According to commercial Hollywood, the future's going to blow. Take a peek inside any blockbuster set in the future and humanity's prospects look dire. Where sci-fi once thrilled audiences with predictions of upcoming dystopias and high-tech paradises in equal measure, fantasy's sparkling utopias have all but faded from the silver screen. Today's films presume an audience's compliance with an almost nihilistic school of thought. Hollywood hardly needs to explain why things in the future are going to suck—they assume that you, dear viewer, already agree that this is how things will be. And it's not pretty.

Tom Cruise hovered above a long-since abandoned earth, desperately searching for life in Oblivion. Will and Jaden Smith did quite the same in After Earth. Brad Pitt battled a zombie apocalypse in World War Z. Simon Pegg, as well as Seth Rogan and the Apatow boys, mused about the end of days with The World's End and This Is the End, respectively. The teenage experience is contextualized with post-apocalyptic gloom in both The Hunger Games and Divergent series. Edge Of Tomorrow muses on the futile cyclicality of wartime. The latest entry in the Transformers franchise acknowledges the damage caused by chapters past, placing the world in techno-phobic ruin. And when Superman saved Metropolis in Man of Steel, it's safe to say that the city looked worse for wear. Somehow, even acts of heroics cause a bit of disaster. Moreover? Every single one of these films was released within the last five years.

"Ever since the atom bomb in WWII, which propagated images of death and destruction around the world, people have been more capable of imagining what an apocalypse looks like and how it may affect them," film critic Rumsey Taylor told VICE. "So their fear or cynicism is motivated by these images of death."

Taylor, who curated a month-long online collection of film essays on the topic of apocalypse for Not Coming to a Theatre Near You, doesn't see much of a difference between today's doomsday blockbusters and those of yesteryear, except for a modern preoccupation with environmental disasters.

The form may have gotten a facelift, but the function remains the same. If Hollywood is to be believed, things are getting worse and worse. Climate change deniers can keep it up, but if movie profits are indicative of anything (the last five years have tracked as the highest profits in industry history), it's that everybody is sort of into the idea that we're wrecking the planet beyond repair.

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"If a film shows us a good outcome, we're going to be bored," explains cultural theorist Judy Berland. "Films use our anxieties as an anchor." Berland, a Professor of Humanities at York University, is one of only three North American representatives for the Association of Cultural Studies' international board (both a mouthful and a big deal). Throughout her career, she's written often about the relationship between the human body and the culture's obsession with the possibilities of science.

"It all comes back to our feelings on science," Berland says. "We're slowly learning that science is actually sort of powerless to fix the things that have already gone wrong. All the amazing things that we hoped science would come up with have caused their own set of problems that science itself isn't able to solve. So that creates a sense of powerlessness."

Berland isn't scapegoating; the boundless potential of science remains the connective tissue between the industrial and the information age. In The Choice: Evolution of Extinction? systems theorist Ervin Lazlo once described an idealized future that was largely the result of science achieving the full potential of human imagination. From the smashing of the atom, the sudden abundance of cheap energy, and the pill's ability to limit population growth, to the development of automated technologies to do our dirty work and the power of television to provide education in every home, the human experience would, at the turn of the century, be a new dawn "hallmarked by humanism, solidarity, and well-being for everyone."

We feel ambivalent about technology, because there are forces stronger than science now.

To put it mildly, this isn't quite what went down. Instead, the endless possibilities of technology created their own set of problems that machines were no longer in a position to mediate.

"I think we feel ambivalent about technology, because there are forces stronger than science now," Berland says, "and that didn't use to be the case. Science was always in this position of complete narrative authority in the 20th century."

Since the birth of science-fiction film, somewhere between John B. Blystone's 1924 The Last Man on Earth and Fritz Lang's 1926 Metropolis, the future has served as fertile soil for both micro and macro conflict. So the idea of "narrative authority" gets at something slightly less abstract than a simple fear of technology.

Susan Sontag once wrote that sci-fi films were "concerned with the aesthetics of destruction, with the peculiar beauties to be found in wreaking havoc." Fair enough. But where last century's disaster films presented destruction as sex and the apocalypse as orgasm, many of today's films depict the gruesome future with banal indifference. Why this apathy toward doomsday?

"There is just a lot of rage right now," says Berland. "Economically, you have this really small number of people being incredibly rich, and then millions of people that have lost everything. And nobody is being held accountable. So there has got to be a lot of rage out there. Whether they're feelings of ambivalence, powerlessness, rage.

"Any dystopian future is always, in a way, a re-figuration of the present," says Professor Sabrina Ferri. "So a film that depicts a terrible future is also proposing a reflection on certain specific aspects of the present historical moment." Ferri is an assistant professor at the University of Notre Dame, where her interdisciplinary work has often focused on catastrophes and ruin in visual culture. Like Berland, Ferri cites apocalyptic cinema as anything but a recent trend.

"The question the focus on the destruction of civilization or on life after the catastrophe?" she asks. "In a way, one could say that an apocalyptic film places its emphasis on the past. In most cases, what is really at the center of the film is the cause, or the chain of causes that have led to the disaster."

This distinction between apocalypse and post-apocalypse isn't a matter of semantics. "One of the dominant readings of the film medium is as a return of the repressed: the things that have been made unconscious in the culture," Berland says. "It's now easier for us to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism."

It's an effect that author and cultural theorist Douglas Rushkoff calls "apocolypto," one of the five stages of his theory of Present Shock, in which scale trumps all.

The general notion of apocalypto is that it has become increasingly easier to imagine a zombie apocalypse than it is to imagine the idea of "next week." And this is largely because of a profound disruption in how we understand the world and time itself. According to Rushkoff, our immersion with technology and other online simulacra, coupled with our understanding of narrative in a 24-hour news context, have created a sense that time, as we imagine it, now exists in a perpetual state of linear "happening." There is no future to be imagined because the world—in all its constant accessibility and activity—is always living in now.

These kind of abstract anxieties are, in Rushkoff's opinion, fundamental to the rise of dystopian narratives, because the films themselves largely displace actual threats in favor of a general atmosphere. Movies like 2011's In Time and 2012's Looper feature pronouncedly grim forecasts of the future—but the state of things rarely factor into the films themselves. They're merely decoration for secondary drama.

Somewhere between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Twin Towers, cultural anxieties became more indefinable. Rushkoff cites the current ill-definition of modern enemies to be reflected back to us in the strange air of the films we watch. And that as American wartime evolved past modern warfare into something else entirely, traditional storytelling conflicts took on a different air.

"After the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and the fall of the Soviet Union. American frontierism was the only thing left," Rushkoff says, his voice taking on the urgency of a history teacher in a room on fire. "The Russians weren't there any more. It wasn't about fighting for freedom. So our big conflicts—the original Us. Vs. Them conflict and all the narratives that go along with it—went away. Now there is no more bad guy out there that we have to beat, so all the moral certainty goes away."

This rationale contextualizes many of the major blockbusters of the last half-decade. The pinnacle of utopian grandeur, Star Trek, got a grim facelift just two years ago. Even Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy often grapples with the anxieties and moral ambiguity of post-9/11 America, if only superficially. It seems that even films set in the present day have taken on a kind of gloom usually reserved for the last days of the party.

It is now easier for us to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

Ferri cites 9/11 as a breaking point in how we perceive cities to react to disaster. She calls the attack an "absolute event," borrowing a term from French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, whose own work has often delved into the subject of the hyper-real. "Events such as 9/11 change history and have enormous historical consequences," Ferri says, "but they do not only alter the historical course. Their devastating violence are highly symbolic—they change our imaginary, the way we see the world and the way we think about the world—and fiction is the realm of the symbolic."

The key seems to be rooted in disaster as shorthand. Whereas films about the end of days used to largely be interested in the "how and why" of disaster, modern apocalypse films seem to be interested merely in CliffsNotes—the fastest way to talk about today is to make tomorrow look gnarly.

"There are just so many things that have to get worked out, that if you want to get to the shortest distance between here and the future that we can imagine, the easiest way is to blow the whole thing up," Rushkoff says. "Crash the whole economy; everyone dies of a plague; there is just so much mentally and symbolically that if you're going to do future-casting, you have to abbreviate, since the real future is something we'll only be getting to slowly. You have to do some shorthand."

That shorthand can manifest itself in a million different directions. If film is interested in making the future look bleak, perhaps the disaster that precedes it is about the closest we'll get to a certain kind of new world order.

"How do you combat the ills of the world in a way that doesn't just make people feel more powerless?" asks Berland. "You tell the story about a meteor that is going to come out of the sky. You talk about something that is going to punish everyone equally."

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All photos by James Franklin

"This is who I am, fuck it," said Rocco Steele, the newly crowned Mr. International Escort 2015. "And that's what you get when you hire me: a genuine person who will give his all to make sure you have a quality experience. You don't get any bull. You get the real me."

Last month, a glistening parade of man meat strutted the stage at Manhattan's OutNYC Hotel. More than 70 half-naked hopefuls competed at the Hookies, the annual "Oscars of escorting," in 17 categories ranging from Best Ass, Best Twink, and Best Kink to Best Dressed and Best Social Media. Male escorts from around the world joked with drag queen host Alaska Thunderfuck, answered skill-testing questions, flashed a bit of peen, and flaunted the rest of their assets in front of 1500 cheering attendees and a substantial live-streaming audience.

The Hookies are put on by Rentboy.com, the popular site that has been connecting male escorts with eager, mostly gay clients for two decades. About 60,000 visitors a day come to Rentboy from all over the world, browsing on-demand fantasy men of all ages, types, looks, and sizes. The Hookies are a splashy celebration of the site's ever-growing stable of rearing stallions. "It's like the movie Showgirls mixed with testosterone," Rentboy's marketing director Sean Van Sant told VICE after the ceremony. Users voted online for their favorite escort, propelling one of the contestants to the coveted Mr. International top spot.

This year it all came down to life experience: The title was snagged by the Manhattan-based Steele, a 45-year-old Ohio native with a rugged physique, a great hair cut, a law degree, and an extensive background in visual merchandising and product development.

Oh, and a ten-inch dick. (He also won "Best Cock.")

A full-time escort and gay porn actor for less than a year, Steele's cock-rocket to the top has been meteoric, the result of a blast of self-confidence, social media engagement, free porn clips, and a razor-sharp marketing plan. Many online hustlers are well-educated and market-savvy, and professional branding instincts are becoming the defining factor in an increasingly crowded field. The true measure of an escort is the size of his Twitter.

No, no, no. I hate it when people call me a hooker. It's belittling. Even worse is 'sex worker.' It sounds like I'm prepping someone for minor surgery.

Steele is the archetypal daddy. Gravel-voiced and naturally dominant, he's covered in tattoos and traffics in filthy bareback porn. Yet he cleans up real nice: a baby-blue-eyed dish on your arm at that high profile gala, or something more later, when the business negotiations continue into the boudoir. As his Rentboy profile states: "I do not accept money for sexual acts. I am compensated via contributions for my time only. Anything that happens during that time is a decision made between two consenting adults."

At Steele's current rate of $350 an hour, those negotiations can get pricey, although he does offer a convenient $1500 overnight rate. The high price point, he says, "helps filter out a lot of flakes." And while it's obvious that no one's hiring Steele to help solve quadratic equations, this noble gigolo balks at the "H" word.

"No, no, no. I hate it when people call me a hooker," he told me. "It's belittling, so trashy. Even worse is 'sex worker.' It's too close to 'sex trafficker.' Or it's too clinical. It sounds like I'm prepping someone for minor surgery.

"I have no problem with people who consider themselves those things," he continued. "But I am an escort. I'm more than just my penis. I wear my heart on my sleeve, and I come to every date expecting to fully live up to your needs, in whatever capacity."

That capacity can include everything from gentle cuddling to administering amateur therapy sessions. Apparently, a lot of people really do hire escorts simply to talk to someone. Just don't criticize Steele's decor. "The only time I had to call off a date was when some guy came over and started being really sarcastic about my apartment. He had to go."

In many ways, Steele is an anomaly in the frisky, fast-paced, yet hard-won world of male escorts. First there are his habits. "This makes me sound like such a Pollyanna," he said with an embarrassed laugh. "But I don't drink, I don't do drugs, I don't stay out all night. I like to go to bed early. Most of my dates are lunchtime encounters with businessmen looking for a break from their wives, husbands, girlfriends, whatever—or they're just into something different. Unlike most people in the business, I usually only book one date a day."

He attributes his healthy hustle lifestyle to his age, another unique selling point. Rentboy features some escorts in their 60s—and Steele is far from a shriveled piece of tail—but the average Rentboy age seems to hover around late 20s. "When I first started doing this, I was really nervous, about gray hairs, wrinkles, the fact that I didn't have that perfect, young body. But at some point I had to embrace it. Not being a 20-year-old, and having gone through my party stage in the 1990s, means I'm more centered, less flighty. I accepted the daddy thing. And people really responded."

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As fluid sexuality and professional escorting become more socially acceptable, and the economy continues to put on a tight squeeze, more men from all walks of life are turning to sites like Rentboy to make ends meet. That's what originally hooked Steele, who left his corporate job a few years ago ("I hated answering to 20-year-olds") and started taking on Rentboy clients in between freelance product development gigs. A boyfriend had suggested he dip his toe into escorting, and an inspirational encounter with an encouraging and supportive older client cemented his new career path, which Steele characterizes as "financially successful."

That's when Steele's corporate merchandising and brand development expertise kicked in. He leapt into social media with a marketer's mindset, sharpened his persona, and soon established a sizable online following. "Before the internet, you'd buy a Mandate or other gay magazine and all you'd have of someone was a picture. Now people expect a narrative, they want to know your life, from what goes on behind the scenes to who you're talking to on the phone. There are so many pieces of the puzzle you can fill in while telling your story." Talking to Steele, one envisions a brave new world of 24-hour "relatable escort life moments" streaming via Periscope or Meerkat.

Steele's most canny branding trick of all? Good ol' porn. Online escorts have long used professional porn scenes as calling cards. Like musicians, they recognize that the recorded product helps fuel desire for the live shows, which is where the real money's at. But distribution and access has been a problem. Most porn stars sign on to the big studios as "exclusives," and those studios zealously guard their property from being pirated and pimped on free porn sites, which naturally have more visitors than the studios' own pay-per-view portals. And you can't just throw double-anal up on YouTube.

Yet, a few months ago, dozens of his scenes started flooding free porn sites. An avalanche of Rocco daddy action overtook the gay web. Steele had found a gaping loophole in the big-studio stranglehold. After working as a free agent with numerous start-up porn studios in Europe and the US—studios which didn't have the resources to constantly police free porn sites and demand their content be removed—Steele watched as pirated clips of himself circulated the internet at a furious rate.

"At first I tried to have them taken down, but there are just so many free sites," he said. "It was like playing porn whack-a-mole. Then I thought, well, what can you do? And I noticed everyone was talking about me. People's access to those scenes really got my name out there in a way no other approach would have."

As far as the porn scenes themselves, which often pair him with a twinkier type to bring out his daddy aspects, "Sometimes I think I may have done too much," Steele said with a laugh. "And there are a few scenes that I cringe while watching, because of the lack of chemistry, or the production values, or just my own nerves. I was scared to death when I started doing porn, because I never envisioned myself as that 'porn type' of guy. I'm actually incredibly self-conscious.

"But then I thought, hey, at my age, I may only have a couple years left in this industry. So why not put as much of me out there as possible? And here I am."

Follow Marke Bieschke on Twitter.

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Amy Freeze, Iguana Cooking Champion. All photos courtesy of Freeze

Floridians get a lot of shit for being from Florida. I mean, yes, Florida is weird as hell and a bunch of pretty sick folks live there. But the state is also a place of tireless creativity. Case in point: A recent cooking competition in Sebring, which celebrated the grand opening of Sebring Wholesale Meats, a new exotic butcher shop that specializes in kangaroo and camel, among other carnivorous delicacies. Recently, the store called upon the citizens of the cozy South Central Florida town to try their hand at cooking up a special meat: iguana.

Five teams of brave chefs did their finest with the hunk of reptile dealt to them. But it was local English teacher and cooking competition vet Amy Freeze who rose as Florida's new Iguana Cooking Champion with her Iguana Carnitas. VICE spoke with Freeze about the creature's surprising bone structure, their free-roaming takeover of a certain South Florida island, and what the fuck your house smells like after slow-cooking an iguana overnight.

VICE: When you're not stewing iguana flesh, what do you do for a living?
Amy Freeze: I'm a full-time English teacher and I'm actually a World Food Championship competitor. This year the Championship is moving to Kissimmee.

Besides iguana carnitas, what are some of the wilder dishes you've created?
I'm a dessert person. I don't normally do anything wild. The iguana is the wildest thing I've ever taken on. It was one of those spur-of-the-moment things. I originally thought it was a joke.

Did you have any kind of experience cooking different kinds of reptiles? Like gator?
No! Well, being in Florida, yes, I've cooked gator. But technically, you're just dealing with frying gator tails. You're not doing anything unusual. I've been to restaurants that do unusual things, but cooking iguana? I had to google it just to see what the bone structure was going to be like.

There are no nice words for what that animal smells like.

I mentioned I was going to do this, and a student of mine piped in very quickly and said that her mother cooks iguana all the time. So I started picking her brain to find out about the iguana ribs—the ribs aren't bone. They're cartilage. Any other reptile, you have meat on the bones, on the ribs. On the iguana, there's nothin'. The tail is actually very strangely put together. There's tons of meat on the tail. It's just a weird little critter.

Is it sort of like cooking a fish with all the tiny little bones?
No, but that's what I expected. When Kevin [Shutt, the shop's owner] gave [the iguanas] to us, they were clean and in a bag, frozen. The tail was in there. The dry carcass was in there—as gross as that sounds. When the tail was not attached, the body itself had the musculature of a rabbit. So I approached that part like a rabbit. When I got to the tail, it was... more like a fish backbone, a flat blade of bones that run down that tail. There's tons of meat on each side.

I took my big meat cleaver, cut it into pieces—the whole body in half, so I could cram the whole thing into a pot. Cut the tail in half, so I could put that in there with it. Then I had to boil it for over an hour, just so I could get it tender enough to pick it apart. They're made of some very tough meat.

How did Kevin get a hold of the iguanas? Are they raised domestically? I know some run wild in South Florida.
The island I grew up on in South Florida, Boca Grand, is actually inundated with iguanas. We have so many iguanas there, there's somebody whose his entire job is to ride around on a golf cart, shoot them, and then dispose of them.

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Iguana meat

The iguanas that are being brought into the country are coming from Puerto Rico. Everything that I've read says that they figured out how to "harvest" them.

How did you prepare the meat? What spices did you use?
We weren't real sure what to do. My husband had the idea to turn it into something a little more expected. Once I deboned [the iguana] and put it in the Crock-Pot, we used something called mojo marinade. We use it on pork a lot. It's a bottled marinade, made by Goya. It's full of garlic, pepper, a lot of sour orange—sour orange helps break down protein. You can put sour orange on just about anything, it'll break it down. I poured an entire bottle on top of the iguana, turned the Crock-Pot on, and let it cook all night.

Low heat?
Yeah. I just put the Crock-Pot on low and went to bed. It cooked from nine o'clock in the evening until about five o'clock the next morning. I drained as much of the "juice" as possible and headed to the cook-off. We served it in flour tortillas with a little bit of onion and pepper and I had three different sauces made up. We technically sold out. We handed out every iguana taco we had.

Did cooking iguana in a Crock-Pot leave any sort of smell in your house?
There are no nice words for what that animal smells like. I thought it might have just been [my experience], but the other teams mentioned the same thing about the smell. It was just not a good thing. I won't be cooking iguana ever in my house again. If we're cooking iguana again, it will be done outside.

What did the final product end up tasting like?
I have no idea.

You didn't try it?
No. In all fairness, my 11-year-old son was very quick to go in there and grab some to try. He said it basically tasted like chicken. My husband tried it. He [also] said it tasted like chicken—he said it was like a very bland chicken. But judging by what everyone said, they liked it. I just couldn't bring myself to try it after I'd smelled it.

Shutt says although the shop does not regularly carry iguana, with enough requests, he promises to make an order. In the meantime, you can purchase Burmese python fillets, alpaca, and yak flat irons. You can also follow Freeze's continued culinary adventures on her blog.

Follow Beca Grimm on Twitter.

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All photos by Graciela Iturbide

Growing up in the 90s on the Southside of Houston I watched my older sister Lynda set the chola beauty standard. She lined her lips with berry-colored lipliner, plucked her eyebrows thin, and teased her permed hair with Aquanet hairspray, creating a stiff asymmetrical bang wave with a height capable of competing with all the homegirls in the neighborhood. She wore baggy polo shirts, gold jewelry, and had a gangbanger boyfriend named Angel with a bald fade and a lowrider car. She was a beautiful, highly accessorized chola who was respected in her world—most of all by me.

When I turned 13, Lynda began initiating me into the chola scene. By then, the look had evolved a bit—bang waves were no longer the style—but the core elements of the culture remained. Lynda and I drank Smirnoffs together, danced to Tejano music at the bar, and, at the end of the night, watched the boys fight in the parking lot. At 15, she bought me my first golden nameplate and I started dating one of Angel's friends. She taught me the moral codes of what would become a sometimes violent teenage lifestyle—codes she had learned growing up in our rough neighborhood.

I got into fights at school with other girls who challenged or disrespected me and tried to hold my own in a community that did not look kindly on weakness. I eventually pushed myself toward academics, hiding away from the scene, and ended up going to college—an opportunity not afforded to many of my peers. However, I maintained my chola vibe throughout my time in high school as a way to survive in my environment. So today, when I see that chola being sampled and recontextualized by fashion designers, pop singers, or celebrity starlets, I can't help but roll my eyes.

At Givenchy's most recent show in Paris, the line used gelled baby hairs and braided hair loops to evoke what designer Riccardo Tisci called a "chola victorian" look. Pop stars aplenty—from Lana del Rey to Gwen Stefani, from Nicki Minaj to Fergie—have all taken elements of chola style and used them for their own devices. Stefani in particular is a veteran of appropriating "chola glamor" with her pencil-thin eyebrows, dark outlined lips, wife-beater crop tops, and the airbrushed lowriders in her videos. Nicki Minaj's chola aesthetic in Young Money's "Senile" video included gold hoop earrings, a red bandana around her forehead, and sagging Dickies atop a sporty Moschino underwear set. Her lips were heavy with liner as she rapped in front of a crew of tattooed and shirtless Mexican dudes.

I get it. Celebs reference the style to conjure a subversive and feminine fierceness. Aesthetically, cholas are really fucking cool. However, there is a dysfunctional idea at the heart of these instances of chola appropriation—that an elaborate outfit is all you need to enter into a culture. Anne Hathaway's character in the movie Havoc is a great example. In the film, she plays a rich white girl from the suburbs of LA who tries to woo a gangster from the Eastside by rocking big gold hoop earrings and brand name urbanwear. In one of the movie's more mortifying scenes, she sings and rolls on her wannabe thug boyfriend to a Tupac song. Then there are those celebs who take it to another level of offense with straight up mockery, like when George Lopez gave Sandra Bullock a chola makeover by drawing her eyebrows on with a Sharpie.

As with most instances of cultural appropriation, when the chola look is worn by pop starlets, it gets stripped of context and becomes little more than a costume. Cholas are more than Latina sidekicks for Lana Del Rey or concepts for Fergie's music video. The chola aesthetic was first forged by the marginalized Mexican-American youths of Southern California. It embodies the remarkable strength and creative independence it takes to survive in a society where your social mobility has been thwarted by racism. The chola identity was conceived by a culture that dealt with gang warfare, violence, and poverty on top of conservative gender roles. The clothes these women wore were more than a fashion statement—they were signifiers of their struggle and hard-won identity.

To understand the significance of the chola subculture, you have to look back at the history of systematic oppression and discrimination that plagued Latino communities in the US. From 1929 to 1944, in a shameful incident known as Mexican Repatriation, the US government forcibly removed around 2 million people of Mexican descent from the country—over 1.2 million of them United States citizens. These people were snatched from their homes and workplaces and illegally deported. The government's campaign against Mexican-American continued throughout the century, as 300-plus acres of land known as the Chavez Ravine owned by generations of Mexican-Americans were slowly stolen from 1951 to 1961 by the Los Angeles City Housing Authority. The residents were forced to sell their land and their houses were burned as practice sites for the LA fire department. (The land was the used to construct today's Dodgers Stadium.)

It was during the time of Mexican Repatriation and WWII that pachucas, the forbears to the cholas, started to appear on the streets of Los Angeles. Pachucas were the female counterpart to pachucos, the Mexican-American teenagers who wore zoot suits with high-waisted pegged pants and long suit coats. Pachucas also had their own nonconformist style of dress. They were known for teasing their hair into bouffant beehives and wearing heavy makeup, tight sweaters, and slacks or knee-length skirts that were immodestly short for the time. They were a rebel subculture that rejected assimilation into the white, hyper-patriotic spirit of WWII. Their rejection of mainstream beauty ideals and association with a non-white underclass challenged the idea of a unified nation, which the US was desperately trying to portray during wartime. The pachuco and pachuca style became a signifier for a racialized other and was therefore considered un-American.

"A chola is the epitome of beauty, style, and pride with a badass, take-no-shit, 'look at me but don't fuck with me' attitude. She is a strong and proud woman who holds it down for her family and hood." –Hellabreezy

In 1943, in the midst of World War II, citywide brawls known as the Zoot Suit Riots took place across Los Angeles and Southern California as white military servicemen began attacking pachucos, who were deemed unpatriotic due to the extra fabric needed to make their clothing, and deviant because of their racial difference. That year, the press called "cholitas" the "auxiliaries of the zoot suit gangs." As depicted in Luis Valdez's 1991 film Zoot Suit and Edward James Olmos's 1992 film American Me, pachucas were also victims of physical and sexual violence during these clashes. Instead of repressing the pachuco culture, these attacks only strengthened the pachucos' desire to resist assimilation into a jingoistic white America that treated brown minorities like second-class citizens. In addition to claiming a non-white womanhood, pachucas also defied gender norms by wearing slacks and sometimes even zoot suits.

"I thought pachucas were so cool. I saw these women with tight sweaters and pants hanging out. They took over the street and taught me that it wasn't only a male space," says Chicano studies scholar Dr. Rosa-Linda Fregoso, author of the 1995 article "Pachucas, Cholas, and Homegirls in Cinema," an analysis of how American Latina women are portrayed in film. To Fregoso, pachucas embody the rebellion against domesticity and challenge the idea of "appropriate female behavior." She says that being a pachuca back in the day was a type of "feminismo popular" or folk feminism that didn't come from an academic consciousness, but from a critique of patriarchal culture embedded within the Chicano community. Fregoso was also experiencing the culture in South Texas. By the 60s, pachuco style had spread all along the Southwestern United States.

"Pachucas [were] very radical women," says Roseli Martinez, an art event organizer in LA, cofounder of Xicanas de Corazon book club, and poster girl for a modern day pachuca movement in California. "When you think about it, it's the 1940s and you're putting on pants, rolling with the guys. You're wearing short skirts, going to parties, getting in fights, holding your man down. And you still don't give up the responsibilities that fall on you for the simple fact of being a woman."

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The transition of a predominant pachuca style to a more gang-inspired chola look happened in the 60s and 70s. The chola, the female counterpart of the cholo, was a "working-class, young Mexican-American female from the barrios of the southwest with a very distinct aesthetic, style, and attitude," according to Hellabreezy, an Oakland-based model and modern-day chola, who spent a part of her youth in the projects of LA. "But to me, a chola is the epitome of beauty, style, and pride with a badass, take-no-shit, 'look at me but don't fuck with me' attitude. She is a strong and proud woman who holds it down for her family and hood."

The term cholo (the masculine form of chola) first entered the popular lexicon in the 60s and 70s in Southern California, although it has been documented in casta paintings as early as the 16th century. According to Latin American dictionaries, it simply means mestizo, or a person of mixed Amerindian or Andean indigenous and European lineages. However, on the streets in the 60s and 70s, the word became slang for the Mexican-American or Chicano gang-affiliated men in Southern California who wore a combination of khaki pants, Pendleton plaid shirts over a white tee, and Locs sunglasses. At this time, gangs were prevalent in barrio life. They offered a sense of family, pride, identity, self-esteem, and belonging—things Chicanos did not receive from the dominant society. (Gang members were not all men; LA has had Latina girl gangs since at least the 1930s.)

The interests of the chola/cholo subculture were documented in the pages of lowrider publications like Teen Angels and Mi Vida Loca, which highlighted cholo art, fashion, tattoos, and moral codes. The chola code included things like loyalty to your homegirls, never fighting over boys, and, in some circles, not dating outside of your neighborhood.

"Most cholas either grew up with family members, their vatos, or even themselves having lowrider cars," says Hellabreezy. "They attended car shows and cruised on the weekends as a favorite past time. Music was a big part of the culture too—like oldies and Chicano rap. Late nights were spent listening to oldies with homies or that special someone, calling your favorite radio station to make song dedications, drinking a 40oz, or just kicking back at the pad."

Being a chola is more than perfect eyeliner, gold accessories, or Dickies. It's an identity forged out of the struggle to assert our culture and history, a struggle that continues.

The chola aesthetic is the result of impoverished women making a lot out of the little things their families could afford. Many of the early cholos and cholas were the sons and daughters of farmworkers, a group of people exploited at high rates because of their lack of education and their vulnerability as undocumented people. In 1965, the United Farm Workers organization was fighting for a mere $1.25 hourly wage, so expensive brands were not a part of this style. Instead the girls wore cheap stuff like wife-beaters over baggy pants by brands like Dickies, a workwear label sold for cheap at local supermarkets. The style also evolved from sharing clothes with brothers and feminizing the cholo gangster look. Cholas wore their eyebrows thin, their eyeliner thick and black, and their hair teased or feathered, sometimes with tall bangs made stiff with hairspray. They also accessorized with gold jewelry: door-knocker earrings and nameplates or chain necklaces.

One of the most popular depictions of the subculture is a photo taken by Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide in East LA in 1986. The iconic picture features a crew of cholas posted up in front of graffiti renditions of the historical Mexican revolutionary figures Benito Juarez, Emiliano Zapata, and Pancho Villa. One woman holds a baby while the other three throw up gang signs with their heads tilted back and their chins up. Another iconic portrayal of teenage cholas is in the movie Mi Vida Loca—a film that focuses on relationships between Central LA high school girls named Sad Girl, Mousie, Whisper, and La Blue Eyes. (The movie got flack from real cholas for depicting a near-fatal riff between Sad Girl and Mousie that started over a boy—something cholas would never do.)

Though the subculture is sometimes spoken of in past tense, plenty of people still identify as cholas or have maintained chola elements in their style, which continue to signify the same sort of defiance the original pachucas did. Hellabreezy, whose real name is Mayra Ramirez, has worked with streetwear brands like Mama Clothing who she feels do the subculture justice. "I loved working with homegirls and creating images of subcultures that have been around for so long," she says. "But I'm careful about the people I collaborate with. I don't want to represent our culture in a wrong way. I only work with people who know the culture and genuinely appreciate it." Although Mama Clothing was a pioneer, embracing the chola look as far back as the late 90s, there are now several female clothing lines owned by Latinas using the chola aesthetic. Brands like BellaDoña and Bandida Clothing all take inspiration from a pachuca and/or chola look. But unlike Givenchy, they're not exoticizing the subculture in a way that disconnects it from it's anti-establishment origins and makes it more palpable to bourgeois white folks, they're articulating a pride in their own culture.

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Chola culture is also being preserved in the art world. At the end of 2014, the Espacio 1839 gallery in LA hosted an art show called Style as Resistance, which posited contemporary pachuco/a style as political. Curator J.C. De Luna created the event, which featured work honoring Chicano culture as a way to combat the ill effects of gentrification in the neighborhood of Boyle Heights by celebrating culture as a counteractive tactic. Men showed up dressed in wing-tipped shoes, elaborate tailored zoot suits, and wide-brimmed hats, while many women arrived wearing high-waisted slacks and the distinct teased pachuca hairstyle. There were discussions about the race riots of the 1940s and nostalgic swing jazz oldies like "Pachuco Boogie" were part of the soundtrack. A handful of visual artists showed their work including photographer Art Meza, who recently published Lowriting, a compilation of photos and literature immortalizing low riders, their owners, and community.

Events such as Style as Resistance actively honor the Chicano history of pachucos and pachucas in light of gentrification and the loss of Chicano cultural hubs in cities like Los Angeles and the Mission District of San Francisco. This is especially important because Chicano history is in danger of being pushed to the margins of the mainstream—we've recently seen the banning of Mexican-American and general ethnic studies in Arizona and the attempted erasure of Cesar Chavez from textbooks. This whitewashing of Mexican-American history makes the disassociation of the chola aesthetic from its political roots seem particularly malignant. Being a chola is more than perfect eyeliner, gold accessories, or Dickies. It's an identity forged out of struggle to assert culture and history, a struggle that continues—just look at the racist "show me your papers" laws popping up in states all over the country, from Arizona to Indiana, and racist Mexican-themed fraternity parties in which frat boys dress not only in ponchos and sombreros but as construction workers and border patrol agents.

"As cholas, we can't just brush the Aquanet off our hair, take our hoops off, and go back to normal suburban life. This is our reality. We live this everyday." –Hellabreezy

I don't want to fight over who gets to use gelled baby hairs because nothing will stop high fashion from harvesting trends from hood kids—everyone knows they are the true creative class. But that doesn't mean I won't stop rolling my eyes whenever I see white Forever 21 models wearing "Compton" sweatshirts and beanies.

"Back in the day, we were mocked for looking different. Now, so many young girls want to emulate the look and have no idea of the cultural background or street politics associated with it," says Hellabreezy. "It's easy for young privileged girls to want to have the look, but when they are done dressing up in their 'chola costume,' they don't have to go back home to the hood and deal with discrimination, violence, and poverty... We can't just brush the Aquanet off our hair, take our hoops off, and go back to normal suburban life like they can because this is our reality. We live this everyday."

Follow Barbara on Twitter.

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Photo via Flickr user Mo Riza

While Edward Snowden gives interviews to John Oliver and the NSA continues to gobble up our data, local police departments are quietly spying on people without public oversight, often thanks to a little device known as a Stingray.

The use of these surveillance tools is apparently widespread, but it's only recently that the general public is becoming aware of it. Last month, a judge that the Erie County, New York, Sheriff's Department had to release unredacted documents about its Stingray use. Last Tuesday, after receiving those documents, the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) reported that the department used Stingrays some 47 times, and seemingly on just one of those occasions got a court order for the subsequent surveillance.

On Friday, the Guardian published the results of the paper's own Stingray investigation. Thanks to some unredacted documents from the Hillsborough County, Florida, Sheriff's Department, the paper concluded that the FBI is directly involved in preventing police departments from sharing any information about their Stingray use and orders them to tell the Feds when requests for information on them are made so that they have time to "prevent disclosure." Worse still, Stingrays are not to be discussed by Florida law enforcement in warrants, testimony, or anywhere in court ever—even at the cost of dropping a case against a defendant.

These revelations are just the latest pieces of concrete proof that spying is being conducted by police departments around the country—and that the federal government has a firm hand in keeping evidence of it far away from the public eye.

Stingrays work by tricking cell phones into contacting them as if they were cell towers. This makes it easy for law enforcement to snag metadata, such as numbers dialed and how long conversations were, as well as the location of the phone itself. Stingrays do this indiscriminately to phones in an area, such as an apartment block. They also disrupt phone service for large numbers of people. US Marshals have even taken Stingrays (or devices that achieve a similar effect) to the air, which involves still more indiscriminate data being sucked up. (The CIA played a role in setting that one up.) Privacy advocates at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) call Stingray-style searches general warrants for the digital age, meaning they are at their core unconstitutional.

Almost invariably described as "suitcase-sized" in media accounts, Stingrays costs tens of thousands of dollars each and are sometimes bought with war on terror grants, or borrowed from the Feds by local law enforcement. In both Florida and New York, cops had an agreement with the FBI to keep Stingray use secret, even the cost of losing an investigation. That's alarming for privacy advocates as well as attorneys for defendants who want to know everything they can about the case against them.

The devices have been around in various forms since the 1990s, and Harris Corporation—which manufactures Stingrays, the name brand generally used to refer to International Mobile Subscriber Identity catchers (IMSIs)— registered a trademark on the device in 2001.

Domestic stingrays reportedly do not have the capacity for intercepting actual cell conversations. However, a related Harris device called a Triggerfish—which may or may not be in use today—can do just that. And other documents suggest that with some modifications, Stingrays could also listen in on calls.

So we more or less know what these things do. The question of who has them, and how exactly they are being used, remains murky because police departments, federal authorities, and the manufacturers kick and scream at every attempt to shed light on the technology. As confirmed by the Erie Sheriff's Department, the FBI requires a non-disclosure agreement from local law enforcement agencies before they purchase or use a Stingray.

Subsequently, law enforcement officials have lied in court and attempted to hide the use of Stingrays in investigations. Perhaps most memorably, in response to an ACLU lawsuit last year that instructed Sarasota, Florida, police to reveal their Stingray use, federal marshals deputized a police officer and then took possession of the requested files in order to evade state sunshine laws. US Marshals have also denied Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for Stingray information, some of which was already public.

The more we learn, the worse this looks. Last Wednesday, it was reported that Baltimore law enforcement has used Stingrays thousands of times since 2007, and concealed that fact from prosecutors and judges the direction of the FBI. Previously, law enforcement there simply argued that Stingray use was already legal under existing wiretapping laws—something privacy advocates dispute. Tracking a phone without a warrant was ruled to be a violation of the Fourth Amendment by the Florida Supreme Court last year. The ACLU has repeatedly argued that Stingrays are an unprecedented violation of privacy rights.

But in most places, without a precedent for the use of this technology, law enforcement organizations—like Chicago cops—have managed to get away with it. The FBI basically argues that since they deploy Stingrays in public places, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy for suspects—even though the devices reach them in their private homes—thereby ostensibly giving the Bureau free reign to deploy them from the streets or air.

In 2013, a USA Today investigation showed that more than 25 police departments have Stingrays. Last October, Motherboard's Jason Koebler wrote that "at least 45 branches of law enforcement" use the gizmos. Numerous federal agencies and the Army and the Navy have also purchased them, spending a total of $30 million on the gadgets since 2004.

Alarmingly, law enforcement always seems to turn to the Harris Corporation's non-disclosure agreement as a means to evade FOIA Requests. Unfortunately, FOIA Exemption number 4 protects" trade secrets and commercial or financial information obtained from a person [that is] privileged or confidential."

On March 26, journalist Matthew Keys seemingly scored a victory with a FOIA request for an operating manual for Stingray devices and the similar, cheaper Kingfish, which tracks communications between cell numbers. The whole procedure took six months and many excruciating emails. At one point, Keys was told by an FCC official that it would be take longer so that Harris Corporation could be given "the opportunity to defend the continued confidentiality of the owners' manual for the products at issue in [Keys'] FOIA request."

In its response, Harris justified its foot-dragging by stating that "disclosure of certain materials... could reasonably put public safety officials at risk, jeopardize the integrity and value of investigative techniques and procedures." (These are all official disclosure exemptions, though the ACLU and other privacy groups have argued that enough information now exists about Stingrays that some of them may no longer apply.)

Just reading the email exchanges show that this was a tedious exercise, but Keys's patience paid off, and we know what an operating manual circa 2010 looks like—sans "trade secret" redactions—for the Stingray, Stingray II, and Kingfish devices.

Unfortunately, there's almost nothing that was left unredacted. The very first page of the manual says it is exempt from FOIA requests. Every successive page says "WARNING ITAR [International Traffic in Arms Regulations) CONTROLLED" and "CONFIDENTIAL, NOT FOR PUBLIC INSPECTION." Each "chapter" of the 58 page manual contains redactions, and the entirely of chapter 5 is redacted under the trade secrets FOIA exemption number 4. That appears to be the only excuse that was needed to exclude nearly every word from this document.

Finally, the 2010 manual has an appendix that is redacted, though most of the devices' warranty terms are helpfully left in. That's all there is. Six months of struggles with the FCC and Harris resulted in no useful information.

According to the Justice Department, "The very existence of [FOIA's] Exemption 4 encourages submitters to voluntarily furnish useful commercial or financial information to the government and provides the government with an assurance that required submissions will be reliable."

(When asked to comment on their non-disclosure agreements with law enforcement, Harris' Vice President of Global Communications Jim Burke said he had none.)

But if there's one thing that the past couple years of revelations about the depth and breadth of government surveillance tactics have shown, it's that secrecy invites abuses, and if Stingrays are being used to help spy on people en masse, the public has the right to know about them.

Follow Lucy Steigerwald on Twitter.

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A well stocked Swiss games store in the early 2000s. Image via Wikipedia

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Our beloved pastime of gaming takes place largely in a virtual space, so it follows that the physical places where we used to purchase these experiences might become neglected. Now they have, and we, the consumers, are as implicit as the patently disinterested businessmen running things (into the ground). How long has the ghost of video game retail haunted its hollow, off-white and purple cadaver? What GAME and its counterparts need isn't an exorcism, it's a full-on resurrection. That, and to learn a few things from Apple.

How did it come to this? Perhaps the biggest problem physical retail faces is that the wider industry just doesn't seem interested—and why should it? Distribution both physical—via Amazon, Shopto, and more stores—and digital is now as scarily convenient as an IV drip, and we can buy up months of game-time with the loose change and lint in our Steam wallets. Convenience is always the death of innovation.

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A branch of GAME in Leeds. Image via Wikipedia

GAME is the perfect cipher. Walk into one (I dare you) and try and make it past the garish swathe of Disney Infinity and Skylanders figurines, soon to be joined by the newcomers of LEGO Dimensions. You'll contend with the thousand-yard stare of the likely lone staffer and then peruse a shelf of charting titles, all straining against the upper limits of their RRP like an overreaching socialite.

Worse than soulless, the purple GAME logo is a blight, a throbbing bruise upon the landscape, both psycho-spatial and cultural. "The industry is constantly evolving—that's the nature of any technology-based industry," explained GAME CEO Martyn Gibbs in a 2013 article by MCV staffer Christopher Dring. "The current changes require a very different approach... more versatile platforms [are] changing the fabric of the gaming industry." Far from typical marketing doublespeak, Gibbs offers here an incisive, specific commentary on how best to address the widening gap between an increasingly defunct model and the gamers it purports to serve.

It's such a shame, but why should we bother with saving it all? Lest I be accused of rose-tinted glasses, GAME and its ilk didn't have far to fall from grace—but just imagine. It's crucial these spaces exist, and improve. Sure, we have the newly curatorial Steam pages, which are a haven for finding and supporting indie stuff. Yet it was a shelf in the GAME my young self took frequent shelter from parental mundanity in that my attention was caught by—on it sat a huge and ugly Baldur's Gate box, something that would come to dominate my gaming persona.

It was in Games Workshop as a shy, nerdy kid that I discovered camaraderie, realized that there were older geeks who were cool and supportive, that I discovered the artistry behind it all. And it was in countless other community-minded retail spaces that a large part of my identity was reconciled with my vision for what the world around me should be.

Now, Games Workshop still exists, and we're in a creator-owned comic (and shop) renaissance—and at the other end of the mainstream spectrum of codified consumerist fetishism we have Apple Stores. These shops were actually a gamble for the now-giant back in the first flourishes of its ascendency, but they paid off due to passionate (cultish) employees, events, workshops and tech support drop-ins. And the free games. Apple understood—and have since built a Smaug-like fortune on—the importance of providing a safe space for people across the tech-literacy spectrum and having a raison d'être that digital can't provide.

So it's not a stretch to picture a dynamic space that reflects the vibrancy of video gaming culture and its proponents. Enterprise such as Jake Tucker's VideoBrains (the TED Talks of gaming), Meltdown, GamerDisco, Kotaku's burgeoning game nights, Rezzed/EGX's continual expansion, eSports (see VICE's recent documentary on the subject)—these all reflect the appetite for in-person analogues to the vendor hub, a flesh and bone cry of "LFG." Perhaps the future of retail rests on the shoulders of these momentous up-starts.

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An Apple Store in New York. Image via Flickr user matt buchanan

Imagine: Your local game space has a cast of inclusive, diverse characters (not unlike Cheers) that you actually looked forward to seeing upon entering, maybe discussing new releases with and receiving tailored, up-to-the-minute recommendations from.

Imagine: As a younger gamer, there's a regular event or small part of the space that you feel genuinely at home in—wherein you commune and play games (including card/board games) with other likeminded youngsters that have happily eschewed jock life for one of constant condescension from the self-proclaimed mainstream.

Imagine: You go and hang out and play a few in-person multiplayer games that are impossible to usually assemble a full complement for— Gang Beasts, Starwhal, Marvel vs. Capcom (never forget), TowerFall, and so on.

And imagine if, much like the Apple Stores, you could pop in to a shop with technical queries, have them solved, graciously, without having to pay for any bullshit add-on insurance.

The very biggest stores deliberately loss-lead on their games stock just to divert attention from e-tailers such as Amazon, making up the margins on typical supermarket shit.

Unfortunately there are plenty of debilitating factors preventing this utopian ideal. A quick run down: a luxury/entertainment commodity undermined by cutthroat subsidies of the supermarket chains; the simple fact our generation has to be so frugal thanks to the economic hangover of the Baby Boomers; the entrenched distribution and manufacture models.

In short, as darling industry analyst Michael Pachter recognizes, the UK retail industry is "a joke." He goes on with his typical cutting wit and aplomb to surmise that "retailers' failure to make money on games has contributed to high street bankruptcies," due to loss-leading prices. Pachter's delusional bon mots might actually make sense if he was referring to the used game trade or supermarkets.

Further insight comes from a source very close to me who works as a retail games buyer for Tesco, who must remain anonymous but requested in all seriousness that I refer to him as "Deepthroat" (it's a Metal Gear in-joke, apparently). He claims that the very biggest stores deliberately loss-lead on their games stock just to divert attention from e-tailers such as Amazon, making up the margins on typical supermarket shit, but that now it's not worth it to the extent they're considering stocking only the surefire AAA hits.

Quite why anyone still turns to Pachter for any kind of "analysis" is as beyond me as competitive StarCraft.

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Brighton's branch of CeX, image via Wikipedia

Pre-owned sales, of course, is another piece of the puzzle. I don't know what CeX's turnover is, but their retail persona is that of a hormonal teenager. The in-store music alone cuts purchase intent off at the waist, and the cold sweats I get in anticipation of a visit makes paying PSN's absurd, inconceivable premiums seem a privilege.

Anyway, the economics of the used-game trade have been written about plenty, and it's widely recognized to up-cycle consumer spend (despite shafting publishers and developers on a unit by unit basis) and keep retailers afloat.

We're further spoiled in Dring's piece to the ineffable wisdom of Dominic Mulroy, responsible for another of our high street's veritable constellation of shining stars, HMV, "who joined the retailer," Dring writes, "after selling it his Gamerbase business... which remains one of HMV's most profitable businesses, something HMV's owner Hilco will no doubt be aware of." You'd be forgiven for thinking that constant liquidation, administration, and selling off controlling shares to a hopelessly irrelevant and stagnant retail giant signified a downturn, but apparently the UK high street video game market grew by 12 percent to £2.3 billion ($3.36 billion) in 2014—so what's the problem?

If distributors and publishers could break down their old-boy networks, interface with and support these new game spaces, launch events and tournaments, then we'd be getting somewhere.

Well, 2014 was the year the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One were released, and new consoles are one of the last bastions of retail relevancy—being able to walk in and pick up your hefty new box of tricks is indubitably desirable, especially as the alternative is usually the hateful courier knocking once on the wrong door before dumping your cargo on the step, outside your door, in full view of the street (true story).

Now, if distributors and publishers could break down their old-boy networks, interface with and support these new game spaces, perhaps keeping costs competitive by taking a leaf from the "Gamer's Edition" revival of boxed products being more than a green plastic wallet, support launch events and tournaments, then we'd be getting somewhere.

Mulroy is right, despite his heinous language, when he goes on to say: "The games stores of the future will need to become edutainment stores." And with the ever-rising tide of talented indies breaking out of their AAA digital sweatshops, innovative, cultural spaces and events, perhaps some (ahem) marketable synergy fusing the best of footfall philosophy with digital ROI paradigms (ahem, *bang*) might indeed pave the way for these new retail hopes of the future.

Until then, I'll be the one in the corner of Meltdown ordering dirt-cheap games on Amazon from my phone and ignoring everyone.

Follow Danny Wadeson on Twitter.

Every spring in Columbus, Ohio, the Arnold Sports Festival draws some of the world's best professional bodybuilders to compete for lavish prizes and prestigious titles. Named for Arnold Schwarzenegger, the convention began in 1989 and includes both a female bodybuilding contest called Ms. International and a "fitness and figure" competition, which focuses on muscle definition rather than size.

While photographer Jen Davis is best known for her deeply personal self-portraits, she recently photographed a female bodybuilder in Los Angeles and became interested in the ways these women present themselves to the world. In early March, she went behind the scenes at the 2015 festival for a closer look.

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In extending its bombing mission to the other end of the Islamic State into its Syrian territory, Canada may be targeting its online caliphate.

And while it's a "legal minefield," the Canadian military has left the door open to striking the terrorist group's considerable communications capabilities and crippling its ability to diffuse propaganda worldwide.

But Canada's Kuwaiti command post for Operation IMPACT might yet sign off on strikes to destroy the Islamic State's ability to launch cyberwarfare attacks.

For the first time since Stephen Harper announced CF-18s would be hitting Syria, Canadian precision munitions pounded the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa on Wednesday.

The Department of National Defence says their fighter jets struck an Islamic State garrison alongside American and Arab allies.

This is the start of a controversial mission that some legal experts say is an affront to international law. Opposition parties have also fervently denounced the plan.

Syria is the Islamic State's real power base. It is believed in the northeast part of the country, where Assad's government is weak, the group is housing its heavy weaponry and the majority of its fighters.

It's also where the Islamic State's nerve centre can be found.

Raqqa is also renowned as the Islamic State's technological hub. Their al Hayat media centre is probably located in the city. It is the backdrop for many of their propaganda videos, including some bizarre military parades. It's also where they appear to be holding John Cantlie, the kidnapped photojournalist who has become a sort of mascot for the state—whether by coercion or brainwashing—and where he was almost freed in a nighttime raid on the city by US special forces.

Anonymous has tried to take down the Islamic State's ability to disseminate that sort of propaganda, but it hasn't produced much in the way of results.

The fact that Raqqa is such an important piece of the Islamic State's ability to disseminate propaganda raises the question: can we bomb it?

Considering that Canada has made a serious effort to crack down on the Islamic State's propaganda (the government's new anti-terrorism bill would allow police to take down Canadian-hosted pro-terror online postings) it would figure that our warplanes may be targeting the infrastructure that connects Raqqa to the world.

Canada has, thus far, avoided striking populated areas. That's allowed the air force to be confident in saying that there has been no collateral damage. Strikes have been "West of Mosul" or "South of Kirkuk." Wednesday's bombing campaign was, however, "near" Raqqa.

If the air force did want to strike infrastructure or buildings closer to the city of Raqqa, they likely could without too much worry. The air force has serious precision-guided munitions and state-of-the-art imaging technology in its CP-140 Auroras, which can run surveillance and reconnaissance missions that can identify human, physical, and—in theory—technological targets with significant accuracy.

VICE interviewed the Canadian commander of the Auroras from the coalition base in Kuwait.

During a briefing on the mission earlier this month, after Ottawa signed-off on the expanded mission, VICE asked Brigadier General Dan Constable whether technological targets could be fair game in Syria.

Constable said they won't be hitting targets because they're publishing propaganda—at least, that's not the consideration right now—but that doesn't mean communications hardware couldn't be in Canada's crosshairs.

"When we are able to determine everything is solid in terms of valid military targets and that they, in this case, would be doing command and control, then they become valid targets, and we can target them," Constable told VICE in the briefing.

"If your question is, you know, shifted more along the lines of what they're doing in terms of on websites and all the rest of that, that's a very different subject and, then again, we would apply all of the same targeting pieces to valid military targets"

Constable said that, above all else, the law of armed conflict applies.

As Human Rights Watch notes, that doesn't necessarily preclude hitting communications infrastructure.

"Attacks on broadcast facilities used for military communications are legitimate under the laws of war. Civilian television and radio stations are legitimate targets only if they meet the criteria for a legitimate military objective," a briefing document prepared by the NGO reads.

Constable said the questions around striking communications infrastructure becomes a question for the lawyers in the command centre.

"It's a legal minefield for me as an operator," he said.

The American Air Force has clearly made a good local case for it, as they've already struck Islamic State positions that they say were used for cyber-warfare.

Canada, however, decides its own missions.

"There is Canadian targeting processes that are applied as well, and when we strike, it's legal and valid military objectives," Constable said.

VICE asked for clarification from Minister of National Defence's office. The department responded by saying that they won't be getting into operation decisions on targeting.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

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Illustrations by the author.

Last month's Germanwings Airbus A320 crash killed all 150 passengers on board. When a disaster of this scale this occurs, one of the immediate priorities is to retrieve the dead. If the bodies are intact, the job is somewhat more straightforward. But when an event is so catastrophic that bodies are fragmented, it's someone's unenviable responsibility to collect and identify the parts.

That job falls to a disaster victim identification (DVI) expert. These specialist volunteers are sent to "closed" disasters, such as plane crashes where the number of victims is known; and "open" disasters, where the dead are innumerable after a large-scale natural events.

Dr. Richard Bassed has been a DVI expert for 13 years. As a forensic odontologist (teeth specialist) for the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, he's used his expertise to identify the dead in the 2002 Bali bombings, the 2004 Indonesian tsunami, and the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires. VICE spoke to him about the realities of such a confronting line of work.

VICE: Can you talk me through the main ways you identify bodies?
Richard Bassed: Everyone usually has a dental record, so your teeth are used a lot. Teeth identify half to two-thirds of the bodies in any mass fatality. They're good because they're durable—it takes a lot to destroy them. A body can be burnt to almost nothing, but the teeth will last. DNA is used too, of course, but it's generally more expensive and can take longer. Finally we use medical records: If you have a pacemaker or titanium hip, all those have serial numbers we can identify you with. Beyond that we have circumstantial property, things like the clothes you're wearing or what's in your wallet. But those are used as a last resort because they don't ensure identity.

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What was your first first DVI operation?
It was the 2002 Bali bombings. Eighty-six Australians died that day, out of 202 people in total. I'd been working as a forensic dentist in mortuaries so I was used to the dead. But in a disaster such as that, the feeling is very different—the level of adrenaline and emotions are running so high.

Also, in developing and impoverished countries there aren't security protocols or organization during a disaster. In Bali, I remember family members just wandering around, trying to identify their own relatives amongst the dead.

That's horrific. So some disasters are more challenging than others?
Absolutely. The bush fires were terrible. It was so close to home. When we visited, we could see where families had tried to hide themselves. We'd heard the reports of people calling 0-0-0, and the operators could hear flames in the background. Everyone fears being burnt to death, it's horrendous. That was probably the most challenging.

With the tsunami, a lot of the bodies had already been recovered in some form before we arrived. Some had washed away and been found in the ocean, or up trees and all over the place. So there wasn't that real emotional connection to the way in which the people had died.

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What obstacles do you face in identifying people?
The first, and most obvious, is the condition of the bodies. In disasters like plane crashes, fires, and explosions the bodies are severely fragmented and the parts can be mingled. It can be very difficult to separate individuals at times. In terms of teeth—which is my forte—sometimes different countries have varying ways of cataloging the shapes and structures of various fillings and teeth. That can create problems.

In the event of criminal disaster—such as MH17 plane crash in the Ukraine— identifying bodies can become a very difficult task. By the time the rebels allowed DVI experts in, many of the bodies had decomposed badly, and some had been thrown on trains and taken to the other side of the country. Many bodies weren't recovered. The plane exploded in the air too, so many bodies were spread out over kilometers.

Is it ever impossible to identify someone?
It depends on the scale of some disasters. Take the tsunami in Thailand—there were 5,000 deceased, and the DVI operation lasted an entire year. And at the end, there were still around 400 bodies that weren't identified. So when you think about the earthquake in Haiti, where 200,000 people were killed, it would take something like 40 years to identify the dead. There just isn't enough forensic DVI expertise in the world to do certain jobs quickly.

Do you ever feel emotionally overwhelmed by your work?
I guess it must affect you eventually. I haven't had an emotional breakdown, but when you come home from these sorts of things there is a sense of emptiness. It's hard to go about your normal day-to-day work after an operation. It's a bit like, what do I do now?

Follow Jack on Twitter.

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Monopoly is one of many board games available for your tablet (seen here on iPad)

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective first came out in 1981, and I've finally got my hands on it. It's a board game in which you move around London, gathering clues in order to solve a series of crimes. There aren't any silly "Roll a six to ask the butcher what he saw!" mechanics. You're given all the information you need over the course of a case, and you have to make the deductions yourself. It's about as close as you can come to being Sherlock without donning a deerstalker, kidnapping Martin Freeman, and dragging him around in order to talk to homeless people.

The only problem is that it's long been pretty rare. In the past, searches on Amazon have revealed used copies for upwards of $150, and I was never crazy enough to buy one of those. However, listings appeared for new copies on April 1, of all days—but a joke it was not. Some websites limited purchases to two per customer, knowing how much people would want this game. At the time of writing there are seven copies left on Amazon UK, so good luck. (And as of publication, it's out of stock.)

I was left wondering if there was a better way. What if Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective were converted into a video game? Then people could download it whenever they liked. Recently I've been playing board games that have come across to mobile formats to see how well they work. Would a game like Ticket to Ride, a classic and a must have for any board gamer, hold up on a little screen? I was unsure at first, but the short answer is: yes.

Of course, mobile adaptations of board games are never going to replace the real thing—just like the modern role playing video game hasn't replaced tabletop Dungeons & Dragons. (In fact, a new edition was released just last year.) However, video games like Neverwinter Nights, drawing heavily from the lore and rule-sets of D&D, do have advantages over the cardboard version. For example, giving players an actual, moving representation of what's going on in the game. It could be argued that D&D is supposed to be about using your imagination, and that you are massively restricted within the confines of a video game. But it absolutely appeals to a certain audience.

The pros and cons of video game versions of board games are pretty obvious. Mobility is a big factor. You can fulfill your dream of playing Monopoly while sitting on the toilet, if you like. I don't know why you'd want to (by which I mean, play Monopoly at all), but the option is there. Even just being able to play on your sofa without having to set up a board and a bunch of pieces is a bonus.

But then, that's also a con. Part of the magic of board gaming is setting up the pieces, rolling dice, moving things around and having a very tactile experience. This is lost when everything is condensed onto a screen. Lots of board games have nice, weighty dice which have exciting things other than just boring old numbers on. These types of game won't be part of the mobile revolution.

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This is how 'Ticket to Ride' looks on an iPad

I've played a few games of the mobile version of Elder Sign, and it just doesn't have the same oomph as the "real-life" version. The majority of the game is based on rolling a number of custom dice in order to fulfill requirements laid out by a mission. The dice have three sides dedicated to "research," and then one each for "lore," "peril," and finally "terror." If you don't fulfill the requirements of a mission, you roll again, but lose a dice. It becomes more and more tense as you see your chances dwindling before your eyes, with the impending eternal reign of an Elder One looming over you.

On mobile, it's just kind of damp. Instead of an Elder One, I was worried about the impending death of my phone battery. You're effectively pressing a random picture generator button each turn, and you never get that situation where the dice seems to roll over onto the side you need in slow motion, right at the last second. Games with these custom dice, or ones with a whole bunch of pieces (war games in particular) don't have the same effect on mobile.

However, in the mobile version of Elder Sign you do get a series of handy tutorial videos built into the app, which is a lot better than reading through pages of a dense instruction manual. This is part of another aspect in favor of mobile board gaming: They are fantastic for introducing new players to the more physical originals. Why scare your friends away with piles of plastic figures and weird dice they've never seen before, when you can have them play through a quick game in 20 minutes on a device they understand?

It also avoids situations where the more aggressive member of your playing group slams the table too hard and trains go flying everywhere.

Ticket to Ride is simply brilliant on mobile. You collect colored cards in order to lay down tracks so you can complete the routes marked on your ticket cards. It's super simple and fast moving, and across a table a game can be completed in about an hour or so. On mobile, you can complete a full game in a fraction of that, in as little as ten minutes, which is great. There won't be any confusion about any of the rules. Scoring is done automatically, a godsend because there's always a moment in the "real" game where someone goes, "Wait, I think I should have more points." And you're told when you complete a ticket—playing with pieces, there's always someone who thinks they've completed one, but they've actually missed a vital route.

Getting to lay down the lovely miniature trains is missing from the mobile version, naturally, but this doesn't really take anything away from it. It also avoids situations where the more aggressive member of your playing group slams the table too hard and trains go flying everywhere, making scoring impossible.

Price is another big one. The standard version of Ticket to Ride costs around $45 on Amazon, and then if you want any expansions you'll have to fork over a bunch more cash. This is fairly cheap as far as board games go, too, as you'll often find pay more. On your phone you'll only be paying about $7 for Ticket to Ride, and a couple of extra bucks for each expansion. With manufacturing costs massively reduced, the price comes crashing down—a good thing when the palpable pieces aren't wholly essential to the game experience.

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The 'XCOM' board game

Board gaming should be a social experience, and playing alone on your phone won't help that. But many of these board game adaptations have online modes, or even pass and play functionality if you've got a few friends in the same room (preferably not the bathroom for this one). While these multiplayer modes aren't ideal, and need some tweaking, particularly in the online matchmaking department, it is nice to have the option. As I said, video game versions won't replace the real life versions, ideally—they'll merely supplement them.

In fact, there are now digital supplements to some board games. The XCOM board game has one player using an app on their tablet for the entirety of the game. This player is the team's coordinator, managing tasks in real time in the face of an alien invasion. Board game purists may turn their noses up at a digital element, but there is no denying that the app adds something that would be hard, or even impossible for a normal board game to achieve.

As a lover of both video and board games, I'm keen to see more crossovers like XCOM—or even just further ports of the best board games to mobile. The addition of digital elements has opened up endless possibilities for designers previously restricted by having to work with real world objects, made of plastic and paper. I'm excited to see what the smartest minds can come up with next. You know who else has a smart mind? Sherlock Holmes. Best get on the pre-order list, pronto.

Follow Matt on Twitter.

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In the second instalment of this four-part series, Tim Burrows looks at England's misunderstood eastern side, continuing here with Boston, Skegness and Grimsby. Part one, which looks at Margate and Dover, is here.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Looking for England? Get in a car and drive from one town to another and you will find it. It's there, look, in the ragged polythene drooping from trees and hedgerows on A-road after A-road. You'll see it in those muddy fields turned into quasi militaristic play parks and populated by over-buff blokes huffing and puffing during the pre-lash section of their stag weekend. The village pub converted into a quirky looking Italian restaurant—that's it, too.

England is also to be found in the scene of migrant workers picking daffodils that we encounter just outside Boston, Lincolnshire on the east side of the country. It is not an England that everybody in Boston is particularly enamored of right now. It seems a thriving town, but some mention an undercurrent that has fostered. Those born overseas make up 15 percent of the town's population of 75,000, mostly from eastern Europe (Poland, Lithuania, Latvia). A respectable Bostonian man who works as an engineer in the local hospital tells us that no one goes down West Street. It's "their" area. "They" sometimes come into "our shops," he says, but it's fine. "They" even have their own nightclub. There is no malice in his voice when uttering these words that seem pretty divisive written down on the page. He is merely telling us the situation the way he sees it.

Among the skleps of West Street is Diva's Cakes, owned and run by Daiva Razguniene. She moved here a decade ago from Lithuania, working in factories with her husband, working her way up to the role of manager until she left to start her cake shop. She calls West Street "East Street" for its concentration of businesses run by east European-born. "English people use the marketplace more but it is £1,600 ($2,300), £2,700 ($4,000) per month [to rent a shop there]." Daiva pays a third of that for the rent of her shop, hence East Street. She and her husband have a kid and will probably stay in Boston now and she sees the future as more integrated than seems credible to some. "More and more when my customers come in and order a wedding cake or to buy some cakes, it is an English man, Lithuanian lady, or an English lady and a Polish man for example—there's lots of mixtures now."

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Boston is five miles inland and almost 40 minutes drive from Skegness. Like most of the east, the constituency of Boston and Skegness has been comfortably Conservative since it was the two separate constituencies, Holland with Boston and East Lindsey, but there is talk of a young challenger in town, the 22-year-old UKIP local hopeful Robin Hunter Clarke (who doesn't want to talk to VICE).

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Seaside towns such as Skegness have the air of the film set, a temporality reflected in its architecture of fun that masks a certain emptiness. In the Waterhole pub round the back of the promenade at Skegness, Middlesbrough are spanking Ipswich 3-1 on wall-to-wall flatscreens. "It's so flat round here," says Dave, who's come in for a midday pint after finishing for the day. "If you've got a motor scooter, you're all right."

Jagged horizons charge Dave up; 52-years-old, he has lived near the Pennines and goes cliff fishing in Scotland from time to time, but he stays because of the work and seems to enjoy the irony that his job is selling and building flat-pack furniture. He doesn't vote but has a lot to say about what's wrong, particularly about the windmills. Between here and Cleethorpes by the Humber river there are another 200 wind turbines going up, he says. Renewable energy is painted as the future of this part of the east of England, but it's ruined the fishing according to Dave. You don't get no cod no more, he says, just the crabs and lobsters (creatures known to be attracted to the base of the huge turbines) that migrate across the Wash from Cromer.

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Skeggy is perhaps best known for being the birthplace of the Butlins holiday camp, when Billy Butlin expanded on his fairground in 1936, and it is still a well-used seaside town. Off-season Butlins exists for the eternal English party crowd, the stag and hen dos. Theme weekends dominate, which brings temporary migrants to the town: 8,000 for the recent 80s night.

It speaks to England's good-time side—the endless celebration of the nothing in particular, which could be said to define us. But there's a feeling that it's slipping. Outside Skegness working men's club, I strike up a conversation as pints are ferried out to help get Saturday moving along nicely. "Yeah, I like Skegness," says Steve, a pensioner in a leather jacket who has the cheeky smile of a man who knows you've screwed his wife and is looking forward to an elaborate revenge. "But it needs entertainment clubs, where people can have a dance and a bit of a singalong, that sort of thing. Comedians, singers... But you haven't got that here so you're either drinking or you're in the bookies."

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Last hurrah of a dead horizon. As flat as a fish finger, or a Findus crispy pancake.

Both are applicable. A whole stand at Grimsby Town's ground Blundell Park is named after the fish and food processing company Findus, and Grimsby was indeed once considered the home of the fish finger.

If there is a foodstuff that could be claimed by the east of England to an almost metaphoric degree, it is the fish finger, first produced in the UK for Birds Eye in Great Yarmouth in the 1950s.

People round here still talk of the Cod Wars with Iceland in the 1970s as the tipping point that punctured Grimsby's proud role as one of the major European fishing ports. After skirmishes off the coast of Iceland over the amount of cod that boats from the UK were catching, a 13- then a 50-mile limit was imposed around Icelandic waters. By the mid 80s, the number of fishermen working out of Grimsby was a sixth of what it was at its height. Yet in the mid 90s, Grimsby was still the center of a fish finger market worth £293 million ($429 million) and which sent out 952 million orange sticks a year—back then, 27 percent of the total catch landed by British fleets ended up in a fish finger. The Birds Eye factory left in 2005 and the factory was burned to the ground by arsonists in 2007. The fish finger has since declined but it is still reckoned that three quarters of the fish eaten in the UK is processed in Grimsby.

Youngs in particular still thrives. It sponsors Cleethorpes's carnival which even features people dressed up as fish fingers in a nod to its processed fish heritage. But much of the work places like this offers is via agencies. I talk to Liam, a mate who's from Grimsby but now lives in London. He can't remember which of the food factories he worked at every time he needed 50 quid, but he knows he hated it. And this is the thing. So much rhetoric today is about how the feckless English are too lazy or too superior to take the work that is offered to them. But what if it is simply the case that it's too mind-numbing and badly paid to be considered. Liam felt he couldn't fit within the narrow "village-like" parameters of what Grimsby expected of him. He had to travel out of town to get the records he wanted. In the end he, like many, chose the opportunity, the anonymity, of London.

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A Labour stronghold since 1945, Great Grimsby is a marginal seat today. Austin Mitchell only beat the Conservatives by 714 votes last time. East Marsh, the second most deprived ward in the country, is the emblem of Grimsby-as-industrial cavity. And while politics offers nothing in the way of change for lives that have flatlined, some TV shows luxuriate in such abandonment. The Channel Four documentary series, Skint, was filmed in the area, which provoked a public fightback thought of as the moment poverty porn was called out in public here.

The port of Grimsby rose in the mid 19th century and peaked a century later when it proudly boasted more fishermen and trawlers than their rivals on the other side of the Humber, Hull. These days, the town languishes in Hull's shadow. Hull is a city, Grimsby's a town. Hull City Football Club play in the Premier League and made the FA Cup final last year; Grimsby Town languish in the Conference North, their supporters among the longest-suffering in the country. Grimsby has a population of almost 90,000; Hull has around three times that at around 330, 000. Hull is capital of culture 2017; Grimsby's most recent cultural highlight was Sacha Baron Cohen depicting the town as a slag-ridden shell for the entertainment of a global audience (except he didn't deign to film it in Grimsby).

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Trade union affiliated party TUSC's candidate Val O'Flynn puts the relationship succinctly: "We don't get the steam off Hull's piss." The £310 million ($454 million) Siemens wind turbine factory that was promised for Grimsby somehow ended up at Hull. "We've been training people to do those jobs. but it's still not certain how many we're going to get now. Where the money's been spent has been at one end of the seafront, in Cleethorpes. The other end, Grimsby, has been left to deteriorate."

TUSC is an umbrella organization attempting to unite a disparate left under one political banner. Val joined as a representative of the Socialist Party after years spoiling her ballot to reflect her feeling of betrayal by Labour. In this way, TUSC is the worker's rights-focused, pro-Europe, anti-fascist UKIP.

Great Grimsby has been targeted by UKIP. The party installed Victoria Ayling as their candidate, but Val feels this might have been a miscalculation, owing to Ayling's overt hostility to immigrants and National Front affiliation, which has led to local infighting. Aside from that niggling NF thing, Ayling is noted for asking the paradoxical question "what happens when the renewables run out?" and last week it was her dear leader Farage's turn to pour scorn on wind farms when he visited, saying "in ten years time there won't be a renewables industry," to much local consternation. Immigration is being pitched as a concern here, although the amount of migrants who have come to Grimsby is less than Boston (where Ayling lives nearby). Most I talk to know that it's the failure of politicians to confront the problem fishing industry that has been the issue, but UKIP's blustering stance on wind farms shows they're not ready to engage with Grimsby's present in a meaningful way—only its past.

Surprisingly for a socialist candidate, Val is engaged to UKIP council candidate Chris Osborne, who is standing for the ward of Croft Baker and who was quoted in the press saying of Ayling that he "can't endorse or support a candidate who I genuinely believe... is racist." But she reckons UKIP in Grimsby is very different prospect to elsewhere: "A lot of them are Labour Party members who became totally disgusted with the party and so decided to join UKIP in order to fight for the community." It points to the flux in UK politics at the moment. Surely if better grassroots parties spring up in England, UKIP will capitulate?

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"Oh England you're fair, but there's none to compare with my Grimsby," sang Elton John inhis ode to the port town from his numb-gummed pomp in 1974. It was written by lifelong collaborator Bernie Taupin, who grew up in villages between Sleaford and Grimsby, and who also wrote "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting" about the rambunctious, everyone's-a-friend-until-they-fucking-deserved-it intensity of a proper weekend tear-up.

Saturday Night still happens in Grimsby town center, but not in the same way it once did. The train conductor was genuinely surprised when we asked for two return tickets to Grimsby as we pulled away from Cleethorpes, as most people go the other way, towards the more tourist-ready resort.

Outside the Barge, an alt pub housed in a converted canalboat on the river Freshney, Stephen and Dave, both 27-year-old post-grads, reminisce about the good times ten years ago when this place would be heaving before everyone went to snakebite-pushing Gulliver's nightclub over the road. "It's a world away from what it used to be," says Stephen, who mentions the decline of Freeman Street, which thrived during the 1960s but is now an archetype of English main-drag desolation. "Grimsby has almost become the Margate of the North—a backwater. The big problem is location; in terms of connections, you're almost at the end of the road... business hasn't come here. While this government has concentrated on London, almost everywhere else has gone to ruin."

But the craic is alive and well in Cleethorpes. When we return, everyone not asleep is bladdered. In a pub-club hybrid I strike up a pissed conversation with a bloke from Cornwall who's had so much lager he looks like he's trying to snog himself at times. He tells me he travels here to work on the wind farms, but doesn't like the place much. He's happy not to engage with it, showing me a video of the rugby on his iPhone and talks about the boys back home. It's this detachment that defines Grimsby, says Val, who points to the hotels built for skilled workers to stay in as if to emphasise that there is not enough quality work and training for people who grew up here. But the party doesn't stop. This is England, after all, and "Uptown Funk" has just come on.

Follow Tim on Twitter.

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Los Baños de Lady María de Padilla beneath the Patio del Crucero in the Alcázar of Seville. Photo via flickr user eszsara

Last night, the fifth season of Game of Thrones (on HBO) opened with the familiar drums and mournful strings. By the end of the episode, an important character received a merciful death, and we were off on a new journey through the lands of Westeros and Essos. As Dornish prince Oberyn Martell said last season, not long before his head was squished by the Mountain: "It is a big and beautiful world. Most of us live and die in the same corner where we were born and never get to see any of it." So, before more heads roll, let's pause the clockwork map and appreciate the world in which our favorite characters live and frequently die.

When one of our characters arrives somewhere new, they aren't just encountering a made-up place in a fictional world, but a location laden with echoes of legends and histories from premodern Europe and Asia. That's part of what makes Game of Thrones so successful—the peoples, places, and even plot lines feel at once familiar and new. Author George R. R. Martin (now with the help of show creators David Benioff and D. B. Weiss) has built a world for which the clockwork map is a fine metaphor—many parts from many sources, in motion, all driving the machinery of intrigue, violence, and impending doom. The key to Westeros and the wider world beyond is that it belongs to no era, no particular mythology, no set of legends, and has no limits. It draws its power from consistent inconsistency. To the modern consumer of epic fantasy, accustomed to the Tolkien model of world-building in which everything fits together based on a detailed history and a tight cosmology, this is unusual.

Martin went another direction, laying out a path that the HBO show still follows. While he clearly has a master plot in mind—winter is, after all, coming; which is to say, don't lose sight of the high-fantasy plot always lurking beneath the hubbub of politics and murders—the world doesn't have to conform to any particular set of norms. Instead of the Tolkien model, Martin and the show creators take the most fascinating ideas from any period and place, whether historical, legendary, or literary, and bring it to their world. The result is a glorious hodgepodge and should be celebrated as such.

Game of Thrones is not the first wildly popular fantasy series or show to take this approach. Rob Barrett, who teaches medieval literature at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, referred me back to the Hyborian Age of Conan the Barbarian and writer G. K. Chesterton's loose mixture of history and fiction in The Ballad of the White Horse.

In the introduction to the The Ballad of the White Horse, the poet, theologian, and philosopher wrote, "It is the chief value of a legend to mix up the centuries while preserving the sentiment. That is the use of tradition: It telescopes history." Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan, read Chesterton's White Horse and set his own stories in a world pulling from legends and history. Note that Chesterson speaks of value. This kind of storytelling has the power to spark the imagination in ways that faithful historical recreation or adopting a specific historical setting for fantasy might not. When history is telescoped, an author takes interesting things from wherever and whenever they want and puts them in service of a new story that still feels familiar. We recognize the archetypes, then follow the plot forward.

The power of telescoping history fuels Game of Thrones. In past seasons, the civil war of Westeros drew from the War of the Roses (from the 14th century) in late medieval England as Martin's vehicle to show the disaster of civil war for civilian populations. The Ironborn invoke the Viking raiders of the ninth and tenth centuries, hundreds of years before the War of the Roses. Like the Vikings, the Ironborn aren't really just raiders but would-be conquerors of the mainland. The Dothraki, now largely out of the story (but perhaps returning later), present a potential existential menace on the scale of the Mongols (13th century). Vaes Dothrak, their city, is not unlike Karakorum, a city that combined the values of nomadic life—tents, open spaces, herds—with the mercantile role of a capital city of a major political power. Vikings, Mongols, and War of the Roses: These elements come from thousands of miles and hundreds of years apart, here telescoped in mythic form to Westeros and Essos. And it works.

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Alexander Siding in the Alcázar of Seville as Dorann Martell in the Water Gardens of Dorne. Photo credit: Macall B. Polay/HBO

Braavos, our other major new setting, was filmed on the Adriatic coast of Croatia. That's fitting, as it clearly draws its nature from the history, myth, and anti-myth (by people who hated it) of premodern Venice. Venice dominated much of the Adriatic for centuries, both militarily and economically. We've previously seen the bank of Braavos, and while Venice was not, in fact, a great banking center (nor did it have a great colossus—that's Rhodes), that we have a financial center being located in a city of canals makes Braavos's Venetian elements unmistakable.

Now we get another often fictionalized aspect of premodern Venice: assassins. Arya Stark finally makes it to Braavos, and in the second episode begins the long journey towards (we assume) becoming a Faceless Man (or girl). In the new season, this telescoping continues. Jamie and Bronn set off to Dorne to rescue the princess (and Jamie's daughter) Myrcella, in what amounts to a particularly bloody take on the buddy movie trope. Dorne is a hybrid place based on Al-Andalus, or Islamic Spain. The Water Gardens of Dorne were, in fact, filmed in the Alcázar of Seville, a great palace from the Islamic era. Dorne is both part of the "western" world of Westeros and yet culturally apart, with better food and wine, but also its relative autonomy for both women and bastards (and the Sand Snakes, who are both). It's a way station between the "eastern" cities of Essos, through which Danerys has traveled, and the purely European medieval territories of Westeros.

The world of Westeros and Essos feel at once familiar and alien, and that's why it's so compelling. Each site and culture reflects the ways that myths and histories echo through time, providing a richer world through which the main characters move and, too often, die.

It's a big and beautiful realm. Oberyn won't get to see it. But we will.

Follow David on Twitter.

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Photo via Freenerd

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Men are more likely to go back in time and kill Yung Hitler than women are, according to an actual psychological study published this month.

This study ignores a number of quite crucial scientific facts about the current state of time travel, but there we go. "Do STEM subjects!" people tell you. "Not this writing nonsense! Do something real with your life! Do a real subject with real-world applications! Science!" And to those people I say: What about this Hitler killing study, then? What now? Where's your science now?

Anyway, you know the theory: Time travel is invented and you—for some reason, despite your complete lack of experience murdering anything other than I Will Survive at a karaoke bar—are chosen to be the first person to go back in time, and they give you a gun, the scientists, they give you a loaded gun and they say: Gokill Hitler, will you? He was a proper dickhead. And then you go back in time to around 1905—Hitler was about 16, then, and rarely guarded by armed Nazis because Nazis hadn't been invented yet—and you shoot him in the balls, face, balls, and balls again. Then you come back to the present day and nobody even cares what you did because Hitler never even happened on their timeline. That's the worst thing: You killed Hitler and nobody even cares. You killed Hitler and you didn't even get a Wikipedia page. People are all like, "Yo, where is my Volkswagen? I swear I used to have a Volkswagen. It was parked, like, right here." And you wipe the Hitler blood off your tracksuit and go: Well, that was a waste of time.

Would you do that, though? If you are a man: probably. If you are a woman: less so, according to researchers in the United States, Canada, and Germany, who collated sample Hitler-killing data from over 6,100 participants across 40 previous "moral dilemma"–style psychological studies. They found that men and women both calculate the cost of one murder versus all the potential lives lost, but women were more likely to be conflicted about the whole thing and men were more likely to straight-up do a murder.

"Women seem to be more likely to have this negative, emotional, gut-level reaction to causing harm to people in the dilemmas, to the one person, whereas men were less likely to express this strong emotional reaction to harm," lead author Rebecca Friesdorf told NPR.

The study—published this month in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin—examines the gender differences in various moral judgments (abortion, torture, Hitler murders) and their application in various real-world scenarios. Example: If you wouldn't kill Hitler, then a small-scale sacrificial judgment like which member of a team to fire to help the rest of the group might be more difficult to make should you ever pack the time-traveling assassin thing in and manage a big ASDA instead. "If these [gender] differences also hold in that context, then that could have some implications for how women and men are making those decisions," Friesdorf says.

Each and every day, we are constantly killing our own personal Hitlers.

There are other ways of dealing with Hitler, of course, beyond straight-up murdering him with a gun. Buy him a nice paint set and a Life Drawing for Dummies book. Say things like, "No, that painting of a building is actually good." Take him bowling, or something. A lot of this could have been avoided if he just had a nice friend. Moral dilemma: Would you be Hitler's best friend if it meant avoiding a war? Would you go paintballing with Hitler? He was probably the type to get really into paintball and bring his own custom-made paintball gun to the range with him. You turn up one Saturday and Hitler has had matching camouflage one-pieces made up with your surnames on the back and "BEST BUDZ" across the bottom in stenciled letters. Every Friday night, he's texting you. "Don't have too many beers tonight, mate!" Hitler is saying. "Paintball tomorrow, remember!" Hitler's outside your house at 6 AM on a Saturday, idling the van, ready to drive you both to a paintball tournament in Swynnerton. The only songs he plays in the car are by Rammstein and he won't let you get out to piss because you're "making really good time." He has been talking about compressed air for 45 straight minutes. Do it. This isn't a moral dilemma. Do it. Don't be his friend. You don't need this. Do it. Kill Hitler. Single paintball pellet to the base of the skull. Do it. Do us all a favor and kill Hitler.

Follow Joel on Twitter.