On Wednesday, Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos announced that his country's police force had seized 12 tons of cocaine – supposedly the most ever confiscated in one go in the history of the country.

Police say the drugs belonged to the elusive Dario Antonio Usuga, AKA "Otoniel" – head of the Gulf Clan, Colombia's most powerful trafficking gang – and that they were discovered underground at four farms in the northwestern department of Antioquia, which was once home to Pablo Escobar's Medellin cartel. Santos remarked that, with this haul included, Colombian police have now seized 362 tons of coke so far this year, already beating 2016's total of 317 tons.

So: good news for the Colombian police's PR department. But what does it mean, realistically, for cocaine consumers worldwide?

Well, there are 907,185 grams in a US ton, meaning – thanks to this seizure – 10,886,220 grams won't be leaving Colombian soil, bound for the cisterns of Miami's dive bars and the nostrils of 1 in 25 Brits. Of course, assuming this stuff is high purity, and therefore going to be cut when it arrives at its final destination, you'd actually end up with slightly more than that figure. Let's take the UK as a case study: here, cocaine purity is currently as high as 80 percent at street level, so we can up that number by 20 percent, bringing the grand total to 13,063,464 gram-bags of gak.

Seeing as we've already done some maths, let's do some more, just for a bit of fun. How long a line could you make out of all those bags? If we say a gram racked up into one long line would come out at about 30cm, totalled up that's 391,903,920cm, or 3,919km – a little longer than the distance between London and Cairo, as the crow flies.

Wi seems like a lot of cocaine, because it is a lot of cocaine. However, as of March this year, Colombia was the world's top cocaine producer, with FARC rebels reportedly encouraging farmers to plant more coca crops after the Colombian government pledged to replace them with legal crops as part of a peace deal with the guerrilla group. According to the US State Department's annual International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, in 2015 – the last year for which figures are available – Colombia had the potential to produce 495 metric tons of cocaine, meaning the 362 tons seized this year won't be anywhere near the full supply. Add to that the fact that Peru and Bolivia also produce a huge amount of cocaine, and the seizures begin to look like less and less of a dent in the overall quantity of coke being exported out of South America.

WATCH: How to Use Cocaine as Safely as Possible

So how, exactly, will this bust affect the global cocaine supply?

"Where they find tons, you know there are other tons that get through every week," says Professor Adam Winstock, founder of the Global Drug Survey. "I would not expect much impact on an already flooded UK market [which is seeing] rising purity."

George McBride of drug policy think-tank VolteFace agrees. "There are about 900-odd tons produced a year [globally], so it's not a huge amount in the grand scheme of things," he says in an email. "These busts are usually just PR stunts [and] have very little impact on availability, price or purity. We've got a steady supply of cheap pure cocaine at the moment, and production has been on the increase in Colombia, so it isn't coming at a time where it's likely to have a big impact."

So there you have it: a good photo-opp – a fun day out for police; a chance to lay out thousands of bricks of cocaine in a big plasticky carpet and stomp around on top of it all – but not really much of a difference being made in the long-run, or even in the short-term.

Unfortunately, it's those on the lower rungs of the drug trade who – like always – will feel the impact of the seizure most. "The consequences will be felt closer to home, with repercussions of violence and intimidation," says Winstock of the potential for conflict a seizure of this size creates. "Narcos [drug gangs] remain compelling evidence that the war on drugs is pointless."

He makes an excellent point: according to the 2017 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime report, globally, demand for cocaine is largely just as high as it's ever been. Cocaine production in Colombia is the highest it's been for two decades. Those perpetrating the War on Drugs are clearly fighting a losing battle. People like cocaine; there's a lot of money to be made in cocaine. It's not going anywhere.

What's needed is a broad re-think in terms of how best to handle the problem: the introduction of measures that stop so many lives being lost, both in the supply chain and among users with increasingly easier access to dangerously high-purity cocaine.

To take part in the Global Drug Survey 2018, an anonymous study of how the world consumes drugs, click here.

@jamie_clifton

More on VICE:

How the UK's Coke Got So Strong

Doped Up Dogs: Why Greyhounds Are Being Given Cocaine

I Ran London's Secret Cocaine Speakeasy

On Wednesday, director Ridley Scott announced that Kevin Spacey has been dropped from the completed Getty kidnapping biopic, All the Money in the World, and that the actor's scenes will be fully reshot with a new actor, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

The decision to scrap Spacey's scenes and bring back the cast and crew for frantic reshoots is completely unprecedented—especially since the film is still on track to hit theaters next month.

Actor Christopher Plummer will take over Spacey's role as oil magnate J. Paul Getty. The film's co-stars Mark Wahlberg and Michelle Williams will be back for the reshoots as well. According to Hollywood Reporter journalist Borys Kit, Plummer was supposedly Scott's original pick to play Getty, but the studio "wanted a bigger name" like Spacey.

Spacey reportedly worked on the film for eight days, and many of his scenes only featured him. It's unclear whether Scott is planning to completely reshoot with Plummer or attempt to CG Plummer into existing scenes. Either way, the turnaround is exceedingly tight to have everything ready for the film's December 22 release.

A trailer for All the Money in the World featuring Spacey has already been released, and the film was set to debut at AFI Fest this weekend, but it was pulled in the wake of Spacey's growing number of sexual assault allegations. On Wednesday, a former news anchor came forward accusing the actor of sexually assaulting her 18-year-old son in 2016.

Netflix has also dropped the disgraced actor from the final season of House of Cards and shelved his Gore Vidal biopic, which was in post-production. The fate of Billionaire Boys Club—another Spacey film that finished shooting before the sexual assault news broke—is still up in the air, but it seems like we're more likely to see Kevin James pop up on House of Cards than have Kevin Spacey star in another Hollywood film again.

In Canada right now, it’s arguably more important than ever to understand how people are using drugs and how they’re getting them.

With cannabis verging on legalization and regulation by July 2018, and as the opioid crisis continues to claim thousands of lives due to the proliferation of fentanyl, we are experiencing a pivotal moment for drugs in this country.

And in this moment, you can help show Canada’s place in the world of drugs by taking the Global Drug Survey.

Take the Global Drug Survey 2018 here.

It’s anonymous and open to anyone over the age of 16. The survey will take about 15-30 minutes and “a bit longer if you have used lots of drugs recently.”

In addition to the regular fare that asks all sorts of questions about drugs and how they intersect with your life, the survey will be looking at fentanyl, its effects, and how people are getting it. It will also look at cannabis in-depth, what age people lose their drug virginity at, and pill testing.

Over 115,000 people across the world took part in the Global Drug Survey last year. To learn more about the survey this year, go to its website, and if you feel so inclined to participate, answer the questions.

We live in scary times. Nuclear brinksmanship was, for decades, a figment of a bygone, wayward era. Now, it is suddenly back in vogue. North Korea has ramped up testing of its nuclear arsenal and long-range missiles, and the United States’ recent response has been anything but staid. Long story short: these idiots are trying to get us all killed.

In a recent Stanford University study it was estimated that, on the first day of an all-out war between North Korea and the United States, one million people could die. I would be so angry if I died on day one of WWIII. Ideally, I wouldn’t die at all, which is why I’m trying to be proactive. I live on the west coast, and if North Korea’s intercontinental ballistic missiles are the real deal, then I’m sitting in their crosshairs. Other than move, I have no option but to prepare myself. That means building a fallout shelter.

Sadly, effective blast shelters—that is, shelters that can withstand a direct nuclear blast—are rather difficult to build and prohibitively expensive. They need to be underground and shielded with at least four inches of thick concrete. I consider myself to be relatively crafty, but pouring concrete is not part of my limited skill set. Contained within that skill set, however, is an ability to assemble IKEA furniture. So I reached out to experts about making a fallout shelter completely out of IKEA furniture.

For much of the second-half of the 20th century, Sweden was nestled right up against the Soviet Union. Despite Sweden’s neutrality, the nation had to always be prepared in the event of a nuclear attack. My hope is that their minimalist, flat-pack furniture reflects this grave sense of caution.

All photos by the author.

“I have to confess, I’ve never been to IKEA,” Janet Liebsch told me. Liebsch and her husband run Fedhealth, a publishing company that specializes in disaster preparedness guides, a commercial for which you can watch below. After a visit to IKEA’s website to learn about what the company has to offer, she informed me that their furniture wouldn’t be of any help if I was in the blast zone. However, I could possibly use it to build what is known as an expedient shelter.

Expedient shelters are not intended to be lived in for much longer than a few days, but, if assembled correctly, one could shield its inhabitants from the radioactive fallout of a nuclear explosion. If I can make it 48 hours to two weeks inside my shelter (the estimated time for fallout to recede to a physiologically acceptable level), then I may just be able to survive.

Liebsch sent me a list of effective shielding materials, as well as the thickness each would need to be in order to equal the protection of 4 inches of concrete.

—5-6 inches (12 – 15 cm) of bricks
—6 inches (15 cm) of sand or gravel
—7 inches (18 cm) of earth
—8 inches (20 cm) of hollow concrete block
—10 inches (25 cm) of water
—14 inches (35 cm) of books or magazines
—18 inches (46 cm) of wood

I was concerned. “IKEA wood usually isn’t real wood,” I told her. “It’s a composite material, like compressed sawdust.”

“Obviously, real wood would be better,” she said. “But that’s better than nothing.”

Leaning on my expert’s advice, I headed to IKEA to find materials for my would-be apocalypse bunker.

A big table is a commonly prescribed centerpiece for expedient shelters, as it acts like a tentpole that can be surrounded by thick, protective materials serving as ad-hoc walls The dining room tables at IKEA, however, aren’t ideal. The farmhouse look is in, and most have obtrusive pieces of wood running between their legs that, while evocative of 19th century Shaker design, make it near impossible to sit underneath comfortably.

As I crawled under a table in the showroom to confirm this, an IKEA employee politely asked if I needed any help. I apologized for being in what must have looked like a peculiar position, but she told me people crawl underneath their tables “all the time.” Clearly, I’m not the only one worried about a North Korean warhead melting the skin off my bones.

If it’s space I’m looking for, I’d need to assemble this shelter from scratch: wall by wall. Liebsch had mentioned that bookcases filled with books work as relatively effective protective walls, and luckily IKEA has plenty of bookcases. The company has sold over 60 million BILLY models since 1978. And while the particle board material they’re made of isn’t an ideal shield from radioactive fallout, filling the cases with books and magazines would help immensely.

A pair of wide BILLYs would serve as my shelter’s first two walls. The glass-fronted model may be more elegant, but, as much as I value aesthetics, I must prioritize the avoidance of hundreds of glass shards cutting me to shreds. At $322.00 a piece, I’m spending far less on these BILLYs than I would have on 4-inch-thick concrete walls. Should I survive a nuclear attack, I may have a little spending money left over to throw around in the barren California wastelands. I could even be a post-apocalyptic warlord if I happen to find the BILLY on sale.

As for other walls, I headed to the wardrobe and armoire section for inspiration. The PAX is big and utilitarian, and it comes in varying widths so I could use one as a pivoting entryway to my shelter. If I pair my PAX with the MARNARDAL hinged door, I would be able to fill it with life-saving insulating materials. (Plus, the MARNARDAL door has a rose pattern that looks like pretty wallpaper.)

As for that insulation, few materials surpass good old-fashioned dirt. “The denseness of dirt is [great], that’s why the best place to be is underground,” Liebsch told me. A clever way to mimic this effect is to stuff pillowcases full of dirt. A couple dozen FÄRGMÅRAs should do the trick. Luckily, IKEA also sells potted plants, so I wouldn’t even need to leave the store to obtain the required dirt. Shove all that into the FÄRGMÅRAs and I’d be in business.

For my roof, I examined IKEA’s collection of countertops. Sadly, most of these were too thin, but if I assembled a patchwork of KARLBY countertops (which are particleboard) and piled a few MORGEDAL mattresses atop this layer, I could have a roof that, while suitably protective, wouldn’t crush me to death in the event of a cave-in.

Liebsch was bullish about mattresses and futons. “You’re going to want those anyway, so you could put them on the inside of the walls,” she said.

“So it could swing down, like a Murphy bed?” I asked.

“Exactly.”

I’ve always wanted a Murphy bed, and if a rogue nuclear state has its way, I may be getting one soon enough. Because of this, I’d have to up my mattress order, adding a few twin-sized MINNESUNDs, as they are thinner than the MORGEDAL and my shelter walls will already be full of adequately protective books and dirt.

As I walked past the decorative knick-knack section, a display of ceramic jugs brought a particular kernel of Liebsch’s wisdom to my mind. “Make sure you have a bucket for your toilet situation,” she told me. “When people are nervous they’re probably going to have loose bowels.” I added two YPPERLIGs to my shopping list.

IKEA is an astonishing place, and it soon became evident that, not only would I be able to build a fallout shelter with materials obtained there, I could also sufficiently stock my rations with IKEA products. Near the cash registers were bottles of water, winter fruit drinks, and various snacks--including jars of delicious-looking lingonberry jam. IKEA also sells hanging herb gardens, which means, in the event of a civilization-altering nuclear attack, I could be eating seasoned food. Toppen! (That’s great!” in Swedish.)

With teeny golf pencil in hand, I took inventory. Just how much would this IKEA shelter set me back?

BILLY wide bookshelves: $322 (x2) = $644

Hundreds of IKEA catalogs to fill bookcases: FREE

PAX wide wardrobe frame: $100 (x5) = $500

PAX narrow Wardrobe Frame: $90 (x1) = $90

MARNARDAL wardrobe doors (with hinges); floral pattern: $80 (x11) = $880

FÄRGMÅRA pillowcases: $2.49 (x32) = $79.6

HIMALAYAMIX potted plant (for dirt): $2.99 (x96) = $287.04

KARLBY countertops for roof: $269 (x5) = $1345.00

MORGEDAL mattresses for roof insulation: $299 (x2) = $598

MINNESUND mattresses for Murphy beds: $89.00 (x2) = $178

YPPERLIG vase for toilet (brown): $19.99 (x2) = $39.98

BITTERGURKA hanging herb garden planter: $9.99

SYLT LINGON (Lingonberry jam): $3.99 (x12) =$47.88

TOTAL: $4,699.57 (add 7.25% California sales tax) = $5,040.29

I value my life, but five grand is a lot of Krona. And I certainly wouldn't have the post-apocalyptic kick-around cash I'd hoped. I needed to think this over.

In the cafeteria I ordered Swedish meatballs, and as I sat down to think about the feasibility of my IKEA bunker, a soft, almost sultry cover of Roxy Music’s “More Than This” played overhead. It got me thinking about what I had learned regarding fallout shelters. Ideally, you’d want to be in a windowless, sturdy structure, one that is sealed off from the outside world and can sustain you for at least 48 hours. That, my friends, is an IKEA showroom and warehouse.

Biting into my mashed potatoes, it became clear that, while building a fallout shelter with IKEA furniture is fine, I’d do much better if I just happened to be inside an IKEA during a nuclear attack. They have food and comfortable seating, and—when it comes time to rebuild society—there are more than enough hexagonal wrenches inside those walls to take on the job.

Hopefully America’s early missile detection systems are in working order; I want to get to IKEA before my fellow survivors finish all the meatballs.

Follow Nick Greene on Twitter.

It is someone’s birthday today, because it is always someone’s birthday. You can hear the sound of it approaching. Haaaa— that first boom of the happy birthday song, screeching tires-first out of someone’s mouth before they’ve had the chance to modulate the volume, before the ensuing chorus chips on in; that sound can last forever: Haaaa—, rising and falling, expectant, an invitation, you know already that the eyes above the noise are pleading, and the others only come in with the —ppy, and that sound can go on forever. Scientists looking to crack the code of time travel need only look at the slowness of time surrounding a single person singing the first brave note of Happy Birthday in a room full of people.

Consider: have you, ever, sung the Happy Birthday song all the way through? Or did you start on —ppy because somebody started it off for you? It takes a certain pathological type of person to start the Happy Birthday song off, and it is not you. And anyway, now, for the fourth time in ten days, it is someone in the office’s birthday.

Birthdays when you were a child were good. When you were five, perhaps, your birthday was the best day of your life: so many presents they eclipsed you, a pile of discarded wrapping paper the height of your thighs, an entire day dedicated just to you. The McDonald’s parties of your youth. The cake and jam and jelly. At 11, somehow, the tone of them changed: birthdays staggered from less a celebration of you and your achievements into a loaded social ceremony, a constant question of whether the cool kids from your school would turn up to your party, or whether you would be condemned here, in purgatory, playing an hour of laserquest with the exact six same boys you hang out with every break and lunchtime.

The birthdays of your adolescence began months before they happened: please, you would beg your mother, please please please can I have an iPad for my birthday. She would acquiesce: yes, she said, you can have the iPad, but you’re not getting any other presents, or a meal, and you can’t have it until the actual day of your birthday. You unwrapped it drearily at 7AM on the dot. Thanks, you said; thank you, mum. On your 18th she sobbed and took photos of you from every awkward angle of your long lank body. "It was only yesterday," she would cry, "when I could hold you in my hand!" At 21, distant uncles gave you a £10 note in an envelope and slapped you on the shoulder. "You’re a grown up, now!" they would say, cheerfully, as if they had not just ushered you into a dark hell. And now you are 26, and it’s your birthday on Tuesday, and you’re working an eight-hour day, and you can see all your colleagues passing a card around to sign it – you see it, glimmering, palmed between desks, not-even-subtle conversations where someone gets up, holding it loose inside a magazine, puts it on another table and says this: "Oh, yeah, did I… tell you about, that, thing?" – it is your birthday and this is the only magic your colleagues can muster.

Today it is Ryan from Accounts’ birthday, and you have to sing the ancient song to him.

WATCH: How a Top Sushi Chef Celebrates His Birthday

This happens in the kitchen, because it always happens in the kitchen. You work in an office but the only shared area is the kitchen. When they ushered you into the working world they promised you beanbag chairs and softly-furnished meeting rooms. Glowing neon pinned to white walls beneath which you could recline and think. Instead, the only shared area is a two-sided room with a sink, a shared plinth or table scattered with sugar granules and a complicated and ignored system of recycling bins. An email has gone around the entire office asking you to gather in the kitchen. You are here, in the corner, the wet smell of used teabags around you, the pools of boiling water. Everyone knows this ceremony now. They know not to bother with the smalltalk. That all of this will be over soon. Ryan will be here, soon, for his birthday.

Every office birthday has a Birthday Leader. This is additional work delegated to mid-level management, and it shows. Please consider this: every birthday card you have ever received from the people in your office is the result of at least two conversations your manager had to have with the person who looks after petty cash. This cost had to be argued for and justified. Someone wrote down how much this card costs. The card cost £1.99, but nobody paid for it. This card – the card either has a fun picture of an animal on the front, or an extended joke about how old you are, or, in cases of extreme humour, the message "Sorry You’re Leaving!" on the front – this card is a business expense that has already been written off. Open it up. It has been signed by everyone you work with in either blue or black biro.

There is no worse writer’s block in the world than being faced with writing a "happy birthday!" message for someone you barely know. Simplify it. There are only three birthday messages allowed: if you know the person well, you can recount a single in-joke the two of you share or a nickname you might have for them. This is fun. Another alternative is to try to kick-start some written banter with the receiver of the card, in an attempt to pull the starter cord on a real-world friendship ("Wow! Can’t believe you’re 90 years old!"). This will not work. And then, often when you can barely form the shapes of their face in your mind’s eye, you are stuck writing something anodyne and generally positive – "Have a good one, mate!" – but also ensuring nobody else has already written it ahead of you. Those are the three birthday card messages allowed. Do not deviate from them. Pass the card along quickly to the next available well-wisher.

READ:

The best birthday cake is the Colin the Caterpillar cake – there will be no arguing about this. Colin the Caterpillar is better than anything on Bake Off. In the old days, you feel, the office cook would prepare a lovingly handmade cake, which would be sliced up and offered around. We do not live in the past any more. Colin the Caterpillar is a superior cake because, when sliced, he comes with a clear hierarchy: the solid chocolate face of Colin is offered to the Birthday Haver, a sacrifice to the gods; the less solid but still robust arse of Colin is offered to the Birthday Leader. Both treats now gone, the interstitial slices of his crumbling torso are offered to you, the scum. "This knife," someone will say, holding up a blunt knife from the cutlery drawer. "We really should get a better knife." Nobody will ever buy a knife. I worked in an office once where we only had plastic cutlery, and at least three knives shattered per cake-cutting, shearing into the corpse like spears thrown into an antelope. Nobody ever bought a knife. There are not enough plates to go around so the still-warm body is handed to you on a torn kitchen napkin. Tear up the remaining crumbs with your hands.

Sometimes you will get a small cake from the Co-Op instead, and it is not as good.

This horrible charade is coming to an end now. You sang the Happy Birthday song, all of you in a horrible harmony, high and low notes clattering into one another, loud and quiet, a morbid drone. Look around at your colleagues while they sing it. Who, among them, do you really know? You’ve worked here for a couple of years now. Surely you should know more people. On your birthday, you flick through your own card. Entire regions of it are signed by people whose names you don’t know. Are… you so unpopular here they have to get ringers in to sign your card? Do… do people sign your birthday card with the same sigh of resignation as when you sign theirs? Sometimes the Birthday Haver is invited to make a speech, and they never do, because who makes speeches. They stand in front of everyone, cheeks pink with the exertion of singing out loud in public. "Thank you," they say, quietly. "I’m, err, having a couple of drinks after work." Nobody says anything. "You don’t have to come!" they say, and you decide right there you are going to come. And it’s just you, isn’t it, in your work shirt and your work trousers, silently sipping a Guinness with The Friends Of Your Colleague Who They Met At University Who Are All Dressed Smart-Casually And Are Relaxed. "So how do you know Ryan?" they say, loudly, in the lulls in conversation. I work with him, you say. These tentative bonds that keep us hopelessly anchored together. Tell them you have to leave, soon, after this next pint. Ryan will understand. And you slink home, just like you slinked to your desk after the birthday song, knowing somehow you are less popular now than you ever were before. Still another half an hour of the working day to go. They never told you birthdays would be like this. It is less than two days until you have to sing this again. Then again, two more days after that. One day it will happen twice. And then again, and again, over and over, as we accelerate ever faster towards death.

@joelgolby

There was once a time when being nerdy was considered uncool. In case you haven't noticed, though, those days are long gone.

Look around any major fandom convention, and you'll see people from all walks of life who aren't too worried anymore about the stigma of being labelled as "geeks." In all likelihood, amongst that very same crowd, you'll also come across super-attractive women at cosplay booths whose followings can rival that of the characters they're portraying.

Holly Wolf is one of those women. With nearly 4 million followers on Facebook alone, Wolf's popularity is a force to be reckoned with. As someone who has modelled for Playboy, she falls on the "sexy cosplayer" side—a controversial descriptor that seeks to separate "regular" cosplayers from those who wear more revealing getups, showing off cleavage, butt, midriff, or all of the above.

"There is no difference between [a] cosplayer and sexy cosplayer," Wolf explained to me at her apartment in Toronto. "There are so many characters that are half-naked or have skin-tight clothing… So does that mean a cosplayer can't cosplay a character that is in nature drawn sexier?" Wolf was wearing a T-shirt of herself in a Street Fighter character cosplay while she was decompressing after broadcasting on Twitch and her first day as an official guest at Fan Expo Canada. This year, official cosplayer guests at that con skewed heavily female—20 women versus three men.

Before any men were added to this year's Fan Expo Canada lineup on the website, actor Adrianna Prosser noted this in a tweet, asking, "Why are #cosplay guests just... women? Is there no (identifies as) men cosplayers that get this kind of clout/status at cons?"

"It's hard to get 'clout status' when you don't have excessive cleavage and aren't walking around looking like a stripper," one man replied.

Though sexy cosplayers have earned huge followings, it seems nerd establishment isn't exactly sure how to handle their popularity.

Part of that means the popularity sexy cosplayers achieve often comes with hate.

Holly Wolf cosplays as a bathing suit version Zero Suit Samus at Fan Expo Canada. Photo by Hayley Stewart

Wolf sometimes deals with online backlash to her cosplays, often in the form of slut-shaming or dismissing her as attention-seeking. When it comes to game franchises such as The Legend of Zelda, which are childhood favourites seen as "family-friendly," some people don't enjoy seeing sexed-up versions of characters. Example A: Wolf posted a photo in August of her in a Playboy bunny-style Zelda cosplay, and a guy commented saying, "That's about as stupid as it gets..makes u look like some cheap dumb ass child molester in a bunny suit."

Another cosplayer I interviewed for this article said a commenter once told her, "You used to be a cosplayer, now you're just a whore." Multiple women I interviewed who do sexy-style cosplay said they often see some version of "just do porn already" in their comments.

Fandom conventions, too, sometimes have a wholesome image to uphold. I, for one, can attest to this from my own experience: Once, when I put in a press pass request with an anime convention to write about hentai, I was warned to be conscientious of the fact that the con was "family-friendly"—even though it literally had an infamous "hentai room" where anime porn screened all hours of the night.

That penchant for a family-friendly image extends to other popular fandom conventions since kids and adults alike enjoy video games, anime, and comics. It's an image that increasingly poses a challenge for sexy cosplayers—a demographic that seems to be growing, as do their followers—to navigate. Though Wolf has now officially guested at a number of conventions, she expressed difficultly in initially getting bookings because of her association with Playboy.

Vera Bambi, who was previously a camgirl, has been cosplaying for five years. However, despite her social media following—at the time of publish, 675K on Instagram, nearly 270K on Facebook—she often has to pay her own way to conventions.

At Emerald City Comic Con in Seattle last year, a security person approached her booth, asking her to change out of her Vampirella cosplay, which Bambi described to me as "a sling" that covers "your nipples and your bits." The thing is, her Vampirella outfit was nearly identical to the comic book character's. Yet, apparently, it was seen as unacceptable at a convention specifically for comics. Bambi told the security guard she would cover up with a sweater, but when they left, she said she didn't keep it on.

"Sexy is just a style. It has nothing to do with how hard you are working."

Bambi is not the only cosplayer who has been approached with similar concerns. In 2012, Jessica Nigri, who is regarded as one of the top cosplayers in the world, was asked to change her outfit or leave at PAX (Penny Arcade Expo) East when she cosplayed as the main character from Lollipop Chainsaw.

PAX notoriously has a ban on "booth babes," which is a colloquialism for scantily clad promotional models. But when it comes to cosplay, even though some of the women participating in it are attractive and scantily clad, it's something completely different: It's an art form. And for the women interviewed for this article, it's even more: It's a career they support themselves with.

"Sexy is just a style. It has nothing to do with how hard you are working," Bambi said. "The sexy design is an art form in itself." Bambi used to design her cosplays for a seamstress to make, but has started making her own now: a recent cosplay she made from top to bottom was a gender-bend version of Khal Drogo from Game of Thrones. "It's a lot of work, but when I was finished, it was really rewarding," she said. In addition to the level of skill associated with creating some cosplays, it can take hours getting ready. Bambi said she spends five hours getting ready anytime she wears her Joker cosplay, for example.

"There's a lot of stigma in being a hot girl."

Despite the hard work and time women such as Bambi and Wolf put into cosplay, they're not immune from being dismissed as "fake gamer girls" or having the authenticity of their cosplay-creating skills called into question.

"It's so weird that it's still a thing to think that people who look a certain way are not allowed to like certain things," Wolf said.

Like Bambi, redhead Canadian camgirl and cosplayer Clara Cosmia has sometimes blurred the lines between cosplay and the adult industry. Cosmia, who makes most of her cosplays from scratch, began cosplaying over five years ago and is especially known for a cosplay of Leeloo from Fifth Element. She occasionally cosplays on cam, such as in her boudoir version of Jessica Rabbit.

"There's a lot of stigma in being a hot girl," Cosmia told me while on the photoshoot for this article. "[People think] you clearly didn't achieve anything because you're hot."

Cosmia has yet to be officially booked by a convention and pays her own way when she appears at them.

Bambi described how other cosplayers who don't dress up in styles as sexy as she does will get booked for conventions, even though some have weaker followings than her. "I understand why people don't take it as seriously when it's more sexual, but I am frustrated by it," she said.

Unlike Bambi, Cosmia has yet to have a direct confrontation about her sexy-style cosplay at a convention. She considers one of her first sexy cosplays to be when she dressed up as a particularly unique spin on Cookie Monster.

"A kid obviously came up to me, and I was a little nervous about that because I made this super goth, slutty version of Cookie Monster—a child character, basically," she said. "But it didn't faze her at all."

The cosplay that really blew up her image, though, was when she dressed up as bandage Leeloo from Fifth Element: "I had adrenaline pumping through me to the max," Cosmia said about her first time wearing that cosplay to a con.

When I asked Cosmia if there is any pressure to do cosplay that falls into the "sexy" category because they are so popular, she replied, "Yes, and it can be really frustrating for girls who straddle the line."

"I could spend 10 times the amount of time and skill level doing an armour build, but if it covers skin, odds are it's not going to get as much attention as a boudoir version of something—it sucks, but that's just the way it is," Cosmia explained.

KayBear cosplays as Morrigan from Dragon Age. Photo courtesy of KayBear

It's a sentiment Atlanta-based sexy cosplayer Kay Thomas (aka KayBear) echoed when I interviewed her over the phone. "You could feel pressured probably to do the more sexy route when you see that the internet will tend to over-share the sexy cosplay." she said. "A lot of people feel the larger, intricate armour builds or sewing projects get overshadowed by the sexy content—sex sells, that's obvious."

Karli Woods, a Canadian cosplayer who has been in the industry professionally for three years, said she has "definitely have felt those pressures before." She said while she has done "sexier things," that's not her focus now and that she is focusing on doing what she is "comfortable with" and building what she calls her "community." Woods is especially known for incorporating tutus she makes into her portrayal of characters, such as a version of R2D2 she calls "R2-tutu."

"I want people coming into cosplay to know that you do not have to do the sexier stuff and show a lot of skin to be successful," Woods told me when we sat down for an interview in her house.

Karli Woods is known for adding tutus to her cosplays. Photo by Hayley Stewart

When she entered the cosplay industry, Woods did so with keen business senses. She had already worked in TV, including as an on-camera host. "I knew already that you couldn't cross certain boundaries to work with certain brands," she said.

Even though Woods doesn't have as high of a following on social media (over 48,000 followers on Instagram) as the other cosplayers in this article who do primarily sexy styles, she doesn't have problems being booked by conventions or working with brands.

Woods also creates content for Patreon, a site where many cosplayers sell subscription-based content for a monthly fee. Woods, for instance, offers Q&A videos and behind-the-scenes cosplay photos. The more you pay per month on Patreon, the more content you receive from creators.

Patreon takes on another use for cosplayers like Wolf, Bambi, and Thomas, giving them the ability to sell sexy content, such as "lewds" or NSFW images. But as of October 17, Patreon changed its guidelines, requiring creators to mark content as "sexual imagery or nudity." It's a move that has, in part, led a number of adult content creators to sign an open letter urging the site not to "abandon" them. (In the past, Patreon discriminated against adult content creators in the form of limited payout options.) The open letter to Patreon includes signatures from at least 13 creators who make cosplay content.

Cosplayers Brit Bliss (left), who has been featured in Maxim, and Missy Mayhem pose at their cosplay booths at Fan Expo Canada.

Thomas, who is putting herself through college with her cosplay career, also sells content on Patreon. The exclusive perks for her highest tier include all her "bikini/lingerie selfies and videos" (over 75 images each month), a bonus 10-photo self-shot set, and the occasional "cute personalized gifts as a thank you." Thomas doesn't do nudes, but does what she calls "implied nudity."

For Thomas, though, the "sexy" aspect came before sexy cosplay did—she said she posted sexy-style photos on her Instagram before she ever started getting into that side of cosplay. Though she just started cosplaying professionally this year, her following has already grown to nearly 170,000 on Instagram. Her first official booking as guest at a convention was in Trinidad in January, and she has had numerous bookings at other cons since.

"I always wanted to do cosplay, but I'm African-American," she told me. "I never saw anyone that was like me doing it—that was my skin colour or ethnicity... It scared me off because it didn't really feel like it was a place for me to join."

Thomas, who is 22, said she had hesitation when she was a teenager about dressing up as white characters.

When she cosplayed as Jinx from League of Legends and Hinata from Naruto , both characters she described as "small, skinny white girls," she experienced a slew of racist online hate.

"It got nasty really quick, with people telling me I was not allowed to do cosplays because I am black, and that was their only argument," she said. Thomas said that racist backlash to her cosplay was her "biggest fear" when she started out in the industry, and it became a reality.

Despite the hate, though, Thomas said that cosplay has changed her life for the better, including how it's aided in building her self-confidence.

For Cosmia, she said getting into sexy cosplay has been a "freeing experience" for her. But, she told me she used to have a different perspective before she got into it.

"People are really surprised to find out that I was that bitchy girl who judged sexy cosplayers when I first started," she said. "If my mentality can change, anyone's can change."

There is an old poster I saw once from some group of 1970s student radicals. It shows a woman of colour standing pensively alongside a fence beneath the words “Class consciousness is figuring out what side of the fence you’re on. Class analysis is figuring out who’s there with you.”

I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, because there is something profoundly uncanny about how we talk about the “middle class” in Canada.

Most of the political, economic, and cultural apparatuses in this country are ostensibly geared towards servicing the interests of the middle class. Most of us also tend to locate ourselves more or less confidently within its ranks. But it’s not really all that clear what the middle class is, how to tell who belongs there, or why it seems to be the axle of the Canadian universe.

The standard rule of thumb in most popular discussion of class in Canada is that a) class is primarily tied to, or even determined by, an individual’s income level and/or the material conditions of their lifestyle, and b) that the “middle class” occupies the central band around a given region’s income. While straightforward and seemingly intuitive, I argue that this approach to thinking about class is not especially useful when actually applied as a tool of socio-economic analysis.

Fortunately, Global News ran a recent report that aimed to explicitly define the middle class in Canada. It’s actually a very pure example of this type of analysis of the Canadian middle class that actually highlights the critical shortcomings of the standard approach, insofar as it obscures more about regional economic disparity and income inequality in Canada than it reveals. But in charting its limitations, we might be able to sketch out a more useful framework for analysis: useful not only in understanding the broad strokes of the Canadian socio-economic landscape, but also in clarifying our politicians’ famously fatuous language about the “middle class.” (That is, it might help us to identify when they’re bullshitting us—and themselves.)

Erica Alini’s report in Global worked with Statistics Canada to create a rough map of the country’s middle class by by analyzing census data for household income distribution. StatsCan then determined local income rankings based on the 2016 census and broke those rankings into five groups (or quintiles) of equal size. The three middle quintiles demarcate, roughly, what counts as middle class. The Canadian middle class, then, turns out to be anyone earning between $33,000 and $130,000 a year—which is quite a range.

Of course, this is only the national figure, which can vary wildly depending on what part of the country you’re looking at. The cutoff for the lowest middle class quintile in Fort McMurray, Alberta is in the ballpark of $91K, which puts you well into the top quintile of the post-asbestos Thetford Mines in Quebec. But by and large, things tend to stick around the national average, as you would expect.

But there are some issues with the picture Alini paints of the Canadian economy. For one, although she notes that regional disparities impact what counts as ‘middle class’ for an area, the piece discusses only comparisons between major urban centres in each province, alongside obvious resource-based outliers like Fort Mac and Thetford Mines. A much more telling impact of regional disparity in income would compare urban centres with rural areas; what counts as middle class varies more between Fort Mac and Vulcan, St. John’s and Baie Verte, than between Toronto and Montreal or Vancouver.

More fundamentally, naming the median three income quintiles as “the middle class” does not tell us anything particularly useful or interesting about Canadian society, and it results in more than a few absurdities. I find it difficult to believe that anyone living in Toronto on a household income of $35,000 a year has a standard of living we would readily recognize as “middle class,” trust funds and other social supports notwithstanding. (And the claim that $31,000 makes you middle class in Vancouver is probably more egregious.) This also omits the implicit assumption that people at the top and bottom of this 60% chunk of the Canadian economy have mutual or overlapping class interests, which strikes me as a vaguely incredible proposition.

Despite its shortcomings, however, there is a reason the income model persists in mainstream discourse. It is highly individualized, and (comparatively) conceptually straightforward. Your class position is a function of your income; the amount of money you make determines the kind of lifestyle you can live (and where you can afford to live it). What is class but a social status, a mode of life? And what is the “middle class” but the aspirational virtuous mean of an unequal society?

This model, in other words, links an individual’s class position to a social status based on consumption. If your class position is expressed in the way you live (ie. the things you own, the things you consume, etc), then most people can (or at least aspire to) pass for middle class even if it’s not, strictly speaking, where they fall among income brackets. That middle class is understood as a kind of personal cultural identity based around a certain pattern of conspicuous consumption goes a long way in explaining Canada’s love affair with astronomical levels of personal debt. Ye shall know them by the exotic fruits in their renovated suburban kitchen, and what Mammon has joined together, let no credit card statement put asunder.

But this is very clearly a limited picture of what class is in Canada. A more useful way of looking at the situation is to consider class not so much as a function of how much money you earn, but by what you actually have to do to earn it—how much power you have over yourself and/or others at your job. Where do you fit relative to decisions over the production and distribution of economic goods and services? This is a more meaningful rubric for demarcating class position than your level of consumption.

The Canadian economy, like all developed economies in the 21st century, is stratified by a breathtaking array of specialized labour practices that work more or less in concert—by the grace of our capitalist central planners in Toronto and New York—to keep our crisis-prone economic system running as smoothly as possible. Fundamentally, you are either selling your ability to labour, or you are buying someone else’s. (Some people also work at directing, regulating, and policing who may sell that labour, for what price, and to what ends—this is a substantive distinguishing feature of the “middle class” properly so-called.)

Class is better understood as a category of social power. That is, it discloses how much autonomy or agency you have in shaping the world in which you (and others) live and work.

On this reading, the middle class is not merely a group of people who happen to have enough education and money to participate in what we have collectively come to define (or accept, as depicted through media and cultural apparatuses) as a ‘mainstream’ or ‘normal’ life. They are, rather, the credentialed professionals who have greater degrees of autonomy at work and a greater access to, and control over, the mechanisms of social and economic and cultural exclusion that separates them from the working class. (Who is excluded by whom in this country, through which mechanisms, and on what basis, is a discussion we leave for another time.)

The middle class may be excluded from any meaningful access to capital, but they have access to other privileges—educational, cultural, intellectual, legal, etc.—that demarcate and elevate them above the working class, who has no meaningful access to either. (The jury is still out on whether or not unionized workers count as properly middle class or as a particularly privileged subset of the working class itself.)

No one is stopping you from living your idealized middle class #bestlife if you have no qualms in charging everything to your credit card.

It is fair to say, however, that the fortunes of the middle class are not what they used to be. The heyday of the North American middle class seems to have been the 1970s (and things are not as grim in Canada as they are in the United States). The education and credentials that were once hallmarks of middle class status are now more widely accessible than ever (thanks in part to an economic order increasingly premised on the vast and uncontrolled expansion of personal debt), but those credentials are also less tied to securing or maintaining middle class jobs than ever before. The global implosion of the financial system in the last decade also marked a definite shift away from security and towards a much more precarious work environment for those of us with aspirations to either join or remain in the middle class. Good education is still a your best bet to join the club, but it’s nowhere near the guarantee it once was—just ask one of the PhD college instructors on strike in Ontario.

Of course, no one is stopping you from living your idealized middle class #bestlife if you have no qualms in charging everything to your credit card—and as long as you can pay the piper when the creditors come calling. But I wouldn’t recommend it.

Ironically, taking this approach to class not only clarifies things, but brings us full circle back to commiserating with the federal Liberals about the woes of the middle class. The situation may not be quite as bleak as they suggest, but the future is both literally and figuratively precarious. (And it’s always more dire for the working class, who unquestionably make up the majority of any developed capitalist economy.)

Unfortunately, there are a number of indications that the Liberals seem more concerned with catering to the interests of the upper class—those with substantial access to capital, ie. the social power to order and structure the economy and everything that entails—than they are with catering to the particular class interests of the rest of us. You could argue that a rising tide lifts all boats; but you could just as easily argue that the interests of the ruling class do not strictly align with your own, and may even run directly counter to them. Conclusively arbitrating this dispute is, of course, far above my pay grade.

Anyway, this concludes our brief lesson in the broad strokes of the Canadian middle class. If this is your jam, I recommend checking out some of the recent work by Erik Olin Wright and/or Malcolm Harris. But I hope this has helped you get a better sense of which side of the fence you find yourself on, and who else might be there with you.

Follow Drew on Twitter.

In late October, a woman named Juli Briskman pulled off something that many Americans—plus many foreigners—would die to do.

Briskman, bless her heart, flipped Trump the bird.

While Trump’s motorcade was cruising through Sterling, Virginia, they passed Briskman who was on her bike. Briskman, realizing who was pulling past her, extended her arm and popped up that wonderful, old as time, middle finger salute to America’s special liddle guy. As a result of pulling of the much loved stunt, the 50-year-old Briskman was fired by her government contractor employer.

However, the hero of this tale is a defiant one and told Huffpo that she’d "do it again” if given the chance.

But what was Briskman really saying with that single digit salute?

Well, as I’m sure you know, the finger is one of the most cherished gestures in the Western world. It’s how we show disapproval to those who can’t hear our vulgarities for whatever reason, it’s how I tell that chachi dude in the black truck that he almost ran me down in a crosswalk, and, if you’re the Canadian editor of VICE Sports, how you say hello to me in the morning.

The history of the finger isn’t completely concrete, but, as Benjamin Bergen, director of the Language and Cognition Lab at the University of California in San Diego explains, we know flipping people off goes back not just centuries but millennia.

"We know that it goes back, at least, to Greek times,” Bergen told VICE. “It shows up in some Greek plays and where it's juxtaposed with other sorts of vulgar gestures, like the waggling of a penis for example. We also know that from records that it also showed up in plays in Roman times and in accounts of senate chamber conflict and so on."

"We know that it had a name in Roman times where it was called the indecent or impudent finger, the Digitus Impudicus. It continues for the following millennium as we know, there are some urban myths people tell about the origins but as far as we can tell none of them are true, it really has a several thousand year history."

Due to the ever shitty fact that time machines aren’t around yet, we don’t know 100 percent what the original middle finger meant, but we have an idea and that idea is all about them dicks. That’s right, as far as we know, the middle finger was pretty much intended to represent a dick. Speaking to the BBC, renowned anthropologist and author of The Naked Ape, Desmond Morris said that the by flipping the finger you’re saying “this is a phallus” and offering it to the recipient.

"The middle finger is the penis and the curled fingers on either side are the testicles,” explained Morris. “By doing it, you are offering someone a phallic gesture.”

One of the first recorded mentions of the finger came in The Clouds, a text written by 424 BC by the playwright Aristophanes when a dude named Strepsiades flips off Socrates by pretending his finger is a dick getting hard—that’s right, [a fictional version of] Socrates was the first dude to get flipped off. Around a hundred years later another mention of the finger appears in the Lives of Eminent Philosophers where yet another philosopher gets flipped off—in all honest, I’m starting to think these philosophers deserved it guys.

As power and influence migrated from the Greeks to the Romans so did the middle finger. In several written Roman works which include poems and plays the gesture popped up. Legend has it that Caligula, the mad emperor of Rome, even had his subjects kiss his middle finger (which he waggled in a suggestive manner) instead of his hand which, again, reinforces the notion of the finger as a phallus.

The middle finger lost a little steam in the middle ages, something that most likely came about by the influence of the puritans in the Catholic church. In a 2008 paper tracking the middle finger’s relationship with the law, Ira P. Robbins writes that the gesture made its way to North America no later than 1886. Why do we know this? Well, we know it because a fucking amazing baseball player named Charles “Old Hoss” Radbourn who played for the Boston Beaneaters flipped off the camera in that year—it is, as far as we know, the first photographed occasion of the bird being flipped.

Build a statue of this man, America. Photo via wikimedia commons.

Now, if you’re wondering why we call it flipping the bird, well, the answer is kinda simple. Centuries ago you would taunt or express displeasure at a dickhead by hissing like a goose (the asshole of the bird world) at them—it became so common that people just started referring to this act as “the goose.” In the 20th century the term had morphed to “the bird” and when hissing at people in public (thankfully) fell out of fashion it became connected with our beloved finger gesture of old.

While the gesture wasn’t birthed in North America it has assuredly become its home for the last little while. In fact, it’s the dominance of American culture across the world that has given the finger its current shining moment in the sun. Thanks to the creeping influence of American-made entertainment and media, more cultures than ever know what our fine little gesture means—which means you shouldn’t randomly flip off people while abroad because A) you’re an asshole if you do and B) they probably know what it means.

"Until maybe 20 years ago, the middle finger didn't mean anything in Japan or Korea,” said Bergen. “Since then, with more and more movies and television coming in, now all of a sudden everyone in Japan knows what that thing is."

"If French cinema had taken over the world after World War II then we probably would be doing the fist thing."

Thanks to American hegemony we now have works of art such as the above.

Of course now, when that dude in the shiny black pickup truck sporting the wifebeater and trucker hat blasts past you in the crosswalk and all can do is flip off the sight of his truck nuts flapping in the wind as he barrels onward to his cousin’s bed, you aren’t saying “LOOK AT MY DICK YOU PIECE OF SHIT.” That’s because, over time, the middle finger has moved away from the literal representation of a dick and more or less just means “fuck you.” This is something that is par for the course, explains Bergen, especially so with crude gestures.

"There is a Brazilian obscene gesture that looks like the A-OK symbol but upside down and meant to look like an anus and it just means the same thing that the middle finger means,” said Bergen. “It just means 'fuck you,' 'fuck off,' or something like that it doesn't mean 'look at my anus' anymore."

Gestures are as old as time. Early humans used them prior to language being around, something we can see within primate communication current day. Prior to speaking the mother language of where they are born, babies often use gestures to communicate to their parents.

"It's a precursor to language both in development and in the history of our species. Gestures has a very direct connection to our emotions,” said Bergen. “When you are in a direct confrontation with someone, you do things physically to send a signal of what's going to happen next—what you want to convey to the person."

So I want you to remember that next time you’re flipping the bird, friends. I want you to remember that you’re not just telling a dickwad in a motorcade to fuck off, you’re connecting to a former time.

You’re singing an ode to our past.

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter.

There is no mind more curious than that of a professional wrestling fan. Fight me.

Wrestling is an industry rooted in mystery and illusion, toeing the line between real and fake, tugging on the heartstrings of fans and forcing them to suspend disbelief. These days, it profits from transparency. Although it's dwarfed in overall global popularity by major sports, wrestling podcasts dominate the Sports and Recreation charts on iTunes, and wrestling memoirs routinely become New York Times bestsellers. Fans are ravenously hungry for old wrestling stories and current behind the scenes information in a way that would seem absurd to common television viewers. In wrestling, that's just what being a fan is these days.

There isn't much about pro wrestling we don't know anymore, or at least, have the ability and opportunity to know. We know every performer's real name, we know they slap their legs or torsos to make their kicks sound more devastating, we know about the little razor blades hidden in wrist tape back when bleeding wasn't taboo on WWE television.

But there's one event wrestling fans continue to revisit with questions, and it's the one that launched this era of inquisitiveness altogether: The Montreal Screwjob.

The “Screwjob” has become a colloquial term for the 1997 edition of WWE's Survivor Series, and the main event between its two biggest stars and best performers, Calgary’s Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels. In short, Hart (the real person) entered the ring with the understanding that he would not be losing the match, but midway through the contest, company owner Vince McMahon double crossed him and had Michaels win the match. It might have looked like a part of a storyline, but the truth—or several versions of it—would soon come out. McMahon had actually screwed Hart—who was leaving to join rival WCW—and altered the finish without his knowledge.

"It became something that people talked about so much for so long that people became fascinated with digging a layer deeper," said Conrad Thompson, co-host of Something To Wrestle and What Happened When, two prominent wrestling podcasts."(The Screwjob) created kind of a thirst for that insider knowledge to a new section of fans who maybe hadn't been interested in that before. To them, it was just this fun escape and it wasn't something that they had to know, sort of, how the sausage was made."

1997 was one of the hottest periods in the history of professional wrestling. WWE and World Championship Wrestling were running head to head, with the Ted Turner-backed WCW starting to dominate the television ratings war thanks to the mega-popular NWO faction, featuring Hulk Hogan, Scott Hall and Kevin Nash. In addition, there was a third, rogue outfit, Extreme Championship Wrestling, which offered another alternative for wrestlers looking to make a living in North America.

It was a good time to be a wrestler, financially. Never before or since have performers had as much leverage as they did in that particular era when it came to negotiating contracts. At the time, WCW was dishing out lucrative contracts that were also guaranteed—something ethically commendable, but fiscally perilous in a profession as hazardous as wrestling. They could afford it, both due to Turner's backing, and their monstrous ratings on TNT every Monday night.

McMahon's WWE (then WWF), meanwhile, was reportedly feeling the pinch. Although Hart was the company's biggest star, arguably its biggest live gate draw globally, and most critically, its champion, McMahon gave him the go ahead to negotiate with his biggest rival, Eric Bischoff and WCW. This was despite the fact that a little over a year prior, Hart had signed a 20-year contract set to keep him with the company for the remainder of his career.

Hart had several opportunities to jump ship in the past, but always remained loyal to McMahon, whom he considered a father figure of sorts.

“When we first started talking to Bret, we had Nitro. My roster was already pretty full, we were already kicking Vince McMahon's ass. Bret would have been nice to have, but certainly wasn't a critical player. It's like having three Joe Montanas and sitting down to talk to a fourth Joe Montana,” Bischoff told VICE.

But the WCW pockets were ultimately deep enough to afford four franchise quarterbacks, inking Hart to a lucrative deal. Though Hart's contract information with WWE has never been made public, Wrestling Observer founder Dave Meltzer has reported that Hart made $1.5 million annually before merchandise, pay-per-view and other residual payouts at that particular time. In the midst of a 2002 racial discrimination lawsuit levied against the company, Turner released its payroll information, which revealed that Hart was making roughly $2.6 million annually. In total, Hart earned $6,754,074 in salary and additional payouts, the third-highest amount of any performer in WCW from 1996 to 2000, next to only Hogan and Bill Goldberg.

“What changed for Bret's benefit and provided him the enormous financial opportunity is that between the first conversation with Bret and the second conversation, Ted Turner called me and said I want to launch a totally new show called Thunder. An entirely new, prime time, live two-hour wrestling show. I knew at that point, there was no way I could split my current roster without diluting it, without cannibalizing it. I knew I had to create an entirely new brand. If we're going to launch an entirely different show, we need an entirely separate roster,” Bischoff said. “That's what enabled me to get the budget to get Bret Hart, because much like Hulk Hogan and the NWO were head of the Nitro phenomenon at that time, I looked at Bret Hart and the fact that he was leaving the WWF as an opportunity to create an entirely new roster and brand that Bret would be the leader of. That was the only reason I was able to offer Bret that kind of money.”

With Hart having decided to leave for WCW, he now had to finish his final days in the WWE, and at some point, drop the championship to a performer who was going to remain with the company. What is known about Hart's contract with WWE at the time is that he had creative control over his character for the final 30 days of his tenure, meaning he could legally veto booking decisions he deemed to be adverse to him or his future career.

Hart's 1997 run—character wise—may be looked back upon as the finest of his career. In the United States, he portrayed an anti-American villain who berated fans and their country for bigotry, a lack of universal health care, etc etc, all the while proclaiming that Canada was the superior country to live in. Transplanted in 2017, that Hart character would be remarkably poignant.

The chief focus of his ire—both in character and out of it—was Michaels. Though the two had respect for one another as performers, and had engaged in wonderful ring spectacles in the past, they neither liked nor trusted one another. The two were entangled in backstage incidents, and took several not-so-thinly veiled personal shots at one another on television, including Michaels alleging on the air that Hart was having an affair with female performer Sunny.

With roughly three weeks remaining on his contract, Hart was set to face Michaels in Montreal at Survivor Series. Hart requested that he not drop his title that particular night, but instead, lose to a wrestler of the company's choosing the following night on Monday Night RAW (including to Michaels, provided Michaels lost to him first), or even at an upcoming pay-per-view in Springfield, MA, in a four-way match against Michaels, The Undertaker and Ken Shamrock. In Hart's mind, it was both within his contractual rights to make the request, but also a reasonable compromise, even though the company would have preferred he lose the title in any fashion that night to Michaels. McMahon's stance is that he was concerned that if Hart did not lose the title in Montreal, he could potentially show up on WCW's flagship Monday night program Nitro the next night with the WWE title and make a mockery of the company—all he had was Hart's word that he wouldn't do it.

Hart, McMahon and the company's writers went back and forth trying to decide upon a finish for the match in Montreal that would be satisfactory to all parties.

“There was an uneasiness because Bret had been pretty difficult all week. It was constant negotiation. Bret would agree, then he'd disagree, he'd agree, then disagree, he'd agree, then call back and say ‘nah, I don't wanna do that.’ It was a lot of give and take all week, trying to get to the point that we needed to get to,” Bruce Prichard, who was one of the company's lead writers and generally known as McMahon's right hand man at the time, told VICE.

It was finally decided that the match would end in a disqualification, with Bret's real life brother Owen Hart and real-life brother-in-law Davey Boy Smith interfering in the match, causing him to technically lose but allow him to retain his title.

Or so Hart thought.

Though Hart has said he'd had suspicions about the company trying to screw him that night, he and Michaels met earlier in the day and had an emotional chat, seemingly burying the hatchet and putting to rest all of their prior issues.

Not surprisingly, the two began having a tremendous, high-tempo match that only they were capable of having at that time. The two had planned a sequence in which Michaels would put Hart in his own finishing maneuver, the Sharpshooter leg lock. The spot went off relatively well, though Hart had to covertly correct Michaels on how to apply the hold while laying on the mat. Moments after that, the bell rang.

Michaels' music played, he was declared the winner, and referee Earl Hebner bolted backstage.

The Montreal Screwjob had happened.

“I was watching at Gorilla Position (right behind the entrance curtain) with Davey Boy and Owen Hart. They were the only two people there. Anybody who says they were there weren't there,” said Prichard. "Watching it, I thought it was a mistake. I'm watching for a spot, and then all of the sudden the bell rings. So I'm trying to talk to the truck, to the timekeeper, I'm trying to find out what's going on. In the meantime, I've got Davey Boy in front of me and he's going 'they just fooked him. They fooked Bret. What do we do?' And I had no clue. I just kind of sat there for a minute and then said, 'I guess fucking go out? I dunno.'"

As Davey Boy and Owen went to the ring, Michaels was feigning anger and frustration with the outcome and heading backstage (it wouldn't be for many years before Michaels admitted he was in on the plan). As unenviable a position as Prichard was in, lead commentator Jim Ross, who was also the head of talent relations at the time, may have had it even worse.

“I didn't know it was coming. I had nothing in my mind as far as what we were going to say. Thank God for that. I didn't want to know,” Ross told VICE. “We never tracked down every little piece of minutia we could get. It just wasn't important. We felt that we were good enough and knew the game well enough that we could narrate whatever you put on our monitor. We'd been around the block a couple times, so we should be OK there. We didn't know anything. So when the finish went down and the bell rung, it was like...uh oh, I get it. Then, Kevin Dunn, the executive producer is in my ear like "OK JR, we're out in 10, 9..." It was a quick out. I didn't have time in ten seconds to think about anything other than getting off the air.”

As the cameras went off the air, Hart went on a rampage, destroying the ringside set before standing in the middle of the ring and drawing the letters “WCW” with his fingers. Afterward, he went backstage, took off his ring gear, showered, dressed, tossed his knee brace in his bag and then uppercutted McMahon out cold, never to be seen again on WWE premises until 2010.

Hart would later tell Sports Illustrated it was the “most beautiful uppercut punch you could ever imagine.”

“I actually thought it would miss and go right up the side of his head, but I popped him right up like a cork was under his jaw and lifted him right off the hand. I broke my right hand just beneath the knuckle, and knocked Vince out cold,” he told SI in 2014.

What makes the incident most unfortunate, and in truth, more fascinating, is that it all may have been totally avoidable. Hart has said subsequently that he had already exceeded his number of mandatory 1997 dates with WWE by November 9, and as such, could have said “I'm not working anymore.” However, with more than three weeks remaining on his contract, it would have been legally impossible, or certainly inadvisable, for him to show up on a rival company's show. And as Bischoff explains, even if he were to have rolled the dice and appeared on Nitro the next night (and it should be noted he did not appear on Nitro until December—so if he could have appeared the next night, why didn't he?), he wouldn't have done so with the WWE title.

All signs point to the fact that Hart was probably telling the truth, and probably would have done exactly what he said he was going to and drop the title before he left the WWE.

“Bret and I talked sensibly about him dropping the title. I didn't really give a damn. I told him it was fine if he dropped the title, it wasn't really going to affect the audience at all. In other words, in my opinion, Bret was a bigger star than the title, and him making the transition was something that that the audience would understand and respect,” said Bischoff. “We were already in the middle of a trademark lawsuit, we were losing ground. Honestly, if I had gone rogue and attempted to convince Bret Hart to bring that title onto WCW television, I would have faced the corporate firing squad. Even if I would have wanted to do it, I wouldn't have been allowed to do it. Which makes it even more sad in a way, that this happened, because there was absolutely no basis for the possibility of that happening.”

The incident is discussed and debated to this day, with most wrestling fans taking a fairly firm stance on who they side with in the controversy—along with conspiracy theories that the Screwjob itself was a work.

“If you were inside the business and you were one of the boys, and strictly one of the boys, then you probably err on that side with Bret, that you have to communicate things, and there has to be understanding and trust. But I also think if you grew up in the office, so to speak, those types are always going to side with the office, that you do what the boss wants to do, and if you don't want to, he'll do it for you,” said Thompson.

What isn't debatable is the impact the incident had on shaping the wrestling world as we know it today, and it's impact in peeling back the curtain on the business.

In 1997, there was a fledgling internet wrestling community that accompanied the iconic Wrestling Observer newsletter which had been in circulation since 1980. Message boards and wrestling news sites were starting to pop up, and fans were beginning to become “smart” to the business. Fans in past years may have known that the outcomes were predetermined, but little else. Anything that went on behind the scenes was very closely guarded, and even if things slipped out, they weren't easily transferable to the world at large anyway.

The Screwjob fell at a time in which interest in wrestling was extremely high and when curiosity about the inner workings of the industry was beginning to bubble as well. At the same time, the industry as a whole was starting to loosen up about “keeping kayfabe.” wrestling slang for maintaining the aura of reality in the presence of the general public.

“With this era, that 97 era, maybe the reason it's so fascinating is there's a lot out there, but not everything's out there,” said Thompson. “Imagine 20 years ago, what would Bret Hart's Twitter have looked like? What would his Instagram have looked like the week of the Screwjob?”

The major reason why we know so much about the Screwjob is because there were documentary cameras filming the whole time. The lauded Canadian documentary film Hitman Hart: Wrestling With Shadows, directed by Paul Jay, came out the very next year, following Hart during the build up and the aftermath of Survivor Series.

Almost a year to the day, NBC would air a network special titled Exposed! Pro Wrestling's Greatest Secrets, which absurdly showed wrestling techniques performed by goofy masked wrestlers and a poorly disguised Harley Race. The following year, Beyond The Mat would be released to critical acclaim, giving another backstage look at the WWE and the wrestling industry as a whole.

Unless you were reading Meltzer's newsletter at the time, the Screwjob seemed like it could potentially have just been an elaborate storyline. After all, WCW's major storyline was a fake “invasion” from a rogue faction mostly consisting of former WWE performers. Most fans' context and understanding of wrestling was minimal, but substantial enough that they could no longer be babied as viewers. They knew that some things weren't real, but couldn't always detect which of those things those were. The industry at large, both in WWE and WCW, leveraged that to the maximum.

Nothing is a better example of that than the Mr. McMahon character, Vince McMahon's on-screen heel persona. With real life animosity heaped on McMahon in the wake of Montreal, he decided to turn himself into a full-time character willing to do, in storyline, what he'd actually just done in real life—fuck over an employee for the perceived betterment of the company. His foil turned out to be Stone Cold Steve Austin, a foul-mouthed Texan who also just did what Bret Hart had done in real life—beat the shit out of his boss.

The moment that bell rang in Montreal, it pushed over a colossal stack of dominoes. McMahon's character and his feud with Austin would propel WWE ahead of WCW and Bischoff, who had already been playing a heel boss character as head of the NWO. The “Monday Night Wars,” the television ratings battle between RAW and Nitro ensued, and ultimately ended in WWE's favor when it acquired WCW in 2001. Moreover, Triple H, who has been credited by Michaels in interviews as the first man to suggest the screwjob finish, went on to marry McMahon's daughter Stephanie, become the highest ranking WWE executive beneath his father-in-law, and you guessed it, now plays an on-screen loathsome boss who fucks over employees and opines about “what's best for business.”

“I hated the circumstances, but what came out in the wash was not bad news across the board. Including Bret, to a degree. I'm sure he still regrets that it happened, but he ended up making a lot of money and he made his money in his mid-30s. Everybody gained something from it. I'm certainly not saying 'well damn the cost, you have to get somebody over.' I'm not saying that at all. But you can go down the list and check off a lot of guys who got rich and famous off that incident,” said Ross.

The people who profit off the transparency of wrestling today include Ross himself, who can double dip as an announcer, a podcaster and bestselling author with his new book Slobberknocker. They also include Thompson and Prichard, whose podcast together has exceeded a million downloads in a week, and even authors of articles like this one.

In standing his ground that night in Montreal, Hart was ostensibly trying to protect the wrestling industry, to ensure that a level of respect was maintained between employer and employee, and between fellow workers. In suffering that indignity, he forced everyone involved to fess up, to reveal how the business actually works.

By questioning authority that night, Hart ensured that wrestling fans would have questions about absolutely everything for the rest of time.

Follow Corey on Twitter.

In the 1980s, Everglades City, Florida, was raided three times by federal law enforcement. This small fishing town of about 500 people was hiding a complex, highly organized drug-smuggling network responsible for running millions of pounds of marijuana from Colombia to Miami. VICE met up with former pot hauler Tim McBride to travel the backwaters and learn more about how it all went down.

I’ve found that all white people have one thing in common. They all think that they are the first to point out that my last name puns well with “wrong.” I’ve encountered Wong puns constantly throughout my decade-plus career as a comedian commenting on race and gender, including one white TV exec who wanted to name a pilot I was working on One Wong Makes It Right.

So when I heard that white guy and Rick and Morty co-creator Dan Harmon was launching a podcast called Whiting Wongs, I was immediately suspicious. Especially since the show bills itself as an “honest conversation about race and writing” and opens up with a theme song sung by Harmon in a “speekee engrish” accent. But according to Harmon, the title of the podcast was the idea of his co-host, Jessica Gao. She’s the Asian-American writer who was harassed by sexist Rick and Morty fans after joining the cartoon’s writer’s room and introducing the psychologist character Dr. Wong. Her involvement in the podcast gave me a little hope that this new show wasn’t just an ignorant white dude joking and pontificating about race from a place of privilege—but could actually make good on its promise of offering a constructive dialogue.

The jury is still out on the show, but the first handful of hour-long episodes are promising. Gao offers a lot of insight into what it’s like for people of color in the TV and film industry, and Harmon does a lot of listening. They both recognize their show won’t solve racism in Hollywood, because the problems are too entrenched for it to be that easy. But their self-awareness and self-deprecating humor is a pretty good salve that can be occasionally insightful. I spoke with Harmon and Gao by phone earlier this week to discuss why the hell they wanted to make Whiting Wongs and what they hope it can add to our nationwide dialogue on race.

Illustration by 100Soft, courtesy Whiting Wongs

VICE: I definitely wouldn’t agree to do a podcast called Whiting Wongs with any old white guy. Jessica, what makes Dan “not just any white guy”?
Jessica: For sure. If any random white guy wanted to do this podcast with me, I’d be like, Get the fuck out of here. But this actually happened organically. It was because of the character of Dr. Wong that we started talking about representation and why it matters. Dan wanted to hear why I was so militant about changing the name “Dr. Wong” once we cast her as Susan Sarandon. So we had this very organic and nice, honest and easy conversation where he was just listening and just taking it all in. And then after that, we kept referring back to that conversation and said “This could be a podcast. Who would listen to it? But let’s do it anyway.” I think one of the big things, when we have these conversations, is I know Dan and know that he is genuinely listening. He has an opinion, but he’s open to someone telling him their side of the story.

Did you have any anxiety about having to represent all people of color as the only of color person on the podcast?
JG: Sorta. If I have to think about the weight of all people of color, it would be too overwhelming to ever say anything. So how I compartmentalize that is I come to it from the angle that I’m speaking from myself and my experiences. I am one person and I can try to explain things from a general person of color point of view, but it’s coming from me.

Dan, in the first episode, you address your listeners as “fans of race.” You’re pretty hard on millennials saying, “Here’s the thing kids, you’re racist. You know how to talk around it, but you’re still racist.” So Dan, are you racist?
Dan: I usually have the same response to that as, “Are you an alcoholic? ” Which is yes, because denial is the first sign that there’s more meat to be carved out. I don’t know how much actual fruitful conversation has ever come from someone denying that they’re sexist, alcoholic, racist... I’ve gotten old, exhausted, self-loathing, and narcissistic enough to say, “Yes, I am whatever you think I am. Can we please talk about what to do about it?”

A different answer to that is I think that by the very valid modern definition, I am racist because I can’t stop thinking about race. If I am in a conversation with someone who is noticeably non-white, it’s on a little heads up display when I am talking to them. I’m sure it’s either boring or agonizing to my friends of color that sooner or later it will come up because I am obsessed about it and can’t stop seeing it. Thankfully, that has become the new definition, rather than the, “I hate you and don’t want you to go to school with my kids” or whatever. That’s something that we just started talking about on the podcast. Can we talk about racism as a spectrum of how polluted is your brain?

JG: Racism is a spectrum. And i think that it really is stupid to say it’s black or white. I hate when people say they don’t see race because that’s stupid. That’s impossible. Of course you see race. You are looking at someone, you see race. And also, noticing that someone is of a different race is not a bad thing.

Are you on the spectrum of racism too as a person of colour?
JG: Yeah. Absolutely. I think every single person is on the spectrum of racism.

DH: If you had power and privilege you’d certainly notice who was white and who was Asian. We talked about that in one of the episodes where, I don’t know how much of a joke it was but, Jessica cops to the fact that if Chinese women ruled the Earth, they would abuse their power.

JG: Yeah. Who wouldn’t?

And we would take all the hotel toiletries.
DH: I hope that people who are on the fence and find themselves embroiled in weird conversations at the age of 20 in a comment section who aren’t given over to any side of any issue can get sucked into the rim of this black hole. Let’s talk about it and maybe we can save some souls from turning into me at 40.

Who are you at 40?
DH: I’m someone who spent 20 years obsessing about race and putting his foot in his mouth and only learning that he was offending people by getting yelled at on the internet. We tend to learn about this stuff by getting yelled at on the internet.

JG: I think what’s helpful is Dan is willing to be the guy who puts his foot in his mouth and says opinions that some part of him knows will probably get him in trouble. But people at home who probably would have said just the same thing but are too afraid to, precisely for that same reason, because they don’t want to get in trouble, can now listen to someone else do it and have someone like me explain the other side of that. And they can do it without any risk to themselves.

DH: Is it true that if you drop a radio into a bathtub, you’ll get electrocuted? Mythbusters has to go in and show you that no, you won’t. There are circuit breakers and stuff. At our highest form, maybe we could become a racial Mythbusters.

My last name is a huge butt of jokes for white people. I’m hoping that by you doing a podcast named Whiting Wongs, it sends the message to the world, “OK, we did it. Now stop with this pun. It’s been done.”
JG: Yeah. We did the best version, so give up.

DH: I think we have to be honest. It’s not just the rhyme. It has the double power of sounding like a racist stereotype of an Asian person saying the word “wrong.”

JG: And also the entire podcast was inspired by a character named Dr. Wong.

DH: I do agree with you and Donald Glover’s philosophy which is the thing that is going to make some of that stuff stop is that it becomes hack. Because nothing really powers cultural progression more than stuff becoming trite, powerless, hack, limp. Everybody wants to be funny and edgy and all that stuff, so it brings up an interesting point. Could we just have a big parade where we all dance around and say, “Look how much Wong sounds like wrong!” “Two Wongs Make a Right!”

Yeah. I would love that.
JG: I say, I never underestimate the reliance on hacky jokes by mediocre white guys.

DH: I do notice after I passed 40, there is this crazy phenomenon of dad jokes. And I don’t have kids. But I swear, on my 40th birthday, I just started connecting dots verbally. My humor became more pun driven. Oh that word sounds like that word… That might be a variable we are not measuring. It’s men over 40 turning into dads, whether they want to or not.

The theme song of Dan singing in broken English made me cringe. Who is this podcast for… white folks?
JG: Well, that was a question we bring up a lot in the first episode. Who is this podcast for? We determined that it’s for two kinds of people. We jokingly say it’s for 44-year-old white men and 34-year-old Asian women. But I think that kind of is the demo in the sense that it’s for white guys who might want to say or ask about these things, but literally don’t have any people of color in their life that they feel comfortable talking to. And so they can kind of listen in and eavesdrop on this conversation between two people who are having an awkward talk about race. And then conversely, on the people of color side, there is a lot of stuff I talk about that you don’t get to hear about especially in regards to how the entertainment industry works. First of all, there are already so few people of color in the entertainment industry. And second, when there are conversations about the industry, you rarely ever hear people of color talking about how it actually is or why it’s difficult.

Dan, in episode 3, you describe how being white is like being Optimus Prime.
DH: I used the metaphor, but I don’t expect it to be profound for other people. As a white man I feel like I am being told I am Optimus Prime at the same time as I am being told that my opinion doesn’t matter. But nobody said you were Optimus Prime in the first place. This isn’t the battle with any Decepticon. This isn’t your job. You misheard that. No one is telling you, “Fix this for me.” No one is telling you, “You have something you need to give up.” This is a conversation that is happening in your presence, because people don’t have secret meetings about it.

JG: As the episodes progressed, I stopped being less and less polite in the way that I talk about white people. I think that Dan helps me understand in a more nuanced way where a lot of white obliviousness comes from. Because I think there is a tendency to just get annoyed or get mad at what I call a lot of dumb white guy opinions. Dan humanizes them and explains why he thinks that way and also what made him change his mind.

What will your final episode look like?
DH: That will be like episode 1,000, which is like wishing the world never stops being racist.

JG: It’s a murder suicide. [laughter]

DH: The two of us are the only ones left in the world and—

JG: I become incredibly racist and Dan becomes incredibly woke—

DH: —and then we run towards each other with—

JG: —with racially insensitive weapons.

DH: Mine is a katana.

JG: And what’s mine? A bayonet?

DH: A Scottish Highlander sword.

JG: There you go.

DH: And then it just fades to black.

You can judge Whiting Wongs for yourself here , including the brand new fifth episode, "Previous Woke Excavations."

Follow Kristina on Twitter.

Crabs, like octopuses, really shouldn't be found anywhere other than in water or on your dinner plate. Still, from time to time, the spiders of the sea have been known to show up on the occasional subway, airport luggage carousels, and now apparently on land mauling and killing birds.

Last week, National Geographic unearthed the rare and gruesome sight of a coconut crab—which typically lives on land and eats coconuts—stalking, stabbing, and then devouring a red-footed booby as it slept. In a quick two-minute span, researchers captured the crab break both of the bird's wings, crush its bones, and render it helpless.

Thankfully, researchers cut the camera off once the feeding frenzy began, watching in horror as five other coconut crabs crept over the bird, disemboweling and eating it alive.

"It was pretty gruesome," researcher Mark Laidre told the New Scientist.

Aside from being metal as hell and a little bit voyeuristic, the footage Laidre captured is apparently revelatory. Coconut crabs had been known to eat meat before, but according to the New Scientist, they weren't known for also hunting creatures down. This brutal crab-bird dissection probably isn't a one-off, either: According to Laidre, the birds tend to stay away from certain crab-infested islands, ostensibly to keep from being massacred.

"In areas where these guys are present and abundant, it would be a smart move, especially among ground-nesting birds, not to place eggs there," Laidre told the New Scientist.

You can watch Mother Nature at work, in all her gory glory, above and remember that the brutality of the animal kingdom isn't just reserved for remote spots in the Indian Ocean. For New Yorkers, the grisliness of the natural world is often just a subway stop away.

Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.

Around two months ago, an underground queer dance party in LA emailed an invite to an upcoming event. The party in question—whose promoter wished to remain anonymous, because their events are not public—has been ongoing for five years, and this invite, by all accounts, looked largely like those that had come before, save for a stern warning at the bottom. “NEW POLICY: We are sick of calling ambulances, so we'll be searching for GHB at the door,” it read. “If we have to remove you from the event for using GHB, you, and everyone in your crew, will be blacklisted from all future events. Handle your shit.”

The promoter was compelled to include the warning after witnessing a sharp rise in revelers overdosing on the drug at his events. When they do, “they can’t stand up, they look passed out and unresponsive, they throw up, they piss themselves,” he said. “When it’s really bad, there’s involuntary twitching and seizures.” And because taking too much GHB can inhibit respiratory functions, leading to coma or even death, partygoers who pass out while on the drug require urgent care from emergency personnel. This represents a particular liability in the underground queer scene, where a single 911 call can give away the location of a party and lead authorities to shut down a venue indefinitely.

“When you endanger our ability to throw parties for everyone else, it’s really fucking selfish on your part,” the promoter added.

First synthesized as a research chemical and anesthetic in France in the 1960s, GHB burst onto the club scene in 1980s. Best known as a date rape drug, it quickly gained a following among both gay and straight people for producing a dissociative alcohol-like high without the hangover or beer belly. Though its rate of use is little-studied, by some measures it’s on the rise, especially among queer people and in the dance music scene. The drug is notoriously difficult to dose, and because it’s typically diluted with liquids, the difference between a good time and a disastrous night is easy to miscalculate.

To boot, GHB is often carried in small vials, meaning it’s easy to hide on your person. “I'm sure it's easy for anyone to get it past security, no matter what,” said the party promoter. In addition to being relatively inconspicuous, GHB is also not particularly difficult to acquire; GBL, a substance that can be manufactured into GHB at home by following a few googleable steps, can be bought online by the liter.

Luke Howard, an international DJ who also works for the LGBTQ addiction resource center Antidote, said the substance became so popular in the UK that it nearly destroyed gay nightlife in the late aughts. “There was a campaign against it in London in the gay press 10 years ago because it was basically ruining the club scene,” he said. Today, though, he said British gay men associate it more with chemsex. “That’s one of the things that’s changed—it’s not such a crisis in UK clubs anymore. People use it now more at private parties.”

According to a study first reported by BuzzFeed, the number of GHB-related deaths in London more than doubled between 2014 and 2015. And the dark recess of a nightclub is far from an ideal place to measure out a dosage of GHB that won’t make you pass out. According a DEA fact sheet, the average GHB dose is one to five grams and can take anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes to kick in, but dealers and users typically measure out GHB by the capful, and slipups are common.

“The danger in these sedatives is you go from experiencing a little bit of a euphoria to becoming completely comatose,” said Raymond Ho, managing director of the California Poison Control Center. “You pass out and can end up choking on your vomit or the drug can decrease your respiratory rate and slow your heart to a dangerously low rhythm.”

Watch: Meet the Man Who Birthed Ecstasy in a Test-Tube

Some believe the number of GHB deaths is significantly higher than what’s been reported. Since 1990, sixteen thousand people have overdosed on GHB and 70 have died in the US, according to data provided by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, but it can be difficult to diagnose the role GHB played in person’s death because the same compound is produced in human tissue, and the drug is cleared from the blood 2-6 hours after ingestion.

The confusion over GHB’s role in deaths, as well as a lack of research on its epidemiology, has given the drug a stealthier profile than other so-called “club drugs.” “It’s usually used in combination with other drugs, primarily crystal meth,” said Mike Rizzo, manager of addiction recovery services at the LA LGBT Center. “It actually doesn’t even register on our database even though it’s definitely a factor in people’s substance abuse. It’s just not people’s primary diagnosis.”

The lack of awareness affects the way people talk about the drug problems in their communities, he added. “When someone dies, people ask, ‘What was he using?’ The first answer is crystal meth, but then later it sometimes emerges that GHB was involved, too.”

Howard said that while UK-based queer clubs have been somewhat successful in banning G, he believes the drug has since become more popular in US and German clubs. “I’ve DJed in New York and seen people pass out who were having a G attack,” he said. He added that overdoses are often terrifying to witness: “If you start to go under on G, you lose your capacity to stand,” he said. “You might bend over or double over, and you’re kind of in a state where you’re passing out. What happens next is similar to a coma, it’s very dangerous. The best thing to do is to get that person to an ER.”

The California Poison Control has seen fewer calls for GHB overdoses in recent years, but Ho said he doesn’t know if the decrease can be attributable to fewer people using it. “Once in awhile, though, you still have someone come in from the club totally comatose and then you get a report back that they’d taken the drug,” he added.

Ho said that ER doctors in major cities tend to be better trained these days about how to respond to club drug overdoses. “There’s good supportive care that can help people until the drug wears off and their respiration and heart rate comes back. It’s somewhat rare, I believe, for someone to die unless they’re left alone and not given help.”

While Howard understands club owners’ worries, he stresses that G users deserve sympathy, not scorn.

“It’s concerning for me to hear these anecdotal stories about G overdoses in New York or Berlin, because I feel if people don’t know what advice to give or how to treat people then we will see more deaths and more clubs close down,” he said. “But what needs to happen is a positive response. We shouldn’t marginalize or stigmatize people. Turning them into ‘unwanted people’ doesn’t solve the problem.”

Follow Steven Blum on Twitter.

The viral story of five naked people arrested in a community south of Edmonton just keeps getting weirder.

Now there is a new twist—hallucinogens.

To catch you up on this story, on Monday morning five people were arrested in an industrial park—all of them were naked. With limited information, the story made the rounds online and was picked up by more international outlets than a story based in central Alberta ever should, with many making fun of the arrest.

One day later, on Tuesday, Alberta RCMP released an update that made the story seem far darker than originally thought. A press release stated that “an adult female and male, and a six-week-old baby were forced into a vehicle against their will and taken from the residence.”

"While the car was being driven, the adult male, who was in the trunk, managed to escape. Shortly after the adult female escaped with the baby."

The three were allegedly kidnapped by the naked grouping of five—four women and one man—who were helped by a Good Samaritan in a truck. The naked five allegedly drove the car into the truck, hit the ditch, and were then thusly arrested. Three of the five were charged while two were released as they were minors.

Canadian Press journalist Chris Purdy outlines the new information in a story published Thursday night, and says that the nude crew may have accidentally drank a type of hallucinogenic tea during breakfast that morning. The information comes from a man who cannot be named because of a publication ban regarding the youths in the case, who is reportedly the father of two of the women involved, the former husband of the third, and friends with the couple who round out the five.

"It's a scary thought thinking, 'Oh, let's try this tea that we purchased,'” the man told the Canadian Press. “And then all sit down thinking they're just going to have a nice morning and end up in that circumstance."

The group, apparently ripped on the tea, reportedly thought they were saving the couple and their baby while they were kidnapping them. The man also told the Canadian Press that blood tests were taken from the suspects at the hospital and that the tea was brought back by the couple from India.

"Whatever potency that stuff had obviously is making it so it's just a big blur," the man told CP. "Nothing came back like illicit drugs, so they figure it may have been some type of herbal drug or something."

The man added that those who were kidnapped aren’t holding a grudge against the naked, possibly-tripping kidnappers. All that taken in mind, we still don’t know what the rationale was, high or otherwise, behind the five of them being naked.

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter.

This article was published in collaboration with the Marshall Project.

I’ve been in prison since I was 22 years old. Now I’m 50. During all those years of incarceration, I’ve lost so many members of my family that it’s hard to keep track.

This is the story of one of those lost loved ones and how they made me think about the life I’ve led—and the one I want to lead.

On the early morning of September 26, 2000, when I woke up in my 11 x 10 foot cell on C block at the Great Meadow Correctional Facility, also known as Comstock, in Washington County, New York, I could just feel that something was off.

Reluctantly, I planted my feet on the floor and prepared for another long day behind bars. I’d been in prison about ten years already, but I didn’t have any family photos hanging in my cell because I didn’t want to turn that cage into my home. Instead , I just stared at the bare orange walls, waiting for breakfast.

When my cell opened, I joined the other inmates forming two-person lines toward an open gate at the end of the 90-foot corridor. Two officers looking bored and holding nightsticks trailed behind all 44 of us as we headed to the mess hall. Among the prisoners, I could hear whispers about the fight that took place in the yard the night before. Two gangs had battled; tear gas was dispersed.

Suddenly, as we walked down a flight of stairs, I was stopped by a guard who directed me from the line toward another group of officers. In prison, when officers single out a prisoner from a group, the other inmates often stop to make sure nothing evil is about to happen to him. So when I was taken out of the line, the others in my company stopped and refused to move, even when they were threatened to keep moving or else. I was grateful for this, but also nervous, wondering if what was happening was connected to the dread I’d felt when I got up that morning.

Then a chaplain stepped forward and began speaking to me in a low voice. It was full of emotion, which is rare in prison, so he immediately had my attention. He told me I had to call home. Confused, I nodded to the prisoners who waited around me, giving them permission to leave, before walking away myself.

In a sergeant’s office, I sat stoically before a metal desk, waiting to make my call. But I was also anxious: I had to know what was so important that I needed to call home first thing in the morning.

After what felt like an excruciating amount of time, the chaplain, an elderly white man with gray hair, dialed an unfamiliar number before handing me the phone. It rang for nearly a minute, and then I heard my Aunt Vicky’s voice on the other end. When I asked her what was going on, she just broke down.

Sobbing, she said that my grandfather, her father, had died. He was 82 years old. His wife, my grandmother, had passed three years earlier, at 85, also while I was in prison. They were married for over five decades.

My grandmother’s death had been deeply painful, and I instantly felt that pain all over again. I’d cared about my grandfather deeply too, though we were not terribly close. He was my father’s father, and I’d spent more time with my mother’s side of the family. But still, he was part of my identity, which had already been so whittled away in prison.

His name was Noah Towns, same as that of my late father. When I was young, I used to visit him and my grandmother and learn about our family. He always seemed pleased to recount his life to me, and I enjoyed those visits.

Born on January 1, 1918, in Dermott, Arkansas, to Robert and Fannie Towns, he’d always taken pride in his history. Through him, I’d learned that my family was originally from South Africa, and that my great-grandfather snuck into America through Canada because this country wouldn’t
accept blacks from certain places. My great-grandfather told customs he was West Indian.

Once in, Robert Towns purchased land in Arkansas and had three sons. My grandfather, for his part, worked in a bank as a security guard for 25 years, and before that as an elevator conductor in a hotel, where he received his first suit from the owner’s wife. He was very proud of that.

As I sat in the prison, in a chair, listening to my aunt cry, I remembered the black-and-white photo my grandfather had showed me when I was 10. The image showed him, at around six years old, as well as his two brothers, my great-grandfather and my great-grandmother. It was taken in the early 1920s, on the land they had purchased.

What I can remember so clearly from that photo was my great-grandfather’s hard black face, as he stood beside his wife and children with a long rifle in his hand. “Don’t you think about messing with me and mine,” it seemed to say.

Suddenly, I felt tired—a weariness inside my soul. Then the tears came.

For a moment I lost myself. Then , realizing where I was, I hung up the phone without saying goodbye. I rose to my feet and asked to leave, wiping angrily at my tears. I was ashamed for having revealed softness in the presence of my oppressor.

Back in my cell, I sat on the floor, with my back against the cold, blank metal wall. I was oblivious to the sounds around me as I wondered just how much smaller my world would become before I hit my minimum sentence in January 2020. At that time, I was 32 years old, and had no idea even then how much pain I would be forced to carry alone.

I’d already mourned my favorite aunt, who died of AIDS in Tennessee after contracting it when she was using crack cocaine. I would later lose my Uncle Joe to diabetes, then my cousin Stanley and Aunt Irene to old age. I lost my cousin Lionel to incarceration, and my two sisters and brother I lost simply to my own long prison term—my distance.

I sat on the floor all morning, mourning not just my grandfather but all of them—and myself, too. That night I slept curled in a ball with tears again on my cheeks, feeling utterly ruined as a man. My dreams were filled with memories of the dead.

The hardest thing about being in prison is not the time the judge gives you, but the time you lose with your family. My grandfather’s death only reminded me of the cost. So I mourned, because it was all I could do.

Dwayne Hurd, 50, is incarcerated at Sullivan Correctional Facility in Fallsburg, New York, where he is serving 32 and a half years to life for second-degree murder and criminal possession of a weapon.

When the first responders arrived, Timothy Smith's death looked like a tragic accident.

On Thursday the 16th of March, at around 9PM, police were called to an industrial estate in Shepshed, a small commuter town in Leicestershire. A silver Ford Focus appeared to have crashed into a wall, and inside East Midlands Ambulance Service had found the body of 45-year-old Timothy Smith, a forklift instructor from Staffordshire, who lived in Tamworth, half an hour's drive away.

Unconscious and unresponsive, Smith was pronounced dead at the scene – however he was found to have injuries not consistent with a road traffic accident, and witnesses had seen two men fleeing the industrial estate. Following the post-mortem examination, it was clear that something was amiss: a stab wound to the heart had killed Smith, not the crash.

Through intensive CCTV work, an examination of Smith’s phone and online appeals from Leicestershire police, detectives placed two young men at the scene: Mark Law and Mason Casey.

Unpicking the evidence, police determined the sequence of events that led to Smith's death. Mark Law and Timothy Smith first made contact via the dating app Badoo, on which Law sent the older man a photo of his penis and the offer of a threesome. On the night of the 16th, at about 8:30PM, Smith picked up 20-year-old Law and 17-year-old Casey in Shepshed and was directed to the nearby Gelders Hall industrial estate. It was here, in what they thought was an empty car park, that Law forced a hunting knife into the stranger's chest, puncturing his heart. Smith, who was fatally injured, tried to drive away, but only managed a few metres before crashing into the wall. The two young men ran off, and Law threw the knife – which was later recovered – into a pond.

Just half an hour after meeting Law and Casey, Smith was dead.

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If you're confused with this report, you’re not alone. The story of Timothy Smith's murder has a lot of holes. Why did these two men choose to murder a man they’d never met? Were there any genuine sexual motives, or was that just part of the trap? Why was Mason Casey there when, before the night of the 16th, all the communication had been solely between Smith and Mark Law?

These are all questions the police tried to answer when they arrested the pair, to varying degrees of success. What they were able to establish fairly quickly was each suspect's position: Law admitted to the murder, while Casey denied any involvement, stressing he was unaware of what would transpire when he got into Smith's car, and blaming his co-accused for the crime.

"I was with Mark Law at his house, and we left there because he had a phone call off this Tim guy," Casey is quoted by the Leicester Mercury as telling investigating officers. "We went to the bottom of the road and Mark was like, 'You coming?' I got in the car behind Mark and we drove to Gelders Hall, around the corner. As the car stopped, I got out to do my boots up. I finished fastening one of my boots up and Mark jumped out of the car, saying: 'Go, go – we’ve got to go now!' He was like, 'I've just stabbed him,' so I panicked and ran off, just went. I didn’t want to be involved in it. He was behind me, he was following me. He was like, 'I can’t believe I’ve just done that, I can’t believe I’ve just done that.' [...] I didn’t think he’d actually do something like this. I thought he was all just talk."

The talk Casey was referring to was Law's admission, some time before the murder, that he was interested in cannibalism, as well as a conversation between the pair about killing "Michael", another man Law had met and sent sexual messages to on Badoo.

During Casey's trial at Leicester Crown Court, the court heard that Mark Law had proposed a meeting with Michael at the same Gelders Hall industrial estate. In a conversation about the meet-up, the jury heard, Law had mentioned stabbing Michael "in the head"; and later – after he'd sent Casey screenshots of his Badoo conversation with the man – Casey had texted his friend the message "Kill him", with a knife emoji.

Casey told the jury: "I didn’t mean anything by it. I was humouring him, with a laugh and a joke. None of it was serious." However, the prosecutor, James House QC, said Casey had told police in his interview that he knew Law had wanted to kill Michael, and that he'd accompanied him to the industrial estate to meet him, a week before the murder of Timothy Smith.

"Did you say what happens when he turns up?" asked Mr House.

"No," said Casey.

"Was there any conversation about what would happen once he had been killed?"

"No."

Stock image, model is not involved in the story. Photo: Jake Smallwood

Luckily, Michael never showed. The reason, he explained when interviewed by police, was because of "the nature of Law’s conversation" – by which he meant Law telling him, "I won’t hurt you unless you hurt me," asking him if he "could fight" and then telling him that an ex-partner had "tried to eat me alive".

The final claim was just one of many cannibalism references Law made in messages on Badoo. In court, Casey Mason's defence barrister, Robert Woodcock QC, gave some more examples.

On the 7th of March, Law asked one man: "Before we continue, you ain’t one of them who chops people up are you? Thought of being in your tummy is scary."

The man replied: "You’re obsessed with being chopped up, ha ha."

He asked another man if he would kidnap and eat him, suggesting they meet on an industrial estate; asked a woman, "Hey can you consume me?" and suggested to another: "Well can you kidnap me and use me for sex, and once you’ve done with me, chop me up, keep me in a freezer and eat me – I’d be free food for you."

When, in court, Woodcock asked Casey about the first time Law mentioned anything to do with cannibalism, he said: "I was at his house," which the jury heard was a short walk away from Casey's own home, and that he'd sometimes go round to play Xbox in Law's bedroom. "We were having a normal conversation about everyday stuff, and he came out with it – he said he would like to eat people," Casey continued.

"What reaction from you did that produce?" asked Woodcock.

"I laughed."

"Did you explore it further with him?"

"No."

During the trial, Woodcock also recounted some of Law's "bizarre, sadistic and revolting" internet searches, which included: "Eating human meat video"; "Can you legally eat a dead person?"; "Strangling someone to death"; "Naked choke hold"; and "How long is death from strangling?"

READ:

Law clearly had a fixation with cannibalism, and propositioned both Michael and Timothy Smith with sex, so could these two elements have been a combined obsession, and could that combination – violence charged with lust – have driven a desire to kill? Could some urge wrapped up in all of that explain why Timothy Smith ended up dead?

In an article for the Independent, Dr Mark Griffiths – a professor at Nottingham Trent University – explored the possible intentions behind cannibalism and its link with sexual fetishisms, describing this "vorarephilia" as "a sexual paraphilia in which individuals are sexually aroused by: i) the idea of being eaten, ii: eating another person, and/or iii: observing this process for sexual gratification", adding that "most vorarephiles' behaviour is fantasy-based, although there have been real cases, such as Armin Meiwes, the so-called 'Rotenburg Cannibal'."

Whether any of this applies to Law, of course, is merely speculation – when he plead guilty to Timothy Smith's murder on Friday the 8th of September at Leicester Crown Court, he avoided a trial and all of the questioning that comes with it.

At Mason Casey's trial, he told the jury he had no idea that Mark Law had planned to kill Timothy Smith, that Law had offered Smith a threesome or that his friend was carrying a knife. However, he admitted he was aware that Law had previously carried a knife; that he knew there was a photo of him on Law's Badoo profile; and that Law had been exchanging sexual messages with Smith. In his police interview, when asked why he'd accompanied Law to meet the older man, the jury heard that Casey had said, "He asked me to. I just went with him. I didn’t think anything would happen – I thought it was just sort of like a normal meet up. I didn’t know anything like this was gonna happen."

However, on Monday the 23rd October, a jury reached a unanimous decision, finding Casey, now 18, guilty of murder. Both men were sentenced to life in prison, with Law ordered to serve a minimum of 19 years and Casey a minimum of 15 before being eligible for parole.

After the sentencing, Timothy Smith's father, Derick, said, "It’s been a long six months of not knowing the reasons why [Timothy was killed], if indeed we will ever know them," adding that the family was still reeling from the "pointless death".

James House QC said he believed there were three possible motives for the murder – one relating to Law's interest in cannibalism, one to Law's sexual fantasies and the other to Law's desire to own a car, which could have been fulfilled by stealing Smith's Ford Focus – according to ITV News. However, he stressed that the true motivation remained unclear – that all those questions and plot holes and missing details have gone answered.

However, if the statement he made following the sentencing is anything to go by, he's sure of one thing: "Law's true intention, whether it was to engage in sexual activity or not, was primarily to kill."

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When you imagine the average voice actor, you’re thinking of a performance; some man or woman adjusting their pitch to sound distinctly for an animated role. When I imagine a voice actor, I’m thinking “super power”—the ability to wield character range and impressions on a level that I still don’t understand.

Rob Paulsen was apparently that man. With over 30 years of voice acting experience, Rob has a hefty 482 roles under his belt during a career that was a huge part of my childhood. Characters from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, GI Joe, Transformers, Animaniacs, and The Tick, among several others, were the staples that coloured my TV set on Saturday mornings when traditional TV was still “that thing.”

So fast forward to years later, to Rob himself reaching out to me, partly to speak on his re-commitment to voice work after a bout with throat cancer, and to also express his appreciation for still being on top of his game. He more than lived up to the man I imagined behind the voice.

VICE: I want to begin with your throat cancer. You were of course the voice my childhood for a good portion of my life; I’m talking Animaniacs, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Pinky and The Brain, The Tick, and suddenly, you’re diagnosed with thing that seems to target the very talent that you love. Tell me what that was like, to hear the news.
Rob Paulsen: Yeah, thanks for asking about this...it was pretty tough. This is what I do for a living, so it really got my attention. It started with a knot on the left side of my neck for about a year. And listen, you’re a guy, most guys, unless they literally can’t walk, or their legs are just bent in the wrong directions, will rarely go to a doctor. I’m no different. I did the typical thing and looked it up on Google, and saw that it could be lymphoma, cancer, or some low grade infection—who knew. It’s not like I felt bad, and it didn’t seem to affect my work, and on top of that, I don’t smoke. So I said screw it, it’ll go away, because you couldn’t even see the thing, if I placed your finger on it, you would've said, holy shit, it’s like a walnut, but it never stuck out. So I go in for my yearly physical, and not five minutes in, my doctor tells me, this isn’t good, I don’t like that. Within 10 days, the day my wife got the phone call, I told my doctor to tell me it straight. I didn’t need to wait to be told the bad news. And of course he says, ‘I think it’s throat cancer.’

I don’t want to assume that you took anything for granted, but elaborate on what that whole experience did to your perspective on things.
I’ve kept in touch with many of the families whose children have ultimately died, and that opportunity really put my own cancer into perspective. I wasn’t 25 with a bunch of little kids. I was 59 years old, and even if they had said, look, you’re about to punch your ticket, this is it, I would have thought of myself as still having had one hell of a run. Relative to the struggles of millions of people around the world at this moment, it was my turn to take a punch. The doctors were clear. You may not die from this, but you’re gonna wish you did. The treatment...it’s pretty brutal. And it’s a lot of radiation. A lot of chemo, with no surgery attached. It’s very painful for obvious reasons. This thing we’re doing now, talking, swallowing, or drinking and eating, it’s virtually impossible for a few months. But they still saved my voice.

Damn, thanks for sharing that, I can imagine how hard it is to put that sort of experience out there. Let’s go positive. You obviously chose a niche career path. How does someone like you get here?
Honest to god, I didn’t even want to do this from the start. When I was a kid, I just wanted to be a hockey player. I really did. Then reality hit me, and I learned pretty quickly that I had neither the talent, temperament or dental insurance to make a living doing this. The second passion of course came from performing, singing primarily for my own enjoyment. We weren’t church people, and we didn’t have a church choir, but my parents were involved with community theatre. I was young at the time, so Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, The Who were my favourites. My parents of course said I could listen to all that, as long as I also took in Shostakovich, Cole Porter, and Johnny Mercer among others. That all cultivated a huge, deep love and respect for all facets of music and helped shape my ear. Other names like Jonathan Hunter, The Pythons, Lucy O'doll and others entered the picture. And I started to create my own characters just for the fun of it. And let me tell ya. Most people who do what I do, even down to writers like yourself, find this thing they’re unexplainably passionate about. And they end up doing it, because they can’t not do it. It becomes a part of their DNA, and that’s how it was for me. I never thought I’d find success from my voice. Fast forward to the moment when I tell my parents to stop wasting money and their time on me so I could enter the entertainment business. And fast forward, to where I got my first big, with the opportunity to audition for GI Joe and Transformers in 1983.

Now you’re getting to my shit.
Man, I’m with Peter Cullen who's from Montreal and voices Optimus Prime and Frank Welker who was and still is Megatron. And I’m saying, holy shit, these actors are unbelievable. They’re so talented. And the list of things I did since then, Darkwing Duck, The Mask, The Tick, Mighty Max, Biker Mice from Mars, Tiny Tunes etc etc. I’m so fortunate. When I travel around and talk to people, it’s then when I realize how much of an impact I’ve had on people, more than I would have ever imaged. The thought of these voices makes everyone smile, and it’s just a damn blast.

So let’s break down a few personal favourites of mines for the reader, I’ll list them off, and you can give me the background. Starting with the most underappreciated of the bunch.

The Tick - Arthur (1993)

Oh man, boy you got that right pal. What a great show. And the first script, right out of the shoot. Ben Edlund, who I think is one of the executives on the new Tick, created that show. Townsend Coleman, who was Michelangelo on the original TMNT played the Tick. And I was hired to be Arthur. The first time I read the audition, I thought, holy shit, now we’re talking. This is so great and so not a kids show. It’s smart, oh my god, it’s smart. God dammit, what a show. That’s one that holds just holds up beautifully.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - Raphael

This was so fun, and I worked on many shows that never became one hundredth of the success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. With the reboot, I’m working with some gifted people and they’re so down to Earth. Completely, utterly approachable. John DiMaggio, Seth MacFarlane, Seth Green...there’s no arrogance behind all these voices. But when the whole TMNT thing started, to see it rise was pretty remarkable. I’ve never had that experience. And to see something literally go from a clean sheet of paper to become iconic...look, people come up with this idea and the next thing you know, 25 years later, you’re walking through a Toys R Us and it’s like, holy shit, I was there from the very beginning, before this toy was an idea. You can make an argument that some people in the world don’t know who Brad Pitt is, but I’ll be damned if you’re gonna tell me that no one has heard of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

The Mask - The Mask, Stanley Ipkiss. (1995)

This was great. An opportunity to work with a film franchise, and it was one of those roles that complimented by improv background. The most challenging issue of course was making this character interesting over the course of 26 or 39 episodes. Because the movie of course was two hours of Jim Carrey being a genius. But the cartoon was of course less expensive to produce and the challenge of trying to maintain these two characters over several hours was huge fun for me. I in fact did voice work for Jim on the side in a few of his films. Naturally when you had to remove swear words and things of that nature, they called on me because we had similar voice tones. But the best part of the show for me, as much as I enjoyed the actual episodes, came from the fact that I got to sing the opening title theme song, which is one of the best songs I’ve ever heard, especially for animation. It’s killer.

The Animaniacs - Yakko

This started as one of those very long, six-week auditions. And by that I mean, you’d get a call every four or five days to come back and try again. They’d pare it down. We like this guy, not that guy, no you come back, blah blah blah. Team wise, I had never known Jess Harnell (Wakko), but Tress MacNeille (Dot), I had known her since she was a cocktail waitress, and she is unarguably the most prolific voice actress in the history of Hollywood, period. She’s done over 600 episodes for the Simpsons alone, not to mention, Babs Bunny, Dot, Daisy Duck—just forget it, it’s crazy. An impossible amount of work. So I remember us calling each other, with my, did you hear anything? Because we knew it was going to be huge and music driven. So I they already already knew I could sing from Tiny Tunes, and they loved the whole helium thing I do with my voice, where I squeeze from my throat. The character was of course written, as a smart-ass sort of guy and again, you’re seeing a pattern here. I got hired to be a smart ass. Life imitates art after all.

The whole thing was pretty remarkable. It’s the only time I ever recall in my career, walking up to a producer and saying, if you don’t hire me for this, you’re making a mistake, and it was utterly not meant to be arrogant. I just felt it. To this day, I still get pretty excited about the whole thing. It makes me so happy, I can’t even properly explain to ya.

Pinky and the Brain - Pinky

I’ve known Maurice LaMarche who plays the Brain for a while now. And I remember the story about how he just walked into an audition, did this Orson Welles impression and basically cancelled all the other auditions for the day. He hammered it out of the gate. So they get their Brain and begin auditions for Pinky. And I have a deep love for the Goons and The Pythons, and that all came to me in that audition. It was like, let’s try something different, what the hell. This is a cartoon, and I’ve already done enough in the sense that I’m not limited by my looks. Only my imagination. So knowing what my counterpart was doing, I figured I’d try this wacky, quasi combination of a British nut, and what the hell, it worked pretty well.

I gotta say. You’re talking about all these characters with differing personalities. You guys literally have a super power. To be able to be someone else so effortlessly like that. I gotta ask, have you ever used these powers for something that wasn’t all that professional?
(Laughs) Oh yeah, especially with my son who’s three now. He loves it when I order pizza as TMNT’s Raphael. Or those times when they were having happy meals with Animaniac characters, and I’d go up to drive throughs and order my meals as Yakko. It was a blast having my son be eight or nine when TMNT was just blowing up. And to this day, when people find out what I do; whether a restaurant, mall, or whatever, I’m being seen in some way. It’s an absolute incredible joy.

And I’ve seen people, men and women get tearful whenever they hear one of these characters. Something about that nostalgic element hits them right where they live and it’s just a surreal experience. I hope it never stops, and I don’t think it’s possible for me to take that for granted. I want to ride this pony for as long as I can because there are plenty of reasons for me to be pissed off every day. But to be involved in things that make people happy...just for its own sake, that’s a great feeling.

Follow Noel Ransome on Twitter.

When Steve Stoute, the CEO and founder of Translation, visited Desus & Mero on Thursday, the hosts asked him about what it was like managing Nas during the "Ether" days, before he pivoted to music marketing. The mogul talked about witnessing JAY-Z and Nas's epic beef go down, and asked the hosts what it was like to see the feud take place from the outside. Their responses definitely left him a little shook.

You can watch all of this week's episodes of Desus & Mero for free online now, and be sure to catch new episodes weeknights at 11 PM on VICELAND.

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

US & International News

Louis C.K. Accused of Sexual Misconduct by Five Women
On Thursday, the New York Times published accounts from five women who said the comedian masturbated in front of them or over the phone without their consent. Prior to the report, the premiere of C.K.'s controversial film I Love You, Daddy was abruptly cancelled, and following the revelations, HBO announced it was "removing Louis C.K.’s past projects from its On Demand services." The intended distributor of I Love You, Daddy has since indicated it is axing release plans, while according to his publicist, "Louis is not going to answer any questions."—VICE News

Alabama Senate Nominee Roy Moore Accused of Molesting 14-Year-Old
The former Alabama judge and Republican Senate nominee was accused of guiding a 14-year-old girl's hand to his underwear during a sexual encounter that took place when he was 32. Three additional women claimed that Moore asked them out (and in some cases, dated them) when they were between the ages of 16 and 18 and he was in his 30s. Moore has called the allegations a "desperate political attack" and a White House spokesperson said President Trump believes "we cannot allow a mere allegation... to destroy a person’s life."—Washington Post/Daily Beast

Puerto Rico Experienced Another Major Power Outage
With more than 50 percent of the island already (still) without electricity after Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico experienced another massive power outage on Thursday due to a mechanical failure. According to the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, as of Thursday, only 18 percent of the island had power. —VICE News

British Prosecutors Deleted Sensitive Emails in Julian Assange Case
The UK's Crown Prosecution Service admitted on Friday to deleting emails with Swedish prosecutors relating to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who is currently fighting extradition from the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Although it's not clear what information was deleted, the reporter who uncovered the mishap believes the UK prosecutors "have something to hide."—The Guardian

Everything Else

Rian Johnson Tapped to Create New Star Wars Trilogy
Disney announced that the The Last Jedi director is set to develop a new set of Star Wars films that will "introduce new characters from a corner of the galaxy that Star Wars lore has never before explored." The company also said it would kick off the debut of its new streaming service in 2019 with a live-action Star Wars series.—Associated Press

Senate Approves Rule Requiring Mandatory Sexual Harassment Training
The Senate voted unanimously on Thursday to pass a new measure that would make sexual harassment training mandatory for all members. Senators will now have to complete the training within 60 days and repeat once during every congressional session.—The Hill

In a time of ruptured humanity and willful ignorance, we get the moralist we deserve. Martin McDonagh, the British Irish playwright turned filmmaker whose new feature Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri hits theaters Friday, writes characters that are foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, hopeless, nasty, bitter, and often vaguely racist and/or homophobic. But these people (and their creator) are wrestling with explicit issues of the faith, forgiveness, and humanity. And in his three films to date— In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths, and now Three Billboards—as well as his many stage plays before them, McDonagh is asking questions about both our personal and shared sense of morality—questions that feel more pressing with each passing day.

His 2008 feature debut, In Bruges, asks those questions most directly and uncomfortably. Its central character, Ray (Colin Farrell), is a hired killer who bungles his confession-booth hit on a priest, murdering a child in the crossfire. "He's dead because of me," he tells his partner Ken (Brendan Gleeson). "And I'm tryin' to get my head around it, and I can't. I'll have always killed that little boy." It's worth noting that neither Ray nor Ken nor their boss Harry (Ralph Fiennes) seem bothered by the spiritual implications of murdering a priest—we're never given its express motive, but are left to assume that, collar or no, he had it coming. So the bar is low, but there's no arguing with its outcome; what Ray did cannot be excused, no matter how hard he tries—or needs it to be.

And yet: In the long, searching conversations the two share on a forced Belgian holiday while they await their next assignment (spoiler: it's Ken's, to kill Ray), the older man expresses his dedication to the idea of forgiveness and redemption. "You're not gonna bring that boy back," he tells Ray. "But you might save the next one." (Ray is skeptical: "What am I gonna be, a doctor? You need exams.")

But both men seem to struggle with whether their actions—on that day, and before—will send them to heaven or hell, or maybe purgatory, which Ray calls "the in-between-y one," where "you weren't really shit, but you weren't really that good." Asked if he believes in all that, Ken can't give a simple answer. "I consigned myself to the fact that I help kill people," he explains, and "most of them aren't good people." But the "most" is the tricky part, isn't it?

A similar conversation occurs midway through McDonagh's second feature, Seven Psychopaths—a less successful picture, mostly because it's more concerned with its winking meta-textual framework than the larger humanistic concerns of his other work. Farrell returns, this time as an unmotivated, alcoholic, badly blocked screenwriter, and the substitution isn't subtle; the character literally shares McDonagh's Christian name. He spends much of the film in the company of Hans (Christopher Walken), who explains simply, "God loves us, I know he does, he's just got a funny way of showing it sometimes."

Martin confesses, of faith and the afterlife, "I'm not sure what I believe… I put a lot of heaven and hell stuff in my stories." But throughout this narrative, both men are confronted with persistent reminders that one's actions always have consequences, whether it's Martin's bad breakup following a drunken outburst, or the murder of Hans's wife when a dognapping scheme goes awry.

Brendan Gleeson stars as Ken and Colin Farrell as Ray in IN BRUGES, a Focus Features release. Credit: Jaap Buitendijk/Focus Features

That idea takes even greater root in In Bruges, its European setting (as opposed to Psychopaths, which is unsurprisingly centered in Hollywood) placing additional gravity on McDonagh's Irish-Catholic notions of reckoning—the knowledge that we have to pay for our sins, no matter how great or small.

So it's not just that Ray, as Harry puts it, "can't kill a kid and expect to get away with it," or that Harry must do the same (his announcement that "I'd have killed myself on the fuckin' spot" is rather quickly tested). It's that the ticket-taker at a tourist attraction is repaid multifold for being rude to Ken, or that the cops catch up with a fleeing Ray—and indirectly lead him back into danger—by nabbing him for a random act of seemingly unrelated restaurant violence much earlier in the film.

Yet for all of the religious implications of such payoffs, McDonagh is clearly working from a lapsed Catholic's perspective—specifically, the assumption that down here, in this life, we're on our own. That dismissal of the cloth is clear in the image of Ray gunning down the priest in In Bruges, and in the words of Three Billboards' Mildred (Frances McDonagh), who lets the town priest know that she has no interest in his moral guidance, because he and his lot are "culpable to boy-fuckin'."

That man of God is visiting on account of the billboards Mildred has put up on a back road, goading Sheriff Bill Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) for failing to find, after seven months of investigation, the man who raped and murdered her teenage daughter. He appeals to her sense of decency, confiding that he is suffering from pancreatic cancer. It doesn't fly: "I know it. Most everybody in town knows it."

"And you still put up those billboards?" he presses, not unreasonably. "Well," she explains, "they wouldn't be as effective after you croak, right?"

Mildred is ostensibly our protagonist—but not always, which is part of the genius of McDonagh's writing. He acknowledges the ways in which we can lose sight of our decency when we're convinced we're in the right, and believe that overrides our willingness to score cheap points. (You can insert your own real-world political-divisiveness parallel, but here's mine.)

When they next face off, it's a boxing match of words, the pair smiling and prodding and pushing each other—until, out of nowhere, he sneezes blood on her, an unexpected appearance by his illness. "I didn't mean to," he insists, in a panic. "It was an accident." And she comforts him. "I know," she assures him. "I know, baby."

Three Billboards is full of moments like that, where the performances that avowed enemies put on for each other are ended by the snap decision to embrace a shared humanity. In that way, it feels like a tonic for these troubled times—a reminder that we can, in fact, find common ground, if we only choose to. After all, if we can't turn to the church at our moments of reckoning, and we can't lean on each other, well, what then?

Placed within the broader vision of McDonagh's worldview, it seems clear that this decision, to acknowledge some semblance of common cause, is one our very livelihood depends on. And perhaps that is the idea he's quietly attempting to convey throughout his work. "I don't want it to be one more movie about guys with guns in their hands," his Seven Psychopaths screenwriter—himself, basically—explains. "I want it to be about love. And peace."

That wish resonates in a scene late in Three Billboards, one that echoes throughout McDonagh's filmography. Mildred finds herself in a misty field, talking to a deer—perhaps a nod to the purity of pagan religion, in contrast to the rituals and starched collars of its organized offspring—wondering aloud how her daughter's murderer hasn't been found. She answers the question with another, rhetorical one: "Cause there ain't no God, and the whole world's empty, and it don't matter what we do to each other?" She pauses, ever so slightly, before answering herself. "I hope not."

The last three words are what elevate McDonagh's musings above those of a self-satisfied dorm-room atheist, or a sneering, gun-toting, screenwriting nihilist. "I hope not." It calls to mind a similar rejoinder at the end of Seven Psychopaths, which has somehow delivered us to the streets of Saigon, and the sight of the first anti-Vietnam War self-immolation. Yet despite the disparity in locations, McDonagh again finds a character in a place of deep contemplation, and when this one is told, "Desist, brother. You know this will not help us," he answers, "It might." And he lights the match.

Those two answers, and the two questions they ask—perhaps only in retrospect, but posed nonetheless—are inextricably linked. Without the promise (or threat) of eternal judgment, does anything we do matter? It might. But is it all for nothing? I hope not.

In asking those questions, and acknowledging that he doesn't know (that none of us really do), McDonagh is interrogating our shared sense of faith and morality as explicitly as any filmmaker this side of Scorsese in Silence and Last Temptation of Christ mode. And in Three Billboards' extraordinary closing lines, the filmmaker offers up what seems the only plausible solution for these conundrums: "I guess we can decide along the way."

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