This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Have you ever hopped Mario up like three platforms, then rounded a corner, and you—you as Mario—need to make a double-length jump across two high arches, which you nail, but then there’s a sort of sand-covered angular wall on the other side, and you—or you as Mario, all fingers and all thumbs—somehow accidentally pop into a crouch, and slide and slide and slide and slide and slide, all the way down again, until you fall right back to where you just started with a soft small: shhhhhht?

Hmm.

I've been watching this video a lot, lately. You will notice that, in this video, there are two emotions at play, each one on the extreme end of the same spectrum: cheerful, boyish joy, and then deep humiliation. One comes quickly after the other. They start so well, the guys—it’s a hot day and they fancy a little dip in the River Thames. But then, something I can only describe as "that time my horse stopped running and I motionlessly fell down an entire cliff in Red Dead Redemption" happens, and one of them skids an infinite amount of time down some stairs, thudda–thudda–thudda–thudda–thudda, and ends up in the water. Then he’s just in his jeans and topless, lying face down in the Thames, and it feels like the Windows error message sound should play for a moment, and then he gets up, wet and humiliated, thoroughly humbled.

So, you know, you can sort of divide this man’s life into two halves. Here: innocent, joyful, full of hope, expectant of frolics:

And then here, post-Matrix glitch (P.M.G., as he will mark his life from now on), red and hot with embarrassment, standing topless in the Thames.

Can you imagine going from this:

To this:

In, like, three seconds? Your life just changed. You’re never going to be the man at the top of the steps ever again.

We have to interrogate the idea that the man wanted to get into the Thames until he started sliding wordlessly into the Thames, at which point he stopped wanting to go in the Thames but could not pull himself out of the tailspin that was dragging him down unavoidably into the river. Really, he wanted to go into the Thames until the Thames came up to meet him, or: He wanted to get in the river on his own terms.

That, I think, is the great sadness of this video: The man was excited to get into the Thames. He was enjoying a hot day on the banks of the river with his pal. And then the heel of one shoe slipped out from beneath him, and he skidded like honest-to-God the first version of Tomb Raider where Lara kept getting nailed by one invisible polygon on the steps to some temple and just started floating down, thudda–thudda–thudda–thudda–thudda, and then he stopped wanting to get into the Thames. The joy evaporated from within him. In that moment—that long, endless moment, where he was just skidding, skidding, skidding, and skidding—he became Schrödinger’s wet boi. At once wanting to get in the river and not.

At what point did that fall become too much? I’ve been thinking about it a lot. We all fall over—it happens, our feet slip out from under us, we crumple, we fall—and we have all, at some point, fallen down some steps. This is universal. But I think there is a very acceptable amount of time you can spend sliding down those steps post-fall where it is alright, and then where it's gone on a bit too long, and then by the emergency point where you really should have grabbed something and stopped sliding by now, and then full "are you still falling over?" embarrassment, and all of those stages are visibly at play here:

"Ooh, gosh"

"Are you OK?"

"… still?"

"Dude, come on."

A word on how this video came to be made: This video should never have been made. The wording at the start of the video almost makes me think the whole thing has been staged—"So here we are, here's Henry," it starts, "and here we are at the Thames. And all of a sudden, we’ve now go—oh, hold on a minute, what’s going on here? There’s two blokes gonna go in­­—" [A man falls for an infinite amount of time down some stairs; laughing so hard it hurts]—but it turns out this dip into the Thames was part of some team-building cross-city treasure hunt, and this was sort of meant to happen right until a man started sliding while the earth was young and only stopped sliding again when the earth had aged a thousand millennia and crumbled to dirt below him, and he did not win the treasure hunt, not at all.

The video also taps into a niche and slowly-dying genre I like to call the "dad video." You know what a dad video is? The entire economy of [the British TV show]You’ve Been Framed is built upon it. A dad video is something that has happened every day since you showed your dad how to make videos on his phone, and now he has this shame-free compulsion to constantly record the mundane: Your dad, halting abruptly in the middle of foot traffic to do a panorama of the high street; your dad, an unflattering angle walk-and-talk selfie video of him striding breathlessly through a grocery store parking lot, talking about Brexit, which he is convinced is going to go viral on all his straight talking Facebook groups, eventually only gets 16 views; your dad, shakily zooming in on a distant table at a Sunday morning car boot. This might not have been recorded by a dad, but it is still a dad video, the kind of stream-of-consciousness we’re-in-London uninteresting crappy thing that dads do, and I’m glad for it: We criticize our always-on, phones-up society, don’t we—once every two years there’s always a viral video of some earnest guy reading a poem directly into a camera, "your phone is rotting your brain / look up at the sky, it might rain"—but for me, it’s actually good. If we did not have dads and dad-lites constantly recording the mundane, we would miss moments of pure magic and glee like this. The world would be a poorer place. Surveillance culture? Bad. Recording guys skidding infinitely on their face, knees, and ass into [what used to be] the dirtiest river in Europe? Extremely, extremely good.

We’ve been through my highest moment of embarrassment before. Looking at this I can only assume this is his. All I can think is: How much is this man still glowing, hot and pink, 24 entire hours after sliding for a hundred thousand years down some shallow steps into the Thames? I feel like you could still cook an egg on him, with the heat of this embarrassment. That he is still topless, sitting sadly and unblinking on a sofa because his body is still running so hot he doesn’t technically need clothes. You could put him in a bath of cold water and his sheer presence in it would heat it up to a nice lukewarm temperature. He wanted a quick dip in the Thames for banter with his friend; what he got was a lifetime of humiliation and regret.

Oh, right, a conclusion. Umm: the Thames is death, the steps are all of us, the man’s inexorable slide into the gray waters below is our movement through life. It represents how we start out with hope but are crushed by the almost-flat steps of capitalism, skidding on the bird shit of debt, and are we not, all of us, topless men sliding forever down some steps on the Thames?

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Fact #1 is I have the skull structure of a God and it is a crime for me to withhold that from the world. Fact #2 is that Instagram Stories are two years old this week. Fact #3 is that men—or straight men, at least—have a complex relationship with selfie-taking, i.e. when I take a selfie I will make 30 attempts, before narrowing that down to four attempts that I quite like, and then I will put those four in my "Favorites" folder and look at them, flicking forward, back, forward, back, microscopic differences in muscle-clench and skin tone, a perfect light beam here, a frond of hair there, before deciding no, actually, all of these attempts are wrong, move to trash, delete from trash, research acidic skincare solutions on healthcare blogs for two hours.

Happy birthday, Instagram Stories! Hip, hip, hooray!

§

Here is my nightmare (recurring). I am on the South Bank and the sun is glistening behind me. You know those types of sunset: blue, then yellow, then a perfect navy dusk. I just rode my bike here and I am feeling good—a dewy sweat is on my dusty face. Golden Hour light is dappled around me. I take my phone out, swirl the front-facing camera round, my face filling the screen. "HEY, EVERYBODY!" someone shouts, two hands around their mouth like a trumpet. "LOOK! THIS GUY’S TAKING A SELFIE!" I try to ride away but the crowd is already booing. I try to spiral up the Millennium Bridge but too many of them are closing in on me, shoving and grappling. "How dare you?" one angry face says. "Who do you think you are?" I break free from the bike and into a muscular sprint, but the bodies around me drag us all, in a pile, to the metallic floor. In a perfect morbid moment of silence, bodies wriggling and wrestling around me, a child looks down, lollipop in hand, disappointed. "The temerity of you, Joel Golby," he says. "How dare you think your face is worthy of documenting here." He leans down to me and his face turns from mild, to a snarl, to a thousand gnashing teeth, to muscles tearing themselves apart, to fire, to flies, to darkness. I wake up in a sweat. The sky is dark and blue.

§

At parties (I am not invited to parties often), in an attempt to skip like a rock over the glassy lake of small talk, I tend to spit out the same three trivia facts, all gleaned from my degree, a mostly-useless three years spent studying linguistics:

1) That, in the 1066 invasion of England, the French brought with them their words for various meats—beef, pork, ect.—because previously, in Old English, we would just call the meats by their animal name: "What’s for dinner tonight?" "Cow" etc.

2) That the native Greek speakers perceive the color blue differently to non-Greeks because the way their language labels the two shades of blue, sky blue, and navy, puts them as opposite colors as orange and yellow are to us (in Chinese, also, there are two distinct browns), and so language can very literally change the way you perceive color, even if the hardware perceiving the color (your eyes) is the same, which is interesting if you think about it, no come back—

3) The reason everyone hates the sound of their own voice is because they are used to hearing it reverberating through the dense bones of their head—same way Beethoven, when he started to go deaf, composed with a pencil clamped between his teeth—whereas when we hear our voices recorded and played back we are hearing those vibrations as they travel through the air, and that difference—subtle, shocking—is what makes transcribing such an absolute living nightmare and why I get the interns to do it—

The point with the third fact (the first two are utterly irrelevant) is I think it’s possible to have that wood-versus-air thing, only with your face. I can look at my face in the mirror and look at it as a pragmatic collection of features—a nose here, a couple of eyes, a brow that needs some shaping, cheeks in need of a shave—but it doesn't look like a face.

Look at myself reflected back in the half-grime of a shop window and it looks more like me. Look back at it in a photo someone else takes and, honestly, my face looks different in every single one. Here is a pretty good (but heavily fucking gendered, sorry!) analogy for the split in knowing how your face looks: Every girl I know seems to know exactly their right angles, looks, and poses to nail a mirror selfie in one shot. Every boy who signs up for Tinder has to upload four photos his ex took of him because they are the only good ones that exist (the fifth photo is a group shot with the boys, which he is the only one ruining). We are selfie averse. We are selfie reluctant. We are selfie agnostic. We cannot look ourselves in the eye.

§

It does not help that we are still feeling the effects now of Justin Bieber and Jaden Smith’s eyebrows in between the years of 2013 and 2014. That was the year Bieber—newly off-the-rails, still cherubically beautiful before the 2015 yeah-alright-he's-cool high, before the 2017 guys-have-you-heard-of-God—and Smith—in his would-actually-go-to-the-MTV-Awards days, before he became the perfect crystalline intersection between streetwear and art—started pulling this face in every photo, as if their eyebrows are trying to rise off their face through a hole in the exact center of their forehead, as if they are trying to impersonate a dog being told off.

If I were being asked on command to cry, this is the exact face I would pull: eyes squinted, eyebrows cartoonishly inverted, somber expression, no smile. I had to go deep through Jaden Smith's Instagram to find this, but you know what I’m talking about don’t you:

Every man thinks this is the only face you’re legally allowed to pull in a selfie, unless he is an amateur comedian or a Joss Whedon fan, in which case he will arch one eyebrow and look quizzically beyond the lens, adjusting his bowtie appropriately.

§

Instagram Stories are a nakedly transparent attempt to grab some of the Snapchat audience, and we should be collectively ashamed of ourselves that it completely worked. In 2016, Instagram was growing stale, as everyone curated and lifestyle-blogged their timelines to a grinding halt. There was no spontaneity in Instagram anymore, and dwell-time on the app dwindled.

Then Stories launched, completely lifted from Snapchat’s primary feature, everyone figured out it was a very good way of flirting, and suddenly, Instagram cleaved into two half apps: on one side, pristine photos of coffee in bed, and vacation swimming pools, and well-composed shots of yourself in front of a sunset; on the other, a rolling boil of drunken nights out, panting bicycle commutes, impromptu selfies, and clinking pints. Instagram suddenly had two personalities—composed and professional stills (the angel) and chaotically impromptu video (the devil)—and in that liminal space, at least, men learned how to take pictures of their face.

§

Back to the nightmare: There is something about the permanence of a deliberately-taken selfie that stirs some weird itch inside the broken male mind. How many men do you know who have ruined a nice group shot by pulling a stupid face or doing some sort of gesture? How many men do you know who actually know how to smile in a way that’s flattering to them (a friend of mine once said to me, in a way that was at once sweet and chilling, "You need to stop showing your teeth in photos," and fair play because she was right)?

We don’t know how to behave in front of a camera. There have been thousands of pop-psychology attempts to explain why "young women taking selfies," and it seems to infuriate men so much—it perennially feels like Piers Morgan is telling Kim Kardashian to "put it away"—but surely some small part of it must be jealousy. "Ah, you look good and feel comfortable in front of a camera," the rotten male mind reasons. "I want to take that away." At least with Stories, though, the photo is gone in 24 straight hours. Even the most vanity-averse person has untagged an unflattering photo of themselves on Facebook. On Stories, even if you're a bit red or a bit blemished or there’s an unflattering angle of your chin, it’s gone in a day. And then you are free.

§

That is it, I suppose: freedom. Instagram Stories have made us a bit freer and easier with the selfie. It’s just a picture of your face. It certainly has for me: over the World Cup, admittedly quite frequently drunk, I’d celebrate each England win by spiraling into the front-facing camera, slick with my own sweat and thrown beer, grabbing friends into a clenched hug, all of us shouting the lyrics to World in Motion, or just saying "wahey." This wouldn’t have happened so much before Stories, when the idea of interrupting a guys' night at the pub by everyone smiling and leaning into the camera would be met with a similar response to if I’d said, "Hey boys—shall we murder a dog tonight?" But everyone’s more comfortable with it now.

Every time I take a real, permanent selfie, I still fundamentally feel like a prick (the bridge, the lollipop boy, the temerity) but Stories creaks open a space to stare at a camera and be playful or ironic if you want to, fleeting, temporary. I don’t mind turning the phone on myself if I’m enjoying a nice day at the park now, or if I’m just sitting at home feeling myself (my hair only seems to peak during the hours of 8 PM and 9 PM, which is very frustrating as that is often the time I am seen by nobody but my roommate, and putting it on Stories seems the most right thing to do). The DM feature is revelatory, too: respond to a friend’s text or message with the most unflattering, chin-forward deep-gurn selfie you can, or send a photo of yourself on Stories and watch DMs roll in.

Faces are weird, and uncomfortable, and you have to live with yours forever, and we should probably have a better relationship with them—and though I'm not saying it’s going to change the world, opening up Instagram Stories, turning the camera around and pressing click on a picture of yourself can go some small way to doing that. The sky is blue, then yellow, then a perfect navy dusk. Open your phone. "HEY, EVERYBODY!" the man shouts. Only, no: not this time. "AH, FALSE ALARM," he says, to the looming crowd. "IT’S JUST INSTAGRAM STORIES, DUDE. WHO CARES." You wake up and the morning sun peeks through your curtains.

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Extremely powerful storms are so intense they can set the ocean floor rumbling, generating a newly-discovered phenomena that scientists are calling "stormquakes."

For years, we’ve seen low growling vibration of hurricanes on seismometers and a low microseismic hum of vibration from waves slamming into beaches. But stormquakes are something new.

“There's a low hum in the Earth called the microseism that's happening all the time generated by the action of wind and waves around the world drumming on the seafloor,” said Wendy Bohon, geologist and science communication specialist at the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology. The very biggest storms drum on the ocean floor with even more energy, creating stormquakes, a newly-discovered phenomena announced this week in an article published in Geophysical Research Letters.

“[Stormquakes] are seismic activity that can travel across the continent that are excited by hurricanes and large winter storms,” Catherine de Groot-Hedlin, geophysicist at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography involved in the research, said.

Unlike the background microseism hum, stormquakes are localized point sources that only show up in certain areas. While the phenomena is so newly-recognized that scientists aren’t entirely sure of the mechanisms yet, they have determined that stormquakes occur along technically passive margins—places that don’t get earthquakes—on broad, large continental shelves.

“It's something about the shape—or the bathymetry—of the seafloor interacting with these big ocean waves that are produced during storms,” Bohon said. “You're getting some kind of energy relief that's beating on the seafloor in a particular way, and those waves are moving out in all directions as coherent packages which we’re then able to detect using seismometers.”

Image: Geophysical Research Letters

With ocean waves all over the world drumming on the ground, the microseism is a mess of incoherent waves, the seismic equivalent of tossing a handful of gravel into a pond and the myriad of many-sized ripples spilling out in all direction. But, Bohon explains, these stormquakes are creating coherent seismic waves that are more like tossing a single pebble into a pond to create clean, coordinated ripples radiating from a single source.

Stormquakes were discovered by adapting a tool originally used to search for a totally different type of geophysical signal.

“I developed it for infrasound, which is sound waves travelling through the air,” de Groot-Hedlin said. One of her co-authors, Sloan Coats, noticed an unusual seismic pattern in the extremely seismically-active Cascadia Subduction Zone of the Pacific Northwest, and asked de Groot-Hedlin to modify her algorithms. “The amplitude are much lower than what we're used to seeing with earthquakes normally,” explains de Groot-Hedlin, but once they saw it, they were able to apply the same technique to other locations and soon realized it was storms, not tectonic movement, that was triggering the stormquakes.

Seismic waves generated by earthquakes, explosions, and now, apparently, storms, can be used to map what’s underground by carefully measuring when seismic waves arrive at different places on the planet. Different types of seismic waves each have different characteristics that interact in specific ways with the materials they pass through. “That gives us an idea of what's happening in the subsurface, both the wave speed, the way the waves change and when the waves stop,” says Bohon.

One of the fundamental assumptions of using background seismic waves like the microseism to map subsurface structures is that they are incoherent—it’s random noise from all directions. “That’s an incorrect assumption,” de Groot-Hedlin said, pointing out that since stormquakes only happen in particular places, they aren’t random. While stormquakes won’t directly lead to better seismic imaging of the Earth’s interior, it will lead to researchers questioning what we think we know so far.

“We can use seismometers to learn a whole lot more than just about earthquakes,” Bohon said. Geophysics is a science of indirection and creativity. “A lot of the things that we're looking for, we can't directly observe, so we have to think of other ways to look at them.”

Seismometers can even be used to study atmospheric phenomena. “There's a slight tilt in the seismometers before a tornado touches down,” Bohon said. These stormquakes are another tool for geophysicists to deploy, and both Bohon and de Groot-Hedlin agree the most exciting part will be the unexpected interdisciplinary collaborations neither of them have even thought of yet.

“Noise means whatever you're not interested in,” said de Groot-Hedlin, who is already adapting her search algorithms to listen to breaking ice, fracking, and even nuclear explosions.

“They found these signals and they've come up with this idea that's supported by evidence,” Bohon said. “But now other scientists from other fields are going to be able to use and run with it.”

“When you're kids, you feel like everything's been discovered. You read textbooks and it's just a bunch of facts,” she added. “We don't know everything there is to know. We know a lot, but we don't know everything,”