'The Office,' reading this post on VICE. Photo via NBC

I was in seventh grade when The Office premiered, making me far too young to appreciate the chilling truths behind all the jokes. I had no idea how realistic the show was in portraying the daily indignities of the modern office world until I spent 13 precious months of my own life working in one. These are the lessons I wish I'd heeded from NBC's The Office before I entered the workforce.

EMPLOYEES DON'T WORK

Everyone on The Office spends most of their time at work not doing any work. Ryan is constantly holding a phone without actually speaking into it and arguing his inability to complete everything from spring cleaning (Season 2: Episode 13) to simple data entry (6:11). Jim spends entire work days pranking Dwight, chatting with Pam, or hosting events like the Office Olympics (2:3). Creed is usually staring into space.

I wish I had understood that not giving a fuck was the norm before I had to learn it the hard way.

My first three months on the job were spent caring too much—I worked overtime to create, edit, and update 1200-plus social-media profiles. But over time I began to realize my manager couldn't tell the difference between something that took me eight hours and something that took me eight minutes. It was easy to stop trying after that. By the end of my employment, I had lowered the bar to a level I can only describe as "Creed": I was coming in late, getting high on lunch breaks, and using my company computer to flip between message boards about sociopathy and borderline personality disorder in an effort to diagnose myself.

Michael Scott, World's Best Boss. Photo via NBC.

BOSSES DON'T WORK, EITHER

Michael's inability to be taken seriously as a boss is a cornerstone of The Office. He becomes desperately ill without exhibiting any symptoms at least 40 times a year (3:22), sleeps on the job (5:28), and frequently justifies taking day trips to do everything from sign the papers on his condo (2:3) to asking all of his ex-lovers about his personality flaws (7:4). When Pam must account for his activities in a day, there are only two items on the list by noon: "Cosby Impression" and "Stood in Pretzel Line" (3:5). When Holly asks if anyone has ever faced ethical dilemmas, Michael readily confesses he didn't work for five entire days after discovering YouTube (5:3).

I thought Michael Scott was just a wild caricature of a bad boss until I got my own.

Once, I was running a wildly ineffective ad campaign for the recruiting department that had burned through $30,000 and had managed to hire a whopping one employee as a result. I had several urgent meetings with my manager, but she reassured me that I should keep the campaign running. When I eventually snapped and pulled the plug, she was annoyed with me for not doing it sooner. She recommended a feminist book for me to read and sent me a link to a Sheryl Sandberg TED Talk. She did this while sipping an iced coffee, finalizing an online order for shoes on Nordstrom.com, and watching the world burn.

Stanley of 'The Office.' Photo via NBC

BEING A MINORITY IS AWKWARD

The Office dedicates entire episodes to showcasing the obtuse ways Michael Scott handles workplace diversity. Michael assumes Stanley can play basketball (1:4), credits him for the "urban vibe" of the office (4:5), and even performs a Chris Rock routine about black people that triggers an even more disastrous day of diversity training (1:2). Darryl teaches Michael phrases to "help with his interracial conversations" that are completely absurd and fabricated but which Michael eagerly applies anyway (2:22). The second black guy to work at the office quits after a day of being harassed by Michael for fitting the stereotype of a black felon (3:9).

I thought Michael's diversity discomfort was funny until I found it reflected in my own coworkers.

There were roughly three-and-a-half black people in my office of 300 (I was the half). I made my first cosmic mistake by starting my job during #Ferguson, and my second mistake by watching a livestream of the grand jury proceedings. My manager asked me to unplug my headphones so she and everyone else could watch, too. For several weeks afterward, my manager sent me at least one New York Times article a day about institutionalized racism and my co-workers spontaneously shared their white guilt with me. It wasn't until I started vocalizing support for a then long-shot Donald Trump presidency that this behavior stopped.

ALCOHOL IS EVERYWHERE

Whether it's during Christmas parties, the annual Dundies, company lunches and picnics, casino night, happy hour, the company convention, Meredith's liquor drawer, or a literal booze cruise, alcohol appears on The Office so many times it deserves a guest credit. Despite this forewarning, I wasn't prepared for dealing with so many semi-professional alcoholics at my office.

I had never seen a beer fridge until I started my job. There were four of them at my office. It wasn't kosher to start drinking before 4:30 PM, but people would openly get smashed once the clock struck. The fridges weren't convenient enough for one of my co-workers, though. He purchased a literal bar cart complete with whiskey decanter set and expensed it to the company as an office supply. Outside of the building, there were company-sponsored happy hours for every conceivable thing: new hires, new fires, birthdays, anniversaries, Tuesdays, whatever.

Dwight, trusting no one. Photo via NBC

TRUST NO ONE

The Office is littered with moments of espionage. Jim and Dwight form a private alliance (1:4), Dwight goes behind Michael's back to steal his job (3:3), and Andy steals Dunder Mifflin's biggest client in order to swindle his way back into the company (8:23). Oh, and everybody in The Office, at one point or another, has a secret phone call in the stairwell.

At least twice a week, a fake meeting would be scheduled on my Google calendar by one of my co-workers. We would meet in one of several soundproof glass-paneled cubicles, set our laptops up, adjust our body language to seem convincingly professional, and have a 30-minute "meeting" about who fucking sucked the most that particular week.

Real meetings weren't much better and often devolved into people covering their asses over balls that had been dropped (blaming whoever wasn't at the meeting was a go-to move) or outright lying about their own productivity.

The Nard Dog: Shitting and quitting. Photo via NBC

QUITTING IS EASY

As a kid I thought I'd stay at whatever job I got until I died because I didn't absorb this key lesson from The Office: Jobs are remarkably easy to quit. Dwight leaves Dunder Mifflin with less than a day's notice (3:12) and then leaves his Staples gig without any notice at all (3:13). Karen is adamant about not leaving Scranton, but her desk is mysteriously empty the next day (4:1). Erin serendipitously stays in Florida to become a live-in nanny for an elderly woman she just met (8:18) after leaving Dunder. Andy leaves Scranton to follow his dreams and shits on David Wallace's car to ensure he can never return (9:21).

I quit my office job two days before Christmas. I wasn't planning on it, but once I was in a room with my beleaguered HR rep, the words tumbled out of me like an avalanche of freedom. It was so easy I wondered why I hadn't done it months earlier. I told him that the daily doldrums of the office were wearing on my mental health and that I just had to leave. He understood, and it felt wonderful to get it off my chest. (That's what she said.)

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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.

Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.

Photo by Chip Somodevilla / Staff via Getty

US News

Clinton Warns the Nation of the Dangers of Trump
Hillary Clinton told voters that America faces "a moment of reckoning," as she formally accepted the Democratic nomination on Thursday night. Clinton questioned whether her opponent Donald Trump has the temperament to be president: "A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons."—CBS News

Amazon CEO Becomes World's Third Richest Person
Jeff Bezos has surpassed Warren Buffett to become the third richest person in the world. Forbes estimated Bezos's fortune to be $66.5 billion after his company Amazon posted a stronger-than-expected quarterly earnings report. Revenue grew 31 percent to $30.4 billion.—Forbes

FBI Investigates Another Democrat Group Hacking
The FBI is investigating a cyber attack against another Democratic Party group, which may be related to the recent hack of DNC emails. A breach of security at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee appears to have been intended to gather information about donors, rather than to steal money.—Reuters

Two Cops Shot in San Diego, One Suspect in Custody
Two San Diego police officers were shot late Thursday night in the Southcrest neighborhood. One officer has died, and the other was seriously wounded. Police warned residents to take shelter while they actively searched for the suspects. One suspect has been taken into custody, but police are reportedly still searching for additional suspects.—NBC News

Auschwitz. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

International News

Al-Nusra Front Cuts Ties with Al Qaeda
Al Qaeda's Syrian affiliate al-Nusra Front has announced it is ending its ties to the global jihadist network founded by Osama bin Laden, to concentrate on the fight against the Syrian government. The group has also changed its name to Jabhat Fath al Sham, or The Front for liberation of al Sham.—Al Jazeera

El Salvador Police Arrests Gang Leaders
The authorities in El Salvador have arrested the leaders of one of the country's most powerful street gangs, the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13). Five leaders of the gang have been arrested, and 120 people detained following police raids. Weapons, money, drugs, and other assets were seized.—BBC News

Afghan Government Loses 19 Districts to the Taliban
The Afghan government lost control of nearly 5 percent of its territory to the Taliban between January and May, according to a US government watchdog. A new report finds the area under government control has decreased to 65.6 percent, a loss of 19 of the country's 400 governing districts.—Reuters

Pope Francis Meets Survivors at Auschwitz
Pope Francis is today visiting the former death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where 1.1 million people were killed during World War II. The pontiff is expected to walk around the camp in silence, and meet camp survivors and Poles who risked their lives to hide Jews from the Nazis.—AP

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Everything Else

Sesame Street Axes Three Characters
As Sesame Street moves to HBO, the show is getting rid of three longtime characters, along with the actors who play them. Bob McGrath (Bob), Emilio Delgado (Luis) and Roscoe Orman (Gordon) have all been let go.—Rolling Stone

Virginia Cops Try to Catch Criminals with 'Pokémon Go'
The Smithfield Police Department in Virginia has attempted to lure people with outstanding warrants into their station by inviting them to catch Ditto, the very rare Pokémon. The call to "capture" was posted on the department's Facebook page.—Richmond Times-Dispatch

Norway Wants to Give Finland a Mountain for Its Birthday
The Norwegian government is considers shifting a border to gift Finland a mountain peak to mark the 100th anniversary of its neighbor's independence. It would place the highest peak on Mount Halti inside Finland.—The Guardian

Canada Has a Rape Kit Problem
Health advocates say there are no consistent rules, and no standard of training across Canada, when it comes to stocking and administering rape kits. Frontline workers say too many people have to leave their community to access a rape kit.—VICE News

Uber Has Yet to Reduce Drunk Driving Deaths
A new study in the American Journal of Epidemiology says that ridesharing services like Uber have had no impact on the rate of drunk driving fatalities in the US. It's partly because drunk people often aren't willing to pay for the cost of a ride.—Motherboard

UN Might Stop Classifying Transgender People Mentally Ill
The World Health Organization, the UN's health agency, is considering a change to its current stance that classifies being transgender as a mental illness. The classification has not been updated since 1990.—VICE News

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.

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.

On this episode of Daily VICE, we sit down with Eric Garner's daughter, Erica, to talk about her role in the Black Lives Matter movement in the two years since her father died at the hands of police officers. She explains how watching her father's death in a cell phone video encouraged her to become a voice for other victims of police brutality.

Watch Daily VICE in the VICE channel on go90. Head to go90.com to learn more and download the app.

About that whole "Smile more" thing. Let's get the common fact out of the way that criticizing the first woman Presidential candidate in history for not being "warm" enough—for expressing a sense of grave urgency at a time when the United States of America's basic tenets of democracy are hanging by a single, solitary thread above a black hole of hate and fascism—is remarkably sexist any way you look at it.

On a broader level, though: what, exactly, does anyone have to smile about lately? Yes, this week's been filled with inspiring speeches and hope-loaded rhetoric—but as Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti put it in his speech during the DNC's final night," politics have a darkness that would not only stop, but reverse the march of progress towards the greater, more prosperous, and more equal America we can and must become." Or: now that the Democratic party's glorified four-day slumber party has concluded, shit's about to get real.

The ever-present specter of doom and gloom didn't stop some from having a jovial attitude though. The night's most potent non-Hillary quotable line came from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who introduced himself with a five-star zinger that was funny because it was, well, true: "I'm Michael Jordan and I'm here with Hillary," he stated to confused laughter. "I said that because I know Donald Trump couldn't tell the difference."

If Abdul-Jabbar's wisecrack was perfectly acerbic and well-timed, others' attempts at injecting a bit of levity into the proceedings didn't land as well. Actress Chloe Grace Moretz has taken a bit of a beating on social media lately for tangling with the likes of Kim Kardashian in a manner decidedly un-woke, so there was a bit of internet skepticism regarding her planned appearance at the DNC—and unfortunately, it was well-warranted. "I'm a millennial," she proclaimed with all the subtlety of nails running down a chalkboard, during a brief speech focused on getting out the vote for, well, millennials. Encouraging young people to vote is a necessary service—but considering the still-ongoing efforts to disenfranchise minority voters in America, you can't help but wish that her get-out-the-vote message carried a bit more reach.

Other out-of-touch moments included Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen's remarks regarding Hillary Clinton, who they've known since the 1970s and accordingly gushed over not unlike rich people at a cocktail function. Perhaps the most offensive moment of the DNC's final night, though, occurred during Katy Perry's statement before performing her inspo-pop anthems "Roar" and "Rise": "I have a mind, and I have a voice," she claimed, before sneering that, at the very least, a vote for Hillary would "cancel out your weird cousin's vote, if you like." Obviously, the theme of unity at this year's DNC has largely been directed towards smoothing the fissure between the party and Bernie Sanders' supporters—but it's vaguely insulting and classist statements like Perry's that only feed into the large-scale cultural divide plaguing the US, and add more fuel to Donald Trump's spiteful fire.

Perry was also arguably the closest the DNC came to booking a youth-oriented performer for this year's ceremonies (Lord knows the GOP tried, though). On the other end of the spectrum, legendary singer-songwriter Carole King took the stage to perform "You've Got a Friend," hewing much closer to the Clintons' taste profile (remember when Fleetwood Mac performed "Don't Stop" at Bill Clinton's inauguration ball?). "Hillary's got so many friends," King offered with a genuine corniness mid-performance, "And Bernie too!" The shots of Democrats in the audience swaying to the performance—an unintentional bookend to Paul Simon's DNC-kickoff appearance at the beginning of the week—was proof that even if there's clear divisions in the party's current ideological makeup, plenty of Democrats are, for better or worse, great at losing themselves to triviality if only for a few moments.

Obviously, though, there was little triviality to be had during Clinton's speech, as she capably laid out the case for supporting her (even though a collective feeling of distrust towards her still exists among voters) and urged the country to, please, for the love of all that is sacred and holy, not elect Donald Trump to the highest possible office in America. "Don't believe anyone who says, 'I alone can fix it,'" Clinton stated, later invoking President Barack Obama's speech from the previous night: "Don't boo, vote." And really, at this point, what else is there left to do?

Follow Larry Fitzmaurice on Twitter.

Charlie Carrel. Photograph by René Velli

In May 2015, 21-year-old Charlie Carrel won almost $1.25 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 $28,000 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 island—where Carrel grew up—made a big deal of his win.

"It was strange seeing my face everywhere for a while," says Carrel, 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."

Carrel was already pretty well-established in the poker world before Monte Carlo. He'd finished fifth in a tournament in Malta, Europe two months before, winning $205,000, and won a tournament in London in November of 2014, walking away with $144,000. "The beautiful thing is nobody knows how lucky they get for winning a tournament," he says. "I can feel as though I played well, but human bias and emotions cloud judgment too heavily to really know."

Carrelwas born in Jersey island 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 defense 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. Carrel's story is the same: he made a $13.27 deposit on a poker website, won his first tournament for $39.84 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 $39.84 into $1,328.07, 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 Carrel. "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."

When he was 19, and with some decent results under his belt, Carrel 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 and a target that I didn't want to leave Jersey before I made $100,000," he says. "So the only points of socialization 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 in PokerStars's 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 win in Monte Carlo. Photo: Tomáš Stacha, copyright of PokerStars

There's one friend in particular who Carrel 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 traveling 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 , 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, Carrel 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 Carrel—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, Carrel 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."

Follow Jack Stanton on Twitter.

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.

Illustration by Liz Renstrom

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.

JT Leroy (left) and Asia Argento in 2005. Photo via 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 name "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 named "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 institutionalized.

Laura Albert in 2007. Photo: Kelly Lee Barrett, via Wikimedia Commons

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 in the US September 9

Follow Roisin Agnew on Twitter.

Photo courtesy of Patrick Haggerty/Paradise of Bachelors

In 1953, when Patrick Haggerty was 13, a little girl showed up to his summer camp in a ballerina outfit. It was a rural camp in eastern Washington run by the agricultural organization 4-H, and while Patrick was a farm boy accustomed to manual labor and callused hands, he found himself hypnotized by the girl's dainty tutu and leotard.

"I knew it would fit me," he told VICE. "And that I was going to get into it."

And so he hatched up a plan, talking his friends and counselors into a skit where they would "dress up silly."

"We do our little skit," he said, "and the day after, even though I was 13 and it was 1958 and at a 4-H camp, I wore the ballerina outfit all day. Dancing up and down and putting on shows and acting like Tinkerbell." He was a hit.

Patrick in a 4-H "drag show." Photo courtesy of Patrick Haggerty/Paradise of Bachelors

To the surprise of absolutely nobody, Patrick grew up to be a gay man, and spent the next 60 years toeing the line between the country roots to which he remained unfailingly loyal and the gay community for which he tirelessly fought. But blending the two wasn't always as easy as it had been at camp.

As a teen, he taught himself to sing and play serviceable guitar chords, and as a young man formed a band with friends called Lavender Country. They recorded one self-titled album in 1973, filled with queer numbers like "Come out Singin'," "Back in the Closet Again," and the song that would decades later launch him to fame: "Cryin' These Cocksucking Tears." It was the first country album known to be released by a gay man. Lyrics included: "It seems you've forgotten/your daydreams are rotten/your ways are alarmingly clear/them victories aren't wanted/as long as I'm haunted/crying these cocksucking tears."

Patrick had no formal musical training before Lavender Country. "I sort of picked it up on my own," he said, absorbing country songs throughout his childhood and learning a few chords from a straight boy who used to let him ride around on the back of his motorcycle.

"I did OK with straight men in my childhood," Patrick said. "I was a sensitive little soul and I could see where my friends were missing gaps emotionally and what they needed, maybe what they weren't getting at home. There were a lot of emotional gaps in rural Washington in 1955, especially for little boys."

Patrick's father, a dairy farmer, was remarkably supportive of everything Patrick did. "Don't sneak," he told his son on one occasion, as Patrick recounted in an episode of NPR's Storycorps. "If you sneak, it means you think you're doing the wrong thing. And if you run around spending your whole life thinking that you're doing the wrong thing, then you'll ruin your immortal soul."

Patrick took that lesson to heart. "If I'm going to be homosexual, I'm sure as fuck not going to sneak about it," he said. "Fuck that."

The only surviving photo of Lavender Country. Photo courtesy of Patrick Haggerty/Paradise of Bachelors

When asked if he ever experienced a heartbreak that worked its way into his music, Patrick responded, "yeahhhh, honey. They found out I was gay in the Peace Corps in 1966. I was 21 and I was in India. I loved India. A lot. One thing led to another, they found out I've sucked some dick, and boom—I was out of the country in 24 hours." His housemate, with whom he had fallen in love, was left behind.

He came out of the closet in full after the Stonewall riots in 1968, but paid a price for his refusal to sneak. Once, he and some gay friends got into a fight when they tried to join a peace rally. "I think our sign said something like 'faggots for Ho Chi Minh,'" he said. "They tried to take our banner away from us, and assumed that because we were faggots were going to lose the fight. But they were wrong. We kicked ass."

A few years later, he recorded Lavender Country. "We performed up and down the coast, Portland, San Francisco," he said. But "there was no call for gay country. It was, like, ridiculous . So I went into all the other things I did in my life—ran for office, activist work. Got married, had two children." (His wife pre-dated his coming out; the kids were co-parented with friends.)

Patrick running for Washington state senate in 1988. Photo courtesy of Patrick Haggerty/Paradise of Bachelors

The album earned meager attention from a few gay venues, the band performed at two gay pride festivals, and a lesbian DJ was fired for playing it in 1974. After that, Lavender Country faded into the memories of its few fans, and his performances have been mostly limited to old folks' homes since. "I was making some extra money singing old songs to old people and having a nice life," he said. "Hadn't even played Lavender Country to anybody in years."

But then "Cocksucking Tears" was posted to YouTube. A music critic stumbled across it, located a vinyl copy on eBay, and passed it along to friends. And in 2014, a North Carolina label called Paradise of Bachelors called to offer a record contract.

"I almost hung up," said Patrick. "I thought it was a gimmick. But it was two straight men out of North Carolina offering me a 50/50 contract. It's completely transformed my life. I turned into a notable in about 2.5 seconds."

He's been covered in Pitchfork, just returned from a midwest tour, and collaborated with recognized country artists like Jack Grelle. Meanwhile, a new documentary about Patrick's career called These C*cksucking Tears is currently rounding the film festival circuit, and has earned jury awards from SXSW and Outfest.

"I grew up in New York, born and raised, so I have no business listening to country music," said Dan Taberski, the film's director told VICE. Dan reached out to Patrick to make a documentary because "he didn't write a gay disco song or a gay poem. He wasn't meeting gay people where they traditionally met in the creative world. He co-opted what is, traditionally, a super straight art form."

Patrick and husband JB in 1988. Photo courtesy of Patrick Haggerty/Paradise of Bachelors

And Patrick, in turn, is using that art form to stand up for gay rights in a way he couldn't have imagined in the 1970s, by bringing together an audience of music fans both straight and gay who are prepared to fight for equality. His shows today draw crowds larger than he's ever seen—over three hundred people packed the patio of Austin's Barracuda for a SXSW showcase—and Patrick swells with pride when describing his fans.

"There's the kids, the anarchical punk fuck-you throw-the-guitar-down eat-shit-and-die crowd. They love Lavender Country and I love them," Patrick said. But an older crowd turns up, too, some of whom remember the climate in which the songs were originally written. "Whoever wants to come to a Lavender Country show, to stand up and be counted, they have an activist heart or they wouldn't be there. They want to move, politically. And that's a fabulous audience."

Even if some of his fans aren't gay, he said, "they're all militantly gay-rights, they all want to fight. They see it as a vehicle and a banner for them to pick up. 'Count me in, I'm on your side.' Straight white men have a lot of power, and they saw Lavender Country and said 'we know what to do with this' and kicked it up into the motherfucking stratosphere."

He paused. "It's like waking up in a new world from 1970, from how they treated us then."

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Promotional imagery for 'Mario and Sonic at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games,' via Nintendo

With the Olympic Games in Rio starting on August 5, you'd be forgiven for expecting to see a tie-in video game stacked in specialist stores and supermarkets alike. Riding high in the chart, no doubt, and rubbing shoulders with FIFA, Minecraft and whatever shooter's got a deal on at the moment. Proud and muscular figures staring out from its sleeve, all strong chins and bulging thighs; athletes at the peak of their physical prowess, at the top of their respective sports. It's not like it's unprecedented: ever since 1992's Olympic Gold and its digits-knackering A-and-B-button-bashing sprints, there's always been an officially licensed game available to coincide with the Summer Games.

But in 2016, that game is nowhere to be found. All that's available is the Sega-developed, Nintendo-published (still sounds weird) Mario and Sonic mash-up,...at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, out now on Wii U and 3DS. It's just as official as Olympic Gold was in terms of earning its Rings, but instead of starring real-life sportsmen and women, or at least anatomically accurate analogues of them, it rounds up a raft of characters from said platforming et al franchises and pits them against each other across events such as archery, rugby sevens, table tennis, and beach volleyball. I've dipped a toe into what it has to offer through the 3DS demo, which allows free access to boxing and the long jump. It's fine, you know; it works, and I can imagine that the full game would distract me for a fair few flights, given the chance. But there's something really missing for me.

And that's the athletes. But the Mario and Sonic games, while giving off the impression of being arcade-style knockabouts with little connecting their gameplay to that of more traditionally stylized multi-event sports games, actually don't play too dissimilarly to the "realer" deal (occasional power-ups aside). And perhaps that's why, in 2016, there's no need for a "proper" Rio 2016 game: even if there was a companion title with the same disciplines included, but you controlled Usain Bolt—or someone designed to look and act like him – instead of Bowser and Robotnik, how it played would most likely be incredibly close to the Nintendo platforms-exclusive titles bearing cartoon avatars.

But when we see the furore over who's going to be on the FIFA cover each year – fans of the series have voted Marco Reus the global star for 2017's edition—and the additional visibility that affords the chosen one, or some, beyond their own sports-specific audience, you've got to wonder what featuring a rising sprinter, javelin thrower, or swimmer on the sleeve of a non-Mario Olympics game would do for their career prospects. Do you know who Fabrice Lapierre is? I didn't until a cursory internet search told me that the Australian could well light up the men's long jump in Brazil. Who's Chad le Clos to anyone who doesn't regularly follow the swimming world? (Turns out he won the 100- and 200-meter butterfly at London's 2012 Games.) English Gardner, anyone? She's maybe the fastest woman in the US right now, over 100 meters.

None of these people are truly household names, in the way that Sonic and Mario, or Messi (definitely) and Marco (possibly, certainly soon to be) are. Back in 2008, for the official Beijing Summer Games tie-in, then published by Sega, shot-putter Reese Hoffa and swimmer Amanda Beard, both Americans, appeared on its cover, doing wonders for their public recognition across the world. That the game in question was multi-format, on Sony and Microsoft consoles and PC—the Wii and DS got their Mario and Sonic games—furthered its reach in a way that no Nintendo-only release can aspire to. The stateside cover for London 2012 also featured a quartet of Team USA contenders, depicted as titans, towering superhumans, above landmarks of the English capital.

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

Many competitors at the Summer Games aren't rolling in monetary rewards for their physical efforts in the same way as top stars in the English Premier League, American NBA, or the most outstanding talents in golf and tennis. They're in it for the pride and the glory, to meet that challenge of excelling over all of your peers. However, if you're winning in a vacuum of publicity, that's no help whatsoever for the continuing health of your chosen sport.

In the UK, in 2015, it emerged that casual participation in sporting activity was falling across the board, most noticeably in swimming, despite the enthusiasm the nation at large had expressed around London 2012. The biggest team games like football and basketball have their pedestal-positioned superstars to forever attract new fans—but here we see a sign, in a mostly individual discipline like swimming, that having no central figureheads can play a part in a national decline of involvement.

There's more to it, of course—investment in local facilities, to actually enable participation, is something that requires attention. But knowing what a successful video game can do for alternative-media engagement—how many people get into a new band through a game, or actively pursue new stories set within previously unexplored comic-book universes—I'm sure that not having the most promising and most likely to alike from Rio 2016 on the cover of a video game is, however slightly, nonetheless damaging to the public's appreciation of just how phenomenal these men and women are.

'London 2012,' launch trailer

We all know Sonic can run quickly, and that Mario's pretty nifty when it comes to leaping about the place. But having these characters in real-world sports, using power-up tricks also seen in, for example, Ultra Smash or Super Mario Strikers, feels like a substantial underselling of just what it takes to reach the top level. I'm not sure that it trivialises their commitment, per se, but it definitely takes away that superhuman element: Mario and Sonic's version of the 2016 Olympics features a robot in the javelin and a gorilla in the boxing. Now that's just cheating even before someone squirts ink everywhere, isn't it?

Why no Bolt-et-al game to complement Mario and Sonic in 2016, then? To me, it's something that's always been there, ever since the very first official release. (I played the hell out of Olympic Gold, on the Game Gear. I'm surprised I didn't hammer right through the console, or at the very least develop RSI at a stupendously young age, given the punishment of its 200-meter freestyle.) Not seeing one up there, out there, beside the now-established cartoon-y Nintendo take, is a big disappointment.

It turns out that the developer of 2012's game, Sega Australia Studios, closed its doors in 2013, and that was that for a 2016 tie-in, with Sega Sports Japan taking the reins for Mario and Sonic and nobody else stepping up to handle the companion affair. A cruelly simple explanation, but a puzzling one, too. It's not like London 2012 performed ostensibly poorly—in the UK, it was at number one on the all-formats chart for three weeks, and sold close to 700,000 copies in its financial year. That's not a bad return given the naturally short shelf life of any game explicitly tied to a real-world event. And the short shelf life shouldn't be a factor, either—EA continues to issue World Cup games alongside its FIFA series, and its 2014 World Cup Brazil release even made a mark on the US charts as anticipation for that year's big kick-off grew.

This year off for a "proper" Olympic game—well, eight years off really, given the next opportunity for one will come in 2020—doesn't bode well for a return come Tokyo's Games four summers from now. Depending on how well virtual reality gaming establishes itself in the home, there might be an opening for a great track-and-field collection that used that technology to give players a sense of what it's like to hurl a spear across a stadium; although anything more kinetic, like the hurdles or gymnastics, would be a motion-sickness challenge that no developer would gladly take on today.

But I can't see it happening. The Mario and Sonic releases are sold on their cast of decades-long-known anthropomorphic avatars rather than their selection of events, and with fencing, table tennis and hammer throwing hardly rivaling the NFL for viewing figures, converting these sports into intuitive interactive games is something I think we'll now see an end to, outside of Nintendo's blessedly blinkered commitment to the cause (no doubt in some way informed by the company's continuing dedication to improving its players' "quality of life"). I could be wrong. I hope so, because it must be massively motivating for any young athlete to see someone they look up to staring back at them from a video game. But with Sega stalling and Mario dominant, I suspect that's it, game over, for another crack at Olympic Gold.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Article continues after the video below

Love aliens? Watch our documentary, The Real 'X-Files'?

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

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

'Aliens: Infestation,' launch trailer

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

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

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

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE Italy

In August 1961, the Soviet cosmonaut Gherman Titov became the second human in space and the first human to vomit outside earth's atmosphere. He had a serious case of space sickness, but you couldn't really blame the guy considering the kind of food cosmonauts had to eat then: his predecessor in space, Yuri Gagarin, had to squeeze puréed meat from a tube into his mouth for lunch.

Since then, culinary circumstances in space have changed drastically—last year Samantha Cristoforetti became the first person to brew a proper espresso in space. In the past, research into space food had been mostly focused on technical aspects like weight, volume, and a long shelf life. The ingredients in space food are sterilized in an autoclave—a kind of pressure chamber. The food needs to last for two or three years and astronauts should be able to consume it without having to prepare it and at zero gravity. It needs to be packaged so it's easy to transport and store—since a space station is very cramped, every centimeter counts.

Inside the HQ of Argotec in Turin

Faced with all those limitations, you'd soon forget that other aspect of food: that it's supposed to taste good. But luckily, more recently researchers in the field of space food are giving more attention to that particular part of the culinary space experience.

Argotec is an Italian company producing food for people in space, and its main focus is to make their dishes as tasty as possible. Like everyone, I too grew up dreaming of becoming an astronaut, so I'm very curious to see what's on the menu once you get to outer space. I went to the Argotec HQ in Turin, Italy to get wined and dined like an astronaut.

Appetizer: Barley and Prawns

You can't light a stove in space, so space food is ready to eat and dishes are packaged in vacuum bags. And there's no reason to bring out the nice cutlery at zero gravity, so astronauts eat from these bags directly with a spoon.

Given that space stations are so small and all the food is vacuum packed, it's notable that astronauts apparently do find room to stash some appetizers because that's what we're being served first. It might be space food but we're still in Italy. It's a salad of rice, prawns, and courgettes—a bit bland, but the Argotec employee explains that your perception of flavors changes completely in space. In the absence of gravity, your saliva becomes congested between the nose and the throat, which has a similar effect on how you perceive flavor as when your having a bad cold. One dish could taste like nothing to one astronaut and be an explosion of flavors to another—which is why it's important to provide a wide variety of flavors.

We take only a few bites to keep room for the rest of the courses. The first thing that strikes me about the barley and prawns is the consistency of the dish—the ingredients have largely retained their natural texture, which I wouldn't expect from food prepared in an autoclave. The flavor wasn't mind boggling but I had prepared for the worst, and rather than being the sort of thing that you'd only eat on a spacewalk, it seemed like something you could very well bring to a picnic.

The First Course: Rice with Chicken and Vegetables

After the appetizer we move to the first course: a dish of rice, chicken, and vegetables that isn't really a risotto and isn't really a chicken curry. But the rice is al dente, the meat feels like real meat and the vegetables have maintained the color they're blessed with here on God's green earth. It's pretty amazing, really.

And the flavor is intense, thanks to the fact that they've been generous with the turmeric. It's actually so heavy on the turmeric that it drowns out all the other flavors. Humankind has used spices to preserve food for centuries, and it's heartwarming to know that the tradition continues in the era of space exploration.

The Main Course: Sorghum with Beef

As a main course we're served beef and sorghum—a type of grain. The dish is tasty, its structure is great and it's my favorite of the day. While the other dishes were served on a plate, we ate the beef directly from the plastic packaging—just like astronauts do. The best thing about it is that when you open the packaging, the food clings to the sides of the inside. According to the Argotech people, this was the most vital part of the research into their dishes: how to make sure the food clings together and keeps the different grains from having a grain party, floating through your space station and getting in your machinery.

They figured it out (don't ask me how), and the technology is now being used for earthly means, like sustenance for people going on Arctic expeditions. That shouldn't come as a surprise, really: many civilian technological innovations are based on developments in space technology.

The Side Dish: Quinoa Salad

The quinoa salad is fine—it reminds me of the rice dish, but here the mackerel dominated and hid all other flavors. It was also apparently Samantha Cristoforetti's favorite when she was on the International Space Station. Cristoforetti wasn't just the first astronaut to brew an espresso in space, but she also was the first to "cook" there—in the sense that she chose and mixed what she wanted to eat from bulk packaging, instead of just having a ready made meal. That might not seem like much, but on a space station getting to choose what you want for dinner is a giant leap for mankind.

Dessert: A Chocolate Bar and Smoothie

For desert, we're having a chocolate-goji berry bar and an apple-pear-strawberry smoothie. The bar itself has a particularly uninviting greenish brown color, but it tastes okay—though not chocolaty enough for me. It tastes only of goji berries, so I figure the bar could make some yoga instructor very happy someday. A space yoga instructor.

The author and his friend Federico

The juice is exactly that—juice.

When people think about the future and functionality of food, images of protein shakes and pills that make any other kind of food unnecessary come to mind. But it's a comforting thought that engineers are working on space food that isn't just about the functionality. When sooner or later a mad visionary actually makes space tourism a reality for us mortals, it's nice to know we'll have something good to eat along the way.

Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File

In the column "How Scared Should I Be?" VICE staff writer and generalized anxiety disorder sufferer Mike Pearl seeks to quantify the scariness of everything under the sun. We hope it'll help you to more wisely allocate that most precious of natural resources: your fear.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is one slippery fucker. For instance, remember that time he faked an IED attack on his own troops in the Jordan Valley in order to tempt the US military to try and sneak into the attack site, sparking a disastrous battle that allowed him to stop a multinational peacekeeping project on his own terms? Holy shit, what a crafty chess master!

Wait, I'm thinking of fictional Russian President Viktor Petrov from House of Cards! But I should be just as scared of Putin as President Frank Underwood is of Petrov, right?

According to Anthony D'Agostino, a "Kremlinologist" and professor of Russian history at San Francisco State University, no I shouldn't. Putin's Russia is just one more country with its own interests, and the recently regained ability to stick up for them. Russia now "bucks us on a range of things," D'Agostino told me. "This is not fatal, or it would not be if we did not still expect Russia to cave everything."

This week, the big story on Putin is the theory, largely out of lefty publications like Talking Points Memo, that he and presidential candidate Donald Trump are in bed together. The media consensus seems to be that the hacker or hackers who stole a huge cache of internal communications from the Democratic National Committee, and sowed discord among Democrats, must have been backed—or even directly hired—by the Russian state. "The move has also helped cement Russian President Vladimir Putin in the minds of many US observers as not only a strategic mastermind, but also the Trump campaign's secret weapon," Julia Ioffee wrote in Foreign Policy.

Then again, when it comes to Putin's involvement, there are a lot more questions than answers.

On one hand, there is the Trump/Putin "bromance." Yes, Trump's isolationist views mean the Kremlin most likely prefers Trump to Clinton. And yes, Trump has praised Putin's leadership, and kinda-sorta-but-not-really said the Putin hacker machine should go after Hillary Clinton's emails next.

On the other hand, as Glenn Greenwald pointed out, latching onto the first opportunity to smear a presidential candidate as though he's some kind of Russian sleeper agent isn't just drastic; it's borderline McCarthyesque. "The history of linking your political opponents to Russia is a really dangerous and ugly one in the US. That's basically how, for a decade, the right demonized the left," Greenwald said in a recent Slate interview.

So granted, this conspiracy theory about Putin holding the puppet strings of President Trump is a paranoid Cold War fantasy, but what is the agenda that Putin would be furthering if he hypothetically had a Trump Manchurian Candidate working for him?

"Putin has, step-by-step, acquired this mythical quality," said Nikolai Sokov, senior research associate at the Middlebury Institute's Center for Nonproliferation Studies. Sokov described Putin's reputation in the West as that of "the ultimate bad guy, who is behind everything that we don't like." Although he hastens to add that "Putin is not a nice guy," and that some of his aims are "harmful."

Putin's tendency to act like an emperor and an autocrat is pretty scary if you're inside of, or near, Russia. Putin appoints regional governors instead of holding elections, including the iron-fisted Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. And while he entertains the idea of term limits for elected officials, he does not, himself, adhere to such limits, and looks like he plans to reign for at least 24 years. And of course, through a protracted show of force, and some sleazy justifications, Putin has redrawn Russia to include the Ukrainian state of Crimea.

And even if you set aside hearsay—some of which is pretty compelling—about Putin's support for political violence, his domestic policies are monstrous by US standards. A notorious gay "propaganda" law Putin supports provides a legal framework for the crackdown of out-of-the-closet gays. Putin's government literally orders dissenting news stories to be clipped from magazines before they can be sold, and unsanctioned protests are now punishable by lengthy prison terms. Even Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower whom Putin is shielding from extradition and prosecution in the US, is horrified by Putin's surveillance measures. Oh, and Putin has banned bad words.

But according to D'Agostino, we all just need to get used to Russia as a major world player again, regardless of how we feel about its internal politics. Fifteen years ago, he said, "Russia was falling apart, yielded to our advice on all things, and looked to us as a model for economic policy." Today, it has "revived somewhat," D'Agostino told me.

For instance, last September, Russia began carrying out airstrikes against militants who opposed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. It was an act of defiance against the Obama administration's vision of a future Syria that's free of ISIS, but also free of Assad. In Sokov's opinion, " policy ourselves."

But if you take Putin at his word, there's no Russian mission to destroy America. "America is a great power. Today, probably, the only superpower. We accept that," Putin said at last month's St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. "We want to and are ready to work with the United States," he added. Sure that quote is obvious political glad-handing, but the alternative to cautiously believing Putin when he's saying reasonable things is surrendering to paranoia.

Final Verdict: How Scared Should I Be of Putin?

1/5: IDGAF

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

This week at the Democratic National Convention, Hillary Clinton was described over and over again as some variation of "competent" or "experienced." Her qualifications were lauded by everyone from the billionaire ex-mayor of New York City to a former CIA boss to undocumented immigrants. This narrative—which Democrats hope will help cast Donald Trump as an unhinged loon—is also, it's gotta be said, a bit boring.

Part of this stems from Clinton herself, whose brand of politics is more pragmatic than inspirational. When I spoke to her admirers in Philadelphia this week, they tended to scoff at words like "revolution" that Bernie Sanders supporters have been throwing around this election cycle. It makes sense—Clinton's fans like that their candidate is a savvy veteran of the political system, and don't want or need her to be some kind of radical. As I canvassed delegates, businesspeople, activists, and politicians about the first woman nominated by a major US political party for president I was struck by the majesty of the moment on one hand, and the limits of even her core supporters' expectations on the other.

Liberal criticism of Clinton aside, though, it's impossible to ignore the symbolism of a major party nominating a woman as its presidential candidate for the first time in American history. On Tuesday, when the former First Lady officially won the Democratic nomination, and each night of the convention after that, groups of women sobbed on the arena floor, celebrating the seminal moment in American political history. Some people were actually speechless, just shaking their heads at one another and marveling at what they had witnessed.

"If there are any little girls out there who stayed up late to watch," Clinton told her flock in a video address Tuesday night, "let me just say, I may become the first woman president, but one of you is next."

That sentiment carried over among the delegates and Clinton diehards I spoke to at hotels and convention parties, as I tried to get a sense of how it was all sinking in. "It is absolutely tremendous to have the most qualified candidate to run for president of the United States be a woman," Sonia Ramirez, director of government affairs for North America's Building Trades Unions, told me. "For those of us who are women and work in the professional sector, this something we usually encounter—we have to be exceptional to be chosen to lead."

Sara Ruiz, Ramirez's teenage niece, was standing right next to her. "It makes me really excited as someone who's a young woman of color getting into politics, it's very exciting to see," she said, of Clinton's nomination. "My friends were very excited for me, they were a little bit jealous—they were Bernie fans but I think they've come around to realize that in order to defeat Donald Trump we need to elect Hillary Clinton."

Clinton has her female critics, of course—Sanders rallies were full of fiery progressive women, and he's been supported by celebrities like Rosario Dawson and Susan Sarandon. But it was striking how many women of power and influence, including many outside of the political sphere, appeared at the convention to point to Clinton's success as a source of strength and pride.

"Hillary is a badass," Shonda Rhymes, creator of Grey's Anatomy and Scandal, told the Democratic Party's women's caucus on Thursday. "Hillary gets it done. Hillary is squad goals, people."

Clinton fans seem aware that one of the campaign's challenges going forward will be convincing left-wing voters who distrust Clinton and suspect #squadgoals–style rhetoric is an inauthentic attempt to cover up the candidate's centrism, and lack of progressive bonafides. "Those of us who work with the party directly do need to give those folks confidence that we'll carry their values forward with Hillary," Ramirez told me.

In the marbled lobby bar of the Ritz-Carlton in downtown Philadelphia Wednesday, where donors and high-powered operatives were already imbibing heavily by midday, it was clear that Clinton's campaign was about continuity. That may not be sexy—though President Barack Obama did everything he could to make it so with his soaring speech that night. But for many mainstream Democrats, Clinton's competency is enough.

"I'm not excited by her as much as I am confident in her abilities to be a great president," a well-coiffed white guy told me at the swanky hotel bar. "It doesn't have as revolutionary of a feel because she's really going to be continuing the work that happened the last eight years."

Another aspect of Clinton's appeal is that she seems to have evolved with the Democratic Party as it's shifted to the left in recent years. "Two years ago, it was almost unimaginable that Hillary Clinton would be campaigning on debt-free college, expanding Social Security, breaking up too-big-to-fail banks and the public option," Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, told me. "The fact that she's there isn't necessarily a revolution—it is symbolic of years of progressive hard work moving the Democratic Party in a populist direction."

Stephanie Leifer, a San Franciscan who works in game marketing and was hawking Hillary swag at a downtown hotel this week, told me that negative pins and lapels weren't doing nearly as well as she expected—attendees weren't into hating Trump as much as they were high on Clinton. That's not exactly stunning at a party convention built around propping up someone who is already American political royalty, but it's still surprising in an election cycle where Democrats have been ginning up fears about Donald Trump in an effort to get people to vote.

"As a woman, it's just a really big deal," Leifer told me of Clinton's nomination.

The Clinton campaign fully embraced the magnitude of the occasion at the convention's final night, with the Democratic women of the Senate appearing on stage together to hype their lady and their moment. Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, and Tammy Baldwin, of Wisconsin—both lefty favorites—gushed over Clinton, as did Maryland's Barbara Mikulski, the first so-called "dean" of the Senate's women and the longest-serving female member of Congress. The scene was as arresting as any all week.

Even Snoop Dogg, who performed at a "unity party" hosted by a trio of Democratic super PACs later that night, had special praise for Clinton, referring to the nominee as the "first boss lady." A healthy swath of the country is locked in on clearing a new threshold in politics right now, and even Berniacs nursing an ideological hangover would do well to stop and think about that—if only for a moment—before rolling their eyes.

"This is something I've been waiting for my entire life," Jazmin Gargoum, a Mississippi native working in organized labor in Washington, told me at a party for EMILY's List, a group that works to elect pro-choice Democratic women. "It was pretty inspiring as a kid to hear my dad and his Libyan-Arab friends talking about Hillary Clinton and how powerful and amazing she was," Gargoum told me. "As an Arab daughter, seeing how inspired they were by her, I was like, That is the kind of woman I want to grow up to be. It's incredible."

Follow Matt Taylor on Twitter.

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.

The fourth episode of our VICELAND show Party Legends—where celebrities tell us their most unforgettable party stories and we animate them—aired on VICELAND Thursday night.

This week we heard some wild stories from actor TJ Miller, rapper Kreayshawn, comedian Erin McGathy, and musicians David Pajo and Marissa Paternoster.

We've recapped our favorite parts of Kreayshawn's story—which involves sneaking into a Hollywood party and having a very loud and abrasive encounter with a big-time actor—for your viewing pleasure in GIFs below.

"What I used to do to explore is take the bus all around LA just to find new things, see new things. I was around Westwood and I saw this commotion and cameras and crowds of people."

"So I get off the bus to see what's going on and I see some guy who's off in the corner. I go up to him and say 'Hey. What's going on?' And he's like, 'I need Michael Strahan's autograph.'

He's freaking out. He's like, 'Get his autograph for me, and I'll get us into the party.' And I'm like, 'What's the party?' He's like, 'Step Brothers premiere party.'

So he hands me this jersey and I run up to him and I'm like, 'Hey! Hey! Sign this! Sign this! Sign this!' just in his face. And he's like, 'All right.' He takes it and he's signing it and hands it back to me. I walk back to the dude and I give it to him. He's like, 'Oh, my God! Oh, my God!' He takes it and he's, like, blowing on it. He was fucking crying.

So he's like, 'I'll take you to get in the party.' So we open the side gate and we go through, and there were these curtains. We looked up the curtain to see if we can just sneak under it, but it's right behind a full bar, so everyone's facing the curtain."

"So we turn around to leave out the gate. But the gate locked us in. So the only way we can get out would be to just get into the party and get caught and kicked out. So we both were like, 'Fuck it. Let's just go for it.'"

"So we both go under the curtain. I'm like, 'Whoa.' I'm just walking around and everyone keeps coming up to me, asking 'Who are you? Who are you?' 'cause I'm standing out like a sore thumb. And I was telling everyone, 'Oh, I'm Will Ferrell's niece.' They're like, 'Oh, okay. Cool. Cool.'

So eventually, after wandering around for a while, I find a group of cool people. And I'm not 100 percent sure, but I think it was Ron Jeremy and Seth Green and Manny from Scarface."

"So we're all hanging out, drinking. And then, they're like, 'Oh, we have to go congratulate Will Ferrell on his movie before we leave.'

We go over to the super VIP area where he is, and they're like, 'Yo, Will. Great movie. Blah, blah, blah.'"

"And Will just looks at me and goes, 'You, you are an asshole!' like, really loud. The whole party's like, 'Whoa. What just happened?' And everyone's looking at me like, 'What did you do to him?'

And he just runs off. He just runs away. He calls me a asshole and runs away from me."

You can catch Party Legends every Thursday at 10:30PM on VICELAND. Find out how to watch here.

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.