe expressing their sexuality – people who are poor, people from certain ethnic communities – even middle-class men who may not have come out to their families."

Jamie McCarthy, a Chariots devotee who came down to say goodbye to the venue, echoes this. "I always found it a lot more accepting than most clubs and bars. For a start, you simply saw older gay men – even up to about the age of 80. What other spaces are there for older guys in London? I'm pretty sure there are guys for whom there is no other space where they could just hang out with other men who have sex with men."

Glass also takes on the sexual health implications. "Chariots provides on-the-spot HIV checks. Yes, some people act recklessly, but the alternative to a space like this is folk using apps to organise their own chem sex parties, with no safety whatsoever. What we are seeing is the destruction of all the infrastructure and spaces where these issues can be tackled, and people educated as a community."

Eventually, one of the guys who actually manages Chariots comes out to talk to the gathering – partly to gently ask them to wrap it up soon, as all the drumming was scaring away potential customers. He also says that their landlords had actually let them stay on longer than they strictly needed to, and that the sauna would try and find a new home. "Shoreditch has been changing for 10 years," he says. "We should have been protesting years ago when they started throwing artists out of their studios".

And maybe that is the point. Chariots going down isn't just a loss for the gay community. I'm straight. I'd never been to Chariots before tonight. But all my friends spoke about this place with such a mixture of joy, humour, devotion and occasional disgust that it always felt like part of my London. It was nice to sit on the 67 bus, knowing that 100 metres away people were having wild and anonymous sex, exploring their own boundaries and figuring out who they were. Like the ozone layer, or the continued existence of Paul McCartney, it was one of those things that has no obvious impact on your day-to-day life, but was comforting to know existed.

And crucially, the rent hikes and gentrifying forces that have swept the artists out of their studios, and are now destroying Chariots, are accelerating. The battles over preserving east London's Norton Folgate Monmouth House building – approved to be turned into office space by mayor Boris Johnson earlier this month, against Islington council's wishes – and the Bishopsgate Goods Yard continue. The loss of alternative, wild transgressive spaces is a loss for all of London.

"It's the destruction of another of the messy, dirty, human spaces we have, in favour of bright new, luxury spaces for those who can afford them," McCarthy, the Chariots veteran, says with a sigh, as the protest winds down. As if in direct opposition to this thought, a drag queen in a nun's habit shouts from behind us: "Right then, anyone for cock?"

(Photo: the writer)

By now the older shamans have all drifted off. The fabulously sequined younger activists all look at each other. "Shall we go in for a sauna, then?" one asks.

"Nah, "they decide, "let's go to the Glory." And they all pile into a car and head off to the trendy new gay bar in Dalston.

The Glamorous Beauty Queens of Miss Gay Lady Venezuela

Austerity Has Killed London's Leading LGBT Mental Health Charity

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

All images courtesy of PYLOT Magazine and this article originally appeared on VICE US.

For an independent magazine on its third issue, PYLOT looks surprisingly like the kind of big-budget international mag that's been kicking around for years: it's thick, laid out beautifully, and the photoshoots are so arresting that your eyes will wander straight to the credits in anticipation of finding a famous name. And there are a few of those, from the great American documentary photographer Roger Ballen, to British upstart Tom Johnson, to established photographer and filmmaker Jane Hilton; the talent onboard speaks volumes for the magazine.

Focusing on narrative storytelling and marrying fashion editorial with documentary photography, PYLOT occupies a unique place in the market. It's really for anyone who sees the gap between high fashion and everyday life as indecipherable. Also, PYLOT keeps it real. You might not notice it immediately, but the mag holds a firm "no retouching" policy. They don't use any Photoshop "in terms of beauty", as the team explains. "We won't do anything that affects how the model looks physically." Ironic, given that editor-in-chief Max Barnett, is – by day – a photographer, as well as a very talented beauty retoucher.

This might have something to do with PYLOT's other policy: analogue photography only. Photo editor Bex Day thinks this is imperative to the magazine's aesthetic. The color, highlights, and grain you get from shooting on film have an authenticity and finish that are nearly impossible to mimic with digital photography or fake through post production. To find out more about the PYLOT's firm ethos and the exciting stories they cover, we talked to magazine's core editorial team, consisting of Barnett, Day, fashion director and stylist Patricia Villirillo, and commissioning editor Henry Gorse.

Photo by Roger Ballen, courtesy of 'PYLOT'

VICE: Hey guys. Does someone want to kick things off by telling me how the magazine came to be?
Max Barnett, Editor-in-Chief: It started as an experiment while I was in my second year at university. I spent my final year researching and developing the concept as part of my university course, but I'd say the magazine got in full swing once Patricia Villirillo and Henry Gorse came on board.

It happened pretty organically; I met Bex at London Fashion Week when we were working backstage taking photos, and Bex introduced me to Patricia, and Patricia introduced me to Henry. After that, the team just flourished. We now have 13 members, which has made it possible to create something that not only embraces analogue photography, but diverse casting, real hard-hitting stories, and experimental fashion features.

What are some of the challenges you face with an independent mag like this? Patricia Villirillo, Fashion Director: I think the most challenging thing is to gain credibility within the industry, as we're all young and still finding our feet. We all work for free out of passion for the magazine; another challenge is that we have no budget at all, as all money from the print sales go to the cost of the next issue. We all help with the casting, assisting, pre-production, and post-production of the shoots for each issue as much as we can. It's definitely our labor of love.

Why is it called PYLOT?
Barnett: At first it was because the idea was a pilot; I was trailing the concept. But I prefer the way the name looks as PYLOT (as opposed to PILOT), the 'Y' gives an even weight to the text. The name has since come to symbolize our practice as a magazine – it helps to push us to create and think in ways that are not the norm. This ties in with our zero beauty retouching ethos, as – as far as I know – no one had yet declared themselves to be a zero beauty retouching publication when we started.

Tell me more about that – why no retouching?
We decided not to beauty retouch our imagery because we felt like, at the time of creating the magazine, there was not a great representation of reality in the fashion industry. I feel like this is changing now, which is great to see. A lot of younger, more independent magazines are going for a more natural finish. It was a way for us to state how we felt and still feel about ethics in the fashion industry, and a way for us to celebrate difference and flaws rather than conceal them.

Bex Day, Photo Editor: It's like that quote by the columnist Mary Schmich, which was later used in that Baz Luhrmann song, "Everybody's Free to Wear Sunscreen": "DO NOT READ BEAUTY MAGAZINES THEY WILL ONLY MAKE YOU FEEL UGLY." That really struck me. I could really relate. I thought, Why on Earth should publications be encouraging abnormal weight and overly retouched skin? Plus, it's important to break rigid beauty ideals and change how people think.

What are some of the themes you've had from issue to issue?
The previous themes have been dedicated to "Craft" and "Family." I think having a theme allows consistency throughout the curation of the publication, allowing a smooth flow of intriguing content. Our latest issue is "The Status Quo Issue."

Photo by Eamonn Freel, Styled by Alessia Vanini

What's in the new issue?
Well Eamonn Freel's fashion editorial is about his brother Ciaran who got brain cancer when he was six-years-old, which unfortunately stopped his brain from progressing. His shoot was about Ciaran's concept of "the status quo" and how he interprets the world. And then there was a fashion story the team constructed from the photographer Roger Ballen's archive, in collaboration with Roger himself.

What does it feel like to work with people like Roger Ballen?
Henry Gorse, Commissioning Editor: It was an absolute pleasure to work with Roger. I drove him and his crew down with Patricia to South Wales and we camped by the sea. These guys know analogue inside out, so it was a breath of fresh air to see how he worked. Hearing his stories and becoming a friend of his was a highlight of Issue 3 for me and the rest of the team. The stuff he was shooting back in the 80s and 90s is being ripped off like hell today, it was important for us to bring him back and give him the attention he deserves. Roger keeps out of the limelight, but we won't let that happen.

Day: We try to endorse established and new talent and mix it all together. Collaborating with industry legends feels incredible – it's a really great feeling that they are into what we do and really supporting us. It's kind of magical being able to talk to your idols and work closely with them.

For example, we also commissioned the fine art photographer Anna Fox to shoot her first fashion story, "Everyday Folk," which portrayed real Morris dancers who she cast and shot over a few days. We featured unseen works of Jane Hilton and an interview with Cheryl Newman to coincide with her renowned series Precious which is about her intimate portraits of Nevada prostitutes.

Photo by Jane Hilton, courtesy of 'PYLOT'

Why do you exclusively publish analogue photography?
In such a digital saturated world, we thought it was important to push for a resurgence in analogue photography. Using film as a medium is important because of the patience and the space you have to have in between shooting and waiting for the negatives to return – the images do not come back instantly. You also think much more carefully about each shot that you take because it is expensive, and you only really need one shot rather than the 50,000 you would take on digital. I guess it also sets a boundary for all the photographers to work to and again, keeps a consistency, too.

What's next for PYLOT?
Gorse: We'll continue to stick to our ethos. I think issue four will really show our quality, when you consider this is all done with no budget, it's scary to think what we could achieve with it. We like to pay attention to past greats, the underdogs and try to look for things in people we can elevate. The most exciting thing for me is watching the team grow together, the talent in this team is special, together there is no limit!

Check out PYLOT's website for more from the magazine and info on the next issue, which is due out in April.

Follow Amelia on Twitter.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

It's Thursday morning in South Carolina, and there's hardly a cloud in the sky. So far the day is tolerable for this Texas boy. I'm still fat full off last night's tenderloin and fried rice, but l load up on a Charleston Nasty Biscuit at the Hominy Grill anyway before the drive to the Lowcountry to see Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz.

Then we're blazing through the South Carolina countryside, heading west on I-26 and listening to Kanye rap about how much Kanye loves Kanye, surprising no one. By the time we get to Mutt's BBQ, where Cruz is supposed to drop in today, I'm hungry again. And I'd like to believe that even Cruz and his Tea Party People can't fuck up South Carolina BBQ.

The sign out front informs us that we've missed the £6 buffet, but even so the parking lot is filled to capacity – even the grass is completely covered with vehicles. Obviously, Ted Cruz has some fans out here. Once again, the bumper stickers remind us where we are. Today, I see a truck with a full nine flags waving from its flatbed: four are American, four are Confederate, and then there's one I've never seen before. I see a guy wearing a Ted Cruz football jersey, identifying him as a member of the "Cruz Crew." It's clean as fuck, in design and colour anyway. It's just the wrong team. I ask to talk, but he declines.

All photos by Abazar Khayami

Suddenly, the senator appears. The press pit lights up – Donald Trump got in a fight with the pope this morning, and reporters want to know what Cruz has to say about who is and isn't a Christian in this race. Cruz demurs, telling them that this one's between Donald and the pope. He makes his way into the building, where his opening act, South Carolina Congressman Jeff Duncan and Utah Senator Mike Lee, are warming up the crowd, making jokes with biblical references and non-secular punchlines. I find a spot in the back and try to see past the assorted trucker hats to the makeshift stage.

After the requisite ass-kissing, the Courageous Conservative steps into the arena and asks that God bless the great state of South Carolina. He thanks his warm-up act for their fidelity to the Constitution and to God. Almost everything Cruz says has to do with Christians, the Constitution, or Barack Obama, who he describes as a disaster to loud applause. He also manages to work in the fact that a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows him leading Trump by two points, a big shift for the Republican senator from Texas. The crowd once again erupts in applause.

Cruz is a little more spit-shined and polished than Trump – his policies at least follow some kind of logical train of thought. But at least in South Carolina, they're both preaching to the same choir – hell, the car parked behind us at Mutt's has a Trump bumper sticker on the back. And when you boil it down, the rhetoric is basically the same. Cruz's stump speech is about what President Ted Cruz would do on his first day in office, a list that includes rescinding every single executive order ever issued by Barack Obama; opening an investigation into reproductive health non-profit organisation Planned Parenthood; instructing the IRS and other rogue federal agencies to stop persecuting Christians; and ripping up the Iranian nuclear deal. Oh, and also moving the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Pretty ambitious first day, Teddy.

As Cruz winds down, we post up by the front door with the news crews and some other suckers in Cruz jerseys, hoping to catch the man on his way out. An older gentleman in gym shorts and moccasins with socks stands nearby with an 8x10 glossy picture of Cruz's face and a sharpie. A teenager dressed up like bowtie-loving businennman Orville Redenbacher drops his business card into a designated box on a nearby Cruz merch stand. The official tees are moving, but there's a lot of homemade gear around here as well – Cruz supporters seem to have some free time on their hands. We chat for a minute with Duncan, the South Carolina congressman who likes to pull a copy of the Constitution out of his left pocket for effect.

Suddenly, Secret Service agents instruct everyone to get off the sidewalk as the senator exits the building. I'm eighth in line outside the door, and when Cruz stops near me, I ask how he plans to stop the federal persecution of the religious right. It's No. 3 on his Day 1 to-do list, and I know that it's an issue that strikes a major nerve with the Tea Party. He lets me know he would just tell federal agencies to lay off Christians, and that the current persecution stems from Obama's abuse of executive power. I thank him for his time, and he continues down the line, working the crowd.

Watching him in action, I totally understand how this guy won an election and why his campaign is resonating so strongly with Christian conservatives. But not every Christian conservative is a Cruz hypebeast, as I suspect we'll see at the next stop: the Conservative Review Convention, a confab of right-wing infotainers and presidential candidates that's going on Thursday night in Greenville, South Carolina.

At this point, I'm getting used to the looks I get from white men in Ford trucks here – it's pretty standard when you're black in places white people thought you knew better than to attend. I'm supposed to already feel too unwelcome to be here. But I'm here now, and I won't leave until I'm ready.

Inside, I spot a funnel cake concession stand and grab one because that's what you do in the South. We wander past various right-wing talk radio booths and people milling around in campaign shirts, and eventually, we make our way to the spin room. Halfway through a pulled pork slider, I get word that Sean Hannity will be in shortly.

I wipe the BBQ sauce off my beard and get ready. I ask him if he and Fox News will throw their support behind the winner of the GOP nomination, even if it's Donald Trump. He tells me that he and Fox News are two separate things, and he deftly avoids giving me a straight answer. I thank him anyway. Leaving, he doesn't just give me a handshake – he gives me dap. A good strong dap, too. Somebody has black friends, y'all.

As the convention begins, our host Michelle Malkin, a self-proclaimed "angry brown lady in a box", welcomes us and announces that this is a safe space for conservatives. Matt Kibbe, a libertarian-leaning operative still reeling from Rand Paul's campaign, follows with a Bernie Sanders "Just Say No" joke comparing socialism to drugs. The next speaker, Virginia Congressman Dave Brat, talks in a conservative tongue so pure I only understand every third word. Later, I see the name Limbaugh on the screen and almost go into cardiac arrest. But it's not Rush – it's his lesser-known brother, David. I breathe a sigh of relief.

And then I see him. The golden goose I've been waiting for all day. A literal Tea Partier, dressed in colonial gear and in full character. And he wants to talk to me. I am the luckiest fucking man in the world. He explains himself, and I do everything in my power to not burst out laughing in his face. Interestingly, he hates Trump with a passion, describing him as a megalomaniac. But he says he's had to hold his nose for Republican candidates through the last few elections and will do it again for Trump before he lets another godless Democrat in the White House. OK.

Later, the one Republican candidate I have yet to see in person enters the room: Finally, it's Ben Fucking Carson. I head back to the spin room stat. Marco Rubio canceled his appearance here tonight, and Cruz has already come and gone, so as far as I'm concerned, Carson is the closer. I ask why his campaign hasn't done better, given how strong his support was among Christian conservatives. He tells me that the media has ignored him, hoping that its lack of attention and general disinterest in his campaign will force him to simply quit the race. Which, he says, he has no intention of doing.

Eventually, the convention winds down, and we prepare for the three-hour drive back to Charleston. It's been a long day, and if I never hear the words forefathers or constitution again in my life, it'll be too damn soon. It's just too fucking much. Plus, I'm out of weed, so my patience for this shit is shot. Gonna find out who the South Carolina Kush plug is. Holla.

Follow Bun B on Twitter.

All images courtesy of Brian Chippendale and Drawn + Quarterly

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Though he's best known for being one of the beasts behind noise-punk duo Lightning Bolt's drum kit, multitalented artist-musician Brian Chippendale is an equally-impossible act to follow when he puts pen to paper. Since co-founding the influential Rhode Island art/music/comics collective Fort Thunder in 1995, Chippendale has been creating comics that blend hyper-dense visuals, rollicking action sequences, goofy slice-of-underpaid-artist-life humour, and biting political satire. The result is like nothing else in comics – " Bloom County through a Gary Panter filter," as Chippendale describes it, "though Panter is way more unhinged. It's genetically complicated."

Puke Force, out from Drawn + Quarterly this week, may be his most accessible book to date. Unlike past work, it's not enormously thick (like its 2010 predecessor, If 'n Oof), extremely tall and hard to hold (like 2006's Ninja), or drawn on the pages of a Japanese catalog (2007's Maggots). Plus, even though Chippendale began working on the text seven years ago, the themes explored in Puke Force feel on-the-pulse, suggesting a naysayer-like quality to the artist.

Utilizing Chippendale's trademark "snake style" layout – in which the action weaves back and forth across each page in zig-zag fashion – Puke Force is a cautionary tale of Grave City, a teeming neoliberal metropolis beset by the dislocating influences of online groupthink and lone-wolf terrorism. Its water has been privatised, its social networks are under surveillance, and its shitty rock bands can barely find a place to play. In other words, though Chippendale may have started the book by serializing it online back in 2009, it's very, very 2016.

VICE: This book was seven years in the making. What took this one so long?
Brian Chippendale: The latest Lightning Bolt album was six years in the making, too. What the hell have I been doing? Looking back, I'm pretty sure bursts of Puke Force drawing coincide with bursts of Lightning Bolt touring – like, I remember drawing all the cafe bombing episodes right after a big tour. The period after Lightning Bolt tours is always a period of calm, because I'm flush with cash and I can work on whatever – and "work on whatever" kind of means work on things that make me no money.

As the comic went on, the amount of info I had to juggle built up, and if I didn't have like a month of free time ahead of me, I wouldn't even bother trying to get back in the swing of it. It takes some time to get that specific idea machine flowing, and to get your pen hand really in shape, too.

If I didn't know any better I'd read this book as a warning to kids about the dangers of online. Not that it's preachy, but the constant connectedness goes hand-in-hand with surveillance, and with the spread of destructive ideas.
People are definitely reading a heavy warning about online activity in the book, and I think that's one regret I have. I love the Internet. [ Laughs] I've gotten so much practical use out of it: Selling prints, booking tours, saying hey to old friends – all that. But I do feel that even though I have an overt need for and warmth toward some social media, there is an undercurrent of energy on there that corrodes the soul.

What do you mean by "corrodes the soul"?
I think it's the feeling that you're not alone anymore. That should be a positive thing, right? But I think aloneness is important. It's very important to get lost in your own head, not just get lost in the hive mind. As an artist, I need to venture inside to get at deeper meaning. Maybe new muscles for that are forming in younger people, new ways to go deep. I don't necessarily think we are going to lose a generation to the internet. It's an amazing tool. Pizza delivery drones, on the other hand? I'll definitely be throwing rocks at them... and ordering pizzas.

Even though Puke Force is a comic about internet culture, it's still very rooted in physical community. The core characters are roommates, or bandmates, or people who all go to the same donut shop. They're connected in a physical space.
For me, that's the answer. The last interview I did for the book really focused on a perceived sense of hopelessness and fear in the book, but I don't totally see it. In my comics, I follow the story, not necessarily the moral message. That doesn't mean the moral message isn't there, it just plays out in a different way. The violence is the loudest, but it's kind of peace that brings everything together.

Like you say, the characters are rooted in a physical world. Community still plays a vital role in society, and it's as strong as ever. Not just online community, but physical, hand-to-hand community. We all still live in a solid world. We all still eat. So the hope is in that. Humans will never truly get sucked into a digital netherworld. Toilets will keep us grounded.

Still, considering the gestation period and the fact that some of this material was posted as early as 2009, it's almost frighteningly prescient. There's a storyline about water privatization that could be about Flint, Michigan; there's a storyline that sounds like GamerGate...
It was upsetting to think that I was making political satire, but that its time was slipping away. Like, I had to get this book out now – that's what I've been thinking for three years. But, somehow, it feels like since maybe 2000, political issues don't get solved anymore, they just intensify. It's all rising. There's a big tsunami of bad shit that's been building for 15 years. Everything [in Puke Force] has stayed, in some way, relevant.

There's an undercurrent of deep skepticism about parenthood in the text. This seems like an idea you wrestled with quite a bit.
This thing took shape over seven years, and one thing that has changed since I started it is my view on parenthood. I still have no kid or kids, but I'm open to it. I'm ready for it. I was terrified of the idea. But it's still a good thing to joke about, ready or not.

In a way, this whole book is just one episode from a larger narrative. If I'm not mistaken, there are connections between this book and your past work like Ninja and If 'n Oof. Is there a Chippendale-verse?
There is a Chippendale-verse. It's not the focus, but it's there. Like, there's a scene in Puke Force where a woman gives birth, and the doctor from If 'n Oof shows up with a soap box to give to her asshole husband. It's just a joke appearance, but I work it out well. Also, the gang from Atrophy Life, my Mothers News serial, show up for one diner scene. That was really because I was drawing a bunch of stuff for Atrophy Life, and I wasn't in Puke Force mode. I needed an episode to get me back in line, so I used them to do that. I like my Atrophy Life gang. As for Ninja, it's a direct prequel to Puke Force.

Your snake-style layout remains unique in comics over a decade after your development of it. Is this a disappointment in some way, that others haven't followed your lead?
No, it's a horrible place to go with comics, doing the snake-style layout. I don't recommend it. [ Laughs] It's good no one else has gone down this dark path. I already loosened the rules: I used to make you go up the facing page, but now I treat each page as its own snake, not each page spread. Don't go there, kids.

'Puke Force' is out now in the US via Drawn + Quarterly. For more information visit the publishing house's website here.

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They obviously took a lot more than this. This looks like it's about £500

Ten years ago today, a group of blaggers from London and the Home Counties pulled off the largest cash robbery in British history. After using an inside man to secretly film the interior of a Securitas depot in Tonbridge, Kent, they abducted the depot manager's family to use as hostages, tied up 14 Securitas staff members, and made off with just over £53 million. It was one of the UK's most ambitious crimes – although the perpetrators' competence didn't quite match up to their gall.

Virtually every error imaginable was made, with DNA evidence left on items used in the raid, incriminating information entrusted to a member of the public, and a phone call plotting the heist accidentally recorded. Money linked to the robbery was found in the houses of the culprits, weapons were found abandoned in a van and one of the perps had kept a floorplan of the Securitas depot in his home, covered in his fingerprints, after the heist.

To mark the 10th anniversary of the robbery, I got in touch with some former criminals to get their view on what could have been done differently. Was there a way in which this monumental crime could have been pulled off without the robbers landing themselves with lengthy prison sentences? Former South London villain Johnny Mack, who had taken part in a £250,000 diamond robbery before reaching his 15th birthday, thinks so. He was less than impressed with the depot robber's methods and went so far as to question the logic behind attempting such a large-scale cash robbery in the first place.

Johnny Mack, reformed and visibly loving life

"I would never have got involved with something involving that much cash," Mack told VICE. "If someone said to me: 'I've got a £50 million job, are you interested?', I'd say no. The simple reason is that I don't know of one job yet that's gone down involving that type of money, where they haven't been caught. When you rob that much cash, you need to have people outside the country who are going to buy that money. The group that did the Tonbridge Securitas got around £50 million. If they sold it through the black market, they'd be lucky if they got £20 million back. They would have been better off going after gold or diamonds."

Stuart Campbell, a criminal jack-of-all-trades who has acted as a fixer for robberies, agreed. "It'd have been easier to get rid of diamonds," he said. "Once they've been cut and polished again, their identity's totally altered." It seems there's a reason why most crimes that target cash are relatively small-scale: it's better to do lots of little robberies and actually get away with it than it is to do a huge one that ends up being the subject of a multi-million pound police operation.

Another major error that the gang made was recruiting hairdresser and makeup artist Michelle Hogg, a policeman's daughter with no experience of crime. She had been on a course that taught her how to apply theatrical makeup, and was used to fit disguises to the robbers. After being leaned on by the authorities during the aftermath of the raid, she testified against her alleged co-conspirators, which helped secure their imprisonment, and is now in the witness protection program as a result.

According to Mack, getting her onboard represented a huge error of judgement. "Would you trust a beautician to be involved in something involving that amount of money?" he asked. "When it comes to things like that, the less people involved, the better. They let far too many people in on it."

Mick Judge, Kent Police Detective Chief Investigator in charge of the case at the time, reflects

These sentiments were echoed by ex-gangster Jason Cook, who was a known face in the London underworld from the age of 17. "Too many people knew what was happening," he said. "There was no need for everyone who was involved to see everybody else. Each person should have just seen one other person so that if one of them went down, the others would have been protected."

So it seems that those in the know don't believe the robbery was as great a crime as it's been made out to be. There was one thing that most of them agreed was a good idea, though: the involvement of an inside man. The gang had recruited Securitas employee Emir Hysenaj to film the inside of the depot using a pinhole camera so that they could gain an insight into the place they were about to rob.

"That's what I would have done," Campbell said. "The bad thing there is that even though they had the camera, they still had to leave behind over £100 million because they didn't bring a big enough van. They should have scoped out the amount that was going to be in there so that they could bring the right size vehicle."

Hysenaj arguably took the biggest risk of anyone in the gang, as his position at the company meant that there was a link between him and the heist. Organised crime expert Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán, who's spoken to VICE before, told me that "inside men" tend to get away with their crimes more often than other criminals. This is because the police usually focus on career criminals, allowing grey agents – those within legal organisations who abuse their positions – to slip below the radar.

Unfortunately for Hysenaj, armed robberies are an exception to this rule. In the wake of the convictions of five of the gang members, the Met Police's Flying Squad head John O'Connor told the BBC that there's always likely to be an inside man when a big job goes down. This meant that the police were on the lookout for signs of an inside job, and Hysenaj eventually received a 20-year sentence for his involvement.

Other gang members made the schoolboy error of hiding either money linked to the depot or items used in the robbery at their properties. Van garage owner Roger Coutts stashed overalls and a balaclava that he had worn during the raid at his house in Bexleyheath, and used-car salesman Stuart Royle hid the keys to vehicles used in the kidnapping of the depot manager at his mum's house. Roofer and martial arts expert Lea Rusha left plans of the depot and Securitas note wrappers in his house, and guns and ammunition in his shed. These were the mistakes that most perplexed the former criminals I spoke to.

"I don't know why they did that," Campbell told me. "The money should have been moved to a safe house straightaway, or down to a farm in the middle of nowhere. A few of them left DNA on various different things as well. They should have used gloves whenever they touched anything. The fact that one of them accidentally pressed the record button on his phone when he was discussing the robbery was baffling too, although I suppose everyone makes avoidable errors at times."

Stuart Campbell, in his halycon days

John Costi, a reformed character who has since forged a career as a fine artist, believes that the prospect of being millionaires might have gone to the robbers' heads. "They should have buried the money and guns deep somewhere off the radar, but when you've got £53 million, I think excitement can get the better of you," he told me.

Costi wasn't entirely critical of the robbers' tactics, and pointed out that large sums of money were never recovered. "Even though they got nicked, in the scheme of things they've done pretty well," he said. "The old bill will be all over them when they get out, but the money they're sitting on is more than most will ever make in a lifetime. Now it's just about how they disappear and get the money on release, 'cause they'll have crazy license conditions and the police will be onto them."

One of the ringleaders, Paul Allen, has just reportedly been freed after spending nine years in prison. If he gets his share of the prize, will it justify being forced to endure a decade behind bars? That depends on whether you believe a price can be placed on years of your life. Crime of the century? In terms of scale, maybe, but in terms of attention to detail, it clearly left a lot to be desired.

Thanks, everyone. Mack's currently working on a film about his life of crime, Cook has written a book based on his experiences, Campbell has an autobiographical book on the way, literally called Jibbers, and Salcedo-Albarán's latest book on drug trafficking and corruption came out last year.

Follow Nick on Twitter.

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This article originally appeared on VICE Serbia.

After days of mostly verbal fuss over the Serbian parliament's approval of the law on cooperation with NATO – which for those with active long-term memories is nothing new, but more of a legislative confirmation of an almost decade-long agreement – hundreds of supporters of ultranationalist and right-wing parties and movements gathered for an anti-NATO protest in the capital city of Belgrade on Saturday. We were there, watching them wave Russian flags and proudly carry iconographic photos of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The protest was held on the same day that national authorities confirmed the deaths of two Serbian embassy employees who had been allegedly held hostage by Islamic State fighters in Libya before being killed in a US air strike. But this wasn't a topic for the protestors. They were more disturbed by what they said was a "betrayal" of the Serbian statehood a move towards falling into the hands of "Western masters" – and they wanted to call on Putin for help.

Protests against NATO aren't unheard of, even in member countries like the UK, and Serbia hasn't gained membership to the organisation either. People have marched against the requirements for demilitarisation or their opposition to their home country taking NATO-led military action without the general population's support before. In Serbia, with its turbulent history of relations with both Western countries and NATO – whose war planes bombed the country for three months in 1999 for its then-regime's treatment of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo – these sorts of protests are far from unexpected.

But the protest against NATO "stealing Serbia's sovereignty", complete with flamboyant Russian flags, pompous photos of Putin and a march towards the Russian embassy in Belgrade, separates Serbia from other opponents of the military machine. We don't want NATO boots on our soil, but apparently Putin's – why not? Here are photos from what we saw.

Ethan Canin. Photo by Nina Subin/courtesy of Random House

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Ethan Canin is the New York Times bestselling author of seven novels. His most recent, A Doubter's Almanac, is about a mathematical genius named Milo Andret, and the ways his genius becomes a liability, scorching Milo and the people close to him.

Canin was my thesis advisor at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. I liked and admired him because he was intelligent, articulate, and generous with his criticism. He wasn't afraid of offering too much guidance, causing someone to feel something, or seeming proscriptive. He was a great teacher, trained at Iowa during its heyday and immersed in story ever since. I wasn't a part of this, but I heard that during my second year, the first-years started calling him "Dad." This annoyed me a little, because I felt kind of like—well, I felt there was something a little possessive about it. (Of course, I only felt that way because I, too, was possessive.) But I digress. The point is, Ethan Canin is kind of the dad that 21st-century American letters never had.

—Amie Barrodale, fiction editor

Singularity Theory

One Saturday in June, his mother banged the garbage-can lid at dinnertime, but when he came in from the woods he found his parents sitting in the Plymouth. His father beckoned him into the backseat. As soon as he got in, they drove away. His father was dressed in a flannel shirt and a fedora. When they stopped, they were in downtown Cheboygan. The Andrets rarely came here. His father paid to park at the pier, even though it would have cost nothing to park a block away. Already this was strange. So was the fedora. The day was warm. Along the boardwalk, a bicycle cab was bumping across the planks and a cotton-candy salesman was spinning cones. The sun was low already, and where the dark lake was disturbed by watercraft it winked with painful brightness, as though the moving vessels were sprinkling glass behind them. Today was his parents' anniversary, he discovered. He could see that there had been some kind of disagreement, though. His mother fidgeted with a picnic basket.

At the public pier, they rented a boat. Now, this was stupendous. A bright blue wooden dinghy, 15 or 16 feet long, with a plank seat at the oarlocks and a high-backed bench in the rear, shaded by a canopy. It looked like the king's skiff in a royal amusement ride. Warily, his father examined it. Then he took off his hat, held it to the side, and jumped down into the hull. The vessel shifted, its keel striking the still surface with a sound like a pan slapping a table, before it steadied against the dock. He took his position at the oars, then waited with a hard expression while Milo and his mother climbed in under the canopy. The picnic basket was placed on the floor. In a moment they'd set out for the northern point of the harbor, a short distance across the inlet, his father's rhythmic stroke swiftly shortening the stretch of water that had now begun to reflect the purplish gold of the sunset. The oarlocks creaked, and the slatted seatback pressed and eased against Milo's spine. Beyond the breakwater lay open lake. As they crossed the far end of the timber-roofed pier, the church bells chimed eight o'clock.

Almost 15 years later, at his interview for graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, the famous Dr. Hans Borland, of the Borland invariant, asked Milo how he'd first become interested in mathematics.

"I was out on the water with my parents," Milo began. Something had changed in him, and he'd found in his 20s that he could tell stories, even long ones, with surprising ease. Nonetheless, he'd remained as alone in the world as he'd always been and could still neither predict nor understand the behavior of others. He remembered Dr. Borland leaning forward. A glimpse of shrewd irises above gold-stemmed trifocals.

"It was evening," Milo said. "We'd gotten a late start. This was in Lake Huron. The northern part."

"Lake Huron," said Dr. Borland, peering over his spectacles. "An underappreciated body of water."

Someone laughed.

"My father took no pleasure in boats," said Milo.

"A disadvantage on the Great Lakes, is it not?"

"He had his reasons."

Milo waited for something more. If they asked, he would tell the story about the Solomon Sea.

"Go on with what you were saying, young man," said another professor, from the back of the room. "What happened on the lake?"

"It was mid-November," said Milo. "Practically winter in our part of the state. My father had rowed us out past the harbor, but he hadn't accounted for the currents or the dark." He paused now, enjoying the quiet. "By the time the sun set, we were still a good ways out. Then the wind came up. It built a sea. Three- or four-foot swells. It was a small boat. We were coming down pretty hard into the troughs. My father's left arm is stronger than his right—we're a family of lefties—and we got turned around."

"Ah," said Professor Borland. "Interesting—and you too are a lefty?"

"Yes, I am."

"Go on."

"So, in the dark, he began rowing us"—here he paused—"away from land. The hills north of town block the light, so when you're out that deep you can't really see much. Lake Huron might as well be an ocean. My father's a good navigator, but he must have been keeping track by some other landmark—maybe the lights from the salmon boats up to the northeast. I figured he knew he was rowing us deeper, so I didn't say anything. Not for a while, anyway. But eventually I realized he didn't know that he was bringing us the wrong way—out to sea."

"And how did you know that?" said Dr. Borland, leaning forward now.

"I've always been able to do it."

"Do what?"

"Maintain awareness of my coordinates. Know where I am."

"Day or night?"

"Either one. Doesn't matter. I don't think it depends on sight."

"And what does your father do?"

"He rowed us a quarter mile further out—"

"I mean, what's his job? What does he do for work? I assume he's still living."

"He teaches high school. At the school I went to. Chemistry and physics."

"Which might explain such a skill in the boy," said Dr. Borland, briefly turning to the other faculty. A couple of them nodded. "Although you might have expected the old man himself to have positional aptitude. Which he obviously hasn't."

Milo could see that the story had impressed his questioners, and he decided not to offer anything more. He chose not to mention his mother, for example, who could always give directions in the car without consulting a map. Or her brother, who made a living in Las Vegas playing blackjack from a memory system.

There were other problems with the story, as well. The November part of it, for one. This was far from the truth. As was the wind. They'd indeed gotten lost in the moonless night, but it had been in June, in warm weather, on a calm lake. In fact, the summertime wind on that part of Lake Huron almost always calmed at dusk, rather than grew stronger. And by November, when the salmon were in the rivers, the fishing boats were in dry dock. But he was sure that none of these men would know such facts. The water in reality had been as smooth as oil, and the air had been a warmish, comforting presence on his skin. His mother had nonetheless grown worried as dark fell over the shore, and his father had responded with grimness and silence, pulling strenuously at the oars until, by Milo's estimation, they were a half mile out to sea, under a black planetarium sky. That's when Milo had finally led them home.

"In actual fact," said Dr. Borland, turning his head again to the others, "very few can do this sort of intrinsic, spatial mapping." There were murmurs, and he returned his gaze to Milo. "And this marked the beginning of your interest in mathematics?"

"I suppose it did."

"And you led your parents home that night because you could picture the plane of the earth and had accounted for all your movements on it."

"I could, Professor. I did."

In fact, he'd long been able to picture the world, all of its six directions, his exact place in any three-dimensional topography. Perhaps the skill had evolved from his years in the pathless woods. For as long as he could remember, his surroundings had been forming themselves into an inverted, low-sloping bowl, a hemisphere of smoothly shifting coordinates in which his position at the center was continually being recalibrated. That part was true. The other details just made the story more memorable.

"Amazing," said Dr. Borland, peering at him again over the tops of his glasses.

"I would call it the bowl of the earth, actually, Professor Borland. Not a plane. An upside-down bowl. A spherical cap, as one of you might say."

"I stand corrected."

Now there was laughter. Borland silenced it with a finger. "Tell us, young man," he said, "how do you pronounce your name?"

"Milo, sir. Like silo."

"And the surname?"

"Andret," he said. He glanced down. "Like bandit, but with the r there."

"Ah," said the professor, turning briefly to his colleagues. "The Midwest."

There was laughter again, looser this time, but Borland once more silenced it with a finger. He turned to the room. "Some of you might have noticed," he said drily, "that this candidate did not take the usual exams. On the recommendation of a colleague from the great state of Michigan"—here he bowed, slightly mockingly, in Milo's direction—"I had him sent a few problems instead, which I chose myself." He turned to the audience. "Let me tell you, gentlemen, these were not your standard questions from the graduate record exam." Now he turned to Milo. "Do you know how you did on them, young man?"

"No, sir, I don't."

"Suffice it to say—" Now he removed his glasses. "Suffice it to say, I see a great deal of potential in you." He looked up. "This is a name, gentlemen—Milo Andret—that you'll all be wise to remember."

There was some coughing. Then silence. Milo could discern little meaning from it. Almost a decade before, as a freshman at Michigan State, he'd earned a perfect score in linear algebra, better than all of the graduate students in the class, without doing a single evening of homework. But for the five years since his degree, he'd been working at a Gulf station in Lansing.

"Young man," said Dr. Borland, "your qualification exam was remarkable." He removed his glasses and peered down at him. "Truly remarkable."

Milo was silent. He'd had a smattering of Cs in the humanities and one D, in sociology.

"And you spent your 20s working in a filling station?"

"It was a service station, really. I did plenty of engine work. I wanted to get a little experience." His father had suggested he might be asked such a question.

"Well, you've had an exceptional, if not a bit erratic, record in college," Professor Borland said. "Let us hope the experience has matured you." He quieted the murmuring. "Let us also hope that we haven't wasted too much time in finding you. I'm sure you'll fit in very well with the mathematics program at the University of California, Berkeley. Which we consider, by the way"—here he snapped away his gaze—"to be the best on the planet."

Excerpted from A Doubter's Almanac by Ethan Canin by arrangement with Penguin Random House. A Doubter's Almanac is due out in the UK via Bloomsbury Publishing in August.

Finding true love is no easy task. I've lost count of how many times I've been on Tinder dates so bad that afterwards I go home and have a little cry over some Katie Melua. Then, even if I meet a person I like, it's easy to hang around with them for a month before they're just like, "Wait, this guy is actually really irritating to hang around with," and I'm forced to head home. To listen to yet more Katie Mulea – possibly "Nine Million Bicycles In Beijing", that's a good one.

So maybe I just didn't have anything in common with these women. But what if you did share the same passions as the person you're with? What if you found love and built a relationship in the very conference centre in which you were at your happiest? I went down to London Super Comic Convention on Saturday to find out, talking to couples dressed up together in their cosplay finest about why they'd bothered and asking what it's like to find love when where you can't be totally sure what anyone really looks like.

Heather and Taz as Victorian Rouge and Gambit. Met at the panto

VICE: Did you meet at Comic Con?
Taz: No we actually met at the theatre, I saw a picture of her doing Rogue and she saw me doing Gambit and it went from there.

Who is the biggest con fan out of you two?
Heather: The costume side is all from me, because when I was working in the theatre I loved doing costume design. My boss told me that there was these places that people went and dressed up and I was like, "You're fucking shitting me, I need to go to these right now." So for the last two years I've been doing these.

Is that why you've come together, to bring him along?
Heather: Yeah I make all of his costumes. If you're by yourself and one of you has a costume then the other person just has to stand by the side, awkwardly, while the other always gets their photo taken. So it's about finding costumes he really likes to wear as well.
Taz: For me I just get to feel hugely proud of what she does.

So it's like a bonding exercise?
Taz: Exactly.

Brice and Vicky as Ivy and Joker. Met at Comic Con

So you met at Comic Con?
Brice: Yes, we did!
Vicky: It's kind of complicated ... We both met doing this, and even though we are together we're both still technically married and are helping each other through our divorces.

Oh wow, okay. How did you meet, then?
Vicky: I put up a picture of my Catwoman cosplay and he put up his Batwoman costume, then we started talking on Facebook and met up in real life and got on.

Why do you like dressing up as a pair?
Vicky: It's nice to do something as a couple because we don't get to spend time much time together cos of work.

Why do you put so much effort in to it?
Brice: I get a lot out of it. Earlier today I was being broadcast to two children in Hong Kong, waving and saying hello and threatening them. Last year I was dressing up as Spiderman and a little child ran up and threw his arms around me. I was crying inside, it was a perfect moment.

Alice and Andy as Tank Girl and Steampunk Joker. Met at Comic Con in 2014

How did you guys approach each other?
Alice: Well, he was dressed as Joker and I was Harly Quinn. Then he was standing behind me and I just sort of groped him.
Andy: It's the genuine story. She turned around and said: "Ooh, a Joker who's taller than me."

Who's the biggest cosplay fan?
Alice: He's been doing longer but I do it better.
Andy: I've been doing it about four years and she's been doing it for two.

What makes you guys do all this each year?
Alice: It beats sitting at home watching a film.
Andy: I like getting into the character. I like it when little kids run up to you and think you're this character, it's really rewarding.
Alice: Yeah also I hate dressing up normally, like for work. I hate that and find it so boring.

Andy and Liora – Princess Mononoke and Wolf Guy. Didn't meet at Comic Con

Whose the biggest cosplay fan?
Andy: She got me into it. I'd never done it before I met her.
Liora: I've been doing it for about two years. I just really like anime and always dressed crazy, so I thought 'why not?' It's just an excuse to do something different.

Do you drag him out to these things, though?
Liora: No he loves it – he comes along of his own accord.

What makes you want to dress up?
Andy: I just think it's kind of cute really.
Liora: It's quite romantic in a weird fantasy sort of way. Its nice to be someone different, to escape reality with each other.

How long have you been together?
Andy: About four months.

Steve and Clare – Batman and Catwoman. Met at the BBC, apparently

Who's the biggest cosplay fan between you two?
Steve: Probably me.

Do you like doing it together?
Steve: Yeah, we're a part of the UK Garrison, a cosplay group that mainly does Star Wars stuff as part of the 501st Legion. And I really liked Batman and one day just said to Clare, "Well maybe you should do Catwoman," and she went for it.
Clare: After a lot of dieting.

Why do you like dressing up as a pair?
Clare: For charity events they are quite strict on the characters you can play, so we always dress in things that go together. And also at large events like this it's always better to have someone with you because you can get lost and separated.

So who makes the costumes?
Steve: I make the most of them. I'm a sculptor and designer whereas Clare is in a more normal office job.

How long have you been together?
Steve: We met when we were working at the BBC, not at a con. But we've known each other for about 20 years.

We took in the other sights after making people tell us about their coupled-up costuming. Enjoy.

Far Cry Primal is set in 10,000 BCE, a time when English wasn't exactly the common tongue – let alone any other modern language, for that matter. There's no way of really knowing how humans communicated that far back in our history, with the earliest writing so far discovered dating from the seventh millennium BCE. Going back further, from the Neolithic era – the beginning of farming, and complex house building – to the stones and bones of the Mesolithic, puts anyone looking to depict the spoken word entirely in the field of speculation. But that doesn't mean a few educated guesses can't be made.

Modern Indo-European languages, like English, Italian and Russian, are likely descended from a single, Proto-Indo-European (PIE) tongue – so wrote Eric A Powell for Archaeology magazine, in an article titled "Telling Tales in Proto-Indo-European". He referenced the work of University of Kentucky assistant professor of linguistics Andrew Byrd in his piece – Byrd had used his expertise to record a 19th century PIE parable, Schleicher's fable, with updated pronunciation. Byrd himself had drawn upon the research of linguists Eric Hamp and Subhadra Kumar Sen to reach his end result.

It was these recordings that drew Ubisoft to Byrd. They emailed him, and his wife and fellow University of Kentucky professor (of modern and classical languages) Brenna, when the developer's Montréal studio was looking to create a prehistoric vocabulary for the tribes of Primal. With the cast of the game living in a fictionalised part of what's now Northern Europe at the dawn of the Holocene, it made sense to base their language on what's known, today, of PIE.

"At first, we didn't believe the email was real," I'm told, over email. "But when we discovered it wasn't spam, we were elated. As gamers ourselves, and scholars of ancient languages, this really was a match made in heaven."

The email had come from Yan Charron, a localisation expert in the Ubisoft Montréal team. He'd found Andrew's recordings, part of what he says is his "larger academic mission to view Proto-Indo-European as a real, human language," rather than mostly meaningless grunts, growls and clicks – your standard caveman-in-a-movie "words". Andrew and Brenna set about creating two distinct languages for Primal, Wenja and Izila, both of which were based on years of research into PIE.

"Just as archaeologists can dig up pottery shards and bones, and make inferences about ancient cultures, so linguists can analyse the words of ancient languages and make inferences about even older languages," the pair tells me (the email replies are shared between the two respondents). "One of the ways we figure out proto-languages is through something called the comparative method."

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"If you know both Spanish and French, you might already realise that the languages are related through how similar they sound," the Byrds continue. "For example, the word for 'who' in Spanish is quien and in French qui – and if you then compare those with Italian, chi, and Portuguese, quem, you can imagine that, at some point, all of these languages descended from a language that had a word for 'who' that looked somewhat like qui – or the Latin, quis. The more Indo-European languages you add, the more patterns you see that cannot be explained through borrowings or coincidence. We are also mindful of how human languages generally behave, which guides us in our choices of the types of changes that may occur in the creation of the Wenja and Izila languages."

Makes sense, doesn't it. The professors didn't go without a little artistic license on the project, though. "While we tried to stay as faithful to PIE as much as possible, there were situations where we could stray a bit off the path. Sometimes we would need a word that couldn't be reconstructed for PIE – which doesn't mean a certain word didn't exist, just that we don't have any evidence that conclusively points back to a single term. These included words like 'yes', 'torch' and even 'tasty' – 'shrash', 'purshazda' and 'paliklayjan su' in Wenja, respectively.

'Far Cry Primal', 101 Trailer

"For each of these, we chose an expression or a compound to convey that idea. 'Shrash' derives from the PIE expression 'it is correct', while 'purshazda' literally means 'fire stick'. And 'paliklayjan su' is a nod to our home in Kentucky, with the meaning 'finger-licking good'. There are other in-jokes in the game, but we won't divulge any more, as we want gamers to discover them on their own."

The Byrds created a 1,250-word dictionary for both Wenja and Izila, and when it came to the voice actors to tackle the script, it was written in a recognisable form. "There are no silent consonants, or vowels, or anything wacky like that. The actors very quickly picked up on how to pronounce the words properly, with a bit of training of course." A Wenja phrasebook will be produced for release beside the game, for anyone who likes to splash their money on special editions.

Read more articles about prehistory on Motherboard

With a couple of linguists on the other end of an email, it's only normal to ask about where human communication might head in the future. Ways in which we speak are dying out all the time – the last user of Klallam in the United States passed away in 2014, taking the tongue with her, while the Cromarty dialect of Scots, native to the small Highland parish that gave it its name, came to an end when Bobby Hogg died in 2012. Surely we won't ever see a time when English ceases to be a common language, across the globe?

"It really is all about politics and the dominance of certain cultures. English, Mandarin Chinese, French and Spanish are not widely spoken because they are better than any other language, rather they are the languages spoken by those in power. Of course, these days it is very handy for there to be a universal lingua franca for science, education, business, and entertainment, and it just so happens to be English right now. But who knows? Maybe Basque will be the lingua franca in 200 years. Only time will tell."

Far Cry Primal is released for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on February 23rd, and for Windows on March 1st. Find more information about the game at its official website.

@MikeDiver

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

In early 2014, writer Charlotte Shane began using an email newsletter service, TinyLetter, to send out confessional and crushing missives about love, sex, relationships, and the inner life of an American sex worker – Shane's "dayjob" at the time. Collated under the name Prostitute Laundry, the newsletters quickly amassed a following of more than 5,000 subscribers, and readers began anxiously awaiting each installment so they could devour the next story of Shane's personal life and work.

Soon, her addictive, intimate writings began to feel much like a serial novel, and last year a Kickstarter campaign to make her TinyLetter series into a book, raised £19,328 – more than three times the amount she was asking for. It was clear that people were more than willing to consume Shane's writing in print, even though they may already have read it in their inboxes. The subsequently created volume of 57 unflinching entries totals nearly 400 pages of writing, spans 2014 and 2015, and culminates with the author's eventual retirement from sex work.

Prostitute Laundry is not popular because of its graphic sexual content (of which there is plenty), but more so because of Shane's ability to write so poetically about humanity. When she unexpectedly falls in love with an artist who readers will know as her now-boyfriend Max, she writes with such emotion and affection, you hope and pray that he doesn't disappear from her life after finding out about her sex work. Shane sometimes likens her readers to TV audiences, which feels on point as their responses to her work on Twitter and across the internet show a level of investment in her characters on par with that of the romantic leads in a favorite sitcom.

Shane, an east coast native and self-described introvert, has been voraciously reading and writing since she was young. It was while studying creative writing at John Hopkins that she began a career in the sex industry in her early twenties, starting with webcam and fetish work before transitioning to in-person and full-service escorting for reasons she didn't divulge to VICE. In addition to writing about her life and sex work at the now-defunct Nightmare Brunette blog – which she also published as an anthology titled N.B. – and crafting her email letters, Shane has also won fans as a prolific sex writer and reporter online, including bylines at Jezebel, Playboy, and The New Inquiry. In anticipation of her upcoming book tour, VICE spoke with Shane about public and private life, the similarities between sex work and writing, and the myth of the "white knight" ending.

VICE: How did the Tiny Letter series take off and become so popular?
Charlotte Shane: The first one was sent to sixty-some people. I'd see that the subscriber list would jump from 200 to 400 within a week, and a lot of times I was clueless as to why. Sometimes people would tell me that another TinyLetter mentioned me. It was probably the summer of 2014, when I was well into the George saga [a pseudonym for the man Shane had an intense, sexual relationship with outside of work who is featured prominently in the book] when it started to feel like it had evolved in a real way and I had an audience and I decided I would try to do a cliffhanger. I started realising that this was a serialised experience.

How did the newsletter and people's reactions build your confidence as a writer? I have to assume it's a more positive experience than writing for the general internet?
It's been overwhelmingly positive, which is very lucky. I think, at the risk of sounding arrogant, I always felt relatively confident as a writer, since I've been writing for so long. Every time I send a letter, people will tweet about it and reply to it and have reactions much like a TV audience would. Some of these readers are all really invested. A lot of time I feel like I have relationships with them; they don't really feel like strangers.

Do you feel like your readers know you or do they just know aspects of you?
I would say most people do know a lot about me, but there are other things people don't know. I look at the two books I've published, and there's so much I wrote about, but there's still so much I didn't write about. They know part of me. The letters are not a performance; they are sincere and I try to be as honest as I can. But not only am I self-reporting, which is suspect from the start, but then also I'm self-editing, consciously, because I want the writing and storytelling to be stronger.

What are the pros and cons of writing under a pseudonym?
I feel like I get less harassment for it because there aren't pictures of me online. I don't know how to describe the amount of harassment other women get that I don't. It gives you a lot of control over what you reveal and when. Not that I would, but if I tried to get a super straight job, all of this wouldn't come up when they're looking into me. The one down side is that if somebody wants to hurt you, this looks like a point of weakness. Like they could blackmail you or accuse you of being fake or not willing to say this under your real name.

Some of these readers are all really invested. A lot of time I feel like I have relationships with them; they don't really feel like strangers

You have a public persona and a private life. Where does one end and the other begin for you?
The two are overlapping in a way that I want and that I feel I have control over. I would love it if one day I could just be totally out as Charlotte and not care if my face is associated with the name. The biggest obstacle for me right now would be my parents, since they are the only people who don't know, but I have faith that I'll get there. I decided a year ago that virtually any other writing I do for the rest of my life will be under this name. I've built up enough of a reputation and network that it would be self-defeating to start over.

You've written about the financial pressure of retirement from sex work. How do you feel about the transition to full-time writer and author?
I think that I'm focused enough and creative enough that I can figure out a way to make writing sustainable for me. Maybe I'm overestimating my own reputation or abilities – I have a history of inexplicable amounts of self-esteem – but I feel like I spent a lot of time building an audience by writing so much and making it public. Even if I'm not a household name, I feel like I have enough of a portfolio now and I feel more prepared to write books, as well.

When you fell in love with Max, your boyfriend who you write so tenderly about in Prostitute Laundry, and decided to retire from sex work last year, were you at all concerned that people would interpret this as a man saving you from sex work or something akin to that existing narrative?
Most of the people reading the letters seemed to be very sensitive and intelligent. I was always impressed with how they understood my emotional developments and how generous they were in interpreting my choices. I've written about how bogus that "white knight ending" is, and how my current relationship is a great one but still challenging in the ways they all are. And I wrote a lot about how and why sex work was important to me and not something I'm ashamed about or regretful of. So hopefully "now that sex work is done, I can be happy!" was not anyone's take away. I tried the best I could to make sure it wasn't.

"Sex work was important to me and not something I'm ashamed about or regretful of."

Are there any similarities between writing and sex work?
One thing I miss about sex work is that I set my rates and I didn't negotiate beyond that. To me, the biggest parallel is that you have to be confident that what you're selling is worth it. You have to have this degree of self-confidence and a track record. It's really useful as an escort to see what other women's rates are and where you fall among them. I think it's easier to get paid what you deserve with escorting. But publications don't put their rates out there and it can be awkward or hard to know what other writers get paid.

You're passionate about the decriminalisation and destigmatisation of sex work. Do you think we'll see either anytime soon?
I'm certainly not expecting that we will, but I think the most realistic thing to hope for is that indoor prostitution, not outdoor prostitution, can and possibly will become a little like the equivalent of white people smoking weed; the trafficking angle really complicates things. A younger generation of women right now, some of them are buying into second wave feminism's "sex work is abuse," but I think many more of them can see past that. So many young women have friends who've dabbled in sex work that they can't say, "they're all victims," or "this is institutionalised misogyny."

What type of writing would you like to do from here on out?
There is a book I have in mind right now that I'm sort of working on, which will be non-fiction but not personal writing. I do want to write a proper sex work memoir because Prostitute Laundry isn't about sex work at all; it's just that I do sex work. The emphasis wouldn't be "this happened to me..." or "sex work is exactly like this..." Hopefully it has a more interesting, wider-reaching thrust than, "Can you believe this guy did this and I got this?" It would have insight into what type of connections are and aren't possible between men and women right now.

For book tour dates, or to purchase a copy of 'Prostitute Laundry,' visit Charlotte Shane's website.

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Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande (Photo by Eoghan OLionnain)

This was dubbed a "three shirt summit". On Friday, after two days of hog-sweating it in Brussels, long after David Cameron's bleary-eyed 5:30AM departure for a cheeky two hours' kip, the EU's 28 leaders were told they were all going to need to get back on booking.com and purchase one more night's hotel rooms.

But the madness isn't how long it lasts, it's that it ends at all. The logistics of making 28 heads of state agree on anything are mind-bending. After all, everyone has to be made better-off by any deal the leaders sign. Have you ever tried to simultaneously give 28 people what they want? It's the Cosmo orgy from hell.

Contrary to British egotistic belief, the attendees at last week's EU summit didn't all turn up just to make sure Dave can see down the challenge of BoJo and Michael Gove. European PMs and Presidents all have their own BoJos, and their own challenges, with their own cranky electorates pointing very different guns to their heads, the likes of which we don't even understand. Lithuanian social media campaigns over dairy subsidies. The Maltese obsession with EU red tape on their plug spanner industry. The Cypriot BoJo menacing the Cypriot PM in the polls with his challenge over ATM taxes.

Yet somehow, everyone won. So everyone signed. How exactly? Scratch the surface with our guide to the week's winners and winners.

BELGIUM (AND ALL THE MINNOWS)

WANTED

The Belgians are the biggest Euro suck-ups in the whole place. Not only does their economy depend on the Brussels gravy train pulling into Bruxelles-Midi laden with delicious gravy, they're also a small country. Pretty much all the minnows are in favour of everything EU, because it stands up for their interests against the bigger bully-boys. Without the EU, Belgium is just the welcome mat to future invasions of France, and so, coming into the summit they were the only country arguing against any brakes on "ever-closer union". The Belgians want as much closer union as they can possibly have, and won't be satisfied until they're so close they can feel the EU from the inside.

GOT

The insertion of a clause stating that Cameron's deal was a final offer. That, after last weekend, Britain could never again come back to the table and ask for another helping of national sovereignty. "There's no second chances", Belgian PM Charles Michel proudly proclaimed.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras (Photo by Panagiotis Maidis)

GREECE

WANTED

Greece's far-left Syriza government came into this EU summit less concerned about their economic death-spiral than they have been in a long time, only because their already kerosene-doused politics has been set fully ablaze by the tens of thousands of migrants still turning up every week at Europe's south-eastern border.

GOT

Within hours, Alexis Tsipras' government declared their intent to block any Brexit treaty if other EU states continued to close their borders to refugees. This was a coded reference to the Austrians, who've started introducing daily caps. Cue: enough panic to win them a one-on-one joint summit with the Austrians, which ended in the pair vaguely declaring their intent to "co-operate better".

French President Francois Hollande (Photo by Jean-Marc Ayrault)

FRANCE

WANTED

To look imperious by ignoring the whole sideshow. Francois Hollande is under so much pressure at home over terrorism and his still-tanking economy that he would be seen as aloof and trivial if he got too deep into arguing the toss on Brexit.

GOT

An agreement that non-Eurozone countries like Britain can't veto financial rules that only concern the Eurozone countries – thereby allowing the Eurozone to hurtle towards its doom much more efficiently.

Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen (Photo by News Oresund)

DENMARK

WANTED

To use Britain as a patsy/battering ram for all the unpleasantness they don't want to throw their own moral weight into. Like us, the Danes also seem to have to hold their nose and make gagging gestures every time they walk into a summit room with Merkel and Hollande. The minority party in the Danish government, the Danish People's Party, is staunchly anti-migration, so they were only too happy to endorse Cameron's plans to index-link child benefits paid back to children in migrants' home countries to the cost of living in those countries. In fact, Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen claimed that this had also been his idea, calling it "a flower in my garden".

GOT

The flower in Rassmussen's garden:

"A proposal to amend Regulation (EC) No 883/2004 of the European Parliament and of the Council on the coordination of social security systems in order to give Member States, with regard to the exportation of child benefits to a Member State other than that where the worker resides, an option to index such benefits to the conditions of the Member State where the child resides. This should apply only to new claims made by EU workers in the host Member State. However, as from 1 January 2020, all Member States may extend indexation to existing claims to child benefits already exported by EU workers. The Commission does not intend to propose that the future system of optional indexation of child benefits be extended to other types of exportable benefits, such as old-age pensions."

Beautiful.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel (Photo courtesy of Christliches Medienmagezin pro)

GERMANY

WANTED

Britain. The Germans understand that without Britain their beloved Euro empire is just them and the French on a series of screechingly awkward dates. They know that once Britain leaves, the French and the Spaniards and Italians will gang up to force through more high-tax protectionist measures, which wouldn't help the Germans sell cars to Americans. Britain's an unlikely soulmate, but a soulmate nonetheless, which is why Mrs Merkel spent the week waving through all DC's carping about migrant benefits, standing up for his demands as "logical and reasonable" before the summit, and intervening again and again in the summit room like a tiger mom at her kid's debating tournament.

GOT

Britain? Or at least, enough flimsy concessions to allow David Cameron to go back and bang on about Peace In Our Time for a weekend.

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THE VISEGRAD STATES

WANTED

Counselling to overcome their own inferiority complexes. The Visegrad states are the four richer nations of eastern Europe: Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia. To them, the debate over child benefits had become a referendum over whether their working-abroad citizens were going to be put in dunce caps and sat at the front of the class just because Joe Stalin rolled over their nations' lawns in 1945. "We agree we need reform," admitted Czech minister Tomas Prouza. "But historically we were second-class citizens in Europe for 45 years. The memory is still with us and I can't imagine any Central European prime minister would agree to reinstate second-class citizenship".

RECEIVED

A reduction from 13 years to seven years for the length of Cameron's benefits "emergency brake", and some similar meaningless "concessions" from original negotiating positions that allowed them to go home and announce that they broke the spirit of the British oppressors.

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Screenshots via Steam

Appearances can be deceptive. The Flame in the Flood looks cute, but spend an hour with it and your nerves will be shredded. You're Scout, a lone wanderer with a scrawny old dog, Aesop, for company. The world is a changed place: waters have risen, breaking the old America up into small chunks of dry land separated by vast floods and surging rapids. When you begin the game's campaign, you are charged with setting out to find the source of a weak radio signal. Perhaps society has clung on, somewhere, while all around you humanity is shattered, carved up into pockets of increasingly feral folk who might not be too pleased to find you rummaging through their supplies.

The look of the game, almost handcrafted, and definitely attractive (unless you focus on the misery in the human faces), masks the considerable challenge you face. Keeping Scout alive – warm, topped up with unpolluted water, fed on anything she can pull from the earth or trap using makeshift snares – is a constant demand. If it rains, and it will, she'll get wet, which could lead to catching a fever. If she scratches a leg on some thorns, the wound might heal up by itself – or it could turn nasty.

The raft she uses to travel downriver, towards the signal's source, isn't indestructible, and every effort she puts into navigating the game's crunching rapids drains her energy. If she's too tired to steer away from an onrushing rock, jutting from the white froth like a dagger, the craft will crash into it, compromising its condition. Along Scout's journey there are opportunities to fix the raft up, and upgrade it – likewise to get a good night's sleep, eat a hot meal, meet helpful non-player characters. But the hardships far outnumber strokes of good fortune.

"The contrast between aesthetic and gameplay experience was very deliberate," the game's designer at Boston studio The Molasses Flood, Forrest Dowling, tells me. The Molasses Flood is an indie setup comprising creators whose past credits include titles in the Halo, Guitar Hero and BioShock series, and The Flame in the Flood, which raised $250,000 on Kickstarter, is its first game. "I think as a team we're fond of surprising contrasts, things that maybe look like one thing but feel like another, as it can add weight to those contrasts. The contrast also should help something that could feel really oppressive still feel like a world a player may want to inhabit for a while. If the aesthetics completely matched the grim difficulty of the game, the result may well have been an experience that sat too heavily on the shoulders of the player, beating them down."

"Another way to look at it may be via our studio name, The Molasses Flood," he continues. "To me, it says a lot about the sort of experiences we are interested in creating. If you're not familiar with it, it was a major accident that occurred in the North End neighbourhood of Boston in 1919, in which millions of gallons of molasses flooded the streets of the city after a tank burst. It's a funny and weird story initially, that reveals itself to be a much more complicated tale of tragic loss and industrial malfeasance as you learn more about it. I viewed that name as a sort of mission statement to create experiences that have multiple facets and defy initial expectation."

Article continues after the video below

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As Forrest so clearly states, The Flame in the Flood is a hard game, one where an easy opening so quickly becomes a grind against wave after wave of problems. The situation for Scout can become grave in no time at all unless you're keeping a keen eye on her temperature, constantly topping her up with food and clean water – or, better, combining raw materials to cook up something a little more satisfying, from dandelion tea, both refreshing and medicinal, or stitching together animal pelts to make warmer clothing. Whatever your efforts, though, your first Scout will most likely die. Items transferred from her backpack to Aesop's will be carried over to your next Scout, who will pick up the journey from a previous save point. The game is procedurally generated, a roguelike (or, in its makers' words, "rogue-lite"), so there's no easily mapped "right" path to take. Deaths cannot be reversed, and I have to say, the first time my Scout died, set upon by a pack of wolves in the middle of the night while looking for a place to bed down, I was crushed.

"It's definitely the intent that it hurts when you die," Forrest says, "but also hopefully you learned a bit along the way, and feel like you could have done something differently the next time around. It is a tough line to walk, when a game allows the loss of progress, but I think that the fact that it raises the stakes for the player is something that's appealing about games with permadeath, and seemed like the right call for a game that's primarily about survival in a procedurally generated world."

There's no hand holding in The Flame and the Flood, few useful tips that flash up on the screen – just warnings, when Scout's in a bad way. It doesn't even tell the player why America is in this awful state. This is a very deliberate move by The Molasses Flood – the why isn't as important as the need to just keep going, to get by now that everything's gone to shit.

"Our intent was to let a person's understanding of what they need to do to survive drive them," Forrest explains. "We all know that we need food and shelter, and if we're stuck in a wilderness and there's nothing to offer reprieve, we better move. Also, some games are about pointing you in a direction and setting you on a rollercoaster, others are about learning the systems, and we aimed squarely at the latter. We try to give enough hints and tips to allow someone to understand the basics, but want folks to figure out the specifics on their own."

I make it eight in-game days with (my first) Scout, something that Forrest says means "it sounds like you were figuring it out, at least enough to navigate the river, stop places, and start finding supplies". People who dip into the game's journal will find additional assistance for their journey: "One of our ideas is that Scout does have survival know how, and we felt that the journal was a good way to allow the player to pull info that the character should know."

The game's debut trailer, from October 2014

The game's campaign has a start and end point, and while what the player sees on the route between them will vary every time, Forrest tells me that, further days into the experience, I'd "best bundle up, because it's going to get a bit colder". By day eight I was seeing the wilderness give way to more signs of a greater settlement having once been here – broken bridges, floating cars. Wherever Scout's headed, it feels, to me, like it's closer to what was once an urban centre. Forrest isn't about to give anything away, of course.

"Ahead you'll find more types of environments to explore, and some other threats. But while there is a backstory, and a reason behind why this world is the way that it is, it's never something that we dive into very explicitly. I loved Cormac McCarthy's The Road as an inspiration for this: in that work, you know there was a nuclear disaster of some sort, but why and how don't matter. It's not a story of the end of the world, it's a story of a father and son trying to stay alive after everything fell apart. We wanted to take a similar approach.

"Things are bad, everything's fallen apart, and some specifics about what happened do become clear, but there's still a lot open to interpretation. Early on, while discussing the plot, we knew that the most important story of this game was going to be each player's own one, of their journey, so that's where we focused most of our efforts. Also, personally, I'm not a huge fan of lore-heavy works, and tend to like backstory when it is delivered as minimally as possible to make the world make sense."

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High challenge, appealing aesthetics, an open narrative and a singularly impressive soundtrack by Hot Water Music's Chuck Ragan – "he's a long-time friend of our art director, Scott Sinclair," Forrest says, explaining how that connection came about – all suggest that The Flame and the Flood will be an indie hit of 2016. It has the right ingredients, at least. I'm not sure how much more I can take in it, but I'm going to push on all the same – I want to see more of this ruined America that The Molasses Flood has realised, one quite unlike any game world before it. Forrest isn't about to get carried away with what the game's potential success will do for its fledgling studio.

"Our hope is that this game does well enough that we can afford to make another, and maybe grow a bit as a studio, but until it's out and we can see how it was received both commercially and critically, it's awfully hard to say. At the very least right now, I can say that we feel like we're in a really good spot, and the reception we've received from our early access players has been really good. Now we've just got our fingers crossed that people will like the final product.

"Ultimately, if the worse case scenario comes to pass, and the game is a commercial and critical failure, we still get to have the knowledge and pride that a small group of us got together and built something from nothing, finished it, and got it out to the world. The fact that we've been able to do this is a gift already, so no matter what happens I'll still be happy with what we accomplished."

The Flame in the Flood is released for Xbox One, Windows and Mac OS X on February 24th. Find more information at the game's official website.

@MikeDiver

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On Saturday night, less than an hour after polls closed in GOP's first Southern primary, the Political Establishment was suddenly forced to realize what most Americans have implicitly known for quite some time: South Carolina, that harbinger of right-wing racism and oily, dog-whistle populism is definitely Donald Trump's Country. The reality-TV mogul won the state's prim by roughly 10 points, outpacing his Republican rivals with more than a third of the vote and cementing his position as the apparently unstoppable frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.

The victory was expected—and expectedly bizarre – proving that it's possible to win a Republican primary, start a PR war with the Pope, and giddily invoke a bogus story about US Marines shooting Muslims with "bullets soaked in pig's blood" – all in one week. By the time Trump took the stage at a victory rally in Spartanburg Saturday night, he was already reminiscing about South Carolina as if it were a distant memory, promising future conquests in next week's Nevada caucuses and in the 11 states that hold primaries on Super Tuesday.

"I want to thank everybody. I love you all South Carolina we will never forget you," he gushed. Now, he added, "Let's put this thing away and let's make America great again!"

Even if the Republican Party does somehow manage to thwart Trump – which, at this point, seems unlikely – he leaves South Carolina having accomplished one of the primary objectives of his presidential campaign – namely, defeating Jeb Bush. Once a favorite to win the GOP nomination, Bush announced Saturday that he would leave the presidential race, after yet another disappointing finish in a Republican primary. "The people of Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina have spoken," Bush said, holding back tears as he delivered his farewell speech. "And I really respect their decisionHis exit was effectively a surrender, who at times has seemed more committed to tormenting Bush than he has to running his own presidential campaign.

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From the moment he entered the race, the real-estate mogul made Jeb! his primary target, gleefully dismissing the youngest Bush scion as "low energy," mocking low polling numbers, and relentlessly trolling him on Twitter. Unaccustomed to reality-TV bullying, Bush completely melted down. By the time he left the race Saturday having failed to break into the top tier in any of the first three Republican nominating contests, his campaign reduced to a punch line that would have been funny if it hadn't been so painfully awkward and sad.

Jeb's loss was particularly embarrassing in South Carolina, a state where both his father and brother won crucial victories, and that his campaign believed was still Bush Family turf. After months of trying to avoid any association with the word "dynasty," Jeb eagerly reclaimed his bloodline in the week before the primary, bringing in his mother, Barbara, and former President George W. Bush in to help him close with voters. Undeterred, Trump seized the opportunity to expand his attacks on other members of the Bush family, lathering up the cable news media with a couple of choice lines about WMD and 9/11, and started referring to Jeb as "Bush III."

In the end, Bush finished in the single digits on Saturday, well behind not only Trump, but also Texas Senator Ted Cruz, and Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who has already usurped Bush as the GOP Establishment's white knight. He just barely managed to edge out Ohio Governor John Kasich, who took second place in New Hampshire but, having once attended a gay wedding, was not expected to perform well with South Carolina's more hardcore brand of Republican voters.

The only real suspense Saturday night was in the race for second place. Rubio managed to edge out Cruz by less than 1 percent, enough for Rubio to spin South Carolina as a victory and declare that Republicans now had a "three-man race" for the nomination. The second-place finish in South Carolina, coupled with Jeb's official exit, positions Rubio as the de facto Establishment answer to Trump and Cruz. Rubio is already spinning that narrative, declaring Saturday that the Republican primary is now a "three-man race." But while Saturday's results are definitely an improvement from last week's fifth-place flop in New Hampshire, the fact remains that Rubio still hasn't won a single primary and he's still a distant third in national polling for the nomination.

Cruz also attempted to spin Saturday's vote as win, jumping on the whole "three-man race" idea and telling supporters that his campaign is "defying expectations." But there wasn't a lot of good news for Cruz in South Carolina, a deep-red Southern state with a very conservative Republican primary electorate, and a sizable bloc of evangelical voters. Those are the very voters who are supposed to make up Cruz's base, so a third-place finish there doesn't bode well for the Senator's turnout strategy going into Southern primaries on Super Tuesday. Cruz, however, was triumphant. "Once again, we have made history," he told supporters Saturday night. "You, the good people of South Carolina, continue to defy the pundits and produce extraordinary results."

Both Cruz and Rubio acknowledged Bush's departure from the race, with Rubio even referring to his one-time mentor as Florida's "greatest governor." Trump, however, chose not to mention his favourite punching bag, even as he congratulated the two Senators for their strong performances. Pundits dismissed the move as classless – but of course, that's exactly the point. Trump's crass, IDF to continue humiliating Jeb!, even as the latter retreats in defeat, is exactly why his supporters love him – and why the attacks worked in the first place.

"There's nothing easy about running for president," Trump told supporters Saturday. "It's tough, it's nasty, it's mean, it's vicious, it's beautiful. When you win it's beautiful and we're going to start – we are going to start winning for our country. We're going to start winning."

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BELGIUM (AND ALL THE MINNOWS)

GREECE

FRANCE

DENMARK

GERMANY

THE VISEGRAD STATES

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