A Vancouver aquarium that had its last two beluga whales die off in November will no longer be able to import or keep whales in captivity. The city's park board unanimously voted to ban the display of all cetaceans on Thursday night.

The park board chair Michael Wiebe called the vote "historic."

Though the better choice for celebration music would arguably have been Michael Jackson's "Will You Be There (Free Willy)," the crowd opted for the more on-the-nose Raffi hit "Baby Beluga."

The bylaw amendment comes into force "no sooner than" May 15. This blocks the aquarium's plans to bring five belugas currently on loan in the US back to Vancouver. Those whales were slated to live in new Arctic pools set to open in 2019.

Malcom Bromley, the park board's general manager, told CBC they'll consider removing the three cetaceans still living on site. That includes a false killer whale (yes, a real thing) named Chester, a Pacific white-sided dolphin named Helen, and Daisy, a harbour porpoise.

Read More: Marineland Is a Hellhole

Vancouver Aquarium's CEO released a statement defending the aquarium's research and conservation efforts. "I know our team will continue to fight for nature long after this conversation has ended, and I'm immensely proud to be a part of a team that reminds me daily of why people around the world look to Vancouver Aquarium as a beacon for world conservation," John Nightingale wrote.

Five aquarium-owned cetaceans died in the last two years, according to a park board statement. Earlier this year, the aquarium had pledged to phase out its research program and discontinue beluga display in 12 years.

Supporters of the aquarium lamented the loss of marine mammal research opportunity Friday. The parks board, meanwhile, committed to working with the fish prison. "We applaud the valuable work by the Aquarium in public education and conservation and look forward to continuing our strong partnership into the future," Wiebe said.

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Ever since House Republican leaders unveiled the 123-page American Health Care Act—on Monday, already so long ago—the replacement to the Affordable Care Act has been combed through by wonks from both sides of the aisle, who have mostly concluded it sucks. Democrats don't want to tear down the ACA, of course, since they expended an enormous amount of effort crafting and passing it in Barack Obama's first term, but it's Republicans who may doom the bill, even though President Donald Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan are both pushing hard for it.

Republican critiques of the AHCA fall broadly into two camps. Hardcore conservatives, both in Congress and in advocacy groups, believe the plan maintains too much of the ACA's framework; some want a "clean" repeal, which would abolish the ACA full stop so they could start reform effort from scratch. Then there are moderate Republicans (especially those vulnerable to Democratic challengers) who will oppose any plan that might significantly reduce healthcare coverage nationwide, as this plan seems likely to do. Senators from states that benefited from the ACA's Medicaid expansion especially oppose the rollback of that expansion.

Both these groups are minorities within the Republican Party, and different representatives and senators have different incentives and views, of course. But given how narrow the margins for victory are—the plan can afford to lose 21 House and just two Senate Republican votes if Democrats unite against it—these critical coalitions matter. And with the caveat that it's early in the process, it's difficult to see how these groups will get to a place where they both feel good about the bill.

Party leaders, including Trump, are working to push the ACHA through over the objections of those two camps, even though the bill's impact has yet to be assessed by the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan number-crunching agency. Congressional leadership especially has reportedly pushed the plan as a binary decision: Either you support it, or you implicitly support the ACA status quo. ACHA proponents have also tried to downplay criticism as ideological bluster that won't matter in the end or the result of misunderstandings about how it fits into a larger Republican healthcare agenda. Amid a heated public debate, the AHCA did manage to clear its first legislative hurdle late Wednesday night, passing markups in two House committees largely unchanged, which may seem like a victory for this party unity push.

The rest of the process isn't likely to go so smoothly, experts told me.

"I think there are a lot of Republicans who actually believe that if you get government out of the way, healthcare will be more abundant," said Mike Cannon of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. "It will be more affordable, the quality will be better, and we will have less people on Medicaid." He added that from the perspective of this growing ideological wing, passing the AHCA would be worse than doing nothing as they believe the plan as it stands will be a massive failure due to its similarities to the ACA. "If they pass this bill," he said of the conservative attitude, "then Republicans are volunteering to take a bullet for Democrats and any hope of repealing [the ACA] is gone."

Trump and his team have signaled their willingness to negotiate elements of the plan to accommodate staunch critics' positions. And some detractors have reportedly come out of talks with Trump heartened, believing they can pull the bill towards the conservative side. (Conservative critics are the key force in the House and hence have received more attention at the outset than moderates.) Promising changes that can be made may not be enough to assuage some conservatives, though. According to Cannon, the most ideologically strident Republicans will insist on gutting everything that even resembles the ACA's key provisions from a final plan.

This faction may not be amenable to compromise because, as Gail Wilensky, a health economist with ample experience navigating government debates, put it, "some of the people who are, at the moment, yelling the loudest are the least practical among the politicians."

Any negotiation over the AHCD will be complicated. For one thing, different conservatives want different things. For another, concessions made to conservatives to pass the plan through the House may damn it in the Senate, where moderate concerns (especially about preserving the Medicaid expansion) are more salient to its success. "In fact," said Wilensky, "I'm not sure the bill they're considering [in the House] now could get through the Senate" because it is too harsh on Medicaid for some moderates. "Anything that moves it to the right [politically] would just compound that concern."

The seeming irreconcilability between the concessions conservatives in the House and moderates in the Senate would like to see in the AHCA may be why the Republican leadership apparently believes the plan as drafted is the best shot they've got at replacing the ACA. "Ryan's plan is an effort to steer between the two groups," explained University of Minnesota healthcare policy expert Lawrence Jacobs.

It's worth noting that the ACA itself weathered internal Democratic debates in 2009, with many on the left arguing Obama should advance a single-payer system and many moderates worried that the compromise legislation that emerged (which was based on conservative ideas) was still too radical—at least for voters who, they worried, would kick them out of this. (In fact, angry voters did unseat a lot of Democrats in the 2010 midterms.)

But this isn't an exact redux of 2009. Though Republicans complained about the ACA passing too quickly through Congress, they are also trying to rush the AHCA through even faster—possibly because they realize protracted exposure to internal debate and negotiation could doom the fragile middle path document. Also, the Republicans behind the AHCA drafted it largely in secret, even from members of their own party. Both moves may be strategic, but they also risk being more divisive.

That speed obviously hasn't shaken off criticism against the AHCA. Nor have proponents' best efforts eliminated the threat that internal discontent poses; as of publication, there were still more than enough Republicans in both chambers potentially leaning against the plan to stop it dead in its tracks. Wilensky cautioned that it's still very early on in the vote-wrangling process, no matter how accelerated it may be. "We'll see whether [leadership] can strong-arm, coerce, buy off—whatever else it is they do behind closed doors—to get support," she said. Those backroom machinations can, and often do, make or break deals like this , and the real calculus behind key votes is often not visible to the public. But going just on what we can see of the debate and dissent, things do not look good for the AHCA.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

A 42-year-old Queensland man faces more than 900 counts of child sex offences, after police discovered he'd solicited explicit photos from minors by posing as online Justin Bieber. The prosecutor will allege Gordon Douglas Chalmers, a law lecturer at Queensland University of Technology, used both Facebook and Skype to trick young fans.

Chalmers was first arrested over a number of sex offences back in November last year, after a tip-off from US and German police. At the time of his arrest, police opposed bail citing his "rapacious appetite" for contacting children could lead to more offences. It's alleged Chalmers "refused" to grant investigators access to his social media accounts.

However, after a search of his computer this week, Chalmer's charge sheet was expanded to 931 counts—including making child exploitation material, using a carriage service to procure person under 16, rape, and the indecent treatment of children. Police allege these offences date back to 2007.

Detective Inspector Jon Rouse said the case highlights how vulnerable children are online, because of "the global reach and skill that child sex offenders have to groom and seduce victims."

"The fact that so many children could believe that they were communicating with this particular celebrity highlights the need for a serious rethink about the way that we as a society educate our children about online safety," Detective Rouse said in a statement. "The breadth of offences committed in this instance are frankly horrendous and I want to recognise the efforts and commitment of the investigative team at Taskforce Argos to keeping children safe."

Chalmers is set to next appear in Brisbane Magistrates Court on April 6.

Jérôme Bocuse inherited more than a name.

His father Paul's status is mythical. Arguably the first chef to step out of the kitchen and into the international spotlight, Paul Bocuse not only made cooking a respectable profession, but he elevated peasant classics like  pot-au-feu to gastronomic heights at L'Auberge du Pont de Collonges in Lyon, the oldest three-Michelin-starred restaurant in the world.  

Naturally, we thought it apt to bring Jérôme Bocuse to Paul Patates, a classic Quebec "pataterie."

Jérôme Bocuse about to crush a Montreal steamie. Photos by Alison Slattery.

This wasn't just an exercise in irony. Jérôme was in town as part of Montréal en Lumière festival to showcase Lyonnais cuisine, one of the cornerstones of which is the  bouchon. A bouchon is a casual restaurant where Lyonnais of all classes gather for a quick, hearty meal and a glass of wine.

Replace those items with steamed hot dogs, poutine, and spruce beer and, essentially, you have Paul Patates. "A bouchon is like a diner in the US or like this place," Jérôme says, pointing to the colorful tiles, steam, and regulars surrounding us. "It's a few tables with Lyonnais classics like macaroni, andouillette, tripes, and  saucisson—fast and casual."

Read more on Munchies.

Check out Weronika Banasińska's Tumblr.

The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, or GINA, was a unicorn in the divided climate of US politics. GINA made it illegal for employers and other groups to discriminate against people based on their genetics, and to require or even ask for genetic tests, or to hand over the results of previous tests in many contexts. Signed into law by George W. Bush in 2008, it passed with a near-unanimous vote of 414-1 in Congress.

Now, Republicans in Congress are pushing a new bill that would gut some of GINA's strongest protections for workers, leading experts to worry that employees may be put in situations where they will have to show their boss their entire genome—or else.

One can imagine a future scenario where an employer might not want to hire someone to be an actuary because they show a genetic predisposition to developing Alzheimer's. But as any geneticist will tell you, DNA is not destiny.

Continue reading on Motherboard

When you're in the mood for a Domino's (read: intoxicated), hunting the web for a 20-percent-off voucher is probably well beyond your cognitive abilities. Squinting at the small print of those elusive discount codes is a feat at the best of times, not least after several Stellas.

The struggle is real.

But now, one man has answered all of our pizza prayers and published a full list of secret Domino's pizza discount codes for every store in the UK.

London-based entrepreneur Tom Church's recently launched website allows users to enter their postcode and find the most up-to-date deals for their nearest Domino's. Church scoured more than 800 locations across the UK for the last three months to track down the deals, and is updating his site daily.

MUNCHIES reached out to Church to find out what prompted this WikiLeaks of pizza. Much like that time you promised yourself you'd have just one slice of stuffed crust Hawaiian, Church's bargain-hunting started small before spiralling out of control.

Read more on MUNCHIES.

(Michael Caine photo via @themichaelcaine / Illustration by Sam Taylor)

There is a particular kind of strangling feeling of dread you get when you are locked or trapped in something. It starts at your chest and rises quickly to your neck – you know this; every time you have been trapped even briefly you will know this – and then the heart rate increases, and the blood starts to pump, and the breathing follows too, and before you know it you are– trying– to– stay– calm– but– it– isn't­– very– easy–. Every time the floodlights on an astroturf pitch flick off and you hear the distant clank of a chainlink door closing up for the night. Every time you try to find your way to the changing rooms after a late night swim and the lights seem to be off in the reception. Did– did they forget about you? Are– are you trapped here forever? The bathroom door won't open and you feel the soft sound of the lock collapsing within itself. And there's that panic again: up, around your chest and your shoulders, threatening to envelope you before you can breathe.

We can assume, then, that it feels quite bad when you are locked in an attic. Michael Caine would not know this, though. Because he has never been locked in an attic. That we know about.

Michael Caine has written 274 tweets in his lifetime, so you have to derive from such succinctness and such paucity of voice that everything he says is important and has weight to it; that is is stuff We All Need To Sit Down And Pay Attention To. Michael Caine doesn't take to Twitter to avoid work, like you and I. He doesn't live-tweet football games. Michael Caine takes to Twitter for big, earth-shifting announcements. He is moved to tweet only when the time is absolutely the most ripe for it. He did not get locked in an attic that time. He did not.

We have to ask the question: why did Michael Caine refute that he was ever locked in an attic? It's a bit Streisand Effect: before Michael Caine said he wasn't locked in an attic, I never for a second thought he was locked in an attic. But then, when he said he wasn't locked in an attic? All I can think about now is Michael Caine being locked in an attic.

– but I want you to imagine, for a second, Michael Caine locked in an attic. In this imagined scenario, you are outside the attic, beneath the attic door. A sturdy wooden ladder leads up to the attic opening, which is sealed tight with a large piece of MDF. The ladder has spots of paint on it, an immovable layer of dust. You know exactly how this ladder smells and feels on your feet in socks. There is that thumping sound you only get from someone hitting a door three times with their fist, realising it hurts, then charging into it somehow with their shoulder. And you can hear the voice, muffled behind the door, distant but recognisable still. It is Michael Caine. "BLOODY–" he says. He is frustrated and hot and panicked and all he can do is Cockney swearing. "BLOODY. THE– THE DOOR! THE BLOODY DOOR!" You stand and listen for a few minutes at the silence. And then you hear it: like a dog, panting and quickly wheezing, but you realise it's not. It's Michael Caine, slumped against the attic wall, uncontrollably weeping. Heah–heah–heah­–heah–heah.

Michael Caine has never felt more powerless in his life.

Michael Caine is convinced he will die here.

– so anyway, yeah, the reason Michael Caine was so moved to deny he ever got locked in an attic is a tabloid story from 2012 that alleged he got locked in an attic. This is par for the course, really, and has been since whenever Twitter became a thing: a celebrity source story would break, and we'd all have a big laugh about it, and then the celebrity themselves would deny the story, which – and I can tell you this from working at a celebrity magazine for two-and-a-half years – would really fuck us over if we'd written up the now-false story for the website. Not naming any names, but… no, I'm not naming any names. Kelly Brook.

Here's the story anyway:

Sir Michael Caine may have wished for some explosives when he was locked in his dressing room overnight after falling asleep on the set of his new thriller film.

The Italian Job star, 79, had gone for a quick nap in his dressing room in the attic of a disused theatre in New Orleans.

But he slept through the director calling a wrap to the day's filming and staff locked up the building believing the actor had already left for the day.

Question: why is Michael Caine's dressing room in an attic? Question: why would someone lock the door specifically to an attic? Question: how could Michael Caine ever get locked in an attic?

When the actor woke up he found himself trapped in the building in the dark – and was only freed the following morning when a carpenter heard his cries.

Sir Michael, whose most famous line 'You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!' in the 1969 film The Italian Job immortalised him in movie history, may have wished he'd had some explosives on hand when he discovered he was stuck in a pitch black building.

Question: does anyone think giving a 79-year-old man trying to explode himself out of an attic is perhaps not a great idea? Does anyone think that? Anyone at all?

I think what makes this tweet so iconic, though, is two things: the dismissive tone of "Just read another story about me being locked in an attick", which suggests this is not just one recorded fake instance of Michael Caine being locked in an attic, that Michael Caine's entire career has been dogged with such accusations, from his early days in theatre through to his breakout role in Zulu through his parody years in the 90s and the "Christopher Nolan's ancient muse" role he has now: all of those highs, constantly, perforated by tabloid stories about him getting locked inside things, namely attics.

Secondly, we have to briefly visit the spelling of the word "attic". Technically, attic with a "k" on the end is incorrect, not aligned with the dictionary-prescribed spelling of it, but now imagine the word in Michael Caine's cockney mouth: there is a hard k sound on the end, when he says it, isn't there? And that is why he spells it as such. Quickly align the wheels in your head to read the following sentence in a perfect Michael Caine voice, and tell me that spelling is off: I'm bloody stuck in a bloody attick, you brass tart! Get me out of here! I'm going to bloody DIE!

The situation we now find ourselves in is Michael Caine cannot realistically ever go in an attic again. Because what if the trapdoor creaks and closes behind him? What if he finds himself, in the pitchest of pitch black, alone and in silence at the top of his home? Soft thuds on the floor and door: nobody there to hear him, nobody climbs to his aid. And in the dust and the fibreglass wool, he makes a sort of nest for the night, and leans into it and cries. "The prophecies came true," Michael Caine sobs, in that voice of his. "They all came true."

@joelgolby

More from this tender little series:

50 Cent Gives Up Masturbating

Spoiler alerts, obviously. Also, why haven't you seen this movie already?

I've seen a lot of think pieces zoning in on the fact that the true horror of Jordan Peele's debut feature film, Get Out, is white feminism. That's true. But I've also seen a horror extending from the screen and filling the packed theatre spaces; the banal laughter and obliviousness of white progressive liberals. I'm allowed to laugh during Get Out, because the awkward situations Chris had to extricate himself from are regular scenarios in my everyday life. Incredulous laughter is what makes them bearable. The white liberals I saw knee slapping themselves into hysterical oblivion clearly missed the mark and seemingly saw the film as only a comedy and not a commentary of their actual faults.

I say liberals because I doubt the Piers Morgans and Tomi Lahrens will venture within a 100 metres of this film after hearing the subject matter. They'll probably call it anti-white and inflammatory while continuing to blow hot air up the precarious aircraft barely keeping Trump afloat. It's white liberals who'll go see Get Out as a testament to their "radical" beliefs and ability to maneuver through identity politics and come out smelling like Febreeze. And it's white liberals who will so skillfully disengage from the subject matter so as to see themselves only as spectators and not perpetrators capable of exerting the same macro and micro-aggressions endured by Chris (played by Daniel Kaluuya), at the hands of his white girlfriend's (Rose, played by Allison WIlliams) progressive middle-class family.

I have an uncomfortable truth for white people raving about Get Out—it's great cinema and I'm glad the thespians in you could appreciate the art. Just as long as you understand that you are Rose. All of you.

Before Trump, I always wondered what white liberals talked to their contrarian friends about. The ones who begin every racist observation with, "I'm not trying to be racist but" or the "I'm going to be devil's advocate" line. For future reference, don't be modest. Own up to it. You are the devil. When they were around people of colour, they were quiet and listened to our traumas. They wore the label of ally with pride as the symbol that separated them from their confederate-flag loving kin. But when racialized folks were absent from spaces, and it fell upon our "allies" to speak on equity, anti-black racism and oppression, how loud were their voices? Clearly not that loud because November 8th.

Photo via Screenshot.

It's become increasingly clear that for white liberals, allyship is a role they act out to ease a conscience and fulfill a self-imposed quota of good deeds. No one is more capable of placing anti-black racism on a hierarchy of least to most than white people. Not for the betterment of those oppressed but for their own sake, so they are never seen as being on the same level as the REAL racists. But here's the gotcha moment—racism is racism. Spouting racist crap is as detrimental as saying nothing when the racist crap hits the fan. Much like Rose remained silent when her Milo-like brother went on about Chris's genetic make-up, white liberals will tsk and frown when they hear about police brutality against black people and yet choose to say nothing when their voices are most needed. Why? Because it's easier to pat yourself on the back for not being like the "worst" of you, than actually being uncomfortable and recognizing the many ways you are just as bad.

There is no humor to be found in racism except for these who see it on a scale of 1-10. For the liberal whites, quips about black men's prowess in bed are witty and tongue-in-cheek. Parents sincerely asking why my English is so good are cringe-worthy yes, but it's forgivable because they are curious, that's all. Grandparents who inquire on the mechanics of our hair without so much as a may I?, as they rush to paw at the strands are clueless but well-meaning. They are from a different time you say.  Damn right they are from a different time. One where good times meant gathering for the communal lynching or hosing protesters fighting for equal rights. "Good" white people are the worst white people. Many of you are smart enough to know that anti-black racism is not simply the stuff of history books and strategically placed days for remembrance. It's an all year, week to week, day by day kind of experience, and yet you choose to treat it as a foreign entity that crops up once in awhile, and only in the most blatantly violent of ways. Rose was dating a black guy and in her mind she probably didn't even see him as black. She didn't see his colour; just that she loved him. Bullshit. When the white cop asked for Chris's ID, he knew well enough to co-operate because black men interacting with the police more times than not ends tragically. Rose chose to be vocal not realizing that while she can be let go, Chris could so easily have been arrested for something she said. Why? Because racism.

In the last moments of the film as the cop car approaches with blaring sirens and red lights, many of you were probably rejoicing for Chris's good fortune. Now he could tell the police what happened and be safe! I can assure you that for black people watching, myself included, my heart fell to the bottom of my stomach because I knew that whatever cop came out of that car was going to see an injured white woman, an injured black men looking over her, and probably if Chris was lucky, arrest him on the spot, or shoot him and never ask questions. White liberals still find comfort in the very systems that oppress us, and that my fair-weathered friends is what makes you just as bad as the others. Pretending that the half-hearted do-gooder actions of the best of you, will soften the blows from the worst is a lie you need to stop regurgitating every decade.

There is really no difference between Lena Dunham and Megyn Kelly except for the fact that one uses racist rhetoric to amplify her platform and the other IS racist rhetoric. Velma Dinkley and Aryan Barbie may seem like polar opposites but enough can be taken from the fact that neither of them have ever specifically called out anti-black racism (past the performative liberal tweet), but in different ways they've contributed to it. One as a means to a racist end, the other as a woeful attempt at pithy humor. The giddy reactions of white people excited by Get Out are just a microcosm of the larger narrative of bad whites and good whites. At the end of the day you share the same camouflage that shields you from a reality which you understand is fucked, but which you're too comfortable to actually want to see torn down. Just like Rose, while sipping her glass of milk, earplugs shutting her off from the rest of the world, you are all perfectly content to be shut off, listening to The Time of my Life.

Follow Tari  on Twitter.

In the latest act of the universe proving to us that we are nothing but side characters living within a poorly written movie, 4Chan just pulled off one of the most impressive, and pointless, internet heists of all time.

A preface here, I realize the broken experiment run amok that is 4Chan is chock full of keyboard-hunching virgins who have morphed into despicable monsters. The pol section of 4Chan (the section that conducted the heist) is a corner of the internet collectively stoking racism and harassing women online as sport. It is where the id of the internet went to die—it is an ocean of piss.

That said, sometimes bad people do impressive things—we can, at times, appreciate the work while despising the people  (cough, cough, Woody Allen cough, cough).

The plot, like a goddamn  Oceans-[insert number here] flick, involves CIA level research of flight and star patterns, Shia Labeouf, a man in the field driving a car honking non-stop, and a Trump hat hanging on a flagpole. However, much like the  Ocean movies, there is a backstory that must be explained in order for you to fully enjoy the insanity of the heist.

The folks of 4Chan have, for some time now, been systematically fucking with Shia Labeouf for his "He Will Not Divide Us" art/protest project. The project first started with Labeouf setting up a webcam in New York. It was supposed to be a permanent live feed for the duration of Trumps presidency, one where people could look into the camera and chant the saying—this obviously did not end well.

The trolls started targeting people who went to the protest and, when figuring out their identity, fucking with them for days. The grown up Louis Stevens would regularly appear in his livestream and shit would get pretty heated, several times the actor screamed in the face of Trump supporters. This all culminated in Labeouf being arrested and charged with assault and harassment.

The non-stop bullshit surrounding his art project seemingly got to some people and it was shut down by the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, where it was located. Shia, not to be deterred, then moved the exhibit to El Rey Theater in Albuquerque in mid-February, but the fuckery continued. The live stream was spray painted and it was eventually shut down when gunshots were reported in the area.

Labeouf at New York version of HWNDU before it was shut down. Photo via twitter.

Still though, Shia, ever the trooper, carried on. This time the HWNDU project featured a livestream of a flag waving in the air. The stream contained only the sky and the flag as not to give away its location to the trolls. 'Yes,' Labeouf must have thought, 'there is no way they're shutting this one down. I, Big-Daddy Shia, did it.'

Big-Daddy Shia would be proven wrong once again—instead of vanquishing the trolls, he started the most intense game of capture the flag ever.

The trolls using only the live stream of the flag, started, I shit you not, studying the flight patterns and contrails of the airplanes passing overhead. They mapped out what they saw and took their findings to flight radars to try and pinpoint a general area. Using the knowledge gleaned from the flight patterns they found that the location was near Greeneville, Tennessee.

The obsessed basement dwellers turned to studying the star patterns and their movements and with that, plus a tweet that Labeouf sent out in a Tennessee diner, the trolls were able to narrow the area even further—to a small patch of land between a house and a river.

The flag, and a timestamp, after it was stolen. Photo via twitter.

This is when their man on the ground came into play. The channers were able to enlist a local troll to drive around the area and repeatedly honk his horn. I would like you, my fair reader, to imagine a man driving around a small Tennessee town in, what I assume to be, a 1994 Toyota Tercel just blaring the horn repeatedly while rocking a, again I assume, soundtrack from a Metal Gear Solid game, all in an attempt to fuck with Shia Lebeouf—this is a thing that actually happened this week.

But then, the trolly magic happened, in the dead of night the horn was picked up on the live stream and the troll posted his location to 4Chan. In probably the sweetest moment of his lil' life, the channer made his way to claim his prize. Down went Shia's white flag of defiance, up went a red Trump hat, and the most pointlessly convoluted game of capture the flag of all time came to an end.

It seems that the troll who successfully stole the flag now has it proudly hung, fittingly, in his basement. The latest iteration of He Will Not Divide Us Lasted a little over 37 hours.

Look Shia, bro, HWNDU was admirable in its intention but maybe it's time to get back to acting because, from the looks of it, these trolls have got your number.

Follow Mack   on Twitter.

In television adverts for Horizon Zero Dawn, when player-controlled character Aloy says that the Earth has been reclaimed by nature, but for machines rather than ourselves, she's not entirely on the money—or the shards, I suppose, to use the game's "post-post-apocalyptic" currency. Yes, the world of some 1,000 years from now is much changed, and inhabited by mechanical creatures of curious design and mysterious origins. But Horizon Zero Dawn isn't a game built around its clanking, stomping goliaths. Its origins are of a more human nature.

"Looking back at the concept art for the game, there's an early image where there's this young, female, tribal hunter with red hair, sitting on the side of a valley, looking out over this extraordinary vista," Horizon's narrative director, John Gonzales, recalls. "So, Aloy showed up there, in the initial world concept conceived by the studio's art director, Jan-Bart van Beek, which dates back something like six years. That was before I came on board, about three and a half years ago."

Once committed to Guerrilla Games' maiden voyage into role-playing territories, the Amsterdam-based company having built its name on the Killzone shooter series, Gonzales set about bringing this then-nameless warrior, this hero in waiting, to life. Initial inspirations included Ellen Ripley ( Alien), Sarah Connor ( The Terminator), and San from Princess Mononoke, "but as we dug into her story, she transcended any particular starting reference."

Continue reading on Waypoint.

This article originally appeared on Noisey UK.

One summer three years ago, I found myself in a dark, cavernous music hall in Tottenham, north London called T Chances. Several bands performed that night, throwing out everything from upbeat reggae and ska to frenetic thrash and punk, each song punctuated by a wall of roaring cheers. Those in the crowd stood arm-in-arm, dancing and shouting along to the music, dripping in sweat while swilling booze from cans. But something about this gig was different: I didn't recognize the bands on the bill, or the beers at the bar, and I couldn't understand the words anyone was singing. It was a Polish punk night—and one of many that have cropped up in the UK recently.

Punk first erupted in Poland in the 80s, soundtracking the country's crescendo towards political change. These days, though, much of its legacy lives on in the Polish ex-pat community in the UK, as bands such as Perma War, Low Rollers, Radioactive Rats, and Pro Publico Bono make a similar—albeit marginally less urgent—scene of their own. The sound of this new wave of Polish punk mixes a raw, relentless energy that borrows as much from 80s DC and New York hardcore as from the brash British sound many of us know and love. And with its penchant for shouting back in the face of fascism, it's become a locus of community at a time when anti-immigrant sentiment has swept through the country like a particularly nasty bout of the clap, pushing communities even further away from each other.

Continue reading on Noisey

What is it? I hesitate to use a loaded term like "three-storey death pit" but—
Where is it? Hammersmith;
What is there to do locally? I honestly don't know. The one and only time I was in Hammersmith I just have blurry memories of there being a really hard-to-cross six-lane road and I had to get, like, four separate night buses to get home. I honestly don't know. Could have imagined all of this. Go on Time Out, if you care about Hammersmith so much. If you want to kiss Hammersmith on the lips. You – actual you – you want to marry Hammersmith.
Alright, how much are they asking? Eight hundred of your pounds per calendar month, squire!

Here's the ad. Honestly tell me that hatch doesn't lead to a death pit. Look me in the eye and tell me.

Please try not to have too many belongings if you're going to live here

Let's take an acid read on my ego, here: I was convinced, initially, that this one was a trap baited only for me. This is where we are with my solipsism. I am too deep down the London property mines now, only recycled air around me, no light: I was convinced, for a good minute, that this was not a genuine property advert; that this series of photos and the description was assembled only for me and me alone, to pull me into writing a London Rental Opportunity of the Week about it, and then… well, I don't know. A reveal, a perfect prestige: announce that I had been tricked, that the listing was an elaborate joke, forcing me to shut the column down forever. Would anyone go so far? Is The Man out to get me? Is Big Foxtons on my case, going to extreme lengths to embarrass me more than I possibly could myself? It's so hard to know who to trust now. Nobody is a true friend. Everybody is a possible double-agent in disguise.

Anyway, here's a one-bed in Hammersmith which – and we can't be sure, we can never be sure – but I'm pretty sure is a repurposed well shaft, that a number of innocent people died in, their bones picked clean of flesh by the dogs and left to glint ivory in the dim sunlight, and then built over with a load of wood offcuts and Britain's smallest sink to make something that almost – very, very almost – resembles somewhere where a human being could feasibly live. I just: it just really seems like this was a prison cell once, 400 years ago, and that a number of men were chained upside-down by the feet to the walls of it, and slowly starved and died there. It just has that vibe!

(I am very serious about this. Did you read that longread, a bit ago, about the guy who just lived in the woods? He just lived in some woods, in America. They arrested him in the end, but he'd been out there for years. Occasionally breaking into forest cabins and plundering them for supplies, occasionally not. It just all got a bit hectic for him and he lived in some woods. Dens, shit like that. Occasional sightings. Like he became a yeti, or something, a Bigfoot figure. And I think if you gave that man carte blanche to build the house of his dreams, he would construct this magnificent hell prison and behold it and go: "Actually, fucking hell. That's a bit much, isn't it. Needs a radiator, or something. Some fairy lights to take the edge off.")

Anyway, to verify that this flat was real and not some enormous cosmic joke, I did something I have never done before, which is "actual journalism". And by that I mean called the dude whose name was on the Gumtree listing and pretended to be interested in the flat. He was very pleasant and had a very calming voice and, if he wasn't trying to rent out what appears to be a vertically-mounted studio apartment for £800 per month (which is so much, man), I would very much enjoy talking to him. He had the soothing voice of a meditative wise man. I feel like he could talk me, quietly, from the edge of any cliff.

Sadly, he is a landlord so is essentially a lot of human skin pulled taut over a small pile of garbage, and so necessarily cannot be a good person, sorry, and so these are the highlights of the conversation, as best I remember them:

– I mean, first of all we had to do that one-minute long back and forth you always have to do with anyone whose number you got off Gumtree, and that is: the Gumtree person asks you why you are calling and where you got their number from, a bit like when you start up a fun and flourishing relationship with a new drug dealer – some lad called "Frosty" – who did give you his number at a warehouse party once but does not remember doing this because, as you can surmise, he was exceptionally high at the time. It was a bit like that;

– Listen, I tried to establish the geography of the flat – I really did – but it's almost impossible to figure out the design here. First up: this flat is stretched over three separate floors, although it's hard to tell what the absolute height of those "floors" actually is. Consider your own house, the place you live right now, and the measurement from the floor up to the ceiling: do you think this place, in Hammersmith, has similarly heighted rooms, repeated three times on top of one another? That this is an actual, legitimate, three-storey flat? Somehow I do not, no. Also, there are two entrances. You have to climb between the floors by lifting flaps and go through a separate entrance to have a shower. "It's very small," he said. It is also constructed like a fucking Escher drawing.

– Someone has lived here before and currently does live here. This is not an experiment in how low-grade a living opportunity needs to be for someone to take it. That experiment has already been resolved. There is no low bar for entry on the London property market. Someone, somewhere, will rent any old shit you'd care to list. We know this now.

– Direct quote: "It's not really a space for socialising."

– The guy asked me my name and where I worked and I just completely freaked out and said "Joe" (what a lie! What a born liar I am!) and that I worked in Aldgate (astonishing lying skills!), which as most of you will know would be a very tedious Circle-line commute that no human would ever, really, particularly choose to undertake, especially if the pay-off is "you get to rest your legs on your own washing machine every time you shit or piss".

Moral: no moral. No moral any more. Please do not rent this one-bed prison pit in Hammersmith for £800 a month. Please do not do that. You are better than that. Yes, even you. No matter how bad you think you are. You are infinitely better than that.

@joelgolby (h/t @TheMightosaurus)

More from this series:

A Fucking Bus in Brighton

Save Your Pocket Money For 25 Years Then Maybe You Could Buy A House

Hot Food is Overrated Anyway

There are a few things that you can count on every spring: your allergies will force you to Google things like "Can humans live without a nose," your ex will slowly snap out of his seasonal depression, and McDonald's will put the Shamrock Shake back on its menu. McDonald's started selling those artificially colored seasonal calories just before St. Patrick's Day 1970—it was actually known as the "St. Patrick's Day Green Milkshake" then—which means that the the company has had 47 years to learn  something about Ireland. Based on this week's international McTwitter fail, though, that hasn't happened.

On Tuesday, McDonald's posted a tweet that said "When your Shamrock Chocolate Madness plays all the right chocolatey-mint notes. #ShamrockSeason." That was accompanied by a 10 second video of a bearded ginger sucking his shake through a straw while wearing a vaguely tartan-looking hat, playing the straws like a bagpipe and standing in front of Stonehenge. None of those things are Irish: tartans and bagpipes are Scottish and everyone knows that Stonehenge was built by aliens in an English field.

McDonald's has since deleted the tweet, but not before everyone on the internet noticed—especially the Irish. "No wonder Americans are dumb," one user in Ireland tweeted, while another said "Maybe the rainbow [at the end of the video] might be Irish."

Read more on Munchies.

Many brides say they crave a fairytale wedding, but some women are taking their princess fantasy to the extreme: They're getting married at one of Disney's resorts in Florida, California, France,Tokyo, Hong Kong, or Shanghai. In 2013 the trade publication  Hotel F&B reported Disney's Fairy Tale Weddings married 1,500 couples a year. The trend has grown so popular, podcasts, message boards, and wedding planners have popped up to serve the women who call themselves Disney Brides.

Who represents the "typical" Disney bride? Michelle Baumann, a representative of Walt Disney World and Disney Weddings, believes no such thing exists. "What makes Disney's Fairy Tale Weddings so amazing is that we get to plan weddings with couples from all over the globe and through all stages of life," she explains in a phone call. "We host so many couples at each of our four destinations that there is no 'typical' bride or groom." According to Baumann, many brides come to Disney because they have followed Disney weddings on social media before they got engaged. A single Disney weddings Pinterest board can yield over 623,000 followers. (Full disclosure: Disney is an investor in VICE Media.) As Carlye Wisel reported in an extensive Racked feature, getting married at a Disney resort ushers a woman into a sisterhood of fellow former Disney Brides. They regularly communicate on DisBoards, a popular Disney message board.

According to  Hotel F&B, the first Disney wedding took place in 1991. In the late 1980s, the magazine reports that then CEO Michael Eisner had gone to a friend's wedding in Japan. He noticed how many people flew to the wedding and thought people would get marred at his theme parks too. When he returned to California, he began plotting Disney's Fairy Tale Weddings endeavor.

Eisner was more than right, and today a diverse subculture has emerged. Former Disney Bride Carrie Hayward now hosts the unofficial "Disney Weddings Podcast" beloved by fellow Disney wedding veterans. (She also wrote PassPorter's  Disney Weddings and Honeymoons, which is considered the Bible of Disney weddings according to Racked.) The podcast has shown a variety of themes amongst Disney marital ceremonies. Hayward has interviewed everyone from a bride who threw an affair that could have been shown on the Style Me Pretty wedding blog to a woman who hosted a "Beauty and the Beast Meets Haunted Mansion" themed nuptial that also included a visit from the Star Wars villains Boba Fett and Kylo Ren. (Disney purchased Lucasfilm, the company that owns the rights to Star Wars, in 2012.) Hayward believes " [what unites Disney Brides] is definitely a love of Disney magic."

"There's this idea of Disney having world class service," she says. "Whether they want the princesses or not, they know they're going to get a day that's like anything else. It's not gonna be a hotel wedding. It's not gonna be their friend's wedding in a church basement. It's something that you can only get at Disney. And if you're already a Disney fan, then this is just an even more amazing way to celebrate that."

Read more at Broadly.

It wasn't like I went to college and decided I wanted to start a knife company. It was kind of a roundabout thing. I'm half-Chinese, but I grew up in South Florida in the 80s. I went to a private school that was pretty much all well-off white kids and myself. Both of my parents are immigrants—my dad is from England and my mom is from Hong Kong. I didn't have any American anchor in my house, and having that half-Asian side was a challenge. People always pick on whoever is different. After I left high school, I decided I wanted to be somewhere that was the complete opposite of that experience, so I went up to Oberlin College—a very multicultural, liberal environment. Oberlin was kind of the beginning of realizing that I wasn't a second-class citizen.

After college, I lived in London and then Japan—that's where I began working for another company that made Japanese knives and kitchenware. I didn't have any previous restaurant experience. It wasn't that I always loved knives growing up—nothing like that. But I do love food and Asian food is my soul food, 100 percent. Pork dumplings: That's what I want to eat when I need comfort food.

I realized that there was a lot of Japanese craftsmanship going on in the knife world that wasn't being represented outside of Japan. In a lot of ways, it's becoming a lost art—a lot of blacksmiths are getting older, and there aren't a ton of younger blacksmiths coming up to replace them. I learned about knives by working in the industry, handling a lot of knives and seeing and using a lot of different knives, speaking with chefs, and testing knives as well—cooking with them and seeing how they feel. There's no set blueprint, but in a lot of ways, I can tell when I pick up a knife if it's going to be a possibility right away: the blade geometry, what type of metal it's made of, how it feels, the finish on the knife. So usually there's a pretty strong "no" right away, or if it feels like a "yes," we'll test it.

Continue reading on MUNCHIES

It's not surprising that women stick together, especially in the creative arts. From horror film promoters The Final Girls to the Rawiya Collective of photojournalists, a certain magic happens when female-identified professionals throw their weight behind each other to present a united front. It's an energy that is clearly present with Skin&Blister, a group of five photographers who had met at London College of Communication.

Sophie Davis, Marta Gut, Francesca Oldfield, Dafne Salis, and Laura Solomons graduated with photography degrees in 2012, but life got in the way and each knuckled down to pursue day jobs. Then, as Davis puts it, "We realized we shared the same desire—to make work again."

"We wanted to get our work out there and have fun whilst doing it," she explains. "I initially approached all the women in the group because I knew their work, and I knew they would have that drive to just be like, 'Fuck it, let's do it!'"

Check out the photos on Broadly

Since I am a member of the coveted 18-to-35 demographic, I usually start my Sundays by waking up and watching all the good bits from Saturday Night Live that I missed while I was busy doing other things (lately, that probably means watching kung fu movies on Netflix and reading). I usually skip the musical guests when I do this, but on a whim this week I decided to watch Father John Misty's performance of "Total Entertainment Forever," his new single from his upcoming LP Pure Comedy.

Now, I'm by no means the world's biggest Father John Misty fan––I found the strain of dry, sleazy irony running through I Love You, Honeybear a bit too reminiscent of Andy Kaufman's Tony Clifton schtick for my tastes––but "Total Entertainment Forever" blew me away. "When the historians find us we'll be in our homes, plugged into our hubs, skin and bones," he sings, writhing with nervy intensity as the band behind him drops out to let his words sink in. "A frozen smile on every face, as the stories replay / This must have been a wonderful place." The song is much like what you'd get if Randy Newman were tasked with writing a Billy Joel song based on Infinite Jest.

He returned, sans guitar but wearing a black duster jacket that was an instrument in its own right, to perform Pure Comedy's title track, vamping to the Nth degree, acting out his lyrics and during the instrumental breakdown doing a canonically weird dance that felt somehow both prurient and chimerical. He let the couplet, "But the only thing that they request / is something to numb the pain with until there's nothing human left," hang in the air just long enough for it to feel uncomfortable, burying his face in his hands before finishing the lyric: " Just some random matter suspended in the dark / I hate to say it, but each other's all we got." I can only imagine what mainstream America must have thought of this performance, but, for me, it was as if I were witnessing Mr. Misty hip-thrust his way into the next echelon of stardom.

Continue reading on Noisey