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I Trolled a Group Trying to Ban Kanye West from Playing Ottawa

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Kanye West performing at the Museum of Modern Art, because if Ottawa doesn't want him there are plenty of places that do. Photo via Flickr user Jason Persse

The sleepy government town of Ottawa awoke Monday to some decidedly cosmopolitan news: Hip-hop recording artist Kanye West had been added as the undisputed headliner of their annual Bluesfest outdoor music festival.

The event has been broadening from its blues roots for a decade, boasting recent headliners like Skrillex, Iron Maiden, Girl Talk, Kiss, LMFAO, and Lady Gaga alongside festival mainstays like Tragically Hip, Weezer, and Black Keys (who seem contractually obligated to play any music festival you'll ever attend in perpetuity).

The Bluesfest lineup is sort of what you want a mass-market music festival to include: a weeklong menu of artists and styles staggered over ebbs and flows of elation, disappointment, discovery, and bros vomiting into their food truck butter chicken.

Except, of course, for hippity-hopper Kanye West.

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Facebook screenshot

It wasn't long before the internet's ultimate tool of flaccid discord—the closed Facebook group—was summoned to shake Bluesfest organizers to their senses: Kanye West can't be allowed to mar the festival's lineup of chaste, ego-less performers chosen for their adherence to the event's unshakable orthodoxy to the blues tradition. There was still time, as several suggested, to replace him with the Foo Fighters, or The Rolling Stones.

The group's creator was interviewed for Ottawa's Metro, and an online petition to "replace him with a better artist" garnered, at time of writing, over 1,000 signatures. A similar petition protesting West's appearance at England's Glastonbury Festival has over 130,000.

Unable to resist the urge to pan for the potential nuggets of precious social performance buried inside, I made my request to join the group, and was promptly accepted.

The group's contents read like a checklist of cultural projection: constructions of West as juvenile, criminal, misogynist, arrogant; laboured appeals to impressionable youth; racial discomfort expertly repackaged as musical preference. One commenter communicated his hope for a repeat of the 2011 stage collapse during a set by veteran rockers Cheap Trick, which injured three people.

So, as anyone jaded by the language of the internet might do, I saved my rousing, persuasive sociological essay for the shower and came up with a far more amusing solution: fucking around with them instead.

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Facebook screenshot

Trolling is, as I've argued previously, an often misunderstood tactic in the internet's guidebook, conflating a wide range of undesirable activities that attack and marginalize others with the more valuable act of co-opting the language of a particular platform in order to highlight hypocrisy or disingenuousness among its ideals.

In accordance, the post mostly tumbled over group members' heads like a Flaming Lips beach ball, though a thread of dispatches from within the group rippled through my and others' social networks.

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Facebook screenshot

Since Monday, the group has upped its media savvy considerably, moving from private to publicly accessible and softening its name from "Stop Kanye West At Ottawa Bluesfest" to the disarmingly vague "Kanye West At Ottawa Bluesfest?" Conversation has expanded to include everything from earnest challenges to the tone of discussion, to red-meat "reverse racism" co-options from men's rights activists, to unfocused cross posts from the results of "Kanye West meme" image searches.

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Facebook screenshot

The takeaway from surges like these is always complicated.

Isolating the variable of racial discomfort, at least in a conclusive sense, is invariably problematic. This year's Bluesfest provides an interesting control in the form of fellow headliner Iggy Azalea, who arguably embodies the gamut of artistic critiques levelled against West but, as of this writing, has yet to attract even the loosest of organized opposition.

If Facebook-forward Ottawans or Brits with social capital have genuine concerns about the musical identity of annual festivals they feel invested in, there are a range of structural and institutional avenues they should feel free to pursue. Lurking on lightning rods just simply isn't good enough.

Seb FoxAllen is a Toronto-based writer, satirist, and extremely fluky fantasy hockey player. Follow him on Twitter.


VICE Vs Video Games: Ten Things I Hate About Video Games in 2015

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A screen shot from 'Grand Theft Auto V'

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Gaming. a hobby that's religiously adored by millions around the world. An aid to depression, a legitimate escape from the struggles of everyday life, social alienation, and even life-threatening illness. A global behemoth of an industry that's worth billions and billions of dollars, and makes more money annually than the music and movie machines combined. A cultural cauldron of bubbling communities, passionate devotees, and dedicated, talented developers. The cast-iron key to thousands of beautifully realized worlds, characters, and stories—each one more memorable and wonderful than the last.

But enough of the saccharine, simpering, sycophantic shit—I need to get a few things off my chest. Here are the ten things that I hate the most about gaming in 2015.

SHITty MANUALS

I opened up my copy of Bloodborne the other day, and I wasn't expecting much, granted. But is this the best they could do? Really? A flimsy, floppy little insert with a controller map on it? And it's not just Hidetaka Miyazaki's latest that's at fault, as video game manuals are virtually nonexistent in 2015. Today, they're just cringing, insipid little buy-our-DLC inserts or download-your-free-new-shit-character-skin-today flyers, limply slotted into the game box and demanding about as much welcome attention as the update from the local Tory MP does when it lands on your doorstep.

I remember when game manuals were written and crafted, when publishers took the time to make them feel part of the experience, and when I'd sit up reading the ones that came with my old Genesis games over and over again, to fully immerse myself in the world before slotting the cartridge into the console for the first time. What the fuck happened, video games? Take some pride in your manuals. And while I'm at it, sort out your box art out, too.

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AMIIBOS

"Wait until I tell dad you collect toy figures now," my charming younger brother threatened the other weekend. At the ripe old age of 30, I couldn't give a beaker of monkey's tit milk what my either of my parents think about my extracurricular activities, but his words ricocheted around the inside of my head for hours afterwards nonetheless.

He had a fucking point. What am I doing collecting these twee, superfluous, infantile little toys? What business do I have spending my ever-dwindling wage packets on small pieces of plastic, just so they can sit staring at me from the lounge shelf with mocking indifference? Will I ever stop? Ness, Charizard, and Pac-Man are coming out this month. I must get those pre-orders. I must have Meta Knight, Little Mac, and Rosalina. I must have all the Fire Emblem characters. I must have them all. I'll go to Japan if I have to. And then I can sit down with a cup of tea and work out exactly where it all went wrong. (Oh god, and now there's yarn Yoshis? Will it never stop?)

Oh, and Dad, if you're reading: as if being shitty at sports and having long hair wasn't bad enough, for the last few months I have been systematically researching and purchasing a series of five-inch figurines based on Nintendo characters. I'll expect the adoption certificate in the post soon.

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LET'S PLAYERS

The other day I got stuck, so I fired up a gameplay broadcast for Resident Evil Revelations 2 on the Xbox One. A chirpy little dickhead bobbed around in the corner of the screen, asking people to like and subscribe to his videos every two minutes. At least.

Now, call me a miser, but I just cannot see the appeal of watching these pricks play games on camera. Sorry.

REDUNDANT REMAKES

Let's be honest: Resident Evil's been remade far too many times. The Last of Us was insultingly repackaged with a smoother frame rate last summer. For some, the lackluster HD remake of Shadow of the Colossus tarnished the game's memory. Even the magnificent Dark Souls II is now being resold to you in a different box, with dragons in bits that didn't previously have dragons in. And even though you already suffered through a hundred hours of death and misery with it last March, you'll probably buy it again, won't you. I know I inevitably will. God, just end me.

Oh, and while I'm here ruining everyone's fun, God of War III doesn't need to be remade either. It looked and performed perfectly fine the first time around, and it wasn't even that great anyway. We don't need another nine hours of Kratos shouting, remastered or otherwise. Next.

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INVISIBLE WIRES

The PS4's DualShock 4 is the Hummer of video game console controllers. It has a massive fucking multi-colored light on the front, vibrates harder than an embittered middle-aged divorcee's Rampant Rabbit, and features a crackly and largely pointless speaker system whose only purpose is to make the phone in GTA V feel a bit more like real-life calls. As a result, the battery is often drained long before I've made it to the bottom of my bowl of bland supermarket stodge, and I have to sit with my ass pressed right up against the edge of the sofa while it charges via a USB cable which extends to the handy length of three inches.

Recently, the controller died on me during a heart-stopping Bloodborne fight with Father Gascoigne (pictured, above) and I had my ass handed to me on a paper plate even quicker than I would have done normally. Sure, there are tweaks that can be made to extend the battery life. And yes, I could just buy a really, really long USB cord. But it's the principle of the thing.

SPLIT-SCREEN GRAPHICS COMPARISONS

Every ten minutes you spend watching a super-serious split-screen graphics comparison video is ten minutes you will never get back.

Oh look, that water looks a bit less shitty than that water. Oh look, those thistles are quivering in the breeze a little bit more convincingly than those thistles quivering in the breeze. Oh look, the left-hand side of this video has more particles floating around than the right-hand side does. Oh look, another fucking split-screen graphics comparison video for idiots.

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THE INEVITABLE ARRIVAL OF SUMMER

On Saturday mornings I like to set my blood simmering by reading people's "weekend tweets" in bed for an hour or so, then I'll stagger to the kitchen in my pants, pour myself a cup of coffee, and slap a limply buttered bit of toast onto a chipped plate. Then, I'll retire to the lounge in said pants, beep on the PS4, and play the video game du jour without interruption until I'm met with the jarring horror of my "ducks" alarm going off on Monday morning. This Saturday morning, however, I had to draw the curtains.

It was then that I realized. Fucking hell. Summer's coming. Men who wear sandals and shorts even though it's still pretty much cold. Twee gastropubs filled with aging women in quilted jackets sipping white wine and showing off their Yorkshire terriers to strangers. Waspy parks and gaggles of braying twats playing Frisbee. It's all in the post. The window of time in which one can play video games non-stop in pants guilt-free is narrowing, and there's absolutely nothing you can do to stop it.

NOWHERE TO HIDE

Picture the scene. I'm sitting there playing Rebirth and dropping M&Ms down the gaps in the sofa. A notification pops up. Generic_twat_1874 wants you to play Battlefield 4. Nah, mate. Time passes. Then, a follow-up WhatsApp message. It's Generic_twat_1874 again. "Join are squad and stop playing shit indie games," he writes. He knows what you're playing and he knows you're ignoring his invites. He even knows you're not that massively into Battlefield. And he doesn't care.

Sony, I love you. Your PS4's alright on the whole, too. But please, for the love of fuck, please include an "appear offline" function with the next firmware update.

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THE DEATH OF 'SILENT HILLS'

A few weeks back I wrote a rambling piece about how P.T.Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro's ballbag-shrinking foray into the world of videogame horror—went on to become my favorite gaming experience of 2014.

So when I realized that Kojima's departure from Konami would likely consign Silent Hills to development hell, despite the absolutely chilling conceptual trailer released at TGS 2014, I was pretty disappointed to say the least.

Konami, please don't let Silent Hills fall into the hands of people who don't understand that horror is about the uncanny, the sad, the surreal, and the hellish. Please don't let it fall into the hands of people who see Norman Reedus and think, "Right we'll take this and make a quick and filthy buck." Please just let Kojima and del Toro do more of whatever it is they were doing last summer. And in doing so, please finally give me another reason to shit my jeans at the weekend.

HD SPACE, LACK THEREOF

Sorry, I must have missed the memo about all new games requiring ten fucking terabytes of memory just to install. So now I'm trawling Amazon looking for compatible hard drives, the best of which cost nearly a hundred bucks which could easily be spent on more rare Amiibos or games I'll play for an hour then put back on the shelf or yet another crappy HD remaster and my PS4 has a sticky R1 button and Bloodborne's too hard and Five Nights at Freddy's is shit and Zelda's been delayed and why do they keep making zombie games and why do digital games cost more than physical ones and why do Telltale Games take so long to release episodes and yeah, it's probably best to call it a day there, really.

Follow Jonathan on Twitter.

How the Backroom Dealings of a Bizarre Florida Eye Doctor Could Bring Down a US Senator

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For years, New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez has been under scrutiny for his questionable ties to a wealthy Florida ophthalmologist and major campaign donor. Yesterday, the two men were finally slapped with federal charges, including corruption, bribery, and fraud. These are major charges (as in, "way more serious than a blowjob"), coming from a Justice Department led by members of Menendez's own political party. So it's safe to expect this case will stir things up. Today, Menendez appeared before a grand jury to plead not guilty.

Menendez's co-defendent, Dr. Salomon Melgen, has been a friend of the Democratic Senator for more than 20 years, and they've been under the investigative microscope for quite a while. But after surviving what appears to have been an attempt to frame them for soliciting underage prostitutes, they've now been indicted for some serious scheming, and judging by yesterday's indictment, it looks like they were doing a lousy job of hiding it.

According to the charges, beginning in 2006, Melgen showered the Senator with about a million dollars in flights, hotels, and campaign donations; in exchange, Menendez and his staff intervened with government officials on behalf of the doctor's business interests.

According to the indictment, that included trying to get the feds to back off after Melgen was accused of bilking Medicare out of millions of dollars, pressuring the US agencies to prop up Melgen's business in the Dominican Republic, and greasing the wheels of the immigration machine to obtain visas for Melgen's foreign girlfriends.

Major scrutiny into the pair's relationship began with some very sexy—and ultimately untrue—accusations. In the fall of 2012, when Menendez was up for reelection to his second term, The Daily Callerpublished a "scoop" that Menendez and Melgen had solicited underage prostitutes in the Dominican Republic, during one of their frequent trips to Melgen's estate there. It was a sensational story, complete with videos of Dominican women willing to testify that they'd had sex with the two men in exchange for money.

Upon scrutiny, it also turned out to have been a total crock, likely cooked up as part of a political smear campaign against Menendez, who was about to take over the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Menendez, who is Cuban-American and a staunch opponent of reconciliation with the Castro regime, claimed it was all an elaborate plot by Cuban intelligence agents, and asked the government to investigate. It's not clear if anything ever came of his request, and the indictment doesn't mention the rumors, and it's not clear if Menendez ever got a probe.

Regardless of the source, the prostitution rumors appear to have turned the feds on to the Senator's real shady business, spurring a two-year corruption investigation by the FBI. The allegations in the indictment describe, in great detail, how Menendez helped Melgen pull some old-fashionedTammany Hall shit, including pocketing lots of money that wasn't his.

And thanks to some juicy allegations about Melgen's extramarital girlfriends, this political scandal still includes the obligatory intrusion into a stranger's sex life, and the text of the indictment really becomes a page turner when you get to the following:

Melgen partially funded Girlfriend 1's tuition through the Sal Melgen Foundation, a non-profit organization with the self-described purpose of "help[ing] with the educational needs of disadvantaged persons" and "assist[ing] with the economic educational needs of children in develeoping [sic] countires [sic] and the U.S."

But perhaps the most damning accusation involves Melgen's alleged overbilling of Medicare, a remarkably simple scam that the feds claim went down the following way:

  • Using one third the recommended dose of an expensive eye medication called Lusentis on patients
  • Giving the leftover medication to two additional patients, thumbing his nose at regulations requiring doctors to administer one vial of Lucentis per patient
  • Filing Medicare reimbursements for all three doses, despite actually using only one
  • Repeating the scheme over the course long enough to collect $20 million, at about $2,000 per dose.

When the authorities in finally noticed what Melgen had overcharged the government for $8.9 million, Menendez allegedly sprang into action on behalf of his donor friend, spending years pushing for meetings with staffers at the Department of Health and Human Services, including Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. In the meantime, Melgen kept making money—in 2012, Medicare paid him $20.3 million, making him the top-paid doctor in the country.

In another weird instance of political graft, Melgen allegedly called upon the US government to strong-arm the Dominican government over a contract dispute with a business he owned there. The company had an exclusive contract to provide X-ray screening services at Dominican ports, which Melgen felt the US needed to help him enforce, calling on his friend in the Senate for assistance.

On May 16, 2012, Menendez met with State Department officials, hoping that they would resolve the arcane business dispute. May 16 was also, according to the indictment...

...the same day that Melgen and his family gave $40,000 to the New Jersey Democratic State Committee Victory Federal Account and $20,000 to Menendez's legal defense fund.

The challenge for the feds is to prove that this kind of thing wasn't just a coincidence, but a quid pro quo, with Melgen's donations contingent on Menendez taking official action on his behalf. While the indictment doesn't contain any smoking gun on this front, it does claim that on at least two other occasions Melgen made big donations to help Menendez's campaign, just days before the Senator intervened on his behalf.

To the cynical, the idea that political donations would be used to pull the strings of a corrupt system may sound like business as usual. But as Menendez allegedly used his political clout to push for his pal's interests, government bureaucrats seem to have been refreshingly annoyed, even uncooperative.

Here's an email from an annoyed State Department employee, after Menendez threatened to make the official testify at a Senate hearing if he didn't get an adequate response to his inquiries about Melgen's port business:

This is the case about which Sen. Menendez threatened to call me to testify at an open hearing. I suspect that was a bluff, but he is very much interested in its resolution. A reminder that I owe the Senator an answer to the question "What can we do to resolve this matter?"

And here's some communication between staffers with the Department of Health and Human Services about Menendez's attempts to get the agency to lay off Melgen's alleged Medicare scam:

Just tried to call you but understand you are in Baltimore today. We have a bit of a situation with Senator Menendez, who is advocating on behalf of a physician friend of his in Florida. The bottom line is that he wants to talk to someone today—I talked his office out of the Secretary, but therefore through [sic] you under the bus. Would you be able to speak with Senator Menendez sometime today? Can I give you a call this a.m. to give you some background on discussions thus far?...
Many thanks and sorry!

When Menendez finally did talk with the HHS Secretary about Melgen's Medicare dispute, she apparently shut him down, in a meeting that is later described as "lively":

The Secretary of HHS disagreed with MENENDEZ's position, explaining that CMS was not going to pay for the same vial of medicine twice, and emphasizing that CDC guidelines expressly advised against multiple applications from the same vial to prevent contamination. The Secretary of HHS also informed MENENDEZ that because MELGEN's case was in the administrative appeals process, she had no power to influence it.

It's as though corruption still bothers the bureaucrats who get roped into it, which is almost encouraging.

The full text of the indictment is embedded below.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter

Exclusive: Here Are 50 People Who Don't Like the UK Conservative Party Very Much

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Yesterday, the Telegraph published a letter signed by over 100 of the UK's richest oligarchs, bosses, and Dragon's Den panelists, saying that they think that people should vote Conservative. Despite some business leaders quite liking the Tories being the most precedented thing in political history after old Etonian prime ministers, this news was apparently worthy of the Telegraph's front page.

In the letter, they said that the Conservative-led government's economic policy shows that "the UK is open for business." In particular they like the fact that the Tories made them pay less corporation tax and they want everyone else to get behind a government that makes big corporations give less money to schools and hospitals, too.

So, people expressing banal opinions is apparently front page news now. With that in mind, today 50 random people that we found in the street have exclusively told VICE that they don't like David Cameron very much.

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Hitting the streets of Camden, North London, I got some stakeholders in British democracy to hold a concise open letter saying, "FUCK THE TORIES." I could have got 103, but the police kept ushering me off the streets, and I got banned from Camden Market by their corporo-fascist security team, condemning me to a lifetime bereft of fake metal band t-shirts.

Needless to say, despite getting fist pumped by socialist goths and heckled by tourists who read the sign wrong and thought I was referring to them, it was relatively easy to find a number of people who were willing to express a prosaic opinion.

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A guy called Jack with blue hair commented, "Who are the Tories? They're the bad ones aren't they? Cool sign."

Some guy with a Mohawk (pictured above) said, "I just want to say thank you for giving me a chance to stick my middle finger up to the Tory government. I hope this photo lasts forever."

So there you have it. While 103 people in board rooms reckon you should definitely vote Conservative, some other people walking the streets of London with edgy haircuts think you definitely shouldn't. What this tells us about the state of play at the election, we'll have to wait and see.

Scroll down to see some people who have an opinion:

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Follow Daisy on Twitter.

Read more of VICE's Election '15 coverage

What's the Best Way to Recycle Your Vibrator?

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But where do you put your sex toys? Photo via Flickr user epSos.de

Getting rid of a beloved sex toy can be a difficult process, and understandably so. For some people, it might represent the longest-lasting sexual relationship they've ever had. For others, kicking a dildo to the curb is as easy as breaking up with a flesh-and-blood partner. In either case, what to actually do with it once it's no longer of use isn't exactly clear. Do you toss it in the compost heap? Sell it on eBay? Maybe donate it to the orgasmically less fortunate? Can you recycle it?

While sex toy recycling still hasn't caught on in any meaningful large-scale sense, there are a handful of purveyors that are taking steps to address the issue for both practical business concerns and environmental considerations.

"Most people just throw them out," says Jack Lamon of Come As You Are, a sex toy co-op in Toronto that's one of the few shops to promote a sex toy recycling program. "Since sex toys have been in existence, they've been going into landfills." That's because most municipalities in North America will not recycle them.

To counter this, Come As You Are encourages people to drop off or mail in their unwanted vibrators and silicone sex toys (after they're thoroughly cleaned) and the co-op will handle the recycling from there. In return, they offer a 15 percent discount coupon for future purchases, and a little peace of mind.

But that program is definitely not the norm, and since the average sex toy is comprised of complex materials and parts—like ABS plastics, silicone, electronic parts, and rechargeable batteries—they can't just go in the mainstream recycling. Some facilities also refuse toys that they consider a potential biohazard; they'll take your trash, but they aren't going anywhere near the junk that's been near your junk. And as toys get more complicated, so do the disposal procedures.

"Right now, as we move toward more 'premium' products, those use the same technology in some cases as a cell phone: lithium ion batteries, rechargeable batteries. If they're just being put into the dump, they're going to leach the same chemicals or toxins as your cell phone," says Coyote Days, product and purchasing manager for Good Vibrations. (She was using what she called "hilariously vague language" since she was waiting in a line at the airport when we spoke on the phone.)

"When looking at high-tech toys that have remote controls, or advanced motors that aren't just a coil or whatever, there's a little more potential for toxins," she continued. "It wasn't such an issue before you had this advanced technology, or people weren't looking at it the same."

Everyone loves silicone when it comes to toys because it's so easy to clean, and comparatively easy to mold into different shapes, but it never degrades, which conjures an image of a floating island of dildos somewhere out in the middle of the ocean.

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Photo via Flickr user Philippe Put

It doesn't have to be that way—recycling these toys requires just a few extra steps of precaution. But whether or not that's worth it isn't widely agreed upon.

"The labor involved in breaking those things down is way too high for it to be worth the while of the average recycling facility," Lamon says. "For us, we're an anti-capitalist sex shop, and we were faced with an ethical dilemma: We love these toys, but it's hard to stomach that all of them were making their way into landfills. We felt like we should do something."

In other words, put your dildo in your dumper, if you want, just not in the dump.

Other stores are following suit. Besides Come As You Are, there's Scarlet Girl, based in Portland, and Love Honey in the UK, both of which have similarly environmentally conscious and sex-positive outlooks. In all three cases, these retailers don't actually undertake the recycling process themselves, but rather expedite it as a sort of go-between in a way that makes it possible for consumers to recycle their toys.

"Most of it is just breaking down the toys, sorting them, then privately contracting out to other companies to recycle them," Lamon says. They've long done battery recycling at the store, and at the moment they're waiting to amass enough ABS plastic to ship out and enough silicone to be repurposed for future use.

Another hurdle comes at the point of return. Although the huge boom in sales across the board—an estimated $15 billion now—has led to sex toys making their way onto the shelves of Walmart and CVS, a great deal of sex toy purchases are made online. While sex-positive toy retailers will often take returns, that's only when the toy is defective.

"We don't allow returns for toys that are functional; the industry has a bad history with reselling them," Lamon says, before going into stories of customers who have mentioned toys they purchased from other retailers that were covered in pubic hair.

Good Vibrations, another sex toy retailer, doesn't maintain its own recycling incentive program. But according to Coyote Days, it is conscientious about seeing that their returns for defective merchandise are properly processed.

I had to ask: Would it be such a bad idea to just throw those vibrators in with the rest of the recycling?

"It's not even that it's a bad idea," says Days, "There's still just a stigma around items for personal use, so when you try to call an e-waste place or try to figure out how to dispose of it, you're met with the same types of attitudes we see pervasive in mainstream American culture: shame, people laugh, or get freaked out you're talking about this product and you want me to touch it?"

Finding a waste facility to even pick up their returns was difficult. She went through ten before she could get a taker.

"I had called so many others, and they would have like a moment of silence, maybe a little laughter. I think that's the reason because of the pervasive embarrassment and shame around intimate products."

At Good Vibrations, the returns aren't a huge endeavor, she says. "We don't have some overflowing room with defective sex toys." But that's because they make pains not to contract out with manufacturers who make a shoddy product likely to be returned, and across the board the quality of toys has gotten better anyway. "The quality of a $20 vibrator is much higher than it used to be even ten years ago," she says.

At Love Honey, returns and recycling represent a much bigger operation. The laws about what can and must be recycled differ between countries, and in the UK, the Waste Electronic and Electrical Equipment regulations mandate that households recycle electrical items. Love Honey co-founder Richard Longhurst explained it to me: "You're not supposed to throw your old toaster, hair dryer, or vibrator in the bin."

Recognizing that people might demur at bringing their butt plugs down to the local recycling center, Love Honey began its Rabbit Amnesty program in 2007. When you send your old toy in, you get credit toward your next purchase.

Andrea Bartlett in Love Honey's returns department says they get about 20 to 30 items a week. In total, they've processed thousands of toys, "which means less rabbits on landfills and more money in our customers pockets. Everyone is a winner." (See a video of the process here.)

In the UK, sex toy retailers don't need to act as the middleman, but it does help.

"People can recycle their toys in their own electrical rubbish bin if they are not too embarrassed, they can find out from their local council what will be picked up but I guess as long as it is battery operated [or plugged in] it is classed as electrical," says Bartlett. "People can also take their sex toys to electrical recycling centers but many are too shy to do so, so they send them to us to do for them. Some of our customers find it extremely sad when it comes to sending their treasured rabbits off to the sex toy graveyard, but by offering them a discount on their new one, the whole experience is much less difficult."

It seems like a lot of extra steps to go through, but for some people it's worth it.

"I think it depends on what your life priorities are," Lamon says. "If you think recycling and waste management generally is important, and you consume a lot of sex toys, it absolutely should be important to you. If you think the apocalypse is near and nothing matters, well, then you should burn them in your back yard. We think it is important, and we couldn't live without ourselves knowing we were contributing to the environment in a negative way."

Good Vibrations shares a similar mission. "We have a mission, education-based, not about just about pleasure, but safety and wellness over all, so taking that one step further, it's important we have a full circle life cycle for these products," Days tells me.

If you don't live near any of these stores, and can't find a sex-positive retailer nearby that can point you in the right direction, Days recommends contacting your local e-waste disposal center and ask them what can be done.

"The best bet is for people concerned about this is to contact your local e-waste providers, get to know them, and help de-stigmatize this industry."

Follow Luke O'Neil on Twitter.

Bartenders Tell Us About the Best and Worst Things They’ve Found in the Bathroom

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Bartending is a dirty job. Drinks get spilled, puke gets puked, punches get thrown. Just about every night, there's someone hooking up where they shouldn't be, throwing up where they shouldn't be, or fucking around in some other annoying way. The men and women behind the bar deal with all the worst parts of a night out without any of the drunken fun.

Bartenders, generally, see some shit others would rather not see. But the worst stuff that happens in bars happens in the bathrooms—so I asked some bar employees for stories about the best, worst, grossest, most surprising, and most disturbing things they've found in the bathrooms at the end of a shift. Here's what they told me. (I left out their last names to protect their dignity and the names of the bars they work at to protect their jobs.)

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"My college town was home to one of the diviest bars I've ever been to. It was also the only place in the zip code that served hard liquor after 10 PM, so it was reliably packed and never had any incentive to improve. My job there basically involved coming in the morning after big party nights and cleaning the bathrooms. In general, it wasn't too bad—you desensitize yourself to most of the common smells pretty quickly—but I had a real 'wow, fuck you' moment when one aggressive imbiber threw up all over the place and then Houdini'd their way out of the stall, leaving the door locked from the inside. I had no way to get in, and wasn't about to slide through a puddle of vomit, so I left it. Then I got fired." –James

"At my first bar job ever—I was 16, hostessing and promoting for a venue in NYC—a girl passed out with her pants down and since I was the only girl on staff I had to go in and pull them up for her." –Ananda

"I've found poop on the seat (how do you even do that?), molly shells on the floor, and one time, after a private event, I opened the closet to put stuff away and there were two girls peeing in Togo cups. Seriously? The bathroom was across the hall." –Rosie

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"One time, I found a pool of blood about a quarter- to a half-inch deep. It spread over the entire floor of the bathroom—like out of a horror film. There was enough blood that the person bleeding would surely need emergency room treatment. The weird thing was, we had no fights that night, and no one came in or left the bar bleeding. It's a small bar, so we would have noticed. My boss just raised his eyebrows and said 'weird,' then went on closing up the bar. I also once found a dead hamster with a collar on it. No name tag, though." –Alex

"Chicken cutlets and sticky bras. I've seen them on the floor in bathrooms, on the floor near the bar, and even on the bar. I've seen girls take them off and leave them there." –Emily

"I had just gotten into work, around 6 PM, and one of our regulars was there. I hadn't served her yet—she was still there from the day shift. About a half hour later, she disappeared. There weren't too many people in the bar yet, but eventually someone was like, 'Wait, where did she go?' So we went into the bathroom. The bathroom consists of only one stall. She was laying on top of the centerpiece for the stall—and the door is completely broken off. The tile where the stall was screwed into was cracked, and every screw and bolt was just straight ripped out. We bought a cheap picnic blanket from the store next door and draped it where the door should have been, but because the toilet paper dispenser is connected to the other door, we couldn't take that down. So every time you went to pull toilet paper out, the door would start to cave in on you." –Lauren

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"I went into the bathroom and I realized I had stepped in gum, because with every step I took, I could feel my shoes clinging to the floor. I made my way to the bathroom stall and as I was squatting, I could smell the familiar smell of poop. I inspected the whole bathroom stall—there's only one stall in there—and eventually I realize it's on the bottom of my fucking shoe. It was never gum; it was shit. And this wasn't dog shit. I have six rescued dogs, so I know exactly what dog shit is like, and this wasn't it. It was human shit. On my shoe.

So I started freaking out and trying to wash the poop off my shoe without touching it, but the poop was literally stuck like gum and it wouldn't come off. Eventually, I left the bathroom and I see TWO LOGS OF POOP ON THE FLOOR. They were so discreetly pooped out, in the corner of the bar, where you'd never guess that anything was there. Horrified, I went to my friends, screaming,"I stepped in human shit! I stepped in human shit!" One of the bartenders realized it was this drunk-ass guy, knocked out, who had pooped on the floor. She called the police and they came to pick him up.

I had to throw that fucking shoe away. And I couldn't just wear one shoe, so I threw the other away and spent the whole night just wearing my socks." –Kati

"There was poop smeared across the walls in what appeared to be a geometric pattern."

"My off-duty bar manager got drunk on his night off and was nowhere to be found at closing time. We later discovered him in the women's bathroom, passed out, sitting on the toilet with his pants around his ankles." –Monique

"I found six different napkins taped to the wall of a toilet stall with beautifully intricate sketches of girls who were in the bar that night and poems to them that bordered on the mentally insane." –Alex

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"I've seen a lot of gross stuff left in the bathrooms here: bloody panties, used condoms with poop on them, and once, there was poop smeared across the walls in what appeared to be a geometric pattern." –Jet

"There is a serial sink pooper at my job. One time, I found a full outfit, nicely folded, on the bathroom floor. Did someone leave naked?" –Joshua

"Once, I walked in on a girl sitting in her own barf and still doing coke. It still makes me giggle." –Nicole

All illustrations by Sam Taylor. See more of his work on his website and on Twitter.

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We Went to Yesterday’s Tampon Tax March in London

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Apart from being a flagrant reminder of one's youth and fertility, being on your period is never fun. Blood gloops out of your vagina, often with little warning, and is often accompanied with excruciating cramps that make you see stars. Then you have to shove a little cotton stick up there to avoid, y'know, embarrassing yourself in public and not soaking and staining every piece of material you come into contact with. Despite this monthly saga being an unavoidable part of being a woman with a womb, our biological cycle is, effectively, taxed.

HM Revenue and Customs categorize tampons as "non-essential luxury items," unlike alcoholic jellies, kangaroo meat and edible sugar flowers—all of which are considered essential to the wellbeing of the community. Of course, if women avoided sanitary ware and actually did just allow themselves to bleed everywhere, there would be chaos. Public transport would be a nightmare—not sure how you'd get the deep, claret stains out of those fuzzy seats on the Tube—and we'd have to buy new clothes every single month.

Paying tax for being a biological woman is not only absurd, it's unapologetically sexist.

In June last year, Goldsmiths student Laura Coryton started an online campaign to stop taxing periods, which has since reached 217,143 signatures of the intended 300k goal (you can sign the petition here). Last week, Laura and her friend Lucy Lu started a Facebook event, inviting supporters to march from 10 Downing Street in fake blood-covered knickers to "show your support to ensure the mighty tampon, sanitary towel and maternity pad are VAT free this election. Tampons not a necessity? Then welcome to the world where we don't wear them."

I didn't have the time or materials to dress up as a period, but I wasn't lacking in spirit, so me and a photographer went to Downing Street to join the march.

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What we didn't expect was to arrive to a swarm of 16-year-old girls singing Bleeding Love by Leona Lewis, their tampon earrings swinging from their ears as they downed cheap cider. I was clearly the oldest person there, it being 5.30PM on a weekday, but it was busy nonetheless.

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Organizer Lucy Lu [pictured above], who was handing out fake blood-soaked knickers to protesters, told VICE, "I was walking down the street and a homeless girl came up to me and said, 'Could I have a tampon?' I thought that was outrageous—tampons should be free on the NHS. Then I started looking into it and I couldn't believe that tampons were still taxed. If HMRC think that they're not an essential, then we're not going to wear them. That's the idea behind the protest," she explained.

"I want more publicity, especially in the run up to the election," she added. Hardly any MPs have said anything about it. Nick Clegg said that it wasn't in his manifesto, Nigel Farage said he'd think about it and David Cameron has always avoided the subject. It's a health issue, not a women's issue."

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I spoke to Indigo [pictured above], who had travelled from Berkshire to attend. "When you realize that Jaffa Cakes, bingo, betting, exotic meats and men's razors are all taxed as necessities, it makes you baffled as to why women's hygiene products are considered 'luxury,'" she said. "The average woman menstruates for 20 to 30 years, so a 5 percent taxation really does add up. It's crazy that men are deciding what are necessities for women."

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There were about four men that turned up, one of whom was Oisin [pictured above]. "I'm here because I heard about it from my girlfriend and I think it's disgusting to tax something that's a necessity of a lot of peoples lives. I want to show my disdain, in the hope that the government will listen."

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Kareen [pictured above] told VICE: "It's ridiculous that we're taxed for having vaginas. This is such an outdated thing. I know it's going to be hard to get the tax taken off, because of the EU law, but I think the best thing would be if the NHS offered tampons or free pads for people."

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After about an hour of chanting "We will bleed!" and "Don't tax our Tampax!' the crowd decided to march down to Parliament Square to roll about in the grass. At this point, the pervasive press presence decided to disperse, while protestors took selfies. "I'm going to put this as my cover photo," I overheard someone who was dressed to the nines in ketchup say.

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Eventually, security ushered everybody off the grass and the protest drew to a close. Despite it resembling an al fresco house party towards the end, it was exciting to be around people who were actually trying to do something about the fact that half the population are being taxed for something that is biologically impossible to prevent. I suppose that's what happens when 75 percent of our parliament are men and they can't even say the word "tampon" out loud.

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Sexism in Space


I Tried to Escape from a Locked Basement with My Ex-Girlfriend, for Fun

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Seinfeld marked the full-fledged mainstream emergence of the idea that it was possible to be cool with your exes. Elaine and Jerry's brief relationship backstory served merely as a preamble to their more important roles as lifelong amigos—you could be friends with your former lovers, and your friendship could be more important, or longer-lasting, than your romance. I have one such ex-girlfriend, with whom I'm still on good terms. After the initial wounds of our conscious uncoupling had started to scab, we began our transition back to being friends, working to overcome the awkwardness of platonically hanging out with someone you're used to seeing naked.

Wanting to test the strength of our now non-romantic bond, I asked my ex, Amber, if she wanted to lock herself in a basement with me. Oh, and if we couldn't escape within 45 minutes, we would be gassed and killed. Well, not really. But that's the fun little backstory of The Basement: A Live Escape Room Experience.

IRL room escapes model themselves after modern room escape game apps (and the clunky flash-based escape games of the aughties internet), which require you to solve puzzles and find clues in order to escape a dangerous situation. The Basement provided the perfect trial for testing the friends-without-benefits relationship Amber and I had forged.

Things got off to a rocky start, however, when I tried to purchase our tickets for the event on my phone. The Basement's mobile site was a tad wonky and wouldn't allow me to purchase more than one pass for the experience. I got mine and called Amber.

"Hey, listen. I don't know what's up with their site, but I could only get mine. Can you get yours on your end?"

"Are you kidding me?" This was starting to feel like we were dating again. "I thought I wasn't going to have to spend anything. That's the whole reason I agreed to do this with you. Fine. Whatever. Yeah, I got it."

Communication hadn't been that big of an issue while we were together, but we both could admit we had a short fuse when it came to things outside our locus of control. If some outside force threw a wrench into our plans, we'd find a way to twist the annoyance into somehow being a result of the ineptitude of the other. If we had any hope of surviving, we'd have to make sure those old habits didn't flare up as we were scrambling around in the dark.

I met Amber at hers the next morning at 11 AM so we could drive together to The Basement's home of Pacoima, California, the methiest part of LA County. Los Angeles being Los Angeles, there was, of course, traffic. Amber cursed at some drivers and I cringed like the old days because I'm positive her road rage is going to get her in trouble some day. (But that was no longer my problem to worry about.)

The Basement was hidden in a dusty, barren strip mall right next to an adult toy superstore. As we were the first of our timeslot's group to arrive, we thought we'd kill time by going into the sex shop and laughing at the ridiculous products together.

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In retrospect, that was an odd decision. It was bizarre to have dicks and vaginas in our faces and try to avoid the natural instinct to then think about that person next to you through a sexualized lens. Sure, we were in this place on a lark, but I had seen Amber naked a million times and could still tell you where specific freckles were located in her swimsuit region. So, despite our having moved on and my having no desire to get intimate with her, I wasn't exactly digging the uncomfortable questions this shop was making me contemplate. I had no desire to ruminate on what penises might have been around her since our breakup. I certainly wished for nothing but her happiness, and undoubtedly that would involve penises, but I still didn't need the mental image brought about by her intrigued "hmm" as she looked at some shredded porn stars.

"We should probably head back to the waiting area," I suggested.

Once back in the holding pen, Amber and I filled out the perfunctory release forms as the rest of our group showed up. It was a clique of eight women. Their giggles and lack of game faces gave off more of a "Sunday Funday" than "we're here to crush this" vibe. Amber and I, who were decidedly here to crush this, shot glances at each other. Looks like it's you and me carrying this thing, we said wordlessly. It had always been this way for us, in happy times, and even as things got bad: the two of us against the world. Apparently, some things don't change.

The previous escape group filed out past us, all chummy and back-slapping. I don't know if they'd beaten the game or not, but their obvious comfort and companionship gave me pause about my own choice to be here: Why wasn't I escaping a torture room with my best friends? Why couldn't I have what this group had, rather than a semi-awkward connection with one person along with mostly benign disdain for some strangers I'd already (unfairly) written off? Quit comparing yourself to others, Justin, I told myself. This is part of what forced a wedge between you two in the first place.

Finally, it was time to enter the room and get to work. Black sacks on all our heads, we were placed in a enclosure surrounded by a chain-link fence while our captor spoke to us via speakers about how he was truly rooting for us to escape and spread his message. The lights flickered on and the woman at the front of the cage grabbed the first key of our journey to freedom.

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This dungeon had the same ambiance of all those in games you've played on your iPad: hints written in blood on the wall, items hidden under furniture, computers with unrealistically simplified GUIs, and all the creepy children's toys in the world to pad out the modern horror film aesthetic.

I attempted to bellow some general to the group.

"Let's all pick an area to focus on at first. Check carefully to find all the hidden top layer clue—"

This group was having none of my mansplaining. Everyone was running around doing their own thing like this actually was life and death. Amber laughed at my flaccid attempt at leadership.

"I don't think they really care what you have to say."

She was right, but the unnecessary emasculation was not appreciated. I stormed off to dig through a pile of body parts away from her snark.

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Codes were cracked, riddles were solved, locks were opened, and our group was mostly operating as a full-blown clusterfuck. At half an hour through our gauntlet, Amber had become a sort of de facto liaison between the group of women and me. Just as when we were together, Amber and I had our own separate things going on. While I maintain this is a healthy way to conduct a relationship, I also know it caused a strain on us when the cracks began to show. Would our unwillingness to share experiences together be our undoing in this creepy cellar as it was in our romantic life?

The countdown timer shifted from a gentle beeping to a submarine dive alarm as we inched closer to our doom. We were just short of freedom. All the passwords were entered or solved and ready to be entered in each wall safe and computer. We just couldn't seem to find a crucial last key that unchained a clearly important piece of the puzzle that would set into motion the Rube Goldberg machine of our liberation.

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"Gas" began to seep into the room, and Amber and I locked eyes over a table of shackles and bondage devices that we'd never had the chance to use in our own sex life. There was kindness in that shared look. Understanding. We both knew that, just as in our time together, we'd done all we could, but some things are just meant to die. This group of pretend-captives was one of those things.

The floodlights came on and the Basement's manager came in to debrief us and field a few questions. This woman was as confused as we were as to the whereabouts of that vexing missing key. "It's the first one we give you so... it's gotta be around here," she explained. A woman from the group sheepishly raised a key in the air.

"Oops. I think I put it in my pocket after I unlocked the front cage. Hehe."

This was not a "hehe" moment. Her friends gave her a thinly veiled razzing of "Aww, c'mon, Carol!" but I never had to see her again so I made a beeline for Amber and probably too loudly said, "Is this lady fucking serious?"

Once we were out of earshot of the others, Amber piled on.

"What kind of moron forgets they have a key in their pocket while playing a motherfucking ROOM ESCAPE game?!"

In that moment there didn't seem to be any awkwardness or the weight of a complicated personal history between us. We were just hating someone together, as friends.

Follow Justin Caffier on Twitter.

The Georgia Legislature Just Pulled the Plug on Electric Cars

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The Georgia Legislature Just Pulled the Plug on Electric Cars

The Recurring Themes that Explain Britain's Leaders' Debate Last Night

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

We were promised a confusing punch-up, but it was more like a tightly choreographed fight scene in a revival of West Side Story. In the end, all the key players had so much to lose (and very little to win) that the Leaders' Debate quickly turned into a series of ticked boxes, as the politicos deliberately tried not to test each other's boundaries, instead engaging in some kind of tacit mutual pact to stick to their individual scripts.

So if it felt a bit formulaic, then maybe, just maybe, that's because it was. After all, at least 14 oft-repeated tropes formed part of a debate that went on longer than most Tarkovsky films. For ease of reference, we've listed them below.

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THE WEIRDO WHO GETS TO POSE AS A "MEMBER OF THE PUBLIC"

The first question, as ever on these occasions, came from a 12-year-old child prodigy in a suit who looked like he was vying to be the William Hague of 2032. He even went by the improbable name of Johnny Tudor—a sort of English Heritage take on Johnny Bravo, and exactly the kind of crap marginal seat-superhero who wanted to know uninteresting things about the deficit that he could have just looked up on the internet anyway.

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THE HIGHLY TRADITIONAL ATTEMPT TO DIFFERENTIATE POLICIES THAT ARE ALL THE SAME

In answering him, all of the parties then did their best angel-pin-head-dance to try and tell you why they were, a) unbelievably financially responsible when it came to the economy, but b) totally going to give you lots of free cool shit, from tax breaks for chihuahuas to free Now TV subscriptions with every hernia operation you ordered on the NHS.

It turned out that all the parties have different platforms on cutting the deficit. Some of them will cut it reaaaaallly slowly at first then reeaaaaaallly quickly at the end. Some will cut it reaaaaallly quickly at first then reeaaaaaallly slowly at the end. Some will cut it reaaallly slowly in the middle, then use that bit to cut around the edges slightly faster. Some will cut it in strips. Some will cut it in a mobius pattern. In summary: everyone would like to cut the deficit but everyone would also like to spend your money.

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THE OFTEN-REPEATED DEBATING FALLBACK YOU WISH THEY'D FORGET

David Cameron's severely disabled son died at the age of six, in NHS care. That is so very horrible. But perhaps, David, the best way to memorialize young Ivan Cameron would be not to use him as a debating point every time your back is against the wall over funding the NHS? Perhaps it would be to go for a long stroll in a quiet garden, and think fondly about the time he said he was scared of monsters and you tucked him in and told him "there are no monsters here, my boy, sleep tight now," and then let a single tear pucker onto your waxy cheek and drop down onto the frosty mid-Winter grass? Amiright or amiright?

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THE MELANIE PHILLIPS ON QUESTION TIME MEMORIAL AWARD FOR SEVERE COMPASSION FAILURE

There's telling Bulgarians they should get to the back of the social housing line, and then there's telling several thousand AIDS patients to go die. When Farage accused NHS AIDS patients who are not British nationals of health tourism, it seemed to stumble into the middle of the room and just lie there for a few minutes before anyone else could figure out a way to respond to it, like being told you have cancer, or, um, AIDS.

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THE CRASHINGLY OBVIOUS TWITTER GAG YOU SAW IN EIGHT DIFFERENT FORMS

Was that Farage was going to tell Natalie Bennet to piss off back to her native Australia.

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THE SADLY UNAVOIDABLE POINTLESSNESS OF THE MINNOWS

For viewers already puzzled by Natalie Bennett, the inclusion of Plaid Cymru's own PolBot 3000 model, Leanne Wood, was pretty much the final straw. Wood commands a party that isn't even in power in a country that comprises one in 20 voters. She is basically less important than the 15th most senior person in the Labour Party, and her policy platform seems to be, "to be a less interesting SNP." For most viewers who hadn't considered Welsh politics in years, the mere sight of Plaid Cymru was enough to make them realize that this disastrous Union experiment had gone on long enough.

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THE HAMMERING OF THE THINGS THE FOCUS GROUPS LIKED IN THE LAST DEBATE

After he lost the polls but won the Twitter war last time out, Eddie's people had evidently picked up on his "good points" in the last (non) debate, and decided to make him amplify them. So we had Ed the Super-Passionate, his voice quimming with hoity emotion as he bleated about the NHS, sounding every bit like he was having his prostate milked by a gorgeous young proctologist. This tactic still seems to be working for him, and at this stage it's a case of "something's got to."

THE MUCH-TRAILED HARPING ON ZERO HOURS

Then, sensing blood in Cameron's wobble in front of Paxman over zero hours contracts, Ed's people had decided to crack that peanut with a diamond-drill jackhammer. After 120 minutes of him thumping them from all angles, it began to sound like this was everything to him. A week ago, no one knew what they were. Now, it sounded like Miliband's dad had been killed by a Contract Killer on Zero Hours and he'd sworn an oath on the brow of Primrose Hill to avenge him.

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THE INEVITABLE LIB DEM RETURN TO MIDDLING-OUT

Do you want to cut a lot? Do you want to cut a little? What if it all just seems a bit confusing and makes your head hurt when you try and decide who's right or wrong? Then obviously you should be voting Lib Dem. Often accused of being wishy-washy, Clegg was actively turning insipidness into his USP by using his closing speech to announce that he'd cut less than the Tories, more than Labour. That was why he deserved your vote: because he's a sort of wibbly public school Goldilocks.

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THE AWKWARD STAGED RHETORICAL FLOURISHES

Of all the creaking staged bits of rhetoric, probably the most tiresome was Nick Clegg trying to call out Ed Miliband on whether he would "apologize for Labour's economic mess." No, wait, it wasn't that at all. It was when David Cameron, super-cringe, claimed to have a copy of the note Liam Byrne left in the Treasury when Labour departed on his actual lectern. No, wait. Tell a lie. Of course, it was Ed Miliband found himself falling back on the most famously effective payoff line in US Presidential debate history. Ronald Reagan's jibes to Jimmy Carter, "There you go again." Yes, Ed was effectively being a covers band of the founding father of neo-conservatism. Michael Foot would've been so proud.

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THE HECKLER

The inevitable heckler arrived, inevitably, in the final quarter. "How would you like to clean up your own mother's piss?" Well, David Cameron liked it just fine, he supposed, because his heckler had made the tactical error of trying to make a serious point about soldiers' after-service care while wearing a furry white gilet and being a dick. As Victoria Prosser—whose Twitter profile describes her as a "mum, coach, artist, wellbeing guru!"—was removed by security, Cameron merely confirmed that he loved Our Boys very much, before noting that a woman in a furry gilet who called herself a "well-being guru" shouldn't expect the public to get behind her.

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THE USE OF CANCELING TRIDENT TO BANKROLL EVERYTHING

Trident is a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) equipped with multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRV). It costs around $3.6 billion a year to run, which is only 15 percent of the Defense budget. Replacing it in a few years time will cost another $30 billion. Yet every minnow party in history from the Lib Dems to the Greens still uses it as their financial black hole-plastering device whenever they want to get out of a spending commitment they've made about free woggles for llamas. This they do by valuing it at "$150 billion" and neglecting to measure that this figure is for the full 30 years. Nicola Sturgeon managed to take up the cudgels against it more than once.

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THE INEVITABLE MASSIVE POLICY AREA OMISSION

It's just a good thing there isn't much global conflict going on, or else our sclerotic, insular island nation might've had to answer a question on international affairs. Given that the debate was already two hours of gray gruel, this was merciful. On the downside, it was an omission that meant that no one would split their sides hearing what Plaid's independent Wales would do if 300,000 fiercely-armed Russian troops lined up in the Baltic, nor hear Natalie Bennett suggest that we should let ISIS live in accordance with their traditional customs and stop trying to impose Western morality on them.

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THE UNCOMFORTABLY PREDICTABLE MEDIA PUZZLEMENT

Afterward, the snap polls simply told us that Cameron and Miliband were neck and neck—which probably says more about tribalism in politics than anything clear. Was there a winner? Not even "democracy" was a real winner here, but over the coming days any polls bounce will be reverse-correlated back to the debates. Pundits gazed at their feet and wondered whether it would all start to mean something soon enough. Is this election campaign actually ever going to generate momentum, or, given that we've spent the better part of a year fighting the phoney war, have we all made up our minds already? Are we now simply drifting toward May 7 in exactly the pattern of electoral gridlock the polls keeping suggesting? They're not always wrong, y'know.

Follow Gavin on Twitter.

Check out more of VICE's UK Election '15 coverage

Chasing the Ghost of Techno's Latest Obsession—TB Arthur

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Chasing the Ghost of Techno's Latest Obsession—TB Arthur

Britain's Prisons Are on the Brink of Exploding

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[body_image width='1000' height='885' path='images/content-images/2015/04/02/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/02/' filename='pissed-on-guards-booby-traps-and-septic-graffiti-25-years-on-from-the-hmp-strangeways-april-fools-day-riots-903-body-image-1427983660.jpg' id='42563']Alan Lord, one of the convicts, on the roof of Strangeways prison displays a message to the onlooking media. Photos courtesy of Alan Lord

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Overcrowded. Understaffed. Underfunded. With austerity cutbacks and a reduced operating budget, conditions have reached critical mass in the 136 prisons that serve England and Wales. Collapsing under the weight of numbers, the prison population is a record 85,925. At 149 per 100,000 people, the UK has one of the highest rates of incarceration in Western Europe. [The United States, however, tops that with 707 prisoners per 100,000 people.]

On Wednesday, it was 25 years since the April Fools' Day riot at HMP Manchester—the longest and bloodiest disturbance in the history of the British prison system. As the anniversary struck, a former convict who had been sent down for possession with intent to supply and was released a week ago told me that things are close to boiling point once more.

"Things are dangerously close to breakdown because of overcrowding and prisoners being locked up for 23 hours out of 24. [They're] sleeping, smoking, eating, wanking, shitting, and pissing without any fucking privacy in sight, smell, and sound of each other in primitive conditions," he said.

He put this down to "government cutbacks—too few prison officers to control inmates during association. Staff shortages have also fucked up once a week visiting times—reduced from 60 mins to 45 minutes." He added that another major issue in the prison is, "cold food and stingy portions" but, he said, there is "no problem getting drugs or access to a mobile phone."

Better known by its former name, Strangeways, HMP Manchester was built in 1868, and is one of England's largest high-security, category A prisons. For many decades, this Victorian relic has enjoyed a reputation for endangering the life and limb of both prisoners and prison officers alike.

The 1990 April Fools' Day riot started at 10:50 AM in the prison chapel. Armed with nine-volt batteries in socks, the cons swiftly overpowered prison officers, stole their keys and unlocked cells. By 11:06 AM, they had made it to the roof of the prison. By 11:15 AM, prison officers were ordered to stand down. From the rooftop, bricks, and slate tiles were used as missiles and hurled down by rioters. To add insult to injury, they pissed on retreating and wounded officers.

The explosion of violence claimed the life of one inmate, a sex offender, and a prison officer who later suffered a heart attack. In total, 194 people were injured and much of the prison was destroyed during the 25 days of protest. But what led 142 hardcore inmates to take it over? Squalid and overcrowded living conditions. At the time, Strangeways held 1,647 men despite only being designed to accommodate 970. Three men, sometimes four, were housed together in 13' x 8' Victorian cells that were built to hold one. Like all rioting prisoners, they had demands, and the demands were not unreasonable. More visiting rights, longer exercise periods, an end to 23-hour lockdown and "slopping out" unsanitary chamber pots (prisoners had to shit and piss in buckets in their cell). They also had a litany of other grievances: mental and physical brutality, the misuse of psychotropic drugs in controlling prisoners, and poor food.

During the course of the riot, hundreds of inmates surrendered, but ringleader Paul Taylor and a dozen other cons planted trapping pits that kept the screws at bay—sections of the prison landing had been destroyed and camouflaged with linoleum tiles through which prison officers would fall. At 6:20 PM on Wednesday, April 25, 1990, the protest came to an end. Indifferent to their petitions of complaint, Mary Stewart, vice-chairperson of the prison's board of visitors, dismissed the rioters as "little men."

With the mutiny over, it soon emerged that the prison's governor, Brendan O'Friel, had wanted to retake Strangeways on the second day of the protest but was overruled by the then Home Secretary David Waddington, despite 18 "snatch squads" waiting in the wings to regain control of the facility. Told to stand down and withdraw by the Home Office, prison officers were left feeling humiliated and frustrated. In the aftermath, 40 inmates ended up in court for rioting, many of them receiving long custodial sentences. Paul Taylor, the ringleader from Liverpool, who was serving three years for theft, deception, and assault, got ten years for his role in the disturbance. Alan Lord, already serving life for murder, was given another ten years for his part.

Strangeways had been trashed. Stones, bricks, rubble, and glass littered the wings of the facility. Cell doors had been ripped off their hinges and thrown off prison landings. Stairwells were demolished and used as shields and makeshift barricades alongside iron-framed beds. In the chapel, where the riot had started 25 days earlier, the altar cross was pulled down and broken into pieces. Pews were smashed up and the chapel's walls were covered in septic graffiti. More than $180 million had to be spent rebuilding the prison. A public inquiry—the Woolf Report—described conditions at Strangeways as "intolerable" and forced major changes to the entire prison system. Lord Woolf's report was seen as a watershed in the history of the British penal system. It set out 12 major recommendations and identified dilapidated, overcrowded, and unsanitary conditions as the factors of trouble.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/IsurMYD7F3I' width='100%' height='360']

Will another full on riot happen again? History not learned from has a tendency to repeat itself. My ex-con source tells me that it's "not lost on the lags that conditions are as bad as they were 25 years ago. There are too many violent prisoners and not enough prison officers to control them. Some trouble makers have been moved into isolation as a preventative measure before anything can be organized."

According to Lord Woolf, the former lord chief justice who led the inquiry into the 1990 riot, the prison system is in crisis.

"There are things that are better now than then, but I fear we've allowed ourselves to go backwards and we're back where we were at the time of Strangeways," Woolf said, in a Prison Reform-sponsored lecture last week. "For a time after the riot things were much better and numbers were going down. Unfortunately prisoners are being kept in conditions that we should not tolerate, they're a long way from home, and their families can't keep in touch with them—a whole gamut of things need to be done and that's why I would welcome a thorough re-look at the situation and above all trying to take prison out of politics."

And a recent parliamentary report warned that government cuts and reforms to the prison system made a "significant contribution" to the decline in safety over the last two years. After a year-long inquiry, the House of Commons Justice Committee expressed "great concern" over the surge in assaults on staff and inmates, as well as the rise in suicides, self-harm, and "concerted indiscipline" in prisons between 2012 and 2014.

The ingredients are there. The dangers have been spelt out. Decisive action needs to be taken before another crisis happens with embarrassing historical timing.

Alexander Reynolds is the author of Convict Land: Undercover in America's Jails.

VICE Premiere: VICE Exclusive: Cure Your Disco Fever with Boulevards''Forgot to Mention'

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Old-school disco pop is making a big comeback right now thanks in large part to artists like Blood Orange and Twin Shadow. Jamil Rashad, also known as Boulevards, follows in the same tradition. He conjures up his inner Freddy Mercury and MJ in this new track, "Forgot to Mention," which sounds like it's made to be listened to while wearing leather pants and sweating joyously.

Band photo by Lauren Gesswein.

Check out more Boulevards here.

What One Life Crew Taught Me About Hardcore

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What One Life Crew Taught Me About Hardcore

'Fuck for Satan': The New Generation of Sex-Centric Tabletop RPGs

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Note: Some of the images below depict violence and sex in ways that might disturb some readers.

In the 70s, when tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons were first winning the hearts and minds of the nerds everywhere, sex was usually relegated to just a paragraph in most RPG rulebooks, if it was mentioned at all. Player characters could slay dragons, explore caves, and save townships from all manner of villains, but their game worlds weren't really designed to accommodate love or the physical actions that follow it.

That didn't stop some dungeon masters from crafting sex-related scenarios for players—sometimes against the will of the other players. Tabletop gaming, like much of nerd culture, began as a male-dominated space, and it remained so for decades. From the very inception of RPGs, female characters have possessed less strength or speed than their male counterparts. Some games even implemented a "comeliness score," which rated how hot your character was and how much influence she could have over the opposite sex. According to a survey of 105 female players conducted in 2006 by a University of Miami philosophy student for a dissertation on gender in role-playing games, more than 55 percent of respondents had been "made to feel uncomfortable, judged, or harassed because of their gender" while playing a game or interacting with the RPG community.

It wasn't until the late 80s and early 90s that companies like White Wolf started to release sex-tinged games like 1991's Vampire: The Masquerade, which centered around lovelorn goth-punk vampires. Though arguably making romance and eroticism important components of the game was a step forward, today The Masquerade seems outdated when viewed through the lens of today's sex-positive, LGBT-inclusive, and feminist values—as do most RPGs from earlier eras. After all, tabletop games reflect the fantasies of their makers and players, and fantasies can easily become colored by biases and misconceptions.

But more open and equitable representations of sex and gender are finally breaking into RPGs. In the latest edition of D&D, for example, a new " androgynous or hermaphroditic" spin was added to the classic elf god character named Corellon Larethian last August. According to the new rules, you should feel free to play your character as "a female character who presents herself as a man, a man who feels trapped in a female body, or a bearded female dwarf who hates being mistaken for a male."

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Image from Numenera: Love and Sex in the Ninth World. Image courtesy of Shanna Germain.

Another major game that is making strides is Numenera, one of the top-selling RPGs of the 2014 holiday season. The game's makers just released an official supplement called Love And Sex in the Ninth World, created by erotica writer Shanna Germain. "We really wanted to create a guide for love and sex just like you would create a guide for any other aspect of a game," she told me.

The supplement includes background on the roles of gender and sexual orientation in Numenera, ways to incorporate sex into your game, and even special items your characters can come across, like the "blood boiler," which is a pill for your characters that "causes an increase in blood flow to any stimulated body parts."

By diving into sex and fleshing out the rules and ways players can incorporate sex into the game, the Numenera supplement helps establish more equitable relations between players in general. It includes a section on how consent should be handled when engaging in these acts with other players that notes that "such topics should be handled with care and with a solid understanding of what your group can and wants to handle at the table."

"We really wanted to create a guide for love and sex just like you would create a guide for any other aspect of a game." –Shanna Germain

Sex and gender boundaries are really being pushed in the world of experimental, indie RPGs. The small scene these games have emerged from have enabled its creators and the players an opportunity to explore sex in new and exciting ways.

Avery Mcdaldno is among the new generation of game developers who are changing the RPG landscape. She's created sex-and-romance-centric games that she told me are often about "queers, community, and disillusionment." Her game Monsterhearts bases its rules on those of another indie RPG, Apocalypse World, but sets the action in a fictional, monster-filled high school.

"I wanted a game that borrowed from the structure of Apocalypse World (messy relationship triangles, partial successes, leading principles, abrupt power swings) to tell a story about the messy, horny lives of teenage monsters," she said. She added that Monsterhearts and its characters are influenced by Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Twilight, and The Craft, but her game isn't so "painfully heterosexist" as most teen supernatural romances.

"The game pushes a queer agenda," Avery said. "There's a two-page spread dedicated to talking about the importance of queering your monster stories, but furthermore, queer themes pervade the mechanics of the game. Monsterhearts is about ambiguity, uncertainty, shame about your body, shame about your wants and needs, feeling like you have something to hide, being horny, but especially being horny in ways that surprise you. It's about coming to terms with the way that sex intersects with power."

This is, as you might imagine, an extremely dramatic evolution from the dark ages of the "harlot table" from the first edition of the Dungeon Master's Guide for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, which described female characters as everything from "wanton wenches" to "slovenly trolls":

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While Numenera and Monsterhearts offer players opportunities for romance, there are other RPGs that portray sex in more shocking or grotesque ways. One of the first games to do this was 2002's F.A.T.A.L., which has been called "the date rape RPG, without dating" and one of the worst RPGs ever; among all sorts of other problems, the rules included an extensive rules and mechanics for rape but didn't even mention consensual sex.

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Cover of F.A.T.A.L.

Though F.A.T.A.L. was universally panned, there are still new games coming out that offer a boundary-testing mix of sex, shock, and humor. Lamentations of the Flame Princess, which was created by James Edward Raggi IV, was widely released in 2011 and involves sacrifice, sex cults, a monster called a Penis Walker, and adventures with titles like "Fuck for Satan."

"I am intentionally trying to get into trouble," Raggi told me. "One of the things I do is try to re-fight the 1980s idea that ' Dungeons & Dragons is satanic, it makes you commit suicide, it's horrible.' From my perspective, back then TSR [the company that owned D&D] totally caved in to that. And if they had said, 'Hell no, you people are crazy,' we might have a much different hobby on our hands now."

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Zombie attack from the pages of Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Image courtesy of James Edward Raggi IV

Lamentations of the Flame Princess has been criticized by some gamers for its depictions of violence against women. When I asked James to comment on those criticisms, he said, "A couple years back, because of such claims, I went through the current Rules & Magic book and counted certain occurrences." According to him, men get messed up at a rate of about 8:1 in the rulebook's art—which he admits can be pretty harsh.

"There is a lot of horrific shit depicted in LotFP books, and sometimes it even involves genitals," James said. "Anybody can cherry-pick examples and make whatever claims you want (and some people do), but absolutely nobody can look at the entirety of LotFP art and tell me with a straight face there's an excess of victimized women."

So what are the most divisive moments in his game? "That core rulebook has got a medusa turning someone to stone while she's fucking him and it's got a Vince Locke illustration of the zombie attack where a zombie's shoving his arm straight up the woman. All the complaints, for any of the artwork, that's the one that gets the most. As far as I'm concerned: mission accomplished."

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The Penis Walker from the pages of Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Image courtesy of James Edward Raggi IV

Kira Magrann, an avid gamer and blogger for GamingAsWomen.com, isn't too impressed by Raggi's brand of shocking RPG.

"I feel like games that use sex to provoke and shock are like most media that features sex to provoke and shock... a little boring?" she said. "What's considered shocking and provoking varies a whole lot, but when I hear those terms, I think 'rape-y or violent' as opposed to 'dark and kinky.' There's ways to showcase all kinds of perverse stuff while still showcasing consent, gender-queerness, and safe sex."

Which is why she welcomes some of the recent sex-positive developments that have taken place in RPGs. However, she still believes there's much more room to grow. "I think that if you want well-rounded characters in any game," she said, "regardless of the setting or rule set, you need to touch on relationships and sex more than most games do today."

Are we at a point where gamers and creators are, across the board, ready to embrace and experiment with sex and sexuality in a mature and equitable way? No, probably not. And major publishers are still at the very infancy of embracing these subjects in ways that aren't childish or insensitive. However, for the brave, adventurous RPG fans out there, there's never been a better time to be a horny elf.

Follow Giaco on Twitter.

Don't Hate Athletes for Being Capitalists, Hate Capitalism

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Don't Hate Athletes for Being Capitalists, Hate Capitalism

De La Soul's New Album Puts a New Spin on the Sampling Controversy

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De La Soul has always been a part of my sonic unconscious. Their first album, 3 Feet High and Rising, dropped in 1989, the same year I was born. In college, my twin sister would give me hip-hop history lessons while driving me around Los Angeles. She played the B-side song "Skip to my Loop"—which immediately transported me back to the 90s. The song combined De La Soul's iconic ironic sound with a riff on a children's song I sang in preschool.

De La Soul has experimented with all kinds of samples and sounds over the years. In 1991 they were hit with a lawsuit for sampling the 1968 Turtles' hit "You Showed Me" on their song "Transmitting Live From Mars." The suit was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.

This week, they posted a Kickstarter campaign to fund their first album in 11 years, and it's clear from the video that the lawsuit still has them gun shy. "Remember when we got sued?" Maseo says early on in the video. They then explain that for the new album they hired an assortment of musicians (and a monkey) to create hundreds of hours of music that they will sample from, making it pretty much impossible to sue them over it. Their caution is understandable, given recent high-profile lawsuits against Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke, Sam Smith, as well as Timbaland and Jay-Z.

De La Soul's pitch worked, and within six hours of posting they had hit their $110,000 goal. Since then the numbers have kept climbing to just above $300,000 at the time of writing. Questlove, The Beastie Boys, and Talib Kweli all tweeted that they helped back the album. I caught up with De La Soul's Posdnuos on the phone this week to talk about the history of sampling, music lawsuits, and the new method they've developed for this album.

VICE: Based on your Kickstarter video, a lot of the inspiration behind this album comes from when you got sued in 1991. Were you expecting that sort of legal trouble at the time?
Posdnuos: At the time, we handed in all that information [about what we sampled]. So I guess the label that we were on, Tommy Boy, chose to clear what they chose to clear as opposed to some of the songs they chose not to. The execs at the label really loved the music. They just didn't expect that our album would get as big as it was. There was nothing like it. It was a litmus test. It got popular, so certain songs where we had sampled someone, and they're hearing their work and realize that this wasn't cleared—that was when everything unfortunately happened.

If you recorded the music yourself, what's the difference between a sample and just another track you recorded for the album?
Well I guess it's just the way you're using it. You're right, it could just be like hey, this is a great three minutes of what you played. We can rhyme over it. Once you then put it inside of any type of machine, whether it's an MPC, an SP-12 or Ableton, whatever instrument or software you have, to then loop and alter it, is when it becomes a sample. Even down to just your own voice. I can record myself rhyming but then there could be a portion of what I rhyme—I could sample it and use it in the hook.


Do you think that other people have gotten away with the kind of thing you got sued for?
I'm sure. It depends on how... well, put it like this—what we went through, that became a big profile case. Different artists got a little bit more clever on how they sampled. As opposed to more of a loop, things became more of a chop. Taking half of a sample mixed with someone else's half of a sample. Make almost like your own music out of samples, where it wasn't that easy to detect.

Did it the change the way you make music?
No, I wouldn't say so. We also became cleverer with how we sample. What it did was help the business be taken care of correctly. Instead of, like on the first album, us handing in a loose-leaf paper with the samples for what we used, it was more of a process that every label adopted. Everything became a little more organized where we would write down everything, make sure we had a copy, and our lawyers had a copy. We also provided a tape at the time—because cassettes were still prominent—of the original sample along with how we used it.


There have been a lot of high profile music lawsuits recently. What do you think about those?
It's still here and it's still unfortunate. I saw that even Jay Z is going through something at the moment with the sample Timbaland used in "Big Pimpin'." I'm sure his execs made sure it was cleared, but the people they cleared it with didn't have the right to clear it, and how is that Jay Z's fault? It's tricky! It's almost like you have to have a sample team. Even with Pharrell and Robin, it's hard to say. You know when I first heard it, I immediately heard—wow I almost thought of it as an ode to "Got to Give It Up," because Robin Thicke was singing in a falsetto like Marvin was. You know it was very similar. They chose not to involve the estate of Marvin Gaye—from what I heard that's what happened. I guess that's the thing that didn't give them a leg to stand on.

What made you decide to try this new way of doing things? Where you record everything that you sample in advance. Are you trying to make a point, or come up with a new method that other artists will use as well?
Personally, I wouldn't say that we've created the wheel in what we're trying. I feel that groups like Stetsasonic, which were considered one of the first hip-hop bands, could turn around and sample the drum [they recorded themselves] and add more to it.

But what we're doing is kind of groundbreaking in how we've done it; not in the sense of sampling ourselves, but in that we created tons of music first to be sampled. I feel that we are the first to do that, definitely. And that could lead to people being like, that is a cool idea. Let me just turn around and have a great time for about a month or so with great musicians. Let them play. Let them feel free. Interject here and there. And from there we can have things to sample from, that can be less of a problem in the long run.

This way you have more control over what you sample. Is that limiting at all? Definitely you have more control, but at the same time it's still a journey. It's not like this is not fun because I'm listening to music that I already know. The process of sampling that can be fun—the way you can see Kanye or Q-Tip or ourselves—go into a record store while they're in Dubai or Argentina, pick up a record, and they're listening to something for the first time with the intent of finding something that moves them, that can be manipulated. With what we did, the same magic happened. We spend so much time making music that when we listen back, there will be sessions where we don't even remember playing. It just sounds so fresh.

Follow Hannah on Twitter.

It's Easier Than You Think to Break Your Arm While Arm Wrestling

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[body_image width='2048' height='1536' path='images/content-images/2015/03/25/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/25/' filename='its-easier-than-you-think-to-break-your-arm-while-arm-wrestling-325-body-image-1427327716.jpg' id='39843']

The author's broken arm X-rays

A few weeks ago, at an impromptu arm wrestling match following the Iditarod race in Nome, Alaska, a woman named Grace Liu had her arm snapped. According to the Alaska Dispatch News, "There was a sickening pop, followed by an eerie silence" as everyone realized that Grace's arm had broken.

If this sounds like a bit much, then you've obviously never seen the scores of YouTube videos documenting this exact thing (watch at your own risk). Arm wrestling matches break a handful of arms every year, and it's much easier to do than you'd think. I should know, because it happened to me.

It was Christmas Eve and I was spending the holiday with my best friend and his family. My girlfriend and I had broken up three months earlier, and I was getting over that and trying to boost my testosterone by working out with my friends. With newfound competitiveness, arm wrestling became our new pastime, and we'd decided to set up a tournament for Christmas Eve.

Everyone gathered around the dinner table as I muscled my way to an easy victory against my best friend's brother. My friend was the next to sit in the challenger's seat. I changed it up and used my fresh, but non-dominant, left arm. This match proved to be a struggle, but my competitive drive surged as everyone cheered on, and I gave my final push toward victory.

I should mention that I'm not a very big guy. And in spite of the weightlifting, I never really got ripped. If you look at the video below, you can see that I'm poorly matched when you compare my arms to the thicker arms of my friend—but I felt like I had strength and strategy going for me. With enough effort, I was pretty sure I could turn the tide of the match.

But the laws of physics were having none of it. There was a loud crack. The room fell silent.

Warning: The below video features a guy's arm being broken

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/qYVyqlnXIh8' width='640' height='480']

The author's fateful arm wrestling match

I remember a surge of pain, then grabbing my arm and pulling it into my lap. It was moving in ways an arm is not supposed to move. Confusion permeated the room, and everyone looked queasy watching my arm flail around. Then the panicked realization set in that holiday fun time was over. Someone—I don't quite remember who—called 9-1-1 and an ambulance arrived.

It turns out a broken arm isn't enough to get you seen immediately and I had to wait eight hours in the ER before anyone started to fix me. It was enough time for my family to arrive, and for my arm, shoulder, and neck to their own aches and pains as I contorted my whole body to compensate for the injury and resulting swelling. When I was finally called back, the nurses painfully tugged on my arm as they took X-rays. The ER doctor reviewed my file, confirmed that this was serious, and—at last—flooded my IV line with pain meds.

[body_image width='2160' height='1440' path='images/content-images/2015/03/25/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/25/' filename='its-easier-than-you-think-to-break-your-arm-while-arm-wrestling-325-body-image-1427327823.jpg' id='39844']

I woke up in the hospital room where I would spend the next two days. I'm told that during this time I was visited by many family and friends—and even had a phone call with my ex-girlfriend, who agreed to give it another shot with me after I recovered. I would go on to have surgery, which required a donor bone from a cadaver, a metal plate, and eight metal screws to repair the break. Even my surgeon was shocked by the damage inflicted in something that's supposed to be a fairly playful competition.

While my arm-snappage was pretty severe, it doesn't seem completely uncommon. According to Dr. Clark Holmes, a board-certified sports medicine physician in Nashville, "There's a characteristic pattern that occurs with an arm wrestling injury." That pattern looks something like this: Your elbow is fixed to the table and you're very forcefully rotating your shoulder as your try to pin your opponent's arm down. "So your elbow can't rotate, but you're rotating the shoulder, and you get this tremendous torque across the humeral shaft."

Often, this results in a humeral shaft fracture—something that Holmes says is common enough in the sport of arm wrestling that there's a fair amount of medical literature about it. And indeed, there is: A study from 2014 warns that "arm wrestling has been recognized as a popular and potentially dangerous competition" and claims that "reports on injuries related to arm wrestling are increasing." There are a few other studies like this, and interestingly, a whole slew of arm wrestling injury research from the 70s and 80s (like this study, which has the witty title "Arm Wrestling Fractures—A Humerus Twist").

[body_image width='1200' height='900' path='images/content-images/2015/03/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/26/' filename='its-easier-than-you-think-to-break-your-arm-while-arm-wrestling-325-body-image-1427328037.jpg' id='39846']

Holmes added that arm wrestling injuries like mine aren't really preventable—they kind of come with the territory. "Unless you completely change the rules of arm wrestling, I would say it's a buyer beware," he says. "There's certainly a risk to it, and a fair number of injuries come with it."

Most of the time, these injuries don't end up as severe as mine. Even after I healed, I was left with a pretty gruesome scar. But the ex-girlfriend and I did end up going out again once I could get back into normal clothes, and that turned out to be the right move: We've been happily married for seven years. I know it puts a cliché little bow on things, but it's true: Breaking my arm might've been the best thing that ever happened to me.

LA’s Longest-Standing Bartender Has 86′d More Celebrities Than You

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LA’s Longest-Standing Bartender Has 86′d More Celebrities Than You
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