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Photo posted on Instagram by Jennifer Pawluck. Photo via Motherboard.

Jennifer Pawluck, a 22-year-old student and activist, was found guilty of criminal harassment this afternoon in Montreal's provincial courthouse.

The conviction stems from an incident in March 2013, wherein Pawluck posted a picture of a mural clearly depicting police commander Ian Lafrenière with a bullet in his head followed by the hashtags #OneBulletOneCop and #AllCopsAreBastards.

Lafrenière is a 19-year veteran of Montreal's police force. He is also a media spokesperson for the City of Montreal Police Department (SPVM) which had to contend with the bulk of the 1,000 or so protests that took place during the spring of 2012, and was often accused of heavy handed crowd-control tactics.

Because of his media presence during the Maple Spring saga, Lafrenière became the face of the city's police at a time when tension between students and police was at an all-time high, making him an easy target for ridicule and threats.

So when Pawluck, who had been heavily involved with Maple Spring anti-tuition hike protests, posted the infamous photo on her now defunct "anarcommie" Instagram account, it was taken seriously. Very seriously.

Four days later, she was arrested and charged with criminal harassment, sparking intense debate about freedom of expression in the digital age.

"Many of my friends do not like the police," Pawluck told the Huffington Post Québec in 2013. "I thought it would be funny to put the picture on Instagram. I do not even know who he is, Ian Lafrenière."

In court last February, the student activist changed her tune slightly, stating that she didn't have a problem with the police per se, but rather with "what they represented."

"It wasn't my intention to target him personally," she testified, adding that she ultimately understood why Cmdt. Lafrenière would feel threatened. Still, Pawluck said she only took the photo because she liked the artwork and didn't even know who Lafrenière was when she stumbled upon the mural in the city's Hochelaga-Maisonneuve neighborhood.

At trial, Pawluck's lawyer argued that posting a photo of graffiti on an Instagram account with 81 followers could not possibly constitute criminal harassment and that her her client lacked the criminal intent necessary to find her guilty of the offense.

Provincial Court judge Marie-Josée Di Lallo obviously did not buy it and instead found Pawluck guilty as charged, ruling that Lafrenière had reasonable grounds to feel threatened by the photo, the Montreal Gazette reported.

In her judgement, Di Lallo added that she had trouble believing that somebody as involved in the 2012 student protests—Pawluck had been arrested on three different occasions during protests—would not know who Lafrenière was, as she claimed.

During the trial, Cmdt. Lafrenière had testified that the photo had made him fear for his well-being and frightened his family to the point that his wife had to take time off work.

"I'd never been threatened like that, even when working on organized crime cases," he told the Court during the trial.

The Pawluck case may not have occupied that place for very long though, because within days, Quebec's provincial police, working in concert with the ATF and authorities in Birmingham, Alabama, uncovered a online plot to kill Cmdt. Lafrenière. When the two men involved in the plot were arrested, they were in possession of an AK-47 and planning to sell 200 silencers to undercover agents.

VICE spoke with Lafrenière, who said he would not be commenting on the case until after sentencing arguments are heard on May 14 in the Pawluck case—the day before a court appearance in the AK-47 case.

Follow Nick Rose on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE Germany.

Every week at a bar called Südblock in Berlin local drag queen and all-around entertainer Pansy, along with her sisters, invite what feels like half of Berlin to come down and enjoy a screening of RuPaul's Drag Race over a few too many whiskies. The night is a hit, and people show up in droves, basically clambering over each other to find a spot from where they can watch their favorite American export.

It was pretty obvious, at least on the fateful evening we were there, that the crowd at Südblock all have their personal favorites. When a contestant appeared on the screen their fan base would ignite inside the bar, clapping and cheering, shouting words of encouragement. But, believe it or not, the show wasn't the main attraction.

Around 11:30 PM, just as the credits began to roll, the projector screen disappeared and Pansy thrust herself out into the limelight. The host, decked out in some rather serious high heels, commanded the audience with her shrill voice and told everyone to prep themselves for her queens.

The stage curtains were pulled to make way for a crew of drag queens, all of whom—Melli Magic, Bambi Mercury, Shiaz Legz, among others—were dressed to the nines. Overall, the night was a proper kaleidoscope of booze, fake nails, and the most impressive stage names since Hedwig and the Angry Inch. We figured that photos wouldn't do the night the justice it deserved, so here are a bunch of 3D gifs.

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Open up @therealdrmiami's SnapChat story and you'll find yourself inside an operating room as a gloved hand makes small incisions on someone's sliced-open abdomen or face while hip-hop thrums quietly in the background. Watch long enough and the screen will fill with blood and lumps of fatty tissue and jiggly silicon implants as the doctor makes his careful snips to rearrange the shapes of his patients' bodies. This isn't some kind of performance played out on SnapChat—this is a real operating room, with a real person under the knife, and a real surgeon calling the shots.

That surgeon is Dr. Michael Salzhauer, a board-certified plastic surgeon at Bal Harbour Plastic Surgery in Florida. He's also a social media freak, better known by his screen name, Dr. Miami. He seems to take his phone wherever he goes, creating a trail of tweets, Instagrams, and SnapChats that chronicle his entire workday—surgery included. His Instagram feed is filled with before-and-after photos, pictures of his hot clients, and, naturally, the occasional inspirational quote. He calls his patients #beautywarriors; recently, he ran a "meme contest" on his Instagram, for which he received over a thousand submissions.

When I first saw Dr. Miami's SnapChat story, my stomach lurched. Watching a stranger get a tummy tuck in real time was completely disturbing to me—but it was also intriguing. I mean, who the hell was this surgeon-turned–social media king? I called his office to ask him myself.

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VICE: What does an average day look like for you?
Dr. Michael Salzhauer: I get into the office anywhere between 7:30 and 8 AM, and lately I leave between ten and midnight. It's intense.

During that time, you're constantly posting to social media.
Yeah. This is the most fun I've had since medical school. You know, in medical school, that's the last time most doctors get to make a joke. So the social media allows me to express my creativity, to reach out to patients, to connect to them on a human level, and not so much the buttoned-up, white-coat, I'm the doctor sort of thing.

Would you say that's part of your personality, or is it mostly for marketing your business?
It's like this: I don't think I would've had the social media success or influence if I wasn't at this stage of my career. In other words, it's taken 19 years in practice and training and 10,000 patients to get to the level of skill and consistency with results and expertise to where I can show off a little bit on social media. This wouldn't work for me if I was just opening up my practice. It just wouldn't. But, of course it's had an effect on the business. I was pretty busy anyway, but now I'm crazy busy. I'm booked until the end of next May. Every single day. It's like, a thousand people, paid and signed up for surgery for the foreseeable future.

And that's all because of your social media presence?
Look, anybody could go online and have an Instagram and all that stuff, but I think it's the way I'm able to show my results as they're happening. You can look on Instagram or SnapChat and you can see what I do [in real time]. You can see me talking to the patients before and after surgery, and you can really see the whole process. It makes people say, "I can put my face in this person's hands."

The videos on your SnapChat story are... kind of stomach-turning. I mean, there's really gory operational footage.
There is. My SnapChat story is basically my whole day. You see me walk into work, you see me talking to the staff, you see me—if the patients allow, and only about half of them allow it—doing the operation. Most of the younger patients, who are of the SnapChat generation, they're like, "Cool! My friends want to watch. They want to watch my surgery as it's happening," which I think it's cool. It really demystifies the whole process. Yes, they are gory, but nobody has to watch it. It's not like it's being broadcast on TLC or something. You have to actually hold your finger on the screen if you want to see it, and the people who follow my SnapChat story, they know what's coming.

[tweet text="@TheRealDrMiami It looks really good. I can't wait to see how it look when it's healed." byline="— JoJo's tone (@GeMini_TeamJo)" user_id="GeMini_TeamJo" tweet_id="589866853482233856" tweet_visual_time="April 19, 2015"]

So you have a conversation with all of your patients where you say, like, "Hey can I SnapChat your operation?"
Oh, of course. All the patients that you see have signed consent forms for that, for social media. The majority of them want their face covered, or tattoos covered, but some of them are like, "No, I would like you to write my boyfriend's name on my back, and shout out to this person, and I would like you to play this type of music during the surgery..."

Wait, you actually get requests for how to take the SnapChat?
Absolutely. I mean, look, I'm 43. People of my generation would be horrified [of having their operation SnapChatted]. This would be shocking to them, because of how my generation views privacy and online security and all that. But kids today—and really, anyone under the age of 25 or 30—they see the world through a completely different lens. Not only is it not shocking to them, they're like, "Yeah, cool. Can you do that?"

Kids these days are so thirsty.
This generational thing—I can see it in my own practice. If a woman comes in and she's over the age of 40, I can tell you for sure, she's going to have trouble with SnapChat or having her pictures go up. But the younger generation, they're out there. You know what the difference is? They're not ashamed. They're not ashamed to talk about their bodies, or discuss their insecurities... I think it's a good thing.

Related: Illegal ass enhancements may be America's next health epidemic.

Would you also say that the images you share on social media do a service in showing what the plastic surgery experience is really like?
Yes, exactly. That's what draws people to it—it's very genuine. I mean, you see the bruising. I tell you right there in the comments, "Yes, this looks like it hurts, because it does. This scar looks long, because it is a long scar. And yes, that scar will be there forever. And yes, she'll be out of work for two or three weeks." This stuff is not like getting your hair cut. I don't sugarcoat it in any way. If you want to see how it's actually done, go onto the SnapChat, and you can see. I've got, on any given day, between 50,000 and 75,000 SnapChat viewers. And they're from all over the world.

How do you keep up with that?
I've got two full-time social media assistants who do the actual snapping and responding to people. There are people from all over the world—a lot of them are medical students, nursing students—and they ask questions about the anatomy, and why I'm doing certain things. It's cool. Really, it's fun.

You have two full-time social media assistants. Do they just, like, follow you around and document your workday?
Yeah, pretty much. You can see them on the SnapChat story—Ashley and Brittany. They also answer inquiries. I've got like, 100,000 followers on Instagram, so I get a lot of direct messages. I'll have other surgeons' patients send me questions, like, "I had a breast augmentation three days ago, and this hurts, is that normal?" And they don't feel comfortable, for whatever reason, asking their doctor, so they hop online and direct message me, and then Ashley and Brittany will answer it. I'll be operating and they'll say, "What do you think about this?" and they'll type back direct messages.

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So your social media interactions are the same conversations you might have in a doctor's office, except instead, they're happening on your Instagram.
Right, and directly to me, which is kind of cool. Obviously there are surgeons who are more experienced than me, but there are a lot of surgeons who are less experienced than me, and they have patients everywhere. So literally, a person in Dubai can send me a direct message that says, "I had a rhinoplasty four weeks ago, what do you think of this?" Then I can click on the picture, look at it, message back to her. They can get a second expert opinion instantly, from anywhere in the world. Technology is amazing.

I've seen you post things on Instagram saying, like, "I'll be offline for a few days, so don't send me any DMs, because Instagram has a limit on how many can stay unanswered in your inbox." How many of these messages are you getting?
It's nonstop. It's like drinking out of a fire hydrant. There's no way to explain, unless you're sitting here watching my phone blow up. You have no idea how many messages I get between the SnapChat and the Instagram. It's hundreds upon hundreds each day. In the beginning, I tried to do it all myself. Then I hired one person, and then I realized this was more like a two-person job, literally all day long. I'm a little bit of a perfectionist, so I don't like any messages going unanswered, so I try to get to all of them. But that's difficult, because there are hundreds upon hundreds each day.

Your posts seem to have adopted this teen vernacular—Emojis and all. Like, I'm looking at your Instagram and there's a post that says: "Mommy Makeover On Super Fleek." Is that you or your social media people?
No, no, that's all me. I'm not [a millennial], but I've sort of been drafted into it. I have a 15-year-old daughter, who actually introduced me to SnapChat, and I also work with a lot of young people. In my office, I've got a whole bunch of millennials, and I hear how they talk. I see how they text message each other and me. I'm a real informal kind of boss, so they can let their hair down a little bit, and I've realized that those are my ideal patients. That's sort of how we got into this. Like, my practice is completely limited to patients under the age of 50. If you're over the age of 50, you can't even see me.

Wait, why?
I decided a few years ago that I only want to operate on the patients that I like and doing the operations that I enjoy. I don't enjoy doing facelifts, so I don't do them anymore. I like doing breast augmentations, tummy tucks, Brazilian butt lifts. Those operations work best in younger patients in general. They're also safest in younger patients. I mean, think about Kanye's mom, who tragically died because she had a heart condition and she wanted plastic surgery and she shopped until she found a plastic surgeon who would do it for her, even though she wasn't fit. So you're going to have more and more of those types of patients over the age of 50, so because I limit my practice to people under 50, I find my days go by beautifully. I'm doing the operations that I like, on the patients that I like, who are the least risk, and they look great. To reach out to those patients best, you really have to use social media.

You can find of Dr. Miami's on Twitter, Instagram, and SnapChat using the handle @therealdrmiami.

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

Last week, Georgia Republican Governor Nathan Deal, flanked by dozens of families with children suffering from rare and intractable medical conditions, stood on the steps of the state capitol and signed the state's first medical marijuana bill into law.

"This certainly has touched my heart," the teary-eyed governor told reporters and others assembled for the signing. "And I'm pleased today we're going to make a difference." Republican State Represenative Allen Peake, who championed the bill and was also in attendance, turned to the families on the staircase and said, "You can come home now!"

Peake was speaking to the so-called "marijuana refugees"—families who have migrated to Colorado since that state legalized marijuana in 2012. Two of the refugees on the steps—now welcome back home—were Janea Cox and her five-year-old daughter Haleigh. In fact, the Georgia bill, which legalizes certain low-THC cannabis strains and oils for serious medical conditions, was named the Haleigh's Hope Act after Cox's daughter, who suffers from a rare epileptic condition that, without treatment, racks her body with hundreds of seizures a day.

A little over a year ago, Haleigh's medical condition had deteriorated so drastically, that her breathing stopped several times a day. In search of alternative treatment for her daughter, Cox moved from Georgia to Colorado, where another Georgia native, Jason Cranford, had moved in 2009 to develop a low-THC strain of marijuana for pediatric use.

"When we pulled her out of Georgia, Haleigh was given about two months to live," Cranford told VICE. Now, a year later, she was back in Atlanta to witness her namesake bill signed into law. (Cranford also named his strain Haleigh's Hope, which might make Haleigh Cox the only person to have a law and a marijuana strain named after her.)

Related: Watch our documentary about the country's youngest marijuana patients

"It's hard to put your child on marijuana, quote-unquote, but to see how it works, there's no way you can write it off," Cox said in an interview, explaining that Haleigh had gone from having more than 200 seizures a day to about ten to 15 on a bad day, with 28 seizure-free days since they moved to Colorado.

"Now she's talking more and making eye contact," Cox added. "I think the best thing is she smiles at us now. Before, she was almost in a comatose state, awake but just out of it."

Driven by stories like Haleigh's, as well as promising preliminary studies, and—in many cases—desperation, families across the country with children suffering from similar conditions have moved to Colorado seeking non-euphoric strains of marijuana like Haleigh's Hope and Charlotte's Web. Cox and Cranford are both now on the board of a 501c3 nonprofit organization called Flowering Hope, which provides medical marijuana for roughly 150 families in the state, according to Cranford.

The rush of marijuana refugees first started around two or three years ago, in the wake of the passage of Colorado's marijuana law, with about six families who moved to the state and reported positive results from cannabidiol, or CBD, a low-THC cannabis extract that doesn't have the euphoric effects commonly associated with marijuana.

The firsthand reports especially piqued the interest of parents with children suffering from Dravet Syndrome, a rare, incurable condition that afflicts children with hundreds of small seizures a day. As word spread through epilepsy support groups, activists began to push for access in more and more states. Along with Georgia, 11 states have recently passed legislation allowing limited access to CBD, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The rush to legalization has outpaced studies of CBD's medical effectiveness. This month, researchers released the results of a small clinical study concluding that CBD shows potential for treating epileptic conditions like Dravet that do not respond to other medications. However, researchers cautioned that more rigorous studies will have to be conducted to verify the conclusions.

But for parents who have run out of new medications to try and treat children with Dravet, there are precious few other options. "These parents were at a position where the doctors were saying, 'We don't know what else to try,'" New York CBD activist Kate Hinz told me. "It's an easier transition then when you have nothing left to lose."

Hinz, whose daughter suffers from Dravet, said she and her husband considered the move to Colorado, but ultimately decided it wasn't doable. Their daughter is on 12 different pharmaceuticals and receives 22 hours of nursing care a day, all of which is provided by the state of New York.

Hinz and her daughter did make a trip to Washington, DC, last month to appear at a press conference on Capitol Hill in support of the CARERS Act, a bill introduced by a bipartisan group of lawmakers that would allow states to set their own medical marijuana free from federal interference.

"These are normal everyday citizens who are forced to become drug smugglers to try and save their children's lives." –Jason Cranford

While there's been significant progress in getting states to legalize CBD, it's been a long, slow grind. In Georgia, activists worked for 16 months to get the new CBD bill through the state legislature. And in some cases, even getting bills passed isn't enough: The Florida legislature passed a bill in 2014 legalizing low-THC forms of marijuana for patients with cancer or epilepsy, but the state has struggled to implement the law; in the meantime, a ten-year-old Florida boy with a rare neurodegenerative disease who would have qualified for treatment died.

The high stakes have led some parents to extreme measures, and illegally transport medical marijuana across state lines for their children. "There are families that are breaking federal law," Cranford said. "It's a shame because a lot of the families I provide to are people like police officers and doctors. These are normal everyday citizens who are forced to become drug smugglers to try and save their children's lives."

The consequences of getting caught can be devastating for parents. Take the case of Shona Banda, an outspoken Kansas medical marijuana activist who credits concentrated cannabis oil with treating her Crohn's Disease. Earlier this month, Banda's 11-year-old son was attending an anti-drug assembly at school when he spoke up to dispute some of the anti-marijuana rhetoric. School officials reported his comments to child welfare, and Banda's son was placed in protective custody later that day. When police served a search warrant on Banda's house, they turned up two ounces of marijuana.

In a court hearing Tuesday, Banda's son was placed, at least temporarily, in the custody of the state. The court also placed a gag order on Banda to prevent her from speaking about her custody case. Banda's lawyer did not respond to a request for comment.

But if Colorado and other states are refuges for these families, they are also, in a way, an exile. In 2013, Brian Wilson made national headlines when he confronted New Jersey Governor Chris Christie at a diner and asked if the governor would sign a pending medical marijuana bill that could save the life of his two-year-old daughter Vivian, who suffers from Dravet.

Christie ended up signing the bill, but the resulting system was far from ideal for the Wilsons. There were strict limits on how much marijuana they could buy each month from the state's two dispensaries. Only dry plant material was available, not CDB oils, and an ounce cost over $500.

But if Colorado and other states are refuges for these families, they are also, in a way, an exile.

Last February, the Wilsons packed up and moved to Colorado. Now Wilson can walk to a dispensary in the morning and get an early-bird special for less than half of what they had to pay in New Jersey.

Leaving Colorado is another story, though. The Wilsons can't travel with Vivian's medicine, which means they can't travel back to New Jersey. "Our whole support system is in New Jersey," Meghan Wilson told me. "We were both born and raised there. That's our roots and life. It's hard to be 36 years old, working from home, and trying to make new friends."

The benefits, though, are both measurable and immeasurable. Wilson said Vivian has responded well to Charlotte's Web and a low dose of THC oil. She used to be incredibly photosensitive. "Sunlight on grass, sunlight on gravel, everything would make her seize," Wilson said.

"Her more severe seizures used to be every three to four days. Now they're every two to three weeks," Wilson added. "Now she goes out to school, and plays on the playground on the swings, out in the sun."

Follow CJ Ciaramella on Twitter.

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Despite the fact that humans have been aged 13 to 19 for the entirety of recorded history, the concept of the "teenager"—someone who is not a child, yet still not an adult—is a relatively new one. The idea that there was a phase between childhood and entering the workforce came into vogue in the 1940s, when the term was first used in a Popular Science article. Presumably, the spread of higher education, coupled with America's post-Depression/post-World War II economic boom, led to a need for fewer family members to enter the workforce, creating a new class of humans with advanced bodies but horrific judgment who were left to fuck around, fuck up, and just plain fuck, for multiple years of their lives. What's more, recent studies suggest that adolescence doesn't truly end until they're around 25, which means that more of us are teens than ever before.

Even though teens are all around us, we understand them less and less. Recently, the New York Times got duped into reporting comments from an alleged teen from Mississippi named "Joe Stevonson" in an article about the rise of vaping among the youth. Stevonson, who claimed his favorite e-cigarette flavor was the Lil Ugly Mane-endorsed "Courtroom," turned out to be a Twitter user named @drugleaf, who was in fact not a vape-obsessed teen named Joe from Mississippi. Which is to say, even the New York Times doesn't understand teens enough to know when someone's fucking with them.

In a way, trying to keep up with teens is like being a human trying to keep up with a herd of salmon desperately swimming upstream to mate. As slippery as the kids these days may be, if you break it down, teens are really only interested in 26 things, and they all happen to start with different letters of the alphabet. I took it upon myself to dive into the waters of the young and find out what teens are like right now and offer a Snapchat of youth culture just as fleeting as youth itself.

A Is for AFLAME

Greek legend says that the titan Prometheus stole fire from the gods to give to mankind. If that legend were actually true, Prometheus would have been a teen, because teens sure do love setting shit on fire. Namely, themselves. Hanson O'Haver, VICE's Social Editor and erstwhile author of the celebrated This Week in Teens column, devoted not one but two swaths of internet real estate to the dubious trend of teen self-inflamation—one debunked the fake trend of teens dousing themselves in lighter fluid and then turning on the shower or jumping into a body of water before they burned to death, while the other reported on a kid who crashed his car after his friend in the passenger seat lit his armpit hair on fire. It's not all bad when it comes to fire and teens, however. When the teen-beloved rapper Lil B's Concord, California apartment caught on fire, he was alerted to the blaze by his teenage neighbor. Thanks, teen.

B Is for BEER

At the tail end of 2014, the organization Monitoring the Future made the happy discovery that teens were drinking at lower rates than they'd been the year before. Hooray! But before you throw a party for your teen and all their friends to celebrate, make sure their friends aren't sneaking any booze in under your nose—a new measure in Fort Collins, Colorado is being proposed that would fine parents who throw parties where alcohol is consumed underage, even if they didn't provide it.

C Is for CONCENTRATION DRUGS

The New York Times reported that A.D.H.D. diagnoses are on the rise, and with them, adderall use, both prescribed and non-prescribed. While adderall abuse among high school seniors is already higher than that of cocaine, nearly one in five boys above the age of 11 have been daignosed with A.D.H.D. Certainly, all of those kids can't have textbook A.D.H.D., but that hasn't stopped doctors from prescribing two-thirds of them with medication. Which is to say, a lot of our teens are running around hopped up on adderall, either because of a lazy doctor or a friend with a lazy doctor.

D Is for DABS

If you google the phrase "the crack of weed" in quotations, you're going to get a lot of search results for dabs (otherwise known as "wax"). This is incorrect. Unlike crack, which is made by heating up cocaine mixed with baking soda and is the crack of cocaine, dabs are what you get when you concentrate weed to the point where you only have THC by extracting all the other, non-THC stuff with butane. I can say from personal experience that they get you high as shit. Last Christmas, a New Jersey teen was caught manufacturing dabs in her parents' garage. According to the Press of Atlantic City, the teen was "charged with manufacturing and distribution of a controlled dangerous substance, possession of marijuana and possession of drug paraphernalia." But don't worry, teens have been dabbing for a while—anxious local news pieces about THC wax have been popping up since 2013.

E Is for ERECTIONS

At a certain point, your body starts going through changes. Unfortunately, this tends to happen when your biology is on the fritz, and if you're a boy, you're going to start popping boners left and right. And if you're a good (bad) teen, you're going to start putting those erections in weird places. Like stuffed horses in toy stores, or the brave teen @VERSACEPOPTARTS who fucked a hot pocket, a box of Pop Tarts, and a box of Fruit Roll-Ups. This doesn't just apply to extreme cases. Anyone who's lived in a college dorm knows that normal people do weird stuff when they masturbate.

Related: Teens can be exorcists too!

F Is for FUNNY STUFF

When you're a teen, your sense of humor is generally horrible. You think offensive stuff is funny because you haven't experienced (or met people who have experienced) the horrors of life that you're casually joking about. That joke about burning someone's house down is pretty funny until you actually meet someone whose house has burned down. Similarly, inside the brain of a stupid teen it might seem like a good idea to ask a girl to prom by strapping a fake bomb on your chest in your high school cafeteria. That's exactly what a La Center, Washington high school student did on Monday when he asked a girl to prom by donning a fake suicide bomb and holding up a sign saying, "I know it's a little late, but I'm kind of the bomb! Will you be my date to prom?" Despite his insistence that "it didn't even look like a bomb," the teen was suspended for five days and will reportedly miss prom.

G Is for GAMING

Have you ever played a video game? They're great. When I was a teen, I literally wore out my copy of Tony Hawk's Underground in an ultimately futile quest to complete 100 percent of the game. This is not just because I didn't have any friends in high school, though that certainly played a part of it. As VICE recently reported, gaming addiction (and internet addiction) is a very real problem in the nation of South Korea, where prospective professional gamers spend up to 88 hours a week in front of a computer, and an estimated 50 percent of teens are addicted to the internet.

H Is for HANDJOBS

I don't really have any statistics for this one (mainly because I'm afraid to google "teen handjobs"), but the New York Post recently reported that the number of New York teens having sex was at an all-time low, which means that the number of teens giving and receiving handjobs in NYC is probably at an all-time high.

I Is for IMPRESSIONABLE

If there's one thing teens love (besides everything else I'm writing about), it's fitting in through buying stuff. Not just "stuff" in the abstract, but the right stuff. Nobody wants to be the lame-ass with the Aeropostale hoodie when everybody else is sporting Abercrombie, and nobody wants to be the goofus with the Moto X when the rest of your classmates have iPhones, which as of a year ago a staggering 61 percent of teens claimed to own.

J Is for JUST WONDERING WHERE YOU ARE

When I was a teen, my parents installed a device in my car that monitored how fast I was driving, as well as how hard I took turns. When I complained to them about it, they told me I was lucky they weren't installing a tracking device in my car, because they could have done that instead. It turns out I was just plain old lucky not to be a teen now, because there are new and terrifying ways of keeping track of your teen. There are a bunch of apps that you can install on your kid's phone to keep tabs on them like a parole officer might with a flight-risk wearing a tracking bracelet. Mama Bear, for instance, lets you track how fast your kids are driving and their location, as well as their social media activities. If that's too much effort, the lazy parent can just turn on the "Find My iPhone" feature on their kid's iPhone, and find their location using proprietary Apple technology. Yeah, it's invasive, and yeah, your kid could just turn their phone off, but have you met a teen? They love phones.

K Is for KYLIE JENNER CHALLENGE

The Kylie Jenner Challenge is yet another in a long line of disturbing (probably overhyped) teen trends. This one involves teens trying to emulate the puffed-up lips of Kylie Jenner (the greatest teen currently teen-ing) by sucking on a shotglass and letting the suction plump up your lips. The internet is focusing on only the worst outcomes of the KCJ, positioning the act as the latest potentially deadly teen craze. It probably isn't as harmful or as widespread as the internet would have you believe, but that doesn't mean teens should be wantonly suction-ing the shit out of their lips or anything.

L Is for LARRY

No, this doesn't refer to a weird teenage fascination with Larry King, though in an interview with Noisey king revealed that one of his kids is 15. Instead, "Larry" is slang for an imaginary romantic relationship between Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson from the popular boy band One Direction. This is called "shipping," as in, "I wish Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson were in a relationship." There is even a social network devoted to the idea.

M Is for MUSIC

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Image via Flickr user Kevin Dooley.

Teens like music, obviously, and who better to ask teens about music than another teen? That's exactly what our compatriots at Noisey thought, so they had their resident teen columnist ask some teens what music they like. Turns out, as always, some teens like old music, some teens like new music, some teens like hip-hop, some like rock, and (this is a new development) some teens are really into incomprehensible dubstep.

N Is for NUDES

When I was a nubile young teen I had to send pics of my underage flesh to my peers using primitive webcams and stone-age picture messaging. Today's teens have all sorts of exciting ways to sext each other. The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy conducted a poll that suggested 20 percent of all teens have sent a nude and that 39 percent have sent a sexually suggestive text or IM. 69 percent (heh) of teens who sent nudes claimed to have sent them to their significant other. 21 percent of the teen girls who sent nudes shot them to a prospective suitor, while a staggering 39 percent of teen boys sent nudes to someone they wanted to get with. It just goes to show that no matter the generation, dudes will never stop trying to show people their dicks.

O Is for OH MY GOD WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING

Everyone messes up when they're young. Part of growing up is making egregious mistakes and then learning from them so as not to make similar, worse mistakes again. Still, sometimes our overzealous law enforcement punishes teens a bit too much. There's the teen who's being charged with attempted murder after throwing firecrackers at cyclists, and then there's the tale of the teen who may be charged for being bitten in the face by the water moccasin that he illegally kept as a pet. Austin Hatfield, the snake-teen in question, is currently in the hospital with an extremely swollen face, so you'd think that would be punishment enough. And while it's true that gossip can be poisonous to teens of any era, recently a pair of teen girls in a group home literally tried to poison their housemates by pouring bleach into their peers' drinking water. While it's unclear if the kids actually thought bleach would hurt anybody or it was just a poorly thought-out prank, unlike the snake-charmer and firecracker-hurler, maybe it's a good idea to charge these poison-wielding teens with, like, something.

P Is for PORNOGRAPHY

The discovery of pornography is an important landmark in any teenage boy's life. For some generations, that meant accessing dirty magazines and videotapes, either from their parents' stash or asking their friend with a beard to buy them some at a store. For others, it meant staying up really late and watching flabby Midwesterners flap their bodies together on HBO's Real Sex. For those in their 20s, it probably involved googling the word "boobs" with SafeSearch turned off and ogling static images of nude flesh. Not today, baby. It's 2015, and any teen with gumption and a high-speed internet connection can access a digital Library of Alexandria of streaming fuck flicks. It's sort of crazy to think about, honestly. As the New York Times pointed out last year, it's impossible to accurately measure the impact of streaming porn on teens, because it would involve a group of researchers dosing teens with a heavy amount of pornography. Which is, obviously, against the law. Still, it's not hard to imagine that if a teen were to only learn about sex from the front page of PornHub, they might have some pretty bizarre assumptions about the timeless art of seduction.

Q Is for QUESTIONS

Why the system designed to keep teens in debt? Why them teens ain't ridin' if they're part of your set? Why they gonna give you life as a teen? Turn around give teens only 12 months for a burger? Why a teen in Texas better than Jordan? Why teens ain't savin' instead of tryin' to be fly? Why is sexting at an an all-time high? Why are teens even alive?

R Is for REGRET

Ever since teens have been on social media, they've posted things that they assumed would remain private but ended up becoming very, very public. Case in point, the teen who was sacked from her job at the Texas restaurant Jet's Pizza before she even started because she tweeted, "Ew I start this fuck ass job tomorrow," only to be fired by the owner over the very same medium.

T Is for TANNING BEDS

When I was in high school in rural North Carolina, I knew several kids who were obsessed with going to tanning beds. The teens, mostly girls, would hold memberships to several tanning establishments in the county, alternating tanning bed joints each day in order to tan daily without going too many times at each location (many tanning parlors have limits on how many times you can tan during the week). Well, the days of teens using tanning beds to achieve that specific orange crispiness may very well be over— in North Carolina, at least. Yesterday, the State House passed the Jim Fulghum Teen Skin Cancer Prevention Act, which, if passed in the State Senate, will set a hard age limit of 18 on tanning beds throughout the state. Previously, North Carolina state law required teens only show up to tanning parlors with a note from a parent. Apparently this practice wasn't strictly enforced, but considering kids have been forging their parents' signatures on things since always, it probably wouldn't have been all that effective anyway.

U Is for UNSAFE PARENTING

Everybody knew that one kid whose parents let them throw underage drinking parties at their house on the weekend. That kid was objectively extremely cool, but looking back, there wasn't really a way to know if that kid was actually popular, or if everyone was just nice to them because they could do ridiculously unsafe things at their house with little to no supervision. It was genuinely embarrassing when the kids' parents joined in on the fun, too—nothing screams "I am desperately seeking a connection with my child" than trying to party with them. Which is why it was especially embarrassing for everyone involved when Rachel Lenhardt of Evans, Georgia helped her teenage daughter throw a party with alcohol and marijuana, and allegedly joined in a game of naked Twister, only to have sex with one of her daughter's friends in the bathroom.

V Is for VINE

If you really want to know what's popping with the kids these days, check out Vine, the six-second video service where legions of micro-memes are born and die every day. If you want to read an extremely in-depth story about the massive world of Vine and its stars you can go over to the New Yorker, or if you'd like, you can just watch the above clip, which is in my opinion the funniest vine of all time.

W Is for WORDS

The beauty of language is that it evolves over time. Words that mean one thing to one generation can mean something totally different to the next, and by the time it reaches them they may have no idea why they're saying what they're saying, but they sure love saying it. This is why teens say things like "werk," "yass," "yeet," and "suss," effectively reblogging them from the cultures they originated in with zero understanding of how these words actually developed. You could get mad at it, or you could just get mad at yourself for how you probably did the same thing when you were a teen.

X is for XI

Did you know that in addition to being a good word to play in Scrabble, Xi is also the 14th letter in the greek alphabet? That's right. FourTEENth.

Y Is for YOLO

The "carpe diem" of teens, YOLO (short for "You Only Live Once," duh) pretty perfectly encapsulates the "fuck it, nothing bad will happen" attitude of youth. It can be both empowering ("I'm going to tell my crush I like them! YOLO!") or absolutely horrifying ("I'm going to jump off this bridge into a pit of snakes! YOLO!"). Either way, it is unquestionably teen.

Z Is for ZAYN MALIK

Ah, poor teens. One Direction is the hottest boy band among teens, and Zayn Malik was its hottest member. However, in the past few weeks he has become its most absent, having departed the group because being a teen idol sounds like it'd be the fucking worst. What's next for Zayn? Acting? Marriage? Both? Only time will tell, but the teens will be waiting.

Drew Millard is on Twitter.

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Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell in 'Wolf Hall.' Courtesy of BBC/Company Productions, Ltd

He hasn't starred in a sex tape or signed on to do a reality show about being rich and horrible in a major metropolis; he hasn't revealed himself as the true identity of Banksy or done whatever stupid thing Justin Bieber got noticed for doing this week. He's not even alive. But somehow 16th-century powerbroker and politician Thomas Cromwell has been pretty hot lately. The subject of two Booker Prize-winning novels by Hilary Mantel—Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies—he (or the character based on him) has in recent weeks both convinced playgoers on either side of the Atlantic to sit through a two-part six-hour historical drama about him and persuaded actor Mark Rylance to descend from his aristocratic perch in the theater to the solidly pedestrian land of television to be Cromwell's small-screen avatar on a BBC/PBS production of Wolf Hall.

The man at the center of the Wolf Hall TV adaptation, which had its American premiere on Masterpiece a few weeks ago, ushered in the troubled closing period of King Henry VIII's reign. For playing that dubious part in history, he has been alternately compared to some of our culture's favorite villains, including Dick Cheney, for his "ice-cold ambition"; fictional Machiavellian favorite Petyr Baelish (AKA Littlefinger) from Game of Thrones, for his relentless and sometimes sadistic drive to the top; and even ISIS, for his murderous religious persecution.

Cromwell's bad rap isn't totally undeserved. Among other things, he helped England split from the Church in Rome so that Henry's marriage to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, could be annulled—and so that he could then assist in the king's marriage and then... separation from Anne Boleyn. He also oversaw the bloody dissolution of England's monasteries, a process which, apparently to his way of thinking, required having monks hung in their habits, beheaded, drawn and quartered—and, for a lucky few, disemboweled while still conscious.

The what of Cromwell's life isn't much disputed, but the why of it is far less clear. Mantel's books, and thus the TV show, have invented very little about the facts: "It's really in the gaps, in the erasures, that I think the novelist can go to work," she told Terry Gross in 2012. By placing Cromwell's dirty work within reasonably imagined historical and personal contexts, a more sympathetic human being starts to emerge: a family man devoted to his wife and children and even in-laws, someone who was fiercely loyal to the patrons who raised him up and ready to do similar service for protégés whose abilities he believed in. A man who abhorred decadences among the clergy and saw the Church for the political institution it was, not the sanctified fantasy that its bureaucracy would have you believe in.

Mantel reportedly worked more closely on adapting this more congenial Cromwell to the stage than she did the small screen. However, when I heard about the TV show and that Mark Rylance was playing Thomas Cromwell, I just about wet myself. A period drama starring " the greatest English theater actor of his generation " along with a mélange of supporting actors whose work has graced a delicious buffet of TV/movie nerd lusts like Sherlock, Game of Thrones, and The Lord of the Rings all in service of an epic, real-life story of such greed, violence, and machination that it makes the diabolical realpolitik of House of Cards look like the optimistic hope-gasm of The West Wing?

In approximating the complicated web of intrigue within Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, the show more or less succeeds. The web is equally complicated and remains intriguing as it jumps from book Wolf to TV Wolf. In other respects, though, the show has been a little disappointing so far. I'm only three episodes in, but it's got problems. Problems that feel especially irritating if you've read the novels.

First, each episode opens with scene-setting title cards. "It's 1529," reads the first card in the first episode. "Henry VIII is on the throne—married to Katherine of Aragon for 20 years without producing a male heir. He has been petitioning the Pope for an annulment for two years without success. Cardinal Wolsey—Lord Chancellor and Henry's advocate in the petition to Rome—has failed his Sovereign in only this one matter."

"And Henry is not a forgiving man."

I'm sure Wolsey failed Henry in a couple matters, but OK, fine. The real problem is with that last sentence. This isn't another story about Henry VIII, as it suggests. We've had plenty of those, all the way from Shakespeare to Philippa Gregory. This is about Thomas Cromwell. As Mantel explained, "This is a great untold story, or at least it wasn't told until now... all the fiction and all the drama we have about Henry VIII's reign and the figure of Cromwell is somehow marginal or missing, and yet he was central. And historians know that, but it just hadn't percolated through to fictionalized narratives."

But such a forceful opening gambit kind of filters Cromwell out from the get-go. Fortunately this doesn't abide too strongly as the show progresses, but it makes me suspicious of how Peter Kosmisnky and Peter Straughan, the series writer and director, respectively, perceive what story it is they're actually retelling. Surely you don't have Cromwell's story without Henry, but that doesn't change who the main character is. Jack Burden doesn't have a story to tell in All the King's Men without working for Willie Stark, but it's still the king's man whose story we're told.

By placing Cromwell's dirty work within reasonably imagined historical and personal contexts, a more sympathetic human being starts to emerge.

Book Wolf isn't the easiest thing you'll ever read, but it's not that hard to get into—it isn't James Joyce but it isn't Clive Cussler, either. Mantel's writing style is accessible, but the plot itself is intricate—I know that roving bands of raging academics would hang me in my habit for saying it like this, but as far as the number of characters and the network of conflicts go, Wolf Hall is Game of Thrones-level complex. Characters' moves and motivations tend toward the opaque—the windows into the human heart require a bit of prying.

While Mantel's readymade dialogue is well employed by the show—lifted from the books as verbatim as possible—those intricacies of narrative and plot aren't quite handled as well, especially at first. A lot of people get introduced quickly, and it's pretty much impossible keep track of who they are or what they want. Meanwhile, within minutes of the first episode opening, we've jumped from 1529 to 1521 to 1525 to 1527 and back to 1529 without the same kind of gentle prompts—like "Summer 1527"—that Mantel uses to help readers through the same temporal shifts. I had read the books and I was even a little at a loss. My wife, who hadn't, got up from the couch 20 minutes in never to return. TV Wolf had an elegant template to work off of that they didn't exactly avail themselves of.

Speaking of phrases that might occasion my drawing and quartering, I don't think Mark Rylance was the right choice for Cromwell. No comment on his acting, which, even to someone who knows nothing about how to do it, is incredible. He quickly has you believing that he is a man who can snap right from snuggling bunnies and cuddling kittens to contradicting a king or ordering the disembowelment of a live monk. But Rylance doesn't look the part. Which shouldn't matter, except that much of the power that Mantel's Cromwell exudes comes from how he looks, which is not like the slim, somewhat diminutive Rylance but rather the famous Hans Holbein portrait, thick and threatening. His menacing meatiness is called out a lot in the book: "Look at you, boy. You could cripple the brute in a fair fight," his brother-in-law says to him at the ripe age of 15. "Thomas, it is like hugging a seawall. What are you made of?" Henry marvels to him some three decades later. Rylance, whatever spectacular powers of emotion and intimidation at his disposal, is simply no seawall, and I'm still not convinced that he could take me in a fight.

But don't shit in my bangers just yet, British-drama enthusiasts. It's a remarkable cast. Even with the ones who don't quite look right, it's everything an Anglophilic period drama-loving heart could desire. Damian Lewis (Brody from Homeland) is an outstanding Henry. His piercing gaze, mercurial temperament, and red hair all evoke Mantel's portrait of the king. Claire Foy as Anne Boleyn nails the seductive antagonism that seems to have allowed her to so tightly coil the English monarch around her finger for all those years. And Anton Lesser's chirpy, disheveled gadfly of a Thomas More is everything you want to hate about the Utopia-writing hypocrite whose haughty espousal of personal piety and asceticism didn't quite live up to his actual bloodlust for players in the Reformation or his conniving for as much power as his faithful little hands could grasp.

Related: Westminster Dog Show... On Acid!

I know that all adaptations of books condense, rearrange, omit, and manipulate plot points, characters, and arcs to contend with the exigencies of telling long stories in compressed forms. I get how it works. But TV Wolf gets loose with a few plot points and historical details for reasons that seem to be less about TV storytelling and more about the show's creators trying to find some kind of narrative territory to mark as their own.

Like how the show handles what are probably the two most defining tragedies of Cromwell's personal life: the abuse he suffered as a boy at the hands of his father and the deaths of his wife and two daughters.

The first is given a 15-page overture in the novel, and, in addition to solid foundational character work, it reminds you that this, again, is not a story about unforgiving Henry, not one about the temptress Anne Boleyn, but about the spectacular rise and fall of our man Thomas. In the show it's a five-second flashback slapped into a quick scene when an older Thomas briefly and bitterly revisits his father while the old paterfamilias shoes a horse.

TV Wolf gets loose with a few plot points and historical details for reasons that seem to be less about TV storytelling and more about the show's creators trying to find some narrative territory to mark as their own.

As for the second tragedy, in history—and in Mantel's book—Cromwell's wife, Elizabeth, died in 1527, victim to a swift and deadly disease that raged through London that summer called the sweating sickness. Exactly when his daughters, Anne and Grace, died is less clear, but Mantel places their deaths side by side in the summer of 1529 from the same disease, a not unlikely scenario. But for some reason TV Wolf has them all die at the same time—on the exact same day. Just as Cromwell comes home from his hard day's work and learns of his wife's awful fate, as he tearfully encounters her corpse laid out in their bed, his young assistant Rafe runs in and says with quiet melodramatic urgency, "It's the girls."

Everyone runs to their room, only to find the little blond visions of youthful purity and innocence side by side in their bed, pale, motionless—dead.

Good god, Britain. What is with your television shows and their unwavering devotion to the melo-iest of melodrama? How many Matthew Crawleys need to die in "unexpected" car accidents an instant after meeting their precious newborn sons before you realize that you're sort of overdoing it? Is Cromwell losing his wife and two-thirds of his progeny not sticking enough for tragedy? I recognize that I'm being equally melodramatic about a small plot point. But do you really believe that, whether they died together or a few years apart, the loneliness and abandonment that Cromwell would have felt from it was any less bearable?

The way details slide around and change from book to movie or book to TV always leaves me in some kind of Sliding Doors scenario where I just don't know what universe I live in anymore. Did Liv Tyler fall in love with Aragorn in the The Lord of the Rings book? Did Tom Bombadil sing his stupid song in the movie? Can elves really do parcour on elephant trunks? I can't remember in Game of Thrones whether Jon Snow is 14 or in his 20s, whether Jorah Mormont is a fat slob or a muscular swashbuckler, or whether Renly Baratheon was outright fucking that guy or people just kind of thought he was gay. If Billy Pilgrim is unstuck in time in Slaughterhouse Five, I think I'm unstuck in story.

Which is leading me to conclude that maybe I should just choose between reading the book or watching the screen adaptation—of any story. Doing both is making for too much dissociation. Not like drank-two-bottles-of-Robitussin-D kind of detachment. But I can't say that the nether region between the worlds is leaving me with any sense of a firm footing.

On the other hand, if I'm the kind of person who is finding his emotions ignited by assessing the quality of Masterpiece adaptations of British novels, I think this kind of cognitive slippage is about as close as I'll ever get to Robo-chugging. So off we go to episode four.

Follow Aidan on Twitter.

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This article originally appeared on VICE Mexico.

Cristina de Middel trained as a photojournalist but chose to drop the profession in order to—as she says—seek reality through fiction. In 2013, the International Center of Photography in New York gave Cristina the Infinity Award for her book The Afronauts, which was based on the 1960s Zambian space program, which aimed to put the first African man in space.

I met up with Cristina for a coffee, and even though we intended to discuss specific photo projects, we ended up discussing her vision of photography, as well as her work in general.

VICE: How come you dropped photojournalism?
Cristina de Middel: I did it because I was disappointed; I was disenchanted. Maybe I'm very passionate and I realized that if it's at all even possible to change the world with a photograph, it certainly won't be in a newspaper. It'll be on other platforms. I didn't want to be part of the press, because of the way it works now. So I decided to try some other things out, to do things a little differently. I tried fiction because I felt as if there's plenty of times that reality just doesn't explain "actual reality" well enough, which is what interests me—making people understand the world in which we live.

As a photojournalist, you have to respect certain rules and I decided to instead prioritize the fact that I wanted people to understand a story on multiple levels and open the debate up a little bit. Daily newspapers are purely based around an opinion that's already been decided by publishers, advertisers, and politicians' interests. What I prioritize is people understanding what is happening and understanding which factors are involved, so that they can form their own opinions on a particular subject.

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Do you think that your photos are a sort of "journalism" that displays what traditional journalism should actually be displaying?
No, I don't do journalism. If anything, I do a sort of documentary. My pictures are all based on real things. I'm not talking about mermaids or unicorns; all of my works are based on something that interests me and something that is actually happening. I think that many things happening today, things that we consume in newspapers, could be explained much better. There's a lot of problems in the world that could be solved with a little more information and a little more understanding.

There's a strong connection between your work and film, right?
Yes, I use film as a reference but understanding cinema is definitely what interests me the most. They're the same; they both use the same optical and chemical system to capture the image and produce it, right? I always give this example: The first film ever screened was this projection of a train entering a station—it made everyone run out of the room thinking they'd be run down.

That was 120 years ago; now we're seeing 3D aliens and nobody cares. The way film is understood and assimilated has evolved, of course. Why? What happened? Something has allowed documentary film to be unapologetic and 3D animation to be unapologetic. What happened with photography? Why are we still waiting for the train to come and run us over? Why hasn't photography developed as fast as language?

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What sort of processes do you use to create your work?
I watch a lot of films as a sort of training. A cornerstone of my work is trying to bend reality to exactly what I want, I think that's far more typical of film than photography. I'm not saying that I need a unicorn or something. But maybe I need a bunch of people dancing in the street and have two ways to achieve that: either try to do it as documentary and wait for someone to pass in front of me while dancing—but I could easily spend a lifetime waiting for that; or I can stop a person and say, "Hey, would you mind doing a dance, right here?"

OK, so would you say that your work is a mix of documentary and fiction?
Yes, I think so. I work with a script, and storyboards and all that. For example, I did a piece of work about two years ago called Snap Fingers and Whistle. It's a version of West Side Story but told through the language of street photography. I went to New York and just started asking people, "Hey, do you mind dancing?" Again, adapting reality to what I want the photograph to be. Sometimes that can be a bit confusing for people, because it opens a debate on the credibility of the photograph. On whether you're telling the real story or not. I think a lot about this.

You aren't doing any filmmaking yourself?
You know why? Film requires a huge team, and after many years working as part of the press, I like to work fast. Everything needs to go fast. This wouldn't work in movies because I can't do it alone. I need someone to do sound, and so on. If I could make a film by myself in one day, then I'd do it.

That said, I feel like I can create the same result with photography. What interests me is telling stories with pictures. Film offers a lot of opportunities that I'm sure I'm missing out on. I have tons of movie ideas but what's most important to me is to tell the story visually, and I can do that with pictures, cartoons, or drawings. Maybe someday I'll decide to do something that can only be achieved with moving images.

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What about photo exhibitions?
I'm not a big fan of photo exhibitions. I don't like them; I usually don't go.

What would you say binds all of your work together?
The thing that binds all of my work together is a direct criticism of the press and the media. It is not a criticism of the media in general, but rather of how things are reduced and the world is simplified down to "Ten articles, 15 images, and this is the truth."

I like to reflect on clichés, which are a direct result of this type of press. Africa becomes elephants at sunset; India, flower markets, ladies with rings in their nose, people bathing in Varanasi; Germany is people drinking beer. This reduction doesn't leave space for analysis or for criticism or review. It has accelerated the creation of clichés.

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That's what I meant by saying that in some way you keep doing journalism.
Yes, in some way. I guess that I chronicle. A photojournalist should learn from artists, learn to tell stories differently, to educate the public and teach themselves to explain things better. Your responsibility is to make people understand what is actually happening.

Artists should also soak in much of a photojournalist's world and see how they're fully committed to reality and recording and explaining the world in which they live. I am really against the type of journalist who goes to Syria to take black-and-white pictures, like some sort of conceptual artist who isn't at all interested in anyone and nobody understands.

So, what do you actually like?
Being in the middle—understanding the language of some but the theme of others. I guess that's why my name is de Middel and probably why I like to be in the middle.

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What are you working on right now?
I just came back from Brazil, where I'm doing a project called "sharkification." It's about the favelas and the Brazilian government's strategy to try and control them with Police Pacification Units (UPP). This creates a near militarization of communities, where suddenly everyone is a suspect. That is an issue.

I know the situation well and what I did was make a metaphor, and attempt to explain what the dynamics are there. I used the simile of an underwater world to imagine that the favelas are a coral reef and there are predators, schools of fish, and some sort of fish camouflage. I try to show it as a habitat in which you see both big fish and small fish, and the fact that not all small fish die. Sometimes big fish die, too. I try to use a model that everyone understands, to explain the favela.

To show a truer "reality" through fiction?
Exactly! I try to open up a debate. I will say that the shark is bad so that you can understand the dynamics. I don't care if you agree with me; what interests me is showing you an issue and letting you come to your own conclusions, and to do so, I need to give you a lot more elements than what you are used to being served by the conventional press.

Why do it in such a playful way?
Most photojournalists are continually trying to play with your feelings. I believe that humor is a smarter way to look at things and it helps people become more curious. Why must everything be so dramatic?

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Some men having a good time with some beer. Photo by Holly Lucas.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Good news, Great Britain: the chance of being jumped while waiting for a taxi late at night or having your teeth smashed in by a piss drunk dickhead in a blazer has fallen to a 15-year low. The reason? According to the Cardiff University researchers who conducted the study into violence-related injuries, it all has to do with a nationwide fall in binge drinking.

In England and Wales, 211,000 patients were victims of violence in 2014, showing a decline of 10 percent on the previous year. This marked the lowest figure since the annual survey of 117 hospitals began in 2001. Researchers say alcohol was involved in around 70 percent of the hospital cases, so it's apparent there's a pretty clear link between the bottle and a bottling.

This decrease in violence is great news for casualty wards and concerned mothers, but what does the decline in drinking far too much in a short amount of time mean for us as a nation? Are we really leaving behind something that—for better or worse—many consider to be a deep-rooted facet of Britain's modern identity?

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A man having a bad time with some Buckfast. Photo by John Beck.

According to Professor Jonathan Shepherd, lead author of the study, the reason binge drinking has declined is simply because people can't afford to get so wasted anymore. During the recession, the price of alcohol has risen while people's disposable income has diminished. However, he warned that binge-drinking and the violence that often follows could increase if the upswing in the nation's economic fortunes combines with a continuation of austerity measures affecting police and on-street CCTV.

"Since 2010, we have identified a decline of over 30 percent in people needing treatment in emergency departments after violence. And yet it isn't all good news; our findings suggest that the issue of alcohol-related violence endures, with violence-related emergency department attendance consistently at its highest levels on weekends," he said.

"As we emerge from the economic downturn we must ensure that the affordability of alcohol does not increase. Over 200,000 people across England and Wales going to emergency departments with injuries caused by violence are still far too many."

Related: "Korean Poo Wine"

It's not just about emergency rooms overrun by patients with alcohol-related injuries; a study released at the end of last month estimated frontline costs of binge drinking to the tax payer to be £4.9 billion [$7.4 billion] a year. The research, conducted by teams from the universities of Essex and Bath, found that, per day, binge drinking increases emergency room admissions by 8 percent, road accidents by 17 percent, on-duty police officers by 30 percent and overall arrests by 45 percent.

Professor Marco Francesconi, who worked on the study, was at pains to highlight that this £4.9 billion figure didn't even reflect the total nationwide cost of drinking large amounts of alcohol all at once.

He said: "Our calculations suggest a cost of £4.9 billion per year. This is large when compared to the government's spending on some welfare programs. For instance, it corresponds to 23 percent of the expenditures on housing benefit. Furthermore, our estimate does not include costs associated with absenteeism, lost employment, reduced productivity, and long-term health problems."

In light of this, the apparent fall in binge drinking can only be welcomed. However, there are concerns that there's not really been a fall at all; that people are still drinking just as much, but in private rather than at the pub.

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Dr. Adam Winstock of the Global Drug Survey—and the man behind OneTooMany.co, a service that compiles user-generated responses as to what defines an excessive amount of drinking—thinks people are maybe just having more house parties. He also made clear that he doesn't think there's an increase in young people turning to legal highs or drugs because of the cost of alcohol.

"As booze gets more expensive it's quite possible that people are drinking more and more in their own homes. Therefore they're not in public areas where they're more likely to get arrested or get into fights with other big groups," he explained. "Alcohol remains the cheapest and most dangerous way to get off your face in the UK. If you've got three 15-year-olds with $15 between them, they can still get six liters of cheap cider. About 1 percent of drinkers turn up to A&E each year. It's not that unusual. The chances of a higher risk young person ending up in hospital at some point from drinking—I'd say it was probably one in five."

One percent might sound small, but it's a massive amount when you consider how many drinkers there are in the UK. Binge drinking is ingrained into our national character, but what's made it so wildly popular? This was the question Dutch psychologist Anna van Wersch set out to answer.

"We found the social aspect to drinking alcohol reflected again and again, with all the participants saying they were in company the last time they got drunk, and several saying drinking alone was 'pointless.' Getting drunk was about sharing happy feelings with others and being sociable," said Professor van Wersch, who admits to being taken aback by British drinking habits when she first moved to England from Holland 17 years ago.

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Photo by Ben Bentley.

Despite a small sample group of 32, the psychologist's findings on people rewarding themselves after a hard working week ring true. Participants in the project were invited to discuss positive notions of binge drinking as well as negative. Being confident, relaxed, and lacking inhibitions were listed as the main positives. Hangovers, getting too intimate or pushy and making a fool of yourself were the main negatives. Surprisingly, not one person mentioned the long-term health implications of drinking too much, or its role in facilitating antisocial behavior.

Van Wersch also highlighted the constraints and cultural norms of British alcohol consumption, such as the need for a "big night out," or abstinence during the week justifying binging at weekends—trends not replicated in other European countries.

"There's a lot of pressure to do well and to behave appropriately and control one's emotions, and that can be stressful. That's why I think the British put so much emphasis in having something to look forward to at the weekend," she said. "Drinking is so embedded in the culture here. Everyone from a young age is integrated into this culture. And if people didn't have the 'big night out' with their friends to look forward to, what would they do and feel like at the end of the week? We don't want a nation on Prozac, do we?"

Van Wersch was verbalizing what many binge drinkers in the UK feel. Pricing, policing, and stricter licensing terms have all demonstrated themselves to be useful tools for helping to curb the worst public excesses of alcohol consumption. However, people who binge drink clearly find benefit in what they do most of the time, and without extreme and unpopular measures they're not going to radically change their habits.

To help binge drinkers maintain enough self-control to mitigate alcohol's most destructive aspects—both for themselves and others—Dr. Winstock believes more needs to be done to change the conversation. He says there is growing evidence that this is happening: for instance, getting paralytic is increasingly socially unacceptable. People are learning to temper themselves after being involved in—or witnessing—a serious incident involving alcohol, likely one of the reasons there are less hospital cases now. However, there is still a lot of difficult ground to cover.

"The drinking guidelines displayed on bottles are based on really good evidence that, above those limits, you are starting to do yourself harm. Most people in the UK know what they are, but only 20 percent take any notice," he said.

"Why don't people pay any attention to it? Because three units a day for a bloke is not going to get him where he wants to be. Guidelines don't acknowledge the reasons people drink. We're a long way from having a conversation about getting the feeling you want from alcohol without doing too much damage."

Follow Ryan on Twitter.

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Matthew today, recalling his deprogramming. Photo via EyeSteelFilm

Mia Donovan's stepbrother, Matthew, was deprogrammed at the age of 14. It was the early 1990s, Satanic Panic had spread across North America, and Matthew's father was worried that his son was involved in satanism. So he hired famed deprogrammer Ted Patrick to reverse-brainwash Matthew—to free his mind from the grip of an alleged cult.

This is how Donovan's excellent documentary Deprogrammed begins. The film explains how the rise of alternative religious groups in the 1970s led panicked parents to seek the help of deprogrammers like Patrick. Through interviews and impressive archival footage, Deprogrammed discusses Patrick's long career, his questionable tactics, and the difficulty of determining whether a person is or is not exercising free will.

VICE spoke with Donovan about her experiences with Patrick, parental paranoia, and how to tell if someone's in a cult.

VICE: What was it about your stepbrother's experience that made you decide you had to make a film about deprogramming and Ted Patrick?
Mia Donovan: I guess me and Matthew were both about 14 when he was deprogrammed. If you can imagine, you're 14 and this is going on—I thought my mom and her boyfriend were crazy. It just seemed really surreal. I didn't really understand what was going on. I didn't know if [Matthew] was in a cult or not. He was a heavy metal kid. There were rumours at school that him and his friends were sacrificing cats. The whole thing was just very bizarre.

The most bizarre thing was meeting Ted after the deprogramming. I still didn't really understand what this all meant then.

But then Ted came home and they wanted to rid the whole house of any Satanic triggers, so he took away a lot of my books and records, but in a really dumb—like in a way that I remember thinking this made it even more ridiculous. They took away my INXS album, because there was a song called, "Devil Inside." Things like that.

It just always stuck with me all these years, this whole phenomenon. And then...as I was doing my first film, Inside Lara Roxx, I started to think about it. I hadn't seen my stepbrother Matthew in almost 20 years when I contacted him.

I thought maybe it was going to be more of a film about him and the Satanic Panic era and how people were misunderstood. I didn't know if Ted was still alive....I didn't know how I felt about Ted either. Because as a child... I didn't really understand him enough. I thought he was a really bad guy who didn't understand the kids or something.

Now I understand him. I've got to know him really well. He's kind of a tragic hero in many ways, because his intentions were good, but he's just very black-and-white in his thinking.

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Ted Patrick during a deprogramming session with Dan in 1979. Photo via EyeSteelFilm

How did you get Ted to agree to the film? And then, what was it like spending time with him? He's a person who had a pretty negative effect on a member of your family—and some other people as well—but, like you said, he really believes what he did was in everyone's best interest.
Matthew's [second] cousin was deprogrammed very successfully by Ted in the mid-'70s. [He was in] a Hare Krishna cult...So two of his second-cousins ended up working for Ted for about a decade on all these Canadian deprogrammings. So I had that sort of in.

That really helped, because [Ted] doesn't remember Matthew. His estimation is that he deprogrammed about 3,500 people, which I think is kind of crazy. I don't know if that's possible, but maybe indirectly, because at the peak of his career he had a lot of people working for him.

Anyways, it started off just like, "Okay, I'm going to go and meet Ted in San Diego, I'm not sure what's going to happen." And I wasn't sure how I was going to feel about him. But right away, he's just very gentle. He's also 85 now so he's at a very different stage in his life.

I just feel that he was the first person to recognize there was something happening with a lot of these radical groups and to recognize there was a potential danger there, but I don't think he understood how to assess groups later on. Like when my stepfather called him—it's hard for him to really explain all this stuff now, but [in the documentary] he says he always listens to the parent's word. I think that's where things may have made it really hard to assess.

Like, Matthew was hanging out with a bunch of high school kids and listening to Slayer, definitely dabbling with drugs and some violent behaviour, but there wasn't really like a charismatic leader in that sense. It wasn't like a cult in that way. But I think Ted just believed he could help. I think he really thinks he can help.

That definitely came across in the film.
But in the early days, I think, he did have some success with Bible-based groups. Because Ted knows the Bible inside out. The first cases, it was usually [The] Children of God, and he would just expose how these leaders twisted Bible scripture.

But then all these different alternative religions appeared, people adopted different lifestyles...
Yeah, it's like, how do you asses when a group is actually potentially dangerous or if it's just like something different?

Exactly. One of the questions your film asks is who has the right to determine what constitutes personal expression and, like you say in the film, what constitutes undue influence? Do you think there's a good answer to this?
No. I mean, I think it's really hard. I think that there [are] situations where you can assess, but I mean, it's really hard to answer. I've been thinking about this since I started [making the film]. It's the type of thing that every time I interview somebody else it just kind of throws me for a loop. It's just a very complicated situation because you never know. I don't think anybody could have foreseen Jonestown happening.

Or even The Heaven's Gate, if you studied them, they did seem to be very, very controlled in a very closed environment. But there's still no way to have predicted they would have done that. [39 members Heaven's Gate committed suicide in 1997.]

Aaron, who's in the film, whose parents tried to deprogram him three times from the Christ Family, [which was] considered a very dangerous, high-controlled cult in the '70s and '80s, but now [the members are] in their 60s and they're all living quite happily together. I think it would be kind of sad to pull them away from that family.

I have conversations with them, I can hang out with them, and they believe this man Lightning Amen is the second coming of Jesus. They believe it so much, but it doesn't seem to really harm them.

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That's the difference, I guess? Like when does this actually harm a person? Because a lot of the times in the film, it seemed as if these parents who were deprogramming their kids were just hysterical that their kids had completely different lifestyles than what they expected them to have. That seemed common in the '70s. These parents grew up in a totally different time, and now their kids are out like meditating all the time.
Yeah. And being vegetarian.

There was this moral panic. And then because of Manson and I think Jonestown, this fed into this paranoia, because deprogramming became very popular right after Jonestown. Parents were just like, "Oh my god, we have to save [our kids]." In some cases people say that [deprogramming] really was helpful. Like Steve Capellini in the documentary, he's so thankful that his parents hired Ted.

Ted's methods were pretty controversial though. He kidnapped people, held them against their will and then harassed them with questions for sometimes months at a time. One of the things the film shows is that some people were so worn down by the process that they just acquiesced, said whatever they needed to say to make it end. It made me wonder, does this guy have any clue what he's doing? Or is he just persistent?
I think there are so many approaches...

I just think that it worked some times so he kept doing it. And when it didn't work, it didn't work, but he didn't necessarily adapt. But other people after him adapted. A lot of people he deprogrammed out of different groups became deprogrammers themselves and really refined it and changed the method a lot. So Ted is not—I mean, he is sort of like the extreme version of deprogramming, the sensational version.

It's really hard because there are no real statistics and I can only go by the people I met. I think a lot of people did—like my stepbrother and Kathleen Crampton—a lot of people did just talk their way out of [deprogramming] and then [went] back to the cults. But back then, Ted and his secretary didn't keep records, they didn't follow up with people. So a lot of people, maybe left for a few months to make their parents happy or whatever and then who knows?

I've heard of other stories where people wanted to leave and the deprogramming was just a really good way for them to get out. It's so complicated. The film kind of, I feel like I just scratched the surface. It's so complex.

Did you ever get a sense of how Ted defines "cult"? Does he have a definition?
His definitions are very black and white. To him a cult is just somebody who controls your mind and controls your critical thinking. Someone who destroys your ability to think critically and controls your will.

How does Ted distinguish between a cult and what we think of as traditional religions?
Ted today, he doesn't explain himself very clearly, but from the archives he always described the difference being personal autonomy and how [cults]...through sleep deprivation and repetition and a form of hypnotism, would interfere with your ability to think critically. Then you become sort of enslaved by it, the will of the leader.

We talked about some of the people who didn't think that deprogramming worked. Then on the flip side, there were people who really felt that it did work. That it helped them come to their own conclusions about the alternative religions they were members of. Is it possible to say if deprogramming was actually necessary? Can you say the ends justified the means?
That sort of comes back to the other questions. I personally think that most of the people he deprogrammed probably would have left the group on their own eventually. I think it was just part of that era. I've met so many people who had spent a lot of time, months or years, in different communes or groups in the '70s and then eventually left. Without the moral panic I think that some people may have stayed, some people may have left. But like I said, it's so difficult to tell.

Steve Capellini told me he really believes he could've still been a [Unification Church member] today if he had not been deprogrammed. Even Cheryl, whose deprogramming, she described [it] as not being perfect, she thinks she would've still been in a cult had her parents not hired Ted.

I think the question is... I guess it's like would they be better off?

I can just talk about the cases that we see in the film, but both Cheryl and Steve say that they're really happy and they are better off now that they're deprogrammed. Somebody like Aaron who was never successfully deprogrammed, it's hard to say. Would his life be better today had one of those deprogrammings worked? I don't know.

He seems very happy.

Do you think Ted ever questioned the parents who were hiring him? Like, did he ever think these parents just didn't understand their kids?
No. Yeah, I don't think he [did], and I think that's where he sort of discredited himself in this history. Because there are other well-known exit counsellors who are around today and who are very well-respected.

Rick Ross, who is in the film, said that he declines half of the calls he gets. He'll say, "This is not a cult situation. This is a family issue."

Has Ted seen the film?
No, he's going to see it on Sunday.

How do you think he'll react and are you excited, nervous?
I'm really excited. I'm nervous. I don't know how he's going to react. I think he'll be fine because I've told him who I was interviewing. I've always told him. He understands the controversy. But he loves it. He's like "Anybody wants to debate me, they can debate me." He likes the controversy.

Deprogrammed screens Sunday April 26 at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Follow Regan Reid on Twitter.

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Attendees at the 25th Annual ASIS NYC Security Conference and Expo. Photos by the author

When I descended down the escalator at Manhattan's Jacob K. Javits Center, I felt like I had entered a low-budget promotional video for SkyNet. Over 75 exhibits scattered across this floor, displaying cameras, drones, cameras, drones, and, of course, DATA. "The greatest risks never use the front door," a stand sign declared. "EVOLVE2ADVANCE," another advised, or warned.

I was in the belly of the 25th Annual ASIS NYC Security Conference and Expo, a peek into the near-future of surveillance aided by the people who were really amped about it. A salesman for SafeRise and I played with Minority Report–like cameras that scan your face and can detect if you're "unauthorized." A few young guys from a company called Total Recall Corporation told me their big-box cameras are scattered across Times Square. This was the sort of place where naming your company after a dystopic sci-fi film appeared to be a selling point.

Earlier, I had slipped into one of the first educational sessions of the morning. The first thing I noticed when I peered around this tiny conference room was how many older white dudes there were. Dudes is really the only word for them—thick-necked, tough-looking guys who would be comfortable wearing sports sunglasses backwards on their heads and who project a vaguely ex-cop aura of potential violence. The sort of person who would sit in a room inside a conference center at 8 AM to learn about counterterrorism, in other words.

The presenter was Naureen N. Kabir, a senior intelligence research specialist at the NYPD's Counterterrorism Bureau and one of the few women here, who was in front of these dudes to detail how the largest counterterrorism program of any municipal city police department in the US tries to stop threats against New York City.

She ran through a PowerPoint of foreign terrorist groups (al Shabaab, Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, etc.), instances of "lone wolf" attacks, and the possibility of Islamic State fighters returning home, which, she said, could happen anytime. "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance," the moderator told us later on. A man sitting next to me shook his head as we flipped through slides showing off pages from Inspire, the al Qaeda magazine.

"I cannot understand why drones can fly over this damn city!" one male attendee yelled out during a Q&A session after. "It's mayhem!" (This was not a question, exactly.)

In agreement, Kabir replied that the NYPD was hard at work. A maritime unit was being built to surveil the skies for drones, and the department constantly analyzed open-source data and past events to find out how to best combat these perhaps existential threats to our livelihood. "We cannot think that something similar couldn't happen here," she said. "Like Mumbai, where packs of gunmen start shooting up different parts of the city."

Related: Watch our documentary on Israel's drone program

The list of ways the government is aggressively keeping New York safe was a long one. One city program, the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, had 7,000 cameras set up across Downtown, Kabir said, along with an array of environmental sensors. Another slide showed off the Hercules team, which is composed of militarized cops fitted with M16s, who patrol places like Penn Station. The Joint Terrorism Task Force connected the NYPD with the FBI, and was responsible, she said, for the arrests this past month of the two women in Queens who were bent on building a bomb. When I asked Kabir if the NYPD was still spying on Muslims, though, I got no definitive answer, and a room full of strange looks.

The seminars continued throughout the day; the next one I attended was titled "Crisis Around the Corner" and touched on hacking, piracy (the high-seas kind), and fires, among other topics. "We are in trouble, people," a director of corporate security declared to the crowd. That was the theme of the two-day conference: The world is unsafe, bad guys are everywhere, and we're a few wrong turns away from one of many varieties of utter devastation.

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I left dazed and confused, not sure what to make of the current state of affairs. But noontime was fast approaching, which meant so was the event of the day, when NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton would be awarded the ASIS Person of the Year Award. Bratton has run the police departments in Los Angeles and New York and overseen drops in crime rates in both cities; in a conference like this he's a kind of minor deity who tirelessly works to make the world a safer place—there's no room here for the criticisms that his aggressive policies unfairly target minorities or might even be unconstitutional.

The program quoted a SF Weekly article my friend Albert Samaha did on Bratton in 2013: "He became NYC's police chief in 1994, applied Broken Windows, and the city experienced a historic drop in crime rates. Then he went to LA and brought the same results." But, Samaha told me, they left out the line that followed: "But there is more to the crime drop that doesn't get mentioned in the narrative. Yes, crime rates in NYC and LA dropped significantly under Bratton's watch. What gets less play, though, is a simple truth: Between 1991 and 2013, America experienced a drastic, coast-to-coast decline in crime."

The award ceremony was held in an enormous hall decked out with tables; every attendee got a caesar salad, a piece of bread, and a slice of chocolate cake. I found a seat in the way back at an empty table that soon filled up with three slick-looking businessmen types and a handful of bigger dudes wearing earpieces.

Before Bratton's appearance, we were treated through a brief, triumphant history of ASIS by the guys who ran it. "We started off with just five exhibits on a floor of the Penta Hotel,"one said. But look at them now—cops and consultants everywhere, an entire international community of security professionals gathered under one roof.

Looking back, the past two and a half decades have been one long boom for this industry—first the war on drugs, then the war on terror, now an increasing focus on cybersecurity. It's been a very, very good time to be in the business of telling people they need increasingly complex systems in order to remain safe, because people have never had more things to be afraid of.

Bratton's acceptance speech was terse—although, for what it's worth, he does give great speeches—and he spent a good bit of it discussing the by-now-old-hat story of how he cleaned up New York using his now-notorious "broken windows" style of policing, in which lower-level offenses are heavily prosecuted as a means of deterring more serious crimes.

"Even here, the Javitz Center," he said. "Twenty-five years ago, you'd have to fight to get out of here, and fight to get in." Everyone laughed, and cheered.

The last seminar of the day I attended was called "Managing Social Unrest" and basically dissected what cops should do when confronted by unruly demonstrators. The panelists, from Philadelphia, seemed surprisingly committed to a kinder, gentler way of managing protest movements like Occupy and Black Lives Matter. "Our goal is zero arrests," Stacy Irving, a former director of Crime Prevention Services for Philly's Center City, said. "That's where we start from."

Throughout the day, I was looking for the common man—a non-dude, someone not professionally tied to the security scene—to get a quote from a citizen who could serve as an unbiased observer. No dice. Everyone was representing one sci-fi-sounding corporation or another.

In the course of doing this, I ran into a French-Canadian named Annick Tramblay who worked at a Belgian company named GSK as their crisis and continuity management director. She had flown here from Europe for the week to see what the conference had to offer, especially when it came to safeguarding against active shooter drills. When I asked her why she had come all this way though, her reply was simple and obvious:

"The market is here," she said. "America does this best."

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

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Nice throw, bro. All photos supplied by 3WA.

Gabriel Hubert tightened his tie and let his toes dangle over the edge off one of the most recognizable buildings in Edmonton. He radioed down to his ground crew 500 feet below and instructed them to block the road with their vehicles.

That's when the 40-year-old welder jumped.

This jump was a personal best for Hubert. Something in Edmonton that was never jumped and won't ever be again. From the time his feet left the building to the time his feet were in a vehicle only 46 seconds had elapsed. This plan took weeks, if not months, to orchestrate. All this for a few seconds of freefall.

Hubert is Edmonton's most prolific BASE jumper. He's jumped at least five buildings within the confines of Alberta's capital and five more around the world. Some of these jumps were legal and some, well, not so much.

Those days are behind him now. Humbert is trying to go straight and bridge that ever existing gap between BASE jumpers and the law.

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A few years ago Hubert was jumping in the small Swiss town of Lauterbrunnen. There, they allow BASE jumpers free reign, letting them leap off the Alps and land in designated fields below. It was gorgeous, the cliffs were optimal, and it wasn't frowned upon. This is something that Hubert has been trying to bring back to Canada, where the sport hasn't found the legitimacy it has elsewhere. Last summer, while out on a fishing expedition, he found it. A beautiful untamed cliff jutting out of Kootenay Lake. He brought in a rangefinder and cased the cliff to make sure it was safe, and then he jumped it.

"I'm telling you, this is as beautiful as BC gets," he said. "Beautiful green-blue water, glaciers, it's just unreal beautiful."

Hubert has been to BASE jumping events, boogies as they're called, all over the world. The events lend legitimacy to the sport. They bring in safety experts, sponsors and let an international group of jumpers have their way with a cliff for some time. Hubert, a contract welder by trade, founded jump group 3WA, the Three Welders Association, in 2008 with two other welders. Now Hubert and the rest of 3WA are organizing a boogie at his Kaslo paradise. It will be the first in Canada. He's found collaborators in Go Fast, an energy drink, and APEX BASE jumping who sponsor many other boogies around the world. It's going to run from July 23rd through the 26th. He's going to offer challenges, like accuracy landing onto docks, to the jumpers who can win prizes.

Hubert was a late bloomer to BASE jumping. Whereas most skydivers and jumpers start in their early twenties, Hubert didn't fling himself into the sky until his friend's 30th birthday, when he suggested they should go skydiving. They went for one weekend, and then the next and then the next and eventually made over 30 jumps that first summer alone.

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Two years later he discovered BASE jumping when his friend Steve "Smiley" Janz told him about jumping off a cliff in Norway and soaring to the ground next to a waterfall. Hubert, who goes by the handle "Ramrod," thought he was full of shit. Turns out Smiley doesn't lie.

"He plugged in these videos, turns out he's not full of it," Hubert told VICE. "This guy is flying wingsuits over mountains and I'd never seen anything at that time. It was life changing."

Smiley was from the old school of BASE jumpers. He had been practicing fixed object jumping for twenty years up to this point and started only a few short years after Carl Boenish, the father of BASE jumping began popularizing the sport. BASE jumping has always been exponentially more dangerous than skydiving but these were especially cruel days for a BASE jumper. There was no set equipment for a jumper and they had to learn as they went. It worked in a extremely unforgiving trial and error like fashion, something would go wrong and they would say to themselves "Oh... let's not do that again." Fatalities were not uncommon. Boenish died BASE jumping and Smiley was pretty much the only one left of his original crew.

After Hubert had shown interest in the sport, Smiley took him out to a 500-foot suspension bridge outside a BC mine and had Hubert and a few of his friends make their first jump. Bridges tend to be popular first jump locations because one of the biggest dangers in BASE jumping comes from having an 180 opening, where your parachute turns you around once pulled. This type of opening is disastrous as the jumper's body can smash into the cliff face. However, with a bridge you just sore underneath. Hubert's first jump was an 180, and after righting himself he soon found himself in a tree. This leafy landing didn't deter Hubert, in fact, he was hooked.

From there Hubert made his way to the Perrine Bridge bridge in Twin Falls, Idaho that crosses Snake River Canyon. Twin Falls is pilgrimage that many jumpers make as it is one of the only locations that BASE Jumping is legal year-round without a permit. It's a place that many virgin jumpers go to have their first jump. But even Twin Falls has seen its fair share of tragedies over the years. Just recently a Vancouver man named Bryan Turnerfell 152 meters to his death off the bridge after his parachute failed to deploy.

Death is a constant danger in the sport.

"To participate in this activity you have to accept that you might die doing it. You have to love it enough to accept that I guess. It's not saying you don't give a shit, and we want to risk it all. We are actually the most calculated people going So many jumpers I know are engineers and doctors," said Hubert. "Critical thinkers that take care of their gear and their planning and all the other factors."

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Hubert has seen death as a result of the sport he holds so dear. He recanted a story about one of his good friends that he met while skydiving in Vancouver. She was a renowned skydiver who met a Swiss man at the drop zone and the two fell in love. She moved back to Switzerland, a BASE jumping mecca, with him. Even though, she only had ten or so BASE jumps the cliffs enticed her, and she made a jump she maybe shouldn't have. Her husband watched as his wife hit a talus, an outcropping on the cliff, after seven seconds of freefall. He ran down to her. She was still alive when he got to her. She looked at him and said "Do you have a smoke, babe?" He did.

She died in his arms after one drag.

"Yes, we cry. Yes, we're sad. We're so messed up compared to what we would classify as regular people. We know we're not normal. Normal people will look at what we do and say we're stupid but they don't get to feel what we feel, the highs, that beautiful feeling of flying." Hubert said. "To jump off a cliff and fly down a mountain, it feels so amazing. But on the inverse side of the coin, with great with great happiness can come great sadness."

A popular mantra among BASE jumpers is "If I die don't cry for me, I'm doing what I love." The jumpers try to remember this, but it is never easy to lose a friend or colleague. However the pros outweigh out the cons for the jumpers, and the high is just too good.

After Hubert had graduated from earth and bridge jumping, he turned his sights towards Edmonton. It was more of a lookup then a turn; this was when Gabe started conquering Edmonton high rises. I asked him about how they were able to get to the roof of several well known high rises in Edmonton. What he described to me sounded more like espionage than a sport.

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It's all about preparation. Hubert and his team might plan for months for a particular jump. The biggest thing is figuring out their way to the roof. A favoured tactic would be to make friends with the right people and get them to draw him a map to the roof. Then they would do a dry run without parachutes.

"I was told to go to this floor, and I was drawn a map on a smoke pack, it said when you get out of the elevator you'll see a desk, take a right, take another right and go through that door, you're in the stairwell, once it closes on you you're locked in there," Hubert told me. "So I had to duct tape that closed. Then I go up six or seven flights of stairs, and I'm at the roof."

If you went at night, the building would be locked and full of security teams so because of this they had to go during the day, and they had to look the part. That is how Gabriel "Ramrod" Hubert found himself on one of Edmonton's largest high-rises dressed impeccably in a suit and unloading a parachute that he had hidden away in a suitcase.

Hubert and his team got so good at jumping buildings that they even shot a commercial for his friends company once.

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If you jump enough times in the city, you're bound to get caught and Hubert has, numerous times. However, one of the common misconceptions about BASE jumping is that it's illegal.While some of the actions required to jump may be illegal, the sport exists in a grey zone. There is no law outlawing it. It's frowned upon but when caught you tend only to get dinged with a trespassing ticket and maybe B&E if you are going to extremes. That said, it also tends to deviate police forces to a non-emergency.

"Individuals who engage in this type of behavior are making a selfish decision that negatively impacts the rest of the city," said Supt. Kevin Galvin with EPS Downtown Division in a recent media release. "These people have little regard for the number of police resources that are dispatched to this type of call – a situation where it was believed someone was in distress. These types of incidents pull police resources that are already overstretched away from those who do require assistance."

These actions can give the sport a bad name. Especially when you all you see are reports centered around men being charged for jumping off a cranein downtown Edmonton. This bad reputation is something that Hubert is trying to remedy with his Boogie by allowing jumpers a safe and legal jump site in Kaslo.

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"I think it's an evolution for me. You see different stages in people as BASE jumpers. When they first start they're so eager they'll go do dumb shit and then boom they'll get hurt. Back in the day I didn't give a shit about who saw me, I didn't give a shit about negative exposure or any of that. I just wanted to jump," said Hubert. "Now I'm going through a phase where I've matured and I've attended all these legitimate events around the world and I've jumped in seven countries now so I got to see different things. I think I just see a bigger picture now. Given that it's the only thing stopping us here in Canada is a legitimate place to do it and some recognition.

"It'd be great to be looked at in a positive light."

When I asked Hubert about the passing of his friends, he told me about an article written by renowned jumper Chris "Douggs" McDougall called "Death in the Sport of Life." After talking to Hubert at length, I can see why McDougall refers to base jumping as the sport of life. I asked him why he does it, why does he put himself in danger like this so willingly? He thought for a second, smiled, and responded.

"Did you ever have dreams that you were flying when you were a kid?"

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter.

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Photo via Flickr user youngthousands

People have been trolling the internet since long before the term entered common parlance. Back then, we just called it "malicious pranks." Sometimes, however, a line is so blatantly crossed that those with even the slightest shred of empathy for their fellow man have to step away from the computer for a while to shake off how inhumane humans can be.

That is more or less what happened when I came across a video called "Twitch Raids: Cooking a Laptop." [You can click the link if you must. But we're not going to embed this video, because fuck those assholes.] Twitch, the behemoth video game streaming platform, exists to allow users to broadcast or view live-streams of kill-streaks, Zerg-rushes, or whatever buzzword exists in the gargantuan world of League of Legends. Naturally, 4chan has found a way to use this site for mischief. "Twitch Raids," a little game invented by the 4chan community, occur when someone on the forum links to a random target's Twitch channel, which is then flooded with harassers. Often the humerous chaos of the deluge is enough to satisfy the attacking horde, but occasionally, when less savvy marks are spotted, the sociopaths of the group begin to rear their heads.

In this video, the Twitch community singled out a 13-year-old boy for their cunning ruse of getting him to destroy his mom's laptop and his own Xbox One. It's unclear why exactly this kid was targeted, but it seems to be primarily because he has stunted social skills, and secondarily, based on comments at the end of the video, because he's chubby.

The first troll in the video, pretending to be a Twitch support staff member, gets to work on the teen by doing the perfunctory deletion of System32. This is an old trick, born from early 2000s internet forum trolls, which involves persuading inept computer users to essentially brick their machines by having them delete System32, an essential file for Windows PCs. "Cooking a laptop" is the natural conclusion of this mean-spirited fun, but instead of the hapless rube reporting on the calamity of their device via text, the whole internet gets to watch the mark embarrass himself in real time on the Twitch platform.

After deleting System32, a second troll, putting on a bad female voice, has the lad use his phone to Skype into the channel so they can watch him destroy his possessions even more. Troll 2 then advises the victim to "demagnetize the electrolytes" in his mom's computer by drizzling a saltwater mixture over the keyboard. He somehow then convinces the kid to slather butter all over the keyboard. But now, the laptop needs to be dried. Too large for the microwave, the laptop is cooked on the oven range for some time until "all the bad central processing units" are smoked out. For good measure (or overkill), the PC's battery was then removed from the smoking embers and wrapped in foil and microwaved to the point of catching fire.

The tormentor drops a pithy 'you just got trolled!' and tells the kid to go eat his toasted computer.

By this point, it's impossible not to cringe at what's happening in this video. Most of us are just hoping it will be over soon. But then, unsatisfied with ruining this kid's mom's laptop, these monsters walk the kid through bricking his Xbox One as well, before asking him to switch the Skype camera to see his "sad face." Then, of course, the tormentor drops a pithy "you just got trolled!" and tells the kid to go eat his toasted computer.

The worst part of this is that the kid might be somewhere on the autism spectrum—or, at the very least, he's far too trusting. Throughout the video, he thanks the "Twitch support's" willingness to help him out "just for the heart of love," cracks jokes that fall flat, makes awkward small talk, and lays out his future career goals to some neckbeards who just want him to suffer. He comes off as a lonely kid looking for a friend, and a sizable group from a large gaming platform pissed their Doritos stained shorts watching him make a fool of himself.

The account that originally posted the video has since been "suspended due to multiple or severe violations of YouTube's policy against spam, gaming, misleading content, or other Terms of Service violations." But the video is preserved on another user's account, and the comments—mostly people calling the kid a "retard"—will disgust you.

I know I'm breaking a cardinal rule here by feeding the trolls with this article, but this video chipped away a bit more of my faith in humanity and needed to be addressed. Bullies will always bully, and there will always be a group of toadies there to goad them on. The most one can do is not participate in the menacing mockery, and express disdain at those who do. Hopefully, as this video gets more and more views, some of the kinder souls on the web can track this kid down and not just hook him up with new tech, but more importantly show him that not everyone online is this evil.

Follow Justin Caffier on Twitter.

Earlier this month, at the annual Space Symposium, members of the US military quietly but clearly voiced their concern that war is coming to space. Soon after officials announced that the Pentagon is looking for $5.5 billion to build up its space defense systems by 2020, Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James straight up admitted that, looking at the layout of modern space exploration, the US now believes it's facing new and evolving threats to everything it owns above earth.

"We need to be ready," James said, according to National Defense Magazine. 'We must prepare for the potentiality of conflict that might extend from earth one day into space."

This isn't just bluster from one corner of the government. This year, Congress urged the Secretary of Defense and Director of National Intelligence to start studying offensive space weapons in addition to defensive systems. The funds allocated for these studies weren't huge—but the very concept of openly pushing for space weaponization is an interesting developing.

Ever since 1967, when the US and USSR signed the Outer Space Treaty, expressly banning the use of nuclear weapons in space and establishing a norm of restraint and pacifism to preserve the vital infrastructure of satellites, most of us have come to view space as a neutral zone. Yet as it turns out nothing in the Outer Space Treaty actually forbids the weaponization of space, meaning that so long as we don't use nukes up there, any form of extraterrestrial brutality is on the table. Most nations have been eager to keep the option open, refusing to sign subsequent treaties with more stringent language restricting the militarization of satellites and spaceships.

Recent tests of space weapons by China have brought the issue to the fore of defense and security agendas. Since 2007, China has openly tested earth-to-space anti-satellite weapons systems, successfully blowing up their own defunct crafts and threatening the orbital infrastructure on which most modern militaries rely. In turn, the US and Russia have tested a range of offensive and defensive technologies, and other nations, like India, seem eager to join the space arms race now too.

Now, all of a sudden, the idea that we'll see some form of open space warfare within our lifetimes no longer seems so far-fetched. Everyone's been quiet on the details, but it's easy to fill in the blanks with scenes from Star Wars. To get a more realistic sense of how the space wars will go down, I talked to Brian Weeden, a technical advisor on space issues at the Secure World Foundation, and a former US Air Force officer who specialized in intercontinental ballistic missiles and space programs.

VICE: If I woke up tomorrow and saw a headline that said Space Conflict Begins! , how would you explain it?
Brian Weeden: If you see that headline, it probably means the reporters are not doing their job. You're never going to see a conflict in space [alone], just like you're never going to see a conflict that is just in the air or just on land. What you're going to see—likely in the near future—is that there is a space component of a conflict on earth. Just like there is an air component, a sea component, and a land component.

So how would conventional earth-based conflict escalate into a space theatre?
The fact that the militaries involved in a conflict on earth are using satellites and space capabilities. For example, the US military right now uses precision-guided munitions. Almost all of those are guided by GPS, which are satellites in orbit that are providing a signal that allows the munitions to know where it is and get to where it needs to be. Almost all militaries right now are using satellite communications. An increasing number of militaries are using satellites for intelligence.

But there've been a lot of plans in the past to attack the earth from space. Could we not see anything like that?
Probably not. The US and Soviets pushed by [the Outer Space Treaty] because both of them saw that putting a nuclear weapon in orbit would be hugely destabilizing. There was a nuclear test called Starfish Prime [in 1962] that set off a 1.2 megaton nuclear warhead in low-earth orbit and it killed like a third of the satellites in orbit at the time, including a couple of American satellites. So everyone quickly realized that setting off nuclear detonations in orbit was not going to be a good idea.

It doesn't have to be nukes though—there was that plan, "Rods from God," to basically just chuck big pieces of metal from space to blast things on earth to pieces.
When the militaries first started thinking about space in the 50s and 60s, they came up with a lot of really crazy stuff, much of which they quickly realized wouldn't work or was not as militarily practical as everybody thought it would be. Because the physics about how things move in space put certain boundaries on what is possible, what is not possible, and even if it is possible, it's probably a really, really difficult engineering solution.

Would Space War be entirely earth-to-satellite then? Or could there be Space-to-Space War?
[Such a conflict] would probably be a combination of earth-to-space and space-to-space. In the last decade-and-a-half, there've been a lot of demonstrations of rendezvous-and-proximity operations (RPO), where you take an object into space, change its orbit so it gets up close to another object in orbit. It's the same thing we do with the International Space Station every time we send food up to it, just robotically. [It can be used for] refueling of satellites, maintenance of parts. But it also [means] you can go snip something off, go poke something, go break something, do lots of bad stuff.

So we attack satellites. How much damage does it do in space and to the nations involved?
It totally depends. Most likely it's going to involve non-kinetic methods to start with—jamming, hacking, spoofing. It's far easier to do. You've got a communications satellite, you can jam its communications much more easily than you can send something to go kill it. And if you've got an optical satellite taking imagery, dazzle it with a laser, take out the optics. As long as it can't see your troops, then you probably have solved your military objective.

I am fairly certain, although there's no evidence to prove it yet, that every conflict in the past ten years probably had a space component that involved jamming, hacking, spoofing, dazzling. That's generally not going to have any waterfall effects. The satellite's function is normal. You're not damaging it. You're just messing with its military function.

The next level up would be the kinetic attacks, where you're trying to destroy or damage the object. Some of those might not have a big effect. If you had a laser that was powerful enough to burn a hole through a critical part of a satellite to render it inoperable, the satellite itself wouldn't be useful, but it wouldn't explode into a whole bunch of debris.

The most worrisome kind of attack is a hyper-kinetic kill, where you're colliding with it at very high speed and the satellite is getting obliterated into thousands of small pieces. Depending upon what orbit that satellite is in, all of those pieces could be up there for a very long time and thus pose a collision risk to everything else in that region.

Is that mutually assured destruction?
Not necessarily, because not every country is as reliant on satellites. And that's why you've heard the US become much more concerned in the last few years about China's anti-satellite capabilities. While China does have a lot of satellites, and they're building a lot of satellites, and they're starting their own militarization of space, the US is by far more reliant on space for its military national security than China is for its.

Why would we escalate from non-kinetic to kinetic attacks?
Let me give you a scenario: Taiwan Straits, really heightened tensions, everything's going to result in conflict. Let's say there's a US carrier group in the area, and the US gets some kind of intelligence that China is getting ready to launch an anti-ship ballistic missile to take out that carrier. A key part of targeting that missile is going to be a satellite. So in that case, the American military commander may decide that taking out one or more of those satellites required to target the missile is [worth it].

And for the massive kinetic attacks?
I honestly can't think of [a reason]. If there's a satellite explosion in the geostationary belt, [the highest orbital level, its debris] are going to be up there, for all intents and purposes, forever. And it's going to be bad.

Are there any new technologies coming down the road that could switch up the tactics of space warfare beyond just hitting satellites from the earth or space
The only thing I can think of is lasers. People have been talking about laser weapons for a long time. The biggest problem is generating power. That might be changing because solar panels are getting much more efficient and powerful. Laser technology and the electronics are getting much better. That could be a game changer.

How likely is it that, beyond just spoofing satellites, I'm going to see some really disruptive space conflict in my lifetime? How nervous should I be?
I still think that you're more likely to see a non-warfare incident than a warfare incident causing problems—natural events like a solar weather storm or a satellite getting hit by a piece of debris or even a mistake or an accident—than any intentional kinetic event.

The one caveat to my pessimism on the likelihood of a kinetic attack: if there is a big conventional fight—we're talking an existential struggle for survival—then all bets are off.

Okay.
I'm sorry it's not the sexy laser and the battle station stuff. But that's why that's science fiction.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

Illustration by Sam Taylor. Follow him on Twitter.