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Cover art detail from 'TimeSplitters: Future Perfect.'

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

I don't remember much of my second year of university. I just remember my room. Days bleeding into one another as I listened at my door to make sure my housemates weren't around before I crept out to get food.

At the start of the year I had tried to kill myself for the first time. Thankfully I didn't do my research and woke up in hospital, but the angst I felt for trying and failing, and the stigma around it, crushed me. My Asperger syndrome hopped into the party and convinced me that everyone would judge me. The result of this ultra combo of neurosis was that when I was released from hospital, I retreated to my room and stayed there.

The situation was dire. After a few weeks, my friends had stopped trying to get in touch and while I was keen to socialize again, I felt too drained to leave my room. My housemates often had parties, but jumping straight in was overwhelming. I was welcome, but couldn't really connect. I felt isolated and the situation seemed hopeless.

I wasn't expecting respite to come from a lurid arcade shooter. One night, I was washing up in the small kitchen next to the living room as a TimeSplitters: Future Perfect tournament rocked the lounge. It'd been months since I'd played a video game; my own Xbox 360 sat under a thick layer of dust. I watched for a while before shyness overcame me and sent me scurrying back to my room.

TimeSplitters is a multiplayer FPS from the makers of N64 classic GoldenEye 007. There was something about the mess of watermelons, monkeys, and explosions that kept drawing me back in. The game takes every cliché it can get and smashes them together: The average game could see you shooting everything from 70s cops to intergalactic space robots.

Over the next couple of weeks I ducked in and out quietly with nothing more than a polite nod. A series of unofficial house rules had created a code of honor for the players and spectators. Thanks to drunken spectators turning into commentators, I started to learn these ad-hoc rules: Any sort of mine was frowned upon and it wasn't how many but who you killed, and how, that gave you prestige.

Related: 'Maise,' our documentary about a 13-year-old girl sectioned under the mental health act

Past midnight one night, a knock came on the bedroom door. My housemate looked sheepish: "We're just about to play some TimeSplitters, fancy it?" My heart hopped up in my throat. Besides a brief smile and nod to the cashier at Tesco or the harried-looking guy that delivered from the Chinese place down the road, this was the first human contact I'd had in weeks.

Turns out I'm the fucking best at TimeSplitters. We laughed, we cried, we did that whooping thing that guys in their early 20s seem to do. We got really stoned. For the first time in months, I went to bed in a good mood.

Around midday the next day, another knock. Less apprehensive now, my housemate yelled through: "TimeSplitters in five!" I ended up playing the game a lot over the following month: it was easier to curl up in my living room than leave the house. Whenever I was worn out I could sneak back to my room.

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'TimeSplitters: Future Perfect' trailer.

The crowd of stoners that rocked up at my house night after night were always happy to play. Their mixture of acceptance and indifference helped me slowly drag myself out of my shell. Conversation stuck to easy topics with a rotating cast and nobody ever really asked any awkward questions about why I was always wandering the house in a pair of Teenage Mutant Hero Turtle pajamas that were a tiny bit too small for me.

Behind the inane characters and explosive weapons, TimeSplitters was an incredibly varied game. The time traveling plot device allowed designers to mix and match their tropes for level and weapon design, while the multiplayer aspect that made GoldenEye such a timeless classic had been revised and improved upon. A variety of competitive and silly game modes, and a map-maker, meant there could be hundreds of hours of content.

A few weeks later, three months after my attempt, I started to venture outside again. Little things like tagging along to the pub, or coming out to get a takeaway. Small adventures. Shortly after that I started to appear at the back of lectures, batting away the more awkward questions with a smile rather than feeling the urge to retreat.

Interested in contemporary culture? Read i-D

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A screen shot from 'TimeSplitters: Future Perfect.'

I'll always have a soft spot for Future Perfect for giving me a way to interact with others when I didn't feel able. It was instrumental in my recovery. When playing TimeSplitters, motives are pretty clear and socializing is easy. I didn't have to second-guess how someone was reacting to me, or whether they were judging: they were just screaming at me for killing them with a brick.

TimeSplitters helped me communicate. Games gave me that space. As many people with depression will tell you, it's easy to slip into a tailspin: Nothing is good, nothing will ever be good. You feel like a prisoner in your own head. For me, that was stopped by one very good shooter and a group of people who were tactful enough not to make a big deal of things while I re-learnt the ropes. While much is made of the incredibly toxic communities surrounding many of our most popular online games, the communities and friendships that form around local multiplayer games can be exceptional for helping people to deal with a range of issues.

Follow Jake on Twitter.

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Box art for 'Banjo-Kazooie.'

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Where were you when you first played Super Mario 64?

In the Virgin Megastore at the end of a blustery March day in your local town center, wearing your poppers, a carrier bag laden, watch-examining mom huffing and puffing beside you at the display unit? At the dodgy, smoky import shop frequented mainly by hardcore The King of Fighters fans? Or were you in your sad little bedroom on Christmas Day, having been finally, finally been allowed to leave the table?

Everyone remembers where they were the first time they nudged the N64's analogue stick and made a three dimensional Mario move—it's modern gaming's very own JFK moment. The tappity-tap of his little feet on the dusty floor. The butterflies flapping around the directional signs, and the rush of Lakitu's majestic camera sweeps. The sheer, orgasmic, indescribable joy of interacting with a proper 3D environment for the first time. It was absolutely breath taking.

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The beginning of an amazing adventure.

Perhaps even more astonishing, and as terrifying as it may be to believe, Princess Peach invited us to the castle to eat cake almost 20 years ago. We've had nearly two decades to digest the importance of Miyamoto's 3D masterpiece, and to observe whether Super Mario 64 could truly stand the test of time, and retain its crown as the most essential 3D platformer ever made. Nobody could deny the game is teeming with genre-defining moments. Those initial seconds frolicking in the castle grounds. Pissing around in the powdery, accordion-soundtracked glacier of Cool, Cool Mountain. Bowser's never-ending staircase. The rendezvous with Yoshi.

But despite all this greatness, Super Mario 64 had a reasonably short-lived reign as king of the early 3D platformer. Why? Because in the baking hot summer of '98, a banjo-twanging bear and a kazoo-playing red-breasted breegull burst onto our crackly little analogue screens. This was Banjo-Kazooie.

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Even at the age of 13, I was already beginning to develop and nurture my life-defining aura of misanthropy, social awkwardness and general antipathy for modern industrial civilization. But no matter how black and stony my hormonal teenage heart, the sight of the N64 logo waddling into frame and a dorky looking bear ratatat-tatting the TV screen eased a grin across my face, and was a reassuring sign of the very colorful, very exciting, and very different things to come. This was going to be pocket money well spent.

Rare's setup for their flagship platformer is simple, just like Nintendo's—rescue the girl, end of. Tooty is to Banjo what Peach is to Mario, and she's been kidnapped by a green-faced witch named Gruntilda to steal her good looks, and who, brilliantly, speaks only in rhyming couplets. Kazooie gives Banjo a feathery wake-up call, and the two set off across the tutorial level Spiral Mountain and over into Grunty's Lair. And the greatest video game soundtrack of a generation kicks in.

Related: VICE's documentary on the growing world of eSports

Or if you prefer your games unplugged: The Mystical Universe of 'Magic: The Gathering'

The tens of tracks composed by Grant Kirkhope for Banjo-Kazooie are among my favorite ever collected, and give each of the cartoonish locales a weighty and unforgettable sense of place. The sand-flecked steel drum calypso of Treasure Trove Cove. Sleigh bells sparkling beneath the frosty music box pomp of Freezeezy Peak. The loopy funeral march of Mad Monster Mansion, a staple on my laptop, with its howling wolves, wailing synths, and harmonizing church organ. Perhaps best of all, Grunty's Lair's spin on the teddy bear's picnic theme alters accordingly depending on your location—bringing in pirate's accordion when you're near Treasure Trove Cove for example, and snake-charmer pungi when you approach the sand-blasted dunes of Gobi's Valley. Characters in the game don't have voices, but speak in a series of sampled noises—burps, squeaks, gurgles—which change in pitch to give the illusion of real conversation. Kirkhope's soundtrack is a fireworks display of aural color, personality, and place, characterized by the way each tune and noise plays out with subtle changes in tempo, rhythm, and melody throughout each of the impeccably designed levels.

And what a world this is. Every frame is bursting with imagination. Not just in the theme-park aesthetic of the main levels themselves—which drag the player across reptile-infested marshlands, smoggy industrial docks and a misty, Hammer-inspired haunted house—but it's also in the goofy animations, the snarky fonts, the way the water drips off Banjo's fur and the way Kazooie bursts from his impossibly small blue backpack. It's a world tied together wonderfully by Grunty's Lair, a hub which puts Mario 64's castle to embarrassing shame with its sketchy shortcuts, head-scratching puzzles and dripping, labyrinthine passageways. Navigating it and solving the cartoonish conundrums and Metroidvanian mazes within is a genuine delight. It'll make you feel clever, make you laugh, make you want to peer around every corner and into every cranny. It's a world that feels so alive, and one with such an agreeably lovable sensibility that the madcap reckless abandon of it all constantly threatens to escape the confines of the TV screen and overflow into your bedroom.

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The entrance to Grunty's Lair.

At the center of all this color and charm, there's the experiences. The moments. Banjo's quest for jiggies, Jinjos, Mumbo tokens, and musical notes is comprised of some of the most irreverent and satisfying tasks ever seen on a home console. Pick up an early jiggy and learn how to fire eggs by shooting them at a gorilla. Give a water-dwelling automaton some room to breathe at the surface of a rusty cavern. Scale a hundred-foot high snowman's scarf and grab the prize in his pipe. Make a sphinx sneeze. Play the notes on a giant church organ with a ghostly limb named Mozand. Eat more yumblies than Mr. Vile. Jiggy by jiggy, the game hurtles along at its own insane Looney Tunes pace, always accessible and always surprising.

Like your games with real balls? We've got a channel for that.

And just when you think the craziness is winding down for the as-standard boss battle and credits roll finale, Rare tear the texture-mapped rug from under your feet and plonk bear and bird into Grunty's Furnace Fun. Arguably the greatest gaming finale in N64 history, this deranged gameshow sequence has the player traversing a series of blocks, each posing their own questions and challenges, the cackling hag Grunty in the role of Bruce Forsyth. Which close-up screenshot was this level from? Whose voice was this? What does Grunty wash her hair with? It's full of itself, audacious, hilarious, and shatters the forth wall into smithereens. Step on over to the square, press A to try it if you dare.

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So after being baffled beyond belief when Banjo-Kazooie goes all Generation Game on your hapless little backside, you finally get to beak-bash Grunty's face in, grab Tooty, and probably flick off the N64 for another round of Control, No Oddjob, remote mines. (Oh, come on. GoldenEye 007, remember?) But theories surrounding the game's more obscure secrets hover in the air like a neon comedy fart. That ice key in Wozza's cave. The Stop N' Swop debacle, and the supposed compatibility with the sequel. The guys at Rare offering zero clarity and whipping message boards up into a knowledge feeding frenzy, even to this day. The fact that friendships can be forged through a mutual misunderstanding of the ice key enigma proves that Banjo is a veritable honeypot of self-awareness, conjecture, and mystery, and it's all the better for it.

Once Rare got bought to shit by Microsoft years later, I got all Banjo crazy again, fired up the original Kirkhope soundtrack and waited for news of a proper return to form. Banjo X? Banjo Threeie? Nope, what we actually got was 2008's underplayed and possibly under-appreciated Nuts n' Bolts, a hybrid platformer and sandbox style vehicle crash-'em-up the likes of which we still haven't seen repeated. It had the Banjo color, a novel central mechanic, and enough nods and nudges to the Banjos of old—especially in the sprawling theme park of BanjoLand—to keep the fans' willies wet until a real sequel arrived.

Which just got announced, by the way—albeit in a different guise. The guys who made the original Banjo-Kazooie have joined forces once again, this time under the name Playtonic, for a project that has become the fastest-ever video game Kickstarter to raise $1,000,000 in pledges. There's some very early gameplay footage floating around. And while we're all a little more sophisticated now, there's every chance it will be just as special as the games that inspired it. It's called Yooka-Laylee and your wallet probably just got 40 quid lighter.

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Artwork from 'Yooka-Laylee.'

When Banjo-Kazooie finally wraps up and all's said and done, you're left with the memories of those conversations with Bottles, the time you turned into a pumpkin, and the relief of finding that final cluster of musical notes. But Banjo's much more than that. It's a game that wasn't afraid to be juvenile and be clever at the same time. It's a game that understood the template perfected by Super Mario 64 and took it one step further, adding thick, rich layers of detail and personality where before there was little. It made one of video gaming's undisputed masterpieces seem lifeless and functional by comparison. It's still the essential early 3D platformer. And no other game has ever made me happier.

Follow Jonathan on Twitter.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Thomas Bidegain is a multiple award-winning screenwriter, perhaps best known for his collaborative work with director Jacques Audiard on films such as A Prophet and Rust and Bone. He had two films at Cannes this year: another collaboration with Audiard, Dheepan, which just picked up the prestigious Palme d'Or Award and rave reviews at the festival, and his own directorial debut, Les Cowboys. I saw the latter at a lunchtime screening in Cannes and there wasn't a single seat left in the theater. When the credits rolled, the place erupted with cheers, which doesn't happen at every screening you go to.

The film tells the tale of Kelly, a young girl who, we've learned, has left home and run away with her boyfriend, an Arab guy. Her parents discover material in her bedroom suggesting a conversion to Islam, and the film becomes a search for their daughter. The first chunk of the film is set during the 1990s, and her furious cowboy father is all screaming lungs and raging vengeance as he tries to find her. We then move on a generation as her more considerate and understanding brother continues to search for her. John C. Reilly stars as an American headhunter who they enlist to help find Kelly.

In the Q&A after the film, Bidegain said that he had essentially created a modern day Western—the film, as the title suggests, is set in a Cowboy community in France—only the traditional role of Indians is replaced with Muslims.

Was Bidegain questioning whether, like the Indians, Muslims are unfairly portrayed as savages and brutes? Was this a film that highlighted racism by employing its tactics within the narrative construct for illustrative purposes? Or simply a movie with racist overtones? It's a deeply engrossing and occasionally brilliant film, but I found it problematic in that it seemed to veer too far into the territory of Islamophobia without enough criticism. I arranged an interview with Bidegain to delve deeper into his controversial debut.

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We meet in the blazing midday sun at Cannes and he walks in wearing a suit, a great deal of which he has sweated through getting here on time. Before we start, Bidegain positions the ashtray and his black coffee on the table and lights up the first cigarette of many during our interview.

First, I ask the director about his primary motivations for the film; where did he get the idea? "It was several things," he says, in a thick French accent. "I read about a gang that was in France—the first jihadist group in Roubaix in the north of France. These people converted to Islam, went through Bosnia and came back with guns to spread terror in France for ten days. That's how I learnt about the first jihad, back during the Yugoslavian war."

Bidegain wanted to re-contextualize the jihad narrative against the backdrop of the Western after a friend showed him a book about people who dress up like cowboys in the French countryside. "There was a lot of dancing, horse-riding, things like that," he tells me. "I thought that would be a good setting, because you already had the hats on the people, so then you have a Western."

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Bidegain says his method of writing and directing is to inject enough personality to give it weight, but to hide it well enough as to not expose yourself: "If you put things that are very personal in the film, what is important is how you cover it. Film is a machine for revealing yourself. Every time you tell a story you reveal something about yourself, even if you're talking about something happening on Mars or a monster film in Japan. If you do it right—if you really care about what you do—then something will come out of you into that story."

This is how the Western influences came into play. As a child growing up watching Westerns, Bidegain felt more of an affinity for the Indians over the cowboys. "I'm Basque and my big brother, when we were kids, always said to me, 'Look at the Indians and think that they're Basque,' and that's the idea: that you can represent one minority with another," he tells me. "To me, that's something that's interesting."

Related: Watch our interview with the director of 'Mad Max: Fury Road'

As for personal affiliations with his films, in the instance of Les Cowboys, Bidegain says that having a son the same age of the disappearing daughter was a kind of narrative catalyst. "I had a son that was the age of Kelly when I was writing. You know, one year you're sat watching movies together and then, a year after—bam!" Bidegain clicks his fingers. "Just like that, we don't know anything, we don't know who his friends are, he doesn't want to see films with you, he doesn't want to hang out with you. The only thing you know is whether he has good grades at school. I think that's what the film is about—you can put the Western or the jihad thing away, and it's just, 'What do you do when your kid grows up?'"

So is conversion something to fear? "There are many different ways you can say 'fuck you' to your parents. I think Kelly—in my generation—would have gone to London and taken drugs in some squats, or 20 years before she would have gone to San Francisco and fucked everybody," says Bidegain. "There are always ways [to misbehave], and one way is to change your religion and move to Pakistan—that will do it. The fact is, we don't ever actually know what Kelly did; we don't find out where she's been."

How Hustlers Try to Scheme Their Way into the Cannes Film Festival

And what of the filmmaking process? Parts of the film were shot in Rajasthan, acting as Pakistan (it is these scenes in which a particularly strong John C. Reilly is most on screen). Bidegain describes the experience as strange. "It was very weird, because we shot there in January, and people told us to be very careful because we were near the frontier of Pakistan, an unstable part of the world, and as we were prepping the shoot there the Charlie Hebdo attacks happened at home.... the violence was actually taking place back in France. It was very intense for us; we were all listening to the radio on our phones, and I talked to the crew at that moment and everybody was really shaken. The only thing we could do was represent those people with truth—then you'll understand a little more and there will be less hatred. It's wishful thinking, but that's the only thing we can do as filmmakers—show that world."

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The message is still a little murky, as far as I'm concerned, but Bidegain stands his ground: "I think the message that it gives, although I don't know if there is any really, is something about acceptance or reconciliation. The father figure thinks he's a cowboy, and the Arabs are Indians and he will chase them. Later on, his son has opened up to the world. So there's a message of tolerance."

Ultimately, says Bidegain, this is the story of small people who have been thrown into the turmoil of the world and their destiny will change. "Basically, Kelly leaves and it changes the destiny of her family and the community. If you want to see a film about jihad then you will be disappointed, but if you want to see a film about a guy looking for his daughter then you'll get your money's worth."

Follow Daniel on Twitter.

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Photo via Flickr user David Gordillo.

This article originally appeared on VICE Serbia

Miki is a 50-year-old Serbian man with a real passion for travel. In fact, he likes it so much so that he's taken 88 return flights to Beijing in the past 15 years. That's roughly 807,000 miles covered. A fairly random achievement, but nevertheless, an impressive one.

Obviously he's not flying just for the sake of it. And no, this isn't some riddle where he ends up being the pilot or a steward or something. His job is a little more illegal than that. Miki sells knockoff Chinese-made clothes from his "boutique" in central Belgrade.

Recently, I got the opportunity to have a quick chat with Miki—who didn't want to reveal his last name—about his trips to China, his clients, and his future plans. Here's what he had to say.

VICE: Seems like you're a fan of China. How often do you go there?
Miki: Usually about ten times a year, although I did have a break for several years. I've been traveling there quite regularly for the last six years—almost every month, actually. I remember the first time I went to China in 1999—I was there to scope out business opportunities. All I had was the sketch of a map that a friend drew for me to show me where to go, which shops to visit, and which hotels to stay in.

Related, on Motherboard: The Chinese deep web takes a darker turn.

What sort of goods do you buy in China?
Mostly high-quality clothes: T-shirts, polos, hoodies, sweatshirts, shirts, skirts, sneakers, shoes, stilettos—that sort of thing.

How have you managed to make money off this when there are thousands of Chinese people selling their goods in Serbia?
We're not selling the same gear. They sell junk and I'm buying and selling premium stuff.

How often does one need to go to China to make an operation like this financially viable?
You only need to go there once to make money. But unfortunately things aren't as cheap there as they used to be. The country has seen incredible economic development lately. Some shop assistants are making up to £800 [$1,200] a month now. That said, they work 12 hours a day and only take one day off a month.

Do you only sell branded stuff?
Yes. Everything is really good quality: It lasts for six, seven years. Just like the original brands.

So, are they copies of the collection of a brand or are they the originals?
As you probably know, every international brand has their factory in China so what I'm selling is actually the original from the exact same factory. They just have different tags.

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Photo by Daniel Bukumirovic

Where do you buy all this stuff?
When I started, there was this one shop where I bought all my stuff from. Nowadays, the business has grown a little and I'm buying from several places. The better-known store is called the "Silk Market"—after that it's probably the "Russian Shed." There's actually quite a lot of Russians who are "reselling" merchandise from Beijing.

It can't be easy getting the stuff into Serbia?
I ship it. I can't tell you more than that.

You must know Beijing pretty well, having been there 88 times.
Quite well. I even dare to take public transport these days. I always book two nights at the same hotel. I eat in different places, though. Mostly restaurants that have been adapted to suit European tastes.

I suppose you're a Chinese food expert now?
Not really. I'm not a fan of their cuisine. To be honest, I eat at McDonald's quite a lot.

Related: Europe's Most Notorious Jewel Thieves

Have you managed to learn the language?
Nope. I know a couple of words, I guess. Language isn't really a problem anymore, though. The new generations over there speak fluent English. In the old days, we had to use some sort of sign language to communicate. Things are much easier now.

What's your average customer like?
A lot of middle-class Serbians still think it's expensive to shop in Belgrade's fancy malls, so my "boutique" is a bit more attractive to them—they can get the same things for less money.

Makes sense. When someone asks what you do for a living, what do you say?
Well, I just say that I sell Chinese stuff. I tend to leave it at that.

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Warning: spoilers about the fifth season abound.

Winter is no longer coming. It's here. As the fifth season of Game of Thrones heads towards its final three episodes, the White Walkers may not be marching their army toward the wall, but it's only a matter of time as everything else is going from bad to worse. Sansa is married to a psychopathic sadist who rapes her every night. Stannis's army (and when did Stannis become a good guy and our best hope for rescue?) is trapped in the snow. Meanwhile, Melisandre the Red Priestess is recommending sacrificing Shireen, Stannis's beloved daughter. Things aren't much better elsewhere. Both queens of Kings Landing are in prison with the city in the grip of a fanatical group of puritanical inquisitors. Daenerys is marrying a noble who represents everything she despises as a way to pursue peace, allowing slaves to kill each other in her honor, and her dragons seem to have gone feral. In Dorne, a plot that showed so much promise early on has either been played for laughs or been laughable when trying to be serious.

Meanwhile, somewhere in an undisclosed location, George R. R. Martin is trying to finish a book called The Winds of Winter . He better hurry, because when season five concludes, the HBO show will reach the end of the published source material.

'Episode 47: Inside the Episode'

Season five has been a troubling one. It aggressively veered away from the books, especially with Sansa's story. At first, the deviations were exciting, as she seemed to be finding herself as actor, rather than a passive pawn being dragged across Westeros. Alas, the show creators—David Benioff and D. B. Weiss—seem to have made this move only to increase the pathos of her eventual rape at the hands of her husband. Maybe within the next three episodes she'll become the agent of her own liberation, since Theon has betrayed her and Brienne is outside the castle, but I'm not counting on it. No matter what, many viewers (including me) are tired of the endless pattern in which female characters can only develop through abuse.

But there's another, subtler, impact of the changing relationship between the books and the show. This season has overlapped with A Dance with Dragons, book five of A Song of Ice and Fire. When the Benioff and Weiss cut characters and scenes from the show, as they have to in adapting the book, it reveals to readers that those characters weren't very important. Dorne wasn't just a site of liberated women with badass weaponry and poor impulse control in the books, but the site of a branch of the Targaryen family. Most readers expect there to eventually be three dragon riders, and there's a vast web of speculation about who they might be. As the show eliminates characters from the script altogether, our options are narrowing.

Meet Beau Wilmont, creator of 'House of Cards'

These options are going to narrow further. Either next spring, when season six starts, or possibly in the following year, Game of Thrones will plow forward while the books lag behind. Martin is a famously slow writer, and in a recent interview, admitted that he's still weighing major plot twists. Although it's important to him that the book comes out before the next season, he said, "Maybe I'm being overly optimistic about how quickly I can finish." Fans need to face the possibility that the show will become canon for the world, with the books lagging behind.

Martin has, of course, consulted with the show creators on the whole story . They know how it's all going to end. That's different, though, than providing scriptwriters with hundreds of pages of action, setting, and dialogue from which to draw. The writing of Martin has informed the voices in the script throughout; but that's likely to change.

As near as I can tell, this is basically unprecedented. Shows and movies have abandoned their source material from time to time, or gone past the limits of a narrow text, but the relationship between Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire is intimate and intricate, and I can't think of a similarly popular work, especially not in fantasy, in which the dynamic between book and show has switched like this.

Books and short stories, of course, have long provided the base for television shows and movies. Justified, which just ended a five-season run, was based on an Elmore Leonard novella . Given that the work is 60 pages long, the show ran past its source material quickly. Procedural shows like Bones and Rizzoli and Isles draw from books, but by their very nature, the shows quickly go their own way. Every episode has to have a mystery which the protagonists solve, in some sense doing the work of a whole book in 60 minutes with time for commercials. Dexter and True Blood, likewise, adapted characters and settings from books, but really only for the first and part of the second seasons. As both series progressed, the show creators used characters and settings to tell new stories that they thought would work best on the small screen. True Blood introduced multiple-POV characters beyond Sookie, while in Dexter the Ice Cream Truck killer is the only serial killer to appear in both the novels and the series. I see these shows as "inspired by" rather than adaptations of a linear work of narrative fiction.

There are, of course, widely successful adaptations. The BBC has just finished airing Wolf Hall, a series based on the first two novels by Hilary Mantel on Thomas Cromwell and the reign of Henry VIII. Had Mantel not finished the books, though, as a history drama, we know how the story ends (spoilers: Cromwell dies. Henry dies. We all die. Valar morghulis). Even just confining oneself to fantasy, the last few years of movie-making have featured many popular adaptions— The Hobbit, The Hunger Games, Twilight, and countless more.

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But imagine that the last Hunger Games movie was written, shot, and even released before Suzanne Collins had finished Mockingjay. It's not unthinkable. When Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone came out in 2001, only the first four books had been published. Had J. K. Rowling not managed to regularly churn out three more books from 2003 to 2007, Hollywood, rather than Rowling, might have provided our first depiction of the death of Dumbledore and the defeat of Voldemort.

That's what's going to happen with Game of Thrones. Whatever the final plot reveals, we'll see it depicted on HBO first, and only later get the chance to read it. So as seasons six and seven unfold, it's time to stop thinking of the books as canon. It will be the end of thinkpieces detailing how the show and books differ . Maybe this will be good—at their best, Benioff and Weiss have stripped away a lot of the excess in Martin's prose, presenting tightly-written and well-directed scenes that make for a better story. At their worst, their insistence on adding extra rape scenes and their obsession with Theon (I have yet to meet a fan who thought Theon was worth all the screentime. There's a reason that Martin did all the torture off page—not for squeamishness, but boredom with the character) drives away fans of the book and show alike.

Game of Thrones is a problematic show. As a fan, I think it's best to admit it and listen to people who have decided they're done. I, however, am a completist. I'm going to keep watching. I'm going to read. I still believe that the bad guys will be defeated, the Starks will be restored to Winterfell, and the dragons will burn the White Walkers to ash. I can't wait.

Game of Thrones airs on Sundays on HBO.

Follow David on Twitter.

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James Rodriguez. Photo via Facebook

"I had no plan to go anywhere at all, I was just hoping to walk, and by the time I was far enough I would be dead, essentially." This is what James Rodriguez tells VICE of his mindset on the evening of Sept. 3, 2014.

Rodriguez, a first-year English and drama student at the University of Toronto, says he was sexually harassed and drugged that night, before he cut himself, mixed prescription pills and alcohol, and walked to Queen's Park in downtown Toronto.

He spent several days in hospital before returning to his residence on campus. However, he found that he was no longer welcome.

Rodriguez is one of the 20 percent of Canadians who experience mental health issues, according to the Canadian Mental Health Association. Suicide accounts for 24 percent of deaths for Canadians aged 15 to 24, making it the second greatest cause of death for that particular demographic.

But for Rodriguez, a gay Canadian of Asian descent, the rate of mental illness and risk of suicide is even higher. According to Rainbow Health Ontario, "LGBT youth face approximately 14 times the risk of suicide and substance abuse than heterosexual peers."

Rodriguez said after he was released from hospital he received a phone call from the dean of students and residence at Innis College, Tim Worgan. He said he was asked to leave residence, and told he could return in the winter semester with the recommendation of a psychiatrist.

"They kept recommending that I drop out for a year, or at least drop out for a semester and continue my studies after, because apparently they thought I would be a danger to myself and everybody in the residence," he said.

"One thing that really stuck [with] me is when I called out the dean on how inappropriate it was to kick someone out who was just traumatized, and his reply was [basically] 'you don't think people here were traumatized either?'"

A University of Toronto statement in response to VICE's request for comment said the school takes "the safety and wellbeing of our students very seriously. While we are unable to discuss specifics of a particular case, the university has a variety of services to support students during difficult times."

The university didn't wish to comment further.

Rodriguez said he spent the next week and a half looking for a new apartment while he crashed on friends' couches, and even spent a few nights in the university's 24-hour library.

He said he was offered different services when he met with Worgan, but the stress of finding new housing meant he had to put his mental health issues aside. He did begin to see a psychologist, but Rodriguez said, "He just wasn't a good fit for what I needed so I stopped seeing him."

Rodriguez then looked into a program under the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) that offers free counselling by psychology graduate students under supervision of a licensed psychologist. After being put on the waitlist, Rodriguez said he was eventually told the program was full.

Even if the program did have space, it probably wouldn't have been able to take him on, explained Dr. Judith Silver, a clinical and counselling psychologist at U of T.

"If people are actively suicidal, we generally don't take them on," said Silver. "Because we have students doing the counselling, they just don't have the experience to take on someone like that."

Silver said the program has seen more students contact them for counselling services in the past few years, something she credits to referrals from U of T's often-overwhelmed psychological and counselling services.

Rodriguez said he has considered seeking private help, but is deterred by the waitlists and cost. The Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) doesn't cover psychological services, according to the Ontario Psychological Association, which passed a resolution at its November 2013 board meeting keeping the hourly rate at $220.

While many Canadians do have some sort of health insurance, most plans provide between $300 and $1,000 a year for psychological services, according to the association. That's not nearly enough for weekly or even monthly treatment.

Rodriguez said he did consider seeking psychiatric (i.e. medical doctors) help, which OHIP covers, but found another long wait list. "There's a long process that requires me to visit my family doctor and psychiatrist and I didn't really have the time to go to Cambridge," where his family doctor is, said Rodriguez.

This isn't the first time at U of T where a student's mental health issues have left them without a room in residence. Erin Hodgson, a former student at U of T, was "evicted by a vote of her peers several years ago after attempting to end her life," according to a CTV W5 documentary.

Hodgson went on to earn a postgraduate degree in Advanced Studies in Special Needs, and become a project lead at Jack.org, an organization dedicated to addressing youth mental health issues. It's named for Jack Windeler, a first-year Queen's University student who committed suicide in 2010.

Similar situations have occurred at other Canadian universities as well. Blake Robert, a student who was previously living in a residence at Acadia University, said she was "asked to leave" because of mental health issues, according to an article published in the Acadia University student newspaper, the Athenaeum.

"If someone you knew committed suicide, would you be comforted by the fact that it didn't happen on campus and instead she was sent off in time to die somewhere else?" wrote Robert.

The Ontario Human Rights Legal Support Centre, which provides legal counsel to individuals who believe they have experienced a human rights violation, has dealt with similar cases "involving discrimination in housing in university settings," according to the centre's manager, Grace Vaccarelli.

Housing providers, including universities, have a duty to accommodate someone with mental health issues, said Vaccarelli, unless they can prove that it would be "undue hardship" to do so. Undue hardship can be qualified in financial, health, or safety terms, she said.

"The duty to accommodate is on everybody, said Vaccarelli. "The university has a duty to accommodate, but so do the other residents in the housing."

The term "undue hardship" also means that "some hardship is due, so there is often a cost associated and there may be disruptions," she said.

Rodriguez said he wasn't given any information about a way to appeal the university's decision. He does not plan to pursue any type of action at this time.

"This entire situation made me feel like I didn't really want to be at U of T anymore," he said. "They do have programs for mental health and wellness and everything, however, it seems very inaccessible, it seems like you're treated like something really disposable."

Since the incident, Rodriguez said he's spoken with the dean of students to discuss how to better assess and deal with the situation in the future.

"I would say it was productive. It sort of benefits other individuals who—God forbid—end up going through this."

Follow Nadia Drissi El-Bouzaidi on Twitter.

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Animal rights protesters outside the Greyhound of the Year Awards. Photo by Chris Bethell.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

According to the UK's right-wing press, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) could soon be taken over by a bunch of human-hating extremists intent on ensuring that no animals are ever kept as pets. We are witnessing "a hardline attempt to seize power at the RSPCA," declared The Times. The Telegraph and The Daily Mail offered similar warnings.

The people in question are those running for the charity's ruling council, a 25-strong board of trustees, voted in by RSPCA members. Among them are several radical campaigners who were singled out to illustrate how this charitable institution is being infiltrated. However, while one candidate, Peta Watson-Smith, has compared factory farming to the Holocaust—quite rightly provoking fury—the shock-horror line of reporting says less about what's really happening than it does about a predetermined stance on the part of the papers.

Dan Lyons is another candidate, and CEO of the think-tank Centre for Animals and Social Justice, which works toward finding a way for animals to be represented in democratic systems. He has never set fire to an animal testing laboratory or sent a letter bomb to a politician.

"There seems to be an ongoing campaign being waged against the RSPCA by some of the media," Lyons told me. "I would speculate that it's motivated by a combination of factors, but a likely prime cause would be relationships between the executives of these outlets, hunting and shooting interests and parts of the Conservative Party."

Although the RSPCA told me the overwhelming bulk of their press is good and that some criticism is healthy and expected, when I did a search on The Times website these are the latest headlines relating to the charity: "RSPCA should forget foxes and focus on essentials;" "'Ban all pets,' says radical who wants to control RSPCA;" "'How we killed your cat was wrong,' says RSPCA;" "RSPCA takes heat off foxhunting;" "RSPCA zealots put down family cat for long hair;" "RSPCA to stop chasing hunts after backlash."

In other words, the RSPCA are a bunch of animal-murdering zealots with a penchant for lost causes. Not, perhaps, the most balanced way to describe an organization that, in 2013, answered more than 1.3 million calls about animal cruelty, rescued over 245,000 animals, and has been responsible for setting vital national standards for the treatment of farmed animals.

That even the moderate, respectable RSPCA has been tarnished with the brush of extremism is part of a wider shift that has seen animal rights campaigners resigned, in the public imagination, to the realm of patchouli oil and mad cow disease: unfortunate relics of our past, irrelevant today.

How did this happen?

The late 1980s through to the mid-90s were a heyday for animal rights activism. It was the cause of its day. But alongside teenagers giving up meat and wearing slogan T-shirts from The Body Shop, the movement's militant epicenter was becoming increasingly extreme.

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The ruins after activists from the Animal Liberation Front set fire to a boathouse at Oxford University in response to plans to build a primate laboratory on campus. Photo by Matt86C via Wikimedia Commons.

To begin with, gestures such as the Animal Liberation Front's attacks on furriers and its rescue of animals from research centers were viewed benignly. However, as humans, rather than property, became targets, opinion changed. In 2004, the Animal Rights Militia—which had been responsible for sending letter bombs to Margaret Thatcher and other MPs in the early-80s— dug up the body of Gladys Hammond as punishment to her family, who ran a business breeding guinea pigs for research.

The FBI branded the UK "the global center of animal rights extremism." Back home, the National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit was created to deal with animal rights protesters and, in particular, the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty campaign, which targeted Huntingdon Life Sciences, an organization that still tests non-medical products on thousands of animals every year.

The violence was a godsend for those who wanted to discredit the cause. Like other social movements that become too popular, focusing on the actions of an extreme few both makes a juicier story and is much simpler than looking into activists' demands.

Even without the fire-bombings of the past, there are valid criticisms to be made about animal activists and their campaigns. PETA's "Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur" crusade has been slammed for misogyny; the movement has tended to be overwhelmingly white and middle class; and with allies like Morrissey, any other bad press is just fluff.

Related: Watch our film 'Dog Days of Yulin,' about a festival in China where a bunch of people get together to slaughter dogs.

However, racism or a lack of intersectionality clearly isn't what the right is fussed about. Search for "animal rights" on the Telegraph website and these are the latest stories: "Kim Kardashian mobbed by animal rights activists during book signing;" "Animal rights blackmailer is jailed;" "Animal rights bomber dies;" "Animal rights saboteur is jailed." The message? Animal activists are dangerous criminals, end of story.

Veteran animal rights campaigner Kim Stallwood, once at the helm of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection and Compassion in World Farming, says that, in part, the movement has simply lost its sting because many big goals have been achieved: being vegetarian or vegan is now mainstream; cosmetic testing on animals has been banned across the EU (though household products are still tested); hunting wild animals with dogs has ( for now) been made illegal.

But there's more to do. In 2013, the RSPCA investigated more than 150,000 animal cruelty complaints in the UK; products you clean your house with are still tested on animals; the lives of most animals we eat are horrific. There are charities and campaigners out there doing good work, but putting your hand up as an animal campaigner is likely to be met with an eye-roll.

Whatever the reasons for the erosion of faith in animal activism, the establishment has long expected the movement's respectable face—people who put nuts out for birds, walk Labradors, and buy free-range eggs—to not ask too many questions or demand radical change. It's vital, therefore, that the biggest, most powerful and respected animal organization, the RSPCA, not get out of hand.

READ ON MUNCHIES: Animal Rights Activists Don't Want You to Swing Chickens for God

"One constant is the fear the establishment has over the RSPCA electing progressive people to its council," Stallwood tells me. "It's a longstanding battle because they don't want it to become a progressive organization. The last thing they want is an organization with so much public influence being over-critical of factory farming and animal research. The establishment financially benefits from all of this work on animals."

In fairness, the RSPCA is critical of farming practices and animal testing, and has been instrumental in bringing reform. But the organization, from necessity, works hard to remain middle of the road. "The extreme end of any ethos will always attract attention," a spokesman told me.

In the case of Lyons, this "extremism" means wanting policy reform that takes animal welfare into account. "The relevant policy fields in DEFRA, the Home Office, and across government have either been captured by animal harm interests or prioritize deregulation and economic growth over everything else, including animal welfare," he says.

These demands aren't outrageous. That our first reaction to the words "animal rights activist" elicits responses like "crusties," "lunatics," and "thugs" (replies to my not-very-scientific vox-pops) is convenient to those who profit from our complacence.

In the meantime, if Lyons is elected to the RSPCA council, he's expecting more bad press. "I don't see the mass media surrendering their allegiance to elitist, reactionary interests any time soon," he says.

Follow Frankie on Twitter.

Maybe you've heard that some of this summer's allotment of CGI skyscraper-snapping is going to come from a disaster movie called San Andreas, starring Dwayne Johnson. This might have left you with questions like "Where can I find a stupidly large screen to watch this stupidly large movie on?" and "Can Dwayne Johnson's year possibly get any better?"

But this fictional movie is about a real geological feature of the West Coast: the San Andreas Fault. Major earthquakes can happen along this underground ridge where two tectonic plates rub together, and they really do threaten California's population centers. That means in addition to the questions above, about the career of the giant, Canadian-America actor formerly named after a geological formation, San Andreas also raises questions about how much Los Angeles and San Francisco need to worry about geology-based catastrophes like the ones in the film.

To find out, we spoke to Dr. Lucy Jones of the United States Geological Survey. Jones, who has been described as LA's "earthquake czar," also serves as the science advisor on seismic safety to Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. She was kind enough to take a break from studying real catastrophes and advocating for earthquake safety measures to answer some of our questions about a movie.

VICE: So tell me about how the San Andreas fault can kill us.
Lucy Jones: I'm with something called the Science Application for Risk Reduction Project [SAFRR] at the United States Geological Survey, and one of the things that SAFRR does is create scenarios of big geologic disasters so people can prepare for them. We've gone through saying: "What's a big San Andreas earthquake gonna be like?" and we even looked into the possibility that we could be triggering offshore landslides that could create a much smaller—but still damaging—tsunami.

You studied tsunamis like the one in the movie?
Well the tsunami [in the movie] was ridiculous, but they had a nice thing where the hero recognizes that the water being pulled out from the harbor is a sign that a tsunami is coming. And when the heroine knows the tsunami is coming, she does vertical evacuation to get away from it. She has to go all the way to the fifteenth floor though, which is not realistic.

Could a tsunami hit LA?
Actually, here in Southern California the San Andreas is far enough away from the ocean that [in tests] we couldn't get big enough motion underwater to get a decent landslide, or any sort of tsunami. We also did a different scenario: an Alaskan earthquake creating a big tsunami. We were trying to make the worst one we could for Southern California, because basically our client was the Port of Los Angeles, and they wanted to understand what they should be preparing for. We had a hard time getting any tsunami close to this region.

We have a lot of nuclear waste here in California, kind of like in Fukushima. Is that a worry that's not in the film?
Nuclear waste storage is sorta crazy. We aren't willing to build repositories, so we leave it on an active fault. But it depends on how they're being stored. Because of earthquake engineering, our buildings are a lot stronger and it takes very strong shakes to bring them down.

Related: Here's some of what happened after Japan's massive earthquake in 2011:

In a worst-case-scenario earthquake, what kind of building collapses would we see?
The reality is that it's a relatively small percentage of the buildings. When we did an analysis, putting together all of our data about how buildings get damaged, and what are the buildings here in Southern California, we ended up estimating that 1,500 buildings would collapse.

But that's a lot!
That's out of about 5 million buildings. Only about one in every 5,000 buildings would actually collapse. It's about one in 16 that would have damage exceeding ten percent of the value of the building. That's not a level of damage you can see really clearly.

Would skyscrapers tip over sideways, like in the movie?
No, no. To fall sideways, you have to have an incredibly strong building to hold together, and only break at the bottom.

Has that ever happened before?
We've seen that once in Chile. There was a building that basically was quite good, except there was a defect on the first floor, and it ended up literally breaking off at the first floor and going sideways.

But modern skyscrapers could fall down too?
There's a difference of opinion. People are building them, and believing they're making them [strong enough]. We actually just got a seismogram—which measures how the ground moves—from Kathmandu that would be very hard on a very tall building.

Wait, you were recording the ground shakes during the Kathmandu earthquake?
We happened to have a seismogram in the basement of the US embassy. So we just got this record, and people are having a debate about it.

What are they saying?
Whether or not we could lose a high-rise is a matter of debate. We did address that issue—this was published in 2008—and we finally got a consensus in the engineering community that said given these ground movements, the collapse of a pre-1994 high-rise is a credible scenario. And this record from Kathmandu would support that.

Yikes!
So, it is possible that we might lose a few high-rises, but not most of them.

Well at least there's that.
And they aren't going to collapse from the bottom. It's gonna be more like 9/11 coming down.

Oh, no. That would be awful.
It would be awful, and there are a lot of unknowns. But it isn't all of [the buildings]. It isn't even widespread.

Another thing that worries me is that we get our water piped in from hundreds of miles away. I worry that those pipes and channels could break.
Yep. You got it. Do you know that I just finished a big program with the mayor of Los Angeles to develop a seismic resilience plan for the city? We took our model of what we think a big earthquake's gonna be like, and looked at what was preventable. And probably the biggest existential threat to the city of Los Angeles is the water system. You know, the water pipes break without earthquakes.

They sure do!
And 15 percent of the pipe in LA is more than 100 years old. I found out all sorts of facts about the water system while I was working with the mayor.

Was he cooperative?
We have a "commitment to a future of seismic resistant pipes." There are pipes that survive earthquakes. We know how to do it.

Can we start soon?
It'll cost billions.

The city council just passed a new budget last week, did it have seismic resistant pipes in there?
It didn't.

Oh.
The mayor has made a big, daring commitment to getting to that future. He's still working on how he pays for it. It's a long-term process. The main thing with the pipes is, how do you live here afterward? How do you get your economy going again? And then the other aspect is the fires. Trigger fires are going to be a big issue.

Oh, right. The fires.
If we lose a lot of water pipes, it could make it that much worse to control fires. In the movie, they do a good job with the fires up at Coit Tower.

Did they get anything else right?
They had the cell phones going out, and the young heroine knows to go and hunt down an old, copper landline when cell phones don't work. Which is a good point. The fiber ones require electricity.

What about where Paul Giamatti says to get under a desk during an earthquake?
It is accurate. He yells "stop, cover, hold on," and someone runs to a doorway, and he goes, "no, down under the table!" That part's all really good.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

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Look at Patrick Kyle's website and buy his books.

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Photo by Andi Schmiedfrom Tel Aviv Grannies Have Way More Fun Than You Do.

This article originally appeared on VICE Alps.

I don't know anything about love. For years, I've been wasting my time on senseless affairs, irrational flings that never result in anything. Despite this, I still don't think there's anything better than this sort of irrational young love, which leaves you ice cold at one moment and drives you completely insane the next.

I wanted to know if the kind of grandiose fairytale love we're raised to expect from life really exists. And I wanted to know what love means for people who have actually had experience on the topic. To find out, I spoke to three older ladies I met in a nursing home.

VICE: Does true love really exist?
Mrs. Kreil (73): Yes, true love does exist. For me it happens really quick.

Have you found it?
I found it, and I lost it. I've been divorced twice.

Related: What do old people think about rap?

And how do you know when it's true love?
You only really recognize it when you're older. I would say that when you're young you mostly imagine true love.

Mrs. Müller (75): I once found true love, but it ended 35 years ago, unfortunately. But I think that a younger person can recognize true love.

What have you learned about love over the course of your life?
Kreil: You feel much calmer about it with age.

Mrs. Huber (73): Yes, I think so too. Serenity comes with age.

Kreil: When you're young, you fall in love and you immediately think it's true love. When you're young, you fall madly in love very quickly.

Huber: And then later, you realize they weren't the right person. Over the years, you start to see everything from another angle. When you're young, you're just brash and like bashing your head into the wall.

Related: Watch our video about a home for older sex workers in Mexico.

How do you express love?
Kreil: I'm actually not that loving anymore. I think the ultimate demonstration of love is just being there for someone. I had years in which I was really needed, and I think that was enough of a sacrifice. That's love.

Huber: Love just gets a different significance as the years go by. In the last years of your life, you see things very differently.

Kreil: Yes, I think you're totally right. But I've seen it twice—older people falling in love and holding hands like teenagers.

Huber: I think that's cute, though.

Kreil: Well, I think it's astounding. Everybody wants that, but it isn't so easy to find.

Huber: I don't think it's just about finding it, it's about your way of thinking too. Because it all goes through your head. You think, you compare, you weigh it out. Like I said, I think love gets a whole new significance when you're older.

Kreil: And the men have changed so much—through all this emancipation of women.

Huber: Yes, the traditional divisions don't exist anymore. When I think back, my husband never took out the trash. Today it's normal for a man to do housework. When I look at my children—my daughter's husband cooks, helps clean up, and I'm happy for her. They just do it together.

In your old age, do you miss this irrational love that you feel when you're younger?
Kreil: I can't really speak about that. I got divorced twice, and I was really close friends with both men.

But have you had butterflies in your stomach since then?
Well, that's the stupidest expression that I've ever heard, but everybody says it. You have a tingling or you're shaking, but why would you have butterflies in your stomach?

OK then, I'll say it your way: Can you still feel this tingling at your age?
I don't think it will ever happen again for me, but it would be nice if it did.

Huber: It's been a while since it happened to me. It wasn't true love with my husband in the beginning either. I wanted to get out of my parents' house and getting a husband was the only way. But over the years, it became an intimate kind of love that I grew to appreciate—even though we got married for practical reasons.

[body_image width='800' height='532' path='images/content-images/2015/05/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/26/' filename='what-old-people-think-about-love-and-sex-876-body-image-1432654961.jpeg' id='60088']Photo by Chris Cooper from Old People Having Fun in the Sun.

And what do you think about sex? What have you learned about it over the course of your life?
My husband got very sick at some point and around the same time, he cheated on me. He said he wanted to know what sex would be like if the woman didn't know about his sickness. There wasn't much happening with us at that point, but still—I told him that I'm not a brothel, where you come and go as you please, and formally kicked him out.

Kreil: You have to find yourself in that situation to have an opinion. A friend of mine also kicked her husband out after he cheated on her.

Huber: Yes, everything was damaged then—my ego, my pride, and, more importantly, the trust was broken. If I don't trust someone, I can't live with them. At least that's the case for me. He also made me an immoral offer, saying I could also look for sex elsewhere if I wanted to. I slapped him in the face and told him to disappear immediately.

Kreil: I also have to say that I was lucky enough to be able to get rid of both my husbands easily. My first husband married again and had children. I think patchwork families are good.

Huber: But you can't generalize. You can't say that all men are players, just like you can't say all women are sluts. It always takes two to tango.

How important is sex in love?
Very important.

Kreil: I think so too.

Huber: It's a very important part of any relationship but particularly of a marriage—it's basically the meat and bones of the marriage. As a woman, I couldn't imagine a marriage without sex.

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Mohamed Fahmy. Screenshot via YouTube

On May 5, Canadian journalist Mohamed Fahmy filed a lawsuit in BC Supreme Court against the Al Jazeera Media Network, his former employer, seeking $100 million in damages after he was jailed for 412 days, including a month in solitary in the" terrorist wing" of Egypt's Tora Supermax "Scorpion" prison. As the Cairo bureau chief for Al Jazeera English, Fahmy claims he and his team were unknowingly running afoul of Egyptian law by possessing unlicensed broadcasting equipment and failing to get proper press accreditation. Al Jazeera was also repackaging English material produced by the bureau and broadcasting it in Arabic under the network's "Egypt Live" banner, in defiance of an Egyptian government ban. Al Jazeera was also allegedly using content produced by paid members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Fahmy claims he took the $12,000 USD-per-month gig with Al Jazeera not knowing that his predecessor had fled Egypt back to Qatar after a raid on the network's Cairo offices just days before his job interview in September 2013.

After successfully appealing his conviction and winning a retrial on "terrorism" charges, Fahmy remains in Cairo awaiting closing arguments, which are set to begin on June 1. His Vancouver-based legal team, Gary Caroline and Joanna Gislason, returned from Cairo last week and Gislason spoke to VICE by phone about the uncharted legal waters of Fahmy's lawsuit, his current situation and his plans for the future back in Canada.

VICE: So you've just returned from Egypt. How long were you there for and what can you tell us about Fahmy's current situation?
Joanna Gislason: We were there for a little bit longer than a week. On the first day we were there, actually just by coincidence really, we were there on one of the days that his trial was being held, so we got to attend one day of the trial. His situation now is relatively nerve-racking because, as you know, after the Court of Cassation found that there wasn't sufficient evidence to uphold the charges, they sent it back for retrial. The prosecution is expected to conclude their case very soon, on Monday, on June 1.

After being there for a week, what kind of impression were you left with given the recent history of that country?
You know what? I'm not sort of speculating or sharing impressions at this time. One of the things that is the case in Egypt is that it's not legally available to people to criticize the judicial system. So as long as we're travelling there and our client is there, we don't have a lot to say about the judicial system.

The lawsuit filed against Al Jazeera deals with torts allegedly committed in Egypt and Qatar, so why file in BC?
Why file in Canada versus in Qatar?

Or anywhere for that matter.
A very practical answer to that, assuming all goes well with the trial right now, is that Mohamed will be continuing with his life in Canada. The other answer is that a lot of what's happened in this case has sort of elevated into a geopolitical battle between Qatar and Egypt. And if you've been reading about it, you know that at least the impression in Egypt is that the Al Jazeera Network and how it reports the news in Egypt is essentially as a mouthpiece for Qatar. And so that political conflict has sort of taken a lot of the attention. And the case of an individual man, an individual employee, dealing with an employer that put him at risk has sort of been lost in the shuffle there. So for a lot of this, Mohamed has felt like sort of a pawn who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. To bring his case against his employer free of all that baggage, the place that makes the most sense for him is where he is returning home to, which is Canada.

Are you concerned that the BC Supreme Court will say that these were torts allegedly committed in a foreign country by a foreign corporation against a former resident? Is there any concern that they'll just throw it out based on jurisdiction alone?
The court will always consider its own jurisdiction in a case like this, so the court will make that determination. It's certainly a question. The court also will take jurisdiction in a case where it involves a Canadian citizen who is coming to the court saying this is the forum where he can access justice.

Your firm specializes in union, labour, and pension matters. How did you prepare for this case given its rather unique circumstances?
I don't know that there's any firm that specializes in the uniqueness of this. The case, even though it's received a lot of attention internationally in terms of freedom of the press and human rights issues , for Mohamed Fahmy, it is an issue about being let down and put at risk by his employer, so that is the area of law that we specialize in, employment law.

The network has stated that Fahmy should seek damages from his jailers rather than his former employer. Is there any plan to go after those who imprisoned him?
It's a bit of a red herring because, whether you like the laws or not, the laws that were in place in Egypt at the time that Al Jazeera was making the choices it was making about whether or not it would have the appropriate licenses or how it was conducting its affairs as a journalistic network, the issue here was choice, and Mohamed Fahmy was not given a choice. He wasn't given an opportunity to make a choice on behalf of himself or on behalf of his team to avoid the risk that he was put in by Al Jazeera. We can criticize, or not, the laws that were on the books that everyone knew what they were, and if Mohamed Fahmy had wanted to take a principled stand against those laws as apparently Al Jazeera did, then he should have been given that opportunity to make that choice for himself. What happened here is that, presumably, Al Jazeera made that choice, but no one from Doha is sitting in a jail in Egypt. The people that took the fall for that were the employees on the ground that weren't aware of the transgressions.

Closing arguments in his retrial begin soon. Obviously an acquittal would be ideal, but what happens if he's convicted again?
It remains to be seen what happens if he's convicted again. You understand the situation I'm in, right?

A conviction after so much publicity around the case would be quite a blow.
What we can say is that the Court of Cassation, which is the essentially the appellate court there, did find that there was insufficient evidence even for the arrest warrants, so what we did not see in the retrial was the introduction by the prosecution of any new evidence. So we know that, at least as it was reported in Egyptian newspapers and I think picked up by a few Canadian newspapers, President Sisi did at one point express that if the convictions were upheld, that he would consider a pardon for these journalists. So of course that would be the ideal if the court comes to the same conclusion again.

Back to the lawsuit. Different reports have quantified the damages being sought as high as $120 million. There was a column in the New York Post where it quantified them at $83 million. The document itself, the only number I can find is $60 million in punitive damages and the others aren't quantified. How much are you actually seeking and how did you arrive at such a number?
The damage amount was announced at a press conference in Egypt for an international audience which I think explains some of the confusion. The $60 million that you see in the lawsuit is an amount that is sort of appropriate to quantify in a Canadian lawsuit for punitive damages. The $100 million is an amount that is expressed in US dollars and aims to do a series of things. One of them is, of course, try to quantify the unquantifiable, which is the harm that Mohamed Fahmy has suffered in terms of his time in prison, his fear during that period leading up to whether or not he'd face the death sentence. So there's that piece of aggravated damages, future loss of income, all of that. There's also consideration of who the defendant is in this case, and if we understand lawsuits to be about seeing justice being done, it's necessary to seek a damage award that actually has some impact on the defendant. And because we're dealing essentially with the Qatari Royal Family that essentially owns Al Jazeera, I think $100 million reflects a few hours of oil revenue for Qatar. The final piece and answer to your question is of course what Mohamed Fahmy would do were he successful in convincing a court that this damage award was appropriate, and that is, in large part, reinvest a lot of this money in terms of other journalists that are wrongly convicted through his foundation.

Obviously, enforcing that against Al Jazeera in the event of success would present its own challenges.
There's challenges everywhere in the case of Mohamed Fahmy, no doubt.

You're getting assistance from Dr. Mohamed Hamouda in Cairo. How did you connect with him and what can you say about the role he's played so far?
We met Dr. Hamouda when we were there. He 's a well respected criminal lawyer in Egypt. He actually hasn't been involved to date in terms of the criminal case, but did decide in the last few months that he wanted to be involved in supporting Mohamed. He spoke very passionately at the press conference in Cairo. He was actually approached by Mohamed Fahmy's fiancé to represent him when he first faced the charges, and Dr. Hamouda told the press conference that he didn't feel comfortable doing that at that time because he, like much of the public, had seen Mohamed Fahmy as being part of the mouthpiece of Doha. Though since that time, he's come to understand the truth of what happened, and that Mohamed Fahmy was sort of a victim of that, and wanted to "set the record straight." Those are his words.

So what's next? Do you have any more travel plans to go see Mr. Fahmy again in the near future or are you staying in Vancouver?
We'll probably be going again in the next few months. Right now we're very focused and very concerned about what's going to happen with the criminal trial in Egypt. So a lot of our energies now are focused on that and hoping that Canada makes all the necessary diplomatic efforts to help him return home.

Which it hasn't been very forthcoming in the recent past, correct?
It took a while to get his passport.

Mr. Caroline has said in the past that it was the Canadian government that was impeding that effort.
As we enter this new stage, all we can do is open that conversation again and hope for the best.

There have been parallels drawn between Mr. Fahmy and Omar Khadr, rightly or wrongly, but the Canadian government hasn't exactly been easy on Canadian citizens who have been imprisoned by foreign powers under questionable circumstances. Obviously Mr. Khadr's and Mr. Fahmy's circumstances are quite different, but there are parallels. What do you think about that?
I think it's always challenging when you're dealing with two sovereign nations with different values and at this point all we can do is return in good faith and ask Harper's government to do what it can to bring this Canadian home.

Is there any timeline involved when he gets home or are you just patiently awaiting the Al Jazeera Media Network's response in BC Supreme Court?
We're just awaiting the response and then the next legal step will occur after that. Like I said, right now our focus is on Cairo and what's going to happen there.

The first trailer for the much-discussed David Foster Wallace movie based on David Lipsky's book Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself is finally upon us. The film stars Jason Segel as Wallace and takes place during a five-day road trip in March of 1996 to promote Infinite Jest, which Lipsky tagged along on for as part of a Rolling Stone assignment. Lipsky is played by Jesse Eisenberg.

David Foster Wallace fanboys were initially skeptical when it was announced in late 2013 that Segel would don the bandana, but between the glowing praise at Sundance and this trailer, he might be the perfect man for the job.

Want Some In-Depth Stories About Literature?

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4. Predicting the Digital Apocalypse: An Interview with Douglas Coupland

Follow River on Twitter.

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Former Chicago Police Officers Jerome Finnegan, left, and Timothy McDermott, right, along with a still-unidentified suspect. Photo via Chicago Sun Times/court file

A photo wrangled from an old court file makes crystal clear why former Officer Timothy McDermott was fired last year by the Chicago Police Department. Standing above an unnamed black man who's hog-tied and adorned with antlers, McDermott and another white officer, Jerome Finnegan, pose smiling with what look like rifles. Coming on the heels of a huge settlement regarding a Chicago Police black-box interrogation site, the pic is not a good look for the oft-disgraced department.

In 2011, Finnegan was sentenced to 12 years in prison for being part of a group of rogue cops who carried out robberies and home invasions. The photo came to light in 2013 as part of that case, the Chicago Sun-Times reports. After a battle to retrieve the photo from the case file, that paper finally published it online Tuesday.

A document prepared by the Chicago Police Board, an oversight body, tells more of the story. On March 24, 2014, the Superintendent of Police asked that McDermott be fired for bringing discredit upon the department, showing disrespect to a citizen, and unnecessarily displaying a weapon. The detective testified that the photo was taken between 1999 and 2003, and that he could remember it only "very, very vaguely"—he said he only remembered someone going, "Hey, Timmie, take a picture."

More on Chicago's policing problems.

The board's vote to fire McDermott was alarmingly close at 5-4. The dissenters argued that they couldn't even prove the black man in the photo was an arrestee and suggested a suspension instead. As the Sun-Times reports, Finnigan remembers arresting the man for having "20 bags of weed," although CPD's Internal Affairs department has been unable to identify him, and Finnegan told the FBI the man was released because he didn't have a serious criminal record.

These days, McDermott drives a truck to support his family and is appealing the CPD's decision, according to the Sun-Times. He's also apparently embarked on a listening tour with residents in hopes of improving relations between cops and the public, though the photo's release will presumably make that trickier to pull off. His appeal is expected to be decided on June 10.

"I am embarrassed by my participation in this photograph," McDermott told Sergeant Michael Barz in a 2013 interview. "I made a mistake as a young, impressionable police officer who was trying to fit in.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

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Photo by Flickr user seeingimonkey

These days, reproductive technology is rapidly changing the way we make babies. There are artificial testicles, artificial wombs, and the very creepy possibility of "single parent reproduction" on the horizon. But for now, advances in reproductive technology notwithstanding, you still need the same basic building blocks to create life. And for couples who need some splooge, there are young, broke, and virile guys out there like me dropping loads off at the sperm bank.

There's a point in every young man's life when he learns about being paid to masturbate into a cup. Almost inevitably, said young man will crack the same joke: "They pay you to jack off? I could've been a millionaire by now!" before laughing himself into a seizure.

After I'd moved to a new city and was struggling for money, I was lured in by the siren song of cash-for-cum. But it wasn't the carefree spank-bank scenario I'd imagined. I lasted only a few months through the rigorous sperm donation process. Sperm donation has been on the rise since the 2010 recession, likely because people view it as an easy way to make a few bucks. But take my advice and think twice before diving into the frozen gene pool.

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Photo by Flickr user seeingimonkey

You'll Be Judged For Your Looks, Your Health, and Your Sexual Preferences

As sperm banks are businesses seeking profits, there are limits on who they can allow into their programs as donors. My cryobank only accepted university-educated men over 5'9" with no family history of illness. These are reasonable stipulations, I suppose. Sometimes, though, the reasons for donor ineligibility can be a bit arbitrary or prejudiced. Recently, the largest sperm bank in the world, Cryos International, enacted a moratorium on donations from redheads in a move that seems more rooted in aesthetic eugenics more than overarching concern with ensuring a healthy, intelligent baby. Then there's the FDA's painting with a broad stroke policy of banning gay men from donations out of a concern for the potential transmission of HIV to the prospective mother. Sure, such a worry could be handled in a less bigoted way like with, say, regular blood checks at three-month intervals for donors and once again upon their exiting of the program, but that's why I'm not a politician or a cryobank scientist.

On Munchies: Sober Vegetarians Have Lousy Sperm

Assuming you do meet the criteria, you still can't just show up with a diploma and medical record and start popping off rounds. No, if you plan to get into this line of work, plan on a month of tests, a trial jizz, and waiting to see if you made the cut before you see one red cent of pay.

My application process at my southern California bank went like this: I applied online and received a phone call a day later. During this call, I set up an in-clinic appointment to fill out paperwork, give blood, and turn over a sample of DNA. The next week, at my scheduled appointment, I did all those things and the staff set an appointment for me with a third-party physician for a full physical and check up. The following week, I went to my physical and the doctor told me all was well and that he'd be contacting the sperm bank to give them the affirmative. A few days later, CCB rang to tell me I could start my donations. I went in the next day to donate. I received $100 for that first donation two weeks later.

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Photo by Flickr user seeingimonkey

The "Reference Material" Sucks

At this point in my life, I'd like to think I've embraced the ancient Greek maxim of "know thyself." This is especially true when it comes to what gets me off. I've been jerking off for a larger percentage of my life than I haven't—so if there's a carnal itch buried in the folds of my brain, I've scratched it. Unfortunately, the cryobank's masturbation aid offering came in the form of two just-able-to-be-called-"hardcore" porno DVDs that were more like a time capsule than jerking fodder. Vaseline-smeared lenses, cheesy music, and added-in-post coos and moans were on the menu. I'm accustomed to seeing winking assholes shot in 4K RED, so my internet-refined palate was having none of their sad, old porn.

In my research before beginning my donations, I'd learned the first sperm bank was founded in 1952. I hadn't expected the porn my bank provided to be from that era, too. But I suppose a sperm bank's only responsibility is to keep up with the latest in cryogenics tech, as opposed to the latest trends in facesitting. Why would they care about pleasing me, if I couldn't make it work, another jerkoff would gladly take my spot.

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Photo by Flickr user seeingimonkey

Jerking Into a Cup Is Awkward

Masturbation never looks cool unless you're a porn star. As guys, we tend to turn into hunched, jaw-clenching simians the moment an incognito window opens, only to return to our (shameful) higher selves upon release. Beating off in, essentially, a doctor's office ratchets the latent discomfort of masturbation up to a whole new level.

On Motherboard: All that sitting on your ass and watching TV is not good for your sperm count.

The act itself was pretty by-the-books, since this bank didn't have one of those fancy Chinese sperm extractors. Instead of catching the glob with a tissue, as I would do during a recreational wank, I had to position a tiny little Styrofoam cup above my dick. Then, with a flick of the wrist that would impress even a seasoned flair bartender, I flipped the cup right-side up before any little Justin homunculi could escape with the aid of gravity.

I left my cup on a tray and walked out by the very cute receptionist to sign something. You'd think that having an attractive staff member there would help with the proceedings, and maybe it did for some people, but for me, it was just another pair of eyes to avoid contact with before I shook off the weirdness of that day's donation.

Related: VICE investigates the future of love and sex in the digital age.

It Will Kill Your Sex Life

This is the dirty little secret of the sperm donation racket that nobody wants to talk about: You're often required to make a minimum of a donation a week to your bank. But if you're donating sperm because you desperately need the money (like I was), then you'll likely be trying to take full advantage of the three days a week maximum number of donations allowed. During my donating days, I was going in on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I had to space my visits two days apart because, in order to build up an adequate sperm count, one must abstain from ejaculation for at least 48 hours between donations. In other words: All my orgasms belonged to the sperm bank.

Well, that's not entirely true. I had maybe a few hours after each donation to try and squeeze in sex. Or all of Friday after that day's donation until midday Saturday, when the 48 hour counter would begin again in anticipation of Monday's donation. Ever wake up horny and want a quickie with your lady friend before work? Too bad. Want to rub one out in bed at night to help yourself get to sleep? Too bad. Nothing would be worse than fucking up your sperm count and then going in to donate only to post low numbers and get denied that $100 check and actually lose money from gas and a two-hour commute back and forth through shitty LA traffic.

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Photo by Flickr user seeingimonkey

You Could Unknowingly Father a Child

Obviously, this is the whole point of going to the sperm bank—you're helping make other peoples' reproductive dreams come true. Still, it's pretty weird to know that your hapless masturbation into a Styrofoam cup could turn into a bouncing baby (or, in some cases, many, many bouncing babies). As cool as you try to play it, there's always going to be a nagging curiosity about whether or not one has genetic offspring out there in the world. I can't speak to the policies of other banks, but my sperm bank does not tell the donor when and if their sperm is used. Could there be dozens of little Justins running around out there right now? Unlikely. But it's feasible that I've sired a kid or two that I'll never meet.

Beyond the fear of the unknown, there are practical concerns about sending your sperm off to make a baby. One of the first things I made sure to check on before I decided to donate was that I wouldn't be on the hook for child support some distant day in the future. I was signing away my rights to be in these hypothetical children's lives, but the law is still somewhat shaky on the financial particulars of these things. The California laws were pretty ironclad that I wasn't going to be getting an invoice in the mail down the road, but cases in other states have resulted in donors being forced to pony up child support dough after making donations.[body_image width='719' height='491' path='images/content-images/2015/05/26/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/26/' filename='getting-paid-to-jerk-off-isnt-all-its-cracked-up-to-be-526-body-image-1432681583.jpg' id='60246']

Photo by Flickr user seeingimonkey

It'll Make You Question Your Own Fertility

My time as a sperm donor came to as unceremoniously abrupt end as each of my individual donations. One day I received a call informing me that my "numbers were a bit odd." What did that mean? Was I sick? Did they discover some hereditary disease in my cum? I was reassured that I'd be informed if they became aware of any health issues while dealing with my seed there at the lab—but they still wanted to run another blood test and see what was up.

I went into the lab for an unpaid donation and blood draw a few days later. Then, about a week later I received a letter in the mail saying I was no longer part of the program. No explanation as to why. Just a "so long, and thanks for all the jizz." As I'm still alive and healthy today, according to my doctor, I can only assume it was something relatively benign, like pH balance or viscosity, that got me booted from the program. But the fact that I don't really know what went wrong haunts me to this day.

Whatever the reason, it turned out to be a barely-disguised blessing. The rigmarole of sperm donation just isn't worth all the stress and lost love, despite the attractive financial carrot these cryobanks dangle in front of your dongle. Every man has to blaze their own path, but my advice is to skip the hand jobs and keep searching for a real job.

Thumbnail photo by Flickr user Mobilus In Mobili.

Follow Justin Caffier on Twitter.

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Girlfriends by JJ Levine

I first encountered JJ Levine's artistic sensibility when wandering through Montreal's queer Village 'hood. He was working as a hairdresser and in the shop where he worked he had placed a handwritten sign that read simply "LESBIAN HAIRCUTS." It was hilarious, and I learned later that Levine had posted the sign because a man had come into the shop and asked if he could get his hair cut or if they only offered lesbian haircuts.

"The lesbian haircut thing led to some confusion," Levine told me, "because I'm trans and not lesbian. But I didn't care."

Levine's photography is rife with such a sense of playfulness and directness. He has been taking gender-busting photos since studying photography at Concordia University. In many instances, Levine is confronting the spectator's own preconceived ideas about gender and sex: one series of photos featured one person appearing in both male and female attire within the same frame. It was then left up to the spectator to decide whether the person within the frame was male or female or, better yet, if that should even matter.

Now Levine is launching a retrospective of his work and a book that spans his entire career. I caught up with him at his Montreal studio.

VICE: Your work is so striking, it's almost hypnotic. How do you choose your subjects?

JJ Levine: Thank you! I photograph the people in my life: my friends, lovers, and siblings. This means that the same subjects come up over and over again in my work, across different projects, often years apart. I never work with strangers, and I believe that the connections I have with the people I photograph make the images what they are.

You seem to mainly photograph people in their own homes, so that gives them a level of comfort and creates a greater sense of intimacy.

It's true that I normally photograph people in their own homes. Occasionally, for logistical or aesthetic reasons, I'll do a shoot in a different location, but one familiar to the subject and to myself, for example a mutual friend's apartment, or my own, particularly if the person is visiting from out of town. The level of comfort that someone has in their own home, or a place where they are staying, comes through in the image.

Is all of your work about gender non-conformity, or do you work on other themes?

I like the idea that portraiture confers importance on its subjects, and in photographing people who do not fit into mainstream, or what are generally considered culturally valuable representations of bodies, genders, and sexualities, I'm suggesting that we are important. So in that sense I would say that my work is not about gender non-conformity, but a desire to contribute to a visual culture that assigns value to people I identify with and care about, because they are fiercely beautiful and deeply valuable to me. Some of my projects address ideas around gender perception, such as Alone Time and Switch, but Queer Portraits is more about my relationships and the people I feel connected to, some of whom are trans and some of whom are not.

Sometimes I get a whiff of Diane Arbus as I look at your photos. But I know she was hugely controversial, as some saw her as deeply exploitative. How important is your own gender identity in terms of having a unique bond with the people you're photographing?

Positioning myself within my work is critical for me and a huge distinction between what I do and what many artists photographing queer and trans people have done in the past. I wouldn't say that my gender identity, specifically, is what connects me to the people I photograph, as many of my subjects are cisgender. I think anyone photographing queer and trans people today will be compared to artists like Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin—both of whom I consider to be incredible photographers, but whose process and experience I do not connect with at all.

The people in your photos look like they may be marginalized on some level, but they are never presented as victims. I don't feel pain when I look at them, rather I see celebration in the photos.

That's what I'm going for, so I'm glad it's coming through. My portraits are of strong, beautiful people who look at the viewer as much as the viewer looks at them. They are present, aware of being looked at, and in control.

Was anyone you photographed ever uncomfortable with the result once the photo was published or exhibited?

I try to avoid this by always showing the people in my images the results before exhibiting or publishing their portraits. Because I shoot on film, it often takes a few days or a week for me to see what a shoot has rendered. I never work with model release forms while I'm photographing, because I want my friends to be able to revoke their consent after seeing the image. In the making of my books, Switch and Queer Portraits 2006–2015, I checked in with everyone who appears in them, and for legal reasons, I have to use model releases for images being published. Out of 100 people, only a couple weren't into having their portrait included, which I respect. The process of contacting everyone in my images was really nice in the end; it gave me a chance to reconnect with people from my past, and I was overwhelmed with the enthusiasm that most people felt about being included in the book project.

Sometimes when artists or writers look back at earlier work, it can surprise them—it might bring up things they were dealing with when they were creating it. This being a retrospective, did looking back at any of the early work surprise you?

The laborious task of digitizing over 100 negatives turned out to be a huge exercise in nostalgia. Some of the images I made almost ten years ago, many of people who remain my best friends, and others of people I have lost touch with, and almost all taken in apartments no longer inhabited by my friends. These images are chock full of memories of times past and relationships that have shifted, all of which flooded back as I was scanning film at 3 AM for months.

Many would argue we've come a long, long way in terms of awareness of and acceptance of queer and trans people. But Foucault said those societies that think they are the most advanced in terms of sexuality are usually the most fucked up. Most Canadians think of themselves as pretty progressive on social issues and human rights. Are we over it?

I think it's all relative. But until trans people can access employment, housing, public washrooms, and basic social services such as healthcare, with the safety, respect, and dignity that cis people are granted, I don't think anybody should be over it. Trans people, and especially trans women of colour, are disproportionately subject to violence, harassment, and state repression such as incarceration in Canada. I also think that sometimes racism and imperialism are replicated when we talk about "us" as progressive, tolerant Canadians and "them" as non-Western societies that are homophobic or transphobic. I do think it is important to acknowledge when victories are won and encourage people working for change. It's because of the work of so many trans activists around the world, and people just living their queer/trans lives, that more and more people are able to come out as trans. Sometimes just bravely existing and people supporting each other day to day is huge even if it isn't under the banner of "activism."

The launch for JJ Levine's retrospective exhibit and new book, Queer Portraits 2006–2015, takes place on May 27 at 7pm at Montreal's Articule Gallery (262 Fairmount W.)