[body_image width='1200' height='771' path='images/content-images/2015/02/25/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/25/' filename='i-got-a-crash-course-in-the-art-of-swinging-at-the-south-london-porn-cinema-193-body-image-1424889322.jpg' id='30891']

Graffiti on a hoarding next to Club 487 in New Cross

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Perhaps inevitably, Club 487—London's last remaining porn cinema—was raided by the Metropolitan Police and Lewisham Council officials last week.

Officers and officials burst into South London's temple of the sin at 1:30 PM on Thursday, with Sergeant Mark Alger of Lewisham tweeting that "the premises are believed to be a pornographic cinema. A number of middle-aged males found inside and removed. LFB [London Fire Brigade] conducting safety checks. Licensing enquiries also taking place."

The hapless wankers inside were allowed to leave with no arrests made, and 487 remains open for business. The club's line is that the incident took place after unfounded reports of drug and alcohol sales were made. The police, finding no evidence of anything of the sort, went away happy.

"Two of the coppers who raided us even said good morning to me yesterday when they were walking past," said Danny, the manager, when I asked him about the incident.

No hard feelings, then. Certainly, if the cinema is able to evade further interference from the boys in blue then it will be a blessing for members of London's swinging demimonde—like Vern, a polite guy in his late 40s who wears glasses and a homely blue pullover. I chatted to him in the bowels of the 487 the week before the raid, although it's kinda hard making polite conversation when you're talking to a man while watching a bunch of other guys bang his wife.

"Wave it over there, mate—not in his face," his wife Melissa gasps. "What if it goes off?"

She is lying on the floor in one of two private cubicles the venue offers. Lit only by a wank-flick called Uniform Fantasies, which plays on the small HD screen above, she is at the center of three blokes, members primed and ready, waiting to receive her oral attention. Another has sex with her, grunting and groaning the whole time. He finishes abruptly, then stands and buttons up his jeans.

"Wooah, that was good," he says. He's tall, with Latin good looks.

"Melissa's a great fuck," says Vern. "She's a good girl. Thank you, mate."

"No—thank you," the guy says.

He seems pretty sincere.

This is a far cry from the glam swinging scene of Killing Kittens and Fever Parties, which cater to sexy young couples and single girls. Using online forums, Melissa and Vern advertise their presence at a variety of venues around London at short notice, inviting lone guys and couples to come down and have fun with them. Club 487, with its gloomy corridors and anonymous vibe, is just their kind of place. They've travelled here tonight all the way from Acton, after Vern finished his last job of the day on the garage forecourt where he works.

"We like it seedy," says Vern. "This gaff is great for us. You know it's gonna be all guys coming down. And Melissa likes to go through a lot of guys."

And does Vern have sex with other women?

"No—I don't need to," he says quickly.

"You're better off going as a couple, not a single guy, otherwise you'll look like a lemon on the first night."

Melissa, when not enjoying the attention of guys who aren't her husband, is a jovial, ebullient lady, her peroxide blonde hair luminous in the dark. She runs around in lingerie and black boots, a glass of whiskey in hand, yelling at anyone who will listen that it's a crying shame that venues like this are being closed down across London. Vern is quieter and more reflective, choosing to enhance his enjoyment of his wife's shenanigans with the occasional sniff of amyl nitrate.

Melissa and Vern have been married for 22 years and swinging for 15. Vern seems to be enjoying the action, even shouting encouragement at his wife's various paramours, but I wonder if he's really happy.

"We're careful. We get tested and everything. When you're swinging, you've got to. Even if you use a condom you still need to make sure everyone's safe," he says.

But how does he feel watching random guys playing hide the sausage with his missus? Is it a turn on?

"It was tough at first, no doubt," he says. "First time she done it there was a bit of an argument—lot of jealousy."

How did he get through it?

"Maybe it was the wrong situation. The wrong guy. We done it with another guy and it was perfect. Nice guy, down-to-earth, spoke to us—you know. And we liked him so it was all right. It was a turn-on."

And you're into it now?

"Yeah, completely. We've been doing it 15 years now so we must like it, mustn't we?"

I guess, in the end, there's no need for jealousy because you're going home with that person?

"Exactly. I think that's why it was hard the first time. What if she enjoys the sex better and fucks off with another guy? But it gets easier."

Do they go to other swingers venues?

"Paradise in Dagenham is OK. But you take your chances. You're better off going as a couple, not a single guy, otherwise you'll look like a lemon on the first night. And if you don't know no one, you're not going to get nothing, like. When you go with a woman, everyone speaks to each other and breaks the ice."

Right.

"'Cause we know guys who go down Paradise and they get nothing. We ask, 'Do you speak to the other couples?' And they say no. So no wonder. It's communication. There's couples that look for single guys, and couples that look for couples. You don't know that until you break the ice. And it's down to the single guy to break the ice, 'cause he'll get the pleasure of fucking someone else's wife."

"She squirts a lot, too. I was with her half an hour ago and my sleeve's still soaking."

Just then another couple pass us in the gloom—an attractive young brunette in her 20s and her partner, a robust-looking guy with a shaved head. They walk into the main cinema room.

"That's Angelina. Nice girl. Melissa had her earlier."

She's certainly prolific.

"She loves sex. She's a good girl."

I follow Angelina and her boyfriend. They're in the back row with another guy. Angelina lies horizontally across them, ministering to them both. On screen, a new movie plays, Twin Cheeks. Melissa, having finished up outside, wanders in to watch with Vern.

"She's going too quick," she shouts. "Slow down a bit!"

It's like this is a live porno and she's the director.

"She knows what she's doing. She's been through a lot of guys in 15 years," Vern remarks.

"She squirts a lot, too," says another bloke. "I was with her half an hour ago and my sleeve's still soaking."

Vern looks proudly at his wife, smiling and nodding slowly as though someone has complimented her on her sporting prowess.

"She's a good girl," he repeats.

"I've had them all," Melissa says. "Footballers—even a [Member of Parliament] once."

It's certainly an impressive resume. Shortly, Angelina and her friends finish up and the night is over. Everyone shakes hands and promises to meet up again soon.

"Great fuck, mate," says one guy, bumping fists with Vern and then lowering his head to give Melissa a kiss on the cheek.

Serial cuckolding may not be for everyone, but for the denizens of Club 487 it's all in a night's work.

"We'd better be off," says Vern. "It's gonna take ages to get home and I've got to sort out my sprockets in the morning."

Now Vern and Melissa must make the drive back home across London. It may be a long way, but for them it's a godsend that venues like Club 487 still exist.

Follow John Lucas on Twitter.

Thumbnail photo by Guillermo Cervera, from his series Sex Club

While pedophiles might be the lowest people on the totem pole of society, we don't really know much about how many there are or what makes them tick. One reason is mandatory reporting laws that keep them from seeking psychological help: If someone who's violated a kid tells his or her therapist, that professional is legally required to report the crime to the cops—as they would when told about about any other crime. So people who have abused children and want to stop have little recourse other than turning themselves in, going to jail, and in all likelihood, getting the shit beaten out of them.

But what about people who are attracted to kids yet have never laid a finger on one? In the United States, there's no way for a would-be pedophile to seek help before he or she acts on their urges. And in August of last year, California made it even harder for those with sexual disorders to get assistance: Assembly Bill 1775 amended the Child Abuse and Neglect Reporting Act so that therapists are now required to report any patient who has looked at kiddie porn.

Last Friday, three therapists sued the attorneys general of LA County and the state of California, claiming that the assembly bill violated patients' confidentiality rights. They say it's hurt their businesses and—perhaps paradoxically—will end up hurting kids in the long run.

"Since the law went into effect on January 1, I'm having people come in who are reluctant to talk", plaintiff Don Mathews, who heads up the Impulse Treatment Center in Walnut Creek, told me. "They say, 'Why should I talk to you if you're going to be a police officer instead of a therapist?'"

The plaintiffs make the case that not all people who seek out child porn are pedophiles. For one, they could be kids who are sexting with their boyfriends or girlfriends. By telling their therapists about this relatively normal teenage interaction, they might be setting themselves up to be branded as sex offenders for distributing illegal images.

When it comes to adults, just admitting you've looked at certain material online would make you an imminent threat in the eyes of California authorities. That doesn't really make sense, according to the complaint, because it's super easy to get child porn on the Internet, and illegal sites are increasingly just another part of the repertoire for those who use taboo images in order to get off.

According to the complaint, these any-kind-of-sex addicts "typically have no prior criminal history, have never expressed a sexual interest toward children, and are active and voluntary participants in psychotherapy to treat their particular sexual disorder, which often involves compulsive viewing of pornography of all kinds on the internet."

Mathews points to the fact that "child porn" involves anyone under 18, but that "teen" is perhaps the most popular smutty search term in the world. He says that not only is it normal for men to be attracted to minors, but a "disturbing amount" are aroused by children of all ages. He pointed to a study in which scientists hooked men's penises up to a plethysmograph and found that around 30 percent of them were turned on by kids.

"So it's not even that uncommon to find nude pictures of children at least a little bit erotic," he says. "The real issue is do you pursue the pictures and do you hurt children. The answer there seems to be 'no.' That 30 percent is not all pedophiles."

The plaintiffs are building their cases on the gap between child-attracted people and actual offenders, but according to Michael Seto, one of the top researchers in the world on pedophilia, assessing how those populations diverge is extremely complicated. He told me that only about 1 percent of the adult male population is made up of true pedophiles, but added that researchers are typically stuck working with people who have been referred to court-ordered counseling after having already offended.

In a literature review he conducted for the journal Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment in 2010, Seto found only three studies on the topic that looked at self-reported pedophiles. Those studies found the percentages of people who both looked at child porn and had molested a kid to be 32.8 percent, 57.4 percent and 47.8 percent, respectively. While there's not a lot of data on the issue, the small amount that exists makes clear that there are at least some people who could use could psychological treatment and are now barred from seeking it under California law.

"We know therapy works," Mathews says," so why are we sabotaging therapy?"

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

[body_image width='604' height='453' path='images/content-images/2015/02/25/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/25/' filename='the-vice-guide-to-speaking-drinking-and-fighting-like-a-newfoundlander-675-body-image-1424903699.jpg' id='30924']

Newfoundland is fun if you can handle it. Photo via Facebook

The cliché that Canada is a polite country, where even people in mosh pits say sorry, is relatively true. Yes we like to have fun, but for the most part, Canadians are pretty civil and nice to each other. Except, for some reason, when it comes to people from Newfoundland. Somewhere along the way, Canadians decided that while it's not okay to make fun of people from other countries, Newfie jokes—which are basically remixed racist jokes—are totally fine. In fact, there are even entire websites dedicated to them.

That's not to say we can't take a joke. We can. In fact, most of our social interactions are comprised of thinking up creative ways to tell the other person they're an idiot. But sometimes it's hard.

Sometimes you find yourself half cut in some shitty dive bar in Edmonton or Toronto or even Halifax and there's a drawing of a fisherman getting sucked off by a fish with the word NEWFIE scrawled above it. In that moment, you feel 500 years of disrespect and petty, grinding, banal oppression rise with the bile in the back of your throat as the salt water boils in your veins. Your first instinct is to smack someone but you order another drink and die a little more inside.

If only mainlanders understood the subtle richness of being a Newfoundlander.

Thankfully, VICE has prepared this insider's guide to traversing the Rock's dense cultural traditions and hopefully, your first trip to George Street won't end with some skeet sticking a butter knife in you.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/1O1VkQToCDA' width='420' height='315']

SPEAKING
First things first: Newfoundlanders are not Maritimers. We are the older, harder-drinking, rowdier cousins of Maritimers. Rule number one of speaking like a Newfoundlander is flipping the fuck out if someone calls you a Maritimer.

Contrary to popular belief, there's no single "Newfoundland Tongue." Sure, after a few drinks it's easy to tell most of us are the bastard offspring of Irish seamen, but island dialects have all the fine, subtle, nuanced flavours I heard you can pick up in expensive wine. But why anyone would pay more than 13 bucks max for a wine drunk is beyond me.

People talk different in every bay, cove, and public housing ghetto scattered across Greater Sin Jawns. It's like history dropped a character from a Shakespeare play into 8,000 different coves, cut them off from the outside world and let them fuck their cousins for a while. Depending on where you're from you might say "you" or "youse" or "ye" or "piss ass" in place of the general second person pronoun. Up in Catalina they pronounce the word "boil" all queer and my crowd in Grand Falls would consider this a "mega scald" on baywops everywhere. Everyone talks funny compared to everyone else and it's fucking super.

At least, that's the way it used to be. Thanks to American television, the internet, and 65 years of state-sponsored snobbery, most Newfoundlanders under the age of 30 have been brought up to talk all proper-like for our oil industry overlords—even in post-Resettlement holdouts like Turks Cove or Christ's Cockles or St. Jones Jacking His Dick. So much the worse for Mainlanders in search of a dancing bear.

For full effect, also replace "th" with "d" in every part of this article.

There's certain universals, though. "Whaddyat?" is a universal greeting and also works pretty good as a pickup line if you have the charm to pull it off (HINT: if you have to ask, you don't). Also, Newfoundlanders all swear religiously. Like, both constantly and in Biblical vernacular. Everyone knows "Lord Thundering Jesus" but with a little effort you can turn basically any prayer and/or minor Old Testament prophet into a curse. "Jumping Jesus," "Gentle Blessed Mary Mother of God" and "Ever Beloved Elisha, Balding Bear-Fucker" all work.

"Christ" and "fuck" are also more or less interchangeable, e.g. "what the fucking Christ" or "what the Christing fuck." Basically just drop the word fuck anywhere you can in a sentence and it's golden. Bay Etiquette also demands you end every declarative statement with 'wha', like "she's colder out tonight than a nun's cunt, wha?"

Mostly though—and I can't stress this enough—if you aren't from Newfoundland, you probably can't speak like a Newfoundlander, so save yourself the embarrassment. Hearing some aging yuppie from southern Ontario come in trying to articulate a stock tourist phrase like, "How's she getting on, me old cock," or whatever else they charge you to recite at a Screech-In on George Street is like nails on a chalkboard. Unless you're Russell Crowe, do not attempt. Just sit back and drink in the full linguistic beauty of our bargain-bin Celtic lilt and tendency to pronounce the letter "H" in random places.

Oh, yeah. The other key to speaking like a Newfoundlander is to not give a shit about Labrador. Like don't mention it or think about it ever and you'll fit right in.

[body_image width='1024' height='681' path='images/content-images/2015/02/25/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/25/' filename='the-vice-guide-to-speaking-drinking-and-fighting-like-a-newfoundlander-675-body-image-1424903858.jpg' id='30925']

Don't be this person, tourists. Photo via Flickr user Jeremy T. Hetzel

DRINKING
OK. So, first off, don't try any of this at home. Drinking at a shed party level is not amateur hour. I'm not going to pretend Newfoundlanders are the world's hardest drinkers (I went drinking with a Russian once and holy fuck) but we're definitely on the A list.

Just think about Screech. Legend has it an American officer was stationed at a base out in the bay during World War II and stumbled across the b'ys having a beach party and getting wrecked on some homemade hooch. The officer asks for a drink and they hand him a cup of some evil-smelling shit. He takes a shot and immediately lets out this piercing scream and runs to the shore and starts gargling sea water. Forget the cheap shit they sell at the liquor store. Moonshine, man. Our grandparents out-drank the US Army like it was no thing. Dudes came back from shooting Nazis in the face or whatever, but they couldn't handle the fermented sludge Joe Blow was scraping off the bottom of a transatlantic fruit barrel.

I know a lot of Canadians think they're hard drinkers, but they're really not. People in the rest of Canada think a casual half case on a Friday night is hard drinking. Buddy. Please. A half case is warm-up drinking. A half case is what you serve children and the elderly.

Part of this is purely constitutional. You can either handle your liquor or you can't. There's no shame in not being a big drinker but there's a lot of shame in pretending to be hard as fuck and then barfing all over the dance floor at Lottie's because you had too many White Russians. Know your limit, play within it.

If you want to go pro, you need a lot of practice. Most Newfoundlanders start their training early. A couple buddies of mine started getting shitfaced on the regular in the sixth grade. That's pretty young, but by grade nine, getting wasted behind the Ultramar or in the woods by The Gazebo (every town has The Gazebo) is par for the course. This is good because you get all the amateur mistakes out of the way early, like being such a state that you shit yourself in public or projectile vomit Sour Puss all over your buddy's shed because you coughed on a blunt. God forbid you end up like one of the Pentecostal kids who turn 19, go savage, and pass out in the bathroom of a St. John's strip club after their second Bacardi Breezer.

Personally, I was a late bloomer. I didn't start drinking until I was 16, which should have been old enough to know that some people are too gross to make out with no matter how much Golden Wedding you pound. But it's all part of the process, right? You have to be willing to drink anything you're offered and just go where the night takes you. Like, is it wise to start a ruckus at a prof's house because you're too fucked up on carrot wine? Probably not, but you gotta crack a few eggs to make an omelette and what have you.

The key is to never give up. My all-time record is a two-four of India Beer, half a flask of Kraken, two bowls of shitty weed, and a small parachute of Fort Mac molly. And I wasn't even the most fucked person at that Christmas party. Personal excellence is always within reach if you're willing to sacrifice your liver and your dignity to the great and terrible gods of the North Atlantic. Come heavy or, seriously, don't come at all.

Mainly, the secret to playing hard is working hard. If you're out hauling shrimp or processing fish or pumping oil or digging graves or whatever other bullshit tasks the international capitalist order assigns Newfoundlanders, not only have you earned a couple drinks, but you'll be able to put them the fuck away, too. Alternatively, drinking is an awesome way to pass long months of chronic, structural unemployment—not that we'd know anything about that.

You have to keep it fun, though. If you're a really obnoxious drunk and keep having the fuck beat out of you downtown, or you're at it all the time just to get through the day, you should probably stop. But if you can handle it, go to town. One of the most magical nights I ever had in St. John's was passing around a flask of Old Sam on top of the Supreme Court while we were blitzed out of our minds on hash. Newfoundland is best experienced half in the bag.

FIGHTING
Full disclosure: barring a Taekwondo spar I lost when I was 12, I have never been in a fight. I don't believe the good Lord desires that we raise our fists in anger, and also I would get immediately murdered in actual combat. But I totally get it.

Consider, first, the cultural background of the average Newfoundlander. Take every centuries-old stereotype you have about sailors, put them on a cold rock in the middle of the ocean and make them really, really poor. Then pile on all the charming quirks of Newfoundland history—"the first idiot in uniform who shows up in the cove with a boat gets supreme power" as a system of government, or the British Empire's love of feeding bastard Irishmen like us to German machine-guns—and let it simmer for a few generations. Throw in a heroic level of alcohol consumption and you're good to fucking go.

Obviously it's a gross stereotype that all Newfoundlanders go around starting fights. We'll finish a fight if you start one, but only skeets go around starting fights. Skeets are the distinctly Newfoundland variety of white trash hicks. The b'ys in Fox racing jackets hanging around outside Tim Hortons blasting AC/DC from their trucks at 2 AM? Definitely skeets. Dude with a heart tattoo that says "NAN" on his forearm, whacked out of his mind on oxys, holding up Needs Convenience with a butter knife? Mega skeet. Skeets will fuck you up.

And it's not just the dudes. We were waiting around for a cab by Trinity Pub on George one night and they were kicking some tiny girl out of the bar and my buddy was like, "Are you okay?" and she flipped her shit and kicked him in the chest down two flights of stone stairs. Nonsense. As I was saying, some people just can't handle their liquor. Or coke, or whatever.

Of course, most of us are better than skeets. Most of us are civilized. Instead of fighting with their hands, the genteel Newfoundlander of today prefers to use their words to pummel the shit out of people emotionally, where the bruises last forever. Newfoundland's proudest literary tradition is coming up with clever and elaborate ways to call other people idiots.

Another fine Newfoundland tradition is public shaming. Public shaming is violent, but it's a really civilized mode of violence for the sake of the common good. Thanks to Twitter, we can take this tradition to the next level by posting pictures of people parked in the fire lane at the mall or pictures of fatal car accidents with sick burns about the stiff's shitty driving. And God forbid you publish something unpopular.

Coming to blows is barbaric. We're not savages.

Basically, the key to fighting—or generally just living—like a Newfoundlander is to not give a fuck. Do not give a good God damn. Life in Newfoundland is a black comedy. The weather is terrible, the jobs blow (assuming you're lucky enough to have one), there has literally never been a good government in 500 years, we hunted the cod and the Beothuk to extinction, and everyone upalong still thinks we're a fucking punchline. So have a laugh on the way to the grave. What does it matter how you talk or drink or fuck if you're having a time? We were mastering absurdism before Camus was even a glimmer in his father's eye.

Like drinking, you either have a constitution for this kind of thing or you don't. Generally, most of us are pretty harmless. But sometimes it's not easy.

You are on the mainland and some shit-eating frat boy or businessman or grad school colleague who should know better is jabbing you in the ribs with a big guffaw like "HA HA SAY 'CAR' AGAIN YOUR ACCENT IS HILARIOUS." You put on your best face, laugh and get a drink in you as quick as you can.

And then sometimes it's really easy. You're just trying to live your life and some dude keeps giving you grief? Crack that sucker in the face. You're a Newfoundlander, man. You don't have time for bullshit.

Drew Brown was born and raised in Newfoundland and grew up mostly in Grand Falls-Windsor. He is now a writer living in Edmonton pursuing a PhD in Political Science at the University of Alberta. You can follow him on Twitter.

Photo by Roberta Neiman

When asked how he's doing, the writer Rudy Wurlitzer has a handful of standard responses: "I'm tap-dancing on a rubber raft," he'll say, or "I'm still on this side of the grass," or "I'm stretched out in front of the Trail's End Saloon, staring into the big empty." Maybe he believes that. But to an outside observer he would seem, at 78, to be faring pretty well. His hips and knees are periodically attacked by surgeons, so he walks with a limp, but he's got the handsomeness of an elder statesman and a perverse mind working at its peak.

He was "crouching in a corner" when I visited him at his grand Victorian home in Hudson, New York, last summer. The walls there are lined with the work of his wife, the photographer Lynn Davis—pictures of ancient Egyptian and Cambodian temples, icebergs and waterfalls, monuments eaten up by time and the elements. Wurlitzer carries himself quietly and with a genuine humility. "Who cares what I've got to say? Who wants to hear it?" he said when first approached about being interviewed. "I think I'd rather just crawl under a rock." Cinefamily had just made inquiries to Wurlitzer about mounting retrospectives in Los Angeles and New York of the films he wrote in the 1970s and 80s—road movies, westerns, and unclassifiable metaphysical excursions—and he seemed deeply ambivalent.

When I asked him whether he was going to go through with it, he crossed and uncrossed his legs, shifted in his seat, shook his head, and looked pained. "I can't. I just can't do it." He trailed off for almost half a minute. "I just can't look at the old work. It makes me feel all kinds of things. It embarrasses me. It makes me anxious. It's not worth it at this age, physically or emotionally. That's why I don't really like doing interviews anymore. I'm always aware that there's so much on either side of the past, and I just want to stay in the present. Especially as I get older."

Since the late 1960s, Wurlitzer has been a screenwriter. If you've seen Two-Lane Blacktop or Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid or Walker, you've seen his work. None of the films he wrote raked in box-office millions, and many screenplays he's written have gone unproduced. But he enjoys a reputation that makes people speak about him in superlatives—that he's one of a kind, that he's his own genre, that there's no one, no one, quite like him. His work makes people want to mount retrospectives on both coasts.

Wurlitzer is also what's best described as a cult novelist. Fiction launched his screenwriting career, which in turn sustained him as he wrote four more experimental novels and a memoir. His novels came into the world quietly and then disappeared the same way. But they insist on keeping themselves alive, being reissued several times and each one having its devotees.

Director Robert Downey Sr., who speaks with Wurlitzer almost daily, told me, "He's so unique, it's hard to analyze him. That writing is tight. It's absurd. It's everything. Those first three books will be around for a long time. And there's no genre there. But they are all absolutely out of one person's brain."

Composer Philip Glass, a friend of Wurlitzer's since they were both 17, said, "I've worked with a lot of other writers, but he's the best. I really wanted to get him into working in theater because he knew how to write for movies so well. He's able to give you clear, verbal resolution of an idea without too many words, and his language is really a vernacular language, the language of everyday words. I think of him as a quintessentially American writer—just the clarity of his writing, the economy of it, the rigor of it."

Wurlitzer is a quiet legend who worked elbow to elbow with louder legends. He worked and made for the sake of working and making and never got very craven about the reward. He was, he says often, grateful to be surviving. Once, on the phone, he told me a story that got at the essence of how he carried himself through his life and work and why his name isn't spoken with the frequency and volume of some of his contemporaries'.

"I revered Samuel Beckett," he said. "I was living in Paris in the early 60s. I was just a young dude on the drift. And I knew Beckett would come to this one café at a certain time. I would take a position in view of his table, and he'd sit there with his drink, and eventually Alberto Giacometti would come in and they'd nod to each other, and Giacometti would sit down and have a drink too. They would not say one word to each other, and then they'd get up, shake hands, and go on their way. I was so impressed by that. What an amazing communication they must have. That almost made me tremble to watch them. I never introduced myself to Beckett, though. I just couldn't. I didn't want to bother him."

Portrait by Rachel Stern

Wurlitzer was born in Cincinnati in 1937 and grew up in New York City at the tail end of the Depression and during wartime deprivations. His family subsisted in a sort of ruined privilege. Wurlitzer's grandfather had amassed a fortune making musical instruments, but most of that was gone by the time Rudy arrived. His father had a name as a dealer of stringed instruments and owned a store in midtown Manhattan. Wurlitzer had musical training from the beginning. "When I was born," he told me, "my grandfather and father put a miniature violin in my crib. So I was fucked." His father would sometimes entertain visitors like violinist Jascha Heifetz, and Rudy was always asked to play. His response was usually to try to run away.

As he got older, he ran farther and farther: to an oil tanker that sailed the Mediterranean; away from his Columbia University education to Cuba, just as Castro's troops entered a euphoric and jubilant Havana; into the Army; to Paris and Majorca; and finally back home to New York City in 1964, where he took an apartment in the East Village.

By the time Wurlitzer settled downtown, the country's cultural weather was becoming curious. There was a rising pitch of activity in Vietnam, greater turbulence in the civil rights battle, and post-Beat acid consciousness beginning to wash in from the West Coast along with the interest in Eastern beliefs that attended it. In the East Village the streets were mounded with garbage, and living there involved genuine bodily risk, but the scene was thriving.

Wurlitzer and his friends spent long nights in the Cedar Tavern, cigarettes between their fingers, drinking and arguing about music and writing and art. There were performances and happenings to witness in lofts and galleries. They'd see Charles Mingus and Ornette Coleman at the Five Spot Café, or John Coltrane at the Village Vanguard. Bob Dylan was putting on his dandified, surrealist speed-freak persona, and no one was oblivious to the energies he unleashed.

"In the days when I was being formed in New York there was great permission. It was a very different time in that way," Wurlitzer told me. "There were people like [Claes] Oldenburg and [Robert] Rauschenberg. You were rubbing up against people like Jasper Johns and certain musicians. An early friend of mine whom I spent a lot of time with was Philip Glass, who was trying to break down the orthodoxy of music. John Cage was a big figure for me because he enlisted silence in his work and I found it very moving."

Two-Lane Blacktop, 1971. Laurie Bird and James Taylor

And there were other methods to help blast at orthodoxies. "Drugs were definitely in the room, and I tried everything," he said. "A lot of drugs I couldn't do. Cocaine made me crazy—I couldn't do that. I could smoke dope. I took acid until I didn't think there was any more to learn from it. Ayahuasca. Mushrooms. I touched base, but—I don't know—I didn't really do it that much."

Wurlitzer had been writing since high school. One of his journal entries from 1955 reads: "I will use this journal to practice writing. I will be able to develop a style or even find out if I have any talent." While he was living by himself in a 12th Street tenement, he began working on the story of a man in ownership of three memories and a fake octopus in a tank, wandering along the California coast. The Paris Review published it in 1966, and Wurlitzer expanded it into the novel Nog, published by Random House in 1969.

Nog is a laying bare of consciousness. The book pulls back the scalp and chips away the bone to show the neurons and nerves of the human mind twitching and pulsing in new air. The whole book is a may-or-may-not proposition: There may or may not be a character named Nog, and Nog may or may not be the narrator himself; one event or other may or may not have happened; other characters may or may not be inventions of the narrator. There's no plot, only movement and motion. Past and present tenses shift constantly in the same paragraph and even sentence; one sentence makes a statement only to be negated in the next. One representative passage reads:

I am too comfortable sitting on the sand, my foot drying now, not knowing that I am about to move on. The storm wasn't invented. I'm sure of that. And the sea was cold and even wet. That was two or three days ago. But there must be another place, a replacement, one foot having the problem of following the other foot, to another place. Now that there are no other feet to follow. I stood and sat again. I must be holding back.

A certain utopian optimism still held as the 60s drew to a close. But in 1968, Wurlitzer had tuned into a quiet-but-getting-louder signal broadcast by people like the Diggers in San Francisco and the Motherfuckers in New York City, something harder-edged and a little more aggressive, possessed of a violent streak that was rapping at the crash-pad windows. The atmosphere of Nog is bleary and broken. Events are neither good nor bad, helpful nor damaging; they only are. It's a sort of Zen trip toward the Altamont frontier.

"My obsession was to explore the composition of the self and what's real and what isn't real. Which is an ongoing process. With Nog I was trying to take it through that whole process. It was the opposite of a screenplay, where it's linear and there's a beginning, middle, and end," Wurlitzer said. "That's the way my mind was working. I was just starting out with no external—no one telling me what to do. I just explored where my mind was. It wasn't conceptual. It was intuitive. It was done for its own sake.

"The frontier that I'm involved with is an interior frontier," he continued. "Not to be too pretentious, but it's about exploring the non-duality of form and emptiness. Which is about what happens when you dissolve your inevitable self-absorptions and are left with the present. You realize that the past is just like everything else—it's a dream. And it's just as much of a fiction as if you were actually writing fiction and we choose to say or choose to remember or can't remember how to remember whatever it was you were trying to remember. It comes out filtered and redefined and has an envelope of fiction to it. Because we're all basically fiction."

Out in Hollywood, in 1970, director Monte Hellman was preparing to begin work on Two-Lane Blacktop. Hellman, a protégé of C-movie impresario Roger Corman, hated the shooting script, about a cross-country auto race, and loved Nog. He pretty soon made an easy leap of logic, and one day Wurlitzer's phone rang in New York with an offer to go to LA and rewrite the screenplay. Wurlitzer took a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont, and as the Manson trial was about to start and the blood was still wet on the campus of Kent State, he began writing. Wurlitzer knew absolutely nothing about cars but read as many hot-rod magazines as he could find and hung out for a time with some stoner gearheads in the San Fernando Valley.

The result was a very peculiar and existentially torqued road movie. Starring James Taylor as the hyper-intense Driver, and Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson as the Mechanic, Two-Lane follows the men as they race GTO, played by Warren Oates, across the country. Very little happens, and there's very little spoken. The colors are stunning, the landscape is beautiful, and the beginning and endpoints don't matter. The important thing is the moment, the motion, and the pure act of driving. We're given nothing of anyone's history, and what little we do get is all lies. We're also given fine lines like:

THE MECHANIC: You'd have yourself a real street sweeper here if you put a little work into it.

GTO: I go fast enough.

THE DRIVER: You can never go fast enough.

Esquire called it the movie of the year and published the screenplay in its entirety in April 1971. Wurlitzer suddenly found himself with a lot of cachet.

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, 1973. Kris Kristofferson, Charles Martin Smith, and Rudy Wurlitzer

Two years before Wurlitzer began his Hollywood residency, the old studios were in serious decline. Run mostly by men born in the late 1800s, they churned out failure after failure with no sense of what moviegoers might best respond to. Until, of course, Easy Rider was released by Columbia in July 1969. Directed by Dennis Hopper and starring Hopper, Jack Nicholson, and Peter Fonda, Easy Rider was shot for around $400,000—and to everyone's shock grossed millions upon millions of dollars. More important, the other studios clamored to give anyone tuned into the counterculture a chance to write and direct and—they hoped—duplicate Easy Rider's success.

That was the atmosphere Wurlitzer arrived in, and as he wrote his second novel, Flats, upon completing his work on Two-Lane, he embraced it. He became close friends with people like Hal Ashby, Nicholson, and Downey. There were days full of writing and networking and long—very long—nights of carousing. Beyond Hollywood, the Weather Underground couldn't stop blowing things up, and the pace of action in Vietnam got even quicker, but the bacchanalian textures of movie life in Los Angeles kept begging to be touched.

Of course, the magic couldn't persist. The American auteurs might have started with the studios' benediction, but personal, searching, visionary films lost their draw, and their makers lost their cachet. Wurlitzer had, in fact, already gotten a feel for the direction things would take.

After the success of Easy Rider, Hopper leveraged his clout to make a film in Peru, and in the glow of approbation for Two-Lane's script, Wurlitzer cashed in on his. He persuaded Universal to let him direct a film set in India and traveled there in 1971 with some producers and moneymen to scout locations. While Wurlitzer was overseas, Hopper's film was released. Appropriately titled The Last Movie, it was an artistic and financial fiasco, every frame of it smeared with drugs. Panic tremors ran through the studio corridors. Permissions were rescinded and productions canceled. Wurlitzer was one of the casualties. Universal pulled the plug.

Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote once about what he termed the "acid western," saying that in most westerns "there's a movement toward enlightenment and freedom," whereas the acid westerns journey toward death. Acid westerns, according to Rosenbaum, "are revisionist Westerns in which American history is reinterpreted to make room for peyote visions and related hallucinogenic experiences, LSD trips in particular." Wurlitzer, he wrote, "is surely the individual most responsible for exploring this genre, having practically invented it himself in the late 60s and then helped to nurture it in the scripts of others."

Wurlitzer's next project would be a prototypical acid western, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, directed by Sam Peckinpah, financed by MGM, and featuring Bob Dylan among the cast. One of Pat Garrett's producers, Gordon Carroll, approached Wurlitzer about doing the screenplay. Peckinpah was a Two-Lane fan, and he and Carroll agreed that Wurlitzer could do justice to the film Peckinpah wanted to make: the sort of exploration of killing men and their personal codes and betrayals that Akira Kurosawa might have undertaken, an even more philosophical journey than Peckinpah's 1969 success, The Wild Bunch.

MGM was struggling financially when production began in 1972. The studio had made a cripplingly big investment in Las Vegas casinos and hoped that Peckinpah's film might put money back in the coffers in time for a late-summer shareholders' meeting. To hedge their bets, MGM gave Peckinpah 70 days to shoot, not much longer to edit, and cut every budgetary corner it could.

"Peckinpah was very much an ingrained and revered outlaw in his way. But that film was what made him so extraordinary," Wurlitzer said. "Peckinpah was constantly at war with the powers that be, with the studio, with the money people. He loved the war, and those who were around him got the benefit of that."

The Pat Garrett set was chaos. To counteract the pressure, Peckinpah drank on scale with his ambitions. He was demanding more and more rewrites from Wurlitzer. After shooting finally finished, MGM used one of Peckinpah's work prints to assemble a cut of its own, 17 minutes shorter than the director's edit. Peckinpah demanded his name be taken off it, and MGM refused. The film was a mess and a flop. Wurlitzer reeled at what the studio had done and recoiled from the new attitudes that were palling the industry. He flew to Nova Scotia and wrote Quake, a novel set after an earthquake has reduced LA to ruins. It was a close look at the evil that men do in an atmosphere of lawlessness. It was also Wurlitzer's middle finger to Hollywood. He left town and never really went back. He'd work on films for years to come, but not theirs.

Rudy Wurlitzer, left, and Sam Peckinpah on the set of Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid

On a summer afternoon in 1977, when Star Wars was breaking every cinematic record, Wurlitzer was driving on Route 85 in New Mexico, cutting through the flats and scrub and sand with Albuquerque at his back and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains humped up ahead. He came along a line of trailers and trucks loaded down with cameras and lights. When he saw teams of people around the vehicles, he slowed down to look and recognized the faces of bit-part players and crew members he'd known five years prior when he'd worked on Pat Garrett.

He stopped the car and stepped out into wicked heat and a zealous sun. He spoke with friends and acquaintances and discovered this was the production for Peckinpah's latest film, Convoy, a cocaine- and liquor-fueled romp involving truckers, cops, and CB radios.

Wurlitzer made for Peckinpah's trailer, rapped on the door, and walked inside.

Sam Peckinpah lay naked on a bed attended by a beautiful, semi-clad nurse who was ramming a shot of vitamin B12 into his ass with one hand and giving him a reach-around with the other. Peckinpah stared at Wurlitzer for a second, then reached over to a side table and picked up a pistol and leveled it at Rudy.

"Where the fuck have you been?" said Peckinpah. Then he passed out.

"Where was I and what was I doing in those years?" Wurlitzer writes in his memoir, Hard Travel to Sacred Places. "Writing a book, a few film scripts in between a failed love affair, hiding out in New Mexico, studying Dharma in Nepal, surviving in New York. Drugs, sex, and rock 'n' roll. Trying to meditate. I can't remember the lineup."

Walker, 1987. Ed Harris (out in front)

In 1984 Wurlitzer published another novel, Slow Fade, and penned a series of scripts with Alex Cox, who wrote Repo Man and Sid and Nancy. Among these was the 1987 film Walker, a surreal, bloody biopic about William Walker, the 19th-century despot of Nicaragua. The next year, Wurlitzer and photographer Robert Frank co-directed Candy Mountain, another insane road movie. Wurlitzer went on to write scripts for Bernardo Bertolucci, Michelangelo Antonioni, and a few other European directors. He penned two libretti for Philip Glass and wrote Hard Travel to Sacred Places, a memoir about Buddhism and the extraordinary grief he experienced when Lynn Davis's son and his stepson, Ayrev, died in a car accident.

"I kept busy," Wurlitzer said. "I was lucky in that I got to pick and choose what I wanted to work on. I needed to put coin on the table. It was getting more and more impossible. But eventually, I found it necessary to get rid of my movie agent in LA. Not because he wasn't doing enough—but because I was afraid I'd be offered something terrible and I wouldn't have the courage not to do it."

There was one project that wasn't a matter of picking and choosing. Starting around 1984 or 1985, Wurlitzer wrote a screenplay called Zebulon, a particularly wild acid western involving a fur trapper, Zebulon Shook, who suffers a curse causing him, after being shot, to wander in limbo between the worlds of the living and the dead. He takes a mess of bodies with him on his drift. He connects with, departs from, and meets again family members and fellow outlaws and random passersby, all the while pursued by psychopaths angling for the bounty on his head. In the end, he's sent deathward into the Pacific, lying in a dugout canoe.

Hal Ashby wanted to tackle it, but it didn't get on. Alex Cox came close, even getting Richard Gere to give a verbal commitment, but Gere bowed out and the financing never shook down. Jim Jarmusch, who traveled in some of the same New York City circles as Wurlitzer, got his hands on the screenplay and initiated a series of conversations and meetings. Together, they parsed the script and speculated on the story until their differences in opinion overbalanced their agreements. They shook hands and took an amicable leave of each other.

A couple of years later, in 1995, Jarmusch released Dead Man, starring Johnny Depp and a fantastic Neil Young soundtrack, about a man cursed to wander between the worlds of the living and the dead after being shot. He takes a mess of bodies with him on his drift, pursued all the while by psychopaths, and is finally sent into the Pacific to die lying in a dugout canoe. Wurlitzer wasn't involved or credited.

"He should have sued," said Cox. "I would have. Even studios don't operate that way."

Wurlitzer opted against it. Too toxic, he thought. Mostly, Wurlitzer said, more than any consideration of cash and credit, he was saddened that a friendship had ended.

"I read Zebulon, and I'd read a lot of scripts at that point in my life," said Lana Griffin, an editor, script consultant, and longtime friend of Wurlitzer's. "It was the best script I'd ever read. I was shocked. It shook me to the core because I thought, If that hasn't been made..."

The screenplay kept making the rounds, but Dead Man had made it a long shot. Finally, in the mid 2000s, Wurlitzer told Griffin that if Zebulon were ever going to see the light of day, it would have to be as a book. For the next few years he worked on his fifth novel, The Drop Edge of Yonder, which the Two Dollar Radio imprint published in 2008.

A poster for the 1988 film Candy Mountain

"I think Rudy is in a class of his own. People who engage with his work are so affected by it because not only is he writing about a journey, an interior journey, but he takes the reader on that journey successfully," Griffin told me. "It's successful in terms of being an entertaining read and, at the same time, sending you on your own journey into your unconscious. He always says he writes to know what he's thinking. He's always in process and it's always being discovered, and therefore it's very free."

I've never been able to not think of Wurlitzer as one of the last few of a heroic group still standing, people who changed the tenor of our creative culture. With publishing still caught in a confused state of transition, a recording industry in stunned collapse, a coprophagic colossus of a motion picture industry—and that's not even talking yet about the worlds of art and theater—the impulse to do anything creative seems as insignificant as pissing in the ocean.

And that Wurlitzer isn't quite done in this climate, that he won't ultimately admit defeat, that he would write to ensure that his vision, Zebulon, would arrive somehow and somewhere out in the world makes him heroic still.

A week after I met Wurlitzer at his home in Hudson, he called me up on the phone and asked me to come back. "I feel like I maybe have more to say, or at least ways to say what I said better," he told me.

The next afternoon, I was back with Wurlitzer in Davis's studio. He was talking at length about being an artist. It was part musing, part requiem, but it also had more than a hint of challenge. "I think that now more than ever the megacities are getting to be more and more impossible hell-worlds," he told me. "I mean not just how much it costs to live in LA or New York or wherever. The confusion, the distractions, there's no sense of community. People who can have a small sense of community and feed each other that way and be spontaneous and have a relationship that's about one to one rather than being plugged in is more and more important. And I think that will grow, because I think it's the only way to survive."

He had been agonizing too over a cold email he had received that morning. "He got the address from my website, I guess, and there was just one line: 'Dear Mr. Wurlitzer, I'm a big fan of your work. Can you tell me what I should do to become a writer?'" he told me. "And I haven't answered him back yet. I don't know—get a day job and maybe think about trying to use your hands? Maybe pick up waiting [tables] or something? Be careful? I don't know what kind of advice to give. I mean, just the thought of what it means to become a writer now and face the commercial aspects of it, what it means to survive... I don't have the answer. I don't know where it's going. So I don't know how to respond to him. I guess maybe plant your ass in a chair and write. And pray for endurance."

Film stills © Universal Pictures and courtesy of Everett Collection

Conversion therapy is the practice of "curing" gay people by trying to turn them straight through counseling and lifestyle restrictions. The practice dates back to the early Freudian period, when homosexuality was considered pathological and attempts to treat it were deemed appropriate. Today, however, homosexuality has been removed from the American Psychiatric Association's list of mental disorders, and conversion therapy is considered ineffective, harmful, and potentially deadly.

Regardless of a nationwide battle toward the acceptance of same­-sex marriage and equal rights for gay people, conversion therapy is still a problem, and it's being practiced every single day in the United States and throughout the world.

In this special report, VICE gets exclusive access to one of the hundreds of gay-conversion-therapy organizations, groups, and sessions in the United States. At the Journey into Manhood program, men pay more than $600 to attend a weekend retreat where they participate in exercises and activities the staff members claim will help them battle their same-sex ­orientation. The only qualification to become a staff member is to have successfully completed the program.

The report meets with the founder of reparative therapy, Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, who is illegally practicing on minors in the State of California, and investigates the controversial legal battle to fight conversion therapy for individuals under 18 years of age. We also travel to the annual Gay Christian Network Conference, speak with former "ex-gay" leaders including John Smid of Love in Action, who is now married to his gay partner, and hear the grueling stories of the individuals who have survived this brutal practice.

[body_image width='2000' height='1331' path='images/content-images/2015/02/25/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/25/' filename='tirnavos-burani-greece-penis-festival-photos-876-body-image-1424892974.jpg' id='30911']

This article originally appeared on VICE Greece.

Greece's most grotesque custom takes place once a year on the first Monday of Lent, in the plain of Thessaly. Walk into the town of Tirnavos that day and all you'll see are people chasing and hitting each other in the streets with fake penises.

The custom is called "Bourani"—like the vegetable soup being boiled in a large cauldron in the middle of the town square. Townspeople and visitors from the nearby villages eat, drink, and sing songs full of profanity until they faint.

Like pretty much every Greek custom, Burani seems to have its roots in ancient Dionysian rituals symbolizing the coming of Spring and fertility—both in humans and in nature. The penis was probably chosen as the symbol of this strange celebration in reaction to the matriarchal society of the time.

[body_image width='1800' height='1198' path='images/content-images/2015/02/25/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/25/' filename='tirnavos-burani-greece-penis-festival-photos-876-body-image-1424894196.jpg' id='30914']

In recent years, the festivities seem to be more focused on crude humor than sexual liberation. Dummy penises made of wood, paper, clay, or sugar seem to cover every possible surface—on tables and benches, next to packs of Marlboros, mobile phones, and kebab shops. Some are placed at crossroads like totem sculptures, while others get stuck on open zippers. People keep kissing them, taking selfies with them, and wearing them as earrings. Everyone swears at each other constantly.

Burani is basically one last day of filth before Lent. Starting Tuesday, and for the next 40 days, life in Tirnavos is supposed to be all about fasting and praying. Or so the custom says.

Here are some photos from the festivities that took place in Tirnavos this past Monday.

[body_image width='1200' height='801' path='images/content-images/2015/02/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/26/' filename='the-trans-rights-bill-is-probably-dead-and-definitely-screwed-up-456-body-image-1424964700.jpg' id='31144']

Trans rights activists marching in the 2013 Dublin gay pride parade. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Citing some made-up reasons, Senator Don Plett took a great idea and made it terrible.

Bill C-279 is legislation that has been debated, in various forms, for nearly a decade in Canada. It's been passed before, but it's never gotten over an insurmountable hurdle: the crowd of appointed partisans in the Senate.

The bill would ensure that if trans people are discriminated against—on the job, by their landlord, in a hospital—they can file a human rights complaint. It will also allow prosecutors to try violent crimes against trans people, if the attack is motivated by their gender, as hate crimes.

Optimism that this time would be different, and the bill would finally become law, was finally snuffed out in a half-hour period on Wednesday evening, as a particularly ornery Conservative Senator injected something so blatantly discriminatory into the bill that just about every trans person in attendance got up and walked out.

"In respect of any service, facility, accommodation or premises that is restricted to one sex only—such as a correction facility, crisis counselling facility, shelter for victims of abuse, washroom facility, shower facility or clothing changing room—the practise is undertaken for the purpose of protecting individuals in a vulnerable situation."

That's the language of Senator Plett's amendment. "The practise" refers to discriminating against trans people—the very thing the bill is designed to prevent. It, in effect, would protect those who discriminate in any way against trans people, so long as they're in a washroom, or a change room, or any of the other places described by the amendment.

VICE interviewed Plett last June about his fervent insistence that affording trans people the same human rights protections as religious and sexual minorities would somehow normalize sexual assault and pedophilia.

"The pedophiles, the Chris Hambrooks of the world, can use this law to their advantage," he said.

Chris Hambrook was a man who tried to enter a women's shelter by claiming to be transgender. The shelter denied him entry and reported him to the police. He was later sentenced to jail indefinitely for various sexual assault charges. A provincial law that does the exact same things as C-279—the things that Plett maintains would protect Hambrook—did not apply.

When Plett's amendment was raised at committee, the opposition Liberals balked.

"This is discriminatory," Senator Mobina Jaffer told Plett.

"I feel my daughter is being discriminated against," replied Senator Plett, offering up his favourite non-sequitur.

Four Liberals voted against the amendment, six Conservatives voted in favour. It passed.

Plett also amended the bill to remove the definition of "gender identity"—something that was only added to the bill because some Conservative MPs felt the legislation was too vague without it.

The unelected Senator hightailed it out of the committee room afterwards.

The bill's path forward is now complicated.

The long version is this: The bill will be referred back to the Senate floor for a vote, where Senators may choose to accept or decline Plett's amendments. Given that all of the Senators on the committee voted for them, it is likely that the entire Conservative caucus will vote for the amendments, and ultimately for the bill itself. After that, the bill goes back to the House of Commons. Since the bill, which originally came from the NDP, now carries wording that is generally offensive to all trans people, it's unlikely that it will get a lot of support from the New Democrats.

"I personally find it difficult to believe that I could support a bill that contains amendments that provide some kind of spurious exemption for bathrooms and change rooms because it contradicts the very purpose of the bill," says the NDP's LGBT critic Randall Garrison, who introduced the bill into the House of Commons.

The House, however, has the option to reject Plett's amendment. Many of the Conservatives who opposed this legislation in the first place also raised the spectre of "the bathroom bill," but 18 others also supported the legislation as it was originally written. Indeed, several Conservative ministers gave forceful and heartfelt endorsements of the protections in the bill.

It's also possible that the Speaker of the House of Commons will rule Plett's bathroom amendment out of order and it will be removed.

A VICE investigation from September also detailed how the Conservatives were trying to push their MPs to vote against the bill altogether.

So it's unclear how that vote will shake out. If the House rejects the amendments, and passes the bill without the bathroom amendment, it must go back to the Senate once more. Convention dictates that they, at that point, stop tinkering.

If the House accepts the amendments, and votes for the bill, it will go directly to the Governor General to get royal assent, and become law. More likely in this scenario, however, is that the NDP will vote against its own bill, albeit a bastardized version of it, and the legislation will die out entirely.

Basically, both chambers have to vote in favour of the exact same version of the bill.

It's also possible, no matter what path the bill takes, that Parliament will rise in June without ever dealing with the bill and it will die.

Regardless, Garrison sees a darker plot at work.

"I believe that there's a small group of senators who are trying to kill the bill, and the Senate's Conservative leadership is allowing them to do so," he says. If that's the case, democracy be damned, the bill never really had a chance.

VICE asked Garrison: Do you think Senator Plett is transphobic?

"I called him that in committee, and maybe I will step back and say, at least the amendments he was talking about to provide an exemption for bathrooms and change rooms are transphobic," Garrison said.

If C-279 does die, it joins an unpleasant class of legislation—bills passed by the House of Commons that did not become law, thanks to amendments from the Senate. Over the last 143 years, there have only been 30 bills that have been returned to the House of Commons, only to later die.

Liberal Senator Grant Mitchell is more optimistic.

"The prognosis for the bill is quite good," he says. "It's still alive. It's not finished."

Mitchell says it's really up to the MPs now. He's optimistic that the Senators will move quickly to vote on the bill, meaning that the Conservatives in the House of Commons will have to decide what they want to do with the bill. He's hoping they'll kill Plett's amendment.

Here's the simpler version about what will happen to C-279: There are two unlikely scenarios where the bill gets passed in its original wording, and one unlikely scenario where the bill becomes law in its amended language. There are also four other situations, which are much likelier, where the bill dies either quickly or in a painfully drawn-out manner.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

Most innovative bands try to approach rock music like modern art—they strive to accomplish what's never been accomplished. Spoken-word interludes? Cool. Stuttery, electronic beats that sound like harsh noise covers of Captain Beefheart? Great. A guy beatboxing over your indie ballad? Why not. But all the experiments and attempts at pushing the bounds of the genre doesn't mean that a good old-fashioned blues groove and some cock-rock vocals aren't still a good time. Nashville's Bad Cop understands that.

Their new song, "Green Eyes," is structured around a catchy riff and singer Chrisopher Moult's wailing vocals that harken back to a time when rock vocalists actually cared about having chops.

Check out more from the band here.

[body_image width='960' height='543' path='images/content-images/2015/02/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/26/' filename='knife-fighting-tom-usher-body-image-1424953405.jpg' id='31017']
Photo via Libre Fighting Mexico Facebook.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

"Study ways to use anything around to your advantage. This includes using one's clothing, or the opponent's clothing, to blind, choke, or distract the opponent. Using whatever is within reach as a projectile. Spitting, biting, pinching, hair pulling, and head-butting. Smashing the opponent's skull into a wall, curb, or table."

It's not Tracy and her mates gearing up for a big night out; it's one of the seven principles of the highly dangerous knife-based pastime known as "Libre Fighting."

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/-GB1SVuu34o' width='500' height='281']
Since its inception in 2004, founder American Scott Babb has set up over 22 chapters worldwide, mostly in the kind of places you'd imagine might be populated by the sort of "free spirits" willing to fight each other with knives. Places like Bosnia, Mexico, Indonesia, and, of course, the UK.

Libre Fighting isn't a traditional martial art, just as a way of fighting. It's quick, ruthless, and extremely violent, as you'd probably expect from anything based completely on finding really clever ways to stab someone with a knife.

[body_image width='640' height='1138' path='images/content-images/2015/02/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/26/' filename='knife-fighting-tom-usher-body-image-1424963538.jpg' id='31114']

Watching videos of the sport in action, the first thing you notice is how fast everything moves; situations are over before you even realize what's going on. The only thing your eyes really pick up are flashes of the custom-made "Libre Fighter Knife," which is basically an ergonomic switchblade, made so the practitioner's hand feels super comfortable while he tries to puncture the life out of another man dressed in a black death metal T-shirt.

The sparring is all set in claustrophobic close quarter conditions to mirror real life muggings and attacks. Two sparring partners are thrown into a tight corner and are told to strike fast, but keep their distance using fast footwork and feints. Obviously in sparring they use rubber tubes instead of knives, because otherwise it would just be called "pirates club" and everyone would end up dead.

I recently spoke to Babb about creating Libre, his experiences growing up, and who would win in a bout between him and Chuck Norris.

[body_image width='720' height='540' path='images/content-images/2015/02/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/26/' filename='knife-fighting-tom-usher-body-image-1424953491.jpg' id='31018']
Scott Babb

VICE: Who are you, where are you and what do you do?
Scott Babb: My name is Scott Babb. I was born and raised in San Diego, California. I started studying martial arts at age eight, thinking it was the solution to all my problems, and continued studying them for the next 30 years.

You mentioned your childhood; do you think there was one traumatic moment that made you get into martial arts or knives especially, like a bully or something?
Well, one of my mentors, Rob [Andersen], once said, "There are two experiences every boy needs to have: kicking someone's ass, and getting their ass kicked." I got to experience both of those multiple times. The first time I saw a knife pulled I was about 11. This 13-year-old kid pulled a pocketknife on a 21-year-old man twice his size and got him to back down.

I was 16 the first time I pulled a knife on someone myself. I'd only been training in knife work for a few months at that time, and two gang members wanted to take my jacket. They were a few years older than me, much bigger, and easily would have overwhelmed me if I were unarmed. When the knife came out, they backed down in much the same manner the 21-year-old man did.

I don't advocate brandishing knives as a primary line of self-defense. Unfortunately, a knife-based martial art also tends to attract some weirdos, so we have to be very careful about who we let in. We have to do a bit of screening and make sure we're not training psychos.

Yeah, I bet. So how did you create Libre Fighting? I've noticed a lot of the close-quarters combat is quite similar to Wing Chun and Krav Maga. Is that something you've studied before?
My primary influences were Filipino martial arts and Western boxing. But what really shaped Libre was studying footage of actual knife assaults. Seeing how people in Western culture used knives. You'll see us doing a lot of techniques where we pin the opponent against the wall and press the attack. That was a direct result of studying prison shankings.

In winter months, where an opponent is wearing several layers of clothing, your tactics have to be different, especially when you only have a four-inch blade. We found that knife attacks generally happened after dark, in close quarters environments, so our training had to reflect that. We do a lot of low-light training, a lot of close-quarters training, and a lot of multiple-opponent training.

And it's a continuing evolution, though that doesn't mean the system is always growing. It also means taking away the nonessential. So I'm as prepared to remove something from the curriculum as I am to add something to it.

A bit like Jeet Kune Do then, but with knives. So who is your martial art for? I mean, people who actually use it outside of a training studio will get arrested pretty quickly, especially in England.
I train a lot of military and law enforcement—Special Forces, private security contractors, and a lot of black belts in other systems. We've done a lot of work with Mexican Special Forces, who have implemented Libre on six occasions that I'm aware of. I also think Libre is ideally suited for women; the knife makes a great equalizer against a 200-pound man.

The way I train a civilian versus the way I train military and law enforcement varies greatly. With civilians it's really about fighting for your life, where the use of a knife—or a similar improvised weapon—would be justified. It's not like a 1950s biker movie where two guys draw knives and circle each other taking hacks back and forth. The scenario I train people for is two or three guys, armed, who have the intention of beating you to death, and you have no choice but to fight for your life with everything you have. That may mean pulling a knife if you carry one, or picking up something that can be used as a stabbing implement if you don't.

Sounds fucking intense. How have the police reacted to you training people in ways to kill people, especially so violently?
I haven't had any problems. I am very selective about who I teach. I screen everyone and talk with him or her before I let them join our classes to make sure they're OK. I'm not shy about booting someone if they strike me as being in any way "off" after they do somehow make it past the screening process.

The truth is, if someone wants to murder another person with a knife, they don't need me to teach them how to do it. It happens every day, all over the world. I teach people to survive against the guy who wants to pick up a knife and murder them.

Yeah, I guess. Do you feel the same about guns in America? Is it a personal responsibility thing, or maybe they're too readily available?
I'm not really a "gun guy," personally. I have nothing against them, but guns aren't really my thing. America is very much a gun culture. It's a subject people are incredibly passionate about in both directions. Personally, I think most legal gun owners are responsible, good, hardworking people. But that being said, guns aren't my thing.

In the UK we can't really relate to the gun culture, but knives are a lot more prevalent. So how many real, live knife fights have you had? And what is the worst injury you've seen when practicing Libre?
I've pulled a knife on three occasions—never had to stick someone, though. And I hope I never have to.

In training, bumps and bruises are common. An occasional split lip. The formative stages involve a lot of forearm clashing, which leaves nasty bruises on the arm. We jokingly refer to this as "the Libre birthmark."

Libre has taken lives in Mexico. All in law enforcement and military situations. I've been able to see photos of two of the incidents. It's something that haunts me, if I'm going to be totally honest about it. The idea that something I created played a part in taking someone's life isn't an easy thing to live with, even if the victim was a criminal and it was a life-or-death situation. I'm not supposed to say that; I'm supposed to pretend to be a tough guy who doesn't care for the lives of criminals, but the truth is, it's a hard thing for me to live with.

[body_image width='764' height='532' path='images/content-images/2015/02/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/26/' filename='knife-fighting-tom-usher-body-image-1424954742.png' id='31035']Photo via Libre Fighting Mexico Facebook

So you're not generally a violent person? Or does it all come out in Libre?
When I was a younger man I was hot-headed, short-tempered, and, at times, mean. But through martial arts and boxing I've purged that anger to a large extent, or at least learned to control it. Nowadays I am very much a pacifist in my day-to-day life. Personally, I don't even carry a knife any more.

In Libre, we train people to explore their dark side, to tap into primal instincts and turn them on and off like a light switch. You'll see in our videos, we always move with intent—we don't walk through the motions. If I'm going to teach someone how to wield a blade, it's also important for me to teach them how to relax their mind and have an even temper as well. To train them to only unleash their demons when they are fighting for their lives. I'm not going to teach someone who is a generally hostile person how to use a blade.

That's good to know. So what's the main thing you'd like people to take away from Libre?
The human body is an incredibly fragile thing if you know how to attack it. In saying that, I'd hope that people would gain a greater appreciation for the value of life. In some sense, Libre is a study of human mortality. If I've done my job well, my students will never, ever want to be placed in a situation where they want to take a life, and will find the thought sickening, as it should be.

But I also like empowering people. As someone who spent a lot of my youth timid and scared, I can relate to feelings of self-doubt, and like giving people the tools to overcome that the way I did.

Finally, I have to ask, who would win in a fight between you and Chuck Norris?
[Laughs] I've always been more of a Bruce Lee fan. And Bruce would kick my ass.

Follow Tom on Twitter.

[body_image width='1024' height='678' path='images/content-images/2015/02/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/26/' filename='the-head-of-the-nsa-is-on-a-charm-offensive-678-body-image-1424971931.jpg' id='31257']

NSA head Admiral Michael Rogers addresses troops. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

"I'm into beards right now."

Admiral Michael Rogers is grinning at a room of military men and women. He just took a question from one Canadian navy officer sporting facial hair. ("You, sir, with the beard.") Now, he's pointing at another scruffy defence type.

The crowd, a collection of private defence contractors, bureaucrats, and enlisted people, laugh and exchange looks.

This guy is the head of the NSA?

After nearly two years of intense scrutiny over the American spy shop's mass surveillance programs, Rogers is making a full-court press to repair the agency's troubled legacy. That means portraying a shinier, happier version of the behemoth spy agency that led widespread surveillance on Germany's chancellor, prominent Muslims, and, well, everybody.

To do so, he's adopted the frantic schedule of a travelling salesman, accepting invites to anywhere that will have him in order to extol the virtue of President Barack Obama's magical privacy elixir—a concoction of remedies that will put limits on the American intelligence community's civil liberties–infringing snooping campaign.

His itinerary has the spy chief criss-crossing the world, giving versions of his sales pitch to various audiences: universities like Stanford and Duke, business audiences in various chambers of commerce, and even the eggheads in Silicon Valley.

Rogers even set up a series of sit-downs with Hollywood creative types, in an effort to inject some more NSA-friendly narratives in mass media.

One thing Rogers will not do, however, is admit that the NSA did anything wrong.

Speaking of Obama's pledge to put new limitations on the NSA's ability to snoop both Americans and foreigners, Rogers said it was all "to try and highlight to our own citizens, as well as citizens around the world: NSA executes its mission within a legal framework within a set of legal priorities."

The strategy behind Rogers' PR blitz splits into three pitches: explain the NSA's mandate and how the agency stays within it; give the organization a veneer of transparency; and talk up the importance of cyber-defence.

The first part is tricky. After all, the revelations from Edward Snowden appear to show that, in a vast multitude of ways, the NSA completely disregarded its mandate and US law in surveilling Americans and foreigners.

In fact, virtually the second that Rogers stepped on stage on February 19 for his presentation, The Intercept published a story with details of how the NSA used some shadowy techniques to get ahold of encryption keys to millions of SIM cards.

But Rogers tried to assuage concerns.

"One of the things I'll often get is: 'Yeah, but you're interested in privacy data.' I'm going: stop. Under the law, if I get information on US persons, I have specific legal restrictions that now go into effect that control what I do with the data, who I share it with, and how I restrict access to it," he told the crowd.

"I don't want privacy data."

That is, of course, at odds with virtually every document that has come from the Snowden leaks.

But Rogers knows that nobody believes him.

"The NSA is obviously still dealing with the aftermath of the media leaks," he said. Rogers refuses to say the word "Snowden."

"In the structure we built in the 1970s, that we really use today, we counted on the power of the court and the role of a Congress," Rogers said when he was last in Canada, in November, for a three-day meeting of the Halifax Security Forum. "We increasingly don't trust our mechanisms of governance. So what do you do when you have an oversight mechanism that your population fundamentally has low trust in? What do you do when the court that you counted on to act as that neutral arbiter, people look at and go: it's a rubber stamp. We don't believe it, we don't trust it? I'd be the first to admit, I'm still trying to work my way through it. So how do you set up an oversight structure in this time and place that resonates with people? Clearly the one that we've had to date, people are suspicious of."

No matter how you feel about the NSA, Rogers has a point—even if things were working properly, would anyone believe them?

Chatting over beers after the talk with two staffers who work for Rogers, it's clear that the agency does feel like it's been slighted. There's an eye-roll whenever Snowden is mentioned. Yet, those who work under Rogers—and, really, Rogers himself—are willing to admit that the leaks were natural blowback to the culture of secrecy that plagued the NSA for years. While they'll always stop short of saying that the NSA ever behaved badly, they're willing to recognize that the leaks brought about something positive: more transparency, more accountability, more safeguards.

His staff said Rogers is more than willing to fire NSA staffers if they step outside the agency's mandate, and he has done so before. They seemed quite proud of that. Of course, that's not something they can brag about publicly—they can't even identify their own staff. Being transparent is very difficult when you can barely talk about transparency.

Rogers uses the word "partnership" a lot. Also: "trust" and "cooperation." It gives the same impression as every office powerpoint from Human Resources you've ever seen.

"Defence" is also a word that comes up often. Rogers won't mention the NSA's proactive data-collection mandate without shoehorning in mention of his cyber-defensive responsibilities. He makes mention of the Sony hack, and the NSA's role in investigating it, at least a dozen times in his stump speech. He's making a very serious effort to rebrand the NSA as a digital fire department, running around trying to defend critical infrastructure that keeps our lights on and our movies streaming.

In the absence of being able to build trust in the NSA, Rogers appears to be trying to build public trust in himself.

But despite the volume of evidence that details the agency's madcap adventures in surveillance not even Orwell could fathom, Rogers' earnest pitch does nip at the fringes of cynicism. He's built like a navy man, but he's got a goofy face and seems perpetually like he's trying to impress you. He's got bags under his eyes like he's a new father to octuplets. He occasionally sounds outright frustrated.

"It's a terrible place for us to be as a nation," Rogers said in Ottawa, of the culture of skepticism. "Quite frankly, it's one of the reasons that I try to do things like this. It's why I say I'll take any question on any topic. Because I want to make sure that people understand, whether I'm talking about my foreign intelligence mission in the NSA or whether I'm talking about the NSA's information assurance mission, it's all about partnerships."

It's interesting that in Rogers' pitch to the public, he's making quite a different pitch to his partners in snooping. Indeed, the metadata king goes to great lengths to butter up his friends.

He not only asked for increased cooperation between the NSA and private industry, but flatly said that there should be very little in the way of barriers at all.

"I believe we have to set up mechanisms to allow the private sector to share information with us in government," Rogers told the crowd. "I believe that we have got to set up mechanisms so that the private sector can share information with us in the government in a real-time, automated, machine-to-machine basis. In the cyber-world, speed and agility are everything."

He also tried to chat up the Canadians. In attendance was Defence Minister Jason Kenney, who is responsible for the NSA's smaller, Canadian brother, the Communication Security Establishment (CSE).

"What're we comfortable with? What're we not comfortable with? What's the role of the private sector, what's the role of the public sector? What's the level of oversight and control we'll have in place so that our citizens are comfortable with the idea of the exchange in Canada? It involves us sitting down with our private counterparts and saying, 'look, lets walk through the specifics of exactly what we need with each other,'" Rogers said, often looking directly at Kenney, who was seated in the front row.

During that Halifax Security Forum appearance, Rogers shared a stage with Justice Minister Peter MacKay.

Several of MacKay's talking points sounded plagiarized from Rogers ("risk has never been higher and trust has never been lower") but, as a Canadian, he had the luxurious benefit of not facing the same sort of scrutiny as his American counterpart.

Indeed, the Snowden revelations that have dogged Obama appeared to spook Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who told an American crowd that he's not "a big believer" in metadata collection, "not just because they have a potential to infringe on civil liberty but usually [they] overwhelm you with data in a way that you can't actually process."

In actuality, Canada's CSE is one of the NSA's most critical partners. Many of the Snowden documents reveal the extent to which the Americans deployed the Canadian agency for intelligence gathering. Some of the leaked presentations show that CSE had actually tapped internet cables to collect signals intelligence.

So even though Obama, while getting the screws, set up some caveats on the NSA's surveillance powers, the Canucks haven't received the same sort of public torture necessary to force action.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

[body_image width='2000' height='1100' path='images/content-images/2015/02/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/26/' filename='ill-never-love-a-console-like-i-loved-the-sega-master-system-138-body-image-1424951209.jpg' id='31005']

As a twig-armed, four-eyed, socially awkward preteen boy growing up in a late-80s suburban household, over which hung the threatening storm clouds of divorce, despair, and alienation, playing video games seemed like the most beautiful and natural thing in the world.

School was full of snotty-nosed kids who teamed up to shout in my ears at lunchtime and attached the wrong color proton pack beams to their Ghostbusters action figures. It was dusty corridors, right-wing headmistresses, terrifying toilets, kiss chases, buttercups under the chin, rice pudding with the skin on, and all-out brawls for pillows in the muggy afternoons. We were pre-Pokémon, pre-Power Rangers, and teetering on the precipice of the video game console revolution.

[body_image width='453' height='604' path='images/content-images/2015/02/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/26/' filename='ill-never-love-a-console-like-i-loved-the-sega-master-system-138-body-image-1424951158.jpg' id='31004']

The author, as a child, playing at the arcades.

And, regularly as clockwork, after the purgatory of school and sometimes on the weekends, I meandered thigh-high around the Superkings-reeking, jaundiced, 50 cents-a-credit, winners-don't-do-drugs arcades in the town where we lived, pestering my father for money so I could have one more rattle round in the After Burner cabinet, or work up another tense sweat trying to beat Double Dragon. Anything but disturb the ten-strong group of chain-smoking, teens jeering at Final Fight, Haggar's lariat roar piercing the smoky air.

I remember wanting that so badly. Not necessarily the stench of cigarettes, inches of yellowed local rags on the doormat, or the unapproachable bomber jacket gangs, but the games. I wanted them in my house, to myself, to enjoy whenever I liked.

And then, one frosty overcast Christmas in 1988, this turned up under the tree.

[body_image width='800' height='450' path='images/content-images/2015/02/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/26/' filename='ill-never-love-a-console-like-i-loved-the-sega-master-system-138-body-image-1424951285.jpg' id='31006']

Image via killerkobra's Photobucket.

How did I feel? I'd love to be able to tell you that I flipped out N64 Kid style, or that I ran around the house screaming with ecstasy, or that I immediately blew chunks all down my Flintstones pajamas out of sheer shock and overwhelming emotion. The truth of the matter is, I wasn't entirely sure what I was looking at. I vaguely remember having seen the ads somewhere along the line, but I don't recall ever specifically wanting a Master System. All I knew was, it looked like the computer games from the arcade. And my dream might shortly be coming true.

We set the machine up that very afternoon—a perfect little mess of stiff wires, chrome analog switch boxes, polystyrene casing, and fiddly ports. Tuning our gigantic, crackly, and hopeless old slag of a Grundig television took a while, particularly after Dad had sunk a few festive pints of cider, but eventually we got it all going and the three-tone-harmonized Sega logo slid onto the screen in front of me.

The console itself, let's be honest, looked terrible. Looking back on it now, and maybe even then, it offended the eye. It was an oversized black Joe 90 command bridge of a machine, with arbitrary arrows and lights and slanted rectangles everywhere, all set against that murky deep red and a cartridge slot that was sloped upward for no reason at all. It was disconcertingly light, echoey, and cheap to the touch.

[body_image width='1024' height='483' path='images/content-images/2015/02/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/26/' filename='ill-never-love-a-console-like-i-loved-the-sega-master-system-138-body-image-1424951351.jpg' id='31007']

Master System, photo via The Strong National Museum of Play.

My edition of the machine came bundled with two built-in games. First to go on was Missile-Defense 3-D, which is rarely remembered as a Master System classic, and for a perfectly good reason—it sucked ass. Essentially, it was a game designed to show off the admittedly ahead-of-its time tech, inviting players to shoot down ICBMs as they hurtled toward your face and the fictional East City. Set across five stages, it was dull, brief, and impossible to finish. By the last stage, the missiles moved so fast even the old put-the-lightgun-right-up-against-the-TV trick didn't work, so it didn't get much playtime in the Beach household.

Much more enjoyable was Shooting Gallery, an overlooked and charming little Duck Hunt clone, which was light-hearted, accessible, and challenging enough to warrant some attention from Mom, who'd come up to the chintzy bedroom every so often and play with us. This, it turns out, was my first experience of multiplayer gaming. Upstairs. In a damp bedroom in Redhill. Clicking a black plastic gun at a screen with my poor old mom.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/id3SjD4VV54' width='560' height='315']

'Shooting Gallery' for the Sega Master System.

The very same winter, dad took me to Brighton for a day trip. I remember it vividly, for two reasons. First, it happened to take place in the middle of some kind of hurricane. In fact, the wind was so strong that the rides on the pier were rotating of their own accord, roofing tiles were smashing on the gray concrete in front of us, and elderly ladies clung to stone pillars to save themselves from serious injury. Secondly, it was the day that I got a copy of Wonder Boy in Monster Land.

When most gamers think of Wonder Boy, they typically refer wistfully to the twee, stripped-down, side-scrolling arcade original, or its successor, the sprawling Metroidvania RPG The Dragon's Trap—both great games, but it's the second one that tugs my 30-year-old heartstrings today. It had a superb line-up of bosses, including the Kraken, Medusa, and, brilliantly, a riddling Sphinx for whom you had to correctly answer multiple-choice questions or face his jumpy, overpowered wrath. It perfectly balanced the linearity of the first game with the delicate RPG elements of the third, and featured a final level so devilish, so baffling, so infuriatingly obtuse, that to this day I still have no idea how you complete it. I never killed the dragon, and I still wake up in night sweats about it. Luckily for me, Sega was developing plenty more strange, melancholy, and magical worlds for me to explore.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/BE-rFtBnvjY' width='560' height='315']

'Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse', full Master System playthrough.

Like Castle of Illusion, for example. Arguably the definitive version of the level-boss-level-boss Mickey Mouse platformer, the Master System version is probably my favorite game in the console's entire library. Bouncing juggling clowns chucking chocolate chunks across the screen, navigating the interior of a ticking grandfather clock—it was shoes off and leg-it-upstairs every afternoon for a good month, poking my delighted nose into every nook and cranny. I'd sit there humming the game's wonderful selection of tunes in my school uniform for hours, just me, Mickey, and the Master System. Sure, the Mega Drive version looked a bit nicer, but it was sluggish and floaty in comparison and lacked the pure joy of the 8-bit version.

Or what about Psycho Fox, the Master System's spiritual prequel to Magical Hat Flying Turbo Adventure/Decap Attack? A surreal side-scroller with four playable animals, each with its own special powers. A homing blackbird that you can use to attack enemies. A range of steampunk-style bosses and lengthy levels with a giddying sense of verticality. A bona-fide Master System classic.

How did I find out about these games? Sega Power magazine. Every month, Sega Power's Hard Line feature would tell me which games were worth my pocket money and which were "pants." Lad culture, Oasis, The Word, and Loaded magazine were looming large, and my favorite mag got swearier and swearier as time went by. Everything I knew about the Master System came from that magazine. A frequently brilliant and sarcastic mess of toilet humor, acerbic wit, and non-criticism (LOOK AT THE GRAPHICS. MY PANTS ARE WET), Sega Power made me feel part of a bigger culture for the first time in my life.

[body_image width='1372' height='572' path='images/content-images/2015/02/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/26/' filename='ill-never-love-a-console-like-i-loved-the-sega-master-system-138-body-image-1424951542.jpg' id='31008']

Image via magazinesfromthepast.wikia.

And the games kept coming. From weirdo one-off rentals like Basketball Nightmare, taste-breakers like Phantasy Star, twinkling psychedelic shoot 'em ups like Fantasy Zone, same-thing-different-skin titles like Asterix and Lucky Dime Caper, even 8-bit ports of gruntier games like Golden Axe and Sonic the Hedgehog. I either traded games or swapped them on the playground with friends, tucking the cartridges into my hot little pockets, my library contracting and expanding accordingly across the white metal shelf in the upstairs bedroom. It was a great time to be into games, and the crunchy sound design and neon-splashed worlds created by Sega and their developers made life as a kid a lot easier to bear.

It was a sad and strange day when I upgraded to a Mega Drive a few Christmases later. I remember looking at the covers of my Master System games with their childlike innocence, awkward copy, and optimistic imagery. I looked fondly at the impossibly square controllers and my old 3D glasses, now with a cack-handed Sellotape repair job and in a bit of a sorry state. I remembered the jaunty sound of the Jungle Zone, Alex Kidd's scale-defying fist, and those early days shooting balloons out of the sky with mom. And eventually, it got packed away, confined to the dusty airing cupboard, its 16-bit successor taking pride of place under the wheezing Grundig.

But wherever you are now, Master System, know this. Those years spent with you were the most glorious of my entire gaming career. And I'll never, ever forget you.

Follow Jonathan on Twitter.

[body_image width='640' height='432' path='images/content-images/2015/02/25/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/25/' filename='brisbanes-goma-tells-selfie-stick-owners-where-to-stick-it-body-image-1424908785.jpg' id='30929']A selfie stick in action. Photo via Flickr user Ton Schulten

Brisbane's Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) is the latest gallery in Australia to ban selfie sticks, presumably after a few too many people swung them dangerously close to artworks in the pursuit of the perfect #artselfie. GOMA now joins the Queensland Art Gallery, National Gallery of Victoria, National Gallery of Australia, and National Portrait Gallery in Canberra in banning selfie sticks. In a statement yesterday, GOMA called the selfie stick a potential threat to the safety of its patrons and artwork

There have been no reported cases of damaged artworks caused by the telescopic smartphone holders, but a growing list of galleries are editing their terms of entry to pre-empt any incidents. Major museums in the US, including the New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, have also banned the sticks.) The Louvre in Paris and the Tate in London however remain selfie stick friendly—for now.)

Despite being one of Australia's most popular Christmas gifts in 2014, the selfie stick's omnipresence has caused more confusion than the Skywhale. Earlier in the week, the Soundwave festival announced it too would confiscate selfie sticks; after seeing festivalgoers snap away in mosh pits during the Melbourne leg of the festival tour, Soundwave promoter AJ Maddah took his outrage to Twitter.

"People with those fucking camera sticks," he wrote, "have some consideration for people behind you trying to enjoy the show."

While critics decry the supposed narcissism of the current generation, galleries know better than to stand in the way of the selfie, with more and more institutions lifting their "no photography" rules. The NGV in Melbourne explicitly encouraged visitors to snap and share their shots of the Jean Paul Gaultier exhibition on social media, making use of what is essentially free marketing. So while you'll need to check your selfie stick at the door, rest assured, galleries will still let you make like Queen B.

Follow Emma on Twitter: @emsydo

[body_image width='900' height='675' path='images/content-images/2015/02/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/26/' filename='too-poor-to-die-278-body-image-1424966038.jpg' id='31158']

Image via Pixabay.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Burying or cremating someone you love is a bizarre, gut-wrenching experience that, whatever stage of grief we're in, has to be done. But imagine having to do it in your own yard because you can't afford a proper service. With funeral poverty becoming a growing problem, this is fast becoming a morbid reality for many people across the UK.

As the cost of funerals has nearly doubled in the last decade, one fifth of the 500,000 families who are bereaved each year are struggling to afford the unavoidable expense of a funeral—the cost of dying is rising seven times faster than the cost of living. In turn, increasing numbers of people are being forced to turn to payday loan lenders, sell their possessions, or even bury their relatives in their backyards.

As if the grief and trauma of losing someone wasn't difficult enough, more and more people are also living with a mountain of funeral debt. It's currently estimated that 110,000 people live with funeral debt in the UK, with each person owing an average of £1,300 [$2,000].

Nevertheless, funeral poverty is an issue that persistently slips under the radar. Discussion of cost surrounding death, for many, can feel cheap and disrespectful. While someone might talk freely about how much they've spent on a vacation, for example, they may wince at the idea of divulging how much they spent on a casket for their father. In turn, funeral poverty combines a double taboo—death and money.

Jacqui Woodward-Smith, 48, has experienced the anguish of funeral poverty first-hand. "When my partner, Will, died in February last year, we had no way to afford the funeral," she says. "I work part-time as a councillor in primary schools, so don't exactly have much spare cash. His only other close relative is his 19-year-old daughter."

"He died of deep vein thrombosis at the age of 54, so it was very sudden and completely out of the blue," Jacqui adds, her voice catching in her throat. "I had nowhere to turn. Both of his parents are dead and his daughter is a student, so I went to the Department of Work and Pensions because it said I was eligible for a funeral grant on their website."

However, Jacqui was outright refused a grant. "They said I wasn't eligible because I'm not the legal next of kin—that was his daughter—but they said she wouldn't be eligible either and that she shouldn't get herself into debt at such a young age."

In the end, Jacqui was advised to "let the council 'dispose' of him."

"What a word to use. I couldn't believe it," she says. "I spoke to all sorts of officials during that time and, while many weren't particularly kind, as soon as I explained that my partner had died, they'd be nice and polite. It was only the DWP who were so rude to me. They treat you the same as if you're calling to try and get benefits and are harsh and insensitive to people while they are grieving."

Stranded with few options, Jacqui posted a public tirade on Facebook that led to several pledges of support. "I didn't want to ask for charity," she says, "but I had no choice. In the end people were really supportive and offered to donate money. Somehow, it all came together."

With the support of her friends and their friends, she was able to put together a funeral for her partner. "It was a rather DIY affair, but if it hadn't been I would've struggled with the money," she tells me. "I ordered a biodegradable coffin online for £450 [$700] and we transported him to the burial site ourselves. We did it all on our own."

The service was held in Glastonbury, after which Will was buried in a natural burial ground near Stonehenge. "Over a hundred people turned up. It was a beautiful day. There were speeches and Will was a guitarist so we made sure there was lots of music—we had Frank Zappa and Peter Gabriel."

Jacqui recognizes that not everyone is this fortunate. "I can't imagine what I would have done without everyone's help. I suppose I would have had to let the council 'dispose' of him, but I don't know how I could've lived with myself," she says. "He deserved better than that. When somebody you love dies, you feel responsible because it's the last act you're going to do for them."

Jacqui is not the only person who has been denied a funeral grant by the government. Half of all applications are rejected. What's more, the maximum amount granted is capped at £700 [$1,080]—a pitiful contribution given that the average funeral costs £3,551 [$5,476]. Even if you are lucky enough to be successful in your application for what is known as the Social Fund Funeral Payments system, you will still be left with a big shortfall to make up. Only those on benefits are eligible for this grant, too. Anyone on a low-income is discounted.

Compounding matters even more is how inefficient the Social Fund system appears to be. Not only do families have to wait several weeks to hear if they are successful, the application also requires an invoice and means that people have to commit to funeral costs before they know whether they are eligible for financial help. Funerals are routinely delayed as people await the outcome. For this reason, a recent report found that this failing system of state support is not only "outdated" but "overly complex" and "insufficient."

For the families who are denied a Funeral Grant and cannot find a way to scrape together any extra funds, they are left with no choice but to opt for a Public Health Funeral—paid for by the local authority and echoing what was known as a Pauper's Funeral in Victorian times. There is no service provided for the family, and the graves themselves don't even have a headstone to say who is buried there. Just like a fly-tipped sofa, you are transported in a van—not a hearse—before the council neatly "disposes" of you. The council ensures this all takes place at 9 AM—something known in Dickensian times as the "9 o'clock trot."

While local councils have always had a duty, under public health law, to dispose of bodies that nobody else takes responsibility for, pauper's funerals have become increasingly common. Once a last resort and intended for people who die alone with no family, local authorities are now experiencing a significant increase in demand. Exact nationwide figures are unknown—councils are often reluctant to release figures—but these funerals must be at significant cost to the government.

In the last year alone, the cost of a Public Health Funeral has risen by 7.1 percent. What's more, last month a Freedom of Information request revealed that 258 people in South Yorkshire have had paupers funerals in the last three years, at a cost of £235,00 [$362,000] to councils.

As the cost of funerals continues to skyrocket—far outstripping inflation—more and more low-income families are struggling to afford this basic necessity. Not only did the average cost of a funeral rise by a staggering 80 percent between 2004 and 2013, the cost of kicking the bucket is expected to radically increase over the next five years. In addition, the difference between what funeral directors charge is astronomical.

The rising cost of dying is causing increasing numbers of people to get into serious, unmanageable debt. Heather Kennedy, the Funeral Poverty Officer at Quaker Social Action warns that "not only do financial worries cause shame and stigma, they also stop people from getting on and being able to grieve properly."

But the question remains: Why is the cost of dying rising so fast?

Firstly, the cost of a burial plot has increased as the cost of land has grown. It's much cheaper for your corpse to decompose in Hull than, say, Islington. Cremation costs have increased, too, as EU regulations have forced crematoriums to install costly new filtration equipment in order to decrease mercury emissions.

And then there's the funeral directors themselves, who often guilt-trip families into buying guilt caskets, spectacular bouquets, and other ostentatious extras. Gently implying that you might as well go the extra mile and buy that gold engraved tombstone as a final mark of respect.

Moreover, prices across the board have further increased since Dignity, Co-operative Funeral Care and Funeral Partners have bought up more and more of the small independent companies. Your local high street funeral directors might still say Smiths & Sons on the outside, but, often, is owned by a massive company with a big-business model. The Good Funeral Guide warns customers against using them as they are more expensive.

[body_image width='800' height='738' path='images/content-images/2015/02/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/26/' filename='too-poor-to-die-278-body-image-1424966189.jpg' id='31159']

Image via Wiki Commons.

In order to address the problem of cost, Catherine Joy decided to set up Brooks, a funeral directors which provides affordable, low-cost funeral services in North London. After growing fed up at the funeral parlor she'd worked in previously, Joy chose to go it alone. "When the place I was working was bought up by Funeral Partners, a massive chain, the prices went up and everything went downhill," she says. "Now they charge £525 [$809] for a removal from the hospital to the mortuary—you have to pay all that before you do anything. They have so many hidden extras."

As someone who is faced with multiple deaths on a daily basis, Joy knows full well that, when someone has died, the family are left in an incredibly vulnerable position. "It means they are susceptible to being ripped off," she says. "My analogy is it's not like buying a car where you go out and test-drive ten and then argue the dealer down. Number one, you're not in the frame of mind to phone round 20 funeral directors. Number two, you don't want look as if you're being mean towards your loved one."

This is precisely what eventually drove Catherine to set up her own independent affordable no-frills service. "I started to feel terrible when I'd have little old ladies phoning me up and saying, "I desperately want a nice funeral for my husband. Is there anything you can do? I'm destroyed I can't give him a good send off." After being constantly asked the same thing, I'd had enough."

"Funeral directors know that, once they've got you through the door, it's very embarrassing for you to then walk out"

Brooks offers direct funeral services for as little as £499 [$769] and, unlike many other funeral directors, ensure that there's hidden extras that will sting you at the end. "We include everything in our prices, unlike other services that will quote a fee without including a coffin or a hearse. They know that once they've got you through the door, it's very embarrassing for you to then walk out."

When a family is trying to arrange a funeral for someone they love, the funeral director's job isn't just about the nuts and bolts practicalities, either. "It's a job that often involves being an informal grief counsellor," says Joy. "Every day people get upset in front of you and you have to help them deal with it." Only making a marginal profit, Joy is clearly motivated by her desire to help people at a time of their lives when they need it most.

She's not the only dedicated to offering cut-rate funerals, either. The Natural Death Centre, a charity that helps people plan funerals, also offers money-saving advice. Rosie Inman-Cook, who has spent the last eight years answering their helpline, tells me that it's entirely possible to organize a funeral for under a grand. "You can buy your coffin online or use a shroud (also known as a burial cloth), opt for a "direct cremation" service, and organize your own transportation to save money."

Cook even suggests digging the grave yourself, as grave-digging can cost anywhere between £150 [$230] and £600 [$925]. Nevertheless, while DIY funerals might be less costly, she acknowledges that lots of people do not have the support networks, time to emotional reserve to organize them.

Funeral poverty is a growing problem in this country, but our inherent squeamishness around talking about the practicalities of death—how a decomposing body can be physically taken care of, with respect—means it continues to be ignored. No one wants to mull their own death or the people around us dying, but we're all going to croak it one day and, unless you want to be "disposed" of by the council, someone is going to be left behind to foot the bill.

Follow Maya on Twitter.

[body_image width='1849' height='855' path='images/content-images/2015/02/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/26/' filename='the-video-game-that-goes-in-search-of-god-258-body-image-1424956046.jpg' id='31046']

Many of 'Pneuma''s puzzles trade on philosophical conundrums, but prior knowledge isn't necessary to complete them.

What is the psychological impact of living in a world you know to be a total fabrication? Once a matter for textbooks and drunken, early morning chinwags, the question seems drastically more pressing in an age of virtual reality headsets and sumptuous 3D graphics, of social and professional lives conducted largely or entirely over the internet.

It's also a concern for the would-be creators of extra-terrestrial habitats, such as the architects of the Mars One program, recently feted in the press. A NASA report from 1976 dwells on the risk of widespread "solipsism syndrome" among cosmonauts, a state of mind "in which a person feels that everything is a dream and is not real." It cites the remote town of Lund in Sweden, where days last a mere six hours in winter and residents spend most of their lives bathed in artificial light. "Street corners look like theater stages, detached from one another," the report notes. "There is no connectedness or depth in the universe and it acquires a very unreal quality as though the whole world is imagination." People who reside in wholly created and controlled facilities such as space stations are more at risk, it says, because "there is nothing beyond the theater stage and beyond an individual's control."

Deco Digital's first-person puzzle game Pneuma: Breath of Life is solipsism syndrome taken to a logical extreme—the conviction that since all we know of the universe is what we perceive, and perception is a function of the mind, it follows that we are gods, creating the universe in the act of experiencing it. As it begins, the titular Pneuma awakens to find himself all alone in a radiant, silent world and deduces that he is the world's center and creator.

As you guide him through puzzle chambers wrought of gleaming marble and gold, Pneuma chatters continually about the nature of the reality he has supposedly created—noting, among other things, that the ground courteously moves away from him when he jumps. His conviction of his own divinity is reinforced by the game's key puzzle mechanic: certain objects, such as doors or bridges, move or change depending on whether they're perceived or not.

"If you're a solipsist and a narcissist, you know you're alone in the world and that you're the only real thing, so you treat yourself as a god," explains writer David Jones. "So it's an extrapolation of that, I guess, an exaggeration. What would happen if you were alone for several years of your life? You would start to believe that you are god. And you'd see that this happens to astronauts—when astronauts go into space they can have episodes of 'derealization.' Essentially, with no human contact, you'd become entirely deceived."

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/vQCN8k5aw0k' width='560' height='315']

'Pneuma: Breath of Life,' gameplay reveal trailer.

Players, of course, are immediately and entirely conscious that Pneuma cannot be the creator of his world. This is a source of both humor and poignancy. "The thought was: he's not crazy," Jones continues. "Pneuma isn't crazy in the story, because his explanations for things are entirely rational. There are no other characters in the game, there's just Pneuma, so to presume he's God, to presume he's creating the world, is kind of the rational inference.

"But as you, as a player, see the game, quite clearly he's not a god. So it becomes quite comedic to you, but it's not actually comedic in and of itself. That's one of the difficult things with the comedy in the game—essentially you're laughing at someone, and it really depends on the kind of person you are, whether you find the game funny."

As a sort of implicit, controlled test for the freak-out potential of a technologically governed environment, Breath of Life is rather fascinating. What makes it all the more interesting, though, is how it relates or doesn't relate to Jones's own Christian faith. He's quick to emphasize that Pneuma isn't evangelical propaganda—it isn't really "about" any particular religion at all, in fact, though there's the odd reference to a concept from Christian thought. "We definitely don't want to come across as a kind of Christian rock band. I'm the only person of practiced faith in the office, so it would be disingenuous, a discredit to the rest of the team to make a huge thing out of that."

[body_image width='938' height='478' path='images/content-images/2015/02/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/26/' filename='the-video-game-that-goes-in-search-of-god-258-body-image-1424956278.jpg' id='31048']

Sight is the key mechanic for most of the puzzles, but some are more traditional in their approach.

If it isn't a game that endorses a particular religion, though, Pneuma might be styled as a game of religious striving. Its protagonist's farcical delusions are an incentive for the player to seek out a more reliable authority about the nature of existence—a deity, in other words, who can guarantee the objective reality of what is perceived.

In the context of a video game, the nearest thing there is to a deity is naturally the game's creator. In Breath of Life, the relationship between the latter, the player and the character of Pneuma becomes increasingly fraught in the course of the narrative. Initially confident of his pre-eminence, Pneuma becomes anxious about the world's failure to behave as desired or expected—he is increasingly troubled to find that not all doors open at a glance, for example.

Players, meanwhile, may grow uneasy about the designer's intentions. Though pleasant, the world is full of disconcerting touches—domestic props such as books and urns that suggest but don't conclusively demonstrate the presence of other living beings. "That was quite an inspiration for the molding of the story," says Jones. "This three-way communication, in that the player thinks that they're communicating with Pneuma, and controlling Pneuma, while perhaps not realizing that there's a developer in there who's controlling them."

[body_image width='1920' height='1080' path='images/content-images/2015/02/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/26/' filename='the-video-game-that-goes-in-search-of-god-258-body-image-1424956333.jpg' id='31049']

Insatiably curious, Pneuma ponders pretty much everything he sees aloud. Why all this marble, for instance?

In this regard, Breath of Life follows in the footsteps of the BioShock games, all of which build to a shocking (or, depending on your degree of jadedness, contrived and sensationalized) revelation that neither the world nor its creators can be relied upon—that not only certain characters but the very designers are out to get you.

The supreme distrust this breeds is analogous to the uncertainty that leads people to enquire about god and religion, which is perhaps why Jones feels that 2013's BioShock Infinite is one of a handful of genuinely good "religious" games on the market. Again, this isn't because it exalts a particular set of beliefs, but simply because it provides a space for thinking about faith, at the level not just of plot but of mechanics and structure. "I think video games are starting to deal with bigger topics and become more grown-up, more adult in addressing them," he says. "I think there's a lot of hope."

Pneuma will be released for PC and Xbox One on the 27 of February

Follow Edwin on Twitter.

[body_image width='640' height='427' path='images/content-images/2015/02/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/26/' filename='officials-are-evacuating-the-city-in-kazakhstan-where-villagers-fall-asleep-at-random-127-body-image-1424971128.jpg' id='31250']

Not a villager in Kazakhstan, but maybe someone afflicted by the same disease. Photo via Flickr user Timothy Krause.

Over the past few months, the town of Kalachi, Kazakhstan, has suffered yet another round of the mystery illness that causes its villagers to fall asleep at random for no apparent reason. The problem was first reported in 2010, and government officials—perhaps spurred on by a recent burst of international attention as well as the scale of the latest flare-up—have finally upped their efforts to get to the root of the bizarre plague. At least two other towns nearby have reported similar symptoms from their residents.

Lead doctors now claim that they may have discovered the source of the epidemic. But their findings seem weak by toxicology standards and are far from the conclusive closure locals need. So with a lack of any real cure, local authorities have just started evacuating Kalachi en masse, hoping that getting people out of the town will just eliminate the illness wholesale.

As of the last outbreak from August to September 2014, about 60 people (10 percent of Kalachi's population) had fallen asleep for days on end. A sudden wave in late December 2014 added over 30 more victims (including one non-local, a visiting Russian retiree) to the count. By the end of January, the overall number of victims had reached 126—not including one cat supposedly affected as well—doubling the affliction's toll to 20 percent of the local population. Among these latest victims was the village's administrator, Asel Sadvakasova. The scale of this outbreak led Kazakhstani Deputy Prime Minister Berdibek Saparbaev to officially call upon foreign medical institutions to help local doctors find the source of the illness and figure out exactly what the hell is going on.

By early February, Professor Leonid Rikhvanov of Tomsk Polytechnic University in Siberia, who'd been following the Kalachi story for some time, answered this call, claiming in international media outlets like the Daily Mail that he could explain the entire affair. The culprit, he said, was the unusually high level of radon gas emitting naturally from nearby uranium mines.

Yet this hypothesis had already been rejected (very early on in the disease's history). And about a week after Rikhvanov made his claim, Sergei Lukashenko, the director of Kazakhstan's National Nuclear Center's Radiation Safety and Ecology Institute, dismissed the radon idea, saying the conditions on the ground didn't match. He also noted that Rikhvanov had never even visited Kalachi, so he had very little evidence upon which to base his claims.

Lukashenko believes the illness has something to do with carbon monoxide leaks, which his agency noted in mid-January they had measured in concentrations up to ten times above nationally acceptable levels in recent regional tests. Kazakhstan's Health Ministry seems to be on board with Lukashenko's theory, declaring around the same time that they had preliminarily connected the condition's symptoms to vapor accumulations in poorly ventilated homes.

"Carbon monoxide is definitely a factor," the Siberian Times quoted Lukashenko as saying. "But I can't tell you whether this is the main and vital factor. The question is why it does not go away. We have some suspicions as the village has a peculiar location and weather patterns frequently force chimney smoke to go down instead of up."

Carbon monoxide has been a favorite culprit for amateurs following the story, so for many Lukashenko's claims will come as a moment of intense validation. Yet this conclusion still feels incomplete as it doesn't describe the conditions of the illness in Kalachi all that well. Many fall asleep suddenly, with no prior symptoms, outside of the homes where leaks occur. And when a batch of four patients were taken to the national capital of Astana for the first time for examination at some of the nation's premiere medical facilities, tests found no traces of external factors that could have influenced their health and caused their current condition.

"Carbon monoxide poisoning doesn't just make you fall down and go to sleep," Professor Andrew Stolbach, the head of Johns Hopkins Hospital's toxicology training curriculum, told VICE, explaining how the Kalachi case as he understands it doesn't fit the proposed explanation. "There's a progress of symptoms: nausea, headache, [and] eventually you can have confusion and unconsciousness. But you move slowly through that progression."

"You can have a big enough concentration at one spot [to knock someone out immediately]," Stolbach admits. "But if it's big enough to knock you out [that quickly], you'd be in a coma."

"It should be very straightforward to determine if it were carbon monoxide poisoning," concluded Stolbach. "You could measure carboxyhemoglobin in the blood. Carbon monoxide would be just the easiest thing to diagnose and exclude."

Despite statements from the Health Ministry about locating the cause of the sleeping sickness in vapors, local officials seem to at least implicitly recognize that carbon monoxide probably isn't the culprit (or at least that they're really getting no closer to a solution) as they recently started evacuating Kalachi.

As far back as late November, Kadyrkhan Otarov, the First Deputy Mayor of Akmola Oblast, the administrative district where Kalachi is located, floated the idea of allocating millions of dollars for locals' resettlement into new homes and jobs in nearby cities like Esil. Around the same time, the majority of Kalachi's residents voted in favor of relocation in a local poll. Then after the latest outbreak further pledges emerged promising to begin relocations by the end of January.

By January 14, 2015, at least one family had a new apartment and plans were to have at least 40 others evacuated by the end of the month. The political head of the Akmola Oblast then promised that every citizen would be relocated by May at the latest. As of mid-February, several families have now dispersed to Atbasar, Bulandy, Ereymentau, and Esil, although their exodus is hampered by the fact that fearful taxi drivers often refuse to come to Kalachi to pick people up lest they be struck with the sleeping sickness themselves.

Yet around the same time that relocation came on the docket in November, residents in the small oilfield town of Beryozovka started to claim they were suffering sudden fainting spells. And the next month the town of Krasnogorsky, a bit closer to the uranium mines than Kalachi, started reporting their own cases of the infamous sleeping sickness and requesting relocation themselves.

To date the government has refused requests for new jobs and accommodation in Beryozovka, although they did offer new homes to the 130 people in Krasnogorsky. But those new homes were, for some unfathomable reason, in Kalachi.

If these other villages are legitimately dealing with the same disease and not just faking symptoms to get a free move out of their hometown, then this combined with the continuing lack of any reasonable explanation for Kalachi's affliction makes the idea of explaining this as a case of Mass Psychological Illness seem a bit more likely. I was previously skeptical of this theory because, even if the community were suffering from the collective stresses of poverty and grim uncertainty, outsiders had also suffered from sleeping sickness without being a part of the cultural milieu. Yet Professor Regina Santella, a toxicologist at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, doesn't think that this rules out a psychological phenomenon.

"I would vote for mass hysteria," Santella wrote to VICE, cautioning that this is not her specialty and that she doesn't know everything about the case. But, she explained, collective psychological conditions can have a profound effect, even sporadically and on outsiders exposed to them.

Stolbach, for his part, isn't ready to back a mass hysteria diagnosis, mainly because it's not just hard to diagnose, but it's also the last thing he'd feel the need to worry about or try to prove.

"We have to exclude other things first," he says. "We'd always consider something like mass hysteria at the end because it's not going to kill you [like an environmental factor might]."

The frustrating thing for anyone in search of a definite diagnosis in this case being, if Kalachi's residents recover when they move, it could be taken as proof of either an undetected environmental factor or of a mass psychological illness. Right now all we have is the timing of the disease's spread and our absolute befuddlement to go on, which is just a weak case for hysteria. If the residents stay ill after they move, we'll have more reason to swing back toward an environmental or biological explanation—but no one's pulling for that. On the other hand, if all goes well for them, the rest of us out here scratching our heads will be left with one more infuriating mystery in the world. If that's the case, at least we might be able to make a decent movie out of all of this.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

Last month, a Dutch 19-year-old identified only as "Tarik Z" stormed a TV station with what turned out to be a fake gun, and demanded air time. Then he just stood there in his suit and tie, muttering for a few minutes, until a SWAT team ran in and arrested him on like TV. He later claimed to have mounted the assault on behalf of a hacker collective who were in turn working for Dutch intelligence, though the police said he acted alone.

A classmate of Tarik Z told AFP that the perpetrator had a rich imagination and that "in recent years he was interested in conspiracy theories involving the Freemasons and a new world order." News sites have since speculated that this was the first emergence of a serious psychiatric condition, pointing out that delusional disorders like schizophrenia usually manifest themselves at around Tarik's age.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/C3gUMdoHJ7o' width='640' height='360']

But where did he get the idea of a hacker collective performing black ops for the Dutch government? Could the time he spent online have influenced him in any way, such as convincing him that reenacting the 1994 film Airheads was a good idea?

In 2010, a study into how schizophrenics use the internet was conducted by Beate Schrank and three other Austrian doctors. The resulting report was called "How Patients with Schizophrenia Use the Internet: A Qualitative Study."

By interviewing people with different illness statuses and in different age groups, the researchers provided a window into what the internet looks like to a person suffering from delusions. To begin with, it annoys them.

"If there were lots of pop-up windows they would feel paranoid," Beate Schrank told me. They were also agitated by sites that prevent users from using a browser's back button.

People with schizophrenia seek out what Schrank called "illness-specific platforms" for discussing the disorder. At the time, she said, that was usually a messageboard hosted by a mental health charity. Today it would likely be something akin to Reddit. "Something like [Reddit] is obviously very important for all sorts of disorders—but especially so for very stigmatized ones like schizophrenia," she said.

Indeed, a Reddit user named "-Renton-" recently wrote about that stigma on the wider internet and his remarks were received warmly on Reddit's schizophrenia community:

I have encountered a lot of people that just don't believe schizophrenics are on the Internet. It's gotten to the point that in online society that if you even ADMIT you have schizophrenia, everyone laughs, why is this? It's as if that if you have schizophrenia or even bipolar (to a lesser extent maybe) that you can't come online, it's just simply impossible to these people.

Dr. Schrank told me oftentimes people with schizophrenia get distracted and lose the thread when they try to have a friendly conversation, and that provokes social anxiety. "Using the internet for that kind of thing would make it easier to communicate with people, because they can focus just on the content," she said.

But along with the upside of enhanced human connection come pitfalls. Some people who cooperated with the study reported episodes during which they'd get distracted, or "carried away," by all the information. Some would spend countless hours on the internet. "It would provoke ideas in their heads, or it would lead to having paranoid, or psychotic, ideas," Schrank said.

Another difficulty people with schizophrenia have online is figuring out what information can be trusted. Everyone has this problem, but the internet is an obstacle course for the paranoid and easily distracted. Setting out to search for something simple can be a perilous prospect. For instance, if I set out to find out if 9/11 justified the war in Afghanistan, the first suggestion questions whether 9/11 happened at all. And hitting "search" for the phrase "Did 9/11 happen?" obviously doesn't just send you to a box that says "Of course it did."

[body_image width='640' height='349' path='images/content-images/2015/02/25/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/25/' filename='how-is-the-internet-changing-schizophrenia-915-body-image-1424884654.jpg' id='30878']

What starts out as simple informative research can quickly become a major trip down a conspiracy rabbit hole. "I remember one [survey respondent] telling me about looking up every single word, and going deeper and deeper and deeper," Schrank said. And conspiracies are only harmless until you put your health on the line.

Patients who suffer from delusions along with symptoms of some other medical condition are particularly vulnerable to being tricked.

"It is most unethical to exploit those who are both desperate and also have potentially impaired judgement due to their illness symptoms, such as people with psychosis," Schrank said—but that doesn't mean the unscrupulous don't take advantage of them.

Even without the internet, Schrank says, desperate schizophrenics often buy into pseudoscience, invest in nonscientific cures, or "buy books about how to talk to the dead and stuff like that." When the internet is added to the mix, they can find themselves paying for some crazy shit.

For instance, delusional people with skin problems often quickly find themselves in the realm of "Morgellons" conspiracies. Morgellons is a term that was made up in 2001, according to the New York Times, and while some Morgellons patients really have skin problems, generally they're given a psychiatric diagnosis: delusional parasitosis, a belief that parasites live under a person's skin. This can be a symptom of schizophrenia, its own diagnosis, or even a side effect of too much cocaine. The fact that Morgellons isn't necessarily a real disease shouldn't stop people from comparing notes online, of course, but too often, someone is cashing in on them.

Miracle cure websites frequently have sections marked " Articles" that are simply SEO keyword–laden texts to attract searchers. (For example:"Morgellons caused by chemtrails.") When someone searches a Morgellons-related term, the "articles" section is designed to come up in that search, and then the site itself will most likely try to sell the patient something nice and expensive, perhaps after a consultation with a Morgellons-friendly doctor who claims to take the patient's medical concerns seriously.

The cold comfort in all this is that many schizophrenics don't have money to lose, Schrank told me. "Because of very severe symptoms, they may lose their credit cards very often." According to Schrank, patients with schizophrenia are often in poverty, and it may be impossible for them to spend much money all at once.

But most likely, the good the internet can do schizophrenics outweighs anything negative. Simply providing something to do—from talking to other people to watching a cat video—can help keep the delusions at bay. As Redditor Kirs1132 said in a thread about coping with symptoms, "When I'm alone thinking to myself, that's when the voices come up."

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.