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Holy Shit, Netflix Is Actually Making a 'Fast & Furious' Cartoon

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The Fast & Furious franchise is already basically a cartoon, starring human action figures who battle zombie cars, divert torpedos with their bare hands, and adhere to the laws of physics about as well as Roadrunner and Coyote. But now it looks like the series is going to get a real, honest-to-God cartoon treatment. On Monday, Netflix announced that it has greenlit—insert car joke here—the first official animated series based on the Fast & Furious films, Variety reports.

The cartoon will center around Tony, the teenage cousin of Vin Diesel's character, Dom Toretto, who apparently decides to follow his cousin's unique career path from simple VCR thief to full-blown secret agent after he "and his friends are recruited by a government agency to infiltrate an elite racing league serving as a front for a nefarious crime organization bent on world domination," according to Variety's synopsis.

Image via Netflix

Netflix will partner with DreamWorks Animation for the new project, the latest in a long string of collaborations between the streaming company and the animation studio that's already brought us Guillermo del Toro's Trollhunters and the Madagascar spinoff All Hail King Julien, among others. Diesel will executive produce the series, alongside fellow Fast & Furious producers Neal Moritz and Chris Morgan.

"We are thrilled to take our fantastic partnership with DreamWorks Animation to the next level with new opportunities from the vast library of Universal Pictures," Netflix's VP of Kids and Family programming, Melissa Cobb, said in a statement. "The Fast & Furious franchise is a global phenomenon beloved by audiences of all ages, and we can’t wait to get started on the new animated series that will capture the action, heart, humor, and global appeal of the feature films."

The show is still in its early stages of development and doesn't have an official release date yet, but between the upcoming sequels and this new cartoon, our children will probably be watching the car-related hijinks of some Toretto descendant long after we are all dead and buried. The next three Fast & Furious movies are already slated to roll out in 2019, 2020, and 2021, starting with Hobbs and Shaw, a spinoff starring The Rock and Jason Statham, so buckle up, everybody.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.


This Neurologist Found Out What Happens to Our Brains When We Die

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This article originally appeared on VICE Germany

If we had paid closer attention to The Simpsons 18 years ago, the election of Donald Trump might not have come as such a shock. And if German neurologist Jens Dreier had just binged enough Star Trek: The Next Generation, he could have already known the outcome of his groundbreaking research, which the sci-fi series predicted 30 years ago.

Dreier works at the Charité Hospital in Berlin, one of Germany's leading university hospitals. In February, the 52-year-old and his colleague, Jed Hartings, published a study that details what happens to our brain at the point of death. It describes how the brain's neurons transmit electrical signals with full force one last time before they completely die off. Though this phenomenon, popularly known in the medical community as a "brain tsunami", had previously only been seen in animals, Dreier and Hartings were able to show it in humans as they died. Their work goes on to suggest that in certain circumstances, the process could be stopped entirely, theorising that it could be done if enough oxygen is supplied to the brain before the cells are destroyed.

Soon after their discovery, the two researchers also found out that a 1988 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation shows chief physician Beverly Crusher trying to revive Lieutenant Tasha Yar, while clearly describing the exact processes the neurologists have been trying to understand for years. I spoke to Dreier about their discovery and how it feels to be beaten by a TV show by three decades.

VICE: How do you study the brain of a dying patient?
Jens: We specifically monitor the brain of patients who are in intensive care to check if they're at risk of having a stroke. By using modern neuro-monitoring, which can record brain activity with great precision, we can see exactly what happens to the brain at the point of death for those patients who sadly don't make it.

What happens exactly?
About 30 seconds after we go into cardiac arrest, our bodies sort of switch into an energy-saving mode by shutting down all the nerve cells. But once we become almost entirely non-functional, our cells come out of their inhibited state and release all their stored energy, which ripples throughout the brain.

And that leads to the brain tsunami?
Yes. That initial wave of sudden electromagnetic energy eventually causes the cells in the brain to break down. Since we began studying this phenomenon in 1993, our ultimate goal has been to either prevent it from happening or slow it down enough so the patient can continue to be treated. But, unfortunately, there are always complications that make it very difficult to work fast enough.

So how did you find out that an episode of Star Trek had predicted your findings 30 years ago?
My colleague, Jed Hartings, brought it to my attention after watching the scene and noticing how similar it is to our work. My best guess is that the creators of Star Trek must have found research at the time that detailed a similar process in animals. The first person to research these sort of brain waves was a Brazilian neurophysiologist who conducted studies on rabbits in the 1940s. All we've done is show it in humans, which has taken this long because medical research in general is an incredibly slow process.


WATCH: The UK's Fake Xanax Epidemic


Did it bother you that Star Trek: The Next Generation seemed to get there before you?
No. The process in Star Trek doesn't go into much detail, but does lay out the general principle really well. Our research is important because we're not only showing that the process happens, but also how we might be able to stop it.

Can you use your research to explain near-death experiences?
It's quite possible that the increased brain activity could lead to people seeing a bright light or experiencing tunnel vision. If that person is then brought back before the cells are destroyed, it's entirely possible that they could remember what they saw. But I don't think any of us will ever know until we experience it ourselves.

Are you fascinated by death?
The more I've studied it, the more I've realised that, as a society, we don't talk about it enough. Often when people lose someone close to them, they’re not very well prepared for it. It's a basic part of the process of life, and may even end up being a positive experience.

This article originally appeared on VICE DE.

How City Drug Gangs First Used Teens to Take Over British Towns

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In 1999, back when Blockbuster was booming and the world was collectively freaking out about Y2K, a crack and heroin-selling crew called "The Londoners" started muscling-in on Brighton's lucrative street drug market. In doing so, they were to change the British drug trade forever.

This crew was different from the other street sellers in Brighton, mainly a mix of well-integrated, home-owning Liverpool gangs and a ragtag collection of local heroin user-dealers, some of whom sold the Big Issue. The new boys of the seaside city, however, were young black guys who commuted from Brixton to Brighton and back each day. Operating under a single phone number and managed by elders back home, they had begun taking over heroin users' council flats to utilise as drug selling bases.

Armed with mobile phones, they sold by appointment only to groups of drug users in Brighton's city centre. Their wraps were high purity and their sales technique was strictly business: no real names, no IOUs and no pointless chit-chat.

Despite regular claims that the drug enterprise model now known as "county lines" – where city drug gangs send teenagers away to sell product in smaller towns – is a brand new type of crime that’s gone largely unreported, this tactic was already a well-oiled machine operating in Brighton at the beginning of the millennium. Its expansion since then has left a trail of destruction across the UK, including the mass exploitation of highly vulnerable young people and addicted drug users, increased violence and the proliferation of 24/7 drug markets providing cheaper, higher purity crack and heroin.

Which leads to the question: why was such a pernicious trend ignored at a national level for so long?

Photo: Lev Dolgachov / Alamy Stock Photo

Pete, now a care worker in his late thirties, was addicted to heroin and crack in Brighton, and was a daily street buyer between 2001 to 2008. "I was buying crack and heroin from 15 and 16-year-old south London boys on BMXs on the strip in 2001," says Pete. "It was well-established by then. I was only 20 at the time, but even I had pangs of guilt about buying off them. I thought, 'Fuck, you’re young.'

"We used to call them the 'away day boys'. They were all working shifts. They would come down on the train from Croydon and Brixton, get off at Preston Park and set up flats with heroin users. They were industrious and uber-reliable. Most of the other dealers in Brighton were a bit of a shambles; most of them stopped selling by 9PM or had their phones turned off. But this lot were 24/7 – you could buy at 4AM, no problem."

Pete knew the names of the dealers who were supplied from Liverpool, and even their partners' names and where they lived. But the London crews operated "like a faceless machine".

"I never knew their real names – they had funny street names, like 'Ice' and 'Ninja'. They were young black kids and all their customers were white. They despised us. They used to spit the drugs out on the floor and laugh at us crawling around for them," says Pete. "But they did three bags for £50 and it was better quality than the Brighton lot."

Brighton wasn't the only destination for England's original county lines gangs. By the second half of the 2000s, drug sellers commuting from London were well-known fixtures on the streets of other southern coastal towns, such as Bournemouth, Worthing and Ipswich. The spread of young city boys selling hard drugs out of town was reflected in the music at the time, by artists such as Joe Black, who spent time in jail for dealing heroin and crack in Reading, and who was openly rapping about "going cunch" in 2008.

It wasn't just heroin and crack these gangs imported into the countryside, but also violence and gang culture: the expansion of drugs into rural and coastal areas was signposted by a rise in supplanted urban violence. It was no coincidence, for example, that the rise of London gangs selling in Southend led to a steep rise in stabbings and shootings

In 2007, a year after 24-year-old south Londoner Jimoh Plunkett was killed after being caught in the crossfire in a shoot-out between rival London gangs at Ipswich's Zest nightclub, police acknowledged they were struggling to cope with waves of young dealers commuting from London to sell crack and heroin in the Suffolk town. As soon as one crew was arrested, fresh faces would arrive in their place, selling from the same SIM card.

The more that gangs expanded into the countryside, the younger the crews seemed to get. In a 2008 article in the Ipswich Star headlined "Army of teens dealing crack and heroin", Detective Chief Inspector Mark Jepson warned that over a third of Class A drug dealers arrested in Ipswich were under 21, with some as young as 15, and the majority were from London. One of the young Londoners dragged into the county lines game in Ipswich was Kirsha Dyer, the sister of former professional footballer Kieron Dyer, jailed for almost five years for conspiracy to sell heroin and crack.

DCI Jepson was one of the first senior officers to openly warn that some of the dealers being sent to work out of London may not simply be in the game to get rich quick, but were instead being exploited. "You could almost class some of these youngsters as victims," he said at the time. "They may have incurred drug debts… and the only way to pay that debt off is to bring drugs into the town. A number will plead guilty at the first opportunity because it gets them out of the system. Otherwise, they could suffer further problems if they return, because not only are they still in debt, but they don't have the drugs or money."

He could not have been more accurate. While police forces around the UK issued public warnings to city dealers to stay off their patch, and devoted a huge amount resources to tackling the expanding numbers of dealers sent out of town, no one seemed willing or able to join the dots. It would be several years before the reality behind going country – its rapidly rising pervasiveness and the fact so many exploited people were being locked up instead of helped – would be accepted.

Photo: Aleksei Gorodenkov / Alamy Stock Photo

In 2015, a groundbreaking piece of research into the links between gang involvement and young people going missing, and an intelligence report published by the National Crime Agency, shifted what was now being called "county lines" into public awareness. Now, after heavy coverage in the media, county lines is being investigated by MPs, is the subject of Home Office guidance and the focus of a new anti-violence strategy.

But all this has come too late for many. When the Londoners were taken out by Brighton police in 2000, only to be swiftly replaced by another crew from the capital, two of them turned out to be school-age kids: a 16-year-old caught with £6,000 cash who was given 12 months probation for dealing heroin and crack, and 15-year old called Tunde Allimi, also charged with dealing heroin and crack. Allimi was unable to appear in court because he had died two months before his trial, killed back home while riding pillion on a motorbike, being chased by police who wrongly thought it was stolen. Meanwhile, the unfortunate heroin user whose house they had "cuckooed" – taken over to sell from – was given an eight-year jail sentence for his troubles.

Victor Marshall, now a retired DSI working at the Police Superintendent’s Association, was head of Brighton’s Drugs and Crime Unit when the Londoners were taken out. He told me that what he was tackling 18 years ago was no different to what people now call county lines.

So why does he think it took so long for the government and national police agencies to get to grips with it? Marshall says county lines were perhaps allowed to flourish undetected at a national level for so long because when the regional crime squads made way for the Serious Organised Crime Squad (the predecessor to the NCA, which ran from 2006 to 2013), local forces became less able to share their problems and get assistance. SOCA's remit was more angled at international crime, and so issues like county lines fell into a policing "void".

Alan Caton, a retired superintendent and current chair of Islington Safeguarding Children Board, was Ipswich's police commander in the mid-2000s. He agrees that a lack of police co-ordination at a national level meant police and the government were "slow off the mark" in dealing with county lines. "We were all dealing with it in isolation, we just dealt with what we were confronted with – we had no idea of the bigger national picture," he says. "Could it have been dealt with sooner? Yes, it could have – and should have – been done sooner, but it wasn't."

But this wasn’t the only reason county lines was left to thrive unchecked for almost two decades. The possibility that young heroin and crack dealers, or people whose homes were used as drug dens, could actually be victims does not fit into the accepted black-and-white narrative which says everyone involved in the drug trade is pure evil. This is why it took so long for the authorities, blinded by a moral crusade, to get their heads around the issue.

Crime experts I have spoken to say county lines was only able to be taken seriously at a national level because of the shift in government and police priorities, towards issues such as child sexual exploitation, child trafficking and vulnerability, rather than simply enforcement. But like grooming, the issue of county lines was ignored for too long – maybe because it was an issue where the victims came from some of the poorest neighbourhoods in the UK.

From the arrival of the Londoners in Brighton, and the discovery of two schoolboys from Brixton selling crack and heroin in a seaside drug den, it has taken nearly two decades for the government to start making policy to tackle the problems wrought by the ongoing expansion of the big city drug trade out into the shires, during which time thousands of young, exploited drug dealers and vulnerable drug users have been jailed.

@Narcomania

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

The Teens Risking Their Lives to 'Surf' On Trains and Buses

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Owen is 16 years old and obsessed with his new hobby: clinging onto the roofs of buses and trains, and riding them through the streets of London. With over 7,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel, "Trickster", Owen is becoming one of the "faces" of the UK train surfing scene – not something you really want to be, given the fact police don't look too kindly on the way he spends his free time.

The college student got onto the "endangering your life for fun" path last year, starting out by climbing cranes, before moving onto riding buses. "I went bus surfing down Regent's Street – that was the first time," he tells me. Soon, Owen was looking for new challenges, and after seeing a video of people climbing onto the roof of a train he thought he'd try his luck.

"It depends on the space you have: if you have a lot of room to spread out your bodyweight, then you can balance yourself, but if you’re in a space where there’s not, you have to hold on," he says of what happens after you've clambered up onto the roof of a moving train. "You're just pumped up; it relieves a lot of adrenaline. Once, I hung off an Overground train. Afterwards, I realised it was one of the stupidest things I'd done."

Owen films his videos using a GoPro ­– and that time on the Overground, the camera caught his dramatic chase away from the police. "It was a lot of fun, because as the video stopped the police were on the way," he says. "I wasn't in the mood to get arrested, so I jumped over the tracks and cleared the electric rail."

Owen made it away that time, but a year into the surfing lifestyle his hobby has come at a cost. The second time he bus surfed down Regent's Street, he was arrested, and this January he was convicted of endangering the safety of a person conveyed by the railway after train surfing.

Owen's train surfing, he tells me, is driven by his desire to remove himself from the problems in his hometown. "The area I grew up in is not the nicest of areas," he explains. "I like to go and get my life out of that area and to get that adrenaline through surfing rather than carrying knives.”

From Stratford, east London, Owen's reasoning might at first seem like an odd excuse. But research by Network Rail last year found that youth trespassing on the railways is more prevalent in areas with higher socio-economic deprivation.

Despite Owen’s certainty that train surfing isn’t as dangerous as, say, carrying a knife, it’s thought that the crime carries a relatively high fatality risk. Official figures are difficult to come by; experts say that deaths from train surfing are often simply recorded as deaths on a railway – from falling from the roof into the path of an approaching train, or being electrocuted on the tracks.

This "hobby" isn't new. Railway companies and the British Transport Police have been warning, on and off, about the dangers of train surfing for years. In 2003, a coroner in Sussex condemned the pastime after an 18-year-old labourer, Thomas Clarke, died after climbing onto the roof of a moving train while on his way home from Guy Fawkes Night celebrations. On New Year's Day last year, 17-year-old British teen, Nye Frankie Newman – part of a well-known free-running group, whose antics include train surfing – died in a train accident on the Paris Metro, rumoured to have been surfing-related.

Bus surfing via Ally Law YouTube

These days, however, the train surfers aren't just chasing the adrenaline rush; they’re also chasing YouTube hits.

Some 22,000 people had watched Harris Ahmed's video of him train surfing in London, while blurting out excited squawks of "swear down, man's a daredevil" and "this is mad; bro, this is just awesome".

Las year, Ahmed was convicted of endangering the safety of a person conveyed by the railway after uploading a video of himself train surfing in Brentwood, Essex – a video which has since been deleted. In court, he admitted to two further offences of train surfing.

Like Owen, 18-year-old Ahmed’s entry into train surfing began on impulse rather than as a planned criminal activity. While waiting for his train one day, he tells me, he just decided to hop on top of the carriage rather than go inside.

"I'd bought a ticket and everything, it wasn’t even planned," he says. "It's a feeling that you can’t describe. It was adrenaline pumping, it was excitement, a rush – and then I thought, 'Why not film it?'" He maintains that the first time he train surfed, it wasn’t for the views. "It was for the excitement. I was caught up in that moment."

A few weeks later, after he uploaded the video onto YouTube under the title "London train surfing escape", police arrived at his house and arrested him. "My parents weren't happy – they were shocked. I didn’t tell them, they found out about it from YouTube," he says. "I don’t see it as being a criminal."

Recent figures show that trespassing on the railways has reached a ten-year high, with 8,000 people in 2016 risking their lives on Britain's train tracks. Young people, like Owen and Ahmed, are the most likely to engage in this kind of risk-taking behaviour.

Inspector Steve Webster of the British Transport Police oversaw the case involving Ahmed, and disagrees that his actions were not criminal. "Not only is train surfing dangerous, it is against the law, and we will always investigate and look to prosecute," he says, adding, "I am stunned that people think [uploading videos of themselves train surfing] is a clever idea, particularly in cases where they use selfie sticks dangerously close to the overhead power lines, which conduct some 25,000 volts of electricity."

Despite their experiences, Owen and Ahmed are both reluctant to acknowledge the dangerous side of train surfing. "I know the extent of my limits," Ahmed, who is now studying media at college, insists. "I was holding on with both hands."

Owen says: "I'm not harming anyone else by doing what I’m doing."

For those dealing with the impact of train surfing and trespassing on a daily basis, though, the reality is somewhat different. Allan Spence, Head of Passenger and Public Safety at Network Rail, has seen the often devastating results of a split-second decision to jump on top of a train.

"Somebody is train surfing because they want some kind of excitement out of it, but the impact on others because of that selfishness is huge," he says. "It's selfishness for a cheap thrill."

The increase in rail trespassing has prompted Network Rail to carry out a series of outreach programmes in schools and community groups, warning young people of what can happen when they play on the railways. "When people see footage of train surfing in other countries, they may not realise the differences," says Spence. "Our bridges, our structures around the railway, have very tight structures: someone riding on the top is very likely to get hit. There are very real dangers."

Dr Patrick Waterson believes a lack of awareness around the dangers of the railway among young people contributes to teenage trespassing. The Loughborough University academic in Human Systems and Complex Factors undertook focus groups with young people about a series of videos designed to help their understanding of rail safety, and was left shocked by the lack of knowledge teens had.

"They know it’s dangerous, but they have no idea about the voltage," he says. "It's the amount of voltage that could actually power a whole house, but they underestimate the risk." Waterson adds that the lack of understanding among focus groups was worse in urban areas, and believes rail safety should form part of the national curriculum. "It's not covered," he says. "Fire and road safety, personal safety, internet use – they all are, but rail safety should be there."

For Owen, his dealings with the law might have succeeded in reducing the appeal of train surfing in London – but they haven't put him off risking his life altogether. Now, he's planning to venture further afield, with trips to Paris and Dubai, and the many climbing opportunities those cities hold.

@susannahkeogh

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

With Her Last Corgi Dead, Queen Elizabeth’s Rule Is Truly Ending

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I am very, very concerned that the non-British world is not taking the death of a 14-year-old small dog seriously enough.

Willow, Queen Elizabeth’s corgi passed away earlier this month. Buckingham palace released a statement saying it will not comment on the matter, which, in elderly English royal lady-speak, is basically an Instagram slideshow with an essay underneath about the power friendship.

This is not her majesty’s first rodeo, and by rodeo I mean visit to the pet cemetery. She’s had over 30 corgis throughout her reign, and this is the first time in eight decades she doesn’t have one. In order to explain the significance of Willow’s death, let me spin you a yarn of the former corgis.

It all started when Queen Elizabeth’s father, the Duke of York, ran over a little girl’s corgi and through a weird chain of apology presents and thank you notes, ended up with a dog of his own. He gave the new corgi, Dookie, to his wife, maybe because he didn’t like having a reminder of the time he murdered a thing. Elizabeth, aged nine, was rather taken. She finally got her own corgi at 18 and called it Susan, which is a bad name for a dog, but when you’re growing up in Buckingham and can realistically only name your own children after former monarchs or apostles, Susan is practically Discobaby69. Elizabeth was so attached to Susan that she decided she only wanted little Susans, so she began breeding her. As the genetic origin of the small-dog clan, Susan’s technical breeding title was the “foundation bitch," but I also suspect it’s how the Queen referred to her after five to seven gin and tonics. As in, "You're my girl, Susan. you're my rock. You're my foundation, bitch.”

Susan went on to be the matriarch to over 30 corgis and later, dorgis (a result of Princess Anne’s dachshund taking a dip into the breeding pool), but they receive less attention publicly, perhaps because unlike their owners they offer too much genetic diversity.

The Queen greeted by British corgi fans. Photo via CP/Press Association Images

Queen Elizabeth’s corgis have gone with her on royal visits, been featured in an Olympic broadcast and been photographed by Annie Leibovitz. In short, as far as I can tell, corgis are basically the only thing that have ever made the Queen smile. But who don't they make smile, you wonder? Everyone. Everyone else who has met them, hates them.

The OG Susan once bit the palace clockwinder. Susan’s descendants have attacked policemen, footmen, and, in a fit of amateur amputation, chewed off the ear of Princess Beatrice’s dog. The Queen herself was actually bitten when she tried to break up a fight amongst her corgis. And we’re not just talking about two corgis fighting—ten of her dogs were brawling when she entered the fray. What caused the unrest is unknown, but let’s just say the corgi psychologist they previously hired was ineffective.

And these are just the physical wounds.

When, in a 2012 BBC documentary, Prince Charles was shown a picture of himself and Susan, he was (typically) less than emotional, saying, “I think her name might be Susan but my mama would probably tell me I was wrong.” This was his childhood pet. It’s not like he’s not a Dog Person, because he grew up to have his own. Considering his mother’s extreme fondness for her dog, I suspect Charles played second fiddle to the foundation bitch as a child and I would speculate that he resents her for it. Furthermore, when Prince William was asked about the dogs, he said he wasn’t sure how Queen Elizabeth “coped” with them. Again, an odd choice of words regarding a beloved pet.

Finally, Prince Harry expressed sheer annoyance that at his fiance’s first interaction—the dogs lay on Meghan Markle's feet pleasantly, whereas he had only ever been barked at.

It’s possible that the corgis just hated men, but I think the truth is that they were bad dogs and the Queen had no interest in training them. Everyone else had to bow to her and address her as Your Majesty. While that has its perks, I think she liked that someone, or something, didn’t obey her. What I’m trying to say is, if you have to genetically engineer a creature to disobey you, you have a good life.

And what more of her life is left now that Willow is gone? She stopped breeding the corgis in the mid-2000s, stating that she doesn’t want them to live in a world without her. Given the corgis’ rapport with everyone else, this seems less like an act of selfishness than simply understanding they would been shot on site without her around. By outliving them, she has indeed succeeded in protecting them. But it still begets the question, by how much does she intend on outliving them by?

It’s hard to say what’s next for our beloved Queen following Willow’s death exactly. Many people experience depression following the death of a pet, and while she has her grandson’s nuptials approaching in May, I’m sure she would have preferred to take Willow as a date instead of her husband. She relied on her dogs, and they certainly relied on her. But then, so do a lot of actual people. She’s been the figurehead of the British Empire pre-dating the Great Depression. She’s also the head of state to former colonies worldwide, including Canada’s.

With all the dark shit that goes along with that (still ongoing) legacy, I wouldn’t be surprised if she prefers to be remembered as a devoted dog mom instead.

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Two Arrests Ordered After Lynch Mob Kills Canadian Man in Peru

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A Peruvian judge issued orders on Monday for the arrests of two men suspected of being involved with the lynch mob killing of a Canadian man, Sebastian Woodroffe.

Woodroffe, 41, of British Columbia, had gone to Peru initially on a quest years ago to study plant medicine in hopes of becoming an addictions counsellor. But last week, after a beloved healer who was part of an Indigenous group, 81-year-old Olivia Arévalo, was shot dead in the Ucayali region, locals accused Woodroffe of murdering her. His name and face were printed on a wanted poster.

A day after her death, a cell phone video captured a lynch mob attacking Woodroffe, dragging him by a noose around his neck on the ground as a group of people watched. Peruvian officials referred publicly to the killing as a “lynching.” Woodroffe's body was found in a makeshift grave.

Arévalo was part of healing centre that offers ayahuasca retreats, Temple of the Way of Light; Woodroffe was one of her patients.

The head of a prosecutor group in Ucayali, Ricardo Jimenez, said Arévalo’s family believes Woodroffe killed the respected shaman because she refused to conduct an ayahuasca-related ritual on him, according to Reuters. Arévalo was part of the Shipibo-Conibo tribe.

On his 2013 Indiegogo page to fund his travels to Peru, Woodroffe listed his intention to study with a Shipibo plant healer. “I feel responsible trying to support this culture and retain some of their treasure in me and my family, and share it with those that wish to learn,” Woodroffe wrote on the page. “I feel this is my path of being a responsible, accountable human being.”

A friend of Woodroffe’s in Canada, Yarrow Willard, expressed disbelief surrounding the accusations against his friend by village people in Ucayali. He told CBC Woodroffe never owned a gun or talked about anything related and described him as “a gentle person.” But, he said that Woodroffe had returned from Peru “troubled” after taking ayahuasca.

In a statement about Woodroffe’s death, Global Affairs Canada said, “We are aware of this case and actively seeking further information.”

Peruvian officials are also investigating Arévalo’s death. Tensions in the Amazon have been increasing as other Indigenous people’s killings have gone unsolved.

According to Jimenez, no one witnessed Arévalo’s murder, though locals accused Woodroffe. Her body was found with gunshot wounds nearby her home. No murder weapon has surfaced as of yet. A theory investigators are looking into involves another foreign national killing her due to a personal debt.

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The New 'Venom' Trailer Finally Gives Us a Look Tom Hardy's Terrifying Venom

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On Monday night, Sony released a new trailer for its upcoming Venom movie at CinemaCon and the new clip gloriously addresses the major problem of the first trailer—by toning down Tom Hardy's emo narration and actually introducing us to Venom, in all his tongue-waggling glory.

"See, we didn’t actually forget to put in Venom in the movie," Sony chairman Tom Rothman joked at the new trailer's premiere, according to Hollywood Reporter. The trailer doesn't feature a Spider-Man cameo, but it's a pretty safe bet that Tom Holland will make a small appearance at some point in the film, because of course.

The new trailer also spells out the movie's plot in a bit more detail. It's a classic tale—alien space goop comes to Earth, schlubby journalist investigates goop, journalist and said goop merge together to create a crazed anti-hero named Venom, hijinks ensue. In this case, the hijinks seem to mostly involve motorcycle tricks, completely decimating evil henchmen, and running directly through trees to save yourself the trouble of going around them.

Like Topher Grace's version of the character from the clusterfuck that was Spider-Man 3, Hardy's Venom stays pretty faithful to the original character design. This time, though, it looks like Venom will have those expressive superhero eyes—apparently a given now in our post-Deadpool world. The Venom symbiote that infects Hardy's character, Eddie Brock, also appears to be able to communicate telepathically with him, whispering evil nothings in his ear like a space devil on his shoulder.

"If you're going to stay, you will only hurt bad people," Brock tries to reason with the intelligent space goo.

"The way I see it," the symbiote replies, "we can do whatever we want."

Venom is directed by Ruben Fleischer and stars Jenny Slate, Michelle Williams, and Riz Ahmed alongside Hardy. The film is set to hit theaters October 5.

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Thai Cops Arrested a Bunch of Tourists at a Hotel Orgy

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If you associate the Thai area of Pattaya with nothing but sex tourism and Singha-powered sleeze, this story will confirm your suspicions.

On Saturday night at about 11:30 PM police stormed a hotel room at the Ban Tulip Hotel in South Pattaya. What they found was 25 people in various stages of copulation, with sex toys, lube, and condoms scattered about the floor. Eleven men of varying origin were arrested along with 14 women.

Those arrested had traveled from the US, Canada, China, Malaysia, Singapore, Germany, Cambodia, India, Ukraine, and of course, Australia.

Here's a YouTube video from police, showing the raid:

According to the Bangkok Post, the event had been organised by the hotel’s owner via Facebook. Chinese national Xeng-chai Yang, 53, was arrested for violating the Hotel Act and illegally facilitating sexual activities—which meant holding an orgy in the hotel’s ground floor, and charging patrons 1,500 baht per person, which came in at about AU$63.

Prostitution is illegal in Thailand, even in areas like Pattaya, where sex is openly flouted as a tourist drawcard.

The Bang Lamung district chief told the Bangkok Post that they’d been tipped off by other guests staying at the hotel. “My staff coordinated with police, immigration and the military to strike quickly and accurately,” he told reporter Chaiyot Pupattanapong. “We carried out the operation while they were having sex and we shut them down.”

The hotel owner allegedly faces a fine of 18 million baht. All 11 men had their details recorded and were then released.

@MorgansJulian

This article originally appeared on VICE AU.

This article originally appeared on VICE AU.


People Are Getting 'Sensual' Massages from Actual Snakes Now

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Ah, there's nothing like a relaxing massage, and there are so many to choose from! Deep tissue, hot stone, Swedish, and, of course, snake. Yes friends, you can now unwind from your anxiety-filled days by having live snakes slither all over your body. Luxurious!

During Monday's episode of Desus & Mero , the hosts watched a video from Insider profiling a "Wholeness Center" that offers snake massages for its clients. The duo decided snake massages aren't for them.

You can watch the latest episode of DESUS & MERO for free, online, right now. New episodes Monday to Thursday at 11PM on VICELAND.COM.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Alleged Toronto Van Attacker’s Facebook Profile Linked to ‘Incels,’ Praised Mass Killer

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Facebook has confirmed to VICE that an online post apparently made by the man accused of killing 10 pedestrians with a van in Toronto on Monday, referencing “incels,” a misogynistic online community, came from his authentic profile. The post has been widely discussed following the attack, and subject to intense suspicion as online hoaxes are common in the wake of such tragedies.

On Monday at around 1:30 PM a white van mounted the sidewalk in a diverse north Toronto neighbourhood and ran down pedestrians for nearly a mile. After the event was over, bodies were strewn along the road. Ten pedestrians died as a result of the attack and 15 more were wounded. Police arrested Alek Minassian, 25, after a tense standoff in which he asked the police officers to kill him, according to bystander video.

Minassian appeared in court on Tuesday morning where he charged with 10 counts of first degree murder and 13 counts of attempted murder. Police have released no information regarding a motive, but a Facebook post may shed light on the alleged killer’s mindset. Facebook confirmed to VICE that the post came from Manissian’s authentic Facebook account, but this does not necessarily mean that Manissian is the person who wrote the post.

The post, which began making the rounds on social media after the attack, referenced an online community of “incels,” a term that means “involuntary celibate.” Elements of this community are known to be extremely misogynistic as incels largely blame their celibacy on women. In 2014, mass killer Elliot Rodger posted a manifesto shortly before killing six people in which he explained that he wanted to punish women for rejecting him. In the video, Rodger dubbed himself the “supreme gentleman,” a moniker that Minassian referenced in his alleged Facebook post. The post also made reference to a “Sgt. 4chan,” apparently referring to the longstanding anonymous message board and troll hub.

“Private (Recruit) Minassian Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt. 4chan please. C23249161,” reads the post. “The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!” In many online communities, “Chads and Stacys” is slang for attractive, non-socially awkward people.

“This is a terrible tragedy and our hearts go out to the people who have been affected. There is absolutely no place on our platform for people who commit such horrendous acts. We have found and immediately deleted the suspect’s Facebook account,” a Facebook spokesperson wrote VICE in an email.

The Globe and Mail reported that students who spent time with Minassian at Toronto’s Seneca College, where he was reportedly enrolled, described him as a socially awkward tech nerd who was good with computers, and had no real violent tendencies nor strong political or religious beliefs.

The incel community faced intense online pushback, with one subreddit dedicated to the group (their main gathering point) being taken down in 2017. Reddit also banned another popular subreddit for incels, called /r/malecels, in the hours following the Toronto incident. Reddit spokespeople did not immediately respond to VICE’s request for comment. Since Monday, the incel and 4chan communities have attempted to distance themselves from Manissian.

Posts following the attack on major online hubs for the incel community expressed disbelief that Minassian’s Facebook post could be authentic. “Everything about this situation seems fishy to me,” a moderator of a forum called Incels.me going by “Master” wrote in post on Tuesday. “It was clearly a troll,” another poster wrote on Incels.me. VICE reached out to Master on Incels.me but didn’t immediately hear back. “Who talks like that?” one user of /Pol/, 4chan’s notorious politics message board, wrote on Monday regarding Manissian’s Facebook post referencing “Sgt. 4chan.” “Totally one of us 4Channers,” wrote another. On /r9k/, another notorious 4chan board, users were also incredulous.“

Why are we such a good scapegoar t [ sic],” one user wrote on Monday, with another user adding, “If this isn't fake, it's gonna bring a lot of attention here. Fuck, we really don't need this right now.”

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Scientists Finally Prove Uranus Smells Like Farts

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Well, well, well, it looks like scientists have finally figured out who's been stinking up space. Who's been cutting a celestial stinker. Who's been ripping astronomical ass. Who's been breaking wind at 560 MPH. Yes, it's true—Uranus really does smell like farts after all.

This week, scientists have verfied that we've been joking about our goofiest-named planet correctly all along. Using data from Hawaii's Gemini North telescope, researchers at the University of Oxford have found that most of the planet's upper atmosphere is composed of hydrogen sulfide—the same stuff that causes the sickening odor when eggs rot or people rip ass.

"If an unfortunate human were ever to descend through Uranus’s clouds, they would be met with very unpleasant and odiferous conditions," Patrick Irwin, one of the study’s authors, said in a news release.

Said unfortunate human would suffer a worse fate then a planetary dutch oven, though, since Uranus is cold as fuck. "Suffocation and exposure in the -200 degrees Celsius atmosphere made of mostly hydrogen, helium, and methane would take its toll long before the smell," Irwin goes on.

The fact that Uranus smells like butt thunder was originally hypothesized by basically every annoying elementary school kid ever and then backed up by Gizmodo last year, but this new research seems to have finally proven it, once and for all.

Although, Uranus is far from the only planet in our solar system that reeks. Venus also likely has a definitively flatulent smell, NASA says, and Mars has a vague shit fume scent, too, which, strangely, has yet to serve as a plot point in any of the many, many, many movies about the Red Planet. For the record, our moon smells like old gunpowder, at least according to the astronauts who walked on it. Things aren't all that bad here on Earth, though—apparently all we have to worry about is the periodic stench of poop trains.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

'Game of Thrones' Showrunner Just Threw Out an Amazing 'Rick and Morty' Crossover Idea

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The Game of Thrones crew has spared no expense to keep its final season spoiler-free, reportedly feeding actors their lines with earpieces instead of giving them scripts, and shooting multiple decoy scenes for the series finale. Now it looks like showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have deployed another smokescreen for the highly-anticipated eighth season as part of their Blu-ray audio commentary for Rick and Morty season three.

Last May, Benioff, Weiss, and Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage joined Justin Roiland in a recording booth to lend their commentary to one of the most memed-to-death episodes of Rick and Morty ever, "Pickle Rick." And in a clips Entertainment Weekly obtained of the longer recording, Weiss throws out an ambitious cross-over idea.

"The last episode of Game of Thrones should be a live-action version of 'Pickle Rick,'" he says.

As much as we'd like to think that that Game of Thrones action scene that took 55 days to shoot was actually a live-action sequence of Rick turning himself into a pickle, squaring off with an assassin, and slaughtering a hideout of Russian spies, it's not likely the minds behind HBO's flagship series would actually spend their hefty production budget on the greatest rickroll of all time. That's more Westworld's style.

Still, it's fun to know that Benioff and Weiss, who helm such a serious fantasy drama, are just a couple of sci-fi nerds that share admiration for the Adult Swim show with legions of fans. In one of the clips EW shared, Benioff describes the Jessica Gao-penned episode as having "maybe the best writing in 2017."

Still, if Benioff and Weiss did want to make a live action "Pickle Rick," they might be able to get away with it. HBO could always make a live-action Rick & Morty reboot, since it's not clear if Adult Swim is planning to order anymore seasons of its massively popular show.

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Get Ready for an Even Darker Dystopia on Season Two of 'Handmaid's Tale'

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With leather muzzles, handcuffs, and men in black capes, The Handmaid’s Tale is back for a second season. Last year, the Hulu series based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel won eight Primetime Emmy Awards, including best drama, and adhered closely to its source material. But season two picks up where the book left off.

At five weeks pregnant, the handmaid Offred (Elisabeth Moss) is shuttled away in a black van, clinging to the hope that where she is headed will be better than where she came from: imprisoned in the home of Commander Fred and his wife, Serena Joy. In the republic of Gilead, a totalitarian theocracy, handmaids like Offred serve one purpose: to provide a fertile body their Commander can rape in order to bear a child, whom she will be forced give up to him and his wife.

Yet Offred bucks the system. And when the show debuted on the heels of Trump’s inauguration in 2017, The Handmaid’s Tale became a rallying cry for feminists, with women donning the iconic red robes at marches and protests. Now, in the aftermath of #MeToo, the show has a new eerie resonance when it comes to the subjugation of women. In the season two premiere, Offred is told, “All of that smart girl bullshit is finished, do you understand?”

Bruce Miller is the showrunner for The Handmaid’s Tale and a longtime Atwood devotee. VICE caught up with him over the phone while he was home in LA preparing for the show’s season premiere.

Photo by George Kraychyk/Hulu

VICE: This upcoming season begins where Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale ends. How closely do you try to stick to Atwood’s intent?
Bruce Miller:
After the book ended, that was the end of the story [Atwood] wanted to tell. She has been incredibly enthusiastic about the ideas we've had—encouraging us to go off the map more than we were comfortable. Encouraging us to be as bold as possible.

The most important thing to me was to maintain the Atwood-ness of it. That feel of her world. Although we're moving past some of the specific plot moves, that's the spirit [in which] we want to take it forward.

Season two feels even darker than season one. How do you avoid venturing too far into violence and becoming exploitative?
I would feel like a failure if what I was creating was exploitative violence porn—that's the farthest thing from what we want to do. The rule of thumb that I try to follow is we never show anything that we don't need to show to tell the story. We don't linger past what is giving us the impact we need to move the story along. It's a very subjective line. Also, we do follow the mandate that Margaret put out when she did her book: that nothing happens on the show that hasn't happened to women in real life, or is currently happening to women in the world somewhere. That doesn't mean you still can't be far too violent and far too dark.

We're telling a bigger story, and this is part of the story. So we show just what we need to show to communicate how it would change Offred's feelings, or what kind of warning it would give her. It's hard to tell a story about a terrible world without being a little terrible.



You changed a line in season one that was too close to “Make America Great Again.” Why did you make that decision?
Every time I heard it, I was out of the scene; I wasn't in the story anymore. If you watch a TV show and one of the characters is named after your neighbor, all you think about is your neighbor. You stop thinking about the show.

And it seemed that we were making a point that we hadn't been making. When we were talking about the show, the slogan wasn’t out there—but by the time we made it, it was. It was such a central part of the discussion, politically, that it seemed we were pointing at the direction of a particular candidate, and that wasn't our intention.

The Handmaid’s Tale has become a touchstone for many on the left—people fighting for women’s rights have been donning the red robes in protest. How do you feel about the response?
I'm stunned and blown away. It's a testament to Margaret and to Ane Crabtree's iconic costumes. This is a story Margaret wrote and a world that Margaret built, and we are bringing Margaret's world to life.

A lot of the power of it is bringing it to a wider audience. It isn't something we're creating. It's a surprise that people are so affected. On the other hand, I've wanted to do this project for 30 years—it's got to be meaningful in some way. It stuck with everybody who's read it. All my writers, it was their favorite book—before I hired them. So there's a big impact that doesn't have anything to do with the show. But when you have anything that helps people become cathartic about their own personal experiences, or helps them see what are their deep, dark, painful secrets they feel isolated in, and realize that a lot of other people have the same deep, dark secrets, then [people realize] they're not so isolated.

The Handmaid’s Tale is largely the story of abuse of power, especially in how women are treated. How does it relate to the #MeToo movement?
It's in my industry. As much as we're grappling with things in our storytelling, this is something we have to grapple with in our offices, with people I've been working with for 25 years. You feel like an idiot when all of this stuff is going on right under your nose and you never noticed. You feel terrible. You haven't been doing your job. You haven't been a good steward of the other human beings in your office. It's given us a good spasm of honesty. Everyone is talking about things that have happened to them, talking about how they wish someone like me had responded to those things. It's been a huge, quick, and very difficult education.

On our show, we are committed to having women writers and directors. It's what you would want to do on a show that's so married to a female point of view. When people are coming out and telling these secret stories about things that have happened to them, things that were traumatic, I think: "We can tell stories about the same kinds of moments that have the same impact as some of these big terrible actions.” The moments of disrespect. The moments of sexism. The moments of threat that weave in and out of women's lives. Honestly, that's one of the reasons you have writers who are women—women go through the world in a different way than men, and they have to explain it to us, and we have to be able to ask.

What would mark the show's success for you, personally? Affecting opinions? Entertaining people? Creating cultural change?
As a writer, I want it to make you feel something. It's so rare that you watch something that makes you feel something genuine. I think of it as an emotional experience [that's also] entertainment. Once it turns into medicine, not only do I think no one's going to watch, I think I won't be making it.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Inside HuCow, the Fetish That Imagines Women as Cows

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Once in a blue moon, a casual, vanilla porn viewer might find a piece of Human Cow (or HuCow for short) fetish porn on a mainstream site like Pornhub. But these videos, often showing women dressed as cows being milked by intricate breast pumping machines while in bondage gear, or animated hybrid cow-women, are about as rare as, say, sea monster porn. Even on fetish-oriented clip sites, they’re a needle in haystack. One might assume, then, that HuCow is an extremely niche fetish. But go searching for HuCow porn off of the big tube and clip brokers, and you’ll find tons of content on dedicated blogs and sites, including a heavy dose of literary erotica and art, much of it fan-generated.

“There is a big niche market for this type of porn,” says sexual fetish expert Mark Griffiths, a Distinguished Professor at Nottingham Trent University School of Social Sciences. “Dozens of sites.” These are active sites. One HuCow Tumblr alone has over 10,000 followers. The frequently updated HuCow Reddit sub has over 23,000 subscribers. As with any fetish, it's hard to say exactly how many HuCow enthusiasts—people role playing as cows for sexual purposes—are in the world or grazing in the proverbial pasture. But these sites seem to indicate a vibrant community.

It's not hard to see why. At its core, HuCow combines several rather large fetishes and kinks—lactation fetish, dominance, submission, objectification.There are even some pregnancy fetishists up in the mix. Each finds HuCow appealing for different reasons.

Take Ed for instance. The man behind hucows.com (NSFW or the faint of heart), a rare HuCow-focused studio, he says his fans seem most excited by women being milked than anything else in his clips. Ditto Sally_Anon, an amateur lactation fetish producer, who first encountered HuCow fetishists on lactophilia Reddit communities, who asked her to cross-post to their groups even though she didn’t dress up or act like a cow in the content she produced. This gels with a sentiment HuCow fetishist HuCow Milker, expressed, quite aggressively, on his Tumblr of the same name: “If you don’t produce milk, you are nothing to me.”

Human lactation may seem like an odd thing to fetishize, especially as cultures often desexualize breasts when they’re being used for feeding infants. But lactation fetishes are common enough that, according to Griffiths, there are even specialist lactophile prostitutes.

Image by Peter PD

Lactation, of course, leads to increased breast size, which explains its appeal to some, says Rebecca Kukla, an ethicist who’s written on cultural perceptions of breastfeeding. Some women enjoy the breast stimulation of milking, so such fetishes, she says, are “likely to be more about reciprocal pleasure than many others.” Consuming breast milk plays into a common kinky urge to be infantilized. Perhaps most importantly, sexualizing something culturally asexual is an appealing form of transgression and re-appropriation. “Many kinksters get erotic pleasure from playing at what they fear most, or find most violating of the proper order,” Kukla says.

However lactation fetishes come about, the jump from pure lactation porn, in which (often) men suckle women or women squirt or pump breast milk on camera, to porn involving cow tropes and lactation feels pretty simple and obvious in some ways.

But, as Kukla rightly points out, cows aren't only good for milk production. They are “the ultimate animals produced specifically for consumption… bred into highly artificial-looking consumer products. In HuCow, the cow-woman is simulating an object produced specifically to be consumed by her partner.”

This appeals to the dominant and submissive types who come to the table to dine on HuCow. Animal play in general, Griffiths has written, often toys with transforming a complex human into a wholly service-oriented beast. In HuCow porn, or relationships—for many enthusiasts, this is something they do in their personal lives, not just consume as erotica—the cow exists to submit to (usually) her dominant “farmer,” who milks her, often forcefully. He may even send her out to stud with bulls, other men who mount her at their leisure and pleasure.

As with many hard submissive fetishes, this may sound terrifying to those looking in from the outside. But even on their own fetishist-facing blogs, HuCow practitioners often acknowledge this is a well-negotiated fantasy, ideally built on mutual respect and desire in participants’ wider lives. In a Snapchat story uploaded to YouTube explaining the intricacies of the HuCow fetish, adult sexuality educator and pleasure advocate Sunny Megatron says, "Remember this is just fantasy role play where turning humans into fantasy cattle is fetishized. And just like any other kind of BDSM or fetish play, this is carefully negotiated by all participants and done consensually."

"Treating a woman—or anybody—as just a mere object is very wrong... if it’s done without their consent," she continues. "But if objectification is mutually desired by both partners, they’ve thoroughly and clearly talked about it ahead of time and then they play it out in a healthy fun fantasy sense, then that’s different." She goes on to remind viewers that dominant submissive fetishes aren't just about the former's wishes or abuses against the latter. "When BDSM scenes are negotiated they are done so according to the desires and limits of the submissive," she says. "The submissive calls the shots."

Artist PeterPD creates HuCow 3-D erotica, and came to the fetish through his interest in bondage more than anything. Likewise, Ed started his HuCow website because he liked “the relentless nature of the” milking machines he’d seen in other HuCow content “as an instrument of torture,” feeding into his own heavy bondage interests. He was surprised by how much of the interest in his content came from lactation lovers first and foremost, but says a number of individuals, like him, become HuCow fans through its bondage and dominance facets.

There are just a few dedicated HuCow content producers like Ed, though. Most fetish producers like Sally_Anon only touch upon it once or twice when commissioned, or because it is a natural offshoot of their usual specialties—lactation, infantilization, transformation, submission.

For reasons that are rather obvious, making HuCow is hard. It takes a lot of work for a woman who has not recently had a child to start lactating—more than most might want to go through for a few clips. And, as Sally Anon points out, not many new mothers want to make lactation porn. So the number of lactating performers is low to begin with. That’s why Ed says he fakes the lactation in his shoots. (Anon notes that her lactophile fans often feel cheated by fake lactation shoots like this.) Finding lactating women with heavy flows also willing to put on cow outfits and get into bondage pumping rigs, much less willing to invest in machines themselves for future content, is exceptionally difficult.

It's easier, then, to represent the fetish in erotic literature—and many authors do. Writers like Elise Fawn, Shelby Houston, Izzy Slam, and Michelle “L” Taylor pump out a steady flow of HuCow erotica on Amazon and other self-publishing platforms. Fans use their own sketching chops, or their facility manipulating games like The Sims, to illustrate or animate ideal scenes. Or they commission artists eager to make a buck to draw their deepest fetish desires for them, explains Boobdollz, the pseudonym of a big boob fetish art provider who sometimes takes HuCow jobs.

Some individuals in HuCow relationships blog about their antics, with vivid visuals attached, as well. Other HuCow bloggers use their platforms to solicit existing HuCow art or clips, aggregate them, and disseminate them to the community at large. The result, it seems, is a vibrant yet niche community, readily producing and sharing amateur and professional content—just not all that visibly on mainstream clip and tube sites.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

The Mystery of the 'Dog Suicide' Bridge

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"I've walked the bridge," says Jenna, 20, from Glasgow. "The first time I reached a point, and it was as if the air got thinner and my stomach jumped, a bit like when you miss a step going down a flight of stairs. The second time, I just couldn't stop feeling like something bad was going to happen. There was a woman with a dog at the edge of the bridge, and the dog would not take a step forward. Later, I found out that a couple of dogs had jumped to their death from the bridge that weekend."

The bridge in question, Overtoun Bridge, spans the Overtoun Burn, in the village of Milton, near Dumbarton in West Dunbartonshire, Scotland. Designed by the acclaimed landscape architect HE Milner, with stone parapets 18 inches thick, it was completed in 1895 and sits on the approach road to Overtoun House, a Scot's Baronial country house and estate built 33 years prior. The house itself sits on a hill, overlooking the River Clyde. If you’ve never been there, you might know it from its use in 2012's baffling sci-fi epic, Cloud Atlas.

The house is said to be haunted, obviously. In Scotland, everything old and Scottish is said to be haunted. But the bridge? There's supposedly much more to it than just a garden-variety haunting.

The structure undoubtedly has a tragic past. In 1994, a 32-year-old man threw his infant son, Eoghan, to his death – on a clear day, between the last two parapets of the bridge – claiming his child was the antichrist. The man tried to kill himself twice, first by following his son off the bridge – which he was stopped from doing by his wife – then slashing his wrists with a knife he'd found. The child died in hospital the following day. The man was found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity in a unanimous verdict, and committed to Carstairs psychiatric hospital in South Lanarkshire.

Yet, whatever is going on in Milton, it’s not humans who are at risk so much as dogs, which has brought the area notoriety in Weird News circles around the globe. Since the 1950s, around 50 dogs have died after leaping off the 50-foot-tall bridge. During the same period, some 600 dogs have made the same jump and survived. Sometimes the dogs have made the jump, survived, come back up and jumped again as soon as they could.

All of the dogs reported to have taken the jump are long-nosed breeds – dolichocephalic types, like German Shepherds and Scottish Terriers. The dogs all jump from the same spot, between the two ramparts on the right-hand side of the bridge, at the very end. And it has to be a clear day. Nobody can explain why.

The most common theory is that smell is luring the dogs to their demise. Squirrel, mice and, most pungently, mink are known to nest below the bridge, the scent of which is attractive to dogs. A scientific test has been undertaken, where ten long-nosed pups were given a variety of scents to follow. Seventy percent of the dogs made for the mink. This theory ticks a variety of boxes. Mink were introduced to the area in the 1950s, when the jumps began, and the smell of mink would be strongest on clear – or dry – days.

But why Overtoun Bridge and not any of the many bridges around Scotland with mink living beneath them? And why do the dogs always jump in the same place?

Are animals even able to deliberately end their lives? Canine psychologist Dr David Sands says dogs cannot. Yet there is some historic precedent within the animal kingdom. A story from the Daily Mail reports that, in 2009, over a period of three days, 28 cows deliberately walked off a cliff in the Swiss alps. In the Oscar winning documentary The Cove, released the same year, dolphin trainer Richard O'Barry told of how Kathy, the dolphin most used in the 1960's television show Flipper, drowned herself in his company. There's an insect, the sap-sucking Acythosiphon Pisum – the Pea Aphid to its mates – that will make itself explode when under attack from ladybugs, to protect other members of its colony. And there are reports of dogs ending their own lives. An 1845 report of a Newfoundland dog in the Illustrated London Times claimed the dog killed itself by throwing itself into water, before "preserving perfect stillness of the legs and feet". Each time it did this, the dog was saved. Then it just held its head underwater until it stopped breathing.

Dr Sands travelled to the bridge with a documentary crew in 2005, in order to conduct his own investigation, something the Scottish Society for the Prevention Of Cruelty to Animals have done too. There, standing at the point of the bridge where the dogs jump, he says, "Just me as a person, forget a dog – all your senses are on fire… it's got a strange feeling."

He also eliminated other proposed explanations. Sight, he said, wasn’t a factor, since from a dogs-eye-view you couldn’t see beyond the wall, just the ivy-covered granite. He ruled sound out, too. A proposed theory that nearby Faslane Bay, home to the UK’s Trident SSBN nuclear submarines, was creating a frequency only animals could hear was shut down after experts in acoustics were brought in to test the length of the bridge, finding nothing unusual in their tests.

"Local people have mixed feelings about the bridge," says Jenna. "There are some who are too frightened to walk their dog over and it and avoid it completely. I’ve never wanted to go back after the experience I had. They need to put up a fence or something, they really do."

@jamesjammcmahon

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.


NRA Supporters Are Blowing Their Perfectly Good YETI Coolers to Bits

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Apparently a good old-fashioned consumer boycott just isn’t visually dramatic enough for some people. Some of the most theatrical of NRA supporters have decided YETI coolers must be publicly destroyed in protest, following the NRA Institute for Legislative Action's announcement that the cooler company was cutting ties with the gun rights group, the Washington Post reports.

Pro-gun activists have since found various ways to obliterate YETI products—crushing them, shooting them up, and blowing them to bits in empty fields.

The violence against the perfectly good camping coolers stems from a recent email sent out to NRA members by the organization’s former president Marion P. Hammer claiming YETI had "declined to do business with the NRA Foundation." But according to a statement from YETI, the company had merely ended "a group of outdated discounting programs" for several organizations, and had offered the NRA Foundation "an alternative customization program."

Still, the backlash has been fierce. In South Carolina, a guy named Bryan Atkinson used ammonium nitrate and aluminium powder to make sure his cooler exploded when he fired his AR-15 rifle at it, filming the ceremony on Facebook Live. The YouTube channel Camo4x4s posted a similar video in which a woman uses a rifle and an explosive target to send another cooler to Kingdom Come.

The owner of a firearms training center decided to fill a YETI tumbler full of holes on his shooting range. Another guy went into Joe Pesci Casino mode, putting a YETI tumbler in a vice and squeezing until it's completely bent out of shape. Others made do by ripping the YETI logo from their cap or chucking a tumbler into the trash.

Several companies have ended discounts with NRA members following the high school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Florida that killed 17 people in February. Sporting goods outlets like REI, Walmart, and Dick’s have even updated their policies on selling certain guns and brands with ties to the NRA. As for YETI, it claims that it is "unwavering in [its] belief in and commitment to the Constitution of the United States and its Second Amendment."

Still, the backlash against the NRA after Parkland seems to be helping its fundraising efforts. According to the Hill, the organization raised $2.4 million in March, the most successful fundraising month it's seen in the last 15 years.

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Ten Coping Mechanisms for These Dark Times

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The world's been particularly shitty lately. Children are famous on Instagram for squeezing limes into their eyes or sledding down escalators. Everything's a fucking reboot. This article would probably never have been written if not for the president of the United States. It often seems as if we've all just collectively given up.

We're all having trouble dealing with these dark times. So here are 10 totally serious coping mechanisms, suggested by our staff, and illustrated for your amusement.

1. Flipping off random cars because the people driving at some point probably drove like an asshole

2. Calling your "back burner" for a drunken make out

3. Using excessive chapstick as a non-destructive oral fixation

4. Not reading the comment section

5. Watching TV alone and eating Saltines. No cheese, no meat, no toppings at all. Just TV and Saltines

6. Touching produce in grocery stores and thinking back to "simpler times"

7. Eating twice your body weight in the dark

8. Getting off to ethically produced porn

9. Doing an excessive amount of face masks to hide from the world and facial recognition tech

10. Watching reruns of Kitchen Nightmares while eating 20 feet of red licorice out of a bag

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

23 Sad Movies on Netflix That Will Make You Feel Something Again

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Deep down we all know there’s something uniquely satisfying about a good long cry, but sometimes we need a movie to get us there. Whenever there’s reason to sob—tax season, winter never ending season, Knick fandom, after sitting through Jack and Jill, or at family get-togethers—we can usually rely on a Disney film with a cute animal death to start that blubbering sequence right.

But maybe, even in knowing this, you’re still a steel-hearted, beyond-all-emotion bastard. Maybe you’re a soulless type who stared into the abyss of Disney’s Coco and tearlessly blinked. Well, it’s for you that I’ve put together a list that should do some kind of trick. A tear, a quiver, something to feel alive again for god sakes. And if these don’t produce some something close to waterworks, I’ve got nothing else for you than a suggestion that you read a self-help book.

Films are available in the US and Canada, unless otherwise noted.

Life Is Beautiful

The boldest quality about Roberto Benigni’s Holocaust story is he had the nerve to laugh while going there. In every way, this film is bittersweet—bitter by way of the subject matter of death camps, death marches and plain ol’ death—but sweet in the humour and fantasy granted by a father’s instinct to shield his child. There’s clearly a felt grief in witnessing a parent’s desperation to guard their kin. That’s made greater because we already know how this movie will end.

The Iron Giant

This is pretty much a Brad Bird take on your classic boy’s best friend story, if that friend was a giant robot thing from another world. Our boy in question, Hogarth Hughes (Eli Marienthal) befriends a metallic alien from another world who crash lands on earth, see’s bad old humans doing really bad things, and attempts to protect little Hughes from that lethal badness. It all concludes in a fashion designed to mess you up. And yes, Vin Diesel voices the Iron Giant, which means Vin Diesel will make you cry.

*Available in the US

Blue Is the Warmest Colour

There’s a blunt, awkward and appealing clumsiness to our romantic firsts; the first kiss, first love, first date, and that first sexual experience. Director Abdellatif Kechiche’s 2013 lesbian drama is pretty much a storyboard of that whole messy process which seems to deeply understand the short shelf-life of young love. If you’ve never fucked up, felt fucked up, or been fucked up by an early relationship, you won’t relate (but you all have).

Some Freaks

A completely un-sanitized love story that avoids the handsome jock falling for the equally beautiful girl, who just so happens to be terminally ill, but teaches said guy about true love, coming-of-age thing. There’s something more relatable and feelable in that. But also universal in its truth; that all bonds are susceptible to decay. Director Ian MacAllister McDonald develops a believable romance here between two societal freaks who are both bullied accordingly (Lily Mae Harrington and Thomas Mann) and presents the answer to the question of what happens when your other bullied, non-accepted half is suddenly accepted when you aren’t.

*Available in the US

The Fault in Our Stars

OK, this one kinda goes for the handsome dude falling for the equally beautiful terminally ill girl here… but in this case, both are terminally ill. One lives on a borrowed time that’s more visible via oxygen tanks and nose tubes, and the other played by Ansel Elgort, is more subtlety sick. Despite knowing, it’s hard to see the eventual death coming. Love lost is just that tried and tear-duct-ly true.

Fruitvale Station

Hundreds of movies exist on Netflix, which translates into thousands of deaths on Netflix. But if Oscar Grant’s (Michael B. Jordan) death doesn’t affect you in a way, no one death will. The very talented Ryan Coogler tiptoes towards the ugly murder by a Bay Area Rapid Transit cop, and it feels like a slow burn stemmed to a firecracker set to blow. Oscar’s fate is already assumed between his exchanges, smiles, and his everyday. Our vision of a human face placed on a real-life tragedy is a reminder that he’s always been human; one snatched away with laboured breaths.

Heaven Knows What

Addiction is dismal. The “high” chase for the sake of the chase is often just that, a journey without the time to pause and really consider its penalties. Both Benny and Josh Safdie displayed that sometimes-illogical pursuit through their 2014 drama about a young heroin addict (Arielle Holmes) who can’t find the common ground between her love for a boyfriend and the love of a drug. Her answer to it all is about as heartbreakingly predictable as it can get.

*Available in the US

Schindler’s List

For most of this black and white 1993 drama, some of the only colours visible are a few Shabbat candles and a Jewish girl in a red coat. To Steven Spielberg’s credit, his intention was to always highlight innocence during this incredibly horrific period of history. The story of Oskar Schindler’s (Liam Neeson) attempts to protect Jewish workers from the Nazis is the most acclaimed tearjerker of this entire list. It won the 1993 best picture at the Oscars for a reason.

Ain’t Them Bodies Saints

We’ve seen these guys before; the dreamers who believe in their own shit while doing everything possible to fuck it up for themselves. Casey Affleck’s Bob Muldoon comes off as the model of this archetype; a small-time prison escapee with notions that he can be loved, raise a family and make it all work out at the same time. There’s an extremely sad, doomed quality in David Lowery’s 2013 look into the loss of a promised dream that's eventually ruined. It all fosters a pity for the bad character choices we’re all susceptible to often making in the pursuit of it.

*Available in the US

Finding Dory

Animated movies are forever the begrudgingly effective tearjerker culprits. And like so many Disney Pixar films, Andrew Stanton’s Finding Nemo sequel is melancholy, nostalgic, sad, and fun—not necessarily in that order. Once this cute little rated-G package is unwrapped from an old flippant joke—Dory’s short-term memory loss—there’s no way to overlook just how much she’s lost because of it; friends, family, and identity. That same old manipulative, tear-jerking Disney shit is rocking on the difficulties of real-life dementia.

Cinema Paradiso

Regardless of who you are, it’s easy to relate to Giuseppe Tornatore’s young Toto, who’s seemingly enamoured by cinema as a child thanks to a lovable projectionst in Alfredo (Phillippe Noiret). From a little boy, we witness his transition into a lovetorn teenager (Marco Leonardi), before finally abandoning his comforts to pursue his adopted passion. What viewers are most left with is the memory of a boisterous Toto, so consumed by his wonder at films telling stories beyond his circumstances, that he pressures Alfredo to teach him all that he knows; a memory an adult Toto can’t seem to shake. There’s a threaded journey here that so many of us have travelled, told in graceful way. The discovery, the loss, and the consequentials that shape us all into the people that we all eventually become.

*Available in the US

The Tribe

Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s vocal-less film of embraced sign-language may feel like a gimmick at first, but it works. There’s a plainess and everyday-ness that makes it feel told. Take a deaf boy who joins a boarding school around those like himself, include the violent and criminal reasons why other boys and girls would attend such a school, and you have a struggle story of a kid seeking acceptance. What it lacks in sound, it makes up in the pure visual statement that amoral selfishness can exist in anyone, regardless of disability.

*Available in the US

On Golden Pond

“Everlasting love” sounds so Hallmark-ey and boring in this day and age. Ours is a world of insta-hookups and Tinder connections that can last as long as an Insta story. And despite that, there remains something still charming about a film going for broke on romance. Director Mark Rydell seemed to understand the subtle parts to love here; the emotional fragility that thrives without the bliss of lust. Ethel and Norman Thayer feel believable in their centuries-old romance and hate that feels eternal.

*Available in the US

Mother

Joon-ho Bong’s 2009 flick is largely about maternal love—the kind that doesn’t play games with the possibility of guilty or innocent. A young man of minor intelligence is accused of murder. His elderly mother (Hye-ja Kim) of course takes it upon herself to prove her son’s innocence. If he’s guilty, we’re not allowed to know that right away. We’re only made to understand what unconditional love looks like, regardless of our pre-watching judgements. So much of this depends on how we as viewers see the circumstances through a women whose younger years have been spent helping her clueless son. And it’s her struggle that makes this one such a difficult journey to watch.

*Available in the US

Seven Pounds

There’s a pretty rickety tightrope between gimmick and riddle with this 2008 Gabriele Muccino movie that irritated critics. It’s confident of its own cleverness, and pretty damn willing to stack on the mushiness. But it’s no Collateral Beauty and I’ll admit it got me. Will Smith, going against type, plays a man consumed by loss on a quest for redemption. You don’t get the smiles, or the bared teeth, you just get a creepy avenging angel. And there’s something eternally unsettling about that. Now if you can buy into it—and haven’t read any spoilers—the gimmick is forgiving, and the answered riddle becomes absolutely crushing.

*Available in Canada

Mountains May Depart

Jia Zhangke’s Korean romance feels personal, but it’s wrapped around a socio-economic condition and reflects a diasporic experience. The film for the most part tracks Shen Tao (Tao Zhao) over three periods in her life within an ever changing love triangle. From China to Australia, triangle to triangle. Each moment plays with a different economic status as provided by the person she’s with, and by its end viewers are given a woman that feels bitter and alienated from her husband whose eye on success trumps his emotions for her. It’s a bitter, real cry.

* Available in the US.

50/50*

One guy has cancer, the other doesn’t. Within that is a funny but sad take on two twenty-somethings dealing with that fact. Thanks to the obvious chemistry of Seth Rogen as Kyle and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Adam, both actors allow for their comedic moments to feel both organic and spontaneous; real in the idea of bros attempting to mask the inevitable. It’s a brotherhood on display that director Jonathan Levine shows off with an unfortunately end chapter.

* Available in Canada

The Pursuit of Happyness

Happiness is its own wealth. Some achieve it through through vice, but for the most part, economics rule all. Poverty is a crushing, soul eating disease and Gabriele Muccino’s autobiographical drama does its best in exposing all that in relation to fatherhood. Chris Gardner’s (Will Smith) rise out of destitution is a familiar bootstrap story, but a well-told one. Despite the Hollywood by-the-numbers plot line, there’s still a lot of ground-level insight about what poverty looks like, sounds like, and feels like to children born into it. The chemistry between Smith and his real-life son Jaden only manages to sell it that much more.

Dead Poets Society

Just about everyone felt devastated when Robin Williams passed away at the age of 64. In knowing that, a revisit of this 1989 drama feels like a literal gut check; a reminder of just how much light Robin brought to film. Like so many other “inspirational teacher” movies, director Peter Weir gave us a teacher tasked with inspiring a group of students to view life differently. It’s hard enough for men in general to express vulnerabilities, let alone through poetry and prose, and it’s beautifully handled here. But it’s hard to view the film so many years later without thinking of Williams’ own issues in retrospect. So if you don’t tear up by the movie itself, then you’ll at least tear up over the memory of an absent legend.

*Available in the US

Mudbound

Mudbound, directed by Dee Rees, the first black woman ever nominated for the adapted screenplay Oscar, may be set seven decades ago, but in a tiki-torch having, #MakeAmericaGreatAgain shouting, Zimmerman-still-walking-free again touting America, the sadness is in how little things have changed since then. There’s of course a great story involving two WWII soldiers, Ronsel Jackson (Jason Mitchell) and Jamie McAllan (Garrett Hedlund) coming home to an America hell bent on separating them. But the real challenge is in asking viewers to divorce themselves from the fact that this shit hasn't actually changed.

Reign Over Me

Cryptic movies about people losing people always seems to work. Mike Binder’s 2007 tragedy ride stood as one of the few half decent films centered around 9/11, even if the event itself felt unnecessary in telling this story. Loss is loss, and Adam Sandler’s portrayal of a broken Charlie Fineman doing everything in his power to escape the loss of a family feels isolating and heartbreaking when you consider that it’s the same happy going Sandler from Click just a year earlier.

The Notebook

If I don’t put this one down, my significant other will murder me. Basically, this is an adapted Nicholas Sparks story and we know that guy rocks with two plots: Old folks falling in love ( Message in a Bottle, Nights in Rodanthe) or young folks falling in love ( Dear John, and this movie). Add in the Canadian with the superpower to make women fall in love him, Ryan Gosling, and the most (Canadian) girl next door, Rachel McAdams, and you have a very cryable love story by Nick Cassavetes.

*Available in Canada

Lion

I’ll assume that you’ve either been a child, at some point met a child, or maybe even lost a child at the mall. All of the above make s Lion an inner wreckage of biblical proportions. Based on a true story, a little boy from India gets seperated several thousand kilometers away from his family. What follows is the tiny and fragile Young Saroo (Sunny Pawar) transitioning from an unforgiving street life to an adopted adult (Dev Patel), whose 25 years become gnawing with memories of a lost family that he wholeheartedly intends to find.

*Available in the US

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Everything We Know About Alek Minassian, the Alleged Toronto Van Attacker

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Alek Minassian was charged with 10 counts of first degree murder and 13 counts of attempted murder Tuesday morning, one day after a rental van ran down pedestrians at a heavily populated Toronto intersection.

Here’s everything we know about the alleged mass murderer and what happened yesterday.

The Attack

The attack took place on Monday just before 1:30 PM EST in North York. The first 911 call was dialed in at 1:27 PM. A rented Ryder van hopped a curb on Yonge Street just south of Finch Avenue and from there weaved on the sidewalks, into opposing lanes, before finally stopping just over two kilometers south of where the carnage began. The Globe and Mail reports that the attack took place over 25 minutes and that one driver following the van said it was going over 70 kilometres an hour. Ten people died and fifteen more were wounded in the incident.

At 1:52 PM police made an arrest in the attack. After a tense standoff, caught by a bystander on video, the suspect begged police to “kill me,” and claimed to have a gun. Alek Minassian, 25, of Richmond Hill, Ontario, was arrested and the police officer who dealt with him has been lauded as a hero. Minassian has been charged with 10 counts of first degree murder and 13 counts of attempted murder. He briefly appeared in court on Tuesday.

The Motive

Police have not released any indication on what Minassian’s motive (if any) was, and Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale stated that the attack had “no known connection to national security.” The closest we have to any indication of a motive comes in the form of a Facebook post that appeared to be written shortly before the attack which links Minassian to the online community known as “incels” and heaps praise on mass murderer Elliot Rodger. The post states that the “Incel Rebellion has already begun” and alludes to “Chads” and “Stacys” which is slang in many online corners, including the alt-right, for attractive non-socially awkward people.

His post read: “Private (Recruit) Minassian Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt. 4chan please. C23249161,” reads the post. “The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!”

Incel and Elliot Rodger

Elliot Rodger killed seven people (including himself) in Isla Vista, California, in 2014. Prior to committing mass murder Rodger posted a YouTube video in which he placed blame for the attack on women who had rejected him. Rodger is treated as a hero in the incel community. The incel movement regards men who believe that the reason they can’t get laid is women and is incredibly misogynistic. In 2017, Reddit shut down the subreddit for incels for inciting violence.

Facebook has confirmed to VICE that the Facebook profile with the statement is authentic, but that does not necessarily mean that Minassian himself wrote the post. The incel community on 4Chan, Reddit, and other websites are actively attempting to put distance between themselves and Minassian.

In a press conference on Tuesday, Toronto Police Service spokesperson alluded to the message saying, “the accused is alleged to have posted a cryptic message on Facebook minutes before he started driving the rented van."

Awkward Tech Wiz

A LinkedIn profile that features the same picture as an account on Facebook that has been confirmed to VICE as authentic states that the man went to Seneca College from 2011 to this year. Seneca College is a public college located in North York, Ontario that has about 100,000 students. The Globe and Mail reports that one classmate of Minassian stated he graduated from the college’s computer studies program just a week ago. Online records show him active on school projects until the end of March.

Reports from the Globe and Mail indicate that during his time at Seneca College, Minassian was a wizard with technology but also was immensely socially awkward. The story reads that Minassian “barely spoke, barely functioned and had difficulty controlling tics.” The story adds that he had no strong political or religious views and that one former classmates of his stated he didn’t even believe the man could rent and drive a vehicle and that they believe that the attack may have been the result of him panicking behind the wheel. Fellow students of Minassian stated that he was quite adept with graphical processing units—specialized computer chips that work to process images.

In a Facebook post, a man named Alexander Alexandrovitch says that he attended Thornlea Secondary School with Minassian. That is a public high school located in Thornhill, Ontario, which is part of York region and north of Toronto. He wrote that the alleged killer’s anti-social behaviour was prominent in his youth as well.

“He was mentally unstable back then,” reads Alenndrovitch’s post. “He was known to meow like a cat and try to bite people, this is one sad and confusing story. Alek Minassian was never intentionally violent but today's act was deliberate.”

Involvement in Military

Minassian had a brief stint in the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) last year, VICE News learned. He joined on August 23. According to a statement from Canada’s Department of National Defence, though, Minassian asked to leave 16 days into 13-week basic training.

“He did not complete his recruit training and requested to be voluntarily released from the CAF after 16 days of recruit training. For privacy reasons, we will not comment further on Alek Minassian’s service in the CAF,” National Defence spokesperson Jessica Lamirande told VICE News in an email on Tuesday.

That training, albeit cut short, took place Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec in September.

He was released from service on October 25.

A senior Canadian Forces official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to CBC News said of Minassian and the attack: "He wasn't adapting to the military lifestyle… There were no red flags and nothing that would point to anything like this."

Minassian received no weapons training during his time in the forces, according to the official who spoke to CBC News.

The numbers that Minassian included in a Facebook post shortly before the attack may be military-related, however. The number “00010” is the trade number for the Canadian infantry, and "C23249161" seems to be a legitimate service number. However, the Department of National Defence said it will not confirm military ID numbers since these are protected under the Privacy Act.

App Development

Minassian, at least at one point, was an app developer. He made a free Google Play app called “Toronto Green Parking Advisor,” which was meant to help people find and price parking spots in the city. The Toronto Green Parking Advisor app was last updated in 2014.

The description of his app reads: “Download the setup package of Toronto Green Parking Advisor 1.0 that is completely free of charge and have a look at users’ reviews on Droid Informer. The app can be launched flawlessly on Android 4.1 and higher. This download is totally safe. Alek Minassian designed this application that lies within the Travel & Local category.”

Other Online Presences

A LinkedIn account exists for Minassian. It lists him as attending Seneca College from 2011-2018 and includes the headshot of him that has been widely circulated in the media since the attack. The profile says Minassian lives in Richmond Hill, Ontario, which is located in the Greater Toronto Area.

No Instagram nor Twitter accounts for Minassian have surfaced as of yet.

He did have a Steam gaming account that has not been active since 2010. Minassian would have been under 18 the last time the account was updated. The bio of that account, “Xboxlightside,” reads in part:

“I love the Halo games. My favourite game is Halo 3 because it has matchmaking. My next favourite is ODST because Firefight is awesome! Halo Wars has matchmaking but I'm better at FPSs than RTSs. Halo 2 is a nice game even though Xbox Live Original has been discontinued. Good thing I downloaded all the maps! I also like Halo: CE because it is an EPIC classic. I also can't wait for the release of Halo: Reach on September 14!”

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Kanye Isn’t Getting Red-Pilled, He’s Just Being Kanye

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Kanye West is back on Twitter, and he’s doing what Kanye does best—riling people up. He’s returned to the social network because, apparently, he’s “writing [a book] in real time.” (Same.) Along with tidbits of his highly-entertaining, mercurial wisdom—”truth is my goal. Controversy is my gym. I'll do a hundred reps of controversy for a 6 pack of truth”—are controversial tweets that have exasperated his woke fanbase.

He tweeted an endorsement of Candace Owens, a black conservative who is the communications director of TPUSA, a national campus organization known for stunts like having a member put on a diaper to protest safe spaces. And he posted multiple videos of Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, and more recently, a toxic far-right internet presence. All this has earned West praise from Alex Jones, who once called him the “microcosm of America’s degeneration.”

To his critics on the left, West’s message is clear:

To better understand the “book” West is currently writing on his Twitter, I went back to his real 2009 book, Thank You and You’re Welcome. Co-written with J. Sakiya Sandifer, the spiral bound pamphlet is a collection of “Kanye-isms” and life advice. Chock full of sage and sometimes trite self-help tidbits—”You can learn more from a critique than from a compliment!” and “Never complain without offering a solution”—it's a reminder that we should take West’s tweets with a grain of salt.

Instead of confining West to our limited partisan and political talking points, we ought to see him as a finicky artist who has an ever evolving worldview—and sharing that worldview on a whim is a crucial part of his artistic practice. As the old adage goes, let Kanye be Kanye.

While criticism of West’s latest problematic endorsements is certainly warranted, the idea that West is somehow in the process of getting red-pilled by the alt-right is kind of silly. West has built his career on being a provocateur. His music, aesthetic, collaborators, and business ventures are in constant flux. This is the guy who came into the game as a hip-hop producer and is now making video games and fashion lines. He's a brilliant and willfully problematic artist who says whatever he wants and doesn’t really care what you think about it. He’s not afraid to put himself out there, and because of that he makes mistakes and magic constantly. He also loves the haters, he thrives off them. In Thank You and You’re Welcome, he writes, “I would rather be hated for who I am than loved for who I’m not.” Later in the book, he opines, “Love your haters, they’re your biggest fans.” If you're getting huffy about one of his tweets, you are one of those haters.

Kanye West is also an enfant terrible. He’s the guy who stole Taylor Swift’s award at the VMAs, the dude who had the courage to say “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” on live TV, and the man who married Kim Kardashian and helped turn her into a style icon. He’s on his own plane, doing Kanye, and that means flourishing off of the kerfuffles he creates.

It almost makes sense that West’s personal philosophy could appeal to conservatives. He’s a self-made multimillionaire who espouses a distinctly American, capitalist ideology. If you want to achieve your goals, “think it, say it, do it,” he instructs in Thank You and You’re Welcome. At another point in the book, he talks about an early career failure. “Instead of allowing my anger to push me to do something negative, I focused on the positive. I...worked harder, and worked through the pain.” In other words, he pulled himself up by his bootstraps to achieve the American Dream the way Republicans always suggest. Of course, Ye is also the guy who blamed Ronald Reagan for pumping the black community with crack cocaine to purposely destroy the Black Power movement. At the end of the day, both conservatives and liberals can find a lot to praise and bemoan when it comes to Kanye, because Kanye is complicated. He can't fit easily into any box. And anytime you think you know which way he's going, he goes the other way just to spite you.

On a page in his book titled, “Embrace your flaws!” the rapper explains how his family used to tell him, “You don’t need to get your teeth fixed,” but the kids at school would taunt him by saying, “Your teeth are big and white just like horse!” He continues:

So I got braces and had to have eight teeth removed… Once my teeth were fixed, everybody (including some of the same people who said I didn’t need them) said, “Your teeth look so much better!” So now, when I see people with messed-up teeth, I want to be that one person who tells them the truth like the kids told me… I don’t believe in accepting a changeable condition.

This is endearing because in typical Kanye fashion it brazenly goes against the common refrain that you should accept yourself for who you are, through a mundane anecdote about getting braces as a child. It’s not particularly profound, but it’s a funny piece of insight into the inner workings of West’s wild mind. He does not go where you want him to go.

The last two pages of the book say, “I question anyone who questions me… but I question myself all the time!” Hopefully, this indicates that West will continue to question the passing thoughts he shares on Twitter.

Short-lived White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci once said, don’t take Trump literally, “take him symbolically.” While that’s terrible advice for how to interpret the words of the President of the United States, it’s a good way to understand West’s Twitter feed. Don’t interpret every statement as a permanent etch in the final book of Kanye, because he's rewriting that book everyday. Trust that he’s always questioning himself, and feel free to do the same.

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Follow Eve Peyser on Twitter and Instagram.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

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