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Franklin from 'GTA V'

I'm staring at the city from my balcony, which juts out over my deck and offers me a risky but rewarding dive into my generously proportioned pool. The lawn on either side is immaculate. The city's soundtrack drifts toward my luxury house on the hill, a mixture of machine noise and human voices. Inside, a radio plays rap music, and I follow its rhymes to a bottle of wine, open on the side. I pour a glass and toast my lifestyle: free and single, rolling in the readies to the tune of seven figures, a mighty king among the regular Vinewood Hills rabble.

Of course, "I" am Franklin Clinton, merely an avatar in Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto V, one of the game's three leading men. Early on in the story, Franklin, whose previous job was working repossession for a dodgy car dealer, is unwittingly introduced to ex-career criminal Michael De Santa, who's about to experience a relapse and welcome him into his world of shady shenanigans. Franklin subsequently meets Lester Crest, a fixer with an eye for manipulating the stock market, and soon enough he has made some serious money, albeit at the expense of popping a few heads. Risky business, sure, but "work" instantly rewarded with a property in the game's equivalent of the Hollywood Hills.

It's all exciting stuff, so very far away from the boring repetition of doing a real job to earn in-game currency. But that's the nature of GTA: bigger bangs, more catastrophic crashes, shinier set pieces, and truckloads of dough. Indeed, it's not too long before your average GTA V player will have amassed enough cash to get whatever they want—clothing, guns, fancy cars, property, whatever the game allows you to buy. And all through aiming a reticule at an NPC's forehead and gently nudging the trigger.

Some games make the player work a lot harder for their money, though—to the extent that there's actually a day job to attend for a set period of time, and the game forces you to carry out a series of pretty menial tasks. Whether or not these sequences are entertaining depends on the player's appreciation of realism in their digital worlds. Playing Football Manager, or even FIFA, can feel like a proper job a lot of the time, but there are always options to simulate certain aspects of the experience, or to assign a task to an AI colleague. But one title stands out to me as really torturing the player as they attain the monetary means to progress the story.

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Ryo, the hero of Sega's 'Shenmue'

Shenmue: Just say the word in select circles and you'll be surrounded by a revered hush. Sega's Dreamcast adventure of 1999, which came to Europe and America in late 2000, has a huge following, even today, and not least of all because it's a series that never reached closure. A sequel arrived in 2001, which saw the game's protagonist Ryo travel from Yokosuka, Japan, to Hong Kong on the trail of nefarious sorts who killed his father, but since that game ended, with our hero mucking about with a magical mirror, nothing more has been heard of the saga. Producer-director Yu Suzuki, who is something of a Sega legend with credits on Out Run and Virtua Fighter, has spoken openly of his desire to return to Ryo for a third installment, but right now you've as much chance of playing Shenmue III in imminent years as you do The Last Guardian.

The first game required Ryo to save for a boat trip to Hong Kong—and that meant getting a job, at the New Yokosuka Harbor, driving a forklift from dawn to dusk. There's gang activity in the vicinity, too, which he has to investigate to build a picture of the people he's after, but the player will spend most of their time dockside, running crates from A to B with their stiffly controlled prongs-fronted vehicle, lifting and lowering, until it's time to board the bus back home. There's a race every morning, but when the forklifts' handling is as much fun as wrangling wild bulls with licorice, don't expect to draw much pleasure from these competitions.

I enjoyed a lot of Shenmue, even though I came to it long after release: I didn't see the game through to its end until early 2014. But the forklift phase came really close to ending my involvement with what is acknowledged as an outstanding title on Sega's swan-song console, a work of real ambition—and a massive budget, equivalent to $98 million by current calculations. It might well be this spend that has hamstrung the opportunities for a third, perhaps concluding game—or, the best programmers on the original all lost the will to live by the fifth month of making forklift trucks roll around a harbor, resulting in a personnel blow that AM2 is yet to recover from.

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A forklift race in 'Shenmue'

Shenmue isn't the only game that bothers the player with busywork, of course. The Fable and Elder Scrolls series have provided occupations for gamers to get stuck into, from making pies and playing the lute to woodcutting, smithing, and carrying out assassinations. The Sims has a wealth of potential careers to pursue: Your little person of choice can move into the medical industry, knuckle down for a music career or, in The Sims 4, serve as a secret agent. Fantasy Life, finally given an English translation on Nintendo's 3DS in late 2014, permits one of 12 career paths, although they can be chopped and changed between relatively at will.

But it was only Shenmue that, from recent memory, really had me feeling: Fuck, this is a chore. And where's the fun in that? Much better to take a call from Lester, meet the old crank, and then take out his target. Because while its view is nice and everything, 3671 Whispymound Drive is nothing without more classy abstract art on its perfectly plastered internal walls.

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Legislators in Indonesia proposed a controversial law this week that would require girls to pass a "virginity test" in order to graduate high school. "If they're not virgins anymore, don't let them pass," said one of the leading lawmakers from Jember, the township in East Java pushing for the V-card test, to a local news site. The proposed policy was ultimately defeated after an outpouring of public outrage across the archipelago nation.

This is not the first time such a law has been proposed in Indonesia. In 2007, the province of West Java called for similar tests on high school graduates, and in 2013, lawmakers in South Sumatra tried as well. Both attempts failed. Still, women applying to the National Police force have been given virginity, or "two-finger" tests since at least 1965—a few months ago, the Indonesian coordinating minister for politics, law, and security told the press that giving female military recruits a hymen check has been obligatory for a while now. Last November, the head of the force's law division told the Jakarta Post that the tests can help determine an applicant's moral standards. "If she turns out to be a prostitute, then how could we accept her for the job?" he rationalized.

Local civil society organizations and foreign advocacy groups have called for an end to the bizarre practice. "President Joko Widodo should send a loud and unambiguous message forbidding virginity tests by local governments, as well as the Indonesian military, police, and civil service," Phelim Kine, deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch said in a press release on Monday.

The practice is degrading, unscientific, and in violation of human rights conventions that Indonesia ascribes to, not to mention a major obstacle to gender equality. But why is it happening in the first place?

Despite provisions in Indonesia's constitution barring gender discrimination, the rights of women there lag far behind those of men. Strict communal perceptions of femininity coupled with an enduring culture of machismo propagates a rigid social understanding of what women can and cannot do. Premarital sex is one of the biggest no-nos. In a country where nearly 90 percent of the population practices Islam, issues of sexuality are often connected with religion and morality. Virginity tests are just the tip of the iceberg.

"The committee is deeply concerned about the persistence of a large number of discriminatory laws at the national level... [as well as] discriminatory bylaws," the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women wrote in a 2012 white paper. Some local regulations are as strange as they are prejudiced. In 2013, a township in Lhokseumawe issued a law banning female passengers from straddling motor bikes. Another law proposed the same year would have banned women from dancing in public spaces.

Other restrictions are just scary: In 2010, the Ministry of Health issued regulations effectively legalizing female genital mutilation, a practice that has polled favorably among 90 percent of Indonesian adults.

In 2013, Indonesia's National Commission on Violence Against Women reported that national and local officials had passed approximately 342 discriminatory laws since 1999. From 2009 to 2013, the number of local discriminatory laws passed more than doubled from 154 to 334. "The number of discriminatory policies continues to increase and there has not yet been any firm and decisive steps taken by the state to prevent and eliminate them," the commission said in an August 2013 press release.

This anachronistic treatment of women is in stark contrast with Indonesia's image as the modern—and religiously moderate—emerging economic hub of Southeast Asia, an image pushed by the new president Joko Widodo, a populist champion of religious pluralism and moderation. But right-wing activists, emboldened by a steady rise in religious conservatism in the country, have advocated laws targeting women's behavior and opposed laws designed to protect women. In 2012, passage of a landmark gender equality bill was put on indefinite hold due to opposition from six major Islamic organizations on the grounds that the legislation went against "Islamic values."

Despite having elected a female president in 2001, the position of women in Indonesian society has been steadily deteriorating since the new millennium. "An expressed notion that women should primarily be heterosexual wives and mothers, continues to make it hard for women to access equal opportunities to men," says Sharyn Graham Davies, associate professor at New Zealand's Auckland University of Technology and author of Sex and Sexualities in Indonesia: Sexual Politics, Diversity, Representations, and Health. "I wouldn't see [virginity tests] as a trend of things 'getting worse,' more I would see it as the cruel reality of a nation where dominant notions of women are of them being virgins until heterosexual marriage and then monogamous within it," she adds.

According to the National Commission on Violence Against Women the number of cases of abuse handled by women's crises centers increased fourfold in four years, from 25,522 cases in 2007 to 119,107 in 2011. Other statistics, such as those related to access to reproductive health care, are also worrisome. Official government statistics attribute between 5 and 11 percent of maternal deaths in Indonesia to unsafe abortions. "Restrictions on sexual and reproductive rights are placing severe and potentially deadly obstacles in the way many women and girls can access reproductive health information and services," Salil Shetty, secretary general of Amnesty International, said in a statement in 2010.

On nearly every front, women face major obstacles to equality in Indonesia. And with endemic rates of official corruption, growing violence from Islamic extremists, a separatist movement in West Papua, and rising rates of HIV and AIDS, the country certainly has a lot more important things to worry about than the status of its citizen's hymens.

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It's time, once again, to marvel at some idiots who don't know how to handle the world:

Cry-Baby #1: An unknown person in Chicago

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Photos via Wikimedia Commons and Google Maps

The incident: A woman parked in someone else's spot.

The appropriate response: Leaving a passive-aggressive note.

The actual response: Someone cut her brake line.

For those of you who don't live in snowy areas: Some places have an unofficial system for reserving parking spots after a heavy snowfall. If you shovel the snow out of a parking space, you have dibs on that spot and are able to reserve it with a chair when you're not using it.

Last week, despite being aware of this system, an unnamed Chicago woman decided to move a white plastic chair from a parking spot and put her car in it. "I understand that people have to put a lot of work into it," she told ABC7. "But I had to shovel my own car out of the snow when we had the big storm and I wasn't selfish enough to claim a spot that wasn't mine." Which is a defense I'm having a little trouble wrapping my head around.

The next morning, when the woman drove off in her car, she noticed that the brakes weren't working properly. "I literally had to put all my weight on the brake pedal," she said.

She took the car to a mechanic, where she was informed her brake line had been cut. Repairing it cost her $225. "It honestly is attempted murder," she said.

She is hoping a security camera at a nearby school will help catch the culprit.

Cry-Baby #2: Karen Shearon

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Screencaps via SI Live and Google Maps

The incident: A girl failed an exam.

The appropriate response: Trying harder in the future, and maybe even using the failure as inspiration for future achievements, a la the (apocryphal) story about Michael Jordan being cut from his high school team and then using that snub as fuel on his way to becoming His Airness, winning several NBA Championships, etc. etc.

The actual response: Her mom allegedly threatened to blow up her school.

Earlier this month, 48-year-old Karen Shearon received a call from the guidance counselor at Susan Wagner High School in Staten Island, to tell her that her daughter had failed an exam.

The exact details of the call are not entirely clear, but, according to the guidance counselor, Shearon told her that she was going to "blow up the school."

Now, if Karen did really say she was going to blow up the school, she almost certainly didn't actually intend to do it. But, much like making jokes about guns in airports or telling a woman which celebrity you think she looks like, making threats involving death and schools is a thing you should never ever do under any circumstances ever.

The school contacted police, who arrested Karen and charged her with misdemeanor aggravated harassment in the second degree.

Karen appeared in court last Friday where she pled not guilty. "I never made such a a phone call," she reportedly said.

She was released on $1,000 bond. As she left the court, she hid her face and told the assembled reporters to "get outta here."

Which of these guys is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this poll down here:

Previously: A guy threw a cat out of a window because it peed on him and a school allegedly suspended a kid for threatening to use the ring from the Hobbit to make someone disappear.

Winner: The Hobbit ring school!!!

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Rapper Yonas Michael hit it semi-big in 2008 as "Y-O," part of the breakout duo U-N-I. He's since decided that acronyms aren't as cool as they were back then and has embarked on a solo career. Yonas did a track with Kendrick Lamar and one with Bun B, and now he's got a new self-released record coming out soon called Black Swan Theory.

This track, Blessed, harkens back to Michael's roots as Y-O, leaning on the Kanye staple of high-pitched vocal samples and organs. The song is a reminder that, like any other genre, rap can experiment with old tastes and patterns without being derivative.

Interdisciplinary New York artists Mike and Claire have previously brought VICE readers a psychedelic 420-scented Easter and a queer Halloween with an original soundtrack by Dev Hynes. In honor of Valentine's Day, we proudly debut what may be their most bizarre creation yet, just in time for you to get all freaky. In it, Claire's real-life parents are haunted by a vaudeville show of love-hungry specters.

Directed by: Mike and Claire
Styled by: Miyako Bellizzi
Assistant: Louis Shannon
Photo Editor: Matthew Leifheit
Hair/Make Up: Glossy Bohemond, Leah James, Leah Samuel
Cast: Mom and Dad, Alexandra Marzella, Lyndsea LaMarr, Claire Christerson, India Salvor Menuez, Aaron Kolfage, Vita Kurland

See Mike and Claire's previous contributions to VICE here.

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Telfar Clemens (right)

Ten years after Queens native Telfar Clemens launched his eponymous fashion brand, Telfar, he got on a plane to Hong Kong to begin the process of creating its 25th collection. He went to the island city looking for inspiration, but settled as he has over the past years, on his "simplex" theme, which takes basics like polos shirts and denim jeans and deconstructs them into his own mutated aesthetic. From far away, Telfar's clothes almost look like something you'd find on a mannequin at Sears, if you stretched them out, cut them up, and placed them on a model with an eerie grin.

Telfar's latest self-titled fall/winter 2015 ready-to-wear collection will be presented on Sunday during New York Fashion Week at Artists Space in Tribeca. The magic of this season lies in the designer's ability to re-imagine the ordinary features of clothing—like the way he transforms tags, belt loops, and the built-in cuffs into peculiar pockets. It's these kinds of small, odd flourishes that make his garments unique and highly sought-after. The collection will feature lots of black corduroy fabrics, and at least one thigh-high jean look, all worn by his usual crew of multiracial models.

As it has been for the past couple of years, Telfar is presenting one of the most anticipated shows of the season, helping shift influence away from the storied fashion houses showing at Lincoln Center to the independent brands of Downtown Manhattan. I had the opportunity to catch up with the designer to discuss how his brand has evolved over the decade, racism in the fashion industry, and what it was like creating a collection inspired by himself.

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Telfar spring/summer 2014 looks.

VICE: What's the inspiration behind this season's collection?
Telfar: We are inspired by ourselves. This collection will reference past seasons. This is the ten-year anniversary of the brand. We are looking at things we did in the first show styling-wise and shifting some of the concepts from the past and fusing them into the "simplex" aesthetic.

Your clothes are unisex—why is that important for you as opposed to doing menswear and womenswear separately?
It's how I dress. When I was younger, I would find a nice shirt and my mom would be like, "That's in the women's section." So I always thought that things that are trendy are geared toward woman first then men later. So in my line, I change the size and not the design because I believe if it looks good on you, it's for you. I want people to make up their own mind about what they like.

I know you DJ a lot of parties downtown and in Brooklyn. Does music also influence how you design?
It's my environment. It's where I am and I'm very much Downtown. And that has definitely fused itself into the brand. But the brand is for everyone. It's not really about the scene. It can be for a 50-year-old man or a five-year-old child. The only thing that is important about the clothes is that they are recognizably Telfar.

What makes the clothes recognizably Telfar?
It's the details. You would see a certain pocket you wouldn't see anywhere else. All the pockets on my clothes are placed in spots where they would have to have two functions. The belt loops on my jeans are pockets as well. The tags in the clothes are pockets. The cuffs in the jeans from this season are pockets. Any little detail you see this season is more than likely a pocket. I have shirt with black-and-white stripes and one of the stripes is a pocket. There is a knit sweater in this collection that has a big waistband and it's so big because it is a pocket.

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A design from 2010

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A design from 2011

You always cast a very diverse group of models. Is that purposeful?
It's purposeful in the way that fashion is for everybody. I hate it that there are dynamics that goes against that in a weird way. Being diverse is the future. It is also representative of what the brand is.

Have you experience any personal racism in the industry?
In the way that people would sometimes be like, "Oh, you are black?" They wouldn't think that I made this brand. In the younger days of the brand, VICE had a store on Lafayette Street in the early 2000s, and they were the first store to start selling my stuff. I remember people in the store who would say things like, "Oh, that Japanese line."

Why do you think it was hard for them to consider that a black dude was behind Telfar?
It wasn't hard. It's just when people think of a black designer, they expect for it to have a hip-hop influence. Or they want it to have a street edge—they want a TV representation of what a black line is. They just think of Puffy. I think of my line as encompassing everything.

Do the people, who say, "Oh this has to be Japanese because there isn't a street element to your clothes" disappoint you?
It's an assumption that doesn't necessarily have an effect on me.

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Spring/summer 2015 behind-the-scenes photo

When you give interviews, do you often get questions about your race?
Yeah, I guess so. There is always this question of how I feel about being a black designer. And I'm like, I feel great. There have been tons of great black designers and they might not be put in the forefront, but they are important.

I asked you that because white designers or artists don't get that question. It seems like a burden only designers of color have to carry. I know for you being a designer is about the clothes and it has very little to do with your ethnic background, but for some reason people want to reduce it to that.
The thing that kind of annoys me about it is that they want this story and it can't just be about me making a really cool jacket. It has to be about the jacket somehow being about where I'm from. I do think this question is very important this year because things have boiled over and have become overtly racist.

Switching over a bit, color seems to be important to you, this season are we getting more color?
Black actually was a big color for me this season. It's something I have been getting into again. I have been ignoring the color black for a lot of seasons.

Is that because it's a fall/winter vibe?
I think it's about the fact that I'm influenced by the idea of what people think is fashion and twisting it. What people generally think to be fashion is black.

Your runway presentations are legendary. What can we expect?
A return to Telfar, and it's a testament to ten years of growth. And corduroy made a huge come back this season. Corduroy everything and denim everything, but the theme is Telfar.

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A spring/summer 2015 look

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Spring/summer 2015 behind-the-scenes photo

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A spring/summer 2015 look

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Specialist James Douglas Ross, who served in Iraq as a military intelligence officer (82nd Airborne Division) in his barracks room. Photo via Hunter Glass

The following is an excerpt from the new afterword of Matt Kennerd's Irregular Army: How the US Military Recruited Neo-Nazis, Gang Members, and Criminals to Fight the War on Terror, which has just been released in paperback. Kennard's new book, The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs. the Masters of the Universe, will be released in April.

Just weeks before the hardcover edition of Irregular Army came out in September 2012, a neo-Nazi US Army veteran walked into a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, and shot dead six worshippers. A topic that had never managed to hold the interest of the American media during the War on Terror—the extremists being trained by the country's military—suddenly moved front and center.

Many Americans wondered how this white supremacist could have survived in the military for so long; surely something must have gone wrong. But the Wisconsin shooter, Wade Michael Page, was merely one of many far-right radicals who have used the US military over the past two decades to gain access to the highest-grade weaponry in the world, alongside attendant training. The Springfield semiautomatic 9mm handgun used by Page in Oak Creek was, for instance, very similar to the Beretta M9, the civilian version of the pistol issued by the US military. And neo-Nazi veterans, like Page, were explicit about wanting to use their new military skills in the coming race war they hoped would ignite in the US. Page's heavy-metal white-power band, called End Apathy, was itself a call to arms. According to a 2010 interview he gave to a white supremacist website, he wanted to "figure out how to end people's apathetic ways"; the band was meant to "be the start towards moving forward."

As details emerged, they seemed to confirm what I had written in this book. The most shocking part of Page's story was that he was completely open about his neo-Nazi views while serving in the army during the 1990s, a decade before the War on Terror. Page was no army private either—he was assigned to the esteemed psychological operations ("psyops") branch. But despite this senior status, the independent American military newspaper Stars and Stripes wrote in the aftermath of the shooting that Page was "steeped in white supremacy during his army days and spouted his racist views on the job as a soldier." Page served from 1992 to 1998. The latter part of this period putatively witnessed the US military taking a strong stand against white supremacism within the ranks after neo-Nazi active-duty paratrooper James Burmeister murdered an African American couple near Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 1995.

Page's story actually bore an uncanny resemblance to that of one of the main characters in Irregular Army: Forrest Fogarty, the War on Terror veteran I spent time with in Tampa, Florida. Like Page, Fogarty was a neo-Nazi; like Page, he was a member of the Hammerskins, the most violent skinhead group in the US; like Page, he served in the US military (in Fogarty's case in Iraq from 2004 to 2005); and like Page, Fogarty was the lead singer in a neo-Nazi rock band. Fogarty had in fact signed up to the US army, complete with racist tattoos, in 1997, around the same time Page was denied reenlistment for alcoholism (not neo-Nazism). In fact, as I looked into the history of Page I even came across images of him playing his racist rock with Fogarty himself: they performed in the same band at neo-Nazi concerts. The US military, it would seem, has a penchant for Nazi rockers.

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Forrest Fogarty, a neo-Nazi soldier who served in Iraq as a part of the military police from 2004 to 2005. Photo by Matt Kennard

The media ate up the Pentagon's reflexive lies during the fallout from the massacre. When Al Jazeera interviewed me, they asked the Pentagon for clarification of their policy on extremists. A spokesman told them that "participation in extremist activities has never been tolerated." The media interest endured for a couple of weeks, then the silence returned. But over the subsequent two years, the threats I warned about in the book played out with frightening regularity. Many of the predictions of "blowback" from a decade (and more) of unchecked extremist and criminal infiltration were coming true. Not long after the Sikh Temple massacre, an anti-government militia of active-duty soldiers at Fort Stewart—where Fogarty had been based—was discovered. This heavily armed group had already murdered an active-duty soldier and his wife and was planning to assassinate President Barack Obama. According to prosecutors, the soldiers had spent nearly $90,000 on guns and bomb components.

Not long after this cell was discovered, a Missouri National Guardsman admitted to helping train a white supremacist group, American Front, whose members were preparing for a domestic race war. These extremists, court documents detailed, were alleged to have committed hate crimes alongside paramilitary training in "furtherance of a civil disorder."

The steady beat of tragedies kept coming. In April 2014, an Army veteran and "grand dragon" of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Frazier Glenn Miller, killed three people at two Jewish centers in a suburb of Kansas City. Miller had retired from the Army in the 1990s as a master sergeant after 20 years of active duty, including two tours in Vietnam and 13 years as a member of the elite Green Berets. These cases were particularly scary because they showed the long lineage of this problem. In the book I had focused on the War on Terror years because in that period even the light regulations that were in place were lit up in flames, but Page and Miller demonstrated the long incubation period allowed for these errant extremist veterans to turn into cold-blooded murderers. Over the next two decades, US society will doubtless endure other versions of these massacres—involving veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan this time round. The scars from these wars are long, deep and may be impossible to salve. The US military has refused to take seriously the dangers posed by the radicals in its service—and its own soldiers, alongside the population they are meant to defend, are paying a heavy price. Many more ticking time bombs—unlike Miller and Page, not yet detonated—are now settling back home after a decade of hard combat training.

But it was not just white supremacist soldiers and veterans who were proving dangerous. Many of the other problems outlined in the book—from the US military's failure to deal with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or the economic hardship of the veteran community—were coming back to bite the US populace. In Wade Page's case, for example, it was a confluence of factors that turned him into a murderer. Like many veterans, his house had been foreclosed on in the aftermath of the financial crisis. This toxic mix involving PTSD, extremism, the financial crisis and its tragic aftermath was a recurrent theme. In May 2014, Marine Corps Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi, who had served in Afghanistan and was being treated for PTSD in a VA hospital, was arrested in Mexico with a huge cache of heavy weaponry. If Mexican police hadn't picked him up, who knows what carnage he could have caused south of the border with his training, weapons skills and troubled psyche—all courtesy of the US military.

Disaster at the hands of a mentally troubled US service member struck again in September 2013, when an aviation electrician in the navy, Aaron Alexis, walked into a secure navy yard in Washington, DC, and shot dead 12 people. Alexis was in a lot of ways emblematic of many of the problems afflicting the US military as it dealt with the fallout from over a decade of war and occupation. He had been decorated with two of the most respected medals bestowed by the US military, and he served it honorably for four years. But he had been arrested twice on firearm offenses: first, in 2004, before he signed up to the navy, and then in 2010, which precipitated his discharge from service. He was also receiving treatment from the Veterans Association for mental health problems. Alexis's father told detectives his son had "anger management problems" associated with PTSD.

As explored in this book, the scourge of PTSD is estimated to afflict upwards of 30 percent of veterans, and while resources have been added, treatment for psychological ailments is sorely lacking. The will to sort this mess out is not there in Washington. One Iraq war veteran, Omar Gonzalez, was so angry he invaded the White House and got through five rings of security in September 2014 before being caught by security. He had, like so many others, been diagnosed with PTSD after three arduous tours of Iraq during which he lost part of his foot. When he came back to the US it did not get any easier: his marriage broke down and he started living on the street. While traumatized veterans are mainly a threat to themselves—it is estimated that 22 veterans in the US commit suicide every day—it's increasingly common for them to take their anger out on others. Still, the military paid no heed.

[body_image width='2000' height='1500' path='images/content-images/2015/02/13/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/13/' filename='american-isis-the-domestic-terrorist-fallout-of-the-iraq-war-213-body-image-1423840568.jpg' id='27349']Tank yard in Taji, Iraq, 2010. Graffiti spells out Sactown Norte, a criminal gang out of Sacramento, California. Photo via Jeffrey Stoleson

In the aftermath of the Navy Yard massacre, a Pentagon inspector general found that 52 convicted felons had "routine" unauthorized access to military facilities, "placing military personnel, dependents, civilians, and installations at an increased security risk." No media reports mentioned the huge numbers of felons, and other criminals, who had been knowingly recruited by the US military when its troop needs were most serious, as detailed in the book.

The Navy Yard massacre was the second largest murder spree on a US base in history. The record in that regard was the Islamic radical Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 13 of his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood in November 2009. The unchecked threat to domestic military installations from US soldiers was reinforced in April 2013, when Ivan Lopez, another US soldier taking military-prescribed medication for depression and anxiety, went on a shooting rampage, again at Fort Hood in Texas, which killed three people as well as him. Investigators concluded that, like Alexis in his DC rampage, Lopez's "fragile" state of mind had been the cause of the shooting spree, remarking, "We believe that is the fundamental, underlying causal factor." It was found that he hadn't been given any serious psychological treatment. Instead he was prescribed pills, the military's preferred method of care for its service members. Lopez, who served in Iraq, hadn't even been considered for early discharge based on his problems. It was a familiar story for a desperate military, and showed that their claim to have "cleaned up their act" in the wake of withdrawal from Iraq was a lie. Lopez had actually bought the .45-caliber pistol at the same store in Killeen, Texas, where Hasan had bought his own five years before.

Most of the murders described above became infamous because Americans were killed en masse. But the slow-burn violence involving gangs and US military personnel continued as well, with terrible human consequences. The New York Daily News reported in 2013 that "Mexican drug cartels are recruiting American soldiers to act as clandestine hit men in the United States, paying them thousands of dollars to assassinate federal informants and organized crime rivals." The story was picked up across the US. "We have seen examples over the past few years where American servicemen are becoming involved in this type of activity," Fred Burton, vice president for Stratfor Global Intelligence, told Fox News. "It is quite worrisome to have individuals with specialized military training and combat experi- ence being associated with the cartels." It had taken nearly a decade for this story to make it to the mainstream, and only because it was now Americans that were under threat from their military's recklessness. The unsayable truth is that criminal gangs are increasingly attractive to veterans, who often find the job market impossible to break into.

Los Zetas is a Mexican cartel that actually grew up out of disaffected former elite Mexican Special Forces, some of whom had received training at Fort Bragg. American soldiers on the same base are now joining them. The drug cartels often seek to hire sicarios—hit men—from the ranks of former US, Mexican, and Guatemalan military forces. The horrific "drug war" in Mexico is slowly moving over the border into the southern US states. In May 2013, four Mexican nationals were caught and charged for their part in a large methamphetamine trafficking organization. It was a vision of the future. This unfolding story with gangs in the US military remains largely unreported because they are killing only each other. That could, of course, change at any time.

In this book, I outlined cases like that of former Pfc. Michael Jackson Apodaca, who carried out a contract killing for the Juárez Cartel in 2009 while an active-duty soldier at Fort Bliss. Apodaca, who served in Afghanistan, was sentenced in an El Paso District Court to life in prison, with a chance of parole after thirty years. With the pressure of two occupations now lifted, the US military now admitted openly that it had allowed all sorts of criminals and gangs to join when they were short on numbers. "A person like Apodaca would not even be allowed to enlist today," said Army Maj. Joe Buccino, spokesman for Fort Bliss. "We're more selective than during the height of Iraq." Unfortunately even that wasn't true, but it was the updated excuse from the war years.

But the silence was proving harder to uphold. In May 2014, Juan Jesús Guerrero-Chapa, a former lawyer for the Gulf Cartel, was mowed down in a well-to-do suburb of Fort Worth, Texas. "Obviously, the nature of this homicide, the way it was carried out indicates—and I said indicates—an organization that is trained to do this type of activity," Southlake Police Chief Stephen Mylett said following the attack. "When you're dealing with individuals that operate on such a professional level, certainly caution forces me to have to lean toward that [sic] this is an organized criminal activity act." Mylett conceded that the murder was a "targeted affair conducted by professional killers," but refused to be drawn on if the killers had military training. "The case is still being investigated," he added. It was even reported that two members of Los Angeles street gangs had gone to fight alongside militias linked to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in the country's civil war, maybe for the same reason they had infiltrated the US military: training and weapons.

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Neo-Nazi graffiti put up outside Camp Taji in Iraq. Photo by Jeffrey Stoleson

The reason these events hit the news is that they happened in the US. But you do not need too much of an imagination to picture similar crimes that were inflicted on the people of Iraq and Afghanistan during a decade of occupation. How many Sikh temple massacres, Navy Yard shootings, Fort Hood rampages were there in Iraq and Afghanistan? We will never know. All the known massacres committed by US troops were initially denied, until the truth finally came out. The US military's ethos is: deny, deny, deny—until that becomes untenable because of the weight of contradictory information. The vast majority of times, we found out about US soldiers' criminal activities only when they erred back home, where the rule of law could not be so easily discarded. That fallout will keep coming.

Maybe as a result of the new military sophistication of the criminal underworld, the militarization of domestic US policing has also ramped up. This has dangerous implications not just for the hyper-violent drug gangs, but also for any American who wants to exercise his or her First Amendment rights. They are now up against militarized and heavily armed law enforcement bringing the behavior and conduct suitable to the warzone back to Main Street. The Judge Dredd–lookalike police force that was trying to "pacify" the black community in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014—after the shooting of an unarmed black teen by the police—was a portent of the future.

The media continued to ignore the deep-rooted problems within the US military because this story so glaringly contradicted the fairytale narrative of the War on Terror. This narrative was one the US mainstream media itself had done so much to support and construct. Individual massacres and atrocities were covered to the point of saturation, but the context was missing. It was also inconceivable that the people who had been at the top of government and turned a blind eye, people like former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, might share some blame. Perhaps this is why there is such surprise every time there is a violent attack: Americans are inevitably told it is an outlier, not the product of a US military that allows extremism and ignores its marginalized veterans. The longer that debate is pushed off the table the worse the problem will become, and the worse the resulting violence.

In the spring of 2014, after the anti-Semitic attack near Kansas City, the New York Times broke the mold and bravely printed a stinging op-ed that highlighted the problem of radicalized soldiers and veterans. Its author, Kathleen Belew, a doctoral student working on a book on Vietnam and the far right, asked: "Would [Miller] have received greater scrutiny had he been a Muslim, a foreigner, not white, not a veteran? The answer is clear, and alarming." She was subjected to a torrent of abuse for impugning the whole veteran community—something she went to great pains to avoid. It was the standard tactic used to shut down debate on the topic and entirely predictable. American Legion National Commander Daniel Dellinger called it a "poorly researched and agenda-driven piece," adding that "the New York Times should be above the slanderous stereotyping of the men and women that have defended us against the racist ideology that Ms. Belew and the NY Times no doubt oppose."

But further vindicating Belew's piece just a month later was news that recruitment fliers imploring soldiers to fight for a "white nation" in the coming race war had been discovered on Fort Carson in Colorado. "Ever wonder if you are fighting for the right side?" the flier asks, urging the soldiers to help "secure the existence of our people and a future for White children." One further report said that a surge of KKK members with military experience had allowed the Loyal White Knights to conduct combat training for the first time in its history. In this case, Allen West, a former Republican congressman and retired military officer, gave the usual line intended to shut down debate: "Why do I question this? Because I know the tactics of the liberal progressive Left, and besmirching the military to prove their long-held thesis is very important," he wrote. I don't think it is too strong to say that when this "blowback" hits the next innocent Americans, the people who tried to impugn the Cassandras will bear part of the responsibility.

There is, in fact, barely anyone who spoke critically of the situation in the US military from the inside who has come out with his or her career or reputation intact. After publication of Irregular Army, I got to know a number of whistleblowers who had bravely exposed this issue during the War on Terror. When a Department of Homeland Security report warned in 2009 of the threat posed by far-right extremism, Secretary Janet Napolitano apologized to veterans for the report's imputation that those with military experience were especially susceptible to solicitations from far-right groups. Daryl Johnson, the senior analyst who wrote the report, was put out to pasture after a ferocious backlash from department officials, the military and some politicians on Capitol Hill. Despite the fact that Johnson's clarion call now looks increasingly prescient, he had to leave the DHS and is now a consultant. It was the same story with other whistleblowers, from Army Reserve Sgt. Jeffrey Stoleson, who alerted his superiors to the gangs in this unit, and had his life destroyed, to former DoD gang investigator Scott Barfield, who was attacked mercilessly for raising the alarm on white supremacist infiltration of the US military.

When I was interviewed by the US mainstream media, the focus was nearly always on what the findings of the book meant for Americans. No one thought it was of interest what the effect was on the populations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Ten seconds before I was to appear on MSNBC opposite a retired colonel, the producer spoke through my earpiece. "Try to keep it light on rape and massacres, please, Matt," he said. I half-laughed, but he was deadly serious. When I got over the temptation to start my first sentence with "We all know there were a lot of rapes and massacres in Iraq," I pulled no punches, despite the host saying I had written the book to make money.

These wars themselves are far from over, as the bombing of Islamic State (IS) positions in Iraq and Syria make clear. Similarly, after touting for years a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan at the end of 2014, President Obama announced, as the deadline hovered on the horizon, that 9,800 troops would be kept in the country until 2016, the year he will leave office. Many predict that as soon as withdrawal happens, the Taliban will follow IS's course and reestablish control of the country. As in Vietnam, years of war, millions of lives destroyed, gargantuan sums of money spent will have achieved nothing but a more dangerous world. The US withdrew from South Vietnam in 1973, and the embassy in Saigon was overrun in 1975. The US withdrew from Iraq in 2012, and IS militants took northern Iraq in 2014. It would not be foolish to believe that when the US finally leaves Afghanistan in 2016, a still-strong Taliban will take over in 2018. Such are the problems of an occupying power trying to impose its will on the natives. The past 13 years of war have been a long black nightmare for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, alongside the US soldiers occupying their countries. The future does not look much brighter—for them or for Americans now facing a new threat from their own soldiers and veterans.

Matt Kennard is a fellow at the Centre for Investigative Journalism in London. Follow him on Twitter.

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Kapil (right) with his father and two other inmates during a prison visit in February 2010

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

One hundred and twenty-four pounds of hash weighs about the same as your girlfriend and has a street value worth over $750,000. That's how much was concealed under Kapil Ghosh's car when he was stopped at the Syria-Turkey border in December 2009. The then 20-year-old was sentenced to nine years in a Turkish jail for smuggling. After 20 months he was repatriated to Britain and was released from Lewes Prison just before last Christmas.

There have been a number of high profile smuggling cases involving Brits making headlines recently. Melissa Reid, 20 and Michaella McCollum, 21 were convicted of smuggling $2.3 million worth of cocaine in Peru last year, while 58-year-old Lindsay Sandiford, who claims she was forced into smuggling cocaine by a gang, could face a firing squad in Bali as early as next month.

Kapil's case never made the national papers and he maintains his innocence, arguing that he was a decoy for a larger smuggling operation.

Having been arrested for drug smuggling, while inside he got caught up in the drug culture that pervades Turkish jail. He told me about living out his own real life Midnight Express, and spending his formative years locked up in a foreign country.

VICE: What was the Turkish prison like?
Kapil Ghosh: In comparison, English jail is a walk in the park. When I got repatriated to Wandsworth, which is a shit hole by English standards, I was happy—like, really happy.

The cells are basically like houses. Every one is different and you're sharing with 30 to 50 people, but they're big. There's a very big downstairs room with tables. We had two showers, two toilets, and a sink. A hole in the floor obviously—not a proper toilet. Then there's upstairs where the beds are, it's set out like a maze. There's a garden as well.

What was it like sharing with that many people?
Hard at first. The snoring as well—loads of them snored and they're not snoring at the same time either. Think of one person snoring, then think of 50 all in a different pattern. I used to take sleeping pills—I did a lot of coke out there—so to come off it and sleep we'd take pills.

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Kapil with his parents and some other inmates during a prison visit in February 2010

So drugs were just available?
Yeah. At the small jail I first went to there was hash, as soon as I got there I could smell it and the screws were smoking it with us. But only because it was a small jail. When you get to the big jails you get the Gendarmerie [military police]. And they're hardcore—if they smell weed they'll strip the cells apart and every month they do proper strip-searches of the cell. But coke and heroin were available.

And you were just offered it openly?
A guy called Youseff took me under his wing, because he spoke English, and we became good friends. They were selling coke, him and his gang and, yeah, I just got on it. There was nothing else to do so we just got on it. It was maddening. Luckily they weren't heroin dealers. It was weird, but the thing is when you're younger you've got more balls. I wouldn't do this now. I can't believe how brave I was back then.

I took shitloads of beatings. The craziest thing was when there was a riot in our cell. The group I was with fought with another group. They're rivals on the outside. They've killed each others' friends, but somehow—I don't know if it's just coincidence—but they're in the same cell together.

What was the weirdest thing that happened when you were there?
So me and Youseff were sniffing coke quite early in the morning. Usually you could hear the screws coming, and we used to put the fridge in front of the peephole, so there was a chance to get rid of anything. But this time we didn't even hear the door open and this guard came in. He poured the coke out, didn't even rack it up or anything—I think he was really desperate or something, he just snorted it up. Then he took it and put it in his bag and then, as he walked off, he said something. I could understand a little bit, but I asked Youseff just to make sure. Youseff was really spaced out, he said, "if we speak, he'll come back and fuck us." We both looked at each other and creased up. We came to the conclusion that maybe he was a junkie and he heard us snorting because it was early morning.

Were there a lot of fights?
Oh yeah, I took shitloads of beatings. The craziest thing was when there was a riot in our cell. The group I was with fought with another group. They're rivals on the outside. They've killed each others' friends, but somehow—I dunno if it's just coincidence—but they're in the same cell together. One day I had an argument with someone and this guy was trying to get to me, he called the guys I was with "top," which means gay and in a Muslim country, that's a very big insult.

Everyone kicked off, it escalated, and everyone was fighting each other. Sometimes the screws will hear, sometimes they don't. Most of the time it's broken up, but this time it was a fucking big riot. I'd just been beaten the shit out of and there was a ringing in my ears, a really fucking loud ringing, and I noticed the Gendarmerie had come in and they were blowing their whistles. They come in and say, "Has there been a fight?" They want you to talk. I'm lying there facedown, covered in blood, and a screw comes over to me and says, "Has there been a fight?" and I was just like, "No, no." "Oyun" you say—which means "game." I'm laying there covered in blood saying it was a game.

There was only one stabbing. Because you've got the two groups doing everything, the coke and all that, if there's stabbings, the gendarmerie are gonna know someone's got stabbed—if he dies it's a problem. So they're gonna come in, search the cell, find a weapon, and find the coke and heroin. So a guy from our group stabbed someone and they actually made him own up to it—they threw him out. He obviously took extra punishment for it, I dunno how many years. I never heard from him again.

People think I'm crazy, I'm actually glad I went to jail.

What were the other people in for?
A lot of them were murderers actually, doing 35-year sentences. They made me toughen up a lot. I'd wander why my friend was calm all the time, and he said to me in Turkish, "patience." I had a nine-year sentence and would probably do six, but I couldn't bitch about that because that's nothing. All these guys were young, like 24, 25—my age now.

What did you think when you got nine years?
Do you know what? It was like weight off my shoulders. My mom even said I didn't seem worried when they told me I got nine years. I started writing, I got into a routine and that was perfect. The hard bit's waiting.

What happened when you got repatriated?
The Minister of Europe got involved and he got me repatriated very quickly. They just came and I was actually in a very good cell in Turkey. I was with a Scottish guy, and there were only eight in the cell. We all got on, there was hot water twice a week, good food, meat once a day. They came and said I was going to Istanbul jail and I was there six weeks. When they came it was sudden, I was happy to go but also really sad. I was relieved, but I was sad to see my friends go.

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Kapil with his parents during a prison visit in February 2010

What was the food like?
OK, I'll give you the rundown. There was kidney beans and rice, split peas and rice, green beans and rice, chick peas and rice, black eyed peas and rice. When baked beans and rice came I'd jump for joy—that was my favorite meal.

Two meals a day, one for lunch, one in the evening, they give a loaf of bread to each prisoner in the morning and maybe olives or fruit. It was boring. I didn't know the importance of olives at the time, but if I'd known I would've eaten all of them. You could order salad from the canteen.

How do you think the experience has changed you?
My mentality is completely different now. I've grown up a lot, I've learnt loads of things. Positive thinking—positive energy. The main lesson I took away from jail is keeping positive, because when I feel positive, happy things come to me. I can get birds, job opportunities, everything. But when I'm negative, or I'm not feeling good about myself, shit comes to me.

I've got a work ethic now, I just want to earn dough now. Before, I'd just make money for tonight. Now I care more about my future. People think I'm crazy, I'm actually glad I went to jail. I know it's five years off my life, but I wouldn't have changed.

You said you did a lot of drugs in jail. Do you still do them?
To be honest, I still like coke, but I've not touched it since I've been out. I just can't do it anymore—the main thing is the morning factor. I've done gear on home leaves mate, but I've realized I don't want to do it, it sucks my energy.

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Kapil today

What was the scariest thing that happened to you?
This happened in English jail, I felt most vulnerable. I was holding something for someone because he was sorting me out with a few bits. These guys who I thought he was with came and robbed him. They told me that he said they could have it and it put me in a big fucking situation. This gang have been trying to get this parcel but its been passed around and they finally clocked I've got it. I even had to ring my parents and say I'm in dough... they thought I was getting bullied and rang up the screws who came to the door and put me in a big situation—I don't want people to think I'm talking. Even my pals are thinking I'm a grass but they're not saying it. I'm looking over my shoulder everywhere and even when you were allowed to go out and socialize, I'd just sit in my cell because I wanted to see if there was trouble coming to my door. It was a horrible feeling. I had to ride it out for about two months.

Tell me about coming back to England.
Interpol came and got me from Turkey and took me to the airport. Then there were two very smartly dressed guys in suits and they were actually screws from Wandsworth. They cuffed me at the very end, but they were good guys. The plane food was nice. One of the screws gave me his chocolate dessert so I was quite grateful.

Since his release, Kapil has found a job in a call center and is writing a book about his time in prison.

Follow Hayden on Twitter.

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Sun News personalities Jerry Agar and Tarek Fatah discuss Fatah's "brown privilege to take over the show." Photo via screenshot

Sun News Network, the TV bastion of Canadian conservatism ( and, arguably, of bigotry), permanently shut down its broadcast at 5 AM today. The network was host to some of Canada's most entertainingly surreal programming in addition to some of our most blatantly racist, and all in just under four years on the air.

The public faces of the network, the most famous of whom is undoubtedly Ezra Levant, are known for their retrograde views on all manner of issues, from the slightly more radical—for example, trans rights—to the downright old-fashioned—like that the Roma are people and as such deserve respect.

But it's important to remember that not everyone who worked for the network was of that ilk. Many of the people working behind the scenes were doing their best to succeed in a cutthroat industry. There aren't a lot of openings in the journalism industry, and everyone needs to eat. Judging people who may or may not share the views of their employer is unfair, even if their work helped create problematic shows. Nothing and no one is perfect, after all, although Sun News certainly wore many of its flaws right on its sleeve.

It is in the spirit of homage that we look back now on some of the most memorable moments Sun News brought Canadians. However it might seem, this isn't about mocking or deriding the (mostly) good people of SNN. But rather a fond looking back at some of our favourite moments, in no particular order.

Faith Goldy demands Liberal leader Justin Trudeau be excommunicated from the Catholic church for his "extremist" views on abortion.

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via The Albatross

Jerry Agar, Anthony Furey, Paige MacPherson, and JJ McCullough explain to Tarek Fatah (also a Sun News personality) why he has Muslim and/or "brown" privilege, and they don't have white privilege.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/BtmOxVjzPUc' width='420' height='315']

via PressProgress

To their credit, Agar and Sun had Torontoist columnist Desmond Cole on to discuss white privilege after the above disastrous segment, although Agar still managed to imply he'd be within his right to worry about Cole being a "gangster."

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via John Human

Brian Lilley, sporting Canada's number one haircut, loves the troops so much he has trouble talking about it. But, hey: there was a patriotic parade not on Remembrance Day!

via Sun News Network

Michael Coren doesn't think Miley Cyrus—or as he says, Smiley Virus—is attractive or talented. She has a "boy's body," which Coren's guest doesn't seem to mind at all.

via Sun News Network

Comedian Scott Vrooman successfully infiltrates Sun News and trolls them on their own show. He calls Sun "Canada's foremost intellectual" outlet.

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via Scott Vrooman

The network was singularly interested in the negative aspects of wind energy, leading to a documentary with this attention-grabbing trailer. Threre's propaganda! Deception! "Dirty secrets behind wind power!"

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/BMajK24q99o' width='560' height='315']

via Sun News

Michael Coren and Faith Goldy discuss gender-inclusive school bathrooms. Because as Coren says, "who better to explain about what [the issue with trans-friendly bathrooms] is than someone who is not transgender or transsexual?"

via Sun News

Brian Lilley demands an apology from Canadian Muslim leaders for... something. For themselves wanting an apology from Prime Minister Stephen Harper?

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/bLJyRpDmrh0' width='560' height='315']

via Sun News

Farewell, Sun News. We do wish your employees all the best, and we hope to see Brian Lilley's haircut again soon.

Follow Tannara Yelland on Twitter.

This week, VICE meets filmmakers Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement to talk about their new movie, What We Do in the Shadows. The film is a mockumentary that follows the lives of four vampires as they share a house, argue about dirty dishes, and go to parties in the filmmakers's native New Zealand.

What We Do in the Shadows premieres in New York today, Friday, February 13. Watch an exclusive trailer here.

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PETER MOLYNEUX PRETTY MUCH RETIRED FROM GAMING

It's been a hell of a week for Peter "I designed Populous" Molyneux (pictured above). We all knew that Godus, the still-in-development-hell-despite-being-"out" god simulator from Pete's 22Cans studio, was in trouble. A Kickstarter-funded project, it's been attracting criticism like freshly laid dog dirt does out-the-box sneakers when you're just running out for some milk (come on, people, pick up your mutt's shit already) for bloody ages. Vague promises had been made regards meeting multiplayer functionality outlined at the funding stage, not to mention several other undelivered Kickstarter pledges, but all anyone can play of the game right now, outside of a Steam early access beta, is a freemium mobile version stuffed full of what every gamer loves so dearly: microtransactions.

This week has seen the state of Godus transition from rocking to wrecked, with Molyneux both culpable for the mess the game's become and distancing himself from seeing out the project. As several sites have documented, but we'll lean on this interview in the Guardian, Molyneux is deeply apologetic that backers of Godus haven't seen the return they expected on their investment. He's also upfront about how 22Cans have let down Bryan Henderson, the Scotsman who was to "play god" in the game's multiplayer mode having "won" the previous "game" (keeping up with these quotation marks?) from Molyneux and company, Curiosity—What's Inside the Cube?.

Henderson's been left in the dark for ages on his role in Godus, as covered in this tremendous but depressing Eurogamer feature. He expected, well, not riches exactly, but a damn site more than the nothing he's received. Says Molyneux of the situation: "We had someone looking after Bryan, and that person left, and nobody took the reins. That was terrible, it was atrocious, and I can understand him feeling offended." Regards the disgruntled backers—like Kotaku UK editor (and VICE contributor) Keza MacDonald, who put her displeasure down in writing—Molyneux told the Guardian: "My hope is that in six to nine months, people start to see the game they really did pledge for."

Peter himself won't be on the game to see it reach that point, though. He's moved onto something new, The Trail, leaving Godus in the hands of Konrad Naszynski, who has already said it's unlikely that all promised features will be implemented. It feels like a case of the buck being passed, but Molyneux isn't wriggling clean of this shitshow.

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Everyone can appreciate how Kickstarter targets might not always be met, and how games can take longer than expected to reach a finished state. But everything about Godus (screenshot, above) has been shambolically mishandled, from the cash-grabbing iOS and Android iterations apparently taking precedence over a proper PC release, to the studio's blanking of the stranger they intended to make a superstar. Whatever Molyneux does next, expect goodwill for his work to be at an unsalvageable low.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun's headline for their recent interview with Molyneux says it all: "I haven't got a reputation in this industry anymore." And with that, it's surely all over for a man who's done so much for both the British and global games business, whose resume stretches way beyond Populous, taking in Fable and its sequels, the original Syndicate and Theme Park, and Dungeon Keeper. Godus was always ambitious, but if Peter Molyneux can't make a god game work properly, what chance does anyone else have of repairing the damage that's been done.

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BUT ENOUGH MISERY: HERE'S THE NEW "FIRESTARTER" TRAILER FOR JUST CAUSE 3

Just Cause 3 will be out just in time for Christmas, and if it's half as much fun as the game that came before it, you're going to want to park that break someplace in the sunny Southern Hemisphere for a few weeks in the surrounds of your own frozen home with this, Dominos on speed dial, and a friend who's willing to feed thin-crust deliciousness into your face as you (rightly so) refuse to divert your eyes from the screen. Open-world-staged emergent hilarity is almost certainly assured, and if that sounds like a canned sales pitch to you, clearly you never played Just Cause 2.

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KIM JONG-UN IS NOW YOURS TO CONTROL

The Third Supreme Leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un, has his own video game. Kind of.

Little Dictator is fresh to the App Store after Apple belatedly approved the Flappy Bird-alike, which has you tapping the screen to keep the missile-riding Jong-un flying right to left through explosive gates for as long as you possibly can. Apple had previously dismissed the game, although it had no such trouble finding a place on Android devices. They've seen the light now, probably because it's far from the first game to reach the App Store that's sought to parody North Korea.

Is Built Games' free-to-download effort any good, though? I deleted it from my phone about ten minutes after downloading it, but it won't cost you anything to try for yourself should the trailer below appeal.

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ANITA SARKEESIAN IS IN A GAME, TOO

A considerably lesser threat to our Western values than Jong-un—not that some lurkers of the internet's slimiest corners won't try to tell you otherwise—Feminist Frequency founder and Gamergate hate-magnet Anita Sarkeesian is to have a TowerFall Ascension character based on her.

Reports Polygon, the game's upcoming expansion Dark World introduces ten new characters, with one archer bearing no little similarity to Sarkeesian.

Says the game's developer, Matt Thornton: "Anita's work has been an inspiration to the team. Her 'Tropes vs. Women in Games' video series gave us a valuable new lens through which to assess our character designs. TowerFall is about bringing people together, so it's vitally important that the cast of playable characters makes everyone feel invited to join in."

Can you guess which of the characters above is based on Anita? Here's a clue: It's the one that looks like Anita Sarkeesian.

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Image via Wikipedia

IF YOU OWN A PLAYSTATION, YOU'RE PROBABLY INTO BDSM

Porn-streaming service SugarDVD has released figures that show that PlayStation 4 owners watch more BSDM porn than users of other devices. Naturally there are some facts to consider here: the PS4 is the market-leading current-gen console, and there's some film or other out right now that's doing a fine job of popularizing a little bondage amongst the masses. But all the same: if you pick up your boyfriend's DualShock 4 tonight and its sticks are stickier than usual, there's a moderate chance he's been spanking himself to the sight of some saucy submission.

SugarDVD's vitals state that BDSM is streamed 1.8 times more on PlayStations than it is Xboxes. "Couples" is a popular search term, too, because face facts here: whipping yourself solo just isn't as rewarding as having a friend wield the crop.

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NETFLIX DOING THE LEGEND OF ZELDA IS A BAD MOVE

The word in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week was that Netflix is going to create an original, live-action series based on Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda franchise. The games press has reacted almost universally negatively to the news.

Dorkly offers "five real problems Netflix will have with the Zelda TV series," their points being: the games don't have much of a consistent, central plot; Link (pictured above) isn't leading-character material; the last time someone made a Zelda TV series it was utterly dreadful; Nintendo and live-action just don't mix, as this awful movie proves so effortlessly; and while Netflix is having a great run on its own commissions, its lucky streak is perhaps overdue a slip.

At the Guardian, Keith Stuart highlights that same lack of a narrative backbone to the Zelda series, adding that the multiple aesthetic approaches of the games give them a variety that a live-action adaptation just wouldn't achieve. Also: what do we really know of Link? When we play as him, he is us—beyond that, he once had an annoying catchphrase and, um, he likes horses?

Says Stuart: "[ Zelda] is a series so utterly interconnected with player experience and agency, so dreamlike and aloof in its sense of space and time." How would "a family-friendly take on Game of Thrones" replicate that? Chances are, it really won't.

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SOME NEW GAMES CAME OUT

Both Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate (3DS) and Evolve (multi-format, read about it here) offer multiplayer monster-tracking hijinks, with the former currently distracting me from the stinking humans sharing my commutes. That said, I'm not "attached" to it just yet—five or six hours in, and I'm enjoying it without wanting to play more once I'm home. But then, I'm more than likely doing it wrong. Capcom's series is a tough one to break into, practically impenetrable on previous iterations, and friends tell me that newcomers—i.e., me—often need an "enabler" to help them on their way, even on this easier-going installment.

The Monster Hunter experience, as I see it: forage for things that can make your character's gear better, and then put that gear to good use against the game's biggest beasts. Sounds like a lot of dull grinding, but I'm reliably informed that 4 Ultimate is one to stick with. So, I will be. It's either that or listening to the same few albums, over and over, that my paltry iPod can store.

Sticking to the 3DS, the new-and-improved port of 2000's The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask is out right now, and to return to the words of Keza MacDonald, it's really worth revisiting. You should read her review for Kotaku, because if nothing else it really illustrates how this series, its world, and its inhabitants, can mean so much to people. No pressure then, Netflix.

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ATARI HAS CONFIRMED THAT THERE IS GOING TO BE A NEW ASTEROIDS

But this really isn't Asteroids, at all. You had one job, Atari.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

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Photo via Wikipedia

Last night, after moderating a panel discussion with Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, and Glenn Greenwald, author and journalist David Carr collapsed in the New York Times newsroom. He was hurried to St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where he was pronounced dead. His wife, Jill, and one of his daughters were with him when he passed. He was 58 years old.

We haven't seen many journalists as talented, frank, or funny as David, but it's likely some of our readers weren't aware of his work until now. Eulogizing such a remarkable man before all the facts come out feels risky, like we might miss something, or make a mistake. The kind of mistake that, while he was alive, David would have caught, and called us on. That's why we loved him.

But as David advised the countless young journalists who once flocked to him for advice, the best cure for writer's block is typing. So I'll just start typing.

As of this morning, the cause of David's death is not entirely clear. What we do know is that for his entire life, he struggled with the myriad physical and psychological challenges that tend to haunt those of us who spend the better part of our youths assaulting our brains with mood-altering chemicals. As a young reporter in Minneapolis, he built a career telling the stories of the most desperate drug users on the streets, before he became one himself.

David's rise from the dregs of that crippling cycle of addiction, as recounted in the 2008 memoir The Night of the Gun, is one of the greatest success stories in our industry. Once he got clean (inspired, in part, by a chilling incident he once recounted in his famous gravelly voice to the Moth, when he left his two infant twin girls alone in a car while he scored coke during a blizzard), David built his career in the 90s at alt weeklies, working for the Twin Cities Reader and the Washington City Paper. Then, in 2002, after stints at the Atlantic and New York magazine, he found a job that perfectly suited his unsparing journalistic wit: Covering the publishing industry for the New York Times' business section. He joined the Times during a time of uncertainty in the paper's history, and rose through the ranks to become its public face. Any discussion of the paper and its influence would be incomplete without a nod to David's work.

Even if you've never read his remarkable "Media Equation" column, you've witnessed its influence on any publication, outlet, or journalist who dares to do things their own way, whatever the consequences. He took shots wherever they were deserved, including at us, famously, in Page One, the 2011 documentary about the Times of which he was the star.

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It's rare that one person is able to improve an entire industry, but that's exactly what Carr achieved. The numerous journalists and organizations he criticized came out better for it. His comments forced all of us to try harder. The bar he set was high but fair, and when a person or company received his praise it was cherished, probably framed and hung on a wall by some. In later years his opinion of us warmed, and he and VICE founder Shane Smith even became friends.

A few years ago, we had the great pleasure of working with one of his twin daughters, Erin, in our London and then US offices. We loved her. As a producer, Erin made some of the best documentaries we've ever done (if you haven't, you should really watch her piece on 3-D printed guns). We miss her humor and weird heart brightening up our lives in an office that can get, as all offices do, a bit depressing at times. Our hearts go out to her, and to the rest of David's family, in this time of unspeakable loss.

But most important, we'd like to thank David Carr. For everything you taught us. The world is different without you in it, and your death is a reminder that at the core of our work, at its very base, are people like you, sitting up late writing truth to power even when it's inconvenient for the execs.

You once wrote that the truth is singular, lies are plural, and that the facts of history are unknowable. You may have been right, but we know one thing: You'll go down in history as the best media reporter of our time. Thank you.

Follow Benjamin Shapiro on Twitter.