Jimmy Limit is a photographer from St. Catharines, Ontario. He traditionally works with ceramics and sculpture in a controlled studio space. In an attempt to break out of that rigid structure he visited Ralphy's Retreat, an animal sanctuary in Ontario that mainly houses rescued pigs.

While at the sanctuary Limit quickly realized the complications of shooting animals.

"Pigs do what pigs wanna do and they're really big and heavy and it's hard to move them. They wanted to eat watermelon, so the photos are mostly pigs eating watermelon."

We're OK with that.

On the season premiere of Weediquette, host Krishna Andavolu continues to chronicle pot's journey into the mainstream. This week, he'll talk to people fighting Child Protective Services over their pot usage.

Weediquette airs Wednesdays at 10 PM on VICELAND.

So, uh, is this ship sinking or what? Vancouver photo by Flickr user David J Laporte

If you've been following headlines over the summer, you might think Canada's real estate market is on the edge of total meltdown.

One of the latest warnings came from a finance dude who traded for Lehman Brothers before they went bankrupt in 2008 (lol, right?); Jared Dillian told the Wall Street website Mauldin Economics that Canada's housing market "is in extreme bubble territory," adding, "I don't see how it could get much worse."

In an interview picked up by Forbes and Global, Dillian said Canadian real estate has become a "very popular short," now "crowded" by US investors like himself, keen to make money off a Canadian crash. (VICE talked to one such shortseller earlier this summer). And, because our banks don't play around with derivatives like their American counterparts, Dillian predicted the crash would be slow and painful over many years, rather than quick and dirty like the 2008 crisis. By Chinese media's estimation, our debt levels will make it even worse.

For those of us living in Vancouver, this has been an easy enough narrative to swallow. Housing has been horribly expensive for years now, and the last six months have broken all kinds of records for insane prices and unprecedented sales, not to mention rising eviction complaints. But even as banks pump out new studies that say affordability in Vancouver is the worst it's ever been, there are plenty of reasons to ignore the Lehman bro. That he has an obvious vested interest in a crash, and his former employer was super-duper wrong that one time, is only part of it. The bottom line is: Vancouver ≠ Canada.

Read More: Meet the Wall Street Shortseller Betting Against Canadian Real Estate

To get a better handle on all this bubble talk, I called up Robert Hogue, senior economist at RBC Economic Research and coauthor of a study released yesterday that confirmed housing affordability in Vancouver is in the actual worst in the country. The bank measured this by comparing median incomes to average "homeownership costs" including mortgage payments, utilities and taxes.

Hogue says Vancouver had its biggest drop in affordability since they started measuring this stuff over the first two quarters of 2016. Right now housing costs sit at 90.3 percent of what a Vancouverite earns before taxes. That's an 18.3 percent drop in affordability over this time last year. (Ownership costs for single-detached homes are an even more ridiculous 126.8 percent of median incomes).

"I think the numbers speak for themselves," Hogue told VICE. "This clearly puts significant pressure on affordability that was already stretched to begin with."

But just because Vancouver's prices have shot up an unsustainable 30 percent in a year, doesn't mean the whole country's housing market is about to come down. By Hogue's account, Vancouver is an outlier when you look at the country as a whole. "We're really only talking about two markets, Toronto and particularly Vancouver, where affordability is deteriorating—not only deteriorating, but at an accelerating pace," he told VICE. "Elsewhere the vast majority of markets are balanced and not an issue."

On the list of least affordable cities, Toronto is second at 60.2 percent, followed by Victoria at 51.4 percent. The rest of Canada is holding stable well below the country's 42.8 percent average. "Most markets across Canada are pretty much within historical norms," he said.

In fact, depending who you ask, the crash has already begun. Vancouver's house-buying bonanza already started slowing down in July, and has dropped off dramatically in the first half of August, after the British Columbia government brought in a tax on foreign investment. Upscale areas like Richmond and West Vancouver saw up to a 94 percent drop in sales in the first two weeks of the month, with prices coming down as much as 24.5 percent over the last three months.

Hogue points out that even a 20 percent drop in Vancouver only takes us back about nine months in prices—a time when the market was still deemed unaffordable. Though it seems pretty dramatic—"frozen solid" or "imploded" by some observers' characterization—it could just as easily be the correction the area needed.

Another study by TD Bank seems to back up the fact that Vancouver and Toronto are on totally different levels, and headed in different directions. The study found Vancouver is facing a "modest correction" that could see prices come down 10 percent over the next year. On the other hand, TD found Toronto has room to for prices to grow, and investors snubbed by the new BC tax might just move their money east.

If you ask Tsur Somerville, director of UBC's Centre for Urban Economics and Real Estate, we've been entirely too fast and loose with the bubble label—particularly on a national scale. "Bubble is a very particular definition in economics. Just because prices are higher than equilibrium—that's not the definition of a bubble. That's part of it," he told VICE. With interest rates so low, he says it's impossible to definitively say what we're seeing is a bubble.

Seeing the drop in Vancouver sales in August, Somerville thinks the Vancouver market could go in a number of directions, but says the smartest move is to wait and see. "Before the tax was announced, sales were already dropping year on year, so you had a bunch of things going on at the same time, which makes it very hard to make a bold declaration."

"I think people are looking for explanations, and people are driven to think what they want to be the narrative, and are looking for facts to support that."

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.

Still via 'DOPESICK'

As British Columbia continues to grapple with skyrocketing rates of fentanyl overdoses, a new study confirms that the highly potent opioid has tainted the majority of drugs on the streets of Vancouver.

Tonight, the season premiere of Weediquette airs on VICELAND at 10 PM. (Watch a trailer above.) In advance of the new season, Weediquette host Krishna Andavolu talked to us about what to expect in tonight's episode—which focuses on pot-smoking parents' battles with Child Protective Services—and the coming season. Read an edited and condensed version of his thoughts below.

We're continuing to chronicle marijuana's move from counterculture into the mainstream, a process that's happened very quickly and with a great amount of excitement. At the same time, though, a lot of people are being left behind.

Our first episode is about parents who have been accused of neglecting their children because they use pot for medical reasons in Kansas, a state where weed is still illegal. For a lot of new entrepreneurs and patients, in the back of their mind they're asking, What am I risking by integrating parenting and pot? That's a question I ask, too, because I'm a young parent—I have a 2-year-old—and I tend to have a lot of pot around me because of my job. We follow the stories of two single moms who don't come from a lot of privilege and are in the midst of having their kids removed because of their weed usage.

With parenting and pot, if you're rich, you're gonna be fine—but if you're not, you're prey to government entities that think that pot is an indicator of poor parental decisions. We lead with that story because it gets at the heart of what Weediquette can do: seeing the larger themes of American life that run through the edifice of pot legalization. I think about why I can do things that I can do and other people can't. As a father, there's nothing that's more important to me in life than my child. What is it like for other people who feel similarly?

While shooting the first season, we found that we're at a point in our culture's relationship with marijuana where it can be commensurate with family life—for a long time, weed was something that was thought to tear families apart. In the second season, we look at weed and community: people forming around their beliefs of what pot can do for them. From football players to Native American tribes, from small business owners in Michigan to people who are trying to kick opiate addiction in Maine—there are so many different pockets of communities that are trying to integrate marijuana into what they think might help them. When you see the world through their eyes, you see that pot is a metonym for other bigger factors in their lives.

Another episode later in the season focuses on how Michigan police use licensed and legal medical-marijuana grows as easy pickings to do raids on. Under the doctrine of civil asset forfeiture, they're able to seize, sell, and fund their police departments from these raids. It's a weird situation, where pot's legal and everyone knows about it but the cops, and it's also another bump in this road to legalization, where the culture of policing—which has been so shaped by the moneyed incentive of the war on drugs—continues despite the fact that weed is actually legal in Michigan. Through stories like these, pot becomes the prism through which we can unpack existential points of conflict that this country still struggles with.

In the episode about opiate addiction, we went to an uncredited backwoods detox facility in rural Maine where former opiate addicts were treating current opiate addicts by giving them massive amounts of THC, so they could get through the effects of withdrawal and form a new identity toward treating their pain. A man I met along that way got into an accident, hurt his back, and went to the doctor. The doctor prescribed Oxycontin, and the man became addicted; the doctor kept upping the dosage, and at some point, the doctor labeled him an addict. The man could no longer get the opiates through prescription, so he went to the street and eventually started doing heroin. It's a perfect example of how the institution of pain management in the medical system has failed a gigantic amount of the population in this country, and how that has reached epidemic levels at this point. It affects the life expectancy of white males in the US, which hasn't gone down since World War II—but now it has because of the opiate crisis.

As much as medical marijuana is taken seriously, it's still treated as a joke—like, "This is an excuse to get high." But interactions like these provide moments where you see how medical marijuana factors into a profound sense of distrust in this country's institutions. How do you pick up the pieces and move on? What's the next step? It's surprisingly profound stuff, and we scratch the surface of people's motivations, and they lay themselves bare. We're forced to confront with how we treat people.

Serotonin was supposed to be our friend. Though often referred to by science blogs as the "happiness hormone," in recent years, serotonin's role in making us happy has come into question.

If you've ever taken selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs)—drugs like Prozac and Zoloft that boost your levels of serotonin—you probably know the results can actually be a mixed bag, particularly in the first few weeks. In my case, sometimes I feel like my life force is being tickled by God, but then other times I'm sure my bedroom walls are about to cave in and crush me.

A new study out of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill attempts to get to the root of this problem. Using lab mice, the experiment investigated the cause of the roller-coaster-like serotonin ramp-up period for SSRIs. The researchers found something puzzling, confirming that serotonin activates circuitry in a certain area of the brain that's directly tied to fear and anxiety.

According to Thomas Kash, a professor of pharmacology at University of North Carolina School of Medicine, and one of the co-authors of the study, researchers may need to focus on this part of the brain—called the BNST, which stands for bed nucleus of the stria terminalis—if they want to understand anxiety.

"This highlights the important role of this structure, the BNST, in anxiety disorders, adding to a growing body of literature suggesting that this may be a potent regulator of different types of anxiety behavior," Kash told VICE.

That's partly because by watching what was going on in the BNST, Kash's research team demonstrated how serotonin-boosting drugs may be tied to anxiety—the exact thing SSRIs are used to treat in the first place. Even more unsettlingly, the researchers also found that naturally occurring serotonin might play a role in activating fear systems as well.

To get to these findings, researchers zapped the paws of the lab mice with electricity and watched a specific area of the brain produce serotonin and deliver it to the BNST. They found that when the flow of serotonin was increased, so were the mouse's anxiety symptoms. Applying Prozac to the BNST also increased anxiety.

Sure, the mice were better able to cope with their paws being shocked, so serotonin was working as advertised. But the experiment essentially confirmed that serotonin was making the recently zapped mice anxious.

It's a reminder that calling serotonin a "happiness hormone" may give the wrong impression. In fact, according to Skirmantas Janusonis, an associate professor of neuroscience at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who studies the brain serotonin system, that characterization only scratches the surface of what serotonin actually does.

"The entire brain is embedded in a dense meshwork of serotonin-releasing fibers, but only a small part of the brain is directly involved in the feelings that we can consciously access—be it sadness or joy," Janusonis told VICE. "SSRIs hit the entire system indiscriminately."

According to Kash, the results found in the lab mice could easily translate to humans, who share the BNST brain region. In human imaging studies, he said, "activation of the BNST has been associated with anxiety and dread in human imaging studies.

"It is plausible that when we give people acute SSRI, this region is recruited to drive anxiety in some people," Kash said. "However," he added, "we will not know until somebody tests this directly."

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

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

Photo by Susana Gonzalez/Bloomberg via Getty

US News

Mexican President Disputes Trump's Wall Claims
Donald Trump has repeatedly promised to build "a great wall" along the US-Mexico border and insisted Mexico will pay for it, "100 percent." But on Wednesday, Trump said he did not discuss who will pay for the wall during his high-profile meeting with Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto. Nieto, however, said on Twitter that they did discuss it and that he "made clear that Mexico will not pay for the wall." —CNN

About 8.4 Million Americans Use Marijuana Regularly
Pot is more popular than ever, according to a new study in the Lancet Psychiatry. The number of daily or near-daily marijuana users rose from 3.9 million in 2002 to 8.4 million 2014. As for plain old marijuana users—defined here as anyone who has used pot in the past year—the number went from 21.9 million to 31.9 million.—CBS News

Democrats Used Black Lives Matter Cheat Sheet
Democrat lawmakers were given their very own "do's and don'ts" cheat sheet on dealing with Black Lives Matter activists, according to a memo obtained and leaked by hacker Guccifer 2.0. It warns not use the phrase "all lives matter" and advises Democrats to "listen to their concerns" but not to "offer support for concrete policy positions." —VICE News

Former Atlanta Cop Indicted in Fatal Shooting
Former Atlanta police officer James Burns has been indicted by a grand jury for the June killing of an unarmed black man named Deravis Caine Rogers. Burns was charged with felony murder, aggravated assault, making a false statement, and violating the oath of office for allegedly firing into Roger's car, even though he had no way of knowing whether the car contained the suspect he was looking for. —NBC News

International News

Security Forces Storm Opposition HQ in Gabon
Gabonese security forces have stormed the headquarters of defeated presidential candidate, Jean Ping. His supporters have staged protests in the capital Libreville since official election results on Saturday gave President Ali Bongo a narrow victory. Ping said two people had been killed in the assault. —Al Jazeera

Brazilian Senate Removes Rousseff from Office
Brazil's Senate has voted to oust President Dilma Rousseff from office for manipulating the nation's budget. Michel Temer has been sworn in as president after 61 senators voted in favor of her dismissal and 20 against. Supporters of Rousseff clashed with police in São Paulo while protesting her impeachment. —VICE News

Tibet's Communist Chief Wants Stronger Criticism of Dalai Lama
China's newly appointed Communist Party chief of Tibet, Wu Yingjie, has called for stronger condemnation of exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, signaling Beijing's hardening stance against the Buddhist figurehead. According to official state media, Wu said the government should "deepen its criticism of the Dalai Lama." —Reuters

Spanish Prime Minister Loses Vote
Mariano Rajoy, Spain's acting prime minister, has lost a parliamentary bid for a second term in office. Rajoy, leader of the conservative Popular Party, won the backing of only 170 representatives in the 350-strong assembly, failing to win support from the opposition. The vote makes it likely that Spain will have a third election in 12 months. The country hasn't had an elected government since December. —CBC News

Everything Else

Apple Boss Wants Tax Ruling Overturned
Apple's chief executive, Tim Cook, has described a European Commission ruling that the company should pay $13 billion in back taxes as "maddening." Cook said he was "very confident" the ruling could be overturned by legal appeal. —BBC News

'Stranger Things' Gets Second Season
Netflix has announced that the Duffer Brothers' show will return for a nine-episode second season in 2017. It will be set in 1984 and events will partly take place outside Hawkins, Indiana.— VICE

Court Upholds Ban on Gun Sales to Marijuana Users
A federal appeals court in San Francisco has ruled that a ban on the sale of guns to holders of medical marijuana cards doesn't violate the Second Amendment. The court decided marijuana "raises the risk of irrational or unpredictable behavior." —AP

Naked Donald Trump Statue Up for Grabs at Auction
The only surviving nude Donald Trump statue will be auctioned off in Los Angeles this October. The auction house said the work by art collective INDECLINE is expected to go for anywhere between $10,000 and $20,000. —VICE

Dark Web Marketplace Bans Fentanyl
Darknet Heroes League (DHL), one of the dark web's key marketplaces, has banned sales of fentanyl after a wave of deaths caused by the drug. An administrator described the drug as a "threat to customers' well-being." —Motherboard

Confidence in Jobs Market Soars
The latest figures show the labor market in good health, as applications for unemployment benefits remained under 300,000. Consumer confidence in the jobs market climbed to its highest point since 2008. —VICE News

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On Wednesday, Donald Trump got up before an audience in Phoenix and gave a much-ballyhooed speech on his immigration policy. Notably, the Republican presidential candidate—actually, you know what? Fuck this.

For the past few months, Trump's campaign has been in the habit of making a big production over the kinds of policy addresses that credible presidential candidates are supposed to deliver as often as they kiss babies. Obligingly, the media swarms around Trump like fruit flies to a rotting orange.

But each time, all that we get is an alleged billionaire throwing out platitudes and vague wish lists of policies he'd like to see enacted on the off chance he gets elected president. It's become very, very tiring to pretend that this exercise is interesting in any way, so I'm not going to try.

A couple weeks ago, in a widely hyped national security speech, Trump declared that ISIS and other terrorists are bad and proceeded to offer very little in the way of actual policy solutions. His economic policy speech the week prior followed the same pattern: After promising that he'd explain the details of his tax plan, Trump basically just told the audience that taxes are bad, and that America should have less of them.

But nevertheless, his campaign was at it again on Wednesday, making a big, fancy media push before what was supposed to be yet another big fancy speech. Would Trump pivot toward a kinder, gentler treatment of immigrants? Would he turn his back on the nativism that his fan base knows and loves?

"Tonight is not going to be a normal rally speech," he declared after taking the stage in Phoenix. "Instead," he added, "I'm going to deliver a detailed policy address on one of the greatest challenges facing our country today: illegal immigration," emphasizing that this was a "very complicated, a difficult subject."

The idea, it seemed, was to give the impression that he and his campaign wonks have spent weeks contemplating the ins and outs of immigration policy. But does that mean that we have to pretend Trump actually cares about the ins and outs of policy? Because when you strip out the yelling about immigrants committing horrible crimes, his hyperbole about Hillary Clinton's plan for "amnesty" and "open borders," and the jokes about deporting her, the speech revealed pretty much the same plan that Trump unveiled more than a year ago.

That includes: building a Big Wall on the US-Mexican border—and making Mexico pay for it; deporting undocumented immigrants en masse; reversing Barack Obama's executive orders granting a pathway to citizenship to some undocumented people; withholding funds from "sanctuary cities"; suspending immigration from war-torn Middle Eastern countries like Syria; and even limiting legal immigration. Blah, blah, blah.

Wednesday's delivery may have been a bit more forceful, the fans a bit louder; maybe more voters tuned in thanks to the media hype machine. But there was nothing new here. The only thing notable was how many people—even, reportedly, Trump's own advisers—believed the Republican nominee would be unveiling some new, kinder, gentler immigration policy. Turns out, Trump doesn't do kinder or gentler. He doesn't do "new." Mostly what he does is fear.

"He has characterized immigration as a threat to the country, and as a force that's undermining our values," said Doris Meissner, a former commissioner of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service who now leads the US immigration policy program at the Migration Policy Institute.

I spoke with Meissner before the speech to get some insight on Trump's past views, but since Trump's views haven't changed, our conversation conveniently doubled as a postmortem of the speech.

"He's talking in these terms of urgency, especially where the US-Mexico border and Mexican immigration is concerned in a way that is so contradictory with the evidence on the ground as to almost seem as willful misrepresentation," she said. "We are at the lowest point in 40 years of Mexican illegal immigration across the Southwest border... It's completely inaccurate that people are pouring across the border and that the Mexican border is somehow not in control."

Should we go into all the other half-truths, and even outright lies, Trump spouted off Wednesday? Like the fact that while the Obama administration has given some undocumented immigrants amnesty, it has also deported more than 2.5 million people, a record. Or that hours before telling a crowd in Arizona that Mexico would pay for the wall, Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto—who Trump had met with that day!—reiterated that no, in fact, Mexico will not be paying for any wall. And so on.

But who cares? The people cheering on Trump Wednesday don't give a shit about my fact-check, or anyone else's—Trump's fans eat all of this up with a spoon.

In the end, the speech was not about immigration, or really about anything for that matter. Like every speech he gives, Trump's speech was about Trump. He does not need to explain himself or his plans, and he does not need to tether his policies to reality. Trump will fix everything, overturn every obstacle, overrule every pesky fact, by virtue of his sheer Trumpiness. This election is about who Trump is—it doesn't matter what Trump says.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

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Our VICELAND show Weediquette is back for a second season and host Krishna Andavolu has a crop of new stories covering marijuana's movement from the counterculture to the mainstream.

On the first episode, Krishna looks into the challenge many parents face when using pot and raising kids. In states where weed is illegal, parents who use marijuana for medical or recreational reasons fear they might lose their children to Child Protective Services. Krishna travels to Kansas to meet two mothers struggling to regain custody of their children after the state deemed they were irresponsible parents for using marijuana.

Check out the full episode above and make sure to tune in every Wednesday night at 10 PM for new episodes of Weediquette on VICELAND.

Photo by nancydowd via Pixabay

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Northern Ireland's lifetime ban on gay men donating blood has finally been lifted. Instead, a "one-year deferral system" has been put in place, which has existed in the rest of the UK since 2011. Basically, this means gay and bisexual men can give blood one year after their last sexual contact with a man.

The health minister, Michelle O'Neill, announced this policy in June. "As health minister, my first responsibility in this matter is patient safety," she said. "Surveillance data from England, Scotland, and Wales and survey evidence from across Britain and the north of Ireland have provided assurance that the risk is lower with a one-year deferral."

The ban on gay men donating blood was brought in across the UK during the 1980s AIDS crisis, but was lifted in England, Scotland, and Wales in 2011. In June this year, it was reported that the risk to blood safety from gay male donations had actually decreased since the policy changed.

The current policy is still heavily criticized for being discriminatory toward gay men, and short-sighted considering the NHS Blood and Transplant service is continually driving for more donations, while the majority of gay men are unable to donate. The government has said it will review this in favor of screening sexual behavior rather than orientation. That Northern Ireland has aligned its policy to the rest of the UK is a positive step in this direction.

Read: You Could Own One of Those Naked Donald Trump Statues for $20,000

Photo via Flickr user Cannabis Culture

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Back in the 90s, weed was just some hippie shit that lame-ass adults smoked when they were feeling nostalgic about the time they saw Moby Grape or whatever. But these days, marijuana is thoroughly mainstream, and everybody and their stepdad in Oregon and Colorado are testing out their green thumb with a pot plant in their backyard.

A new study published in the UK has proved just how prevalent America's weed renaissance really is: 10 million more people in the US have started smoking pot since 2002, the Guardian reports.

The study's researchers took data from nearly 600,000 Americans surveyed since the turn of the 21st century, finding a 2.9 percent bump between 2002 and 2014 of citizens who admitted to blazing at least once over the past year. According to the study, today, 13.3 percent of the US population burns one down at least once in a while.

"We certainly expected, based on other research, to find an increase," Dr. Wilson Compton, one of the study's authors, told the Guardian. "It's well known in the US that the laws related to marijuana have been changing; we've seen a number of states passing laws to allow marijuana for medical purposes."

What's more, daily pot use has also increased dramatically. The study found that the number of people who regularly smoke nearly doubled, from 3.9 million to 8.4 million people.

While almost half of the US has laws legalizing the use of marijuana for either medical or recreational use, the drug is still far from accepted nationwide—parents in states with strict weed laws still risk losing their kids to Child Protective Services for their marijuana use, and the DEA still thinks the drug belongs in the same class as heroin and bath salts.

Read: Teens Aren't Smoking Weed Even Though It's Legal, Study Says

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In 2011, Warren Jeffs, the leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), was sentenced to life in prison—plus 20 years—for sexually abusing two of his child brides. Jeffs led the FLDS church, which had splintered from mainstream Mormonism in order to continue to practice polygamy. Often times, girls as young as 12 were forced to marry older members.

On this episode of Profiles by VICE, we travel to Short Creek, the small, isolated community on the Utah-Arizona border where members of the FLDS live and practice their beliefs. There, three young women tell us why they left the polygamist sect, how they deal with PTSD in the aftermath of their traumatic situation, and how they're building a new life in the tiny border town.

For more on the FLDS, read: The Long Search for the Missing Child Brides of a Mormon Polygamist Sect

This article originally appeared on VICE Romania.

When talking about European seaside resorts, a lot of tourists complain about the fact that there is absolutely nothing to do there except relax on the beach all day and go clubbing at night. But that's because they don't know the joys of Vacation Village—a massive carnival that takes place near the Mamaia resort, on the Romanian Black Sea throughout the summer months.

Like all carnivals, Vacation Village is the kind of place where you can stuff your face with sugar-filled treats, while riding creepy carnival rides that have probably been on this world longer than you have. In the evening, you can choose between watching a music concert or trying out the local cuisine, which, as you can see, consists mainly of grilled meat. And then there's always the option of creeping around, taking photos of the miserable men, who have been forced to get henna tattoos and punch bags by their children or significant others. This summer, I opted for the latter.

Scroll down for the results.

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Be kind to the person who has to stare at this day in and day out. Photo via Flickr user Victor Bjorkund.

AHHHH, September. The good month. Summer is a bullshit season and I'm glad it's dead. Bring on fall fashion and the flood of bad jokes about white girls and pumpkin spice.

Matt Bomer at last year's San Diego Comic Con. Photo via Flickr user Gage Skidmore

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This weekend, it was revealed that Matt Bomer, a cisgender actor best known for roles in Magic Mike and American Horror Story, will be playing a transgender sex worker in the upcoming film Anything, based on a play by Timothy McNeil.

Bomer's casting follows other recent high-profile trans roles performed by cis performers, including Jared Leto in 2013's Dallas Buyers Club and Eddie Redmayne in last year's The Danish Girl. And as with those roles, backlash against the casting decision arrived soon after the news emerged.

Trans activists and performers, like Sense8's Jamie Clayton and Jen Richards, creator and star of the Emmy-nominated web series "Her Story", took to Twitter and YouTube to share criticism of the decision. Bomer initially blocked Clayton on Twitter after the actress tweeted that she hoped the actor would "do some actual good for the trans community" with the role, then later unblocked her. Richards, who auditioned but was not cast in a small part in the film, explained in a YouTube video posted last night that she feels when cis performers play trans roles, they deprive the already marginalized trans community of economic and political opportunities, dispossess those roles from performers who have lived the experience of the characters they portray, and perpetuate violence against trans women.

With notable exceptions in recent series like Sense8, Transparent, and Orange Is the New Black, trans characters in TV and film are rarely cast with trans performers. This April, an analysis of 105 trans characters on American television by Autostraddle found that "by and large, trans women are rarely seen on television, and when they are, the context is either tragic or farcical. Trans women on TV do these things: they die or are dying, they kill other people or are killed, they are your old pal from college who presents as female now, they are in the hospital, they've come down to the station for questioning. They always wear dresses and lots of makeup, they usually date men, they're usually white, and they're rarely portrayed by actual trans women."

"I had a conversation with the casting director Matt Bomer's association with the film," which, as Richards explained in her YouTube video, is common practice in Hollywood. "I think the producers were at least slightly aware of an issue and thought they could offset Bomer's casting by having trans women in some of the smaller roles."

"When we think of trans people, besides Laverne , we think of Jared Leto, Jeffrey Tambor, Eddie Redmayne, and now Matt Bomer. We're basically telling the world trans women are just men performing gender. I can't stand that or let that go unchecked." —Jen Richards

A representative for Anything's producers did not return a request for comment by the time this article went to press, nor did a publicist for Mark Ruffalo. Ruffalo, an executive producer for the film, amicably responded to concerns from the trans community on Twitter.

"To the Trans community. I hear you. It's wrenching to you see you in this pain. I am glad we are having this conversation. It's time," he wrote.

In her YouTube video, Richards also expressed concern over the content of the script she read at the time she auditioned for the role. Anything is based on a Timothy McNeil play about a Southern widower named Early Landry, whose sister relocates him to Los Angeles after several suicide attempts. The play revolves around his budding relationship with a "drug-addicted transvestite prostitute" named Freda Von Rhenberg. (While a press release reported that the character Bomer plays in Anything is transgender, the character in McNeil's original play is reportedly a "transvestite." "Transvestite" is an outdated and problematic term for cross dresser, which is distinct from transgender.)

Writer and trans activist Julia Serano is disappointed but not surprised at the recycling of such a stereotypical narrative.

"There is a tendency in society for people to presume that trans people must have horrible, tragic lives," she told VICE. "In my book Whipping Girl, I talk about the pervasive assumption that people who transition to female do so for sexual reasons (which is rooted in the assumption that women are sexual objects). This explains why movie producers churn out 'drug-addicted transvestite prostitute'-type roles.

"Given the high-profile backlash to casting decisions made in Dallas Buyers Club, Transparent, The Danish Girl, and other productions, it's almost impossible to imagine that Bomer has never heard of trans people's perspectives on this matter," Serano said. "He surely knows that, by accepting this role, he is ensuring that there is one fewer job out there for transgender actors. And the dynamics of this issue will not change so long as Hollywood refuses to cast transgender actors as cisgender characters."

This week's backlash closely mirrors backlash last year against Stonewall, a fictional retelling of the Stonewall Riots, which cast a white, cisgender gay man as the protagonist, despite the fact that queer and trans people of color initiated the riot. And despite years of such uproar over cis casting decisions for trans roles, directors, producers, and actors continue to lack foresight on ways in which they contribute to discrimination against transgender people in their productions.

Bomer's casting in this role deprives a trans woman the opportunity to play it. Though critics argue his notoriety was what drove the decision, with well-known actresses like Clayton, Richards, the Spirit Award–winning Mya Taylor and Emmy Award–winning Laverne Cox to choose from, finding a notable trans performer in Hollywood is easier than ever.

"The kind of media that has the largest reach are film and TV," said Richards. "When we think of trans people, besides Laverne , we think of Jared Leto, Jeffrey Tambor, Eddie Redmayne, and now Matt Bomer. We're basically telling the world trans women are just men performing gender. I can't stand that or let that go unchecked. I think cis people who take these roles, do these movies, and greenlight these shows have to be confronted with that reality that they are morally complicit in the discrimination and violence trans people face and need to do better."

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Takes a couple cops to deal with a man with milk on his balls. Photo via Flickr user bcemergencyphotos

Thanks to a dude in Penticton, BC, we can now all have the image of a naked man rubbing his junk with homo milk forever burnt into our minds.

Penticton Mounties were called to a gas station at two in the morning last week because a man had taken his clothes off and was bathing his genitals in milk after accidentally spraying himself with bear spray.

Naturally, we have many questions about, well, all of this.

Don Wrigglesworth, an RCMP spokesperson, kind of helped to explain after police found the man already naked when they arrived.

"He was in excruciating pain and vigorously using his shirt to scrub his genitals with homogenized milk in an attempt to relieve the pain," Wrigglesworth told the Canadian Press.

Milk is a common antidote for spicy food, so I guess I can understand this guy's thought process in using it to soothe his burning dick.

But I'd really love to know how exactly one *accidentally* gets bear spray on themselves, in particular, gets bear spray on their dick. According to Wrigglesworth, the man told police that three men had attacked him—but after police investigated they concluded he sprayed himself by accident.

The story gets even better though because later on that night, police found five more people rolling on the ground outside a house after they too were sprayed with bear spray.

Eventually they told police that the duel started over some debt.

I'm just gonna assume it's some weird sex thing because seriously, what else could it be?

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A California jail inmate in 2013. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, file)

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One morning in late April, Jose Duncan biked 12 miles as fast as he could through his hometown of Stockton, California, to learn more about a nearly two-year-old law.

"There was this little piece of paper on the wall at the mental health clinic where I volunteered talking about some Prop 47 thing," Duncan, who is 34, told VICE. "I had never heard of it."

Though he was unfamiliar with Proposition 47, which passed in November 2014, the information on the flyer about a chance to wipe his felony record clean was more than enough to pique Duncan's interest. With five felony charges and four misdemeanors, his record had long stood in the way of his ability to access public housing and find work. All of Duncan's charges were nonviolent, he said, involving things like drug possession and petty theft. Duncan, who has been clean for two years, struggled with meth addiction for over a decade starting in his late teens.

"I was homeless for ten years," he told me. "A lot of my charges were for stealing food and having drugs on me. After being on drugs for so many years, I just never pictured a future for myself."

Now Duncan is among the thousands of Californians who have reaped the benefits of Prop. 47, a ballot initiative that reduced penalties for some nonviolent crimes—including simple drug possession and theft under $950—from felonies to misdemeanors. In the face of claims that the law is directly responsible for rising crime rates across the state, Prop. 47 is under fire. But rather than turning their backs on criminal justice reform, state lawmakers have passed an amendment to extend the window of time in which former felons can apply to have their sentences reduced. Governor Jerry Brown's office declined to comment on whether he will sign the bill, but its easy passage suggests a state with a legacy of being harsh on criminals of all stripes is determined to change course.

Though some states have reclassified certain felonies in the past, Prop. 47 was the first time such changes became available retroactively at such a broad scale. The law both changed the way future crimes are classified, and gave people like Duncan a chance to wipe decades-old felonies away. It was a big deal in a state that made national headlines in the 90s for its three-strikes law, among other tough-on-crime policies. But in order to get the original law past some of its critics, authors agreed to limit the period of time in which those with felony records could petition for re-sentencing. Under the current incarnation of the law, that window will close in November 2017, and thousands could miss their chance to be free of troubled pasts.

The amendment on Brown's desk would extend the window to 2022.

"We already have other statutes that don't have time limits," David Greenberg, Chief Deputy District Attorney of San Diego County, told VICE. "Why are we putting a time limit on this?"

The answer, according to Greenberg, is "politics." He helped draft the amendment, which was ultimately authored by Assemblymember Shirley Weber. Yet in testament to the state's evolving attitude toward crime, despite his support for extending the deadline, Greenberg was actually a strong opponent of Prop. 47 from day one—and remains one.

"It took away a lot of options for us," Greenberg, who argues that prosecutors already used their discretion to reduce certain felonies to misdemeanors, told me.

But when San Diego County Public Defenders office told the DA they would have to file 150 to 250,000 petitions before the November deadline, Greenberg said, he knew the burden on the court and his office would be untenable. In Los Angeles County, which is the largest in the state, the number of petitions would be at least twice that, Greenberg added.

"The vast majority of people have no idea their felonies could be reduced," he told me. "You would think with all this publicity that those folks who are cleaning their life up and are eligible would be reaching out, but that's just not the reality."

That's where record-change fairs and "reclassification clinics" come in. Organized by advocates and volunteer attorneys, events like the one on the flyer that caught Duncan's eye have become a vital way to reach Californians who have never heard of Proposition 47.

"The hurdle is really just getting the word out," said Lenore Anderson, coauthor of Prop. 47 and executive director of the Alliance for Safety and Justice, a nonprofit that has hosted record change fairs. "Hundreds of thousands of Californians have felony record convictions, but a lot of folks are infrequent voters or may not be aware of the law change."

Duncan, who has proselytized the value of Prop. 47 to anyone who will listen since discovering it, told me that "everyone he talks to has never heard about it," affirming the work ahead for organizations like Anderson's. Attendance at the fairs has varied, but advocates like her point to events like one in Los Angeles this June, where over 5,000 people arrived, she said, far exceeding the capacity that volunteers had expected.

"It started at 11 in the morning, and when we showed up at seven to set up there were 20 people in line with lawn chairs," Anderson added. "It's unbelievable to see how motivated people are about getting a second chance."

While people like Duncan are rebuilding their lives, critics of the new regime maintain the law has opened the floodgates for opportunistic criminals. While the state's prison and jail populations have declined since the law's passage, and the number of felony arrests has dropped 28.5 percent last year, a surge in property crime has law and order types worried.

In spite of Greenberg's fervent support for the extension of the window for people to petition for re-sentencing, he directly credits Proposition 47 with the crime spike.

"The crooks know how to avoid felonies now and take advantage of that," he said. "I don't think the voters really knew what they were getting. I did not and still don't believe was necessary."

As the debate over the crime rate's rise continues, Duncan and others who've been touched by the law will go on spreading the word. Rochelle Solombrino, an office manager at the San Pedro-based drug treatment clinic she graduated from after her release from prison in 2009, is another believer. When the clinic received funding through a county contract that came with the requirement that no one on staff could have a felony conviction, Solombrino feared she would lose her job and the stability that came with it. But after applying for her two felonies to be reduced to misdemeanors, she was cleared—and kept her lifeline.

"When I got my first felony I thought, 'Who will hire me? Who will invest in me? I'm a drug addict and a felon,'" Solombrino said. "Prop. 47 completely changed my life."

Follow Rebecca McCray on Twitter.

Video from Lynn Johnson's Kickstarter

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The story of how Lynn Johnson plans to change the world starts with him getting into a nasty ski accident in Purgatory, which is a town in Colorado. But his torn ACL doesn't matter—the important thing is that while he was injured, he bought a hat in the shape of a turtle, and this altered his life forever. Everyone gave him comments on the hat. Strangers would wave hello or laugh when they saw him. Johnson, now 63, is a former minister and used to be a principal at a Christian school; he's got the kind of corny, Midwestern charm that can crowbar a smile out of just about anyone. He'd make jokes about his hats and came up with little sayings like, "You cannot be rude when wearing a turtle, not only would it be impolite, you will also look stupid," and, "Come out of your shell, wear a turtle!"

The turtle hat became Johnson's signature look, a conversation starter. "I can't say I've made intimate friends because of the hat, but it makes cab drivers smile," Johnson, who lives in Indiana, told VICE. "Cab drivers can be so bored all day long and then they see the hat, and it brightens their day. It bridges that impersonal gap with everyone." He wore it to England, where people were so reserved they wouldn't say anything to him, but would start chuckling as soon as they passed. When he officiated one of his daughters' weddings, the turtle was perched on top of his head.

Years passed. The hat got stained and worn-out, but the tag had fallen off, so Johnson couldn't figure out how to get another one. He looked all over the internet and couldn't find it. It was like he had the only one in the world. He replaced the lining, but it was still in bad shape. Then, 16 years after he bought it, he found another one in a secondhand store. But soon that hat was salt-stained. Worse, the company that made the hats had gone out of business. How was he going to get another turtle hat?

The original hat, deconstructed for production

He'd just have to pay to make a new generation of hats, that's how. And this is when Johnson's ambitions got bigger. He tore apart his hat so he could create a pattern for the manufacturer and launched a Kickstarter to raise the $5,000 he'd need to handle all the expenses. He has a website and is also selling T-shirts that say, "Prove you have a sense of Humor! Wear a Turtle on your head." (The period is on the T-shirt.)

But the turtle hats are about more than just hats, or turtles. Johnson believes that his hat makes him friendly and open. "It's my signature signal that I'm a friendly guy who you can ask to take a photo, and who won't get mad when flights are delayed, even if it's inconvenient," is how his website puts it. "It is my reminder to lighten up today."

Screengrab from Lynn Johnson's Kickstarter

"Some of us, growing up, our mothers taught us, 'When you go out the door, put on a smile,'" Johnson said. "It's very much like putting on a smile."

Maybe, if more people wear turtle hats, more people will feel the same thing that Johnson feels when he wears his. That's his idea anyway. Inside each hat he ships, he plans to put a card that tells the owners, "Lighten up. Slow down. Work the hat, not your phone. Try not to take yourself too seriously."

Johnson is thinking bigger than that, though. In an email, he outlined an idea for "Turtle Hat Societies," groups where men could get together to mentor young people, provide scholarships to the underprivileged, and do other good works.

"Men in America tend to be isolated and not have truly close friendly, non-competitive, honest relationships," Johnson wrote. "We need such relationships for our best wellbeing and human flourishing."

Johnson is a goofy, goofy man—when he answered the phone, he kicked off our conversation by saying, "This is Lynn Johnson, how may I button up your day?" His Kickstarter page is similarly goofy, and if you are bred on irony and the idea that the best jokes are somehow shocking or mean, you inevitably ask yourself, Is he kidding? But no, he is not kidding, and you can't deny his whole campaign has an undeniable power. Can you picture someone in a turtle hat starting a war? Or shooting an unarmed civilian? Or sending mean tweets? When Johnson says that he wants "to touch many thousands of lives, lightly and cheerfully, for the better," you believe him, and you want him to succeed.

He's raised more than $2,700 of his $5,000 goal with 24 days to go, and there's a good chance his campaign will go a bit viral—Johnson said that he's been contacted by BuzzFeed, the Washington Post, and even The Late Late Show with James Corden. But for now, he's just walking around with the hat he had made as a sample.

"Since the Kickstarter, I'm so shameless," he said. "I wear it everywhere, and if anyone even looks at me, I walk up to them and say, 'You like the hat? I know where you can get one just like it,' and then I hand them a card. It's wonderful."

Check out Lynn Johnson's Kickstarter here.

Photo via Flickr user Zach Zupancic

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Once upon a time, before Chipotle was synonymous with E. coli and wage theft, the Mexican grill was loved by millions. Now in an effort to regain the trust of its once-loyal patrons, Chipotle is launching a string of promotional deals to coax cautious eaters back into the fold, the New York Post reports.

This month, the floundering fast-food chain plans to offer free drinks for high school students and free meals for kids under 12 every Sunday. The deals are clearly aimed to get the youth back on the burrito bandwagon, since their parents are probably still pretty upset about the whole "pooping blood" thing.

Chipotle's problems first erupted back in 2015 when hundreds of cases of norovirus, salmonella, and E. coli were traced back to locations across the US. The company published a record of the incidents, realizing you can't exactly sweep a rancid burrito bowl under the rug without people noticing.

It's hard to say if some free fountain drinks will help Chipotle bounce back from the 44 percent profit fall it's suffered since last year, but the chain seems pretty desperate to get you in the door. But hey, if everything works out, maybe it can get someone to eat its food every day for almost half a year again.

Read: Meet the Guy Who's Been Eating Chipotle Every Day for Five Months

Image by Lia Kantrowitz

When the Jerry Springer Show debuted in 1991, it was kinda thoughtful, really. It started off as a program in which the former mayor of Cincinnati delved into such topics as homelessness and poverty. Hardly anyone remembers that, though. Most people know the show as a parade of people who have made horrible choices and are willing to rehash those choices before a studio audience, and also get into fights onstage.

The show has been on for 25 seasons, which means there's been a mind-bogglingly huge number of guests, each with their own story of wrecked relationships and secret lives. Getting these people on TV is a complicated, sometimes messy job, but somebody has to do it.

I spoke to one of those people recently, a woman who worked on the show for a summer within the last decade. (I'm omitting any identifying details because she signed a non-disclosure agreement.) Curious about what it was like to be behind the scenes of one of the most notorious TV programs of all time, I asked her about her months of answering phones, wrangling guests, and talking to guys who had sex with their moms. This is what she told me:

VICE: How did you end up getting a job working on The Jerry Springer Show?Telephone Operator: I think it was the summer, and I saw the listing on Craigslist. It was a long time ago, but I think I just sent in my résumé and someone called me to ask if I'd ever answered phones before and if I was easily upset—because I was going to hear some awful stuff. I think I understood at the time what the job was, but it's hard to prepare for the kind of stuff that you're going to hear in that situation.

I started on the phones the next day. I don't remember my very first call. The vast majority of the calls were one family member having sex with the lover of another family member, like "I slept with my mom's boyfriend," or "I slept with my daughter's boyfriend," or "I slept with my aunt's husband." People called that hotline to say any crazy thing that was going on in their life.

So what was the first truly memorable phone call you got?
I think one of the first really memorable phone calls I got was from a little girl who told me she was hiding in a closet from an abusive father. She called because she thought that the security guard Steve

How did you feel the first time that you got that phone call, knowing that you couldn't really do anything? What did you say to end the call?
I felt extremely helpless and very sad. Eventually the call dropped. I think I went to go find someone who maybe could help or who I could see to be allowed to call the police. I mean, she was also a kid, so I was trying to get an address of where she was out of her. But basically, by the time I got a supervisor-type person's attention, the little girl was off of the phone.

It was very sad. I think I tried to justify it by trying to tell myself that it probably wasn't a real person, or it was a fake call. A lot of people called, and they just wanted money, or they were just extremely crazy people.

How many times do you think you got that phone call from someone who thought Steve Wilkos was going to come help them?
I guess I would say once or twice a day. Usually it wasn't like someone crying in a closet being like, "Oh my God, come save me." Usually it was just like someone who was unhappy and being like, "My boyfriend is an asshole! I think Steve should come kick the shit out of him!" Adults also thought this. I mean, a lot of the people who called in come from these neighborhoods where you really have no idea how poor they are and how little access they have to anything. This is a resource to them— The Jerry Springer Show. This is how few resources a lot of these people had.

In what ways would people try to use the show as a resource?
I think most people seemed to just be really excited for a flight to somewhere else––a city. They seemed just excited for the free fight and the free meal that comes with it, and perhaps the idea that they might become famous off of this.

Did you have a lot of people call that were fabricating stories to try to get a free meal?
Probably. I would have no way of knowing if someone was making up stories. There was a special code—it was like HO or something—which meant "just wants a handout." And that was like one-third of the phone calls I took. If somebody didn't have a pitch, and just called blatantly asking for money like, "My house burned down, and then I lost my job, and I thought maybe you guys could help me out." That call would be like a third of the calls.

Were there any calls that you found interesting or humorous that were memorable?
A lot of the time it was just how people told the story. There was this woman who had me on the phone for the longest time, and she had a fetish for sleeping with her daughter's boyfriends and used to sleep with them all of the time. I kept being like, "OK, thank you, I've got it." and she was like, "No! Let me describe to you in great detail how I seduce her boyfriends. They just want the younger version, but I'm even hotter."

There was this one guy who was scared to death because he cheated on his fiancé with her sister, and he wanted to tell her on the show. A lot of the time people want to do confessional things on the show, like one guy who wanted to tell his wife that he secretly preferred having sex with men who were dressed like women.

Did you have any notorious repeat callers?
"Snake Eyes" was a guy who used to call several times a day––probably more than that because it was almost as though every single person would get messages or calls from him every day. He didn't really make any sense. It was more like he would just spurt out a stream-of-consciousness thing like, "Tomato! Tomato! The tomato goes to the sun, and they all build a ship, and the ship is going to go into the sky because outer space is what it's all about!" Something like that but for an hour. And at the end of the day, whoever got the most calls from Snake Eyes got free drinks when we went out after work.

My assumption is that he was a homeless guy standing at a pay phone, but it was really funny to imagine him as a normal person sitting in an office who was seemingly normal but was just calling to make these crazy phone calls all day.

Did you see any of the people on there who you spoke with when you watched the show?
No—I mean I wouldn't have known, you know? In some ways, all of their stories were so generic. "Likes having sex with my dog." I had that happen about five or six times. Guys called because they had an obsession with rubbing things on their junk and then having some type of animal lick it off. At that point, that was like the least upsetting thing I had possibly heard. I was just like, "Yep! Makes total sense. If I had a penis, that's definitely what I would do with it."

That was like the least upsetting? What would be like the most then?
The most upsetting was like people who were being abused and beaten by someone. There were a lot of molestation stories. It's shocking how much they were able to get dudes on who were like, "Yeah, I'm molesting my kid."

Sometimes you would get a $50 extra if you were the person who would babysit guests in between their flight and going to sleep. So I took them to dinner once or twice, but I didn't do it for long because a lot of the times they would hit on me or say something really creepy. You would have to keep them from ordering alcohol, so sometimes you would be convincing alcoholics not to order alcohol.

What would those nights be like?
They'd fly them in, and someone would bring them to the hotel, and I would come and meet them at the hotel, and I would take them to dinner. I would have the company credit card, and I would take them and myself to dinner. It would be a place like Heartland Brewery or something like that. Burgers and sandwiches and roast chicken. Stuff like that.

Based on the very limited thing you would know about the person, which was probably awful, how would you make small talk over the course of a dinner with somebody like that?
A lot of the time, I didn't know which episode they were here to shoot, or what their story was. They'd frequently tell me. They'd be like, "So, don't you want to ask me about my foot fetish?" or something, and I would be like, "No, I'm good." I'm pretty good at making conversation with strangers. I'd usually be like, "So, how long have you been in Arkansas? What do you do?"

Fifty bucks doesn't seem worth it to have dinner with people who have more fucked up reasons to be on the show than a foot fetish.
I feel like some of the most upsetting conversations I had involved men telling me casually that they beat on their wives or their girlfriends. Like, "Oh, my girlfriend and I had a fight, because I was sleeping on the couch, and I was all dirty, and she kept yelling at me to get off the couch because she said I was getting it dirty. So I punched her in the face, and she's trying to divorce me. Now here we are on the show." So I would be like, "Oh. That's weird."

I feel like I've had a lot of deep conversations with a lot of rednecks like, "So why do you choose to hit women? Hmm... Here's why I think you shouldn't hit women." And usually they were like, "Equality, right? Shouldn't I treat a woman the way I treat a man for bugging me?" and I would be like, "No. I don't think that because women are physically smaller and can't hit you back or can't cause the same physical damage. Women have to be afraid in so many places. They shouldn't have to be afraid in their own home." But I feel like a lot of the times, I would just try to reason with them and be like, "Huh. Why did you do that?" But if they just told me straight something less immoral like, "I had sex with my mom!" I was kind of just a little bit like, "Oh... That's cool... I had sex with an older woman one time." Then I would usually just bond with them over my own hedonism and flaws.

Was there anyone who you actually vibed with?
They were all pretty scary dudes. I'm not going to lie. I didn't sign up to take them to dinner very often. There would be a lot of confrontation because they would want to drink, and I would be like, "No, we can't pay for alcohol."

Come to think of it, no, not really.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.