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In this sketch by courtroom artist Jeff Kandyba, Aurora theater shooting defendant James Holmes, center left, and defense attorney Daniel King sit in court. (AP)

Almost three years after James Holmes filled a Colorado movie theater with tear gas and bullets during a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises, killing 12 and injuring 70, his trial finally began on Monday afternoon. While the defense painted a portrait of a mentally ill boy in need of treatment, and the prosecution insisted he was a broken-hearted killer out for existential revenge, both sides unveiled similar narratives of a young life spun dangerously out of control.

Of course, each side came to rather different conclusions about whether Holmes understood the moral implications of attacking a roomful of strangers.

"The defendant does not have to prove that he was insane at the commission of the act," Judge Carlos A. Samour Jr. told a jury made up of five men and 19 women—12 of them alternates—before opening statements began. "Rather, prosecution has the burden to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was not insane at the time of the commission of the act."

Jurors will decide if Holmes receives the death penalty, life in prison, or is confined to a mental health facility.

Whether or not District Attorney George Brauchler proves Holmes was sane that night, he certainly succeeded on Monday in capturing the horror and devastation of Colorado's worst mass murder since Columbine. Dressed in a sharply tailored suit while navigating a powerpoint presentation, he took the jury through a powerful recreation of the 2012 shooting, playing the bullet-speckled audio of the 9-1-1 call and describing the details of the victims' wounds while pointing at Holmes, whose wrists and ankle were tethered discretely to the floor by a cable.

"Through this door is horror," Brauchler said between long, dramatic pauses. "Through this door is bullets, blood, brains, and bodies. Through this door, one guy, who felt as if he had lost his career, lost his love life, lost his purpose, came to execute a plan in his heart and mind for two and a half months."

During a two-hour monologue about Holmes, the "wicked smart" neuroscience student who was dumped by the first person who had sex with him, quit school, and went on a rampage, Brauchler punctuated the story every ten minutes or so with a short biography of one of the victims, displaying their photo on a nearby TV. Rebecca Wingo, mother of two, planned to be a social worker. Caleb Medley was an aspiring stand-up comic.

The detailed account of Holmes's plot was nothing if not impressive. Brauchler described the elaborate yet ultimately failed booby-trap bomb in his apartment, the four weapons and hundreds of rounds of ammunition he'd prepared, the armor covering "every millimeter of his body." He argued that Holmes strategically selected the theater for its minimal amount of exits—and that while making these plans, the accused wrote emails to his parents and flirted with girls on dating sites, seemingly a mentally acute person.

Following his own opening statement, public defender Daniel King expressed suspicion at Brauchler's motives in focusing on the victims and the way they died.

"I'm concerned that the prosecutor representing the government, your government, just stood before you and talked about the 'horrors' of what took place in the movie theater, and I saw the impact on your faces," King said. "Nothing he said is contested by the defense. Mr. Holmes has entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, essentially admitting that he was the person in the theater, pulling the trigger."

According to Aya Gruber, a criminal law professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, "insanity" is strictly a legal term, not a medical one, and in order to be declared legally insane, you must have been not only been diagnosed with a mental illness, but demonstrate that it was that illness that prevented you from understanding right from wrong when committing a crime.

If that can be demonstrated, then "technically they're supposed to acquit him," Gruber explains. "But in my experience, juries really dislike acquitting people who do monstrous things on the basis of insanity. Instead, they look for whether he could plan, was rational and in control of his senses, and then they can find him to be sane."

Technically, Gruber points out, the jury is not supposed to do that, but prosecutors know better.

"So you'll notice in Brauchler's opening statement he said that the guy scouted out the movie theater and meticulously planned the crime," she says. "That shouldn't matter that much. If we believed all of this planning was pursuant to a delusion, we should acquit him. But juries are highly reluctant to acquit people who seemed in control of their actions... There's a way to try the case where they're kind of encouraging the jury not to follow the law."

Brauchler said that two doctors who had examined Holmes by order of the court following the shooting had concluded that he was sane, while King argued that there were 20 doctors who had determined that Holmes suffered from some kind of schizophrenia.

Both sides agreed that there was something not right with Holmes for some time; Brauchler pointed out that in his journal Holmes wrote that since middle school he'd had "a long-standing hatred of mankind," and that he'd "had the obsession to kill since he was a kid." The defense and prosecution agree on the facts that he was once a gifted student whose abilities declined while pursuing his graduate degree at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. This, followed by his first girlfriend rejecting him, was apparently the germination of his turn toward violence.

"He tried to murder a theater full of people to make himself feel better, because he thought it would increase his self-worth," Brauchler argued. Of course, Holmes's defense team looks at the same narrative and sees a textbook pattern of schizophrenic symptoms.

"James Holmes was genetically gifted with a high IQ, and genetically cursed with a family history of pervasive and serious mental illness," defense lawyer Katherine Spengler said. "And those things don't cancel each other out, they coexist."

The defense pointed toward his journal, which suggested that Holmes had "fought for years and years to overcome [his] biology," and argued that his pursuit of neuroscience was an attempt to better understand and one day repair his ailing brain. "Schizophrenia lies latent in people, there are signs of it as a child, but it blossoms into full psychosis when individuals are in their early twenties," King added.

"He had homicidal thoughts as a child," Spengler said. "He had thoughts about nuclear winters, which were coping mechanisms to stress."

Defense attorneys suggested Holmes's illness was apparent as a child, went underground, and then resurfaced at the age of 24—the tail end of period when schizophrenia often surfaces in men. His mental health issues were said to continue throughout his stay in prison, where King said Holmes would cover himself in his own feces, eat paper, lick the walls, and declare himself to be Peter Pan.

Like the prosecutor, Spengler said that Holmes's motive for the massacre was that "by killing others, he could gain value and acquire worth. He believed that by killing others would fundamentally change his life." But while Brauchler sees this as mere vanity taken to a violent extreme, Spengler argues that it is evidence of "delusional thinking."

Gruber, the law professor, says that it's pretty routine for both sides of an insanity defense trial to follow a similar storyline in their arguments while coming to completely different conclusions. She says this is due to the legal ambiguity over what constitutes a sane bad person and a sick person who couldn't help themselves.

"It's a delicate fiction that people who commit heinous crimes are somehow completely mentally fit, and just evil," she says. "Criminal law hinges on the idea that some people are responsible for their deranged acts, and other people aren't—and where do you find that fine line between someone who is a sociopath and immoral and should go to jail, and a sociopath who is ill and should go to a mental institution? It's a such a fine line that the narrative can support either side of that line."

Given the reluctance most juries have for accepting insanity pleas, along with the extreme political waves this crime has caused (controversial gun legislation, for instance), the defense has their work cut out for them in trying to convince a Colorado jury that James Holmes was not directly responsible for all those traveling bullets.

Still, on the first day of a trial that is expected to last until Labor Day, King attempted to guide the jury away from the hysteria of public outcry and first-glance assumptions, and remind them what is expected of them as jurors.

"As I stand before you I feel a great wave of pain and emotion from this community, and from these victims. What I'm going to suggest to you through the course of this trial, is that if the flood waters rise, the only thing to do is to move above the water-line together—there is the fortress of the law. There is no room in the fortress of the law for hatred. There is no room for retribution, or vengeance. The law commands that you fairly and rationally consider all the evidence in the case, and you decide whether the prosecution has proven beyond all reasonable doubt that Mr. Holmes was not insane when he stepped into that movie theater. Not whether mass murder is wrong, not about how badly the victims were harmed, not about gun control, or mental health treatment. Not here in the fortress of the law."

Follow Josiah M. Hesse on Twitter.

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I'm not a movie buff, but this past week I pretended that I was. I gathered a bunch of friends to watch a few of Generation X's favourite coming-of-age movies so that we could learn from/openly mock some of our forbearers' cultural touchstones. My (super-old!) editors suggested I to check out Empire Records, Trainspotting, Reality Bites, Slacker, and Singles—generation-defining films that most of us had never seen (or heard of). I mean, we were born between 1993-1997, so we also weren't alive when most of the movies were released, but that didn't stop of us from voicing our opinion on the glorious 90s.

Empire Records (1995)

The entire movie takes place over one awesome day in a record store. The cops are called about four times, there's a love story, a suicide story, and a takedown of a speed freak. There's also an almost-sex scene, followed by an actual sex scene of two girls trying to live out their fantasy with their pop-star crush. This movie literally had it all and we loved it.

The stereotypical '90s traits made us laugh even if it was unintentional. My pal Keith says it really can't be a '90s movie until you've lost count of how many times the hot guy has pushed his hair back and looks up with a smile. That luscious, voluminous Rachel-Green-Lizzie-McGuire hair was something to aspire to.

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Image via WikiCommons

One of the more esoteric arguments one can have involves what actually counts as a sport. Is a sport anything that involves competition? Does something require a modicum of physical skill and finely honed mental acuity to count as a sport? Certainly there are things like football, or soccer, or basketball, or baseball, which are so obviously sports that it's insulting to call them anything different.

Then there are sports like table tennis, shot put, archery, curling, or racewalking, which despite nobody caring about them are sports because they have a place in the Olympics. And then there's stuff like bowling, spelling bees, chess, pool, poker, log rolling, and competitive Scrabble, all of which are "sports" mainly by virtue of them having at some point aired on ESPN2, otherwise known as "the Deuce," a repository for whatever bad, sport-oriented ideas its parent network ESPN decides to shit out.

On Sunday night, ESPN2 managed to outdeuce itself, airing the final round of the Heroes of the Dorm tournament, in which college students competed against one another in the still-in-beta multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game Heroes of the Storm. (The winner would have his college tuition paid for by Blizzard, the game's manufacturer.) Heroes of the Dorm captured a measly 0.1 rating (meaning about 120,000 people watched), with much of its potential audience instead tuning into either Game of Thrones or the NBA playoffs. This was a weird move on ESPN's part, and a total coup for Blizzard, who kinda-sorta got away with murder on this one.

This isn't the first time ESPN has tried to convince people to watch other people play video games. Perhaps you recall Madden Nation, a show involving the country's top Madden players going around on a bus playing each other at pretend football. A joint venture between Madden publisher EA Sports and ESPN, the show lasted four seasons and featured humans with names like "Sherm Sticky," "Young Nephew," and "Rico Hollywood" yelling at each other while playing football on a screen. Someone named K Good took it upon themselves to put the show on YouTube. You can watch a sample episode here, though I'm not sure why you would.

It's not that ESPN shouldn't be airing gaming-related content. To the contrary, the channel most emphatically should be if they want to service a very real and very growing audience. In fact, last year the network aired a Dota 2 tournament, much to the chagrin of the real sports heads that make up a large swath of its viewership. While it's doubtful that eSports would ever become as popular in the States as they are in, say, South Korea (where there are two dedicated TV networks airing StarCraft II competitions), the audience for eSports certainly exists.

According to data published by the tech firm Super Data Research, 31.4 million Americans have watched or participated in eSports, with the League of Legends Season 3 World Championships racking up a total of 32 million viewers worldwide. Meanwhile, the livestreaming service Twitch features a robust audience of people who tune in to watch people other people play video games. According to the site's directory, at this very moment over 100,000 people are tuned in to Counter Strike and League of Legends each, and about 70,000 are watching Dota 2. These games have huge, built-in audiences who both play the game and are willing to watch people play it at the highest level. At this point, it's just a matter of figuring out how to make eSports accessible to an audience that isn't already familiar with the intricacies of the game(s). Much like golf or, like, hockey, if you don't know what's going on while watching competitive StarCraft or League of Legends, the experience can be about as exciting as watching C-SPAN. Which is to say, really fucking boring.

Related: Watch our documentary on the wide world of South Korean eSports.

Certainly, there's nothing wrong with airing shows with a limited audience. But it's hard not to question ESPN's judgment when airing Heroes of the Dorm, when it brings little to the table other than the Blizzard pedigree.

If you look at the Twitch numbers, you'll see that Heroes of the Storm has about 6,000 active viewers. This a fraction of LoL's numbers, which is a problem for Blizzard, for whom Heroes of the Storm is a pretty big deal. Featuring characters from Blizzard's three flagships StarCraft, Diablo, and Warcraft, Heroes of the Storm is a MOBA game much like League of Legends.

Unlike LoL, however, whose intricacies and relatively skilled user base have created a fairly high barrier to entry for players, HotS focuses more on the player having, y'know, fun rather than trying to run them into the ground with complicated bullshit. It's a game meant for filthy casuals, the exact type of people who might stumble upon an ESPN2 broadcast, get hooked in, and decide to give the game a shot once it makes its full launch on the June 2.

Top image from Wiki Commons.

Drew Millard is on Twitter.

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Look at Steven Weissman's blog and buy his books from Fantagraphics.

In the Ugandan slum of Wakaliga, a thriving film industry called Wakaliwood has emerged. Mixing elements of Western action flicks and Chinese Kung Fu movies with Ugandan culture, Wakaliwood's movies have garnered a cult following not just in in Uganda, but all over the world. We headed to Wakaliga to spend a day on the set of the next Wakaliwood hit.

Music for the piece was provided by Ramon Film Productions and Alex "Saba Saba" Kirya.

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Imagine learning for free! Photo via Flickr user Francisco Osorio

University tuition in Canada, much like the global temperature, has been for the last several years steadily setting record highs only to break them the next year. Between the early 1990s and the 2012-13 school year, the national average for tuition nearly tripled: the 1990-91 average of $1,464 was equal to $2,243 in 2013 dollars, when the average had increased to $6,610.

With tuition rising, students—those who aren't discouraged by the high price of education—are turning more and more to student loans to finance their educations. The average debt load of a Canadian university graduate is now $27,000. Yet, as everyone under 40 knows, a university education is no longer the gateway to a well-paying job that it once was. It's become more like a high school diploma: a base-line entry point into the job market.

David Macdonald, senior economist with the left-leaning Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, says that last part might actually be a good thing.

"If you look at the trends in education over a long period of time," he says, "what you see is that, for instance, it used to be that high school had tuition attached to it, and people had to pay to go to high school. At a certain point, once the percentage of people going to high school hit a certain level, it became a service that was just paid for through government coffers as opposed to being paid for through individual tuition."

That's right: the fact that more people are going to university means that it should, and probably eventually will, be funded by the government. In other words, tuition will be free.

Macdonald says that's the way post-secondary education funding is heading globally, though Canada is slower in following that pattern. We have the sixth-highest average undergrad tuition of all Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nations, and that's not even counting the exorbitant fees most universities charge international students.

And free university is not only somewhat common worldwide—tuition-free countries include much of the European Union as well as Sri Lanka, Brazil, and others—it would be easy (economically speaking) to implement here. Recently instituted federal programs like income splitting and the universal child care benefit cost about what free tuition would, so it's really a matter of priorities and political will, according to Macdonald.

So what would implementing free tuition look like? For starters, it would be much more likely to come from the provincial level of government than federal, and not just because free tuition is essentially anathema to the Conservative Party. While it would be possible for the federal government to dramatically increase the amount of money it transfers to provincial governments, it's the provinces that fund education, and the provinces also decide how to spend their federal transfer money. Aside from that, there are dramatic differences in how much tuition costs in each province right now, and that would impact any national program that might, in some far-off leftist utopian future, be considered.

"If you were to create a national program, you'd have to account for the fact that Ontario starts at a much higher level than Quebec does, for instance," said Macdonald.

However, individual provincial governments could decide to increase their funding of universities and mandate that tuition be decreased. And those two would have to go hand in hand.

"Look," Macdonald said, "free tuition could not happen without a substantial increase in government transfers to universities, and we often miss this: that universities, depends on the province obviously, but universities, roughly half of their revenue is being funded by governments. Provincial governments. And then the other portion is split between tuition and other ways they can raise funds, other fees. But ... tuition is going up because government transfers are going down."

One argument provinces have put forward as they've continued slashing university funding is that their hands are more or less tied by rising costs in other areas, such as health care, and that the federal government has cut its transfers to the provinces. If we value education as much as we value our health, it would seem to make sense that governments should fund both. For that reason, it's valuable to look at ways both provincial governments and the federal government could institute free tuition: there are multiple ways this could be implemented, meaning even if some provinces are as cash-strapped as they say, free tuition is by no means a lost cause.

There are a few examples for free-tuition advocates to look to. One is Germany, where tuition was slowly introduced (mostly in the western states) throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s. However, there was massive opposition, and each state individually opted to eliminate fees, usually when a left-leaning party was elected. One notable exception is Bavaria, where the conservative party "gave into the mainstream" in the 2013-14 year.

Education in Germany is also funded by the states, so their experience is especially instructive for anyone in Canada looking to fight the rising tide of tuition fees. We can also look to Quebec and Newfoundland for homegrown examples of reducing or slowing the rise of tuition fees.

Newfoundland had one of the highest tuition rates in the country in the late '90s, when the government made a conscious decision to reverse that; while the government hasn't eliminated tuition, it allowed fees to decrease by increasing funding to its (one) university.

In Quebec, as most Canadians well know, there is an active protest culture that fights attempts to increase tuition. This is coupled with high transfers from the provincial government to universities, which allows some of the country's best universities to continue operating while charging some of the lowest tuition.

Elsewhere in Canada, political parties are inclined to favour seniors (who turn out to elections in droves) and middle- to upper-class adults (who pay higher taxes), because their dissatisfaction has tangible results for the ruling party du jour. Quebec's protesting students have that same effect on the government there, but in the rest of Canada, students haven't yet found a way to make politicians care about them.

With all of this evidence about the financial feasibility of free tuition and the obvious benefits to students, who wouldn't be saddled with debt, Macdonald says there's clearly only one reason free tuition isn't in the works today.

"It's not an economic issue: it's purely a political issue as to whether or not this is what we want."

Follow Tannara Yelland on Twitter.

On Monday at the National Oral Health Conference, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), in association with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), announced that they're lowering the amount of fluoride they recommend pumping into America's water supplies.

In an interview, Deputy Surgeon General Boris Lushniak defended the practice of fluoridation, and said that the new recommendation comes after opponents of fluoridation have had their say."We listened to the concerns of the people in the United States, but the science is behind us: Fluoride prevents tooth decay," Lushniak said.

The decision to decrease the amount of fluoride in drinking water comes after four years and 19,000 public comments made to the HHS—18,500 of which, Lushniak said, were all form letter from an organization he wouldn't name.

Fluoridation is an oddly controversial subject and has been for years; if you're familiar with conspiracy theories about it, that's probably because it was parodied by Stanley Kubrick in Dr. Strangelove. But there are plenty of present-day, nonfictional people who believe the chemical is a nefarious plot. Infowars' Alex Jones, for one, believes that the fluoride program is allowing the government to pocket "financial windfalls," from someone who is "mass medicating the public against their will."

On Monday, Jones's website linked to the Associated Press piece about this new fluoride recommendation, but did not editorialize about it. But commenters didn't hold back in expressing their displeasure:

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The CDC attempted to address these concerns earlier this month in its latest statement on fluoride. In it, the agency once again touted it as "1 of 10 great public health achievements of the 20th century," a reference to their official top ten list.

Related: For more water controversies, check out our documentary about America's tainted waterways.

That report pointed to a systematic review of water fluoridation that found no documented links to a huge laundry list of problems including heart disease, cancer, Down syndrome, low IQ and Alzheimer's, brittle bones, kidney problems, or even the notorious fluoride allergy.

You get the sense that government health officials are really, really sick of disproving these accusations. "I want to dispel the idea of danger related to fluoride," Lushniak said. He pointed to a specific report from 2006 that exonerated fluoride as a cause of health problems. (Anti-fluoridation activists, most prominently a scientist named Robert J. Carton, took issue with this report, naturally.)

So why reduce the amount of fluoride at all? Lushniak said the previous recommended amount sometimes caused "white marks" on the developing teeth of people who are now getting too much fluoride thanks to the additional fluoride in their toothpaste or mouthwash. "I'm readjusting the standard based on the fact that other sources of fluoride are available," he said.

Lushniak says he's heard from plenty of people who are worried about fluoride."We looked through all this," Lushniak said. "We answered the questions, and we feel more confident than ever that we're making the right decision."

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

I love a good racing simulator, I really do. I've played more Gran Turismo than I can remember, F1 2013 is one of my most played games on Steam, and just a few days ago I bought Milestone's motorbike sim, Ride, which I'm loving. But you know, sometimes I just want to crash a pickup truck into a busy crossroads. No game series quite has Burnout's mix of high-speed arcade street racing and pure mayhem and destruction.

2002's Burnout 2: Point of Impact was one of the first games I ever played on the PlayStation 2, and it was probably the game I played the most. The reason for this was simple: the crash mode. It was glorious. The goal was simple: drive really fast into traffic at a junction in order to cause as much carnage as possible. The more you smashed everything up, the more points you got. What's not to love? The regular race modes were awesome, too, so insanely fast that through sheer speed alone the game delivered challenge to arcade-style driving that could seem lackluster in other titles. But it was the crash mode that made this game unique and meant it is the game I remember most fondly when I think of Burnout.

The removal of the crash mode in 2007's Dominator was a huge loss to the series, and it never came back. The following year's Burnout Paradise (which provides the screenshot above) was a great game for many reasons—there was a huge choice of vehicles, the open-world setting wasn't overused at the time, and the racing was fun. But without something a bit different to change it up when I got bored of main game, it didn't hold my attention for very long. There were a lot of modes in Paradise, but they all revolved around the same principle: drive really fast from one place to another. Sometimes you had to ram other drivers off the road, sometimes you had to avoid being wrecked yourself, but you were always just driving really fast from one place to another. Driving really fast into a bus is so much more satisfying.

There seems to be a bit of an obsession at the moment with making racing games super serious. You either have simulators like the aforementioned Gran Turismo and F1 games, or you get arcade racers like Need for Speed with dull racing mechanics that they try to spice up with some kind of ridiculous story that nobody ever cares about. Realistic racers can be fun, but games are at the stage now where it's really quite easy for developers to make a car (or motorbike) look photo-realistic. The upcoming Project CARS has been preceded by trailers full of very pretty car models and hugely detailed interiors, but these aren't things we haven't seen before. Every time a racing sim comes out it claims to be the most realistic, or the best-looking yet, but really there is very little difference between most of them. There are some less serious racers out there, granted, but other than Mario Kart they don't get much publicity. And Mario Kart doesn't actively celebrate your effort in causing traffic collisions.

The only racing game around right now giving us something like the Burnout experience is the early access title Wreckfest. Developed by Bugbear Studios, it could be considered a spiritual successor to FlatOut, the demolition derby and stunt driving series. The trailer on Steam is full of rusty old bangers crashing into each other, and bits of metal flying all over the place. It's the only racing game around in 2015 where the goal is destruction over actually winning races. (Or, at least, the two are placed on an even keel.)

But while Wreckfest does look good, it's not quite the same as Burnout. The racing isn't as fast and there is no dedicated crash mode. A demolition derby is cool, but it's still a race in the sense that it's a competition to see who comes out on top. The crash mode in Burnout pitted you against the game, not other players. There's also the fact that Burnout is road, not track racing. It not only encourages you to recklessly endanger civilians, it rewards you for it.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/RtMZoAHTXNU' width='560' height='315']

Some Germans having fun with 'Burnout 2: Point of Impact'

With Burnout Paradise, developers Criterion made a truly awesome game. That was the last proper Burnout (2011's Crash! doesn't count) and it came out so long ago that, surely, it's time for a new one: more high-speed racing, even more cars being sent flying through the air in slow-motion, and the old crash mode (please). Alas, such a release seems unlikely. Criterion is working on a new IP, but apparently the Guildford-based studio is moving away from cars. While I'm sure their new game will be great—it apparently has helicopters, planes, and ATVs, among other things—the fact that there might not ever be another Burnout makes me sad.

So I suppose there's only one course of appropriate action. Dig out the old PS2, stick Point of Impact in the disc drawer, and drive into things, fast.

Follow Andrew on Twitter.

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Family friend Jerome at his Hervey Bay store Dundees in 1989, Queensland. The building is now a chain grocery store.

They're known as corner shops in New South Wales, delis in South Australia, and dairies in New Zealand, but a "milk bar" is where Victorians go to buy Chico rolls, five-cent lollies, and several different types of white bread. They're vestiges of a 20th-century childhood and, sadly, they're on the way out. Which all explains why a guy from Melbourne named Eamon Donnelly is documenting them.

A graphic designer and photographer, Eamon self-published a book of milk bar photography a few years back. He didn't think it would go anywhere, but he started getting letters from shop owners around the country, along with their old photos. Spurred by their support, he's been compiling photos and interviews for another book to be released next year. We thought we'd see how he's going.

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Port Melbourne milk bar

VICE: What do you find so interesting about milk bars?
Eamon Donnelly: It's sort of complicated but I'll start at the beginning. A few years ago I started to look for 1980s coffee table books. There was one called A Day in the Life of Australia, published in 1981, the year I was born. So I was flicking through and something just clicked. The 1980s! It just seems to me to be the archetypal Australian period. I remember the summers, the color, the fashion, the excess, and there was just so much money everywhere. I think of the 1980s as a happy time.

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Eamon (far right) with his cousins drinking Fanta in a Geelong Milk Bar in the mid 1980s. Photo by Mal Donnelly (Eamon's dad)

And where did milk bars fit in?
Well part of that memory for me was milk bars. The street where I grew up had a milk bar run by a husband and wife—Peggy and Dave. And one day I wanted to go back and have a look, maybe even buy an ice cream. So I drove over but it was gone, replaced by a naturopath. The only remnant of the shop was a few tin signs on the side. One for the Age and the other for the Sun.

So I got thinking, Whathappened to milk bars? I started taking photos to capture them, first on Polaroid but then with digital SLR. Since the first book I've built up an archive of around 300, maybe 350 different milk bars around the country.

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Hotham Street milk bar, Balaclava

You must have dug up some history in your travels.
I have. The milk bar is an Australian invention. A Greek migrant named Joachim Tavlaridis opened the first in 1932. At that time a lot of Greek migrants were moving to America, as well as Australia, and Joachim visited family in Chicago and saw they were opening shops called soda parlors. So he came back to Sydney with a similar idea, but instead of soda he'd sell milkshakes. At Sydney's Martin Place he opened the first milk bar called the Black and White 4d Milk Bar. And it was a huge hit. So other Greek immigrants copied the idea and within about five years there were thousands around Australia and New Zealand.

Over the years, corner stores and milk bars became the same thing, as they were the go-to business for migrants. So all the Greek and Italian migrants bought the corner stores from the Irish and English immigrants from the previous generation, but started selling all this exotic food from back home. This is why in SA and WA they're called delis.

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Darebin Road milk bar

And what have you observed about them now?
They're on their last legs. The thing that owners have told me is that they used to be open seven days a week, whereas the supermarkets were closed weekends. Now supermarkets and 7-Elevens are open all the time and they just can't compete. A few owners have told me their money now comes from cigarette sales. So these days they basically sell bread, cigarettes, and newspapers, but no one buys newspapers either. Not a lot sell hot food any more, or milkshakes. It's sad, but then it's just change. I'm trying to archive this change.

You can check out Eamon's various milk bar projects here. He also runs the the Island Continent, a site all about Australian nostalgia.

Follow Julian onTwitter.

Steven Braddy, better known as SDotBraddy, has been working his way through the ranks of the Miami rap world since 2012. He's part of C9, the collective helmed by Denzel Curry, one of South Florida's young breakthrough hip-hop artists. C9 artists are all over Braddy's upcoming LP, Private Sessions, and the collective's talent and versatility on the record solidify C9's place at the top of the scene. "D.A.B.S." is his second single—a slow-paced R&B rap track chronicling a drug-infused night of sexual shenanigans with 6LACK on vocals. Check it out.

Listen to more SDotBraddy on his Soundcloud.

Konami let Silent Hill die a long time ago. It hadn't really been on anyone's mind for some time anyway, not before Gamescom last summer. Then Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro's Silent Hills was secretly announced through P.T., which quietly took up the immediate mantle of the most obscenely horrifying game of all time when Sony made it available that day as a free PlayStation Network download for PS4.

Suddenly, all the poor intervening years after development unit Team Silent released their swan song Silent Hill 4: The Room (and then scattered to the winds, probably not by choice) didn't matter. The festering pustule that developed from a succession of lesser developers over the series' catatonic shell was lanced off in an instant. If anyone could bring Silent Hill back from the brink it was Kojima, and players soon learned that this hour-long nauseating genre gut-punch was his proof.

But on April 27th 2015, Konami killed Silent Hill all over again, confirming what realistically we all already knew. Silent Hills is dead.

Of course it is. The evolution of Konami's increasingly bizarre public divorce proceedings with Kojima has been less than kind (or rational). As soon as word started going around last month that Metal Gear Solid's eccentric creator would leave after finishing MGSV: The Phantom Pain, I began making my peace with the death of Silent Hills. It was inevitable fallout.

Yes, losing Silent Hills is a travesty. But the real crater left from all this scorched earth—one much easier to simply miss in the massive shadow of Silent Hills' fresh corpse—is that Konami is pulling P.T. from PSN, effective almost immediately.

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Norman Reedus as he appears in "promotional material" for 'Silent Hills'

That's right: On April 29, the most horrifying piece of interactive entertainment ever to grace the medium will be gone. If you own a PS4 and somehow haven't already added it to your collection, stop what you're doing and download it now. Even if you're too scared to do more than just sit in the strange little cement room where the game opens, staring at a hefty door leading into a hallway from hell. Even if you never play it at all.

Because whether you're a fan of Silent Hill or are interested in P.T. or Kojima or even if horror is no longer really relevant to you, this is something that we should be holding on to, however we can. The more copies downloaded, the better. P.T. had already elevated itself beyond its secondary status as a tool of viral marketing—just look at how many game of the year lists it managed to haunt at the end of 2014 if you need convincing. And now, thanks to Konami, it's become a piece of history, worthy of preservation beyond a mess of incoherent Let's Play videos archived on YouTube.

The publisher apparently disagrees. No explanation was given when a small disclaimer popped up on the P.T. site over the weekend saying that distribution of the game would end imminently, even what it meant for Silent Hills was pretty clear. And the reasoning to kill off P.T. is easily justifiable from a strictly corporate standpoint: you can't have promotional material out there in the wild advertising a cancelled product.

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The Tokyo Game Show trailer for the now-canceled 'Silent Hills'

The problem is that Konami evidently sees P.T. as only that—promotional material. Yet when Kojima Productions decided to use its Fox Engine to create a self-contained narrative game (which undoubtedly had nothing to do, whatsoever, with what Silent Hills would've been) any value it had as marketing, exclusively, fell away.

In fact, if you hacked off the ending credits that announce Kojima, del Toro, and the Silent Hills name, you would have a perfectly intact bite-sized nightmare inexplicably featuring actor Norman Reedus. And that's fine. And so long as you own it, P.T. can live on as its own autonomous thing.

In the interest of damage control Konami has been quick to tell Silent Hill fans that they're committed to the franchise. Their prepared statement over the death of Silent Hills offered reassurance that they intend to keep producing new titles featuring the town that takes all. As for any further involvement from Kojima or del Toro, talks are stated as being "currently underway."

Still, given Konami's track record with some of their most beloved series, it's hard to put much stock in this. For starters, they've spent the last month wiping out (almost) every mention of Kojima's name (or that of KojiPro, or the Fox Engine) from the games he's worked on. Silent Hill itself has been passed around various Western studios for over a decade now, with little to show for it but surface-level lip-service to the disturbing abstract iconography Team Silent made synonymous with the series in the first place.

Then there was the negligent treatment of the paltry Silent Hill HD Collection. The remaster was so inexcusably broken—it shipped full of bugs, frame rate issues, and a horrible lack of atmospheric fog, the fucking heart of Silent Hill, due to porting from incomplete code—that a lot of fans flat-out refused to support its release.

And let's not get into how the recognizable marketability of Pyramid Head or those, uh, sexy no-face nurses have yielded cheap cash-ins like the Silent Hill gear teenage goths wear, and two absolutely abysmal movies. One of those ended with Pyramid Head heroically playing bodyguard to the film's protagonist. In a word: shit.

I could go on. Koji Igarashi, the long-time designer credited with creating and honing the best elements of Castlevania, seemingly languished in his last few years at Konami before eventually exiting the company in 2014, leaving Spanish developer MercurySteam to take the reins (for a time, anyway) on developing the series' Lords of Shadow games. With LoS 2 a financial failure, there's been no further word on what future Castlevania might have.

Contra, maybe now a niche throwback to the 8- and 16-bit eras (much like its shmuppy spacefaring cousin, Gradius), has had a few attempts at revival too, the most recent being a familiar flaming "C" teaser played during a pre-E3 press conference in 2011. It never amounted to anything.

Finally, while the company will maintain a presence in the London and Tokyo markets, Konami voluntarily took itself off the New York Stock Exchange last week due to low profits, news I only discovered in the midst of writing this piece. In light of all this, the cancellation of Silent Hills doesn't seem like just a temporary setback—it could well end up being the death rattle of a true video game dynasty.

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A typically gross screen from 'P.T.'

Despite the laundry list of often baffling decisions with their classic properties, Konami's history of ambivalence isn't that surprising. It's a company that's by all appearances run by the kind of rigid internal business philosophy that's prevalent in a lot of conservative Japanese publishers. (Sega and Nintendo are two other good examples. Why can't we just have Generations' classic 2D fat Sonic back?)

Maybe more notably, Konami's gaming division also takes a backseat to pachinko and casino entertainment, among other things, so you can see how some of the internal logic over the past 10 or 15 years might've gone. Silent Hills and P.T. are just the latest casualties.

All this is to say that with this kind of mindset, you can see how snuffing out the existence of P.T. might not necessarily be seen as a big deal—or worthy of consideration in any capacity—to Konami management. But for everyone else it is, or it should be.

More than film or books or television, video games are a medium more often than not saddled with an inexorable sense of disposability, whether it's through the crucially limited lifespan of strictly server-based experiences or the homogenous yearly sequels that plague the most historically profit-heavy sectors of triple-A development. Why should P.T. be any different?

Maybe we should raid the Louvre and piss on the Mona Lisa. Or take a sledgehammer to poor Richard III's remains before he's ever able to enjoy being back in the ground at proper rest. Or go torch a library, or a record shop.

You get the idea. So what if games are just stupid idiotic childish playthings compared to the incongruous, inconceivable weight of history—that doesn't mean they're not part of culture, too. Record-keeping is as important here as anywhere else, otherwise the medium really isn't anything more significant than an endless deluge of playable commercials to be thoughtlessly consumed.

Regardless, it's not like Konami can do much to stop P.T. from propagating after it's pulled. Copies of the game will surface online. Modders will probably figure out how to get it to run either on its native PS4 hardware, or PC. The homegrown community that's dedicated itself to utterly mental conspiracy theories about it is only likely to grow.

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Oh god oh god oh god...

Sure, the publisher technically retains property for stuff like this—though really, once something as cultish as P.T. is disseminated into the online sphere, publicly, it arguably belongs more to the fans. And if you're reading this after the fact: You should find a way to play it, somehow.

Konami's future isn't clear, and it's possible that the writing's been on the wall for a long time. I can vividly recall stumbling on their strangely bare booth on the show floor at 2014's E3: a large, nondescript white box and a couple of velvet ropes leading to small flanking showcase interiors on a barren spread of thick carpet. No giant statues or murals, no flashing lights, no game logos, no games. (They decided to hang up a few small MGSV posters on the second day.)

It may be that the space was dreamt up to affect a sort of hip minimalism, made to pop against a sea of garish visual noise. Instead it had an opposite, concerning effect; its hasty-looking plastic shell sagged by measure of E3's carnival aesthetic, giving the impression of something sad, something not quite all there.

What happens next is anyone's guess. But putting aside their history of past mistakes, it's still bittersweet to see what's become of Konami's somewhat soiled legacy. It, like P.T., deserves better.

Follow Steve on Twitter.

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Ostamas' Facebook status was updated on the weekend.

Bushie was reportedly from Little Grand Rapids, a First Nation community in northern Manitoba. His niece, Amanda Martin, told CBC News that she hadn't heard from Bushie in more than a month and that she worried about his safety when he travelled to Winnipeg. She says her uncle had been staying at a boarding home for First Nations people in the city.

As for whether police are characterizing Ostamas as a serial killer, Superintendent Danny Smyth wouldn't say for sure at a press conference Tuesday.

"I don't know if there's a definition for a serial killer, but three murders is significant," he told reporters.

According to his Facebook and Google+ pages, Ostamas claimed to have lived in LA and attended the New York Medical College. A spokesperson from the College told VICE that they have no records of him ever attending. While it hasn't been confirmed that he lived in LA, we do know that he enjoys taking selfies with beer and listening to Biggie Smalls.

Smyth said that police believe Ostamas was "familiar with at least two of the victims" and that he was known among staff at homeless shelters across the city, including the Siloam Mission. On Monday, police removed several dumpsters from the alley behind Siloam in connection to their investigation, but haven't said why.

As VICE reported this morning, Siloam's deputy director, Laiza Pacheco, says that while these murders are rare and horrific, such acts of violence are in keeping with the broader culture of violence against homeless and other vulnerable populations in the city.

The Winnipeg Police will be contacting other jurisdictions in Canada where Ostamas might have travelled, but did not say whether he is involved in any other unsolved crimes in Canada. He reportedly has a history of violence, including being involved with instances of assault in the Thunder Bay area dating back to 2002.

Ostamas is scheduled to appear in court on Wednesday morning.

Follow Rachel Browne on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Fist-­bitingly embarrassing mash­ups? Impassioned monologues from Martin Freeman? Spoofs of boy bands that belong int the 1990s? How did this happen? Party political broadcasts (PPBs) were originally intended as a simple broadcasting gambit to differentiate parties on dryly literal lines. They were a logical extension of the BBC's paternalistic desire to educate and inform. For these short slots at least, they didn't bother to entertain.

Or did they? Let's think of PPBs as sleeper hits, the kind of work that takes time to mature and penetrate but finds its audience in the end. Because actually, not only do old PPBs tell us plenty about their eras but they're funny too. Sometimes funny peculiar. But still funny.

Take this 1955 effort from cadaverous Tory Harold MacMillan. It begins with a dynamic, lingering shot of—ta­da!—a leaflet. And then, we meet the man himself, cutting a patrician yet still oddly rakish figure in what he no doubt referred to as his drawing room. It's as if the nation has been summoned for a telling­ off. It's simultaneously wooden and patronizing.­ MacMillan adopts the tone of a man trying ­for the fifteenth bloody time to teach a class ­full of slow-­witted schoolchildren how to tie their laces. "Here's a picture of what we've done" he dully intones at one point. "Let's look at it together." Ooh yes, let's. And thanks again, Harold. You really are a brick. Let's just say it's a long six minutes.

So thank goodness for the Labour party and their effortless gift for showbiz.

In 1959, one Anthony Wedgwood Benn was the party's poster boy. And it has to be said that his opening chair swivel to camera, during which he resembles the world's least threatening Bond villain, has "future Glastonbury headliner" written all over it. We're told, with some pride, that the broadcast is coming "direct from Labour's Radio and TV Operations Room in London." But there's lots of talk about "Hugh Gaitskell's national tour"­ which probably did a roaring trade in T-­shirts with the dates on the back. Also, look out for a guest appearance from Albert Steptoe, presumably representing all working class people, ever.

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Patronizing the lower orders has never been a single party speciality. From a Labour point of view, what followed was decidedly mixed. They spent parts of the next dozen or so years in office. But their relationship with the camera and the TV studio remained uneasy.

In 1970, for example, they pushed the boat out. The intro music is incongruously laid back and groovy the kind of thing Astrud Gilberto might have listened to while sipping a late ­afternoon Caipirinha. And it's a University Challenge spoof which must have seemed very clever at the time. Sadly, it's introduced by a man with hardly any teeth which doesn't really feel like a subliminal suggestion of prospective health and happiness. The resulting sketch actually manipulates time itself—it manages to fit more dead air and longueurs into its three minute duration than seems technically possible. Still, back then at least Labour had Harold Wilson, with his pipe, his half­pint mug of warm bitter, and his general air of dangerously bohemian outlaw glamor.

By 1974, things had got real. Doom and despair stalked the land. Not for the last time, we wondered if a posh, jowly Tory might save us. We never learn, do we? This Labour Party film is so self-­consciously gloomy and austere, you half-expect Ted Heath to start weeping and rending his garments before climactically leaning to one side and blowing a candle out on our dreams. The effect is to make you go: "Jesus, this guy's depressing. Let's vote for someone else." Which shortly afterwards, we did.

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In the 1979 Conservative effort, Margaret Thatcher seems almost imploring. She's Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest explaining why the chemical cosh is the only solution. "Don't worry," she simpers. "We'll look after you." It's the most sinister bedtime story you've ever had a nightmare about.

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By 1987, Thatcher's final broadcast, she's initially an ambient presence. Perhaps she's now too important to even bother with the trifling matter of going on TV? Instead we're treated to a Labour Party magician who performs a number of policy tricks that don't work—get it? But no, eventually she appears, in an overloaded and maximalist climax; to admonish, to sneer, to just simply gloat. Finally, a valedictory segment of breathtaking arrogance shows her bestowing blessings on grateful cub ­scouts, waving magisterially and admonishing foreigners and socialists while what appears to be a mash­up of "Pomp and Circumstance" and the Hawaii Five-­0 theme plays in the background. Loathing Thatcher's various miserable bequests to the nation is one thing. But it's hard not to watch this and feel faintly, guiltily impressed by her sheer, berserk chutzpah.

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After Thatcher, the next era struggled to be born, living as it was, with the mother of all political hangovers. It was 1997 that saw the next paradigm shift as PPBs entered the celebrity age. Initially, this resulted in what might be the definitive Liberal Democrat broadcast as John Cleese takes a few minutes to think aloud about why the party he's endorsing isn't going to win. Can we draw a line between his wry bafflement and Nick Clegg's desperate 2010 power grab? Probably. For years, they'd been wondering why nobody gave a toss about them. Finally, they just quit the soul­-searching and decided to become Tories.

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Still, you could easily argue that this self­-effacing offering has more dignity than this 1997 Labour monstrosity. Pete Postlethwaite came to be rightly regarded as something of a national treasure. But he probably went to his grave regretting his turn as a ghostly, creepy, and unrealistically right­ on taxi driver in this wildly overblown short film that resembles something Richard Curtis might have made in his sleep.

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It didn't matter though. Because the Tories had given up. No famous people wanted to be friends with John Major. Well, maybe Peter Stringfellow and Jim Davidson did but commissioning a PPB containing cameos from them would have been a punt. So instead, we got this desultory affair which scrolls through its autopilot list of idle threats before basically shrugging its shoulders and slouching off to suggest William Hague try wearing a baseball cap to the Notting Hill Carnival.

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The eventual effect of the Blair years was a kind of post­-ideological, managerial, flattening ­out of mainstream politics. Even aside from its more pernicious effects, this has led to a decline in the general levels of unselfconscious absurdity that used to make PPBs such a reliable treat. But since this homogenization has resulted in the rise of multi­-party politics, it seems fitting to end with the only party political broadcast that anyone's really noticed this time. Is the Green Party's boyband spoof funny? Kind of, in a faintly self­-satisfied, Radio 4 panel show sort of way. Has it been effective? Well, it got a lot of shares and retweets. Whether that amounts to success is moot but at least they tried. Still, when the alternative is having Natalie Bennett saying stuff, it's probably tempting to think outside the box.