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When I was a kid, there was a skating rink near my house—one of those terminally ill and wholly dorky kind of rinks, complete with disco lights, bad music, and arcade cabinets. I spent a lot of time there in my primary school days, running loops hectically around the varnished floor for birthday parties and hangout sessions.

I was terrible at rollerblading. Rollerskating, too, was utterly beyond me. Every run would end in a premature wipeout, usually when faced with the insurmountable challenge of lazily turning to the left. It was rough. Just thinking about it makes my ass hurt. I was, in fact, always aching for more quarters to go spend at the Marvel vs. Capcom machine, lest I have to go back out there and demonstrate to my classmates just how inept I really was.

Despite my complete lack of coordination—or, perhaps, because of it—I thought skating was the coolest thing in the goddamn world. There was something ineffably empowering about it, some deep, swaggering joy in gaining speed, wheels eating into the ground, some upbeat tune from the loudspeakers pounding into my ear. I can remember moments, seconds at a time, where I got it, where it all worked. They were transcendent.

But then I fell. The real world, obviously, was not going to prove a satisfying outlet for my admiration.

That's where Jet Set Radio came in. I don't remember when I first saw it, but I remember my reaction: This was the raddest shit imaginable. It had the brightest colors; a sharp, bombastic sense of style; and a locomotion system based entirely on looking as cool as possible with wheels attached to your feet. I was sold. The only problem, then, was that I didn't have a Dreamcast, and so I languished from afar for years, pining to be one of the cool kids.

When I finally had a chance to dig deep into the world of Tokyo-to, the caricatured city of youth culture melting pots where Jet Set Radio takes place, it both was and wasn't what I was expecting. It is a game, certainly, about the fluidity of good skating, the joy of motion and skill. But skating itself is less the focus and more the medium. All the technical aspects of the sport are simplified, and everything is comfortably controlled with just a few buttons. Pulling off tricks is just a matter of getting in the air most of the time. This isn't Tony Hawk's Pro Skater.

No, the real focus of Jet Set Radio is right there in the title. This is a game about music. And that's what, even so long after its 2000 release, remains so brilliant about it. And it's why I think it's a game that we can still learn a lot from.

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See, I think video games have an influence problem. And it's not, as a lot of critics like to argue, about video games relying too much on outside influences in lieu of developing their own language, or at least it's not entirely that. I think drawing influence from other art forms is an incredibly important part of making good art, and games are no different. After all, nothing is wholly original, and that process of cutting and pasting found ideas and aesthetics is an essential part of the process.

No, the problem that bothers me is how shallow video gaming's reference pool tends to be. I'm speaking in generalizations here, certainly, and I don't want to erase the eclectic, widely drawing work out there. But so many mainstream games seem to get their cues either from television, movies, or other video games. This is a disappointingly tiny range of inspirations, and is it any wonder, then, that major releases often feel so similar? And the games that do pull from other sources often do so in half-hearted or co-opting ways. (Sunset Overdrive comes to mind, a game that tries to be a modern Jet Set Radio but that, as Garrett Martin at Paste put it, relates to punk the same way Hot Topic does.)

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'Jet Set Radio' trailer, announcing the game's 2012 HD re-releases

And I think music is an excellent place to look. Music can inform mood and motion, using repetition and structure to create flow and feeling. Bungie, talking about their development of Halo, famously described the core gameplay as built on "30 seconds of fun," a familiar gameplay loop repeated over time, structuring the design, an idea that's not that different in ethos than, say, the repeated verse-chorus-verse structure of a pop song. There are meaningful touchstones of comparison, is what I'm saying, places where games and music can and maybe should overlap. And by incorporating the sound and styles of different strains of youth-oriented popular music, Jet Set Radio gets it right.

The first person introduced to you in Jet Set Radio is the bombastic DJ Professor K, sole proprietor of a pirate radio station, introducing you to the world and its characters like a radio play take on Walter Hill's 1979 movie The Warriors. You're a hooligan with big over-ear headphones and a can of spray paint, part of one of many youth gangs roaming around the Tokyo-to. Your goals are simple: Stake out your territory, leave your mark on as many places as possible, and look cool as hell doing it.

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Tokyo-to is rendered in vivid colors and sharp edges, one of the first games to use the cel shading style of graphics. While typically noted for making games look more like cartoons, here they also make Jet Set Radio look more like graffiti, all exaggerated shapes and thick lines, drawing particular influence from the places where street art has overlapped with music culture—Eric Haze, an artist who famously designed album art for the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, among others, was consulted by developers Smilebit (previously AM6, since renamed Sega Sports Japan) in order to form their aesthetic. The whole world feels like it could be scrawled on a wall somewhere, reeking of spray paint fumes.

And every moment is bursting with sound. Barely a single second goes by without a piece of music to accompany it. The music in Jet Set Radio is energetic, rhythm-heavy and defiant. It's an eclectic mixture of hip-hop, dance pop, ska, and Japanese rock, a multicultural melange of youth culture and an irrepressible, joyful sense of revolution. Every moment thrums to its soundtrack, which is, on the default settings, emphasized almost more than the in-game sounds, positioning it as a central consideration of play. Every stage has one or two songs all its own, making it a dance, encouraging the player to match their skating to the beat and mood of the music.

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That soundtrack, combined with the bright, graffiti-inflected visual style, gives the whole game the sensibility of a music video. As you skate around the stages at high speeds, marking the world as yours, it captures that sense that I had on the skating rink as a kid, the feeling that the cheesy music was playing for me. It makes you the axis around which the whole world is turning. If Jet Set Radio is a music video, you're the star, an avatar of pop's glorious presence in the world. And when the police start chasing you for being young and rowdy and tagging the place up, as police are wont to do, especially in cheesy music videos, you are always a little faster, a little cooler.

The police, by the by, do chase the hell out of you, escalating in supremely cartoonish fashion. In one early stage, set in a quarry, all bright red and orange, the cops move from chasing you around to assailing you with gun choppers, and for the rest of the stage you have to tag the surroundings while avoiding being carpet bombed into cel-shaded oblivion. It contributes to a general sense of youthful rebellion, a grinning rejection that feels drawn from decades of pop music. It's the feeling that the best way to screw the man is to turn the volume up and let the music drown them out. You gotta fight for your right to party, and all that.

Not that Jet Set Radio is a perfect game or anything (it is, among other things, surprisingly difficult, as I learned when I recently revisited it on Steam—the playthrough these screens are taken from). But by trying to capture an ethos pulled from pop music and youth culture, it encapsulates something not a lot of games get at, embodying an experience more accessible and, frankly, more fun than most Michael Bay–fellating action romps get at. Not that I'm opposed to a violent romp now and then. But Jet Set Radio is a party, a celebration of style and sound. And it's the sort of game the industry could do with a lot more of.

Follow Jake on Twitter.

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Photo courtesy Mother

Skateboarding is in a strange place at the moment. With contests offering $150,000 prize purses and talks of inclusion in the Olympics, the mainstream perception of skating is that it is bigger and richer than ever. And that might be the case for 1 percent of the industry, but the rest are struggling to make ends meet. Some of the problems stem from the fact that there are a shit ton of pros out there today, and many companies can barely afford to pay them the industry-standard $2 royalty per board sale.

A few weeks ago I interviewed former Alien Workshop filmer William Strobeck, who told me he wished that skateboarding would return to the golden era of the 90s. In one way it already has—rather than languishing on a team for little to no money, many skaters are choosing to step out on their own and start their own brands much like Rick Howard and Mike Carroll did when they left Steve Rocco's camp in 1993 to start Girl skateboards. The result has had a somewhat crippling effect on a few of the larger wood manufacturers in the core market. With mom and pop skateshops unable to compete with the volume discounts given to a Zumiez chain or various online mega-sites, shop owners (and skaters) are forced to seek out products that are uniquely theirs, with smaller distribution. Out of nowhere upstart board brands like Fucking Awesome, Polar, 3D, Palace, and Magenta have taken over most of the real estate on skateshop walls.

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Gilbert Crockett's pro model. Photo courtesy Mother

Mother Collective is the newest addition to this trend, and it is positioned to outsell all the others. Risen from the ashes of Alien Workshop's death in 2014, Mother reunites the unique styles of pros Jake Johnson, Tyler Bledsoe, and Gilbert Crockett with former Alien Workshop team manager Chad Bowers captaining the ship from his living room. Mother isn't reinventing the wheel—their focus is on no-gimmick street skating coupled with low distribution. When Mother shipped their first round of boards they made them exclusively available to a few dozen skateshops. No mall chains or online retailers. The response was immediate. In the 12 years I've owned NJ Skateshop we've never sold out of a new brand so quickly.

As a lifetime fan of the original brand known as Alien Workshop and a friend of the very talented and underrated Gilbert Crockett, who has been board-sponsorless for nearly a year, I'm really pulling for Mother. There was actually a brief moment last year when Gil and I had discussed doing our own board brand called Jumpers, but it wasn't a good fit at the time. A week before ole Gil relocated back to his hometown of Richmond, Virginia from LA I sat him down to discuss Mother, the rebirth of Alien Workshop, and bringing skateboarding back to its roots.

VICE: How did you get the news that Alien Workshop was going out of business?
Gilbert Crockett: Chad Bowers called me and told me I'm fired and he was fired and everybody was fired. It was getting weird around then so I knew that call was a possibility eventually, but obviously it was a bummer being the end of that chapter of my life.

What did Workshop mean to you, especially as a skater from the East Coast?
It was that company that I thought was forever. I've never felt like that with a board sponsor, you know? It meant everything to me. It was the dream sponsor when you were a kid. Workshop is the ultimate. Just watching those dudes in videos growing up, there was no better team. From Benny [Maglinao] being the filmer and editor, AVE [Anthony Van Engelen] and [Jason] Dill being at the head of the ship for as long as they were; you knew you were in good hands. I would never worry about the way my footage was going to get edited, the way my ad was going to get laid out, or anything. Once you leave that scenario, it's different. You actually have to think about, am I going to be stoked on anything that I'm working on with these people?

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Photo by Anthony Acosta

You went without a board sponsor for close to a year. What was that time like for you? What were you doing for boards?
I skated FA [Fucking Awesome] boards for a while. Jimi Britches gave me boards with the OK from AVE and Dill—not to ride for them, just so I had skateboards. I didn't know what I was going to do. I didn't exactly have a place to go for a long time and I didn't really care. We were just finishing this Vans video that's coming out next month and I didn't want to think about it for a long time. It was just that thing you didn't want to deal with, like paying a bill or something.

Recently Alien Workshop has returned with an all-amateur team. How do you feel about that?
I don't feel much about it. I never thought I'd be bummed about having this Workshop tattoo on my finger, but if anything bums me out it's that it's not dead when it should be dead. It died. You can't just call some girlfriend you used to have and get back with her and pick up where you left off...

When she's dead.
Especially if she died!

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Photo by Anthony Acosta

So you're not following the new Alien ams on Instagram?
I don't dislike either of those skateboarders, I think they're sick, I just think... Fuck, I don't know how to say this and not be mean, but I don't think the new Workshop is sick. I don't think it's Workshop. I just think it's this thing that's there. I don't even want to look at it and judge it or think about it like that. It's just some other thing and I just have to not pay attention to it and that kind of sucks.

Yeah, I just interviewed Paul Liliani for King Shit magazine and I said to him, "Riding for the Workshop has to feel like you're fucking a dead man's wife." Then I asked him if AVE or Dill would have put him on Workshop back when he was flow and he said, "I doubt it. They never put me on the team back then." But I'm wondering if you just feel the way you do because Rob Dyrdek never knew your name.
Maybe partially. Like I said, I don't even want to feel any way toward the new Workshop because Mike Hill is a genius and I like those two skateboarders, but I want to look at Mike Hill as Mike Hill and those two skateboarders as those two skateboarders. It's just a shame that I have to look at them and they're called The Workshop. That sucks.

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Photo by Anthony Acosta

What was the story with Dyrdek not knowing your name?
I was in LA years ago and we went to Dill's art show next to Supreme. Dyrdek was talking to AVE and I went up to him and was like, "What's up, dude?" I stuck my hand out and he was like, "Hey. How's it going man?" He wasn't a dick or anything, he was just kind of short with me, like, "...yeah, what's up, dude?" AVE was like, "Do you know who this is?" Rob was like, "No." He was like, "This is Gilbert. Gilbert Crockett." Rob was like, "...Gilbert Crockett?" AVE was like, "He fucking rides for us!" Rob starts jumping up and down and laughing, giving me high-fives and says, "Oh my god! Just the other day I read your name and I was thinking, I wonder if I would even know who that is if I saw him?

And he didn't.
Yeah, it was pretty funny.

Related: For more on the history of Alien Workshop watch Josh Kalis's Epicly Later'd episode above.

Did you feel like a million bucks?
Yeah, I thought it was funny as shit.

You're getting the band back together with this new board company, Mother Collective. Let's talk about that.
Yeah, so far it's awesome. It's me, Jake Johnson, and Tyler Bledsoe riding for Mother out of Ohio. Chad Bowers is running it; he was the Workshop team manager. It's something that I've never had with a company. Chad listens to us. It's not just this floating brand name or branding idea. Nothing is set up like another company and yeah, everyone knows that's the cool thing to do right now, but it's not trying to be cool. It's not trying to be anything it's not. It's just these dudes and their ideas and their images. It almost feels like a magazine, where all these people are contributing photos and stories and ideas and everyone is every part of it. Hopefully it always runs like that and it never even feels like some company. Hopefully people realize that these are real people who are all really involved with everything and want to be a part of it too.

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Photo courtesy Mother

Where does the name Mother come from?
We were struggling with a name for a while. Chad told me he wanted to call the distribution company Mother, and I think I said, "Why don't we just call the board brand Mother?" And that's what we ended up calling it. The reason it's a good name is that this is a family sort of thing; everyone is involved in what comes out of it.

All of you guys bled Alien for so long. Will there be any Alien aesthetic to it at any point?
It doesn't seem like it, no. We've only done this first run of boards, but it doesn't look anything like Alien.

Mother is out of Ohio. For decades Alien Workshop was the pride of the buckeye state, but in the end they moved to California to survive. Can a board brand out of Ohio be successful again?
I think so. I think people are attracted to newer, smaller brands who do things for the reasons that kids want to buy boards nowadays and appeal to kids who aren't in Los Angeles. A lot of kids come from places like where Jake, Tyler, and myself do, with smaller skate scenes. And things have gone back to the roots in those scenes. Everyone is looking at these videos and these board companies, and these people are doing real street skating—that's how all these brands were founded, with real street skating and not stunting down 40-stair handrails. I think things going in that direction will help.

Follow @MotherCollective and @CeeBlues on Insta or go to mothercollective.com

More stupid can be found at Chrisnieratko.com or @Nieratko

Casting the 2016 election as a "generational choice," US Senator Marco Rubio formally threw his hat in the ring for the Republican presidential nomination, presenting himself as a young, forward-looking candidate with fresh ideas to fix the US economy and deal with problems of income inequality.

"The time has come for our generation to lead the way toward a new American Century," Rubio said. "This election is not just about what laws we will pass. It is a generational choice about what kind of country we will be."

Highlighting his relative youth—the Florida Senator is 43— Rubio contrasted his campaign with those of the 2016 heirs apparent—namely Jeb Bush, a fellow Floridian and Rubio's former political mentor, and Hillary Clinton—with thinly veiled references that dismissed the older candidates as 90s-era relics.

"While our people and economy are pushing the boundaries of the 21st century, too many of our leaders and their ideas are stuck in the twentieth century," Rubio told an audience of about 1,000 supporters. "They are busy looking backward, so they do not see how jobs and prosperity today depend on our ability to compete in a global economy. So our leaders put us at a disadvantage by taxing, borrowing and regulating like it's 1999."

Later, he took a more direct shot at Clinton, who announced her campaign for the Democratic nomination in a video on Sunday. "Just yesterday, a leader from yesterday began a campaign for President by promising to take us back to yesterday," Rubio said, eliciting laughter from the crowd. "But yesterday is over, and we are never going back."

"We Americans are proud of our history, but our country has always been about the future," he continued. "Before us now is the opportunity to author the greatest chapter yet in the amazing story of America. We can't do that by going back to the leaders and ideas of the past. We must change the decisions we are making by changing the people who are making them."

Like Senators Rand Paul and Ted Cruz—the two other GOP candidates who have announced their campaigns—Rubio is positioning himself as a new face of the Republican Party,someone who can excite the conservative base while also overcoming the demographic challenges that have hurt the party in the past two presidential contests. Like Paul and Cruz, Rubio has similarly made efforts to reach out to youth and minority voters, primarily by namedropping Pitbull, who is apparently a personal acquaintance.

In his speech Monday, he also played up his ties to the Latino community, at one point shifting into Spanish as he quoted his father, a Cuban immigrant. The speech was staged at Miami's Freedom Tower, an Ellis Island-style location where Cubans were once processed after fleeing from the Castro regime.

Rather than couching his announcement in the paranoid, fear-mongering rhetoric favored by some of the other members of his party, Rubio's speech Monday took a markedly more optimistic tone, centered around an idea he calls the "New American Century." Unlike many of the other GOP hopefuls, Rubio's positions on issues like taxes, immigration, and foreign policy tend to fall in line with the Establishment wing of the GOP. The speech Monday was an obvious attempt to distinguish the Florida Senator as an alternative option to more moderate Republicans looking for a new face with a name other than Bush.

Predictably, Democrats were quick to attack the idea that Rubio could be some kind of "new" Republican candidate. "The truth is—as those of us in Florida know all too well—he's simply peddling the same stale, harmful wares that the rest of the Republican Party is selling," Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, a Florida congresswoman, said in a statement after Rubio's announcement. "Rubio says he's a new type of Republican, but the only things he's ever championed are the same failed policies the public has already rejected, and the only cause he's ever advanced is his own.

Follow VICE Politics on Twitter

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Canadian troops pushing supplies for Ukraine in November 2014. Photo via Canadian government

Two hundred Canadian soldiers will be heading to Ukraine to build that country's capacity to defend itself from Russia, as Ottawa prepares for a massive military operation to bump up against President Vladimir Putin's landgrab in Ukraine.

Tuesday's announcement puts Canada more squarely in the mix of the Cold War-esque conflict in Eastern Europe, while trying to project force against Russia in its own back yard.

Minister of Defence Jason Kenney said directly on Tuesday that a "higher tempo" of Russian planes entering Canada's Arctic has been a part of the ongoing dispute between Moscow and the West.

As early as December 8, 2014, NORAD confirmed to VICE Canada that Russian long-range bombers flew into the US and Canadian Air Defense Identification Zones (ADIZ).

"CF-18 fighters intercepted and visually identified two Russian Tu-95 'Bear' long-range bombers flying in international airspace northwest of Anchorage and into the Beaufort Sea off Canada's coast," said a spokesperson for NORAD.

Increased Russian traffic in Canada's North is being complemented by a growing Canadian presence on Russian President Vladimir Putin's doorstep.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper released details of the mission on Tuesday morning, flanked by Kenney, Chief of Defence Staff General Tom Lawson, and representatives of the Ukrainian government.

Kenney said the announcement was directly "in the wake of Vladimir Putin's belligerence in Ukraine."

The release provided to VICE details that the training will involve "explosive ordnance disposal and improvised explosive device disposal training, military police training, medical training, flight safety training, and logistics system modernization training."

The mission is expected to go until March 31, 2017, which suggests that Ottawa sees the conflict with the Kremlin as remaining unresolved in the long-term. It also bodes well for Harper's commitment to establish permanent NATO bases in Eastern Europe as a deterrent for any potential Russian aggression to countries like Poland.

The whole training mission is expected to cost up to $16 million in 2015-2016, and roughly the same in the following year.

Most of the training will be going to the Ukrainian National Guard and the Ukrainian Army and will be done in conjunction with the United States and United Kingdom.

Logistics will involve Canadian forces helping to build capacity to move supplies and weapons across the tumultuous Eastern part of the country.

"It is not an easy task in any country, let alone when that country finds itself in conflict," Lawson said.

Flight safety training is obvious need, as Kiev is currently hobbled by a rapidly dwindling fleet of aircraft.

Canada will be taking the lead on military police training, as the United Kingdom and the United States will be driving other parts of the mission.

The training continues Ottawa's commitment to non-lethal aid to Ukraine. Most of the equipment sent thus far includes items like sleeping bags, helmets and flak vests.

As part of the expanded mission, the Canadian Armed Forces will also be training Ukrainian National Guard personnel in "individual and unit tactics."

Ukraine has been pressuring its allies, including Canada and the United States, to contribute real military equipment to help its army against President Vladimir Putin's encroachment and Moscow-backed separatists trying to establish Russian satellite states in the Eastern part of the country.

"We are leaving that option on the table," Kenney told reporters after the prime minister's announcement—which was closed to reporters, and questions were forbidden.

Kenney confirmed that Kiev requested weaponry, but he says that meetings between Harper, President Barack Obama, UK Prime Minister David Cameron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel concluded that NATO members should not be kicking in kinetic weaponry.

Canada has, however, been providing satellite imagery of the disputed eastern part of the country.

"There are separatists who are being well supported by the Russian military that we're watching in action in the eastern part of Ukraine," Lawson said.

Concerns have been raised about Operation IMPACT, which involves Canadian Forces personnel training Kurdish fighters to go to war with the Islamic State. There, it's special forces doing the on-the-ground work. The Department of Defence received heat after it was revealed that those forces had traded fire with IS militants.

"We are there not to get involved in combat but to assist our Ukrainian partners to defend themselves and their territorial integrity," Kenney said.

Lawson said there has been no plan to put special forces on the ground in Ukraine.

"I don't expect as we source these troops that we'll be drawing on special ops at all," General Lawson told VICE.

During the briefing, questions were by Ottawa Citizen reporter David Pugliese—Kenney's main tormentor—as to whether Canada had concerned that far-right extremists could benefit from Canada's training mission.

"We've discussed that issue and how we can avoid doing so," Kenney said.

Paramilitary groups like Right Sector, which have earned the moniker of "neo-Nazi," have forged an unholy alliance with Kiev in the mission to beat back a Russian invasion.

To avoid aiding such groups, Kenney said, trainers would only work with "uniformed Ukrainian soldiers" loyal to their government.

This mission is being done on top of other training programs being run by Canada for Ukrainian soldiers, and is separate from Operation REASSURANCE, which has seen hundreds of Canadians operating training missions throughout Europe as a show of force against the Kremlin.

Kenney announced in Tuesday's briefing that REASSURANCE would be expanded, with over 1,000 Canadian personnel deployed to Europe this summer.

"It will be hard not to notice by anyone who's interested in what NATO can bring to bear," Lawson said.

Most of the Canadian personnel—largely members of a mechanized infantry bridge from Canadian Forces Base Petawawa, but also members of the Canadian Air Force—will be conducting the training at the Yavoriv base in western Ukraine.

Kenney called that centre "state of the art" and underlined that it couldn't be farther from the conflict zone in eastern Ukraine. Kenney called it at least "a day's drive." As such, he said the risk to Canadian Armed Forces personnel would be "relatively low."

Follow Justin Ling and Ben Makuch on Twitter

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This article contains plot spoilers for BioShock and BioShock 2.

If you played it at launch in 2010, you might have found it easy to disregard BioShock 2 as a cowardly, or at least diffident, kind of video game. Three years earlier, its predecessor, BioShock, had made land on the browned shores of gaming, and been heralded a watershed title for both critical debate and commercial taste. It questioned whether games and the people who made them, when faced with the unpredictable behavior of the player, truly had anything to say. At the same time, it introduced to first-person shooter fans the philosophy of Ayn Rand, demonstrating how different subject matter could infiltrate the basest entertainment forms.

And so BioShock 2 was bound to face derision. It wasn't just the sequel to a shooter, and therefore an hereditary target for brickbats. It was the follow-up to, what was at the time, the most significant mainstream game in ten years. To outclass its older brother, as video game sequels are uniformly expected to do, BioShock 2 would have had to not only embark on a more penetrating philosophical expedition, but redefine for people, once again, the core principle of gaming. And it didn't, at least, not overtly.

Review scores were fair and some writers, like Tom Bramwell of Eurogamer, saw the game for what it was, and found room to praise BioShock 2's subtlety compared to its forebear. But the game, nowadays at least, is largely forgotten. Between the ground-breaking BioShock, and the marred, implosive BioShock Infinite, BioShock 2 is the overlooked middle-brother—a shame, considering it's the smartest, most sophisticated of the trio.

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'BioShock 2' launch trailer

BioShock, and its acclaimed satire of capitalism, self-interest, and Rand, is nowhere near as brave as its sequel, which chooses as its philosophical quarries notions of community, collectivism, and altruism. The antagonist, Dr. Sofia Lamb, aims to inject the genetic memories stored in people's blood into a single individual, effectively imbuing that person with a physical understanding of every other person's needs, desires, and experiences. This "true utopian," selected to be Lamb's daughter, Eleanor, will be, in theory, an efficient and altruistic leader of the world, whose decisions will be based not on selfish ideology, but intrinsic empathy towards all.

The idea backfires, however, when it is tested on researcher Gil Alexander, who rather than a benevolent, understanding leader, becomes a monster, driven insane by the myriad desires and experiences pulling his mind in different directions. The ideal is further compromised by Lamb's methods, which devolve into kidnapping, extortion, and murder. She becomes a character who will stop at nothing to help people.

BioShock 2 argues the impossibility of absolute altruism. To equally and unwaveringly care for absolutely everybody, at all times, in all things, is not possible—no system or person is capable of balancing the vastly different experiences and expectations that human beings have. BioShock 2 recognizes that at the same time, any system that proposed to do such a thing would still require a leader, and so a utilitarian society is shown to be an hypocrisy, insofar as it being a society in the first place.

The criminal lengths Lamb goes to are merely an endgame example of how the small amount of power granted to a utopian, altruistic individual would still corrupt, how even in a world where everybody, ostensibly, got a fair share, there would still be one person with a greater amount of influence. More than attacking Rand, greed, and big business, questioning the plausibility of equal distribution takes guts. And where BioShock was an argument for and against the player, BioShock 2 adopts a much harder stance: the desires, expectations, and whims of other people are a cancer.

Like Gil Alexander—like the would-be utopian, Eleanor—BioShock 2 was burdened by expectation. Stemming from players, from critics, and from within publisher 2K, all of whom expected a sequel to BioShock to look a certain way, BioShock 2's development team was subject to the demands and requirements of other people, forced to imbibe them like the genetic memories contained in blood. If the original BioShock doubted the honesty and wherewithal of a video game developer, implying that it was perhaps more valuable to ignore what a game is telling you, BioShock 2 questioned the involvement of outsiders, suggesting that a multitude of pressures, and an abundance of influence, is what damages the creative process. Alexander goes mad through trying to accommodate the wants of every single person. Likewise, you can imagine the BioShock 2 developers, trapped, frustrated, and drowning in the various things that they were told their game had to be.

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The Big Daddy character is a 'BioShock' icon

If it's the conflict between despotic developer and capricious player which is poisonous in BioShock, in BioShock 2 it's the mainstream industry's determination to be inoffensive, to give all things to all people. Attending to feedback, be it from journalists, players, or your own bosses, perhaps has some merits. And BioShock 2 director Jordan Thomas, who I've met and spoken to on various occasions, would be the last person to champion, above all else, auteurism. But BioShock 2's protest is against design-by-committee, against games being made anodyne on purpose. It's testament to the game's writing that its posturing on the implications of altruism flows into its post-modern debate.

"Dadification" is a term you may have heard, particularly in this essay by Mattie Brice. It describes a specific and unfortunately common type of video game story, wherein the playable protagonist is male and has to rescue and/or protect a sometimes younger, but always vulnerable female companion, essentially a daughter surrogate. The Last of Us is a prescient example, also BioShock Infinite, Splinter Cell: Conviction, the original Silent Hill. But where the relationship between the father and daughter is often romanticized in games—since games are often made by middle-aged men, who themselves have children—BioShock 2 characterizes "dadification" as monstrous, perverse.

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A Little Sister, going about her business

Your character, Subject Delta, is one of the BioShock series' iconic Big Daddies. A great, hulking figure, part man, part machinery, he is bound—via hypnosis and pheromones—to protect the Little Sisters, grotesque young girls who gather blood from dead bodies. The bond between "father" and "daughter" in BioShock 2 isn't founded on love, or even emotion—it's forced by chemicals and augmented biology. Also, their relationship boils down to the father shooting, stabbing, and killing while the daughter extracts dead people's blood and drinks it, in order to convert it, using her strangely modified internal organs, back into raw genetic material.

There's nothing pretty or romantic about it, just sick, repulsive, and strange. BioShock can take some credit for this, since it's the game that birthed the Big Daddies and the Little Sisters, but BioShock 2 is almost entirely about their relationship. It foregrounds their ugly, nightmarish image of parenthood, where love for and the need to protect one's children is partly the forced result of internal chemicals and hormones. Unlike a lot of other "dad" games, being a father isn't beautiful, or noble, in BioShock 2. It's a kind of grubby obligation. And the male's protective instinct doesn't result in some whirlwind end scene, where he is reunited with his daughter and she's safe, and everything is fine again. It simply sees him killing lots of enemies, while the little girl obscenely drinks blood.

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'BioShock 2' also introduces the menacing Big Sister

But still, five years since its release, BioShock 2 remains sidelined. It didn't have the new-found celebrity of Ken Levine to help publicize it, nor was it in a fortunate position credibility wise—sequels, especially to beloved original IP, are often doomed from birth. But it is, truly, the best BioShock game. It has loftier themes and more interesting writing than either of its siblings, but they're disguised by fun-first shooting mechanics and joyful, B-movie excess. Play the scene where Sinclair, your comrade, is transformed into a Big Daddy and try not to smile.

This, ultimately, is what BioShock 2 has over its contemporaries: self-awareness. Neither the grandiose BioShock or the pretentious BioShock Infinite seem particularly mindful of their own silliness, bloodiness, or absurd, balletic combat, and so it becomes hard to have faith in anything they say at all. BioShock 2 has fun with shooting, bloodletting, and genre, but still comes with a philosophical and ideological boot knife strapped to its ankle. It's a very intelligent game. It's the BioShock that ought to endure.

Follow Ed on Twitter.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

A new Scottish drunk-driving law introduced in December is proving to be so effective that it is actively damaging the economy, according to a Bank of Scotland (BoS) report published yesterday. It's a report that raises a number of questions, the most pressing of those being: Yo, how much of the Scottish economy is built on the cornerstone of people drunk-driving?

Turns out: a fair bit. As the BoS detailed yesterday, the private sector of the country's economy saw a "poor month" in March, with the bank's chief economist and extremely Scottishly named person Donald McRae attributing this dip in economic form to new drunk-drive limit laws introduced in December. "Manufacturing exporters have been affected by the falling euro," he said, "while services businesses in hospitality are seeing a changing pattern of spending resulting from the lowered alcohol limit while driving."

The new legal limit for Scottish motorists was reduced from 80mg in every 100ml of blood to 50mg in December, with drivers being warned that having "no alcohol at all" in their system was the only dead-on method to blowing a legal breathalyzer score. But 50mg is also a feasible amount of alcohol to have in your system after a not-even-decadent night out, or after having a glass of wine at lunchtime before your commute home hours later. The new law has essentially taken the concept of the cheeky pint after work and walked it out to a nice farm with long grass and wheat fields for it to run through one last time—tongue hanging and tail wagging, sweet, delirious eyes—and then solemnly lifted its rifle, taken aim, and shot it in the head. "Daddy," the new Scottish drinking law's children say, when it comes home. "Where's the concept of the cheeky after-work pint gone?" And the new Scottish drinking law goes to its shed and takes its hat off and just sobs. It sobs and it sobs and it sobs.

So how much has this new legal limit killed trade? According to the Independent, bar sales have dropped up to 60 percent in the two months following its introduction. Even accounting for the people who do Dry January skewing the figures, 60 percent is pretty massive, and the chief exec of the Scottish Licensed Trade Association, Paul Waterson, has described the law responsible as a "draconian" and prohibition-esque attack on pubs. "It's stopped people having a drink at lunchtime, or having a drink on the way home from work. People aren't coming in for food with their families on a Sunday afternoon," he told the Independent. "We feel it's had an effect far worse than the smoking ban had in 2006. There's questions being asked about the future of the trade—it's probably the last nail in the coffin for independent operators."

If you're not Scottish, you're probably wondering how this affects you. Well, while the official police report on the impact of the new law won't be available until Autumn, initial figures from the first three weeks of police data saw 255 people were found drunk-driving compared to 348 over the same period in the previous year, a reduction of 27 percent. A spokesperson for the Scottish government said the country was "leading the way across the UK," with Northern Ireland currently considering the same thing. While the UK government has said it has no plans to reduce its 80mg limit—that is the joint highest drunk-drive limit in Europe—it isn't hard to foresee them following suit. The cuddly Labrador of the after-work pint will be taken out back and shot anew.

When that happens, perhaps we can learn from our northern brethren. Perhaps—as is suggested by the Bank of Scotland's report—Scottish drinkers haven't stopped drinking altogether because of the change in the drunk-drive limit. Perhaps they've just regulated themselves to accommodate it. And perhaps this is because the Scottish are holy, perfect drinkers, who have calculated precisely which combination of Buckfast and beer will allow them to achieve a perfectly legal 49mg on their eternal nemesis: the breathalyzer. Perhaps no Scottish driver has ever driven 100 percent sober, and they all snorkel just beneath the sea line of the legal limit, slightly buzzed on sherry, abiding always by the law and harming no one. The golden ratio of drinking has been solved, and it has been solved en masse by Scotland, a land of literal piss artists. Here's to you, Scotland. Here's to you and your economy.

Follow Joel on Twitter.

Actor Marc-André Grondin sits down with Pierre-Karl Péladeau—the former multimillionaire CEO of Quebecor Inc. and the frontrunner in the Parti Québécois' leadership race—to discuss sovereignty, Sun News, and weed legalization.

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Xergio Córdoba

This article originally appeared on VICE Spain.

Xergio Córdoba is a sound engineer from Spain who has patented a system that uses psychoacoustics to allow concert halls and nightclubs to boost their volume while still maintaining the same dBA. The invention is called Masn´live© and it's basically a processor that, once inserted into any sound system, allows you to enjoy music at its intended quality without breaking any noise laws.

This theoretically allows you to crank the volume up without whiny neighbors or nearby businesses ever noticing. Could this be ultimate solution for party people everywhere? We sat Xergio down to ask.

VICE: How did you come up with this technology?
Xergio Córdoba: I came up with the idea a few years ago, when talking to a client who ran a nightclub. It can be quite difficult for a lot these places to run their businesses with the legal constraints surrounding decibel output. Acoustic emission regulations demand lower sound pressure levels and the sound quality deteriorates massively in order to restrict the emission of lower acoustic frequencies. Bad sound can really ruin the reputation of a business.

Don't you think those regulations are helping to limit unnecessary and potentially damaging noise?
Well, the club business used to be a "no man's land" where anything went. So of course lawmakers are doing the right thing by caring for the environment and taking people's homes and businesses into account. That said, I think that developers and site owners need to do things right and begin checking out whether buildings and their surrounding environment are actually suited for a nightclub or not.

So what are the first steps when you decide to build a tool like yours?
Testing the equipment and running all the corrections and solutions after countless hours of insomnia. The mind just seems to work more freely in those hours. Actually, the vast majority of this system was conceived and developed during sleepless nights with only a small recorder to capture all of my insane ideas. It wasn't that easy, though.

Just when you think that you have built it and it's good to go, you need to start patenting the product and—together with the development team—begin writing down the ins and outs of the entire thing in a way that people can't misunderstand. There's this constant worry that, all of a sudden, a company will appear and say that they've done it before. There's plenty of patented things that have never gotten released. Actually, there was another company who was looking into technology like this. They actually tried to block our patent but luckily we won it.

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Xergio posing with his patent

Can you explain, in layman's terms, how this system works?
Well, it's quite complicated to oversimplify the process, but basically it's as much about the physical sound wave as it is about how the brain interprets the same sound wave. It's pure psychoacoustics.

To give an example, it's like when you listen to an MP3 through headphones and there's a drum or a bass, but the headphones are too small to reproduce it correctly. This is instead done by evolutionary compensation. It's something that we use a lot in mastering and have applied to our system in order to accomplish what we were after.

Does your system protect against excessive noise and potential ear damage?
Hearing damage is based on dBA levels and the amount of time that your ears are exposed to those levels. Unfortunately, our system doesn't prevent ear damage but what it does is it helps your brain perceive music as if it's louder than it actually is and, in that way, it minimizes exposure to damaging frequencies.

At what point did you know that you'd achieved what you wanted?
We knew we'd achieved success when we saw that we could achieve bass frequencies that appeared more powerful than they actually were. We were able to double the loudness, while still maintaining the same dBA, as well as improving audio quality and impact.

Double the sound at the same dBA level—that sounds amazing. What do you think is the limit?
Well, doubling the sound is already more than a victory for us. Especially since we achieved it while maintaining audio integrity and quality. Not too long ago, at a pretty well known club in Madrid, we hit almost three times the sound but the quality began to deteriorate because the room was packed. They chose to keep it at that level though—even with a slighter lower sound quality—because it was their anniversary.

Where else could you use the system—maybe a house party?
It has been tested at a house party in Barcelona. But, above all, it's aimed at artists looking to transmit their musical message in the best quality possible. We can achieve real wonders with next to no sound issues. It's basically the same as audio mastering, but at a venue instead of a studio. Pretty much everything sounds better, higher, sharper, and there's much more detail. We've tested it in a whole bunch of places, all with extremely surprising results. We've tried it with blues, pop, salsa, rock—all genres.

Which artists have tried it?
Laurent Garnier tried it at La Riviera. We used it at Sonar with people like Ellen Allien, Steve Lawler, Joris Voorn, and Miss Kittin. Jamie Jones used it at Teatro Arteria in Barcelona. Lee Foss used it at the Egg Club in London, Pendulum in Madrid, a bunch of times at Fabrik and Atlántida Barcelona; also Oscar Mulero and Christian Wunsch at Reverse.

It sounds like it would be pretty good for outdoor raves. Can it be used in open spaces?
Sure. It can be used in any area that has a good sound system, really. It's proven effective in both enclosed and outdoor spaces. We actually used it in a bunch of different scenarios during Sonar Festival. We'll try and implement it at many more renowned festivals this year.

So, what's the next step? Going commercial?
Yes. That's the hardest part—you need to create something new but not too new, because most people won't understand it. It's all about us "encoding" the musical experience in a way that the mind can "decode." It's definitely hard to take that next step—that final step.

Cabbage Patch Kids were one of the most popular toys of the 80s. Over the course of the decade, the dolls reportedly generated about $2 billion in sales.

The dolls were originally invented by a Kentucky artist named Martha Nelson Thomas. Martha first started making them in the early 70s, and would "adopt" them out to family and friends. The dolls eventually caught the eye of Xavier Roberts, a Georgia man who ran a gift shop. After Martha denied him permission to sell her dolls, he stole the design and began making his own versions.

Xavier's dolls, which each had his signature printed on the ass, became wildly successful over the next few years. Their popularity reached its peak in 1983, when shortages of the dolls over the Christmas period led to mini-riots in toy stores across the country. Martha Nelson didn't make a single penny from her creation.

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Blackwater military contractors were once ubiquitous in the Middle East. Photo via Flickr user Heath Powell

Four former employees of Blackwater, the since-rebranded private security giant that won huge government contracts to protect Americans during the Iraq War, were sentenced to decades in prison on Monday for their participation in a 2007 massacre in Baghdad's Nisour Square.

Nicholas A. Slatten, who before jumping in the mercenary game was an Army sniper from Tennessee, got life for murder. He was the one who fired the initial, unprovoked shots that set off a bloodbath and caused some 14 civilian deaths in a crowded traffic circle.

"In criminal justice, there are moments where people get caught in a kind of proverbial vortex—a perfect storm," said Geoffrey S. Corn, a former Army officer, lawyer, and professor at the South Texas College of Law who specializes in international jurisdiction issues. "And these guys—whether good, bad, or indifferent—were deeply involved in the incident that became symbolic for the impunity of armed security contractors."

The slaughter was a massive public relations and foreign policy disaster for the Bush administration, one career prosecutors at the Justice Department were determined to correct. But as Matt Apuzzo reported for the New York Times, internal squabbling over just how hard to push for lengthy prison sentences—not to mention allegations of prosecutorial misconduct—nearly derailed the whole thing.

The 30-year sentences slapped on the other men, Paul A. Slough, Dustin L. Heard, and Evan S. Liberty, leaned on a Reagan-era law intended to discourage machine gun use in crack-plagued cities. The defense and some legal observers argued that was inappropriate for security types working in a Middle Eastern war zone, but Federal Judge Royce C. Lamberth apparently decided the crime was egregious enough to throw the book at them.

"These guys would be a lot better off in a military court, because first of all there wouldn't be any mandatory minimums," Corn, who supported the prosecution but had reservations about the massive sentences, told me.

Related: Watch "In Saddam's Shadow," a look at Baghdad ten years after the invasion.

Though the sentences officially close the book on one of the more egregious incidents of the Iraq War, it's ultimately a footnote to the larger tragedy of an invasion that became one of the greatest foreign policy errors in modern US history. The legal system took eight years to convict the men, during which time Iraq became engulfed by sectarianism, corruption, and the rise of the Islamic State. And the officials and corporate executives responsible for the chaos in the country got off scot-free.

All four men maintained their innocence to the end, and can be expected to appeal in the months and years ahead. The only thing we know for sure at this point is that the guys responsible for one of the Bush era's signature national security excesses are going to prison for a while.

"It's clear these fine young men just panicked," Judge Lamberth said. "But the overall wild thing that went on just cannot be condoned by this court."

Follow Matt Taylor on Twitter.

Last month, a 57-year-old man was arrested in Melbourne for stealing shoes. This came about after a 19-year-old woman lost a pair of Vans from her front door. She bought a new pair, as many would, and placed them back at the front door with a CCTV camera. The shoes promptly disappeared—but the woman had captured footage of a man on a bike skulking around her doorstep. When her third pair disappeared, she called the police and handed over the footage. The ensuing investigation eventually led to a man in nearby Kilsyth.

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Police still aren't sure exactly how long he was stealing shoes

Arriving at the Kilsyth address, police discovered a house littered with stolen shoes. As they told me, they found nearly a thousand pairs in total, stuffed into cupboards and drawers and strewn in piles that ironically buried his vacuum cleaner. He was charged with theft, but is yet to be sentenced.

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The scene at the police station

On Monday afternoon the Mooroolbark police held a collection day for the shoes. Local residents who'd lost footwear were invited to look through the collection. I went along to ask some questions, starting with, "who does this?"

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Senior Constable Peter Baker holds up his favorite pairs.

"The guy had a routine," explained Senior Constable Peter Baker. "He'd get up every morning at 4 AM and ride down the street. He had the same path every day, with the same houses and he'd look up the driveways. If he saw shoes he liked, he'd take them." Barker went on to explain that shoe snatcher would finish the morning with a coffee and a hot dog at 7-Eleven. He didn't work, he didn't have friends, and as the constable explained, "his one purpose in life was to steal shoes."

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All visitors signed a book so the police could compile victim statements.

Mooroolbark police station has a sort of garage attached to it. I got there to see they'd laid the shoes out over the floor. There were a few people milling about looking through the assembled footwear. One guy had lost two pairs of expensive runners. "Yeah it's kind of funny now," he said. "But not at the time. When it happened I was so pissed off I called the cops." He was looking around but couldn't find his pair.

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These grey guys were vastly overrepresented.

It was surprising how similar the shoes were. The thief obviously had a preference for Vans-style skate shoes and all the rip-off variants you get from Target. Rubber soles, canvas sides, in white, black, or gray. He also didn't seem to care if they were clean. Some were clearly from bins.

"He didn't wear them," explained Barker. "He told me that he once couldn't get into a pub wearing moccasins, so he wore a pair of the shoes. That was the only time." Constable Barker explained that aside from that example, the thief claimed he wore nothing but flip-flops and moccasins." As mentioned, there were virtually no flip-flops or moccasins about. Just a single pair of dolphin slippers.

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Taylor, not finding her shoes

Another local named Taylor showed up. She'd lost a pair of Havaianas from her doorstep a few months back. "I looked everywhere," she said. "When I heard this story it made sense so I came to look." Despite hoping, she didn't found them either. "My friends said I shouldn't bother because they'd be too gross to wear, but they're plastic. I'd just wash them off."

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You get the picture

Regardless of what Taylor thought of the motive, Senior Constable Barker insisted the shoes weren't stolen for sexual gratification. "The guy told me he was from a poor background. When he grew up he could never afford cool shoes and obviously saw this canvas style as being cool." This struck me as sad and Barker agreed. "He's big guy with tattoos, but he's also a big puppy," the cop said. "Actually the saddest part is that we confiscated his bike. We think it was stolen so I don't know what he's going to do now. He didn't have anything else going on."

Follow Julian on Twitter.

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The bouncers drew an 'X' on top of the Berghain stamp on Jenny's wrist, before kicking her out of the club to make sure she didn't try to get back in.

This article originally appeared on VICE Germany.

The doors of Berlin's Berghain guard a mythical land of clubbing from which few have returned. Apart from those turned away at the entrance, that is. For more than a decade, countless rejected partygoers have wondered where they went wrong, so we asked photographers Benedikt Brandhofer and Leif Marcus (collectively known as "ich + du") to help us get answers. They hung around outside Berghain in late March and tried to find a common denominator.

Here are their portraits of people who didn't get into Europe's most exclusive temple of doom:

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Elena is pretty sure she had to stay outside because she was laughing too much.

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Pierre from Berlin is about to go to sleep and come back after breakfast on Sunday morning to give it another shot.

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Jenny was already in, but got kicked out for taking pictures.

Tatjana and Maret believe getting into Berghain is especially hard for Russians like them.

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Peter wanted to party at Berghain one last time before heading home to Australia. The bouncers thought he'd had enough.

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Morgana's heading to Suicide Circus—another famous Berlin nightclub—instead.

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Florian from Berlin has gotten into Berghain many times. He figures today was simply not his lucky night.

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Lievwkje wonders why she didn't get in and is determined to try again next time. Being turned away has only stoked her curiosity about Berghain.

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Marieke came here with Lievwkje and wants to party at Suicide Circus now.

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Carson and Nick from Sweden wonder if it was their nationality or their exceptional beauty that sealed their fate as Berghain rejects.

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Next time Tomec plans on sticking with his favorite spot, KitKatClub.

Thank you, everyone! Most of our rejects were very relaxed about being told no and moved on to clubs like Watergate and Suicide Circus after having a shot of warm schnapps with our photographers.

All photos by Benedikt Brandhofer + Leif Marcus.

Jersey City–based Vomitface have been slapped with labels like "black surf," "sludge pop," and even "dark grunge." For those of us who don't enjoy categorizing bands into meaningless two-word Tumblr tags, Vomitface could be described a bass-heavy noise rock band that makes weird angular songs that manage to be heavy without sacrificing any melodic hooks. This track, "Never Make It," is from their upcoming EP, out May 12 on Boxing Clever Records. The sludgy bass sort of sounds like indie rock version of Primus. It's fantastic.

Check out more Vomitface at their website.

When I was asked to interview Tel Aviv–based photographer Guy Pitchon, I was intrigued because I knew nothing about the Tel Aviv Skate scene. But after looking at his website I was dying to pick the brain of a fellow photo nerd. When Guy isn't doing graphic design or giving his friends tattoos, he's shooting technically amazing skate photos of the Tel Aviv skate community or snapping an intimate shot of the aftermath of a slam. It's not just skating that Pitchon captures, but everything that happens when you say "let's go skate." We caught up with Pitchon via Skype and talked to him about his new book, Love Child, which is filled with beautiful, candid moments of his everyday surroundings.

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All photos by Guy Pitchon

VICE: Where are you right now?
Guy Pitchon: I'm in Tel Aviv. I just got home, I was at the beach today.

Amazing, I wish I could say the same. What keeps you in Tel Aviv?
Man, I really do love it here. I like the food, the people, my family, the fact that it's so small and I can cycle wherever I want. It can be hard if you don't have more of a mainstream job, but that's why I sell my own artwork, do graphic design, graffiti jobs, some tattoo work, photography lessons, etc. It's hard to be a full-time skate photographer here because, for example, I'll shoot for Vans here but it's nothing compared to the guy shooting for Vans in California. I'm working with what I've got.

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How did Love Child come about and can you tell me a little bit about it?
Love Child began as an exhibition. Two years ago, I was still pretty new to the art scene and I had a hard time finding a gallery, and the galleries I would talk to wanted me to be more specific about what I was going to exhibit. I had it all in my head, but I hadn't finished the work yet. Finally, a gallery gave me a chance without asking too many questions—it was a gallery that was a part of a school that I went to. The space was quite large and I filled it well with very small and large scale prints as well as handmade skateboards.

Is the book self-published?
Yes, with a little help from this residency I was apart of here in Israel called Art Port. Other than budget they gave me everything and every decision was made by me.

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Are there any images in Love Child that you would consider to be your favourite?
I have a favourite spread. It's the one with the kid showing off his tattoo on his upper arm. The tattoo stands for some kind of LSD formula compound or some shit. (Laughs.) The other image is of this skater climbing a bomb shelter.

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What came first, photography or skateboarding?
Definitely skateboarding. I started skateboarding with my brother at age 12 on a board I got from my grandfather, and I would just skate around the block all day. I guess I just fell in love with it from that moment. I never really thought about photography until I was exposed to the few magazines that were available to me. Immediately I wanted to shoot skateboarding so I bought a simple camera—it was a fairly long process because I had nobody to learn from and had to do everything on my own, y'know? With various lenses, cameras, lighting equipment... Also, for a long time you couldn't get radio slaves in Israel because they would use the same frequency as the military, so it made it even more difficult. You can find them here now though.

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I see you cover both lifestyle and skateboard action photography, is there one you prefer shooting over the other?
I don't know. The lifestyle is technically easier—it's just nice being close to your subject and it can be with a simple camera with a 50mm lens and that's it. For action, you have to deal with so much equipment, security guards, and spots, so it's harder but it's definitely exciting. I don't think I could do only lifestyle. The lifestyle shots I usually take when I go out to take a real skate photo, so I can appreciate both.

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What's skateboarding like in Israel and what's the public's general outlook?
It's rad, man! [Tel Aviv is] a small city so you can skate to and from anywhere you want. You might get hassled by security guards or pedestrians, but the cops don't really care, so it's really rare that you would get a ticket. Otherwise, there are plenty of cool spots and I find it to be pretty photogenic. From the public's perspective it's well-liked these days, I think. Recently, all these skateparks have been popping up everywhere so less skaters are skating in the streets, which I think people are happy about because it's less noise and easier for them to accept.

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Can you tell me more about the skate scene in the rest of Israel and the Middle East where political and social unrest has been rising? Has living in this environment affected the scene at all?
Well, politics affected the scene, but more in the "macro" sense, like, it's harder to travel with an Israeli passport, you can be denied if it doesn't seem safe for people to visit, so it can be kind of isolated, and that's bad. But in the "micro," however, the politics is less present in the skate scene. But the art world is definitely affected—cultural boycott, bands and artist that won't come here, Israeli artists get invited abroad less.

Has it affected you or your skating?
Yeah, last year in Tel Aviv, on the opening night of an exhibition I worked on for a year, there were sirens, and missiles over my head. It was a weak turnout. I totally forgot about that until now. It's crazy that it becomes so normal and we get used to it. As far as skating goes, I don't think so, although, it could be a good excuse for why I suck so much [laughs].

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What photographers inspire you?
I really like everything Ed Templeton does as well as Larry Clark. More recently, I like Atiba Jefferson and I've also really been liking what Arto Saari has put out. Those are the bigger, main guys that come to mind. There are many more, of course.

What's your process for taking photos?
It varies but I like randomly finding a spot and then figuring out which skater and trick would look best. Different spots call for different kinds of skaters, naturally. Then, with a small crew, we'll go back to the spot in the late evening. I really like night shooting because I feel like at night its a totally empty canvas so only what you choose to light will show up in the photo.

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Have you photographed any Canadian skaters?
Yeah! Do you know Josh Evin?

Yeah. Well, not personally, but I knew of him.
Right, so he was in Israel a couple weeks before his tragic accident and I got to take some photos of him. Skating with him was so fun, he was so gnarly. One of the photos I took of him got published in a Canadian skate magazine. I was pretty sad to hear when he passed away.

Yeah, that was sad for sure, he was so talented. What's next for you?
I'm going to Panama for the first time in three days to surf for two weeks. I'm so excited! I haven't surfed too much before. I took photos for this surf camp last year and during that job I learned how to surf a little bit and really enjoyed it. I'm getting older and skating is hard on my body and surfing seems to be a little less strenuous so I'm hoping this fills that gap a little bit.

Check out Guy's book Love Child here, and more about him on his website.