Keep smiling! You're getting nothing from this labour! Photo via Wiki

Go to a therapist? They'll suggest volunteering. Want to add meaning to your life? Why not try volunteering? Your ex says you're a narcissistic asshole incapable of feeling? Volunteering! Dragging yourself down to the nearest animal shelter to scrape some cat shit from a cage is the oldest trick in the book for improving your mental health and raising your happiness. Except maybe, after all that, it's not.

A new study suggests that visiting a nursing home isn't benefiting the person you really wanted it to: you.

Researchers at the University of Southampton in England looked at data from the British Household Panel Survey, which sampled adults living in 5,000 households every year from 1991 to 2008. The questionnaires measured mental health and emotional wellbeing and compared it to how often people volunteered.

They found that those who volunteered regularly scored an average of six percent higher on wellbeing tests—great news, right? But when they analyzed the data, found that volunteering had no impact at all for young people. The results were skewed because from the age of 40, mental health and wellbeing improved significantly for those volunteering, peaking at the age of 76 to 80, when there was 12 percent boost to mental health.

If this is true, plenty of do-gooders right now are silently admitting to themselves that volunteering has done nothing but add more stress to their week. The researchers speculated that one reason for these results may be that volunteering when you're young may just be seen as another chore or obligation. But when you're older, it becomes more personal or meaningful. They suggest that it may be beneficial to those who have been made redundant or have retired and have a more isolated life.

Go on then, call up the old folks home. Tell them you're not coming this week, and then resign yourself to being a narcissistic asshole until you're in your 40s at least.

Read: A Lawsuit Claims Hillary Clinton's Emails Caused the Benghazi Attack

Tent city camper Jaime Green and her partner Mark in May. Photo by Jackie Dives

They've been called skids, junkies, criminals—you name it, and Victoria's tent city campers have heard it. Jaime Green, a resident of the homeless camp on Victoria's courthouse lawn for eight months, says she dealt with the insults by trying to make herself smaller, more invisible.

"I was more introverted at tent city, but that's not my natural way," she told VICE.

Today Green says she's feeling more like herself, now that she's settling into a new home in a social housing project the BC government agreed to fund in June—one of three buildings the province has bought since the camp started last fall. The move marks a near-end to a divisive chapter of Victoria's housing debate, as the court-ordered deadline to dismantle the homeless camp arrived yesterday. Though a handful of campers stayed at the site another night, most, like Green, have leapt at the opportunity to move indoors.

When VICE last checked in with Green back in May, she and her partner Mark were still on waiting lists for low-income housing. Green had been living on the streets for two and a half years, camping in parks and avoiding temporary shelters that wouldn't allow couples. This week both of them moved across the hall from each other in a former seniors' care facility, along with dozens of other former campers. "Every time I go in the hallways I see more people I recognize from tent city," she said.

Now Green is finally finding time to decompress, and take advantage of having a roof over her head. "Just the security of it—having a solid door, knowing I don't have to carry around or stash or worry about anything while I'm away from home—that's been such a weight off."

Read More: Inside the BC Tent City That Beat the Government in Court

The BC government says it has housed or found shelter for 260 people since the camp started last fall—a fact Green credits to the 10-month protest. "It wouldn't have come about if the numbers of people weren't there," says Green. "If it really was just half a dozen people camping, they would have just left us, we would have been invisible."

On Monday, cleanup crews filled large bins with leftover tents and debris, while photographers stood at the edges, taking photos of the people and structures left behind. By the end of day, observers estimated anywhere between five and 20 campers could be staying overnight, including a tent city founder named Doug.

"I'm going to stay there for the night if I can, or in another park, or walk the streets—do whatever I can," he told VICE. Doug doesn't have a long-term plan for life after tent city, but says it likely won't be in supportive housing, where he says service providers "patrol" and "control" residents.

"We expected we'd be here until September 7, like the judge said," Doug told VICE. "It's too fast, there's too many people coming around, trying to get us out of there."

BC's minister of housing said the province would allow some leeway for those waiting to get placed and figuring out next steps. If the protest continues, they'll consider an enforcement order.

In the meantime, Green hopes the province does more for the city's 1,300 homeless, and BC's housing crisis in general.

"I don't think it's enough," says Green. "Housing costs are about double what we're given on disability and welfare—that's two times away from being able to afford your own place. Then you're digging into grocery money, and that's not safe, that's not healthy."

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Gage Skidmore

It doesn't look like Donald Trump is going to change his act anytime soon, as if it's some kind of a surprise to anyone except a few GOP leaders still hoping he'll fall in line. On Tuesday, Trump told Fox Business Network that his temperament is what's gotten him this far in the campaign, and he'll be sticking with it, Politico reports.

"I've always had a good temperament, and it's gotten me here," he said. "We beat a lot of people in the primaries, and now we have one person left. We're actually doing pretty well there, but we'll see how it all comes out."

Trump continued to tout his primary wins even after GOP members cried for him to start "acting more presidential" in the wake of his ongoing feud with the Khans or his weird hacking plea to Russia. Trump seems to firmly believe his brash behavior is key to his success and said he doesn't think it's "appropriate" to change it now that he's on the official Republican party ticket.

But each day following his disastrous past two weeks seems to bring with it a new lag in the polls behind Hillary Clinton and a fresh handful of prominent Republican leaders and donors taking their support elsewhere.

It might not be a temperament the Republican Party is proud of, but it's one that Trump's supporters can still rally behind.

Read: Why Trump's Campaign Refuses to Die, No Matter What the Media Says

In the season finale of Black Market, host Michael K. Williams meets with drug users in the UK who shoplift meat and other household items before selling them to support their habit.

Then, on an all-new episode of CYBERWAR, we investigate the people behind the 2002 computer virus, Stuxnet, written specifically to take out Iran's nuclear facilities, and look into the ways it has changed the digital battlefield.

Black Market airs Tuesdays at 10 PM followed by CYBERWAR at 10:30 PM on VICELAND.

My parents realized when I was young that the schools in our Brooklyn, New York, neighborhood were subpar compared to those in Manhattan. So they combined their resources with other families in my community to start a carpool service that transported me and other neighborhood kids to the higher-quality schools in Lower Manhattan.

After school and during the summer, we'd attend programs at our local church. Many of the black families who took advantage of the carpool were members of there. On Sundays, these families tithed and voiced how their contributions should be used to pay for the employment of local teenagers, so the kids could make a little money and hopefully stay out of trouble.

These cooperative efforts of sharing resources and money were done by families in my community to ensure the future of the the next generation, despite our neighborhood's failing schools and lack of after-school programs and youth employment. These sort of informal co-ops are nothing new to the black community. However, as a new generation faces systemic challenges like the police shootings of unarmed blacks, young activists are taking another look at economic efforts like co-ops as a possible way to fight institutional inequality.

An extension of Black Lives Matter, the Movement 4 Black Lives has gained popularity because it promotes "divestment from a system that criminalizes and incarcerates" black people. Popular musicians like Killer Mike and Solange Knowles have taken to social media to encourage blacks to consider the power of their dollar, as well as the importance of putting that dollar back into the black community. Thanks to efforts like these, black owned banks like Citizens Trust and OneUnited have reported an increase in their services since the tragic police shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. Overall, there is a great deal of conversation happening right now around what needs to be done to address the economic plight of blacks and how that struggle is connected to topical issues like police brutality.

To get a better understanding of how co-ops can address the systemic racism in America today, I called up Dr. Jessica Gordon Nembhard. She's the author of Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice and a professor of community justice and social economic development at John Jay College. Here's what she had to say about co-ops and the fight for racial justice in America.

Dr. Jessica Gordon Nembhard. Photo courtesy of Nembhard

VICE: Everyone kind of understands what co-ops are, but can you give me a hard definition?
Dr. Jessica Gordon Nembhard: Businesses that practice cooperative economics are owned by a collective of people. The important part is that the people are not owning it for the purpose of making a profit, but for the purpose of satisfying a need or addressing a problem. Another unique piece is the democratic governing structure. Everybody who owns it has one vote regardless of how much money they put into it. If you choose to put more money into that enterprise, that's your choice, and you can get a return. But your ability to make the decisions for the enterprise are equal to anyone else's. It's a way to democratize and make more grassroots ownership possible.

So it's really about satisfying a need more than making money?
Any enterprise in a capitalistic system still has to have enough money to keep the company alive. So it's not that you don't have to make profits, but in this case, it's actually called a surplus, because the point is not to just put money back into individuals' hands, but to make a stronger business and keep satisfying the needs of the community.

How do co-ops function in a capitalistic system?
We have examples all over the world, and sometimes how that looks is it's a small enterprise that allows smaller individuals to compete. Take a group like Land-of-Lakes, which is one of our largest agricultural corporations. It is actually a cooperative of dairy farmers that all own Land-of-Lakes together, equally. And Land-of-Lakes buys its milk and produces all the dairy products. So the co-op has the factories, does all the production, does all the marketing, handles the business side. That frees the farmers up to do their dairy farming knowing that they have a market. Individually, they wouldn't be able to afford a production plant or afford all the advertising. But owning it all together, the individual farmers can now afford to compete.

What role has cooperative economics played in black communities in the US?
African Americans have engaged in some form of collective economics throughout our entire history in America. Sometimes it was tilling kitchen gardens on Sundays when we weren't working as enslaved people and sharing the produce. Sometimes it was putting in dues to bury loved ones.

By the 1700s and 1800s, we had more formalized systems of collective economics that were more enterprise-driven like insurance companies and collective farming. Eventually, we had collective grocery stores, credit unions, and healthcare. Europeans eventually recognized the model around 1844, and it formally came to the US. Blacks then started forming official co-ops in the 1860s and 1870s. By the 1880s, labor unions were actually helping workers to start their own co-ops, and blacks were involved in that, too.

Did it play a role in the civil rights movement?
It was what I call a silent partner to the movement. This was done by blacks partly to survive outside of US capitalism, which was so exploitative. It was also a way to create independence and wealth, so we could be more politically active.

Can you tell me about the relationship between segregation and cooperative economics?
One of things we learn when we study cooperative economics is the stronger co-ops have members who have a strong sense of camaraderie. So how do you find people who already have that feeling and get them to do co-ops? For blacks, sometimes it was already being involved in church or an activity that made you want to do more for your community. Sometimes it was because they had nothing, and they pulled together just to survive. And sometimes they were already politically active, and then they realized being politically active made them economically vulnerable. W. E. B. Du Bois said that we need to self-segregate so that we can create that sense of solidarity and use an economic structure that recognizes that sense of solidarity to create economic prosperity for all of us. And from that position of strength, we can go back out to the rest of the world. Either integrate if we want to, or at least demand our rights and demand equal footing.

Do you think that is necessary?
I have mixed feelings about that. The need for us to strengthen ourselves and create a wall around ourselves is still important. However, in this day and age, I think you have to study your situation and figure out which strategy makes the most sense. There is such a thing as white allies. Many whites in the co-op world are progressive and work with other alternative economic solidarity projects outside of their race.

Many young black activists are focused on addressing police brutality. While it's an important issue, is it essential that we begin to examine areas like economic injustice?
I've been trying to figure out how how to talk to a generation that is out in the street focused on police brutality, which is a horrendous issue. For me, I think there are two things.

One, none of the liberation movements existed without an economic strategy. Two, I actually think that some of our issues with police brutality are connected to capitalism and economic exploitation and the fact that we have such a hierarchal exploitive system. If we can start thinking about ways that communities can become safer through grassroots economic organizing, by becoming more involved in cooperatives and other economic solidarity, it would stop pitting people against one another economically and get people used to working together and solving problems. Also, if we have a system where we are making money in other ways, we can start to do things like back the campaigns of our own political candidates. Our police systems are owned and run by the mayors and city councils, who keep privilege in the hands of a few. But if we can gain enough monetary power, we can collectively take over and control these systems.

What advice would you give a young person interested in engaging in buying black, boycotting, and cooperative economics?
There are a couple things. Just because it is black-owned doesn't mean it is a co-op. While we want more black people to be involved in the economy, some black businesses are just as capitalist and exploitative as white-owned businesses. When I'm talking about co-ops, I am talking about a group who owns a business and is run off the principles of one person, one vote. So the first thing is to start to learn about it. I've learned that many co-ops started with a study group. We're already coming together on the picket line, protesting. So why don't we come together and start studying economic alternatives.

Thumbnail image via Flickr user Gage Skidmore

Donald Trump told Fox Business Network Tuesday morning that he has no plans to change the way he's running for president, and then he promptly set out to prove it. A short while later, the Republican presidential nominee took the stage at a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina, and appealed to "Second Amendment people" to help stop Hillary.

"If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks," Trump told the crowd before adding, "Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is. I don't know."

The Clinton campaign quickly responded, releasing a statement saying what shouldn't need to be said, but maybe still does: "A person seeking to be President of the United States should not suggest violence in any way."

Trump's campaign, for his part, said he just meant that "Second Amendment people" should vote. And if you look at the broader context of the candidate's remarks, it almost seems more like the guy was playing a (loaded) game of word association than anything else. Still, a fresh batch of Republican defections could be in the offing.

Read: Donald Trump Has No Plans to Stop Being Donald Trump

At the end of August, VICELAND will return with an all new season of Weediquette, our show that investigates the world's pot paradigm. Host Krishna Andavolu will continue to chronicle marijuana's journey into the mainstream, following folks who are kicking opiate addiction, fighting child protective services, battling stigma in the NFL, losing the war on drugs, and finding Jesus with weed.

Check out the trailer above and make sure to tune in for all new episodes on VICELAND starting Wednesday, August 31.

Women representing the Lesbian Herstory Archives march in the 2007 New York City LGBTQ Pride March. Photo via Flickr user istolethetv

This June, the media spent more time reporting on the Pulse nightclub massacre than any other LGBTQ hate crime in American history. This makes sense, given it was both the deadliest mass shooting and deadliest assault on the gay community in our nation's history. But beyond those and other aspects for which the tragedy stands alone, it will come to be defined by another singular feature: It was the first of its kind whose coverage will be archived by mainstream historical institutions, like libraries and private historical collections. Because until the turn of the century, gay people have had to maintain their own archives—and the history of how LGBTQ citizens came to value and preserve their own history was a story, much like that of gay liberation itself, of many hard-fought battles to be won.

The sheer volume of coverage produced was not due solely to the massacre's scale. Until Pulse, in which 49 were shot dead, the deadliest American LGBTQ hate crime was a 1973 arson attack on UpStairs Lounge, a New Orleans gay bar in which 32 died during services for the Metropolitan Community Church, a chapter of the first-ever gay church in the United States. But that assault saw little mainstream news coverage at the time, due to homophobia and an unwillingness to report on LGBTQ lives.

Violence against gay people is nothing new, but the mainstream reporting of such incidents is—and the subsequent preservation of the stories of their victims and perpetrators.

Throughout history, it's been up to queer people to document their own history. As I show in my book, Stand By Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation, historical archives—libraries, both academic and public, and private institutions that make it their mission to hold and properly preserve historical artifacts—have traditionally refused to preserve the records of LGBTQ people. When they did, homosexuality appeared in card catalogs under derogatory subjects like deviance, criminality, and medical disorder.

As a result, LGBTQ people have come to recognize that documenting their past is an inextricable part of the gay liberation movement. Beyond political protests and pride parades, a quieter, more somber effort has taken root among them to report on, collect, and document their history, in order to preserve their past and to demonstrate what makes gay culture distinct.

In the 1970s, not long after the Stonewall riots, a group known as the Gay Socialist Action Project began meeting at a Manhattan apartment to read feminist and socialist texts in order to grasp the power dynamics that had oppressed them. They came to realize their oppression was less about their sexual choices and more about social stigmas that pathologize homosexuality. This realization revolutionized how Jonathan Ned Katz, one of the group's members, began to interpret the past.

These archives and others are vital because they tell a different kind of gay history. Most mainstream LGBTQ history traces the rise of gay liberation to the Stonewall uprising, but the truth is more complex.

With only a high school diploma, Katz began to investigate the history of homosexuality from the colonial era to his 1970s present. Investigating the way homosexuality had been listed in New York Public Library card catalogs, he traced how authorities portrayed homosexuality first as a sin, then as a "sickness," then, later, as a criminal act. In 1976, he set out to prove that LGBTQ people had their own history with the publication of his anthology Gay American History. It was "the bible of gay liberation for many years to come," Craig Rodwell, the owner of Oscar Wilde Bookshop, the first gay bookstore in the world, said in a newspaper interview at the time.

Four years earlier, in 1972, a group of lesbians turned their 92nd Street apartment into the first-ever lesbian history archive, theHerstory Archives. While fledgling at first—early on, founders would stuff shopping bags with artifacts to present privately in homes, bars, women's groups and early gay churches—it stands today as a living museum, still open to the public.

"Our histories were disappearing, or uncomfortable to find or locked away," said co-founder Deborah Edel in an interview with the Brooklyn Historical Society this June. It was "important for people to feel at home with the archives," she said, "and at home with their own history." To that end, the Herstory Archives remain independent from government funding, and visitors are free to touch and engage with its contents, which include all manner of artifacts—from letters and photographs to shirts, buttons, and candle sticks.

Their efforts marked a turning point: Secretly and subversively, LGBTQ people began to pass their history along to one another, rather than place it in the hands of discriminatory libraries and mainstream archives. Over the decades that followed, in attics and overstuffed closets, they continued to archive the histories of their own people. And over the past decade, such libraries and archives have begun to treasure, rather than trivialize, such materials.

The formal process of converting these collections into archived, institutionally accessible anthologies has created some of the most important compendiums of gay archival material available in America today. In 2007, Kay Tobin Lahusen, a gay photojournalist, donated more than 170 boxes of historical materials from her private collection to the New York Public Library, which marked the beginning of an era in which public libraries began to accept and house collections of LGBT materials. A year later, prominent lesbian-feminist historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg donated her late-19th-century collection of 650 books and pamphlets to the Library Company of Philadelphia, one of the oldest libraries in the country, including research that had established her as one of America's leading gender and sexuality historians.

These archives and others are vital because they tell a different kind of gay history. Most mainstream LGBTQ history traces the rise of gay liberation to the Stonewall uprising, but the truth is more complex.

LGBTQ archives include massive repositories of newspapers founded by and for LGBTQ people showcasing the full breadth of gay culture produced during the 20th century, from the churches they founded to the plays they wrote to the poetry they read, including the surprisingly vast breadth of gay poetry produced in prisons. Such papers also evince a surprising amount of intra-community conflict and political division that runs counter to the popular portrayal of a unified gay political front. Gay archives reveal the racial, ethnic, gender, and class fissures that have undermined the popular representation of a monolithic gay community.

Most of all, these archives tell of the violence and hatred LGBT people have endured. While mainstream newspapers reported on the progress of the gay liberation movement, crumbling gay newspapers remind us of the gristly violence of the UpStairs Lounge arson attack. While pop culture romanticized the hedonism of gay sex throughout the 1970s, decaying audiotapes recount stories of gay activists exposing the epidemic of prison rape or the story of Patrick Wayne Kearney, a serial killer who targeted and murdered somewhere between 21 and 43 homosexual men throughout the decade. And, today, as well-intentioned talking heads announce "It Gets Better" in online media campaigns, Herstory Archives photographs depict a time in which graffiti implored passerby to simply "kill lesbians."

Eventually, coverage of the Pulse nightclub attack will descend upon these new LGBTQ historical archives and will mark a profound change in how such history is recorded. Rather than depicting the story of LGBTQ liberation as a linear trajectory of upward progress, Pulse will remind future researchers that the plight of LGBTQ people in the 21st century has been a story of progress and pushback, of triumph and tragedy. More profoundly, it will reveal that in the 21st century, the onus no longer lies upon LGBTQ people to document their own history.

Jim Downs is the author of Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation (Basic Books, 2016). He is currently an Andrew W. Mellon New Directions Fellow at Harvard University and an associate professor of history at Connecticut College. Follow him on Twitter.

A version of this post originally appeared on The Trace.

Last month, as Republicans gathered in Cleveland to nominate Donald Trump as their presidential candidate, Chris Cox, the chief lobbyist for the National Rifle Association, addressed the gathered delegates, becoming the first NRA official to speak at such a major party gathering. A week later, in Philadelphia, Democrats had their own unprecedented moment in the gun debate, devoting an unprecedented amount of attention to the impact of gun violence and Hillary Clinton's plans to reduce it.

And that was before the nominee drove the message home herself. "I'm not here to take away your guns," she told the crowd as she accepted the party's nomination. "I just don't want you to be shot by someone who shouldn't have a gun in the first place."

The dueling convention moments were a sign that the country's heated debate about gun laws and gun violence would rage on through the general election—one that was apparently confirmed Tuesday with Donald Trump's suggestion that "Second Amendment people" could do something about Clinton. With the perennial political gun fight now firmly lodged in the campaign narrative, here are five storylines to watch as the candidates and their parties head into the homestretch.

1. Can gun reformers match the intensity of their gun-rights counterparts?

In April at an MSNBC town hall, Clinton called on voters who share her embrace of tighter gun laws to flock to the polls. "I'm going to keep talking about it, and we are going to make it clear that this has to be a voting issue," she said.

To do that, as Clinton knew, her campaign will need to change an electoral status quo: voter intensity for gun issues has typically been much stronger among the Republican base than in her party. As Vox's German Lopez has noted, the political scientist Kristin Goss believes that for the pro-gun side, the issue is simply more visceral: its voters feel they have something to lose.

But Democrats are betting that's changing, as the combination of increasingly frequent mass shootings and congressional gridlock bring new urgency to the issue. The massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 spawned activist groups that have pushed other forms of gun violence into the spotlight. Rising urban homicide rates have increased media attention on gun deaths in American cities. And following the June shooting at Orlando's Pulse nightclub, gay rights groups have joined the fold.

"The cumulative effect of these tragedies is starting to increase the intensity of the attention we give this issue," Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, of Connecticut, said recently.

Polling shows that progressives' newfound focus on guns has translated into political will. In 2013, polls showed that conservatives were far less likely than liberals to vote for a candidate that disagreed with them on guns, and more likely to donate money to an organization that matched their position on guns. By the end of 2015, though, a similar number of Democrats and Republicans said they would only vote for a candidate who supported their position on guns. According to an Associated Press-GfK survey released last month, overall support for tougher gun laws is at the highest it's been in the US since the Sandy Hook shooting.

2. Can gun reform rally the Obama coalition?

For all their criticism of Donald Trump's shortage of specific plans, the Democrats who addressed the gun issue in Philadelphia mostly kept things gauzy—and likely did so deliberately, suggesting that the party plans to rally supporters around the gun issue for reasons only indirectly related to policy.

Before President Barack Obama took the stage Wednesday night, a video played in the arena that presented the 2012 mass shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School—and a string of high-profile mass shootings that followed—as the moral crucible of his presidency. Obama—and, by association, the Americans who elected him—was portrayed as a heartbroken leader eager for gun reform, but stymied by Republicans beholden to the NRA.

The video—and the speech that followed—cast gun reform as an essential reason for Obama supporters to turn out again this November. As The Trace has reported, Democratic strategists hope that a strong stance against gun violence will unify the "Obama coalition" against a common enemy: A Republican party supplicant to a heartless gun lobby. It also holds the promise of cathartic progress, perhaps making up for a lack of enthusiasm voters feel for the current Democratic nominee.

"We need to take action, and we need to take action now," said producer and director Lee Daniels in his convention remarks. "There's only one candidate willing on the gun lobby and keep our families safe."

Political journalists have observed that with Obamacare on the books, Democrats have lacked a cause that galvanizes the progressive base, and stirs the soul in a way that pocketbook issues do not. Emily Tisch Sussman, campaign director for the Center for American Progress Action Fund, argued that gun reform can be a replacement issue, with the potential to drive Democratic turnout in 2016 in the same way that gay rights and marriage equality did in the 2012 race.

"LGBT issues don't present the same big clear villain," she told The Trace this fall. "Democrats are going to have to reconvene the Obama coalition for 2016 and has very high interest."

3. How much can the NRA help Trump in key Rust Belt states?

Since securing their parties' respective nominations, both candidates have turned their focus almost entirely to the Rust Belt battleground, caravanning across states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan with lofty policy promises and dispatching their surrogates to the farther flung cornfields of the Midwest.

It's a region where the NRA's message provides Trump another avenue for boosting support among disaffected white male voters—a voting bloc that Trump needs, and that accounts for a large portion of the NRA's membership. that the NRA takes pains to keep happy. Both Ohio and Pennsylvania swung for Obama in 2008 and 2012, and have chosen state leaders from both sides of the ticket in recent years. And in 2016, both states will also vote in competitive Senate races, in which the candidates are already pushing gun laws to the fore. The NRA seems especially eager to make an example of Ohio Democratic Senate candidate Ted Strickland, a relatively pro-gun former governor who has modifying his position since leaving office. Already, the NRA has spent $1.2 million against the Democrat—only slightly less than it has spent against Clinton.

But the political geography of the Rust Belt gives Clinton an urban counterbalance to the support that Trump and the NRA hold among white men and rural residents. In Pennsylvania for example, the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh metro areas account for a disproportionate share of the state population—so much so that Democrats can carry the Pennsylvania electoral votes by just by racking up big margins in those cities, even if they lose everywhere else. Data collected during the Democratic primaries found that areas with the most voters in a state also tended to have the voters who were most enthusiastic about stricter gun control.

4. What's the deal with the NRA's Benghazi obsession?

In late June, the NRA spent $2 million to launch its first ad of the 2016 presidential election cycle. But the spot did not mention guns or the Second Amendment—instead, its focus was Benghazi.

The ad, which aired in key battleground states, features Mark "Oz" Geist, a former Marine and one of the private security contractors who interceded during the deadly 2012 siege on the US diplomatic compound in Libya. "A lot of people say they're not going to vote this November because their candidate didn't win," he says, walking through a cemetery. "Well, I know some people who won't be voting this year either."

"Hillary as president? No thanks," he concludes. "I served in Benghazi. My friends didn't make it. They did their part. Do yours."

The ad spot is a way for the NRA to double down on the story it likes to tell about itself and its members, who are encouraged to view themselves as society's "sheepdogs," protecting the defenseless flocks from wolves—which include mass shooters and terrorists. If the US government would simply butt out and leave citizens to protect themselves, the argument goes, Americans would be much more secure.

Geist is the NRA's latest military hero, following in the footsteps of deceased Navy Seal Chris Kyle, who authored American Sniper, and Marcus Luttrell, also a Navy Seal, who wrote Lone Survivor. Both books were made into blockbuster films, and are celebrations of toughness, perseverance, and rugged individualism in the face of grave danger.

Geist helped author 13 Hours, a book about his experience in Benghazi; it, too, was made into a blockbuster film. According to its version of events, Geist and his fellow commandos were delayed in their intervention by the chain of command. Against the orders of superiors, they finally headed over to the nearby compound to fend of the attackers on their own: an international spin on the sheepdog story.

Geist, whose account of the Benghazi attack helped inform the book 13 Hours, was a speaker at the RNC last month, and also one of the chief attractions at this year's NRA convention. There, in a speech that perhaps laid the groundwork for Trump's recent Second Amendment comment, Geist told thousands of people that Clinton could not be relied upon to protect Americans, and that it was up to people like him—like them—to stop her. "The NRA is America's safest place," he declared.

5. How Will Democrats Take On the NRA?

Clinton's willingness to address gun violence as an issue has been clear since the early days of the 2016 primary campaign, when, in a September debate, she announced that she was proud to have the NRA as an enemy. Since then, she's often employed the rhetoric on the trail. Announcing Virginia Senator Tim Kaine as her running mate last month, for example, she applauded his "backbone of steel," adding with a smirk: "Just ask the NRA."

But despite Clinton's readiness to bash the NRA by name, Democrats remain divided on how best to tackle the issue. Some gun reform advocates—including Americans for Responsible Solutions, the gun control group formed by former Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly—recommend that allies avoid directly criticizing the gun lobby outright.

The reasoning is that, thanks to the NRA's popular gun safety and training programs, a lot of Americans feel positively about the group. Despite a spate of bad press around the Orlando shooting, for instance, a July AP poll found that equal proportions of the electorate—37 percent each—viewed the NRA favorably and unfavorably.

It's a reminder that, while there may be no backing down now for Democrats on this issue, going on offense on the gun issue is still new territory for liberals. And in a political era when every key phrase is relentlessly focus-grouped, it's clear that Clinton and her compatriots are still sorting out some of the details.

A version of this article was originally published by the Trace, a nonprofit news organization covering guns in America. Sign up for the newsletter, or follow the Trace on Facebook or Twitter.

Photo by Michael Ezell. Courtesy of Mark Steger

Warning: This post spoils the last episode of the Netflix TV series Stranger Things.

Netflix's retro-spooky adventure series Stranger Things is a love letter to early 80s supernatural adventure movies—the blockbusters where the young protagonists wear corduroy pants and have pudding-bowl haircuts. But it also owes a great deal to Jaws. A movie about grown-ups on a boat might not be an obvious reference point for Stranger Things, which is steeped more in Steven Spielberg's kids-in-the-woods-with-flashlights oeuvre. But Spielberg's 1975 killer shark movie is probably the most famous cinematic example of the "wait as long as possible to show the monster" movie principle.

And the monster in Stranger Things definitely kept viewers waiting.

Over eight episodes, the show rolls out stranger and stranger things (see what I did there?) right up until the final installment, when, at long last, we're allowed to see the strangest thing of them all: the demogorgon, a.k.a. the creature, a.k.a. the monster. Once revealed, we've spent so much time dreading the monster's ability to harm our heroes that it barely has to wiggle one of the giant flower petals that make up its face to succeed in horrifying us. And it does more than wiggle its petals.

Veteran actor/performance artist/choreographer Mark Steger, who occupied the monster suit, was kind enough to grant us an interview so we could find out what went into the creation of his character. It turns out there's more of a connection to Jaws than just the timing of the creature's reveal—or, as Steger suggested, her reveal?

'Stranger Things' screengrab via Netflix

VICE: What's with the petals? Is the monster a plant monster?
Mark Steger: That's a fair speculation. I feel like the monster maybe is more mushroom, which is kind of between plant and animal. Mushroom DNA is more similar to animal DNA than to plant DNA, to me.

At moments where we just barely see the monster early in the show, is that you?
I'm wearing the full costume. There were times when I would take the stilts off for more mobility. When you're in the woods there's branches and rocks and things, so you can be a little unstable. But that's me in the full regalia.

Did you have to go through one of those crazy, all-day makeup processes?
The process of Spectral Motion.

Seger giving a performance demonstration. Photo by Aaron Sims. Courtesy of Mark Steger

In that case, we're only able to see when the petals opened?
Yeah, I could see better when they opened. When they were closed, there was a couple little gaps, but they weren't always in the same spot.

Were the hands computer-generated? It seems like your arms would have to be super long for those to be your real hands.
The hands were animatronic. I was puppet'ing the arms. My arms were covered in digital green sleeves that were removed in post. It was like I was part puppet. I was part machine. I was part human, animating the whole thing. It was a very complicated process.

Was working without being able to see the biggest challenge?
It was actually really loud in there. Even when the motors were turned off, there was this high-pitched whine. And there were 26 motors running the head, and when we were actually doing a shot, I couldn't hear directions. They would have to shout at the top of their lungs and then maybe I would hear them. The suit probably weighed about 30 pounds or so, and you're completely sealed in. It's like wearing a wetsuit and covering your whole body.

The conditions that are created by you getting into the suit really help you get in the mindset of being this other creature.

Sounds hard. Did you ever break down from sheer effort?
Having really good endurance is a really important part of this job. I usually nibble on potato chips all day, and drink electrolytes of some sort just to keep going. You can't eat a heavy meal and get in the suit. For one thing, the suit's tighter. But also you also have to regulate your blood sugar when you're in there. I'm really thin, so I burn calories really quickly, so I'm always having to manage that.

What was the hardest part?
The whole scene where I was fighting the kids in the house: The actors Joe and close them again as I brought my head down. It was an interesting interactive process. I spent a lot of time just waiting outside for some of those shots. You're very cold, and a little stiff, and you're having to hit marks and inhabit the character.

What did the directors tell you in terms of the character's motivation?
The simple directions the Duffers gave me were, "You're basically a shark, like the shark from Jaws, and you travel between realms to feed." So that was my main goal in this character.

And what's your process for bringing that across onscreen?
I was just thinking, I'm like a shark. I am perfect for what I am built for. A shark hasn't evolved in 200 million years—or however long its been. So that's what I was thinking: This is what I do. I'm the best at it. I'm better than anyone else at it. It was great direction. They were very clear about what they were going for, which was very refreshing. They communicated well, and it was a fun process. What we're doing is a lot of work, and obviously it's very stressful, but it felt like play.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Photo via AMC and Flickr user Mike Mozart

On Monday, police in western New York uncovered what they believe to be a subterranean meth lab hidden beneath the parking lot of an Amherst Walmart, NBC reports.

Amherst police were reportedly just doing a routine patrol of the area when they happened upon an open culvert running below the store's parking lot. When they popped their heads down there, the cops found a bunch of chemicals, spray paint, and what they believe to be methamphetamine.

Hazmat crews were called to the scene, and they set up shop right there in the lot, taping the area off and dropping down into the suspected lab through a manhole. Surrounding shoppers watched as the crews brought up chemicals in large white buckets before testing it. Authorities are currently sifting through Walmart's security footage in hopes of finding a suspect.

No one has been charged yet, and authorities have sent off the evidence for more tests, so we'll have to wait and see if the police actually found meth or just a large quantity of donut glaze.

Read: A 30-Person Brawl Broke Out in Walmart After Some Teens Laughed at a Woman's Dress

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Hundreds of people are singing together. It's a song from Sonic Adventure 2, the one that accompanies the titular Sonic the Hedgehog snowboarding down busy city streets with total disinterest in any motorist's safety. Lyrics are projected behind a performance from composer and guitar-shredder Jun Senoue, but nobody needs to reference them. I remember way more of the tune than I'd have thought.

Summer of Sonic is an almost yearly daylong convention celebrating a community that has popped up around SEGA's blue mascot. People are dressed up as all your favorite characters: Sonic, Tails, Other Sonic, Mr. Eggs. I'm eager to understand why this is even happening. I've played a Sonic. I'm not sure what there is to Sonic to warrant the gathering. Rings, certainly. Chili dogs: check. He's... got... shoes?

In 2008, Summer of Sonic was a few friends from fansites who intended to meet up in a pub and were accidentally joined by a fire safety defying a number of unannounced participants. The event grew to more suitable venues, peaking in 2011 with 1,200 attendees. This year's is the result of a successful Kickstarter backed by nearly 700 people. I didn't know any of this until I arrived; I expected a handful of Mega Drive lifers in a dreary hotel lobby comparing details on each of their Green Hill Zone scale replica tattoos.

Instead, Summer of Sonic is a brightly lit, spacious, all-ages day of variety fun and smiling faces. Oh no, I think, instantly. It's going to be hard to make fun of this.

I ask people if they're having fun, and most tell me this isn't their first time attending. They're here to get signatures from Sonic the Comic staff, designers from the old and new games, and the aforementioned musical performer (despite many being told they may not get a chance due to high demand). SEGA has also brought along the 2017-due Sonic Mania for its UK debut, and the line for it reaches Come on I've Got Other Shit to Do Today levels of interest.

A few of the celebrity guests are brought out to the main stage. For fun, Sonic characters are placed on the faces of the assembled stars, and each has to guess which is impeding his or her vision. Someone standing behind me shouts out who the characters are as they're being attached, rendering the exercise pointless. I get the impression he's done this out of reflex and excitement, rather than intentional malice. The guests play along, guessing anyway.

Two lads wander around dressed as Mario and Luigi. It's a good gag. They get a laugh anytime someone new spots them. I have to wonder, Where is the Mario convention? There should surely be a convention dedicated to all of the important mascot characters. Why only Sonic?

I posit a theory: It's the Sonic games' disparity in quality that breeds this kind of community. I'd argue that because Mario games are consistently good, there's nothing to champion, to root for, to see as the underdog spurred on only by some support. There's no inter-species romance in Mario, or at least it exists only implicitly. During a panel later in the day, one of the organizers jokes that people come to Summer of Sonic so that they can have people to argue with about which Sonic game is the worst. Another tells a story about a kid who showed up to his first event with no friends at all,but left it with ten new best ones.

Three lads are at a urinal, and independent of one another, have come dressed as Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles. They're all standing next to one another taking a piss. It's beautiful. They're laughing and having a fantastic time. I'll forever regret being too kind to take picture.

At 5 PM, on what feels to me like a full workday, a DJ occupies a booth on the side of the main stage and busts out club remixes of Sonic 2 tracks. I begin to earnestly appreciate the Sonic R theme on a completely new level, now that I know it's possible to fucking rave to it.

Before another performance by Jun Senoue, joined by Crush 40 bandmate Johnny Gioeli, a group of lads near me make jokes about Trigger Warnings and describe a fantasy person who identifies themselves as a "Demisexual Fox-Kin." I want them to fuck off out of this beautiful day I'm having. I'd later Google the phrase and see it's not even their own joke, which is all the more disappointing.

But that moment is the sole sour note.

Until that point I'd completely stopped seeing Sonic the Hedgehog as being owned by his corporate dads, instead seeing the avatar as very much an icon of and informed by its community. Sonic's official Twitter account now capitalizes more on a tone set by weird content created by fans than it does anything related to a still ongoing Sonic cartoon series or any other available narrative products. I like to think that SEGA itself has realized that the image of Sonic that many people recognize is not the result of genre-defining games from 25 years ago, but the result of idiosyncratic DeviantArt content. (Please play the fantastic Sonic Dreams Collection for more dissection of this idea.)

New, on Munchies: We're All Lying About How Much We Eat

One of the organizers on a panel talks about how a parent attendee's life has been made easier because Summer of Sonic means their autistic child has something social to look forward to for months and think about for ages after. I'm told another story about a young girl at the first meet who asked if she was going to meet Sonic in real life. She's since come along every year, now a teenager, this time cosplaying as a pink Boba Fett.

The part of me that wanted to make fun of the Summer of Sonic had gone. Fast.

Follow Matthew Jones on Twitter.

Follow Alex Davis on Twitter.

Our interns being emojis, just having a bit of a laugh (Photo: VICE)

Emojis are important. More important than you'd think. How, when your friend sends you a meme, or a photo of themselves next to a sign they think is funny, would you respond if it weren't for the cry-laugh emoji? "Haha" sounds insincere; "lol" is too half-hearted; "That's funny" makes you sound like an emotionless pretend-human who never learned how to laugh.

The cry-laugh emoji, however, does the job perfectly, and is applicable to any number of scenarios. The same can be said for flamenco lady, heart-kiss guy, embarrassed monkey, A-OK hand, underlined 100, fiyah and many more. You probably don't realise how much you rely on emojis to communicate, but in 2014 6 billion of them were sent every day, and last year the Oxford Dictionary made the cry-laugh guy their "word of the year" – which is obviously dumb, because it's not a word, but illustrates just how significant emojis have become.

To test exactly how much our everyday interactions now depend on little yellow faces and illustrations of bombs, as opposed to actual words, we asked our two editorial interns – Yasmin, 21, and Salma, 24 – to go five days without using any emojis.

Salma (left) and Yasmin (Photo: VICE)

DAY ONE

Salma: In the immortal words of the human hacky-sack from Counting Crows: "You don't know what you got till it's gone."

I never thought I'd see the day where I missed emojis, as mourning the loss of some pixels is a pretty sure sign that your life is going extremely badly. But there I was, on WhatsApp, realising how tough the task ahead of me was. Talking to a friend, it struck me how difficult it is to sustain a text-based conversation when you're sending short, humourless sentences and not just half-arseing your response with a pray-hands emoji.

Yasmin: This was, without a doubt, the hardest day of the whole challenge. I was, after all, setting myself up for five long days without sending a single person the thinking-face emoji when I couldn't be bothered to reply to them. Without being able to bless my boyfriend's life with the kissing face or the pink glitter heart. Not using emojis doesn't just affect you, but also the ones you love.

A couple of hours in I found I'd had to delete more than one emoji. I don't smoke, but I'd guess that giving up emojis is exactly as challenging as giving up cigarettes; your finger instinctively flicks back to them before your brain can process what you're doing, before you've even realised you've hit the A-OK hand 17 times in a row.

Within a couple of hours, my boyfriend knew something was up. He sent me a text: "Is there a reason you haven't sent me any emojis today? Are you mad?" Which, I suppose, shows how out of character the whole thing was for me. But I blew off his concern, insisting I just really love the words now and wanted to be faithful to the words.

DAY TWO

Salma: I was at Wilderness Festival, feeling smug about not using emojis for precisely one solitary day, and decided to give a full-on digital detox a whirl. I didn't need my phone anyway – not when I had booze and a literary tent and the knowledge I wasn't at work but the majority of my friends definitely were.

Two hours later, I was stressing. How could I post Instagram pics with emojis? How could I send irritating "I'm here skinny dipping in the lake / fire-walking / drinking lots of cider and you're at the office" messages to my friends without the help of the smiley devil face to make it clear that I'm not actually a huge dickhead? It was like having a meal and not being able to taste anything.

Yasmin: By this point I'd decided to compensate for the visible lack of emotion in all my messages by using loads of exclamation marks, because people who use loads of exclamation marks come across as happy, right!!?!?!?! Turns out: no. You just look like you really, really need to up your Xanax dose. That, or people think you're being sarcastic. I got a message while planning an evening out with my friend Cherish, for instance, that read: "Why do you sound so bored?" Even the addition of extra exclamation marks didn't have her convinced.

DAY THREE

Salma: My phone had run out of battery at this point, which, yes, is kind of cheating in the whole "don't use emojis challenge", but also an act of God and something that was completely out of my control.

Yasmin: It was Friday and I was actually getting used to living an emoji-free life. I had grand plans to do absolutely nothing with my evening, bar ignore all incoming messages and watch Netflix, but then something happened: I found out that Iris Apfel – the 94-year-old businesswoman and fashion icon – had released her own line of emojis. I am a massive Iris Apfel fan. I follow her on Instagram; I periodically make my friends re-watch the documentary that was released about her in 2014; I plan to buy all of her belongings at auction and become her in later life. So naturally, my first reaction upon hearing about her emoji line was to download it from the app store. Problem was, I couldn't actually use any of the emojis yet, so I just called it an early night, turned all the lights off and went to sleep, because seriously what's the point.

DAY FOUR

Salma: I gave in and blew £10 to charge my phone, and then I gave in again. One of my closest friends was leaving for China for good, and our Whatsapp conversation felt flat – like I couldn't care less about our 15 years of friendship. So I used an emoji. Or, actually, three emojis: the China flag, cocktails and my favourite, the aubergine. I regret nothing, but I was slightly shocked at how I had to resort to emojis to lift the mood.

Yasmin: From the outset, I knew the weekend would be hard; Saturday is a key day for making plans, and it's near-impossible to make a plan without using emojis, because without them there are zero ways to convey your excitement / joy / apprehension, etc, etc, etc. Because of this, I actually typed "thumbs up" when a friend messaged me to confirm our plans for the evening, which seemed absolutely fine at the time, but – in retrospect – does not. I was very much looking forward to using emojis again.

DAY FIVE

Salma: Going emoji free is harder than giving up drink during Ramadan; at least with that you know there's something nice in a glass waiting for you right at the very end. With this, the reward is being able to send your friend an instantly forgettable illustration of a pizza slice. Day five sucked.

Yasmin: Hungover and feeling incredibly sorry myself, I didn't feel the need to message too many friends to complain, because looking at a screen was painful and overwhelming. So that worked in my favour, I guess, and as I eventually watched the clock tick over past midnight, I felt some kind of sense of accomplishment. I had gone five whole days without using any emojis, and was maybe better for it?

A TIME FOR REFLECTION

Salma: The most unexpected aspect of the experiment was that I felt that my personality had been compromised. It's hard to convey any real emotion with words alone; you just sound miserable the entire time. I'm sure people managed it on SMS before emojis existed, but I – like many of my friends – really must now be conditioned to rely on them to communicate certain things.

Yasmin: If this experiment proved anything it's that I, totally unconsciously, use emojis way more than I thought I did at the beginning of this week. Don't bother hating me; I already despise myself for what I've become.

@its_me_salma / @YasminAJeffery

More on VICE:

I Dressed Like an Idiot at London Fashion Week to See How Easy It Is to Get Style Blogged

A Day in the Life of a Pornstar Couple

I Acted Like a Dickhead for a Week and It Did Me a World Of Good

An image of regret (via Jake Lewis)

Yes it turns out all those late nights in the libraries and all those times you put a funnel of alcohol into your body to try and impress people and all those dress up events you put so much effort into attending and all those time you walked home, your shoes held in your hands because you'd danced them into agony, your feet wet and cold on the pavement beneath you, eating toast from the Christian Union, overall just completely disappointing your parents, and all of it for a just-about-2.1 in History, all that: turns out that was all absolutely not worth it, because a survey of graduates has found that a good third entirely regret going to university at all, mainly because of the debt but for other good reasons too.

According to a study from the insurer Aviva – and I'm not sure why Aviva are getting involved, really, like what does insurance have to do with the deep cuts of regret that sear through your life – but according to Aviva around 37 per cent of graduates under 35 regret getting a degree because of the enormous debts they accrued doing it.

Additionally 49 per cent of graduates think they could have got to where they are without their degrees (this is just a statistical rewording of that uncle you have who spends every Christmas getting drunk and telling you, "YOU WANT TO SPEND A FEW TERMS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LIFE" because you're so "WET BEHIND THE TWAT"), with those in the south east less likely to regret going to university, and those in Wales, the West Midlands and north east more likely to regret the whole thing/reckon they could've got where they got without it.

This is all tacked on to the announcement last week that university fees are expected to rise next year, tenuously in line with inflation, to £9,250 per year – plus the idea of university debt being tied to the already financially doomed future of most millennials, who basically will never buy a house, never afford to retire, and are basically struggling just to keep a Netflix subscription going at the moment. It's all good. It's... it's all good.

"Millennials are plagued with uncertainty about the outlook for their financial futures, an issue which has not been helped by the uncertainty of today's economic and political climate," Aviva's Louise Colley said. "The financial hangover from university has also led many in this age group to question whether in hindsight they made the right decision and how much value it has brought to their current position."

I personally reckon we should just start a knowledge pool of all the stuff we can just about remember learning from our degrees, undercutting the higher education industry with one big forum thread, outlawing the need for this system and its inherent debt altogether. I'll start: pretty sure the word 'beef' is part of the English language because of the French invasion of 1066 (we, the English, just called beef 'cow' back then, before the French came in with their fancy words and their fancy ways), and also the aftermath of the plague was basically the advent of the middle class (poor field workers were in short supply post-plague, so were able to barter houses and land and stuff for doing their jobs, and then when they got them they got bang into Whole Foods and holistic schooling). That's it, that's all I learnt. Oh, and a psychology student once told me picking the label off your beer means you're sexually frustrated. Right. That's, like, eight grand's worth of knowledge right there. Pretty sure you can blag your way through a job interview with that. Done. We beat the system. Done!

@joelgolby

Coming soon on VICE: Is University Worth It?

From 18th August, the day that thousands of sixth formers find out whether they've got a place at university, VICE investigates whether it still makes sense to be a student. As tuition fees rise, maintenance grants are scrapped, and research finds that graduates from a number of universities are less likely to find work than school leavers, we look into whether higher education can still provide a transformative experience for your mind, your prospects and your social life.

More on university:

What It's Really Like to Go On 'University Challenge'

Cider Casualties and Angry Stoners: A Night with Exeter University's Campus Security

What the Hell Are Britain's Universities For?

Image via Marvel Comics

I've been blind since birth. Growing up, I devoured novels translated into braille and adapted into audio books, but there was never an equivalent for comic books. While my sighted friends were enjoying Batman and Spider-Man comics, I became complacent with hearing about them secondhand but never experiencing the stories for myself.

Later, I would discover companies like Audio Comics and Graphic Audio, which have produced audio versions of comics. But browsing the websites that sell their audio comics can be challenging when you're blind. Which is exactly why Guy Hasson created Comics Empower, an online comic book store for the blind.

The Comics Empower website was designed to put blind and visually impaired customers first by providing original and adapted audio comics produced in-house, plus audio comics produced by other companies. The store is completely accessible to the blind or visually impaired using a high-contrast display or a screen reader. On the contrary, sighted people who visit the store will need to use adaptive tools and techniques to navigate or ask a visually impaired person for assistance.

I reached out to Hasson to ask him about why he created the store and what he envisions as the future of comics for the blind.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

VICE: Tell me about how you got into comics.
Guy Hasson: I grew up in Israel. We didn't really have any comics—not Spider-Man, not Superman. We just had two comics, which were both in black-and-white. One was Tarzan. I don't remember the other's name, but it was kind of a Tarzan rip-off, with adventures in Africa.

When I got to the United States at age 11, the first thing I bought was a Spider-Man comic book. And that's it, I was hooked. Three years later, I was in high school, and I'd go to the used comic book store two minutes away from the school at the end of every day, where I would pick up some kind of old, cheap comic book with my lunch money.

How did you come up with the idea of making a comic store for the blind?
I was running an indie comic book company called New Worlds Comics for a year and a half, when suddenly a thought came to me: Why are there no comics for the blind? And then I figured out how to do it, how to translate everything to audio, how to build the website, how to create the store, and so on. In a month and a half, the website was up with a few comic books, just to see if they were done right. Once people reacted well to them, we were off to the races.

But you're not blind or visually impaired, right?
No, and there was no one blind or visually impaired in my family or friends at the time who could have triggered this thought. There was no real reason for me to think of it. But once I had figured out how to do it, it was just a crime not to do it.

There are literally tens of thousands of kids, teens, and adults out there who would love to read the same comic books their sighted friends are reading and to talk to them about it, without waiting for the friends or family to read the comics to them. By accident, it turned out to be one of the most important things I've done in my life.

Comics Empower has created its own in-house audio adaptations of comic books. What's the difference between those and, say, Audio Comics or Graphic Audio adaptations?
Those are really good productions. We actually sell Audio Comics productions at Comics Empower, and I hope that Graphic Audio will allow us to sell its comics as well. We're a comic book store, not a comic book publisher—so anyone who creates great comic books can be sold at Comics Empower.

Having said that, Comics Empower does create a lot of audio productions for comics, and we do it differently from Graphic Audio or Audio Comics. They have great productions with a big cast and music and they create, as they say, "a movie in your head." Comics Empower, on the other hand, creates comic books with one actor per comic, and no music. We give the comic book experience, rather than a movie experience, going page by page, panel by panel, to give you the entire experience of reading a comic book in a way that keeps your interest going, start to finish.

We did a little poll after releasing Audio Comics, and it turned out that though people like both types, there was a large preference to the comic book experience rather than the movie experience. That actually surprised me.

On Motherboard: 'A Blind Legend' Uses Binaural Audio to Create a Game for the Visually Impaired

How did you decide to have panel descriptions and a single narrator?
That's how you read a comic book. There's only one voice: the voice in your head. And you go page by page, and you go down each page from one panel to another, following the story, reading the speech bubbles, the captions, and so on. That's the comic book experience I have, that everyone has, and that is the experience that's inaccessible to so many people.

What is your future outlook for blind comic book writers, and why do you think that way?
We've had two winners for the writing competition for a blind or visually impaired comic book writer. After all, now that you can read comics, there is no reason in the world you can't write comics. And, indeed, there are two first-place winners because their writing was really good.

One comic, Bakasura, is about a mysterious demon haunting a town in India. And the other, Unseen, is about a blind assassin. Both are very different from each other, and both are very good. There is no reason that the writers, Pranav Lal and Chad Allen, can't sell their comics to Marvel or DC, and maybe in the future get TV or movie deals. And there's no reason other blind or visually impaired writers can't do the same.

Follow Robert Kingett on Twitter.

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

Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons

US NEWS

Trump Denies Gun Rights Remark Was Veiled Threat
Donald Trump's campaign has been forced to deny that he was calling for violence against Hillary Clinton after saying "Second Amendment people" could "maybe" stop Clinton from nominating Supreme Court justices. His campaign issued a statement saying Trump only meant people supporting the Second Amendment would vote together.—CBS News

Baltimore Police Found to Violate Civil Rights
A Department of Justice report released today finds that the Baltimore Police Department routinely violated civil rights, disproportionately targeting black residents in poor neighborhoods. Some orders were found to be "explicitly discriminatory," such as an order to arrest "all the black hoodies" in a neighborhood.—The Baltimore Sun

Emails Raise Questions About Clinton Foundation Ties to State Department
Newly released email exchanges between employees at the Clinton Foundation and the State Department from 2009 appear to show the charitable foundation seeking government influence. The 44 email exchanges show discussions about US donors and business people expressing interest in overseas policy matters.—The New York Times

Gunfire Report at Ferguson Protest March
Gunfire was reported in Ferguson, Missouri, on Tuesday evening at a protest march marking the second anniversary of the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown. A spokesman for the city said police responded to reports of gunfire after a pedestrian had been struck by a passing car, but the reports have not yet been confirmed.—NBC News

INTERNATIONAL NEWS

Brazil Senate Votes for Impeachment Trial
Brazil's Senate has voted to hold an impeachment trial for suspended president Dilma Rousseff, who's accused of breaking a budget law and using illegal accounting methods. A two-thirds majority is needed in a final vote following the trial, due to begin in the week after the Olympics closing ceremony.—BBC News

Leaked Files Show Abuse at Australian Detention Camp
More than 2,000 leaked incident reports from Australia's offshore detention center for asylum seekers on Nauru reveal widespread abuse and trauma inflicted on children and women. The files include seven reports of sexual assault and 59 reports of assault on children, including guards allegedly slapping children in the face.—The Guardian

Vietnam Moves Rocket Launchers onto Disputed Islands
Vietnam has placed mobile rocket launchers on several islands in the disputed South China Sea, according to Western officials. The launchers have yet to be armed but have been placed strategically on five bases in the Spratly Islands in recent months, a development likely to raise tensions with China.—Reuters

Hospital Fire Kills 11 Babies in Iraq
At least 11 prematurely born babies have been killed in a fire at a hospital in the Iraqi capital Baghdad. The health ministry said the fire broke out inside the maternity unit at Yarmouk Teaching Hospital. Seven other children and 29 women were rescued and moved to a nearby hospital in the city.—Al Jazeera

Photo by Jean Catuffe / Getty

EVERYTHING ELSE

Michael Phelps Wins Two More Golds
Michael Phelps won another two gold medals at the Rio Olympics on Tuesday night, claiming the 20th and 21st golds of his career. He won the men's 200m butterfly and the men's 4 x 200m Olympic freestyle relay.—CNN

Michael Jordan Gives $5 Million to African American Museum
The NBA legend has donated $5 million to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. The museum, set to open September 24, will feature a gallery named "The Michael Jordan Hall: Game Changers."—USA Today

KFC Urged to Stop Antibiotics in Chicken Supply Chain
A coalition of consumer groups will deliver a petition from more than 350,000 people to KFC today, calling on the fast food giant to stop the routine use of antibiotics by the companies that supply its chicken.—Reuters

Canada Seizes 50 Million Doses of Elephant Tranquilizer
Canadian agents seized a huge shipment of carfentanil, a synthetic drug typically used to sedate elephants. Police expressed fears about the health impact if the shipment, enough to produce 50 million doses, had "made its way to the street."—VICE News

Humans Use Up Earth's Resources for 2016
Human beings have officially overspent the planet's resource budget for the year, according to the Global Footprint Network. We reached Earth Overshoot Day on August 8, taking more natural capital than the planet can reproduce.—Motherboard

China Pissed Off About Incorrect Flags in Rio
Olympic organizers have pledged to remove all misaligned Chinese flags that keep popping up during the games. China flags used in Rio have featured small stars not correctly tilted toward the large star.—VICE Sports

Catherine Opie, courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong

This story appeared in the August issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

Photographer Catherine Opie is perhaps best known for her portraits of Los Angeles's leather-dyke community. Her work, which has been widely exhibited, including in a major survey at the Guggenheim, is formally beautiful—she cites Lewis Hine, among others, as an influence—and in addition to portraiture includes studio and landscape photography. Here she captures life at a rodeo in Oregon.

Tommy Wiseau. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Ever since The Room became a critically panned cult classic, its star and director Tommy Wiseau has been leveraging the fan love into other gigs and products. His website sells all The Room merch one might expect (shirts, posters, footballs), as well as a line of unisex underwear with "TOMMY WISEAU" prominently displayed on the waistband of each pair. So I wasn't entirely surprised when I heard about a new dating site catering primarily to fans of The Room.

On the surface, TheRoomDating.com sounds cute, if not a bit niche—a place for fans of the film to congregate and find love. Sure, the interface looks like it was built in the Myspace era, with all its widgets and sidebar menus, but it's got all the standard-issue components for a dating site.

Once you make an account, you can choose to connect with boys, girls, or The Room movie fans. You can also select whether you're there for friends, chatting, dates, felatio , or whatever "vampire cutting" is. Then there's a "3D chat" function, which puts you in a 3D-rendered penthouse overlooking the ocean while a demonic voiceover of Tim Curry from the 1985 film Legend narrates: "Beneath the skin, we are already one. Was it not your sin that trapped the unicorn? Even now, the evil seed of what you've done germinates within you."

Screencap of the 3D chat room on TheRoomDating.com

For a dating site purportedly for fans of The Room, though, TRD has scant few nods to its namesake film. Besides the aforementioned checkbox to connect with other fans, the only real connections to the movie I could find were on the site's social-media pages (like a "tearing apart" reference on the Twitter page). Even weirder, when I looked up the site's domain registration, it appeared to be registered to none other than Greg Sestero, Wiseau's longtime friend and co-star in The Room.

Every answer I sought about this website only yielded more questions. I reached out to Sestero, but he did not return multiple requests for an interview. So in a desperate Hail Mary, I reached out to Wiseau himself—and surprisingly, he agreed to talk to me.

Here is the transcript of our phone call. All very much .

Photo via theroommovie.com

VICE: I came across the site the other day and wondered if it was real and if you were behind it. Are you?
Tommy Wiseau: What are you referring to?

TheRoomDating.com.
Oh. So what we're doing there... Well, we're promoting the underwear. I don't know if you know, but I'm the designer as well.

Yes, the "open style" ones?
No. TommyWiseau.com. The underwear.

Yes. I was told by your guy you called them "open style underwear."
No, I'm not familiar with that one.

OK. Sorry about that.
You go to TommyWiseau.com... I've been doing this for five years actually. And we are trying to promoting in a different way. And I think one of the ways we are promoting is TheRoomDating.com, and they have a tremendous response there, so this is one of the, you know, territories where it happens, basically.

So did you, yourself, set up TheRoomDating.com, or did a third party?
Well, I think it's from third party. You know, I'm promoting underwear, as I mentioned. So that's what we're doing here.

I appreciate the opportunity to link up with you about that but—
We'll see what happens.

Right. Well, can you tell me more about how your underwear fits into dating, then?
Well, my design is very unique. There's a special pocket inside the underwear. It's for ladies as well as for guys. We've had really great response. As you probably know, I travel across the country once a month for special events. You can go to TheRoomMovie.com and, next time, we're actually going to Portland, we've just come back from Philadelphia. Actually The Room right now is much bigger than ever. I don't know why, but I think it's good.

Screencap via TheRoomDating.com

Yeah. Why question success?
So basically, either way, you have 100 percent cotton. Actually 95 percent with the spandex, which is 5 percent, and it's very comfy. And we have three different styles, actually three different styles, actually six different styles, but it's typical two styles. Three styles. Like a brief, boxer, and... as well as... um...

Boxer briefs?
No. And also trunks. Also we have a style called "open style." Like the fly you open. But we have a really great response. I may open a store. I'm not sure yet. I have a lot going on. I'm working, as you know, on The Neighbors, and we're doing a vampire movie.

Oh? You're working on a vampire movie too?
Mmhm. Well, it's the first one. Not two.

I meant "also," not the number two.
That's what I meant, too. That's funny. Sometimes on the phone, when you talk, it's funny. So that's basically pretty exciting. As I said, we have a tremendous TheRoomDating.com response, and my understanding is it's really beneficial for us to promote the underwear in a way. The concept is like you meet someone, you go to see The Room, or vice versa. I think with different couples we'll see what happens.

Photo courtesy of Tommy Wiseau

But how do you think you can grow a whole relationship out of a shared love of one movie?
What do you mean?

OK, what would you say is the best way The Room and the site can bring people together?
You know, The Room, I discovered, also, you know, as I mentioned, we have many events called "special events" right now while we're touring: 2016 Love is Blind Tour. I've noticed that some people actually meet at The Room. They're strangers; they have a similar in common.

For many years, as you probably know, the media was very brutal with us. They didn't understand the micro-activity. For example, some of the actors, they still have some kind of delusional ideas about The Room. Basically, you know, I create The Room, attempt to have fun with it. They don't understand that. They think, Oh, it happened by accident. Well, nothing happens by accident. They can't be behind the scenes of The Room. As you probably know, we released the Blu-ray as well as DVD, so you can see my work. Let me give you an example. I always like to give examples. That's the best way. "The script did not exist." Y'know? It's laughable. It's just complete— You have a segment of America, as well worldwide, and people believe this garbage. It's completely garbage, you know. And it's very disrespectful, you know? And I don't care if they don't like my movie. That's fine with me, but it's not right when people are doing some kind of propaganda. "Oh, the script does not exist. He did not know what he was doing." You know, I've experienced 20 years in the movie industry directly and indirectly, you know? And I can survive to make movies basically, to be an actor. So, I love it. That's my passion.

Do you feel that's mostly just people not understanding your vision?
They don't. That's the problem. You see, even today, the media actually prefers to talk about some kind of issue with all the culture instead of figuring out what The Room is about. The Room, in my view, is part of culture actually, directly and indirectly. We've got people who really love us, you know? Actually we get good numbers, you know? For example, Philadelphia, we had more than 1,200 people. So it was spectacular—they actually did an extra screening Saturday because it was all sold out, you see. So people don't see positive things about The Room. But it actually connects people, directly and indirectly, and I'm always promoting it. I've been promoting it the past 13 years, 14 years, and I want people to have fun with it. They don't understand the concept, and it's sad, you know? That's not my concern actually, though, because I'm happy.

I can personally attest to The Room connecting people. It's not a love story, but when—
Actually speaking of love, since you mentioned it, Justin, we have a couple—that I know of, OK, so I don't know how many are out there—but I know of at least two people who got married because of The Room, directly and indirectly. I didn't ask, though, because I'm a very respectful person. That's another thing people don't understand about me but never mind about that.

When I first moved to Los Angeles, I went to a screening of The Room, and I ended up meeting a guy who would become one of my best friends, and through him, I started writing professionally. So I owe my career to you, in a way.
Oh wow! I did not know I would learn this today.

Yep. We met at The Room.
Well, hopefully you liked it.

I love it. That's why we're talking now. But back to you. Are you currently dating anyone?
Yeah, I have a relationship, and I think that we all need it. It's a part of our nature if you really think about it. I always encourage people, you know, to have— Actually, last time at a screening of The Room, I stayed and said, "If you don't know anybody, don't worry about it. Just when you're sitting in the theater." At the time of the screening, I said, "Say hello to the guy or person next to you in the seat, just for fun." I don't know how that turned out, but I noticed people have fun with The Room, you know? And that's the idea behind it, you know? Sometimes people ask me, "Do you want to change anything about The Room?" and I say, "Hey, I would not change anything." Of course I would not use two cameras—waste of money—but by the same token, you know, I don't think I would change so much.

Back to dating, though, what's the most romantic thing you've ever done for someone else?
What do you mean by that?

Well, going off The Room itself, you're a bit of a romantic at heart, no?
Yeah. What I did to my own life? Huh, that's a good one. Well, I did go to Hawaii with a person. And I paid for the ticket! I like to go for dinner sometimes. You know, basic stuff. You can be kind to the person. Help the person with her affairs in the date. But there's also a limitation to what you can do, you know? People thought it's tricky to be there in a relationship—they can do whatever they want. I don't think people balance right. I go by my studies of psychology 101. Again, that involves everybody: politicians, actors, lawyers, and others. Writers, etc. We don't have the same thing, but we have a tendency within the society to criticize, always think we do the right thing, but mostly people who I notice who criticize. Actually, to me, they're behind schedule. So you have to be, you have to balance it. Because if somebody criticizes your writing or my movie, all that behavior, there's nothing wrong with that. It actually helps it. But it also limits how a person, he or she, will conduct within the prejudice. Is this their hatred, or a bully, etc.

Right.
We have a lot of situations with some other writers where they bully like crazy because mostly writers or reporters, you probably know—that's what I know—they wanna be a big star like a rock star. You probably know about it. So, again, you can see this in American politics right now. When a reporter asks questions and some of those questions are completely off the wall, which there is nothing that calls for that.

Hopefully nothing has been too off the wall for you here today.
No, not yet, but we'll see what happens. Sometimes we have an event at the university, right? And they write me sometimes, especially kids and students, and they ask me questions and I say, "Hey, it's not appropriate, that." And they are very surprised. If you don't like my movie, that's OK. I still love you. It's no problem because, you see, it's important to be honest, you know. But, I always say: You may not like my movie, The Room, but eventually, maybe, you find something that is funny and you say, "Well, maybe I enjoy a little bit."

There's something in it for everyone.
I'm not expecting everybody to enjoy The Room, you know. That's why when I designed Tommy Wiseau website, when we actually working on it, we only have one category, The Room section. But we wanna condense everything, just to tackle all the public who maybe don't like The Room. People have their own preference.

I'll close on one more question about dating, as that's the focus of this piece here. What would you suggest as the perfect first date for two people who met on TheRoomDating.com?
I think the best thing is don't think too much about it and be respectful. It's a dilemma with getting it to work. So first you have to have respect for the person and then don't expect much. Be honest. And go to TommyWiseau.com and buy new underwear, which is very easy to wash, et cetera. So, you know. Let me just end out on this word. If a lot of people love one another, the world would be a better place to live. Thank you very much, I love you all.

Follow Justin Caffier on Twitter.

A gavel. (via)

A very blue exchange occurred in Chelmsford Crown Court between a judge and a big fat racist on Tuesday, as judge Patricia Lynch QC sentenced defendant John Hennigan to 18 months in jail for racially abusing a Caribbean woman.

Hennigan, who looks a bit like every racist football firm movie extra was melted into one gigantic mega-prick, or the final boss in a video game about corpulent anti-Semites, has 23 convictions for 47 offences, mostly for being a racist shithouse.

After the sentence was handed down, Hennigan told the judge that she was "a bit of a cunt", to which the QC replied: "You're a bit of a cunt yourself. Being offensive to me doesn't help." It would have been better without the second sentence but it's still pretty good for a judge. Hennigan then told her: "Go fuck yourself". "You too," she replied.

After the heated exchange, Hennigan banged on the glass of his stand, sieg heiled twice and sang a ditty about gassing Jews. The judge mocked Hennigan's actions by saying: "We're all very impressed. Take him down."

Though some may chide the judge for unprofessionalism, it's difficult to see the problem, not out of a sense of righteousness, but through a sense of defending the facts. Hennigan confronts mothers who have young children present. He has to be court-ordered not to be racist in public. The guy is clearly a cunt. Let the records show it in perpetuity throughout the universe.

@joe_bish

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