What a garbage year 2017 was. Our democracy is in shambles. New assaults on the humanity of anyone who isn’t a rich white man with quivering jowls come seemingly by the hour. We're all sad and mad and tired all the time. It’s hard to make sense of this fresh hell that is our world now. Naturally, Americans flocked to our Google overlords to try to reach some semblance of understanding. The internet monolith recently released its annual Year in Search data, and it gives some clue as to what a downer year it was.

Americans were wildy Googling information on the latest natural disaster or mass shooting, cuz I guess we had a few of those this year or something?? And given the famous faces falling like rapey dominos on a daily basis, it should come as no shock that the top 10 Googled people of 2017 were all sexual predators, the women they preyed upon, or Kathy Griffin.

Surprisingly, “how to gouge out your eyes and ears with a butter knife so you can no longer see or hear the news” is not one of the top trending searches for 2017. Instead the most frequently asked “how to” and “what is” queries point to an America in desperate need of relief. For instance, the most Googled “how to” question of 2017 was “how to make slime,” and not “how to survive a nuclear blast.” "How to escape my boss’ office after he pulls out his dick and uses the secret button under his desk to lock the doors?” inexplicably didn't make the cut either.

Here are the rest of the questions America asked Google most. I will answer as many as I can. I take no joy in this task.

What is DACA?

DACA is short for “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals,” an immigration policy put into place by President Obama in 2012. It allowed undocumented immigrants who were brought into the U.S. as children to obtain a work permit and a renewable two-year “deferred action,” or stay, on any deportation proceedings. Essentially, it prevented young people from being deported back to countries they may not have been to since they were babies, and allowed them a (slightly) easier path to citizenship.

On September 5, 2017, the Trump administration—via deranged Keebler elf Jeff Sessions—repealed DACA and claimed the policy encouraged lawbreaking and brought down wages for American citizens (it doesn’t, but OK). The 800,000 people currently enrolled in the program will remain under DACA protection from deportation until March 5, 2018, when, according to a White House memo, they should “prepare for and arrange their departure from the United States” unless Congress gets tired of taking stuff away from poor people and takes a stab at voting on an alternative.

What is Net Neutrality?

The video above gives a great rundown of all the net neutrality mess. It also helps explain another, arguably more pressing question, one that somehow didn't make Google's list: "Why is Ajit Pai's face so goddamn punchable?"

How to buy Bitcoin?

Go to Bitcoin.com and choose an exchange on their Buy Bitcoin page. Then follow the instructions and use your hard-earned dollars to purchase a fraction of one made-up internet coin, which will likely decrease in value over the next few months and leave you with nothing to show for your efforts. Make sure to tell your bank before you do this or they’ll assume some nerd stole your credit card.

How to make slime?

Mix together Elmer’s glue, borax, water and green food colouring in a large whiskey barrel. Climb inside, taking care to completely submerge your head. Breath in the slime and die slowly as the heavy, sticky substance fills your lungs. Repeat if necessary.

What is the Paris Climate Agreement?

An international pact between literally every major country on Earth—except the United States—to help combat the effects of climate change by curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

What is ANTIFA?

Depending on who you ask, ANTIFA is either a group of covert super-soldiers who are actively working to overthrow democracy and install Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton as respective king and queen of a new communist dystopia, or a small splinter of radical leftists who are OK with punching Nazis.

What is a solar eclipse?

When a powerful witch is scorned, she brews a potion using the blood of a freshly-skinned calf and the sap of an ageless tree, and appeals to the moon to do her bidding. The moon, wary of falling too far under the command of the witch, tries to flee, but is thwarted in its flight by the witch’s particular friend, a burning ball of gas we humans call “the sun.” The sun blocks the moon’s path, and in the process, all light on Earth is extinguished for a few, brief minutes. When the moon has agreed to serve the witch until the end of time, the sun floats away from the moon’s shadow, bringing light back to the cold, dark planet. Or something.

How to freeze your credit?

If you were one of the 145.5 million Americans whose personal data was breached when hackers broke into the Equifax database this summer, you might wanna freeze your credit. This will prevent the three major credit bureaus (Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian) from releasing your credit report to anyone, so if someone tries to use your SSN fraudulently, they’ll be denied.

The process of freezing your credit is pretty simple, if not kind of annoying. If you decide you want to do it, you can contact all three major credit bureaus online. Keep in mind it may cost $5 to $10 per freeze depending on where you live, because why SHOULDN’T you, the victim of a crime, have to pay to prevent being further victimized?? Also, every time you want to apply for a new credit card, new apartment or open a new utility account, you’ll have to manually unfreeze all three of your reports or you’ll be automatically denied. That costs money too! I DUNNO WELCOME TO LATE CAPITALISM, Y’ALL!

How to cook a turkey in the oven?

YOU CAN’T.

What is the Antikythera mechanism?

You guys, we found this fucking thing in 1902, why is this rusty Grecian crank still making headlines after 115 years? Contrary to what your crazy cousin Brian thinks, the Antikythera mechanism is not surefire proof of ancient aliens. It’s just a 2,000-year-old crank-powered astronomical calculator that could predict eclipses and chart the movement of the planets and do equations and shit. Why is it so hard for people to believe that ancient civilizations might have had a few pieces of rudimentary technology at their disposal? In the past 30 years we’ve figured out how to replicate the concept of cross-planet telepathy and put all of human knowledge into a device that fits in our hands. But sure, the idea that the Greeks might have built a calculator is pretty wild.

What is covfefe?

I’m going to defer to Urban Dictionary for this one:

Checks out.

What is a hurricane?

Just one of many reasons to avoid Florida at all costs.

How to make a fidget spinner?

Why would you ever want to MAKE a fidget spinner??? They cost like $2. If THIS is what people have been Googling no wonder we almost elected an alleged pedophile to the senate. What a stupid year.

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Fans have a lot of feelings about Star Wars: The Last Jedi—particularly about a meandering scene in an interstellar casino populated by super-rich arms dealers. One of those egregiously wealthy one-percenters is a Gremlin lookalike who's so trashed that he mistakes the beloved soccer ball-shaped droid, BB-8, for a slot machine. It's kind of sad, really, but it elicits a huge laugh from the audience. That drunk Rumplestiltskin, Nerdist reports in an interview with VFX supervisor Ben Morris, is called Dobbu Scay, and was secretly performed by Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill.

In the years between The Return of the Jedi and the return of Hamill to a galaxy far, far away, the Star Wars scion made a name for himself as a mesmerizing voice actor. Outside of George Lucas's iconic space opera, he boasts about 300 credits, most famously the spine-chilling Joker in Batman: The Animated Series. After being famously unable to break out the pipes in 2015's The Force Awakens, Nerdist reports that he asked director Rian Johnson for a little extra time to flex his voice acting chops in the sequel.

“Mark came to Rian [Johnson]," says Morris. "Mark’s done an awful lot of computer game voices for characters, but he’s never had the chance [to do mo-cap]. So, he said, ‘I want to put the dots on, man. I want to do that mo-cap thing.'” Johnson acquiesced, creating the bougie alien party animal whom reformed Stormtrooper Finn and Resistance engineer Rose encounter on the Las Vegas-like planet of Canto Bight.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi. L to R: Rose (Kelly Marie Tran) and Finn (John Boyega). Photo: David James. ©2017 Lucasfilm Ltd. All Rights Reserved

Hamill's shoot involved constructing a giant, wire-frame BB-8 on Industrial Light and Magic's London soundstage in order to transform him into a pug-sized banker. A little bit of stumbling around "I think Mark had a great time," Morris tells Nerdist. "And we leave that as the basis for his performance ideas for the character.”

Dobbu Scay is just one of many, many cameos—32, by Vanity Fair's count— in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, including previous Johnson collaborator Joseph Gordon-Levitt, British Princes William and Harry, former R2-D2 actor Warwick Davis, tons of Game of Thrones alums, Shawn of the Dead director Edgar Wright, Ellie Goulding, and Carrie Fisher's dog, Gary, who you can see on the far left of the image above.

“Where were you the day the first Vine died?” is a question I hope my grandchildren get to ask me. I’m not being dramatic (OK, maybe a little) when I say Vine is a cultural institution. The platform held the greatest and only collection of looping six second videos, featuring anything from the most absurd comedy to some wholesome videos of this musical man and his dog. It launched a whole genre of millennial humour and the careers of a bunch of suburban teens. And then one day it shut down. The death of Vine seemed to happen as suddenly as one of its six-second videos.

One of Vine’s creators, Dom Hofmann, recently announced through a series of mildly cryptic tweets that he was launching a new version of the platform. The original Vine was created and launched four years ago by Hofmann, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll. The trio sold the platform to Twitter in October 2012, before it’s launch. Twitter shut down the service in October 2017, effectively ending the careers of thousands of content creators, who were reported to be making $20,000 to $50,000 in brand deals.

Hofmann had hinted earlier through Twitter that he was working on a new Vine platform. But on December 6 he released what seems to be its new logo. Hofmann also tweeted that he wanted to establish three principles for V2, which include an “equal voice” for every creator and fostering a “civilized, kind, inclusive, and absolutely non-toxic community.” In V2, this inclusivity is apparently going to be achieved, at least in part, via the new “nope” button—however Hofmann’s been equally vague about the feature besides tweeting that it’ll let users “shape your timeline.”

After the initial announcement, there hasn’t been much else from Hofmann about the platform. But in the meantime, VICE spoke to some of the platform’s first content creators to figure out what went wrong with Vine and what V2 needs to get right.

Wahlid Mohammad

VICE: What was going on with you when Vine first shut down?
Wahlid: When it first shut down I got pretty lucky because I knew—I didn’t put all my eggs in Vine. Luckily I had a job. Vine was great though because it helped me learn my timing and I learned a lot about myself making those short videos. I got a job from it, like I used to work at Subway, then I quit to make videos on the internet, which was not the best idea at the time.

How did you feel about the state of Vine right before it shut down?
Maybe like two or three months before it shut down, everyone kind of felt like it was dying off or it wasn’t as active as it used to be. It was a good year in 2015, it was popping everyone was making stuff and trends left and right and then the last couple of months it was just like meh. And I had heard, like someone from Vine told me that the reason Vine dead was that “creators like yourself aren’t making stuff as often.” I was like “oh shit.” That hit me hard.

If Vine didn’t shut down would you still be on it?
Yeah! I have so many ideas, I have like a little booklet ever since Vine died.

So if V2 launched tomorrow would you be ready to go?
I just want to do one Vine where like it’s me in a cage with a full beard and it’s like “3 years since Vine” and I’m so jaded, maybe I have a hyena next to me. But I want to keep it super casual where I’m just like “hey guys, what’s good? I’m back.”

Vine’s such a unique format, was it hard to transition out of it and make longer content?
Once you kind of figure out and pinpoint your own timing, which is what Vine teaches you, you can pretty much do anything. It was hard man, that timing is not easy.

Is it going to be hard to get back into making Vines?
I mean I’d definitely be more jaded, I’d feel a little bit cooler because I’ve had all this experience.

How much do you know about V2? Have you spoken to any of the creators personally?
Not the main guy [Dom] but I’ve spoken to the other guys before. They’re cool, I mean engineers can be really interesting people, not to bash them but some of them are kind of weird. But no I haven’t talked to them. All I know is that one little picture he put out.

What does the new Vine need to have to make it better? Would monetization help?
Yeah monetization would help the platform. But whatever 2015 was, it was such a prime time for Vine. If they kept it there—I think what they did that messed it up was that they curated it just a bit too much, and then whatever was popular was kind of their favourites. I think it should be anyone’s ball game at that point, because in 2015 you could see anyone on the popular page and then 2016 it was sort of whoever their favourite creator was. I’d rather everyone have a chance.

Nick Colletti

VICE: Where were you when the OG Vine shut down?
Nick: I was in LA when I first heard about it. There was talk about it, like they were going to shut it down but then one day it was like, “Oh shit it’s actually gone.” I was just like “Well, fuck.” Guess I got to figure out something else.

Were you already thinking of transitioning out of Vine before the app shut down?
Yeah, honestly after all the initial stuff happened to me I was like “Woah, I want to go even further.” Move to more traditional forms of media I guess. I was already not posting as much content as I used to, and then it shut down and I was like, “Alright, it’s gone for good now.”

If Vine came back tomorrow would you be on the app?
Hell yeah. Yeah, I don’t have like a “Oh, I’m too good for it now” attitude. I think Vine was awesome and if it comes back it’s going to be just as fun you know.

One of the problems Viners had with Vine was the lack of monetization. Did you make any money off Vine?
I actually didn’t. No one really made money from Vine. We went to Miami for this thing for them, for Vine, and they gave us these $150 Visa gift card things. It’s not like Vine was paying me every month, like 40 fucking grand. But I feel like there are a million ways to make money if you just like make funny shit online. The money will come. So yeah, it kinda sucked that it wasn’t monetized or anything. But are we here to make money or are we here to make content?

Was it stressful being on a platform that you knew could end any day? And now to suddenly have it come back? How does that affect you?
You know when you break up with someone or hook up with them and then you never talk to them again and then they come back in your life, it’s like that. I don’t know if it’s going to be the same. I really hope it’s going to be the same thing. But if they have these new features, like a monetizing aspect — I honestly haven’t heard anything. Anyone that I’ve talked to, I’ve been like “do you know any inside information?”. No one I think really knows alot.

Yeah, there’s not much information out there about it. We don’t really know things like if your followers will be reinstated. Would you go back if you have to start at ground zero?
Honestly, yeah. All that stuff doesn’t matter to me anymore. Yeah I don’t give a shit about followers. They’re always going to be there. If you make good shit they’ll come. But yeah I think if it’s a clean slate I think that could be fun as hell too, let’s start over.

What would you improve with V2? Should it stay at 6 seconds?
Yeah, I feel like that’s the sexiest part about it. It’s this one thing that’s never going to change. Honestly, I feel where they left off was at a good point. They had worked out so much good shit, like you could add your own songs to the videos, take audio clips from other peoples vines. They implemented the zoom in thing. They did a bunch of shit, it was actually really good towards the end so I think if they do that. I don’t know though, I don’t even know if it’s going to look the same.

Is it going to be hard for you to get back into the format of Vine and making those six second videos?
Hell no! Oh I’m ready, I’m so ready. I don’t think they’re ready for me. I’m going to post like 30 videos a day. It’s just super easy, Vine doesn’t take a lot of planning. Little six second videos are really easy to manage. I can’t formulate like a script or storyboard. Some of these YouTubers are like out of control, it’s like a real fucking production, like a real Hollywood thing. I’m like “Damn, I thought we were just making a funny video for the internet.” That’s why I like Vine.

Brandon Calvillo

VICE: Where were you at when Vine shut down, as a Viner?
Brandon: I was towards the tail end of it. I didn’t lose interest in it, I had just sort of run out of things to say on it. Because I wanted to say a lot of things and do a lot of things, like sketches and stuff, but I was losing steam. What I decided, because the format was so short, is that I should start doing things longer form. I should just like write something, and I started to write and it was like “this is turning into a movie.” So I was writing a movie while Vine was close to finishing. So the idea of writing a movie was so much more exciting to me, so towards the tail end I was just sort of doing that.

Why do you think the OG Vine flopped? Was it the audience? Was it creators?
I think it had to do with both. Vine was huge back in 2013 to 2015, it was pretty huge, and then I guess the audience was like, “This format, there’s not much you can do with it.” And also, the creators on Vine, which was the whole reason Vine took off, a lot of them left to do other things. There’s only so much you can do with that format. It was a brilliant format to tell a joke, because you tell the joke and it's done and then it loops, and sometimes it gets funnier as you keep on watching it. But I feel like that initial spark of making a Vine had started to wane with a lot of creators.

Do you think you’d still be on Vine if it was around right now?
I think that got me into Vine was watching other viners make them. I got creatively inspired by them because they were making content that was funny and cool. I think the only way for me to get back on if Vine were to come back—because the part of my brain is so gone, the part that used to think of Vine ideas—the only way I could back in is to see other Viners make cool stuff. But if Vine came out again and they were like “okay you have to make the first vine” I would not know what to do.

What does V2 need to get right?
From a monetization standpoint, I think if they started to pay creators like YouTube does, I feel like people will start making Vines for the wrong reasons. Not that they didn’t already do that with the first Vine, because that’s what a lot of bigger Viners did with brand deals and stuff. But I think that with the new one if they were to monetize I don’t know if that would be beneficial. But at the same time on the other side of that is everyone’s got to eat. It’s hard to be a viner full time. On the creative side of it, I don’t think they should change anything. I don’t think anything should change when it comes to the making of a Vine. All the stuff they had was pretty perfect—the 6.5 seconds, the looping. The looping was the thing that made it so unique and cool.

You mentioned in one of your tweets that the Vine community was “toxic,” what do you mean by that?
It was just toxic in the sense that it seemed like everybody was hating on everybody else for two reasons—for numbers, and for ego. There was also this thing going around where big viners would steal ideas from little viners. That’s alleged, but still it made the little viners more angry. There was just a lot of anger and toxicity just on both sides. It made the app less fun to me.

We don’t know much about V2, has anyone from Vine reached out to you?
No, when Vine shut down all Viners were kept in the dark and now that it’s coming back we’re all still being kept in the dark.

Yeah, not much besides the tweets.
He’s being really vague with it. He released a logo that looks like it was made on Microsoft Paint.

Ray Ligaya

VICE: How’d you feel when Vine shut down initially?
Ray: Well, I was one of the OGs back in 2013 to start off Vine. After that, after the three year span, there were waves of Viners. There was that first wave of Viners that blew up and realized there’s monetization on it, so we had to move on to something else. Then came waves and waves of Viners and the app just started deteriorating. I knew a year before it “died” that it was going to die. So I just decided to do my own thing. It’s interesting to see that they're bringing Vine back and it won’t be under twitter.

So would you ever return to Vine?
I mean yeah I would return to see how it is, to see what’s different compared to the old Vine. But they need to really give us an incentive to come back. If they want us to start posting, we can starting posting but give us an incentive—we blew up that first app. Help us a bit. The guy made millions of dollars doing this and we didn’t see a cent from the app. We had to get the money from other companies, we brought in the companies like Coca-Cola and McDonalds. That wasn’t through Vine, the numbers helped, but it wasn’t Vine. I realized a year before it died, I knew it was going to die. They need a way to monetize.

How did you know it was going to die? What pointed that out for you?
It was oversaturated. You could see it in the engagements, you could see new people. It’s not the same—before it was a community. People loved it, people enjoyed posting. Now it’s come to a point where this is going to be in competition with other apps that are trying to be the next Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat, you know. The benefit of V2 is that it’s a version of an old popular app, so it’ll get that initial push. But they’re going to get people wanting to become that so called “Viner” instead of just using the app for fun. When we first started Vine, the OGs, we did it because we had fun and it was these creative six seconds. Now people just want that fame, it’s like “I want to be a Viner now,” “I want to be a YouTuber, a vlogger because this person’s doing it and they’re making this much money.” It’s still, in my opinion, oversaturated. I don’t doubt that it’ll be big, but how long it’ll stay big—I don’t know.

Do you think they should reinstate peoples followers?
100 percent. They’d have to work something out with Twitter because Twitter still owns Vine. You can still see the number of loops I have on my Twitter account. So I think what Dom’s doing is something completely new, but a second version of it. I don’t know how he’s going to pull it off but I do have my fingers crossed.

Do you think people are going to consider you a Viner for the rest of your life?
I think some people do, some people see me as an artist, some people see me as a YouTuber. It’s a mix. It’s all about what platform the creator puts their energy into. There are alot of social media outlets that have reached out to me, and I think other Viners can vouch for this, but a lot of app companies are reaching out and paying us to post on their social media. So if V2 is going to be something like that, I’m on board. It sucks because I gained 1.5 million followers on Vine and it was gone. I knew once I hit a million I saw a downfall.

If you didn’t get those 1.5 million followers back would you go back?
I’d still use the app and go on with my life. My opinion though—I don’t think it’ll last unless they monetize it and focus on the creators. And they should really shed light on the OG creators that brought Vine up to another level. It took them three years to get a meeting with all the Canadian viners, three years till I finally saw a face that worked at Vine. It took them three years.

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In the same week Canada’s government predicted 4,000 people will die of opioid overdoses this year, BC’s Centre for Disease Control got a green light to provide safe medical-grade opioids to at-risk users.

As first reported by the Globe and Mail, a new pilot project is expected to give out hydromorphone pills to registered users in April 2018, likely at local supervised consumption sites or supportive housing. Entrenched opioid users registered with the health agency will be given three free doses daily.

BCCDC executive director Mark Tyndall told the Globe the initiative is meant to slow the province’s overdose death toll, which has intensified along with the proliferation of synthetic opioids like fentanyl. In BC, more than 1,200 people have already died of illicit drug overdoses since January.

A clean, medical-grade alternative to the illegal drug market is something harm reduction advocates have been asking for since a public health emergency was first declared in April 2016.

“It’s obviously really good news, it’s the right thing to do, it’ll save a lot of lives, and it’ll give people an alternative,” Overdose Prevention Society founder Sarah Blyth told VICE. “I think the government should be proud they’re moving forward on this, even though it’s been a bit slower than we’d like in a crisis situation.”

Blyth’s volunteer overdose prevention team just moved into an indoor space at 58 Hastings Street in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, long considered to be ground zero of a nation-wide overdose epidemic. She says removing organized crime and street drugs from the equation will do a lot to help the users she sees, who are often dealing with mental and physical disabilities, homelessness, and trauma, on top of fighting addiction.

Drug policy lawyer Caitlin Shane of the Pivot Legal Society applauded the program for its low-barrier, less clinical approach. After a period of supervision, users will reportedly be able to take home their doses for the day and consume them in any manner they see fit. “This really gives people more freedom to live their lives and focus on what’s important,” she told VICE. “Just because they use drugs doesn’t meant they need to be surveilled.”

Pivot has been a longtime advocate for patients accessing a small supervised opioid injection program based in Vancouver. The BCCDC pilot project will be one of the first government-sanctioned supply-based solutions to roll out since a public health emergency was declared last year.

The opioid replacement effort also sets itself apart with its comparatively low cost. At a reported 64 cents per dose, each participant would access free and safe drugs for about $700 a year. Given the high cost of responding to emergency overdoses in the streets, advocates are hoping even their opponents will support more of this work.

“Historically people who’ve been opposed to harm reduction efforts have relied on an argument that it’s a waste of taxpayer money,” Shane told VICE. “Hopefully people who do hold that perspective—that this is a waste of money or whatever—will see it is cost effective.”

The green light comes while the BC government is stepping up its own free overdose-fighting resources. Today BC’s Mental Health and Addictions Minister Judy Darcy announced that more than 200 participating pharmacies will now offer free take-home naloxone kits.

Advocates like Shane and Blyth acknowledge none of these efforts address the root causes of addiction, but they’re badly needed nonetheless.With more than 100 people dying each month in BC, their only hope is the help comes sooner.

“We really don’t have any time to waste, and unfortunately this has been a pattern we see in all forms of harm reduction,” Shane said. “Communities are stepping up to do the work governments are not doing.”

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Sonny’s parents warned him: Authorities could turn him into immigration enforcement at any time. So, growing up in rural California, he cowered at police, avoided applying for jobs, and never drove.

“I thought they could pick me up whenever and send me back,” said Sonny, now 20, who was born in Mexico and crossed the border at age five with his mother and younger brother. “When cops would pull my friends over and I was in the car, if they asked for my ID I’d say I didn’t have it. I didn’t want them to know something was up with my citizenship.”

As Donald Trump campaigned last fall, Sonny entered 12th grade more anxious than ever, internalizing Trump’s promises to purge the nation of undocumented immigrants and to erect a 70-foot-tall cement border wall with Mexico. “I started hearing things like, ‘Mexicans and immigrants are all bad,’” recalled Sonny, who requested his last name not be used to protect his family’s privacy. “It made it harder to imagine staying here, being scared so many people are against you.”

Then one day after school, as Sonny found solace in watching his favorite movie, Dances with Wolves, his father burst into his room with an outrageous proposal.

“He walked in and said I could be a citizen,” said Sonny. “I thought it was going to be another scam.”

He had good reason to distrust the claim. His family had already overpaid a notary to help him apply for DACA, an Obama-era program that provided deportation relief for young undocumented immigrants in two-year increments. In the family’s tiny town outside Davis, California, immigration attorneys were scarce and Sonny knew no other youths—other than his brother—in his position.

“People tell you different stories over here, and they charge you different amounts,” Sonny’s father Jose told me of notaries pledging to help immigrants adjust their legal status. “I went to a notary public who charged us $700 to fill out a two-year application. I decided I needed to get a second opinion.”

Jose’s quest led Sonny and his brother Jose, who had always believed they lived illegally in the States, to a stunning realization: They are, and always have been, US citizens.

An unknown, but significant amount of US residents spend their lives ignorant of the fact they, too, are citizens, due to the complexity of citizenship requirements and a lack of education about those criteria.

“Its very common actually,” said immigration attorney Holly Cooper, co-director of the immigration law clinic at UC Davis, who specializes in citizenship claims and handled the brothers’ case. “It’s a life-changer for so many of our clients who live their lives thinking they're undocumented and then we turn around and tell them, ‘You’re a citizen.’”

Cooper estimated that about 5 percent of the individuals who approach her for immigration help are unwittingly citizens.

“You find a lot of these people in rural communities because of a lack of access to lawyers in rural communities,” she said, noting that even in many “know your rights” presentations for immigrants people skip over explanations about citizenship.

Sonny and Jose had a straightforward case: Their father (also named Jose) was a US citizen who had lived in the US more than ten years before the sons’ birth, making them also automatic citizens, Cooper explained.

Jose was born in Chicago to Mexican immigrant parents and spent his life in the States but visited Mexico regularly, meeting his future wife on one of those trips. He moved briefly to Mexico, where they married and had children, but then returned to the US to work as a forklift operator, and his family soon followed.

If you sort through a somewhat complicated chart at the USCIS website, it’s clear that Sonny and Jose qualify for citizenship. But it’s not intuitive to many that they would. Even highly educated people—including some attorneys—are unclear about the criteria for citizenship, said Cooper.

“I work with public defenders all the time who don't understand this,” she told me. “It’s hard to educate people about because it’s so complicated. It’s a labyrinth of laws.”

The easiest criteria for citizenship is birth in the United States, but people can also be citizens through their parents or grandparents, and the requirements vary depending on what year they were born, since citizenship laws have evolved over time. To prove their citizenship, a qualified individual can either apply for a US passport through the US State Department or for a certificate of citizenship through US Citizenship and Immigration Services—a process that takes months, even years, depending on the complexity of the case and discretion of the government officials.

The boys’ father had significant proof of his US birth and residency, but it still took months for Cooper and her law students to secure their citizenship from the Department of State, she said. The younger son, Jose, now 18, got confirmation of his status by May, while Sonny only just received his confirmation this fall.

“For Jose it was easier but Sonny had a different passport officer who wanted all the documentation for his father’s schooling, his tax returns, birth certificate, marriage certificate,” Cooper said, explaining that the passport office guards against fraud in this way.

The officer also asked for documents of every job the father had worked and every time he had left the country and returned, resulting in a “45-year history of Jose’s life,” said Cooper’s law student Apurva Behal*, who compiled the information.

A US State Department spokesman said the agency receives first-time passport applications from US residents asserting their citizenship on occasion, but could not provide specific statistics. He told me individuals born and living abroad more frequently contact US consulates asserting citizenship claims because they have realized they qualify for citizenship through a parent.

With no central database of US citizens, and a lack of clarity over individual cases, the US federal government has also been known to detain and to deport US citizens.

More than 800 individuals were released from immigrant detention facilities between 2007 and 2015 after they proved they were citizens, according to data obtained by a FOIA request by Northwestern University professor Jacqueline Stevens and analyzed by NPR. Stevens, director of Northwestern’s deportation research clinic, has estimated that thousands more people have been wrongfully detained and deported without having the chance to prove their citizenship. In one recent high-profile case, a citizen named Davino Watson was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for over three years but was denied any compensation for his imprisonment.

A spokesperson for Immigration and Customs Enforcement responded told me that the agency “takes very seriously any and all assertions that an individual in its custody may have a claim to U.S. citizenship.”

“Analyzing US citizenship for individuals born abroad can often be very complex, as it often involves investigating the individual’s birth and immigration history, residency history, immigration status, marital status of the individual’s parents, and the ever-changing body of law that was in place at the time of the individual’s birth,” the spokesperson, Danielle Bennet, said in an emailed statement. “This complexity means that some individuals don't even know they are U.S. citizens until well after they are encountered by ICE.”

Fortunately for Sonny and Jose, their father thought to investigate his sons’ legal status before they had an encounter with immigration enforcement, and before they ever moved out of his house.

“We probably would have moved to Mexico already, because ICE was doing roundups,” the elder Jose told me of the deportation raids enacted under the Trump administration. “It’s changed now: They can do what they want to do and they can study what they want to study.”

For Sonny, who ran daily to his mailbox this fall to check for his passport, the document gave him the hope he lacked for a future in the US.

“The first day I slept with it under my pillow to keep it safe—I didn't want to lose it,” he said of the night in early October. Now Sonny, an understated young man who draws and does martial arts, has begun applying for jobs with his ID, and celebrated his citizenship last month along with his 20th birthday.

“It feels good, I can finally work, travel, and vote,” he told me. “I feel more like this is my home.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Apurva Behal's name. VICE regrets the error.

Follow Meredith Hoffman on Twitter.

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

US News

Trump Threatens Global Community Over UN Jerusalem Vote
The president suggested he would stop supplying aid to countries in the UN that vote to reject his decision to move the American embassy to Jerusalem. On Wednesday, Trump told his cabinet: “All of these nations that take our money and then they vote against us… Well, we’re watching those votes. Let them vote against us; we’ll save a lot. We don’t care.”—The New York Times

US Life Expectancy Falls Again as Drug Deaths Rise
The latest government statistics showed life expectancy in the US falling to 78.6 years—the first time since the early 1960s it has fallen two years in a row. The National Center for Health Statistics also reported a striking 21 percent increase in drug overdose deaths in 2016. The rate of fatal overdoses from synthetic opioids doubled over the same period.—TONIC

Trump Commutes Sentence of White-Collar Convict
The president commuted the 27-year prison sentence given to Sholom Rubashkin, a former kosher slaughterhouse owner who was found guilty of fraud and money laundering in 2009. The White House cited a bipartisan group of more than 100 legal officials and scholars concerned by “the severity of his sentence" as well as evidence used in the prosecution. The commutation did not include a formal pardon.—VICE News

Apple Admits to Slowing Down Older iPhones
The company announced that a software feature introduced last year makes iPhones slow down over time to cope with battery problems. Apple said the feature was designed to keep phones from “unexpectedly shutting down.” Jeff Suovanen, an engineer at iFixit, said the slowing down “causes a lot of perfectly good phones to get replaced.”—Motherboard

International News

More Than a Dozen Injured in Melbourne Car Attack
A 32-year-old man was arrested after police said he plowed his car into a crowd of people in the center of the Australian city. At least 18 people were hurt, with several reportedly in critical condition. Police said the collision with pedestrians on Flinders Street was deliberate, and added that the suspect has mental health issues. Officers initially found no ties to terrorist groups.—VICE News

Another North Korean Soldier Flees Across the Border
The soldier made it across the demilitarized zone (DMZ) into South Korea under heavy fog. South Korean soldiers fired 20 warning shots to repel North Korean border guards who may have been looking for the defector. He is the fourth North Korean soldier to escape and defect by crossing the DMZ in 2017.—Al Jazeera

Catalans Head to the Polls for Crucial Vote
The people of Catalonia were slated to vote Thursday in a regional election called by the Spanish government in a bid to contain the separatist movement. The previous local parliament was dissolved in October after its former president Carles Puigdemont was accused of going rogue and declaring independence from Spain after a referendum appeared to find support for the move. The separatist leader has been campaigning while in exile in Belgium.—Reuters

UK’s Deputy PM Sacked over Porn Allegations
British Prime Minister Theresa May fired her deputy, Damian Green, following allegations that he had pornographic images on his work computer. An investigation by May’s cabinet secretary concluded that Green’s explanation of the issue had been “inaccurate” and “misleading.” Green insisted he did not view or download porn in his office.—Sky News

Everything Else

Nelly Sued Over Alleged Sexual Assault
Monique Greene filed a lawsuit alleging the rapper sexually assaulted her on his tour bus in October. Prosecutors did not press charges against Nelly despite his arrest at the time, claiming Greene did not cooperate with inquiries. Nelly denied the accusation.—AP

Katy Perry Drops New Video
The star released Marie Antoinette-inspired visuals for “Hey Hey Hey,” the fourth single from her album Witness. Perry described the video as “a fun, triumphant piece of pop candy” and “a glam little stocking stuffer” on Instagram.—Billboard

MoMa Running a ‘Twin Peaks’ Marathon
New York’s Museum of Modern Art will host marathon screenings of the third season of David Lynch's show in January. MoMa film curator Rajendra Roy said the series was “something totally and spectacularly unique.”—i-D

Kendrick Lamar's Producer Had Hard Drive Stolen
Derek “MixedByAli” Ali, the 27-year-old sound engineer who worked with Lamar on DAMN., had unreleased music files reportedly worth $1 million snatched from his car. The cops managed to recover Ali’s hard drive and have returned it to him.—Noisey

Mark Hamill Has a Second Role in 'The Last Jedi'
The actor who plays Luke Skywalker reportedly did the voiceover for an alien gambler character called Dobbu Scay in The Last Jedi. Visual effects supervisor Ben Morris said Hammill “had a great time” playing the part in the casino scene.—VICE

Make sure to check out the latest episode of VICE's daily podcast. Today we run through Noisey's list of the 100 best songs of 2017.

Despite its retelling of the making of the uniquely awful 2003 film The Room, James Franco’s The Disaster Artist has become critically revered upon release. His co-producer and longtime collaborator Seth Rogen summarized the phenomenon in a single tweet: “We made a movie about the worst movie and it might be our best movie.”

And The Disaster Artist's success resembles that of American Movie, Chris Smith's 1999 documentary focusing on a small town filmmaker and his excruciatingly amateurish short film Coven. American Movie was an instant hit with audiences and critics alike, winning the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at that year's Sundance Film Festival. While the two movies are miles apart in terms of scope and scale, the core concept is surprisingly similar. So what exactly is so appealing about watching a movie about bad movie?

The Disaster Artist finds Franco at his highest form as an actor, his portrayal of The Room director Tommy Wiseau as opaque as the aura of mystery that surrounds the bizarre filmmaker himself. The film is a masterful comedy that nails the art of restraint and ridiculousness with such precision that you’d mistake it for an absurd documentary, were it not for all the recognizable faces. American Movie's subject, Mark Borchardt, possesses a similar surrealist quality: he refuses to let a lack of budget or professional experience stop him from making the next great horror film. In a sleepy Midwestern suburb, Borchardt begs and borrows from his friends and family in trying to turn his dream into a reality.

At the center of each film are two oddly charmisic if not totally off-kilter protagonists, neither of whom what most moviegoers would consider conventional heroes. But Wiseau and Borchardt are both determined filmmakers with a true love for American cinema, bound by their aggressively ambitious and uncompromising personalities, as well as lanky, long-haired appearances and a shared passion for over-the-top and occasionally off-putting filmmaking.

There's a hint of the idiomatic “trainwreck” concept behind the appeal of The Disaster Artist and American Movie: the respective stories are so bizarre that you can’t look away, but the appeal runs deeper, too. It may be simultaneously cringe-inducing and entertaining to watch Borchardt yell at his mother for not framing a shot to his liking, or to see Wiseau freak out when he feels slighted by his crew, but both Franco and Smith build up an enormous amount of empathy for their leads. It doesn’t matter how ill-conceived their dreams are, or how hawkish they can be around others—you still find yourself rooting for these oddball characters.

There's also an underdog element to both The Disaster Artist and American Movie that everyone can relate to. The protagonists feel misunderstood by the world that surrounds them, which isn't an uncommon feeling. You can potentially relate to their feelings of desire, isolation, and desperation, and perhaps there's something comforting about seeing those emotions earnestly depicted in film. Wiseau and Borchardt's dedication to their art, as well as their idiosyncratic personalities and lack of self-awareness, makes for two compelling and comedic stories about one's own hopes and dreams.

Wiseau and Borchardt seem to represent the weirdest and most wide-eyed parts that exist in us all. Their unabashed pursuit feels oddly relatable, and that their stories are set on the backdrop of the making of a movie quickly becomes an afterthought. In both The Disaster Artist and American Movie, despite the ill-advised endeavors that the characters are pursuing, you still find yourself hoping for a happy ending. Both movies delight in the charm of eccentric artists and the spectacle of bad filmmaking—which, oddly enough, make for two pretty great movies.

In 1924, Velma Kelly killed her adulterous husband and Roxie Hart shot her lying boyfriend. Both women ended up on Chicago’s murderess row, facing a gruesome public execution by hanging. But through sheer willpower, manipulation, and a little razzle dazzle, they found themselves acquitted of their crimes and back on vaudeville’s main stage. That’s the plot of the musical Chicago, the 2002 film adaptation of which turns 15 this month. One of the joys of watching a film like Chicago is that men are punished for the wrongs they’ve committed against the women who trusted them—vindication that’s rarely achieved in real life.

Niccolo Machiavelli once said, “Men ought either to be indulged or utterly destroyed, for if you merely offend them they take vengeance, but if you injure them greatly they are unable to retaliate, so that the injury done to a man ought to be such that vengeance cannot be feared.” It’s ironic, perhaps, that a social critic known for seemingly endorsing the use of violence as a means to maintain power against the powerless could so succinctly deliver an indictment on how to aptly deal with the crimes of men—those who are biologically called men at birth and who wilfully use sexism and the patriarchy to strengthen not only their careers, but their own invincibility.

And so Kelly and Hart took it upon themselves to do something the law has, more often than not, failed to do; deliver justice against men who use, abuse, and dispose of women. Fifteen years later, such unhindered autonomy and boldness is rare to come across in film, with vengeance gendered as something men seek for honour and dignity and women only out of hysteria or lack of feeling.

In the film’s opening minutes, six of the women on death row deliver their defence in the court of public opinion, explaining the reasons for their incarceration with testimonies detailing interactions with men. No mental gymnastics are required to understand that, for these inmates, vindication was the only objective, with the absence of regret and the resounding and defiant chorus sounding: “He had it coming, he only had himself to blame. And if you’d been there. And if you’d seen it, I bet you, you would have done the same.”

One of the women fired two warning shots into her husband’s head for popping gum after requesting silence following a day’s work; another slipped arsenic in her partner’s drink after discovering he had six wives; another stabbed her verbally abusive boyfriend. “It was a murder, not a crime,” is the consistent thread running throughout the film, as the women repeat the sentiment that, although their actions were seemingly brutal, they were also justifiable.

Women are rarely allowed the chance to defend their actions when violence is involved. They’re expected to live quietly in the margins of conventional society, with the perceptions of womanhood and motherhood dictating that we are not only incapable of violence, but that committing violence is an unnatural act that goes against everything attached to society’s understanding of women.
In a patriarchal world, many abusive actions perpetrated by men against women have been normalized to the point of numbing the humiliation and blurring the line between right and wrong, supported by selective interpretations of the Christian way that’s upheld in ways that only serve to project white supremacy and sexism, while denying true accountability for one’s actions. For the past few months, the news cycle has been filled with news stories of men sexually harassing women. For Tarana Burke, the black woman who started the #METOO campaign, as well as the women who came forward with their stories, some form of vindication can be achieved from the exposure of these men’s crimes.

But unlike the women in Chicago, who chose to retaliate by choosing utter destruction, women of the real world will have to suffice with swift moments of shock and retribution, while bracing themselves for the inevitable return of their tormentors. In our world, men are allowed to repent and given the benefit of the doubt; in Hart and Kelly’s world, they chose to silence the men in their lives, making it so they’re the only people capable of retelling their recollection of events. Hart and Kelly made it possible for their own truth to be the only version heard, refusing to allow the men around them any kind of repentance or glory—even from beyond the grave.

In much of America, the Christmas season means candy canes, carols, claymation specials, and all that wholesome childhood jazz. But in the X-rated corners of the internet, it means one thing: Santa Claus porn. Every year, several major studios put out scenes in which Father Christmas goes to town on a girl awakened by a sleigh crash, a housewife up late, or some buxom elf.

This year’s crop of Santa smut hasn’t all been released yet. But 2015 brought scenes like Sneaky Santa from Reality Kings, in which St. Nick spills his milk, awakening a mother and her step-daughter. The two women clean up the milk, randomly get sapphic with each other, then catch the yuletide intruder “caressing his jingle balls,” and decide to run with it. And 2016 gave the world Ho Ho Ho… Santa Gave Me Anal for Christmas from Jules Jordan, in which the gift giver scolds, spanks, and inevitably fucks a girl for snooping through her presents early. Santa porn isn’t a huge genre. But the list could go on and on.

I’ve written in the past about why studios make any type of holiday-themed skin flick. Writ short, porn mirrors the mainstream. If it gets a special episode or festive film, it gets the adult treatment, too. Christmas is the big daddy of holiday movies, so it’s a sweet spot for porn as well—doubly so because porn viewership slacks off around Christmas. Drawing back a few of those eyeballs with a relevant gimmick can help a studio’s bottom line. And Santa’s a fixture of many Christmas specials, so of course he’ll feature in many Christmas porn special, too.

But none of that explains how the adult industry actually makes this shtick work—how it sexualizes the decidedly unsexy, family-friendly, belly-full-of-jelly figure that is Santa Claus. To answer this question, which probably no one was actually asking, I reached out to a number of male porn stars who have played Santa multiple times to hear how they approached this bizarre role.

Steve Holmes with Holly Hendrix on the set of "Ho Ho Ho… Santa Gave Me Anal"

“I don’t really do any kind of preparation,” says Dick Chibbles, a performer who’s been in the industry for 17 years, acted in nearly 2,000 scenes, and played Santa a couple of times. Most of the men I spoke to for this piece shared this sentiment. As “woodmen,” their job is largely to get in, get hard, and get off when the director tells them to. They just run with any script they’re given. And they’re given such varied characters to play that they’re ready to jump into anything.

Porn “can even turn the Easter bunny into something sexual,” notes Keiran Lee, a well-known male porn star with a decade-long career and a couple stints as Santa under his belt.

For Chibbles, these bizarre roles are almost a relief. They’re a break from playing teachers, deliverymen, or other porn tropes. And they’re simpler than lawyers or cops, he says. It’s easier for him to toss out Santa’s catch phrases than it is to recall legal jargon mid-fuck. But in the end there’s little difference: wear the outfit, throw out a few ho ho hos and some chatter about elves to fit the suit, then get to business. “Approaching a Santa-based porn script, even in all its hilarity, is no different than any other gig,” says Sean Lawless, a performer active since 2012, with a couple Santa credits, “aside from wearing a red jumpsuit, long curly wig, and fake beard.”

Often, there’s not any chance for male performers to decide how they want to portray the iconic fat man, or how they can square his wholesome side with their erotic endeavors. The last two times Steve Holmes, a performer with 21 years of experience, played Santa (including in 2016’s Ho Ho Ho… Santa Gave Me Anal, alongside Holly Hendrix), “it was gonzo, without any scripted dialogue… I didn’t know I was supposed to be Santa Claus before I arrived on set.”

Holmes shrugs this off as just one of the oddities of porn. “For me,” he said, “it really makes no difference what character they want me to play, as long as I can have sex with a hot girl.”

If forced to, though, most performers can instantly bridge the divide between the Santa legend and porn. “If you think about it, Santa is more of a creepy figure than a friendly myth,” mused Chibbles. “The guy breaks into your house. He’s constantly watching your kids during the year.”

Taking the Santa myth with a pinch of salt and cynicism can lead to dark portrayals, subverting the wholesome image towards lascivious ends. These portrayals range from a bumbling Santa with voyeuristic tendencies, as in Sneaky Santa, to a taskmaster Santa who runs his elves ragged, as in a 2014 scene from xxxtrasmall.com in which an elf played by Lizzie Bell has to seduce a gruff Santa just to get a break. A depressive and overworked Santa is on high display in a Molly Bennett scene from a couple years back, which opens on Santa wandering around wasted and wondering why no one gives him presents. He slumps on Bennett’s doorstep, rousing her from sleep. Bright-eyed, she welcomes him in and asks what he brought her, only for him to try to convince her, through slurring speech, that she’s actually a bad girl and should accept one of the sex toys in his bag. In fact, he suggests, she should let him use them on her.

But more often than not, porn likes to lean into the juxtaposition of a bumbling and kindly old man indulging in the carnal pleasures most humans crave without breaking his character. Porn, as I’ve often been told, is full of cut-ups who thrive on the absurdity of it all. (Why do you think there are so many hardcore yet self-consciously campy porn parodies?) “I consider myself a ridiculous character to start,” said Lawless, “so adopting atypical banter and traits is usually a fun thing for me. The goofier the character, the more I ham it up. Santa being a prime example.”

Holmes went hard into the hammy shtick in his improvised scene last year with Hendrix. The shoot starts with Hendrix, prancing around a tree in lingerie, taking a vibrator out of her Christmas stocking, and playing with it until Santa shows up. “Ho ho ho, what do we have here,” Holmes sing-songs, “a little hoe.” The puns and riffs come hard and heavy. (On why he thinks Hendrix has been a naughty girl and needs punishment: “There was this little boy who fell in love with you, and you didn’t suck his cock. This was not nice.”) At points, Hendrix openly laughs. By the end of the scene, Holmes has lost all his Santa paraphernalia, but he’s still trying to keep up the act. After the cumshot, Hendrix starts to sing a carol while Holmes untangles the lights from a nearby tree and drapes them over her as she laughs.

Even in lecherous Santa scenes, the directors and actors often can’t resist leaning into the humor of the character. The studio 21st Sextury recently released a “five-Santa gangbang” featuring Gina Gerson, which opens with her wishing by a tree for Santa to visit. One after another, Santas spring out from behind a tree, nearly doing jazz hands. The Santas give her wholesome gifts. Then one pulls out a camcorder, sees Gerson loves it, and asks if she wants to make a film. From there, things start to get a bit creepy-touchy. But Gerson’s character runs with it, urging Santa to whip out his cock. Cue the sex, the ho ho hos throughout, and the constant references to naughty and nice lists.

None of the actors I spoke to were sure what audiences wanted to see in these pornographic portrayals of Santa, or whether any depictions went over better than others. Holmes knows his scene with Hendrix sold well, but he isn’t sure whether that was just about Hendrix, about the sex, or about his improvised Santa comedy. All he knows is that Santa was a fun and simple character to play...

Except in one respect: the costume. “The red felt suit,” said Chibbles, “was disgustingly sweaty and hot as hell.” The actors I spoke to largely agree—Santa's festive outfit is the only tricky part about sexualizing the sweet, avuncular childhood icon.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

At age 25, Sean Pettit is already one of the most famous and accomplished skiers in the world. The multiple-X Game champion started skiing professionally at the age of 11 and signed with Red Bull when he was 13. But well before that, he and his older brother Callum—who is also now a pro skier—were already pushing the boundaries of winter sport.

The Pettit family moved around a lot in Pemberton, British Columbia, where he grew up. And no matter where they went, their house would always turn into a do-it-yourself playground. Whenever it snowed, Sean and his brother would climb up to the roof and build an avalanche slope filled with hundreds of pounds of snow that they would slide off of with their friends. “It probably looked super sketchy,” Pettit said. “But that’s how we grew up.”

Their mother, Deb, raised her two kids as a single mom, and the brothers were always competing to one-up each other. “It was a feed-off-each-other kind of deal,” Pettit said. If his older brother did a 360 degree trick at the park with his board, Sean would have to try and do a 540. “It was this constant trying to one-up each other battle all through life, pretty much, that’s never stopped. I think it’s still happening,” Pettit said.

The one-upmanship would get ramped up during the holidays, where the main event was always the backyard snow skate. Snowskates are a hybrid of a skateboard and snowboard that is used to pull off skateboard style tricks in the snow.

At around the age of 9, Pettit discovered a salvage yard in the woods a couple blocks from his house. Along with his brother and friends, he would rummage through the yard, finding tires, pipes, 2x4 with nails, and fences that he would bring home to set up his own snow skate park in the backyard. Once they’d constructed these obstacle courses, he’d hop on his board, and have snow skate competitions with Callum.

The most memorable piece he picked up from the salvage yard was a classic yellow roller coaster playground slide, which Pettit turned into a rail at the end of his obstacle course. There would be long sessions in the winter to see who could actually get to the end of the rail without bailing. “We would always try to lock in on a board slide on both edges on this playground slide,” Pettit said. “It was this huge battle, to see who could get to the end first. I can remember a lot of fails.”

The snow skate park became a regular tradition for several years of Pettit’s childhood, but through all of the falls off his DIY skate park set-up, there were never any serious injuries. “Injuries are kind of catching up to me now,” Pettit said. “But as a young kid, I felt like I was made of rubber. There were injuries for sure because someone was always bailing, but it was never anything serious, just a little blood here and there, but never any broken bones. We did dangerous things, but when you look back, I would say it built character.”

Through all the adventures, Pettit doesn’t remember his mom ever discouraging them from doing what they wanted to. “We had freedom to be shitheads,” Pettit said, laughing. “My mom never said anything. She just always kept to herself. We were out there, doing our thing, and she never once worried about anything.”

For Pettit, being afforded that space to explore as a kid in his backyard still means the world.

“Being able to grow up and not having fear and just going for it all the time, I think that’s what really shaped me to be the athlete I am today,” Pettit said. “Parents are always telling their kids what they can’t do. My brother and I never had that growing up. My mom always gave us the freedom that we wanted. Having that freedom, it just felt like we were free to decide what we wanted to do and were never pushed in any particular direction. That’s how we ended up becoming professional skiers.”

Last night was anything but a typical council meeting in Puslinch, Ontario.

Instead of the usual votes on parks and the minutiae of local finance, the five-member council voted on whether or not to rename Swastika Trail—a local, privately owned road that has sparked a national debate about heritage versus human rights.

Although the council ultimately voted to keep the controversial name, residents who say they’re embarrassed to give out their address say they won’t let the matter rest.

Rows of chairs were filled by roughly 60 people, including residents, supporters, and members of Jewish advocacy organization B’nai Brith, who were contacted by a resident from the street—which is home to roughly 50 residents—to back the seemingly uncontroversial opinion that Swastika Trail is a problematic name for a street in 2017. Two uniformed OPP officers were stationed near the back of the room.

“I don’t usually get involved with municipal politics,” Michael Mostyn, CEO of B’nai Brith, was heard saying to a colleague. “But this is ridiculous.”

Michael Mostyn addressing council members.

Proponents of the name change claimed they experienced embarrassment each time they pulled out their driver’s licence. A few years ago, a child who lived on the street was nearly suspended from school for writing Swastika on the sidewalk—a word he only knew as the name of his street.

The issue has come up periodically in the neighbourhood for decades. This time, though, neither side is backing down. On November 1, the majority of Swastika Trail residents voted in favour of keeping the name. Residents in favour of changing the name, who lost by five votes, then decided to take the issue to politicians and human rights organizations.

Mayor Dennis Lever and all four Puslinch councillors sat at the front of the main hall in the Puslinch Community Centre. Council meetings are typically held in the township office, but this meeting was moved in anticipation of high attendance, given the attention this battle has received from national and international press, including the Times of Israel.

Lever has said that this debate would not be happening if this were a public road—the street would simply have been renamed. The fact that the street is privately owned makes the issue more complex.

Delegates were given 10 minutes each to make their case. Swastika Trail resident Lori Wyszynski was the first to speak. The room was silent as she approached the podium, other than the incessant rattling of old heating vents.

“Swastika Trail was named in 1920 by its original owner, Ross Barber, long before World War II,” Wyszynski said, as she shared details of the swastika symbol’s origin and meaning, prior to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party adopting and forever changing the nature of the symbol. She accused residents in favour of the renaming of being hurtful bullies with a closed-minded approach. “I spoke to Mr. Barber’s grandson recently,” she continued, “and he assured me that his grandfather was anything but a racist.”

“This street should have been renamed in 1945,” proclaimed Bill Knetsch, a long-time resident whose family fought against the Nazis in during their occupation of The Netherlands. “When we watched the riots in Charlottesville this summer, with protesters wearing and waving the swastika so proudly, was it the ancient religious symbol of peace and good luck that came to mind?”

Puslinch, a town of about 7,000, in south-central Ontario is overwhelmingly white and Christian. The 2011 census said not a single Jewish person lived in the town and only 300 people identified as visible minorities.

The presentations continued for over two hours, as residents in favour of keeping the name shared stories of their heritage and hometown pride. Some claimed they viewed this as a teaching moment, and an opportunity to reclaim and restore the swastika’s original meaning.

“We can’t move forward if we are constantly looking back,” resident Donna O’Krafka said to council. “To hell with Hitler, we came up with the name first!”

Donna O’Krafka addressing council members.

Those in favour of changing the name said the swastika’s origin was irrelevant given its greater association with hatred and bigotry. Michael Mostyn shared a petition facilitated by B’nai Brith with over 2,000 signatures from citizens in favour of renaming the street.

Jim and Jennifer Horton, who have lived on the street since 2009, presented their denied application for a vanity plate containing the word swastika.

“I paid the $310 fee and submitted the application to see how the Ontario government felt about the word,” Jim Horton said. “They promptly denied our application, and informed us that the word has falls into the category of human rights discrimination.”

Denied application for a vanity plate with the word swastika.

After the presentations, each councillor as well as the mayor read statements. All except one councillor spoke of the importance of respecting the results from the November 1 vote.

“Not honouring this vote would be disrespectful to the democracy and beliefs that our countrymen fought and died for,” said Councillor Susan Fielding, “and for this reason, I will be voting against the renaming.”

Other councillors saw it differently.

“This is not simply a local matter, this is a bigger political issue,” noted Councillor John Sepulis. “The word swastika is viewed negatively by the majority of our society. To try and convince people otherwise, given our unique circumstances, would be fruitless.”

A vote was held, and the majority voted 4-1 in favour of maintaining the name. Councillor Sepulis was the only one who showed dissent.

“Council had their minds made up before any of us spoke,” said Jennifer Horton. “They didn’t ask a single question and all reading prepared statements. What was the point of any of us speaking?”

“I’m glad it’s over and I hope it stays that way,” said O’Krafka. She believes that the residents may eventually reconcile, but a doesn’t plan on initiating contact with those on the other side of the debate at this time.

The room lacked the expected air of defeat, and residents on the wrong side of tonight’s vote were adamant that this is not the end.

“We will absolutely be pursuing this with the Ontario government as a human rights issue,” said Horton. “The denial of our licence plate application is proof that this name needs to go.”

“I feel validated that our democratic process was upheld by council,” said Natalia Busch, who spoke in favour of keeping the street name. “This whole thing has torn our community in half, and I hope that now, we can go back to normal. I think if council had gone the other way, it would have started a war.”

“They spoke about democracy and process, but I don’t think either of those were respected today,” said Mostyn. “You heard from several residents that the voting system was flawed, and it was not overseen by the municipal government. We will proceed accordingly with the knowledge that at the provincial level, this word is classified by our government as human rights discrimination.”

Shannon McDermott is a writer and 2018 Global Journalism Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs.

Critics seem to love The Last Jedi, and it's raking in cash hand over fist at the box office. But for a movie that's apparently obscenely popular, it's facing some pretty serious backlash from viewers—as of Thursday, its audience score on Rotten Tomatoes weighed in at 54 percent. So what gives?

According to the Huffington Post, a fringe alt-right group might be to blame. Some anonymous troll behind the Facebook group "Down With Disney's Treatment of Franchises and its Fanboys" told HuffPo he dispatched an army of bots to flood The Last Jedi's Rotten Tomatoes page with negative reviews. The moderator—who self-identifies as alt-right—said he went after the movie for its "feminist agenda," arguing that Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) is a "victim of the anti-mansplaining movement,” Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) is somehow being "turn[ed] gay," and that there are too many women featured in the film.

“I’m sick and tired of men being portrayed as idiots," the moderator told HuffPo. "There was a time we ruled society and I want to see that again. That is why I voted for Donald Trump.”

In a Facebook post, the moderator took sole credit for The Last Jedi's low audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes, claiming that his bots "rigged this score and still keep it dropping." But as the review aggregator tells it, that's a load of bunk. A representative from the site told HuffPo that if an army of bots were shitposting on The Last Jedi's page, Rotten Tomatoes would've noticed.

"As a course of regular business, we have a team of security, network, social, [and] database experts who monitor all of our platforms and they haven’t seen any unusual activity,” the rep said.

Rotten Tomatoes' vice president Jeff Voris told HuffPo the troll taking credit for the low score is probably just looking for some attention—retroactively claiming to be a mastermind behind something that, in reality, he had no hand in shaping.

"These things happen from time to time where somebody opportunistically seizes on a moment and says, ‘Oh, that thing? Yeah, I did that,’” Voris said. “We take [foul play] very seriously, and we’ve looked at this, and to the best of our investigation so far this looks like legitimate user behaviour."

Alt-right villains aside, some Star Wars fans are legitimately disappointed in The Last Jedi. With a host of news breaking about scenes and characters that were cut from the film, there's no telling who the movie might piss off next.

Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.

There are endless gifts to get your marijuana-minded loved ones this holiday season. Does your mom love weed? Buy her a trip to a cannabis spa. Does your uncle like to blaze? Pick him up some marijuana-infused BBQ sauce. There's nothing wrong with going the simple route and just bringing home a big bag of nugs—unless, of course, home is somewhere where weed's still illegal.

An elderly couple apparently made that exact mistake this week. Cops in York, Nebraska, arrested an 80-year-old man and an 83-year-old woman for carrying around 60 pounds of marijuana in the back of their pickup truck, the York New-Times reports.

Either the senior citizens have a lot of friends or they were really feeling the gift of giving this year, because they swear that the $336,000 worth of weed was all going to get wrapped up as Christmas gifts.

York County Sheriff's Department deputies pulled over Patrick and Barbara Jiron on Tuesday for driving erratically. As the cops approached the Jirons' truck, they immediately caught a whiff of weed and opted to search the vehicle.

When they did, they discovered bags and bags —and at least one old cheddar cheese ball container—full of marijuana.

The Jirons reportedly told the officers that they were on the road from Clearlake Oaks, California, and headed to Vermont for the holidays to dole out nugs to friends and family like a pair of green-thumbed Santas.

"They said the marijuana was for Christmas presents," Lieutenant Paul Vrbka told the New-Times.

The cops apparently gave a big "bah, humbug" to that and hauled the elderly duo off to jail. The Jirons are now facing felony charges of possession of marijuana with the intent to deliver.

It's unclear whether the couple was actually planning to spread yuletide highs or if they had a secret scheme to sling. Either way, they probably should've been a little more inconspicuous when sneaking weed across state lines. At the very least, they could've disguised the stuff as limes.

This article originally appeared on VICE Germany

Perhaps the most fucked up love story since Romeo and Juliet – or at least Twilight – begins with a casual, romantic text at 7.03AM on the 10th of November 2010. Marco sends a girl named Anna a message seemingly inspired by a bullshit proverbs board he found on Pinterest. "When I sleep, everything goes dark," he writes. "But when I open my eyes and look up, I see shining stars. And the brightest and most beautiful star is you."

Call me a cynic, tell me I've never known true love, but for the first time in my life, I completely understand why so many relationships end with one person ghosting the other. Though, to be fair to Marco, his shtick seems to work with women – 15 minutes later he gets a text from another woman. "I love you so much my darling," it says. This one is from his girlfriend, Jana.

Not the original screenshots. All screenshots, originally written in German, have been translated in English and recreated.

That we are reading these messages is largely thanks to Lukas Adolphi, but also because Marco isn’t the smartest guy going. Back in 2010, Marco and an accomplice robbed Adolphi at a cashpoint – stealing his phone and some cash. When Marco and his mate were eventually arrested two weeks later, they confessed to everything.

Lukas got his phone back, but when he did, he found a bunch of messages that Marco had sent to his nearest and dearest. Thankfully, Lukas felt that these texts were just too good to keep to himself, so he has published them in a book, "Die Cops ham mein Handy" (The Cops Have My Phone).

Marco’s story is that of a teenager who, in his free time, spray paints walls, and tries to balance several relationships at a time. He’s a schoolboy torn between a desire for real intimacy, and the struggle of becoming "a real man" – or at least, what he and his young friends imagine a real man is. Above all, he really loves Anna – and Jana, and Lara, and Maria, and Lea.

Watch: Phone Hackers – Britain's Secret Surveillance

Right from the off, we discover that Marco is in a bit of a dilemma. He has really strong feelings for Anna, especially, a girl he knows from school. But he's in a relationship with someone whose feelings he doesn’t want to hurt; at least not too much. That’s why, two hours after sending a routine "I love you, too," he writes a long message to Jana in which he explains how he isn’t good enough for her, and that they'd be better off as friends. It’s almost convincing, until you read the next message, sent to Anna minutes later. "I’m single... I just ended it. Call me!"

There are so many moments when it becomes hard to believe that the messages were written by real, living, breathing people. For example, one evening, Anna begs Marco to let her in to his house because "my hair will get wet and then I won’t be beautiful anymore". And of course, she wants to be beautiful for someone who sends messages like: "I’m here and you’re there, which means one of us is in the wrong place. I love you so much."

The book is a real rollercoaster – brutal, cringeworthy and addictive in equal measure. It's a complex journey through all the fears that a person can have in a relationship. What does it mean if they don't text back all day? Is it because they're really busy or because they hate me? How seriously should I take the hearts and kisses at the end of a text? And, above all, just how many people are they messaging right now?

Not the original screenshots. All screenshots, originally written in German, have been translated in English and recreated.

Above all, this little book shows how easy it is to map out the life of a complete stranger, simply by reading their everyday messages. And this all happened in 2010. The 2017 version would feature a lot more material – from photos and Instagram posts to tweets and Snapchats that could fill volumes.

Adolphi promises he hasn't edited any of the messages. But, "in a few cases", he has re-ordered them in chronological order. "If you text several people at the same time, it turns into a big mess," he tells me. "I saw it as my job to provide the reader with something readable." And, of course, he changed the names of the protagonists, too.

It actually doesn’t make a difference if Marco really is Marco; if Anna really is Anna; and if people called Karge or Pitzi in reality have less stupid nicknames. It's what's inside their star-crossed hearts that matters.

Reading on, Anna is happy that Marco has broken up with Jana, even though she has a boyfriend, called Flori. But Marco is still in touch with Jana – explaining to her that he isn’t completely sure that having a threesome with her and a mutual friend is a good idea. Though that won’t stop him from asking her eight days later to "send me the numbers of women that might be interested," just to keep his options open. In general, everyone that Marco knows seems to be in at least one relationship, but is regularly, and rather openly, arranging to sleep with other people. It’s a sordid web that even Jeremy Kyle would struggle to unweave.

"I was surprised by the brutality of it all," Adolphi says. "In one moment he says goodnight to his girlfriend, but in the next he's negotiating a threesome with someone else."

Whenever you think that you have the social dynamics pinned down, another trapdoor opens and offers you something that you wish you hadn’t seen – especially in the second half of the book. Marco and Paul are planning to meet up with someone called Karo, when the tone of their chummy, brotherly love descends into something more sinister. "Don’t go fucking today or I’ll thump you," writes Marco, before transforming from unfaithful dumbass to potential sex offender. "We’ll lock them in until they open their gobs for our dicks," he writes.

Over the following days, we hear less from Anna as Marco's sexual language becomes more crude. Has she seen through his games? Does she want to get back with Flori, whose car was apparently vandalised? Marco speaks to other people about "wanting something" from Anna, but they stop chatting directly. Their two-week love affair – love is appropriate here because they use it in almost every message they share – seems to be fading. Perhaps it's unfair to judge young people based on the messages they share, but you should probably make an exception for Marco and his gang. xoxo

Dave Chappelle's final stand-up special of the year, Dave Chappelle: Equanimity, is set to hit Netflix on New Year's Eve. Equanimity may be the third of the 2017 trilogy of Chappelle specials, but it's the first to be shot specifically for Netflix—and it looks like he's using the opportunity to try out his new anti-Trump material.

On Thursday, Netflix dropped a full trailer for Equanimity, featuring Dave Chappelle in all his glory, going in on Trump voters in America.

In the two-minute trailer, Chappelle reflects on the 2016 election and how he "felt sorry" for Trump supporters waiting to cast their vote for the Donald.

"I stood with them in line like all Americans are required to do in a democracy—nobody skips the line to vote—and I listened to them," Chappelle says. "I listened to them say naive poor white people things. 'Man, Donald Trump's gonna go to Washington and he's gonna fight for us.'

"I'm standing there thinking in my mind, 'You dumb motherfucker. You are poor. He's fighting for me.'" Chappelle—who Netflix famously paid $60 million for this trio of specials—jokes between rips from what looks like a JUUL.

The special was written and shot a while back, but the material hits particularly close to home in the shadow of Congress passing its tax bill, which isn't exactly designed to help out the lower class.

Give the trailer a watch above, and let Equanimity help you say goodbye to the normalized chaos that was 2017 when the special drops December 31 on Netflix.

As anyone who's been on the internet this year knows, the price of Bitcoin has exploded. The idea of making millions for doing next to nothing makes Americans lose their minds, so it's not surprising that people who had never heard of cryptocurrency a few years (or even months or weeks) ago are now more than willing to invest in it. At least some experts say the fact that consumers are reportedly taking out credit card debt and mortgages to do so suggests a speculative bubble is looming. After all, if you ask any given Bitcoin proponent how blockchain technology works, there's a good chance you'll be met with silence or rage.

But the combination of hype and a general lack of knowledge about what's being invested in seems to have some investors latching onto anything with the words 'Bitcoin' or 'blockchain' in it. Or at least that's the only plausible explanation for why a beverage company saw its shares rise by almost 300 percent after a name change from Long Island Iced Tea Corp. to Long Blockchain Corp.

According to Bloomberg, it's just one of several companies that have rebranded to capitalize on the crypto craze. Not that such a pivot necessarily means a whole lot in particular for Long Blockchain, which appears to remain a company that literally sells lemonade—albeit one that was struggling before it got in on the gold rush.

"As with many of the recently christened crypto companies—a list that includes former makers of juice, sports bras and sofas—Long Blockchain so far has little to show for its aspirations," Bloomberg reported. "It has no agreements with any blockchain firms, and says 'there is no assurance that a definitive agreement with these, or any other entity, will be entered into or ultimately consummated.'"

The main thing this company has done differently at this stage, so far as the outside world can tell, is purchase longblockchain.com. Its original website remains intact and promotes their signature product of Long Island Tea.

Speaking of misleading names, this stuff is apparently non-alcoholic.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

On Tinder, it’s super common to see guys listing their height. The implied reason is that women who are attracted to men actually give a shit about this physical trait. I even once saw a guy list his height on his profile—5’8”—while simultaneously complaining that women cared so much about it. That was definitely a swipe left, but it seems like there’s this perceived obsession that women usually only want to date guys who are taller than them.

So, I decided to ask a bunch of women who are into guys if they actually give a shit. For the record, I’m 5’4” and, as a general rule, won’t seriously date guys who are shorter than me (though I have dated someone the same height as me).

Here’s what other women think about your height:

Relationships are an investment. Women get the short end of the stick in most cases. Men will use us to prove their worth socially… It is only fair we get to do the same because society looks at women with short, unattractive men as being foolish, gold diggers, etc. Why should I take a social blow for a short man when they rarely take social blows being with an ugly woman? They want to judge us on dating sites by photos of our faces and bodies to decide if we're "worthy" of their attention. Well how tall are you? Are you worthy of my attention back? Why are men the only people who get to make ego-based decisions? I have an ego as well.

If you know the man long-term and he's short and you like his personality, there’s no issue there with dating. The issue comes when we can’t make decisions to protect our own egos, when we are being told the egos of unfamiliar men are more valuable than our own. On a format as shallow as Tinder, women are being solely judged on our appearance overall... If you have an issue with telling me your height so I can make a socially conscious decision, then I have an issue with you looking at my face so you can do the same. —Celia, 26

I'm 5'9,” so I'm pretty tall, but I still like to wear heels. My boyfriend is only a few inches taller than me, but he prefers when I wear heels that don't make me look taller than him. I personally don't mind it at all and do it anyway. I've also had a few men I was interested in before tell me that they didn't like that I was taller than them—I think they find it intimidating for some reason. —Sam, 26

Height: It doesn't matter when you're lying down, but significant differences in height do make some couple activities like dancing or taking photos together a little more challenging. Nothing that can't be remedied with a little creativity. Plus, it can be really cute when people are in love and really different heights. If it's like a fling though, and I were choosing for superficial reasons, taller than me is preferable. If you're looking for a significant connection, measurements are not that important, but a one-nighter you might just want to sleep with someone who checks all the boxes in terms of your own idea of what is attractive, which could be tall or short. —Hannah, 28

I’m 5’8,” and my new boyfriend is much taller than my ex. My ex was about my height. I'm a pretty tall girl. Honestly, it’s never a thought to me. Sometimes I see myself almost being like, omg, [my boyfriend] is so much taller than me! But then I'm like, why do I care? Am I joyful in comparison to my ex? I just don't have time or the heart space to look into these things. I just like to hug him, which for playful purposes, I do love the height of [my boyfriend]. But we’re just a more playful couple than my previous relationship so, back to that heart space… don't care. You're hot. —Megan, 24

I’m decently tall—5’7”—and would like for my partner to be taller than me. I’d like it if they were taller than me in heels, too. My last partner was 6’1, and I was happy with that, but the two before him were 5’9. It’s a preference, but not a requirement. And I’m willing to break the preference for Zac Efron or Scott Disick. Generally speaking, I have a type. But I will not rule someone out based on height alone. It may, however, be a contributing factor when paired with other things I don’t like. —Erica, 24

I don’t find height matters personally, like, at all. But some guys have hangups if they are shorter than you. I found they make little comments like when we are dancing or if they wanted a kiss. They would make little apologies or ask if I could avoid wearing high shoes. Personally, I am only 5'3, so it’s pretty rare for me to find anyone shorter. I briefly went out with a guy who came just under my shoulders. I found it was him or others who seemed most affected. The guy I am currently with is much taller than I am, and it gets tricky when cropping or posing for photos, but other than that, no big deal. One guy I liked was almost exactly my height. It was convenient in some ways but not a factor in the attraction. I find it is always handy to have someone tall to help me with household things, but I have friends for that. There are much more important things to look for in a partner. —Laney, 31

I’m 5’7. I have dated dudes shorter than me, my height, and taller than me. I gotta say it was much better when they were my height. Tall is OK and convenient for getting shit off shelves and stuff, but that’s too much person. People don’t need to be that much people. —Kaylin, 26

This article originally appeared on VICE Sweden

Although I was born and raised in Sweden, I'm embarrassed to admit that I've never set foot on a Baltic booze cruise. These unbelievably popular party ships sail around the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Finland, and offer tax free shopping and unlimited drinks and food for the duration of the trip. For 510 Swedish krona (£45), you're set for a full day and night. For only 280 kroner (£25), you won't get the all-you-can-eat-and-drink option, but you can use the hours on board to stock up on every litre of tax-free liquor you're able to carry home. That means a great deal to Swedes and Fins, since alcohol in both countries is expensive and sales are restricted.

According to Visit Stockholm, 11 million people travel around the Baltic Sea every year, many of them on a booze cruise. The idea of being trapped in a confined space with a bunch of drunk strangers has never really appealed to me, but everyone I know is obsessed with these ferries. To find out why, I booked a ferry from Stockholm to Turku, in Finland, and back – a 23 hour weekend return during which I would never have to leave the boat, let alone set foot in Finland.

The author waiting to board the ship.

I board the ferry at 7PM on a Friday evening after work. My fellow travellers are young couples and families with small children, but the majority are groups of drunk mates. One thing they all have in common, however, is their level of excitement. I feel like I’ve turned up late and sober to a house party and will need to work hard to be able to share in the general sense of euphoria.

After a long walk through the ship's corridors, I find my sparsely decorated, windowless cabin. In a poorly considered attempt to trick my mind into thinking there’s daylight streaming in, the room's designer hung a mirror where, in any other room where humans are expected to spend some time, there would be a window. The mirror is framed with some actual curtains.

The author settling into his windowless chamber.

After I've settled in, it’s time to go exploring. My first stop is a fairly obvious one – the all-you-can-eat-and-drink buffet. It would frankly be silly of me not to start this trip by inhaling all the prawns and wine I can get my hands on.

The lighting in the spacious dining room is absolutely migraine inducing. I scamper to the buffet, but before I manage to reach it, a staff member ushers me to a table. I'm squeezed in between four separate groups of sesh lads – one of which is obstructed from view by the impressive wall of empty beer glasses they've managed to build between them and me.

When I finally reach the buffet, I notice that I shouldn't have hoped for any Swedish or Finnish delicacies – on offer is a mildly confusing but interesting mix of international dishes, such as lamb stew and Pad Thai. I pile a little bit of everything on my plate, fill my glass with wine from a tap and head back to my seat.

The ferry's dinning room.

While I'm trying to eat, a guy next to me starts dipping into his extensive repertoire of drunken chants. The lyrics are simple but effective – he mostly just repeats the words “Go Sweden” about 20 times – so it's easy for other guests to join in. Many do.

After moving on to several ear-shattering renditions of popular Swedish folk songs, he finishes by proudly mooning everyone in his vicinity. Finally, a reluctant member of staff walks over to tell him off, and on that note, his set is done.

There's nothing like free white wine on tap.

Two hours into exploring exactly how much unidentifiable free wine I can drink, I notice that other passengers are starting to move towards the back of the ship. There, I soon discover, is the beating heart of this godless vessel – its nightclub.

The venue is massive, with two floors and a stage where a band is playing a medley of inoffensive feel-good tunes. Groups of friends have gathered around in small circles to dance, but you can sense the tension – they're only warming up.

The first dancers of the night take the floor.

Soon, a spontaneous conga line breaks out, and as a crowd starts to gather in front of the stage, it's time for me to get up from my seat too. I'm just in time for the night's headliners, Swedish DJ duo Rebecca & Fiona. From the cheers, screams and hands put up in the air without the duo specifically having to ask for it, it's clear that this is what the night has been leading up to.

The crowd is one hundred percent into all of this, occasionally splashing cheap beer and wine on each other, and me. And then, I hear a call I haven't heard in a long time, which brings me right back to any dance floor and festival field I've spent time on during the noughties – a spontaneous choir of dudes bellows Seven Nation Army's refrain. It's stuck in my head for the rest of the trip.

Rebecca & Fiona.

When the party ends a few hours later, most guests carry themselves back to the restaurant to further test the limits of the all-you-can-eat buffet. I order a pizza, but when it's finished, I realise that I'm more or less alone in the dining hall – most people have headed to their cabins. I decide to do the same.

Hours later, I wake up because the ship is shifting and shaking to the point that I'm preparing to accept my impending death. My whole room seems to wobble, but since it's pitch dark in this miserable pit, it's hard to tell what's going on exactly. I leap for the door, marked by a sliver of light underneath it, and shakily crawl out of my room. I quickly regain my balance and walk further down the corridor, where I find a door leading out on to a balcony.

For the first time since I got on it, I'm breathing fresh air and I'm reminded that this ship is actually sailing through the outside world. I take it all in – the sea, the birds cutting through the grey, Nordic sky and a few of my countrymen holding on to the railing, looking like shit.

It turns out that it's just afternoon, and all that shaking was the ship on its journey back to Sweden. I feel a tinge of sadness that I won't see any of Finland, but I'm well aware that experiencing what another country has to offer – or even just getting from A to B – isn't the point of a party cruise.

This second half of the trip is fairly bleak. It's quiet, and the people who are up and about seem anxious and very hungover. We still have still six hours to kill before we're back in Stockholm. What are we supposed to do now?

Trying to find entertainment in the club.

I head back to the club. It’s not completely deserted but it's boring as hell – there are some kids running around doing cartwheels on stage, and a group of teens who seem just old enough to drink, lying defeated on a few sofas in a corner.

The next two hours are eventless, sad and unbearably long. By now, my fellow travellers have bought all the tax free booze, cigarettes and snus they could ever want – and then some. In the end, most of them shuffle back to the club and, for lack of anything better to do, just sit there.

Watch: VICE UK's 15th Birthday Party

At 4PM the staff try to get some semblance of a party started again, by having a dance group put on a show on stage. But the second the dancers walk off, apathy strikes again. With a couple of more hours to go, I head back to my cabin, get into bed and peer into the darkness until it's announced through the speakers that we've reached Stockholm.

Getting off the boat.

We all gather by the exit – if there's any excitement in the air now, it's because we're finally able to get the fuck off this ship.

Reeking of yesterday’s spilled beer on the subway home, I'm thinking I completely understand why so many people pay to get shit-faced on these ferries. Bottomless drinking, eating and partying while out on international waters is a glorious experience. It's just that there's no escaping your boredom and your hangover, the next day. At that point, you're quite literally lost at sea.

Nearly all transgender people experience gender dysphoria (a disconnect between the gender one identifies with and their body's) in their lives, but for transgender women, that dysphoria is compounded by the sexism inherent in American society, and the way it treats women’s bodies. We cannot use public restrooms without garnering backlash, and many trans women are often shamed by society for diverging from already-high expectations for women’s bodies, from our height to our voices to what’s in our pants.

As a trans woman, I’ve contended with cissexism (sexism against transgender people) amplified by transmisogynoir, the oppression of trans black women, who are subject to some of the heaviest forms of discrimination and violence in our country. And for trans women of all stripes, the compounded nature of sexism and anti-trans discrimination in American society makeds transitioning difficult, to say the least.

But if the narrative surrounding our community is one of constant negativity and despair, we’ll never be allowed to thrive. Many trans women find some refuge against body and gender dysphoria through transition; things like changing the way we wear our hair or specific changes in our bodies can become a beacon of hope. I interviewed five trans women about the parts of their transition they love, those that have helped them see themselves for the women they really are.

Photo by Jay Bury

Eva Thomas, Missouri

When I feel really dysphoric, I hold up a mirror to my face. I look and search for femininity. I look at my face and see women in my family, which makes me realize the legacy of strong black women I'm part of. I look at my lips and see my mother. I look at my eyes and see my grandmother. I look at my nose and see my great-grandmother. Finding femininity in my natural features diminishes my dysphoria and makes me feel a strong sense of pride.

Growing up, I was always told I looked like different men in my family. I fought back by likening myself to our family’s women—and I did this without even realizing how much more my experiences resonated with womanhood. Once, when I was nine, I remember my mother finding an old photo of herself at that same age; my cousins saw it and said, “Wow, you look just like her but with a wig on.” It’s a memory I’ve held onto, and when puberty hit, I relished in it. I watched as my jawline became more square and defined; my hands and feet began to grow, but the rest of my body didn't keep up. Many people said they were disportionate to the rest of my body. It’s something I’ve struggled with.

A couple years ago, I began working out and pushing my body past its limits. I did this to run away from transitioning and hopefully finally bring my body into proportion. I've since worked to lose that muscle mass, but now I see that young kid in high school I once was—with too-large hands and feet and a body too small and skinny to match. But my face hasn’t betrayed me too much throughout all these years. It's the one thing I don't feel as compelled to change quite as much or wish that I could.

I definitely compare myself to cis women way too much, which only leads to my pointing out facial features that don't match "traditional" standards of beauty. But when I think of the women in my family before me, I reclaim my own personal narrative, and position myself in the narrative of womanhood that trans women are so often denied. We have to reclaim our time.

Ada Powers, California

As cliché (for a trans girl) as it may sound, nothing makes me feel happier about my body than my breasts: how they feel on my frame, or nestled against my arms as I fall asleep; how they look in a bra, in a dress, or in someone else's hands; having a bosom to cradle the faces of the people I care about, to raise the eyebrows of my lovers, to demand attention. They make me feel powerful, confident, and most of all, myself, a part of my body I've never had before yet somehow feel joyfully reunited with.

The development of my breasts has been a constant throughout my medical transition, and always a source of high emotion. As my flat pecs first starting aching with a tell-tale breast bud, the fearful thrill it sent through my body confirmed that I did, in fact, want to walk down this path. And then they slowly emerged, small and tender, needing to be hidden under scarves and sweaters. I would check them ten times a day, the way a child might keep returning to the mailbox knowing the toy they ordered is nowhere near yet due to arrive.

As they've grown, changing the shape of my body in small but noticeable ways every few months, they've been a constant encouragement for me to evolve my sense of fashion, find new ways to show them off, attempt outfits I'd been too nervous or dysphoric to try before.

Two years since I first began taking estrogen, my social transition complete, I still check them every morning before I shower, cupping my hand under modest B-cups and using the gaps between my fingers as lines on a ruler to detect another spurt of growth, knowing I'm only a few years into a strange second puberty stuffed into my adulthood. And even as I go about my days more quietly now, my transition now a practiced part of my life, I’m reminded that even the ability to glance nonchalantly in a mirror, seeing only myself without falling into a vortex of wishing and hoping, is a gift I've only recently learned to give myself.

Nicole Lynn Perry, California

Because I served on active duty in the Marines (something I did partially due to my dysphoria), the fact that I’m able to grow my hair out causes me the least amount of dysphoria. I'm able to do whatever I want with my hair now. And it's brought out comparisons to Angela Davis—comparisons that are nothing short of awesome for me, because I'm an activist.

My favorite part of my transition is my activism. Although there are times I feel it shouldn’t be necessary to have to work this hard, I would rather be driven to step out and represent my community than sit back and not do anything. All of the connections I have made both locally and nationally not only give me a community to talk with but also a family that I can reach out to as well.

Jady Morelli, Michigan

The hair on my head has never been a source of dysphoria for me. It’s always been dark, thick and had a nice natural wave. I can style it as I like. That's nice. And my feet, oddly. They were a men’s 10 when I started; they’re a women’s 9 ½ now.

One thing that hormones have fixed and gives me the slightest bit of hope are my eyes. They used to be sunken, sleepy, half-opened slits, and by the magic of taking a few blue and white pills every day, they’re bigger and more feminine than they used to be. They’ve also changed color, from a deep, deep brown to a lighter greenish-brown. What this adds up to is that I look my most feminine in the reflection of my car's rearview mirror. I've also done a bit of voice training, and have eradicated the trigger of my deep voice.

Jenna Porter, Indiana

Jenna. That’s my name. It’s the final destination in a long string of names I’ve gone by throughout my life. I always knew the name I was given at birth wasn’t right for me, so I used my initials, went by nicknames, picked entirely new names out for myself on multiple occasions, once even changed it legally. Despite all the different names I went by, nothing ever stuck, until I realized why: I’m transgender. That brought the previous 25 years into perspective. The life I lived—including the countless names I went by—never felt right because it lacked the femininity I desired deep down. Accepting this fact gave me the freedom to find what I needed, and finding a name that accurately describes me, that portrays what I need it to portray, has easily been the best part of my transition. I will never not be astonished at the joy my name has brought me.

Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) has also played a tremendous role in bringing me joy. HRT has brought on countless changes, but for me, the best by far has been breast development. I’ve always been overweight and, thus, my chest has never been flat, but having a flabby chest due to being overweight is absolutely nothing like having breasts. My chest prior to starting HRT caused me so much dysphoria. It looked and felt nothing like it should. Now, though? I love my chest. The tissue growth, the fat redistribution, the roundness, the feeling that I didn’t have before. My boobs are great—and that’s a direct quote from someone else. They’re beautiful, sensual, everything I’ve always wanted. Femininity that, again, I so desperately desired has finally appeared, and a part of my body that used to cause me so much dysphoria has now become my favorite part. I couldn’t ask for more than that.

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When you want to sue the largest, most powerful companies on the planet, Steve Berman is the guy you call. He forced Jack-in-the-Box to pay $12 million for causing an E. coli outbreak that killed four children. He won a $215 million settlement against Enron for defrauding investors and wiping out employee retirement accounts. He represented auto dealers in a $1.6 billion lawsuit against Volkswagen for cheating on diesel emissions.

Berman is best known, though, for suing big tobacco in the 1990s. At the end of that fight, he helped negotiate a $206 billion settlement from cigarette makers like Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, and Brown & Williamson for causing cancer. It remains the largest legal settlement of its kind in history.

But Berman is now working on a lawsuit that could be even bigger: He is suing five of the world’s most powerful oil companies for causing climate change. He represents Oakland and San Francisco in a lawsuit filed last September demanding that Exxon, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and BP pay billions for sea walls and other defenses against ocean rise.

Just like with tobacco, the case could hinge on whether these companies lied to the public about the dangers of their business model. Berman has evidence that companies like Exxon knew burning oil causes climate change as early as the 1950s. Internally, oil companies took steps to protect their offshore oil rigs and Arctic pipelines from global warming while publicly they denied the science—the same way cigarette makers did research into cancer while denying their product was harmful. “Defendants stole a page from the Big Tobacco playbook,” the lawsuit alleges.

Legally speaking, that argument might not be such a stretch. “The parallels to tobacco are quite clear,” Carroll Muffett, the president of the Washington, DC–based Center for International Environmental Law, told me.

Still, nobody has won a lawsuit like this and the oil companies I contacted didn’t seem to think Berman’s would be any different. “Should this litigation proceed,” a spokesperson for Chevron wrote in an email, “it will only serve special interests at the expense of broader policy, regulatory, and economic priorities.” Other, less biased observers also have doubts. “I’m not that sure actually,” said Martin Olszynski, a University of Calgary law professor who has researched the parallels between oil and tobacco. “It seems obvious that at some point the defendants will say, ‘But look, there was demand for our product.’”

Berman himself failed to win a similar lawsuit in 2012, when a court dismissed his attempt to hold Exxon and about two dozen other fossil fuel producers responsible for the sea rise swallowing an Alaskan village. But a lot has changed since then. Science linking individual corporations to climate change is more sophisticated. Incriminating oil company documents are surfacing. New court decisions—especially a recent ruling against lead paint companies—are removing legal barriers. Suing big oil could be one way to win real environmental gains in the Trump era. “We have the federal government claiming there’s no climate change, we have the EPA rolling back,” Berman told me in an interview from his office on the 33rd floor of a Seattle high-rise. “[We can] use the law to accomplish what politicians won’t do.”

The reason not to dismiss Berman is that he has a history of proving doubters wrong. When he entered the legal fight against tobacco companies in the 1990s, mainstream opinion was that he would be unsuccessful. The owners of brands like Marlboro and Camel had crushed hundreds of lawsuits attempting to link cigarettes to cancer and emphysema. “No one had ever won a tobacco case,” Berman said. His own law partner was wary of getting involved. But in late 1998, the industry surrendered and agreed to pay out hundreds of billions of dollars. The People Vs. Big Tobacco, a book about the case, described Berman as one of the “crucial players.”

The stakes are even higher in his big oil lawsuit. Berman is not just trying to get oil companies to pay for seawalls in the Bay Area. In a broader sense he’s attempting to hold them responsible for endangering all human life on earth. “This is different in kind from anything else,” Timothy Crosland, the director of a UK-based climate law group called Plan B, told me. “Once you get started, you get one case that goes through, this is an avalanche. It’s got the potential really to bring down the fossil fuel companies.”

For insight into Berman’s worldview it helps to go back to his 1960s upbringing in Highland Park, a Chicago suburb. “It was a really evolutionary time,” he said. “I grew up with a mother who was one of the first women to burn her bra.” His dad wanted to be a career Army officer but grew disillusioned by the Vietnam War and ended up running an insurance company. “He kind of became liberal himself,” Berman said.

Others he knew evolved from progressive to militant. They set off bombs and ran from the law. “They were elder brothers of some of my close friends and I’ve never seen them again,” Berman said. Though he’s not sure if they officially belonged to the Weather Underground, the left-wing organization that bombed US government buildings and banks in the 1970s and broke Timothy Leary out of jail, “they were in that genre of people out there doing radical stuff.” Berman chose to embrace the law. “The way to make change is to get trained in what the establishment does and make change through the process,” he later told the publication Super Lawyers.

Berman went to law school and moved out to Seattle, where he got hired by a firm that mostly did defense work for companies in industries like insurance. Berman was part of a smaller team at the firm that sued companies instead. In 1993, he met with a parent whose child had lost a kidney after eating at Jack in the Box and getting food poisoning. “I remember sitting in the room thinking, ‘This could have been my kid,’” he said. “I was so choked up I could barely talk.” His superiors at the firm didn’t want to take the case. “So I said, ‘I’m out of here.”

Berman and a colleague Carl Hagens formed their own firm, Hagens Berman. He’d wanted to set out on his own for some time and here was the perfect excuse. Two years later they settled with Jack in the Box for $12 million.

That case was tiny compared to what came next. In 1996, Washington’s attorney general hired Berman’s new firm to represent the state in a wave of public health lawsuits against tobacco companies. Soon Berman represented 13 states. “The quiet youthful [lawyer] worked brutal hours to make up for his firm’s small size, arriving at his office at six AM and staying until nine or ten PM six days a week,” reads the book Civil Warriors: The Legal Siege on the Tobacco Industry. His law partner was skeptical, according to Berman. “He was afraid we would lose the case,” he said. “If we devoted all our time to a losing effort and we didn’t have any income we could go under.”

It was a legitimate concern. By then hundreds of tobacco lawsuits had failed. Cigarette makers argued smoking was a personal choice. They pointed to research—often funded by the tobacco industry —casting doubt on the link between cigarettes and cancer. But several factors aligned to make the industry vulnerable to litigation. A series of whistleblowers revealed that tobacco companies knew smoking is addictive and causes cancer. Secret corporate documents showed companies did market research on how to target children with ads and branding. Mississippi Attorney General Mike Moore filed a lawsuit demanding tobacco companies pay the healthcare costs of smokers who’d become sick. And by 1998, 46 states were demanding the same.

Berman gave the opening statement at the trial in Washington in front of hundreds of people who had crowded into a Seattle courthouse. “I had a big poster that said, ‘The Industry’s Five Big Lies,’ and I went through each one,” he recalled. By then the industry was ready to surrender. Berman, Moore and others had been holding meetings with its leaders to negotiate the terms. On November, 1998, Big tobacco officially agreed to pay $206 billion to 46 states. It received immunity from lawsuits similar to the ones led by Moore and Berman. Yet it was still a massive victory. “We were pretty damn happy,” he said.

How can you prove that oil dug out of the ground by Exxon is causing a tiny Alaskan village to disappear?

Berman now had a game plan for defeating powerful industries: Accuse them of misleading the public to protect revenues, then find plaintiffs who are suffering the consequences. In the late 2000s, he heard about a coastal village in Alaska called Kivalina that would have to be relocated because of rising oceans. The move could cost up to $400 million, according to his lawsuit, and the Army Corps of Engineers said climate change is to blame. Berman sued Exxon, Chevron, BP, ConocoPhillips, and 20 other fossil fuel producers on behalf of the villagers, arguing these companies spread doubt and confusion about climate change knowing communities such as Kivalina are in danger. Exxon, for instance, had run full-page New York Times ads about “unsettled science.”

“You’re not asking the court to evaluate the reasonableness of the conduct… You’re asking a court to evaluate if somebody conspired to lie,” Berman told The Atlantic at the time.

Berman flew to Kivalina at one point. The village is built on an island off the west coast of Alaska. Its 400 or so indigenous residents had watched helplessly as shoreline disappeared, winter storms got fiercer, and waves lapped closer to the school. There was a pervasive feeling of despair. “The island is sad, sad that it’s going away,” he said. The magnitude of climate change hit him on the flight home. “You could see acres of dying trees from the pine bark beetle,” he said. “That was really striking.” A federal court dismissed the lawsuit, deciding that who’s to blame for climate change is a job best left to entities like Congress or the White House. But the real issue was causation. How can you prove that oil dug out of the ground by Exxon is causing a tiny Alaskan village to disappear?

“There is no realistic possibility of tracing any particular alleged effect of global warming to any particular emissions by any specific person, entity, group at any particular point in time,” wrote US District Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong. It’s a tough obstacle to surmount. “In climate change there’s a lot of diffuse actors,” said the University of Calgary’s Olszynski. “It’s not just the oil companies.”

But there are several reasons Berman’s new lawsuit against big oil could be more successful. Whereas Kivalina was filed in federal court, he wants to represent the cities of San Francisco and Oakland in California state court, which he thinks may be less likely to decide the case raises political questions outside of its jurisdiction. And, he added, “Some people believe that there are more conservative judges on the federal bench.” The defense team for big oil is fighting to get the suit heard federally. The case was “going to be mired down for the next three or four months in a procedural battle,” Berman predicted.

There have also been big leaps in climate science. Researchers like Richard Heede have calculated that close to two-thirds of greenhouse gases emitted over the last 150 years can be traced back to just 90 companies. Exxon, Chevron, BP, Shell and ConocoPhillips are in the top ten. “We have better science,” Berman argued. “We think causation will be easier to prove.”

Financial damages from climate change are also more quantifiable. San Francisco estimates sea-level rise could threaten $49 billion in property. “The major coastal cities in America and abroad have people worried about this,” he said. “That’s a big advancement since the Kivalina case.”

Incriminating oil industry documents, meanwhile, continue to surface. A report released in mid-November by the Center for International Environmental Law has new evidence that big oil was warned about the risks of global temperature rise nearly 50 years ago. “There seems to be no doubt that the potential damage to our environment could be severe,” explains a 1969 study prepared for the American Petroleum Institute by two Stanford scientists. This wasn’t a one-off thing. “From the late 1960s onwards up into the 80s those warnings from their own scientists grew more and more urgent,” Muffett, the November report’s co-author, told me. An internal Exxon memo from 1981 states that carbon emissions could “produce effects which will indeed be catastrophic—at least for a substantial fraction of the earth’s population.” By then the company had calculated that reducing its carbon footprint would hurt revenues. Internally, the industry began to protect itself from climate change. Companies designed taller offshore oilrigs and pipelines able to withstand melting permafrost. “[They] had a responsibility to warn the public,” Muffett said. Instead, Exxon, BP, Chevron and Shell formed a group known as the Global Climate Coalition that argued climate science “is not well understood” into the 90s.

These are clear parallels to the cancer-denying days of big tobacco. But in recent years the comparison has become harder to make. Big oil now publicly admits the existence of climate change. “Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is a global issue that requires global engagement and action,” a Chevron spokesperson wrote to me. Berman must convince a court that earlier industry denial campaigns created lasting damage. Even with better science, questions of responsibility still loom. “In the case of global climate change, a molecule of carbon is literally around the world in seven days,” Scott Segal, an attorney who defends energy companies, told the Washington Post in July. “The requisite causation needed for nuisance suits is missing and unprovable.”

That’s how the law has traditionally viewed things. Yet a recent ruling in California against lead paint companies suggests the law’s view on causation is evolving. “This may not sound like it has anything to do with climate change,” Olszynski told me, “but it does.” For 17 years, three paint companies—ConAgra, NL Industries, and Sherwin-Williams—argued in court that the lead paint they manufactured couldn’t be linked to specific houses where people got sick. But last month the California Court of Appeals ruled that their marketing “implied lead paint was safe,” even though the companies knew it was not. “That’s a really important point,” Olszynski explained. It could mean there’s a stronger case that oil companies are legally responsible for sea-rise damage in San Francisco and Oakland. They marketed and sold a product that they knew is causing climate change.

You could make the same argument about the coal industry. Or carmakers such as General Motors. “If the oil company took the barrel of oil out of the ground but it was consumed in the car, how do you apportion liability?” Olszynski asked. But he thinks that the legal fight against tobacco companies provides a case study for how these types of challenges can be beaten. “Guys like Steve were like visionaries,” he argued. “That’s an important story because it talks about the speed to which the legal system can change.”

As far as Berman is concerned the story isn’t over. On climate change he thinks it’s just getting started. If a judge decides his case can be heard—a big if, considering that no lawsuit against big oil has made it to that stage—then Berman can call on Exxon, BP, Shell, ConocoPhillips and Chevron to make internal reports and research into climate change available. “[I’m] dying to get to those documents,” he said. “I’m convinced they’re going to be smoking hot.”

As our interview came to a close I asked Berman to describe the best-case scenario for all this. “Imagine if I could get ten or 15 cities to all sue and put the same pressure on the oil companies that we did with tobacco companies and create some kind of massive settlement,” he said. He acted as if it was the first time he’d thought of the idea. But I got the feeling it wasn’t.

Geoff Dembicki is the author of Are We Screwed? How a New Generation is Fighting to Survive Climate Change. Follow him on Twitter.