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Photo of Morrison Gurza by HZD Photography, courtesy of Andrew Morrison Gurza

There's going to be a sex party in Toronto on August 14. Possibly an orgy, as the Toronto Star put it, although the organizers don't want the pressure that comes with that word. It's just a party where you can get naked, see other people naked, maybe watch those people get off with each other, and respond to that however you want. If you start off feeling reserved but then become excited while watching, someone will lift you out of your wheelchair and into a harness, and you can get in on the action.

The sex party, called Deliciously Disabled, is a fully accessible romp, and a place where disability will take center stage. It's impossible to say whether or not it's the first of its kind in history, but it's the first to have flyers, $20 admission, and a full bar. This one's also going to coincide with the end of the Parapan Am Games, which should bring plenty of participants to town.

Oasis Aqualounge, a Toronto sex club, is sponsoring the event, but their facility, a 19th-century mansion full of staircases, is horribly inaccessible. Undeterred, the organizers, Fatima Mechtab, Andrew Morrison-Gurza, and Stella Palikarova found a spot nearby called Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, which was also zoned for sex parties, but has ramps.

I talked to Mechtab and Morrison-Gurza, who calls himself "the most deliciously disabled queer crip you'll ever meet," about their plans for the party, and for the disabled community of Toronto.

Like sexy stuff? Watch what life is like for a German kinkster who inflated his penis to cartoonish dimensions.

VICE: What's the story behind this event?
Fatima: Stella and I were friends and we talked about how cool it would be to have an event that would be like Oasis, but something that was wheelchair-accessible.

Andrew: I was contacted by Stella and Fatima back in February of 2015, and they said they were interested in hosting a sex-positive party that put disability at the forefront, and they wanted my expertise because I work as a consultant. We really needed something that's kind of playful and fun and easy to say. I've been building a brand: Deliciously Disabled. I decided it'd be really fun to bring that in, and so we adopted that as the name of the event. I think it will be fun and playful.

So you said earlier you prefer the term "play party," not orgy?
Andrew: Everyone is marketing it as a huge orgy. It's not exactly that. It's a party where we're putting disability and sexuality at the forefront and we're saying you need to celebrate disability and sexuality together.

Can people have sex and get drunk, though?
Fatima: At Oasis, we have a bathhouse license, and in Canada we are allowed to have an on-premises venue that sells alcohol, and allows nudity, and allows sex.

Am I right to assume Canada is more permissive than most US states?
Fatima: It's my understanding that basically in the States, if you serve alcohol, you can't be nude. I think the laws are a little bit different [from jurisdiction to jurisdiction].

When you're dealing with people who require a lot of care from care providers, nudity only comes into play when you're being taken care of.

Are you experienced at having sex in front of people?
Andrew: This will be my first foray into public sex and nudity. I've been nude for photo shoots. I've done that kind of stuff, so I'm comfortable with myself. On a larger scale? This is my first foray into that.

Do you think you have more than the usual level of confidence in your body?
Andrew: I like that my body's curved, you know? I like that it's different. I like that it's scarred. I like that there's all these different facets to it that if I didn't have a disability, wouldn't be part of my experience.

Have you decided on your level of involvement—if you will—at the party?
Andrew: I'm really interested to see how it plays out. I mean I think there's always nerves whenever you are asked to get naked with a bunch of people in the room and see what happens. But I'm excited about what it could do for the community.

Is there going to be anything else besides drinking and sex?
Fatima: We're in the midst of getting more performers. We want to have like sexy, titillating things like burlesque, maybe some dancers, possibly like a live sex show that would happen on stage with participants. All of that is sort of being figured out right now. We have a DJ, I'm thinking about maybe having a photo booth.

So what's the equipment setup going to be for making it accessible?
Fatima: We're hoping to get some cots or some beds that would be able to also accommodate a hydraulic lift. With certain beds the contraption won't work, so people in wheelchairs, or who need to be moved, would require a hydraulic lift so we need to get sort of special cots or mattresses.

Andrew: For me to be able to have sex, a harness is required. So I would need the individual that I'm with to actually guide them to do that. I would also need them to help me get undressed, which can also be really sexy and fun, because you can make a little game out of it and it can be a little show.

What do you want people to take away from the experience?
Andrew: I'm hoping the party will take the fear out of these big devices that individuals will need to have access, and that will actually be a sexy part of the day. I'm really really proud of it because it puts disability and the disabled body and disabled sensuality at the forefront of the party, which is something that we have not ever seen before in this scope. When you're dealing with people who require a lot of care from care providers, nudity only comes into play when you're being taken care of.

What if someone wants to have sex privately during the party?
Fatima: The venue itself [...] is inclusive for a lot of different kinds of people, but the one thing it isn't is private. That's not really what we're trying to do. If you wanted to have sex in that kind of space then you can go to a hotel, or you can stay home or something. We're not really trying to make it that kind of party. We really want it to be open, and we really want sexual expression to be out there.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Illustrations by Matt Rota

This article appears in the June Issue of VICE Magazine.

Jin 2006, we were working on our first-ever fiction issue. I wanted to publish fiction by Aleksandar Hemon. He wrote back, saying that he didn't have any stories available. The same thing happened with Akhil Sharma. They were both very polite. They were two of my favorite writers, and they were among hundreds of writers whom I wrote. You see, I had a secret weapon. A friend at a prestigious magazine had given me a list of writers' emails. I just wrote to him with their names, and he sent me back a spreadsheet with their emails. In the course of unprofessionally harassing Hemon and Sharma, I learned that they would be in Paris on the same night, and I asked them to go to dinner on VICE and bring a tape recorder. They agreed!

And after all that, we killed the piece. But I can remember parts of it. I remember that as the night got long, Sharma said, "Now I have to go to the bathroom, but while I'm gone I want you to pick a nice wine so we can spend up all their money, because I don't like being taken advantage of."

Hemon, sounding sleepy, said, "Wha...?"

"Think about it."

I mourned the loss of that conversation from Paris. In the eight years since, Sharma published Family Life, which won the 2015 Folio Prize for fiction. Hemon published The Lazarus Project, a novel, and The Book of My Lives, an essay collection, both of which were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. And with a little begging and bribery, we persuaded them to do it again, at Le Bernardin in New York. Here is their conversation, edited for length.

—Amie Barrodale, VICE fiction editor

Akhil Sharma: I don't know if your experience of being a writer is like mine, where it's hard to earn a living.

Aleksandar Hemon: Yeah, it is.

Sharma: So it's weird to go to a very fancy restaurant and order cavalierly. It's sort of a strange experience.

Hemon: I was recently in a five-star hotel with a Michelin-star restaurant, and I still feel they can see through all my good manners and see that my poverty is genetic and has been running in my family for millennia. I can't treat it coolly and objectively the way people who are used to it can. I was in a theme park of wealth. I just happened to be there, but I'm really a low-wage worker.

Sharma: I grew up not well off, and I worked really hard to not be near my relatives. It seems like working hard was to, like, avoid being with my cousin who steals shit. I experience the same thing feeling like people can see through me. But I don't have a desire to be in that world.

Hemon: That hotel was beautifully designed and there's a collection of art, and even though all the individual pieces of art aren't worthless, they're not art—they're decoration. You cannot get around that they hang on the walls of a fancy hotel. And decorative art is nothing that I care about.

Sharma: I see the logic of what you're saying. I find myself very touched and excited when I see something well made, a jacket or a shirt or something like that. I can get a lot of pleasure from that. If it's really nice carpeting in the hallway, I'll say, "Let me enjoy this, this is what I've got."

Hemon: I guess this genetically inscribed sense of poverty is part of my family history, or the history of the region where I'm from. And it is a survivalist mode of living, like jumping from island to island as the sharks are swimming. But because of that, there are all these enjoyable things, one at a time. Nearly everyone I know from my world, my family and my friends, thinks in terms of instability and occasionally pleasure and whatever goodness there is. Good things can all pass like that. The carpet is great, but it can go like this. It should be appreciated and enjoyed, but...

Possessing such things is meaningless. You can have all this stuff, and then it's gone.

Sharma: But don't things become more valuable? When I think about price, I think, when I'm on my deathbed, I'm going to look back and say, "Everything was fine. Why weren't you happier?"

Hemon: My goal is to be happy too, but it's a matter of what it is that makes you happy. So I realize that pleasure is not the same thing as happiness, nor is happiness constant exposure to pleasure. It's just pleasure. I enjoy this greatly, but it doesn't make me happy in this substantial way. This is what I've learned from my life.

Sharma: I am full of gratitude, sitting here, eating this delicious thing.

Hemon: Gratitude is different from happiness. I like this life in which I can be exposed to new experiences...

I ski, and an in-flight magazine called my agent asking for writers who ski, and I volunteered. So I was skiing at Gstaad, but Gstaad is not just a ski resort. I skied, but I also spent time at a couple of hotels to write about them. It hasn't been published yet. As they say, "Where you drop me, there I land." So I landed in Gstaad.

Sharma: How often are you going to Bosnia?

Hemon: Once or twice a year. I used to go more before having kids, but last year was twice. This year I haven't gone yet. But I'm always in touch with people there. I turned in a column in Bosnian yesterday, and I wrote a movie script with a Bosnian director, mainly by way of Skype. For a movie called Love Island. The first two drafts were in Bosnian, and then we switched to English. Much of it is in English now. I can do this these days, on Skype. My parents, who live in Canada, they go to Bosnia once a year for a couple months. They just move there once a year because they are sick of the Canadian winter. My sister, who lives in London, she comes down to see them with her family. When I go, no one is surprised to see me. I don't have to do any catching up. I report about my life in various ways, and my friends always know what I'm up to. There's a fascinating absence in the United States of the full understanding of what is going on with immigration. Not just Republicans. And it's not just denial—it's naïveté.

Sharma: The myth of the immigrant is so strange—somebody who is out of place.

Hemon: The Ellis Island trope whereby you enter and become someone else, become an American. Your transformation started at Ellis Island. You'd become a new person, and once you did well here you'd return to the old land, the myth goes, 40 or 50 years later, and not recognize anything. There's this weird fantasy of becoming American as an embodiment of human potential.

Sharma: When you go to Bosnia, how long do you stay?

Hemon: Sometimes I'm in Europe and just go over for a few days to see friends. It's hard to stay, because I don't want to leave my kids for too long. I maintain contact with Bosnia by writing, but I also talk to people and am politically involved and all that. I don't have this burning nostalgia to go to Bosnia; it's been eliminated. When I go to Bosnia, I don't go to remember my youth. I go there to visit people who live there now and because I miss my friends, the same way I miss my friends in New York.

Sharma: Now, if you go to India, there's sort of a perpetual haze. At night, it never really gets fully dark because there's so much light and the sky is just covered with pollution, so the light is always in the back. What I miss is being in the center of the city and seeing stars. When I think about India in terms of nostalgia, I realize that nostalgia is mostly physical. And it was a different world physically, because plastic was more valuable and not as common. You wouldn't find stuff on the side of the road, even as early as 2000. You didn't see trash anywhere. I feel a nostalgia about that.

Hemon: I don't think nostalgia is the word for that really. It's more "I wish I could experience my youth, but with this mind." I would appreciate it more but also be more conscious of all that. Because I can see it now from this distance, and there were good things happening and important things that I was too invested in it to fully see the totality of it. When I think back, I wish I had paid more attention. It might be a writer's malady to always long for more consciousness.

Sharma: How old are your children?

Hemon: Three and seven. We lost a child between those two. The older one had a sister who died. My younger daughter has something called Prader-Willi syndrome. It's a spectrum disorder, which means it can be really bad and then not that bad. So she's on the good end of the spectrum. But it does require care, so my wife has carried the burden, and when I'm home we share the duties. But when I'm not, she has to handle it. So she's returning to a place where she can begin to work again, because the three-year-old has started going to kindergarten.

Sharma: You know, my wife and I decided not to have kids right before we got married, in part because I didn't think I would be a good father. My childhood was so miserable that I think you almost need a miracle to raise a good child. We've been married now for 13 years, and I think it'd be nice to have a kid, but it's too late.

Hemon: That's a decision everyone has to make, but you can't know what kind of father you'll be because it changes you. It expands you, but what areas of yourself you expand into is hard to tell. Some things become better, and some things become worse. Some people just see themselves with more space inside. There's no way of knowing. People don't want to make a leap into the unknown. I don't feel that I've lost anything for having kids—it's all worth it. The kids are beautiful.

Sharma: My parents were difficult people. They were mean, and they became worse after my brother's accident. The older I get, the more compassion I find I have, and the more compassion I have, the harder it is for me to avoid my parents. I've talked to my mother recently, but I basically avoid her, and my father as well. Yet it's hard to maintain that boundary, which is sort of self-preservation. Have you ever been to India?

Hemon: No, but people have been telling me to go for years. I haven't wanted to leave my family. But now I have a book out and could go do some work there.

Hemon: One of my pieces from my previous book, about my friend's war experience, is being published as an e-single. He will be here at the Apple Store SoHo event with me with a video work.

Sharma: I've always wanted to be invited to this Paris Review thing but never was. I was once invited to the Penn Gala at the Museum of Natural History, and I was invited at the last moment because this guy canceled. Someone emailed me immediately asking if I had a tuxedo and then said, "OK, if you want to come, you can come." It's just so wonderful to be allowed into this silly thing. It's good to get to come and see them and see what's going on.

Hemon: I live in Chicago because I like Chicago. But one of the reasons why I wouldn't want to live in New York is precisely because of this exposure to the publishing industry and literary culture. It ends up being boring really quickly, I find. My enthusiasm leaves within a day or two. When I come I might go to those things, but I don't long for them ever. They're the Hollywood of the publishing industry.

Sharma: For me, when it's there, I'm happy to enjoy it, and when it's not there, whatever.

I have a friend who was telling me he thinks it would be hard to work in New York City because there are so many distractions. But I think wherever you go, you carry your distractions with you.

Hemon: Well, there are plenty of distractions in Chicago. But here in New York, they're distractions in that there are people who work in the same business as you and there's this sense of competitiveness. I've been at parties in New York where there's a critical mass of writers and people in the publishing industry and you can feel it. The hierarchies are always fluctuating, and people in New York always have an idea of the relative positioning of everyone in the room, of these hierarchies. And to me, it's not even a moral problem—it's just too exhausting. I don't care, and I don't want to care. I would end up caring because I can't not engage with other people. I couldn't stay away from it. I can't isolate myself. If someone invites me to a party, I'll go. If you want to isolate yourself, New York is a bad place. It's hard work figuring out what's going on, not behind the scenes but in the shuffling. I was talking to someone, a friend, at a party. And—I don't think less of him for this—in the middle of a sentence, I saw a shift on his face, and I knew that someone important had walked in. I didn't even need to look. Just a slight repositioning. And I looked back, and it was Susan Sontag. There's nothing wrong with being fascinated by Susan Sontag, but it's all just too much work. Many writers and people I'm friends with in Chicago, they do similar things as I do, but I have a lot of friends who have no connection with literature or publishing. There's no hierarchy, because there's nothing to gain.

Sharma: How did you find getting into publishing? For me, I feel one of the reasons that the book has done well is that, you know, people can meet me. I can just meet an editor for a coffee. I feel like one of the reasons I've been successful is that I've been proximate. It seems so useful to be in New York. But when I first started publishing, I wasn't living in New York.

Hemon: What makes it the Hollywood of the publishing industry is that you have to be there in order for it to happen. And I don't think that's wrong—it just depends on the sensibility. I can't do it. It worked out well enough, and I lucked out. This was in the late 90s, and I was writing things and placing them in small literary journals, including Ploughshares. This came to the attention of Stuart Dybek, who'd read an earlier story that I had written, and he was on a jury that gave it a small Illinois award. It wasn't small then, it was huge, but he liked the story so much that when he was a guest editor of Ploughshares he asked me to submit to him, so I did. They published the story, and it so happened that my agent's assistant was meeting a friend at a bookstore and she was late, so he took Ploughshares, and my story happened to be the first one in the issue. She was late enough for him to read the story, and then she arrived, but he read it and took it to his boss—now my agent—and said, "You have to read this." And she called me out of the blue. I didn't even have a book on acquiring an agent or anything; I didn't know how it worked. I didn't ask any questions about how it worked; I didn't know what her cut would be. I worried about asking or not. Finally I said, "How does this work? What do you get out of this?" And she said, "I thought you knew; everyone knows." And I didn't know. So she told me, and she's been my agent since. The extent of my self-promotion was just to mail stories to journals. Then they reached a few people, and it went off. These people are friends now, and it's part of my gratitude to Chicago. But I didn't strategize how to get into it.

Sharma: I had written some stories that were good, that I thought were good, and I went to Stanford and had an agent who was pushing some of these things out who did not. I began to get more and more depressed there because I didn't see what the future would be. I began writing a novel, and it wasn't going well. At some point I took my best short story and sent it to five magazines. Normally, when I would send I wouldn't send a self-addressed envelope because I didn't want it back. You can throw it away—I'll just print more [laughs]. This time I felt like I had to be very proper and do everything correctly, so I included some of these envelopes, and I got four rejections within a few days. I'm convinced that the fuckers didn't even read it because they would come back the same way. The fifth one I didn't hear back from, and I thought, Oh, great, the bastards stole my stamps, because I had no money. My fellowship was $11,000 a year in Palo Alto [laughs]. I sent it in February or March, and then in June or July I got a letter from the Atlantic saying that they wanted the story, and then I promptly sent them another story thinking they'd maybe buy it too. I wanted to get into the New Yorker, so I had my agent send it to them. And they said no and asked if it was a mistake and said we'd sent this to them before. Then I sent it to the Atlantic and they did the second one, and then things opened up. I thought my life would be different almost immediately, but it's basically the same thing, just not having money. I'd always thought there would be some way that one could be financially safe.

Hemon: If you know how to do it, let me know, because I don't.

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Yeesh. Look at that thing. Photo via Flickr user Prayitno

Resenting Toronto is a basic part of growing up in the Canadian prairies, where I am from.

We are taught from an early age that those who live "out East" are selfish swindlers intent on fucking over the rest of the country, and many people are still mad about policies that privileged Central Canadian elites over the Western provinces going as far back as John A. Macdonald's first government.

This hostility is by no means confined to the flat provinces, though. Virtually every region has reason to resent Toronto, for sins both real and imagined, but it usually comes down to the fact that so much of the country's wealth, power, and influence is based there. Hatred for the city is so universal it even spawned a documentary in 2007 titled Let's All Hate Toronto.

Having lived in Toronto for the past two years, I can confirm that exactly none of that hatred is misplaced.

Last week, Globe and Mail sports columnist Cathal Kelly helpfully reminded many Canadians why the country's largest city is so loathed outside its borders. In a lazy column about the FIFA Women's World Cup, Kelly lamented that the competition was kicking off in Edmonton's Commonwealth Stadium and not in Toronto. After gratuitously insulting Edmonton by calling it ugly and bush-league, and claiming the stadium holding the World Cup opener "says 'high school'" because it has a track around the field, he even suggested "the real victim here is Toronto."

Kelly, who has many bad opinions, managed to provide in one piece of writing a perfect encapsulation of what makes Toronto so obnoxious to the rest of the country. The column both reinforced Torontonians' arrogant self-image of being the centre of the country, if not the larger universe, while also making the city seem like a bunch of thin-skinned whiners.

While some people in Edmonton are up in arms over Kelly's column—the city famously has no chill—the most it truly deserves is some heavy eye-rolling. What, after all, does Toronto have to brag about?

Toronto considers itself a global city but can barely keep its aging infrastructure from crumbling. The transit system hasn't seen any meaningful expansion since the 1980s (as I write this the entire subway system has unexpectedly stopped working and we've been told there won't be any buses as backup). Taking a streetcar during rush hour? Then prepare to rub up against a dozen sweaty strangers on your way through the door as you pack yourself in like a sardine while elderly pedestrians on the sidewalk outpace your stilted progress. And good luck dating anyone who lives outside the areas served by this woefully inadequate transit system. Torontonians also incessantly talk about their commutes, much like I'm doing right now.

Everyone in T-dot (an awful nickname) wants to live south of Bloor Street, but housing is so damn expensive you'll end up in a tiny matchbox apartment or living with roommates well into your 30s. Nearly half the city's workforce gets by on precarious, often minimum-wage work, and they are increasingly priced out of core neighbourhoods. The real estate market is even more insane than the rest of the city's economy, and a complete absence of any government action on the matter means more than 100,000 people are on waiting lists for public housing at any given time.

Downtowners hate the suburbs; the suburbs hate downtown. The only thing they agree on is that being forced into the same city through amalgamation was a colossal mistake, and they use every election to remind each other and produce city councils full of gridlock and infighting, with the biggest fight right now over a downtown overpass that you only really care about if you drive on it, like during one of those aforementioned commutes, which means you are from the suburbs, a delivery truck or a rich asshole. And there are a lot of rich assholes in Toronto.

Toronto gave us a mayor who called in the army for snow removal, something westerners and Maritimers only stopped laughing about when voters inflicted four years of Mayor Rob Ford on themselves. Despite the city's vaunted diversity and multiculturalism, it took years to convince the police to abandon the racist practice of carding, and only 14 people of colour have ever been elected city councillors. The summer humidity makes it feel like you're walking through sweat soup. The SkyDome (sorry, Rogers Centre) and CN Tower are not that interesting, even for tourists. The Toronto Maple Leafs.

Toronto's affairs also get universalized in a way that just doesn't ring true to the rest of the country. It leads to a minor story about a high school dress code becoming an issue of supposed national importance, as happened with "Crop Top Day" in May. Or consider the Toronto Raptors' obnoxious marketing tagline "We The North" that claims ownership of the entire country's identity, even though the NBA is an afterthought in much of the country. This from a city where I have known people to boast about having never travelled west of Etobicoke.

Are there just as many reasons to love Toronto? Yes, for Torontonians. But the rest of the country doesn't give a shit about how nice the Don Valley is or how many street festivals are held for mac and cheese, how historic certain neighbourhoods are or Drake's tattoos.

Hating Toronto ultimately serves a much more important function than mere venting. For a country of only 35 million people spread out across a continent spanning six time zones, it can be hard to find meaningful national symbols upon which to forge common values and identity. Beavers and maple syrup? That's just tourist kitsch. But hating Toronto? Ah, now we're talking about a real common purpose.

The most painful part of the Toronto/Canada relationship, though, is that so many people eventually end up here whether they want to or not. Many journalists, for a personal example, can only get so far in their field before they have to consider moving to the Big Smoke. Same goes for comedians, actors, or any other creative field. Hell, you probably end up here if you're a lawyer or banker, too, if you want to make it to the top of your profession. With more than five million people in the Greater Toronto Area—about one seventh of the whole country's population—there's no denying the city has many opportunities simply not available elsewhere, and other parts of the country have for generations lost many of their young people to the megacity.

Like it or not, in a lot of ways Toronto is the best we've got. Toronto may not be the most prominent city we deserve, but it's the one we need... as a convenient focal point of our resentment, mockery, and hostility, while those within the city are mostly blissfully unaware of their awfulness.

Follow Toronto resident Ishmael N. Daro on Twitter.

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IWGB cycle couriers protesting yesterday. All photos courtesy of IWGB.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Gathering in covens outside pubs they can't afford, darting past your bus window as you sit in a jam, or banging on the windows of drivers that nearly run them over, cycle couriers are one of the most distinctive and visible of London's work tribes. With their cans of Tyskie beer and their tipped up peaks, cut-off tights, and fixies, they're instantly recognizable. But cycle courier culture isn't so much rooted in its fashion as the way their unique job makes them relate to each other—they are a network of people who are essentially in competition, but also united by the precarious nature of their work.

In the past month, a group of riders working for the large delivery company CitySprint have unionized with the International Workers of Great Britain (IWGB) union. As well as being poorly paid, the couriers say their work is physically and mentally hard, and they have no sick pay, holiday pay, or pension. They've had enough. Yesterday they held a day-long protest—a cycle tour with placards and flags around some of CitySprint's most prestigious clients.

The IWGB claims that CitySprint pays its couriers as little as £1.25 [$2] for some deliveries. The union believes that this means workers are earning around or sometimes below the minimum wage. CitySprint says that the IWGB's figures are "misleading," saying their couriers earn around £10.48 [$16.25] per hour on average and that earnings have increased over the last three years.

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"Buffalo Bill" used to edit Moving Target, a zine about courier culture. He works as a controller now and is not involved in the current dispute, but sitting in a pub, he told me how he has seen the trade transform since he started out as a rider in the 1980s: the TV ad pilot tapes came and went with the dawn of the internet, the stacks of press releases from the stock exchange—100 deliveries from one dispatch—all disappeared with the dawn of the fax machine. Unlike the things they're delivering, couriers' pay has stayed pretty much the same since the 80s says Bill, with the best couriers taking home £200 [$300] a week. £200 used to be more like £600 [$900] in the 80s.

IWGB is a relatively small union with a reputation for fiercely representing its members' interests; the branch in the University of London is made up largely of the Latin American cleaners who ran the successful 3Cosas campaign last year, eventually winning their demands of holidays, sick pay and pensions, as well as the London Living Wage. But what is notable about the couriers' campaign is the sheer difficulty of unionizing, due to the zero-hour work culture of couriers, where essentially everyone is an individual responsible for their own wage.

The vast majority of couriers are not employed by the companies they work for, but are self-employed contractors. However, they are often expected to hire the uniform of the company they work for. "Tying up" couriers is also prevalent—riders can earn more when there is a single controller giving a combination of jobs that overlap and map an efficient course through the city, so they often have to stick with one company day in, day out, 9 AM to 6 PM. Couriers are essentially employees of their companies in all but name, but have none of the benefits of being on staff.

However well a rider does, all it takes is a broken leg or a bent frame, and their job vanishes. As little as one day out of the saddle might destroy the relationship that controllers demand. Some riders relish this—Bill told me about how some couriers he worked with delivered packages covered in blood, in a kind of Whiplash style show of tenacity. The flipside of this is couriers who can't even climb back on their bikes, who can get instantly substituted for another rider chasing a fee.

Watch: Russian Grave Robbers

Rob, of Control Courier Collective—an agency owned by couriers themselves—knows this competition well. "What keeps the industry going is the dockets [delivery receipts] paying, the only motivation keeping you from sitting on the corner for the ten minutes before you deliver an urgent job."

But Rob has it better than most. Control operates differently from a normal courier business: instead of having couriers compete as individuals, Control's couriers work together, sometimes sharing jobs or swapping assignments mid-journey to get the job done quicker. They manage to pay 80 percent to the rider, not the industry standard 50:50 split between couriers and company.

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Friday evening on Leather Lane and couriers gather to drink away another week and trade stories. Perhaps surprisingly, they told me how getting hit on the roads isn't their biggest worry. "The most famous statistic that goes around the courier community is that more couriers have died from mental health issues than have died on the road," a courier who works for CitySprint and is part of the IWGB, told me. "People end up in this job because they find it hard to fit into the rest of 'normal' society."

Bill says this is precisely what draws some people to the industry. "People who have depressive tendencies are attracted [to] and stay in the job, because it gives you instant release: riding feels good. The satisfaction is instant.

"There's quite a strong streak of nihilism amongst couriers. When I was a kid, I wanted to be different, and working as a courier appealed to me because there was something of the outsider to it. It appeals to loads of young men because someone is paying you to take risks."

It's the unique appeal of the job—the fact that riding a bike all day is more fun than sitting in an office—which is perhaps one of the factors making couriers easy to exploit, and creating an industry where even the fittest struggle to survive. The appeal can only last for so long. "Eventually you realize that you are just riding around in circles. And you start to ask yourself: 'What the fuck is this that I'm delivering?'" said Bill.

Follow Ed on Twitter.

[body_image width='640' height='640' path='images/content-images/2015/06/08/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/06/08/' filename='in-praise-of-arnold-schwarzenegger-ageing-badass-903-body-image-1433784845.jpg' id='64183']Photo via Instagram.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

There's never been a lot relatable about Arnold Schwarzenegger. Even if he didn't look like a big pile of paint cans laminated in ham, he was a self-made real-estate millionaire by 30, had a dad in the Nazi party, and knew how to drive a tank. At his peak, he could feasibly tear a normal, mortal man in half, and his peak lasted a long time: first as the record-breaking consecutive Mr Olympia, and then as a sort of Hollywood muscle-robot, ruling the A-list with a huge, unbreakable fist. His fans have never had much in common with him because he's never really been human. He's always been more of a living, breathing, cigar-chomping wish fulfillment power fantasy, revving into the sunset on a motorcycle.

He's always had his detractors. Clive James once described him as looking like a condom full of walnuts—but young Arnie was like a god to millions of people. Even in roles where he was meant to be something of an everyman, he was still—clearly—Arnold Schwarzenegger. Arnold Schwarzenegger is never not Arnold Schwarzenegger. He'd be stuck in a plaid shirt and a suburban house and was meant to be believable as just some dude when he looked like—well, he looked like Arnold fucking Schwarzenegger. Those plaid shirts were enormous. They almost definitely came out of a catalogue, because you cannot just buy clothes that big from shops. There is literally no disguising that he is Arnold Schwarzenegger. "LINDA," he'd barf, "MY LOVELY WIFE. I LOVE OUR QUAINT AND QUIET SUBURBAN LIFE." But no he didn't. Arnie eat about a thousand eggs a day back then. He wasn't just built like a brick shithouse, he was built like a brick shithouse that survived solely on a diet of other brick shithouses. If a film with him in was ever going to be praised for its realism, every time another character met him they'd have to open with something like, "Fuck me, you look like a human tree."

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He played a barbarian, a robot, Hercules—fantasy figures befitting his cartoon-like physique, and roles where wooden acting and a thick accent were unlikely to matter. The Terminator films used his lack of range to great effect, as a terrifying killing machine in the first one and reducing grown men to tears with a stoic thumbs-up in the second. In the first Terminator he speaks less than 100 words, including "I'll be back," the catchphrase he'd return to throughout his career.

The thing is, one day he won't be back. He's a mere mortal. One day, Arnold Schwarzenegger will die. That's being made increasingly clear as he enters the old, grizzled, knackered stage of his career. Nothing deteriorates like perfection, and that's what he was frequently judged to be—as a four-time Mr. Universe and seven-time Mr. Olympia, he was held up as the closest we had.

But he looks kind of fucked now. His eyes are slits. His skin's looser. The decade he spent in politics didn't treat him particularly well—it didn't treat California amazingly, either—and a string of fuck-ups, both political and personal, seem like they took their toll on him. Revelations of infidelities (including a lengthy affair with his former housekeeper that led to an illegitimate son, Joseph Baena, who couldn't look much more like Schwarzenegger if he wore his face as a mask) led to a high-profile, costly divorce, and the novelty of a movie star politician with a fun nickname ("the Governator") wore off. The talk there had once been that the US would repeal the natural-born citizen clause in the Constitution to allow him to one day run for President died down.

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Life did what Hollywood baddies couldn't, and beat the shit out of him. His post-politics return to film was as an older, more tired man. He still seemed like he could punch a rhino through a bank vault, but it wouldn't go as far as it once would have. The rhino would maybe require a second punch to truly die. In the photo on his Wikipedia page, he's got bloodshot eyes. It looks like he just had a three-beer lunch, took a nap, and then someone woke him up. But he's way better for it. The Arnie of the 2010s is a more interesting, more relatable, more talented actor than before—one that actually seems human. The Austrian Oak could be transforming into a Clint Eastwood kind of figure—Eastwood was 62 when he made Unforgiven, and 74 when he made Million Dollar Baby. Schwarzenegger's slap in the middle now. He'll be 68 next month—and he could be entering the most interesting phase of his career.

Like, however stupidly expensive any of his living habits might be (as mentioned: he has a tank)(a man who is essentially already a tank has an additional tank to drive around in), Arnold Schwarzenegger never needs to make a film again. He was worth $800,000,000 at one point, which even after some bad investments and a messy divorce won't exactly have left him on the shitpile. Making money isn't hard when you're an icon. The ability to wander into an advert, fall on his ass, overact as himself for eight seconds and leave with a wheelbarrow of cash means he can pick and choose actual acting projects as he sees fit.

Nobody involved in the meerkat ad above was trying to make great art. It's not a career-defining performance from Schwarzenegger or either of the CGI meerkats. It's never going to be anyone's favorite ad and people are still going to say "Orange Wednesdays" in the UK. But maybe it's a necessary evil. Stuff like that gives Schwarzenegger the luxury to seek out films that are genuinely interesting, and even if the results have been a bit mixed, he's come out of them well.

His first lead role in a decade, 2013's The Last Stand, brought South Korean director Kim Jee-Woon to Hollywood and gave Arnie wrestling-style, grappling fight scenes that actually showed how a big man in his 60s would scrap—ugly, heavy punches, pinning through men's torsos and pushing them through windows. Not Conan, not the Terminator, just an aging man who's livid and wants everyone to shut the fuck up. David Ayer's Sabotage is a self-consciously unpleasant and ugly film, in which every character is horrible and the fun, semi-abstract deaths of most action films are replaced with genuinely horrifying grisly murders. And Schwarzenegger looks like total shit in it. He's grey round the temples, his receding hairline is really drawn attention to and his eyes are tiny and dark. When he smokes a cigar, he doesn't look cool like he used to in the 90s during interviews, when he'd be sat in a Hawaiian shirt on a film set chomping on a big fat stogie and laughing his head off. He just looks like he should give up smoking. He's so old. But he comes across like a character actor in the role, not a fading muscleman. If it was somehow the first film you saw him in, which it obviously wasn't for anyone, you'd be intrigued by the big dude with the slightly funny accent.

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And now, with Maggie, he's like an actual, proper, full-on actor. He plays the grizzled, bearded father of a girl imminently transforming into a zombie. It's almost a drama. Arnie's always been praised for his charisma—and his, like, enormousness—but when it's come to acting there's always been a kind of shrug from critics, a feeling of "Come on now, it's Arnold Schwarzenegger, you know what you're getting." With Maggie, for the first time he's being praised for a performance on its own terms rather than, "for Arnold Schwarzenegger, this isn't rubbish." He even cries on screen, something that would once have been unthinkable without some sort of appallingly shit robot-discovering-feelings "What is dis liquid from my eyes?" set-up.

Later on this summer, Schwarzenegger is supposedly beginning work on The Legend Of Conan, a canonical Conan sequel which the writer has described as "Unforgiven with a sword-wielding barbarian." It probably won't get the shelf of awards that Eastwood's film did, but stranger things have happened—as long as it veers away from the Red Sonja vibe of yore and sees Arnie actually emoting instead of oldly swinging a sword, it could continue his renaissance apace.

Before that, though, in the imminent Terminator: Genisys (which could only have a worse title if it was called Tyrmynytyr: Gynysys), Old Badass 2015 Arnie fights Young Bulging 1984 Arnie, recreated with body doubles, CGI, and stock footage. This is largely due to that franchise's fuck-this-shit attitude towards timelines, continuity, and fan expectation, but it works as a metaphor for Schwarzenegger's whole career. On one side there's a young, grunting, seemingly indestructible beefcake: unfeeling, monosyllabic, more a visual effect than an actor; impressive, inscrutable, inhuman. On the other there's an older, more lived-in version: flawed, vulnerable, emotional, interesting. But still with badass sunglasses and a big fuck-off gun. Because come on: he's still Arnold fucking Schwarzenegger.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

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Kids (unaffiliated with Bissonnette or Garland) playing hockey in Westmount. Photo via Flickr user Yatmandu

A Canadian director is mounting a potential class action lawsuit against a wealthy Montreal suburb for allegedly allowing a hockey coach to abuse young boys for more than 30 years while the coach was a city employee. In a motion for class action certification filed Friday in the Quebec Superior Court, Matthew Bissonnette alleges City of Westmount employees knew the coach was abusing him and at least three other children he knows of, but they did nothing.

Bissonnette wants $100,000 in psychological damages for the trauma he experienced, and he's inviting others who suffered abuse to join his lawsuit.

John Garland, who died in 2012, was a coach at the city's parks and recreation department from 1953 to 1987 and was a "familiar face in Westmount" who would each year pick his favourite boys on the hockey team to dote upon, Bissonette's court motion reads. City employees called them "Johnny's Pets," the motion adds.

At the time, the city's recreation centre managed 40 hockey teams with 600 kids, his court document says. On Monday, Bissonnette told VICE Garland allowed him and his other favourites special access to his locker, where the other kids weren't allowed. He would also take the boys out to dinner and to his apartment, where "soda, junk food, pool, darts, and video games were readily available."

City employees "could easily witness" the boys getting into Garland's car since their office windows overlooked the parking lot, but they did nothing, Bissonnette alleges in his motion.

In 1978, when Bissonnette was 12, his coach began making sexual advances toward him, he claims in court documents. At his apartment, Garland asked him to sit on his lap in a reclining chair while he hugged him and rocked back and forth.

The coach soon began massaging Bissonnette on his couch, and would touch his genitals and masturbate him. According to the director's court motion, the coach called these sessions "warm ups," implying they would help him prepare for hockey games.

"These home visits were common knowledge among department participants and employees," he alleges. "No responsible adult could have failed to consider that Garland's relationship with these boys was inappropriate."

The abuse, which included emotional manipulation and gifts, continued until Bissonnette was 14. He started to resist the coach's advances, and stopped visiting his apartment.

He remembers those years as "terrifying," "shameful," and "alienating."

"No one's around, no one's going to help you, no one's going to stop this," he told VICE, describing how he felt at the time.

As a result of the coach's actions, Bissonnette told VICE he began self medicating, first with alcohol, weed, acid, speed, and mescaline, then later with cocaine, vicoden, percocet, and ambien. "It was sort of an escalation," he said. "What you see with self-medication in my experience is it works and then it stops working."

Bissonnette told VICE that, in the spring of 1993, while he was a law student at Queen's University and was still heavily using drugs, he'd worked up the nerve to file a criminal complaint against Garland with Westmount police, and a detective began investigating his case. But later that year, the court motion says, the detective left a message with Bissonnette's roommate saying there wasn't enough evidence to charge Garland, and police were dropping the case.

The detective said Garland had maintained his innocence and threatened to sue for defamation. According to the director's court filings, police knew the hockey coach and didn't believe Bissonnette's story, the detective told him.

'[The detective] stated that [Bissonnette], as a first year law student, was knowledgeable of civil litigation and was fabricating the abuse in the hope of financial gain."

For a decade Bissonnette played a movie in his head imagining he would tell everyone and it would get fixed, he told VICE. So when he finally told police and they thought he had fabricated the story, he says it was "completely shocking."

"I couldn't believe it, and it was heartbreaking."

He told VICE his reaction at the time was: "Fuck these people, fuck the city of Westmount. If they want to protect and coddle a pedophile, and that's the kind of world that they're building for themselves, I'm done with these people."

The police were the only professional entity he sought help from at that time, the court documents state, and they "turned their back on [him] at the moment when he needed them most."

In 2002, nearly 10 years after he tried going to police, Bissonnette started seeing a therapist and realized the full weight of the abuse and both the city and police's response to it.

In 2012, the sexual abuse of former NHL player Theoren Fleury by his coach dominated headlines and Bissonnette again decided to approach police. But police told him there was no record of his complaint. A freedom of information request by his lawyer confirmed that was true.

But in 2012, before Bissonnette could bring charges against his former coach, Garland died.

For years, Garland repeated the same pattern of behaviour with all the boys he singled out for abuse, Bissonnette's lawyer, Bruce Johnston, told VICE Monday. Johnston argues that as a city employee, the city is liable for his behavior.

"Westmount was the employer of Mr. Garland and as employer, in law, the city of Westmount is legally responsible for the faults committed by Mr. Garland, who was in the employ of the city and was acting within the confines of his mandate. He had contact with these children because he was an employee of the city of Westmount, and as such the city of Westmount is liable for the faults of its employee."

There were clear signs that the city should have seen that should have led them to intervene, he added.

The City of Westmount declined to comment on the lawsuit.

"The Westmount Police was disbanded in 1973," Westmount's current Mayor Peter Trent told Maclean's. "They are trying to say we had something to do with his plea in 1993, when of course Westmount Police didn't exist. It was called the Montreal Urban Community police that was run by Montreal, and Westmount had no control whatsoever over the police at the station."

A judge has not yet certified the suit as a class action. Westmount has not yet filed a statement of defense. That's to be expected as the action was filed on Friday, Johnston said.

As a result of the alleged abuse, Bissonnette explained to VICE, he used drugs as a crutch for 30 years. It was only through therapy and the birth of his son, now eight years old, that he realized he was abusing drugs because of the sexual abuse he suffered.

He's been clean for a year and four months.

As part of his recovery, he's changed his view of the city employees he says allowed the abuse to happen. He understands people make mistakes and that doesn't make them bad people. "It just means you made a mistake, and what you do is you acknowledge it and then you make it right."

Bissonnette lives in LA and has directed art films including Who Loves the Sun, Passenger Side, and Looking for Leonard.

With files from Joseph Elfassi.

Follow Hilary Beaumont on Twitter.

[body_image width='1920' height='1080' path='images/content-images/2015/06/10/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/06/10/' filename='death-to-pranks-death-to-youtube-104-body-image-1433933038.jpg' id='64868']Pictured: the exact moment truth died

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Here is one of those viral videos everyone likes. I'll embed it, but you're not going to watch it. I mean, for fuck's sake: It's five minutes and 14 seconds long. Do you really have five minutes and 14 seconds to spare? You could die at any moment. And as your synapses fire to a final brain death, and the key moments of your life run in front of you like stones rushing towards the sea, you will go: Man, I sure did spend a lot of time spent cross-legged on my bed watching YouTube videos.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/SbpdIsmyOXE' width='640' height='360']

And so the task falls to me to describe the above five minutes and 14 seconds to you. But you don't really need it, do you? You know what's going to happen as well as I do: someone—the kind of person who, at parties and with a straight face, introduces themselves to people with the descriptor "YouTube prankster" ("I do these pranks—you know, funny pranks; we get good views, actually. Although one time I put my knob in a Coke bottle and we had to go to hospital.") ("We kind of do these behind-the-scenes vlogs as well. Wait, no, come back!")—someone dressed up in a bunny outfit jumps out at people from behind a corner to see how they react.

Because it's funny, isn't it, how scared people get? It's only a bunny! It's only a massive, human-sized bunny screaming at you out of nowhere in the cold dead of night! What you crying for! It's just a prank, mate! Just a prank! It's not the grim specter of death! Your human reflexes and fight-or-flight instinct have been provoked by a simple lampoon! Once the adrenaline stops pulsing around your bloodstream you'll be fine! Can you quickly sign this release form so we don't have to blur your face?

But 2015 being the year that pranksters discovered the meta-prank, so tick follows tock, so a stooge-like male lead is coerced into feigning a heart attack, and so we get three minutes of footage of a man in a bunny outfit showing genuine remorse, thinking the heart attack man died an undignified death on the floor of an unclean hospital. The big stupid rabbit man goes and cries on a parking meter. The big stupid bunny man leans wistfully on a fence. I have killed, he thinks. He is a killer. What will they do to the big stupid rabbit man in prison? They'll shank my kidneys out my ass, he's thinking. I'm the worst scum on Earth. I killed a man over a 600,000-subscriber YouTube channel. And then, just when you think the Vine generation might have its first emotion—might learn contrition—someone goes: Dude. Dude. Who's that? And an alive man storms out of the hospital and everyone calls each other fuckers.

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What is this inexplicable human urge to prank? Is this what separates us from the animals: Unlike chimps and unlike dolphins, unlike birds and unlike bees, we think it's funny to run a hair trimmer over someone's head and then pretend we took all their hair off, or walk around LA throwing a lasso over girls before getting legitimately beaten up? Is this the peak of our existence, making our friends believe they've killed someone while racking up the viral hits?

I don't want to be the one to say this, but: If anything, this video of a large idiot bunny man not killing someone disproves the existence of God. Would a just and even-handed God let us get to this point? Or would he turn the lights off before we got this far? There is no higher power. There is no reason to be good. YouTube pranksters are out of control, and they're shitting on the concept of truth. Is anything real any more? Or are we all locked in some third or fourth-level YouTube video, where the ultimate gist of the prank is that we all think we have free will? That reality as we think we know it is actually a Truman Show–esque social experiment masterminded by The Awful Sam Pepper? That we are alone in the universe, cold and alone: that we are all sliding down a wall, feigning a heart attack while filmed from three angles by three thin boys in snapbacks, forever?

You did it, humanity. You finally made a video so bad it made me doubt my reality.

Follow Joel on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Ashes. That's how the E3 2014 trailer for Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain opens. A slow tracking shot over the charred remnants of some terrible violence, burned corpses, and blasted wood and blood all mired together in mud. Then in the corner, a credit appears: "Trailer Directed and Edited by Hideo Kojima." What follows is a five-minute music-led montage of various scenes from the game, pulled and ordered by Kojima as much to tantalize as to depict the inevitable suffering of Snake and his burgeoning private military. Marketing or not, the presented format can't stop the director from telling a story.

Like Metal Gear Solid itself, the lead-up to The Phantom Pain has been anything but subtle. What began with a trick announcement at the 2012 VGAs under the guise of the so-called Moby Dick Studios has led all the way to this dramatic teaser, which ends with a crimson-faced Snake glistening against a background of flames as the words "Coming 1984" pop boldly on screen. No one makes trailers quite like these, in the games industry or probably anywhere else.

Rather than standard sizzle reels of gameplay (gameplay is rarely shown at all) MGS's trailers traditionally rely on film techniques. The camera work of the Fox Engine; editing, sound, and music choices; juxtaposition—these are all products of Kojima's overtly cinematic ambitions. Whether he cut together any other MGSV video—before the 1984 trailer, none have made explicit mention of him doing all the legwork himself—his oversight seems assured. There's a notable pushback against typical end-of-video reminders to pre-order for exclusive skins and DLC, replaced by a sense of directorial authorship. When an MGS trailer is over, it just ends.

All of this – thoughts on ownership, Kojima's name on the 1984 trailer (as well as it being removed from MGS's online presence), the sad public unravelling at Konami, much of which continues to be a mystery—weighed heavily on me when I recently had a chance to dig into The Phantom Pain for myself. It still does. The 1984 trailer is probably the last time we'll see MGSV presented through Kojima's eyes until The Phantom Pain's September release; consequently, it felt strange to be sitting inside Konami's LA studio, a building with a conference space appropriately called the "Solidus Room," being among the first to play a game littered with Kojima's fingerprints when the director was nowhere to be found. His absence hung heavily in the room, like his ghost in MGS4. It almost felt like a mercy to keep the focus squarely on picking up a controller and digging in.

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Another game, another dog.

So, some conflicted feelings right from the start. At least if you're intimately familiar with standalone prologue Ground Zeroes' Camp Omega, The Phantom Pain is like a (somewhat bittersweet, considering) reunion with an old friend. Of course there are significant aspects of it that I can't discuss, and I wouldn't regardless if I could—the best part of an MGS narrative is to experience it for yourself. That just leaves one big question mark: does The Phantom Pain still feel like A Hideo Kojima Game?

Assuming plans to remove the phrase from its box art continue, yes—in everything except name. You can find Kojima's handiwork and supervision in every sortie that you deploy, each blown out like an oversized Xerox of Ground Zeroes' initial blueprint. By his own words, MGSV's compact introduction was never meant to provide players more than only the slightest taste of what was to come—and that was true enough, as Camp Omega lacked much in the way of cardboard boxes. In practical terms, it makes The Phantom Pain Kojima's fascination with open-world writ large, where riding your horse through the Afghan desert is more than a little like a stealthy Red Dead Redemption.

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Yet it's not a typical open-world sandbox that is Kojima's ultimate goal in the same way it is in Far Cry or Grand Theft Auto (the latter of which he's professed to feeling depressed over, twice). Maps aren't arbitrarily limited by pointless activation tasks, nor are they playgrounds just to cause mayhem. There's a balance to be struck in weighing your own freedom against the director's grander vision. It heightens the learning curve on Metal Gear consumption just enough to make you realize that, after 15 hours—and more, you've probably barely scratched the surface of what The Phantom Pain is actually about. The story of Big Boss's fall unspools slowly.

Compare that to the claustrophobic enclosures of MGS4's rigid design, where ostensibly large areas often had few variations to get through and roughly half the time in-game interaction meant pressing the X button to trigger a flashback during a cutscene. Instead, open-ended solutions create a stake in ownership, something of a first for the series outside of emotional attachment to characters. Kojima's guiding hand means The Phantom Pain's disparate gameplay and story elements are funneled into a long, cohesive whole, where narrative purpose is fused even into side ops, bringing incidental story bits and extras into the fold.

"Players will start complaining that they can't clear the game," Kojima famously said last March, when he announced that The Phantom Pain was 200 times the size Ground Zeroes. In an era where players can't be bothered to sit through the entirety of a five-hour FPS campaign, I don't think it was meant as a joke.

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You don't have to always be stealthy, but you'll get a better score if you remain unseen for the entire mission.

Think of that scope, fittingly, more as a culmination of all that Metal Gear Solid has been. Tweaks and ideas that have been forged from as early as 2006's Portable Ops come to fruition through the lens of Peace Walker. Similarly, you'll probably recognize Mother Base's bright orange paint and clean industrial design as a knowing wink to MGS2's Big Shell. Self-awareness and the meta-referential are pervasive, and Ground Zeroes had just the first hints of it. That it comes with the ability to attach wild sheep to Fulton recovery balloons is another signature—despite its seriousness, Metal Gear Solid is nothing if not a factory for ridiculous non-sequiturs.

Sometime over the course of my two days with The Phantom Pain, I almost forgot about Kojima. It wasn't through neglect or his sudden disappearance. I was just in the moment, having fun. And the more I uncovered the depth of Metal Gear Solid's swan song—for as full as MGSV is, there's no reason it shouldn't be—it became clear the game is its developers' farewell to the series, too. Drinking in all I could see, I wasn't thinking about how this was the end, I guess, because for me it isn't; not as long as I can remember it. (Besides, that's the great thing about media—you can always revisit.) Over the closing credits of MGS2, a game obsessed with legacy, Rika Muranaka sang that you can't say goodbye to yesterday, but you can. It's okay to let things end.

One more thing about Mother Base: when you take a tour around the fleshed-out grounds of your HQ after a few construction expansions, you're not just seeing Snake boosting the morale of his men. Kojima is present here too, asking you to pause for a moment to just take in all that you—he, both of you—have built up over the years. With MGSV closing the loop on the Big Boss's timeline, it's all led up to this moment. Assuredly, The Phantom Pain is full of them.

Follow Steve Haske on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE Alps.

Last week, while researching an article, I came across a pro-ana WhatsApp group. It basically functions as a forum for young women who are dedicated anorexics and see anorexia as a lifestyle choice rather than the life-threatening disease it can be. As painful as it was to see teenagers push one another deeper into anorexia, the forum itself wasn't the most disturbing part of the experience.

The Swiss blog Skinnylicious is another pro-ana forum, a sort of paradise for young girls who are toying with the idea of becoming anorexic. It has something called a "twin market," where these young ladies place ads looking for others with the same clothing measurements. In the midst of all these posts, one in particular caught my eye: one by someone professing to be a "pro-ana coach."

"Do you want to lose weight?" the advertisement read. "Get skinny instead of slim? I can help."

The guy behind the post referred to himself as a professional pro-ana coach, offering up his years of experience "purely out of kindness." He included his phone number—which he said girls should only use if they were dead-serious about losing weight. Wanting to learn as much as possible about the grim realities of the pro-ana community, I decided to contact him via WhatsApp.

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Not the original screenshots. All screenshots, originally written in German, have been remade in English.

I told my new coach that I wanted to become anorexic. I also mentioned that I was 15 and dedicated to the task. It took less than a day for "Andree"—the pseudonym under which he introduced himself—to reply. After asking him which weight he'd recommend for me, he explained that he'd need to see a picture of me in my underwear before he could make that decision. The alarm bells already ringing in my mind grew louder.

Andree had told me that he was 25. An adult man wanting to help 15-year-old girls become anorexic and needing intimate photos to do so? I decided to play along for a while and sent the "coach" some pictures that I had found online. I sent a picture of a very young and very thin girl. She barely even needed the bra that she wore in the picture. It appeared that Andree liked what he saw. He agreed to coach me, but not before I agreed to a few conditions.

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Note: "ANA" and "MIA" stand for Anorexia and Bulimia, respectively.

I could barely believe what I was reading. This madman was telling me that I had to sexually degrade myself to achieve anorexia. The experience was so absurd and his intentions so blatantly evil that I felt physically ill. It appeared that this was a man who stalked the internet hunting for vulnerable teenage girls—most of whom undoubtedly suffered from depression and eating disorders.

I had already spent a week with teenagers belonging to an online pro-ana group for the purposes of another article, and had experienced firsthand the strange self-loathing these girls possessed. They wanted to be reminded of how worthless and fat they were on a daily basis. This man was using a very dangerous illness for his own gain—namely, to get intimate photos of underage girls.

Related: Watch our film 'Young Reoffenders,' about a disenfranchised group of young British men trapped in a cycle of crime and incarceration.

I pulled myself together and decided that I should take this further. The "coach" eventually wanted to speak to me on the phone. I put on my squeakiest voice and made sure to keep my answers short.

Had I understood what he meant by conducting our exchanges "intimate"? I said I had. Then he explained: "I have to be sure that you're mature enough for my coaching. I'm going to ask you a few questions and then give you tasks that you will have to complete."

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He asked me when I had lost my virginity, whether I masturbated, and whether I had ever had anal sex. As my stomach turned, I stammered answers while trying not to explode with rage. Once we got off the phone, he sent me the tasks that I had to complete.

I fed him the answers he wanted to hear and decided to contact the police immediately afterwards. When I returned to the page that housed his ad, I was shocked to find that he wasn't the only one up to this. I had been so preoccupied with finding a pro-ana group that I hadn't noticed the dozens of ads there were for coaches. It seemed as if the world's pedophiles had found a new way of gaining access to psychologically unstable teenagers.

Related: The Dark Tale of the 'Final Fantasy VII' House

All the ads looking for ana-twins or WhatsApp groups seemed to have been placed by girls. But all of the pro-ana coaches either claimed to be male and over 20 or didn't offer any information about their identity at all.

Questions raced through my mind, the answers to which were a resounding and horrifying "yes." Were these pedophiles using pro-ana pages to hunt out young girls with low self-esteem? It certainly seemed that way. Were they more attracted to the thin, bony bodies of anorexic teens? Again, it was hard to escape this conclusion. In the midst of this, my personal coach got in touch again. Apparently, he couldn't wait any longer for the naked videos he had demanded.

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This last demand made me flip. "Pupil." This pig was suddenly attempting to go from coach to teacher and master. I came up with an excuse to get out of his toilet challenge and avoid being exposed. But Andree seemed so keen on my fictional 15-year-old persona that he thought he would be able to tempt me with a "real" coaching session.

He explained that his coaching would be most effective if I visited him in Frankfurt. He reminded me that I'd need to work hard to become anorexic and that I'd need to be intimately degraded. He had shown his true colors. I didn't dare to think about the kind of 15-year-old girl who, being so hell-bent on losing weight, would visit such a creep in a strange city.

That evening, I wrote an email to the German police and informed them about my blog, my experiment, and Andree. I know there are many more Andrees out there and many more of these blogs.

The dangers posed by pro-ana blogs have always seemed very pressing and real. But perhaps they harbor causes for concern that go beyond the usual anxieties about deliberate and fetishized teenage weight loss.

At the time of writing, the German police have contacted Interpol and the case is under international investigation.

There are still people out there figuring out ways to make interesting music in 2015 while staying within the normal confines of the electronic music palette. The Alabama-based tape label Noumenal Loom has built up a name for themselves by tracking down and championing these people. Earthy, whose new album Days will drop June 24, is their most recent find.

Earthy—Edaan Brook and Brint Hansen—fuse fragmented beats with vocal samples and found sounds, building complex nets of textures out of half-sung syllables and the sound of cans opening. This song, "RGB," is from the upcoming record, which marks Noumenal's Loom's first foray into vinyl. It makes you feel like you're playing a video game adaptation of a Miyazaki movie. Check it out.

Preorder the duo's album here.

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FEWS Project Manager Audrey Carmichael testing NPS in the lab. Photos by the author

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

It looks like a head shop is taking inventory in a college science lab. On one side of the work surface are a few bags of white powder labeled with the very complicated names of chemical compounds; on the other is a range of foil packets sporting dodgy graphic designs and names like Gogaine, Ching, Exodus, and Herbal Haze.

Machines buzz and whirr in the background as chemists sit at computer screens, monitoring the compounds that pass through them. It's eerily quiet, and beyond the small selection of buildings in front of the window, there is no sign of civilization for miles.

The white powders are a selection of novel psychoactive substances (NPS), a group of drugs that have been blamed for a string of high-profile deaths in the UK since 2009. However, this isn't a Chinese laboratory manufacturing the stuff you see sold to college kids at Glastonbury, nor is it a home chemist's clandestine DIY workshop in an Ipswich industrial estate. This is the lab of the Forensic Early Warning System (FEWS) at the UK Home Office's Center for Applied Science and Technology in St. Albans.

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A selection of NPS in the FEWS lab

The FEWS was set up in 2011 to identify all the NPS—dubbed "legal highs"—reaching the market, and to tackle the problem of the rapid rise in number seen in the preceding three years. Currently, chemists—predominantly in China, India, and Pakistan—closely monitor new laws and apply minor tweaks to controlled substances, taking them back outside legislation faster than authorities can ban them.

But the blanket ban announced here a couple of weeks ago in the Psychoactive Substances Bill will prohibit the production, distribution, sale, and supply of any substance defined to have a "psychoactive effect," with anyone caught doing so facing up to seven years in jail.

"The bill will put an end to the game of cat and mouse in which new drugs appear on the market more quickly than government can identify and ban them," explains Mike Penning, Minister of State for Policing, Crime, Criminal Justice, and Victims. "Young people who take these substances are taking exceptional risks with their health, and those who profit from their sale have a complete disregard for the potential consequences. That's why we are targeting the suppliers."

You'd have thought the new legislation, which applies a blanket ban to all NPS, will leave the team at FEWS out of a job. However, fears remain that the number of NPS will continue to grow despite the ban, and that the lack of regulation due to manufacturing being forced underground will create more risk around these products. So what is the future of NPS in the UK under a blanket ban?

Audrey Carmichael, the FEWS project manager, continues frantically trying to keep up with new products that hit the UK market. "Psychoactive substances will still need to be identified. The Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 will continue to control drugs where there is expert evidence of their harms," she explains, setting up another sample for testing.

"For almost every traditional drug you can think of that's on the market, we will see a synthetic version," Carmichael explains, summing up the new front on the UK's war on drugs. "We still see completely new compounds around once a month."

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Some more NPS in the FEWS lab

During a recent test purchase, the team found that two branded packets from the same head shop contained entirely different chemicals. "They're marked with each ingredient by weight, so they look legitimate, but it often doesn't correlate to what we see when we do analysis," Carmichael remarks. "We've found antibiotics and all sorts. We don't know if they are by-products, or just something to bulk it out with."

As one of the biggest service providers of forensic toxicology to UK police forces, this lack of regulation is something that Dr. Mark Piper, head of toxicology at Randox Laboratories, has firsthand experience of.

"You can buy two batches of the same product, and what is in them can vary massively. You never know what's in that packet – it's just a white chemical," he explains. "There is little in the way of quality control in the manufacture of these."

However, Piper is clear in what he sees happening once the ban is enforced: "I don't doubt for a minute that it will be driven underground."

Interested in more conventional drugs? Watch our documentary 'Swansea Love Story'

Other experts also fear the ban may only serve to make the current situation even worse. "One of the worries when you use criminal law is that you drive the form of drug use further underground," explains Dr. Neil McKeganey, founder of the Center for Drug Misuse Research. "You have less access to the production process as there is no scope for any kind of cooperation. These substances are not well understood at the moment in terms of their chemical components—it can take an extraordinarily long time to work out what is in them. If you use regulation, it becomes much harder to work that out."

This lack of regulation within the market is something that Donal (not his real name), director of one of the UK's original legal high manufacturers, bemoans. "We would welcome a regulated market," he says. "The better guidelines there are for a supplier, the better. It became so popular that people have just set up in five minutes without really understanding the product or knowing where it has come from. It has given the industry a bad name and put people at risk. We need licensing and compliance, like you have in other industries."

READ ON NOISEY: How Will the New Ban On Laughing Gas, Poppers and Legal Highs Affect This Summer's Festivals?

Donal also feels that the government is building bad legislation on top of an already flawed system. "The restrictions that are currently in place actually cause more problems, as we can't give any information. If you stop pharmacies telling people how many paracetamol they can take, quite quickly people will start dying from using paracetamol," he points out.

Donal believes the ban is only set to make the situation worse. "People are not going to stop abusing substances because legislation says they can't; it just means that the more reputable and scrupulous people will stop selling it, and the less reputable ones will continue, creating organized crime and a more dangerous market," he says. "The bill has been brought in with the intention of protecting the youth, but it will have the opposite effect. It's an Elastoplast on a gaping wound: slightly pointless and getting in the way of the healing process."

Follow Rob on Twitter.

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Dave spent a lot of the evening pointing a video camera at a lit window in the apartment. Photos by the author

According to Raymond Chandler, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and a lot of reality TV, being a private detective is awesome. Or so I thought until I attended a stakeout with a guy I'll call Dave.

Dave is a Melbourne PI with Lyonswood Investigations, and I met him during his third day outside a St. Kilda apartment. He'd been watching the place on 14-hour shifts from his hatchback, which made me quickly realize that a lot of PI mythology is, in fact, mythical. I sat in with Dave for a few hours, and he ran me through his processes, his musical preferences, and what he does for toilet breaks.

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We got in and out of the car whenever someone showed up at the door.

VICE: Hey, Dave, what are we doing here?
Dave: We're waiting here to serve a court summons. Normally you'd just knock on the door and hand them over. But this person is a little tricky because they're hard to get hold of. So when we see the guy we'll follow and hand the papers over. This is a somewhat unique case, though.

Why is it unique? What sort of work do you usually do?
All sorts. You've got corporate jobs where you're working for a larger company that wants a particular aspect of their business looked into. Then you've got your WorkCover jobs. In those situations the insurance company wants to know if a person on benefits is genuinely injured. Then you get your private jobs where the husband or wife thinks a partner is cheating.

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More filming. It's interesting to note the PI world has ignored the DSLR phase.

Do you have a favorite?
I do like the private stuff. You end up doing things like going into a restaurant to record a conversation while you're having a meal. It's quite exciting, whereas a lot of your WorkCover and corporate jobs mean sitting in a car for hours and then going home. It can be pretty draining sitting in a car for hours.

Yes, as I'm discovering. How do you go to the toilet?
Well, you have a wee bottle. I use an orange-juice bottle, actually. Then there's number twos, and in the early days I had a little toilet-type thing. But now if I really need to go, I just go. You just hope that when you come back nothing has changed. I've heard of people blowing jobs because they went to the toilet.

What is your favorite music to follow someone?
When I follow people I used to like Neil Diamond. Anything that's a little mellow. But when you're on the follow you go from being very relaxed to being stressed. You're like, Shit, I don't want to lose them! You could have been waiting for 12 hours for a guy and then lose him in five minutes. So nowadays I usually have the radio off just because I need to concentrate.

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Dave

What about clothing? Do you dress in a particular way?
Generally I go for darker clothing. You also need something that looks neat anywhere. If I'm doing multiple follows I'll put my baseball cap on and change my top so nobody recognizes me.

Run me through how you plan a surveillance job.
I always check out the area before I go. Country roads are difficult because there's nobody around and you're much more obvious. If I'm on a straight road I immediately know I can sit as far away as possible. Some people are looking for someone watching them. If you're really careful you're probably up to something dodgy. If someone is looking for surveillance they're normally looking in the first few kilometers around home. But once they're driving they're much more relaxed.

What do you think makes a good private investigator?
You've got to have patience and integrity. You also need to be reliable and honest. People put a lot of trust in you. Sometimes they're telling you things that they wouldn't tell their closest friends. There's a lot of hidden responsibility to this job.

In the end, no one emerged from the apartment and I went home. Dave is still on the job, for all I know.

After the Supreme Court struck down laws around sex work as being harmful to people in the trade, the federal government passed Bill C-36, which criminalizes johns who patronize sex workers. The government argues these laws are intended to protect women from human traffickers, but critics say they make the trade more dangerous for those consensually doing sex work. It's now illegal for sex workers to advertise their services, and because johns are committing a crime, they may pressure workers to rush into encounters without vetting potential clients.

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

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Washakada Indian Residential School in Elkhorn, Manitoba, in 1900. Photo via Flickr user BiblioArchives

In 1967, race riots in Detroit left 43 people dead. President Lyndon B. Johnson was quick to label rioters "criminals" and order 4,700 Federal troops into the heart of Detroit to quell the violence. It was the latest in a series of race riots that swept the United States—Rochester, Harlem and Philadelphia in '64, LA in '65, Ohio, Nebraska, New Jersey—and there was pressure on the president to call a commission.

A year later, the final report of the Kerner Commission came as a shock. It found that the rioting was not the work of hoodlums intent on destabilizing society, but rather an expression of the systemic exclusion of Black Americans from political and economic life. It was not a law-and-order problem, but a racism and poverty problem, rooted in the institution of slavery.

The Kerner Report became an instant bestseller. Marlon Brando went on ABC's late-night talk show The Joey Bishop Show and read aloud from its famous introduction: "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal." He would later be hounded by hecklers carrying signs calling him a "n*****-loving creep."

Fifty years on, Canadians have just been presented with an equally astounding bombshell of a commission report, and one that deserves to be as widely read.

For seven years, the Truth & Reconciliation Commission did its work, and many wondered how closely it would stick to its mandate of addressing mandatory residential schools in Canada. Some worried that residential schools might be depicted, as Ottawa's Catholic Archbishop Terrence Prendergast described them this week, as a generally well-intentioned but poorly executed policy of social improvement, ultimately spoiled by a few sexually abusive bad apples.

This week we found out that this was not to be the case. The opening paragraph of the TRC Report leaves little room for interpretation:

For over a century, the central goals of Canada's Aboriginal policy were to eliminate Aboriginal governments; ignore Aboriginal rights; terminate the Treaties; and, through a process of assimilation, cause Aboriginal peoples to cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious and racial entities in Canada. The establishment and operation of residential schools were a central element of this policy, which can be best described as 'cultural genocide.'

Tasked with investigating the residential school system, the TRC found it to be part of a coherent and systematic campaign to assert control over Aboriginal land and resources. In other words, to build Canada.

Much of the response to the Report has focused on whether residential school policy does or doesn't count as cultural genocide, or wondered why 'cultural.' People have inevitably questioned what this might have to do with the Holocaust. For some Canadians, the word "genocide" is enough to jar them into taking notice. The stories undoubtedly deserve attention—seven generations of children torn from their parents' arms, beaten, shamed, broken, disappeared. Children in residential schools were more likely to die there than Canadian soldiers were in World War II. Look closely, and "genocide" won't seem like too strong a word.

But this is not just a story about residential schools. The Report reminds us what residential schools were intended to achieve. It was not simply a culturally-driven project of Christianizing. Rather, the goal was to destroy the economic, political and legal foundations of Indigenous communities, and make way for the unrestricted exploitation and occupation of their land.

Residential schools were a means to an end. No Indigenous people meant "no reserves, no Treaties, and no Aboriginal rights." Even early colonial administrators and lawmakers knew that these territories weren't terra nullius—weren't empty. This land needed to be emptied, in order that it could be filled with Canada. It didn't work, which is why we are even talking about this.

Today, dealing with the "Indian problem" no longer looks like forcing children into church-run schools. It looks like so-called "tough on crime" legislation that sees our prisons filling with Indigenous people. (Aboriginal women represent four percent of all female Canadians, but one third of the female prison population.) It looks like our Minister of Aboriginal Affairs blaming the disproportionate number of murdered Indigenous women on "a lack of respect for women and girls on reserves." (See here for a guide to the related concept of "black-on-black" crime.) It looks like the federal government strong-arming First Nations' into oil and gas development and, through Bill C-51, criminalizing anyone who threatens to stand in the way.

It's not just that there are still Indigenous people in Canada. It's that their legal, political, economic, spiritual systems persist—and these systems are what continue to be a problem. As Canadians, we imagine that our country covers this land like a blanket. It doesn't, and never has. The history of Canada has been like pulling a too-small sheet onto a bed: where it covers one corner, it pulls from the other, its thin fabric already tattered. Mohawks in Kanesatake take up arms; the Unist'ot'en Camp asserts Wet'suwet'en sovereignty in the path of the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline; the Heiltsuk First Nation shut down a commercial herring harvest, threatening the Department of Fisheries with "a war on the water." These are not examples of tears in the fabric of Canada—they are instances of the pre-existing, Indigenous systems of government showing through.

As a story about our country, the Report challenges non-Indigenous Canadians to see how we all continue to benefit from the residential school system, in the very ease of our existence here. The next step is to, as I heard one TRC participant put it, "quit acting like we own the place."

Many Canadians are afraid of talking about colonialism. "What am I supposed to do," we ask, "go back to where I came from?" This reaction is rooted in insecurity and resentment, as well as what Vanessa Watts and Hayden King describe as "a resistance to sacrificing privilege and sharing power." This is most understandable from racialized people whose own lives are marked by the effects of global imperial projects. Yet as Chris Corrigan wrote this week, "no matter if your family arrived in 1532 or last Tuesday... If you have Canadian citizenship you personally benefit from the treaty relationships that, over time, have made it possible for Canadians to own land, to develop resources, to use water, to hike in the forest, to grow things and make money." As the Report puts it, "We are all Treaty people."

What we have is not a colonial state, but a settler colonial state. In other words, Indigenous people are to some degree stuck with us, and us with them. Luckily, the Report provides a series of exceedingly specific steps we can call on our government to take, and none of them involve deporting anyone.

The TRC calls for the reform of a range of practices and policies—from getting rid of mandatory minimums for certain offences, to reworking museum displays, to specific annual reports on specific health, wellness, and economic development. Some cost money, but not all of them.

Recommendation number 25 calls for a "written policy that reaffirms the independence of the RCMP to investigate crimes in which the government has its own interest." Number 28 asks law schools to introduce a mandatory course on Aboriginal peoples and law. Number 84 calls for the restoration of funding to CBC/Radio-Canada, whose mandate includes serving the Canada's unprofitable and largely Indigenous isolated communities. Number 94 suggests changes to Canada's oath of citizenship that reflect the fact that becoming Canadian means entering into a relationship with Indigenous people. On the other hand, Number 43 demands the full implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which includes the right to self-determination—a huge re-orientation, to say the least.

Change must happen in our heads, but not only there. As TRC Commissioner Justice Sinclair told CBC Radio: "You can get rid of all the racists—in the workplace, in police departments, in the court system—but as long as society continues to do business as it does today, you would continue to have racism."

Unfortunately, our current government seems firmly committed to remaining on the wrong side of history. As the Report points out, "The relationship between the federal government and Aboriginal peoples is deteriorating." Last week, it deteriorated further. On Tuesday, Valcourt remained pointedly seated during a standing ovation at the presentation of the Report, while NDP leader Thomas Mulcair took the opportunity to deliver some demonstrative side-eye. Prime minister Stephen Harper didn't even pretend to give a crap about the Commission—his attendance was limited to an invite-only event at Rideau Hall, at which he said nothing. Meanwhile, a tweet on the PM's official Twitter account was a photo of him drinking a beer. Disregarding Indigenous people may be good politics, after all.

After its release in 1968, the Kerner Report shaped a generation of political activism. It erased the imaginary line between the bad old days of slavery in the past, and the present in which people were supposedly equal. It didn't solve the problem of systemic racism in America, but it provided a vocabulary for speaking about it. It stated the fact which was painfully obvious to so many: race inequality in America was not a coincidence.

The Report of the TRC has pulled off a similar trick. It transforms a commission addressing Aboriginal people and policy into a commission also about the rest of us. It gives us the language for asking the hard but unavoidable question: How are we to live as settlers in what we call Canada?

The TRC has not yet announced plans to publish its final report, but you can read the PDF here.

Follow Mayana C. Slobodian on Twitter.

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Fernando (left) with Iron Maiden bassist Steve Harris. Photo courtesy of Fernando Leal

This article originally appeared on VICE Spain.

Fernando Leal was only 16 when he first witnessed Iron Maiden in all their screechy, spandex glory. A colleague of his father's took him to the festival Rockódromo in Madrid to experience the lights, the smoke, and the thick stench of hairspray that makes up any proper metal concert.

The gig was the most intense thing the young man had ever experienced. Little did he know, he'd end up seeing the exact same spectacle hundreds of more times over the next three decades—230 more times, to be quite exact—from Mexico to Australia and pretty much everywhere in between.

"This is how I spend my vacations. Why would I sit on a beach for 15 days? That'd be a complete waste of time," he says.

Fernando's love affair started in 1987, when Somewhere in Time—Iron Maiden's space-themed synthesizer-heavy album—was released. Just like millions of other kids, Fernando was sucked in by the galloping bass lines and ghoulish imagery of the band. After experiencing it live for the first time, he was sold.

"I've seen every Spanish concert since," he assures me, adding that he's gone to great measures to make this happen. Once, for instance, he climbed out of the window at a military barracks in full combat gear in order to make it to a concert. To this day, he's still a bit embarrassed he showed up with a shaved head.

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Fernando with Steve Harris again

After seeing them a few times in home country, the Spanish shows were no longer enough for Fernando Maiden (as he's come to be known in the Spanish metal scene). So, in 1998, he grabbed his passport and headed to London.

"It was way different to see the band play on their home turf," he tells me.

Curious as to how the experience would translate across borders, he began traveling the globe to see Iron Maiden play. To this day, his biggest achievement is following the band through Japan and Australia, and eventually making it into one of their music videos. "Check out' Revelations (Flight 666),' I'm in there in the first 10 seconds," he says proudly.

Clearly, this heavy metal globetrotting doesn't come cheap, but Fernando has a few things on side. "I don't have kids, a car, or a mortgage, or whatever, so I have some extra money," he explains. "For various health reasons I don't drink, either, so I don't actually go out that much. I just make sure to book tickets early, and most of the time I sleep in the airport. It's cheaper. My trip to India and Dubai actually only lasted four days."

Fernando's boss is a pretty key character in this obsession; he's relatively flexible with days off and doesn't mind too much that Fernando sometimes shows up directly from the airport. However, it's getting tougher to organize these spontaneous trips: "It used to be much easier to just pick individual days, but now the boss wants me to give much more notice if I'm heading off on tour," says Fernando.

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Fernando doesn't get off easy with his mates, either—some of them consider him a bit of a freak. "They grow up, marry, and have children. I've just chosen another way of life," he says.

"My girlfriend is the only one who genuinely seems to understand me," he adds, explaining that the pair often travel together and leave that extra bit of time for sightseeing.

According to Fernando, his level of dedication isn't all that uncommon among Maiden fans. "I know a Swiss guy who's done more than 300 concerts himself," says Fernando, clearly impressed.

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Over the years, Fernando has bumped into his heroes on more than one occasion. In Dublin, he even ended up drinking pints with Janick Gers, the band's guitarist. However, he generally prefers to keep away.

"I like to keep my distance," he says. "I don't want to be disappointed, you know?"

Fernando is over the moon that singer Bruce Dickinson made a speedy recovery from his recent battle with cancer because it means they'll inevitably be back on the tour circuit again before long.

"The day I get bored at a concert, I'll stop going," Fernando says. For now, that doesn't seem too likely.