I researched vertical clitoral hood piercings for almost a year before I decided to get one. I talked myself out of it for months, pretending the time wasn't right and I was too busy, or that I hadn't done enough research. When I ran out of links to click and pictures to examine, I finally accepted that it was now or never. If I really wanted it, I would need to stop thinking about it and simply do it.

Vertical clitoral hood (VCH) piercings are the most popular female genital piercings, because of the quick healing time its natural conformity to the anatomical shape of the wearer. Aside from its aesthetic value, the VCH piercing increases clitoral stimulation during sexual activity and offers the possibility of more pleasure. The piercer places a surgical-steel bar (similar to those used in belly button piercings) through the little covering of skin that protects the clitoris so that one steel ball at the end of the bar is visible to the naked eye, while the other rests gently on top of a woman's clitoris under the little skin flap.

Obsessive by nature, I took my investigation into the world of genital piercings very seriously—I wanted to be absolutely sure before I began poking holes down there. At first, I encountered horror stories of women who went in for clitoral hood piercings and came out with nerve damage, caused by inexperienced piercers who permanently maimed their clients by piercing the clitoris along with the hood. While my insides clenched at the thought of being stabbed through my clitoris, I was relieved to find out that these cases of butchery were rare, and there were a surprising number of genital piercers with excellent reviews in my area.

What if someone at the piercing place laughs at me? Will I ever be able to cross my legs again?

After months of explicit internet searches, I decided that I loved the way they looked: delicate and feminine, but with an undeniable edge. And the prospect of having better sex and more intense orgasms was certainly intriguing. As far as piercings went, the VCH was also affordable: with an approximate service fee of $40 and a jewelry cost between $20 and $40, a VCH piercing would cost only a few dollars more than a belly button or tongue ring.

Although enthusiastic to get the piercing, I was still too ashamed to tell anyone aside from my boyfriend what I was doing. While 72 percent of American women have piercings of some kind, only 2 percent have piercings on the genitals. I'm a nice, normal girl. And we nice, normal girls just don't do things like pierce our vaginas—which is probably why the National Health Service in the UK now views consensual vaginal piercings as a crime, and why some doctors treat women with genital piercings less favorably.

Besides those concerns, my anxieties about the piercing were too personal to share: What if I lose all sensation and it ruins sex forever? What if someone at the piercing place laughs at me? Will I ever be able to cross my legs again? Will it show through my pants? What if I hate it?

I also grappled with my existence as a straitlaced, disciplined athlete who had never misbehaved in any major way in her entire life. I wondered how I might come to terms with what I saw as a transgression from my own identity, eagerly welcoming wildness into my otherwise orderly life. I wasn't the kind of person who did these sorts of things. And yet, I wanted so badly to get this piercing.

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The author

Early one Saturday afternoon I gritted my teeth and hailed a taxi, determined to go through with it. In the cab, I reminded myself that whatever happened, I would (most likely) return alive and could easily pretend the whole episode had never occurred. After all, I hadn't told anybody what I was doing in the first place.

As I approached my destination, my cheeks burned with insecurity. I briefly wondered why I was even there, doing something I shouldn't in a place where I didn't belong. Tucking my chin and folding my arms, I did my best to look small (not an easy task at over six feet tall) as I exited the cab. I saw the glass storefront of the piercing parlor and hustled to the safety of its cloud-colored walls.

I scuttled inside and approached the counter, brimming with false confidence. I still felt painfully out of place; this piercing parlor, in spite of its spa-like motif, was no different than any other. There really wasn't a nice, quiet place for normal girls like me to get their vaginas pierced.

"Hi there, what can I help you with today?"

The receptionist had a jewel-embossed piercing the size of a dime in the space between her chin and her bottom lip that sparkled when she talked.

"Hi, I'd like to get a VCH piercing?"

On the word "piercing" my voice hitched and rose, squeaking out a question in place of the confident declaration that I intended. I used the piercing's abbreviated name to sound sophisticated, and mostly to avoid saying "clitoral." I was intensely uncomfortable with the word clitoris, even when I was asking another person to pierce the skin above mine.

More on body modification: VICE meets tattoo artist Valerie Vargas of Frith Street Tattoo in SoHo, where she's known for doing the prettiest "lady heads" in the world.

The receptionist prepared paperwork and invited me to browse the jewelry, where I scrutinized each piece. I refused to decorate my lady-bits with anything plastic, colored, or cheap-looking, though I appreciated the irony in wanting a "classy" genital piercing. I settled on a plain steel bar with a cubic zirconium stone on the visible ball end of the jewelry. I filled out my consent forms as the receptionist rattled off information:

"As I'm sure you know, we sterilize all of our equipment in an autoclave to avoid infections. You'll go over aftercare instructions and payment with your piercer after you're all done, but it'll be about $75 today. Please sign here to indicate that you understand all of our policies and procedures. Your piercer today will be Ed; he'll come get you when he's all set."

A man. A man would be touching my vagina, poking a hole in it! The only men to ever even see that part of my body were my ex and current boyfriend, and now a perfect stranger who was a man would not only see me; he would also pierce me. I knew in the corner of my mind that I could probably wait a little longer and ask for a female piercer instead, but such a prudish request would be too humiliating. As far as I was concerned, the kind of girl who got her clitoral hood pierced was not the kind of girl who cared about the gender of her piercer. I would maintain the façade of being that kind of girl if it killed me.

The cotton swab's aggressive intrusion into the most sensitive part of my anatomy felt foreign and heavy. Was this how my piercing would feel?

"Gen?"

I looked up and saw Ed shuffle out to greet me, a gentle smile on his face. He was a short, overweight Hispanic man with a close beard and dreadlocks on the parts of his head that weren't shaved. Like everyone else in the shop aside from me, his face was amply decorated with rings, bars, and glittering studs. He looked a lot friendlier than I was expecting. I followed him into a procedure room that looked like a doctor's office, only its padded table was black and only half the length. I perched on the edge and dangled my legs as Ed and I chatted about my piercing.

"I'm going to ask you to take your pants and underwear off, and lay down on the table with your legs in a butterfly position when we get started."

"Oh, that's fine, that's what my waxer has me do!" My nerves induced me to over-share, but Ed wasn't fazed.

"Great, and so at that point I will take a look and see if you're anatomically suited for the piercing. I wouldn't worry about this. Most women are. From there we will use a needle receiving tube under your clitoral hood, or NRT, to place the jewelry."

I almost interjected again to declare that I knew all that already. From my extensive research, I knew that the NRT technique was the most advanced way of performing a VCH piercing, and I presumed that I knew exactly what to expect in the piercing process. Instead of speaking, I simply nodded and smiled as Ed talked me through everything in his soft, understanding voice. I wondered if Ed was gay. He had a maternal tone and the touch of an experienced nurse, and though I usually consider myself too progressive to just assume a person's sexual orientation, I unquestioningly accepted my presumptions of Ed's same-sex inclinations. It felt less uncomfortable to have my vagina examined by a gay man than to lie spread-eagled in front of a straight one.

I took off my pants and underwear and climbed onto the table as Ed instructed, crossing my arms over my chest and watching him as he prepared his tools. He held up a cotton swab with the soft cotton removed, saying, "I'm going to check your hood now to make sure we can do the piercing; I'll be placing this through the opening of your hood and it will be resting on your clitoris where the jewelry will sit. OK?"

"OK," I squeaked as he turned his attention from my face to my vagina. I suppressed the urge to giggle at the word hood and stared at the ceiling. I felt intense pressure and the pull of the cotton swab on my skin, and my eyes widened. It hurt more than I thought it would. The cotton swab's aggressive intrusion into the most sensitive part of my anatomy felt foreign and heavy. Was this how my piercing would feel?

"The opening of your hood is a little tight, but you're suited for the piercing! I'm going to get started."

I felt the cottonless cotton swab withdraw and the coldness of iodine in its place. I put my hands to my face and exhaled deeply. As Ed worked, I considered the absurdity of discussing the tightness of my hood with a strange man. I shivered with pent-up nervous laughter.

All humor quickly evaporated as I felt the same pressure as with the cotton swab, followed by a sharp stab of pain. I wrinkled my nose and squinted against it, careful not to move my lower body.

The pain faded to a powerful sting as Ed secured my jewelry and swabbed off the remainder of the iodine. In less than a minute, it was done.

He handed me a mirror, and I speechlessly took it and angled my newly ornamented anatomy into view... I loved it.

"You doing OK, Gen? That wasn't so bad, was it?"

I could hear the reassuring smile in his voice as he spoke, and I wanted to slap him. He wasn't allowed to be cheerful while I was still suffering from the shock of what had just transpired.

"I'm OK... Yeah, that hurt more than I was expecting, 'cause everything I saw online said it was so easy—that it was just a little pinch because the skin down there is so thin..." My voice felt weak, emptied of all its energy from the unexpected pain.

"Here's a mirror so that you can take a look at it. What do you think?"

He handed me a mirror, and I speechlessly took it and angled my newly ornamented anatomy into view. I held my breath while I peeked, and exhaled slowly as I took in the unadulterated appearance of my own body.

I loved it. It looked exactly like all the pictures I'd spent so many minutes staring at. And I'd made the perfect choice with the cubic zirconium; my piercing had just the right amount of sparkle.

Scared to touch it, I handed the mirror back to Ed, beaming at the results of what had been a perilous journey for me. I walked gingerly to the corner and hailed a cab, incredibly pleased with myself for having the courage to actually go through with it.

Three weeks later, my piercing was almost completely healed. I had already gotten enthusiastic approval from my boyfriend in a very exhibitionistic Skype call, where he declared it "really hot." I was discovering how to move, sit, stand, and bathe in new ways to avoid disturbing the tender, healing skin and the powerful sensation that flared any time I so much as nudged the piercing. All sexual activity was forbidden for at least four weeks, so I had yet to investigate claims of enhanced pleasure.

As I learned how to navigate my newly adorned body, I gave up trying to navigate my own silly binary of what was "normal" and what wasn't. I wasn't as simple and straightforward as I had once thought. I was my own version of a nice, normal girl: one who happened to have her vagina pierced.

Read more stories about piercings on VICE.com.

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Irvine Welsh in Toronto. Photo via Twitter

Twenty-two years after his debut novel, Trainspotting, shocked and delighted the world with its tales of Edinburgh junkies, Irvine Welsh is still cooking up controversy. His new novel, A Decent Ride, featuring cab driver and serial shagger Juice Terry—who returns from Glue (2001) and the Trainspotting sequel, Porno (2002)—includes necrophilia, murder by bodily fluids, and chapters narrated by Terry's penis.

Reviewers have found it a love-it-or-loathe-it proposition, and Welsh thinks this is "perfect." Over bangers 'n' mash and a pint of local lager in Toronto at The Football Factory—named after his friend John King's 1996 novel about hooliganism—he talked about Scottish independence (good), dancing frat boys (bad), FHRITP ("horrible"), and the value of starting arguments.

VICE: More than any of your novels, A Decent Ride is framed as a comedy.
Irvine Welsh: Usually I'm about dark drama with pitch-black comedy to relieve the tension and keep people invested in the drama. This one is much more the other way around, introducing darker, dramatic themes through comedy. I thought the [UK] election would be quite divisive for Scotland, so I wanted [the book] to be a piss-take—where people could just laugh at ourselves and the ludicrousness of being alive in this world.

Was Juice Terry nagging at you to write a novel about him?
Yeah, the characters in Trainspotting, Filth [1998, and filmed last year], and Glue resonate—I always write little pieces about them, and sometimes they develop into something bigger. I still have an apartment in Edinburgh, but I haven't lived there consistently for about 20 years, and I thought that with the referendum [in September on Scottish independence], there's a whole new kind of Scotland developing. Juice Terry was my tour guide. I wanted somebody who was really single-minded, and Terry's like the classic "No" voter: "I'm happy in my world. I've got my shagging, and I've got my driving." And then suddenly his life falls apart; he's opened up by a cataclysmic event, and he has to engage with it. He has to reorder himself, to take more interest in his family, his kids, his mother, his community, his male friendships, in things like golf and reading, and he'd eventually be writing poems if this was kept up. It's to mirror that cultural shakedown—we're pulled out of our complacency by things happening around us that we really don't quite grasp.

There are hidden depths to him, aren't there? Because he's able to slide easily into reading literature like Moby-Dick.
Yeah, he's not a stupid guy; he's wilfully ignorant, like a lot of people. A bit of knowledge is a very painful thing, because it makes you aware of society in general and your place in it. That's basically why a lot of poor or working-class people are right wing, because when you realize your status is pretty disadvantaged, that puts a burden of responsibility on you to change the world, and a lot people feel that burden is too much. It's something I can't criticize because I've done it myself so many times; if you're working 9-to-5, you're ground down by the end of the day. You want to put your feet up to watch fucking shite on TV like Pop Idol. You don't want to go out to local political meetings; you want to go to football on Saturday and fuckin' sing songs and let off steam. Sometimes things happen that shake you out of that world. To me, the Scottish independence [movement] was like punk or acid house—people got energized at a grassroots level and focused on a renewal of democracy and self-definition: Who are we? What kind of relationships do we aspire to that are going to make our lives better? Once these uncomfortable questions are asked, they can't really be unasked.

Is it harder for you to speak about these issues given that you live in Chicago now?
You experience exile in a very different way nowadays, because you've got the internet. I had a big argument with my mate Jimmy; he said, "Why do you tell people to vote yes on Twitter? You're never fuckin' there!" I said, "Look, I'm there more than you, you fat cunt, 'cause all you do is you sit in front of your fuckin' TV!" He's got his big flatscreen; he never goes out of the house. If you count his front room as Scotland, he's there more than me, but when I'm there for three months of the year, I'm out and about, talking to people. If you're engaged, you're operating on a different level.

On Twitter, you mentioned how you felt journalists in the US and the UK lack the "balls" to take on "waffling, entitled power chuggers."
[Jeremy] Paxman is brilliant; he just gets ripped into everybody. But generally print journalism is so concentrated in the hands of multinational billionaires that it has a negative effect on what people can do and say. They've cornered themselves into irrelevance; also with technology, people just aren't buying newspapers, are they? I honestly believe that if the broadcast media like the BBC stopped the "What do papers say?" shows, people wouldn't even know the papers exist. It's like the broadcast media are sponsoring the continuation of newspapers.

A lot of arts coverage now is so celebrity-driven.
Yeah, it's also sponsorships. In Scotland, there are so many great visual artists, writers and musicians [because] nobody gives a fuck about sponsoring anything. When I'm out in LA with my agents or with my managers down in Miami, every single night is a fucking brand ambassador's party for this or that. It's light and bright, and there's beautiful people around and photo opportunities, but it's fucking rubbish. They're forcing this glamness into mainstream culture. There is in certain places the beginning of an underground, outside of that big metropolitan glare.

You used to DJ house music. Have you done so recently?
I'm too old, man. Old people shouldn't fuckin' DJ.... I've got a pal who's got a club in Chicago; I some days go in and DJ with him, but now I think you have to be able to pull an all-nighter to DJ. These fuckin' 50-something legs can't carry me across the dancefloor for 12 hours without chemicals, and I can't take loads of chemicals now.

A lot of dance music now is actually for people who don't dance. If you go to see Calvin Harris or David Guetta playing a proper house club, they'll play amazing music for dance music aficionados, but in Vegas, it's a frat boy set. It's all fuckin' breaks, man—you can't build up any dance rhythm. A piece of tune will come in that people recognize; they'll [clap for] about three seconds and then, boom! Another bang! Bang! Bang! It's for people whose attention span is fucked; they can't just glide into the music. They've got to be distracted from remembering they're on the dance floor. The frat boys that go to the clubs in Vegas are the new versions of the housewives that listened to easy-listening radio. They want a certain thing, and it can't be out of their comfort zone.

In contrast to this, I understand you've taken up boxing.
Yeah, if you're at a desk all day, you've got to do something to keep fit. It's been a big part of my life for years. I do a lot of padwork; I don't do in the ring sparring with an opponent now. Your hand-speed goes, and if you're there with younger guys... So to me, it is just fitness, but I do like the whole culture around it.

What did you think of Pacquiao versus Mayweather?
Everybody knew it was going to be a shit fight and Mayweather was going to win, and they watched it anyway. Two fighters past their best, one whose ages quicker than the other's, but you have to watch it because for years, you've been sold this whole idea that they're going to fight. Your psychotic little internet timeline isn't complete until you've gone to that point. I think we should just shut down the internet for a year and see how people function—that would be fuckin' great. And ban mobile phones for a year.

Have you tried cutting yourself off?
I'm going to do it a bit this summer. I've started switching the phone off for long periods. If someone doesn't phone or text you, you get all that psychotic worry: "What's happened to my wife and family—are they OK?" It's bullshit. How did we get to feel that way? It becomes this terrible form of social control—you get addicted.

The worst elements of the web impinge on our daily lives: recently in Toronto we had a scandal where a female newscaster confronted some men after having "Fuck her right in the pussy" shouted at her—straight out of an internet meme.
It's that horrible trend in the patriarchy to silence women. If you look at Twitter, for example, why should bright, interesting women be silenced by fucking idiots who've got nothing to say, and who are going to be found dead in their mother's basement in six months anyway? It's easier to shut somebody down if you feel you've got some kind of status over her. It has to be stopped. Can you imagine if women's voices were excluded from the internet? Then smart guys who want to intellectualize stuff get shouted down, and so what you've got is fuckin' idiots basically shouting football slogans at each other. How entertaining is that going to be after five minutes? Not only because it's morally wrong; even worse, because it's aesthetically crap—it's just fucking boring.

And how unthinking it is—you're parroting someone else. It's not original.
How many times can you say that before it stops to be funny? One guy comes in and does that to a woman commentator; the very first time, it would be fuckin' hilarious. It's demeaning to the woman, but this guy has genuinely transgressed—he's been really sexist and chauvinistic about it, but at least he's done something quite rebellious and original. All these fucking idiots doing the same thing, it becomes completely different. The same as if a guy's commentating, and a woman comes in, saying, "Rip his fuckin' nuts off!" The first time, people would piss themselves on the internet, but the second women come in constantly doing that, it becomes an attack on men. This is an attack on women, and it should be seen in that way.

You made your reputation early on as a "shocking" writer, and since then you've divided the critics—as with A Decent Ride.
It's perfect. It's a divided society, so art and literature should mirror that division. I'm not about consensus at all. Get people discussing and arguing about stuff. When people say, "This is a great book," or "This is a shit book," you've got to start talking about all the cultural values that underpin that, and that's when you get a real literary discussion going.

Are you trying to push people's buttons?
No, I'm not, really; I'm trying to get a reaction from myself, because we're all a cluster of different emotions, so you're always in conflict with yourself, trying to find harmony... I'm exploring that internal conflict. So when I get negative reactions as well as positive ones, it's grist to the mill, because I'm feeling all this stuff too, in some ways. I'm not entirely comfortable with what I'm doing, so that makes me feel great about it.

The chapters from the point of view of Terry's penis bring to mind the talking tapeworm in Filth.
The tapeworm is Bruce Robinson's conscience, but in this one, the penis is Terry's distilled id and ego, and Terry becomes the superego, in Freudian terms. He's trying to go, "No, I'm on higher pursuits now." "Fuck off!" He's the real voice of Juice Terry as a cock.

You've gone back into typographical experimentation, where the words create the shape of the object talking.
It's always fun to do that sort of thing.... When you go to the toilet, everyone wants to draw a big fuckin' spurting cock and hairy balls on the fucking wall. You never get beyond that. I get to do it in the book.

Have you been reading any Canadian books?
Yeah, Craig Davidson's one of my favourite Canadian writers; he's brilliant. The Fighter is one of the best-ever boxing novels. It really captures the gym life, and it's a great parable of different conceptions of masculinity. Canada's always punched above its weight in fiction. Alice Munro, I don't know how she manages to write a short story that dense—it's just fuckin' unbelievable. When you read a collection, you feel like you've read about a dozen novels.

How was the Canadian-made film of your novella Ecstasy [directed by Rob Heydon in 2011] received in the UK?
It was great until the accents started to come in—some of the smaller walk-on parts. I went to one cinema, and the first time one person sounds like Groundskeeper Willie, people think, "Oh, fair enough." The second time, everybody starts laughing, and that was a problem, because the core market was Scotland. So it didn't do as well as we thought it would do, but it's still a good film; it's got a lot of heart.

Since moving to Chicago, you've become a hockey fan. Any prediction for the Stanley Cup?
I think it's going to be a victory for the Hawks against the Tampa Bay sex offenders—the logo's a kind of white van. These games are never cut and dried, but I can't see the Hawks losing this one at all.

Follow Mike Doherty on Twitter.

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Photo of a terrifying cat (not the one from this story) via Flickr user R∂lf Κλενγελ

Sometimes it seems like life is just one long series of impossible-to-predict obstacles thrown at you by a cruel, game show host-esque God. Your kid pukes all over the grocery store aisle, a stray door upends you while you're biking across town, your phone rings at 2 AM and your best friend is going, "Um, I'm in jail?" On occasion, you want to revert to childhood and appeal to a higher authority—"This is too hard," you want to whine. "It's TOO hard. I can't."

That must have been how Mohammed Lokman of Stamford, Connecticut, felt last week when he called 9-1-1 because he was scared of his own cat. You might feel inclined to mock him, especially when you learn that he and his wife just conceded the house to the feline for hours before phoning the cops in desperation at 1:30 AM. But it's easy to imagine him not as a frightened nebbish, but as a man who was just hit by one too many micro-crises that day, and now has to deal with the fact that his beloved Nibbles has transformed into a ten-pound ball of spitting, fanged rage.

In any case, a recording of the call was obtained by a local Fox TV affiliate, and I decided to listen in to see how it went. It started normally enough, at least from the 9-1-1 operator's end:

-"I have a problem in my home. I cannot go inside of my home."
-"What's the problem?"

You can't go in your home? Must be serious!

-"The problem is my cat was getting too aggressive, and I was inside and she attacked me. She scratched my leg, and bites me. And so me and my wife came outside, and we cannot go in our home, for like three or four hours."
-"This is, uh—you said, a cat?"

There are multitudes contained in that uh. A good 9-1-1 operator can singlehandedly save your life; these men and women occasionally have to listen helplessly as someone is murdered. It's a serious, life-or-death sort of job—until you realize that you are going to have to talk some guy through dealing with a small, pissed-off animal with jaws too weak to seriously harm any adult in the world.

-"So you want the police to come and remove the cat? What is the problem? Like..."
-"Yeah. They have to go inside the home [to] remove the cat."
-"OK. [long pause] um... I don't know. Was something wrong with the cat? Like it was [trails off]"

Good question! Was it... rabid? Radioactive? Undead?

"Ah, we don't know that. She had a baby last night, and then she was good until 10:00, 11:00 today. Then I came from outside, and then I changed my clothes and got in bed and she started to attack me."

Oh. It gave birth. This actually makes sense—in 2010, a woman in Idaho was horribly attacked by her cat after it gave birth. Maternal aggression in cats is something cat experts will warn you about if you're planning to breed cats. (Though seriously, why would you?)

"It's so aggressive and so mad. And then five minutes ago I tried to open the door again, and she was waiting at the door, and it was too much screaming and noise, and coming like in an attacking mood."

The Stamford cops took pity on Lokman, and arrived on the scene in order to help him muster the courage to go inside and go to bed.

No one deserves to be attacked by their cat—but also, getting your cat spayed or neutered is a great way to potentially reduce his or her aggression. If it sounds expensive or hard, call Spay USA at 1 (800) 248-7729, and maybe they can help you get your life together.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

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Josh Maldonado runs a cool demo at SVVR. Photo courtesy Discovr.

Shrinking people down small enough so they can travel through the human circulatory system is no longer just for sci-fi films from the '60s—or half-baked Archer episodes based on said sci-fi films. One Toronto student is trying to make the virtual classroom a reality, and has started with a tour of your circulatory system: instead of reading a textbook or watching a PowerPoint slideshow, you and your guide have to dodge the blood cells while swimming through the arteries. When you take off the virtual reality goggles, you find yourself still seated in your classroom.

But there's more than just biology in the virtual world. History, geography, and the sciences all have potential for immersive education. Studying Ancient Rome would be a hell of a lot more interesting if you could go there and explore it for yourself—talk to some of the locals, walk through the coliseum, check out a ludus. Virtual reality, thought to be dead after it failed in the hands of '90s technology, is back. And this time it could change education for the better.

Josh Maldonado's September 2014 final practicum for his radio and television arts media program at Ryerson University was an educational VR program. The thesis project, named Vessels VR, was a guided tour of the circulatory system.

Maldonado, who is the first in his family to attend university, comes from a television production background. But in February, he quit his job and flew down to San Francisco alone to take part in a VR accelerator program. Although he admits the start was shaky, he says that being surrounded by other people with the same vision for VR helped him realize the vast potential for education in the medium.

"I started roadmapping this idea of creating a narrative in virtual reality, at the time Oculus had stated it was intended mainly for games," said the 23-year-old. "But I think myself, and other people were already thinking of how it could be used to tell stories in a different way."

The biology experience, which was inspired by the cartoon The Magic School Bus, became the first example of educational experiences that could be created by Discovr, Maldonado's immersive discovery VR Company.

"We didn't know anything about producing VR at that time. But we had three months to figure it out. So I just spent like 14 hours a day learning how to develop this stuff. Building the product while learning the technology," he said of when they first began Vessels.

Aside from more curriculum-focused concepts, Maldonado would like to explore areas such as brain training games (like Luminosity) and occupational training programs.

His initial goal was to get a system set up for every classroom in Ontario, to fix an education system he deems outdated and broken. But after the San Francisco-based venture firm picked up his company, he sees the potential to get one in classrooms across the globe.

"The best learning experiences are experiences that are emotionally compelling. And I feel like virtual reality in itself as a medium, regardless of if [whether] it's for entertainment or for education, has a sledgehammer of emotional impact because it puts you inside the subject matter," he said.

Rothenberg Ventures, the self-claimed Millennial Venture Firm in Silicon Valley, picked up Discovr as the only Canadian company for the River VR and AR accelerator. Rothenberg brings founders together, invests money and provides mentoring services alongside the networking needed to help these companies grow. Discovr was was joined by 12 other companies from around the world, including FOVE, the world's first eye-tracking VR headset.

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Pitching your company is different than pitching practicum. Photo courtesy Discovr.

Tipatat Chennavasin, creative director of River, says that he distinctly remembers when he first saw Maldonado's work as Vessels VR.

"I just remember reading that in an article and being like 'Wow, this a company to watch,'" he said. "It was really exciting when they applied to River and I had already known about them."

"I felt like at the forefront of education, was Discovr."

Maldonado is young to the industry, but his age may benefit him as VR continues to grab attention around the world—most recently, HTC, Google, and Apple have announced their involvement in the industry.

"I was probably a decade younger than most of the people at River," he said. "Just [the] least developed in terms of my own personal experience, a lot of these guys have intense computer science backgrounds. They've worked at studios like DreamWorks, you know what I mean? We have ex-Call of Duty developers. And I'm just a kid who basically graduated from a [little known] university in Ontario, Canada."

But Maldonado's journey was not without struggles. With no equipment, co-founder, a team, or even the knowledge of the other companies, Maldonado felt that he arrived with nothing in hand.

"It was like learning how to swim by being tossed in the ocean," he said.

Once in California, Maldonado was left with the task of building up a team again.

"I went to schools and I found recent grads that I think are undervalued by other people," he said. "I think those types of people are perfect for what we want to do."

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Maldonado and Jazmin Cano, Discovr's lead technical artist. Photo courtesy Discovr.

Growing up in a technology-oriented generation makes for entrepreneurs who understand the real-life potential of VR, especially after the failed wave of VR in the '90s.

Chennavasin thinks that minds like Maldonado's and his team are needed to push the boundaries of VR, who are unaffected by the past failure.

"To have people who are able to think without those constraints, I think those are the people who are really going to take it to the next level," he said.

Discovr plans to begin testing their academic VR content in September. They will soon begin to develop STEM (Science Tech Engineering Math) experiences as well.

Follow Sierra Bein on Twitter.

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Gabriel Hubert, in white to the right, with friends. All photos via 3WA

One of legends of the Albertan BASE jumping scene took flight for the final time on Sunday.

Gabriel Hubert was wingsuit flying in Canmore, jumping Ha Ling Peak, when his parachute didn't deploy in time and he crashed into the trees below. Sadly, the 40-year-old welder died on scene.

A forum post on Basejumper.com written by a fellow jumper who was there details what happened:

After exit he really didn't start flying his suit until 100ft over the trees at the end of the talus and the suit was not performing well, this was the start of a 30 sec flight maintaining this distance for the remainder of the flight, with not enough separation we assume he had a problem reaching his BOC [chute pouch]. Ramrod impacted the way he lived his fucking life ................FULL SPEED........NOTHING OUT..............

It was apparently just his second BASE jump with a wingsuit. BASE jumping and wingsuit jumping are entirely different beasts. BASE jumping you are leaping off a grounded platform with a parachute, whereas in wingsuit flying you are in a specially made suit that allows you to catch the air and glide.

A few months ago, I was lucky enough to speak with Gabe for a profile for VICE and talk about his love for the sport and his plans to take it legal.

"To participate in this activity you have to accept that you might die doing it," Hubert told me at the time. "You have to love it enough to accept that I guess."

He was a joy to talk to, smart, funny, and as he put it "a little bit crazy."

BASE jumpers live by the unwritten mantra of "If I die don't cry for me, I'm doing what I love." This was something that Hubert told me several times during the duration of our conversation.

"It is the nature of our life," Hubert's friend and fellow jumper Chris Thombs said Monday. "Sad he is gone but happy he lived!"

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Hubert was a legend in the Edmonton BASE jumping community. He was a mentor to many jumpers and founded the 3WA jump team, the Three Welders Association, in 2008 with two other welders. Together the team "conquered," as he put it, several buildings in this town including some of Edmonton's largest, almost always with Hubert personally taking the leap. Several of these jumps had to be well-orchestrated by Hubert and his team almost to the point of espionage. Their missions would involve him dressing up in his finest suit, navigating the building to its roof with a map that he obtained through "methods," and radioing to a convoy to block off the road, allowing him to jump. From the moment his feet left the building to the moment he was driving away in his buddy's vehicle, no jump took him over a minute.

All jumps were a rush to him and these jumps in particular Hubert held close to his heart because of the camaraderie between him and his team.

But Hubert recently put the days of illegal jumps behind him and was actively attempting to put on a Boogie in BC this summer in July. It would have been the first one in Canada. The plan was to legitimize the sport in this country by offering a legal and high-profile place to jump. He had found the ideal spot, a beautiful spot on Kootney Lake. Over the last few months Gabe was finding new jump points on the untamed cliffs that jut out of the lake. He was immensely excited for the upcoming event and the possibility of legitimizing the sport in Canada.

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"I think it's an evolution for me." Hubert told me in April. "I think I just see a bigger picture now. Given that it's the only thing stopping us here in Canada is a legitimate place to do it and some recognition. It'd be great to be looked at in a positive light."

According to the Facebook pages of Go Fast Games Canada, the name the event was slated to be called, the Boogie will be postponed because of Hubert's death.

Over our coffee two months ago I asked Hubert about why he did it. Why did he jump? This is an inherently dangerous sport and why, as a father, did he put himself in such danger while making these jumps? He smiled and asked me a question in return.

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

His final Facebook post read: "Sun is shining, institutionalized on sirius, going wingsuiting, ahhh fuck ya!! Thanks life."

Rest easy Gabe.

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter.

Thumbnail image via the Verge

Pizza boxes are good for transporting pizza and making graffiti stencils and sometimes presenting genitalia in porn, but they haven't been particularly good at doubling as movie projectors until now. The Verge pointed out that tireless pizza innovators Pizza Hut just released a limited run of pizza boxes which, with help from your iPhone, can transform into DIY film projectors. The boxes, called "Blockbuster Boxes," are only available in Hong Kong right now. The pizza boxes come with a tiny pizza table which can hold your iPhone, as well as a lens to boost your phone's screen and display it in all its dim, blurry glory across a wall. Each box also has a scannable QR code to download one of four different movies.

It's unclear what movies Pizza Hut is giving away, except that there are four different genre-specific boxes with four different films: a scary one, a comedy, a romance, and an action flick. It's doubtful that Pizza Hut would be giving away any genuinely decent movies for free on a pizza box—the action one is probably something as heinous as Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever—but that's OK since the video quality will probably be pretty low filtered through a glass lens and projected onto a wall, and it's unlikely you'll be able to hear anything since your phone speaker will be hidden inside a closed cardboard box. Keep on innovating, Pizza Hut. Not every new invention will be as revolutionary as stuffing cheese into crusts, but we appreciate your continued attempts to test the creative limits of the pizza form.

Want Some In-Depth Stories About Pizza?

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4. Indiana Pizza Joint Owners Who Refused to Cater Gay Weddings May Permanently Close Shop

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All photos by Adam Kleifield

Maybe it's the dog person in me, but I was a little cynical when I first heard about CatCon. I wasn't quite sure what to expect, and the CatCon website didn't go into much detail, other than to promise "the world's top cat-centric merchandise including furniture, art, toys, and clothing... as well as conversations with some of the top cat experts in the world." I worried that this whole convention might just be a sea of overpriced cat meme merchandise. Plus, my last experience at a convention center had been an exhausting nonstop barrage of pushy salespeople. So I headed to CatCon with a bit of wariness and a steely resolve not to buy anything.

Greeting me at the entrance to the convention was a Stumptown coffee kiosk, which was a pretty genius move: get the already-excited attendees hopped up on caffeine from the very beginning. Coffee would be the only product I saw that day that wasn't adorable, round, and a completely unnecessary purchase that (to my own dismay) I desperately wanted.

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The first booth I saw was selling Pusheen the Cat merchandise, which instantly destroyed both my cynicism and my resolve not to spend money. If you're not familiar with Pusheen, she is a fat, round, and very cute cartoon cat who does cute things in GIF form. CatCon had stacks upon stacks of regular-size plush Pusheens, but the Pusheen plush de Grace was the one that was the size of a small bed. It was the roundest thing I've ever seen. I laid my head on it and prayed that someone would walk by, see how much I needed it, and buy it for me. It didn't have a price tag. If you have to ask, you can't afford it.

Are cats spies sent by aliens? Read Motherboard's deep examination of one of the internet's best conspiracy theories.

There were also plenty of cute things for the non-cat lover. I passed one booth selling "steamed buns," fat plush bunnies with angry little expressions on their face, nestled in bamboo containers. Why is it so cute when small animals look angry?

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I did some quick mental math to see if I could afford a steamed bun. It would probably motivate me to get more work done, I reasoned, by improving morale around the office (my apartment). Luckily, before I could make any bad decisions, I got distracted by two men wearing cat-themed booty shorts.

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They were waiting in an enormously long line, which they told me was for Lil' Bub's Big Show. Lil' Bub, of course, is a celebrity cat known for her buggy eyes and always-visible tongue. She is more famous than any of us will ever be. I found out that her Big Show featured Jack McBrayer and started at 4:00. It was 2:32 PM when I talked to the booty shorts guys, and they told me people started lining up at least an hour before then.

Watch VICE's award-winning documentary about Lil' Bub:

I'd seen plenty of products and events for humans, but so far, none for actual cats. Then I saw a display for Katris, a high-end, tetris-like piece of furniture that can function as a cat tree, bookshelf, and coffee table all in one. And the cat furniture didn't stop there. I passed a booth for CatistrophiCreations, which sold complicated, expensive-looking furniture specifically for cats, including rope bridges and a "tornado cat tree."

The display looked nicer than anywhere I've ever lived. If your cat gets bored hanging out on its pricey cat furniture, you could buy it a cat exercise wheel at the next booth over. One Fast Cat was selling what is basically giant hamster wheels for cats. Their "cat exercise wheel" costs $249, plus $20 for any replacement foam pads you need. It's hard for me to imagine seeing this in someone's house and not questioning their sanity, but the cats in One Fast Cat's videos seem to be enjoying it, so what do I know?

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/m9-QOGUHjOo' width='640' height='360']

At this point, I was an hour in, and was feeling accomplished that I still hadn't bought anything. This was no small feat. In addition to the rows and rows of booths selling cute things, there were also roving merchants and promoters handing out fliers and business cards to anyone who would take them. The weirdest promotional flier I received was for a cat video—not a channel, but a single video. It advertised the music video for Stereolizza's "Cool Cat," which purported to be "THE FUNNIEST CAT VIDEO EVER MADE!!!" (Caps and exclamation marks taken directly from the flier.) I watched the video, which is not, in actuality, the funniest cat video ever made.

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Because I had exercised such a heroic amount of self-control by not buying anything, I felt that I deserved a coffee from one of the multiple Stumptown booths inside the convention, whose only mistake was not having a banner that said "stay cat-ffeinated." That's Marketing 101, people. But fate had other plans for me, for on my doomed journey to the coffee booth, I passed The Little Friends of Printmaking. The name alone told me I didn't stand a chance. Though not especially cat-centric, their prints clearly catered to this audience. They were all adorable, and stylish in a 1960s-vintage-inspired way. I broke down and bought a print of two mice eating a strawberry. It was titled "Love and Friendship." What was I supposed to do?

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My initial skepticism stood no chance against the magic of CatCon. Far from feeling like a cash grab, the con was filled with small business owners positively glowing from their customers' enthusiasm. Several business owners told me they'd sold out of their products on the first day. And it's hard to feel cynical when surrounded by people dressed head-to-toe in cat-themed apparel.

Plus, a portion of merchandise sales went to FixNation, a nonprofit dedicated to reducing cat homelessness. So I was pretty much morally obligated to buy something. Right? Right???

Follow Allegra Ringo on Twitter.

Photo by Sam Clarke

This article appears in the June Issue of VICE Magazine.

There's really no worse place to interview someone than a Russian bathhouse. The steam fucks up digital recorders as well as traditional pad and pen, some loudmouth is always bellowing in not-English, and taking photos is generally viewed with suspicion, if not malice. The banya is, however, a fine place to write a "profile," where observation reigns over accurate quotation and smirky descriptions of the salad your subject orders and the way he or she mangles the accent while ordering it suffice as insight. It is also simply a pleasant time.

I went to the Mermaid Spa in Brighton Beach with Joshua Cohen, per his suggestion (mine was to take kratom together, which he politely dismissed as "too corny") to have just such a time. Cohen is one of those never-not-working writeaholics who do the long-as-all-hell book reviews in Harper's, the London Review of Books, and the like. He's currently promoting his fourth novel, second-drafting his fifth, and sitting on some five books of collected short stories and nonfiction as well as an always growing pile of new work to collect. And he's 34. To top off the intimidation, these aren't alty little chapbooks or novellas but thick, crushing tomes of dense, excessively researched prose.

The most recent one is called Book of Numbers and at its most basic is a corporate history of a surrogate Google called Tetration.com as told between the company's founding programmer, named Joshua Cohen, and a washed-up Brooklyn novelist hired as his ghostwriter, also named Joshua Cohen. I agree that sounds cute, and the first part of the book does such an effective pantomime of a milquetoast Brooklyn novelist, I was fully prepared to accept it as the real Joshua Cohen's real Brooklyn-noveling voice until a wayward sentence bricked me upside the head like Reginald Denny.

"I think one of the best lines in the book is, 'How big a nigger cock can Natalie Portman fit in her little Jew hole?'" Josh said shortly after hello, selling me on him for the second time.

"You notice that Principal [fake novelist Josh's term in the book for fake Google Josh] never uses any contractions or possessives when he speaks, and that he always refers to himself in the first person plural?"

Yes, I did, I responded. Very clever tics for an off sort of Silicon Valley guy.

"Did you also notice that each section of the book had an even number of paragraphs and that every paragraph had an even number of sentences in it?"

Oh, shit, I did not.

"On top of that, every sentence has a number of syllables metered to work out to fulfill certain metric principles. Most of them are even, but then the sentences I wanted to rhythmically stick out I arranged so that they're odd, but then the odd-number sentences within the paragraph all balance out and add up to an even number. It's all very even-number-based, base four since Tetration, of course, means square. I wanted a structuring device for Principal's speech to insure that it has this autistic sort of regularity, almost like an algorithm, but it's also done in tribute to the Chandah·s´a¯stra, the ancient Sanskrit book of prosody that's the earliest known form of binary notation. And the first person plural, of course, is how the Hindu gods refer to themselves in epics like the Ramayana and Mahabharata."

As a high-pitched whirr slowly replaced the thoughts in my head, I came to terms with the fact that I now had to get naked with this cracked James Joyce computerman.

Before our schvitz, we'd stopped by Josh's Red Hook apartment to grab bathing suits for both of us. Though he referred to it several times as a bunker, it was one of the more unbunkerly basements I've ever been in. Lotta light, windows at both ends, long and tall enough to have some five or six ceiling-high bookshelves and additional free stacks without looking like a lunatic's garret. "You have to see it when I pull the middle doors shut and get all the light out of here. Then you can really get cooking."

The shelves next to Josh's work desk have four books turned out and leaned against the spines of the rest, bookstore-display-style: The Orators by W. H. Auden and Black Swan by Thomas Mann sandwiching a pair of 60s-era sci-fi paperbacks.

"The new stuff I'm working on draws from these. I'm trying to base some of the language on Auden's 'Journal of an Airman,' the sort of clipped, jargony speech he uses, while the story is more in line with Black Swan, which features one of the best uses of an animal in literature."

"Oh, yeah," I said as if I'd read it.

Josh rustled up his trunks and a pair of thin, red bootleg Umbros for me. Then we made our way back out into the hall, past a pile of shoes so big and mostly dressy it looked like spillover from a Holocaust museum.

"These are all from family members. Whenever a guy dies I get the shoes."

The joke I wish I'd made at this point was a pun on shoes and the Shoah, but instead I asked him whether he'd seen Adam Sandler's movie The Cobbler. Worse, he hadn't. :(

While the Russian & Turkish Baths on Tenth Street in the East Village is where Belushi went to sweat out his SNL after-parties and where Jonathan Ames goes to hang that stupid fucking hat, the Mermaid Spa is where actual Russians go. Not a ton on a Wednesday night, but enough to fill out the dining area and really get the decibels going at key points in the evening's Rangers game. It's also situated right by the entrance to Sea Gate, which, Josh pointed out, not only is the city's only gated community but also contains one of the city's only trailer parks. While most gated communities tend to downplay their gatedness out of decorum, Sea Gate's entrance is a furnace mouth of black iron bars and full-height turnstiles.

"There was some looting during Sandy, so now the NYPD has these permanent checkpoints and the whole place on lockdown."

After ziplocking our cell phones with the Mermaid's cashier lady, Josh and I changed into our blousy trunks and opted for mutual blindness instead of having to defog our glasses every five seconds. Divested of his iron-rim Lennon specs and all the rest, Joshua looked less the harried Soviet dissident of his Wikipedia page and more like a sandy-haired Matthew Broderick. I avoided pointing this out for fear of it being read as a come-on, or even just a shitty reference. I'd been batting pretty low by this point.

We steamed, then sauna'd, then dunked ourselves in those horrible ice baths that make your entire skin contract. After a second round we decamped to the cafeteria tables in the middle of the banya, and Josh ordered us some juice and sliced grapefruit using just enough Russian to tell the waitress he didn't speak Russian and me that he probably spoke really good Russian. Josh lived in Brighton Beach for five years before moving to Red Hook and had given me an extremely informative tour of the neighborhood on our drive in: the Kazakh nightclubs, the Amberjack V party boat, the warehouse-size brothel with PUSSSEY? spray-painted on its otherwise clean walls.

"The only time I ever bought coke off of Russians, it was here," he'd told me as we pulled up to a darkened side street lined with menacing clapboard terror-cabins. "The Coast Guard built these as barracks back in the forties. Hands down the scariest place I've ever been in New York."

Once our grapefruit arrived I pointed out that it contains a chemical that enhances the effects of kratom, just to put that out there. He again declined.

While we took a mid-fruit smoke break on the banya's smoking porch (Russians), it occurred to me that Joshua was one of the only authors I'd met who didn't consciously write like he spoke or, as observed, speak like he wrote. Which was a relief, since his written diction is an esteem-blasting babel of 99-cent words like catholicon, eloign, and unmullioned, even when he's not combing ancient Vedic prosody manuals to program his characters' speech.

"I really want to develop a stable rhetoric, though, so I can work on multiple books at the same time. You don't get that anymore—everybody's terrified about being seen as pretentious. But, like, Faulkner had that great biblical tone when he wasn't writing in a character's voice."

After another round of steams, we headed for the showers. "I always have this fantasy when I get back to the locker that I'm going to open it and all my clothes will be replaced by better versions. Like the nice shirt I should have bought instead of this one."

As we left the Mermaid and approached the car, both our eyes trained on a lit window just over the Sea Gate fence, perfectly framing two ladies in profile over a steaming stovetop.

"Look at that," Josh said. "A busty woman stirring—no, two busty women stirring a pot. It's like a Vermeer."

I faked a cough to stifle my second hubba.

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Rick Baker. Photo by Justin Charles

Rick Baker is closing up shop. The legendary special-effects and makeup creator recently announced that he would be shuttering his studio and auctioning off 400 of his best-known props. Baker's career included some of the most enduring effects imagery of the 20th century, including work on The Exorcist, Star Wars, the "Thriller" music video, and Men in Black. For 35 years, his iconic costumes, makeup, and props defined film effects just prior to our own age of computer-generated imagery. The auction marked a bittersweet moment in film history; the end of an era—if not precisely the era of practical effects, then at least the era of Rick Baker's work in film.

Music video to "Thriller" (1982) by Michael Jackson with special effects and costumes by Rick Baker

By chance, the auction took place on opening day for San Andreas, a CGI-fueled disaster blockbuster. In its review of San Andreas, the New York Times noted the obvious: "the most disturbing thing about this may be how dull and routine it seems. Computer-generated imagery can produce remarkably detailed vistas of disaster... but the technology also has a way of stripping such spectacles of impact and interest." The contrast with old-fashioned practical effects was stark. In An American Werewolf In London, Baker showed a man transforming into a wolf onscreen, something that had previously only been hinted at with dissolves and cutaways. The effect had astonished audiences. Now, the ability to amaze seemed itself doomed for extinction.

I met up with Baker in a colossal conference room at the Universal City Hilton. At 64, he is trim, gracious, and conspicuously enthusiastic—the kind of guy most men would like to age into as they approach retirement. We were given a few minutes to chat before the sale got underway.

VICE: I heard you on NPR the other day, and I was struck by your lack of bitterness. On one hand, you were saying that CGI had played a large role in the closing of your studio, and on the other hand you were saying you were comfortable with that.
Rick Baker: It wasn't just CGI. I've seen that come up a lot. Ever since that NPR thing, I've been getting a lot of tweets saying, "End of an era, end of an era." You know, it's kind of been that for a while. The whole business has changed. I had a 60,000 square foot studio, which was great for How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Planet of the Apes. But it's not great for making a nose for somebody. And I've had that. I had one project where I had a guy making some teeth, in this 60,000 square foot building, by himself, in summer. My air conditioning bill was more than I was getting paid to make the teeth. So it just became time. Those big jobs don't exist anymore. As a young man, when I finally started meeting some people in the industry, I met a lot of bitter people, and a lot of crabby old guys, and I thought, "How can you be like that? You're in this amazing industry doing these cool things." And I didn't want to become that.

'When you have a good actor, in a good makeup, and he's been sitting in the makeup chair looking at himself in the mirror, seeing himself become something else, and then he walks onto a set and he knows where he is, he knows what he looks like, and he gives a performance that he's never going to give on a motion-capture stage.' –

Much of your work involves faces. Which seems ironic, because faces are the hardest things to fake with CGI. Avatar got it right, and then Tron: Legacy got it wrong a year later. Do you think there will be work for practical effects and makeup people doing facial design for CGI films?
Yeah, I do think so. When CG first became popular, we instantly became dinosaurs. But what happened was [the studios] started coming around, realizing that we actually had a skill set. I was brought in to do some damage control on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I said I would do it, but I didn't really want credit, because they wanted to do this CG head. They said, "You can model this stuff in the real world better than we can on the computer." So we actually modeled and made real, completely finished, silicone heads that they scanned to make their computer model from.

I was always hoping for a much closer marriage between the CG and the makeup stuff. I've been designing on a computer since the late 80s—'89, I think—because I saw the writing on the wall, too. I've been doing computer models, and doing my designs extensively on a computer, and I love it. I love doing digital models and digital paintings, and playing with digital compositing. But I don't think it's the answer to everything. I think you're going to lose something.

When you have a good actor, in a good makeup, and he's been sitting in the makeup chair looking at himself in the mirror, seeing himself become something else, and then he walks onto a set and he knows where he is, he knows what he looks like, he gives a performance that he's never going to give on a motion-capture stage.

Clip from 'Harry and the Hendersons' (1987) with special effects work by Rick Baker

Now that CGI can show nearly anything, do you think filmmakers have lost the ability to astonish audiences? I'm thinking of that transformation scene in American Werewolf... Is that kind of jolt just not possible any more?
Well, there seems to be a lot of CGI backlash, and [talk that] they're going to bring back practical effects. But it's not happening that much. I loved Mad Max: Fury Road , [seeing] a 70-year-old director kicking every young punk's ass. And the fact that there was so much practical stuff. It does give you a different kind of adrenaline rush. I have the hardest time going to movies now and caring about stuff. I'm an effects nerd, that's the kind of stuff that got me into this, and I watch films and I'm like, Why do I not care? Why am I just so bored? That's one of the downfalls of the CGI stuff. You can do anything. But does it make it better? I don't necessarily think so. But yeah, I think there's a real difference when you know that something's really happening. That guy really did risk his life, and this guy's really standing in front of the camera doing this. I would rather watch an old Ray Harryhausen movie and suffer through 45 minutes of bad dialogue to get the 30-second stop-motion shot.

Looking through the auction catalog, I was horrified by the "loose Edgar skins" from Men in Black. They're terrifying. In your huge 60,000 square foot studio, you must have had a lot of faces with empty eyes staring at you. Did that get creepy?
I grew up in a bedroom full of that stuff, from the time I was ten. It doesn't scare me.

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"Loose Edgar skin" by Rick Baker. Photo by Justin Charles

There's never a point when you're walking to the bathroom, late at night, and you bump into something soft and eyeless...
When it's something that's come out of your head, and made by your hands, it's not frightening. But if a film is well made, I can still be affected by it. I remember working on The Exorcist, when I was in my early 20s, with the master, Dick Smith. I did the majority of the work on the head—the body and the head—when her head turns around, So I knew that very well. But when I saw the film, I found it as frightening as everybody else. And I was impressed by that. That's filmmaking. It's so hard to see a film that you worked on, and be affected by it.

Check out the two kids who remade 'Indiana Jones':

Michael Jackson contacted you for work on the "Thriller" video—is that correct?
He contacted John Landis because of An American Werewolf in London. I was the first phone call that John made, and he said, "Michael Jackson wants to do a rock video... very much American Werewolf-influenced. He wants to transform." I said, "Little Michael Jackson?" and he was like, "Well, he's not little Michael Jackson anymore."

I was really concerned about making up a pop star. I thought, This is going to be difficult, and he's not going to be a good subject for this . But I was totally wrong. He loved it, [but] it was chaotic, and I had a whole lot of work to do in a very little amount of time. I had to use union makeup artists whom I didn't really know, and didn't know what they could do to apply these makeups on the dancers, and I was applying makeup on Michael on the same night, running around the makeup trailers, going, "No, no, no..." And there we were, in Vernon, the meatpacking district, in the middle of the night, and they started doing the "Thriller" dance...

On the Creators Project: Here's How 'Game of Thrones' Shoots Flamethrowers into Actual Castles

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Creatures and busts from the auction. Photo by the author

Vernon must've had no one there at that point. You were probably the only audience.
Yeah. The worst part was, we started filming right around the time they start slaughtering animals. They do it at like two in the morning, and there was, like, a smell. It was literally right outside of the slaughterhouse. That was a little bit creepy. So I was standing there in the middle of the street, watching what was happening in front of my eyes, and my brain did a complete 360, and it was like, "Look at what's happening in front of you, Rick." Landis said to me, on that night, "People are going to know you more for this than for anything you do the rest of your career." And it is. When people say, "What do you do for a living?" I say, "I'm a makeup artist." "Have you done anything that I would have seen?" I say, "Yes," and they say, "What?" I say, "'Thriller,'" and it's like, "You did 'Thriller'?"

I think there's a real difference when you know that something's really happening. That guy really did risk his life, and this guy's really standing in front of the camera doing this.

People are more impressed with that than your work on the cantina scene in Star Wars?
Yeah. "Thriller"'s the one that I know people have seen. But yeah, it's all about getting the work done, because you have so much to do in the preproduction, and you spend every waking hour working. Then when you're on the set and you get the makeup on this actor, and you actually see it start to become this living, breathing thing, it's magical.

Sounds like something you might miss.
I'm gonna miss a part of it. But I'm not gonna miss the chaos of the business. I didn't get into this to become a businessman—I got into this to make things. And I'm still gonna make things. I'm making things every day, and they get to be what I want to make.

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Harry mask by Rick Baker from 'Harry and the Hendersons' (1987). Photo by the author

Baker's presence was requested. I took a seat in the last row of the cavernous Ballroom C, not far from a display table of aliens and severed heads, a fraction of the collection up for sale. In the distance, a stage had been decorated with a full-sized Men in Black alien, the eponymous Grinch, a seemingly ancient gargoyle, and a decayed corpse tied to a chair with its throat slit. A man in a suit jacket welcomed the meager crowd—most bidding was done online or by phone—with a plea to take our auction paddles and "wave 'em like you just don't care."

I badgered a Hilton employee for the ballroom's dimensions and did some quick math. Baker's studio was 15 times the size of the massive conference room. I tried to imagine such a space, its parade of aliens and apes and monsters stretching to the horizon. I couldn't quite picture it. Far away, the auctioneer banged his gavel. One sale down, 399 to go. It was going to be a long auction.

Sam McPheeters was born in Lorain, Ohio, in 1969. He is the former lead singer of Born Against, Men's Recovery Project, and Wrangler Brutes, and the founder of Vermiform Records. His columns, essays, profiles, and short stories have appeared in the American Prospect, Chicago Reader, OC Weekly, Punk Planet, the Stranger, VICE, and the Village Voice. He lives in Pomona, California, with his wife.

VICE is proud to present this excerpt from Joshua Cohen's astonishing and orchestral new novel, Book of Numbers, which comes out today. Thomas Morton's profile of the author appears in our June fiction issue.

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An excerpt from BOOK OF NUMBERS

From the book: 'Book of Numbers,' by Joshua Cohen. Copyright © 2015 by Joshua Cohen. Published by Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

Yehoshuah Kohen was born in the shtetl of Bershad, on the Southern Bug, halfway between Kiev and Odessa, Russian Empire, presently Ukraine. The old century was dying, and the new century lurking just beyond the fields , lying in wait in the snowy woods would be no consolation. By the goyim Christians, it was 1870/71. In an heirloom Bible, the family Kohen recorded only FUCK ME BEGIN LATER

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from the Palo Alto sessions: We were born in the year of the microprocessor, LGBT Pride Month, the Day of the Death of Mohammed [June 8, 1971]. M-Unit a retired gender studies professor at UC Berkeley, D-Unit an engineer, Xerox-PARC. Basically he was one of the inventors of personal computing. Which meant, he used to say, he took computing personally. We grew up in a white splancher in Crescent Park [Palo Alto]. A good neighborhood too überaware of its goodness. Lots of cool subdued kids. Lots of cool hippie parents. Kindergarten was at Berkeley. A totally egalitarian viro. M-Unit and D-Unit alternated breakfasts, spelt pancakes, stevia quinoa. We had chore charts, surprise room cleanliness inspections. We collected dinosaur eggs, coprolite, ambered insects, pyrite. We memorized the chart of Mendeleev, which hung on our ceiling. We were picked on at school for our [INCOMPREHENSIBLE—wardrobe?], which was sewn by parental friend [INCOMPREHENSIBLE—Nancy Apt?], the back fabrics of the chinos and buttondowns different from the fabrics in front. We were raised to mistrust brands, to be a proactive consumer, a prosumer. All adults were academics. Primiparousness was the norm.

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Communication is a useful [tool [way] to understand Cohen's family. Cohen's was a family [consumed subsumed] by communication [communications/communications systems]: His father, Abraham, was one of the prime innovators of laid many of the most important foundations for worked on a team that helped establish a few vital technical specifications for the internet—before the web, before the technology had any commercial, industrial, or even military? applications. Not many companies can afford a pure research arm, but Xerox, the photocopy giant, could, and endowed PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) in 1970 ? thousands of miles away from Xerox corporate headquarters (in Rochester, New York). The PARCys, as employees were called, were free to pursue their projects with minimal supervision, but with minimal support. The innovations that came out of their labs, particularly from the Computer Science Division, set the standards for modern computing. Though Xerox invested in developing none of them, though development costs would've been prohibitive.

In 1972, the Computer Science Division built the Alto, the world's first personal computer [IS THIS TRUE?], which featured a wordprocessing program called Wupiwug, which its programmer Hal Lahasky always claimed was a monster from a scifi book by a writer he'd never name, though it was only an acronym for "What U Press Is What U Get," an indication that the keystrokes a user made were reflected directly onscreen, and not on a teletype printout. [INSERT HERE A LINE ABOUT LANGUAGES: BASIC, LISP.]

Nascent computing displayed its output on a tick of tape. The monitor followed, a face to face the user's, light hurled at a pane of glass. The last frontier, or what was regarded as the last frontier, was also the first, paper again. The laserprinter both continued and undermined the Xerox tradition: in that it reproduced, but from a nonexistent original, putting to paper the page of the screen (parenthetically, the laserprinter was the only PARC innovation Xerox ever brought to market, in 1977 debuting the 9700, which averaged TK?? pages per minute, and retailed for $??K). (The output of nascent computing was just text, and not its formatting—to Abraham, the two were inseparable.) The problems he had set out to solve involved what today is called "desktop publishing," or "design"—namely, how to perfectly reproduce a print artifact onscreen, and then, outrageously, how to render it manipulatable, perfectly printable again.

[However, building on phototelegraphy, which had been around since the 19th century, and the shift from wire to wireless facsimile, which occurred just after the turn of the 20th, Xerox's main interest in documents remained in their reproduction, and in their reproduction through transmission, not in their manipulation. All distances had to be bridgeable, as far as Xerox was concerned—the distance between PARC and Rochester Stamford, CT, to which Xerox moved its HQ in 19??, was not.] While Abraham's colleagues were focused on [creating the] transmission protocols between computers[, and computers and printers], and constructing the Ethernet—a local area network [explain] that allowed machines, and the people who made them, to communicate with one another virtually—Abraham was alone in his fixation. He spent 14 years at PARC huddled with scanners that still functioned with tubes, surrounded by hunched engineers who'd already been graduated to transistors and circuits.

While the character recognition program was relatively simple to code [WHAT WAS IT CALLED?], as were the modifications to Wupiwug that allowed user modification of the recognized characters, it was the image that proved frustrating. The images scanned well [do scanners work the same way as photocopiers or fax?], but Abraham was never able to code an interface that pleased him. Every graphics program he invented was either too rudimentary, or [the opposite of rudimentary?] intricate. He experimented with raster and vector, with dividing the graphics into 2D "spatches," into 3D "layers," but his lack of progress led to a lack of resource availability, and in 1984, with PARC reorganized under new management, Abraham's unit was mothballed, and he was transferred to another [BUT WHICH?].

He would joke to his son that this was the fate of the Jews—to be stymied by the image.

[[OPENING VERSION 1 BIOGRAPHY: One hundred years before PARC's inception, Yehoshuah Kohen was born in 1870, in the shtetl of Bershad, on the Southern Bug, halfway between Kiev and Odessa, Russian Empire, presently Ukraine.

Bershad was a textile town, and antisemitism was a familiar thread. Upon returning from a spell at the yeshiva of Koretz, Yehoshuah married Chava Friedgant, the youngest daughter of a family of weavers, and it was weaving that supported Yehoshuah's life of study and prayer, and the life of their son, Yosef, born 1895. In 18??, however, a pogrom was sparked [a pogrom sparked how?], and burned the Jewish textile warehouse [but only one warehouse?]. Theirs was a tragedy so common to the milieu that it can only become banal by repetition.

Regardless—wagon to Uman, trains to Lvov, Warsaw, Berlin, Hamburg—the family took a steamship to America, bundling with them a single trunk, and Yosef. Ellis Island records attest to an arrival of April 4, 1901. The year of the Edison battery and the transatlantic radio, the death of Queen Victoria and the assassination of McKinley, annus Rooseveltus. The first day of Passover 5661.

They settled on Orchard Street, on the East Side of New York City, where Yehoshuah—now "Cohen"—found a job as an iceman, initially cutting that substance from the East River, before being promoted to assistant deliverer (an innate sense for horses and geography), to chief deliverer (developing English and manners), cut manager, assistant payroll. But when his payroll chief married the daughter of the ice concern's owner, he left. The man was a fellow immigrant, but from Uzhgorod[, Ungvar in Yiddish], who considered Yehoshuah a peasant[, which he was]. But he was also a natural businessman.

In 1909, with money he'd saved and income from Chava's lacemaking, Yehoshuah purchased a building in Coney Island, Brooklyn—freezing cellar down below, living quarters up top—from which he'd deliver his ice to every borough, and even unto the wilds of New Jersey, where he buried Chava in 1918 (influenza).

A year later, their only son, the Americanized "Joseph"—who'd spent his late teens working nights for his father while attending Stuyvesant High School during the day, and his early 20s working days while attending City College at night—was married to Eve Leopold, a German American Jewess and fellow student at [City College? whose family, all of whom were involved with industrial refrigerator/freezer manufacturing, disapproved of the match, and attempted to snub Joseph by not taking him into the business, instead granting him a nonexclusive license to retail their products, which he did, to outstanding success, by exploiting the newly emerging home market, introducing puffs of the Russian Pale into American households by van and truck as far afield as Connecticut].

[Yehoshuah died in 1967, Joseph in 1977. Colon cancer—both?]

In 1930, Joseph and Eve had a daughter, Lily (accountant, d. 1998? how?), and, in 1933, a son, Abraham (named for Eve Leopold's grandfather? great-uncle?, Abraham Leopold, a pioneer of gas absorption technology? or aqua ammonia?).

"Abs" was a loving, and beloved, son—in true immigrant fashion, Joseph and Eve would have done anything for him, but in true first- generation American fashion, "Abs" had required nothing, and had accomplished all he had on scholarship: Harvard (bachelor's in electrical engineering), MIT (SM, electrical engineering), Stanford (PhD, electrical engineering). Twelve years of education had cost his parents nothing.

If Abs ever disappointed his parents it wasn't with any computer coupling, rather with a coupling more personal [more what?]. Joseph and Eve still held out hope that their son would return home after he finished his PhD, and Abs seemed to placate them throughout 1969 by interviewing for positions at IBM, Honeywell, Multics, and Bolt, Beranek, and Newman [was he offered any?]. But he had no intention of taking a job with any East Coast firm. Either because of the women out west, or the war in Vietnam.

Joseph's pedes plani (flatfeet) had earned his deferral from WWI, and Abs had been too young for conscription into WWII, too II-S (enrolled in essential studies) for Korea , and old enough that by Vietnam he wasn't fit for anything besides servicing mainframes[, which were the size of jungle temples, and brought napalm from the sky] .

On Christmas Day 1969, Abs had accepted the only offer he'd been waiting for[, from the celebrated Computer Science Laboratory of Xerox-PARC]

On New Year's Eve, 1970, two men wandered San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury in a celebratory mood. Abs and Hal Lahasky had been rivals at Stanford, but now that both were newly minted PARCys, the time had come to be friends. Firecrackers were going off in the streets [WERE THEY?]. Love-beaded flower-children danced in the gutters with sparklers [DID THEY?]. The house [DESCRIPTION OF WOOD BOHEMIAN GINGERBREAD TRIM SF HOUSE] belonged to a cousin/friend of Lahasky's, but the party going on inside it, spilling out onto the porch and the street, was so packed that Abs never met her/him, and lost Lahasky within a moment of arriving [REWRITE/CUT: NO LAHASKY].

Marijuana was being passed around, which Abs was used to, but then, judging by the [crazy bucknakedish people], there was also LSD. He avoided the punch and went for beer. People stood [at a distance from the hifi?] "drinking draft." That's what they told him the game was called. You drank the number of drinks of your draft number. Until you hit it, or died. Luckily, also unluckily, the numbers were low. Still, a guy [in a Mao suit?] had to be held standing by, or was trying for a piggyback ride from, a [pretty young] woman.

"Let me help," Abs said.

"I got it," she said, and slumped the guy up against a banister. "Chivalry is misogyny."

Then she turned away just as he said, "And chauvinist on a double word score is 36 points in Scrabble."

She paused, "Heavy."

"And a pair of Yahtzee dice can be rolled in 36 combinations."

"So you're a [spaz/square]?"


"I'm 36."


"That's your draft number?"


"I mean I'm 36 years old."

"Bummer." ["far out"?]


A month before, on the first day of December, the Selective Service System—an agency of the US government responsible for staffing the armed forces—[had reached its omnipotent eagle's talons into a dimestore fishbowl] and chosen 366 blue plastic capsules, each of which had been [impregnated] with a paper slip marked with a number corresponding to a day of 1944, which was a leap year. The first number drawn was 258, and the 258th day of that year was September 14. The last was 160, and the 160th day was June 8. Anyone born on June 8 got the highest draft number, 366, and would be among the last to be inducted, while anyone born on September 14 got the lowest, 1, and would be among the first —the other 364 days of 1944 all drew draft numbers between them .

A subsequent drawing was held with the 26 letters of the alphabet, to determine the order in which the men born on the same day would be called. The guy [in bellbottoms/pirate shirt] groveling at the woman's [quilt skirt] had a birthday of October 26, which was the seventh number picked. His last name was Negrón, and N was the fifth letter picked, and his first was Witold, and W was the ninth. Witold Negrón had done seven shots [of rum?], then five, then nine. Then pounded a beer[?]. He was going to smuggle himself to Vancouver, and the woman told Abs she was considering tagging along.

Her name was Sari Le Vay, and she was a PhD student of comparative linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley[, at which she'd later teach linguistics and gender studies]. She was just finishing up her classwork but was finding it difficult to begin her dissertation [WHAT WAS ABS'S DISSERTATION? DID HE HAVE TO DO ONE?], she said. Her academic field was not respected, women the world over weren't respected, the current party Central Committee in Hanoi had the lowest number of women of any socialist or communist governing body worldwide, zero, and beyond all that, it was like America had already slaughtered her boyfriend, whose body was laid out on the stairs. She rolled her own Bali Shag, drank Mohawk ginger brandy, popped bennies. She had opinions on how Bundists treated their wives and Trotsky treated the blacks. Self-determination was not a transitional demand. She'd registered Chicanos to vote in Oakland and dated them. Men and women both.

Out on the porch they pondered space. She had theories beyond MLK and the Kennedys. NASA landed on the moon, but it also controlled monsoon season. Kissinger sabotaged the peacetalks to tilt the election from Humphrey.

"Like this lottery shitcrock," she said. "Like we're all equal and even and fair in America and who gets picked to go die is just one big serendipity—I don't think so. It can't be an accident that everyone I know numbered low is either a minority or an immigrant. You're a numbers guy—you check the numbers."

That's what Abs did the very next morning [BUT WHAT DID HE DO THE REST OF THE NIGHT?]—he found the numbers in The Stanford Daily [IN HIS APARTMENT OR?]. But they had nothing to do with minorities or immigrants. Though there was something about them still perturbing. Or something about Sari had left him smitten. He got her number out of the phonebook and wrote it down at the top of [a page]. Under it he listed all the draft numbers, in 29 rows for the shortest month, 31 rows for the longest, across 12 monthly columns, making a crippled square of days with 18 extras dangling at bottom [like orphans trying to hang onto a Huey whomping out of Saigon].

He got up and into his [car type?] to find a computer, because the sooner this got done, the sooner he could call her. But Stanford's lab was closed for New Year's and PARC wasn't finished yet and didn't have any computers. The IBM 360s and SDS Sigmas were still trucking on the interstate. He shouldn't have shown up at work until [?].

He went back to Perry Lane [his neighborhood?], and took the integers by hand, put together scatters, chi matrices, demarchic distributions. He called up Lahasky to hash it out at the Nut House [WHICH WAS?], even bothered their mutual dissertation advisor [UNINTELLIGIBLE NAME]. The math was just elementary statistics, the advisor's encouragement was exciting, the rest was galling. [As a computer person] It was galling that the US government had entrusted such an undertaking to anything but computers.

"Lottocracy, or, Casting Democracy in with the Lots" was carried by all the major news outlets, in reduced layreader form, over the second week of January [(the days of draft numbers 101, 224, 306, 199, and 194)], though the complete article was published only in July, in a special War Math issue of Science. Abs's scrawled charts had been typeset, and the epigraph was from the Book of Proverbs: "The lot causeth contentions to cease, and parteth between the mighty." The paper opened by [IN THAT PEDANTIC AUTODIDACTIC SNIDE WAY TECHNOCRATS HAVE OF KNOWING, NEVER THINKING] surveying Biblical and Classical literature pertaining to divination by lots (or cleromancy), before recounting the supplanting of deistic caprice by the laws of nature and rules of logic [erudition supplied by Rabbi Maurice Fienberg of Congregation Beyt Am, Palo Alto]. It went on to define differences between the "arbitrary" and the "random" (the former a determination of will/discretion, the latter hypothetically indeterminate, or chance), and the basic principles of sortition (the differences between chance samplings of volunteers and of the general population): ["QUOTE"]

The second section explained the Selective Service regulations for the draft lottery[, the third was tragic, the fourth, a farce]

The third section opened by asserting that in a year with 366 days the average lottery number for each month should be situated in the middle—at 183. But in this lottery the average draft number for the first six months of the year was higher (for people born in January, the average draft number was 201.2), while the ADN for the last six months was lower (for people born in December, the ADN was 121.5). The correlation between one's date of birth and draft number indicated a regression curve of −.226. An unflawed lottery would've maintained a level correlation at zero, a straight flatline throughout the year.

[In sum, the closer you were born to the start of things, the better.]

The paper then pointed out that people are not born with uniform distribution throughout the year[ and especially not with uniform distribution in the leap years]. It proved this by parsing datasets from the US Public Health Service to determine that the birthrates in the first quarters of each year between 1900 and 1940 [EARLIEST RECORDS? TO THE WWII DRAFT?] were a mean 12.2% above average[, confirming that summers between the equinoctes have normally been the busiest periods of conception]. Further[—through a sinister twist that might only be explained through a syncrasy of biochemistry, sex trends, and God—]an average of 64.2% of all babies born during the first quarters of 1900–1940 were male. This meant that early year male babies were doubly insured against conscription—firstly by their birthdates, and then secondly by their disproportionate sample size.

All [samples of] men who shared the same birthday were inducted by order of their names, last, middle, and first weighted accordingly, and ranked in the lotteried sequence: an alphabet that began with J and ended with V[ for Victory]. This policy spelled discrimination for men who lacked middle names, and made no provision for the grading of men with identical birthdates and names.

It was this nameranking that comprised the lottery's purest bias, apparently. Equations weren't required to understand that the scores of Johnsons and McNamaras and Nixons and Mitchells and Hoovers and Helmses in America tended to have middle names while the singularly ethnic Witold Negróns tended not to.

The paper's fourth section, its conclusion: In preparation for the lottery drawing, Abs wrote, the days and so the months had been encapsulated consecutively. Meaning that the capsules containing the papers with the January dates were assembled first, the February capsules were assembled second, and so on through the calendar, with each month's encapsulations poured into a handcranked drum, a mechanical bingo spinner [like a wheel for a gerbil or hamster], upon completion. This meant that the January capsules were mixed with the others 11x, the February capsules mixed 10x, and so on, through the November capsules, which were mixed with the others 2x, and the December capsules, mixed only 1x. A final condemnation cited the Selective Service's own report that the capsules had been poured into the fishbowl from the side of the drum that'd held the earlier days of the year, so that the latter less thoroughly spun days remained atop[ floating like a scum].

On the day "Lottocracy, or, Casting Democracy in with the Lots" was published in a special War Math issue of Science in July 1970, six months after Sari inspired it Abs proposed to Sari. Theirs being an engagement very preoccupied with numbers—figures, equations—it bears notice that though they were married at Congregation Beyt Am, in Palo Alto, on January 1, 1971, their son and only child was born on June 8.

Witold Negrón, 8th Battalion, 4th Artillery, was mortally wounded in Operation Lam Son 719 between Khe Sanh forward supply base and Tchepone, Laos, March 1971.

Joshua Cohen is the author of Book of Numbers.

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Illustration by Dan Evans.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

I started losing my sight the moment someone put a label on my clumsiness. It was 2006 and I was 24. Before then, I fell into ditches, knocked over bar stools, and failed to spot hands offered up for shaking, but it wasn't medical, it was just me: inept and socially awkward. When the eye doctors got involved, suddenly my identity got a long-winded adjunct: retinitis pigmentosa. Which of course means nothing to anyone.

Few people have heard of the condition, despite it being the most common cause of blindness among working-age Brits. "I have this thing called RP," I try to explain. "Sometimes I can see fine, at other times I walk headlong into walls." But it gets complicated and takes too long. In short: RP is a genetic disorder that causes the retina of the eyes to self-destruct—no one knows why—causing night-blindness, increasingly untrustworthy peripheral vision, and, eventually, in some cases, complete blindness. If we met, you wouldn't realize anything was wrong; I'd just be an ungracious weirdo shunning your handshake.

They revoked my driver's license shortly after I was diagnosed. It seemed a bitter blow at the time, but was also, I see now, a blessing. I was working as staff writer on a laddish motorcycle magazine and convincing no one as a biker lad. Occasionally I'd tear along, revving raucously and relishing the fuck-you-ness of it all, but more often than not I felt out of place, imperiled and sure only of my imminent mangledness. Riding in the dark, I'd squint and do my best to follow the white line. The problem wasn't just dying retinas, it was a more general dying inside. These days I gladly take the train.

As part of the diagnosis, they put a clicker in my hand, stuck my head in a machine, and told me to watch for tiny flashing lights in my peripheral vision. The machine made a preemptive buzz so I knew when the light was about to flash, but that didn't help me see it. What seemed like hours later, having not yet hit the clicker once, the optician's furrowed brow boring into my back, I realized that no one has flunked a game this badly since we gave granny a go on Minecraft three Christmases ago.

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A scan of the author's peripheral vision test results (the solid blue dots are the scotomas).

Thankfully there wasn't a leaderboard to record my all-comers worst score, but I did get a print-out showing my scotomas (from the Greek skotos, meaning darkness), my patches of "missing" peripheral vision. Dark isn't how they appear to me, though, and they haven't so much gone missing as gone mental.

Where my retinas are failing, my brain fills in with visual white noise, encircling my good vision, the unaffected central bit, with an indistinct swathe of manically flashing, shimmering blurriness. This made-up sparkly shit makes it hard to decipher the real content of any given scene. Shadows leap out at me like projectile slabs of stone, while pull-along suitcases prowl unseen like ghost-dogs behind their Machiavellian masters. I'm never quite sure what I can and can't see—until, that is, the tedium of foreboding is broken by the sound of my body hitting something hard, followed by pain and embarrassment.

That's the worst part: being constantly initiated into new realms of uncertainty. Then again, what doesn't kill me reminds me I'm kill-able, and that's valuable. Uncertainty creeps into view like an education in—or at least a metaphor for—mortality. Beyond the age of about 30—I'm 33 now, the age Jesus was when the bad shit started happening to him—the body begins to lose its vitality. Tissues regenerate but less reliably, no longer dependable, ever on the brink of losing control and throwing a tumorous tantrum or letting hair fall out or grow in ridiculous places. I'm taking nothing for granted. My eyes show me my fate every day: fuzzy, full of jeopardy, yet shimmering.

I don't fear blindness, per se—just as I don't fear the concept of mortality. The horror is specific: I dread not being able to see you seeing me. It's vain and it's visceral. If desire were to fade, what then, pleasure too? And without pleasure, what's left? Never mind great books and sublime vistas; I can't bear to imagine losing the smiles, the lips and eyes, the blushes and the buttocks. It's an anxiety like any other: centered on sex. To see or not to be, that is the question.

There is no prognosis. "Every case is different," they tell you, "that much we know. There might be a cure one day, it's hard to say." Deterioration is the only guarantee. When I look in the mirror, I can't see my whole face any more, just my eyes and nose. I let myself go and imagine living long ago, 160 years or more—before Dr. Franciscus Donders first uttered "RP." Was I, the inexplicably clumsy, darkness-averse Victorian, worse off for not knowing? Yes! The benefits of diagnosis come back to me: concessionary rail travel, and an excuse.

RP is hardly a diagnosis. The doctors admit, if pressed, that it's just a catchall term used to lump together a whole range of diversely rotting retinas. To be fair to the scientists, though, they have got less flaky since the invention of genetic screening. The genomics wonks are sifting through millions of potential DNA coding errors, cross-referencing and identifying each of the many mutations that cause RP symptoms. A tiny typo on a single gene is all it takes to spell death for the retina. The level of detail is mind-blowing, yet gallingly inconsequential.

I supplied a blood sample for screening years ago, and last month finally the result came back. They had (eureka!) found my faulty gene: It is USH2A, I was told, which encodes the protein usherin. Meaning what? "At position 308, there's a GCCA that shouldn't be there, and an A that should be a G at 3358." Oh, right. I tried to imagine the chaos that could ensue from replacing Gs with As... hearing "a rave" every time someone said "grave." It soon dawned on me I was none the wiser.

READ ON VICE SPORTS: Meet the Bats, Argentina's Blind Football Team

Is this screening result a breakthrough or just another long-winded label to put on my stumbling tendency? In terms of understanding how quickly my eyes are likely to deteriorate—never mind putting them right—the scientists have to concede a blind-spot.

"So far we're rubbish at looking at the specific mutation and predicting the severity of the disease," admits my geneticist friend, Richard. "We don't have enough good data, as most of these mutations are really rare."

It's like looking for a needle in a haystack, finding it decades later, and realizing, Damn, we don't have any thread, and we don't know how to sew.

Sight loss has taught me that no picture is ever complete. My faithless eyes won't let me forget that there is always something unseen or unseeable waiting to trip me up. Whether it's a blind-spot, illusion, self-deception, a quirk of biology, or the brain playing tricks, few things are only what they seem. Seeing isn't believing, it's a reckoning with doubt.

Follow David Bradford on Twitter.

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'Diablo' Illustration by Stephen Maurice Graham

I wrote an article not too long ago about how Blizzard Entertainment has lost its storytelling magic. With World of Warcraft becoming such an expansive game, I miss the focused narrative of the real-time strategy titles. Nevertheless, over the years Blizzard has consistently delivered some outstanding moments, usually accompanied by an astonishingly detailed cutscene that even back in the early 2000s could rival Hollywood's finest in terms of animation quality.

Heroes of the Storm is Blizzard's attempt at a MOBA, and features a range of popular characters from across its franchises. And, with the game getting its full release last week, it's a good time to look back at some of the California-based developer's greatest moments. These standout scenes are listed in no particular order, but beware of spoilers for games that are over a decade old.

The Culling of Stratholme – Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos

A good place to start is with one of Blizzard's most famous characters, Arthas Menethil. In that earlier article I gave you the rundown of his downfall from Paladin and Crown Prince of Lordaeron to Death Knight and leader of the Undead Scourge. And Stratholme is where it all began.

The necromancer Kel'Thuzad had been infecting the grain supply across the countryside, which not only caused a plague that killed anyone who ate it, but they then rose from the dead as a minion of the Scourge. When Arthas arrived at Stratholme to confront the necromancer, he found that the grain had already been distributed here. He ordered his fellow Paladin Uther, along with the Knights of the Silver Hand, to purge the entire city before the plague could take effect.

This was difficult for 11-year-old Matt to understand. I was used to the good guys doing the right thing, and always finding a way. Here I was forced to take control of a man who fought for justice, and murder innocent humans. It was simultaneously the most shocking and most badass gaming moment of my childhood.

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The Betrayal of Kerrigan – StarCraft

I have a theory that the writers at Blizzard in the late 90s and early 00s were professional wrestling fans, because the games were littered with heel turns. Originally a Terran Ghost, an espionage agent and assassin, Kerrigan was left behind on a planet overrun by the insectoid Zerg by her commanding officer Arcturus Mengsk.

Everyone thought that she'd die at the hands (claws?) of the Zerg, but instead she was captured. After discovering her psychic powers and seeing her potential as a weapon, she was placed in a chrysalis. When she emerged, she became the "Queen of Blades" and fought back against the Terran forces and her former allies.

What's particularly cool about this moment is that it originally happened in the first StarCraft game as part of a mission. In StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty we were treated to a fully rendered cutscene using the same script.

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Watch: The Mystical Universe of 'Magic: The Gathering'

Love MOBAs and the like? Check out VICE's documentary on eSports.

Tyrael's Sacrifice – Diablo III

Sacrifice is another big element in Blizzard's storytelling, and there aren't many bigger than the one Tyrael made for humanity in Diablo III. As the Archangel of Justice, he declared that if the forces of Heaven would not come to Man's aid against the demons Belial and Azmodan, then he'd do it himself. After a fight against Imperius, Archangel of Valor, he rips off his own wings and falls to earth, setting up the game's second act.

Sacrificing your immortality and a place on the council of Heaven in order to save the mortals on Sanctuary below is a pretty cool thing to do, all things considered. It was also a fantastic reveal at the end of the first act, suddenly realizing that you've been accompanied by a fallen archangel. It also helped that the cutscene was totally awesome.

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Arthas's Betrayal – Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos

Back to betrayals. The main one here is at the end of the human act of Reign of Chaos, where Arthas, having been corrupted by the Lich King, returns to his home of Lordaeron and murders his father the king. The next act follows the Undead, and Arthas is once again the central character.

Of course, for someone who's turned evil, you're not going to be satisfied with just one betrayal. Previously Arthas had presumably carelessly killed his former friend Muradin Bronzebeard (he actually turned up later with no memory of the event). Afterwards, he murdered the Ranger-General of the elven city Silvermoon, Sylvanas Windrunner, but not content to let her die, turned her spirit into a banshee.

Even as a member of the Undead, Windrunner hated Arthas for this, and formed a splinter faction called the Forsaken. If you choose Undead as your race in World of Warcraft, this is what you're playing as, and you can even pay Sylvanas a visit in the Undercity.

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The Destruction of Dalaran – Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos

This moment was another directly linked to Arthas's descent into madness. As leader of the Scourge, Arthas acquired the spellbook of Medivh, an ancient mage who had been possessed and corrupted in previous attempts to conquer the world. Using the spellbook, he was able to summon Archimonde, an incredibly powerful warlock who was many thousands of years old.

Now, when I say powerful, I mean being-able-to-destroy-an-entire-city-using-your-mind powerful, because that's exactly what Archimonde did to the city of Dalaran. Also bear in mind that this city was inhabited by archmages, and they were powerless to resist. After its destruction, some mages moved back into the ruins and began rebuilding. If you played "vanilla" World of Warcraft, you might remember the giant impenetrable purple dome in Alterac Mountains. Inside, the Kirin Tor were working to restore the city. Eventually, the city was moved to an entirely different continent and now floats above a forest, because why not?

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Need a break from fantasy? Head to VICE News.

The Secret Cow Level – Diablo II

Let's take a step away from death and betrayal for a moment, and talk about one of Blizzard's longest running jokes. If you complete Diablo II on any difficulty, and combine Wirt's Leg with a Tome of Town Portal in the Horadric Cube, then a portal will appear in the first act's starting area. If none of those words make any sense to you, don't worry: they don't make sense to a lot of people.

The portal takes you to the Secret Cow Level, a small area full of "Hell Bovines" and the infamous "Cow King". The bovine monarch drops the rarest items in the game, and he can only be killed once per difficulty level. So if you know someone who has the full Cow King's Leathers set, they're either incredibly lucky, or they're bastard cheaters.

Over the years Blizzard has consistently said that there is no Cow Level, but we know differently. It's even referenced in Diablo III, as the ghost of the Cow King appears in Old Tristram Road. Your player character references the old Cow Level out loud, but even the Cow King himself says there is no such thing. This is in spite of the fact that he stands next to the portal to the game's own secret level, Whimsyshire, which is inhabited by unicorns and teddy bears.

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Corrupted Blood – World of Warcraft

Let's keep it light for a while longer. Even though the "Corrupted Blood" incident isn't part of the lore of Warcraft, and wasn't even planned by the writers or developers, it remains one of Blizzard's most memorable moments. For a week in September 2005, World of Warcraft was infected by a plague.

Hakkar, the final boss of the raid Zul'Gurub, used an ability which put a debuff on players. It only lasts a few seconds, but drains your health pretty rapidly. The most dangerous part, however, is that it's highly contagious. So when a bug allowed the Corrupted Blood debuff to exit the raid and spread among the general population, chaos ensued. Low-level characters were killed instantly and had no idea why. People who knew what was going on fled the highly populated cities.

It was all very silly, but the reactions of the players were real. As such, epidemiologists actually studied the event, finding how people would react to a real-world outbreak. Characters who could heal offered their services, other players directed people away from infected areas, and of course there were the trolls who intentionally tried to spread it around. The latter group were studied by anti-terrorism officials, who noted the implications of a planned biological attack.

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The Death of the Lich King – World of Warcraft

Arthas's path eventually took its darkest turn when he merged with the Lich King. He telepathically ruled the Scourge for a time from the Frozen Throne in Icecrown Citadel. That is until those meddling millions of players got in his way.

Arthas was main antagonist of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion and final raid boss. When you're that high profile you know you don't have much time left on this world. However, when the raids arrived at his doorstep, it appeared to all be a trap. He imprisoned Tirion Fordring in ice and thanked him for bringing the most powerful heroes in the world to him. Following this, Arthas effortlessly killed all of the players.

However, thanks to a bit of magic, Tirion managed to break free and shattered the Lich King's evil sword. The souls of everyone the sword had ever claimed came rushing out, and aided the now resurrected players in defeating Arthas once and for all.

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Honorable Mentions

There are so many here because just about every time there is a Blizzard cinematic, it's an exciting event. The trailers for all of its games, the cutscenes between acts: there's always something cool going on. We've gone all this time without mentioning Malfurion and Illidan Stormrage, Thrall, Grom Hellscream, Diablo himself, and we barely touched upon Jim Raynor. Here's hoping that Blizzard will return to single-player storytelling one day, and create many more memorable moments like these.

@matt_porter44 / @400facts

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A glacier in Denali National Park and Preserve in Prince William Sound, Alaska, which is slowly melting away. Photo by the US Geological Survey

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced last month that the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere surpassed 400ppm for the first time in recorded history. The agency added that the average rate of emissions is increasing, and that we can expect to reach the "point of no return" of 450ppm more quickly than previous milestones unless emissions are drastically reduced.

What? Have your eyes glazed over already? You don't feel empowered to start leading a low-carbon lifestyle? Do you not get what "point of no return" means?

You're not alone, especially if you reside in a Western country, and Per Espen Stoknes isn't surprised you feel that way. Stoknes is the author of What We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global Warming, which begins by exploring the "climate paradox"—the depressing phenomenon observed in wealthy countries like the US, Canada, and Australia, where public concern about climate change has steadily decreased, despite broad consensus among climate scientists and more frightening journalism about climate change than ever before. A psychologist and economist, Stoknes draws on the findings of social, evolutionary, and cognitive behavioral psychology to explain why English-speaking people just can't be bothered to care about climate change. Thankfully, he also offers strategies for how to talk about the environment if you really want to get the point across. We discussed these recommendations, which have strong implications, particularly for journalists and activists.

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Photo courtesy of Per Espen Stoknes

VICE: Why do you think journalism on climate change has been ineffective in convincing the public about the urgency of the problem?
Per Espen Stoknes: Studies have shown that over 80 percent of newspaper articles on IPCC climate change reports have used the catastrophe framing. Also, many journalists have extensively quoted active deniers to give "both" sides a voice, a practice which creates a "false balance."

Thus, today, global warming is the biggest story that has never been told. Recently I think we've seen a change in coverage, for instance in The Guardian. The main shift is to telling stories about the people making the change happen; focusing on opportunities, solutions, and true green growth. From psychology, we know that the best mix to create engagement and creativity is a [ratio] of one to three in negative to positive stories. My own research has resulted in four main groups of narratives that are and need to be told: a) green growth opportunities, b) better quality of life, i.e. what does a low-carbon society look like? c) the ethical stewardship story, and finally, d) stories on re-wilding and the resilience of nature. The more people start believing we can create a better society with lower emissions, the sooner they can start taking action.

How is dissonance explained psychologically, and how can climate change action be organized to cut through it?
Say you were influenced by peers to bully someone, verbally or physically. After doing so—to keep our positive self-image—you'll tend to reduce the dissonance ("I'm bullying someone, but I'm a nice person") by making up self-justifications such as "he's bad/nuts/stupid" or "he really deserved it." Or the opposite: Let's say you're kind to someone, or give money to the homeless, or donate blood. If you think that these causes are pointless, then dissonance hits: "I'm a caring person, but I'm wasting my resources." Therefore, we tend to avoid this by propping up the belief that these causes that [we] act for are great. "I'm doing this; therefore the cause must be important."

We're really fucking up the planet. VICE News reports that humans are destroying the environment at a rate unprecedented in over 10,000 years.

Thus, the more we drive, eat beef, fly, or live in high-energy use buildings, the more dissonance we experience when we hear about awful global warming effects that results from our actions. Opposite: The more we drive electric cars, e-bikes, eat no-till foods, and put solar panels on our roofs, the more we believe in the importance of climate change. Therefore, by applying "nudging"—making it simpler or the default option to take action for the climate—the more we can build consistent attitudes that actually support climate policy.

Speaking of beef, multiple studies have concluded that animal agriculture contributes the most emissions to climate change—more than energy and transportation. Do you think a mass collective shift to a plant-based diet is possible, and what socio-psychological barriers stand in the way?
If you tell people "You can't have your meat!" you'll mostly increase the resistance. You may be ecologically "right," but the psychological barriers will kick in big time. What's needed is to build support among the public to push for structural solutions; cutting food-waste, less deforestation, more no-till farming, meat reduction, organic farming, etc. Fundamentally, agriculture should become carbon-negative; storing more carbon in the soil than it emits. And on the end-user side it must be fun, easy, and inspiring to make and enjoy tasty plant-based foods. I think we've just seen the start of culinary explorations that go way beyond. In Oslo, we did a study that looked at [designating] the vegetarian option as the "the chef's special" or the default dish of the day. It contributed to substantially to meat reduction.

We [should] tell new stories of the dream, not the nightmares. We must describe where we want to go, such as smarter green growth, happier lives, and better cities.

In the book, you say that because individuals want to defend their identities and behavior in the face of warnings about climate change, the issue has become politically polarized. Can climate change as a policy issue ever become de-polarized enough for people to act without feeling attacked?
We need to apply a mix of strategies that hold the potential to dissolve the polarization: use social networks, supportive framings, simple actions, stories, and signals. We start by changing the messengers to people that are inside non-polarized social networks such as sport teams, churches, neighborhoods, towns, and cities. Second, we avoid doom, cost, and sacrifice framings, and talk about the issue in terms of opportunity, insurance, risk management, health, and resilience. Third, we make behaviors such as purchasing solar panels, energy-efficient appliances, homes, getting around in cities, simpler and more convenient. Fourth, and most important, we tell new stories of the dream, not the nightmares. We must describe where we want to go, such as smarter green growth, happier lives, and better cities, stewardship rather than dominion, and re-wilding nature by allowing its resilience to flourish again.

Last July, a hiker was mauled by a polar bear in the Arctic. We went back with him to the scene of the attack to investigate why climate change is causing polar bears to target humans.

Yet some powerful individuals, like ExxonMobil's CEO, still see climate change adaptation as a net loss. Do you think bottom-up social organization can really accumulate enough support to influence the behavior of economic behemoths that want to maintain the status quo?
No. Bottom-up social organization alone can't win a direct fight with the oil dinosaurs. But other behemoths can and will do so. Of the four largest companies in the world, only one is an oil company. The other three are Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Why should these companies let ExxonMobil ruin the growth of their consumer markets, as global warming will? Global corporations understand and recognize the future value of a benign climate for a stable business market. Extreme weather, with floods in Asia and droughts in Silicon Valley, hits both supply chains and disrupts their best workers' quality of life. There's little business on a broken planet. Further, other fossil players are changing: Big Coal is dying—down 70 percent in value in a few years—and now CEOs from other global oil and gas behemoths have signaled that they're ready for a price on carbon. Smart investors will discover early enough what the new trends are, and find that profit margins in the fossil sector are declining relative to other rapid growth sectors. So whatever ExxonMobil dinosaurs say, the other companies are moving, as well as increasing numbers of their customers. It's now business-to-business competition, no longer idealists versus business. The direction is inevitable. Only the timing remains uncertain.

You seem optimistic about the capacity of technology to facilitate sustainable human lifestyles, but a lot of technological optimism as expressed in media is still focused on technology that promises to allow us to defy ecological limits, such as interplanetary colonization. Does that type of idea affect people's will to act on climate change, if they believe our ecosystem will inevitably expand beyond Earth's limits?
Technology won't fix it. There are a lot of savior delusions as part of our Christian culture. Neither technology by itself, escaping to other planets in Star Trek mode, nor waiting for Jesus to return will quite cut it. Along with the economists' dream of one global carbon price, these fictions belong to what psychologists would call "wishful thinking." The uptake of technology is shaped by the social system it becomes part of, and it shapes society in turn. Any type of transformation will result of messy drawn-out interactions between the public, government, and commercial technologies. There is no silver bullet. And yet there is a grounded hope that our engagement, across public, governmental, and business reforms, will make the swerve in time.

There are too many good reasons why we humans resist the many sad facts of climate disruption, the "global weirding." It finally boils down to the question,Why bother? That one question reveals a simple fact: The most fundamental obstacles to averting dangerous climate disruption are not mainly physical or technological or even institutional—they have to do with how we align our thinking and doing with our being. This missing alignment shows clearly in the current lack of courage, determination, and imagination to carry through the necessary actions to combat climate disruption. But these human capacities are, luckily, as renewable as the wind and the sunshine. Humans will act for the long-term when conducive conditions are in place. Therefore, all climate communicators need to assist building the necessary social norms, supportive frames, simple actions, new stories, and better signals.

Bill Kilby is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles.

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Each puzzle piece is another shred of your dignity, offered up to your corporate overlords in exchange for the hope—the hope!—of benefits and vacation. Photo via Flickr user Horia Varlan

The office is horrible, by dint of being the place you have to go to do work you may or may not care about for dozens of hours each week just so you can afford to eat and have a home. It is an awful manifestation of capitalism, because as bad as it is, it's a marker of privilege for people working in it, a sign that you've surpassed the many retail and service-industry precarious workers of the world. And yet, despite all that, office culture is even worse than the place that birthed it.

Think about it: implicit dress codes, forced friendships with people you'd otherwise never talk to, the fetishization of breaks and food (one office I worked at had a morning-break tradition called "Fat Fridays," which is as offensive as it is depressing). It's the worst. One of the few acceptable ways office drones can try to fool themselves into thinking they're not just cogs in a machine is the email signature, and you better believe the full range of humanity's boring, annoying, and evil nature is on display. We've helpfully compiled a list of popular email sign-offs, and analyzed what they mean about you.

Thanks
You're so relieved when people acknowledge your existence (if only electronically) that you desperately toss out this little nugget of gratitude over and over again until it loses all meaning. "Thanks," you say after someone completes a report early at your request. "Thanks," person who offered to do the mail run when the office administrator is on vacation. "Thanks," stranger from IT who responded "k" to an email chain you don't even need to be on. After a while, you might as well be signing off with "best." You do, however, enjoy the smug satisfaction that comes with passive-aggressively including "thanks" in any correspondence where your intent is less than cordial.

Thanks very much
You're being way too friendly about requesting a change of meeting times via Google Calendar. Everyone knows you don't care that much and it's weirding us all out, Susan.

Sincerely
You traveled to 2015 from 1905 and, while somehow mastering computer and internet technologies, you have yet to relinquish your sense of etiquette. Lord knows why you opted to work in corporate sales when you possess the secret of time travel, but a well-timed "sincerely" can brighten anyone's day, so thank you.

Cheers
If you successfully pull this off, you give the impression to everyone you email that you are incredibly affable and enjoy pubs. There's also a good chance you give email-related anxiety to people who know they can't and never will make "cheers" work. It's not your fault, though: you're just out there living your life, cheers-ing every single person you interact with like some happy drunk bloke watching his footie team win the match.

Best
You knew you couldn't pull off "cheers," but "sincerely" sounded weirdly stiff to you. You settled on this as the (ironically!) next-best solution. Sometimes you reflect on the fact that you don't wish the literal best to every person you email, and you feel like a fraud. How many more people will you lie to this week? When will the madness end?

Talk soon
Will we, Brad? Will. We?

XO / XOXO / etc.
You once went to France for a semester abroad, where you smoked on cafe patios while reading beaten-up early-20th-century novels and made eye contact with a local Parisian bartender when you fucked. The earth moved for you. When you came back home, you started kissing your friends on their cheeks when you greeted them, longing for that warm embrace of European sophistication, ignoring the shudders of North American puritanism. Now that trip seems to be receding further and further in the rear mirror and you wonder how many cigarettes you need to have smoked to be at risk for lung cancer. It's been years since you've read anything not on a Kindle. You can't recall the bartender's name, only that the colour of his eyes are similar to your corporate-mandated Windows XP background. When you "xoxo" you almost feel alive.

Yours truly
Why are you writing Depression-era love letters to your coworkers? "Yours truly" should be included in HR policies, because it's got the anachronism of "sincerely" with a hint of "I yearn for you, my darling." This is entirely too much for a work email, but then, you are entirely too much. You know few boundaries and whenever people gently try to tell you maybe you shouldn't bring every new intern up to speed on your messy divorce, you chalk it up to other people not being as free as you.

"Before you print this email, please consider the impact it will have on the environment."
Linda, it's 2015. No one is printing off emails willy-nilly, because our eyes and brains have adapted to the new reality and we now think we read better on screens than on paper. If I'm printing your email it's because I have to, and I don't appreciate your jab of environmental apocalypse guilt. That said, the only people that print off office emails are lawyers and HR, the worst kind of office people, so this is a nice passive-aggressive move. Sorry Jared.

Nothing but your lowercased name
You want everyone to know how busy you are. That shift button is just slowing you down on your way up the corporate ladder. Either that or you're a failed novelist and e.e. cummings fan, and your email signature is the only place you can keep the dream alive.

Just your official signature, complete with job title and company logo
You want everyone to know how busy you are and why. You have no concern for mucking up the message history with extra text, which means either that you're too old to realize the inconvenience you're causing, or you are maybe a sociopath.

You've changed your iPhone email sign-off to anything other than "Sent from my iPhone"
You are everything that is wrong with the world.

Follow Tannara Yelland on Twitter.

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Despite their placement in this photo, lighters are not proper menstrual products. Photo via Flickr user Jo Guldi

In The Vagina Monologues, playwright Eve Ensler described the process of inserting tampons as such: "It's a dry wad of fucking cotton shoved up there... my vagina just sees it and it goes into shock."

It's true, it's not a cake-walk. For the most part it's an uncomfortable experience where you have to get the "lean" just right, a one-foot-up-on-the-loo, tilt-your-pelvis-this-way lean that I've never fully mastered. And those tiny cotton fibres smart! According to Menstruation.com.au, "their use may cause lacerations and ulcerations of the vaginal wall. [...] When the tampon is removed, a layer of the vaginal lining may be scraped or peeled off." That's a gross way of saying you might bleed more, so you'll likely end up buying more. It's a never-ending cycle (bah dum CHING).

Throughout those fertile pre-menopause years, menstruating people spend millions of dollars on menstrual products, and, for decades, we've also been taxed for the privilege. In 2014 alone, Canadian women spent over $519 million on tampons, pads, menstrual cups (et al), giving the government a whopping $36 million or more in GST revenue. But that's all about to end.

Thanks to NDP MP Irene Mathyssen's lobbying and an online petition, come Canada Day 2015, Canadian menstruators will no longer have to pay the GST on menstrual products. Huzzah! We put the US in uterUS! Ovaries before brovaries! Utopian fallopian! My menstrual cup runneth over!

With only a few months to go before a federal election, the Conservative government tabled the motion itself with cross-party support, instead of waiting for a future budget as they initially suggested.

And the movement has gone global: our Commonwealth comrades-in-bleedage of the United Kingdom and Australia have asked their governments to drop their menstrual taxes as well.

It's worth noting, however, that the NDP has been trying to eliminate the tax since 2004. In the interim decade, the tax has generated hundreds of millions of dollars for the government's coffers. With all that cash, Canadian women could have purchased Turks & Caicos and turned it into our collective Tiki Bar instead.

The NDP petition rightfully points out that "a small tax on tampons/pads/panty liners/menstrual cups adds up when combined with the systemic challenges many women, trans people, genderqueer people, and other menstruators face in terms of their income, housing, and economic stability."

But it's more than that. There is an ingrained social stigma attached to menstrual blood and the act of menstruation. While the taxes on these products reduce access to them, the social stigmas and attitudes therein decrease that access even further. Even I am embarrassed when the clerk ringing up my tampon order at the pharmacy is a non-bleeder. Most times, I won't even bother buying if there isn't a woman behind the counter. Sometimes the need for these products isn't worth the knowing looks, smirks, and shade thrown my way.

Periods are a natural part of some of our bodies and they are a sign that everything is in working order (also, Period Sex Forever!), but people in many cultures and time periods haven't seen it as such.

Some years ago Neil LaBute wrote, "I could never trust anything that bleeds for a week and doesn't die" (and then South Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut and countless dudebros stole it). While most might see that as harmless ribbing, the shady side-eye it throws at us is akin to some prevalent attitudes. Many women in India, for example, who are of "menstruation age" (ten to 50) are not allowed in certain temples in order to "maintain their sanctity." Many religions have different, strict rules for menstruating women, and here in the West, with the exception of a few dudes, most hetero men are so disgusted by menstrual blood that they won't even entertain the idea of having sex with their partner while she's on the rag. It's such a common complaint among whiney Yoko Bronos that a German street artist began postering the city of Karlsrühe with period pads on which were printed, "Imagine if men were as disgusted with rape as they are with periods."

Of course, commercials for tampons and pads reinforce the obnoxious shaming—"avoid messy spills and odours" is a common refrain. And let's not forget that there is the rare risk of Toxic Shock Syndrome associated with using tampons. If left untreated, TSS can prove fatal. Since tampon packaging almost always includes a warning label, rates are on the decline, but serious incidents still occur.

Coupled with the social constraints, the financial constraints created by extra taxes are not insignificant. Many women suffer from a host of reproductive issues that can cause menorrhagia (heavy bleeding), forcing the need to spend extra on supplies. Such conditions include but are not limited to: hormone imbalances, Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, uterine fibroids, polyps, adenomyosis, cancer, Von Willebrand's Disease, pelvic inflammatory disease, and endometriosis. Apart from the fact that I now want to name my band Von Willebrand's Disease, this is noteworthy stuff. For decades, people who are forced go through tampons like some of us go through Q-tips have had to suffer the indignity of their condition in addition to a tax that told them their absotively-posolutely-necessary pads and tampons were "non-essential/luxury items."

For the Greek chorus of devil's advocates out there, ready to shit on the notion that pads and tampons might be essential, let's just reflect for a moment upon the items that the federal government has already exempted from GST: human sperm (how much do people charge for that? Asking for a friend), wedding cakes (because you can't have the latter without the former?), incontinence products like Depends, and cocktail cherries.

That's how little the Canadian government has been thinking about people's periods since 2004: they're less important than maraschinos.

Now that we are no longer going to be forced to pay the federal government for the privilege of our natural bodily functions, there's also talk of ditching the provincial tax on menstruation products.

This victory is a small but important step in addressing the stigma associated with menstruation. If our MPs can speak of it in Parliament, perhaps now the general public can, too? Perhaps it's time to have a larger discussion on why women are shamed for openly discussing menstruation. I am tired of being told to be embarrassed that I bleed. I'm tired of whispering the words "period" and "tampon" for decorum's sake: a decorum that wasn't fashioned with women in mind. I am tired of tampon commercials telling me this is something "messy" and "smelly" and worth forgetting. I don't need to know why people think menstruation is gross, I just need to know why we can't talk about it. I need to know why your discomfort surrounding the topic has anything to do with me. You think menstruation is shameful? Good for you. But keep your fucking shame off of my body.

If it took us this long to address the unfair taxation of tampons, how long until saying the word "tampon" isn't followed by an avalanche of giggles and gag reflexes?

Follow Christine Estima on Twitter.

Slam poetry has garnered a weird reputation over the years. Though they're often not given the respect they deserve, some slam poets are incredibly talented and able to convey important, socially conscious messages to a pretty large audience. Saul Williams is one of the masters of slam poetry, and has helped shape everything that's good about the genre. He's always retained a remarkable sense of integrity and has an eclectic roster of past collaborators including Trent Reznor, Blackalicious, and Zack de la Rocha.

Today, we're premiering Williams's new video, "Burundi," directed by Kivu Ruhorahoza and graphics by Antonio Ribeiro. In it, Williams speaks with the voice of a computer hacker navigating the chaos of our contemporary political climate. It's intense as shit and also pretty catchy.