This article originally appeared on VICE Spain

When the doors of the Palacio de Deportes arena in Madrid opened for the Iron Maiden show two weeks ago, a small group of fans had been camping out in front of the gates for 24 hours. They were young girls all decked out in Iron Maiden shirts and flags. "We slept here with 10 people," they told us about an hour before the doors opened. They were nervous – it was the first time they were going to see the band live.

Meanwhile behind them, Iron Maiden's more senior fans were taking things a bit easier. These Spanish veteran fans met through their Iron Maiden fandom and have been friends for decades – seeing each other only at shows. Before every gig, they come together in front of the arena for a sort of pre-game. They stand around, have a beer and a chat about the band, the concerts they've missed, the leaked set list, what Resurrection Fest festival in Viveiro was like last weekend and how the band members seem to be doing physically during this last tour.

This year's street party – or botellón in Spanish – started small, but as the opening approached it gradually took over the whole of Plaza de Felipe II. Grocery shops that line the square in front of the Arena started to run out of cold beers, but well-prepared fans had brought along ice boxes filled with alcohol.

One couple told us the first Iron Maiden concert they went to was at this very stadium in Madrid, more than 25 years ago. They couldn't count how many times they've seen the band since then. The same can probably be said of the rest of these pre-gamers – they all seemed to be fiercely faithful to their idols, and to take no note of how much Bruce Dickinson looks like your dad these days. Likely, because these guys are your dad.

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DiMatteo (far left) and the gang circa 1970. Images courtesy of Frank DiMatteo

The mythos and underworld infamy of the Mafia has long been romanticized on the silver screen. These pop-culture depictions glorify the gangster lifestyle and its man-of-honor ethos. But oftentimes, reality is nothing likeGoodfellas or The Godfather. In the mean streets of Brooklyn, life is rough and sometimes becoming an associate of the Mafia is the only option.

Frank DiMatteo was born on Cross Street in Red Hook and raised in a family of mob hitmen. When you grow up with Crazy Joey Gallo pinching your cheeks until you cry like DiMatteo did, childhood can be nothing if not adventuresome. In his new book, The President Street Boys: Growing Up Mafia, out July 26, DiMatteo tells what it was like to grow up with mob royalty.

His father and godfather were both enforcers for the infamous Gallo brothers. DiMatteo's uncle was a bodyguard for Frank Costello and a capo in the Genovese crime family. DiMatteo dropped out of school at an early age and started hanging around with the President Street Boys, also known as the Gallo crime family, a faction of the Colombo family. Growing up, he had a front row seat as the Gallo's waged a war for control of the Colombo family.

DiMatteo calls himself a Mafia "survivor." When many of his peers ended up in the trunk of a car or thrown into Sheepshead Bay to "swim with the fishes," DiMatteo, at 58, is still kicking. And unlike many Mafia guys who've told their story, DiMatteo isn't a rat. He walked away from the mob in the early 2000s with his integrity intact and still lives in his hometown of Brooklyn. We spoke with him to find out what it was like working for the mob in its heyday, how 60s culture changed the game, what he thinks about the modern Mafia, and why he started Mob Candy, a Mafia-culture magazine.

VICE: What was it like growing up in a Mafia household in Brooklyn in the 1960s and 1970s?
Frank DiMatteo: Eight, nine I didn't give a fuck. I was busy being a little kid. I didn't comprehend the real Mafia stuff, because it wasn't really spoken about, and there were no books and newspapers in our face every second like now. By ten you notice your uncles are a lot different from other people. They're whispering and then there are people coming around and they dress differently than other families. By 12 or 13, I knew who everybody was. By 13, I was driving, and I started learning about the life. By then, I knew exactly what was going on, so I was privy to a few things, but not much. I didn't go kill nobody at 13, but I was going to the clubs with them. Driving them here and there because I was tall. I looked like I do now, just a lot younger. I was six foot at 13. These guys went to a lot of restaurants, a lot of clubs, topless joints. Driving is basically how I learned what was going on.

My godfather is Bobby B. Bobby was one of the shooters for the G crew. He wanted to be my godfather, and I was very close to him. I drove him around for a couple of years in the early 70s. Bobby was a character, a stone killer, but you would think he was a jokester, like real schizoid. I mean, the guy was for real, but he was a funny-type guy as far as you could make him out. If you didn't know him, you really couldn't make him out at all. These characters are a very strange breed of men.

Was it like a regular job? You just clocked in? Did you know your job detail?
No one turned around and said, "Hey, Frankie, let me tell you what we're doing today in detail." You're not supposed to tell every little thing you're doing to everybody. People that look for too much information scare me, because that's not what we're there for. I wasn't supposed to know shit. If I wasn't involved in it, I really wasn't suppose to know about it. But I'd hear other people tell me all sorts of stories and stuff, and I'd go, "How do you know that shit, man? You're not supposed to know that."

What was life like in a Mafia crew back then?
Everybody was busy doing their thing. Who's robbing? Who's stealing? And who's trying to eat? You know what I mean. It was the early 70s. Money wasn't flowing. We weren't big time hoods. Every fucking day they were trying to do something—shake somebody down. So you didn't know what was going on. We were doing cigarette runs to make some money. We were hoods, man. And they all had different personalities. Who was a grumpy fuck? Who was funny? Who was a drunk? Who was a pot head? We had Puerto Ricans with us. We had Syrian guys with us. We had a Jew guy with us. It was like a fucking circus. Who had five dollars in their pocket?

What was Crazy Joey Gallo like?
Joey left when I was like five or six. He went to jail. He got out when I was like 16, 17, so I saw Joey for one year. I think 71 to 72. Joey was Joey. Joey was a scary guy. His eyes gleamed. He smiled. He wasn't the guy to joke with. But on the other side, if you're with him, there's nothing to fear. But Joey sowed his oats when he came home. Don't forget he was gone for ten years, so he was going out drinking. He was conducting business, but he stayed in the city a lot. The rest of us guys those days stayed in Brooklyn. We didn't leave far from the neighborhood.

Joey was staying in the city with my godfather and Pete the Greek. We'd see him once a week if were lucky. He would come down to the club. He was a nutty guy. Functional, but legitimately nuts. He had no fear. He was like the throwback of the 1920s gangsters. He thought he could move around and do what he wanted, say what he wanted. He didn't think nobody was going to shoot him, nobody had the balls to do it, so that's how he functioned. But we know he was wrong. He was only out a year when they killed him.

How did the 1960s impact the younger generation of mobsters coming up who filled in the ranks?
The 60s impacted the mob guys coming up. The new hoods were a little different than the old street guys from the 20s. The street guys from the 20s came up out of poverty. These guys, late 60s early 70s, they weren't starving as much. They were just bad guys. What the 60s did was just open the doors to different crimes, stocks and bonds, and these guys just had a different mindset. Then there was the pot. In the 20s, 30s, and 40s, I don't think they were walking around fucking zoning out all of the time. These guys would smoke a joint in the street and laugh like it was a joke. They were half crazy. It all changed. It changed them. The respect or the mindset. They didn't listen to all the rules and regulations like the old-timers did. They laughed at that shit.

DiMatteo and his wife, Emily, around 1970

How did you leave the mob and avoid prison?
I was lucky. Had some foresight on a few things. Beat a lot of cases. I was very, very lucky to walk away, especially with all this rat shit. But we just walked away like it was the end of the day. The boss flipped, so no one came back and said, "No, you can't do this, you can't leave the Mafia." Everybody was ratting. Everybody was gone. We walked out the door like nobody was watching the door, like the door wasn't locked anymore. Nobody even called us. We were just lucky all the way around.

What do you think of the Mafia today?
They have no idea what they're doing. They're young. They've got guys who don't know shit because a lot of guys are dead, a lot of guys are in jail. A lot of guys are rats. A lot guys with a lot of time in have flipped. These guys coming up, no one is teaching them. They're just reading books and saying the word Omerta, you know?

Half the guys in charge, you can't even call them by their nickname anymore. They can't kiss in public because they're afraid. They're afraid of everything. It's like a fucking joke now. You've got no respect. Every other crew is laughing at you. You've got the Albanians laughing, the Russians laughing, you know? There's no respect. They're not scamming nobody no more. The other thing is you've got 200 rats, and no one is dead. Not one rat is dead, and they're walking around in the open.

The President Street Boys: Growing Up Mafia will be released on July 26.

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Robin Hunicke in 2009, photographed during her time working at 'Journey' makers thatgamecompany (via Wikipedia)

"As a developer, it's my job to evangelise the games that I think are different, that are doing new things. And when they come out, I want everyone I know to know about them. But it'd be really awesome if we could somehow give away space, or create platforms of promotion, that were just about innovation."

Robin Hunicke knows a thing or two about going against what the gaming public might perceive as the stylistic grain, the marketable middle-ground, sales-numbers safe spaces of play. Having worked on MySims and Boom Blox at Electronic Arts, the San Francisco-based game designer (and professor of game design, at the University of California, Santa Cruz) moved to thatgamecompany, where she produced Journey. Perhaps you heard of it, as it was kind of a big deal.

"With Woorld, this whole place could be a play space, the walls, the ceiling, the floor. And making such a game just transforms the way you think about design." – Robin Hunicke

Journey was a critical and commercial success that arrived without much in the way of how-it-works precedent, playing like nothing most that picked it up had seen before. A multiplayer game in which human-to-human interactions were all but stripped away. A short experience, coming in at under 90 minutes from start to finish, but with lasting, memory-making resonance. A story told only one way, yet left open to all manner of individual interpretation. Journey earned rave reviews and collected all manner of industry awards (dominating the 2013 Game Developers Choice Awards), and broke PlayStation Network sales records.

Today, Robin is overseeing the singular experiences rolling out of Funomena, a studio she established in early 2013 with former thatgamecompany colleague Martin Middleton. First came Terra, an educational, not-for-profit game designed to work with a Fitbit to generate energy to facilitate terraforming of an alien world. Later, Wattam, a collaboration with Katamari Damacy designer Keita Takahashi, described by the studio as "a delightfully, explosive, exploratory game". It looks like this. Luna, "a tactile, narrative puzzle game" that bridged the two projects, wasn't quite so wacky, but undeniably beautiful. And now comes Woorld, which sees Funomena move into augmented reality, mixing digital and physical play – again in the company of the peerless Takahashi. It will be pre-installed in the forthcoming Lenovo Phab2 Pro phone, working across other Google Tango devices.

"With Woorld, honestly, we were a little sceptical about the Tango technology to start with," Robin tells me, in a quiet moment during Brighton's Develop Conference – she's attending as one of its keynote speakers. "We didn't know if we could have fun with it. We went down to Google, and met with Johnny Lee, and looked at the camera, and the device that they had, and immediately we were like: wow.

"With Woorld, this whole place could be a play space, the walls, the ceiling, the floor. And making such a game just transforms the way you think about design. Because, normally, with VR experiences or console experiences, we have complete control over what's in the environment. The designers dictate things. But in an augmented reality experience, the world is just a really undesigned place. In your house, you'll have your tables and your chairs, maybe a cat running around, and designing for that kind of environment has been really eye opening, and so fun. It's been a very fast project, a quite lightweight experience in the sense that you can just get in there right away. But it's going to ship on every device, so it has to be that accessible."

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That Woorld is great to play, to share with friends, was something that became obvious to Robin and the team while they were making it, because they so often found themselves laughing in its company. "It really livened up the studio, because we were all playing it there, all the time," she recalls. "People would hear you laughing, and they'd come over, and they'd want to use the device, and see what you'd built. I would say that it brought a tonne of levity and joy into the design process itself, because it is in the space that you work and live in. It's been a totally new experience, developing this, but I'd do it again in a heartbeat."

Quite where Woorld fits in the wider gaming landscape, though, is hard to get a handle on. This is a new tool, a new toy, for new technology, coming through at a time when augmented reality is enjoying a spell of popularity courtesy of Pokémon Go; but without that kind of massive IP to drive its marketing, merely the wonderfully colourful and somewhat surreal visuals that Takahashi's fans have come to expect, it's not like the game is about to follow in said record-setter's monstrous footsteps. And Robin sees this problem of visibility, of public accessibility and appetite for something left of the expected, not just as a headache for Funomena, but everyone making games outside of the triple-A sphere.

"There are a lot of very different games out there, but as an industry we're not so good at presenting that in our marketing, and our PR, and the stories that we write. And that's what really carries this medium forward – how people perceive it. How many games get covered that are radically different from whatever else is around? How many of them are featured on the front of the online stores? How many are appearing in top ten lists? When your top ten lists are based on sales, and sales are influenced by marketing budgets, you're only rarely going to see a Papers, Please or That Dragon, Cancer, or Firewatch or even The Witness, right up there amongst the most popular games. And I think it's on us to change that.

A screenshot of 'Woorld' (via Funomena.com)

"Wouldn't it be great if anyone could make the next Minecraft, or the next Journey, or the next Papers, Please? If independently made games keep growing in popularity, and we keep on expanding the marketplace – because there are a lot of people right now who don't play indie games at all – then that'd be amazing. Let's do that."

One way of doing that would be for distribution channels to place greater emphasis on highlighting experiences that are so far from the norm. "Why not have an innovation tab in online stores?" she asks, rhetorically. "Maybe the labels we're using are out of date. What are they, like, twenty, thirty years old?"

Those labels don't just mean "action", "adventure", "puzzle" or "sports"; Robin's talking about the language that flows through every way that the gaming industry presents itself, how it reflects and addresses issues that eat away at its insides.

"I think it's just about living the values that we want to live, and saying the things that we want to focus on, rather than reacting to older labels that may or may not be appropriate." – Robin Hunicke

"I've been to the White House on this initiative called Computer Science For All, and I try to volunteer for it whenever I can. That's full of fantastic people, and the last time I was there I met with the Chief Technology Officer of the United States, Megan Smith, and she was talking about Maria Klawe's work at Harvey Mudd, and she's been promoting an idea that when people come into the college, as programmers, they get divided into two groups: people who've already programmed a lot, and people who haven't at all.

"So you have experts, and beginners – two safe communities. It's not about gender, or race, or class – it's about how much experience you have. Then, in both of those groups, unconscious bias is being removed from the learning cycle. In this exercise, you will help the robot move rocks into a pile. That's one version. In this exercise, you will help the robot move the groceries from the kart into the boot of the car. The same exercise, essentially. Then in this exercise, you'll help the girls from Frozen move these snow bricks over here so they can build a castle. Same exact programming. Separate the frame from the exercise, separate the communities into beginner and expert, and they're at parity in six years.

Robin Hunicke, photographed at Funomena (via Funomena.com)

"So let's do that across gaming – separate the gender and the cultural status of developers from their work, and from the way we write about it, and the financing, and the relationship of scale from our evaluation of its innovative qualities, and use better vocabulary. We do all that, and in ten years, we'll have moved very far away from the problems of having to discuss things like gender imbalance in the industry, and towards a situation where our values – the things that we value – are reflected in the things that we write, and the way that we give awards, and the way that we promote.

"I think it's just about living the values that we want to live, and saying the things that we want to focus on, rather than reacting to older labels that may or may not be appropriate. There's always going to be room for great art, and room for new experiences. And, if you invest in those experiences, the chances are that one in ten, or one in twenty, will deliver a really big return, on a level with a game like The Witness, or Journey. But it's impossible for one, small person to really know how we proceed."

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Impossible at an individual level, maybe, but Robin's words are essential food for thought for what could, or should, happen on a united front. During our time together I ask for her opinion on how to bring more women into the making and marketing of video games – but as she so neatly elucidates in her answer to me, I'm really speaking to the wrong person. And in many ways, video gaming is constantly asking the wrong questions to the wrong people.

Want to get more women into games? Go and speak to the guys that hold the keys to those positions, not the women knocking on the doors. Want to see more innovative, independent games being played alongside the big-budget shooters and sports sims? Consider why those cover-grabbing games are enjoying such heightened visibility, and if you need to add to their oxygen of hype at the expense of something genuinely new. We could all be better at supporting games-makers who want to progress this medium in all the right ways – through sharing, through inventing, through fun, rather than rinsing and repeating what's known to "work". Robin Hunicke is just one of many people wanting to encourage change in the way we work within and relate to video games, but it's exciting to imagine what'll happen when all of the voices around hers, singing equally inspiring songs, do band together.

Find out more about Funomena's projects at the company's website, here.

@MikeDiver

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When Lila Thirkield sold her San Francisco lesbian bar Lexington Club nearly two years ago, it seemed to be the death knell of lesbian nightlife in the city. The "Lex," as patrons affectionately called the bar, was one of the few surviving venues that catered to queer women in a city awash with gay-male entertainment. Her situation wasn't unique to San Francisco, either: Most major US cities have long offered multiple bars for the boys, with comparatively few devoted solely to dykes. In the two years since, the handful of lesbian bars left in America has dwindled to practically nothing.

As spaces for queer women have increasingly disappeared from the American nightlife landscape, their proprietors and patrons—as well as artists, writers, historians, and other cultural gatekeepers—have risen up to make clear that a vital sort of queer institution is eroding from our national consciousness. And as they move to document the spaces they've called home, a new configuration of agender, lesbian-friendly queer nightlife has taken root in their stead, one that may prove a blueprint for the future of queer nightlife in general.

While bars catering to gay men haven't exactly thrived across the country, they have skirted the downturn that lesbian spaces have experienced since the turn of the decade. Some point to the economic disparity between genders in explaining the discrepancy, while others look to the mainstreaming of gay culture, and the fact that queers coming out today have less need for specifically queer spaces than do generations prior.

Many lesbian bars that face closure have played significant roles in LGBTQ history, and most have represented, at various points, the only places that gay, bisexual, and gender nonconforming women could dance, flirt, socialize, and feel accepted by their peers in public. Even before Stonewall, historian Lisa Davis's Under the Mink recounts the surprising symbiosis between the lesbian community and the New York Mafia in the 1930s and 40s, when the mob ran—in a surprisingly equitable way—every lesbian club in the city, and often provided protection for early drag queens and gender nonconforming women. Indeed, such women needed that protection, as lesbian bars were often the target of police raids. Until the 1970s, dancing with members of one's sex and wearing opposite-sex clothing was illegal in many cities.

Watch Broadly's cross-country search for the last lesbian bars in America.

After World War II, homophile organizations like the Daughters of Bilitis offered social outlets for middle-class, professional lesbians, many of whom preferred private spaces to convene, as they found the bar scene less respectable. Some working-class and masculine-presenting lesbians preferred bars, in turn, where butch/femme roles were most pronounced. The women's liberation movement, which emphasized political activism over recreation and sexual pleasure, meant that lesbian bars—and strictly delineated butch/femme roles, which were seen as mimicking unequal heterosexual power dynamics—fell out of favor.

But lesbian bars vibrantly resurfaced in the 1990s, a time in which same-sex relationships became more visible in the media, even as right-wing politicians and evangelicals continued to vilify homosexuals. It was during this decade that the "lipstick lesbian" archetype reigned supreme, a sensibility that may have influenced the aesthetics of 90s bar culture.

As the needs of the lesbian community continue to evolve, a new wave of alternative queer nightlife that eschews gender binaries, affected labels, and strictly delineated queer sensibilities has taken root, and it may be able to provide a blueprint for the next generation of lesbian-inclusive spaces. Los Angeles, in particular, offers a case study of the kinds of spaces and events that arise in the wake of the decline of lesbian nightlife. After LA lost the Normandie Room in 2012, an intimate lesbian bar with a single billiards table and a beautiful, hard-to-get androgynous bartender, only one lesbian space remained: the Palms, a dingy West Hollywood haunt enjoyed by your mother's lesbians, Ellen DeGeneres and Melissa Etheridge, until it closed in 2013 for "property redevelopment."

Since then, lesbians have turned toward venues that host weekly or monthly nights geared toward queers (and their friends) of all genders. In Los Angeles, these include Rumours at Chinatown's Grand Star Jazz Club, Homoccult at Akbar in Los Feliz, and Mustache Mondays at the LASH, a dimly lit, industrial spot downtown. Beyond LA, queer parties across the country—like Chicago's Queen! and Hugo Ball, New York's Battle Hymn and Shock Value, Boston's House Boi, and more—are providing similarly genderless nights and hotspots for women, men, and any gender identification in between to let loose.

They are spaces open to all comers, including those who identify as trans, agender, asexual, and straight. Irene Urias, a curator of Mustache Mondays, explains that its diverse party was created as a response to the homogeneity of West Hollywood, the LA boystown that dominates the city's queer nightlife. When asked if there is a lesbian angle to the event, she bristles: "I don't want to be defined by any one thing, I don't want to put a label on the party," she insists. "There's no mold here."

It's difficult to see a cost to this newfound embrace of outsider identities and marginalized communities. At all-inclusive events, anyone and everyone can feel welcome, particularly people who have been traditionally excluded from mainstream gay nightlife. At the same time, these changes accompany the rejection of a specifically lesbian identity, in terms of both preferred terminology and the types of social spaces our community creates. It's a trend that shows no signs of stopping, in Los Angeles or across the country. Today, gay women's nightlife no longer means female-only sanctuaries. The heterogeneous, co-ed, and adaptable alternatives that have replaced it are a breath of fresh air for those who have been waiting all their lives to finally be themselves.

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A bottle of 665 Leather's house brand of poppers and a bottle of Jungle Juice aerosol poppers, surrounded by poppers pins made by the author. Photo by the author

I was first introduced to poppers (the inhalant that makes anal sex a breeze and dancing a joy) by a lesbian roommate who worked at a nightclub bar, who would return home each night with an armful of confiscated drugs. (It was, suffice it to say, an incredible living arrangement.) One drunken night, when I was 20, she forced me to take my first hit. Seconds later, I found myself rolling around on the carpet, giggling uncontrollably while my face turned red with heat.

I had no idea poppers were primarily a hookup drug until I was offered them during, you know, a hookup. I became massively confused, wondering why my guy wanted to turn the tide of our passionate night toward a tickle party. But it was then that I came to understand the glory that is sex on poppers.

In their heyday, poppers were typically made from a form of alkyl nitrite called amyl nitrite or isobutyl nitrite. Nowadays, retail variations can include harsh formulas—everything from cyclohexyl nitrite to isopropyl nitrate—that often seem strong enough to strip paint; when inhaled, they can produce headaches, possibly cause permanent vision damage, and, according to some experts, even sudden death; older, legit formulas merely produce a pleasant ten-second high.

How reliably they produce that high, of course, depends on the brand you're inhaling. And there's a lot more to poppers these days than whatever Al Pacino was snorting in Cruising.

My body is now a prison and my brain is floating, waiting for my sensory system to restart, and I feel as if a friend were to shock or surprise me while I'm on them, my heart would explode.

At sex shops, you'll take your pick from seemingly dozens of brands of tiny amber bottles, with names like Amsterdam, Locker Room, Jungle Juice and Rush. I refer to the latter as the Nike of inhalants, and while Rush may be the most recognizable brand in the game, its vials aren't produced with the same care as, say, a fine Scotch. Bottles of "Rush" are sold for $5 at New York bodegas and $20 at upscale LA sex shops; there's legitimate formulations, obviously counterfeit offerings, and everything in between. And it's as important as ever to know what you're popping into. Maculopathy, after all, is never a hot look.

Enter small batch, local, artisanal poppers. Given how (relatively) easy it is to homebrew it, some gear and fetish shops now offer signature blends on the DL. A friend of a friend tipped me off to 665 Leather, a leather store in West Hollywood, which offers an unlabeled 10 ml bottle of its own unique formula for $20, one it simply calls "Leather Cleaner." (Other shops I called were cagey about divulging many details over the phone—one obliquely told me to "stop by," and left it at that—but I've heard that more than a few sex shops now carry house brands.)

While picking up a bottle, I was told it was made by "a guy," and the concoction is "similar" to amyl nitrite. I'd like to envision said man in a white lab coat with an MIT diploma nearby, but I later settle for picturing a leather pig who may or may not own a rubber fist.

I give them a rip once I get home, and the effects are intense compared to your everyday bottle of Locker Room or Nitro. My head is on fire and pulsating; my lungs feel like helium balloons inflated to their limit. The first hit is no joke, but once my eyes stop watering and I bow my head for round two, I find I'm unable to repeat the euphoria I experienced just moments before. Which is sad, because some formulas maintain their potency for hit after hit after of cheek-flushing hits. (Though as I clear my nostrils after my dive into Leather Cleaner, I catch a pleasant sweetness in my nose, and the slightest hint of vanilla bean. It's a wonderful vintage nonetheless.)

At the other end of the poppers spectrum lay varieties that offer the same high in more intense ways, and while at 665, I picked up a bottle of aerosol poppers named Jungle Juice. These contain ethyl chloride, and there's no recommended dose, because the label indicates they're "for cleaning glass and metal surfaces." They are, to say the least, decidedly sketchier than your average bottle of Rush—and I can't recommend you try them out, because the risk of harm to your body is that much greater, as I later learned.

I reach out to an experienced friend for further instructions, and he advises me that a five-second spray on a clean sock will do the trick; hold to mouth, breathe in a few times, and enjoy. I give it a whirl, and within ten seconds, my body is tingling from head to toe. (Especially my fingers, but I also think I sprayed that hand trying to angle the nozzle—this stuff is no joke.) The effect is far removed from the typical jolt I get from a normal huff of poppers; my body is now a prison and my brain is floating, waiting for my sensory system to restart, and I feel as if a friend were to shock or surprise me while I'm on them, my heart would explode. They're definitely doing... something to my body.

After giving them another try, I decide to play doctor and determine that it is in my best medical interest to discontinue use of this product. The next morning, my throat felt noticeably sore. It's possible I overdid it with these, but then again, the label reads "Cleaning Solution," and instructions suggest the formula is great for stainless steel kitchen appliances, so who knows what went wrong or why my reaction felt so harsh. The bottle could say "¯\_(ツ)_/¯" and I would have the same idea of what it is and how to use it.

With all the names, formulas, manufacturers, and counterfeiters of poppers in the world today, it's impossible to know exactly what you're ingesting and how much is too much when it comes to the drug. According to some studies, poppers are fairly innocuous—in 2007, they were ranked 19th out of 20 popular drugs in terms of addictiveness and potential for harm. Some people have gluten allergies and feel fatigued when they cave and eat that office donut; others take their first whiff of poppers and end up blowing out the center of their retinas. If you do choose to indulge in some unvetted formulation of the stuff, it's in your best interest to do some research to determine the authenticity of the product and what it's actually made of. In this day and age, there are forums and communities of users with decades of aggregated experience on the topic. It's a terrifying world out there in poppers-land—one day, hopefully, we'll see GMO-free nitrites on the shelves of Whole Foods, but until then, play safe.

The author's cat also enjoys a huff of euphoria. Gif by the author

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Police outside the residential facility in Kanagawa. Photo via Getty

At around 2 AM on Tuesday, Satoshi Uematsu put a hammer through the window of his old workplace. Prowling around the first floor, he opened a bag filled with knives. The 26-year-old––apparently motivated by a desire to eradicate the disabled––then started slashing people's throats. In the end, he killed at least 19 and seriously injured about 20 more at a residential facility for the handicapped located an hour outside of Tokyo.

After attacking nearly a third of the center's residents at his leisure, Uetmatsu drove to the Sagamihara police station and confessed to one of the deadliest crimes to take place in Japan since World War II. The country has one of the lowest homicide rates in the world, according to the United Nations, and some reports are calling the slashings the biggest mass murder to ever happen there. Regardless of its scale, the fact that it happened at all is the result of disturbing negligence by Japanese officials who failed to act despite repeated warnings.

Back in February, Uetmatsu delivered a letter to a Japanese politician asking for permission to mercy kill the handicapped. "I dream of a world where the disabled can die in peace," it read. "I will carry out the plan without hurting the staffers, and I will turn myself in after I kill the disabled."

The letter proposed an elaborate plan involving the killing of 470 disabled people as part of a "revolution." What he wanted from the politician was a guarantee that he could get off on insanity grounds and be given $5 million and plastic surgery to start a new life afterward.

Days later, he was questioned by police for handing out fliers near the facility that contained similar comments, and he was eventually committed to a mental hospital, where he was diagnosed as paranoid and dependent on weed. Despite working at a facility that cared for disabled people, and harboring a stated desire to murder them, Uematsu reportedly first got in trouble with his boss over tattoos on his chest and back.

Yuji Kuroiwa, the governor of the Kanagawa Prefecture, has apologized for not acting in advance, according to the Associated Press. The nine men and ten women who died ranged in age from 18 to 70.

Uematsu's attack lasted about 40 minutes, and it's likely he would have claimed many more victims if Japan's gun-control laws had been more lax. It's completely illegal to own a handgun in the country, and to get a shotgun or rifle is a longwinded process (even members of the notorious Yakuza gang rarely carry firearms.) In 2014, there were only six gun-related deaths in the entire country, and in 2015, there were only eight crimes in which guns were fired. As such, knives are the weapons of choice for the country's most infamous crimes. In 2001, a former janitor stabbed eight children to death at their school. In 2008, a man murdered eight people at a shopping center with a dagger.

Meanwhile, in Japan, confessions are extremely common. Police aren't allowed to conduct wiretaps or undercover operations, and the legal system doesn't allow for plea bargains, so authorities are forced to rely on a cultural pressure to unburden oneself after wrongdoing. Perhaps because of this, the country has a 99 percent conviction rate. Uematsu reportedly told police in no uncertain terms, "I did it."

If Uematsu made troubling but consistent remarks to politicians and co-workers, his Twitter account reveals that he was fixated on a number of things he believed were afflicting his homeland, like AIDS and radiation poisoning. On July 23, he commented on a teen gunman killing nine people in Munich, Germany, saying, "it would have been fun if it was a toy."

His final missive came just after an employee of the facility called the police Monday morning. "May there be peace in our world," it read. "Beautiful Japan!!!!!!"

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

DVS in 'The Intent' (Screen shot via)

Last night, central London saw the premiere of a new British thriller. The Intent is the story (I think) of an undercover police officer called Gunz (Dylan Duffus) who goes along for a very violent ride with Hoodz (played by grime MC Scorcher) as they murder and pillage at every corner shop and mechanic in south London. The locations they rob tend to have an inexplicable amount of cash in them; it's never really explained why a corner shop has a duffel bag filled with £20,000 resting below the counter.

Femi Oyeniran – who directed, produced and wrote the film – plays Mitch, who's just happy to sell eighths of weed to his mates and isn't really on shooting people in the face in broad daylight every other week, so turns back to the church.

A scene in the film finds Scorcher's Hoodz parlaying with a local gangster called Brownie in an attempt to sell him a few keys of cocaine he's just stolen. Brownie is played by rapper DVS (pronounced "Devious"). As he enters Brownie's domain, he finds him torturing a screaming man on a table by burning him with a hot iron.

This would be a unremarkable segment of a crime film, had DVS – real name Courtney Hutchinson, from Brixton, south London – not been charged with the torture and rape of a woman in February of this year.

Hutchinson reportedly attacked the woman at his flat near City Airport after an argument. He'd met her when she was 17. He allegedly whipped her with phone and television wires, punched her in the face and throat repeatedly, pushed a chair leg into her stomach and burnt her with a hot iron. She was then raped repeatedly by Hutchinson, who forced her to have a high temperature shower, even though she asked for a cold one to soothe the burns on her skin. He was charged with rape and false imprisonment and has pleaded guilty to both – although, confusingly,a tweet was sent from his account a couple of days ago that read, "Whoever's dumb enough to think I could rape a 17 year girl then so be it. But I could never be that guy. So carry on trying slander my name." He will face sentencing in September.

I'm no expert in the machinations of the film industry. I've never made a film. I've never had to raise money from investors to make a passion project. A lot of work and effort has gone into making The Intent, regardless of how it turned out. But to feature a man who has been charged with a crime that is eerily similar to the one he acts out on screen is too great a folly not to mention.

The filmmakers have said in a statement to VICE that: "Before the production of The Intent commenced (two years ago – in July 2014) all cast members were vigorously screened with respect to any criminal activity and gang affiliations before being allowed to participate. What's more, the film has been picture-locked since last September."

Though the crime was committed in February, five months after the final edit was completed, it has been a further five months from the crime to now. Five months in which the decision to pull the scene was not made. Even now, as the film prepares to go on general release, it is not too late. Hutchinson's role is not even remotely integral to the story; the scene could quite easily have been cut. To let the film go to premiere with the scene remaining – one that graphically shows a man performing a staged act of torture he would subsequently use on a woman whose life is now irrevocably changed as a result of it – boggles the mind.

The full statement from the filmmakers can be found here.

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The author pictured left, not looking like a socially awkward recluse

"You don't look like you have Asperger syndrome."

I hear this sentence a lot. It's a death knell for understanding: the part where a friend, one night stand, or even romantic partner learns I have Asperger syndrome and makes the decision that they know more about the condition than the people who diagnosed me.

It's often meant as a message of solidarity: "Hey, you can pass for whatever counts as normal around here, good job." Yet it shows a complete lack of knowledge about the entire disorder.

As awareness of Asperger's has grown, it's also become defined entirely by the stereotype of someone who is socially awkward, a topic that many twentysomethings feel like an authority on. When someone says I don't look like I have Asperger's, this is what I hear: "All people with Asperger's are socially impaired, reclusive, obsessive and really fucking good at maths, right?"

I'm not going to breakdown exactly what Asperger's is, because VICE already did a great job of this, I'm just going to talk about where people are getting it wrong. One small change since the article was written in 2012, though: Asperger's syndrome technically no longer exists, it was folded into "Autistic Spectrum Disorder" in May 2013. The general catch-all term takes in everything anywhere near related to autism, but it's convenient shorthand to refer to it by its original name.

I suck at maths. I also love socialising, although it's incredibly draining. I will spend most of the day after a social event obsessing over the 10,000 things I definitely did wrong and everyone hates me for, but while I'm there, I can have a pretty decent time as long as I don't think I'm doing anything to make people think I'm weird. Most people with Asperger's are affected in different ways, but generally we're all high-functioning.

There's one advantage that most of us have. To have Asperger's is to be a fantastic actor. Those with the syndrome will have different personalities they adopt for different situations. After enough practice, none of us ever "looks like they have Asperger's". In the same way that someone with depression might try to appear more upbeat when they're out and around, Asperger's sufferers might adopt a personality that helps them make friends and fit in.

Sadly, while this might help us make friends, it rarely scratches the itch for companionship, which can lead to more serious risks. It might be that I'm just a dickhead, but I've always found the worse part of Asperger's syndrome not to be the social ineptitude, but the crushing sense of "otherness" that means even in a room full of people professing they love your company, you feel alone. It's not often discussed, but depression and Asperger's often go hand in hand and it's this that prompted my first suicide attempt. I'm not alone, either. Depending on what study you look at, between 7 to 15 percent of people who have been admitted to hospital for attempted suicide also have a diagnosis for autism. This is much higher than the 1 percent rate of autism diagnosis across the country would suggest.

It's incredibly distressing to watch your friends, family and colleagues all distance themselves from you over social rules you've broken or slights that everyone but you has noticed – slowly starting to feel less and less welcome in places but not being able to ask what's wrong, because people just won't tell you. Because you can't read social cues, you'll often get a gut feeling there's a problem you're not equipped to detect.

This panic can mean those with Asperger's are plagued with self-doubt. If Asperger's has taught me anything, it's that my gut feelings can often be wrong, so challenging people for behaving coldly towards you could actually just drive people away, when they weren't acting coldly in the first place. The worst part about this is that while I might have the social skills of a toddler, I'm often totally aware that they're getting it wrong, but aren't able to adequately resolve the situation or express myself. I'm frequently stumped why friends don't seem to want to hang out or talk anymore. This varies due to the severity for different people, but it's something that many friends with Asperger's have discussed feeling.

In fact, one friend said the only way she was able to handle the unseen and unspoken pressures of society when you can't instinctively deal with it was "to just stop giving a shit what anyone thought about her". This is something that is much easier said than done.

But while people with Asperger's are slowly struggling to understand these unwritten rules of social conduct, characters in popular culture like Sheldon Cooper from unfunny sitcom Big Bang Theory or Ryan Gosling's supercool yet ultraviolent driver from Drive are propagating the stereotypes. Living with Asperger's is much more than just the stereotype, yet, for now at least, it seems that's all the representation we're going to get.

It'd be nice if, rather than playing it for laughs, pop culture depictions of Asperger's could focus on the other side of things: the increased risk of mental health problems, the crippling self-worth issues and even the thorny subject of the increased suicide risks. The most important thing to consider, both for pop culture and for the purposes of befriending one of us strange and mythical Asperger's sufferers, is that we're all different people, and we're all doing the best we can to just get on with things.

@Jake_Tucker

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Young people overwhelmingly didn't vote for Brexit. Because why on earth would they? Hey, undergraduate, want to ruin the economy and prevent yourself from studying abroad? No way! Young professional, want to make it way harder and a lot more expensive to go on holiday? Nope! Definitely not! Well-informed 20-something, want to blame immigration for absolutely everything wrong with the UK? Of course not! Because you're not a complete idiot!

Still, the Leave campaign stole it, so there's not much we can do now but wait to see how much we're screwed over in the long run. In the short-term, however, things aren't looking great – we haven't even left the EU yet, but young people are already feeling the effects of the vote in a very real way.

We spoke to a few to find out exactly how it's affected them.

Katie, 23, Derby

I'm currently studying my MA in translation, and Brexit has hugely damaged my career prospects. EU laws protecting workers' rights and funding languages and translation will be taken away soon, making it a lot harder for translators like me to find well-paid work. It's the EU that helps us set decent rates: £90 per 1,000 words, which may sound a lot, but it's actually a good few days' work to complete. Without EU help, we could see this fall to £30 or less.

Also, how will I negotiate with my foreign business partners now? I could of course go abroad to do these negotiations in person – but oh wait: a lack of free movement might stop that. We are now no longer protected from flight taxes, so getting there will cost more. This is more money that I don't have, thanks to my lowered job prospects and the ruined economy – not to mention the fact my pounds will be worthless after converting them to euros.

The Brexit result has been devastating for me. I feel like my future is bleak. I feel like I've spent £50,000 on a career that is going to fall down a black hole. I feel so devastated that people didn't consider the real-world repercussions. We certainly have taken our county back: to the dark ages where we're now stuck and all alone.

Susanna, 18, Harrogate

I voted to stay in the EU. As much as I'm heartbroken by the outcome, I'm more worried by the consequences I will potentially face in the future as a result. In September I'm going to begin a languages degree, and one of the key parts is the year abroad. I knew, as a language student, that leaving the EU would impact the future of the scheme. I was so excited by Erasmus. It's such a big part of my degree and I was looking forward to living abroad and experiencing another culture. There's no better way to learn a language than to experience it firsthand in the country it is spoken.

The possibility of British students like myself being excluded from this scheme because of something most of us young people didn't vote for breaks my heart. I am worried that I won't get the opportunity to go ahead and experience it myself, something that my own mother did when she did her languages degree over 20 years ago. I really hope that the scheme can stay in place for years to come.

I do feel that my future has been robbed. Fortunately, I am dual nationality already as I am full Italian but was born here in the UK. I'm so grateful that I have an Italian passport as well as a British passport, as I'm sure it will make my life a lot easier over these next few years.

Joshua, 25, Coventry

Everyone talked about "getting our country back" as literally the only argument for leaving. I think the old generation all voted to leave because of reasons that won't really won't affect them in the long run, like immigration and getting more money for the NHS – which I don't think will happen anyway. Everything about the Leave campaign was a lie, and that's why the majority of them are backtracking on everything they said.

I work hard all year in construction and now my holiday is costing me around £500 more because of the shit exchange rate. I'm having to go into my savings to get that little extra bit of cash. It's just annoying, not least because I'm trying to save for a house at the same time. It costs an absolute fortune to buy a house regardless, and it's going to become harder and harder to buy one now.

Mark, 28

I work for a company that manufactures and supplies a range of building products that are all made in Europe, but we sell them in the UK. We also sell them worldwide, but our investors are very wary at the moment because there is so much uncertainty over here. We buy everything with euros and we're now making up to 30 percent less on all of our sales than we were previously because the pound is struggling, which is honestly the nicest way to put it.

No politicians have confirmed what's going to happen or when it's going to happen, which means our investors are basically looking at whether they're going to pull out of the UK because we're making so little money. Because my job is the head of UK sales, if we're not selling in the country, there's not really a position for me. So it's a pretty strange time at the moment – I'm in limbo, but I'm going to find out at the end of this month whether I'm going to be made redundant or not, and it's an example of how people don't realise how much we rely on Europe, as well as Europe relies on us.

I'm a realist; I know sales jobs are easy to pick up when the economy is booming and things are great, but on the flipside of that, with all this uncertainty around the economy, people and businesses probably aren't going to be looking to hire as much as they were. I've had a look about just in case, but there doesn't seem to be much out there that would help me advance my career at my age, so to speak. It's fair enough, too: why would people invest in the country if they don't know what the political situation is likely to be? I don't think anyone's under any illusions that we have a solution for a long-term problem. It's things like this that the people who have voted to leave don't realise will happen, and how they'll be influenced. The future is bleak, and no one's doing anything about it.

Merisha, 24

There are family members I don't speak to any more as a result of Brexit. Not because of the way they voted, but the disgusting comments they made about immigration that I didn't agree with. As the daughter of an immigrant, I'm not willing to stand by some of my family members any more. I also keep hearing people around me saying "the economy will get better, it's just for the moment", but nothing good has happened yet; it's all going to depend on the deal our government can do with the EU.

Politically, we're a mess, and I'm not sure it's going to get any better. We are one of the laughing stocks of the world, with a government that ran away when they needed to take control and continue what they fought for. This vote has shown the true colours of people in terms of xenophobia and bigotry; it's truly split the nation. There are too many people on both sides blaming each other for the way they voted and too much name-calling and pettiness. Unfortunately, this is the decision that's happened and we're going to have to live with it, even if a lot of us don't want to.

Bethany, 19

I really wanted to study abroad for my master's, but because I've only just finished my first year, by the time we actually leave it might mean I can't secure Erasmus funding, which would make it pretty much impossible for me to go. On top of my own worries, I feel like the UK is on self-destruct mode and that we're becoming increasingly isolated. Knowing that we're stuck on this little island makes me want to go and live somewhere else. We're going to end up building a wall like America or something, I swear. This is only the beginning.

@YasminAJeffery / @its_me_salma

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YouTube is probably the greatest anthropological project ever launched. It has managed to expose the multitudes of the human condition more than any other medium ever created, and allowed people to express themselves in more diverse ways than at any point in history. This weekly column is an outlet for me to share with you some undiscovered gems, as well some very well-trodden gems, and discuss just what it is that makes the chosen accounts so intriguing.

WHO: Clifton Chilli Club
WHAT: Sweaty British people eating chillis at fetes.
HOW MANY SUBSCRIBERS AT TIME OF WRITING: 37,728
WHY SHOULD I CARE: There's something slightly untoward about seeing a row of Brits lined up on a table ready to partake in some joint summertime food banter. Food banter is usually the preserve of our American cousins – hot dog eating competitions, pie eating competitions, dumpling eating competitions, hot dog pie eating competitions: you name it, those motherfuckers will eat too much of it in front of a throng of whooping children and mothers while a terrible compere cracks wise about the girth of the main contender. You need only look to previous YTCOTW star Matt Stonie to find evidence of their star-spangled gluttony.

When it comes to British chilli eating, the Clifton Chilli Club is about as big a name as you'll find. They're in attendance at a bunch of annual chilli and food festivals, enlisting around ten people a time to munch on their peppers, which range from the pathetic Padron pepper (500 Scoville units, the scale used to determine the spiciness of a chilli) to the upsettingly painful Trinidad Scorpion, which comes in at a bitchin' 1.5 million Scovilles and up.

Men dressed as sailors, guffawing dads and girlfriends out to prove something sit at the table and harm themselves greatly. Sometimes they vomit up all the deep red chillis into a bin, as if excising themselves of a particularly placenta-esque demon from hell.

If you thought sunglasses looked cool, then I'm here to tell you, friend, that they're not. At least, whenever these blokes wear them, they look powerfully uncool. There's a certain type of person who, having watched a few of these videos, tends to go in for the chilli-eating contest. They seem to be fairly nondescript men in their twenties and thirties who still gel their hair spiky, who still wear slogan T-shirts. They have shorts with pockets that don't go anywhere. They don't even buy their own shoes. Their shoes suck. They get put in a lot of headlocks by bigger blokes. But this is their moment, a time when they can prove their manliness, their sense of endurance, while a cheering crowd goads them into unimaginable gastric agony.

Clifton Chilli Club do some other stuff, like sauce reviews and recipes, but it's these little treats – these little windows into the Normal Lad's psyche – that pique my interest the most.

@joe_bish

For more YouTube Channel of the Week, click here.

Don't get too attached to these marines – there's a good chance they won't be seeing the credits.

Aliens is 30 years old. I know this, because I can use calendars. James Cameron's all-guns-blazing sequel to Ridley Scott's sci-fi horror masterpiece of 1979 came out in July 1986, pulling in a box office of well over 100 million dollars on a budget of around 18 million. It won two Oscars, seven Saturn Awards, and was undoubtedly my favourite movie of all time until I reached an age where I could better appreciate the pacing and tension of its predecessor (and had seen more films). Its director's cut was a regular watch when underage parties finally cooled down, and we all slumped in front of the TV set. So far as action movies of the 1980s go, though, few come better – IMDb has it placed eighth in terms of popularity for the decade, encompassing films of all genres.

Aliens developed a rabid fanbase, eager for more stories of heavily armed marines battling acid-for-blood xenomorphs across the stars. So when Alien 3 came along in 1992, scarred by scripting problems, director's chair changes and featuring no guns whatsoever in opposition to just a single alien, people got pissed. Cameron himself was a critic of the film, calling its killing off of the survivors of Aliens a "slap in the face". The all-action follow-up to Aliens, sold as a "true sequel" and effectively rewriting the series' story as steered by Alien 3, would ultimately come out as a video game in 2013. Sadly, Aliens: Colonial Marines by Gearbox Software was a disaster of a shooter, riddled with bugs and awful enemy AI, set in boring environments and featuring forgettable characters. "You have to ask, if this didn't have the Alien branding, would it even have seen the light of day?" asked Eurogamer in its review. If only it'd remained in the dark.

For anyone wanting to celebrate Aliens' 30th by getting stuck into a video gaming experience of comparable drama and adrenaline, featuring familiar iconography, weaponry and worlds, it might seem that Colonial Marines is the only option. Suck it up, stick it in – the disc, that is – and just go with it. Yeah, yeah, that is Hicks, and I know, the whole thing's an absolute state; but what else are you going to play these days, on still-active systems? Alien: Isolation is a phenomenal game, of course, but it's a tonal cousin of the first movie, a far cry from the pulse rifle-lugging grunts of bug hunts past.

Well, you could play the WayForward-made Aliens: Infestation. Scratch that: you should play Aliens: Infestation (let's stick with the colon), especially if you're the sort of person who a) loved Cameron's movie more than you should have given you were something like 11 the first time you saw it, and b) know your way around the metroidvania genre, as this is very much an experience that mirrors the 2D open-world design of Nintendo's 1986 explore 'em up. Which is absolutely fair enough, as Metroid certainly borrowed its share of aesthetic cues from Scott's Alien, the game's character designer Yoshio Sakamoto declaring the movie a "huge influence", and its art team looking to H.R. Giger's work for creature inspiration. Infestation is merely cashing in what the Alien franchise was inarguably owed.

Infestation is a Nintendo DS game, meaning that it's also playable on the 3DS range – meaning that there are somewhere in the region of 210 million people out there who can pick this up and immediately play it on their handheld console. But it came out right at the back end of the DS's lifespan, in the autumn of 2011, which hardly aided its commercial visibility. This wasn't the first time a more than decent Alien franchise tie-in emerged when gaming technology had all but moved on.

In late 2000, with the PS2 already selling in big numbers, Alien: Resurrection came out for the original PlayStation, a full three years after the movie it shared its title and plot with. Although it doesn't look too similar at a first glance, Resurrection being a grimy first-person shooter, the game shares a few qualities with Infestation: both are heavy on atmosphere, in place of genuinely transportive graphics, and use multiple player-controlled protagonists. Both are incredibly tough, too, the difference being that once a soldier is dead in Infestation, they stay dead, XCOM style.

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Love aliens? Watch The Real 'X-Files'.

Which is why you can never rush anywhere in Infestation. It does put you in the boots of a number of marines, each one packing some serious firepower; but race into a new area of the game – be that during one of its USS Sulaco-set stages, or on the surface of the infamous LV-426 – paying little mind to the bleeping of your motion tracker, and you'll swiftly be overwhelmed by aliens, enemy soldiers (alas, this isn't strictly a men (and women) versus monsters affair), aggressive robots or any combination of Bad Things. On opening each and every door, via keycards or blowtorch, you creep into the newly discovered space, just in case. Because underneath all that armour, behind all those guns and bombs, and beneath those layers of attitude, you're just a puny human. And puny humans die real easily.

I've had my crew – four at a time, and no more, with new recruits available to fill vacant roles, assuming you can find stray soldiers willing to step in – obliterated inside 20 minutes of play before. Lose all four of your squad without an opportunity to recruit replacements, like in a tough boss battle encounter, and it's game over, man, game over. Every character plays the same way, at the same speed and with the same abilities, but Infestation's vibrant character designs, by X-Men artist Chris Bachalo, means that each has a distinct personality when exchanging messages with the operation's commanding officer, one Patrick "Stainless" Steel.

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'Aliens: Infestation', launch trailer

And the mission at the game's narrative core is unashamedly indebted to Cameron's 1986 story – "the company", Weyland-Yutani, is again trying to get aliens into its research facilities with the objective of using them as biological weapons. Your team isn't about to let this happen, even with a "generic company man" (the game's words, not mine) interfering. Plenty of callbacks to Aliens are inserted into the gameplay, including a loader fight, flambéing eggs, and a frantic APC escape; and the music's bombastic blasts and eerie turns are deliberately evocative of James Horner's original score.

Infestation looks simple, primitive, as a great many 2D games do nowadays. It's not going to blow anyone away with its looks, however nice some of the idle animations are. And it's not going to take up days of your time – if you're good enough, and that'll take practise, you can finish the whole thing within three hours, barely longer than the film that inspired it. But this is a deep and memorable Aliens-affiliated experience that does a terrific job of continuing the action that Cameron's movie delivered. It's not considered canon, as Colonial Marines so depressingly is, but by leaving the events of Alien 3 untouched but still returning to so many memorable locations – you even see inside the Derelict – it assuredly earns its unofficial place within the series in fan-pleasing style.

This is not the perfect Alien/s game – its respawning enemies can absolutely dick off, and there are times when the environment is almost conspiring against you, trapping your marine between a crate and an enemy with a gun, with no wiggle room to get your own shots away. To be honest, I don't think any game tied to 20th Century Fox's continuing franchise has quite nailed its interactive potential. But Infestation is absolutely the best game, the only game, to celebrate Aliens' 30th anniversary with, that you can easily play today without having to source a defunct console, or Konami's thoroughly bananas arcade game of 1990. Because zombies were a thing in Aliens, right?

@MikeDiver

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Older people love having sex. That's because, like younger people, they too are also humans, and humans generally enjoy having sex with other humans. It's a lot of fun, and it feels great, and it's good for your bones and your heart and your soul. So it's no surprise that a recent report found that 26 percent of people over 60 in the UK are unhappy with life because they're not having sex enough. In fact, a lack of sex later on in life, it turns out, is a greater cause of distress than being stuck at home all day, living in relative squalor or being widowed.

A 2015 University of Manchester study found that 54 percent of men and 31 percent of woman over 70 are sexually active, but for the remaining percentages, it must be frustrating racking up all those decades of experience and then not being able to anything with it. So because you can never know too much about ~coitus~, we asked a bunch of people over (or near) the age of 60 to share some of that experience with us, giving us their best sex tips and asking them about they've seen sex change throughout their lives.

Sue, 67

(Photo: Agnieszka Chabros for Catalogue Mag)

In the late 1960s, in Britain, men still had all the power, so they asked women out on dates, and people would go to things like balls. But then there was also the radical hippy group who came in and held orgies with marijuana and acid and sexy dancers.

Even though men weren't very experienced with sex, because they didn't get to have experiences with any women that were more advanced sexually, women just thought whatever they did was OK because it was all they knew. And since all young people lived at home with their parents, there was no opportunity to go out and have flagrant sex and experiment on the kitchen floor. The change started in the mid-60s, because the music became a huge signifier of what was different. It was an odd time, though, because there was this huge sense of conservatism throughout it all – women were still writing cookery books and knitting back then, for god's sake. But then a whole bunch of acid came along and it gave people the freedom to say, "I will not get married, I will not have children, I will not be locked into housework; I will get a job and fly around the world instead." In the 70s my sister and I were living in a beach town, so we had to have sex with a different boy every night for a year to get experience. People went from sitting at home and eating TV dinners to not ever going home and dancing and fucking as much as they could.

The best thing to do to learn about sex is to go and have a lot of sex. I would tell everyone to go out and pick up random people. People should also talk about things, because there's no replacement for that. Definitely, definitely practice masturbation, because that's a skill. You have to know exactly what you want, and you've got to know what's happening to your body. So, if you're with a partner that can't give you those tingles in your feet, you're with the wrong person and you've got to leave them, because sex dictates how your relationship will be. You must also love your body and explore it in every single way. Even the top of your head; everything. You should also be very informed on sex toys – everyone should go to Amsterdam, because really that's where the best sex shops are, and it's brilliant! Having sex with people of the same gender is important, too – everyone should try that at least once in their life, but be sure to just have lots of one night stands in general. Lastly, everyone should try bondage games at some point in his or her life. With the right partner, it can be amazing. Oh, and everyone should make a movie of themselves having sex. If you're not turned on, don't do it. That's the only rule with sex.

Leo*, 59

People have always had sex – I doubt there's anything that people do today which wasn't done by the generation before us, or the generation before that, or the one before that, etc. I don't think dating has changed, either – people still go to the same kinds of places and get up to the same kinds of shenanigans.

Finding a date has certainly changed, though. Apps like Tinder have made it possible to find a date while sat on the sofa, which I guess is fine for most, but it sort of takes the sport out of it. I think the best part of dating is the thrill of the chase, the subtleties of flirting and the risk that she might already be in a relationship. With Tinder, this is all removed. How dull!

I've been very lucky in my life. Without sounding like a complete arse, I have never had a problem in getting a date, and I've done pretty much everything that can be done, sexually. If I were to offer any pearls of wisdom to younger men, it would be this: porn isn't real. The women that you will meet in your life are not porn stars and sex isn't like it is portrayed in porn films. Take time with your partner and don't be an arsehole.

Jo*, 60

When the six-week block of school holidays came around in the late-60s, my friends and I would meet up and go out to parks to meet up with boys and kiss them in the bushes. We'd meet the boys at the youth club and then get together afterwards, and if we could we'd get into clubs because sometimes they didn't check how old we were. We'd go there early and stay until way past midnight by putting mops in our beds with wigs on top so our parents wouldn't find out because they were Christians and would have gone crazy. All the boys used to walk us home, though. There was never the question or thought they'd do something bad to us, because it just wasn't like that. No matter how far it was, they'd walk us home.

Everything was different then; I got pregnant with my first child when I was 16, so we started young, even though our parents didn't want us to. It was all about breaking the rules and doing what we wanted to do at the time. I'd put on my best dress, make-up and go! Those were the days – everything was easier then and no one was scared of what might happen because it wasn't very likely anything would. We had good times back then, man. Things are so much different now, though – we could be free and do what we wanted, but people have to be much more careful now. I hear so many horror stories these days that I just want to tell all my grandchildren not to go out with strangers and do what I did, because you just can't any more.

If you do find someone you like and you get along and that spark is there, make sure you use protection! Or the pill if you've been together for a long time and you know where the other person's been. And tell each other what you like and what you don't – that is so important. When I got pregnant I'd only had sex a few times and I didn't even like it that much back then. So don't continue with something you aren't enjoying or you don't think is all that, and don't ditch your friends for anyone. Those are the most important things! That wasn't even on my mind when I was fooling about, because no one talked about it, but there you have it.

READ ON BROADLY: Teen Girls Are Roasting Boys Online in New Cyberbullying Trend

Ron*, 59

It's definitely become easier now for people to find sex. Dating was there earlier, but it was difficult to engage in sex unless there was some hope of a relationship. Today, I've found it really doesn't matter if people engage in sex even without a relationship. It's more out of carnal desire probably, or just to convince yourself there is physical compatibility.

Easy availability of sexual services via the internet has also made things so different for many people, such as paying for sex or sex outside marriage, for example. It's kind of denigrated the beauty of sex, so more isn't always better in my opinion.

As for sex tips? Don't rush in just for physical attraction or desire. Think about possible consequences, too. But, most importantly, you can enjoy a good sex life without making it the only headline in any relationship. Love, live, laugh and enjoy a relationship.

*Names have been changed to suit the person's low-key lifestyle.

@YasminAJeffery / @its_me_salma

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Sean Penn as Spicoli in 'Fast Times at Ridgemont High.' Universal Pictures

This article is originally from VICE US

"I no longer doubt that marijuana can be an intellectual stimulant," wrote the Harvard professor Lester Grinspoon in 1994. "It can help the user to penetrate conceptual boundaries, promote fluidity of associations, and enhance insight and creativity."
Those sentences are from his introduction to an edition of Marihuana Reconsidered, his groundbreaking 1971 book that aimed to challenge the public outcry over marijuana use.

The original edition ofMarihuana Reconsidered also included an essay by someone who referred to himself as "Mr. X," and he noted how being high in the shower helped him figure out how racism worked—a revelation that inspired him to write 11 essays in an hour. The claim sounded crazy, until it was revealed that Mr. X was Carl Motherfucking Sagan.

Sagan is a great example of a pothead who's accomplished amazing stuff while high—and he's not alone. Steve Jobs used marijuana to aid his creativity in the 70s, while weed was one of many chemicals it took to get Hunter S. Thompson's mental engines revving. Francis Crick was one of the scientists who discovered DNA, as well as an unlikely pot advocate who was a founding member of the proto-legalization group called Society of Mental Awareness (SOMA). The famed neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote that pot allowed him to reconcile with his own atheism; author Lee Childs—whose Jack Reacher novels are a favorite among the Fox News set—recently admitted he's smoked every night for 44 years and writes while stoned. So why the hell do people generally think of potheads as lazy do-nothings?

There was once a time when marijuana was accepted among intellectuals and creative types as lubrication for the brain. Under the influence of hashish, "people completely unsuited for word-play will improvise an endless string of puns and wholly improbable idea relationships fit to outdo the ablest masters of this preposterous craft," wrote the French poet, essayist, and general chill-ass dude Charles Baudelaire in 1860. He added, "Every difficult question... becomes clear and transparent. Every contradiction is reconciled. Man has surpassed the gods."

Of course, Baudelaire was geographically and temporally separated from the American moral majority's reign of marijuana scare-mongering in the 60s and 70s. As Grinspoon wrote, "There is something peculiar about illicit drugs: If they don't always make the drug user behave irrationally, they certainly cause many nonusers to behave that way."

And right when marijuana cultivated a reputation as the counterculture's substance of choice, the government stepped in to impose what Allen St. Pierre refers to as "the idea that marijuana use creates a lack of productivity, a slobbishness, a lack of attention." St. Pierre is executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (or NORML), and says that those stereotypes have been around since the Nixon administration, who used them to wrest legitimacy from anti-Vietnam War activists.

Nixon and his cohorts worked to ensure that, as St. Pierre puts it, "Regardless of your political affiliation, if you were a Vietnam War protestor, ergo, you were a pot smoking, non-working hippie." A talkative, bubbly guy, St. Pierre essentially functions as a one-man force against public misconceptions regarding weed: He speaks with gleeful erudition about marijuana, and he estimates he's done "thousands" of interviews about the drug since joining NORML in 1991.

As the years have passed, the myth of the pot-smoking slacker has grown thanks to the Partnership for a Drug Free America (PDFA), the organization behind the notorious "This Is Your Brain on Drugs" ads. Founded in 1985, the Partnership for a Drug Free America brought together the best and brightest in the advertising industry to create ads meant to, according to one LA Times article from 1996, "un-sell" the idea of taking drugs. The PDFA didn't just brand drugs as lame, but actively dangerous, too; and just like Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign, the PDFA initially did little to distinguish between weed and harder substances such as cocaine or heroin.

One of its ads depicted a kid who smoked pot once as dangling from puppet strings, while another found a stoned kid named Tommy smoking a joint in the park being mocked by his schoolmates for being a delirious loser. Another featured a documentary-style interview with an imaginary burnout whose pot use led him to heroin at the age of 14. Scary stuff—that is, until it was revealed in 1997 that the PDFA was being bankrolled in part by Big Alcohol, Big Tobacco, and Big Pharma, a plot that St. Pierre rightly says is "about as Orwellian as you can get."

Though the PDFA swore off accepting funds from alcohol and tobacco companies in 1997, it still accepts donations from Big Pharma; two years ago, the Nation wrote about how Purdue Pharma—the makers of OxyContin—was a major funder of anti-marijuana legalization efforts. But St. Pierre tells me that he expects stoner stereotypes to decrease as the decriminalization of marijuana increases: "When one walks into a marijuana dispensary today, they see some are designed equal to or better than any Starbucks." As more people become familiar with weed, and realize it doesn't turn them or the users they know into puppets on a string, the perception lifts.

Meanwhile, anecdotes of artists using marijuana to enhance both their creativity and productivity are myriad. DJ Quik frantically mixed half of Tupac's classic post-jail album All Eyez on Me in 48 hours by alternating between a steady smoking regimen of cigarettes and joints (Quik's reps confirmed to VICE that the story is true). And as St. Pierre points out, "Listen to the Beatles in their first years of existence, then listen to Sgt. Pepper. It wasn't the fact that they went from being 22 to 26—it's that they took marijuana."

And anyway, science—to a certain degree—backs up the idea that weed can motivate rather than deflate. A 2011 study showed that alcoholics who switched from booze to weed might experience increased creativity as a result, and a 2014 academic paper posited that marijuana could help increase creativity in uncreative people.

"I don't think marijuana is a key that unlocks something," St. Pierre is keen to clarify. "But marijuana can help people get through their day and have a series of clear thoughts. People are ripping away the overwrought static in their head and live a more functional life. If that isn't creativity, then what is?"

Follow Drew Millard on Twitter.

I was about eight when someone showed me how to draw this. It started with two sets of three parallel lines that were joined diagonally left to right, then capped off at the top and bottom with pointy bits. It was a fierce, beautiful S, and drawing it was addictive.

Soon all my schoolbooks were covered in The S. I never questioned what it meant or where it came from, I just knew I loved it. But it turns out I wasn't the only one.

I recently googled The S and discovered that although everyone loves it, no one knows its origins. Various Reddits and notice boards are full of really nostalgic people without a clue.

It seems The S has appeared throughout all of North America, South America, Europe, Russia, Asia, and Australia. Some people think it's a 90s thing, others report seeing it as early as the 1960s. There were theories that it was the symbol of some 80s hair metal band. Other people thought it was the original emblem for the clothing brand Stussy. Others thought it was an incarnation of the Superman logo. No one was sure.

I thought I'd ask the office.

"That's the Superman S," mused Ben, our in-house graphics guy. I asked him if that meant it was actually from Superman but he said it wasn't. "No, I think it's just what kids think when they're drawing it. They really just draw it because it's cool."

I got on the phone to DC Comics to find out if they knew anything. According to Benjamin LeClear, who manages the comics library at their studio in Burbank, California, the S has nothing to do with Superman.

"It doesn't look like any of the emblems from the old Superman Shield logos," he said after rummaging through their collection. "His 'S' has a lot of open space and almost never connects to itself."

Benjamin told me he'd become intrigued and, like me, launched his own mini investigation on the web only to turn up nothing. "I didn't realise what a crazy urban myth/mystery this Pointed S thing is," he said. "I would love for this to be Superman-related, but I don't think it is. Though Superman has the most famous 'S' symbol of all time."

"It's the Stussy S!" exclaimed Ramona, one of our producers. Like Ben's guess, she didn't think it was actually an emblem associated with Stussy, but refused to believe it had any other name. "It's definitely called the Stussy S," she said, then drew her own version that wasn't as good as mine.

Pretty much every forum on the web mentions Stussy—the Californian surf/street wear company founded in the 80s. A lot of people seem convinced the symbol was originally a Stussy logo, so I called Stussy.

"No, this is not an original Stussy Logo," stated Emmy Coates, who has worked alongside Shawn Stussy since 1985. "I personally get asked this a lot, but people have been drawing this S long before Stussy was established. People have just assumed it was Stussy and it's sort of spread from there. It's actually quite amusing."

I finally asked Emmy what she thought the symbol looked like. "It looks like Suzuki logo," she replied.

I was tempted to call Suzuki but didn't. I needed to zoom out and take in the bigger picture, so I got in touch with an expert in symbols and semiotics: Paul Cobley.

Paul is a Professor in Language and Media at Middlesex University in London. According to him the theory that it was a hair metal symbol was also ridiculous—"It's certainly not the Saxon logo," he said. "Theirs was far more sharp and had a staff." Then he offered the most likely yet bland explanation of all. That is, it's fun to draw.

"The reason kids go through this is probably because it's a Moebius strip," he said, referring to the sort of looped one-surface shapes Escher was fond of drawing. "It can't be drawn continuously, but it does have a perpetual flow."

I think he was on to something. Most nine-year-olds can't draw, so when someone hands them a magical recipe to create something fairly cool, on demand—that'll go viral. Especially when the shape has the sophisticated, mathematical lineage of a Moebius strip. Yes I'd learned the term ten minutes earlier, but whatever. Moebius strip.

The S isn't a Stussy logo or a Superman emblem or a gift from aliens, I think it's just the most fun ever.

Follow Julian on Twitter.

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Illustrations by Sophie Wolfson

If people found out you didn't shave off your pubic hair, you were both disgusting and a lesbian. If you got a boyfriend, you were a slut; if you had a boyfriend but didn't sleep with him, you were frigid, and if you didn't ever have a boyfriend you were a freak. When you went on holiday, you had to take a whole Facebook album's worth of photos of you looking as thin as possible. Your group of friends start only eating soup or an apple for lunch. You start eating an apple for lunch. The thought of ever having to be a teenage girl again is enough to make me feel like I've got a hand physically around my throat.

Nothing surprises me about the new study from Girlguiding. Their poll of 1,627 girls and young women showed that confidence rapidly drops away from girls at the age of 10. Ninety percent of nine- and 10-year-old girls felt they would have the same chance as boys at succeeding in their chosen jobs, but this dropped to 54 percent among 11- to 16-year-olds and to 35 percent among 17- to 21-year-olds. Only a quarter of the older group said they felt "powerful", compared with a third of 11- to 16-year-old girls.

Anxiety is a multi-causal illness, but the fact that women feel worse by the time they're an adult than they do when they're a teenager is a troubling tell-tale sign of time spent lacking in confidence and feeling powerless. Women are nearly twice as likely to have anxiety than men. To find out more about these sad stats, I asked girls and young women about the first moment they felt like they'd lost their power and what to do to ensure this stops happening to the next generation of women.

Jennifer, 19, London

It was at the beginning of secondary school when people started making fun of me for being smart. I started worrying about why they weren't saying it to guys, so I began hiding being clever. I felt I wasn't being what a girl was supposed to be like. I was even told by a family friend that girls being clever intimidated guys. Not being honest with myself or standing up for myself made me feel so powerless.

It got worse when I was 13 or 14, as you worry more about what people are saying about your looks. One time after a chemistry test where I got full marks, this boy from my class came up to me and said, "Were you the one who got 100 percent?" I nodded and he said, "Why do you always do that? It's so unfair." A guy in my class also got 100 percent but he said nothing to him about it, only me. I felt like I'd done something I should be ashamed of as I'd made a boy feel bad. It's only now I see it doesn't matter how I make men feel.

If we want to help girls there needs to be a real focus on PSHE and SRE – which should definitely be mandatory and good quality – to teach girls about their own value and how to treat themselves.

Carissa, 18, South London

It was when I first went to high school. Suddenly, you're expected to not look like a kid any more and you have to be an attractive woman. It's make-up, shaving, waxing and everything. It all comes at once. If you can't keep up with that it can be a big problem for you. The people that were considered popular did it first and then there's the pressure to follow them and do whatever they're doing to get by. That's when your insecurities come in, you notice the differences between you and other people – how you present yourself, how you look and your relationships. As you get older, it gets worse. Your self awareness grows and you have the added pressure of being an adult on top but you're still carrying those pressures that started when you were 12 or 13.

It's difficult to fix because the media has a lot to do with it and no one can control that. But inside school environments, it's about educating people on those topics rather than ignoring them. I don't remember ever being told about confidence or gender imbalance at school. If there was a talk as a year group, it was always about drugs or alcohol or maybe safe sex, but never about more mental issues. Now when kids are that age they don't just have Facebook either, they have Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and we see celebrities and people older than us and we want to live that life and hold ourselves to those standards even though we're kids. Social media definitely makes this worse but how can you regulate how much time people go on it for? It's hard.

Alice, 13, Norwich

One day I was watching a movie and realised it was always the woman being the victim or unable to protect themselves. The woman was never going to beat the bad guy. They just go off with the guy and the guy gets rewarded. People and adverts say, "You're a girl, you can do what you want!" but it doesn't feel like that in reality. It feels like you get punished. In our sex education talk someone asked, "Why are men superior to women?" and the teachers just ignored the question and wouldn't discuss the idea further.

For me to feel more powerful, we'd have to get rid of a lot of the sexist people in the world.

Amena, 21, Birmingham

As soon as I lost confidence in one thing, I snowballed and lost confidence in any area. Before you hit puberty you either have baby fat or you're thin. If you have that baby fat, you're looking at the opposition before you hit puberty and it plays on your mind. At 11 or 12, you start looking at who's popular, and it's the girls wearing make-up and older clothes. It's harsh for girls, you're completely judged on your appearance. We felt powerless in the changing rooms. During PE, some of my friends would go into the toilets to change rather than be in the open. It's that age when you transition from knickers to boxer shorts to proper underwear. Everyone's looking around the gym to see if they're behind or if anyone's not wearing the right thing.

This got worse later on for me. Now I can't even leave the house without wearing make-up. I feel like as I get older I'm losing power. I'm increasingly critical and I think that's true of most girls I know. We're so hard on ourselves.

I'd say if young girls deleted celebrities and people who don't make them feel good about themselves on social media, that'd help. Now I only follow people who inspire me. People who do really cool art or make-up, for example. Workshops on how to deal with your body differing for other women's, and how you should fight to be equal to men in the workplace should be mandatory. Teachers are too scared to waver from the curriculum. School is the biggest part of socialisation so they should be allowed and encouraged to talk with kids about what goes on outside the classroom.

Esme, 15, London

If a boy wanted to be a musician, he is judged on how well he can play the saxophone. But I feel like if me or one of my friends wanted to be a saxophonist, first people would look at me and if they liked what they saw, they would then listen to my music. Knowing that makes me feel powerless.

I have no idea what could be done to make girls have more confidence. When you find out let me know. There should probably be more realistic portrayals of adolescence in mainstream media. It doesn't help my self-confidence to look at Olivia Newton-John in Grease and think that's what 17-year-olds are supposed to look like, when in reality she was like 28 when it was filmed. I want to see teens actually in their formative years, spots and all. There should also be more advice from school too. We have wellbeing lessons on gender identity and fluidity which have been surprisingly progressive but as for power and confidence, we've never heard anything about that. Even if we did, it would almost definitely be all together as opposed to separate by gender and too broad to be helpful.

India, 21, Cardiff

I started secondary school as a long-haired, long-limbed girl who could pull on and off my size four skinny jeans without unbuttoning the front. I lost power the minute my body started to grow, as I'd internalised the notion that to be thin was to be happy. I remember crying in my bedroom at 14 when I could no longer fit in my size six clothes. Around a similar time I was travelling home on the school bus and the boy behind me was telling me in detail how I was considered an "ugly" one of the girls. I walked home in tears and went to the bathroom to realise that I'd started my period. That was the time I realised I was no longer a neat or perfect girl.

I don't think there's an external solution though. We're always going to look on Instagram or at other people in magazines or the street. It's about naturally cultivating friendships and relationships which make you feel better about yourself and developing constructive habits and hobbies. I started competitive dance training to inhabit my body properly instead of living in my head. For me at least, it's been a good decade of struggle. Traditional parent or teacher interventions never worked for me or anyone I know. Perhaps trying to cultivate a culture at school and home where girls feel valued or worthwhile somehow would help.

Ruby, 19, Bristol

Having moved to a new city and having been going out to various different events and clubs, I have witnessed or been subjected to various accounts of groping and grabbing. Boys that seem to either be slightly younger than myself or the same age think it's fine to treat the girls around them in the clubs like a piece of meat that's on display. I immediately feel powerless as a young girl when, in response to having my bum grabbed, I tell them to stop and not to touch me, I get various slurs and hand signals shoved in my face. One of the only ways to get them to listen is to say "I have a boyfriend". Sadly it seems they are more likely to have respect for another guy than a girl. When in fact the only thing that needs to be said when you don't want someone touching you is "no".

I think in schools, from a younger age, maybe around 10, girls and boys should have open discussions in classes with supervision and direction from an elder about relationships, treating people with respect and that nothing is expected of you from someone. It's okay to say no and that's the only reason you need to give, should you feel that way.

@hannahrosewens

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Theresa May and her husband Philip (Photo by Hannah McKay)

This country! The government has only gone and handed the contract for a key government equality helpline for those who have faced discrimination on the grounds of their sex, race, or disability to god damn G4S, according to Buzzfeed News.

G4S: the controversial outsourcing company that faced criticism for its running of youth prisons.

G4S: the company that used immigrant detainees as a source of cheap labour.

G4S: the company whose security preparations for the 2012 Olympic games were "totally chaotic" and "an utter farce".

G4S: the company with a rap sheet longer than the amount of time they keep migrants locked away.

But you know the thing that really makes this bad? According to some guy on Twitter, Theresa May's husband owns shares in G4S.

It should now be obvious that Theresa May's bid for Prime Ministerial power has all been a giant swizz leading up to the handing over of a Government Discrimination Hotline contract to a company that her husband owns some shares in, so that he can smugly watch the tiny-printed numbers rise every morning in his copy of the FT.

Except nobody seems to have any evidence that Philip May owns any shares in G4S. The rumour was going around the internet for years, but the company has denied it albeit having let it fester for a bit. Despite this, the myth persists on social media, online comment sections and pub chats, resurfacing again today with the less important news that a helpline for people facing discrimination will now be run by a company with a history of bungling sensitive contracts and making the lives of vulnerable people miserable. The good news is, Theresa May's husband doesn't own shares in them, so it's fine!

There's a tendency out there, just short of conspiracy theory, to try and find what would be a decent impropriety story, not bother to find out if it's really true, and make that the focus. In doing so, the clear and obvious bad thing that is happening, not because of some corruption but due to the normal functioning of systems of government, can get a bit lost. Myths and innuendo about our probably not pig-fucking elite have a history, but I'm not sure what purpose is served here.

Don't get me wrong, I love a good conflict of interest story as much as the next person. Take, for instance, the actually substantiated story reported by the Independent with a headline that goes: "Theresa May's husband is a senior executive at a $1.4tn investment fund that profits from tax avoiding companies".

Or the time Theresa May defended Lincolnshire Police when they awarded a G4S a £200 million contract – a contract advised upon for the firm by one Tom Winsor, who just two years earlier had written an independent report on police reform for the government.

But fortunately in this case, while G4S is being handed another chance to hopefully not screw up some more lives, Theresa May's husband will not personally profit from this. So everything is fine.

@SimonChilds13

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(Image: Flickr user brar_j, via)

Don't Trust the Internet is a weekly column where we investigate all the bullshit tabloid stories, political memes and conspiracy hearsay that your mum is sharing on Facebook.

Okay, so disclaimer: I don't use Pokemon Go. I have no problem with anybody who does, but sadly I have neither the data nor the inclination to chase Jigglypuffs around Hornsey. However, there are some elements of its omnipresence that are starting to grate. None more than the totally, definitely, absolutely fake "Crazy Pokemon Go" stories.

There's a logic to this, of course. If a considerable percentage of the world's smartphone users suddenly start meandering around strange and hidden locations they're bound to, on occasion, stumble across strange and hidden things. A couple of big stories have been true – this girl finding a dead body sounds pretty legit, as does this Plymouth sex shop becoming a Pokestop – but in their wake they have inspired a dearth of fabricated Pokefables. Inspirational or cautionary tales of looking for Charmanders and finding love, or murder scenes, or adorable elderly people. It's a foolproof setup; there's no way of proving you're lying, and all you need is a weird location and kooky incident, and you've got a ready-made crazy Pokemon Go story.

Much in the vein of people pretending to be children for retweets, these stories must come from a thirst for viral recognition. A strange regressive urge found in grown-adults to be popular and lauded for capturing one of life's quirky moments. And for as long as Pokemon Go continues to be more popular than food, we can expect these outright lies to continue. Reddit upvotes, dude! Gotta catch em all!

WITNESSING A MURDER

Let's begin with the fakest of all the fake "crazy Pokemon Go" stories. If you can't be bothered to watch the entire video, it's basically a clip taken from a live stream of a YouTuber called Alex Ramirez playing Pokemon Go. Out of nowhere, in the middle of his game, he suddenly notices a truck pulling up outside the church where he was playing. At this point, Ramirez suddenly freaks because, "ohmygodohmygodohmygod" he's just seen the dude in the truck kill some chick. What follows is a thrilling audio sequence as he finds himself pursued by the murderer, before eventually calling the police to explain everything that had happened. Only, he didn't, because, of course, none of this happened.

This story was picked up initially by loads of places, mostly gaming blogs and tech sites including Gizmodo, as well as blowing up on Reddit. Since then, Ramirez's story has become weirder and weirder. The police got involved to say they believe the video is a fake; Ramirez has supposedly lost his job as an Uber driver (something Uber have denied); and at one point Ramirez even had a GoFundMe set up in his honour – since he got sacked and all – but now it's becoming more and more obvious he made the whole thing up, the campaign has disappeared.

The biggest giveaway that Ramirez is chatting absolute Pokeballs is his acting. If you're going to go one stage further with your fake story and actually record audio of "the incident" rather than just write it down and post it on Reddit, you've got to be able to convincingly capture exactly how a human being would likely respond to witnessing a murder. Ramirez literally says: "Why is there a random truck here at the church? Is this motherfucker playing Pokemon too? Oh my god! Huh! Oh my god! Holy shit! This guy just killed some chick! Oh my god! I just witnessed a fucking murder!" Not exactly kitchen sink realism is it.

THREATENED WITH MURDER

This small epic is currently one of the most popular on Reddit's very own "Crazy Pokemon Stories" subreddit. It follows an "average evening of Pokemon hunting" for three brothers who, following a disagreement over how many original Pokemon there were, find themselves the victims of homophobic slurs and death threats at the hands of some older lads and their over-zealous mum. The best part of the whole thing is the GCSE drama of how the initial confrontation plays out. Behold:

"You know, I had all the original 120 Pokemon when they came out."

Obviously he was exaggerating, but we cared more about him getting his numbers wrong.

Ralph corrected: "151."

"Huh?"

"There were 151 original Pokemon."

You could cut the air with a knife, couldn't you? Proper old school stand-off, this. The sheer venom packed into that "huh". I'm shuddering reading it. I can see them now, the two packs of Pokemon hunters, like a version of West Side Story featuring an all-male cast of vloggers with baseball caps. The flick of a switch-blade when Ralph says, "There were 151 original Pokemon." The silence – the unending silence in which you could have heard a pin drop – preceding the absolute chaos that follows. And oh boy, what chaos. Thrown soda, cries of "faggot" and a mother so batshit crazy she threatens to run everybody over. All because some punk didn't know how many original Pokemon there were.

This is definitely fake, but that said, the actions of the mother remind me of the only Pokemon story I have. When I was nine years old I collected Pokemon cards. One afternoon a boy of a similar age who lived a few doors up from us came round to play. We were comparing cards and eventually agreed to swap three of his cards for one of mine – I think it was a Golem – based on their relative worth. He went home and I thought nothing more of it, until an hour later his mum came storming down the street and called me out quite publicly for conning her son out of three cards. I was forced to return them, without getting my Golem back. It was deeply humiliating and I have never forgiven the shitty mother or her shitty son.

SHOTS FIRED

Another one popular on tech blogs and Reddit, a YouTuber's run-in with a gun-wielding landowner is one of the more dramatic Pokemon Go incidents to hit the internet. As played out in the video above, the gag-inducingly named Lanceypooh got into a spot of bother when driving out into the middle of some backwoods somewhere in the dead of night. Everything goes awry when the plucky heroes leave their car and find themselves being yelled at by whoever owns the land it turns out they're trespassing on. The video of the incident currently has over 400,000 plays.

There's a line in Superbad that goes, "I'm sorry, Evan, that the Coen Brothers don't direct the porn that I watch." I'd like to imagine that if the Coen brothers ever do direct some porn, it will look a bit like this. A couple of hapless middle-American blokes, stranded out in the middle of nowhere, shaky handheld camera, gunshots.

The thing that makes these setups so obviously fake is just how performative everybody is during the build up. Not only is it an unholy coincidence that the whole thing was being filmed, but the two stooges involved behave like the worst kind of post-Will Ferrell YouTube comedian‚ squawking irate zingers at each other about "rural Pokemon" in a tone that screams, "God, I desperately hope my comedy vlog about tech takes off after people see how funny I am on this, because at this point I really have nothing left to give."

CAUGHT CHEATING

This story got picked up by both the New York Post and the Daily Mail, despite literally just being a vague anecdote about a breakup. This crazy Pokemon Go story goes as follows. "Gamer" Evan Scribner was canoodling with his ex-girlfriend behind his current girlfriend's back – something he would have got away with if it wasn't for Pokemon Go's pesky geolocation services. Scribner claims that due to the app recording his location – and when exactly he was at said location – his girlfriend was able to work out where he'd been due to him catching Pokemon in the neighbouring area. Poor old Evan says his girlfriend worked out he'd been spending time with his ex and hasn't spoken to him since.

There's definitely something fishy here. Besides the whole "your girlfriend isn't speaking to you but you're doing an interview with the New York Post" thing, surely this story would only be worth reporting if there was a shred of evidence it actually happened, as opposed to a "gamer" – not a job title, by the way – retelling an anecdote. I'm also surprised there weren't more obvious ways of catching him out, like, I don't know, text messages or phone calls. To have to go deep into somebody's Pokehistory seems like really taking the long way round.

No, most likely, this "story" was just a way for Evan Scribner to show off to the world about how often he gets laid. Man just wants you to know how big his Pokeballs are, basically.

SURVEILLANCE

One of the most popular rumours about Pokemon Go is that it is, in fact, a massive surveillance operation run by the CIA, or Google, or the NSA, or the Illuminati, or something. This theory has spread like wildfire across Facebook, and even movie director Oliver Stone has declared the game a "new level of invasion" that could lead to "totalitarianism". There are a few different versions of this story. One suggests that Pokemon Go is using your camera to deliver images of your home to Google Maps, but other reports go further, suggesting that the app could be feeding information to the CIA or the NSA.

In very, very basic terms it sort of makes sense. Pokemon Go is essentially a massive map of the world featuring real-time locations of whichever members of the population are playing at the time. But you've got to ask yourself: what exactly would the CIA want with that information? Surely a massive list of the whereabouts of everyone currently playing Pokemon Go is the most counter-productive data imaginable. That's basically a hard-drive full of all the least dangerous people on the planet. The people who run blogs about game consoles, the people who Instagram their pets, the people who go to comic book conventions. It's literally the antithesis of a most-wanted list.

Even then, it's not real. Snopes recently got in touch with Google to ask if this data was being collected – if Pokemon Go really was handing all of our personal information over to the government – and the answer was a resounding no.

@a_n_g_u_s

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The news normally reports when stuff happens: a bomb goes off or a celebrity dies or Rupert Murdoch gets a new wife, that kind of thing. But there is one news story that is reported week in week out about something staying exactly the same: interest rates.

In March 2009, the Bank of England lowered interest rates to 0.5 percent. Today, it is still 0.5 percent, having not budged in all that time. Yet in those intervening seven-and-a-bit years, that miniscule number has hardly been out of the news – including this week when there was astorysuggesting Natwest might start to charge businesses for keeping their money there, essentially offering negative interest. We'll get to that, but first: why is the continuation of half a percent rate such a big deal?

Basically, 0.5 percent is a disconcertingly low interest rate. It's the financial equivalent of the UK being in a constant state of emergency, with extraordinary measures like curfews and police checks, only continuing indefinitely.

A low interest rate means that saving your money is a bit of a waste of time, because it's likely to depreciate in value. If you're earning 0.5 percent from your bank account and the cost of living is rising by about 1.4 percent (which is the current Retail Price Index rate of inflation) then essentially you are losing money. So rather than keep your money in a bank account, it makes sense to spend and consume, buy stuff, buy a house, reinvest into your business, keep the economy moving.

In theory, it should also be a great time to borrow, because you don't have to pay back as much, and borrowing money means you can buy even more stuff.

But in the long term, you don't want everyone to just be constantly spending - it's good for people to have financial reserves and less debt. It's just not good right now, when the economy is still a mess like this.

So low interest rates are a special measure. But like a lot of special measures, once they're in place, people are terrified of withdrawal. It's like taking sleeping pills when you're anxious, but then continuing to take them when you're not. After a while you can't get to sleep without them - or maybe you could, but you're too scared to find out. And that's why the low interest rates remain news, because this extraordinary measure has become the new normal.

Now, if you're a millennial on minimum wage working at a regional branch of Whittards Tea while you try to get your psych-grime band up and running, then you probably aren't that bothered about low interest rates when you have lots of debt and no money. In a way, low interest rates are kind to people like you. But there's another way they have the potential to fuck you forever.

To see why, let's talk about negative interest rates, because after all these years of 0.5 percent interest and people wondering when rates are going to go back up, the Bank of England is instead about to cut interest rates again, perhaps to 0.25 percent, perhaps to 0 percent. They are preparing for a Brexit recession, and so believe in more of this low interest medicine.

That's why Natwest started to warn their customers about negative interest rate this week, essentially charging them to keep their money there. Which seems ridiculous: why would anyone give all their money to a bank if they were to be charged for the privilege?

Well, many central banks have already implemented negative interest rates, so big banks like Natwest are already experiencing negative interest. If Natwest stores £1 million with the European Central Bank, which sets interest rates for the Eurozone, a year later they'll get back £996,000. So far they have been sucking up those losses themselves, because negative interest rates sound really shit for customers, but they're now saying, initially to their business customers - shopkeepers, freelancers, small business owners - that they may soon have to start charging negative rates.

You might think that people would just take all their money out and put it under their mattresses, and that is the fear, but if you're a bank or a business you can't do that. It's impractical and unsafe. Banks need to leave their money with federal banks, and businesses need to leave their money with regular banks, and so people are sort of left with little choice.

So how is this going to affect you, my penniless friend? First, because low interest rates are going to make it harder for banks to turn a profit, and even if that makes you rub your little hands with glee, it's going to mean further economic downturns and job losses in the short term, especially as banks are likely to do more shady bubble-inflating dark money shit in order to make up the lost profit margins.

Second, because lowering interest rates to comedically negative levels shows government's absolute unwillingness to stimulate the economy in other ways, like investing wild amounts of borrowed cash in education, health and infrastructure leaving the economy not only stimulated but all of us with better public services (something we'll need when they've got no money). And third, because even if these new rates mean that banks offer you loans at a lower cost, you're still going to be in debt and being in debt so that you can have money is literally the shittest way of having money.

Negative interest rates seem like they might only affect the rich and that is probably true for now, but they also precipitate an uneasy new dawn in global finance – one in which debt is celebrated, the refusal of governments to seek alternatives to austerity is steadfast and there's no way of money holding on to its value.

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This article originally appeared on VICE Romania

It's hot as fuck in Romania at the moment – last weekend, temperatures hit 35°C before noon on both days. There's no way to escape the heat, to avoid sweating like a pig. I find that Bucharest has a unique sort of beauty when it's dealing with these kinds of temperatures, so last weekend I went out on the street armed with a camera and a bottle of water. I live in Mexico, and I've never had to deal with such oppressive heat.

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