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We Spoke to an Academic Who's Spent 25 Years Researching Drugs in Clubs


'Marco Polo' Would Be Better Without Marco Polo

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Kublai Khan and Marco Polo on the steppe. Photo by  Phil Bray for Netflix.

This Friday, Netflix will release their newest show, Marco Polo. The company is gambling on the ​big-budget drama series to cater to both the Game of Thrones fanboys as well as the international markets. The show is a good gamble, because the source material offers Netflix access to rich material that has been captivating audiences since around 1300. The Game of Thrones camp will get their fill of complex court intrigue and sexual debauchery, but there's also plenty for fans of kung-fu historical romance—a popular genre around the world, and one that Netflix is also mining through their plan to exclusively release the sequel to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Marco Polo has all the makings of a great series. There's intrigue, politics, battles, betrayals, assassins in the night, discussions of tax policy, executions, angst, torture, and gorgeous male and female bodies thrown at each other in epic martial arts battles and sex—sometimes simultaneously. Unfortunately, it also has a scrawny white guy named Marco Polo wandering through the scenes, often moping and confused.

Sometimes, Polo makes little descriptive statements about the world and everyone reacts as if he's just done something amazing. Kublai Khan treats him like a son, Mongol noblewomen have sex with him on the steppe, and a blind kung-fu master teaches him martial arts, all for no convincing reason. Netflix's Polo is just a boring, white guy character who exists to lead the narrative action.

Maybe Polo will develop into an interesting character once he learns more kung-fu, has sex with a few more steppe princesses, and generally stops moping about the Mongol capital; more likely, he'll be like " Piper Chapman" in that other Netflix Original, Orange is the New Black: the least engaging character in an ensemble of talented actors and good storytelling. Luckily, the historical drama woven into Marco Polo, which focuses on the growing pains of the Mongol Empire, is interesting and provides plenty of drama to delve into, at least when Polo isn't there to mess things up.

The show opens in the late 13th-century as the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan is preparing to extend his domain over all of China. He already rules the north, but the southern Song dynasty and their walled city of Xiangyang still hold out against the Mongol threat. Some of the Mongols, especially the Khan's brother Ariq, are worried that Kublai is going to make the Mongols too Chinese. They are especially concerned that Kublai's son is not a "real" Mongol. Plots thicken, Mongols wrestle, and men get drunk on fermented horses' milk served from a ladle fashioned from an elephant's scrotum. Rebels rebel and are quashed (spoiler: Kublai Khan is going to win).

Meanwhile, inside Xiangyang, the "Cricket Minister" plots. He likes to play with praying mantises in a little bowl, while considering ways to consolidate power, most of which involve tormenting his sister and making sure that there's no peace with Mongolia. He's also mean to little girls, which is the show's way of making it clear to us that he's the bad guy.

The historical Marco Polo grew up in Venice during the 13th century. He was in Asia during the 1270s and 1280s, and then moved home. Around 1298, Polo was under house arrest in Genoa, which was at war with Venice at the time, and met the Italian Romance writer Rustichello da Pisa. According to tradition, Polo told the writer his stories of Asia and the Great Khan. Based on those conversations, Rustichello wrote a kind of textual atlas of the world, bracketed by a brief, narrative prologue of Polo's travels and a section on the recent history of Kublai Khan. It's from this last section that the show draws.

Generally, historians believe that most of Polo's account is authentic, if heavily garnished with myth and legend. It's entirely likely that Polo's skill with languages made him useful to the Khan. Also, Kublai made a habit of employing non-Chinese individuals to oversee some of his governmental affairs. Kublai was, as portrayed in the show, remarkably interested in people from diverse cultures and religions, so long as they all were held in place under the Mongol order. The historical Polo, a skilled traveler and keen observer, unsurprisingly found a niche in the great court.

The problem with the show is that we're meant to enter that complex world along with Marco Polo, who is presented as something of a neophyte. The writers use Polo's ignorance to awkwardly explain Mongol or Chinese history and culture to the viewer. In the first episode, Polo's father and uncle give the younger Marco into the Khan's service as a semi-slave. Kublai, who has daddy issues of his own, is so impressed by Marco's skill with language and description that he brings the young man into his close confidence and sends him to the blind master, Hundred Eyes, for military training. That's not a bad premise. But in the first five episodes, Marco isn't interesting enough to deserve all this attention. In fact, in any given scene, he's probably the least interesting person in view.

There's a long history of "the East" being portrayed in our culture solely through the gaze of the westerner—a tradition academics call "orientalism." In the orientalist tradition, Asian societies are mysterious, sensual, antiquated, static, and easily dominated by the West.

Marco Polo both resists this tradition and is drawn into it. When the white guy is off-screen, Mongol society looks nuanced and in a state of productive flux. It was complicated for a group of 100,000 steppe nomads to transition into ruling major global empires, and the show makes a story of cultural shift exciting to watch. But as soon as Marco becomes the focus, the show morphs back to another episode of "explaining Mongol or Chinese culture to the white guy." Without Polo, the show is rich, complex, and beautiful. Unfortunately, the show is called Marco Polo, so he's around far too often.

Watch ​Marco Polo on Netflix tomorrow.

David M. Perry is Associate Professor of History at Dominican University. Hiswork can be found at CNN, Al Jazeera America, the Atlantic, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

An English School Wants to Teach Kids About the ‘Working Class’ by Taking Them to a Soccer Match

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[body_image width='1500' height='500' path='images/content-images/2014/12/11/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/11/' filename='lets-go-to-millwall-and-watch-the-working-class-909-body-image-1418313755.jpg' id='10810']This is where working-class people go. Image via ​@MillwallFC)

This post originally appeared on VICE UK

Cool Sociology Teacher news now, and a Cool Sociology Teacher at Varndean College in Brighton has had a Cool Sociology Teacher idea: hey kids, let's go and observe the primitive working class in their native environment by going to a Millwall game! Cool Sociology Teacher has a bongo at his house. Cool Sociology Teacher had a year out to, like, find himself? In South America? Cool Sociology Teacher only cut the braids out of his ponytail when his army dad threatened to write him out of the will if he didn't. Woah kids, do you like reggae! Ganja style! Let's go down the Den and try not to get extremely beaten up!

Yeah: As The Sun reports, pupils at the sixth form college are being offered the chance to attend tomorrow night's undoubtedly naughty matchup between Millwall and Brighton, where they can "enjoy a delicious pie," wash it down with "a cup of tea, or a nice warm beefy Bovril," and then take their notebooks and their copies of Webb and Westegaard's AS Sociology: The Complete Course and make some real as hell observations about the bottom rungs of the social class.

Gasp! As a man with a tattoo of the St. George's Cross on his skull bottles someone for calling him a cunt!

Marvel! As someone somehow manages to smuggle their weapon dog into the stadium and feed him some bones!

Or just! Don't make assumptions about soccer fans and what they may or may not do at a soccer match!

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According to the poster billing the event (just £18.25 [nearly $30] with your NUS card), students will have the opportunity to watch gender performance in action, as well as racism, a cheeky bit of homophobia, some hyper masculinity and an exemplar of working-class culture, to boot. I mean, you could feasibly get that exact same experience hanging out at the Slug and Fiddle in Canary Wharf, but I suppose it doesn't do pies.

The plan, obviously, has come under fire on Twitter, because everything comes under fire on Twitter these days: That's 2014. Some are saying the whole thing smacks of classism. Others don't reckon the pies are up to much scratch at the Millwall ground. But most of all, it's a bit "them and us", isn't it? A bit, "Come, lords and ladies, gather round, and watch as these brainless pig men get angry at Ricardo Fuller for shanking another sitter over the bar!"

The College's head of sociology, Rad Pete Bailey, told the paper: "Students are expected to study the relationship of identity to gender and social class among other things, also the relationship between leisure activities and identity." He then really solemnly pointed to the framed photo of Bob Marley on his desk and added: "Going to the football provides an opportunity to look at some of these things."

Maybe Pete has a point. It's entirely possible the sociology group are planning additional trips, to see other classes in their native environment: a visit to Kirstie Allsopp's house to watch her make her own pasta, or a New Year trip to whichever brothel is nearest to the Houses of Parliament. But more likely they'll just go and watch the Millwall match, trudge back with all their preconceptions intact, and then write it up into a neat 500-word essay for a low B mark.

Follow Joel Golby on ​Twitter

On Moving, and the Shit You Take with You

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No one, save the impossibly rich, enjoys moving. If you're well off, you can afford the luxury of hiring desperate college students to schlep your Eames chairs, coffee table books, and carefully cultivated collection of modern art to your soon-to-be tastefully decorated mid-century home. If you're not, you can afford to pay your hungover, soon-to-be-embittered friends in pizza and piss-weak American macrobrews for an afternoon spent unburdening yet another in a series of fifth-floor walkups of its worthless contents. Regardless of which camp you may fall into, moving, like death, comes to us all. It is an inevitability of life, much like, uh, death.

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I recently, begrudgingly, found myself home for Thanksgiving. During my brief tenure there, I did what you do when you're at home—emptily watched hours of cable television while waiting for sleep's warm, Snuggie-esque embrace. Eons after my grandparents had retired for the night, the remote control happened upon an episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills wherein one of the titular housewives hired a group of young, dumb, and full of cum college boys to box up and transport her leather couches and Louboutins to their next (no doubt) fabulous locale. In one (clearly scripted) scene, she elatedly instructed the boys to expose their taut abs to her Cosmo-swilling cohorts, who in turn judged their fuckability. In the next scene, she perversely declared that she had fucked the one the group deemed most fuckable.

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She, of course, belongs to the impossibly rich camp. I, of course, do not. So when I recently moved, limelight-desperate hardbodies were not on the payroll. Instead, I guilt-tripped my kindhearted friends into schlepping the secondhand rowing machine I steadfastly refuse to get rid of down two flights of stairs. I did not fuck any of them. Given the degree to which I ruined their Saturday afternoon, I should have. (I'm a wonderful and giving fuck, I assure you.)

I used to be used to moving. In my troubled young adulthood I was a transient, never staying in one place for any significant amount of time. Across the country, across the globe, I'd traverse, jumping from place to place, new beau to new beau, heavy bindle in hand. Thankfully, my wanderin' days hit the pavement when I hit Los Angeles, the Xanadu I've called home for the past seven years. For the last five, I actively inhabited a neighborhood anyone I encountered with skin as white as privilege informed me I should actively fear. I never did. Instead, I felt a grandiose, unwarranted sense of pride every time I stumbled home unscathed at two in the morning. I was, after all, an early gentrifier! A trailblazer!

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Times changed, as they do, and with them came shifts in the demographics of my neighborhood. I convinced myself that the people who had lived in my building for decades respected me more than my fellow gentrifiers because I didn't wear Lululemon yoga pants, own a rescue pit bull, or refuse to make eye contact with them in the hall. I was one of the "good ones." Or was I? As time passed and ironically mustachioed men with fixed gear bikes started to outnumber sincerely mustachioed men with mountain bikes, I began to feel more and more like a fraud. It didn't help that the grim specter of the death of my last relationship hovered everywhere, making the glorified room I called an apartment feel like a prison cell. It was time, I decided, to move to a new room. A room where I could make more, different, unpleasant memories!

Moving is a time for reassessment. It is a time to ask oneself, Why do I own so many ball gowns? It's also, apparently, a time to convince one's self that one owns so many ball gowns because one needs said ball gowns, in spite of the fact that they have become fetid over time. (Listen—oneself does not make dry-cleaning money, OK?)

Moving is also a time for realization. It is a time to realize, with horror, how many copies of " ​Inhaler" by Tad you have (two, if you're keeping track). Coming face to face with the amount of literal and figurative garbage you've surrounded yourself with, like a fortress between you and all those sociopaths who are into "clean" interior design, is harrowing. There is nothing more humbling than watching one of your closest friends buckle under the weight of a box filled with cut-out vinyl and your novelty coffee mug collection.

When you are young, you are oftentimes under the impression that owning interesting things makes you, by proxy, interesting. When you're older, you realize that, goddamn it, you own far too many VHS tapes of The Gong Show for someone who doesn't own a functional VCR.

It's funny, the way in which we can convince ourselves we still need things we clearly have no need for. The mind is a powerful and stupid organ. What, exactly, the things I own are doesn't matter. All that matters is that they're mine. They, by their association with me, prove that I am here. Without their existence, do I exist? (The answer is that I would, but without my Gong Show tapes, and would you really call that living?)

I did try to unburden myself before the move, selling thousands of dollars worth of things I had acquired over the years for a pittance. I gave away a great many trinkets. And yet still, in spite of it all, I find myself surrounded by stuff. Because I gave up trying to avoid the inevitable.

Sure, I'm tired of being surrounded by boxes filled with "personality." But instead of examining their contents and deciding whether or not they're necessary, I simply placed them on the shelf above my bed. Now, when I wake up in the morning, I open my eyes and see all my stuff staring right back at me. The clutter renders my apartment non-Pinterestable. Fuck it, I thought as I put the boxes on the shelf, I'm still in my 20s. (I am, in the interest of full disclosure, no longer in my twenties.)

The boxes are perilously stacked; when the big one hits, they will surely fall on me and either crush me instantly or leave me trapped. Under them, my wholly uninteresting corpse will exist.

Follow Megan Koester on ​Twitter.

Photos of Christmas Decorations in Depressing Places

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The Church of Scientology's L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition, Los Angeles

For the last couple of festive seasons, I've been keeping an eye out for Christmas decorations whenever I'm in a place that's especially miserable. 

Whether it's at the DMV, a cemetery, or a building where children go to be treated for cancer, everyone seems keen to spread a little festive cheer at this time of year. 


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DMV Hollywood West, Los Angeles

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Newark Airport Baggage Claim, Newark, New Jersey

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Culver City Army Recruitment Center, Los Angeles

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Skid Row, Los Angeles

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Euston Station, London

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Metropolitan Detention Center federal prison waiting room, Los Angeles

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Camper's Corner check-cashing service, Los Angeles

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Detroit Metropolitan Airport

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Children's Hospital, Los Angeles

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Los Angeles School Police Department cruiser, Los Angeles

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606 S Olive St., Los Angeles. Home of the US Immigration Court

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San Julian Park, Skid Row, Los Angeles

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UK border, Heathrow Airport, London

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Saint Catherine's Cemetery, Burbage, England

Follow Jamie "Lee Curtis" Taete on ​Twitter.

Comics: Leslie's Diary Comics - Hippie Bath

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What CIA Torture and Police Violence Have in Common

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All but the most recalcitrant hardliners (e.g. Dic​k Cheney) have expressed some measure of revulsion at the grisly CIA tactics described in the Senate "torture report" finally released this week after years of arduous haggling and obfuscating. It would be politically dimwitted not to at least mouth a few condemnatory cliches, given that the purveyor of the report, California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, is one of the most reliably hawkish members of Congress in either party. Everyone from T​ed Cruz to Barack Obama to John McCain has gone on the record as saying some variation of "torture is bad." OK, so now what?

Is there any reason to believe that institutional safeguards have been put in place to ensure that the next time there's some great terrorist-related crisis—involving, say, the Islamic St​ate—politicians will remember their exhortations this week and resist the temptation to go above and beyond the law when seeking to punish "the enemy"? Is there any reason to suppose that the authoritarian impulses of the federal government have been put in check, and the national security apparatus will behave more mercifully from here on out? No, not really.

Politicians interested in portraying themselves as deeply committed to rectifying governmental misdeeds rarely exhibit any desire to thwart the momentum of the violent state. They just want to dress it up slightly differently. That's been the hallmark of the Obama years—move forward, not backward. Don't busy yourselves with actually prosecuting the perpetrators of a massive worldwide torture regime. Better to reserve the prosecutorial power of the state for the ​whistleblowers who bring these abuses to li​ght. Politicians may be willing to criticize certain styles of state violence (especially when they were perpetrated by a previous administration), and even tinker with reforms at the margins, but marginal improvements still leave room for vast suffering.

It doesn't seem coincidental that a society that countenances jammin​g tubes up defenseless detainees' rectums—a practice that might be reasonably characterized as "rape"—might also countenance, say, a massive stop-and-frisk ​regime in New York City. Former NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly is even reported to have explicitly said that his intention was to "ins​till fear" in minorities as a behavioral modification strategy. Sensing a trend?

Police malfeasance and CIA torture share a common strand of DNA: Both are forms of state-sponsored violence borne out of irrational fears, whether of "terrorists" or of a minority-heavy underclass. Inhumane treatment is justified on the grounds that these people ultimately deserve it, and are hardly worthy of being fully considered "people" at all.

The principle that torture is wrong and everyone deserves a modicum of human rights is easy to recite from behind a computer screen when the stakes are nil—but in the real world, when applying this principle uniformly requires blunting the emotionally-driven instinct to retaliate against perceived enemies, politicians who are against "torture" in the abstract inevitably waver. Thus we see leading Democrats sounding the right notes this week—we must hold police​ more accountable, we must hold torturers accountable—while doing virtually nothing that might realistically advance these goals. They won't jail the torturers. They won't de-militarize the police. The tendency to deploy state violence in response to perceived societal ills, whether at home or abroad, has not waned.

Inhumane treatment is justified on the grounds that these people ultimately deserve it, and are hardly worthy of being fully considered "people" at all.

Even in the wake of the torture report, it's implausible that anything will be done to tangibly diminish the autonomy of the CIA, which has been committing horrendous acts since its inception and will carry on committing horrendous acts for the conceivable future. The safe, politically palatable course is to just zoom in on some of its most outlandish abuses, such as "rectal rehydration," and continue praising the ​CIA at an institutional level. Anyone who might suggest that this entity is foundationally flawed and ought to be abolished (as Ron Paul famously did in 2007) still gets laughed out of the room and deemed a loon. 

[tweet text="Q: What keeps this program from happening again in another crisis? Brennan: "I defer to the policymakers in future times"" byline="— Matt Apuzzo (@mattapuzzo)" user_id="mattapuzzo" tweet_id="543122748944703488" tweet_visual_time="December 11, 2014"]

Similarly, plenty of politicians, notably New York City m​ayor Bill de Blasio, have said auspicious things with respect to police reform: "black lives matter" and so forth. But precious ​few have shown any inclination to directly challenge law enforcement lobbyi​sts. As much as street protests might raise public consciousness, elected officials and the judiciary must buck the status quo in order for anything to truly change.

This is why it's always perilous to endow government actors with additional powers; they will almost never relinquish them, and these powers will likely only expand as bureaucracies and political interests become entrenched. Bet your bottom dollar: US intelligence agencies will continue to do heinous things around the globe ​and then lie ab​out them; police departments will continue to give guns to cops who have​ no business exerting lethal force.

We'll know that "torture" has been truly repudiated in this country when torturous conditions cease to be imposed on the most vulnerable, demonized, and maligned. That will require summoning the political will to meaningfully restrict the power of agencies ostensibly charged with keeping us secure, from the CIA on down to your local police department. Change on this scale is feasible only if Americans are willing to give up a little bit of comfort and acquire a little bit of empathy—which could be asking too much.

Follow Michael Tracey on T​witter.

VICE Vs Video Games: Anxiety Disorders and the Great Escape Video Games Can Provide

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Artwork forNeverending Nightmares

Paris in the autumn. The final months of the year, at the end of a millennium. The city holds many memories for me. Of cafés. Of music. Of love. And of anxiety disorders.

Clowns are scary enough, George Stobbart thought to himself. Never mind those with a penchant for murder. The explosion had ripped a hole in the otherwise peaceful Parisian cul-de-sac, now showered in broken glass and upturned tables and charred golden leaves. The café-cum-crime scene was now a smoldering shell, and as George pulled himself up and dusted himself off, the stench from the melting plastic-coated canopy at his feet scalded his nostrils.

Miraculously, a copy of the national newspaper had survived the blast, just yards away. George picked it up, read the headlines, and placed it back on the ground. He picked it up, read the headlines, and placed it back on the ground. He read the headlines, and placed it back on the ground.

George could see the bistro's waitress through the gaping hole that once housed the building's windows, slumped over a booth, seemingly unconscious. He knew he should help her, but walking towards the door's threshold was merely a formality. His brain knew this. He knew this. Turning in the opposite direction, he wandered towards the adjacent alleyway.

A small black cat pounced from within a trash can before darting up the street. George peered inside the bin, and sat the lid back in place. He turned away, turned back, lifted the lid and looked inside again. Nothing new. Down the road, he could see an odd-looking mustachioed policeman walking toward the wreckage, just beyond some road works. He thought it best to wait it out here, out of sight. But not before checking the trash can again.

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Broken Sword

Revolution Software's 90s point-and-click classic Broken Sword suddenly plays out very differently against the backdrop of mental illness. Here is an adventure game that requires so much investigation, so much interaction, now made impossible by re-imagining the lead character with anxiety disorders.

With obsessive compulsive disorder, protagonist Stobbart struggles to pinpoint exactly which items he must use or disregard in order to progress, obsessing over trivial interplay; a crippling social anxiety complex (approximately 24 percent of adults diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder receive an additional diagnosis of social anxiety disorder) makes interacting with others exponentially more challenging. Here, by assuming these conditions, the game can go no further than as outlined above. In essence, the escapism that video games facilitate on a daily basis can be seen here in the starkest of examples; true testament to the medium's transformative powers. And they can also transport us into the worlds of others.

For Matt Gilgenbach, OCD makes developing video games particularly challenging. Games development requires not only time and patience, but also assertiveness, as designing a game can be a long, drawn-out process, whereby making big decisions is often common course. Even for veterans of the trade, this operation can be fairly onerous—even more so if you harbor an obsessive disposition.

Under the banner of 24 Caret Games, Gilgenbach released his first independent title in 2012, Retro/Grade, a hybrid rhythm/side-scrolling shooter. Having spent an extensive four years in development—and having swallowed all of his savings—much rested on the shoulders of Gilgenbach's independent debut, particularly given his meticulous nature and impeccable standards.

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The trailer for Retro/Grade

"I think I stole this quote from movies," he says, "but I would say it's even more true in games: You never really finish a game; you just stop working on it. There are so many things where you can just do a deep dive and spend so much time getting every aspect of the characters or the elements right.

"While I'm trying very hard to not nitpick, it's still sometimes very frustrating to some of my artists, because eventually, rather than saying, 'Oh, you did a good job—I'm happy with the asset,' I just sort of have to say, 'OK, I don't care anymore—we've worked on this enough.' For them, working for me—wanting to hear that they're doing a good a job—it's difficult to just hear me simply say, 'OK, no, I'm just washing my hands of it.'"

Retro/Grade would go on to become somewhat of a critical darling, but would more or less bomb commercially. As a rhythm-cum-shooter title, Gilgenbach had hoped to harness the waning—but once recognized—enthusiasm for music games such as Guitar Hero, and capitalize on the fact that many users within this spectrum would already own its increasingly redundant guitar controller. Gilgenbach acknowledges that being picky about the details—stating he was "terrified" when it came to finally releasing the game into the world—and ultimately missing the window of opportunity regarding rhythm games were the most likely the main reasons for failure.

Nonetheless, the whole experience had drained Gilgenbach on every level. Emotionally, physically, financially and mentally. He'd sunk £45,000 ($70,000) of his own money into Retro/Grade's development, paying for artists and attending events. He'd borrowed more on top of that from his parents. There was no pay cheque for four years. Worse still, he just couldn't comprehend how or why the game had racked up top scores across the board, yet offered little financial return. To this day, Gilgenbach admits just how difficult it is for him to reconcile the game's lack of success. At the time, he came close to turning his back on everything.

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A scene from Retro/Grade

"I thought about quitting game development altogether, not just independent game development," he says. "Independent game development is very challenging and it's very stressful. But there's a great reward for that. Perhaps not a ton of financial rewards—I don't think there are many indie game developers that are really making the big bucks—but I think it's more about it being creatively fulfilling, being able to make the games you want to make. That's why I'm indie, but it's definitely tough. I didn't really have any good ideas for what else I could do, but I did think about giving up game development altogether."

It was during this time that Gilgenbach slipped into depression. He found it difficult to communicate how he was feeling—a symptom largely consistent with the illness—further compounded by his pre-existing OCD. Verbal communication was out of the question, and after struggling to write about where he stood emotionally, he turned his hand toward interactive means. In his mind, a horror game was born; one that would depict the horrors of mental illness, as far as he understood it. That game would become  ​Neverending Nightmares.

By largely doing everything the opposite way around from Retro/Grade, Gilgenbach and his newly formed Infinitap Games team set about outlining a fixed schedule and, crucially, a fixed budget. This time, Gilgenbach would acknowledge the challenges that his OCD forced upon the development studio, and was thus better able to organize a work plan. Helped along by a successful Kickstarter campaign, Neverending Nightmares would release on time, minus an overly extensive development cycle. Perhaps most importantly, Gilgenbach would release Neverending Nightmares into the world "without getting the details perfect."

Naturally, this was a big step. And what Neverending Nightmares portrayed would extend to a period in Gilgenbach's life to which he refers to as "rock bottom"—where things couldn't get any worse, before getting continually worse still. Most interestingly, he notes this time as one that could, and arguably should, have been his happiest—at least as far as outside, common-minded perception is concerned.

"The interesting thing about mental illness is that you can't point to any specific thing and say, 'This is why this is or was bad,'" he says. "I don't have a good answer—I was at college and, in terms of outward appearances, I was one of the best students in the computer science program, getting As in all my classes. On the outside there was nothing wrong with me. It was just over time, the way my mind worked had just become so terrible, to the point that I was really my own worst enemy.

"I could be doing something that I really enjoy, and then my mind would turn against me and I'd start thinking about what a terrible person I was, or there was a lot of self-abusive language—in my mind I would say all these nasty things to myself, or I'd have these horrible thoughts of self-injury."

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The trailer for Neverending Nightmares

Gilgenbach admits that some of these thoughts are still with him, but are now more manageable. Making Neverending Nightmares was overall a therapeutic experience, and although within the bounds of the game's animated style, these visions of self-harm do feature quite prominently. By getting these intrusive thoughts down and into a game, however, Gilgenbach feels they in turn lost their power.

Since release at the end of September, Infinitap has been inundated with emails and messages from players praising Neverending Nightmares for its portrayal of mental illness and how it has affected them, or how they are able to relate their own circumstances to the game. Gilgenbach himself has been on a very interesting—if, at times, very dark—journey. But he's come out on top. Video games have provided that much needed outlet of escape against some very challenging personal, yet clearly relatable, circumstances. I ask him if there needs to be more of a conversation had about mental illness in video games.

"I think there should be a conversation in general," he says. "There's such a stigma associated with mental illness and it makes it more challenging for people who suffer. If I tell people I have asthma, then people are like, 'Oh, whatever, I guess you can't run really far.'

"But if you tell people you have OCD and depression, then you get funny looks. People don't understand it, and may be like, 'Oh, cheer up,' or just, 'Get over it.' They don't understand that it's part of your being and it's a constant battle and a constant struggle and it's never going to go away."

Neverending Nightmares is out now, via Steam and for Ouya.

Follow Joe Donnelly on ​Twitter


Suggestions for New Bras in the Age of the 'Bionic Bra'

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Photo via Flickr user  ​​recyclethis

Boobs are an engineering enigma. They've been around for as long as mankind has existed, yet people are still stumped about what to do with them. This explains why, year after year, bra architects invent what they're sure is the "world's best bra," which will assuredly plump up, bump up, and smooth out your tits into the beautiful balls of fat that they are, while keeping you as comfortable as if you were naked.

The latest attempt comes from a team of researchers at Breast Research Australia, or BRA. They're developing what they call the "​world's first bionic bra"—a sports bra that "automatically tightens in response to breast movement," which is supposed to give extra support during exercise and then relax into a more comfortable fit during rest. The researchers have been working on the bra for 15 years. By way of comparison, it took ten years to build the Large Hadron Collider.

"Unfortunately, the most supportive sports bras tend to be the most uncomfortable to wear," said Julie Steele, director of BRA, in a press release about the new product. I'm not sure how a bra that suffocates your boobs during exercise would be anything but uncomfortable to wear, but whatever. 

From what I understand, the BRA bra has built-in sensors that detect breast movement, which then trigger a part of the bra's band to clench up. The press release didn't delve into the specifics of how this works, but mentioned that these new technologies are enabled by "approaches such as 3D printing." Steele also added that "when finished, the Bionic Bra will transform bra design."

That would be surprising. The bra market is already incredibly saturated with inventions meant to "transform" the functionality of the bra: bras with a ​built-in flask; bras that ​send a tweet every time you unclasp it; bras that ​spew whipped cream; bras that look like ​two ice packs strapped to your chest, designed to keep you cool in the summer; bras that are ​bulletproofbras that ​only unhook when it senses you are in love (though we've heard you can fool it with pizza). You can outfit your boobs in just about anything (including ​this $2 million diddy) and if that still isn't enough of a selection, you can even get underwire ​surgically implanted beneath your skin to ensure that your boobs have perma-lift.

There have been approximately 7 billion bra inventions meant to revolutionize the way your breasts look and feel. But is that enough? Since none of these inventions have earned the title of "world's best bra," here are some other inventions I'd like to see on the market:

  • Transformer bra. First it's a bra; then it's a car.
  • Pepper-spray bra. ​The time it takes to reach into your oversize purse and fish out pepper spray could be the difference between your life and death. Pepper spray should come spewing out of your boobs on command.
  • Secretary bra. Someone already designed a bra that ​holds your cell phone, but what about a bra that takes your calls?
  • Gas-mask bra. Oh wait, ​that already exists.
  • Glade PlugIn bra. Like air freshener, but for your boobs. Also helpful for those days when you forget to put on deodorant.
  • Life-proof push-up bra. At least one woman's life has been spared thanks to an enormous amount of silicone padding in a bra. ​Push-up bras save lives, people.
  • Back-rubbing bra. If you're going to wear it all day, might as well have some kind of massaging capabilities in the back.

Or, IDK, how about an invisible bra that you can't see or feel, which allows your boobs to just hang out there and be themselves? No? Too complicated?

Follow Arielle Pardes on ​Twitter.

The VICE Albums of the Year 2014

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Image by ​Marta Parszeniew

This post originally appeared on VICE UK

As 2014 slams the brakes on, editors the breadth of the land put their feet up on the desk and just serve you some reconstituted yesterdays: top-10-20-30-50-100 countdowns of stuff that happened over the past 12 months. But as you grind your way through one end-of-year music supplement banging on about Twigs's re-sexing up of pop and Aphex Twin's continuing influence after another, your eyes go oblong and there's a sense of intense, giddying deja vu. Haven't we seen it all before? In every other magazine/paper/webzine/cereal box? Like, ​every year? Forever?

Slice through the crap: This truly is The Only Top 51 Albums Of The Year Countdown You'll Ever Need.

51: The only one of the acts from the publication's January "Ones To Watch" feature not to be dropped.

50: The theoretical position of the Aphex album if he'd released it at the maximum inflection point of the public's indifference curve, i.e. five years after Drukqs.

49: A record that arrived at that weird week in mid-January where an utterly empty release schedule means the press must lionize any old shit just to fill the blank space they still have for a 900-word review.

48: Morrissey's pre-ordained position, after a secret meeting of the music business conspiracy against him decided to tighten the screws a bit.

47: Perfume Genius

46: Credible dance producer secretly praying his label doesn't decide to put out the Sam Smith "feat" he did back when Sam was still "the cool guy from Disclosure."

45: U2, with boxout thinkpiece on "their mad iTunes gamble that paid off."

44: Label's street team already trying to give them a push as "the biggest Ello artist of 2015."

43: Uncomfortable moment we've all been anticipating: the advent of grime musicians with bona fide legacy-act status.

42: Dean Blunt

41: Rapper who dials up his publicist every week asking why she hasn't done more to push his raw, courageous opinions on Ferguson.

40: The theoretical position of the Aphex album if he'd dropped Syro a square and career-minded two years after Drukqs.

39: Artist thanking lucky stars their tax avoidance was in a marginally different Jersey scheme to Take That and Arctic Monkeys.

38: Token African world musos. Copy features jibe at Bob Geldof (via haughty lionizing of "the real Africa").

37: Old-timer with sixth "bold return to form" of the past ten years, each worse than the last.

36: If you actually listened to this in 2014, you have multiple DrownedInSound forum handles and occasionally use them simultaneously to "win" arguments by complex sock-puppetry.

35: Jessie Ware or Katy B

34: Leonard Cohen

33: Brian Eno/Karl Hyde or Scott Walker/Sunn O)))

32: Have featured in at least three "Finally, meet the groups bringing politics back into music" pieces by John Harris.

31: Sorry, but who the fuck is actually listening to Bombay Bicycle Club?

30: Everyone only heard about this because it seemed to be going through the roof on Metacritic. That's right: a haphazard scattering of random nerds at the Tallahassee Gazette, the New England Reader, Shizzle Magazine and cokemachineglow.com coincidentally boned this record, and now it is somehow a big deal for wider culture.

29: Ariel Pink

28: Album still rocking the same sparse "future R&B" thing from five years ago, despite the fact that real-life R&B's future has turned out to consist of Rita Ora and "All About That Bass."

27: Features someone who used to be in Late Of The Pier hoping no one will notice their third-time-lucky indie career.

26: Features someone who used to be in Joe Lean & the Jing Jang Jong hoping no one will notice their third-time-lucky indie career.

25: Unexpectedly high appearance for old timer with an insufferably bland solo career so he can be softened up to win the "legacy/lifetime achievement" award next year.

24: 90s act now reviewed far better than they ever were in their supposed heyday, when they were treated as a contemporary artist, rather than now, as a misty-eyed nostalgia mercy fuck.

23: Peaking Lights

22: Despite glib lionizing by the commentariat, if anyone had ever attempted a detailed reading of the lyrics sheet, they'd soon see that the "feminist statement" the critics gushed about can be most charitably summarized as: "Girls rock!!!! Having a fanny is totally boss!!!"

21: Sign of the times story of how they met: "We were both retrenched as A&Rs by major labels on the same day."

20: Band whose publicist thought it'd be a really good idea if they strongly criticized Taylor Swift re: Spotify, really wishing all those .001-cent additional Spotify plays their widely publicized soundbites generated would sum into something they could eat right about now.

19: Whichever scratchy band of no-marks has managed to make one scratchy C86 garage-pop song that sounds marginally different to every other scratchy C86 garage-pop song you've heard in your entire life forever. Alvvays, Ex Hex, whathaveyou...

18: "Barnstorming" appearance on a US chat show doing exactly what they'd done day after day on tour for five years when all these suddenly hip media praise-singers were listening to fucking Purity Ring instead.

17: Pitchfork-approved trap.

16: Pitchfork-approved hardcore.

15: Pitchfork-approved Pitchfork music.

14: Singer-songwriter croaking out something dusty-earnest on Saddle Creek or Bella Union that ultimately does little to disguise the fact they're Ben Howard with a mouthful of Temazepam: Yup, the year's inexplicable folk biggie has landed.

13: Flying Lotus

12: Ominous point in human history where people voting for Iggy Azalea as a joke meets people voting for Iggy Azalea because they are deadly serious. This is basically how the Nazis got power.

11: Actual bullshit.

10: Run The Jewels

9: Ethereal. Ghostly. Diaphanous. Luminescent. Spectral. "Creates worlds." Record that has all the critics reaching for their thesaurus to see if they can find a word they haven't used for "very dull and ponderous."

8: They will play Field Day 2015 and no one will go.

7: The actual position of Aphex Twin album owing to giant psychic bounce because of extraordinary time lag between releases.

6: The rap "party album of 2014" that makes you wince imagining the parties of the Hackney media elite: three worse-for-wear unpaid editorial assistants in ratty 90s skirts self-consciously "working it out" to this alleged "booty music" at 1AM around a laptop in a dingy Clapton flat above a chicken shop while gak talks unto gak about Russell Brand and house prices.

Numbers 2 - 5: Records that were OK: No one was mad about them, but no one disliked them much either, so they swam through the middle course, whereas intense records that some people were truly passionate about but others really hated all ultimately failed to make the cut.

NUMBER 1: Coldplay (Q), Jack White (NME), Sven Vath (Mixmag), FKA Twigs (Pitchfork) Neil Young (Uncut), Neil Young (Mojo), Neil Young (Classic Rock), Neil Young (Home & Garden), some bloke humming transcendentally over distorted tape loops of concrete being laid (The Wire).

Follow Gavin Haynes on ​Twitter

VICE Meets: Talking to the Star and Director of 'A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night'

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Ana Lily Amirpour's debut feature, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, is an Iranian vampire Western about a girl who preys on the dejected residents of a town called Bad City while cloaked in a black chador. VICE had a chance to talk to Amirpour and the star of the film, Sheila Vand, about love and loneliness in the genre-bending noir.

A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night will be screened at Montreal's Phi Centre on December 18. ​Tickets are available here.​

Congress Is Going to Stop DC from Legalizing Weed

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On a freezing Wednesday night in downtown Washington, DC, Adam Eidinger and a group of tightly bundled marijuana legalization advocates marched down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol Building. It was ostensibly a march to protest Congress' continued meddling in DC's home rule, but it was as much a metaphor for how little attention Congress was paying them. They'd been left out in the cold again.

Congress is poised to pass a more than $1 trillion spending bill that includes measures blocking the Dist​rict legalizing marijuana. The provisions have outraged local activists and politicians in the city, where voters approved a ballot initiative legalizing recreational marijuana by nearly 70 percent, but lawmakers are charging ahead with the bill anyway.

"At this point I'm ready to commit acts of civil disobedience to see that this initiative is passed," Eidinger told me, standing outside of the Justice Department last night. "If a policy maker refuses to address the issue, sitting down in their office to uphold the will of the 147,000 people who voted for this is a justifiable act, and we're going to continue to do acts of civil disobedience until they recognize the election. This is human rights violation taking place."

Eidinger and some of his fellow advocates had spent the past two days staging a sit-in in Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's office, trying to get congressional leadership to scrap the provisions, but to no avail. The activist said he got a bit of face-time with one of the majority leader's staffers, but Reid himself never showed up.

The inclusion of the provision blocking DC's marijuana law is a victory for Maryland Republican Rep. Andy Harris, who has been leading the crusade against legal weed in the nation's capital. Harris and leaders on the House Appropriations Committee tucked the provision into the middle of the massive 1,600-page spending bill that Congress has to pass on Thursday in order to prevent a government shutdown.

The amendment prohibits federal and local funds from being used in DC "to enact any law, rule, or regulation to legalize or reduce penalties associated with the possession, use or distribution" of marijuana.

DC politicians have condemned the move as an affront to democracy. "To undermine the vote of the people—taxpayers—does not foster or promote the 'limited government' stance House Republicans claim they stand for," DC City Councilmember David Grosso said in a statement this week. "It's uninformed paternalistic meddling."

But Harris, one of the biggest anti-pot crusaders in Congress, is having none of it. "That's the way the Constitution was written," he sai​d in an interview with Politico Wednesday, responding to criticism from DC officials and residents. "If they don't like that oversight, move outside of the federal district to one of the 50 states that is not covered by the jurisdiction of Congress as a whole."

That's a charming message to the roughly 600,000 people who live in DC, a city where black residents were eight times​ more likely to be arrested for marijuana than whites.

Initially, supporters of the legalization initiative were hopeful that Senate Democrats and the White House w​ould stick up for them. But in the end, no one appeared to have the political will to risk a government shutdown in order to protect DC autonomy. Earlier this year the Obama administration threatened to veto a spending bill that included Harris's rider. In a July statement, the White House sa​id it "strongly opposed" provisions "preventing District from using own funds to carry out locally passed marijuana policies." However, a White House statem​ent on the new spending bill released Thursday doesn't mention DC, and urges Congress to pass the legislation.

Top congressional negotiators didn't even bother to tell Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, DC's representative in Congress that the provision had made it into the final bill. Not that she can vote on it anyway.

However, there is confusion about what exactly the Harris provisions will mean for legal weed in Washington, DC. It's unclear from the if the amendments will block the city from enacting legalization altogether—the initiative has already passed, and after all, how much money does it take to not enforce a law?—or simply block the DC Council from passing legislation to tax and regulate sales of marijuana.

DC officials have said that they still plan to let the legalization initiative stand, even if the city is barred by Congress from regulating or enforcing the law. Norton t​old Roll Call that, ""based on a plain reading of the bill and principles of statutory interpretation, the District may be able to carry out its marijuana legalization initiative." And in a reversal from previous statements, city's mayor-elect, Muriel Bowser, reportedly said Wednesday that she'd allow unregulated marijuana if Congress blocks the city's attempts to tax and regulate it.

If that happens, Harris will be responsible for creating an unregulated legal weed zone in the heart of the federal government. Quite a legacy for Congress's most rabid prohibitionist.

Eidinger said he agrees with Norton's assessment, but adds, "We're not settling for that because we should have autonomy. We should be able to write our own laws."

In many ways, it's been business as usual. Republicans in Congress blocked DC's medical marijuana laws for more than a decade. And as in past years, the "cromnibus" also blocks the city from operating needle exchanges and funding abortions, except in cases of rape or incest, among other provisions.

In a case of seriously mixed messages, the same spending bill will also block the J​ustice Department and DEA from interfering with legitimate medical marijuana operations in states that have legalized pot. The Republican-controlled House passed a similar me​asure by surprising margins earlier this year.

"The US House voted five times this year to let states set their own marijuana policy and we believe we can repeal this DC rider at some point," the Drug Policy Alliance's Bill Piper said in a statement to VICE. "We will win in the end."

Follow CJ on ​Twitter.

The Satanic Statue Being Made for Oklahoma's Statehouse Is Coming Along Nicely

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Photo by Jonathan Smith

Two weeks ago I found myself in the backwoods of rural Florida standing in front of a ​bronzed bust of the pagan idol Baphomet. A few days later it would be attached to its eight-and-a-half-foot cloven body and put to rest on a throne flanked on either side by a small metallic child. Eventually, its creators hope, it will be whisked away to Oklahoma where it will be placed next to a Ten Commandments monument on the front lawn of the state capitol.

Photos courtesy of Mark Porter

I had come to this foundry in the middle of the sticks with Lucien Greaves, the spokesperson for the Satanic Temple, the group behind the monument. The last time I saw it was in a small Brooklyn studio in April, when it was still being formed out of clay by ​Mark Porter, an artist trained in classical sculpture. Now, seven months later, it's almost finished.

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Photos by Jonathan Smith

Before this trip I had been under the impression that bronze sculptures were created with a giant crane that dipped the work whole into a vat of molten bronze like a piece of bread into a fondue bowl. That's not the case. The work is cut into many pieces, each of which is bronzed separately before being welded back together. When we arrived, different parts of the sculpture lay scattered across the property. The bust sat on a wooden table inside a sort of open-air shed, while the torso rested nearby on a smaller table. The hooves and arms were splayed out on the ground nearby. The following day, Porter, along with two other men, would begin the arduous process of welding the disparate pieces together to create a smooth, fluid sculpture meant to serve as a testament to the equal representation of all religions under United States law.

While it's not yet finished, the below images should give you an idea of what these guys are working with:

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Photos courtesy of Mark Porter

Oklahoma is far from the only state with a religious monument—or even a Ten Commandments monument—on government property. In fact, there's even a ​handy website that maps them all out for you. So why did the Satanic Temple choose Oklahoma? 

"They specifically made statements that this location was to be a monument park," Greaves told me. "They didn't put it in exactly those words, but that was the legal rhetoric that they instituted to justify it and pretend there was constitutional standing for it, and that was just a breach of the [First Amendment's] establishment clause. They set the perfect groundwork for us."

Lucien Greaves. Photo by Jonathan Smith

Oklahoma State Representative Mike Ritze set that groundwork in 2012 when he paid for the Ten Commandments monument and its installation with money out of his own pocket. Because he paid for the Commandments himself, it was classified as a donation and allowed to be placed on government property.

The Temple has been largely ignored by members of the Oklahoma government, so on July 30 they decided to file a Freedom of Information Act request for documents relating to the installation of the Baphomet statue. "I feel strongly that we didn't receive all the documents we should have," Greaves told me. "It seems highly unlikely to me that their files consist entirely of citizen letters opposed to the monument with almost no communication with government officials as to where they stand on it." The Temple even had proof that at least one of the documents was withheld, according to Greaves, in the form of a registered letter the Satanic Temple had sent to the Capital Preservation Commission. "We had gotten the notice that they'd received it," Greaves said. Yet "that was not included in their file of communications regarding the Satanic Temple monument request." After an appeal, the Capital Preservation Commission produced a copy of the letter.

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The statue before bronzing. Photo courtesy of Mark Porter

Of course, all of this talk of installing the statue in Oklahoma is contingent on the Ten Commandments monument being rebuilt after a drunk guy who heard voices in his head pissed on the slab b​efore smashing his car into it last October. If it's not rebuilt, the Temple will in stop trying to put Baphomet on the statehouse yard.

According to Greaves, the existence of the Ten Commandments statue is essential to his organization's goals with this project. The Baphomet is "part man, part animal, points above, points below, the legs are crossed, upright pentagram on head, inverse pentagram behind the head, and the Caduceus on the lap representing balance and reconciliation," he said. "The message behind Baphoment is a reconciliation of the opposites, not this call to arms of one against one but a merging of the two. That's part of the reason that it can only exist standing next to the Ten Commandments. That's part of the message. We wouldn't want to proselytize as a single voice in the public square."

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Baphomet's children waiting to be bronzed. Photo by Jonathan Smith

Luckily for the Temple, it seems as though the Commandments are on track to be rebuilt. Representative Mike Ritze, whose voicemail ends with "have a great day in the Lord!" told VICE that he has already raised the money to rebuild the Commandments monument and plans to have it reinstalled at an undisclosed date. When asked how the money was raised, he responded, simply, "private."

When I broke this news to Greaves this week via email he replied:

Everything is now in place for the battle ahead. This isn't a mere petty fight that exploits a legal loophole. The forthcoming battle for Oklahoma cuts to the heart of how we conceive of our rights as American citizens, how we interpret and respect our constitutional values of plurality and individual freedom. However this case is ultimately decided, it will have deep and lasting ramifications for generations to come. This monument of Baphomet will hereafter be recognized as a central icon for the continually growing populations of Satanists, secularists, and advocates for individual liberty who refuse to bow to the arbitrary authority of archaic edicts, and refuse to accept their marginalization at the hands of thinly-veiled theocrats. We look forward to arranging with Oklahoma a date in which we may erect and unveil Baphomet, where it will stand in honor of the unjustly accused, the slandered minority, the maligned outgroups, so that we might pay respect to their memory and celebrate our progress as a pluralistic nation founded on secular law.

While the Baphomet is the Temple's most high-profile project to date, they are constantly working on other community-oriented projects, such as a Satanic holiday ​display that will be installed in the Florida State Capitol's rotunda near a Nativity scene. Then there's the Satanic coloring book, set to be distributed, along with bibles donated by the Christian group World Changers of Florida, to students in the Orange County School District in January. And in July, the Temple used the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby ruling in an ongoing effort to gain legal exemption to informed conse​nt laws for women who want an abortion but don't want to be given a bunch of scientifically unsound literature.

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From left: Satanic Temple High Priest Brian Werner, Lucien Greaves, and Mark Porter. Photo by Jonathan Smith

Those very public projects, as well as others, have led some to accuse the Temple of being media whores performing stunts to get attention. "Well of course!" Greaves says. "You need media to bring attention to these issues. If we're going to do a public prayer, we want to do it in a place like the town of Greec​e where it's a Supreme Court battle. We don't want to keep this secret. We want it high-profile."

For more on the Satanic Temple, visit their ​website.

Follow Jonathan Smith on ​Twitter.

Douglas Bourgeois on His Trippy, Musician-Filled Paintings

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A New Place to Dwell, by Douglas Bourgeois. All images courtesy of Arthur Roger Gallery

With 18 different venues spread throughout New Orleans from small arts spaces in Treme and Central City to major museums such as the New Orleans Museum of Art, the contemporary art biennial ​Pros​pect.3 certainly doesn't make it easy for an individual to stand out from the over 50 participating artists in the show. But Southern Louisiana artist Douglas Bourgeois does that with his bizarrely beautiful paintings ranging from a saintly Elvis kneeling in reverence to his holy guitar with his beloved mother and Priscilla nearby to soul legend Bobby Womack and Lynchian torch singer Lana Del Rey performing a duet on the moon.


Womack and Del Ray, by Douglas Bourgeois

Though Prospect.3, which was as organized by artistic director and Los Angeles County Museum of Art curator Franklin Sirmans, has a distinctly international bent, Bourgeois's vibrant art is thoroughly steeped in the cultural heritage of southern Louisiana. Born and currently living and working in the small rural community of St. Amant, where he returned in the 1980s after living in New Orleans for several years, Bourgeois's art reflects the regions deep historical ties to music from the blues to jazz to R&B and hip-hop. Bourgeois's work also features rich symbolism and a heavy dose of magical realism, creating a dreamlike visual landscape that appears both hallucinatory and thoroughly American.

With his works displayed in one corner of the Prospect.3 exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center, I spoke with Bourgeois about the influence of southern Louisiana on his artwork, his artistic process, whether he sees his work as camp, and why he chose to paint that duet between Womack and Lana Del Rey.

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Iko-Ikon, by Douglas Bourgeois

VICE: How does Southern Louisiana influence your paintings?
Douglas Bourgeois: The humid air and lush subtropical landscape here are a big influence, just being steeped in it all the time. The music traditions from South Louisiana are more from memory imprints earlier in my life, from jukeboxes which used to be in most family restaurants or when wedding receptions were in a dance hall. When I lived in New Orleans briefly in the 1970s, a couple of second-line funeral processions passed by my house and I mistakenly thought those happened all the time, not yet knowing how serious an occasion that was. I also used to sit in the gospel tent during New Orleans Jazz Fest all day long and let it wash over me—it was so otherworldly and beautiful, I didn't want to leave.


American Address, by Douglas Bourgeois

I'm fascinated by your frequent use of pop cultural figures from Elvis to Lana Del Rey. What interests you about these figures as subjects of your paintings?
Music has nourished me since I first heard Elvis's "Hound Dog" as a little kid. Almost all the music I heard was from the radio and records, not live music. So I see recording artists as emissaries, as visionaries, flawed and human as they might be. I revere their gift to profoundly touch people, and honor them by putting them in the paintings. I'm also intrigued by the dichotomy of fame that these artists grapple with. How can a musician of widespread fame keep his or her sanity? It's a tightrope walk, from what I've gleaned from all the biographies I've read.

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Her Dreams Were Like Medicine by Douglas Bourgeois

Your representations of these pop cultural figures have a real saintly quality, particularly Elvis in A New Place to Dwell. Even your bold color choices remind me of Byzantine icons. Growing up Catholic, what role does Catholicism play in your work?
Since we lived far from urban areas and museums, the earliest artworks I saw were reproductions of Renaissance religious paintings and Byzantine icons in prayer missals. Also dime store religious repros were on the walls in everyday family homes. We also were given "holy cards" as students or when in summer catechism classes, sort of the equivalent of baseball cards for young Catholics.

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Our Lady of the Monster Beats, by Douglas Bourgeois

On the other pop culture side of things, I saw Life magazie profiles and work by Jackson Pollock, Joseph Cornell, Van Gogh and Picasso.

Of your paintings in Prospect.3, the most recent is Womack and Del Ray. I'm curious about your choice to juxtapose soul legend Bobby Womack, who passed away this year, with a younger musician Lana Del Rey. Why did you choose to paint these two artists together?
I've occasionally placed seemingly unrelated artists together in paintings, as though they'd met across eras and genres—L'il Kim and Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson and Rakim, the Runaways and painter Otto Dix. Oddly enough, the pairing of Lana Del Rey and Bobby Womack was real, just ideal for a painting. They did a song together on Bobby Womack's final album The Bravest Man in the Universe. I've always loved Womack's voice and his gravelly plaintive singing paired with Del Rey's ghostly torch vocals called out to me. The temporal change made was that Bobby Womack was younger in the painting, and they were singing on the moon. Bobby Womack died a few months after I'd finished the painting.

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St. Anthony Appears to Tony, by Douglas Bourgeois

Your paintings are extremely complex, filled with intricate details and symbols. What is your artistic process?
The visual can come to me while driving, walking or mowing the lawn, when my mind is emptied of conscious thought, and if it's a strong image that stays with me, I write a description and make a thumbnail sketch. Other images might come from seeing a music video or from a photo in a discarded book like Popular Mechanics. I make collages quite a bit and sometimes, a collage gets reborn as a painting.

I draw fairly detailed outlines on prepared panels. There's a lot of erasure, all the preparatory sketching is beneath the paint. Facile drawing is not natural to me, so I really have to push it to the intended shape. The original image can change while being laid out—sometimes when the idea seems to be turning to shit, rearranging it can make it work out to something better than the originally imagined picture. Then I paint with oil media, basically background to foreground, top to bottom. Depending on the size, that takes me two to four months.

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Dollcake at Seaby Douglas Bourgeois

In an essay on your work by curator and Prospect New Orleans founder Dan Cameron, he references camp. Is camp important in your work? How?
I never thought about camp when doing the work. Other people saw that, more so in earlier paintings that were more brutal. As I got older, I became interested in a more serene strangeness, the extraordinary within the ordinary, fantastic visions even in a small town or seemingly dull environment. There's still humor in it but it's more melancholy.

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Refrigeratorby Douglas Bourgeois

Your work seems to blend pop art, surrealism, and magical realism. Who or what are your artistic inspirations?
There are so many artists whose work inspires me, here are just a few: Giotto, Giovanni Bellini, Gauguin, Egon Schiele, Alice Neel, Whitfield Lovell, Joseph Cornell, Diane Arbus, Kerry James Marshall, Renee Stout, Rosalie Gascoigne, Willie Birch, William Blake, Michael Northuis, Otto Dix, Edvard Munch, Frida Kahlo, Gregory Gillespie, Sue Coe. As indicated before, music such as deep soul, Southern gospel music, raw rock 'n' roll and Americana, independent hip-hop, R&B, pop—the way musical expression hybridizes and reinvents popular music.

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Lamb, ​by Douglas Bourgeois

I'm also drawn to discarded paper media and ephemera, small objects, toys, obsolete electronics and machinery, animal illustrations, and children's books.

Your contribution to Prospect.3 features paintings from the late 1970s to this year. With a selection from a wide range of your career, how do you see your work evolving through your career?
I think the earlier works were more obsessive about objects and filling every inch of a painting to maximum capacity. I see a little more breathing space in the works now and try for less density. I am still preoccupied with how people with unique compulsions (artists, musicians, writers, saints, seers, performers) try to function on Planet Earth, but recent works seem more accepting and less pissed off.

In future, I'd like to spend more time just drawing for its own sake, and see how that could impact paintings. Also I'd like to play with sound collage and video pieces.

​Prospe​ct.3 Biennialis open through January 25, 2015.

Emily Colucci is a New York–based writer and the co-founder of F​ilthy Dreams, a blog that analyzes culture through a queer lens. Follow her on T​witter.

​The US Navy Got Itself a Fancy New Laser

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A United States Air Force laser experiment. Photo courtesy of ​WikiCommons

This Wednesday, the US Navy invited the world to witness the firepower of its fully armed and operational Laser Weapons System, or LaWS, for short. The first such system to be installed on an active ship, the USS Ponce in the Persian Gulf, video of firing tests released by the military show the laser taking down two unmanned ships and a drone. Rather eerily the laser, which lacks any colored light or pew-pew sound effects, swivels on its turret to lock precisely onto the engine of each craft. Then, suddenly, the engines just suddenly combust, grounding the otherwise intact vehicle and hypothetical crew.

Chief of Naval Research Rear Admiral Matthew L. Klunder, in somewhat ominous language, hailed the weapons test as a major technological breakthrough, so outclassing enemy capabilities as "to ensure our sailors and marines are never in a fair fight."

Officials first announced that they would test the LaWS system on the Ponce this spring, and tests have been underway since September. The system is the result of $40 million and more than four years of research, design, and manufacture across naval research and private sector labs. Operated using what is essentially a video game controller and hooked into the diesel power and navigation systems of the ship, the 30-kilowatt laser (at least six times as strong as an industrial, metal-cutting laser) is one of the most energy efficient ever tested. It can be adjusted to non-lethal settings, allowing it to knock out opponents' optical sensors or temporarily blind (dazzle) a combatant. Those involved in the device's research believe they can triple-to-quintuple the power of the laser, though, and test these new versions within the next two-to-three years, hopefully seeing active and widespread combat deployment by the early 2020s.

Yet despite what all the hype and mind boggling footage may imply, this is far from the first weapons system the American military has ever tested, or the first footage of such tests ever released. Earlier this year, defense contractor Lockheed Martin demonstrated its own 30-kilowatt laser, marketing it for possible inclusion on combat planes and tanks, Boeing demonstrated its ability to target and fire through inclement weather, and China announced its own laser systems tests. Even industrial laser cutters released last year are starting to look eerily similar to TV laser rifles.

What makes the LaWS test so revolutionary (one member of the Navy's Solid State Laser Technology Maturation program sees it as equal to the shift from swords to gunpowder) is that the Ponce will keep the system mounted and has been authorized to use it in self-defense. The first system installed for use on an active military craft, this moves laser technology from something that's historically been five years away for decades to a battlefield reality.

Laser weapons like the one on the Ponce are basically lethalized light. A focused beam of energy, with enough juice running through them they are capable of cutting through and destroying the hull of a ship or engine of a plane. Yet to date most lasers in use by armies around the world have been used for their precision targeting and optical sensor disabling rather than their destructive capabilities. Even a system like the LaWS lacks a certain explosive punch, as it can only put precise holes in objects within a few miles, which is nothing close to what you'd need to, say, disable an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, as we once imagined lasers might do. If not for the ability to accurately and reliably hit small targets, like engine blocks or fuel sources, something like LaWS would be the military industrial equivalent of keying a car.

It'd be nice to be able to say the military has embraced this pinpointing technology because it could theoretically reduce civilian and combatant casualties, neutralize inbound projectile threats to our citizens and soldiers, and turn war into a game of equipment stoppage rather than messy, indiscriminate carnage. And the focus of firing tests on incoming mortars and missiles and small, swift suicide or swarming boat attacks (think USS Cole bombing to understand this threat), plus official statements on the value of lasers as an ordinance-free weapon creating less risk than storing and handling fuel and gunpowder, indicate some concern with soldier safety. But much more language in Wednesday's announcements concerned the cost efficiency of lasers and no mention was made of decreased enemy or non-combatant casualties.

"At less than a dollar per shot," said Klunder, "there's no question about the value LaWS provides," compared to thousand-plus dollar missiles.

Folks in the 1970s and 1980s developed laser weapons with more explosive ideas, as when President Ronald Reagan famously envisioned a belt of laser-firing anti-nuke satellites dubbed the Strategic Defense Initiative but often derogatorily known as Star Wars. So many attempts were made to develop and deploy lasers in the 80s especially that in 1995 the UN had to step in to issue some (now quaint) protocols about laser weapons. Yet by the early 2000s the technology had proven so costly, risky, and impractical to the grandiose expectations that preceded it that, aside from a few doodles and early stage research projects, it seemed near shelving.

Only when military researchers embraced the laser as a cheap solution to short-range, precision defensive capabilities rather than a Michael Bay vision of the future did systems tests start to come hard and heavy around the turn of the last decade, especially from 2009 to 2012. These laser weapons, mostly stationary or hosted on proving ranges and bases, have experimented with different laser technologies, power sources, beam strengths and applications, and mounting systems for use in air or on land and sea alike. But up until now none had ever been tested on a bobbing, bustling, active vehicle like the Ponce, nor put into active service.

"We ran this particular weapon ... through some extremely tough paces," said Klunder. "And it locked on and destroyed the targets we designated with near-instantaneous lethality."

This above-expectation performance in real-world conditions, including adverse heat, humidity, and winds, have pushed ahead plans to keep the laser cannon on the Ponce for at least a year. While there, the ship's captain, under guidance of new laser-themed rules of engagement negotiated over the past year with the Pentagon, will be empowered to use the laser as a defensive capability if needed.

Such a deployment is likely to light a fire under the asses of other projects, and move us towards a mass-issuing of laser systems within the next decade, breaking a long cycle of the technology sitting just over a never-reached horizon. For now, the Navy will focus on refining and strengthening LaWS, among other projects. But off of the seas other departments of the military will have to tackle the issue of power and portability if they want to mount effective devices on smaller vehicles like Humvees and see mass deployment in-step with the Navy calendar. For now, we're at the very least looking at a space-age ocean scape within the near future. 

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.


Lara Gasparotto Has an Eye for Beautiful Things

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This post originally appeared on ​VICE Netherlands

Twenty five-year-old Lara Gasparotto comes from the city of Liège in Belgium and has an eye for beautiful things. Fortunately for us, she is also a photographer so she can share that eye with the rest of the world.

See more of Lara's work ​here

Why Is it Legal for Rich Foreigners to Come to American for Organ Transplants?

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It's a shocking image, one meant to jar sleepy subway commuters on their morning ride: Amid the sneakers and stilettos of urban partygoers stands a pair of bare feet, wearing the toe-tag of a corpse.

Every 15 hours, a New Yorker dies waiting for an organ, the tagline reads. Become an organ donor.

What the ad doesn't say and most donors don't know is that a growing number of the state's deceased donor organs aren't going to New Yorkers at all, but to Saudi sheikhs and other mega-wealthy 1 percenters with no ties to the United States. They actually take holidays here for the sole purpose of obtaining the organs.

Sound illegal? It's not.

The same 1984 la​w that prohibits you from selling your kidney or a nub of your liver while you're alive enshrines the right of wealthy foreigners to receive them once you're dead. So long as recipients pay full price for the procedure and wait on the same list as everyone else, they can procure a liver, kidney, heart, lung, pancreas, or length of intestine at a top-flight transplant center in their pick of major American cities where hund​reds of loca​l​s will die waiting for those same organs each year.

"Originally, it was no big deal because there was no great shortage of organs," explained Doctor Gabriel Danovitch, a former committee member of the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), the nonprofit that manages the country's deceased donor organs under contract with the Health Resources and Services Administration (HSRA).

But all that has changed dramatically in the last 30 years. Today there are more than 120,​000 Americans waiting for new organs—the vast majority of which come from deceased donors—and close to 10,500 are w​aiting in New York state alone.

"When we went to change the rule, we were told clearly by the UNOS legal representation that we could not exclude [people who enter the country solely for transplants]," Danovitch said. "We couldn't say, 'No, you can't have foreigners here.'"

To be clear, jetting in from abroad can't buy you a better spot on the line—that was part of the purpose of the original National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA). But the growing numbers are concerning enough to those within the medical community that the government recently change​d the way it disaggregates data about non-resident transplant patients to isolate and track this specific category.

New federal transp​lant data shows that the number of foreign visitors added to the waiting list last year is still a tiny fraction of the total number of patients, and the number who were transplanted make up an even smaller one. But both data points are way up from where they were in 2012, and anecdotal evidence suggests hospitals are happy to see that trend continue.

"The system has set this up in part because it's financially lucrative—many of these people are capable of building wings on hospitals, and they do," said Dr. Arthur Caplan, an ethicist at NYU's Tisch School of Medicine. "They're usually paying cash, and they're usually paying upfront, and the'll often say things like we want not just a private room but we want the whole floor, and we'll pay for it...[These patients] can really wield their influence in ways that even rich Americans find harder to do."

Even those who don't shower institutions with their financial gratitude still end up paying much more for an organ transplant than their American counterparts do.

"In the original NOTA law, you were not allowed to charge money differently from a foreigner or not—but that's bullshit," Dr. Danovitch explained. "Everyone who gets a transplant in the US gets it through their insurance, but you get it wholesale. When someone comes from Dubai or Kuwait or Saudi Arabia, they [pay] the full cost, retail, so the hospital will make a lot of money on them."

The trend isn't unique to New York—Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins, and Houston's Hermann Memorial are among about a dozen hospitals that have become big players, according to the da​ta—but as the state with one of the highest concentrations of top transplant hospitals and one of the lowest rates of donation, its consequences are starkest in this state. Columbia Presbyterian liste​d 12 foreign visitors for livers alone last year—about 5 percent of liver listings and more than any other hospital in the country except Johns Hopkins, which listed 15 such candidates out of 258 for that year.

Columbia did not return VICE's calls or emails for comment. Neither did John Hopkins, Hermann, or Cleveland Clinic. None of what they or any other hospital performing these procedures do is illegal, nor in theor​y will it ever be illegal, no matter how large the trend grows. The government did set a threshold—sometimes called "the 5 perc​ent rule"—that triggers an audit of any institution that performs more than 5 percent of its total transplants on visitors. But the "rule" (which has since been revised) lacked teeth from the beginning.

"In theory, if a program did not have a clear or acceptable rationale (in the committee's view) for transplanting a disproportionate number of non-residents, that could have led to further review and action," UNOS spokesman Joel Newman explained in an email. In practice, there's no legal limit to the number of foreign visitors who can receive organs here, an HRSA spokesman confirmed. 

What concerns those in the medical community about this practice isn't where the organs end up, but whether their distribution is fair: According to Dr. Caplan, an undocumented immigrant is reasonably likely to contribute to the American donor organ pool, but will almost certainly never receive a deceased donor organ, even if he or she is in need—the cost of immunosuppressants and other lifelong care is simply too high. 

"Generally speaking, what one would want is that the same population that receives organs receives from a population that are potential donors," Danovitch said. "I'm not an INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service] official—all I care is, 'Do you live here?'"

What many fear could emerge instead is a bizarre reversal of traditional transplant tourism, in which big US hospitals cater increasingly to well-heeled patients who come from less developed countries like India, China, and the Philippines at the same time that desperately ill patients from the US travel to those same countries to buy organs from the local poor.

"I've had three patients already receive deceased donor transplants this year," said one transplant worker at a large New York transplant center, who asked not to be named because they are not authorized to speak with the press. "You come to my clinic any day, they're coming—it's a big business to get these patients to come here."

Follow Sonja Sharp on ​Twitter.

The Irish Took to the Streets of Dublin to Protest Against Austerity

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Photos by Crispin

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

Tens of thousands took to the streets of Dublin yesterday to show their anger at a government. They were protesting to show that they're not happy to pay extra charges for their water—an​ iss​ue that has galvanized feeling against austerity in general.

Community groups made up of young families and pensioners marched into the city center peacefully chanting and singing. The city slowly ground to a halt as protest groups from all over the country merged in the heart of the capital near Nassau Street just beside Trinity College.

Figures for the protests range wildly. Protest groups claimed up to 100,000, while the Irish state broadcasters said it was in the ballpark of 30,000.

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While the protesters cracked jokes with immobilized bus drivers, the police gathered their muscle to show everybody who was in change.

The Public Order Unit (riot squad to you and me) closed off nearby Kildare Street, the entrance to Ireland's main parliamentary building, Leinster House. People shouted abuse at the layers of cops facing them under the banner of the Eviction Task Force, a group that stops bailiffs from kicking poor people out of the their homes.

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People gathered outside the main entrance to Leinster House and the police blocked them from going any farther, which really riled everyone up. I turned around to chants of "Fuck the pigs, the fascist bastards" only to find a little old lady, banner in hand, screaming at the cops.

While the pensioners yelled at the police, the main body of protesters gathered at a stage set up on the other side of Leinster House by Right2Water—the protest's organizers.

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Speakers from community groups rallied the crowd, screaming "traitors" at the politicians in the parliament building beside them. Brendan Ogle, a controversial union boss and Russell Brand's new ​ BFF, was the emcee, and he joked with the protesters over their signs, such as, "I've given up sex, the government fuck me every day." Irish acts performed songs and people read poetry while Brendan took the piss out of the government locked into the building beside them. In a brief moment of quiet, the crowd paused to remember Jonathan Corrie, a homeless man who died outside the parliament last week.

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Gerry Adams got on stage telling everybody that no one would give them their rights—Irish people have to take them for themselves, he said. Adams leads the newly poll-topping Sinn Féin and is possibly one of the most polarizing figures in Irish politics. Many looked at the ground uncomfortably while others chanted, "Go Gerry, go Gerry" à la Jerry Springer.

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The protest was an angry but a relatively family-friendly affair with its fair share of old people and children. Still, the police seemed like they were expecting Armageddon. This is probably because one young joker let the air out of a minister's tires a few weeks ago in Dublin. This led much of the Irish media to claim that the entire protest movement was infiltrated by a "dissident" and "sinister element," which in turn led to a boycott of Independent News Media (INM)—the country's biggest media company. INM is partly owned by Irish mega-mogul Denis O'Brien, the closest thing the country has to a oligarch. One of his companies also owns the water metering company and another even owns the barriers that separated the police from the protesters outside Leinster House.

At one point, historian Lorcan Collins compared O'Brien to William Martin Murphy, a famous anti-trade unionist and Ireland's first press baron who "locked" workers out of employment for unionizing. Veteran leftie Claire Daly said we could tell our children and grandchildren about how we helped change Ireland. Nobody needed to as they were all there, eating crisps surrounded by the riot squad.

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In the midst of nostalgic historical banter and bawdy signs, Gerry Adams stopped to take a selfie with a guy dressed as Santa Claus with a giant tap on this head.

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Back on Kildare Street the cops arrested a guy for jumping over the barricades while the crowd shouted "Enda Kenny, not a penny," referring to the prime minister. The public order unit must have been disappointed as they went back to waiting for something to happen.

Paul Murphy from the Socialist Party and Mary Lou McDonald from Sinn Féin spoke to a more subdued crowd in Merrion Square. It's interesting to note Murphy was one of the few politicians to come out against the water tax—Mary Lou and other Sinn Féin members were happy to pay it until public discourse changed.

The protest spilled over to other parts of the city with people blocking the Quays and O'Connell Street, much to the disgust of Ireland's top drag queen Panti who  ​tweeted that everyone should let the commuters go home.

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The police followed the protesters down to O'Connell Street, where minor clashes occurred between the handful of protesters and dozens of cops.

The recent protests represent years of austerity and Irish fury at their current political landscape. Political polls show Sinn Féin is in the lead yet if a snap election was called independent candidates would comprise a huge part of Irish Parliament, showing a marked shift to the left.

Brendan Ogle spoke to me about the political future of a people who have lost faith in their leaders:  "The party system has failed people, and that's why there are so many independents coming forward. The left has been demonized in this country for too long. You never hear people talk about the 'radical right' and there's a lot more lunatics on that side," he said.

The disaffection doesn't seem to be going away—instead it's growing. It's manifesting itself with people turning away from the two main political parties— Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael—standing as candidates and on the streets as well. The next national protest has been scheduled for January 31.

Follow Norma Costello on ​Twitter.

​Watch Pussy Riot Perform "Deceptacon" and Jarvis Cocker Cover Celine Dion at the VICE 20-Year Anniversary Party

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Last weekend we threw a little shindig to celebrate our 20th birthday at the Duggal Greenhouse in Brooklyn. The house was packed with about 3,000 of our friends, fans, and contributors, and the evening's entertainment was essentially a micro-festival chock full of some of the most legendary musicians from the last two decades. The way it worked was a house band made up of Nick Zinner, Andrew Wyatt, Pauli PSM, and Jack Lawrence played through the night as everyone from Stephen Malkmus to Jarvis Cocker to Jonah Hill to Lil' Wayne took the stage to do a few numbers.

We filmed everyone's sets, and starting today we'll be releasing them on our YouTube channel. First up is Pussy Riot's performance of Le Tigre's "Deceptacon" and Jarvis Cocker's cover of  Celine Dion's "The Power of Love."

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Pussy Riot's contribution featured Sasha Klokova of both Pussy Riot and ​the Jack Wood on vocals, along with brief speeches from Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alekhina. Sasha is from Siberia, and this was her first time in the United States. She had never seen Le Tigre live, but still managed to pull off a performance that blew minds and eardrums across the Greenhouse. Masha spoke about being at the protests in Times Square the night before, while Nadya sang a few lines from Neil Young's "Ohio." It was one of the highlights of the night. 

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Jarvis Cocker nearly brought the room to tears with his intimate cover of Celine Dion's "The Power of Love." He decided to play the Dion classic because it was VICE's 20th anniversary and "20 years ago, this was one of the biggest songs in the world."

In addition to posting the rest of the night's performances over the coming weeks, we're working with Lance Bangs to create a documentary on the evening. It will feature footage from rehearsals, performances, and interviews with every musician involved about their memories of both the songs they chose to play, and VICE. You'll also hear from VICE co-founders Shane Smith and Suroosh Alvi, CCO Eddy Moretti, and various others. The goal is to tell our story through the songs and artists that have built our soundtrack over the past 20 years. Wish us luck.

VICE Turns 20 Set List:

"Needy Girl" (Chromeo)

"House of Jealous Lovers" (Nick Thorburn)

"Symphony of Destruction" (Acrassicauda, Tony Foresta, Dave Ellefson, Alex Skolnick)

"Seek & Destroy" (Acrassicauda, Tony Foresta, Dave Ellefson, Alex Skolnick)

"Easy Rider" (Action Bronson)

"Give Me One Reason" (Action Bronson)

"Waiting Room" (Damian Abraham)

"Fuck You" (Damian Abraham)

"We Are 138" (Damian Abraham and John Joseph)

"We Gotta Know" (John Joseph)

"Attitude" (John Joseph)

"Police Story" (John Joseph)

"Marvin's Room" (Jonah Hill)

"I Was Born (a Unicorn)" (Nick Thorburn)

"Paper Planes" (The-Dream)

"Run" (Ghostface)

"Daytona 500" (Ghostface and Raekwon)

"Family Tree" (Black Lips)

"Bad Kids" (Black Lips)

"NYC Cops" (Meredith Graves)

"Range Life" (Stephen Malkmus)

"Remedy" (Stephen Malkmus)

"Bizzare Love Triangle" (Scarlett Johannson)

"Deceptacon" (Pussy Riot)

"Maps" (Karen O)

"Art Star" (Karen O)

"Power of Love" (Jarvis Cocker)

"If the Kids are United" (Jarvis Cocker)

"John/Loyal/Believe Me/No Worries" (Lil' Wayne)

"Anarchy in the UK" (Andrew WK)

How an Australian Millionaire Ended up Alone and Shirtless on a Tropical Island

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Photos by Brian Casey

In the 1980s David Glasheen was the chairman of a Sydney-based resource syndicate specializing in Papua New Guinean gold mining. He was also active in the stock market, amassing a fortune that peaked at around US $28.4 million, which he sank into luxury harbor-view real estate. That's when the market sank him.

On October 19, 1987, the Dow Jones dropped a record 508 points, costing Glasheen about $7.25 million. This was the Black Monday crash (known as the Black Tuesday crash in Australia due to the time difference) that killed the 80s boom in a single day. But for Glasheen, the effects dragged on. "The next few years were really bloody hard," he recalls. "My wife lost a lot of money, and she blamed me for most of it. Basically the family fell apart in 1991." Glasheen ended up in court, lost, and then the banks moved in. By 1993 most of his money was gone, and he was looking for an escape.

Later that year, he met a woman from Zimbabwe who was recently divorced. They were at a similar place emotionally, he said, so when their friend mentioned an available lease at Restoration Island, an undeveloped 64-acre pristine island off the top of Australia's east coast, they jumped at the opportunity and set up there in a little beachside shack. The plan, eventually, was to build a 60-room luxury resort. 

"The idea didn't last long," Glasheen said. "She couldn't handle it. It was all too tough for her." After the woman left, he grew a beard and stopped wearing shirts. Soon after, he got bogged down in a war with the local Aborigines, who refused to let him build the resort. That's when his shack became permanent. One by one, Glasheen's dreams broke down into a kind of shipwrecked bankruptcy, which is how he still lives today: a tropical castaway, but one who still loves playing the market.

"The stock market is terrific," says Glasheen, now 69 years old. "It's the quickest, easiest way to make a dollar. It's better than a job. You can earn 50 times the amount, in a tenth of the time." Surprisingly, he doesn't blame the market for his current situation. He was too rash, he says, allowing himself to get too deep. "I wasn't smart enough to see it coming. I knew it was getting toppy, and I should have sold. But I didn't, so I went down with the ship."

For Glasheen, life on the island hasn't been completely unpleasant. Over the last two decades he's renovated a World War II outpost into a livable home, complete with solar power and internet. It's an hour's boat ride to the mainland for groceries, a trip he makes just a few times a year—he grows his own vegetables and catches fresh crabs and fish. He's hosted numerous visitors, including Russell Crowe, who once moored his yacht and stayed for dinner.

Perhaps the only thing missing is a partner to share it with. Glasheen has posted ads on internet dating sites, looking for a girlfriend. "Nothing ever came of it really," he laughs. "I had an Italian girl here for a short term. But she talked about an open relationship, and I didn't know what that was. I thought it meant we didn't have secrets."

Glasheen says the best part of becoming a hermit has been the peace. "Restoration Island is a good name," he said. "It's restored me personally, in every which way." Despite this, Glasheen still plays the market and praises uranium as a savvy investment. In this way, he's not a hermit in the mold of Christopher McCandless, whose story became Into the Wild. Glasheen is more like a yuppie refugee than a naturalist. It's clear he arrived at the island for a lack of options rather than for some grand ideology. Speaking with him, his head is still very much geared toward the investment world. When I ask for some investment advice, he's more than forthcoming.

"Follow the [horse] jockeys," he says. "If you know the managers and their track records, follow those people. If they're consistently successful, you'll make money. It's all about errors. If you can stop your errors, and let the good ones run, you'll make money. And start small. I'm a great believer in the pyramids, the bridge builders. They've all got one thing in common—they started from small beginnings. They've all made mistakes, and you've got to make mistakes too. You've got to lose it, but then you can make money."

Or you could end up shirtless on a tropical island eating crabs all day long, which isn't so bad either.

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