[body_image width='700' height='471' path='images/content-images/2014/12/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/17/' filename='good-things-did-happen-for-women-this-year-body-image-1418830794.jpg' id='12065']

Malala Yousafzai with the Obamas in the Oval Office. Image via the White House

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

All told, 2014 hasn't been the greatest year for women. If you picked up any newspaper on any day of the week, evidence of violence and abuse against women would be found on every other page.

Consider the following: the Pistorius verdict, Ray Rice, Gamergate, Boko Haram's kidnapping of more than 200 schoolgirls, Elliot Rodger, Ched Evans, Julien Blanc, Dapper Laughs, Bill Cosby; the Rolling Stone rape fiasco, abortion politics across the US, and the UK's aggressive pursuit of cases against rape complainants. And on and on

But there is hope. There is. There have been some great moments for women in 2014 and it's important that we remember them, even when—especially when—it feels like we're constantly skidding along a dog shit–covered pavement. There are 22 female world leaders currently in power. Good women doing good things everywhere.

Here are some of last year's standout moments.

MALALA WON THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE
17-year-old Malala Yousafzai has shown the world the violence that women can face if they assert their human right to be educated, but also the power of dedicated, defiant activism. It's only been five years since the Pakistani schoolgirl's anonymous diary about life under the Taliban ruling in northwest Pakistan first captured the public's imagination. Since then, she's experienced highs and lows. On the downside, she was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman on her school bus—but more positively, she became the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize for her continued campaigning for better education for women and girls across the world. Her response to journalists on the day? That it wouldn't "help with exams" and that she needed to get back to her chemistry class.

[body_image width='700' height='495' path='images/content-images/2014/12/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/17/' filename='good-things-did-happen-for-women-this-year-body-image-1418830039.jpg' id='12053']

Image via Wikipedia

ANGELINA JOLIE HELD THE WORLD'S FIRST EVER SUMMIT TO END SEXUAL VIOLENCE IN WAR
Angelina Jolie and Brain from Pinky and the Brain, sorry, bald macaque, sorry, Foreign Secretary William Hague, made history in June with the first global summit to address the sexual violence that is so prevalent in conflicts around the world. The summit brought together 900 experts, survivors, faith leaders, and NGOs from 100 countries, all of whom pledged their commitment to pragmatically tackling the use of rape as a weapon of war.

[body_image width='700' height='363' path='images/content-images/2014/12/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/17/' filename='good-things-did-happen-for-women-this-year-body-image-1418830123.jpg' id='12056']

Image via Wikipedia

THERE'S OVER 100 WOMEN IN US CONGRESS FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER
After the news that Maryland and Massachusetts had both elected Republican governors in the 2014 midterms, liberal analysts labelled the midterms as "shellacking, the sequel." But while the Democrats may have taken a hit, women from both sides were victorious. The 114th Congress will see 100 women serving—a landmark in US politics. This includes the youngest woman ever elected (30-year-old Elise Stefanik) and female politicians who talk openly about having abortions—making female reproductive rights a central issue across several states. Progress, then, if not radical overhaul.

AN ENGLISH SCHOOLGIRL BULLIED MICHAEL GOVE INTO INCREASING AWARENESS OF FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION IN SCHOOLS
In February, the Guardian launched their EndFGM campaign, calling on then education secretary Michael Gove to write to all teachers in England and Wales warning them of the dangers of female genital mutilation. The face of the campaign was 17-year-old Fahma Mohamed. Within just three weeks, her petition had more than 230,000 signatures and was publicly supported by Yousafzai and Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general. Under the increasing public pressure generated by Mohamed, Gove—who, when under pressure, always wears the look of a graying PE teacher spying a scuffle on the basketball court—eventually met her and her fellow campaigners from Integrate Bristol and did what she wanted. He wrote to the teachers about FGM. The subject was lifted from the shadows and into public discourse. The lesson here, as with Malala, is that neither youth or gender are a barrier to successful campaigning. Not if you fight hard enough.

[body_image width='700' height='467' path='images/content-images/2014/12/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/17/' filename='good-things-did-happen-for-women-this-year-body-image-1418824682.jpg' id='11973']

Some of The E15 Mums. Photo via Facebook

SOME MOMS FROM EAST LONDON TORE THE POLITICAL ELITE A NEW ONE
The occupation of the Carpenters estate in Stratford, East London, showed the true worth of grassroots protest. A group of 29 single working-class mothers—who'd been evicted from the local mother-and-baby hostel after its funding was cut, and then encouraged to move miles away to places like Birmingham and Hastings—occupied vacant East London flats in September in protest at Newham Council's plans to demolish a housing estate, in a campaign that has come to be seen as illustrating London's housing crisis in microcosm. That it was led by a social group so routinely written off as anonymous, apolitical, scrounging "benefit mums" (a Focus E15 Mothers Leader, Jasmin Stone, said, "We've been called sluts, told to shut our legs"), cruising between one sheltered accommodation to another, made it electric. These women proved everyone—Daily Mail headline writers, suited council officials, and red-nosed old cabinet members—so spectacularly wrong. They were articulate, measured, successful activists who supported one another, got results, and are an inspiration for any disenfranchised young woman who doesn't believe she has any power.

[body_image width='700' height='483' path='images/content-images/2014/12/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/17/' filename='good-things-did-happen-for-women-this-year-body-image-1418829200.png' id='12037']

EMMA SULKOWICZ'S CARRY THAT WEIGHT MIGHT BE THE GREATEST PROTEST PIECE OF OUR TIME
The Columbia student vowed to carry her 50-pound dorm mattress around with her as long as her attacker—who, according to the police report, anally raped her in her dorm room—remained a student there, too. Then it turned into an international movement. Carry That Weight exposed a private scene in a (very) public sphere, forcing the acknowledgement that most college sexual assaults are committed by people who know the victims – often in their own rooms. It was protest art of, as the New York Times suggested, last resorts.

It's such a simple premise—just a girl, with a mattress. Yet everyone knows, and can see, where it took place. The wider effect on public consciousness surrounding on-campus sexual assaults remains to be seen. But when Sulkowicz took the microphone after the final rally and said, "I don't need to say his name, you know who it is," before being helped by students—women and men—to carry 28 mattresses to the home of Columbia President Lee Bollinger and stack them outside his door, it rang like a gong. They taped a list of demands to Bollinger's door, ending with a personal appeal for the university to re-open Sulkowicz's case.

BEYONCE PERFORMED IN FRONT OF THE WORD "FEMINIST" ALL YEAR
I've heard so many conversations about Beyoncé's muddled "feminist credentials" and how Beyoncé wasn't as feminist an album "as the media made out" this year, it made me want to dig a hole in a cauliflower and climb inside. Yes, the words in Jay-Z's rap on "Drunk in Love" are jarring within the album's sentiment and yes, people are within their rights to question a major public figure having a "feminist awakening," but we should all be able to come to a base agreement that the absolute bare fucking minimum definition of "feminism" is the public advocacy of economic and political rights for women. That's it.

[body_image width='501' height='209' path='images/content-images/2014/12/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/17/' filename='good-things-did-happen-for-women-this-year-body-image-1418827775.png' id='12001']

What Beyoncé did for feminism, on television, on stages, in magazines, across the ENTIRE GLOBE is, as Roxane Gay said, a "reach WAY more than anything we've seen." I met an 11-year-old boy at a friend's birthday recently who said he was inspired to "look into" feminism after seeing all the pictures of Beyoncé stood in front of the word on stage, in giant, illuminated letters. This kid was wearing a homemade T-shirt with the feminist fist symbol sprayed on.

[body_image width='700' height='381' path='images/content-images/2014/12/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/17/' filename='good-things-did-happen-for-women-this-year-body-image-1418827624.png' id='11998']

ROXANE GAY CALLED BULLSHIT ON ELITIST FEMINISM
2014 saw Gay becoming one of the most formidable voices in the feminist sphere. "I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all," she wrote in her collection of essays, Bad Feminist, which basically handed elitist feminism a hand mirror and said: "Have a good look at yourself, hon." Her prevailing message is that, while there are plenty of different kinds of feminists, the most important thing is to accept all our differences and work together towards the same goal—gender equality.

She delivers astute insight on race, politics, sexual violence and popular culture (on Netflix's Orange Is the New Black, a show widely touted for its diversity, she says, "It is diverse in the shallowest, most tokenistic ways... This is the famine from which we must imagine feast") that manages to be both devastating and, often—crucially—funny. That there is a tattooed, sarcastic, self-aware, highly intelligent black woman at the forefront of zeitgeist-y feminist discourse is something to treasure going into 2015. I trust her so-called "messiness" as a feminist because it's realistic. It stops me from losing track, from feeling like I'm not getting it anymore.

[body_image width='700' height='392' path='images/content-images/2014/12/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/17/' filename='good-things-did-happen-for-women-this-year-body-image-1418825264.png' id='11976']

AMY POEHLER WROTE A REALLY, REALLY GOOD BOOK
Poehler put out an absolute stonker of a book this year and if I had a teenage daughter I'd be thrusting it into her face every single day. Yes Please is basically a memoir of how Poehler came to be the engine of some of the best US comedy shows in decades (SNL, Parks and Recreation) but feels more important for its lessons in how to get far as a woman—basically: Be nice, but fight every single fucking second of the way. Throughout, Poehler speaks defiantly about ambition and, of all the big feminist advice tomes (How to Be a Woman, Not That Kind of Girl, Bossypants), hers feels like the biggest call to arms. Her points are rigid and unflinching. "Let me take a minute to say I love bossy women," she writes. "Some people hate the word, and I understand how 'bossy' can seem like a shitty way to describe a woman with a determined point of view, but for me, a bossy woman is someone to search out and celebrate." In a world where so many are still threatened by the so-called "hysterical woman," by "internet girls" with "snarky" tones (hey, Aaron Sorkin!) Yes Please was—is—an oasis.

SCOTLAND MADE A WOMAN FIRST MINISTER FOR THE FIRST TIME
Nicola Sturgeon became Scottish National Party (SNP) leader and first minister of Scotland after Alex Salmond decided to stand down. First becoming an SNP member at 16 after being galvanized by the sense of social injustice she felt watching Thatcherism play out, she knew it was wrong for Scotland to be governed by a Tory government they hadn't elected. She bucked the dominant Labour leaning of the country, though, believing that only through true independence would Scotland prosper. Following the narrow referendum defeat, Sturgeon has spoke defiantly on how "further devolution is the route to independence", believing that Scottish independence is a "when," not an "if."

EMILY WATSON TOLD THE UN THAT GENDER INEQUALITY IS EVERYONE'S ISSUE
The actor and newly-appointed UN Women Goodwill Ambassador delivered a passionate speech on gender and feminism at the motherfucking UN HQ in New York this September. Watson was there to launch the "HeForShe" campaign, which hopes to motivate a billion boys and men to become advocates for ending the day-to-day inequality that girls and women face across the world. Met with a roaring standing ovation, she said, "Why is the word [feminist] such an uncomfortable one? I am from Britain and think it is right that as a woman I am paid the same as my male counterparts. I think it is right that I should be able to make decisions about my own body. I think it is right that women be involved on my behalf in the policies and decision-making of my country. I think it is right that socially I am afforded the same respect as men. But sadly I can say that there is no one country in the world where all women can expect to receive these rights." By involving both genders in her campaign, she said she hopes to do away with the "us vs. them" mentality, the idea that feminism is a "man-hating" cause.

A PREGNANT WOMAN TOOK ANTI-ABORTION PROTESTERS TO CHURCH
Pregnant women shouting, as my esteemed colleague points out, are wicked. Even more so when they're taking down abortion protesters who shove film cameras and huge placards depicting tiny, bloodied foetuses into the faces of women stepping into a clinic—women who could be, for all they know, seeking help after being raped. In a video that quickly went viral (it raced to 2 million YouTube views in one day), a heavily pregnant woman who works for Kids Company said to anti-abortion protesters (the controversial Abort 67 group) outside a Southwark clinic that "making women feel guilty is so wrong, so fucking wrong." The crux of her rage was that Kids Company was just around the corner, and that the people—children—using their services should not have to see the images. "Many people have been been abused—you don't know what their reasons are," she says. "This is just so wrong on so many levels." From her, "No, madame, what? I'm talking," it's three minutes of pure fire that cuts through pro-life shaming like a knife through butter.

LAVERNE COX HELPED CHANGE THE LANDSCAPE FOR TRANS PEOPLE
In addition to her role in Orange Is the New Black as transgender inmate Sophia Burset, Cox has spent 2014 not just nudging, but trampling barriers for the transgender community. While OITNB's casting was thought by some (like Roxanne Gay) to be tokenistic, a trans woman playing a trans woman was a Big Deal. It just doesn't happen. Amazon Prime's mega 2014 success story, Transparent, featuring the dad from Arrested Development playing a trans woman who finally starts to live as who she is, probably owes a lot to Cox's visibility in Hollywood. 2014 saw her receiving an Emmy nomination for OITNB and a knockout cover of TIME Magazine, talking at length about being bullied growing up, activism, and how visibility saves lives.

JENNIFER LAWRENCE SAID FUCK YOU TO INTERNET TROLLS
Jennifer Lawrence beat the internet's shittiest trolls at their own game. The 4chan celebrity nude scandal was, naturally, targeted pretty exclusively at female celebrities—including Lawrence, who woke one day to find that someone had leaked nude images of her for public viewing and sharing. The exploitation of female sexuality became one of the most surefire ways of putting a woman down in 2014, but Lawrence did a precise, middle finger flick to it all when she told Vanity Fair that it's those who chastise women for taking intimate photos that should be ashamed of themselves: "I started to write an apology, but I don't have anything to say I'm sorry for."

Follow Eleanor Morgan on Twitter

[body_image width='1200' height='795' path='images/content-images/2014/12/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/18/' filename='sex-worker-march-soho-2014-774-body-image-1418909970.jpg' id='12391']

Photos by Jake Lewis

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

Last night, I joined a march through Soho in support of sex workers. It's an area of London that—despite what the surveyors, developers, and local council might tell you—belongs to these people, and has done for much of the 20th century.

Other events were taking place across the world for International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, but in London the date seemed especially poignant, marking a year since one of the most cynical crackdowns on prostitution the country has seen— the police raids that took place on these streets last Christmas.

The raids were playing on the marchers' minds, as were the 174 sex workers known to have been killed around the world in 2014, their lives commemorated with the candles we carried. However, the march was as much as a celebration as it was a vigil; sex workers have won some important victories this year and, for that, we sung sex work–themed Christmas carols.

[body_image width='1200' height='795' path='images/content-images/2014/12/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/18/' filename='sex-worker-march-soho-2014-774-body-image-1418910004.jpg' id='12392']

Starting at Soho Square, we wound our way through the streets, past Christmas parties spilling out of bars before pausing outside the offices of Soho Estates. Here, the "Save Soho, save our girls!" chant melted away into jeers and boos.

Soho Estates is the legacy of Paul Raymond, one-time "King of Soho," a man who built a £650 million ($1.15 billion) empire on strippers, porn, and property. Raymond died in 2008, but Soho Estates still owns a significant chunk of the area. Importantly, Walker's Court—one of London's most gloriously sleazy alleyways—is part of its portfolio. Once filled with sex workers doing their thing in flats above the alley's shops, Soho Estates has other plans for the area: regeneration, transformation, cleansing. The plans are well underway.

Ironically, Soho's cultural capital—the reason bar owners and restauranteurs have chosen this location for their faux-speakeasies and Mexican joints mocked up to look like brothels—is partly due to its association with the sex industry and all the seedy, titillating connotations that presents. Now, that aspect of the area is being bulldozered in favor of luxury flats and sanitized retail spaces.

"Boo!" yelled the crowd. "Shame on you, Soho Estates!"

Some passersby looked surprised—it's Christmas, why are people being so shouty? I suppose, if you haven't been paying attention, Soho seems much as it's always been. A little less grubby, perhaps, but who cares about the disappearance of a couple of sex shops when you can now get an $12 frozen yogurt instead?

[body_image width='1200' height='795' path='images/content-images/2014/12/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/18/' filename='sex-worker-march-soho-2014-774-body-image-1418910064.jpg' id='12394']

Reverend Simon Buckley and Niki Adams from the English Collective of Prostitutes standing in front of demonstrators at St. Anne's Church

The march eventually reached its destination, St. Anne's Church, so the marchers snuffed their candles and shuffled inside, laying down their placards and squeezing into seats. Subversive Christmas carol-singing over, this was why they were really there: to reignite the rage about the systematic abuse of sex workers, both here and around the world.

The church was hosting a screening of Ana Aranha's film Soho Trot, which documents what happened during the raids last year.

"The maid and I are handcuffed and held to the floor. The police smash up everything in the flat," says one woman.

"The police have their own television people with them. Reporters are taking photos of so-called vulnerable women," says another. "I am taken outside in my underwear. It is freezing. Is this for the cameras?"

[body_image width='1200' height='795' path='images/content-images/2014/12/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/18/' filename='sex-worker-march-soho-2014-774-body-image-1418910198.jpg' id='12395']

You may remember those pictures, splashed across the internet last year. The tabloid-friendly shots of skimpily-clad girls cowering from cameras were the result of an 18-month operation by the Met. "Operation Companion" was initially sold to us as targeting trafficking, but the sting failed to find trafficked women.

Instead, they found women who were working—by choice—in what they said was the safest place in England. The women were immediately evicted. However, after a series of farcical court appearances—bewilderment over the fact that women, not pimps, had organized their own neon sign, for example—18 of the 20 closed flats were reopened. Sex workers were vindicated.

[body_image width='1200' height='795' path='images/content-images/2014/12/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/18/' filename='sex-worker-march-soho-2014-774-body-image-1418910228.jpg' id='12396']

Rev Simon Buckley of St. Anne's Church initially supported the police operation; billed as "saving sex slaves," who wouldn't be? However, once he met the women themselves, Buckley switched sides. Last night, he stood up to welcome us to his church.

"English Heritage put up plaques to commemorate great battles," he said. "There should be one here saying: 'In 2014, the battle between the girls and the Met was fought and won.'"

The reopening of flats may have been a victory, but everyone knows the battle isn't over. With vigorous gentrification annihilating Soho's seedy origins, it's only a matter of time until the last sex worker is pushed out. And something changed after the raids; what had previously been a reasonable relationship with the police in Soho was shattered.

[body_image width='1200' height='795' path='images/content-images/2014/12/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/18/' filename='sex-worker-march-soho-2014-774-body-image-1418910035.jpg' id='12393']

Niki Adams

Niki Adams is part of the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP), the group behind last night's vigil. She told me that violence against sex workers doesn't only come from dangerous clients.

"Our experience of violence goes deeper," Adams told me. "We protest police violence. Who do we report violence to if our attackers are police? We protest racist witch-hunts which mean that people of color are the vast majority of sex workers who lose their lives. And we protest the violence of poverty; the majority of sex workers are mothers, standing between destitution and the survival of our families. Finally, we protest the violence of criminalization because it undermines our efforts to work safely and organie for our rights."

[body_image width='1200' height='857' path='images/content-images/2014/12/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/18/' filename='sex-worker-march-soho-2014-774-body-image-1418910304.jpg' id='12398']

A working flat in Soho. Photo by Frankie Mullin

In a working flat around the corner, I heard the same thing. Welcomed in, I took a seat on the sofa in the pink-walled room, kitted out with a kettle, microwave, TV and CCTV cameras (to keep an eye on the men who come here for sex). Catalina*, a woman in her 20s wearing a fluffy dressing gown and stripper heels, was working in a flat on Walker's Court last year when its door was smashed down by police.

"I came to work like normal, and after I see police running up the stairs," she told me. "They had dogs. They were shouting at me: 'Don't move, don't move.' They started yelling at me, asking me if I was trafficked, because I'm from Romania. It was scary. I still shake when I see the police."

Catalina's maid, Jody*, was also there that day. It's illegal for more than one woman to work together, but sex workers can employ maids to open the door to clients, pop to the shop for them and generally act as another pair of eyes. Jody is formidable. She told me she won't go without a fight. That, like the women who work here, she would do anything to provide for her children and grandchildren.

"I've worked here for 17 years," she told me. "I know all the café owners, the shop owners, the people in the sun bed shops, the boys on the market. We've always had the backing of the community. If something happens in one of these flats, you can just lean out of the window and shout for help. The raids were really about Soho Estates' redevelopment. They've literally ripped the heart out of Soho."

[body_image width='1200' height='795' path='images/content-images/2014/12/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/18/' filename='sex-worker-march-soho-2014-774-body-image-1418910420.jpg' id='12400']

Soho still has a heart, but hearts are fragile things, unlikely to withstand the iron fist of commercialization. At the vigil, Soho residents expressed their dismay at what's happening to their beloved, free-thinking area.

"We support the girls. They're our sisters," said Katie, who's been hanging out in Soho for as long as I've been alive. "They're trying to turn Soho into Brent Cross, but we like it seedy. If you take the sex girls away, Soho is finished."

The night ended with representatives from the Sex Worker Open University reading out a list of the 174 sex workers who were murdered in 2014. It was, unsurprisingly, bleak. Most sex workers are killed while working on the streets, so with Soho's safe apartments under threat, it's horribly likely that the below list of sex workers killed in the UK this year is going to be even longer come next December.

Mariana Pope, 24, Ilford
Unknown, London
Maria Duque-Tunjano, 48, London
Rivka Holden, 55, London
Bernadeta Nawracaj/Julia Anders, 43, Richmond
Georgiana Stuparu, 23, Coventry
Yvette Hallsworth, 36, Derby
Lidia Pascale, 55, Birmingham

*Names have been changed to protect identities

Follow Frankie Mullin on Twitter.

The nice thing about being a nerd is the sheer volume of stuff released to please you. If you're geeky, and you like geeky stuff, each year brings more fun, more games, and more diversions. This year offered a host of new geeky games, gadgets, comics, shows, and movies. And I'm not talking about that big-budget, "geek-chic" bullshit. I'm talking about the real deal, I-have-a-hard-time-attracting-the-opposite-sex-or-just-plain-interacting-so-I'm-just-going-to-fiddle-with-this-puzzle-instead stuff.

Geek out with me as I take a look back at 2014.

Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft

[body_image width='1920' height='1080' path='images/content-images/2014/12/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/17/' filename='the-best-in-geekdom-2014-body-image-1418855694.jpg' id='12178']

This iOS, Mac, and PC game from the makers of World of Warcraft debuted in March. Designed as an interactive digital card game, Hearthstone scratches the same itch as Magic: The Gathering, but it succeeds with online play where Magic fails. The game features heroes, monsters, robots, and murloks (little fish-goblins... you still with me?), and the gameplay is clean and easy to understand.

Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game

[body_image width='1400' height='730' path='images/content-images/2014/12/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/17/' filename='the-best-in-geekdom-2014-body-image-1418855953.jpg' id='12182']

In the world of board games, the zombie genre is overblown and basically kaput. It takes a really impressive game, like Plaid Hat's Dead of Winter, to catch the collective attention of nerds. In this strategy and storytelling game, two to five players take on the roles of survivors in a post-apocalyptic colony. Players have to keep up morale on the colony, find food, survive zombie attacks, and squelch any crises that arise. Each player has a secret agenda that they want to achieve, and only through tense negotiation and difficult decision-making will anyone come out ahead.

True Detective

[body_image width='2000' height='1000' path='images/content-images/2014/12/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/17/' filename='the-best-in-geekdom-2014-body-image-1418856679.jpg' id='12183']

I'm not saying True Detective was one of the geekiest things to happen this year... However, the inclusion of a heavy-handed H.P. Lovecraft mythos into a taut crime drama sure is! With mention of Carcosa, the King in Yellow, and all types of other nods, fans of the Cthulhu mythos were left pulling their hair out while Richard at the water cooler rambled on about it all meant. Whether you like the series or not, nothing else on TV injected its series with random nerd-friendly elements like True Detective.

LIX 3D Printing Pen

Kickstarter is great at funding inventions that no one needs but everyone suddenly realizes they want, and here's another example. The LIX 3D Printing Pen, which was successfully backed this year, gives artistically gifted spatial thinkers the ability to draw in midair and make solid creations. As far as geek gadgets go, few this year can compete with something so damn futuristic.

Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor

[body_image width='1920' height='1200' path='images/content-images/2014/12/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/17/' filename='the-best-in-geekdom-2014-body-image-1418856870.jpg' id='12184']

Here's one for all the Tolkien nerds out there. The multi-platform video game Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor, released this fall, was equal parts open-world gaming and Silmarillion-filled fan service. While other games may have done the sneak-and-hide better, this huge new game did it with the geek flag flying high. Sure, the Lord of the Rings is mainstream now, but there's nothing geekier than sinking 50 hours into a game to learn the secret history of Celebrimbor.

Tabletop's Third Season Crowdfunding Explosion

[body_image width='1600' height='1286' path='images/content-images/2014/12/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/17/' filename='the-best-in-geekdom-2014-body-image-1418856994.jpg' id='12185']

Praised among nerds as something of a golden child, Wil Wheaton (that's Wesley Crusher to you) now hosts an immensely popular webseries about board games. Tabletop, which has been going strong since 2012, invites "celebrities" to Wil's gaming table to play (and teach) various board games. This year it was announced that the third season of Tabletop would be crowdfunded on Indiegogo. Board games are starting to trickle into the popular zeitgeist, as evidenced by the show far exceeding its goal and raising $1.4 million.

Season Two of Uncle Grandpa

"Good Mornin'" is Uncle Grandpa's catchphrase. It's a pretty dumb and ignites hate in the hearts of many young viewers. But this absurd Cartoon Network cartoon—about a magical man who is everyone's uncle and grandpa—truly hit its stride this year in its second season. While lots of young viewers hate the show, a burgeoning group of nerdy cartoon fanatics are finding this crazy cartoon and latching on.

Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition

[body_image width='1920' height='1080' path='images/content-images/2014/12/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/17/' filename='the-best-in-geekdom-2014-body-image-1418857400.jpg' id='12186']

I wrote about the release of the newest Player's Handbook for Dungeons & Dragons back in August. Since then, we've seen releases for the Monster Manual (which covers each and every goblin, kobold, ogre, and dragon) and the seminal Dungeon Master's Guide, which dropped in December. All three books are updated for a streamlined, newcomer-friendly game of D&D that points toward a new attitude of openness and inclusion in the world of roleplaying games.

The Veronica Mars Movie

[body_image width='1024' height='768' path='images/content-images/2014/12/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/17/' filename='the-best-in-geekdom-2014-body-image-1418857984.jpg' id='12187']

You think comic book geeks are die-hard fans? Try hanging out with a TV fanatic. Losties (fans of Lost), Fang-Bangers (True Blood), Trekkies (Star Trek), Scoobies (Buffy)—these are just a few of the dedicated fanbases devoted to cult (and not-so-cult) TV shows. And this year the Marshmallows (yes, Marshmallows) came out in force to Kickstart a movie based on the Veronica Mars series. The movie had 91,000 backers and raised over $5 million.

The Return of Moon Knight

[body_image width='664' height='907' path='images/content-images/2014/12/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/18/' filename='the-best-in-geekdom-2014-body-image-1418863915.jpg' id='12189']

Moon Knight is a cool, creepy, totally moody superhero comic that's been cancelled over and over again. This year, helmed by genre icon Warren Ellis and illustrated by Declan Shalvey, the "Marvel Batman" hit the ground running in a brand new series. With dual personalities, magical gadgets, and a backstory involving an Egyptian moon god, this new iteration of the hero hits the sweet spot we're always looking for: right between geeky and "not embarrassing."

Jodorowsky's Dune

If you're a Dune fanatic like me, you don't care who makes an adaptation and how it falls short of the novel by Frank Herbert. It doesn't matter. You just want to see Paul, Baron Harkonnen, Duncan Idaho, et al on screen. But seeing this documentary about the greatest science fiction movie that was never made may be hard for some dedicated fans. Jodorowsky's vision of this sci-fi movie was huge, grand, elaborate, and starred Salvador Dali as the grand Padishah Emperor of the galaxy. This is a great documentary, but damn, Jodorowsky's Dune is a meditation on what could have been.

Follow Giaco on ​Twitter

New York City doesn't have its very own Guantanamo Bay, but Rikers Island comes pretty damn close. Made up of ten different jails, the floating mass of a prison complex is where local criminals—mostly minorities—go to disappear into the purgatory of our criminal justice system. Stuck between the Bronx and Queens, Rikers has remained a symbol of American bureaucratic backwardness for decades to city and federal law enforcement agencies alike. One recent, glaring example is that of Kalief Browder, the now-19-year-old subject of a recent New Yorker profile who was lost in the place for three years without trial for a low-level "broken windows" infraction. In his case, the crime was the alleged theft of a backpack.

As of late, Rikers has made for even rougher headlines with its own version of a torture report: stories of "fight club"-like violence between guards and inmates that have led to an array of deaths, including those of some mentally ill patients. But finally, somewhat like recent relocation efforts at Guantanamo, it seems as if the tide may be shifting towards some sort semblance of sanity off the shores of New York.

Almost immediately upon entering office last January, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio faced pressure from all sides to reform Rikers: After a damning investigation by the New York Times into 129 inmates seriously injured by guards, US Attorney Preet Bharara led the charge of the Justice Department, issuing an investigative report in August on what was going on behind Rikers' closed doors. The verdict: lots of really bad, unconstitutional shit.

A month after the report's release, de Blasio and Corrections Commissioner Joe Ponte first began talking about serious reform, like moving adolescent inmates off of Rikers entirely. "It's encouraging to see that the city has done a couple things in recent days," Bharara said in September. "But there's a lot more that needs to be done."

Back then, the US attorney said that if he didn't see progress from the mayor's reforms, a federal lawsuit might be in the offing. On Thursday, the hammer came down: According to court filings, the feds will take the city of New York to court over Rikers Island, citing numerous civil rights violations. "While the United States had hoped to reach a speedy resolution with the city on these critical issues," Bharara said in the filing, "thus far insufficient progress has been made."

Assistant US Attorney Vanita Gupta, the former ACLU lawyer recently appointed to head up the DOJ's Civil Rights division, went a step further, calling for a federal monitor—the same proposal established last year in Floyd v. New York, the landmark case that deemed the practice of stop-and-frisk unconstitutional. "It is our sincere hope that we can resolve these issues with the city through a court enforceable agreement with a monitor in order to implement sustainable systemic reforms," Gupta said.

On Wednesday, de Blasio visited two prisons on Rikers for the first time in his mayoralty to announce that earlier this month the New York City Corrections Department had officially ended the use of punitive segregation for adolescent inmates there. When this practice was in place, if a juvenile inmate broke a jail rule, he was separated from the general population and tossed into solitary confinement, a dungeon-esque place known among Rikers residents as the Bing. At the beginning of this year, 91 adolescents found themselves stuck there.

Now, in lieu of that, the inmates will enter either a Transitional Repair Unit or Second Chance Housing, both of which focus on positive rehabilitation and support for inmates not old enough to buy cigarettes. The mayor also emphasized the mental health factor at Rikers, as his office recently announced a $130 million injection of cash to help stem tide of the the mentally ill—who take up just under 40 percent of New York's jail cells—away from prison and into medical facilities.

"We wanted a decent and humane environment so the job could get done—not the dehumanizing environment that existed too often in the past," the mayor told reporters. "It is not only our responsibility as leaders to fix these conditions and move forward, it's our moral responsibility as humans not to create a situation where so many people had to experience so many difficult things—and I mean everyone who was a part of the reality here."

But to this day, de Blasio has yet to make any indication that this transfer of minors off of the island will ever happen. Of course, a federal lawsuit could change that. But, in a way, the progressive mayor's Rikers reforms fall in line with his NYPD initiatives: some promising stuff, but still short of what activists want. (VICE reached out to the mayor's office for comment and will update if we hear back.)

"It's like, 'Great, this is a step in the right direction,'" Glenn Martin of JustLeadership USA, a group focused on dramatically trimming the American prison population, said. "But moving all the adolescents off of Rikers is what the DOJ's report ultimately said had to be done, and that's not happening." Taking it a step further, Martin voiced the opinion of what many Rikers opponents believe to be the best (and only) antidote to its hellish conditions: Shut the place down.

"I don't think any good can come from Rikers Island—I would argue that no one should be there," he said. "As resource-rich and progressive as New York is, we can't find a place for 13,000 inmates locked away on this island?"

When asked of his hope for future mayoral action, Martin said he believes that the announcement on Wednesday was "a part of a multi-pronged approach from de Blasio." But right now, he's not seeing the mayor being "pushed to act boldly and courageously." In Martin's opinion, that's partly because of de Blasio's ties to Norman Seabrook, the Corrections Department union boss.

According to a detailed investigation that the Times released on Monday, Seabrook has used his position as the head of the Corrections Department Benevolent Association to construct a sort of shell around Rikers, defending it from external pressures or prosecutors like Bharara via Frank Underwood–style politicking. These maneuvers include dethroning a powerful investigator, preventing inmates from attending court dates by halting their buses, and dramatically beefing up the salaries of himself, his executive board, and his members.

Seabrook has managed to become a primary consultant to the mayor on the Rikers crisis; he was even recently spotted by this reporter outside of a holiday party on Monday held at Gracie Mansion, the mayoral residence. That relationship, of course, brings the mayor's Rikers reforms into question: How can anything be achieved if someone so staunchly opposed to reform is whispering into your ear? But Seabrook's true influence lies upstate in Albany, where he throw plenty of weight around in the state legislature.

One bill Seabrook pushed through State Senate and Assembly would essentially move the cases of corrections officers out of the Bronx and into Queens. By doing so, the idea is that the district attorney and juries there would be less likely to indict and convict corrections officers. "He's consolidating power left and right," Martin said. "Who else has the power to shop venues to shield his members from prosecution?"

If signed by Governor Andrew Cuomo, the legislation would greatly impact future cases like that of Terrence Pendergrass, a supervising corrections officer who was found guilty in federal court on Wednesday of letting inmate Jason Echevarria die after he ingested some soap and repeatedly called for help. According to testimony, Pendergrass told a lower-level officer to only alert him if an inmate needed to be removed from his cell, or if there was a dead body in play.

"Echevarria should not have died, and the convictions of individual wrongdoers at Rikers Island—as well as the systemic, institution-wide reforms we are pursuing—should help prevent tragedies like Echevarria's death from occurring again," Bharara said in a statement.

Just like Guantanamo, it would appear as if these "systematic, institution-wide reforms" Bharara is calling for will be a slow-burning, albeit controversial, flame. Too many players are involved for reform to come quickly. As the mayor said on Wednesday, "The problems at Rikers have literally been decades in the making." In other words, something this fucked up cannot be fixed overnight.

But just as he does with the NYPD, de Blasio tends to bank on a signature Barack Obama tactic: Just trust me, he seems to be saying, and change will come sooner or later. For the sake of the nearly 13,000 inmates who live on Rikers, let's hope so.

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

[body_image width='1200' height='797' path='images/content-images/2014/12/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/18/' filename='celebrity-photographer-chris-floyd-brit-pop-amelia-abraham-233-body-image-1418917009.jpg' id='12499']

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

When Chris Floyd was 18, all he wanted to do was photograph bands for a living. Conveniently, it was the early 90s, meaning shelves were full of all the music magazines that have since been lost to high-speed broadband connections. Magazines that needed pictures of musicians and were perfectly happy to bankroll a tour around Europe to get them.

"I used to go and see these magazines to check for work," Chris tells me over the phone. "And, you know, you just keep going back and going back until one of them gives you a job."

There was another world outside of publishing that piqued Chris's interest—a world populated by music PRs and record company execs, i.e. the kind of people you need to meet if you want to get into shooting album covers and press shots: the big money.

[body_image width='1500' height='1008' path='images/content-images/2014/12/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/17/' filename='celebrity-photographer-chris-floyd-brit-pop-amelia-abraham-233-body-image-1418855051.jpeg' id='12169']

Oasis

One of Chris's earliest memories of a job was shooting Noel Gallagher for the second or third issue of Loaded, which back then—believe it or not—used to run articles about Fellini alongside those about soccer or fast cars. This was before Oasis's first single had come out. Chris had never heard of them. No one had.

"I had to go to this hotel in South Manchester that was in a terraced house, like a Bayswater hotel," Chris tells me. "I didn't know who this Noel Gallagher was; I had no idea if he was their manager or if he was in the band—I didn't know anything. I went down the hall and into the room, and he said, 'I've just got to watch the end of this match, it's not long.' So I just sort of sat there while he watched the football, and then we started talking.

[body_image width='1500' height='998' path='images/content-images/2014/12/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/17/' filename='celebrity-photographer-chris-floyd-brit-pop-amelia-abraham-233-body-image-1418855701.jpg' id='12179']

Noel Gallagher

"If you look at Noel's lap in the photo, he's got an address book full of phone numbers. He started going through this book, phoning these numbers and asking people, 'Alright, have you seen our kid?' The other person would obviously say, 'No,' and Noel would be like, 'OK, see you later.' I, coming from the south, didn't understand what he meant by 'our kid,' so I asked him, and he was like, 'The singer, my brother.' I was like, 'Oh right, so you're definitely in the band?' He said: 'I am the fucking band.' I was so blissfully ignorant.

"Noel eventually located Liam and arranged to meet him on the street corner somewhere, so we left the hotel and we walked around Withington, or Fallowfield, or wherever it was, for fucking ages. But when I met Liam I just remember thinking, within five minutes, that if he can sing and his songs are half good, he's a total megastar. Everything about him just oozed charisma in the flesh."

[body_image width='1500' height='996' path='images/content-images/2014/12/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/17/' filename='celebrity-photographer-chris-floyd-brit-pop-amelia-abraham-233-body-image-1418855574.jpg' id='12176']

Beck

Chris began shooting for The Face, and then Dazed and Confused when it first opened—when it was still essentially just a big, folded, pull-out poster. He lived in a big flat share in Putney at the time and remembers seeing a piece about Dazed founders Jefferson Hack and Rankin in the Evening Standard on his way home.

It read something like: "Two bright young things from the London College of Printing are looking for collaborators, people who are willing to bring ideas for a magazine of sorts. If you're interested, ring this number."

In the picture, the two of them were wearing bags over their heads, the point being that the focus was on the talent. So Chris rang up. Rankin answered and invited Chris to come and see them.

"So I went into their office and ended up getting sent on a job shooting Beck," says Chris. "That was the first thing I did for Dazed. Beck was playing a gig in some shithole of a pub in King's Cross, and I went to his dressing room afterwards and took some pictures of him."

[body_image width='991' height='1500' path='images/content-images/2014/12/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/17/' filename='celebrity-photographer-chris-floyd-brit-pop-amelia-abraham-233-body-image-1418855188.jpg' id='12171']

Beck

Chris had his first taste of life on the road when he accompanied The Verve on the 1994 Lollapalooza tour. "The Beastie Boys were headlining—I remember that—and it was just after Kurt Cobain had died," says Chris. "It was the first time I went on tour and it was incredibly intoxicating. You had access to all the alcohol you wanted, all the weed you wanted, anything else you wanted—and the record company paid for it.

"I remember one night when Richard Ashcroft, the singer, collapsed after the show in Kansas City and was taken in an ambulance to hospital with heat exhaustion because he hadn't drunk enough water. He's a skinny guy to start with, and he just totally collapsed. It was scary—his legs just buckled under him. Then, the same night, the drummer just went mental in the hotel room and started throwing stuff out the window. It was a proper rock parody.

[body_image width='1500' height='1004' path='images/content-images/2014/12/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/17/' filename='celebrity-photographer-chris-floyd-brit-pop-amelia-abraham-233-body-image-1418855141.jpg' id='12170']

The Verve

"It's funny, because I keep reading things about them and all the other bands years later. It's this little footnote in British music history, and I knock my head and I'm like, 'Oh yeah, I was there.' I have pictures of The Verve backstage on the bikes, pictures of them being arrested—you know, all that stuff. Bands were so unselfconscious then; I was merrily snapping away while they were putting the handcuffs on."

At the time, none of it felt iconic, maintains Chris. He was in his early twenties and it was only a year or two earlier that he'd been doing telesales at the Yellow Pages. He says the reason it didn't feel so much like a definitive moment in music at the time was because most of these—Blur, Oasis, Pulp, The Verve—were people just like him, people from the suburbs, people who grew up in the drab, grey UK of the 1980s.

[body_image width='996' height='1500' path='images/content-images/2014/12/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/17/' filename='celebrity-photographer-chris-floyd-brit-pop-amelia-abraham-233-body-image-1418855215.jpg' id='12172']

Jarvis Cocker

"I think a lot of those bands grew up slightly obsessed with a romantic idea of London—of what London could be," says Chris. "For me, the most defining album of the time—before that, actually—of what London could be was the Pet Shop Boys' very first album, Please. It's just full of these songs about things happening late at night in bars in Soho.

"London was, like, 20 miles away, but 20 light years away at the same time. A lot of those people—Pulp, the Verve—yeah, they're from the north, but they still kind of had this feeling of being outsiders looking through a window into a club they weren't invited into for a long time. And then when it kicked off, all of a sudden they were the people inside the club."

[body_image width='1500' height='996' path='images/content-images/2014/12/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/17/' filename='celebrity-photographer-chris-floyd-brit-pop-amelia-abraham-233-body-image-1418855504.jpg' id='12174']

Richard Ashcroft and Liam Gallagher

That club, according to Chris, was Smashing on Regent Street, "opposite Hamleys toy shop." Every Friday night, all the faces from the UK's music and fashion scenes converged on Smashing's colored dance floor—squares that lit up from underneath and influenced whoever shot the video for Pulp's "Disco 2000."

"Everyone went there," Chris tells me. "Pulp. Blur. But then you had all these third division ones like Menswear, Salad—all one-word names. It was 1995 then, and I remember looking around thinking, 'These are the days and this is the life.'"

Follow Chris and Amelia on Twitter.

Chris has an exhibition of his photos, "Bigger Than God," opening this Friday, December 19, at the Hoxton Gallery in London. He'll be showing alongside other music photography giants like Pat Pope. RSVP for the opening here, and check out more of Chris' photos from the show below.

[body_image width='1456' height='1500' path='images/content-images/2014/12/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/18/' filename='celebrity-photographer-chris-floyd-brit-pop-amelia-abraham-233-body-image-1418904846.jpg' id='12330']

PJ Harvey

[body_image width='1200' height='1209' path='images/content-images/2014/12/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/18/' filename='celebrity-photographer-chris-floyd-brit-pop-amelia-abraham-233-body-image-1418906761.jpg' id='12362']

Suede

[body_image width='1488' height='1500' path='images/content-images/2014/12/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/18/' filename='celebrity-photographer-chris-floyd-brit-pop-amelia-abraham-233-body-image-1418904885.jpg' id='12331']

William Orbit

We're ambivalent about Los Angeles. When you talk about a place with so many obviously amazing things right next to so many obviously horrible things, how can you not be ambivalent? People who relentlessly trash LA, and people who can't stop talking about how great it is are equally boring.

So in a year when the conventional wisdom said " Go to Los Angeles right now!" and "Get the fuck out of Los Angeles right now!" we've been here, watching the place closely, keeping an eye on the environmental problems, the local politics, the culture, and just the vibe on the streets. As the mayor might say, this was a big fuckin' year. Here's what we learned:

[body_image width='1300' height='867' path='images/content-images/2014/12/07/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/07/' filename='what-we-learned-about-los-angeles-in-2014-312-body-image-1417975347.jpg' id='9464']

Some children who may or may not be vaccinated. Photo by Michelle Groskopf

LA's Rich, Unvaccinated Children Are a Bunch of Disease Time Bombs

Every city in America probably has anti-vaxxers, but rich children in Los Angeles might just be the people who are most vulnerable to disease anywhere in the country.

To make matters worse, the unvaccinated snowflakes of Los Angeles are a breeding ground for LA's whooping cough problem. It seems that to parents on the city's posh Westside, protecting your child's purity of essence (or something) is a higher priority than stopping a potentially fatal outbreak.

A big story about this by—of all publications— The Hollywood Reporter came out in September. Journalists took a look at the state's immunization records and discovered that rich kids attending hoity-toity, entertainment-industry-centric daycare centers, preschools, and kindergartens had rates of unvaccinated kids as high as 68 percent. WHO statistics put those micro-populations in Los Angeles alongside places like Chad and South Sudan in terms of protection from communicable disease.

The New Mayor Will Say "Fuck" on TV if He Feels Like It

LA's new mayor Eric Garcetti is like some kind of experiment to create the perfect politician for Los Angeles. He's always on, and he has just the right remark for every occasion in both English and Spanish. He also looks like what you would get if you told a cartoonist, "draw a picture of a mayor."

Anyway, when the LA Kings won the Stanley Cup this year, he went to a giant reception for the team, and gave the following speech:

...which included the line "This is a big fuckin' day." Whether it came from genuine enthusiasm for the game of hockey (which LA residents aren't known for) or just the desire to suddenly make the whole event about himself, the remark was fun for everyone, and it may have set a precedent that even in this puritanical country, you can talk like an adult in public and not have to go on NBC Nightly News afterward to pretend you're sorry.

There Were a Lot of Earthquakes for Some Reason

LA gets plenty of earthquakes. But the area had more substantial earthquakes in 2014 than any year since 1994, the year of the deadly Northridge quake. It was enough to be chalked up not just as randomly-occurring events clumping together, but a trend worth examining for a cause.

The Santa Monica Mountains (the area residents know as "around the 405 freeway") in particular showed a general increase in seismic activity that caused geologists to stand up and take notice. It was, in many ways, similar to the rise in earthquakes nationwide that the US Geological Survey has connected to fracking.

Whatever the cause, the most intense tremor of the year was the 5.1 magnitude La Habra quake, which caused a blackout that affected thousands, damaged a few homes, and injured a handful of people.

[body_image width='1300' height='867' path='images/content-images/2014/12/09/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/09/' filename='what-we-learned-about-los-angeles-in-2014-312-body-image-1418158796.jpg' id='10217']

Photo by Michelle Groskopf

Los Angeles Is Decent at Water Conservation

The entire city of Los Angeles might be the product of a water supply being hijacked from a fertile farm community and piped into what should be a desert, but it turns out the people of Los Angeles have pretty good water conservation habits. Water saving measures begun back in 2009 actually helped during California's historic, ongoing drought. Common practices like fake lawns, and drought-resistant plants make the area tougher to blame than the real water hogs like Rancho Santa Fe.

PR-wise, one smart water conservation measure was the cancellation of LA's Slide the City event over the summer. The Slide the City team desperately wanted to bring their giant faux Slip'N Slide to downtown LA, and in the grand scheme of things, a wet strip of vinyl in the middle of a park wouldn't have chugged nearly the amount of water an almond farm consumes. But letting all that water run into the gutters just so a few people can go "whee!" during a drought this bad would have been a very bad look. So the Powers That Be didn't award Slide the City the necessary permit.

Now if only the city would shut down that huge fucking pointless fountain in Los Feliz.

Photo by Jamie "Lee Curtis" Taete

Cops Aren't Always the Racist Assholes We Expect Them to Be

We're not too fond of our cops here in LA. They have such a strong track record of beating the shit out of black people that they should just quit the police thing and go pro. That's why when Danielle Watts, a black actress, accused the LAPD of harassing her and her boyfriend in Studio City, it was easy to believe her version of the events. She was just minding her own business with her white beau and the racist LAPD couldn't handle their forbidden jungle fever love so they decided to rough them up like they were Bud White from LA Confidential or something. Of course the LAPD was racially profiling her. That's what the LAPD does.

The well-meaning but less skeptical of us took her at her word. But then a tape of her confrontation with the cops came out and revealed her to be bordering on verbally abusive with the authorities, who said they matched the description of a couple who was seen fornicating in public. Whoops!

Watts is awaiting arraignment for misdemeanor lewd conduct. I don't trust the police, but I also don't trust anyone, just like my boy Stone Cold Steve Austin.

[body_image width='640' height='480' path='images/content-images/2014/12/07/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/07/' filename='what-we-learned-about-los-angeles-in-2014-312-body-image-1417974960.jpg' id='9462']

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Our Most Delicious Food Is Illegal

Bacon-wrapped hot dogs—sometimes called " danger dogs," for the shoddy quality of their ingredients—are among LA's favorite street foods. They're sold out of pushcarts around the city with grilled onions and jalapeños and ketchup and mayonnaise. They're delicious, and, apparently, also illegal. This is something that most people realized when the City Council announced they were considering a proposal to legalize street vending.

There are about 50,000 street vendors in LA, so this is a sizable economy we're talking about. The City Council is still sorting out how to best legalize and regulate all these sidewalk sales, and they don't expect to make any changes until next year. The regulations will probably include some kind of stipulation about how long vendors can keep the hot dogs roasting out there in the sun, since that surely violates the city's health code. Will something be lost in the dogs when they're legal? Only time will tell.

[body_image width='540' height='271' path='images/content-images/2014/12/07/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/07/' filename='what-we-learned-about-los-angeles-in-2014-312-body-image-1417975911.png' id='9466']

The Police Do Not Control Facebook

On August 1 this year, Facebook shut down for about half an hour. The appropriate response to this would have been, obviously, finding something else to do while waiting for the website to reload. The actual response, however, was the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department getting frantic calls from LA residents who wanted Facebook back. It got so bad that a sergeant from the Sheriff's Department sent out a tweet, kindly reminding everyone that Facebook isn't actually a law enforcement issue and to please stop calling 911 about it.

Photo by Michelle Groskopf

No One Can Understand Our Parking Signs

If you've ever been to Los Angeles or seen a movie or watched a stand-up comedian you'll know that finding a parking space in the city is its own version of hell. And once you finally manage to find a space, you have to decipher the cryptic warnings on parking signs: one-hour parking during the day, except for Sundays, and no standing between 1 PM and 4 PM, but only during school hours. Or something.

[body_image width='1280' height='694' path='images/content-images/2014/12/09/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/09/' filename='what-we-learned-about-los-angeles-in-2014-312-body-image-1418159276.png' id='10219']

Image courtesy of Nicole Sylianteng

Parking tickets ain't cheap, but getting them is an accepted part of living in this city. It's just too hard to figure out what is and isn't allowed. So earlier this year, a graphic designer decided there should be a simpler method for understanding when and where you can and can't park. The design she came up with clearly demarcated where you could park, at what time, and for how long. The City Council voted to pilot the new program in October, which means Angelenos no longer have an excuse to park where they aren't supposed to—but it doesn't mean that we still won't.

There Are, Apparently, Ways to Get Around LA Other Than Driving

People in Los Angeles have a love/hate relationship with driving. We like to complain about the terrible traffic, how expensive gas is, roads being closed because they're filming something, how annoying parking is, that nobody uses turn signals, that there are too many potholes, etc. etc. etc. Driving in LA is, in a word, atrocious. And yet, we're extremely defensive of our cars, to the point where most LA residents deny the existence of citywide public transportation at all.

This year, that started to change. Sort of. We're still obsessed with cars, but we're starting to let other people occasionally drive us around. Los Angeles is now Uber's third-largest market, and after they slashed their price-per-mile over the summer, some people suggested that the ridesharing app could actually replace the need to have a car at all. There was even a cringey New York Times article about it. Admittedly, we're not quite there yet—stats from this year say driving still makes up 75 percent of daily transportation—but we're learning that there are ways to get around Los Angeles other than behind the wheel. Besides Uber, the number of people in LA walking and biking has doubled in the past decade, and apparently there's a metro?

Donald Sterling Is the Worst Rich Guy in Town (and That's Saying Something)

Basketball is a primarily black sport. Charles Barkley said it, so it must be true. That's why it was so shocking that now-former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling had such a problem with black people showing up to his games.

Sterling was caught on tape condemning his mistress for bringing black men to Clipper games and posing with them in her Instagram photos (one of those black men happened to be Los Angeles legend Magic Johnson). Black guys are the ones that packed Staples Center and lined his pockets. They're kind of integral to the whole basketball-league-thing working.

To his credit, new NBA commissioner Adam Silver wasted very little time banning Sterling for his comments and forced him to sell the team to eccentric mega-billionaire/lunatic Steve Ballmer. Sterling is still in the midst of legal action involving his wife and the NBA. The Clippers have moved on to the business of winning games. Black people can still go to Staples Center. Talk about a fairy tale ending.

[body_image width='640' height='360' path='images/content-images/2014/12/07/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/07/' filename='what-we-learned-about-los-angeles-in-2014-312-body-image-1417975239.jpg' id='9463']

Photo by Megan Koester

New York Is Stealing All of Our Talk Shows

Since the 1970s, NBC's The Tonight Show has broadcast from "Beautiful Downtown Burbank" or, for eight weird months in 2009 and 2010, Universal City.

From Carson to Leno to Conan and back to Leno, Tonight has been a decidedly LA program. The Tonight Show was a shiny reflection of our city: alternating between bland and bizarre; status-obsessed; cheesy, but comforting; consistently amusing at the end of the day.

When Jay Leno finally shuffled off the stage to fiddle with his collection of funny cars and construct a lifelike approximation of his mother's womb made entirely of denim, new host Jimmy Fallon packed up the show and moved it back to its ancestral home in New York. The show is still as weak as the coffee at Langer's Deli (regional zinger!) but now with more of New York's trademarked obnoxious, self-congratulatory swagger. New York didn't just take one of our pop cultural institutions, but it also took 164 jobs. According to the Hollywood Reporter, NBC laid off the entire staff of The Tonight Show in Burbank and "encouraged them to apply for jobs in New York."

That's not a ton of jobs, but it's part of an ongoing exodus of showbiz jobs from LA. Other cities and states offer better tax incentives for production than we can afford. Worse yet, we're living in a New York cultural moment where it seems like the center of gravity has shifted back east.

Mayor Eric Garcetti fell all over himself to praise CBS for keeping The new Late Late Show with James Corden in LA. James Corden isn't particularly well-known and the Craig Ferguson version of the show is barely watched, but it's better than nothing.

The Lakers Suck

Angelenos are proud of many things: our amazing weather, our proximity to the beach, our classic architecture, our commitment to the arts, our Mexican food, ourselves, and the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team. We love the Lakers so much that we let Magic Johnson buy up half the town and begged him to keep going. The Lakers are one of the few things that can bring our sprawling, demographically divided city together.

We've been spoiled by Elgin Baylor, Jerry West, Magic, Kareem, James Worthy, Shaq, Kobe, and Pau for decades. Eleven times, Los Angeles has been able to celebrate an NBA championship (the Lakers won another five when they played in Minneapolis). Eventually, it was all going to fall apart. We just weren't expecting it to happen so soon.

The Lakers are horrendous. So far this season, the most notable thing about them has been one of their players dating Iggy Azalea. They're poised to miss the playoffs for the second year in a row. The last time the Lakers missed the playoffs two years in a row was 1974-1976. It says something that the Los Angeles Clippers, a team that has historically been miserable and just had its former owner outed as a racist (see above), is more popular than the historically significant Lakers. The Lakers may never be the rallying point for the city again, joining the Dodgers as a team that coasts on the city's goodwill while violently eating shit. Some of us have a hard time admitting this truth, but the Lakers will likely keep reminding us all of their shittiness into 2015, too.

[body_image width='1000' height='805' path='images/content-images/2014/12/09/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/09/' filename='what-we-learned-about-los-angeles-in-2014-312-body-image-1418159519.jpg' id='10220']

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Andy Dick Can Now (Allegedly) Add "Jewel Thief" to His Resume

There's a familiar local joke that for every LA resident, there's at least one Andy Dick story. Some of these stories are funny, some are utterly tragic, but all contain the magic of Dick. Andy gets in trouble with the law so much that he might as well have a wing of the County Courthouse named after him. His latest quagmire came after TMZ reported he swiped a $1,000 necklace off of a passerby on Hollywood Blvd in November. According to reports, Andy asked to see the necklace, the man agreed, and then Andy swiped it off his body.

Andy was picked up by the cops a few days later (while in possession of a single pill of unprescribed Adderall) since if someone says "Andy Dick stole my necklace," he's not terribly hard to find. The authorities declined to press charges because, according to TMZ, the amount of drugs he had was so minimal, and he even returned the stolen necklace. Better to refrain from speculating on what would happen if Andy Dick were black, and not famous. Instead, let's remember that Andy Dick is out there and he will offend again. Be ever vigilant, because Andy Dick could be anywhere—in your closet, under your bed, on your comedy podcast, or at your local dive bar. He's the One Who Knocks. He's a ghost that haunts our city. Andy Dick, you are LA.

Thumbnail photo via Flickr User Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade

Domestic violence seems to have been a trending topic all year—Christy Mack was beaten by her boyfriend, UFC fighter War Machine; Ray Rice knocked his then-fiance, now-wife unconscious in an elevator; the Senate recently convened a panel on domestic violence among pro athletes.

The general public's understanding of these tragic relationships is shaky at best, however—often, people don't understand why victims stay, or their understanding of the complex dynamics of abuse are limited to not very good Jennifer Lopez movies.

Marina Wood, the prevention coordinator at House of Ruth, a California-based nonprofit, says that there's a "cycle of violence" in extremely dysfunctional relationships. It starts with what she calls the "honeymoon period" of calm and conjugal bliss. Next is "tension building," when the abuser might get jealous or angry for any reason—reasons the victim, of course, can't predict, so he or she walks on eggshells, not knowing what will led to a sudden spike of rage. Then comes the "explosion," in which an especially frightening incident occurs. This could be overt violence, or it could involve the abuser doing a number of things to scare the victim, like threatening to kill their family (which Mack alleges that War Machine did prior to assaulting her).

Victims often stick around after the explosion because the cycle of abuse reverts back to the beginning. After an explosion, the abuser is usually apologetic, tearful, generous, loving—it's back to honeymoon mode. This behavior leaves the victim in an understandably confused state. And every time the cycle goes around, it gets worse.

"The two biggest reasons people stay are fear and love," says Wood. In some cases, a victim might stay for the honeymoon period, but as the cycle continues and worsens, their fear escalates. After a certain point, "they're not staying because of the honeymoon period, they're staying because of the explosion," she says—the victim is frightened of what their partner is capable of.

Some abusers make threats against the victim's life, or the lives of their loved ones. Some abusers threaten to attack random citizens, and sometimes they go through with as John Allen Muhammad, the " DC sniper," did. Workers at the House of Ruth have to keep in mind that only the victim knows what their abuser is capable of. Sometimes, after multiple times through the cycle, they eventually seek help—and if they call a domestic abuse shelter, it's usually at the point when their situation has progressed to a potentially lethal on.

"They come to [House of Ruth] shelter with petechia eye because they've been strangled," Wood tells me. "They come to us when they think 'I'm going to die.'"

And, counterintuitively, leaving an abusive relationship doesn't lower one's chances of being attacked by one's partner—it increases them significantly. A statistic commonly cited by anti–domestic violence organizations is that 70 percent of violence occurs when the victim is planning to leave or has left the abuser. Restraining orders and shelters don't always work either. The abuser often finds ways to harm the victim no matter the obstacles. One of Wood's clients repeatedly got fired from various jobs because her abuser, whom she had left, kept calling her employers to out her as an undocumented immigrant. The victim might be afraid of countless possibilities—their abuser knows what would hurt them, and wants to exploit that.

The emotional violence can also turn inward. A huge part of domestic abuse is that the victim blames himself or herself. Often, the abuser helps this along by convincing the victim that he or she the crazy one— you're being too sensitive, you misconstrued what I said , etc. All too often, the victim's family or friends contribute to this self-blame. They might not realize that what they're hearing about qualifies as domestic abuse. Many of Wood's clients tell her that they've told their parents what's going on, and their parents' response was, "that's normal." There might be generations of cyclical abuse behind that response.

It's hard to know how to respond to something as horrific as domestic abuse, but we can start by acknowledging that victims don't need blame or skepticism. They need a culture that empowers them to recognize the signs of domestic abuse before it's too late.

Follow Allegra Ringo on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan have a death pact. Of course they do. Of course they do. If any couple on earth have a death pact, it's Richard and Judy. There are no two people alive who are more destined to end each other. Look deep into their eyes. Know their burning desire to kill the one whom they most love.

When I think about Richard killing Judy, which is often, it makes me sad for him. Richard Madeley, running topless through dark woods with an axe. Richard Madeley, blithely stirring ricin into Judy's morning tea. Richard Madeley, roaring with bitter rage, as Judy's old lady arms stir weakly beneath a pillow.

But I can never think about Judy killing Richard. "If Judy was really ill and in logical mind," Richard told the Telegraph in May, "I wouldn't give a tuppenny fuck if there was a risk of being prosecuted. I'd do what was right for my wife." Richard Madeley shoots an arrow at a distant target. Richard Madeley walks into the night after setting fire to their Plymouth home. Richard Madeley wears Judy's still-warm skin like a suit. Richard Madeley screams "TUPPENNY FUCK" into the evening wind.

But Judy's obviously going to bottle it at the last minute, isn't she? "I've loaded the gun, Judy," Richard is saying, through the vocoder that has replaced large tracts of his throat. It's 2054 and he's on the way out. "Just fucking do it." No. So Richard Madeley's back-up death plan is, as he told the same paper, this: "For me, it would be the locked room, the bottle of whisky and the revolver. I wouldn't want to mess around."

I feel like Richard Madeley saw Vanishing Point at the same crucial moment in his early development that I did.

Let me explain. Vanishing Point, for the uninitiated, is a film about a man driving a car. It was 1971. You could make a film like that. "Man drives car around a lot for 90 minutes" was a legitimate pitch. And what's worse, it took two people to come up with it: one to pitch the story outline—"OK, so what if a man has to drive a car somewhere? For 90 minutes?" And one to write the screenplay—"EXT: We open with MAN DRIVING CAR. He looks SAD. He drives very at speed into TWO SOLID BULLDOZERS."

Yep, that's how Vanishing Point ends: A man drives around for 90 minutes, just infuriating the police, then decks it into the bulldozer-heavy roadblock they've set up. The first thing you say when our hero, Kowalski, decks it into two bulldozers in a ball of flames is: "What? Why?" And then you rewind the tape. "Why? WHAT? WHY?" Then you rewind it again. And then you're at the start, watching Vanishing Point all over again and wondering how it took two entire human beings to write such an obvious script.

And so the whole film becomes about decoding what exactly makes Kowalski want to deck his car into two bulldozers, a story told through a handful of entirely unconnected flashbacks. There's a bit where he used to be a policeman? And a bit where he used to be a NASCAR driver who crashed? And a bit where him and some hippy chick are hanging out spooning in a beach shack? It turns out the scar-digging hippy chick was Kowalski's girlfriend, and as we learn, died moments later when she goes for a post-coital surf in the sea and gets hit by a wave—which, beyond choking on a pair of flares or being fatally ignited by a lava lamp, is the most 70s death ever.

There's a school of thought among leading Vanishing Point scholars that says Kowalski isn't just avenging the death of his hippy girlfriend by slamming into two bulldozers with a hella sweet Dodge Charger, but is actually running away from the series of disappointments that mark his life as a former war veteran, a disgraced police officer and a crash-happy racing driver reduced to shuttling cars across country as a way of making ends meet. He is —in some kind of labored metaphor—driven towards death. To those people I say: You are totally overthinking Vanishing Point.

Vanishing Point is a film that has an eight-minute sequence where Kowalski talks to a rattlesnake hunter that is blatantly just there to pad the film up to the 90-minute mark. Like: When the Rattlesnake Man turns his basket of rattlesnakes upside-down onto the desert ground, the film goes slo-mo just to make it last a little longer. Vanishing Point is a film where there is so much driving that, when there isn't any driving, you instantly get bored. There are shonky police investigation scenes ("We're following him," one officer says. "With computers." Cue a long, lingering shot of a corkboard studded with LEDs), and a bit with a naked girl on a motorbike which doesn't even approach making sense.

At one point, a police chief furiously asks "What's going on out there?" and instead of someone grabbing the walkie talkie and saying, "HE KEEPS GOING AROUND CORNERS AND THAT'S A CONCEPT WE CANNOT DEAL WITH" a young officer instead sends the message, "Chief, we lost him." There is no big reveal here. There is no metaphor. The two writers (TWO) seemingly ran out of ideas somewhere around the four-minute mark, clearly after having spaffed all the good stuff on dialogue like this:

HELLA SPOOKY DUDE IN PINK SHIRT: Is something wrong?

KOWALSKI: Why, should there be?

H/S/D/i/P/S: It's just you're so silent. And moody.

K: Well maybe that's just my nature.

[BOTH MEN glare with a TOTALLY INTENSE SILENCE]

H/S/D/i/P/S: Why are you laughing?

K: I'm not laughing.

H/S/D/i/P/S: Yes you are. Way down deep inside yourself.

Like: bare, down-to-the-bones dogshit. But Vanishing Point isn't about words, or story. It's about pink sunsets. Fresh tarmac. A super cool DJ who is blind. Insanely real rock licks. A NASCAR race I don't quite see the point of. Riding up ramps made of mud. Making motorbike policemen fall off their bikes and exclaim, alternately, "Augh!" and "Dangit!" Kowalski beats a guy in an impromptu race (he does this sick move where he changes gear at the exact right time) so hard that he calls him a "bastard" before driving into a river. Are you young? Are you free? Do you have sideburns that could carpet a small bedroom? Then you are Kowalski, mate. We are all Kowalski.

I wanted to be Kowalski when I was 13, mainly for those sideburns, which I couldn't grow at the time and would struggle to even now. I have a vivid memory of watching Vanishing Point late night on ITV2 (this was pre-Arg-from-TOWIE-era ITV2—the glory days of ITV2, if you can believe it, before a man with a neck that just does not suit a bow tie but who insistently and always wears bowties laughs for half an hour at his own fart while one of his mates gets her eyebrows tattooed.) I was home alone, drinking the exactly one Irn Bru-flavoured WKD I was allowed out of the fridge when my parents weren't home, eating a pizza that was half tuna-sweetcorn and half mortadella. Think I was wearing my grey pyjama bottoms, if it helps the memory any.

Anyway, I was flicking around for something to watch after Robot Wars had ended and found Vanishing Point, and was hooked: I loved that the police never bothered to ask him why he wouldn't stop the car before embarking on a nationwide manhunt, or how easily they were confounded by Kowalski's special move of driving quickly around a corner; I loved the friendship struck up between the blind DJ and Kowalski conducted entire via ham radio; I loved the iconic Dodge Challenger car; I didn't love the Rattlesnake Man bit but let's gloss over that; and, most crucially, I loved the ending. The mad, mad, two-people-run-out-of-ideas-at-once ending.

Because what Kowalski does is go out in a blaze of glory. He realizes that he has nothing much left to live for so he decorates some bulldozers with his body parts. And I feel that if I were in a situation where I was ready to "chuck a Madeley"—like Kowalski in the entirely pointless 1997 made-for-TV remake, played by Viggo Mortenson, whose dead hippy chick girlfriend is replaced by a wife who he finds out has died in childbirth so the film actually makes sense—I'd do the same. I'd flutter off the end of a tall building. Lie in the bath with a hand grenade on my chest. Lead the police on a wild goose chase, talk to a snake man, have a deep-but-pointless conversation with a naked girl on a motorbike, take a load of speed, and then crash face, shoulder and arms first into two earth-moving vehicles.

I'd just want people to find me and go, "Damn, he really meant to do that." I would want to be Kowalski.

Follow Joel Golby on Twitter.

The deaf prostitute took my hand in hers and traced "20" on my palm with her finger. When I look back on all my nights out, it's a moment more depressing than even a wet Tuesday in Torquay, England, could muster. I'd bumped into her down on the corner in front of Havana's faded Hotel Nacional, former stomping ground of Sinatra, Hemingway, and Brando—plus, host to the infamous Mafia conference in 1946 that Coppola recreated in Godfather II. All I'd done was ask her for directions. I shook my head and tried to mime: "Sorry for wasting your time."

It wouldn't have been the first time a foreigner in Cuba was assumed to be in the market for transactional sex, and now that the USA and Cuba are friends again there'll be a whole lot more of it. Thanks to the travel ban currently in place, only around 60,000 Americans visit Cuba each year. Jay-Z and Beyonce caused a minor diplomatic incident when they went this summer, and they're the closest things America has to infallible royalty. The US figure is dwarfed by the 150,000 Brits and more than a million Canadians who are drawn there by the promise of sun, rum, and hot, steamy salsa dancing.

But when it comes to sex tourism in Cuba, the girls on the corner outside the Hotel Nacional only tell half the story. It's the young Cuban men in the salsa clubs who are getting most of the action. If you take a garishly painted vintage Chevy down the Malecón along the seafront from the Hotel Nacional, after about ten minutes you'll hit 1830, a famed outdoor salsa club which attracts scores of tourists from the UK, Canada, Italy, and Spain who are looking to, ahem, get their groove back.

It's a weird sensation to go halfway round the world to wind up seeing someone who could be your grandma grinding up against a guy who looks like he's auditioning for a part in a Step Up sequel. It's probably not just a fling, either. In Canada, where most of the country's tourists come from, the majority of applications to bring their new Cuban spouse back home with them are filed by middle-aged women.

[body_image width='950' height='591' path='images/content-images/2014/12/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/18/' filename='old-ladies-cuban-boyfriends-327-body-image-1418918663.png' id='12513']

Photo via

The phenomenon has become so widespread that, earlier this year, Canada's CBC broadcast Love Under Cuban Skies, a documentary that followed the relationships of several older women with young Cuban lovers. Paula Warren, an American in her 60s, married a 23-year-old Cuban named Andy.

"This is like the second chapter in my life," she told documentarian Wendy Champagne. "I mean, I was a professional, I worked hard... everything was all this intellectual stuff and I did that and I did it well but I'm through with that. So now it's time to go out and enjoy life. To some women they have to have a man with money. To some women they have to have a man who's educated. Whatever. To me, in my heart of hearts, it had to be a Cuban."

A Canadian Women's Studies professor named Jill Arnott summed up the appeal of the men who refer to themselves as jineteros ("jockeys" or "hustlers"). "Cuban men are notoriously charming," she says. "They're very good-looking, as a generalization, and can dance like nobody's business. They're very appealing, but they've got game. They've got game like I've never seen."

Unlike male sex tourists, women rarely just straight-out pay for sex. It's more common for holiday romances to start off with long, moonlit walks on the beach and end up with the women paying for dinners, mojitos, cigars, new clothes, household repairs, visas, flights, satellite TV subscriptions, and pretty much anything else the jineteros can't afford on their local wages, which average $20 a month.

Then comes the long-distance relationship and, often, marriage—despite a lengthy immigration process which can take up to two years. Champagne's documentary concludes with several women who fly their Cuban husbands to live with them in America or Canada. Some—but not all—of the couples end up separating shortly after the jineteros arrives safely over the border.

[body_image width='978' height='632' path='images/content-images/2014/12/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/18/' filename='old-ladies-cuban-boyfriends-327-body-image-1418920294.jpg' id='12536']

A Cuban bar. Photo via

At 1830 I get talking to Aleida, a dancer who makes the mistake of hauling me onto the dance floor and consequently has to suffer my painfully bad attempt at a salsa. A single mom whose daughter has a European father, she's well versed in the pitfalls of long-distance relationships. She points out that in a country as isolated as Cuba, where both foreign travel and internet access is severely restricted, Europeans and North Americans can be seen as rare tickets to the outside world. There's a lively contradiction between how trapped Cubans can feel on their island with the pride they have in their country. Her eyes light up when she mentions that she's met Fidel. She calls him "the most beautiful man in the world." I bet he can salsa better than I can.

So, while Obama probably wasn't imagining himself rounding up an old folks' home into Air Force One and letting them loose at the Mustang Saloon, his decision to normalize diplomatic relations with Cuba could pave the way for a lot more international relations than he bargained for. That'll make a lot of jineteros in Havana very happy. And, if your aunt takes a sudden interest in salsa lessons, you'll know why.

Follow Kevin EG Perry on Twitter.

"Bullied By a Bee" is unabashedly indie rock. And it doesn't pretend to be anything more. It'll help you remember a simpler time, when there was no Bandcamp and you had to go to a record store and wear gym sock-scented headphones if you wanted to listen to music.

This track is from the band's upcoming album, It's Always Nice To See You, set to be released on February 3rd via Topshelf Records, the Boston-based label whose roster includes Prawn and Braid.

Preorder Kind of Like Spitting's new split with Warren Franklin & the Founding Fathers at Topshelf Records.

VICE Reports travels to Mississippi, where the Klu Klux Klan is experiencing a rise in members that's fueled by a new strategy of targeting veterans just returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. In this installment, host Rocco Castoro meets the head of security for the North Mississippi White Knights and explores how the KKK's numbers are tied to world wars.

On Wednesday morning, a former Florida governor named Jeb Bush posted a holiday-themed Facebook post that, aside from reminding us of how even politicians are somebody's dad, announced he would "actively explore the possibility of runningfor President of the United States." Along with being a particularly impressive exercise in Playing It Cool — "hey girl, you want to actively explore the possibility of getting a cocktail?" — Jeb's announcement might've set off some jingle bells in your brain. That guy's last name, it sure does sound familiar.

Jeb, of course, is a Bush, son of George H.W. and brother of George W., the 41^st and 43^rd presidents of the United States. If he does decide to actively explore running for president, and then actively runs for president, Jeb would be bidding to become the 45^th president. Then we'd get another one-president break, after which the Bush family would have to trot out someone else, and, locked into this pattern, we'd repeat ourselves ad nauseam until constant email leaks destroyed the country entirely.

It's been over 20 years since H.W. was in office, but the memory of W. is still fresh in the minds of most voting-age American citizens — and there's a good chance those memories aren't all warm and fuzzy ones. W. left office in 2009 with a cellar-floor approval rating (although President Obama's isn'tmuch higher these days); and, for what they're worth, polls of presidential scholars tend to place #43 in the bottom-ten of American presidents, where he joins history-class inside-jokes like Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, James Buchanan, and Warren G. Harding.

This raises a question for Jeb: despite his high approval ratings as governor in Florida, would having W. as a brother be a major hit to his chances of becoming president? And is W. still the albatross that some Americans, particularly those on the left, are convinced he might be?

Although conservative analysts I spoke with were reluctant to discuss the relationship between 61-year-old Jeb and his 68-year-old brother George, there's a decent amount of evidence on the record to suggest that it isn't super-tight. In May, Politico's Maggie Haberman wrote that some insiders had suggested W. was "ambivalent" about Jeb running, and that the two have never been "deeply close" or "formed a reliance on each other as confidants." And in 2008, Slate editor Jacob Weisberg, author of The Bush Tragedy, painted a picture of the pair as siblingrivals, suggesting that jealousy of Jeb "was a factor in George's effort to pull his life together at age 40, when he found God and quit drinking," and that George had "torpedoed" his younger brother's presidential aspirations.

Two details from Weisberg's piece are particularly illustrative. First: "In the hotel suite in Houston where George was celebrating [his win in the 1994 race for Texas governor], his aunt, Nancy Ellis, heard him speaking to his father over the phone. 'Why do you feel bad about Jeb?' he asked his dad, according to one biography of the family. 'Why don't you feel good about me?'"

Then: "While Jeb seems resigned to abandoning politics, family friends have described his parents as devastated that the older son spiked the chances of the younger one. In December 2006, the former president gave a glimpse of this when he paid tribute to his second son at a ceremony to mark the end of Jeb's two terms as governor. Bush began to crack when talking about Jeb's 1994 defeat, and how his son didn't whine or complain about the unfair attacks on him in the election. 'The true measure of a man is ... ' Bush tried to say, now openly sobbing as Jeb approached to comfort him, ' ... is how you handle victory ... and also defeat.'"

But American memories can be both impressively long and shockingly short, and in somewhere in the middle, minds change. Among conservatives, the opinion of W. has risen steadily since he left office—a combination of reassessment, wounds healed, and personal affection for the folksy president. Plus, in the harsh light of the Obama presidency, the right has reason to look back fondly on the last time their party held the White House.

"I think George is viewed very differently now than he was in 2008, and we can thank Barack Obama for a lot of that," Florida GOP consultant Rick Wilson told me. W., he said, "is a smart guy in many ways, even if they aren't Harvard Law professor ways. He understands people, and he knew to stay out of the game last time around. But I think W. will benefit Jeb if he does choose to run."

"We haven't won the White House since 1928 without a Bush or a Nixon on the ballot," Wilson added. "That's kind of a big deal, and we're fresh out of Nixons."

Plus, in light of the fact that Democrats will almost certainly be fielding their own heir apparent in 2016—who, as Wilson says, comes from a political family Republicans view on par with the Lannisters—Jeb's own heredity seems less concerning.

Jeb has plenty of high bars to hurdle going into the primaries. Much of the party's right-wing thinks he's a centrist throwback—just look at the deluge of hits Breitbart has put out on him since Tuesday—and he hasn't run a campaign in 14 years. Even if he isn't a boon for the general voting public, W. might be the least of his problems.

Follow Kevin on Twitter

[body_image width='1200' height='867' path='images/content-images/2014/12/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/18/' filename='quebec-just-shut-the-door-on-shale-gas-development-for-now-284-body-image-1418930607.jpg' id='12587']

Wyoming landscape dotted with fracking wells and roads leading to them. Photo via Flickr user Simon Fraser University — University Communica​tions.

The oil and gas industry was dealt another blow in Quebec this week, as Quebec's environmental review board the Bureau des audiences publiques sur l'environnement (BAPE) released its assessment report on shale gas. The report points out that the social and environmental risks and costs of shale gas exploitation would outweigh its anticipated economic benefits.

"That's what we've been saying all along," Association québécoise de lutte contre la pollution atmosphérique (AQLPA) president André Bélisle told VICE. He said the report basically confirms "all recommendations and questions raised by AQLPA" about the potential risks for air, water, and soil quality of shale gas development in the densely populated areas along the St. Lawrence River.

In response to the report, Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard announced Tuesday that he did "not see the interest in developing [the shale industry]." He went on to say, "If there's no segment of the population that approves of the practice then I don't see the interest in developing it," effectively shutting the door on the shale industry in Quebec and signalling a temporary win for opponents of shale gas extraction.

However, business and industry groups—including the Quebec Oil and Gas Association (QOGA)—were quick to respond. In a joint press release several groups asked "the government keep an open door for exploitation of shale gas" and said the government should not base its decision on "a simple cost-benefit analysis by an agency whose main task is to assess environmental impacts." VICE reached out the QOGA for further comments, but our interview request was declined.

Shale gas exploration in Quebec started in 2008 under the previous Liberal government, when Quebec sold more than 600 exploration certificates to the oil and gas companies—without any public consultation or environmental assessment. At the time, AQLPA was among the first groups to sound the alarm and was already calling for a moratorium and a BAPE investigation into shale gas exploration back in 2009.

It took two more years of growing opposition, stirred up by local residents and environmental groups like AQLPA, before the Liberal government—which was openly in favour of oil and gas development in the province—agreed to a limited environmental study that did not include the relevance of shale gas exploration itself but only its sustainable implementation. The BAPE concluded that there was a lack of information and that a Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) was necessary.

While awaiting the result of the SEA launched in 2011, the PQ government—elected in 2012—passed a moratorium on shale oil development in Quebec. This decision resulted in a $250-million lawsuit against the federal government under NAFTA, in yet another demonstration of the energy industry's eagerness to use the law to protect its interests from opposition.

The SEA report was filed in February 2014, just a few weeks before the provincial election kicked the minority Parti Québécois out of office. It confirmed shale gas development would have "non-negligible" public health risks, which is a weird way to say it would be bad for the environment—mostly water contamination from the toxic chemicals used in the hydraulic fracturing process—and concluded that "any exploration or exploitation of shale gas in Quebec would raise greenhouse gas emissions."

The recently released BAPE report goes even further, calling into question the safety of hydraulic fracturing techniques and questioning the potential of shale gas development. In the press release announcing the report's publication, the commission noted that "it is not demonstrated that exploration and exploitation of shale gas in the St. Lawrence lowlands, with the hydraulic fracturing technique, would be advantageous for Quebec because of the level of costs and the potential externalities in comparison to royalties that would be perceived by Quebec. Other preoccupations remain as well, amongst others, in terms of social acceptability, legislation and with regards to knowledge acquisition, notably on water resources."

"There is proof that you can't have any control on hydraulic fracturing at the exploration stage," AQLPA president Bélisle asserted. "It's a major problem in terms of air pollution and in terms of risk for the groundwater tables."

In 2011, a Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) report had already found that 19 out of 31 exploratory shale gas wells were leaking. At this rate, the exploitation of the 8,000 to 12,000 wells planned by the industry across Quebec would leave behind a toxic legacy of leaking wells for decades.

While the risks have been clearly established, the potential economic gains are still unproven. Not long ago, the Quebec government was actively moving forward with oil and gas exploration, hoping to confirm the commercial potential of shale gas and shale oil deposits in Quebec.

However, opponents to Quebec's shale plans cast doubt on their economic viability. "If there was such an interesting potential, how can you explain that Shell, BP—the so-called majors—didn't show up?" Bélisle asked rhetorically. With oil prices plummeting, the prospect of a commercially viable development in Quebec seems more and more unlikely. And if what's happening south of the border is any indication, the shale boom might not last very long—that is, if it ever starts.

"It's dead," Bélisle said about the oil and gas industry's big plans for extraction in Quebec. "There's no infrastructure that allows this exploitation." This echoes what environmental activist Maude Prud'Homme said last week in an interview with VICE on the latest developments in one of the most advanced extraction projects in the province: "Right now, there's not one oil project that's doing well in Quebec," she said.

With the Premier apparently shutting the door on shale development for now, it remains to be seen if Quebec will join New York and in New Brunswick and propose a full ban on fracking altogether. In the meantime it looks like the 300 trillion cubic feet of gas trapped in Quebec's Utica shale formation will stay put, and potential environmental risks have, for now, been avoided.

Follow Simon on Twitter.

Dozens of cameramen, spectators and reporters crowd around a visibly annoyed, though unflinching, Al Sharpton. His entourage—about 20 people dressed in either business attire or neon green vests—tries to give him breathing room from the sea of people. "I need everyone to move back," a flustered handler yells at the mob clicking photos and live-tweeting the scene.

The thousands of people are assembled Saturday for Sharpton's Justice For All March, preparing to start their short walk from DC's Freedom Plaza to a spot near the Capitol. This is Sharpton's show. But the Reverend isn't ready for it to begin. The green vests carve out a path—"Move it back! Move it back!" Sharpton won't march until he's in position, squarely behind a massive sign emblazoned with the logo of his civil rights group, the National Action Network.

Sharpton had organized the march in response to the racial tensions that have erupted nationwide since a grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri, decided not to indict the white police officer who killed 18-year-old Michael Brown, bringing attention to other recent police shootings against unarmed black men and boys in places like Staten Island and Cleveland. But while the civil rights leader, now age 60, is still able to attract a massive throng of activists from around the country, there were indications on the ground Saturday that the "Hands Up, Don't Shoot!" movement may have moved beyond Sharpton's control.

[body_image width='900' height='616' path='images/content-images/2014/12/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/18/' filename='al-sharpton-is-struggling-to-control-the-black-lives-matter-movement-1218-body-image-1418932019.jpg' id='12588']

"This movement was started by the young people," yelled an animated Johnetta Elzie, telling the crowd of the rubber bullets she was hit with while protesting on Ferguson's streets. "I thought there was going to be actions, not a show. This is a show."

Elzie wasn't alone. About a dozen young protestors joined her as she stormed the stage and took the mic at Sharpton's march, saying that the Reverend was a distraction to their work in Ferguson. It was another sign that the massive outcry against police violence that has swept communities across the country in recent weeks has unearthed tensions among activists, with young protesters feeling disconnected from Sharpton and the old guard of civil rights leaders whom he represents.

"There [have] always been some misgivings among many African Americans about Sharpton. He is a lightning rod," said Michael Fauntroy, an associate professor of political science at Howard University in Washington, DC. He added that the unease about the Reverend has been compounded by his sudden launch into the center of mainstream politics and cable news media. "At some level, he's co-opted by the government and the administration and his position in terms of big commercial media doesn't lend itself to the kind of independence you need to lead a movement."

As demonstrations against police violence have swept the country, a younger generation of protesters has emerged that tends to be suspicious of the Establishment, whether its Establishment cops or Establishment activists. They have formed new coalitions like Tribe X and Lost Voices to demand police accountability, and adopted a protest style that is more disruptive than many older activists are comfortable with. They shout in the faces of police officers and lie down on busy DC or New York bridges. Occasionally, their demonstrations devolve into violence. And their agenda is simpler than Sharpton's, focused narrowly on the local police forces they accuse of abusing power by shooting indiscriminately.

The generational divisions have left activists largely without a defined leader or agenda, with younger protesters wary that their older counterparts are trying to copopt what they see as a grassroots movement.

"We should not forget that the demonstrations that are happening from coast to coast are largely organized by young people of color and young folks that have adopted an intersectional message of liberation of their communities from police violence," said Andy Stepanian, a progressive media strategist who volunteers with the Ferguson protest group Hands Up United.

"[It's] not necessarily some of the traditional, welfare-istic or hyperbolic approach of the national organizations that we've heard about for years," Stepanian said. "There is a changing of the guard that's happening in this country. They're doing so organically without the help of groups like the NAACP or Rainbow Push Coalition and others."

[body_image width='900' height='627' path='images/content-images/2014/12/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/18/' filename='al-sharpton-is-struggling-to-control-the-black-lives-matter-movement-1218-body-image-1418932061.jpg' id='12589']

Sharpton is aware of this tension. In his speech Saturday, he attempted to unify the disparate factions of protesters. "We don't all agree with each other. We don't all have the same tactics, but we have the same goal, and that is equal protection under the law," he told the crowd gathered near the Capitol Dome. "And that's not black against white. It's right against wrong."

A couple days after the march, Sharpton called me, after an aide informed him I was working on a piece highlighting concerns about his leadership of the police violence protests. The criticism isn't news to him, but he's also not happy about it. In a defensive, quiet tone, he informed me his critics, whether academics or young protestors with their hands up, are "simplistic."

"It's a lot of side show that really at the end of the day doesn't matter," he said dismissively. He's been hitting the pavement for months, he said, before smaller protests sprang up, and reminded me that he'd marched in New York this summer after a video surfaced of an NYPD officer killing Eric Garner in a chokehold. He was vehement that no generational discord exists among activists, arguing his organization is grooming young civil rights activists and that any disagreements with other protestors are tactical, not philosophical.

Sharpton pointed out that he'd been accompanied at Saturday's march by the families of victims, including Michael Brown's mother, Lesley McSpadden, and Sybrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon Martin. Their presence, Sharpton said, should be enough to quiet his critics. "How could the families be a distraction from their pursuit of justice?" he asked, raising his voice slightly. "It's their loved ones."

But while Sharpton may not see it, the generational divide over how to best combat police brutality was evident at his march. And other older civil rights activists seem to feel it. As the crowd slowly walked down Washington's main drag, Barbara Cole, a 77-year-old St. Louis native, told me she feels a sense of culpability as she prepares to pass the torch on to a generation struggling with the same racial tension that's been simmering in the US since she was born. "In my generation we should have corrected this and we didn't, so I'm kind of on a guilt trip."

Matt Laslo is a reporter based in Washington, D.C. Follow him on Twitter

[body_image width='620' height='349' path='images/content-images/2014/12/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/18/' filename='ottawa-police-are-no-longer-searching-for-the-hackers-who-took-down-their-website-294-body-image-1418935665.jpg' id='12594']

Screenshot of the City of Ottawa website when it was hacked earlier this month.

​Ottawa police say they're no longer devoting cybercrime resources to tracking down the hacker group known as Aerith, which has been a thorn in its side for nearly a month.

Although it remains an "open investigation," cyber crime officers are no longer tracing the source of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that forced the Ottawa Police Service (OPS) website offline ​for more than a week. The hackers also claimed responsibility for crashing the Toronto Police Service, Canadian Parliament, and Supreme Court for shorter periods.

In various online posts the hackers known as Aerith mock police for their inability to unmask their real identities. Aerith has bragged that it launched attacks on places as wide ranging as Brazil, Germany, and Russia, though those are unproven. Ottawa police received the brunt of the attacks actually attributed to Aerith.

When asked why OPS would pull back its technology experts from the case—a police source said the force had better things to focus on.

"There are more important crimes to solve," said the source. "Child pornographers, murders, people abusing kids—than to devote resources to this attention seeker."

Aerith first appeared on the Ottawa police's radar on November 21, the day the hacker group defaced the City of Ottawa website with a dancing banana and a threatening message directed at a local detective. The following day, Aerith upped the ante, launching a barrage of DDoS attacks on the Ottawa police website, flooding its servers with so much data it forced the site to display an error message for e​ight days while technicians worked on a solution.

The group's aim was to get more than 60 charges dropped against a 16-year-old boy from a suburb of Ottawa. That suspect w​as accused of using his computer for "swatting"—essentially making prank 911 calls throughout Canada and the United States, resulting in heavily armed SWAT officers being sent out to schools and homes to stop non-existent active shooters and bomb threats.

The hacker group insists the Ottawa teen has been set up by an individual he upset online while playing Minecraft or Call of Duty. Although police cannot trace the IP address to a definitive location, three officers VICE spoke to believe Aerith is from Ottawa.

In early October, one month before the hackers burst onto the scene, this reporter received an anonymous email from a person who called himself "Reaper." He claimed to have gone to school with the Barrhaven teen and witnessed the arrest. The email described a white van, full of tactical officers in body armour, wearing masks and carrying assault rifles.

Reaper described how the youth was on an afternoon walk with his parents and the family dog when two plainclothes police officers, one with a gun in hand, jumped out of an unmarked vehicle and pushed the teen to the ground, handcuffing him.

Over the course of eight hours, Reaper said he watched as a dozen officers searched his friend's home, carrying out thousands of dollars of computer equipment and transmitters, and several long guns.This account is similar to what other neighbours told VICE about the arrest. Police have said they seized several firearms and ammunition from the home as a "precaution."

In that first email, Reaper also mentions evidence police arrested the wrong person, and that his friend was being set up by someone using the now-suspended Twitter hand​le @CherrytheGod.

Reaper said he was making plans to go public with all the evidence and Cherry would have "hell to pay." A day after the arrest of the 16-year-old, I engaged in a Twitter direct message exchange with @CherryTheGod. He bragged to me that he helped Canadian authorities take down the swatter.

Cherry said that he "doxxed" or culled from the internet reams of personal information about the Barrhaven teen including more than a dozen online pseudonyms he allegedly used to harass people on social media and gaming sites. Cherry claimed that he forwarded that information to both the FBI and the RCMP.

This bizarre and tangled case has triggered two parallel investigations by the Ottawa police. The first involves the alleged teen swatter, and the second is focused on uncloaking Aerith. Although police have so far been unable to catch the hacker, OPS has managed to get its website back up. It is also paying a cybersecurity firm to divert the DDoS attacks.

The cybersecurity firm is taking all the packets of data Aerith is launching at OPS and moving it to another network line hosted by the security firm. This solution costs in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, but it has effectively stripped the hacker group of what appears to be its one and only weapon.

Aerith has recently resorted to trolling investigators on Twitter and sending police email attempts to "negotiate." Aerith sent an email last Friday riddled with grammatical errors. A copy of it was blind copied to VICE.

It opens with the line: "I understand it feel's [sic] like catering to terrorists, however I would like to present you with an offer."

The "offer" Aerith gave to police is information on the real swatter, who supposedly framed the 16-year-old Ottawa boy. Aerith brags in the email they can provide investigators with photos and transcripts of internet chats implicating an alleged teenager living in New Jersey who uses the Twitter account @CherrytheGod.

But even as Aerith extends an offer of "help" consisting of what they think is all the necessary evidence to arrest the alleged American teen, in the very next breath the hackers make a threat to the police.

"We have power over you...I'll give you 4 hours to respond before something bad happens..maybe a dancing Ottawa Police Banana?"

But four hours came and went, and nothing happened to the OPS website.

VICE asked police if they would even look at the information Aerith is presenting. Staff Sgt. Rick Baldwin-Ooms—whose unit arrested and laid charges against the Ottawa teen—says he won't comment on a case before the courts.

"We always consider viable evidence," said Baldwin-Ooms. 

That's the caveat, though—investigators don't trust Aerith. They say the chats can be faked.

On Monday, investigators sent an email to Aerith urging them to show investigators the convoluted chat logs and make a statement in person. Aerith scoffed at the request, once again changing tactics—this time taking to Twitter to inform police they were ​ready to confess.

Yesterday, the group posted a house address for officers to visit in Laval, Quebec—one of the cities allegedly swatted by the 16-year-old. In a follow-up email to VICE, Reaper explained it was the home of a witness, a high school student who allegedly also provided false information part of the case against the Ottawa teen in regards to a swatting incident in Laval.

Despite Aerith's attempts to exonerate the 16-year-old youth, police say they're not dropping the charges. A 10-day trial has been set for next June. The youth's lawyer, Joshua Clarke, has disclosure from police of electronic evidence pointing to his client. To defend against the accusations, Reaper said he sent the same information to the defence posted by Aerith.

But in the end, he said, they said between cops and an alleged hacking collective won't decide the innocence or guilt of the alleged swatter—that'll be up to the courts to decide.

Follow Judy on ​Twitter.

[body_image width='635' height='474' path='images/content-images/2014/12/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/18/' filename='meet-the-dentist-who-will-fix-your-mouth-after-meth-ruins-it-429-body-image-1418933848.jpg' id='12593']

Photo via Flickr user Bill Walsh

I remember the first time I saw a "meth mouth" billboard on the highway. I was in the backseat of a car driving up into the North Carolina mountains. The landscape was blurring by outside my window in a static mix of rock, snow, and sky. Then, as the car went around a bend in the road, a terrifying face broke through the monotonous scenery, looming down at me like a miserable giant. The words at the bottom of the billboard read: "Need Help?" followed by a phone number.

Usually, these kinds of billboards employ a "before and after" format. On the left side we have a pretty woman, and on the right we have the haggard zombie that meth has turned her into. The juxtaposition of these images is powerful, a warning that if you even think about touching meth, you too could suddenly have a body littered with sores, wrinkles lining your face like a topographic map, and teeth that look as if you've tried to chew on a stick of dynamite.

Despite these kinds of graphic warnings, meth continues to be a growing concern in North Carolina. According to a 2013 report by the NC Department of Justice, the number of meth labs shut down by authorities had increased from 460 in the previous year to 561. These production sites were located predominantly in the eastern and western parts of the state, and 81% of these labs were designated as "shake and bake" operations, small-scale productions that require little more than a few key ingredients, temporary seclusion, and an empty soda bottle in which to produce the meth. While local authorities are busy trying to stop the production of homegrown meth, dental professionals are equally as busy trying to clean up the wreckage that meth leaves behind in the mouths of its users.

A few months ago, East Carolina University's School of Dental Medicine hosted an academic presentation entitled "Meth Mouth: An Interdisciplinary Team-Based Approach," that brought dental and healthcare professionals together to discuss "meth mouth" and meth addiction. I spoke with Dr. Robert Carter, the director of the General Practice Residency Program at ECU and one of the conference's presenters, about his own experiences working with these kinds of patients, and the new developments his program is undertaking in order to change the way "meth mouth" treatment is approached.

[body_image width='1020' height='683' path='images/content-images/2014/12/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/18/' filename='meet-the-dentist-who-will-fix-your-mouth-after-meth-ruins-it-429-body-image-1418933645.jpg' id='12592']

Meth mouth photo via Flickr user D.C.Atty

VICE: Can you describe the first time you saw a case of meth mouth in person?
Dr. Carter: The first time I remember seeing someone with Meth Mouth was at one of these Missions of Mercy clinics in Dare County, Kill Devil Hills. My first patient was someone who admitted to me that he was a meth abuser and said, "my teeth are all messed up." And they were! They were all broke down and carious. I basically had to take out all of his teeth. He was a young guy, in his 20s.I think it was a good 25... 26 teeth I took out of him.

From there I assume you have to start wearing dentures, but how do addicts and recovering addicts pay for that?
That's a big issue. Dental costs range... Let me give you some rough estimates, since everyone is different. The first level of care is you take out all their teeth and give them dentures. Dentures cost anywhere from $1,000 to $1,500, and the extraction cost can be anywhere from $100 to $200 a tooth. So if you're taking out 20 teeth and getting new dentures... You're looking at spending about $5,000 dollars for the most basic level of care.

There are other levels, though, where you take out only the really bad teeth, and then you try to fix the other ones with root canals and fillings. Then you give them partial dentures to replace the ones they've lost. That can range from $6,000 to $12,000.

But if you're talking about completely rehabilitating the mouth where you go ahead and fix everything—you change the "bite" on the patients so their teeth aren't closing down so much, you do implants where they're needed to be done—you could come out at around $50,000 to repair the ravages of meth mouth.

If you're going to get that much work done, you've already beaten the addiction, right?
Let's face it, if someone is abusing drugs they really need to be led by the hand from one place to another to get the help they need. It's treating the abuse that's the key. Usually the folks who are able to quit using meth have already been in the system and know what they need to do to get themselves back to normal in terms of "dental."

At what point do you remember the issue of meth mouth becoming part of the conversation within dental schools?
It's been something in the works for a while. In the old days a patient would come in with this kind of rapid decay and you would turn them over to social services or try to get them to some place that could help them. Now, we kind of have a new method where you have social workers, nurses, physicians, allied health personnel such as counselors and nurse practitioners, physicians' assistants, all working together to help identify meth abusers and get them the help they need.

Do you think the way ECU's School of Dentistry has been focusing on meth mouth education stems from North Carolina having its own unique issues with the disease?
Well, yes. Especially in this part of North Carolina [Eastern North Carolina], it's a big issue. I think thatNorth Carolina has one of the highest concentrations of meth labs in the United States. Hang on...

[Dr. Carter pulls out some statistic sheets]

OK. These are numbers from the calendar year 2012. There's a total of 11,210 meth labs. North Carolina had 457. That's probably the highest on the East Coast. Twenty-five percent of meth labs are located in homes with children. It's not confined to young, single people. There are families that make this stuff. Financially it's very rewarding for some of these folks. They just go down to the lab and say, "I have to go to the lab, Johnny." It's pretty pervasive. It becomes the new normal.

Why do you think meth has such a hold on the eastern part of North Carolina?
The I-95 corridor. You have transportation up and down the east coast, and also North Carolina, even though it's a pretty populous state, is still pretty rural, so these labs can hide out in the rural areas and there's less likelihood of detection. You can go back and forth. It's easier to move chemicals. Meth labs involve a lot of hardware, so they need that infrastructure to get these things built. I understand that there's a new brand of Mexican meth that's making inroads into the area now.

When you're looking into someone's mouth, what's the first sign that let's you know your patient is a meth abuser.
It all relates to one thing: dry mouth. What happens is meth dries your mouth out, and without the saliva to cleanse your teeth, the bacteria collects on your teeth and goes crazy. It causes massive decay.

So it's a misconception that meth mouth is simply caused by smoking meth?
Meth just causes the "dry mouth," and the dry mouth causes the problem. The way meth users try to take care of that is they'll drink a lot of sugary drinks and eat sweet things because sweets cause salivation. But it doesn't make that much saliva, just a little bit. It gives them the sensation. Of course, that feeds the bacteria on their teeth and it eats them away. Another aspect of meth is it causes you to have high anxiety, and one symptom of high anxiety is tooth grinding. So you can imagine your teeth are already weakened by the acidic bacteria, and then you're grinding on them. It's a very nasty result.

Does dealing with patients like this take a personal toll on you?
What helps me and some of our residents get through it is that we realize these patients have a problem, and part of that attitude is the problem. It's a disease. They're not bad people. They just happened to make some bad decisions that resulted in this terrible situation they're in. So you're treating the whole person, not just the mouth. You're dealing with their terrible social situation and the medical situation. You have to look at the whole being. So when you're looking at it from that standpoint, you don't take their outbursts or lack of cooperation so personally. If you don't do that, it can take its toll. You can let the patient start making you feel guilty and responsible for their problems.

It can be very exhausting to work on a patient with meth abuse, but when they turn around and improve, it's worth it.

So there's a psychological aspect to having your teeth fixed?
Absolutely. That's an outward sign of them fixing themselves. When you take out the bad teeth and put in the dentures they can smile again and chew again and they look good and people start responding to them positively because they're looking better. It gives them more confidence to keep on going to the next steps to break the addiction. Dentistry is a big part of the rehabilitation of a meth abuser.

New York skateboarding legend Ian Reid is responsible for the two rawest, most gritty skate videos of all time: Ian Reid's Video, and Sex, Hood, Skate. The antics of Jackass, CKY, and early Baker videos combined can't come close to the unflinching, bro-cam hood footage of beat downs, threesomes, shootings, drugs, hip-hop and, of course, the skateboarding that Reid captured.

At the time of Ian Reid's Video release in 2005, Ian was an amateur skater for Aesthetics Skateboards and best friends with Brian Wenning, who became a household name after his 2003 DC Shoes video part was released. Ian and Brian were both well-known figures on the East Coast skate scene at the time, and they skated and partied with every big name that passed through New York in the early aughts. As a result, Reid's videos are a who's who of skate legends like Jason Dill, Chima Ferguson, Josh Kalis, Stevie Williams, and on and on—with footage ranging from proper to shaky to poached to filmed off someone's laptop.

I was certain that Ian, like Bam before him, was destined for mega-stardom, more for his antics and hijinx than his skateboarding. But after dropping his second video, Sex, Hood, Skate, he disappeared. Some people assumed that Ian was taken down in Wenning's cataclysmic career demise, while others thought he might have "got caught up in some hood shit." Truth be told, somewhere around 2008 Ian "gave up the dream of skateboarding and realized photography was a better medium." And he's been photographing everything from skating, to Syrian refugees, to BDSM in abandoned mental asylums ever since with the same primal eye that he used for his videos.

[body_image width='1000' height='750' path='images/content-images/2014/12/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/18/' filename='ian-reed-streets-is-talking-body-image-1418930220.jpg' id='12586']

VICE: Ian, tell people your story and where you're from.
Ian Reid: I'm from Fort Greene, New York. Not what it is now—I am from what Fort Greene was. I grew up wanting to write graffiti with all the older kids in my neighborhood and the only way to do that was by riding a skateboard with them and joining their skate crew, Twisted Skates. I got a skateboard and started writing graffiti in 1988. That was the introduction to everything.

You've created some of the rawest skate videos in history. How would you describe them to someone who has never seen them, and how'd you get into filming?
It was because the kids in my hood weren't getting out of the hood. Because I was skateboarding, I was traveling a lot and wanted to show them things outside of our area. So I started filming stuff to show them when I got back from my travels. The two videos I put out were just real life. It's what was going on for me at that time. But it was also a time before the internet. You couldn't just type in "crazy shit" and see crazy shit back then.

I think some of your crazy shit holds the test of time. Wasn't there a shooting in the last one?
Yeah, that was on my block. Code of the streets. Some dude got caught slipping. But the VHS version, which is the original version, that's the real crazy one. There's actual sex—there are a few random threesomes with me and this chick. There's Brain Wenning losing his virginity in the basement of Josh Kalis's house in Philly. I filmed the whole thing from start to finish. It was such an experience. That moment in a person's life, having it on video because it randomly happened and wasn't a planned activity, is pretty wild.

Celebrity sex tapes are fetching quite a bit of money. How much do you think a Brain Wenning losing his virginity tape would be worth?
Back in that day it might have fetched me a pretty penny, but things have changed these days so I can't really speculate that.

I'll give you $20.
OK, I'll take it. What's funny about you saying that is that in the sequel I made in 2007, there is more Brain Wenning sex in the video. When you see it you're definitely going to smile and clap your hands.

Brian is godfather to one of your kids. How's he doing these days? What's the update?
He's good. He's skateboarding. He's got a job doing some construction work to get that extra money up. Skateboarding is still what he loves to do but we don't get to see him too much anymore.

How about you? You skating much these days?
Yeah, yeah. I still skate all the time. You have to. It's what allowed me to do everything I'm doing. You can't really step away from the essence of everything, which for me is skateboarding. It keeps me young.

Let's talk about your shift from filming and skateboarding to your new career in photography. You're from Fort Greene, why not be just another street photographer?
Ha! I don't really even know what street photography is. I take photos in the street all the time of my girls, so I guess I'm a street photographer. I think that's a different genre where you walk around the streets and take photos of strangers. It's kind of creepy, but I do a lot of creepy shit too so I cant judge.

[body_image width='1000' height='667' path='images/content-images/2014/12/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/18/' filename='ian-reed-streets-is-talking-body-image-1418936331.jpg' id='12597']

You shoot a lot of BDSM stuff. How did you get into that scene?
One of my neighbors was heavy into it. I took a photo of my neighbor and she posted it on some website and a lot of people liked it. After that people started to want me to take their photos. They basically inducted me into the New York tribe of BDSM people. The induction was interesting. They invited me to this dude's house and all the girls were on their knees as servants. Basically I had sex with this dude's wife and this other dude's girlfriend and then they said, "You're an honorary member." I didn't really know what I was an honorary member of but I was a member of something. It was definitely a weird experience; it was like going to a skate spot and jumping out the van and having to perform.

Was that type of fetish something you were into previously, or was that all new to you?
I was always into women, but the way that it occurs in that scene is totally different. I was very naïve and didn't understand it. It was very eye-opening to learn the power of words and how they can take sex to a whole other level. In that scene you can make anyone do anything with the correct words. And they don't have to be harsh or cruel or mean words; it could be very nice, kind, and polite words. It's been wild. There have been some aspects of it that "normal people" couldn't understand. I used to have a house slave. He would come clean my house in women's underwear. It was fine to me, I didn't give a fuck. I'd be sitting around editing photos while dude was cleaning my house and he would do an immaculate job! One day one of my neighbors came over and saw what was happening and they were tripped out, like "What the hell is going on here? This is crazy!" And the slave doesn't say a word. He's not allowed to talk, so he just kept cleaning. That was about seven years ago, after I gave up the dream of skateboarding and realized photography was a better medium.

Your Tumblr has a bunch of photos from Eastern Europe. What were you working on over there?
I spent a good amount of time in the Ukraine trying to find girls to shoot, but it didn't happen. As any person who has been to Eastern Europe knows, being black over there is not the best thing. I got called a nigger a lot, and not in the Justin Bieber way of saying nigga, more like the KKK nigger. It was wild. But it wasn't threatening. After the third day I got a little tipsy and I was coming home and this dude was like, "Ah, you fucking nigger." And I was like, "Yo, what's up, man? You want to fight?" He didn't want to fight and we actually started talking and he said he'd never even seen a black person. He explained he grew up that way, that his culture didn't have black people around and that was just a word they used. He said, basically, "I don't know any better."

[body_image width='1000' height='667' path='images/content-images/2014/12/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/18/' filename='ian-reed-streets-is-talking-body-image-1418936300.jpg' id='12596']

Do cops ever give you shit about the topless photos?
I shoot one of my favorite girls out in New York City who loves being topless. In New York it's legal to be topless, so I'll have someone parade her around on a little leash and lead her through the city. Every once in while a cop will show up and be like, "Yo, man! This ain't cool. You got to cover up." And I'm like, "Nah, bro. She don't got to cover up. It's legal. If you want to try and exert some power and say we're being indecent in public or causing a disturbance then you better call your C.O. first and tell him what you're going to do and I'll call my lawyer and have him sue the city for harassment and false arrest." Then they realize they can't do shit and I carry on. I always try to snap a photo of the girl with the cop when I can.

You like to shoot in abandoned asylums and hospitals. Ever encounter any sketchy situations?
Not really. Once I had a girl tied to a chair in a room and we heard this group of people come in. Turns out it was just some kids, but she was trembling because she was already nervous. Then there was one day in this asylum where we got chased by the homeless guy who lived there. We just ran because we figured if you're living in an abandoned asylum then you must be pretty crazy. We didn't really want to take any chances.

I wrote a porno called Pussy on Rotisserie. So I gotta ask, what's with the guy getting barbequed?
That photo was shot on the 4th of July. Me and my friends wanted to have a barbeque and we did. We barbequed a human. When I got the call about it I was like, "Hell yeah, I want to barbeque someone." Black people love barbeque and hot sauce and bbq sauce! I got to the house and they had the spit all ready. The guy, Jim, gets off the plane from Texas in a white denim mini skirt and he's all excited. The girls wash him down, shave all the hair off his body and strap him down to the spit and the barbequing begins. The basting took 40 minutes, then they lit the coals and he roasted on the spit for about three and half hours and got pretty cooked. When it was time to take him off he was yelling that he didn't want to get off. He wanted to stay on there until his skin was legitimately burned. That definitely goes down as one of the wildest things I have photographed.

[The below video is NSFW. Only watch if you want to see a naked old man get barbequed.]

If that wasn't the craziest thing you've photographed, what was?
I photographed this guy in Syria who killed a lot of people. His wife made me lunch and I ate with him. He had defected from the regime, and at the time I was shooting refugees in this camp in Northern Syria and he told me his story. It's a different type of gnarly than a guy getting roasted, because this guy killed people. It was insane, but at the same time he was very normal. He said he was in the army and his job was to follow the orders of his commander. He said they would raid villages and they'd line up all the men and they would shoot them dead.

Man, you have taken quite a different path from making hood skate videos in Brooklyn.
Yeah, it's surreal in the sense that I did it. Anyone can do it. I never went to any kind of photography school or anything and I was able to do it. Sometimes I do bug out, like, "Damn, I've literally been around the world a few times and seen a lot of crazy shit," and to think where I came from in Fort Greene to what I do now.

Do you share the BDSM stories and photos with your family?
Ha! Yeah, man. They're not into it at all. I shot a whole church series of things happening on a cross. We crucified this girl and my mom was not thrilled. She's definitely religious and I got asked to leave. She was like, "Ian, I think you should go. I really think you should go home."

Follow Ian on Twitter and Tumblr

More stupid can be found on Chris's website and Twitter