Turn left. Follow this line. Go here. Open that. Video games, for the sake of both functionality and accessibility, often lead you around. Even games like Limbo, Firewatch and Resident Evil, games expressly about getting lost somewhere, tacitly tell you where you need to go. To create a true sense of disorientation, one would have to break several of game-making's ground rules.

Especially towards its end, ADR1FT frustrated me. For an entire hour, I floated around the inside and outside of its – wonderfully imagined – space station, trying to work out where I had to go. The objective markers were vague, the radar didn't help and if I tried to cross between sections of the ship that, unbeknown to me, were too far apart, I would run out of oxygen and die.

Space, in both the literal and conceptual senses, is an illusion in ADR1FT. The universe is all around you and suggests unlimited possibility, but you cannot go there; ADR1FT is loosely structured, but unlike in its contemporaries – Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, Journey and The Witness – exploration often results in death.

For years, I've wondered how it would feel to play a video game that belied simple navigation mechanics and spatial understanding. ADR1FT can be agonising. But after speaking to Adam Orth, its writer and director, I understand why it had to be that way.

"We didn't make the game from a point of view of 'let's fuck the player'," Orth explains. "In fact, my number one design theory is never fuck the player. There are times in ADR1FT where it's punishing, but that stuff bubbled up naturally."

"I had every offer in the world, from dozens of publications, to talk about it, but it would have been like screaming into an empty hydrant." – Adam Orth

In 2013, Orth, employed at the time as a game director for Microsoft, commented on Twitter about the soon-to-be-released Xbox One. Rumours were circulating that in order to play games, the console would always have to be connected to the internet. "Sorry, I don't get the drama around having an 'always on' console," Orth wrote. "That's the world we live in. #dealwithit."

When both Xbox fans and the gaming press caught wind of Orth's remark, a scandal erupted. Four days after posting the tweet, Orth resigned from Microsoft.

Article continues after the video below

Watch VICE's short film on the making of 'Hyper Light Drifter'

"You can explore in ADR1FT, but it's literally at the peril of your life," he says. "And if you're on Twitter, especially if you're working for a big company you're on a very linear path – you can venture off it, but that also is at your peril.

"I was an idiot. I could have easily avoided that whole thing. I resigned from my job and just didn't have anything to do, but I'd had this idea for a space game for a while, and when I started putting my own personal experience over and into the game it started to seem like a unique way to talk about things. At the time that it was actually happening, I had every offer in the world, from dozens of publications, to talk about it, but it would have been like screaming into an empty hydrant."

'ADR1FT', PlayStation 4 launch trailer

Such is the frustration when playing ADR1FT. Agency is deceptive. You can float and move in 360 degrees, but against the vastness of space, you are powerless. Today, given our myriad forms of communication, it's not hard for you to say something. But faced with the overwhelming volume of the internet, what's the point?

To the scandal that derailed Orth's career and the fallout in his personal life that followed, ADR1FT is a reply. The "1" in the title is a deliberate reference to this eponymous, harbinger of doom Xbox. Lead, player-controlled character Alex Oshima shares Orth's initials. On a grander scale, HAN-IV, the destroyed space station which players navigate, represents Orth's life, literally broken into pieces.

"There isn't really a single part of the narrative that isn't somehow right from my life." – Adam Orth

"It's not the most timely way to respond to something, three years later, but I put real things from my life into every (non-playable) character's story, on purpose," Orth says. "Elizabeth has these message from her mother about the death of her father, and that's straight from my life. When my dad died, I had a pretty messed up relationship with him and hadn't resolved any of it as an adult. There's a storyline involving addiction – my dad was a really bad alcoholic. My mom's a cancer survivor so there's a cancer story in there. And there's a character called Lopez who's a pie-eyed optimist, and that's a lot of me, myself, personally. There isn't really a single part of the narrative that isn't somehow right from my life.

"It drives me crazy when people call ADR1FT a 'floating simulator'. It's the same as when people are calling certain games 'walking simulators' – the last thing those games are doing is simulating fucking walking. No one spends two years getting a perfect walking cycle down. It's an insult to the people who makes those games, and you're missing everything about what makes them interesting."

With ADR1FT under his belt and a demon off his back, Orth is re-adjusting to life as a known game-maker, on the internet.

New, on Motherboard: We'll Never Hear from the Philae Comet Lander Again, Sob

"ADR1FT cost three million dollars," he explains. "That's not very much. But I'm very, very proud of what we've made. I think we've found a unique voice.

"Still, it's hard doing something public facing. I'm glad I lived in a time when people were critical of things and there wasn't a way to just broadcast it constantly. People of this (new) generation will never have that experience. And because they'll never have it, there is no built-in empathy. There is just no decency filter any more. You find yourself wishing you could keep doing what you're doing, but just have it not be public facing – you start considering reactions from the beginning of a project, thinking, 'we can't do that because we know what the response will be', or, 'if we don't do this, we're gonna lose points'. And at that point, the internet is winning. We've been working on our next game since January. It's not our IP – it's somebody else's. I think that's a good step for us before we head out on our next adventure."

ADR1FT was released on July the 15th for PlayStation 4, and came out for PC earlier in 2016. More information at the game's official website.

@mostsincerelyed

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Boozehound HQ in the airport (via Wikipedia)

As a daily booze drinker, I take great umbrage to the news that the way alcohol is being sold in airports is to be revised. What the fuck, guys? Drinking in airports is my right. It's the only thing to do other than get a katsu curry from Wagamama at 8:30 in the morning and play House of the Dead III in the arcade surrounded by screeching kids and sad looking parents. What's the point of having a holiday if you're just going to have to clean some kid's shit off his arse while he cries? No wonder they pound pint after pint at the Gatwick 'Spoons before getting on a four-hour flight to Crete.

But the Brits are maybe hitting the bottle a little too much pre-flight. In the last two years, 442 people have been held on suspicion of being drunk on a plane or at the airport. Lord Tariq Ahmad is in charge of reviewing whether selling alcohol to bored passengers at the crack of dawn is a good idea or not. He says: "I don't think we want to kill merriment altogether, but I think it's important that passengers who board planes are also responsible and have a responsibility to other passengers, and that certainly should be the factor which we bear in mind." Pssht, "responsibility". The only responsibility I have is to get so blind drunk before my flight that I forget that I could potentially die in an explosion after the plane falls backwards during take off like some horrible fiery Alton Towers ride. Call me old-fashioned, but I'd quite like to have my own corpse at my funeral and not just some assorted ashes and bits of melted safety card on my remaining teeth.

Naturally the northerners are getting more pissed than the rest of the UK as the excitement of leaving the north would get anyone giddy enough to imbibe five gin and tonics in 20 minutes, which is why Manchester and Glasgow airports are trying a new scheme where shops sell booze all sealed up to stop scallies battering the pilots.

I hope for the sake of fearful flyers and depressed parents everywhere that Lord Ahmad doesn't do away with our sweet nectar in the airports. They can be scary places and sometimes a stiff drink is what you need to allay your anxieties. Conversely, maybe this will stop roving packs of ultra-lads neknominating each other to death before their flight to Amsterdam so they can jeer at prostitutes and throw up in the canal after drinking three snakebites and smoking a strong bifta rolled in novelty Tin Tin rolling paper.

@joe_bish

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By now you'll know all about #BoycottByron. But hey, while we're here, let's go over the details one more time: Byron, the burger chain and inventor of "Freddar cheese", is in the news because UK immigration officials recently arrested 35 of its staff across London, with "full cooperation" from the restaurant.

A senior member of staff alleged that employees suspected of working in the UK illegally had all been invited to a health and safety training day, before immigration officials swooped. The Home Office denied those claims. Either way, the chain isn't going to face any legal action itself because bosses were apparently shown false documents by the 35 arrested employees when they were applying for work.

People, understandably, have opinions about all this. Some are boycotting Byron using #BoycottByron; others are using the same hashtag to defend the chain for doing the lawful thing. But these are all people on the internet. We wanted to know what customers thought, so we went and stood outside the Hoxton branch of Byron to ask a few of them.

VICE: What do you think about these raids?
Saabaeah, 26: It's disgusting. To me, it's a lack of duty of care, because you don't do that to other human beings. If you feel that something untoward is going on then you have go through the right channels. You don't round people up like cattle and then have them checked out.

So would you feel guilty eating there?
Now I know that, I'm not sure I'm going to go back there, to be honest.

You said before that you've been here for four years on an ancestry visa. Do these kind of situations make you feel vulnerable?
For me, I'm "safe", in a sense. But I think it speaks volumes about the system itself and the way it addresses foreign aliens, or whatever you want to call them. I think that doesn't necessarily make me feel vulnerable, but it does make me feel wary.

Ally, 21, from New Zealand and Andres, 22, from Italy

So you don't fancy going to Byron Burgers now then?
Andreas: We were just talking about it – it's disgusting. I've been there once and I actually liked it. I'm an immigrant myself. I'm not illegal – I'm from Italy – but I don't feel happy spending money or funding them after what they've done to their illegal immigrants.
Ally: I once had a burnt burger. It was bad. Now, after this, I've got an excuse not to go.

They cooperated fully with the Home Office – thoughts?
Andreas: Is it not illegal for employers to hire someone illegal anyway? Is it not illegal to, like, trap them? It's just gross.
Ally: It's really sad! It would have taken them so much money to get here. I mean, I know it's illegal, but it's really sad.
Andreas: The way they did it, they were like, "Oh, let's go to training," and then the police were there. It's like, no – it's wrong. It's such a big company doing something like that; it's so unethical.

How do you feel when you hear stories like this?
It's just one more sad story after all this Brexit stuff about immigration. They're trying to blame us.

Pete, 26, and James, 32

How do you feel about what happened?
Pete: I'm in two minds. My understanding of what happened is that Byron invited a load of employees to what they were calling a training day, and then the Home Office were there and shipped loads of workers off. So, on the one hand, I think they're illegal workers, so it's fair enough, but on the other hand it's a pretty underhand thing to do.
James: It's simple – it's a simple exploitation of people! It's a shameful abuse of the law, and I'm quite disappointed now that we've paid all this money for a milkshake. I feel like a hypocrite! But I really wanted a milkshake. I've just heard about it and I quickly looked up the BBC article and, to be honest, I'm not surprised. I wouldn't be surprised if several other fast food chains did exactly the same thing.

Do you feel guilty having your milkshake right now?
I will do when I've had my milkshake.
Pete: Right now, to be honest, when I saw people were trying to boycott it I thought it was a really good idea, but then I kind of forgot about it...
James: In my defence, I'd paid before he told me about the scandal, because I hadn't heard about it, which is unusual, because I read the news every day.

Has this news put you off eating at Byron?
Thomas, 30: Well, I don't know what the facts are. I heard they were lured into some place – I think it's pretty cruel. I don't agree with that. I don't know the extent to how hideous and vile they are, but I don't really agree with our immigration policies anyway.

Would you ever dream of doing what Byron do?
Selling people short? No. Because I don't agree. I think everyone should have a right to live and a right to live with a good quality of life, regardless of where they're from, and I don't really believe in a nation state and racist foreign policy, basically.

Sini, 33 and Anssi, 35

How do you feel about this news?
Ansi: We go to Byron quite frequently, even though we live in Finland.
Sini: We always go here, every time we're in London.

Would news like this affect you eating here?
Ansi: I think it would.
Sini: We think it's not OK to have illegal workers, of course. That's not OK.

Do you think the fact they got deported is bad, or do you think it's worse that they had illegal workers to begin with?
Sini: I think both.
Ansi: I would say so, yeah.

Are you going to eat there now?
Ansi: Kind of. It's a complicated issue. We come almost once a month. We started eating here five or six years ago. We want to eat, but maybe not in here after this news. Can we go Breakfast Club ? I don't want to support them, even though the burgers are good.

@its_me_salma

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(Photo by Michael Segalov)

Brexit might have happened and the world is rapidly destroying itself but at least someone is having a good time in this hellish reality. Rich Brits are now taking a lot more coke and ecstasy than they did last year.

New figures show that the use of the two drugs has soared among people in wealthier households in England and Wales. In 2015/16, three per cent of those aged between 16 and 59 from households with an income of £50,000 or more reported taking powder cocaine in the previous year. That might not sound like a lot, but that's an increase from 2.2 percent the previous year. Both were deemed "statistically significant" in the Home Office report and are the largest percentages for the use of the substances since 2008/9.

By contrast, drug use in lower-income households was either down or flat year-on-year.

The figures showed some other interesting facts too. Around one in five young adults, aged 16 to 25, had taken an illicit drug in the last year, equivalent to around 1.1 million people. While that's similar to the previous year, it's down dramatically compared to 10 years ago, when the proportion was more than 25 percent. It also showed that more than a third of adults thought it would be very or fairly easy for them personally to get hooked up with drugs within 24 hours if they wanted them.

Simon Antrobus, chief executive of Addaction, said: "The figures showing rising cocaine and ecstasy use in adults in households with £50,000 income a year or more, higher purity, wider availability and a cultural shift which has increasingly normalised those substances."

More on coke:

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The other week, there was a bizarre story about two grandmothers being kicked out of a cinema for laughing. The duo were at a showing of Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie in Islington, but apparently it was too funny.

That seems like a fairly draconian policy for a cinema showing a comedy film. But it's also further proof that cinemas can no longer compete with the luxury of home entertainment. These days, we're used to watching films and boxsets in the comfort of our own home, spread-eagled on the rug, eating snacks of our choosing and laughing at a volume that suits us. You simply couldn't bring that level of comfort into a cinema.

If cinemas are to survive they need to compete with staying in at home and watching Netflix. Punishing people for laughing is a step in the wrong direction.

Perhaps I could be a kind of movie messiah – an eye-opener - delivering a wake-up call to the frontlines of the film industry and dragging it into the 21st century, ensnaring disenfranchised millennials and saving the box office from "weaker prospects going forward than at any time in the past 30 years". So, like a brave apostle on a mission of enlightenment, I decided to head out and educate different cinemas by bringing the art of 21st century viewing to them.

COMFORT, DARLING

If there's one thing that really puts me off joining people for a trip to the pictures, it's the dress code. That library chic at the Curzon just makes me feel so impotent. I want maximum comfort before I settle in for a three-hour foreign language epic. So for my first foray, I slip into my best dressing gown and a good pair of worn boxers and get on the bus to Peckhamplex. This Patsy is going to see Ab Fab.

I grab myself an extra-large sack of popcorn and take my seat in the centre of the front row. Sprawling my bare legs across empty seats, I get cosy. During the trailers, my friend rings me. I answer, stand up to the side of the aisle and swiftly tell him what time the showing will finish. Returning, a lady behind me tuts loudly: right now she is an agent of cinema's impending downfall, but after my work is done, she'll merely be a relic. So to mark the moment of this passing of the torch – from old to new – I cracked a beer and took a selfie.

The film started. There they are: Eddy and Patsy, on the big screen! I yell into the air and clap when they appear. Patsy - dirty as ever - falling asleep on the toilet seat. Hahahahaha. Whenever she delivers a zinger I swirl my beer and toss it up into the air. This is the life. This is what watching films should be about. It's the best experience I've had in front of the big screen in years. It's so good, as a matter of fact, I decide to do what I do when I'm having fun: get out my Mac out and let people know what they're missing out on.

Yes some of these photos are quite bad but we were in a cinema it's dark in there.

I ask the lovely lady behind me whether she has the WiFi code and she stares blankly at me – what is wrong with these fridges? It's no biggie, I can hotspot. Soon I hear a "psst" from the side of the aisle: it's tall cinema employee who I had friendly banter about popcorn size with on the way in, calling me over.

"Sir, we've had complaints that you're filming the movie on your laptop?"

"Oh, sorry. You must be mistaken: I'm just charging my phone and tweeting to my friends."

"Well, can you put all of that away, mate?"

"I suppose, yeah."

The guy walks on and I get the message: it is chillout time. So I let the story kick on, taking deep drags on my e-cigarette and bathing in its vapour miasma. It is an absolute blast until I feel a sharp poke in the shoulder; he's back with reinforcements.

"You've got to go sir, come on." The guy starts helping me pick away all my stuff.

"But what did I do?"

"We've had four separate complaints about you, mate. I've already had to give out a few full refunds. You know what you've done."

"I was just trying to get comfy," I say, as I'm led through the cinema, where dozens of staff – some laughing, some with furrowed brows – are gathered watching me drag my stuff out.

And with that I'm out on my arse. Sat on the benches outside gathering my thoughts, a staff member walks past and mumbles 'prick'. Twenty minutes I lasted, before being forcefully ejected. Clearly this is not the place for me – well, it won't be for at least a few months, as I've been banned – and not a place to start a revolution. Onwards and upwards, I'll have to birth a new dawn on a new horizon.

I AM THE BIG SHOT

Maybe people would respect me more if I looked more 'cinema'. Then perhaps I could enjoy Ab Fab in the comfort I so richly deserve. So I've drank seven cups of coffee, dressed up as Ron Howard, brought my favourite chair along and am in search of that magical shot. Time is money, people, so I blast through the foyer –"one big shot of espresso and a ticket to Ab Fab, please!" – and I'm on my way. I walk around the screen finding the perfect spot and set out my chair somewhere on the second row in the aisle. The credits roll. "Roll titles," I mutter quietly, immediately ingratiating myself with the film community.

"Perfect shot," I say to myself at the end of every scene, proving my spectacular film knowledge. Soon, however, a couple on the row behind are rubbernecking. Can a man not speak to himself during a film? It says 'big shot' on my chair, for crying out loud. Sure enough, a security guard emerges from the outside, bounding down the stairs towards me.

"You can't film in here! Do you know how serious this is? You can get a £500,000 fine for it. My manager will call the police if he sees you doing this."

"But I'm not recording."

"You're not?"

"No, I'm not recording, really."

"Oh," He says confusedly, before disappearing off up the stairs. I've already missed out on a bucket load of shots and that's only going to get worse, as the door fast reopens.

"My manager is worked up, he doesn't believe you. Can you please come with me?"

"Ok, fine." I climb the stairs with him and outside stands a congregation of staff.

"Is this about the chair? If so, I'm sorry but my back really doesn't agree with-"

"No not the chair, mate, more about the fact you're filming!" The manager barks.

"I'm not filming, seriously."

"I can see you on the cameras inside, holding the thing up to your eye. This is a serious offense."

"But it's not a camera. Look, let me show you." So I put down the device on the floor, and the group gather.

"Almonds? Is that Piriton? What even is this?" The manager asks.

"It's my lunchbox."

"Then why does it have a lens on top of it?"

"Oh, that's just a pair of binoculars. I like to have them depending on where I set up my seat – I just want to get the best shot possible."

"Is all this spraypainted?" I nod, and the manager scratches his head and picks up the box to feel its weight. "This was a waste of time." I'm encouraged to go back to my seat. And from there, I enjoy the rest of the film in the best seat in the house, chowing down almonds and Percy Pigs. Adaptable, accommodating, it's a great score here in Brixton, and though I unnecessarily missed five minutes of the flick, they're going to be fine once the revolution comes.

MICRO-SAVINGS

If there's one thing in particular that perturbs millennials and stops them from heading out to the cinema, it's the money. And in a world where we'd rather skip buying soap to save for the bus, we're not going to spend six quid on a frankfurter with three fried onions, are we? But I've discovered a little loophole - a foolproof method as it were - to save you money and bring the legions back to the box office. So I headed to the biggest iMax in Europe with that recipe.

One man; one microwave; one mission: to make his own popcorn to enjoy the film with.

So I stroll into the lobby and what's the first thing I spot? All I need: I got the power. I plug the little fella in and start taking the popcorn out of my bag - it's all too easy.

"Man, you can't do that." A clerk rushes from behind the ticket desk, then stops blankly. "Have you brought your own microwave here to make your own popcorn?" He's staring up at me - I nod. "Well... that's awesome. But don't do it directly in the view of the main door like this, go around the counter."

Well, why won't you look at that? The tide is turning! I rush around the corner, giddy, and find the perfect spot. Out comes the popcorn and the microwave goes on: just two minutes and counting until everything changes. 50 seconds fly by and the heat thunderously rises with every rotation; people gather in disbelief, taking photos on their phones. 40 more: am I Gandhi, amid gathering crowds, leading the march against imperialism? 30 creep by to the hum of this marvellous machine and the beat of its timer. I watch, hypnotised: I can see the light.

"What do you think you're doing?" A man rushes over and yanks out the cable.

"I'm just, making my own popcorn, it's my favourite."

"You've brought a microwave, presumably all the way from home, to make your own popcorn at the cinema?"

"Correct, yeah. Do you mind if I just finish it off with 30 or so more seconds?"

"Are you joking? We can't let anything be plugged into our walls for one, it's dangerous."

At this point, the manager dismisses the security guard and assumes the dominance, packing the cable away.

"Now the popcorn is essentially ready anyway, can I just take it into the screening and see the film?"

"Are you crazy? You can't take a microwave into a cinema screen. It's a hazard. Think about it: people walking around, in the dark, and you've got a microwave there. They could break their toes!"

"Well what about if I buy a seat for the microwave?" I plead.

"...What?"

"A seat, that I can put the microwave on."

"Just think about what you've just – no - I'm sorry but you can't come into the screening. You're going to have to take the microwave away from here."

The manager turns away for a second and I call him back. "Would you like a bit of popcorn?" He swivels 180 degrees, wearing a face twisted with bemusement. It fast explodes into knowing smile, and he takes a handful, engulfs it heartily, and turns away. My work here is done.

You can't be surprised by the staff taking me to the dogs after a few disturbances: this is commonplace when you're bringing about change, upsetting the status quo. And these guys just aren't ready to be saved, yet. But you saw the sign, you saw the manager taking a handful of popcorn. A small gesture that, like the fluttering wings of a butterfly, could reverberate around the globe and go down in the history books as the moment that saved cinema culture. That mouthful and smile told me one thing: it didn't matter that this man has a lifetime's supply of professionally made popcorn at his behest and probably spends most of his days picking at the stuff; he wants to break bread with the proletariat; he wants a taste of the working man. And as far as I can see, it is simply a matter of time. A matter of time until everyone is carrying their microwave, showing up to the cinema in their underwear and making a pitch for their own chair.

You mark my words, today is the day that we saved cinema.

@Oobahs

Photos by Dean Noroozi, James Butler and Jamie Hubball

More shit we made Oobah do:

I Asked Strangers on the Internet to Insult Me for a Laugh

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I Followed Bottles of Vodka Home from the Shops to Meet the UK's Drinkers

Charlie Carrel (Photograph by René Velli)

In May of 2015, 21-year-old Charlie Carrel won almost £1 million playing poker. At the Grand Final of the PokerStars European Tour in Monte Carlo he beat 215 other players in the high roller tournament – a game that cost €25,500 to enter. Because he was a 21-year-old who'd just won a life-changing amount of money, papers and websites across the UK and Jersey – where Carrel grew up – made a big deal of his win.

"It was strange seeing my face everywhere for a while," says Charlie, reflecting on articles that sprung up in places like The Sun and LadBible, which he felt described his success more like a lottery win than something that took years of practice and studying to achieve. "I don't think they were very good at capturing anything about me."

Charlie was already pretty well established in the poker world before Monte Carlo. He'd finished fifth in a tournament in Malta two months before, winning €183,800, and won a tournament in London in November of 2014, walking away with £108,625. "The beautiful thing is nobody knows how lucky they get for winning a tournament," says Charlie. "I can feel as though I played well, but human bias and emotions cloud judgment too heavily to really know."

Charlie was born in Jersey in 1993 and lived there until he was seven, when his family uprooted to London. A smart kid, he endured the same thing a lot of smart kids are forced to endure: merciless bullying for a big chunk of his time at school. "Intelligence and no social ability to hide it is not a great mix," he admits. "I was severely bullied for quite a large part of my childhood."

Thing is, he says, all that bullying turned out to be kind of helpful.

"Having no more than one friend – shout out to my best friend, Matthew Pettit – for a long period of time definitely stunted my emotional and social development," he says. "I created a defence mechanism – I can detach from my emotions. A poker example would be how I never feel stressed if I'm on a final table. I can turn it off. I'm grateful for that."

Charlie bounced from hobby to hobby throughout his teens, focusing his attention on something until he got bored of it. But the one thing he didn't get bored of was poker.

Ask any professional poker player under 30 how they got into the game and you'll get a similar story; it always starts with small games at home with friends. Then comes a small deposit on an online site. Often, beginner's luck strikes and that initial success evolves into a passion that they focus all their time and energy on. Charlie's story is the same: he made a £10 deposit on a poker website, won his first tournament for £30 and has never had to deposit again.

This part of Carrel's story is something that was covered by those tabloid articles. He turned his £30 into £1,000, then a bit more, then a bit more, and eventually a whole lot more. What they didn't cover, though, is what it took to get to that point. It's not a lottery win time and time again; it takes work to get to the top, just like in any other game. The game of online poker evolves so quickly that keeping up with the trends – and all the new software designed to help players improve – takes hours of studying, playing and revision. Regular life is often a distraction.

"My social life was annihilated by poker," says Charlie. "I lost contact with 90-something percent of my friends because I knew that poker was likely going to be one of the most important tasks of my life."

READ: Big Blinds and Heartbreak – Adventures at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas

When he was 19, and with some decent results under his belt, Charlie came up with a plan: he'd move back to Jersey to live with his grandma and only leave when he was rich. "I had a bankroll of around $2,500 ," he says. "So the only points of socialisation I had were the various Skype groups and study groups I participated in to learn the game and develop a more rounded approach. Safe to say, my social skills deteriorated along with my social life."

Luckily, all that studying worked: about two-thirds of the way through his $100,000 goal he won $201,711 (£153,000) in PokerStars' biggest weekly online tournament, the Sunday Million.

"Suddenly I was getting messages from people I once met at a festival, to people that used to bully me in school, to distant family members that I hadn't spoken to, to complete strangers," he remembers. But obviously he didn't share any of his winnings with them, because that would be an extremely weird thing to do. Instead, he took some of his friends on a trip to Amsterdam.

Ben Heath (left) and Carrel after his €1,114,000 win in Monte Carlo (Photo: Tomáš Stacha, copyright of PokerStars)

There's one friend in particular who Charlie can't speak highly enough of – fellow pro Ben Heath. "I could speak about my friendship with Ben for years," Carrel says. "He's special. After two years of living and travelling together, we've never really had an argument. What I love about my friendship with Ben is the way we handle the swings of poker. When I was eliminated from my biggest ever buy-in tournament (£84,000), the first thing Ben did was point and laugh at me. And I would do the same to him. And it works for us."

As I'm writing this, Charlie is at home in Jersey instead of attending the World Series of Poker (WSOP) in Las Vegas. The career of a poker player is often judged by the amount of tournaments they win at the WSOP, so the fact that Charlie – considered one of the best young tournament players right now – has skipped it raised a few eyebrows.

"It's been one of the hardest yet best decisions I've made," he says. "But I've been able to explore new things like Jiu-jitsu, cooking, strenuous exercise and creative writing. Most importantly, I've been able to spend time with my family."

Now 22 years old, Charlie has more money in his current account than most of us will earn throughout our entire careers. So what's he going to do next?

"I have no idea what's in store for the future," he says. "I have so many plans it's impossible to have enough time to do them all. It's the infinite outcomes of the future that excites me."

@J_W_Stanton

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(via Per-Olof Forsberg)

Banner week for people shoving drugs up their nastiest bits to hide them from the police. Banner, banner week. Yesterday, a reminder: we learned a man in Swindon shoved seven grams of cocaine up his dick, up his dick, presumably in that dark crevice between the foreskin and the meat, but still I don't understand precisely how – I mean, seven grams! Seven fucking grams! Up your dick! – and now today, to Liverpool, where they are shoving Kinder Eggs full of heroin up their dots for fun and for profit:

A drug smuggler who stashed heroin-filled Kinder Eggs up his bum is an "academically-gifted" former grammar schoolboy.

Sean Kenny was jailed for four years after leading a plot to carry drugs worth thousands of pounds down to Plymouth.

His sentence showcases the audacious Mossley Hill criminal's stunning fall from a talented schoolboy to Liverpool's latest drugs mule.

Kenny faces a stint behind bars after being caught at Plymouth rail station along with his "naive" brother James - who he manipulated into helping him.

The pair were found to be in possession of nearly £25,000 of heroin and cannabis placed inside Kinder Egg capsules and stashed in their bottoms. (via)

Yes I have some questions, officer:

i. What kind of dude has £25,000 lying around for cannabis and heroin and then gets the train to Plymouth, like get a hire car my boy, get a taxi, there is less need for you to shove the drugs into your penny that way, you can just keep them on your lap in a holdall, I truly to not understand this travel decision;

ii. To get the capsule (or capsules) out of a Kinder Egg, one must eat the chocolate first, and I want to enquire as to what the vibe is like in a room when you are eating a Kinder Egg with the express intention of shoving the middle of it up your bum. Like: Sean Kenny and his brother, just tearing through a box of Kinder Eggs, methodically, no joy, popping all the capsules in a little pile in the middle of a coffee table, knowing where they were going. Knowing exactly where they were going. They were going up their arses;

iii. Did they make the toys in the middle or nah;

iv. When one is putting a substantial number of drug-filled Kinder Egg capsules up one's pipe, does one lubricate first, or is there a sort of machismo in putting a Kinder Egg inner inside your body without assistance? I feel like a man who wanted to put a lot of heroin into his bum for monetary reasons might have some reservations about lubing up first. I dunno why this is. I just... I just can't shake the mental image of Sean Kenny, on all fours on a coffee table, sweating and shouting "I'm not gay!" while his brother thumbs another Kinder Egg into his arse;

v. Again, a question of quantities: £25,000 worth of drugs is a pretty decent amount of drugs, by volume! That is a lot of drugs to put in your anus! That's.... that's quite a lot of heroin to have up your arse! How you walking, my boy?

I suppose we've all learned a lot this week, specifically about the smuggling of drugs from one place to another. Sit with me and hold my hand and let's review our findings: shoving 7.2 grams of cocaine up your dick? Bad. Shoving £25,000 of smack up your lentil? An inadvisable idea. If you want to smuggle drugs into Glastonbury or whatever – that's the only time you really let go, these days, isn't it, what with the triathlon coming up and trying to get your head down at work, they say if you do overtime for six more months then in a couple years you could make it up to partner level, that's how Lewis got started and look at him now, plus you're saving up for a flat, also, so no gak, thanks, and you've sort of been on a healthy kick lately haven't you, lots of juice and juicing and prunes, so it's not really worth a big weekend now, just sweating and crunching your teeth and feeling bad all Sunday, you'd rather go for a run, wouldn't you, same high! – but yeah just shove it in your sock or fold it into a loaf of bread like everyone else. Again, to reiterate, in case you need it: don't fill a Kinder Egg capsule w/ smack and bang it up your arsehole. Thank you for your time.

@joelgolby

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"The Survivors" expo in central Bucharest

Earlier this month, the Romanian police launched an eerie awareness campaign about the life-saving qualities of the seat belt. 15 car seats were placed in central Bucharest, all taken from wrecks of cars in which people lost their lives because they weren't wearing a seat belt. The seats are still stained, but the passengers sitting in them at the time of the accident survived because they did remember to wear their seat belts.

The aim of the exhibition is to reduce the number of traffic-related deaths – Romania has the second highest number of deadly traffic accidents in the European Union. According to the police, about eight lives are lost on the Romanian roads every day because people can't be bothered to wear a belt, forget about it or actually tie it behind the seat to fool the car's sensors.

Each seat in the exhibition comes with a corny title celebrating the virtues of the seat belt, and a heartbreaking story from the survivor of the crash. Like this one:

"I wish it had been me instead of Cristi and his brother Vali. They were young and full of life. Cristi had just moved to Bucharest and his brother was living with their parents in another city. They had hung out together over the weekend at Christi's, and then we drove Vali back to their parents. They were both tired. Traffic was pretty slow, so Cristi told Vali to relax and leave his seat belt. Suddenly we went off-road, I still don't know why. I yelled at them, but there was no one left to hear me – we hit a concrete wall."

Depending on how decent your Romanian is, you can read more stories here.

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JT Leroy (left) and Asia Argento in 2005 (Photo: Yui Mok / PA Archive/Press Association Images)

When the story broke in October of 2005 it was described as the greatest literary hoax in recent memory. What had started as the phone calls of a fucked-up 16-year-old boy called "Terminator" to his therapist had turned into a strange literary phenomenon that had drawn in the likes of Gus Van Sant, Tom Waits, Courtney Love, Winona Ryder, Mary Karr, Asia Argento and more. It was the bizarre case of the writer JT Leroy, the subject matter of Jeff Feuerzeig's compulsively watchable Author: The JT LeRoy Story.

Growing up on a West Virginia truck-stop, Jeremiah "Terminator" Leroy had lived through an abusive childhood watching his "lot lizard" mother turn tricks to feed her habit. By the time he was seven she was making him cross dress, using him as bait for the local johns. Soon he was hustling up and down truck-stops of the American South, addicted to heroin and HIV positive.

The mid-90s found "Terminator" in San Francisco. A fateful phone call to a child protection hotline introduced him to a psychologist, Dr Richard Owens, who advised him to write things down in between sessions over the phone (they never met in person) as a form of therapy. In the meantime, between 1994 and 1995, writers Bruce Benderson and Dennis Cooper began receiving phone calls from a troubled boy with a "very soft female voice". Now living with a British woman called "Speedie" and a boyfriend, "Astor","Terminator" began to fax over his writing. Benderson and Cooper were astounded. How could a 14-year-old hustler write this?

His first novel, Sarah, came out in 2000 when JT would have been 17. It was dubbed autobiographical fiction and drew heavily on the gothic details of his upbringing, tying them together in a heightened style that made it an instant classic of transgressive fiction, garnering endless positive reviews. Still, no one had yet met JT in person.

At the height of the success of Sarah, in 2001, an awkward young man with a girlish round face, a blonde wig and glasses debuted before the world as the writer Jeremiah "Terminator" Leroy. Having finally emerged from obscurity, he was now everywhere, feted by a growing tribe of celebrity friends and confidantes.

But in October of 2005, an article entitled "Who is the real JT Leroy?", written by Stephen Beachy for New York Magazine, questioned whether the writer really existed at all and suggested that the "man behind the curtain" was in fact no man at all, but a 40-year-old Brooklyn woman named Laura Albert, otherwise known as JT's British assistant, "Speedie". An article in The New York Times in February of 2006 went on to prove that 24-year-old JT Leroy – or "Wigs and Glasses", as Beachy called him – was actually played in public by a woman called Savannah Knoop, the sister of Laura Albert's husband Geoff Knoop, or "Astor". Instead of JT Leroy there was a cast of characters with shady motives. His books were not the autobiographical product of a West Virginian drug-addicted child prodigy, but the fiction of a mother-of-one in her late-thirties who was writing for American TV series Deadwood by the name Emily Frasier, or "Speedie". The confusion was felt by everyone.

Jeff Feuerzeig's documentary looks at what he calls "the wildest story about 'story'" through the experience of Laura Albert. "What I ended up learning going on this journey with the film was that there was a massive amount of deceit in this story that Laura shares very openly, no doubt," says Feuerzeig over the phone. "But it was a much more organic journey that couldn't possibly have been premeditated."

Albert is unpredictable and fascinating to watch in her pieces to camera. The most unreliable of unreliable narrators, she shares all without remorse, foul-mouthed and wide-eyed, as though she herself cannot quite believe the batshit stuff that happened. "Is it surprising that Laura Albert turned out to be a good storyteller?" Feuerzeig asks. "She clearly was a great storyteller. When it came time to tell her story she shared everything."

Having never heard of the JT Leroy story, when Feuerzeig first read about it a few years ago it bowled him over. He contacted Albert and sent her his critically acclaimed The Devil and Daniel Johnston, a documentary that looked into the relationship between mental illness and art-making in the case of musician Daniel Johnston. Albert liked it and agreed to do the documentary, despite turning down several directors previously. "This was her chance to finally tell," says Feuerzeig.

Via pieces to camera and a staggering volume of self-documentation, we're given an image of a deeply disturbed young woman. Albert's archive of old notebooks, super 8 footage, photographs, doodles (which Feuerzeig animates in Author) and audio recordings could be "the largest known collection of self-documentation, if anyone is keeping score, in documentary film", in Feuerzeig's opinion.

Physically and sexually abused as a young girl, she later developed a food addiction and a hotline addiction that turned into hours of ringing child hotlines posing as different young boys. She used avatars to explore the outside world, often employing her sister while she remained indoors, too ashamed of her "size". She had an affinity for punk culture. We find out that she was institutionalised.

Laura Albert in 2007 (Photo: Kelly Lee Barrett, via)

Hiding behind the persona of a young abused boy, far from her own mental illness, her own history of abuse, her weight and her perceived inability to be a true artist, Albert's arc reads almost like a mythical tale of tortured female expression. Feuerzeig tells me that these days she wears a pendant of a typewriter round her neck that says, "Write hard, die free."

There's a relish for the details in the obsolete technologies from the 90s and early 2000s in Author. We watch cassette tapes roll as Tom Waits rings JT to tell him his writing is "so wet, it's alive". We hear the phone calls between Courtney Love and Laura Albert after the "reveal" has happened ("I've a tiny line of coke, I don't want to put you on hold, do you mind if I do it?") and we listen as JT Leroy (Albert) tells Asia Argento that he loves her over the phone. Each little insight offers an explanation to the betrayal felt by many of JT's friends and the bitter fallout that followed, the "Carrie moment" as Albert calls it. "I'm going to be standing there covered in pig's blood."

"A metaphor is different to a fucking hoax," JT Leroy drawls down the phone to Dr Owens towards the end. What is the JT Leroy story a metaphor for then if it isn't a hoax? At the time of the "reveal", the writer Mary Gaitskill, one of JT's earliest supporters, commented that the JT Leroy story represented "the confusion between love and art and publicity", a confusion that seems far more suited to 2016 than to 2005, when the duality between identity and work has never seemed more prescient. As art-making has become increasingly defined by popularity contests played out across platforms, and as the curation of avatars and personae has become standard in celebrity-obsessed culture, the question central to Author is, does the work stand for itself?

Will the work stand for itself without the drug-addicted teen from West Virginia? Feuerzeig thinks so. He begins Author with a Fellini quote. "A created thing is never invented and it is never true: it is always and ever itself." How much does our idea of 'who' wrote 'what' influence our appreciation of it? JT LeRoy's books are being re released to coincide with Author, so there's one way to find out.

'Author: The Jt LeRoy Story' is out today.

@Roisin_Agnew

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Illustration by Liz Renstrom

This article originally appeared on VICE US

It was inevitable. Somebody asked revered filmmaker Werner Herzog, known for making some of the most daring and fiercely original films and documentaries over the past 40 years, what he thinks about Pokémon Go.

Werner Herzog: When two persons in search of a Pokémon clash at the corner of Sunset and San Vicente is there violence? Is there murder?

The Verge: They do fight, virtually.
Physically, do they fight?

No—
Do they bite each other's hands? Do they punch each other?

The people or the...
Yes, there must be real people if it's a real encounter with someone else.

Well, it's been interesting because there are all these anecdotes of people who are playing the game, and they've never met their neighbors, for instance. And when they go outside to look for Pokémon they realize they're playing the same game, and start talking to each other.
You'd have to give me a cell phone, which I'm not going to use anyway, and I have no clue what's going on there, but I don't need to play the game.

The acclaimed director was doing press around his forthcoming documentary about the internet, called Lo and Behold. The film explores the origins, possibilities, and abuses of the internet, and includes positively Herzogian lines such as, "Does the internet dream?" and "The corridor here looks repulsive" (said about the computer-engineering wing of the UCLA campus).

It seems unlikely that the 73-year-old Bavarian-born documentarian, who has bragged about not owning a cell phone—OK, only for emergencies, he concedes—has taken such an interest in technology. But in addition to Lo and Behold, Herzog recently launched an online filmmaking course for MasterClass.

When you think about it, perhaps it's not so odd that the director of unforgettable documentaries about the death penalty, ski-jumping, erupting volcanoes, and life at the South Pole, would be into the exploring the role of humanity at the edge of the digital abyss. After all, this is the same glorious man capable of consuming his own shoes, obsessing over WrestleMania, and speaking from the point-of-view of a plastic bag (the short film, a PSA against pollution, is surprisingly affecting).

Could we be in for a Herzog-narrated romp through "augmented reality," flinging Poké Balls and ensnaring Charmanders? In a world littered with Herzog's takes on Curious George and Pokémon Go mash-ups of David Attenborough, it's only a matter of time.

Follow James Yeh on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE US

Over the past seven days, America witnessed 11 mass shootings that left 11 dead and 55 wounded. These attacks bring the US mass shooting body count so far in 2016 to 245 dead and 834 injured.

Meanwhile, Europe suffered two mass shootings over the same period of time. Exactly a week ago, details were still emerging about 18-year-old David Ali Sonboly's still mysterious but apparently xenophobic attack in a Munich, Germany shopping mall, which ultimately left nine dead, not including the lone shooter who killed himself as well, and 27 injured. Then on Tuesday, a familial dispute over an apartment in Magas, Russia, left the local chief of police dead and four wounded, two of whom were also officers, in still unclear circumstance. These incidents bring the continent's body toll in such attacks so far this year to 37 dead and 125 injured.

In America, the defining shooting of the week hit just after midnight on Monday morning when at least one gunman opened fire on a teen-centric party at Club Blu in Fort Myers, Florida. The shooter(s) killed 14-year-old Sean Archilles and 18-year-old Stef'an Strawder and injured 17 others between the ages of 12 and 27. Police arrested three people of interest right after the attack, 19-year-olds Derrick Church and Demetrius O'Neal and 22-year-old Tajze Battle. But they were charged with resisting arrest, not with anything directly related to the shooting; as of publication it remains unclear whether they had anything to do with the attack itself.

The attack in Fort Myers drew a fair amount of international coverage toward the start of the week. But ultimately it did not receive as much attention as one might have expected for an attack in which over a dozen mostly young people at a supposedly safe event were injured. After all, while we can be shockingly blasé about many large scale shootings, as Jaclyn Schildkraut, an expert on media coverage of mass shootings at the State University of New York in Oswego, recently told VICE, Americans tend to consider children the ultimate "worthy victims." As such we're riveted by attacks involving predominately children, especially in public venues, like this.

Part of the seemingly mild reaction to Fort Myers may have stemmed from a continuing global focus on Sonboly's Munich massacre, which hit almost every hallmark laid out by Schildkraut for a headline-grabbing attack: The shooting unfolded in a public and unlikely location—a mall in a nation which has largely avoided major attacksfrom any party in recent years—and was perpetrated not by the Islamic State as many feared, but by a seemingly bigoted, troubled teen. His victims were moderately targeted, but predominately random, and mostly young as well. Chaotic, narrative defying, brutal to innocent youth, and massive by any standards, especially those of Germany, it was a fittingly archetypal media spectacle-ready rampage for a shooter who apparently made it his business to study and ape some of the worst mass shootings ever.

Meanwhile aside from the high number of children involved, Fort Myers in many ways fit established narratives of large scale US gun violence, conceivably making it less extraordinary from a media coverage perspective. For starters, it took place at a nightspot, an incredibly common site for such attacks. (There were three other mass shootings at bars or clubs this week alone: One on Saturday morning in North Charleston, South Carolina left four injured. One on Sunday morning in Hamilton, Ohio, left one dead and seven injured. And one on Thursday morning in Elmira, New York, left five injured.) And, given that we measure the importance of attacks in part by their numbers relative to other incidents, the fact that this nightclub shooting happened just over a month after Omar Mateen's massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, about three hours away—the largest mass shooting in modern American history—might have compressed the impact of its overall body count.

While the identity and motives of the shooter(s) still remain mysterious, witness reports and speculation by individuals associated with the club indicate that it may all have stemmed from a conflict between rappers. A local DJ said he had previously been warned about potential violence at the event, while the owner of the club (which had seen previous, if smaller-scale, attacks) noted that shootings are a regular occurrence in the area. Combined with the fact that many of those involved were from minority communities, whose lives recent events have repeatedly shown us are chronically devalued in American society, you can start to see why Fort Myers might read to many as a simultaneously large and tragic yet also routine shooting, easy for us to move past.

Yet while the Fort Myers shooting may not be the most exceptional attack of the week, and while it may play into mass shooting tropes, it still left two teens dead—and many more wounded. That is an unacceptable and unnecessary tragedy. So were the five injuries in a street shooting in Kankakee, Illinois, last Friday; the two deaths and two injuries at a home in Cincinnati, Ohio, on Saturday morning; the four deaths and one injured in Bastrop, Texas, and four more injured in Brooklyn, New York, in apartment shootings later that night; the four injuries in a shooting at a home in Panola, Alabama, Tuesday evening; or the two dead and two injured in Chicago, Illinois, and four more injured in Baltimore, Maryland, in street shootings Thursday morning.

All of these deaths and injuries take a lasting toll on real lives. They are also collectively part of an epidemic of mass shootings much larger than any individual tragedy, slowly grinding away at America. Whether or not they fit patterns of violence, or seem subdued relative to tragedies like those in Orlando or Munich, each of these incidents deserves its due consideration. And America's mass shooting problem in aggregate deserves our continued collective focus.

For the past two summers, I traveled to Newport, Rhode Island, alongside hundreds of East Coast fishermen to the Monster Shark Tournament. The tournament moved to Newport in 2014 from its original location in Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts, on Martha's Vineyard. As a kid on Martha's Vineyard, I always looked forward to the tournament, but a recent town council decision deemed the tournament's drunken revelers and "circus" atmosphere inappropriate for the area.

For two days, the fishermen formed teams and left before dawn, returning to the weigh-in later that afternoon to have their daily catches judged. While the other boats waited patiently in line, a tournament staff member attached a rope to each shark's tail and hoisted it up to a white platform to be weighed; only the largest sharks were presented.

The Monster Shark Tournament uses International Game Fishing Association (IGFA) regulations to promote ethical angling practices; the stringent rules are designed to ensure that the fishing has a minimal impact on the shark population. Scientists and researchers are also on hand to collect samples, and the boats' captains can choose between keeping their catch, donating it to a local food bank, or handing it over to the researchers. The tournament provides invaluable samples for marine biologists all along the East Coast.

The event seems like a bloody affair, but it's hard to view the Monster Shark Tournament as an outright massacre. Seeing a marine biologist hack a shark's head off of the gills is brutal, but there's also something terrifyingly beautiful about looking at these creatures up close, seeing not only their strength but also their fragility.

My fond recollection of the tie-dyed, Birkenstock'ed Martha's Vineyard protesters fighting with tournament staff make it difficult to document the event as an impartial bystander, but my nostalgia and awe at the beauty of these sea giants also makes it hard to look away.

Art Vandelay Press will be releasing these photographs into a spiral bound photo book called Swamp Yankee by Maggie Shannon, available at tonight's opening at Printed Matter in NYC.

All photographs by Maggie Shannon.

Intergalactic drag stars of 'Vegas in Space.' Photo courtesy of Phillip Ford

Nineteen-Ninety-one proved to be a remarkably bittersweet year for acclaimed San Francisco drag troupe Sluts-a-Go-Go. It was when they released their feature film Vegas in Space, a magnum opus nearly eight years in the making. But before the movie had its world premiere, two of its stars, drag icons Doris Fish and Tippi, would succumb to AIDS, leaving an indelible absence in the celebration that followed.

The film, a joint vision of Doris Fish and filmmaker Phillip R. Ford, would eventually traverse the globe, playing the likes of Sundance and Cannes. E! would broadcast images of Miss X, who plays Queen Veneer, Empress of Earth, marching the streets of France in support of the festival run, and the movie eventually became a staple of the once-popular late-night cable cult film showcase USA Up All Night.

For many, Vegas in Space was a cinematic revelation. A loving homage to B-movies and drive-in era sci-fi, the film follows a group of astronauts who "change their sex" (using drag) to infiltrate planet Clitoris, a pleasure world without men, investigate the disappearance of vital gems of Girlinium, and save the universe from certain peril. Campy, psychedelic, and utterly bizarre, Vegas in Space is one of the first truly queer midnight movies, and while it wasn't the first film to toy with gender-bending and drag (The Rocky Horror Picture Show being a noteworthy example), Vegas has the distinction of being the first—and possibly only—cult film to feature an all-drag cast.

Despite screening at venerable international film festivals and making it onto late-night cable, finding an audience for Vegas was difficult. While it's hard to imagine in a world without RuPaul's Drag Race embedded in the mainstream, back in 1991, drag culture was a black sheep of the LGBTQ community. It "was not the image were trying to present when they were fighting for 'gays in the military,'" Ford has said in interviews.

It was a time when a new school of rising filmmakers, from Todd Haynes to Christine Vachon, sought to minimize camp influences and maximize mainstream legitimacy in gay filmmaking through subtler, fully realized on-screen characters.

Photo courtesy of Phillip Ford

But no one ever said that to blaze a trail was to be lauded for the journey, and Vegas in Space did eventually earn its stripes. Though distributors of the period shied away from acquiring outwardly gay films, Lloyd Kaufman's independent film studio and distributor Troma eventually purchased its distribution rights. Thanks to Troma, the company responsible for such classic midnight movie fare as The Toxic Avenger and Blood Sucking Freaks, Vegas found audiences both queer and fringe.

And in the 25 years since its initial release, fans have banded together to maintain its legacy. A quick internet search will reveal cult fandom for Vegas in Space is as strong as ever. But I would argue it's incorrect to conclude that Vegas was ahead of its time. Instead, the movie emerged at exactly the right moment.

Thanks in no small part to Vegas, 1991 would turn out to be a watershed year for queer cinema, one that hasn't been replicated since. It was the year that brought us Todd Haynes's Poison, Pedro Almodovar's High Heels, and Derek Jarman's Edward II, establishing each as visionary directors with new kinds of queer stories to tell. These narratives eschewed stereotypes and obvious morals for subtler characterizations of queer lives. It was also the same year that filmmaker, writer, and photographer Bruce LaBruce released his first feature, No Skin Off My Ass, a film about lust and skinheads that kicked off a lauded career, which continues to explore the intersection of pornography and cinema today. And Isaac Julien's Young Soul Rebels became one of the first major international releases to showcase queer romance between people of color.

The year kickstarted an era that came to be known as the New Queer Wave, and rightly so. As queer people pulled themselves up from the devastation wrought by the AIDS crisis throughout the 80s, LGBTQ artists found themselves ready to tell new kinds of queer stories. These were films that sought to show the world that a queer person could be more than a statistic. Within each of these narratives, one found radically different voices yearning to be heard.

And heard they were. With the onslaught of queer cinema that invaded film festivals, the New Queer Wave forever changed the landscape of LGBTQ film to follow. Movies like Tom Kalin's Swoon, Rose Troche's Go Fish, and the aforementioned Priscilla all have films released in 1991 to thank for their existence.

Photo courtesy of Phillip Ford

Not every film adored by horror nerds and cinema geeks can claim to be an important part of cultural history, let alone one populated with intergalactic drag queens. Vegas in Space and the New Queer Wave showed a generation of queer youth and aspiring filmmakers that it was OK to embrace their otherness, rather than bury what makes them unique—it taught us that it was all right to speak out, seek representation, and reach for the stars.

Michael Varrati co-produced a 25th anniversary screening and cast reunion of Vegas in Space for San Francisco's Frameline Film Festival. Follow him on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE Sweden

When we arrive at Tensta square the area seems peaceful. People go about their daily business while a handful of policemen stroll up and down the square – the demonstration hasn't started yet.

That demonstration is Järva Pride, a self-proclaimed LGBT event in Stockholm's suburbs, organised by nationalist, right-wing Swedish Democrat (Sverigedemokraterna) party member Jan Sjunnesson. The march goes through the Tensta, Rinkeby, and Kista neighbourhoods – all heavily populated by Middle Eastern and African immigrants – to highlight what those marching say is a lack of acceptance for LGBT people's rights. The demo thus kicks up controversy and outrage in both the LGBT community and anti-racism movements.

At the centre of the conflict sit Sjunnesson's far-right sympathies and his association with the Swedish Democrats – a highly controversial party in Sweden, given its critical view on immigration.

Sjunnesson himself has been the editor-in-chief of the party's official magazine, Samtiden, and contributes to Avpixlat: a propaganda-fuelled website that specialises in self-dubbed "politically incorrect" news, and picks up criticism from elsewhere in the media for allegedly spreading xenophobia and Islamophobia.

I quickly spot white-clad Sjunnesson, who seems very pleased with the media attention. Before allowing us to take any photos, he asks to wait for him to assemble what he calls his signature outfit – a cap from Donald Trump's presidential campaign.

Jan Sjunneson, in his Trump 2016 best

"Gays for Trump," Sjunneson exclaims proudly. "I used to work here in Tensta as a school principal in 2004 and as a project leader for a center for immigrant youth, so I know the area quite well. I believe demonstrations like this should march through similar kinds of neighbourhoods across Sweden and all of Europe," he says.

A few minutes later I meet Fej Skantz, an activist from RFSL Stockholm – the organisation that organises Sweden's official gay pride week, and doesn't support today's parade. She holds a poster that reads ''No racists on our streets!'' and is here as a part of the counter-protest against what they see as Pride Järva's hidden agenda. Skantz explains that she herself actually lives in Tensta and that the demonising rhetoric of Sjunnesson doesn't reflect the reality of living in the area.

Fej Skantz, of RFSL Stockholm

"It's a great neighbourhood and it is important to not let the fascists march here. I am an LGBT person myself and it is crucial for me that we, the people living here, stand together and do not get influenced by those who want to divide us.

She is by far not the only one critical towards the parade. As Sjunnesson welcomes the 30 or so people who've shown up to demonstrate, a group of counter-protesters arrive, far outnumbering Sjunnesson's group. Separated by only a few policemen, the groups begin to chant simultaneously, in an attempt to drown each other out. After a few moments, it's quite hard to separate Pride Järva's ''No homo-haters on our streets'' from the rhythmic counter-chant of "No racists and Islamophobes on our streets".

The Järva Pride lot, ready to march

I approach a group of teenagers hanging out by the benches a few metres away. I want to know what they make of this circus, but they seem quite suspicious of our camera. One of the boys says that he doesn't want gay people in this neighbourhood, but doesn't elaborate further. Another one says he believes in freedom of speech and that he is OK with it.

Counter-protesters, holding up anti-racist and anti-Islamphobic signs

As the march proceeds through the fields between the neighbourhoods Tensta and Rinkeby, the line of Järva demonstrators and counter-protesters holding anti-racist slogans gets slightly mixed up. Sjunnesson begins chanting "no racists on our streets" alongside the counter-protestors for a while, to show he's not the villain they say he is. The police trying to separate the one group from the other seem rather clueless. An older woman on crutches, one of Sjunnesson's supporters, gets lost between the counter-protesters. She mumbles something about preserving Sweden for Swedes. As the mismatched line marches on, passersby stare at the unfolding scene, trying to make any sense of the whole thing.

Sjunnesson chose to wear a bulletproof vest for his speech

As the march finally arrives in Rinkeby, the police block the counter-protesters from the town square entrance, as Sjunnesson gets ready to make his speech. He talks about left-wing monopoly, the Islamist intolerance and his intolerance for this intolerance. He also avoids touching on the subject of LGBT asylum seekers. He explains everybody is welcome at his parade, pointing out that his political sympathies do not necessarily reflect the ones of all the protesters by his side.

I ask a Pride Järva supporter – a woman in her fifties – why she's here. Does she know the neighbourhood well? "I think everybody should have the right to love who they love, no matter their religious beliefs or origin," she says. "I live in Stockholm – I don't come here too often but I know of Rinkeby from police reports in the news. But I don't personally know anybody here, no."

A younger man adds he also heard of somebody from the area who was afraid to participate. He adds: "The point is to show that we exist. And that we exist here in the area surrounding Järva. That we are allowed to be here and demand to be respected."

At Rinkeby square I notice Pedro, a tall, young man with a halo of curls who wears a short denim dress. He's joined the parade to listen to Sjunnesson's speech. "I am here just to spread Pride message and leave the politics out of it," he says.

Here's Pedro

Pedro lives in another district with a high immigrant rate and tells me about his experience of being openly LGBT there. "I know that I can't go out after certain times at night dressed up in female clothes. I can in the daytime, people tend to be less aggressive when there is a crowd present. Nothing has really ever happened to me, I just get people staring at me. But I do not feel very safe. It might happen in the city centre as well, but not as much as here. I hang out a lot in Söder, which is more of a 'leftie', liberal area."

Meanwhile, Sjunnesson ends his speech saying that: "It should be possible to be a blond, blue-eyed Swedish gay individual in Sweden."

As I look around I see a group of older Kurdish men having a smoke at the local bar and notice a Somali mother is buying groceries at a Turkish fruit stand. They're all going about their daily lives. Nobody is really paying much attention to all blond Swedes demonstrating and counter-protesting, among, and to some extent, about them.

Illustration by Tyler Boss

Life Inside is an ongoing collaboration between the Marshall Project and VICE that offers first-person perspectives from those who live and work in the criminal justice system. This article originally appeared on VICE US

Sports gambling is a serious form of entertainment in prison. I'd guess maybe 30 percent percent of inmates bet on sports, at least where I was in the late 1990s, at Wyoming State Penitentiary. That's where I learned the hustle, working as a 'writer' who collects betting slips and delivers them back to a bookie. I'd make 20 or 25 percent off the top, or $1.25 cents off a $5 bet, no matter whether the better or the bookie won.

It's a great job because there's no exposure. It was the actual bookie who had to sneak into the education wing of the place, where the copy machines were located, and find a way to distract the staff and make copies of the cards listing the odds for all the day's games. Then he'd have to count and store all the winnings.

In 2001, I was transferred to a federal prison. In addition to my five years for burglary, the feds had indicted me on conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine, and gave me just under 17 years. When I got to the federal facility in Yazoo City, Miss., I saw the action was ten times what it had been at the state level. So I became a bookie myself. Basketball was the most profitable because it happened every day, but individual football games could bring in a lot of money. I took in $7,000 worth of bets on one NFL Sunday. Generally, my goal was to make a profit of 25 percent.

I'd call family members or friends to get the lines—lists from Las Vegas of who is favored to win and by how much—that bookies use to set the odds. After a few years, the federal prisons brought in CorrLinks, a basic emailing system, and I could have people send me the lines that way.

In the Mississippi prison, nobody used actual cash; it was all stamps and mackerel. Fish was good because you could buy hundreds of dollars worth at a time from the commissary, whereas you were only allowed to buy one $10 book of stamps. At the end of the day, a bookie would have tons of little pouches of mackerel worth between $1.15 and $1.35. He could use them as currency on their own, or sell them for a buck each to weight-lifters who wanted to bulk up on protein.

I had up to 14 writers working under me. White guys and black guys who could go get bets from their racial groups. I also had a few writers who dealt with everybody—race never goes away in prison, but sports betting was often able to bridge the divide.

Eventually, I was transferred to a prison in Coleman, Florida. A partner and I went into business together, and I made even more money down there. Some of the bookies didn't know what they were doing: they wouldn't know how to do the calculations and would be paying above odds. So we would bet against them and make a killing.

I got to the point where I easily made $16,000 each month.

One of the biggest hauls came during the 2010 Super Bowl, when the New Orleans Saints played the Indianapolis Colts. The Colts were favored to win, but my partner was a Saints fan, so we set up the odds against what Vegas was recommending, which generally you shouldn't do. Everyone who wanted the Colts to win bet against us, but the Saints won. We made close to ten grand that night. Of course, there were also times we had a bad night and lost all our money.

We spent nights counting our stamps, but needed a way to hide them. There were Now and Later candies for sale at the commissary, in those six-inch packages. We'd buy them, take out the candy, trim the stamp books into squares, fold them up, tuck them into the packages, and seal them back up. One package could hold a hundred books of stamps.

We lived well, never calling home for money. We spent maybe $1,500 a month on food, cigarettes, and gambling. Instead of going to the chow hall three times a day, I could prepare a meal in my cell with food from the commissary. I could also pay people to steal special food from the chow hall: shrimp, steaks, roast beef. I'd buy cartons of cigarettes that others had smuggled in, sell them, and make a profit. If I liked the shoes a guy was wearing as he walked off the bus, I could buy them from him.

When I was released, in 2014, my probation officer told me she didn't want me to be involved in gambling, and forced me to shut it all down. That, unfortunately, was the end of my run.

This article originally appeared on VICE US

There comes a time in nearly every young person's life when it becomes necessary to shake off the shackles of your hometown and carve out a new life for yourself someplace faraway and unfamiliar. Or maybe you're the one stuck in your hometown while everyone you know has moved onto bigger and better things. Either way, it's a hallmark of young adulthood to suddenly find yourself in a situation where you don't know anyone, and you don't have any money.

Before you resign yourself to a life of isolation—or worse, mistake your parents or coworkers as substitutes for real friends—take a deep breath. It may seem like a herculean task, but making friends only gets harder as you grow older, when things like spouses, children, and your fast-approaching mortality get in the way of your quest to meet new people. So now, while you're young, is actually the best time to expand your social circle.

First, there's the internet. It's not exactly rocket science that you can meet people online. Plenty of people have used dating apps as a means of finding friends in new cities, and there are actually some apps designed for non-sexual matches, like Wiith, the "Tinder for friends." Sure, you're mostly going to find other people who are lonely and desperate, but beggars can't be choosers.

If you want to weed out the weirdos trawling for sex, meetup.com is a surprisingly decent resource for connecting with local people who share similar interests. With the mission of "using the internet to get people off the internet," the site has been successfully connecting people around the globe since 2002. Whether you want to bond with fellow Dallas Cowboys or Cowboy Bebop fans, there are groups in nearly every major city that can put you in the proximity of likeminded individuals. Meetup also organizes group events, which can take some of the pressure off meeting new people. The events scheduled by Meetup organizers are usually free or very low-cost, so your broke ass won't have to worry about joining a new group only to be hit up for dues.

Kristen Hodgson, Meetup's communication director, told VICE there are already 15,000 site-orchestrated meetups happening every day, spanning from hiking groups to cannabis entrepreneurs. She also pointed out that "when you start with that shared interest, and you bond while doing whatever you love to do, that's a great catalyst for friendship."

On the other end of the online friend-sourcing spectrum is RentAFriend.com, a website that basically works like a friend escort service. It's reasonable to worry the site is a front for actual escorts, and the janky, domain-squatter appearance of the homepage doesn't do much to assuage those fears. But RentAFriend explicitly states that they are "strictly a platonic Friendship website... not a dating website, and not an escort agency."

I've personally offered my friendship services through RentAFriend.com, which resulted in an awkward but ultimately harmless older gentleman paying me $90 to have some drinks and shoot the shit for a couple hours. I wouldn't exactly call that dude my new best friend, but he made for decent company and I earned $90. Even if you don't wind up making a friend, you'll walk away a little less broke.

But let's say you want to get off the internet and meet some friends the old-fashioned way. One of the best ways to do this without spending a ton of money is to volunteer. There are approximately 200 charitable causes for every human on Earth, so finding one that suits you should be a breeze.

Whether you're passionate about a socio-political movement and ready to help organize marches or you just want to just play with puppies at the local animal shelter, there's a place for you to volunteer your time and energy. You might walk away smelling like cat piss, sure, but a few shifts should provide you with ample opportunity to meet other people, and getting to know each other by cleaning animal cages is a hell of a lot cheaper than getting to know each other over drinks every weekend.

For those who lack the moral fortitude to volunteer, there's always improv. There's no better way to make friends than getting thrown into a circle of strangers and acting out what Bernie Sanders would be like in caveman times. Improv is great for the broke and friendless, because the craft is predicated on anyone being able to do it anywhere, and you'll quickly break down those walls of awkwardness that come with meeting strangers. And while improv schools like Upright Citizens Brigade, Second City, and Groundlings are all expensive as fuck, there are scores of free improv workshops and classes in most large cities.

Paul Storiale, who's been running a weekly free improv class in Los Angeles for the past two years, said making friends was one of the main reasons he started the group.

"I've seen a lot of friendships form over the years in these classes. A couple that met in my class is now expecting a child, even," Storiale told me. "If you're coming into a town and don't know anyone, it's a great way to expand your social circle."

If all else fails and you find yourself broke and alone, you can find other lonely people on Pokémon GO. The internet is rife with stories of would-be Pokémon trainers spotting each other wandering aimlessly around public parks, 7-Elevens, and graveyards, only to buddy up in the shared task of hunting down the wily Dratini hiding somewhere in the vicinity.

A little dorky, sure, but as one Redditor put it: "I've made friends online before, but never something as tangible as this. This is nuts. It's dawning on me how this is a long time coming for us who grew up with these games and always wanted to be like Ash or Red. It's really a dream come true. Can't wait to meet way more people through this game."

Follow Justin Caffier on Twitter.

My journey to the plains of Kyrgyzstan comes from a bit of an odd story. I read in the papers that Kazakhstan was scrapping its tourist visa fees and an unpopular, tedious sign-in process for foreigners, to try make the country more "tourist friendly". It didn't take much persuading for my friend Henry and I to book flights to Almaty via Istanbul.

I'd heard Kyrgyzstan was worth visiting and not impossible to get to from Almaty, so we spontaneously decided to give that a go too. We didn't have much knowledge at all of the local area, as we crossed the border from Kazakhstan to Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. There is a proper "Soviet meets Silk Road" feel about the place, but we quickly realised we'd need to head out of the city to see more of the area's traditions.

After paying a fee to a fixer who spoke English, he took us out to the countryside and recommended two activities: Ulak Tartysh – more commonly known as dead goat polo – and Kyz Kumay, a game where a group of men on horses chase a woman, who can protect herself with a whip, from a "match-winning kiss".

There was a game of Ulak Tartysh taking place the following day, so we agreed a time and a place and met our fixer the next morning. We had no idea which direction we were heading in, but two and a half hours later we arrived at a small rural village in the Kyrgyz mountains.

The name "dead goat polo" seems to tell you just about everything you'd expect to see but I didn't really understand how you could format rules around a group of 20 guys on horses chasing a carcass. As I soon discovered, I was very wrong. There aren't just rules to Ulak Tartysh, there are full-on international championships that take place, mainly across central Asia and the Middle East. Countries like Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan play against each other in test matches to sell-out crowds.

The field we stood in was around the size of a cricket pitch, surrounded by mountains and sealed off with bulky rocks rather than a rope boundary. Spectators stood in a small watchtower made of scrap metal parts and worn-out tires functioned as 'goals' on the end of the pitch.

Once the 20-odd players arrived on horseback, they picked teams and put on the corresponding red or blue T-shirts before a group of about 13 arrived on a smaller horse, carrying the goat's carcass. Then things kicked off, with the men wrestling for possession of the dead goat before galloping down the field and chucking it in the tyre goal. The horses sometimes lost control and ran off the field, right at us spectators, and the game came eventually to a premature end when one of the players fell off his horse and landed awkwardly on his hip. He was eventually OK, though. An occupational hazard.

See more of Stevie's photos from the Kyrgyz mountains below, and his other photography work on his website.

This article originally appeared on VICE US

As we navigate whatever crap-era of the internet we're in, it's becoming clear that most of its promises have been unfulfilled. Cultural barriers thought to be eradicated as we learned more about one another have instead begat digital walls that have cloistered us even more. Money expected to trickle down with the ease of transaction is simply being funneled to Silicon Valley. The ease of publication has meant the sharing of more stories, but also more tossed-off reactions from sexists, racists, anti-Semites, and whoever else is out there. But what about the promise of "disrupting" dating?

At first, the positives of online dating were obvious. Being able to vet over a more extended period of time and trading messages back and forth over days as opposed to a few drinks at a bar meant fewer false starts. Both parties could try to get on the same page, offering fewer misunderstandings when they treaded those murky waters between "dating" and "relationship." That's good. But more than that, it was the expansive dating options that changed the game.

Rather than your love life being tied to where one happened to be born, or the trustworthiness of your social circle, or the whimsy of chance, online dating allowed for more variety in potential suitors. It was the Mall of America instead of the corner bodega. Having these additional options would, theoretically, allow potential dates the chance to hone what they were looking for, to find the partner juuuuust right. This was the goal of first generation dating sites like Match.com, eHarmony, and OKCupid... They cast enormous nets, and let the user choose their catch.

But that's old internet. The new hot dating sites are curated, niche, with their URL names branding the singular category they serve. Christian Singles (duh), Farmers Only (also duh), SaladMatch (vegetarians), MeetMindful (spiritual yoga folk), TrekPassions (fans of Star Trek). These sites are now legion, and their perceived value is understandable. Filtering for sci-fi nerds or religious affiliations is just a step removed from clicking your sexual preference on your profile. But the ability to focus a dating search on one specific category can also be horrifying if the category of interest is built around pernicious things like hate or violence or crackpot ideas.

The latest and one of the most portentous niche dating sites is Awake Dating, "the best dating site for conspiracy singles, awake singles, truther singles." (The word "best" is also worrying, as apparently there's more than one?) At the site, users match based on the norm, like proximity and age, but also the out-there, like "9/11 Was an Inside Job" and "Illuminati." When I check it out myself, my closest potential romance is with a 32-year-old woman with a Monica Lewinksy profile pic who lists among her interests, "How to Survive When You're Wide Eyed Blazened Awake" and "Jewish Mind Control."

"It's conception goes back a couple of years," says Jarrod Fidden, Awake Dating's CEO, in his heavy Australian accent over Skype. "My wife and I found we didn't resonate with the people who were involved with the mainstream narrative. While we were married, we thought that, maybe if you were single, you don't have someone else to share these ideas with. So, we provided that platform."

In a little over two months, Fidden claims the site has gathered over 10,000 members, hooking up on commonalities such as Area 51, anti-vax activism, or the Round-Earth Conspiracy (the movement that sees the "mainstream narrative"of a round Earth as propaganda used to control the masses). "Everyone's interpretation of what it's going to mean to be 'awake' is going to change from person to person," says Fidden. "It's not for us to decide what's outlandish or not. There's all this information, and in this day and age, each has their own opinion."

But, well, maybe that's not good. With so many outlets, everyone not only has their own opinion, but access to others who share that opinion, no matter how outlandish it is. If you happen to believe that Kraft controls the New World Order, on our beloved internet you're sure to find someone to second that, and thusly legitimize your own insanity.

When I press Fidden about this potential echo chamber effect that could come from conspiracists dating one another, he dips into his own personal experience. "I've had discussions with my wife about things we haven't agreed on, and every discussion we end up changing opinions," he says. "The ability to communicate openly and honestly disseminates the ideas, and finds the truth."

By now we know that's not exactly how it works. One need only delve into the Twitter mentions of any fight about gun control or the lady Ghostbusters to see that opinions, once fortified by other internet randos, become solidified and dug-in. There are a few terms flying around for this concept. The Filter Bubble is the biggest.

The main concept is thus: Surround yourself with those who believe the same things as you, and those beliefs become truths, which means there's no talking you out of them.

How this occurs is obvious when you consider our new internet reality. Everyone's personal experience on the web is a unique butterfly of surfing tailored to their own needs. Your Facebook feed is curated by you, with your own friends or acquaintances. If you get annoyed with them for certain posts, the "hide from feed" button is a few clicks away. Your Instagram and Twitter work the same. We've come to accept this, but what's a little more insidious is the fact that your Google search results are different from everyone else's as well.

Google and most other search engines are intended to give us information about what we want to know. To do so, they use "cookies" to track not only our location (which comes in handy, if we're looking for nearby Korean joints) and search history (which comes in handy if we're a NASCAR fan searching for "Jim Johnson" and don't want to hear about the Dallas Cowboys). In those cases, pumping us search results to return the information we're looking for is benign. The cancerous part is when we search about issues where opinions mingle with fact.

As Eli Pariser—former CEO of Upworthy—highlighted in his 2011 book The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You, a search for "BP" can produce two outcomes for two different users. For one, it can offer information about stock prices, but for another, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that ravaged the Gulf in 2011. The difference depends on what the user's search history has shown. This difference is relatively low level, but consider the person Googling "the truth about vaccinations" with a search history showing a pattern of visiting anti-vaxxer websites. They could be led to more conspiracy nonsense that further promotes their preconceived ideas, as opposed to actual science.

This isn't just the fault of search engines, though. They're mostly just doing their job, after all.

"I don't think we can blame one particular site," says Engin Bozdag, a senior researcher at 4TU Centre for Ethics and Technology and senior privacy consultant at PwC who studied the filter bubble in his PhD thesis. "We cannot just solve this by regulating algorithms and telling them, 'you should create a more diverse environment so people can hear diverse opinions from opposing viewpoints.'"

Frankly, that product won't sell, because people wouldn't want to use it. If the top search engines or social media platforms began highlighting opposing viewpoints or opinions, people will move to ones that don't. (DuckDuckGo is a search engine that doesn't track users, meaning it provides the same results for any search, but there's a reason you haven't heard of it until now.) Which, in a roundabout way, brings us back to niche dating websites.

WATCH: My Life Online

"Let's say you want to date a conspiracy theorist, doesn't have to tell you, you shouldn't do that," says Bozdag. "That would violate your autonomy and choice. And if it shows you results you do not wish, you won't use the tool anymore."

Meaning that it really falls on the prospective internet user to purposefully gather opposing views, seek out those beyond their own cultural sphere. And that's really fucking hard. "On Twitter, I try to add people from opposing viewpoints to see what arguments they're using. At least, see their sources," says Bozdag. "But this is an exhausting task. No one would want to do this unless you have a very personal interest."

Leaving us in a weird place with no clear solutions, which is getting people to do things they don't want to do just because they should, like asking people to eat vegetables even though they don't taste as good as McDonald's burgers. No one wants to do things that are hard, because they're hard. Avoiding the filter bubble is solely up to our own willpower to forgo base tendencies to surround ourselves with only those we agree with.

"The reason why you should listen to other parties, that's beyond internet, or Facebook and Google," says Bozdag. "is to improve your own arguments, and also enlarge your own viewpoint before you make up your mind."

Niche dating sites that filter out our ability to connect with those who don't share our belief that lizard people control the world's currency from the sewers of L.A. is only adding to the problem. Worst of all, while the other forms of the filter bubble are generally self-contained within the minds and opinions of one person, one idealized end result from these niche dating sites is love, then lasting relationships, and then the creation of our planet's next generation crackpots. And that's one scary prospect.

Follow Rick on Twitter.

It should have been a standard Saturday night. On the 2nd of November 1996, gangly teenager Damien Nettles headed out in Cowes on the Isle of Wight with his good friend Chris Boon. They'd been out at a party earlier in the evening. Nothing special. Bored, they'd bought ciders, taken the ferry to west Cowes and then tried to get served at a couple of pubs, underage, before giving up and going their separate ways on the high street. Chris would be the last person close to Damien to see him alive. Damien was 16.

But this isn't the story of a horrifying murder on an island that most Brits barely think about beyond planning their Bestival fancy dress. It's the bizarre tale of a boy who just disappeared. About 25 minutes before midnight, Damien walked into a chippy and stumbled his way through an order. From what we can piece together courtesy of the chip shop's CCTV footage, he bought his food, briefly chatted to a few men at the counter and walked outside into the darkness.

His story has crept back into the news now, almost 20 years later, as the subject of BBC Three serialised documentary Unsolved: The Boy Who Disappeared. It's an attempt at a British take on Making a Murderer or Serial – where a quick Google search could tell all about how the story's unfolded so far – and fronted by Panorama investigative journalists Bronagh Munro and Alys Harte.

"Quite quickly we came to Damien's story as this remarkable case that had thousands of people involved in the police investigation, hundreds of witness statements taken, and then ... nothing," Harte says, speaking over the phone on the day Unsolved debuted online. "They made eight arrests, there was a massive effort over 20 years, and yet still nothing. Other people had tried before so we thought, 'we should give this a go.'" The results of she and Munro's yearlong investigation is an eight-part show, split into bite-sized episodes that each run to about 15 minutes long. You're taken onto the island, introduced to a score of characters believed to be linked to Damien and left fumbling in the dark after quiet whispers of leads, bumping into one dead end after the next.

Damien's mother, Valerie Nettles, shows up early as a key resource. She flies back to the Isle of Wight from her Dallas home to meet Munro and Harte, sending them all the information she's gathered on the case to date. Watching her walk along the streets that somehow snatched her son away, it's hard not to feel moved by how calm she seems. How composed.

I ask Harte what it felt like to work with Valerie, no doubt opening up old wounds about the night that changed her life for good. "The kind of grief that Valerie's dealing with is a really complicated, heartbreaking one," Harte says. "She's ... pretty sure that her son is dead but she's not 100 percent sure. And she doesn't have anywhere to grieve him – she doesn't have a grave – so it's really difficult." You see that written on Valerie's face, first when she video chats with the two reporters and later when they meet in person.

Surely, after years of speaking to the press about a story that's barely progressed, Valerie would feel drained at the prospect of dredging everything up again, this time for the BBC. How did it feel to be back on the island during filming? "Going back after Damien went missing is bittersweet," she says, speaking from her home in Texas, "because I love it, but something terrible happened to us there. Something ripped our family apart and caused us to spiral off in a direction we would have never had to go in our lives."

Valerie, with Damien as a baby (Photo courtesy of Valerie Nettles)

She goes on: "I knew it wasn't going to be easy, going into this program, and that we may not get all the answers we would hope for. But I think it's highlighted more questions surrounding the case – it's been a hard slog for nearly 20 years to make some sense out of all of this."

She's right. You can go through all eight episodes of Unsolved and walk away as confused as you started. Harte and Munro present plenty of leads, and most of the evidence they uncover seems to point in the direction of a couple of drug houses run by some of the town's dealers. One in particular, Nicky McNamara, stands out as a prime source of potential knowledge. That sounds promising, you might think, until you learn that he's dead. He was found in 2003, reportedly after taking an overdose at a friend's house – and obviously "dead men can't talk," as Valerie tells me.

By the time you meet Shirley Barrett – who used to live in the house where McNamara died and is doorstepped extraordinarly by Munro and Harte in episode six – then encounter Dan Spencer, another former drug sidekick, you can't tell who is or isn't telling the truth when questioned. "With hindsight I've found out so much," Valerie says, "not just about Shirley Barrett, in the film, but about young people – the age of my kids then – who've come forward now." From them she's learned that drugs featured more heavily in local teenagers' lives than she was aware at the time.

The people who served Damien on that November night – known only as Rob and Sharon – remember him acting strangely, in an account shared second-hand by the former chip shop owner. "It wasn't drink, was Rob's opinion, and Sharon agreed with that," says Denis Welsh in the show. "She said we can recognise drink – it was a 'drugs effect', if you like."

The Nettles family: father Ed, Damien holding Valerie, and siblings James and Melissa

According to the show, the Hampshire constabulary police lost a few crucial surveillance tapes that could have shown where else Damien walked after midnight; that's just one of a few reasons Valerie has for deeming their handling of the ongoing and open case "lackluster, shoddy and pitiful". From the police force's perspective, they've spent 20 years involving 1,134 people in the investigation – "either as investigators, witnesses, or people of interest", they say – taking 357 witness statements and reviewing more than 2,500 documents.

But really, it's the banality of Damien's last known whereabouts that make this story so frustrating. Everyone's been on those nights, where you wander from one place to the next in the vague hopes of landing on something entertaining for a few hours. But most of us make it home. Damien never again saw his parents and three siblings – Sarah, now 38, James, 32, and 28-year-old Melissa. To be clear, Unsolved doesn't quite match Making a Murderer or season one of Serial in terms of production value and intrigue, but puts in a valiant effort at digging around for reasons why things turned out the way they did.

"Up until a few minutes after midnight," Harte says, "it's almost minute-by-minute, the eye-witness accounts of where Damien was and who he was speaking to. And then" – she pauses – "it stops. How did a 16-year-old boy disappear? Even if there are great leaps forward in the coming months, I feel there will always be unanswered questions about this case." For Valerie, those questions give her a sense of purpose. "I'm not the only mother of a missing child to feel desperate, but we go out there rattling cages," she says. "That's what we do."

Unsolved: the Boy Who Disappeared is on now available for UK-based viewers to stream on BBC iPlayer

@tnm___

More on VICE:

What Actually Happens When Someone Goes Missing in the UK?

Why I'm Finally Telling the Truth About Britain's Most Notorious Gangland Murder

How to Murder a Prize-Winning Dog and Get Away with It

All photos by the author

You can never quite know what you might see on any given evening in London. As the city wound down for drinks and dinner after another week, a Byron Hamburgers branch in Holborn found itself the target of a sting operation led by two direct action protest groups. Well, more of an insect operation.

Members of the London Black Revolutionaries and Malcolm X Movement acted in response to this week's controversy over the burger chain's cooperation with the Home Office to ambush and later deport dozens of its unregistered migrant employees on Friday evening. The plan was to release 8,000 crickets, 4,000 cockroaches and 1,000 locusts into the middle of two Byron restaurants on Friday evening – I was invited down to witness what the organisations saw as this somewhat biblical act of vengeance.

We were meant to meet up beforehand, but a communication breakdown meant I missed the first hit on the St Giles Street branch. I was hastily told to head over to the second target on Holborn High Street. Outside, I saw what looked like two City boys meeting at the front of the restaurant, likely deciding to go in for a bite. When they hurried out two minutes later, I realised they were part of the "sting".

"We went in with intent to cause disruption to Byron's business and we wanted to take affirmative action," they said to me afterwards, once I'd tracked them down. "These are our people being deported... we want an apology. There's no reason for businesses to be doing the work of the UK Border Agency. We're sending a message out to other companies too, not just Byron."

In all honesty, the display wasn't as dramatic as I'd imagined. I'd pictured chaos and screaming as swarms of insects flew about a frantic restaurant with toppled chairs and half-eaten burgers left abandoned to the appetite a merciless scourge. What I actually saw was a somewhat bemused crowd encircling what appeared to be a pile of white larvae on the floor in the middle of the restaurant.

The clientele couldn't really tell what the moving pile was, and apart from the odd shriek or jump, the whole affair was rather calm. In fact some of the customers on the periphery of the restaurant barely took notice and simply continued to eat their food at their table. Several people inside didn't seem to have noticed how or why the infestation made its way inside.

After I'd been pushed outside by management, no doubt spooked by my camera, I chatted more with the protesters – who, for obvious reasons, wanted to remain anonymous. As we spoke, it became clear that their message seemed to run deeper than this week's scandal. "We needed to develop strategic actions right now in terms of the black grassroots and the immigrant grassroots and the context of growing fascism on a state level", one of the London Black Revolutionaries said.

In a reference to Katie Hopkins likening Middle Eastern immigrants to cockroaches, one of the Malcolm X Movement members added: "They want to call our people cockroaches. Cockroaches are coming for you. Cockroaches don't die – we multiply and we take over."

While I understood why the protesters felt compelled to act, I couldn't help but feel that the ones being most victimised could have been those the activists had set out to defend in the first place: the waiters and chefs who, as I was leaving, had to clean up the mess left behind by the sting.

When I put this to the London Black Revs, they said their direct action was meant to be a wake-up call to those still working at Byron, to stand in solidarity with their fellow workers.

Though what Byron did was legal, those opposing it – including an unrelated picketing protest that coincided with Friday's action – believe it's unethical. That it essentially amounts to entrapment, since staff who were later questioned by the Home Office were called to work for a training day. For that reason, both London Black Revs and the Malcolm X Movement said they had one final message for Byron. "No more entrapment or we'll be back. Any business chain, any time: you are vulnerable. You are in our proverbial crosshairs."