Video directed by Alex Smith

A few months ago, we premiered a track from Vomitface's newest EP. It was an continues to be one of the best songs VICE has had the pleasure of premiering, and so when the Jersey City band reached out to us with a new music video, we were more than happy to help give it a push. There's are a LOT of bands out there, and a lot of them are terrible, but all the shit makes the rare great and unknown band even more exceptional—Vomitface is one of those gems.

They play gut-blasting sludgy music that takes all the wimpiness out of indie rock and makes you want to move around. Their lyrics are intelligent and tongue-in-cheek without being annoying. They've transcended all the hipster garbage New York seems to use as its cultural fuel and crank out genuinely creative tunes at a maniacal clip. They're not exactly "punk," since punk died a looooooong time ago, but they embody the confrontational ethos of the old punk rockers.

I tracked the band down to chat a little bit about the video, rich kids, and the rash of nostalgia-baiting bands in NYC right now.

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Photo by Mark Iantosca

VICE: How'd you come up with the concept for this video? Were there any specific visual influences?
Jared Micah: Alex, the director, approached us after a show saying that he wanted to do a video with this specific concept. We were in the midst of writing the new EP, and so we kind of recorded the track with his concept in mind. The video is more of a collaborative piece rather than a promotional companion to the song.

When filming began, all we knew is that we would be in this terrifying space, running from Alex, who would be chasing us with a camera—and, we would soon learn, maniacally screaming at us for motivation. We still can't decide if it was more frightening or disgusting down there. After a long night of shooting/running, we were all exhausted, and it was so dusty we were blowing gray crap out of our noses for days.

Want more music stuff? Check out Noisey.

How do you approach the over-saturated East Coast music world? Which bands do you find yourselves listening to most?
We actually started pursuing the band seriously in an effort to counteract what—at the time—we considered to be the prevailing musical trends in the NYC area, i.e. reverb-saturated nostalgia bait. We wanted something loud but melodic and not rigidly bound by a specific genre. When we first started booking shows, we struggled to find similar artists to play with, but gradually we came across a lot of bands with similar ideas, so that was reassuring.

The real problem with band overpopulation is that in New York, specifically, there are too many spoiled little shits in bands. Those people take away opportunities from the more deserving and talented. But rich people have always done that. I would just rather that bullshit happen in the Financial District and not at a DIY venue.

Oh man, I could not agree with you more.
Yeah. Not to say there isn't a supportive element to the East Coast music world (especially outside of New York), but the sheer saturation of bands does make for a very competitive "scene." For better or worse, we have a natural aversion to or inability to deal with scene politics, so we try to keep a distance and concentrate on developing ourselves. We already have jobs for that kind of drama. Music is the escape from that kind of pettiness.

My biggest problem with music journalism is everyone tries to compare things to other things. Without using the names of other bands, how would you describe your sound?
We just make a mix of what we like and can all agree on. And I guess what we all agree on is loud music of some kind. If that reminds a lazy writer of some other band, that's fine. Go ahead and write that band down and turn in your review so you can get through your queue and Instagram yourself drinking craft beer on a rooftop.

Watch it, buddy.
Preetma Singh: I guess that's where the grunge comparison comes in. Melodies! Guitars! Fuzz! It must be grunge revival! It must be Nirvana! As if grunge was even a monolithic genre to begin with.

What are your future plans?
Micah: We're finishing up writing the material for our first full-length that we're recording with Steve Albini in July. We have a show this week at Northside Festival, and then we'll be touring around throughout the summer in support of the EP.

Singh: Hopefully shattering some (post-)millennial optimism along the way.

I'm amazed Albini hasn't gone deaf yet. Thanks Vomitface. We love you.

Buy Vomitface's new EP here.

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A comforting photo of London bathed in smog. Photo by David Holt via.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

London's air is not good for Londoners. You may have already worked this out for yourself via all that black stuff you regularly hack up after your morning cycle into work. However, last week the campaigning group Clean Air in London released a damning report demonstrating just how harmful the capital's air pollution can be; according to their findings, 1,300 people have died prematurely in 2015 alone as a result of London's diminishing air quality.

It's a bold, headline-grabbing figure, but what does it actually mean?

"The figure of 1,300 people dying prematurely in London as a result of air pollution so far this year is a statistical estimate," says Dr. Heather Walton of King's College London. "This figure is based on fine particulate air pollution, PM2.5. Studies of large groups of people show that there is a correlation between the annual average PM2.5 concentrations across a city and the numbers of deaths—or, more precisely, the timing of their deaths."

PM2.5 relates to particles that are 2.5 micrometers or smaller in diameter. They can only be seen under an electron microscope (which retail at roughly £65,000 [$100,000]), so your chances of dodging them on the high street are pretty slim.

"Particulate matter contains mixtures of many components, including heavy metals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and other components," Dr. Walton explains. Once all these little particles are swirling about inside your lungs, they can cause something called oxidative stress.

"This is where antioxidant defenses in the lung are depleted, reactive compounds are produced and reactions occur that change parts of lipid, DNA, and protein molecules within the lung," she says. "The body responds to this by generating an inflammatory response in the lung, and this, in turn, can change the composition of the blood in a way that increases the risk of damage to the heart, or can lead to neural messages that change the rhythm of the heart. Even if these processes occur to only a minor degree, it can still be a problem in people with heart or lung disease who will already have increased oxidative stress and increased levels of inflammation."

That's why the report uses the clunky phrase "premature deaths." You're pretty unlikely to suddenly develop critical issues as a result of air pollution, but if you're already sick then all the nasty crap being churned through your lungs is only going to make you sicker.

Watch 'Toxic: Linfen, China,' our film about the most polluted place on earth:

Other junk in the air includes Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2), which can cause bronchitis, asthma, and other respiratory conditions; and ground-level o-zone, which creates a summertime smog—perfect for adding character to photographs of urban foxes, but also capable of inflaming the lungs, as well as generally irritating the eyes, nose, and throat.

The final problem that Dr. Walton identifies is one that might make you feel a little like you're living in a Simpsons Movie–esque domed city designed specifically to kill you both slowly and painfully. "Exposure to air pollution is ubiquitous," she warns. "So even if it is a weaker risk factor than other risk factors, such as smoking, it can still have an extensive public health impact because so many people are exposed."

Sucking in London's grim, dirty air is an inevitable part of living in the city. Rather than frolicking on the Outer Hebrides, our unsullied lungs bathed in particulate-free air, we're all destined to engage in daily battle with this invisible enemy. Even if you head to Hampstead Heath for the day and feel like you're probably breathing in clean air because you're surrounded by bushes and insects you've never seen before, think again: it's awful all over the city, with Kensington and Chelsea taking the absolute top position in terms of Air Most Likely to Kill You Early.

The inexorable spread of shitty air has led to something of a fight back within the scientific community. The Clean Air in London app, developed by founder Simon Birkett, alerts the user on days when pollution is forecast to be high and gives them advice on how to reduce their emissions and exposure to air that's going to be particularly harmful.

READ ON MUNCHIES: Avocados Might Help Protect Your Lungs from Stinky Air Pollution

Still, these are only baby steps into a very grown-up problem; Jenny Bates, air pollution campaigner for Friends of the Earth, calls air pollution the "biggest environmental cause of premature death," claiming it's responsible for "killing 29,000 people prematurely a year from fine particles, but this could double if the effects of toxic NO2 gas are added, and there are health effects below current EU legal limits."

Bates also observes that "air pollution is carcinogenic and hits the most vulnerable and disadvantaged hardest." The link between air pollution and deprived areas has been long established—a 2005 report on the issue concluded that "significant sources of pollution are disproportionately located in more deprived areas," and that, while the health issues varied on a site-by-site basis, the sense of "place stigma" surrounded heavily polluted areas remained.

So London's atmosphere, which once inspired Monet but now inspires that guy on the tube to cough directly into your mouth, disproportionately impacts areas already underrepresented by Westminster's interests. Barry Gardiner, MP for leafy Brent North and Shadow Environment Minister, has responded to the figures by stating that "1,337 people have already died as result of air pollution, yet the mayor's proposals will not bring this down to safe levels until 2030. We need decisive action now to protect our children; not vague promises for 15 years down the line."

Simon Birkett, founder of Clean Air in London, believes there's one simple move to be made if we want to start making progress now. "The biggest single step London could take to address this crisis would be to ban all diesel vehicles from the most polluted places, [in the same way] coal was banned so successfully almost exactly 60 years ago," he tells me over email.

Air pollution isn't going to kill you today, but just like those who worked with asbestos in the 1980s, there's a ticking clock looming over our heads. With an increased number of environmentally efficient vehicles being produced—including electric buses—and plans to safeguard parts of London as "Ultra-Low Emission Zones" (which will, presumably, protect social housing and not just Hyde Park and Blackheath), things might get better eventually. But we've still got a number of years to spend at this dangerous level, so get used to shelling out more than anyone else in the UK on rent while your health continues to suffer.

Follow Nick on Twitter.

It was cold and early when I met Alf to go mushie picking. The conditions were perfect, he told me, as mushrooms only come up once a year and need a special arrangement of moisture and temperature. And as I was new to garden drugs, Alf said he'd show me the ropes.

Magic mushrooms contain the hallucinogenic compound psilocybin, which when ingested reduces brain activity in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which is the part of brain believed to contain our sense of "self." This effect was uncovered in 2011 by British researcher Robin Carhart-Harris from the Imperial College, London, and it's still considered the leading study in the area. What Carhart-Harris concluded was that when the brain's ability to interpret its own sensory inputs is reduced, the conscious mind is able to receive information that otherwise gets discarded. As Carhart-Harris told Time in 2012, psilocybin "shuts off this ruminating area and allows the mind to work more freely."

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Me with a good one

This decrease in brain activity can last six hours. If that's your thing, there are at least 30 types of psilocybin mushroom around Australia, although their cultivation, possession, and ingestion is strictly prohibited.

Possession or use carries a penalty fine of up to $3,000 and if you're unlucky can result in jail time. However this is unusual, with only two precedents in Australian history. The most recent case involved a Brazilian chef named Lauro Carrilho, who in 2013 received a 15-month suspended sentence for possessing 630 grams of mushies in a plastic shopping bag. He'd been growing them when someone he knew snitched, leading to a charge for manufacturing commercial quantities of a prohibited drug.

Despite this, the police usually just issue warnings that they'll be targeting known areas over the harvest season. Nevertheless Alf insisted that he's never actually seen any cops.

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Just ten minutes from my house we stopped beside a tree-lined verge and Alf began looking. "It's the pine mulch scattered by the council that makes this a good spot," he said. "It provides carbon to feed the mycelium which then blooms into mushrooms." He explained this is why magic mushrooms grow in public parks and pointed triumphantly to a patch of brown caps. "There," he said, pointing: "blue meanies."

Alf squatted, cut them off at the stem, and showed me their identifying features. They had grayish-brown dome-shaped caps and thin stems, which turned a light blue if squished. The blue bruising was the all-clear signal, he explained, and deposited them in a paper bag. Alf continued picking while joggers and cyclists passed, until one shouted "mushies!" Then we moved along.

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As we looked around we got talking about bad trips, and Alf told me about a particular friend of his. "She became animalistic," he said. She just got stuck repeating, the mother, the daughter, the father, the sister, the mother, the daughter, the father, the sister , again and again for eight hours straight. It was terrible."

Alf also acknowledged that he'd witnessed friends wetting themselves while on shrooms. "It isn't uncommon," he said. "And that's a huge wig-out, because, it's like, I'm toilet-trained and I just pissed myself ."

Related: Interested in magic mushrooms? Then check out the Icelandic Skin-Disease Mushroom Fashion Fiasco

Like that? Then watch Hamilton and the Philosopher's Stone

Aside from the dangers of a bad trip, the other risk is mistakenly picking the wrong species. Poisonous mushrooms can cause liver or kidney failure, which is a particularly slow and unpleasant way to go out. In January 2012 two Chinese nationals died three days after eating mushrooms at a New Years Eve party in Canberra. The story was widely circulated with heavy lashings of medical warnings, but still, every year, a few more people wind up in hospital.

In February this year the Illawara Mercury reported that ten people across NSW had been hospitalized when unseasonal rains kicked off an early mushie season. The article noted that they might not have all been trying to get high, but then why else would you eat blue shrooms? "If in doubt, don't take them," Alf shrugged, seemingly unperturbed. "They call it beautiful suicide," he said. "Because first it'll make you trip and then it'll kill you."

The woodland was littered with mushrooms, scattered under bushes and among the fallen leaves, and soon my eyes were calibrated for their shape. Along with blue meanies, there were a dozen other fungi that had been already uprooted and discarded. "People have already been picking here," said Alf, "pulling them up to see if they're meanies."

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He explained that in the city some places get raided by 10 AM. This accordingly leads to some silly sort of picking politics, whereby people don't share their tried and tested spots. Some even become territorial, he explained, and they'll turf intruders off.

Before long, Alf was satisfied that we'd collected enough. While heading home, I asked him what he liked about tripping. "Some people like to escape reality, while others like to experience something more," he said. "For me, there's definitely an unknown spiritual element to tripping. I'm very aware that human consciousness is limited so taking something psychoactive releases that a little. I definitely think of it as a kind of a release. And it's just funny to see what your mind is capable of."

Follow Max on Twitter.

This week, we'll be releasing a documentary on the new paradigm for sex work in Canada. Last year, the government passed Bill C-36, which criminalizes johns who patronize sex workers. These new laws also limit the abilities for sex workers to advertise their services. The government argues that this helps protect women in the trade from human traffickers, but others say that it makes sex work more dangerous for women who are consensually working in the industry.

We sent Lowell, a pop singer and former stripper, to meet with the policy makers and police to discuss C-36. Lowell also went down to Nevada to see how a regulated, legal sex industry functions. She also met with one particular john to see how he feels about his behaviour becoming newly illegal.

Watch out for the full length coming this week.

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Image via Wiki Commons.

I don't like to fly. I don't like that I can't get fresh air. I don't like that I can't use the bathroom without the entire cabin seeing me. I mostly travel alone and have never once sat next to a remotely attractive person. I don't like that my entire life is in the hands of someone whose face I never see and name I don't know. I don't like that I can't ask him how many hours of sleep he got the night before or the last time he drank alcohol. Has he recently had some sort of personal catastrophe that might distract him from flying a 75-ton piece of machinery through the sky? Even though the National Safety Council puts your odds of dying in "Air and Space Transport Incidents" at 1:8,015 (for reference, your odds of dying in a car crash are 1:112), that's little comfort as you're in a several-ton hunk of machinery improbably hanging above the Earth. Your entire life is out of your control and once you go up there is only one way down. The only part of flying I do like is landing safely at my destination.

Last month, my "irrational" fears became reality. I took a United Express flight from Monterey, California on my way to meet up with some friends in Punta Mita, Mexico. I had one stop at LAX before getting to my final destination. That flight turned out to be this one. Here's what was going through my head:

It's a quick, one-hour flight, so I decide to save my emergency Xanax for the LA to Mexico portion of my journey. Soon enough, the captain announces we're starting our descent into LAX. We circle the airport twice, which is slightly unsettling. I look around to see if the flight attendant has some sort of explanation to offer. Nothing. Since we're coming from a small airport, maybe we're waiting for a runway to open up? I return to my book.

The captain makes a long, inaudible announcement. The flight attendant walks to the back half of the plane. Turns out our landing gear hasn't come down. She says it could be a computer error, so we're going to fly very low past the tower at LAX to see if the landing gear is down but just not registering to the system. It is at this point that I feel butterflies in my stomach.

A man behind me jokes to his friend, "Thanks for the relaxing weekend." They both chuckle. I am not chuckling. I start to feel a slow boil of panic. We fly past the tower and go back up in the air. No landing gear. I begin to shake. The flight attendant answers the phone that links to the cockpit. Her face goes white, and I decide it's time to completely freak the fuck out.

On Motherboard: Every Day Over the US, Eleven Airplanes Are Hit By Lasers

I reach for my emergency Xanax. My mouth is dry, so I chew it. Besides, won't that make it work faster anyway? The flight attendant announces that we're making an emergency landing. She explains that we are going to dump fuel to "reduce our chance of a fire." Reduce. Not prevent. Reduce.

A man shouts, "Can't we land in the water?!" No. She tells us, "If you see smoke in the cabin open the emergency exits and get everyone out." She shows us how to get into the "brace position," with our heads tucked between our legs.

The fire department and emergency responders are on the scene, she claims. And with that, she heads to the front of the plane and straps herself into her seat, closing her eyes. The grimness of our situation consumes me.

I turn my phone on and have one bar of service. I start to compose a text to my fiancé. What do you say in a situation like this? I see the news helicopters from the window, and worry he'll find out before I can reach him. I tell him I'm on the plane and that we might be making an emergency landing. I tell him I love him and that I'll text him when I land. The truth is I don't know if I'll be able to text him when I land.

The cabin is quiet as we make our descent. I'm not a religious person, but I silently pray. I put my head down to brace. As we approach the ground, the only thing I hear is the flight attendant screaming, "BRACE, BRACE, BRACE, BRACE."

We touch the runway. The impact is loud, but not as rough as I had anticipated. Under my breath, I softly chant please stop, please stop, please stop. The plane finally does.

The flight attendant shouts, "Is everyone OK?" No one is on fire. So, yes.

We all cheer and clap, but we're cut short and told to get off immediately. As we exit the plane I see firefighters and emergency vehicles surrounding us. Sitting on its belly, the plane looks like a beached whale. I take my phone out to snap a photo, but I'm shaking so violently that it flies out of my hands.

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Photo by the author.

Trembling and crying, I call my fiancé and my sister. Everyone else around me seems fine. I can't tell if I'm freaking out because I am totally emotionally unstable, or if everyone else appears calm because they had staved off the reality of what could have happened to us.

A firefighter brings my purse and laptop to me, and I run the two terminals to make my connecting flight to Mexico by five minutes. I sleep the entire way.

The question I've been asked the most about my experience is what the airline gave the passengers as compensation. The answer is a bullshit letter of apology from a VP of Customer Relations, who explained that since the reaction to the incident on the ground was "largely positive" the final decision for us was apology only. [Editor's Note: When contacted by VICE, United sent the following statement: "We issued a letter to all customers onboard to apologize and ensure them that safety is always our first priority. Following any travel experience, we work individually with customers on a case-by-case basis taking into account the circumstances of their travel journey to provide further assistance when appropriate."] Technically, an airline is not liable in a crash unless it's proven they did not take all the necessary precautions to prevent the accident, and to be fair, the reaction was "largely positive," but only because we were all happy to be not dead.

After I told them I thought their letter of apology was absolute horseshit, they threw in a $150 flight voucher which, for obvious reasons, I will not be using.

Follow Laura on Twitter.

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Photo by Robert Foster.

Britain likes a drink. This has been evident every Friday and Saturday night on these isles since the beginning of human history, through to the point where the term "booze Britain" became a legitimate phrase used by everyone from dour old men writing despairing op-eds for the Telegraph to whomever was responsible for naming Bravo's primetime programming in the early-2000s.

However, British boozing isn't all big nights, banter, and beautiful moments you're unlikely to remember the following morning; new research into global drinking habits has revealed that, for every 100 drinkers in a British pub, at least one will end up seeking emergency treatment after getting pissed.

The Global Drug Survey, an online survey of 100,000 people in 50 countries, shows that in Britain—a country so in love with alcohol it used the Black Death as an excuse to demand "the best and brownest" ale—with the pleasure of drinking comes the pain.

Of the respondents in Britain who sought help after a drinking session, almost a fifth had drunk more than 20 drinks, and half of them ended up hospitalized. Three percent said they had been drinking for more than four days. The symptoms most often reported by those needing medical help were accidents, trauma, confusion, memory loss, becoming unconscious, and feeling depressed and anxious the morning after.

Most people said they took 24 hours to recover from a big session, while some said they had never fully recovered. Over a third of those who'd sought emergency help after getting pissed admitted the experience had not changed their drinking habits. Official government figures show that 1.2 million people a year are admitted to hospitals due to alcohol, while liver disease in those under 30 has more than doubled over the past 20 years.

More than one in ten drinkers admitted there were times they could not stop drinking once they had started; that they or one of their friends had gotten injured during a drinking bout; that they could not remember what happened the night before; and that others had expressed concern about their drinking. Two-thirds of people arrived at a drinking venue after pre-loading at home or at a friend's house, with over one in ten taking drugs before a night of drinking.

People felt safer drinking in pubs and bars than in clubs, with over a fifth of people saying they felt unsafe traveling home after a drink.

Almost a fifth reported feelings of guilt or regret after drinking, and more than a third of British drinkers indicated they would like to drink less over the next 12 months. Just under one in ten people said they had "not been able to do what was normally expected of them" after drinking. Two percent said they needed a hair of the dog the morning after a heavy session to cope with their hangover.

READ ON MUNCHIES: UK Pubs Are Treating Prosecco Like Beer, and Italy Is Pissed

All in all, the survey shows that bad things happen after drinking more often to British drinkers than the average global drinker. Want another example? Here's one: we are the world champions of not remembering what we've done the night before, which you can either blame on our fondness for super-strength beers like Special Brew, or the British predilection for getting pissed in order to do or say things we're too scared to do sober.

But despite people deserting boozed-up Britain in a huff and the claims that we're a global "laughing stock" because of some photos of drunk people in a Daily Mail article, the survey found that our perceived reputation as the world's number one pisshead isn't entirely accurate.

That crown goes to Ireland, whose prime minister Enda Kenny had to deny in March that St. Patrick's Day was just an excuse to get hammered after Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott delivered an address where he talked about drinking Guinness on Ireland's alleged holy day. The survey found the Irish also had the highest rates of people needing emergency treatment after drinking, with nearly three in every 100 drinkers requiring a medic after a session.

The UK trails Ireland, Poland, New Zealand, Brazil, Australia, and France in terms of the number of men whose drinking could be described as being "dependent." The Global Drug Survey reflects official EU statistics that show Britain sits in the middle of the EU drinking table, which is topped by Latvia, Romania, and Lithuania, and propped up by Italy, Sweden, and Malta.

The Global Drug Survey found that the most common drinking venue among British drinkers was at a pub or a bar, followed by people's homes, house parties, and clubs. Nearly one in ten said they drank most of their alcohol alone. While around half of respondents knew that serving alcohol to drunk people is illegal, three-quarters said they have witnessed pubs and clubs serve drunk people. On that note, the best places to go if you want to get served while you're shitfaced, according to the survey, are Hungary, Greece, and Brazil.

Related: Watch our film 'Talking Politics with Drunk Toffs at the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race'

British women, whose job it was to maintain the most widespread village business in 1300—brewing beer—had a higher showing, coming in fifth in the problem drinking league table after Ireland, Poland, Denmark, and France.

Globally, the average person drank alcohol two to three times a week, had three to four drinks, and got hammered less than once a month.

There have been many articles about booze Britain going to the dogs. But the golden era of British boozing was before 1600, during the Medieval era, when people had far more leisure time to get pissed on the endless stream of ale brewed in the local village. In around 1400, the British pub was born, allowing people to get steaming and fight each other closer to home, rather than having to walk to the other side of the village to have a beer and a punch-up.

In 1870, the average person drank 23 pints of beer and one bottle of a spirit a month. Pubs became the centre of communities, de facto trade union HQs, labor exchanges, and social security offices for local working class communities.

With the arrival of the Industrial Revolution, people had to work longer hours and drinking rates began to fall. Nevertheless, the temperance movement got short shift in England because booze was and still is so central to our social lives. Instead, it had to hop on a boat to America where a puritanical life was all the rage.

We're clearly not the best when it comes to drinking responsibly—one of every 100 people being hospitalized after drinking is never great—but figures suggest that binge drinking among Britain's young adults is continuing to fall. So give it another 200 years and we might have reined it in enough to fall a few places in the global Bad Drinker rankings.

To get instant, unbiased, and anonymous feedback on your drinking, visit drinksmeter.com

Follow Max on Twitter.

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Fernando Haddad. Photo by Felipe Larozza.

This article originally appeared on VICE Brazil.

São Paulo's mayor, Fernando Haddad, has made a bit of a name for himself during his stay in office. He's loved by some but hated passionately by just as many. Known for being savvy on social media, he's pretty vocal in attacking what he considers to be biased reporting via his Twitter account. That, and highlighting stuff that he's done that he thinks is super cool. Alongside his mayoral duties, he also recently began teaching at the University of São Paulo (UPS).

We sat him down for a chat about solvents, crack users, baile funk, and a ton of other stuff that, for the most part, goes under the radar of Brazil's press.

VICE: Hey Fernando. We heard a rumor about you wandering around a São Paulo skatepark asking kids about their passions and dreams. What's that about?
Fernando Haddad: Well, generally speaking, I love listening to what people have to say. If you want to be able to teach, then you need to listen—a lot. I truly believe that the perspectives of people living in smaller communities or in the suburbs are some of the most interesting you can find. When I'm out there on the streets, I enjoy meeting people and listening to their complaints and critiques. It's something that I take great pleasure in.

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An MPL demonstration on the way to Fernando Haddad's house. Photo by Felipe Larozza / VICE.

We cover a lot of protests at VICE. Back in 2011, we came to this very building with the MPL. We saw them when they were parading around with a doll of you. I heard they showed up at your place the next day. Were you there?
I wasn't. I'm quite sure that I am not the first mayor to be picked on by them. I really don't recommend progressive people to act like that towards a politician. I know that they come from a very anti-government standpoint, but I think it's the wrong way to go about things. Being left-wing myself, I find it worrying that people organize like that. That said, I, of course, understand their youthful spirit of demand.

Do you feel intimidated when you're sitting in your office and people are right outside, protesting against you?
Quite the opposite. I'll just go downstairs and hop into the parade wagon and speak to the people. Actually, when I was the Minister of Education, I used to have to deal with a lot more protests.

What about people showing up at your house? Im thinking about your family.
It doesn't bother me. I think it bothers my neighbors a lot more. I'm right here if they want to talk. What bothers me is the lack of political culture these people seem to possess. Like I said, it really isn't a good way to go about things.

We recently did a piece about dengue fever in Brasilândia. One house we visited had nine people infected with the disease—a lot of folks were asking why the government had shut down its medical tent there.
Because there was no need for it to exist, really. Right now, the temperature is dropping, which will in turn kill the mosquitos. The instance of the infection is also on the way down. Previously, we had about 1,000 cases per 100,000 inhabitants. Now, we're down to 300. Thanks to some serious teamwork from the health department and the general population, we've done an amazing job of isolating the disease. People have really listened to our advice.

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The partnership between the military and health workers began in Northern São Paulo. Photo by Felipe Larozza/VICE.

You also deployed the army to help control the disease, right? How did you choose where that kind of intervention was necessary?
I'm not quite sure how to answer that question. Basically, I gave a mandate for the army to give a hand wherever the health department teams were having trouble getting into people's homes. All of the teams seemed to be experiencing issues with this. People are quite reluctant to open their doors to strangers. The reports that I've seen suggest that the army presence definitely helped. Them just being there helped people's confidence and security. But I think you'd be better off asking the health department about all that.

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Cracolândia. Photo by Felipe Larozza/VICE.

Last year, we were there when the government demolished a small drug market in Cracolândia—a neighborhood well known for having a high concentration of drug users. What's your opinion on these crack addicts? What sort of people are they?
I definitely don't think we should try to paint all drug users into the same corner. When I was in Luz—before we launched the Open Arms program—I witnessed a dramatic problem. I remember the state government saying that we should knock down all the hotels that people were using for drug trafficking and prostitution. We didn't, of course. Instead, we rented the hotels ourselves and used them to house these marginalized people. We offered them both food and work—something that caught the world's attention. People from Holland, England, and even Canada came here to visit us. Everyone in the program gets medical assistance, food, and an equal opportunity to build themselves a professional career.

What people don't understand about the Open Arms project is that such an initiative can't exist when the local drug dealers are still about—that's why we demolished that area. We aren't trying to attack anyone's rights or anything, but we can't have people drug trafficking like that.

Related: Stopping HIV with the Truvada Revolution

Last year we were reporting on local funk block parties known as fluxos. We came across this stuff called lança-perfume, which is basically a solvent that kids inhale to get high. It was everywhere. We talked to Denarc (Brazil's drug unit) and they had little to no knowledge of the stuff. Is there anything being done about this stuff and other similar inhalant drugs like loló?
What happens at these parties happens all over the city, right? It's not just at the parties. It'd be impossible to hire agents to go out and write fines for people in every single region, every single night. We need to talk to the organizers and figure things out. Another stereotype that you meet is that all the organizers of these parties are "drug dealers." It's a myth. Maybe 10 percent of these parties are set up by individuals with connections to drug dealers, but the rest of the time it's just regular people trying to have some fun in a tough city.

We met with the organizers from all parts of São Paulo last year, and in less than 12 months complaints had dropped by 75 percent. All we did was sit down and have an honest talk with these people. We understand that music is part of culture. We also understand that there's a real lack of space in the city, as well as a lack of public transport. We basically just asked them to understand there's families that need to sleep and get up for work the next day. They don't need to be disturbed. We want to meet these people half way and find some good spots for them to hold their parties. Places that make sense for everyone. There really are a lot of people coming to these parties.

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A "fluxos" party in São Paulo. Photo by Felipe Paiva.

That's nice. But what about the prevalence of loló?
That's the same as lança-perfume, right? The police need to investigate that. But sometimes regular civilians are less intimidating than a police officer. I really believe in the power of social control coming from within the community itself. The community protecting itself, its children, its teenagers, you know? I think that's far more effective than a police presence. It's way more educative than if the state were to provide those kinds of activities.

It's more Hannibal than The Shawshank Redemption.

On Saturday, two convicted killers managed to escape from the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York, a town of about 5,000 near the Canadian border. And while prison movies might have taught us to root for an underdog, neither David Sweat, 35, nor Richard Matt, 49, have much in common with Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke. In fact, both are said to be cold-blooded murderers, and the latter was deemed "the most vicious, evil person I've ever come across in 38 years as a police officer" by a retired captain who once investigated him.

David Sweat ended up at Clinton, a maximum security facility and the largest in the state—it's known locally as "Little Siberia"—after a fireworks store burglary on July 4, 2002 went wrong, the New York Times reports. Although the heist was pulled off, Deputy Sheriff Kevin Tarsia, who was working a night shift by himself, stumbled upon the criminals as they were dividing their spoils in a park. Sweat and a companion shot and killed the cop.

Richard Matt's path to the facility is much more meandering—and terrifying. He'd escaped from county prison once before, in 1986, near Buffalo. According to a Buffalo News article from January 2007, he was sent to prison in 1993 for charges related to a 1989 rape and a 1991 stabbing of a nurse.

Later, in what Niagara County District Attorney Matthew J. Murphy called "one of the most horrific crimes" he'd ever prosecuted, Matt killed a 76-year-old food warehouse owner he was working for after getting fired for poor performance. He and his accomplice, a video store clerk who wanted to become a cop, made away with $80 and jewelry before casting the senior citizen's dismembered torso into the Niagara River.

Afterward, Matt fled to Mexico, where he stabbed an American engineer to death outside of a bar, according to United Press International (UPI). In 2007, after serving about nine years in a Mexican prison, he was brought back to America and eventually thrown into Clinton, with no chance of parole before 2032, according to the Times.

Related: Read this history of prison escapes by famed author Donald Westlake.

On Friday night or Saturday morning, the two men set up dummies they'd crafted to fool guards checking on their cells. Then they used power tools to cut a hole in between their adjacent cells. Finally, they cut into a two-foot-wide pipe and shimmied through it until they popped up through a manhole about a block away from the prison. (The escapees apparently left a note to cops reading, "Have a nice day!")

According to Bryce Peterson, an expert on prison escapes at the Urban Institute, about 95 percent of them happen when prisoners take advantage of opportunities like a door left ajar at a minimum security facility. He adds that the same thing might have happened here, despite Clinton being a max prison.

"It sounds like a construction worker on site might have left the tools," Peterson told VICE. "I would be very shocked if someone was able to smuggle this in from the outside that wasn't employed by the facility. That would be a pretty big thing to smuggle in." (According to CNN, law enforcement interviewed an employee at Clinton who may have helped the men escape.)

In his research, Peterson has found that escapees will often either seek help from old friends once breaking loose, or else try to live in the woods for as long as possible. The latter might be the only recourse for the pair considering Clinton is surrounded by wilderness—which could make them incredibly hard to track down.

Then comes the question of how the men will obtain food, shelter and clothing that isn't a prisoner's uniform. According to Peterson, without some kind of help, escapees are prone to get desperate.

"That's when you tend to see violent incidents," he told me. "When you have someone who's extremely motivated to stay out of custody, they'll take to robbery or home invasions or whatever it takes to stay out."

If the past is any indication, Matt is someone you don't want anywhere near your house.

The Times reports that when he was on trial for killing his old employer, Matt was treated like Hannibal Lecter. Snipers were posted at the courthouse, and glass was removed from the chambers lest he smash it and try to shank someone.

"I'm very concerned that people are going to get hurt the longer he's out," a retired detective who used to lean on Matt as a criminal informant told the paper. "I've seen him inflict wounds on himself, cut himself; break his collarbone and not seek any treatment. He's just totally, totally fearless, and doesn't respond to pain."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

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Kalief Browder in 2014. Photo by Zach Gross for the New Yorker

Kalief Browder's story seems impossibly unfair, a collection of individual outrages adding up to a horror that can't be captured by the bare facts. A black kid from the Bronx who was arrested under suspicion of stealing a backpack at 16, Browder was held by New York City for three years without trial, where he was stuck in solitary confinement for months on end—when he wasn't enduring beatings at the hands of guards or other inmates.

Jennifer Gonnerman detailed all of that in an incredible New Yorker story last year, but this weekend brought the brutal coda: The 22-year-old committed suicide on Saturday after attempting to kill himself more than once while in jail—and at least once since his release.

Browder hadn't been the same since his release in 2013. He found holding down a job—much less dating and long-term career ambitions and the other things twentysomethings take for granted—next to impossible. Still, an anonymous donor volunteered to pay for this past semester at Bronx Community College, and Browder seemed, slowly, to be trending in the right direction.

"He was doing better than he ever had been since he'd come from jail," Gonnerman told me in an interview Monday. As she wrote after Browder's death, he had recently been embraced by celebrities like Rosie O'Donnell and Jay Z. (O'Donnell has since tweeted a poem suggesting she'd been texting with Browder an hour before he hanged himself outside a window at his mother's home.)

But even though Browder seemed to have new friends in powerful places, that wasn't exactly his ambition.

"He had no desire to be a celebrity or to be in the spotlight all the time," Gonnerman said.

For more on policing in America, check out VICE News' Officer Involved blog.

Over the past year, we've seen horrific case after horrific case where unarmed black men were killed by police in the name of public safety. Browder's death doesn't exactly fit that mold. There was no dramatic, fatal confrontation with police. There are no conflicting accounts about hands being up or backs being turned. Certainly, Browder won't be listed in the spiffy new databases unveiled last week by some of the premier news organizations in the world to document the deaths caused American cops.

But Browder's death is just as much of a product of our broken criminal justice system as those of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, or Walter Scott. Browder's was not a police killing, but he was effectively destroyed by the state, beginning with the cops who questioned and detained him on flimsy charges.

Perhaps most heart-wrenching about this whole thing is that the system seemed to be finally be working. Gonnerman and one of the most prestigious publications in the country had devoted a massive print feature to his tale, and she was still on the case, following up the original story with searing video of Browder being beaten in jail. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio mentioned Browder by name when announcing reforms of the city's court system. O'Donnell gave him a MacBook Air as a gift. Browder had a picture of himself with Jay Z where, according to Gonnerman, he looked "euphoric."

It wasn't enough.

"He obviously needed much more than attention or any kind of material resources," Gonnerman told me. "The emotional pain ran very, very deep. In the end, I think, no amount of help or words of comfort were enough to undo that psychological damage."

Browder's death reminds us that what happens after you're released from the clutches of the criminal justice system is just as important as your time in its grasp. It's one thing to be out of jail, and another to be truly free.

Kalief Browder never got there, and criminal justice reform in America still has a long way to go.

"All the cell phone video that we've been seeing and all of these protests have done an excellent job of beginning to bring the question of police accountability onto the frontpages of our newspapers," Gonnerman said, "but now is time for that same conversation, that same push for accountability, to be happening in our jails and our prisons."

Follow Matt Taylor on Twitter.

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

This article originally appeared on VICE Alps.

Thirty people were injured this weekend when lightning struck a music festival in the south of Germany. Thankfully everyone is alive and in "good health," but the unfortunate festival-goers had to spend their weekend in the hospital instead of enjoying the Foo Fighters—which, depending on who you ask, might have actually been slightly less painful.

Seemingly, being hit by lightning isn't as uncommon as you'd think. In Austria, for example, two to three people are struck every year. Miraculously, not everyone dies; the mortality rate depends on a whole bunch of factors, like the strength of the flash, the current's path through the body, and the length of time before the victim receives first aid .

Renate K is one of the lucky ones to have survived being hit. Her entire life changed in that millionth of a second when she was struck while out hunting on a summer's evening. The following is a retelling of Renate's experience.

I come from a long line of hunters. Sneaking around in the woods and looking for animals to shoot has been a tradition of my family's for generations.

One early July evening, we were out on an ordinary hunting trip. It had just stopped raining and the clouds were finally breaking and letting the sun actually shine through. My husband and I had climbed up into a tall hunting hut so we could do what us hunters do best: sit around and wait. We both had our heads stuck out of the small opening in the wooden hut's facade, staring out into the forest to see if anything was moving. I began to feel the raindrops trickling down again, so I pulled my hat down a little bit. That's the last thing I remember.

READ ON MOTHERBOARD: Why Weather Predictions Will Never Be Perfect

Next thing I knew, I felt as if I was on a roller coaster. Everything felt as if it was upside down, and I had this excruciating pain in my face. When I opened my eyes, I realized I was laying on the floor and my husband was violently shaking me so I'd wake up. Nothing made sense, so I just started screaming. I had no idea what was happening.

"We've been hit by lightning," he shouted.

I couldn't feel anything other than my head. I was almost completely numb.

My husband threw me over his shoulder and carried my limp body down the ladder. He managed to get me to the edge of the forest, where he laid me down on an embankment so he could run off and grab the car. I wasn't able to muster the strength to sit up, but I could sense the feeling slowly creeping back into my body. I couldn't help but worry about what was going through his head—his wife laying there like a burned piece of flesh in a field. I didn't want him to think I was dead, so I used every bit of strength I had just to sit up. Just to show him that I was still alive. At that exact same moment, my telephone started ringing. It was my son. Right there and then, I had no clue if I would even survive that day—I was terrified that the numbness would keep spreading and take over my head. It was a dreadful experience that I wanted to spare my son from. That said, I couldn't pick up the phone even if I wanted to.

My husband got me into the car and raced me back to our house, where his parents helped lift me up onto a chair. I sat there, lifeless. On the one hand, I was completely numb, but, at the same time, every single part of my body felt as if it was burning. It was strange, because I was equally as apathetic as I was scared about death. I was absolutely certain that I'd die that day.

Related: Into weather? Watch 'The Mexican Town That Fist Fights to Summon Rain'

For some reason my jacket wasn't even scratched—unlike the blouse I had on underneath, which was completely torn to shreds. I had this bloody, stinking burn starting on my right shoulder and running diagonally all the way down my body to my left foot.

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Renate's burn marks and the lightning exit wound. Photo courtesy of Renate K

It didn't take long for the paramedics to arrive. All of a sudden there were blue lights everywhere. Five cars arrived to stabilize me and my husband. I guess our upper arms had been touching when the lightning hit, so he got the last of the charge. He admitted that he had no clue what was going on until he was half way down the hut's ladder. Until then, everything was just black.

Our blood pressure reacted quite differently to the incident. While his was extremely high, 220 over 200, mine stayed perfectly stable at 120 over 80. Which isn't all that different from that of a sleeping baby. We were rushed off to separate hospitals, where we spent two days in the ICU having our conditions monitored. We were OK, bar all the severe burning, of course.

The day after the incident, every single inch of my body hurt. It was as if I'd never exercised in my life and then decided to run an Ironman triathlon, or something. On top of that, I was smashed for about an entire week after. I couldn't do anything. I didn't want to go shopping, to cook, to do whatever, basically—I just lay there powerless with zero will to move a single muscle in my body.

One of the toughest parts of the whole thing came right after. The press basically attacked us, looking for interviews, but I declined all requests. I was just so incredibly happy to be alive that I didn't want to spend my time speaking to the media about how I'd nearly died. Especially after I heard about the four lightning victims that had been killed on the exact same day in Germany. Three had died on the spot, but the fourth passed away some days later in hospital. Purely out of coincidence, I actually managed to stumble across my doctor discussing what had happened to me, on television. He explained to the camera that I wasn't out of danger just yet and that I could actually still die from it a few days later. What a way to find that out.

People often ask me if the incident has changed my perspective on life. I don't think so. I guess that it just made me realize that I've always lived my life as I should. No lightning bolt will change that. The only big difference is that I cringe every time I see a burst of lightning, and I try to avoid storms as much as humanly possible.

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"Squids," with pistols, and sneakers. Only on Nintendo.

A version of this article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Video gaming has a language barrier, and I'm not talking exclusively about the vernacular of so many fantasy RPGs and spacefaring sci-fi shooters. Those games, brimming with terminology tedious enough to make a librarian who can only get off when reciting the Dewey Decimal System into the mirror, while wearing a mask of old leather book covers, slip into a coma, know their audience and can confidently quip discombobulatingly without feeling like they've just dropped a new Esperanto on the world. I'm on about something so much more basic, a single four-letter word that can, and does, confuse so often: play.

"Video games don't have to be fun," was the message of a Motherboard article focusing on indie festival Two5Six in May, and VICE Gaming has carried coverage aplenty of titles that aren't supposed to fill their player with sunshine feelings. Case in point: "It's Vital to Have Video Games That Aren't Fun." "Fun" and "play" tend to be hands-holding, word-association buddies in our understanding, though—when you play, you're having fun. It's why the breaks between lessons in primary schools are called "playtime"—although that might just be because barking "piss off outside, with your naïve hopes and dreams, and let us smoke fags and forget about our dead-end existences" bang on the bell tends to leave six-year-olds in tears.

"Play," then, needn't mean fun, and playing video games shouldn't be seen as an exclusively fun pastime. Playing games like these is no fucking fun at all. I didn't sit through the parental anguish of Heavy Rain with a big, dumb grin plastered all over my face. I smiled once during the post-apocalyptic horrors of Metro: Last Light, and that was only because my pizza had arrived. When I was young, I managed to somehow embed a toothbrush bristle in my lower gum and it hurt like all hell, but I still laughed more then, through the pain, than I did during the duration of Dead Space. I've never managed more than six laps of P.T. because I'd rather my sofa didn't stink of piss.

We "play" games because we understand them to be just that: games, like football and tennis, which require the swinging of our arms and legs. Except you "play" chess, too, and it's unlikely you'll ever run during one of those matches, unless Total Wipeout undergoes a majorly rebranded reboot, fronted by Victoria Coren Mitchell in full riot gear. But I'm losing my original train of thought amid all the sweat here, so: "Play," when it comes to video games, can mislead with ease. You interact with these experiences, and navigate their many and varied obstacles by manipulating a controlling device in such a way that your thumbs and fingers get a workout, but the same is rarely said of your ass. They can be completely awful things that are precisely zero fun, but yet we "play" them. Which sounds weird, really. Is my point. I'm glad we've cleared that up. It only took four paragraphs.

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Here, Kirby faces off against a windy tree. Obviously.

"Play" in its pure, glee-spreading guise, though, is what one veteran purveyor of software and systems wholeheartedly specializes in—and its adaptation of "play," expressed through its current catalogue, refers to the source material that we've all had experience of, acknowledging better than anyone else the connection between physical and virtual play. When we're kids, we learn through play. We hold things and mould things. We pull things apart and put them back together. We cut the hair on our sister's dolls because we're bastards and plenty old enough to know it won't grow back, and we're super smug about the whole thing until two weeks later when it transpires that Optimus Prime's arms, once snapped, remain that way. Children make mistakes and that teaches us: Don't make those mistakes again. Stick a knife into a toaster once and you're curious. Do it twice and you're a dipstick. And quite possibly dead.

Nintendo's Wii U output of late, and I include an imminent title too, is tailored to perfectly encapsulate "play" as it meant to us when shorts were a know-no-better fashion statement and not a desperate cry for ballsack comfort on the two days of the year when London's Underground becomes hotter than sunny side-up Venus. The unique-selling-point aspects of Kirby and the Rainbow Curse (...and the Rainbow Paintbrush in Europe, perhaps because "rainbow curse" sounds like he's full of imaginatively foul language), Yoshi's Woolly World and Splatoon are all rooted in the physical world: clay, wool, paint, respectively. These are things that we played with at home—it's why the knackered old kitchen table that your mum can't bring herself to chuck out so now it's in the garage where the car should be is so very stained (memories, or something, I don't know). These are things that we held in our hands, that we turned and twisted and spilled and stretched. This is play to a five-year-old, just as, on the telly or the GamePad's between-your-palms screen, it is to a 35-year-old. (Come on, no teenagers admit to owning a Wii U, do they? Not unless they're deliberately asking for a playground knockdown.)

Related: VICE's documentary on eSports

Alternatively, check out Motherboard's video on the new Kings of Kong

I love that, perhaps completely by chance, there's these three games that play not a thing like one another, but that are bound by their tangible quirks. In the spring-released Kirby, you swipe the GamePad to create bloaty ball-aiding platforms, poking the tubby pink blob's backside to propel him on his way—you "paint" the screen, I suppose, but not in the same way that Splatoon does, which takes the basic concept of a Super Soaker square-off, ups the volume and the contrast like a Dreamcast game that missed its release window, and then lets its players get on with it.

Online and off (but more often on, or else you're doing it wrong), Splatoon is a blast. You dash about, bobbing your stupid smiling squid head beneath a cap that you could only buy once you'd leveled up your freshness or something (some of the game's presentation is decidedly exclusionist of attitude, and vacuous of message, but whatever), lobbing great pustules of ink across a battlefield—an underpass, a shopping mall, a skate-park—in order to coat the most territory within an allotted time frame. It's a shooter that circumvents standard genre violence: You play four against four, beside silent strangers, but eliminating the opposition isn't the point of these turf wars.

The winning team is the one that gets their color on the greater percentage of the horizontal surfaces, as judged by, for reasons that I'm yet to fathom, a fat cat called Judd. Its music is catchy, its matches are quick, and it absolutely nails that just-one-more-turn-before-bed-oh-shit-it's-gone-midnight factor that so many grimly gray variants on the style shoot embarrassingly wide of. And it does what all "play" should: When you fail, and your team loses, you still get something out of it. Your experience points rise. Perhaps you'll reach a new level, even in defeat. Your squid pops back up onto its feet (weird), and a "continue?" splat dances on your screen. "A" can't be pressed quickly enough.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/QVX7sYjkoLo' width='560' height='315']

A trailer for the forthcoming 'Woolly World,' even more sickeningly cute in Japanese.

You wouldn't call Splatoon cute, mind, unlike Yoshi's newest platformer, his first headlining adventure since 1997's Yoshi's Story, which comes out at the end of June in Europe and Australia, Japan in July, with a North American release date expected in the autumn (or, y'know, "fall," but around here that still means an angry old man shouting into a microphone while a bunch of people he met eight minutes ago smash musical instruments against each other). Like its predecessor of the best part of 20 years ago, Woolly World features levels made up of—hey, you totally guessed it! Which connects it nicely to the handmade look of Yoshi's Story, which pushed the N64 to deliver a card-and-paper aesthetic not so dissimilar to Vita essential Tearaway, or the award-winning cut-outs of Lumino City. It's absolutely adorable, and those aren't words that you'll often read in consecutive order on this site without their writer receiving a wedgie.

What Nintendo has made with these games is obvious: these are toys, very literally playthings. Games today are often anything but—they're serious-face affairs where the world must be saved from extra-terrestrial arseholes who are entirely within their rights to be in such a pissy mood given we willingly launched music by Blur into space. That, or they're asking us to think deeper about our own existences by turning the first-person camera right back at us and shouting: hey, you, the fat bastard holding out for a record killstreak, doesn't all of this mindless murder really make you appreciate the luxuries of the life you lead? Of course not, replies said bastard, greedily plunging a hand into his third grab-bag-sized sack of Monster Munch. But not these Nintendo titles, not these toys.

What do you mean you missed the previous two links to Motherboard content?

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Now, come on, that's just completely unrealistic.

These games don't care that your phone bill's late or your cat died (if it's as fat as Judd, no wonder) or your BMI is right off the scale and it's not your fault because you just retain water and it's nothing to do with all the Cathedral City that's not in the fridge anymore but the incriminating evidence is all over the sideboard—all they want is to make you happy. They are not a shoulder of support at a time of crisis, a crutch for your very real emotions; they are rockets to the fluffiest of fluffy clouds, all cartoon cuddly, from which vantage point you can't survey a single thing due to the rainbow-colored joy being forced into your retinas until you vomit a Care Bear Stare into your lap.

But then, haven't Nintendo games always been a bit like this? Did we really believe ZombiU would kick-start a new wave of Ninty nasties? Of course we didn't—although that game is creepy as fuck and that bit in the nursery is pure chills and, oh balls, there's the upholstery soiled. Nintendo makes toys to play with, and calls them games, whereas other developers create stories, mythologies, and relationships and graft them onto an interactive experience full of contextual controls and expositional prologues that last the length of half an HBO season. Which is not to say that Nintendo don't do that, too, or that they're incapable of concocting compelling narratives—but who in their right mind is going to form a lasting emotional connection with a puffing protagonist resembling a distended testicle?

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And these do... something.

Whatever the hardline Nintendo fan's relationship with the company's array of, let's say, "individual" avatars, the formula is evidently working: after a dismal few years which saw company revenues nosedive and industry observers predicting the quick death of the Wii U, Nintendo's back in the black financially, having posted a profit of $350 million for the latest fiscal year. Which, to place that figure into some basic perspective, was almost $100 million more than they'd anticipated, and represented a substantial reversal of fortunes following a $23 billion loss in the previous year. Miyamoto must have got a round in, at the very least.

Nintendo's amiibos—small figures that add something to games but I'm not 100 percent sure what, as the ones I have are still in their boxes because I Am That Guy—reinforce their toymaker credentials, as what else are these manifestations of (mostly, as I do really know what they do) superfluous tat but toys? If you were so inclined you could tear Mario and Bowser from their packaging and mash their little faces into each other. Or Mario's into Peach's, depending on your mood (you animal). These tiny plastic statues are so popular that some so-and-so stole a truckload of them in May, like a modern-day Buster Edwards with an Edge subscription. A dastardly deed, no doubt, but all the same: if you find a contraband Villager for a reasonable price, call me, yeah? I'll set him up on a play date with my Link, while I play with myself. By myself, by myself. On the Wii U. Is what I meant. Oh God.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

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There's a grown man in Hoboken, New Jersey who rides around all year wearing a Batman costume on a bicycle adorned with Batman flags and streamers. He swerves through the streets, honking a horn and looking for the Joker, all the while screaming, "Happy New Year!" at the wrong time of the year. He doesn't do it for fame or money, he won't charge you for a photograph with him; he simply does it because he likes to pretend to be Batman. Like a child and the sound of an ice cream truck, when I hear his honking coming down Hudson Street, long before I see him, I feel giddy. When I finally lay my eyes upon his cape and cowl and he waves at me I am overwhelmed with a sense of hope and optimism that the world has not yet vanquished all the colorful characters into hiding, that there are still those who march to the beat of their own drum amongst us to inspire our children to be something different, something special.

But there aren't enough Batmans out there for my liking and so I tend not to concern myself with the happenings of the outside world and instead insulate myself within the skateboarding community. And while there are many rebellious factions of skateboarders out there, as its popularity has grown it has become increasingly infiltrated by opportunistic outsider athletic brands that want to turn a lifestyle once fueled by drugs, booze, and rebellion into the next drug-tested, uniform-wearing Olympic sport.

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All skateboarding can do at this point is batten down the hatches and prepare itself for The Great Kook Epidemic of 2016, while championing those who truly do not give a fuck. For example, take Vancouver B.C.'s Barrier Kult. The "BA. KU." is a collective of like-minded professional and amateur Canadian skaters who were displeased with the direction skating was headed and decided in 2003 to don ski masks, create Black Metal-inspired identities, and dedicate their existence to skating only one obstacle: the Jersey Barrier. For more than a decade I've been keeping tabs on the Kult, getting as excited by their "evil" web videos as I do when I see Batman on his bicycle.

I've always wanted to interview them, but there's an age-old Big Brother rule that forbids interviewing people with whom you are too obsessed to keep a professional journalistic distance (as a result, I've refused three Ghostface interviews in my life). But after speaking with Anthony Tafuro about his new book, BA. KU. Kult Skating/Dark Rituals,I decided I'd break the rule just this once. Luckily Barrier Kult founding member, Depth Leviathan Dweller, only does email interviews so I was able to avoid fanning out too hard.

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VICE: What is the story with these Canadians running around hiding their faces in ski masks, skating on Jersey Barriers? Are they embarrassed to be Canadian?
Anthony Tafuro: When they first agreed to let me shoot them they set some ground rules of no tropes of fire, no women tropes. They wanted everything to be about skateboarding and the barrier. I wanted to focus on why they were only skateboarding this one surface, the Jersey Barrier, and not stairs or bowls or ramps. A lot of people judge this team on that, because you're restricting what you can do by only skating one surface, but to them it's very ritualistic. It allows them to challenge themselves. They were all very much involved in the vert skate world, specifically Deer Man, but they have a lot of young guys on the team now so they are contemporary. They're not just this old-school skate crew that does old-school tricks on old-school skateboards. They did explain to me that they aren't into the whole street skating scene but there they are skating a barrier, a street object, but they're skating it like a ramp.

Would one get kicked out of the Kult if they skated ledges or stairs?
They all do skate as professional skaters but when they skate as Barrier Kult they put on the masks, they go as their fictional names and that's it; they're Barrier Kult.

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Were you permitted to see them without the masks on?
Yeah, of course.

Would they have killed you if you included a photo of them without the masks on?
No, never. It's just not important to show them without the masks. They explained to me the only reason they put on the masks was that they wanted to have this anonymous identity. They would scratch out their faces in each frame of the footage, but it was a lot of editing work and that's why they started wearing masks.

There are lots of pentagrams and Satanic imagery going on in the photos.
In their videos, too. When I first watched their video reel I noticed they had all these old movie clips of some of my favorite ritual scenes. That's what made me realize this is so much more than just skateboarding.

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[The Barrier Kult has written in all caps since 2003 for ritualistic reasons. We apologize if you feel like you're being yelled at by Depth Leviathan Dweller. - Ed.]

VICE: What's the origin of the Kult and the ski mask?
DEPTH LEVIATHAN DWELLER: BA. KU. WAS STARTED BY MYSELF, DEER MAN OF DARK WOODS, AND ANOTHER BC INTERIOR MEMBER, VLAD MOUNTAIN IMPALER. FOR US, THE HIGHWAY BARRIER WAS ALWAYS A GO-TO SPOT FOR TIGHT TRANSITION SESSIONS, TRYING TO LAND RAMP TRICKS ON THE LIPS OF VARIOUS BARRIERS. THE VIOLENCE OF THE SHALLOW END OF POOLS ARE APEX, BUT HARDER TO COME BY IN BC AND HIGHWAY BARRIERS ARE EVERYWHERE. WHEN WE MOVED TO VANCOUVER 15 YEARS AGO, WE CONTINUED OUR BARRIER ASSAULTS, BUT IT BECAME A STAPLE OF OUR 'SKATEBOARDING'—THE BARRIER BECOMING AN ALTAR THAT SIGNIFIES VIOLENT TIGHT TRANSITIONS, THE MOVEMENTS AND THE 'SKATEBOARD CULTURE' DECONSTRUCTED, OCCULT PRACTICES UTILIZED—ELITE BLACK WAR METAL STUDIED AND PARALLELED TO OUR 'SKATEBOARDING' TO KEEP THE MILITANCE AND DIRECTION IN THE MEMBERS PURE. THE BARRIER KULT'S FIRST ZINES APPEARED IN 2003. IF YOU LOOK CLOSELY, THE FACES ARE BLACKED OUT, HOODS AND BANDANAS ARE WORN. THE BALACLAVA CAME DIRECTLY AFTER THE FIRST ZINE AS IT GUARANTEED, MADE EASIER THE DISGUISE. BLACK GLOVES WERE ALSO WORN IN EARLY PRACTICES BY THOSE INVOLVED.

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Skateboarding is larger than ever and a lot of younger kids are attracted to it for that jockish aspect that is motivated by fame and money. So I truly love that you guys are doing your own thing completely anonymously without hope for accolades. What is your take on the current state of skating and the infiltration of the jock-mentality?
THE ANONYMOUS ASPECT OF THE BARRIER KULT FURTHER EXEMPLIFIES THE CHARACTERISTICS THAT WE SEE MISSING FROM 'CONTEMPORARY' SKATEBOARDING. WE LIKE TO EXEMPLIFY THE TOTEMIC / FETISHISTIC ASPECTS OF SKATEBOARDING, THE APPRECIATION OF THE CULTEST OF MOVEMENTS THAT WERE GLORIFIED IN THE 80s FOR US BY ARTICLES LIKE NEIL BLENDER'S 'AGGRO ZONE' AND GSD'S 'STREET SHEET.' SIMPLE, YET POWERFUL SPOTS CHOSEN [EG. GEMCO BANK], ACCESSIBLE YET APEX MOVEMENTS CHOSEN [SLAPPY, SLASH, TAILBLOCK, 50/50 STALL, BONELESS ONE, LAP-OVER GRIND]. WE SEE TRUE 'REBELLION' AND 'SKATEBOARD CULTURE' AS APPRECIATION OF THE MILITANT CULT MOVEMENTS MADE WORSHIPPED. THE BARRIER KULT HAS A PLACE FOR 'PROGRESSION' WITH THE 'TRICKS' LANDED BY MEMBERS DEER MAN OF DARK WOODS AND BEAST OF GEVAUDAN, BUT WE INTERPRET THOSE AS SIMPLY METHODS FOR BA. KU. PLAGUE SPREADING.

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WHEN STRIPPED DOWN, ESSENTIALLY SKATEBOARDING IS AN ACTIVITY, 'A FORM OF GAME' THAT ALMOST ACCIDENTALLY TRANSLATED INTO A PUNK ETHIC IN THE EARLY 80S. YES, THE CRIMINALITY OF SKATEBOARDING—FENCE HOPPING, DESTROYING 'PROPERTY,' AGGRESSIVE MOVES, ETC. MAKES IT TRANSLATE INTO SOMETHING MORE HARDCORE / AGGRO—HENCE THE INEVITABILITY OF PUNK CULTURE, BUT WE SEE THE 1990s+ CONTEMPORARY 'FREESTYLE TRICKERY' TRANSLATED TO THE STREET ADDING A COMPLEXITY TO THE ACTIONS THAT HERALD THE CONSEQUENCE OF JOCK CULTURE. WE SEE NO COINCIDENCE THAT COMPLEX TRICKS LEAD TO JOCK MENTALITY, ESPECIALLY WHEN THEY CAN BE STRUCTURED AND LANDED IN FRONT OF A CROWD OR ON A TELEVISION.

THE ANONYMITY ADDS TO THE STRUCTURE OF THE BARRIER KULT AND ITS DISDAIN FOR SKATEBOARDING'S OBSESSION WITH SUPPOSED CREATIVITY AND CHARACTER. JUST BECAUSE YOU CAN LAND A 'HARD TRICK' ON A SKATEBOARD DOESN'T MEAN THAT YOU ARE A CREATIVE BEING, OR A PERSON THAT I SHOULD LISTEN TO TO HEAR POTENTIALLY MISDIRECTED AND UNEDUCATED VIEWS ON DIFFERENT SUBJECTS. THERE IS NOTHING MORE POISONOUS THAN SKATEBOARD PROS THAT USE THE PUBLIC APPRECIATION OF THEIR 'SKATEBOARD TRICKERY' TO PUSH SOMETHING LIKE RELIGION, FASHION, OR TRICK TRENDS ON OTHER SKATEBOARDERS.

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I'm from New Jersey, home of the Jersey Barrier. I'm curious why you've chosen the barrier as your main canvas? Don't you feel limited by only skating one thing?
THE JERSEY BARRIER ACTS AS AN ACCESSIBLE ALTAR TO TIGHT TRANSITION SKATEBOARDING. BEING ABLE TO NEGOTIATE AND KNIFE [SKATEBOARD] THE VIOLENT TRANSITION OF A JERSEY / K-RAIL / RITUAL BARRIER RE-ENACTS THE CULT AND APEX FEELING OF SKATEBOARDING THE SHALLOW END OF A POOL OR SOME OBSCURE TRANSITIONS FOUND AT AN ABANDONED WATERSLIDE PARK. THE ELLIPTICAL TRANSITION OF THE HIGHWAY BARRIER ALSO HERALDS BACK TO THE TIME OF EARLY 80s HALF- AND QUARTER-PIPES AND THE VERT CULTURE THAT REVOLVED AROUND DUPLICATING TIGHT POOL TRANSITIONS INTO BACKYARD RAMPS.

THE CONTROL AND RITUAL OF THE OCCULT AND ELITE BLACK WAR METAL KEEPS THE BARRIER KULT MILITANT IN ITS DEDICATION TO THE RITUAL BARRIER.

How did the book come about and why let an outsider from Long Island into your fold?
WE WERE CONTACTED BY ANTHONY AND AFTER LOOKING AT HIS WORK AND HEARING HIS PLAN, WE DECIDED TO LET HIM PHOTOGRAPH US. HE WAS INCREDIBLY PROFESSIONAL; RENTING HIS OWN CAR, HIS OWN HOTEL ROOM, ETC. SO IT MADE IT EASY FOR US TO GO ON WITH OUR DAILY SCHEDULES WHILE WE ALSO WORKED OUT WHERE AND WHEN TO SHOOT. IN THE TWO SEPARATE OCCASIONS HE WAS IN VANCOUVER, IT WAS THE OFF SEASON, SO THE SKIES WERE GREY AND MOST OF THE SPOTS WERE WET ADDING TO THE REALITY AND DYNAMISM OF THE SHOOTS. ANTHONY HAD A KEEN UNDERSTANDING OF OUR PRACTICES AND DIRECTION, AND HIS COLLEAGUE THAT CAME WITH HIM TO HELP ON THE FIRST SHOOT HAD A DEEP UNDERSTANDING OF NEW YORK SKATEBOARDING AND THE SKAVENGER / ANIMAL BMX WORLD THAT COMPARATIVELY WORSHIPS RIDING CELLAR DOORS WHICH IS A CULTURE OF ITS OWN. BOTH OF THEM HAVE A KEEN INTEREST IN PROPER RITUAL BLACK WAR METAL AS WELL, WHICH ALSO HELPED DEEPLY WITH THE AESTHETIC AND DIRECTION. VANCOUVER IS HOME TO TWO OF THE MOST WORSHIPPED AND CULT OF BLACK WAR METAL BANDS—BLASPHEMY AND CONQUEROR—WHICH ANTHONY ALSO APPRECIATED AND LET SEEP INTO THE HISTORY OF THE BA. KU. VIA THE PHOTOS OF THE VESTS, JACKETS, LPS, ETC.

THE FINAL EXECUTION OF THE BOOK IS EXCELLENT; LIKE A VIRTUAL BLACK & WHITE JOURNEY THROUGH OUR PRACTICES, BELIEFS AND DIRECTION.

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Over time I've watched the Kult grow beyond your Canadian borders. How does one become a mask-carrying member?
NON-CANADIAN MEMBERS INCLUDE CRUSADE TEMPLAR HORSE SKELETON IN SAN FRANCISCO AND LUTHER, MOSS-COVERED WITCHMAKER CANDLEMAS IN SAN DIEGO. BOTH MEMBERS WERE MET VIA COMMON ALLIES. CTHS VIA THE VANCOUVER JAK'S, LMWC VIA OUR CONNECTION WITH GULLWING TRUCKS [THE GULLWING SUPER PRO III].

How many members of the Kult are there at this point? What's the initiation process once accepted into the Kult?
THERE ARE 12 TITLED MEMBERS. NO 'OFFICIAL' INITIATION, JUST MILITANT DEDICATION, PLAGUE SPREADING. ONE FUTURE MEMBER FROM JAPAN IS STILL GAINING HIS 'TITLE' VIA REPEATED AND DOCUMENTED TAILBLOCK RITUALS.

Do you buy the masks in bulk?
MANY OF OUR MASKS WE HAVE WORN SINCE 2003. I KNOW THAT FOR A FACT, MYSELF, DMODW, AND MUSKELLUNGE OF DARK ISLAND HAVE BEEN WEARING THE SAME UNWASHED MASKS SINCE THE BIRTH OF THE BA. KU.

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Recently Huf made all over print weed ski masks. What is your take on anyone else using ski masks? Do you feel that's kind of your thing and others should just leave the masks alone?
AGAIN, THE BALACLAVAS FOR US WERE AT FIRST USED TO MAKE THE PURPOSES OF ANONYMITY MORE STRAIGHTFORWARD WHEN FILMING AND PHOTOGRAPHING. EVENTUALLY THE MASKS TOOK ON A LIFE OF THEIR OWN, ACTING AS A SYMBOL, EVEN AN AESTHETIC FOR THE BA. KU. OF COURSE, THE WEARING OF BALACLAVAS IN SKATEBOARDING IS NOTHING NEW [EG. SKULL SKATES HAD PHOTO SHOOTS IN THE 90s WITH ASSOCIATES ALL WEARING THE MASKS]. SO WE UNDERSTAND THAT OTHER SKATEBOARD COMPANIES HAVE THEIR OWN AGENDA IN WEARING AND MAKING THE BALACLAVAS. WE ONLY HAVE TROUBLE WITH FANATICAL GROUPS MAKING THEIR OWN BA. KU. 'TRIBUTE' CLOTHING FOR RE-SALE, ETC BUT USUALLY WE CONTACT THEM AND PROPER TRADES ARE MADE.

Do you guys eat with the masks on?
I ONCE WATCHED DMODW DRINK FROM A RIVER WITH HIS MASK ON IN NAGANO, JAPAN DURING A SKULL SKATES / BARRIER KULT TOUR.

What's next for the Kult?
FURTHER PROJECTS WITH GULLWING TRUCKS, MORE DECKS WITH SKULL SKATES. RUNNING THE BA. KU. CLOTHING COMPANY, WORKINGS WITH HEROIN SKATEBOARDS, FILMING FOR THE BARRIER KULT HORDE VIDEO TWO.

Follow @Orufat on Instagram.

Follow the Kult or buy the book here.

More stupid from Chris can be found at Chrisnieratko.com or on Twitter.