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Look at Noah Van Sciver's blog, Twitter, and Fantagraphics.

Self Defense Family has been keeping the post-hardcore spirit alive since 2003, and their involvement with legendary hardcore label Deathwish Inc. has only bolstered their reputation. The same goes for Touché Amoré—a band who has, at times, single handedly maintained the integrity of screamo. Put these two well-rooted bands in a studio together, and you've got yourself a collaborative seven-inch featuring more than 15 musicians putting their all into two chaotic tracks.

The A-side, "Circa 95," is a seamless blend of Self Defense Family's cynical attitude and Touché Amoré's proclivity for emo. The second track, "Low Beams," is slower and more sprawling—it builds to a climax that'll please even the most jaded of hardcore kids. Check it out.

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A study released this week informs us that the average worldwide penis size is 5.2 inches long when erect. According to the BJU International Journal of Urology, which published the findings, this should help to "reassure the large majority of men that the size of their penis is in the normal range."

I'm sure it does, but that doesn't mean these results are all good news; my life does not change one bit waking up to find that, today, I am only 1.2 inches below average, as opposed to the whopping 1.8 inch discrepancy of yesterday.

I suppose this whole exercise of laboriously measuring 15,521 penises—both flaccid and hard—demonstrates that, as a society, we do still possess the ability to obsess upon size. ( I'm open to that accusation myself.) So, whatever else is said, I'm happy that we're all talking about penis size in an open, honest, non-judgmental, and serious way. Which we all are, right?

And yes, another positive factor—helpfully pointed out by the folk at BJU—is that those worried about their average-sized dick being small no longer have cause to worry. Because, at five inches, it's not small; it's average. From now on, when someone tells you that your average dick is small, it's abundantly clear that the problem is in their perception, not your equipment.

A penis can't be measured by inches on a stick—a penis is as small as a man's confidence betrays it to be.

However, I'm unconvinced that second point holds up. For the man with penis size anxiety is a man who takes an enormous amount of convincing. Every time he hears a kindly lady state, "That's not small," he gives a blank stare and thinks, Thank you. I wish that were true.'

A penis can't be measured by inches on a stick—a penis is as small as a man's confidence betrays it to be; or else as small as the imagination of the partner he is with. We see new research emerging regularly, seemingly always driving down the international standard of "acceptable dick." But this has never helped—and will never help—a single soul.

At the same time, we find ourselves confronted with language like "average" and "the normal range." This implies that the rest of us are in the abnormal range, a polarization that doesn't serve anyone very well. A polarization, in fact, that immediately draws my mind to a solemn story of penis size anxiety leading to teenage suicide. Size is not a mark on a ruler; it really is a state of mind.

There is no doubt in my mind that you know a man of around my stature, or less. Think for a moment who it could be. Your dad? Your brother? Your roommate? Wouldn't you be angry to see someone point a finger at their penis and shriek, telling them, "Ew, you're abnormal!" Draw upon the strength of your familial and social bonds and recognize this thinking as the trouble that it is.

When a man suffers size anxiety there is only one solution. Enlargement methods (pills, devices, surgeries) will never yield a result that ends in happiness—though bankruptcy, anguish, and physical deformation are definitely in the cards, if that sounds like your vibe. Likewise, comparison to others will never ease a troubled mind; you'll go mad questioning the veracity of the data or the quality of the interpretations.

The only answer is to accept who you are.

While these surveys may seem to be devised to help that, they simply do not. Nobody quite believes them. At the rate they crop up, saying different things each time, they don't even seem to believe themselves. They polarize society into those who are normal, and those who are abnormal. Even if they don't quite encourage an obsession with size, they certainly endorse the idea that size is a necessary concern.

"But I have to feel something," a lady recently said to me in an interview on the topic. And I quite agree. But I believe technique and imagination can excite a greater response from a greater expanse of flesh than any dick, of any size, could ever hope to.

Follow Ant on Twitter.

Eric Zala and Chris Strompolos are two best friends. When they were kids, they decided to make their own Raiders of the Lost Ark adaptation by reenacting each scene of the film shot by shot. Now adults, the two have finally raised the money to shoot the final missing scene, so VICE decided to meet up with them as they finish their lifelong project and attend its premiere.

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Aderonke (center wearing glasses) and Happiness (center-right wearing glasses)

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Imagine, tucked away in business parks not far from you, suburban Guantanamo Bays. Immigrant detention centers where faceless civil servants can, with no need of a judge, incarcerate people indefinitely.

A UK parliamentary inquiry into the detention of people on immigration grounds this week lifts the lid on a cruel, secretive regime under which 30,000 people a year are locked up indefinitely—not for committing a crime, but to facilitate deporting them.

The cross-party group of MPs and Peers found that the UK is alone in the EU in locking people up with no time limit, and recommend the next government introduce a maximum time limit of 28 days on the length of time anyone can be detained in immigration detention. The inquiry found that detention is used "disproportionately frequently," and heard all too often disabled people, pregnant women, the elderly, victims of abuse, torture, and trafficking are held with no time limit, often with little or no access to legal representation, and often breaking the Home Office's own rules. The inquiry also heard that HM Prisons Inspectorate found around a quarter of cases of prolonged immigration detention were down to nothing more than bureaucratic inefficiency.

The detention regime is brutal, it seems, for all asylum seekers—but it gets worse the more vulnerable you are, and the more things a prejudiced detention center guard or government lawyer could hold against you.

The Bedfordshire detention center for women was rocked by accusations of sexual abuse and intrusive behavior by male staff last year after which 11 staff were fired. Yet somehow multinational Serco, which runs it, managed to renew its contract. Yarl's Wood is again at the center of a Channel 4 News undercover investigation this week, which filmed sexist, racist male guards describing detainees as "black bitch" and "evil," and scoffing "they are all slashing their wrists, apparently. Let them slash their wrists... It's attention seeking." Serco has now suspended two staff.

Last night, I caught up with former Yarl's Wood detainee Aderonke Apata at a High Court judicial review of her asylum case. Aderonke's testimony on the lack of access to legal representation and the daily homophobic attacks she faced as a Nigerian lesbian in detention was some of the most distressing the inquiry heard.

"I welcome the recommendations of the Detention Inquiry, it couldn't have come at a better time," she said. "It is unacceptable to detain anybody in the first instance because most people that flee for their lives had been through one torture or the other. Detaining LGBT asylum seekers is the most horrendous injustice given that they are locked up with people from their homophobic countries. It is like they are sent back to their countries of origin where they then constantly get persecuted and are unable to report it because of fear of adverse effects on their claims."

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Morton Hall Immigration Removal Center

Aderonke told the inquiry that the financial cost of detention to the taxpayer is pointless but added that the cost to human life was immeasurable. The lack of a time limit, she said, is "mental torture, designed to break you."

She described a distressing regime at Yarl's Wood Removal Center where she was held with many vulnerable women, who had fled "torture, been trafficked, or subjected to forced marriage."

As many detainees in the Bedfordshire center were from Nigeria, Aderonke said she was locked up for ten months with the same prejudice and cruelty she had escaped. "Every day people abused me physically or verbally," recalled Aderonke, "but it wasn't in the interests of Serco who run Yarl's Wood to tell the Home Office about what was going on." She described the experience as "miserable, depressing, fearful—full of agony and pain."

Aderonke spent over a year in Yarl's Wood after being caught working in the mental health sector without a work permit. "To support myself and my daughter I had to get a job," she explained.

Yet in Yarl's Wood she worked for $1.50 an hour for the Home Office, and even won an "employee of the month" award. The irony wasn't lost on Aderonke and she described the use of detainees to help run detention centers on a fraction of minimum wage as "modern day slavery."

The LGBT activist told me that back in Nigeria she was outed by neighbors and locked up by the police and tortured for being a lesbian. She managed to bribe her way out and fled Nigeria in 2004, but lost her three-year-old son and brother to related vigilante murders, as well as her girlfriend of 20 years. Aderonke was sentenced to death by stoning in a Sharia court for being gay.

Seeking refuge in the UK, she faced the humiliating challenge of proving her sexual orientation by answering degrading questions about her personal experiences. Despite being an LGBT campaigner, winning UK LGBT Positive Role Model National Diversity Award, producing love letters from partners and being engaged to her current partner Happiness Agboro, the UK Home Office doesn't buy that she's a lesbian.

Aderonke met Happiness in Yarl's Wood Immigration, and Happiness has helped Aderonke fight her corner ever since, telling her it would be worth it because "nothing good comes easy."

Yet the ever-present threat of detention, being torn from her wife-to-be, daughter, and community of friends, as well as deportation to a country where she has been sentenced to death has left Aderonke with post-traumatic stress disorder, which caused her to be hospitalized recently.

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Yesterday, Aderonke took her fight for asylum in the UK to the High Court, packed with 100 well-wishers and gay activists including Peter Tatchell.

In court, The Home Office argued Aderonke can't be a lesbian as she has a daughter. Their barrister Andrew Bird said, "You can't be a heterosexual one day and a lesbian the next day. Just as you can't change your race." The lawyer representing the British state suggested Aderonke "has deliberately altered her appearance... to a lesbian stereotype." Doubting that Aderonke could undertake LGBT activism when suffering from depression, the Home Office barrister went on, "if she is suicidal and depressed she is making a jolly good show of it."

Aderonke's barrister Abid Mahmood, called the comments "highly offensive." The judge reserved his decision for three weeks.

If Home Secretary Theresa May refuses to acknowledge that Aderonke is a lesbian, what chance do others facing deportation to countries where homosexuality is criminalized have? Lisa Matthews of Right to Remain, which has been campaigning for Aderonke, told me of others who have even felt pressured into handing the Home Office videos of their love life. "We know of one case," said Lisa, "where someone was told they can't be gay as they did not look aroused enough in the video. This situation is horrific."

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This week's Parliamentary Inquiry expressed extreme concern that LGBT detainees like Aderonke face bullying, harassment, and abuse inside detention centers. It was not only a condemnation of the cost to detainees' mental health thanks to the UK's overzealous use of detention, but also its financial cost. The Home Office recently admitted that in 2013/14 the total cost of running immigration detention was $251 million. The inquiry heard how it is 80 percent cheaper for immigration disputes to be resolved in the community. The Home Office paid out a staggering $7.3 million in compensation for unlawful detention last year. And a time limit of 28 days could save $133 million per year.

Despite all this, over the last 12 months, UK immigration detention center capacity has increased by 25 percent, and the government has just announced a plan to double the size of Campsfield House Immigration Removal Center in Oxfordshire.

Follow Ben on Twitter.

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Inside Holloway Road's People's Club. This and all other original photos by Jake Lewis.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

It's no secret that London's nightclubs are under attack right now. In fact, it's a citywide outrage. A war on fun that a thousand petitions can't seem to halt. From those that have already closed—Plastic People, The Buffalo Bar, The Joiners Arms, Madame Jojo's—to the numerous others that've been threatened with closure, including the totemic granddaddy of them all, Fabric, we are witnessing a miserable purge against the dark rooms that shape the lives of young Londoners and in which the city's cultural identity is forged.

There seems to be a wide-ranging arsenal available to anyone who wants to shut down a club these days. Madame Jojo's, a Soho club so archaically seedy that Kubrick filmed part of Eyes Wide Shut there, was closed and will be bulldozed after bouncers pulled out baseball bats on assailants hurling glass bottles that struck them and members of the public. Fabric, a venue that people will happily get on a plane to visit, has only just managed to retain its license by promising to provide sniffer dogs at the entrance. The Astoria and Sin were knocked down to make way for Crossrail, London's new Stargate to the suburbs, and the Joiners will make way for flats. Gentrification has many ways to get what it wants.

The latest London institution to find itself in the crosshairs is People's, a club on Holloway Road that has been serving a predominantly Afro-Caribbean clientele for over 30 years, only to find itself at Highbury Magistrates' Court last week, fighting for survival. The details of what it's in the dock for are sketchy. Apparently there have been complaints from locals about problems with parking and pissing, as well as a few scuffles outside. This is apparently enough to put the 24-hour license of one of London's longest running nightclubs—and by extension, the nightclub itself—on death row.

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In the last year or so, the story of People's has become a personal one to me and my friends. Having lived nearby for a while, we'd often wander past on our way home and wonder if we could put on our own party there. Soon, a monthly club night called Eternal was born, which became a Thursday night fixture, packing out the 200-capacity venue with people from all across London and DJs you just wouldn't expect to find in a place so small and intimate. It also led to us becoming unlikely friends and allies (they call us "the whiteboys") with owner Tony "Bossman" Hassan and the rest of the People's management.

As the hearing for the club's future got underway, I went down to February's Eternal to speak to the people involved and try to understand what People's means to those who party and work there, why it's come under threat, and what chance it really has of staying open.

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A typical Saturday morning at People's.

The place has existed just off the map of London's club scene for over three decades now. Officially a "social club" rather than a nightclub, it retains a loyal cast of regulars and is a cult concern for a chunk of London's Afro-Caribbean community. Its Friday and Saturday nights play a raucous cacophony of reggae, pop, bashment, rap, and slow jams, and it's almost always rammed.

It's a basement club with an upstairs bar, the kind of place you don't see very often any more; all low ceilings, wooden fixtures, sticky floors, with a bassy sound system and bottles of lemonade behind the bar. It calls to mind a strange hybrid of a seaside bungalow, the bar inGoodfellas and Lee "Scratch" Perry's Black Ark Studios. Warehouse Project it is not.

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The club has been run by the same family since the day it opened, and it shows. It speaks to an old style of going out, one that's more about community than line-ups, constancy rather than novelty. It's a club that keeps it down and dirty, (which is probably part of the reason the council want it gone), yet its welcoming air seems like something from a bygone era in the age of wristband rave.

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Evian Christ on the decks at Eternal.

In the short time that Eternal has been running, we've managed to book acts that never get to play places like this any more. Since last February this reggae club in Lower Holloway has seen the likes of Jamie xx, Jacques Greene, How To Dress Well, Oneman, George Fitzgerald, MSSNGNO, Koreless, Evian Christ, a PC Music takeover night, and much more. These are acts who usually play Croatian festivals, who do events at the Barbican, who work with Kanye, but they come to People's because it's different.

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5:33 AM at People's

Running alongside Eternal is the club's real draw: the historic regular nights they've been doing here since the early 80s, when the sounds of Burning Spear and Black Uhuru ruled the dancefloor. To come to People's on a Friday or Saturday is to experience something increasingly rare in the city Boris is building. A truly organic, truly London clubbing experience. The crowd is multiracial, mono-up-for-it. From original Rastas to rudeboys, to white girls and suits, it's totally real, totally London. It's Carnival under a roof, twice a week.

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There are no wristbands here, no fleecing promoters, backstage passes, early-bird tickets, call-times for the DJs, or street teams outside. They sell rubbers and Rizla behind the bar, and keep the fridges stocked with peach wine and Dragon Stout. The queue isn't full of misplaced students bombing their supplies before the dogs get to them, rather people who are there to soak in the atmosphere of the place and let the music take control. It's a nightclub, not an airport with a DJ.

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The place is known for its array of hand-drawn signs, which range from the understandable "no drinks in the DJ booth," to the niche "no vulgar bashment tunes please." So iconic are the signs at People's that Turner Prize winner and local legend Jeremy Deller even immortalized them in his work.

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All these component differences create a feeling of uniqueness; I can't stress enough how different it is to everywhere else. And a major part of that difference is down to its 24-hour license, which was known to manifest itself in barbecues on the roof terrace, until the authorities put the cosh on that.

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People's is a club designed for you not to be able to stand at the back and nod your head, it's a club where you have to take your coat off, it's a club where you have to dance. It's a club where your personal space and state of mind are going to be invaded, whether you like it or not. It's not a club where you can catch a quick DJ set and get the last tube home.

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Presiding over all this is Tony "Bossman" Hassan (pictured here next to a mural tribute to himself inside the club), a Londoner who's been running the club for 16 years now ("It's a part of my soul," he tells me). I ask him why he thinks the club is under threat.

"We've got a 24-hour license, which is easy to get, but hard to keep hold of. I don't know whether it's part of the cleansing which seems to be going on in this part of Holloway, but they're giving us a hard time about it.

"We don't want the residents to have sleepless nights; I wouldn't like it either. So we put security round the corner, brought in resident's parking like they do with Arsenal [the football club's stadium is a five-minute stroll away] but they didn't seem to want to hear any of our offers. In 30 years, the radar has never been on People's Club—until now.

"You can see what's happening: all these little clubs closing down, turning into coffee bars. They're treating us like children, they all want us to be in bed by 10 PM. Where's a Londoner supposed to go any more?"

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But just how important is the 24-hour license to People's? Could Hassan run the club without it? "It's very important to us, because it allows us to run the club the way we want to run it. We only open Fridays and Saturdays, and Thursdays once a month. We usually close at six or seven, I don't think we've disturbed anyone too much," he says. "If we can only stay open 'til two, it's all over. It's called bankruptcy, it's called the jobs of 16, 17 people. It'll finish it. It's just not really worth it after that."

And what will he do if Islington Council decide to shut the place? "It'll hurt me badly. It's not about the money, it's about what we've built up over these 30 years." Nevertheless, he remains defiant. "But you know what? I'll still run it; I'll still open up like normal until they handcuff me and take me away. Because I haven't done anything wrong."

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Earlier this week, Hassan, some of People's staff and regular promoters went down to Highbury Magistrates' Court for the hearing regarding the club's future. After listening to the prosecution witnesses, including some local council types and the two residents who complained, the hearing was postponed until April after questioning overran. Which, at the very least, buys People's a couple more months.

Everyone's optimistic about the case, but the wider question that concerns all of London's nightlife is whether anyone in authority is really that interested in keeping somewhere that holds no appeal for them open. Alas, for all its cultural weight, nightclubs just aren't that viable in London any more.

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If People's does go, the effect of the club's closure will be devastating. More so than perhaps any of the other closures I mentioned earlier, because People's is a club that's still relevant, hosting some of the most cutting-edge acts on the planet in an affordable, unusual setting, and remaining a vital place in the city's Afro-Caribbean culture. Not to mention the people who work there, the people who love it there and the area of Holloway to which it belongs, which is slowly seeing the grim specter of Upper Street consumerism creep up its ancient path.

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On the surface, a bunch of London hipsters there to see Jamie xx and the predominantly local, Afro-Caribbean crowd that flock to the place on Fridays and Saturdays don't have much in common. They don't listen to the same music and they don't wear the same clothes, and one is of course undoubtedly more privileged than the other.

But what both groups do have is an interest in the real culture of the city, in its nightlife, its music, its fashions, and its chaos. It's very easy to accuse any kind of change of being part of the gentrification cycle, and maybe there are elements of truth to that. But the fact is that cities need to stay cool to survive, they have to push forward to stop themselves becoming museums, and clubs are vital to that process. But the people ruling this city, the people moving into places on Holloway Road and complaining about People's, don't want nightclubs, they want coffee shops. They want to watch Wolf Hall, go to bed, and have a few pale ales on a Friday night.

But London wasn't built on coffee shops and pale ale; it was built on innovation, tradition, integration, and urbanism. You can get artisan foodstuffs in any First-World city on Earth, but you won't find another People's. It's a place whose specifics could only really exist in London, and yet the forces that are shaping the capital are trying to trample it in the rush to this city into Geneva-on-Thames.

I understand that not everyone wants a nightclub on their doorstep, but you know what? Maybe don't move to one of the most heavily populated areas in Europe, on what is essentially a massive A-road, with four or five other clubs in close proximity (including the Garage, where somebody was shot a few months ago), if you're the kind of person who tries to get places shut down. London is a city, and cities are noisy, dirty and full of nightclubs. A lot of us like it that way.

In short: Fuck Boris, save People's.

Follow Clive and Jake on Twitter.

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'Tony Hawk's Proving Ground': one of the few games the author can claim to be proficient at

Much to my best friends' frustration, I am fucking terrible at video games. Whether it was fudging the Facility level of GoldenEye 007 or repeatedly dropping off screen in a weedy haze during late-night sessions of Rayman Origins, I've been a perennial thorn in the controller of those closest to me. When I shut my eyes and think of those friends, I see faces flushed with frustration. I hear cries of annoyed anguish. I taste the bitter tears wept by someone really, really bad at every game that isn't a Tony Hawk one.

Despite somehow beating, or at least remembering beating, Super Mario World on a black-and-white portable in the utility room of the first house I recall living in, I was always aware of my innate inability to actually play games properly. I lose concentration. I have poor hand-eye coordination. A limited attention span. A natural disposition to shy away from anything difficult. I gave up on playing them properly, on considering myself an actual gamer, just after I'd lent The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time to a friend so he could help me help Link transition from pre-pubescent squealer to Master Sword–wielding big man in Hyrule.

The thing was, and is, I still love the idea of games. What I lacked in active participatory skills, I made up for with an all-encompassing desire to consume as much about them as I could passively. My pocket money was divided between saving up for and then splurging a whole fiver on one of Sold-Out Software's budget classics, and keeping up with the Joneses in the form of any gaming magazine I could lay my hands on. Though I've not powered through Edge on a train journey in a while, I can still tell you the exact scores that NGC gave certain games, zingers straight out of the back pages of N64, and 17 years on I'm still traumatized by the sight of Charlie Brooker eating his own ketchup-smeared arse in PC Zone.

When I wasn't reading about development studios in Suriname or wildly disagreeing with the scores doled out to titles I was never going to touch, I was at friends' houses, sat cross-legged on their beds, watching them play. This is where I got my real kicks: watching, just watching. My emerging scopophilia was encouraged by friends who were happy to keep on playing—when I was around, their lives were infinite.

A junior analyst, or at least an English graduate who flicked through a book about Lacan once, would probably link this desire to reject control in the virtual field to an inability to handle the harsh actualities of life as it has to be lived. There's probably, painfully, a lot of truth in that. But fucking hell, do you know how hard it is to live with yourself when you're that bad at Halo 3? It's misery.

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'Halo 3''s Master Chief, ahead of being brutally slain in the hands of the author

Don't get me wrong, I still pick up and play from time to time. I'm a dab hand at the character-creation mode in FIFA 13, can still bang together a 500,000-point combo in Proving Ground with my eyes closed, and when I became unemployed last year I got at least halfway through Max Payne 3. It's just that doing so makes me feel useless, ashamed, anxious, and pathetic. I feel that enough out there in the real world, so it seems absurd to inflict it upon myself in a medium that—and we'll avoid getting into the tedious but-is-it-art debate here—is inherently about escapism and pleasure.

This inability to transmute myself into an experience outside of that which I directly live, that which I try and avoid as much as possible, is something I've come to terms with, something I've made a part of myself. Friends know by now that I'm the watcher, the dude happy to look out for approaching enemies and potential pitfalls. That I can do. I can live vicariously through them.

Living in the age of the unending stream has been a godsend for people like myself. I can now lose whole weekends to watching strangers play games I'll never lay my hands on. I am there with them, through the restarts and frustrations, the trials and tribulations. I sit with wide-eyed wonder as they steamroll through Super Mario 64 in the same time it took me to collect my first five stars. I'm thrilled as they get past the first ten minutes of Dark Souls II. Through them, the games come alive to me. I'm shown things that I'd never see, taken to places out of reach for putzes like me.

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The not-at-all-generic cast of 'Gears of War 3'

Last year's mindboggling Twitch trawl through Pokémon—an exercise in the power of group control and an interactive art piece as much as it was people trying to complete a game—was everything the voyeurs like myself could have dreamed for. A whole game tackled in laborious fashion, live, to be dipped in and out of at will. I'd check in on it sporadically, spend a few minutes in the frantic world of missteps it created. I never contributed. Never typed "left" or "right". I just watched. As I always do.

I still read about games. I still watch trailers. I still have internal rankings for publishers and studios. I still wonder what Miyamoto is up to, and why. I still carry around with me an unceasing affinity and affection for Nintendo. I'm happy with my passive participation.

A while back, when I was a part-time student and he was out of work, my housemate and I played the co-op mode of Gears of War 3 to completion. We argued. We bickered. I apologized. But we got through it. We finished the game. Sometimes I think that it was the proudest he's ever been of me.

Follow Josh on Twitter.

Previously:

eMatch-Fixing: Why Poverty and Chaos is Driving Pro-Gamers to Risk Everything

Powder Play: The Making of 'Alto's Adventure'

In the Mouth of the Moon: A Personal Reading of 'Majora's Mask'

If John Carpenter were to direct an episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark?, it would probably look a lot like It Follows. David Robert Mitchell's evocative throwback has all the aesthetic trappings of an old-school chiller and the vague mythology of something Nickelodeon might have aired on a Saturday night back in the 90s. That might sound like an odd blend, but the result is the best horror movie in years.

The premise is brilliant in its simplicity: A girl named Jay sleeps with the guy she's been seeing for a while. After doing the deed, he knocks her out with chloroform. She wakes up tied to a wheelchair in an abandoned parking garage to a foreboding warning: "This thing, it's gonna follow you. Somebody gave it to me, and I passed it to you."

This sexually transmitted monster changes form every time it appears. On one occasion, it could be a total stranger you wouldn't notice in a crowd. The next time, it could take the shape of your dearest friend or even a parent. No one knows what it truly looks like. And though it lurches at the glacial pace of a zombie, it always catches up to you.

It gets worse. If and when this being kills its prey, it simply goes back to chasing the last one. In order to truly rid yourself of this thing, you have to put as many degrees of sexual separation between you and it as possible—sleeping with someone new does no good if they're unaware of the danger and end up getting killed a day later. This leads to a lot of impromptu sex ed, though Mitchell stops short of turning the film into a finger-wagging PSA.

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It Follows has an urban-legend vibe to it, and as such we're meant to feel the mythos in our bones rather than fully understand it. Mitchell, who wrote and directed it, is highly attuned to what we'll call "cinematic kid" logic: the way parents seem to be absent whenever shit goes down and intrepid teens take it upon themselves to band together and turn problems like a supernatural entity into just another adventure. Jay is shouldering a life-threatening burden, but at no point is she ever really alone with it—her sister, her sister's friend, and the boy who's always had a crush on Jay are right there with her, as is the cool neighbor from across the street with a car.

Maika Monroe, who impressed in the similarly Carpenter-inflected The Guest last year, fulfills the promise she showed in that film and then some. She's the millennial scream queen we've been waiting for; her expressive qualities are the perfect match for Mitchell's moody, atmospheric approach to terrifying his audience. As Jay, she reckons with something we all must eventually: the disheartening knowledge that most aspects of real life aren't what you were led to believe, doubly so if you're a sheltered youth from the suburbs. That's scary even without an unstoppable creature chasing you day and night.

Horror movies have been punishing sexually active teenagers for decades. Mitchell is careful to avoid this trope, never giving the sense that he's disciplining these characters—he's more like a sympathetic guidance counselor who genuinely wants his students to make it through their ordeal unscathed.

Throwback horror flicks are often obnoxious in their reference-heavy worship of their genre forebears, but Mitchell, who's already made a thoughtful teen movie with The Myth of the American Sleepover, uses his influences as a starting point rather than something to blindly aspire to. Which isn't to say he doesn't adore the films and conventions he's riffing on—the wall-to-wall synth score and the old movies constantly playing in the background are evidence enough that he does. In mellowing out those sensibilities and fusing them with those of gentler, more young adult-oriented fare, Mitchell has made a film that's as kind to its audience as it is to its characters.

Follow Michael on Twitter.

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1979. I'm 30 years old and back in the Ozarks, after a 12-year absence, crashing on the second floor of a redbrick 18-room downtown hotel which has been empty for 35 years. My father owns the building along with his portrait and wedding photography studio downstairs. He's letting me stay here though he finds the situation embarrassing and wants me to regain the proper path that I was never really on. His wife offers to buy me a one-way bus ticket to anywhere I want to go. I'm not working but I know an editor at a porn rag in Los Angeles who buys nasty pictures so I'm on the lookout for models. I'm fueled by substance and drink and touches of mania.

One night I find myself in a bar that happens to be the place where a bunch of my old high school friends hang out. A guy I used to know named Bobby, spots me. "Scotty Sothern," he says. "Fuckin' yay, man. You're Scotty fuckin' Sothern."

"I'm sorry but no, you're mistaking me for someone else. My name is Bobby."

"No, uhuh, you're Scotty fuckin' Sothern. I'm Bobby, not you. You're Scotty Sothern."

"Sorry, but I'm afraid I'm someone else, not Scotty."

"Wait there, don't move." He goes off into the crowd and then comes back with a guy named Bubby. He points at me and says to Bubby, "That's Scotty fuckin' Sothern, isn't it?"

Bubby says yeah, that's Scotty Sothern and hey Scotty. I say hey Bubby, how you doing? Bubby says he's doing OK and then goes back to wherever he was. Bobby tells me, you always was funny, Scotty, and can he buy me a drink?

I join Bobby and two girls at his table. One of the girls is his girlfriend and the other is her friend. She is tall and skinny with chiseled cheekbones and short black hair and she's wearing a thin thigh-high kitty-cat tee-shirt that says Hang in there, Baby. She's gorgeous and my heart is a cartoon valentine beating out of my chest. She tells me her name is Claudine and I lean into her zone and sniff her perfume.

"Gorgeous women make me stutter," I say. "So if I act like an idiot you're the one to blame."

"I never heard that before. You're kind of a smart-aleck, huh?"

"Is that OK?"

"I like smart alecks."

"Great, that's good. You're from someplace other than here, aren't you?"

"Kansas City. You look like you're a photographer."

"I am. You look like you're a model."

"I am. Do you ever take nude pictures?"

"I only take nude pictures. You ever do any nude modeling?"

"I only do nude modeling."

"I have a photography studio downtown. We could go there right now and take pictures."

She's close to me; I can feel her breath on my face and I want to stick my tongue in her mouth. I want to go to Kansas City and move in with her. Her eyes go out of focus and the mood shifts. "I'm really drunk," she says then pukes up a fifth of booze and a réchaffeé of spaghetti with marinara sauce. Her eyes cross and she passes out with her face splat into the pool of puke. I tell Bobby maybe I'll see him again someday but I never do.

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I venture from Hotel Paradise one night and end up in a little school bus on cinderblocks tucked away in a field of weedy urban rubble. Inside, at the driver's seat sits an American aboriginal, named Charlie Bump. He has long black hair and a baseball-sized bump on his forehead. He charges a dollar to enter and then sells cans of beer from a cooler. In the back of the bus a record player and speakers are set up, colored flashing lights and a little round stage where a stripper is dancing. I see it all in a drug-induced stupor and it's more like a surrealistic dream than a here-and-now. The stripper is not very friendly, nor is Charlie Bump. I drink myself into a blackout and the next day I wake up and my life is the same as the day before.

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I've rigged a doorbell downstairs at the front door to the old fire alarm and when it rings at 2 AM, I'm speeding, smoking, drinking, and writing bad poetry. I go downstairs and it's the stripper from the bus. She tells me I told her I want to take studio pictures and I'll give her a couple of prints for free. She has a Missouri twang and she is serious to the point of no fun. I see Charlie Bump across the street sitting on the curb watching us. Her name is Dara Lynn Roundtree and I invite her into my pop's studio and load the Hasselblad with Tri-X. She tells me she will strip but won't do anything nasty. She signs a release and we take pictures but neither of us is getting into it. I ask her to look a little bit happier and she starts laughing, saying the word, Ha ha ha ha ha. When I ask her to remove another article of her stripper uniform she tells me I'd better not try any funny business. I tell her no problem I'll stay behind the camera. I shoot a 12 exposure roll of black and white and I know these are images I'll never sell to the pink-seeking magazine in LA so I suppose I'll have to call it art. I tell the school bus stripper thank you and she can get dressed now and I'll make her some 8x10s later in the week.

Scot's first book, Lowlife, was released in 2011, and his memoir, Curb Service, is out now. You can find more information on his website.

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Prime Minister Stephen Harper has pushed a "tough-on-crime" agenda throughout his political career. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

If you plan on killing someone, now's the time—the Harper government is about to remove the eligibility for parole for particularly nasty murderers.

At an event in Scarborough on Wednesday, the prime minister told supporters and families of murder victims that he's planning on introducing legislation that would automatically keep certain violent criminals, and those convicted of high treason, in jail forever.

Any Canadian found guilty of first degree murder that involves sexual assault, kidnapping or forcible confinement, terrorism, the killing of a police or correctional officer, or any other killing "of a particularly brutal nature" would automatically be sentenced to life in prison without any chance of parole, unless there are "exceptional circumstances."

After 35 years in jail, a convicted killer facing a lifetime in prison can petition the minister of public safety to be released.

"Let me be clear: this is not parole," Harper said.

"Unlike parole, decisions will not rest with an appointed board, but with the federal cabinet, men and women fully accountable to their fellow citizens, and to the families of the victims of these criminals."

Harper was joined by Justice Minister Peter MacKay, who has presided over many of the government's new tough-on-crime changes.

"The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, there are certain criminals who should never, ever, be allowed to walk the streets where you and your neighbours live and work or the streets where our children play," Harper said.

That new mandatory minimum is sure to draw flak. Currently, the maximum penalty under the law is 25 years without parole—though many violent offenders never actually see the light of day. Judges can, however, impose consecutive sentences for multiple murders. That means that for every murder another 25 years without parole is added to the offender's sentence.

The changes, however, might not stand up. As the Globe and Mail reported the day before the announcement, some in the governing caucus were concerned that jailing people in perpetuity would be found unconstitutional. The Charter, of course, protects Canadians' right to liberty, except in cases where it's reasonable to deprive them of it.

The Supreme Court likely won't be fond of the idea of leaving the only recourse for liberty to the federal cabinet—even if they have been convicted of high treason.

Evidently, the government lawyers who asked that the proposal be taken off the table were overruled.

After Harper's remarks Wednesday, Sharon Rosenfeldt‎ took the stage to offer personal perspective on the bill. Her son Daryn was murdered by serial killer Clifford Olsen in 1981. Olsen died in prison, but he made frequent requests for parole.

"When Clifford Olsen murdered our son, we also got a life sentence," Rosenfeldt told the room.

Afterwards, the prime minister returned to the stage and made the extraordinary decision to take questions from journalists, something he rarely does.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

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The author on the set of When Women Rule the World

I've scammed my way onto not one, but two UK reality TV shows. I'm a bit of a Canadian charlatan and knew exactly how to manipulate the producers into casting me, so it was my own damned fault when they crucified me on national television. Why reality TV? I was bored and it was something to do. Fifteen minutes of fame is alluring to a con artist because it only requires one discipline to attain it: hustling.

If you know what producers are looking for in auditions, you can tailor your responses to jive with their vision. Here's a hint: they're looking for sociopaths. Think about it: sociopaths are known to display a lack of empathy, a lack of remorse, and tend to have violent outbursts. Sounds like every contestant on reality television ever, right?

In my auditions, I misrepresented myself completely as a man-eating, bravado-bitching, shit-talking, feminist powerhouse. It was an extreme character culled from one corner of my personality. In reality, I'm just trying to figure things out like the rest of the world. However, along with not wanting fatties, producers don't want complexity. They want drama, and the essence of drama is conflict. Everyday life is devoid of the habitual conflict that wouldn't make for interesting television, but creation myths need a devil. Become the devil, truth be damned.

Unlike North American reality TV shows, British reality TV is an institution held in the highest regard and treated like a religion. Reality TV stars in the UK can easily parlay their fleeting fame into perfume deals, fitness DVDs, tell-alls, glamour modelling, or the holiest of holies, a marriage to a footballer. There's a lot of money and fame to be had for those who are willing to have their bowel movements broadcast to millions. What's more, they are regarded with a colossal respect that North Americans might find odd. Big Brother, Geordie Shore, and The Only Way Is Essex are huge cash-cows that have made celebrities out of sociopathic nobodies like Jade Goody. Jade Goody entered the UK Big Brother house in 2002 and became a sensation when her mentally deranged question, "Am I mingin'?" became a catchphrase. When she returned to the show in 2007, she racially bullied Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty, calling her "Shilpa Poppadom" and telling her to "go back to the slums." It was an international incident that even made its way to question time in British parliament. When she was removed from the Big Brother house, Goody's sociopathic non-apologies landed on the wrong side of genuine, and she eventually died as she had lived: surrounded by cameras and people who hated her.

But, as the saying goes, if you can't be famous, be infamous.

The two reality TV shows in my case were When Women Rule The World (2008) and First Dates (2014). Both were produced by the British network Channel 4 (also home to Black Mirror) and broadcast to millions of viewers across the UK and Ireland. The former was looking for strong, opinionated, feminist-minded hotheads who would govern an island with only one law: women rule, men obey. I immediately filled out an application. I answered every section with as much forced swagger I could muster. One of the questions asked why I wanted to be on television. I figured "revenge" would be a poorly-received answer, so I instead wrote "because I'm awesome and people love me." Attaching my most intimidatingly-sexy photos I could find, I sent it off into the gauze of cyberspace.

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I received a reply from the show's researchers within a week, inviting me in for an on-camera audition. I wasn't surprised or excited. I knew they would contact me. I knew exactly what I was doing. At the audition, they trained a camera on me and asked questions like, "What's the one thing you think men can learn from women?"

"Cunnilingus," I replied. I mean, who fucking says something like that? But they ate that shit up. After several more meetings, where I glad-handed the series producers, went through costume fittings, and had a police-background check, they brought in a psychologist to assess the mental soundness of each cast member. This is where the real hustle took effect. There is a con called Blind Man's Bluff. Usually in this con, a hustler fakes blindness to misdirect attention as a card-game is stacked or a casino is knocked over. I simply removed the blind aspect and focussed on the bluff. In my defence, the psychologist was extremely inept.

"Have you ever experienced domestic violence?"

Yes.

"No," I cheerfully replied with a gregarious smile.

"How would you rate your level of happiness?" she asked.

I'm intermittently depressed.

"I'm a very happy person," I batted my lashes, and she stupidly ticked the boxes on the boilerplate form.

The next week, I was on a plane from London to the Dominican Republic. Upon arriving at the lavish set that had been built on a secluded beach by a crew of over 200, I realized that millions had been spent by the network: salaries, travel, accommodation, writers, props, electricians, camera operators, booms, the director, and the fees each of us were paid. And here I was, sporting a shit-eating grin with an all-expense paid holiday to the Caribbean with the bonus of television exposure.

My fellow female castmates were loud and posturing Bacchanalians who ranged from a glamour model to a porn star who specialized in anal. Hard butts and fake breasts abounded. The male cast included misogynistic footballers and an alpha male gangsta rapper. Think of the rebellion! Our show was hosted by Steve Jones, who would later find fame in America as the host of X Factor and Entertainment Tonight.

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For First Dates, once again, I was bored, and I already knew that Channel 4 employs fucktards, so when I heard they were casting for their second season, I immediately filled out their questionnaire and sent in a pouty selfie. First Dates is a popular fly-on-the-wall series that pairs two strangers on a dinner date in the hopes that sparks will fly or heads will roll. I bluffed my way through two on-camera auditions, spoon-feeding them Velveeta one-liners. Unlike WWRTW where I was cast in the entire eight-episode season, I knew I would only be cast in one FD episode, so I had to bring my A game.

Turns out, I underestimated the FD producers. They're not complete morons after all. As I was mic'd up and sent into the restaurant to film my episode, I met the man who was to be my dinner companion: a delightfully sweet chap who had an unfortunate and rather nagging stammer. I wasn't prepared for that. I was used to my castmates being obnoxious and undignified sociopaths. He was charming and smiley, but couldn't talk very much without trailing off into a painful episode. So I did all the nervous talking. I blathered verbal diarrhea until my throat tightened like a sphincter. When the episode aired, they edited it in such a manner that I appeared to be bullying him for his speech impediment. They spliced up shots and jammed them out of sequence to make it look like I was rolling my eyes at him or shutting him down when he tried to speak. They totally frankensound-bited me on national television.

Social media blew up and Twitter users were threatening to stab me in the face with a fork or rape me in on the street. I couldn't go anywhere in London without being recognized as "that Canadian bitch." Once, I was at a pub in Covent Garden when a crowd gathered around me. "I just saw you on television, why did you do that to that poor lad?" I shrugged my shoulders and apologized to them for letting them down. It was so brutal after a while that I actually began to sport a disguise in public. I was the most hated woman in the UK for a time. I became an insomniac and a depressive.

And I deserved it.

I met with the producers to discuss with them the death threats I was receiving, and how unfair I felt my portrayal was. They nodded their heads, bought me lunch, and told me they took my concerns very seriously. They assured me they would come to my defence on the official Twitter and Facebook accounts, and broadcast unseen footage that would prove I wasn't a bully.

Naturally, none of that ever happened. Nor did I expect it to. Their show continued, to great fanfare, and I eventually had to leave London to get away from the scandal.

That's the biggest con: when it turns out the hustler is actually the mark. I learned the hard way that, one day, someone other than you is going to have the last laugh, and what are you going to do then?

Follow Christine Estima on Twitter.

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A pro-choice protestor stands in front of the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform's sign. Photos by Mack Lamoureux

"Shove that up your ass."

The young lady with the books under her arm spun on her heel after saying that, and walked away. In response, Cameron Wilson put the pamphlet back into the stack in his hand, smiled, and politely wished her a nice day. Several feet away, looming behind an angry group of protesters, a very large and very graphic image of an aborted fetus watched the encounter unfold.

A week earlier, University of Alberta students began noticing the appearance of posters adorned with the title "Trigger Warnings." The posters warned of an upcoming demonstration on March 3 and 4, during which graphic images were going to be displayed and that, "If you do not wish to see these images, we suggest you avoid the portion of campus on these days."

I made my way to the U of A's main quad, with camera in tow, to see exactly what sort of plans required the group to put up trigger warnings.

I was greeted by the words "Killing a Baby is a Bad Choice" emblazoned on a large poster, paired with the photo of a bloody fetus posed next to a nickel. Surrounding the poster were peace officers and counter-protesters.

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That's where I met Wilson, a 24-year-old law student at U of A and a member of the campus club GoLife, an anti-abortion group. The group had invited the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform (CCBR) to the school for a demonstration. The simple fact that the CCBR is controversial wasn't why the students were upset. It was what the group brought with them to the university: graphic pictures, and lots of them.

In total, there were around seven or eight posters and they were big, around four feet by eight. Set up an in front of them were university students attempting to block the bloody fetuses from view. I set about milling around the protest in the -20 degree weather. Talking to both sides, I quickly realized that, for the counter-protesters, who mostly identified as pro choice and carried pro-choice signs, that this wasn't a pro-choice against anti-choice event. Instead, this was about the CCBR's tactics—the counter-protesters wanted the university to be a safe space.

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"We don't think it's right that one group's freedom of speech trumps other groups' freedom to feel safe at work and at school," said Brian Steele, an organizer of the counter-protest. "There is a difference between having a discussion on pro life and hanging banners about pro life and trying to emotionally traumatize people. There is a difference between shock and awe and actually promoting a discussion.

"The group out there says they want a discussion, but really, all they're promoting is stigmatization, and I think that's wrong."

The fear for people's safety stems from the graphic nature the posters. The counter-protest would argue that the images have a very real chance of traumatizing or "triggering" people who have experienced something similar in the past—something that can be quite dangerous and mentally harming to the victim by evoking an emotional flashback. Such a flashback could result in a relapse in depression and, in extreme cases, even self harm and suicide.

That this demonstration occurred during U of A's pride week only exasperated the problem. GoLife and the CCBR vehemently stated that this was a simple but unfortunate coincidence. However, for several years, the pride week and parade have been held on the same week and typically makes its way past the main quad. This being a simple "coincidence" would require some intense managerial shortsightedness by the pro life group. Regardless, because it was pride week, rainbow flags could be seen punctuating the quad, and protesters formed a visual barricade so that the children and people walking in the parade couldn't view the signs. Chanting, "Let's talk, not shock," "Don't erase safe space," and my personal favourite, "Don't be a willy, these images are silly," the protestors accomplished their goal.

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This lead the members of the CCBR and GoLife to state that these actions were an affront to their freedom of speech and blocking a crucial portion of their argument.

"I think that it was unfair of students to start creating that socially almost coercive attitude of don't engage them, don't take their pamphlets, don't talk to them," said Wilson. "I think that a purpose of university is to always ask the tough questions."

In short, this event unintentionally proved to be a microcosm for the debate between a person's safety and freedom of speech.

It was difficult to debate in the cold, however, so members of each group took shifts. They would rotate between suffering out in the frigid temperatures and finding warmth within the nearby U of A building. Within the building existed a Tim Hortons with a perpetual long line which gladly served coffee to both sides. At one point I saw both pro-lifers and counter protesters awkwardly waiting in line at the Tim Hortons together adamantly not making eye contact.

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I spent some time talking to and shadowing several members of the severely outnumbered pro lifers. They walked throughout the display attempting to hand out pamphlets and engage a discussion with the counter protestors. It was easy to differentiate the articulate and determined veterans from the visually nervous and twitchy greenhorns. For the most part, the conversations remained spirited yet intellectual. However, sometimes a pro lifer would compare abortion to genocide and, shockingly, the conversation would go sour. (The CCBR runs a campaign called the Genocide Awareness Project in which they utilize large posters, much like the ones seen at the U of A, to illustrate that very comparison.)

And let me tell you, nothing extinguishes a conversation quite like comparing abortion to the Holocaust.

The people with GoLife and the CCBR aren't stupid by any means. Personally, I found most of them to be extremely intelligent and articulate, and what they are doing is a very smart tactic. While it may not be the best at achieving their goal of "facilitating conversation"—it's a little hard to have an intellectual conversation with the remnants of an abortion looming over you—it did bring a horde of media to the event.

"It is shocking, it is awful," said Wilson of the display. "But it's shocking and awful because abortion is shocking and awful."

It was an event just like this that got Wilson to become an active participant in the anti-abortion movement. Back when he was in Grade 11, Wilson attended a CCBR event that his brothers were involved in and received a pamphlet. The graphic photos utilized on the pamphlet spurred him to action, and he's been involved ever since.

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It's come full circle for Wilson, now handing out an updated version of the very pamphlets that initially moved him.

From my conversations, it seems that both sides felt that the day was a success. The counter-protestors felt that way because they were able to actively block the display from the pride parade and kept the appearance of the quad as a safe place. And on the flip side, the anti-abortionists considered it was a success because they attracted media attention and generated what they felt was a lot of good dialogue. From what I saw, the majority of the students didn't have the time of day for the CCBR, nor their graphic display. Some students would stop and look, and some would even discuss the issue, but for the most part these students seemed to be far more focused on getting to class or into a warm building. For some this whole thing seemed to really just be a hassle that might make them late to their next anthropology class.

It seems that, for most students, getting to anthro on time trumps gawking at a giant, bloody fetus.

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter.

"Why isn't there an Uber for prostitution?" some men have asked on blogs lately, quoting other men.

The reason is simple, and too short to justify an entire article's worth of opinion on the internet (another service for which we don't yet have an Uber): because prostitution is—as of this writing, anyway—outlawed.

There's more to it than that. For one, none of these opinion-havers (at Forbes, Slate, and Reason, for instance) offer any indication they've asked the people who would power such apps why they don't yet exist.

Still, these writers are compelled by the allure of "Prostitution 3.0," a paradise of technologically sophisticated and legally regulated sex work proposed in a 2013 Iowa Law Review article by University of Colorado law professor Scott Peppet.

He wrote:

Empirical evidence from the economics and sociology of sex work shows that new, Internet-enabled, indoor forms of prostitution may be healthier, less violent, and more rewarding than traditional street prostitution. This Article argues that these existing "Prostitution 2.0" innovations have not yet improved sex markets sufficiently to warrant legalization. It suggests that creating a new "Prostitution 3.0" that solves the remaining problems of disease, violence, and coercion in prostitution markets is possible, but would require removing legal barriers to ongoing technological innovation in this context, such as state laws criminalizing technologies that "advance prostitution."

Peppet believes the problem with prostitution is that it's just not yet sufficiently disrupted by "innovation." Prostitution 3.0 is sold to readers as a seamless commercial sexual encounter made possible by advances in technology, but advances still limited by our messy reality, where the leading minds driving this change can barely even perceive the demands of the people who sell sex.

Prostitution 3.0 falls flat because the criminalization of sex workers is (still) primarily to blame for the poor conditions they may face. Study after study (including a new one released this past week in the UK) point to the harms inflicted on sex workers by laws that inhibit their ability to screen customers, work together, openly discuss their services, and prevent HIV exposure.

What harms Prostitution 3.0 invokes—"disease" and "trafficking"—aren't bugs in our present legal regime regulating commercial sex. They are its primary features.

Prostitution 3.0 is about customer service—not the lives of sex workers. This may also be why the man who proposed it and those who have written it up have declined to note that sex workers have also been calling for police to get out of the prostitution business, and have been demanding this for the past 40 years.

As bandied about on the blogs, then, Prostitution 3.0 is just another male fantasy. It hardly engages with current global debates around prostitution policy, or the realities of criminalization, or the notion that sex workers may also have demands. But that's not why it's a hot topic: That's because someone at Forbes tacked the word "Uber" onto the story.

"In any case, while legalizing prostitution may be a long way off for the US, allowing technology that makes it safer and less intertwined with criminal world seems would seem like a positive step forward" is a sentence that Forbes blogger Adam Ozimek wrote, without acknowledging that the more direct way to dissociate a behavior from criminal activity is to no longer outlaw that behavior.

Given the weakness of the legal rationale here, it should be no surprise that the concept of Prostitution 3.0 also ignores (as most app developers already do) what people who actually are involved in selling sexual entertainment and services might desire.

But last spring, I had the privilege of posing that very question to a panel of sex workers and advocates, convened at the conference Theorizing the Web. Better connecting with customers ranked low, if it ranked at all, in the panelists' priorities. Instead, they named the many ways existing online services discriminate against sex workers, censor their content, and contribute to their surveillance by law enforcement.

I checked back in with my panelists to see what they think about the idea of an Uber for sex work. Emma Caterine, advocate and co-author of the study "Criminal, Victim, or Worker?" tells me the real issue is access and police profiling.

"Most of the folks I work with are very low-income, and while most of them have smart phones—since that's disproportionately how people of color and poor people get internet access—they are generally much more cautious since it is usually them who get targeted for arrest," she says. Even if prostitution were to be decriminalized, police might still target these communities for surveillance and arrest. Mobile phones may be necessary for work, but they also bring risks apps can't solve so easily.

"They either know or have known people who have been arrested and in the processing had their phones searched, both legally and illegally," Caterine explains. "So a lot of them don't even like texting clients, let alone having an app that implicates them."

In addition to avoiding police surveillance, sex workers face interference that other people don't in putting apps to work—interference from tech companies themselves. One of my other panelists, Hawk Kinkaid, COO of Rentboy.com and president of the nonprofit program HOOK for men in the sex industry, put it this way: "Apple has been a conservatively vigilant company making the very notion of an app serving responsible adults working as male (and female, trans, etc.) escorts in the business difficult to envision."

Even if selling sex were no longer criminalized, how are you going to get past an App Store that won't currently accept legal sexually explicit content? "This stigmatization inhibits possible app products that could communicate safety and education content," Kinkaid adds, "as well as other effective resources which explicitly serve adult industry workers."

Along with cops and corporations, sex workers also face discriminatory service from banks. Online payment processors charge much higher fees for accounts they deem "adult." Services that rely on payment processors—anyone who processes a credit card for you online—in turn refuse service to "adult" users, even those conducting legal business that is not the target of anti-prostitution policing. This discrimination is directed not just at commercial sex but at anything a sex worker might do online.

When I asked the CEO of WePay why his company shut down a porn performer's fundraiser for urgent medical needs, he blamed policies set by banks. If sex workers are going to rely on apps to obtain payment, those apps may just go the route of WePay and refuse their business. (On Tumblr, lists of such businesses circulate, along with the experiences of cam girls, porn performers, and other sex workers who have had their accounts shut down.)

Prostitution 3.0 doesn't account for this kind of discrimination by online banking services and social media—institutions on which sex workers increasingly rely.

One of the few groups not led by sex workers to raise these concerns is the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Its guide for sex workers, authored by Nadia Kayyali, should sound familiar bells for anyone who works with human rights advocates. There is no magic app or perfect tool, only a set of practices sex workers can adopt to minimize harm and exposure. (These principles are also familiar to sex workers, who are among the early adopters of harm reduction—safer sex for safer sex work—as an occupational safety strategy.)

These tools and strategies don't take powers normally reserved for police and instead enshrine them in a piece of software. They put power directly in sex workers' hands.

Caterine did have a suggestion for such an app that could be of use in her community.

"Something like Zerobin: basically, a highly encrypted text communication version of Snapchat where messages automatically expire or saved info automatically deletes under certain conditions, i.e., typing in the wrong password, etc." Even with this app, clients could take advantage of the lack of a digital record, increasing some risks of coercion, but as Caterine points out, "That's certainly always going to be an issue in a system where people in the sex trades are too scared of getting arrested to report crimes or file lawsuits."

Of course, this sudden interest in decriminalization as a means by which to better erect technology in service of prostitution could end up putting developers in a mutually beneficial relationship with sex workers. But it likely won't. Not when the guy making the arguments—Professor Peppet—offers proposals like, "We could argue about the exact language that a state would use. But all you would be doing is saying: 'Look, if you're a pimp manipulating street walkers, we're still going to criminalize that behavior while allowing the technology company or a startup, who was creating a Web app, to do something without being prosecuted.'"

All this sounds like is the creation of a more on-brand brothel cleaned up for the data age, run for the benefit of men who would previously never associate with such a business.

Which is what "Prostitution 3.0" is really about, the most perennially " disruptive" thing of our era: a man selling his idea. It's a business, after all, just one that provides more value for him than it does to sex workers.

Follow Melissa Gira Grant on Twitter.

In the late 90s, Belle and Sebastian's Stuart David and his wife Karn David began collaborating at Glasglow art shows. That collaboration grew into a project called Looper, which released a single on Subpop, and things kept going from there. Now, almost two decades later, Looper is releasing a five-CD career-spanning box set on April 14, via Mute.

Belle & Sebastian are twee and cute and all, but Looper's track "Mondo 77" shies away from that. It's a catchy, minimalist dance tune, and the new video pairs it with some found footage of weird shit, like little kids twirling ribbons and people dancing to disco. It's a good time all around.

Preorder the Looper box set here.

An early photographer of American punk rock, Brad Elterman captured many of the greatest musicians of the 70s and 80s at the height of their beauty and talent. Le Reve is a column that follows the photographer on his continuing adventures. Brad has been living the dream for decades, and he still takes photographs every day and stocks the swimming pool at his Bel Air home, Villa Le Reve, with beautiful women, artists, fashionistas, and cultural luminaries. In this installment of Le Reve, Brad reconnects with the mysterious and reclusive Christiane F. for the first time since 1981.

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It has been 34 years since I last saw Christiane F. at our photo session on Hollywood Boulevard in 1981. She was flown from Germany to Los Angeles to promote the massively popular cult film based on her life, and I was some kid with a camera on assignment for a German magazine. As I recall, her English was a bit limited, but the film's director, Uli Edel, was there to help. I remember seeing her at the Rainbow with my pal Rodney Bingheimer after our photo session, but then she was gone. She flew back to Berlin, and 34 years passed very quickly.

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Many younger people have asked me about that photo session over the last couple of years. They all say the same thing: "oh, so cool." Personally I find all the admiration a bit puzzling, considering the book and film were about a teenage heroin addict who sells her body for dope.

Thanks to some lovely friends, I was reconnected with Christiane once again, this time in Berlin. We dined and spoke about friends from back in the day. Christiane still had the same laugh, the same smile, those stunning cheekbones, and her remarkable love for life.

I wanted to connect with her again through the camera as I did during our youth. I didn't want to ask her any personal questions, because all of that stuff has been documented over and over again. I wanted to connect with her as a friend and not a reporter. Just like we did back in '81.

The photo session took place on the last day of my Berlin stay. It was a rotten, nasty, cold and wet Berlin day, something that Berliners are accustomed to. A far cry from our first session in sunny Hollywood, but no one cared.

We drove out to one of the remaining pieces of the Berlin wall and walked around with Leon, Christiane's ten-year-old Chow. School kids and tourists took iPhone photos of themselves in the background while I shot one roll of film with my pocket camera.

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Read VICE's previous interview with Christiane F here. Follow @bradelterman on Instagram.

This article was originally published by VICE Netherlands.

Maybe you, like me, decided at some point in your life that you'd had enough of soft drugs for a while. Whether this was the beginning of a smoke-free existence or just a hopeless case of hubris is irrelevant here; the point is that you stopped smoking weed for a bit. When you did, you probably also experienced a plethora of positive effects: You felt more energetic, found it easier to remember things, and stopped spending $20 a day on cheeseburgers and Doritos.

A few days after I quit smoking weed for the first time, I started dreaming again and those dreams seemed more vivid than ever. I realized that as a stoner, I actually hardly ever dreamt at all, and that the few dreams I had weren't half as intense as my dreams these days. What's up with that?

I decided to call Dr. Hans Hamburger, neurologist, somnologist (sleep expert), and head of Holland Sleep Research—a specialist research center for sleep disorders in the Netherlands.

According to Hamburger, this resurgence of dreams is common among former smokers; weed suppresses your REM sleep. When you put your rolling papers, pipe, or vaporizers away for a while, your REM sleep suddenly gets the free rein it had before you became a superficially sleeping stoner

Because I'm not a somnologist myself, I asked what REM sleep exactly is. "Every night, you go through about four or five sleep cycles," Hamburger replied. "Each cycle takes about ninety minutes, during which you go through different phases. There's superficial sleep, deep sleep, and finally REM sleep. During that REM period, you have most of your dreams. You don't usually remember your dreams if you continue sleeping. The last REM period just before you wake up takes the longest—and you'll only remember the dreams you had in that time if you wake up during it. If you don't wake up during the REM period, you won't remember a thing."

Does this mean you can't remember anything at all when you're sleeping? The answer seems to be no. "You only remember the things that happen while you're awake," said Hamburger. "We don't remember the things that happen while we are sleeping, because we're in a lowered state of consciousness. That has something to do with the fact that when you're asleep, you're processing the memories of things that happened during the day and essentially filing them away in your brain."

Dreams help you sort through the thousands of impressions and images you encounter every day. When you smoke weed regularly, that function is also suppressed. Dr. Hamburger confirms this: "By smoking weed, you suppress the REM sleep, and with that you also suppress a lot of important functions of that REM sleep. One of those functions is reliving the things you have experienced and coming to terms with them, as it were. Processing all kinds of psychological influences is something you do in REM sleep. You also anticipate the things that will happen the next day or the days after that. While you're sleeping, you already consider those and make decisions in advance."

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The less you give your brain the change to sort this shit out during REM sleep, the more dazed and confused you are during the day. This may explain why the seasoned stoner will often put off tasks and decisions until the very last minute: You failed to anticipate these issues properly, which is why you're late filing your taxes again, or can't remember where you left your house keys.

Alcohol, surprisingly, has the opposite effect: If you go to bed shitfaced, the phases of REM sleep last longer. That is not to say that drinking two bottles of vodka before going to bed will help you get a good night's sleep. "Too much alcohol suppresses the deep sleep and gives you more REM sleep, but it makes you more restless and wake up more often. If you drink way too much, you'll be twisting and turning all night and keep waking up," said Hamburger.

Anyway, back to smoking weed. The effect pot has on your night's rest is clear. But why are your dreams so hyper-realistic and feverish after you stop smoking?

"If you've been taking a drug that suppresses a certain phenomenon for a while, then that phenomenon will come back stronger when you stop using that drug," explained Hamburger. "That's what we call 'the rebound effect'—which is also noticeable in people who take a lot of sleeping pills. If they stop taking those, they often get very strange and intense dreams. That is also often the reason why people keep taking those sleeping pills—they become dependent on them, which is to say, addicted."

In other words: your body goes into sprint-dream-mode, and that is why your dreams are so intense. According to Hamburger, the body recovers from the rebound effect on its own over time. "It is a temporary attempt to catch up on all the dreaming you missed when you were smoking weed. It usually goes away after two to three weeks," he said. "Your body will know when it's all caught up and ready to go back to business as usual."