One year after the election that swept Justin Trudeau to power, the new Liberal government has failed to make a dent in the prime minister's promise to end boil water advisories on First Nation reserves across the country within five years.

Photo via Flickr user Ansy Dupiton

On Monday, singer, actor, and democracy enthusiast Justin Timberlake posted a selfie of himself voting in his hometown of Memphis. "Hey! You! Yeah, YOU! I just flew from LA to Memphis to #rockthevote!!! No excuses, my good people!" he wrote in the caption. "Get out and VOTE!"

This, it turned out, could have been a crime, thanks to a state law banning photos or videos inside polling stations except in certain limited circumstances. The Shelby County District Attorney's Office released a statement on Tuesday saying that the photo was being reviewed and might have broken that law, before the DA released a second statement clarifying that officials won't be using their "limited resources" to look into the matter.

But does that mean that laws against voting selfies—which are common to many states—are unenforceable, or is JT just getting off the hook because he's a celebrity who tried to to do good? Could I, a regular person, be prosecuted if I did the same?

To get some clarity, I called up Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, who is an expert on elections. While I had him on the line, I also asked him a bunch of hypothetical questions I'd been wondering about—like what would happen if you died or vomited or made a mistake in the voting booth.

VICE: Is it illegal to take a selfie in the voting booth?
Rick Hasen: Well, it's not illegal everywhere. It depends what you're talking about. In some states, it's legal. In some states, it's illegal. And in some states, it's unclear. And in the states where it's illegal, there have been some court challenges, so we're waiting to see what the Supreme Court ends up saying if it ultimately ends up there.

Why would you ever make these kinds of laws?
Here's the issue: In the old days, before the secret ballot, which came around 1900 or 1910 in a lot of states, there was a fair amount of vote-buying. You could verify how people voted if you didn't have a secret ballot. You still see that occasionally with absentee ballots. And so the danger of selfies is that you can verify how you voted, and people could pay you. Also, people could be coerced. You can imagine a spouse who wants to know how their spouse voted. So that's the argument against them.

And on the other side is probably a First Amendment argument, right?
Right––freedom of expression. is a way of affirming that you're engaging in a civil act. So it's kind of a tough balancing act that the courts have to engage in to figure out whether or not a law trying to preserve election integrity is justified given the First Amendment concerns.

Can you talk about some of the cases that might make it there? Do they literally have to do with selfies?
Well, with the example of one in New Hampshire, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit to try and get the law struck down. . And I know that Snapchat has been involved in the lawsuit to try and support the ACLU's argument, because they think it's a good thing that people can take these kinds of pictures. I think the chances of being prosecuted for something like this is very small, but I still think the laws are serving a valid purpose and it's not to deter people from celebrating their civil duty but instead is trying to make sure we maintain integrity in our election process.

While I have you on the phone: What happens if you screw up and accidentally vote for the wrong person? Can you tell a poll worker after the fact and fix it?
Well, remember, we don't run one election. We don't even run 51 elections. We run something like 8,000 or 9,000 elections, so the rules are somewhat different in every place. In California, where I am, if you mess up your ballot, you can turn it in, and they can destroy it and give you a new one. And that's typically how things work if you haven't put your ballot into the ballot box or pushed that final button on the electronic machine to put your vote in. But at some point, it becomes too late.

What if you spilled coffee or something all over your ballot? You could get another one as long as you haven't reached the point of no return?
That's right. In fact, in some countries, like in Australia where there's mandatory voting, some people pour coffee or do things to their ballot as a protest because they don't want to vote.

Another question: If you leave part of the ballot blank, does that invalidate the whole thing, or do you not need to fill it all out?
You don't need to fill out the whole thing. And I would say that in places where there are lots on the ballot, it's a very common thing to do. I think that the statistic that I heard from San Francisco is that between federal, state, and local races, that we'd be voting on up to 150 things. A lot of people, when in doubt, don't vote because they don't feel competent on a particular question.

So what would happen––hypothetically––if you went into cardiac arrest in the middle of voting. Would they count your ballot?
Well, that seems pretty unrealistic and like the last thing that we'd worry about, but I can talk about a more common thing, which is someone casting an absentee ballot two weeks before the election, and then they die. States differ on this question as to whether or not that ballot would count. As with all of these things, there's enough variation that you can't really answer the question for every place.

I'm always paranoid that I'll show up to my polling place and my name won't be the list. If that were to happen, could I just get a provisional ballot?
You can always be offered a provisional ballot. By law, you have to be offered one. But the state doesn't have to count it. So if you go to the wrong polling place and ask to vote a provisional ballot, in many places, you'll be allowed to write it, but it won't count. But if it turns out that you were mistakenly removed from the list, then you might have to talk to election officials to make sure your vote is going to count. But if you're supposed to be at the polling place on Elm Street and you end up going to the polling place on Main Street, and you think, Ah, I'll just do the provisional ballot, you're probably gonna be throwing your vote away.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

In the lead-up to Waypoint's launch on October 28, the site's staff is giving a preview of some of the titles that they'll be playing during the massive 72 Games in 72 Hours livestream.

When Owlboy is released on November 1, it will have been nearly ten years after development began on the gorgeous looking, Metroid-inspired action game. It wasn't supposed to take this long, of course. No one involved in making Owlboy expected to spend the better part of a decade on a single game, and when the clock strikes midnight on Halloween, it will mark the end of an unexpectedly long journey.

"I've always imagined it would be emotional," said art director Simon Anderson, who's been with Owlboy since day one. "A lot of people suggest it'll feel like a relief."

That relief is, if everything goes according to plan, close at hand.

The game's developer, D-Pad, is made up of just five people: an art director, two programmers, a designer, and a composer. Like most small teams, though, people wear many hats and are responsible for many other jobs—public relations, QA testing, etc.

The original idea for Owlboy came about when Andersen was closely watching rumors about Nintendo's upcoming "Revolution" console, which would later be called the Wii. As other developers were mulling new directions for how to play video games, Andersen saw an opening for a callback to the pixel-driven action games he (and others) had grown up on.

This was long before the concept of retro-style games went through the full trend cycle: once a novel idea, , then a popular style, and ultimately, a repetitive cliché. (Owlboy comes, somewhat ironically, at the tail end of that rotation.)

While playing Super Mario Bros. 3, Andersen was struck by the game's Tanooki suit, which lets Mario float down after a jump by tapping a button. Andersen's idea was the opposite: Let the player fly up. Simultaneously, leaked details on a prototype for a new Kid Icarus, worked on by Rogue Squadron developer Factor 5, had Andersen mulling how to represent flying in 3D. It seemed overly difficult, leading Andersen to double down on 2D for his game. The final puzzle piece was a suggestion from Andersen's girlfriend: The main character should be an owl.

"With that," said Andersen, "everything fell into place and pretty much all the major characters were sketched that same night."

At that point, Andersen figured Owlboy would ship in 2011. He was, uh, pretty far off.

One of the game's early victories was a nomination in the 2010 Independent Games Festival for visual excellence. Though Owlboy didn't win, the recognition was important. Soon after, the team was invited to attend the Norwegian Game Awards, a competition for students. Owlboy won the top prize, which came with something better than recognition: a $10,000 check.

"It really did feel like we were on our way to something amazing," said Andersen. "Like we had made the right choice to go all in for our dreams."

"We literally thought, Hey guys, we're finishing this thing with this—2010 is the year of the owl!" said programmer Jo-Remi Madsen. "We're in 2016. It's still not year of the owl."

Though $10,000 feels like a big number, it's nothing if you want to build a modern game. Continuing to work on Owlboy has been possible because the developers have benefited from the generosity of friends and family, whether it comes to financial stability or having a cheap place to stay. They've also received a relatively meager amount of grant money—less than $80,000—from the Norwegian government. By being thrifty, that money "saved their asses" a few times.

So what took so long? The game didn't come into focus until the team produced a demo in 2011. And while Owlboy's basic premise hasn't changed, the game has been through several full-on reboots, often because as development dragged on, players were demanding games of increasingly higher quality. It didn't help that Metroid-style games became increasingly en vogue, forcing Owlboy to adjust.

"We literally thought, 'Hey guys we're finishing this thing with this—2010 is the year of the owl!' We're in 2016. It's still not year of the owl."—Jo-Remi Madsen

"The long development ended up becoming its own burden," said Andersen. "Considering how I had originally pitched this project and involved all these people to help me create it, I felt very, very responsible whenever there was another delay, someone was unhappy or stressed."

Life (and death) happened over the course of that ten years, too. When I talked with the team about its experiences, a melancholy tone hovered over the conversation. Overworked, exhausted, and hoping the finish line really was in sight, D-Pad sounded utterly spent.

For example, Andersen had promised his girlfriend a proposal—and a wedding—after the game shipped. Every time he delayed Owlboy, he was delaying this next chapter in his life.

"Having to constantly tell her it was going to be another year was getting to me badly," he said.

He eventually gave up, and the two got married last year.

Andersen's struggled with depression, too—a problem for him since he was young. For him, depression is "always an underlying factor" and an unfortunate constant. "My art and our work the positives in my life," he said, "so I always had that to push me through."

The simple march of time has proven brutal, too.

"When we started out working on Owlboy, all my grandparents were still alive—cheering me on year after year," said Madsen. "Not once have I been told to stop, or 'go find a proper job, one that pays.' My family isn't like that. Now, as Owlboy is about to launch, I've lost all my grandparents, but their support stuck with me."

Halfway through development, Madsen was on his way to meet up with one of his best friends for dinner when he received a call telling him that the man had died of catastrophic heart failure.

"From that moment on," he said. "I've been painfully aware of how fragile life can be."

Relationships haven't been easy for Madsen, either.

"During this project," he said, "I've had several girlfriends somehow willing to be part of the madness—and just like the rest—they've been massively supportive. But even with massive support, with time, I've started feeling bad about my constant empty promises. 'The game is coming out this year.' 'Just a couple of months now.' 'Soon, soon.' In the end, I've had to let them go, because I've always been aware that my living situation isn't exactly ideal."

That living situation changed over the years. Andersen was working out of his parents' home, but during development, his parents not only got divorced but the house burned down. Fortunately, Madsen was able to move into his parents' house, allowing Andersen to hunker down in the apartment Madsen had been living in. That apartment became a pseudo office. The rest of the team is scattered around various parts of Norway, the US, and Canada.

After working on the same game for so long, the team worried it wasn't capable of even shipping a game. To prove themselves wrong, instead of taking a vacation, they spent the summer of 2013 working on Savant - Ascent, a quick 'n' dirty pixel shooter that, thankfully, was well-received. It also proved to Owlboy fans that, yes, that game might actually get finished. It's gone on to sell more than 500,000 copies, keeping the team afloat financially.

"It was refreshing and reminded us just what we can do as a team," said Andersen. "It's easy to forget when you have to put that talent to work over such a long time."

The low-lows have been, especially in the final stretch, accompanied by high-highs. The developers pitched a panel for this year's PAX Prime in Seattle, a chance to take a short break from the grind, show the game to people who might buy it later in the year, and pass on some lessons from their years working on Owlboy. While it sounded good on paper, the team worried that nine years meant everyone had forgotten about Owlboy and moved on.

What if no one showed up to the panel? What if people didn't like the game? Had the scheduling gods, who slotted their panel at the end of the event's last day, screwed them?

"If you'll join us," Andersen said at the panel, before revealing the game's release date, "it's time for the scariest thing we've ever done."

It didn't matter. More than 400 people showed up to their panel, and the response to a trailer announcing the game's release date, the one they're sticking to, was a standing ovation.

"The applause was spectacular," said Andersen.

You can watch the moment he's talking about here:

"If we never showed our games off, never got praised, and never saw how people light up when they play our games," said Madsen, "I just wouldn't make games at all."

In less than a week, Owlboy launches on Steam. There's no guarantee it will be a success, no way to know if the team will manage to stay together for another game. But for the people who've been here for the past nine years, getting a chance to say goodbye might be enough.

Follow Waypoint on Twitter, Facebook, and Twitch, and tune in to our 72-hour launch livestream marathon, starting at 12 PM EST on October 28!

Follow Patrick Klepek on Twitter, and if you have a news tip you'd like to share, drop him an email.

Archive screenshot from 'Tattoo Assassins.' Courtesy of Dan Amrich

The Mortal Kombat of 1992 delivered the perfect insult to the injury of video game defeat with the fatality. These gory finishing moves, pioneered by the infamous fighter, were the equivalent of blacktop trash talk for guys that couldn't dunk, the smack chatter of White Men Can't Jump adapted into a new medium, heightening the drama of the arcade scene. Rival developers were left with two options to keep their own comparably styled projects competitive: Make them good, or make them bloody. Guess which they chose.

The Mortal Kombat series would become a cash cow, spawning movies, toys, comic books, a cartoon, and an ill-advised stage production (yes, really). Arcade-goers weren't the only ones taking notice of the growing popularity of Liu Kang, Johnny Cage, et al. Naturally, competitors wanted some of the original Mortal Kombat's success, and they saw fatalities as the way to get it, without taking the time to appreciate the actual playability of Midway's hit. Author and video game journalist Dan Amrich was covering the fighting game scene at the time.

"Any kid back then could walk up and put a quarter in an arcade game and see these fatalities—and that was an escapist, naughty thrill for them. That, and maybe their parents didn't know that they were going to the arcade, and didn't realize what they were playing when they got there. It wasn't all Pac-Man anymore. It was Pac-Man chewing on the bones of Blinky."

"It wasn't all Pac-Man anymore. It was Pac-Man chewing on the bones of Blinky."—Dan Amrich

The arcade (and, as an extension, home console) battle between the early to mid-1990s fighters ultimately boiled down to who had the best fatalities. Mortal Kombat's competitors comprised an eclectic group, similar to any good fighting game roster. Time Killers, Primal Rage, BloodStorm, Survival Arts, Killer Instinct, Weaponlord, Kasumi Ninja, Way of the Warrior, Eternal Champions, Tattoo Assassins, and others all fought over the same few pieces of a bloody pie.

"All the other companies were going, 'This fighting thing is not going away, it's only building, and we should get on board,'" Amrich remembers. But these rival companies didn't fully get why Mortal Kombat was a success. The game worked because it played superbly—not everyone could pull off the fatalities, after all. But so many in the market incorrectly assumed that if they made their own releases gory, gamers would come in comparable droves.

Filmmaker and game artist Josh Tsui worked on a number of Midway titles in the 1990s, including WWF WrestleMania: The Arcade Game. He also witnessed the evolution of the Mortal Kombat series, and even made cameos in Mortal Kombat II and 4. Tsui was a part of the second wave of arcade gaming, a subject he's covering in his own documentary, Insert Coin.

"Back then, in the 90s, just about anytime you saw an Asian person in an arcade game, coming out of Midway, there's a very good chance it was me," he explains, laughing. "I think I was the only Asian person in the entire building.

"I kind of relate the fatalities to eating Cap'n Crunch's Crunch Berries," he continues. "Crunch Berries are great because there are so few of them on top of the cereal. If you had a box just of Crunch Berries, though, it's gonna taste terrible after awhile. So that's the way I look at some of these games using fatalities. They overdid it on the wrong things."

So, the fatality is the Crunch Berry of game design: fun in small doses, nauseating in excess. What these games lacked in technical achievement, they overcompensated with buckets of 16-bit blood, but each imitator attempted to put their own "unique" spin on the mechanic. Developer Incredible Technologies' first entry into the market was Time Killers, which included mid-fight dismemberments—because missing limbs was the key to dethroning MK, obviously. The result was less groundbreaking, more side splitting.

Matches turned into unintentionally hilarious homages to the "Black Knight" scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Incredible's next title, BloodStorm, continued the war against MK, even poaching actor Daniel Pesina—who portrayed Johnny Cage in the first two Mortal Kombats—for an advertisement.

A screenshot of 'Time Killers' (SEGA Genesis version). Captured by the author

The absolute worst of these Kombat wannabes was Data East's Tattoo Assassins—a fighting game about warriors with tattoos that come alive. But unlike the others, and despite its ridiculous premise, this game had Midway staffers exchanging concerned looks.

"We actually did see it here in Chicago, and I remember out of all the copycat games, that was the one people were the most worried about," Tsui explains. "Bob Gale, the writer and producer of Back to the Future, was behind this thing. There was a lot of money being spent on it. So there was some concern about it. Then when we saw it on test, and realized this was a thing made by people who had never done a fighting game before."

Amrich actually covered Tattoo Assassins, and tells me about its unusual roots.

"It started life as a feature film script, but Bob Gale couldn't get anybody onboard for it. He thought this would be a great, fun popcorn movie. When they did a Back to the Future pinball game at Data East, they worked with Bob Gale directly. They had a very good partnership, and that was a very good pinball machine. So, at some point, during some meeting, Bob Gale said, 'Hey, I've got this other idea that, now that I think about it, would make a great fighting game.' And Data East said, 'We're all ears, what ya got?'"

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE's short film on the competitive gaming world of 'Smite'

What they got was a barely working mess that never made it to arcades. Data East, after seeing the unholy hell spawn they'd programmed, used their collective common sense and squashed it. But like a technological cockroach, the game survives through ROM hacks and emulations. Tattoo Assassins has even gained cult status due to its outlandish claim, proudly boasted during its attract mode, that there are 2,196 unique fatalities in the game.

"There's a 20-minute supercut video on YouTube where somebody went to the trouble of figuring out all of the fatalities and then edited them all together," Amrich says. "So if you haven't seen that, I highly recommend opening something cold and frosty and sitting through it. That's how I've seen most of them."

He's right that there is a selection of Tattoo Assassins fatalities videos on YouTube. But beer or no beer, they're really not worth much of your time.

Archive screenshot of 'Tattoo Assassins.' Courtesy of Dan Amrich

"Fans—and when I say fans, what I really mean is masochists—have gone through and created detailed move lists for it, even when the game itself never fully shipped," Amrich continues. "I was contacted by one of the designers on the team, one of the programmers rather, and he said that there were three machines, 100 percent coded games, in existence. A couple of years after we spoke to each other, I found out one of them had been destroyed by a flood in Miami. Divine intervention is what that is."

But with that claim of more than 2,000 fatalities, and the whole Bob Gale backstory, it's inevitable that Tattoo Assassins would continue to fascinate people today.

"My favorite ridiculous fatality in the game is the happy Thanksgiving one, where the winning character sort of bends over at the waist and shoots turkeys on platters out of their ass," Amrich adds. "A dozen turkeys shoot out of their ass. I'm kind of proud to say, on behalf of the entire games industry, that nobody else has bothered to do that. I'd like to think that other game companies saw that and said, 'Yeah, we're not going that far.'"

"When the fatalities came around, it made people realize: 'Wow, video games can do anything.'"—Josh Tsui

Once all the turkeys had flown, and the blood dried, the industry was stuffed to its gills with violent fighting games—and some genuinely good ones got a little lost in the mix. Killer Instinct and Primal Rage were more than serviceable games—the former lives on to this day, in a rebooted form, as a competitive fighter, showcased at eSports events the world over, while the latter received countless ports. Visual Concepts' Weaponlord was another unfairly labeled as a Mortal Kombat copycat, but its emphasis on weapons and a complex system of counters and blocks can be seen as a precursor to the likes of Soulcalibur. But technology was marching onward, and 2D fighters were made to look like relics by the new, 3D likes of Virtua Fighter and Tekken. Severed limbs lost their appeal.

But the trend for bloody finishing moves did result in something more than just a bunch of goofy gore. To Tsui, the fatalities arms race meant that video games had again kicked open a door of potential—for what the medium can be, and where it can go. "When the fatalities came around, it made people realize: 'Wow, video games can do anything,'" he says. They might be little more than a footnote, then, in the wider history of games development, but in their own, unique way fatalities showed the world that video games were growing up, changing, becoming something more than children's toys. The controversy that Mortal Kombat attracted only serves to illustrate this evolution: Previously unconcerned parties began to look at video games as a major entertainment medium, and properly monitor what was being produced and who it was aimed at.

Even Pac-Man would finally find himself in a fighter, come the Super Smash Bros. iterations of 2014—but, mercifully, you won't ever find him gnawing on a ball and socket joint of a fallen Bowser as the sun sets over the Kongo Jungle. That sort of visceral thrill remains the preserve of Mortal Kombat, now on its tenth main edition and showing no signs of fading away like most of its 1990s rivals. Appropriately, it didn't merely beat them, back in the day: It saw them staggering, tore off its mask, and flambéed the lot of them. Just for fun, of course.

Follow William Barboza on Twitter.

VICE Gaming is now Waypoint – come and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and more.

A different outdoor urinator. Photo via Flickr user thefuturistics

A seemingly endless stream of drunk people's urine is eroding the stone foundation of the world's tallest church in the German city of Ulm, and no one quite knows how to stop it, CNN reports.

Late-night revelers already face a $109 fine if they're caught emptying their bladders on the 531-foot-tall Ulm Minster church, but the monetary threat hasn't thwarted drunken partiers drawn to the hulking piss-beacon.

The damage to the stone base of the church comes from the acids and salt in the pee, not to mention other bodily fluids drunk folks might leave behind, like puke.

"I've been keeping an eye on it for half a year now and, once again, it's coated with urine and vomit," the church's head of maintenance, Michael Hilbert, told a local paper. "This is about preserving law and order."

What law and order means in this case is probably just some Ulm city officials dishing out a few bucks for more public toilets or for city cops to up their ticketing. But the easiest solution may lie in the bottom of a few five-gallon buckets of that pee-proof paint.

Read: Why More Men Are Sitting Down to Pee

Photo by John MacKenzie via Creative Commons

The Mississippi chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is calling for the feds to probe an incident in which white high school students allegedly came up behind a black teen and pulled a noose tightly around his neck, the New York Times reports.

The 15-year-old wasn't harmed, but his parents brought the October 13 incident to local NAACP president Derrick Johnson after first going to the school administration and law enforcement.

"It's probably one of the hardest cases I'll ever handle in my career because of the nature of it," Captain Boggs, a black officer with the local sheriff's department whose own investigation is apparently ongoing, told the Times. "Have I ever had to deal with something like this? No, not from a high school."

Two additional complaints have since been made, according to the NAACP, one involving the same school—Stone High—in Wiggins, Mississippi. "Allowing students to commit blatant hate crimes without severe consequences sends a message to students that their safety and well-being are not valuable enough to be protected," the NAACP said in a statement.

While the alleged perpetrators have not been named, a lawyer from the school district did confirm to the Associated Press that one has been disciplined. Johnson told the Times that some of the students involved had participated in a school parade holding a Confederate flag in the past.

Johnson added that he plans to meet with the FBI on Wednesday to see if it can move forward with a hate-crime investigation. Meanwhile, the student is apparently still in school, despite what the NAACP president described as "emotional distress."

Read: How Many Racists Are There in America?

The CN Tower doesn't need no pills. Photo by Jason Baker

Toronto city workers are literally getting their dicks hard on the public dime.

According to an auditor general's report released Tuesday, city employees spent $1.9 million on drugs like Viagra and Cialis in 2015 and spend $3 million a year on prescription opioids including fentanyl.

The report broke down some of the "excessive and unusual drug claims."

For example, 16 of the men claiming erection drugs in 2015 were taking more than a year's supply (between 395 and 600 once-a-day pills) in addition to Cialis "on-demand drugs" which are not recommended for daily use.

The city doesn't place a limit on how much workers can claim for erection drugs, something the report said should be corrected to $500 a year. Five employees claimed $5,000 worth of boner meds in 2015.

With opioids, 27 claimants were dispensed the same prescription drug at different pharmacies on the same day (this is known as pharmacy shopping and has been linked to overdoses); 16 claimants were reimbursed an equivalent of two years or more supply of Oxycodone in a one-year period; and several claimants were reimbursed for four times the maximum annual supply of Oxycodone within one year.

According to the RCMP, the street value of Oxycodone ranges from $20-$40 a pill.

More than 30 claimants claimed more than an 18-month supply of fentanyl patches within one year.

In addition, 237 employees made two claims for controlled substances at different pharmacies within the same week and 328 workers were reimbursed for the same drug multiple times on the same days.

About 15 percent of Canadians use prescription opioids for pain, and overdose deaths have seen a spike in recent years. Meanwhile, synthetic fentanyl was responsible for 302 deaths in BC alone from January to August of 2016.

The auditor general noted "prescription opioid pain relievers, sedatives, and stimulants are the three classes of controlled substances most commonly misused and have high tendencies for abuse and diversion."

In total, the city spent $60 million in drug benefits last year.

The report made 18 recommendations to help the city tighten up its oversight of drug claims and prevent the misuse of benefits.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Adam Capay. Photo via Allison Jane Capay

A young Indigenous man who was in solitary confinement for four years without trial has been moved from his cell, Ontario's correctional services minister told the legislature on Wednesday.

The move follows mounting public outrage over the case of Adam Capay, who has been languishing in an isolated cell in a Thunder Bay jail since 2012, and a push for action from his family. It also comes a day after the minister said he would not intervene.

"This individual has been moved from their cell," said Correctional Services Minister David Orazietti during Question Period. "They are no longer in that same cell. They are in a different location, with appropriate lighting and access to day rooms, spending time out of their cell for showers, phone calls and access to TV. It is my understanding, from speaking to officials, that the inmate is satisfied with the conditions they are presently in."

But according to jail officials, the move is only temporary and only took place because of construction in the segregation unit, which will last about six weeks.

Mike Lundy, a correctional officer at the Thunder Bay District Jail and president of OPSEU 737, told TBSNewswatch that a door is being added to the unit.

Follow Tamara Khandaker on Twitter.

It's NBA season again, and while that's pretty exciting news for basketball fans as a whole, it can also be a trying time for Knicks loyalists: Just ask the Bodega Boys.

Before the Knicks faced off against the Cleveland Cavaliers last night, New York natives Desus Nice and the Kid Mero gave some hot takes on what was about to unfold during their VICELAND late-night show Desus & Mero. Unfortunately, the duo's predictions of grandeur fell short, and the Knicks lost by 29 points.

Can the team turn it around? Desus and Mero hope so, but—as Desus put it—being a Knicks fan is more about the journey than the destination.

Watch this week's episode of Desus & Mero for free online now, and be sure to catch new episodes weeknights at 11 PM ET/PT on VICELAND.

Let Pennywise do his thing. Photo via Warner Brothers

When I first heard a few weeks ago that Home Depot was removing the Scary Peeper Creeper Halloween decoration from its shelves, I was a bit skeptical.

The offending costume—a prop of a hooded man whose hands are at the sides of his face—has suction cups that can be attached to the windows of a home, so it looks as if he's peering inside. Very scary stuff. It was stripped from the hardware store's shelves after a Markham, Ontario woman said voyeurism is a crime in Canada and shouldn't be glorified.

Thing is, murder is also a much frowned-upon crime and yet deranged killers and their victims remain one of the most popular Halloween tropes. Still, I can understand the logic of those who are offended by the Peeper Creeper—the name itself, a nod to peeping Toms, doesn't do it any favours.

It seems this Halloween, more so than in Halloweens past, the Peeper has plenty of company. In a strive to be sensitive, we've seen students at Brock University issue a list of banned costumes that are considered to be in poor taste, including Bill Cosby, Caitlyn Jenner, and attire that belongs to cultural groups i.e. headdresses and bindis. Some stores, for the first time, won't be carrying any Indigenous-themed costumes, (though others are refusing to stop selling those same costumes, despite being called out as racist). And just this week, a group of US-based mental health advocates went public with its demand that mentally ill people shouldn't be used to scare people during Halloween (think: psych ward haunted houses). All in all, things are relatively woke, which is a good thing.

Read More: Clowns Have Drawn First Blood in the Clown War

Some people are no doubt annoyed by what they see as a bow to political correctness. And while you may be struggling to figure out where to draw the line, I have figured it out for the greater good of all society.

The line is clown bans.

Hysteria over "creepy clowns" has been sweeping North America for months. I guess it started in Greenville, South Carolina, where kids reportedly spotted clowns trying to lure them into the forest with money (sounds like an OK deal tbh). Soon after, clown-related "incidents" began popping up in other parts of the US and Canada. Most of them appear to be dumb pranks—in Toronto two teens were arrested after one chased a fellow student around while wearing a clown costume and the other filmed it; Halifax police opened an investigation after a teen posted an image of a clown lurking outside a school with the caption "We stalking you so keep your eyes open. We ain't killing, we just creeping." In St. Remi, Quebec last week, yet another teen clown was charged with assault with a weapon after allegedly attacking someone—though, when reached by VICE, Quebec provincial police did not elaborate what weapon he possessed. (I have a hunch it might've been the costume itself.) The teen was also charged with wearing a disguise, and cops have asked people to call 911 if they spot clowns.

Won't someone think of the clown? Photo via Jake Kivanç

As a result of all the hype, some school districts including Fort McMurray have banned clown costumes outright.

"There was concern that some students were not reacting well to the whole creepy clown issue. I'm supporting our students, I'm supporting our principals in those observations," superintendent Doug Nicholls told the CBC. Meanwhile Canadian Tire has pulled two hanging clown decorations in an effort to be "sensitive," though a spokesperson admitted no customers had complained.

IMO catering to everyone's sensitivities—especially when their sensitivity is a fear—goes against the very principle of Halloween. Lots of people get squeamish around blood—are zombies, decapitated limbs, or vampires next to go? What about kids dressing up like Satan—the literal embodiment of all evil in the world? Won't someone think of the Catholics?

A couple years ago, some Canadian schools started replacing Halloween with "black and orange day" because it's more inclusive and doesn't have roots in "occultism." Gee, that sucks, I thought at the time. But if the only non-offensive thing left to dress up as is a sexy Bernie Sanders, that might not be such a shitty alternative.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Illustration by Tallulah Fontaine for VICE

I moved to Michigan from California when I was four years old. I got a new house, a new school, and, eventually, some new friends. But perhaps best of all, I got new seasons. Four of them, to be exact.

For me, the arrival of fall brightened the corners of life in an unexpected way. Suddenly the suffocating shroud of hot summer air was lifted. The blinding white sunlight gave way to more sensitive amber hues. All parts of nature seemed to point toward hidden meanings and possibilities. Red, orange, and yellow leaves clung desperately to the trees before becoming a rich mixture of brown, somehow representing the essence of earth itself, a kind of life force emerging through decay.

The air was sharper and more urgent. The world smelled like possibility. And when someone came in from outside, that magical woodsy tree scent clung to them, somehow making them more human and more animal at the same time. More alive. Autumn is the season of feeling.

Autumn brings previews of the cold bleakness of the year's end, and with it, time to work on one's inner life.

There's nothing like experiencing the changing of seasons over the course of a year. People in parts of California and the South seem to believe they have seasons, too, but the changes are so subtle that it's almost impossible to tell a difference in the weather from April to October. Watching these four extremely distinct contrasting atmospheric edges melt into one another as a kid in Michigan, and today from my home in the New York City, is a beautiful ritual. Not every day is meant to feel the same, or be 82 degrees and sunny.

I've taken to comparing the seasons to the times of day: Sunrise is spring. Midday is summer. Twilight is fall. Nighttime is winter. I hate mornings, and in general don't really enjoy the sun. Therefore, spring and summer—the morning and midday equivalents—are my least favorite parts of the year. Sunset expresses the golden chilled hues of autumn perfectly, and night is the cold desolate darkness of winter.

Autumn brings previews of the cold bleakness of the months ahead, and with it, time to work on one's inner life. Spring may be the season of rebirth, at least in terms of the non-human realm of the natural world, but for the human self, autumn seems to encourage inner rejuvenation. As a chill sets into the air, I feel a natural inclination to withdraw into myself, and enjoy rebuilding the indoors of my mind and surroundings.

The cold weather justifies the desire to stay in by a fireplace or space heater and just work on the self, a time to deeply think about things and turn physical inactivity into internal mental action. To me, these colder months always present a tremendous opportunity—a sense of almost unlimited possibility, and a kind of unfounded and extremely hopefully optimism, all pointing toward inspiring new ideas about life and creation. If the flower is reborn in spring, the human spirit is reborn in fall.

I know that many people don't agree with my take on the seasons. Some, in fact, believe the exact opposite is true. But for me, long winter nights always held more appeal than outdoor summer activities. There is something too bright, too glaring, too exposed about the spring and summer months. There is no shadow, no mystery, no unseen realms of potentiality, no gray skies to match up with my inner shadows, where the imagination can step in and fill in the blanks with outlandish visions and ideas. There is no room in the summer for the melancholy feelings of despair inside us, and in fall, I find an outer recognition of my inner experience. It's deeply affirming and meaningful to have Mother Nature herself reach out and say, "You're not alone. I feel this way, too."

Just as we listen to a sad song to make audible the sensitive feelings inside us, the ambience of autumn confirms the wistful aspects of our souls. The moody melodies of minor key months like October and November legitimize our sullenness as a worthwhile and necessary texture in humanity—an appropriate variant of the dynamics of our spirits.

Autumn has a beautiful way of substantiating these lower moods and reflecting them in the environment as something vital and true. Darkness is as crucial to us as light—we can't appreciate the sun without the shadow, or spring without the fall. Remember that and embrace your inner autumn and the feelings it encourages.

Follow Andrew W.K. on Twitter.

Check out Dame Darcy's website, Instagram, and Twitter.

Screenshot via

All people need to get it on — even, well, especially, those serving time.

Take the case of Kelly Ellard, one of British Columbia's most notorious murderers. Earlier this week Postmedia reported that Ellard, after months of conjugal visits with her boyfriend, a parolee with gang-ties, is now eight months pregnant.

Ellard is serving a life sentence after being found guilty in 2005 for the 1997 killing of Reena Virk. Ellard, then 15, ruthlessly beat Virk, alongside a group of six girls, underneath a Victoria bridge and afterwards Ellard and her friend Warren Glowatski drowned her in the river.

The father-to-be of Ellard's child is currently back behind bars after failing to comply to his parole. So, with both parents in jail, the baby eventually goes to the non-jailed family, right?

Well, as it turns out, it's not exactly as Orange is the New Black would have you believe.

According to Correctional Services Canada there are several possible options when an inmate gives birth. The first, and one most people would initially jump to, is that the child would either be given to the next of kin or go into the foster system.

However, there exists the possibility of Ellard rearing her lil' one behind bars.

The Institutional Mother-Child Program allows mothers who are currently serving time to raise their child in prison full time to the age of four.

"The program is intended to foster positive relationships between federally incarcerated women and their children by providing a supportive environment that promotes stability and continuity for the mother-child relationship," said Jacques Audrey, with the CSC, in an email to VICE.

Proponents of the program say that fostering this relationship drastically reduces a prisoner's chance of recidivism and is in the best interest of the child. The program moves the mother and child into their own little pad in a mother-child unit of the prison.

Read More: Babies Behind Bars

To be a part of this program CSC looks at three different categories: the woman having not committed an offence against a child (if she has, she can seek a psychiatric assessment saying she is not a threat to her child), she is classified in minimum or medium security, and she is not residing in a unit treating women for mental health issues.

If a mother successfully applies to the program a child could move into the jail from the outside as well.

The Guidelines for the Implementation of Mother-Child Units in Canadian Correctional Facilities—put together by the Collaborating Centre for Prison Health and Education at the University of British Columbia — say that "mother-child units in correctional facilities allow children to bond with their mothers in a safe and supportive environment and allow mothers to develop positive parenting and social skills."

"Through this lens, incarceration can be viewed as a transformative period for mothers and their children."

Critics of the program say raising a child behind bars is tantamount to child abuse but Dr. Ruth Elwood Martin, one of the authors of the guidelines, says that's simply an emotional response.

"I would say those people don't know what they're talking about and they don't have the best interest of the child at heart. Once you take a child away from the mother, there is no going back," said Martin.

"We should be doing everything to give that baby the best chance for a healthy life."

According to these guidelines the child would live with the mother in a special unit with a crib beside her bed and be allowed 24-hour access to her child. Other inmates can apply to be babysitters and the unit will be outfitted to best care for a child.

"If you actually looked at a Mother-Child unit, you would say 'wow, this is a great place to raise a child.' It just looks like a regular pre-school or day-care. It's a very appropriate place to raise a child," said Martin.

Martin said the prisons form collaborations with the surrounding community to have resources brought in to care for the child.

After the lil' prison dweller is four he or she won't be able to continue to live in the slammer and has to be transitioned to the outside — but the child can stay with the mother part time until the age of 12. The guidelines have not been fully adopted but Martin said she is pleased with the progress CSC has made.

"As far as I can tell, the policies for CSC's Mother-Child Unit, and the policies that the provincial branch eventually adopted were very similar to the content of the guidelines," said Martin.

According to CSC there are currently only six women participating in the Mother-Child program across Canada. Some critics, including Martin, say that number is far too low and many women are being left out of the program.

"We have so many children that are in foster care. So, what happens when a woman gives birth in prison? She goes to the hospital, she gives birth and the baby is put into foster care," said Martin. "So not only is that woman a bad woman because she committed a crime and is in prison, but she is now a terrible mother because her baby was taken away from her."

"I would challenge people and say that's an incredible opportunity to start breaking some of the patterns we have in Canada of putting children in foster care."

Follow Mack on Twitter.

Not the bar where the joke was apparently made. Photo via Flickr user dumbonyc

Your Facebook posts can spark arguments, your emails may be hacked, the government might monitor your phone calls and texts, and the recipients of your Tinder messages are definitely sharing them with friends and laughing about you. But conversations held within the bleary, beery confines of a bar are supposed to be sacred and secret, right? Right?

Turns out no. Ivanka Trump learned that the hard way (pun intended) when a decade-old alleged dive bar utterance about a hypothetical "mulatto cock" flew around the internet after BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti brought it up on Twitter. And one 28-year-old New Yorker learned a similar lesson over the weekend when a joke about killing Ivanka's angry dad apparently got him detained and interrogated by cops.

As Gothamist reports, Greg Chang, a local public school US history teacher, was posted up at Roebling Sporting Club in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on Saturday afternoon when the conversation turned to politics. "The offending joke, I believe, was, 'If Donald Trump becomes president, I would pursue an early retirement—life in federal prison," he told Gothamist. "Lucky for me I know the two parts of the country a President Trump would spend most of his time in: the Beltway and the City."

According to Chang, multiple officers showed up not long after, entered the bar, and asked for a word. (They had apparently been called by someone who overheard the conversation.) "I stepped outside, and literally the first question out of the sergeant's mouth is, 'Did you make any comments about Donald Trump today?" Chang said.

The teacher was not technically "arrested," but when cops ask you nicely to come down to the precinct for a longer interview—after seizing your driver's license—it's not insane to be afraid to say no. (VICE reached out to the bar for comment on the incident, which neither the NYPD nor Secret Service would comment on to Gothamist.) Chang said he was made to wait for three hours at the station before a Secret Service agent and detective began a more formal interrogation. Apparently convinced he might have said something more specific or serious, the duo laid into him for another hour or so before calling it quits and letting him go, Chang added.

Adding insult to injury, the NYPD somehow lost Chang's license, and he had to sign a waiver allowing law enforcement to contact his therapist and look through his medical records, he claimed.

Chang has not been charged with a crime, but can you get in real trouble for saying that you'd like to Kennedy your least favorite candidate? According to Clay Calvert, director of the Marion B. Brechner First Amendment Project at the University of Florida, the answer is hell no.

"It was absurd to detain this particular individual for making what clearly appears to be a joke," Calvert told me.

For something you say to be a "true threat"—basically, the legal standard for what counts as a legitimate one and not just loose talk—it has to be evaluated on three criteria: the content, the context, and the audience that heard it. "So you have to actually look at what was said, the context in which it was said—in this case in a bar as a joke—and the reaction to it, if people laughed and thought it was funny," Clay said. "The be put in fear of imminent bodily harm" in order not to be protected under the First Amendment, he added.

The professor actually happened to be talking Donald Trump in class yesterday, specifically how the candidate made that weird allusion to "Second Amendment people" many took to be a jest about killing Hillary Clinton. That too, is protected speech, according to Clay.

"That's not a threat because he's hedging all his bets in the context of a political rally where people would understand he's engaged in rhetoric," he said.

So if there's lesson here (Chang was apparently told by one cop that he ought to be learning one), it's that your average beat cop may not be particularly well-versed on legal jurisprudence. And perhaps also that bars—that allegedly sacrosanct American institution—are not a safe space.

Follow Matt Taylor on Twitter.

The manslaughter charge is the first of its kind in Edmonton. Still via 'DOPESICK'

For the first time, police in Edmonton have charged a 25-year-old man with manslaughter in the death of another man who overdosed on fentanyl earlier this year.

As the opioid overdose rate continues to rise across Canada, and in Alberta especially, it's one of the few times police have taken this type of action against a suspected drug supplier.

Staff Sgt. Dave Monson announced Wednesday that following an "extensive investigation," Jordan Yarmey is alleged to have supplied 33-year-old Szymon Kalich with the drug that's around 50 times more potent than heroin.

Officers were called to a home in the southeast part of the city one afternoon this January in response to reports of a body lying in the hallway, Monson explained.

Toxicology tests later confirmed that fentanyl was the cause of Kalich's death.

Monson said the charge should send a message to anyone selling illicit substances.

Image via Twitter

The government of Newfoundland and Labrador and three Indigenous groups reached a late-night deal Wednesday, after a 13 hours of negotiation, that could potentially stop contamination downstream from a major hydroelectric project in Canada's north.

Dream Corp LLC is the latest in what has become a very distinct brand of comedy midwifed into the world by Adult Swim. The show is a strange and pleasing trip, equal parts live-action and animated dream sequences, centered on a wild-haired dream therapist named Dr. Roberts (Jon Gries) and the staffers at his semi-futuristic warehouse medical facility.

The structure of each 15-minute episode is ostensibly straightforward—Dr. Roberts sees a patient and, with the help of a team of technicians (including a robot voiced by Dream Corp executive producer Steven Merchant), goes inside the patient's dreams and cures them. This being Adult Swim, things usually go off the rails pretty quickly, and it often doesn't really make any sense, even when we feel like we're in familiar territory. To play up the psychedelic effect, the show makes use of rotoscoping, a technique in which live-action footage is traced over, frame by frame, by animators.

The pilot, which aired Sunday, begins when a young man comes to the center for help with impotence. In a rotoscoped sequence of the patient's dreams, Dr. Roberts, the patient, a woman in a frog costume eating spaghetti (the patient's girlfriend), and Dave Coulier sit around a restaurant table before Coulier turns into a Legolas-like elf after having sex with the patient's spaghetti-eating girlfriend/frog. The good doctor's prescription? A job at Dream Corp LLC.

Showrunner Daniel Stessen is an accomplished music video and short film director who won Best Short Animated Film at the 2014 Berlin Independent Film Festival for a project called The Gold Sparrow. He is also a former roommate of John Krasinski (another Dream Corp executive producer). I recently chatted by phone with Stessen about his new show, highbrow dick jokes, and the singularity.

VICE: How do you explain Dream Corp to people?
Daniel Stessen: It's dream therapy. How I normally pitch it is that traditional therapy can take months or even years to get to the root of an issue. In this case, Dr. Roberts puts you under, and then he drops into your subconscious with you and guides you to the root of your issue. So he can, in real time, wire the issue that you're having. In the pilot, it's impotence. In one episode, the Academy Award–nominated June Squibb comes in to quit smoking. Another is couples therapy, another OCD. But it's not always so straightforward.

Where did the idea for the show come from?
For a bit, I got really into singularity and the concept of living forever inside of a hard drive. Our idea of the future is always so clean and beautiful. No one's ever touched on how we got to that place. There's the Zach Morris phone . Now there's the iPhone 7, but there's also the Zach Morris phone that we all look at and laugh. So I'm trying to explore the first generation of the technology that's still in its beta stage, that's just filled with kinks and still needs to be worked out.

But in real life, dude, when I was young, I had bad night terrors. When I was 11, I woke up in my next door neighbor's house, in his parents' bedroom, screaming, "They're coming! They're coming! They're coming!" And this is not the first time that dream had happened, so I ended up being scared to go to bed for a while. My father sent me to a therapist to figure out what was going on. There was a whole bunch of other shit that was going on, but we went to the child therapist and he helped me. I'd go there a play with building blocks, and he'd help me figure out what my dream was about.

When I started reading this singularity stuff, and I had this personal experience that this stuff really works. This therapist helped me figure out what was going on in my dream, and I never had it again. And now add in living cyborgs. Why don't we go into the dream instead of talking about it? And that's Dream Corp.

Did you make the show for Adult Swim?
Yes, we pitched it to them first. The Gold Sparrow was doing well, and I had also done the farewells for The Office, and that was nominated for an Emmy. So I wrote something specifically for them. And in reality, Liquid Television and Adult Swim have shaped who I am as a filmmaker from a very early age. It's always been a dream and a goal to work with them. They funded the first pilot that we made in 2014. It tested in focus groups for the next couple months, and then they said, "OK, good job! But can we do it a little more like this?" And we went back to the drawing board. They ordered a rewrite of the pilot.

I worked that over and over until I got it right. And that's when I brought Stephen Merchant on as an executive producer. When I was stuck with the rewrites, I bounced some ideas off of him. Really, his biggest thing was when he told me to just watch the pilot of House. He goes, "I've never seen it, but I bet that it's going to help you."

Stephen Merchant told you to watch the pilot of House, but he had never seen it?
Yeah! And he was totally right. When I watched—the thing about House is that everyone is there for a reason. With Dream Corp, the original pilot was more of a visceral experience. Once I realized that we needed to define the characters a little bit more, it cracked the job wide open.

He knows what he's doing.
I've learned so much from him and Krasinski. Every single round of notes. Every single edit. They've been so amazing every time. So supportive the whole time. They're making suggestions, but they're also saying, "Do it how you would do it." And so does Adult Swim. They've all given me the freedom to do my thing, but it helps when you have rules.

It does feels like a very Adult Swim type of show, but sometimes it's hard to articulate why that is.
One thing that I heard someone say, "If it would fit on any other network, then they don't want it." They don't want it to be able to play anywhere else. And that really made sense to me.

What do you think influenced the feel of Dream Corp the most?
Everything on Liquid Television.

I'm not familiar with that.
That was the first Adult Swim. It was on MTV.

Aeon Flux started there. There was another thing called The Head, which was a pretty epic and mind-bending thing that when you're in eighth grade, you feel like, Oh my God, I shouldn't be watching this. But you absolutely should be.

And early Adult Swim: Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law; Venture Brothers. These are things that really excited me as a writer, first and foremost. And British television. There's a show called Peep ShowPeep Show. That's a huge influence. Steve and I would talk a lot about that show. I use a lot of POV in Dream Corp, and that's influenced by Peep Show. I just love British humor. The fact that nothing matters, that's what's funny for me. On Dream Corp, we try to play it so serious, because these people are real people. But the stuff they're saying, everything can be thrown away, everything is disposable, and that's really funny. The lines and the patients are disposable. I feel like my goal is to make something that is Magnolia meets Airplane!

That's the dream.
I don't understand why comedy isn't in museums. Why is a funny painting not in a museum, but a sad painting is? I'd like to make high art highbrow dick jokes. One of my friends told me that he thinks that Dream Corp is highbrow DIY. And that's really cool, too. That's a big compliment. It's tricky, the concept of walking into someone's dream—it's something we've all thought of doing.

"Why is a funny painting not in a museum, but a sad painting is? I'd like to make high art highbrow dick jokes."

It sounds like you're really interested in infusing different strains of things into what can be found funny.
Absolutely. You don't need to—although getting punched in the dick is funny, it will never not be funny. But there's a way, and it's all in the character development, and the amazing actors we're working with, the humor can come from new, stranger places.

Explain rotoscoping to me.
So the nuts and bolts of how it is: You film the actor, and we're usually in a huge warehouse. You light him or her exactly how you want, and then costume them how you want, and then we take that footage, do the whole scene, edit it together, and then send it to animation, and they draw it over each individual frame.

So all that's being filmed is the actor in an empty warehouse?
Yes, as well as anything they are touching. So it still has that flow. If you're not holding a cup of coffee, and you try to draw a cup of coffee in there, it won't be part of the same illustration. So all you need is that cup, and then one of our animation teams will build an entire background, floor to ceiling. Another one will just do the characters, which is the roto aspect. I think that this form is really beautiful.

How does shooting a scene work?
It's like having an imaginary friend. A lot of time I'm running around telling them what's happening while it's happening. "You're coming in on a helicopter, the wind is blowing, it's freezing, you're on a side of a mountain. It's a very heroic moment." I make sure I can paint the whole scene for them verbally before we even get in there, and then we'll play with it once we're in there. Acting in an empty space is hard, a lot harder than you would think. Every scene is tricky. But, really, it's just feels like playing with your friends on a playground.

Cody Wiewandt is a writer living in New York.

Dream Corp LLCairs Sundays at 11:45 PM on Adult Swim.

Tonight, on an all-new episode of Weediquette, Krishna heads to Providence, Rhode Island, to go to a service for a church that considers weed a sacrament.

Then, on the season premiere of Hamilton's Pharmacopeia, Hamilton heads to South Africa, the last place on earth Quaaludes can still be found, to study the drug and explore its history of experimentation.

Finally, catch another new episode of DESUS & MERO with special guest Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend.

Weediquette airs Wednesdays at 9:30 PM, followed by Hamilton's Pharmacopeia at 10, and DESUS & MERO at 11:30 on VICELAND.

Want to know if you get VICELAND? Head here to find out how to tune in.

If there's one thing the internet loves, it's arguing over simple optical illusions!

Remember THAT dress? Was it yellow? Was it blue? It all depended on the cones inside your eyes! Did that stop us arguing over it? Not one bit! How about pulling it up big on a laptop screen and showing our computer in turn to everyone in the office? Hell yeah! I think it's gold and white, because it is! Some people think it's blue! Nutty shit!

Well: get ready to lose your goddamn bollocks again, because there's a new optical illusion in town. In fact, there are five of them. Don't forget to hop in the comments below and tell us what you can see! That's not boring at all! Also, please share this on Facebook with a leading caption like, 'So...' then the cry-laugh emoji then tagging 20 separate people! Thank you! Like & Subscribe for more of this good shit!

BILL MURRAY OR TOM HANKS?

This one really has the internet divided: is the picture below loveable alleged wife beater Bill Murray, or is it walking Oscar nomination Tom Hanks?

(Photo: David Shankbone, via)

Look closely: while at first glance the picture looks like Hanks, it is actually Bill Murray. Woah! Remember when he tended the bar at SXSW one time and gave everyone tequila no matter what they asked for? Leg-end-a-ry!

OIL OR PAINT?

This is a real "once you see it..." illusion. Look carefully at the photo below:

(Photo: Troy Maresek, via)

No – that's not a real Star Trek outfit! It's actually cleverly applied body paint, but more than a few people on the 'web have been fooled.

KATY PESCHANEL

THINK FAST: is this singer Katy Perry, or singer/actress Zooey Deschanel?

(Photo: Eva Rinaldi, via)

The answer is: neither! Although Katy Perry and Zooey Deschanel famously look the same because they were cloned from the same genetic material in the same underground Hollywood bunker, this is actually British actress Emily Blunt.

WHAT COLOUR ARE THESE TROUSERS?

It's the new "The Dress"! What colour are the trousers in the photo below?

(Photo: Casey Green, via)

Some see pink, some see orange: and once you start seeing one, you can't see the other! I suppose all of this is just to illustrate what isolated little lives we truly lead. We can try to reach out, can't we – touch our fingers tenderly across the infinite voids between us, to our friends or our lovers or our family or our colleagues – but ultimately we are alone, utterly alone, in solipsistic little worlds, only we can see the colours we see, only we can taste the flavours we taste, only we can feel the chill-like crackle of nerves and sensations, a feather stroked longingly up the skin of your forearm, an ice cube down your stomach, wax on your chest, only you can feel this, only you can see this; we can share our experiences in body but never in mind, truly, we are never more alone than when we are looking at an optical illusion and seeing a colour other than the one we are meant to—

HEDGE OR MAN?

Just a simple landscape view, right? Some bushes, a hedge, some foliage, a tree, the immaculate green sweep of grass, half-frosty on the crisp cool ground of the first few days of winter—

(Photo: Duncan Price, via)

WRONG. Look again: there's actually the face of a man hidden inside this image. It might take you a few minutes to see it – relax your eyes, try to zoom out, focus on the centre of the image and try to stare a metre or two behind it, but don't you ever feel, sometimes, that you could be doing something more? That maybe if you'd applied yourself, all along, that maybe you wouldn't be here, at work but trying to avoid work, at school but trying to avoid school, frittering your spare time away into the abyss, trying to see things that are already there? Do you ever wonder where you might have ended up if you had tried? If you hadn't wasted all this time doing nothing? – but you should be able to just make out the shape of a man's face. Got it yet? Can you make him out? Don't forget to Like & Subscribe and hit up the comments section below!

More stuff sort of related to this in which we ask people stuff:

We Asked a Colour Vision Expert About the Colour of that Dress

We Asked an Expert How to Go Viral and Make Yourself Wildly Rich

We Asked a 'Meme Scientist' What Makes a Meme Go Viral

Via chick.com

Jack Chick died on Sunday. It was a moment he'd been waiting for all his life. He was, in his own way, an incredibly successful man – an architect of the Satanic Panic, a hero of the religious right and, for a long time, almost inescapable: his bizarre Christian comic books were given out outside churches, left in motel rooms, thrust into the hands of passengers at airports and bus stations by thousands of willing evangelists across America and the rest of the planet – up to a billion of the things have been sold over the years – but it wasn't life he was interested in.

Few of Jack Chick's stories ended without some unfortunate being hideously bumped off by a freak accident, before finding themselves faced by a gargantuan, faceless Christ, the suffering man of Nazareth reconfigured as a monstrous god of the underworld. His Jesus didn't care how good you were in your life, or whether you tried to do right by the people around you: did you or did you not believe in Him?

Jack Chick took a perverse delight in pulling the strings of this puppet Christ, having Him send dozens of decent people to burn forever in the fires of Hell, because he always knew that he would not be one of them. Jack Chick's theology was a Protestantism stripped down to its barest, coldest contradiction. The actual teachings of Christianity were always just incidental; the core of his project was a magic spell – something that only works if you believe that it will, but you'll only find out after you die. This spell was called Jesus Christ, but it didn't really matter. In other stories, gamblers and murderers and other unwholesome people would be told to accept Christ just before their death, and so long as they repeated the magic incantation their reward would be eternal bliss in Heaven. Maybe that was Jack Chick's reward, too. Only he knows now, and he's not around to tell us.

As a weird and awkward teenager I loved Jack Chick. Other gangly, nerdish kids took solace in the stupid wish-fulfilment worlds of fantasy or science fiction; I had Chick tracts. His comics were all available for free on the internet; the idea was that Christian evangelists too shy to spread the Gospel by mouth could print them out at home and then hand them to strangers.

It's hard to imagine that any of these bizarre fables actually changed anyone's mind; they were mostly a way for evangelicals to convince themselves they were preaching God's word while taking on all the impersonal efficiency demanded by Mammon. Nearly all of them involved a fantasy drama of conversion to Christianity, in which the ordinary person seemed to have never even heard of Christian ideas but believes them on the spot ("Wow – you're saying Jesus Christ died for my sins? That's so cool!").

Via chick.com

For a Jewish kid from north London, insulated from the grim reality of the American religious right by thousands of miles of Atlantic Ocean, these strange half-human creatures opened up a universe far stranger than any Middle-Earth. These comics were entrancing precisely because they seemed so incapable of imagining anyone else's point of view, of even pretending to meet me half-way. They showed a complete, perfect secondary world, one that looked just like this one, but one in which people didn't behave like real people, or talk like them either ("Haw haw haw!"), which was swarming with actual demons, fanged and ugly – and millions seemed to really think they were living in it. I must have read them all.

Not that Jack Chick's world was a nice place. Not that Jack Chick was a nice man. I didn't just disagree with his judgements on the theory of evolution (a godless lie), gay people ( demon-possessed), rock music (a vector for demonic possession), the Catholic church (a Satanic world conspiracy), Islam (a moon cult founded by nefarious agents of the Catholic church and followed by the demon-possessed) or nice Jewish boys like myself ( good for killing Muslims, but Hellbound unless we converted to Christianity) – I found much of it to be utterly morally reprehensible, which it is. His politics came from the quasi-fascist John Birch society; his theology bypassed all the millennia of existential grappling with the Bible and tradition, powered by a very un-Christlike self-satisfaction and hate. But his cartoons were always so lurid, so gaudy, tactless and fundamentally stupid that they were effectively defanged; all his poisonous ideology was neutered by the sheer silliness of its presentation. They were, each of them, a beautiful piece of fundamentalist kitsch.

As the gay author and publisher Huw Lemmey wrote, "As a teenager made me feel better about myself than 1,000 'It Gets Better' videos ever could." Something about these comics made them lend themselves so easily to ironic recuperation. They were, after all, modelled on Communist propaganda given out in comic-book form to Chinese children; he was always playing with a form that never really belonged to him.

Like prurient tabloid newspapers, Jack Chick was clearly fascinated by every sin and vice he railed against; the comics were filled with drug use, occultism, gay erotica, joyriding, alcoholism – all the thrills that the Christian right usually tried to deny any kind of representation in other media. His paranoia about witchcraft and demons was magnificent and hyperbolic; particularly popular were his nearly annual broadsides against Halloween, the devil's birthday, including a tract in which Satan himself appears as a pumpkin-headed figure who sets about murdering unsuspecting teens, and his take on Dungeons and Dragons, presented as a form of occult training in which witches slowly prepare children to start practicing black magic.

But Jack Chick also had a really peculiar form of genius, which shouldn't ever be understated. In a banalised and depthless American postmodernity he saw Miltonian struggle: devils swarming into classrooms, the slow gears of ancient conspiracies churning beneath the surface of everyday life, a world so much grander and more cosmic than it actually is. He wasn't so much a comic book artist as the last great stained-glass painter of the European tradition, his didactic little fables bringing theology and liturgy into the domain of fungible images, to educate the unchurched. There's something very medieval about his forms and his style; the monstrous and grotesquely sexual demons stalking through everyday scenes recall the paintings and woodcuts of an earlier era; the images built for symbolic meaning rather than representational accuracy might be the last remnants of a thousand-year-old allegorical tradition.

It's a dying world. The religious right's stranglehold over American politics is fading fast: in a few weeks, millions of them will find themselves voting for Donald Trump, an utterly godless and depraved sinner who barely even bothers to nod to their perverse ideologies of family values and Christian uprightness. Jack Chick's death is just another sign that all these things are finally vanishing. But with it comes the loss of a truly bizarre talent. All that we can hope is that he's moved on to better things.

@sam_kriss

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