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Photo via Wikimedia Commons user Yellowspacehopper

Everyday, on my way to teach and research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I have to passSilent Sam, the statue of a Confederate soldier erected with the intention of symbolizing the 321 UNC alumni who died fighting to maintain a way of life built on the oppression and degradation of black people.

Apologists for Silent Sam like to mention that the soldier's belt has no cartridge box, rendering his gun useless. The soldier, facing north as an eternal defender against Union aggression, cannot commit real violence. His weapon is supposed to be an empty symbol. But for many members of the UNC community, Silent Sam's presence is itself an act of violence. It's an attack upon those who make this campus their place of education, work, and residence. Tomorrow, they will be speaking out by forming a rally at 12:10 PM in front of the Silent Sam to voice their discontent with this and other symbols of white supremacy on our campus.

A few yards from Silent Sam stands the Unsung Founders memorial. It's intended to honor the contributions of African American labor, "bond and free," to the building of the university. The memorial consists of a table supported by 300 statues of black people. These statues, standing maybe a foot high each, literally bear the weight of visitors' picnics on their bodies while a larger-than-life white man with a gun stands high above them on his pedestal. The relationship between these monuments replicates the social order that Silent Sam upholds.

Silent Sam appeared in 1913 amid a wave of Confederate memorials popping up throughout the South. "If the Confederacy had raised proportionately as many soldiers as the postwar South raised monuments," quipped Civil War historian James M. McPherson, "the Confederates might have won the war." These monuments were not simply tributes to the dead; their construction participated in an active rewriting of Confederate history in which the slaveowners' rebellion was transformed into a Southern freedom struggle against Northern oppression.

The proliferation of Confederate monuments, championed by groups such as the Daughters of the Confederacy, also occurred alongside Southern states' successful disenfranchisement of the Black vote and rise of Jim Crow laws. Like the legal enforcement of segregation, Confederate memorials such as Silent Sam served to inscribe a particular vision of the South onto public spaces. As much as Silent Sam honors fallen members of the UNC community, the statue also preserves white supremacy as an enduring value of that community.

At Silent Sam's dedication, industrialist Julian Carr spoke of the Confederacy's "battles in defense of Southern liberty and Southern honor," and honored its soldiers as having "saved the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the South." He also mentioned that just 100 yards from the monument, he personally "horse-whipped a Negro wench, until her skirt hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady." These are the values for which Silent Sam stands with rifle in hand. (Carr, incidentally, is also honored on campus with a building in his name.)

A UNC residence hall also bears the name of Thomas Ruffin, the North Carolina Supreme Court justice who wrote the decision in State v. Mann, which ruled in favor of a man who whipped his slave and then shot her when she attempted to escape. Ruffin declared that to preserve the "full dominion of the owner over the slave," there could be no legal restrictions on a master's treatment of his slaves. Ruffin ruled that because slaves were property, they could not pursue legal recourses against their masters.

Tributes to white supremacists are sprinkled across the campus landscape: Spencer Hall is named for Cornelia Phillips Spencer (Phillips Hall is named after her father and brothers), the anti-Reconstructionist who famously rang the bell to reopen UNC after working to ensure that black students would be barred from admission; Hamilton Hall is named after UNC professor and Jim Crow supporter J.G. de Roulhac Hamilton; the Daniels Building is named after Josephus Daniels, newspaper editor, champion for black disenfranchisement, inciter of race riots, and leading voice in what he literally called the "White Supremacy Campaign."

In the case that personally hits me the hardest, the building in which I work, Saunders Hall, is named for William L. Saunders, a Confederate colonel and founding figure in North Carolina's Ku Klux Klan. Invoking the Fifth Amendment to avoid revealing his relationship to the Klan before a Congressional committee, Saunders famously replied, "I decline to answer" to so many questions that the phrase was put on his tombstone.

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The naming of campus buildings after these individuals honors their various contributions to the life of the university and surrounding communities. The university must decide, however, whether tributes to the dead are worth committing violence against living members of the UNC community—students, faculty, and staff whose mere presence at UNC would have been an unthinkable nightmare to figures such as Saunders.

I will say it again: These names constitute acts of violence against the UNC community. Writing on the racism of UNC's landscape way back in 2002, Yoni Chapman, then a grad student in the history department, mentioned an African American student who became physically sick whenever entering Saunders for classes. That was 13 years ago. As students today pass through the doors of Saunders Hall, they are still institutionally coerced into recognition of the Ku Klux Klan. The secret history behind Saunders Hall is no secret at all, but widely transmitted as campus oral tradition. It continues to shame us.

For years, students have worked to challenge the racism in UNC's culture of names and monuments. This Friday, hundreds of members of the UNC community are gathering at Silent Sam and will make three demands: First, that Saunders Hall is renamed Hurston Hall, in honor of Zora Neale Hurston; second, that Silent Sam bears a plaque directly addressing the history behind the statue; third, that orientation for incoming students includes a curriculum that contextualizes UNC's racial history.

Silent Sam, of course, has never been silent. Upon his arrival in 1913, he loudly proclaimed the university to be a white domain, offering himself as a campus placeholder for white supremacy. Silent Sam embodied lamentation for the dead in a race war, defenders of a world in which black women could be "horse-whipped" for saying the wrong thing to white women. Sadly, this was what it meant in 1913 for Silent Sam to represent the UNC community. A century later, Silent Sam continues to speak. If the solution is not to pull the statue out of the ground altogether, we can at least make Silent Sam speak for and to a UNC that he never could have imagined or accepted. Confronting and rewriting the meanings that have been inscribed on our landmarks, we can give the campus map a voice that represents everyone who contributes to UNC's histories and futures.

As same-sex marriage inches closer toward legalization nationwide, bakeries have emerged as an unlikely new battleground for those opposed to marriage equality. Attempting to mirror anti-discrimination rulings against bakeries that refuse service to gay couples, activists have been contacting LGBT-affirming bakeries requesting custom cakes frosted with anti-gay slogans. When the bakeries decline, the customer claims religious discrimination.

In the most recent incident, Colorado resident Bill Jack filed a religious discrimination complaint with the state's civil rights office, after Denver's Azucar Bakery refusing to make a Bible-shaped cake decorated with two-men holding hands, covered by an "X." The bakery's owner, Marjorie Silva, told Out Front Colorado that she offered to "bake the cake in the shape of a Bible, and then I told him I'd sell him a [decorating] bag with the right tip and the right icing so he could write those things himself."

But Jack—the co-founder of Worldview Academy, a Christian youth organization described on its website as "a non-denominational organization dedicated to helping Christians to think and to live in accord with a biblical worldview so that they will serve Christ and lead the culture"—refused, and is claiming that by not making the cake, Silva discriminated against him based on his creed.

At first glance, it looks like Jack and other Christian activists are trying to steal a page out of the progressive playbook, in an attempt to underscore what they see as liberal hypocrisy of anti-discrimination laws. Commenting on Jack's complaint, Focus on the Family spokesman Jeff Johnston toldThe Christian Post that "just as a Christian baker should not be required to create a cake for a same-sex ceremony, this baker should not be required to create a cake with a message that goes against her conscience."

The complaint against Azucar is a sort of a warped reflection of one filed against Masterpiece Bakeshop, another Colorado bakery that was found guilty in 2013 of violating anti-discrimination laws after the owner refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. The store's owners were ordered by a Colorado court end its discriminatory practices, and to submit quarterly reports for two years on it's progress training its employees on the state's anti-discrimination laws.

Despite the suggestion from conservatives, legal experts say that the two cases aren't really all that alike. "There is a difference between refusing to do business with someone based on their characteristics, and refusing to make a particular product," said Jennifer Hendricks, a constitutional law professor at the University of Colorado Boulder . "If you're making a plain cake with flowers on it and will sell it to this type of person, but not that type of person, that's discrimination. [The bakery] aren't saying 'I wont make you [an anti-gay] cake because of your religion, they're saying 'I don't want to make this cake.'"

As the legal battle over same-sex marriage winds down, gay marriage opponents have shifted their focus to the issue of religious freedom, specifically, whether an individual or business has the right to refuse service to someone based on religious beliefs. Bakeries and other wedding vendors have become a flashpoint in this new struggle. Speaking at a Values Voters summit in Washington D.C. last year, Oregon bakeshop owner Melissa Klein burst into tears explaining how the $150,000 fine she incurred for refusing to bake a cake for a pair of marrying lesbians left her bankrupt and out of business. The story enraged anti-gay activist Theodore Shoebat, and inspired him to make a list of 13 LGBT-friendly cake-shops, and film himself calling each one to request a cake decorated with the phrase "Gay Marriage Is Wrong."

"I woke up one morning and said 'lets take the battle to them,'" Shoebat told me in a phone interview. "When the Christian says 'I'm sorry, I can't do it' it's all of the sudden a civil rights issue. But when you ask a pro-homosexual, an openly sodomite bakery, to give me a cake that supports my beliefs, they can say it's against their beliefs. My main intention was to tell other Christians: You can take it to them."

In Colorado, newly-elected state representative Gordon Klingenschmitt—a prominent anti-gay activist who once attempted to exorcise demons from President Obama via an Internet video—has pounced on Jack's complaint, using it as an opportunity to call for new legislation that would allow individuals and businesses to refuse service to people they don't like.

"Right now there's a loophole [in nondiscrimination statutes] that's allowing these bakers to be brought up on charges of discrimination," Klingenschmitt told Fox 31 Denver. "I think the loophole ought to be fixed so that every baker, every artist, every person in Colorado is not compelled by the government to produced anything they personally disagree with."

Klingenschmitt said he is in the middle of drafting legislation on the issue, but hasn't given any details about what that bill might look like. (He did not respond to my phone calls.)

Meanwhile, In the court of public opinion, the claim of religious discrimination against Azucar Bakery has rallied LGBT supporters around the store. "Our usually quiet January at Azucar Bakery has turned out to be more busy than our busiest wedding season!" the store said in a statement on its Facebook page.

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The maroon and white signs hang in dormitory halls: "No guests are allowed in any UMass Amherst Residence Halls. UMass Amherst resident students are allowed access only to the hall in which they live."

The no-visitors rule takes effect Sunday, and while it represents an unusual step by the university administration, it's not a response to a terror threat or a natural disaster. Instead, it's a preemptive battening down of the hatches for the Super Bowl—an event that, for the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is marked by debauchery that's as disruptive as it is predictable. Especially when the local favorite New England Patriots are involved.

Colleges all over the country have had to deal with sports-related shenanigans of varying degrees of seriousness. From Super Bowl violence near the University of Northern Colorado's campus in 1999 to the thousands of Penn State students who clashed with police and toppled a news van in protest of football coach Joe Paterno's 2011 firing amid the school's sexual molestation scandal, this is the stuff of Americana. At UMass, a school whose wild party-school heyday has been fading in recent years, confrontations between drunk students and police are near-annual occurrences that continue to vex administrators.

"I know most students do not condone the negative behavior of a few, but, unfortunately we must acknowledge that our campus has a history of large-scale unruly gatherings, often associated with sporting events," Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Enku Gelaye wrote in message to students, urging the campus to "defy expectations" and reject calls to riot posted on social media.

A maze-like strip of towering Brutalist architecture and well-trafficked courtyards, the university's Southwest Residential Area has long enjoyed a reputation for sports- and alcohol-fueled rowdiness. In recent years, major defeats or victories by local teams—the Patriots in 2012, the Boston Red Sox in 2013 and 2004, the UMass football team in 2006—have seen up to 1,800 students pour outdoors to throw beer cans and toilet paper about, start fires, and even fight the riot cops who get sent out to stop everything from getting out of hand.

This year, with another Patriots Super Bowl appearance whetting appetites for Keystone Light and high-spirited vandalism, the administration is taking strong measures to prevent yet another chaotic disturbance—including declaring Southwest a no-go zone for nonresidents. Gelaye, in a message to parents, recommended that students who live in the residential area should stay in their dorms, and those who do not should stay away the night of the game.

University spokesman Ed Blaguszewski told VICE the school is basing its response on recommendations from former Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis, whose consulting firm penned a report on campus safety following mass arrests at an off-campus St. Patrick's Day party in Amherst last year. Davis's firm suggested the school focus on preventive policing and consider the suspension of guest privileges under "extraordinary circumstances."

UMass is not alone in its concern: In Washington State and New England, schools are tightening security before kickoff. The city of Seattle, whose Seahawks will play the Patriots on Sunday, erupted into chaos after their team's Super Bowl win last year.

"If the Seahawks are able to win another Super Bowl, people are going to be very excited and very enthused, and they're going to celebrate. We hope they celebrate in an orderly and responsible fashion," University of Washington spokesman Norm Arkans said in a statement. "We are not worried about an extreme reaction, but we are prepared if people end up responding over-enthusiastically."

University police will increase their presence at the Seattle campus, where some students lit fires after last year's game.

Colleges in New England and Washington contacted by VICE reported a variety of responses to the upcoming game, though none besides UMass Amherst plan to restrict student movement.

Boston University will host a communal viewing party and increase police patrols, though guest privileges will not be affected and it's anticipated that most students will watch the game in their dorm rooms. The University of New Hampshire will work with campus and local police to ensure security, and residence staff will inform students of the school's behavioral expectations. And the University of Connecticut, where campus police arrested dozens of people after the school's basketball team won the NCAA championship last year, will have extra officers on duty, though a spokesperson said no problems are expected.

Other universities are taking a relaxed approach, expressing confidence that their student bodies will celebrate victory or mourn defeat without lighting anything on fire or punching anyone. Through spokespeople, Tufts University and the University of Vermont told VICE that there will be no changes in staffing or procedures for the weekend. A Boston College spokesman said no additional security was planned, though students are encouraged to remain on campus and not attend any large gatherings in the city after the game. And both Gonzaga University and Washington State University, whose campuses lie over 250 miles from last year's post-game clashes in Seattle, do not plan on increasing security.

"There were no incidents on our campus last year when the Seahawks won the Super Bowl, and we don't anticipate any when they win again this year," wrote Washington State University spokesman Rob Strenge in an email.

Some campuses have reacted to athletic events with less restraint. In 2005 and 2013, students at the Michigan State University went on rampages over the performance of their basketball and football teams, respectively. When University of Tennessee football fans learned in 2010 that coach Lane Kiffen was unexpectedly leaving for a job at the University of Southern California, students set fires and scrawled "Fuck You Lane Kiffen" on the Rock, a boulder in the middle of campus traditionally used as a student message board.

UMass has repeatedly drawn up ideas to prevent rioting after sporting and major news events on campus, with schemes falling flat due to legal problems or logistics.

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Riot police on the UMass-Amherst campus after the Super Bowl in 2012. Photo by Chelsie Field/Daily Collegian

In 2012, then-head of UMass housing Eddie Hull asked campus police to search individual students wearing backpacks as they entered dorms on the night of the big game, according to an email we reviewed at the time. Then chief of campus police Johnny Whitehead questioned the idea's constitutionality and never implemented it, he said in an interview. The game ended with a Patriots loss, 14 arrests, and riot police shooting pepper balls into a crowd of hundreds of raucous students outside a campus dining hall.

According to internal emails obtained by VICE, the next year two weeks before the Super Bowl Hull recommended banning students from using "areas around residence halls" for "spontaneous celebrations," instead funneling students to an official gathering sanctioned by the school.

The proposal never took. Hull said in an email to administration and student government officials that his plan to restrict outdoor celebrations was criticized for not leaving students with any choice and being a logistical nightmare to enforce on short notice. Hull also criticized the negative effect on campus of these "mob-like gatherings," citing student complaints and concern for the psychological well-being of students who are military veterans (and presumably might suffer from PTSD).

Though Sunday's restrictions are the most dramatic policy change implemented by UMass administrators, housing rules will change the Friday and Saturday before the game, too: Students will only be allowed to sign in two non-UMass individuals into their dorms. On other nights, students are allowed to sign in up to four guests.

The changes have been met with dissatisfaction on campus, according to social media posts and interviews with students. One Twitter user posted a photo of a sign announcing the rule with the caption "Welcome to UMass Alcatraz." The Massachusetts Daily Collegian, the school's student-run daily newspaper, published an opinion piece arguing that the guest ban will not prevent students from holding wild celebrations. (Full disclosure: Both of the authors are former Daily Collegian staffers.)

UMass political science junior Charlotte Kelly, a 20-year-old who lives in the on-campus suites furthest from the Southwest towers, said not all of the 22,000 undergraduates are interested in the Big Game or running down to Southwest to celebrate afterwards. She called the new guest policy rules "unjust" and "unfair," saying students living on campus may have to cancel plans with friends or study groups over a game they could not care less about. (The school will host about 40 viewing parties in dorms and common areas, according to spokesman Ed Blaguszewski.)

Like most other students she's spoken with, Kelly says she found out about the housing changes through word of mouth and student media late last week.

"The student government knew about it and didn't say anything. Higher-ups in Res Life knew about it and didn't say anything," she said. "This massive change to [students'] lives was happening and none of them had been told about it."

All UMass students received an email outlining the ban on Super Bowl day guests Monday afternoon from the head of residence hall security.

Student Government Association President Vinayak Rao said the administration informed SGA members of the guest policy changes soon after the Patriots secured their Super Bowl berth.

Rao said he and other students have reservations about the game day changes, noting that he sees why students, like one woman he spoke with who said she's upset she can't watch the game with her boyfriend, are frustrated. But Rao also said he understands the administration's measure as an attempt to ensure the safety and security of students.

"I believe the university has tried a lot of things in the past and this is a step that they felt they had to take," he said. "Naturally, it was not well-received at all, by students living in the dorms and living off-campus as well."

Amid Super Bowl hype and an administration anxious to quell possible disruptions, some are trying to find another way. UMass Junior Tim Gustave has invited over a thousand people to a Facebook event he's titled "UMass Amherst School-Wide Peaceful Protest (In Lieu Of Patriots Riot)," in the hopes that his fellow students would rather spend their post-game evening campaigning against social injustice than drunkenly destroying property.

"I have faith in you," Gustave wrote on Facebook. "Peace is more powerful than any act of stupidity and won't get you arrested or expelled from school."

Dan Glaun is a freelance journalist based in Queens. Alyssa Creamer is a Boston reporter who works as a Metro Correspondent for the Boston Globe and a digital producer at WBUR. Follow Dan and Alyssa on Twitter.

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Andrew Kalleen, with the fedora at left, alongside NYC Councilman Stephen Levin after his arrest in October. Photo by Jeff Young via Andrew Kalleen's Facebook page.

Andrew Kalleen asked the cop to read off a cell phone.

"The following nontransit uses are permitted by the [Metropolitan Transportation] Authority, provided they do not impede transit activities and they are conducted in accordance with these rules," the officer boomed in front of an increasingly irate crowd before ticking off a list. When he got to the part permitting artistic performances, those watching the scene on the G train platform in Brooklyn clapped. They thought it was over, that Kalleen had proven his right to busk for money on the Brooklyn subway platform, as hundreds of performers do every day all over New York City.

They were wrong.

Franco called for backup as Kalleen broke into a rendition of Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here." In the middle of the song, his instrument was jabbed at and then forcibly removed. The police arrested the musician to chants of "Fuck the police!" and video of the ordeal made headlines from the New York Daily News to the Guardian last October.

This week, the 30-year-old announced plans to file suit against the city and the NYPD. People have sued—and won—over this very issue in the past, and New York will probably be paying out some more settlements this year, according to advocates. It's the latest development in an all-out war against street performing—a practice that's been legal for decades—and one that has only been exacerbated since Bill Bratton became police commissioner again in January.

New York City street performance originated in Five Points—the neighborhood that Martin Scorsese chronicled in his movie Gangs of New York. It was "part of the culture along the docks," according to Jack Tchen, a history professor at NYU. "It came from people getting on and off ships from many parts of the world and having to learn how to coexist and talk to each other."

The clash of Irish and African-American cultures in Five Points birthed new forms of expression, like tap dancing. But the street performers were demonized by temperance-minded Protestants, Tchen says, who eventually moved away from the mass transit areas they considered crime-ridden and dirty.

Busking became a touchstone of life among the downtrodden. It became such a popular way to make money during the Depression that in 1936, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia banned it altogether. People protested for decades—including beat poets like Allen Ginsberg—until the ban was lifted in 1970. But that didn't stop cops from harassing street performers.

In 1990, Bill Bratton became the head of the New York City Transit Police. He was a big proponent of the " broken windows" theory of policing, which suggests that targeting minor crimes like fare-dodging and vandalism deters larger crimes. He's still pushing the same policy now that he's the police commissioner again (he served in the role in the mid 90s)—and last year he oversaw a massive increase in the arrests of panhandlers and buskers.

Kalleen had been busking long before the latest crackdown. He moved to the city from San Francisco six years ago and played duets with his roommate at the Bedford L stop in Williamsburg before he started going there alone. His favorite spot to play was the Metropolitan stop on the G train, because it was close to his home (he lives in Bed-Stuy) and because he had the most time to connect with his audience (the G train is notoriously slow). Commuters who frequent that platform know that it attracts some of the most polished performers in the entire system, and is far less frantic than popular spots like Union Square.

"It just has great acoustics," Kalleen told me. "People are there late at night waiting for 20 minutes, which means you can put on an actual show for them."

He soon became a full-time busker, which meant enduring occasional harassment from cops. He's been ejected from the platform six times before, he told me, but decided to make a stand during the widely publicized incident last fall. Because the officer had no reason to arrest him, he was ultimately charged with a Depression-era penal code violation, according to his lawyer, Paul Hale. After the charges were dropped, Kalleen decided to take the cops to task.

He's not the first. Matthew Christian, who plays violin, won a $30,000 settlement from the city after he was arrested for street performing in 2011 . Now he's the head of an organization called BuskNY that hooks performers up with legal help. He's had his hands full since Bratton took office.

"Historically, New York City has been a leader in public performance, and 2014 was sort of a change in that trajectory," he told me. "[Bratton] pushed Broken Windows and a lot of officers into the subway."

Kalleen found Hale, his attorney, through BuskNY, and now they're putting together a multi-party lawsuit that they intend to file in a matter of days. If they win, Kalleen says, he will pour the settlement into improving Bed-Stuy. He sees the issue as an abuse of power that extends way beyond subway platforms, although he considers what goes on there a vital part of the city.

"There is incredible art happening beneath New York," he says. "It would be so sad if we got to a place where it all stopped. Millions of people per day support it and enjoy it, and it would be an enormous hit to the city's culture."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

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The author with his finger inside of the Kiiroo Onyx. All photos by Vito Di Stefano

A crowd of a hundred or more had gathered in the Panorama Ballroom on the penthouse floor of the Andaz hotel in West Hollywood. It was a Thursday afternoon, and we were all attending the XBIZ 360 sex industry conference. Onstage was the Shockspot, once dubbed the "Rolls Royce of fuck machines"—a mechanized contraption of hard lines and metallic finish with a dildo affixed to its arm. Next to it, a man was gripping a Fleshlight, the famous ersatz vagina.

The Fleshlight was outfitted with a special attachment called a Vstroker. "What it does is it monitors your motion and transfers it to your USB drive that's plugged into your computer," said Vstroker COO John Ruskin, who was demonstrating from the stage. He explained that the company has partnered with the webcam porn site Flirt4Free to provide an interactive service—a virtual sex experience that would let customers get physical (well, "physical") with cam girls via the internet.

And with a jiggle of the tricked-out Fleshlight, the Shockspot's dildo arm jerked back and forth, each thrust punctuated by a robotic wheeze.

Is this kind of technology the future of sex toys? There's been a lot of buzz over the years about the growing field of " teledildonics," an ugly-sounding portmanteau that refers to the intersection of sex toys, electronics, and computers. And in an age when studies show that nearly one in ten Americans acknowledges using their smartphones during sex, the embrace of increasingly high-tech sex gadgets on a wide scale may seem inevitable. But as the technology gets more advanced—offering new options for long-distance couples, tech aficionados, and, yes, sex-cam customers—it's also apparent that translating sex to cyberspace is an immensely complicated feat rife with the potential for failed experiments, bad designs, unreliable technology, and insane-looking innovations.

"You have to basically translate all of human evolution's movement and gesticulations and everything else that involves sex and procreation into this tiny little piece of crappy hardware," said Kyle "qDot" Machulis, a robotics and virtual-reality engineer who runs the teledildonics blog Slashdong, when I asked him about the emerging field. "That's really hard. If you think about computers normally, most people are scared to install their printer."

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The term teledildonics was invented in 1975 by the information technology guru Ted Nelson, and in the years since many have suspected that computers would revolutionize sex. "Some day your sex life could be shut off for failure to pay your electric bill," the Chicago Tribune declared in 1993. That same decade, the company Digital Sexsations released one of the first teledildonics devices: the Black Box, which connected up to four plastic toys to an old-school online chat interface, letting a user control the vibrations remotely.

The Black Box is hilariously crude by today's standards, but many toy makers have embraced the idea of remote connections, developing vibrators that can be controlled through WiFi or Bluetooth. The New Hampshire-based manufacturer OhMiBod is going one step further with a new version of its smartphone app that will let you sync their vibrators to the heart-rate monitor on a smartwatch, translating heart beats into vibration pulses. Meanwhile, the company Comingle is currently in the middle of a $50,000 crowdfunding campaign for the Mod, a "multi-vibrating, open-source dildo platform" outfitted with a Wii Nunchuk joystick, Arduino controller, and hacker-friendly programming options.

New toys are constantly being invented and produced by toy manufacturers as well as independent designers, and many of the latest developments get regular coverage on tech blogs (not least Motherboard's "Future Sex" series). At the XBIZ 360 conference, one of the hottest presentations of the day came from the Amsterdam company Kiiroo, maker of two products just released that represent a new frontier in long-distance lovemaking.

The first is the Onyx, an elegant black jack-off toy equipped with outside sensors, ten contracting internal rings, and a Fleshlight sleeve. The second is the Pearl, a soft-white silicone vibrator that, if stroked, licked, or inserted, sends signals through a Bluetooth connection over a video chat platform back to the Onyx, creating for the lucky fella a nuanced intercourse experience in real time.

"I tested it myself," said Toon Timmermans, Kiiroo's co-founder and CEO, after the company's presentation. Though the products hadn't been released on the market yet, he said the company had already received thousands of preorders, selling out over half of its first batch. "We need to figure out a way of bringing people closer together," he said.

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Exciting though they may seem, the products are still relatively limited—while the male user can get serviced remotely, the Onyx can't control what's going on with the Pearl. But Timmermans says he plans to update the software to make the Onyx control the Pearl's vibrations, and eventually do even more. Some designers see much promise in this technology. Brian Shuster, CEO of Utherverse Digital and mastermind behind the virtual reality sex environment Red Light Center, imagines a time five years from now when devices like the Onyx will be in their fourth or fifth generations and can be paired with virtual-reality environments to offer what he expects will be remarkably complex, human-like sensations and experiences.

"You'll be holding hands. You'll kiss her on the cheek and she'll rub your shoulder. You'll be licking her vagina," Shuster says. "I don't want to do that on a Fleshlight. But when every sort of brush of the lips or lick of the tongue actually transmits the stimulation in both directions, of course— of course—people are going to do it. There's going to be consumer demand."

How realistic is this though, really? In the sex toy industry, some regard the teledildonics market with a skeptical eye.

"We're still trying to determine: Is it a trend or is it a fad?" says Robert Rheaume, president of toy manufacturer Jimmyjane, which specializes in elegant vibrators with a design focus. "For us, the jury's out right now. We don't have a definitive position on it. But we are looking at it and exploring it, for sure."

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The truth is that not all teledildonics toys make sense. Just consider the Je Joue, a vibrator released in 2007 that came with its own programming language. As Machulis explained last year on the Slashdong blog, the product never managed to catch on because it was too expensive (it sold for for £225, or about $400, at the time) and too hard to use. Also, he wrote, many women didn't seem totally seduced by the programming concept, which let users create their own "Grooves" through a USB computer hookup and swap their unique vibrator patterns with other Je Joue owners.

Even more daunting was the A10 Cyclone. A Japanese jack-off machine for men originally released in 2009, it promised to change "the course of masturbation history" with the help of a powerful engine and 49 rotating modes, including several "ultra high" speed settings. But watching it in action might make you think more of an industrial-grade food processor than a fun sex toy. And even getting it to work was somewhat complicated by the fact that it required use of a special R-1 controller, which was sold separately. (The newer Bluetooth-compatible version of the Cyclone, released last year, looks friendlier, but still very heavy duty.)

All of which points to perhaps the biggest challenge of high-tech sex toys. When you can get satisfaction from a more straightforward toy—like Hitachi's high-powered Magic Wand massager, first released way back in 1968 and still wildly popular today—you have to wonder whether it's worth the effort of using a complex, internet-connected device.

Perhaps it'll let you get close to a loved one from a long distance, or experience a new palette of sensations. But as Machulis points out, simply setting it up could also be a mood-killing headache: "You have to turn on your computer, hook up the toy, hope the toy has drivers on there, hope the drivers will talk to the toy in the correct way, connect to someone over the internet hoping that your internet connection is not lagging, talk to the same protocol as their toy, hope that their internet is not lagging, and that they have a toy that will talk to yours..."

And in the end, you might just end up resorting to the simplest tool of all.

Follow Peter Holslin on Twitter.

This week Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology released what they're calling their most comprehensive projections to date on how climate change will effect Australia by the end of the 21st century. Unsurprisingly it's not light reading. Australia is to be hit harder by climate change than any other country, and the CSIRO is "confident" that temperatures will increase, sea levels will rise, oceans will become more acidic, and snow depths will decline.

The most worrying aspect of the report is the prediction that temperatures in Australia could increase by more than five degrees Celsius by 2090, the highest predicted rise of any countries.

Compounding this are two reports there will be "more occurrences of devastating weather events," as well as "more frequent swings of opposite extremes from one year to the next." Dr. Wenju Cai, the chief writer of the report, says will all have "profound socioeconomic consequences."

He predicts that extreme El Nino and La Nina events—which are often associated with bushfires, droughts, and flooding in Australia—will happen once every 13 years rather than the current rate of once of every 23 years. (One example of a La Nina event is the 2011 the Queensland floods that killed 38 people and cost the economy an estimated $30 billion.) "It's a double whammy," Dr. Cai says. "It may be droughts one year, and then the next year there's no relief because there'll be flooding and extreme rain."

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Professor Will Steffen, a climate change expert and researcher at the Australian National University in Canberra, says that these changes to the climate will have "many serious impacts" on health, agriculture, infrastructure, and mining.

More regular heat waves and a gradual increase in temperatures will lead to more cases of heatstroke, and even death in extreme examples, as well as a general loss of workers' productivity. C hanges to the climate could result in "large reductions in crop yield," says professor Steffen, as well as heat stress and animals becoming tired more easily. He points to the loss of 20 to 30 percent of wheat and maize in Europe during the 2003 heat wave, which at the time was the hottest summer since 1540. Steffen warns that similar crop reductions could be seen across the Australian agriculture sector as temperatures begin to rise and heat waves become more common. These temperature increases will have a dire effect on Australian farmers, he says, as "there'll be more stress on plants and animals".

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These heat waves will also create more dangerous bushfire conditions and "increase the risk of more frequent and intense fires," which will especially impact rural areas. Compounding this, it will rain less often but the rains will be more intense when they do come, which will leave some crops waterlogged. If these dire predictions are correct, there will also be significantly more droughts in the agricultural zones in the south of the country, and as Steffen says, "we all have a very good idea of how farming suffers in prolonged and severe droughts."

Our electricity and transport infrastructure will also struggle in these conditions, with Steffen predicting buckling train lines and the like becoming more regular. As Melbourne's Metro trains are regularly shut down on warm days, this will make a problematic situation even more serious.

Climate change will also have a devastating impact on mining, one of Australia's largest industries. "Extreme heat can affect outdoor workers, reducing their productivity and endangering their health," Steffen explains. "Extreme rainfall can flood mines and close them down for long periods of time." This has already happened in the country, with many Queensland mines shutting down for extended stretches during the floods of 2011 and 2012. Mining makes up an estimated 5.6 percent of Australia's GDP, and the country is the world's largest exporter of coal, iron ore, lead, and diamonds.

Despite all this bad news, professor Steffen says that with quick action these dire consequences might be at least partially avoided. "You can't immediately stop the warming trend, it's going to take a couple of decades," he explains. "We need to stabilize the climate and need to start reducing emissions now. It's important that we get on top of this problem, we can cope with small increases, but it will be much harder to cope with the larger increases."

But with a change this big, it needs to happen at a massive level. "We have to have national policies, such as carbon pricing systems of some type, a renewable energy target and we need a continuity of policies," he says.

Steffen says that despite the seemingly disastrous nature of these reports for Australia, there is widespread acknowledgement that action must be taken, and many are already starting to act. We just better hope it's in time.

Follow Denham on Twitter.

In what might be the most face-palm-worthy fuck-up so far this year, two Italian Jews found themselves locked inside the grounds of the former concentration camp at Auschwitz on Tuesday. They attempted to escape through a window in the museum's visitor center, tripping an alarm. This summoned on-site security guards and eventually the police, who detained the men for several hours before moving them to a nearby police station for further questioning.

All told, the incident lasted about six hours, feeding concerns about resurgent European anti-Semitism in the process.

Riccardo Pacifici and Fabio Perugia, the president and spokesman of the Roman Jewish Community, respectively, had come to the site with Italian journalist David Parenzo. Along with two film crew members, they were covering the ceremonies marking the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the camp by the Soviet Red Army for Italy's Matrix talk show.

In addition to gay, Roma, Slavic, and other prisoners of the Nazi regime, over a million Jews were gassed to death at the camp. Even more were sentenced to slave labor—including thousands of Italian Jews.

The crew had received permission to film on the camp grounds after hours from museum director Piotr Sywinski, and were scheduled to be let out by guards at 11:30 PM. But when they finished early and found the main gates locked—and no guards present—they sought another exit

"They interrogated us until six in the morning—two Jews who had been locked inside the Auschwitz camp, where I lost some of my family," Pacifici told the Italian paper La Stampa. (His grandfather, a prominent rabbi also named Riccardo, was killed there in 1943.)

"More and more police were summoned until there were some 12 officers who held us in the camp," Perugia told Haaretz.

"We were not afraid but we were stunned by this farce, in which even the Polish police don't know what to do," Pacifici added in a tweet.

The whole affair, which eventually required intervention by the Italian embassy, became such a public relations nightmare that acting Italian President Pietro Grasso called the men to share his sympathies.

Although the two Italian Jewish representatives did have a point about the tragic irony of the situation, there's little to suggest this was anything more than a monumental failure of communication. Having suffered increased vandalism in recent years, and seeing a security alert at a site in the museum with an ATM and other valuables, guards say they just followed protocol. According to a statement by Polish police spokesperson Mariusz Sokolowiski as related to the Associated Press, the police were only called in because the Italians failed to provide any identification—most likely because the language barrier prevented them from understanding the guards' request. Sokolowiski does concede that the police could have been more helpful given that staff knew an Italian crew would be trying to get out around that time.

Of course, it's hard to fault those wondering if anti-Semitism factored in here. As recently as the 1990s, memorials at Auschwitz conspicuously downplayed mention of the camp's Jewish victims and implicitly excluded participation by devout Jews who wanted to pray. And even after years of concentrated rediscovery and embrace of Jewish history and culture in Poland, surveys in 2013 still showed almost a quarter of Poles holding traditionally anti-Semitic beliefs, with over half believing Jews enjoy undue control over global financial and media institutions—an increase from 2009.

Europe has also experienced a recent spike in anti-Semitic rhetoric and violence. In the wake of anti-Jewish slogans popping up in Germany last summer and violence in France over the past several months, the United Nations just held a summit on European anti-Semitism. The European Jewish Association is also pushing for the right for Jews to carry guns for self-defense and European Jews are immigrating to Israel in big numbers.

"Jews are targeted in Europe once again because they are Jews," the BBC quoted Ronald S. Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, as saying at the same Auschwitz memorial Pacifici and Perugia attended on Tuesday. "Once again, young Jewish boys are afraid to wear yarmulkes on the streets of Paris, Budapest, London and even Berlin."

So if the screw-up at Auschwitz was just that—a mistake—the attendant uproar does nothing to help Europe's image as a backwater of lingering anti-Semitism.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

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The days of record collecting before the internet were days when you knew what you knew and you had what you had. Music spread from dealer to dealer by way of tapes—or it didn't, in the case of collectors who considered themselves to be the most exalted gatekeepers and holders of occult knowledge and therefore had less fun and communicated with fewer people.

That's the way it was in the fall of 1982, when I started buying 60s punk/garage compilations as a 17-year-old in Sweden. My friends and I raided Ginza, the biggest of the Swedish cut-out mail order houses, for cheapo copies of compilations like Nuggets and the Pebbles series along with albums by the Seeds, the Sonics, the Chocolate Watch Band, and the Standells. My friends, who were older than me, provided context for the albums (So you think you are a punk kid? You know nothing! ) and motivated us to form a band playing Count Five, Seeds, and Kim Fowley covers.

Then, in 1984, the first two volumes of the Back from the Grave comp series showed up in the local import record store, and they were so much better than anything we'd heard we were baffled by them. It was like the first time you hear the Pagans or Pharoah Sanders or the Wipers. Me and my snotty little pals hadn't heard of any of the records or bands on those compilations, and were blown away by this constant stream of what could only be described as sacred sounds from the USA. Even to this day, most rock and punk bands I've heard can't match the intensity of a BFTG track.

Every Back from the Grave record begins with its jacket art, and it always tells the same sort of story: A bunch of zombie punks are reanimated to rid the world of the squares and douchebags that have turned it into an ugly place to live. It's a revenge fantasy, the cartoonish destruction of the last few decades of American music and culture by the spirits of the past, and it's hard not to take the side of the axe-wielding zombie punkers.

Nowadays, in an era when everything that has ever been sung, spoken, ukuleled, painted, collaged, or crafted has been recycled, recontextualized, cool-branded, and downloaded, I often feel that the old world wants some sort of vengeance on the new. The mass market is full of the reverberations of bits and pieces of the culture of the past that come to the present watered-down, commodified, regurgitated. The Urban Outfitters version, the shmuckification of the counterculture one retro T-shirt at a time. The garage punk zombie teens on the Back from the Grave LP jackets know all this, and they are pissed off. Tim Warren, the man who has been compiling these genius assemblages of primitive American shit music for the last 30 years, is pissed off too.

Back from the Grave Volume 1 came out in the fall of 1983. Tim and his label Crypt Records have been pyromaniacs of garage punk enthusiasm ever since, preaching a primitive mid-60s punk rock gospel around the globe, inspiring people to form bands, collect records, get laid, and get drunk, all in a manner that runs counter to the normal, hermeneutical traditions of record collecting. This month, Tim is releasing Back from the Grave volumes nine and ten after a 17-year gap since volume eight. After that last one Tim used to say that he didn't think there were enough killer records out there for another volume. Well, he was wrong: The two latest comps are some of the best collections of 60s garage punk I've ever heard.

BFTG releases are like an amazing collage, a great gumbo, or your girlfriends' sexiest outfit. Or, for that matter, the best mixtape you ever made.

Now, I've listened to plenty of garage comps in my day. There are some great ones, but BFTG is its own thing, like how the Cramps are their own thing. When Tim puts the obscure tracks together in a sequence the sum is much greater than the parts: Each consecutive crazed rock 'n' roll record hits the garage-punk sweet spot of our collective frontal lobe more precisely. BFTG releases are like an amazing collage, a great gumbo, or your girlfriends' sexiest outfit. Or, for that matter, the best mixtape you ever made.

Some compilation albums work, and some don't, and it seems very difficult to discern which components direct the work in one direction or another. I've been spilling a constant stream of BFTG comps on the turntable for most of my adult life, and you just can't fuck with them. They're like Picasso's Guernica or a perfect sausage and peppers hero. They are art that is primeval and perfect. Compare them to Jackson Pollock—it's in the pour. If you or I poured paint it would look like some asshole poured some paint. But when Pollock poured paint it became amazing and beautiful. The pour of Back from the Grave volumes nine and ten is mind-boggling.

So, where do the tunes come from? It's an old story: In the wake of the frenzy of Beatlemania and the British Invasion circa 1964, tens of thousands of American teenagers formed bands, some of them rooted in previous teenage frenzies like hot rod music or surf music or frat rock. (A parallel history could no doubt be written on how the arrival of the Beatles prevented " Surfin' Bird" by the Trashmen from being a number-one record in the USA, but that's punk conspiracy theory turf.) It was an act of cultural imitation that goes three layers deep: A black blues guy had his jams imitated by foppy Brits in Carnaby Street clothes who were then in turn imitated by white American teenagers draped in Woolworths clobber (imitating the Carnaby Street fashion, natch).

This resulted in musical alchemy. American mid-60s teenage garage punk has a primeval gut-wrench rev that blasts through your speakers, proving once and for all that rock 'n' roll is a poignant art form blacksmithed in the USA. There is some sort of oddly spiritual connection linking the visceral sound blasts directly to black rock 'n' roll, blues, and R&B, even as the teen bands imitating the Rolling Stones or the Pretty Things or the Dave Clark Five have no direct knowledge of the artists imitated by said foppy Brits.

Some argue that the first time the word punk as a musical term saw the light of day was in Dave Marsh's 1971 article in Creem magazine. Well, the term was in frequent use in the late 1960s, as a slew of collectors and rock fanzine writers were eagerly hoarding the crude, primitive, and genius 45s left by the legions of American teen bands in the wake of the British Invasion. This style was called punk rock: rock made by teen punks.

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The launch of the Back from the Grave series was the final stage of a three-step rocket: In 1972, the illustrious rock thinker/rock feeler Lenny Kaye convinced Elektra Records to let him compile and issue a double LP compilation of American mid 60s one-hit and no-hit wonders. The comp was called Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, and its cultural importance is only now starting to be understood. Lenny was one of the first people to realize that truly progressive (no, not in the hippie sense) rock 'n' roll gnosis occurred on the margins, and would reverberate for decades to come. Nuggets was not a commercial success, but like the Velvet Underground, like the Stooges, like the Ramones, a cultural landscape shifted in its wake, as the chain reaction resulting from the ownership and blissful enjoyment of this cultural artifact came to resonate and ripple in a myriad of ways. Mere months after the release of Nuggets, bands from around the globe had formed explicitly to explore this landscape, fumbling in the wilderness for primitive American rock 'n' roll sounds to scratch an omnipresent itch. In Australia, the Saints; in France, the Dogs; in the USA, the Droogs.

The significance of Nuggets has to be understood in the context of the past, because digital mass communication has fucked up our notions of obscurity and how information is disseminated. Back then, even the biggest singles didn't stay in the shops for long, albums, except huge hits, went off shelves rather quickly, and the taste-maker know-it-all record shop hadn't reared its Levi's 505–draped ass. For Lenny Kaye to convince Elektra top banana Jac Holzman that it was a good idea to gather a number of relatively obscure, mostly non-hit records and repackage them within a context is a mind-boggling achievement. According to a pre-punk zine interview with Kaye, there were numerous tracks that they wanted to include but couldn't because it wasn't clear who owned the rights, but what ended up being Nuggets is still awe-inspiring.

Nuggets begat the late and great Greg Shaw's compilation series Pebbles, a series which wasn't particularly worried about clearing rights. Shaw, who I'd argue is the Johnny Appleseed of American punk, had published rock 'n' roll fanzines since the mid 1960s. His Mojo Navigator appeared in the middle of the San Francisco rock scene in 1966. By 1969 it had evolved into a retro-rock connoisseur bible, exploring the lore and history of primitive American musics ranging from rockabilly to garage punk, alongside lengthy and insightful excursions into marginal British Invasion sounds. Bomp became a record label, a professional rock zine, and a distribution outlet for the sounds that came to be called punk rock. From 1978 on, Shaw compiled and released the Pebbles garage punk anthology series.

The release of Pebbles was timed perfectly with the boost in interest in all things 60s, a snacky side dish to the post-punk skinny tie power-pop entree of 1979/1980. Punk-era ears had gotten people used to raunch, and the avalanches of indie 45s had advanced the momentum of obscurity-seeking. The musical language of 60s garage punk wasn't as familiar then as it is now, either. To most, the 60s was pop and choruses and ringing Rickenbackers; there wasn't a distinction between the cutesy stuff and gruntiest and most primitive. This is certainly reflected in the Pebbles comps, as is Greg Shaw's personal taste, with its baffling adoration of melody sitting in counterpoint to garage punk raunch. Following Pebbles, numerous other garage-punk/garage-psych compilations started mushrooming by the early 1980s.

These were mostly rudimentary in execution. Information about the bands was limited, most of them were psychedelia-themed, and many of the early 60s comps would mix in lighter Strawberry Alarm Clock-type bands with the teen punks. Cue Tim:

I started putting together cassettes of cool non-reissued 60s punk 45s and one day said, "Fuck it! Put out a record!" I wanted to piss on all the lame-o comps that mixed together psych noodling with garage and proto-bubblegum and I wanted to concentrate on the primal teen-band gronk. My pal Mort Todd put together the cover art from my pathetic scrawling "rough art," and then I'm about to put it out and I needed a label name and I saw my Tales from the Crypt comics and said "OK!" I'd been wanting to do a 60s punk comp for a while, not that I had the greatest of collections as I'd only just started finding original 45s two years prior thanks to Billy Miller hipping me to Vic Figlar's auction lists and Goldmine magazine, but cos I'd been buying just about EVERY 60s garage punk comp LP and been disappointed with the bulk of them. You'd have two or three great tracks and 13 crap ones plus a horrendous "Groovy 60s" sleeve. No attitude, no anger, no snot—and attitude, anger and snot is PRECISELY what 60s punk is all about—so BOOM: HIRE MORT!! So I scawled together this ruff sketch of a graveyard scene with the gravestone and the zombie 60s punk kid shoveling dirt atop a bunch of CRAP albums and handed it to Mort and he expanded upon it with the zombie guy and gal crawling out of the ground, the bats, etc.!

Mort Todd:

I moved to New York City at 17, right out of high school, and immediately got started in producing comics and video. I got together with a few new friends, including Dan Clowes and Rick Altergott, and started publishing comics. Our first release was Psycho Comics #1. We had a launch party at the legendary Club 57 at St. Mark's Place and I got Tim, who had recently moved to NYC, to DJ. I drew a poster to promote the party featuring zombies dancing around a bonfire of burning Psycho Comics, and that certainly inspired Tim for the Back from the Grave album covers. For the first few covers he would give me a rough sketch with doodles of all kinds of hateful things happening to hippies by the garage punk zombies. I'd work from the sketches and amp them up a bit. I can only think of one time he had me change something on the cover and that was Grave 4. I had a hippie chick skateboarding in front of the Batmobile, about to get hit. Tim had me change it to a roller skater, which did make more sense as skateboarding was cool while the kind of people who roller-boogied were more worthy of ridicule.

"Attitude, anger and snot is PRECISELY what 60s punk is all about" –Tim Warren

It's been 23 years since the first Back from the Grave, and four decades since these sounds were first etched on wax, but they still sound fresh, the lyrical wounds still raw. For collectors and compilers, it seems like there will always be gold in them thar hills of the 60s punk scene, always new bands and songs to discover and digest.

There's something comforting about BFTG's enduring power. The teenagers who made that music had tapped into something great, and my teenaged self recognized that ineffable thing two decades later. Its power endures, while the pop cultural dreck produced in the following decades is chugging steadily toward oblivion. The 60s zombie punks on the comp covers will never die, and they'll go on decapitating and burying their imitators and descendants for a long, long time.

Johan Kugelberg runs the project space/archiving company Boo-Hooray. Follow him on Twitter.

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All photos by Stacy Kranitz

For the past decade, photographer Stacy Kranitz, the artist who shot this month's story on the Sausage Castle, has embedded with subcultures throughout America and this Saturday night, her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles will open at Little Big Man Gallery. Comprised of intimate and daring photographs from an alternative community called Skatopia in southern Ohio, the show presents a visceral take on this subset of American youth. She is one of our new favorite photographers—look for more of her work in upcoming issues of VICE's print magazine.

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Alongside still images, the exhibition will also include Kranitz's feature-length film, Jerimy, which documents the life of a boy she met at Skatopia. The footage is both beautiful an unnerving, and it probes the different ways the artist unabashedly utilizes and venerates the youthful sexuality of her muse.

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Still from Jerimy, a film by Stacy Kranitz

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Stacy Kranitz's From the Study on Post-Pubescent Manhood will be on view at Little Big Man Gallery, 801 Mateo Street in Los Angeles, through March 14. Come to the opening reception this Saturday, January 31, from 6:30 to 9:00 PM.

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Suge Knight is in deep shit.

The 49-year-old Death Row Records founder turned himself into the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department early this morning after he allegedly ran over one man and injured another in the parking lot of a burger joint in Compton, California. An argument with members of a film crew that began on the set for the NWA biopic Straight Outta Compton apparently spilled over to the nearby restaurant, and that's when someone died.

Witnesses told TMZ, who broke the story, that Knight's behavior at Tam's Burgers got the attention of security, who asked him to leave. Knight's lawyer contradicted this version of events to the local media, suggesting his client was "attacked" by two people. Either way, one man died and the other was hospitalized with non–life threatening injuries.

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The police haven't released the name of the deceased, but some outlets are suggesting it's Terry Carter, a friend of Knight's who showed up at the burger joint with him.

Knight's lawyer described the event as an accident, suggesting Knight hit the pedestrians while leaving. Police are treating it as a homicide, however. Late Thursday night, they held a press conference, and stated that Knight had run over the victim more than once. After turning himself in and being interviewed, Knight was arrested and his bail was set at $2 million.

The other victim named in the media, Cle Sloane—an actor from Training Day and End of Watch—does not appear to have suffered serious injuries.

While it might be hard to believe, the possibility of a fresh murder charge isn't the only thing that's making Knight's life hard right now. Last summer, Knight attended a party hosted by Chris Brown, and wound up getting shot six times. Then, in October, Knight and his friend comedian Katt Williams were arrested for stealing a paparazzi's camera.

According to Suge's lawyer, his health is in decline. He was hospitalized in November after taking a bad fall in his jail cell. He then passed out while receiving an X-ray and found out he had a blood clot in one of his lungs, according to TMZ. He's also been on blood thinners, and was still recovering from the ordeal when this latest fracas went down.

To make matters worse for Knight, he was due in court this week because of the camera incident. He has a history of blowing off court dates, and a history of violent crime.

Long story short: Knight's health appears to be fragile, it already looked like he was bound for prison, and now he's facing a potential murder charge.

Knight is famous, of course, for creating Death Row Records and being probably as responsible as any non-musician for putting the West Coast G-Funk sound in record stores and on the radio in the early 1990s.

Of course, Knight never really cleared his name—in the public eye, at least—for the 1997 murder of the Notorious B.I.G. His storied rivalry with Biggie's label Bad Boy Records is still a favorite topic of conspiracy theorists, but what happened in the parking lot seems a lot less mysterious.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

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A photo from a swingers party in London (but not the one written about in this article)

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

"Not ready yet, son?"

"No mate, sorry."

It's funny how polite people are at a gangbang. In the gloom, the young lad backs away from the couch where the middle-aged woman sits, her mini-skirt hitched up, legs open, visible to an audience of ten, maybe 12, guys. They move to let him through. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he couldn't rise to the occasion. No one gives him a hard time, though—the genial attitude of everyone there implies that this is an occupational hazard on the swinging scene. Nothing to get worked up about.

It's Saturday night and we're downstairs at Club 487, a new porn cinema that opened on a quiet street in South London at the beginning of this year. Rather than face a swift demise, as many had predicted, it instead appears to be going from strength to strength, if tonight's shenanigans are anything to go by.

Jane and Mike are a couple in their early 40s who have been swinging for over a decade and arranged to come here tonight on a popular sex meet-up forum. They are accompanied by Adrian, a dapper Asian guy in a black suit, and nine or ten eager acolytes, men in jeans and trainers with hungry eyes who smoke vapes and suck Red Stripe from cans bought at the newsagent's next door.

After a cursory tour by the management, who are gracious to the point of obsequiousness, as though Jane were Angelina Jolie (there aren't many female visitors to Club 487), the couple go into one of the smaller "private" rooms. Here, they hold court beneath the beaming eye of an HD TV showing How Stella Got Her Tube Packed. One man is tasked with manually stimulating Jane while the others watch and manually stimulate themselves. Jane, who is sitting between Mike and Adrian, seems to be getting into it. But then—

"Shit! Your hands aren't half cold."

"Sorry!" says the hapless fluffer, pulling back quickly. After a moment, someone else steps in, and soon Jane is ready to entertain her fans. Trousers around ankles, pricks in hand, the men patiently await their turn.

After about ten minutes there's a break for Jane to get her breath back. People stand around chatting, comparing notes on the scene.

"Have you been to Paradise in Dagenham?" one guy asks.

"Once," says someone else. "I didn't stay long. It's moody in there."

"I'm going down later," says Adrian. "I arranged to meet three women off the forum at 11. If it is moody, I'll just stick with them."

"Cap d'Agde [a notorious nudist resort in France] is where it's at," says Mike. "Puts England to shame. Try it. Fucking everywhere. By the pool, in the sauna. Ten o' clock in the morning on the beach. It gets a bit much in the end. After a week, the women can't walk and the men feel like they're passing battery acid when they piss."

There's respectful laughter. Clearly, Mike and Jane know what they're talking about. Mike and Jane have lived the life.

"Anyone been to Rio's in Kentish Town?"

"Yeah. It's a dive."

"This man's been waiting patiently. Very polite, he's been."

As they talk, another man kneels before Jane and works his magic. Soon she is sighing, her head thrown back, the sheen on her face bright in the gloom of the subterranean screening room.

"I think Jane's ready again now," says Adrian. Jane nods in ecstatic assent. Mike holds her, keeping a careful eye on the proceedings, eliciting neither signs of discomfort nor pleasure.

"This man's been waiting patiently," says Adrian, motioning towards a middle-aged gent with a Partridge-like side parting. He's wearing cords and a sensible fleece. "Very polite, he's been."

Jane nods, beckoning him forward.

Slightly grossed-out, I wander into the main screening room. A few odd-balls are there, away from the action—an old geezer with a large collection of carrier bags who looks like a very unwell Michel Houellebecq, and a guy in a quilted football manager's coat and a beanie. The movie they're watching shows a young woman wearing a dildo that looks like a cucumber wrapped in silver foil.

Back downstairs, the smell of amyl and condom rubber is strong.

While the cinema's former premises in Islington attracted a largely gay clientele, it seems the new venture has a wider appeal. No doubt the buzz on online swingers' sites has helped. When Mike and Jane write up their field report of tonight's session—which they're sure to do—it will surely only bring more punters down.

"It's word of mouth, innit?" says Danny, the manager. "I can't tell you how happy I am with the way things are going right now. Slowly, slowly, catchy monkey. Now we've got this lot coming, the sky's the limit."

Back downstairs, the smell of amyl and condom rubber is strong. A green strip light affixed to the skirting board illuminates the path from the stairwell to the private room where Mike and Jane and their friends are still enjoying themselves.

"Not in there, love," says Jane to one guy, who, full of consternation—worried that he's committed a cardinal faux pas—backs off straight away. Now Adrian and Mike take their turn.

"Oh! Mike, come on—we're a couple of straight guys. I'm not into that!"

I guess the darkness makes it difficult to see precisely what you're grabbing.

Adrian and Mike take Jane to a dark corner for a breather. It sounds like the breather she's getting is very strenuous indeed.

The respectful, almost reverent, atmosphere means there is very little conversation. Bizarrely, the on-screen porn dialogue—they're now showing Blowjob Impossible—at times seems to provide commentary on the real-life action ("Oh my, let me see what you've got... that's so big.") There is certainly no coercion here at all—only consensual, if rather grubby, adult fun.

A few minutes later, Adrian announces that Jane needs a breather again. He and Mike take her to a dark corner. Shortly it sounds like the breather she's getting is very strenuous indeed.

Finally it's time to go. Adrian leads Mike and Jane past the main room.

"Thanks guys," he says, and waves, like a publicist escorting a royal dignitary out after a Q&A session. They are followed by the guys who came in with them. The only people left are Houellebecq and two Spanish blokes drinking beer and talking football.

"Great guy, that Adrian," says Danny as I leave. "Friendly. Positive. Good to be around. Makes all the difference in a place like this."

He's right, of course. What just happened may not be everyone's cup of tea, but the whole thing was conducted with respect and decorum, and certainly looked a lot more fun for the participants than a night in front of the laptop.

Follow John on Twitter.

This article was written by VICE Greece and VICE Germany.

Thanks to the Greek economic crisis, a divide has been grown between Germany and Greece. Germans—the bail-outers and austerity-imposers—have been spouting anti-Greek rhetoric while Greeks—the austerity-hit recipients—have been spouting anti-German rhetoric.

For the past few years, the Greek media has been reveling in self-pity, painting a portrait of German Chancellor Angela Merkel as an evil old maid looking to suck the life out of the hard-working, hard-done-by Greek people. In Germany, it's quite the opposite: Op-ed writers routinely portray Greece as a fund-sapping blight on the nation.

The situation only got worse in the last week, with radical left-wing party Syriza winning the Greek general election after pledging to renegotiate the terms of the country's debt with Germany. Now both countries feel like they're engaged in some kind of rivalry.

But is that really the case? We walked around the center of Berlin and the center of Athens to ask young people how they actually feel about each other.

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Beate (Berlin): I stopped following the story in the German press—they keep trying to humiliate that country and it makes me too angry. I have a few Greek friends from university, and through them I know how hard life is over there.

They have all these crazy taxes that no one can pay. The media in Germany want us to think they're stupid and lazy, but I know that is not the case. Austerity just doesn't work.

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Konstantinos (Athens): I've been to Berlin and I loved the city and their sense of organization, but as a people they were a little cold and sort of racist against Greeks—at least the older generation. When you tell them you're Greek they look at you sort of strange. This was the feeling I got the one week I spent there.

But I liked their way of doing things, their and that they looked clean and refined. I think I would live comfortably there.

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Jan (Berlin): I don't think the EU should threaten the Greeks with cuts just because they don't want austerity anymore. I think Germany just has to help them now so that they can stay in the Euro.

The EU came together for a reason—solidarity. It makes no sense to turn your back on someone the moment they start experiencing difficulties—the whole alliance would be kind of pointless then.

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Katerina (Athens): I am a waitress so I service quite a few German tourists. I get the impression that Germans are so-so. There are those who are nice and kind but some are more annoying. One thing is certain when you get a German customer: They won't be tipping.

They generally give off a negative vibe and I think it's because of that Merkel madwoman.

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Robin (Berlin): I guess it would be great for the Greeks if they got their old currency back, but it wouldn't be good for the rest of the EU. Although they wouldn't be able to afford foreign technology. Also I'm not sure about this left-wing guy.

The crisis is partly Greece's fault. But it's as much Germany's and the EU's fault. Take the weapons Germany sells to Greece—we basically force them to buy expensive equipment worth billions of Euros. I mean, the Greek army is better equipped than our own! Why, I wonder? That's also a reason they don't have money—they spent it all on our weapons.

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Christos (Athens): Usually when I think of Germany I think of something negative because of World War II. Before the crisis, the negative view I had was because of its history, now I can say that my opinion has been affected because of the political situation too.

However, I don't equate politicians with citizens. We cannot undermine nor question some aspects of German culture. They have their own mentality about life and going about the everyday, more stringent regulations that frame the way they live.

I believe they have a better educational system and maybe that's why people come out as more stringent. I don't agree with those who say that the Germans are bad people—they simply have superior interests.

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Clara (Berlin): I think that a country shouldn't leave the EU once it's joined. That's what the EU is for, countries supporting each other. If they lose the Euro now, this would make their crisis much worse.

Also, traveling to Greece is much easier when they also have the Euro. I traveled to to Thessaloniki and Chalkidiki three years ago and it's beautiful. They have so much culture! And I didn't feel like they did not like me because I was German. Everyone I met was really relaxed—I've never experienced Greeks as being unfriendly.

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Konstantina (Athens): I've travelled all around Europe, but in Germany it seemed to me that people didn't really make an effort to speak English with us. The Germans are a very good people, but they take life too seriously. Greeks speak loud and generally give off happy vibes—the Germans are way too quiet.

I loved Berlin though! It's a great city—the streets are clean, there are lots of bars, their museums and restaurants are nice, and they all dress well, but I didn't really like their local cuisine. Also anything produced in Germany is of very good quality—even if you buy a blender you can be sure that if it's from Germany, it's a guarantee.

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Film still from 'Hard to Be a God'

"This is not Earth. It's another planet." So begins Aleksei German's Hard to Be a God, the late Russian filmmaker's adaptation of a Soviet sci-fi novel published in 1964. Said planet is named Arkanar and has yet to advance beyond its own Dark Ages, making this a primitive foray into the realm of speculative fiction despite being set 800 years in the future. Stationed on the sphere is an earthling named Don Rumata, who was sent (along with several others) as a secret emissary. He's something of a cross between Cassandra, the tragic figure from Greek mythology who was gifted/cursed with the power of prophecies that no one would ever believe, and Luke Wilson's character in Idiocracy, an intergalactic anthropologist incapable of directly intervening in the world's affairs.

Words scarcely do justice to this repugnant milieu. Death and disease are the norm. Blood, pus, gore, shit, and all manner of other bodily fluids are strewn across almost every scene. Naked bodies abound, with German taking every opportunity to emphasize the most grotesque aspects of the human form. With few exceptions, Rumata's experiences don't inspire much sympathy from the miserable peasants he's tasked with passively observing. Some of the worst are divided into two warring factions: the Blacks and the Greys, whose differences are ultimately moot. Both are vying for power and neither is defined by their scruples.

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Film still from 'Hard to Be a God'

The artistic and intelligent are being systematically purged from the impoverished villages where Hard to Be a God takes place, furthering the descent into filth and barbarism. Arkanar isn't as retrograde as it is because its people simply haven't reached their own Enlightenment yet, because any efforts to bring about progress have been violently halted. Rumata (whom the locals believe to be the bastard son of a pagan god) is the deity alluded to in the title. His difficulty comes from his inability to make this purgatorial locale less of a shithole. "Maybe the abyss belched you out," one man says to Rumata. "Maybe you're God's son." Even holiness is expressed via bodily function here.

His one active role is to protect the select few who are trying to make Arkanar a better place, and it isn't much of a spoiler to say that he isn't very successful. Few bat an eye at the worsening conditions. For them, this is business as usual. Their present combines all the worst qualities of the past and none of the advantages of the future.

That such an ostensibly nihilistic worldview manages to captivate is owed largely to elegant, flowing cinematography that's far more graceful than Arkanar deserves. Vladimir Ilin and Yuriy Klimenkofollow's camera follows Rumata so closely that we almost see things from his perspective, with a number of passersby looking directly at us, breaking the fourth wall. It's an uncomfortably immersive experience that gives new meaning to the phrase "nice place to visit, wouldn't want to live there."

German died before the movie was finished, and the work his wife and son put into completing it on his behalf makes for a hell of a swan song. The shoot is said to have taken as long as six years, and the result is a three-hour black-and-white opus of despair with plenty of gallows but not much humor. There's no light at the end of Arkanar's tunnel, but there is opportunity to reflect on the base impulses that keep societies entrenched in backwards thinking. For the viewer, anyway—no one there seems particularly inclined to do more than eat, drink, and fight. This may not be Earth, but it isn't exactly alien.

Follow Michael Nordine on Twitter.

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A student protest against fees in London last year. Photo by Adam Barnett.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

What do four years at university and cheap electrical appliances have in common? "Not a lot" would usually be the answer, but if the principal at a Scottish university gets his way, you might soon be able to obtain a money back guarantee on both. Outlining radical plans on Wednesday, professor Craig Mahoney of the University of the West of Scotland (UWS) said he believed that if students fail their degree course, they should entitled to a rebate on their tuition fees. UWS are already looking at putting this in place and if successfully implemented, it would amount to one of the most drastic shake-ups of the student finance system since tuition fees were introduced.

Delivering a speech at an event in the House of Commons—a venue more accustomed speeches about to hiking up fees than handing out refunds—Mahoney explained that if students are accepted into the university on the basis that they'll succeed, and then fail despite having, "attended and participated in all the support and development opportunities we offer," the university is considering processing a refund on their tuition fees.

On the face of it, this seems fair enough—it must be pretty galling to fork out tens of thousands on tuition fees and then have nothing to show for it except piles of half-assed essays, novelty Guinness hats and letters from Student Finance. While Scottish students aren't subject to fees and are unlikely to be anytime soon, overseas students and those from other parts of the UK pay between £7,000 [$10,500] and £10,000 [$15,000] for each year of their studies at UWS. I don't know about you, but if flunking my finals and getting a dreaded Fail (No Award) was going to be soothed by a £30,000 [$45,000] check from the university, it would be something worth considering.

It seems that UWS haven't been overcome by a fit of altruism, however. This proposal doesn't give power back to students in any real sense. Instead, their proposals are all about increasing the university's attractiveness to lucrative foreign students, or "customers" as Mahoney puts it.

Despite the his assurance that, "this isn't all about monetization of higher education," he also said the UK's publicly-funded universities need to, "become more commercially sensitive and begin to act more like private industry... to allow us to remain competitive across the globe." Which sounds exactly like thing thing he said it "isn't about."

Student groups have slammed the refund proposal as a "marketing gimmick." I spoke to Gary Paterson, community campaigns convenor at NUS Scotland about it. He drew comparison between the policy and "no-win no-fee" legal firms. "On the face of it, the proposals look rather friendly and an obvious recruitment hook. But this 'Claims Direct' style recruitment is the latest in a string of marketing ploys that focuses on students as cash cows. Students resent the idea that education is a product."

Jade McCarroll, in the final term of a social sciences degree at UWS, was similarly scathing, raising fears that fee refunds could compromise academic integrity at the university. "I think it's in keeping with the whole idea of student satisfaction in the provider/customer sense, and it will put pressure on staff to pass as many students as possible. Although it might be tempting for anyone who has spent that amount of money to take this up, we need to be asking why our university is treating rest of UK and overseas students as cash cows in the first place."

That's the burning issue here—are universities simply degree factories churning out graduates with employment-ready 2:1s or do they serve a deeper role in which society values education for its own sake? And can a balance be struck between these visions? Although this is a conflict which has been raging for decades, the UWS "no degree no fee" concept has brought it sharply into focus. And it's thrown another open question into the mix: If degrees are just products you pick off a shelf—and if success and failure is emphasized and quantified in a marketable way—who's to blame if you fail because you spent three years cultivating a case of liver cirrhosis? At what point do lecturers become liable for students not passing a particular class? In some cases, blaming universities would be like putting a metal dish in your microwave, watching it blow up, and blaming the manufacturer.

Although UWS have stated the move is about meeting the "needs and desires" of their students, Jack Douglas, the Student President at the university, revealed that there hasn't been any consultation on it yet, with the Student Association unaware of the proposal prior to this week's speech. Douglas said that offering a cash incentive to fail would do little to help students struggling with their degrees, and warned against the creation of a "two tier" system in which academics would, potentially, be under less commercial pressure to pass state-funded Scottish students. "Any investment should be used to make sure people don't drop out in the first place and to help them get their degree, not as a ploy to get more students in," he said.

The university Principal's speech in London this week was billed as being one of "Dangerous Ideas." The reaction from student bodies suggests that they at least agree on the "dangerous" part, although probably for different reasons.

Follow Liam on Twitter.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

As we already told you, 25 is a hell of an age. Technically, you're still young—you're still an idiot, probably, you still wear skinny jeans, and it's still acceptable to spend Sundays eating cold pizza in your bed—but also you are not at all young. Maybe you found a gray hair. Maybe you have a wrinkle. Maybe you make a very slight, very quiet noise when you get up off a sofa. Either way: Death is getting closer. Can you hear that sound? That quiet, throbbing, gnawing sound? That is the sound of oblivion, an oblivion you are staring directly into.

Despite your body aging—and your mind getting to the point where you're dancing in a club and you go, "What is this shit? What is this SHIT? I refuse to dance to this song. This isn't music, these are just noises"—it's not all bad. While you will rightly mourn the lost first times of younger days—your first cigarette, your first drink, your first fuck—it would be totally illogical to think there is no novelty to growing up. And while no one's ever going to commission an entire series of articles based on people's first experiences of, say, enjoying ironing, the softer-focus novelties of your late 20s will come to fill in the gray areas of a life that to this stage has probably felt more like a series of flash grenades exploding in a nightclub than a meaningful journey.

Here are 25 things you'll genuinely start enjoying once you slam into the brick wall of 25.

1) Get Your Financial Shit Together
Hey, kids! It's your dad here, and today we're going to talk about why sometimes getting a loan to cover your debts is cheaper than constantly overdrafting your checking account and bitching about it! Later, I'm going to teach you the fine art of "actually opening bank statements to see if anything is fucked up with them," and in a bit we're going to closely watch some commercials for banks on TV to see if switching to another one might work out to be beneficial for you.

Then, to round off the day, we're going to have a serious chat about not owing our bank any loyalty just because we had a student account with them once. Doesn't that sound fun? Well, no: It sounds and is intensely boring, but the freedom from anxiety that results from the dull drudgery of the above can be fucking exhilarating. Having your financial shit together is way more fun than getting a text from your bank on the second day of the month telling you that your overdraft limit has been met.

2) Decide What Friends You Want to Have Some Memories With
At 25, you're about three years away from the infinite summer I like to call "The Summer Where Every Fucker You Know Gets Married." It is a summer of verandas and not swearing around elderly aunts and realizing that covertly doing coke around toddlers isn't a good idea. For you, it's going to be a tricky task, being around all that pleasantness and love, because look at you: You are doomed to be alone.

Alone but for your friends, that is. At 25, you're straddling two sets of friends—those hazy, grew-up-with-them knuckleheads you used to hang around with at school, and actual adult friends you actually see every week and go to the pub with. You have a job now. You have shit to do. You have weddings to go to and banks to think about, and now that more than a quarter of your life has been dumped down the toilet, your time is a finite and precious resource. Do you really need to stay on especially good terms with your freshman college roommate?

The way I figure it, old people's homes in some distant floating space future in which we will all compost down into death are going to be amazing: PlayStations, HBO shows beamed directly into our ocular nerves, endless Vines, us all remembering the 90s together until we die. When I am locked in the iron lung that will inevitably become my tomb, I want to be laughing and joking with my friends—my real friends, the ones it isn't a chore to be around—reminiscing about the cool shit we did in our 20s. So pick them now, and make some memories.

[body_image width='720' height='960' path='images/content-images/2015/01/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/30/' filename='25-things-you-should-start-doing-now-youre-25-205-body-image-1422621801.jpg' id='22790']Tidy up when you take a shit, man. Photo via Flickr user Tony Newell

3) Learn Something New
In my early 20s, before I became a walking, moaning diabetes risk, I used to think the lamest thing in all of creation was grown-ass people picking up a new hobby via the medium of adult learning courses. What, you want to learn stuff? In your spare time? Neerrrrrrrrrrd.

But now I get it: I haven't learned anything new in a really long time, and it's fun to learn something on your own terms, without being lectured to from a podium. And here's another thing I do with every second of my fucking day: look at a screen. So hell yeah I want to learn to, like, climb rocks, or keep butterflies, or play badminton. As long as I am looking at Twitter one less hour of my life, then maybe I will have a shot at being happy.

4) Listen to Your Parents
You're an adult now, and seeing as they can't ground you or chew you out for smoking, your parents are increasingly irrelevant—somewhere you go when you want a dinner, two old people who look a bit like you and keep calling to ask if you're eating your vegetables and making friends. And yeah: Your dad might be a bit boring on the surface ("There's only two things I like, son, and that's watching baseball and thinking about baseball"), but try getting him down to the bar and see how fun he is after three picklebacks. Not only will he be full of loads of stories about how he used to sleep around before he met your mom, he'll also be full of sage (if hokey) advice, plus he doesn't understand your world of Netflix and flash mobs and pen drives, so you'll feel way younger afterward. Get to know your parents. They're way cooler than you think.

( Unless they are dead.)

5) Get Some Basic Home-Maintenance Skills
You know how the lights keep going off in your apartment? You know you can fix that yourself, right, without having to call the landlord? You just switch out the lightbulbs. Or replace a fuse, which is just swapping two very small things that you can buy from Home Depot. Assembling furniture without screwing a shelf on the wrong way around is so satisfying it might push you toward enlightenment—harps sound and angels sing when you put a plant pot on a small side table and the whole thing doesn't collapse and explode into flame.

6) Fucking Do Something You've Always Wanted to Do
I've always wanted to go to New York. "I've always wanted to go to New York," I tell people, wistfully, normally when they come back from New York. Do you know how modest and shitty a dream that is? I could do that right now. I could go to an airport right now and do this thing. It would cost, like, $2,000, and that's with excessive spending money for all the bagels I'm going to eat. If you've always wanted to do something, just fucking do it. You're 25. Who's going to stop you?

7) Be the Coolest Uncle or Auntie Possible
Maybe you have actually birthed a human child out of your body or that of another. If so, congratulations on having to be responsible for every remaining second of your life until you die. If not, just find the nearest younger cousin or kid nephew or something like that and be the absolute coolest uncle or auntie you can be.

Oh, what, your dad doesn't buy you Legos because you got a load for Christmas? Well, guess who just got you some Legos, homie. Oh, what, your mom won't play Mario Kart with you because she's too busy doing everything else you require to stay alive? Well, guess who's about to beat you around Koopa Troopa Beach using Bowser, sucker. The goal is to make the kid like you more than he likes his actual parents, then breeze your way home as soon as he starts crying or taking a shit.

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Photo by Bruno Bayley

8) Do Something with Your Weekends
Netflix is kind of like smack if smack combined the not-having-to-move a whole lot with letting you watch all seven seasons of The West Wing. The fact that Netflix programmed that "Are You Still There? You've Watched 100 Episodes of Prison Break in a Row and There Aren't Even That Many Episodes so You Must Have Looped Around and Watched Some Again" feature says it all: Soon, the streaming service will alert the authorities of your death if you log 60 continuous hours of The Office.

It's easy to lose a weekend to Battlestar Galactica, and then another, and soon you'll be like, "Nah, I can't come out—I've got a season finale to get through," and then your friends stop calling, and then in five distant years people will mention your name and ask what happened to you and they will go, "Oh, you know. They just got really boring." This can happen, and your weekends are where it gets you. Go to art galleries. Go on a hike. Go anywhere you're not allowed to have your hideous, unwashed genitals just splayed out there like smashed ham.

9) Learn to Cook at Least One Decent Meal
If you can cook exactly one 8/10 meal, you can get people to sleep with you. (If you're good-looking, you can get away with that meal being 7/10—a decent steak, or a stir fry that isn't made with burger meat.) Here's how it works: Invite them to your house, open a bottle of wine, cook really flamboyantly in front of them, make like a pie or a tagine or guacamole—or an apple crumble: People will fuck you for apple crumble—then just immediately have sex with them straight after. It is a basic human reaction to want to bone when you watch someone turn a pile of cooking apples, butter, and oats into a delicious crumble.

[body_image width='683' height='1024' path='images/content-images/2015/01/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/30/' filename='25-things-you-should-start-doing-now-youre-25-205-body-image-1422621012.jpg' id='22786']Beer chicken is good because it requires you to drink a little bit of beer first. Photo via Flickr user James Savage

10) Learn How to Roast the Shit Out of a Chicken
Take a chicken. Rub some of that fancy salt that comes in a box on it. Probably some olive oil. Cut two lemons into quarters and shove them up the cavity where its ass used to be. A bit of thyme if you have it. Roast it for somewhere between an hour-and-a-half and two hours. Boom. You just roasted the shit out of a chicken. The skin is crispy and the meat is delicious. Flip it over and dig the oysters out. Eat a thigh like you're a caveman. Shred some leftover breast meat and make Singapore noodles for your dinner tomorrow. You just roasted a chicken, dude! You're amazing!

11) Never Let Your Battery Die
When you are in your early 20s your dragged-through-a-hedge, late-to-work, I-went-out-on-a-Thursday-and-didn't-sleep-at-all unreliability is a cool personality trait. You're the quirky lead in the teen movie of your life! You're like Zooey Deschanel, if Zooey Deschanel woke up in some stranger's dorm and brushed her teeth with her finger to make the taste of asshole go away! You just ordered Domino's to the office! You're so fucking young!

But when you slam into 25, bosses lose their sense of humor about you turning up at 11 AM smelling like rimming and Ouzo. Here's a tip: Charge your phone to full capacity before you go on a night out. To do that, you will need two chargers: one for home and one for work. This $10 investment means that when you wake up with a banging headache—and, like, you're on a beach—you can text your excuses to your boss, answer any where-the-fuck-are-you phone calls, get back to emails so your peers don't think you're a complete douche, and get a cab to take you to your apartment for clean pants and then immediately to work. You're so 25, man! You're still making the same terrible, irresponsible party decisions, but you're totally owning them!

12) Start Editing Your Past
By the time you've hit 25, you'll have done some stuff in your youth that will render you stiff and puce with embarrassment: You'll have been kicked out of a bar. You'll have genuinely liked Evanescence. You'll have been the worst.

So start editing those bad bits out. You know that guy you knew from school who, every time you go to the bar, reminds everyone about that time you couldn't do a chin-up in PE class? Let's get rid of him. Love letters you wrote as a teenager? Burn them. The gap year you took? Erase it from your resume. All those shitty clothes you got a little bit too fat for two years ago but don't quite have the heart to throw away because they remind you of your lithe, knife-between-the-teeth youth? Fire them into the fucking sun.

13) ...But Go Back and Laugh at Your Youth
You used to have an eyebrow ring, for fuck's sake . You would stay up until 4 AM writing a novel that you will never show anyone. You bought a crushed bouillon cube thinking it was hash. Dig out your old poetry journal or MySpace profile or something and laugh at the wreck you once were. In a way, it's a fucking marvel you made it this far.

14) Realize That Getting a Ton of Groceries Is Cool
Pre-25, most of my supermarket experiences involved getting one bag of supermarket cookies and four jars of those baby sweetcorn things. Maybe a multipack of Slim Jims? I don't know. Do we need ketchup?

Open your eyes to the fact that going on a food-shopping rampage is amazing. You know how you go to a grown-up's house and they have a bunch of different things in their fridge, not just two different kinds of mustard, Bloody Mary mix, and an onion? You could have that at home every day, if you just go to the supermarket once a week and get shitloads of food—a massive multipack of chicken, some stuff on sale that you might freeze, vegetables, a big pack of yogurt, toilet paper, spices, and some frozen fries you will forget to take out and will inevitably go as a soggy mass into the trash. A real big shopping trip can rock your world. Until you've bought three four-packs of tuna because "they are a really good price," you've not really lived.

[body_image width='768' height='1024' path='images/content-images/2015/01/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/30/' filename='25-things-you-should-start-doing-now-youre-25-205-body-image-1422621158.jpg' id='22787']That's you, that is. Photo via Flickr istolethetv

15) Save Animals or Something
Even if you're just donating $5 a month to charity, you should start making your impact on the earth slightly less shitty than your previous 25 years have been. Like: Cocaine destroys swaths of rainforest. Every time you flush a toilet you piss away almost four gallons of clean water. You, personally, are worse than an old fridge full of aerosol cans, on fire, strapped to a nuclear submarine, in the Niger Delta. Rescue a cat or something. Volunteer. Find a charity you actually give a shit about and find the best way to donate your money or time to it. You've spent 25 years being a selfish fuckhead; treat yourself to a new type of happiness that can only be attained through not being an asshole.

16) Start Giving Change to the Homeless
Next time someone asks for a bit of change and you have a bit of change, just give them that change, dude. Don't think about what they are going to spend it on. Don't replay those scare stories you hear about the homeless scamming idiots like you at 50 cents a throw and then retiring to their villa in Grenada. There's a guy on the pavement with a shivering dog because he does not have a house with a chair in it that he can sit in instead. It costs about $1 to be briefly decent to him.

17) Learn How to Live with Someone Else
Wipe crumbs off your surfaces, do your washing up promptly, aim your piss into the actual toilet, and—as your office manager probably had to remind you with a passive-aggressive all-office email this week— if you take a heinous shit in the toilet, flush it away. It is your shit. Who the fuck are you if you don't feel obligated to flush away your own shit?

18) Start Doing Your Weird Sex Stuff While Sober
Youthful doorway sex is all well and good, but until this point it's probably been fueled by the kind of adrenaline that only really hits when you've been drinking like you've been fired face-first into the sea out of a cannon. Sex after 25 is great: You know what you like, you know what you don't like, you know what you can get away with, you're really fucking good at it, and you've built up a decent enough wad of bedding to relax on afterward.

[body_image width='1024' height='768' path='images/content-images/2015/01/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/30/' filename='25-things-you-should-start-doing-now-youre-25-205-body-image-1422621324.jpg' id='22788']Damn, gurl, you got any room on that clothesline for me? Photo via Flickr user portogallo2007

19) Look After Your Body
You know how you're tired all the time and lethargic? There are vitamins that can help that. You know that weird clicky shoulder you have? A sort of dull click, the shoulder makes. A sort of thup. Get a doctor to look at it! Maybe you just need a really good massage, or maybe you have a rare and undiagnosed shoulder disease. A doctor can tell you that thing.

Because it turns out that Hulk Hogan was right about taking your vitamins—in a way, wizened old men in leotards are the smartest dudes alive, which makes it so weird that they choose to dress like sex offenders. Anyway: Tighten up, catch a few Zs, eat a multivitamin now and again. You'll feel great for it.

20) Own One Nice Thing You Would Save from a Fire if Your House Burned Down
Pre-25, the only things I owned that were worth saving from a house fire were this one good pair of socks I had that have since developed a hole, and maybe, like, my passport? I don't know. My keys? Would I need my keys if my house burned down? I don't know. Now I own a really nice set of knives. There I'd be: no socks, no passport, house burning down in the back, walking away, smiling with my knives. (If I had to pick just one, I'd pick the big knife.)

21) Get a Job You Like
Obviously the world is in ruins and most people are lucky to have a job at all, let alone one they like, but at 25 you are at that sweet spot of not really having a lot of responsibility but also having remnants of that youthful "Fuck it, I'm going to Thailand for six months" attitude you once had. If you're ever thinking of switching careers, or going back to school, or packing it all in and going freelance, or moving countries, now is about the best time to do it.

22) Give a Shit About Politics
Even if you're wrong, it's good to push yourself out of the fog of ignorance and start, like, watching the news and understanding some of it. Maybe you've been interested in politics for years—if you have ever smoked a joint in the same room as a Che Guevara poster, then that counts—but it's time that you step up your game.

It's actually really buoying to have an informed opinion about something, especially when you win an argument in the bar just because you took the time to read an entire article in the New Yorker. So read some pamphlets. Get mad about stuff. Join a march, if you feel you have to. Give a shit.

[body_image width='922' height='1229' path='images/content-images/2015/01/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/30/' filename='25-things-you-should-start-doing-now-youre-25-205-body-image-1422621951.jpg' id='22793']Art. Photo via Flickr user Klovivi

23) Stop Trying to Be Your Heroes
Doing a load of drugs and staying up late noticing things won't make you Hunter S Thompson. Talking really quickly about feet doesn't make you Quentin Tarantino. You're a fully formed person, now. You're locked in. Stop saving up to buy the exact same leather jacket Drake wore in the "Fuckin' Problems" video.

24) Brunch
You're going to get really into brunch. It's not a real meal, but as your nights out get shorter and your hangovers get longer, you're going to get really fucking into brunch. Then you'll complain about brunch later. It's the cir-cle of liiiifffeeee...

25) Embrace the Novelty of Growing Up
There's that whole theory about how every cell in your body is replaced over each seven-year stretch of your life: all your bones, all your veins, that weird bump you have on your forehead. It's sort of true, sort of false, but the analogy is pretty neat: You are a different person, wholly, from that rail-thin 18-year-old you used to be, with that mop of hair, remember, blinking your fresh young eyes against the bright morning sun of hope.

Think about it like this: If you're 25 now, you were 18 the year the first iPhone came out. Now look at iPhones! You used to be an iPhone, and now you're an iPhone 6! You have a camera on the front and the back now! You can capture slow-motion video! You are a lot wider than you used to be, but weirdly also flatter!

It's kind of good, that change. Unless you committed a series of murders or something, you are a better person now than you were then. You are fuller and better-rounded and more comfortable with who you are. You've probably got a better haircut or draw your eyebrows on better. There's a high chance also that you wear better jeans. That's something to be celebrated, right? You're not young-young any more—you'll never be the person who invents new slang ever again; nobody will ever refer to you as a "wunderkind" when you do something well, since you're just expected to be competent—but that's not a bad thing.

A lot of people fear age: They'll never do things for the first time again, fear that the urgent, butterfly-rush of love will never strike them in the stomach again, that they will fade into mediocrity, their life increasingly becoming one long trip to an IKEA.

But it's not like that. Aging is about finding new things you love rather than desperately clinging on to the old things you used to. Don't be one of those shitheads in the Cereal Café in their pajamas talking about how much they miss the old Ghostbusters.

Follow Joel on Twitter.

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Illustrations by Tom Scotcher

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

You haven't had a shit day at work until someone threatens to kill you and means it. Or until you've had to see to a tiny baby who's been burned repeatedly with cigarettes. Or until you've been so scared you want to call the police but can't in case it will get back to your employer.

Welcome to life as a children's social worker in London.

Child protection means working with children who are at risk of or suffering "significant harm"—i.e., something that will have a significant impact on their health and/or development: physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, emotional abuse. It could be indirect, too, like seeing or hearing someone else being mistreated. Or witnessing domestic violence.

I used to work in child protection, but now I work with "looked-after" children—when the local authority takes on some of the child's parenting. Unaccompanied asylum-seeking children generally come under the category of looked after. These children can be placed with friends or family, but usually they're in foster care. Sometimes, they're put in specialist residential placements, in secure or psychiatric units, or what are, effectively, youth prisons.

Mostly, I visit children at home with their families. I carry out assessments and find out how things are. If there are risks to the child, I try to work out how serious they are and what can be done to minimize them. Things like parents using drugs and alcohol, or parents who are violent, mentally ill, or have a learning disability that affects their ability to take care of their children. These kids might be referred to us by police following the arrest of a pedophile or gang member, or by the school because the parents aren't managing. As part of the process we talk to teachers, doctors, and anyone who's relevant. If we're really concerned and the parent doesn't agree with us, we might need to go to court to have a judge decide what to do.

Parents are often anxious when you visit. That's understandable. Some go to huge efforts to clean up—reassuring on one level, but often not where the worry lies. I drink a lot of tea. Having a cup of tea with someone is like saying, "Let's build something together." Sure, if I go into a house with dog shit on the floor and a sink full of mold I might be like, "Oh I've just had one in the office, thank you," but usually it's a sign that the family is at least trying to be welcoming.

Other visits are awful, though. Most days I'll get put down. I was told by one parent, "It's ridiculous you think you can wear that cross—how can a person like you think you'll ever be close to God?" With some clients I feel physically sick before I have to go see them because they're so aggressive. Their hatred scares the shit out of me, but somehow I have to be professional. These are people the police would never go see alone, or without stab-proof vests, mace spray, and radio contact—but we're sent in with no one knowing where we are and armed just with a mobile phone. I've downloaded an app so my boyfriend can see where I am, for all the good that will do.

These are people the police would never go see alone, or without stab-proof vests, mace spray, and radio contact—but we're sent in with no-one knowing where we are and armed just with a mobile phone.

You have to remember that, in most cases, these people are victims themselves. When children are exposed to severe violence and drug use from their parents, they don't have a model to follow. There are parents who've been through such terrible abuse themselves that they project onto you. We're the focus of a lot of people's anxieties. There have been high profile social work failures but, really, those cases tend to be workers set up to fail, with unachievable case loads. None of the serious case reviews that I've read found the reason for a death to be solely down to incompetence. Incompetence in the face of impossible case loads is much more common.

I'm lucky that my borough is relatively small and that I have good managers. My case load isn't as high as some of the horror stories. In some boroughs that Ofsted has noted as failing, social workers might have 50 families at once. How can you do even the basic work, let alone be able to remember all the children's birthdays or what they need? Seventeen families is the most I've had, and there are times when that feels so overwhelming I don't know what to do.

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At the moment, I have 15 children. With looked-after children, you tend to work with fewer kids, but they need more support. In one week, I had a teenager scream at me in anger because I didn't agree with her. Another cried because she couldn't go home for Christmas. Two ran away. Two threatened me with stabbing. And that's just the active ones. Trying to hold on to what the quieter ones need in all the chaos is hard.

I'm contracted to 35 hours a week, which is a joke. I often work 50 hours, but 60 is not unusual. None of that overtime is paid. We get two days off on TOIL per month, but that really doesn't begin to cover it.

There's a ton of paperwork, too, which is basically just done for Ofsted. With looked-after children there are seven forms we have to complete per child—some of them several times a year. The families don't give a fuck about the plans we write, though. They care about the conversations we have and the things we do, but there's no escaping it even if it is a massive waste of time. It's so, so frustrating.

A lot of the time, you can feel powerless to help because the thresholds are so high. There was one little boy when I was in child protection; the kitchen where he lived was unused for cooking, but filthy—with a greasy film over everything, a fridge three quarters-full of compacted ice, and no door on the oven. He was just being fed little snacks. The relationship between him and his parent was so bad. The parent clearly had serious mental health problems but it was really hard to pinpoint what they were because they wouldn't agree to psychiatric assessments. I found myself in tears, having nightmares about the boy. But the court wouldn't have agreed that was grounds to remove a child.

Another challenge with social work is that all children adore their parents—even when they're completely hopeless. If parent are angry with me, what will the children do? They have a loyalty to them.

When you look at the way social workers are portrayed on shows like EastEnders, you'd think it's easy to take away a child from their family. It's not. We do everything we possibly can not to. The first child I argued should be removed was the baby with the cigarette burns. That's the threshold. I expected that it was going to be an emotionally intense job, but I had no idea just how much blame and criticism flies around. We operate in an environment driven by fear, by people trying to cover their backs and point fingers. It's terrifying because you could end up being sued if something really bad happens, and it's not a situation you have control over.

The government's recent cuts haven't helped. So many supportive and preventative services have had budgets slashed. Women try to leave violent men and the accommodation we offer is so shitty I get why it might not seem like such a bad idea to go back. I work in a building where we don't have recycling because it's too expensive, where the taps don't always work, where washing-up sponges are a luxury. It takes the piss. And don't even ask about the plans for children's services to be privatized—I will literally leave if I see the kind of cuts to children's social work that have happened for people working in probation or learning disabilities.

Women try to leave violent men and the accommodation we offer is so shitty I get why it might not seem like such a bad idea to go back.

So why do I continue to put myself through this?

I'll give you an example. We got involved with this mother because she was a heavy drinker. During one of her blackouts, she assaulted her child. It was horrendous. I thought, There's no way this child can stay with this family. But with a great deal of difficult work with the parents, support from the grandparents, and the family drug and alcohol court, gradually the situation shifted. The mom became more reflective, the children did better in school. Years later, I got a Christmas card from the granny saying that the little ones are doing amazingly well, that they're back with their mom, who now runs alcohol support groups.

Of course, that's not going to happen every day. But although we can't always see the results of the work we're doing at the time, that doesn't mean it's not making a difference. If a young person is in a really bad place, they need someone alongside them, to hold them together like a parent would. Hopefully this won't just make their life better but might prevent the whole fucked up cycle starting all over again when they have their own kids. That means the world. So, although this job drives me crazy and makes me cry, I'm not going anywhere just now. Because if I don't do it, who will?

As told to Rachel Segal Hamilton.