Doom metal really hasn't changed that much since Black Sabbath more or less invented the genre. Things have been taken to their logical extreme, of course, and some bands have wonderfully embodied the belief that end of days is either immanent or, at the very least, imaginable. The parameters of doom are specific, so when a band does it well and avoids sounding derivative, it's amazing. That's what Hiram-Maxim pulls off in their upcoming debut.

This track, "Visceral," builds into an apocalyptic fervor before dissipating into a cloudy haze and ending before you've had your fill. Thankfully there's a whole album of these brutal-but-beautiful goodies. Even better, it's going to be released on Aqualamb Records—a label that specializes in publishing beautiful 33 1/2-esque picture books alongside their audio releases. You can preorder it here.

HBO's True Blood may have popularized the Southern vampire, but are there actually real blood-sucking beasts lurking in the bayou? We visited Father Sebastiaan, who claims to be a "godfather" figure of the vampire world and a member of the Sabertooth clan. He works within the vampire community of Louisiana fitting fangs and throwing modern-day vampire balls where would-be Draculas party and sip blood.

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More VICE Guides: Dating Rich Girls / Adulthood / Self-Esteem / Raving. Photo by Ben Shapiro

You are exactly the kind of person who would be at a place like this, at this time of the morning. You are here, you've been here a thousand times before, and you'll be here until the sun breaks.

The usual debris is all here, too: torn envelopes and a swamp of bottle tops, plastic bags, ashtrays, dip dyes, dirty shoes, and wandering hands all caught in the piss-weak glow of one eco-friendly lightbulb. Everyone's doing internet drugs and listening to wedding disco, and five people with heartbreak in their eyes have turned the small bedroom into some kind of cocaine call center. Where are you? Where are your friends? Someone said this was the kitchen but it looks more like New Year's Eve in a Brazilian super-prison.

You could be at any party in any part of the country. You could be any age. Ultimately, there is very little difference between a ninth grade smoke out and Hudson Mohawke's housewarming. Nothing ever seems to change. All these parties are the same. But hidden somewhere within this kingdom of grinding teeth are the rites that will define your young life.

Which is why we thought we'd finally get around to piecing together The VICE Guide to House Parties: a kind of Anarchist's Cookbook to deploy against people who still think it's acceptable to pick up that acoustic guitar.

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Photo by Beth Hiley

MAKING AN ENTRANCE

If you're male, you've probably already mastered the art of making everyone at a party hate you before you've even arrived. But if you're new to this game, just remember two things: after 2:00 AM, "it's winding down now tbh" really does mean "fuck off," and people on comedowns don't generally like being disturbed at dawn by a massive gang of hammered people screaming the While Mom Isn't At Home song, even if they did bring an extra Rolling Rock. Although, on the other hand, fuck it and fuck them; it's a house party. If they don't like you, they can always call the cops.

For girls, it's a lot simpler. Never has there been a house party at which girls were not welcome. So basically, ladies, just show up whenever, wherever, and however you please. Show up on fire if you want; you'll still get in ahead of anyone in a sports jersey.

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Photo by Matt Leifheit

GET DRUNK, NOT HAMMERED

Whatever your gender, it's best to show up at least a little drunk. Not hammered: drunk. Hammered is morose; hammered is sat grimacing alone in the corner; hammered is daring the neighbor to go on, call the fucking police, so hammered can laugh its head off as it's led away into the dancing blue lights. Drunk, for the purpose of this article, is defined as the healthy buzz normally experienced around the sixth beer. Drunk is being alert enough to charm and chat; drunk gets you remembered in a good way, drunk helps you dance but not fall over.

Arrive drunk at midnight. Arrive drunk in a gang. Barge in the door with plastic bags full of booze. Make no effort to find the hosts. Secure a location. Light a cigarette without asking. Hijack the quietest conversation and make it the loudest. Find the person with the gear and charm it out of them. If you show up the right amount of drunk, you'll leave with whomever you want.

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Photo by Rhys James

BEING THE DJ

Hold the phones, guys: DJ Jazzy Jeff is here to play a selection of tight tunes for us all to boogie to! Oh, wait, no, it's not Jazzy Jeff, it's you, and you're trying to "drop" Burial at 11:30 PM.

Basically just don't do it. You've had six drinks, you've only listened to the same ten songs since you left school, you can't actually DJ, and the host's Wi-Fi is feeling unwell. A good house party is about harmony and coming together; it's not about obscurity or pomposity.

At some point, when everyone's drunk, they'll probably start singing along to something from your collective past which you may totally fucking hate. It could be Weezer, it could be the Spice Girls—either way, they may look silly, but the bastards in the corner rolling their eyes look worse. You shouldn't be on the sidelines, you should be in the middle of the ruckus, spilling every drink within arm's reach.

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Photo by Rhys James

BEING THE BAND

Fuck off with your music, mariachi man. Put away your acoustic guitar before I eat your acoustic guitar, stop rapping unless you're actually in A$AP Mob, and if there happens to be a hand drum nearby, don't fucking hit it. You're in college, not Stomp.

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Photo by Emma McKay

PISSING OFF YOUR PARENTS

Fact: Every single dad who'd get mad at the idea of a house party happening under his roof also has one semi-legendary bottle of booze he's been saving for years and not once taken a sip of. Tonight, it is important that you are the one who finds it.

It's normally whiskey. ("I'll crack out a glass of this the day I retire," say dads.) Sometimes it's more exotic, something green and lurid-looking that a friend of theirs brought back from a vacation. ("He had a heart attack pretty much immediately after—bad golf swing, down in one—so that dusty bottle reminds me of Barry.") Dads attach unnecessary weight to middlingly expensive bottles of alcohol, and it's your job to puncture their laughable Don Draper daydreams by drinking them. It will be at the back of a cupboard or cabinet—you might have to reach past half-bottles of vodka or some long turned-to-vinegar port to find it, but it will be there—and is best enjoyed among a party full of people who are way too drunk to fully savor the expensive flavor notes, or even get any in their mouths. Nothing enhances the taste of a 20-year-old single malt like knowing someone will get written out of a will because of it.

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Photo by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

DRUGS

You've moved on from the dad-booze and are now talking about the Bushwick street art wars with some French girls. French girls love that shit. Judging by the shapes their faces are making and the tense, terse atmosphere, this is a cocaine party, but that doesn't help really. Every party seems to be a cocaine party these days. Even if everyone keeps talking about how there isn't any cocaine.

Finally, you find your friends huddled together in the bogs, like hostages in an embassy siege. Still, you're glad; at a house party your drugs crew is like your own personal Stand By Me. You stick together, you know who has the bumps and the dabs, and if anyone tries to muscle in, you pass the buck to someone else—"It's not really mine to give away, pal, sorry." Except it is yours to give away, that's the beauty of it. Drugs aren't cool if you don't share them; no one likes the guy sitting in the corner on a beanbag keying a gram of showbiz to himself while staring intently at your sister. Pick your players, get sorted, and get out there to lord it over everyone else like you're the kings and queens of turbo-brain-smash land.

Oh, and if you're the kind of person who takes smack to a house party, fuck off.

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Photo by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

HAVING FUN

Remember why you came here in the first place: the tribal rites of a Saturday night and all that, the pageantry of it, the stupidity, the chance of meeting your next ex, the feeling of total nothing and utter everything all at once as the blinkers of the working week are torn away. A bit of fucking madness. You want to dance with some good looking art students, or models, or whomever, and you want to fall over a sofa while "CoCo" makes the floor shudder.

You're not there to have a fight with your friend, or talk about gender politics, or cry in a toilet. You're there to have fun before you have kids.

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Photo by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

FOOD

If you remember anything about party food, the party wasn't worth remembering at all. And if you put vegetable chips out, you're your own grandma and you deserve to have your place trashed.

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Photo by Rhys James

WHO TO HANG OUT WITH

There are two major fuck-ups people at house parties make: they either hang out with the same person all night, or they stay in a huddle of the exact friends they came with, nursing beers and muttering, "This party sucks." Yeah, it's definitely the party that sucks, guy, not the six haircuts sitting in the corner checking Twitter and worrying about the last bus home.

Be the change you want to see in the house party. Strike up a conversation with the chubby guy in the V-files pants whose sofa you stayed on that one time. Don't persecute the two girls with the cartoon unicorn hair, give them a beer. Use the garden smoking area as an amphitheatre for your libido at its most charming. Back scratch with the gurn crew. Talk to the host a bit so they invite you to the next party. If anyone finds anything weird in a forgotten corner or room of the house—absinthe, horse tranquilizers, a samurai sword—you need to be hanging out with that person. If you leave a party having only talked to the same people you talk to every other day of your shitty life, then you have fundamentally failed.

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Photo by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

WHO TO AVOID

You aren't in the house's designated Room 1 any longer—you're upstairs, in the bedroom-cum-chillout-zone, with a bunch of sad bastards with wispy beards rolling their tits off, squinting into the middle distance and slowly wigging out to "my boy Hugo's new mix." These people suck. They've followed you all your life, and you can't work out how they keep finding you. You've moved from the suburbs to the city, and yet they're still here. They've always been here. Maybe they have your Facebook password and come to every party you get invited to.

When you were a teenager, they were listening to Dillinja, then it was Digital Mystikz, now it's probably J Dilla or deep house or something else that people used to like three years ago. They're the bumfluff Time Lords, forever stinking up house parties and rubbing their hands together when they speak, forever telling people to come to their terrible, terrible night at some jazz club next week.

WHO ELSE TO AVOID

Foreign students who get black-out drunk and start fighting people because they can't understand what anyone is saying; anyone who wants to talk to you about Berlin; anyone mixing cocktails.

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Photo by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

PISSING VS. FUCKING: THE RULES OF THE ONLY BATHROOM

When I say the word "toilet" to you, what do you think of: yawning ceramic chasm for your turds to splash into, or a sort of cold stout stool for you to fuck on? At a house party, it is both. Therein lies a philosophical problem: if you are going to have sex in the bathroom, where is everyone else going to defecate, piss, or vomit? The answer is "in the garden." If you must use the bathroom for sex, do: just be forewarned that when you walk out panting and adjusting your underwear, a line of about eight people—each of them brim full of piss, wobbling like an overpoured pint—will be really, really mad at you. Plus the bathroom will smell like a very sweaty bag of pork rinds. When people think of your genitals, do you want them to think also of pork rinds?

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BREAKING SHIT

If you break something, don't panic, think: How expensive and irreplaceable is the thing? Did you step on a PlayStation, or did you spill a Schaefer's over the Ark of the Covenant? Because PlayStations are easy to replace—they're covered in most domestic insurance plans, and at worst the party thrower will have to go without FIFA for a few weeks. Anything more significant might be cause for an apology. But not, like, a groveling one. So you broke a plate: so what. You did a few lines off the only remaining photo of their grandma: big deal. You smashed up a grandfather clock that was awarded to the same grandma for her services in a WWII munitions factory. Mmm, maybe a bigger deal, but even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day, amiright!?

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Photo by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

TIDYING UP

What are you, a maid? If you do the smallest amount of tidying up—some cigarette ash coaxed into an empty can, a bottle Zeppelined vaguely toward the trash—you are subconsciously signaling to the rest of the group, "The party is over. One of us is secretly a mom." Get in, get fucked up, and leave that place looking like The City of God.

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Photo by Joanna Fuertes-Knight

HOOKING UP

Someone's bringing in "Rip Groove" slowly, nicely. Looping that squiggly beat that makes it feel like your guts are falling away from your body. You drop into a kind of un-PC holiday camp limbo and the person you've been working your way across the room toward for the last hour starts to laugh at how funny and weird you are. You stand as the drop comes in, then you move closer. Before you know it both sets of hands are rubbing and sliding across nylon, denim, and skin, like you've just purchased each other for a considerable sum and are looking for dents in the paintwork. Still no lipsing. It keeps going like this, on and on till you're both wondering if the other is secretly married.

And then they fuck off and start talking to someone whose gender you can't quite make out behind a Mishka hoodie. No worries, though: only cheesy fuckers go out to get laid, and tonight you're a fucking spaceman.

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Photo by Bruno Bayley

FIGHTING

If we were to map statistics about fights at house parties on a bell curve, the mean would occur around the 11th grade. Throwing a punch is required entry to most high school parties. But as people get older most of the guys who used to start the brawls fade away, either from being shunned by everyone else or getting stabbed after clocking the guy nobody knows standing in the kitchen next to the steak knives.

But no matter your age, if someone pushes you it's only natural that you will want to kick them in the face. The difference is that now there's a part of you that wonders if this might be your best chance of getting wasted while smoking indoors tonight, and you aren't going to let a little thing like self-respect get in the way of that. It really is a testament to the power of addiction that there aren't more fights at house parties.

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Photo by Emma McKay

DEALING WITH THE COPS

Statistically, at least one of your neighbors is a dick, and as such they have been twitching their curtains at you since your first guest showed up with a four-pack and a little cigarette made of weed. If this is the case then at some point the police are going to turn up, dicks swinging, to smash the party. Such is life.

The key here, obviously, is to be as chill as possible. When they knock on the door, turn the music down, or at the very least the bass. Find the girl at the party who went to the most expensive private school and send her to talk to the police until they go away. Give it 45 minutes—just enough time for the angry dad who called the fuzz to fall into a false sense of brink-of-sleep security—then hammer the music back up into the red zone again, pummeling some more Haxan Cloak through his bedroom wall. Take that, you fucking narc.

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WHEN TO LEAVE

MIDNIGHT: You can leave now under the guise of going on to another party even if you're just going home to eat Skittles and jerk off to infomercials.
1:00 AM: You can leave now and most people won't notice you're gone. The trains are running on the nights and weekends schedule and someone will laugh at your haircut while you stand on the platform but who cares, you've still got time to grab a slice before curling up in your bed alone yet again. What's the fucking point of anything anyway?
2:00 AM: You can leave now and the girl/boy you've had a crush on for ages is going to be walking round the party you just left, asking your friends if they've seen you, and then hook up with one of them because you left.
3AM: You can leave now and you just missed the party of the century. Oh man, it was wild. Sam broke a vase and Ant kissed a girl!
4AM: You might as well just stay now. Sunday brunch is only a few hours away.

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HOME

And that's that. There you lie, alone but not alone, safe in the knowledge that you have both rinsed that terrible week out of your system and ruined the next one for yourself. Your heart sounds like a Fela Kuti track, all weird beats and screams. You spent about 80 bucks and gained absolutely zero new experiences from it, but like life, it was beautiful while it lasted. You realize that even if you don't remember it, it was about the moment, not the memory.

Because however much these experiences seem to blend into one, they are at least experiences. They remind you that you're still alive, and that you're not yet one of those people who perches smugly on sofas with their significant other, bragging about how, "We never really go out any more, darling. Do we?" Before going to bed with their t-shirts on and falling asleep on opposite sides of the mattress.

So yeah, same time, same place next week. Wherever that may be.

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The author and her mother

I was baptized into the the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints when I was eight years old. My parents were devout; they were married in the temple just three weeks after my mom returned from her mission. We went to church every Sunday, attended church events every week, and prayed together every night.

Once a month, members were invited to bear their testimonies in church, which meant going up to the microphone and sharing declarations of their faith. Good members would do this regularly, often crying when they spoke, overcome by the presence of the Holy Ghost. My parents always encouraged me and my brothers to go up. I was terrified. I couldn't think of anything original to say, and I never cried, but it was expected so I did it.

As I got older, I started to wonder: Why can't I cry? Why don't I feel anything? I remember trying desperately to produce emotion as I watched my peers become overwhelmed with feeling during church camp. I willed tears to come out of my eyes. And for a moment, I thought I felt something—but it quickly dissolved, out of my grasp.

I believed that the church was true, but I didn't feel what everyone else felt. I wanted to dress fabulously, not modestly. I wanted to hang out with boys and talk about boobs. Other parents considered me a bad influence on their kids, sometimes even excluding me from gatherings. And my mom was beautiful, vibrant, and ambitious, so she didn't exactly fit in to the Midwestern LDS culture either.

My parents got divorced and my mom fell in love with a non-member, who she eventually slept with. Riddled with guilt, she confessed immediately, but the priesthood had her excommunicated anyway, as premarital sex is considered the worst sin you can commit next to murder. For three years she was not allowed to participate or speak in church—she essentially wore a big scarlet letter on her chest. Fitting in was harder for all of us after that.

When the humiliation of the repentance process was over, we moved to Utah. We'd been performing as ventriloquists together and I'd been writing songs; this was our shot at a new life.

Then we met Adam.

My mom and Adam (I've changed his name) met at an LDS singles' dance. He looked strikingly similar to someone from a dream she'd had years before, she said. In Mormonism, it's common to pray for and look for signs from God, so when she met this man she'd dreamed about after all that hard repentance work—a man who had something magnetic about him, something special—it seemed clear that it meant something. It had to be a sign.

My mother is one of the smartest people I've ever met. She's brilliant, funny, and incredibly loving. But she has trust issues. Not the kind where you don't trust people—that's my thing. My mom can't help but trust everyone. Since faith takes precedence over facts in Mormonism, and trusting the prophet is imperative, it's already conducive to a certain kind of blindness. By the time she met Adam, her judgment was considerably clouded.

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The church believes that Joseph Smith used magic stones to translate the Book of Mormon from ancient golden plates which were given to him by an angel. As the story goes, one section of that book—known as the Sealed Portion—contained profound revelations and was hidden from the world, to resurface in the last days. And that's tricky. Because if one dude can show up out of nowhere and become a prophet by translating mysterious scripture that nobody really gets to see, why can't some other dude show up with the Sealed Portion?

Adam was open about the fact that he was a former polygamist who'd once convinced his community that he was a prophet. Now he was a single man who frequented Mormon dances. Then he met my mom. They started spending time together, and with the help of others who claimed to be believers, he began convincing her that the Sealed Portion had been revealed to him to translate, thus ushering in the end of days. He had samples. He claimed the church knew. Eventually, he succeeded in making her believe that he was the new, true prophet of God.

I remember feeling uneasy about him at first. By that point I was all too familiar with the range of evil and extraordinary men who were drawn to my mother's trusting nature. There was a constant stream of stalkers, scholars, and sociopaths trying to fight their way into her life. So when Adam came along, I was wary. But I was still only 12. He won my heart by complimenting my singing and buying me things like Gushers and Doritos. Snacks were a big deal in our household.

I ended up believing in him entirely by accident. I was looking through my mom's computer when I found some emails he'd sent her: He told her she was chosen by God to do his work in these end times. End times—as in the second coming of Christ. As I read on, it dawned on me: Adam was a prophet.

And finally, after feeling so little for so long, I was moved to tears. It suddenly made sense. Of course I had never fit in—because my family was special, destined for something great. The church had made me feel unfit, unimportant. But this was important.

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I told my mom what I'd seen. She explained everything, and for a little while, it was bliss. At Adam's direction, I started building an Angelfire website for a foundation he was creating to help the needy as a part of God's plan. I caught glimpses of the Sealed Portion on the computer. And best of all, he told my mom that her greatest purpose in life was her kids. Specifically, me. I was going to change the world, he said. When she relayed this to me, I thought I'd burst with pride.

He began having revelations. First, my mom was to become his spiritual wife (read: sex). Then we needed to sell our extra possessions and give the money to the poor via the foundation. We had a big yard sale; she sold the wedding dress she'd been saving for when she got remarried.

The next revelation said my brothers and I couldn't live with our mom anymore, because her mission was too dangerous. Rather than go to my dad's house in California, I stayed with my friend Sean's family for a while to be near my mom. I have warm memories from my time there: I played video games, watched UHF for the first time, and wrote essays about Weird Al. For the most part, it was life as usual.

Except that I was harboring this massive secret. I was pretending everything was normal, all the while believing that I had been chosen by God. I snuck downstairs at night to talk to my mom on the phone in hushed tones when Sean's family was asleep. I took it very seriously—and whenever I'd feel left out or alone, I'd console myself with the idea of, "Oh yeah, well just you wait... we're bringing about the Second Coming."

I knelt down to pray one day at Sean's house. "Dear Heavenly Father, I'm thankful for this day," I started as usual. "I know that Adam is a true proph—" I began to say, and I stopped. I'd gotten this strange little nagging feeling. I couldn't finish the sentence.

I missed my mom. I knew huge sacrifices in this life were important to reach salvation in the next, but I'd begun to worry about her. She seemed sad.

My brother and I went to visit her in the place Adam had assigned her to live. It was a single room in a dark, depressing resident hotel. The bathrooms were in the hallways, and the hallways were filled with ex-cons. That night, one admirer stood yelling outside the building, throwing pennies at her window until he got inside. He pounded violently on the door and screamed threats as we held each other until the police came. That was her life, and she was alone. I was scared for her.

I didn't know yet, but Adam had had another revelation. He'd been sending men to have sex with her. She had pleaded with him to change his mind, but he'd insisted it was a test she had to pass. Submit to these men, he threatened, or be separated from your family for eternity. When she tried to find ways around it, an abusive pimp took over and forced her. My mom wasn't just sad. She was suicidal.

Finally, one of Adam's men came to do the deed with her and broke down crying. The man was shaken by the reality of her living conditions and, having participated in the deceit, confessed that it had all been made up. He moved her out of there that night.

It all came crashing down. Adam was not a prophet. The foundation bank account, where my mother's money had been going, actually belonged to Adam's girlfriend and new "first wife," who had participated in the hoax.

My mom and I sat on the hill outside Sean's house when she came to tell me the truth. She was in tears. Suddenly, I didn't care about being special anymore. I just wanted her to be OK.

And she was—we were. She went to therapy; she's getting her PhD in media psychology now and she's an activist working against human trafficking. She still sees the best in people, somehow. I dealt with it through music and songwriting, my own version of feeling the spirit. Adam went off the radar for a while, but later reemerged with the completed Sealed Portion. He would go on to attract many more followers.

We're not Mormon anymore, and we might not be chosen by God. But damnit, we're together, and I still think we're special.

Follow Lola Blanc on Twitter.

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Say bye-bye to those pesky birth control pills. Photo via Flickr user Delightfully Tacky

Swedish scientists have created an app that allows people to prevent pregnancy without suffering maniacal condom paranoia, being pumped full of hormones, or worrying about the potential complications of intrauterine devices (IUDs).

The app is called Natural Cycles, and it uses the fertility awareness method many menstruating people have used since time immemorial. Compared to the multitudes of people who have used this method, though, this app claims to be 99.95 percent effective in preventing pregnancy. I highly doubt most people who track their own cycles can claim the same.

To use it, menstruating people must simply take their temperature upon waking up and record the temperature in the app. The app funnels all the data provided into an algorithm, and tells you whether it's a "red day" or a "green day." On green days, you're safe to have unprotected sex without worrying about pregnancy. On red days, condoms are recommended.

Aside from the temperature recordings, users must also record when they have their periods. And if they're super Type A, they can also use ovulation strips and record the data from that, too. The more data, the more accurate the app's algorithm will be, and thus the more condom-free, stress-free fucking the user gets to engage in.

But if you fuck it up—that's to say, you forget to supply the app with the data it needs—it will still have you covered. You'll simply have more "red" days on your calendar, and if you're smart, you'll use a condom on those days. If you're not smart, you might wind up procreating.

Doctors Raoul Scherwitzl and his partner Elina Berglund are both former physicists, and they created the app because Berglund was sick of being on the pill. She'd been on it for a decade, and wanted a hormone-free alternative.

In case you're wondering about her credentials: Berglund was formerly a researcher at CERN, and she was one of the physicists who discovered the Higgs Boson, which won the Nobel Prize in 2013. So yeah, feel free to trust her. Also consider that Swedes are great at acknowledging and celebrating the vagina and its many magical functions.

"Basically, we provide a hormone-free birth control method," Scherwitzl said. "You get to know your body, rather than doing something to it."

So far, the app has about 30,000 active users. But it must be acknowledged that this is really a tool for the monogamous. Obviously, it prevents only pregnancy. It doesn't offer any protection against the contraction of sexually transmitted infections (STIs). This app, then, is probably best-suited to somewhat long-term partners who only have sex with each other and who have been tested for STIs. If you want to bonk someone outside of your main partnership, you might want to employ the dreaded condom, even on a green day.

Natural Cycles' 99 percent efficacy has been clinically tested by tracking the cycles of 317 women. I asked Scherwitzl if he thinks that's a big enough sample size, and he says it is for now. He says they'll do more in the future, because that's how they'll get doctors to recommend their method.

On top of the clinical trial, he and Berglund tested it out themselves before launching the company, and successfully avoided pregnancy the entire time. Then, they decided to have a child, so they flipped the way they used it and became pregnant within months.

I ask if there are any warnings they would give on human error. Natural family-planning methods come with their share of risks. About 24 in 100 women who use fertility awareness as their main method of contraception will become pregnant within the year. But because the app knows when its user ovulates, which people often don't on their own, that number can easily be much lower with the app's use.

When asked if the app takes into account the fact that sperm can live in the body for up to five days following intercourse, Scherwitzl replied swiftly. "Yes," he said sassily. "Of course we account for that risk. Otherwise we would not be 99 percent safe." And from their website:

"The fertile window ends with the ovulation day and begins 5 days before, since sperm can survive 2-5 days in the female body. Only during these 'red' days can the woman get pregnant through unprotected sexual intercourse."

The day will simply become a red day if one forgets to record, and then the onus is on them to use a condom.

"It's like any birth control," he says. "You have the perfect use, and then you have the typical use." He uses the pill as an example. Many people forget a pill, or take medication that alters its efficacy without realizing it. And even with perfect use of condoms, about two percent of menstruating people will become pregnant. With typical use, it goes up to about 20 percent.

Planned Parenthood says natural methods straight up are not for you if you "can't keep careful records." So, for instance, if you're high all the time (or have certain medical conditions), you may be at risk.

"The nice thing with us is if you forget to record, that's okay," the app's co-creator says. "The algorithm will become more and more skeptical and will say, 'Like okay, this day, even though it could have been a green day, you [didn't pay attention].'"

It costs less than the pill does for people without drug coverage: $60 per year, or $5 per month. Included in the cost is a thermometer, and payments can be made monthly or quarterly.

Scherwitzl calls the app "a nice solution for all." Users can have more spontaneous sex, and people who find condoms uncomfortable don't have to stress about them.

He argues the push from the medical community to go on the pill or, in far fewer cases, to have an IUD inserted, can "blind" people. Patients are told these methods are the only way, and doctors seldom mention that, with a little care and attention, more natural contraception practices can be quite effective. If we really want to solve the dilemma many people find themselves in with birth control, education is the key, he says. Those who use the app correctly will no longer need to juggle the fear of pill-induced anxiety, depression, or lowered sex drive with fear of IUD complications like dislodging, ectopic pregnancy, or uterine perforation.

"[We should] talk openly about it. We don't want it to be a subject people are embarrassed about."

Follow Sarah Ratchford on Twitter.

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Photo via Flickr user Dan Cox

In a rare unanimous decision, Canada's highest court has ruled that the criminal prohibition of assisted suicide is unconstitutional. They struck down two specific sections the Criminal Code and suspended the invalidity of those articles for 12 months so Parliament could get its act together to come up with a new legislative framework that isn't unconstitutional.

The Criminal Code articles in question, 14 and 241(b), were found to be in violation of section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms because they violate patients' rights to life, liberty and security of the person in a manner that is "overbroad" and "not connected to the objective" of the law, which is to protect people from being induced to commit suicide when they are at their most weak and vulnerable.

In other words, according to the court, the blanket prohibition on assisted suicide that was in effect until today was forcing terminally ill patients to "take their own lives prematurely, for fear that they would be incapable of doing so when they reached the point where suffering was intolerable." The ruling added that "an individual's response to a grievous and irremediable medical condition is a matter critical to their dignity and autonomy. The prohibition denies people in this situation the right to make decisions concerning their bodily integrity and medical care and thus trenches on their liberty."

Today's landmark decision has changed the legal framework for assisted-suicide cases, but it only applies to a very specific set of circumstances. First, the patient must "clearly consent to the termination of life" and second, they must suffer from "a grievous and irremediable medical condition that causes enduring suffering that is intolerable to the individual in the circumstances of his or her condition."

Until this morning, physician-assisted suicide was a criminal offence in Canada and could result in criminal prosecution for any person who "aids or abets a person to commit suicide." That meant that any family member, nurse, or doctor who helped a terminally ill patient obtain life-ending treatment or drugs could have faced criminal charges.

One of the plaintiffs in this case, Lee Carter, had to spend $32,000 of her life savings in order to bring her incapacitated 89-year-old mother Kathleen to Switzerland; the Dignitas Clinic, which specializes in physician-assisted suicide, is located there. She suffered from chronic pain and immobility caused by spinal stenosis, and refused to live as an "ironing board," according to court documents. Her daughter argued that she should have been able to get end-of-life-care for her mother in Vancouver without fear of criminal prosecution and a possible 14-year jail sentence.

One of the main legal issues that came up in Carter's case, and what was essentially the argument of the Attorney General of Canada, was that the Supreme Court was bound by its 1993 Rodriguez decision, when a slim majority of judges (5-4) found that a blanket criminal prohibition of assisted suicide was constitutional and necessary to protect those in a position of vulnerability.

But the legal landscape of Canada has changed significantly in the intervening 22 years. For starters, Beverly McLachlin is now the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Back in 1993, when the issue of s. 241(b) and assisted suicide first came before the court, she was in the minority and in her strongly worded dissent she asked: "What is the difference between suicide and assisted suicide that justifies making the one lawful and the other a crime, that justifies allowing some this choice, while denying it to others?"

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has expressed discomfort about addressing this political hot potato. "These difficult questions around right-to-die and assisted suicide, as you know they were discussed a couple of years back in the Parliament of Canada, and the government of Canada at this time has no intention of reopening that debate," he told reporters in Quebec last October. Justice Minister and Attorney General Peter McKay, for his part, has defended the 1993 Rodriguez ruling.

But not all Conservative Party members hold the Rodriguez decision in such high regard. Steven Fletcher, Conservative Member of Parliament for the Winnipeg riding of Charleswood-St. James-Assiniboia was rendered quadriplegic when his car struck a moose on a highway north of Winnipeg in 1996. He is Canada's first ever Member of Parliament with a permanent disability and has been a vocal supporter of assisted suicide. He hailed today's decision as "the most important ruling that the Supreme Court has made since the 1982 Constitution."

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Hazeltine Creek on the ground. Photo courtesy Kieran Oudshoorn

On February 3, law enforcement raided the headquarters of Imperial Metals, the mining company responsible for a massive mining waste spill in British Columbia's central interior. The search could potentially lead to millions of dollars in fines and even jail time.

By volume Imperial Metals' Mount Polley spill ranks among the largest mining leaks in the world. A tailings pond dam holding back 25 million cubic metres of waste collapsed on August 4, 2014, sending an avalanche of toxic sludge containing lead, mercury, arsenic, and selenium into salmon-bearing waterways.

Six months later, more than 70 officials executed search warrants at Imperial Metals' Mount Polley and Vancouver offices, as well as the offices of two engineering firms involved in the dam's design and maintenance. Tuesday's search and seizure collected evidence for a joint investigation by RCMP, Environment Canada, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and BC's Conservation Officer Services.

Inspector Chris Doyle said the conservation agency is leading the inquiry. "The RCMP is part of the investigative team, and ultimately the team as a whole will submit to provincial and federal Crown Counsel," he said. It's then up to the crown to press charges.

In the same week, Mount Polley's sister mine Red Chris received a temporary permit to start mining copper and gold despite ongoing concerns raised by some members of the Tahltan First Nation. The Red Chris wastewater pond is designed by AMEC, one of the companies raided by conservation services. AMEC took over as the engineer of record at Mount Polley in 2011, and until recent months was also the engineer of record at Red Chris.

That permit goes against the findings of an engineering review panel, released last week, that recommended new mines move toward "best available technologies" like "dry-stack" or "filtered" tailings rather than sludgy wastewater ponds.

The review found design flaws were the root cause of the Mount Polley disaster. Authors pointed to unstable glacial soil underneath the tailings pond and the dam's steeply sloped walls as contributing factors to the spill. In a press conference last week, review chair Norbert Morgenstern explained that if building on an unstable glacial lake deposit was the "loaded gun," then building up the dam walls at a steep incline "pulled the trigger."

The BC government announced it would require all mines to determine the stability of "foundation materials" by June 30 to ensure the disaster is not repeated.

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The Mount Polley disaster from the sky. Photo via Mining Watch

An independent review of Red Chris, requested by the Tahltan First Nation and paid for by Imperial Metals in October, found there's 90 metres of sandy glacial deposits under the newly-opened mine. "A major design issue for the tailings impoundments is the high permeability of the foundation soils," reads the report, carried out by the engineering firm Klohn Crippen Berger and released in November 2014.

At the time, the Mount Polley review wasn't yet completed. "Any technical lessons to be learned from Mount Polley cannot be applied to this facility because the forensic investigation into the cause of that failure has not yet been completed," the Red Chris report read.

I asked Morgenstern if he thinks Red Chris is using the "best available technology" his review recommends. He replied: "I have not evaluated anything at Red Chris and I am not able to comment on their design or operations."

Despite his use of a loaded gun metaphor, Morgenstern's review does not aim to demonstrate criminal or civil culpability. The report maintains employees and government mine inspectors did nothing wrong; it concludes there was no way the spill could have been predicted or prevented. Whereas last week's review panel took an unnecessary amount of care not to blame anyone, the conservation services' inquiry has the power to bring about criminal charges and punishment.

Doyle declined to offer details about the investigation's direction, or to specify whether criminal charges would be sought. He added that releasing information could compromise the investigation. "The primary focus is on BC's Environmental Management Act and the federal Fisheries Act," he said, "but it's not limited to those acts."

While these might seem like boring or bureaucratic pieces of legislation, the two acts pack a surprising punch. If a company or individual is found deliberately harming the environment, or through recklessness puts the safety of others at risk, the Environmental Management Act calls for a maximum fine of $3 million, or three years' jail time, or both. The Fisheries Act can fine a corporation the size of Imperial Metals up to $6 million for an indictable offense, or two years imprisonment, or both.

Fines are usually much lower, of course, but a recent record-breaking case may hint at what could happen to Imperial Metals in years to come. On December 22, following a three-year investigation, a Montreal-based mining company was charged $7.5 million in fines for environmental violations under the Fisheries Act relating to a much smaller tailings pond breach. Scaling the ruling up to Mount Polley proportions, it would amount to nearly a billion in fines.

Reached while on location at Red Chris, Imperial Metals VP corporate affairs Steve Robertson declined comment on the raid's impact on operations.

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.

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More people play video games today than at any other point of the medium's short history. Women play as much as men, statistics for 2014 indicating a near-50/50 split between genders in the US as well as the UK. By 2017 the global games market could be worth over $100 billion. And yet, one divisive developer feels that we're all doing it wrong.

David Cage, founder of Paris studio Quantic Dream, has long been an outspoken figure in games development, attracting derision and devotion in measures that, quite probably, favor the former perspective. Quantic Dream's output, which amounts to just four shipped titles to date, is predominantly big on narrative and short on archetypal action. Fans of frenetic first-person shooters, step away now.

Some have cried foul, complaining that these are not games at all, and Cage himself has sought to categorize his creations as "interactive drama." He's told anyone who'll listen that "nobody should be allowed to define what a video game is," and how games "have a chance to become mass market." Somebody should probably show him the financial projections, as they're kind of a big deal already.

He's been like this since day one: a visionary, sure, but one who can easily rub people the wrong way with egotistical rhetoric—especially as his "interactive dramas" haven't been entirely successful. The studio's first game of 1999, the future-set Omikron: The Nomad Soul, featured a complicated, body jumping plot and in-game appearances from David Bowie, who also contributed to its soundtrack. But despite the high-profile pop star's presence, the game bombed commercially. It was "too weird" for America, apparently, where publisher Eidos "didn't support the game at all."

The studio's most recent release, the 2013 PlayStation 3 exclusive Beyond: Two Souls, arrived headlined by motion-captured Hollywood actors Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe. Star power has never been a problem for Cage and company, then, but a consistent critical reception has. GameSpot awarded the game 9/10, with reviewer Tom McShea concluding: "Beyond: Two Souls so easily melds story and mechanics that you become enamored with this young woman and her extraordinary life." VideoGamer was less kind, critic Steve Burns writing that it's "flawed in almost every possible way."

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The talents of Page and Dafoe couldn't earn Beyond: Two Souls universal acclaim

I didn't mind Beyond: Two Souls. I finished it in two sittings, seeing the conclusion to Ellen-Page-as-Jodie-Holmes's story inside 12 hours—which is more than I can say of many, allegedly better games that I've not completed. When the game told me to press a button, I did—but it's entirely right to criticize its dearth of player agency, its strictly limited interactivity. I felt some empathy for Jodie's situations, experienced across several years of her life; but the supernatural side to the tale, her connection with the (also player-controlled) spirit Aiden, didn't really resonate with me. So it was a halfway success, personally.

Quantic Dream's PS3 debut was 2010's Heavy Rain, a quadruple-perspective serial killer case bearing streaked, noir-ish shades. Turns out the private investigator did it—whoops, sorry, spoilers. (Come on, if you were going to play Heavy Rain, you would have by now—it'd sold an Omikron-shading two million copies by 2011, so there's been no shortage of cheap, second-hand copies trading these past few years.) But it's the studio's second game that I got into the most—and it's a title that's just received a high-definition remaster for Windows, Mac, and iOS devices.

Fahrenheit came out in 2005, looking and feeling entirely unlike any other game on the platform I first played it on, the PlayStation 2. Quantic Dream's USP was that this represented the first genuine "interactive film," which has painted Cage as something of a right player, wrong industry sort ever since. "I'm not a frustrated movie director," he told Gamescom in 2012, when hyping Beyond; "I love this medium, and I'm genuinely passionate about [it]... growing every day, and I just want to be a part of it."

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Here's where our story begins, with Lucas about to do something he may regret later

And it did feel that Fahrenheit was pushing the gaming medium—unlike what came after, it wasn't all simplistic quick-time events and context-sensitive stick movements. There was real tension, which carried over to how you manipulated the controller: balancing lead playable character (of three) Lucas Kane across precarious crossings meant precise depression of the pad's shoulder buttons, and Simon Says-style analogue twitching could become seriously stressful.

It wasn't easy, basically—neither Heavy Rain nor Beyond really featured fail states, and while Cage attributes the 75 percent completion rate of the former to its "emotional engagement," the fact that it never showed the player a game over screen certainly helped. Fahrenheit was different: Lucas can be killed (or otherwise prevented from continuing) in a variety of ways, and can become so depressed with his testing circumstances that he commits suicide.

The game's story, set against a harsh New York winter, begins grounded enough—Lucas comes to in a diner bathroom to discover that he has apparently murdered a fellow patron. Is this a case of amnesia, or something much darker, and considerably more convoluted? Obviously, it's the latter: The plot takes some suspect turns into occult themes and sci-fi weirdness, culminating with the rescue of the "Indigo Child," who is ultimately the key to humanity's survival against an artificial intelligence invasion and something, something, something else. Put it this way, when Eurogamer's John Walker wrote that Fahrenheit is broken in "about 657 ways," about 640 of those faults can be found in the game's narrative. Thinking about it now gives me a headache.

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Although he appears pretty fragile, Lucas possesses Neo-from-The-Matrix-like powers, to get him through situations like this

Cage himself feels that he put a foot or two wrong with the plot of the "first-ever interactive film." (Forgetting Under a Killing Moon and Burn Cycle, obviously, and even before that we had Dragon's Lair and... oh, you get it.) In a lengthy post-mortem of the game (called Indigo Prophecy in the US) for Gamasutra, he pinpoints "glitches in the writing" which compromised the story, and that the A.I. bad guys added "confusion to the plot." You're telling me, Dave. Not a clue what was going on with those digital bug things.

There are further failures with Fahrenheit that Cage can identify today. "I made the mistake of not devoting enough time to the last hour of the game," he writes in that same dissection of the game's pluses and minuses, and outlines the difficulties faced with selling a concept like this to publishers and players alike: "Explaining the concept of an original game with no real prior references is a major difficulty that must not be underestimated."

Yet ten years on, Fahrenheit remains a game that rewards investigation today. Toucharcade's coverage of its new iOS port is positive, calling the experience "one to remember," and its verdict echoes reviews of 2005: Edge wrote that it's "almost shocking how seamless, engrossing and accessible" the game was, and PC Gamer called it a "classic adventure pumped up with massive doses of adrenaline." It's no lost masterpiece, but while it's understandable to dismiss Fahrenheit if you've been put off by the bunkum of Beyond: Two Souls, this really is a curio worth taking a chance on.

Just don't stare at the creepy sex scene between Lucas and Carla, OK? Now that is doing it wrong.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

The basement of the Brooklyn Civil Court is a stark reminder that for most of mankind's history, you couldn't store information on computers. Huge stacks of court dockets line the wall in this bleak corner of local bureaucracy—thousands upon thousands of files. Divorce papers, deeds to homes, bankruptcies, foreclosures. These are living testaments to the ordinary lives of millions of people in Brooklyn. And to retrieve just one, you have to physically fill out a small slip of paper with its specific index number so a court employee can search for it. By hand.

The Clerk's Office is legally obligated to retain all undigitized court papers for 25 years, so this is where they end up. And to dive further past 1990, you'll have to request it from an off-site storage facility, which could take two to three weeks.

That is, of course, if it's still standing.

Last Saturday, a seven-alarm fire tore through a Williamsburg warehouse, creating a smoking, smoldering mess on the waterfront that could be seen from miles away. Fortunately, no injuries were reported, but the fire lasted well into the week, fueled by the mountains of papers stashed inside.

According to the New York Times, the CitiStorage facility held "40,000 boxes from the Administration for Children's Services, and 32,700 boxes from the health department, including 28,000 boxes of correctional health inmate records from 2009 and earlier." There were also 700,000 boxes from the city's Health and Hospitals Corporation, 143,000 of which were damaged. Luckily, city officials said Thursday that most of those documents were digitized, so the impact of their loss will be minimal.

Court records, however, are generally not preserved digitally. Though it's not clear yet exactly how much was lost, we know the fire consumed a significant chunk of Brooklyn's legal history, which means troves of information that could be useful to historians, experts, prisoners, and average citizens alike were lost. As one Clerk's Office representative said, "They're priceless."

"At this point, we don't have specifics [on what was lost]," Arlene Hackel, the assistant director of communications at the Office of Court Administration, told me. "What we do know is that these were closed cases before 1990; cases from Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn."

The cases, Hackel said, were primarily from those boroughs' Supreme Civil Court, Family Court, and Criminal Court, and may have included historical records. Half of the cases in storage were at a different location, so right now, her office is determining which half is which, and other possible methods of bringing those files back to life. This may include the digitization of microfilm, if available. To pinpoint what needs to be restored, though, is still fuzzy: "We cannot verify all of the facts right now," Hackel concluded.

But for Oren Yaniv, the Brooklyn courts reporter for the New York Daily News, this loss of knowledge could have been way worse. "Of course, if criminal case files or more recent civil files were lost—that would be a problem," Yaniv told me over email. "But that's not the case as far as I know."

Yaniv cited the work of Brooklyn DA Kenneth Thompson's Conviction Review Unit (CRU), which, since his inauguration in 2014, has already overturned over ten longstanding convictions, with more cases pending. And even though the DA's office has looked into convictions that are older than 1990—like that of David McCallum, who, after being convicted for murder in 1986, was recently freed—a spokesperson told me that no CRU cases were lost in the flames.

"It doesn't really affect my work because we never go back that far when looking for old lawsuits, and I imagine that even if we were to order a file from that storage, it would have taken months to retrieve," Yaniv continued. "That loss strikes me as more sentimental than practical."

The fire really impacts people like Marc A. Hermann, a Brooklyn native and photographer. His grandfather, Harvey L. Strelzin, was a man of the courts, serving as a private lawyer, an assistant attorney general, and state assemblyman. So if some estimates are true—that all of Brooklyn Civil Court records between the 1880s and 1950s were affected (which Hackel couldn't verify)—any history of his grandfather's work evaporated like the smoke into the cold February air.

"Of course, I don't know for sure what, if anything, was in there pertaining to my family, but it's a rude awakening for people like me who undertake historical and genealogical research," Hermann told me. "My grandfather died when I was 11, and [I was] too young to really appreciate his courtroom stories. Now, this is going to make it nearly impossible to research them.

"We often run into a big brick wall when we dig into the past because, oh, the 1890 Federal Census doesn't exist. Fire in 1921. Army records from World War II? Gone. Fire at the St. Louis National Archives," Hermann added. "Sometimes you think Well, that's a problem of the past. Records are obviously much better stored now, but then something like this happens."

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

It's a sad commentary on the federal government's antiquated stance on drugs that even the most tepid administration statements in support of medical marijuana are hailed as bold new thinking. US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy elicited such a response when he said on national television this week that—brace yourself—there is "some preliminary data showing that for certain medical conditions and symptoms that marijuana can be helpful."

"We have to use that data to drive policy making," he said, adding later, "I'm very interested to see where that takes us."

As obvious as Murthy's statement may be—his assessment lines up with the positions of an alphabet soup of medical associations—it is also at odds with longstanding federal policy that classifies marijuana as a Schedule I drug, which the Justice Department defines as "drugs with no currently accepted medical use."

It's not the first time an Obama administration official has acknowledged the absurdity of this policy—the president himself said as much in an interview with the New Yorker last year. Legalization advocates have crossed their fingers that these acknowledgements will eventually lead to some kind of tangible thaw in federal drug policies.

That's probably wishful thinking. Just a a few hours after Murtha's interview Wednesday, the Department of Health and Human Services put out a long-winded, late-night statement on the Surgeon General's behalf, "clarifying" his earlier comments about weed.

"Marijuana policy — and all public health policies — should be driven by science," the statement read. "I believe that marijuana should be subjected to the same, rigorous clinical trials and scientific scrutiny that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) applies to all new medications. The Federal Government has and continues to fund research on possible health benefits of marijuana and its components. While clinical trials for certain components of marijuana appear promising for some medical conditions, neither the FDA nor the Institute of Medicine have found smoked marijuana to meet the standards for safe and effective medicine for any condition to date."

For its part, the Justice Department said this week that it supports medical marijuana research. "Consistent with the Controlled Substances Act and regulations, the Department supports research into potential medical uses of marijuana," an agency spokesperson said in a statement to VICE. "The DEA has never denied an application for registration to conduct research with marijuana where HHS has determined that the research protocol is scientifically sound."

Of course, even if that's technically true, the federal government has never made it easy for researchers to study marijuana. Because pot is a Schedule I drug, the only legal supplier of research-grade marijuana in the country is the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). As its name implies, the institute has a congressionally-mandated mission to research abuse and addiction, not the potential therapeutic effects of drugs.

However, NIDA surprised policy watchers last year when it approved a long-delayed study on marijuana's possible use in treating PTSD. The DEA also approved NIDA to significantly increase its annual marijuana harvest. Until marijuana is rescheduled, though, it will remain under the tight-fisted control of the feds, who will likely continue to limit research and thus—in a convenient catch-22—support the government's assertion that there is just too little research to justify rescheduling pot.

None of this is likely to change anytime soon, especially as federal prosecutor Loretta Lynch gears up to replace Eric Holder as US attorney general. In confirmation hearings last week, Lynch told Congress last week that she is opposed to marijuana legalization, and disagrees with the president's past comments about the dangers of the drug.

That could leave the matter up to Congress—an aide to Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul told The Daily Beast Thursday that Paul is planning to introduce a bill this year to reschedule marijuana. But while that type of legislation would likely get support from progressive Democrats and libertarian-leaning Republicans like Paul, success seems unlikely given that most GOP leaders in Congress remain staunch Drug War hawks.

So for now at least, legalization activists and medical marijuana patients will have to be satisfied with platitudes, sound-bytes, and heavily-clarified crumbs from Obama administration officials who know science is right, but aren't ready to do anything about it.

Follow CJ on Twitter

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Photo of Harvard via Flickr user Chaval Brasil

In fiction, people seem to be totally OK with the idea of professor-student romance. It's a common enough trope that Ross dated one of his charges in an episode of Friends. Everyone cheers at the end of Never Been Kissed even though Michael Vartan was under the impression that Drew Barrymore was a high school senior when the two first hit it off. In real life, of course, if an 18-year-old undergrad started "dating" a professor everyone would be skeeved out, and both parties' friends would probably tell them to cut it out.

But since college students are legally adults it's sort of a legal and ethical gray area, and one that Harvard University just dealt with by officially banning professors from sleeping with undergrads. This is notable because the past, schools have taken a more nuanced approach to the issue. For instance, in 2003, California's university system said teachers couldn't sleep with students who they might end up grading—so basically, an aspiring engineer and a humanities professor could do pretty much whatever they wanted. Lately, though, there seems to be a pushback against any kind of teacher-kid hookup: Yale and the University of Connecticut introduced a rule against such liaisons just before Harvard did.

"Some schools have a tiny minority of professors who use their popularity and prestige to empower themselves," Billie Wright Dziech, who studies teacher-student relationships, told Bloomberg. "This is a very, very serious problem for higher education." (A spokeswoman for the American Association of University Professors told Bloomberg a blanket ban was inappropriate.)

What Dziech is talking about sounds like the sexual predation Naomi Wolf famously described in New York Magazine back in 2004. But what about when the perpetrator isn't a lecherous old man, or when a student is actively pursuing a young professor, as was the case in that Friends episode? And what about drunkenly going home with your TA?

To sort this out, I called an ethicist, or actually the Ethicist—Randy Cohen, who wrote that column for the New York Times Magazine from 1999 to 2011.

"The ethical problem is, 'What obligation does the university system have to protect its students?'" he told me. "Does a university have the right to create a system in which so many cases a professor is going to be sexually exploiting a student?"

While banning any acts between two consenting adults might be wrong in any other context, Cohen thinks the university is a special setting that's got a different set of rules. Thanks to the First Amendment, we allow most forms of hate speech in America, provided it doesn't go beyond some bad or offensive words. But on campuses, rules about that kind of speech can be helpful—and instructive—because they force students to construct arguments that don't rely on ad hominem attacks and therefore make the world a better place.

"Once you're an adult and you're out in the world, the culture is gonna offer you less protection, and you're in a better position—one hopes—to make better decisions about things that really do promote you're own happiness," Cohen says. "But for four years on campus, you're given a little extra protection, and you're encouraged to learn the idea of a real egalitarian relationship."

Ultimately, he told me, Harvard's decision is a matter of sacrificing a minor social good in exchange for a huge societal benefit. And it's one that every school should make, regardless of the fear that prospect seems to invoke in the American Association of University Professors.

"They're so wishy-washy and mush-mouthed. They say 'Oh yes, these relationships are fraught with danger, yet we don't want to forbid them.'" he says. "Well, what do you wanna do, boys?"

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/O1jGNd4Deys' width='640' height='360']

If the countless hours of rage-inducing dash-cam footage on YouTube are to be believed, drivers in Russia can be real douchebags. Obviously, there are lunatics behind the wheel in every country, but Russian roads seem to be on the verge of outright anarchy: Cars will double- and triple-park along bus lanes, they regularly drive on sidewalks and footpaths to avoid traffic, and there's seemingly no police intervention to keep drivers from acting like selfish assholes. With law enforcement not doing much about all this, a group of Russian youth have taken matters into their own hands by starting a campaign to shame rude drivers by plastering their windshields with massive, round stickers which proclaim, in Russian, "I Spit on Everybody, I Drive/Park However I Want."

The group is named StopXam, which means "Stop Rude People" in Russian (or "Stop a Douchebag," depending on how you translate it). They've posted countless YouTube videos of their work, politely confronting the offending drivers and asking them kindly to stop mowing down pedestrians on sidewalks or double-parking on busy streets. Most of the drivers apologize and move along, but the ones who obstinately refuse get one of those big ol' stickers, which seem extremely difficult to remove and take up about half the span of the windshield. Sometimes these confrontations are funny, sometimes they're violent, but most of all, they're deeply gratifying.

To learn more about these Russian traffic vigilantes, I got in touch with the leader and founder of StopXam, Dmitry Chugunov. We spoke together in Russian, and the following is an English translation of the conversation we had.

VICE: How and when did you start StopXam?
Dmitry Chugunov: StopXam started in May of 2010, so we're coming up on five years soon. I started it based on my personal, negative experiences in Moscow, and running into rudeness. One day, I waited nearly three hours behind a car that was double-parked. Driving around it was impossible and I ended up having to commit a few severe traffic violations to get through.

So you decided to put massive stickers on their cars?
You know, me and my friends were thinking about how we could identify a xam [literally a "rude person" in Russian] and decided there should be some sort of sticker that would be large enough to take up half a windshield, and should have that long message on them.

In some of your videos your altercations have gotten violent. Are you ever afraid it might turn ugly?
You know, no. I haven't gotten scared in a long time. I don't look for fights, but I approach them with the understanding that people who do look for fights are weak people who are trying to hide their weakness behind aggression. In order to maintain their right to rudeness, they'll be verbally aggressive or threaten injury, but I approach that calmly enough. I've had army experience, I'm not afraid.

Do you ever consider carrying a weapon to defend yourself, or even just like, a big stick?
I'd sooner say no than yes. Aggression breeds aggression and we're trying to, instead, step away from any aggression. The maximum we'd be willing to carry is maybe pepper spray, but we haven't even really gotten to that point, and furthermore we wouldn't carry sticks or any kind of traumatic weapons.

So what's the deal with Russians being terrible, rude drivers?
Not all of them are! Part of the goal of this project is to show that there are different drivers: There are those who don't give a fuck about anybody, who believe that other people's time, emotions, and lives don't have any value. People who think that their business is more important than everybody else's. Our goal is to show these people and ridicule them in our videos. In doing that, we're forming negative associations with the younger generation in relation to that sort of behavior, and we're trying to establish an appropriate pattern of behavior for future and current drivers.

That's well said, but why is it that Russia, specifically, has this issue? Between the dashcam footage and your videos, it does seem like Russia has a disproportionate share of shitty drivers.
Well, first of all, we have some really heavy traffic, but the situation isn't as regional as you say. If you take any metropolis, you'll see people behaving badly when dealing with accidents and slow-moving traffic. And you know, day to day, cars are a pretty universal modes of transportation, and unfortunately people aren't ready to opt out of that comfort and instead use public transit. Besides, cars are symbols of wealth... the cooler your car, the more self-assured you probably feel. But that's a certain problem with this population that's only just establishing itself as a developed society. On account of the last 25 years in our history—which were very difficult, in relation to the formation of the Russian Federation—there are large gaps in family values and education that can't not lead to the problems that we see on the road. It's a reflection of existing problems, the shortcomings of people to solve disagreements in some sort of constructive way.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/BHJxIwvFIGY' width='640' height='360']

Do you have a favorite StopXam moment?
Oh man, probably not. I cherish all of them for different reasons. Some videos are funny, some are sad, but all of them are part of a larger story about restoring order in the minds of people and I wouldn't single any out specifically.

How many people are in your group?
This group spans Russia now; it's in Nizhniy Rubezh, Ukraine, and Saksan. There are thousands of people who support the project, and hundreds of people who actually make it happen.

How do people support your cause?
Some people send us money, but most people simply support us by spreading the good word—that's enough for us. The thing is, we have two channels on YouTube, one is temporarily blocked right now because of a few legal issues, but on that one we've got over 2 million subscribers, on the other one we've got about 250,000. So, that's a large enough audience that through its size alone is able to support the project.

Do the police help or support you guys?
Partially. At first they would bother us more than they would help us, but there was a moment when our relationship became more parallel. That is, they wouldn't necessarily help, but they wouldn't harass us either. They understood that our project has the blessing of the president, and they generally tried to distance themselves. Especially since in practice we don't ignore anybody, I mean if a police car breaks the law, we'll bother them the same way we bother everybody else, just as we do with the cars of the FSB, doesn't matter who, the FSO, we approach everybody with the same harshness because the law is the law.

Wait, StopXam has the blessing of the president? What did Putin tell you guys?
He said we're good folks but that it's dangerous and we need to be very careful so as not to overstep the boundaries of the law, because a functioning society must operate within the law.

What have you learned from all of this?
In short, I'd say that I've probably become more patient and tolerant. I've learned to understand others, and most importantly I've learned to communicate my point of view even to the most stubborn people. I've managed to break through to some very obstinate folks the idea that their freedom ends where another person's freedom begins.

Follow Jules Suzdaltsev on Twitter.

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Every night, as I stand to leave my office desk, I look over the remnants of my workday. There are lunch and snack scraps, used cups and cans, crumpled-up napkins, and more. Usually I clean it up, but sometimes I eat something like a Nature Valley bar and the crumbs are everywhere. The amazing thing is when I get to work the next day, everything is clean thanks to the wonderful night cleaning staff. These guys tend to be some of the more undervalued office workers, but work a few days in a messy hovel and you'll see the difference cleanliness makes. Filmmaker Jesse Allen decided to mine the world of nighttime cleaners for his fantastic, pitch black comedy short, The Clean Up.

The film opens on two maids cleaning around an overweight employee, cursing his slovenliness in Spanish. The joke continues as they invisibly move among the English-language-only employees left dallying around late at night on a weekday. Cursing and cajoling the men in Spanish, the elder cleaning woman gains an almost perverse pleasure in being totally ignored—until she gets to Mr. Samuelson's office, that is. He's the one man in the office who's ever noticed her, ever attempted conversation, and ever attempted to just treat her like a human. But when something totally weird, fucked up, and sexual threatens to destroy that bond, the two cleaning women set off on an unlikely quest to get a little bit of R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

Watch the short below and then read an interview with its director, Jesse Allen.

VICE: Have you ever worked in an office?
Jesse Allen: Besides some time in Germany and a year working at a mental hospital, I've been working in an office for ten years as a video editor for commercials. I work a lot of 3 AM nights when projects require it, so I've had a lot of hand-gesture conversations with Chinese and Spanish-speaking cleaning crews throughout the years.

It struck me how we both have the same office just at different times of day. Half the people I work with never even see the people who come in late at night. It's a completely different world. My boss was nice enough to let us shoot the film at my office, Moondog Edit. Our current cleaning crew speaks perfect English though, and they love to give me shit about the plot. They were around for a lot of the filming.

How many fucked-up scenarios did you come up with for disposing the body? What were some of the best you didn't use?
There were a lot in early drafts. I remember there was one with an air vent that didn't quite work. I had to keep all deaths dealing with the neck bruises, so it limited my options. We actually used all the situations we shot. The actresses, Maria and Alba, saved a lot them—I credit them with really making the fan scene work. It was the weakest on the page and now my favorite on the screen.

Are you into autoerotic asphyxiation?
No, I wish I was that interesting. My producers, Simon and Jim, did some last-minute research and found out that people put lemons in their mouths during the act. It's a safety mechanism. If they start to pass out, they'll clench their teeth and the citrus burst in their mouth will wake them up. I loved that detail, so we put a lemon in Lynn's mouth. I like the authenticity, but it does confuse a lot of people. The most frequent question is: "What's the lemon all about?"

My next question was going to be about the lemon, but instead it will be about how you'd like to die?
Old, without my knowledge, and instantaneous. A coward's dream. We'll see if I ever get more comfortable with death. I'm amazed by those who are.

What are you working on now?
I am shopping my scripts My 30-Year War: The Story of Hiroo Onoda and Granite State (which can be found on the Black List). I'm also finishing up a short I made with Andrew Gilchrist called Dead Water. We'll be submitting soon to festivals. It doesn't deal with autoerotic asphyxiation, but it's much more disturbing.

Jesse Allen is a writer and director from New York by way of New Hampshire. His work includes Sea Pig, Delphine Lucielle: The Creation, The Frontiersman's Wife, and Party Trick. His script My 30-Year War (co-written with Andrew Gori) was a finalist at the IFP Film Market and optioned by NPR's This American Life. His Script Granite State was semi-finalist at the Austin Film Festival and the Nicholl Fellowship. Among others, he has screened his work at the Seattle International, Hamptons International, Chicago International, and Provincetown International Film Festivals.

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as a film curator. He's the Senior Curator for Vimeo's On Demand platform. He has also programmed at Tribeca Film Festival, Rooftop Films, and the Hamptons International Film Festival.

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Japanese commuters in Tokyo. Photo via Flickr user Todd Mecklem

Japan is poised to force workers to take at least five days of paid vacation a year, a compromise between employers' groups calling for three and labor unions that wanted eight. Everyone in the country seems to agree that it's critical workers take their legally guaranteed vacation time, because not only are Japanese people not having sex, they're also refusing to take a break from the grind—and it's becoming an economic and health crisis.

Under Japan's Labor Standards Law, employees are entitled to at least ten days of paid annual leave per year, with one extra day per year worked until the employee reaches a 20-day-a-year cap. The average employee in 2013 was entitled to 18.5 vacation days and received 15 days off for national holidays. That's already the second lowest amount of vacation among the world's wealthiest nations—behind only the United States, with our ten federal holidays and lack of (federally) guaranteed paid leave.

Perhaps most surprising is that less than half of Japanese folks took their full vacation allotment in 2013, with the typical worker claiming only nine of an available 18.5 vacation days. One in six workers took none.

By comparison, the average French worker receives at least 37 legally guaranteed days of paid leave per year and uses 93 percent of them, figures that are similar to those of most other European nations.

The situation in Japan stems from a culture of overwork. Despite regulations that guarantee workers an eight-hour day and 40-hour work week, a mixture of peer pressure and stress about job security in a stagnant economy pushes workers to put in dozens, if not over a hundred, hours of (often unpaid and unrecorded) overtime per month. At least 22 percent of workers put in over 49 hours a week, compared to 11 percent in France and second only to South Korea's 35 percent overwork rate.

Yuu Wakebe, the Health and Labor Ministry official shepherding new laws on leisure time like this one into existence, ironically admits that he, too, works 100 hours of overtime a month and only took off five days in 2014, one of which was a sick day.

"It is actually a worker's right to take paid vacation," Wakebe recently told the Associated Press, "but working in Japan involves quite a lot of volunteer spirit."

But toiling away to the point of absurdity is not essential to Japanese culture. Some historians argue that, into the early 20th century, Japanese workers had a healthy respect for holidays and work limits—and were even considered lazy by some foreigners. But for many reasons, workaholism is now widespread and entrenched.

A fair body of evidence supports the idea that this overwork does not help—and may even cost—Japanese companies' profits. Workers' tendency to stay at the office just to seem like they're working actually drives down productivity numbers, and plummeting job satisfaction and skyrocketing fatigue also decrease the amount and quality of work done in the hours at the office. And according to some analysts, citizens' refusal to take breaks hammers the leisure industry, hurting the national economy. Some also blame overwork for the nation's plummeting birth rates, which may be working in tandem with increasingly asexual youth to doom the national supply of labor and skew the population towards geriatrics. That surplus of old people, in turn, portends an impossible burden for the nation's social welfare regime.

Overwork is also contributing to a national health crisis in which thousands are literally working themselves to death. This is known as karoshi, a term that entered the Japanese lexicon in the boom years of the 1970s. In America, the closest term we have is workaholism, yet despite the word's circulation in common speech since 1968, the US lacks any clear definition or official recognition of the condition like that afforded to karoshi. Around 2000, stories of workers hanging themselves after pulling 17-hour days and falling over from dehydration on shifts started to dominate the news—especially after Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi's stroke that year was attributed to karoshi—raising awareness of a major public health crisis.

As of 2011, 10,000 of Japan's 30,000 annual suicides were credited to karoshi, and in 2012, reports suggested that up to 5 percent of all strokes and heart attacks among citizens under 60 were caused by karoshi as well. By 2013, 1,409 citizens applied for (and 436 received) worker's comp for karoshi-based mental illness, while 784 applied for (and 133 received) compensation on the basis of karoshi-related brain and heart disorders. Most cases likely go unreported thanks to social stigmas and the high burdens of proof for claimants. But estimates suggest that up to 10 percent of Japanese workers put in 60-plus hours of work a week in conditions similar to acknowledged karoshi victims, putting them at risk of illness or even death.

The five-day mandatory vacation time legislation is far from the government's first attempt to tackle the economic and health threats of an overwork epidemic. Throughout the early 2000s, officials made it easier to recognize and claim compensation or treatment for karoshi. Some major cases—like the award of half a million dollars in damages to the family of a worker who put in 190 hours of overtime a month for three years in poor conditions before killing himself—have raised the profile of overwork and made it easier to talk about and seek aid or speak freely. The Ministry of Health and Labor has also issued a bunch of advice to workers, like their recommendation last year that employees take 30-minute naps in the afternoons to distress and refresh.

In 2014, lawmakers passed the Act on the Promotion of Measures to Prevent Karoshi, which came into effect at the end of the year. The act, which will be revised in 2017 pending findings on the overwork crisis, allocates resources to the study of karoshi and support of counseling and peer support resources like Workaholics Anonymous meetings, a national karoshi hotline, and a Karoshi Awareness Month (November).

But how do you legislate chilling out? In early January, reports surfaced that the government wanted to coerce people into taking at least 70 percent of their guaranteed paid leave by 2020. Even before talk of this new five-day mandate law, officials started moving around national holidays to better align with weekends, creating the nation's first five-day, vacation-ready weekends in May and September. And by mid-August 2016, the nation will add a 16th national holiday to its roster—the seemingly arbitrary Mountain Day. Yes, this is about celebrating the nation's mountains, but it's really just another excuse to force offices to close and overtaxed workers to chill the fuck out for a little while.

Unfortunately, it's unlikely that the Japanese government will be able to force people to take it easy. In the Netherlands, for instance, despite copious vacation days, up to 3 percent of the population suffers from leisure sickness —the inability to stop worrying about work while "relaxing," which makes one physically ill from stress. So long as the culture of worry and pressure persists in Japan, people could just get sick on their time off. That means there may soon be a whole new and highly ironic psychosomatic epidemic in the nation for the government to deal with.

Many nations are witnessing rising overtime and falling vacation rates similar to Japan's. Thanks to post-depression job insecurity, up to 57 percent of Americans are leaving vacation days on the table (the average worker took about 13 days of paid leave a year). Meanwhile in 2014, Chinese media outlets reported up to 600,000 local deaths tied to overwork-based exhaustion.

So let's hope Japan's mandated holidays and naptime advisories make for a functional mellowing program. The rest of the world may soon need a model to follow.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

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"Venus and Cupid" by Alessandro Allori

It's February. Which means it's almost time for Valentine's Day, that anxiety-inducing holiday that often ends with us broke from buying gifts for unrequited loves and crying while we creep on our ex's Instagram. At this point, everyone has accepted that Valentine's Day isn't about real love, it's about making us feel shitty and the holiday-industrial complex squeezing us for all of our hard-earned cash. Yet that reality hasn't deterred young couples from indulging in the ubiquitous dinner, movie, and dry handjob routine, or stopped singles looking for love from right-swiping on Tinder until they get carpal tunnel.

If we are going to get conned year after year into celebrating Cupid's dreadful holiday, we should at least make the most of it by forgoing the off-brand drug store chocolates and the teddy bears made in sweatshops. This year, give your Valentine one of the gifts from my thoughtful guide that will ensure that even if you don't fall in love, you'll probably bust a nut.

For Your Grindr Date

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Enema Bulb Syringe (buy at Amazon.com $14.34)

What could possibly be more considerate than rinsing your colon for a potential romantic encounter? This eco-friendly Enema Bulb Syringe will make cleaning out the ol' pipes quick and easy so you can get to the fun part of sticking foreign objects in your back door.

For Your Tinder Date

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Plan B (buy at Walgreens for $49.99)

First impressions are everything on a Tinder date. Most people will show up with their pockets bursting with prophylactics. Dare to be different by packing the Plan B. Having a couple morning-after-pills on deck shows that you like it raw like ODB, but you're not "for the children."

For Your Long-Term Boyfriend

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Clone-a-Willy (buy at cloneawilly.co.uk for $44.95)

Although diamonds might be forever, good dick isn't. As the years go by, your bae's boner, which stands up as straight as a flag pole on the Fourth of July, is gonna be as limp as a wet noodle one day. Capture the glory of his penis while it's still in its prime with this Clone-a-Willy Kit. That way you'll always be able to have access to the cock you fell in love with. And he'll have a totem of his groin's glory days. It's the kind of gift that keeps on giving.

For the Polyamorous Couple[body_image width='610' height='610' path='images/content-images/2015/02/05/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/05/' filename='valentines-day-gift-guide-body-image-1423155705.jpg' id='24899']

Moregasm Kit (buy at babeland.com $250.00)

You might be asking yourself, "How can I possibly pleasure all of the peens and vageens in my life this Valentine's Day?" Well the answer is: the Moregasm Kit. If you can't keep the bodily fluids flowing with this bad boy, maybe you need to cut a few members from your roster.

For the Guy You Met on Craigslist

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The Vajankle (buy at sinthetics.com $175.00)

Hooking up with people on Craiglist can be a fast track to ending up on the back of milk carton. But then again, who doesn't love a little kink? If you show up to your creepy date's house with this fuckable severed foot, maybe he'll let you keep yours.

For the Missionary Couple

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Noise Perfume (buy at ephemera.pl $91.66)

I get it, not everybody's into anal beads and nipple clamps. There are other dimensions to sexuality. Olfactory is one of the most fun, because it can conjure up so many intense feelings. These scents by Ephemera are designed to smell like sounds—bass, drone, and noise—and can take you back to the first time you two met at that sweaty summer loft party in Bushwick, where there were bands playing, trippy art installations happening, and you both were praying you had on clean underwear.

For Your Girlfriend Who's More Interested in Erotic Novels

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Fetish Fantasy Ultimate Bondage Kit (buy at Amazon.com $29.29)

There is a strong chance that your significant other wants to drag you to the movie theater on Valentine's Day to see Hollywood's hackneyed take on BDSM. Instead of allowing their heads to fill up with unrealistic expectations, show them what bondage is all about in the comfort of your own home with some Chinese takeout, a funny safe word like "Gary Coleman," and this nifty starter kit.

For the Long-Distance Couple

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Twist Cyper Pleasure Toy (buy at lovepalz.com $79.00)

Celebrating Valentine's Day long-distance used to mean sharing late night sexts and whacking off over the phone together, hoping to have simultaneous petit morts. But thanks to the Twist Cyper PleasureToy, you can get your loved one off from anywhere on the planet with these interactive teledildonics.

For the Lesbian Couple

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The Semenette (buy at thesemenette.com $139.95)

Sure, the Seamenette comes off like a glorified turkey baster. But don't diss it until you fuck it. If you're trying to knock up your partner, strapping one of these squirting rubber dicks adds a pretty exciting level of intimacy to a process that is usually kind of clinical. At the end of the day, what's the fun in baby-making if you can shoot some splooge?

For the Girl Who Hates Valentine's Day

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Bijoux 21 Diamond Vibrator (buy at adamandeve.com $60.00)

You might be a woman who prefers staying at home to enjoy her singledom with a marathon of rom-coms and a half-pint of ice cream, but that doesn't mean you can't show yourself a little love. Gift yourself this glamorous three-speed diamond shaped vibrator to enjoy between Hugh Grant scenes.

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Best Bitches Bracelet (buy at shopjeen.com $13.00)

Sometimes you have to remind your girls that you couldn't navigate this harsh patriarchal world without them. Show them you love them by crowning them as your best bitches with these throwback bracelets.

For the Guy Who Can't Afford a Date

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Tenga Egg (buy at babeland.com $8.50)

Just because you are broke as shit and can't afford to take some ungrateful broad out to a fancy dinner and a movie, it doesn't mean you shouldn't treat yourself. Instead of using the money you find in your couch on a Hot-and-Ready, splurge on a Tenga Egg and get to stroking.

For the Long-Term Girlfriend

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Crave Vesper (buy at babeland.com $149.00)

Your lady has probably hinted at a couple pieces of pricey jewelry she would be interested in receiving on Valentine's Day, but when was the last time a diamond ring gave her an orgasm? Get her this shiny 24K gold Crave Vesper necklace that doubles as a vibrator.

For the Cosplay Couple

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Fox Anal Butt Plug (buy at etsy.com $34.99)

What self-respecting man doesn't fantasize about doing it doggy-style with a furry little fox? Make your boo's dreams come true by shoving this fox tail up your foxhole. Nothing says love like not being able to sit down.

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