[body_image width='1200' height='604' path='images/content-images/2015/01/21/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/21/' filename='i-took-the-internet-addiction-quiz-and-i-won-371-body-image-1421884358.jpg' id='20097']Illustrations by Joel Benjamin

Internet addiction is not an official condition yet recognized in the DSM-V. But a recent search for "internet addiction help" revealed various rehab centers for internet addiction, therapists who specialize in the condition, as well as Internet & Tech Addiction Anonymous.

I've been clean and sober from drugs and alcohol for a long time and know a fair amount about addiction, which is why I'm able to recognize exactly what's going on with me and the internet: I am trying to patch a hole inside me that cannot be patched by anything external. The internet gives me dopamine, attention, amplification, connection, and escape. It also distracts, disappoints, and paralyzes me, as well as catalyzes my false sense of self. I am cobbling together the dregs of what I can still use to get high into a shitty dopamine party.

Also, I don't know what I'm doing. Lately I feel like the internet is cobbling me together. I feel like there is no longer any barrier where I end and the internet begins. I'm kind of scared.

But is my obsession with the internet actually an addiction? I've decided to answer that question by taking a quiz from Psych Central called Are You Addicted to the Internet? While the quiz is multiple choice, my relationship with the internet is complex, and so I have chosen to write my responses in essay form. I've also decided to take this quiz publicly—not so much as to be held accountable, but because what better place to confront one's internet demons than on the internet with all of you addicts (especially you dicks in the comments section).

OK. Here we go.

1. How often do you find that you stay online longer than you intended?

I like to use my iPhone in bathrooms. I've spent hours on the toilet not peeing. Sometimes it's my own toilet. Sometimes I'm out in the world and I excuse myself to use the bathroom. I always tell myself five minutes. It's never five minutes. I fall down a hole and the vanishing feels good. People think I'm dead. I like it.

I try to set rules around my internet usage. The act of rule-setting means that I am probably an internet addict. Like, people who aren't addicts don't need to set rules about things. They just do them.

Some of my rules include: Ten minutes of meditation before turning on phone or computer in the morning, no social media before noon, only 120 minutes on social media websites per day, only two tweets per day and only after 7 PM, internet detox for 24 hours on weekend. I break them all daily.

2. Do you prefer the excitement of the internet to intimacy with your partner?

Yes. Of course. Unless the partner is a virtual stranger upon whom I have projected a fantasy narrative and we are making out for the first time in a hotel room.

When something real has to be done, like making the bed or paying a bill, I feel like it is going to kill me.

3. Do you neglect household chores to spend more time online?

When something real has to be done, like making the bed or paying a bill, I feel like it is going to kill me. Like, I feel that a cruel and oppressive mother is coming for me and the world is comprised of nothing but Sisyphean tasks, wherein you infinitely push a boulder up a hill and are infinitely crushed. One time I was handwashing underwear in the sink and then I got on Twitter and the sink overflowed and the neighbor downstairs, who just had a baby, sent the building manager up and the building manager busted in and I thought he was a serial killer. So, yes.

4. Does your work (or school work) suffer because of the amount of time you spend online?

My work is online.

5. Do you form new relationships with others online?

I would rather be on the internet engaging with half-imaginary people in a fake way than in real life engaging with real people in a real way. Not that everything on the internet is fake. I have forged some deep connections with people I've never met (or maybe I was connecting with myself—my own desire for who I wanted them to be) via the internet. Sometimes I compare the IRL people in my life with the internet people in my life and I always feel like, why can't the IRL people be more like the internet people? This is maybe because real people aren't pixelated. Their mistakes and annoyingness can't be repurposed into a fantasy. I actually have to see the real people and be seen by them. If people never become real, it's harder for them to disappoint you. That's why the internet is good for sad people. You can be with people without having to be with people.

6. Do others in your life complain to you about the amount of time you spend online?

The person with whom I am in a primary relationship calls my phone my "boyfriend." He becomes elated when the battery dies. One time he threatened to throw it out the window. He is way more concerned with the way I use the internet to shut him out than anything I could do sexually with another person. I tell him that I am not shutting him out. I am shutting out reality. Unfortunately for him, he is real.

7. Do you become defensive or secretive when anyone asks you what you do online?

It's more about the act of being online, itself, than what I am doing there. Everyone knows what I am doing there. I'm tweeting. It's more about the bathroom thing. I will say to the person with whom I have a relationship "I have to poop." And then I'm gone for the rest of the night.

Actually, one thing I am ashamed of is that I like "female friendly" porn. Like, I wish that I didn't like "female friendly" porn. I wish that when I watched Xander Corvus eat "babysitter" Melanie Rios's pussy, I wasn't like Omg he is so in love with her. Like, he has def been in love with her the whole time she has been his babysitter and he has dreamt of this moment and now it is here and he will def want to be with her forever. I wish I wasn't like that.

8. Have you ever noticed that your job performance or productivity suffers because of the time spent online?

Obvi.

9. Do you check your email before something else that you need to do?

I can't even get involved in email anymore, because it usually requires more than 140 characters. If I do send an email, I use Siri to do it and dictate the thing. So, the internet has destroyed my attention span to the extent that I can no longer email. The internet has gotten me off of email. The iPhone has gotten me off the laptop. If the laptop is cocaine, the iPhone is crack. And I take these hits of crack before, during, and after everything.

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10. Do you snap, yell, or act annoyed if someone bothers you while you are online?

I'm usually in a comatose state and not aware of the world around me. When I'm down the rabbit hole, I don't see you.

11. Do you find yourself anxiously anticipating when you will go online again?

I've had the shakes.

12. Do you block out disturbing thoughts about your life with soothing thoughts of the internet?

My biggest fear is dying. Death is fine, but dying itself—the inability to breathe, the final panic attack—is really scary. I'm also scared of life itself, since dying is implicit in life. Sometimes life seems hyperreal. Like, I look at people and they look like robots or like they are made of rubber and I think I am witnessing the lifting of a matrix, but it's probably just anxiety. In those moments I am like damn, no one knows what's really going on here. My therapist doesn't help. She can't explain what's going on here any better than anyone else. She can't stop me from dying. The internet can't either, but it's a good place to tether that adrenaline. It's easier than rubber people.

Another thing I am afraid of is rejection. If anyone is going to reject me, I'd rather it be me. When a real human being rejects my IRL self, or I perceive a rejection of my IRL self, I need confirmation that I am worthy of being on the planet. The way that I achieve this confirmation is to garner fake love from strangers via an avatar that resembles me.

These attempts at reparation of my core self, or lack of core self, always result in a cascade of binge tweeting. I immediately follow the binge by deleting all or most of the tweets and then follow the mass deletion with a shame spiral.

13. Do you fear that life without the internet would be boring, empty, or joyless?

No, I think it would be beautiful. I imagine myself on a rocky beach, clutching something green. It's probably seaweed, but maybe it's moss. I drink a lot of chamomile tea. I "show up" for myself. Yeah, it would be empty.

14. Do you find yourself saying "just a few more minutes" when online?

If there is anything I don't like, it's linear time. The internet makes me feel like I can bend time. I can't bend time, so I just say "five more minutes" and then fall into a vortex. I go into blackouts.

15. Do you feel preoccupied with the internet when offline, or fantasize about being online?

Obvi.

I think the internet replicates the sun.

16. Do you lose sleep due to being online late at night?

This morning I woke up at 3 AM and went online. It's now 6:30 in the morning. I've done that every night this week, except for Monday, when I didn't go to sleep at all. I think the internet replicates the sun. Maybe goth/emo/highly sensitive people shouldn't be on the internet. We are bound to wither.

17. Do you try to hide how long you've been online?

When I was still drinking, I used to show up at bars, already drunk, and quickly order a drink. I'd pretend that first drink at the bar had gotten me drunk. I keep my So Sad Today Twitter account anonymous, because I am embarrassed by how much I tweet. I feel like there is a connection here.

18. Do you choose to spend more time online over going out with others?

The internet means I get to be with people without leaving the house. Also, I can be anybody I want to be. Like, I can be a fucking wizard on the internet while, in reality, I am here eating Weight Watchers lasagna and wearing a pair of boxer shorts with trumpets on them.

19. Have you tried to cut down the amount of time you spend online and failed?

Every day.

20. Do you feel depressed, moody, or nervous when you are offline, which goes away once you are back online?

Actually, a lot of times I go on the internet and it's the internet that makes me depressed, moody, and nervous. Like, I go on there and two seconds later I'm like fuck everything. But IRL is somehow still worse.

There is something about the internet that, even when it sucks, holds infinite potential at all times. I may know a site is going to suck, because it just sucked a second ago, but I keep hitting refresh. Eventually it changes. But life isn't like that. When I keep hitting refresh on the same thing in life I keep getting the same thing. Making the same mistakes + expecting different results = fuck.

Actually, maybe that's not entirely true. There's a spirituality in repetitive things: malas, mantras, rosaries, Hail Marys, or as Prince said, joy in repetition. The problem with addiction is that the joy in repetition eventually gives way to a combination of both joy and problems. Then it gives way to just problems.

I think that the internet's grasp on me has something to do with its light and blankness. The light and blankness are sexy and they make me feel like anything is possible. I am sure that life holds the same infinite potential that the internet holds. But unfortunately, I'm forced to be a grown-up in life. On the internet I'm still 16.

Also, I've done well at the internet. If Twitter is a video game, I've beaten it. I haven't always done well at life. I haven't beaten the fact that I am going to die one day. The cheat code for dying is what?

I just don't see myself ever walking a middle path with the internet. It's probably going to have to be all or nothing. Harm reduction never worked for me. Once a cucumber turns into a pickle, you can't turn it back into a cucumber. And I've been pickled by the internet for a long time.

So Sad Today is a never-ending existential crisis played out in 140 characters or less. Its anonymous author has struggled with consciousness since long before the creation of the Twitter feed in 2012, and has finally decided the time has come to project her anxieties on a larger screen, in the form of a biweekly column on this website. Read the first installment here.

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Jaime Castano, former real-estate broker. Photo via Facebook

Back in August, a 19-year-old student fell asleep in classmate Jaime Castano's dorm room, and she didn't wake up when he sang to her—or even when he lit the mattress on fire.

Only after the teenager discovered burn marks on her torso and Snapchat documentation the next day did she realize exactly what had happened.

The craziest part? Castano was expelled from New York University in September, but school officials didn't tell the cops about the fire incident until late October, apparently because the victim was skittish about coming forward.

Castano's Facebook page shows that the 20-year-old, who is from Miami, started working as a real estate broker for Citi Habitats soon after his expulsion. He's also a member of the Facebook group NYU Snaps, which asks members: "Did you spot someone dozing off in class and feel the need to embarrass that person?"

According to the the Real Deal, an archived broker profile suggests Castano showed apartments in Chelsea and Greenwich Village. "I offer clients an unparalleled work ethic, and experience in assisting with the long process of finding the right space and closing a transaction," he wrote on his page. "Everyone deserves that kind of commitment."

Bizarrely, even after the university's months-long delay, police took even longer to get on the case. Castano was just arraigned this Tuesday for first-degree assault and reckless endangerment, and has reportedly admitted he started the fire. He is no longer an employee at Citi Habitats.

On Friday, Castano will finally learn if he's been indicted.

The administrators of the NYU Snaps group did not return immediate requests for comment about whether Castano's horrifying video was distributed through their community. Right around the time of the incident this summer, VICE reported about how teens were lighting each other on fire for a moment in the social media spotlight.

So far, it remains unclear whether Castano's primary motive was getting in on the latest bizarre teen trend. Even if it was, what's most troubling here is that NYU didn't involve the police sooner.

"In retrospect, when the facts became clear, this case should have been reported to the police, notwithstanding the reluctance of the victim," NYU spokesman John Beckman said in a statement Wednesday. "We are conducting a full investigation as to how a different decision was made in this case and clarifying our decision-making process so that cases like this are reported to the police immediately in the future."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

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Photo of Tokyo businessmen not having sex via WikiCommons

According to a recent report by the Japan Family Planning Association, shockingly few people in the Land of the Rising Sun are doin' it. The new data, which contributes to the controversial narrative of an increasingly asexual Japan, may be cause for worry for the nation's bureaucrats, who have spent much of the past few years trying to find the right incentives to get more of their countrymen pregnant to reverse the nation's declining population.

Of the survey's respondents, 49 percent said they had not had sex in the past month, up 5 five percent over numbers from 2013. Most blamed fatigue, a loss of spark, or the sense that sex was just too much of a hassle. But 18 percent of men (20 percent among those aged 25 to 29) just said they have no interest in or actively dislike trips to pound town, suggesting a deeper social change beyond a collective dry spell.

These numbers come amidst ongoing concerns about Japan's declining fertility and its potential economic impacts. With the world's highest life expectancy (80 for men, 87 for women, and 83 on average) and one of its 20 lowest birth rates (1.4 children per woman, below replacement levels), many fear that by 2020 old-age incontinence underpants will outsell diapers, by 2040 over-80s will outnumber under-15s, and by 2060 the nation's population will shrink from its current 128 million to 87 million with up to 40 percent over 65 years old. Given the nation's resistance to bringing in migrant labor, this could tank Japan's viable workforce and relegate the nation to what increasingly seems like an inevitable spiral into economic decline—not to mention leave many elderly abandoned, save for (in the best case scenario) the care of robot companions.

While low sexual activity is far from the sole or even the most significant factor fueling the nation's low fertility—sex doesn't always result in babies and babies aren't always the result of a couple's sex—any trend that might lead to fewer pregnancies piques national and global attention in such a baby-hungry country.

Yet some reject the narrative that Japan is developing a unique and widespread "celibacy syndrome," arguing that although a fair number of citizens have no interest in sex, their ranks are not truly jaw-dropping. Those numbers, argue people who believe in a sexed up Japan, have been blown out of proportion by the spurious use of statistics on dating, marriage, and childbirth to prop up the notion of endemic abstinence.

Many took special issue with a 2013 Guardian article, anchored around the notion that Japanese youths have stopped having sex. The piece makes its argument based upon a litany of statistics on the nation's singles scene and quotes women bemoaning the gender norms a wife is pressured to conform to and the difficulties of maintaining a career while raising a child. As critics have pointed out, a lack of marriage, relationships, or sexual experience does not equate to a lack of sexual desire across the board or sexual activity for those experienced but unattached.

Some critics of the celibacy narrative argue that eye-popping numbers about those without sexual desire mask the reality of an increasingly horny nation. Since 1990, they point out, the number of unmarried individuals going without sex has dropped from 65 to 50 percent of women and from 45 to 40 percent of men. (The studies are mum on how decreasing marriage rates affect these stats.) A 2013 sexual activity study by Japan's Sagami Gomu, a condom company, also shows that 59 percent of men and 75 percent of women in their 20s had had sex, while 83 percent of men and 57 percent of women who had not had sex expressed their interest in trying intercourse.

Yet these statistics cannot fully dispel numbers like those coming out of the latest Japan Family Planning Association Survey. Much as being single doesn't necessarily mean one isn't having sex, people who have had sex in the past aren't necessarily having sex today. Even ongoing sexual activity doesn't indicate sexual interest in some cases. So really the only way to get an accurate gauge on whether or not people in Japan want to mash meats anymore is to ask them directly about their sexual interest, separate from their relationship or virginity statuses.

When you do that, the numbers seem to show a steady decline in sex drive over time. As of 2012, 36 percent of teenage men and 59 percent of teenage women (a supposedly universally hormone addled population) expressed no interest or were actively turned off by sex—a 19 and 12 percent increase over 2008 numbers, respectively. (A later 2013 survey appears to show lower levels of sexual disinterest, but the numbers examine a different age bracket and therefore aren't really comparable, especially since part of the celibacy narrative is that it's more marked in the younger generations.) The same year, another survey by the Japanese Association for Sex Education found that sexual activity in university girls had gone down to 47 percent, a 60 percent drop since 2005. One statistician has created a series of graphs, looking for the origins of this trend, which show just how much lower the nation's collective sex drive is than other nations'.

Cultural commentators attempt to blame this downward sexual trend either on Japan's "grass-eating men," or "herbivores," a supposedly large demographic of sexually timid and sensitive males. But those who study this subculture (which seems to be a rejection of standard Japanese masculinity) find no real evidence of sexual disinterest—some are even seen as quite suave.

Others blame shut-ins, unemployed and socially awkward young men living with little social contact. But they number less than a million—far too few to explain these numbers.

Singling out these groups as the main cause of Japan's sexual disengagement also feels a bit trivializing-to-demeaning, insomuch as it asks us to believe that bashfulness in men can explain the self-reported lack of sexual interest in young women across the nation.

The most convincing explanation for the trend offered thus far may be one of widespread cultural pressures and changing life desires amongst Japan's youth. Commentators make the point that still-extant social norms about modesty and purity make it difficult to navigate flings or casual sex, leading some to see it as a fraught hassle. The Guardian article quotes a local sex and relationship counselor, Ai Aoyama, talking about how many young people do not want to get involved in traditional relationship structures or the charged experience of sex.

"They're coming to me because they think that, by wanting something different, there's something wrong with them," Aoyama told the Guardian. "Both men and women say to me they don't see the point of love. They don't believe it can lead anywhere. Relationships have become too hard."

The Japanese government, in its attempts to reinvigorate the nation's fertility rates, has focused broadly on programs to incentivize having children, rather than focusing in on sex. For years, they've hosted speed-dating sessions and singles mixers and poured millionsinto tax breaks and cash payments for new parents and policies, like extended daycare coverage, to make it easier for women to work while being mothers. The most sexual venture they've undertaken is trying to get businesses to shoo their employees out of the office by 6 PM in the hope that they'll knock boots and pop a few more babies into future census numbers.

Given that a lack of sexual interest is a deep, personal, and apparently growing issue in Japan that isn't likely to be solved by any of the above measures, it remains unclear what the government should do to help heat up the nation.

There are a few examples of programs in other nations aimed at fostering a sexual spark—from Singapore's 2012 "National Night" advertising sex as patriotism to Russia's 2007 Day of Contraception giving prizes to those who give birth on a certain day—the effectiveness of these projects remains questionable at best and are not necessarily models should or would want to follow.

But much as the best way to get a grasp on the trend of sexual disengagement was to ask people year-after-year whether they were interested in hiding the salami, perhaps the best way for the government to find solutions would be to ask those respondents why they feel the way they do. If the participants say it's the result of societal pressures, maybe Prime Minister Shinzo Abe can do something about that. If they say it's just who they are and how they feel, maybe the Japanese government should consider nutting up and working on its migrant labor policies to save its workforce and its nation rather than fixating on isolationism and its people's libidos.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

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Dir: Kevin Moore
Rating: 9
EvilAngel.com

My buddy Eddie Peralta is a tattoo artist in New Jersey. I've been trying to persuade him to publish a book of all the shitty tattoo requests he's had to accommodate over the years, but he refuses. I'm not sure if he feels bad for the people who have to walk around with these awful works of "art" or if he's embarrassed that his name would be attached to them. Whatever his reasoning, he is doing a major disservice to the world by not sharing the photos of his earlier work, from when he was making his bones on the cutty side of Elizabeth, New Jersey, permanently ruining people's skin. For the record, Eddie is a fantastic artist, but during those early years of tattooing his talents were certainly wasted on unbelievably bad tattoos. And I'm not talking ironic hipster tattoos of bacon or Rambo; I'm talking praying hands pressed together holding a machete or an Uzi in preparation for a holy war. He's shown me so many epic photos that it's hard to remember my favorite. It might be the huge kanji symbol for strength with the word strength written in 244-point type below it in parentheses, just as it appeared on the flashcard. Eddie tried to dissuade the customer from getting the English translation below the symbol and said, "Hey, man. That's going to be redundant." The customer's English wasn't much better than his Japanese. He turned to his friends and said, "See! He said my shit is gonna be redundant, son!"

I'm pretty sure most of his photos were taken in the mid 90s, because I distinctly remember one depicting a sexy BBW with enormous, luscious breasts. She paid Ed to cover her left tit with a portrait of Tupac and her right tit with a portrait of Biggie Smalls. At her request, he drew a massive sacred heart on the chest plate between them, with the words forever in my heart running underneath.

Do you remember the video for Snoop Dogg's 1993 debut single, "Who Am I?" It's the one in which Snoop and his buddies transform into a pack of dogs (which I can only assume was inspired by the classic C. M. Coolidge paintings of dogs playing poker). The track was one of the few West Coast hits that was a huge success with the East Coast's often anti-G-funk-rap audience. I guess the song really struck a chord with a man in Elizabeth. He came into Ed's shop wanting to get his three sons tattooed on his shoulder. He brought in the clearest photo he had of the three young men and asked Ed to start sketching out a portrait. Before Ed's pencil could hit the paper, the loving father started asking Ed to freehand-improvise "just one more thing." First, he wanted all three boys to be wearing hats. Because the boys always wore hats, he said. The youngest one wore a baseball hat, always backward. The oldest son wore a Kangol, never straight. The middle son didn't have a hat preference, so the dad said Ed was free to draw whatever hat he liked, although the dad preferred it to be a fedora. Ed obliged and got to work. "Oh," the dad said. "Do you think you could draw them a bit younger? Not babies, but younger." Ed smiled, nodded, and went back to drawing. "And one more thing," the dad said. "Can you draw them as pit bulls?" Ed turned to the man, held up the photo, and asked, "Why did you bring me this picture?" "As a reference," the dad said, matter-of-factly. With that, Ed began sketching out the most magnificent portrait I'd ever seen of three pit bulls in hats. The only way he could've done better is if they'd been playing poker or rolling dice.

More stupid can be found at Chrisnieratko.com or @Nieratko on Twitter.

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Photo of Elizabeth Warren via Flickr user Edward Kimmel

Last week Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren asserted for the umpteenth time that she will not be running for president. The revelation came in the form of a very straightforward answer ("No") to a very straightforward question ("So are you going to run for president?"). But contemporary political journalism encourages unremitting, aimless speculation about prospective presidential campaigns, so "no" is inevitably construed as "maybe! wink wink."

As the dream candidate of many progressives, Warren's every utterance is dissected with Talmudic intensity; her speeches and statements are routinely subjected to several layers of meta-analysis totally removed from anything she's actually done or said. This latest declaration has proven to be of particular interest given the apparent shift in verb tense. Warren's previous repeated, categorical denials— such as last month's "I am not running for president"—convinced scores of analysts that she was deliberately referring only to the present. She's not running now, but she could be—or will—be running later!

Warren gets this odd amount of attention because pundits and activists have exalted her to the status of Hillary Clinton's only viable challenger, imbuing her with the savior-like ability to single-handedly initiate a "conversation" about how the Democratic Party must reinvent itself in the post-Obama era. But there's one pesky problem that these observers seems to gloss over: Warren might not be all that great of a candidate.

Firstly, Warren seems largely disinterested in foreign policy. Her main area of expertise is financial industry regulation, for which she has been fiery and knowledgeable advocate. But if the legions of fans spearheading the "Ready for Warren" movement expect her to mount a vigorous campaign for commander-in-chief, she would presumably have to develop some thoughts on how to manage the most powerful military force in the world. If she became president, after all, Congress could prevent her from implementing measures like the "21st Century Glass-Steagall Act," but she'd have near-unilateral control over whether to invade countries or overthrow unfriendly regimes.

What little Warren has said on foreign policy amounts to pro-interventionist boilerplate—a trait conspicuously ignored by elements of her progressive fan base—leaving anti-war Democrats little reason to rally behind Warren. And if Warren's hypothetical campaign got as far as a televised debate, the notoriously hawkish Hillary would likely have the advantage on the subject.

Secondly, she could arguably do more good for her cause by staying in the Senate. It comes down to what the Ready for Warren crowd is interested in accomplishing: Do they want to shift how the Democratic Party crafts economic policy? If so, Warren already commands an unusual degree of influence in that arena, as evidenced by the withdrawal last week of a Treasury Department candidate she sought to undermine. Minority Leader Harry Reid created an entirely new leadership position for her out of thin air without even consulting the rest of the Democratic caucus, suggesting that her leverage in the party may well be unrivaled.

If she ran for president, Warren would have to forego legislating in favor of touring the country giving stump speeches and debasing herself at fundraising events; she'd have to be schooled in the intricacies of issues (like foreign policy) she doesn't have to deal with as a Senator; and the next time she wanted to castigate some weaselly Treasury nominee for being too close to Wall Street, the frenetic presidential campaign "narrative" would obscure whatever substantive point she is trying to make.

Then there's the strangely overlooked question of whether Warren has the personal ambition to run. She's 65—only two years younger than the aged Hillary—and currently finds herself comfortably ensconced within the Democratic Party establishment. Maybe it's just not her disposition to take on the Clinton machine.

Unfortunately for the legions of operatives and journalists hyping the "Warren takes on Hillary" storyline, the fervor today over Warren looks like sort of a melodramatic prelude to her inevitable endorsement of Hillary. She may never have had sufficient popular support to actually win, and her endless denials of interest might not have required all that tortured psuedo-analysis. But hey, who the heck knows? I can't read her mind any more than any other political watcher can, and Warren could always end up disavowing all her past statements and mount a surprise campaign. It would certainly provide a jolt to listless pundits waiting desperately for something to squawk about. But it probably wouldn't do much beyond that.

Follow Michael Tracey on Twitter.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

We play video games for many reasons. For some, it's about learning and mastering a game's systems, and the feeling of empowerment and accomplishment that comes with it. For others, it's about being whisked away to another world and escaping the grey routine of everyday life. And then there are the simulator fans. These guys don't want to fly starships, run criminal empires, or pretend they're windswept warriors from the Wilderness of Death: they want to empty garbage cans, fertilize crops, and put tarmac on roads.

Niche simulators are quietly successful on PC, and there's an astonishing variety of them. There's OMSI, which sees you driving a bus around the streets of 1980s Berlin. Or how about Garbage Truck Simulator, which asks the question: Do you have what it takes to be a trash tycoon? And if you've ever wondered why train conductors earn $75,000 a year, try playing London Underground Simulator. It took me almost an hour, with a manual, just to start the engine. Then I overshot Edgware Road by about half a mile.

Simulators, and the people who play them, are easy targets for piss-taking. They're the contemporary equivalent of the stereotypical train-spotting, Thermos-clutching anorak of modern English folklore. But thanks to YouTube, that's slowly changing. Suddenly these games are being exposed to audiences of millions, and normal people are starting to play them and realize that, hey, some of them are actually pretty good.

I don't play many sims, but I was intrigued by Euro Truck Simulator 2. Not because I had some burning desire to drive heavy goods vehicles around Germany, but because I heard from a few people that, honestly, seriously, it's really good. So I had a go, as a joke, and ended up playing it for over 30 hours. That's an entire day and some change I've spent driving along imaginary highways, obeying the speed limit, delivering wood shavings to Stuttgart and hauling powdered milk to Aberdeen. Time I could have spent hunting space pirates in Elite, battling demons in Dark Souls, or just going outside.

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Euro Truck Simulator 2 gameplay

The game recreates a huge chunk of Britain and continental Europe. It's not to scale, because that would be insane, but it still takes ages to drive across it. If you've taken a job to deliver something from, say, London to Warsaw, it's going to take you over an hour to get there—and that's not counting traffic, service stops, or any accidents you might have along the way. You have to get there as quickly and smoothly as possible, and will be punished for being late, dinging up your truck, or breaking traffic laws. If this all sounds deathly boring, that's because it is. Playing this game is probably an idiotic way to spend the only life you'll ever have, but at the same time there's something strangely compelling about it.

Most of your time is spent on long highways. Here, your only interaction is keeping your wheels straight, managing your speed, and occasionally changing lanes. Like driving on an actual highways, then. But it's here that the game is at its most hypnotic. The muffled rumble of the tarmac under your wheels, the swish of the wipers, raindrops tapping at the windows. It's bizarrely soothing, like a screensaver for your brain. You can listen to live radio from whichever country you're in, and I have fond memories of screaming down a rain-soaked autobahn listening to Fleetwood Mac on a German classic rock station.

It's so relaxing, in fact, that it's become an unexpected form of meditation for me. If I'm stressed out or feeling overworked I'll go and drive down the freeway for half an hour in a big fucking truck. It clears my mind, and eventually the only thing I'm worried about is where the next service station is, because I'm low on gas, or if I'm going to get these bags of sand to Rotterdam in time. Don't bother paying a guy in flip-flops $75 a session for transcendental meditation lessons: Install Euro Truck Simulator 2 instead.

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But then it catches you off guard. Your GPS sends you down some narrow, twisting country road in the middle of nowhere. It's the dead of night and you've got 20 tons of explosives resting precariously on your trailer. Then your headlights blink off because you battered into wall earlier and damaged your engine. Now you have to guide your lump of a truck down this nightmare backroad with instinct alone. But then, mercifully, the lights flicker back to life. Between all the lengthy, uneventful drives down bleak highways, there are these rare, but unforgettable, little moments of heart-in-mouth excitement.

It helps, of course, that it's a solid, well-designed game. The driving model is weighty and satisfying, and the simulation elements—traffic, weather, physics, sound effects—are all detailed and realistic. A lot of sims are a bit creaky and low-rent, but this boasts proper production values and surprisingly beautiful visuals. Well, as beautiful as a stretch of concrete and asphalt can be. The rain in particular looks amazing, with droplets that streak across the window as you speed up. If authentic drizzle is your thing, this is the game for you. It nicely captures the feel of each of its featured countries, although there's some weirdness, like incongruous sunflower fields lining Glaswegian roads.

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If this wasn't thrilling enough, the game also has support for the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. So, naturally, I had to give it a go. Combined with a steering wheel and pedals, it was remarkably convincing. I could look around the cabin by moving my head, and even lean out of the side window to look back at my trailer. After about 20 minutes I'd genuinely tricked my brain into thinking it was a physical space, and at one point I was so confused I tried to lean my arm on the non-existent window to my left. Using a pioneering VR headset to drive slowly down a street in a truck might sound like a gross misuse of the technology, but it's impressive as hell.

Above all, Euro Truck Simulator 2 (and the entire simulation genre) is just another form of escapism—as much as any fantasy RPG or fetishistic military FPS. It just happens to be an escape into a world not many people want to escape into. Still, I'm glad it exists, because it's a testament to how broad and varied a medium gaming has become. There really is a game for everyone, whether you want to be a survivor in a post-apocalyptic wasteland or a forklift driver. I never wanted to be a trucker, but Euro Truck Simulator 2 has given me a newfound appreciation for this curious subculture of very odd games.

Follow Andy on Twitter.

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Look at Alex Schubert's Instagram and blog, and buy his books.

As licensed commercial pot production takes off in Washington State, prices are collapsing.

This was predictable. After all, the idea that a legal product was going to continue to sell at black-market rates never made a whole lot of sense. One grower recently told the Associated Press that what sold for about $21 a gram last year will bring in only four bucks this year. I'm hearing some stores in Spokane now offer bud for $12 per gram retail, which isn't very different from street prices. Washington prices are likely to go even lower over time, and there's no reason to think that Colorado—or Oregon, for that matter—will be any different.

As commercial prices fall, the black market will be squeezed out. Legislation in Washington State is poised to fold the medical market into the commercial one, speeding up the process. At that point—and not before—we can start to ask serious questions about the impact of legalizing cannabis; everything up to now has been mere prologue.

More than anything else, we have to figure out exactly what bottom-of-the-barrel pot prices mean for people—especially teenagers and 20-somethings—who like to get high all the time, to the point where it starts to interfere with the rest of their lives.

The problems caused by too little pot have quickly given way to the difficulties caused by excess. If some growers go broke, that's an issue for them, but not for the public. But if retail prices keep dropping, we can expect to see surging rates of heavy use, especially among young people. If they were to get as low as three or four bucks a gram—which won't be out of reach in a couple of years—Washington retail would be competitive with California's illicit wholesale market, and Washington could develop an "export" market supplying dealers elsewhere. (By the same token, Washington has to worry about competition from Oregon.)

The current tax systems in Washington and Colorado are both price-based (or ad valorem) taxes. That just means that taxes fall along with prices. But if the goal is to squeeze out the black market while minimizing the increase in substance use disorder—defined as continued use of the drug in the face of negative consequences—you really want taxation based on quantity rather than price, or "specific excise" taxes.

Oregon's legalization law has an excise tax, but it's fixed at $35 per ounce, or about $1.25 a gram. That's not going to be enough to keep retail prices there from falling dramatically. And because every ounce is taxed the same, regardless of how potent the bud is, the Oregon law encourages producers to make the strongest product possible. (Imagine if whiskey and beer were taxed at the same rate.) There's reason to worry that very potent cannabis—as measured by the content of THC—creates higher risks of adverse reactions such as panic attacks and patterns of problem use.

Of course, many Americans believe marijuana use rarely becomes problematic, and continued, overblown warnings of pot-induced Armageddon from conservative blowhards make it tempting to think the drug is harmless. But that's simply not supported by the facts. According to calculations done (for a not-yet-published paper) by Professor Jonathan Caulkins of Carnegie Mellon University, based on the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, about 40 percent of those who consume pot at all in the course of a month report using on 25 or more days during that month. About half of those daily or near-daily users—according to their own answers to survey questions—show signs of substance use disorder. That means they use the drug more often than they want to, or they can't stop using, and that it's causing conflicts with other people and making it harder for them to go to school, hold down a job, or deal with other responsibilities. With the number of heavy daily cannabis users up seven-fold over the past 20 years (according to Caulkins), the spread of cannabis overconsumption isn't something that we can safely ignore, and falling prices are likely to make the problem worse.

So how do we find the sweet spot in marijuana pricing? The ideal taxation system would levy a tax per milligram of THC, rather than per ounce of plant material. That tax ought to rise as the market price falls, in order to keep what the consumer pays more or less constant around the current black-market price of $10 or so per gram of roughly 10 percent–THC cannabis. Since producing weed legally is extremely cheap, that tax would eventually settle down at between five and ten cents per milligram of THC. And since ten to 20 milligrams of THC is enough to get a casual user stoned (depending in part on how the stuff is consumed), that hardly seems like an excessive price.

In the end, I still think we're likely to arrive at a legal system that, on balance, outperforms the drug war disaster that was the status quo a few years ago. But there's no guarantee, and a lot of fine-tuning needed to get from here to there.

Mark Kleiman is Professor of Public Policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. Through BOTEC Analysis Corporation, he provided advice to the Washington State Liquor Control Board on the implementation of Washington's legal cannabis market. Follow him on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE Australia.

A 2013 study found that 7 percent of Australians aged 14 years and older reported using crystal meth (a.k.a. "ice") at some point in their lives. Numbers aren't available for 2014 yet, but we're told they're rising. So who's smoking this stuff? It's not only for the downtrodden and tooth-deprived anymore.

People with good jobs on ice aren't hard to find. Take Alex (whose name has been changed). He works in the central office of a non-disclosed national bank as a lender. Until last year he was using the drug regularly at work. Here's how he did it.

Banking is a stressful environment. People who say banking isn't stressful are just insane. They hire people who are book-smart but not that socially switched on. So they're like empty vessels, without personality. You're working with four or five of them, and they're just talking about their cat and you're thinking that you'd smoke or drink anything to get away from them.

I never liked ice when I was younger. I was all about the pills. In the 2000s the quality of the pills was fantastic, but then they went to shit all of a sudden and everyone moved to shard. So ice became a weekend thing. We'd smoke on the weekend and spend the week coming down.

Productivity was just through the roof, which is why management didn't care.

So I'd be in this routine—we used to call it manic Mondays, terrible Tuesdays, Westgate Wednesdays... Thursdays were actually all right because you were coming back to Friday again. I was working for the weekend, when I could go to my friend's house and smoke up again. We used to call it the never-ending story.

Doing it at work, that was kind of taboo. So I said I'd just smoke it once but on the first hit I got that peak. It was like phwooaaa, I'm rocking. I was talking to people and typing at a million miles an hour. I could answer like 5,000 phone calls and just keep going. Productivity was through the roof, which is why management didn't care. I'd be like, I'm absolutely smashing this out, I've done all my work, I've done everything! Then a pattern formed and it became Monday, then Wednesday, and then it came to a point where the days didn't matter anymore.

The come-down is really rough. You need Xanax. I don't know how people do it without Xanax. It's the no-sleeping thing that kills you, the sleep deprivation. But Xanax changed the game. If you have a Xanax just by itself you've got 20 minutes before you're out. And if you have a puff by itself you're just fucking off your face. But together, they balance themselves out. We called Xanax the get-out-of-jail-free card.

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Christmas cubicles. Illustrations via Michael Hili

I didn't think anyone else did it. The bank is very straight-edge, but ice was all over the place at Christmas parties. You'd go to the Christmas party and know who the tweakers were because they are were beaming. They'd invite you to the toilet, and then you'd be like, Oh my God, that guy is in that department and that guy works in accounts. Christmas parties are where you pick it. So yeah, the last four Christmas parties people were smoking in the toilet.

I never cared about work, but I still felt ashamed most of the time. It was like you were only doing it for the excitement. I wanted to be better; I wanted to progress. I wanted to feel better and have more money and do nice things and be with nice people. I hadn't been clean in a long time because a younger me was always on gear. It's alcohol, man—once you've drunk, it's a gateway drug to everything else.

Anxiety and panic attacks were common. They happened in meetings, and you'd just be holding on because you were coming down. I used to take a lot of time off work if I was high or coming down, and I'd feel bad because I wasn't actually sick. I'd just take enough time to fix myself, but it takes weeks to do it properly. And my general mood was just shit.

Finally, I saw that meme saying It's 2014 and I'm still a piece of shit and thought, I am. I just wasn't doing anything positive, so I stopped. I don't like to do things in halves. I just stopped taking it one day, and I was a mess. I couldn't even go to Safeway and get a sandwich. Every part of my body was telling me to run away. But I think that was the adverse effects of Xanax and not the ice. I've done a complete 180 now. I didn't even drink last weekend.

It wasn't detrimental to my career, but it wasn't a progression thing either. It was just such a focal point that I didn't bother progressing with anything else. No one on ice has ever said to me, Hey, I got a new job, man or I got a new girlfriend. None of that happened to me either. I just lost years, really. I didn't go out for dinner for like two years. It took me four months solid to get off of it. And you know what? I just heard that I got a new job. Just then. I wouldn't have got it if I were still using.

Illustrations by Michael Hili

As told to Charlie Braithwaite. Follow him on Twitter.

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This is a collection of new photos by Maya Fuhr. She's ventured from her colourful signature 35mm to medium format film shot with the big gun—a Hasselblad. She says there's something incredibly satisfying about the clearer, square of photograph and that it's nice to separate herself from her subject—looking down into the camera as opposed to directly at them. All in all, she's found a fresh way to pleasure herself by consciously spying and lurking on the things she loves—just done with a bigger device (wink wink).

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Semi trucks roared past the two of us as we biked up the hill. Route 1 out of Philadelphia barely has a shoulder, so we hugged the embankment, trying to avoid traffic. We pedaled so close to the edge of the road bushes nipped at our legs as the July sun bore down on us.

The artist Emile Klein and I were on our way to Baltimore, where in two days Klein would begin painting his next subjects. "A psychedelic therapist and a hypnotist who're married," was how Klein described them. But first we had to bike there. For Klein, this would not be a problem. He bikes everywhere and has for years. He rode before me wearing shorts, his bare calf muscles bulging like knots on tree trunks.

Meanwhile, the sweat dribbled down my forehead and into my eyes. Trying to sop my face dry with my shirt, I lost balance and my bike wobbled, twisting my front wheel toward the road and into traffic. I righted myself, and the coming car missed me by a couple feet. This happened repeatedly. It was 94 degrees, humid, and we'd been biking all morning.

Klein never swerved nor showed any indication that the heat or the long trip was causing him pain. His only challenge was to ride slowly enough for me to keep pace. Eventually, he shrugged off that encumbrance, and sped up until he was out of sight.

I met Klein at the arts high school we both attended a decade ago in San Francisco. But I hadn't seen much of him since he started the You're US project in 2011. The trip to Baltimore was an opportunity to witness firsthand the monastic life he'd built for himself riding on America's highways and sleeping on its couches.

The goal of You're US is for Klein to paint portraits of three people from every state. So far, he's painted 40 Americans from ten different states. In exchange for his Renaissance-style portraits, Klein's subjects give him room, board, and the opportunity to record stories from their lives. The resulting audio has been featured on NPR's Snap Judgment and played alongside video of his paintings at UnionDocs, a nonprofit center for documentary art in Brooklyn.

As an added difficulty, Klein travels from subject to subject by bike. He's traveled 14,000 miles in the past three years—almost all of those miles in the summer heat with 80 pounds of art and life supplies in saddlebags hanging off his wheels. Sometimes he rides a hundred miles in a day.

But the first day of our trip from Philly to Baltimore was only 40 miles. Klein was going easy on me.

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At the end of the day, we pulled into Juniper Hill Farms outside of Landenberg, a town on the Pennsylvania-Maryland border. The front door of a farmhouse opened and out came Lindsey Flexner and Odin, a burly old hippie and his slobbery mastiff.

"How you doing, Otie?" Klein said in a baby-voice, squatting to pet the dog. Flexner hugged Klein like an old friend; his wife, Dianne Belnavis, had been one of Klein's subjects a while back. Since then, Belnavis and Flexner had grown close to the artist and let him use their home as a way station on his travels through the mid-Atlantic.

"Dianne ain't around this week," Flexner said. "You seen the Guys yet?" We hadn't. "The Guys" are the residents of Juniper Hill Farm, a group of young men with autism who pay rent and tend livestock and a garden. Belnavis founded Juniper Hill to offer the autistic dignified housing. Rather than being warehoused in some grim facility, residents enjoy an edenic life funded by their disability checks and menial jobs Belnavis helps them acquire.

Flexner told us he was up until 2:30 AM the night before playing music. "You can sleep in," Klein said. "I'll feed the animals in the morning."

"Are you sure?" Flexner asked. "Don't forget anything with the rabbits, 'cause if anything happens, I get blamed."

"Listen," Klein responded. "It's the chard plus the—" Flexner cut him off laughing, nodding his head. Klein knew the drill.

Klein's subjects open their lives to him because of moments like these. As Klein would later tell me, "I'm a ninja about small ways of helping out: Taking out their trash when they're not there and putting a new bag in. Not eating too much of their food but complimenting it, unless there's someone who likes you to eat a lot of their food. And then eating a lot of their food."

Klein even withholds his bodily functions to save his hosts from odor. "I just did a portrait recently where the guy's bedroom was next to his bathroom and it was very close quarters," he told me. Klein didn't poop in the house for a week. "I felt bloated the whole time."

Bloating isn't the only risk Klein faces when he inserts himself into his subjects' lives. During one stay at Juniper Hill, Robin, one of the autistic residents, wouldn't stop saying "nigger." Klein lost his temper and demanded that Robin stop. In response, Robin punched him in the mouth, busting his lip.

After eating dinner in the farmhouse inhabited by the Guys, Klein took me to Belnavis's unoccupied bedroom in the center of the house. The portrait he'd painted of Belnavis sat hidden in an alcove. Cosmetic mirrors and brushes surrounded the unframed painting as it leaned against a wall. Like all of Klein's work, the painting is beautiful. In it, Belnavis glows against a shimmering blue background, like an angel in a T-shirt.

When I asked Klein about it later, he didn't seem to care that the painting of Belnavis was stuffed in the messy back corner of a bedroom. "I know some of my subjects value them more than others. I mean, one lady stored hers in her oven." Klein laughed. "I was like 'OK, it's yours to do what you want with, but the oven?'"

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This attitude reflects Klein's disdain for the exclusivity of classical portraiture. Klein intensely dislikes the aristocratic aura associated with his style of art. He's especially offended by artists who profit by painting and photographing the poor, then selling their work to wealthy private collectors or esteemed galleries.

"There are a lot of projects that document people who can't afford to be documented," Klein later told me. "Like going into a favela and taking pictures and putting it in an exhibition. Or writing a song like Sufjan Stevens about an 'other.'"

You're US is intended as "reparations for a longstanding offense" of the wealthy and well-connected profiting from depicting the type of poor and working class people Klein often paints. To subvert this tradition, Klein gives complete ownership of the finished works to the subjects themselves, only requiring them to occasionally loan the paintings to Klein for You're US exhibitions.

"The system is set up for artists to go and document somebody and then reap the rewards of documenting someone else's life," Klein told me. You're US "is confronting that. By saying, 'You own this now. You can burn it, scratch it up, throw it away. The responsibility for this part of American history is yours, not a museum's.'"

That night I slept in a trailer while Klein crashed in the house with the Guys. To Klein, such accommodations amount to luxury. On the road traveling from subject to subject, he sleeps on benches, behind dumpsters, amid trees and bushes. He has a tent, but often Klein lies in the open air on his jacket.

Klein had a gun pulled on him after spending the night in his tent behind a church in North Carolina. He's broken into an abandoned motel to spend the night. And he once snuck into an empty church to sleep on a soft pew.

Klein is as much a strange drifter as he is a classically trained artist. Not that his current lifestyle affords him much of a choice. He makes less than $10,000 a year. Klein's paintings could sell for $4,000 on the open market, a low estimate in comparison to his contemporaries. By trading them in exchange for a week's worth of room and board, he essentially gives them away. This may be another reason Klein's subjects adore him.

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Klein was trained as a portraiture artist at Angel Art Academy in Florence, where he became the school's janitor to get unfettered access to its studios. He'd spend 18 hours a day at the academy, drawing, painting, mopping, and sweeping. But by Klein's fifth and final year of study, he had grown disillusioned with the rigidity of classical portraiture. The life of a classical portraiture artist loomed heavily before Klein—though the occupation pays well, affording its practitioners entrance to the parlors and drawing rooms of the wealthy, Klein was repulsed by the looming specter of a career spent painting rich Europeans and their cats.

Fortuitously, at the end of his time in Florence, Klein's godfather emailed him a story in the New Yorker that would change his life. Written by Julian Barnes, "The Limner" is a short piece of historical fiction about limners, itinerant American portraiture artists from the Revolutionary era who traveled New England by horseback and painted commoners for a pittance. While limners lacked formal art training and had formerly been house or sign painters, the paintings they left behind offer a rare glance into the lives of the lower classes of the 18th century.

"The typical American could not afford the work of the European trained artist, nor would they want such work," Stacy Hollander, a senior curator at the American Folk Art Museum in New York, told me. "They had just had a revolution against England, so they were rejecting the values of Britain and the art that went along with it."

Klein was fascinated by how the limners democratized what had formerly been an art form exclusively for the wealthy. He wondered, after his long absence from the US, if he could replicate the limner lifestyle in contemporary America, painting poor and working-class people for practically nothing, riding on a bike instead of a horse.

"I kind of didn't know America anymore," Klein told me. "I wanted to do a project that showed all kinds of Americans who aren't normally represented in this kind of portraiture."

Following a light breakfast, Klein watered and fed Juniper Hill's animals. He fended off a sheep with a stick to keep it from eating the goats' food. Afterward, he fiddled with the back tire of his bike, which suffered from holes and had gone flat the day before.

After we said our goodbyes, we mounted our bikes. It was 10:30 AM and the humidity weighed us down like a thick blanket. The road from Landenberg into Maryland rolled with hills steeper and more plentiful than we'd encountered the day before. An hour and a half into riding and my back already hurt. Another 50 miles lay before us.

Meanwhile, Klein seemed to ride faster, even with the added weight of art supplies and an easel he'd picked up at Juniper Hill. Eventually he quit stopping to let me catch up and I lost him. I didn't see him again for over an hour. By the time I got to Perryville, my legs were dead and the heat was in the mid 90s. The sun was everywhere. I'd been biking as hard as I could, trying to catch up, but I couldn't keep going. I pulled over to a strip mall and there was Klein, leaning in the shade against the wall of a supermarket, finishing his lunch.

As we rested, the clouds rolled in dark and heavy. Klein's iPhone predicted a storm. "Normally, I'd just ride through it," Klein told me. "It's dangerous, but it can be fun. But since you're here..." In his eyes I saw the memory of my swerves into traffic the day before.

We rode to Perryville's train station and locked up our bikes. Klein had to be in Baltimore that evening, so we'd have to go by train. Klein wasn't happy. He told me, "I'm justifying this to myself because we're going to have to come back to Perryville in a couple days to get our bikes. Then we'll have to ride into Baltimore. No cheating." He wanted to make sure I got the whole experience, backache and all.

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Sadie Brannon holding her portrait from the 'You're US' series

The storm slammed against the train's windows as we rode the MARC toward Baltimore. "I don't understand why anyone says 'yes' to me," Klein said. "Why would anyone say, 'Sure, come along while I mourn at my mother's grave'? Or, 'Watch me take my insulin'? Or, 'Come to the hospital with me while I check on my dying husband'?"

Klein extracts stories from his subjects after bonding with them. They grant him access to record the most private parts of their lives for his online audio interviews. In the story of Yolanda Williams, a California woman Klein profiled in 2011, she recounts her crack abuse, prostitution, and inability to raise a daughter who eventually grew addicted to crack herself. In another story, Sadie Brannon from Virginia opens up to Klein about the brother who raped her as a child. She goes on to talk about the racist, verbal abuse hurled at her by her husband, whom Klein lived with while he painted and recorded Brannon.

But it wasn't always so easy for the portraitist. His first long trip through Florida in 2011 was a disaster. He arrived in Miami without any subjects lined up to paint, but he wasn't worried. Klein assumed it would be easy to find people willing to share their life stories and house him in exchange for a portrait worth thousands. And though he'd never been to Florida, he figured the map on his smartphone would adequately guide him. He was wrong on both counts.

Klein spent over a week riding across Florida in the June heat, desperately looking for someone who would let him paint his or her portrait. And he kept getting lost, riding for miles only to discover that his iPhone had betrayed him again, that a road on the map didn't exist anymore, maybe never existed, was just a walking trail that became brambles. One of these mistakes forced him to ride for hours on a deserted road through the Everglades. "It was an alligator and vulture wildlife reserve," Klein told me. "The alligators swam in the water bordering both sides of the road. The vultures would continually land right in front of my bike and I'd yell at them." This went on for 40 miles.

Klein continued north, from Belle Glade to Sarasota, emailing and calling community centers and religious groups across the state, trying to convince them to host him. Eventually he arrived in Gibsonton, a town renowned as a winter home for carnies. Klein hoped to find a bearded lady or strongman to paint. Instead, staying at what he refers to as a "crack motel," he met an ex-convict who wept while recounting the tragic story of his youth into Klein's recorder. The following morning the ex-con shook down Klein for $30, demanded a "loan" of hundreds more, and ran him out of town with threats of rape and murder when he refused.

"Throughout my life I've made things work out," Klein told me. In Florida "that was not at all the case."

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Carly Ptak holding her portrait from the 'You're US' series

The day after our train ride, Klein stood behind a camera in a West Baltimore basement. He pointed the camera at his two latest subjects, Twig Harper, the psychedelic therapist, and Carly Ptak, the hypnotist, as they posed for their portraits. Harper and Ptak first gained notoriety as Nautical Almanac, an influential noise music act from the same Michigan scene that produced Andrew WK and Wolf Eyes. More recently, their fame has hinged on Harper's use of guided psychedelic drug trips for therapeutic purposes.

Scattered lights lit the cavernous house, a space filled with a patchwork of found and handcrafted objects. In a dim room sat a deprivation chamber that Harper's patients use after they've ingested LSD or mushrooms. Outside, words of New Age positivity decorated the purple bricks of the house's facade. "Friends," "Peace," "Love."

Books on chakras, metaphysics, and drugs lined the walls of the basement, stuffed onto shelves and stacked on chairs. Harper and Ptak posed in front of one of these bookshelves. Harper stood awkwardly, his long lanky body leaned against the shelf, while Ptak sat in a chair beside Harper, her hair done up in a circular braid like that of a space princess. As Harper set and reset into different poses, trying to get comfortable, Ptak begged Klein to capture the beauty of her husband's face, saying, "I hope you get his pretty nose."

Klein ignored her. He works like he rides; quickly and without humor. If he smiled and laughed during his initial setting of Harper and Ptak, it was only to put them at ease. He fidgeted behind a camera, photographing different poses from which he would later model his painting.

"Could you bend in, like you're bending into the conversation?" Klein told Harper, who still struggled to feel or look comfortable. "No, that looks horrible. Don't do that." This continued for another hour, leaving the artist and his subjects visibly exhausted.

[body_image width='1200' height='881' path='images/content-images/2015/01/21/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/21/' filename='the-biking-limner-123-body-image-1421858540.jpg' id='20015']Twig Harper holding his portrait from the 'You're US' series

Klein agonizes over his paintings. He special-orders his pigments and concocts his own mix of paint that he proudly claims will last 500 years. And he won't show his work in progress to anyone lest a stray critical remark send him into a spiral of self-doubt that will hurt the final product.

But despite the meticulousness Klein exhibits while creating his paintings, he speaks flippantly when discussing his process.

"I have friends who make very fancy, very developed paintings, but I don't have the option of doing that," Klein said. "To just sit around and work on one painting forever. Because I'm traveling."

Klein's irreverence regarding his work reflects his view of classical portraiture as being possibly worthless. Earlier on the trip, while discussing old-master style painting, Klein exclaimed, "We have millions of these things. Do we really need another? I don't know. We could toss a bunch of them."

Klein's derision might be explained by naturalistic painting's place in contemporary art conversation—that is, it has no place, at least not when it's done in earnest. Contemporary artists like Kehinde Wiley (famous for painting an imitation of Napoleon Crossing the Alps with a black man in Timberland boots sitting in for the French dictator) still make work that hearkens to classical realism, but usually as a means of commenting on the societies and cultures that historically produced such work.

"Painting portraiture hasn't been a major art form for a really long time," Hollander, the curator from the American Folk Art Museum, told me when I talked to her about Klein's work. "So [ You're US] is a retro project."

Klein is acutely aware of this dynamic. He told me that if he could reverse time, he would have studied conceptual art, which is more or less the opposite of classical realism. Speaking of his studies in Italy, he said to me, "In Florence I learned a trade," spitting out the word trade like an over-chewed piece of gum.

[body_image width='1200' height='900' path='images/content-images/2015/01/21/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/21/' filename='the-biking-limner-123-body-image-1421858942.jpg' id='20020']Tod holding his portrait from the 'You're US' series

At 5:30 AM the next morning Klein and his friend with a van picked me up from the apartment on the outskirts of the Station North neighborhood where I crashed. We drove to Baltimore's Pennsylvania station to catch an early train to Perryville, where we would collect our bikes and ride back into the city. But as soon as his friend drove off, Klein realized he'd left the keys to unlock his bike at Harper and Ptak's house in West Baltimore. Furious, he kicked a cement planter box over and over, like he was trying to break the box or his foot. It would be impossible for him to catch the early train, which left in a few minutes. The following train left in an hour and it was the last train to Perryville until much later in the day.

"This is why I don't ride with other people," he told me, shivering with rage. "Just go. Start the ride back by yourself. I'll catch up."

I would later learn that, loath to ask another favor from his friend with the van or pay for a taxi, Klein had sprinted to West Baltimore and back. He'd run eight miles in under an hour, wearing hard, stiff bike shoes that were as bad for sprinting as snow boots. He barely caught the next train.

Klein never caught up with me. I rode the 40 miles from Perryville to Baltimore in just a few hours. My body had acclimated to long rides and the trip into the city was easy. I rode straight on the shoulder, never wobbling into traffic. Without the pressure to keep pace or a justified fear of accidental death, long-distance riding became pleasant. I could see why a loner like Klein would choose this solitary life on the road.

After we returned to Baltimore, Klein spent the rest of the week cloistered in Ptak and Harper's house, weaving himself into the fabric of their daily routines. He smoked weed and salvia with Harper, underwent hypnotherapy with Ptak, and floated in the sensory deprivation chamber. He posed them again, this time individually because he'd decided they both deserved their own paintings. And over two days he recorded 15 hours of audio of them talking about their lives.

By the end of his time with them, Klein felt adopted. "Ptak made me this amazing little patch that I'm wearing on my neck," Klein told me. She'd also given Klein a key to their house, just in case he was ever in the area and wanted a place to crash.

When I first heard of You're US, I thought Klein had set out to recreate the life of the old American limners by copying its most shallow elements with a modern analog. A bike instead of a horse. Room and board instead of discounted prices. All of America instead of just the 13 colonies.

But I was wrong. He's recreated the best part of what the limners did for America. You're US brings a contemporary art project within the grasp of those who could never afford and rarely have access to such art. Just as the limners did hundreds of years ago.

And this doesn't seem lost on Klein. He once said to me, "[Limners] represent the part of American history that I totally love. The gumption to do something totally crazy... The fact that the limners were just like 'I'm gonna try this.' That's why I admire them."

Follow Jesse Cottrell on Twitter.

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Issue #12 cover image courtesy of Hannah Kozak, Issue #10 cover by Jan Adriaans

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

If you really sat down and tried, you could turn a lot of pages in the space of 30 days. While we've spent over a decade providing you with about 120 of those pages every month, it turns out there are many more magazines in the world than VICE. This series, Ink Spots, is a helpful guide on which of those zines, pamphlets, and publications you should be reading when you're not staring at ours.

The Editorial Magazine's message is cryptic. They publish almost every kind of work conceivable, from fashion editorials to amateur photography to excellent photography to poetry to essays to interviews to paintings to that CGI art everyone's always arguing about. There are very few advertisements. They're open to subscriptions but without guidelines.

One of the best Editorial features I read was in Issue #12 , and it was an interview with Hollywood stuntwoman and photographer Hannah Kozak, who talked about throwing punches and leaping out of buildings. Kozak had been sneaking onto sets and shooting the world of Hollywood make-believe since before she was actually invited onto them as a body double, and shared some of her candid portraits with Editorial, including those of Nicholas Cage and Isabella Rossellini on the set of David Lynch's Wild at Heart.

This got me thinking; The Editorial Magazine is kind of Lynchian. And maybe that's all it needs to be, an intriguing series of timeless images with no collective thread. Photographer and painter Claire Milbrath, the magazine's editor, shared with us some of those images below, including the work of photographers Petra Collins, Etienne Saint-Denis, and Monika Mogi, as well as artists Clay Hickson and Jonny Negron.

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A collage of the fake social media posts set up using the author's face and first name

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Yesterday, I wrote an article describing how, for the past eight years, someone has been stealing Facebook photos from myself and my closest friends, and then using them to create and update numerous fake social media profiles.

This situation, while definitely creepy, invasive, and undesirable, was just about bearable. But then we learned she'd been using our faces to talk to guys we'd never met on the internet, and it all became a little more worrying. Especially when we'd bump into these guys in public—on the strip in Malia, in my college dorm, and on various nights out around London, for example—and have to explain that the person they'd been talking to every night for months wasn't really who they thought it was—i.e. me or one of my friends.

After the piece went up, a guy got in touch with me. He told me he'd been on the receiving end of one of the fake accounts, and that for the past two years he'd been tricked into believing he'd built up an intense, if remote, relationship with one of my closest friends—a relationship that, in his mind, involved her chasing him to another country before flying home and nearly killing herself with a drug overdose.

Due to the sensitive nature of some of his answers, the guy wanted to remain anonymous. The following conversation is probably as weird to read as it was to have over the phone, earlier today.

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Correspondence between the interviewee and the operator of the fake account

VICE: When did you first start speaking to the fake account?
Catfish victim: In September of 2012. I was going through Facebook and I saw a girl who I thought I recognized from a night out the weekend before. It started with a simple message, asking if she was at a certain club that weekend, and she replied saying, "Yeah, I think I remember speaking to you." I never questioned it, I just thought, Why would anyone lie about that? So we started talking, and we got on really well.

Did you continue speaking after that?
Yes, a few weeks later she said she was having a birthday party at her college house and said I was invited and that I could bring a few friends. She messaged me on the morning of the party, saying she was driving up from London and that she would message me when it was OK to come up. It got to ten o'clock and I'd received no reply to my messages, but I didn't know her very well so I didn't think much of it. She rang me a couple of hours later saying she'd had a nightmare and was home now and that we were still allowed to come if we wanted—but I said I'd already made plans by that point. After that, we spoke every night on the phone for hours and would WhatsApp or speak on Facebook chat throughout the day.

What kept you speaking for that long?
I had a problem with drug addiction. I was addicted to ketamine, and after speaking to this girl for a few months and really feeling comfortable and like I could trust her, we started talking about it. She told me her older brother had died from a ket overdose. Our connection then got really strong, because she was always there for me, helping me, and it all seemed so real. She was always there for me, and I would spend hours on the phone to her every night talking about it. We went through stages of me getting on the drugs, falling out about it, and not talking for months sometimes, but we would always start talking again in the end.

Did you ever try to meet her after the failed party incident?
We hadn't been speaking for a while, and then she told me she was doing an internship in New York, so I didn't think anything of not meeting her. We'd speak every night for a few hours, but she had a different phone number to the one she used for WhatsApp, and that one didn't work when I tried to call. She said it was her "work phone" that I could call and text, but that I had to limit it because she would get into trouble if they caught her using it as a personal phone.

Did you consider that she might be fake?
I started to recently. I accused her of it once and she really didn't like it—she didn't speak to me for a while after that. She always seemed to have a way of blagging it and turning it back round on me, and then I'd feel guilty for accusing her. I kind of ignored the signs, and the excuses she gave seemed reasonable. Plus, this girl had been there for me at my darkest time. We got on really well and were never stuck for something to talk about over the hours and hours we spent on the phone. She made me feel good. Why would I want to ruin all that?

When was the last time you spoke?
I went away last summer, and we fell out because she begged me not to go, but I knew it was what I wanted to do. I'd been offered a good job and I wasn't going to let this girl walk back into my life and stop me from going and doing what I wanted to do, so we didn't speak for a while. I agreed not to sleep with anyone else and said I'd be back in September, and we talked about going to London or New York together. Then she called and gave me an ultimatum: that I come home or never speak to her again. I stuck to my guns and refused to come home. We argued a lot about it, so I started to ignore her and we didn't speak for ages.

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Correspondence between the interviewee and the operator of the fake account after she discovered he'd slept with someone

Oh, so you've spoken to her since then?
She called me when I was away, describing exactly what I was doing and wearing to the point that I knew she had to be there. She said she was in the hotel opposite, but said before she met me she had to know if I'd slept with anyone else. I told her the truth—I had, but it was nothing serious. But she took it really badly—she was crying down the phone and said she didn't want to meet until she had her head sorted. She said she flew home that night.

What happened after that?
I tried to cut her out of my life. I knew if I kept speaking to her she'd have me wrapped around her little finger again. She called me in October saying she was majorly depressed and that she'd turned to heroin. She knew I had a history of heroin addiction in my family, so I took it really badly. She said she was going to overdose, but I thought she was lying so I called her bluff and told her to do it. I didn't hear from her for a while after so I started to panic.

I messaged the last girl who had posted on her timeline, who I now know to be another fake profile, and she told me that her roommate had found her overdosed in her room. I felt awful; all her "friends" started sending me hate mail, blaming me for it. A couple of weeks later, she started speaking to me again, and yesterday said she didn't want to get close to me again if I was going to follow through with my plans to travel this summer. She said she was deleting her Facebook, and then I saw your article.

Have you contacted her since?
I messaged her, but she hasn't replied—she's also un-followed me on Twitter and Instagram, so I can't find her anymore. I would like to speak to her now. I have a lot of questions for her.

Follow Ellie on Twitter.

Dying in the apocalypse seems like the best way to go. Most people bow out of the world in pretty lame ways, like cancer or lupus or complications from a leg gash you never had checked out. The end of the world is much more exciting: There'd be walls of fire, mile-high tidal waves, and gaping crevasses in the ground for panicked crowds to topple into. Oakland doom band Abstractor must figure the end is coming any day now, so they've written the apocalypse a theme song.

The band is set to release their new album, Wound Empire, on February 10. "Cruciform" is an epic and introspective song dripping with doomy goodness. The album was mastered by another doom god, Brad Boatright, who's previously worked with Sunn O))), Sleep, and Wolves in the Throne Room. Listen to "Cruciform" nice and loud while you browse WWI chemical warfare photos on Google. You can almost smell the fire and brimstone.

Preorder the new album Bandcamp.

[body_image width='818' height='600' path='images/content-images/2015/01/22/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/22/' filename='its-still-legal-to-drive-a-mobility-scooter-when-youre-fucked-off-your-face-body-image-1421927839.png' id='20200']These people probably aren't drunk—but they could be and that would be totally legal. Photo via Wiki Commons

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that when a 47-year-old disabled man from Sunderland, England, was arrested for driving his mobility scooter while three times over the drunk-driving limit last June, it was because he was absolutely razzed off his face. But it wasn't. What saw him wind up in the magistrates' courts were the two young men who were riding the scooter with him—one hanging off the back, the other allegedly perched on his knee.

The charges against Colin Beven were dropped this week, after he told the court that the two men had jumped on his scooter as he passed them, rather than the more heart-warming image of a very drunk man offering a lift home to two lads at the end of a heavy night out.

Beven's attorney went on to tell the court, "Mr. Beven can drink as much as he wants, do whatever he wants with that scooter, as long as he does not carry passengers."

This is when the alarm bell starts to ring. We're all well aware that mobility scooters aren't nearly one of the scariest things you can bump into (they fall well below your ex's mom and "that teacher who really believed in you"), while they can only legally travel at four to eight miles per hour. So why the hell have more than 300 people been injured by mobility scooters in the UK over the last five years?

Colin Beven—however drunk he was—didn't actually hurt anyone. However, a quick internet search of "mobility scooter deaths" brings up a bunch of different news stories surrounding accidental deaths and injuries, 95 percent of which are the driver's fault.

One woman from Exeter suffered a fractured spine last year, after being the victim of a hit-and-run incident involving a man on a Rascal mobility scooter. She commented that, "It was like a scene from the film Bad Grandpa."

This kind of incident can only be exacerbated by drunk driving, which is not at all rare in the case of those with mobility scooters. One man in Croydon ploughed through a shop window in reverse while drunk at the wheel of his scooter, another woman in South Wales recently refused to be breathalyzed when driving hers dangerously. She claimed that she had "only two or three double vodkas" over lunch.

The last report published by the House of Commons Transport Committee claimed that there are over 330,000 mobility scooters in operation across the country, but as of yet there are no tests or regulations controlling who can use them, let alone laws that stop people driving them while hammered.

[body_image width='787' height='543' path='images/content-images/2015/01/22/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/22/' filename='its-still-legal-to-drive-a-mobility-scooter-when-youre-fucked-off-your-face-body-image-1421934334.png' id='20244']Again, there's no insinuation that this man is drunk—but he could be and that would still be fine! Photo via Geograph

Kevin Clifton, Head of Road Safety at the gallantly named Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) told me that "mobility scooters provide an important form of transport for people who might otherwise not be able to get out and about. However, as with all forms of transport, they create some risk, for both the user and for other people.

"Some road traffic laws—specifically regulations governing careless and dangerous driving, driving while under the influence of drugs or alcohol, and the use of mobile phones while driving—should apply to mobility scooter users."

Clearly mobility scooters aren't a top priority in terms of legislation and they're also not the only modes of transport that benefit from the loophole: bikes, electric bikes, and even the riding lawnmowers that John Hughes made famous can be driven over the alcohol limit without breaking the law. Unfortunately, it will probably take a worse incident than Colin's to trigger a change in the law, so in the meantime, look both ways when crossing.

If there was a pin-up boy for the age-old axiom, "You can choose your friends, but not your family," Rainer Höß would definitely be it. The 48-year-old German was born into a clan known for helping perpetrate one of the greatest crimes ever committed against humanity and then denying it ever happened.

It wasn't until the age of 12 that Rainer got the harrowing reality check that his grandfather, Rudolf Höß, was Auschwitz's top executioner. Not only did grandpa Höß supervise the murder of over 1.5 million Jews, gypsies, and political prisoners, he was also the brains behind Auschwitz's transformation from an old army barracks into a killing machine capable of slaughtering 2,000 people an hour. Granddad even designed the gas chambers and introduced the Zyklon B gas used to execute children and the elderly.

If that wasn't horrific enough, Rainer Höß committed all of these atrocities just a few hundred yards away from his family's villa, where Rainer's father grew up playing with toys made by Auschwitz's prisoners and picking strawberries that were dusty with the ash of human remains.

Both of Rainer's parents filled his head with Nazi propaganda about his grandfather being a war hero. He had to learn the brutal truth of his grandfather's past from his schoolteachers—a revelation that explained why older people flinched at the utterance of his last name, why he wasn't allowed on school trips to Auschwitz, and why the school gardener, a Holocaust survivor, beat him black and blue in the schoolyard.

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_{Rainer Höß's father playing in a toy Nazi aircraft made by Auschwitz prisoners as a child}

In response to his family's refusal to admit Rudolf Höß's role in the genocide, Rainer cut all ties with them three decades ago and has dedicated his adult life to fighting Holocaust deniers, despite the fact that this turned him into the black sheep of his family.

"There's no way I could be part of a family that perceives a mass murderer as not only a hero, but a victim of the Jews and allies," Rainer told me. "Despite the fact that there are thousands of historical documents and eyewitnesses proving what my grandfather did, they still choose to deny it."

Even his 80-year-old aunt Inge-Brigitt, a former Balenciaga model who spent the last 40 years in Washington, DC working for a Jewish-run fashion boutique (yes, the irony is baffling) called him "a lying, drug-addicted, fame-seeking, money-hungry, evil young man" in an interview with Exberliner.

Although Inge-Brigitt doesn't deny that Jews were murdered in the camps, she doesn't believe millions were killed. Even when Thomas Harding of the Washington Post pointed out to her that her father confessed to being responsible for the death of more than a million Jews, she claimed the British just "took it out of him with torture."

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_{Rainer Höß at Auschwitz's crematorium}

Aunt Inge-Brigitt isn't the only Höß who feels that way. According to Exberliner,Rainer's estranged niece Anita Höß, who lives in Sydney, Australia, posted the following on a Holocaust forum in August 2013: "I'm not ashamed of the overstated outcomes of the Jews during WWII. Other nationalities fared much worse—Russians under Stalin and other nationalities under the Iron Curtain. The Jews continue to perpetuate themselves as victims—it's time they moved on."

Shocked and dismayed by statements like these, Rainer said it shows the ideological seeds planted by his grandfather 70 years ago are unfortunately still bearing fruit.

"If I ever get the chance to meet [Anita] in person, I'd simply invite her to travel with me to Auschwitz to talk to survivors," he said.

Visiting Auschwitz is a pilgrimage Rainer first made back in 2009. Visiting has helped him connect with survivors and their families. On one of these trips he met Eva Mozes Kor, who suffered through SS officer Josef Mengele's notorious twin experiments at Auschwitz. Now, they have "such an intimate and familial relationship" that she's adopted him as her grandson

"[Our] relationship symbolizes that hatred between ethnic groups need not exist," Rainer told me.

Another friendship he developed by visiting Auschwitz was with Jewish photographer Marc Erwin Babej, son of a Terezin survivor. Babej recently photographed Rainer for his Mischlinge ("Crossbreeds") photo series, which featured postwar-generation Germans surrounded by relics of the Third Reich.

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_{Rudolf Höß with his family}

In 2010, Rainer went to Israel to take part in the Israeli-German documentary titled Hitler's Children. The film is about how the descendants of the most powerful figures in the Nazi regime— Heinrich Himmler, Hans Frank, Hermann Göring, and Rudolf Höss—have dealt with the horrific legacy attached to their surnames. In the film, a group of students asked Rainer, "What would you do to your grandfather if you saw him today?" To this, Rainer responded without a second thought, "I would kill him myself."

"That was an extremely nerve-racking, emotionally charged moment for me," he said to me. "[I stood up] in front of all those young Jewish students as the grandson of a Jewish mass murderer. While their question will never get a real answer, I tried my best to answer it honestly."

In recent years, Rainer inherited a swastika-clad 60-pound fireproof chest—a gift to his grandfather from Himmler—containing over 2,100 pages of Rudolf Höß's unpublished diaries describing his experiences at Auschwitz and how to enhance the genocide process as well as hundreds of family photos and color slides, personal effects, and a gold signet ring.

After attempting to sell the Nazi family heirloom to Israeli Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem in 2009, he came under fire from the Israeli media for trying to make a profit off the Holocaust.

"If it had truly been about the money for me, I would have sold it to a Nazi organization instead," he said. "I'm completely aware that it was a stupid move, one for which I've repeatedly apologized to the public and received an international spanking."

He later donated the chest to the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich, where it remains today. He has provided various documents from the chest to a team of lawyers currently attempting to bring former SS guards to court, even going to the lengths of traveling with them to the US.

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_{A swastika-clad fireproof chest that Rainer inherited—a gift to his grandfather from Himmler}

Although he's helping bring hiding Nazis to justice, his main tool in the fight against his grandfather's legacy is outreach to young people. Educating the youth about the dangers of neo-Nazism and right-wing extremism in Germany has become his full-time job. To that end, he spoke at more than 70 schools last year.

"The students respond extremely enthusiastically to my story, asking me several questions afterwards and even sharing stories with me that their grandparents have told them," he said.

In addition to his talks, Rainer hopes the German government will also fund school trips to Auschwitz in future so they can feel the emotional weight of the Holocaust for themselves.

"Every time I've visited Auschwitz, I've witnessed young people moved to tears and turn speechless due to the sheer brutality of what happened there," he said.

[body_image width='1500' height='1125' path='images/content-images/2015/01/21/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/21/' filename='my-nazi-grandfather-was-one-of-the-worst-mass-murderers-in-human-history-715-body-image-1421858353.jpg' id='20008']

Rainer Höß with Holocaust survivor Eva Mozes Kor

Although Rainer admits he'll probably always bear the heavy cross his grandfather put on his shoulders, he's taken it upon himself to speak out and do what he can to make sure that Naziism doesn't rise again.

In a video he produced for the Swedish Socialist Youth League's Never Forget to Vote campaign, Rainer said, "I know more than most people about the desire to forget. There have been times when I have wanted to deny my past—pretend I was someone else. But we must never forget our past, no matter how much it hurts. Because, when we forget, history will repeat itself. "

Follow Emily Wasik on Twitter.

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Kurdish Peshmerga forces. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Canada won't be equipping Kurdish or Iraqi fighters with the heavy weaponry they're requesting, at least not yet, Defence Minister Rob Nicholson tells VICE.

The minister was speaking from London, where he was meeting with a congregation of world leaders who assembled to discuss the effort to fight ISIS.

The meeting was the start of what Nicholson says will be regular meets among coalition nations in Iraq discussing intelligence sharing, humanitarian support, and military aid for the region.

VICE asked Nicholson whether there was a discussion of sending weaponry to the under-equipped Iraqi and Kurdish fighters to aid in their tough fight with the Islamic State.

Nicholson said there was "a consideration of all aspects of the conflict and there was a recognition that the Iraqis and the Kurds need to continue to have support." He, however, wouldn't say whether Canadian weapons were on the table.

He did add that "there were no specific asks to any particular country."

But as VICE reported in November, the Kurds are adamant that without advanced weaponry, they'll never be able to quash the Islamic State.

"We have not yet received what we have requested," Kurdistan Foreign Affairs Minister Falah Mustafa Bakir told VICE. "We hope that the international coalition...will look into this situation to send what the Peshmerga need, because they are reliable."

The Kurds then repeated that call in London this week.

Bakir underlined that only a handful of Western states, like Germany and France, have kicked in effective weapons to the Peshmerga to counter well equipped ISIS forces. Canada, meanwhile, hasn't shipped arms to any of the forces combatting ISIS, opting instead to ferry Soviet-era weaponry from Eastern Europe to the Kurdistan region.

Nicholson indicates there is no renewed discussions on the Canadian side of changing its stance. Ottawa has long maintained arming any side of the conflict could end up seeing Canadian-made goods falling into the wrong hands.

The Harper government is, however, sending surplus Canadian Forces gear to the Iraqi Security Forces.

Canada announced this week that it's shipping 6000 pieces of gear, mostly for cold weather conditions. Thus far, Canada kicked in $10 million in non-lethal aid to the Iraqi Security Forces.

The Iraqi Prime Minister was also in London for the talks. He has repeatedly requested more serious arms from the West in order to equip his forces, which have been weakened thanks to desertions and intense fighting with ISIS and other militias.

ISIS has pillaged huge arms caches from Iraqi forces, filled with American made and supplied weapons. Those stolen stockpiles include artillery, humvees, and various light weapons.

Nicholson also told VICE discussions at the London meeting is focusing on intelligence-gathering and sharing among the Western powers to avoid repeats of the attacks that struck Paris earlier this month.

"We recognized the importance of [...] tipping-off each other, for instance if information comes with respect to either homegrown terrorists, illegal financing, that kind of thing," Nicholson said.

Canada has just opened up powers for its main spy agency, CSIS, to go abroad and run operations in foreign countries, employing CSEC and the NSA in the process.

Nicholson's London visit was underscored by confirmation from leadership of the Canadian Forces this week that the role of Canada's special operations troops in Iraq is more advanced than previously thought.

Chief of Defence Staff General Tom Lawson released a statement Thursday morning acknowledging, "the situation on the ground has evolved" since the initial deployment of Canadian troops to Northern Iraq last September, and that they have increasingly been used to target ISIS positions.

The issue came to the forefront this week after a technical briefing by the Department of Defence revealed that Canadian Forces soldiers exchanged gunfire with ISIS fighters. The special operations forces, stationed in northern Iraq in an advising role for Iraqi security forces, had come under mortar and machine gun fire while on the front lines of coalition positions.

The soldiers effectively returned sniper fire, "neutralizing the mortar and the machine gun position," Brigadier-General Michael Rouleau told media on Monday.

Rouleau is the commander of the Canadian Special Forces. He confirmed for the first time that the over 69 special operations personnel under his command (on top of their training and advisory role), have been involved in pinpointing targets for CF-18 air strikes while on the ground, with the use of lasers.

"We enable these strikes by working with coalition aircraft and with the Iraqi security forces," Rouleau said. "To ensure that targets are legitimate and that the risks of collateral damage are mitigated."

While it was previously unknown exactly how close Canadian Forces were getting to the action, the briefing reveals Canadian Forces are sometimes on the rapidly-changing front lines.

Nicholson and Lawson, however, maintain Canadian troops are not in Iraq under a combat role.

"Our [Special Operations Forces] Personnel are not seeking to directly engage the enemy, but we are providing assistance to forces that are in combat," Lawson said in his statement.

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