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'Dying Light' zombies

There's a type of zombie in Techland's recent Dying Light called the Demolisher. I came across one of them laying into a group of survivors in an open courtyard, and it wasn't exactly a fair fight. It was ten feet tall and had muscles even the Hulk would check out in the gym. It must've been a riot officer in a previous life: the survivors' attacks just seemed to bounce off the creature's helmet and remaining armor. I could see how it got its name.

The Demolisher made short work of the others and quickly turned its attention to me. Thankfully, I had my trusty police rifle. Sadly, I knew the irony would be lost on this monster as it charged towards me. Dodging around, I fired into it, eventually breaking through some of its armor. But then I ran out of ammo. And while I was fumbling around trying to switch to another weapon, it charged into me and knocked me to the ground.

I had three choices. One: Get up and continue the fight with a melee weapon. Risky, but it might be worth the reward. Two: Flee with my tail between my legs. Avoidance is pretty much always an option in Dying Light. Three: Turn the whole situation into an elaborate metaphor for zombie video games.

Much like my new Demolisher friend, zombie games are tough to get rid of. In the last couple of years there have been plenty of high-profile releases featuring the shuffling (or, some of the time, sprinting) undead, such as Dying Light, Dead Rising 3, and a few adaptations of The Walking Dead. There are several zombie survival games like DayZ and H1Z1 on Steam's Early Access. We've had a remaster of Resident Evil, and Dead Island 2 is coming soon.

That sounds like a lot, right? Well, I'm here to tell you that it's not such a bad thing. There has been some reaction to the never-ending tide of the undead, and I understand where it's coming from, because I used to be on that side of things. Oh, great, another zombie game has been announced, I thought to myself every few months. Why can't we just kill them all off?

Well, you can't kill what's already dead, so the zombies just keep coming, and like the viruses that often cause the infected to turn, they keep spreading. They've become so prevalent that zombie games have effectively become their own genre—and when I realized that was when I switched sides. Zombies aren't just stale antagonists in the survival horror or shooter genres anymore—they have become their own thing. I didn't get mad when Yet Another FPS™ got announced, so why should I get worked up about another title featuring armies of the undead?

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'Dying Light,' launch trailer

Everyone has the same options with today's zombie games as I did with the Demolisher. You can either pick up your plank of wood with a nail in it and dive into the action, or you can keep your distance and not engage. If you're in the latter group, that's fine, I don't blame you. Just don't ruin the blood-splattering fun for the rest of us, yeah?

Barring the obvious similarities of the main enemies, zombie video games aren't as same-y as they first appear. In the mid 2000s, critics said that the shooter genre had become stale. Then in 2007, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare came out and revolutionized multiplayer action, paving the way for years to come. The high lasted for about five years or so before the same questions were being raised again. "OK, we get it. What's next?"

High mobility was next, taking a step back towards the fast-paced arena shooters of the 1990s. Games such as Quake and Unreal Tournament worked great with a mouse and keyboard, but the console market needed to slow things down a bit for the controllers. However, as technology and control systems have progressed, Titanfall and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare have added boost jets and free running to their repertoires. There are still loads of shooters, but there is quite a lot of diversity to be found.

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'Dead Island' set its zombie-slaughtering scenes against a tropical backdrop

The same thing has happened with the zombie genre. For the most part, the settings were dark and dreary. Scary enemies had to be backed up by a scary location, right? Dead Island flipped that idea on its head by having the best portion of the game take place in a sunny beach resort. Has the free running of Dying Light created a revolution for zombies that future games will try and emulate? Only time will tell. My guess is that, at the very least, the structures in zombie games will become more vertical, shying away from the labyrinthine tight corridors of old.

There is, of course, a lot more diversity in the genre than just how to move about, just like how there are way more zombie types than the Demolisher in Dying Light. From Dead Rising to Left 4 Dead, there is, as they say, something for everyone. Yes, there are a lot of zombie games, but that also means there are a lot of good zombie games, and they're not necessarily all alike (although maybe they should stop all having either "Dead" or "Z" in their titles).

Take Telltale's The Walking Dead, for example. If you had told me a few years ago that I would be utterly devastated by the death of certain characters, and that I would actually cry at a piece of zombie fiction, I would've laughed in your face. Narrative has always been something that horror games have had a problem with, and while The Walking Dead is more adventure than horror, Telltale has certainly taken some steps towards remedying that.

So that's if you want to feel. What about if you don't want to feel, and just want to mindlessly distract yourself for a bit? Zombies have you covered for that. The Dead Rising series is all about giving you the tools to go on a rampage through hordes of rotting enemies. Want to make a ridiculous weapon involving a teddy bear and explosives? Go for it.

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Telltale's episodic games based on 'The Walking Dead' have provided the feels beside the traditional decapitations

Neither The Walking Dead nor Dead Rising are particularly scary, and that's what zombies are supposed to be, right? Fear is always around the corner with the likes of Dead Space, though. OK, they're "Necromorphs," not zombies, but c'mon. A lot of it is simple jump-scares, but they're still frightening. The incongruously gruesome Wii U exclusive ZombiU can also be a pants-soaking experience unless your emotions are utterly dead to being cornered by blood-hungry bastards in the dark.

If you don't fancy taking on the undead alone, you've always got cooperative games like Killing Floor and the "Zombies" mode in Call of Duty. Teaming up with some pals to take on waves of the living dead is way more fun than doing it all by your lonesome. For something completely different, why not try Audio Defense: Zombie Arena? It's a game you can get on the App Store in which you're fighting the usual waves of zombies, but with a twist: you can't see anything. You put on your headphones and listen to where the creatures are coming from. With no visuals and outside noise muffled, you're fully immersed in twisting around to face the sounds to stop yourself from getting eaten. So while a sizable stack of games feature zombies right now, it's foolish to assume they're all alike.

I ended up killing the Demolisher in the end, by the way. I found loads of money on its corpse. Zombies are big business. Just ask the developers of DayZ, a game in Steam Early Access and not due to be finished for some time yet, but that has already sold over three million copies. A few streets away I found another Demolisher, just like how in a few months there will be another zombie game to play. They're here, amongst us in greater numbers than ever before, and they'll be around for some time yet. But that's OK, because zombies are still pretty cool.

Follow Matt on Twitter.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

You can't help feeling that vegetarianism and veganism have lost some of their alternative cachet. They're no longer exotic novelty lifestyles limited to the McCartneys, Green Party members, IBS sufferers, and white guys with dreadlocks, and recent research from analysts at Mintel has shown that one in eight adults in the UK are now vegetarians or vegans, and that this includes one in five 16- to 24-year olds. Surviving on a diet of plants is now unavoidably lamestream.

According to Mintel's report, though, the rise of vacillating, part-time vegetarians who are actively trying to reduce their meat consumption is more significant than the growing number of categorical, self-identifying "vegetarians" or "vegans." This has led to an evolution on the supermarket shelves—the number of food products carrying a "vegetarian" claim has apparently doubled to 12 percent, while one in eight meat buyers would now consider buying half meat and half vegetable protein across a week's shopping. Even the less obviously meat-containing products like chocolate or sweets are playing to this growing market, with 11 percent now alleging to be animal-free.

Bearing all this in mind, I decided to reach out to Brian Kateman, host of a TEDx talk about "ending the battle between vegans, vegetarians, and everyone else" and co-founder of a movement called Reducetarian, which aims to bring together the burgeoning community of individuals who have committed themselves to eating a diet of less meat. I wanted to ask him how and why this is all happening.

First off, says Brian, the data-centric world in which we live means health problems, and the well-being of farm animals and the environment are issues that are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. "Right now it's hard to not know that climate change is happening," he explains. "It is happening, and we know it. The data shows us that eating a more plant-based diet really is more healthy for you. And certainly the animal welfare component is incredibly powerful. We know that animals are treated incredibly poorly in these areas. We've seen video footage from these sort of undercover investigations, which are particularly powerful."

Second, people are also growing to move beyond the all-or-nothing vegetarian or vegan mindset; it isn't necessary to completely eliminate meat from your diet. "Initiatives like Reducetarian are so appealing because it's so easy to eat less meat now," says Brian. "It's not hard; just look at all the options that have emerged in restaurants and supermarkets over the past few years. So it's a combination of being more aware of all of these important issues, but also the ease and convenience of eating less meat."

The meatless message is above all taking off in the form of online pledges, often framed as "challenges." For example, there was a 40 percent rise in sign-up to the Vegan Society's Veganuary month last year, while similar campaigns like Meat Free Mondays, the #VeggiePledge, and VB6 continue to home in on student campuses and non-working middle-class parents. Way back in 2013—well ahead of the game—the Norwegian army introduced its own mandatory meat-free Monday.

Meanwhile, presumably sensing an opportunity for either endorsements or kudos, famous people (and unashamed meat eaters) like Lil B and Beyoncé have recently decided to launch, respectively, a vegan-themed emoji app and a meatless food delivery service.

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Many formal Reducetarians, Kateman tells me, also subscribe to the cult-like "effective altruism" movement, which essentially takes an empirical, rationalist approach to finding out how to make the world a better place. So, he says, rather than dropping the bacon altogether, it may in fact be more sustainable to continue to eat it, but in moderation. "There are all of these different messages around encouraging people to eat less meat. There's veganism, there's vegetarianism, there's semi-vegetarianism, there are plant-based diets, there's 'eat less meat,' there's 'eat more fruit and vegetables.' We have all of these different messages, but the important question is, 'Which is the most effective?' Part of being an effective altruist is thinking about how your message and intentions actually translate into deliverables and outcomes, and that's something that we take very seriously." He says studies conducted by The Humane League go some way to proving the effectiveness of Reducetarianism, but more research is still required.

I asked Kateman whether an element of moral licensing might come into play when some people sign up to these schemes. In other words, are these aspiring young people, by eating that vegan meal, just "doing their part" for the environment, and thereby exempting themselves from doing another good thing in future (say, walking to work or eating another vegan meal)? Is all of this just a token gesture, a fad?

Kateman is quick to defend the movement. "The idea is that the best meal a person could have is one without meat. And there will be times when a person will choose to eat meat, but I think that there is an awareness when ordering or cooking that, if it is a meal without meat, it is perhaps a healthier, more moral meal. I hope the nature of the word Reducetarian will push people past that moral licensing, and remind them that their work is never done. This idea of gradualism and moderation is not new; it's been applied and used before."

As more people become cognisant of the true external costs of meat, a phenomenon explored in David Robinson Simon's enlightening new book Meatonomics, Kateman says we're going to see increased investments in cell culture technology. It's already happening: "Beyond Meat, which is a large company that offers alternative meat products, recently had a multimillion dollar investment, and we're going to see increasingly more of this," he says. "Same with restaurants—food markets are going to open up to this new target audience. It's going to become very normal to eat less meat, and perhaps eventually not eat real meat at all. At least, if more alternatives become available and this technology accelerates to the point where we have cell-cultured animals."

To sustain the movement, Kateman plans to release a Reducetarian cookbook, develop a curriculum for classrooms and work on an app "where people are able to track their meat consumption and see how it translates," in real terms. Eventually, he envisions a world in which every student union and school council has a "Reducetarian rep." And by putting a name to the trend, he claims the movement is offering an identity to the 95 percent of people around the world who aren't vegetarians or vegans. "We need to have a shared conversation about our shared commitment to eating less meat," he says. "And that's regardless of where we fall along the spectrum."

Follow Huw on Twitter.

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A march memorializing the missing and murdered indigenous women of Canada. Photo via Facebook user Nathan Woods

At Canada's largest and longest-running memorial march for murdered and missing aboriginal women, Lorelei Williams lights a candle to honour her murdered cousin and her missing aunt.

"I come for my missing auntie Belinda Williams. She's been missing since 1977—she's still missing today," said Williams. "And for my cousin Tanya Holyk. She went missing in 1996—her DNA was later found on Robert Pickton's farm. That's who I come for, that's why I do the march."

The annual ceremony draws attention to the fact indigenous women are nearly four times more likely to be murdered in Canada than non-indigenous women. On February 14, Williams joined a chorus of thousands attending marches across the country, all calling for public inquiry into the crisis.

"There's a war on our women, and it needs to be dealt with," she said.

Now in its 25th year, the walk circles Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, scattering tobacco, roses, and the smell of smudged sweetgrass where women have been lost or killed. Red roses tell a story of a murder; yellow ones denote a still-missing person. Elders lead prayer and song, while survivors of violence, addiction, poverty, and systemic racism share personal stories with the crowd.

"This is my only daughter," a mother announces to onlookers, holding a large photograph of Cassandra Antone, killed in 1997. "I'll never get to see her wedding."

Calls for an inquiry have grown stronger since an RCMP report released last year confirmed significantly higher rates of violence toward aboriginal women and girls. News of 15-year-old Tina Fontaine's unsolved murder last summer, followed by the brutal assault of 16-year-old Rinelle Harper in December, sparked protest and debate in Winnipeg (where both crimes occurred) and across the country.

But Canada's governmental leadership has so far dismissed this long-simmering movement. In December, Prime Minister Stephen Harper told CBC's Peter Mansbridge a national inquiry into missing and murdered aboriginal women and girls "isn't really high on our radar, to be honest."

Harper told Mansbridge the phenomenon has already been studied, and that resources should go toward preventing and punishing crime instead. British Columbia's government funded its own inquiry into missing and murdered aboriginal women in 2011, which found racism, sexism, and critical police failures marred many local investigations.

"He really needs to give his head a shake," Williams says of Harper, adding a national inquiry should be high on his list of priorities. On each arm she wears photos of her lost family members. "We really need to get to the root causes of why this is happening to our women across Canada."

For indigenous families impacted by Canada's most high-profile serial killer, Robert Pickton, justice and closure remains elusive. Michele Pineault, whose daughter Stephanie Lane was also identified on Pickton's Port Coquitlam farm, recently learned that BC coroners had been keeping her daughter's partial remains in storage since 2003.

"To have your daughter's skeletal remains returned 11 and a half years later, it's an injustice," Pineault says of the coroner's "oversight." At the time of the trial, investigators told her there wasn't enough DNA for a murder charge to hold up in court. "There are families now wondering if what they've buried is even their family members."

As BC's own inquiry laid bare, the Pickton investigation was riddled with plenty more fuck-ups. If such mistakes could happen following the largest crime scene investigation in Canadian history, Williams worries about what that means for smaller, colder investigations. "When I found out there was new evidence I was so shocked," she said. "How many more cases can be solved if they'd just looked in their storage lockers?""

Vancouver's indigenous women continue to march every year so these missteps are not forgotten. But in sharing all this pain, many also begin to find peace and solidarity.

"When we connect we're actually healing," Williams said. "I never used to be able to do a whole walk... I would maybe come down for half an hour or an hour, and it was too overwhelming for me.

"Now that I have a lot of support and other family members I can do the whole walk," she added. "We're here together, raising awareness of this issue so it doesn't happen to any other families."

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.

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A woman who is not a child abuser. Photo via Flickr user US Army

Erica Hammel's two-year-old child Wyatt was shaken so badly that he got brain damage.

Her ex-husband's then girlfriend allegedly did the awful deed a year ago, leaving the kid temporarily blinded and unable to speak. The accused, Rachel Edwards, had two previous child abuse charges, but had only gotten probation. Now Hammel wants to prevent anyone else from experiencing this horror by establishing a public database for child abusers.

Michigan, where Hammel lives, actually already has a child abuse database that contains about 275,000 names, but it's only accessible to law enforcement and child protective services. Hammel wants to make that database public, like sex offender registries. But tempting as shaming child abusers might be, expanding the reach of law enforcement is always a dangerous game.

All 50 states have some version of a sex offender registry, and they're rife with problems. There are three quarters of a million people listed across the country, and the "sex offender" label is extremely broad—some may be dangerous pedophiles, while others might just have taken a leak outside. And Michigan's child abuse database has flaws of its own. For one thing, while sex offender registries are based on convictions, the Michigan database lists people merely suspected of child abuse or neglect.

Then there's question of whether or not public shame is a fair part of punishment. Are we going to restrict child abusers in the way sex offenders are often barred from living near schools or other places? This modern reincarnation of the colonial stocks in the town square may be satisfying to victims' families and worried parents, but that fleeting comfort is not the same thing as justice.

After all, drug addiction—most of us can agree—is a terrible thing. But overblown fears about it gave us the war on drugs. We should be cautious of new punishment regimes, even when they're designed to persecute something as heinous as child abuse.

Now for this week's bad cops:

-In April, four St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department officers pulled over a driver, beat him when he refused to leave the car, and then turned off their dashcam. Video of the incident was released Monday by lawyers for the victim, Cortez Bufford. He supposedly made an illegal U-turn and had marijuana on him. He also had a handgun, which one of the cops apparently spotted during the encounter. Bufford was dragged out, Tasered multiple times, and had his head stepped on by Officer Monroe Jenkins.

The gun was stolen and loaded, and also had a bullet in the chamber. But the felony weapons charge and the misdemeanor resisting arrest charge were both dropped because, several minutes into the confrontation, SLMPD officer Kelli Swinton reminded her fellow officers just before the dashcam was turned off that they were still rolling—they were "red right now." The mayor of St. Louis asked that this footage not be released for months so as not to add fuel to the post–Michael Brown flames. Bufford is suing for the cost of his medical bills, and he says cops hit him again after the camera was turned off.

One easy fix to prevent this sort of thing from happening again is not to give police officers the power to turn off their cameras. The one who actually did the deed is supposedly going to be disciplined, but of course is appealing. They should be fired, period. And whether or not she did anything awful to Bufford, Swinton should be fired just suggesting that cops "wait" to finish their beating of a suspect until after the camera was turned off. There can be no second chances for that kind of underhanded behavior in law enforcement.

-A 37-year-old woman who suffered from schizophrenia died while being repaired for transfer from a Fairfax County, Virginia, jail earlier in the month, and her family is trying to figure out why. Natasha McKenna had been jailed for assault on a law enforcement officer. She reportedly fought back—all 130 pounds of her—when guards tried to move her on February 3. Sheriff's deputies stunned her as many as five times, and gave her two black eyes, an arm injury, and a finger injury that was so bad the digit had to be amputated. The exact cause of her death remains to be seen.

-Police in Pasco, Washington, fatally shot a 35-year-old homeless man on Tuesday after he allegedly threw rocks at police. The police chief said the rocks were sizable, and that the deceased—Antonio Zambrano-Montes—had been throwing them at cars. But apparent video of the confrontation doesn't show him actually hitting the cops, even if he kept throwing the rocks and refused to listen to their commands. A Taser reportedly failed to work, so cops allegedly shot Zambrano-Montes as he was running away. Rocks can absolutely hurt people, and cops were right to take a look at the situation to make sure nobody was being attacked. But what, exactly, is the purpose of body armor, Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles (MRAPs), and helmets for law enforcement if rocks can justify lethal force?

-Arizona State Senator Sylvia Allen has introduced Senate Bill 1435, a heinously backwards proposal that would make local government less transparent and accessible to the public. It seems that the state's Open Meetings law is preventing public officials from having a good chat without nosy citizens demanding to be let in on the action, so SB1435 would ensure that more such meetings are closed to the pbulic. The legislation would also, in most cases, conceal the names of police officers involved in deadly force incidents for up to 90 days. In a state that houses renegade cops like Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, this is an especially terrible plan.

-On February 6, Madison, Alabama police stopped 57-year-old Sureshbhai Patel, who was on a walk around the neighborhood. Patel had apparently done something to warrant a neighbor—who described him as an unfamiliar "skinny black guy"—calling police. Unfortunately, Patel speaks no English, and was in the area to help take care of his sickly grandson. Officer Eric Parker seemingly became frustrated with Patel's inability to answer questions, and his attempts to walk away, so Parker threw him down onto the sidewalk. The result? Patel is partially paralyzed from a neck injury, and his family has filed a lawsuit.

As bad as this appears to be, it could be worse in terms of accountability. Parker has already turned himself in for third-degree assault charges, and his boss is not standing by his use of force. It looks like Parker might even be fired, but we'll see if criminal charges actually follow.

-Another guy who should probably get fired: New Mexico Principal Robert Archuleta, who suspended an eighth grader for ten days after he threw an American flag out the window. That wasn't enough, however—Archuleta felt it prudent to dial the school resource officer, who directed the principal to his local FBI field office. Burning the flag is, of course, legal, but people have still been punished by law enforcement in recent years for demonstrating insufficient respect for the rectangle of cloth. Regardless, Archuleta is teaching his kids a really killer lesson about excessive, irrational authority and nationalism.

-A Georgia woman has filed a federal lawsuit alleging that an Albany, Georgia police officer attacked her—causing a miscarriage—because he didn't like her tone. Kenya Harris's suit alleges that in 2011, after five hours of waiting to pick up her son at the police station, she tried to explain to officers that she had other children to tend to, and thus needed to speed things up a bit. Officer Ryan Jenkens told her to be quiet, and when she tried to explain again, he allegedly grabbed her by the neck and threw her to the floor. She says she passed out, and later miscarried from the experience. Police also cuffed and interrogated her, and declined to take her to the hospital. Harris is asking for $50,000. If her story is true, she deserves a whole lot more than that.

-This week's Good Cop award comes with a laundry list of civil liberty caveats. However, FBI Director James Comey should be praised for the speech he gave last week to Georgetown Law School, where he said, "At many points in American history, law enforcement enforced the status quo, a status quo that was often brutally unfair to disfavored groups." Comey conceded that people of color often get the shaft in this country, and cops need to do better. He also expressed support for better FBI record-keeping of police shootings across the US. This bodes well. Even the most mainstream and powerful of federal law enforcement officials know that reform is in the air. Admitting that there's a problem in American policing isn't nearly as controversial as it once was.

Follow Lucy Steigerwald on Twitter.

It's generally thought that Western society is about as removed from death and dying as it's ever been, despite all the glorification of violence in the media. But what is it really like to take another person's life? What are the intricacies of killing that Hollywood doesn't quite capture? After a lot of phone calls and hours spent trawling the internet, I found four guys who'd all had some sort of experience with causing someone's death and were willing to share. Here are their stories, in their own words. (All names and identifying details have been stripped out.)

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The Driver

The worst moment of my life happened during the summer of 2014, around 9:30 PM. I was driving home through a part of town with strip clubs and cheap hotels that's kind of dark. I was turning a corner and I saw an older man, late 50s to early 60s, gray hair, tall and lanky. I thought, Shit, I'm gonna hit this guy, and honked. He had time to run but just kept walking at the same pace. So I slammed on the brakes, tried to swerve, but hit him.

There was a sound of brakes squealing, glass shattering, and metal crumpling, all in less than a second. I jumped out of the car to see if he was OK but he was unconscious with a right leg smashed sideways at the shin. Several other people stopped and someone was asking me what to do. I told him to call 9-1-1.

Later, after I'd gone home, my dad got a call from the police to say the guy had died. In the following days I tried to continue my normal life and told as few people as possible. My mother had other plans, though, and told my entire extended family. I had my sister's wedding two weeks later and everyone was hugging me and telling me I did nothing wrong. I just wanted everything to go back to normal. Funny thing about forgetting, though: You can't when you want to. I still think about this man every day. What would he be doing right now if it weren't for me?

They're charging me with a speeding ticket but it hasn't gone to court yet. If there's one thing I learned, it's not to jaywalk. Seriously, just walk where it's safe.

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The Soldier

I'm from a small town. I graduated high school back in 2005, full of testosterone, so of course I joined the army and volunteered for the battalion scout platoon. Those guys live with the attitude, We're better than you because we hold ourselves to it . This breeds a mentality much like at high school where no one wants to be the last to lose their virginity. We fought with each other for the first kill of the deployment. You didn't think about what it would be like to take a life, or how it might feel afterwards.

It happened for me on the night before Mothers' Day, 2007. I just remember standing up with my team leader and my roomie, looking down the sights of my rifle and engaging these guys hiding around a mortar. When the first guy stood up, it was like a plastic target popping up. I just fired. When the dust settled, we'd killed six insurgents in the field. Two more died in a hospital.

Friendly forces came and retrieved their bodies, and we made it back to everyone in the platoon congratulating us. But weeks later, as the deployment dragged on, I slowly began to humanize the mangled faces of the guys we'd killed. I remembered wondering if there was a tiny little Iraqi girl crying at home because dad didn't come back, or if there was a wife with a husband who was now gone forever.

I'd been there so long I'd stopped caring about death. I wasn't afraid and just accepted everything. But when I realized I'd completely and utterly obliterated a human being from existence, it was absolute mental torture; it made the possibility of getting killed there very real again.

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The Son

Mom and Dad split up when I was four but he was never out of the picture. Holiday family dinners were always our thing. New Year's and Fourth of July, dad and I always talked about US and world history on the pier, or watched fireworks over San Francisco. All the way up until last year.

Ultimately, his lungs were failing and he couldn't get enough oxygen. The day before admitting him to hospice, his doctors set up a meeting to discuss what to do next. He didn't want to be put on a ventilator and there was little else they could do.

Maybe four hours before he passed he had me sit him up. He took me by the hands and said "I... I think I want to turn the oxygen off," and gave me a hug. He took his mask off and I made the nurse leave. Then I helped to lay him back and held his hand.

I don't recall when his eyes stopped moving, but they didn't close. He was still breathing, slower, but not trying, not here anymore. I realized his hand was completely limp at that point, more so than when you're just asleep. My internal dialogue just repeated over and over, You've had my back my whole life and I've got yours until the end, and then finally, I'm really going to miss talking with you .

After I just sort of walked around the room with my hands on my head wondering, What the fuck now? I put all his things in a garbage bag and carried it outside. I did right by him without question. He made the choice himself, I just helped him to act. I am beyond proud of him for not forcing me to make the choice on my own.

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The Teenager

This all happened in rural north Florida. I was 18 but never one for going out and partying so I was at home alone on the computer, just surfing. Around nine o'clock I heard the window in the living room being smashed in.

Honestly, I don't remember thinking much about what to do. I just went for my unloaded shotgun under my bed, grabbed the four shells from my bedside stand, and loaded them without racking one in the breach. After I set my defense, I called 9-1-1 and told the operator there was an intruder at my house. She was just telling me to not fight back when the intruder broke through my bedroom door. I had my shotgun leveled directly at his center of mass. I racked it and yelled at him to get out. He just stood there, staring as if weighing up his odds. Then he moved suddenly and pulled a pistol from the front of his pants.

This part worries me: I didn't hesitate a second. As soon as his hand gripped the pistol, I fired. The first shot destroyed his chest cavity and his spine. He collapsed. Second shot blew open the better part of his head. The 9-1-1 operator was calling for me to answer. She was shaken by what happened and she was very relieved when she heard my voice come through on the line. I just told her that I was OK and the intruder was dead. She stayed on the line with me until the cops arrived.

After that I went out to the front porch with my grandfather. I just remember throwing up and crying. It doesn't sit well with me at all that I took a life. It is against human nature to take what God has given to every man and woman. But put in the same situation again, I would still pull the trigger. I will protect my life and those who I love.

Illustrations by Molly Rose Dyson

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Screenshot of Lindsay Kantha Souvannarath's blog

One of the suspects police say was planning a mass shooting in Halifax on Valentine's Day posted GIFs glorifying Nazis and the 1999 Columbine shooting all over his Tumblr. But authorities say the planned attack was not terrorism.

Police found the 19-year-old suspect, James Gamble, dead in his suburban Halifax home on Friday. Investigators say they talked to the suspect before he died, but that there was no evidence he was shot by police.

The suspect and his friends were planning to open fire in a Halifax shopping mall and then shoot themselves, police said. In relation to the alleged plot, they charged 20-year-old Randall Steven Shepherd and 23-year-old Lindsay Kantha Souvannarath from Geneva, Illinois with conspiracy to commit murder. Police were able to prevent the planned shooting thanks to an anonymous tip through Crime Stoppers.

"The attack does not appear to have been culturally motivated, therefore not linked to terrorism," Justice Minister Peter MacKay told reporters Saturday during a press conference. He characterized the suspects as "murderous misfits."

One week ago, under a photo showing footage of the Columbine shooting, in which two young men killed 12 students and one teacher at the Colorado high school, the 19-year-old suspect typed, "Murder time is fun time."

On February 11, two suspects—Gamble and Souvannarath—posted "Valentine's Day, it's going down," on their blogs, and referred to the Columbine shooters by their first names. The words "Der Untergang" also appear in the post, referring to a movie about the last ten days of Adolf Hitler's life and reign over Germany.

On Friday, Gamble posted a GIF of Bart Simpson pulling down a blind splashed with the words, "February 14th is coming."

Selfies on his blog show Gamble unsheathing hunting knives and loading a long gun. In some photos he wears a scream mask.

His Tumblr appears to be popular in the online subculture of Columbine shooting fans. He posted GIFs of footage from the shooting and wrote about how he related to the gunmen.

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Drawing glorifying Nazis and "white power" from Souvannarath's Facebook

Referring to one of the shooters, a commenter on his blog asked, "Do you have combat boots like Dylan?" "Indeed I do," he replied, posting a photo of himself wearing the boots and holding a long gun and hunting knife.

He had thought of suicide "a million times," he wrote, and had "nearly attempted to do so." On Friday, the suspect posted a crime scene photo on his Tumblr purporting to show the Sandy Hook shooter's body and the gun he used to kill himself.

Glorified images of Hitler and SS fighters are posted all over his Tumblr. He also posted GIFs showing the September 11 attacks in New York City, and a graphic video of John F. Kennedy's assassination.

Souvannarath posted a pencil drawing of a Nazi emblem with the words "white power" to her Facebook album "Peace, Love & Tolerance," along with other images on the same theme.

Shepherd and Souvannarath are scheduled to appear in court Tuesday on conspiracy to commit murder charges.

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For the past six months, I've sat next to this guy at work we call BigRiv. He keeps a samurai sword on his desk, eats a burrito for lunch pretty much every day (which he calls a "'rito"), and has a tattoo of Abraham Lincoln with a pair of big ol' titties. Despite the intimidating blade, BigRiv makes my life generally better in the 50-plus hours a week we spend slouched over laptops, shoulder to shoulder.

Turns out that the guy's in a band called Pocket Hercules, and he recently hit me up over Gchat to ask if I knew any music writers who could give his new, self-titled LP a shout (I think he was too modest to ask me IRL). I said, "If only you worked at a multibillion dollar media company where all your co-workers liked you, dug your music, and were totally cool with nepotism." He sighed and agreed. "If only!"

Well today, VICE is premiering Pocket Hercules's first single, "Divers." The band formed in Oregon in 2010 and has since moved to Brooklyn, where most of the members lives together in a weird, commune-type cabin above a Greenpoint tattoo parlor.

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Photo by Julian Master

"Divers" is angular, vulnerable guitar rock nodding to both the band's Northwest indie rock roots and Chapel Hill bands like Polvo and Archers of Loaf. It's a heart-ripper that begins with a sphincter-tightening guitar riff and continues to storm from there. The full album—recorded in 2014 with Jonny Schenke (Parquet Courts, Mazes)—is set for release March 24 on Seagreen Records.

The song reminds me of seeing Built to Spill with the first girl I fell in love with after we'd broken up. It was a miserable night, but the concert was fucking good. Everything about that night was emotional in an almost painfully earnest way—both the music and the mood. I wish she and I hung out after and ate some 'ritos, but instead I walked home alone while listening to a song that should have been the one embedded above. Thanks for being you, BigRiv.

Pocket Hercules's self-titled album is out March 24. Preorder it here.

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For ten near-freezing days this February, the 65th Berlin International Film Festival opened the city's countless scattered kinos up to the public. Jafar Panahi's clever collapsed-allegory Taxi took the Golden Bear prize at Saturday's closing event, and was an exception to a bleak, mean slate of films elsewhere in the festival. Still, harrowing can be good. Sort of. Here's some of the best out of the somewhat depressing bunch of films I saw.

NASTY BABY

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The burst of hooting and hollering from the audience as the end credits of Nasty Baby rolled made it quite clear that everyone in the cinema was affected by this film. Written and directed by Chilean filmmaker-cum-musician-cum-painter Sebastian Silva (Crystal Fairy & the Magical Cactus, Magic Magic), it's a tense, tricky, and frequently-baffling black comedy.

The primary plot of the film unfolds in Brooklyn, New York, and follows performance artist Freddy (Silva) striving to conceive a baby with his boyfriend Mo (TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe) and his friend Polly (Kristen Wiig). Its script is dominated by semen jokes and syringes and is perfectly funny and fine until it's really, really not. The meandering, easy lives of the film's hipster trio (think dinner parties with friends gathered around the Netflix-fireplace, everyone drinking from jars) comes skidding to a stop in a calculated third-act tailspin.

Exhausting and frustrating and brilliant, Nasty Baby is that rare film that feels obligated to correspond only to its own insane logic, and like some kind of filmic equivalent to a fistfight, eventually delivers an unquestionable knockout—eliciting successfully shock, awe, and animated rounds of applause from its audience with their mouths agape.

QUEEN OF EARTH

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Alex Ross Perry's psychological thriller Queen of Earth is another anxious, neurotic, and superb film. Perry's last, Listen Up Philip—which topped some recent year-end lists and also starred Mad Men's Elisabeth Moss—foreshadowed Queen of Earth's similar brand of selfish solipsism; Jason Schwartzman's author and creative writing professor too busy projecting his own thoughts to the page to read and critique the work of his students. Here, Perry's retro aesthetic shifts from 70s New York and the overtures of early Woody Allen visible in Listen Up Philip, to that of a more glimmering European midnight-movie, with Roman Polanski's Repulsion a clear influence.

Queen of Earth centers around Catherine (Moss) and Virginia (Katherine Waterston) as they leave New York City on an ill-fated excursion upstate. With a non-linear narrative that restlessly resets itself, this disorientating film shuffles between two consecutive summers and the alternating pitch-black depressive episodes (the type where, for example, one might sleep with a knife under their pillow) of our passive-aggressive, antagonistic BFFs.

The film is overwhelming and nauseating, its themes—exorcism, transference, and possession—aided no doubt by Keegan DeWitt's menacing, eerie original score. Its scratching violins are complemented by disconcerting camerawork of claustrophobic chamber-play framing and tight close-ups. Expect egomaniacal monologues—lots of them.

THE LOOK OF SILENCE

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Joshua Oppenheimer followed the perpetrators of the 1965/6 mass killings in Indonesia and had them recreate their crimes for his camera in 2012's The Act of Killing. Taking the same genocide as its subject matter, The Look of Silence acts as a companion piece and standalone film. It's not the confounding blinder that its predecessor was, but nonetheless is an important thickening of the plot, and drafts a dialogue that realizes some obscured potential in The Act of Killing.

In The Look of Silence, authority over the story shifts from perpetrator Anwar Congo to the personal tragedy of victim Adi Rukun. Rather than looking at the return of the repressed, The Look of Silence explores the importance of perspective, spooky Lacanian gazes, and the dynamic that exists between viewer and subject.

Oppenheimer's uncompromising, even stupefying film forgoes any irreverent winking-to-the-camera, recounting solemnly the harrowing stories of massacred, slaughtered "subversives" buried alive and beheaded. It'll leave you dumb, silent, and unable to recoil from its grip. The perfect date movie.

EL CLUB

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Pablo Larraín's drama of body and blood, El Club, bluntly and brutally begins with a quote from Genesis 1:4—"God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness"—before revealing in the dim 98 minutes that ensue such a lofty claim as utter bullshit.

Larraín previously directed the historical drama No, a similarly political film that looked at Chile's Pinochet dictatorship in 1988, and the public referendum that challenged its rule. In El Club, he tackles the struggle to divvy out the good from bad in a country under the authority of the corrupt Catholic church.

Living remotely and comfortably in a house down by the water in Santiago, four ex-communicated and criminal priests are sentenced to a life of retirement. As penance for their transgressions (disgraced in the wake of clerical sex abuse scandals), the club is kept in line by a strict prison guard nun, Sister Mónica (Antonia Zegers), who forbids the group from any self-pleasure, self-flagellation, and interaction with the town's community. But community and piety are two Christian virtues nowhere to be found in this conniving, cunning club, which goes to sadistic lengths to ensure their survival when their protection is threatened by a new arrival (Marcelo Alonso) on his own mission to shut them down.

45 YEARS

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Breaking out with 2011's Weekend and the HBO show Looking, UK writer-director Andrew Haigh has, in 45 Years, graduated from bold portraits of amorous youth in flourish, to a more rigid, prismatic examination of a lifelong marriage in a moment of crisis.

Norfolk is overgrown and fog-filled, and the happy Geoff (Tom Courtenay) and Kate Mercer (Charlotte Rampling—both co-stars awarded Silver Bear acting honors) are looking forward to their impending Saturday night, which also happens to be their 45th wedding anniversary. And then, unexpectedly—and rather improbably—the frozen body of Geoff's first love, Katya, is discovered in the Swiss mountains.

One might be tempted to reduce 45 Years to an unlikely Mike Leigh reimagining of Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca, but the off-screen Alpine subplot works well to magnify the film's otherwise clinical and too-vivid realism, and in turn, that realism's too-real sorrow. External humdrum domestic scenes contrast with the more quietly devastating internal advance of plot; Kate's who-loves-who metastasis of worry expressed tremendously by the shattering, sublimating Rampling. Sure to sting eyes everywhere on its wider release this autumn.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

For most, winter is an annoyance. Despite the particularly brutal weather the northeastern United States has been experiencing lately, it's still just a four-month period spent worrying about how sweaty your thighs are going to get if you wear long-johns on the subway.

For some, however, the change of season signals the beginning of a seemingly inescapable black hole—a sudden downturn in mood and mindset. This condition is known as seasonal affective disorder, or "SAD"—a form of depression that tends to affect sufferers on a seasonal basis. "Generally speaking, it occurs in winter," says Sam Challis from Mind, a leading British mental health charity. "However, some individuals do find themselves feeling the same symptoms over the summer period."

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All images of the SAD book courtesy of Studio C&C.

Like many matters of the mind, the exact causes of SAD are somewhat unclear and difficult to prove. "One theory is that light stimulates the parts of the brain that control mood, appetite, and sleep, so therefore the absence of light has a massive impact," Sam explains. "Similarly, some suggest that the brain associates darkness with sleep. As our modern lives don't allow us to change our waking hours to match the sun, some people experience SAD symptoms when there's a mismatch between the hours they keep and the hours of daylight."

These symptoms, Sam explains, include "feeling lethargic, generally 'down,' having a decreased interest in sex and relationships, and may [involve the sufferer finding it] difficult to concentrate."

[vimeo src='//player.vimeo.com/video/118908461' width='640' height='360']

The promo video for Studio C&C's SAD exhibition at Protein Studios. Directed and filmed by Olivia Pringle and Oskar Proctor with Studio C&C

Inspired to create a "haven from SAD," Studio C&C —a South London creative studio—is staging an exhibition intended as an "over the top escapism event."

The show, which starts this Thursday at Shoreditch's Protein Studios, is centered around a large-format publication featuring the vivid, hyper-fluorescent work of more than 30 emerging artists. The book, according to Alex from Studio C&C, will "hopefully sit on the reader's shelf and be brought out in the depths of January and February, ideally to serve as a form of help or therapy for sufferers."

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The vitamin D "acid tabs" from the SAD book.

The publication, available for purchase at the exhibition, opens with a very tangible example of this idea: a sheet of acid-blotter paper containing a three-month supply of vitamin D tabs, designed by artist Callum Copley. Researchers have associated a vitamin D deficiency with a greater risk of SAD, so, the theory goes, get some extra vitamin D in you and minimize that risk.

"We receive the majority of our vitamin D intake from exposure to sunlight, meaning it's something we miss out on in the winter," says Alex. "So that particular piece is designed to make the reader feel upbeat."

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Although the book is key to the exhibition and something the group has been working on for over a year, the gallery space will also feature a number of other artworks, all of which share the same common intention: to "create a space for people as a kind of refuge from SAD—a sanctuary; hopefully somewhere that feels a million miles from London in the middle of February."

The motivations behind the project are fairly direct: "Every artist in the book relates to SAD in some form or another—some of them quite severely, some less so. That's organically created quite a range in the book: some of the contributors may have been using their artwork as a coping mechanism, as an exercise to help them manage their feelings. Whereas other people's works are just supposed to be cheerful for the reader."

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Neina, a marketing administrator who also works with SADA (Seasonal Affective Disorder Association) on their media and communications, tells me about her experience of first being diagnosed with the condition: "There's quite often a trigger with SAD. For me, unfortunately a friend died just before the millennium, which sent me into a bit of a depressive state, and I think the seasonal affective disorder kind of continued from there," she recalls. "But it wasn't until 2003 that I was actually diagnosed by a doctor."

Neina explains to me how SAD made her feel at her lowest points: "I just really couldn't get out of bed. And I don't mean just not wanting to get out bed; I mean really not having the energy to get out of bed," she says. "I just wanted to fall asleep the whole time. The best way I can describe it is like you just want to hibernate, like you don't want to engage with people."

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Over the years, however, Neina has managed to take some control of the condition, explaining that two products in particular have changed her life. "I have a light box, which is basically a bright light that simulates the kind of light you'd get on a bright summer's day," she tells me. "I also have a dawn simulator, which does what it says on the tin: it wakes you up gently by simulating sunrise."

Neina, who describes herself as an "ambassador for the disorder," is glad to see that the Studio C&C exhibition is taking place, as any event to promote a better understanding of SAD can only be a positive thing. "I've had people take the mickey out of me at different places, and people say that SAD doesn't exist," says Neina. "However, I'd challenge this: It has been classed as a medical condition and is recognized by medical councils."

And Neina's right—SAD isn't a punchline or a matter to be taken lightly; it's a legitimate form of depression and deserves all the attention it can get. So if you feel down this winter, tell someone about it. And if you're told about it, listen.

Studio C&C's SAD exhibition runs from February 19 until February 22 at Protein Studios, Shoreditch.

To get on the guest list for the opening night of the exhibition (which includes some free cocktails), send your name to rsvp@prote.in.

The full list of artists involved are: Jonah Ainslie, Ellie Andrews, Adam Bletchly, Elizabeth Bradley, Laura Callaghan, Callum Copley, Orron Fearon, Will Gates, Goodchild, Eliot Haworth, Jamie Julien Brown, Joseph P Kelly, Jason Kerley, Tessa Lawer, Chris Mackenzie-Gray, Charlotte Maeva-Perret, Alex McCullough, Ludo O'Grady, Andrew Osman, Joseph Pleass, Sean Preston, Oskar Proctor, Jamie Roberts, William Rowe, Lawrence Slater, Thomas Slater, Donal Sturt, Jack Taylor, Sean Thomas, Andrew Thorpe, Marc Torrent, Cei Willis and Jay Wright.

Mind is a leading mental health charity in England and Wales, providing advice and support to anyone experiencing a mental health problem. The charity has a confidential information and support line, Mind Infoline, available on 0300 123 3393 (lines open from 9AM to 6PM, Monday to Friday).

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'Okhai Ojeikere, 'HD-55774 (Beri Beri),' from the series Hairstyles, Nigeria, 1974. © The Estate of J.D. 'Okhai Ojeikere / Victoria and Albert, London

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

As anyone who has ever had to clear through a suitcase of curling snapshots left on top of their divorcing parents' wardrobe will tell you, photographs can be both objects of beauty and portals to a lost moment. A moment that, without the photograph, would have been wiped from history altogether.

The V&A became the first museum in the UK to collect photographs way back in 1852, a mere 13 years after the introduction of the daguerreotype and the accepted "birth" of photography. And yet despite this, a few years ago they realized that there was a gap in the collection: black people.

Both as the subjects of photography and the photographers themselves, black British people were under-represented in the collection. So in partnership with the Black Cultural Archives, the V&A launched Staying Power: Photographs of Black British Experience 1950s-1990s, a project meant to fill that gap, raise awareness of the contribution of black Britons to British culture, and celebrate the art of photography. The result is the two new simultaneous displays open at the V&A and BCA.

We spoke to the V&A's curator of photography, Marta Weiss, about the project, music, studio photography, and Eton suits.

VICE: It's not often that a big cultural organization like the V&A will admit to a gap like this. Do you think it's been successful?
Marta Weiss: By the end of the project we collected 118 photographs by 17 different photographers. We did already have images by some really important contemporary black photographers, like Ingrid Pollard and Charlie Gregory, in the collection, but now we feel like we've really built on that.

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J. D. 'Okhai Ojeikere, 'Untitled, HG 423-04,' from the series Headties, Nigeria, 2004. © The Estate of J.D. 'Okhai Ojeikere / Victoria and Albert, London.

When we say Black British Experience are we just talking about a London experience?
I have to admit that it is heavily weighted towards London and that's something we were concerned about. But we've got photographs by Pogus Ceasar of the Handsworth riots and life in Birmingham, of the Specials playing in Coventry. Ingrid Pollard's photographs deal with the black figure in a rural British landscape and we also have some photographs that are African.

In a very significant way Britain, particularly London, has been a meeting point for immigrant communities. So the Black British experience is actually quite multicultural. How is that reflected in this collection?
It's not just about black people in isolation—it's about black people in Britain. In Armet Francis's 1964 self portrait in the mirror, you can see a white woman sitting on the bed in the background. It shows a black photographer in action, but also in the context of a broader community.

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Armet Francis, 'Self-Portrait in Mirror', London, 1964. © Armet Francis / Victoria and Albert, London.

That cultural exchange often happens through music, I suppose, like the evolution of Jamaican ska into British two-tone.
Music is definitely a presence in this exhibition. For instance, we've got female hip-hop performers and B-boys in Brixton from the 1990s taken by Normski. We've got people dressed to the nines going intotThe Cue Club in the early 1960s taken by Charlie Phillips and we have a photograph of a sound system by Dennis Morris. They're depictions of black British culture, but also how that's influenced the British music scene.

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Neil Kenlock, 'Untitled [Young woman seated on the floor at home in front of her television set]', London, 1972. © Neil Kenlock / Victoria and Albert, London.

How did you create the narrative of the exhibition? Because it's not chronological.
No, it's not a chronological display by any means. The broad themes are representation and identity and how they intersect with fashion; clothing, hair, make up, interiors, textiles, and furnishings.

Another mini-theme is the studio portrait and the identity portrait. We have some actual studio portraits from Ghana by James Barnor, taken in the 1950s, but there are also several photographs that take that tradition of the studio portrait and twist it a little bit. For instance, Neil Kenlock in the 1970s photographed Caribbean families in their homes in London. They look very much like studio portraits, but instead of using the painted backdrop of a studio they're standing in front of the curtains in their own home and posing with their own possessions, to show how well they're doing as immigrants in this country.

Al Vandenberg took portraits on the street, but he had a real rapport with his sitters. He often sets them up with a shop front, servicing the same purpose as the studio setting. There's a certain formality to them that comes from that studio tradition, even though they're taken in the streets.

Often, studio photographs are specifically shot to send back home; to show your assimilation to a new culture or success in a new country.
Yes, the studio is a place where you can act out your fantasies—that might mean wearing your best clothes and doing your makeup well. Or, in the case of Seydou Keita in Mali, it might mean posing with a sewing machine, or with a moped as a status symbol.

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Normski, 'African Homeboy '—Brixton, London, 1987.© Normski / Victoria and Albert, London

How is identity shown in the photographs? Is it about creating an identity or simply capturing your identity through photography?
Maxine Walker draws on identity photos by composing her shots like you would in a photo booth. She uses clothing, make-up, and wigs to transform into different versions of herself, but she's also using photography itself. If you look at the background of the one where she has a blonde wig and very light skin tone it's much lighter than on the one where she has dark skin. They've actually been shot and printed differently.

You combine the photographs with oral histories. Why were those stories important?
Well in the case of Dennis Morris, for example, he talks about his photograph from an Anglican church in Hackney; all the boys are wearing what he refers to as "Eton suits." They're very formal and very English. That was actually the choir that he was part of as a boy. It was through the church that he joined a photography club and that was how he got his start in photography.

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Al Vandenberg, 'High Street Kensington' from the series 'On a Good Day. ©The Estate of Al Vandenberg / Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Were there certain political or cultural moments that you felt should be included in a display of black British culture from the 1950s to the 1990s?
We've got photographs of a record shop in Brixton that was firebombed by the National Front, photographs of protests outside various court cases, photographs of racist graffiti or housing adverts. But we don't just think of photographs as a window to the world. It's not just about the subject, it has to be a great image too.

By framing the exhibition from the 1950s to the 1990s you encompass a shift in youth culture from the Windrush generation right up to the last days of analog technology.
Yes, I suppose these were all taken with cameras, on film, not phones. You could say the whole thing goes from Windrush to digital.

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'Stranded Deep': Fall into its ocean and hardly-animated Early Access sharks will jostle you to a slow and weird death.

In many ways, Steam's Early Access store is a bit like the Police Academy of video games. Inexperienced and under-qualified rookies bumming around in a pre-release stupor, firing their guns into priceless vases, supergluing other games' hands to their heads in the showers, making realistic siren sounds with their mouths to fool criminals, and using gay bars as punchlines in a way that makes a modern audience feel a little bit uncomfortable.

You might notice how none of the examples I've given is strictly analogous to how Early Access actually works, but that's because I've decided to release this article early. Much like an Early Access game, it is a work-in-progress. The complete article will be ready sometime in 2016 and will probably feature an introductory metaphor that makes more sense. Maybe next time I'll compare Early Access to a barn full of digital eggs, and consumers to chickens who'll choose which eggs to sit on and hatch and which eggs we'll stab to death with our beaks.

No matter which of the two official analogies you choose— Police Academy or eggs in a barn—Steam's half-baked game incubator has become the nesting ground for a whole new genre: the unfinished survival game. It's a type of game that's been gestating in the wings for as long as anyone can remember: a cruel sort of exposure simulator that throws you into an unfeeling (and unpopulated) world with nothing but the clothes on your back and your innate ability to punch trees into wood.

At the time of writing, there are exactly three million of these games on Steam. Forty thousand more were released in the time it took you to read that sentence, including: Dang It I'm Alone on the Moon Now; Oops the World Ended While I Was Walking in This Mystical Forest; Marc Ecko's Lost in the Desert Again Can Somebody Help; and I Suppose I'm Happy to Eat Raw Fish Straight Out of the Sea For the First Week or So of This Survival Experience Until I Learn How to Craft a Fire.

They're everywhere, and like most things in the world it's all Minecraft's fault. The all-conquering pig-harassment simulator certainly wasn't the first game to introduce death by forgetting to eat some chicken every once in a while (that honor goes to Streets of Rage, which had entire roast birds hidden in the trash, discarded by the decadent and poultry-burdened population of pre-recession Manhattan), but it definitely popularized the notion of a game where you build a shed that you sit in until you die.

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'DayZ' is a bit like 'The Road,' if 'The Road' were slightly bleaker, more hopeless, and ultimately futile.

DayZ, for example, is a zombie survival game in which you're most likely to die from stubbing your toe on a fence and succumbing to sepsis, or simply of thirst, or of hunger, or of sadness. It's rare to even see a zombie in this game, never mind die at the necrotic hands of one. Instead, running out of cans of beans is a far more terrifying prospect than encountering the shambling undead horde. And when zombies can be found carrying delicious, life-giving zucchinis on their rotting person, the notion of what's actually scary becomes entirely inverted. You'll want that zucchini so badly that you'll wander obliviously into danger, floating along smell lines like a cartoon dog.

That game is, at least, far more complete than a lot of the other Early Access survival games currently available. GRAV is an open-world crafting and survival game that was topping the Steam charts for the better part of a week, which I mention only for its unironic and brazenly honest opening line that describes it as "like most of the other survival adventure games out there today." It's not a bad game, bless them, but Christ.

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'GRAV' is distinct from other survival games because it is called 'GRAV,' and no other survival games are called that.

Stranded Deep is an unfinished game in which you, a man who knows precisely how many sticks need to be combined in order to craft a campfire (it's exactly five, no more and no fewer), become marooned on an archipelago of tiny desert islands after your Learjet plonks into the ocean. With little else to do, you immediately set about clicking on the few interactive objects you can find, picking up rocks and starfish and smashing them together to see if they turn into a new object that exists slightly further up the game's secret and hidden tech tree.

Stranded Deep doesn't tell you what objects will fit together, ostensibly leaving it up to trial and error to find out what works and what doesn't. To craft something, you must drag objects to within a rough proximity of one another, so any items that don't combine end up sitting in an uncooperative pile of junk on the beach, while those that do will glow orange once they're near enough to their constituent buddies, requiring just a click or two to merge into something new and interesting.

So you make your piles and hope for the best. A stick and a rock make an axe. An axe and a coconut make a drinkable coconut. Maybe combining a coconut and a crab will create the speedboat you require to escape this survival hell? Perhaps lashing together a conch and a potato would create a sort of rudimentary modem you could use to call for help? If survival games are supposed to provide a gratifying and challenging degree of realism, they've gone all squiffy with this "use everything on everything" approach to building the things that you need to not die. This wasn't how Tom Hanks did it, and as a rule I only do things the way Tom Hanks or any of the characters he has portrayed do things.

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'Stranded Deep': shortly after taking this screenshot I fell out of a palm tree and broke my legs, which I firmly believe is the best way to lose at any game.

In reality, you're expected to consult the Stranded Deep wiki, an online and external repository of crafting recipes that you can call upon to guide you through the process of survival. This, as you could imagine, always feels like cheating. You're being given the answers to the game's clueless (in the literal sense of there being no clues) puzzles, but what other choice do you have when that answer is "combine one fuel tank, one carburetor, one engine, one propeller, one stick, and one duct tape to create an outboard motor"? Relying on alt-tabbing out to a third-party crafting guide is sadly endemic of a survival genre that hasn't yet figured out how to organically teach players how to build, survive, and thrive in the barren landscapes they've created.

And if Castaway could teach the genre anything, it would be to give players the ultimate control over their destiny. That bit where Tom Hanks goes to retrieve the rope he had at one point intended to use to hang himself, and he shouts at his volleyball friend about it, and it's terribly sad. Why not give players the opportunity to meet death on their own terms? Let them walk into the sea. Let them embrace the void. Let them reject this horrible universe of obtuse item combinations you've trapped them in and instead hurl themselves into one of your procedurally generated volcanoes.

And then, if your metrics show enough people choosing death over life, you must agree to remove your game from sale forever. Because like Tackleberry in Police Academy, your best efforts are probably doing more harm than good.

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Photograph by Greg Martin

In Clancy Martin's new book Love and Lies: An Essay on Truthfulness, Deceit, and the Growth and Care of Erotic Love, he writes, "The dogmatic insistence that one has never told a lie in his or her life is obviously false," and someone who thinks she's never lied is probably "deeply entrenched in a self-deceptive self-image." Well, I'm telling the truth when I say this book blew my mind. Drawing from psychology, philosophy, literature, cognitive neuroscience, and Martin's beautifully and hauntingly rendered personal narrative, Love and Lies explores the complexity of what it means to be a loving being that is (at just about any given moment) capable of deception. Martin's book makes us aware of how such a dangerous and potentially self-destructive capacity also helps create the possibility for us to be actively truthful, to love and grow close to others.

I corresponded with the author and occasional VICE contributor over email one weekend, just before the release of Love and Lies, which is now available in stores and by order.

VICE: Before you were a philosophy professor, you were a jewelry salesman. You "used deception to take the easy way out of selling." It made you miserable, led to a cocaine addiction and extended time in the executive bathroom where you'd stand in front of the mirror with a gun barrel in your mouth. You write: "Though I don't believe in the existence of a soul, exactly, I came to understand what people mean when they say you are losing your soul." Well, what do they mean?
Clancy Martin: I think when we talk about "losing our soul" what we might mean is something like losing self-respect, losing our sense of what matters, losing our hope that we can become better people—maybe even becoming cynical about the whole enterprise of human life. When I was at my lowest, I thought life was no more than struggling to get from one day to the next without killing yourself. If I could have crawled into a cocoon that would have put me to sleep forever I would have done so—or would have wished to do so—and then felt sorry for myself that I didn't. This, for me, was "losing my soul." Forgetting that anyone other than me and my little circle of immediate concerns mattered.

Excessive lying, in my opinion, will do this to a person. Why? I think because, as Adrienne Rich says, "the liar leads a life of unutterable loneliness": Somehow communication with others, when we feel like we are actually talking to one another and not just pretending to talk, restores our belief in the idea that we can become better people. And why is that the case? Because then we remember that other people matter—and that we, as individuals, might matter to them, too. Yes, successful communication requires some dishonesty. But too much dishonesty completely isolates you from other people, and that takes you to a place of complete despair. Someone who has become a habitual liar—as I was when I was in the jewelry business, for example—is a lot like a person coming down off cocaine (something that also happened to me a lot back in those jewelry days). You feel so utterly alone, you feel helpless, abandoned, meaningless. Unloved. To feel and express love means at least to believe in the possibility of sharing your experiences with others, and that means trying to be truthful, and believing in the possibility of truthfulness, of genuine communication.

Why is getting down to the truth so compelling? Related to that—what do you think of the expression getting "down" to the truth? As if it's under other things. It seems we're always "seeking" or "discovering" or "uncovering" it. Sometimes it feels like truth itself is something we have a relationship with, which can be enjoyable and amusing or maddening.
This is a profound and difficult question. Many Buddhists believe that at the start of the spiritual path, a mountain is just a mountain and a river is just a river. Then, a bit further down the path—nearer to the truth, if you will—the mountain is no longer a mountain and the river is no longer a river: The students see the truth of their illusory nature. But then still further along the way to understanding, at a certain point the student understands: The mountain is just a mountain, the river is just a river. Nietzsche put it another way, but I think he had a very similar idea. "Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live," he wrote. "What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, to believe in forms, tones, words, the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial— out of profundity."

To put it in the terms of love and lies, I think because we don't see into each other's minds, and yet we want to know what other people are thinking and feeling, we feel like we are always on the search for the truth of what's going on behind those eyes. And then often it's also the case that when people are angry they feel as though they are suddenly "speaking the truth"—stripping off the mask—just because of the burst of adrenaline that goes with anger. So the sweet dopey feeling of falling in love was a big lie and the cruel, speedy feeling of shouting "I hate you!" is the real truth. But what's actually going on is much more subtle: When we're thinking of other people's minds, I think, we should spend a bit more time reflecting on our own. Chances are people are about as sincere as we are, about as manipulative, about as frightened, about as needy, etc. We are all always trying out truths on each other, uncertain until we get a response what is true and what is false, what is real and what is unreal. You know how you often learn so much more from a novel than from a "true" psychological case study? The great novelist is just playing with human psychology; she doesn't "know" whether she's getting it right or wrong. There's no "truth" about whether or not Hamlet was crazy (though I think he wasn't).

We do have a love affair with the truth, and we think it is one of our highest goods. And of course having true beliefs matters! But having some false ones—such as that my wife will love me, no matter what—matters too. This is why I love your question: I think we should recognize that "the truth" is as complex as people are, and that's why, when we think about "telling the truth" or "telling a lie" it's often much more complicated than we like to pretend. Human beliefs, emotions and attitudes are not like on/off switches, true/false, right/wrong. But we do have this very old idea—maybe we can blame Plato, like Nietzsche does—that if we just peel back this black layer of falsehood the truth will be revealed blazing underneath, like gold under the lead or the dawn after a long, lonely night. It's a persistent part of our mythology, and it might have to do with how disoriented, perplexed, and confused we felt as little kids: like adults knew the truth about everything, if only we could grow up! But now that we're grown ups, are we really any less confused?

[body_image width='1650' height='2475' path='images/content-images/2015/02/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/17/' filename='how-to-leave-the-bathroom-an-interview-with-clancy-martin-232-body-image-1424188347.jpg' id='28201']You write about how we tell our children lying is wrong, when with our actions we show them how we lie quite regularly. For example, we tell people what they want to hear so as not to alienate them, or ourselves from them. But then, ironically, it's lying that also distances us from the people we love because it's a "reminder that you know the contents of your own mind and the other person doesn't." So then we're constantly walking a sort of balance beam, in regards to what degree of truth we think we need to tell or conceal so as to keep our relationships with people.
This seems to me to be exactly right. When it comes to truthfulness and deception, we learn from the time we are very small children how to walk this balance beam: how much to tell, when and why; how much we can share, but also how much loneliness we must be willing to accept, or even to seek out. We also learn that having friends and loved ones means being willing to lie to them: to tell them what they want to hear, sometimes, rather than what you believe to be "the truth" about themselves, you, or someone else. First we learn this with our parents and then on the schoolyard—and anyone who was unpopular as a kid, like me, will remember how frustrating it seemed that so much of the conversation was a kind of deceptive social discourse I just didn't get, a verbal game I couldn't figure out how to play.

Among adults, of course, social deception and manipulated discourse are essential to authority, esteem, and popularity—but a known liar will always be excluded, unpopular. In fact, to be a recognized liar is in most cases merely a sign that the person in question isn't very good at lying—or that this person lets down the veils at the wrong moments, fails to understand how the game is being played. When we think of the most "sophisticated" social discourse—in 19th-century French salons, for example, or in the dinner parties Proust shows us—we see the most refined forms of dexterity in deception, in guise and manipulation, in navigating the waters of popularity and prestige through the deftness of one's ability to control what is being said, quite independently of its truthfulness.

Of course this tradition is very old: In Confucianism it is thought of as the virtue of preserving social harmony through words; in Homer, it is the famous cleverness, the virtue of Odysseus when it comes to lying—especially, in social situations. So yes, the earlier we learn how to balance on this beam, the better. And I think it does come with a recognition that, at the end of the day, we are alone. Though we get happy moments of intimacy with the ones we love most that are moments of truthfulness, of sharing secrets, etc. it is the play between deception and truthfulness that we should acknowledge, rather than the privileging of one over the other.

When you were three, you wanted your mother to look at a Lite-Brite picture you'd made that you were very excited about. She said she'd look at it in the morning. But in the morning she was gone and a babysitter was there, wearing (for reasons that remain mysterious) your mother's robe. She and your father had left for a two-week vacation in Hawaii! You seem pretty traumatized by the incident. My father used to wake my brother and I up and tell us it was snowing. We'd happily run to the window, then find out there was no snow. Your mother thought she was telling you what you needed to hear. My father was being playful. Should they have behaved differently? Had they not committed these deceptions on our young selves, would we have become just as screwed up in some other way?
Well, I think my mom and your dad were both being naughty, even if it was an understandable kind of naughtiness (and they are two different kinds of naughtiness). My mom told her lie for the most familiar reason of them all: out of (understandable) cowardice. We all lie because of cowardice. To tell the truth almost always requires courage; though sometimes having recourse to the truth—"Well, yes, I said it, but only because it's true! He is ugly!"—is its own form of cowardice. For me, the two greatest virtues good lovers can cultivate are care and courage.

Now your dad's lie—which seems to fall squarely into the category of what I, as a dad, call "dad jokes"—jokes that are dumb and aren't funny to anyone but the dad, if him—might be seen as a kind of playful fictionalizing or storytelling, which just happened to be a bit misguided. How play, imagination, and fiction move into the realm of teasing, trickery and fraud is an endlessly fascinating subject. Here I think our first appeal should probably be to the intention of the deceiver: Did he mean just to entertain you guys? (Even if he was misguided?) Or was it just naughty teasing, which all dads have to unlearn, I think—it starts with the love of tickling your kids, and then becomes a kind of verbal tickling that big brothers and dads are notorious for. I remember being terrified of closing my eyes in the shower for years because my big brother told me that murderers always wait until you close your eyes in the shower before sneaking into the bathroom. That's not a very nice kind of teasing, though it can be fun—schoolyard bullying is a related behavior. We see it is bad because the intention is straightforwardly bad.

Here again Buddhist philosophy is helpful. Although Buddhists generally discourage any kind of untruthful speech, they also generally recognize that at times a well-intentioned lie may serve a morally praiseworthy purpose. This seems to me to be right. At least one criterion for any kind of speech, truthful or not, ought to be: Is it kindly intended? If it is not kindly intended, you should avoid it, false or true.

Let's say someone reading this is at a crossroads; he is having one of those moments like you did in the executive bathroom stall, feeling he is at the brink of losing something some people might call his "soul." He's reading this on his phone, door locked to the rest of the world, but he's supposed to be somewhere else. He doesn't want to leave the bathroom because he doesn't know how to go on anymore with his life like this. What would help? What do you suggest?
He's a kid, and he doesn't want to leave the bathroom and lie to his mother about the fact that he hasn't been able to poop. He's 30 years old, owns a chain of jewelry stores, and he's standing looking at himself in the mirror with a gun in his mouth; he doesn't want to leave the bathroom. He's 45, out to dinner with friends in New York, going through his second divorce, and he doesn't want to leave the bathroom and face that craziness of social interaction that seems so much more impossible, so insane, when you're deep in suffering and other people seem to be capable, gifted, happy, having fun. Or even he's merely experiencing one of those many moments all of us experience when we "don't want to leave the bathroom": Like, here's the one safe place, here's the one place where no one can get me, where I can be safe and alone.

What do we say to this person?

Once, when I was first thrown out of high school—for having weed in my locker, one of the worst sins you could commit in my very puritanical home—I was in my bedroom trying not to cry: We'd just come back from the principal's office, and my mom and my stepdad hadn't spoken a word to me on the way home. Finally I just started bawling. And my mom came into my room and put her hand on my back and said something to me I'll never forget: "It's the hardest time in your life, this time. It's going to get easier, I promise. I wouldn't go back to being a teenager again for anything."

I don't know whether or not she knew she was lying: It most certainly wasn't the hardest time in my life, and she—I later learned—had been through times as an adult that I can barely imagine even now (she was very seriously abused by my father, and then remarried a violent, angry man and had to raise his seven very messed-up kids—plus the three she had of her own, all in a 1500-square-foot, three-bedroom rented house). But it was a lie I desperately needed to hear, and the fact that she was willing to console me—truth or lie, it didn't matter—the fact that she cared enough to try to console me, made me feel so much better. I've never felt as loved by my mother as I did at that moment.

So I think I'd like to send someone who loves that person into the bathroom to say: "Hey, this is the hardest time in your life; it's going to get easier." Because it does get easier, even if it also gets harder. And the real point is that someone cares enough about you to say it. That's why A. A. works (when it does): because of the power of caring. To me, caring is the highest virtue—it includes virtues like forgiveness and also repentance. When I have failed to care for the people I love and caused them harm—whether through telling lies, telling the truth, or the many other ways—that's when I've really fucked up, as a person. And I am very grateful for those many times in my life when someone has shown me care despite the fact that at that moment I probably didn't deserve it. Learning to care properly for people is of course a lifetime's task. But that really seems to me to be an effort worth making. And sometimes you might have to tell a little caring lie to help someone get out of the bathroom, you know? To help someone get back to their writing desk. To help someone get the kids to school in the morning or to go back to sleep at night, or to believe that the next guy they go out on a date with isn't going to be as big an ass as the last guy. Leaving the bathroom is risky but, after all, they are kind of lonely, stinky places.

[body_image width='1200' height='769' path='images/content-images/2015/02/11/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/11/' filename='interview-richard-twyman-fireworks-royal-court-876-body-image-1423667213.jpg' id='26551']Richard Twyman at the Royal Court's rehearsal studio. Photo by Rose Lewenstein

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

The walls of the Royal Court's rehearsal studio are covered in photos, timelines and character studies, as International Associate Richard Twyman prepares for the opening of his production of Fireworks, a new Palestinian play by Dalia Taha.

The Royal Court has been working in Palestine since 1998, led by International Director Elyse Dodgson. Fireworks marks their first full production by an emerging Palestinian playwright.

I met Richard to talk about what it's been like to develop a play in Palestine and stage it in Sloane Square.

VICE: Hi Richard. Could you tell me a little about Fireworks?
Richard Twyman: It's a play that looks at what happens when parents are denied their most instinctive need to protect their children, by living through a war. It's also about how those children start to grow up and mature in strange, dangerous, violent ways, because of the occupation.

It's by a Palestinian writer called Dalia Taha, who grew up in Ramallah in the West Bank. One of the things she lived through as a teenager was the Second Intifada. She applied to the Royal Court's International Residency Programme with an idea to write about her experiences during that period.

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Saleh Bakri (Khalid) and Shakira Riddell- Morales (Lubna) in Fireworks at the Royal Court Theatre. Photo by Helen Maybanks

How did the play make it from Palestine to Sloane Square?
We started working with Dalia in 2013. She came and did a workshop [at the Royal Court] on her first draft, and we just kept working on it because we all saw real potential in her. Her writing was incredibly brave. It was an insight into Palestine that we'd never seen before, and also an insight into what it's like for a family to live through an act of violence.

Then in the summer of 2014, in the midst of the war in Gaza, we were in discussions about programming the play. And I had this very strange sensation of being in the rehearsal room with her and realizing that the play we were working on felt much tamer and gentler than what was happening in reality. So we did lots more work on it, and Dalia went away and made some big structural changes, and I think what she did was to let what was happening in Gaza into the play.

Why is it called Fireworks?
We were actually searching for a title for a long time because Dalia had always left it untitled. And over that summer we received a letter from another writer that we were working with in Gaza which explained how she was telling her young child that the bombs outside were fireworks, to protect them from what was happening. That metaphor just felt so apt.

In the UK, we sometimes see a lot of work from Palestine or about Palestine that can feel quite on the nose in terms of how it tackles the politics. Of course, there's a validity to that work, but what I find so inspiring about this play is that it comes from a totally different angle. Fireworks was a title that reflected that.

"We received a letter from another writer that we were working with in Gaza which explained how she was telling her young child that the bombs outside were fireworks, to protect them from what was happening. That metaphor just felt so apt."

You went to Palestine twice last year with the Royal Court. What were the challenges of working there?
I first went in March for the second phase of a writers group we were running out there. We were in a town called Beit Jala, just up the hill from Bethlehem. Day to day it seems very peaceful, but the moment you look around or try to travel anywhere you immediately bump into incredible restrictions: the wall, the checkpoints, the illegal settlements. For example, even something as simple as going to see a piece of theatre together was impossible. Half the writers couldn't come because their permits don't allow them to travel freely between the West Bank and Jerusalem.

And then I went back in November and ostensibly it was the same, but I noticed that the level of tension had increased profoundly. At the time, there had been a series of attacks in Jerusalem and tensions were very high. People were saying it was the worst they had ever known. So that really affected people. But they get on with it. They keep protesting and they keep creating work and they keep living.

How did the writers respond to each other's work?
We knew we were programming Fireworks at that point and got together a group of actors to read it in Arabic, so that we could hear it in its original language. And it's really nerve-wracking when you do a play that's obviously written about those people, for that country, by someone from that country. But they were totally overwhelmed; they felt it tapped into something deep in their experience of living through those moments, in so many different ways.

I'll never forget how one person was laughing hysterically about how during one of the periods of bombing they were hiding behind a couch, because they'd convinced themselves that that bit of the room was going to be safer if a bomb dropped. And he was going, "Of course, it would make absolutely no difference, we would have been dead either way!"

Why is it important that Fireworks is seen in London?
When George Devine founded the Royal Court he wrote this manifesto, and one of the things it says is that he wants it to be a truly international theatre. Historically, it's always done that to a point, but since Elyse Dodgson founded the international department 20 years ago, she strove to go further and further afield and work in more and more challenging places.

[body_image width='1000' height='667' path='images/content-images/2015/02/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/17/' filename='interview-richard-twyman-fireworks-royal-court-876-body-image-1424164430.jpg' id='28014']Shereen Martin (Samar) andNabil Elouahabi(Ahmad) in Fireworks at the Royal Court Theatre. Photo by Helen Maybanks

But for me it's a very personal belief that we've all got to tell stories to each other. This sounds really cheesy, but we have to understand that we're connected to people in the world—even people we've never met before—and I think the best way to do that is to share stories about what it's like in places and countries and cultures that we don't directly know.

What do you think theatre can do that protests and petitions can't?
I remember packing my suitcase when I first went to Palestine—packing books and scripts and playwriting manuals—and I was thinking, Why aren't I taking out other things that are more useful? Why am I taking these words? Shouldn't I be doing something more worthwhile?

And within about a day or two of being there, I had a total reversal. I was talking to these writers and I realized that actually, in a situation like that, where a culture is slowly being systematically eroded by powerful forces opposed to it, to have voices that can articulate in every field is just so fundamentally important. Having different art forms is crucial to having a role in the world and a voice that can be heard. I don't want to talk for anyone, but there's a real sense of being totally fucked over and subject to much greater geo-political forces.

When we were casting, I talked to [Palestinian actor] Saleh Bakri on Skype. He loved the play and knew Dalia already, and I said to him, "How would you feel about coming to London and doing this play?" And he had this massive smile and he said, "I think it would be absolutely right to come and do this play in London, in Britain, because it's all your fault anyway."

In a situation like that, where a culture is slowly being systematically eroded by powerful forces opposed to it, to have voices that can articulate in every field is just so fundamentally important.

Do you feel like you have more of a responsibility, as a British director, in the way you represent the people and ideas in the play?
Yeah, I really do. There's an incredible responsibility to the people's stories you're telling and you have to be aware of that every step of the way. But the way we work here is always inside out; it's always from a writer within that country, and also you always have the writer in the rehearsal room. So it's partly my responsibility, but it's shared with someone who really knows their shit.

Having Dalia in the room has been extraordinary. I mean, in theory she's relatively inexperienced because she's only done a few plays, but she holds herself and she talks and engages in the work like she's been doing it for 50 years.

[body_image width='1000' height='714' path='images/content-images/2015/02/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/17/' filename='interview-richard-twyman-fireworks-royal-court-876-body-image-1424164507.jpg' id='28016']Yusuf Hofri (Khalil) and Nabil Elouahabi (Ahmad) in Fireworks at the Royal Court Theatre. Photo by Helen Maybanks

What's been the most challenging part of the rehearsal process?
Kids! No, I'm being slightly facetious. We've got four amazing children in the play, but obviously they still have to go to school, so it's a logistical thing of how to get through all those scenes when you've only got three hours a day with them. They come in and they're high on sugar, but they're amazing. They give us this sort of adrenalin shot.

The design process was really interesting because there are so many visuals in our heads of what Palestine is. An audience come with that baggage, so we have to find a way of stripping it away and letting them see these characters afresh. There's something about the news that almost deadens people after weeks of seeing it. The cliché is rubble, dust, concrete, destruction, people wailing... But there's also the color, the kitsch-ness, the life, the humor, the joy, the absurdity.

What do you hope the audience gets from watching the show?
Understanding, I think. To understand a percentage, a part, a small residue of what it's like to live in a situation like that. So you can reach out across the globe to where this is happening and come out the theatre knowing a bit more about it. And then maybe that will affect the way you see things in the future.

And also because I think it's just a really extraordinary play. It's a great work of art. It's darkly funny and it's immensely painful.

Fireworks runs February 12 through March 14 at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs in London.

Follow Rose Lewenstein on Twitter.

[body_image width='650' height='433' path='images/content-images/2015/02/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/16/' filename='student-halls-in-leeds-are-being-torn-apart-by-flyer-wars-675-body-image-1424103482.jpg' id='27919']Flyers litter the student postboxes

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Photos by Vincent Gallagher.

In a recent interview featured in the Manchester Evening News, clubbing magnate and Warehouse Project founder Sacha Lord-Marchionne reminisced on his early days as a promoter. He recounted how he "paid a cleaner at [University of Manchester halls of residence] Owens Park £20 [$30] and a bottle of whisky for the skeleton key" in order to distribute flyers throughout student halls. He went on to describe "a constant chase between me and security" that lasted for years.

Having worked at student halls in Leeds for over a year, I'm in a position to tell you that the situation is still just as ludicrous. You have one main promotions company who have a contract with the university, meaning that—officially—only they can promote events in the halls. Then you have a cluster of rival companies successfully paying students who live there to plaster the walls with their own promotions.

On top of all that, you have a constant influx of chancers breaching security in the thick of night to promote events. And, between all three warring factions, two very tired security staff armed with a trolley and a nervous fear of Blu-Tack. The result? Thousands of flyers turn up on site every day during term, and nobody really knows where they come from or how to stop it. I'm sure it's much the same kind of situation in the halls of any party town university throughout the UK.

Students are bribed with pizzas, drink tokens, and free tickets to see their favorite DJs. As the flyering gets more competitive, so the stakes are raised; one particularly popular promoter turned up one day, completely unannounced, and provided the entire workforce with a free curry each. The next day, flyering efforts redoubled. There's probably a micro-lesson about incentivization in there, but I'm too busy wiping bhuna off my hands to preach it.

Promoting clubs here is big business (there are over 1,500 students living on this site alone, all with disposable incomes and a ferocious appetite for drowning themselves in booze and attempting to move their limbs to music), and a cutthroat one at that. If a poster is put up, it's ripped down almost immediately by unseen phantoms moving in the shadow of the night. In its place, there will be 200 more, and nobody will know where they came from or how they got there. And this is relentless, on every poster board, and in every corridor, and under every door. It's getting tense.

Flyering in halls, the university states in its code of conduct, is not tolerated without specific permission. However, the situation has become so extreme that the administration has been forced to take measures to combat the illicit promotions.

These include the installation of the kind of student entrances HMP Belmarsh would be proud of, and locked notice boards (your poster in one of those costs you between two to four guest list spots and a few drink tokens). Problem is, as soon as these were locked up, people just started sticking posters on top of them.

[body_image width='650' height='433' path='images/content-images/2015/02/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/16/' filename='student-halls-in-leeds-are-being-torn-apart-by-flyer-wars-675-body-image-1424103335.jpg' id='27913']The famous "big gate"

Robin Gibson co-ran a couple of student club nights in Leeds between 2008 and 2013, before moving on to Bristol. I spoke to him about the age-old art of making students look at posters.

"We promoted mainly using printed material, but towards the end, with social media thrown in there too, we'd spend up to a month promoting each event," he said. "We would print 10,000 flyers for each event and aim to post most of them through people's doors in halls.

"Gaining access was difficult. The trick was to make friends with people who lived there to gain access and go under the cover of night, as the security are already dealing with all sorts of other shit—usually crying girls or lockouts. Free tickets usually had to be given, too.

"We really struggled with posters; if you put up a poster it's taken down and ripped up straight away. A combination of security guards and competition in the city did that. Leeds is an extremely competitive environment when it comes to promoting nights; it's pretty much a saturated market.

"It's not just posters getting ripped down. Promoters would go onto public forums on Facebook and say what they thought was wrong with your flyers, your event and how theirs would be a more enjoyable night."

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It's also not just clubs that are being promoted. Over in the more lucrative world of laughing gas, trading rivalries have resulted in more than ripped up posters and passive aggressive forum posts. In a shocking (for Leeds) turn of events—dubbed a "violent turf war" by local media—a vendor was brutally attacked by men masking their faces with balaclavas and wielding baseball bats.

"It happened again a couple of weeks later," says Jordan Pow, head of the Nos Boss company the vendor was representing. While a driver was out for delivery, he was targeted by men in balaclavas: "They threw bricks through every window," says Jordan. "As our driver opened the door to make a run for it, they legged it."

Nos Boss' dealers now drive with in-car CCTV and take security guards along for the ride.

[body_image width='650' height='433' path='images/content-images/2015/02/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/16/' filename='student-halls-in-leeds-are-being-torn-apart-by-flyer-wars-675-body-image-1424103386.jpg' id='27914']Scooby and Julian

"Nobody is really allowed to flyer on-site, apart from that one company," confirmed Scooby and Julian, two security guards working at the halls in Leeds. "We've had massive problems. It has reduced slightly since the arrival of the big gates, but I still have to walk around with a shopping trolley to pick them up. I'm not joking!

"The company with the all-important agreement are supposed to remove all the other flyers, but they don't. We just have to try and keep on top of it, but with the volume coming in it's an impossible task. Most of the flyerers come from inside now—they're approached by the companies and offered work."

I do feel for the security who are caught up in all this—there are only so many Skibadee Birthday Bash flyers one can tear off a wall before breaking out in hives. So when I spoke Tom Buxey, Managing Director of major players FYI Marketing, I was glad to hear his outline of a different strategy for marketing directly to students.

"We get them involved in the event by offering sets to aspiring DJs, stage management, and artist liaison opportunities," he told me. "Many become ticket reps by selling to their network of friends and promoting the event at the same time."

Tom and his colleagues at FYI must be doing something right: their hugely popular Jungle Jam night just celebrated its 10th birthday.

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Jack Chatwin, a first-year music production student currently living in halls, described being approached in his first week in the city by promoters who offered him a post selling tickets to a popular student night. "They just knocked on my door and said that I could sell tickets," he said.

However, the competition was fierce—Jack stepped out of the game after only selling a measly two tickets. "It helps if you're an attractive girl," he added.

Last year saw angry media student James Barford-Evans spearheading a campaign to ban flyers from his halls of residence and all other parts of the Leeds campus. Not only did he argue that the posters are "highly irritating," but also "a big waste of natural resources." He has a point: I've never seen any evidence of the hundreds of thousands of flyers that turn up at the halls I work in being recycled. Any suggestion to address that issue is quickly met by initial interest and concern from management, and then forgotten even quicker.

Other students, such as third-year Josh Julien, believe we should encourage such activity. Around the time of Barford-Evans' campaign, he told The Tab Leeds: "Pretty much all of the flyerers are students, so banning flyering will affect students the most."

This sentiment was echoed by William Wade, city manager at Voodoo Events, one of the largest student events companies in the north. He was quick to point out that promoting club nights as a student could land you a decent job after uni, explaining that he's "been in it for four years now" and telling me: "I've built my way up from the bottom being a flyerer to having an awesome job, bro."

It could be argued that it's a sorry state of affairs when graduates look forward to getting on the career ladder as a sort of professional litterer. Mind you, I suppose that's better than an unpaid internship or a zero-hour contract.

So I guess the question is: will the introduction of social media marketing techniques, adopted by the vast majority of club nights, eventually spell the demise of all this comical nonsense? Perhaps. But if the flyer fever in Leeds is anything to go by, it's not going to be any time soon.

Follow Simon on Twitter.

Hulme in 1978.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Manchester in 2015 is a very different place to what it was in the 1980s and 90s. Today's skyline is almost unrecognizable from the past. Back then, everything was a bit rough around the edges and, colloquially, "a bit rum."

Ancoats, right next to the city center, is now being enveloped by the fashionable Northern Quarter. Not too long ago, after everyone there lost their jobs and the residential population fell below the levels it was pre-industrial revolution, it was basically just a place where you could buy a lot of drugs of varying quality. The G-Mex center—or the Manchester Central Convention Complex as it's now officially called—once a rail link to St. Pancras known as Manchester Central, was little more than a dilapidated parking lot. The Great Northern Warehouse, before it had luxury bowling, movie screens, and a celebrity chef, was, plainly speaking, a shit-hole.

If you watch old episodes of Cracker, you'll see how grotty Manchester was. That's not to say it was a bad place to be and there was nothing going on, but there was something about the city that was insular, dirty, and dysfunctional.

Then, in 1996, the IRA blew up Marks and Spencer and, from that point on, Manchester started to change. Basically it went pro, with a £1.2 billion [$1.8 billion] clean-up operation. Most Mancs can see both the good and the bad in their city cleaning up its act. However, of old Manchester, one thing is definitely lacking in the current landscape—the wild frontier that was Hulme.

Hulme in 1985-86. "Manchester- the evils truth or myth?" from Steve Mardy on Vimeo.

Hulme Crescents was one of the biggest urban regenerations in Europe. After being a slum area for the mills, Manchester City Council oversaw the building of a massive new housing project in 1972. It housed 13,000 people, which at some point included Warhol's Nico, French actor Alain Delon, and Mark Kermode. The whole project was flawed, with loads of design and construction problems. 19 years after it was built, the whole thing was pulled to the ground.

The Crescents were what they sound like—four enormous, crescent shaped blocks of flats. They were such a gigantic fuck-up that a mere two years after being erected they were deemed unsafe for families to reside there. When 1984 rolled around, the council stopped taking rents.

That's when the fun started.

[body_image width='640' height='451' path='images/content-images/2015/02/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/17/' filename='hulme-manchester-history-party-squats-109-body-image-1424174364.jpg' id='28074']

Image via MDMA Archive.

Even though the Architects Journal described the area as "Europe's worst housing stock," people started to move in. There was something about the dystopian look of it all that appealed to some of Manchester's futurists in Thatcher's Britain. Others, meanwhile, just saw it as somewhere to live where you didn't have to pay any rent. With newly built flyovers cutting it off from the city, the feeling of isolation made Hulme feel like it was its own republic within Manchester.

The police pretty much avoided the place, which meant that the squats started to party, and creative people saw it as the perfect place to be. The council couldn't afford to knock the thing down, but still provided electricity to those living there.

Parties sprung up in the area, most notoriously at the PSV Club, which was of course the birthplace of what was to become Factory Records. Joy Division played early shows there and Mick Hucknall could be seen having a pint in the Grant's Arms. Dancehall sound-systems were plenty, with local crews battling it out, as well as attracting some of reggae's biggest and best.

Baron Turbo playing at PSV in 1982.

While the press focused on Tony Wilson and the Hacienda, many Manchester party-goers were much more interested in The Kitchen, slap bang in the middle of Hulme. The city was known for its blues parties—ad-hoc clubs in derelict houses—but The Kitchen was something else. Three knocked-through flats created a space that was crazier, more direct and off-the-hook than Factory's show club. That's not to say the Hacienda was a polite venue, but The Kitchen didn't have to worry about trivial things like licensing laws and not pissing wherever you wanted. Also, if you wanted more room to dance in The Kitchen, then instead of writing to the council, you'd just get yourself a hammer and knock a wall in.

The concrete of The Crescents were soon livened up with graffiti and street-art. The lack of ownership and communal areas were perfect catalysts for Hulme residents to let their creativity flow in whatever direction they felt like. During the mid-80s, Hulme had its own clubs, arthouse cinema, and its own style that saw young men buying second-hand baggy suits. An area that was unloved and unused by a city gracious enough to leave it on the power grid was thriving.

At one point, the creative folk decided to make a massive pirate ship, because why the hell not? There was also "The Nautilus," which was built by attaching steel and wood to a Sherpa Van. It looked like the Yellow Submarine and was known to locals as The Naughty Bus. In the wild west of Hulme, it enjoyed a brief spell razzing around on local fields before some scallies firebombed it.

Ruthless Rap Assassins

Hulme carnival rocked soundsystems, gave a stage to Manchester's poet laureate Lemn Sissay, and from The Crescents came the Ruthless Rap Assassins, Manchester's very own take on something between the politics of Public Enemy and the Daisy Age positivity of De La Soul.

Travelers, acid dropouts, MCs, punks, deadbeats, photographers, artists, crusties, and every other bohemian daydreamer started to focus on Hulme. Counterculture was the energy that kept things moving, along with the dealers and prostitutes who were now finding refuge there.

Graffiti and street art was a huge deal in Hulme, with swathes of it attracting artists from all over the country, and Manchester's Kelzo making a name for himself (his work is still seen throughout the city).

Everything creative in Manchester owes something to Hulme and its crescents. Of course, there's a myriad of influences on the city, taken from far outside the ring road, but while many pinpoint Manchester's pop-cultural Year Dot to the Sex Pistols show at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, the city has an entire cultural output that barely noticed Johnny Rotten and Co, emanating from its own bohemian enclave. Some of Manchester's most iconic images sprung out of Hulme—most notably, perhaps, Kevin Cummins' shot of Joy Division on Princess Parkway.

The free raves, the political protests, the music, the space to do as you pleased in an area untouched by stupid things like rent—it couldn't last. In 1991, Manchester City Council got millions of pounds from the government to sort it all out and the Hulme Crescents were razed in 1994. In February 1996, a gas explosion in Bonsall Street was caused by people who had ripped out gas pipes in a flat. In June 1996, the IRA set off a 3,300-pound bomb on Corporation Street in Manchester city center, ushering in a complete change in the way Manchester operated.

Where Manchester once felt like it was propelled forward by enthusiastic amateurs, post-bomb and post-Hulme, everything became more professional. Hulme itself underwent a £400 million [$600 million] redevelopment program.

Some of that Hulme spark is still there, especially in the Hulme housing co-op Homes for Change. Right now, despite bridges that link to the city center, Hulme still feels separate from the rest of Manchester. Sure enough, it is quieter than it used to be, but the echoes are still there. It isn't as lawless and chaotic as it once was, but a sense of distance remains. Rather apt for a place that takes its name from the old Norse word for "small island."

Either way, it shouldn't be forgotten what Hulme gave to everyone. Manchester—you owe Hulme a pint.

Follow Mof on Twitter.

[body_image width='1000' height='667' path='images/content-images/2015/02/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/17/' filename='what-do-dominatrixes-do-on-their-days-off-217-body-image-1424200563.jpg' id='28297']

Photo courtesy of Mistress Dee

The fantasy of the secretary or the barista or the girl next door who moonlights as a sex worker is almost too cliché to bear. Girls with "normal" jobs and top-secret alter egos like "Peaches McCreamsicle" pop up again and again in a genre of literature I'll call "Dude, You Wish." There's an entire empire of sleazy internet ads built around the concept ("Warning: YOU WILL PROBABLY SEE YOUR FEMALE BOSS AND/OR EX-GIRLFRIEND ON THIS 18+ SITE"). So it is with a critical eye toward the randy businessmen of the world that I make the following statement: Many professional dominatrixes do work a second job, and just because you haven't seen them in the dungeon doesn't mean you haven't used their services.

Take Mona Darling, a 40-something domme with purple hair and an otherworldly calm in her voice who bills herself as the "Dominatrix Mommy Blogger." Her blog started as a secret outlet for venting about clients, but when she had trouble conceiving, she decided to use the platform to write about infertility. Gradually, the two roles—domme and mom—came to inhabit one internet domain. As her readership grew, she noticed that her readers kept reaching out to her privately with their own sexual issues. "These women would contact me and be like, 'I'm such a normal woman, I'm on the PTA, but I love when somebody spanks me,'" Mona told me.

Although Mona writes about motherhood and sex work in the same space, she keeps the two roles very distinct. "Have you ever been to Hawaii?" she asks me. "You get off the plane and the air is different and it helps you get into that vacation mode. The same thing happens at the dungeon. The same thing happens when I pick up my child at school. Each time, I'm stepping into a different world and role."

That's not to say they never collide in unexpected ways. When her son's class took a trip to a local art studio, the five-year-olds lined up to hand-dip a single candle. Fourteen kids. One candle. The dipping process took forever. Later, Mona tweeted that it was the most intense wax scene she'd ever been involved in.

But the sphere inhabited by pro dommes is very different from the land of vanilla culture, and sometimes straddling the two can be exhausting. Mistress Dee, an artist and pro domme in New York, "lives in fear of the day" when her two worlds collide. Dee is "terrified" of the day someone outs her as a sex worker, which she feels is inevitable. Given that she's incredibly successful as a domme—"I'm internationally renowned," she says, "and that's not an overstatement, [though] in some ways I wish it wasn't true"—her goal is to keep her domme identity as secret for as long as possible. The irony is that she doesn't want to be a domme forever—she wants to be a full-time artist. But even when her domming days are behind her, she'll look at them as something that can and will haunt her.

"There are publications out there that take pleasure in destroying people's careers over this sort of thing," she says. "I just hope that by the time the two worlds meet, I'm making enough money to hire a really good PR team."

Dee's friend Goddess Aviva also keeps her two primary identities mostly separate, but aside from any residual fear of discovery, she's kind of living the dream. Aviva is a visual artist who works on one big art project during the summers and supports her life in NYC by domming during the rest of the year. Her domme work is the financial and psychological enabler of her artistic work. She is her own sugar mama, the Vera to her inner Nabokov. She sleeps in, takes yoga classes, schedules a few sessions with clients every week, goes to museums and shows to stay inspired, has a "very active social life," and usually has one slave day every week—that is, a personal slave, who doesn't pay for her services but instead will come over and clean her house or massage her or take her shopping.

But Aviva isn't just in this for an easy buck. She says she's in it because the need to be in control is an intrinsic part of her personality. In college, she found herself bored with traditional hookup culture and intrigued by mind games and controlling the situation. Still, becoming a dominatrix started out as a joke. "I was like, 'Haha, what if I moved to New York and worked as a dominatrix—that would be funny,'" she says. Now, domming is part of herself that she'd be exploring anyway, with or without the job.

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Photo courtesy of Mistress Dee

Surely some pro dommes just do it for the money, but for these women, it's a job that taps into something a little deeper. Even Dee, who didn't know anything about the BDSM lifestyle before she started, felt the call of the domme long before she knew what it was. "Looking back, I had a lot of qualities that were naturally dominant," she says. "I had grown up as a very confident alpha female."

While all three dommes take care to keep their careers separate—whether that means not blogging about their son's kindergarten class or keeping their vanilla identities on total lockdown—it's inevitable that the characteristics of domme work bleed into their other hustles, and vice versa. Sometimes it's useful or empowering—sometimes it's not. Mona, for instance, says she's become more nurturing as a pro domme since having a child.

Aviva says her work as a pro domme has made her feel much more self-expressed, which in turn fuels her creative side. "You have to be really creative and smart and confident in order to do well as a pro domme, and I use all those characteristic as an artist as well," she says.

On the other hand, Dee's art suffered for a while, since it demands a vulnerability and a willingness to be out of control that's "very antithetical to domination in many ways." The tension between domming and art was something she had to actively address in her artistic life. "I'd been compartmentalizing my domme work so much because it's such a weird, intense job, that I found myself blocking off parts of myself that I couldn't access as an artist," she says.

All three women agree that having another job or gig or interest or outlet is important for sex workers of all types. "You're taking a lot of people's energies," says Mona, "and sometimes you'll have a really bad session where you can't connect with the person and you take a big hit to your self esteem and it's easier to back off and do something else instead of being like, 'I have to do this tomorrow or I can't pay my rent.'"

Aviva uses an intensive screening process when choosing her clients for the sake of her own psychological health. "You're dealing with a lot of people who have inner conflicts," she says. "They feel like they can't express parts of themselves in their daily life or vanilla relationships or at work. Often, you're dealing with a lot of guilt and shame, and that can be very heavy, emotionally."

So yeah, the idea of a dominatrix with a secret daytime identity isn't just a fantasy—it can be almost a psychological necessity. And it's more common than you'd think. Mona has what amounts to an entire little black book of sex worker friends with other jobs. "I have friends who work in tech—I have a friend who worked for the government for a long time—I have friends who are masseuses part-time and some kind of sex worker the rest of the time," she says. "A well-known domme I knew was also a house cleaner. I knew a librarian who stripped one night a week."

Follow Tori Telfer on Twitter.