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Arnold Putra is a fashion designer with a colorful past. His life appears to be a never-ending rollercoaster of high drama and international intrigue, as he travels the world winding up everyone from three-letter agencies to military juntas to assorted moralists. 

In the latest issue of VICE magazine, Arnold was kind enough to detail the time he narrowly avoided getting beaten to death in a Myanmar prison. He traveled to the country last year with a Buddha tattoo on his leg—perfectly fine in Los Angeles, where it was inked, but frowned upon quite severely in Myanmar, where images of “the awakened one” are considered blasphemous and are near-guaranteed to find you on the wrong end of clenched fists and maybe the odd bit of lead piping in the national prison system.

After finding himself incarcerated, possibly due to the toilet-stall betrayal of one of the junta’s ruling general’s daughters, he was in a bind. In the end, he was able to find a typically ingenious solution: bribing the local police force to turn their offices into a makeshift tattoo studio, where the Buddha on his calf was transformed into a stupid koala emoji.

You can read the full, incredible story in an interview with VICE’s Ben Ditto below:

Elsewhere behind the paywall this week, and in another story from The Not The Photo Issue of VICE magazine, we bring you the AI wokescold and the AI edgelord: a pair of AI bots based on two of the most irritating types of VICE reader. 

We gave them their own Instagram handles, so they can respond to all our posts and fight with you in the comments. Give it a read to meet the embittered pair; who knows, perhaps you were one of the people who inspired their creation:

Have a fantastic weekend,

Kevin Lee Kharas
Editor in Chief, VICE Magazine

To get past the paywall, sign up for VICE membership. A Digital Only subscription is just $2 a month (or $20 a year, if you prefer), while $70 a year also gets you 4 issues of VICE magazine, delivered straight to your door. (All three kill all the ads on this site.)