VICE CA

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Screen detail via YouTube.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Look at this. Look at this video—the video below. Look at Ryu and M. Bison having a fight, from the forthcoming Street Fighter V, which we got to check out at E3. No, look at it properly. Ignore the bit where Ryu gets KO'd through a bin. Ignore that move where Bison does a sort of three-stage overhead kick, and then heels Ryu in the skull so hard his head ignites with a powerful purple lightning. You're watching Street Fighter wrong. Look, just look, and then I'll explain.

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I suppose my main question here is: What in the blue and infinite fuck is going on in the background of this video? The only way we can attempt to understand it is by trying to describe it:

i) First up, we gotta talk about the Royal Guard who is there violently playing the trombone, because that does not seem like it is part of the Royal Guard remit. I do not think this is Queen-approved. Is this just him chilling while he waits for a train? Like he spent the entire day guarding Buckingham Palace, stoically unemotional—even when American tourists got right up in his face. And to let off some steam on his commute home—the indication from Street Fighter V is that the Palace Guard commute home in full uniform, much like the staff at Sainsbury's, and do not take a backpack with some civvies to change into—he likes to play trombone while watching maniacs fight.

ii) Then, if you look a little to the left, you will see two more Palace Guardsmen. This time they're locked in what seems to be—and it's hard to tell, because the only sound is Ryu screaming in agony—a sort of rap battle. But instead of rapping offensively at each other, they are just playing a small drum, in what might be called a "drum off." I don't know.

iii) Actually, there seems to be a musical theme to this generic Victorian-style nameless London train station, because for whatever reason there is also a sort of monstrously proportioned glam rocker playing an electric guitar. Like, are M. Bison and Ryu actually fighting backstage ahead of the semi-final of an especially uninspiring Britain's Got Talent season? Did they accidentally start fighting during an open mic night?

Related: Bare Knuckle

iv) Thing is, the whole fighting in the middle of a train station setup is actually very "kicking out time at Yates's," isn't it? Now look to one side at the dude in the top hat and with the umbrella who is not psyched by the massive repetitive violence being wrought in front of him. My theory is this man is also drunk, and has been watching Ryu and M. Bison slowly escalate from squabbling over Raheem Sterling's Liverpool contributions this year in the pub (pints one to three) through full-on kicking each other through bins in the train station (pints five to eight), and is really into it, because his life is fundamentally empty; and...

v) The janitor. The janitor is the one who spooks me out the most. The janitor is the one who unnerves me. Because look at him, far left: eyes sleepy, leaning gently on his own mop, just watching every enormous thump and every heavy kick of the fight. Is he there to clean up the blood? To put Ryu's ruined body in a couple of big recycling bags and wheel him around to the trash out back? Why does the janitor not care about the damage being wreaked upon his domain? There is no freer man alive than a janitor who doesn't give a shit if the building he is in charge of might be rendered down to dust by a flying man with dictator boots on who, in traditional Street Fighter lore, is the incarnation of evil.

I guess what I am asking is: are video games realistic, anymore? Because this is not an accurate rendition of the London I live in, and now I'm starting to doubt what else I think I have learned about the geography of various cities across the world. For example, is Tokyo really just an open fish market where all the men are bald, have large beards, and wear coarse tunics with rope for belts and assemble politely behind a series of barrels while two fighters pummel the living shit out of each other? I've always assumed many American cities are sort of hellish futuro-skyscapes, floating green metal discs that are incredibly easy to fall to your death off while being punched in the trunk by Eddy Gordo. Is that true? Is that correct? Or are video games lying to me?

Does eating mushrooms really make you double in size and make your jump more athletic? Does collecting hundreds upon hundreds of extremely boring hidden packages and UFO parts actually grant us special bonuses? Do our Gamerscores even matter? With the background characters in this London level of Street Fighter V, Capcom are saying: nothing is real. With the dancing saxophone trombone man, they are saying: gaming is pointless. With the creepy janitor dude, they are saying: reality is a myth. Thank you, Capcom. Your curious meta-commentary is exactly what gaming needs.

Follow Joel Golby on Twitter.

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The author in his living room.

A version of this article originally appeared on VICE France

VICE UK has an ongoing series called London Rental Opportunity of the Week that catalogues the absolutely fucking dire living spaces that the city's landlords offer up to desperate renters for obscene amounts of money. For example, you may remember that one guy who was attempting to rent out a single, leopard-print dog blanket–covered bed in his kitchen. That's a bad deal even by the standards of ultra-expensive US cities like New York and San Francisco.

But though Londoners, New Yorkers, and San Franciscans may complain about their too-damn-high rents, Parisians often deal with even smaller living spaces— but despite their tiny rooms, they someone manage to look cool and unperturbed by the lack of square footage.

Before moving to Paris, I lived in the middle of the Californian desert and paid about $250 a month for a six-bedroom house. Before that, I lived in Réunion Island—a place where the notion of living within four walls barely exists.

It's about a year and a half since I moved to the French capital, where I currently rent an extremely compact apartment that costs me a small fortune. I try to be out and about as often as possible because, when I'm at home, I feel as if the walls are glued to my skin. It was living like this that convinced me to put together a series documenting what in French we call Chambres de Bonne, or "maid's rooms."

Maid's rooms are small converted spaces on the top floors of apartment buildings that have been divided into a vast number of small studios. They first appeared in Paris around 1830 and were a great example of the city's social hierarchy: The rich lived in huge flats on the lower floors, while servants lived in much more humble rooms upstairs. Today, these maid's rooms are usually rented by young, broke students and the lower working class.

Quite often, these rooms just about meet the minimum size authorized by French law—a surface area of 96 square feet and/or a volume of 215 cubic feet. Being curious as to who lived in such rooms these days, I contacted some friends and a whole bunch of strangers to see if they'd allow me to visit their places and talk to them about the silly amounts of money they are paying to live there.

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Cathé (student) in her 96-square-foot apartment. She pays $550 excluding bills.

Cathé comes from Uruguay. She's been living in Paris for about four years and recently got her BA in plastic arts. She's decided to go to Southeast Asia next year because, as she says, "People in Paris run faster than time itself. Everything goes too fast. I have to get out of this tornado."

We've actually been friends for a year but this was the first time I saw her place. Looking at the psychedelic pictures plastered all over the walls, I can understand why her personality isn't necessarily compatible with a hectic city like Paris.

Arnaud (student) in his seventh floor 107-square-foot apartment. He pays $400 excluding bills.

Arnaud was the third tenant I photographed. He has two passions in life: partying and climbing. Easy access to the roof was a decisive selling point when he was signing the lease. Parisian rooftops are just as great for climbing as they are for drinking beer.

On the day we met, he didn't have anything to drink and we were too lazy to go up and down several floors to get any, so instead we went for a walk across the roofs.

Johanna (student) in her ninth-floor 129-square-foot apartment. She pays $530 excluding bills.

Out of all the people I've visited, Johanna seems to be set up the best. Her studio looks bigger that 129 square feet—it's well laid-out and has a high ceiling and a massive window that give the room a certain brightness. She can also eat dinner on the roof while enjoying an amazing view of the city, which is precisely what we did right before taking her picture.

Dominique in his fourth-floor 96-square-foot apartment. He's the owner.

We acquire stuff as we get older. That seems to be the pattern of life. But when you're living in a maid's room, minimalism is definitely preferable to hoarding. Dominique was the oldest person I met while making this series, so I was excited to see his studio. He's an illustrator and has a bunch of side jobs to earn extra money.

He explained to me that he bought his micro-studio apartment a few years ago. For him renting is like "throwing money into an endless hole." He renovated the entire space and even managed to fit a bathtub into the 96 square feet. He proudly told me about how he was able to watch TV while taking a bath.

Clara (au pair) in her third-floor 107-square-foot apartment.

Clara is a Swedish au pair who's passionate about fashion. Her situation is right out of the 1830s: She works for the wealthy landlords living on the first floor of her building. She doesn't pay any rent but in exchange, she has to take care of the family's kids.

Watch: Heartbreak Hustle

Ghislain (student) in his fifth-floor 107-square-foot apartment. He pays $550 excluding bills.

Ghislain was fine with me taking a picture of his place, but couldn't understand why I wanted him to be in it. He wasn't particularly happy about being in the series even though I explained why I wanted the tenants to be present.

Actually, I think that without anybody to personify these spaces, the series wouldn't have worked: Without him, his room might as well have been part of a bad motel.

Roksana (hotel receptionist) in her 86-square-foot apartment. She pays $585.

It's illegal to rent out a place that's less than 96 square feet unless the volume is at least 247 cubic feet. That was the case in this room, which felt much like a human cage. In situations like this, every centimeter has to be utilized carefully.

Roksana is Polish and loves cooking and having friends around but her kitchenette doesn't exactly lend itself to dinner parties.

Anca (journalist) in her fifth-floor 182-square-foot apartment. She pays $670 excluding bills.

Anca is American. She ended up in Paris looking for a job when she got her hands on this flat "by chance." I swung by her place at nine in the morning, right before she went to work.

Out of all the rooms I photographed, hers is the most spacious. It felt strange thinking, "Damn! 182 square feet—that's lucky!"

Victorienne (model) in her fourth-floor 150-square-feet apartment. She pays $670.

I immediately noticed just how symmetrically Victorienne's things were laid out. I carefully sat myself on a chair and tried not to ruin the arrangement.

We had tea together and when I explained my photo project, she got it immediately. She hopped on the bed and posed with her cup of tea in her hand.

We're touring German prisons with T he Marshall Project. For behind-the-scenes photos and observations from the road, follow Maurice Chammah on Twitter.

Pictures of European prisons can be shocking, at least here in the United States. After all, eight of Buzzfeed's "14 Prisons That Will Make You Question What You Think About Serving Time" were in Europe, and last fall, Business Insider told us, "An American Warden Visited A Norwegian Prison, And He Couldn't Believe What He Saw." Fed a steady diet of The Shawshank Redemption and Orange is the New Black, American readers know their own prisons are bleak places. So these images—of well-stocked kitchens, pottery studios, and cells that look like college dorm rooms—are a reminder of how starkly different correctional systems can be.

The Vera Institute of Justice, a New York-based nonprofit that works with government agencies to improve courts, prisons, and other criminal justice institutions, has been trying for the last few years to show Americans that the two continents may not be as wildly incompatible as such headlines might suggest. This week, Vera and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice are taking a group of prison officials, prosecutors, researchers, and activists from the US to tour German prisons. The International Sentencing and Corrections Exchange, as this tour is being called, includes the heads of the prison systems for New Mexico, Washington, Tennessee, and Connecticut, several district attorneys, and Connecticut Governor Dannel P. Malloy.

I'm here with them. Over the next several days, I'll be keeping a tour diary for The Marshall Project and VICE, watching as they visit a series of facilities in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, along the northern coast, and hear presentations on how Germany handles sentencing, drug addiction, officer training, juveniles, high-risk prisoners, and probation.

The trip comes amidst an ongoing reevaluation in the US on both the right and left about whether the tough-on-crime policies that proliferated in the 1970s—from lengthened sentences to increased use of solitary confinement to the prosecution of teenagers in adult courts—have actually made the public safer. (That reappraisal has been promoted by two conservatives on this trip: Marc Levin, a Marshall Project advisory board member and policy director of the Right on Crime movement, and Vikrant Reddy, a research fellow at the Charles Koch Institute).

"I think at the end of the day, the public want people who return to their communities who won't commit more crimes," said Bernie Warner, Washington state's corrections secretary and one of those making the journey, summing up the general feelings behind the trend. "Unless you focus on fixing behavior, you're putting people back in the community who are bad for public safety."

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The state officials picked for this trip have shown an interest in reform. Malloy, the governor of Connecticut, and the state's corrections chief, Scott Semple, have pushed to repeal mandatory sentences and improve programs to help ex-prisoners find jobs, terming this broader initiative the "Second-Chance Society." Gregg Marcantel, the corrections secretary of New Mexico, has pushed to reduce usage of solitary confinement. John Chisholm, the district attorney of Milwaukee County, has tried to address high incarceration rates of African-Americans.

The Vera Institute has chosen these leaders in hopes that they'll take the European lessons seriously, and that they have the clout and credibility to enact change once they return home.

The track record for this idea is short but promising. In 2013, Vera took a similar group on tours of prisons in the Netherlands and Germany. John Wetzel, who runs the prison system in Pennsylvania, adapted ideas from the trip as he revamped the way his state handles prisoners before they're released. He learned how in Germany, correctional officers are more like therapists than guards, and when he returned, Wetzel told me, he increased training in communication skills for his employees, "shifting the whole focus around humanizing offenders and lifting the expectations for officers, to get every staff member to feel some ownership over outcomes." Wetzel also increased mental health training, because "when people understand the root cause of behavior, they are more likely to not interpret something as disrespectful."

The point of all this, Wetzel added, is to figure out what's causing prisoners to commit crimes so you can find out how to make sure they're less likely to commit more once they leave prison, thereby protecting the public. "It almost smacked me in the face when they said that public safety is a logical consequence of a good corrections system, and not the other way around."

Check out our documentary on Giwar Hajabi, aka Xatar, a German rapper of Iranian descent who was released from prison in December 2014.

Beyond policy, comparing American and German prisons will surely unearth some deeper undercurrents in the histories of both societies. Just as no study of American prisons is complete without looking at the history of race relations all the way back to slavery, German incarceration exists in the shadow of the 1940s and that decade's unspeakable combination of prison, factory, and slaughterhouse.

"I'm interested in how contemporary German officials imagine the past in relation to their current practices," said Khalil Gibran Muhammad, who directs the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library and is making the trip. He has argued in the past that American public discourse is far more willing to examine the horrors of the Holocaust than to reckon with the legacy of slavery.

Jeff Rosen, the district attorney of Santa Clara, California, is staying an extra two days in Germany to visit the remains of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where his father was rounded up as a five-year-old and narrowly escaped death, even as much of his family did not.

"I think it's kind of amazing that I'm going to see where my father was in a concentration camp in 1945, and go in 2015 to see German prisons and how enlightened and progressive they are," Rosen told me. "It's quite a world."

"I think that people can change," he added. "I think countries can change."

A previous version of this story misstated the location of a previous Vera prison tour.

This article was co-published with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization focused on the US criminal justice system. You can sign-up for their newsletter, or follow The Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

Follow Maurice Chammah on Twitter.

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All photos by the author

Typically, it's only in hindsight that we can pinpoint the moment at which a cultural trend starts to die. When it comes to food trucks, particularly in Boston, where they've reached the peak of culinary coolness, there is no such ambiguity: The time of death was Thursday, June 11, 2015. That's the day that Olive Garden's Breadstick Nation Tour food truck rolled into Boston, hauling with it thousands of salted loaves and a metric ton of identity baggage.

The truck posted up in Boston's bustling Faneuil Hall, where it stood for four days handing out free breadstick sandwiches, promoting the chain's newest menu item. Unsurprisingly, many of the area's other food trucks were not pleased. Some argued that the city shouldn't have issued Olive Garden's truck a permit at all, since food truck permits are relatively competitive in Boston, and the prime real estate where the Olive Garden truck was allowed to park isn't typically available for use.

Boston.com convened a forum of the city's grappa-snouted restauranteurs from the traditionally Italian enclave of the North End, home to dozens of Italian restaurants, who decried the presence of the food truck parking anywhere near their hallowed, cobblestone streets. "It's an insult to everyone in the North End selling Italian food for more than 100 years," groused one.

Frank DePasquale, owner of numerous restaurants in the vicinity, including Bricco, echoed the sentiment to me: "It is beyond any reasoning that I have to understand why anyone would want to eat that food when there is some of the best and most authentic Italian food in the country right here in the North End," he said, pointing out the abundance of options, from simple sandwich shops using wholesome breads, to what he called "high-end boutique Italian cuisine." "Visitors to the North End come here for our delicious variety of authentic cuisine," he said. "Not for the Olive Garden Food Truck."

Of course, when it comes to any arguments about authenticity, the definition of the term is going to fluctuate depending on who is conducting the ideological symposium. Boston Globe food critic Devra First pushed back in a series of tweets over the weekend, writing: "The breadstick sandwiches may not be very good... Neither are some of the North End's 'authentic' restaurants. So let's not get hung up on 'authenticity.'"

She's not wrong. While there are certainly very many fine restaurants in the North End, and it's a neighborhood exceptionally rich in history, it's long since become a tourist trap and bridge-and-tunnel dining destination.

"The time to worry about authenticity in the North End was probably 40 years ago," Drew Starr, a close observer of the Boston restaurant scene, formerly of Eater, told me. "Half the restaurants have Sysco as their executive chef," he said, referencing the multinational food distribution conglomerate that services Olive Garden's parent company Darden Restaurants. "You can have the exact same frozen lasagna at your choice of a dozen restaurants there."

"The real motivations of the people bitching, I believe, have way less to do with Olive Garden than the fact it's competition. And it's hard to compete with free when you're already serving commodity food."

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Italianicity aside, an Olive Garden truck, owned by Darden, a company with over $6 billion in annual sales, muscling its way onto the Boston food truck scene—and in particular, into the highly-trafficked neighborhood of Faneuil Hall—is further cause for concern. Some of Boston's food trucks, which have only been legal since 2011 and whose spaces are divvied out by a lottery system, were irked by a heavyweight corporation dipping its meat balls in the vodka sauce.

More on Olive Garden: The Sugar Babies Guide to Suburban Eating

"As long as they're parked somewhere safe, I don't really give a shit," Starr said of the location. "If standing outside in the sun eating awkward, mass-produced stunt food is more attractive to someone than the best goddamn Mexican tortas in the world at Tenoch [Mexican food truck], well, whatever, that's just how shit works."

But, he said, "just let local trucks do it too. Or at least charge a fortune to the brands that want to do giveaways and put the money into the Public Market or to building a homeless shelter."

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On Sunday afternoon, I found the Olive Garden truck parked in Faneuil Hall in the type of high-visibility, high-traffic spot most food trucks would give their left wheels for. The green and brown truck was covered in text prompts of varying degrees of appetizing: Love. Savor. Garlic. Food. Yum. Rihanna's "We Found Love" was blasting from its speakers, competing with the music bleeding over from a nearby team of dancers, around which a gaggle of slouch-shorted and anticipatory tourists circled. Magicians and bucket drummers plied their mystical arts.

I dutifully took my place in a line, about 20 people deep, which stretched back to a statue of Sam Adams overlooking the proceedings. "Statesman: incorruptible and fearless" read the plaque. You literally could not ask for a better spot for a food truck in Boston, unless maybe you pulled up on home plate at Fenway and Pablo Sandoval had a pocket full of $50 bills.

More on local food trucks: VICE travels to Philadelphia to see how trucks are shaping the city's local cuisine.

The day before, James DiSabatino—owner of Roxy's Grilled Cheese, a favorite food truck in Boston that's since opened a brick and mortar space—told me he had just tried the Olive Garden breadstick sandwich. He quickly clarified that he didn't go out of his way to get it—"I don't want anyone to think I'm that type of guy"—but that once he saw it, a "morbid curiosity set in."

I asked him how it was. "They serve those breadsticks with just... shit... stuffed in the middle. Like a meatball and and a chicken parmesan one. I don't even know what they gave me when I took it, but I think it was meatball. It was exactly as disappointing as you would expect it to be," he said, as if offering the sandwich an epitaph.

In line, one of the greeters noticed me taking pictures, and encouraged me to use the hashtag #breadsticknation for a chance to win a year's supply of breadsticks.

I asked her how people had been responding so far. They served about 1,000 on the first day she was there, she estimated. A sign on the truck informed me that they would be videotaping everyone in the vicinity and if I did not consent to that, I should leave the area. In other words, by merely congregating in one of Boston's busiest markets, we were all consenting to become an extra in an Olive Garden commercial of some kind.

"People have been liking it," the greeter said. "It's free! Everybody loves free. And these are good... They're pretty good. Everyone's gonna get hungry sometimes."

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"This is what I secretly wanted for lunch," said a young woman walking by as she piloted a sandwich toward her open mouth. One of the Olive Garden employees took to a microphone to encourage passersby to stuff the breadstick sandwiches in their faces.

"This is a brand new lunch time item we just came out with last week, you can find them in all the stores," he said as John Legend's "All of Me" played. "There's absolutely no catch! We don't want any information, and you don't have to sign up for anything! We just want you to come try the sandwich."

Fair enough. I got my sandwich and skulked off to try it away from the crowd, like a dog that's dragged a dead squirrel under the porch. The breadsticks were breaded with salt, and the chicken was breaded with bread. The proceedings were lightly sauced, although I detected the sweet tang of tomato somewhere in there. Cheese was also involved. I felt sad.

I was not the least bit hungry, but I took a few bites out of professional responsibility. To be honest, though, I could probably eat five of these and love every minute of it, then spend the next week of my life regretting it.

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Joe Benzon, the man with the microphone, had just come from the truck's first stop in New York City last week. He was the the tour manager for the truck. He was very nice and enthusiastic and professional. There are four of them, he explained, and they'll be on the road throughout the country for the next couple of months. The number of people they'll serve will vary from city to city; in Pittsburgh, they'll be at an event with a couple hundred thousand, but here he estimated between 5,000 and 10,000.

"I'm not saying this just because I work for them, honest to god, it's been 100 percent completely positive reviews," he said of the guests they'd served. "I haven't heard one person say anything negative all week in New York and all week here in Boston, which can be tough cities with tough food critics. But people have loved it."

I pointed out that there had been pushback from other North End restaurant owners, but Benzon shrugged it off. "We've gotten tons of good publicity and good press and buzz around the sandwich and around this food truck, and we just wanted to come to the city of Boston and give as many people as many free sandwiches as they like. That's all we're trying to do."

He assured me they'd gone through all the appropriate permitting channels in a process that took months—"everything from permitting to making the custom vehicle wrapped with graphics"—and that, so far, the Olive Garden team was enthused with how everything had turned out.

Still, I couldn't help but think about what DiSabatino had told me about how difficult operating a food truck in Boston has become of late. When the program first launched, there were about 12 or 14 trucks on the streets—now there's over 80. The competition is fierce.

"The city created a program in 2011 that was great for 14 trucks, but they haven't adjusted it at all for the amount of trucks," DiSabatino explained. "It's more or less same amount of spots shared by many more people making it very difficult for people to make a living."

He wasn't offended about the so-called inauthenticity of Olive Garden's Italian fare, but as he explained, "I guess I am offended that the city would allow a corporate sponsored food truck to park wherever it wants, but also really restricts the trucks that are just small businesses trying to make a living."

Back in Faneuil Hall, a field trip of teens in matching T-shirts were taking group selfies in front of the Olive Garden truck. One of the mothers sprayed sunscreen on her daughter's neck while a nearby man cursed to himself about—and this is too on-the-nose Boston to make up—how the Yankees suck. The line had grown.

"Yo, where's my sandwich?" a dude in line yelled out.

They were coming fresh out of the oven any minute, Benzon said. Then he took the microphone again and shouted, "I love Boston!"

Follow Luke O'Neil on Twitter.

The Exodus of the Maritime's Creative Class is Hurting its EDM Scene

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A screen from the Valiant megaWAD.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

With E3 in full swing, attentions might be turning right now to Bethesda's new DOOM, the fourth major entry in the shooter series—but the original Doom of 1993 remains one of the greatest design achievements in games history. It's a perfect killing engine, an over-the-top bloodbath of ludicrously fast movement, powerful weapons, and lethal enemies. These factors work in concert, making dodging incoming fire from the varied cast of demonic antagonists vital, unlike the bullet sponge nature of modern gaming's heroes. It's such a unique and brilliant place to play in that even now, two decades on from its last official release, the game's community continues to produce incredible mapsets. And I spoke to one of these mappers, Paul "skillsaw" DeBruyne, about his magnum opus: Valiant.

Valiant is a 32-map "megaWAD"—a term used for full campaigns, named after the file extension used by Doom maps. As much as the base game, it is a triumph of level, monster and weapon design. Paul, not content with the hellspawn available in 1994's vanilla Doom II, came up with his own modifications to improve it, bringing it more in line with the blood-rush thrills of its predecessor.

"I love all of Doom's monsters, but several of them [in the sequel] seemed really vanilla to me—the Imp, Demon, Hell Knight, and Baron especially. Other monsters have interesting projectile patterns that require more player engagement to avoid, or have attacks that can zone the player out of areas. Those behaviors and those strengths really feel more complete to me. I was just trying to make Imps, Demons, Hell Knights, and Barons more interesting from a gameplay perspective."

"Interesting" is one term for it, but I'd likely go with "a fresh new hell I wasn't prepared for," or simply: "Oh God." Paul did away with the high-health, slow-moving Barons and Hell Knights, replacing them with two far more deadly variants. Cybruisers are equipped with a rocket-launcher, the deadliest weapon monsters can have, direct hits one-shotting armor-less players and massive area-of-effect damage making perfect positioning vital. Pyro Knights, meanwhile, sport a custom-made stream of fire that moves faster than anything else in the game.

"I wanted them to still be good walls of meat, but also dangerous when used at range," Paul explains. "The new versions are way, way more likely to actually kill someone. In order to compensate for their much increased threat level, I tried to give the player some extra audio and visual cues—the Cybruisers make a stomping noise, and the Pyro Knights are always [lit up]."

Paul didn't stop there. Smaller changes were made to other enemies. The plasma-spewing spider-walker Arachnotrons now have a chance to vomit out the head from their metal body when they die, creating a low-health, highly-lethal Arachnorb that floats around. Paul created this so he had a flying threat that could be used in swarms but didn't have a pile of health to grind through, like the Cacodemon.

Or if you're just here for the DOOM, check out Motherboard's video on its designer, John Romero.

The Cyberdemon and Spider Mastermind, Doom's boss monsters, were left unchanged but used sparingly in map design. The lowliest of the zombies, troopers, and shotgun guys also maintained their usual roles: cannon fodder. I mean that quite literally—one of Doom's greatest details is that the only ammo that will drop is from these weaker enemies and their chaingun-toting cousin. Killing ranks of them with a single shotgun blast feels stellar and lets mappers refill the guns of players using something other than an ammo cache, and in a more exciting way.

Changes to the player's arsenal were less in number but as great in effect, as Paul explains:

"I've always thought the chaingun was pretty much crap compared to everything else in Doom II. In the first Doom, it was awesome because most of the monsters had really low health and you could take out lots of them really effortlessly with it. Doom II's monsters have so much health that they're a pain to kill with it. You just want to use the super shotgun, or rockets, or cells all the time. I kept raising the rate of fire on the chaingun until I was excited to find boxes of bullets."

In this he succeeded. I'm now worried about going back to Doom II or onto other WADs that don't use Valiant's upgraded bullet-spewer. It's a last resort no longer, leveling hordes of enemies in moments and providing decent damage even at the very edge of Doom's short engagement range. That's another of Doom's great choices—there is no long-range, instant-hit weapon like a sniper rifle, and while all projectiles can travel infinitely, they're relatively slow. It forces you into the nitty-gritty of a fight, where deadly melee attacks can take you down and your shotgun proves most destructive. It also makes dodging between criss-crossing rockets and plasma not only fun, but a necessity to close on targets.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/s8bzwuEuq6w' width='560' height='315']

Valiant gameplay of map one: "Bad Reception."

Designing maps around that is, of course, a challenge. Paul's first WAD came out in the late 1990s, when he was 13: "I didn't even have internet access at the time—I remember purchasing what was essentially a 700-page Doom-mapping textbook and CD-ROM, and learning from that, using the tools provided on the CD."

But it wasn't until 2007 that he began working on Doom mapping in earnest. A question from a friend lead to him trying out Alien Vendetta, one of the more famous Doom conversions, and he hasn't "been able to get enough Doom since." Valiant is the sum of the work of the past eight years. It's split into five episodes of six maps each, plus two secret levels. Each episode has a theme, with the finale set on the Moon.

Check out music by VICE at Noisey

This is where some of Valiant's best maps can be found, for me, including one that combines two levels from an earlier mapping project, Lunatic, into a single, massive affair. However, across its length Valiant hits every type of map, every size, and scope and number of enemies you could hope for, and it does so expertly. It always matches and often surpasses the work Doom-makers id Software did themselves, back in the early 1990s.

I ask Paul what he'll do next, now that the megaWAD is finished, something he considers the endgame of his Doom mapping:

"I'd say, 'No more megaWADs,' but it's pretty much a running joke that anyone who says that ends up doing one again. If I do another it'll be a few years off at least, but I think even then it's unlikely. I've made a few maps and have a handful more ideas for a short desert and ancient ruins-themed episode, but it's still a long ways off."

"A long ways off" can't come soon enough.

You can download and play Valiant right now, assuming you've a copy of Doom II to hand, too.

Follow Ben Barrett on Twitter.

The Cardinals Are Being Investigated for Hacking the Astros' Player Database

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You've probably never seen mermaids this close before. Photo courtesy Marielle Chartier-Henault.

Pissing off a mermaid (or merman) has got to be one of the saddest things you can do, along with abandoning a basket of puppies or cancelling Christmas at an orphanage.

Mermaids are wonderfully ethereal creatures who should be free to splash around and hang out on sexy rocks whenever they want, even if IRL they're just people with active imaginations wearing spandex tails at public swimming pools.

In a controversial move that outraged the Canadian mermaid community and made everyone else realize that a Canadian mermaid community exists, the city of Edmonton and the city of Surrey in B.C. placed an official ban on wearing mermaid tails in their swimming pools. A spokesperson from the city of Edmonton stated the reason for the ban was that wearing mermaid tails "promotes breath-holding, which can lead to blackouts."

Is there merit to the city's argument, or is that a bit like saying "wearing running shoes promotes sprinting out into traffic?" Aspiring pro mermaid Krista Visinski certainly doesn't agree, and has organized a 600 person petition to try to revoke the ban. Others from the mermaid community fear that the bans in Edmonton and Surrey are going to cause a ripple effect, spreading into other Canadian cities.

To make sense of this bizarre turn of events, I reached out to the founder of Canada's first and only Mermaid Academy and official Mermaid Ambassador of Canada, Marielle Chartier-Henault. We caught up at a local pool in Montreal to talk tails, bans, and the future of mermaid-hood and mermanity.

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Mermaids always need matching tops with their tails. Photo courtesy Marielle Chartier-Henault.

VICE: Hi Marielle, so what are your thoughts on this mermaid ban?
MARIELLE CHARTIER-HENAULT: Well, for me personally, this is pretty good news because the mermaid ban is only for public swimming pools. Since I run a private academy I'm not too worried about my mermaid school being threatened. If anything, people might need to come to my school to be mermaids now. But as for the ban itself, I think a complete ban might be a bit extreme. I think the best way would be that you can wear the tail if you have your certificate by passing a swim test, like with scuba diving. You don't go scuba diving in a pool. The thing is, without proper training and supervision, there is a little bit of a risk with the tails—just like snowboarding where your feet are tied together—but [that's why] you have an instructor to help.

One of the arguments for the ban from the city of Edmonton was that wearing the tails promotes holding your breath underwater for extended periods of time, which could lead to blackouts and drowning. What's your response to that?
I think it's totally off track. Any kind of swimming you need to put your head underwater, and there's nothing forcing you to hold your breath. It's not like free diving, where you hold your breath sometimes as long as you can. We'd never promote that, and I've never heard of a single blackout, so I dunno where they got that from. I've never seen that in my class. I mean, you've tried it, you have your head underwater for a couple seconds, what did you think?

This mermaid doesn't wish she was human. Photo courtesy Marielle Chartier-Henault.

I mean it got pretty real but I never felt unsafe. I felt like I was slowing the class down a little bit but, no, never close to blackouts or drowning. So aside from my embarrassment...with all this publicity from the ban, this has been the most real mermaids have ever been in a way. They're actually affecting public policy. How do you feel about that, as one of them?
I think it's a good thing because people didn't know about it before, and now they're talking about it on TV. I'm really happy about that and hopefully we can arrive at some kind of a solution! When I'm in the water and I see the people smiling, that's the mermaid. That's the mermaid magic. To make people happy, that's what I enjoy doing and that's what keeps me going in this. You might have an idea that seems crazy, but if you go forward with it, people will want to join you.

Some merfolk are worried about a ripple effect to other cities. Are you concerned about that?
You know, I don't really know exactly what to expect. It's difficult to say at this point because we don't know much influence the mermaid community would have over the potential bans, but I'm not too worried. I will continue to run classes in private swim time. I've heard of a few professional mermaids coming out of the scene who wanted to start their mermaid business like that woman from Edmonton, but she was unable to with the ban and was so angry. For me, whatever happens, I will just go with it. A lot of mermaids are individual performers and they do birthday parties and stuff, which they do during public swim.

Do you feel solidarity with the mermaid community?
I feel yes, there is a solidarity and I try to keep in contact with those people because it's a relatively small community in Canada and it's important to help each other. And for me its just about raising awareness, like covering all the safety issues. But at the same time, I don't know [any other instructors'] qualifications and I don't want to back someone who is maybe unsafe. Even with my own school, I set my own standards like with lifeguards and synchronized swimming instructors, but there is no regulation or any kind of standard that can say 'this is safe.' Just like building a bridge, you have to be sure. Like, I can't make sure that this mermaid in Edmonton would be good. I don't know her, that's why maybe I would like to be the reference in training, you know if someone wants to give mermaid lessons in their own province they can do their training with me, and I could give them some kind of certification.

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It's better down where it's wetter, take it from them. Photo courtesy Marielle Chartier-Henault.

That would be pretty legendary. You'd be like queen of the mermaids.
[Laughs] Oh, yeah. Mermaid in chief. That's how I'll get my empire. But I think that's the way I'll go, like to regulate in Canada. I'm going to the go to the Philippines soon and when I do, I'll see how the mermaid system works over there. I also know they're training potential mermaids in Germany and in Singapore. Those places have certification courses because mermaids are everywhere.

So, if we are to take something from this it would be to be a mermaid all you want, you encourage it, but please do it under proper supervision.
Yes! Exactly.

And you have plans to expand to Toronto and Ottawa, could you tell me about that?
Yeah, everything is organized for Toronto, the school is starting July 5, and Ottawa in September.

Awesome. I wish you the very best of luck.
Thanks!

Follow Stephen Keefe on Twitter.

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Image via Flickr user Ezra Wolfe

Entourage is horrible, but you already know that.

It's really not necessary to decode why Entourage is bad, that's pretty straightforward: it's offensive to women, men, homosexual people, heterosexual people, people in relationships, babies, and people with functioning brains.

Vince, E, Turtle, and Johnny Drama are the kind of rich people whose lack of self-awareness causes peasants to break into castles and cut off people's heads. Luckily they're in that gated community, though.

The movie wasn't any more offensive than the show, but it was less funny and less engaged with the mechanics of the oily, secretive, sleazy Hollywood system. But when it comes to the show, many people like Entourage but few will admit to it. I'm talking the kind of people who generally avoid nightmare garbage machines like Vince and his bro-culture friends in real life, but regard Entourage as a mindless, entertaining-behind-the-scenes mockumentary hosted by the Pussy Posse. So what is it about that show? Is it just that we like to frolic in the jizz-powered adventures of the idle rich and smugly laugh at these homies making homie-mistakes and woo-ing chicks with their classic homie-charm, while still remaining true to their homies? Is that wrong?

Maybe behind the tequila companies and the threesomes, Entourage follows a great literary tradition that actually has some philosophical weight.

Instead of evaluating why Entourage is shit, let's ask why it once worked. It can't just be Ari Gold's quips or Turtle's fledging rap producing career that have us hooked, the show is too repetitive for that. Maybe behind the tequila companies and the threesomes, Entourage follows a great literary tradition that actually has some philosophical weight. Vincent Chase parallels many spoiled protagonists in great American fiction, longing for a treasure that keeps slipping from his grasp: which in Entourage plays more like "Will Vince do the movie?" "Oh, he's looking like he won't do the movie!" "Oh cool, he's doing the movie!" Vincent Chase is Gatsby and international stardom is his Daisy Buchanan. Or is it his green light? Is E Daisy? Is Mandy Moore Daisy? Maybe we invest in Vincent Chase because he's doing what we want to do, executing one of the most pure existential journeys a person can undertake: he is following his personal legend.

In 1988, Brazilian author Paulo Coelho wrote The Alchemist, a self help book that was wrapped in an allegory about a shepherd called Santiago, a quest to find some treasure, and a whole lotta omens. It's one of the best selling books of all time and your year 10 literature teacher's favourite read. One of the reasons The Alchemist was so successful was that it introduced the concept of the personal legend. A desire that originates in the soul of the universe in which the planet conspires to help you achieve "what you have always wanted to accomplish".

Readers loved the concept of personal legends because it sounds like a sweet ass deal. So, the universe is actually conspiring to fulfil my dreams? It's a myth that I can't control my destiny? There is no such thing as coincidences, just signs and omens that my personal legend is almost achieved? Fuck, yeah! I am convinced that The Alchemist is in every Hollywood agent's waiting room, ready to inspire young actors and comfort them by purring, "keep going, the universe wants this". The Alchemist is about following your dreams against all odds, odds like money, women, and being attacked by desert warriors. If that doesn't sum up Entourage, I don't know what does.

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Like movies? Then watch our documentary about the Mexican Narco cinema below

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Even though Vincent Chase is a millionaire playboy riding the ups and downs of stardom and Santiago is ah, a shepherd, their personal legends take them on similar journeys. Also, there're only two female characters in The Alchemist: one is described as "very pretty" and the other one doesn't have a name. At their core, both Entourage and The Alchemist are about pursuing material riches, only to conclude that the greatest riches are the friendships they develop along the way—and also, material riches.

Vinnie's Personal Legend is artistic fulfilment as an actor and enough mainstream success to keep those Rolls Royce's rollin'. Vince is 100 percent convinced he alone can control his fate, which explains the number of times he casually fires Ari and E in the delusion he knows what's best for his career.

Santiago had dreams to keep him on track and Vince has his homies.

In The Alchemist we're told "moving when luck is on your side" is the way of the universe. The universe wants you to succeed, fool! Vince's bad (and arrogant) business decisions are all built on his belief that things will just work themselves out, ignoring the 20 or so people it takes to keep his career on track. He almost quits Aquaman, does quit the sequel to work on the train wreck Medellin, burns a whole studio who vowed to never work with him again, gets fired from the set of his comeback movie for fighting with the director, and decides to try his own stunts and almost kills himself. He continually pushes his luck and wants the best of the indie and blockbuster world because he knows that ultimately it will all work out. And it does! His track record for picking projects isn't fantastic but that doesn't seem to shake his resolve. Vince may shows signs of insecurity throughout Entourage's eight seasons but there's always someone to remind him he's the shit. Santiago had dreams to keep him on track and Vince has his homies.

At the end of The Alchemist—27-year-old spoiler alert—Santiago realises "life is generous to people who follow their personal legend". Entourage is all about the rewards that come from following one's destiny: the rewards generally being cars and porn stars. Vince makes ill-advised decisions because he knows that being a star is his true destiny. Maybe aside from the jokes about self absorbed actors and the Drama's elaborate breakfasts, people like to watch Entourage because it's nice to witness someone with so much faith in their personal legend. It's life affirming to see someone follow through with a sometimes ludicrous dream.

Maybe. But yo, the guest stars are pretty cool too.

Follow Sinead on Twitter: @SineadStubbins

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It's just a suggestion, but you should probably kill this thing, via YouTube.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Bethesda got E3 2015 off to a pretty tremendous start, as evidenced by our appreciation of the Fallout 4 hype. Yet to some observers it wasn't the developer's much-anticipated open-world adventure that most appealed; rather, it was the trailer and gameplay footage of the resurrected DOOM.

This is NOT Doom 4, its makers are keen to stress, but quite specifically DOOM (all caps a must), like a digit would put off a slew of new customers. Anyway, the new DOOM has had a bit of a rough ride to get to this point. A year or so ago, a bunch of screenshots and information leaked about a Doom-related project that was unceremoniously scrapped. Reports abounded of a Call of Duty–like cinematic shooter, set in a ruined city and featuring a rebel faction facing off against the forces of hell, making it sound more like Killzone than "Kill 'em all." It was binned for—to paraphrase Bethesda themselves—not being "Doom enough."

Then, at Quakecon 2014, they actually showed some early footage of the game to select punters, and then did the impossible of keeping something secret in this age when almost everything is online mere seconds after it's shown in a room with the worst Wi-Fi in the Western world. It has been a long wait for this new DOOM.

We got the E3 (preview) trailer a whole month ago, such is this ridiculous world of teasers, hype and pre-orders we live in. There was about two seconds of total gameplay footage in it—a super shotgun being reloaded at close range, and what appeared to be a revenant from Doom II firing off a bunch of missiles. Two things, two seconds, two important bits of information. Firstly, the enemies are skeletal forces of hell, and that is cool. Secondly, there's a shotgun in it, and that's A BIG DEAL. Any decent Doom should basically be Shotgun: The Game. Sure, there's plenty of other iconic weapons in the mix, but none still feel so bloody satisfying to use to this day than the shotgun from the original Doom.

Post-Bethesda's conference, we've seen a fuller trailer and a several minutes of actual gameplay. It initially looks like a really pretty version of Doom 3, the much-maligned black sheep of the Doom series with its greater focus on survival-horror scare tactics than out-and-out blasting enemies. However, once things start moving it is clear that this new DOOM is extremely fast-paced, with an emphasis on constantly moving during combat to avoid enemy attacks while dishing out your own. In the gameplay footage, the opening shot shows what appears to be a huge blast furnace, a bit like where Arnie gave his final thumbs up in Terminator 2, carved into the Martian surface—a wide and open area full of places to explore and to fight in. Your marine can now double jump and pull himself up onto higher ledges, which is hardly Mirror's Edge-style parkour, but it looks like inspiration's been drawn from Quake III's smooth, silky movement, with a few extra bits bolted on.

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

The E3 gameplay trailer for 'DOOM.'

Then there's the violence, something the Doom series has quite the history with. The original games were released at a time where splashing copious amounts of blood into proceedings was a certain way to shift a shipload of copies, and it was arguably the most graphic franchise of the lot. The first-person perspective, the arsenal of firearms and numerous different death animations stood out from almost everything else available at the time, and the name "Doom" was consistently tied to discussions surrounding the controversy of violence in video games.

How things have changed. Death is everywhere in games today. We're totally desensitized. Hundreds of people are offed in E3 game trailers every year, and hardly anyone cares. DOOM really goes for it in terms of gore, almost brazenly so, making the bone-cracking and ball-busting of the recent Mortal Kombat X look tame in comparison. Bullets tear pieces off enemies; a close-range shotgun blast will send pieces of meat flying everywhere; and the chainsaw now carves monsters into bloody chunks. The new DOOM also introduces finishing moves, useable against weakened enemies indicated by a blue outline. These are anything from "simply" reaching into a hole in their chest and tearing out their heart to the ultraviolent act of tearing off one of their legs and using it to stave their head in. One concern, though, is how quickly these kills will begin to repeat themselves, as once you've torn an enemy's jaw off, leaving their tongue flapping uselessly, you've done it a thousand times.

Related: 'DIY Guns'

Alternatively: Exploring the 'Nazi Village' of Jamel

Anyone who has played the 2010 PC Doom mod "Brutal Doom" will recognize a load of these features. Clearly, someone at Bethesda has been taking notes, as the footage shown contains plenty of stuff that "Brutal" has been doing for years. Enemies are more active and will leap around the area to get at you. Explosions cause huge amounts of carnage, blowing hellspawn apart and causing huge chain reactions if they catch another explosive object. Opponents can be dismembered by weapon fire, blasted up the wall with a shotgun only to slide lifelessly back down, and torn in half by a minigun, leaving a legless torso pulling itself along, still trying to get at you. There's much more in the way of melee combat, including the ability to dish out a big old kick that launches the recipient so they can be shot out of the air, Bulletstorm style, and, of course, the finishing moves are there, allowing you to rip and tear your way through the levels. "Brutal" is more than just a gore mod; it fundamentally changes the way that you approach a lot of the combat situations in "Classic" Doom.

Real bloody sports: check out FIGHTLAND

Plenty of players have assumed that "Brutal" was bringing the essence of the 1993 original up to date, but several interviews with creators John Romero and John Carmack indicate that Doom was actually meant to be a horror game, with Doom 3 likely much closer to the initial design document. "Brutal Doom" is a bastardization of what you remember Doom to be like. The original is a game that's still really playable to this day, that doesn't suffer from the ravages of time like so many others, but "Brutal Doom" is the game you talked about in the playground made real—when you hadn't actually played it, but you had seen screenshots in magazines and heard that your mate's dad had it on his work 386. The first Doom was a fast-moving action game that dropped you into the eyes of a space marine tasked with fighting his way through a very literal hell, with acts of violence only spoken about in hushed tones taking place. And DOOM looks like the sequel to that game.

With four-player co-op and the classic death-match mode confirmed, as well as a few reports coming out of E3 suggesting an easy to use level editor being included, DOOM is shaping up to be a game worthy of its series' lofty reputation. After battling through its own developmental hell, this respawned version of a classic shooter is looking hella good indeed.

Follow Andi on Twitter.

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Publicity photo of Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll in blackface as Amos and Andy from the radio program Amos 'n' Andy

By now you probably have an opinion on Jerry Seinfeld's recent political correctness comments. Think about that for a second. A few years ago, if I'd told you that you would read, write, or argue over something Jerry Seinfeld's said, you would have asked me who the ad wizards were who came up with that. This is Jerry Seinfeld we're talking about. He's the Target-brand khakis version of people. He doesn't get political. He doesn't try to dissect race. His hottest takes are reserved for the plastic doodads on the ends of shoelaces. Hell, the last thing he said in the infamous ESPN radio interview he's currently weathering the storm from was literally: "I talk about the subjects I talk about because for some reason I can make them funny. If I can't make them funny, you don't hear 'em."

Jerry's not alone. Comedy giants of all stripes, when not busy staying silent on the numerous sexual-assault allegations of their peers, have recently come out in full force decrying "kids today," how they are "too PC," and how it's hurting or even killing comedy. These attacks on comedy must be at their most punishing, since it's all people can talk about now, right? Well, in Chris Rock's own words about stuffy college crowds, "I remember talking to George Carlin before he died and him saying the exact same thing."

George Carlin died almost a decade ago. I've been using comedy to pay the bills for the last few years, so I have a vested interest in this. With cellphone cameras capturing every moment a comedian steps out of line, and Theodore Thinkpiece pouncing on tweets from a whole president ago, is 2015 the most difficult time to be a comedian?

To get some perspective, I reached out to the Human Encyclopedia of Comedy, Kliph Nesteroff. I'd heard his fascinating stories of mob-era comedians being beaten half-to-death for heckling the wrong person on Marc Maron's podcast, and have since become a voracious devourer of his articles on WFMU's blog. His forthcoming book, The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels and the History of American Comedy (you can preorder it here) shines a light on the comedy's rocky past.

On Motherboard: How Millennials and Their Content Farms Commodified Political Correctness

I wanted to find the first mentions of " PC sensibilities"—or whatever the code words were back then—in comedy's history. Nesteroff traced it back to vaudeville, when "instead of doing impressions of celebrities, people did impressions of ethnicity. Sometimes the act playing the Jew comic was Jewish and a lot times it was somebody putting on a fake nose." He pointed out that Charlie Chaplin, who is often mistaken for a Jew (but isn't actually Jewish) used to play a character named Sam Cohen who was a Jew, "with a fake nose and like a wide black brimmed hat. That was really common back then and it was also kind of a response to increasing immigration."

As cultures began to blend together in America, that kind of thing didn't fly anymore. By World War II, ethnic comedy started to become less acceptable, and "after World War II, Hitler kind of made the idea of ridiculing races distasteful," Nesteroff explained. "You very rarely saw blackface after 1945. But there were people that reacted negatively to those depictions and we often don't hear about them. Often we'll hear about blackface being apologized for, saying it was 'of its time,' but there were a lot of people at that time who were reacting against it."

In Nesteroff's book, he offers this example:

Vaudeville comedians Harry Hershfield and Peter Donald made their living with racial caricature. When former [vaudeville] players Groucho Marx and Walter Winchell found themselves in a position of power years later, they waged a battle to have racial caricature erased from vaudeville. They used Hershfield and Donald as examples of undesirable comedy. Hershfield and Donald defended themselves, telling the press that racial caricature "if done well is not offensive." In an open letter to Variety they argued, "the most dialectically used and abused nationals were the Scots and the Swedes—who have never complained." Groucho Marx shot back angrily, "The Sandy McPhersons and Yonny Yohnsons were not a minority being subjected to oppression, restriction, segregation or persecution.

So there was a sort of organized campaign to get rid of this ethnic comedy. I wondered if there were also early examples of comedians being "attacked" by people they would describe as "over-sensitive" in the audience.

Whether or not PC sensibilities have ruined comedy, performing stand-up is just plain hard to do. Here, VICE editor Harry Cheadle finds out for himself.

Nesteroff told me there was a woman named Belle Barth, who was sued by two audience members in the mid-60s. "They said that her material had corrupted them morally and sued her," to the tune of $1.6 million. Compare that to today, when a comedian says something offensive and it ends up in an editorial on some website about how the joke "went too far," and then after a week, it's all forgotten. "In these instances," Nesteroff said, returning to cases like Belle Barth, "there's people being arrested, booked, fined, jailed—being dragged to the courts."

He mentioned the famous example of Lenny Bruce, who faced numerous obscenity charges for using certain four-letter words and was outright banned from several cities. But, Netseroff said, "there were a number of comedians who were arrested prior to Lenny Bruce. There was this very obscure guy named George 'Hoppy' Hopkins. He was arrested right around the same time as Lenny Bruce actually, in 1961 in Anaheim. [It was] a citizen's arrest by a guy in the audience who was offended by his material... [The guy] called the police, and the the police booked him... He spent two nights in jail, and he had to pay a fine for lewd and lascivious behavior based on whatever language he used."

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Newspaper press photo of Lenny Bruce being arrested. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

These examples are actual violations of free speech. Comedians (and people in general) today say things like, "Ugh! My free speech is being violated," but nobody's actually being sued by a Ned Flanders in the audience.

"Nobody is being blacklisted in comedy," echoed Nesteroff. "Show business is so atomized that even if you were blacklisted, say, from the major networks, there's enough comedy fans who aren't watching the major networks that you can still find your audience with your podcast or your YouTube channel or whatever. So even if somebody's platform is being violated, they can easily find another platform and their audience will follow them. It was much more difficult several years ago or several decades ago."

That's kind of an understatement. Here are just a few hard-to-believe but true accounts from Nesteroff's book:

Burlesque comic Jimmy Savo was arrested by plainclothesmen in 1942 after an organization called the Catholic Theater Movement complained about his performance at the New York Ambassador Theater. The summons said "the show violates the penal law prohibiting indecency on the stage."
Comedians Mickey Diamond and Jack High were arrested for obscenity in 1946 in Philadelphia. They were removed from the stage at the Silver Fleet Inn and held on bail.
Marty Wayne had problems with a Philadelphia judge who said "nightclub operators should compel comedians to submit scripts before allowing them to go on." An arresting officer read portions of Wayne's act and Judge McDevitt called the material "an affront to public morals." The details of that have yet to surface, but for the charge of "lewd entertainment," Wayne served six months in prison.
In 1949 comedian Lenny Ross was arrested in Atlantic City on charges of being "smutty." The State Department demanded Ross be "dismissed and barred from working" based on a previous conviction "for using blue material and obscene language in his act, for which he served a prison term." Ross told the judge, "I resort to smut only because patrons demand it."

The definition of lewdness was completely arbitrary. The offending material was never quoted in the newspaper, so it's hard to determine what was actually said. But knowing the restrictions of the time, it's unlikely it would be considered offensive today. Variety pointed out at the time, "Under the present attitude, any routine except tap dancing is eligible for the tag 'lewd entertainment.'"

Hearing this, it seems like 2015 is actually the ideal time to be a stand-up comedian. The PC uproar cited by guys like Seinfeld doesn't seem to be bent silencing the freedom of speech, it's more about the fundamental desire people have to see comedy they can identify with—even if they're not white, male, or straight. Who knows what comedy happening right now will be looked back on in 90 years with the same disgust that we have for blackface? The only thing I do know is that as a comedian, I'd much rather deal with the PC Police than the actual fucking police.

Follow Josh Androsky on Twitter.

The long national mystery is finally over. After months of pretending to deliberate over whether he wants to run the free world, Jeb Bush confirmed Monday that he is, in fact, running for president in 2016. "I will campaign as I would serve, going everywhere, speaking to everyone, keeping my word, facing the issues without flinching, and staying true to what I believe," he told an audience at Miami Dade College. "I will take nothing and no one for granted. I will run with heart. I will run to win."

For those of you who thought Bush already was running for president, your confusion is understandable. Ever since he announced on Facebook last December that he would "actively explore" a White House bid, the younger brother of George W. has been campaigning as if the decision was already made, which, of course, it was. By holding off on making it official, though Bush bought himself time to start building his national network, and raise boatloads of money for his various Super PACs and leadership committees, pushing what few limits remain in America's gutted campaign finance laws.

The delay also gave Bush an opportunity to start selling himself as the GOP's answer to Hillary Clinton— a frontrunner whose inevitable nomination would be grudgingly accepted, if not embraced, by her party's grassroots base. And for the first few months of 2015, it looked like this pitch was working. Mitt Romney chickened out of running a third campaign, Chris Christie's White House dreams deflated, and Bush was left as the Establishment Candidate, rising to the top of the crowded GOP field in most national polls.

In the weeks leading up to his Miami announcement, though, things started to slide downhill. First, there were the four days that Bush spent trying to decide how he felt about his brother's invasion of Iraq—a bizarre series of cable news stuttering that suggested the younger Bush actually never considered that someone might ask how he felt about his brother's infamous decision to send America into a disastrous, decades-long war. Then, last week, reporters unearthed his 1995 book Profiles in Character, in which Bush argued, among other things, that America needed to restore a sense of "public shame" by ridiculing unwed mothers and divorcees. In the meantime, a Washington Post headline declared that Bush's "Campaign Ran Off Course Before It Even Began."

With Monday's announcement, Bush3 was clearly looking to recover from all this, and reestablish his status as the GOP's natural frontrunner for 2016. The Miami rally was an enormous, folksy production, located in a Cuban-American enclave at a school which claims to have the largest Hispanic student body in the US. The message—which the campaign not-so-subtly emphasized in a flood of schmaltzy social media blasts—was that Bush is the saner, sweeter, squishier choice who can pull the Republican Party back from the lunatic fringe.

"As a candidate, I intend to let everyone hear my message, including the many who can express their love of country in a different language," Bush told his audience before launching into a few minutes of Spanish. "I will campaign as I would serve, going everywhere, speaking to everyone, keeping my word, facing the issues without flinching, and staying true to what I believe."

"I will take nothing and no one for granted. I will run with heart," he concluded. "I will run to win."

A video released on the eve of Bush's speech underscored this message, featuring testimonials from a diverse cross-section of Floridians—a Hispanic immigrant, a victim of domestic violence, an African-American woman who was the first in her family to attend college—expressing gratitude for their former governor. As the Washington Post's Paul Waldman noted, if not for the word "conservative," it would be hard to tell that the video is about a Republican.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/YQt_E4acnWo' width='100%' height='360']

But Bush's attempt to recover from his recent stumbles also highlights his underlying weakness as a frontrunner, and the uncomfortable questions that will undoubtedly follow him into his official 2016 campaign. For starters, while Bush is earnestly (though perhaps not explicitly) rebranding himself as a moderate centrist, riffing off his brother's "Compassionate Conservative" mantra, his record as governor of Florida—which he talked up for most of Monday's speech—tells a different story.

Bush was a staunch and vocal conservative, unafraid of voicing his often-harsh views on criminal justice, the social safety net, and the decline of family values in America. This is, after all, the same guy who turned Terri Schiavo into a cause celebre for the Religious Right, signed the nation's first Stand Your Ground law, expanded Florida's prison system, and opposed programs that emphasized treatment over punishment for nonviolent drug offenders.

The bigger issue, of course, is Bush's name, and all the political baggage that it brings with it. In his speech, Bush attempted to dispel the idea of himself as some kind of heir, declaring that no candidate "deserves the job by right of resume, party, seniority, family, or family narrative." But even the no-last-name logo (Jeb!) that his campaign rolled out for the kickoff ally probably won't be enough to make Americans forget that this guy wants to be the third Bush to run for president and win.

"The presidency should not be passed on from one liberal to the next," he proclaimed in Miami. The implication, of course, is that passing it from one Bush to the next would be much better.

Follow Grace Wyler on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Deus Ex! It's that bit in the play where some dude in a robe pops out of a cardboard cloud to tell everybody that, actually, the spirit of Christmas was inside you all al... hang on, I'm getting my wires crossed. In this case, Deus Ex is the definitive cyberpunk role-playing game series, restored to the limelight by Canadian developer Eidos Montreal in the (sad) absence of franchise creator Ion Storm.

The last installment, 2011's Human Revolution, was the tale of Adam Jensen—a sharply bearded cyborg you could upgrade to be a better talker, fighter, hacker, or assassin as you went about saving the Earth of 2027 from frothy-lipped technovangelists and despotic fat cats. And the upcoming Mankind Divided, for Xbox One, PS4, and PC? I went to see that at Eidos Montreal's offices recently. Let me tell you all about it.

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'Deus Ex: Mankind Divided' announcement trailer.

It's all about the fear of technology

Human Revolution wasn't exactly a work of sunny, Steve Jobsian optimism, but it did give play to the idea of a "golden age" in cybernetics and transhumanism, with entrepreneurs like David Sarif free to meddle with our God-given flesh for the supposed betterment of civilization. Set just two years later, Mankind Divided puts the screws on. Regardless of your decision at the end of the previous game, it presents a society racked by dread of biomechanical augmentations following a remotely triggered outbreak of psychotic rage among those with implants.

Everywhere you go in Mankind Divided, "augs" are getting shafted by the state and an attendant mob of private military corporations. A portion of the campaign takes place in "Golem City," a vast shanty town composed of crudely soldered-together habitation modules, where unfortunates with prosthetic limbs huddle over blazing oil drums or wave placards at enforcers in body armor. There are checkpoints where flying drones and thugs in giant exosuits train spotlights on queues of frightened people, sifting the vanilla humans from the cyborgs. The social split underwrites the game's marvelous art direction—symbols of hope from Human Revolution, such as the silhouette of Icarus soaring towards the sun, reappear in a twisted, half-suffocated form, squeezed in amongst giant imposing slabs of corporate architecture.

(On the fear-of-tech topic, Motherboard has a fresh article on how the game's fiction reflects our own cyborg anxieties.)

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"Meaningful choice" applies to more than just the ending

Jensen has come a long way since losing most of his lower body to a terrorist attack in Human Revolution. Nowadays he's cock of the roost at Interpol, where he heads an elite squad tasked with tracking down rogue augs. In secret, Jensen is also working to uncover the Illuminati—gaming's go-to bad guy of late, a dastardly cabal of the rich and powerful who'll settle for nothing less than wireless control of every living thing on Earth. This quest leads him to the Juggernaut Collective, a group of augmented revolutionaries, and it's here that things get messy. As an augmented person himself, Jensen entertains a certain sympathy for the Juggernaut's political objectives, but can he help them out without compromising his day job?

The answer, naturally, is no. You'll be asked to pick a side throughout Mankind Divided, weighing up the needs of the moment against whether you think keeping the peace is more important than upholding the rights of fellow cyborgs. This isn't quite a binary faction split—acting in the Juggernaut Collective's favor at one point won't lock off access to the Interpol plotline—but the world will react in all sorts of ways to the decisions you make. The idea, Eidos Montreal's narrative director Mary DeMarle told me, is to create a highly replayable game that doesn't revolve around your choices at the end, as Human Revolution did. One player might speak to people, use weapons or visit areas that simply aren't present in another's playthrough.

Or if it's strictly gaming you're here for, watch our documentary on eSports

Don't worry, it's not a combat-driven game

Mankind Divided's reveal trailer (which you can watch just up there) left a lot of people worried that the series had gone full Van Damme, shucking off its stealth pretensions like a tatty dressing gown as Jensen pirouetted from one execution to the next. The trailer wasn't exactly packed to the gills with evidence of the previous game's sophisticated NPC conversation system, either, unless you count firing a cluster bomb into somebody's face as some sort of playful icebreaker.

Don't despair, oh waggers of chins and huggers of shadows. Mankind Divided is built around the same four play styles as its predecessor: winning people over in dialogue, sneaking past them, hacking computer systems (nowadays from afar, if you install the right augmentations) to exploit terrain variables such as motorized ladders, and, of course, capping punks or skewering them with your pop-out elbow katanas (these can now be fired at stuff, for the purposes of Arnie quotes). The difference is that when you are plunged into open battle, it's much more fun, thanks to Jensen's new augmentations and moveset. Speaking of which...

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Jensen's much quicker on his toes

As in Human Revolution, you'll overhaul Jensen's various cybernetic abilities with Praxis points as the campaign rolls on. The new moves and augmentations Eidos Montreal has shown off so far are mostly about mobility and aggression. There's the PEPS launcher, a fold-out wrist cannon that takes a few seconds to charge but liquidates unarmored targets; an aug that propels non-lethal Taser-style darts from your knuckles; the Titan skin mod, which coats you briefly in super-enduring liquid metal; and the Icarus Dash, which lets you zip short distances on the ground or while airborne. Jensen's basic moveset has also been expanded for ease of use—he can execute or knock out people from a corner without breaking out of third-person view, customize weapons in first-person without switching to an inventory screen, and dash from cover to cover by aiming a reticule, as in the most recent Splinter Cell games.

Fancy yourself a real-life cyborg? Motherboard has something to say on that.

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They've fixed the boss fights, supposedly

Human Revolution's boss fights weren't exactly its most celebrated features. Like cockeyed gate-crashers at a family reunion, they stomped all over the game's delicate interplay of systems and abilities in favor of "good" old-fashioned ballistics—much to the dismay of players who'd kitted themselves out as saboteurs or social manipulators. It was no huge surprise to learn that Eidos Montreal didn't actually design them—the job was handed out to Grip Entertainment—and the developers are adamant that they won't make the same mistake twice.

Every boss encounter in Mankind Divided is supposedly available to the full range of approaches. You can tiptoe up to bosses and bop them on the noggin. You can slash at their defenses with rifle fire. You can sweet-talk either the boss or perhaps his or her underlings, avoiding a confrontation entirely. You can even take down every bigwig non-lethally, which (Xbox Live achievements aside) should have intriguing ramifications for the game's ending.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided doesn't have a release date just yet, but if it gets one this E3, these words will be amended appropriately. All screens from Deus Ex Universe.

Follow Edwin Evans-Thirlwell on Twitter.

Justin Trudeau Wants to Change the Way Canadians Vote

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This photo is from a fetish club we went to once, not the speed dating night, because we wanted to preserve everyone's anonymity. Photos by Jake Lewis.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Mary, a petite woman in a black dress, rolls back the sleeve of Ryan's T-shirt to reveal his newly-scarred flesh.

"Wow, so cool!" she says, examining the still-fresh cuts he's made that form a lattice on his bicep. Then, without a word, she starts slapping him. She's gentle at first, just quiet little flirty ones to the cheek, but they get louder and sharper as she screws up her face and starts properly laying into him, genuinely trying to inflict as much pain as possible. Soon, couples from the surrounding tables stop talking to clap and cheer her on.

Given that we're in a north London gastropub with wrought-iron staircases and ceiling beams—the kind of place where adult men who try to one-up each other with microbrewery trivia might meet up to be awful—this behavior seems particularly odd. But tonight is the venue's monthly fetish speed-dating event. Having a girlfriend already, I'm not here to get slapped repeatedly by a stranger in front of an enthusiastic crowd. But I figured it could be a good place to get a succinct overview of London's fetish scene—a series of four-minute encounters with as many subs, doms, pay pigs, sneaker destroyers and scally gear fetishists as possible, all in a venue without loud music or an aroused naked man locked in a cage distracting everyone there.

I've never been to a fetish speed-dating night before, so I was initially unsure of the dress code—whether I'd look like a nark in a sea of latex and cock cages—but the event's website informed me that smart-casual was fine and that above all I should "be myself." When I arrive I'm greeted by Miss Jo, the organizer, who has run kink clubs in London for the last 20 years. Eating olives out of a ramekin with a cocktail stick, she is jolly and welcoming, putting everyone at ease. She gives me a white sticker to write my name on and tells me to have a good time.

What I've always disliked about the idea of speed-dating is its rote, inauthentic, ruthless nature. Like it or not, you'll be judged heavily on your fitness as a potential sexual partner. If no one enjoys the mental image of you naked, you mope off with no phone numbers, left to get really insecure about your weird neck on the night bus home. But with fetish speed dating there's another layer—after all, your kinks have to match those of the person you're attracted to. And what if the kink you're into is simply too niche for the vanilla nerds who've turned up on the night?

I'm mulling this over as I get chatting to Jack, who's having a cigarette and a pint outside. For whatever reason, I'd imagined a group of femme fatale types in PVC dresses and high heels, but in reality the crowd looks more like a group of mature students about to enroll on an improv course. Jack's in tartan trousers, a frayed green satin shirt, and heavy silver rings.

How many times has he been fetish speed dating before?

"Twice." He looks momentarily bemused. "When it was down Farringdon, like."

Presumably he hasn't met his match yet, then?

"I've met some really nice people. Not really met anyone, though, like."

He laughs ruefully and stabs at his lower lip with a nicotine-stained finger.

"I'm just looking for a girl who'll kick the fuck out of me."

Danny, who's with him, is just over five feet tall in a shiny gray suit, friendly, and keen to chat. He works as a supervisor on a building site and has come down after clocking off, hoping to meet new friends. He's pretty fresh to all of this, apparently.

"I'm just starting to go to events, find my feet," he says.

And what kind of fetish partner is he hoping to find tonight?

"I'm just looking for a girl who'll kick the fuck out of me," he says.

A bell rings, meaning it's time for the men to take their places at tables set out in a private area of the bar. Sitting there with my name badge on, I feel more like I'm at a group interview for an Asda checkout job than a quick-fire fetishist meet and greet.

Miss Jo explains the rules. The guys wait while the girls come and sit with them for four minutes each. If you like one another, you exchange numbers. If not, they move on. As simple as this sounds, I feel her rundown doesn't cover all bases. When do you reveal that you enjoy being stripped naked and wrapped in chili-coated cling film? Up front, or after pleasantries have been exchanged? This isn't hyperbole. The whole point of this event, I figured, is to find your match, so when do you get around to addressing the details?

Another initially disconcerting point: my table is positioned right next to Ryan's, meaning he'll be able to hear whatever excruciating banter I dredge up. Luckily, it turns out Ryan is a friendly guy, and my anxiety on this point subsides. He tells me that he classifies himself as a "switch"—someone who fluctuates between being a dom (a dominant partner) or a sub (a submissive partner). Most people here tonight are just one of the two.

Watch our documentary 'Sex + Food: Inside the Hungry World of Feeder Fetishes'

As Ed Sheeran's "Bloodstream" wafts over the sound system, I prepare to meet the first of my four-minute dates.

Miranda, the first girl who comes over, is in her late twenties and wearing the kind of floral dress that wouldn't look out of place on Henman Hill in early July. However, her demure appearance doesn't quite match her somewhat convoluted intimate preferences. "I'm a service dom. That's someone who likes to hit other people. But only because they like it," she says.

So you're an altruistic dom, in other words?

"There's a lot of depravity in me that I can't really talk about. You can't really talk about that stuff after four minutes," she points out, declining my offer of a cheese and onion crisp.

Next up is Hannah, a schoolteacher. She's a sub, and she puts this down to her job. Having to boss kids around all day means that when she's off duty she prefers that someone else hands out the lines. She tells me about the difficulties of dating on the fetish scene.

"I always get subs coming up to me in clubs," she says. "They make it very obvious: 'Can I lick you?' Er no, we just met."

Who's the strangest person she's ever been out with?

"I met a semi-rapist once. 'Is it OK if I do this to you?' he kept saying, then just doing it anyway. No, we're in public! It's just lucky I know self-defense."

Another lady, Lynne, whose husband gets off on her serially cuckolding him, relates how age can also be an issue.

"I'm 43 and I get 21-year-olds getting in touch—they're more than half my age!"

Does it matter?

"Yes, in the sense of experience. We did have a 21-year-old once, and he came within six minutes."

One thing I find confusing is how some of the women I meet have predilections they don't necessarily find erotic. Kathryn, a tax accountant in her mid-forties, explains that her real interest in the mind-numbingly complex art of Japanese rope bondage is not that it's sexy, but that it's "a bit of a laugh." Andrea tells me that she goes to Club Pedestal, where women are fawned over by sub men. But does she actually find putting her feet up on a guy and using him as a coffee table a turn-on?

"No—for sex I'm more about mind games."

So why go to an event like that if it's not about sex?

"It's just interesting. It's different to a normal club night where the women are subjugated to the guys."

"I'm into extreme cock and ball torture," says Samantha. "Extreme."

Laura, who appears to have drunk enough booze for everyone else in there, is more forthcoming about her interests.

"I love dungeons," she slurs. "And I love blood."

Blood?

"It's really sexy. It's a turn-on. I don't scar easily. I like blood all over the place."

Another woman who's not shy about her tastes is Samantha.

"I'm into extreme cock and ball torture," she says. "Extreme," she emphasizes.

My toes curling involuntarily, I ask if it's dangerous.

"Yeah."

How dangerous?

"I like staple-gun play."

Right.

"And castration, if you want."

Seriously?

"Well, if you wanted. Legalities aside."

READ ON MOTHERBOARD: The Fetish for Video Game Characters Trapped in Quicksand

And what does she do when she's not lacerating guys' scrotums?

"I'm a surgeon," she says. She sniffs and looks around. "You know the problem with these events? There are no real fetishists here."

By the end of the night I feel like I've got a pretty good sense of the capital's visible kinky interests, at least among its women. Those interests are, while not exactly mainstream, not quite as unique as I'd expected: the majority fall into either the sub or dom category, which—considering the past decade of films like Secretary, Nymphomaniac, and Fifty Shades of Grey—the general public is already well-acquainted with. Of course, there were some exponents of the more fringe elements nestled in there.

As I'm on my way out, I bump into Danny and ask how his night went.

"Good," he says, and pauses. "But there are a few in here tonight where I thought, Woah, that's a bit hardcore."

All names have been changed.

Follow John on Twitter.

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This article originally appeared on VICE Alps.

The thought that Paul might be gay never crossed my mind. I never imagined that someone who'd been in a relationship with me would go on to perform what to me seemed like a pretty dramatic handbrake turn in their sexual preferences. It also should be noted that I have, in my life, gained pretty solid marks when it comes to working with dicks.

But maybe, for a while, I was a bit blind. I often wondered why he never took the initiative when it came to sex. I knew that I was his first, so I thought it may have had something to do with inexperience. In spite of that, I kept wishing that he'd be a little more engaged in bed. Most of the time it was like I had to talk him into having sex with me. He was more excited when the new Rihanna single came out.

Absurdly, at some point I started to take pleasure in his lack of interest. I controlled when we had sex. Admittedly, I had to seduce him in a new way each time, and it really wasn't easy, but I had fun doing it.

Related: Gay Conversion Therapy

I was also a few years older than him, so I kind of felt like a younger version of Mrs. Robinson. And usually, it worked out for me—all my efforts to make him hard paid off. Faking an orgasm is harder for men than it is for women.

However, since my attempts weren't always successful, the thick skin I'd developed to deal with rejection came in handy often. We've all heard the "not tonight" cliche trotted out in films and TV programs, where the woman is too tired or has a headache—in our case, it was simply reversed. Sometimes it felt like he only wanted to have sex with me out of pity, which isn't exactly a turn-on.

At some point, I finally realized that he wasn't interested in sleeping with me at all. By the end, the whole thing had became a one-woman show, and it was only platitudinal amounts of cooperation from him that kept it from looking like sexual assault. After dirty lingerie and sex toys stopped being seductive to him, I was at my wit's end and would usually just rely on my hand while Paul was in the shower.

That was the beginning of the end. Paul wanted to be all over the place, just not between my legs, and at some point I couldn't deal with it anymore. I wanted to talk, he didn't. I wanted to fuck, he didn't. In little under a year, we realized that our relationship couldn't continue. We broke up and lost touch.

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Once I was single, my girlfriends confronted me with suspicions they'd apparently been harboring for months. They hadn't wanted to raise them with me during the relationship in case I was in love but suddenly it all made sense.

A year later, I found out from mutual friends that he'd come out. Of course it wasn't that surprising—in my head the true direction of his sexual leanings had been obvious for a while. You might think I'd feel insulted or resentful, but that wasn't the case. On the contrary, I felt sincerely happy for him. I felt relieved.

Most straight women I've spoken to about the subject say their confidence would be totally destroyed if they found out an ex was gay, because it would somehow be their "fault." A friend of mine told me that if a guy outed himself "after her," it would make her doubt her own womanliness and her ego would be in the bin. That's the biggest crock of shit I've ever heard.

Eventually, Paul had the decency to meet me and talk it through, which I totally respect him for doing. I had a lot of questions and there were explanations that I deserved. We spoke for a long time about insecurities, repression, and self-acceptance and I understood where he was coming from. In some way, I had always understood him. And at least I knew that I hadn't been just a beard.

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Photos by Chris Bethell

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

To most people, the thought of being handcuffed to a stranger who's several feet taller than you and determined to get as wasted as humanly possible sounds like the sort of punishment doled out in a kind of pissed-up Amazonia.

For Ben Wilcox, a 30-year-old dwarf-for-hire, it's a standard night at work. Under the moniker of Little Yet Large Entertainment, he accompanies soon-to-be grooms and brides at their bachelor and bachelorette parties, handcuffed to them as they drink, cry, and vomit their way through the evening.

I spoke to him recently to find out what exactly the job entails, and how he feels about stags and hens hiring little people for their pre-nuptial piss-ups.

VICE: Hi Ben. How did you get into being handcuffed to bachelors and bachelorettes?
Ben Wilcox: Three years ago I saw something come up on Facebook about some friends who were getting into movie work, so I joined a company and got into panto. Then I met some other dwarves who did stag and hen party nights. They gave me a number to call, and within a week I had a job offer. I enjoyed it so much that I got myself signed up to Hayley B Entertainments agency.

What are your rates and services?
One hundred pounds [$156] an hour, but if they book me for six hours then it drops to £475 [$740]. I get paid cash upfront, so if the night finishes early, as long as it's their fault they've still got to pay. The main objective is whoever's chained up to me is my best friend for the evening. You just dress up in whichever costume they want and banter around them, have a laugh, and get them free drinks.

What are the best experiences you've had while in this line of work?
Some people have put me up in five-star hotels. I've been to Ibiza, Portugal, and Germany, completely paid for. I've been picked up in a Bentley and taken on to millionaire's yachts with big dance floors and an open bar. I've had some epic nights and some absolute disasters.

What kind of things have happened on the disastrous nights?
I was in an Irish bar with a load of Irish lads and I was dressed as a leprechaun. One of the lads, who was about 30, started kicking me. So I said to the person who I was handcuffed to, "One of your lads keeps kicking me from behind." He found out which one it was and had a proper go at him.

I had one group of 18- or 19-year-olds who tried putting drugs in my drink. I usually get a lemonade, which is clear, and they got me a drink and it was all murky. They asked me to down it in one. I refused, and they were going, "Go on, go on," and I said, "Look, you down it in one, I ain't drinking that." I told them they spoiled the night, poured the drink on the floor, and left.

I met another group in Birmingham at 6:30 PM on a weekend night. I called them to let the group of lads—who were about 27 or 28—know I was at the meeting point. I was hanging around for a bit, and then I got a call telling me to ring a number and say, "I've got your money. Where are you?" I thought it was a bit strange, but I did it. All of a sudden, this car comes screeching round the corner. The driver had a woolen stocking over his face. The guy in the passenger seat had his face covered, too. In the back was a man with a Halloween mask on, with all of the face holes stapled up. He was the stag. There were two other guys, and one of them had a ball-gag in his mouth and was blindfolded. The driver asked me to get in the middle of them, get handcuffed to the stag and say, "Where's my money?" Some of them got out, and one of them started screaming and pulled the handbrake off and ran out of the car. The car started rolling down the hill, with no driver in the car. I could see a main road at the bottom and we were rolling quite quickly towards heavy traffic, and I was chained to the guy in the back. I was scared. Then, like Superman, one of them came running in and pulled the handbrake up—a couple of meters from the road. Then we pulled up at a Premier Inn, crossed the road, and went to a kebab house and sat in there for two and a half hours. It was really, really strange.

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Have you worked on many crazy hen parties?
There was one in Wales where I was dressed as a sheep. When I got there, the girl didn't even want me handcuffed to her. She freaked out. She just kept saying, "I can't do this," and darted off into the crowd. Then one of her group said she had a phobia of dwarves, but they didn't know. So that night ended early.

I was asked to strip by a group of ladies in London. I was dressed as a butler in my tuxedo, and they asked me to serve wine for half an hour in a venue above a pub. As I went in, there was about 40 of them, and they started shouting, "Off! Off! Off!" So I took my shirt off, dental-flossed myself with my top, danced on the table a bit, and got down to my boxers. This is when I was single, so I could get away with it. I wouldn't have usually done it, but it was just that sort of situation, and I went with it.

What happens if the client you're handcuffed to needs the toilet?
They want you handcuffed to them all the time, so if he wants to use the urinal I'll just stand back. But if he wants to do a number two then I'll take the handcuffs off him and let him go into the cubicle, but I'll wait outside the door so he can't go anywhere.

What are your thoughts about people wanting to be handcuffed to dwarves? Do you think it's exploitative at all?
It's pretty strange, but I might as well use what I have to the best of my advantage. Most of them want it because they like the attention. When they've got a dwarf strapped to them in a camp costume, they get so much more attention when they're walking around the club or pub. It's all about a little bit of attention before they get married and settle down.

Do you ever worry for your safety?
Yes, and my girlfriend and my family worry about me, but there are rules. They can't be abusive to us and I can leave if it gets to a certain level of drunkenness, like if he falls over. I don't get drunk, but I'll have the odd one or two drinks. They have to be careful with my hand as well, because it wouldn't take much to rip it off. I've been picked up and dropped before, so now I ask people not to pick me up.

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What advice would you give anyone who was thinking of becoming a dwarf for hire?
It's a risky job, and you have to be streetwise. A lot of little people are wrapped in cotton wool by their parents and might not have the backbone for it. I went on an event with another dwarf and they just stood there staring at the floor all night. You have to have the confidence to be the gimmick. I make sure they are laughing with me and not at me.

I'll educate people if they start being silly or rude to me. I'm in a big community of dwarves online, and many of them hate being called midgets. If someone's saying, "Get a fucking picture with the fucking midget" then I'll let them know that isn't right. I'll also tell people that they could have a child that's a dwarf. My parents are both normal and there's no dwarfism anywhere else in my family.

Follow Sophia on Twitter.

We Hope Nelson Mandela Wanted His Legacy to Include a Line of Wines

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Photo courtesy of BBC America

Warning: Spoilers about the third season abound.

These days, narrative complication is de rigeur in television drama. Game of Thrones,Mad Men, and other prestige television make a virtue of tying plots and counter-plots and character arcs into a great labyrinthine. Even by those standards, though, Orphan Black is a triumph of convolution. The show originally started off as a kind of sci-fi detective show, with gutter punk Sarah Manning (Tatiana Maslany) impersonating her dead clone double, Beth Childs, to investigate Childs's death. Quickly, though, that already improbable scenario has spiraled up and out and round about. Everything culminated in the latest episode with the discovery that Sarah's grandmother is also her twin brother. Believe it or not.

Despite the tangles, the dead Beth Childs isn't entirely forgotten, and her police partner, Art Bell (played by the rubber-faced Kevin Hanchard) is on the margins of the narrative. Instead of serving to drive the investigation, the plot rather desperately compels Bell to retroactively transform his relationship with the dead Childs into a love plot. The hard-boiled, competent detective we were introduced to has been replaced by an incoherent soap opera-y puddle.

Calling something a "soap opera" is, of course, a deadly insult—when Downton Abbey for example, is compared to a soap opera, it is not a compliment. It's hard to think of another television genre outside reality TV that is so thoroughly and universally despised. Soap operas—as feminist scholar Tania Modleski suggests in her classic 1982 Loving with a Vengeance: Mass Produced Fantasies for Women—are seen as drippy, sentimental, and dumb. They looked at as a mangle of confused narratives lacking the intellectual fulfillment of closure, designed for consumption by bored and undiscerning housewives. You can see some of those prejudices slipping through in Spencer Kornhaber's review of the series, which points out that Orphan Black is often a bundle of confused clichés and coincidences. Though he doesn't use the exact words "soap opera," when you put together lots coincidences with love plots triumphing over logic, the connection isn't all that obscure.

Overall, Kornhaber likes Orphan Black, and his appreciation of soap opera that isn't called soap opera seems in line with our particular historical moment. Serialized fiction is huge on television and elsewhere, and soap opera tropes have become almost surreptitiously accepted, and even celebrated.

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Scene from 'Orphan Black.' Photo courtesy of BBC America

Orange Is the New Black alsoemploys soap opera tropes—like the manipulative Big Bad villain in season two—as part of its effort to turn the women-in-prison genre from exploitation to a female-friendly drama. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's soap operafication of the superhero genre in the 1960s—with convoluted continuity and unrequited love affairs—has fostered our current superhero obsession, from Daredevil's tragic back story to Age of Ultron's weepy, unlikely Hulk/Black Widow romance.

But Orphan Black isn't just decorously dabbling in soap opera. On the contrary, it revels in the stuff up to Tatiana Maslany's staggeringly varied hairlines. The show's entire premise is based around the hoary twin trope, as Maslany gets to play a fleet of different characters, often in the same scene.

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Scene from 'Orphan Black.' Photo courtesy of BBC America

The Big Bad villainess is all over the place, too: In the second season, Maslany gets to play corporate ice-princess dominatrix Rachel as the villain, and in the current season three arc, there are not one, but two heart-of-coal mother characters. In fact, the most thoroughgoing way in which Orphan Black embraces soap opera is through its obsessive, almost self-parodically escalating obsession with family. Sarah goes from trying to protect her daughter to trying to protect all her fellow sister clones, to trying to protect male clones, who are her biological brothers. The seemingly endlessly metastasizing cast of allies and antagonists and protagonists is thus united by blood: Everyone, it seems, is related to everyone else.

On Motherboard: Read about the Real-Life Science Behind the Cloning on Orphan Black

In Loving with a Vengeance, Modleski ties the tropes of soap opera—seriality, lack of an ending, and focus on family—to the lives and concerns of the women who watched them while going about their never-ending domestic tasks. Housework, Modleski argues, is not a fixed task with a delimited stopping point. Instead, like soap operas, it goes on and on, with various difficulties and frustrations and complications, but with no real finale. "Soap operas invest exquisite pleasure in the central condition of a woman's life: waiting—whether for her phone to ring, for the baby to take its nap, or for the family to be reunited," Modleski writes.

Check out our interview with Crystal Moselle, the director of 'The Wolfpack':

All this waiting is tied to domesticity and family responsibilities. Mothers are expected to identify and care for children, spouses, and often extended families, in a constant, fluctuating spasmodic but constant effusion of care and empathy. Like Tatiana Maslany, they must perform the emotional work to be everybody in turn—and, not infrequently, like Maslany playing four clones in one scene, the emotional work to be everybody at once.

Not all of those who watch soap operas are housewives, of course. But Modleski argues convincingly that through its rhythms and thematic concerns, the soap opera "constitutes the viewer as a mother in the home." Orphan Black does this as well, very self-consciously, through the clone Alison Hendrix.

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Alison is an uptight suburban mom whom Maslany plays with tightly-wound, neurotic glee. In the current season, while the rest of the clones are dealing with intertwined loopy conspiracies and murderous religious fanatics, Alison and her husband Donnie (Kristian Bruun) are embroiled in a comic, largely self-contained arc as Alison attempts to win a school-board election by selling mother's-helpers illegal drugs to the local housewives.

When Donnie wonders if everybody else's life is as complicated as theirs, it's in part meant to be ironic—the suburban complexities of getting kids to soccer practice are obviously not as grueling as Sarah's fight against whoever it is she's fighting against at this moment in the plot. But Donnie's complaint is also a tip-off: The soap opera spy drama is a metaphor for Mom's frantic, emotionally-draining, repetitive task—the intricate, thankless salvation of the family.

Also on Motherboard: Cloning a Mammoth Is Only the Start

Alison at first seems like the perfect-mother archetype‚ complete with minivan, scheduled activities for the kids, and scrunchy hair ties. But over the course of the meandering plot, it becomes clear that she's got other interests. After she and Donnie bury a dead body in the second season, she's turned on, telling him (in the same clipped, soccer-mom voice) that she wants it nasty, bent over the sink where they just cleaned up the blood. And she almost radiates excitement as her drug-dealing business becomes more successful, doing a bump-and-grind with Donnie on their bed amidst all the money—a lighter take on Walter White's insight that it feels good to be bad. The violent world of spies and sudden, brutal endings frightens Alison, but is also thrilling to her as an escape from the dreary humdrum soap opera of suburbia. In that sense, we can see Orphan Black as a rejection of domesticity and its tedious emotional and physical work. As more and more women are moving out of the home, Orphan Black sets up a soap opera dynamic to celebrate leaving it behind.

Still, Orphan Black is too committed to its soap opera tropes to simply toss them aside. Rather than replacing soap opera with espionage or cop shows, the series instead works to turn all those other genres into soap opera. The world of violent endings and focused missions is domesticated. The virtues and trials of motherhood—empathy, multiple focus, diffuse goals—in Orphan Black spread out of the domestic sphere, and into the whole world.

Scene from 'Orphan Black.' Photo courtesy of BBC America

In one episode this season, Helena is in the process of escaping from the clutches of a military conspiracy. But as she's sneaking out, she finds one of the male clones who captured her strapped to a medical contraption with his brain exposed. He begs her to kill him—and though she knows it will mean her own capture, she does as he asks. Her love for her brother (whom she doesn't even yet know is her brother), lands her back in a prison much like the one in which she spent her childhood. Every time Helena breaks free, she's locked up again. Love, soap opera tells us, is a trap of drudgery that never ends. But it's also heroic.

That's not a heroism that's much celebrated in most sci-fi, spy, or action stories. Usually such narratives focus on disconnected cowboy loners: James Bond, Batman, Han Solo, and, yes, even Katniss and Mad Max. Which is why it's so refreshing to find a story that, with paranoia but also with hope, imagines a future in which housewives, and sisters, and mothers still matter.

Orphan Black airs Saturdays at 9 PM EST on BBC America.

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