VICE

The spring issue of VICE magazine is yours to pre order now. vice.com/en/article/int…

From Sydney Sweeney’s Illuminati underwear to Don DeLillo’s hockey sex novel, the column that is terminally online so you don’t have to be is back to tell you how to feel about things. Compiled by @damsmithwriter: vice.com/en/article/rat…

An improv comedy troupe. A virtual tech-house raver. Someone with incurable cancer. A long-distance married couple and a grieving son. Full story @amberbeanfilm: vice.com/en/article/mee…

Last week, Meta announced that it was shuttering Horizon Worlds, the VR platform that was heralded as the future by Mark Zuckerberg when it launched in 2021, even though it basically just looked like a bunch of Nintendo Wii characters fucking around in a low-budget children’s cartoon. A U-turn swiftly followed. Meta isn’t closing Horizon Worlds. But it is basically abandoning it, radically cutting back development and funding. A small number of people are utterly heartbroken about this. VICE spoke to several (i.e. nearly all) of them.

Small, scrappy, and overrun by racist kids and virtual sex pests. Meta's Horizon Worlds was, from the outside looking in, cherished by almost nobody. Almost.

When @Polymarket announced last week that it was opening its own bar, social media—or, being real, mainly just X—erupted. The news was greeted with glee, intrigue, and ridicule, as people wondered whether it would actually happen or was just some kind of stunt. Despite lacking a press pass or an invite, VICE’s roving reporter Nick Dove (@manabovetown), joined the long queue outside the venue in Washington D.C. before a bouncer (who looked suspiciously like @2hollis2) recognized him and waved him on through. What he found inside was a clusterfuck of opening night mayhem, “Georgetown students gambling Daddy’s money, blue-blazered crypto bros,” and not many women. “Peering up at the 80-plus pitch-black screens decorating the walls, I thought it a poetic failure,” writes Dove. “For all their purported foresight, and talk of these markets’ third eyes for the future, when the moment actually arrived, they—we—were all blind. With history, in the end, there’s nothing certain but the fog of the unknown, and dissolution of prior illusions.” Polymarket is currently making headlines for paying out nearly $1 million to a customer who seemed to have inside knowledge of U.S. military action in Iran. If it thought opening its own bar might generate some public goodwill, it bet wrong. Read Dove’s full report now: vice.com/en/article/gat…

In which @manabovetown reports from a shit show. vice.com/en/article/gat…

behold:

The spring issue of VICE magazine is yours to pre order now. vice.com/en/article/int…

The Epstein files. Live-streamed war. An onslaught of generative AI. In a world of endless images, which ones survive—and why?

In Manhattan, Alison Long has been holding a seven-day doomscrolling duvet session, surrounded by liquor bottles and trash. VICE's @manabovetown visited her “altar of paralysis.”

Cold-hearted life advice from @amberbeanfilm vice.com/en/article/why…

Archive your sexts. Learn how to make a banging conciliatory martini. Strike when the pork brains skewers are doing their evil work.

The modern world is doing strange things to our hearts and libidos. You will be hard pushed to find two people better equipped to converse on that than Caia Hagel and @shumonbasar vice.com/en/article/lov…

“Grow up and threaten to kill me properly,” says the Soulseek AI Homer Simpson troll to his army of online haters. Interview with @damsmithwriter vice.com/en/article/ai-…

We got him. VICE's @damsmithwriter tracked down the troll who is “destroying” Soulseek with a “potentially infinite” number of AI Homer Simpson songs. Unsurprisingly, he was in obnoxious and unrepentant mood: vice.com/en/article/ai-…