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This Sunday during a speech at South by Southwest, the Slovakian activist-turned-inventor Juraj Vaculík announced that his company, AeroMobile, plans to put a functional flying car on the consumer market by 2017. According to Vaculík , the craft will liberate us from traffic jams, overcome unreliable and uncomfortable short-haul air travel, and negate the problems of poor infrastructure in rural or less developed areas within our lifetimes.

"We need to move traffic from a 2D to a 3D space," Engadget quoted Vaculík as saying.

Although AeroMobile has been developing flying car prototypes since 2010 , the company first attracted widespread attention in 2013 when they made their first public demonstrations of a less than stable first model craft. Then, in October 2014 , they demonstrated a more sophisticated model of their vehicle at Austria's Pioneers Festival. Although only a two-seater , the contraption is the size of a limousine, using fold-down wings and a secondary conventional plane steering system to take off on patches of road or grass . It can climb to almost 10,000 feet and fly over 400 miles per trip at nearly 100 miles an hour.

Last month the Rocketeer-style Martin Jetpack company went public with a promising IPO and the claim it will release the gravity blasters onto the mass market next year. Developments like these make it seem like the world is finally fulfilling the promise made to all of us by mid-20th century sci-fi and cartoons. Yet as nice as it would be to believe that the future is finally now, this isn't the fist time someone's shown the world a functional flying car prototype and promised a revolution within a few years.

The AeroMobile design is both badass and a sure sign of the leaps and bounds of modern science over the disastrous flying automobiles of yesteryear. But even Vaculík publicly acknowledges that maneuvering all of the regulatory concerns around mass personal flight, then going on to make a safe and usable vehicle affordable, is a huge challenge. AeroMobile remains optimistic , but all indications suggest its vision of a zippy future still faces many hurdles.

We've actually been trying to build flying cars (and jetpacks for that matter) since the early 20 ^th century. As far back as 1917 , less than a decade after the Model T came out, an American inventor was making brief airborne jumps in a carriage outfitted with a motor and aluminum wings. Even Henry Ford himself got behind the idea for a time, and in the 1950s at least two designs were certified as flightworthy by the US government. Yet due to the unwieldy nature of the designs and the inefficiency of existing technologies and construction materials, most companies lost interest in the idea after test pilots met their untimely deaths .

Yet thanks to the development of new technologies (like carbon fiber chases , which keep weight down without making flying machines brittle death traps), the design and construction of a functional flyer has grown increasingly common in the new millennium. That's exactly why we've seen so many promising prototypes over the past decade. As early as 2004, we started hearing about a flying car from the Dutch company PAL-V, which had produced a functional gyrocopter-like prototype by 2009. As of 2012 , our friends at The Creator's Project were already reporting on the company's plans to release a commercial version of their flying car by 2014.

There was also a good deal of excitement a couple of years back about the Massachusetts-based Terrafugia , which in 2012 publicly tested a prototype they'd started working on in 2006 . Their cool folding wings, great conviction, and promises of future innovations like pop-up rotary blades to take off vertically from stalled traffic managed to convince about 100 people to drop $10,000 a pop for down payments on their own flying cars for delivery within a few years.

For all the hype and promise, though, these projects typically go quiet for ages, then announce that there will be some serious (almost perpetual) delays. Terrafugia once had hopes to get its cars out there by 2009 , but then faced a slew of regulatory conformity issues and had to push back several times . Their relative silence, and their wishy-washy this year or next stance on a current roll out date, may be part of the reason why the hopeful are turning toward AeroMobile now.

To his credit, Vaculík openly acknowledges how hard it can be to design a functional craft that complies with governmental regulations. (Flying cars need to comply with both existing aviation and driving laws regarding construction, driver licensing, and safety precautions, which often run at odds with each other, like requiring non-flight-friendly materials in cars for crash protection.)

"The technology is there," The Washington Post quoted Vaculík as saying in 2014. "So the biggest challenge has always been meeting the standards of regulators. Nothing is in place to deal with something like a flying car."

"We need to somehow deal with 100 years of bureaucracy in the air," he added to CNet recently, "and 100 years of bureaucracy on the road."

However Vaculík remains optimistic about his company's chances at getting around these regulatory constraints. New guidelines, like those issued in 2008 in America , allow flying cars to be regulated like "Light Sport Aircraft " in the sky, a less onerous designation than a full-fledged plane. And governments have shown willingness in the past to bend automobile construction regulations, allowing lighter glass for instance , in flying car prototypes seeking certification. Vaculík believes that he has the cooperation of the European Union to help him navigate, comply with, work around, and develop technologies to fill the gaps in existing regulatory frameworks—and he's confident that he can overcome these barriers by 2017, although he's kept quiet as to the details.

"We are currently finalizing the certification process for airworthiness in Slovakia," AeroMobil Chief Communications Officer Štefan Vadocz told VICE in an email. "As our chief designer, Stefan Kelin, is very experienced in automotive design and also aviation engineering, the prototype fulfills most of the requirements for both categories. We [also] started to develop AeroMobil 3.0 [the current model] with the regulations in mind."

He also explained that AeroMobil is cooperating with a number of major industry leaders like the Slovak Automotive Industry Association and the UK society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders in order to understand and navigate the intense regulatory challenges ahead.

Even if Vaculík manages to make an officially certifiably safe flying car, though, he still has to consider the issue of accessibility and the size of the market for what he produces. As of now, his craft and others set for release in the next few years run for something between $250,000 and $300,000 a piece (before factoring in the precedent of the aviation industry , where projected prices often jump substantially once production beings). Beyond the prohibitive costs, in order to comply with regulatory regimens, drivers (of cars and jetpacks alike) will need a separate small aircraft license.

"It is too early to speak about market price at this stage," admits Vadocz. "Only after completion of final configuration we will be able to set the price span [sic]."

However, he still thinks the company can retail on par with luxury crafts and get the one-up on the Cessna and small airplane market thanks to a few little perks and benefits:

"You don't need to change vehicles during your journey from A to B [in a flying car]," he explains. "AeroMobil is very efficient real door-to-door vehicle for medium distance travel [sic]."

A couple inventors in California have just embraced the cost barriers of flying cars, mocking up designs last year for the GF7, a high-end luxury car with a proper jet engine (unlike the gas-fed models marketed by other flying car makers) capable of traveling 550 miles per hour in the air. At $3 to $5 million for the prototype (similar to the cost for a private jet), they're hoping to sell based on coolness and convenience to the already rich, bypassing the image of a popular model.

Vaculík still dreams of the people's flying car, though, apparently going the Tesla route of releasing a high-end " Flying Roadster " to build visibility, confidence, and funding, before developing something that everyone can use and afford. Ideally, to get around the piloting and persisting safety issues , AeroMobile hopes to produce a fully automated , four-seat craft with an almost 900-mile flight range. Yet given the lack of real automated driving regulations on the ground, much less in the free-form space of the air, and the youth of automated driving technologies themselves , Vadocz said they were studying the potential for such mass-accessible flying cars, but as of now he couldn't give an ETA for a such a car, its cost, or the shape of the potential market for it.

The hopeful believe that there will be enough interest in elite vehicles to create a market amongst governments and mass consumers, driving down the costs of and greasing the tracks toward development and sales. Advocates point out that the technology will be attractive to any looking for more reliable and efficient short-length flights tailored to individual schedules and needs and to governments hoping to reduce infrastructure costs , especially in less populated regions .

Yet it's not clear if these benefits outweigh the sheer costs and risks of mass individual flight.

"If something goes wrong on your car," Leslie Kendall, curator of the Peterson Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, pointed out to the Los Angeles Times in 2012, "you can ease to the side of the road—not so much if something goes wrong in the air."

Vadocz claims that the new fail-safes, like parachute rescue systems, will ensure that even failing cars stay safe, and notes that automation technology is getting better and safer all the time. But that sill might not be enough to assure everyone of the car's human-error-proof safety.

Maybe the cost of materials will go down and demand will rise, as the flying car proponents hope. Maybe regulations will eventually come together in favor of safe and well-policed yet practical mass individual flight. Or maybe we'll find ways to ensure the safety of automation technologies and the further safety of drivers and passengers when those controls fail. But that's the thing: for now flying cars are almost just barely a possibility for one percenters. And the path between that and the modern equivalent of George Jetson getting his hands on one is studded with an almost infinite number of maybes and unforeseens that leave this tech and Vaculík's dreams exciting as a sign of the development of science, yet high questionable in practical terms.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

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One of the new Club 487 membership cards

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

It's been a turbulent few weeks for Club 487, South London's temple for one-handed pleasure-seekers and the capital's only remaining porn cinema. After it was raided by the Metropolitan Police in February, stories about the club appeared in the Evening Standard and the Mirror, bringing disproportionate national attention to this otherwise discreet local business. But despite online chatter suggesting that the venue may be in danger of closure, the good news for hand party enthusiasts is that it's still going strong.

With their license application displayed prominently on the front door, new membership cards printed and signing-in required for anyone looking for a quick wrist workout, it's clear that Club 487 is toeing the line as a private members' club. So do they expect another raid?

"Nah," says Danny, the duty manager. "Someone trying to cause trouble told lies about us, so the police came down, checked us out and found nothing. They haven't been back since."

Far from heralding the club's demise, recent weeks have seen improvements to the premises. There are new lockers for patrons to leave their bags and coats in, and poppers and lube on sale from reception at the top of the staircase that leads down into the dark pornographic underworld below. Talk among the clientele now is of further innovations to the business once the council paperwork has been signed off.

"They're gonna put glory holes in upstairs," says Sam, a short, sparky Irish guy with slicked-back Elvis hair, who wears a winkle pickers and a golfing jumper. He's a veteran of the wank shack scene, having been a regular at Mr. B's (formerly Fantasy Video) on City Road back in the day, as well as the Sunset Cinema in Soho in the 90s. "Glory holes are where it's at. There's demand, and it's more cost-effective than getting another screen. It's a better business proposition."

It's 3 PM on a Sunday afternoon. Sam sits on the safe that forms a makeshift table in the little antechamber before Club 487's main screening room and its two toss-booths. The computer-processed cries of women faking orgasms provide a soundtrack to our conversation.

"They're also gonna make the booths private," he continues. "VIP. With doors. So couples can book them. Then, if they want a bit of fun, they can call others in."

Whether this is true or not is impossible to say, with rumors floating around Club 487 like condom wrappers on the wind. But what seems certain in that the owners are confident of appeasing the local authorities and that big plans are afoot. Right now, though, the booths are not private—both contain sleeping men in their fifties, one in a stained leather jacket, the other in a suit with a ragged jumper beneath. It seems a far cry from the shiny sex emporium that Sam depicts, but then the owners of Club 487 view the premises primarily as a social club rather than a sex venue.

Sam is a family man with two grown-up kids. Why does he spend his Sunday afternoons here?

"I started going to the Sunset in Soho when my wife Frieda died," he says.

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He used to be a door-to-door salesman before he retired a few years ago.

"I sold windows. I'd come round your house at 8 PM and stay till 1:30 or two in the morning, 'til you signed that damn bit of paper. 'These windows cost us 20 grand, but I'll give them to you for five,' I used to say. I'd stay and get drunk with the customers. I walked out of one house half-cut with a green African parrot. Bloke didn't have enough money so he gave it me as part of the deal."

After he stopped working, his cinema visits became more frequent.

"I would go to Fantasy, and then Mr. B's when it changed owners. They're great places, the cinemas, as long as you watch out for the dippers. You can spend as long as you like, and they're warm, too. I've made loads of friends. Kevin, for one, who comes here most weekends. He's a lawyer. We send each other Christmas cards now. There's no way we would have met if it weren't for porn cinemas."

"Why would I? Men who drink together and wank together—they're closer."

It's a touching story, but as we walk into the main room and sit down the whole row vibrates as the man at the end enjoys himself vigorously to Fatal Erection, playing on the huge HD screen in front of us. I wonder whether the other patrons' activities ever put Sam off?

"Not at all," he says. "Everyone's got needs, ain't they? What's the problem with a few people getting together to watch a movie? There's far worse things going on out there. Close this place down and it'll just go underground."

How many times a week does he visit?

"Not so much now—I live north of the river and it takes me an hour on the bus each way. But before I'd be visiting the cinemas seven times a week, no problem."

Every day? Seriously?

"Why not? My mates go, you can bring a flask and there's naked girls getting done on screen. What more could you ask for?"

And he doesn't mind his mates being there while he enjoys the movies?

"Why would I? Men who drink together and wank together—they're closer, like."

It's an intriguing viewpoint, and one presumably shared by most of Club 487's growing fan base.

"She's so pretty. And she drinks it down," he says. "Drinks it down."

Later, the vibe switches up as an attractive woman in her twenties arrives with her partner. She sits naked in the front row. To the sound of Gregorian chant music from The Sexorcist, playing on the main screen, guys still wearing jackets and tracksuits take it in turns to mount her while others watch and show their appreciation manually. With bowed shoulders they amble over, wanking with deep concentration, each awaiting his turn. After a while the action moves to the floor. There is the sound of persistent panting. Finally, finished for now, the girl climbs back into her seat and nestles her head romantically on her partner's shoulder.

"I hope you guys had a good time," says Danny as I leave.

Does he ever go down to enjoy the fun himself?

"Me? Nah. I just sit here in the office, keep myself to myself and count the money. I'm a family man."

The Frenchman that follows me out has certainly made the most of it. Describing the girl downstairs, his face lights up in wonder.

"She's so pretty. And she drinks it down," he says. "Drinks it down," he repeats meditatively.

In spite of recent unrest, Club 487 is still thriving and, today at least, is clearly still both keeping London's swingers happy and providing a place for men like Sam to come and have a beer and a wank with their mates.

Follow John on Twitter.

St. Patrick's Day in Savannah is quite an experience. Thousands of tourists flock to this little city on the East Coast where imbibing in the streets is legal, ready to drink green beer and stumble around on the cobble stones of the town's famed River Street. By 8:30 AM the screaming wakes you up. I had my first drink at 9:30 AM and proceeded to get fairly intoxicated by noon. Lunch consists of whatever food vendor you stumble into, and then you go right back to drinking. People are dressed like extras in a weird, Paddy's Day–themed sequel to Mad Max or Tank Girl. Most enjoy having their photos taken, except when they're leaned over vomiting on the sidewalk. By nightfall most tourists are passed out, and only the strongest are still going hard. The next day is gross. Trash and vomit riddle the streets. Pollen has covered every car and street sign, and the tourists who are still awake are stumbling around, trying to find a cold beer to stave off the inevitable hangover. This year I attempted to capture the chaos as best I could.

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Bolivian President Evo Morales. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Which world leader declared that he wants to remove the panties of female ministers as he strummed a lute in his country's main plaza? Or that he beds members of his country's most prominent indigenous women's organization?

Many would be surprised to hear that it's Bolivia's Evo Morales. But Morales' Rob Ford-ish quotes are not the news-making international headlines one might assume. Instead, he has been winning a place in the hearts of many people of conscience for his progressive reforms to the poor South American country's laws and constitution—paying particular attention to women.

Since Morales came to power, he has enshrined electoral gender parity in the constitution and passed a law to combat violence against women. Entitled "The Law to Guarantee Women a Life Free of Violence," it names 16 forms of violence against women and sets the punishment for femicide at 30 years in jail with no possibility of parole.

But many criticize the law for having no teeth. Among the loudest critics are Mujeres Creando, a renowned Bolivian feminist organization. They are the sharp stone in Morales' quinoa soup.

According to Bolivia's Center for Women's Information and Development (CIDEM), since the law's approval in March 2013 the rate of femicides has increased and only a handful of perpetrators have been busted, leaving over 90 percent of reported femicides unpunished.

Andrea Callejas coordinates the Mujeres Creando centre in Bolivia's capital, La Paz. "The law was a reaction to protests around Hanalí Huaycho, a journalist murdered by her policeman husband, something that happens every day," she says. "People started to ask why the government does nothing. Two or three months later, there was a law, made very fast and badly. And nothing has happened."

Ask about Mujeres Creando in Bolivia and you will hear words of praise for their work to dismantle machismo, but you will invariably hear they are too radical, locas, and man-haters. It is not surprising; for them, nothing is sacred. They even dare to take a stab at Latin America's most beloved revolutionary hero: Che Guevara. One of their most notorious pieces of graffiti, scrawled across neighbourhoods in Bolivia, reads: "Evo and Che are the same: irresponsible fathers."

These are two of countless men who have made Mujeres Creando's list of irresponsible fathers, one of many tactics to break machismo. Published in their magazine, the Malhablada, and announced over their FM station, Radio Deseo, the list is so effective at encouraging men to make alimony payments and pick up the slack that, in some cases, just the threat of being added to the list has resolved months of missing child support payments.

The CIDEM reports that, in recent years, not only has the number of femicides in Bolivia increased, but also their violent nature: a woman's eyes are sliced out with a knife after she's been raped; a pregnant woman is gang raped by her partner and his friends and then beaten to death; and a woman in her third trimester is killed by a hitman hired by her husband. CIDEM likens the female body in Bolivia to a battlefield.

Greta Vargas of Mujeres Creando lives in Santa Cruz, where she is the coordinator of one of Mujeres Creando's two legal clinics, Women in Search of Justice, dedicated to providing legal support to women facing gendered violence.

The mayor of her city, Percy Fernandez, holds a double title: last year, Evo Morales lauded him as the best mayor in Bolivia; he also holds the unofficial record for the most times being caught on national television groping prominent women, including a renowned journalist. Morales has remained quiet on the second point.

"Violence always existed," Vargas says. "The difference now is that there is more awareness...NGOs, the government, and so on, say you should denounce violence, but it is contradictory. When you go to the police they want to get rid of you, the authorities doubt you. They are helping to create a man who knows that the police won't do anything, discrediting the word of women. Impunity. This society is making monsters that can kill."

Callejas echoes what many women are saying: that this is a backlash from men as "more women are rebelling and achieving their dreams."

Impunity for rape and murder isn't only awarded to jealous exes. In September, Maria Galindo, co-founder of Mujeres Creando, presented a new film with an uncut interview: an indigenous cleaning woman speaks for the first time about about being drugged and raped by a legislator in a government building during a New Year's party. The state defended the rapist and ignored the woman. In the background of the interview, left there for the obvious effect, a parliamentary session led by Evo Morales, laughing and smiling, runs its course.

It is no wonder another of the group's popular graffiti reads: "Behind every happy woman is an abandoned machista."

In this episode of American Obsessions, we take a look at the beloved game of pinball, starting with controversial history and days of corruption and then diving into the story of a family rooted deep in the nostalgic game's past and future.

Between the 1940s and 1970s, pinball was banned in some of the biggest cities in the United States due to claims that it was a mafia-run gambling scheme that was corrupting the youth of America. It wasn't until 1976 that expert Roger Sharpe testified in court to demonstrate that pinball was a game of skill and not luck, after which the ban was lifted in New York City.

This, however, wasn't the end of the game's long battle for legality and legitimacy, and some cities today still do not allow pinball in their districts. But these days, the game is making a comeback—both in court and in the world of gaming.

In the above video, VICE follows pinball fans, including breakout musician Mac Demarco and beloved playfield artist Dirty Donny, to learn more about the game's place in American pop culture. We then travel to the 2014 annual Pinball Expo in Chicago to meet with the Sharpe family and watch the best players in the world battle for the title.

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Image via Denver's NBC News9.

In a Denver courtroom on March 13, a man named Richard Kirk pleaded not guilty to the first-degree murder of his wife, Kristine. He doesn't dispute that he killed her—according to the statement of probable cause, Kirk, without being questioned, told the officer arresting him that he had killed his wife. But Kirk's attorneys argue that the legally purchased marijuana edible he had consumed before the incident had so clouded his mind that he couldn't be held culpable for his actions.

Even in a state still grappling with how to handle legalized marijuana, it seems like an awful lot of responsibility to heap on a product called Karma Kandy Orange Ginger—the candy that, according to the search warrant affidavit obtained by VICE, was listed on a receipt found in the Kirks' basement on the night of the murder.

Troy Bisgard, the Denver Homicide Unit detective who responded to the scene last April, testified last year that there was a small amount—the exactly level was unspecified—of THC (and no other controlled substance) found in Kirk's blood; he did not speculate as to whether this played a role in the murder.

According to the affidavit, Denver police officers were dispatched to the Kirk residence around 9:30 PM on April 14, 2014. Officially, it was a domestic disturbance call—Kristine had told the 9-1-1 dispatcher that her husband was talking about the end of the world and was begging her to shoot him; he was holding a gun they normally kept in a locked safe. Kristine went on to say that her husband had eaten marijuana edibles, she believed he was hallucinating, and that he was terrifying the couple's three young children. At the end of the 9-1-1 call, Kristine screamed and then, after an apparent gunshot, the line went silent. She was pronounced dead on the scene at 9:58 PM.

According to local news reports from last fall, friends of the couple say Richard began being verbally abusive to Kristine at least six weeks before the shooting. This was around the time he started putting his paychecks in a private account rather than the couple's joint account. In addition to what friends reported to be a massive amount of credit card debt, a public records search conducted by VICE indicated that Richard had been on the receiving end of three tax liens from the IRS, the last two being issued in 2010. According to a report from CBS last year, a detective testified that Kristine was covered by a $340,000 life insurance policy.

In short, there seems to have been more than enough discord in the Kirk household to point to a possible motive—which might well discredit the "pot made me do it" argument. But there are those who believe there could be some merit in Kirk's likely marijuana defense. Karen Steinhauser, a Colorado legal analyst, told Denver's CBS affiliate over the weekend that there is precedent for a certain kind of intoxication as "a complete defense to a charge."

"[When] the substances produce an effect that was not anticipated," Steinhauser said, "then you have an involuntary intoxication." Such a scenario might mean Kirk would not be held legally responsible for his wife's murder.

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A selection of marijuana edibles. Photo via Wiki Commons

So just how likely is it that THC affected Kirk so aggressively and adversely? In 2014, the year recreational marijuana became legal to sell, purchase, and possess in Colorado, there were at least 56 calls to the Rocky Mountain Poison and Drug Center from adults 19 and older that were believed to be related to marijuana. There have also been some high-profile cases of edibles in particular causing distress. Most famously, Levy Pongi, a 19-year-old exchange student from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, ate a single cookie that contained what is believed to be more than six standard dosages of THC, then leapt to his death out of a fourth-story window.

In the wake of Pongi's death and the Kirk killing, Barbara Brohl, the executive director of the Colorado Department of Revenue State Licensing Authority, signed a set of emergency rules governing the labeling and sale of edibles last July. The rules stipulate that one "serving" of THC be limited to ten milligrams, and that products that contain multiple servings be clearly indicated. Richard Kirk's public defender claims that, prior to the his wife's death, Kirk consumed 100 milligrams of THC—in other words, enough to send any ordinary pot user completely round the bend. (It is unknown how much experience he had with marijuana and edibles.)

But would that be enough to make Kirk hallucinate, as his wife said he did moments before he killed her? Dr. Cheryl Corcoran, who studies biological markers of risk and illness progression in schizophrenia at Columbia, has written that that marijuana can cause hallucinations in approximately one in every seven people. The National Institute of Health says that too much weed can indeed cause "auditory hallucinations, paranoid feelings of being persecuted, depersonalization, derealization, anxiety, grandiosity, irritability."

Richard Kirk's trial begins October 26. No matter the outcome, it's unlikely to change the legal status of legal marijuana in Colorado—not with the tax revenue from pot sales being used to fund substance abuse programs in schools. But it could well serve as a point of contention in states where battles over legalization rage on.

Follow Paul Thompson on Twitter.

Sex is everywhere. It's in our commercials, our television shows, our music, our art. There are songs about getting laid or not getting laid, books that examine sexual awakenings of various sorts, movies that center around the two leads getting into bed with one another, and incredibly long sitcom plot arcs devoted to the question of whether certain characters will bone one another.

If you were someone who didn't understand sexual attraction on a basic level—if you didn't really get why people liked doing that stuff so much—this might be a bit confusing. How would you perceive a rom-com, for example? Or appreciate any music after 1950? If you had no intention of ever having sex, would the world even make sense?

To find out I took to online asexual forums and did some asking around. You may know this already, but the term asexual refers to people with very low or nonexistent sex drives. Three such people agreed to share their stories, as well as some perceptions of modern culture. Here's what they said.

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Zak

Looking back I realize that I felt different at around 12, but it wasn't until 17 that I knew for sure. The defining moment was at this crazy party with some of my friends. One of the chicks started flashing her breasts and all the guys went wild, but it hardly even got my attention. Before then I'd always doubted my asexuality, but seeing a half-naked woman for the first time and not even flinching, that confirmed it.

The reason is this: Whether you're asexual or not, everyone finds certain things beautiful. But art, sunsets, flowers, paintings, and songs don't have any sexual desire attached to them. In the same way, I can find the naked female body beautiful, but it also doesn't have any sexual connotations for me. To me it's an artistic beauty and seeing a half-naked woman was the same. Would you start yelling and going wild over a painting?

This is why certain things never make sense to me. Like seeing a woman try to get out of a speeding ticket by flirting with the cop. I don't know why the hope of sex would tempt someone to do something they wouldn't usually do. It makes the mere concept of Hooters completely baffling. Eating there won't get you laid. A hygienic waitress is an asset; one in tight shorts is probably a liability.

I find a surprising amount of things are determined and driven by sexual desire. Like the examples I used above, but also in basically any other interaction. Whether it's a job interview, meeting a potential new friend, or even just a brief interaction with a stranger on the street. How people react to you is pretty much mostly driven by how attractive they find you. I find that so strange.

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Wagner

I'm from Rio de Janeiro. I'm a city boy, an only son, and I wasn't allowed to leave the house because the city was too dangerous. So I passed the time with my toys and cartoon shows, or by just playing on the computer.

When I was six I made a bet with my cousins that I'd never date. They scoffed and offered me a McDonalds Happy Meal for every year that I stayed single after 16. To me it was a perfect bet, and I won every year, but only one of them paid the meal. The rest said they couldn't remember agreeing.

It always bugged me that even smart people are interested in sex and relationships. People I regarded as intelligent friends would always talk about this "special something" they couldn't describe and I couldn't feel. The fact that this experience excluded me was, and still is, devastating. I spent many years wondering if I was the true alien.

Why sex? We as a civilization are so much more advanced than just this one particular impulse. Why not make another impulse central? It could be food or breathing adequately. Sex is not even necessary to survival since IVF was invented. And I don't understand why there are so many songs about sex and how awesome it feels, but there're almost none about chocolate or other foods. How many songs do you know about food? Almost none. That's never made sense to me.

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Kristopher

I'm half Polish, but I was born and raised in New Jersey. At first I thought I was bisexual, that is until about two years ago. I was sick of being constantly bombarded by dick pics whenever I opened my OkCupid account, so I was looking for some other answers. When I found an article about asexuality I cried for the longest time. Finally there was a label that actually made sense: homoromantic, gray-asexual. This means I'm romantically attracted to other men, but my sex drive is extremely low. The solace I found in that long slur of seemingly meaningless, non-compoundable words was ineffable.

The best explanation I can offer to justify my lack of interest in sex involves ice cream. It sounds absurd, but hear me out. Relationships are like ice cream cones, and ice cream is kind of like sex. I've tried vanilla ice cream and I've tried chocolate, but in the end the thing that really got me going was the cone. I could nibble on the same cone all day long. But people keep looking at my cone and telling me to load it with ice cream. I don't need any of the extra flavorings that ice cream brings. I'm perfectly content. All I want is the common denominator: the cone, the baseline, the snappy personality.

My mom once told me jokingly, "I love France, but hate the French." Sometimes that's how I feel about our planet. We've built stunning architecture, created cultures, enslaved one another, abolished slavery, and re-enslaved each other. Human beings have so much potential, but we get caught up in all the wrong things.

To be honest I thought I had an advantage over 99 percent of people for a while, just because my judgment wasn't clouded by thoughts of hound-doggedness. I think a lot of asexuals look down on sexual people at some point or another. It happens when you're such a small minority.

Follow Julian on Twitter

Illustrations by Carla Uriarte

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Tonight at Manhattan's Dashwood Books, Brooklyn-based photographer David Brandon Geeting will launch the first-ever monograph of his work, which is being published by Pau Wau Press. Titled Infinite Power, the book sports a foreword by art writer Christopher Schreck and almost 100 juicy full-color pages of Geeting's slapstick compositions. Humor is a driving force of the book, which combines glossy commercial outtakes, sublime still lifes, and flattened, confusing excerpts from the real world. It all adds up to a queer kind of street photography, which remixes Geeting's personal life with his life as a professional photographer for publications like Bloomberg Businessweek, The Fader, The New York Times Magazine, and VICE.

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Outside New York's Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art street vendors sell artwork alongside carts selling hot dogs and falafels. The works on view here are considerably less stuffy than those typically shown inside the museum. They range from pop art replicas starring celebrities to bootleg Picassos to funky metal and glass sculptures of cats to photographs of Times Square in which only the yellow taxi cabs are in color. Since Geeting's work is anything but highfalutin', we figured these art dealers might have some insight to offer. So we sent our correspondent Sergiy Barchuk to the Upper East Side to ask them what they thought.

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VICE: Which photo was your favorite?
Minno: This one is funny and this one is a little bit sad. I think it's a cemetery, in my thinking.

I noticed you laughed when you saw that one.
Yeah, yeah, because it's funny. The girl is so silly with the cucumber. So silly and funny.

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Please look through the book and tell me which photos you like and why you like them.
Andrew: Very abstract, very abstract. I like this.

How come?
I'm hungry. Haha.

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Is there one that stands out? Any favorites?
Nicolas: Yeah, this one.

You like that one? Why?
I don't know. It's like, philosophical.

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What do you like about this one?
Jacob: Sometimes it's just hard to explain. It's like when you look at something you can feel something different about it. You know? That's what really captures me. So these are orange peels or lime peels, or lemon peels.

What does it make you feel?
Oh, the mood. OK, if I'm looking at this one, I'm feeling the mood of modern art, pop culture. That's what I'm getting from it... The other thing I'm reminded of black-and-white spots, I don't know if that's in the late 80s or 70s, you know, polka dots were so popular back then. You don't see polka dots anymore. People are just wearing garbage now.

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I like this one too.

What do you like about that one?
It's just that the rotten bananas underneath and you're shooting or something with the finger pointing like this. I mean how often do you see a banana this rotten? As soon as has a little black spot it's in the garbage, I don't want to see any more.

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VICE: What do you like about this one?
Mustafah: I like the girl, it looks like she's enjoying herself.

See more of David Brandon Geeting's work on his website, and come to his book launch tonight at Dashwood Books. He will be signing copies, and he's a really friendly dude.

See more of Sergiy Barchuk's work on his website.

Scott Dekraai, the man behind the worst mass shooting in Orange County, California, history, may avoid the death penalty because prosecutors illegally obtained evidence from a paid jailhouse snitch. As the Orange County Register reported this week, Dekraai's lawyers and the judge overseeing the case allege that the informant, a Mexican mafia leader named Fernando "Wicked" Perez known for cooperating with prosecutors, was part of a shady long-term project meant to gather as much evidence as possible against high-profile defendants—even when they weren't in an interrogation room.

California policies on the use of jailhouse informants to convict criminal defendants are relatively strict, and for good reason. Because they can receive reduced sentences in exchange for their testimony, jailhouse snitches have every incentive in the world to claim that they heard a defendant confess to a crime. To counteract this, the California Department of Justice requires that the senior assistant state attorney general approve the use of each jailhouse snitch based on the existence of a recording of the informant receiving the confession—as well an assessment of whether the individual has a record of reliability or might have inside information. Furthermore, a 2011 California law bans the use of informants whose testimony is uncorroborated.

These laws were the result of a culture of snitch testimony in the 1980s, when in California alone at least 225 cases involving jailhouse informants had to be re-examined, as the New York Times reported back in 1989. A man named Leslie Vernon White was at the center of the mess. He offered testimony in at least a dozen cases, each time claiming to have heard the defendant confess to the crime. As a result, he was furloughed, during which time he beat his wife, pulled a knife on his landlady, and stole a purse. To mitigate his punishment, White essentially informed on himself, explaining to the police how he had made a career as a jailhouse snitch. The scheme boiled down to White calling up a specific case's prosecutor posing as an LAPD sergeant. The prosecutor would describe the particulars of the case to White, who would then call the prison's bailiff, this time posing this time as a DA, ordering that he and the prisoner he was trying to snitch on be transferred to court for interviews. That way, he had the who/what/where/when/why of the case, as well as a record that he and the poor guy he was about to inform on had been in the same place at the same time.

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Image via Wellcome Library

When White explained what he had done on 60 Minutes in 1989, more than a few Californians thought tougher rules needed to be enacted to allow a jailhouse snitch to testify. But despite the state's efforts, malfeasance with jailhouse snitches continues. Which begs the question: If they're such a hassle, and entail the risk of having a case thrown out, why do prosecutors still use them?

For one, they're incredibly effective at securing convictions. Juries tend to find confessions very compelling, and it seems wrong to disallow testimony of a confession just because the person doing the testifying is in prison. Hardline anti-snitch advocates might prefer that informants only be used if they have not been given any reward for their testimony, but this too seems too extreme—there are very real consequences in the criminal underworld for snitching, and relying on the public-spiritedness of convicted people isn't likely to bear fruit.

The effectiveness of jailhouse informant testimony is also precisely why it is so dangerous. Evidence of this effectiveness that paints the practice in a decidedly negative light comes from the Innocence Project, which claims that "in 15 percent of wrongful conviction cases overturned through DNA testing, statements from people with incentives to testify... were critical evidence used to convict an innocent person." That figure, while terrifying, combines both jailhouse informants and co-defendants who snitch on their partners in exchange for a lighter sentence. But the situation is even darker when restricted to death row cases. According to a 2005 report by the Northwestern University Center on Wrongful Convictions, of 111 death row exonerations since the 1970s, 51 were men convicted with the help of testimony from "witnesses with an incentive to lie."

False testimony is the leading cause of wrongful conviction among men on death row. That's why the Innocence Project emphasizes the importance of declaring any benefits jailhouse informants receive and allowing judges to explain to the jury that snitches should be seen as potentially unreliable. The Center on Wrongful Convictions' recommendations are similar, with an emphasis on only admitting testimony about conversations if those conversations have been recorded.

These proposals are popular among reformers; the American Bar Association's Criminal Justice magazine supported them in 2003, along with the idea of using expert testimony to further communicate to jurors that snitches have been found unreliable in the past. Pew Trusts' the Justice Project adds that jurors should be made aware of the background of the jailhouse informant, including his criminal history (which is never spotless) and whether he is a "career informant" who has been used by prosecutors in the past.

These all sound like reasonable proposals that should limit the harm done by jailhouse informants while still allowing the prosecution to use them in support of the truth. Even the most ardent reformers can't reasonably ask that they be banned entirely, as the idea of defendants gleefully recounting their crimes to cellmates in the full knowledge that they cannot testify against them is unpalatable. But even these reforms cannot overcome the human fallibility of jurors.

In a fascinating pair of recent papers, University of Alabama in Huntsville Professor Jeffrey Neuschatz and his co-authors tested the effectiveness of jailhouse informants through a series of experiments. In a 2008 paper, the authors had a sample of college students and community members read an abbreviated transcript of a trial. Some of the subjects read a transcript that included the testimony of a jailhouse informant to whom the defendant had confessed his crime privately—crucially, there were two versions, one in which the informant received a benefit for his testimony and another in which he did not—while the control group's transcript had no such testimony. Overall, the addition of this "secondary confession" raised the average rate of conviction to 71 percent from 30 percent in the control settings. The subjects did not, however, seem to care whether the informant was benefiting from testifying: The difference in conviction rates between those two samples was not statistically significant. Because this is somewhat surprising, the researchers performed a second experiment in which the incentive was made more explicit (the transcript included a question to the informant as to whether he got five years off his sentence in exchange for testifying, and the snitch responded, "Yes sir, I did."). But again, the experimental jurors were no less likely to convict in the face of an obvious conflict of interest.

The results of a 2012 follow-up study are even more surprising. Using a similar setup, there were two new manipulations: the addition of an expert witness who testified to the unreliability of jailhouse snitches, or the addition of information that the snitch who was testifying had similarly testified (with a benefit) either zero, five, or 20 times in the past. Astonishingly, the jurors remained unshakable in their trust of the jailhouse snitch, and none of the information that might have caused them to doubt his credibility had any impact. Previous studies had testified to the effectiveness of confessions in swaying juries, and even though this confession was communicated secondhand by someone the jurors were prompted to view as unreliable, the strength of the confession dramatically increased the conviction rate.

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Image via Wellcome Library

Although evidence from studies like these is less than definitive, it does cast doubt upon the effectiveness of even the more extensive precautions a state like California has enacted. And that makes the behavior of the DA's office in the Dekraai case even more troubling. Dekraai seems to be dead-to-rights guilty of a heinous crime, but he may go through several more years of litigation because the snitch's testimony against him was illegal. Though some might dismiss that as a bullshit legal technicality, making sure all the rules are followed is important, even and perhaps especially if the cops are trying to strengthen a case against someone they strongly suspect is guilty.

Just look at the case of Steven Manning.

Sentenced to death for murder in 1993, former Chicago cop Manning's conviction hinged on the testimony of Tommy Dye, a jailhouse informant with ten felony convictions and a dozen nicknames (including "William Zonka"). In exchange for testifying that he had heard Manning confess, Dye got off eight years chopped off his sentence. And the testimony itself was somewhat suspect: Dye claimed to have captured the confession on a tape recorder provided by the FBI, but according to a report in the Chicago Tribune, when he went to play the tapes in court, the confession wasn't there. Dye explained this away by claiming the confessions existed in two small blips in the recordings, "one caused by a malfunction, the other by Dye bending over inadvertently and covering the microphones tucked under the waistband of his underwear," as the paper put it. Manning's conviction was eventually overturned.

But Manning, it turns out, was an unsavory character after all. After his release, he changed his name to Steven Mandell and got into some nasty stuff: In February of last year, the Associated Press reported that he was "convicted of plotting to kidnap, torture, extort money, and then kill and dismember Riverside businessman Steve Campbell in an office he and an accomplice had equipped with saws and a sink in which to drain the person's blood."

So as terrible as being wrongly convicted because of a snitch's testimony might be, the scariest part of cops and prosecutors not following the law surrounding the use of jailhouse snitches—as appears to have happened in the Dekraai case—is that guilty people might catch a break.

Follow Kevin Michael on Twitter.

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The drugs page on the now shuttered Evolution marketplace. Screenshot via

The darknet's biggest contraband marketplace has vanished in a suspected $12 million swindle that's sent tremors of panic through the online drug-buying community. Evolution—which had become the go-to site for anything from heroin and ketamine to guns and fake passports since the FBI closed down Silk Road 2.0 in November—appears to have been a lavish scam.

On Tuesday, Evolution's administrators—whose pseudonyms are Vert and Kimble—brought the shutters down on their site and ran off with all the money drug dealers and buyers had stored in their accounts. The amount of bitcoins hoarded, according to a number of Evolution merchants, amounts to around $12 million.

One Evolution customer, TripAddict, posted on Reddit's darknet markets forum (all sic):

100% confirmed Evo is donzo. God dammit. I'm happy and sad at the same time. I was about to deposit about 200 worth of BTC and then this happens. Glad i didnt get fucked. I feel for the people who did tho.

To the Evo admins who scammed: I hope you enjoy the 12M and screwing thousands of dealers and loyal buyers you fucking cunts.

Shortly beforehand, NSWGreat, a drug dealer on Evolution who claims to know the site's administrators, warned users (all sic):

I hate to [be] the bearer of bad news, but I've been suspicious the past few days with withdrawals not working and admins usually are more forth coming in explaining to me why they're slow but they weren't this time.

I have admin access to see parts of the back end, the admins are preparing to exit scam with all the funds. Not a single withdrawal has gone through in almost a week. Automatic withdrawals has been disabled.

I am so sorry, but Verto and Kimble have fucked us all. I have over $20,000 in escrow myself from sales.

I can't fucking believe it, absolute scum. I am giving this warning to you all as soon as I possibly could of.

Evolution had been one of two main darknet sites—the other is Agora—to pick up the slack after the demise of Silk Road 2.0 last year, when the FBI seized $3.7 million worth of bitcoins stored in its users' accounts. Last month, Ross Ulbricht was convicted of running the original Silk Road.

This is not the first time darknet markets have turned out to be a scam. In 2013, those running two sites—Atlantis and the Sheep Marketplace—made off with all the bitcoins. The Sheep scam netted the site's turncoat administrators an estimated $5.3 million.

Accessed through the anonymous browser Tor, Evolution had a reputation as a busy, reliable, and efficient marketplace, which is perhaps why so many people got stung.

Mike Power, the author of Drugs 2.0: The Web Revolution That's Changing How the World Gets High, told me there would be serious fallout from the Evolution robbery.

"Evolution was the best-designed, best-coded, and best-administrated of all the darknet markets. It had the look and feel of a legitimate website—pages loaded quickly and uptime was very solid," he explained. "The guys behind it were old-school hackers and carders from the Tor Carding Forum, and had good technical expertise.

"This was a brilliantly executed, breathtakingly huge scam and should serve as a warning to all dark web shoppers to never store their bitcoins in a centralized marketplace such as this. Users can't trust anything or anyone—but even that level of uncertainty is better for many than dealing face to face with regular dealers.

"Someone, possibly multiple people, will probably be killed in connection to this, by the way. The site owners have just ripped off thousands of drug dealers. Many dealers there operate on credit terms for bigger dealers. It's an awful scenario, there will be a lot of blood spilt."

Last night, as news of Evolution's demise spread, a new darknet site called Ironclad appeared. Its stated purpose: "to be complete, reliable, and secure."

Whether users and dealers believe this mission statement is another matter altogether.

Follow Max on Twitter.

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Lemon kush. Photo via Flickr user Mark

Though one can still be arrested for the mere possession of weed in Canada, we don't seem all too concerned about that. We smoke joints in parks and conduct terribly obvious handoffs on street corners. And though our government insists it doesn't recognize weed as a medicine, it also, you know, recognizes weed as a medicine, as people can be exempted from the law if they have a medical license. Obtaining such a license within the confines of our stoney country can be difficult enough. But in other countries, the chase can seem prohibitive. In some cases, a medicinal stoner might just decide to stay home and avoid a sad and fruitless pursuit of sinsemilla and the pain that comes without it.

Luckily, there are a few professional stoners in Canada who are willing to direct the rest of us away from our general derpiness and onto the path of some dece dank. Mark Klokeid, otherwise known as The Weed Guy, smokes weed for medicinal purposes. In 2003, doctors found a lump in his neck, and he was diagnosed with stage IV cancer. He vaped to get through the chemo, deal with the nausea, and get some sleep. He still has health concerns, and his body is still facing some difficulties following that.

But now, he's an advocate for the use of medicinal weed and runs a BC dispensary called iMedikate. He also founded kush.ca, where you will find video footage in which Klokeid gallavants through various countries in search of reefer.

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"Smoking weed takes your mind off of [the pain], gives you something else to focus on," he says. "There's a sense of community; there's a sense of ritual and spiritualism using cannabis."

Klokeid says it's possible to re-up in just about any country. But he always makes sure to do his research ahead of time to see if his federal exemption will help him. Obviously it's dumb to try to do the cross-border smuggle, given weed's cruel scent and the fact that it's likely to land your ass in jail. Klokeid breaks down the rules for weed-hunting abroad.

Step one: Bring your papers but also bring the paper that really matters, bribery cash.

"I recommend bringing some bribery money," Klokeid says. In most countries, if you plan to pursue some pot tourism, it's best to carry a few hundred extra dollars to pay off police. The trick usually works for him, but this is coming from a guy who has done time in a Hong Kong jail. A couple of years ago, he flew in from Amsterdam, was searched, and discovered with a roach in his pocket. Because he's a diabetic, he had to be transported to a medical prison ward before going to court.

"I was in there with Tanzanian drug dealers, four or five of them, and they were handcuffed to the bed. They were pooping out little black eggs, I don't know if it was heroin or hash or what it was."

His court date went as well as could be hoped: he was fined the equivalent of about $50 and set free. In China, he says, he doesn't think anything too terrible would ever happen. (If you're in western China and happen to visit Kashgar, you can buy hash at the open market.) "I think at worst, they'd take your passport and tell you to get the hell out of the country. You know, they'll blacklist ya." You'd probably also have to pay some money, and maybe spend a few weeks in prison.

That said, government there recognized Klokeid's federal exemption. He had his papers with him, and he says the customs officers actually felt bad for him. Can't emphasize enough: Bring. Your. Papers.

OK, but what if you want to avoid such a fate?

One of the best places for weed shopping, according to Klokeid, is Nepal. It's not legal, but it grows naturally just about everywhere, so it's not hard to get. If you're there long enough, you can literally just go and pick some leaves and cure them yourself. There's also amazing hash. He's had good luck in Cambodia, too, and in Spain, where it's illegal to sell weed, but not to consume it. (That's provided you smoke up in your private home and refrain from doing bong rips out in the street like a fratty dick.) The compassion clubs in Spain recognize Klokeid's exemption and sometimes even hook him up with a discount. Jamaica, too, has good weed that's readily available (obviously).

In order to figure out how to get weed abroad, Klokeid gets friendly with the locals, finds one he trusts, and pays them a flat rate for a day tour, plus some extra so they'll bring him to the weed. Klokeid sometimes hires a translator, but he usually just uses Google translate to communicate. He goes to the same driver whenever he's in Cambodia. In Nepal, a dude once found him a 20-foot-tall plant.

On that note, we need to discuss how not to look sketch when attempting to purchase marijuana in other countries. It turns out getting a pot leaf tramp stamp might go a long way in that regard. Klokeid has a pot tattoo on his back, so when he wants some, he just shows it to the potential dealers and they "immediately relax" upon sight of it, apparently. Making people feel comfortable is key.

Also, make sure you're comfortable. Don't give anyone money until you see the product. Don't make yourself out to be wealthy, or you're begging to be robbed. If you're nervous, you can always make them smoke some first. Aside from that, he says it's simply a matter of going online and getting tips from stoners who have gone before. At the end of the day, it's stoner trust that'll get you through.

"You know what? Us pot smokers, when we look eye to eye, we tend to know who's on the right and who's not."

When all else fails, the internet will always help you get high. Klokeid was desperate for weed in Sri Lanka, and was about to fly out to a remote island off the coast. He went online and found himself in a thread on the subject. A guy said he should email him, because he had a huge stash of hash oil. He emailed, and was told to meet him at the airport. The dude showed up and saved Klokeid from days of discomfort and sleepless nights.

"[This island was] one of the hardest places to find weed if you had to. People watching my videos think I smuggled it, but I really scored it at the airport, you know. It's that kind of research you need to do if you're a patient like me."

In terms of countries where you're absolutely fucked: if you need weed, don't go to Singapore, Indonesia, or Korea.

"Indonesia is pretty bad. It's super, super illegal. In Singapore, I didn't even bother." Japan is also a pretty wretched part of the world to try to get stoned.

When I started writing this article, I wanted to explore how Canadians could get away with being medically sanctioned stoners in the US, Klokeid says it's simply a matter of going somewhere a Canadian exemption would translate, like Colorado, California, Washington, or Alaska. He brings his doctor's diagnosis and "seeks out places that are friendly," researching the requirements and legality of medical pot in those states before he goes.

"I wouldn't carry marijuana across the border. Your options are simply to access the services [available] to patients that are American."

I call around to a few compassion clubs in Toronto. Management at two different places say they've never heard clients discuss accessing medical pot in the US. They have a feeling many patients simply avoid going there because they can't be without their medication.

If you're forced to do without, Klokeid recommends using synthetic THC. Without it, he finds he has difficulty sleeping, can only sleep for four or five hours, and ends up feeling restless.

"They're good enough—especially if you take enough of them—but I find they're hit or miss. I don't go too many places where there's no cannabis at all."

On the flip side, if you're visiting BC from another country, it's pretty easy for someone to hook you up. You just have to bring your state papers (or the equivalent), and a membership to a dispensary. If you don't have those things, you can get a diagnosis from a naturopath for about $50, Klokeid says. Some dispensaries in Canada will even serve you if you arrive with a doctor's note in hand.

"All of the dispensaries here are more than eager to help people," he says. "If you book your naturopath appointment before you come up here and see the doctor, you could instantly be getting cannabis."

Follow Sarah Ratchford on Twitter.

On May 3, 1974, 14-year-old John Watson's body was found in a ditch with a .22-caliber bullet in the back of his head.

The night before, the teen's mom tasked him with bicycling to a motel in their rural hamlet of Wheeler Bottom, Pennsylvania, to buy her a pack of cigarettes. (It was 1974 and 14-year-olds could do that, apparently.) An attractive kid with a bright smile, dark eyes, and a wave of chestnut hair extending to his eyebrows, Johnny, as he was known, arrived at the motel, bought the cigs and played on the pinball machine for a while. He said hello to a pair of neighbors as he bicycled back through the rainy night.

They were the last to see him alive, according to a Pennsylvania State Police affidavit.

When Johnny failed to return home, police and volunteers canvassed the area with flashlights. It wasn't until the next morning that a town resident found Johnny on his back with his head tipped oddly to the side. His bike was discovered in the woods, about 200 feet from the body.

Johnny's brother, Thomas, rushed to scene and hugged the lifeless, 150-pound body. Then he noticed something strange: The corpse was dry, despite the rain of the prior evening. Police later found dragging marks in the area, but even with these tantalizing clues, the case went cold.

Decades passed. Johnny's parents died without ever knowing who shot their son. His brother and sister died, too. It seemed like the whole town, which sits about 40 miles south of Pittsburgh, forgot about Johnny Watson.

At least until last month.

On February 18, state police arrested Joseph Edward Leos, 58, for Watson's murder. In 1974, police had questioned Leos, a friend of Johnny's, and took a raincoat from him. The coat sat in storage for decades, but now a forensic test has confirmed the presence of gunshot residue on the jacket. Investigators beat the odds; according to a 2011 study by the RAND Corporation, only one in 20 cold case re-openings leads to an arrest. Had police arrested Leos before he became a salt-and-pepper-haired middle-aged man, they might have prevented another murder for which he was suspected but never arrested.

Leos was 17 at the time of Johnny Watson's murder and lived with his grandmother, whose property abutted the one where the body was found. The affidavit that lead to his recent arrest suggests the two boys were lovers. Back in 1974, Thomas Watson told investigators that Leos had been "engaging in relationships with other male individuals" and also noted that Johnny "began seeing a girl from school" before the killing, suggesting jealousy might have played a role.

On the night Johnny failed to return home, Leos went to the Watson residence to see him, a mutual friend told police in 1974. Leos left at 9 PM while Johnny was biking back from the motel, according to the police timeline.

Leos's aunt, Carol Grandy, remembered encountering him about an hour later. When she testified before the grand jury that approved the warrant for his recent arrest, she recalled that he appeared "agitated," "frantic," and "really upset."

"Something terrible has happened to Johnny," Leos reportedly muttered to her. "He is in trouble."

As a search party fanned the neighborhood, a state trooper interviewed Leos. He merely said, "Something just hit me and told me that Johnny was in bad trouble. That is all I can tell you," according to the affidavit.

The trooper took a blue overcoat from Leos, presumably to look for blood or other clues. They also found and confiscated a .22-caliber rifle at the home of Johnny Watson, the victim.

In the days to come, Leos seemed like a wounded friend. He even sat next to Watson's mother in the hearse at Johnny's funeral, the dead boy's niece recently told a local TV station. He stayed close to the Watsons and even left his grandmother's home and to live with them for a few years.

Leos stayed in the area after things settled down. He worked as a janitor at a Volkswagen plant for a while and was apparently dedicated to his pets. Last month a reporter for a local paper, who trampled through his property, found the graves and headstones of four of them, marked with birth and death dates and names (Itty Bitty, Callie, Skittles, and Poor Little Puss).

His was not an entirely quiet life. In 1983, Leos was arrested for aggravated assault, though the archived Pennsylvania court record offers few details. In 1992, he was brought up on assault charges again.

Alberta Myers, a 93-year-old resident of Ruffs Dale, says Leos stabbed her son Dennis at that time and was briefly jailed for it. Myers adds that Leos was "a friend of Dennis and the two lived together."

Myers recalls her son as "helpful" and a "workaholic." He had assisted his father in a tractor dealership and, at one point, began the process of trying to start a dealership with Leos as a partner.

Nine months after Leos was arrested, the mobile home he shared with Dennis Myers in Mount Pleasant caught fire, killing 38-year-old Myers and the pair's dog.

Myers's mother says police thought the fire had been set intentionally and questioned Leos. "They considered setting up a microphone at [Dennis's] grave," which Leos often visited, she says. Ultimately, "they told me they didn't have the evidence for an arrest."

When asked if she believes if Leos murdered her son, Myers answers, "Yes, I do. Oh, yes." She adds, "I wasn't ever looking for revenge, but I would have liked for someone to have paid for my son's death."

All through his years, that blue raincoat was waiting to catch up with Leos.

In 2009, the Pennsylvania State Police's cold case investigator, John Tobin, sent it to the R.J. Lee Group, a scientific testing company headquartered in Monroeville, Penn. "It was because testing had come such a long way, they thought they might be able to get some gunshot residue off it," explains Ryan Clark, a spokesperson for the Fayette County District Attorney's Office.

Allison Murtha, the manager of R.J. Lee Group's forensics department, says 99 percent of its cases are related to gunshot residue. The company is consulted by both prosecutors and defense attorneys. "It's not unusual for us to get items that are very old," she says.

The firm utilizes scanning electron microscopy, a technique that has become "the standard of the industry," according to Murtha. EMS looks for lead, antimony and barium, trace elements of gunshot residue, in close concentration.

More than five years passed between the day Leos's old raincoat tested positive and a judge signed off on his arrest. (Murtha remembers seeing the coat as an intern and is now managing the department.) Clark, the DA spokesperson, says this delay was due to the slow-moving mechanism that is a grand jury–authorized arrest.

The preliminary hearing resumes on March 24. Prosecutors have their work cut out for them; the same 2011 RAND report that found just one in 20 cold case re-openings leads to arrest concluded that only one in 100 leads to a conviction. But they'll attempt to prove that the gunshot residue completes the timeline of what happened of May 3, 1974, that 17-year-old Leos fetched a rifle from the victim's own home and, between nine and 9:30 PM, spotted Johnny Watson on his bicycle and gunned him down.

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Two robots face each other from opposite sides of the utilitarian arena, a metal cage designed to keep the 200-plus pound fighting machines focused on each other. On one side, a giant vertical spinning blade sits on top of a squat three-wheel chassis; we're told the thing is named Nightmare. On the other side, a Roomba-esque metal box with no discernible weapon. It's called Biohazard.

The match starts, and as Biohazard zips across the arena floor and smashes into Nightmare, its weapon becomes obvious: The thing rams, and it rams hard. Biohazard wedges itself underneath Nightmare as its theoretically dangerous blade spins idly, a useless decoration. The smaller bot then pushes Nightmare into one of the "booby traps" that litter the arena—in this case, a buzzsaw that popped out of the arena floor. Biohazard backs up with impressive speed and rams its opponent again. Nightmare's lone weapon slows, then stops completely. It's helpless. Biohazard, by dint of its apparently superior design, has neutralized its opponent and won the match. Biohazard's operator, the unassuming Carlo Bertocchini, smiles like a proud father. His baby has just won the Heavyweight Quarterfinals. It would eventually win the championship.

This, of course, was BattleBots—a TV series about grown men fighting with remote-controlled robots. When the show premiered in 2000, it was the lone sports program on Comedy Central and the network's first attempt at sports programming since the forgotten ESPN parody Sports Monster. It was also the first show about robots fighting one another.

At the turn of the century, there was nothing like BattleBots. The idea of advanced robots was still, more or less, a futuristic fantasy. The fact that the show focused on the incredibly young sport of robot fighting meant that everyone was just figuring it out as they went along, like baseball in the 1870s but with pneumatic sledgehammers.

I watched BattleBots in high school and I always loved the chaos of it. Not just the chaos of the literal robot fights, but of the robot builders' plans—throwing everything against the wall trying to figure out how to win the thing. A washtub with a bunch of buzzsaws? Or a mini Gravitron with spikes? Fuck it, how about we just make a giant door wedge on wheels? As long as it wins, who gives a shit?

It was all amazing—especially in the early 2000s. YouTube didn't exist, and watching actual, functioning robots in action was a novel, let alone robots beating the shit out of each other. It was advanced, but at the same time so very amateur. It was a combat sport that did no lasting damage. (For the most part—more on that later).

After five seasons, BattleBots ended in 2002. Most of the competitors simply went back to what they had been doing before: namely, working in Silicon Valley. Will Wright, who competed with a robot called Chiabot and had previously invented SimCity, went back to working in the field of human-robot interaction after his stint on the show. Christian Calrberg—who piloted the bots Knee-Breaker, OverKill, and the popular Minion—started building an "open-source light." Jim Smentowski, who built Nightmare, moved to Florida and opened up an online store called RobotMarketPlace for aspiring bot builders.

Some of the people who had appeared on the show went on to become big names in science education television: Bill Nye (the show's "technical expert"), Grant Imamura, and both Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage from Mythbusters. But robot fighting, in the context of the show, was mostly left behind.

Until now. In February, ABC announced that the network would be rebooting the show, to premiere this summer. It's been over a decade since the original BattleBots aired on Comedy Central. I wanted to know how some of its competitors had been changed by the show. I wanted to ask this old guard about how their lives had progressed since BattleBots ended over a decade ago, and how the state of robo-fighting had changed. That's how I met BattleBots champions Charlie Tilford and Gage Cauchois.

Charlie Tilford was living and working in Silicon Valley before he piloted his robot Mauler, which quickly became a fan favorite on BattleBots. Even before that, actually, he had appeared on BattleBots' precursor, the British Robot Wars.

"We were at the first fight, the heavyweight championship," Tilford remembers. "I had read about it in Wired magazine. I saw a picture of the [Robot Wars] founder Marc Thorpe with a gas-powered chainsaw mounted on [a remote-control chassis]." At the time, Tilford's two sons were ten and 14, and they were thrilled. "There was a ten-day event. If you paid the $50 entrance fee, you could have a team of four people. So we could just build something in our garage" to compete at a Robot Wars event in nearby San Francisco.

Tilford was hooked. With his reliable bot Mauler—a spinning disk retrofitted with flails and crudely spray-painted to resemble what looked like an angry day-glo carp—he stuck around through the Comedy Central series. Though he only won a single televised fight, it was a great one, with Mauler defeating the aforementioned Nightmare. (For what it's worth, Nightmare did amass a respectable 8-8 record during its tenure on BattleBots.)

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Mauler wasn't a perennial champion like Biohazard or some of the other robots that crushed time and time again, but due to his personal popularity, success in the sport came relatively quickly for Tilford. One year, he made $28,000 in toy royalties alone, and he earned more from a lucrative Seagate sponsorship. At the same time, Tilford was cultivating a fan base of science-minded kids, all while enjoying the approachability that comes with cult celebrity. " BattleBots was really neat that kids could not only watch something on television but actually talk with real people," he told, referring to young fans' penchant for approaching their team at events to talk shop.

And Tilford loved talking about bots. He still speaks proudly about an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and the Baha Men. He kept fighting robots until BattleBots ended.

"One of the last things we did, we went up against someone that had the rim of a tractor trailer made out of forged aluminum alloy about three-quarters of an inch thick," he said. "We smashed into it and put two holes in it you could put your fist through. That's a lot of fun."

Not everyone reflects on the series with such unabashed pride, though. Tilford's contemporary Gage Cauchois took a far more bittersweet, mercenary view of the whole BattleBots experience.

Cauchois was very successful as a competitor, winning three championships in total. His final design, Vladiator, won the superheavyweight division in season three thanks both to its uncanny ability to flip other robots on their backs combined with Cauchois's skill at the controller. His robots, Vlad the Impaler and the subsequent Vladiator, were among the most popular in the sport's history.

When Vladiator went up against a robot called Techno Destructo, it became clear how dominant Cauchois's design could be. Early in the fight, Techno Destructo flipped Vladiator on its back. The flat four-wheeler was equipped to handle a setback like this though, and remained just as mobile—in fact, about 30 seconds later it flipped Destructo akimbo with a well-timed ram, leaving it helpless against the wall. Vladiator backed up and rammed Destructo again, then again, destroying the back plates that protected Techno Destructo's delicate guts. And that was the match.

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Cauchois doesn't seem to care much about his accomplishments in the sport of robot fighting though. "I was doing it for the money," he told me. Championship bonuses were hefty, and coupled with sponsorship deals (the robots were usually plastered with ads like NASCAR stock cars) competitors could theoretically live off of the money they made from BattleBots. (It doesn't seem like many of them did, though; most kept a day job or at least did freelance design work on the side.) For Cauchois, the pursuit of winning became more and more demanding, and as the sport got more competitive, robot fighting became an increasingly more expensive.

Then Cauchois sustained a serious injury when his hand was crushed by a piece of metal from his robot, Vladiator—the fault, he said, of an inept crew member that the show insisted he use. The tendons in his hand were severed. "I had to go to hand surgeon to get it properly repaired. BattleBots paid my deductible, [but] they weren't even liable for anything," Cauchois said. "They offered to pay, but made it sound like they were doing me a favor. I didn't find that particularly generous, since it was their guy who dropped the robot."

Still, when he reflects on his BattleBots experiences, there are moments he seems especially proud of. "My robot broke the floor, which was a goal of mine," he remembered. "They said the arena was indestructible but nothing's indestructible."

According to Deadline, the BattleBots reboot—slated to air this summer—will have "a greater emphasis on the design and build elements of each robot, the bot builder backstories, their intense pursuit of the championship and the spectacle of the event." In other words, expect less robot fighting and more manufactured human drama. (I reached out to executive producer Ed Roski to ask about the reboot, but he did not respond.)

It definitely doesn't sound like the BattleBots I watched. At its core, the show was a utilitarian design competition—and the best designers don't always make the best reality show personalities. When I mentioned the show's reboot to Cauchois, he said, "I wouldn't like that at all. I'm kind of introvert. I don't want a lot of people nosing around. Get the Kardashians."

Tilford isn't coming back for the ABC reboot either, but for different reasons—he wants to turn it over to younger participants, a new generation of robot enthusiasts.

A lot has changed in the field of robot technology since Tilford and Cauchois were building robots. They both agreed that the detail that would most transform the show in from 2002 to 2015 was battery size. Batteries are now lithium polymer, and according to Cauchois would be a tenth the weight of the older ones. As Tilford put it, "with the lighter batteries you can do a helluva lot of damage."

I asked Cauchois what he'd like to see on a BattleBots revival. He had a pretty clear list: "You'd want to have an electronic driving assist. You'd want to have something on robot where the robot has a targeting system that would steer it and correct. You just push a 'launch' button. That would be fun," he said. But the new contestants on BattleBots were only given two and a half months and $7,000 to build their robots from original designs—so who knows what sort of machines that process will result.

The new BattleBots seems likely to more of a reality show about robot builders than the original, and though the two shows share the same name and the same DNA, it'll be a different animal. But however it's formatted, the program is bound feature robots destroying robots, which is really all anyone can ask. "It'll be interesting to see what people come up with," Cauchois said. "Thirteen years later? That's a long time."

Thumbnail photo via Flickr user Thiago Avancini.

Follow Jacob Harper on Twitter.

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Look at JKME's blog here.

[body_image width='797' height='528' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='indian-authorities-documentary-about-the-countrys-rape-problem-body-image-1426686672.png' id='37387']Photo from VICE's own documentary on rape in India, which you can watch here.

All eyes in India were on the Delhi High Court today as a verdict on the broadcast ban of controversial documentary India's Daughter was announced. The film, about a gang-rape victim, was originally scheduled for a worldwide premiere on International Women's Day on March 8, but ran into trouble when Indian authorities protested against its content and the way in which it portrayed their country.

This morning, a division bench (a panel of judges) at the Court announced that the ban on the Indian broadcast would continue till April 15, when the court will hear the appeal against the ban all over again. The panel also asked to see the official advice issued by the Government for banning the documentary.

The case went to the bench today—headed by Delhi's Chief Justice, G Rohini—after a two-judge panel at the same court admitted their inability to rule on the ban, because "emotional" media coverage surrounding the case was clouding their judgment. And therein lies a lesson for all of us.

It's tempting to think of a country's judiciary as being completely impervious to any sort of influence; that's the independence every free and fair society strives for. In such a utopia, lawyers are expected to be partisan only to the point considered necessary for helping their clients efficiently.

Judges, however, are deemed to be above even this. They are imagined to be superhuman beings, who must think, live, and work in a vacuum keeping in mind only the Constitution and previous verdicts. (India—like the UK—follows common law, where previous judicial decisions have the power of legislation.)

But this can't possibly be true. If the hoi polloi, media, political establishment, and every other pillar of society vehemently speak out in one, emotionally-charged voice, then is it unthinkable that some of that fervor seep into the judges' chamber as well? "[Judges] are not from outer space," said justice BD Ahmed, also at the Delhi High Court. "They can get subconsciously pressured by emotional media trials."

For those not up to date on raging headlines from the subcontinent, India's Daughter is a British documentary, part of BBC's Storyville series, about the victim of the brutal gang-rape in Delhi in 2012. The woman, a young physiotherapy student, was assaulted and raped by six men in a moving bus. The rapists had inserted an iron rod inside her and drew her intestines out. She was in hospital for two weeks following the incident, before she finally succumbed to her injuries.

The documentary, by British filmmaker Leslee Udwin, contains interviews with one of the convicted rapists from inside his jail cell. Staring calmly into the camera, Mukesh expresses a stunning lack of remorse. "A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy. A decent girl won't roam around at night," he says. "Housework and housekeeping is for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night doing wrong things, wearing wrong clothes."

The team behind India's Daughter aired this clip on Indian news channels a week before the documentary's planned premiere. Shit hit the proverbial fan. The video went viral, Twitter and Facebook feeds were taken over by outraged viewers, and the Guardian, for example, has published 22 stories on the controversy in the last two weeks. That's more than a story and a half per day.

In 2013, Mukesh Singh was sentenced to death by the Delhi High Court, a verdict he has appealed. The case now rests with the Supreme Court of India, which will announce the final verdict, which is a roundabout way of saying that the matter is sub judice, which is a roundabout way of saying the judiciary is still deliberating upon Mukesh's fate. And going by the frank admission by one judicial bench that their integrity had been compromised by a "media trial," it's not preposterous that another judicial bench may also be susceptible to the same.

You may disagree with the notion that publicly documented interviews with convicts who are under consideration can prejudice court proceedings, but it's hard to disagree with the notion that this, at least, deserves the attention of due legal process. Whatever the verdict today had been—ban or no ban—we could have rested in the confidence that the judges reached their decision while cognizant of the ramifications to their actions, not just for freedom of speech and expression in India but also for one man's right to a fair trial.

None of this is to say that everything the Indian government has done over this controversy has been justified. If anything, the country's politicians have taken the legal rationale supporting their actions, and stomped on it in a jingoistic dance of moral policing and censorship.

At various points in the last fortnight, India's political leaders have outdone each other with the jaw-dropping ridiculousness of their statements. During a debate in Parliament over India's Daughter, the Minister for Parliamentary Affairs, Venkaiah Naidu, claimed the documentary was an "international conspiracy to defame India." (It's not.) Meenakshi Lekhi, the National Spokesperson for the ruling party, said the documentary's broadcast would "affect tourism" in the country. (Too late for that.) And the Home Minister, Rajnath Singh, announced the government was looking to pursue legal action against the BBC for broadcasting India's Daughter in the UK.

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Indians protesting after a gang rape in New Delhi in 2012. Photo via Flickr user Ramesh Lalwani.

It would have done India's politicians some good to look up what happened to Barbra Streisand when she tried to remove an aerial photograph of her home from the public eye. In a world with the internet, banning something or—even worse—talking about banning it is spectacularly ineffective. Not only is it hard to execute, but it actually heightens the interest in the thing to be banned. One can never truly envision how many of the views, retweets, and shares garnered by India's Daughter are due to the Indian government's anger with it, but the answer would be: a lot.

Moreover, trying to clamp criticism down is antithetical to a democracy. India's political establishment should realize that there is much to be learnt from constructive criticism, especially if it reveals ugly truths. It took the country's leaders less time to think of India's Daughter as an "international conspiracy" than it did to seek action against two practicing lawyers who make horrifically misogynistic statements in the documentary.

If only the authorities directed their ample energy and resources towards better pursuits, we would come closer to addressing the societal issues raised by this whole fracas.

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Imagery from 'Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare'

The end of March beckons, and with it the sounding of an eSports trumpet. All eyes in the scene will soon turn to Los Angeles for the World Call of Duty Championships, where the best teams battle it out to walk away with the biggest share from a hefty $1 million prize pool. Which, when you think about it, is a lot of money for shooting imaginary guns at imaginary things. It's more money than people get for shooting real guns at real things, but without the icky mess that comes with such behavior, the kind that even Cillit Bang can't shift.

A million dollars isn't the biggest prize pot in eSports—the DOTA 2 International last year saw players compete for a $10 million pool, seeing winners taking home more per person than what you'd bank from winning the Super Bowl—but it's the largest in Call of Duty, which is about as mainstream as you can get when it comes to western eSports. Call of Duty is the jock of the eSports world, fired up on machismo, exhibiting a winning-at-all-costs attitude, with matches played out in scratchy polyester shirts and powered by enough energy drinks to dissolve your liver.

Video games has always been seen as a bland safari full of white males running around shouting at each other between fist bumps, windmill high-fives, and "slightly jokey, but not really joking" sharing of YouPorn links. But the demographic expanded from those out-dated perspectives quite some time ago. More women play than ever before ( stats here), and gaming is growing up, diversifying its content, extending its reach, and maturing its demographic.

But when it comes to competitive gaming, women are still stuck in the metaphorical kitchen, making sandwiches for all the dudes on stage. Call of Duty seems to be particularly behind the times, with a dearth of notable female participants while other titles seem to be more welcoming of their talents, and have been for some time. You might think that's because CoD is a shooter, and "girls don't like guns," but there are top female players on Halo: Reach (spacey alien guns), Counter Strike: Global Offensive (cartoony madcap guns) and surprisingly even Dead or Alive 4, one of the most barely clothed beat 'em ups you can find today. (I know when I get into a scrap my clothes always get in the way. But, annoyingly, if you do strip off, it usually ends the fight by calming the other person down, a bit like putting a towel over a budgie cage.)

We've had years of gender stereotype bullshit shoved down all our throats, like "how to be a real man," "what characteristics women can't help but fall for in a man," or past-it ideas as to why women can't be on the army frontline or play soccer at the same level as men. (Something about if they fall over then all the other soccer players would stop playing and bring them cold compresses and smelling salts? Clearly a match would just take forever to finish).

I know, I know, it's really the fault of us women for having dispositions jovially stitched together out of kittens and macramé owls. A "real" man would have known that kittens and string-like things don't go together. So thank god that video games came along, creating a world in which gender should really be irrelevant as everyone is on a level playing field whatever their genitals, physicality mostly becoming immaterial. I mean, as long as you hit the buttons in the right order, anyone could be a champion.

Perhaps the shortage of female players in CoD is due to its jock-like presentation. When done on a mega scale in the States, the whole thing has a very ESPN/Sports Center vibe, all ties, shouting, slick-back hair, and late-night trips to casinos. Women, if they're even around, are generally girlfriends cheering their partners on, work in PR for the events, or are one of the infamous eGirls—the assumed-to-be-groupies cheer squad that attends events.

Alan Brice is a professional eSports commentator, well known on the global CoD scene having attended competitions the world over. He gives me his take on women in CoD: "I was made aware of a few girls [at an event] recently, and I genuinely couldn't believe some of the conversation that was forwarded to me—that they were going to sleep with as many pros as they can, to get their [Twitter] followers up. I hope they weren't being serious."

The problem is that this reputation precedes all girls looking to get into eSports—they most likely want nothing to do with the dicks of the male superstar players, but observers naturally assume all women in the CoD scene are more into that than thrashing the opposition on screen. This does the community, in CoD and beyond into the wider eSports industry, no favors whatsoever, and creates suspicion as to the motives of any girl's attendance of a pro-gaming competition.

Morgan 'Morgz' Ashurst, formerly of the Epsilon eSports team, is one of the few female Call of Duty players to have played both beside and against some of the best in Europe, and she's experienced this prejudice first hand.

"Luckily, people who've been in the scene long enough know that's not the case with me," she tells me. "But for the newcomers... Others see a girl, and they naturally just think, 'Oh that's another eGirl,' and that does make me feel extremely paranoid when I'm at an event."

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Imagery from 'Call of Duty: Black Ops 2'

To be taken seriously in eSports, whatever your sex, you need to practice as much as your peers, dedicating as much time as they do to getting better. But for women, there's another hurdle to get over: the evident gender bias. You have to brush off the online berating and pressure that comes from being a rare female in a male-dominated industry and competitive environment. Manage that and you, too, can play some Call of Duty. But it's inevitable that many women are put off long before they reach that point.

"Even if I did approach a half-decent team with three guys on it, they wouldn't even get me in games to play with them," adds Ashurst. "They would automatically say no to me, just because of my gender." So even if you do put in the effort, there's every chance that discrimination will still rear its ugly head, preventing you from testing your mettle against male counterparts.

It always strikes me as strange that there should be such opinions in the gaming community towards women. Are these guys just scared that women might beat them at something supposedly "masculine"? Is being beaten by a girl at a video game the slightly more grown-up equivalent of someone pulling down your pants in the playground in front of everyone?

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compLexity plays EnVyUs in the 2014 World Championship final

We're consistently missing the opportunity to work together towards a common goal here. Having more women in eSports would legitimize it further by losing the "nerd dude" stereotype, and more women competing could even mean more men coming down to watch—why do you think girls get in free at some clubs? More people in general means bigger prizes, more tournaments, a wider community, and increased opportunities to play against the best—all of which adds up to more diversity and, get this, delicious money for the eSports community. But does the CoD world even want more women?

"I just want to see more people playing, I don't mind if it's male or female," Brice says. "People have asked me this in my career many times: 'How do we get more women into playing?' And my answer is that I just don't know, unless you can have a wide change of attitudes to naturally bring more women into it."

One suggestion is to have more female-only tournaments and teams, but is this counter-productive? "Well, I don't agree with segregation, but I end up playing in female teams, mainly as it is just easier," Ashurst states. So the women who are already involved in eSports are segregating themselves to avoid dealing with prejudice in an already stressful situation. Until attitudes change in Call of Duty circles, and female gamers have a place to play (and fail, sometimes) without fearing the wrath of online abuse, then the male-dominated makeup of the professional CoD player base will never change.

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Imagery from 'Call of Duty: Ghosts'

Ashurst feels that she's over the first hurdle, at least; that she's now respected as a player, but it's taken a long time. "It's tough for new people," she says, "but not so bad for me now, as I've pushed to be taken seriously."

Call of Duty is an unstoppable machine. It's a product that shines a light so bright that even its casual fans and outright non-gamers are a bit blinded by it. It's one of the biggest gaming franchises to date—so ideally positioned to lead by example and really push gaming into its next generation of attitudes and player acceptance.

Whether it's through more female tournaments or simply the on-going promotion of healthier online interaction, anything that encourages more people to compete and play can only be a good thing for the CoD community—and, as an extension, eSports as a whole. Perhaps it'd just take a dedicated and open-minded few to really inspire a raft of women to pick up their controllers and open up a can of whoop-ass—or, at the very least, some sick no-scope headshots. They love that shit just as much as anyone born with balls.

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