Women are overlooked far too often in photography. How can we continue to combat this erasure? My answer is this column, “Woman Seeing Woman.” While it’s just the start of solving this problem, I, a female writer and photographer, hope to celebrate the astoundingly powerful female voices we have in photography by offering a glimpse into their work.

In Julie Blackmon’s image “Midwest Materials,” children bounce balls off the side of a building on a day of blue skies. Girls’ pigtails dangle near their ears and a boy runs shirtless through vacant parking spaces. Another looks up aimlessly at the sky. For people who grew up unattended, whose parents said “go play outside” and then expected them home at dusk, the scene might not be an unusual one. But for a child who grew up with what are now called “helicopter parents” it might be a bit unnerving. Where are their parents? What are they doing wandering alone?

The nature of being a parent has changed so much in the last few decades, and with it so has the state of mind of being a parent. In Julie Blackmon’s work of layered images—she doesn’t consider herself a photographer, but rather an artist whose medium is photography—she creates scenes of children whose parents are often absent, either of body or of mind. Somewhat famously, O Magazine wanted to publish her image “The Power of Now,” in which a mother lounges in the sun while a baby creeps ever closer to a pool, but only if she could move the baby further away from the water. Blackmon declined because a safe baby was not the point of the image. Rather, the point was that there’s never a moment of respite as a parent because look what happens if you take one—your baby creeps closer to the water, literally or metaphorically.

Blackmon sees her work as a way of understanding the world through the lens of parenting, a space that for her and for so many is stressful, overwhelming, and anxiety-inducing. By creating these mythical scenes dripping with dark humour, she’s able to process her experiences and make sense of what’s happening around her. “The craziness and the chaos in whatever scenes are more to me a metaphor for my psychological state as a mother and being overwhelmed and trying to sort it out,” Blackmon said. Parenting is filled with so many mixed emotions and those contradictions are what make it a complex experience. She said, “Really, as much as there’s all these kids, the absence of the mother in the photos, that’s really what to me that work is about.”

So the work isn’t really about “parenting” at all. Blackmon makes the comparison to Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird: the film wasn’t about Sacramento, but the city gives way to a bigger lens of human experience. Similarly, for Blackmon, parenting acts as a springboard for seeing things about the roles of women and what they manage. “I think women artists, women in general, we’re still doing the bulk of everything. We’re still seeing what needs to be done and even if we have the most wonderful husbands ever, we’re still having to designate, we’re still having to see the big picture of what needs to happen,” she said. If there’s something that needs to be addressed in the home or with the family, Blackmon still feels that women, especially those who are artists, are the parental partners who have to put their work second.

Blackmon’s work is not autobiographical. No she doesn’t have 17 kids. Even when she had been using her own children as subjects (she now uses neighbourhood children), she still found them to be characters in a larger scene she had created. “I didn’t think of it as something to be held dear to my heart in a way that a mother would hold her kids’ pictures dear,” she said. “It was dear because it was my work and I was giving it everything I had, but not because of who was in it.” After all, men photographing their children are not instantly stereotyped as “dad photographers.” But because Blackmon’s work takes place in her home, she often feels like she has to answer to that “mom photographer” stereotype, just like Cig Harvey. “If we are women we’re taking care of a lot of people. Even if they’re not our babies, they’re our mother-in-laws and they’re our neighbours. But it’s so hard when that truth is then held against you like, ‘Oh, you’re just going in your backyard with your neighbour’s kids.’ She said. “The images that I do are hopefully a reflection of something much bigger than my personal life. That’s what a real artist does.”

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In a viral video posted to YouTube this week, a man tried to show he was a big boy by ripping an anti-fascism poster in half during a May Day protest in Seattle on Tuesday. However, even after using some folding tricks, the guy in the Patriot Prayer T-shirt was unable to Hulk it up and destroy the poster. During Thursday's episode of Desus & Mero, the hosts discussed the dude's technique, and added their unique brand of commentary to the glorious footage.

You can watch the latest episode of Desus & Mero for free online now, and be sure to catch new episodes weeknights at 11 PM on VICELAND.

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In a 2011 BBC interview, the late, great art critic John Berger was asked, in an intrigued but slightly incredulous tone, about his Marxism and whether it was "still helpful today".

"If we look at what is happening to the world and the decisions taken every day," Berger replied, "all those decisions made in the name of one priority, of ever increasing profit… at that moment, Marx doesn’t seem so obsolete, does he?"

As a revered cultural figure, Berger was the kind of Marxist the establishment could afford to indulge a little. Yes, he had some pretty radical ideas, but it was OK because he was writing books and making television programmes. He wouldn't be let into the heart of the system; his ideas would remain on the sidelines.

Interviews like this were common. In 2002, the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm was asked again and again by a sweaty Jeremy Paxman if his commitment to communism was not misguided. Maintaining his dignity in the midst of Paxman's hectoring disbelief, Hobsbawm told him that, "My commitment to the poor, to the oppressed, wasn't."

For decades, frothing condescension has been the default position for dealing with Marxism. As the 200th anniversary of Marx's birth arrives tomorrow, this stance is becoming more and more absurd.

Karl Marx was born 200 years ago, on the 5th of May, 1818, in Trier, a small Rhineland city near the French border. Though, by the time of his death in 1883, much of his writing remained unpublished, his influence grew and grew, and interpretations of his work proliferated to the point where, today, when we talk about Marxism (not to mention socialism or communism), we could be talking about any number of ideologies, systems and theories.

This is not the place for those debates. It's enough to say that Marx (as well as his frequent writing partner, Friedrich Engels) remains the pre-eminent critic of capitalism, that he saw it as a system that degrades and exploits workers, a system whose recurring problems (homelessness, inequality, an economy that bounces all over the place, plutocracy, waste, instability) are unavoidable and built into it, and that these problems would be the system’s downfall, with the working classes rising up to free themselves from tyranny.

Marx's analyses and predictions were revolutionary. They showed that a world without capitalism was a possibility and that human beings would never be truly free until such a world came about. It is perhaps because of this that no other thinker since his birth has inspired as much admiration, passion, rage, incredulity and condescension as Marx.

The establishment tends to think of Marxists as either dangerous or absurd, as sinister revolutionaries or naïve idealists. Following the end of the Cold War and the emergence of Third Way politics in the 1990s, it looked for a while as though Marxism was dead, capitalism had triumphed, the end of history was here and that, as Thatcher put it, there was "no alternative".

Marx graffiti in Oaxaca, Mexico. Photo by the author.

Today, things look very different. Marxism, which never went away, is back. Capitalism, which was for a time seen as being akin to a law of nature, something permanent and unchangeable, is now being discussed and critiqued even by its champions.

Distinguished liberal publications like the New York Times are publishing articles saying Marx was right; a child named Sceneable is racking up millions of views with YouTube videos about communism; Chapo Trap House is a leftist podcast piling up subscriptions; and polls show that a majority of American adults under the age of 30 reject capitalism.

New books, plays and films are being made about Marx, with a recent focus on his life as a young guy who liked to drink and talk all night, before giving capitalism hell all day.

Across the Western world, Marx's influence is beginning to be felt again in the political mainstream. In America, Bernie Sanders – not a Marxist, but not a Marx hater – won millions of votes running as an unashamed democratic socialist in a country whose embrace of neoliberal capitalism and official antipathy toward leftist thought is something it has effectively gone to war over again and again and again.

In Britain, the Labour party is renewed under another socialist, Jeremy Corbyn. At the beginning of March, the Financial Times published an interview with Corbyn's shadow chancellor and long-time comrade John McDonnell under the headline, "Is Britain ready for a socialist chancellor?" Corbyn, McDonnell and their other main ally, Diane Abbott, spent decades on the sidelines of a Labour party led by Tony Blair and his successors. Now, though they may be surrounded by disbelief and hostility, they are at its heart.

The unravelling of capitalism, its morphing into ever more grotesque shapes, as predicted by Marx, is a huge part of this resurgence. In the countries that birthed capitalism (Europe, North America, Japan), wages have not grown for decades. Work is increasingly precarious. Affordable housing is in short supply. Meanwhile, those at the very top get richer and richer, with Oxfam finding that, in 2017, 82 percent of the wealth generated went to the richest 1 percent of the global population.

If you have had the feeling that you are being ripped off, well there's Marx, showing you that you always create more value for your employer than your employer pays you. "Capital," he writes, "is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. ... If the labourer consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist."

If you have been bedazzled and enraptured by the latest trainers off the production line, well there’s Marx, with his theory of the commodity fetish.

If you have had the feeling that you are not in control of your life, that you are a cog in a machine, that the work you do does not in any way represent you and that you are being overwhelmed by competition, well there’s Marx again, with his theory of alienation, and more besides.

"Marx's relevance today is chiefly in the analysis of the concentration of wealth in the hands of the property-owning classes, which the materialist conception of history takes as its starting-point, and in the cultural and political implications which such a concentration of wealth implies and evidences," Gregory Claeys, author of the newly published Marx and Marxism, told me. "Plutocracy is everywhere evident, and its control over the means of propaganda [press, TV, internet] as well as the capacity of corporate money to circumvent the democratic political process is equally obvious."

Claeys, who describes himself as a socialist, not a Marxist, identifies three factors that have led to a renewed interest in left alternatives to neoliberal capitalism and to which Marx is "clearly relevant to".

Marx graffiti in Oaxaca, Mexico. Photo by the author.

These are the "persistence of the 2008 financial crisis, with the warning that chronic instability still underpins capitalism generally; the astonishing growth in inequality which has marked the last decade or so, and warnings about the prospects of mass unemployment in the later 21st century as automation proceeds".

On that last point, the idea of fully automated luxury communism has come along, with the crucial point that what automation leads to is a political decision – we could end up in a hyper-capitalist dystopia in which machines have taken most of the work but the money and time still remains in the hands of the few, or we could see the money saved from automation put in the hands of the people whose jobs have been taken by machines, thus liberating us.

Marxism, as intellectual Terry Eagleton suggests, "is about leisure, not labour. It is a project that should be eagerly supported by all those who dislike having to work. It holds that the most precious activities are those done simply for the hell of it, and that art is in this sense the paradigm of authentic human activity".

Vijay Prashad, author, journalist and director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, told me that, as a Marxist, he understands that "liberalism and other forms of political thought are not able to manage the contradiction between their high-minded ideals and the policies that they produce (namely, policies that consolidate and propagate private property over human needs)".

Capitalism, Prashad believes, cannot solve its own problems. "We have acute joblessness around the planet. Three billion people go to bed each night with hunger gnawing their stomach lining. There is no solution to any of these within the realm of capitalist thought and policy. Entrepreneurship? That won’t end world hunger. Nor will vouchers. What alternative is available?"

Prashad offered a robust defence of a criticism often made of Marx, namely that his work was used as the foundation for societies that ended up becoming akin to dictatorships, that the killing of millions of people in the Soviet Union, China and elsewhere is proof that Marxism leads inevitably to death and destruction.

"The 20th century is filled with experiments towards a post-capitalist future," Prashad says. "Most of these experiments took place in peasant societies, where the new state had to struggle to assemble resources for socialism. These experiments taught us lessons, showed us a glimpse of another world – and showed us the limitations of building socialism without resources and building socialism without a genuinely strong capacity to be democratic in action."

In the end, Marx and his work represents that idea of an alternative to what we have, to the idea of another world being possible. Though it has been treated as such, Marxism is not a religion. Not everything has to be applied. But one of the reasons Marx has been so feared and smeared is because of his deviation from orthodox thinking, because of the threat to the established order carried in his work.

There is also, particularly in his early work, a great championing of humanity. "The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence," he writes in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, "the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour... The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life- the greater is the store of your estranged being."

Today, there isn’t even a guarantee that shunning the public house and the dance hall in favour of work will lead to you accumulating a nice hoard of mothproof treasure. Today, you might just have to work all the time in order to survive. In Marx, at least, we have someone who understands this.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Last month, a respected ayahuasca shaman was shot dead in a village in Peru. Olivia Arévalo Lomas has been described as a "Gloria Steinem" figure for her Indigenous community. The 81-year-old's death was a shock to the people in Ucayali Province, and to the growing global community around ayahuasca, a psychedelic brew native to the Amazon.

But the story doesn't end there. When Lomas's devotees found out she was killed, they traced the crime to the chief suspect, a Canadian named Sebastian Woodroffe who had been studying medicinal plants under Lomas. In what appears to be a brutal lynching, two men killed 41-year-old Woodroffe and then dragged his body behind a car before burying it. Peruvian prosectors say that the bullet cartridges used to kill Lomas could be traced back to his gun.

These deaths have sent ripples through the network of global ayahuasca advocates, who continuously struggle to navigate the potential risks of ayahuasca tourism in the Indigenous communities of the Amazon. Reporter Allison Tierney has been following this story as it unfolds.

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The Canadian who was lynched in April in a suspected retribution killing in Peru is now believed to have killed 81-year-old shaman Olivia Arévalo Lomas, according to a prosecutor in the country.

This news comes via Ucayali region chief prosecutor Ricardo Jimenez, AP reports.

Evidence that indicates Sebastian Woodroffe, 41, of British Columbia, shot and killed Arévalo is, in part, gunpowder on the man’s clothing and found bullet cartridges.

Said bullet cartridges match those of the gun Woodroffe had reportedly bought in early April, according to the AP report.

Two men in Peru have been ordered arrested in Woodroffe’s death. According to investigators, these suspects have yet to be found.

Woodroffe had been in Peru on and off over the years. According to a crowdfunding page to initially fund his travels to Peru, he wished to study plant medicine and planned to seek knowledge from the Shipibo people—the tribe Arévalo was part of.

About 10 minutes into Atlanta’s “FUBU” episode, I fell back into my shy, tight-jean-wearing middle-school stan for the “popular” kids. They were the fashionable branded kings/queens in a mostly black school, with keys to figurative Bentleys of social, sexual and material wealth. They got the numbers first, the freshest seats first, the school dances first, and other stans knew their names first. The world seemed like it was theirs, and my reasons for wanting what they had came from a need to feel as important as they seemed.

After a streak of surreal episodes for Atlanta, we got something more grounded last night, a flashback featuring both cousins from back in their school days. The time felt very 90s-ish, with us meeting little Earn (Alkoya Brunson) in a budget store. We immediately hear “Give Me One Reason” by Tracy Chapman in the background (dead giveaway of the era), as Earn spots something green with the letters F-U-B-U (For Us By Us)—a black owned fashion staple back in the day. So he turns on the beg and plead game with Mama Earns and his chance at status begins.

What follows becomes a slow strut into a ride of popularity. The boys start to give him props, the girls notice him, and a single shirt begins to make him just as soon as it can break him. But like all things Atlanta, nothing rides steady here. A class clown of the student body notices an identical shirt on another kid named Devin (Myles Truitt) with some tell-tale differences, and the search for the counterfeiter between Earn and Devin begins.

"If it's fake, everybody's gonna roast me...forever," Earns says to a white friend who seems oblivious. Him being white, and not privy to the same black culture code of conduct, he replies, “It doesn’t seem like a big deal to me. I’ve worn this shirt twice this week. It’s a fake.”

I can’t speak for a white guy in middle-school here, but there’s always been something linked between fashion and a self-esteem within many black communities. I personally never grew up with the funds for brand names, so I cheated just like my man Earn. I bought the bootlegs, I borrowed the brands from cousins, and I overwashed so that I could overwear (ala, tight jeans). Even now, some of that mentality still sticks with me in my push to put on airs in order to “feel” ahead in uncomfortable spaces.

What many don’t often tell you, is that when you grow up in poverty, you don’t want to see anything that reminds you of the poverty. Your self-esteem gets wrapped up in an expensive material that speaks an opposite tune to that. For some of us, the clothing becomes a visible symbol that makes us feel like we can be worth worth a damn in the face of poverty, discrimination, and racism. And anyone that doesn’t fit that mold will get clowned on for appearing like the place we’re constantly attempting to escape. It’s the core reason why FUBU, Nike, and Air Jordans were so popular in the hood; their attachments to status status as primary reasons reasons why they were so often took (stolen). In that regular Atlanta-“we’re not telling you this, but we kinda are” way, we see the start in Earn’s own lifelong attempt to achieve something he can call worth.

Going back to the episode at hand, our young Paper Boi takes it upon himself to bail Earn out of his fashion bind with his silver-tongue, leading to an inevitable loser between two the FUBU wearers. Apart from the standard bullying and name-calling that hits Devin like a brick, something far more tragic happens that further speaks to the toxicity of name branded self-worth.

We don’t know why exactly Devin was pushed over the edge to that extent. But we’re made to know that the appearance of status with a price tag, especially in relation to an impoverished culture that ranked position around it, was a culprit. Even in Atlanta’s present, with adult Earn still living close to the poverty line, he’s still trying to chase that same thing called status that will give him a feeling of worth.

It’s best summed up by 90s-era Mama Earn near the close of the episode.

“You are a black man in America. When you meet people, you need to look good. Your clothes are important,” she tells him.

And truthfully, a lot of us are still trying to find that same importance extends beyond the places we came from, the labels we fight against, and the barriers put before us.

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In some parallel universe, one not so different from our own, Peter Jackson never made his Lord of the Rings film trilogy. He never went to New Zealand, he never cast Elijah Wood, he never filmed those Hobbit movies, and... alright, maybe that one wouldn't be so bad. But in this parallel plane of existence, the Lord of the Rings movies weren't a trilogy at all—it was one movie, directed by Quentin Tarantino. And it probably would have sucked.

According to Anything You Can Imagine, an upcoming book about Peter Jackson's quest to make his now-legendary Lord of the Rings trilogy, that's almost what happened, the Guardian reports.

Back in the late 90s, when Jackson was in early development on the series with Miramax, then-Miramax head Harvey Weinstein tried to push him to condense all three stories into one single Lord of the Rings movie. Weinstein's idea for the film, which he reportedly detailed in a 1998 memo to Jackson, would have completely cut out the Balrog, all of Helm's Deep, and possibly even Saruman, according to Stuff.

When Jackson pushed back, saying that the version was "guaranteed to disappoint every single person that has read that book," Weinstein reportedly threatened to cut him out of the project entirely and replace him with Quentin Tarantino.

"Harvey was like, 'You’re either doing this or you’re not. You’re out. And I got Quentin ready to direct it,'" producer Ken Kamins told the book's author, Ian Nathan.

Jackson eventually split with Miramax and went to New Line, where he was allowed to craft the trilogy as he wanted, and the rest is history or whatever. But what would a Tarantino-helmed Lord of the Rings movie actually have looked like, if that had actually come to pass? The truth is, it would probably have been terrible.

Look, there's no denying that Quentin Tarantino is a genius director. Half of his films so far are stone-cold classics—fight me on which half—and the guy has shaped American independent cinema for the past two decades. But the closest he's ever gotten to fantasy is probably writing From Dusk Till Dawn, and Tarantino's way too self-conscious a director to tackle something like Frodo and Sam's friendship as earnestly as it needs to be. Plus, trying to condense a 455,000-word trilogy of beloved novels into a slim, two-hour runtime is already nearly impossible, no matter who you are. Ralph Bakshi's animated Lord of the Rings movie may be beloved by 15-year-olds who just discovered mushrooms, but it is a flawed film and still only managed to cover Fellowship and part of Two Towers.

To be fair, Weinstein's threat was likely just a bluff, since Tarantino was fresh off of Jackie Brown at that point and not yet the proven powerhouse who could be trusted with such a massive property. He is now, though, so maybe Amazon should hit him up about its new Lord of the Rings series—especially since the director seems to be down with established franchises these days.

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In March of this year history was made. For the first time ever, something cool actually happened at SXSW. Bernie Sanders was speaking during the tech conference week of the festival, and InfoWars had dispatched a team of intrepid InfoTeens to hassle his supporters outside of the event. The result was a clip they put together called "Liberals Defend Socialism At Bernie Sanders Event." While it was posted shortly after it happened, the video seems to have been taken down off their channels some time recently. Perhaps because, and this is another first, they realized how dumb they look.

You don’t need to watch the whole thing—it still lives online elsewhere—unless you’re a fan of flop sweating reporters and bleak cringe comedy. But there is one highlight that is a must watch. It was reposted on Twitter earlier this week by Dasha Nekrasova, one of the people InfoWars’ Ashton Whitty attempted to interview, where it quickly went viral, owing almost entirely to her super human levels of indifference.

Nekrasova, a 27-year-old podcaster, socialist, and actress from Brooklyn who was at SXSW to promote her new film Wobble Palace, a relationship comedy set in the final days before the 2016 election, handles the onslaught of stupidity from Whitty exactly how ambush interviews like this should be handled: not with an earnest attempt at debate, which isn’t what InfoWars is after in the first place of course, but with soul-chilling indifference, perfect comedic timing, and a series of instantly memorable line-readings. “You people have like worms in your brain, honestly,” she says at one point to Whitty’s questioning about people in Venezuela eating rats due to... socialism, or something.

Since Nekrasova’s tweet has exploded, Whitty has offered another rejoinder, which she posted to YouTube and I’m not going to watch but you can if you want, and a predictable chorus of the most disingenuous and dumbest people alive, like Pauly No Mates, have jumped in to destroy Nekrasova with her own logic, by pointing out a socialist drinking an iced coffee is a disqualifying indulgence.

I called Nekrasova to talk about her appearance on InfoWars, and life after going "softly viral."

VICE: Why did you decide to repost the video this week?
Dasha Nekrasova: They took it down because it became sort of softly viral I guess, and they probably realized they looked stupid.

What was going on that day when they tried to interview you?
Bernie Sanders was there giving a speech, which I couldn’t go to because I had to do an interview for my film. So I went and got an iced coffee. I was on my way to do another interview when Ashton Witty accosted me. The phone I’m holding right before InfoWars came up to me, a SXSW staffer had handed me the Google Pixel phone I’m holding to fill out a survey. That’s why I’m kind of preoccupied with the phone because there’s a woman off camera that’s waiting for me to fill out this survey at the same time.

You seemed to think it was funny at the time. Do you still think it’s funny?
I think it’s funny. I didn’t realize it was an InfoWars reporter at first, which is why I’m so enthusiastic to talk about Bernie Sanders. And when she asked me what’s so great about socialism I sort of like… I told her I don’t want to do this! But InfoWars is such a joke. I watch InfoWars.

You mention they have brain worms, what do you think is actually wrong with these people?
Ashton Whitty has a real victim complex. She’s an interesting person who’s like a social justice warrior who got red-pilled. She’s operating in the same way that obnoxious libs do, but she has a conservative worldview. I think she watches this propaganda and absorbs it. I don’t know what’s wrong with them, they have like a paranoid conspiracy worldview.

She definitely wasn’t on the top of her game that day.
Well, her whole thing is she’s from Berkeley, and with her victim complex pretends that she came out as conservative and it ruined her relationship with her family. I think she’s also an aspiring actress, and she attributes her failure in Hollywood to her red pill politics. It’s remarkable.

Do you think if this keeps getting bigger it will get a reaction out of Alex Jones?
Well, Ashton just did a new response video. I think she should lose her job! She’s a terrible reporter. But no I don’t think it will make it all the way to daddy. I think it would be wise of them to abstain.

You watch InfoWars to goof on it or?
I don’t watch it regularly. But it’s highly entertaining.

Alex Jones and Ben Shapiro are having a beef now. If you had to choose, gun to your head, who are you siding with there.
Um, Alex Jones!

He seems more human in his horribleness to me.
Yeah, I would agree with that.

Like a meaty, fleshy, horribleness. Not a wooden boy.
Yeah, he’s alive.

So at some point in the video your friend seems like he realized, Yeah, I don't want to be in on this.
That was my film’s producer AJ. We were all stunned when it happened. I was kind of afraid. It was very nerve-wracking. Me and Ashton both were like trembling, like vibrating as we were talking. She had a very nervous energy that made me very nervous. I think I reflexively had this very nonchalant demeanor. After it happened I was positive they were going to chop it up and edit it to make me seem totally stupid. I was surprised when they posted the un-edited video.

That’s funny that you say you were nervous because I think the general reaction has been, Oh my God, she is playing it so cool… So that’s not your natural affect?
Not exactly. The coffee sipping seems like it. I knew when I said eating the rich that was something they would like hearing. There was like a performative aspect to it. But the performativity was like a defense.

I didn’t realize you were an actress when I saw it. I wonder if you were playing a role in retrospect.
Maybe a little bit. I really was trying to listen to her and engage with her and respond. But then when she started talking about rats and Venezuela and stuff I realized it was like talking to a mentally ill person. I was sort of improvising.

I’m sure you’re getting a lot of people saying you’re a bad ass and a lot of horrible shit from the InfoWars mutants.
It’s been more of the former. The InfoWars critique is that I seem very much like a millennial caricature. And obviously I’m wearing that sailor outfit.

That does add to the absurdity!
Right! I seem like a cartoon of a millennial. But it’s mostly like, if you’re such a socialist why are you… drinking coffee?

What advice would you give anyone who finds themselves ambushed by one of these people?
They’re so hostile and aggressive. I mean, I think you just do your best. I think you keep in mind what they’re trying to do is get a reaction out of you, which is what I think people appreciate about my InfoWars appearance, the high-nonchalance. But when that happens to you you just have to go for it.

It’s almost the same rule for Twitter. Don’t get mad.
For sure. Like, don’t make a spectacle out of how mad you are. I think they want people to get mad.

You do a podcast called Red Scare. Is it mostly really left wing political stuff?
It’s me and writer Anna Khachiyan and we do neoliberal critiques, with a focus on women’s issues and Russian American affairs. The last episode we talked about the White House Correspondence dinner.

Where did you come down on that?
I think our guest on that episode, comedian Stephen Phillips-Horst, made a really good point, that it’s almost the perfect story because it gives people on the right a chance to be outraged about the content of her jokes and people on the left get to do a preachy free speech to power thing. A big part of Trumpism is the impression I get that everyone is role-playing or LARPing. It’s this reality TV spectacle of politics, which InfoWars very much is. At the same time, a lot of rose emoji communists online are also doing that, too.

You said your film is political as well?
It’s sort of a political movie. It’s set Halloween weekend before the 2016 election, and it’s sort of an improv-y relationship sex comedy. It’s very much a time capsule of that period. The two characters in it, who break up, they meet in 2012 in line to vote for Barack Obama, and the relationship spans the Obama administration, and you see them in these three days before the election when everything is sort of falling apart as Trump is about to win.

Did you ever get to the bottom of what Whitty was talking about with the rats?
Do you remember the video of the rat taking a shower? It’s not a rat. It’s like this Venezuelan rodent. And it’s not showering it probably wants to get the soap off its body. But I think that’s what Ashton was referring to. I think they eat whatever that rodent is called.

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Hours after a 5.0-magnitude earthquake rocked Hawaii's Big Island on Thursday, a volcano that had been threatening to erupt all week blew its top, shooting plumes of ash into the sky and sending streams of lava flowing toward two nearby residential areas. Hundreds of people in Leilani Estates and Lanipuna Gardens were ordered to evacuate, but, thankfully, there were no reported injuries, the Washington Post reports.

At about 4:30 PM, lava and "white, hot vapor and blue fume" started to spew from cracks in the ground, sometimes spilling out onto residential roads, according to the US Geological Survey. While locals fled their homes, some stopped to whip out their cameras and record the scene—capturing some unreal, terrifying footage of what it's like to find yourself face-to-face with an erupting volcano.

Photo via US Geological Survey via AP

According to the USGS, the eruption lasted for roughly two hours, finally coming to a close at about 6:30 PM local time. Geologists are monitoring the volcano and the fissures that opened up nearby, and the USGS is keeping Kilauea's alert level at "Warning"—signifying that "hazardous eruption is imminent, underway, or suspected." For now—with the volcano liable to blow again at any time, and dangerous levels of sulfur dioxide in the area—residents don't have any word on when it might be safe to go back home.

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Related: Volcanoes Are Erupting Across the Pacific Ring of Fire

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Cops surely come across a lot of interesting stuff during the course of their investigations, but four Peel region police officers allegedly couldn’t resist stealing a Tony Montana statue while busting an accused drug dealer.

According to the Brampton Guardian, Sgt. Manuel Pinheiro and constables Richard Rerrie, Damian Savino and Mihai Muresan are facing theft under $5,000, obstructing police, and perjury, after allegedly stealing the Scarface statue, cash, and jewelry from Lowell Somerville.

Somerville, who was facing heroin, cocaine, and MDMA-related trafficking and possession charges told a judge the officers stole from him. The charges against him were stayed after Justice Jennifer Woollcombe reviewed video footage of the alleged theft going down.

In her decision to stay the charges last year, Woollcombe reportedly described the statue (which does sound pretty cool) as “modelled on Montana’s character, at the end of the movie Scarface, at the point at which he utters the phrase, ‘say hello to my little friend,’ in reference to the gun that he is carrying.”

Somerville claimed that after he was released from custody, he checked on his storage unit, which cops had raided, and saw that the statue was gone. Security footage also showed “the shape of the object that was carried out of the facility by Officer Rerrie appears very similar to the shape of the statue of Tony Montana,” according to Woollcombe’s ruling. She didn’t buy Constable Rerrie’s rebuttal that they took a free heater, not the statue.

“It seemed most likely that one of them found the statue and that a number of them recognized the statue as Tony Montana, a renowned drug dealer in a movie that they were familiar with,” Woollcombe said. “The irony of finding a statue of a drug dealer in a storage unit of a person they had just arrested for drug dealing is obvious.”

She also slammed the cops for “deceiving the court about what they’d done.”

Following the ruling, Peel police launched an internal probe and have now charged the officers. They are suspended with pay.

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We New Jerseyans are a tough people. We listen as you jeer at us for our toll booths, and Snooki, and Chris Christie's summer vacations, while you get to enjoy all the wonderful things we have to offer—The Sopranos, Bruce Springsteen, terrifying highways. And while we're also a divisive people—some of us root for the Giants, others the Eagles—we know it's us against the rest of the world. No matter where geographically we live in our great state, we always go "down the shore." (We never go "up" there.) We defend our land to those who aren't from it, to those who will never understand—but we also, most importantly, hold ourselves accountable. We rib, we fight, and we admit we're wrong to one another's faces. So when one of our own fucks up, it's our job to tell them so: Like the NJ dairy farmers who have decided to make pork roll–flavored ice cream.

For those not familiar with this breakfast delicacy, first off, I'm sincerely sorry. It is the most perfect of meat options, yet somehow the most difficult to describe. It's a bit like ham that tastes a bit like bacon—or, according to USA Today, "a cross between Canadian bacon and bacon, less hammy and smoky than Canadian, fattier and saltier than bacon, with a unique texture, both crispy and slightly mushy." Like, I said... it's perfect on its own.

But now, apparently, Windy Brow Farms in Fredon Township has begun putting the meat into ice cream, the Associated Press reports. The desert, allegedly, "mixes in French toast with actual pieces of pork roll." The reason for the French toast part of the concoction, if you're curious, is because Jake Hunt, Windy Brow's managing partner, said it would be "gross" otherwise. I understand wanting a balance of sweet and salty, but come on, bro. For starters, pork roll does not need anything else to improve it, especially something from France. If it does, you've already messed up. (Eater, with seemingly no evidence, has already called this "the ultimate New Jersey delicacy," and to that I say a resounding "fughettaboutit.")

I will go on the record: Pork roll does not belong in ice cream. It belongs sizzling in a frying pan, and then stuck between a roll with some cheesy eggs. It belongs on a sandwich resting under the heat lamps of the local WaWa, sitting there wrapped in tinfoil, as it has for hours, waiting to be grabbed on the way to school for $2.59. Hell, it even belongs on minor league baseball jerseys, and at its own festival. Pork roll deserves to be honored and held high. We have eaten it for centuries. It makes us—the proud citizens of the Garden State—who we are.

I must admit, I've not tried the Taylor Ham ice cream yet. I do not plan to, and if you do, I guarantee you it's going to be a mistake. And if I still haven't convinced you that all of this is a bad idea, consider one more thing: Pork roll is already a contentious enough issue. In 2016, for instance, 70,000 Jersey residents voted on whether or not it was called "pork roll" or "Taylor Ham," the meat's brand name. (That whole thing resulted in a heated regional debate that still exists today, but that's another story.) Let's not make the whole situation any worse than it has to be. There's absolutely no need to be putting this shit in ice cream.

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Mélanie-Rose Frappier, is an ex-competitive squash player who founded It’s Cool To Be Healthy and teaches Canadian teens about Indigenous history. All of Frappier’s projects are born from her own curiosity. And it’s easy to understand this desire to know more when you know how complex her upbringing is: Metis, half French, half Anishinaabe, living in Sudbury, Ontario.

The 21-year-old is currently studying Health Promotion and Indigenous Studies. But in her spare time, she goes from school to school to help Indigenous teens connect with their culture by sharing with them what her own quest for identity taught her. And in her spare time from that, she works so young people can live a healthy life in what has been dubbed one of Canada’s most obese cities.

The first time I ever got stoned, I told my college boyfriend that I finally understood The Beatles. Naturally, he laughed his ass off. Unlike most of us plebes, who get a little high and think we're creative geniuses, Vernon O'Meally turns his psychedelic experiences into luminous, detailed works of art.

Inspired by funk, old school R&B, psychedelic rock, and punk—and what it feels like to listen to that music while tripping balls—O'Meally's paintings are like synesthesia on canvas. He paints what he hears. Blaring horns become bold, frenetic lines atop a neon background; wailing guitars are sweeping ribbons of charcoal.

O'Meally's paintings are unlike the "art" your stoner roommate might make. They're nuanced, imaginative, and precise. The Atlanta-born artist has an encyclopedic knowledge of classic jams, and he deconstructs his favorite music with the precision of a composer before splicing it back together on canvas.

VICE caught up with O'Meally at the opening of his solo show This Way to That Way at one of New York's coolest new art spaces, ABXY on the Lower East Side.

Installation view

VICE: What inspires your art?
Vernon O’Meally: Most of my inspiration comes from music—psychedelic rock, a bunch of old school R&B, this and that. Growing up, my dad listened to a lot of old school music. He’s Jamaican and he listened to a lot of reggae and old school slow songs. Still to this day, the saddest of songs don’t get me down; they make me very happy. I just love the groove of it. It’s all about the groove of the music and the journey that it takes me on.

What’s some of your favourite music?
The very first album I listened to was Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow, and it’s just really great. The song “White Rabbit” inspired the Alice in Wonderland television installation in my show. The song kinda goes through Alice’s journey, and it’s just really cool.

Deep Purple is also one of my favourites. Led Zeppelin and them draw a lot of influence from Robert Johnson and the Delta blues, but they kick it up a notch with that heavy metal sound. Other than that: Al Green, The O’Jays’ Back Stabbers, Jimi Hendrix—he’s a big inspiration.

I really love Bad Brains. Before I heard them, my lines connected in a different way, and when I started listening to punk a little more, Bad Brains just made me go crazy on a large scale. My work got bigger as a result of punk. I went out and bought a six yard canvas, posted up, and turned on the music.

There’s also a lot of rappers now—like A$AP Rocky has the song “L$D,” and Flatbush Zombies—inspired by psychedelics. I love that it’s creating a whole different style of hip hop. It has a different groove to it that I love, because I generally love a bunch of old shit. Stuff from the 60s and 70s, that sort of thing.

Vernon O'Meally, This Way to That Way, 2018

What’s up with the smiley faces painted on record sleeves?
I was looking at old LSD tabs with that classic art on it, like spaceships or smiley faces. I also thought about the Temptations album Psychedelic Shack. It’s so groovy. I love their voices, the a cappella. There’s this one song that I played called “Smiling Faces Sometimes” [Editor’s note: this song appeared on the 1971 album Sky’s the Limit] and the idea is that sometimes a smile doesn’t tell the truth. So I went crazy with the smileys. There’s different ways you can interpret it.

What role do psychedelic drugs play in your art?
I don’t actually make art while I’m on psychedelics. But I hear musical riffs in my head all the time. And that journey while you’re on LSD…I like to sit back and listen to music, generally, and drink some wine and listen to a whole album, or two, or three. And when a particular riff or something plays over and over in my head, [my art] is how I get it out of my head. And psychedelics help me interpret the music differently.

The artist (L). Vernon O'Meally, Purple Drapes and Zodiac Stars, 2018 (R)

How do you translate the music into art?
So I love using charcoal, because unlike a paintbrush that you have to pause and re-dip, drawing with charcoal just doesn’t end. It’s like a guitar pick, you know? That’s how I see it in my medium: it’s my guitar pick, and I’m just going.

Large, broad strokes are like a long guitar riff, specifically like a Deep Purple thing. [Jagged marks] are movements I use a lot, and that’s from the Bad Brains, like diga diga duh nuh. It kind of moves with the music. [And then short lines] I’m just going ch ch to the music, almost like percussion.

I usually work with my canvases on the ground. I like to circle around it, and I love that, because you’re in full control. Sometimes with a large canvas, if it’s on the wall, my arm can get tired. But I don’t wanna stop. On the ground, I can have that flow.

The artist in front of his piece Halfway Down the Stairs There's a Stair Where I Sit, 2018

Do you make your paintings all in one sitting?
Early on, I never wanted to stop. I’d just want to keep going, and sometimes it’s me knowing when to stop. A large piece can take a day or two generally.

Whoa, that’s pretty fast.
I just go. I’m usually in [the studio] from like 12 PM one day till 10 AM the next day. Sometimes I just sit and stare for a few songs. Put on some heavy metal, and then go back and attack it. If it’s a slow song, I move slow with it. That kind of thing.

What do you listen to when you’re making art?
Whatever I’m feeling at the time. Maybe I’ll do jazz mixed with heavy metal or some reggae. And punk is always so different from the rest, because it’s like a repeat of the same thing. I want to make the same marks over and over. I mixed up lots of different genres [for this show]. I like to show how different music creates a different type of flow. The colour blocks [in my paintings] show a mix of different genres.

Artist Bryan Ellingson with the sound and video installation he created for O'Meally's show

So how does sound factor into your show?
I wanted to do this thing with Alice in Wonderland, and the title of the show is This Way to That Way, which is a reference to the road where she meets the Cheshire Cat. I wanted to have the ticking of a clock, riffs from Pink Floyd, lines from the animated movie. And Bryan [Ellingson] and I like a lot of the same music, so we wanted to make it a trip for people as they’re coming into the gallery.

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What you learn in your first year of postsecondary are the lessons that carry you through the next few years of your life. For a lesson to sink in you've got to learn the hard way. Transitioning from high school to university or college is hardly ever smooth, and I could have benefited from someone telling me a thing or two about their mistakes. We spoke to people who have already made it through their first year in one piece, about what lessons they would pass on to the incoming flocks of high school students.

Adam Travis

First year at: University of New Brunswick, Business Administration

What happened?
I always knew I talked in my sleep from time to time, but my first experience sleepwalking was in my first year of university. I’d gone out to a house party with a few people from my residence but had come back before midnight. I said goodnight to my roommate and crawled under the sheets. The next morning, I made my way downstairs to the main lounge. When I walked in, D, a guy who lived downstairs, told me ‘it was nice to see you last night!’ I thought he was joking, since this is the first time I’d seen him in days. He proceeded to tell me I’d barged into his room at 3 AM in my pajamas and crawled into his roommate’s bed and fallen asleep. It wasn’t until an RA came in and told me it was the wrong room that I bolted up, shouted ‘FUCK’ and ran upstairs to my room. It had to be a joke. It was then that the RA on duty came in and cracked a smile, looking in my direction. He told me, word-for-word, the exact same story as D. We eventually surmised that I got up to use the bathroom and for some reason, went downstairs and went to D’s room—which was directly underneath mine—and into his roommate’s bed—on the same side of the room as mine. As far as I know, it was a one-off thing, but I’ve heard of other people in residence doing similar things. As for other sleep stuff, my roommate was a night owl and I was usually in bed by 10 PM, which is pretty vanilla as far as roommate conflicts go.

What did you learn?
Sharing a room can be a new experience for a lot of people, as is living in close contact with close to 100 people. You’ll see a lot of people’s weird habits, so be open and understanding—everyone is weird to somebody. Don’t be afraid to set out clear ground rules for behavior, chores, and money, too. It might feel awkward to make a list of do’s and don’ts but it’ll prevent a lot of stress down the line. In any case, communication is key. “Hoping they get the hint” is a bad strategy at best, which usually ends up with you being filled with passive-aggressive rage and them still being unaware that there’s a problem.

Zarina Mia

First year at: University of Toronto, History and English double major

What happened?
When I was in first-year, I was stressed beyond belief. I had a really easy time in high school getting good grades but when I was in first year that dramatically changed and it had been the first time I regularly getting Cs and I couldn’t believe it. One day in lecture I began crying because my grades were not where I wanted them to be. I was so embarrassed about myself. But then not long after, it was exam period and I was in the library studying and I saw someone else who was on their own just sitting doing their work and they started crying. Then, I was in a lecture and my professor started crying. It was because they had read a very emotional poem but just the fact that they were able to be comfortable releasing that emotion in front of everyone made me feel better.

Did you see more people cry?
Oh, all the time! I have seen professors cry a bunch of times, especially because in English we read a lot of poetry, stories that evoke really intense feelings. But even with my friends getting a really bad grade or learning they might need to drop a class is always very emotional.

What did you learn?
I learned that it’s not so much of a big deal to have feelings and be human, you know? Especially because so many people are coming from different places with different experiences. People don’t care what they look like, people will come to class wearing pajamas, with their hair up, people want to be comfortable, it’s not a fashion show. In high school that was a huge thing for me, doing my makeup every morning having a really nice outfit because I wanted to impress everyone. People are way less judgmental, more mature generally and it’s a lot easier to feel comfortable in who you are.

Hakim Omar-Bujak

First year at: Concordia University, software engineering

What happened?
We have a weird house number. It’s 665, so it’s not 666 but it’s almost there. And it’s a cool apartment; I live in a sort of grungy upcoming neighborhood in Montreal. The rent is super cheap. One thing I learned is move to Montreal if you want to pay cheap rent. But my neighbours are kind of shitty, like I don’t know, they’re just really [rude] Quebecois people. They smoke infinite cigarettes, and [use] all the swear words. It’s a strange relationship. We both hate each other secretly. But every time we see each other, we’re like ‘Hey how’s it going.’ One thing that pisses me off is that there’s always dog shit on their side of the balcony and we share a balcony. The dog just always shits there. Whenever I have friends over there’s just a pile of dog shit. There’s this one funny story from when I just moved in, I lived here for about two months and my neighbours had this cat. This cat really liked me and would always come to my side of the balcony to get pet or push her body against me. A month after that, they knock on my door… and they’re like, is my cat inside your house? I was like no? Do you guys think I stole your cat or something?

What did you learn?
We both don’t really like each other just because we live beside each other. It’s going to be harder to change the person than it is to find a new apartment.

Josh Varty

First year at: University of Waterloo, bachelor of applied science in computer engineering

What happened?
For me, high school was sort of a competition to not care about things. That lead to a lot of people fucking around and not taking things seriously, in my first year of university I had core group of friends and we ran into this issue where we carried that mentality forward, we wouldn’t study, we wouldn’t go to class, we would drink during the weeks and stuff like that. And it ended up with one third of our group failing that semester and dropping out of university. It caused myself especially to take a minute to reflect on why we were at university and why we wanted to be there, or even if we wanted to be there. And I looked around and realized all the people I admired in my life got to where they were through working hard. Even in terms of each class that you skip, it’s essentially $70 that you paid for, that you’re missing out on. And looking at things that way helped ground me.

Did you ever strike that balance?
Yeah, for the first two semesters after there was very little partying. Maybe at the start or in between semesters, but during the school year it was really head-down. We hung out in the library if we hung out at all. But towards the end of university things sort of let up and I think I got more of a balanced experience out of it. So in a certain sense I did get it out of my system. For one of my friends, he didn’t come to the same understanding. Maybe even not having him around changed my outlook on some of those things.

What did you learn?
My lessons I think would be that any accomplishment, anything you want to get done in your life, that is of any value, is going to take hard work, and it’s going to take putting yourself through discomfort and you can’t coast your way to the finish line. If you want to get somewhere and you want to excel at something, it doesn’t come naturally. The more distractions you have around you the harder it will be to focus. And the people who are surrounding you are definitely going to have some impact on what you value and what you focus on.

Miriam Valdes-Carletti

First year at: Ryerson University, Bachelor of Journalism

What happened?
I was taking sociology in first year and I sat in the very front row with my friend just because she wanted to. [The prof] was setting up his laptop to the power point and all of a sudden there was a naked lady on the screen and everyone kind of gasped for a second and I don’t think he realized until we were like what the fuck and he quickly swept it away and stuttered. I was kind of confused like, did that just happen? And the thing is it was a sociology class so we were like… was that supposed to be there? The following week he sent out an email and before class he formally apologized, like I’m so sorry I hope that didn’t offend anyone and if you want to complain or you want to go to student services or get help after this traumatizing event you can. I don’t think I need help now, but thank you. It was just really funny. I came from a Catholic high school so we didn’t really talk about pornography or anything like that kind of stuff and all of a sudden it was on the screen, like what the fuck! We were all about Jesus, so I was like oh my God it’s the devil on the screen.

OMG. What else was a shock in particular with the transition from a Catholic school to a university?
I had to wear a uniform so that was one big thing for me. I actually had to choose what to wear. My closet was very minimal in high school like I had a couple pairs or sweats and most of the time when I came home from school I would wear my uniform when I went to bed anyway because I was too lazy to change. You’d even get in trouble if you wore your uniform wrong. I’d get in trouble if I wore colorful socks. I don’t know if this makes me feel like an adult, but I remember [a prof in university] swore at me once because I was talking while he was talking. The profs are more chill and they want to be called by their first name so that took some getting used to. Like, oh, are we friends now? You have a PhD but I’m calling you Dan.

What did you learn from all this?
This is a lesson more for that teacher than the students but don’t leave porn on your laptop before you go into lecture. The biggest lesson I learned was not to raise your hand and ask a prof if you can go to the bathroom. He kind of gave me a weird like, ‘Uh yeah of course you can I don’t care, you can do whatever you want.’ And I realized like, wow OK, I can do whatever I want. Moving from high school to university and having that independence, even just being able to go to the bathroom on your own, it’s a little thing but it also shows how independent you are now and how you really have control over your bladder now so it’s pretty cool.

Cassie Lowe

First year at: Humber College, film and television

(Also: George Brown for sign language and deaf studies, and first year at McMaster University for social work)

What happened?
The first time I went to school was because I wanted to go the same university as my mom. And I was like oh my God, I’m going to go to McMaster like my mom and I’m going to get a degree and I kind of felt pressure. It wasn’t my mother’s fault. But that’s why I went to university first. Society says you’re not smart unless you go for a degree. So I went to McMaster, hated it. Then I went to George Brown because I was like, this will get me money. Which again, is not the right reason to go to school. Then finally I applied to media foundations [at Humber], which its funny, media foundations was the other program I was thinking about going into before I got accepted to McMaster. I had to fail there and then I had to fail at George Brown to realize like, you know what I should be going to school for what I want to do and for what I like rather than something that’s money-based, or something society says that you should have. And now I love school.

It’s pretty cool to have done so many first years though.
I do think it is unique, when I dropped out of McMaster I felt so bad. It put me into a depression. I felt like I was an idiot. And then I applied to George Brown and the same thing happened. But I don’t regret it at all now. I feel like if I had gone to Humber first I might not have appreciated it as much. For a while, I actually resented dropping out. Because so many people would be like, ‘what are you in school for?’ Like, oh, I dropped out twice. It’s funny because now a lot of my friends have actually gone through the same thing.

What did you learn in your three years as a first year?
Do it for yourself. And don’t stop trying if you do fail because it’s all part of the journey. It’s hard. But I feel like a lot of people have to learn it. Oh and just because you don’t go to university doesn’t mean you’re in idiot. I don’t know if I’m just bragging, but I literally went from dropping at two different schools and I just got an academic award this year. I was the top of my class in the program and I was like woah! I never thought I’d get an academic award. Like, that’s cool. Fuck you, all my haters. How bow dat. I’m using the money to get a camera.

Eric*

First year at: Carleton University, bachelor of commerce in accounting

What happened?
It all started on literally my first day. I was on rez for probably 15 minutes into the night, I was just drinking a Busch, there were a bunch of people playing beer pong. All of a sudden a big group of campus security walked in and they write everyone up. I didn’t think much of it, but after two weeks I got called in and I had to talk to this lady about why I was drinking. I had to complete this online alcohol assessment which is a test to see if you’re dependent on alcohol or not and I had to write about it. Probably like, my second week on rez we were smoking in our room. We got a knock on the door and it was campus security again. We were trying to bullshit it, but at the same time I feel like they knew. My roommate got a little baggie with some weed in it and he gave it to them. But we actually had way more. We had to go in for another meeting with the same lady, and this time we had to complete this weed thing. It was a website that educates you about weed so I had to do this whole assessment about weed this time.

How many times did this happen?
It escalated to the point where I was going to get kicked off rez. I had to write out a fucking like, five-page thing arguing why I should be allowed to stay. Two of the times we got booked we hadn’t actually been smoking in our rooms. It was just bullshit. One of the times, I wasn’t even in Ottawa. Me and my roommate were both in Markham and somehow we got written up while we were in Markham for “smoking weed in Ottawa.” It was the stupidest thing ever. There was another time one of the security guards had his ear pressed against my door listening to what we were talking about. When he did knock on our door he was like, oh I heard you guys talking about a scale. No one in the room was talking about a scale.

What did you learn?
Live it up, but campus security are assholes, and they don’t want you to have a good time. Eventually we realized that at a certain time they get off so we would just wait until then and do all our smoking and whatnot. Residence isn’t as party-friendly as you think it is when you’re in high school. If I could do it again I would just go in a lot more cautious. I would probably go in more like alright we’re going to party but we’re going to be sneaky about it.

Philippe Lavoie

First year at: University of Ottawa, international studies and modern languages

What happened?
I was trying to go out grocery shopping and my card got declined and I was like oh well... I’ll put this back. And then it got declined again and I was like OK, I need to step aside before I embarrass myself. And I figured out how much money I had and got the basics I needed and basically spend my last dollar. I was like man, this is so stupid how did this happen? And then I looked up and I saw there were three empty 1.75 liters of Smirnoff sitting on top of my dresser, and I was like that’s probably why I’m eating plain lettuce for dinner tonight. My mom was out of the country or something so I couldn’t ask her for money, so it was the moment I was like oh my god I’m really super alone and the realization that this is my life, that I have to support right now, really did help smarten me up and in the second half the semester, I got a lot less vodka.

How did you get to that point?
I wanted the ability to focus on that transition into university life so I worked three part-time jobs during the summer before to save up what I thought was going to be enough money to get me through the eight months of school. But I was also having way too much fun in rez to do that. I wasn’t used to having savings and a large amount of money in my bank account. So I would look at my statement and be like omg there’s so much money here. Swipe swipe swipe. Then I wouldn’t look at it for weeks and weeks. And because I wasn’t working there was no new money coming in except for birthday and Christmas money which is nothing. You should never bank on that.

What did you learn?
I learned how to budget. That’s a good one. There were enough times where I was like oh my god there is 75 cents in my bank account or like, oh my god there are minus 200 dollars in my bank account and that’s not the worst thing, I think that’s important for someone to go through in their life. To be like I have a cup of rice and three tubs of peanut butter and a bag of marshmallows how can I make a meal out of this? If you’re in that situation and you go out for drinks… order a Caesar, the celery stick is a good snack. That’s the other one. I don’t want to be pessimistic… it doesn’t get better, you’re still going to see shiny shit on the shelf and not have the money for it. I think I might go to the store after this.

Leticia-Noriko Walters

First year at: University of Waterloo, Geology

What happened?
In high school I never kept my phone for longer than a month. I maybe went through 15 blackberries, two androids, five iPhones. For the first week I went to a party but I had been hella crunk I guess and I had my phone plugged into the music. I fell asleep at the party, it was a friends place, so it wasn’t me at some random person’s place sleeping. When I woke up I was like oh the music’s not playing, where is my phone? Literally like maybe 20 minutes ago I fell asleep. It turns out someone had stolen my phone. I took my entire year after graduating off just so I could fuck around essentially, I thought my first year of university I was going to be responsible. Finally I got another iPhone and I’ve had this phone for a few years now.

I guess you can’t really trust people at parties, or you just have to expect the unexpected.
We’ve had a few parties at our house but we’ve never had issue because the people we invite are just people we know. My friends don’t steal things. But they bring really random shit to parties. This one time they brought an octopus to a party. Like from a store. I think it was dead, I don’t think it was alive. But they filled the bathtub and put it in there. Yeah they do weird shit. They’ve done some other shit too… I think they took a bite out of all the apples in the house. I don’t fucking know. But they do shit like that, so be careful who you invite [to your house] because they might do really random shit and you won’t know how to deal with it the next day.

What else did you learn from these parties?
If you’re like me and you lose your phone all the time, literally just glue it to you somewhere. Don’t be like hey can I play some music? It’s fucking stupid. Everyone isn’t as connected as they were in high school. I want to say that some people are assholes, but a lot of the times when I went out people were just great people.

Mariel Lepra

First year at: University of British Columbia, bachelor of science (marine biology)

What happened?
I was like I need to get out of my house, I just need to like, be a big girl and get the fuck out and move out as far as I can. And to me, that was BC and I had this ideal picture of Vancouver in my head and then I showed up in like, East Hastings. I don’t think I ever fully adjusted to be honest, because I came back [home] for my mental health. My big thing that kind of makes them laugh is to be honest, my mind erased most of first year because I was so fucking depressed it was awful. Clinical depression runs in my family and it was totally exasperated when I was so far away from home. BC is super different from Toronto. Definitely even just living on campus. There’s like a nudist beach on campus too. There’s this guy named Ninja and he’d come around and sell acid and shrooms chocolate at like 12 PM. He’d just be sitting on the beach smoking a bong and come up and be like, do you need anything? He had a ninja sword I don’t know why.

So you kind of romanticized it?
I totally did. I was like oh everyone is going to be super chill, and smoking weed in Vancouver and it’s going to be great and green. But it rains all the time… when it’s a sunny day you’re like holy fuck the city is beautiful. And when it rains you’re like holy shit this is depressing. I completely didn’t take into account half the things that people were telling me to take into account. Living in a dorm for me was hellish because you have to listen to people having sex and listening to people being idiots. I was like this guy isn’t going to last more than five minutes but then 20 minutes in I was like just stop. It took me forever to fall asleep, so to finally fall asleep and be woken up by some guy grunting and hitting a headboard like… no. There was one girl that somehow managed to get her period blood all over the [bathroom] and she would wash out her dirty panties in the sink. Like, once I went to bathroom to brush my teeth and she was washing out her panties in the sink. Like the blood out of her panties. Maybe it would have been funny if I wasn’t extremely depressed.

What did you learn?
Just don’t run out of the house because you think you’re going to have your own.

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*Name has been changed.

The following story contains some basic plot spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War.

Against all odds, Infinity War, Marvel's bajillion-character epic, basically works as a film. The reason it does is Thanos, the villain at its center, is one of the best movie supervillains of all time. OK, that's not a tough title to earn—can you even name the baddies in Thor: The Dark World or Iron Man 3? Still, Thanos is an undeniably memorable character, mostly because like a lot of great evildoers his motivations are totally understandable, even close to heroic. He just takes things far enough that he crosses over into outright insanity.

Specifically, Thanos is worried that the universe is overcrowded and that this overcrowding will lead to a resource shortage and catastrophe. It's a fear reminiscent of the theories of Thomas Malthus, an 18th-century English thinker who worried that the world's rising population would result in food shortages. His calculations haven't proved to be correct, but there remain plenty of people who think that out-of-control population growth is causing environmental problems. The most drastic form this kind of logic takes is the argument that we should stop having kids in order to save the world.

Thanos takes things one step beyond calling for zero population growth—he assembles six magic stones so he can wipe out half the universe's population with a snap of his fingers. Obviously this is bad. But what about a more mild form of Thanosism, where he snaps his fingers and implements a universal one-child policy? Would we be thanking him?

To sort this out, I called up Lyman Stone, a economics researcher specializing in population issues who has written on the subject before in Vox, among other places. We had a conversation that went from Thanos to climate change to the abuse people who have lots of kids get then back to Thanos. Here's how it went:

VICE: Let's start off with a simple one: Are there too many people in the world right now?
Lyman Stone: No.

When people talk about overpopulation you have to ask, "Why? What is the problem with the number of people that we have?" You get a couple answers. Sometimes people say we can’t feed them all. That’s not true. The caloric output of current agriculture is more than enough to feed everyone, and most of the world is nowhere near maximum theoretical yields with even current technology.

Maybe people think we don’t have enough water. Water stress is a big deal in many parts of the world—but water is renewable. You can desalinate it, you can collect it from the atmosphere, it literally falls from the sky. But then you get to the problem with desalinating water for everyone, which is energy. That is the fundamental population problem—not food, not crowding, the only real issue is energy. Then the question is, why do we not have enough energy? That gets to fossil fuels, global warming—but at the end of the day, there is a vast amount of energy available using fairly simple technologies like wind, hydro energy, and biomass, which is renewable since the sun is pumping energy onto us. Energy is a place where we’re making massive strides, and the potential for renewables are enormous.

Considering all that, why are people—not just movie villains—worried about overpopulation?
Look at the calculus on global warming—global warming is caused by how much carbon it takes to produce a dollar of economic output, multiplied by the dollars of economic output per person on earth, multiplied by the number of people. The trouble is while this is a neat way to break out the problem, it makes something look causal that might not be causal, and that’s population. The question is if you reduced population, would you actually get less emissions—and the answer is not really. There’s been a lot of research on this, on what happens when you get population reduction in a society. Emissions don’t shrink nearly as much as they should. You don’t turn the power plant off because population falls 5 percent, you still have the roads, there are fixed costs that don’t change.

Furthermore, if you do the actual math—even if you assume that people are this causal instrument and that the economy would immediately respond to population changes—you come to the conclusion that there is no plausible population trajectory for the earth that makes any difference. A drop in fertility doesn’t change climate forecasts very much. It’s just not that influential, especially on the time horizon that we need. We need a change in carbon output this century to avoid catastrophic global warming. The impacts of reducing fertility start to show up in like 2075 and aren’t really big until 2200—that’s too little too late. The way you have to do it is you have to find ways to use less carbon. You have to use alternative energies, renewable energies. You have to encourage more efficient allocations of people in different living arrangements.

Everyone in the field is aware of this, but the mid-level-education, cocktail-party-level-of-information activists have it in their heads that the family with four kids down the street is causing global warming. That’s just total crap. What’s causing global warming is that your local power plant is coal-fired instead of natural gas–fired, or natural gas–fired instead of a hydro plant, or it’s a hydro plant instead of wind and solar.

Do you see that a lot, people with large families getting shamed?
It’s a real thing. I write a lot about family issues and fertility, and there are a lot of pejoratives thrown around—"breeders" is a phrase people like to use. Sit down with a family that has five or six kids and ask them what their experience going to the mall or going to the movies. The looks they get, the things that get said to them. It’s absurd what people feel they have license to say.

To get back to Infinity War, can you envision a time when the world would get overcrowded? Is that a realistic concern?
Yes. There’s a thing called the Kardashev Scale, which classifies civilizations into four categories. Type 0 means a civilization that captures less than the complete energy output that reaches its planet. So the energy from a star hits your planet, are you capturing all of it? If you are, you’re type I. Type II is a civilization that captures all the energy coming out of its star—this is your science-fiction Dyson Spheres—and Type III captures the entire energy of a galaxy. We are type less-than-I, I think we’re probably close to type 0.45. That means we can probably afford to have two times as much energy consumption as we currently have and not be hitting anything like physical constraints. If we can find ways to use less energy, we can grow more. But there are physical limits. Without hypothesizing multi-planet human civilization—which we should totally do—we probably can’t sustain more than two or three times our current population. It comes down to whether we have the social will to make it happen.

In terms of planning?
In terms of policy choices that are necessary to sustain that kind of population. Exploiting all available energy sources, not wasting energy on things like non-constructive things like blowing each other up with nuclear weapons. You can only have a big population if you’re basically peaceful and your society focuses on efficiency and avoiding wasteful activities.

Would we want to live in that society? The peaceful side sounds great, but how far does society go to discourage wasteful activities? Do you have to apply to a government board to go on vacation? To sustain a large population with a good standard of living and preservation of basic liberties would require substantial technological advancement.

This is pretty far way from what Thanos is talking about. To be clear, you’re anti-Thanos, right?
Right. I am averse to solutions that involve the destruction of human life. I think those aren’t solutions. The point of making that view the villain is that it’s villainous.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

My brain has always raced. It has always churned out buckshot blasts of imaginings and ideas and half-truths at a rate beyond my control. Hence the meds. I was diagnosed with bipolar as a young adult and so I live with that, amongst other things. I have always been a little hypomanic and as such I have always been a little hyper-imaginative. I am only just understanding how this misshapes my memories, and bends my perception of self and time.

Somedays I feel like Wile E. Coyote chasing the uncatchable Roadrunner. I’m on ACME rocket-skates hurtling towards a tunnel that’s painted onto a brick wall. And suddenly, hypomanic excitement turns to depression when it smacks against the cement of realty.

But like Wile E. Coyote, my trouble isn’t running off the cliff—it’s looking down.

The problem with a brain that only rests when it has overheated and crashed is that my sense of time is truncated. The problem with a brain that is constantly inventing scenarios, vignettes, and characters is that the imagined tangles constantly with the real. And as such, my sense of self via memory becomes illusory and untrustworthy.

It’s hard to keep track of who I am. There are just too many selves to keep track of. I do not mean split personalities so much as I mean split narratives. Wrangling these narratives isn’t easy, ordering them in a way that can be parsed by an outsider is almost impossible. When I was young and somehow dumber than I am now, I tried to illustrate this “sensation” for a date. I drew a straight line with connected lines branching from it in a linear and “logical” way and explained that that’s how “normal” thought worked (I imagined). I then drew several straight lines that were unconnected but adjacent, that didn’t so much branch as they did leapfrog. “This is how my thinking works,” I said.

She didn’t like it.

And that’s fair. It’s a weird and contradictory notion to try and explain. Especially to a friend or partner. How do you tell someone you experience concurrent and conflating “truths”? That your mind prevents you from ever being truly “present”? Some pen lines on a cocktail napkin are cold comfort.

For me, this problem has been particularly bad since December. I honestly couldn’t tell you what I’ve been doing between then and now. I see shapes of my actions, but they’re coupled with fabulation: attending a family wedding (happened) where my date was a cam girl (didn’t), a friend using a float tank (happened) but almost drowning (didn’t), my dog getting out and barking at a yuppie (happened) who casts him as ‘Young Moose’ in a prequel-series about Frasier’s dad (didn’t, yet).

We all imagine and we all bullshit but when you do it at a rate that is beyond your control (sans medication) your memories (and thus reality) comes to resemble a string of abstract scenes with your head floating over them, not unlike the truth shattering finale of last year’s Twin Peaks: The Return.

I recognise in Agent Cooper that coalescence of malformed time and experience: the stillness of being in a great rush while stuck in limbo.

Medication can slow or alter the course of this kind of thinking of course but it isn’t a cure-all. It has consequences. For me being doped up cuts the rapid patter malarkey off at the knees. But as a writer and comedian, malarkey is literally my bread and butter. Hypomanic imaginings may be troublesome but it is all I’m programmed to do and all I take joy in, to lose it entirely as I did on meds is in its own way a distant kind of suicide.

So what do you do? How can you ground yourself in reality when you are uncertain what that is? How do you slow yourself down?

Akira Kurosawa

I binge. I try to turn my manic-obsessive symptoms towards consumption. Getting lost in something seems to be the best way to slow the thoughts, temper the bullshit, and tether the stories. In the past this was self-destructive (drink, sex, Warhammer) but overtime I’ve learned to redirect the hunger that comes with rapid fire thinking towards constructive ends. Books, films, music—I use these like dropped candy to trace where I’ve been in the thick woods of my mind. So although I can’t recall much of what has transpired this year I can tell you that I have spent the last two months watching the complete filmography of Akira Kurosawa. Which, by some luck, largely deals with the interplay between time, truth, and memory.

There’s a moment in his masterpiece Ikiru (1952) aka “To Live” where Takeshi Shimura’s character Watanabe reflects on a life as rushed as it was static: “what have I been doing there? I can’t remember no matter how I try. All I remember is just being busy. And even then, I was bored.”

Watanabe doesn’t notice the three decades lost to his job as a bureaucrat until he is diagnosed with stomach cancer and given six months to live. Yanked out of his delusion, his time and memory are given new worth. He remarks on the setting sun: “Oh how lovely, I haven’t seen a sunset in 30 years.”

Busyness and boredom. My mind spews one to placate the other. My memories appear in the gap between these two extremes, defined by one or the other. All I remember is just being busy and even then, I was bored. I have missed a lot of sunsets.

The ultimate lesson of “Ikiru” is that a man is what he does, not what he imagines himself to be doing; a difficult truism for me to confront.

I often wonder what will disrupt my hypomanic thought cycles (hopefully not stomach cancer.) I am currently cocooned in manic constructs and collapsed memories. Time stands still around me while ricocheting within me. The coyote is looking down.

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This article originally appeared on VICE AU.

What it’s like to suck a dick from the back. How it feels to have two cocks in your pussy. The pros and cons of “paying for penis.” These are some of the more tepid topics that were touched on the first time I tuned into the Whoreible Decisions podcast.

The show is co-hosted by Mandii B and WeezyWTF, two longtime friends who don’t agree on much besides their love for sex and black people. The bisexual black women started the show in 2017 with an episode chronicling the time Weezy accompanied Mandii to the gyno to get a clingy condom plucked from her coochie. Since then, over the course of more than 50 episodes, the 27 year olds have covered everything from polyamory and pegging to the #MeToo movement and general sexual health. With tens of thousands of followers on social media, more than 80,000 streams a week, sold out live events, and their recent ascension to the hyped Loudspeaker Network, they’re quietly hosting one of the hottest podcasts on the internet.

The idea for Whoreible Decisions came to Weezy in 2016 when she was asked to guest star on the No Chaser podcast.

“I come into the recording session with a bag that had bondage tape, a collar, and a leash. I open it up and they’re looking at me like I’m crazy,” Weezy recalls to me inside the Downtown Manhattan studio where her and Mandii record Whoreibe Decisions. “The second we were done, they were like, ‘Yo, that was the most lit shit ever.’ When it came out, everybody loved it. They were getting crazy feedback. And I was like, I need a podcast of my own, but who else do I know? Who’s as much of a ho as me?”

“That’s what she says everytime she tells this story and I hate it,” Mandii interjects exasperated.

Their rise has certainly been fueled by their willingness to get nasty. But as salacious as the show is, it’s also lowkey radical. Representation is a crucial aspect of what they do. Though they both have one non-black parent, they staunchly identify as black women of colour in the media space.

“This is a black podcast,” Mandii says to me. “All of my friends are black. I go to black shit. I only take black dick. That’s literally all it is.”

“I’m more inclusive,” Weezy says. “But before any white boy fucks me, I have to know they’re down. I don’t play that shit on my Bumble profile. It clearly says #blacklivesmater. Swipe left if you’ve voted for Trump.”

Weezy and Mandii’s blackness is important because while cultural products like Sex and the City have allowed us to see white women who fuck as whole, unsullied people, America hasn’t granted that kind of humanity to black women. Instead, the media has long pushed a hypersexualized image of black women as a foil to the mythical purity of white ladies. To counteract these nasty stereotypes, black women have often tried to police themselves, contort themselves, and define themselves in their opposition to these racist and sexist portrayals—instead of just being themselves. Whoreible Decisions side steps that brutal binary through its intimate conversations about group sex between two attractive, smart black women who have corporate day jobs.

“You don’t have to hide who you are, who you like, what sex you like, what pleases you,” Mandii explains to me.

[However, both Weezy and Mandii do hide their identities out of fear that their explicit podcast might damage their professional careers in tech and finance, respectively. Because of this, we’re only referring to them by their aliases.]

Even the name of the show is about reframing the conversation around pleasure for women of color through reclamation. “‘Whoreible’ was not intended to talk shit about anybody," Weezy says to me. “It was just used to be ironic because Mandii and I have been called that so much.”

Of course, Whoreible Decisions isn’t the only podcast featuring black ladies talking about fucking. There’s the intersectional Inner Hoe Uprising, the humourous Sex with Strangers, the poetic The Sexually Liberated Woman, and a ton more floating around on SoundCloud, pushing sex positivity for people of color. What has helped set Whoreible Decisions apart from its peers is the contentious, yet tender friendship shared by Mandii B and WeezyWTF. Like sisters, they can be merciless towards each others—calling each other names and dragging each other for past failures. But underneath their bickering is a well of love that they’ve spent half their lives building.

Naturally, their friendship started with a fight in 2005 at a ratchet teen club in Orlando, Florida called the Roxy. Up until that scuffle, the 13 year olds hadn’t met in person because they went to different high schools. But they did talk mad shit to each other on AOL Instant Messenger and MySpace.

Their smouldering beef was sparked over a boy with a car. The 18-year-old dude in question stood over six feet, rocked braids, and talked with a New York accent, which according to them, was a hot commodity in Southern Florida back in the day. Weezy started dating the Big Apple transplant first. But then Mandii caught his attention and his affection. And so the battle lines were drawn. By the time the girls had finally run into each other at the Roxy, immersed in flashing lights and the booming sounds of crunk music, they were knucking, bucking, and ready to fight.

“Mandii likes to say she won the fight,” Weezy tells me. “But it wasn’t really a fight because security came... What happened was my ponytail got ripped out...”

“Oh yeah,” Mandii interjects, “All these years later, I do feel like I beat your ass because they was throwing your wig around the club.”

“It wasn’t a wig,” Weezy replies with a laugh. “It was a ponytail... And I got it back.”

While physical altercations are often the tale-tale sign of the end of a relationship, for Mandii and Weezy that fight was just the beginning. Eventually, Mandii reached out to Weezy by phone to apologize for the scalping, because, as she puts it, she is a “bigger person—in size and maturity.” On that fateful phone call, the fiesty girls found themselves bonding over one thing—the realization that the boy they’d both been pining for “wasn’t shit.”

Mandii B presenting WeezyWTF a condom bouquet.

Eventually, they decided to start hanging out as “young blossoming hos,” engaging in the kinds of antics and hijinks you’d expect from wayward women who are hungry for life and curious about sex. They hid their “ho clothes” until they were out of the sight of their parents. They got in the car with a “butch Asian chick who used to sell drugs” and drove for three hours to the Cheetah’s strip club in Miami, making out along the way, only to get rebuffed at the door for having fake IDs. And they kicked it with scores of boys: Jamaicans, skaters, gang bangers, athletes… Through all this running and gunning, they formed a real bond—despite the fact that they came from different sides of the tracks.

“Back in the day, Weezy thought she was New New. She had gold, Bape, and would even wear little pink and purple streaks in her hair,” Mandii reflects with a laugh.

Of course, that was a bit of a put on. Weezy grew up with money in Orlando. Her Israeli father owned a chain of camera stores and tourist shops and was heavily invested in the stock market.

When Mandi first saw Weezy’s crib, she was stunned. “It was so big! The biggest house in her neighborhood,” Mandi tells me. “She had a movie theater and a water fountain. Her stairs were like a red carpet, literally. There were mirrors all inside and her floors were marble. It was Victorian-esque—everything in the house was gold.”

Mandii, however, grew up in less opulent environs—the projects. She was raised in Oak Ridge and Pine Hills by her single, caucasian mother. “It was just a struggle,” she tells me. ”I’ve lived in a shelter. I was on food stamps, section 8. That’s how I was raised.”

With the stock market crash in the late 2000s, however, Weezy’s family’s fortunes changed. Her dad also had a stroke that made him incapable of working, forcing her and her black stay-at-home mother from Queens, New York to enter the workforce. “We lost everything,” she tells me, as if she is still stunned by it. Weezy tried her hand at community college, but eventually dropped out to focus on making money to help support her family.

Mandii also tried college. She graduated at the top of her class in high school and set out to attend Georgia St. University. But without guidance, she floundered financially. “No one in my family went to college, so I didn’t know how college was supposed to work out. I had $11,000 in financial aid and at orientation they’re like, Yeah, let us know how are you going to pay for the remaining $20,000 balance, because I was out of state. I was like, Fuck, I can’t afford that.”

As their lives were taking unexpected turns, the two young women fell out again. It happened on Weezy’s 21st birthday in 2012 at Cleo’s, a strip joint in Orlando. Social media drama between Mandii and one of Weezy’s friends led to a brawl. “To this day, I don’t know what it looked like because I was all up in this dude’s face and I was wondering why he wouldn’t even look at me. I turn around and there’s a table flying. It was fucking Mandii!” The spat put the best friends on opposite sides of a beef, causing a rift between the young women that would result in them not speaking for years.

During their time apart, both of them managed to really get their shit together. Mandii moved to New York City with $400 to her name and started working as a sports blogger, particularly focused on the debauchery of athletes. Her gossip site called Full Court Pumps started to garner notoriety for its intimate POV into the sports world and her book, called Up on Game, took it even further with stories of the “sexcapades and wild nights of… professional athletes.” She even tried her hand at podcasting, launching a short-lived program with former NFL linebacker LaMarr Woodley called LMT’s Point Taken Podcast. But the whole thing was cramping her social life. “I was in Vegas at Liquid at John Wall’s table and a girl goes to his cousin and is like, ‘That’s the blogger girl. Make sure she doesn’t take pictures.’ People didn’t trust me being around.”

She also began to realize that money in the blogging game was inconsistent. Determined not to retread to the poverty of her youth, she decided to go back to school and focus on something definitively lucrative—finance.

Even without a degree, Weezy managed to find her own professional success.

“I was working a retail job for a telecom brand in Florida, still taking care of my parents. But I climbed my way up the corporate ladder. They said, ‘We can move you to New York.’ So I left Florida in 2016. I loved it. Finally, I was making six figures.”

Though they were back in the same city, the two had yet to connect—until Mandii extended another olive branch. “Mandii sent me a message and said she was happy to see me doing well. I was like, ‘You know what why don’t we meet up and have a drink?’”

The two met at Serafina in Manhattan. And despite all the bullshit, they started back right where they had left off.

“That was the first time we had caught up in forever. She had a sugar daddy at the time. I had a sugar daddy, too. So we just talked about how we both had sugar daddies and then we realized that we both still liked sex, fun, guys... We still liked just living our lives,” Mandii says.

WeezyWTF and Mandii B on the dildophone.

Three months later, the duo were recording those kinds of conversations as Whoreible Decisions. Their early recording sessions were done in a rinky dink booth on the Lower East Side that they rented for $30-an-hour. If you go back and listen to the first few episodes, you can hear them rushing to wrap up before going over their time. Mandii would edit all of the audio herself on a MacBook Pro that she got from one of her sugar daddies.

But despite the humble beginnings, it didn’t take long for them to start racking up streams on SoundCloud. In December 2017, they did their first live show at Projective Space in New York in front of a sold out 200-person audience with fans who traveled as far as London and Canada to see them in the flesh. Their recent guest appearance on Charlamagne Tha God and Andrew Schulz's Brilliant Idiots podcast in early April has racked up more than 200,000 streams already, and has introduced them to a whole new audience. And they’ve just surpassed the one million streams mark on their podcast.

In April, they also joined the Loudspeaker Network, which is the home of blockbuster podcasts like The Read and The Combat Jack Show. This transition has helped them upgrade to a new studio and given them a great deal more promotional power. The only real obstacle they have ahead of them now is getting along.

“We have different ideas of what fun is,” Mandii says. “I’m not going to a fucking warehouse party in Brooklyn with white people where there’s a sprinkle of black dudes to choose from who probably want a blond.”

“Who says I don’t like black people? … We just literally had to sign a partnership agreement at Panera bread to have someone who mediates between us when we start going off on each other like this,” says Weezy.

“Yeah, it’s cause she doesn’t know how to communicate,” interjects Mandii.

But despite their dust ups, at least they still see eye to eye on the important things—and that is what they want to share with young sexually active women.

“Own your sexuality for you—for your pleasure, for whatever you want. Self worth is a big deal,” Mandii tells me.

“That’s right. Yes, we talk about dirty things. Just hearing those things makes people think, You’re doing it because you want this man or this athlete. No! I like to fuck and other people do too. They just aint telling you.”

This story is a part of VICE's ongoing effort to highlight the contributions of black women around the globe who are making a difference. To read more stories about strong black women making history today, go here.

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It’s been pretty much assumed for some time that Jason Kenney and his United Conservative Party will defeat Rachel Notley’s NDP in the next provincial election.

The UCP have a massive lead in the polls (although it is one that is shrinking) and will be running against the NDP, a party that is tantamount to Satan for many Albertan conservatives.

But the road to political office is never smooth, and Jason Kenney is having a real issue keeping the social conservatives in his party quiet. Take for example how UCP delegates voted this weekend—passing motions that target gay teenagers and young women who make the decision to have an abortion.

The hubbub took place at the first-ever United Conservative Party policy convention in Red Deer on Sunday. The meeting was huge, bringing in 2,500 people and conservative bigwigs from across the country like Rona Ambrose, Brad Wall and Andrew Scheer.

But the two motions turned out to be the story from the weekend.

The first, Motion 30, focused on Gay-Straight Alliances in Alberta’s school systems. GSAs have been a hot-button issue in Alberta for some time and is widely read as targeting specifically targeting the students that join gay-straight alliances. The UCP policy is that schools will have to notify a child's parents anytime they join a club of a sexual or religious nature. It came as a response to the NDP making it illegal for a teacher to out a gay student.

Some 57 percent of the delegates voted in favour of the motion (it should be noted that many on the opposing side passionately argued against it) which has been widely criticized as an effort to out gay kids. It’s such a bad plan that three conservative MPs spoke against it, including a former interim leader of the PC party.

“This is about outing gay kids . . . don’t be called the Lake of Fire party, I’m begging you,” Ric McIver, the current UCP caucus whip, told the crowd. He added that voting for this would hurt their chances of winning. Motion 30 was the most contentious of the day and many who voted for it said they were doing so for because they supported parental rights not because they were anti-gay.

For those not initiated into the terrible but fascinating world of Albertan politics, Lake of Fire party refers to the Wildrose party that blew a late lead in the 2012 election. Their collapse came after anti-gay blog posts were discovered to be written by a Wildrose member in the running; this connection to social conservatism caused Albertans to turn on them.

Kenney was adamant that this was not about outing gay kids and that the motion won’t impact their platform come election season in 2019. Kenney stated that as the leader he gets to “hold the pen” and “interpret the resolution and its relevance to party policy.” The 49-year-old career politician was adamant that his party would not pass a law notifying parents if their kids joined a GSA.

“Let me be absolutely stone-cold clear: a United Conservative government will not be changing law or policy to require notification of parents when kids join GSAs,” he told media.

The second of the two controversial motions passed in the conference would require parents to be informed of any “invasive medical procedures” on a child under the age of 18—i.e. an abortion. According to Maclean’s, Kenney, a former anti-abortion activist, was not available to speak to this motion but a party member told the magazine that it, like Motion 30, would also not be adopted.

The weekend was supposed to be a nice get together where the UCP could bash the NDP, pass some motions against environmentalists and the carbon tax, and continue their slow and steady march towards victory. However, at the end of the day, even if Kenney ignores the motion as he says he’ll do, his delegates handed the NDP plenty of ammunition for the next electoral campaign.

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In this new photo series, we're collecting some of our favourite photographs and want your help captioning them. Every week, we'll throw a new photo up on our Instagram and cull the best captions that capture the current mood.

This week, we featured a photo shot by Julian Master that perfectly illustrates the excitement most of us are feeling now that summer is finally upon us. Here are some of our favourites from the more than 1,200 responses:

• Sliding into summer like...—@aliwithan_i
• Coachella, day two.—@fionnanmurphy
• Photo of me reversing evolution to escape the BS on land.—@ericarnoldvisuals
• "Hold on. This just came out of the dryer..."—@jsolvie
• Disney's A Little Mermaid reboot is expected to be grittier and more realistic.—@themattfranc0
• "Mom we talked about this."—@gam.84
• PETA is taking its investigative work a little too far now.—@mr_dume
• "Wish I could be part of that world."—@mollybea
• Yet again another unrealistic body expectation for women.—@jewlzieg
• When people are trying to help you be your best self but you know It’s something you have to do for yourself.—@arielle115
• Wait.....I think I found my cell phone.—@yomanawwdamn
• "Just wear something casual...nothing fancy."
  ME:
  —@itsafrankyyygram
• Actual footage of me putting on my jeans in the morning—@jwinne
• When you don’t need no man.—@jamesturner4105
• "Fuck Eric, I want my voice back."—@carolina_agb

And the winner:

• Me trying to fit all my parent's expectations.—@ruxandra5099

Check VICE's Instagram next week for our next installment. Visit Julian Master's website and Instagram for more of his photos.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Donald Gorske, the 64-year-old world record holder who's spent the past 46 years on a noble quest to eat a shit-ton of Big Macs, scarfed down his 30,000th burger over the weekend, ABC 2 reports.

Gorske reportedly ate his first Big Mac in the spring of 1972, and he's been chowing down a couple just about every day since. His undying McDonald's love has earned him a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records and in Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me, but the dude hasn't eaten a herculean amount of all-beef patties and special sauce for the fame—he just really, really, really likes Big Macs.

"Everything about eating Big Macs every day was perfect," Gorske wrote in his self-published book, 22,477 Big Macs—obviously penned a few years ago, back before he hit the big 3-0. "I never had a craving for something different. I had found my perfect food... The stress of having to eat a non-McDonalds meal was over."

He hit the 30,000-burger milestone on Friday and is still going strong with no plans to change up his diet. According to Gorske, he's in perfectly good health and actually weighs less than he did 5,000 burgers ago. He's also taken to eating a daily McDonald's fruit and yogurt parfait because his wife wanted him to eat more fruits and vegetables.

"If I go for 40,000, that'll take me another 14 years or whatever like that," the retired prison guard told ABC 7, there to capture the man's recent Mac milestone. "I don't think people celebrate 35,000 at all, so we're probably looking at 14 more years down the road, and I'll be 78 years old then! So we'll have to see how I'm doing then, you know?"

To be fair, eating 35,000 Big Macs in one lifetime and surviving is certainly worthy of a celebration. Good luck on your quest, Gorske, you really put that guy who ate Chipotle for a few years to shame. See you at 40,000.

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